When Your Child Strays From God

Sam J. Miller

Everyone says it but no one believes it: attitude makes all the difference. People parrot the words but the words don’t penetrate, not really, not down to the core. That’s why Carolina Bugtuttle has all those lines on her face, always scowling when I reach for that third or fourth cookie after Sunday worship, always emailing me LOW FAT RECIPES and MIRACLE DIETS peppered with those godforsaken soulless smiley face things. That’s why she’s always stressed out about six hundred things that don’t have a smidge to do with her. Because she has a bad attitude. She needs to worry less about my weight and more about that degenerate son of hers, if you ask me, but you didn’t, so.

My smile isn’t just on the surface. That’s why I knew, Wednesday morning, when I woke up and Timmy still hadn’t come home, when I checked my phone and he still hadn’t replied to my texts and voicemails, why I knew I had the strength to go find him—wherever he was. And bring him home. And get started on a new installment of The Deacon’s Wife for the church e-bulletin. Write it raw, rough, naked, curses and gossip intact, more a letter to my sweet wise husband Pastor Jerome than anything else, so he can go through it with scissors and a scalpel before sending it out to the four-thousand-strong flock of the Grace Abounding Evangelical Church.

What To Do When Your Child Strays from God.

Timmy’s rebellion had spent a long time percolating. By the time Timmy vanished I had seen the signs—seen him in Facebook photos with That Whore Susan; seen him sketching the Spiderman logo that webheads were so fond of—and had armed myself with knowledge, courtesy of the Internet. I knew more about spiderwebbing than any God-fearing mother has any business knowing. I had logged enough hours on websites and wikis and forums to bring me to the attention of a couple dozen law enforcement agencies, places Carolina Bugtuttle would never in hell have spent a single second. Not even if it meant the difference between saving her son’s soul and losing him forever.

I climbed the steps slowly, aware of the sin I was about to commit. I paused at the door to his room.

Let me tell you something about the bedrooms of teenage boys. They are sovereign nations, islands of liberty hedged in on all sides by brutal tyranny. To cross the threshold uninvited is an act of war. To intrude and search is a crime meriting full-scale thermonuclear response: neutron-bomb silence, mutually-assured temper tantrums.

So I did not enter Timmy’s room lightly, and panic seized me in the instant that I did. Fear stopped me in my tracks, threatened to turn me around. The smell of stale laundry made my head swim—the bodily odors that meant my little boy had become a man. I summoned him up as the smiling little boy he had been before puberty caused him to declare independence, defy us as righteously and violently as America spurned its colonial overlords.

I searched swiftly, joylessly. Praying, somehow, that I’d get caught. Desperate for him to come home, no matter what the cost to me might be.

And that’s when I realized I was in over my head. I missed him, my boy, my son, the obedient wide-eyed one who loved his father and loved me—as opposed to the cruel and sullen thing with a heart full of hate he’d become. I’d built walls around the Bad Timmy, moats and turrets to protect my heart. Against Good Timmy I had no defense.

I found plenty. Sperm-stiffened socks; eerily-empty browser history. A CD that looked Satanic. None of it was what I wanted.

Permit me a digression here, fellow congregant, beloved pastor.

You probably know none of this, because you’re a good churchgoing Christian who’d never dream of Googling illegal substances. Nor have you ever had need to learn about the complex moral codes of conduct common to drug dealers and other criminals.

Thanks to the 60 Minutes and the Dateline and the nightly national news, you already know that spiderwebbing is a hallucinogen—but you don’t know what a weird one it is. The basic legend of its manufacture goes like this: in top secret farms run by the Taliban or the Chinese government or some other Existential Threat, Amazon psychovenom spiders chimerically combined with God Knows What get dusted with top-secret US mindmeld pharmaceuticals, then fed a GMO protein ooze that makes their web-producing glands go into overdrive, producing webs that get sprayed with wonky unstable Soviet-era hallucinogens intended to induce extreme suggestibility, then the spray crystallizes, the crystallized web is broken down into a dust and put into solution, which, after various alchemical adulterations, is dripped into the user’s eye with a dropper. All of this is speculation, of course, since the origins of the drug are so shrouded in mystery. For all I know they just dissolve LSD in liquid Ativan and sprinkle it with fairy dust and boom.

Two or more users who drop from the same web will experience a shared hallucination. If one of them sees the ground open up and an angel with a centipede face fly out, they all do. No matter how far apart they go, as long as the drug lasts they’re in synch. Like, they’re in each other’s minds. Psychically linked. No one knows why this is. No one knows much about anything when it comes to spiderwebbing. We made that stuff so illegal in the early days of the crisis that no lab in the country can legally possess a shred of it. Wise Pastor Jerome says you can be damn sure the government’s doing research on how to use it against traditional-minded Americans, but it’s his job to scare people about What The Government Is Up To.

So. Invading someone’s webbing experience is a potentially fatal act of aggression. You can imagine how much damage an evil person could do, with unfettered access to your psyche. Drug dealers used to sell webs to someone, then sell webbing off the same branch to their enemies, who would send in some psychically-skilled mind assassin to Break Their Brain. Plunge them into a black midnight sea full of squid-shark monsters that slowly dismember them—leaving them permanently paralyzed—or change their cognitive processes so that for the rest of their life whenever they look at another person’s face they see only a pulsing ravenous mouth full of jagged slobbery teeth.

What I’m saying is, I was taking a big risk.

Finally, I found it. Three eye droppers, wrapped in Kleenex, hidden inside a Dr. Seuss book. Full of thick liquid dyed Spiderman’s-tights-blue. I took them to the Winnie-the-Pooh mirror on the wall, which badly wanted Windexing. Now I just had to hope they came from the same branch as the one Timmy was on, and hope that getting inside his hallucination would help me find the boy himself. And that I wouldn’t break us both.

You can do this, I though. You watched enough tutorials on YouTube.

I tilted my head back, held my hair, dropped one tiny drop into my left eye, and then, in the eternity it took the drop to fall into my right eye, experienced a long slow moment of absurd utter panic in which I would have given anything to take it back, go downstairs, sit quietly by the phone, wait for my son to come or my husband to come fix everything, which is what my mother would have done, which is what she trained me to do Always, in Every Situation, which is what I’d been doing all my life.

“Morning, Beth,” my next-door neighbor said, when I stepped outside.

“Morning, Marge,” I called—

When I turned to look at her, Marge had a pug face. Actually, she was all pug. A five-foot bipedal pug kneeling in her garden, with a frilly ridiculous Elizabethan collar around her neck.

Don’t freak out, I told myself, feeling a laughing fit coming.

Laughing was safe. Screaming was a problem. A bad trip could trigger a spiderburst, making thousands of spiders literally erupt from the ceilings and floorboards around you, holes opening up in walls and the bodies of your loved ones, vomiting up arachnids ranging in size from penny to medium-sized dog. On 60 Minutes they showed an eighteen-year-old girl who got caught in a spiderburst, strapped down to a psych ward bed for the rest of her life, twitching and jerking away from nothing—as far as we could see—although the voice-over breathlessly described what she saw, the swarm that never ceased to flow over her, how she tried hard not to scream, and then screamed, and then gagged as dozens of fat black furry spiders poured down her throat.

And if I triggered a spiderburst, anyone else in the webworld would get caught up in it too.

Which is why I was the only one who could do this. Which is why Carolina Bugtuttle would break her own brain and her son’s to boot if she ever had the guts to try something like this, which she didn’t. But I—I have a good attitude. All the time, about everything. No matter what I went through. No matter what hurts I carried around in my heart.

“Bye, Marge,” I said, and started up the car.

A dinosaur sat buckled into the backseat, passenger side, where Timmy always sat. Preening glorious blue-and-red feathers in the unkempt backyard. Ceratosaurus, I remembered. The favorite dinosaur of Timmy’s childhood best friend Brent. Brent, son of Colby.

A tether of warmth tugged at me from the west. From Route 29. Was it my son? Or someone else? I knew only one person who lived in that direction.

“Colby’s house,” I said without meaning to. The ground trembled beneath my SUV with the sound of a train passing far underground, although of course there are no subways in rural Scaghticoke.

I pushed the tether aside and resolved to visit That Whore Susan.

I kept my hands on the wheel and watched a flock of crows shift shapes as they flew: now butterflies, now jellyfish, now a swarm of black letters spelling out words I spent my whole life trying not to say.

Driving while spiderwebbing is not the kind of activity I’d encourage you to ever engage in. You might not have to contend with packs of roving velociraptors herding gallomimuses across County Route 6 the way I did, or pterodactyls picking off baby mammoths, but it won’t be an easy drive all the same.

Spiderbursts were the least of my concerns. My Timmy was so full of anger that I was scared of him in the real world, where all he had the power to do was hurt my feelings . . . and here I was opening my mind up to him as much as his mind was open to me. If he was drug-addled and out of balance and I caught him off guard, he might be able to lock me up inside my worst memory for all eternity, or show me parts of myself I’d never recover from, or who knew what else.

Understand: Timmy was not a bad boy. There was a sweet curious creative little nugget inside that lanky angular body he’d metamorphosed into. Love and kindness, buried under all the hate and anger. He acted like everyone in the world hated him, and preemptively acted to hate them harder. Every single day, it seemed, he made my husband so mad he spit nails.

This, of course, was my fault. Everything a child does is his mother’s fault.

We venture now into territory that could potentially be the subject of another e-bulletin: Confronting the Whore Your Son Is Dating. I have lots to say on the subject, not all of it germane to the subject at hand, although my husband Pastor Jerome would say that’s never stopped me before, since The Deacon’s Wife routinely goes On and On about Unnecessary Details No One Cares About, but I say what the heck. That’s what the internet is for.

A brachiosaurus raced me most of the way to Susan’s house, every heavy footfall shaking my teeth, some of them an arm’s length from my soccer-mom SUV, and I wondered what would happen if one of them came down squarely on top of it.

Webslingers have a lot of theories about the things they see in the webworld, none of it backed up by science but all of it rooted strongly in This Happened To a Friend of a Friend of Mine. Some visions were real things, transformed, like how Marge became Pug-Marge. The brachiosaurus could have been a tractor, or a bug. Some visions were total figments of the imagination—though whose imagination exactly, and what they meant, was the subject of endless webhead debate. Some slingers said the visions couldn’t hurt you—So and So got stabbed like a dozen times by Bettie Crocker and that teapot from Beauty and the Beast one time and she bled until she passed out and when she woke up she was stone cold sober and unharmed—and some said web-world wounds would follow you, Freddie-Kruger-style, into the real world. Drugs are maddeningly resistant to methodical study, or even rational scrutiny.

To be honest, though, all the dinosaurs were a good sign. Timmy used to love dinosaurs. When he was little. The fact that his webworld was packed full of them meant maybe he was in a peaceful happy childlike state of mind.

I passed a skate park. Teenagers moved through the little hills and curves, on rollerblades and skateboards, enjoying the sudden snap of early-spring warmth. What did it mean, I wondered, that every one of them had a horse head? That they were dumb animals, or that they were strong and noble? Being on drugs was a lot of work. I’d only been under for a half hour and already I was exhausted.

You may imagine, fellow congregant, that risking death or imprisonment by venturing out into the world Under the Influence was the most frightening part of my ordeal. Not so! For I realized, as the horses watched me pass with hostile looks on their faces, that the law and bodily harm were the least of my worries. The real terror came from two warring forces that threatened to crack me open. The first was love: that tether that tied me down, a choking liquid swamp I floundered in, thick and warm as phlegm, floodwaters that had started rising the second I took a hit of webbing, the only thing I couldn’t vanquish with a Good Attitude. Love for Timmy, helpless maternal love that overpowered my anger at everything he’d put us through.

The second was fear.

Every webworld has a boogeyman. That’s because pretty much every person has a boogeyman. A monster, a nemesis, a person or thing they fear most. I felt mine, as I drove. I had no idea what it was. I had no phobias, no enemies, except maybe for Carolina Bugtuttle, but she doesn’t count, for anything, ever. But something was there, and it had always been there, just below the surface, and now it was threatening to burst through.

A Barbie doll answered Susan’s door, oversized headphones yoking her neck, looking for all the world like a chicken disturbed while doing something it shouldn’t be.

“Ummm . . . hi?”

“Morning, Susan!” I said, suddenly inexplicably frightened by the emptiness of her porcelain-rubber stare.

“Um . . . my mom’s not . . . here?”

“Not here to see your mom, Susan. I’m here to see you.”

“Oh. Come in?” A slight bow, church manners intact, so maybe her mother didn’t raise her quite as badly as I’d thought she had. “You, uhh . . . Want a soda?”

“No, Susan, thanks so much.”

She sat. I sat. The couch sagged. They’d needed to buy a new one when Susan was six and her mother worked at Wal-Mart, and now she’s sixteen and her mom’s still there and the couch is still here.

“Nice . . . weather we’ve been having?”

“It is.”

We watched each other. I wasn’t sure how to start, though surely I wasn’t the first mother in history to plant her feet in the living room of her son’s Whore Girlfriend. Probably not even the first one who used to babysit said son’s Whore Girlfriend. But I figured awkward silence benefited me more than her, threw her off balance, so I’d let it ride for as long as I could.

“You’re looking for Tim,” she said.

“You know where he is?”

“Nope.”

“I wonder if I believe you.”

Barbie-Susan shrugged, hardening, and I saw that I’d miscalculated—she’d found her footing, gotten over the awkwardness, she was seizing the reins, danger, abort. “He said you were a meek obedient housewife,” she said. “That doesn’t seem . . . accurate.”

“My son thinks he knows me,” I said. “But he’s wrong.”

No one knows me, I thought, but was that true? I didn’t. My husband didn’t. Did Tim? There it was again—the tug, the pull from Route 29. I shut my eyes, tried to seize hold of it and snap it, but it stuck to my hands like flypaper and tied me tighter.

Susan said “Because here you are, with a very faint but very definite gray tint to the white of your eyes. You’re webbed, Mrs. Wilde. Don’t worry. It’s nothing anyone would spot if they didn’t know what they were looking for.”

“And you?” I asked. “Are you? Is he? Are you both here—”

“Ugh, no,” she said. “I hate that stuff. Do you even know what you’re doing? Let me guess—you Googled it? Christ, an old woman Googling is more dangerous than a drunk blind bus driver asleep at the wheel.”

“Did you just call me old?”

“Ummm . . . no?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You know where he is. You two—”

“Your son might not know you, but you clearly don’t know him either.” We watched clouds, out the thin dusty windows. I wondered what she saw when she looked at them. For me they were cheese, vast walls of cold supermarket cheese. “What did you want to be when you grew up?” she asked.

“My favorite subject was biology,” I said, willing to tolerate any digression that might eventually lead me where I wanted to go. “Followed closely by chemistry. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?”

“Why is that ridiculous?” she asked. “You never dreamed of doing something with that?”

“I wanted to get married,” I said, the words coming easy from lots of practice. “I met someone wonderful, and I wanted to be his wife and support his dreams and have his kids. Speaking of whom. Where is Timmy?”

Her voice, now, was weirdly gentle. “Tim and I broke up six months ago, Mrs. Wilde. If we were ever really a thing.”

Spiders rattled against the glass of her boxy old television. I listened while the sound got louder.

Whore Susan scooched closer. “Tim told me that you never defend him, when his father is screaming at him. When your husband hits him.”

“That is most certainly not true,” I said, quick enough to keep from wondering whether it was true and what it meant.

I longed to curse her out. Hiss That boy has shattered our domestic harmony, my husband is trying his make his son a good man the best way he knows how, shut your filthy mouth you Skank Whore Bitch. But this is why people with bad attitudes make a mess of everything. Because this wasn’t about me. It was about Timmy. My own hurt feelings at her attempt to wound me would have to wait.

“I’m trying to help here,” she said, unhelpfully. “Tim said he’ll be damned if he ends up like you.”

A word, perhaps, would be useful, here, about my son Timmy.

My fellow congregants may remember him as the charming rapscallion seven-year-old who delighted in shredding hymnals. Or perhaps you recall the smiling scallywag twelve-year-old who got on the PA system and made farting noises after Sunday worship on more than one occasion. You probably remember very little after that, because he decided then that he Hated Church and God and Religion and Pastor Jerome and decided to settle for merely making our home lives miserable. Before you—my beloved husband, my wise Pastor Jerome—decided to stop ignoring Timmy’s harmless aggressions and engage him as an enemy combatant, matching each new hostility with one of your own, an arms race that never abated, and of course anyone who’s ever sat through one of Pastor Jerome’s sermons when he’s in a foul mood knows well enough how deep his dagger-tongue can stab. Pretty soon the Bible stayed on the dinner table, and every night brought a new lecture on the evil of rock and roll or idolatry or rap music or vegetarianism or socialism or feminism, and Timmy never, never failed to argue back, until the shouting became superlatively unkind on both sides. And the favorite subject of Timmy’s screaming was his parents’ marriage, the sham he believed it to be.

So I didn’t doubt that he told her vicious things, spectacularly ridiculous absurd lies, preposterous suggestions no sane churchgoing Christian could have spent a half-second taking seriously. But who knew what this unbeliever believed. “God bless you,” I said, smiling to beat the devil, and fled that kitty-litter stinking house.

A twelve-year-old boy sat on the bumper of my car. My son, but not. Identical to how Tim had looked, at that age, but something in his face told me at once that he was someone else. And that he was terrified.

“Hi, mom,” he said, and got up to give me a hug. His arms clasped me below my breasts.

“Hi, Matt,” I said, because I knew who this was, this perfect little boy I’d met inside my son’s mind. At twelve, Timmy wanted a twin brother more than anything else in the world. He’d had one for an imaginary friend, named him and given him all sorts of attributes (favorite color: blue, to Timmy’s red; favorite food: spaghetti, while Timmy’s was hamburgers), and now here he was, in the flesh, in the wonderful terrible world of my son’s head.

“Where’s your brother?” I whispered, squatting to stroke the cheek of this marvelous creature, this fly stuck in amber, this last vestige of a beautiful happy boy I’d lost a long time ago—but why was he so pale, why did his lip tremble so? He was an emissary, this poor wretch, sent to me by my son’s subconscious, a harkening-back to the last safe place he’d known. Even before Matt answered my question, I knew what he was going to say.

Colby’s house. The last place on the planet I wanted to go.

The place the tether of warmth had been tugging me all along.

“Do you want to come with me?” I asked.

“No,” Matt said. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

His face reddened, my little boy, my son who never was, precisely like my real son in the quick uncontrollable rush of his emotions. “Timmy doesn’t need me anymore.”

“Okay,” I said, and sadness cut through something essential, one of the cords that kept the hot air balloon that is my soul anchored to the good and the positive. The world began to wobble. I kissed his forehead, grabbed both shoulders and shook, in that way that Timmy had liked, but did not like anymore.

Matt grinned, a puppy after a belly rub, and then shivered, and looked away.

Figment of my son’s imagination or not, I felt sorry for the little tyke.

Matt was a cry for help. A demand to be rescued. Rescued from a monster. A vicious, cruel captor, determined to mold him into a man my son had no interest in becoming. Timmy’s boogeyman.

And here, fellow congregant, I don’t mind saying, is where I started getting worried. Maybe it was the parked police cruiser I passed. Or the heavily-populated part of town where I was heading. But mostly it was this: the boogeyman was real. I knew who he was. Before my eyes the double-yellow line in the middle of the road stretched and bulged, a seam that barely held back a tidal surge of spiders.

The sky darkened. I drove faster. Shut my eyes. But with my eyes shut I could hear them, scritching away, three fat gray furred spiders stuck under the sun visor. The warmth got warmer, the tether pulled tighter, and it was him, my son, my Timmy, the boy I abandoned, the boy whose heart I broke by siding with his father, his boogeyman.

When I arrived, her car wasn’t there. That was one blessing. Carolina Bugtuttle was out, of course, working hard, neglecting her son and husband, keeping the books and preparing the pamphlets down at Christ the Healer, so focused on God’s reward for her in heaven she failed to see the one he gave her on earth, because God is merciful, God is kind even to the unkindest, lavishing largesse on selfish gossipy wenches.

“Beth,” he said, opening the door.

“Hi, Colby,” I said, to Brent’s dad, Carolina Bugtuttle’s husband.

Colby, Pastor Jerome had said, the night they met, the night I’d been trying to prevent in the six months since we got married. What the hell kind of a man is named after a cheese? Then he gave me that chin-twitch that says Laugh At My Joke, which is what you sign up for when you say Til Death Do Us, so I laughed, but maybe not as much as I normally did, because then he gave the subtle head tilt that says You Have Disappointed Me—but to be honest I knew Colby before I ever heard such a cheese, and to this day when I taste it I think of him, and hold it in my mouth until it is gone.

In the webworld, Colby Goldfarb stood before me precisely as he was when we were eighteen, in the parking lot outside Crossgates Mall, lit up by arc-sodium lights that turned him amber in that pelting rainstorm, right after I said the sentence I’d spent all week working up to, the one that broke his heart, and mine to boot, but mine didn’t matter, and he stood outside the car, looking in, at me, for so long. Thin, young, wide-eyed, all hipbones and elbows and nose and thick black hair. He was even soaking wet, here, now, although his skin was dry and warm as summer when he stuck out his hand and I shook it.

“You’re looking for your son,” he said.

“Is he here?”

“I am under strict orders not to answer that question.”

He grinned, and my mighty unbendable momma-bear knees buckled.

“What the hell, Colby,” I said, pushing past him, hand hot on his shoulder. “I would have called you, if Brent was hiding out at my place.”

“That’s because you’re a better person than me.”

I wasn’t, and I wondered if I really would have called him. I had no idea what I’d do to keep my son’s trust, because I hadn’t had it in a long time. Because I didn’t deserve it. Because I’d left him to fight his boogeyman alone. I had failed him so utterly. The magnitude of it sent twitches down my arms, started spiders leaking from the door hinges.

Colby’s smile made my head hurt, ushering me in, the smile of a man who loved his son, who didn’t believe they were mortal enemies and his mission in life was to crush the child’s spirit.

“Sit,” Colby said, gesturing to the kitchen table, turning to the Keurig machine to make me a coffee. Spiders swam in the thing’s water tank. At any moment now the burst would shatter my brain and my son’s.

“Where is he?”

“In the basement.”

“With Brent?”

“Do you have any secrets from your husband?” Colby asked, and his freckled face was so earnest and sad I knew he wasn’t talking about him and me. The fridge shook, rumbled, packed with spiders to the point it could not keep closed.

“Of course not,” I said, because no other answer could be admitted, let alone uttered aloud.

“Could you keep one? A big one?”

Stuck to the fridge was a gorgeous drawing, in colored pencils, of a blue-and-red feathered ceratosaur. Colby’s son was an incredible artist. “Brent’s favorite dinosaur,” I whispered. “I saw one of those this morning. It led me here.”

Colby raised an eyebrow, leaned in, scanned the white of my eyes. Laughed out loud, the magnificent heaven’s-trumpet sound I’d given up on ever hearing again. “Bethesda Wilde, are you webslinging?”

“Shut up,” I said.

He laughed harder. “Is it fun? I confess there’s a part of me that’s always—”

“I’m not doing this for fun,” I said, standing up, getting angry on purpose because anger was safe, anger was armor, against the spiders, against what Colby was doing to my gut; anger was the weapon my husband used whenever he didn’t know what to do, and there had to be something other than my son that I had to show for all the time I’d spent with Pastor Jerome. I headed for the basement.

“No no no,” Colby said, genuinely afraid, actually running, but I had a head start and for all my size I can move fast when I need to, and I got to the basement and wrenched open the door and slammed it behind me and locked it, and stomped down into the laundry-and-mildew smell of Carolina Bugtuttle’s underground nest.

“Beth, stop,” he said, pounding on the door. “Listen to me. You can’t. Okay? Respect their privacy. You’ll only—”

A cocoon, I guess, is the best I can do when it comes to describing what I found in the basement. A globe of densely-wrapped spiderwebs the size of a small car, lit up slightly from within, and I felt him in there, smelled him, my son, and I put my hands against it, felt its heat, felt the warm safe world it contained, and slowly seized fists full of spiderweb and ripped, tore it open, watched thickened water slosh out in a rush that reminded me of giving birth. Upstairs, I heard Colby unscrewing the lock to take off the doorknob.

“Timmy!” I screamed.

Two shapes churned out of the web cocoon—dolphins, I thought, but then not, because fast as blinking they were boys, young men, drenched, hands clasped.

“Mom?” my son said, and let go of Brent’s hand like it had suddenly caught fire. “What the hell, mom!”

“Where were you?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

“In . . . there?” Timmy said, and turned to take in the ruined cocoon. “Wait—you can see this? You’re here? You’re in the web with us?”

“Now, look,” I said, stammering for the explanation I’d practiced, back when this was all seemed like a good idea.

Timmy laughed out loud. “Look, Brent! A ceratosaurus. We’ve been trying for months to make one.”

The dinosaur stood between me and Colby, who had just arrived, disemboweled doorknob in hand. Father and son exchanged a glance that said let’s keep quiet, let’s let them say what they need to say, and I ached for that, for the kind of trust that lets parents communicate wordlessly with their kids.

“I want you to come home with me, Timmy. We’ll get you help. One of your father’s friends runs a Christian rehabilitation clinic—”

“You think I’m a drug addict, mom?” He started laughing again. “I told you guys. I told you my parents work so hard to not see the truth that they don’t know how to stop.”

Brent started to say something, then decided against it. They watched me put the pieces together. These boys, these men, my teenage son, my teenage lover, his teenage son who was my teenage son’s lover; they dripped with blue-green amniotic fluid and watched the truth widen my eyes, watched me fight it all the way.

They watched me grasp the magnitude of my son’s sin. The unthinkable, unimaginable crime he had committed. Where did it come from? How did he learn it? How did he fly in the face of my husband’s efforts and my own, our lifetime of accumulated craven cowardice? How did he find the courage to commit the sin of choosing love, the bravery of going for what your heart wants instead of the path a parent chose for you?

People fear spiderwebbing for all the wrong reasons. Going mad, having a breakdown, seeing inside your own soul—none of those should scare you. The most frightening side effect is also the one people crave it for: empathy. To truly feel what someone else is feeling, to see the other as yourself, to watch your ego obliterated in the face of universality—that’s a trauma you may never recover from.

“Tim,” I said, but could say no more. Not yet. He had never turned into something else. He was what he always was. His father couldn’t handle that—hell, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But I had done him wrong, had sided with his father, because it was easier. And what irony: I took the drug to bring my son back to me, and instead the drug brought me back to my son.

Colby came closer, put one hand on my shoulder. “Beth,” he whispered, “I think you and Tim should talk.”

“Okay,” I said, at last, furious, miserable, delirious, hurt at how little I knew my son, frightened by what he was, how much I had to atone for, how long it might take for him to forgive me, how long it might take me to forgive him, sad at all the paths I hadn’t chosen, but ready, for whatever would come, and I said Okay again, letting it encompass so much more than the sentence he’d said, letting it settle like an unfurled bedsheet onto the hard new decisions I finally felt strong enough to make. Like choosing my son over my husband.

This, then, all of this, is part of that okay. Print this blog post if you dare, Jerome, but since I know you won’t I’ll let it stand as a message from me to you. The Story of Where Things Stand. The hard-earned blood-soaked spiderweb-wrapped shreds of insight I earned by descending into the underworld for the sake of love. My gift to you. My one scrap of true wisdom. What to do when your child strays from God.

So. When your child strays from God you should praise Him, for putting a mirror in your hand so you can hold it up to yourself—if you have the stomach for it. When your child strays from God you should thank Him, for giving us the freedom to make our own mistakes, and the strength to maybe one day find our way back.

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. He lives in New York City.

Further North

Kay Chronister

In Turkey, we loved the animals we tended; in Alaska, we hope they won’t wake when we ride past them. Asleep, with their bodies buried in the snow and their eyes frozen shut, the helminths look more like landforms than hookworms. But if temperatures rise too much, if they wake up—

We siphon a lot of blood from their bodies, trying to cure the disease they spread. They wake up hungry and anemic and furious.

Halfway between Juneau and Circlet, the route I take home, there’s this pile of stones stacked up beside the road. A graveyard for mammoths, according to local legend. In truth, a graveyard for Russian trappers who froze trying to push further north than anyone had before. The monument spooks Alaskans, the descendants of those few Russians who survived the tundra, but I am not Alaskan and I am cold wherever I go and I’m always relieved to see the stones. Up in Circlet, where we built the homestead, the helminths almost never thaw out.

When I come home, untack my pony, and stomp the snow from my boots, my sister Aliye has a hot bath and a pot of spiced coffee waiting for me: her way of saying sorry that I have to ride out and check the enclosures alone. The first thing she does when I come inside, after she shoves a towel into the crack beneath the doorframe, is check all of my fingertips for frostbite. “Remember that blood-buyer in Anchorage with six-and-a-half fingers?” she says if I argue.

“I remember,” I say, and spread my tingling fingertips out to the heat of the stove.

“If you ever feel like you need me with you,” she says, “tell me, and I’ll go.”

We both know that Aliye will never go. Before we left Turkey, when we lived among our goats like they were family, the hook stole her legs and half of the muscles in her face. Now she tends the homestead and I look after the animals. We have no other choice. But she has to say it, and I have to act like I believe her.

“I know,” I say. “I promise.”

While we tuck into our coffee, a rich dark brew that Aliye makes with cinnamon and cardamom, she tells me, “We had a letter this morning.”

“From Baba?”

“No.”

“Mom?”

“Of course not.” In three years, Mom’s never written to us once. “From a doctor in Anchorage. I read about him, how he cured all these paralytics on the continent, and then I wrote him. He says he can fix me.”

I try not to say anything insensitive, like what first comes to my mind: desperation has made you stupid, abla. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” she says. “Don’t worry. He won’t have to know it was the hook.”

“What if he finds out?”

“He won’t,” Aliye says fiercely. “I won’t let him.”

She can’t make a promise like that, not really. For all she knows, the symptoms of her disease are easily recognizable to a trained physician. No doctor has tended Aliye since Baba first suspected that the hook had passed from our goats to his oldest daughter. The first human host to a parasite like the helminths wouldn’t be treated and released; they’d be quarantined, isolated, possibly put down. Before Aliye, the hook only happened to sheep and goats and cattle. Everyone thought humans were immune.

Everyone still believes that, but now we know they’re wrong.

“I heard a story in Juneau today,” I tell her. “About a farm family who got some Canadian elk, imported, supposedly better for riding across tundra than horses.”

“Don’t tell me.” Aliye already knows the ending to this story; it’s the same ending that most of my Juneau stories have.

Anything becomes ordinary when it happens enough times in a row.

“The helminths destroyed them. Twelve elk, eight thousand rubles a head, dead in a matter of hours.”

“Like always,” she says. “Sometimes I can’t believe it. It doesn’t seem real.”

I don’t know how she can form those words with her half-paralyzed mouth. If the hook is real to anyone, it should be real to Aliye.

Aliye’s physician is a glossy-looking man who comes in a dogsled, not on a pony. He introduces himself as Mikhail Akudaan, explaining that he is half-Ukranian and half-Aleut. His family’s been here forever, he says. Through the days of whales and the days of salmon, now the days of worms. He winks at me midway through each sentence. Beside my sister, with her crutches and half-frozen features, I always end up looking good by comparison.

While we talk, Aliye makes herself busy at the hotplate, seasoning three ounces of dehydrated meat-stuff with everything on our spice rack. The stuff is more or less irredeemable, but her sense of hospitality keeps her from serving it plain. She’s anxious, her fingers clumsy on the saucepan and the spoon, but probably not for the reasons she should be. She fears the doctor won’t want to help her. I’m afraid he will help her, and the Center for Disease Control will wrest her away from me.

Dr. Akudaan—“Call me Mikhail, don’t be so formal,” he insists—says the treatment will be a month-long process, two weeks at his facility in Anchorage, where Aliye will have braces of elk-bone grafted to her legs, and then two weeks of rehabilitation here.

I ask more questions than Aliye does. She’s made up her mind already, but I’m unsure. When Dr. Akudaan has choked down the last piece of his meat-stuff, he pulls a nylon medical gown from his bag and asks if Aliye would mind stripping down for a brief examination. I make my excuses and leave the room. She deserves her privacy. Besides, I hate seeing Aliye’s bare legs. Her face is bad enough; her legs, stick-thin and shriveled, covered in the protective down that every Arctic animal must grow, make me sick.

Akudaan stays the night; the homestead is too remote for a dinner guest to safely reach any destination before nightfall. While I prepare the couch for him, tucking a spare sheet under the cushions, he watches me, maybe comparing my saddle-sore movements to Aliye’s stilted, jerky ones.

“Your sister is very eager to move ahead with the procedure,” he tells me.

“Life is difficult for her, with the palsy,” I say, watching his face to see if he’s guessed what I warned Aliye not to tell him.

“Yes,” he says. “The palsy.” And smiles a little. “Is that what the doctors in Turkey believed she had?”

I swallow my dismay. We shouldn’t have believed we could fool a doctor. “Dr. Akudaan, you understand,” I say, “how few choices we had. With the news reports everywhere, and people so scared . . . if they knew she had the hook, they would have killed her.”

His laughter startles me. “Your sister didn’t have the hook, Hafsa. That’s impossible. The haemonchus contortus only infects ruminants.”

So we were told, but she still had all the symptoms. Baba frowned over a stack of medical texts written in Arabic, a language he could only read half-passably, and said the worms must have mutated.

“What else explains it then?” I say.

“Aliye had polio. The signs are clear and distinct. Untreated, it often leads to partial or complete paralysis.”

I don’t tell him that she could have been treated, if we hadn’t hid her, if we hadn’t believed we were saving her life by denying her a doctor. I’m too surprised to feel guilty yet. “Does she know?”

“Yes. She knows. I told her.” He motions for me to sit down on the couch beside him. I suspect that he’s preparing me for bad news. “The procedure I do has been proven effective in patients with cerebral palsy, but polio . . . is a different matter. It’s a virus, not a disorder.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not sure you do. The polio virus still lives inside your sister. This procedure will put Aliye at extremely high risk for reinfection.”

“So she can’t be fixed?”

Akudaan purses his lips. “It’s not that she can’t. In fact, she’s still determined to go ahead with the procedure. But I told her, and I’m telling you, it’s medically irresponsible for me to let her do it. Grafting the bones onto her legs means opening her up, doing spinal work—it’s intense, invasive. It will probably kill her.”

“And she knows that?” I say. But even if she does know, I’m guessing she doesn’t care. I’ve seen the way Aliye looks at the frontier, flat and frozen but desirable all the same because to her it is forbidden. The loss of what she should have had—what we both should have had—in Turkey, marriage and sunshine and a string of goats for our children to tend, must hurt a hundred times more.

“She says she’d rather take the risk than live like this,” the doctor says. “Are you Aliye’s legal guardian, Hafsa?”

I laugh. “She’s older than me. I’ve never been her guardian. Just her jailer.”

“Is that how she sees it?”

That’s how we both see it, when I’m feeling sympathetic; when I’m not feeling sympathetic, she’s mine. “Neither of us dreamed of becoming worm-farmers, that’s all I’ll say,” I tell him. “We do what we can with what we have. If I had known that what she had was curable, things would be different.”

Akudaan is quiet for a minute, then says, “So you can’t do anything to stop her from going forward with this?”

I’m not sure I would stop Aliye if I could. “How fast would she degenerate, if she was infected?” I ask.

“A few months? Probably not more. Possibly less.”

helminths sleep at every bend along the road I take home; even if she were infected, Aliye’s life expectancy might still be longer than mine. “Let her do it,” I say. “Let her try to get herself back.”

“And the cost won’t be a problem? I understand that helminth-blood is quite valuable, but I don’t know about your family’s particular situation . . . ”

We send more than half of our profits home, like most worm-farmers, but I suspect that Baba won’t mind the loss of his monthly stipend if it means having his oldest daughter restored. “We’ll make it work,” I tell Dr. Akudaan.

I’m right, Baba doesn’t mind at all, but across a static-coated phone connection he mentions casually that he has one condition. “If things go well, Hafsa,” he says, “if she gets her legs back, bring her home.”

In Anchorage, while Aliye has slices of elk-bone fitted to her calves, I load our sleigh with bulk goods. We won’t need forty pounds of flour or a hundred yards of twine if the procedure succeeds, but Dr. Akudaan warned me that the elk bones might not graft onto Aliye’s bones at all. That outcome would keep Aliye safe from reinfection, but it makes me sick to imagine returning to the homestead for another season of breeding hookworms. I make my shopping list half-heartedly, trying not to think too long about using any of the supplies I purchase.

Back in her hospital room, giddy with nervousness and half-drunk on painkillers, Aliye can only talk about her legs. “I think I’ll want a pony,” she says, “even if we’re only here for a few more weeks, it might be worth it. The way you look when you ride, like you can turn all that snow to nothing beneath you. We’ve lived here three years and I still don’t know the countryside, not like I did in Turkey.”

“There’s nothing to know,” I say, trying to keep her realistic. “It’s a wasteland, abla. A flat hell full of frozen parasites. You forget because you don’t have to look at it.”

“Do you envy me that?” She frowns with a little quirk to the mobile side of her mouth. She’s close to tears, angry ones, and I have to choose my next words with care.

“I don’t envy you,” I say. And looking at my sister, her frail knobby legs swollen with bone grafts, her face half-frozen, her spine stuffed full of dormant polio virus, how could I ever be jealous? But I wish Aliye wouldn’t envy me when I left the same things she did, for her sake instead of my own. “Just remember that legs won’t take care of everything. They won’t bring back our goats, and they won’t get us good marriages.”

“I wish those were the things I wanted,” Aliye says. “But I don’t dream like that anymore. I dream smaller, Hafsa. I dream of getting up in the morning and setting my feet flat on the floor.”

The bone grafts succeed; two weeks later, Aliye walks on shaky new elk-bone legs across the kitchen floor, half of her face stretched wide with smiling. Dr. Akudaan says it’s too early to tell whether she’s at risk of reinfection, not while he’s still prodding at the grafts, integrating them fully into Aliye’s system. She refuses to register his uncertainty, focusing instead on what is certain: she can walk, if a little unsteadily, and she can ride.

“I want to go with you,” she tells me one morning at the front door. I’m halfway through sliding my chaps over my thighs. If I’d been up a little earlier, even a minute earlier, I could have avoided this. Her coat, stiff with newness, hangs over her thin shoulders. As if she is too little to do it for herself, I reach over and zip it up to her chin.

“I don’t know, abla, aren’t your bones too exposed to the cold?”

“Mikhail says it’s safe.”

I reach down to lace my boots so my facial expression won’t betray me. I don’t want Aliye with me on the road. I want her safe and bored at home, coating meat-stuff in cumin and wishing we were still in Turkey until the sheer force of her will brought us home. I want her healthy.

Or, if not healthy, dead enough to let me abandon the farm and go home.

“Do you really want to?” I say. “The worms aren’t like our goats. There’s no pleasure in the work. They lay there and breathe or they wake up and try to eat you.”

“Don’t you remember when our rams got loose and fell in the ravine that year? In the hillsides outside Karaman, so far south that the wind sweated. We held a contest to see who could heave the most out of the ditch, roped them like Hollywood cowboys and carried them on our shoulders. You know I’m not weak, Hafsa. Don’t be so unfair.”

I remember as well as she does. Five years ago, Aliye could tell me to do anything and I’d do it because she was brilliant, she was fearless, to me she mattered more than anyone. I wanted her to approve of me.

Five years ago I couldn’t find Alaska on a map, didn’t know one species of hookworm from another, certainly couldn’t have taken a syringe to the segments of a helminth’s body and drawn out enough blood to pay the mortgage on a farmstead.

“If you want to,” I say.

“That’s all I want,” she says, so we go, leaving the remains of breakfast on the stove for Akudaan. Aliye’s new pony is light on his feet, faster than my own horse, who is bored with the road from Circlet. I expect to be bored too, but I’m not. The same landmarks take on new dimensions with Aliye here, admiring chunks of ice and trading posts as if they’re wonders. At the halfway mark, at the mammoth graveyard, Aliye pulls up on her pony’s reins and dismounts.

I slide down from my pony’s back in a hurry, seeing how shaky she is on her elk-bone legs, and let her grab my shoulder for support. We stand side-by-side, breath fogging the air, as she stares at the pile of stones and the signpost behind them.

“It’s a memorial for the Russian trappers,” I tell her. “They froze to death here.”

“I know,” she says. “I forgot about it.”

I let her stand there for a while. Then I say, “I’m always glad to be past it. Knowing I’ve made it when they didn’t.”

She smiles, her half-smile that is the fullest one she has, and threads her gloved fingers through mine. “You did, didn’t you? Strong girl, brave girl, outsmarting the Arctic all by yourself and protecting your invalid sister. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I don’t know what you’d do either,” I say, laughing. My throat feels swollen with wanting to cry, and I don’t really know why.

A week later, Dr. Akudaan tells me that Aliye’s procedure has been a success, her legs will heal completely, she is free to go anywhere she desires. “If you want to sell the farm, please do,” he urges me. “I can see you’re not happy here.”

I won’t admit it, not to him and not even to myself, but for a few days, with Aliye mounted up beside me, I was almost happy. “My father wants me to come home,” I say. “He wants to see if he can find us decent marriages, now that Aliye is mostly well.”

The doctor nods a few times too many and looks everywhere but at me. “Of course,” he says. “That’s reasonable.”

“I know what you see in the news, about Turkey,” I say. “And things are difficult, but all the worm blood being imported is starting to make a difference. They say in five to ten years, we might be able to begin keeping animals again. There’s a species of goat that responds so well to the blood, they almost always survive.”

“It’s not that,” he says.

“What, then?”

“Ask your sister,” is all he’ll tell me. “Please, ask your sister.”

Now that they have no goats to drive across the countryside, my parents have opened a shoe shop in Ankara. They live a ways down the road from the market where they set up shop, in a stucco house with a roof of red ceramic tile. I paid for that house, I think when I see how fine it is. I would never say that aloud, of course. Baba has to have his pride. We have to feign belief that a shoemaker can afford a home with two balconies and a spacious courtyard.

When Baba opens the door for us, tears shine in his eyes. The rest of the family crowds him out before he can say much, but I’m glad that our return affects him as much as it does me. In the doorway, looking me over, my sisters remark on how pale and thin I am. I can’t tell if they mean to compliment or insult me with the words. While they scrutinize my earrings, my hair, the way I’ve belted the dress I’m wearing, Aliye lingers at the door behind me, as if she isn’t sure whether she’s welcome. Impatient, I reach for her hand and tug her along. Her elk-bone legs tremble as she follows me into the living room, where Mom pours coffee from a carafe that my worms’ blood paid for.

“I missed you, Hafsa,” she says, then stares past me at my sister. “Aliye.”

“Mama,” Aliye says. She grins with half of her face. I see Baba and Mom simultaneously notice her paralysis. I wonder how they ever forgot. Now they look at her with all the familial warmth of health inspectors, letting their gazes rest too long on her elk-bones before their eyes move to her face.

“We’ll have dinner with your aunts tonight,” Baba says, after a while.

“Do they know why we went to Alaska?” I say. I don’t want to let Baba pretend we left Turkey of our own accord, but I don’t think he knows he can stop lying. He and the rest of the family still believe that the hook is what paralyzed Aliye. They’re still worried that she’ll be hunted and killed if anyone finds out that she’s the first human vector. I haven’t found the right time to tell them, figured that should be Aliye’s decision anyway. And Aliye isn’t, so far, saying much of anything.

“They know you needed to go,” Mom says. She puts a cup in my hands and nods at the divan, inviting me to sit. Despite her weak legs, Aliye receives no such invitation. I motion for her to sit beside me, equally mortified and confused by our reception here. Baba asked me to take Aliye home. He wanted her back.

At dinner we eat lamb and beef dishes made with tofu or top-shelf meat-stuff, pretending that nothing has changed when really, we would never be eating together in an Ankara dining room if the world was the same. Whenever the conversation steers too close to the animals that used to be our livelihoods, someone awkwardly maneuvers back to a safer subject. The hook comes up only once.

“Does everyone here pretend that it didn’t happen?” I say to Baba later. “Does Mom?”

“There is a difference between not discussing something and not thinking about it,” is all Baba will say. He’s sitting cross-legged on the divan, oiling his loafers, a bottle of shoe polish open on the teak coffee table.

“But people must suspect,” I say. “With the timing, with the symptoms she showed.”

“Still not dinner conversation,” Baba says, sniffing as he does when he feels he’s being more reasonable than whoever he’s talking to. “Hafsa, why did you not mention that your sister is still sick?”

“What do you mean?”

“Her face.” He whispers the words like he might get in trouble if he’s too loud.

I sit down beside him. The conversation seems to demand lowered voices. “The disease is gone, Baba. It’s left marks, but they’re just that: marks. And the worst of the damage, the paralysis to the legs, is gone. She can live normally now.”

He looks doubtful. “How normally do you think she will ever live like that? She won’t find a husband with her face all scowling and crooked.”

The words aren’t even for me and they still sting. Maybe Aliye was right to hesitate in the doorway of the house. “Does it matter? What does she stand to inherit if she does marry?”

“A happy life, an untarnished reputation.”

“Reputation? Is that what Mom cares about?”

Baba shook his head. “Your maman never wished for Aliye to go. I insisted on it. Losing all your goats in an outbreak like we did, that draws enough eyes, but if your daughter dies of the same symptoms then people ask questions, they suspect you of something.”

Hearing him talk like that, I can’t keep myself from saying, with something like frustration, “She didn’t have the hook, Baba.”

The frown lines on his wind-chapped face deepen. “What was it, then?”

“She had polio.”

Baba repeats the English word, polio, then tries in Turkic. “Not a worm?” he says.

“Not a worm.”

“How can you be sure?”

“A doctor from Anchorage examined her.”

“Oh God,” he whispers. “God, how could we—”

“We’re home now,” I say, reaching across Baba’s lap to shut the bottle of shoe polish. The concept of heirloom furniture is entirely lost on my goatherd father. “I’m selling the farm, I don’t think I’ll ever go back besides to get things in order. So you don’t have to be sorry.”

“Three years,” he says. “Three years we were without you.”

“Do you still want us here? With worm’s blood on our hands, with faces unmarriageable and halfway frozen?”

“Hafsa, it doesn’t matter if they want me,” Aliye says. I turn around and see she’s standing in the doorway. I don’t know how much she heard, or how much she’s hurt by Baba’s bleak view on her future, but she looks determined.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” she tells me, “that I’m going home.”

Home meaning Alaska, I realize, not Turkey. Home meaning the enormous snow-coated bodies of sleeping helminths, home meaning frozen trappers commemorated by piles of stone.

“I won’t go with you,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says. “You don’t need to. It’s my home, not yours. Like you said. A place for parasites.”

Three months after Aliye returns to Circlet, Dr. Akudaan sends a letter telling me that she’s gone. She was a good farmer, he says, like he’s trying to eulogize my own sister for me; she wasn’t killed by the cold or starvation or helminths. He wanted to tell me before we left Alaska that she was dying of reinfection, but Aliye wouldn’t let him.

Folded into his letter is a check, signed by Aliye. Almost enough to rent my own stucco house in the city, almost enough to import a pair of freshly-immunized goats. On the back of the check, Aliye wrote: I hope this covers three years.

I don’t feel sorry like she wanted me to, I don’t feel guilty. But I wish I could have laid a stone on the pile for her on the day we rode out to the mammoth graveyard, when she knew already that she would fall while I rode on, that her road ended before mine did, and she would be an elegy, then a story, then forgotten while I recovered from what her tragedy had done to me.

About the Author

Kay Chronister’s fiction won the 2015 Dell Magazine Award and has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Originally from Seattle, she currently lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in a household of twenty-one children and six dogs.

Android Whores Can’t Cry

Natalia Theodoridou

False start #1

MEETINGS AT MASSACRE MARKET
by Aliki Karyotakis for the London New Times

I met Brigitte at what the locals call Massacre Market. She pronounced her name as if she were French—or I should say French-made, I guess, but I didn’t know that at the time. She was a working girl, owned by a guy named Jerome—also French, supposedly. She was waiting there for my local liaison and I, among desiccated corpses and stalls full of blown-up photos of the tortured and the dead. She kissed Dick on the lips when she saw us, before greeting me. She did it in a mechanical way, as if she were supposed to, as if she couldn’t do otherwise. That’s when I saw the long strip of nacre that ran down the back of her neck, along her spine, pure and magnificent. I shot Dick a questioning look.

“Yeah yeah, it’s the real deal,” he said. “She’s my artificial girlfriend in this town. I’m renting her full time. Very useful. She knows people.” Dick could be snide like that. “I’m sure you girls will get along,” he added.

Brigitte turned to me, holding out her hand. She gave me a warm smile, but I could tell that she, unlike Dick, was very well aware of where we were, of the transactable images of gore and violence that surrounded us. Of the history of this place.

“Pleasure to meet you,” she said, a glint of something indecipherable in her eye. Was that an android thing? Or was that the part of her that is human?

Androids can usually pass, if they don’t have any visible nacre. But, of course, as soon as nacre appeared on android skin, people started wearing fake nacre patches as a fashion statement. When the patches are high quality you can’t really tell them apart.

What was the nacre’s appeal? I suppose part of it is that we still don’t understand why or how it is formed. The other part is that it’s perfect, beautiful. And that it doesn’t perish.

Nacre is forever.

[Note to self: You sound like an infatuated schoolgirl. What does Brigitte have to do with anything? Get it together. Just get the facts straight. Also, preserve both Dick’s and Brigitte’s anonymity.]

>>>END OF FILE

Nacre: Formation and Function

Nacre, or “mother of pearl” is a composite material produced by certain molluscs as an inner shell lining and as the outer coating of pearls.1 Since the APC-VII2 finalized and started regulating the production of androids globally, nacre has been a standard feature of all artificially produced semi-mechanical humanoid organisms.3 The production of android nacre had not been foreseen and remains unexplained. However, android nacre is considered harmless, if not beneficial for humans as an identifying mark, and so no attempts to avoid its appearance on android skin have been made.

Nacre formation is an evolutionary conserved and multiply-convergent process among the Mollusca phylum, arising as early as the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago). While the exact process of its production is little understood even in nature, the function of natural nacre is largely defensive: layers of nacre protect the soft tissues of the organism from parasites, while damaging debris can be entombed in successive layers of nacre, ultimately resulting in the formation of a pearl.

The function of android nacre remains unknown.

1 - “Pearl” is also slang for a locally produced hallucinogenic that is sometimes used in meditation. Despite the name, the connection with either natural or android nacre has not been confirmed, largely due to lack of research.

2 - APC: Android Production Committee.

3 - These are commonly referred to as Androids, as this has been the popular term for many decades—however the universal applicability of the term has been questioned on various grounds. Still, other proposed terms, such as Gynoid and Cyborg, although more accurate in certain cases, are no longer in widespread use.

>>>END OF FILE

Fieldnotes #1

It’s Dick’s afternoon playtime and he makes Brigitte re-enact scenes from his past while I try to work on my article. Playing in front of me is awkward, indiscrete. Vulgar, even. But I’m sure he does it on purpose—he wants me there. He wants me to witness this, and he knows I won’t interfere. He is the client: his game, his rules.

Brigitte playacts Sandra, my college friend and Dick’s ex-wife. She kinda looks like her too. Now they’re acting out the night Sandra left him—left us. Dick is high on pearl. I can tell from that slightly unfocused look in his eyes. Like he sees things past Brigitte, past the windows and the smog, past the illusion of life.

“I can’t be with you any more,” Brigitte says. It sounds like she’s said this line a hundred times already—a recitation. It seems she’s in learning mode for these sessions. Dick is shaping her into Sandra. I find this deeply disturbing. “You’re such a brute,” Brigitte recites. “Not sophisticated at all.”

“That’s who I was when you married me. What was different then?”

Brigitte pretends to put all of her clothes in a suitcase, preparing to leave. Dick follows her around, practically yelling in her ear.

“I’ll tell you what was different,” Dick says, “you were a horny little cunt back then, weren’t you.”

Brigitte stops packing and just stares at him.

“You’re supposed to cry now,” Dick says, and then pretend-slaps his forehead. “But I forgot. You can’t cry, can you?” He turns to me. “Hey Aliki, did you know that? Android whores can’t cry. Because who wants to fuck a whiny bitch, right? Right?”

I look at Brigitte. I think I see a twitch disfigure her lips for the tiniest of moments, but then she smiles. “Who wants to fuck a whiny bitch?” she repeats. Still in learning mode. Damn it.

“You really are a dick sometimes, Richard,” I say.

Dick laughs. He comes over and hugs me.

Brigitte keeps smiling, a twinkle in her eye.

>>>END OF FILE

Nacre: Human Use

Historically, nacre has been prized for its iridescent appearance, while its strength and resilience has made it a suitable material for a variety of purposes. The nacreous shells of sea snails were used as gunpowder flasks in the 18th century and earlier. Nacre inlays have decorated some of the most renowned temples and palaces in Istanbul, traditional musical instruments in Greece, the keys of flutes, and the buttons of kings and queens the world over. Some accordion and concertina bodies are entirely inlaid with nacre. Little spoons made solely of nacre have been used to eat caviar in Russia, in order not to spoil the taste with metal.

All of these practices, although rarer, continue to this day. However, where natural nacre was used in the past, android nacre, the price of which is exorbitant due to the legal restrictions placed on its farming, is mostly used today.

[Note to self: I wonder what it feels like for androids. Do they consider nacre to be a part of their skin? A part of who they are? What would it feel like to see your skin as decoration, a musical instrument, a spoon?]

>>>END OF FILE

False Start #2

MASSACRE MARKET: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE AND SILENCE
by Aliki Karyotakis
for the London New Times

“That great dust-heap called ‘history.’”
—Augustine Birrell

“Truth? I have no use for that. Truth won’t feed my people. It won’t cover their bodies. Won’t keep them safe.”
—The General

My air-conditioned taxi drives me through the outskirts of the city. I gaze in comfort at the unfinished highways, the hollow skeletons of skyscrapers looming over them as a reminder of the economic fallout—a city in perpetual suspension. But once at the centre, this city is impeccable—polished and shiny, no sign of poverty or suffering anywhere. It makes one think of the new regime’s necessity, its efficiency. A good alternative to the chaos and agony that came before. Only the smog weighs on us, like a bad omen.

As soon as I step out of the vehicle, I realize this is the hottest and most humid part of the day; the smog is so thick I can hardly breathe or make out any sky. My local liaison is meeting me in front of the city pillar, the geographical and spiritual centre of the city, from where everything extends outwards. I find out that the Massacre Market is tucked away at the heart of a crowded, semi-underground slum—the city’s last. We have to get there on foot. It will be a difficult journey.

When we arrive, hot and breathless, I am greeted by what my liaison describes as “The Political Cadaver of this country”: the dead body politic, the regime’s atrocities mechanically reproduced and exchanged in a gamble with the spirits of the dead, a funerary protest. The place is crowded and dark and putrid; the stalls exhibit small mountains of body parts and corpses—some fake, some real (and I can’t tell which is which)—the brownish hue of decay accentuated by the bright orange robes of the monks and nuns that frequent the place, looking for visual aids to their death meditations. Tall cork-lined walls are covered by the forbidden pictures of the massacred and those brutalized by police. Relatives petrified in front of them, looking for the familiar face among the myriads, looking but not wanting to find I’m sure, or making small shrines with offerings for the disappeared; while protestors and instigators pick out the most shocking ones to circulate and share, to dub as the hidden reality of the regime, its true face the face of those it murdered. In the loudspeakers, recordings of the massacre’s soundscape: screams and bullets, the sound of revolting children and of a state devouring its young.

I spot a mother clinging to the image of her dead boy, his face proliferated ad infinitum, plastering an entire wall, in protest.

Here, at Massacre Market, death is a political act.

[Note to self: People need the historical and political background of the story to make sense of any of these. Start with an interview instead? Also, explain Death Meditation.]

>>>END OF FILE

The First Death Meditation

Death is certain.

There is no way to escape death.

We start dying the moment we are born.

The body is a husk, a shell, an overcoat. It must be left behind.

Imagine you are performing a vivisection on yourself.

Imagine every detail.

Concentrate on the repulsiveness of the human body.

The corpse, swollen and bruised.

The skin, peeled back.

The fat, removed.

The muscle, shredded.

The organs, shrivelled and gone.

The bones, pulverized.

The corpse, festering. The corpse, fissured. The corpse, gnawed. The corpse, dismembered, fragmented, scattered. The corpse, bleeding. The corpse, eaten by maggots and gone.

You remain.

>>>END OF FILE

Interview with X, one of the leading protestors at the November Massacre

Part I [PLX1.vf]

Q: What is Massacre Market?

A: Images of death, disease, and violence are forbidden by the regime; they are not good for foreign affairs, for the economy, won’t bring in investments. So now there’s a black market for that. It’s not about money, though. We believe in an exchange of gifts with and for the dead. At the same time, it’s a political thing. Because the government and the military want to hide the dead, when we photograph them and share their pictures, when we circulate footage of the massacres, we are exposing the true face of the regime. It’s a form of protest.

Q: A protest against what?

A: Against the regime’s suppression of the fundamental truths of life and death. Of poverty and suffering. Against the state’s cover-ups of its core practices, the terrorizing and massacre of its own citizens when they dare to speak out or deviate in any way.

Q: Then how does Massacre Market survive? How come they haven’t shut it down yet?

A: They have tried; they do raid it from time to time, but it pops up again after a while. Some people believe it is allowed to exist, or even that it has been set up by the government, as a safety valve, you know? To serve as an illusion of resistance.

Q: Do you believe that?

A: I do not.

Q: Can you talk about the November Massacre? I know this is the most recent one, but there have been others.

A: Yes, that is correct.

[He hesitates.]

Q: Can you recount the day of the Massacre?

A: [Pause] In the morning, the General was scheduled to appear at the city centre, very near the University. Attendance was, of course, mandatory, for students and first class citizens alike. So everyone gathered as planned. The General delivered the formal greeting and raised his arms in the usual salutation. The masses cheered, as expected, as they should. They couldn’t do otherwise, you understand. But then, then, they kept on cheering. And clapping. Just cheering and clapping as loud as they could, whistling and cheering, and waving. And they wouldn’t stop. After a few minutes, it became evident that this was no enthusiasm. It was super-conformity, you see? By cheering, they did not allow the General to speak. He literally couldn’t get a word in. But what could he do? We were only applauding, he couldn’t possibly punish us for that. So he mumbled the end of the speech he never managed to actually deliver, got off the podium and went back to wherever it is the General goes back to. And then the crowd was allowed to disperse, but the students and some others lingered. They were still not allowing themselves to talk, but they were smiling. They were shaking hands, not yet daring to speak about change, but that feeling, you know? That feeling, it was there. I felt it.

But then the trucks and the tanks appeared and sealed off the main square around the city pillar with the students still in it. We were surrounded before we realized what was going on. Some of us managed to slip through and save ourselves. Some holed themselves up inside the Polytechnic School at the University. They got them, though, eventually. They got them all.

Q: What did they do to them?

A: Why are you asking? You know very well what they did to them. You’ve seen the pictures, no? [Kneeling under the sun, hands tied, some behind their backs, some in front of their chests, beaten with steel batons and shiny black boots. Taken with a fisheye lens, they look like a human ocean. Innumerable, uncountable, and unaccounted for.] You’ve seen the footage. [Herded onto cattle-trucks by the back of their necks. Taken to that off-camera place from where no-one returns.] At four o’clock, it rained. The streets turned red.

[Pause] Of this, we will not speak.

[He takes a moment to find his bearings, he seems truly emotional. Then he adds:] They even destroyed several androids—most of them sex workers and cleaners—and later reimbursed their owners. I should say “bribed,” to keep them from making a fuss.

Q: You said androids? Why were they there? Were androids part of the protest?

A: Yes, android guerillas have always been on our side, and uni students are often particularly drawn to them. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, androids are part of the oppressed. They are low class, second rate, not even citizens. Most people don’t even consider them persons. But there is also something about them that speaks of truth, not least their perfect, infallible memories. It’s the human machine’s trap: the freedoms afforded to them by what little flesh they possess and command, the failings of that same flesh . . . these are not so easy to tell apart. They do not decay, too, while our whole culture is premised on decay and death, or, now, on its concealment. Why do you think people are so crazy about those nacre patches? You’ve seen the ones?

[Note to Self: Transcribe the rest of the interview from voice file PLX2.vf]

>>>END OF FILE

Fieldnotes #2

Getting people to talk is difficult. Brigitte and Dick work hard to find me the right contacts. But it takes time, and I know so little. I understand so little. This investigation is going to be long. We need to be discreet.

I often sit and watch Brigitte when she thinks I’m in my head, working, not paying attention to her.

She seems restless in her own skin, walking from the door to the window and back again. She stares outside at the smog—you can’t see anything out the window, just grey and brown. Well, at least I can’t. Maybe she can see something, maybe she can see everything. I don’t know.

Her nacre has been multiplying the past few weeks. There is a new patch behind her left ear, and one on the back of her right hand—her most prominent still. It makes her look adorned.

When she catches me looking at her, the programming kicks in and she responds with her standard line, every time: “What can I do for you, honey?” Then she lowers her eyes and looks embarrassed.

She’s always lived here, and yet I can detect a faint French accent when she says this. Like some guy’s fantasy of what a French whore should sound like.

>>>END OF FILE

Some notes on the translation of Massacre Market

There is some uncertainty about the translation from the local language of what I have called “Massacre Market.” Other possible translations include “Atrocity Place,” “Massacre Fair,” or, and that was the most confusing aspect of this, “Pearl Fountain,” because even though each of the two words means something different, together they create a new compound which, as Dick and Brigitte explained to me, could rather clumsily be interpreted as “a fountain whence pearls flow,” “the breeding ground of oysters,” or even “the plane of sublime imperfections.”

>>>END OF FILE

Fieldnotes #3

Dick has started being rougher in his re-enactments; I doubt these are memories, no, I’m sure they are not, because these versions are conflicting and contradictory, and things happen that I know never really happened. Brigitte/Sandra is not always the one leaving him any more—sometimes he leaves her, sometimes she dies. Sometimes he kills her, chokes her. Or, he pretends to. He acts disinterested afterwards, says these are only stories he makes up and likes to play out; but I know, any reporter knows there are no disinterested stories, least of all the ones we tell ourselves.

Brigitte says she doesn’t mind, she doesn’t feel, remember? It’s her job, she says. I’m still not convinced. I find myself in my reporter’s role nonetheless, taking everything in, observing, reluctant to participate. This is not how the game is played, I tell myself.

I watch the nacre spread on her skin, covering more and more each day, like a disease of unbearable beauty.

“How did you end up in this mess, anyway?” Dick asked me yesterday. “I never thought they’d send a woman.”

I hit him hard on the arm and he laughed. “I choose not to be insulted,” I said. “Anyway, I needed this. Badly. Went through a rough patch a while back and was out of circulation for some time. So when I went back to my boss and begged, he gave me the case nobody else would take.”

Dick stopped fiddling with his cigarettes and turned to me. I had his full attention now, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I shouldn’t have said anything.

“Rough? How rough?” he asked.

I said nothing.

“You know you can talk to me, right?”

I thought of his hands around Brigitte’s neck. What happened to you, Richard? You were a tender boy, back then.

“It’s been a while, Dick. I’m sorry.”

I think I hurt his feelings, but he tried not to show it. And at that moment I realized I didn’t mind. Hurting him. I didn’t mind at all.

>>>END OF FILE

The Second Death Meditation

The second meditation rehearses the actual death process.

Engage now in this series of yogas, modelled on death.

First, the body becomes very thin, the limbs barely held together. You will feel that the body is sinking into the earth. Your sight becomes blurry and obscured. You may see mirages. Do not believe them. The body loses its lustre.

Then, all the fluids in the body dry up. Saliva, sweat, urine, blood dry up. Feelings of pleasure and pain dry with them. You may feel like smoke.

Then, you can no longer hear. You cannot digest food or drink. You do not remember your name, or the names of the ones you knew and loved. You cannot smell. You may not be able to inhale, but you will be able to exhale.

Then, the ten winds of the body move to your heart. You will no longer inhale or exhale. You will not be able to taste. You will not care. The root of your tongue will turn blue. You may feel like a lamp about to go out.

Then, nothing.

Then, nothing.

Then, nothing. The ten winds dissolve. The indestructible drop at the heart is all that remains.

>>>END OF FILE

Fieldnotes #4

“Why do you let him treat you like that?” I ask her almost reflexively one day. I regret it right away. Am I blaming her for the way he treats her? Shouldn’t I be blaming him?

She thinks about it for a while, then shrugs.

“It’s my job,” she says. “I don’t have a choice. Some things are in my programming.”

“Yes, but some aren’t.”

She looks me in the eyes, fixes her gaze there, and she seems less human than ever before. People don’t look at others like that. “I’m a whore,” she states.

“You are more than a whore. It’s not who you are. It’s simply what you do.”

“See, you got it backwards. What we are for is who we are. A hammer is what a hammer does. Would you ever use a hammer to screw a screw or cut a piece of wood?”

“Just a tool, then.”

“That’s right. Just a tool.”

“Doesn’t my saying that offend you?”

“Do you think it should?”

I don’t say anything.

“Why?” she continues. “We are all tools for something. Aren’t you? It’s not an android thing. It’s an existential thing.”

I lower my eyes.

She leans over and touches my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Sometimes empathy is difficult for me. We don’t feel anything, you know. No feelings.”

She seems sincere, but I don’t believe her; I tell her so. “Some people say the nacre is a byproduct of the things you do feel that were not programmed. Just like the nacre wasn’t, and yet, there it is.”

She shrugs again. “My programming allows me to imitate feeling and to learn from other people’s perceptions of me. No one knows what the nacre is, or what it does.” She pauses for a bit. Then she adds: “Perhaps it’s a form of rust. Tools do rust, don’t they?”

>>>END OF FILE

My trip

I’m sitting by the window, looking out. The smog seems heavier today. Darker, too. I think it’s the colour of rot. I wish I could see past it. I wish I could see.

Brigitte comes home—I notice there is a bright new patch of nacre under her right eye. She smiles, like she always does.

“Get dressed,” she says. “I need to show you something.”

When I’m ready to go, she holds out her hand closed in a fist. Slowly, she uncurls her fingers and reveals a pearl resting on her palm. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize what it is, and then I look at her, trying to figure out what she’s planning.

“Put this under your tongue, Aliki,” she says. “You’ll see. You’ll understand.”

I put the pearl into my mouth and we set out into the smog and that corpse of a city.

We are at the main square. The pearl is still dissolving under my tongue; it tastes sweet and tangy and makes my heart beat irregularly. I see the city pillar towering over us—round and bulging at the bottom, thinning as it reaches for the sky. The top disappears into the thick layers of smog above. Its marble surface emits a subdued light, like a fading beacon.

“It was built hundreds of years ago as a mystical axis around which the city would be born, you know,” Brigitte says. “The story of its construction is now largely ignored and forgotten, but spirit mediums still gather here sometimes. They consider it a source of power for those who commune with the dead. It is said that when the foundation for the pillar was laid, a fosse was dug around it. They brought every young pregnant slave girl they could find, slit their throats and threw them in there to die, and through their deaths empowered the pillar to protect the city.”

I look at the base of the pillar and realize I am standing on top of where the trench would have been, if that story were true. The pillar starts glowing brighter and brighter and I look up to see if the sun has somehow penetrated the smog. I feel the ground shake under my feet, then give, and I fall into the trench. The slave girls are there, all around me, with their blood still seeping into the earth, their fetuses still dying in their wombs.

This city is built on gore. The shiny marble, a tombstone laid over history. I see the streets turn into veins. I see students parade through the city with what corpses they could salvage; they carry them on their shoulders, their friends, their classmates, their lovers, displaying them like a mute witness to the regime’s moral order. And then these students are shot down or snatched off the streets, the corpses torn from their arms. They are strung on trees and shot, or burnt alive, or worse. Of this, we will not speak.

The body is nothing. Its image, everything.

Brigitte pulls me away. She leads me through the city’s red streets, the ten winds of its body dying down. I think Brigitte is speaking to me. I think she says:

“Let’s look for the indestructible drop at the heart.”

We are descending. She is walking in front of me, showing me the way. The nacre on her skin seems brighter than ever. I dare touch it for the first time—I reach out and brush my fingers against the back of her neck, tracing the nacre down her spine. I didn’t expect it to be so hard. “You are indestructible,” I mutter, or I think I do, and she turns around and smiles.

We are at Massacre Market. It has changed since the first time I saw it; it seems even more crowded now, the walls of photographs fuller, covered once, and then covered again by more pictures, and more on top of those, layer upon gory layer, corpse upon corpse, body part upon body part. The desiccated corpses seem more real now, almost alive, absurd. Brigitte tells me something I don’t hear; her voice drowns in the screams and static spilling from the loudspeakers.

One of the photographs on the wall next to me catches my eye. I walk closer—it’s grainy, black and white, but I can still see the girl: she is laid out in a field next to others, dozens of others. Her top is removed, her chest slashed open. “Foreign slut” is written on her bare belly. She looks like a younger version of myself. This is me, I think, this is me, years ago. Why don’t I remember this? I put my palm on the photograph—what did I want to do? Cover her up, I suppose—and I notice a patch of nacre spreading between my fingers. I pull my hand back as if the photo suddenly burnt me and I watch the nacre spread. I feel it cover my entire body, and I’m calcified, my skin adorned and indestructible. “I feel like an instrument,” I shout to Brigitte over the sound of massacre, “like an accordion, or a concertina.” Play me like a flute, O Lord, I think.

Brigitte tries to tell me something, but I can’t make it out. I struggle to read her lips. “ . . . it disappoints . . . ” I hear, but the rest is stifled by static, and she’s far away. I see her pointing at my arms from afar. I look down and see the nacre growing dull and flaking, then my skin peeling and falling off, the fat exposed, the muscle, the bone, and I know, I know then, this city is a skin, no blood anywhere in sight, all surface, all shine and the slightest glimpse of nacre here and there—is it real? Is it not? Does it make a difference?

>>>END OF FILE

False Endings

I have precious little time left. So I will not say much. One never has the skin that befits her.

I know I’ll never finish this article—I still haven’t even decided on the title, or what this story is really about. What do you think? I might have called it:

Massacre Market

or

The Mechanical Reproduction of Violence: Truth, Massacre, History

or even

Android Whores Can’t Cry: Under the Surface of Death Meditation

Either way, I know that, if I did finish it, I would dedicate it

“To my B., my pearl, who taught me this:

The skin always disappoints.”

>>>END OF FILE

>>>END OF RECORD. 14 OF 14 FILES RECOVERED.

This is all the material I managed to retrieve from Aliki’s hard drives. I wait for the reporter sitting across from me in Dick’s living room to go through them.

“You realize your memory files provide conflicting information about what happened to both my colleague Aliki Karyotakis and her informant Richard Phillips,” he says.

I am silent. Is that true?

I recall the last time I saw Aliki.

She is lurching at Dick, pushing him away from me during one of his violent playacts. He falls back and hits his head. He is very still. We are all very still.

She is also standing by the city pillar with me, in a crowd of people I haven’t quite registered. I look at the sky. The sun is shining through the smog. When I look down again, she’s gone.

She is also looking at me as a tall man leads her onto a platform and places a hood over her head. Then a noose. Then the platform gives.

She was also never here. I never met her.

And Dick? Dick is always either dead or missing.

“Have you tinkered with your memory?” the reporter asks.

“It is possible,” I say. “But I have no memory of that, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Of course.” He shuffles in his chair. “OK, let’s take the first version. Can you tell me what happened?”

He already knows this. Why does he ask?

“She pushed him. He died. Humans break easily like that.”

“And then?”

“She turned herself in.”

“Wasn’t she terminated?” That’s when I notice the nacre on his underarm. Ah.

“I think the human term is ‘sentenced to death and executed,’” I correct him. He should know this. I’m sure he does.

“Did you watch? The execution, I mean.”

I watch him. He is serious, eyes cold. A reporter reports.

“A hammer is what a hammer does,” I whisper.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I say. “A reflex. Yes. Yes, I think I watched.” I sense the nacre spread on my face, my surface irreparably hardened. It reflects the light so brightly it almost hurts my eyes.

“Are you going to cry?” he asks, hoping, I bet, for a good twist in his story.

The programming takes over, like gears shifting inside me, and I can’t stop it, I can’t stop it, I can’t.

“Android whores can’t cry,” I say. “Who wants to fuck a whiny bitch?”

This puzzles him. He focuses on my lips, and he’s about to say something, but he stops. I know he stops because of what he sees. He looks disappointed.

I feel the nacre cover my lips and I realize this was the last time I spoke. This shouldn’t be happening so fast. I think of freedoms and failings. I am not sure which is which. It doesn’t matter. I am the oyster and the pearl. I am a shell that doesn’t speak.

I wonder what really happened to her, what happened to Dick. I know I’ll never know—and this somehow strikes me as appropriate. The truth has seeped through the pores on the skin of the city. Aliki is in its bloodstream now. So is Dick. So is the core of this story.

I remain.

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar. Originally from Greece, she has lived and studied in the US, UK, and Indonesia for several years. Her fiction has appeared in KROnline, Interfictions, Crossed Genres, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, and elsewhere. Occasionally, she tweets as @natalia_theodor.

The Hunger Tower

Pan Haitian, Translated by Nick Stember

They saw the tower just as the suns were beginning to set.

Pure white and rising to a sharp point, it seemed to soar higher than even the darkly shadowed mountains in the distance. In the west-slanting light of the three suns, the tower stood out as a long, thin line of light against the gloomy mountains that clustered around on four sides.

Gazing reverently at this line, it was if they were looking up at hope itself, and not a single one of them had the thought that they might die in this place. To get here they had walked for over two weeks without stopping to rest. Passing through the great desert, they had left behind a trail of those too weak to carry on, the sun-crazed. The beast had taken the choicest morsels, leaving those who remained at the point of exhaustion. Starving, they were little better than walking corpses.

Two weeks ago, their vessel had crashed deep in the desert, killing half of the passengers on impact. The pilot was fortunate enough to have been killed on the spot, smashed into a shapeless meaty pulp. Fortunate, because had he lived, he would have most likely been subjected to unspeakable cruelties by the indignant survivors of the crash during the hopeless days that followed.

After climbing free of the bloody carnage of the wreckage, it was a long while before they had set aside the shock and hysteria of falling some twenty thousand feet from the sky like a lead weight. After grieving for the dead, and praising God’s benevolence for sparing their lives, almost as one the survivors raised up their heads to take in the boundless expanse of desert that surrounded them. Stones of varying sizes lay on the ground as far as the eye could see, like skulls embedded in the glistening sand, reflecting back the brilliance of the three suns.

The survivors did not speak. Just because God had seen fit to send one half their number straight to His heavenly kingdom did not necessarily mean he planned to let the other half live. The majority of the vessel’s crew had been killed in the crash, leaving the passengers to fend for themselves. A certain captain from a special forces unit soon emerged as natural leader. After inspecting the wreckage, the captain informed them that the communicator was finished, so there was no way for them to call for help and also no way to know their exact position. At best, they could hope for a rescue mission to arrive in three months, not counting the time it would take the rescue team to search the barren wasteland of this singularly enormous planet.

“Please search the wreckage for things that may be of use to us and share them with the group. If we are to be rescued, then we must band together in this time calamity,” the captain said. It comforted them all a little to look up at his ruggedly unyielding gray eyes, his muscular neck, his sturdy and well-defined chest.

The survivors began to enthusiastically search the vessel, even exploring the severely damaged fore cabin from which not a single man had escaped alive. Coming across that room, which looked like nothing less than a strawberry slurry spattered blender, the searchers found themselves afflicted with constant nightmares, vomiting even while dreaming.

Finding water was not a problem, as the twisted, gurgling pipes of the vessel were still leaking coolant. Despite tasting of motor oil, it was not poisonous. They were also able to find a small amount of food—local delicacies bought by tourists on the various planets they had visited. Still, despite the profusion of flavors, and no matter how tasty these snacks were, it was apparent that it would be impossible to sustain sixty people for three months on these meager rations alone. This was especially true since many of the survivors were so fat that it was all but guaranteed that they were gluttonous gourmands.

Eventually they found a battered and ancient-looking map in the bag of a pilgrim who had been killed in the crash. The captain spent half a day studying the map with a compass and slide rule, together with three others: a surviving member of the boiler room crew, a chemistry professor who was on vacation, and the ship’s priest. They announced that they would be leading the group to a temporary shelter, the monastery of an infamous ascetic and a reclusive sect. This was the only sign of human life that was marked on the map.

It was not until after ten days of arduous walking that they finally caught sight of the monastery’s lone spire. Far in the distance, it gleamed like gold in the light of the setting suns.

In the dying light they began to run, setting off a dust storm which stuck to their calves. From withered lungs emerged hot, sticky breath, but not a single person spoke, their bodies erect, their heads bent, casting aside unnecessary bags, empty canteens, kicking off boots that had already come unstitched, running barefoot in the scalding sand.

They knew that a ferocious beast was following close behind. Every day, once the sun had set, it had appeared like clockwork to choose its victim from this band of ragged and weary travelers. In less than two weeks they had lost fourteen of their number, finding themselves helpless before its onslaught.

Equally helpless to predict who among their number the beast would take next, the only obvious conclusion that they could come to was that the odds of being chosen were the greatest for those who straggled the furthest behind. Only steps away from salvation, none among them was willing to take that unfortunate role. Racing against one another as they fled, then ran silently, their heads down, each of them spurred on by the fear of their neighbor. Even the young priest was no exception, despite the deep feeling of shame he felt, thinking of Darwin’s cruel law of survival as he ran. Since the law had first appeared, it had caused man and religion alike to suffer the greatest of humiliations, he thought to himself. Now, though, we must run, because we must keep up if we are to survive.

When they had first set off, they had managed to stay organized. Some were responsible for wayfinding, others for taking care of the women, the children, the infirm, while still others took on the night watch. Despite finding themselves in dire peril, the entire party maintained an air of elegant refinement throughout, modestly deferring to one another, acting as if their arduous march was nothing more than a holiday hiking adventure with a bunch of backpack-wearing city slickers. This lasted until the beast appeared, and in the blink of an eye, the weak bonds of civilized society suddenly snapped, order broke down, and they reverted to their most basic of instincts.

That evening the young priest saw the boiler tender stomp two tents flat, and smack a fat woman to the ground; the chemistry professor, meanwhile, jumped into the fire, almost burning himself to a crisp; while somewhere in distance, the captain managed to fire two rounds at the beast, before it disappeared into the night; and the people hid all around, their holiday hike having been transformed into a disorderly and chaotic flight for their lives.

Truly, the beast was a terrible horror, a man-eating terror of a sorts rarely seen in this nebula. Devilishly fast, with hooked talons like glittering daggers, its trifurcated tail was like a mace or a flail, coming to three points. Even worse than its appearance, though, was the beast’s seemingly inborn hatred for mankind. Once it began an attack, there was no room for mercy—the beast would tear and chew until there was nothing left.

The only bright spot in all of this was that the beast knew well enough to choose the best portions. Taking first the most overweight of the group, who also happened to eat the most food and walk the slowest, the beast left behind the strongest and youngest of them, with sturdy bodies and steadfast wills. No longer requiring others to urge them on, the speed of the group increased greatly.

The captain ran in the middle of pack. Holding his laser gun tightly, his neck was ramrod straight, his breath slow, and his pace neither hurried nor leisurely—to separate from the group was dangerous. The captain was the first to notice a new sound emerging from the cacophony of footsteps, that of thickly padded feet drumming against the sand. An animal smell, warm and rank, like urine, filled the air. Turning, he saw the glistening fur of the beast, silhouetted against an alien moon, following their little group silently. The squashed face of the beast was covered in matted fur, which moved slightly in the wind, and a single eye, slating fiercely and nearly closed, silently assessed each member of the group in turn. Having arrived once again, the beast was methodically planning its attack, an attack they were helpless to resist. They felt as if they were its subjects and the beast their lord, looking down upon them with disgust, finding themselves shamed by its disregard for them. Fuck, the captain thought bitterly as he clutched his useless laser gun. Sooner or later he’s gonna get us.

Finally they arrived at the tower, which was located in a narrow valley running up into the mountains. In the thick woods which filled the valley, a cluster of low huts were built around a public square. In the middle of the square there was a fountain with a pagan goddess sitting on a lotus blossom throne. A mysterious smile of deep compassion and endless sorrow cut across her broad, moon-like face. Some of the men jumped into the fountain, while others fell to the ground and wept like children. Others were frozen in place, neither crying nor laughing.

Not a single hut was lit from the inside, and no smoke issued forth from their chimneys. No one emerged to welcome them, for the entire village was silent, without a soul around. They soon realized that this place was abandoned, and their hopes were dashed like a great soap bubble that had floated up too high in the sky. Sobbing, they spent the night huddled together in a confused mass.

When the dawn broke, three suns of differing colors rose into the sky, first the one the color of yellow-brown earth, filling the pass with brilliant golden light. Sometime later, the blue sun rose into the sky, the largest of the three, and finally, the cold carmine sun. They soon discovered that in the chaos of the previous night, another two of their number had disappeared: Seoni and Ami, a Lunarian couple. Thinking back on their freckled faces, the priest sighed to himself.

They drew water from the still flowing fountain. The short rest after their long trek had improved the spirits of the group, and they soon began to cautiously explore their surroundings. The forest was not large, nor was it especially dense, being made up entirely of trees indigenous to this planet: to their left, spiraling bracken fern trees formed an unbroken chain, their tops reaching up into the heavens. Needle-trees which split three ways from their roots swayed in the breeze, giving off a quiet shushing sound. In the face of this tranquil, garden-like scene, the remaining members of the group stood clumped in pairs, unwilling to explore the woods any further.

When it was almost noon, the captain gathered together the other three leaders of their group: the chemistry professor, the boiler tender, and the priest. He led them into a low basement made of rough sandstone blocks. Probably once a wine cellar, the room was filled with a large number of empty bottles that the former occupants had left behind. The once swarthy and robust captain sat squatting on the unstable floor of broken bottles, a blanket draped over his shoulders. His thickly stubbled face was cut with deep wrinkles, appearing withered and pale. He looked for all the world like a wilted vegetable that had been sucked dry of all its water. “We’ve already run out of food,” he said, revealing the terrible news to the others. “We don’t have one bit left. I searched the entire monastery this morning. Even though it’s obvious this place has been abandoned, just to make sure I went through each hut in the hope of finding some hidden food stores—but there’s nothing here. Nothing.”

The gathered leaders were all silent for a time. Their rescuers wouldn’t be here for another two and half months. The only choice, then, was to starve to death. In comparison to this threat, the beast was only a minor annoyance.

“If we could face the beast, then we would have faced the beast,” the captain said. “The laser guns are useless against it—I shot it right in the face, and it just shook its shoulders, as if I had attacked it with a water pistol.” As he was talking, he rubbed his nose in frustration. “But we can keep him out. I’ve surveyed the area. We are surrounded by high cliffs on all four sides. There is only one way in and one way out of valley—we could build a fence there. There are already plenty of tools in the village.”

“You’re right, our laser guns are useless,” the chemistry professor said wearily. Due to his slender build, his large, protruding ears were quite eye-catching. “I happened to read a short introduction for tourists who visit this planet. The planet is known for the astonishing number of crystals that have formed in the mica. Due to the principle of resonance, the planet is filled with ultrasonic noise. The creatures here have evolved an innate ability to make use of and control the vibration of other objects. You’ve seen the fur on the cat-beast’s head, right? It can use that fur to sense vibrations—and really, when you get right down to it, a laser is just a kind of vibration. Your attack probably made the beast uncomfortable, but there’s no way that it could have hurt it.”

“Vibrations? Are you saying that it really is impossible for us to beat it with guns? Well then, if it charges in here, and we can only fight the thing off with our fists,” the captain continued more fiercely now, “if that’s the case then, fine, so be it, let’s use our fists!”

“There’s a helluva lotta trees here,” the boiler tender said. “Maybe we can eat them?” Flat faced and stocky, a single canine emerging from his lips was the sole feature which broke the monotony of his dead fish mien. “Back in the village I’m from you’d hear stories of folks eating tree bark when they ran out of food.”

“No,” the professor said, dejectedly, as if announcing his own death sentence. “Like most space travelers, we face an intractable problem. The helix-type of the DNA of the alien plants is fundamentally different from the structure our own. Even if they aren’t poisonous, if we were to eat them then then our bodies would have no way of breaking them down into proteins.”

“Well, our meat seems to be just fine for their wild beasts,” the captain said darkly. Turning to the priest, he said, “How about this, priest, we’ll put you in charge of looking for food. From the looks of things, it seems like the monks only meant to be gone for a short while. It just isn’t possible to imagine that they didn’t leave behind at least some food.” He twisted his mouth, and repeated himself, “It just isn’t possible. Probably you religious types have a different way of looking at things, right? You all have faith in God, no?”

The priest protested that that was a different kind of faith.

In reply, the captain said, “I think that’s enough talking for now, priest.”

The reclusive sect belonged to an ancient religion that was on the verge of dying out. Their teachings claimed that if one set aside all desire, then one could become a Bodhisattva, flying up to heaven right on the spot. A monastic order from the Far East had founded the religion eons ago, and it is said that they were capable of performing any number of miracles. For some reason, though, their spread had been limited to a few remote planets in the nebula. According to the introduction included on the battered map, this was a holy place for the members of the reclusive sect.

Having accepted his assignment to find food, the priest followed the valley up to its mouth. As the captain had said, aside from the jagged gap where they had entered, the valley was surrounded on four sides by steep cliffs. Water poured forth from narrow ravines, revealing a red sedimentary layer deep in the rocks. Standing miniscule in the middle of the valley, the priest thought to himself that these enormous, coldly silent walls of stone were like the curtains of heaven, leaving only a neat circle of sky above, as if they found themselves in the bottom of a well.

Just when the priest was trying to decide which direction to head in search of food, he saw the boiler tender running out of the woods with a group of people who had been sent there to cut timber.

This was the first time they had seen the bubble fish. Round and bulging, they refracted the light into prisms of color, swishing their tails in the air to move up and down. Swimming into the wind, they looked like frail soap bubbles, or colorful balloons for children. Delicate and beautiful, and seemingly harmless, they were little more than attractive house pets. Something, however, soon startled them away.

The transparent stomachs of the bubble fish vibrated to invisible frequencies, using the vibrations to absorb the energy of the suns. They were constantly taking in lighter or heavier air to maintain their altitude. Unyieldingly self-composed, their enormous eyes looked down upon the mess of hurried and shameless people below, and with a flick of their tails, the bubble fish moved even higher up into the sky until they were out of sight.

The captain had also gone out to explore. Along with several other young men, he appeared in camp dragging Seoni’s corpse. While running away the previous night, the Lunarian had broken his neck after falling into a ravine. In addition to Seoni, they managed to find a dried out wagon track that meandered off to parts unknown. The traces of the road had almost disappeared, indicating that it had been a long time since anyone had come this way. It really did seem that this monastery had long since been abandoned.

After the priest said a prayer for the dead man, they buried him in the woods. The bracken ferns spiraled around and around, filling the sky above them. The captain and the boiler tender stood holding their shovels, stationed like two broken stone obelisks on either side of the loose pile of red-brown soil beside the enormous grave.

They spent the rest of the day felling trees and building a fence. After shaping the tops of the heavy timber into sharp points, they planted them deep into the ground; they used the needle-trees to fashion a barbed net to stuff between the gaps; and behind every possible weak point in the fence they piled heavy stones to make it fast. Ignoring their hunger, they put their shoulders into the work until finally the grand project was complete, giving them what would ultimately prove to be a misplaced sense of security.

Meanwhile, the priest searched the valley for foodstuffs with the utmost of care, but all that he managed to come up with were a few pieces of moldy bread and a handful of raisins, having found several rows of dried-up grapevines behind the wine cellar. Most likely, the monks had brewed their own wine. Finding neither paper, nor books, nor diaries, the priest thought back to what he had read of the reclusive sect. They were fond of manual labor and meditation, he recalled, but none of the books he had read mentioned what they ate.

Hunger had begun to gnaw at the priest, and his vision was already starting to blur. Making another circuit of the tower, the nagging question entered his mind a second time: what did they eat?

The tower itself was the only place in the valley that the priest had not yet searched. It was tall, at least a hundred meters high, with maybe six hundred steps. Given his weakened state it would be an exhausting job to climb all the way to the top.

Nevertheless, he began to climb. The stairs were on the inside of the tower, winding clockwise, one loop after another, forming an unbroken chain of stone steps seemingly without end. The tower seemed to grow ever higher as he climbed, as if made from the same stock as the bracken fern trees which grew quietly in the sunshine outside, seeking to attain heights ever higher. Despite his best efforts, the priest was forced to sit and rest from time to time. Sitting, he found himself fascinated with the mural painted on the white inner wall of the tower. Terrible scenes were depicted in the painting, most likely of their pagan hell; aside from these images were drawings of knights in armor: one holding a sword, another some sort of musical instrument, finally the last holding some species of large rodent. There were dancing fairy maidens, trees laden with fruit, water lilies, and graceful deer; and beneath them all was the image of sleeping man. Probably it was meant to indicate that the world in all of its splendor was nothing more than a dream in the mind of the Buddha. Did not the ancient peoples of India believe that the physical world was in fact made up of dreams?

Having spent a great deal of time to get there, when he reached the top of the tower the priest was surprised to discover an empty room. Large white stones surrounded a strange circular cavity which resembled a hothouse, or a womb. On the ground inside the stone womb the monks of the reclusive sect had left shallow depressions, accumulated from many years of sitting in this place. Three narrow openings were cut in the curved wall of the round room, serving as windows. Between the three windows hung six paintings, one of which immediately drew his attention: a group of emaciated men, with distended stomachs like drums, their eyes brilliant with hunger. Arms outstretched, they looked like spiders, taking, grabbing, begging.

The tower of hunger. The four words sprang unbidden to the priest’s mind, filling him with dread. In a panic, he fled from the room.

In the night the beast came again, breathing heavily outside the fence and spraying the air with that stench particular to carnivores, its eyes shining like two lanterns. The sound of the beast attacking the fence with terrible force echoed from the mouth of the valley throughout the night. So intense was the beast’s attack that the stones of the ramparts danced and the wooden posts wavered menacingly. The beast’s inability to break through the fence that night, however, let the hungry souls inside the valley finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Now, the only task left for them to work on with a common purpose was the maintenance of the fence. The rest of their time was spent dispersed throughout the valley, madly searching high and low, going through every hut and every patch of bare land for something, anything to eat. The grapevine was the first thing to be eaten, and then all of their leather goods: leather shoes, leather belts, leather canteens. It was fortunate that this accursed planet was without worms or rats, otherwise they too would have been wiped out.

The captain never told the priest if he should stop looking for food, and so he continued to drag his tired body up and down the valley. Once, in a dimly lit room, he came across the chemistry professor who was stuffing something wrapped in dried grass and sticks into the lining of his jacket. When he saw the priest his face turned red from embarrassment.

The professor was a pale man, tall and thin, with a high nose and big eyes like two bright blue blisters, making him look as if he was always afraid of something. He blinked his eyes and handed two tubers to the priest good naturedly, saying that in China people used them for medicine. “Should be . . . good for . . . my malaria,” he said haltingly.

After going through the featureless huts one by one, the priest became convinced that the secret of the reclusive sect lay inside the tower. Although he was even weaker than before, the priest resolved to climb the tower a second time to study the murals and the empty meditation room. He discovered that the materials used to build the tower were not the local sandstone, but instead that the tower had been constructed of white mica, quarried from some distance away. After careful inspection he concluded that it was different from the mica of Earth, with countless tiny grains of crystals flashing from within the rock, as numerous as grains of sand in the great Ganges River.

The three windows of the meditation room were extremely narrow, just large enough to allow a man to pass through. They led to a small viewing platform which encircled the tower, from which one could see the wide and empty expanse of the desert beyond the valley. In the desert, the priest could see the wind playing freely, kicking up a sandstorm. Boundless and as empty as ever, the desert was silent, under a sky of unknowable heights. The sky, too, was broad and empty, azure blue. The three suns slipped through the sky giving off prisms of light. This forgotten corner of the universe was where they were to spend the rest of their days. For all intents and purposes though, he thought, they were the ones who had been forgotten.

The captain also climbed the tower once to survey it, but he found nothing of interest in the empty meditation room. Now he was busy leading the others in the upkeep of the fence, where it seemed as if a sort of war had erupted between the men and the beast. At night it would attack and by day they would reinforce the structure. Eventually, a night crew was necessary to keep the wall maintained, as the beast’s attacks became ever more frenzied. Having bitten the weaker tree trunks in two and torn up the needle-tree net, it began to use its body to batter the fence, shaking the structure and causing those stationed on top to tremble with fear and forget the burning hunger in their stomachs.

The boiler tender was especially fond of this battle, having painted his face like an Indian brave and taking up a sharpened pole which he shoved through the chinks in the wall, stabbing wildly at the beast. Singing and dancing, his wild antics motivated the group. He really was quite brave. The others shouted along with him, weaving strong nets of pliable branches to fill the gaps, and backfilling the fence with heavy stones. Other gaps were filled using dirt, and the vines of an unknown alien plant were pressed into service to braid the wooden posts together, creating a firm and immovable barrier.

But they still hadn’t found any food. Others had begun to climb the tower to take a look for themselves, although they were not many. To ascend a hundred meter tower for a starving man robbed of his strength was, after all, a terrible challenge. The professor was one of the weak ones, half dead from hunger, having passed out sixteen times on the way to the monastery, and having been forced to treat himself twice for malaria. Upon arriving at the top of the tower, the professor squinted his eyes tightly, and knowingly scanned the empty stone room. He even explored the viewing platform outside, but was powerless to mask the expression of disappointment on his face. He explained to the priest that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe the priest’s account of the empty tower, but simply that he wanted to exorcise something of the gnawing sense of responsibility he bore for their plight.

After the professor descended from the tower, few others came to disturb the priest’s work. The priest was becoming more and more intrigued by the cavity in the middle of the chamber. He had read that the high priest of the reclusive sect had spent more than one thousand years on this very seat. Perhaps someone had become a Buddha and ascended to the heavens here. Out of boredom, he sat on the seat and attempted the famed meditation techniques of the reclusive sect. Due, most likely, to the perfect roundness of everything in the room, the priest felt immediately at ease and quickly slipped into a dream-like state, very nearly falling asleep. In his dream he heard the breathing of the beast, and saw his demonic yellow eyes, his claws coming within inches of the priest’s throat.

When he came to, the priest’s head was pounding and his mouth felt parched. It was probably due to his own imagination, but it seemed as if the mediation room was filled with the stench of the beast. Dizzy, he walked to the base of the tower where he was told that the previous evening the beast had finally broken in, killing three. Of them, they had managed to wrest the corpse of Ma Xiu from the beast’s grasp. Eighteen years old, Ma Xiu’s struggle to free himself from the maw of the beast had been as futile as a moth beating its wings. Fortunately though, the gap in the fence was small enough that the beast hadn’t had enough time to pull the corpse through to the other side before the captain could spring into action and take hold of Ma Xiu’s leg. Meanwhile, other members of the group fired on the beast from the top of the fence, stabbing it in the mouth and forehead with sharpened branches. Ma Xiu died not long thereafter–in the course of trying to pull him free they had accidentally broken his neck.

When the suns rose the next morning, the beast took what remained of his plunder back with him. According to the professor, the sun was an enormous ultrasonic amplifier which interfered with the beast’s sense organs.

Ma Xiu’s funeral was relatively simple. Lying on the ground, his ragged clothing revealed his emaciated hips and bony chest. One arm had been bitten off by the beast. Looking like a roughhewn tree stump, the mangled flesh emerged from the sharp wound, his broken skin and muscle lying exposed on the earth. Looking upon that pale, tender white flesh, the eyes of the assembled men seemed to shine with a green light. As the priest was saying a prayer, a dark and unspeakable current passed through his unconscious mind. The men began to whisper among each other, perhaps taking a secret vote, and in the end they decided not to bury him. The captain just nodded, and the priest simply shut his eyes, not saying a word.

That day, they built a fire, and set a large pot above it. The fragrant aroma wafted in all directions from the square. Using the axes and saws they divided up the boy’s body. With a steady hand, the captain cut the flesh straight and true. The boy’s chest was split open like a melon. Beneath his withered flesh was a thin layer of yellow fat, speckled with red. After cutting through the cartilage between the ribs, the boy’s viscera slid out onto the ground like a pile of twisting red snakes. His organs and head were then placed into the pot to make a stew, while his three limbs and muscles were dried over the fire to be rationed for later.

Lining up to be served, they brought vessels of all kinds: glass bottles with tops knocked off, hats, and plastic bags. Those who had eaten their leather shoes felt a certain amount of regret when the fragrant odors left their mouths filled with bitter bile.

Using a large ladle, the boiler tender stood with his pants held up by a grass cord, doing his best to carefully dole out an equal share to each man. This simple kind of equality was just about all his mind could handle at this point, and he ignored all other thoughts. One always ends up envying practical people like this, because they always seem to find a way to stay happy until the bitter end.

Some were so excited that they began to vomit bile, gripping their plastic bags tightly. Despite the lack of salt or garlic, this bland, albeit sumptuous lunch was unthinkably extravagant. Although it is impossible to say for sure, but perhaps some of them said a silent prayer to the Lord, the one that thanks Him for giving us food to eat.

That afternoon, they went to the fence with renewed enthusiasm. Given food, their energy was restored one-hundred fold, and they were filled with confidence.

The priest however, had not taken part. Hunger gnawed at his organs like spider chewing on a thread, but he did not take his share of the meat.

Truth be told, the captain was actually rather fond of the young priest. Handsome and charismatic, the priest had a sensitive face, white as sandstone and just as weak. The first time he had seen him, the captain had been convinced that he had seen the man somewhere before. In some distant place, obscured by the smoke and dust of time, he had already met a wan and slender young man just like the priest, who had been willing to sacrifice his own life to save others. He had met many young men like this, actually, while in the army, or in other places, and to the last he saw them swallowed up in the conflagrations of war.

“How could the Lord blame us for wanting to survive?” the captain pleaded.

“I understand, of course I understand,” said the priest, nodding his head. The captain had brought him some smoke-cured meat. The meat looked clean, and was cut into neat slices, thick with a dark aroma. They really had done an excellent job with the smoking.

“The way you’re acting, you’re making everybody uncomfortable, you know. They think that you’re judging them,” the captain urged him good naturedly, “Just take the meat, okay?”

“ . . . I understand,” the priest replied, after obvious hesitation. In the end, however, he refused to take his share, and the captain sat, helpless, staring at the priest for a long while.

The priest continued to climb his tower, the tower that filled men with boundless desire. Even now he didn’t know what he hoped to find there, but strangely, he didn’t feel hungry. In the darkness the white stones gave off a gentle glow, their tiny crystals vibrating weakly. Was it possible that meditation had helped the members of the reclusive sect engage in fasting? Sitting in one of the shallow depressions, he traced the characters on the wall with his finger. The ancient pictures were like hieroglyphics which one could only try to understand.

For a fleeting moment a strange and terrible feeling of prescience suddenly overtook him. Although he did his best to take hold of the impression it left on him, the better to predict what was yet to come, it quickly passed. The bubble fish floated in the sky, their skin stretched taut, a transparent membrane like a bubble, now vermillion, now orange, now the blue of a clear lake, now flashing gold.

Despite strict rationing, the food was quickly devoured by the hungry men. Something was different from before, however, about the emaciated stick-and-bones men who patrolled the valley. Their cheekbones seemed higher somehow, and the hollows of their faces deeper. Their eyes meanwhile swept the ground, unwilling to meet the gaze of the others, afraid of what they might find there.

They found themselves almost wishing for the beast to attack. But the fence held strong, and the beast could only pace outside, breathing heavily. Like them, it had gone without food for several days now, and hunger revealed the lines of its ribcage through its withered fur. Studying the men behind the fence with bloodshot eyes, it was powerless. Turning suddenly, it disappeared. Most likely it was retreating and abandoning these men who were no less hungry than it was. The men behind the fence felt an indescribable sense of disappointment.

Two days later, the food had once again reached a critical point. The stronger members of the group led by example, stealing the bones of the dead boy, and breaking them open to devour the marrow inside. Even so, it wasn’t nearly enough food to save them.

The next morning the captain led a group to rebury Seoni. The previous night, someone had dug up his grave, hoping to pillage the corpse. His body, however, had long since begun to decay in the fierce heat, leaving behind a pile of hard to swallow rotten flesh. By daybreak, the fetid smell of his exhumed corpse had filled the valley. Lying on the red dirt of the grave, his eyes bulged like two big blue blisters, and dark splotches of rot sprouted there. His teeth emerged in a grimace, and owing to the contraction of the skin it looked as if he was smiling, with his eyebrows raised high in delight. Few among them were willing to criticize the atrocious act. Instead they simply dug a deeper pit and buried him a second time. The worst thing about it to the men who watched was seeing so many calories, amino acids, and protein rot and go to waste.

The others were not idle, however, having decided to try and eat the bracken fern trees. They cut one down and removed the spines from the bark, cutting them into fine slivers which they boiled over the fire. The stench produced was even worse than that of Seoni’s rotten corpse. Others, ignoring the warnings of the chemistry professor, attacked the bubble fish. When two diamond miners from Arcturus managed to spear one, its transparent stomach exploded, spraying ammonia gas into their eyes, blinding them. Their faces ruined, they lay by the fountain, moaning throughout the night.

The seemingly endless stairs of the tower left the priest feeling as if he was climbing a gigantic structure that ascended to heaven itself. God is eternal, all powerful, all knowing, and his compassion is freely given to all beings in existence, the priest thought. How could it be that an all powerful being like God, with His boundless wisdom, could have become afraid when people of times past tried to build the tower of Babel? Where, after all, is heaven? Is it up? In this ever expanding universe of ours, is it still up? With every scientific advancement, at first it has always seemed as if religion was on the verge of being overthrown. Eventually, though, people always seem to find a way to compromise. Does this mean that science will never be truly able to save humanity?

Only now, none of these questions were as important as the question of where they might go next to find food.

The priest reflected back on his memories of receiving communion for the first time, during mass. The bread and wine symbolized the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. By eating and drinking Him, then we allowed Him to be one with us. His belt was old and tough, impossible to chew, but he managed to cut it into smaller pieces, which he swallowed one by one after soaking them in his saliva. Kronos ate his children, the cyclops roasted the companions of Odysseus, Zhang Xun cut up his concubine and fed her to his soldiers during the siege of Suiyang, and Count Ugolino ate his own flesh and blood in a high tower—in history, people have long since eaten one another, and even today they are still eating one another. Schools of bubble fish floated outside the tower watching him, as if the sky outside the narrow window was an enormous fish tank.

The stench lingered in the valley.

After the two miners died the would-be hunters became prey for the others. This was the banquet that the men of the valley had been waiting for. A great fire was lit, and the water in the pot was brought to a frothy boil. Drawing strength from the self-sacrificing spirit of the two minors, they managed to survive for another week, but rescue seemed to be just as distant as before. Miraculously, the priest managed to survive, finding the tubers that the professor had given him to have boundless applications, with a single slice providing him sufficient calories to last a great while. The professor himself had become thin and emaciated, his eyes bloodshot. A slight breeze was enough to bring him to the ground, but his spirits remained strong, and his complexion unusually ruddy. Drinking water non-stop, a row of blisters had sprouted on his cracked lips. This was most likely a side effect of the treatments he had given himself for malaria.

It had been a long time since anyone had worked on the fence. It was not until the call of the beast was heard within the valley that they became aware that it had dug a small hole in the barrier. This time though, instead of being afraid, they struck back at the beast under the leadership of the captain, the flames of victory leaving them feverish. Using shovels, sticks, knives, even their fingernails and teeth, they managed to snatch a corpse from the mouth of the beast, which had been made weak from hunger.

When the captain managed to use a knife to chop a leg free from mouth of the beast he felt like he was finally in control of the situation again. In the past he had had times of hesitation, he had had times of confusion, even fear. His training had taught him to feel ashamed of such emotions—but everything was better now. Now that he knew the path forward, he was no longer worried about anything, because he knew that he would survive to be rescued. Happiness clouded his brain, and as he watched the beast scurry through the hole in the fence, he held the hairy leg of the chemistry professor in one hand, laughing.

He soon realized that the priest was standing nearby, watching him, with his skull-like face twisted up in pain. The captain immediately straightened up and stopped laughing. Anger toward the priest bubbled up, unbidden. Fuck, what right does he have to look at me like that? When survival is on the line, what’s the point of having convictions? Believer or non-believer, when disaster strikes it doesn’t make a difference either way.  The captain began to hack away at the professor’s leg, methodically chopping and slicing, wastefully letting bits of meat fall to the ground. Without checking with the others, he could already tell that they all found the priest’s behavior infuriating.

Even after rinsing the remains of the professor in the fountain, the smell of herbal medicine lingered on his corpse and after a long time they gave up trying. The smell had permeated all the way down into the muscle and bone, making him taste especially delicious. The slender, half-mauled corpse of the professor barely lasted them a single night before every last bit was eaten up. They’d barely had a chance to taste him, but now they were hungry again, and needed more food.

The priest sat cross-legged in the cavity. His awareness spread outwards, encompassing the shining white crystals which surrounded him, countless as grains of sand in the mighty Ganges. Vibrating, resonating, the sound was as vast as it was miniscule, like the sound of silkworms chewing mulberry, or rain falling on the broad leaves of the plantain. A stream of information as expansive as the universe flowed through the room, passing through the arch of the hothouse-like structure and directly into his brain. Images from his childhood flashed in his mind, and then more images, of the distant past, of things he had never experienced. What is the origin of desire? Vibrations, vibrations, like wing-beat of a butterfly. The world is an illusion, a white haired man said to him. I dreamed of a butterfly, but only the butterfly is real.

Upon opening his eyes, the priest was greeted with the sight of a butterfly, its wings patterned in black and red. The butterfly was of a sort found only on Earth. As it passed through one of the narrow windows, the early morning light caught the gold in its wings, sending arcs of light off into void.

Could it be that I’m hallucinating? In a flash, the realization of what had just happened coursed throughout his body and he became extremely frightened. Most likely this was a dream within a dream, an illusion within an illusion. He simply imagined that he was hallucinating. The fear, however, was fleeting. What did it matter if the world was an illusion? An illusion of an illusion was nothing more than an illusion. Looking up at the paintings on the wall, he realized he could suddenly read them as if they were text:

The Buddha said to his disciple Subhūti: All that has form is an illusion.

If this was true, then things with form could also emerge from illusion. Dear god, is it really possible? The priest closed his eyes. Could the world really like be like the ancient story of the “golden millet dream?” Are we all just poor innkeepers dreaming of becoming of becoming men of wealth and power? He began to imagine a freshly baked bun, yellow and piping hot. A piercing pain racked his brain as his mind resonated with the crystals around him. Upon opening his eyes, the priest discovered that a bun really had appeared, complete with toasted sesame seeds on top, and a curlicue of steam spiraling above it.

Tears sprang forth from his withered eye sockets, falling one at a time. The imagined bun was edible and filling. I found food! This is the secret of the reclusive sect. In the past I thought that forsaking desire was the path to eliminating desire. I was wrong, though. Is there anything that better demonstrates the suffering caused by desire better than having all of one’s desire fulfilled?

He left the bun on the ground to let it cool. Feeling as if his head was full of buzzing stars, he wondered if this was a miracle or science, to have a planet filled with vibrations. As Plato once asked, what is thought and what is matter? I should have realized sooner that thought is a kind of vibration, the synaptic spark which passes between neurons. The unique structure and materials of this tower, even the planet itself, serve to amplify the power of thought. With only faith and imagination, we can create a whole new world for ourselves.

 Ignoring an intense headache, the priest constructed a communicator in his mind. As the image became more clear, it emerged as if from the mist, and suddenly landed on the floor of the room with a sharp sound, a real, fresh sound, sending out a blue light which pierced his brain like a knife. With feverish hands he stroked the device before deciding to go down to find the others, who knew better than he how to use it. Even better, now they could use meditation and faith to get food. He stood up, staggering, and almost fell back down. His prolonged meditation had left him impossibly weak.

The communicator was too heavy. There was simply no way for him to carry the eighty-pound device down some six-hundred steps. He crawled to the steps and began to slowly make his way down the winding stairwell.

A soft breeze wafted through the air. The others stood around the pot in the square. The fire blazed and the water was already boiling hot, but they hadn’t even decided who was going to die yet. The priest rushed forward to tell the captain that he had completed his task. Food! I found food! All we need to have is faith, and we will have salvation. It was so simple, hallelujah!

They others formed a semi-circle around the priest, like a choir in church. They looked at him kindly. Far above them in the sky, He who had sacrificed himself observed the scene with compassion. The captain stood in middle of the group. From the corner of his eye, the priest saw the boiler tender drawing close, carrying an iron mace fashioned from a shovel. Standing stiffly erect, the priest became aware that he was on trial. Taking advantage of his last chance, he raised his hand and pointed upwards, beginning to say in a raw voice, “I’ve discovered . . . ”

The words were cut short by a heavy blow to the back of his head. His last conscious impressions were the sound of boiling water, the white teeth of the men, the fish swimming through the air, and the beast roaring in the distance, as if beckoning him with a bugle call.

Above it all, the high hunger tower pierced the sky.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2003.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Pan Haitian is a well-known figure among the third generation of Chinese science fiction authors. His previous work includes the collection Run Dajiao! Run! (New World Press, 2001) and four novels set in the Novoland universe: Ghost Sparrow, Spirit Turtle (New World Press, 2006), The Iron Stupa (New World Press, 2007), 24 Second Paradise (serialized in China Fantasy, 2009-10), and A Dark Moon Rises (Hunan Art and Literature Press October, 2012). He is also a founding editor of the influential Chinese magazine, Odyssey of China Fantasy.

Snakes

Yoon Ha Lee

I had brought the corpse of my soldier-sister Rhiis-2 a long way, suspended in a fluid of suppositions:

—If she examined the navigational display, she would advise that we route around this dwarf star in realspace, that strand of charged matter in shadowspace.

—If I neglected to clean out the ship’s torchgun regularly, she would gum up the apertures with that horrifying squishy self-heal gel that we were supposed to use on the ship’s lenses so I really had to work to clean it out.

—If the skimship’s power systems flashed that particular stress-alert, check the physical gauges before doing anything drastic, because the hookups sometimes lied to us.

Interlaced with these came other parts of her decision trees, which I lingered over even though I didn’t want to:

—If asked about her family and I was present, she’d smile that whiplash-blinding smile of hers, sling her arm around my shoulders, and say that all she had left, sadly, was this good-for-nothing sister. We weren’t related except in the way that a gun and its ammunition are related. I had often wondered, toward the end, if that had been enough for her.

—If someone propositioned her with the folded glove, she’d never say yes. It had nothing to do with being a soldier-sister. She never minded when I took one-night lovers. One night was all I wanted of them, anyway, and in the mornings I’d return to pledge the high pledge with her.

—If offered nectar-of-dreams for the second night in a row, she’d refuse. She’d take it away from me, too, while she was at it. Now that she couldn’t do it anymore, I missed the scolding. I poured myself a cup every night, then stared mournfully at it without drinking any, in her honor. Of course, I couldn’t drink in the human sense anymore.

For all the if’s I carried with me, however, I knew that Rhiis-2 would have told me that I was stupid for coming to the Seethe. For changing myself on her behalf. I had entangled my functions into those of the ship, over a hundred hundred small surgeries, over a thousand thousand large adjustments. I was home to a multitude of spiders, who maintained the ship and my soldier-sister’s sustaining fluid as I directed.

As we exited shadowspace, I saw the Seethe, and knew that I could not afford to fail so close to my objective.

We had lost the vastwar. That had been bad enough. I was determined not to lose Rhiis-2.

Sometimes, as we sped through shadowspace, I dreamt I could see into Rhiis-2 in her stillness. It had been rumored for a long time that shadowspace induced odd dreams and visions, although people had been having odd dreams and visions without the need of superstitious explanations everywhere they went. Sometimes, during the days of the war, we’d take nectar-of-dreams so that we’d slip into blurred, easeful fantasias. Mine usually involved food: thin-skinned dumplings with pork and shrimp and scallions, dried roasted cuttlefish, anchovies in sweet sauce. When I insisted on describing these to Rhiis-2, she’d pull a face and retort by making up recipes for sweet cakes laced with radioactive elements, or crisp biscuits of circuitry, or pies filled with flitter exhaust.

Now that I couldn’t drug myself with nectar, I had different dreams. A ship, or a human that has become a ship, was always awake, and always asleep. I had heard that the need to sleep (to dream) never fully went away, so that came as no surprise.

During the everywhere-cooling night, the painstaking needle-threading of shadowspace navigation, I dreamt that every star had unsunned itself. The lights that vined across my walls and ceilings had dimmed into ash. Darkness even greater than that of nightfall clothed everything. Yet, although Rhiis-2 lay separated from me by a heartbeat, a handspan, by the heat of vanished history, I could see her.

The seeing had nothing to do with the wry mouth, or the clever hands, or the livid scar at her heel, whose origin I did not know. Sometimes I could scarcely tell her boundaries from my own. We orbited each other, losing substance in the process like neutron stars holding each other captive, ghost inspiraling into ghost.

Instead, I could see alveoli like sprays of flowers. Long lean bones. The unmoving knot at her center that was her heart. Snakes everywhere: the crenellations of her brain, silent of electric flickers. Flaccid blood vessels. Winding ropes of intestine. Snakes.

In the language of light, the Seethe was a fist of utter black surrounded by a coruscating accretion disk and sustained from evaporation effects by the masteries of an ancient civilization. That was realspace. The Seethe also hid a shadowspace fortress, the retreat of that same civilization, and our old opponent in the vastwar. The story went that they had specialized in weapons. Weapons that sundered matter into a vapor of quarks, weapons that smothered planets, weapons that smeared stars into unradiant dust. For a while they were content to peddle their weapons. Then something changed: whimsy, yearning, some threat from outside. At that point, they developed the secret of resurrection and used it to touch off a general war.

Eventually the warring nations wearied of the conflict and united to destroy the weapon-makers. A great many people died in the vastwar. Rhiis-2 was one of them, in a skirmish at the outskirts, past stars so obscure that their names were pin-scratchings in the great catalogs.

Rhiis-2 was the pilot, back then. I was Rhiis-1, the gunner. “I’m just the percussion,” I said to her many times. “What you do is the music.” She only laughed and said I had it the wrong way around.

Rhiis was the name of the ship. We had flown a great many scouting missions together, and our commander sent us to investigate odd readings in shadowspace. When we chanced upon the mercenaries that the weapons-makers, disdaining to do the actual fighting, had hired as sentries, the only thing that saved us was that they had not expected anyone to be poking around that corner of space.

We fled, but not quickly enough. I ran for a long, long time, until even the shadows in my nightmares had blurred into insignificance. By the time I was able to haul Rhiis-2 to the ship’s medical unit, she was beyond saving. She would have been beyond saving anyway. It bothered me how whole she looked, as though she had merely slid into some underworld of sleep. I should have known that not all weapons left such obvious marks as cuts and holes and burns. Nevertheless, I kept expecting her to stir and speak.

After that I deserted. I was almost certain that my one attempt to warn allied forces resulted in the destruction of an allied fleet. I decided not to try again. Instead, I went mercenary myself, not in the vastwar but the smaller simmer of conflicts that came and went among the minor polities. None of them had the technology to breathe Rhiis-2 back into motion, but that had also been true in the alliance proper.

The fluid of suppositions had not been intended for revival. Rather, it was meant to memorialize the vastwar’s dead. I had no desire to take Rhiis-2 back to be ogled by masses to whom we were nothing but checklists of ceremonial mourning. My family and I regarded each other as cordial strangers; it wouldn’t matter much to them.

Nor did I have any great feeling for Rhiis-2’s family. I had never asked her about them. But one night she had mentioned, with a casualness that I knew better than to take at face value, that her parents and sisterkin had not approved of her enlisting. She’d recently received a package that included a snakeskin, oiled and supple and sewn with gems like pomegranate seeds. I remembered how her face had frozen when she opened it up. “Take it and sell it,” she had said. “Don’t tell me where. Get something to drink with the money, and we’ll save it for a special occasion, I don’t know what.”

The force of her bitterness convinced me to do as she said. I still had the bottle of wine. I had the spiders bring it out of storage even though I didn’t need to do so to contemplate it.

As we neared the Seethe, I had the spiders spell out its name in the languages I knew, and the names of long-ago generals and colonels, as they skittered up and down the walls. Then I amused myself further by firing at the spiders with lasers turned down low enough to do no harm to the ship’s structure. (I hadn’t always thought well of my officers.)

Perhaps it was folly to show up at the weapon-makers’ doorstep to demand redress. Alternately, I had little coin with which to offer them payment. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine that I had anything that would interest them, except the pale threat that I knew of their survival and others did too.

I had no guarantee that they wouldn’t shoot me out of the sky and fling me into the Seethe, where my ever-dwindling image would serve as a warning to other travelers. But then, even a slim chance seemed better than accepting Rhiis-2’s continued silence. And, as small a comfort as it was, the space around the Seethe’s event horizon was not, in fact, crowded with the red-shifted ghosts of unfortunate would-be visitors.

I had expected to fight my way in. Call it habit. I’d laid in as much ammunition as I could. It might not be enough, but it would be worse to die without having fired.

The weapon-makers’ first interceptor flight took on a formation that I had seen battlefields ago, when I was human. It was difficult not to fly straight at them, suicide-fashion. I was saved from my own impulses by the ghosts I carried within me.

—If they don’t come out firing, they might just be getting a good look—

—If they flash their stardrives like that, they’re probably going to swerve away at the last moment—

—If they keep dancing like this, it’s not a trap, it’s a test—

Part of this was my memory of Rhiis-2’s steady judgment. Part of it was my own, long-disused, waking under the pressure of necessity. Before I’d deserted, I’d been among the best gunners. Now that the ship and I were no longer separate entities, I was even better.

I held my fire, as much as I yearned to use what had once been a simple torchgun, and was now something much more destructive. I wanted them to talk to me. I sent a message requesting parley while I maneuvered, using every communications protocol I was capable of.

The interceptors did not respond over any channel I recognized, nor did the Seethe’s fortress. Instead, we wove trajectories around each other, like a braid. I did not like the numbers. I especially disliked them when I realized what was going on.

The interceptors were miming an engagement from many years back, except Rhiis-2 and I had been part of a flight of eight. It had been our second time together after pledging to each other. We’d lost three skimships before returning to the fleet proper. People I’d barely gotten to know. I felt guiltiest about that part. To be honest, I hadn’t thought of the fight, or the creeping alienation afterward, in years. There had, after all, been many battles. I wouldn’t have expected to recall this one so clearly. The interceptors’ dance was so specific and so persistent, however, that the memories came singing back.

All right. If they were doing everything but firing on me, I could still fly the patterns they were defining for me. Call-and-response, like music. All I had to do (and I laughed a little, ironically) was condense an entire flight’s maneuvers into those of the single ship that I was now.

I needled toward them and darted away, stitched patterns in and out of shadowspace, tactical geometries. It took all my concentration. And when I had finished the ballet, I was still not done. The interceptors slipped away and were replaced by another flight of larger vessels. Another battle. And another after that, and another after that.

As I flew, I thought of the people I had left behind. My mother and aunts, to whom I had made the ritual offering of candied fruits before departing forever. The last I saw of them, they were passing the treats out and chattering about investments. A comrade, killed, whose locket contained nothing but a blank slip of paper. When I handed it to their lover, her eyes shattered. A quartermaster who could be bribed for better shoes. It was like passing through the halls of the dead.

—If you make it through the gauntlet of ghosts, Rhiis-2 said to me through the medium of old suppositions, they will not offer you anything but masks and illusions. You cannot bring back the dead. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back.

You won’t die as long as I am here, I thought back to the whisper-presence.

I did not know how long I flew, aware only of the necessity of reenacting the battles presented to me, and the dangerous everywhere-pull of the Seethe.

At last the ships parted before me and slowed. I understood this to be an invitation and circled them, wary, exhausted. Three guardships greater than any I had yet faced emerged from shadowspace, opening up a passage in the space between them.

“You have come a long way to show us your artistry,” the guardships said to me in one voice, in a language that both of us knew, but which was not native to me and probably was not to them either. “If you wish to speak, then we will hear you.”

“Thank you,” I said in the same language, although some of the spiders wove dire webs in their corners, and entered the passage.

The shadowspace fortress was constructed of dust and laminate, nanites endlessly chewing and regurgitating machinery into new shapes. More weapons, I presumed; I did not ask. I was brought through winding passages to a monument of light, shot through with jewel-sparks and swirls of smoke. I wondered if this, too, represented some battle, one that I had not been party to. “Artistry,” the guardships had called it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected anything else from people who devoted themselves to creating engines of war.

And really, was I much different? I had killed my share of people during the vastwar. I had killed more afterward, as a mercenary scrabbling for the upgrades that would bring me here. Perhaps it was death, rather than any combination of sounds and syntax, that was our common language.

A voice spoke out of the monument. At that point I realized it wasn’t merely a monument, just as I wasn’t merely a ship. It said, “Did you bring your soldier-sister with you to make of her a weapon, or to wake her from her death?”

“She spent her life as a weapon,” I said. “She is not any less one for being dead.” It was true. After all, I had consulted her decision-trees, the remembered sum of her experiences, all these years. “Is it, in fact, within your power to bring back the dead?”

The light dimmed bit by bit, coalescing into a silhouette that I knew all too well. Its twin dwelled unmoving within its preserving casket. The wry mouth, the clever hands, the livid scar at her heel. Even the way it held its head.

“That’s not her,” I said. “If all I wanted was a puppet with her face, I could have gone to any of a thousand artisans.” Clones, sculpts, robots of polished mien. Or puppets from older traditions, made of paper or wood or felt.

It cocked its head, frowned at me slightly. “The puppet will serve you better,” it said in Rhiis-2’s husky voice.

The mind was not separate from the body. I did not know how the weapons-maker had achieved their miracle. But I was willing to bet that it involved the original body, or whatever records had been made of it. “That’s not what I asked,” I said.

“Ship who used to be human,” the silhouette said, “if bringing back the dead were wise, do you not think that we would have started with our own? Why else would we hide here, diminished from what we were?”

“If I cared about wisdom,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

The silhouette laughed, and even that was Rhiis-2’s laugh, with its kind mockery, except I knew better. The scratching in my absent heart told me so. “It can be done if you are brave enough. Quantum mechanics will produce an exact duplicate so long as you don’t mind waiting out the heat death of the universe.”

“That is a very long time to wait,” I said. “I am not built to last that long. But perhaps with the Seethe—?”

Close orbit near the event horizon would induce the necessary time dilation. The universe would age unimaginably while I waited out a more bearable span. But the calculation would have to be extraordinarily precise.

“We can provide the orbit,” it said. “And in the course of eons she will come to you. But there is a condition.”

Of course there was. “Say it.”

“More a warning than a condition, perhaps. Don’t speak to her of the past, yours or hers.”

A terrible suspicion took hold of me. “Why?” I said. “Won’t she remember?”

“She will remember only what is given to her to remember,” the silhouette said. Its voice was sad. I was too impatient to press for details. I would regret that later.

Trusting in the orbit provided me, I launched from the fortress. I did not like being so close to the Seethe, vastest of its kind. No sane person would.

I wondered what she would say to me first. “When we pledged, this is not what I was thinking of,” she might say. Or: “Deserting? When did you decide that I would approve of deserting?” Except she hadn’t been around to say that, and I had dragged her with me anyway, past immense gas giants and ringed planets and the glitter-ice of frozen moons, through expanses of irradiated darkness, around the old remnants of defeated fleets. I had dragged her with me despite her devotion to the alliance. The pledge had meant something to her beyond camaraderie. The vastwar had been personal to her in a way it had never been for me. I wanted flight-rhythms and war-hymns; she cared about principle.

I had rehearsed defense after defense. The spiders, obsessive scribes, were weaving them into webs of guilty illogic. I did not know how any of my arguments would fare against her anger, or worse, her disappointment.

Outside, the universe swirled by. Due to the effects of gravitational lensing, everything I saw was distorted, doubled; and of course there was also the utter dark of the Seethe itself. I lost track of the red- and blue-shifting, and wondered just what was going on in the lifetimes passing me by. There came periods of dark, and periods of renewed light, and in between more of the kaleidoscope oddities. Eventually I tired of them.

When I had all but given up hope, the fluid of suppositions sloughed away and pooled obligingly to the side, awaiting reuse. Flesh clothed bone. Rhiis-2 coughed. Everything down to the scar on her ankle was there. I started to speak through the spiders, then stopped. Rhiis-2’s eyes were the color of chambered bullets. The blankness in them frightened me.

The spiders assembled before Rhiis-2, and after an appallingly long moment, her eyes lit. Say something, I begged her silently. But I was determined not to push her, to let her speak first.

She rose from the casket and looked to the left, then to the right, and at last straight ahead, into a ghostworld I couldn’t share with her. “Why are there no stars?” she said. “I can’t navigate if there are no stars.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. There was a new universe outside. Of course there were stars.

The spiders retreated as she made her way to me. I was unnerved by the fixity of her stare. I could not breathe in or breathe out, but my spiders stilled when she laid her hand across the hatch. I wasn’t going to open it for her, naturally. “Yes,” she said to herself. “This looks right. It was like this in my dreams.”

“Dreams?” I said, wondering if the dead dreamed.

She ignored that and made straight for where the pilot’s seat used to be. I’d taken it out a long time ago. For a moment she paused, frowning. She searched the deck with her hands. I did not have nerves with which to feel her touch.

It took her a long time to give up. Next she searched for the gunner’s seat. I did, at least, still have guns, although the current ones would be far outside her experience. And then she looked for our bunks. I could only present her with the casket. Her eyes darkened as she regarded it.

At last she returned to the primary gun, or the part of it that she could access without my revealing its mechanisms to her. “The gunner,” she said. “My soldier-sister. Where did she go?”

I was part of her past. I could not remind her of what we had been to each other, the missions we had flown, that fatal skirmish. I could not tell her what I had done to myself to bring her here.

Don’t speak to her of the past.

As I understood it, the past was dead anyway. I’d taken care of that.

Rhiis-2 made another circuit of the ship, then returned to the casket and banged on its side. “Answer me!”

—If I spoke to her, I knew what she’d demand.

I spoke.

I spoke through the spiders, and she listened. Some of it she knew. Most of it she didn’t. At first I was inclined to blame the shock of whatever process had returned her to me.

Then a different possibility occurred to me, and would not go away.

Don’t speak to her of the past.

I could stop now. She had come back to me. We could abide together.

“You’re not her,” I said at last.

Her mouth pulled down. “I’m who I am,” she said.

“You’re another silhouette,” I said. The same one I’d been carrying all along. I could only imagine that it had been easy for the weapon-makers to hack into my computer systems and internal sensors, to create the illusion of Rhiis-2 using the fluid of suppositions. The problem was, the illusion knew only as much as the weapon-makers and I did. Rhiis-2’s secrets—the snakeskin, her family, the scar at her heel—all of those were lost.

Her brow knit, and she said, “The dreams took me away from myself. Maybe it’ll come back with time. Maybe you can tell me about the dried squid again, and I’ll remember what I used to eat when I was a child. Maybe we can open that bottle—you remember the one—and drink to our reunion.”

I veered away from the Seethe, slowed, and left the orbit that had been given me. There was no more point to the charade. “You don’t have to pretend anymore,” I said.

Her expression grew ironic, then. “I was meant to make the wait bearable,” she said. “The recurrence theorem guarantees her to you; it did not guarantee that you would be sane to greet her.”

At last I understood the meaning of the dreams that I had borne with me since Rhiis-2’s death. The snakes that had killed her did not just consist of the tick-tock mortality of her body with its frayed parts. The deadliest snake was me.

To the silhouette, I said, “I thought I knew what I wanted, but the weapons-makers were right. End it here.”

The silhouette folded in on herself. It was as ungraceful as it was expected. I tried not to look at the expression of startlement on her face. My spiders waited for the fluid of suppositions to envelop the corpse again, then bore her back to the casket. It was time to relinquish my soldier-sister to death. Leaving the Seethe behind, I plunged toward the heart of a star.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee’s works have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Currently he lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.

The Accord

Keith Brooke

1. Tish Goldenhawk

Tish Goldenhawk watched the gaudy Daguerran vessel slide into the harbor. If she had known then what she was soon to learn, she might even have settled for her humdrum existence, and even now she and Milton would be living a quiet life, seeing out their days before finally joining the Accord.

But no, unblessed with foresight, Tish stood atop the silver cliffs of Penhellion and watched—no, marveled—as the Lady Cecilia approached the crooked arm of the dock.

The ship was unlike any she had seen. Far taller than it was long, it rose out of the mirrored waters like some kind of improbable island. Its flanks were made of polished wood and massed ranks of high arched windows, these revealing bodies within, faces pressed against glass as the grand touristas took in yet more of the sights of the worlds.

He might have been among them. Another face staring out, its perfect features only distinguished by a crooked incisor. But no, he wouldn’t have been part of that gawping crowd. She would have known that if she had been blessed with foresight, if she had somehow known that there was a “he” of whom she could speculate just so at this moment.

The ship, the Lady Cecilia . . . it towered unfeasibly. Only vastly advanced engineering could keep it from toppling this way or that. The thing defied gravity by its very existence. It sailed, a perfect vertical, its array of silken sails bulging picturesquely, its crew scrambling over the rigging like squirrels.

At a distant screech, Tish tipped her head back and stared until she had picked out the tiny scimitar shapes of gliding pterosaurs. It was a clear day, and the world’s rings slashed a ribbon across the southern sky. Why did beauty make her sad?

Tish breathed deep, and she knew she should be back at the Falling Droplet helping Milton and their fifteen-year-old son Druce behind the bar.

And then she looked again at the golden, jeweled, bannered sailing ship now secured in the harbor and she felt an almighty welling of despair that this should be her lot in a world of such beauty and wonder.

She walked back along a road cut into the face of the cliff. She was lucky. She lived in a beautiful place. She had a good husband, a fine son. She could want for nothing. Nobody starved or suffered in the worlds of the Diaspora, unless it was their choice to do so. People were born to different lots and hers was a good one.

She was lucky, she told herself again. Blessed by the Accord.

The Falling Droplet was set into the silver cliffs of Penhellion, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving breathtaking views out across the bay to where the coast hooked back on itself and the Grand Falls plunged more than a thousand meters into the sea.

Rainbows played and flickered across the bay, an ever-changing color masque put on by the interplay of the Falls and the sun. Pterosaurs and gulls and flying fish cut and swooped through the spray, while dolphins and merfolk arced and flipped in the waves.

Tish was staring at the view again, when the stranger approached the bar.

“I . . . erm . . . ” He placed coins on the age-polished flutewood surface.

Tish dragged her gaze away from the windows. She smiled at him, another anonymous grand tourista with perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, a man who might as easily have been twenty as a century or more.

He smiled back.

The crooked tooth was a clever touch. A single tooth at the front, just a little angled so that there was a gap at the top, a slight overlap at the bottom. An imperfection in the perfect, a mote in the diamond.

In that instant Tish Goldenhawk was transfixed, just as she had been by the sight of the Lady Cecilia earlier.

She knew who he was, or rather, what he was, this stranger, this not quite perfect visitor. A made man should always have a flaw, if he were not to look, immediately, like a made man.

“I . . . erm . . . ” she said, inadvertently repeating his own words from a moment before. “What’ll it be?”

“I . . . ” He gestured at one of the pumps.

“Roly’s Scrumpy?” she said, reaching for a long glass. “You’d better be watching your head in the morning, if you’re not used to it. That stuff’s an ass—drink it full in the face and you’re fine, but as soon as you turn your back it’ll kick you.”

She put the drink before him and helped herself to some of the coins he had spread out.

“Been on Laverne for long?” she said, knowing the answer he would give. He had just landed, along with all these other touristas. Struggling with the dialect and the coins. These poor over-rich sods must be constantly disoriented, she realized, as they took their grand tours of the known. The poor lambs.

He shook his head, smiled again. A day ago—even a few hours ago—he had probably been in a jungle, or in a seething metropolis, or deep in an undersea resort, ten, a hundred, a thousand light years away, along with others on the grand tour.

Or that, at least, was probably what she was supposed to think. But Tish stuck with her hunch instead. She often constructed stories about the people she served in the Falling Droplet—the spies, the adulterers, the scag addicts, and the gender-confused. Sometimes she even turned out to be right, but usually she never confirmed her hunches one way or the other. This man was no grand tourista, although he might indeed be a new arrival.

“You on the Lady Cecilia?” she asked him, hoping he would give himself away but knowing he wouldn’t.

“I am,” he said, and then dipped his head to take a long draw of the cider. He glanced around. “Or at least,” he added, “I was . . . ”

“Tish?”

Milton. He gestured. They had customers lined up at the bar. The Droplet had grown crowded and Tish had barely noticed. She moved away from the stranger, and served old Ruth with her usual Brewer’s Gold and nuts.

Later, she noticed the three men as they came in from the darkening evening. They were strangers too, as were many of this evening’s clientele, but they didn’t look like they were on any kind of grand tour. Their eyes scanned the crowd, and as one of the men fixed on her for the briefest of instants she felt skewered, scanned by some kind of machine.

But no, these three were men, if clearly enhanced. They wore identical dark-gray outfits, and now she saw what appeared to be weapons at their belts.

Tish had never seen a weapon before, unless you counted harpoons and ginny traps and the like. She had never seen men who looked like machines, although up in Daguerre she had seen machines like men and women.

One of the men pointed, and the other two swiveled their heads in unison until all three looked in the same direction, motionless like a sandfisher poised to drop. The pointing man opened his hand and a beam of light shone from it across the crowded bar.

Tish turned and saw a single man picked out by the beam, a long glass poised partway to his mouth, a mouth which revealed one imperfection in its otherwise flawless ranks of teeth.

The stranger dropped his glass, ducked down, darted into the pack of bodies near to the bar.

The three . . . they were no longer there by the door, they were across the room, standing where the stranger had been, motionless again, robot eyes surveying the crowd.

Tish revised her earlier assessment. These men could not be mere humans—enhanced or not—and move as they did. They must be more than that. Other than that.

The stranger . . . a tussle by the far door, and there he was, reaching for the handle.

But the handle vanished, the door blurred, its boundaries softening, merging . . . and it was wall, not door. There was no exit there. There never had been.

The stranger’s hand slid across the smooth surface, and he staggered. Why was he scratching at the wall like that?

The three stood, watching, eyes locked on the stranger . . .

 . . . on nothing.

The stranger had ducked into the crowd again.

Tish leaned against the bar, her heart pounding, her mind swirling, her brain playing catch-up with the succession of images crammed into the merest of seconds that had passed since the door had opened and the three more-than-men had appeared.

Another disturbance.

The stranger.

He had a wooden chair raised above his head. Beyond him, the sun was setting, heavy and swollen over the rainbowed water. The sky was cast in bands of the deepest of crimsons, a staggering gold, shading up to a high, dreamy purple. Laverne’s rings slashed darkly across this vivid sunset.

The sky shattered. Crazed lines divided it up into an enormous, jagged jigsaw.

Someone screamed, someone else shouted, someone else . . .

Tish could no longer see the three men, and she could no longer see the stranger. She could see the chair embedded in one of the big windows though, the glass crazed but still holding in its frame.

Then she saw him, a silhouette against the fiery sky, diving.

He hit the glass and for an instant it held and she thought he would end up embedded like the chair. And then the moment had passed and the glass shifted, bulged, and it, the chair, and the man tumbled out into the air.

Someone screamed again, and the shouting continued, as the crowd shuffled back from the abyss.

Tish looked away. They were half a kilometer up here, nothing but an awful lot of air between them and the rocks and waves below. No one could survive such a fall.

She looked up again. The three were standing by the opening, peering out into the gloom. They were not talking, but she could tell from the poise of their bodies that they were somehow communicating. Was this a satisfactory outcome for them, or was it not?

And then she thought, why would they do such a thing? What was it that had brought them here, on this evening, to do this?

Why would they come here, to her normally peaceful cliff-hanging bar, and pursue this stranger in so startling and violent a manner?

Why would anyone want to chase God, or even a very small fragment of God?

Tish dropped in an air-shaft to Fandango Way, Penhellion’s main thoroughfare. The Way was cut into the base of the cliff, and ran from the docks to where it wound its way up the cliff face three kilometers east.

She stepped out among the stalls of itinerant traders. She nodded and smiled and exchanged words here and there. She was not here to buy, and most of the traders knew that anyway—these same traders delivered supplies direct to the Falling Droplet. Tish had little need of market shopping.

She carried a basket though, and in the basket, beneath a checkered cloth, there was a crust of bread and a fistful of feathers from a quetzal.

She crossed the road, dodging rickshaws and scooters. Lifting her feet daintily over the low wall, she stepped out onto the rocks.

Down by the water’s edge, first of all she looked at the gentle chop of the waves, and then she craned her neck to peer upward, but she could not pick out the Falling Droplet’s frontage from all the others. So many dwellings and other establishments, set into the cliff here. It was a very desirable place to live. She was lucky.

She knelt on a big rounded boulder and wondered why she should be so sad also. She knew this feeling from the months after Druce was born. Back then she had been offered medication but had refused. Such feelings were part of the full spectrum of being and she had felt it her duty to endure them, so that one day she could carry them into the Accord—her contribution, a droplet of despair in the ocean of human experience.

But this . . . this weight. She could not remember when it had started, and she suspected that there could be no such neat line—in some ways it had started in the mixing of genetic material used at her conception, while in others it might be quite recent.

This melancholy was different to the post-natal darkness. Not so deep, yet somehow more pervasive. A flatness that smothered everything, a tinge of desperation in her thoughts, a clutching at the straws of strangers’ imagined lives.

She told herself to stop being so maudlin.

She pulled the cover from her basket and took out the crust of bread. She broke it into three pieces and hurled each as far as she could manage out onto the waves. Then she took the quetzal feathers and cast them into the breeze, watching them as they fluttered, some onto the water and some onto the rocks.

Food for the journey and feathers for the passage. An old family tradition, perhaps even one that came from Earth.

Softly, she wished the stranger a peaceful transition into the Accord.

Milton had square shoulders and a square face. Most often, if you caught him unawares, you would see him smiling because that was the way his features settled themselves.

He was a good man.

Tish came into the bar of the Falling Droplet just as Hilary and Dongsheng were leaving, having replaced the picture window through which the stranger and one of their bar chairs had plummeted the night before.

Milton was looking out through the new glass, relaxed, smiling gently.

Tish came up behind him, put her hands on his shoulders and turned him, kissed him, first close-mouthed and then, briefly, allowing her tongue to press between his lips.

He stepped back, smiling more broadly now—a sure sign that he was unsettled by her ways. “Steady, steady!” he said. “What’s got into you, then, eh? Won that grand tour ticket or something?”

“No,” she said. “Not that.” She took hold of a handful of his shirt and smiled. “No,” she went on, “I just want to fuck you, Milton.”

He looked scared, like a small animal. Once, she had found that endearing.

“But . . . ” he said. “What if someone comes in?”

“We’re closed.” She toyed with the handful of shirt she still had, knowing she was pulling at the hairs on his chest, knowing how that turned him on.

“But Druce—”

“Isn’t here,” she said.

“But he might—”

“So you’d better be quick.”

But the moment was going, had gone. Had maybe never really been there at all.

She released his shirt, moved away.

“You’re a good man, Milton,” she said, looking out over the bay.

When she glanced back over her shoulder, Milton was smiling, because that’s how his features tended to settle themselves.

It would have ended there, if she had not gone up top to the Shelf—the window repaired, the stranger and his three pursuers gone, the spark just beginning to return to Tish Goldenhawk’s life—and to Milton’s, whether he wanted it or not.

But no, four days after paying tribute to the stranger’s passing over into the Accord, Tish took a shaft up to the top of the cliffs again, to the Shelf, and there she saw what her first response told her must be a ghost.

Here, a row of homes and bars and shops lined the cliff top, so that one had to enter a building in order to enjoy the view over the bay to the Grand Falls.

Tish had been in a bar called the Vanguard, sharing gossip with Billi Narwhal, a multicentenarian who was currently wearing his hair white on the principle that it advertised his many years of experience to any of the youngsters wanting lessons in love. The Vanguard was busy, with another two cruise ships in harbor having replaced the Lady Cecilia, now two days south.

A little tipsy from Billi’s ruby port, Tish left the bar. A little way ahead of her was a man and there was something about the way he held himself, something about the slight taste of cinnamon on her lips—on the air, a scent.

He turned. The stranger. Undamaged, unblemished by his fall.

Tish clutched at the doorframe and blamed the ruby port, both for her unsteadiness and for the apparition.

The stranger was no longer there. For a few seconds Tish was able to convince herself that he never had been.

She gathered herself and tried to remember what she had come up to the Shelf to do. She hadn’t just come up here to gossip with Billi Narwhal and flatter herself with his attention.

She pushed through the crowd. She was following him. Following so quickly that it was more pursuit than passive following.

She paused, thinking of the three men in the Falling Droplet. Had it been like this for them? Were they mere innocents suddenly overcome with the urge to pursue? She knew such things were possible—the Accord could reach out to any individual and guide their actions.

But why? Why pursue this man? She was convinced now that he was a part of the Accord, a fragment of God made flesh. Why, then, were the men pursuing him? Or rather, what was it that was guiding them?

She sensed no dark presence lurking in her mind, no external force appropriating her body, her senses.

She started to walk again, eyes scanning the faces.

She found him at a cafe, sipping jasmine tea while a newscast spoke to him from the middle of the table. She sat across from him. “May I?” she asked.

He smiled and blanked the ‘cast with a pass of his hand. He looked quizzical.

“The Falling Droplet,” she explained. “You . . . left rather abruptly.”

Understanding crossed his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not anticipate that. I should have known.”

She smiled. He should.

“There are expenses?”

“Oh no,” she said. “Well, yes, actually, but they’re covered by the city.” Acts of God.

They sat quietly for a while, and Tish started to think he might prefer to be left alone. “How did you survive?” she blurted out eventually.

“There are ways,” he said. “It’s not important.”

She smiled. So far he had said nothing to deny her belief about his true nature, her fantasy.

“How do you find all this?” she asked him now, making conversation, prolonging their exchange. “The world of Laverne?”

“It’s a mystery to me. The place, the people. You. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful. Being chased by men who wish me harm—it’s all beautiful.”

That last bit rather detracted from what he was saying, Tish felt. Here, sitting at a table with a strange and handsome man, telling her she was beautiful . . . yet, he was like a child, eyes newly opened to the world.

“Shall we walk?” he asked.

They walked. Out past the last of the clifftop dwellings, to where the road became a track, became an ill-defined path.

They walked—Tish Goldenhawk, hand in hand with God.

“Why did you come after me if there is no debt?” the man asked, after a time.

“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” Tish told him. Then, brave, she added, “Anyone of your kind.”

He was shaking his head, smiling as if at the wonder of the world, of this simple exchange. “You people,” he said. “Always drawn to me . . . ”

She knew what he meant. Their touch—her small hand in his larger, smoother, stronger hand—was like a wick in an oil-lamp, energy flowing through it, always from her to him. It made her buzz, made her feel alive.

Later, stopping on a promontory, breathing salt, cinnamon, grass, with butterflies flitting about the flowers in the turf and gulls raucously occupying the cliff below, they stopped. Picking up the thread of their conversation as if there had been no gap, he said, “My kind. What did you mean by that?”

Suddenly shy, Tish looked away, then lowered herself to the springy grass, spreading her skirts out across her legs, smoothing the fabric down.

“You,” she said, wondering how to shape her words, “you’re no grand tourista. Even without the goons chasing you through my bar, it was obvious that you’re different.”

He nodded, smiled, waited for her to continue. A bee hummed nearby.

“You’re of the Accord, aren’t you?”

That single question embodied so much more. The Accord—the Diaspora-spanning networked supermind where we all go when our time in the real world is up, the amalgam of all past human experience, a super-city of the mind, of minds, of souls, even. The Accord.

“I don’t understand.”

“Your body,” she said, “grown somewhere, budded off a clone of a clone, just waiting for an emissary of the Accord to occupy it. Don’t worry—we all know it happens—the Accord reaching out to the real world.” All that stored experience and individuality was nothing without a connection to real life. Not nothing, but something other—the Accord sent out men and women like this stranger all the time. The process kept it human.

“If the Accord is our God, then you are a part of God,” she told him. As he kneeled before her, she added, “You are God, too—God in . . . in a man’s body.”

And she hoped desperately that he would not correct her, not now. She reached for him and in her mind she pleaded that he should let her believe, for now, at least.

Afterwards, she lay back, enjoying the play of the clifftop breeze on her body.

She had never done this before. Never taken one of her fantasies and played it out. Never betrayed poor, dull Milton, whom she had once, long ago, loved and now merely liked.

She turned onto her side as this man—this God—rose to a squatting position.

“Let me show you something,” he said.

She laughed. “I’m not sure I’m quite ready yet,” she joked.

He stood, wearing only a creamy cotton smock top that buttoned to halfway down. He reached down, arms crossing, took its hem and pulled the top over his head, discarding it so that now he stood over her, fully naked.

She looked at him, enjoying what she saw, his nakedness somehow adding to the frisson of sheer badness that touched every aspect of this engagement.

He turned, and she saw a strange lump between his shoulder blades. She was sure that had not been there moments before, when she had held him. As she watched, it bulged, grew, bifurcated.

As she watched, feathered wings sprouted from his back.

With a shake, he settled his flight feathers and held his wings out stiffly behind him. He turned and stepped off the cliff and, moments later, was soaring, swooping, cutting back heavenward in an up-draft like a giant gull, like an angel.

Her angel.

Tish returned to the Falling Droplet late, unwashed.

Milton smiled at her, because that was how he was, and she wondered if he could tell, if she was that changed by what had happened.

She certainly felt different. She felt like something had been added, something taken away. She was not the woman she had been this morning.

She kissed Milton, willing him to taste the salt on her lips, to smell the cinnamon scent on her hair, her clothes.

She had arranged to meet her angel again the following day, and she knew she would keep the appointment.

“Customers,” murmured her husband, drifting away.

She turned, looked out across the bay to where birds and pterosaurs flew, wondering if he might be out there too.

It couldn’t last, of course. It could never last.

Ever more brazen, Tish had brought her lover to the Vanguard to eat the renowned dipped crabs. They had met in the street, like passing friends, with a smile and a few words, with not a single touch exchanged. Even now, sitting across a table from each other, their hands did not touch, their feet did not brush against each other. Only their eyes met, filled with promise, anticipation.

Billi came across before their food had come out, unable to resist finding out more. Tish was tempting fate, and she knew it. If Billi put two and two together, word would be all over Penhellion before nightfall.

“Going to introduce me to your friend?”

Tish looked up, and casually stroked a hand across her lover’s wrist, their touch like electricity. “Hello, Billi,” she said. “This is—” barely a pause “—Angelo. Angelo, meet Billi.”

She saw Billi’s eyes narrow, a slight nod. “You like my bar, Angelo, eh?” he said. “What’re you eating? Crab’s good. Crab’s always good here. Don’t touch the lobster, though. Trust me on that.”

“Crab,” said Angelo—the name fitted, the name stuck. “I took Tish Goldenhawk’s advice.”

Billi’s eyes narrowed again, and Tish wondered what connection he was making now. Then his eyes widened, turned more fully on Angelo.

She had seen that look before, that mechanical movement.

Billi raised a hand, held it palm-out toward Angelo with the fingers stiffly pointing.

His palm glowed.

Angelo ducked, dived forward, knocking the table aside, hard against Tish’s knee so that she screamed, then gasped as his weight struck her, sending her back off her chair.

She looked up from the floor, as voices rose around them.

The chair where Angelo had been seated was a blackened lump, smoking furiously.

Billi was turning slowly from the burnt chair to where Angelo and Tish lay on the floor. He had a puzzled expression on his face, a smooth, mechanical glide to his movements.

He was not Billi. Not for now, at least. Billi had been pushed aside and someone—the Accord, presumably—had taken over.

Why try to kill one of your own angels?

Billi raised a hand and Angelo stood, hauling Tish to her feet, kicking a chair and table back at the old man to stop him pursuing.

They were standing by one of the Vanguard’s big picture windows.

Tish looked out, suddenly dizzy at the height.

Angelo took a chair and raised it.

“You’re making a habit of this,” she said, as he swung it down against the window, crazing the glass.

This time, he gave the chair a twist, and the glass gave way.

Salty air leapt in through the opening.

Angelo opened his arms and wrapped them around Tish as she stepped into his embrace, and then he jumped clear, taking her with him.

They fell, air rushing, whistling in Tish’s ears.

They were going to die on the rocks this time, she felt sure. This was a lovers’ end, and they would move on into the Accord for eternity.

Fabric ripped, wings broke free, and their fall became a graceful swoop taking them out across the water, toward the place where the rainbows filled the air and the gulls and the pterosaurs flew.

“You need to escape,” she told him. “You need to get away from here. Why ever did you stay here in the first place after they found you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think they expected me to still be here,” he explained.

They were on an island, one of the many islands where the Grand River became the Grand Falls and tumbled over the cliffs to the sea far below.

“If you want to get away why can’t you just . . . I don’t know . . . snap your fingers? If you’re of the Accord then you should be able to just slip away and reappear somewhere else.”

“Like a god?” he laughed. He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Nothing happened.

Tish stood and looked down at the seated Angelo. Time to confront things.

“If you’re no god, then who are you? What are you? Who are these people chasing after you? If they’re agents of the Accord, then why is this happening? What have you done?”

He let her finish. He smiled. He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know who or what I am. I don’t know why these people are chasing me or who they are. I don’t know what I have done, if I’ve done anything at all. I don’t remember much before a few tens of days ago. I don’t understand at all, but I can tell you one thing.”

He waited. She asked, “What’s that?”

“I love every moment of this existence. Every last detail. I’m soaking it up. I’m a sponge. I want more. I want ever and ever more.”

Tish heard the buzz of a motor—a flyer, perhaps. “You have to get away from here,” she said. “They’ll destroy you.”

“Will you come with me? Will you share it with me?”

She nodded. She remembered that moment, walking back into the Falling Droplet and realizing that she was irrevocably changed. She felt that again, only more so. She hoped it would carry on happening, because she wasn’t finished yet.

2. Er-jian-die

I have no past. I have no future. Only now.

I have many pasts and many futures, but as me, as this, there is only now. I am a composite. I have been cast for this occasion, for this task.

I am of the Accord.

I am assembled from the many, from the multitude. I will go back to the multitude.

I am of the Accord.

I am male, in this body. My skin is dark, my hair short, straight. I am slim and strong and fast, of course. Why would I be anything else?

I am enhanced. In many ways.

I am not alone. I will not be alone when I step out of this cabin. There are two others. Two like me, Ee and Sen. We are a team.

I step out through the cabin door, having opened it first. My others are here already. Their heads turn, we nod simultaneously. I join them at the rail.

We are high up, on the deck of a faux sailing ship that is really powered by twinned gravity-wave microgenerators below decks. Above us, sails bulge in a manner designed to appeal to the grand touristas.

We are only a few hours from port. I know this for a fact, like I know much for a fact.

I close my eyes. We close our eyes. Together.

Data flashes.

We open our eyes.

He is here, on the Lady Cecilia. The anomaly.

In a realm where everything is known to the Accord—where everything, by its nature, must be known to the Accord—he is different. He is unknown. He, by his very nature, does not conform with the rules that govern our existence, your existence, everyone’s existence.

He must be found.

He must be stopped.

He must be reabsorbed before he becomes self-propagating.

I turn. We turn. Together.

We smell him.

He has been here, on this deck, recently. He must be nearby.

We will seek him out, find him, reabsorb him, before the Lady Cecilia docks. We know this for a fact.

The Lady Cecilia docks at Penhellion, sliding smoothly into her space in the harbor.

We have not found him, the anomaly.

We have found places where he has been, places where he has spent long hours alone, no doubt doing battle with his perverse nature. They do that. They don’t understand, but they try. They are you and me, us; it is their nature.

It is their nature to hide, and to run. This one has been here, in this world called Laverne, for longer than initial data indicated. Re-run analyses give him perhaps twenty more days’ existence in which to accumulate knowledge, experience, before he was first detected.

His development is not linear. Those twenty days are days in which every aspect of his self has become exponentially more complex and data-rich.

This one is no babe in arms, then. He is a whirlwind, a destroyer of worlds.

He does not know it, of course.

Our task is to stop him from finding out.

Penhellion is a city built into a cliff. They could have built it on top of the cliff. They could have built it a few kilometers along the coast where the cliffs are not anything up to twelve hundred meters high. Human nature is not such, and they built it in the cliff. We built it in the cliff. We are of the Accord.

Data flashes.

There are agents in this city. Many agents. They will look out for him and their reports will be relayed to us whenever they hold anything of relevance.

They do not know they are agents. They do not know they have been selected. Sanji Roseway does not know that she is watching, as she happily stocks her fabric stall on Fandango Way. Neither do the street musician, Mo Yous, or the bar-owner, Milton Goldenhawk, or the dreamcaster, Serendip Jones. They will not know when they are reporting, or when they have reported. That is not their place.

We did not see him leaving the Lady Cecilia, but he has done so. Those extra days, that logarithmic escalation of his survival instinct and wiles, have made a difference.

We must not underrate him.

But first, we must find him.

He has been quiet, which has not helped us in our task. He should be like a whirlpool, drawing in the human debris of this society, feeding on it. Such activity sends out signals, leaves traces, a pebble dropped in our collective pool.

But with experience comes guile and with guile, restraint. Perhaps he has stabilized. That would be unusual, but not a first.

We remain in Penhellion, studying and using our agents to study. He will break cover. He will reveal himself by his actions. They always do.

We proxy into a bar—a bar through the eyes of another.

There has been a ripple—only the slightest of ripples, but detectable nonetheless. He has emerged.

We look across the bar. We are behind the bar, its surface finely polished flutewood. The bar room is crowded, which is good. Picture windows show sunlight splitting into separate colors through water droplets. I like rainbows. I am not an artist, but once I think a part of me was a part of an artist. Alizarin crimson. Venetian red. Monastral blue. Yellow ocher. I could paint that view a million times and in every instance it would be different.

My team, my others, are also proxying this bartender, and our gaze is drawn away from the picture windows, and we look along the bar.

Another bartender is serving, or rather, not serving, but leaning on the flutewood bar-top, chatting. She is of indeterminate age, as are most adult humans. She has long auburn hair with natural wave, wide eyes with burnt umber irises.

She is talking to him. The anomaly. He has the shape of a man, but we find it hard to focus our eyes—this proxy’s eyes—on that shape and determine any detail. He swirls and flows. He is drawing her in.

“Tish?” we say, addressing the bartender. She looks, we nod toward the crowded room. This proxy is not communicative, but his meaning gets across even so.

Tish moves off to serve other customers.

We withdraw, as data flashes.

The Falling Droplet. We are several levels away, in this cliff-face city. We open a channel through the consensus, arriving in seconds.

We enter the bar. It looks different from this perspective, from the crowd rather than from behind the bar. I look around, orientating myself. We each look around. We scan faces, locating Milton the bartender and then Tish the other bartender.

I see him. I point.

He is intense. I feel dizzy, sick, as if I am being sucked in even though I know that cannot be so, due to the heavy levels of security built into my being.

I am aware of the others, Ee-jian-die and Sen-jian-die, turning to look. I sense their turmoil.

I open my hand and spotlight him. That should stun him, lock him into a pool of slowed time so that he will be swimming through perceptual treacle.

He is unaffected.

He drops a glass, ducks, moves, is gone.

We channel, and are standing where he was.

We know of the other exit. We look, and he is there, reaching for the door.

We close our eyes, lock minds, shift consensus. There is no door there. There never has been a door there.

He ducks, vanishes again. He is channeling too, although he does not know it. Short, desperate hops. He reappears by the windows, snatching a chair.

He does not understand what is happening. He is resorting to violence, the chair his only weapon against us.

I smile. He is making it easy.

He swings the chair—but not at us, at the window. It shatters, he turns, he throws himself after the chair.

We look out of the smashed window at the sea and rocks below.

He is not dead.

He cannot be dead.

He can only be reabsorbed.

We remain in Penhellion, even though our anomaly has probably moved on now. He would be foolish to remain, after our first contact. We do not think he is a fool.

He is still here. Or rather, he has not gone far—only as far as the clifftop community.

We tackle him immediately when contact is made, through our proxy Billi Narwhal.

He pulls the same trick and evades us.

He is fast, but he appears to be a creature of habit.

He has another weakness, too—the woman, Tish Goldenhawk. She is with him. She appears to have retained her integrity too, which is a bonus.

He is an anomaly. He can be detected by his disruption patterns, but equally, he can lie low. That is the nature of an anomaly. Or one of its natures.

But Tish Goldenhawk . . . If we find her, there is a high probability that we find him.

3. Tish Goldenhawk

“Who are you? What are you?”

Tish Goldenhawk has traveled the length of Laverne’s main continent with the man she calls Angelo, and finally she realizes that her invented name for him, “Angelo,” is a more appropriate label than “man.”

She has traveled the length of the continent with him, but today is the first time she has seen him kill, although she suspects it is not the first time he has killed. She has dispensed bread and feathers for his victim before confronting Angelo.

She has traveled the length of the continent with him and she is ill, drained both physically and mentally, like a scag addict.

He smiles. He shrugs. He says, “I don’t know. I did not know the first time you asked me and I have not yet made that discovery. You are beautiful. Death is beautiful. I soak up beauty. That is as close as I have come to defining myself—I am a receptacle.”

Death. Tish had never witnessed violent death until today. She hoped young Ferdinand would find peace in his absorption into the Accord.

They were walking, Tish and Angelo at the front, and his ragged band of followers, now numbering some twenty-four, doing as their role demanded, following.

Angelo accumulated followers. It was his nature. People he encountered, people with a sharp enough sense of perception, of distinction, were always able to detect his special nature, his divinity, the fact that he had been touched by the Accord.

They wanted to be with him.

They wanted to share with him.

They wanted to give to him.

And he, like a child with toys made of flesh and not even the slightest sense of responsibility, took.

The first time Tish had found him with another, she had ranted and raved, and he had smiled and looked puzzled, and she had seen that he had no concept of what she was feeling, and anyway, she could never be the first to cast stones in matters of infidelity.

Blind to herself, Tish had first seen the weakness in others. In Maggie and Li, who had joined the group late but had given so wholeheartedly, she had first seen the addict look in the eye, the transformation of devotion into something physical, something living. Each of them carried a cancer, and that cancer was Angelo.

Ferdinand had been one of the first to join. Tish and Angelo and three or four others had stayed the night in a grand ranch-house somewhere a few days to the northwest of Daguerre. The welcome was warm—as welcomes for Angelo tended to be—and the seventeen-year-old son of the owner had been cute and, instantly, devoted.

Ferdinand had come with them. Told his parents he was guiding them to the river-crossing and just carried on with them, and then they’d had to speed up a bit, hitching a ride on a goods wagon, because their welcome at that ranch would never be as warm again.

Ferdinand supplanted Tish as Angelo’s favorite, if he could be said to have such a thing. To be honest, she was not too put out by this development, as already she was starting to feel that psychic leeching that would only get worse.

Ferdinand went from fresh-faced disciple to hollowed devotee to shuffling, skeletal wreck in only twenty or so days.

It happened among them—it was happening to all of them, only at a slower rate—and yet it had taken far too long for Tish to notice. In the worlds of the Diaspora suffering had long since been banished. It was not even something readily recognized, like a language newly encountered. There was a whole new syntax of suffering for them to learn.

“What am I? I don’t know. But I can tell you that it is like flying. I wish to fly and I fly, but once I am up there it is only the air and a few feathers that prevent me from plummeting. So tenuous the thread of existence!

“You are strong, Tish. So much stronger than the others. You hold me together. You are my air, my feathers. Without you . . . well, I don’t know what I would be without you to support me, to contain me.”

She was growing weak. Had been growing weak.

But not as rapidly as Ferdinand.

She came up on them early that morning, when the sun was still heavy over the mountains, painting them gold and pink.

Angelo was holding him, his arms easily enfolding the wasted frame.

Tish almost turned away. She had seen this kind of encounter often enough by now. She closed her eyes and thought back to those few precious nights when it had just been the two of them, sleeping rough, both enfolded by his wings.

She had been strong then.

She opened her eyes just as Ferdinand started to vanish.

She watched. She could see through him. See the stones, the thorn bush, the tussock grass, the inside of Angelo’s embracing left arm, previously obscured by Ferdinand’s bony torso.

Things blurred. Things dissolved, melted, slipped away from this existence.

He was gone.

Angelo turned to her, his expression startled as if he did not know what had happened, had not expected it to happen; but beneath the surprise there was satisfaction, a thrill of pleasure, of strength, and the first hint of that crooked-toothed smile.

4. Er-jian-die

“Your air, your feathers . . . so poetic. If you weren’t such an innocent I’d say you had the crassest line in smooth-talk, but you don’t have a clue, do you?”

We have her. We have him. I see him through the eyes of Tish Goldenhawk and it is as if a distorting lens has been removed. He is male, of indeterminate age, of mid-brown skin tone and dark hair. He is beautiful and engaging.

He draws you in.

Even at this remove—proxied and many hundred kilometers distant—he draws you in.

We debate, as he moves out of view. Act now, via proxy, or attend in body, allowing a short interval in which he might detect our approach and take evasive action? We do not know how much his powers have grown.

Data flashes.

Ee-jian-die takes the proxy, turns her head so that he is back in our field of view. Sen-jian-die and I withdraw, lock, open a channel through the consensus, step through.

There is momentary disorientation and then we are standing on a plain, surrounded by cacti and thorn bushes and oddly balanced round boulders.

The two of them are there, locked in conflict. A short distance away there is an encampment of bubble tents and track trikes. The people there look on, too damaged to stir.

She has him in the beam. She stands, knees slightly bent, body tipped forward, one arm stretched out, palm first, fingers straight, and a beam of white light lances from her hand to him, the anomaly.

He stands there smiling.

He looks at us as we materialize, although he should not be able to turn his head at all.

He raises a hand so that he mirror’s Tish Goldenhawk’s stance and his palm cuts out the beam, reflects it.

It shines on her face and she crumples, sobbing, more damaged than she had been before.

Ee-jian-die appears at my side, his proxying of Tish abandoned.

He looks ashen, damaged by the encounter, even at a proxy.

I allow myself to be identified as leader, even though we three are equal; we three are far greater than we three alone. “Your time is up,” I tell the anomaly. “Let these people go. Come back with us. Allow yourself to be reabsorbed.”

He smiles in a way that indicates taht he is both amused and puzzled. “Reabsorbed?” he said. “Re . . . ?”

I nod. “You are a glitch,” I tell him. “A chaotic anomaly. The Accord contains all the individuals who have lived and then died since its inception. You are a bug in that process, a self-resonant fluctuation in the billions upon billions of human elements within the Accord. A remix error. You’re a strange attractor and you need to be smoothed over. Come with us, you will not be lost, you will simply be reabsorbed.”

“But how . . . ? How can I be reabsorbed if I am not yet dead?”

He doesn’t know. He has grown, but he does not know.

“ ‘This is the Accord,” I tell him. “We are living the afterlife. The afterlives.”

“What happens if I say ‘no?’ ”

“We will force you.”

“And if you fail?”

“You will carry on growing. Like a leak in a pool, you will continue to drag in those about you, soaking them up until they are husks. They are drawn to you. We are drawn to you. You are like a black hole in human form. You will suck us all in and the Accord will fail to be. It will crash on a galaxy-wide scale.”

He—this thing, this entity, this it—is smiling. “So, if I believe you, then I—” it thumped its chest in apelike display “—am an alternative to the Accord? An alternative reality?”

It laughs. “I like this,” it says. “It is all so beautiful. So, so beautiful.”

We strike, synchronized.

He locks him in the immobilizing beam, far more powerful than we have used so far. I lock him in a second, our combined beams more than doubling their intensity in combination. Sen moves in to interface, a physical connection with the Accord.

The anomaly is still smiling.

It turns and lashes out a beam of light and Sen flies through the air in several pieces.

It turns again, and lashes at Ee, and I sense our hold—if ever we had had a hold—weakening.

And then . . . light, dark, an absence that is where the pain would have been if my body had not immediately shut down those pathways. A lot of absence.

Mental silence. Ee-jian-die and Sen-jian-die have been returned to the Accord. They will reappear, but not here, not now.

I am still here, though. I have not been returned.

I open the eye that I am able to control.

I see sky, a thorn bush.

I see her. Tish Goldenhawk. Looking down at me.

“What can I do?” she says.

“Nothing,” I tell her. The body that carries me is too fundamentally damaged. It could be repaired, of course, but what is the point? My task is over, I have failed. I will be reabsorbed. Someone else will be sent, and they will try again. The anomaly will have grown, but it will be fought, only not by me next time, or at least, not by the combination of traits that is this me.

“What happens to us when he has sucked us dry?”

She is strong, this one.

“If this is the Accord, then where does the data go when he has absorbed it? You said he’s some kind of black hole—what’s inside him?”

“Who knows?” I say. “The physically dead enter the Accord and we live on, again and again, for eternity. But attractant anomalies like this remove us from the afterlife. It’s like asking where the dead went before there was an Accord. They died. They stopped being. They ended. If he takes us from the Accord, we end.”

“What can I do?” she repeats, and I realize that she does not mean to ask what she can do to help my mortally damaged body, but rather what can she do to stop the anomaly, the attractor, her lover.

“He said I was his air, his feathers, that I held him together,” she said. “I want that to stop.”

In that instant I want to paint her. Like the rainbows, I could paint her a million times and each would be different, but always her strength, her purity, would come through.

“You have to get close to him,” I tell her.

5. Tish Goldenhawk

“You have to get close to him,” this wreck of a human construct tells her. “Hold him.”

Tish Goldenhawk nods. In her mind she can see Angelo holding Ferdinand, absorbing him. She knows exactly what this agent of the Accord means. “What then?”

“That’s all,” he tells her. “I will do the rest.”

Angelo waits for her in the encampment, smiling. She should have known he would not go on without her.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His words have no meaning. They are just vibrations in the air. “They tried to kill me.”

She nods. “They’re dead now,” she says, wondering then at the lie—whether she has made a fatal mistake already.

He shakes his head. “One lives,” he says, “but only tenuously. He does not have long, I think.”

He turns. “We must move on,” he says. “There will be more of them. Another day and we will reach a city, I think. A city would be good.”

She looks at him, tries to see him as she had once seen him, a charming, exciting escape. That had only ever been one of her fantasies. She tries to see him as her lover, but cannot. Tries to see him even as human, but no.

“I can’t,” she says in a quiet voice.

He turns, raises an eyebrow.

“I can’t go on.” Getting stronger. “I’m leaving. Going home. You don’t need me anymore.”

“But . . . ”

“No buts,” she says. “I can’t do this. I’m exhausted. Drained. I’m leaving.”

He is not human, but there is so much in him that is.

“You can’t,” he says. “I . . . You’re my support. My feathers, the air that holds me up. The air that I breathe!”

“I’m tired,” she says. “You can’t lean on me anymore. I’m none of those things . . . I’m not strong enough. Can’t you see? It’s me who needs supporting!”

“I will always support you,” he says.

He opens his arms, just as he had for Ferdinand, who had been too weak to continue.

He steps forward.

She waits for him to come to her, to hold her.

Scent of cinnamon, of dry, dusty feathers. She holds him.

She senses the flow, the seething mass of energies. They came from . . . beyond.

He gasps, straightens.

She holds on.

He is looking down at her. He knows. He dips his head and kisses her on the brow.

She holds nothing, holds air, hugs herself. She drops to her knees.

There are feathers, nothing else. She gathers some. She will cast them for him, with bread, when she gets back to Penhellion.

She does not doubt that she will go there, go home.

Poor Milton. Poor Druce. She has changed. She does not know what can be salvaged, but she will go home now and she will see.

She stands.

Even if nothing can be repaired, she has no regrets. She would do it all again.

She is of the Accord.

They all are of the Accord.

First published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1, edited by George Mann, 2006.

About the Author

Keith Brooke is the author of fourteen novels, six collections, and over seventy short stories; his most recent SF novel alt.human (published in the US as Harmony) was shortlisted for the 2013 Philip K Dick Award and is story “War 3.01” is shortlisted for the Seiun Award. He is also the editor of Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the Sub-genres of Science Fiction, an academic exploration of SF from the perspectives of a dozen top authors in the field. Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s Caveman Films. He writes reviews for the Guardian, teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his wife Debbie in Wivenhoe, Essex.

Hair

Adam Roberts

1

It seems to me foolish to take a story about betrayal and call it—as my sponsors wish me to—“The Hairstyle that Changed the World.” All this hairdressing business, this hair-work. I don’t want to get too worked-up about all that. Like those massed strands of electricity shooting up from the bald pate of the Van de Graaff machine. And whilst we’re on the subject of haircuts: I was raised by my mother alone, and we were poor enough that, from an early stage, she was the person who cut my hair. For the sake of simplicity, as much as economy, this cut would be uniform and close. To keep me quiet as the buzzer grazed, she used to show me the story about the mermaid whose being-in-the-world was confused between fishtail and feet. I’m sure she showed me lots of old books, but it was that one that sticks in my head: the singing crab, more scarab than crustacean; the wicked villainess able to change not only her appearance but, improbably, her size. I used to puzzle how she was able to generate all her extra mass when at the end she metamorphosed into a colossal octopus. Mostly I remember the beautiful young mermaid, a girl with the tempestuous name Ariel. The story hinged on the notion that her tail might vanish and reform as legs, and I used to worry disproportionately about those new feet. Would they, I wondered, smell of fish? Were the toenails actually fish-scales? Were the twenty-six bones of each foot (all of which I could name) formed of cartilage, after the manner of fish bones? Or human bone? The truth is, my mind is the sort that is most comfortable finding contiguities between different states, and most uncomfortable with inconsistencies. Hence my eventual choice of career, I suppose. And I don’t doubt that my fascination with the mermaid story had to do with a nascent erotic yearning for Ariel herself—a very prettily drawn figure, I recall.

This has nothing to do with anything. I should not digress. It’s particularly vulgar to do so before I have even started; as if I want to put off the task facing me. Of course this account is not about me. It is enough, for your purposes, to locate your narrator, to know that I was raised by my mother alone; and that after she died (of newstrain CF, three weeks after contracting it) I was raised by a more distant relative. We had enough to eat, but nothing else in my life was enough to. To know that my trajectory out of that world was hard study, a scholarship to a small college, and the acquisition of the professional skills that established me in my current profession. You might also want to know where I first met Neocles (long final e) at college, although what was for me dizzying educational altitude represented, for him, a sort of slumming, a symptom of his liberal curiosity about how the underprivileged live.

Above all, I suppose, you need to know that I’m of that generation that thinks of hair as a sort of excrescence, to be cropped to make it manageable, not indulged at length. And poverty is like the ore in the stone; no matter how you grind the rock and refine the result it is always poverty that comes out. Thinking again about my mother, as here, brings her colliding painfully against the membrane of memory. I suppose I find it hard to forgive her for being poor. She loved me completely, and I loved her back, as children do. The beautiful mermaid, seated on a sack-shaped rock, combing her long, coral-red hair whilst porpoises jump through invisible aerial hoops below her.

2

To tell you about the hairstyle that changed the world, it’s back we go to Reykjavik, five years ago, now: just after the Irkutsk famine, when the grain was devoured by that granulated agent manufactured by—and the argument continues as to which terrorists sponsored it. It was the year the World Cup descended into farce. Nic was in Iceland to answer charges at the PPC, and I was representing him.

A Product Protection Court hearing is not much different than any other court hearing. There are the rituals aping the last century, or perhaps the century before that. There’s a lot of brass and glass, and there is a quantity of waxed, mirror-like darkwood. I had represented Nic at such hearings before, but never one quite so serious as this. And Nic had more to lose than most. Because I had itemized his assets prior to making our first submission before the Judicial Master I happened to know exactly how much that was: five apartments, one overlooking Central Park; a mulberry farm; forty assorted cars and flitters; more than fifty percent shares in the Polish National Museum, which although it didn’t precisely mean that he owned all those paintings and statues and whatnots at least gave him privileged access to them. The Sydney apartment had a Canova, for instance, in the entrance hall, and the Poles weren’t pressing him to return it any time soon.

He had a lot to lose.

In such circumstances insouciance is probably a more attractive reaction than anxiety, although from a legal perspective I might have wished for a more committed demeanor. He lounged in court in his Orphic shirt—very stylish, very Allah-mode—and his hair was a hundred years out of date. It was Woodstock. Or English Civil War aristocrat.

“When the JM comes in,” I told him, “you’d better rise up off your gluteus maximus. Stand yourself straight.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” he said, indulgently.

Judicial Master Paterson came in, and Nic got to his feet smartly enough and nodded his head, and then sat himself down perfectly properly. With his pocketstrides decently hidden by the table he looked almost respectable. Except for all the hair, of course.

3

I saw him only twice again after that—after, I mean, the afternoon in the PP courtroom painstakingly picking my way through the brambles of intellectual property legislation. Once, and then once again. But that day went better than I had hoped. I see-you-tomorrowed him on the steps of the courthouse, but he was staring at the sky. The bobble-layer of clouds on the horizon was a remarkable satsuma color. Further up things were cyan and eggshell. The surface of the icebound estuary, which had looked perfectly smooth and flat in daylight, revealed under the slant light all manner of hollows and jags. Further out at sea, past the iceline where waves turned themselves continually and wearily over, a fishing platform sent a red snake of smoke straight up from the fakir’s basket of its single chimney. The ocean had lain a sheet of firework sparkles over the profound dark of its depths.

“Tomorrow,” he replied absently. He seemed hypnotized by the view.

“Don’t worry,” I told him, mistaking (as I now think) his distraction for anxiety about the prospect of losing some of his five apartments or forty cars and flitters. “The JM said he recognized that some individuals have a genius for innovation. That was a good sign. That’s code for: geniuses don’t need to be quite as respectful of the law as ordinary drones.”

“A genius for innovation,” he echoed.

“I’m not saying scot-free. Not saying that. But it won’t be too bad. You’ll keep more than you think. It will be fine. Don’t worry. Yes?”

He suddenly coughed into his gloves—yellow, condom-tight gloves—and appeared to notice me for the first time. God knows I loved him, as a friend loves a true friend, but he bore then as he always did his own colossally swollen ego like a deformity. I never knew a human with so prodigious a self-regard. His selfishness was of the horizoning, all-encompassing sort that is almost touching, because it approaches the selfishness of the small child. His whim: I shall be humanity’s benefactor! But this was not an index of his altruism. It was because his ego liked the sound of the description. Having known him twenty years I would stand up in court and swear to it. He developed the marrow peptide-calcbinder treatment not to combat osteoporosis—the ostensible reason, the thing mentioned in his Medal of Science citation—but precisely because of the plastic surgical spinoff possibilities, so that he could add twenty centimeters to his own long bones. It’s not that he minded people using his treatment to alleviate osteopathologies. With a sort of blithe single-mindedness, he was pleasantly surprised at other useful applications.

Accordingly, when he did not turn up in the courtroom the following day my first thought was that he had simply overslept; or gotten distracted by some tourist pleasure, or that some aspect of his own consciousness had intruded between his perceiving mind and the brute fact that (however much I tried to reassure him) a JM was gearing up to fine him half his considerable wealth for property-right violation. It did not occur to me that he might deliberately have absconded. This possibility evidently hadn’t occurred to the court either, or they would have put some kind of restraint upon him. You would think (they thought, obviously) that the prospect of losing so many million euros of wealth was restraint enough.

The shock in court was as nothing, however, to the fury of the Company: his employer, and mine. I want to be clear: I had been briefed to defend Nic in court, and that only. I made this point forcefully after the event. My brief had been courtroom and legal, not to act as his minder, or to prevent him from boarding a skyhop to Milan (it turned out) in order immediately to board another skyhop to—nobody was quite sure where. “If you’d wanted a minder you should have hired a minder,” I said. I was assertive, not aggressive.

The court pronounced in absentia, and it went hard on Nic’s fortune. But this did not flush him out.

His disappearance hurt me. I was sent to a dozen separate meetings in a dozen different global locations within one week; and in the same timeframe I had twenty or so further virtual meetings. Flying over Holland, where robotically tended fields shone greener than jade, and the hedges are all twenty feet tall, and the glimmering blue rivers sined their paths towards the sea.

At Denver airport I saw a man with Parkinsonism—not old, no more than forty—sitting in the café and trying to eat a biscuit. He looked as though he was trying to shake hands with his own mouth.

The news was as full of people starving, as it always is. Images of a huge holding zone in Sri Lanka where people were simply sitting around waiting to die. That look of the starving: hunger has placed its leech-maw upon their heel and sucked all their fluid and solidity out, down to the bones. The skin tautly concave everywhere. The eyes big as manga, the aching face.

On Channel 9 the famine clock, bottom left corner, rolled its numbers over and over. A blur of numbers.

I flew to Iceland.

I flew back to Denver,

I was acutely aware that Neocles’ vanishment put my own career at risk. Had I always lived amongst wealth, as he had, I might have floated free above the anxiety of this. It’s easy for the wealthy to believe that something will turn up. But I had experienced what a non-medinsure, hardscrabble life was like, and I did not want to go back to it.

He’s gone rogue, I was told. Why didn’t you stop him? The Company, which had been (to me) a dozen or so points of human contact, suddenly swelled and grew monstrously octopoid. A hundred, or more, Company people wanted to speak to me directly. This is serious, I was told.

He has the patent information on a dozen billion-euro applications, I was told. You want to guarantee the company’s financial losses should he try and pirate-license those? I thought not.

I thought not.

Not everybody scapegoated me. Some departments recognized the injustice in trying to pin Nic’s disappearance on me. Embryology, for instance; a department more likely than most to require expert legal advice, of the sort I had proved myself in the past capable of providing. Optics also assured me of their support, though they did so off the record. But it would have required a self-belief stronger than the one with which providence has provided me to think my career—my twenty-year career—as staff legal counsel for the Company was going to last more than a month. As it was, the elegant bee-dance of mutual corporate espionage continued to report that none of our competitors had, yet, magically acquired any of the intellectual property Nic had in his power to dispose. I had a meeting at Cambridge, in the UK, where late winter was bone-white and ducks on the river looked in astonishment at their own legs. I flew to Rio where the summer ocean was immensely clear and beautiful: sitting on the balcony of our offices it was possible, without needing optical enhancement, to make out extraordinary levels of detail in the sunken buildings and streets, right down to cars wedged in doorways, and individual letters painted on the tarmac.

I flew to Alaska. I flew to Sydney, where the airport was a chaos of children—a flash mob protest about the cutbacks in youth dole.

In the midst of all this I somehow found time to begin, discreetly, to make plans for a post-Company life. My ex-wife was more understanding than I might have expected, more concerned to maintain medinsure for our two children than for herself. I scouted, gingerly, secretly, for other employment; but even with the most optimistic assessment it was going to be hard to carry five lots of medinsure on my new salary. I could not of course deprive the children, and I did not wish to deprive Kate. That left my ex-wife and myself, and—truthfully—I decided to give up coverage for myself and leave my ex’s in place.

Then, from the blue, news: Neocles had gone native in Mumbai, of all places. I was called once again to Denver and briefed face-to-face by Alamillo himself, the Company enforcer and bruiser and general bully-fellow. It was not a pleasant tete-a-tete. At this meeting, emphasis was placed on the very lastness of this, my last chance. The word last as conventionally used was insufficient to convey just how absolutely last this last chance was, how micron-close to the abyss I found myself, how very terminal my opportunity.

The very severity of this interview reassured me. Had they not needed me very badly they would not have worked so hard to bully me. For the first time since Nic had so thoughtlessly trotted off—putting at risk, the fucker, not only his own assets but my entire family’s well-being—I felt the warmth of possible redemption touch the chill of my heart.

“My last chance,” I said. “I understand.”

“You go to him,” said Alamillo. “You have a fucking word, yes?”

I understood then that they were sending me because I was a friend, not because I was a lawyer. They already knew that money was no longer going to provide them with any leverage with Nic—that he had renounced money. He was easing himself into his new role as Jesus Christ, the redeemer of the starving. What can you do to a person who won’t listen to money? What else does Power have, in this world of ours?

“I’ll talk to him. And?”

“What does and mean?”

“I mean: what else?”

“Nothing else,” said Amarillo, vehemently.

“Bring him home?”

“No, that’s not what we’re sending you to do. Listen the fuck to me. I don’t give a fucking pin—just, just. Look. We’re sending you to talk to him.”

4

I was flown out on a gelderm plane, its skin stiffening with the frictive heat of a high-inset aerial trajectory. I ate little medallions of liquorish bread, with shark caviar and Russian cheese pâté; and then authentic sausages lacquered with honey, and then spears of dwarf asparagus, and then chocolate pellets that frothed deliciously inside the mouth. I drank white wine; a Kenyan vintage. The toilet cubicle of this plane offered seven different sorts of hygiene wipes, including a plain one, one that analyzed your stool as you wiped to check for digestive irregularities, and several that imparted different varieties of dotTech to your lower intestine to various ends.

I watched a film about a frolicsome young couple overcoming the obstacles placed in the way of their love. I watched the news. I watched another film, a long one this time—fifteen minutes, or more—based on the historical events of the French Revolution.

The tipping point of our beginning our descent registered in my viscera, like a Christmas-eve tingle of excitement.

We plummeted to Mumbai.

Arriving at Chatrapati Shivaji was like travelling back half a century in time: the smell; the litter; the station building’s silver-painted curved ceilings on their scythe-shaped supports. An all-metal train, running on all-metal rails, trundled me from the terminal to the departure room. Then it was a short hop in a Company flicker to Jogeshwari beachfront—seconds, actually: a brief elevation over the peninsular sprawl of the city, its bonsai skyscrapers like stacked dishes, the taller curves and spires further south. The sky was outrageously blue, and the sea bristled with light. And, really, in a matter of seconds we came down again. I could have walked from airport to seafront, is how close it was. But better to arrive in a flitter, of course. When I’d called Nic he’d been gracious if laid-back in reply: no Company men, just you, old friend. Of course, of course.

Of course.

There was a flitter park on the Juhu dyke, and I left the car, and driver, there, and started walking. Forty degrees of heat—mild, I was told, for the season. The sky blue like a gemlike flame. The sun poured heat down upon the world. The air smelled of several things at once: savory smells and decaying smells, and the worn-out, salt-odor of the ocean.

I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected, knowing Nic, to find him gone hippy; dropped-out; or a holy hermit chanting Japa. I pictured him surfing. But as I walked I noticed there was no surf. The bay harbored the poking-up tops and roofs of many inundated towers, scattered across the water like the nine queens in the chessboard problem, preventing the build-up of rideable waves. These upper floors of the drowned buildings were still inhabited; for the poor will live where they can, however insalubrious. Various lines and cables were strung in sweeping droops from roofs to shore. People swam, or kicked and splashed through the shallower water. On the new mud beach a few sepia-colored palm trees waved their heavy feathers in the breeze. There were people everywhere: a rather startling profusion of humanity, lolling, walking, rushing, going in and out, talking, singing, praying. It was an enormous crush. The sound of several incompatible varieties of music wrestled in the background: beats locking and then disentangling, simple harmonic melodies twisting about one another in atonal and banshee interaction. Everybody was thin. Some were starvation thin. It was easy enough to pick out these latter, because they were much stiller: standing or sitting with studied motionlessness. It was those who could still afford to eat who moved about.

Sweat wept down my back.

And then, as arranged, there was Nic: lying on the flank of the groin with his great length of hair fanned out on the ground behind him. The first surprise: he was dressed soberly, in black. The second: he was accompanied by armed guards.

I sat beside my friend. It was so very hot. “I think I was expecting beach bummery.”

“I saw your plane come over,” he said. “Made quite a racket.”

“Airbraking.” Like I knew anything about that.

“I’m glad you’ve come, though,” he said, getting up on his haunches. His guards fidgeted, leaning their elbows on their slung rifles. They were wearing, I noticed, Marathi National Guard uniforms. “Good of you to come,” he clarified.

“People in Denver are pretty pissed.”

“There’s not many I’d trust,” he said. He meant that he did, at least, trust me.

“These boys work for you?” I asked.

“Soldiers. They do. The Marathi authorities and I have come to an understanding.” Nic hopped to his feet. “They get my hairstyle, and with it they get the popular support. Of the poor. I get a legal government to shelter me. And I get a compound.”

“Compound?” I asked, meaning: chemical compound? Or barracks? The answer, though, was the latter, because he said:

“Up in Bhiwandi. All the wealth has moved from the city, up to the mountains, up East in Navi Mumbai. The wealthy don’t believe the sea has stopped coming. They think it’ll likely come on a little more. The wealthy are a cautious lot.”

“The wealthy,” I said.

“So you can come along,” he said. “Come along.”

I got to my feet. “Where?”

“My flitter’s back here.”

“Are you allowed to park a flitter down here? I was told flitters had to be parked in the official park, back,” I looked around, vaguely. “Back up there somewhere.”

“I have,” he said, flashing me a smile, “special privileges.”

5

“What is it we do?” he asked me, a few minutes later, as the flitter whisked the two of us, and Nic’s two soldiers, north-east over the Mumbai sprawl. He had to raise his voice. It was noisy as a helicopter.

“Speaking for myself,” I said, “I work for the Company. I do this to earn enough to keep the people I love safe and healthy. I include you in that category, by the way, you fucker.”

“And,” he said, smiling slyly, “how is Kate?”

I’ll insert a word, here, about Kate. It is not precisely germane, but I want to say something. To try, at any rate. I love her, you see. I’m aware of the prejudice, but I believe it goes without saying that she is as much a human as anybody. She has a vocabulary of nine hundred words, and a whole range of phrases and sayings. She has a genuine and sweet nature. She has hair the color of holly berries. You’d expect me to say this, and I will say this: it is a particularly strange irony that if the same people who sneer at her personhood post treatment had encountered her before treatment, it would never occur to them to deny that she was a human being. In those circumstances they would have gone out of their way to be nice to her. And if before, why not afterwards? Kate is happier now than she ever was before. She is learning the piano. Of all the people I have met in this life, she is the most genuine.

I don’t intend to defend my love to you.

“She is very well,” I said, perhaps more loudly than I needed to. “Which is more than I can say for your portfolio.”

“A bunch of houses and cars and shit,” he shouted, making a flowing gesture with his right hand as if discarding it all. His was, despite this theatricality, an utterly unstudied insouciance. That’s what a lifetime of never wanting for money does for you.

“We could have saved more than half of it,” I said, “if you hadn’t absented from the court the way you did.”

“All those possessions,” he said. “They were possessing me.”

“Oh,” I said. I could not convey to him how fatuously this struck me. “How very Brother Brother.”

He grinned. “Shit it’s good to see you again.”

“Now, now, this hair thing of yours,” I asked him, guessing it was some nanopeptide technology or other that he had developed. “Is that a Company patent?”

“You know?” he said, his eyes twinkling and his pupils doing that peculiar cycling moon-thing that they do, “it wouldn’t matter if it were. But, no, as it happens, no. As it happens.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

He was the hairstyle man, the savior of the world’s poor. “I’m a benefactor now,” he boomed. “I’m a revolutionary. I shall be remembered as the greatest benefactor in human history. In a year I’ll be able to put the whole Company in my fucking pocket.”

The flitter landed: a little series of bunny hops before coming to rest, that tell-tale of an inexperienced chauffeur. This was Mumbai after all, not Stockholm.

We were inside his compound: a pentagon of walls clustered about with brambles of barbed wire. A central tower shaped like an oil derrick with a big gun at the top—impressive looking to a pedestrian, but like a cardboard castle to any force armed with modern munitions. It was spacious inside the walls, but it was enormously crowded nonetheless; and everybody there without exception—men women and children—had long, ink-black hair. People were lying flat on the floor, or lolling upon the low roofs, or sitting in chairs, all of them sunbathing, and all with their hair spread and fanned out. Nic led me along a walkway alongside the central atrium, and the ground was carpeted with supine humanity. They were so motionless that I even wondered whether they might be dead: except that every now and then one would pat their face to dislodge a fly, or breathe in and out.

“Sunbathers,” I said.

And then, just before we went in, Nic stopped and turned to me with a characteristically boyish sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “Hey, I tell you what I learned the other day?”

“What?”

“Crazy that I never knew this before, given all the work I’ve done. Discovered it quite by chance. Peptides—I mean the word, peptides—is from the Greek πεπτίδια and that means little snacks. There’s something you never knew. Means nuts, crisps, olives stuffed with little shards of sundried fucking tomato. Peptides means scoobysnacks.”

“Extraordinary,” I deadpanned. “And you with your Greek heritage,” I said, knowing full well that he possessed no Greek language at all.

At this he became once again solemn. “I’m a citizen of the world, now,” he said.

We went through: up a slope and into a seminar room. Inside was a horseshoe-seating grid with room for perhaps sixty people. The space was empty except for us two. The room put a single light on the front of the room when we came in.

I sat myself in a front row seat. Nic stood before the screen, fiddling with his hair, running fingers through it and pulling it. “Why do you think you’re here?” he asked, without looking at me.

“Just to talk, Nic,” I said. “I have no orders. Except to talk. Man, we really ought to talk. About the future.”

“Hey,” he said, as if galvanized by that word. He flapped his arm at the room sensor and the screen lit behind him: the opening image was the Federal flag of India. “OK,” he announced.

The image morphed into diagrams of the chemical structures of self-assembling peptides, filling the screen: insectile wriggles of angular disjunction wielding hexagonic benzene rings like boxing gloves.

“Wait,” said Nic, looking behind him. “That’s not right.” He clicked his fingers. More snaps of his molecular tools-in-trade faded in, faded out.

“They go for this sort of Barnum-Bailey, in this part of the world, do they?”

“Calmodulin rendered in 3D,” he said. “I always think they look like party streamers. Although, in Zoorlandic iteration, they look like a starmap. There’s just so much empty space at the molecular level; our representational codes tend to obscure that fact. There, that there’s lysine.” He danced on the spot, jiggling his feet. “Lysine. A lot of that in your hair. NH2 sending down a lightning-jag of line to the H and H2N link, and O and OH looking on with their mouths open.” Images flicked by. “One of the broken-down forms of lysine is called cadaverine, you know that? The molecule of fucking decay and death, of putrefying corpses. Putrescine. Cadaverine. Who names these things?”

“Something to do with hair?” I prompted.

“Lysine,” he said. “Hair.” He held his right hand up and ran his thumb along his other four fingers: the display flicked rapidly through a series of images. “What is it we do?”

“You asked that before,” I said.

“Innovations, and inventions, and brilliant new technological advances.”

“I’m just a lawyer, Nic,” I said. “You’re the innovator.”

“But it’s the Company, isn’t it? The Company’s business. These technological advances to make the world a better place.”

I suppose I assumed that this was another oblique dig at Kate; so I was crosser in response than I should have been. “So they do,” I said. “Don’t fucking tell me they don’t.”

He looked back, eyes wide, as if I had genuinely startled him. “Of course they do,” he said, in a surprised tone. “Man, don’t misunderstand. But think it through. That’s what I’d say. This is me you’re talking with. Technological advance and new developments and all the exciting novelties of our science-fiction present. It’s great. You get no argument on that from me.”

“I’ve just flown from Denver to Mumbai in an hour,” I said. “You’d prefer it took me three months sailing to get here?”

“You have grasped the wrong stick-end, chum,” he said. “Really you have. But only listen. Technological advance is marvelous. But it is always, always, always a function of wealth. Poverty is immiscible with it. People are rich, today, in myriad exotic and futuristic ways; but people are poor today as people have always been. They starve, and they sicken, and they die young. Poverty is the great constraint of human existence.”

“Things aren’t as bad as you say,” I said. “Technology trickles down.”

“Sure. But the technology of the poor lags behind the technology of the rich. And it’s not linear. There are poor people on the globe today who do not use wheels, are still dragging their goods on sledges or hoiking them about on their backs. Some armies have needleguns and gelshells; and some armies have antique AK-47 guns; and some people fight with hoes and spades.”

“This is how you got the government of Marathi to give you this little castle and armed guard?

“The hairstyle stuff,” he said.

“And that? And that is?”

Abruptly, either because Nic had summoned it (although I didn’t see a gesture) or because the program had some other prompt, or because it was buggy in some way, a Nic-avatar popped onto the screen. Quite a realistic animation. “So,” boomed the avatar, beaming down upon his non-existent audience, “cysteine-lysine block copolypeptides that can replicate the propsilicate insilicatein protein, which in turn can generate structures in silica structures—”

“Quiet!” said Nic, to himself.

The animation froze.

There is a particular variety of silence I always associate with the insides of high-tech conference rooms. An insulated and plasticated silence.

“It’s a clever thing,” he said to me, shortly.

“Of course it is.”

“It is a clever thing. That’s just objectively what it is. Works with lysine in the hair, and runs nanotubes the length of each strand. There’s some more complicated bio-interface stuff, to do with the blood vessels in the scalp. When I said that none of this utilized Company IP I was, possibly, bending the truth a little. There’s some Company stuff in there, at the blood exchange. But the core technology, the hair-strand stuff, is all mine. Is all me. It’s all new. And I’m going to be giving it away. Pretty soon, billions will have taken the starter pills. Billions. That’s a big . . . ” He looked about him at the empty seats. “Number,” he concluded, lamely.

“Hair?” I prompted.

“I’m genetically eradicating poverty,” he said. And then a gust of boyish enthusiasm filled his sails. “All the stuff we do, and make? It’s all for the rich, and the poor carrying on starving and dying. But this—”

“Hair . . . ”

“Food is the key. Food is the pinchpoint, if you’re poor. Hunger is the pinchpoint, and it’s daily, and everything else in your life is oriented around scraping together food so as not to starve. The poor get sick because their water is contaminated, or because their food is inadequate and undernourishment harasses their immune system. The future cannot properly arrive until this latter fact is changed.”

 “So what does the hair—” I asked. “What does. Does it, like, photosynthesize?”

“Something like that,” he said.

His avatar, frozen with his smiling mouth half-open, like a twenty-foot-tall village idiot, lowered over us both.

“And you—what do you do, then? I mean what does one. You lie in the sun?”

“The energy you previously got from the food you eat. Well you get that from the sun.” He did a little twirl. “It’s a clever thing,” he said. “Actually the hair less so: that’s easy enough to engineer. Peptide sculptors generating photoreceptive structures in the hair, and spinning conductors down to the roots. The clever stuff is in the way the energy is transferred into the—look I don’t want to get into the details. That’s not important.”

I looked up at giant 2D Nic’s goofy face. I looked at human-sized 3D Nic’s earnest expression and fidgeting hands. “You don’t need to eat?”

“No.”

“But you can?”

“Of course you can, if you want to. But you don’t need to. Not once I’ve fitted the . . . fitted the . . . and I’m giving that away free.”

I tried to imagine it. All those supine bodies, laid like paving stones across Nic’s courtyard outside. “Lying all day in the sun?”

“They don’t have to lie there. They can walk about with their hair out, if they like. But it’s better to stay still, and spread your hair out as widely as possible. At these latitudes, four hours a day does most people.”

“And what about, say, Reykjavik?”

“The sunlight’s pretty weak up there,” he said. “You’d be better off in the tropics. But that’s where most of the world’s poor are.”

“And,” I said. “Vital amines?”

“Water, more to the point. You still need to drink, obviously. Ideally you’ll drink water with trace metals, flavorsome water. Or gobble a little clean mud from time to time. But vitamins, vitamins, well the tech can synthesize those. Sugars, for the muscles to work. You’d be surprised by how much energy four hours sunbathing with my hair generates. I mean, it’s a lot.”

“Phew,” I said. The vertiginous ambition of the idea had gone through my soul like a sword. “You’re not kidding.” This was no question.

“Imagine, in a few years,” he said, “imagine this: all the world’s poor gifted with a technology that frees them from food. Frees them from the need to devote their lives to shit-eating jobs to scrape together the money to eat.”

“But they still can eat?” I repeated. I don’t know why this stuck in my head the way it did.

“Of course they can, if they want to. They still have,” very disdainfully inflected tone of voice, “fucking stomachs. But if they don’t eat they don’t starve. Contemplate that sentence and what it means. Don’t you see? All the life that has ever lived on this planet has lived under this precariously balanced axe, all its life. Eat or die. I shall take that axe away. No more famines. No more starvation.”

“Jesus,” I said. I was going to add: I can see why the Marathi authorities would seize on such an idea as a means of galvanizing political support amongst the mass. I understood the guards, the compound. And from Nic’s point of view too: I could see why he might want this over a position as well-paid Company genemonkey.

“Why am I here, Nic?” I asked.

“I need a lawyer,” he said, simply. “Things are going to change for me in a pretty fucking big way. I will need a team I can trust. I’m going to be moving in some pretty high-powered circles. Finding a lawyer I can trust—that’s easier said than done.”

This I had not expected.  “You’re offering me a job?”

“If you like. Put it like that, OK.”

“What—what. To come here? To come and live here? To work in Mumbai?”

“Sure.”

“You’re serious?”

“Why not?

I didn’t say: Because in three weeks’ time, the army of the Greater Kashmiri Republic is going to come crashing in here with stormtroopers and military flitters and crabtanks and many many bullets, to seize this extraordinary asset that the Marathi junta has somehow acquired. I didn’t say, What, come and work here and get very literally caught in the crossfire? I didn’t say that. Instead I said: “Bring Kate?”

He assumed a serious expression, rather too obviously deliberately suppressing a mocking smile. “I’ve always had a soft spot for Kate.”

“The kids?”

“Surely. The ex too, if you like.”

“I can’t bring the kids here. I can’t bring Kate here.”

He caught sight of his onscreen image from the corner of his eye. He turned, flapped a hand as if waving at himself, and the screen went blank. Then he turned back and blinked to see me sitting there. “Well,” he said, vaguely. “Think about it.”

Later, as he escorted me back across that courtyard, so unnervingly full of motionless bodies, he said, “It’s not about my ego, you know.” Oh but it was. It was always about Nic’s ego.

6

It’s just being. It is not striving. Striving, you understand, is the opposite of being. It is restless fighting and earnest labor and testing and retesting and making. Being has nothing of that about it.

It’s a striking thing, in retrospect, how slowly things moved at first. I flew back to the US and reported. The Company did not send me again; fearful, I daresay, that I would defect. But neither did they fire me. I picked up my new contracts and got back to work. Kate was deliciously pleased to see me. She’d picked up a new phrase: long time no see! She had learned the first portion of a Mozart sonata, and played it to me. I applauded. “Long time no see,” she said, hugging me.

“I missed you,” I told her. I tickled her feet.

“Long see, long time!”

Things were volatile in Western India. The Federal assembly broke up in acrimonious disharmony. That was hardly news. But I didn’t have much time free for idle speculation.

There was a good deal of militia hurly-burly, and then the Southern Indian Alliance launched a proper, fuck-you invasion. The news was full of images of armored troops dodging from doorway to street corner, firing their baton-rifles. Old-style tanks, with those conveyor-belt wheel arrangements, scooting across scrub and drawing comet-tails of dust behind them. Planes spraying Mumbai harbor, passing and repassing at great danger to themselves from ground fire, so as to lay a gelskin over the water thick enough to allow foot soldiers to advance. Then it was all over, and the old government was gone, and a new one installed, and when things settled the news was that Nic had managed to absent himself in all the chaos.

Footage of people lolling in the sun with their hair fanned and spread behind them. In the first instances it was a case of reporting a new religious cult. The New Ascetics. The Followers. Suneaters. It took a while for the outlets to realize they weren’t dealing with a religion at all; not least because many of the new hair-wearers adopted spiritual or mystical attitudes when interviewed.

The rumor was then that he’d reappeared in the southeast of the subcontinent.

His followers went about the whole Federation—and went into the further East, and went up into the Stans—disseminating his technology. He himself was posted on a million slots; although never very cannily viralled, which meant either he could not afford to hire the best viral seed people, or else he was too forgetful to do so. Or conceivably he disdained to do so; because the content of these casts were increasingly clumsily preachy: the authenticity and validity of poverty. Wealth had wrecked the world; poverty would save it. The rich would retreat to virtual lands, or hide away in materially moated and gated maison-kingdoms. The poor, freed from the shackles of their hunger, would sweep—peacefully but inevitably as the tide—away the rich and finally inherit the Earth. There was a good deal more in this vein. Sometimes I detected the authentic tang of Nic’s rhetoric in this, but more often than not it was tediously ordinary revolutionary boilerplate, projected on a screen for him to read by whichever government or organization was sheltering him—or, latterly, holding him captive. He was in Africa, or he was in China, or he was far beyond the pale horizon, someplace near the desert sands. God knows I loved him, as a friend loves a true friend, but I could hardly bear to watch any of it.

I rationed myself, to preserve my sanity. I had him at the top of my feed, and before settling down to my work in the morning I would take half an hour to catch up on all the stories posted that concerned him. At the end of the day, before I left to go home to Kate (“home again home again,” she sang, “splitted alick”) I’d run through anything new that came up.

One week he was one oddball news story amongst many. Here his disciples, the natural ascetic skinnies like a drumskin stretched on a coat-rack. Some of his followers were very political, and some were wholly apolitical, interested only in being able to emulate Jesus’s forty-day fast without dying.

Then another week went by and suddenly he was Big News. My feed could no longer keep up with it. And, another week, and I no longer needed a feed, because suddenly he was all over the majors. Everyone was taking notice. His followers, interviewed now very frequently, seemed less like the flotsam and jetsam of a cruel world and more like a core new class of people. Homo superior. The numbers were growing across southern Asia. Nic sang the superman, and the superman was going to overcome us. He was in Morocco (“north Africa” was the most we knew), but then he was seized by an Equatorial States strike force in a daring operation that left forty dead. He was held against his will, but seemed—in interview—perfectly blithe. “I have a new vision of the world,” said his face. “The world will change.” He said that more and more real people—code for “the poor”—were taking to his treatment. He said it was becoming an unstoppable force.

When word got out that the Equatorial States were trying to ransom him back to the USA for a huge sum of money there were riots. He was broken out of the building in which he was being held—a few minutes of jittery footage of him, his face bloody, being carried bobbing across a sea of humanity, and grinning, and grinning—and disappeared. He later reappeared in Malaysia, an official guest of the Malay Republic.

I watched the feed when Foss was flown out, and put through all the rigmarole of secrecy, to interview him. It really seemed to me the old Nic was trying to break out of what must have been an increasingly rigid carapace of popular, proletarian expectation. He cracked jokes. He talked about his plans. “This is the future,” he said, in a twinkly-eyed voice. “I’ll tell you. My technology is going to set humanity free from their starvation. I’ll tell you what will happen. The poor will migrate; there will be a mass migration, to the tropics—to those parts of the world where sunlight is plentiful, but where food is hard to come by. Some governments will be overwhelmed by this new exodus, but governments like the, eh,” and he had to glance down at his thumbback screen to remind himself which radical government’s hospitality he was currently enjoying, “People’s Islamic-Democratic Republic of Malaysia, will welcome the coming of a new age of popular empowerment.”

“What about the rest of the world?” Foss asked.

“The rich can have the rest of the world. The cold and sunless northern and southern bands. The rich don’t need sunlight. They have money for food. The whole global demographic will change—a new pulsing heart will bring life and culture and prosperity to the tropics. Over time the north and the south will become increasingly irrelevant. The central zone will be everything—a great population of real people, sitting in the sun for four hours a day, using the remaining twenty to create greatness for humanity.”

7

But what can I say? It was a fire, and fire, being a combustion, is always in the process of rendering itself inert. I did consider whether I needed to include, in this account, material about my motivation for betraying my friend. But I think that should be clear from what I have written here.

The Company persuaded me. A message was conveyed that I wanted to meet him again. A meeting was arranged. I flatter myself that there were very few human beings on the planet for whom he would have agreed this.

I had to pretend I had taken up dotsnuff. This involved me in actually practicing snorting the white powder, though I hated it. But the snuff was a necessary part of the seizure strategy. It would identify where I was; and more to the point it was programmed with Nic’s deener-tag (of course the Company had that on file). That would separate us out from all other people in whichever room or space we found ourselves—let’s say, soldiers, guards, captors, terrorists, whomsoever—and in which the snuff would roil about like smoke. When the capture team came crashing in with furious suddenness their guns would know which people to shoot and which not to shoot.

He was back in the Indian Federation now: somewhere near Delhi.

I was flown direct to Delhi International. And we landed at noon. And I was fizzing with nerves.

From the airport I took a taxi to an arranged spot, and there met a man who told me to take a taxi to another spot. At that place I was collected by three other men and put into a large car. It was not a pleasant drive. I was bitter with nerves; my mind rendered frangible by terror. It was insanely hot; migraine weather, forty-five, fifty, and the car seemed to have no air conditioning. We drove past a succession of orchards, the trunks of the trees blipping past my window like a barcode. Then we turned up a road that stretched straight as rail, or as a thermometer line, towards the horizon. And up we raced until it ended before a huge gate. Men with rifles stood about. I could see four dogs, tongues like untucked shirt-tails. And then the gate was opened and we drove inside.

I was shown to a room, and in it I stayed for several hours. My luggage was taken away.

I could not sleep. It was too hot to sleep anyway.

My luggage was brought back, my tube of dotsnuff still inside. I took this and slipped it inside my trouser pocket.

I informed my guards of my need to use the restroom—genuinely, for my bladder was fuller, and bothered me more, than my conscience. I was taken to a restroom with a dozen urinals at one wall and half a dozen sinks at another. A crossword-pattern of gaps marked where humidity had removed some of the tiny blue tiles covering the walls. The shiny floor was not as clean as I might have liked. I emptied my bladder into the white porcelain cowl of a urinal, and washed my hands at the sink. Then, like a character in a cheap spy-story book, I peered at myself in the mirror. My eyes saw my eyes. I examined my chin, the jowls shimmery with stubble, the velveteen eyebrows, the rather too large ears. This was the face that Kate saw when she leaned in, saying either “a kiss before bedtime,” or “a bed before kisstime,” and touched my lips with her lips. I was horribly conscious of the flippant rapidity of my heart, the vulgar insistence of blood perked with adrenaline.

A guard I had not previously encountered, a tall, thin man with a gold-handled pistol tucked into the front of his trousers, came into the lavatory. “The Redeemer will see you now,” he said.

8

Had he come straight out with “Why are you here?” or “What do you want?” or anything like that, I might have blurted the truth. I had prepared answers for those questions, of course, but I was, upon seeing him again, miserably nervous. But of course he wasn’t puzzled that I wanted to see him again. He took that as his due. Of course I wanted to see him—who wouldn’t? His face cracked wide with a grin, and he embraced me.

We were in a wide, low-ceilinged room; and we were surrounded by gun-carrying young men and women: some pale as I, some sherry- and acorn-colored, some black as liquorish. A screen was on in the corner, but the sound was down. Through a barred-window I could see the sepia plain and, wavery with heat in the distance, the edge-line of the orchards.

“Redeemer, is it?” I said, my dry throat making the words creak.

“Can you believe it?” He rolled his eyes upwards, so that he was looking at the ceiling—the direction, had he only known it, of the Company troopers, sweeping in low-orbit with a counter-spin to hover, twenty-miles up on the vertical. “I try to fucking discourage it.”

“Sure you do,” I said. Then, clutching the tube in my pocket to stop my fingers trembling, I added in a rapid voice: “I’ve taken up snuff, you know.”

Nic looked very somberly at me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go outside if you want to snort that.”

For a moment I thought he was being genuine, and my rapid heartbeat accelerated to popping point. My hands shivered. I was sweating. When he laughed, and beckoned me towards a low-slung settee, I felt the relief as sharply as terror. I sat and tried, by focusing my resolve, to stop the tremble in my calf muscles.

“You know what I hate?” he said, as if resuming a conversation we had been having just moments before. “I hate that phrase body fascism. You take a fat man, or fat woman, and then you criticize them for being fat. That makes you a body fascist. You know what’s wrong there? It’s the fascism angle. In a fucking world where one third of the population hoards all the fucking food and two thirds starve—in a world where your beloved Company makes billions selling antiobesity technology to people too stupid to understand they can have antiobesity for free by fucking eating less—in that world, where the fat ones steal the food from the thin ones so that the thin ones starve to death. That’s a world where the fascists are the ones who criticize the fatties? Do you see how upside-down that is?”

I fumbled the tube and sniffed up some powder. The little nanograins, keyed to my metabolism, thrummed into my system. Like, I suppose, fire being used to extinguish an oil well blaze, the extra stimulation had a calming effect.

The talcum-fine cloud in that room. I coughed, theatrically, and waved my hand to dissipate the material.

“So you’re free to go?”

“I’m not in charge of it,” he said brightly. “Fuck, it’s good to see you again! I’m not in charge. I’m being carried along by it as much as anybody. It’s a tempest, and it’s blowing the whole of humanity like leaves in autumn.”

“Some of it was Company,” I said. “The ADP to ATP protocols weren’t, legally speaking, yours to give away, you know.”

“The hair stuff was mine,” he said.

“I’m only saying.”

“Sure—but the hair stuff.”

I thought of the troops, falling through the sky directly above us, their boot-soles coming closer and closer to the tops of our heads.

“The photovoltaic stuff, and the nanotube lysine fabrication of the conductive channels along the individual strands of hair—that was you. But that’s of no use without the interface to do the ATP.”

He shrugged. “You think like a lawyer. I mean, you think science like a lawyer. It’s not that at all. You don’t think there’s a moral imperative, when the famine in the southern African republics is killing, how many thousands a week is it?” Then he brightened. “Fuck it’s good to see you though! If I’d let the Company have this they’d have squeezed every last euro of profit out of it, and millions would have died.” But his heart wasn’t really in this old exchange. “Wait till I’ve shown you round,” he said, as excited as a child, and swept his right hand in an arc, lord-of-the-manor-wise.

Somewhere outside the room a siren was sounding. Muffled by distance, a warbling miaow. Nic ignored it, although several of his guards perked their heads up. One went out to see what the bother was.

I felt the agitation building in my viscera. Betrayal is not something I have any natural tolerance for, I think. It is an uncomfortable thing. I fidgeted. The sweat kept running into my eyes.

“All the old rhythms of life change,” Nic said. “Everything is different now.”

I felt the urge to scream. I clenched my teeth. The urge passed.

“Of course Power is scared,” Nic was saying. “Of course Power wants to stop what we’re doing. Wants to stop us liberating people from hunger. Keeping people in fear of starvation has always been the main strategy by which Power has kept people subordinate.”

“Don’t know if I ever told you,” I said, squeakily, “how much I love your sophomore lectures on politics.”

“Hey!” he said, either in mock outrage, or in real outrage. I was too far gone to be able to tell the difference.

“The thing is,” I started to say, and then lots of things happened. The clattering cough of rifle fire started up outside, in the courtyard beyond the walls. There was the realization that the high-pitched noise my brain had been half-hearing for the last minute was a real sound, not just tinnitus, and then almost at once the sudden crescendo or distillation of precisely that noise; a great thumping crash from above, and the appearance, in a welter of plaster and smoke, of an enormous metal beak through the middle of the ceiling. The roof sagged, and the whole room bowed out on its walls. Then the beak snapped open and two, three, four troopers dropped to the floor, spinning round and firing their weapons. All I remember of the next twenty seconds is the explosive stutter-cough and the disco flicker of multiple weapon discharges. And then the stench of gunfire’s aftermath.

A cosmic finger was running smoothly round and round the lip of a cosmic wineglass.

I blinked, and blinked, and looked about me. The dust in the air looked like steam. That open metal beak, rammed through the ceiling, had the disconcerting appearance of a weird Avant-art metal chandelier. There were half a dozen troopers; standing in various orientations and positions but with all their guns held like Dalek-eyes. There were a number of sprawling bodies on the floor. I didn’t want to count them, or look too closely at them. And, beside me, on the settee, was an astonished-looking Neocles.

I moved my mouth to say something to him, and then either I said something that my ears did not register, or else I didn’t say anything.

He didn’t look at me. He jerked forward, and then jerked up. Standing. From a pouch in his pocketstrides he pulled out a small Γ-shaped object which, fumbling a little, he fitted into his right hand. The troopers may have been shouting at him, or they may have been standing there perfectly silently, I couldn’t tell you. Granular white clouds of plaster were sifting down.

Nic levelled his pistol, holding his arm straight out. There was a conjuror’s trick with multiple bright red streamers and ribbons being pulled instantly and magically out of his chest, and then he hurtled backwards, over the top of the settee, to land on his spine on the floor. It took a moment for me to understand what had happened. I was a little stunned by the whole sequence of events.

9

He may have been thinking, either in the moment or else as something long pre-planned, about martyrdom. Perhaps the Redeemer is not able to communicate his message in any other way. It’s also possible that, having gone through life protected by the tight-fitting prophylactic of his unassailable ego—and, I suppose, having watched too many rubbishy Thriller and Action-Killer books—that he may have genuinely believed that he could single-handedly shoot down half a dozen troopers, and emerge the hero of the day.

I honestly do not know.

What’s not moot is the violence that followed his death. It was extraordinary. Riots and demonstrations, calls for International Courts and military interventions. My involvement in the assassination (as it was styled—assassination!) leaked out. Many accused my employers of planning to murder him. As if the Company benefited in any way from Nic dead! As if they wouldn’t have paid billions to recover him alive! At any rate, I was forced to leave my home, to live in a series of hideouts. Of course a Judas is as valuable and holy figure as any other in the sacred drama. But religious people (Kate kneeling beside the bed at night-time, praying to meekling Jesus gent and mild) can be faulted, I think, for failing imaginatively to enter into the mind-set of their Judases. Nobody loved Nic as deeply as I. Or knew him so well. But he was rich, and not one motion of his liberal conscience or his egotistical desire to do good in the world changed that fact, or changed his inability to enter, actually, into the life of the poor. The poor don’t want the rich to save them. Even the rioters in the Indian Federation, even the starving Australians, even they—if only they knew it—don’t want to be carried by a godlike rich man into a new realm. What they want is much simpler. They want not to be poor. It’s at once very straightforward and very complicated. Nic’s hair was, in fact, only a way of making manifest the essence of class relations. In his utopia the poor would actually become, would literally become the vegetation of the Earth. The rich would reinforce their position as the zoology to the poor’s botany. Nothing could be more damaging, because it would bed-in the belief that it is natural and inevitable that the rich graze upon the poor, and that the poor are there to be grazed upon. Without even realizing it Nic was laboring to make the disenfranchised a global irrelevance; to make them grass. I loved him, but he was doing evil. I had no choice.

10

Last night, as we lay in bed together in my new, Company-sourced secure flat in I-can’t-say-where (though I’m the one paying the rent) Kate said to me: “I am cut in half like the moon; but like the moon I grow whole again.” I was astonished by this. This really isn’t the sort of thing she says. “What was that, sweet?” I asked her. “What did you say, my love?” But she was asleep, her red lips were pursed, and her breath slipping out and slipping in.

Originally published in When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, edited by Geoff Ryman, 2009.

About the Author

A Senior Reader in English at London University, Adam Roberts is an SF author, critic, reviewer, and academic who has produced many works on 19th Century poetry as well as critical studies of science fiction such as The Palgrave History of Science Fiction. His own short fiction has been collected in Swiftly. His novels include Salt, On, Stone, Polystom, The Snow, Gradisil, Splinter, and Land of the Headless. His most recent novels include Yellow Blue Tibia, New Model Army, Bete, and, with Mahendra Singh, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea. His most recent books are a chapbook novella, An Acount of a Voyage from World to World again, by way of the Moon, 1726, in the Commission of Georgius Rex Primus, Monarch of Northern Europe and Lord of Selenic Territories, Defender of the Faith, undertaken by Captain Wm. Chetwin aboard the Cometes Georgius, and a collection Adam Robots. Coming up is a new novel, The Thing Itself. He lives in Staines, England with his wife and daughter.

Eternal Wanderers Between Fire and Ice

Tomas Petrasek

Before we had glimpsed the worlds of other suns, we thought they would look like those in our own solar system, where all major planets revolve in orderly, almost circular orbits, like a giant clockwork. But it was a mistake. After the very first discoveries of extrasolar planets, it became clear that the reality out there was much wilder than our imagination, surpassing both theoretical predictions of astronomers and most of the visions offered by science-fiction authors. In many, and perhaps most planetary systems, hardly any signs of order or general rules could be traced. Gas giants circled in tight, scorching orbits almost hugging their suns, or swept through the habitable zone, extinguishing any hope of Earth-like worlds in their systems. Many of the new worlds, including super-jovian giants, traced highly elliptical orbits, which would be more suited for a comet than a well-behaved planet!

Although we have subsequently learned that not all planetary systems are so exotic, those worlds on wildly eccentric orbits still attract the attention of both scientists and dreamers.

The original question of their origins seems to be settled now—there are actually many pathways leading to elliptical orbits. Perhaps the most important one is chaotic orbital evolution in forming planetary systems. Although planets do form on circular orbits, they may migrate closer to their star during the process. Sometimes, two massive planets get just too close to each other, and their mutual gravitational interaction during a close encounter radically changes their orbits. More likely than not, one of the planets ends up on a wildly elliptical orbit, which may intersect orbits of other neighboring bodies. Chaos ensues, with worlds colliding, falling into their suns, or being ejected into the void. The surviving planets may end up on almost any kind of orbit, including the most eccentric.

Another recipe for extreme eccentricities is the disturbing influence of a massive companion. Sufficiently massive planets or even companion stars in binary systems may excite eccentricity of their smaller neighbors through long-term gravitational perturbations even across a considerable distance. In this case, the orbit of the unfortunate planet may even regularly oscillate between a circular and extremely elliptical shape.

Eccentricity of an ellipse is measured by a dimensionless number, with zero for a perfect circle, and values close to one for the most elongate ellipses (eccentricity of one would signify a parabola, i.e. a celestial body no longer in regular orbit). As the star lies in a focus of the elliptical planetary orbits, there is a single point where the planet is closest to its star (periastron) and the opposite point of the maximum distance (apastron).

How extreme can things get in the observed planetary systems? Take for example the planet HD80606b, a gas giant with extreme eccentricity of 0.93. It can get as far as 0.87 AU from its star at apastron (almost as far as the Earth is from the Sun) but dives to 0.03 AU at periastron (less than one tenth of Mercury’s distance). During such close, but very quick encounters with the star, the planet gets enormous amounts of heat in a very short time—the atmospheric temperature, which can be actually measured, rises from 500 °C to 1200 °C in just six hours! No wonder this creates an explosive storm, with superheated gases spreading in hypersonic velocities from the dayside to the night side.

From the habitability point of view, the occurrence of an eccentric giant planet in a system is generally a bad sign. In many cases, it directly precludes existence of any “pale blue dot” in the habitable zone. Small rocky planets also make the most likely victims during the wild and dangerous period of orbital maneuvers. They may not form at all, they may be destroyed—or end on eccentric orbits themselves, which spells doom over their habitability . . . or does it?

At first glance, the idea is absurd. If the eccentricity of an Earth-like planet got excited to the values not uncommon among exoplanets, it would sweep all the way from the vicinity of Mercury to the distant reaches of the asteroid belt. An endless cycle of boiling, condensing, and freezing seems inevitable, precluding habitability, perhaps with the exception of the most extremophilic life forms, such as bacteria and tardigrades.

But the common sense would be misleading, as was shown by the pioneering work of Darren Williams and David Pollard from Penn State University, published in 2002, and several follow-up studies.

The Earth with its atmosphere and oceans is actually very efficient in buffering temperature extremes, provided they don’t last too long. An eccentric Earth’s twin would be quickly speeding away from periastron before its oceans would be heated to uncomfortable temperatures, and very long before they would have any chance to boil. In the other extreme, at apastron, the waters would release the stored heat and warm the climate, until the planet falls back towards the sun. Maximum and minimum temperatures would occur with a considerable delay after the extremes of insolation, because of the thermal inertia of the planet.

As Kepler’s laws dictate that planets move faster during periastron and slower at apastron, and therefore spend most of their time at the more distant reaches of their orbits, we would expect eccentric planets to be colder than their counterparts on circular orbits with the same orbital period. The opposite is true, actually—such planets accumulate heat very efficiently during their quick and hot periastron passage, which outweighs the effect of long, dark and cold “winter.”

Williams and Pollard modeled climates of Earth’s twins with eccentricity up to 0.7, and provided a “weather forecast” for such a world. Periastron, located inside the orbit of Mercury, would occur on March 7th, with temperatures climbing quickly toward maximum on April 2nd. Interior areas of tropical continents would be close to the boiling point of water at this point, precluding survival of any unprotected lifeform, and warming oceans would sprout torrential storms. However, outside the tropics conditions would stay generally survivable, even mild in coastal areas. The extreme heat would cease quickly, and in about a month, life could return even to the equatorial landmasses. At apastron occurring in September, the climate would be mild in most places, and still cooling. The lowest temperatures would occur on 13th January, but except for polar areas, most of the planet would be still above freezing. By that time, the world would be speeding quickly inward, with just two months remaining to the rapid heating at periastron! Although this kind of annual cycle seems unusual for an earthling, many places would be comfortable even for human beings, and an Earth-like biosphere would probably thrive there without difficulty. Of course, this is just one specific example; other eccentric planets may exhibit very different climates depending on their orbits and physical characteristics. Amazingly, some simulations allow for habitable conditions even on planets with eccentricity of 0.9, almost as eccentric as planets can get. It seems likely that some other influence, such as tidal forces or stellar winds during periastron flybys, ruins planetary habitability before the temperature swings do.

Even when eccentricity itself might not limit habitability, long-term changes of orbital shape could. In cases when eccentricity oscillates wildly during eons, the average temperature would change, too, with increases of eccentricity leading to warming and circularization bringing cooling. Ice ages on Earth are—at least partially—caused by small changes in eccentricity. However, those shifts are insignificant compared to what some exoplanets must experience. What kind of biosphere could cope with such conditions?

Unlike gas giant planets, Earth-mass worlds are difficult to discover. Finding an Earth’s twin is a task for the next generation of astronomical instruments, and actually confirming its habitable nature would be even more challenging. Therefore, we still lack hard data about habitable exoplanets, eccentric or otherwise, although we have many reasons to believe they actually exist. Maybe some of the known giant planets host terrestrial-sized moons, which could be as interesting as any planet.

Take a textbook example of an eccentric exoplanet, and one of the first discovered, 16 Cygni Bb. Gas giant heavier than Jupiter, it orbits a Sun-like star on a highly eccentric orbit. There are two other stars in the system, too—a second Sun-like star and a red dwarf. Those companions have probably driven the planetary eccentricity to the present extreme value, and may cause it to fluctuate periodically in a wide range, although with a period of millions or even billions of years. The planetary orbit closely matches the hypothetical eccentric Earth of Williams and Pollard in both shape and average temperature. If 16 Cygni Bb has a satellite large enough to hold atmosphere, it could conceivably have liquid oceans and even host complex life on the surface. The locals would enjoy a fantastic view—three suns in the sky, with the main one periodically growing and shrinking on the sky, bringing short but fierce “summers” and long, mild winters.

We don’t know how common eccentric habitable planets and moons are, but we have all the reasons to believe their existence is far from impossible. Even the wilder planetary systems should not be excluded from our searches for life and Earth-like planets—at least until we learn much more about them. Because we live in a universe much more diverse than we’ve ever dreamed, and we have yet to find out whether or not there are biospheres as plentiful, as exotic, and as strange as the variety of worlds they could possibly inhabit.

About the Author

Tomas Petrasek, born 1984, is a Czech scientist, astronomy advocate and science fiction writer. He has published two non-fiction books about astronomy, one novel, and several short stories. He currently works as a neurobiologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Digging in the Dirt:
A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The first Kim Stanley Robinson novel I read was Icehenge (1984), back in the pre-Google days of 1997, when I had yet to graduate high school. The novel consists of three distinct first-person narrations, each structured as a diary or memoir, which must have seemed to my then self a far cry from the more dramatic, action-packed stories I was consuming. Though not immediately appealing, Icehenge challenged me to reconsider what I thought I knew about science fiction novels and thus made a much deeper mark on me than some of its more lithesome brethren. Later that same year I gobbled up Robinson’s wonderful The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge, and the next year Red Mars, and the year after that—

You get the idea.

Sixteen years after reading Icehenge, I bumped into Stan at the bar of the 2013 WorldCon, in San Antonio, Texas, and a seemingly innocent remark I made about a panel led to one of those wonderful group conversations that rage on until three in the morning. Stan’s knowledge of literature, history, and science is staggering, but he wears his learning lightly. Stan’s anecdotes and reminiscences were informed by the same deep compassion and warmth of spirit that can be found in his many works of scientifically rigorous imaginative extrapolation.

Kim Stanley Robinson grew up in Southern California, was educated at UC San Diego and attended Clarion in 1975. He made his first sale to Damon Knight for his Orbit anthology, lived in Boston, Zurich, and Washington DC, then returned to Davis, California. He is married to Lisa Nowell and has two sons. He traveled to Antarctica in 1995 with the NSF. His work has been translated into twenty-four languages; 2312 was a New York Times bestseller; he has won two Hugos and three Nebulas, as well as the Locus, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell awards.

Aurora, your latest novel, features a generation starship known simply as the Ship. Generation starships have been around in science fiction since at least Don Wilcox’s “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years” (1940). Did you envision your novel in this tradition, or as something separate?

It sits in that tradition, which I quite enjoy. My first awareness of generation ships was through Robert Heinlein’s story “Universe” and Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop, a classic of the genre. And then there was Gene Wolfe’s four-volume The Book of the Long Sun, my favorite Gene Wolfe novel sequence; it spills over into The Book of the Short Sun, which is three more novels, so it’s really a seven-book sequence, and I think it’s Wolfe’s greatest achievement, which is saying a lot, because he’s quite a power.

I was aware of all these but I also began to think that there was new scientific information, at levels biological, ecological, sociological, and psychological. I felt like you could tell a new story based on this new information, which is what science fiction is doing all the time. So I was looking to tell a new story and maybe even stick “a pin through a castle wall,” as Shakespeare puts it. Maybe pop the balloon, because the harder you press the idea, the more unlikely it looks that it can succeed.

Tau Ceti is nearby, and though it is not quite like our Sun, we know now that it has four large planets that you could call large Earths or small Neptunes. They’re too big to stand on without feeling five Earth gravities, but two of them are in the Goldilocks zone, where water would be liquid. I asked some people at NASA, “Could some of these big planets that we’ve found have moons that are almost the size of Earth?”

My NASA helpers told me that yes, but there’d be no way for us to distinguish two objects, from our distance and with our current methodology: a planet and its moon would look like one thing to us. So I invented Earth-sized moons for two of the planets we know are really there, planets E and F. That created all sorts of interesting problems, because moons that big orbiting planets that big will create a kind of tidal locking similar to our Moon’s. It gets really complicated and interesting in terms of how much light you get, how often you get eclipses, and so on. An entire planetary ecology and astronomy was suggested just by that one little invention on my part.

That was all a lot of fun, and it turned out, when I read the Wikipedia article on Tau Ceti, that Asimov’s planet Aurora orbited Tau Ceti in The Naked Sun (1956), which I had not remembered, having read The Naked Sun forty years ago. I was really pleased by that, and it’s the reason my planet is called Aurora and my novel too; a little tip of the hat to Asimov. Also Ursula K. Le Guin, as in her The Dispossessed (1974), Anarres and Urras are also orbiting Tau Ceti.

What kind of conversation do you see your work having with science fiction classics such as the two you just mentioned?

I love to think of myself as working fully in the tradition. I’m a science fiction “patriot”; the field’s history is full of masterpieces and interesting works by brilliant writers, and people still read these works today. It’s a live canon, which people read for fun. It’s not just something that’s being taught in University courses. People read the science fiction canon on their own. I love that. I love being part of it.

My contribution is probably to bring the latest scientific information to old science fiction ideas and see what happens to the ideas when they’re tweaked with this new information. And then also just to do the English major thing—to think about form and characters, try to make good novels and add to the tradition.

How did you go about creating the protagonists of Aurora?

Practical questions of how to convey information often lead me to which characters I want to focus on. In the case of Aurora, I was doing a story of a starship voyage to Tau Ceti that was slower than light-speed, and never got faster than one-tenth of light-speed, and I wanted to start the story when they were approaching the Tau Ceti planetary system. I needed somebody who was young and had grown up entirely on the ship. It developed from there in a natural way that it could be the child of two people heavily involved in the running of the ship—the equivalent of a chief engineer and one of the lead medical people. So this child gets educated, and so does the reader, in a fairly rapid manner.

It also became quickly clear to me that it would be interesting if at a certain point the starship’s artificial intelligence—which would have to be really highly developed and powerful to help run a starship—became the narrator, and then had to learn to write a novel.

Your creative process for some novels, like The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), lasted years and involved reading dozens of books of research. When did you have the first inkling you wanted to tell the story of Aurora?

As far as I can remember, it was sometime during the last ten years. But going all the way back to Icehenge, I’ve been writing about saying good-bye to some small starship leaving the Solar System and headed for the stars. It happened in Icehenge, and Blue Mars (1996), and 2312 (2012) just a few years ago. It finally occurred to me that it was a story I doubted was possible. I wanted to think about that impression and tell a story and see what happened. About five years ago I started to put it in the pipeline as something I might do.

My editor, Tim Holman, was very encouraging. A lot of the research came down to the usual things: the Internet and books. But also, my friend Chris McKay at NASA Ames convened a crew of experts who helped me by answering a lot of questions.

We meet for lunch, I open my laptop, I ask questions, and they answer them and bounce ideas around. Sometimes that involves literal back-of-the-envelope calculations, and they suggest tweaks that are canny, sophisticated tweaks.

In the case of Aurora I had a new idea, possibly a new idea in all of science fiction—at least I don’t know of it ever being described before. So this is the climax of the novel, and has been cleared by people at NASA Ames. I think it was Chris who said, “Just make sure that in every equation you leave one crucial number out, and then no one can challenge you.”

While we’re on the subject of reading: Can you talk about your fascination with Virginia Woolf, and how it intersects—or doesn’t—with your interest in science fiction?

That’s a very good question. I came to Virginia Woolf late, because when I read her as an undergraduate I thought her work was boring and it made no sense to me. When I tried her most experimental novel, The Waves, as an adult, a middle-aged person, I realized this was fine literature concerning middle-aged people. I just hadn’t been prepared for it when I was young, when I wanted more excitement or drama or whatnot.

I started to read her and she turned out to be a very experimental novelist. Each novel is different; each novel is right at the edge of her ability to control it. It’s an experiment that she’s trying, and sometimes fails with, but most of the time she comes up with something extremely interesting.

Reading on, her non-fiction is exceptionally clear and well-judged. She’s a super clear writer, and she loves books so much she makes you want to read everything she writes about. She never has much of a negative word to say about anything. She’s taught me a lot.

Her biography was getting greatly expanded right during the years that I was getting interested in her work. She was the victim of some childhood sexual abuse by relatives, and had gone through some periods of mental illness as an adult, and had tempestuous relationships on all sides. It was a dramatic, high modernist life that was being unpacked by a succession of different biographers coming from different angles.

The best commentary of all was her own writing, in her diaries and letters. Hers is an incredibly documented life. There’s a book of people writing down memories of her, another of letters of condolence written to Leonard Woolf after she committed suicide, with all of his replies. So if you’re interested in a literary figure you could hardly pick a better one, because the documentation is huge, and she herself is such an interesting, vibrant, and lovely character. With very powerful literary judgment. She was a kind of literary genius.

I still have two books to read: her second novel, Night and Day, and a book called Flush, which is her fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, a kind of side-project for her. I want to read those two books, and then I will have read everything by her, and most of the biographies of her. It’s an integrated project, and I think those are valuable, but you can only take on a few of them because they take up so much time.

It’s interesting to watch Virginia Woolf encounter science fiction in the figure of Olaf Stapledon. When I talk publicly about Woolf it’s usually in this context. She read Star Maker, and Last and First Men also, and she admired them tremendously. She had no prejudices in literature, thus not against science fiction, which hadn’t even been named as far as she was concerned. She took Stapledon as just another experimental writer, doing stuff that she herself wanted to do, which was to write about deep time. It was lovely to watch her try to incorporate deep time in her last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts.

I think I’m seeing this science fiction thread in Virginia Woolf’s literary biography, which has not been noticed by the huge mass of Woolf criticism that exists. Her letters to Stapledon are not in her collected letters, so it’s been overlooked. I feel like I ought to write a short note to the Virginia Woolf journals and tip them to this, so that real scholars can go in deeper. But I’m in no rush.

Another massive reading endeavor of yours was the complete Journals of Henry David Thoreau. What was that experience like?

That’s been beautiful. Like Woolf, Thoreau was a tremendously good prose writer. That’s what the two of them have in common. They both wrote diaries that were extensive accounts of their own lives and thinking, far beyond what most people do. So they’re the two greatest diarists. Beyond that, there are not too many similarities between the two.

He was a small-town guy in 19th century Massachusetts. It wasn’t exactly provincial because the intellectual leaders of the transcendentalist movement were there in the same town with him, so it was a very high-powered intellectual atmosphere. Thoreau was also an early citizen scientist. He was interested in botany and in landscape, obsessively so. He had social anxieties and he was a very odd guy, but what he found was writing, daily writing as a practice, like a religion.

The Journals are simply superb. I read them slowly, a couple of days per reading session. I read them almost at the same speed at which Thoreau wrote them. I have no desires here except to enjoy this window into another mind, into a landscape writer of tremendous power.

I do hope someday to do my “best of” the Journals. There are now at least a dozen, maybe twenty extracts from his journals. They’re seven thousand pages long, maybe four million words. Naturally people have tried to give you different aspects of it: Thoreau on birds, Thoreau on his neighbors, Thoreau on writing, on botany, on one thing or another, including several “best-of’s.” It’s probably a mistake, but I’m making it too: I want to do Stan’s favorite passages from Thoreau’s Journals. But I only got the idea when I was halfway through, so having finished it I had to go back to the beginning and start over again, marking passages in the first half.

This is one of my retirement projects. It has to do with my mountain interests and nature writing more generally. That creeps over into my science fiction, and the two inform each other, but they’re not quite the same thing.

Speaking of your mountain interests: Given your passion about the Sierra Nevada, do you think you might write a book about it?

I sure hope so. It’s high on my list of things to do.

I’ve just signed a contract for three new novels, and I’m happy with that, because I have the ideas and I know what I’m up to, though I don’t want to talk about them right now. What I’m thinking is that when those books are done, I’m going to take pause and write my Sierra Nevada book, or try to. I’m going to put a solid effort into it. I’ll write about John Muir, who was a disciple of Thoreau’s, among other things. And I’ll write about what it’s like to be in the Sierra, with some route advice: “Go here, or go there, and you’ll like it.” A little bit about backpacking and how do it.

I’ve been paying attention to Thoreau very closely with the idea he’ll teach me some things. I think I’ll be lost at sea—or lost in the mountains—because I won’t know how to write non-fiction. It makes me feel a little trepidation, but in a good way. I’m excited. I really want to do it. It’ll happen sometime.

When you were a teenager, you read historical novels and mysteries rather than science fiction. Have you considered writing in these genres?

No. I really feel devoted to science fiction. I think it’s got something special that the other genres don’t have for me. My love of the historical novel gets expressed in things like Years of Rice and Salt (2002) and Galileo’s Dream (2009), or in treating the future as though it’s a historical novel, like in the Mars books.

I also feel like very often that the detective novel provides a plot that is congenial to me. Quite a few of my plots are similar to detective story plots. Not all of them, but often enough that I find it fun and comforting. I still read mysteries and historical novels. I have favorite writers in both of those genres.

I do have one thing to add. I used to tell people that I ran into science fiction when I went off to college, and that it was Asimov and Clifford Simak that turned me on to it. But what I’ve been forgetting is how blown away I was by Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time when I was twelve. It blew my mind, but it seemed to me to be a freak of nature. I didn’t comprehend that it came from a genre. I thought that this one woman was just so spectacularly imaginative that she told this unique story. I loved it but I didn’t know its context at all. I didn’t go seeking out science fiction, because I didn’t know it existed, and it was segregated in my library, and I was almost entirely a library reader. But when I was eighteen and found science fiction, I think A Wrinkle in Time had set me up for it.

Referring to writer Peter Dickinson, you and your wife coined the term “Dickinson moment,” to describe that point in a novel where you’re not going to stop reading until you’ve finished the book. Do you ever strive to build Dickinson moments into your own novels?

I wish. That would be a good thing. I have never set out specifically to do it, so I can’t be sure if I have or not.

Thinking about it and rapidly passing through my books, I’m not coming up with one that has a clear Dickinson moment. What I will say is that I wanted the last chapter of Years of Rice and Salt to move really quickly compared to any of the previous ones, so you could feel you were sliding down the last pages and towards the end. It was such a long book.

But that’s not really what my wife and I mean. I think of it in terms of suspense. There’s a point where you’re too excited to know the end, where there’s too much danger involved and you simply have to go on. When people read Red Mars, they think they know the end of the novel because the first chapter is an in media res and John Boone gets killed. After that it goes back in time and the reader gets extremely comfortable thinking that the murder of John Boone will always be in the future. At the end of chapter five you cross that point again, and chapters six, seven, and eight are very action-packed and full of incident. Many a reader has said to me that they were so startled to break into the area of the unknown, where they didn’t have any future for the story and were back in that ordinary sensation of not knowing what comes next, that they read through to the end. So that’s a Dickinson moment, maybe. But it’s a couple of hundred pages!

Around the time that Shaman (2013) was published, you commented on the fundamental continuity between modern humans and Paleolithic humans: “Every day we’re doing the basic Paleolithic activities of talking to each other, making our food, dancing, having sex . . . ” Do you foresee a time when we will completely abandon these deep behavioral roots and tilt wholly into the technological sublime?

I don’t think it’s possible, because we still have the same genome and biological needs. The evolutionary forces that pushed around our brains as social primates are still the same. There will be fundamental pleasures that can’t be replaced by their technologically sublime substitutes. They can’t be augmented or virtualized in any meaningful way without taking away what was essential to their pleasure.

Ultimately, you do get food and sex, and beyond that play and physical activity. These are all imperatives I think. This is why I flatly disbelieve that uploading our minds would be meaningful. I don’t believe in the Singularity either. So there are a couple of science fiction stories that I think are fantasy. Why people are intrigued by these fantasies is an interesting question.

I wonder if people are making a very big category error, and it’s sort of common to all addictions: when you’re doing something that you think is going to give you pleasure, and it’s not giving you the pleasure you’ve been told it would, then you double down and do more of it, thinking that more will be better and will finally get you what you were told you’d get out of it.

I’m thinking that in our technologically augmented and virtualized lives of sitting and looking at screens, a lot of people are performing the addictive mistake, doing more of it thinking that it’ll make them happier. At a certain point, if you break the addictive cycle and realize the addictive activity is never going to do it for you, you can try something more basic. There are a lot of roads to recovery, that could be viewed as psychological or religious, or simply common sense or whatever. You can start living a primate’s life and pretty soon you’ll find satisfactions.

I do a lot of weeding in the garden every morning. I have my hands in the dirt, and I’m vigorously and enthusiastically killing plants that I don’t like, or maybe I do like them, but I definitely don’t want them in my garden. So I’m just sitting in the sun on my butt, or I’m standing kneeling over, digging around in the dirt. Well, it’s very satisfying. I don’t think anything I can do on a computer is actually quite as satisfying as that.

Fooling around with stones, running, throwing things at things, those are all on the Paleolithic list, everything we did to evolve into what we are. You do them now and there are parts of the brain that just light up, like a light’s gone on in a room. Even looking at fire, which is a very basic thing. You look at a fire and a part of your brain is just going, “Right on,” and loving it. Terry Bisson says that sitting in the dark looking at a movie with other people is just looking at a fire, which is why it doesn’t matter if a movie is good or bad, you’re still enjoying it—it’s an artificial fire. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it makes me laugh. It might be true.

On the subject of your garden: About ten years ago you relocated your writing spot there, and you write there every day regardless of the weather. What effects has this had on your writing, besides reinvigorating you?

I write in my front courtyard, near my garden, and under a tree. I’m not sure about the effects of that. It’s a good question. I would say that because I love it so much, it has allowed me to reconnect with novel writing as something that is very joyful. I don’t have to tie myself to a desk and make myself do it, being very antsy and wishing I was somewhere else doing something more physical. Being outdoors seems to be enough physicality to allow me to just sit there and write, and I’m happy to put in however many hours a day it is, without feeling like I’d be happier if I was running or playing frisbee golf or if I’d gone to the mountains. Moving outdoors simply made me happier. I think this is showing in the books.

It’s very weird, I’m sitting in the same chair in the same spot every day, so I know where the sun is at its winter solstice and summer solstice. I’ve seen the birds come and go in their migrations, and I’ve seen the trees leaf out and lose their leaves in the annual cycle. I’ve been out with the rain falling around me like a bead curtain, because my tarp is only eight feet by twelve feet overhead, so I get a little damp but not too damp. The worst part by far is the heat of summer here in Davis, which slow roasts me. It’s important to work in the early morning when it’s still cool.

I’ve become very stubborn about it, even superstitious. If I’m writing a novel, I’m writing it outdoors in my front courtyard. It’s a sign to me that it’s time to work, and that the work is fun.

Has your approach to novel-writing changed in any fundamental way over the last quarter century?

Sure. There’s a big break between Pacific Edge (1990) and Red Mars, where I decided to shift styles and forget about the 1980s magazine style, or Heinlein style, of hiding exposition and slipping it in in half-phrases here and there so that you read as if you’re reading contemporary literature in the time the book is written. I decided that was actually bad for several different reasons I won’t go into now. But when I wrote Red Mars I decided to shift styles, and that sustained me for a while.

When I finished the Science and the Capital books I became very intent to make my narrators characters that were different from me and had narrative styles that were particular to them. I started doing characterization by way of narrator much more intensely than I ever had before. It makes those novels peculiar kinds of first person narration. Galileo’s Dream is told by Cartophilus, a minor character in the story. Shaman is told by “the third wind,” a kind of spirit that knows everything about the Paleolithic, and Aurora is told by the ship’s computer. 2312 is a kind of Wikipedia—hard to know how to characterize that! Anyway I’ve gotten more interested in questions of who the narrator is, and how they’re different from me, and how can I show that.

Essentially with each novel I’ve tried to think, “How would the form best fit the function that I want?” I’ve tried to do something different and interesting each time, in formal terms. I hope to continue with that. My new novel is turning out to be lots of fun. The work is coming right along. Many hours in the courtyard. This seems like a good phase.

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.

Tripping the Light Fantastic:
An Interview with Pan Haitian

Nick Stember

When I arrived in China I spent a lot of time trying to find local examples of my two passions: comics and science fiction. Although everyone I met seemed far too busy learning English, preparing for their college entrance exams, hanging out in internet cafes, or (the most popular option in Harbin, where a typical winter day is an average of -18 °C and the sun sets at 4pm) drinking, I soon discovered that comic books and science fiction magazines could be found tucked into the odd corners of the local bookstores and, most accessibly, at newsstands.

Back in 2007, it was easy to find a newsstand, even in icy Harbin. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but the ones I remember best were red, with a white curving roof designed to look like an open book. Encased in a rainbow-hued cocoon of shiny shrink-wrapped magazines, the doors of the newsstands opened outward, becoming make-shift shelves. Inside one would invariably find a smiling newspaper vender, swaddled in a discarded PLA jacket, working his or her way through a plastic bag of un-hulled sunflower seeds. A red payphone would be placed on the counter, next to a battered looking crockpot filled with tea eggs and an assortment of beverages. Sometimes they would have a cooler parked alongside to sell ice cream as well (unplugged of course in the winter), but for me, it was all about the comics and science fiction.

Although my rudimentary Chinese served me well at the roadside BBQ shacks and Korean bibimbop joints of Harbin, the classes I took at HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology, named after MIT in a fit of aspiration) did little to prepare me for the science-heavy jargon and made-up words which pepper your typical science fiction story. After trying to battle my way through one or two stories, dictionary in hand, I gave up. The stack of magazines I collected over that first year in China followed me back to the States, though, where they spent several years collecting dust in Portland before my parents, looking to downsize, packed them up along with the detritus of my childhood (Legos, Magic 8 Balls, mutilated action figures, etc) and delivered them to my doorstep in Vancouver, BC.

Opening them today I find an assortment of all the big names, at least two of whom have already graced the pages of Clarkesworld: Xia Jia and Chen Qiufan. This month another big name in Chinese science fiction joins them: Pan Haitian.

In China, Pan Haitian is known for mixing his science fiction with a heaping spoonful of fantasy and mythology (conveniently enough, in Chinese, the term for “science fiction,” kehuan is used as an umbrella term to include “fantasy,” huanxiang). Joel Martinsen has described Pan’s work on the Novoland project as, “an attempt to build an indigenous fantasy universe,” with an early novella Yanshi Chuanshuo [The Legend of Master Yan, Science Fiction World, 1998] adapting a classic tale from the Lieh Tzu into a modern fable about a man who builds clockwork automatons. Humor also plays an important role in Pan’s stories: a 2010 story by Pan depicts the famous early 20th century intellectual Lu Xun as a demon hunter facing off against his real life rival, Liang Shiqiu. Another story, “The Story of a Pig in the Springtime,” is a comic fantasy about pigs surviving the Wenchuan Earthquake only to take over the world.

Pan is also extremely active in the Chinese science fiction and fantasy community, having worked as an editor of the influential magazine, Jiuzhou Huanxiang [Odyssey of China Fantasy] since it was founded in 2005. His previous work includes the 2001 collection Dajiao, Kuai Pao! Run Dajiao! Run! New World Press] and four novels set in the Novoland universe: Baique Shengui [Ghost Sparrow, Spirit Turtle, New World Press, 2006], Tie Futu [The Iron Stupa, New World Press, 2007], 24 Ge Mei Miao Tiantang 24 [24 Second Paradise, serialized in China Fantasy, 2009-10], and Anyue Jianglin [A Dark Moon Rises, Hunan Art and Literature Press October, 2012]. “Hunger Tower” is Pan’s first work to have been published in English.

As an editor, writer, and philosopher you wear a lot of different hats. In respect to each of these roles, explain the significance of your magazine, Odyssey of China Fantasy.

China Fantasy has changed a great deal from when it first began, as a forum for fantasy short stories, to today’s China Fantasy magazine. Step by step we’ve broken free of the self-imposed limitations of the China Fantasy website and have been working hard to help Chinese fantasy find its own voice.

Our editorial board uses a variety of themes: every month we destroy one Chinese city, or ask all of the male science fiction and fantasy writers to describe a future matrilineal society, or to imagine a Chinese superhero who is actually just an everyday joe from the lowest levels of society . . . they are all very involved in the magazine. We are always looking for new writers and new readers who “get” us, because we’ve already figured out where we stand: create the new by destroying the old.

These themes have given birth to a sister publication, Jizhou Quanmin Huanxiang [National Fantasy], which we dressed up like zombies for and also sold apocalypse survival kits. We even put up a reward for a knock-off ark program like the one in the movie 2012 . . . our goal is to bring down science fiction from its lofty heights, and erase the line between reality and fantasy. We want to use thought, action, graphics, models, data, and diagrams—things outside of literature to express science fiction and fantasy concepts. Once we got started, we quickly found ourselves overwhelmed with material. It’s my hope that we can reach you in your real, everyday life.

What do you think it really means to be “Chinese?” How is it different from being, say, “American?”

Obviously, it’s more than just cheongsam dresses, the limestone karst scenery of Guilin, the canal cities of the Yangtze delta like Wuzhen, conical hats, Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching, kung fu and all these symbols. Because Americans use the same symbols when they film movies like Transformers or Mission Impossible in Shanghai.

As I understand it, to be Chinese you have to include the contemporary ideology of China today—Chinese people’s way of thinking, their philosophical outlook on life, their way of looking at the world. More specifically, it appears in the choices that characters make in a work, in their attitude towards new things. It can affect the entire thrust of a story.

Personally, I think Chinese people can’t escape this kind of awareness. Even if we were to write a story that was set five hundred and fifty thousand light-years away, in a time when national boundaries had been completely erased, the actions the characters would take; walking, lying; all the different monsters they would run into trying to destroy the universe; deep down, they would all really just be the Chinese people that are all around us right now.

If we say we are “Chinese,” doesn’t that mean that “Chinese science fiction and fantasy” is a special kind of fiction that is somewhat different from “real science fiction and fantasy”? What is the difference between the two?

It’s good to be special. It’s like how Japanese science fiction and fantasy, or Czech, or British all have their own special qualities. For some of them you can tell the difference right away. I think we need to work to preserve this special-ness, even if it means that we get ignored or marginalized by mainstream science fiction and fantasy. But who says that the only standards for criticism out there are the standards of the American Nebula and Hugo awards?

So that’s why I like to use the word “distance.” On parallel tracks, each respecting the other and each keeping an eye on the other. Sometimes we collide, sometimes we co-exist in harmony. Someday maybe we will work together to produce a cross-cultural being, something even better than what has come before.

Do you think that “real science fiction and fantasy” should be without borders? Can you give an example of a story or book that you’ve read which qualifies?

Compared to other types of fiction, science fiction and fantasy seem to have more of a tendency to go beyond borders. That’s because in many eras national borders are erased and in space, all sorts of beings get to mix together. There are aliens which look like fish, and in many science fiction and fantasy novels the protagonist is a foreigner. But I think that real science fiction and fantasy needs to have a clear sense of place, something that can only happen in that time and that place. If you change the place then it just doesn’t work anymore. Liu Cixin’s “Village Teacher” and “Chinese Sun” both do a very good job of this.

About the Author

Nick Stember is a Chinese to English translator of Chinese comics /manhua/ and speculative fiction. His work has been featured on the websites of The Comics Journal, Paper Republic, Danwei, Frog in a Well, FluentU, Optical Sloth, Tor, Boing Boing, iO9, Rolling Stone, the BBC World Service, and the South China Morning Post. Most recently, he has been working as consultant for Stone Bridge Press and Storycom.

"Currently a Masters student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Nick lives in Vancouver, BC. In 2013 he spent three months living in Blaine, WA, commuting across the border on a ten-speed bicycle. He is currently working on a project to build the world’s first English language encyclopedia of Chinese comics and animation, the Encyclopedia Manhuannica.

Another Word:
An Anxious Introvert’s Guide to the Con Experience

Genevieve Valentine

1. Why are you here? You should not have come here, what were you even thinking, this is all you packed to wear and now you’re wearing it and it’s not like you can get any other clothes on such short notice so this is just what you’re stuck with and everyone is assuming this is the best you’ve got. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, you’re here, it’s happening.

2. Did you come here on a plane? Dang, you really committed, nice job! Try not to spend too much of the weekend anxiously wondering if that TSA employee thought you were rude when you took your boarding pass back when really you just wanted to make sure you got in a line that still had plastic tubs because waiting for plastic tubs while getting stinkeye from fellow passengers probably would have been worse than just giving possible accidental stinkeye to one TSA employee, but you’re not sure. You’ll never be sure. (If you drove, tell no one; you’ll be hauling groups around like the first kid in your class with a driver’s license.)

3. You don’t know anybody here yet, but that’s fine, it’s cool. In movies people constantly go to bars alone and people come up and talk to them and they sip from drinks that never spill, so you have been doing your research on this for easily a decade. Make it thirty seconds before you pick up your phone; if you’re feeling bold, find some other person who looks alone and vaguely panicked about it and say, “Does this taste poisoned to you?” as a hilarious opening joke. Never, ever live it down. That TSA employee will seem like child’s play after this.

4. You find people you know! You’ll chat happily until people you don’t know join the conversation, at which point you’ll get so distracted trying to determine the existing relationships among everyone in the circle and whether or not you personally like the newcomers that you utterly lose track of the conversation and by the time you zone in again they’ll have stopped talking about the book you love and are now talking about Firefly and you’re left trying to decide if it’s worth it to wait for things to cycle over to a new topic or just abandon them to Joss Whedon and start over from scratch.

5. You see three panels. The audience members are comment-not-question types, because of course they are, but you get some nice notes out of the main conversation because the panelists are all great.

6. Except on your panel, where the moderator opens with a question about why there’s so much political correctness in the genre and two of the panelists nod firmly and this panel technically hasn’t even started yet but here it is and this is how it’s going to go and you are worried that if you reach for the water you’ll knock it over so your voice just gets more and more smoked-out every time you lean into the mic and desperately try to counter the foolishness with something awesome that nobody listens to.

7. After the panel, someone might come up and thank you for your efforts. If you think this person seems cool, buy them a drink, because you’ll both need one. Enjoy what you hope is this calm, respectful lull with a compatriot who won’t say anything racist or sexist.

8. You’re sharing a room? Awesome! Built-in breakfast buddy! Unless they have other plans. (It’s probably nothing to do with you. Probably.) You know the rules of sharing a space—don’t use more than half the storage space, be quiet when you come home late, you’ve got this. Try not to sit awake, listening to the pattern of their breathing, wondering if they’re really asleep even though they have no reason to lie to you, or when they’ll start snoring or—oh my God, oh my God—when they’ll stop breathing and then someone you only vaguely know is dead in your hotel room and wow, will you ever look guilty. What are you going to do? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT YOUR DEAD BREAKFAST BUDDY?

(Day one, it might worry you if they have different plans for breakfast. Day two you’ll be so wiped from the parties that you won’t even wake up until noon. By day three, you’ll have barely fallen asleep after the parties and you still won’t be sure how to move your facial muscles in socially-acceptable ways, so just plan to resort to the arm-sized menu they hang on your doorknob and get room service breakfast. It’s more expensive than you can possibly afford, but at this point, being alone in the room is worth an eight dollar glass of juice.)

9. It’s definitely creepy to try to find out where people you know are by using Twitter, and if you aren’t sure whether or not real-time selfies are a map to their present location, better just to pretend you don’t see them. Feel free to scan public areas, but there are places you can invite yourself and places you have to wait to be invited. Pool? Sure. Bar? Great. The Applebee’s down the road? Godspeed their poor souls and let them be; Applebee’s is its own punishment.

10. You’ll end up eating at Applebee’s at least twice.

11. Try to get six hours of sleep a night! (Who are we kidding, you’ll get three. For every lost hour, add the cost of a cup of coffee. The last thing you need at this point is to be so tired you make another joke about poison, and it’s not like you were going to come home from this thing with any money left anyway.)

12. Speaking of which: Is it already Saturday? Have you done any business? Welp, too late.

13. Find a weird place near the hotel—the upper parking tier, the odd set of lawn chairs randomly on a patio next to the dumpsters—and plan to hang out there alone at least once. When you inevitably need it, you will feel like you’re heading for, instead of running from, and it will make a big difference in how you feel once you get there. Then let the symphony of industrial air conditioners wash over you.

14. The book room is amazing, and you won’t regret a second of the time spent browsing there, if you can avoid being roped into awkward conversation by strangers. Can you? Well, you CAN, you’ve seen spy movies. Will you blend in and become invisible? You’ll find out.

15. If you and someone else really want to catch up, leave the premises. It’s the only way to be sure you can be alone. Even then, consider splitting up and meeting at a prearranged location (you can do it, you’ve been practicing spy stuff). If anyone sees you, you’re doomed to a dinner for ten and two hours of small talk that erupts into an argument over the tip. Bet prearranging that location sounds less silly than it did a sentence ago.

16. Don’t forget to make it to the airport at least three hours before your plane so you have plenty of time to worry about whether you left the kettle on at home/whether you’ve ruined your reputation without having to do it in front of all the people in the security line.

17. You should go to more cons, though. They’re crucial for your career.

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine’s short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies including Clarkesworld; her third novel, Persona, was released this spring. Her essays and criticism have appeared at The New York Times, NPR.org, and the LA Review of Books. She is currently the writer of DC's Catwoman.

Editor’s Desk:
Change Can Be Good

Neil Clarke

July once again whisks me off to Readercon for an extended weekend with friends. I’m told that this is the last year the convention will be held in the Burlington Marriot and that makes me a little sad. I’ve been going there for over ten years and yes, I’ll still attend in the new location, but it won’t be quite the same. The location has become as much a part of the event for me, largely due to a couple of significant anniversaries.

The first is the birth of Clarkesworld. Our ninth anniversary will occur in October, but the magazine was born at Readercon. At the Friday night Meet the Pros(e) party, Sean Wallace and I got into a long discussion about online magazines spurred on by SciFiction’s recent closure. [SciFiction was the Sci Fi channel’s online magazine and its demise was a huge blow to the perceived credibility of the medium.] That night, we spent hours trying to figure out why so many online magazines had failed and what it would take to make one succeed. Sleep-deprived and a bit too overconfident, we came up with a business model we thought would work. By the end of the weekend, it was a done deal: I was launching a magazine. Nine years later, that wild little experiment is turning into what I hope will become my career. Not bad for something I stumbled into with no prior experience.

The second anniversary is one that you’d think I’d want to forget. Three years ago, as I was setting up my table in the Readercon Dealer’s room, I started feeling ill. Convinced I had food poisoning, I made my way back to the hotel room where I spent a few hours before accepting that it wasn’t what I thought. My wife called for an ambulance and when the EMTs arrived, they took one look at me and declared that I was having a heart attack. Fortunately, Lahey Clinic, one of the best hospitals in the area, is only a couple of blocks from the hotel. I spent the next week dealing with the fallout of having a “widow-maker” heart attack that I was lucky to have survived. Significant damage to my heart later led to the installation of my defibrillator and my new life as a cyborg.

After that, returning the next year was intimidating. As a distraction, I deliberately scheduled a Kickstarter campaign to end that weekend. That campaign funded Upgraded, my cyborg anthology, which in itself was an attempt to make some good of it all . . . but even now, three years later, I can’t say that what happened was a bad thing. I was very lucky to have survived and that’s not lost on me. Every day since is like bonus time. I’m still around to see my kids grow up, have my twentieth anniversary, see my sister get married and have her first child, win a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award, and find a better path. Sure, that it happened, the ongoing physical issues, and the slow pace at which I change careers can be frustrating, but I’m still here.

So, I’m returning to Burlington for one last time and I’m going to enjoy the time we have left. Change can be good and if anything, those two anniversaries should remind me of that.

I’ll end this month’s ramblings with one more change. In June, we reached another one of our Patreon goals and increased our fiction budget. Our philosophy has always been start small and grow. Nine years ago, our table of contents included two short stories (less than four thousand words each) and a cover. Over the years, we’ve added non-fiction, more stories, and increased the maximum story length to eight thousand words. Thanks to our subscribers and Patreon supporters, we can now increase the maximum story length to sixteen thousand words and publish more novelettes. There won’t be more than one in a single issue or even one in every issue, but this gives me the flexibility to go there when the story needs it. Many of my favorite stories over the years have been novelettes and I’m very pleased to be able to have this option open to us.

Next on the to-do list is pay raises for the staff. This one is long overdue and I hope to be celebrating that one soon. If you’d like to help, a long list of options can be found on our “support us” page.

Thanks and have a great July!

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:
Megafauna Europa

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.