Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 110

Table of Contents

So Much Cooking

by Naomi Kritzer

Your Right Arm

by Nin Harris

In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer

by Sara Saab

The Hexagonal Bolero of Honeybees

by Krista Hoeppner Leahy

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Xia Jia

Way Down East

by Tim Sullivan

One Last, Great Adventure

by Ellen Kushner and Ysabeau S. Wilce

You Wouldn't Be Reading This If It Weren't For Buck Rogers

by Mark Cole

Words with Wings: A Conversation with Fran Wilde

by Chris Urie

Another Word: Chinese Science Fiction and Chinese Reality

by Liu Cixin

Editor's Desk: Making My Holiday Wish List

by Neil Clarke

Gate World

Art by Julie Dillon

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

So Much Cooking

Naomi Kritzer

Carole’s Roast Chicken

This is a food blog, not a disease blog, but of course the rumors all over about bird flu are making me nervous. I don’t know about you, but I deal with anxiety by cooking. So much cooking. But, I’m trying to stick to that New Year’s resolution to share four healthy recipes (entrées, salads, sides . . . ) for every dessert recipe I post, and I just wrote about those lemon meringue bars last week. So even though I dealt with my anxiety yesterday by baking another batch of those bars, and possibly by eating half of them in one sitting, I am not going to bake that new recipe I found for pecan bars today. No! Instead, I’m going to make my friend Carole’s amazing roast chicken. Because how better to deal with fears of bird flu than by eating a bird, am I right?

Here’s how you can make it yourself. You’ll need a chicken, first of all. Carole cuts it up herself but I’m lazy, so I buy a cut-up chicken at the store. You’ll need at least two pounds of potatoes. You’ll need a lemon and a garlic bulb. You’ll need a big wide roasting pan. I use a Cuisinart heavy-duty lasagna pan, but you can get by with a 13×9 cake pan.

Cut up the potatoes into little cubes (use good potatoes! The yellow ones or maybe the red ones. In the summer I buy them at the Farmer’s Market.) Spray your pan with some cooking spray and toss in the potatoes. Peel all the garlic (really, all of it!) and scatter the whole cloves all through with the potatoes. If you’re thinking, “all that garlic?” just trust me on this. Roasted garlic gets all mild and melty and you can eat it like the potato chunks. Really. You’ll thank me later. Finally, lay out the chicken on top, skin-down. You’ll turn it halfway through cooking. Shake some oregano over all the meat and also some sea salt and a few twists of pepper.

Squeeze the lemon, or maybe even two lemons if you really like lemon, and mix it in with 1/4 cup of olive oil. Pour that over everything and use your hands to mix it in, make sure it’s all over the chicken and the potatoes. Then pour just a tiny bit of water down the side of the pan—you don’t want to get it on the chicken—so the potatoes don’t burn and stick. Pop it into a 425-degree oven and roast for an hour. Flip your chicken a half hour in so the skin gets nice and crispy.

Guys, it is SO GOOD. Half the time I swear Dominic doesn’t even notice what he’s eating, but he always likes this dish, and so do I. If you make this much for two people, you’ll have leftovers for lunch. But we’re having guests over tonight, my brother and his wife and kids. So, I’m actually using two chickens and four pounds of potatoes, because teenagers eat a lot.

And chicken has magical healing properties if you make it into soup, so surely some of them stick around when you roast it? And so does garlic, so eat some and stay healthy.

xxoo, Natalie

Substitute Chip Cookies

So, we have some unexpected long-term house guests.

My sister-in-law Katrina is a nurse at Regions Hospital. She’s not in the ER or the infectious diseases floor but let’s face it, it’s not like you can corral a bunch of airborne viruses and tell them they’re banned from OBGYN. Leo and Kat are worried that if this bird flu thing is the real deal, she could bring it home. Leo’s willing to take his chances but when I said, “Would you like to have the kids stay with me for a while,” Kat said, “That would make us both feel so much better,” so voila, here I am, hosting an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old. Monika is thirteen, Jo is eleven.

We have a guest room and a sofa bed. Monika got the guest room, Jo’s on the sofa bed, although we promised to renegotiate this in a few days if they’re still here. (It’s actually a double bed in the guest room but trust me, you don’t want to make my nieces share a bed if you don’t absolutely have to.)

I went to the store today to stock up just in case we want to minimize the “leaving the house” stuff for a while. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who had that thought because (a) the lines were unbelievable and (b) I tried four stores and they were all completely out of milk and eggs. I did manage to get an enormous jumbo package of toilet paper plus a huge sack of rat food (did I mention that Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer? I didn’t? Well, my younger niece Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer. The rat was not actually invited along for the family dinner, but Dominic ran over today to pick the rat up because he thought Jo would feel better about the whole situation if she had her pet staying here, too.)

The freezer section was also incredibly picked over but at the Asian grocery (store #4) I bought some enormous sacks of rice and also about fifteen pounds of frozen dumplings and you know what, I’m not going to try to list what I came home with as it would be too embarrassing. I’ll just stick to the essentials, which is, no milk and no eggs. I did manage to get some butter, but it was the super-fancy organic kind that’s $10 per pound so I was also a little worried about using up our butter reserve on one batch of cookies. And Jo really wanted chocolate chip cookies.

Okay, actually: I really wanted chocolate chip cookies. But Jo was very willing to agree that she wanted some, too.

You can substitute mayo for eggs, in cookies, and you can substitute oil for the butter. They’ll be better cookies if you happen to have some sesame oil to put in for part of the oil (or any other nut-related oil) and we did, in fact, have sesame oil. And as it happens, those four grocery stores were not out of chocolate chips.

Here’s the recipe in case you are also improvising today:

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup of vegetable oils (preferable 2 T sesame oil + canola oil to equal 1 cup.)

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

6 tablespoons of mayonnaise

12 ounces of whatever sort of chips you have in the house, or chopped up chocolate

Cream the sugar and the oil, then beat in the mayonnaise. I promise the cookies will turn out fine, no matter how gross the mayo smells and looks while you’re beating it in. Mix the baking soda, salt, and flour together, then gradually beat in the mayo mixture, and stir in your chips.

Drop by rounded spoonfuls—oh, you know how to make cookies. You don’t have to grease your cookie sheets. Bake at 375F for about ten minutes and if you want them to stay chewy and soft, put them away in an airtight container before they’re all the way cool. If you like your cookies crunchy, well, what’s wrong with you? But in that case cool them before you put them away, and in fact you’ll probably be happier storing them in something that’s not airtight, like a classic cookie jar.

I gave Dominic the first batch and he said, “you didn’t use up all the butter on this, did you?” I told him we’re not about to run out of butter. We are, however, about to run out of coffee. I may die. Even if I don’t get bird flu. Excuse me, H5N1.

xxoo, Natalie

Homemade Pizza

So, how are things where you live?

Where I live (Minneapolis) there have been 83 confirmed cases of H5N1. The good news (!!!) is that it’s apparently not as lethal in the human-to-human variant as it was back when it was just birds-to-human, but since it was 60% lethal in the old form that’s not really what I think of as good good news. The bad news is that there’s a four-day incubation period so those 83 people all infected others and this is only the tiny, tiny tip of a giant, lethal iceberg.

Probably wherever you live you’re hearing about “social distancing,” which in most places means “we’re going to shut down the schools and movie theaters and other places where folks might gather, stagger work hours to minimize crowding, and instruct everyone to wear face masks and not stand too close to each other when they’re waiting in lines.” In Minneapolis, they’re already worried enough that they’re saying that anyone who can just stay home should go ahead and do that. Since Dominic works in IT and can telecommute, that’s us. I’d planned to go to the store today again to maybe get milk and eggs. If it had been just me and Dominic . . . I still wouldn’t have risked it. But I definitely wasn’t going to risk it with Jo and Monika in the house.

I made homemade pizza for lunch. The same recipe I made last December right after I got the pizza stone for Christmas—but, no fresh mushrooms. We had a can of pineapple tidbits and some pepperoni so that’s what we topped it with. I thought about trying some of the dried shitake mushrooms on the pizza but on thinking about it I didn’t think the texture would work.

We are now completely out of milk, which makes breakfast kind of a problem, and we’re also out of coffee, which makes everything about my day kind of a problem. Fortunately, we still have some Lipton tea bags (intended for iced tea in the summer) and that’s what I used for my caffeine fix.

(Running out of coffee was pure stupidity on my part. I even remember seeing it on the shelf at the grocery store, but I’m picky about my coffee and I was planning to go to my coffee shop for fresh beans today. Ha ha ha! Folgers and Maxwell House sound pretty good to me now!)

xxoo, Natalie

Eggless Pancakes and Homemade Syrup

In the comments on my last post, someone wanted to know about grocery delivery. We do have grocery delivery in the Twin Cities, but every single store that offers it is currently saying that they are only providing it to current customers. I did register an account with all the places that do it, and I’ve put in an Amazon order for a bunch of items you can have delivered (like more TP) and I’m hoping they don’t e-mail me back to say they ran out and cancelled my order . . . anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to order anything grocery-like anytime soon.

Some of the restaurants in town are still delivering food and I don’t know how I feel about that. Dominic and I are very lucky in that we do have the option of staying home. That makes me feel a little guilty, but in fact, me going out would not make the people who still have to go out, for their jobs, even one tiny bit safer. Quite the opposite. If I got infected, I’d be one more person spreading the virus. (Including to my nieces.) Anyway, Kat has to go out because she’s a labor and delivery nurse, and people are depending on her. But I don’t know if a pizza delivery guy should really be considered essential personnel.

In any case, no one delivers breakfast (which was what I sat down to write about) and no one’s going to bring me milk, so I made milk-less, egg-less, butter-less pancakes, and so can you. Here’s what you need:

2 cups of flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

Blend that together and then add:

1/2 cup of pureed banana OR pureed pumpkin OR applesauce OR any other pureed fruit you’ve got around. I used banana because I have some bananas in my freezer.

1 1/2 cups of water

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup sugar

Whisk it all together. You’ll need to grease your skillet a little bit extra because this sticks more than pancakes that were made with butter or oil.

We’re out of maple syrup, but it turned out we still had a bottle of blueberry syrup in the back of a cabinet and that’s what we had with them. There are recipes online for homemade pancake syrup but I haven’t tried them yet. Monika hated the blueberry syrup and just ate them with sugar and cinnamon. Jo thought the blueberry syrup was fine but agreed that maple (or even fake maple) would be better. (I’m with Monika, for the record.)

xxoo, Natalie

Miscellaneous Soup

So, before we get to the recipe today, I was wondering if people could do a favor for one of my friends. Melissa is a waitress, and so far thank God she is still healthy but her restaurant has shut down for the duration. So, it’s good that she’s not going to be fired for not coming in to work, and she’s glad to stay home where she’s safe, but she really needs that job to pay for things like her rent. Anyway, I talked her into setting up a GoFundMe and if you could throw in even a dollar, that would be a big help. Also, to sweeten the pot a little, if you donate anything (even just a dollar!) I’ll throw your name into a hat and draw one reader and that lucky reader will get to have me make, and eat, and blog, anything you want, although if you want me to do that before the pandemic is over you’ll be stuck choosing from the stuff I can make with the ingredients that are in my house. And, I just drove a carload of groceries over to Melissa because she and her daughter were basically out of food, and the food shelves are not running, either. (So, if you were thinking that blueberry-glazed carrots or something would be good, you’re already too late, because she is now the proud owner of that bottle of blueberry syrup. Also, I’m out of carrots.)

Anyway, go donate! If you’ve ever wanted me to try again with the Baked Alaska, or experiment with dishwasher salmon, now’s your chance.

Today, I made Miscellaneous Soup. That is the soup of all the miscellaneous things you have lying around. I actually make this quite often, but I’ve never blogged about it before, because I just don’t think most people would be very impressed. Ordinarily, I make it with stock (boxed stock, if I don’t want to waste my homemade stock on this sort of meal), and some leftover cooked meat if I’ve got it, and whatever vegetables are in the fridge, and either some canned beans or some noodles or both.

What I used today:

2 packets of ramen noodles, including their little flavoring sachet

Wine (we are not even close to being out of wine. Too bad it’s not very good poured over breakfast cereal.)

1/2 pound of frozen roast corn

1/4 pound of frozen mixed vegetables

2 cups dry lentils

1/2 pound of frozen turkey meatballs

I heated up 4 cups of water and added the flavoring packet, 1 cup of wine, and the lentils. From my spice drawer, I also added some cumin and coriander, because I thought they’d go reasonably well with the spice packet. I cooked the lentils in the broth. I thawed out the corn and the mixed veggies and threw that in and then cooked the turkey meatballs in the oven because that’s what the bag wants you to do and then I broke up the ramen brick and threw that in and added the meatballs. And that’s what we all had for dinner.

Jo hates lentils and Monika didn’t like the frozen roast corn but after some complaining they ate it all anyway. And Andrea and Tom liked it fine.

Right, I guess I should fill you in about Andrea and Tom.

Andrea is a friend of Monika’s from school; they’re both in 8th grade. Monika found out (I guess from a text?) that Andrea was home alone with her brother, Tom, because their mother is so worried about bringing the flu home that she’s been sleeping in the car instead of coming home. Tom is only three. Also, they were totally out of food, which is why Monika brought this up (after I did the grocery drop off for Melissa.)

I told her that of course we could bring some food over to her friend, but when I realized Andrea was taking care of a three-year-old full time I suggested they come over here, instead.

So now Monika and Jo are sharing the double bed in the guest room, because sorry, girls, sometimes “shared sacrifice” means a shared bed. Andrea is on the sofa bed and Tom is on the loveseat. Well, he was on the loveseat last night. I think tonight he’s going to be on the loveseat cushions and those cushions are going to be on the floor so he’s got less far to fall if he rolls off again.

Can I just say, this is not exactly how I’d imagined my February. But at least we’re all healthy and not out of food yet.

xxoo, Natalie

Ten Things I’m Going to Make When This Is Over

Dinner today was hamburger and rice. I kept looking at recipes and crying, and Dominic wound up cooking.

I kind of want to tell you all the things we’re out of. Like, AA batteries. (I had to track down a corded mouse from the closet where we shove all the electronic stuff we don’t use anymore, because my cordless mouse uses AA batteries.) Dishwasher detergent. (We still have dish soap, but you can’t put that in a dishwasher. So we’re washing everything by hand.) But you remember when we used to say, “first-world problems” about petty complaints? These are healthy-person problems.

We got a call today that Kat is sick. She’s been working 16-hour shifts because some of the other nurses are sick and some of them were refusing to come in and they needed nurses because the babies have still been coming, because they’re going to just keep doing that. Literally everyone is in masks and gloves all the time, but—today she’s running a fever.

Leo says she’s not going to go into the hospital because there isn’t anything they can really do for you anyway, especially as overloaded as they are. She’s just going to stay at home and drink fluids and try to be one of the 68% who’ve been making it through.

So yeah, I wasn’t going to tell you about that when I sat down, I was going to tell you all about the things I’ve been craving that I’m going to make when all this is over but I guess what I really want to say is that the top ten things I want to make when all this is over are ten different flavors of cupcake for Kat, because Kat loves my cupcakes, and if you’re into prayer or good thoughts or anything like that, please send some her way.

There’s still time to donate to Melissa and choose something to have me make. But, seriously, you’ll want to wait until this is over because there’s just not much in the house.

Kale Juice Smoothies (Not Really)

Dear crazy people who read my blog,

I know—well, I’m pretty sure—that you’re trying to be helpful.

But telling me that all my sister-in-law (the mother of my nieces!) needs to do to recover is drink kale juice smoothies with extra wheatgrass and whatever else was supposed to go in your Magic Immune Tonic? Not helpful. First of all, she’s sick with a disease with a 32% fatality rate. Second of all, even if kale or kelp or whatever it was was magic, have you actually been reading my blog? We are eating rice, with flavored olive oil, for fully half our meals now. Today we mixed in some dry Corn Flakes, partly for the textural variety but partly just because we could make less rice because we’re starting to worry that we’re going to run out of that, too.

I can produce a kale smoothie for Kat like I can pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass and make her some chicken soup with it.

Also, this is a food blog, not a conspiracy theory blog. If you want to try to convince people that the government is infecting everyone on purpose toward some nefarious end, go do it somewhere else.

No love,

Natalie

Rabbit Stew

There are these rabbits that live in our yard. I swear we have like six. They’re the reason I can’t grow lettuce in my garden. (Well, that plus I’d rather use the space for tomatoes.)

I am pretty sure I could rig up a trap for it with items I have around the house and bunnies are delicious.

Pros:

Fresh meat!

Cons:

Dominic thinks it’s possible we could get influenza from eating the bunny. (I think he’s being paranoid and as long as we cook it really well we should be fine. I could braise it in wine.)

I have no actual idea how to skin and gut a rabbit, but I have sharp knives and the Internet and I’m very resourceful.

Jo is aghast at the idea of eating a bunny.

We’d probably catch at most one rabbit, and one rabbit split between all these people isn’t very much rabbit.

It’s even more people now, because we’ve added another kid. (You can feel free to make a Pied Piper joke. Or a crazy cat lady joke. We are making all the jokes because it’s the only stress release I’ve got remaining to me.) Arie is twelve, and came really close to being driven back to his cold, empty apartment after he suggested we eat Jo’s rat. (If he were just out of food, we could send him home with food, but the heat’s also gone out, the landlord’s not answering the phone, and it’s February and we live in Minnesota.)

Arie is Andrea’s cousin. Or, hold on, I take it back. Maybe he’s her cousin’s friend? You know what, I just didn’t ask that many questions when I heard “twelve” and “no heat.”

xxoo, Natalie

This is no longer a food blog

This is a boredom and isolation blog.

Also a stress management blog. Normally, I manage stress by cooking. Except we’re out of some key ingredient for like 85% of the recipes I can find, and also out of all the obvious substitutes (or nearly) and I’m starting to worry that we will actually run out of food altogether. I’ve pondered trying to reverse-engineer flour by crushing the flakes of the Raisin Bran in my food processor, like some very high-tech version of Laura Ingalls grinding up unprocessed wheat in a coffee mill in The Long Winter.

My cute little bungalow is very spacious for me and Dominic. For me, Dominic, and five kids ranging in age from three to thirteen, it’s starting to feel a little cramped. Monika brought a laptop and she, Arie, and Andrea all want turns using it. (Jo doesn’t ask very often, she just sighs a martyred sigh and says no it’s fine she understands why the big kids are hogging the computer.) We are thoroughly expert on the streaming movies available on every online service but the problem is, if it’s appropriate for Tom to watch, the big kids mostly aren’t interested. We did find a few old-timey musicals that everyone could tolerate but now Tom wants to watch them over and over and Andrea says if she has to listen to “the hiiiiiiiiiills are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuuuuuusic” one more time she might smash the TV with a brick.

We have a back yard and from an influenza infection standpoint it’s reasonably safe to play back there, but it’s February in Minnesota and we’re having a cold snap, like yesterday morning it was -30 with the windchill. (The good news: the cold temperatures might slow the spread of the virus.)

So here’s what we did today: I had some craft paints in the basement, and brushes, so we pulled all the living room furniture away from the wall and I let them paint a mural. The good news: this kept them happily occupied all afternoon. The even better news: they’re not done yet.

xxoo, Natalie

Birthday Pancake Cake

Today is Jo’s birthday, and everyone almost forgot. In part because she clearly expected that everyone had more important things on their mind and wasn’t going to bring it up. Monika, bless her cranky thirteen-year-old heart, remembered.

I thought at first we were not going to be able to bake her a cake. (Unless I really could figure out a way to turn cereal flakes into usable flour, and probably not even then.) But—when I went digging yesterday for the craft paint in the basement, I found this small box of just-add-water pancake mix with our camping equipment. If I’d remembered it before now, I totally would’ve turned it into breakfast at some point, so thank goodness for absent-mindedness. We also still had a package of instant butterscotch pudding mix, un-used since you really can’t make instant pudding without milk.

The other kids took a break from painting the mural and instead made decorations out of printer paper, scissors, and pens. (They made a chain-link streamer.)

I think there’s got to be a way to turn pancake mix into a proper cake, but all the methods I found online needed ingredients I didn’t have. So I wound up making the pancake mix into pancakes, then turning the pancakes into a cake with butterscotch frosting in between layers. (To make butterscotch frosting, I used some melted butter—we still had a little left—and some oil, and the butterscotch pudding mix.)

And we stuck two votive candles on it and sang.

Jo did get presents, despite my cluelessness. The mail is still coming—some days—and her father remembered. A big box full of presents ordered from online showed up late in the day, signed “with love from Mom and Dad,” which made her cry.

We’ve been getting updates on Kat, which mostly I haven’t been sharing because they haven’t been very good. We’re just trying to soldier on, I guess. And today that meant celebrating Jo’s birthday.

It Feels Like Christmas

You guys, YOU GUYS. We’re going to get a food delivery! Of something! Maybe I should back up and explain. The local Influenza Task Force arranged for the grocery stores with delivery services to hire on a whole lot more people, mostly people like Melissa whose jobs are shut down, and they’re now staffed well enough to do deliveries nearly everywhere. Everyone was assigned to a grocer and since we have eight people living here (oh, did I mention Arie also had a friend who needed somewhere quarantined to stay? We are full up now, seriously, the bathroom situation is beyond critical already and we’ve been rotating turns to sleep on the floor) we’re allowed to buy up to $560 worth of stuff and it should arrive sometime in the next few days. They’ve instructed us not to go out to meet the delivery person: they’ll leave it on our doorstep and go.

Of course, the problem is that they are out of practically everything. Minneapolis is such a hot spot, a lot of delivery drivers don’t want to come here, plus things are such a mess in California that not much produce is going anywhere at all, so there was no fresh produce of any kind available. I was able to order frozen peaches—though who knows if they’ll actually bring any. Of course there was no milk or eggs but they had almond milk in stock so I ordered almond milk because at least you can use it in baking. They also warned me that in the event that something went out of stock they’d just make a substitution so who even knows, see, it’ll be totally like Christmas, where you give your Mom a wish list and maybe something you put on it shows up under the tree.

I did include a note saying to please, please, please make sure that we got either coffee or something with caffeine. If I have to drink Diet Mountain Dew for breakfast, I will. I mean, we had a two-liter of Coke and I’ve been rationing it out and it’s going flat and I don’t even care. Well, I do care. But I care more about the headaches I get when deprived of my morning caffeine fix.

Some of you were asking about Kat. She’s hanging in there, and Leo has stayed healthy. Thanks for asking.

Someone also asked about the rabbits. So far I have not murdered any of the local wildlife, because maybe I’m slightly squeamish, and Dominic is definitely squeamish.

xxoo, Natalie

Rice Krispie Treats

So, here’s what came in the box from the grocery store. In addition to a bunch of generally useful items like meat, oil, pancake mix, etc., we got:

12 cans of coconut milk

1 enormous can of off-brand vacuum-packed ground coffee THANK YOU GOD.

3 bags of miniature marshmallows

2 large cans of butter-flavored shortening

1 enormous pack of TP THANK YOU GOD. I am not going to tell you what we were substituting.

1 small pack of AA batteries

A sack of Hershey’s Miniatures, you know, itty bitty candy bars like you give out on Halloween.

14 little boxes of Jell-O gelatin

1 absolutely goliath-sized sack of knock-off Rice Krispie look-alikes

Most of this was not stuff we ordered. In a few cases, I could make a guess what the substitution was. I wanted flour, I got pancake mix. (That one’s not bad.) I wanted chocolate chips, I got Hershey’s Miniatures. (Again, not bad.) I ordered some grape juice concentrate because we’ve been out of anything fruit-like for days and days and although technically you can’t get scurvy this quickly (I checked) I’ve been craving things like carrots and I thought maybe some fruit juice would help. I think the coconut milk was the substitute for the almond milk.

I have no idea why I got the Crispy Rice. I didn’t ask for cereal. We still even have some cereal. But! They also gave us marshmallows and butter-flavored shortening (if not actual butter) so you know what it’s time for, don’t you? That’s right. RICE KRISPY TREATS.

I made these once when I was a kid without a microwave oven, and let me just tell you, they are a lot of work when you don’t have a microwave oven. You have to stand over a stove, stirring marshmallows over low heat, for what feels like two hours. They’ll still give you stovetop directions but I highly recommend microwave cooking for these.

What you’ll need:

3 tablespoons butter (or margarine or butter-flavored shortening. You can even use extra-virgin olive oil! But, I do not recommend using garlic-infused extra-virgin olive oil.)

1 10-oz bag of marshmallows (or 4 cups of mini marshmallows or 1 jar of marshmallow fluff.)

6 cups rice cereal (or corn flakes or Cheerios or whatever cereal you’ve got on hand but if you decide to use bran flakes or Grape Nuts I’m not responsible for the results.)

Put your butter and your marshmallows into a microwave-safe bowl. Heat on high for two minutes. Stir. Heat on high for another minute. Stir until smooth. Add the cereal. Stir until distributed.

Spray or oil a 13×9 inch pan and spread the marshmallow mixture out in the pan. Not surprisingly this is incredibly sticky and you’ll want to use waxed paper folded over your hands, or a greased spatula, or possibly you could just butter your own hands but be careful not to burn yourself. Let it cool and then cut it into squares.

Dominic came in while I was spreading the stuff out in my pan and said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m making Coq au Vin, asshole.”

He said, “This is why I can’t have nice things.”

Maybe you had to be there.

For dinner tonight, we had minute steaks and Rice Krispy treats. And there was great rejoicing.

xxoo, Natalie

Katrina Jane, March 5, 1972 - February 20, 2018

I’ve got nothing today. I’m sorry.

My brother was coughing when he called to tell us the bad news, but said he wasn’t sick, didn’t have a fever, and definitely hadn’t caught the flu from Kat.

Thanks for everyone’s thoughts and prayers. I know I’m not the only person grieving here, so just know that I’m thinking of you, even as you’re thinking of me.

You Still Have to Eat

Leo had Kat cremated but he’s going to wait to have a memorial service until we can all come—including her kids. Monika was furious and insisted that she wants a proper funeral, and wants to go, and thinks it should be this week like funerals normally are, and of course that’s just not possible. They can’t actually stop us from having gatherings but there are no churches, no funeral homes, no nothing that’s going to let you set up folding chairs and have a bunch of people sitting together and delivering eulogies.

We finally talked Monika down by holding our own memorial service, with as many of the trappings as we could possibly put together. We made floral arrangements by taking apart the floral wreath I had in the kitchen with dried lavender in it. We all dressed in black, even though that meant most of the kids had to borrow stuff out of my closet. Then we put out folding chairs in the living room and Dominic led us in a funeral service.

Monika had wanted to do a eulogy but she was crying too hard. She’d written it out, though, so Arie read it for her. I saved it, in case she wants to read it at the real memorial service. Well, maybe for her, this will always be the real memorial service. But there will be another one, a public one, when the epidemic is over.

In Minnesota after a funeral, there’s usually lunch in a church basement and there’s often this dish called ambrosia salad. (Maybe other states have this? I haven’t been to very many funerals outside Minnesota.) I was missing some of the ingredients, but I did have lime Jell-O and mini-marshmallows and even a pack of frozen non-dairy topping and I used canned mandarin oranges instead of the crushed pineapple, and mixed all together that worked pretty well. We had ambrosia salad and breakfast sausages for lunch. (I don’t know why we got so many packs of breakfast sausages, but it’s food, and everyone likes them, so we’ve been eating them almost every day, mostly not for breakfast.)

Monika asked if she could save her share of the ambrosia salad in the fridge until tomorrow, because she really likes it, and she didn’t feel like eating, and didn’t want anyone else to eat her share. (Which was a legitimate worry.) I put it in a container and wrote MONIKA’S, NO ONE ELSE TOUCH ON PAIN OF BEING FED TO THE RAT in sharpie on the lid. Which made her laugh, a little. I guess that’s good.

Jo sat through the service and ate her lunch and didn’t say a word. Mostly she looks like she doesn’t really believe it.

Stone Soup

Arie informed me today that the thing I called “Miscellaneous Soup” is actually called “Stone Soup,” after a folk story where three hungry strangers trick villagers into feeding them. In the story they announce that they’re going to make soup for everyone out of a rock, and when curious villagers come to check out what they’re doing, say that the soup would be better with a carrot or two . . . and an onion . . . and maybe some potatoes . . . and some beans . . . and one villager brings potatoes, and another one brings an onion, and in the end, there’s a lovely pot of soup for everyone.

I started to point out that I wasn’t tricking anybody, all this stuff was in my cabinet already, but then I realized that I didn’t just have dinner but an activity and all the kids came into the kitchen and acted out the story with little Tom playing the hungry stranger trying to get everyone to chip in for the soup and then throwing each item into the pot.

Then they all made cookies, while I watched, using mayo for the eggs and dicing up mini candy bars for the chips.

It was a sunny day today—cold, but really sunny—and we spread out a picnic cloth and ate in the living room, Stone Soup and chocolate chip cookies and everyone went around in a circle and said the thing they were most looking forward to doing when this was over. Monika said she wanted to be able to take an hour-long shower (everyone’s limited to seven minutes or we run out of hot water). Dominic said he wanted to go to the library. I said I wanted to bake a chocolate soufflé. Everyone complained about that and said it couldn’t be cooking or baking, so I said I wanted to go see a movie, in a theater, something funny, and eat popcorn.

Tomorrow is the first of March.

Hydration

Dominic is sick. It’s not flu. I mean, it can’t be; we haven’t gone out. Literally the whole point of staying in like this has been to avoid exposure. It also can’t be anything else you’d catch. We thought at first possibly it was food poisoning, but no one else is sick and we’ve all been eating the same food. According to Dr. Google, who admittedly is sort of a specialist in worst-case scenarios, it’s either diverticulitis or appendicitis. Or a kidney stone.

Obviously, going in to a doctor’s office is not on the table. We did a phone consultation. The guy we talked to said that yes, it could be any of those things and offered to call in a prescription for Augmentin if we could find a pharmacy that had it. The problem is, even though H5N1 is a virus and antibiotics won’t do anything for it, there are a lot of people who didn’t believe this and some of them had doctors willing to prescribe whatever they were asking for and the upshot is, all our pharmacies are out of almost everything. Oh, plus a bunch of pharmacies got robbed, though mostly that was for pain meds. Pharmacies are as much of a mess as anything else, is what I’m saying.

I’m not giving up, because in addition to the pharmacies that answered the phone and said they didn’t have any, there were a ton where no one even picked up. I’m going to keep trying. In the meantime, we’re keeping Dominic hydrated and hoping for the best. I always keep a couple of bottles of Pedialyte around, because the last thing you want to do when you’re puking is drive to the store, and that stuff’s gross enough that no one’s tried to get me to pop it open for dessert. So I’ve got it chilled and he’s trying to drink sips.

If it’s a kidney stone, Augmentin won’t do anything, but eventually he’ll pass the stone and recover, although it’ll really suck in the meantime. (I wish we had some stronger pain medication than Tylenol. For real, no one has Vicodin right now. Not a single pharmacy.) If it’s appendicitis, there’s a 75% chance that the Augmentin will fix it. (This is new! Well, I mean, it’s new information. There was a study on treating appendicitis with antibiotics and 75% of cases are a type of appendicitis that won’t rupture and can be treated with antibiotics! And if you get a CT scan they can tell whether that’s the kind you’ve got, but, well.) If it’s diverticulitis, and he can keep down fluids, the antibiotics should help. If he’s got the worse kind, and can’t keep down fluids, they would normally hospitalize him for IV antibiotics and maybe do surgery. But again, not an option.

Oh, it could also be cancer. (Thanks, Dr. Google!) In which case there’s no point worrying about it until the epidemic is over.

Cream of Augmentin

I got an e-mail from someone who has Augmentin they’re willing to sell me. Or at least they say it’s Augmentin. I guess I’d have to trust them, which is maybe a questionable decision. They want $1,000 for the bottle, cash only. Dominic was appalled that I’d even consider this. He thought it was a scam, and they were planning to just steal the cash.

Fortunately I also got through to a pharmacy that still had it, a little neighborhood place. Dominic’s doctor called in the prescription, and I gave them my credit card number over the phone, and they actually delivered it. While I was on the phone with them they listed out some other things they have in stock and in addition to the Augmentin we got toothpaste and a big stack of last month’s magazines. Shout out to St. Paul Corner Drug: we are going to get every prescription from you for the rest of our natural lives.

I was hoping that starting the Augmentin would make Dominic at least a little better right away, but instead he’s getting worse.

Possibly this is just a reaction to the Augmentin. It’s not as bad as some antibiotics, but it can definitely upset your stomach, which is pretty counterproductive when puking and stomach pain are your major symptoms.

I had appendicitis when I was a teenager. I spent a day throwing up, and when I got worse instead of better my mother took me to the emergency room. I wound up having surgery. Afterwards I was restricted to clear liquids for a while, just broth and Jell-O and tea, which I got really tired of before they let me back on solid food. My mother smuggled in homemade chicken stock for me in a Thermos—it was still a clear liquid, but at least it was the homemade kind, the healing kind.

If I could pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass, like I joked about, I would wring its neck and turn it into stock right now for Dominic. Nothing’s staying down, did I mention that? Nothing. But it’s not like we have anything for him other than Pedialyte.

I’m going to try to catch a rabbit.

Rabbit Soup

You guys, you really can find instructions for just about anything online. Okay, I’ve never looked to see if there’s a YouTube video on how to commit the perfect crime, but trapping an animal? Well, among other things, it turns out that the cartoon-style box-leaned-up-against-a-stick-with-bait-underneath is totally a thing you can actually do, but then you’ve got a live animal and if you’re planning to eat it you’ll still need to kill it. I wound up making a wire snare using instructions I found online in the hopes that the snare would do the dirty work for me. And it did. More or less. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say, rabbits can scream.

You can also find instructions for gutting and skinning a rabbit online. I used my kitchen shears for some of this, and I worked outside so that Jo didn’t have to watch. My back yard now looks like a murder scene, by the way, and my fingers were so cold by the end I couldn’t feel them. I feel like I ought to use the fur for something but I don’t think Home Taxidermy is the sort of craft that’s going to keep the pack of pre-teens cheerfully occupied. (Right now they’re reading through all the magazines we got from the pharmacy and I’m pretending not to notice that one of them is Cosmo.)

Back inside I browned the rabbit in the oven, since roasted chicken bones make for much tastier stock than just raw chicken, and then I covered it in just enough water to cover and simmered it for six hours. This would be better stock if I had an onion or some carrots or even some onion or carrot peelings, but we make do. The meat came off the bones, and I took out the meat and chopped it up and put it in the fridge for later, and I boiled the bones for a bit longer and then added a little bit of salt.

The secret to good stock, by the way, is to put in just enough water to cover the bones, and to cook it at a low temperature for a very long time. So there wasn’t a whole lot of stock, in the end: just one big mug full.

The kids have been staying downstairs, trying to keep out of Dominic’s way. Jo and Monika made dinner for the rest of us last night (rice and breakfast sausages) so I could take care of him. I saw Jo watching me while I carried up the mug of soup, though.

The bedroom doesn’t smell very pleasant at the moment—sweat, vomit, and cucumber-scented cleaner from Target. It’s too cold to open the windows, even just for a little while.

Dominic didn’t want it. I’d been making him sip Pedialyte but mostly he was just throwing it up again, and he was dehydrated. I pulled up a stool and sat by the edge of his bed with a spoon and told him he had to have a spoonful. So he swallowed that, and I waited to see if it stayed down, or came back up. It stayed down.

Two minutes later I gave him another spoonful. That stayed down, too.

This is how you rehydrate a little kid, by the way: one teaspoonful every two minutes. It takes a long time to get a mug into someone if you’re going a teaspoon at a time, but eventually the whole mug was gone. The Augmentin stayed down, too.

I went downstairs and set another snare in the back yard.

Something Decadent

So, thank you everyone who donated to Melissa’s fundraiser. I put all the names in the hat and drew out Jessi from Boston, Massachusetts, and she says she doesn’t want me to wait until everything is over, she wants a recipe now. And her request was, “Make something decadent. Whatever you’ve got that can be decadent.” And Dominic is sufficiently recovered today, that he can eat something decadent and not regret it horribly within ten minutes, so let’s do this thing.

We still have no milk, no cream, no eggs. I used the frozen whipped topping for the ambrosia salad and the marshmallows for the rice krispy treats (which aren’t exactly decadent, anyway).

But! Let’s talk about coconut milk. If you open a can of coconut milk without shaking it up, you’ll find this gloppy almost-solid stuff clinging to the sides of the can; that’s coconut cream. You can chill it, and whip it, and it turns into something like whipped cream. We set aside the coconut cream from three of the cans and chilled it.

I had no baking cocoa, because we used it all up a while back on a not-terribly-successful attempt at making hot chocolate, but I did have some mini Hershey bars still, so I melted the dark chocolate ones and cooled it, and thinned that out with just a tiny bit of the reserved coconut milk. It wasn’t a ton of chocolate, just so you know—it’s been a bit of a fight to keep people from just scarfing that candy straight down. But we had a little.

Then I whipped the coconut cream until it was very thick and almost stiff, and then mixed in the dark chocolate and a little bit of extra sugar, and it turned into this coconut-chocolate mousse.

When eating decadent food, presentation counts for a lot. We used some beautiful china teacups that I got from my great-grandmother: I scooped coconut-chocolate mousse into eight of them, and then I took the last of the milk chocolate mini bars and grated them with a little hand grater to put chocolate shavings on top. We also had some sparkly purple sprinkles up with the cake decorations so I put just a tiny pinch of that onto each cup. And I opened one of the cans of mandarin oranges and each of the mousse cups got two little orange wedges.

And I tied a ribbon around the handles of each teacup.

And then we set the table with the tablecloth and the nice china and we ate our Stone Soup of the day by candlelight and then I brought out the mousse and everyone ate theirs and then licked out the cups.

Some days it’s hard to imagine that this will ever be over, that we’ll ever be able to get things back to normal at all. When everyone is sniping at each other it feels like you’ve always been trapped in the middle of a half-dozen bickering children and always will be. When you’re in the midst of grief, it’s hard to imagine spring ever coming.

But Dominic pulled through, and Leo didn’t get sick. And tying the ribbons around the handles, I knew: this will all come to an end. We’ll survive this, and everyone will go home. I’m going to miss them, I thought, this pack of other people’s children I’ve crammed into my bungalow.

“Can I keep the ribbon?” Jo asked, when she was done with her mousse.

I told her, of course she could. And then she and Monika started arguing over whether she could have Monika’s ribbon, too, because of course they did, and that was our day, I guess, in a nutshell.

xxoo, Natalie

About the Author

Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons; this is her second appearance in Clarkesworld. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam; she has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories, and she moonlights as a science blogger. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two daughters.

Your Right Arm

Nin Harris

His name was Jagdeep. He did not believe in ghosts.

“Did you kill the last human?” Teng asked, her eyes avid, curiosity making her quiver. Rasakhi knew the question was inevitable, but this did not stop the sigh. Four of Teng’s hind-legs wove indigo and tan-dyed mengkuang strips into the mats that were everywhere on the nursery ship. Teng shivered as she worked. Rasakhi did not bother to remind her that the cold was just an illusion, encased as Teng was in a silver praying-mantis chassis. Rasakhi had evaded cybernetic enhancement her whole life, fearful of that gap between her consciousness and the supplemented consciousness of augmented parts.

It was always cold on this ship.

Rasakhi welcomed the chill. It reminded her that she was still encased in flesh, failing though it was.

“I lived with him, as you well know,” she said to Teng. No one would remember her triumphs as a navigator. Everyone would remember her in relation to the last human.

“But do you remember how he died? Did you kill him?” Teng asked again, seemingly unaware that she was being repetitive.

Rasakhi looked away from the engineer. Just beyond them, fledgling apsaras moved marbles from groove to groove carved into long congkak boards, a game they had taken with them from the nusantara. On a sanded platform, other children played hopscotch, jumping from square to square as they sang counting songs Rasakhi had taught them. Above them, the lights glowed a muted green, soothing optically enhanced eyes that were trained to look for patterns in messages that floated before them all of the time, but for more material things, like chairs, and corners. The earliest engineers quickly learned the importance of adjusting the lighting on every ship.

“Jagdeep was running from the force that imploded the last human colony. We did not do that. It was not in our best interests to drive humans into extinction. It’s far better for you to ask if I remember the first time I met him. The first time I met him was the day that Jagdeep was put into a humanoid biotech replacement unit. I do not even know if he had any humanity left on the day our eyes first met.”

Teng’s look was inquisitive to the point of intrusion. The apsara-hybrid engineer had transferred to Rasakhi’s sector three months ago, and had not wasted time in befriending the retired navigator who ran the nursery ship. She seemed completely insensible to the fact that her presence was not wanted. Teng was not the first and would likely not be the last who would want to unearth the secret behind Rasakhi’s life with Jagdeep.

“Did you love him, Rasakhi?”

“I am surprised by the question, Teng. Love is a human emotion. It is not an emotion we are conditioned to acknowledge. How do you go from asking if I killed him to asking if I loved him? I don’t understand these wild connections you’re making.”

“Apsaras were bred for love on the world we came from,” Teng said, her visored eyes insistent upon knowing the truth, “we were also bred to kill the things we love.”

“Yes, apsaras are also voluptuous dancers who are somehow lighter than air. We also shimmer when we dance.” Rasakhi said with some irony, throwing Teng a wintry look. “Say rather, that we were bred for the pleasure of humans. Love is a different thing altogether.”

“I have never shimmered in my life, not even when I had a complete apsara body,” Teng said, smiling, “but it is true. They bred us from the bunian that they stole to serve as court-dancers and companions. But that means that we have human DNA, don’t we?”

“We are not trained and conditioned to acknowledge human emotions,” Rasakhi said.

“Have you truly never loved, Rasakhi?” Teng sounded wistful. Rasakhi reminded herself of how young the engineer was. Be patient, be gentle, she told herself.

“If we feel an emotion, how do we label it? The way that humans label such things? I know amusement. I know that I am happy with companionship. I know what it feels to have a void when someone has left you. I do not know if that is the same as knowing love.”

Teng said, “We do not mate. We used to, when humans were necessary. But then they became redundant, and so did biological functions.”

“Well then. There’s your answer. Why do you ask me about an emotion that is redundant to our kind? The bunian ensured that none of us would ever need to mate again. Not the bunian, not the apsara, nor our sisters, the bird-clawed Khinnaree. All we require is companionship, and community. We have the consensus, we have the engineering wherewithal to ensure that we shall never go extinct. So why would we have a need to kill?”

Teng looked bashful, “The songs the humans sing about love. They are so sad and so beautiful. There are so many of those songs in the Sound Library. I listen, and it makes me feel strange. I always wondered how it actually felt. I tried talking to the converted humans but in their biotech systems they have forgotten all of those things.”

Rasakhi’s obsidian eyes softened as she looked at the younger apsara, “They are no longer what they used to be. Upon conversion, consciousness changes. They no longer have the depth perception required to parse emotions, or sense-data. Emotions, if they exist, exist as phantom limbs. As ghosts. The memory of an emotion, simulated upon cue. And yet, these memories are the backbone of our colony’s cultures.”

We had time before that last asteroid obliterated earth. Ample time to prepare.

The sun was younger when we first took to the skies in our first machines, made of wood and bronze, borne upwards by a fleet of armored garuda. We had no need of science then, we were fueled by sakti and by the benedictions of the holy bird, the Jentayu. This was not to last, as our magics faded, and we learned that we too, needed to master science and engineering.

The sun was older when the first super giant solar flare knocked out our strongest shield. For millennia, we had escaped the path of comets and asteroids. Narrow misses.

Sudden solar flares that could have knocked out our power supplies, and our magical reserves. The solar flares, and all manner of cosmic exigencies failed, because we worked overtime. All of us. The Khinnaree admirals, the bunian and apsara engineers.

We were safe until the sakti that held our shields up got weaker and weaker, while the asteroids came by more frequently.

I do not remember the first navigator who guided the first fleet of ships strong enough to transport all of us and all of the humans away from the solar system. I do not remember the day when humans were made aware of our existence. I do not remember the first human fleet of ships, or the first space war between our kind and the humans, several solar systems away from earth. But I remember accounts of that exodus. I remember enough to tell you about it as though I was there. Even if I must supplement that account with details of my own imagined recollection.

Jagdeep was the last human colonist. He had taken the last fighter pod, and had crashed into our fleet. He sustained serious injuries. This was not a fleet of soldiers. We were navigators and scientists. We were cybernetic engineers. We were astro-botanists and DNA scientists. There was no need to harvest his DNA immediately—the bunian and apsaras had evolved long ago. They had augmented themselves, and could replicate well enough. There was no need to do anything to the last human, except to watch him die.

Or to allow him to live.

Mercy was not a thing exclusive to humans.

The bunian, the apsara, and the Khinnaree had long learned that their bodies had attributes that allowed them to flow easier into the cybernetic interfaces built by the human fleets. They had adapted easier to it, and their engineers had pillaged human technology in order to forge better bodies for members of their colony who had lost their limbs. They began to do the same for the humans that they had rescued or had vanquished.

The first night we met, I watched as the engineers fitted Jagdeep to the biotech units that replaced his left arm and the entire side of his torso that had been incinerated when his ship crashed into our fleet. It was a painful process. He cried, often. I held his right hand as he looked pleadingly up at me, for mercy, for death. They replaced his limbs, one by one. Except for his right arm.

His right hand, to hold my own.

We used a humanoid frame for his body. He did not choose, like you, to be in an insectoid carapace. He clung on to his humanity. Jagdeep did not take to the replacements as easily as the others. He was too weak, too fragile.

When he could walk, we would walk. I brought him to the sprawling courtyard in my apartments. I astonished him with the grandeur of our plantations and of the ecosystems we had replicated and preserved. And he taught me of the ways of planting that they had improved upon.

And he would tell me things about his life.

He was trained as a fighter pilot, but he yearned to be a gardener. They had greenhouses in their fleet. Small, crude things built into abandoned storage halls. They grew yams, and water spinach, and tapioca. Some even tried to cultivate rice, but it was a very different kind of rice from the paddy fields of earth. We tried to improve on that, Jagdeep and I. We grew lentils and spices. He cooked for me dhal curries and parathas. Out of respect for my mate, I too became vegetarian.

We were happy.

We lived together, apsara and human, the first such union since our combined fleets had left earth’s solar system.

And the last.

We turned their kind into hybrids. They thanked us, one by one, as we switched them off as humans. We connected their consciousnesses to various biotech parts if they were still functional, or to our monolithic mainframes when nothing could be saved of their bodies. Their sakti bolstered our own embodied magics. We watched as consciousness dissipated, to be replaced by pattern recognition and simulacra of consciousness that became our communications systems between ships. They became bodies that could not decay. We harvested not just DNA from their bodies, but sakti, that force that had fueled our floating cities on earth, and kept them invisible to human eyes.

When age took first his kidneys, and then disease gradually weakened his heart, we knew the engineers would come for him. It was their last chance to get the last batch of pure human DNA, and of human sakti. They would attach his consciousness to one of the monoliths that fueled our ships and our communication systems. He would live on in the fleet.

On that last night, we sat together on my bed, his right hand in my left hand. I kissed him on the mouth gently, so as not to exert his heart. His eyes begged me again.

He asked me to smother him with a pillow, to do anything before they severed him completely from humanity, before his heart was replaced the way his kidneys had been replaced, before his brain was severed from his body.

“Did you do it? Did you snuff him out?” Teng’s silver praying mantis fore-legs were busy at work on a second mat, but her eyes were hungry. Rasakhi’s softening regard towards Teng was halted by those eyes.

She said, “Why do you suppose we do this? Why do we reproduce a past none of us actually know? Why do we memorialize the humans that we have turned into machines?”

Teng shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Why do you ask me questions about remembrance, and of love, when you do not even bother to ask why we play congkak, and weave mengkuang and rattan mats, long after they have lost their relevance? Why do you ask me if I killed the last human when we continue to profit from their systemic death? I did not kill the last human, Teng. We did that.”

I could not smother him. I wept in his arms, both organic and inorganic. He cried silently into my hair. We fell asleep. In the morning they came for him. I clung to him and screamed into their faces. His eyes begged at me.

I scrambled and fought them all: bunian, apsara, claw-footed Khinnaree. Yes, even the Khinnaree in full-berserk mode. I kicked, I bit at them.

Perhaps I have Khinnaree blood somewhere in my ancestry too.

His heart expired during the struggle.

They confined me in my quarters for a year.

I did not kill the last human, we killed him.

They taught us how to kill. They taught us how to enslave, how to colonize, how to exploit.

A long time ago, when the first bunian princess was stolen by the first man who dragged her away from her celestial robes, we learned the price of being valued for how we looked.

A long time ago we learned to transform into tigers, into owls, into trees to hide from them. We learned how to grow wings, to become swan-maidens and owl-vampires. Some of us turned into the chicken-feet Khinnaree of the Himmapan. Some of us became nenek kebayan, old women of the jungle who drugged wicked men with malicious potions and dispensed sage advice to virtuous warriors.

We learned to build machines, to live in the sky. We learned to harvest the sakti that made us beautiful and powerful. We used that celestial force to create weapons and ways in which to ensure we would never again be stolen.

We stole back the women they stole from us, the ones they bred with humans to create apsaras, my ancestors. We stole their kind to propagate our own. We became an empire of bunian, apsaras, and Khinnarees.

We did not learn love from the humans. We did learn nostalgia, that step-cousin of memory. But our relationship with humans has always been complex, for they are bred into us.

We used our technology to protect them as well. To protect the planet we shared.

Jagdeep gave me comfort. I held on to the memory of that comfort for a very long time in the year that they had me confined. I yearned to return to his arms, to touch his right arm, to cradle his right palm within the warmth of my own. I knew that what was left of him was now encased in a silver cylinder, with no surface of skin left for me to touch. With no consciousness, no qualia left to recognize what we shared.

All that was left of him were algorithms and the processing of external stimuli. Simulating sentience.

He learned from me the apsara ways of silence, and of meditation. We meditated a lot when we did not work in the gardens and plantations together.

Those human songs you asked me about?

He sang some of them for me as I strung together cempaka chains for our mutual amusement.

When they released me from confinement, I was honorably discharged. Retired. They sent me here to be a nursemaid to fledgling apsaras.

Teng watched as the aging apsara stood up, walking towards the wall that showed them the stars surrounding the void that was a dead galaxy.

“He fuels this ship,” Rasakhi said.

“I know,” Teng said, “I tend to his unit. It is the strangest thing, his unit. It is always so cold. He sometimes speaks. But often he does not.”

Ah. Rasakhi gave the younger woman a speculative look. She said, “All of the humans that we captured or rescued did not believe in ghosts. So strange, considering that we exist, and now they don’t, except as hybrids, a blend between machine, apsara DNA, and human parts. They would have done the same to Jagdeep, except that his body had deteriorated beyond help. And in that last struggle, his heart expired. They punished me for that. Not for killing him. He would have made a far more superior model if he possessed a functioning heart.”

Teng shivered.

“It’s getting even colder. How is that possible? I keep double-checking the calibrations on the heating system. They’re always in order.”

“It’s always cold on this ship. It will always be this cold.”

Rasakhi did not articulate the reasons behind the temperature. It was not needed. She met Teng’s eyes. In the end, this at least was understood.

About the Author

Nin Harris is a Malaysian poet, writer, and Gothic scholar. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, space opera, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s poetry is published in Jabberwocky 3, Goblin Fruit, and Strange Horizons. Nin’s fiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in Lackington’s, Giganotosaurus, Strange Horizons, and Alphabet of Embers.

In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer

Sara Saab

PRE-TAKEOFF REPORT—WORLDSHIP K5-NME, “MUNAWWER”

FROM: Suraya Khouri-Smith (Lead Ground Attaché, Munawwer Crew)
DATE: January 15th, 2139
FOR: Dougal Smith (Transition Commander, EVAC-Central)

Commander Smith,

I hope you’ll forgive the whimsy of this report. I’ve held my silence my entire life, and there are many things I deserve to say to you. I know it’s a breach of protocol, but in a sense, so was I. And there may not be another chance.

The information you need, first: the worldship Munawwer, evacuation vessel for the territory of the Lebanese Republic, began boarding two weeks ago. It rests in shallow water off the coast of Beirut, covered in knobbly city gulls and their droppings. Its access ramps are down and secured to a section of the corniche’s wide boardwalk.

Autocount figures tell me there are 845,912 people on board.

This number has been creeping up through the night despite orders to cease boarding until daylight. People jump from the corniche’s pier, swim the span between the boardwalk and the worldship under cover of night, clamber up sea-facing loading bays. When we do catch them, they are half-drowned, and we send them to the Munawwer’s medical bays, and someone willfully forgets they are on board.

At other times it would be funny, how it is here; how open to interpretation even the most mortally important rules are. Cousins sneak on board cousins; husbands sneak on board sisters-in-law.

Fathers, their daughters.

For the official record I’ll confirm that the total passenger count permitted is the usual 900,000. The queue outside is four people abreast to the mountain horizon and beyond.

We expect to fill the Munawwer to capacity in the next three days.

Commander, last night in my assigned Munawwer bunkroom, I undressed in utter dark. I pulled the film of laminate from the brand new porthole; it came away in a single satisfying sheet—tack-tack-tack—that I balled up inside my hot fist. I pressed it hard over my breastbone, felt the complaint of my failing body. The coast of Beirut was a luminous thing, swaying, dancing with the emissions of the city. But more than that, I was entranced by the Munawwer’s queue, a thick cable of light threading up and into the Lebanese foothills.

I do not remember getting into my bed, but I remember shaking in the controlled atmosphere kept at an ambient temperature. It was the sterility of the moment versus the literal mass of our undertaking; lifting the bigness of the Munawwer into the sky, the long game of searching out a welcoming planet over generations, the unliftable weight of what’s sure to be left behind.

Yesterday our engineering crew began dismantling Beirut’s decrepit old lighthouse for fear of the structure interfering with the hover-and-power phase of our upcoming liftoff. Other early clearance checks are as done as they can be, given the chaos, and should be completed tomorrow morning by eleven-hundred.

DATE: January 16th, 2139

Officer Nizar and Junior Officer Bahaa conducted a floor by floor walkthrough this morning, assisted by a huge surveyor crew from EVAC-Central. I wonder if you’ve ever spoken to their prissy Lead face-to-face? I didn’t ask him about you.

Everything is going to plan. Occupied berths are correctly locked down if you don’t count the villagers Nizar found wandering galley to galley looking for Northerners, Southerners, Beirutis, cousins—looking for something to hold onto that wasn’t their soil, the musk of their air, or the familiar mountainous contours of their horizon.

After we closed boarding for the night, I was startled by the familiar strains of Fairouz issuing from the Munawwer’s loud PA system. Ballads of patriotism and yearning. It took me two whole folkloric masterpieces to find the culprit: our own Officer Nizar. I told him I hadn’t authorized music, although I’d gamble you—hapless lover of the Orient—wouldn’t fault his taste.

“Have a heart, Suraya,” he said. “These people are leaving their homes forever.”

“We’re carrying digital archives of the last five hundred years of Lebanese culture, Officer,” I said.

“I can see that you think that’s enough to make up for this colossal heartbreak,” he said.

I insisted.

In the resulting silence I thought I heard a collective intake of breath from nearly a million people, a noise that groaned through windpipes, a sound of rope under load. But I could not allow those in the queue—those to be left behind—to hear jubilation from the ship. It wasn’t fair to anybody.

Against official guidance, we never issued dig-forms to announce the evacuation. Half of the population do not own personal holos; the ones who do won’t wear them because of superstition, or discomfort, or because they are too vain or traditional to have anything ported to their faces.

I was seven when it became a legal requirement to fit a sinus air filter almost everywhere in the world. Lebanon too. My mother fought so hard to avoid putting me through the procedure. It’s unclear whether she was right. Air quality did improve drastically in the next five years. But given where I am now, perhaps even the one year she appealed against the surgery was a year too many.

Did you have a chance to know that about her? That she was more principled than right, most of the time? It makes me wonder how she let you fall for her, just enough that here I am.

A decade later, I got my own holo fitted, and the sinus filter upgraded, because I could. When my mother found out, she didn’t speak to me for a month.

Anyway, no dig-forms. Instead, as approved by the Worldship K5-NME Steering Board on June 20, 2138, we sent criers to every town and village. The megaphone and magcar approach—the jolt of building panic—was enough. At its peak, the queue for the Munawwer was a 130-mile phalanx snaking south from the Mediterranean coast then turning up winding mountain tracks towards the northern border.

The queue has a thousand character traits, a volatile temperament. As if by some orderly law of physics, the closer to the waiting worldship the queue gets, the wilder it is. In the nearer villages to the coastline, rowdy end-of-the-world parties have ransacked homes and businesses. Those in the far away half, winding through mountain villages, are more sedate. They stare at my ground crew before they take the rations they’re offered. Their infants wail in ways that bring to mind footage of long-eradicated famines, but they are not hungry or cold or sick. They are scared.

Commander Smith, it played out as an incident of geography—to save the nearest ones to the sea and doom the rest. Doom. A silly word, so grave-sounding it is hard to take seriously. When you learned you had a child back on Earth, did you worry that she was doomed to die there, having never threaded through the far reaches of space? Did you really believe, then, that the projections were right, that the collision course had been accurately charted? Did you laugh, disbelieving, when they said the asteroid storm was the width of our solar system, big and fast enough to wipe out the planet? I wonder if you thought about your fourth-grader—your teenager, your adult daughter—when one by one the missions EVAC launched to vacuum the critical debris failed?

Vacuum the critical debris. Like a bit of dust under the sofa.

Of course, we broadcast capacity warnings. 900,000 people per EVAC member-nation: enough to preserve race, language, culture. Still, 900,000 is not a whole country. Here, it’s two out of five.

This, at least, is clear to everyone. We shouted it in ringing voices from the backs of the magcars.

DATE: January 17th, 2139

Officer Nizar’s been compiling hasty geographic and demographic statistics on the queue. He is behind schedule sending these to EVAC-Central. In lieu of official figures, some notes:

Last week, we sent surveyor crews to every signposted village across the country, from the Bekaa Valley to the Jnoub to the Chouf. Every town is a ghost town—even the people left behind are near enough ghosts, the very old and stubborn, spirits stronger than their bones.

Gourds and winter fruit rot in open steriles by the roadside. Chimneys are without their curls of smoke; hawker bots make lazy figures-of-eight in the snow outside shops and markets. They call out in mechanical confusion to the crew, promising prices so low they indicate a complete cessation of demand.

We will never know the exact geographic and demographic spread of those queuing for evacuation. You didn’t broadcast details of the landing until the worldship’s bulk was nearly above us. The arrival surprised us. If anything, the people were better primed, more ready to strap their belongings to pallets or their own bodies, to abandon their magcars at the milling ends of the mag-proofed queue, which quickly packed tight and spilled farther and farther up the mountain.

You would think they would fight, butcher each other out of envy, make pilgrimages to the front and demand entry. At first, they did. We’re not a lie-down-and-die kind of people. This is something you might not have known, if you tasted only pleasure here, if you knew us only through that lens. When we began to debar not just individuals but entire innocent families, a sort of order fell over everything.

Doom. A silly word.

Still, scuffles erupt, old sectarian allegiances flare, fossilized in forenames and surnames. Everyone, though, seems tired. The uncertainty is another kind of mass spreading in our chests, heavy as the Munawwer squatting in the sea.

Last night, Nizar reported that thousands and thousands of the elderly and the infirm had sieved to the front of the queue almost overnight. I asked to see for myself. We went down the access ramp together, past the corniche and the cordoned-off half-mile, to where the queue began.

“What’s this?” he asked, gesturing at the weary faces, gray or brown as the rocks of the seafront. “We broadcast that people of childbearing age get priority.”

A younger man stepped out of the four-abreast queue. “Mind your manners, habibi. We treat our grandparents with respect, even at times like these.”

“Brother, that’s nonsense,” returned Nizar with his usual gift for diplomacy. “This is a worldship. The idea’s to continue all of goddamn humanity out there.” He pointed to the sky, inky and flat. “Your grandpa can’t help with that, no matter how sprightly he might be.”

“I’ll punch your face in if you speak that way around your elders, brother.”

At this point we were forced to remove the young man from the queue and debar him from the boarding procedure. He produced an old-fashioned Marlboro from the back of his slacks and swaggered away cussing towards a viewing point for Pigeon Rock. All of him seemed to billow in the breeze. He smoked his cigarette and watched waves crash against the limestone formation where it crouched out in the shallow sea, diligently ignoring the massive moonlike presence of the Munawwer blotting out most of the horizon.

Officer Nizar’s team has been guarding access to the ship since it appeared in the sky, pinwheel shadow spreading over all the wards of the city.

We had been practicing the procedures for a year—since we opened EVAC’s holo pings and found that we’d been chosen. Most of my ground crew have military backgrounds. Nizar was a Major in the Armed Forces. I’m not a soldier, but you know, I suppose, that I’m no stranger to protocol.

Commander Smith—I topped every mathematics exam at school. Headmaster Boutros brought me brochures on EVAC-Central, the United Nations Space Program, Lebanese Astronautics. But at university I fell credit by credit into Anthropology, thinking, I guess, of lecturing at the Sorbonne, thinking, I guess, of staying rooted to humanity. Rooted to Earth.

Do you already know this? Did my mother ever sneak you messages about me? Did she tell you about the poem I wrote about you in secondary school, the one that won an award? As far as I know she never spoke to you after you left.

If you do know, you can hear it again: I was a civil servant for the Interior Ministry until the Munawwer, my days crammed with the amplified tedium of the entire nation. You found out about me somehow, found my name: a vain search for your own, a flight through billions of census archive files, the fuzzy match that finally snagged my hyphens, my half-concealed identity.

I suppose you chose me for my experience with projects that mobilize our population? Perhaps you would not have let blood run thicker than reason if you’d known that nothing mobilizes our population that doesn’t originate within their own hearts.

And since there is nothing else to lose which isn’t already fated to be lost—homeland, loved ones, history—perhaps you would not have granted me a ground crew member’s golden ticket to fly away had you known, father. About my loose procedural skill, the hours of my youth I spent staring blankly through scrolling municipal notices, statistics, memos, recommendations. Saying just enough. Nights, returning to an empty house, one parent gone too soon, another gone too far away. The stop-start friendships and intimacies I increasingly shed. Then illness tightening like a cast over these last few years of my own decline. Yes, that.

We followed your procedures to the last letter. We deployed our ground crew, arranged the queue four-abreast as specified, heated it, and distributed insulated overshoes, food packets, blankets. We asked desperate people out in the cold to smother cooking fires and pack away shisha pipes. We switched off the Fairouz songs and arrested hooligans and shushed panicked outbursts.

The Munawwer is almost full now. We will leave millions behind.

Nearly a month ago I sent the passenger guidance checklist to Officer Nizar. Today, I caught up with his patrol near Khalde, pulled him aside by the seawall in the calm of drifting snow to go through it.

I read from my holo. “Are we ‘screening boarding worldship passengers for weapons or materials which may be used to fashion weapons’?”

He stared at me with self-assurance and a dirty sort of pity. “Why would we do that? If anyone’s going to be so deranged and damaged,” he corkscrewed a finger into his temple, “as to blow up humanity’s only chance in this fucked-up universe, then we don’t deserve to survive.”

“Not humanity’s only chance,” I said on reflex. “At least one worldship per member-nation and—” I looked back over the hillsides of Khalde, heard the living noise of the queue and ran out of words to rely on.

Nizar scanned the holo he’d pulled up, presumably the checklist. Presumably for the first time. “What stupid shit.”

I ached for the sweetness of striking his perfect nose with a closed fist. Instead, I trembled in the instantly filthy snowdrift and pulled rank: “What screening have you been doing, Officer?”

Nizar watched me over his twenty-twenties moustache, back in fashion for the end of the world.

“We frisk them, Ms. Suraya, Your Excellency,” he quipped. “Mostly for tobacco pipes. The ground crew boys deserve a good pipe. The ones who are staying, I mean.” His face slackened around its folds and wrinkles, leaving the shelf of his brow to carry his countenance. According to his EVAC records, Nizar is thirty-four. The apocalypse has aged us early.

“Are you using your ticket?” I asked, my voice a snowflake, too soft for authority.

Nizar switched off the holo he’d been staring past and turned to relieve himself against a railing.

“Excuse me. Urgent need,” he said, squinting at the gray bulk of the Munawwer ten miles down the coast. His planted stance reminded me of the upstart we’d ejected from the queue the night before.

“A difficult decision,” he said, hitching his hips and zipping up. “Ticket off-planet in my back pocket, nieces and nephews up in the middle of the queue. No chance they get to board. With my ticket, one of them survives to start life new, start a new nation.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Near Zahle,” he said. “Too far. They refused to leave the village any earlier.”

Maybe it’s naive to think this is noteworthy, but we’ve all pulled strings to place friends and family in the Beiruti sections of the queue. Forcibly camped them out on the corniche as soon as we heard about the landing. But no one dares smuggle relatives on board a near-capacity worldship. No one wants to tempt fate. Being debarred is one thing; having your entire family debarred by EVAC-Central is an especial cruelty.

“It’s just a single ticket,” I said. “How many can you save with one ticket?”

“One youngster more worthy than me, habibi,” he said.

“They’ve said there might be another ship for Lebanon,” I muttered into the wind off the Mediterranean, hoping he wouldn’t catch it. But he did, and his skeptical bark broke my heart.

“What about you?” he asked after a meaningful silence. “Are you using your ticket?”

“I don’t have any family left here. My cousins emigrated years ago to countries where worldships queue for you, not the other way round.”

“But you mentioned your father was . . . ” he said.

“None of your business.” It’s nobody’s business. It’s barely even yours. You left and never came back. You forfeited everything.

“So you’ll take it,” Nizar rejoined softly. “You’ll get on that goddamn ship with the goddamn rest of them.”

I had no useful response. I breathed in the tang of fish and old fossil fuel spills, and now and again the new smell of ozone off the Munawwer, carried by the icy breeze.

DATE: January 18th, 2139

Our evacuee numbers hit 900,000 this morning.

Actually, there are 900,124 on board according to autocount. There were children, so many children—how could I leave them behind? We rounded up the healthiest ones, the ones who could bear to be separated from wailing parents. The ones whose parents let them go. And yes: the ones whose eyes burrowed holes in our hearts.

In my bunk last night, I could not sleep for the torment of all the little ones in the winding queue, foreheads lucent in the night, too far from Beirut to break my crew’s hearts. They’re the living ghosts of our dreams now. One day soon they will disperse as invisible particles into the sky, while the ones we save live on, we hope, on and on, in the vastness of traversable space.

Surely one hundred and twenty-four slight bodies cannot disrupt the stability of a craft like the Munawwer. We brought them on board on my direct orders. What horrifies me is that you never told us how many more we could have saved—how big the occupancy headroom really was.

Thoughts that keep me up despite the Munawwer’s atmospheric sedatives:

That the Munawwer will go up in flames during hover-and-power (the sadness, then, of those left behind).

That the children on board will forget their parents and grandparents and their language and the generosity of their culture.

That humanity is a meaningless thing, transplanted far from its origins.

That they will all die of heartbreak, lightyears away from this ill-luck country.

That there will never be another worldship allocated to this tiny, insignificant land on the edge of the sea. (The certainty of this.)

That it has all been a giant mistake. That Earth is as fine as it seems, and will remain here, blue and green and giving, to pine after forever.

That Nizar’s nieces and nephews will be left behind.

That Nizar will be left behind.

That you and I will one day meet.

That we will all kill each other on the ship, anyway, for the same reasons we’ve killed each other at home.

That you and I will never meet.

That I will die in the end of the world.

That I will die before the end of the world.

DATE: January 19th, 2139

Commander Smith—I’ve tagged the section below for excision; please ratify and pass it to EVAC-Central’s Specialist Services team.

I understand from guidance document PUB-214 that I may only commend a single person from the Munawwer’s ground crew.

According to my EVAC profile, I command a crew of ten thousand across Lebanese territory. I’ve only had brief interactions with a handful of my crew, devolving most responsibilities to more capable hands. This is my failing. My heart has shied at every juncture from the sad business of evacuating the Earth.

Of the half dozen ground crew members I’ve worked with nearly daily, the one I have come to know best is Officer Nizar Adel Taleb, my second-in-command.

I understand, further, that any officer given a formal commendation to Specialist Services will be promoted to flight crew on the next available worldship. I have good reason to believe this is the good craft Kuro-Obi, L6-AUAS, which will land along the Japanese mainland at an unspecified time in the next six months. Non-native flight crew members on a foreign country’s ship, according to the guidance document, are permitted to evacuate all remaining blood relatives.

Therefore, please take this as my formal commendation of Officer Nizar Taleb.

Off the record, I maintain that Officer Nizar is as self-important and narrow-minded a prick as they come. Be that as it may, he’s done nothing to warrant the conflict between his own bodily survival and the tearing of his soul to pieces.

This morning, after every last one of our 900,124 evacuees was safely on board, I went walking along the corniche.

I meandered towards that stabbing void in the sky where days ago the lighthouse would have been, barnacled, salt-streaked. Then I turned on my heels to walk the way I’d come.

I had changed out of my attaché’s uniform right after we sounded bugle calls all the way up the queue—the worldship’s full, the worldship’s full. The official clothing felt like a betrayal.

I walked, and Beirut heaved around me. There were still millions in the queue, now a shapeless inflamed gathering of people and magcars pouring towards the coast. Thousands of ground crew in riot gear and heavy arms held people back from the half-mile cordon leading to the Munawwer’s access ramps. It was something between a funeral procession and a terrible mob. A deafening noise reverberated in the air. Gulls flapped off the Munawwer in agitation. It was all the ground crew could do to prevent a crush.

Faces streamed past me, fixated on the motionless worldship and its blue blinking lights of habitation. If anyone looked back at me I thought: is this the one I’ll send away into outer space?

A cousin, a sister, a lover. Any of these would have provided me with a selfless sacrifice. But isn’t it an impossibility to pull a single stranger, unwitting, from the crowd? How dare I play a god’s game?

Another god’s game: to learn, one day before a worldship lands to carry 900,000 people away, that the growing wrongness in your chest is wronger than you thought. To be given the choice to go to Europe for treatment, or to stay and serve your people at your father’s bidding, the only thing he’s ever asked. Little doom and bigger doom, braiding, lines in a palm.

The night after I learned this, Commander Smith, I had a dream. I was inside a station-city, a pearl in the sealed-shell darkness of deep space. And you were there. I was laying curled into myself and you were healing me. And I would live.

I woke up and my veins were pulsing with loneliness, and my chest was throbbing with pain.

So this morning, I walked the corniche and stopped as close along the railings as I could get to the Munawwer, jostled by a field of people and their confusion. It was huge, bright, sublime—a promise of safety and stability by virtue of mass alone.

With every fiber of my broken lungs I inhaled. Then I inhaled again. I held my breath and felt dizzy with the sticky task of living. And I felt that death was neither a foe, nor something I could grab by the scruff.

Then I went, slowed by the drag of the doomed, towards the worldship’s access ramp. And then on board, to complete the last of the paperwork.

About the Author

Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon, not far from Pigeon Rock. She now lives in North London, where she works on transport systems for the future. In her spare time she boxes, runs, and continues to hunt for the perfect almond croissant. Sara is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her fiction has recently appeared in Interzone and The Dark, and you can find her on Twitter as @alixanaeuphoria.

The Hexagonal Bolero of Honeybees

Krista Hoeppner Leahy

Hum

“For so work the honeybees . . . The sad-eyed justice with his surly hum Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone.”
—Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth

We cannot tame vibration, much as we long to suss its purpose.

Are there those among us who fly only to mate and then die? Some who work perpetually, some who are queens? Or is it more that we are each—we are all—the hive? The honeycomb and the bees? The sticky-sweet-surly hum a chorus we cannot hear, only sing?

Pluck a sunbeam, a bee sings.

Pluck an oceanwave, the earth rings.

But whose hand is doing the plucking?

And what hum signals tomorrow’s fall of the executioner’s blade?

Hope

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Ciro loved his daddy, and loved painting flowers like a bee. Daddy said he was better than a bee, but Ciro didn’t think that was true, ‘cuz bees made honey. Ciro couldn’t make honey, but he could climb the highest, licking his paintbrush in between painting the teeny-tiny flowers. Yummy, but not as yummy as honey. Sometimes after he crept along the tallest branches, Daddy would say “Fly, bee, fly” and Ciro would back flip down into his daddy’s waiting arms. Maybe Daddy wasn’t his real daddy, and maybe Ciro would never be a real bee, but none of that mattered when it was just Ciro painting flowers.

Hunger

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
 . . . revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
—Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

The atrium air was warm, impossibly warm compared to the frozen tundra outside, and redolent of blooms delicious as forgotten dreams. The cross-latticed Sunglass atrium was separated from the body of the greenhouse by mechanical sally ports, but the bees could smell enough of the Allmond orchards beyond to pulse with anticipation—of course some ventilation would be required, even with the closed loop geothermal heating system. Mishka’s bees crawled through her honeycomb crown, tickling her scalp, as they sussed for the source of the fragrance. She ignored the tickling and the damnable itching of her nectarways and focused on the hand-pollinator’s bid. Gabhan was the competition, she reminded herself, never mind the boy he wore on his shoulders, like an accessory proclaiming his innocence.

“ . . . hand-pollination offers more control, more finesse, more flexibility, more artistry—the human touch will honor your trees, Arborist. We cradle your Allmond blooms as only a human hand can. Isn’t that right, Ciro?”

“Right-ee-o!” The boy, who had to be younger than four, smiled; the boy’s crinkled eyes echoed the curve of his mouth—a triple grin!—and he looked as pleased as if he had invented human hands himself.

Mishka refused to smile back. No doubt Gabhan had coerced the boy to make him perform with such utter charm. She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, soothing her itching as best she could. The boy’s charm—forced or not—could only hurt her chances, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted.

Gabhan lifted his hands towards the vaulted Sunglass ceiling, adding, “Of course, if you care to risk your crop with the unregulated wildness of hiver bees,” he laughed, and was that a wink he aimed at Mishka? Unbelievable. “Who am I to convince you otherwise?”

Mishka didn’t trust Gabhan, with his easy laugh and bear-like chest, his way of spreading his fingers wide into the air, as if he had nothing to hide, as if he were offering ease and naturalness and health, when in truth hand-pollination was laborious, only partially effective and as unnatural as her own symbiont nature. Natural pollination had died out when the climate chilled, no matter how he waxed poetic about the gentle artistry and power of the human hand.

Hands hands hands. If only she could stop thinking about her hands itch itch itching across her forearms and knuckles and palms. Withholding nectar intensified itching all along her altered nerves, even though the nectar production was restricted to her torso.

There was the rub. The damning, itching rub. The one the apiarists had warned Mishka about, that her latent eczema might be triggered by the symbiont grafting—that for her becoming a hiver might involve more sacrifice than most.

Small price to pay for becoming a pollinator. For nurturing 60,000 bees and securing her own livelihood with one profound surgery. Not to mention solving the world hunger problem. Wry joke. Her father’s joke. Back when her father joked. Back when her father lived. Back when folks had the luxury of worrying about a world hunger problem, not just their own grumbling ping-panging middles. Back when there was a world, not this archipelago of greenhouses rock-skipped across the continents.

And in this greenhouse—warmest in North America, floored with sequoia felled to escape becoming another forest of frozen stalagmites, latticed in Sunglass to amplify sun, and plugged deep into the hum of geothermal heat fueling the geysers of Yellowstone—Mishka sweated and the more she sweated, the more she itched, and the more the bees pulsed, triggering histamines, opening altered nerveways, and Mishka’s nectar began to pump, pooling internally, preparing to let down, to cascade amidst prickling skin . . . oh the urge to scratch. From the soles of her sweating feet to her honeycombed scalp and pulsing hive of a crown, Mishka itched itched itched until she could barely hear Gabhan’s closing bid.

“ . . . not child slavery rather child freedom.” This last punctuated by the boy performing a double back flip off Gabhan’s shoulders, landing as lightly as a flower himself before sinking into a graceful kneel, and offering up a single perfect blush and cream bloom in his cupped hands.

Mishka seethed at Gabhan’s dismissal of the child labor question as nothing but a philosophical imbroglio best answered with a circus trick. Thankfully the Arborist didn’t take the bloom, even when Gabhan knelt as well. She still had a chance at the bid, but that loose bloom was making the itching worse, making it even harder to concentrate.

Of course, once the bees fed, the itching would subside, but she couldn’t afford a feeding now, not while the Arborist was deliberating which pollinator—hand or hiver—to award the orchard contract. The bees would nuzzle into every nectar crevice of Mishka’s bosom, throat, abdomen—all the easiest nerveways for the apiarists to alter, near the milk-production zone, why all hivers were female—and after having postponed the bees this long, they would suckle with scavenging force. While the Arborist was no doubt more open-minded than most, and hopefully tempted by the hivers’ bargain fees, she doubted They would award the hivers the Allmond orchard contract—the largest protein and medicinal crop of North America—after witnessing her bees swarm her torso as she moaned and swooned to the dusky red sequoia floor.

What was taking the Arborist so long? Yes, Arborists were part gardeners, part mechanics, part monks, and often of the neuter gender as this one was, but why did the monk part always seem to hold sway when there was a decision to make?

The Arborist only nodded slightly in response to Gabhan’s speech. Work-worn hands still held in prayer, They seemed distracted, squinting first at the Sunglass above, then glancing at the doors leading to Their private chambers, the Orchard entrance, and the exits to the waiting sleds, as if uncertain where to stand. Did They need to be perfectly positioned to make Their decision?

The Arborists had a reputation for demanding absolute perfection—gift and curse, but a necessary trait in running as delicate and critical an ecosystem as a greenhouse—but Mishka hadn’t thought Their perfection extended to physically positioning Themselves in a room. Gabhan and the boy still knelt, bloom proffered up, as if awaiting a king’s command. Damned if she would be the one to move and betray discomfort, not for the itching, nor the heat. Did her bees pulse more, the longer the bloom waited? Or was it her imagination? She just needed to hang on until she won or lost the bid; then she could return to her solo sled, begin the journey back to the hiver community, and let the bees feed themselves into a frenzy, privately.

A rotten egg smell filled the chamber as gas vented from a duct near the Arborist, ruffling Their cellulosic robes as they scurried away. They began Their squinting, shuffling routine all over again, this time closer to the Allmond orchard entrance. Mishka almost felt sympathy, for the duct near her felt positively volcanic, but why couldn’t the Arborist just monk out Their decision? And They had better not open those orchard doors, for if They did, nothing Mishka did could stop the hive from rising. The boy’s one bloom had teased her bees, but an orchard of blooms? Once her bees smelled real food, real pollen, not the synthetic nectar Mishka produced—which they subsisted on when in sled transit between greenhouses—nothing would keep them hived.

She was using every breath control and muscle control and mind control and fuck control she could think of to keep the hive calm, to send the message all along her honeycombed curves and blooming nerves that patience was the price to pay for bliss, that calm would win, to stay close to the big queen, stay close to her, queen bee, queen hiver, queen Mishka who cared for and loved these bees as fiercely as if they were her own milk-babies. But the hotter it got the more she itched and she could feel her control slipping, and which would be worse, her forager bees suddenly swarming from the stress? Or a feeding frenzy of the nurse bees erupting, in their mania to tend the little queen and the brood housed in the honeycomb necklace cradled between Mishka’s breasts?

At least the sulfur smell was gone, and a new sweetness reigned in the air. Thank the honey. But the heat, surely they could retire to a cooler chamber?

She risked a glance at Gabhan, and saw him cradling Ciro, poor tired boy, fading in the heat, and her concentration slipped, as a bead of nectar dripped down her sternum, and her favorite nurse bee—the one Mishka had stupidly named SingSongSun, right after the surgery, back when she’d been drunk on her own histamines and honey-high, when Singsong’s sweet buzz and guzzle and sun-colored thorax had seemed like a miracle rivaled only by the ongoing persistence of the human spirit—Singsong peeked her antennae out of the honeycomb necklace, and hummed, as if she were answering a question that Mishka hadn’t heard—buzzing delicately but probing with indescribable delicacy, and Mishka couldn’t keep herself from humming the melody of that old father tune she’d loved as a child, and then, of course, the hive rose, unable to resist the cloying sweetness of the air any longer, and her knees guillotined to the sequoia floor—knock knock, knock down—oh oh oh she was in trouble.

Heat

“I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee,
Won’t my mommy be so proud of me . . . ”
—Traditional Children’s Song

SingSong waited, long as she could. She smelled fear on big queen. She smelled strangeness. She knew to wait, to hide, to keep the hive quiet. But then earth queen hummed, a wrong song, and a strange nectar fell, and little queen buzzed and big queen hummed the birth song she’d sung when Singsong hatched out of her cell, and even fighting the wrongness of the earth hum, Singsong was helpless against the lure of her birth song, its wafting, waggling, pure love calling her and her sisters out out out to forage the world and for once there was nectar enough for all, nectar enough to bathe in, to dream in, to drown in, and the air was its own nectar, wet and warm, so warm, such heat pulling the bees up up up up into the air out of their precious comb, away from big queen, but what treasures they would bring her, such nectar they would find her, and then little queen and big queen could taste of the molten nectar which must be molten, mustn’t it, for the air itself felt like smoke, her Singsong wings were glowing with flame, she must be near the sun, what would big queen give her, supping of the sun?

She tried, tried to waggle the dance that would tell her sisters how to find the sun. Delectable. Scorching. Glory. Does fire scream? Or was Singsong learning to speak like big queen at last? Where where where was her big queen? She buzzed SingSongSun, SingSongSung, SingSongSun, SingSongSung, which way was up and which way was down?

No no no. How could she nurse the brood if she couldn’t waggle the dance to the food? The wrong earth queen hum was gone, why couldn’t she think?

The hive would swarm if she waggled too hard a dance.

Simple simple, not up, not down.

Waggle smells. Nurse the brood.

First find flower. Second find sun.

Harvest

“Eat honey, my son, for it is good . . . ”
—Proverbs 24:13, The New International Bible

Ciro didn’t want to open his eyes. That seemed like a bad idea. Even closed, his eyes really, really hurt. And his ears hurt. And his nose. Everything hurt.

But it couldn’t be that bad, could it, if he was breathing? As long as he was breathing, he could imagine his daddy was breathing, and the bee-woman who’d tried so hard not to smile at him, and even the sad Arborist. As long as Ciro just listened to his breathing, he could pretend everyone was breathing and everything was fine.

He listened to his own breath, inhaling and exhaling, with a soft “huh.” And then a soft “ha.” And again. Over and over again sounds that started with “h” but didn’t mean as much as Ciro needed them to mean.

Inhale, exhale, “Huh.”

Inhale, exhale, “Ha.”

He couldn’t get rid of the “h” quite, was that okay? But he could stretch the other sound. Wasn’t that how you made words?

“Huuuuunnnnhh.” No that wouldn’t work.

“Heeee.” Closer. “Heeeeeelllp.” Right-O.

That was what he wanted. Help. For something was wrong. He couldn’t move. And he couldn’t feel his hands. Just a burning where his hands should be. When he tried to move the burning, it hurt so much he couldn’t breathe anymore. So he stopped trying to move the burning. No hurting. Just breathing. Make these “huh ha hee” sounds. One more time, he tried.

“Heeeelllp.”

Then, far away, there was crawling stickiness, so faint in the burning. Then the crawling became his fingers, his burning fingers. Hurting but he could now breathe. Still burning, but at least fingers again. Then, yummy yummy stickiness on his lips and in his nose and something in his ears, and a tickling all across his skin. Tickling everywhere. Bees! The bees were alive!

Things must still be okay if the bees were alive and coming to cover him in honey. They must know he’d always wanted to be a bee. Bees were wise like that, he figured. He wanted them to know he loved them, so he said what his daddy always said to him. “Fly, bee, fly.”

And then the floor hummed away from him, and he felt himself go up up up and Ciro opened his eyes, for he didn’t want to miss learning to fly.

Hubris

“He is not worthy of the honey-comb, That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.”
—Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Locrine (contested attribution)

Once the pollinator’s sled departed, the Arborist retreated into the relative safety of Their private chambers. At last. What a terrible day. A terrible duty. They were so tired of making these decisions. Would life only ever subsist of this, choosing the slower way to die? Every year, a worse pollination rate. And now the hivers wanted to try? Ridiculous.

Now at least, it did not matter. The greenhouse might last long enough for pollination, but by harvest time, there would be no greenhouse left. The internal report was clear. Under the strain of increased seismic activity, the closed loop geothermal system was breaking apart, and no amount of repair or patching could keep the system in place when the real quake came. And in the meantime, toxic gases—hydrogen sulfide, methane, boron, radon, the list went on—were being vented into a greenhouse never equipped for such open-loop toxic gas venting. The accident today might have killed the Arborist, the pollinators, and perhaps that accident could have been averted. But the coming accident, the killing of all those trees, all those stomachs going empty without the Allmonds to feed them, that accident there was no averting.

The greenhouse was no longer stable, and no human intervention could save them. What could humanity do in the face of seismic waves, pummeling through ocean and land, their hums buckling the very earth? Today’s events had clarified Their mind. They saw again the child Ciro flying through the air with such faith and grace, and landing without a care in the world. Soon that grace would be a ghost too.

Like the boy’s hands, burned beyond recognition, beyond use, in spite of the healing properties of the unexpected hiver honey, and Their healing skills and silver-soaked antiseptic bandages. Nothing could save the boy’s hands, and nothing could save the greenhouse.

Better not to prolong this sacrilege of false gardens and failing gardeners. Better to let the world fall again, as God ordained every time. There were some choices They could still make. Some perfections were still attainable. Standing on the Mission table They had once used as a desk—a reminder that life was service and life without service, no life at all—They looped a rope around the exposed pine log bracing the ceiling, pulled tight below Their larynx, and right before kicking the table out, They said the oldest prayer They knew: Please please please.

Home

“Thus, I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously, or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure.”
—Darwin, Origin of the Species

“You’re safe, don’t worry.” The voice was familiar, and seemed concerned, despite the reassuring words.

She felt the familiar swaying of a sled beneath her, but not her sled, surely. Too much darkness, and too much room. And the smell of pickled vegetables—beets maybe? So not her sled, but one equipped for long distances. Where was she?

“My bees, ow . . . ” Mishka’s throat scraped, as if she’d swallowed sandpaper. Her eyes were tearing so much she couldn’t see, nor could she smell. Why couldn’t she smell anything? And where was the warm, pulsing, crawling comfort of her bees?

“There was an accident.”

Could that be Gabhan? Was he the blurry figure hovering over her? This must be his sled. Of course a hand-pollinator’s sled would be equipped with its own sustenance for cross-continent travel.

“Sulfur explosion. We did the best we could. We were all knocked unconscious, but once I woke, I pulled you clear. You were almost on top of the duct when it blew, and last I’d seen you’d fallen to your knees, well . . . we didn’t know if you were still alive. I should have been suspicious when Ciro fainted.” His voice narrowed, an open road squeezed into a too small tunnel. “Apparently there have been quakes for quite a while. The Arborist told us that, at least, before ordering us to evacuate, but . . . he should have told us sooner. Should have told a lot of people. We could have transplanted the orchard, re-rigged the closed system into a bouncer, converted it to an open geothermal unit with enough time, something . . . ”

“Bouncer?” She still couldn’t focus. She was nauseous, and he wasn’t making that much sense. But, at least she was no longer itching. Oh no. She couldn’t feel her bees, and she couldn’t feel the itching—had she lost everything? But no, when she touched her throat it was still reassuringly sticky with nectar. Pressing down her torso, she felt rivulets of undrunk nectar. But what solace would there be in being a hiver, if the bees she’d changed her very nature for had died? “I’m sorry. My bees? Where are my bees?” She struggled to get up.

“Please. Don’t try to move yet. I’m afraid most of your bees are gone. I thought it best to evacuate you with us. Your sled was damaged in the blast and Ciro, well—” He coughed. The tunnel of his voice tightened further. “I was knocked out for a while, and then when the Arborist was bandaging Ciro . . . I’m sorry, I was distracted. Most of them flew away. I didn’t see where.”

She couldn’t blame them for swarming to a new hive. Not when she’d just been knocked silly by a gas explosion. And they wouldn’t have swarmed to the sled if it had been damaged. The sled could be replaced. The bees couldn’t. They couldn’t all be gone, could they? “They all flew away?”

“A few we found on the floor around you, not moving and we hoped they were only stunned. Once it was cool enough, I retrieved them. And your necklace, we have that.”

Thank the honey. “Where is it?”

“Ciro has it. I hope you don’t mind. He—he burned his hands.” The tunnel of his voice squeezed shut.

She didn’t understand. “His hands? Why is he wearing my necklace? What happened?”

“The bees saved me.” Now the boy, his voice lighter but somber. At least her ears still worked.

“What?”

“They saved me. They fed me honey and put honey in my ears and then I flew with them. Then a bunch of them left, but the rest crawled into your necklace.”

“That’s right, son. Quite a lucky little bee you are.”

For a minute, talking to Ciro, there’d been some hint of the Gabhan from the atrium—his voice full of assurance and warmth—but then he whispered in her ear, and his voice caved-in, shutting out hope. “The boy’s been through a lot. Breathing that much gas and fourth-degree burns can cause hallucinations, especially in one so small. I think the bees were drawn to the flower, to him. He probably had traces of pollen on his hands and mouth. He used to lick his paintbrush and fingers, no matter how I scolded.

“No scolding anymore, right, Ciro?” The hearty assurance was back, but all she could hear were the cracks.

“But it’s true, the bees did save me! I’m sorry so many of them died, but these are alive. They were worried about you.” His voice trembled, and in spite of the pain and the nausea, Mishka smiled. He wasn’t feigning now, whatever had happened, he believed the bees had saved him.

“Look!” He thrust something right in front of her face.

She blinked, her vision clearing a bit. Against the gauzy white of his limbs, she could distinguish a fist-sized smudge of sun-yellow, catching her breath with its promise. Her honeycomb necklace—heart of her hive.

“Here!”

She cradled the necklace as gently as she could, her fingers delicately tap-tap-tapping against the comb—a hum answered, and tears blossomed in her eyes.

Her little queen, her nurses, some of her brood were alive. She would be able to rebuild her hive. There were other greenhouses, other bids. All was not lost.

“Will you teach me to feed the bees? Like you do?”

And here in front of her was this injured child, looking at her with such hope.

“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.”

Ciro’s smile slipped. “But I think this one likes me. He’s been feeding me honey the whole time.”

“She. The bee is a she.”

“Oh.” A pause. “But it has a penis. Look!”

And he thrust a bee right under her nose, a slightly larger than average bee, golden as the sun. Of course Singsong would have survived, possibly even nursed the boy with honey. What a miracle she was.

“See?” He pointed to Singsong’s stinger. “I told you he has a penis!”

Mishka couldn’t help but laugh and even Gabhan chuckled, as they both tried to explain what exactly a stinger was and why all of Mishka’s bees were girls, and the laughter brought hope with it, as it always does.

“Please teach me to help the bees, okay? I’ll do anything.”

But no amount of laughter would make it possible for a male to become a hiver, even if he would do anything. Gabhan was a hand-pollinator; he must know that hivers had to be female. “Gabhan, hivers all have to be—”

“He needs something to think about while he waits for the bandages to come off.” The words were quick as cuts, quick enough to cut her sentence off forever, but light as pollen blown by the wind, as if by keeping his tone light, the words would never land, and never landing, time would cease, and those bandages would never have to come off. For what would happen when the bandages came off? What would a hand-pollinator do without hands? If Gabhan couldn’t face those questions yet, she couldn’t blame him.

She inhaled deeply. What a mash of smells in the warm sled. Pickled beets. The honey of her bees. Gabhan’s scared fierce musk. Her own fear-sweat and sweet-nectar, clouding the terrible burned smell of what remained of Ciro’s hands. What agony for the boy—she was sure he’d become coerced into hand-pollination, and that coercion had led to catastrophe. What could she say? Singsong at least seemed to have picked the boy. That counted for something. Maybe right now, that counted for everything.

“Okay. I’ll teach you what I can. Come here.”

The boy whooped. “I knew you’d help. I just knew it!”

Carefully, finally, after hours of not itching, Mishka gently, gently scratched her clavicle—at last! Even in the midst of catastrophe, a surge of joy welled as fresh nectar began to flow, and Singsong suckled. “Do you see her tongue? It’s a kind of straw. We call it her glossa, or proboscis.”

“What does she call it?”

Mishka chuckled. Even Singsong seemed to buzz a honeybee laughter. “I don’t know, Ciro. Maybe you’ll be the one to find out.”

And for a moment, it seemed as if in spite of the whole disaster, everything was going to be all right. Who knew what apiarists could do, with a nurse bee and a devoted four-year-old boy?

Mishka wouldn’t be the one to say no, nothing is possible. Say no today, and there may not be a tomorrow. Maybe the Allmond greenhouse was doomed. Maybe all the greenhouses along the fault line were doomed. Or maybe they’d sled back tomorrow and find the Arborist was dead wrong in Their catastrophic doomsaying. But there were other continents, and other ways of heating greenhouses.

For as long as Singsong could fly and find flowers, and for as long as there were Ciros willing to do anything they could to help the bees, there could be a tomorrow. And as long as there could be a tomorrow, there was a chance. A chance that humanity could adapt. Keep calling this place home. Wasn’t that what they’d always wanted, even back when Earth was called Eden?

Honeycomb

“This we have now/is not imagination . . . This/ that we are now/created the body, cell by cell,/like bees building a honeycomb./The human body and the universe/grew from this, not this/from the universe and the human body.”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi

SingSong waited. She wanted to save little queen, save big queen, save earth queen.

But all she could do was see if the child would wake. Taste the honey. Tend the honey.

Every night, the same wait. The boy had survived. But each darkness she doubted if he would breathe come dawn.

She could always go impale herself on a frozen branch of a petrified tree, suss the ice nectar of a forgotten species, call that consummation.

But for now she would wait. If the child woke, they would begin again. Pollinate one flower. Waggle one dance. Nurse one bee. Didn’t matter boy child or girl child, it was a child. And children could learn. Create. Mate. Come awake.

Humans were not earth queen, able to change the hum on a whim—but maybe she and big queen and little queen and the child could make a new hive, and survive the whims and untamed hums of earth queen.

Breathe with me, she buzzed.

Ravish today; make us a tomorrow.

About the Author

Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a writer and actor. Her work has appeared in ASIM, Farrago’s Wainscot, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, Tin House, The Way of the Wizard, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014, and elsewhere. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007 and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She also loves and worries about the bees of our world. Check out www.honeylove.org and www.thehoneybeeconservancy.org if you do too.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Xia Jia, translated by Ken Liu

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Li Yunsong (librarian, traveler on a winter’s night)
posted on 20xx-04-06

Many are the ways of commemorating the dead, and no one can say which is best—not even the dead.

The method I’m about to tell you is perhaps the strangest of them all.

My father was a librarian. Years ago, when I was a little child, he used to bring me to work and let me loose among the dusty tomes on old shelves. The experience forged an emotional bond between me and paper books. I could spend a whole day with my head buried in a book, careless of the absence of other entertainments. As I grew up, I discovered that the world outside the library was far more complicated, and I had a hard time adjusting. Socially awkward and having few friends, I returned to my hometown after college and started working at my father’s old library. It felt natural, like a book finding the exact place on the shelves assigned to it by the numbers on its spine.

There wasn’t much to do at work. In an age when most reading was done electronically, the library had few patrons. Like a graveyard attendant, I took care of the forgotten books and saw the occasional visitor, but there was little expectation of real conversation. The sunlight glided tranquilly between the shelves, day after day. Every day, I entered this sanctuary, quiet as a tomb, and pulled a book or two randomly off the shelves to read.

This was pretty much my version of heaven.

Borges once wrote, “God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents’ parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.” I didn’t believe in God, but sometimes I felt that I was searching for something as well.

One rainy autumn afternoon, the library received a donation of books. I opened one and saw a small red collector’s seal on the title page, which told me that another old man who had treasured books had died. His children had piled his collection, gathered over a lifetime, in front of his apartment building. Those which were worth something had been picked out by used book dealers, leaving the rest to be sold by the kilogram to a paper mill, to be gifted, or to be donated to the library. This sort of thing happened every year. I sorted the books, recorded and catalogued them, stuck on call numbers and barcodes, wiped off the dust, and stacked them neatly so that they could be shelved.

This took me two hours; I was exhausted, dizzy, and needed a break. While the teakettle was boiling, I picked up a slim volume off the top of the stack. It was a chapbook of poetry.

I started to read. From the first character in the first line of the first poem, I felt that I had found what I had always sought. Accompanied by the faint pitter-patter of rain outside, I chewed over the verses carefully, as delighted as a starving man who had finally been given manna.

The poet was unfamiliar to me, and there was only a short paragraph that passed for her biography. There wasn’t even a photograph. She wrote under a pen name, and her real name was unknown. She had died twenty years ago at the age of thirty-one. I pulled out my phone to look her up, but the Internet gave me nothing, as though she had never existed.

I felt a tingling up my spine. How could a poet who had lived in the information age leave no trace on the Web? It was inconceivable.

In the middle of the chapbook I found a library book request form. The sheet was thin, yellowed, but still well preserved. The borrower had filled out the form with the title of the poetry book as well as his library card number in a neat, forceful hand. I inputted the information into the computer system and found that the borrower had been a regular patron, though he hadn’t come for a few months. The borrower’s records in the database did not contain this book—which made sense, as the library had never had a copy of it.

Why would a book request form from my library be found in the private collection of an old man, and how did it get back here to me? Who was the borrower listed on the form, and what was his relationship to the old man? Or perhaps they were the same person using different names?

I finished the poems in the chapbook and shelved it as well as the other donated books. The next day, for some reason, I found myself in front of the shelf with the chapbook. It was still there, a slim volume squeezed between other books like a mysterious woman hiding in the attic. I pulled it out and re-read it from the first page. Though the poems were decades old, I could clearly sense from the rich, ambivalent images the massive waves of sorrow that had swept up most people in this age, like a lonely cry slipping through the cracks and seams of broken walls and fallen ruins, flowing without end.

Who was the poet? What did she look like and where did she live? What was her life like? Other than me, the dead collector, and the mysterious borrower, had she had other readers?

I had no answers. All I could do was to read the poems over and over again, like a fish diving deeper. The poet and her poems turned into the dark abyss of my dreams, concealing all secrets.

Three months later, as the first snow of winter fell, I met the borrower.

He was in his forties, of medium height, possessing a lean, angular face, and dressed plainly. When I saw the familiar string of numbers on his library card, I got so excited that I almost cried out. But the looming silence of the library reminded me to swallow the cry.

Using the library’s surveillance cameras, I observed him passing through the stacks and up and down the stairs like a ghost. I saw him walk into the room where old newspapers and magazines were kept, the only patron in that space. He retrieved a stack of bound newspapers and carefully laid it out on the desk, where he proceeded to flip through it slowly, page by page. I was puzzled. These newspapers were electronically stored and indexed, and all he had to do was to perform a simple search in the database. Why did he bother to come into the library to flip through them like this? Perhaps he was nostalgic for the sensation of bare fingers against old paper?

Suddenly, the borrower on my closed-circuit TV screen lifted his face and glanced around, staring in the direction of the camera for a second. Then he shifted his position so that his body blocked my view. A few seconds later, he moved away and flipped the newspaper to the next page.

I was certain that he had done something he did not want others to find out during that brief moment. Maybe he took a photograph. But considering all these papers had been digitized, what was the point of sneaking a picture?

Before closing time, the borrower approached me and set down that thin chapbook. I scanned the barcode but held on to the book. My curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to break my habitual silence and risk speaking with a stranger.

“Do you like these poems?” I asked.

He was surprised. It was as if I had been invisible, but now appeared out of thin air.

“They’re . . . all right.” His tone was cautious.

“I think they’re lovely,” I said. “No, that’s not quite right. They’re powerful, as though they could return order and form to ruins that had been slumbering for thousands of years.”

I told him how I had come across these poems, and repeated to him the quote from Borges. I spoke to him about how I couldn’t forget the mysterious poet, and even recounted for him how I had become the librarian here.

Ripples of emotion spread across his face, as though my words had been drops of rain falling into a pond.

After I was done talking, he picked a book request form from the box on the desk and handed it to me. “Please give me your contact info.”

I wrote down my name and phone number. Without glancing at the form, he picked it up and placed it between the pages of the chapbook. “I will be in touch.” He strode toward the exit.

I waited more than a week. On a stormy evening, my phone rang. I answered it, and the borrower’s low, sonorous voice filled my ears.

“There’s a gathering tonight we’d like to invite you to.”

“Tonight?” I looked up at the dense, swirling snow outside the window. “We?”

He gave me an address and a time. Then he added, “I hope you can make it.” He hung up.

His last words were irresistible—it had been many years since anyone had said “hope” to me. I checked myself in the mirror and left the library, opening my umbrella as I did so.

The snow was so thick that it seemed solid. There were very few pedestrians or cars out on the road. My town was too small to have a subway or tube transport system, and transportation was no different from how it had been twenty, thirty years earlier. I made my way through ankle-deep snow to the bus stop, and the bus also had very few passengers. I rode for eight or so stops, got off, and walked some more until I reached the address the borrower had given me: it was a bar that had seen better years.

I pushed open the thick wooden door and swept aside the cotton curtain. Warm air infused with an aroma that I was sure I knew enveloped my face. About fifteen people were seated in the bar in a loose circle, and there was an old fashioned coal stove—the kind that took honeycomb briquettes—in the middle of the circle. On top of the stove sat an aluminum kettle hissing with white steam.

The borrower picked up the kettle and poured me a cup of hot tea. I was surprised to see that there was a hint of a smile on his cold, expressionless face. He introduced me to the others, and it didn’t take me long to realize that most of them were as socially awkward as me, but I could see friendliness and candor in their eyes. They already thought of me as one of them. I relaxed.

I found an empty chair and sat down. The borrower stood up like a host and said, “Good evening, everybody. Let’s welcome our new friend. Today is a special day, and I’m delighted to see all of you make it on a snowy night like this.”

The crowd quieted, holding hot cups of tea and listening.

“Tonight, we gather to remember a poet,” he continued. “Twenty years ago, a cold, stormy winter’s night just like this one, she departed our world.

“Everyone here tonight is a reader of her work. We love her poems but know almost nothing about her life. It is said that she was an introvert who lived like a hermit. She didn’t use the computer or the Web, and left behind almost no photographs or videos. Her poems received little attention during her lifetime, and were published only in a few obscure literary journals. When the editors of these journals asked for an author photo or an interview, she never responded.

“But one editor, who loved her work, managed to maintain a correspondence with her. Through handwritten letters, the two of them discussed life and poetry, poverty and humility, the terrors and hopes of our age. This was a simple, pure friendship, sustained only through the written word. They never met each other in life.

“Right before the poet died, she sent all her published and unpublished poems to the editor. After reading through them, the editor decided to publish a collection as a way to commemorate her dead friend. But she knew that the only way to make a collection of poetry popular was to package up the poet’s life into a story that was already popular with the crowd. The story had to exaggerate the poet’s mystery and solitude, dig up the scars of her family life and childhood, show her poverty and hunger, disclose her hidden life of love, and present her death scene with pathos. It had to be a story that would make everyone—whether they read poetry or not—shed tears of sympathy for a young woman poet who died too young, drive the crowd to curse our cold, commercial age for persecuting genius, allow each and every member of the audience to project themselves onto her. This was the only way to sell a collection of poetry, to grow her fame, to make her name last through the ages.

“But this was also exactly what the poet would have hated.

“And so the editor chose another way to commemorate her friend. She paid to print and bind copies of the chapbook and mailed them to her friends, anyone who was willing to read the poems, the penniless writers, translators, teachers, editors, students, librarians. She wrote in the note accompanying the chapbook that if anyone wanted more copies to gift to others, she would mail them for free. And since she knew so little about the poet’s life, she couldn’t satisfy their curiosity.

“Year after year, readers who loved her work formed clubs like this one. We read and pass on her work, from one private shelf to another, from one library to another library. But we are not interested in superficial attention; we do not fabricate tear-jerking tales about her life; we do not manufacture illusions that would be popular. We only wish for readers to admire her through her poetry, and we disdain insincere blurbs, biographies, photographs, or interviews. In fact, we make it our mission to eliminate any material of that sort. If one of us discovers an image or biographical record of her somewhere, we do our best to delete it. Documents on the Web can be deleted, databases can be carefully edited, tapes and rolls of film can be cut and then pasted back together, and anything printed could be torn out and burned.

“Very few people have noticed our actions. Compared to making news, reducing attention was work that could be carried out quietly. Of course, it was impossible to accomplish what we did without anyone noticing. There will always be the curious who wanted to know the stories behind the poems, who needed to pierce the riddle. We have no right to stop them, but we will say: we do not know any secrets, and we do not want to know any. For us, the poems themselves are enough.”

The borrower finished speaking. He opened the chapbook in his hand and placed it in front of me. I saw a yellowed piece of paper between the pages, like a piece cut from an old newspaper.

“I cut this out of the newspapers collected in your library. I’m sorry that I damaged your property. Now I return this to you so that you can decide what to do with it.”

I looked at the piece of paper. There was a blurry photograph on it. Almost twenty pale faces, exposed to the sun, stared at me. Was one of them the poet? Which one? How would I know?

The answer to the riddle was its plain text.

I picked up the piece of paper with the tips of my fingers and brought it to the stove, tossing it in. The flame licked the paper, burst into an orange flare, and in a blink the paper had turned into a curl of ash.

I looked at the borrower, who smiled at me, extending a hand. I held his large and warm hand. I realized that it had been a long time since I last held a stranger’s hand. My eyes grew wet.

“How about we read a poem together?” he said.

We sat down in our chairs and flipped open the chapbooks to the first page. We read from the first character in the first line of the first poem. Our voices floated up, passed through the ceiling, rose against the falling drifts of snow, until they had returned to the eternal, cold, dark abyss.

Originally published in Chinese in Guangming Daily, June 5, 2015 Version 14.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Recently, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990″ as the topic of her dissertation. She now teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

She has been publishing fiction since college in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld, Nature, and Upgraded.

Way Down East

Tim Sullivan

“Season’s starting early, eh?” Laurent said, standing on the pier and scratching his gray beard.

“Why do you say that?” Donny asked, grunting as he hoisted a lobster trap onto the deck.

“Look at that fella coming out of the CVS.” Laurent nodded toward Water Street. “He look local to you?”

A blond young man in a business suit and sunglasses was leaving the pharmacy with a white plastic bag in hand, walking up the hill toward the Penobscot Hotel. He was about the same age as Donny’s son, early thirties, but Little Donny had seldom acted as solemn as this guy, even when he was in church.

“He’s part of the Gleezer’s security detail,” Laurent said.

“Is he?” Donny asked. “Guess I forgot all about that thing,”

“Did you, now?”

Donny took a momentary break. His back was hurting so much that he was beginning to think he was getting too old for this work. Too bad he didn’t know how to do anything else.

“That guy could be a tourist,” he said, ragging on Laurent, who’d repeated every rumor he’d heard since the visitor from Gliese 581c arrived on the island yesterday.

“Wonder what they bought?” said Laurent.

“Could be anything.”

“They don’t sell just anything in the drug store.”

“Course not. I meant anything they sell in the CVS, wise guy.”

“That ain’t what you said.”

“Well, I’ll just have to watch myself from now on,” Donny said. “Make sure it’s not too complicated for you.”

“Wicked,” Laurent said.

“Ain’t it, though?”

“See on TV how the Gleezer can roll around naked and get away with it?”

“It ain’t naked,” Donny said. “It’s got that elastic thing on.”

“You can see right through it.”

“So what? What is there to see?”

“Quite a lot, if you ask me.”

“No reproductive organs, is what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.”

“Let’s get these traps baited. We can’t stand here all day gawking at everybody who comes out of the drug store.”

“All day? Ain’t even been two minutes,” Laurent muttered, climbing over the gunwale.

“If we don’t get to work, we’ll never get this boat paid off,” Donny complained. “Leave it up to you, we’d never even get away from the pier.”

“Maybe we should call it a day. Take a look at those clouds coming in from the east,” Laurent said. “We go out now, we’ll get wet.”

“A little rain won’t melt us.”

They finished baiting the traps, and Donny untied the painter. He wound it up and tossed it into the lazarette as Laurent started the engine. For a moment, he stared at the rainbow trail left on the water in their wake. He was glad he couldn’t see it anymore once they got into open water and Laurent opened up the engine to churn up some foam.

They did run into rain on the way back, enough to make them don their slickers. But it cleared off pretty soon, and once they were moored at the pier again they busied themselves putting their catch into the live tank.

A lot of the eggs attached to the female lobsters were orange, which meant they were dead. It was something they saw more and more every year. After they separated the berried ladies to be thrown back, and plopped the boys into the tank, they took a breather.

“Damn, ain’t this boat a beauty, though,” Donny said, patting the fiberglass transom.

“She sure is,” Laurent said. “High bow, low topside aft, and she cuts through the water like a dream.”

“What’ll we name her, now that we finally got her?”

“I don’t know,” Laurent said. “How about ‘Swifty’?”

“Oh, come off it. That’s just plain stupid.”

“So what’s your big idea?”

“Don’t have one yet.”

“Well, I’d say ‘Swifty’ is better than ‘Don’t Have One Yet’.”

Donny sighed. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered.

When they were finished at sunset, Laurent talked Donny into going to Salty’s for a beer. Donny argued that he should get home, but he knew Laurent was lonely nights since June left him, except when his daughters and their husbands and kids took the ferry over from the mainland. He ended up calling Beth on the cell and told her he’d be home in an hour or two.

They drove Laurent’s truck up the hill to Salty’s and found the parking lot nearly full.

“It’s Friday night, ain’t it?” Donny said.

“Good guess, Dick Tracy.”

They parked and went in, walking past the decorative fishing nets to join the crowd. The joint was jumping. A few summer people were already in town, and their well-heeled kids were hanging out and flirting with the locals, at least those old enough to drink or get their hands on phony IDs. The jukebox was thumping rap.

Donny and Laurent sidled up to the bar and took a couple stools.

Mike, the bartender, was wiping a glass. He had to shout to make himself heard over the music and the enthusiastic bellowing of the kids. “Hello, boys.”

“What’s the word, Mike?”

“Nothin’ much.” Mike put the gleaming glass next to the other clean glasses on the shelf. “What’ll you have?”

“Two Narragansetts,” said Laurent.

“I don’t want a Nastygansett,” Donny said. “Give me a Sam Adams.”

“Big spender.” Mike fetched two bottles and poured their drinks into two tall glasses, leaving a perfect head on each.

“You’re the master, Mike,” Laurent said, blowing a little foam off the top.

“That’s what they tell me,” Mike said. “See the Gleezer’s buddies in town today?”

“One of ’em, not fifty yards from the boat, before we went for our last jaunt.”

The song on the jukebox ended, and there was a lull before the next one started.

“I hear the Gleezer wants to go out,” Mike said, his belly hanging over the cedar bar as he moved closer to speak confidentially.

“Out where?”

“Out around the Bay.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of those Secret Service fellas traveling with it,” Mike said.

“Secret Service?” Donny said. “Is the thing running for president?”

“Nope,” Laurent said. “It wasn’t born in this country.”

That got a laugh.

“So how’d you meet Secret Squirrel?” Donny asked.

“He slipped in here for a quick one last night just before closing.”

“No kiddin’?” Donny had never thought of Secret Service agents having fun, the way they were always so serious when you saw them on TV.

“Would I kid you?”

Mike turned to attend to some other customers, and the music blared once again.

Donny and Laurent nursed their beers.

“I wonder how much they’re willing to pay,” Donny hollered.

“Huh?”

“For the Gleezer’s joy ride,” Donny said. “I wonder how much the government’s willing to fork out?”

“Secret Service probably arranged a cruise already.”

“Think so?”

“Well, they’d want a luxury boat.”

“That might draw too much attention.”

“Well, if Mike heard it last night. . . . ” Laurent was thinking it over.

“Maybe we should go over to the hotel and look into it.”

“Nah, they’ve already chartered a boat.”

“How do you know that?”

“Common sense.”

“That’s something you’ve always been short on.”

“Look who’s talking, you red-headed dummy.”

They each took another pull from their beers.

“We do need to start paying off the boat,” Laurent shouted.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“I guess it can’t hurt to make an offer.”

“Guess not,” Donny said. “Glad you thought of it.”

Laurent downed the rest of his beer. “Me, too.”

“All right, first thing in the morning, then?”

“Why not go over there now?” Laurent said. “It ain’t even supper time yet.”

“I gotta get home.”

“Shouldn’t take too long,” Laurent said, up for an adventure now. “Frank Dunsmore’s workin’ the night shift.”

“Ain’t that just ducky?”

“Well, we know him. Now’s the time to go over to the hotel and ask him who the boss is.”

“Maybe the Gleezer’s the boss.”

“Let’s hope it talks our language then.”

Donny threw a few dollars on the bar and finished his beer. They rose from their stools.

“See you, Mike,” Donny said.

Mike waved at them, and they elbowed their way through the noisy crowd and out the door.

“Sure you’re okay drivin’?” Donny asked, glad to be away from the racket.

“I only had one beer.”

They got into the truck. “I’m thinking about the night you hit that bridge abutment in Rockland.”

“Thirty-five years ago, and you’re still talking about it.”

“You only had one before that little fender bender, as I recall.”

“I had more than one that night—’less you mean one six-pack.”

The two men laughed.

It didn’t take long to get to the hotel. In fact, it didn’t take long to get anywhere on the island. Donny didn’t mind, because he always felt lost when he went to Boston or Portland, or even Bangor. He was an island boy at heart, and he liked it that way.

The Penobscot Hotel had been built in 1896, with new wings added in the fifties and the eighties. It was elegant and expensive. Except for delivering lobsters to the kitchen loading dock, the only time Donny had been inside was his senior prom in 1973. He remembered smoking a joint in the men’s room with Laurent and some other boys with shag hairdos who were all long gone from the island now, except for one who taught at a nearby high school on the mainland . . . and Frank, the man they were going to see.

Laurent pulled into the parking lot. There were a few cars, an AIV, and some trailers and a TV van at the back of the lot, but nothing much. The public had gradually stopped paying attention since the initial buzz when the Gleezer splashed down, or the media would have been out in force. Only the likes of Laurent had kept up with the story until the Gleezer showed up on the island. Most people didn’t care all that much about it anymore, since the Gleezer had nothing to say and was kept out of sight most of the time. You could only look at the same two or three clips of it so many times.

Donny and Laurent got out without bothering to lock the truck. Nobody was going to steal from them here, because everybody either had money or were people they knew, including the Costa Rican chambermaids.

“We should have worn our tuxedos,” Laurent said as they approached the glass lobby door.

“Why, are we going to a costume party?” Donny asked, opening the door for his old buddy. “After you, Alphonse.”

“Merci, garçon.” Laurent went through his pockets as if searching in vain for a coin. “Quel dommage! J’ommet tous mes argent en l’autre pantalon!”

“You damn cheapskate frog.”

The olive green carpet was so spotless that Donny almost was afraid to walk on it. A couple of well-dressed people sat on well-upholstered chairs in the lobby, and he was pretty sure from their watchful attitude that they weren’t tourists.

The balding night manager was looking at a laptop as they walked up to him.

“Hello, Frank,” said Laurent.

Frank Dunsmore looked up and greeted them with the superior air Donny had always found so annoying. “Hello, Laurent. Long time, no see. How are you, Don?”

“All right.”

“You two want a room?”

“Funny fella,” said Laurent. “No, we just want to talk to whoever’s in charge of the Gleezer’s bunch.”

Frank looked amused, and Donny wanted to smack him. He saw Frank as a smarmy local boy who’d always sucked up to rich people so he wouldn’t have to earn an honest living as a lobsterman.

“I can’t just send you up to their floor,” Frank said with his customary self-importance. “They’ve got it cordoned off.”

“Can’t you talk to somebody up there?”

“Why? What do you want with ’em?”

“We got a business proposition to make.”

“Now, what kind of business would you two have with our distinguished guest?”

Laurent glanced at Donny, who shrugged in return. “We hear the Gleezer wants to go for a boat ride, and we’re willin’ to take it out.”

“Oh,” said Frank. “Who told you that?”

“Grapevine,” Donny said, before Laurent could answer.

“Have you two jokers seen our penthouse guest?”

“Only online and on TV,” Laurent admitted.

“Well, it’s one thing to see a picture of it, and it’s another thing seeing it live.”

“I guess so.”

“This is a very special time for the Penobscot,” Frank said, looking impressed with himself. “And for our island.”

“God bless America and the state of Maine, too,” Donny said. “Does that mean you ain’t gonna call up there, or are you planning to mess with us the rest of the night?” He was fed up with Frank’s superciliousness. “We got better things to do.”

Frank was taken aback. “All right, Don, don’t get your shorts in a bunch. I’ll call ’em, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He got on the house phone and spoke to somebody.

“Couple of lobstermen have a boat to charter,” he said, among other things, including their names, which he repeated twice. He hung up after a minute and said, “You can go on up.”

“Thanks,” Laurent said.

“Just a minute,” Frank said. “I gotta go key the elevator or it won’t take you to the penthouse.”

Frank came out from behind the desk and led them to the elevator. He got inside with them and set it with a card, and then slipped out.

“Good luck, fellas,” he said as the door slid shut.

“What a jerk,” Donny said on the way up.

“Oh, he ain’t so bad,” Laurent said.

Donny watched the LED display, 1, 2, 3, and he was feeling pretty tense by the time they reached the penthouse.

“Here we go,” Laurent said, waiting for the door to open.

The delay made it seem like an awfully long time. At last it opened, loudly and irrevocably. A woman stood right in front of the door. She was dark and had short raven hair. She was very good-looking.

“Mr. Doyle and Mr. Therriault?” she said, adjusting a little electronic earpiece clamped to her left lobe.

“Yes, ma’am,” Donny said. “That’s us.”

“I’m Special Agent Hernandez,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” Laurent said, offering his hand.

Donny shook hands with her, too. He’d never met a Special Agent before. He wondered if she spoke to the chambermaids in Spanish.

“Please put all your change and keys in this bin and step through the metal detector.”

The metal detector was behind her, and she stepped aside to let them go through. Laurent went first, followed by Donny. Special Agent Hernandez watched them as they picked up their keys and coins. So did two young men in suits down the hall, one of whom they’d seen coming out of the drug store that afternoon.

“Please come with me.” She turned and Donny watched her shapely calves flex as she led them through the penthouse suite. All the doors were closed but one.

The room she took them to was just like something in a movie, with windows on three sides so you could see the town’s lights and the white-capped water breaking on the rocks below.

“Nice,” Laurent said.

Donny didn’t say anything, embarrassed by his boots squishing.

“If you gentlemen will wait here,” the lady said. “Mr. Towson will be right with you.”

“Thank you,” Donny said.

“Help yourselves to the refreshments on the table,” she said, and then left them alone.

There were bagels, salmon, fresh fruit, bottled water, wine, and a coffee urn with cups and saucers, cutlery, and napkins. Laurent grabbed a banana, and Donny had a pumpernickel bagel, which he slathered with cream cheese using a butter knife. He bit into it and found it was as hard as a rock, but tasty. Both poured themselves some coffee into china cups and sat on the fanciest sofa Donny had ever seen in his life, holding their saucers in their laps.

“Imagine the kind of money it takes to rent this place,” Laurent said, looking around at the fancy furnishings and framed paintings on the walls.

Donny didn’t speak, because he was sure they were being monitored. He didn’t intend to say something stupid and blow this job.

Towson kept them waiting quite a while. When he finally appeared, he proved to be a trim man with thick, silvery white hair, in his late fifties, wearing a very expensive suit and a blue satin tie.

“Hi,” he said, extending a manicured hand. “I’m Jerry Towson.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Towson,” Laurent said, rising to shake his hand. “Laurent Therriault. This is Donny Doyle.”

Donny got up and shook with Towson, conscious of the dried chum blood under his fingernails and the smell of lobster battling with Towson’s cologne. Towson had a strong grip, though, and his gray eyes sized up a man in a hurry.

“I understand you gentlemen have a boat you’d be willing to charter for a day?” Towson asked, coming right to the point.

“Ayuh, a brand new Northern Bay 36,” Laurent said.

“Just got her this week,” Donny added.

“Do you have any objection to a thorough security check of your boat before the launch?”

“Nope,” Laurent quickly said.

Towson nodded at him, and then turned to Donny. “And you, Mr. Doyle? Do you have any objections?”

“I guess not,” Donny said, remembering that this had been his idea in the first place. “Long as nothing’s damaged.”

“I assure you we’ll be careful,” Mr. Towson said, showing his capped teeth as he smiled like a cable TV newsman. “Are there any questions?”

“Yeah, what, uh . . . ” Laurent hesitated.

“Please go on.”

“What do we do if there’s trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“Yeah,” Laurent said. “What if it runs out of the stuff it breathes, or something like that?”

“We’ll have a team there to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

“How many people?” Donny asked. “It’s only a thirty-six footer, you know.”

“Just three people, including me,” Towson said. “Is that too many passengers?”

“No, that’ll be all right,” Laurent said, glancing at his buddy.

“Fine,” Towson said. “How much do you charge for a charter cruise?”

“This’ll be the first one,” Donny said. “Make us an offer.”

“Five thousand dollars.”

Donny thought his jaw was going to hit his collarbone. “Uh . . . ”

“Yes, sir, that’ll be fine,” Laurent quickly said.

“Excellent,” Towson said. “Will a check be all right?”

“Long as it don’t bounce,” Donny said, recovering quickly from the shock.

Towson smiled. “We’ll have a cashier’s check for you tomorrow morning, and we’ll have the visitor at the dock at five o’clock sharp. After a routine security scan, we’ll be off.”

“You’ll find our boat moored right at the end of Water Street,” Donny said. “Can’t miss it. No name painted on her yet.”

“I’m sure you understand how important discretion is in this matter,” Towson said. “We ask only that you tell no one about it until after the visitor is safely ashore.”

“Okay,” Laurent said.

“Right,” Donny said.

“And just one more thing,” Towson said.

“Ayuh?”

“Are there any firearms aboard?”

“Just a Very pistol—you know, a flare gun,” Laurent said.

“Nothing else?”

“Nope,” Donny said, “we don’t shoot lobsters, we just trap ’em.”

Towson smiled. “Very good, gentlemen, you have a deal with the United States government.”

“Good enough for me,” Laurent said.

“And you, Mr. Doyle?”

“Sure,” Donny said. He was thinking about the money this could bring their way after the deal was done—television, online interviews, magazines. . . . It could turn out to be very profitable. People would want to ride on the Gleezer boat, and they’d be willing to pay for the privilege.

And even if he and Laurent didn’t make another penny off this deal, they could at least lay down a pretty hefty payment on the boat next month.

“When you said we can’t tell anybody,” Donny said to Towson, “does that include my wife?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Donny nodded. It would be hard to keep it from Beth, but it wasn’t unusual for a lobster boat to put out at five, so she wouldn’t be suspicious. He’d have a good story to tell her when he got home tomorrow, in any case.

“It’s a deal.”

They each shook hands with Towson to seal it.

“I have some things to attend to, gentlemen,” he said. “But feel free to linger here as long as you wish, and please help yourselves to food and beverages.”

“Can we take some goodies home with us?” Laurent asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Towson said. “It might raise questions.”

“Well, I live alone nowadays,” Laurent said. “Nobody’s gonna question me.”

“Then I see no reason why you can’t take all you like. Good evening, gentlemen.”

He walked out of the room.

“And here I am with mouths to feed,” Donny said.

“I’ll save you some,” Laurent said, gathering up grapes, apples, and bagels, which he wrapped in napkins and stuffed into his coat pockets. He gripped a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in his meaty hand and started toward the door. “Give it to you when we come back tomorrow. Except for the wine, which I’m keeping.”

“The food’ll be stale.”

“Then don’t eat it,” Laurent said, as they left the panoramic view behind them on their way to the elevator. “See if I care.”

“You’re all heart.”

“Ayuh.”

Chewing on a grape, Laurent nodded at the two young men in suits as they waited for the elevator. The ride down seemed much faster. Laurent waved at Frank as he and Donny walked through the lobby.

“How’d it go?” Frank called to them, busting to know what had happened upstairs.

“Can’t talk about it, Frank,” Donny shouted back. “National security.”

In the parking lot, they looked up as a helicopter noisily flew over.

“Government or news?” Laurent said, spitting out a seed and popping another grape into his mouth.

“Don’t see what difference it makes.”

Laurent dropped Donny off at the house, looking out for wildlife along the way. Dark as it was with the birches all around, Donny noticed that a couple more shingles had fallen into the front yard as he walked up to the front door. He’d have to work on the roof this summer.

He heard the dog barking as he let himself in.

“Hello, Bert,” he said stroking the Lab’s yellow fur as he entered. “I almost had some treats for you, but no dice.”

“Did you get anything to eat?” Beth asked, coming out of the kitchen as Donny flung his coat over the newel post. He could hear the TV going in the living room.

“Ayuh.” He kissed her on the cheek, his face tickled by her long hair. She’d stopped coloring it lately, calling it her “gray badge of courage.” It wasn’t really all that gray yet. He liked the way it looked, long and feminine.

“How’s your back?” Beth asked.

“Aching a little bit, but I’m okay.”

“Little Donny called a short while ago,” Beth said. “He said he was sorry he missed you.”

“Did he, now?”

“Things are picking up for him,” Beth said, ignoring Donny’s sardonic tone. “He’s got a few gigs lined up and some time in the recording studio.”

“So he’s gonna be a rock star soon?”

“As long as he’s happy,” Beth said, looking at him with her green eyes.

Donny grunted as he sat on the bottom step and Beth helped him haul off his short boots. Bert’s tail counted time, whacking against the bottom step.

“I shouldn’t have had coffee,” Donny said, changing the subject.

“Since when do you drink coffee at Salty’s?”

He let the question pass as he stood up.

“I still have some of that Ambien Doctor Blaisdell prescribed,” Beth said. “That ought to put you out.”

“Ayuh.”

He took a bath and the pill, and he was ready to go to sleep an hour later. Beth joined him, lying down next to him in their queen size bed and rubbing his back for a few minutes.

“Everybody on the island’s talking about the Gleezer,” she said, pulling up the comforter and turning on her side to put out the lamp on the night stand.

“Day before yesterday nobody around here cared about it.”

“Kind of exciting, having it come here.”

“Kinda.”

“What do you suppose it wants?”

“Wants? What do you mean, baby?”

“Well, why this island of all the places on Earth?”

“Same reason as summer people come here, I guess.”

“For the rustic New England charm?”

They both laughed.

“Have you got something on your mind, Donny?”

“You know there’s never anything on my mind.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“It’s just that we’re gonna have a long day tomorrow.”

“Are you thinking about Little Donny?”

“Nothing I can do about him.”

Beth didn’t say anything. They’d been through it a thousand times. She believed that Little Donny was brave to be unashamed of the way he was, but Donny wondered if things might have turned out different if he had interested the boy in something besides playing the keyboard.

Beth snuggled up.

“Your nose is cold,” he said.

“Cold nose, warm heart,” she said. “Did you find orange berries on the females today?”

“Ayuh.”

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Well, sure it does,” Donny said. “What are we gonna do if the lobsters die off?”

She touched his hair. “We’ll get by.”

The Ambien was making Donny drift off, but he was thinking about tomorrow and what it might mean. He had to remind himself not to say anything to Beth about it.

And then he was asleep.

Beth was up before him, at quarter past four. She was making coffee, bacon, and eggs. Donny washed his face and came downstairs, trying to savor the delicious odors, but too worried about how things were going to go today to enjoy it much. He didn’t want Beth to notice his anxiety, though, so he talked about something he knew would prevent her from asking him any questions.

“Little Donny still got plans to marry Alan?” he asked.

“Oh, he mentions it every now and then,” Beth said, pleased to talk about their son as she cracked an egg and plopped its contents into the buttered pan.

“I know you wanted grandchildren,” Donny said.

“If they get married, maybe they can adopt.”

It wouldn’t be the same, he thought, but he kept it to himself.

They ate in silence.

Laurent picked him up at twenty minutes to five, to make sure they’d be at the pier in plenty of time. Rolling down his window, Laurent patted Bert on the head, the dog’s paws resting on the pickup’s side panel.

“Something wrong with the heater?” Donny inquired after he got in.

“Give it a chance,” Laurent replied.

“We’ll be out on the water before it warms up in here.”

“Ain’t it awful?”

It was still dark, but as they bumped down the hill from Donny’s house, the Atlantic was starting to reflect a quicksilver hint of light.

“Think the Gleezer’s sun looks different than ours?” Donny asked.

“That’s what they claim,” Laurent said. “It’s red all the time, not just at sunrise and sunset.”

“All the time? No kiddin’?”

“No kiddin’.”

“So how does there happen to be life on its planet?”

“Well, there’s water, and I guess wherever there’s water there’s life.”

As usual, Laurent drove right onto the pier. Donny thought it was kind of nice that they wouldn’t have to tote any traps today if they didn’t feel like it. They were just going to take a little cruise out onto the bay with the Gleezer. He remembered movies about space monsters and alien menaces, and it made him chuckle.

“Are you losin’ it?” Laurent said.

“Well, you gotta admit this is kinda weird, Laurent.”

Laurent laughed, too. “Can’t deny it.”

They climbed aboard and got ready for the imminent arrival of the Gleezer’s team.

A massive, black AIV—the one they’d seen in the hotel parking lot—rolled down Water Street and parked itself behind Laurent’s truck right on time, five o’clock sharp. Excepting its pristine paint job, it looked like it ought to be patrolling the streets of a war zone. Its headlights illuminated the boat and hurt Donny’s eyes.

He didn’t like having Laurent’s truck blocked off, but they weren’t going to be using it until they got back.

Towson got out of the AIV and walked toward their boat. He looked as fresh as a daisy, wearing an overcoat, his silver hair glistening from the morning mist. He had so much hair that Donny wondered if it was plugs or a wig.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Towson said, as two young Secret Servicemen climbed aboard and looked the boat over for Weapons of Mass Destruction. This morning, they were dressed in jeans and jackets, the guy they’d seen yesterday wearing a Cubs cap over his blond hair and the other one wearing a knit watch cap. Donny hoped they wouldn’t fall into the head when they went below deck.

“Morning,” Laurent said, sniffling a bit.

“Coming down with a cold, Mr. Therriault?”

“Just allergies.”

“So it’s in the AIV?” Donny asked. “The, uh . . . visitor?”

“Yes.” Towson glanced over his shoulder. “We’ll lift it out in its environmental tank and put it on the deck whenever you’re ready.”

“No time like the present,” Donny said.

“I agree, but let’s give my men time to finish the security check first.”

A couple minutes later, they were satisfied.

Towson turned and pressed buttons on a remote. The back door of the SUV opened. Appendages that looked like they were assembled from a giant Erector Set swung a polarized glass tank over the roof and hood, depositing it on the pier. It was about the size of a coffin.

“Pretty nifty,” Laurent said.

“Do we have to haul it aboard ourselves?” Donny asked.

Towson shook his head and directed his two men to do it. They grasped handles on the sides of the glass tank and lifted it without much strain.

“The lady didn’t come?” Laurent asked, as the two Secret Service agents wrestled the tank aboard. The boat bobbed under their weight as they set it on the deck.

“Special Agent Hernandez?” Towson said. “No, I’m afraid not. She’s in charge of the team back at the hotel.”

“Too bad for you, Laurent,” Donny said. “I could tell she likes you.”

“Funny fella,” Laurent replied. “You ought to be writing for Conan O’Brien.”

“It’d pay better.”

“Well, Special Agent Hernandez is a pretty woman,” Laurent said, “wouldn’t you say, Mr. Towson?”

“I would,” Towson replied.

“Are you coming with us?” Donny asked.

“Yes, I am,” Towson said. “Why do you ask?”

“You might get your feet wet.”

“They’ve been wet before,” Towson said.

Towson reached under his coat, and for a moment Donny thought he was going to show them his handgun. Instead, he pulled an envelope from his inside breast pocket.

“Your check,” he said.

Laurent and Donny exchanged glances. Donny took the envelope, because it seemed that Laurent didn’t want to.

“Feel free to look it over,” Towson said, smiling, “if you don’t trust the federal government.”

“You never know these days,” Laurent said.

They all laughed.

“I guess it’ll be all right,” Donny said. “After all, we know where you’re staying.”

Another laugh. Maybe, Donny thought, this wouldn’t be such a bad day . . . if it didn’t rain.

“This is a fine looking vessel,” Towson said, turning his attention to the boat.

“Built this year,” Laurent said.

“AI steering system?”

“No, we couldn’t afford that. She’s got Raytheon and old-fashioned GPS, but we hardly ever need it, so. . . . ”

“I guess you know your way around this bay pretty well.”

“Ayuh, we’ve been doing this all our lives,” Donny said, suspecting that he was being patronized.

“Let’s get on board,” Laurent said, deftly hopping over the gunwale and offering a hand to Towson.

Donny untied the painter and climbed aboard as Laurent started her up. They put out slowly.

“Are we going to see the . . . ” He almost said “the Gleezer,” but caught himself. “ . . . visitor?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if we pull up some lobster traps while we’re out?” Laurent asked.

“I don’t see any reason to object.”

“All right, then. Just a few to keep us busy.”

The sun was emerging over the horizon, breaking into a million shimmering red lights on the water.

No matter how many times he saw it, Donny never got tired of it.

“Lovely,” Towson said, as they got away from shore and gathered speed. “Just lovely.”

“Grows on you,” Laurent said.

The steady sound of the boat’s diesel engine was overcome by the rattling whir of a helicopter passing overhead.

“One of yours?” Donny asked.

“In case of emergency,” Towson said.

“If a tanker comes too close, will the chopper blow her out of the water?” Donny drily asked. “That would be something to tell the grandkids about.”

“You have grandchildren, Mr. Doyle?”

That question took all the fun out of the conversation. Donny decided to clam up. He had the distinct feeling that Towson knew everything there was to know about him, right down to what he ate for breakfast. For a few minutes he’d been fooled into thinking this guy was just like anybody else.

He watched for buoys marking their traps.

Before he spotted any, Towson went into the pilot house and ordered Laurent to stop the boat.

When the engine cut off, it took a moment for Donny to hear anything, but then the familiar sounds of the waves lapping on the hull and the gulls cawing overhead slowly came to him. All he was thinking of was that he was about to see the Gleezer.

The two Secret Servicemen stood by while Towson pulled a cylindrical key out of his pocket and inserted it into a slot in the tank’s lid.

The side of the tank, rather than the lid, slowly opened. It made a ramp leading to the deck. Donny thought there would be a lot of gadgets inside, but he couldn’t see much other than the dark mass of the tank’s occupant.

The Gleezer took its time coming out.

It was wearing its protective sheath, just as Donny had seen on TV. It sort of squirmed and flopped onto the deck, almost like a fish out of water. Alarmed, Donny glanced at Towson, but the government man seemed calm.

Laurent came out of the pilot house. He was spellbound by the Gleezer.

“Is everything all right?” Laurent asked in a tone barely above a whisper.

“There’s no cause for concern,” said Towson.

“It doesn’t look all right,” Donny said. Not only that, but he could smell it right through its clear covering, and he didn’t care for the odor. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever smelled before.

The Gleezer slithered a few feet across the deck. Donny tried to think of something to compare its appearance to. A centipede, a bug, a lobster, even . . . but none of these analogies would do. It had quite a few appendages, maybe a dozen, but they didn’t look like the limbs of any animal he’d ever seen. There were two humps on either side with kidney-shaped artificial lungs in them, supplying the atmosphere the Gleezer needed to survive on Earth. Two transparent tubes connected the inflating lungs to the tank.

He knew that the lump on its back was where its brain was located, but he had no idea if it could see, smell, hear, or feel—at least not the way humans and animals did.

Frank had told the truth, for once in his life. It was one thing to see a picture of the Gleezer, and another thing to see it for real. It was only four feet away from Donny, and the sight of it made him want to jump into the drink.

He stood on the lazily yawing deck, his beloved Bay all around him, the early morning light dazzling on the dappled water. He looked away from the Gleezer and toward the sunrise until it hurt his eyes.

“You get used to its appearance,” Towson said.

“I don’t think I ever could,” Donny said. “It’s ugly.”

“You ain’t no prize yourself,” Laurent cracked from under the fly bridge.

“Nobody asked you.”

Towson frowned. “I know the visitor’s different, but it’s intelligent, and it’s sensitive.”

“Sensitive?” Donny scoffed.

“In other words, shut up,” Laurent said.

Donny turned on Laurent. “Don’t tell me to shut up, you dumb Canuck.”

“Gentlemen, please,” Towson said. “The visitor can sense your anger.”

“It can?” Laurent asked.

“Yes, it’s empathic.”

“Like on Star Trek?” Laurent asked.

“Well, no,” Towson explained. “In the same way that you and I might sense that an animal’s in pain.”

“In pain?” Donny demanded. “Who’s in pain?”

Towson left the question unanswered.

Donny looked astern toward the island. It was his home, a little piece of rock jutting out of the Atlantic. Right now he wished he was back at the house, in bed with Beth. For the first time in his adult life, he was beginning to feel a little seasick.

“You all right, Donny?” Laurent asked.

“Course I’m all right.”

“You’re looking a little pale.”

Donny grabbed a line and attached it to a metal lobster trap, watching the Gleezer peripherally. Slits in its pulsing hide opened and closed, observing him in some unknowable way, and the Secret Service detail watched them both through their human eyes.

Get a hold of yourself, man. This was your idea. It’s just a job of work. It’ll all be over in a few hours.

“If it’s all right with you, Mr. Towson, could we go check on some traps now?” Laurent asked.

“Certainly,” Towson said.

Laurent went into the pilot house and started up the engine again.

Towson approached Donny. “Have you ever been in the military, Mr. Doyle?”

“Navy.”

“Combat?”

“No.”

He expected Towson to ask more questions, but he didn’t.

“So what are you trying to say?” Donny said, angrily turning to face Towson. “You think I’m a coward or something?”

“No, sir, I don’t think that,” Towson said.

“Just let me do my work, and you and your boys and that thing enjoy the ride, and we’ll be all right.”

“Fine,” Towson said. He backed off, and grabbed the lanyard to steady himself on the slippery deck. The water was becoming choppier now that they were moving farther out to sea.

“You men have enviable lives,” he heard Towson say to Laurent a few minutes later.

“We like it,” Laurent said.

Donny snorted, unnoticed by the others. Laurent’s wife had left him, his daughters lived out of state, he was over fifty, and he had nothing but time on his hands when he wasn’t working. What did he like so much about his life? If he was so happy, why did he keep Donny out at night instead of going home and being happy by himself?

Funny thing was, though, that Donny didn’t mind hanging out nights at Salty’s all that much. He could usually be talked into it. Nevertheless, he wished he’d gone home last night, instead of going to the hotel.

He kept thinking of the Senior Prom, and how pretty Beth had looked that night all those years ago when they danced in the hotel ballroom. It wasn’t just the joint and the beers that had made him see her that way, either. She was a pretty one. When he looked at her now, he could still see that fresh young girl through the wrinkles and gray hair.

He sensed that the Gleezer was moving, undulating along the deck a few inches at a time. There wasn’t much room, but he still didn’t want to be near it, not if he could help it.

He bent over, feeling a twinge in his lower back, and stepped into the pilot house.

“What can I do you for?” Laurent asked.

“I’ll take the helm for a while,” Donny said, “if you don’t mind.”

Laurent relinquished the wheel. “There’s the buoy straight ahead. You ain’t gonna be driving for long.”

“I just want to get away from that thing.”

“Ever occur to you that it might have feelings?” Laurent said, ducking his head to go out on deck.

Donny would have sneered, but Laurent was gone already, and he didn’t really feel like sneering anyway. He knew it was likely that the Gleezer had emotions, but he couldn’t believe it after seeing the ugly beast. He could more easily believe a lobster would send him a valentine.

But Laurent had a point. The Gleezer had come across space from billions of miles away, so it had to be intelligent. In fact, it was probably a lot smarter than him.

That wasn’t saying much, he mused, as he cut the engine and steered the boat toward the buoy. He glanced over his shoulder through the hatch and saw the Gleezer throbbing like a clump of shrink-wrapped, spiny seaweed on the deck.

He was beginning to regret his show of revulsion toward the Gleezer and snapping at Towson. He started thinking about Little Donny, and realized that he had allowed himself to feel like less than a man because his son was gay. That was no way to be, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help it.

It was hard to see through the windscreen, for some reason. Donny tasted salt water on his lips, even though there was no spray inside the pilot house. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He didn’t want to cry. Why couldn’t he stop it? What was wrong with him?

He sensed someone moving behind him, and glanced over his shoulder to see who it was.

It was the Gleezer.

Donny turned around to see it crawling across the deck toward the pilot house.

“What does it want?” he called out in a near panic.

Towson called out to him. “The visitor’s just curious.”

“Is it coming in here?” Donny shouted.

“No, I don’t think it has that intention,” Towson said in a reassuring tone.

The Gleezer kept inching toward the hatchway. Donny started feeling claustrophobic. He turned back toward the wheel, but he could see the Gleezer reflected in the glass, the morning sun glistening on its sheath. It was nearly five feet long, a foot and a half wide, and maybe two feet high, counting the brain hump that protruded from the top, and it was a mottled gray-green, almost black, with all those spines and spindly legs sticking out.

Did it see him? He was certain it knew he was there, but what did it think he was? Did it understand what he was, what it meant to be a man? To suffer life’s disappointments and work every day just to grow older, closer and closer to death every minute? No, of course it didn’t. How could it know what a human is?

It stopped short of coming inside and lay on the deck, quivering. He thought it made a sound, but then he realized that was just a gull screeching in the distance.

The two younger Secret Servicemen, both big guys, came over and lifted the Gleezer up.

“It wants to see more of the bay,” Donny said, feeling a bit stupid. “That’s all.”

“Yes,” Towson said. “That’s all.”

“It sure didn’t come out here to look at your boots, Donny,” Laurent said as he dropped the anchor.

“But it could have seen the Bay from the shore.”

“Not the same thing.”

“Well, I know that, Laurent,” Donny said, getting an idea. “Hey, we got that net. We could put the Gleezer in and lift him up.”

“That’d be better than you fellas just holding him like that,” Laurent agreed. “It’s up to you, Mr. Towson.”

“You don’t think it could be dangerous?” Towson asked.

“Oh, no. We’ve got a winch, so we can suspend the Gleezer right over the water if he wants.”

“The Gleezer?” Towson said. “Is that what you call our visitor?”

“Ayuh,” Laurent said. “I hope he doesn’t mind.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Towson said after a pause, as if he’d been listening to someone they couldn’t hear.

“Pretty good-natured, is he?”

“As far as we know,” Towson said. “But the visitor isn’t a he. Its gender is indeterminate.”

“Oh. Well, we promise we won’t do anything untoward that could cause an interstellar incident,” Laurent said.

Towson smiled. “You’re a man of hidden depths, Mr. Therriault.”

“Just like the sea around me,” Laurent said.

Donny wondered if Towson was insulting him by implication. Did he think Donny Doyle had no depths? Well, maybe it was true. A man who held a grudge against his own son because of something the boy couldn’t help was a shallow man, and he had to admit that to himself. He’d been through it in his mind many, many times, and he knew Beth loved Little Donny even though he’d never give her a grandchild. If Little Donny and his boyfriend could adopt a kid she’d be just as happy as if he were straight, married to a nice girl, and a proud father.

Why couldn’t he feel that way?

Laurent was lucky. He was divorced, but he was a grandfather three times over. Not only that, but he got along fine with his ex. Everything was all right in his world, no matter what. Easy-going Laurent, everybody’s pal.

He helped Laurent attach the fishing net to the winch.

“So you fish too?” Towson asked.

“Ayuh,” Laurent said. “Whatever it takes to make ends meet.”

“How do you talk to the Gleezer?” Donny asked Towson.

“I’ve got a chip in my skull that translates its communications subsonically,” Towson explained. “Everything I see and hear is conveyed to a team of exobiologists in the hotel and at labs in Washington and Houston.”

“I read about that,” Laurent said, spreading the net onto the deck. “Do you know what it’s thinking?”

“No, only what it wants me to know.”

“You’re really committed to your job, I’d say, to have that chip put in.”

“It can be removed,” Towson said, almost apologetically.

“You fellas can lay it on the net now,” Donny said.

The two Secret Servicemen placed the Gleezer on the net very carefully and stepped back.

Donny cranked up the winch, glad to be doing something besides making an ass of himself, and glad to gain a bit of distance on the Gleezer. He tried not to think of anything besides what he was doing at that moment.

He ratcheted the net up about five feet, until the Gleezer was suspended over the deck, swaying back and forth.

“Okay, boys,” he said, “swing ’er out to starboard.”

“That means to the right,” Laurent said.

Towson nodded and the two younger men obeyed. Donny wondered if those two Secret Servicemen ever spoke. Maybe he had it all wrong, and they were the ones who weren’t human.

The winch pivoted and the Gleezer hung over the water, limned by the indigo sky. The tubes trailed onto the deck and into the environmental tank.

“Everything all right?” Laurent said, looking at Towson.

“Fine,” Towson said, after a moment.

Donny, standing by the winch, wondered if the Gleezer enjoyed the ocean the same way he did. Maybe it wasn’t quite as ugly as he’d first thought. Frank had put that idea in his head last night, about seeing it. Donny had been tired, and thinking about money, so maybe he’d been more susceptible than he should have been. He was so worried about making things work out that he was as jumpy as flea these days.

This boat cost almost three hundred thousand dollars, and buying it had been a big risk, but so what? Such mundane considerations were bleached away by the morning sun climbing up over the Atlantic, as he considered the possibility of the Gleezer taking pleasure in its surroundings.

Donny turned toward Towson. “Is it . . . ?”

Towson waited for him to finish the question.

“Is it enjoying itself?”

Towson thought about that for a moment. “Yes.”

“All right, then,” Donny said. “Just tell us when to reel it in.”

“It may be a little while,” Towson said, “from what the visitor is telling me.”

They watched from the gently rocking deck for a few minutes, and Donny thought about how far the Gleezer had come from its home, more than twenty light years away, just to see a yokel like him recoil from it.

“Did I hurt it?” Donny said, surprised that he would ask.

“Hurt it?”

“Its feelings, like Laurent said.”

Towson stared straight into his eyes. “I don’t think you should worry about it. The visitor has provoked negative reactions in quite a few people since it’s been here.”

Donny looked down at the deck. “I’m sorry I was one of ’em.”

He turned away from Towson as he felt the tears starting again. What was the matter with him, carrying on like this? He wasn’t a child.

He felt a light touch on his elbow. It was Laurent.

“It’s all right, old buddy,” Laurent said softly. “Nobody’s going to tell on you.”

Now the tears really came.

“I don’t care if they do,” Donny said, wiping his face on his sleeve. “I’m turning into a bitter old man, and who cares if anybody knows it?”

“You ain’t so bad, Donny,” Laurent said, sympathy in his hazel eyes.

Donny snorted. “I guess it could be worse. I could be Frank.”

Laurent chuckled. “Ayuh, that’d be a lot worse.”

“Made a fool of myself, didn’t I?”

“No,” Laurent said. “You got a lot on your mind.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Sure do. You okay now?”

“Ayuh.”

“Well, we better make sure the Gleezer don’t fall in,” Laurent said, winking at him.

“Right. Might scare the sharks.”

They tooled around the Bay, occasionally weighing anchor to pull up some traps while the Gleezer basked in the spring sun.

“Can I give you a hand with those, sir?” the blond Secret Serviceman asked as they dropped anchor for the fourth time around nine.

“Sure,” Laurent said. “They’re pretty heavy, but you look like a strong guy.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Donny was relieved to know the kid could talk. The other one, wearing a pair of sunglasses, kept an eye on the Gleezer. That was all right with Donny; he preferred working alone.

“Were you in the Navy?” Laurent asked the helpful Secret Serviceman as they hauled on a line.

“Coast Guard.”

“Good enough to know starboard from port, I guess,” Laurent said, the veins standing out on his temples as he strained at the line. “Me and Donny both enlisted in the Navy the same day.”

“You’ve been friends a long time, huh?”

“Donny’s my best friend,” Laurent said. “Always has been, ever since we were toddlers. Our fathers were lobstermen, too. We grew up wearing yellow slickers and rain hats.”

Donny thought about his father, dead seven years now, and his mother wasting away in the nursing home in Portland. His older brother Ed had drowned in an accident while pulling traps back in 1968; he’d been only eighteen years old. Did the Gleezer have parents? Did it have brothers and sisters?

Maybe he’d do some reading about the Gleezer after this was over. When it first splashed down off an Indonesian island, the news about it was non-stop. After a few days Donny had tuned it all out, like most people. As far as his daily life was concerned, Indonesia was as far away as Gliese 581c.

But it hadn’t always been like that. He’d sailed to the Far East on a destroyer in 1975. He’d wanted to see something besides the Bay and the island, to know what was out there. He was stymied, however, by the fact that the Gleezer didn’t come from this world at all. It hadn’t just come across the sea, it had crossed the gulf of space.

In a way, though, maybe it wasn’t so different from him. It wanted to see something other than its familiar world.

The sun rose higher, warming Donny. He reflected that this was the easiest five thousand dollars he and Laurent had ever made, and they even had an extra hand to help them with the traps today.

“Mind if I ask you your name?” Laurent said to the young Secret Serviceman, “or is it a state secret?”

“My name’s Fields,” the young man said.

“Where you from, Agent Fields?” Laurent asked.

“Iowa.”

“Nice place to be from,” Laurent said.

“I’m not sure I know how to take that comment,” the kid said, grinning.

“No offense meant.”

“None taken.”

“I bet you didn’t see too many lobster boats when you were growing up out in the cornfields.”

“That’s a safe bet, Mr. Therriault.”

“Call me Laurent.”

A sailboat tacked into the wind and kept pace with them for a while.

“What’ll we do if they approach?” the other young Secret Serviceman asked.

Towson indicated that the chopper was not far away.

“Jeez, they aren’t gonna blow ’em out of the water, are they?” Donny said, alarmed at the prospect.

“We’ll keep the visitor safe,” Towson said. “That’s our job.”

“Those are our neighbors,” Donny said, “not terrorists.”

“We’re not going to do anything to them, unless they threaten the visitor. Do you think that’s likely, Mr. Doyle?”

“Only if they’re New Yorkers.”

Towson didn’t seem to get the joke at first, but then he smiled. “I’m from New York.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“You a Yankees man or a Mets man?”

“Yankees.”

“I wouldn’t mention that to many people around here.”

“Yes, I know,” Towson said, “but I hope we can call off the hostilities until the season gets underway.”

“That I can’t guarantee.” Donny went into a long peroration about Boston’s pitching staff, starters and relievers both, the powerful Red Sox batting order, and the Colombian kid who’d led the league in stolen bases last year. “He’s just about invisible when he tags second,” Donny said, “like greased lightning.”

“He’s quite a base runner,” Towson agreed.

Donny had hoped to distract Towson until the sailboat passed them. It continued to keep pace at a fair distance, and now he could see that someone on deck was watching through binoculars. Towson never took his eyes off it.

“We’ll have to report them if they take pictures,” Towson said.

“And then what?”

“Their cameras will be confiscated.”

“But why? Everybody’s seen pictures of the Gleezer.”

“I have my orders, Mr. Doyle.”

Donny had almost been feeling friendly enough to let the government man call him by his first name, but after that exchange he decided he’d let Towson go on calling him Mr. Doyle.

“You can’t blame people for being curious,” he said.

“I don’t blame them for anything,” Towson replied. “I’m just following protocol.”

“Hell of a country, ain’t it?” Donny said, “Regular people can’t even take a snapshot of the first visitor from another planet.”

“It’s not my decision.”

“No, I guess not. You’re only following orders, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

This was more like talking to a brick wall than a man, Donny thought, so he gave up trying and went back to work in silence. He was relieved to see that the sailboat had tacked to the south, without anyone aboard taking pictures, as far as he could tell. He’d never seen that particular boat before, and he wondered if it had come around the back side of the island from Castine, or maybe up from Camden.

“How’s the Gleezer doing up there?” Laurent asked, as he’d been asking every few minutes.

“So far, okay,” Towson said.

“Glad somebody around here’s having a good time,” Donny muttered to himself as he hefted a trap onto the deck and took a look at the contents.

“Uh, oh,” he said, “we got some trouble, Laurent.”

“Fight?”

“Ayuh,” Donny said, “this fella’s missing his pincher.”

Donny found the claw in the trap, along with a two pound male.

“Ornery, ain’t you?” Donny said to the battle’s victor as he held it dripping up to the sunlight.

“I’ve been wondering about something,” Laurent said to the kid.

“What’s that, Mr. Therriault?”

“Didn’t I tell you to call me Laurent? How did the President get along with the Gleezer?”

The kid didn’t say anything.

“I mean, what did she think of it?”

“She was courteous, cordial, and diplomatic,” Towson said, stepping in.

Agent Fields was trying hard not to laugh, Donny noticed. Maybe the President was as repulsed by the Gleezer as he was.

The Gleezer didn’t seem to bother Laurent much, but that was Laurent. Nothing bothered him all that much, not even losing his wife after a quarter century of marriage. He’d probably have a new one as soon as the divorce was finalized. Donny knew a couple widows who had their eyes on his old buddy. Now that Laurent was half-owner of this peapod, he’d have to fight off the ladies when he started dating again, especially once he and Donny really got the business going, bought more boats, hired some local boys, and sold lobsters wholesale to the big supermarket and restaurant chains.

At least they’d already put the first part of their plan into play, even if they’d gone into hock to buy the boat.

That was how Donny passed the rest of the morning, daydreaming and hauling up traps, until he noticed Laurent looking worried as he gazed aft. He was watching the three Secret Servicemen.

Towson spoke to his boys in low tones as they huddled with him. Donny couldn’t hear what he said, but he had the impression that something was wrong, especially with the way Agent Fields looked up at the net.

“Want us to haul it in?” Laurent asked.

Towson ignored him, almost as if he hadn’t heard him speak. He groped his way to the gunwale nearest to the net and stared straight at it.

“What is it?” Donny said.

Towson was very somber, and Agent Fields seemed worried. The quiet kid in the watch cap looked scared. Donny glanced at Laurent, who shrugged. He hadn’t heard what Towson had told his boys, either.

“The visitor’s dead,” Towson said.

“Dead . . . ?” Laurent’s mouth hung open.

“How can that be?” Donny said, feeling as if he’d just fallen overboard. “It’s just been laying up there, sunning itself. What could have killed it?”

“I don’t know, perhaps natural causes,” Towson said. “But it’s dead. All communication has stopped.”

“Maybe it’s just the chip,” Laurent said.

“No, the visitor let me know that it was dying just before the end.” Towson’s slate eyes didn’t blink.

“Jeez,” Laurent said.

“It can’t die on our boat,” Donny said, thinking about the possible consequences. There went all the dreams of capitalizing on the Gleezer’s little excursion around the bay. “You never even said it was sick.”

“I didn’t know,” Towson said. “There was only so much the exobiologists could figure out.”

“Was it very old?” Laurent said.

“We don’t know how long its species’ lifespan normally runs.”

“It came here to die,” Donny said, beginning to understand. “It came all the way to Earth just to die.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Donny looked up at the strange shape suspended over the Bay. “I wonder why?”

“Maybe it didn’t want to make the folks back home unhappy,” Laurent ventured.

The two young Secret Service agents swung the winch around, and Donny ratcheted it down until the Gleezer lay on the deck, still as a stone. Nobody spoke for a long time.

“The poor thing,” Laurent said at last.

The men stood in a circle around the alien’s corpse.

“Did it suffer?” Donny asked.

“What?” Towson said, still staring at the Gleezer.

“Was it in pain when it died?”

“It seemed peaceful,” Towson said, as if he were answering someone a long, long way away.

“Should we put it in its tank, sir?” Agent Fields asked.

“Yes, I suppose we should,” Towson said.

“What good will that do the Gleezer now?” Donny asked.

“None, but we don’t want it to decay. The chopper will lower a sling to take the tank back to the mainland. There’s a team staying at the suite who’ll examine it.”

“Frank’s gonna have to make some room in the hotel freezer,” Donny said.

“Yes, we may have to do that until arrangements can be made,” Towson said. “But for now, let’s get the visitor inside the tank.”

Donny worked the winch. Towson turned the tank on its side, and the two younger Secret Service agents guided the dead Gleezer over to it. They tilted the net until the Gleezer’s remains slid into the environmental tank. Once Towson was sure it was completely enclosed and the tubes were coiled inside the tank, he gently shut the ramp, now positioned as the lid. The tank hissed as it locked.

Donny didn’t know whether to admire Towson’s professionalism or to be contemptuous of his coolness. He decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Towson would probably be forced to retire from the Secret Service after this incident.

“Do you think one of us should say something?” Laurent asked.

“Say something?” Towson repeated.

“A prayer,” Donny said.

“Would one of you like to offer a few words?”

It was silent except for the gulls. The boat rocked back and forth. They all gazed at the Gleezer’s tank. No one spoke.

“Here comes the chopper,” said the Secret Serviceman whose name Donny didn’t know.

The approaching helicopter made a racket overhead and dipped as the sling was lowered toward the deck. It was the work of only a few seconds to lift and secure the environmental tank inside the sling. Everyone stood back as it went up, their clothing snapping like flags in the rotor’s wind.

They watched the helicopter fly back toward the island.

“I guess you’ll want us to take you in,” Laurent said.

“If you don’t mind,” Towson said.

Laurent went back into the pilot house.

“I’m sorry,” Donny said to Towson.

“Thank you, Mr. Doyle,” Towson said.

“What will they do with the . . . body?” Donny asked.

“I don’t know,” Towson said. “Dissection, most likely.”

Donny nodded.

“It’s too bad it can’t be sent home.”

“Yes, it’s too bad,” Towson said, “but a lot can be learned from its remains.”

“Why do you suppose it came here?” Donny asked.

“As far as I know,” Towson said, “it never revealed anything more than its desire to visit our world.”

“And now we’ll never know.”

“Probably not.”

“Imagine . . . ” Donny said.

“Imagine what?”

“How lonely it must have been.”

Towson nodded. There was no more talk until they said goodbye on the pier.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Towson said, “on behalf of your government and myself personally.”

“We got paid pretty well,” said Laurent, as the two younger Secret Servicemen climbed into the AIV.

“Not enough,” Towson said. He shook hands with Laurent and Donny, and got in to join his men. “Goodbye.”

“Bye,” Laurent said.

The door slid shut and the AIV backed itself up and turned around, heading up Water Street. It passed a couple of kids, who paid no attention to it.

Donny and Laurent watched until it was out of sight.

“Let’s get those lobsters in the tank,” Laurent said, after a while.

They climbed back aboard and got to work. The Gleezer’s strange scent lingered, but it was fading quickly. Donny separated one berried female from the others, and was pleased to see that her eggs were clear, not orange.

After a while, he had an idea.

“I got a name for the boat,” he said.

“What is it?”

“The Gleezer,” Donny said. “Like it?”

Laurent looked out at the Bay for a moment, and then said, “Yes, I do.”

“Know what else?”

“What’s that?”

“I think I’m gonna call my son tonight.”

“Good idea,” Laurent said. “Let me know how Little Donny’s doing, will you?”

“I sure will.”

“I’ll call my girls too. See how everybody is.”

“You gonna tell ’em?” Donny asked.

“Tell ’em what?”

“About what happened today?”

“I guess so,” Laurent said, after a moment. “It’s not something we can keep quiet, anyway. Might as well tell ’em.”

“Ayuh.”

They went back to work baiting traps.

Behind them, the sea rolled on as it had for billions of years.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December, 2008.

About the Author

Tim Sullivan is the author of the novels Destiny’s End, The Parasite War, The Martian Viking, and Lords of Creation, and edited the horror anthologies Tropical Chills and Cold Shocks. He has also appeared as an actor in many movies, directed, and written several screenplays. His critically acclaimed short stories have appeared in most of the genre’s major markets. He lives in South Miami, Florida with critic Fiona Kellegan.

One Last, Great Adventure

Ellen Kushner and Ysabeau S. Wilce

The Hero is fashionably late to the ball. He saunters through the ballroom doors, shrugging off the footman’s offer to divest him of velvet cloak and magnificently feathered hat. At the top of the stairs, he pauses, surveys the throngs below him, one negligent hand propped on his sword pommel, the other propped on the curve of his hip. He is smiling, as well a hero should.

Although the Hero needs no introduction, the steward introduces him anyway, bellowing over the vigorous music, the vigorous conversation. Those party-goers who arrived unfashionably on time turn away from the music, away from the conversation, and begin to applaud. Who would not applaud such a man, who slew the Lamia of Jengti in single combat, who turned back the invading hordes of Xana, and who, during the bloating sickness, crossed the Ice Ocean to bring back medicine for the city? The people of the City State Asteria love him. He has just returned from a three month campaign up in the highlands, helping their ally, the Sarifather of Irk, rid his kingdom of a pesky dragon, and he’s been missed.

The Hero is a mercenary, but he’s their mercenary.

The ball is not in the Hero’s honor, but that does not stop him from being mobbed by well-wishers as he comes down the sweeping staircase. They shake his hand, and pat his back, and ask him to dance, and offer him drinks, all of which he waves away with a good natured laugh. By inches, he makes his way to the dais, where sits the Elector of Asteria, watching the hub-bub with a fond eye.

The Hero kisses the Elector’s hand, and is warmly received in return. After he extends his well-wishes on her birthday, he is swept away by the Elector’s Heir to the roulette table, where he puts his fabulous luck to work at winning a large sum of gold. Later he charms the crowd with a vigorous horn-pipe solo, orates a touching toast to the birthday girl, and quickly dispatches a kettle-snake that somehow managed to crawl in through an open door and help itself to the oyster bar.

Later still, when the ball is called closed by the steward, and the rest of the guests have been stuffed, drunken and exhausted, into their carriages, the Hero slips through the darkened hallways of the Elector’s palace, evading the drowsy guards, and climbs the one hundred and fifty steps to the top of the Star Tower. He arrives at the top, puffing and a bit winded, for the steps are steep and very narrow. But the Elector is waiting for him inside, and she doesn’t mind that he’s a bit sweaty, not at all.

Even later, they lie wrapped in fur blankets, before the fire, and look upward, through the glass ceiling at the star-studded sky. The moon has long since set, but to the south, the darkness is slightly washed with green. The comet will be rising soon.

“I’m getting old,” the Hero says with a sigh. “Once this time of night would have felt too early. Now it feels too late.”

“Oh, tut,” says the Elector, who is older than the Hero by at least fifteen years, and still feels in her prime. Their exertions reopened the dragon scratch on the Hero’s thigh, and they are both now liberally streaked with blood, but neither feels like leaving their cocoon to attend to the mess. Their limbs are entangled in the most perfect comfort, and because of the glass above, the room is cold.

“I should retire,” the Hero says, yawning. “I’m thinking of retiring, actually.”

“And what would you do then, I wonder? Take up knitting?” The Elector toys with the scar on his shoulder, received years ago in a fight with an egregore.

“You don’t know how it is, darling,” he complains. “People trying to kill you all the time, facing death, pretending you don’t care—”

“No, I don’t know about any of that,” the Elector answers. She has weathered six assassination attempts, given birth to three children, and faced down two coups, all with a smile on her face. But that’s not heroic, that’s just life.

“I think about it . . . stopping. Sleeping late in the morning, not being responsible for anyone’s well-being. But then I think: What’s my legacy? What will I have left behind? What will they sing of in the evenings when I’m gone, and the next hero’s come in to slay nameless beasts with his well-named sword . . . ? And I think to myself: one last adventure. One last great adventure to go out on . . . And then I can buy a small house in the country and grow fat on apple dumplings.”

“Well if that’s really what you want, I may be able to help.” The Elector slithers from the fur blankets, goes to her desk, pawing through the mess. “Are you familiar with Illyria?”

“It’s west, somewhere, isn’t it?”

The Elector has found what she was looking for, and now she turns back to the Hero. The comet has risen fully now, flooding the room with green light, turning her long gray hair silvery, turns the dried blood on her stomach and thighs emerald. “Far west. It’s a small country, not much to commend it. Some decent rubies. A few songs. And this.”

He catches the chain she lobs at him. The pendant hits him square on the chest. He holds it up, sees a dangling gold locket set with a circle of tiny rubies. Inside is a gorgeously rendered portrait of a small pair of bare feet. The feet are young and soft, fragile looking. They are feet that have never walked a mile, or climbed a fence, or worn an ill-fitting shoe.

“Is this a joke?” the Hero asks. He is finding these small feet strangely stirring. They look so defenseless. The toes remind him of little pearls.

“Illyria is a hilly country. They like feet there. Their poets say the feet are the root of the soul. Or something.” She fusses with some papers, not looking at him. “And besides, some people find feet to be very erotic.”

“Some do.” Now he too rises from the fur blankets, to fill his jorum with wine poured from the clay jug warming on the hob. He tosses the wine back, and begins to dress. “But what should I do in Illyria?”

“Along with feet, what Illyria is rich in, is monsters. Strange, complicated, hard-to-kill ones. One monster in particular is causing the King of Illyria a lot of consternation. He has sent out a diplomatic circular seeking a hero to slay this monster.”

“Has he no heroes of his own?”

“Apparently not. But he does have a daughter with beautiful feet.”

“What is wrong with this princess that she cannot slay her own monster?”

“Not everyone is so enamored of swordplay, my love. And anyway, in Illyria they prefer their ladies to be delicate and decorative.” The Elector returns to the snug nest of blankets, watches the Hero as he sits in a chair, pulls on one boot.

He says casually, “You mentioned songs. Is there, perhaps a song in which a hero slays a monster and wins the hand of the princess, and the rights to a kingdom rich in rubies?”

“Now, as to that, you must ask your jongleur. My acquaintance with their legends and art forms extends only as far as that embassy ball I attended, in which feet were greatly celebrated in art and song, but woefully trampled in dance.” The Elector arches one of her own elegant feet, and lays it in his lap. He massages it idly with his large and capable hands. “But I imagine the standard rules apply.”

“It’s a long time,” he says with a roguish grin, “since I was a foot soldier.”

The Hero had started small, the third son of a highborn family in a country far to the north, which he has never cared to name. In that country’s tradition, the third son is the steward of the land, but the Hero did not care to be a steward. His personality was charmingly amoral, and his inclinations were towards flamboyant actions. But those qualities were reserved for the first son, with maybe a bit left over for the second. The third son was to be sober and attentive to the family’s extensive holdings, from which derived most of the family’s income and influence. He saw no heroics in pumpkins or wheat, so he left, leaving behind his family name, taking with him only his ambitions.

He went south, joined the Elector’s army as a private, and rose through the ranks to captain. He fought in her name as she expanded her territories, and in this fighting he made his own name as one who was reckless and bold, who was fair in battle, would honor the terms of a surrender, and who led from in front, not from behind. Then, bored with discipline and taking orders, he resigned his commission, and put together a small hand-picked crew of toughs and renegades, men who would fight to the death for the right price. Together, they embarked upon a glittering career as mercenaries, and with each campaign their fame grew.

But now, almost thirty years later, the Hero is ready to put his sword down. The knee he broke when a wyvern fell on it aches when it rains. The lung-full of dragon smoke he sucked in fifteen years ago still makes him wheeze. He has lost a toe to a shark-shifter, broken his nose in a battle with a catoblepas, and still has nightmares about being trapped for a week in a troll’s nest. His horse seems taller and the ground harder and field rations harder to digest. Wedding a sweet young princess and settling down to rule a small but rich kingdom sounds to him like an excellent retirement plan.

And so the next day finds him waiting for the Illyrian envoy in one of the Elector’s lesser receiving rooms. He’s wearing his best doublet, his best trunk hose, his best sleeves. Golden earrings gleam against his dark skin. His black hair is caught in a gold clasp. He doesn’t look at all like a hard-bitten mercenary. He looks like a prince.

“What if she’s an idiot?” Reynard says.

Typically, Reynard has not bothered to dress up. He wears the same tattered rusty red robe when-ever, what-ever. Since it’s never in style, it’s never out of style either. Unlike heroes, jongleurs of his caliber have no reason to try to impress with their clothes. When he sings or tells his tales, most people close their eyes to listen harder. Now, Reynard quits his pacing and perches on the velvet settee, hands clasped in his lap.

“As long as the princess is rich, I don’t care.” The Hero helps himself to a sugar plum. Since he’s in constant fighting trim, he never has to watch his waistline.

“Perhaps they are her best feature.” Reynard waves the dish away; he doesn’t fight. He’s been with the Hero ever since the Hero rescued him from a nasty trap he was caught in up in the Refusian Mountains. Like the Hero, he, too, has no place of origin, not that he’ll admit to. He knows the songs and stories of many lands, and plenty of good riddles, too.

He says: “What if she’s a scold?”

“Let her scold! My hearing is half shot already. Is my buckler on straight?”

“You look perfect and you know it,” Reynard says. “What if she’s an idiot and a scold and ugly besides?”

“Why then,” the Hero says fondly, “I still have you.”

Reynard snuggles up to him, and when the Illyrian envoy enters the room, he sees only a handsome dark man with a fox tucked under his arm. The Hero is feeding it sugarplums.

“How much farther is it to the palace?” the Hero asks. He tries to ask casually, aware that even so he risks sounding like a child on the road to granny’s. He is game but disgruntled; he’s no longer used to not being the one in charge of an expedition. They’ve been on the road for three weeks, with various modes of transportation: a ship down the coast, barges up river, and now horse-back. And yet, they don’t seem any closer to arriving.

Illyria is a much drier land than he had expected. And a redder one, besides. Each day seems hotter, and they left the last tree behind two days ago. Now it’s red rocks and cactus, and, at the watering holes, the occasional scrubby thornbush. The only green is a green by courtesy; at home, he would have called it gray. But things are different, here. The sky above is as blue as well-tempered steel.

“Surely that third river was the last one we had to cross?” The ‘river’ had had no water in it. If the Envoy hadn’t identified it as a river, the Hero would have thought it just another wash. The desert was criss-crossed with washes, proof that at some day it would rain. But not today.

From the back of his gray gelding, the muffled Envoy sighs and answers, “I’m afraid the map is a bit of a muddle.”

“You’re afraid?” The snappish redhead who rides at the Hero’s side turns his head to the Envoy, lightning quick. When he isn’t singing or telling stories, nothing but quips and pleasantries ever fall from his lips. It annoys the Envoy to no end. “My dear sir,” continues the redhead, closing in for the punchline; “if you’re afraid, imagine how the rest of us feel.”

“Reynard.” The Hero holds up his hand, and the jongleur stills, as if by magic.

“I only meant,” the Envoy says with forced patience, “that things are not exactly what they seem. On the map. We are not used to describing things as if we see them from above. Our maps, the ones our people use, are drawn from the foot’s eye view. Foreigners find them incomprehensible.”

“A map in translation,” the Hero says. “I see.”

“But we must arrive before dark,” the Envoy intones ominously, and the Hero does not need to ask why.

He betrays no disappointment when they come to the palace. After all, it’s not as though he’d been shown a picture of it surrounded by rubies. Nobody said it would be huge and splendid. And it’s not. Just a long building, melting into the hilltop it sits upon. Made of dried mud, painted a faded blue, with a red tile roof. They cross a moat full of prickly pear cactus, pass through a fence made of tall ocotillo spines. A simple house, but well-fortified.

And the forbidding mud walls hold a secret: a courtyard brilliant with purple and red bougainvillea, fragrant with fruit trees: oranges, lemons, fat red pomegranates. A stone fountain burbles refreshingly in the center of the courtyard. Above, the second floor balcony is lined with people, silently watching their arrival.

“Oh, good,” says Reynard; “I love an audience.” But he dismounts wearily, and says nothing more.

Before the Hero can follow suit, he is approached by a big man draped in a molting bear-skin, holding a stirrup-cup. The man does not speak any tongue the Hero is familiar with from his travels, but the ever-serviceable Envoy translates as the Hero is enthusiastically greeted with the cup and, once he has drunk and dismounted, an embrace. He still hasn’t figured out who the man is—could be the King, or the chief of security, for all he knows—but it doesn’t matter for now. Plenty of time tonight for reccy work. There will be a feast. There always is.

The welcome cup is promising, though; it implies brief hospitality, followed by a rest. He’s exhausted, and glad to be led to a hot bath. Once, he could ride all day and feast all night. Now he looks forward to his bed.

But first, as he predicted: the feast. The food is simple but ample. It’s not like anything he’s tasted before—everything is fiery hot, or seems to involve maize in one form or another—but he guesses he’ll get used to it in time. There’s plenty of cool, fizzy ale to put the fire out.

Reynard’s songs are well-received, even if the words are not understood. Reynard is well-versed in many languages and probably can speak this one, too, but he likes to lead with his best material. And not to reveal all he knows.

The bear-skin man does turn out to be the King. No crown, but a very impressive jade earring. You’d think he’d have broken out the rubies tonight, but nothing doing. He grins a lot, and slaps the Hero on the shoulder, his bad shoulder, alas. But he grins back; no need to get on the wrong side of his prospective father-in-law.

The Princess does not appear until the sweet is served; in fact, there are no other women at the feast at all. The Hero, used to the casual egalitarianism of the Elector’s court, finds that somewhat jarring. The Princess turns out to be a small, nervous girl, her hair in elaborate braids. No rubies there, either, though some nice enameled hairpins. She wears heavily-embroidered red velvet slippers on her feet, which are larger than the portrait made them appear. Maybe it’s the embroidery.

All in all, not what the Hero had hoped for, but it could have been much, much worse, so he will not complain. The Princess pours him tea with shaking hands, and smiles tremulously when he drinks it. It’s over-brewed, bitter and skunky, but he smiles his thanks. Heroes must operate heroically on many levels.

Eventually, the Hero brings up the Monster himself. He’s been waiting for the King to mention it, but the King seems to have forgotten why he’s there. Unaccountably nervous, the King. Probing questions receive vague answers.

Where can the Monster be found? In the hills, somewhere. Or possibly the sky. What does it look like? Big. How big? Bigger, apparently, than a man flapping his arms in a terrifying manner. It flies, then? Maybe. Unless it doesn’t. It has claws, or possibly extra sets of hands, or talons.

“It can take many forms, this monster,” the Envoy explains. “It is devious. Cunning.”

The Hero smiles to himself. He doesn’t care what form it takes, or if it’s devious, cunning, or smells like a poopy diaper and can sing five-part madrigals with itself. He’s never met a monster he couldn’t kill. He’ll kill this one, too. And then he will claim his reward and be done with heroics for good.

The Envoy communicates this to the King, prettying up the sentiment, of course. They agree he will go monster hunting in the morning. Even if they don’t actually find it then, he can get the lay of the land, and show off a little to give them confidence.

The Hero doesn’t care that the palace is small, or the country clearly not rich. As long as the bed is soft, he’ll be happy.

It is.

The Hero wakes in the soft bed to utter darkness and the susurrus of movement. Slowly he moves his hand, touches the warm steel that lies by his left side. He’d gone to sleep with the curled bulk of Reynard pressed against his right side. That pressure is now gone, but not surprisingly. At night, Reynard has a tendency to wander. He listens to the darkness, hears nothing more. But he knows he is not alone. He waits for the danger to declare itself, and declare it does, with the strike of a flint. A spark leaps, and then lights a small oil lamp, flaring green eyes.

“By the spotted god, I almost killed you,” the Hero complains. “Why did you not declare yourself?”

“I found the Princess,” the jongleur says, instead of answering.

The Hero sits up in astonishment.

“What do you mean?”

“The Princess. They’ve got her locked up in a storeroom. Not the girl from the feast. The real Princess.”

“That wasn’t the real Princess?”

“No. I’m sure of it. I recognized her feet.”

“Why is she locked up in a storeroom?”

“I don’t know. I think we should leave. Get out of here while we can. I don’t like the smell of any of this.”

The Hero is painfully aware that when Reynard doesn’t like the smell of something, it’s usually because that something stinks. But the soft bed . . . and the comfortable manor house . . . and his retirement. They are hundreds of leagues away from Asteria, and he has exactly three hundred dromas in his purse, five hundred more buried in a cave in the Pachego Mountains, and seventy-nine the Lord of Ravensgill owes him from a long night of euchre. That’s not enough to retire on.

And how can he return to the Elector, and tell her it did not work out? That he ran?

Plus he’d really like to know why the real Princess is tied up in the cellar, and a false princess was presented to him.

The Hero’s dim light plays off the storeroom’s crock-lined walls. A ham hanging from the ceiling almost cracks him in the head. If you can say nothing else about the King, he is well prepared for winter. Or a long siege. Reynard trots before him, leading the way. He would prefer to run, but he understands that a hero has his honor.

They come to a halt in front of a brass-bound door.

Reynard pauses to sniff the crack at the bottom appreciatively. “The stillroom,” he explains. “They’ve got a great vinegar mother starter. Pickles must be amazing.”

Reynard will have been in the room already, to bring back word of the Princess’s feet; but now he just stands there. It is the Hero’s place to open the door to the Rescue.

Still, a hero knows better than to rush into what could be a trap. On the other side of the still room door, the Hero holds the light low, not to reveal himself. In the corner, propped up against a giant clay pickle jar, is a sad tangle of clothes from which stick out two very dirty bare feet. The Hero recognizes them instantly. He has looked at their portrait a hundred times. He is wearing it around his neck now.

Still, he approaches the bundle slowly, with his sword drawn.

Reynard shows no such caution. He trots right over to the Princess’s bare foot and nudges it with his nose. She comes awake quickly, flipping and flapping like a fish, for the ropes that bind her allow no better movement.

“Have you come to kill me?” she spits. Unlike the people upstairs, she speaks a kind of basic form of Middle Standard. Curious.

“Is there a reason I should?” the Hero asks.

“Monsters need no reason!”

Reynard noses the girl’s foot again, and she tries to jerk it away.

“I’m not a monster!” the Hero protests.

“Untie me then, and prove it.”

“Tell me why I should first. Then I will be more comfortable untying you.”

“My feet are numb. Numb and grimsome. It is a disgrace. You must not look at them.”

Politely, he looks over at a shelf full of preserved fruit of some kind. It is impossible to tell, in this light, what kind it is.

She follows his gaze. “And they do not feed me.”

A slash of the Hero’s sword and a dried sausage falls into his grasp.

The girl glares at him. “Most heroic. I see now. Yes, you are the Hero, with my portrait on your neck. My father sent you, to slay monsters and marry me. Are you done with the slaying? It matters not; I shall not marry you!”

“The feeling may be mutual, madam. But we get nowhere if you are not forthcoming with the reason you are in this situation.”

“Give me some meat and I will tell you.”

So the Hero cuts off a couple slices and offers them to Reynard, who takes them delicately, and carries them over to the Princess. Still bound, she takes the slices from his muzzle to her lips, and gobbles them down.

“Now,” she says imperiously, somewhat spoiling the effect by trying to wipe grease off her chin with her shoulder, “are you going to release me or not?”

One of her pretty feet, which she’d tucked up demurely under the edge of her grubby gown, peeks out a little. Good gods, the Hero thinks; is she flirting with me?

If she is, he knows this game.

“It depends,” he says. He slouches elegantly, one hand negligently on his pommel. “If you refuse to wed your rescuer, then what’s in it for me?”

“Ah,” she snaps back; “but I think you do not yet do the slaying. A braggart is no hero.”

“But a hero can still be a braggart. What have you got against heroes, anyway?”

She draws her feet back in. “In the general, nothing. But to be forced to marry the one, just because he knows how to make the Monster go SPLAT with his sword . . . How is this for me the what’s in it?”

The Hero’s just a sucker for girls trying out slang. He crouches, loosens the ropes. As soon as she is free, the girl clambers unsteadily to her feet, grabs the nearest jar and pops the lid. She doesn’t bother with a spoon.

“Ah!” she sighs happily, licking her lips. “This was the worst! To be looking always, and never tasting.” She runs her finger around the bottom of the jar. “This is really quite good. Pumpkin. I like the spice. When I home, these I take.”

“Home . . . ? But surely you live here?”

The Princess gapes at him. Her teeth, like her toes, are little pearls. “But surely I do not! You think this—this?—is the house of my father?!”

The Hero sits down on a barrel. Between the long journey, the feast, the ale, and the tiny bit of sleep he’s gotten, this whole thing is beginning to feel like a dream to him. It has a certain dream logic. If he had to slay something now, he could probably do it on sheer nerve, but untangling riddles he prefers to do by day and well-rested. He pops open another jar of pumpkin jam. It is good.

“You may,” he says wearily, “remember a certain bargain we made over sausage? I have yet to see your end of it fulfilled. Why. Are. You. Here?”

She sits forward, her posture much improved by food and blood circulation. Oh, he thinks; to be so young as to bounce back that quickly from being tied up!

“You know, I think,” she says, “our land it is plagued by the Monsters. And my father, he seeks the Hero to kill them. The men of our land, them we cannot trust—for many of them are with sympathy for the Monsters, yes! Many of them even have the blood in their families, though they will not say. And those that do not, they are villains, lowly men of the soil unworthy. Do you see?”

He doesn’t, quite, but he nods to keep her going.

“My father the King, may his name be exalted although I am quite mad at him and wish never to step in his shadow again, he hates the Monsters so much, he wishes them all dead.” Another nod; this is par for the course. “My father the King seeks a man to lead us in battle, to slay them in the dawn time. And I would be wed to that man, no matter where his feet have took him!”

She shakes her head. Her ash-colored hair, loose from all her exertions, falls in snaky, dusty ringlets down her modest front. “This cannot be. I will not wed nobody like that. But it is true, my family’s throne will never be free if the Monsters are not put down.

“So I think: I will kill them myself! Then I make my own choice.” She looks up into his face to see if she is shocking him. He thinks of the Elector and her heir, and nods sagely, his face a mask of politic sympathy. “Thus I take my little brother’s sword, and I climb out my window but I do not have to go through the cactus which is good because I only bring the one dress, and I have a good horse and know to saddle so I make away before anyone know it first. And thus I come here, to their lair! But they—”

“Wait.” The Hero holds up one hand. He almost laid it on her shoulder, but you don’t do that, not yet. “This house—with the sausage, and the very decent jam—this is the Monsters’ lair?”

“Oh, yes.”

“The ones who made the jam?”

She nods, unperturbed by the dream-logic of the thing.

Ha! Well, that explains the remoteness and inaccessibility of the ‘palace.’ It’s a hideout, not a royal seat. These people want his protection, probably from the King; no wonder they were evasive about monsters. So did their Envoy deceive the Elector? Or—

She interrupts his thoughts, leaning forward to say earnestly, “Do not be deceive by their looks being like us.” Her eyes get very wide. “These Monsters are the terrible. They are—how do you say it?” She utters a word that sounds like asfdasfddfs.

At his side, Reynard mutters something softly. He can’t quite catch it—and since Reynard has not declared himself yet to the Princess, the Hero knows from experience that it is not his place to ask the fox to speak.

Her next words make it clear that he was right.

“Animals!” she whispers. “They are not human, not at all. They wear human face, but their hearts are monster, and too their shape, when they will!”

Reynard bristles, growling.

The Princess goes on heedlessly, “For years they live amongst us, pretending to be like. Because my grandfather’s father’s father, he conquered this land and made them leave or promise never to do their asfdasfddfs tricks again. Ha!” She spits delicately, for emphasis, it seems. “My toe.” Curse words never translate well in any language. “But they are true to their nature. Untrue to us. At night, when they wish it, they make the shapes of animals, and then,” she breathes, like a child telling ghost stories, “then they run in our villages and eat our young and ravage our maidens and steal our coinage.”

Well, isn’t that what Monsters always do? He nods gravely, and she continues, encouraged, “They say they own this country before we come here to make them civilized like us. We must defeat them or give up our land. And that may never be. That is what my father says. I wonder sometimes because my nursie she was asfdasfddfs. And I love her very much, she no monster. But she had live with us a long time, and civilized. These, they are bad!”

Reynard’s growls grow perilously close to speech. The Hero places a cautioning hand on his head, then slices a little of what’s left of the sausage. But before he can offer it to the fox, to his surprise the Princess says softly, “Oh! May I feed it to him?”

May she? It’s an interesting moment. The Hero hands the Princess the meat, and she holds it out to the fox, very slowly and gently. This, he thinks, is a girl who has not had pets of her own.

Reynard sniffs it for form’s sake, as if he did not know what it was, or who was offering. For a second, the Hero thinks he will snap her fingers, but instead, he snaps the sausage, tosses it showily in the air, catches it in his mouth and swallows it whole. The Princess laughs. She has a nice laugh. The Hero lets out a little of the tension of the night. Peace offering accepted, although he’s unsure why. He can’t wait to hear Reynard’s take on everything. Did he really not realize they were in a house of Shifters, himself?

“I like this little one,” she says, bending to pet him.

Reynard nips her fingers. She squeaks, then bats him playfully on the ear. He leans in to her. She scratches him behind his neck, which he adores—but seldom lets the Hero do.

“This one,” she croons, “he understand. He is very sweet.” Reynard leans into her, cuddling. What is he up to? Gaining her trust, the Hero supposes. Playing some foxish game of strategy.

The Princess sighs, looks up at the Hero again. “So we are understanding, now?” She puts the fox aside, clambers to her feet. She leans unsteadily against a pickle barrel. “Your sword you give me, and the Monster I kill.”

The girl has sand, the Hero has to give her that. Here she stands in a storeroom, defenseless and covered in jam, and she is sticking to her plan. But he can’t give her his sword, of course.

“All of them?” he asks.

“Mmm, no. That is not possible, even to you, I think.” She taps the barrel, thinking. “I kill just one; then I am Hero. I go home. My father cannot choose for me then.”

She’s let her foot peep out again from underneath the bedraggled hem of her gown. A ruby ring sparkles on one toe. “Your sword?”

The Hero hesitates. He’s a man of action, even of strategy—battle strategy. He is clever about movements, and terrain, and how other people who think that way are likely to jump. It’s not his job to figure out who the enemy is. That’s Reynard’s job. But Reynard is licking the Princess’s fingers, seemingly unconcerned with her genocidal plots.

“I make friends with asfdasfddfs when I am Queen, I think,” she says. “That will be best for all, and no more killing nonsense. We go, now?”

The Hero has learned one piece of diplomatic strategy from Reynard: the stall. Best to leave the Princess snug in the storeroom whilst he and Reynard discuss their course of action.

“But if I release you, it would be to warn the Monsters of what we plan.” (Oh, dear; now he’s picking up her diction. He does that, when he travels.)

“Yes,” she replies; “that is right. Good thinking, Hero. You tie me up again—but loosely—and I will be so helpless and hungry they will pity me. And then—BAMM! Ha.”

The Hero smiles. She’s brave, and has a good sense of fun.

So back to the filthy floor she goes, and he ties her up again, but loosely.

He stands up, taking the light with him. Her voice at his feet is suddenly small. “I wonder if . . . if your fox might like to stay with me? Just a little while? Until light comes again?”

Of course he feels sorry for the girl; but if she wants to be a hero, she needs to learn to wait in the dark, alone. He wants to get Reynard back up to the room, so they can discuss and strategize. He wants Reynard’s take on the shifting situation. Ha. He puns when he’s tired. But it’s Reynard’s choice.

“Thank you,” says the Princess softly. He lowers the light a tidge, just enough to see the red fox curled at her feet.

Dawn is breaking; there’s movement about the house. The Hero heads stealthily back to his room. But when he gets to his door, he finds it open. Inside is a whirl of screeching Illyrians. The bear-skinned ‘King’ rushes towards him, gesticulating and shouting. He’s swept up in the whirl, and borne down the hallway.

Did they discover his discovery of the Princess? Everyone is shouting. Some are waving short swords; others brandish bows. The Hero looks around frantically for the Envoy; he hopes they are not shouting hang him or chop him or something equally unpleasant, but without the Envoy he has no idea. No one has disarmed him yet, which is reassuring. They are making enough noise, surely, that Reynard will be warned.

The horde bursts out into the courtyard; the sun is barely over the roof ridge and already its rays feel like hammer-blows on his back. The gate is open; they hustle across the cactus moat, and through the ocotillo stockade to a stand of nervous-looking horses. There’s the Envoy, holding the bridle of a beautiful paint horse.

“What is going on?” the Hero demands.

“The Monster! Come, mount, we have no time to lose! He catches the dawn!”

As they ride away, pell-mell, the Hero looks over his shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of a small red shape, rushing to catch up with them. But the dust cloud is too thick and obscuring.

Even in early morning, it is hot out on the Illyrian hillside. The smells of sage and juniper mingle with the dust and old, old yellow rock. He wonders where the rubies are. Maybe right underneath him . . .

They’d ridden to an outcropping of boulders. There, they dismounted and picketed the horses, and there the monsters—who looked like men and who hadn’t acted the least bit monstrous—had given him a club made of some sort of polished hardwood, its tip embedded with shards of black glass as sharp as his sword’s blade; and then they insisted that he take a swig from the leather bota. A grassy-tasting liquid that burnt the roof of his mouth and made him feel momentarily light-headed. He accepted the club politely, planning to drop it behind a bush when he could.

What is the Monster that the monsters are afraid of? A bigger Shifter? A renegade, a rogue?

From his stance on the hillside, he looks around hopefully for Reynard; but still no sign of the small red fox. This, more than the approaching Monster, makes him nervous. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the commotion from the storeroom? No, Reynard can hear a mouse a mile away. It’s unlike Reynard to stay so far behind out of choice. He must be working strategy. That’s it.

There’s sudden silence. The Hero looks up, momentarily blinded by the sunlight. And so he feels it before he hears it, hears it before he sees it. The tremble of rock, the rhythm of hooves. Look up, look right, and across that little hill . . . and there it is, magnificent and undaunted, against the sun.

A four-legged bird, wings more than the usual two, hard to tell when they’re folded back, but jet black, obsidian black, gleaming with a million colors in the sun. Its legs are shiny, but end in spiked hooves. Its eyes are rubies. Its beak is enormous.

The man next to him is trembling. He’s breathing a word, over and over again . . . it’s so clearly “HIM! THAT! HIM!” that the Hero needs no translation. The terror is palpable.

The Monster wheels and cavorts upon the hill, as if announcing itself, as if daring anyone to approach it. It pauses, then, its wheeling more focused, purposeful. The great beak turns from side to side, ruby eyes scanning the terrain. It is looking for them.

This is his moment. Time for thinking, time for planning is over. The Hero charges, sword upraised.

And the Monster draws a weapon of its own.

Oh, six-fingered gods, it’s a man! A man robed in feathers and jewels, but a man nonetheless, up on a horse so he has the advantage, but that’s easy enough, the Hero has killed plenty of valiant steeds in his time (pity, though, about this one).

Unhorsed, the feathered man leaps to the high ground, defends himself with massive strokes of his strangely serrated blade, formed of a shining black so dark that when the sun catches it, it turns white, or all colors at once. Bastard. The Hero is whistling through his teeth, an old habit from his training days that he’s not even aware of doing.

The creature puts up a good fight. He has a hard time thinking of him as a man. The feathers and jewels are beautiful, distracting . . . they should slow the fellow down, but they seem to give him assurance. Maybe he’s using magic. Probably he is. The elaborate mask should be denying him peripheral vision, but instead he seems to see out of the side of his head, like a bird. The cape should be weighing him down, but he’s stronger than the Hero; he feels that when their blades collide, and the force of the obsidian blade nearly pushes him off the hillside. Damn.

The others are shouting something at him, but it’s from the direction of his deaf ear. And do they really think they can advise him how to fight?

The Hero begins to work at disrobing his opponent, to separate him from his magic accoutrements. Tricky, but fun. Very tricky. Trying to stay alive while aiming for a shoulder seam . . . Trying to breathe in the hot sun while figuring out how the headpiece attaches to the neck . . . The Hero is slowing down. This is not going well.

He seems to have shrunk to the size of a small animal; he is looking up at a huge black blade coming down at him from a cerulean sky. No, he is on his knees, that’s what it is. They’re going to hurt like seven devils later, but for now he must use them to get up. Up is where he belongs, not rolling and dodging, eating dust like a desert snake. He can’t get a purchase. It’s like the land is pulling him down, demanding he yield his bones to it before they can even belong to him for the few years remaining to him. He was planning to retire here, not to expire. Not yet.

Dimly he realizes someone new is shouting over the din, and that shouting is not words of encouragement either. He raises his head, sees through the grit a pair of dirty, perfectly formed feet.

“STOP!!!” screams the Princess. The rest of her words, foreign, are lost to him.

The feathered creature stops. The Hero struggles to his feet, wipes sweat from his eyes, finds his fighting stance, watches the other for his next move—and is utterly astonished by the fact that the creature has begun to dance. It’s a lively pace, a sprightly jig that seems to be designed to keep his feet from touching the earth—or, no, to get a bright red fox to let go of his legs.

The Hero is touched beyond measure; Reynard has never fought for him before—and he is horrified to realize that means he must need him to.

The creature stamps and shouts, still trying to shake Reynard off his lower legs. The Hero realizes he must try to attack the top half, the feathered cape, flaring into wings, the beaked head. Because of the fox dance, it’s hard to say where the feathered man will be from moment to moment.

The creature is ignoring the Hero, now, concentrating on getting rid of Reynard. Which is good, because he’s afraid to come in too close, lest he hurt the fox by mistake. And besides, his sword has gotten awfully heavy. Must be the heat. The fox is a flurry of motion. The Hero is mesmerized by the dancing colors: foxfur rust, tailtip black, rainbow obsidian blade, ruby eye, feather black, rainbow blade, foxblood red—

“No!” the Princess is shouting. Is she defending the Monster, or Reynard? He should give her his impossibly heavy sword after all, see how much luck she has with it. She’s lifting something dark and bright: the club they’d given him. She holds it high above her head, and flings it over both their heads, right at the feathered creature.

It hits with a huge thud. The creature’s arms fly upward. Is it going to take off from the hillside? No; the obsidian blade goes sailing out instead. Empty-handed, the creature seems to shrink. It—he—falls forward, face-plants in the dust, head askew as the beak turns to one side, reaching for but never nailing the fox lying utterly still beside it.

The Hero stands panting, gasping for water, no longer sure of his status. His sword feels right in his hand. The Monster is dead. Why is no one cheering and bringing him a drink?

At his feet, a girl sits in the dust of the hillside, cradling a ragged bundle of red fur in her lap. She is crooning to it, and stroking its bloody pelt.

In the end, he decides to return to Asteria.

The King of Illyria is dead, slain on a dusty hillside by a mysterious stranger while out hunting for his missing daughter, to bring her back to her duty. The Princess will become Queen of the land, now—its first female ruler from this line of invaders. She is assured the throne by virtue of the support of the Shifters, whose rights she has vowed to sustain at the price of their sworn loyalty, and a tribute of seventy-seven jars of pumpkin jam each year.

And she will be marrying an Outlander, a clever red-haired man with a beautiful voice, a nice line in verse, and a pronounced limp from a healing wound. Their time together in the storeroom had been short, but intensely romantic. The last of the Princess’s antipathy for Shifters had vanished away, and Reynard had realized two feet, when they were so well formed, were just as good as four.

They asked him to stay, of course. He’d make a wonderful ornament to their court, and a godfather to their children. He could help train the new queen in fighting, and later her children, as well.

But he is suddenly homesick for a place he never thought was home. He’d like to swim in the Asteria River again, and to fish in it, too. He’d like to sit in the orchards of Asteria, and pick apples from their trees. He’d like to taste the fine pastries of the Asterian court, and the sweet red wine.

He’d like to see the Elector again.

He takes two of the three hundred dromos from his purse, plus his winnings from last night’s game of something enough like euchre for him to have been successful with the younger set, and a gold hairpin from the grateful princess, and goes off to the Bazaar to see if he can find the Elector a really nice ruby ring.

There will be a Bazaar. There always is.

First published in Fearsome Journeys, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2013.

About the Authors

Ellen Kushner’s cult classic “Fantasy of Manners” novel Swordspoint introduced readers to the world to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (Locus Award, Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), and a growing handful of related short stories. She recorded all three novels in audiobook form for Neil Gaiman Presents/Audible.com, and Swordspoint won a 2012 Audie Award. Her novel Thomas the Rhymer won both the World Fantasy and Mythopoeic awards. With Holly Black, she co-edited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban fantasy shared world series created by Terri Windling. A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, Ellen Kushner was also the longtime host of the national public radio show Sound & Spirit, and created several one-woman shows for it. Most recently, she revisited the world of Riverside first popularized in Swordspoint with Tremontaine, a collaborative serial novel from SerialBox.com. She lives in New York City with Delia Sherman and no cats whatsoever.

Ysabeau S. Wilce was born in California and has followed the drum through Spain and most of its North American colonies. She became a lapsed historian when facts no longer compared favorably to the shining lies of her imagination. Prior to this capitulation, she researched arcane military subjects and presented educational programs on how to boil laundry at several frontier army forts. She is a graduate of Clarion West and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree Award, and won the Andre Norton Award. Her novels include Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from A Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined To Her Room), and Flora’s Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light. Her most recent work, a collection of short stories called Prophecies,Libels & Dreams was published in 2014. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is very fond of mules.

You Wouldn’t Be Reading This If It Weren’t For Buck Rogers

Mark Cole

Buck Rogers.

The name is often spoken with a sneer, as if all of science fiction could be summed up with a single, iniquitous name—which makes it very hard to appreciate how much we owe him.

Buck freed SF from the confines of the adventure pulps and a narrow, specialized audience and put it in the average reader’s hand (and a toy raygun in the other!). Before long hordes of imitators followed Buck. Almost every newspaper had a SF strip. They would spill into the pages of the early comic books, into the movie theaters, the radio and TV, bringing SF to thousands of new readers. At least one—Ray Bradbury—gave Buck credit for his lifelong interest in SF (and who knows how many others weren’t quite as willing to admit it).

And perhaps the strip wasn’t quite as terrible as we think.

Originally, he was named “Anthony.”

Buck got his start in a singularly dull novelette by Philip Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 AD”, in the August 1928 Amazing Stories (its cover looks so much like the classic images of Buck that no one notices it illustrates E.E. “Doc” Smith’s story, Skylark of Space).

By now everyone knows the story: Rogers gets trapped in a mine filled with a mysterious radioactive gas and wakes up almost five hundred years later. But then it bogs down in endless descriptions of future technology, future history, and future language. Even the “exciting” action is told in a detached tone, more suitable for a history text than a pulp adventure.

Yet, within a year, it became one of the most popular comic strips ever.

How that happened isn’t clear. Nowlan later claimed that he’d suggested the idea to John F. Dille, the head of the National Newspaper Syndicate, while Dille, in Coulton Waugh’s The Comics, failed even to mention Nowlan and took full credit for creating Buck. Some sources claim Dille persuaded the reluctant Nowlan to adapt his story. And supposedly Buck’s original artist, Lt. Dick Calkins, loved dinosaurs and wanted to draw a prehistoric strip instead.

Whatever happened, Buck Rogers awoke in the Twenty-Fifth Century on January 7, 1929. Dille gave him his new name, borrowed from cowboy star Buck Jones (or, depending on who’s telling the story, the Dille family dog).

The first strip rushed through the first eight pages of the original and the strips that followed introduced the Twenty-Fifth Century with a minimum of talk and a fair amount of action. True, the artwork is stiff, and the average strip has as many words as several weeks of a modern comic. But even these early strips have an intense readability as they rush headlong from one adventure to the next.

The novelette‘s “Han” became “Mongol Reds,” losing the SF backstory that appeared in Nowlan’s sequel “The Airlords of Han.”  While many have accused the strip of “yellow menace” racism, the original Han were a “soulless” race, tainted by the mysterious influence of a “small planet or meteor” that crashed in a remote part of China. Nowlan even notes that Mongols from non-tainted regions were nothing like them.

While the strip refers to the Mongols as “Reds” it never actually calls them Communists: it merely notes that they came out of the Gobi desert and crushed the armies of the world with their “super-science.” But before the year was out something remarkable happens that severs most of the strip’s connections to its Amazing roots. Buck and his girlfriend, Wilma Deering, go to the Mongol Emperor’s Forbidden City, hoping to end the war. There they find a gilded, super-scientific Kublai Khan who didn’t know that his treacherous Viceroy has been oppressing the Americans.

Peace breaks out. Buck and Wilma return home to capture the Viceroy—and everyone forgets the Mongols who promptly vanish from the strip and are never heard from again.

But before things have a chance to get dull, a new menace appears: the Tiger Men of Mars!

Within the next few years, Buck would travel to Mars, then to the asteroid Eros, and eventually Saturn, the artwork improving enormously along the way. A Sunday page, featuring the adventures of Wilma’s little brother, Buddy, launched in March of 1930. A radio show followed in 1932, a TV series in 1950.

And then there were the toys.

The official Buck Rogers raygun hit the stores in 1934, setting off a price war between Macy’s and Gimbel’s that left both stores in shambles (Buck actually carries one in the 1936 movie serial). Tons of merchandise flooded the market, everything from Big Little Books to rocket ships, spacesuits, helmets, figures, buttons, watches, and rings. It was the first—and perhaps the most successful—SF franchise.

So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that hordes of imitators soon burst onto the comics page.

Oddly, Buck’s influence didn’t help his first competitor: Basil Wolverton (of “Lena the Hyena” fame) sold Marco of Mars to the Independent Syndicate of New York in 1929, only to have them drop it before publication: Buck Rogers had just gone to Mars and they didn‘t think there was room for another Mars strip. Only a handful of samples survive.

However, Jack Swift, a copy of the successful Tom Swift books, did far better, reaching the comics page in 1930 and running for seven years—not that anyone remembers it today.

Buck’s first serious competitor rode into the comics on the back of a dinosaur in 1933. Rather than a futuristic setting, the NEA chose the distant past. V.T. Hamlin created a rollicking, energetic strip about the “bone age” adventures of a caveman named Alley Oop, featuring some of the most stunning Sunday pages ever created.

But Hamlin did something even more stunning six years later, when Alley and his girlfriend get sucked into the modern world by Dr. Wonmug’s time machine. Oop quickly joins Wonmug’s research team and journeys through time and space, going everywhere from ancient Troy and prehistoric Egypt, to the Old West and a rocket trip to the moon. Of all the SF newspaper comics of the thirties, Alley Oop is the only one still published.

Brick Bradford started in 1933 as an aviation strip very like Dick Calkins’ other strip, Skyways. His adventures would take him through space and time and even deep into the subatomic world. While it was never quite in the same league as the best SF comic strips, Brick appeared in a 1947 movie serial and actually outlasted Buck Rogers, surviving until 1987.

Buck’s greatest competitor did not reach the comics page until 1934. Flash Gordon was the rarest of all things, the imitation that was far greater than the original.

King Features had considered a cartoon version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s, John Carter (ERB’s son would write and draw John Carter of Mars in 1941). Instead they let loose Alex Raymond—one of the greatest illustrators ever—on an incredible Sunday page that hurled the readers into a world of monsters and fantastic machines.

Modern readers used to the general blandness of the comics page will probably be stunned by how brutal Flash could be. In its most outrageous sequence, thousands of warriors from all over Mongo gather to vie for their own kingdom in the monstrous “Tournament of Death,” knowing that all but one of them will die in the arena.

The strip added a daily version by Austin Briggs in 1940, who took over the Sundays in 1944, after Raymond volunteered for the Marines. Various other artists succeeded him. The strip lasted until 2003.

It is hard for us to understand the influence the comics had back then. Everyone read them. When a newspaper strike hit New York, Mayor LaGuardia went on the air to read the latest installments of Little Orphan Annie and other strips.

At their peak, every syndicate tried to develop a complete package to compete with their rivals’ most successful strips—a detective strip, a soap opera strip, an adventure strip . . . and, of course, an SF strip.

Some, like Dash Dixon were just plain ugly, but if your paper couldn’t get Flash Gordon, you could settle for his doppleganger, Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire (1935-1941), instead. Speed Spaulding (1940-1941) adapted the novel When Worlds Collide into comics form, adding a two-fisted hero and a love interest.

SF also found its way into a number of established strips. Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse fought mad scientists and mechanical men, explored floating cities, and even hunted dinosaurs in a lost world. A mad scientist named O.G. Wotasnozzle moved into the upstairs bedroom in the Sappo top strip of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater (a.k.a., Popeye): he and Sappo would go on a five month tour of the solar system in 1937, and his bizarre inventions dominated the strip long after Segar’s death.

Even odder was the sudden lurch into SF and fantasy taken by Harry Tuthill’s bitingly satiric portrayal of a feuding couple in The Bungle Family. His unlikable hero accidentally traveled to the future in 1934 (in a sequence reprinted in The Comic Strip Century) and the strip was never quite the same.

And then there’s Connie, by master illustrator Frank Godwin. She started out in 1927 as yet another flighty flapper, became an aviator when the daily strip debuted two years later, then a detective, and then an adventurer. Before long, her exploits took her through time and on an epic 1938 space trip.

By the 1950s, the comics market had changed. The adventure strip—the mainstay of SF comics—was in decline, thanks in part to Peanuts and the visually simplified gag strips that followed—and in part to television and changes in readership.

But a few new SF strips tried to buck the trend. Twin Earths (1952-1963), which revolved around the discovery of a parallel earth, featured separate continuities for the Sundays and dailies, each set on a different earth.

In 1952, the New York Daily Sun tried to attract new readers with an exclusive strip not available anywhere else. Beyond Mars was written by Golden age SF Grandmaster Jack Williamson and loosely based on his Seetee novels (these strips will finally be available in a full color collection this October).

Art Sansom, best known for The Born Loser drew Chris Welkin, Planeteer, a strip once described as Terry and the Pirates go to Mars. His Caniff-inspired artwork, however, was far better than that of the 1950s George Wunder’s Terry. And Jerry Robinson, the creator of the Joker, drew Jet Scott, a near-future SF spy strip that ran from 1953 to 1955.

The sixties were not as kind to the SF strip.

Only Australian artists Reg and Stanley Pitt managed to sell a new SF strip, Gully Foyle. However, while the Ledger Syndicate convinced fifty papers to take their adaptation of The Stars My Destination, all their hard work came crashing down when Alfred Bester tangled up their rights to the book.

Even Buck Rogers couldn’t survive and ended in 1967.

But that didn’t stop Dick Tracy from going into space.

In 1962, Diet Smith, the genius entrepreneur behind the two way wrist radio, unveiled the space coupe. Two years later, Tracy reached the moon where he encountered the Moon Maid, and the people of Moon Valley.

Mike Curtis, the strip’s current artist, claims that it was The Jetsons that inspired Chester Gould to create the sequence. Others credit John F. Kennedy’s speech about putting a man on the Moon. Either way, the violent earthbound detective suddenly found himself in fantastic adventures that would have been more at home in a children’s SF strip of the thirties. His adopted son even married the Moon Maid.

Gould quietly dropped the Moon storyline after Apollo Eleven, shoving the Moon Maid into the background and only referring to her as “Junior’s wife.” The sequence has been an embarrassment for Tracy aficionados for years and Gould’s successors killed the Moon Maid off as soon as they could.

Ironically, the current team decided to bring back the Moon Maid in 2012. Whether Staton and Curtis will now abandon the Moon—or how much longer the octogenarian sleuth will survive—remains to be seen.

The SF comic strip wasn’t quite dead, however.

Three new SF strips (and a revived Buck Rogers)—hit the comics page in the wake of Star Wars.

Star Hawks began in 1977. Written by SF humorist (and comics historian) Ron Goulart and drawn by Gil Kane, the strip hearkened back to comics like Flash Gordon. It originally came in an unusual two-tiered format that allowed more room for the artwork, but this proved too radical for most editors to accept. It quickly reverted to standard size, but it was too late to overcome those first impressions. The strip only lasted until 1981.

The others followed in 1979. March brought a Star Wars comic drawn by Magnus Robot Fighter’s Russ Manning. When he retired, the dream team of comics legends Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson took over. Sadly, it died in 1984.

Inspired by the success of the new TV series, Buck Rogers returned in September, in a modernized version that had nothing to do with the show. He survived until 1983—two years longer than his TV incarnation.

In December, Paramount cashed in on Star Trek: The Motion Picture with a strip based on the film but featuring new stories. After The Wrath of Khan came out, they updated the art without comment. It never ran in many papers and even the most diehard Trek fans had no idea it existed. In its four years at least 24 artists worked on it, more than many strips that ran for forty or fifty years. Larry Niven even wrote a 1982 sequence.

But it still wasn’t enough.

Perhaps the problem was that there had been too many SF strips. Or perhaps it was the general decline of the newspaper. Whatever the reason, they all died, leaving only Alley Oop and Flash Gordon.

And Flash went into endless re-runs in 2003.

SF never quite died on the comics page, though.

While SF tropes appear on the comics page almost everyday—after all, most strips are now drawn by the post-Spielberg generation—a select few offer a steady diet of SF humor, whether in the fantasy sequences in Calvin and Hobbes and the brilliant but little noticed Franklin Fibbs or the SF adventures of Jim Meddick’s Monty, and Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows. Mark Buford’s Scary Gary and Mark Tatulli’s Lio mix it with a little horror and Ink Pen with superheroes.

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! by Tim Rickard is perhaps the most science fictional strip in the newspapers today. But it never aspires to be more than a broad parody of all things Star Trek.

And then there was the one, last great missed opportunity, the potential classic that died far too young:

In 2005, Universal Press Syndicate launched Captain Murphey on the Comics.com website.

Their web-only strips were a twist on the “development contracts” offered to promising cartoonists. Instead of honing their skills drawing comics that would probably never be seen, their work appeared online, with the promise of syndication should they attract an audience. Pearls Before Swine may have been the only strip to make that leap.

Mark Seydewitz loved the pulpy feel of classic Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and brought it to his story of a Rocket Ranger who shoots first and shoots later. Perhaps more than anyone else, Seydewitz’s work resembled V.T. Hamlin at his peak, combining humor and non-stop adventure. Like Alex Raymond, his artwork changed with each new story, from Steadman-esque ink splatters to Roy Crane duotone landscapes. And then there were the close-ups of Murphey’s incredibly expressive face, inspired by Bill Watterson’s much newer classic.

But after two years Mark had to quit. Murphey never managed to escape from the digital slums, and the strips vanished from the internet overnight. They have never returned.

SF has become one of the staples of the webcomic. Some are even quite good, although few of them attempt to match either the complex artwork or grueling schedules of the classics. Universal’s GoComics continues to run original material, although not much of it even pretends to be formatted for the newspapers.

Most newspapers continue to run strips that have long since outlived their creators’ replacements—and few are willing to risk running anything new. It hardly looks likely that the dearth of SF comics will end any time soon.

Well . . . Mark Seydewitz is trying to syndicate a new—and very different—SF strip. You never know. Some heroic editor out there might take a chance on it.

After all, we know it will be great.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Words with Wings:
A Conversation with Fran Wilde

Chris Urie

I met Fran Wilde years ago through a mutual friend and fantasy author. In the time that I’ve known her, she’s published brilliant short fiction and incisive articles on the art of fiction. Her debut novel Updraft, was released from Tor Books this past September.

Updraft is the story of Kirit Densira and her attempt to save her family and home from the oppressive reign of the Singers. In a world high above the clouds, Wilde weaves a complex tale filled with multi-faceted characters and a setting unlike any other. Towers of living bone jut out from clouds and people fly on hand-crafted wings.

Fran Wilde’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and Tor.com. She also hosts an interview series called Cooking the Books, all about the intersection between food and fiction.

Now that your debut novel is out, how has it changed your writing life?

Right now, what’s changed is finding time to write while traveling and blogging to promote Updraft.

For better or for worse, I love both traveling and blogging, and that can be distracting.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the blog posts (see my Questionable Answers post at Chuck Wendig’s Terribleminds, for an example). I wouldn’t do as many blog posts if they weren’t fun, and I think I did forty-six iterations of fun in September, plus the regular Cooking the Books and Book Bites posts I do on my website.

Doing readings and appearances for Updraft has been equally amazing. Getting the opportunity to appear with authors like Seanan McGuire, Greg van Eekhout, and Adam Rakunas on the west coast, meeting booksellers, and then traveling on the east coast with my fellow Tor debuts—Seth Dickinson and Ilana Myers in October has been amazing. Plus local Philadelphia events, especially Doylestown Bookshop, Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr PA, and the incredible launch at Barnes & Noble Rittenhouse Square—all were and are great opportunities to connect with readers and talk with them. I love that.

Which means I have to pry time loose from my schedule to write . . . a very different experience for me. (I get hermit-ish when I write.) I’ve been finding moments, especially on my days off and on the planes and trains (I can’t write very much in cars), and it hasn’t been too big a difference, but it’s still a shift. Who knows? Sometimes changing things up energizes the writing too.

Updraft features a deep and dynamic setting. What were some of the difficulties in worldbuilding such a complex society?

The main fiddly bits weren’t so much a difficulty as a memory game. Remembering which towers produced what items, mapping out what the wind flows were around each tower and around the city itself, and how best to approach and leave towers at what angles. Also counting the tiers and keeping track of what tier my characters were on or near for certain scenes required careful mapping. I found it really fun.

What can readers expect from next book set in the Updraft universe?

Cloudbound is about leadership at its heart. And gravity. A lot of gravity. (The title should be a pretty solid clue for Updraft readers). Also monsters. There are familiar characters (yes, fans of a particular character, he’s back) and new ones. More wing fights. And new towers to explore . . .

If you could have a pair of wings from your book, what would they look like?

Mine would be sepia/tea-stained like Ezarit’s but with wind-whorls like Kirit’s. Ezarit’s wings have a stylized kestrel on them, which is perfect for her character. My wings would be light and fleet and furlable, with the fine-tuned controls the singers have. I might have a pair of darker wings too. Hmmmm . . .

You cut your writing teeth in the short fiction realm. What has writing short fiction taught you?

Concision.

I was tempted to leave it at that, but also, short fiction teaches the power that two words, placed side-by-side have over each other, when not crowded by other words. And the power of editing and revising.

Food can be an often-overlooked aspect of fiction. Your podcast Cooking the Books highlights the importance of culinary creations. How does food add depth to a story?

Food isn’t necessarily an overlooked aspect of fiction for many authors—so many people write beautiful food! I think it’s easy to get caught up in the world of a book and miss the careful work writers are doing with food, line-of-supply, economics, and kitchen/dining culture when they talk about food.

What Cooking the Books has allowed us to do is to talk about a lot of craft and worldbuilding techniques that come up when food is involved. As well as other issues including socioeconomics, war, cultures and cultural appropriation, and gross-out humor. To name a few. Plus, apparently, cannibalism, sometimes.

Food gives writers a way to reveal parts of a world, a setting, or a relationship without using exposition. Who eats and who doesn’t, what do they eat, where does that food come from and how does it get to the table, what foods are scarce vs. plentiful. What foods reveal power structures because of their expense, and which reveal different biological leanings due to their edibility vs inedibility. There are so many more questions beyond this, and luckily, we’ve got forty-three episodes and counting at Cooking the Books, some podcasts, some text, to whet your appetite.

(Caveat: we are also known for our *terrible* puns and our recipes.)

Is it true Joe Haldeman once taught you how to make a pizza in a foxhole with plastique?

That is totally true.

Joe and Gay Haldeman were among the first interviews I did for Cooking the Books and I’d done a lot of research on a couple of topics, including food in The Forever War and The Forever Peace, plus a ton on the history of MREs and C-rations.

But when our Skype call began, Joe broke into a mischievous smile and asked whether I would want to know how one cooked pizza in a foxhole with plastique (the short answer: very carefully) and I tossed all my research out the window and said: GO!

You seem to travel far and wide to every convention under the sun. What is it about cons that you love so much?

Aw, I wish I could go to more cons, actually. What I love? The conversations and the community. I like learning new things and meeting new people. Hearing what they have to say. I also like seeing friends I haven’t seen in a long time.

Even when I have a big panel list of my own, I try to go to panels and readings in my down time. Sometimes this is hard because cons are tiring too, but often I find that sitting in a panel, just listening, is a great way to recharge.

What projects are you currently working on? More short stories I hope!

I’m working on several short stories, a novel or two, revisions, and a secret project to be named later. I’m also preparing for the spring launch of my first Tor.com novella, “The Jewel and Her Lapidary,” which is set in my gem universe, and I’m very excited about that.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Chinese Science Fiction and Chinese Reality

Liu Cixin

China is a society undergoing rapid development and transformation, where crises are present along with hopes, and opportunities coexist with challenges. This is a reality reflected in the science fiction produced there.

Chinese readers often interpret science fiction in unexpected ways. Take my Three Body series as an example. The alien-invasion story takes as its premise a “worst-case” scenario for relationships among members of the cosmic society of civilizations, which is called the “Dark Forest” state. In this state, different starfaring civilizations have no choice but to attempt to annihilate each other at the first opportunity.

After publication, the novels became surprisingly popular among those working in China’s Internet industry. They saw the “Dark Forest” state portrayed in the novels as an accurate reflection of the state of brutal competition among China’s Internet companies.

In particular, they point to a type of warfare described in the novels in which one civilization attempts to destroy another by lowering the dimensionality of space itself. Readers say that this “dimension-reduction” method of attack is prevalent in the Chinese Internet industry, where companies often use techniques such as unsustainably low prices or even free, inferior goods to drag other competitors to a “lower plane” of competition, where they can be eliminated because the attackers are more familiar with survival at this lower level of existence.

Authors (myself included) are often befuddled by such interpretations.

The conflicts and crises present in Chinese society are sometimes reflected in science fiction with metaphors both blunt and subtle. For example, Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” describes a dystopian society in which words are gradually forbidden by the authorities for political reasons until people are able to communicate in daily life only with an extremely limited list of approved words. Zhang Ran’s “Ether” similarly portrays a society of ubiquitous surveillance in which people resort to the primitive method of writing on each other’s palms with a finger to communicate freely. These two stories are obviously commenting on China’s Internet censorship regime.

Chen Qiufan’s novel, The Waste Tide, on the other hand, works more subtly by portraying a scene that is both familiar and strange: following the invasion of a foreign capital, a symbolic Chinese island is turned into a dumping ground for electronic waste products from the rest of the world. The inhabitants of the island eke out a living among the mountainous heaps of garbage and evolve into bizarre cyborgs.

On the other hand, contemporary Chinese science fiction also evinces an enterprising spirit and optimism. In science fiction written in my country during the last century, the Chinese of the future were, as a whole, rather vaguely portrayed. For readers during that time, China was at the periphery of the world, and the future of the world and the human race would be determined by superpowers like the United States and the Soviet Union, and China would have little influence on it. Science fiction of the time did not have any Chinese superhero capable of changing the world.

However, as the pace of China’s modernization accelerated, Chinese readers began to feel the growing presence of their country in the future of the world. For example, in the Three Body series, most of the characters responsible for saving and destroying the world were Chinese, and readers did not find this implausible.

A typical example of the optimism that China would have a hand in making the future is my story, “Sun of China.” The protagonist of the story is a migrant laborer from the countryside, a “spider-man” who cleans the windows of skyscrapers in the cities.

He belongs to a unique Chinese social class at the bottom of society, struggling to make low wages through backbreaking labor without even the right to settle in the cities they serve. China, meanwhile, has constructed a giant mirror in space, called “Sun of China,” that would help stabilize the climate and increase agricultural output. In order to save money, migrant laborers from the countryside are hired to clean this mirror in space.

The protagonist of the story, due to his experience as a spider-man, gets the job and begins to live a new life in space. Finally, this man from one of the poorest villages in Northwestern China manages to transform the giant reflector into a solar sail that he uses to depart the solar system for the limitless space beyond.

The question of the relationship between China’s science fiction and its reality has always been perplexing. What I’ve written so far is still fairly superficial, and I’ve long tried to get a deeper insight into the issue.

Let me try to point to a phenomenon unique to the Chinese science fiction of the last century: the paucity of subject material. Many of the core subjects of Western science fiction—long space journeys, time travel, alien invasions, apocalyptic catastrophes, the origin and end of the universe, etc.—were simply not present in Chinese science fiction at all because they were too far from the reality of China. The science fiction of the time hewed to everyday reality closely, and one might even describe them as practical.

But at present, Chinese science fiction has lifted off from the ground and entered space, even reaching beyond the solar system to the very edge of the universe. What I’ve described above as reflecting the reality of Chinese society is not the mainstream of science fiction. The most popular works have little to do with the day-to-day reality of people’s lives.

Another popular writer, Bao Shu, often sets his fiction in contemporary China, but it is used only as a setting. Even a writer like Wang Jinkang, who believes in a style of science fiction tied to reality, has cast his sight to the end of the universe in his new book, Escape from the Mother Universe.

Chinese science fiction is in the process of shifting its focus to topics that are far from reality, more ethereal and philosophical. After much reflection, I’ve reached a conclusion that is surprising even to myself.

The most profound way that Chinese science fiction reflects Chinese reality is not in the incisive portrayals of and subtle metaphors about Chinese society, but in its trend of moving away from concerns with everyday reality. The manner in which Chinese science fiction is moving further and further away from reality and closer to the future and the stars is a reflection of the deep changes in the thinking patterns of the Chinese people, especially the younger generation. I have no doubt such changes will, in turn, transform China’s present as well as its future.

About the Author

Liu Cixin is a representative of the new generation of Chinese science fiction authors and recognized as a leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He was awarded the China Galaxy Science Fiction Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006 and again in 2010. His representative work The Three-body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, finished 3rd in 2015 Campbell Awards, and was a nominee for the 2015 Nebula Award.

His works have received wide acclaim on account of their powerful atmosphere and brilliant imagination. Liu Cixin’s stories successfully combine the exceedingly ephemeral with hard reality, all the while focusing on revealing the essence and aesthetics of science. He has endeavoured to create a distinctly Chinese style of science fiction. Liu Cixin is a member of the China Science Writers’ Association and the Shanxi Writers’ Association.

Editor’s Desk:
Making My Holiday Wish List

Neil Clarke

I’m going to keep it brief this month. My last two editorials have been on the heavier side of things, exposing some sad truths about short fiction reviews and short fiction magazines. They’ve generated a fair bit of discussion and I hope it continues to do so. As expected, there were some who tried to twist my words to fit their own narrative or self-promote. The people that amused me most were those who tried to paint me as an old guard traditionalist. Admittedly, Clarkesworld being nine years old makes us positively ancient in internet years, but we’ve never given up on trying new things, even the “crazy” ones. If that’s become old guard, I was right to be concerned about the future of a field I love.

It’s easy to become distracted by the stray voices of discord on the internet. Most of the feedback from these two editorials was quite positive. Several people echoed my sentiments about supporting the publications you love before they need to be saved and some even mentioned that they had been inspired to do so. That’s uplifting, but what I’ve seen doesn’t change those darker predictions for a market compression. The numbers simply don’t line up with the volume of publications. In the end, it’s readership that determines the size of the pool.

That said, I can think of no better time than Thanksgiving—this month in the U.S.—to say thank you for being one of our readers. You mean the world to us. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve put more of you on my holiday wish list.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series will be launched by Night Shade Books in 2016. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art: Gate World

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.