Touring with the Alien

Carolyn Ives Gilman

The alien spaceships were beautiful, no one could deny that: towering domes of overlapping, chitinous plates in pearly dawn colors, like reflections on a tranquil sea. They appeared overnight, a dozen incongruous soap-bubble structures scattered across the North American continent. One of them blocked a major Interstate in Ohio; another monopolized a stadium parking lot in Tulsa. But most stood in cornfields and forests and deserts where they caused little inconvenience.

Everyone called them spaceships, but from the beginning the experts questioned that name. NORAD had recorded no incoming landing craft, and no mother ship orbited above. That left two main possibilities: they were visitations from an alien race that traveled by some incomprehensibly advanced method; or they were a mutant eruption of Earth’s own tortured ecosystem.

The domes were impervious. Probing radiation bounced off them, as did potshots from locals in the days before the military moved in to cordon off the areas. Attempts to communicate produced no reaction. All the domes did was sit there reflecting the sky in luminous, dreaming colors.

Six months later, the panic had subsided and even CNN had grown weary of reporting breaking news that was just the same old news. Then, entry panels began to open and out walked the translators, one per dome. They were perfectly ordinary-looking human beings who said that they had been abducted as children and had now come back to interpret between their biological race and the people who had adopted them.

Humanity learned surprisingly little from the translators. The aliens had come in peace. They had no demands and no questions. They merely wanted to sit here minding their own business for a while. They wanted to be left alone.

No one believed it.

Avery was visiting her brother when her boss called.

“Say, you’ve still got those security credentials, right?” Frank said.

“Yes . . . ” She had gotten the security clearance in order to haul a hush-hush load of nuclear fuel to Nevada, a feat she wasn’t keen on repeating.

“And you’re in D.C.?”

She was actually in northern Virginia, but close enough. “Yeah.”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

“Don’t tell me it’s another gig for Those We Dare Not Name.”

He didn’t laugh, which told her it was bad. “Uh . . . no. More like those we can’t name.”

She didn’t get it. “What?”

“Some . . . neighbors. Who live in funny-shaped houses. I can’t say more over the phone.”

She got it then. “Frank! You took a contract from the frigging aliens?”

“Sssh,” he said, as if every phone in America weren’t bugged. “It’s strictly confidential.”

“Jesus,” she breathed out. She had done some crazy things for Frank, but this was over the top. “When, where, what?”

“Leaving tonight. D.C. to St. Louis. A converted tour bus.”

“Tour bus? How many of them are going?”

“Two passengers. One human, one . . . whatever. Will you do it?”

She looked into the immaculate condo living room, where her brother, Blake, and his husband, Jeff, were playing a noisy, fast-paced video game, oblivious to her conversation. She had promised to be at Blake’s concert tomorrow. It meant a lot to him. “Just a second,” she said to Frank.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

“Two seconds.” She muted the phone and walked into the living room. Blake saw her expression and paused the game.

She said, “Would you hate me if I couldn’t be there tomorrow?”

Disappointment, resignation, and wry acceptance crossed his face, as if he hadn’t ever really expected her to keep her promise. “What is it?” he asked.

“A job,” she said. “A really important job. Never mind, I’ll turn it down.”

“No, Ave, don’t worry. There will be other concerts.”

Still, she hesitated. “You sure?” she said. She and Blake had always hung together, like castaways on a hostile sea. They had given each other courage to sail into the wind. To disappoint him felt disloyal.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Now I’ll be sorry if you stay.”

She thumbed the phone on. “Okay, Frank, I’ll do it. This better not get me in trouble.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “I’ll email you instructions. Bye.”

From the couch, Jeff said, “Now I know why you want to do it. Because it’s likely to get you in trouble.”

“No, he gave me his word,” Avery said.

“Cowboy Frank? The one who had you drive guns to Nicaragua?”

“That was perfectly legal,” Avery said.

Jeff had a point, as usual. Specialty Shipping did the jobs no reputable company would handle. Ergo, so did Avery.

“What is it this time?” Blake asked.

“I can’t say.” The email had come through; Frank had attached the instructions as if a PDF were more secure than email. She opened and scanned them.

The job had been cleared by the government, but the client was the alien passenger, and she was to take orders only from him, within the law. She scanned the rest of the instructions till she saw the pickup time. “Damn, I’ve got to get going,” she said.

Her brother followed her into the guest room to watch her pack up. He had never understood her nomadic lifestyle, which made his silent support for it all the more generous. She was compelled to wander; he was rooted in this home, this relationship, this warm, supportive community. She was a discarder, using things up and throwing them away; he had created a home that was a visual expression of himself—from the spare, Japanese-style furniture to the Zen colors on the walls. Visiting him was like living inside a beautiful soul. She had no idea how they could have grown up so different. It was as if they were foundlings.

She pulled on her boots and shouldered her backpack. Blake hugged her. “Have a good trip,” he said. “Call me.”

“Will do,” she said, and hit the road again.

The media had called the dome in Rock Creek Park the Mother Ship—but only because of its proximity to the White House, not because it was in any way distinctive. Like the others, it had appeared overnight, sited on a broad, grassy clearing that had been a secluded picnic ground in the urban park. It filled the entire creek valley, cutting off the trails and greatly inconveniencing the joggers and bikers.

Avery was unprepared for its scale. Like most people, she had seen the domes only on TV, and the small screen did not do justice to the neck-craning reality. She leaned forward over the wheel and peered out the windshield as she brought the bus to a halt at the last checkpoint. The National Park Police pickup that had escorted her through all the other checkpoints pulled aside.

The appearance of an alien habitat had set off a battle of jurisdictions in Washington. The dome stood on U.S. Park Service property, but D.C. Police controlled all the access streets, and the U.S. Army was tasked with maintaining a perimeter around it. No agency wanted to surrender a particle of authority to the others. And then there was the polite, well-groomed young man who had introduced himself as “Henry,” now sitting in the passenger seat next to her. His neatly pressed suit sported no bulges of weaponry, but she assumed he was CIA.

She now saw method in Frank’s madness at calling her so spur-of-the-moment. Her last-minute arrival had prevented anyone from pulling her aside into a cinderblock room for a “briefing.” Instead, Henry had accompanied her in the bus, chatting informally.

“Say, while you’re on the road . . . ”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“The alien’s my client. I don’t spy on clients.”

He paused a moment, but seemed unruffled. “Not even for your country?”

“If I think my country’s in danger, I’ll get in touch.”

“Fair enough,” he said pleasantly. She hadn’t expected him to give up so easily.

He handed her a business card. “So you can get in touch,” he said.

She glanced at it. It said “Henry,” with a phone number. No logo, no agency, no last name. She put it in a pocket.

“I have to get out here,” he said when the bus rolled to a halt a hundred yards from the dome. “It’s been nice meeting you, Avery.”

“Take your bug with you,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The bug you left somewhere in this cab.”

“There’s no bug,” he said seriously.

Since the bus was probably wired like a studio, she shrugged and resolved not to scratch anywhere embarrassing till she had a chance to search. As she closed the door behind Henry, the soldiers removed the roadblock and she eased the bus forward.

It was almost evening, but floodlights came on as she approached the dome. She pulled the bus parallel to the wall and lowered the wheelchair lift. One of the hexagonal panels slid aside, revealing a stocky, dark-haired young man in black glasses, surrounded by packing crates of the same pearly substance as the dome. Avery started forward to help with loading, but he said tensely, “Stay where you are.” She obeyed. He pushed the first crate forward and it moved as if on wheels, though Avery could see none. It was slightly too wide for the lift, so the man put his hands on either side and pushed in. The crate reconfigured itself, growing taller and narrower till it fit onto the platform. Avery activated the power lift.

He wouldn’t let Avery touch any of the crates, but insisted on stowing them himself at the back of the bus, where a private bedroom suite had once accommodated a touring celebrity singer. When the last crate was on, he came forward and said, “We can go now.”

“What about the other passenger?” Avery said.

“He’s here.”

She realized that the alien must have been in one of the crates—or, for all she knew, was one of the crates. “Okay,” she said. “Where to?”

“Anywhere,” he said, and turned to go back into the bedroom.

Since she had no instructions to the contrary, Avery decided to head south. As she pulled out of the park, there was no police escort, no helicopter overhead, no obvious trailing car. The terms of this journey had been carefully negotiated at the highest levels, she knew. Their security was to be secrecy; no one was to know where they were. Avery’s instructions from Frank had stressed that, aside from getting the alien safely where he wanted to go, insuring his privacy was her top priority. She was not to pry into his business or allow anyone else to do so.

Rush hour traffic delayed them a long time. At first, Avery concentrated on putting as much distance as she could between the bus and Washington. It was past ten by the time she turned off the main roads. She activated the GPS to try and find a route, but all the screen showed was snow. She tried her phone, and the result was the same. Not even the radio worked. One of those crates must have contained a jamming device; the bus was a rolling electronic dead zone. She smiled. So much for Henry’s bugs.

It was quiet and peaceful driving through the night. A nearly full moon rode in the clear autumn sky, and woods closed in around them. Once, when she had first taken up driving in order to escape her memories, she had played a game of heading randomly down roads she had never seen, getting deliberately lost. Now she played it again, not caring where she ended up. She had never been good at keeping to the main roads.

By 3:00 she was tired, and when she saw the entrance to a state park, she turned and pulled into the empty parking lot. In the quiet after the engine shut off, she walked back through the kitchen and sitting area to see if there were any objections from her passengers. She listened at the closed door, but heard nothing and concluded they were asleep. As she was turning away, the door jerked open and the translator said, “What do you want?”

He was still fully dressed, exactly as she had seen him before, except without the glasses, his eyes were a little bloodshot, as if he hadn’t closed them. “I’ve pulled over to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s not safe to keep driving without rest.”

“Oh. All right,” he said, and closed the door.

Shrugging, she went forward. There was a fold-down bunk that had once served the previous owner’s entourage, and she now prepared to use it. She brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, pulled a sleeping bag from her backpack, and settled in.

Morning sun woke her. When she opened her eyes, it was flooding in the windows. At the kitchen table a yard away from her, the translator was sitting, staring out the window. By daylight, she saw that he had a square face the color of teak and closely trimmed black beard. She guessed that he might be Latino, and in his twenties.

“Morning,” she said. He turned to stare at her, but said nothing. Not practiced in social graces, she thought. “I’m Avery,” she said.

Still he didn’t reply. “It’s customary to tell me your name now,” she said.

“Oh. Lionel,” he answered.

“Pleased to meet you.”

He said nothing, so she got up and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still staring fixedly out the window. She started making coffee. “Want some?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Coffee.”

“I ought to try it,” he said reluctantly.

“Well, don’t let me force you,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” He was studying her, apprehensive.

“I wouldn’t. I was being sarcastic. Like a joke. Never mind.”

“Oh.”

He got up restlessly and started opening the cupboards. Frank had stocked them with all the necessities, even a few luxuries. But Lionel didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.

“Are you hungry?” Avery guessed.

“What do you mean?”

Avery searched for another way to word the question. “Would you like me to fix you some breakfast?”

He looked utterly stumped.

“Never mind. Just sit down and I’ll make you something.”

He sat down, gripping the edge of the table tensely. “That’s a tree,” he said, looking out the window.

“Right. It’s a whole lot of trees.”

“I ought to go out.”

She didn’t make the mistake of joking again. It was like talking to a person raised by wolves. Or aliens.

When she set a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of him, he sniffed it suspiciously. “That’s food?”

“Yes, it’s good. Try it.”

He watched her eat for a few moments, then gingerly tried a bite of scrambled eggs. His expression showed distaste, but he resolutely forced himself to swallow. But when he tried the bacon, he couldn’t bear it. “It bit my mouth,” he said.

“You’re probably not used to the salt. What do you normally eat?”

He reached in a pocket and took out some brown pellets that looked like dog kibble. Avery made a face of disgust. “What is that, people chow?”

“It’s perfectly adapted to our nutritional needs,” Lionel said. “Try it.”

She was about to say “no thanks,” but he was clearly making an effort to try new things, so she took a pellet and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t terrible—chewy rather than crunchy—but tasteless. “I think I’ll stick to our food,” she said.

He looked gloomy. “I need to learn to eat yours.”

“Why? Research?”

He nodded. “I have to find out how the feral humans live.”

So, Avery reflected, she was dealing with someone raised as a pet, who was now being released into the wild. For whatever reason.

“So where do you want to go today?” Avery said, sipping coffee.

He gave an indifferent gesture.

“You’re heading for St. Louis?”

“Oh, I just picked that name off a map. It seemed to be in the center.”

“That it is.” She had lived there once; it was so incorrigibly in the center there was no edge to it. “Do you want to go by any particular route?”

He shrugged.

“How much time do you have?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Okay. The scenic route, then.”

She got up to clean the dishes, telling Lionel that this was a good time for him to go out, if he wanted to. It took him a while to summon his resolve. She watched out the kitchen window as he approached a tree as if to have a conversation with it. He felt its bark, smelled its leaves, and returned unhappy and distracted.

Avery followed the same random-choice method of navigation as the previous night, but always trending west. Soon they came to the first ridge of mountains. People from western states talked as if the Appalachians weren’t real mountains, but they were—rugged and impenetrable ridges like walls erected to bar people from the land of milk and honey. In the mountains, all the roads ran northeast and southwest through the valleys between the crumpled land, with only the brave roads daring to climb up and pierce the ranges. The autumn leaves were at their height, russet and gold against the brilliant sky. All day long Lionel sat staring out the window.

That night she found a half-deserted campground outside a small town. She refilled the water tanks, hooked up the electricity, then came back in. “You’re all set,” she told Lionel. “If it’s all right with you, I’m heading into town.”

“Okay,” he said.

It felt good to stretch her legs walking along the highway shoulder. The air was chill but bracing. The town was a tired, half abandoned place, but she found a bar and settled down with a beer and a burger. She couldn’t help watching the patrons around her—worn-down, elderly people just managing to hang on. What would an alien think of America if she brought him here?

Remembering that she was away from the interference field, she thumbed on her phone—and immediately realized that the ping would give away her location to the spooks. But since she’d already done it, she dialed her brother’s number and left a voicemail congratulating him on the concert she was missing. “Everything’s fine with me,” she said, then added mischievously, “I met a nice young man named Henry. I think he’s sweet on me. Bye.”

Heading back through the night, she became aware that someone was following her. The highway was too dark to see who it was, but when she stopped, the footsteps behind her stopped, too. At last a car passed, and she wheeled around to see what the headlights showed.

“Lionel!” she shouted. He didn’t answer, just stood there, so she walked back toward him. “Did you follow me?”

He was standing with hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Defensively, he said, “I wanted to see what you would do when I wasn’t around.”

“It’s none of your business what I do off duty. Listen, respecting privacy goes both ways. If you want me to respect yours, you’ve got to respect mine, okay?”

He looked cold and miserable, so she said, “Come on, let’s get back before you freeze solid.”

They walked side by side in silence, gravel crunching underfoot. At last he said stiffly, “I’d like to re-negotiate our contract.”

“Oh, yeah? What part of the contract?”

“The part about privacy. I . . . ” He searched for words. “We should have asked for more than a driver. We need a translator.”

At least he’d realized it. He might speak perfect English, but he was not fluent in Human.

“My contract is with your . . . employer. Is this what he wants?”

“Who?”

“The other passenger. I don’t know what to call him. ‘The alien’ isn’t polite. What’s his name?”

“They don’t have names. They don’t have a language.”

Astonished, Avery said, “Then how do you communicate?”

He glowered at her. She held up her hands. “Sorry. No offense intended. I’m just trying to find out what he wants.”

“They don’t want things,” he muttered, gazing fixedly at the moonlit road. “At least, not like you do. They’re not . . . awake. Aware. Not like people are.”

This made so little sense to Avery, she wondered if he were having trouble with the language. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean they’re not . . . sentient?”

“They’re not conscious,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“But they have technology. They built those domes, or brought them here, or whatever the hell they did. They have an advanced civilization.”

“I didn’t say they aren’t smart. They’re smarter than people are. They’re just not conscious.”

Avery shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine it.”

“Yes, you can,” Lionel said impatiently. “People function unconsciously all the time. You’re not aware that you’re keeping your balance right now—you just do it automatically. You don’t have to be aware to walk, or breathe. In fact, the more skillful you are at something, the less aware you are. Being aware would just degrade their skill.”

They had come to the campground entrance. Behind the dark pine trees, Avery could see the bus, holding its unknowable passenger. For a moment the bus seemed to stare back with blank eyes. She made herself focus on the practical. “So how can I know what he wants?”

“I’m telling you.”

She refrained from asking, “And how do you know?” because he’d already refused to answer that. The new privacy rules were to be selective, then. But she already knew more about the aliens than anyone else on Earth, except the translators. Not that she understood.

“I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him ‘him,’ or ‘the alien,’” Avery said the next morning over breakfast. “I have to give him a name. I’m going to call him ‘Mr. Burbage.’ If he doesn’t know, he won’t mind.”

Lionel didn’t look any more disturbed than usual. She took that as consent.

“So where are we going today?” she asked.

He pressed his lips together in concentration. “I need to go to a place where I can acquire knowledge.”

Since this could encompass anything from a brothel to a university, Avery said, “You’ve got to be more specific. What kind of knowledge?”

“Knowledge about you.”

“Me?”

“No, you humans. How you work.”

Humans. For that, she would have to find a bigger town.

As she cruised down a county road, Avery thought about Blake. Once, he had told her that to play an instrument truly well, you had to lose all awareness of what you were doing, and rely entirely on the muscle memory in your fingers. “You are so in the present, there is no room for self,” Blake said. “No ego, no doubt, no introspection.”

She envied him the ability to achieve such a state. She had tried to play the saxophone, but had never gotten good enough to experience what Blake described. Only playing video games could she concentrate intensely enough to lose self-awareness. It was strange, how addictive it was to escape the prison of her skull and forget she had a self. Mystics and meditators strove to achieve such a state.

A motion in the corner of her eye made her slam on the brakes and swerve. A startled deer pirouetted, flipped its tail, and leaped away. She continued on more slowly, searching for a sign to see where she was. She could not remember having driven the last miles, or whether she had passed any turns. Smiling grimly, she realized that driving was her skill, something she knew so well that she could do it unconsciously. She had even reacted to a threat before knowing what it was. Her reflexes were faster than her conscious mind.

Were the aliens like that all the time? In a perpetual state of flow, like virtuoso musicians or Zen monks in samadhi? What would be the point of achieving such supreme skill, if the price was never knowing it was you doing it?

Around noon, they came to a town nestled in a steep valley on a rushing river. Driving down the main street, she spied a quaint, cupolaed building with a “Municipal Library” sign out front. Farther on, at the edge of town, an abandoned car lot offered a grass-pocked parking lot, so she turned in. “Come on, Lionel,” she called out. “I’ve found a place for you to acquire knowledge.”

They walked back into town together. The library was quiet and empty except for an old man reading a magazine. The selection of books was sparse, but there was a row of computers. “You know how to use these?” Avery said in a low voice.

“Not this kind,” Lionel said. “They’re very . . . primitive.”

They sat down together, and Avery explained how to work the mouse and get on the Internet, how to search and scroll. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You can go now.”

Shrugging, she left him to his research. She strolled down the main street, stopped in a drugstore, then found a café that offered fried egg sandwiches on Wonder Bread, a luxury from her childhood. With lunch and a cup of coffee, she settled down to wait, sorting email on her phone.

Some time later, she became aware of the television behind the counter. It was tuned to one of those daytime exposé shows hosted by a shrill woman who spoke in a tone of breathless indignation. “Coming up,” she said, “Slaves or traitors? Who are these alien translators?”

Avery realized that some part of her brain must have been listening and alerted her conscious mind to pay attention, just as it had reacted to the deer. She had a threat detection system she was not even aware of.

In the story that followed, a correspondent revealed that she had been unable to match any of the translators with missing children recorded in the past twenty years. The host treated this as suspicious information that someone ought to be looking into. Then came a panel of experts to discuss what they knew of the translators, which was nothing.

“Turncoats,” commented one of the men at the counter watching the show. “Why would anyone betray his own race?”

“They’re not even human,” said another, “just made to look that way. They’re clones or robots or something.”

“The government won’t do anything. They’re just letting those aliens sit there.”

Avery got up to pay her bill. The woman at the cash register said, “You connected with that big tour bus parked out at Fenniman’s?”

She had forgotten that in a town like this, everyone knew instantly what was out of the ordinary.

“Yeah,” Avery said. “Me and my . . . boyfriend are delivering it to a new owner.”

She glanced up at the television just as a collage of faces appeared. Lionel’s was in the top row. “Look closely,” the show’s host said. “If you recognize any of these faces, call us at 1-800- . . . ” Avery didn’t wait to hear the number. The door shut behind her.

It was hard not to walk quickly enough to attract attention. Why had she left him alone, as if it were safe? Briefly, she thought of bringing the bus in to pick him up at the library, but it would only attract more attention. The sensible thing was to slip inconspicuously out of town.

Lionel was engrossed in a website about the brain when she came in. She sat down next to him and said quietly, “We’ve got to leave.”

“I’m not . . . ”

“Lionel. We have to leave. Right now.”

He frowned, but got the message. As he rose to put on his coat, she quickly erased his browser history and cache. Then she led the way out and around the building to a back street where there were fewer eyes. “Hold my hand,” she said.

“Why?”

“I told them you were my boyfriend. We’ve got to act friendly.”

He didn’t object or ask what was going on. The aliens had trained him well, she thought.

The street they were on came to an end, and they were forced back onto the main thoroughfare, right past the café. In Avery’s mind every window was a pair of eyes staring at the strangers. As they left the business section of town and the buildings thinned out, she became aware of someone walking a block behind them. Glancing back, she saw a man in hunter’s camouflage and billed cap, carrying a gun case on a strap over one shoulder.

She sped up, but the man trailing them sped up as well. When they were in sight of the bus, Avery pressed the keys into Lionel’s hand and said, “Go on ahead. I’ll stall this guy. Get inside and don’t open the door to anyone but me.” Then she turned back to confront their pursuer.

Familiarity tickled as he drew closer. When she was sure, she called out, “Afternoon, Henry! What a coincidence to see you here.”

“Hello, Avery,” he said. He didn’t look quite right in the hunter costume: he was too urban and fit. “That was pretty careless of you. I followed to make sure you got back safe.”

“I didn’t know his picture was all over the TV,” she said. “I’ve been out of touch.”

“I know, we lost track of you for a while there. Please don’t do that again.”

As threats went, Henry now seemed like the lesser evil. She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t see any need to get in touch.” That meant the country was not in peril.

“Thanks,” he said. “Listen, if you turn left on Highway 19 ahead, you’ll come to a national park with a campground. It’ll be safe.”

As she walked back to the bus, she was composing a lie about who she had been talking to. But Lionel never asked. As soon as she was on board he started eagerly telling her about what he had learned in the library. She had never seen him so animated, so she gestured him to sit in the passenger seat beside her while she got the bus moving again.

“The reason you’re conscious is because of the cerebral cortex,” he said. “It’s an add-on, the last part of the brain to evolve. Its only purpose is to monitor what the rest of the brain is doing. All the sensory input goes to the inner brain first, and gets processed, so the cortex never gets the raw data. It only sees the effect on the rest of the brain, not what’s really out there. That’s why you’re aware of yourself. In fact, it’s all you’re aware of.”

“Why are you saying ‘you’?” Avery asked. “You’ve got a cerebral cortex, too.”

Defensively, he said, “I’m not like you.”

Avery shrugged. “Okay.” But she wanted to keep the conversation going. “So Mr. Burbage doesn’t have a cortex? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s right,” Lionel said. “For him, life is a skill of the autonomic nervous system, not something he had to consciously learn. That’s why he can think and react faster than we can, and requires less energy. The messages don’t have to travel on a useless detour through the cortex.”

“Useless?” Avery objected. “I kind of like being conscious.”

Lionel fell silent, suddenly grave and troubled.

She glanced over at him. “What’s the matter?”

In a low tone he said, “He likes being conscious, too. It’s what they want from us.”

Avery gripped the wheel and tried not to react. Up to now, the translators had denied that the aliens wanted anything at all from humans. But then it occurred to her that Lionel might not mean humans when he said “us.”

“You mean, you translators?” she ventured.

He nodded, looking grim.

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, reacting to his expression.

“Not for us,” he said. “It’s bad for them. It’s killing him.”

He was struggling with some strong emotion. Guilt, she thought. Maybe grief.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Angrily, he stood up to head back into the bus. “Why do you make me think of this?” he said. “Why can’t you just mind your own business?”

Avery drove on, listening as he slammed the bedroom door behind him. She didn’t feel any resentment. She knew all about guilt and grief, and how useless they made you feel. Lionel’s behavior made more sense to her now. He was having trouble distinguishing between what was happening to him externally and what was coming from inside. Even people skilled at being human had trouble with that.

The national park Henry had recommended turned out to be at Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass early pioneers had used to migrate west to Kentucky. They spent the night in the campground undisturbed. At dawn, Avery strolled out in the damp morning air to look around. She quickly returned to say, “Lionel, come out here. You need to see this.”

She led him across the road to an overlook facing west. From the edge of the Appalachians they looked out on range after range of wooded foothills swaddled in fog. The morning sun at their backs lit everything in shades of mauve and azure. Avery felt like Daniel Boone looking out on the Promised Land, stretching before her into the misty distance, unpolluted by the past.

“I find this pleasant,” Lionel said gravely.

Avery smiled. It was a breakthrough statement for someone so unaccustomed to introspection that he hadn’t been able to tell her he was hungry two days ago. But all she said was, “Me, too.”

After several moments of silence, she ventured, “Don’t you think Mr. Burbage would enjoy seeing this? There’s no one else around. Doesn’t he want to get out of the bus some time?”

“He is seeing it,” Lionel said.

“What do you mean?”

“He is here.” Lionel tapped his head with a finger.

Avery couldn’t help staring. “You mean you have some sort of telepathic connection with him?”

“There’s no such thing as telepathy,” Lionel said dismissively. “They communicate with neurotransmitters.” She was still waiting, so he said, “He doesn’t have to be all in one place. Part of him is with me, part of him is in the bus.”

“In your head?” she asked, trying not to betray how creepy she found this news.

He nodded. “He needs me to observe the world for him, and understand it. They have had lots of other helper species to do things for them—species that build things, or transport them. But we’re the first one with advanced consciousness.”

“And that’s why they’re interested in us.”

Lionel looked away to avoid her eyes, but nodded. “They like it,” he said, his voice low and reluctant. “At first it was just novel and new for them, but now it’s become an addiction, like a dangerous drug. We pay a high metabolic price for consciousness; it’s why our lifespan is so short. They live for centuries. But when they get hooked on us, they burn out even faster than we do.”

He picked up a rock and flung it over the cliff, watching as it arced up, then plummeted.

“And if he dies, what happens to you?” Avery asked.

“I don’t want him to die,” Lionel said. He put his hands in his pockets and studied his feet. “It feels . . . good to have him around. I like his company. He’s very old, very wise.”

For a moment, she could see it through his eyes. She could imagine feeling intimately connected to an ancient being who was dying from an inability to part with his adopted human son. What a terrible burden for Lionel to carry, to be slowly killing someone he loved.

And yet, she still felt uneasy.

“How do you know?” she asked.

He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“You said he’s old and wise. How do you know that?”

“The way you know anything unconscious. It’s a feeling, an instinct.”

“Are you sure he not controlling you? Pushing around your neurotransmitters?”

“That’s absurd,” he said, mildly irritated. “I told you, he’s not conscious, at least not naturally. Control is a conscious thing.”

“But what if you did something he didn’t want?”

“I don’t feel like doing things he doesn’t want. Like talking to you now. He must have decided he can trust you, because I wouldn’t feel like telling you anything if he hadn’t.”

Avery wasn’t sure whether being trusted by an alien was something she aspired to. But she did want Lionel to trust her, and so she let the subject drop.

“Where do you want to go today?” she asked.

“You keep asking me that.” He stared out on the landscape, as if waiting for a revelation. At last he said, “I want to see humans living as they normally do. We’ve barely seen any of them. I didn’t think the planet was so sparsely populated.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to have to make a phone call for that.”

When he had returned to the bus, she strolled away, took out Henry’s card, and thumbed the number. Despite the early hour, he answered on the first ring.

“He wants to see humans,” she said. “Normal humans behaving normally. Can you help me out?”

“Let me make some calls,” he said. “I’ll text you instructions.”

“No men in black,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

“I get it.”

When Avery stopped for diesel around noon, the gas station television was blaring with news that the Justice Department would investigate the aliens for abducting human children. She escaped into the restroom to check her phone. The internet was ablaze with speculation: who the translators were, whether they could be freed, whether they were human at all. The part of the government that had approved Lionel’s road trip was clearly working at cross purposes with the part that had dreamed up this new strategy for extracting information from the aliens. The only good news was that no hint had leaked out that an alien was roaming the back roads of America in a converted bus.

Henry had texted her a cryptic suggestion to head toward Paris. She had to Google it to find that there actually was a Paris, Kentucky. When she came out to pay for the fuel, she was relieved to see that the television had moved on to World Series coverage. On impulse, she bought a Cardinals cap for Lionel.

Paris turned out to be a quaint old Kentucky town that had once had delusions of cityhood. Today, a county fair was the main event in town. The RV park was almost full, but Avery’s E.T. Express managed to maneuver in. When everything was settled, she sat on the bus steps sipping a Bud and waiting for night so they could venture out with a little more anonymity. The only thing watching her was a skittish, half-wild cat crouched behind a trashcan. Somehow, it reminded her of Lionel, so she tossed it a Cheeto to see if she could lure it out. It refused the bait.

That night, disguised by the dark and a Cardinals cap, Lionel looked tolerably inconspicuous. As they were leaving to take in the fair, she said, “Will Mr. Burbage be okay while we’re gone? What if someone tries to break into the bus?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right,” Lionel said. His tone implied more than his words. She resolved to call Henry at the earliest opportunity and pass along a warning not to try anything.

The people in the midway all looked authentic. If there were snipers on the bigtop and agents on the merry-go-round, she couldn’t tell. When people failed to recognize Lionel at the ticket stand and popcorn wagon, she began to relax. Everyone was here to enjoy themselves, not to look for aliens.

She introduced Lionel to the joys of corn dogs and cotton candy, to the Ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl. He took in the jangling sounds, the smells of deep-fried food, and the blinking lights with a grave and studious air. When they had had their fill of all the machines meant to disorient and confuse, they took a break at a picnic table, sipping Cokes.

Avery said, “Is Mr. Burbage enjoying this?”

Lionel shrugged. “Are you?” He wasn’t deflecting her question; he actually wanted to know.

She considered. “I think people enjoy these events mainly because they bring back childhood memories,” she said.

“Yes. It does seem familiar,” Lionel said.

“Really? What about it?”

He paused, searching his mind. “The smells,” he said at last.

Avery nodded. It was smells for her, as well: deep fat fryers, popcorn. “Do you remember anything from the time before you were abducted?”

“Adopted,” he corrected her.

“Right, adopted. What about your family?”

He shook his head.

“Do you ever wonder what kind of people they were?”

“The kind of people who wouldn’t look for me,” he said coldly.

“Wait a minute. You don’t know that. For all you know, your mother might have cried her eyes out when you disappeared.”

He stared at her. She realized she had spoken with more emotion than she had intended. The subject had touched a nerve. “Sorry,” she muttered, and got up. “I’m tired. Can we head back?”

“Sure,” he said, and followed her without question.

That night she couldn’t sleep. She lay watching the pattern from the lights outside on the ceiling, but her mind was on the back of the bus. Up to now she had slept without thinking of the strangeness just beyond the door, but tonight it bothered her.

About 3:00 AM she roused from a doze at the sound of Lionel’s quiet footstep going past her. She lay silent as he eased the bus door open. When he had gone outside she rose and looked to see what he was doing. He walked away from the bus toward a maintenance shed and some dumpsters. She debated whether to follow him; it was just what she had scolded him for doing to her. But concern for his safety won out, and she took a flashlight from the driver’s console, put it in the pocket of a windbreaker, and followed.

At first she thought she had lost him. The parking lot was motionless and quiet. A slight breeze stirred the pines on the edge of the road. Then she heard a scuffling sound ahead, a thump, and a soft crack. At first she stood listening, but when there was no more sound, she crept forward. Rounding the dumpster, she saw in its shadow a figure crouched on the ground. Unable to make out what was going on, she switched on the flashlight.

Lionel turned, his eyes wild and hostile. Dangling from his hand was the limp body of a cat, its head ripped off. His face was smeared with its blood. Watching her, he deliberately ripped a bite of cat meat from the body with his teeth and swallowed.

“Lionel!” she cried out in horror. “Put that down!”

He turned away, trying to hide his prey like an animal. Without thinking, she grabbed his arm, and he spun fiercely around, as if to fight her. His eyes looked utterly alien. She stepped back. “It’s me, Avery,” she said.

He looked down at the mangled carcass in his hand, then dropped it, rose, and backed away. Once again taking his arm, Avery guided him away from the dumpsters, back to the bus. Inside, she led him to the kitchen sink. “Wash,” she ordered, then went to firmly close the bus door.

Her heart was pounding, and she kept the heavy flashlight in her hand for security. But when she came back, she saw he was trembling so hard he had dropped the soap and was leaning against the sink for support. Seeing that his face was still smeared with blood, she took a paper towel and wiped him off, then dried his hands. He sank onto the bench by the kitchen table. She stood watching him, arms crossed, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t.

“So what was that about?” she said sternly.

He shook his head.

“Cats aren’t food,” she said. “They’re living beings.”

Still he didn’t speak.

“Have you been sneaking out at night all along?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “I don’t know . . . I just thought . . . I wanted to see what it would feel like.”

“You mean Mr. Burbage wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said.

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Well, people don’t do things like that.”

He was looking ill. She grabbed his arm and hustled him into the bathroom, aiming him at the toilet. She left him there vomiting, and started shoving belongings into her backpack. As she swung it onto her shoulder, he staggered to the bathroom door.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I can’t sleep here, knowing you do things like that.”

He looked dumbstruck. She pushed past him and out the door. She was striding away across the gravel parking lot when he called after her, “Avery! You can’t leave.”

She wheeled around. “Can’t I? Just watch me.”

He left the bus and followed her. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“I won’t do it again.”

“Who’s talking, you or him?”

A light went on in the RV next to them. She realized they were making a late-night scene like trailer-park trash, attracting attention. This wasn’t an argument they could have in public. And now that she was out here, she realized she had no place to go. So she shooed Lionel back toward the bus.

Once inside, she said, “This is the thing, Lionel. This whole situation is creeping me out. You can’t make any promises as long as he’s in charge. Maybe next time he’ll want to see what it feels like to kill me in my sleep, and you won’t be able to stop him.”

Lionel looked disturbed. “He won’t do that.”

“How do you know?”

“I just . . . do.”

“That’s not good enough. I need to see him.”

Avery wasn’t sure why she had blurted it out, except that living with an invisible, ever-present passenger had become intolerable. As long as she didn’t know what the door in the back of the bus concealed, she couldn’t be at ease.

He shook his head. “That won’t help.”

She crossed her arms and said, “I can’t stay unless I know what he is.”

Lionel’s face took on an introspective look, as if he were consulting his conscience. At last he said, “You’d have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Avery hadn’t really expected him to consent, and now felt a nervous tremor. She dropped her pack on the bed and gripped her hands into fists. “All right.”

He led the way to the back of the bus and eased the door open as if fearing to disturb the occupant within. She followed him in. The small room was dimly lit and there was an earthy smell. All the crates he had brought in must have been folded up and put away, because none were visible. There was an unmade bed, and beside it a clear box like an aquarium tank, holding something she could not quite make out. When Lionel turned on a light, she saw what the tank contained.

It looked most like a coral or sponge—a yellowish, rounded growth the size of half a beach ball, resting on a bed of wood chips and dead leaves. Lionel picked up a spray bottle and misted it tenderly. It responded by expanding as if breathing.

“That’s Mr. Burbage?” Avery whispered.

Lionel nodded. “Part of him. The most important part.”

The alien seemed insignificant, something she could destroy with a bottle of bleach. “Can he move?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Lionel said. “Not the way we do.”

She waited for him to explain. At first he seemed reluctant, but he finally said, “They are colonies of cells with a complicated life cycle. This is the final stage of their development, when they become most complex and organized. After this, they dissolve into the earth. The cells don’t die; they go on to form other coalitions. But the individual is lost. Just like us, I suppose.”

What she was feeling, she realized, was disappointment. In spite of all Lionel had told her, she had hoped there would be some way of communicating. Before, she had not truly believed that the alien could be insentient. Now she did. In fact, she found it hard to believe that it could think at all.

“How do you know he’s intelligent?” she asked. “He could be just a heap of chemicals, like a loaf of bread rising.”

“How do you know I’m intelligent?” he said, staring at the tank. “Or anyone?”

“You react to me. You communicate. He can’t.”

“Yes, he can.”

“How? If I touched him—“

“No!” Lionel said quickly. “Don’t touch him. You’d see, he would react. It wouldn’t be malice, just a reflex.”

“Then how do you . . . ?”

Reluctantly, Lionel said, “He has to touch you. It’s the only way to exchange neurotransmitters.” He paused, as if debating something internally. She watched the conflict play across his face. At last, reluctantly, he said, “I think he would be willing to communicate with you.”

It was what she had wanted, some reassurance of the alien’s intentions. But now it was offered, her instincts were unwilling. “No thanks,” she said.

Lionel looked relieved. She realized he hadn’t wanted to give up his unique relationship with Mr. Burbage.

“Thanks anyway,” she said, for the generosity of the offer he hadn’t wanted to make.

And yet, it left her unsure. She had only Lionel’s word that the alien was friendly. After tonight, that wasn’t enough.

Neither of them could sleep, so as soon as day came they set out again. Heading west, Avery knew they were going deeper and deeper into isolationist territory, where even human strangers were unwelcome, never mind aliens. This was the land where she had grown up, and she knew it well. From here, the world outside looked like a violent, threatening place full of impoverished hordes who envied and hated the good life in America. Here, even the churches preached self-satisfaction, and discontent was the fault of those who hated freedom—like college professors, homosexuals, and immigrants.

Growing up, she had expected to spend her life in this country. She had done everything right—married just out of high school, worked as a waitress, gotten pregnant at 19. Her life had been mapped out in front of her.

She couldn’t even imagine it now.

This morning, Lionel seemed to want to talk. He sat beside her in the co-pilot seat, watching the road and answering her questions.

“What does it feel like, when he communicates with you?”

He reflected. “It feels like a mood, or a hunch. Or I act on impulse.”

“How do you know it’s him, and not your own subconscious?”

“I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

Avery shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to go through life acting on hunches.”

“Why not?”

“Your unconscious . . . it’s unreliable. You can’t control it. It can lead you wrong.”

“That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not some outside entity; it’s you. It’s your conscious mind that’s the slave master, always worrying about control. Your unconscious only wants to preserve you.”

“Not if there’s an alien messing around with it.”

“He’s not like that. This drive to dominate—that’s a conscious thing. He doesn’t have that slave master part of the brain.”

“Do you know that for a fact, or are you just guessing?”

“Guessing is what your unconscious tells you. Knowing is a conscious thing. They’re only in conflict if your mind is fighting itself.”

“Sounds like the human condition to me,” Avery said. This had to be the weirdest conversation in her life.

“Is he here now?” she asked.

“Of course he is.”

“Don’t you ever want to get away from him?”

Puzzled, he said, “Why should I?”

“Privacy. To be by yourself.”

“I don’t want to be by myself.”

Something in his voice told her he was thinking ahead, to the death of his lifelong companion. Abruptly, he rose and walked back into the bus.

Actually, she had lied to him. She had gone through life acting on hunches. Go with your gut had been her motto, because she had trusted her gut. But of course it had nothing to do with gut, or heart—it was her unconscious mind she had been following. Her unconscious was why she took this road rather than that, or preferred Raisin Bran to Corn Flakes. It was why she found certain tunes achingly beautiful, and why she was fond of this strange young man, against all rational evidence.

As the road led them nearer to southern Illinois, Avery found memories surfacing. They came with a tug of regret, like a choking rope pulling her back toward the person she hadn’t become. She thought of the cascade of non-decisions that had led her to become the rootless, disconnected person she was, as much a stranger to the human race as Lionel was, in her way.

What good has consciousness ever done me? she thought. It only made her aware that she could never truly connect with another human being, deep down. And on that day when her cells would dissolve into the soil, there would be no trace her consciousness had ever existed.

That night they camped at a freeway rest stop a day’s drive from St. Louis. Lionel was moody and anxious. Avery’s attempt to interest him in a trashy novel was fruitless. At last she asked what was wrong. Fighting to find the words, he said, “He’s very ill. This trip was a bad idea. All the stimulation has made him worse.”

Tentatively, she said, “Should we head for one of the domes?”

Lionel shook his head. “They can’t cure this . . . this addiction to consciousness. If they could, I don’t think he’d take it.”

“Do the others—his own people—know what’s wrong with him?”

Lionel nodded wordlessly.

She didn’t know what comfort to offer. “Well,” she said at last, “it was his choice to come.”

“A selfish choice,” Lionel said angrily.

She couldn’t help noticing that he was speaking for himself, Lionel, as distinct from Mr. Burbage. Thoughtfully, she said, “Maybe they can’t love us as much as we can love them.”

He looked at her as if the word “love” had never entered his vocabulary. “Don’t say us,” he said. “I’m not one of you.”

She didn’t believe it for a second, but she just said, “Suit yourself,” and turned back to her novel. After a few moments, he went into the back of the bus and closed the door.

She lay there trying to read for a while, but the story couldn’t hold her attention. She kept listening for some sound from beyond the door, some indication of how they were doing. At last she got up quietly and went to listen. Hearing nothing, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Softly, she cracked it open to look inside.

Lionel was not asleep. He was lying on the bed, his head next to the alien’s tank. But the alien was no longer in the tank; it was on the pillow. It had extruded a mass of long, cordlike tentacles that gripped Lionel’s head in a medusa embrace, snaking into every opening. One had entered an ear, another a nostril. A third had nudged aside an eyeball in order to enter the eye socket. Fluid coursed along the translucent vessels connecting man and creature.

Avery wavered on the edge of horror. Her first instinct was to intervene, to defend Lionel from what looked like an attack. But the expression on his face was not of terror, but peace. All his vague references to exchanging neurotransmitters came back to her now: this was what he had meant. The alien communicated by drinking cerebrospinal fluid, its drug of choice, and injecting its own.

Shaken, she eased the door shut again. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she went outside to walk around the bus to calm her nerves. After three circuits she leaned back against the cold metal, wishing she had a cigarette for the first time in years. Above her, the stars were cold and bright. What was this relationship she had landed in the middle of—predator and prey? father and son? pusher and addict? master and slave? Or some strange combination of all? Had she just witnessed an alien learning about love?

She had been saving a bottle of bourbon for special occasions, so she went in to pour herself a shot.

To her surprise, Lionel emerged before she was quite drunk. She thought of offering him a glass, but wasn’t sure how it would mix with whatever was already in his brain.

He sat down across from her, but just stared silently at the floor for a long time. At last he stirred and said, “I think we ought to take him to a private place.”

“What sort of private place?” Avery asked.

“Somewhere dignified. Natural. Secluded.”

To die, she realized. The alien wanted to die in private. Or Lionel wanted him to. There was no telling where one left off and the other began.

“I know a place,” she said. “Will he make it another day?”

Lionel nodded silently.

Through the bourbon haze, Avery wondered what she ought to say to Henry. Was the country in danger? She didn’t think so. This seemed like a personal matter. To be sure, she said, “You’re certain his relatives won’t blame us if he dies?”

“Blame?” he said.

That was conscious-talk, she realized. “React when he doesn’t come back?”

“If they were going to react, they would have done it when he left. They aren’t expecting anything, not even his return. They don’t live in an imaginary future like you people do.”

“Wise of them,” she said.

“Yes.”

They rolled into St. Louis in late afternoon, across the Poplar Street Bridge next to the Arch and off onto I-70 toward the north part of town. Avery knew exactly where she was going. From the first moment Frank had told her the destination was St. Louis, she had known she would end up driving this way, toward the place where she had left the first part of her life.

Bellefontaine Cemetery lay on what had been the outskirts of the city in Victorian times, several hundred acres of greenery behind a stone wall and a wrought-iron gate. It was a relic from a time when cemeteries were landscaped, parklike sanctuaries from the city. Huge old oak and sweetgum trees lined the winding roadways, their branches now black against the sky. Avery drove slowly past the marble mausoleums and toward the hill at the back of the cemetery, which looked out over the valley toward the Missouri River. It was everything Lionel had wanted—peaceful, natural, secluded.

Some light rain misted down out of the overcast sky. Avery parked the bus and went out to check whether they were alone. She had seen no one but a single dog-walker near the entrance, and no vehicle had followed them in. The gates would close in half an hour, and the bus would have to be out. Henry and his friends were probably waiting outside the gate for them to appear again. She returned to the bus and knocked on Lionel’s door. He opened it right away. Inside, the large picnic cooler they had bought was standing open, ready.

“Help me lift him in,” Lionel said.

Avery maneuvered past the cooler to the tank. “Is it okay for me to touch him?”

“Hold your hand close to him for a few seconds.”

Avery did as instructed. A translucent tentacle extruded from the cauliflower folds of the alien’s body. It touched her palm, recoiled, then extended again. Gently, hesitantly, it explored her hand, tickling slightly as it probed her palm and curled around her pinkie. She held perfectly still.

“What is he thinking?” she whispered.

“He’s learning your chemical identity,” Lionel said.

“How can he learn without being aware? Can he even remember?”

“Of course he can remember. Your immune system learns and remembers just about every pathogen it ever met, and it’s not aware. Can you remember them all?”

She shook her head, stymied.

At last, apparently satisfied, the tendril retracted into the alien’s body.

“All right,” Lionel said, “now you can touch him.”

The alien was surprisingly heavy. Together, they lifted him onto the bed of dirt and wood chips Lionel had spread in the bottom of the cooler. Lionel fitted the lid on loosely, and each of them took a handle to carry their load out into the open air. Avery led the way around a mausoleum shaped like a Greek temple to an unmowed spot hidden from the path. Sycamore leaves and bark littered the ground, damp from the rain.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

For answer, Lionel set down his end of the cooler and straightened, breathing in the forest smell. “This is okay.”

“I have to move the bus. Stay behind this building in case anyone comes by. I’ll be back.”

The gatekeeper waved as she pulled the bus out onto the street. By the time she had parked it on a nearby residential street and returned, the gate was closed. She walked around the cemetery perimeter to an unfrequented side, then scrambled up the wall and over the spiked fence.

Inside, the traffic noise of the city fell away. The trees arched overhead in churchlike silence. Not a squirrel stirred. Avery sat down on a tombstone to wait. Beyond the hill, Lionel was holding vigil at the side of his dying companion, and she wanted to give him privacy. The stillness felt good, but unfamiliar. Her life was made of motion. She had been driving for twenty years—driving away, driving beyond, always a new destination. Never back.

The daylight would soon be gone. She needed to do the other thing she had come here for. Raising the hood of her raincoat, she headed downhill, the grass caressing her sneakers wetly. It was years since she had visited the grave of her daughter Gabrielle, whose short life and death were like a chasm dividing her life into before and after. They had called it crib death then—an unexplained, random, purposeless death. “Nothing you could have done,” the doctor had said, thinking that was more comforting than knowing that the universe just didn’t give a damn.

Gabrielle’s grave lay in a grove of cedar trees—the plot a gift from a sympathetic patron at the café where Avery had worked. At first she had thought of turning it down because the little grave would be overshadowed by more ostentatious death; but the suburban cemeteries had looked so industrial, monuments stamped out by machine. She had come to love the age and seclusion of this spot. At first, she had visited over and over.

As she approached in the fading light, she saw that something was lying on the headstone. When she came close she saw that some stranger had placed on the grave a little terra cotta angel with one wing broken. Avery stood staring at the bedraggled figurine, now soaked with rain, a gift to her daughter from someone she didn’t even know. Then, a sudden, unexpected wave of grief doubled her over. It had been twenty years since she had touched her daughter, but the memory was still vivid and tactile. She remembered the smell, the softness of her skin, the utter trust in her eyes. She felt again the aching hole of her absence.

Avery sank to her knees in the wet grass, sobbing for the child she hadn’t been able to protect, for the sympathy of the nameless stranger, even for the helpless, mutilated angel who would never fly.

There was a sound behind her, and she looked up. Lionel stood there watching her, rain running down his face—no, it was tears. He wiped his eyes, then looked at his hands. “I don’t know why I feel like this,” he said.

Poor, muddled man. She got up and hugged him for knowing exactly how she felt. They stood there for a moment, two people trapped in their own brains, and the only crack in the wall was empathy.

“Is he gone?” she asked softly.

He shook his head. “Not yet. I left him alone in case it was me . . . interfering. Then I saw you and followed.”

“This is my daughter’s grave,” Avery said. “I didn’t know I still miss her so much.”

She took his hand and started back up the hill. They said nothing, but didn’t let go of each other till they got to the marble mausoleum where they had left Mr. Burbage.

The alien was still there, resting on the ground next to the cooler. Lionel knelt beside him and held out a hand. A bouquet of tentacles reached out and grasped it, then withdrew. Lionel came over to where Avery stood watching. “I’m going to stay with him. You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to,” she said, “if it’s okay with you.”

He ducked his head furtively.

So they settled down to keep a strange death watch. Avery shared some chemical hand-warmers she had brought from the bus. When those ran out and night deepened, she managed to find some dry wood at the bottom of a groundskeeper’s brush pile to start a campfire. She sat poking the fire with a stick, feeling drained of tears, worn down as an old tire.

“Does he know he’s dying?” she asked.

Lionel nodded. “I know, and so he knows.” A little bitterly, he added, “That’s what consciousness does for you.”

“So normally he wouldn’t know?”

He shook his head. “Or care. It’s just part of their life cycle. There’s no death if there’s no self to be aware of it.”

“No life either,” Avery said.

Lionel just sat breaking twigs and tossing them on the fire. “I keep wondering if it was worth it. If consciousness is good enough to die for.”

She tried to imagine being free of her self—of the regrets of the past and fear of the future. If this were a Star Trek episode, she thought, this would be when Captain Kirk would deliver a speech in defense of being human, despite all the drawbacks. She didn’t feel that way.

“You’re right,” she said. “Consciousness kind of sucks.”

The sky was beginning to glow with dawn when at last they saw a change in the alien. The brainlike mass started to shrink and a liquid pool spread out from under it, as if it were dissolving. There was no sound. At the end, its body deflated like a falling soufflé, leaving nothing but a slight crust on the leaves and a damp patch on the ground.

They sat for a long time in silence. It was light when Lionel got up and brushed off his pants, his face set and grim. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

Avery felt reluctant to leave. “His cells are in the soil?” she said.

“Yes, they’ll live underground for a while, spreading and multiplying. They’ll go through some blooming and sporing cycles. If any dogs or children come along at that stage, the spores will establish a colony in their brains. It’s how they invade.”

His voice was perfectly indifferent. Avery stared at him. “You might have mentioned that.”

He shrugged.

An inspiration struck her. She seized up a stick and started digging in the damp patch of ground, scooping up soil in her hands and putting it into the cooler.

“What are you doing?” Lionel said. “You can’t stop him, it’s too late.”

“I’m not trying to,” Avery said. “I want some cells to transplant. I’m going to grow an alien of my own.”

“That’s the stupidest—”

A moment later he was on his knees beside her, digging and scooping up dirt. They got enough to half-fill the cooler, then covered it with leaves to keep it damp.

“Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll bring the bus to pick you up. The gates open in an hour. Don’t let anyone see you.”

When she got back to the street where she had left the bus, Henry was waiting in a parked car. He got out and opened the passenger door for her, but she didn’t get inside. “I’ve got to get back,” she said, inclining her head toward the bus. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“I just needed a break. I had to get away.”

“In a cemetery? All night?”

“It’s personal.”

“Is there something I should know?”

“We’re heading back home today.”

He waited, but she said no more. There was no use telling him; he couldn’t do anything about it. The invasion was already underway.

He let her return to the bus, and she drove it to a gas station to fuel up while waiting for the cemetery to open. At the stroke of 8:30 she pulled the bus through the gate, waving at the puzzled gatekeeper.

Between them, she and Lionel carried the cooler into the bus, leaving behind only the remains of a campfire and a slightly disturbed spot of soil. Then she headed straight for the freeway.

They stopped for a fast-food breakfast in southern Illinois. Avery kept driving as she ate her egg muffin and coffee. Soon Lionel came to sit shotgun beside her, carrying a plastic container full of soil.

“Is that mine?” she asked.

“No, this one’s mine. You can have the rest.”

“Thanks.”

“It won’t be him,” Lionel said, looking at the soil cradled on his lap.

“No. But it’ll be yours. Yours to raise and teach.”

As hers would be.

“I thought you would have some kind of tribal loyalty to prevent them invading,” Lionel said.

Avery thought about it a moment, then said, “We’re not defenseless, you know. We’ve got something they want. The gift of self, of mortality. God, I feel like the snake in the garden. But my alien will love me for it.” She could see the cooler in the rear view mirror, sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Already she felt fond of the person it would become. Gestating inside. “It gives a new meaning to alien abduction, doesn’t it?” she said.

He didn’t get the joke. “You aren’t afraid to become . . . something like me?”

She looked over at him. “No one can be like you, Lionel.”

Even after all this time together, he still didn’t know how to react when she said things like that.

About the Author

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her most recent novel, Dark Orbit (2015), is about a scientific expedition to a crystalline planet where the explorers must confront mysteries about themselves and their reality in order to escape alive. Her other novels include Halfway Human and the two-volume novel Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. Her short fiction appears in many Best of the Year collections and has been translated into seven languages. In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in frontier and Native history. She is author of Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, and five other books on aspects of Native American and western history. She lives in Washington, D.C. and works as an exhibit developer for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Balin

Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu

I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Balin’s dark skin, an adaptation for the tropics, appears as aphotic as the abyss of deep space, all reflected light absorbed by the thick layer of gel smeared over his body and the nanometer-thin translucent membrane wrap. Suspended between bubbles in the gel, microsensors twinkle with a pale blue glow like dying stars, like the miniature images of me in his eyes.

“Don’t be afraid,” I whisper. “Relax. Soon it’ll be better.”

As though he understands me, his face softens and wrinkles pile up at the corners of his eyes. Even the scar over his brow is no longer so apparent.

He’s old. Though I’ve never figured out how to tell the age in his kind.

My assistant helps Balin onto the omnidirectional treadmill, securing a harness around his waist. No matter in which direction he runs and how fast, the treadmill will adjust to keep him centered and stable.

The assistant hands the helmet to me, and I put it over Balin’s head myself. His eyes, bulging with astonishment like two light bulbs, disappear into the darkness.

“Everything will be fine,” I say, my voice so low that no one can hear me, as though I’m comforting myself.

The red light on the helmet flashes, faster and faster. A few seconds later, it turns green.

As though struck by a spell, Balin’s body stiffens. He reminds me of a lamb who has heard the grinding of the butcher’s knife against the whetstone.

A summer night the year I turned thirteen: The air was hot and sticky; the scent of rust and mold, prelude to a typhoon, filled my nostrils.

I lay on the floor of the main hall of my ancestral compound. I flattened my body against the cool, green mosaic stone tiles like a gecko until the floor under my body had been warmed by my skin; then I rolled to the side, seeking a fresh set of tiles to keep me cool.

From behind came the familiar sound of scuffling leather soles: crisp, quick-paced, echoing loudly in the empty hall. I knew who it was, but I didn’t bother to move, greeting the owner of those footsteps with the sight of my raised ass.

“Why aren’t you in the new house? There’s air conditioning.”

My father’s tone was uncharacteristically gentle. The new house he referred to was a three-story addition just erected at the back of the ancestral compound, filled with imported furniture and appliances and decorated in the latest fashion. He had even added a spacious study just for me.

“I hate the new house.”

“Foolish child!” He raised his voice, but then quickly lowered it to a barely audible mutter.

I knew he was apologizing to our ancestors. I gazed up at the shrine behind the joss sticks and the black-and-white portraits on the wall to see if any of them would react to my father’s entreaties.

They did not.

My father heaved a long sigh. “Ah Peng, I haven’t forgotten your birthday. I had an accident on the way back from up north with the cargo, which is why I’m two days late.”

I shifted, and wriggled like a pond loach until I found another cool spot on the tiled floor.

The cigarette stench on my father’s breath permeated the air as he whispered at my ear, “I’ve had your present ready for a long while. You’ll like it; it’s not something you can buy in a shop.”

He clapped twice, and I heard a different set of footsteps approach, the sound of flesh flapping against stone, close together, moist, like some amphibious creature that had just crawled out of the sea.

I sat up and gazed in the direction of the sound. Behind my father, a lively black silhouette, limned by the creamy yellow light of the hallway light, stood over the algae-green mosaic tiles. A disproportionately large bulbous head swayed over a thin and slight figure, like the sheep’s head atop the slender stick that served as a sign outside the butcher’s shop in town.

The shadow took two steps forward, and I realized that the backlighting wasn’t the only reason the figure was so dark. The person—if one could call the creature a person—seemed to be covered from head to toe in a layer of black paint that absorbed all light. It was as though a seam had been torn in the world, and the person-shaped crack devoured all light—except for two tiny glows: his slightly protruding eyes.

It was indeed a boy, a naked boy who wore a loincloth woven from bark and palm fronds. His head wasn’t quite as large as it had seemed in shadow; rather, the illusion had been caused by his hair, worn in two strange buns that resembled the horns of a ram. Agitated, he concentrated on the gaps between the tiles at his feet, his toes wiggling and squirming, sounding like insect feet scrabbling along the floor.

“He’s a paoxiao,” my father said, giving me the name of a creature from ancient myths who was said to possess the body of a goat, the head of a man—though with eyes located below the cheeks, the teeth of a tiger, and the nails of a human, and who cried like a baby and devoured humans without mercy. “We captured him on one of the small islands in the South China Sea. I imagine that he’s never set foot on a civilized floor in his life.”

I stared at him, stupefied. The boy was about my age, but everything about him made me uneasy—especially the fact that my father gave him to me as a present.

“I don’t like him,” I said. “I’d rather have a puppy.”

A violent fit of coughing seized my father. It took him a few moments to recover.

“Don’t be stupid. He’s worth a lot more than a dog. If I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, I would never have believed he’s real.” His voice grew ethereal as he went on.

A susurrating noise grew louder. I shuddered; the typhoon was here.

The wind blew the boy’s scent to me, a strong, briny stench that reminded me of a fish, a common, slender, iron-black, cheap fish trawled from the ocean.

That’s a good name for him, isn’t it? I thought.

My father had long planned out everything about my life up through age forty-five.

At eighteen I would attend a college right here in Guangdong Province and study business—the school couldn’t be more than three hours from home by train.

In college, I would not be allowed to date. This was because my father had already picked out a girl for me: the daughter of his business partner Lao Luo. Indeed, he had taken the trouble to go to a fortuneteller to ensure that the eight characters of our birth times were compatible.

After graduation, Lao Luo’s daughter and I would get married. By my twenty-fifth year, my father would have his first grandchild. By twenty-eight I would give him another. And depending on the sexes of the first two, he might want a third as well.

Simultaneous with the birth of my first child, I would also join the family business. He would take me around to pay my respects to all his partners and suppliers (he had gotten to know most of them in the army).

Since I was expected to work very long hours, who would take care of my child? His mother, of course—see, my father already decided it would be a boy. My wife would stay home; there would be two sets of grandparents; and we could hire nannies.

By age thirty I would take over the Lin Family Tea Company. In the five years prior to this point, I would have to master all aspects of the tea trade, from identification of tea leaves to manufacture and transport, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of all my father’s partners and competitors.

For the next fifteen years, with my retired father as my advisor, I would lead the family business to new heights: branching out into other provinces and spreading Lin tea leafs all over China; and if I’m lucky, perhaps even breaking into the overseas trade, a lifelong goal that my father had always wanted—but also hesitated—to pursue.

By the time I was forty-five, my oldest child would be close to graduating from college. At that point, I would follow in my father’s footsteps and find a good wife for him.

Everything in my father’s universe functioned as an essential component in an intricate piece of well-maintained clockwork: gear meshed with gear, wheel turned upon wheel, motion without end.

Whenever I argued with him over his grand plan for me, he always brought up my grandfather, his grandfather, and then my grandfather’s grandfather—he would point at the wall of ancestors’ portraits and denounce me for forgetting my roots.

This is the way the Lin family has survived, he would say. Are you telling me you are no longer a Lin?

Sometimes I wondered if I was really living in the twenty-first century.

I called him Balin. In our topolect, balin meant a fish with scales.

In reality, he looked more like a goat, especially when he lifted his eyes to gaze at the horizon, his two hair buns poking up like horns. My father told me that the paoxiao have an incredibly strong sense of direction. Even if they were blindfolded, hogtied, tossed into the dark hold of a ship, hauled across the ocean in a journey lasting weeks, and sold and resold through numerous buyers, they’d still be able to find their way home. Of course, given the geopolitical disputes in the South China Sea, exactly what country was their home was indeterminate.

“Then do we need to leash him like a dog?” I asked my father.

He chuckled unnaturally. “The paoxiao are even more accepting of fate than we. They believe everything that happens to them is by the will of the gods and spirits; that’s why they’ll never run away.”

Gradually, Balin grew used to his new environment. My father repurposed our old chicken coop as his home. It took him a long time to figure out that the bedding was meant for him to sleep on, but even after that, he preferred to sleep on the rough, sandy floor. He ate just about everything, even crunching the chicken bones leftover after our meals. I and the other children of the village enjoyed crouching outside his hutch to watch him eat. This was also the only time when I could see his teeth clearly: densely packed, sharp triangles like the teeth of a shark; they easily ripped apart whatever he stuffed into his mouth.

As I watched, I couldn’t help imagining the feeling of those sharp teeth tearing into me; I would then shudder with a complicated sensation, a mixture of pain and addictive pleasure.

One day, after Balin had eaten enough, he leisurely crawled out of his enclosure. His thin figure sporting a bulging, round tummy resembled a twig with a swelling gall. A couple of other kids and I were playing “monster in the water.” Balin, waddling from side to side, stopped not far from us and watched our game with curiosity.

“Shrimp! Shrimp! Watch out if you don’t want one to bite off your toes!” Shouting and screaming, we pretended to be fishermen standing on shore (a short brick wall) gingerly sticking our feet into the (nonexistent) river. Dip. Dip. Pull back.

The boy who was the water monster ran back and forth, trying to grab the bare feet of the fishermen as they dipped into the river. Only by pulling a fisherman into the river would the water monster be redeemed to humanity, and his unlucky victim would turn into the new water monster.

No one remembered when Balin joined our game. But then Nana, a neighbor, abruptly stopped and pointed. I looked and saw Balin imitating the movements of the water monster: leaping over here, bounding over there. Except that he wasn’t grabbing or snatching at the feet of fishermen, but empty air.

Children often liked to imitate the speech or body language of others, but what Balin was doing was unlike anything I had ever seen. Balin’s movements were almost in perfect synchrony with Ah Hui, the boy who was the water monster.

I say “almost” because it was impossible to detect with the naked eye whether there was a delay between Balin’s movements and Ah Hui’s. Balin was like a shadow that Ah Hui had cast five meters away. Each time Ah Hui turned, each time he extended his hand, even each time he paused dispiritedly because he had missed a fisherman—every gesture was mirrored by Balin perfectly.

I couldn’t understand how Balin was accomplishing this feat, as though he was moving without thinking.

Finally, Ah Hui stopped because everyone was staring.

Ah Hui took a few steps toward Balin; Balin took a few steps toward Ah Hui. Even the way they dragged their heels was exactly the same.

“Why are you copying me?” demanded Ah Hui.

Balin’s lips moved in synchrony, though the syllables that emerged from his mouth were mere noise, like the screeching of a broken radio.

Ah Hui pushed Balin, but he stumbled back because Balin also pushed him at the same moment.

The crowd of children grew excited at the farcical scene, far more interesting than the water monster game.

“Fight! Fight!”

Ah Hui jumped at Balin, and the two grappled with each other. This was a fascinating fight because their motions mirrored each other exactly. Soon, neither could move as they were locked in a stalemate, staring into each other’s eyes.

“That’s enough! Go home, all of you!” Massive hands picked both of them off the ground and forcibly separated them as though parting a pair of conjoined twins. It was Father.

Ah Hui angrily spat on the ground. The children scattered.

Balin did not imitate Ah Hui this time. It was as though some switch had been shut off in him.

Smiling, Father glanced at me, as though to say, Now do you understand why this present is so great?

“We can view the human brain as a machine with just three functions: sensing, thinking, and motor control. If we use a computer as an analogy, sensing is the input, thinking is the computation carried out by the switches, and motor control is the output—the brain’s only means of interacting with the external world. Do you see why?”

Before knowing Mr. Lu, I would never have believed that a gym teacher would give this sort of speech.

Mr. Lu was a local legend. He was not that tall, only about five-foot-eight, his hair cropped short. Through the thin shirts he wore in summers we could see his bulging muscles. It was said that he had studied abroad.

Everyone in our class was puzzled by why somebody who had left China and seen the world would want to return to our tiny, poor town to be a middle-school teacher. Later, we heard that Mr. Lu was an only child. His father was bedridden with a chronic illness, and his mother had died early. Since there were no other relatives who could care for his father and the old man refused to leave town, saying that he preferred to die where he was born, Mr. Lu had no choice but to move home and find a teaching job. Since his degree was in the neurology of motor control, the principal naturally thought he would be qualified to teach phys ed.

Unlike our other teachers, Mr. Lu never put on any airs around us. He joked about with us as though we were all friends.

Once, I asked him, “Why did you come back to this town?”

“There’s an old Confucian saying that as long as your parents are alive, you should not travel too far. I’d been far away from home for more than a decade, and my father won’t be with me for much longer. I have to think about him.”

I asked him another question: “Will you leave after both your parents are gone then?”

Mr. Lu frowned, as though he didn’t want to think about the question. Then he said, “In my field there was a pioneering researcher named Donald Broadbent. He once said that it was far harder to control human behavior than to control the stimuli influencing them. That was why in the study of motor control it was difficult to devise simple scientific laws of the form ‘A leads to B.’”

“So?” I asked, knowing that he had no intention of answering my question.

“So no one knows what will happen in the future.” He nodded and took a long drag of his cigarette.

“Bullshit,” I said, accepting the cigarette from him and taking a puff.

No one thought he would stick around our town for long.

In the end he was my gym teacher from eighth grade through twelfth grade, married a local woman, and had kids.

Just the way he predicted.

At first we used a pushpin, and then we switched to the electric igniter for a cigarette lighter. Snap! There it was: a pale blue electric arc.

Father thought this was more civilized.

The people who had sold Balin to him had also taught him a trick. If he wanted Balin to imitate someone, he should have Balin face the target and lock gazes. Then he should “stimulate” Balin in some way. Once Balin’s eyes glazed over then the “connection” was established. They explained to my father that this was a unique custom of Balin’s kind.

Balin brought us endless entertainment.

As long as I could remember, I’d always enjoyed street puppetry, whether shadow puppets, glove puppets, or marionettes. Curious, I would sneak behind the stage and watch the performers give life to the inanimate and enact moving scenes of love and revenge. In my childhood, such transformations had seemed magical, and now with Balin, I finally had the chance to practice my own brand of magic.

I danced, and so did he. I boxed, and so did he. I had been shy about putting on a performance in front of my relatives, but now, through Balin’s body, I became the family entertainer.

I had Balin imitate Father when he was drunk. I had him imitate anyone who was different in town: the madman, the cripple, the idiot, the beggar who had broken legs and arms and who had to crawl along the ground like a worm, the epileptic . . . my friends and I would laugh so hard that we would roll on the ground—until the relatives of our victims came after us, wielding bamboo laundry rods.

Balin was also good at imitating animals: he was best at cats, dogs, oxen, goats, pigs; not so good with ducks and chickens; and completely useless when it came to fish.

Sometimes, I found him crouched outside the door to the main house in the ancestral compound spying on our TV. He was especially fascinated by animal documentaries. When he saw prey being hunted down and killed by predators, Balin’s body twitched and spasmed uncontrollably, as though he was the one whose belly was being ripped open, his entrails spilling forth.

There were times when Balin grew tired. While imitating a target, his movements would slow and diverge from the target’s, like a wind-up figurine running down or a toy car with almost-exhausted batteries. After a while, he would fall to the ground and stop moving, and no matter how hard we kicked him, he refused to budge. The only solution was to make him eat, stuff him to the gills.

Other than exhaustion, he never resisted or showed any signs of unhappiness. In my childish eyes, Balin was no different from the puppets constructed from hide, cellophane, fabric, or wood. He was nothing more than an object faithfully carrying out the controller’s will, but he himself was devoid of emotion. His imitation was nothing more than an unthinking reflex.

Eventually, we tired of controlling Balin one-on-one, and we invented more complex and also crueler multiplayer games.

First, we decided the order through rock-paper-scissors. The winner got to control Balin to fight against the loser. The winner of the contest then got to fight against the next kid in line. I was the first.

The experience was cool beyond measure. Like a general sitting safe far from the frontlines, I commanded my soldier on the battlefield to press, punch, dodge, kick, roundhouse . . . because I was at a distance from the fight, I could discern my opponent’s intentions and movements with more clarity, and devise better attacks and responses. Moreover, since Balin was the one who endured all the pain, I had no fear and could attack ruthlessly.

I thought my victory was certain.

But for some reason, all my carefully planned moves, as they were carried out by Balin, seemed to lack strength. Even punches and kicks that landed squarely against my opponent did little to shock the opponent, much less to injure him. Soon, Balin was on the ground, enduring a hailstorm of punches.

“Bite him! Bite!” I snapped my jaw in the air, knowing the power of Balin’s sharp teeth.

But Balin was like a marionette whose strings had been cut. My opponent’s fists did not relent, and soon Balin’s cheeks were swollen.

“Dammit!” I spat on the ground, conceding the fight.

Now it was my turn to face Balin, controlled by the victor of the last round. I stared at him as ferociously as I could manage. His face was bloody, the skin around his eyes bruised and puffy, but his irises still held their habitual tranquility. I was enraged.

Glancing out the corner of my eye, I observed the movements of Ah Hui, Balin’s controller. I was familiar with how Ah Hui fought. He always stepped forward with his left foot and punched with his right fist. I was going to surprise him with a low spinning sweep kick to knock him off his feet. Once he was on the ground, the fight would basically be over.

Ah Hui stepped forward with his left foot. Here it comes. I was about to crouch down and begin my sweep, but Balin’s foot moved and kicked up the dirt at his feet, blinding me in an instant. Next, his leg swept low along the ground, and I was the one knocked off my feet. My eyes squeezed shut, I wrapped my arms about my head, preparing to endure a fusillade of punches.

However, the fight did not proceed the way I imagined. The punches did land against my body, but there was no force behind them at all. At first, I thought Balin was probably tired, but soon realized that was not the case. Ah Hui’s own punches against the air were forceful and precise, but Balin apparently was holding back on purpose so that his punches landed on my body like caresses.

Without warning, the punching stopped. Something warm and smelly pressed itself against my face.

Laughter erupted around me. When I finally understood what had happened, a wave of heat suffused my face.

Balin had sat on me with his nude and dirty bottom.

Ah Hui knew that Balin’s punches were useless, which was why he had come up with such a dirty trick.

I pushed Balin away and leapt up off the ground. In one quick motion, I pressed Balin to the ground and held him down. Tears poured out of my eyes, stung by the kicked-up sand as well as humiliation and rage. Balin looked up at me, his swollen eyes also filled with tears, as though he knew exactly how I felt at that moment.

Then it hit me. He’s just imitating. I raised my fist.

“Why didn’t you punch with real force, like I wanted you to?”

My fist pounded against Balin’s thin body, thumping as though I was punching a hollow shell made of fragile plywood.

“Why don’t you hit me back?”

My fingers felt the teeth beneath his lips rattling.

“Tell me why!”

A crisp snap of bone. A wound opened over Balin’s right brow, the torn skin extended to the tip of his eye. Pink and white fascia and fat spilled out from under the dark skin, and bright red blood flowed freely, soon pooling on the sandy earth under him.

A heavy, fish-like scent wafted from his body.

Terrified, I got off him and stepped back. The other children were stunned as well.

The dust settled, and Balin lay still, curled up like a slaughtered lamb. He glanced at me with his left eye, the one not covered in blood. The tranquil orb still betrayed no emotion. In that moment, for the first time, I felt that he was like me: he was made of flesh and blood; he was a person with a soul.

The moment lasted only seconds. Almost instinctively, I realized that if I had not been treating Balin as a human being until this moment, then it was impossible for me to do so in the future either.

I brushed off the dirt on my pants and shoved my way through the crowd of children, never looking back.

I enter “Ghost” mode, experiencing everything experienced by Balin, trapped in his VR suit.

I—Balin—we are standing on some beautiful tropical island. Based on my suggestion, the environment artist has combined the sights and vegetation from multiple South China Sea islands to create this reality. Even the angle and temperature of light are calculated to be accurate for the latitude.

My intent is to give Balin the sensation of being back home—his real home. But the environment doesn’t seem to have reduced his terror.

The view whirls violently: sky, sand, the ocean nearby, scattered vines, and from time to time, even rough gray polygonal structures whose textures have yet to be applied.

I feel dizzy. This is the result of visual signals and bodily motion being out of sync. The eyes tell my brain that I’m moving, but the vestibular system tells my brain that I’m not. The conflict between the two sets of signals gives rise to a feeling of sickness.

For Balin, we have deployed the most advanced techniques to shrink the signal delay to within five milliseconds. In addition, we are using motion capture technology to synchronize the movements between his virtual body and his physical body. He could move freely on the omnidirectional treadmill, but his position wouldn’t shift one inch.

We’re treating him like a guest in first class, anticipating all his needs.

Balin stands rooted to his spot. He can’t understand how the world in his eyes is related to the bright, sterile lab he was in just a few minutes ago.

“This is useless,” I bark at the technicians through my microphone. “We’ve got to get him to move!”

Balin’s head whips around. The surround sound system in his helmet warns him of movements behind his body. A quaking wave ripples through the dense jungle, and a flock of birds erupts into the air. Something gigantic is shoving its way through the vegetation, making its way toward Balin. Motionless, Balin stares at the bush.

A massive herd of prehistoric creatures bursts from the jungle. Even I, no expert on evolutionary biology, can tell that they don’t belong to the same geologic epoch. The technicians have used whatever models they can find in the database to try to get Balin to move.

Still, he stands there like a tree stump, enduring waves of Tyrannosaurus rexes, saber-toothed tigers, monstrous dragonflies, crocodilian-shaped ancestors of dinosaurs, and strange arthropods as they rush at him and then, howling and screaming, sweep through him like wisps of mist. This is a bug in the physics engine, but if we were to fix the bug and fully simulate the physical experience, the VR user would not be able to endure the impact.

It isn’t over yet.

The ground under Balin begins to quake and split. Trees lean over and topple. Volcanoes erupt and crimson molten lava spills out of the earth, coalescing into bloody rivers. Massive waves more than ten meters tall charge at our position from the sea.

“I think you might be overdoing this a bit,” I say into the mike. I hear faint giggles.

Imagine how a primitive human tossed into the middle of such an apocalyptic scene would feel. Would he consider himself a savior who is suffering for the sins of the entire human race? Or would he be on the cusp of madness, his senses on the verge of collapse?

Or would he behave like Balin: no reaction at all?

Suddenly, I understand the truth.

I back out of Ghost mode, and remove Balin’s helmet. Sensors are studded like pearls all over his skull. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut, the wrinkles around them so deep that they resemble insect antennae.

“Let’s stop here today.” I sigh helplessly, recalling that afternoon long ago when I had punched him until he bled.

As the time approached for all the high school students to declare our intended subjects of study before the college entrance examination, the war between my father and me heated up.

According to his grand plan, I was supposed to major in political science or history in college, but I had zero interest in those subjects, which I viewed as painted whores at the whim of those in power. I wanted to major in a hard science like physics, or at the minimum biology—something that according to Mr. Lu involved “fundamental questions.”

My father was contemptuous of my reasons. He pointed to the houses in our ancestral compound, and the tea leaves drying over the racks in the yard, glistening like gold dust in the bright sunlight.

“Do you think there are any questions more fundamental than making a living and feeding your family?”

It was like discussing music theory with a cud-chewing cow.

I gave up trying to convince Father. I had my own plan. With Mr. Lu’s help, I obtained permission from the teachers to cram for common subjects like math, Chinese, and English with students who intended to declare for the humanities, but then I would sneak away to study physics, chemistry, and biology with the science students. If class schedules conflicted, I would make my own choices and then make up the missed work later.

My teachers were willing to let me get away with it because they had their own selfish hopes. Rather than forcing someone who had no interest to study politics and history, they thought they might as well let me follow my heart. If they got lucky, it was possible that I would do extraordinarily well on the college entrance examination as a science student and bring honor to them all.

I thought my plan would fool my busy father, who was away from home more often than not. I was going to surprise him at the last minute, when I had to fill out the desired majors and top choice schools right before the examination. Even if he blew up at me then, it would be too late.

I was so naïve.

On the day we were supposed to fill out the forms, all my friends received a copy of the blank form except me. I thought the head teacher had made a mistake.

“Uh . . . your father already filled it out for you.” The teacher dared not meet my eyes.

I don’t remember how I made it home that day. Like a lost, homeless dog, I wandered the streets and alleyways of the town aimlessly until I found myself in front of the ancestral compound.

Father was entertaining himself by playing with Balin. He had dug up an old set of army uniforms and put them on Balin. The loose folds and wide pant legs hung on Balin like a tent, making him resemble a monkey who had stolen some human clothing. Father had Balin follow orders he had learned during the time he was in the army: stand at attention, stand at ease, right dress, left dress, march in place, and so on. When I was in elementary school, Father had enjoyed ordering me around like a drill sergeant at the parade ground, and I had hated those “games” more than anything else.

It had been years since he had tried anything like that with me, but now he had found a new recruit.

A soldier who would obey every one of his commands without question.

“One-two-one! One-two-one! Forwaaaaard-march!” As he barked out the commands and demonstrated the moves, Balin goose-stepped around the yard, his pant legs muddy as they dragged on the ground.

I stepped between them and faced my father. “You have no intention of letting me go to college, is that it?”

“Riiiiight-dress!” My father whipped his head to the right and shuffled his feet. I heard the sound of feet scrabbling against the ground in synchrony behind me.

“You knew about my plan a long time ago, didn’t you?” I demanded. “But you said nothing before you played your trick so I wouldn’t have a chance to stop you.”

“Maaaaarch in place!”

Enraged, I turned around and held Balin still, not allowing him to proceed any longer like a mindless drone. But he seemed unable to stop. The pant legs slapped against the ground, whipping up wisps of dust.

I grabbed his head and forced him to lock gazes with me. I pulled out the electric lighter from my pocket and flicked it; a pale blue arc burst into life next to his temple. Balin screamed like a baby.

I looked into his eyes; now he belonged to me.

“You have no right to control me! All you care about is your business. Have you ever thought about what I want for my future?”

As I screamed at my father, Balin marched around us, his finger also pointing at Father, his mouth also screaming. The circle he made around the two of us tightened on each loop.

“I’m going to college whether you want me to go or not. And I’m going to study whatever I want!” I clenched my jaw. Balin’s finger was almost touching my father. “Let me tell you something, Father: I never want to become like you.”

The militaristic arrogance melted from my father. He stood there, his face fallen and back hunched, like crops that had been bitten by frost. I expected him to hit back, hard, as was his wont, but he did not.

“I knew. I’ve always known that you don’t want to walk the path others have paved for you,” my father’s voice faded until it was barely a whisper. “You remind me so much of myself when I was your age. But I have no choice—”

“So you want me to repeat your life?”

My father’s knees buckled. I thought he was going to fall, but he knelt on the ground and embraced Balin.

“You can’t leave!” he shouted. “I know what’s going to happen if you go away to college. No one who leaves this town ever returns.”

I struggled against the empty air so that Balin, moving in sync with me, could free himself from my father’s grasp. As long as I could remember, my father had never hugged me.

“Don’t be so childish! Open your eyes! See the world for what it is.”

Balin was like a wind-up toy that had malfunctioned. His limbs whipped about in a frenzy; the military uniform he wore was torn in multiple places, revealing the dark, unreflective skin.

“The way you spoke just now is just like your mother.” Another pale blue spark came to life over Balin’s temple. Abruptly, he ceased struggling, and held my father tightly like a long-lost lover. “Are you going to abandon me just like she did?”

I was stunned.

I had never thought about this matter from my father’s perspective. I had always thought that he wanted to keep me close at hand because he was selfish, narrow-minded, but I had never seen it as a reaction to the fear of being abandoned. My mother had left us when I was too young to view it as trauma, but it cast a shadow over the rest of his life.

Wordless, I approached my father, who held on to Balin tightly. I bent down and caressed his spine, no longer as straight as in my memory. Maybe this was as close as the two of us would ever be.

I saw the tears spilling from the corners of Balin’s eyes. For a moment, I doubted myself.

Maybe it isn’t just about control and power, but also love.

There are many things I wish I had known before I turned seventeen.

For example, the fact that most of the structures in the human brain have something to do with motor functions, including the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, the brainstem, the motor region of the cerebral cortex and the direct projection of the somatosensory cortex to the primary motor cortex, and so on.

For example, the cerebellum contains more neurons than any other part of the brain. As humans evolved, the cerebellar cortex grew in step with the rapidly increasing volume of the frontal lobe.

For example, any interaction with the outside world, whether informational or physical, including moving limbs, manipulating tools, gesticulating, speaking, glancing, making faces—each ultimately requires activating a series of muscles to realize.

For example, an arm contains twenty-six separate muscles, and each muscle on average contains a hundred motor units, each made up by a motor neuron and its associated skeletal muscle fibers. Thus, the motion of a single arm is governed by a possibility space at least 2^2600 in size, a number far greater than the total number of atoms in the universe.

Human motion is so complex and subtle, and each casual movement represents the result of so much computation, analysis, and planning that even the most advanced robots are incapable of moving as well as a three-year-old.

And we haven’t even discussed all the information, emotion, and culture embodied in human motion.

On the way to the high-speed rail station, my father maintained his silence, only clutching my suitcase tightly. The northbound train finally appeared before us, shiny, new, smooth in outline, like something that was going to slide into the unknowable future the moment the brakes were released.

In the end, my father and I failed to reach a compromise. If I was going to college in Beijing, he would not pay for any of my expenses.

“Unless you promise to return,” he said.

I gazed through him, as though I was already seeing the future, a future that belonged to me. For that, I was willing to be the black sheep from a white flock, the sheep in perpetual exile.

“Dad, take care of yourself.”

I grabbed my suitcase to board the train, but my father refused to let go of the handle, and the suitcase awkwardly hung between us. A moment later, both of us let go, and the suitcase fell to the ground.

I was about to erupt when my father slapped his heels together to stand at attention, giving me a crisp military salute. Without a word, he turned and left. He had once told me that it was bad luck to say goodbye before going to war. Better to leave each other with other memories.

I watched his diminishing figure, raised my hand, and returned his salute gently.

I did not truly understand the meaning in my gesture.

“I never thought we’d fail because of a wild man,” says my thesis advisor Ouyang, who is also the project leader. He claps me on the shoulder, his smile disguising the sharp edges of his words. “It’s no big deal. Let’s keep on working at this. We still have time.”

But I know him too well. What he really means is We are running out of time.

Or, to put it another way, This is your idea, your project. Whether you can get your degree in time will depend on what you do next.

Of course he will never mention how much of our time he has taken up in the past to handle the random projects he promised business investors.

Frustrated, I massage my scalp. My eyes fall on Balin, now shut in his pink-hued pet enclosure. Eyes glazed, he stares at the floor, as though still not recovered from his ordeal in the VR environment. The contrast between the pink pet enclosure and his appearance is comical, but I can’t make myself laugh.

What would Mr. Lu do?

Everything began with that idle conversation with him years ago concerning “A leads to B.”

Traditional theorists believe that motor control is the result of stored programs. When a person wants to move a certain way, the motor cortex picks out a certain program from its stored repertoire and carries it out much the same way a player piano follows the roll of perforated paper. The program’s instructions determine the activation patterns in the motor regions of the cortex and the spinal cord, which then, in turn, activate the muscles to complete the motion.

This naturally raises the question: the same motion can be carried out in infinite ways. How does the brain store an infinite number of motor programs?

Remember that arm whose potential possible number of movements exceeds the number of atoms in the universe?

In 2002, the mathematician Emanuel Todorov came up with a theory in an attempt to answer this question. Basically, he argued that motor control is really an optimization problem for the brain. Optimality is defined by high-level performance criteria such as maximizing precision, minimizing energy consumption, minimizing control effort, and so on.

In the optimization process, the brain relies on the processing powers of the cerebellum. Before the commands for movement have reached muscles, the cerebellum predicts the results of anticipated motion, and then, combined with real-time sensory feedback, helps the brain evaluate and coordinate the motor commands.

A simple example: when ascending or descending a set of stairs, we will often stumble due to miscounting the number of steps. If feedback-based adjustments are made in time, we can recover and not fall. Feedback, of course, is often noisy and involves a delay.

Todorov’s mathematical model is compatible with all known evidence concerning the neural mechanisms of motor control and can be used to explain all kinds of behavior phenomena. Given some physical parameters, it’s even possible to predict the resulting motion using his model: for instance, how an eight-legged creature would jump in Pluto’s gravity.

Physics engines based on his models are used by Hollywood to produce naturalistic movements for avatars in virtual environments.

By the time I was in college, the Todorov model was already treated as textbook authority. Experiment after experiment provided more evidence that it was correct.

And then one day, Mr. Lu and I discussed Balin.

After I left home for college, he and I had kept in touch via email. He was like an oracular AI from whom I could get answers for everything: academics, awkward social situations, even relationship advice. We wrote long emails back and forth discussing questions that must have seemed ridiculous to anyone else, such as “would an out-of-body experience engineered by technology violate religion’s claim on spirituality?”

By an unspoken agreement, both of us avoided talking about my father.

Mr. Lu told me that Balin had been sold to another family in town, a nouveau riche household which was often mocked for conspicuous acts of consumption that appeared ridiculous in the townspeople’s eyes.

I had known that Father’s business had run into a rough patch, but I hadn’t imagined that he would be so short on cash as to consider selling Balin.

I shifted the topic to the Todorov mathematical model, and a new thought struck me. Balin was capable of imitating movements with perfect precision. Suppose we had him perform two sets of identical movements: one through subconscious imitation and the other by his own will; do these two sets of movements go through the same process of motor control?

Mathematically, there was only a single optimal solution, but was there a difference in the way the optimal solution was arrived at?

It took Mr. Lu three days to get back to me. Unlike his usual free-flowing, loquacious style, this time he wrote only a few lines:

I think you’re asking a very important question, one whose importance perhaps you don’t even realize. If we can’t distinguish between mechanical imitation and conscious, willed movement at the level of neural activity, then the question is: Does free will truly exist?

I couldn’t sleep that night. I spent two weeks designing the prototype experiment, and spent even more time studying the feasibility of my proposed study, soliciting feedback from my mentors and other professors. Then I submitted my project for approval.

It wasn’t until everything was ready that I realized that this experiment, one seeking to address a “fundamental question,” lacked a fundamental, required component.

I had no choice but to break my promise to myself and go home.

I’m going just to get Balin, I reminded myself again and again. Just for Balin.

Just like how A leads to B. Simple, right?

I once read a science fiction novel called The Orphans, which was about aliens who had come to Earth. They could imitate the appearance of specific humans and pass as human in society, but they couldn’t perfectly capture the characteristic ways their targets moved or the subtleties of their facial expressions. Many aliens, exposed as frauds, were hunted down by humans.

In order to survive, the aliens had to study how humans communicated via body language. They pretended to be abandoned orphans, and, once taken in by kind-hearted families, proceeded to use the opportunity of living together to imitate the mannerisms and expressions of their adoptive parents.

To the parents’ surprise, their children became more and more like them. And once the alien orphans decided that they had learned enough, they killed their father or mother, took on their appearance, and took their place. The scene where an alien killed his father and took his mother as his wife was unforgettable.

Though it became harder to tell aliens apart from humans, people finally discovered the fundamental difference between the extraterrestrials and humans.

Although the aliens were able to imitate human movements with perfect fidelity, they lacked the mirror neurons unique to human brains, and thus were unable to intuit the emotional shifts occurring behind human faces or to experience similar neural activation patterns in their own minds. In other words, they lacked the capacity for empathy.

And so humans devised an effective means to detect aliens: bring harm to those closest to the disguised aliens and observe the aliens for signs of pain, fear, or rage. The test was called “the stabbing needle test.”

The story’s lesson seems to be: humanity isn’t the only species in the universe that has difficulty relating to their parents.

Mr. Lu knew everything about Balin. He thought of the paoxiao as an example of overdevelopment in the mirror neuron system. He was fascinated by Balin, but he disapproved of the way we treated him.

“But he’s never resisted or even wanted to run away,” I used to counter.

“Overactive mirror neurons lead to a pathological excess of empathy,” he said. “Maybe he just couldn’t tolerate the look of abandonment in his tormentors’—your—eyes.”

“I guess that could be true,” I said. “I must be an example of underdevelopment of mirror neurons.”

“Cold-blooded, one might say.”

But when Mr. Lu took me to find Balin on my return, I realized that I wasn’t the most cold-blooded, not by far.

Balin was naked, his body full of bruises and lacerations. Thick, rusty chains were locked about his neck and shackled his arms and legs. He was shut inside a tiny brick-and-mud enclosure, about five feet on each side. The interior was dim, and the stale air saturated with the gag-inducing stench of excrement and rotting food. He was thinner than I remembered. Flies buzzed about his wounds, and the outlines of his skeleton poked from under his skin. He was like an animal about to be sent to the butcher’s.

He looked at me, and there was no reaction in his eyes at all. It was just like the first time we had met, that summer night when I was thirteen.

“They had him mirror the movements of animals . . . mating—” Mr. Lu was unable to continue.

Memories of the past flood into my mind in a flash.

I have no recollection of what happened next. It was as though I had been possessed by some spirit, and I moved without remembering wanting to move.

According to Mr. Lu, I rushed into the house of Balin’s new owners, and grabbed the Pomeranian beloved by the family patriarch’s daughter-in-law. I opened my jaw and held the neck of the whimpering creature between my teeth.

“You said, ‘If you don’t let Balin go, I’m going to bite all the way through,’” Mr. Lu said.

I spat on the ground. Though I didn’t remember any of it, this did sound like something I would do.

Mr. Lu and I rushed Balin to the hospital. As we were preparing to leave, Mr. Lu stopped me. “Do you want to see your father?”

That was how I found out that my father had been hospitalized. Once in college, I had had almost no contact with him, and gradually, I had stopped even thinking about him.

He looked about ten years older. Tubing was stuck into his nostrils and arms. His hair was sparse, and his gaze unsteady. A few years ago, when Pu’er tea was all the rage, he had gambled with all his chips and ended up as the last fool to buy in at the height of the mania. He was stuck with warehouses full of tea leaves as the price collapsed, and ended up losing just about everything.

As he looked at me, I noted that his expression reminded me of Balin’s, as though he was saying, I knew you’d be back.

“I . . . I’m here for Balin,” I said.

My father saw through my facade and cracked a smile, revealing a mouthful of teeth stained yellow by years of smoking.

“That little gremlin? He’s much smarter than you think. We all thought we were controlling him, but sometimes I wonder if he was controlling all of us.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“It’s the same way with you. I always thought I was the one in charge. But after you left, I realized that you had always held a thread whose other end is looped around my heart. No matter how far away you are, as soon as you twitch your fingers, I suffer pangs of heartache.” My father closed his eyes and put his hand over his chest.

Something was stuck in my throat.

I walked up to his bed and wanted to lean down to embrace him. But halfway through the motion, my body refused to obey. Awkwardly, I clapped him on the shoulder, straightened up, and walked away.

“I’m glad you’re back,” my father said from behind me, his voice hoarse. I didn’t turn around.

Mr. Lu was waiting for me at the door. I pretended to scratch my eyes to disguise the emotional turmoil.

“Do you think fate likes to play jokes on us?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You wanted to escape the route your father had paved for you, but in the end, you ended up in the same place as me.”

“I think I’m coming around to your way of thinking.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“No one knows what will happen in the future.”

We’ve failed again.

The original premise is very simple: Balin’s hypertrophic mirror neuron system makes him the ideal experimental subject because his imitation is a kind of instinct. Thus, his movements during imitation ought to be free from much of the noise and interference found in human motor control due to conscious cognition.

We use non-invasive electrodes to capture the neural activity in Balin’s motor cortex as he’s imitating a sequence of movements. Then we have him repeat the sequence under his own will and use motion capture to ensure that we get a perfect match between the two sets of movements. Mathematically, that means that the two sequences are indistinguishable; they are the same motion.

Then, by comparing the two sets of neural patterns captured during the process, we can find out if the same neural signals were activating the same regions of the motor cortex in the same sequence and with the same strength.

If there are differences, then the Todorov model, accepted as gospel, will have been revealed to be seriously lacking.

But if there are no differences, the consequences will be even more severe. Maybe human beings are doing nothing but imitating the behaviors of other individuals, and are only operating under the illusion of free will.

No matter what, the result of the experiment ought to be earth-shattering.

Yet, the experiment was a failure from the very beginning. Balin has refused to look into anyone’s eyes, and has refused to imitate anyone’s movements, including me.

I can guess the reason, but I have no solution. My team has vowed to solve the secret of human cognition, yet we can’t even heal the psychic trauma inflicted on a mere “primitive.”

I thought of the idea of using virtual reality. Situating Balin in an environment completely disconnected from the reality around him may help him recover his normal habits.

And so we went through a series of virtual environments: islands, glaciers, deserts, even space; we manufactured incredible catastrophes; we even devoted enormous effort to construct avatars of paoxiao, hoping that the sight of others of his kind would awaken his dormant mirror neurons.

Without exception, all these tricks have failed.

Now, at midnight, only I and the zombie-like Balin remain in the lab. Everyone else has left. I know what they’re thinking: this experiment is a joke, and I’m the man who has finished telling the joke and looks around confused, unsure why everyone else is laughing.

Balin is curled up into a ball in the pet house made from pink foam boards. I remember Mr. Lu’s words. He was right. I’ve never treated Balin as a person, not even now.

A colleague once implanted a wireless receiver into a rat’s brain. By electrically stimulating the rat’s somatosensory cortex and the medial forebrain bundle, my colleague was able to induce sensations of pleasure and pain in the rat, thereby controlling where the rat moved.

There’s no qualitative difference between that and what I’m doing to Balin.

I am indeed a bastard whose mirror neurons are atrophied.

Unbidden, the memory of a children’s game resurfaces, the game in which Balin first showed us his fantastic ability.

“Shrimp! Shrimp! Watch out if you don’t want one to bite off your toes!”

I chant in a low voice, embarrassed. I pretend to be a fisherman, dipping my foot into the imaginary river from the shore and quickly pulling back.

Balin glances at me.

“Shrimp! Shrimp! Watch out if you don’t want one to bite off your toes!” My chant grows louder.

Balin stares at my clumsy movements. Gently, slowly, he crawls out of the pet house, stopping a few steps away from me.

“Shrimp! Shrimp! Watch out if you don’t want one to bite off your toes!” My legs are jerking wildly like some caricature of a pole dancer in a club.

Abruptly, Balin jumps at me with incredible speed, moving the exact way Ah Hui used to.

He remembers; he remembers everything.

Balin leaps and bounds, grabbing at my dipping leg. A baby-like gurgle emerges from his throat. He’s laughing. This is the first time I’ve ever heard him laugh in the all the years I’ve known him.

He is now re-enacting the movements of everyone in town who had been a bit different. All their movements seem to have been engraved in Balin’s brain, so vivid and precise that I can recognize who he’s replaying at a glance. In turn, he becomes the madman, the cripple, the idiot, the beggar who had broken legs and arms, and the epileptic; he is a cat, a dog, an ox, a goat, a pig, and a crude chicken; he is my drunk father and me, dancing about in joy.

In a moment, I’ve traveled through thousands of kilometers and returned to the hometown of my childhood.

Without warning, Balin begins to play two roles simultaneously, re-enacing the day of the rupture between me and my father.

Watching the argument between me and my father as an observer is eerie: the movements before me are so familiar, yet my memories have grown indistinct, unreal. I was so angry then, so stubborn, like a wild horse that refused to take the reins. My father, on the other hand, was so pitiful and meek. Again and again, he backed off; he suffered. It is nothing like how I remember the scene.

Balin quickly switches between roles, gesturing and posturing like a skilled mime.

Though I know what happens next, when it does happen I’m not prepared.

Balin wraps his arms about me, just the way my father back then wrapped his arms about him. He hugs me tightly, his head buried in the crook of my neck. I smell that familiar fish-like scent, like the sea, and a warm liquid flows down my collar like a river that has absorbed the heat of the sun.

I stay still, thinking about how to react.

Then I give up thinking, allowing my body to react and open up, hugging him back the way I would hug an old friend, the way I would hug my father.

I know that I have owed this hug for far too long, to him and to my father.

I think I finally understand how to solve the problem.

At the end of The Orphans, the team that had come up with the stabbing needle test found, to their horror, that even when they harmed the aliens passing as human, their dear ones, the real humans, also failed to react. Their mirror neuron systems would not activate.

Humanity is a species that was never designed to truly empathize with another species.

Just like those aliens.

Good thing that’s just a bad piece of science fiction, isn’t it?

“We need to think about this from his perspective,” I say to Ouyang.

“His?” It takes a full three seconds for my advisor to figure out what I mean. “Who? The primitive?”

“His name is Balin. We should make him the focus, and construct an environment that will put him at ease, rather than cheap tourist scenes we imagine he’ll enjoy.”

“What are you talking about? You should be concerned about how you’re going to finish your project and get your degree, instead of worrying about the feelings of some primitive. Don’t waste my time.”

Mr. Lu once said that the progress of a civilization should be measured by its degree of empathy—whether members of the civilization are capable of thinking from the values and perspectives of others—and not some other objectified scale.

Silently, I stare at Ouyang’s face, trying to discern some trace of civilization.

The face, so carefully maintained to be wrinkle-free, is a wasteland.

I decide to work on the problem myself. Several younger students join me on their own initiative, restoring some of my faith in humanity. To be sure, most of them are motivated by their hatred of Ouyang, and it’s not a bad way to earn a few credits.

There’s a virtual reality program called iDealism, which claims to be capable of generating an environment based on brainwave patterns. In reality, all it does is select pre-existing models from a database whose brainwave signatures match the user’s—at most it adds some high-resolution transitions. We hacked it for our own use, and since our lab’s sensors are several orders of magnitude more sensitive than consumer-grade sensors, we add a lot of new measurement axes to the software and connect it to the largest open-source database, which contains demo data from virtual reality labs from around the world.

And now, Balin is going to be the Prime Mover of this virtual universe.

He will have plenty of time to explore the linkage between this world and every thought in his mind. I will record every move and gesture Balin makes. Then, when he returns to the real world, I will reconnect with him. I will imitate to the best of my ability each of his gestures. The two of us will be as two parallel mirrors, reflecting each other endlessly.

I put the helmet on Balin’s head. His gaze is as placid as water.

The red light flashes, speeds up, turns green.

I enter Ghost mode, and bring up a third-person POV window in the upper-right hand corner. In it, I see a tiny avatar of Balin trembling in place.

Balin’s world is primordial chaos. There is no earth, no heaven, no east, west, north, or south. I struggle against the vertigo.

Finally, he stops shaking. A flash of lightning slowly divides the chaos, determining the location of the sky.

The lightning extends, limning a massive eye in the cloud cover. A web of fine lightning feelers spreads from the eye in every direction.

The light fades. Balin lifts his head and raises his hands. Rain falls.

He begins to dance.

Drops of rain fall with laughter, giving substance to the outline of wind. The wind lifts Balin until he is floating in the air, twirling about.

It is impossible to describe his dance with words. It is as if he has become a part of all Creation, and the heavens and the earth both respond to his movements and change.

My heart speeds up; my throat is dry; my hands and feet are icy cold. I’m witnessing an unsought miracle.

He lifts his hand and flowers bloom. He lifts his foot and birds flutter forth.

Balin dances between unnamed peaks, above unmapped lakes. Everywhere he sets foot, joyful mandalas bloom and spread, and he falls into their swirling, colorful centers.

One moment he is smaller than an atom, the next he encompasses the universe. All scales have lost meaning in his dance.

Every nameless life sings to him. He opens his mouth, and all the gods of the paoxiao emerge from his lips.

The spirits meld into his black skin like dark waves that rage and erupt, sweeping him up, up into the air. Behind him, the waves coalesce into an endless web on which all the fruits of creation may be found, each playing its own rhythm. A hundred million billion species are in search of their common origin.

I understand now.

In Balin’s eyes, the soul is immanent in all Creation, and there is no difference between a dragonfly and a man. His nervous system is constructed in such a way as to allow him to empathize with the universe. It is impossible to imagine how much effort he must put into calming the tsunamis that rage constantly in his heart.

Even someone as unenlightened as me cannot be unmoved when faced with this grand spectacle produced by all Life. My eyes swim in hot tears, and threads of ecstasy inside my heart are woven with the dizzying sights in my vision. I stand atop a peak, but a step away from transcendence.

As for the answer I was seeking? I don’t think it’s so important anymore.

Balin absorbs everything into his body. His avatar expands rapidly and then deflates.

He falls.

The world dims, grows indistinct, lifeless.

Balin is like a thin film stretched against the tumbling, twirling space-time. The physics engine’s algorithms undulate the edge of his body as though blown by a wind, and fragments rise into the air like a flock of birds.

His shape is disintegrating, dissolving.

I disconnect Balin from the VR system and take off his helmet.

He lies facedown on the soft, dark gray floor, his limbs spread out, unmoving.

“Balin?” I don’t dare move him.

“Balin?” Everyone in the lab is waiting. Will this joke of an experiment turn into a tragedy?

Slowly, he shifts in place. Then he wriggles to the side like a pond loach until he is once again flattened against the floor, adopting the posture of a gecko.

I laugh. Like my father years ago, I clap my hands twice.

Balin turns, sits up, stares at me.

It is just like that hot and sticky summer night the year I turned thirteen, when we first met.

Originally published in Chinese in People’s Literature, July 2015.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chen Qiufan was born in 1981, in Shantou, China. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Mr. Chen’s surname is written first. He sometimes uses the English name Stanley Chan.) He is a graduate of Peking University and published his first short story in 1997 in Science Fiction World, China’s largest science fiction magazine. Since 2004, he has published over 30 stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah and other magazines. His first novel, The Abyss of Vision, came out in 2006. He won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award in 2006 with “A Record of the Cave of Ning Mountain,” a work written in Classical Chinese. His story, “The Tomb,” was translated into English and Italian and can be found in The Apex Book of World SF II and Alias 6. He now lives in Beijing and works for Google China.

The Bridge of Dreams

Gregory Feeley

1

When Heimdallr finds an hour to spare from his labors, he polishes a length of Bifröst flat as a plane, then bevels adjacent sides so that the resultant stretch bends and disperses the sun’s weak rays like a prism. He rarely has the leisure for such pastimes. Although Charon and its primary face each other like ancient adversaries who will never avert their gaze, their distance varies slightly—much less than any other pair in the solar system, but enough to put a continual strain on the bridge. Cracks and fissures form, which Heimdallr must hasten to repair. Like stalagmites approaching to merge, the ends of the worldbridge were built by accretion, the rough bases thickening as their tips rose (or descended) towards each other. An extent of gleaming smoothness stands out like crystal embedded in stone, stirring in Heimdallr vague memories older than himself. Then hairline cracks begin to form, and he brings his engines to bear, smothering them beneath layers of ethane and ice.

The faint and short-lived spectra that these surfaces produce are a source of deep but fleeting pleasure, for they appear only during those microseconds when the cloud of vapor has discharged from his nozzle but not yet struck and turned solid. A skein of half-glimpsed images are brought to mind, though not by memory. Heimdallr remembers what he has experienced and perceived, and these tangled recollections are stranger, reaching him along pathways he cannot look down to espy. Others’ lives, forgotten by those long dead: the sight of the Rainbow roils them like a quake disturbing graves.

A puff of plasma tickles his cheek and he looks toward the Sun, a pinpoint of light but not heat, and the ruined worlds that circle it. Plouton and Charon, now joined by the haft that he made and maintains, is traveling outward, where it shall tarry long among the vast mist of volatiles that sheathes the outermost worlds before beginning a long journey closer—but never close—to that swollen mass of radiance.

The ice-conjoined binary has completed this circuit once and more since he last heard the whisper of radio waves or the flicker of a laser pulse from any point Sunward. Triton has been silent for centuries; signals from Phaiton’s Children went out one by one like candles. The dense swirling airs of Titan remained infinitesimally warmer than what Heimdallr thought nature could account for, although this might as likely be heat diffusing from an abandoned fission pile—a coal slowly cooling in a dead hearth—as evidence of settlements still active below the surface. Were he truly human, his heart would burst at this.

Meanwhile there remains his duty. Heimdallr stands master of Bifröst, its length enough to wrap three times about the girdle of the Earth. Weekly—the time the two worlds took to swing about each other approximated that ancient measure—it must be patched and reinforced, with substances gathered from their surfaces. From a distance the bridge is invisible: an icy thread running up to the overhead world, too slender to catch much of what light can reach it. At either base it resembles a rough-hewn tower the girth of a mountain, thicker on Plouton with its greater gravity. Genuine ice mountains rise from the lifeless plains, and Heimdallr has already lain waste to five in quarrying blocks for his span. Yearly he must venture farther to gather material for repairs, and someday will have to cross the horizons of both worlds, into lands where the other world is absent from the sky. He does not know how he will feel about this; feelings are something he imperfectly understands.

He is not on the ground when the glint of light catches his eye. Plouton-Charon lies far from the ecliptic, so Heimdallr may look inward toward the other planets without being dazzled by the Sun. The spark’s wavelengths are shifted to blue, although to a degree too faint for a human eye to detect. It is coming toward him quickly.

When the light flares brighter and shifts toward red, he knows that it is not a missile. For days he had pondered how to defend Bifröst—large, brittle, immobile—against assault. A direct blow to projectiles might knock them off course, but such a strike must be massive or extremely fast—many times local escape velocity—and Heimdallr doubted his bow possessed the strength for either. Evidence that the decelerating vessel would come to rest a kilometer away does not reassure, although he shifts his stance and takes his hand from the pommel of his sword.

It is not until the thrusters cut off that he can see the gleaming spear, which is now rotating on its axis with tiny puffs of vapor. The blade turns once and now rests in the hand of a helmeted woman, who raises it above her head.

“Ho,” Heimdallr says. “You stand before Bifröst, the Rainbow Bridge, and I its builder and guardian. Be welcome if you offer no threat.”

“I am Garðrofa, message-bearer.” She seems to hang in space before him, although in fact she is circling in a plane that lies perpendicular to Bifröst. Heimdallr, his back to the bridge, can see tiny jets emerge at intervals from her boots, correcting the unstable orbit. “I bring you word.”

“What is your message, and from whom?”

“I bring the message; I do not know its content, nor its sender.” Then she says: “You are called—entreated, not summoned, yet the knowledge of duty itself summons—to the Sheltered Gardens. Please come in the flesh, as no pallid counterfeit will suffice.”

“‘The flesh’? They believe I possess the power or inclination to create an Iteration and send it loose?”

Garðrofa looked at him quizzically. “Whom do you speak of?”

“You just relayed an appeal from the Sheltered Gardens.”

“I did?”

“Who gave you this message?”

“I do not know.”

“Why then did you carry it?”

“I do not know.”

Heimdallr considered her. “Is there more?”

“No.”

Heimdallr’s nature, and the physical form he has taken, precludes the need for shelter, but the oldest parts of him understands the importance of hospitality. “My hall lies beyond. It is scant warmer than the space surrounding us, but its hewn beams offer relief from the unbroken sight of stars.”

“Thank you, but if I may decline without giving offense, I do.”

It has been a lifetime and more since Heimdallr has spoken to a being before him, and while loneliness does not lay waste to his spirit, the rupture of his solitude now seems pleasing. “To take refreshment together—whatever resources you have expended in traveling hither, I can replenish—would satisfy the obligations of both guest and host, and more agreeably than my other duties can claim. The invitation stands, and unless you depart forthwith, I shall at length repeat it.”

“I have no plans to depart,” says Garðrofa simply.

“No?” Hundreds of scanning programs and tiny probes have been examining the visitor and the space around and beyond her, and have reported one by one that she offers no threat.

“Do those who dispatched you wish to give you additional missions, or offer you some reward for your service?”

“I do not know.”

“That is surprising,” he says. “How long were you voyaging here?”

“I cannot say. During the interval of travel, I was not.”

Heimdallr ponders this. He wishes to ask, “What more can you tell me?” but guesses that the answer would be Nothing. “My hounds have sniffed your boots and found you unthreatening. Are you doubtful regarding my own good will?”

“No. I am not concerned for my safety.”

He has not had to think quickly in many years, but does so now. “Then let me show you my world. At worst you will be bored.”

At this Heimdallr launched himself out and downward, toward Plouton. Had he simply pushed away from the ice, he would have been hours drifting toward the primary. The passage of time might not have bothered either of them, but he felt it was a moment to be purposeful.

Acceleration is slow, but eight thousand kilometers lie between Bifröst’s midpoint and the surface, and his boots strike ground with a satisfying crunch and a spray of methane snow. Long practice has taught him the stride that covers the most distance without leaving him afloat in a high trajectory, and he moves swiftly over the landscape, flat here (he long ago cleared it for the transportation of building material) but becoming irregular the farther one gets from Bifröst’s trunk. The time and energy required to travel distances mean nothing to him, so he built his fastness (once named Himminbjorg, though he soon realized that a structure no one would ever see or hear of does not need a name) on the ground that offered the most impressive view, which proved to be in one of Plouton’s highlands.

Heimdallr knew without turning his head that Garðrofa had matched his stride and was following him at a half dozen paces. He saw no need to offer information about the temperature, local gravity, mineral composition, and other bits of “local color” (the ancient term abruptly came to him) that she could clearly perceive for herself. Instead he told her something she could not measure. “I find this beautiful,” he says. “Can you see the beauty here?”

“Perhaps.”

It was her first ambiguous response, and he wondered at it. She did not elaborate, however, and after a moment he says: “My calculations suggest that your voyage originated in the Gardens. Does this correspond with your own memories?”

“No.”

That part of his mind that had been reviewing past, hitherto unstudied images of the sky, identifying the minute smudges of the approaching Garðrofa, and calculating possible trajectories from its shifts had brought to consciousness its conclusion. He did not need to know how he knew, any more than a seafaring ancestor would have questioned his sense of shifting balance.

“Is there trouble at the Great Work? Has the Parasol grown tattered, or its attendants injured or starved, so it will soon tear or blow away and those it has sheltered will roast?”

“I do not know.”

“Is there conflict between the peoples of the disparate spheres? All human history has been plagued by such pointless strife.”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Did those who sent you approach others before appealing to so distant a figure as me?”

“If so, they did not inform me.”

She was giving the same reply, but no longer with identical answers. This was rhetoric, a human art older than any craft operating on this world. He wonders if she is becoming more human as the sheath that brought her sloughs away.

He points toward the horizon. “That is my redoubt.”

It was not built like anything on Earth, where the gravity is twenty times greater and structures are shaped to bear loads. It contains no rock, for Plouton’s stony core lies far below its surface. It is not defensive in design, for it is not a fortress, and no above-ground structure in the solar system could withstand assault by relativistic projectiles. It is probably not beautiful, although Heimdallr pondered beauty as he constructed it.

If nothing else, it is unique.

The entrance is large and stands always open. The Great Hall is suited for feasting, as are the upstairs quarters for privacy, though he never expected guests. He leads her in and bids her to take her ease, and offers to withdraw should she prefer solitude. Garðrofa looks up at the vaulted ceiling; turns to study the tall windows looking upon the icy plain, the colonnade opposite leading to the inner courtyard; walks about the banquet table. “I do not wish for anything,” she says.

“Please sit,” he says. She does so, although she does not seem more comfortable. After a moment he asks, “Is there anything more you wish to do or tell me?”

“No,” she replies. “My mission is completed.”

“You are free to act as you please?”

She seems to consider this. “Yes, although I have no further needs. Now that . . . ” She breaks off, and he looks curiously at her. “With my duties discharged, aspects of my being are shutting down, allowing others to . . . It is curious,” she says at last. “I am now able to feel—well, it is difficult to describe.” She looks at him. “Have you been lonely here?”

“No,” he says, startled. “Although I am enjoying your company, the solitude has never troubled me.” Nor has he wondered at that, and now wonders why he didn’t. Years ago he dealt with this by devising an editor that would reduce sensitivity to cognitive activities that produced distress. Because he understood the survival value of such thoughts, he did not debar them from consciousness; they stood beyond a diaphanous scrim, available for assessment but unable to inflict pain. Now the scrim seems to be rippling in an intangible breeze, and that which lay beyond is now gliding forward to join him.

Years ago . . . he also created a program that would allow him to access uncomfortable memories but prevent them from coming unbidden to mind. He will not know how many years unless he makes an effort. That, he decides, he will do later.

“I am beginning to feel that I would be lonely,” she says.

Heimdallr begins to reply, but suddenly realizes that he is uncertain regarding his own feelings, which seem to be changing. “The person I was never felt lonely, but your presence has provoked something.” It has provoked shifts and subsidences, and he is less surprised by the onset of change than by what is changing—or rather, changing back.

He had isolated and disabled numerous vulnerable aspects of his personality, but had known enough not to eliminate them, and now they are rushing back like waters reclaiming the land. He is a proud and social man who values the respect of those he admires, a man of curiosity, ambition, and unsurprising passions. All now come rushing back, dizzying him even as he stands unmoving.

“We are alone on this world together,” he says, “and only for a short time.” The millions of nerve endings suitable for sexual response still function, even if they are not wired to his skin.

“I understand,” she answers. She sits thinking for a time—no time at all, by the scale he is used to, but long (he remembers) for human conversation—and then stands.

Their coupling would have struck their ancestors as heroic: it takes place in the extreme cold, it lasts a very long time, and it generates enough heat to melt the ice (methane) around them. Such flesh as they possess does not fatigue, nor are their nervous systems restricted to the range of sensation available to the humans of earlier epochs. Their emotional responses climb, soar, and dive like cranes traversing a mountain range. Tolerances are pushed, subroutines neglected to the point of recklessness in order to devote all resources to the act. Each climax offers the promise of richer and more complex raptures; the lovers do not cease until they decide, almost simultaneously, that their capacity for exaltation has reached its limit.

After such exertion, one can only lie side by side, unselfconsciously engaged in the archaism of actually touching. It is longer still before they rise, for there is more than much for each to consider, and each has—to a degree that must itself be pondered—become now a different person. Heimdallr goes off to begin building his craft; Garðrofa to explore the world’s continent-sized surface. They rarely speak, although each feels as though the other is standing near.

Much of the substances he needs are already incorporated into the engines that maintain Bifröst or the mechanisms that support them, and he is careful about what he harvests for his own use. There is more: energies must be summoned and gathered; a route plotted; a flight plan of fractal intricacy devised. The minders to manage these tasks and the artificers to carry them out must themselves be supervised, and Heimdallr is long at these labors before construction is finally underway and he seeks out Garðrofa, who has ranged as far as the backside of Charon.

“I have given orders for preparations for my journey,” he told her. “We may occupy the meantime as we please. You will accompany me on the same trajectory when we return?”

“I shall not return,” she replied.

“You wish to stay here?”

“I shall not stay. The functions that sustain me were not designed to outlast the voyage, and I shall soon discorporate.”

Surprise, like a dropped match briefly illuminating an abyss, may fail to sound the depths that engulfs it. “How is this so?” he asks.

“I do not know.”

“You are alarmed, afraid? Resigned?”

“No.”

“How might this be forestalled?”

“By no means available. I am a message to be discarded once read.”

Heimdallr is used to solving problems, but he can see nothing here. “This is unacceptable. Why should I live and not you?”

“You shall not always live. And for accepting this voyage you shall live less long, though differently.”

His response to this, and hers in turn, are clear to both of them and go unspoken. They rush into each other’s arms, perhaps knowing where this will lead. There is no point in anything else; all other actions open to them close like convergent series.

They will couple till she perishes, a fusion reaction to light up the surrounding night. Neither knows whether these exertions will delay or hasten the failure of some critical system, nor what such collapse will be like. The space they have entered defines their shared future; tumbling, they do not wonder when they will strike its far wall.

When it comes, there is time for an instant of awareness, a hand raised perhaps in farewell. Then solitude, more sudden than seems possible; his soul rings with the shock of it.

It is as things were before, save that it is not.

He returns to his labors, which now involves hurling boulder-sized chunks of special ice into the sky, along paths that shall intersect his own eventual route. With the dispatch of the first projectile his timetable is fixed, immutable as the movement of the heavens. He lets fly with three more, at precisely calculated intervals and trajectories, and prepares for a departure time that is similarly established. The calculations involved in ascertaining the mass and composition of the payloads as well as their exact trajectories are delegated to engines of inhuman strangeness, leaving his own mind to muse upon what it will. He wonders whether the loneliness he now feels will someday settle back into the familiar solitude, which held its own stoic satisfactions.

It is not something he broods upon, but eventually he begins to realize—as a shadow that moves too slowly to see will eventually lengthen to reach you—that he is not, at least not in the sense that he has understood his self to be, entirely alone.

Heimdallr always knew that the emissary from the sunlit realms would have had recourse were he to refuse her invitation. Whether she knew it or not, Garðrofa possessed means designed either to compel his cooperation or take that which her masters valued in him. What manner of invasive procedure she had to breach the citadel of his self and suborn his will Heimdallr never asked, and does not wonder now. But now he wonders whether she managed to plant a piton before falling away.

“Garðrofa?” he calls. “Are you there?”

The answer is not Yes, but neither is it silence. For a long time Heimdallr stands listening, and only slowly begins to realize that the presence he perceives does not lie beyond the frontiers of his self, a dim figure that will not come forward, but stands closer, too close to be clearly discerned. Too close, though he thinks for a long time before he accepts this, to be distinct: she is not with him but in him.

It is in thinking this through that the transformation truly takes hold. The process is too strange to surprise; Heimgarð rises and turns about only to survey its aftermath, which comprehends hrs own self. Hse reflects without wonder or resentment, for many things are clearer now.

The time approaches, ratcheting down to zero in the tiny exact steps of an ancient clockwork, and Heimgarð stands ready on the dayside of Plouton. The spacecraft that will take hrm to the inner System is attached to hrs back and thighs, like the folded wings of Daidolos. How long did hse—did Heimdallr—abide on this world? A moment’s thought would tell hrm, though consciousness could not function with centuries of such data casually to hand.

With a final step, the moment is here. Heimgarð looks up at the tiny Sun, swings back hrs arms and flexes hrs legs, and in one smooth motion launches hrmself into space.

2

The Sun is a campfire, casting long shadows into a night that soon swallows them whole. Warriors, explorers, soldiers on campaign have sat by its flickering light, as Neolithic tribes had once done, all of them aware of how quickly its illumination fades with distance. A few steps into the dimness beyond and its protecting powers fade, for predators prowl its perimeter.

No predators lurk in the Solar System, a boundless vacuum sprinkled, more sparsely than humans can grasp, with finely distributed rubble. There are no trees or hills to block the light, so the fire can be seen, a pinpoint of illumination, from miles distant. Others, too far ever to reach, fill the sky, creating an illusion of plenitude that humans can never shake.

Hse accelerates steadily and will ultimately reach a velocity few human vehicles have attained, though the voyage will still last for years. Do the nations of the Sheltered Gardens still reckon time by the Earth’s rotational period? Hse could search hrs memories, where missives from the Gardens are stored, but they are all too old to be conclusive. Better perhaps to seek the answer by musing upon human nature. There will be time enough, and hse needs the practice.

For all its aching emptiness, the distance Heimgarð must traverse yields a measurable risk of collision with some grain of matter. Such an impact would be catastrophic, and the craft that is largely Heimgarð has been built to offer what protection it can, including lookout instrumentation gazing ahead and around for anything larger than a dust particle. Should hse detect one in hrs path, Heimgarð would have microseconds in which to aim and fire a high-energy beam to knock it away. If that proves impossible, hse could take evasive action—avoiding impact perhaps by millimeters—or decelerate hard, enough that the tiny bullet would complete its transit across hrs path.

The processing power required to maintain such vigilance at all times occupies a significant fraction of hrs attention, so hrs thoughts develop slowly. There is plenty of time, however, and Heimgarð continues to muse even during those hours when much of hrs brain is asleep.

The Sheltered Gardens lie before hrm; or rather, the point that the Gardens will someday reach; they will circle the Sun many times before their path and hsr intersect. Sometimes Heimgarð imagines that the site of hrs destination is still the white-clouded planet of ancient times, Tài bái xīng or Hesperos, and that it shall progress through its history, accommodating itself to Aris and joining in an intricate dance, by the time hse reaches it. It is a strange thought, but there is time for that. Some of hrs thoughts, twining and looping through long, uninterrupted chains of association, are too strange for hrm to articulate, were anyone present to hear them.

Heimgarð’s trajectory lies far from the ecliptic, but part of hrs mind announces, in the midst of a complex meditation, that if one drew a line from hrs position perpendicular to the ecliptic and tracked where it falls on the disk, hse has just crossed the orbit of Neptune. The planet itself is nowhere near this point, but hse finds hrmself reflecting on Triton: large, volcanically active, and closer to its primary than Selene is—was—to Earth. Once Heimdallr dreamed of building a Bifröst extending from the surface of Triton to point a long finger almost into Neptune’s atmosphere. The project was absurd: such a structure would have to be constructed of strong and flexible alloys, jointed like a dragon’s vertebrae, and hrs stolid heart recoiled at the unnaturalness of any like venture. Still, hse wonders if the Tritonides had ever considered it: they loved advanced engineering, and the great blue world that hung unmoving in their sky never ceased to fascinate and entice them.

No world was visible to Heimgarð as hse coasted silently through the darkness. Hrs propellant was gone, and hse cruised in a great ellipse that would, should hse fail to refuel and resume powered flight, veer close to the Sun, incinerating hrm and subjecting the molten mass that remained to incredible deceleration as it swung about and headed out again in a millennia-long orbit. A tiny part of hrs attention tracks the path of the first ice boulder as hse slowly overtakes it, the largest object in millions of kilometers.

The final hours before the encounter focus all of Heimgarð’s available thoughts, which hse recognizes as a good thing. The slowly spinning mass lies ahead, visible only by reflected starlight, which is to say, invisible to normal human eyes. Hse uses lidar to study its shifting albedo, its steady increase in diameter as it moves slowly into hrs path. Hse might have carved handholds into its surface, or shaped it to look like an artifact (a spaceborne projectile, or perhaps a sculpture), but did not think of it at the time. That it occurred to hrm now suggests that hrs thinking has changed: hse is not the being he was.

At the instant of encounter hse seizes it, and while its midsection is too great for hrm to get hrs arms fully around, the spikes in hrs fingers dig powerfully in, anchoring hrs grip. Hrs trajectory shifts, to a degree minutely different from that predicted, and jets fire briefly to correct. Already hse is beginning to consume the boulder’s substance, and within minutes a tiny tongue of plasma flares brilliantly and acceleration resumes. That part of hrs mind that courses through material most resembling protoplasm feels the surge, and hse feels a thrill first known to the horsemen of the Eurasian steppes.

There is a deep pleasure in powered flight, in steady acceleration that surpasses that of coasting through space. Heimgarð more than doubles hrs velocity over the next few hundred hours, then finds hrmself missing the sustained roar once the fuel is expended. Hse is a bullet, a flung stone, a falling star, free to resume powered flight once hse overtakes and consumes the next tumbling floe.

Heimgarð moves, swiftly by the scale of humans and their works, slowly by that of what milestones can be found. When hse “passes the orbit” of Ouranos, one part of hrs mind informs the rest, which is deep in a reverie no ancestor could follow. There will be no need ever to communicate its nature, no occasion ever to recollect it in tranquility, which hse guesses does not lie ahead. Hse is whelmed in solitude and stillness: no wind to ruffle hrs hair, no blast to chill or spray to soak. Molecules—nothing larger—occasionally ping against hrs visor.

Hse listens for radio waves, and eventually assembles an enormous dish, kilometers across yet thinner than a cell wall, that floats beside hrm like the shadow of a moon, but hears nothing save bursts of emissions from the Sun. Perhaps as hse angles closer to the ecliptic hse will be able to pick up transmissions, though none ever reached hrm on the worldbridge. The possibility that the only remaining radio communications are those from the Gardens to Hermaon, too close to the Sun to distinguish from its incessant roar, fills hrm with something like sadness.

Heimgarð does not possess the soul of either poet or metaphysician, but hse never loses hrs train of thought, however long or complex it grows. When the view does not change and maintenance protocols are unvarying, there is little else to do but think, and the “train”—linear only in its earliest stages—is soon ramifying through all dimensions, a steadily branching tree. Hse can image this edifice in its entirety while pondering every bud, and hrs unwavering attention allows hrm to prune irrelevancies and shore up weaknesses with the patience of an ancient gardener, one who barely notices that her potted topiary has grown into a maze. Whether the final edifice is profound, or even communicable, is of no consequence to hrm, for spreading word of hrs thoughts is not in Heimgarð’s nature. Left to hrmself, hse builds.

Inside the orbit of Phaiton hse intercepts the final iceball and begins to decelerate. The distance between the great planet and the Gardens is smaller than what hse has already crossed, yet the span cries out in its vacancy, for Ceres, Aris and the very Earth once filled it and now are elsewhere or otherwise. Slowing, the blast from hrs rockets now flare before hrm, strong enough to vaporize any grit that might cross hrs trajectory. Hse looks down past hrs boots to see hrs path obscured by the spray, and so can observe hrs flight only by holding a reflector, like Perseus’s shield, at arm’s length.

Ceres, the tiniest world, was purposefully deflected, a servitor dispatched in the name of duty, and Aris now nestles in the Gardens, but the crumpled thing where humanity was born is but a phantasma, for all that its mass is undiminished. To contemplate this is to feel pain in a place you never knew, and Heimgarð, still new to emotion, is stunned into something like grief.

Hse is now entering the realm of light, where comets would begin to blaze and the solar wind strengthens steadily. Earlier hse could adjust hrs trajectory with a few bursts of vaporized ice, but now hse is expending fuel profligately, decelerating long and hard even as the Sun seeks to pull hrm in. Hse will not meet the Garden head on, but the delta-v required to match orbits still consumes much of hrs substance. The voyager will reach hrs destination stripped to essentials, ribs showing like a wolf’s come spring.

Selene makes a full circuit about the Sun as hse approaches, allowing Heimgarð to observe its bright bead swelling just before it disappears behind the solar corona. Sometime later it reappears on the Sun’s opposite side, to swing out, bright again, and then narrow to a sliver as it circles back toward hrm. This grants Heimgarð unobstructed sight lines to every point on the lunar surface, but no radio signal reaches hrm. The flare of hrs rockets would be visible to any imaging device scanning the sky, and hrs rapid movement across the heavens would allow any processor with access to a database to identify hrs point of origin, but the vanished Earth’s moon is as silent as Phaiton’s. Hrs summoners in the Gardens must be observing hrm through optical instruments—hse would detect the touch of any lidar signal—but even they are mute. Hse watches the bright spots of the Garden, a constellation of worlds, as they swell into fullness and then vanish behind the Sun. When the Parasol appears on schedule, a dull glowing circle of partially reflected energy, Heimgarð is significantly closer, angling not toward where it is but where it shall be. A season later and the Parasol shows itself on edge, the Garden worlds glowing as dim semicircles in its shadow.

Now voices fill hrs ears. Words of welcome, instruction, requests for data. Garðrofa would perhaps recognize them, but Garðrofa is no longer here. Heimgarð has hrs own flight plans to follow. At the proper instant hse jettisons hrs craft, which falls away into an elliptical orbit that will someday decay into incandescence. Hse is falling free, moving toward an artificial structure that has swung round to face hrm.

Ahead, the gates open. Sentries, watchful against nearing projectiles, are alerted to hrs authorized entry and turn aside their weapons. Alone, unarmed, the onetime sentinel of Bifröst slows to a trudge with the last of hrs propellant and enters the redoubt of Men.

3

Welcome is traditional for even the strangest arrivals, and wayfarers are expected to rest upon journey’s end. Although Heimgarð is not accustomed to resting, hse recognizes the need for convalescence: hrs tissues bruised from weeks of braking and riddled from fusillades of ionized particles. Hse lies upon a bed in minimal gravity, undisturbed (though the bed was doubtless monitoring hrs well-being) while hse heals.

The welcome hse receives is more ambivalent. When after forty hours—this is a world of human time, which hse resumes measuring in those terms—Heimgarð stands, a door appears before hrm and hse passes through, to a space where others soon come to greet him. Perhaps they were not expecting hrm, but rather their envoy bearing Heimdallr in tow, or someone more like themselves.

“Our thanks for taking such trouble to come,” says one, evidently female. She speaks the language that Garðrofa had—the one Heimdallr spoke a century and more ago, which (hse now realizes) may well be now spoken nowhere. Courtesy and research: neither incompatible with coercion, which Heimgarð can find no reason to resent. Hse nods gravely.

“There is much that you must tell me,” hse answers. Right now the Garden-dwellers are seeking rather than offering information: hse can sense their attempts to access hrs memories, which hse is able to deflect, perhaps because their technology was used to create Garðrofa, whose being now suffuses hrs substance. What they seek to know, they will have to ask.

“Let us show you.” The section of floor they stood on descended into darkness. Heimgarð feels the pull of gravity increase and realizes that, of course, hse had lain in a gravity field—no bed functions otherwise. Hse seeks to shake off the fogginess of mind that is evidently afflicting hrm.

“It will be a few seconds,” another says. There is a faint shudder underfoot, and suddenly the blackness is spangled by stars. They are outside the habitat, moving through space, a clear bubble encasing them—does the Parasol block radiation so effectively?—and the great globe of Hesperos, dimmer than it appeared in the morning sky of Earth, hangs before their heads, three quarters full. Once more in free fall, Heimgarð orients hrmself to view it more easily. Is there a pinpoint of light showing on its night side? Hse isn’t sure.

“We are bound for Aris, where the gravity is more like your world’s,” says a third. Plouton’s gravity is but a fraction even of Hermaon’s, and of course it was Heimdallr who was accustomed to Plouton’s gravity. Hrs hosts see before them someone who is not Heimdallr nor Garðrofa, who has neither youth nor age, and balk at this troubling fact. Heimgarð, who calls no world hrs own, simply nods.

Aris is visible beyond Hesperos, a deeper shade of the red it has shown humanity since its earliest members gazed into the night sky. The closeness of the two recognizable disks is deeply unnatural: it is something done by man, a feat on a scale greater than that of Bifröst or even the Parasol. Though Heimgarð has always been able to visualize the binary accurately, hse is profoundly affected by the sight.

Aris and Hesperos circle each other in a calculated dance, at a distance that leaves each looming large in the other’s sky. Once there was talk of the worlds being aligned so that the greater would exert on the lesser an influence comparable to what Selene had once wrought upon Earth. Perhaps the engineers of this project—the greatest humankind has ever achieved, or now ever will—expected to seed the larger world with the Earth’s legacy of tide-sensitive creatures and plant life, most even then banished into digital limbo. There is certainly no talk of that now.

The Sheltered Gardens are, like the rest of the solar system, mostly empty space, but the cone within the Parasol’s umbra is several million times denser than the rest. A moment’s observation shows numerous apparent stars moving against the background of the heavens: spacecraft, habitats, and the glint of enormous engines that once displaced a planet, now parked in permanent orbits like abandoned ordnance in the aftermath of a vast war.

“We have cleared the orbital zone of debris,” one of them says. “No dangerous shards fly through.” A walled garden, Heimgarð thinks: any loose stones prised from where nature had cast them and diverted for use elsewhere. But no one planned to spend their life in a garden.

Hse does not say this, nor anything else. The voyage takes several hours, which hse employs to recalibrate hrs sense of time: everything is now taking place quickly.

Aris is brighter than hse remembers seeing it—the Parasol admits as much sunlight as the Earth and Selene receive—but the planet shows no sign of what atmosphere it has gained. Hse can see the long thread of gases swirling along the Potamegos, too faint for normal human vision, but the red surface remains cloudless. Data are available at hrs mind’s fingertips, numbers attesting to the enormous difficulties of pulling away the top of Hesperos’s atmosphere and tunneling it across space, the decades it will take, even if the harvest rate can be steadily increased as its planners intended. Somewhere in these numbers, or in others, lies the reason that hse has been brought here.

Aerobraking is impossible over a planet with no significant atmosphere, so the craft decelerates using another world’s: the compressed gases of Hesperos are fired like rocket exhaust toward the surface of Aris. As the craft slows, its passengers stand upon its forward bulkhead, the planet now invisible below them. Most of them are significantly smaller than unmodified humans, and Heimgarð has also reduced hrs dimensions, shedding much of the mass hse used to cross the solar system. A guest, hse has doffed hat, cloak, and boots, and stands unaccommodated before them: the thing itself, whatever that may be.

They look at each other quizzically; Heimgarð possesses no skills in reading others’ expressions, but knows that they cannot read hsr. They pass through an opening in the Koleos—the world-sheathing membrane, billowing gently in what winds can reach it, is invisible even as they slip through—and are soon within a few kilometers of Aris’s surface, although the sky is getting no brighter. A small world: the horizon appears only seconds before touchdown.

The landscape is stony plain, its shades of red and ocher spotted with sheets of verdant fuzz. Heimgarð knew of the Gardeners’ plans to pull water and minerals from the soil with tailored viridiplantae, hardy organisms that will eventually change the ecosphere into something in which they cannot survive.

“Pankor is just beyond that low ridge,” says one of them, pointing. “We will enter it from here.” And the craft drops into the ground, through a shaft that opens after they have descended thirty-four meters (Heimgarð’s sensors immediately told hrm this) onto a high-ceilinged tunnel, the first interior space Heimgarð has entered that does not feel cramped. The scent of vegetation wafts toward them—Heimgarð freezes at it touches hrs nostrils—and the others begin walking toward it, on ground that rings solid beneath their steps.

Heimgarð follows as they move toward sunlight at the corridors’ end. An enormous vista opens upon the city of Pankor, built upon the terraced walls of a narrow tract of Valles Marineris and covered by a clear dome. By now Heimgarð can smell fir needles, though the source of this memory lies beyond reach. Birds, wings flapping with unnatural languor, fly slowly past.

Across a distance of 3.2 kilometers, boughs sway on breezes dense as those that once swept Earth.

None of the guides announce the city’s population, plans for expansion, or the details of its physical plant, for they know that Heimgarð can access these data on the open skein. Instead they wait politely. Hse can offer praise, but allows hrs nature to find expression. “What is the problem you face?”

“Time,” one replies. “We cannot take centuries to move humanity into the new worlds. A civilization of refugees, huddling in scattered habitats, will weaken and fail over generations. The Potamegos can never be more than a trickle; the wind that blows from Hesperos to Aris must swell to a gale, that this endeavor may show results within our people’s lifetime.”

“So what do you seek?”

“We need to build Yggdrasil.”

There is a silence while Heimgarð locates and assesses the data on this. “A daunting project,” hse says after a moment. “It would require a lot of mass.”

“Yes.”

Hse does not add that it would be difficult to operate, for the tendency of their remarks is clear. “Bifröst is nothing like what you propose. I can offer you neither knowledge nor skills.”

“Do not be too certain. You managed such a structure for a long period of time, and that is a perspective we require.”

Heimgarð ponders the dynamics that would act upon this world-spanning tree, its roots extracting gases from one as its branches disperse them over the other. There is a superficial resemblance to hrs creation, but this structure is hollow: not a bridge, but a sluice.

Heimgarð was never an engineer, but the sentinel of Bifröst was first its builder, and hse imagines the superheated gases being drawn up into the roots and then cooling rapidly as they expand. The long trunk would fill with moving vapor, whose density would decrease sharply across its length even as new gases pushed inward. Roots and branches would writhe like a living thing.

The master of such a venture would wield enormous responsibility, like the project manager for the Pyramids or the admiral of a starship fleet. Among those who understood the trials of command, such an overseer’s name would live forever.

Hse says, “I don’t believe you.”

They take hrm to the Sky Dragon, which sails upon the seas of Hesperos’s cloud cover like an enormous curled leaf. From there an airship lofts them to Estia, at this altitude a mere spire, light enough in its nanotube structure to bend in the terrible winds. Docking is interesting; the craft is relatively unwieldy and the buffeting provokes in hrm an involuntary tensing unfelt for centuries. In the event of catastrophic failure they would fall fifty kilometers to the ground. Although Heimgarð possessed the means to slow hrs descent, hse would not be able to survive the surface conditions, as hse easily had on Plouton. The thought is a novel one, and some part of hrm stirs uneasily.

The maneuver proceeds without incident, and they debark unmindful of the roaring about them. The platform takes them down swiftly, converting their kinetic potential into electricity as it brakes. The column widens from flue to hearth as they descend, for the growing pressure more than compensates for the weaker winds. At its bottom, enormous blocks of hewn stone have been laid: quarried from the foundations of the earth, they are stacked kilometers high, the cornerstones upon which nanotubes of exotic composition, interwoven like chain mail against the crushing world-dragon, rise through seething murk of slowly diminishing pressure toward the habitable skies.

It is an expressway to hell, but Heimgarð feels a faint relief in setting boots upon it. Perhaps hrs hosts realized that hse would be more comfortable with a structure that is anchored to the ground.

“The realm of the clouds is ours, but we must claim the surface. Volcanism and the ravaging atmosphere assail the land from below and above, yet it is our nature as humans to tread ground and look into the sky. Our thick-walled city is but a warren, its parks enlarged caverns lit by artifice. You, who know what it is to stand beneath the stars, can comprehend our need to make a home.”

Heimgarð looks down the kilometers of shaft, which exhales air warmed by the city below them. Lights may be shining at the bottom, although hrs eyesight is not presently enhanced to see more than an ordinary person’s.

The city is as they described it, and hse feels as uncomfortable in its teeming as they anticipated. As many people lived here as inhabited all the rest of Hesperos, each of them (it was worth recalling) used to such conditions. Why was this worse than living in an orbital habitat? Heimgarð could not say.

When they tell hrm what they want, hse knows they are not telling hrm everything. What they say is alarming enough.

“We want you to treat with them. They will heed you, as they do not us.”

Heimgarð protests that hse knows nothing of them, has no experience dealing with such beings. Hse also declares that the Gardeners will have to be more open with hrm about the nature of this mission. They nod and tell hrm more, though it is not the information hse needs.

“Is this why you brought me here?” Hse does not mean it resentfully, for those feelings seem distant from the person hse is.

And they show hrm images of Eridu, as vivid as though hse were gazing upon it in the cloud-cropped future of their dreams. The city stands ringed by a wall eight kilometers high, above which the now-skimmed cauldron of Hesperos’s atmosphere drifts over a dome that admits great slanting beams of sunlight. Twelve hundred square kilometers of flat and gently rolling land, Eridu bristled with structures—residential ziggurats, buildings shaped like warped planes, lifted wings, cylinders and prisms, all interlaced with tubes and ribbons of transport routes—and winding swathes of parkland, rumpled green or flat blue.

“We can tell you, for any given second, how many people are alive in the Gardens. But we cannot tell you what proportion of humanity this constitutes. Do the thermal signatures from Selene bespeak surviving settlements or merely the half-functioning life systems, still emitting heat long after those it once warmed are gone? Are there survivors sheltered within the moons circling Phaiton? Or are we behind the Parasol the sole redoubt of humanity? To reflect upon this is to understand why we must return to environments that maintain themselves. Planetary surfaces are not immune to disaster but they are safer than habitats and warrens beneath frozen moons.”

Heimgarð’s memories of breathing the air of a sun-warmed planet are too distant to be brought into focus, but hse nods. They take this for general assent, and after further thanks hse is given a spacecraft, again one that wraps around hrs back and chest, and bade farewell. When the propitious moment arrives, hse is launched—on boosters that drop away like husks once they have attained the proper velocity—and sails out from behind the Parasol and into brilliant sunlight. Carefully timed thrusts produce immediate deceleration and hse drops toward the Sun, into a transfer orbit that will take hrm around and into an encounter with Hermaon, the iron planet, and its underworld.

4

In distance and time, it is Heimgarð’s shortest journey, but the weeks of travel are disconcerting in a way hse has never felt before. There is no radio transmission demanding an explanation for hrs approach, for it is clear what Heimgarð intends. No decisions confront hrm: three landing platforms lie flush upon the surface of Hermaon, equally spaced along the equator, and the calculus of ballistics makes clear which one hse shall use.

In some realms, choice is superfluous. Beyond the limits of logic and mathematics, however, certainty dissolves: what steps hse must afterward take seem not just unsure but unfathomable.

Certainly the kobolds offer nothing: even a challenge would give hrm some information, but they are silent. Heimgarð takes the trouble to brake no harder than an unmodified human could bear; it is hrs message to them, which is received without comment. Hrs boots touch down upon the flat surface and gravity reaches once more through hrs soles. Carefully hse unstraps hrs spacecraft and sets it beside hrm. The nightside landscape, visible only by the infrared emissions of its cooling surface, allows hrm the pleasure of a familiarly close horizon.

To look about for sensors would only show foolishness; of course hse is being watched. What do they expect from their uninvited visitor, whose identity they have doubtless inferred? Perhaps the traveler who crossed the planetary spheres, gaze fixed and hair streaming, shall now stride puissant to the door and rap upon it. There is no door, although a featureless structure rises three meters above the platform at its eastern edge. Hse turns to face it and its near side slides open, disclosing darkness within. Six steps—hse savors the act of walking again upon a small cold world—take hrm to the threshold and into the space. The floor drops swiftly away, and hse descends.

Heimgarð counts the meters as hse plummets—the accelerometer nestled in some equivalent of hrs inner ear allows this almost without effort—and notes the slowly rising temperature. The interior of Hermaon is molten, the silicates of its crust slow to conduct heat: the temperature is still well below the freezing point of carbon dioxide, but if the capsule falls far enough, it will open upon tremendous heat. Heimgarð is calculating how long hrs systems can keep hrs organic tissues from cooking when it begins slowing to a stop. With a hiss—there is air beyond—the panel slides open, upon a space radiating neither heat nor light.

Hse steps forward into the darkness. Hrs boots ring on the floor beneath hrm, and hrs mind builds a picture from the returning echoes. The chamber is low-ceilinged, large, and filled with kobolds. They stand facing hrm, unmoving.

Most of their bodies are insulated by thick skin or clothing, but their eyes emit heat enough to glow infraredly in the gloom. How many are there? Although Heimgarð’s greater height affords a vantage, their serried ranks soon disappear behind the small planet’s curvature.

“Tell us what you want,” they say.

There is air enough in the chamber for Heimgarð to speak aloud. “The government of the Sheltered Gardens seeks your assistance in a project of great importance to them. They have authorized me to negotiate with you for this.”

“Untrue.” The voices now come not in unison but as a ragged chorus, rebounding off the low ceiling like scattered particles. “They want our gold.”

It is a moment before Heimgarð is able to comprehend this. “This project will indeed require large amounts of various heavy metals, but the combined masses of Hesperos and Aris are more than—”

“The Gardeners want our gold, which we will not surrender. So they have thrown you to us in propitiation.”

“Why would those of the Sheltered Gardens seek the resources of Hermaon? Both worlds—”

“They wish to hoard their own.”

“They know not how to mine it at such pressures.”

“They dropped you down the shaft to spy on us. They care not if you never return.”

With a shock hse realizes that this is true. Hse had been outfitted with the means to send a continuous data stream back to the Gardens, plus—hse now guessed—mobile devices to record such data and maneuver to dispatch it should transmission be blocked. Had the kobolds detected and disabled these?

This will require thinking, which Heimgarð is not now free to do. Hse ventures farther into the chamber, stepping between kobolds who turn their heads to regard hrm but do not otherwise move.

“How do you suppose those of the Gardens propose to dispossess you of yours? How am I, unfamiliar with your world and even theirs, to accomplish this for them?”

“Guile.”

“Trickery.”

“A stratagem, not yet apparent.”

“Humans are deceitful, in thrall to the sexual strategies that drove their animal ancestors and drive them just as blindly. They jostle and kick for social supremacy and mating opportunities, fitfully aware of how this appears yet unable to transcend it. They injure their societies in the interest of those few with whom they share genes, and will injure them in pursuit of opportunities to breed further. They are suspicious, irrational, and destructive, eventually to all but most immediately to those unlike themselves.

“They know we do not trust them, so they sent you.”

“But I am human,” Heimgarð points out.

And the space about him erupts in reverberating gales of eerie laughter.

Heimgarð ranges through their realm, which they do not forbid. There are passageways too small for hrm to enter, their endpoints unknown. Kobolds bustle past, sometimes carrying implements. One turns to regard hrm as it passes, gaze fixed upon hrm as its head rotates through 180 degrees. A many-toned muttering, language (if that’s what it is) unfamiliar, rises as hse moves through crowds of greater density.

If they have a leader, it is not coming forward. Kobolds once were people, Heimgarð was told, but that may not be the case for those now before hrm. Hse is not certain whether they are behaving like humans, for hse cannot tell what most of them are doing. Heimgarð sees one that it looking steadily at hrm, which hse takes as permission to address. “What is it you seek?” hse asks.

“We seek to protect what is ours.”

“You must aspire to be more than just watchdogs. What do you want?” But the kobold merely repeats itself, and Heimgarð moves on.

“What do you want?” he asks another.

“We want to be left alone.”

“Have you not been left to your solitude? Only I have come, and you chose to admit me.” But to this there is no reply.

One expresses itself clearly: “We don’t have to say what we want.”

After that hse wanders without hindering nor suffering hindrance from the strange creatures hastening past hrm. Possibly they are extending their domain, although hse can detect neither the vibrations nor airborne dust that would suggest excavation anywhere nearby. How far does this netherworld reach? How numerous its denizens?

Sometimes hse moves through great open plazas, sometimes down long colonnades or passageways narrow as tunnels. Hse ventures far enough that the curvature beneath hrm becomes measurable, and numbers collect in an unremarked register of hrs mind. Heimgarð is certain there is information they are not giving hrm, and studies the low ceilings and curving floors, the pressure and temperature of the air currents that brush past, the behavior of the kobolds hse speaks to or glimpses from afar. When the surmise materializes, it halts hrm with the abruptness of a hand against hrs chest. For a long moment hse simply stands motionless, running the figures repeatedly through hrs mind and wondering at the absurd implication.

“All right,” hse announces. Hse does not address hrs words in any direction, for hse knows that all are listening. “Take me to the realm below. There is no point trying to hide it.”

Perhaps they have been prepared for this moment. Certainly they do not feign incomprehension. Heimgarð is conducted to an elevator shaft, one that leads down rather than up. Hse enters the capsule and it drops through the floor, accelerating at a rate that hse studies closely. The capsule is transparent and is enveloped in darkness, but hse knows—and a beam from hrs helmet confirms—that hse is descending not down a tunnel but rather through a vast emptiness.

There are faint sources of light, and massive structures—girders and struts—discernible to hrs instruments across hundreds of kilometers. By now hse knows what hse will find, so hse does not strain to look straight down. Within minutes hse has data enough to guess when deceleration will begin, and at what point hse will touch bottom.

The door slides silently open and hse steps out onto level ground. The air is cool, but significantly thicker than in the chambers above. The ground is smooth but slightly yielding, and after a few steps hse feels it crunch like sand beneath hrs soles.

The gravitational pull is 1.00.

The lights overhead are dim as stars, but illuminated globes atop poles, like streetlamps from the early Industrial Era, dot the landscape, casting long intersecting shadows. Kobolds are everywhere, most of them much smaller than what hse has earlier seen. They enter and exit ornate structures that line thoroughfares, walking alone or in groups. A wheeled vehicle passes hrm.

The horizon is close, so Heimgarð does not have to venture far before features appear over it: a great coliseum, a range of hills, a large lake or perhaps a small sea. Hse approaches its shore and continues forward, wondering, until hse stands in its shallows: liquid water. Ships ply its surface, some under sail, and vibrations tell hrm of submarine vessels moving beneath, negotiating an environment populated (dissolved organics tell hrm) by marine life swimming or floating within its almost lightless depths.

Were hse to circle the shore and continue walking, hse would eventually circumnavigate this ornament, perfectly positioned around the center of its hollowed planet. It is a world of small compass, but a world.

There are other elevators, paired shafts that ferry a constant stream of kobolds up and down. None of them look at Heimgarð, although they clearly perceive hrm. Hrs own shaft stands ready upon hrs return; perhaps it was assembled expressly for hrm.

Hse rides it back up and looks out upon the Kobolds who await him as the door slides open. To address those present is, hse understands, to address them all.

Hse says, “I won’t ask what you have done; I can see that much. Nor will I ask why you did it. Instead I will ask once more: What is it you want?”

“We want a world. We want to feel the ground beneath our feet. The weightlessness of space is not for people, and the sensation of being flung against a rotating surface is not true gravity.”

“And so you have constructed that . . . eggshell sphere around a kernel of degenerate matter? A black hole? Contracting upon itself like an infinite arch, at exactly the distance you wished?”

“As you infer. It gave us a World, though small, on—or in—a planet too scant to provide it otherwise.”

“And the technology to wreak such upheavals: Has this anything to do with what befell the Earth?”

“No. Yet the Gardeners would never believe that: In their too-human fearfulness and imprudence they would draw an irresistible conclusion. Knowledge of our works they could not handle, so cannot ever learn.”

“Yet you admitted me into your midst, and now I know.”

“Yes.”

Silence follows this. Neither Heimgarð nor the kobolds cross their arms, square their stance: they consider themselves human, but are not so bound to their primate biology as to ape such bellicose posturing.

Heimgarð betrays nothing, but in fact harbors little to betray. I did not ask for this, hse wants to say. I do not wish to wield this club, yet now it rests in my hand.

“You must,” hse says, “have thought of this. So what would you have me do?”

And after more silence, they tell hrm.

5

The voyage out is not a return; nothing ever is.

Plouton-Charon lies more than a hundred degrees off Heimgarð’s course; each second takes hrm farther from it. The Gardens are also swinging behind the Sun; hse will attend no ceremonies celebrating hrs success. The kobolds would in any case likely forbid it: their concern for the safety of their secret would preclude giving the Gardeners any chance to lay hold of hrm.

Heimgarð will not see the effects of the deal hse hammered out, and in hrs fatigue—a surprisingly organic response—hse does not much care. The hammer, hse dully reflects, feels the impact as much as the substance it works.

The kobolds will keep their “gold”: none of Hermaion’s remaining metals will be sent to the Gardeners, who will never know why. Within weeks, however, kobolds by the hundreds will depart for Hesperos—not for any of the tall cities, but to the raging planet itself—and begin quarrying its own resources. Iron, copper, and more run in veins through its crust, waiting to be mined by anything willing to labor in darkness and gravity. Perhaps they will even enjoy it.

In return they have exacted their own price: the broker’s eternal exile. Heimgarð is to leave the inner system, never to return. But as recompense—and perhaps to speed hrm on hrs way—hse has been rebuilt, by techs whose skills even the Gardeners likely cannot match: outfitted with greater fuel capacity, energy storage, stress tolerance, resistance to temperature extremes. And given a destination.

Blue Neptune, smaller and denser than tilted Ouranos, was once inhabited by humans. The Tritonides are gone, the moon’s surface too cold for anything to be operating beneath its surface, and the few structures orbiting the planet can be confirmed, even from this distance, as lifeless hulks. Yet the kobolds wonder: they have calculated the distance from the planetary core at which the gravity is identical to Earth’s, and pondered the stratum’s dynamics: the great heat below, the great cold above, the tremendous winds and pressure. They believe it possible that humans, the remnants of the Triton settlement, may live down there.

Certainly they do not imagine that a spherical shell such as their own, but immensely larger, could have been constructed with the resources of a faltering colony. But a ribbon circling Neptune’s equator, perhaps only a kilometer wide, would be three orders of magnitude simpler. “Think of it as a bridge,” they told him. “Suspended over an icy hell, a bridge attached not to abutments but arching round to join itself, floating freely in the depths.” Such a construct would be wildly unstable, but if it were joined by two more rings, all at right angle to each other . . . the kobolds’ models said it could be possible.

Heimgarð imagined such a folly—a frail gyroscope forever steadying itself under incredible stresses—and doubted greatly that it ever existed. But the underground creatures had their price, and Heimgarð was a part of it. The frenetic makeshifts of the Gardens—the forges of Hesperos; the coming construction of Yggdrasil—were not destined for hrm.

Although the kobolds insist that a society surviving deep within Neptune’s atmosphere would possess sufficient insulation to prevent measurable heat from reaching the surface, the planet is as cold as it has always been. Their touching hopes are sign enough of their essential humanity; hrs bleak certainty suggests something different.

Hse rises from Hermaion on tongues of flame, accelerating steadily. Gravity, or its simulacrum, presses up against hrs soles. Does the sensation afford comfort to the human creature?

The voyage out will last significantly longer, for the climb out of the Sun’s deep gravity well reduces velocity. And there will be less to occupy hrs thoughts: no radio signals to listen for, no curiosity at a summons.

Will hse be lonely? It is a strange thought. If hrs two precursor minds could separate and occupy opposite sides of hrs helmet, perhaps they would soon tire of each other. Perhaps it was the fact that hse clearly is not quite human that allowed hrm to mediate between two mistrustful populations.

And perhaps solitude will someday grow burdensome. Hse will certainly have time to find out.

Heimgarð accelerates away from the grasping Sun, hrs straight course bent by its presence. Eventually the engines will cut off and the illusion of gravity vanish. Hrs trajectory will become an orbit—one of cometary magnitude, a centuries-long ellipse, were it not someday to intersect a world.

Like a rising spark, the sentinel departs the circle of light, into a wider darkness.

About the Author

Gregory Feeley is the author of two novels (The Oxygen Barons and Arabian Wine), many novellas, and a raft of short stories, articles, and book reviews. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, the Sturgeon, and the Philip K. Dick Awards.

The Cedar Grid

Sara Saab

Jassim is giving chase and he shouldn’t be.

Beneath the flapping robes of Jassim’s running target, a deadly corset bristling with titanium circuitry flashes into view. He catches an unmistakable mineral scent with its nose of vanilla sponge coming off the attacker—not a human odor, nowhere near the vinegar of his condemned-man’s sweat.

Sprinting footfalls judder in his knees. His panicked brain has yet to quell this bodily compulsion to pursue, to defend. Out-of-place thoughts burst to salience: his mother’s proud profile on a poster, conversations with his elder brother Majd late into the night.

“It’s an attack! Catch them! Stop them!” Jassim shouts, frightened by his own voice, but he sees that everyone is moving away, swiftly away.

He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be chasing off an attacker who’s wearing a bomb.

Doctor, Professor, Shaikh, mender of hearts, cobbler of souls: these are the titles Jassim would choose. Martyr was never one of them, never a word he imagined huddled against his forename, his tribesname, his planetsname. In the dry-mouthed beating of this moment, other moments rising towards it like waves coaxed by a tidal force, Jassim knows hotly and darkly that Martyr will be his title.

That’s when he tries it on his lips: The Young Martyr Jassim Kawakby Auroron-Hexler, he of the planets, he of the stratosphere, and the taste of it is salt and tang and the burn of lye.

Majd steps out, achy, onto streets yellow with artificial light on wet paving. The rainshower was artificial too, of course, cloud puffed out of a craft and seeded. He ups the heat inside his Skin and his mouth quirks with some ancestral nostalgia. It’s not bad, the duplicity, the made weather. It evokes hand-me-down memories of Earth.

Flask in hand, he trundles towards the ka’ak lady’s cube, rolling his gait to shake out his lower back. She’ll fill the flask with spiced lentil soup, delicious and cheap. The tip he received from the Noni for the back massage will cover it. The Noni always tips, but Majd isn’t sure it’s worth the trouble. His fingertips smart with splinters from the frills of their carapace despite the handling gloves.

“Hi, Auntie,” he says and seals the door of the modest cube behind him. Inside it’s bright and warm. He takes the breathing visor off.

“Majd Kawakby, how’s your mother?” The old lady is watching an Earth serial, staticy against one of the active walls of the cube. It’s dubbed in Hexler pidgin. He’s sure she would prefer it in Arabic.

“She’s fine, Auntie. She’s running as an independent in the Planetary Commune elections in a few months. So, busy-busy.”

At the talk of politics, the ka’ak lady wills the channel over to the news. The newscaster’s perfect posture alerts Majd to the bow of his own spent shoulders. He straightens up.

“The Commune should be ashamed to put someone like your mother through that process. Like a nobody!” she admonishes him, lifting a loop of fresh ka’ak bread from the hook they’re stacked on. “The Kawakby tribe ruled across the Auroron network for two generations—”

“—Actually, just soup today,” Majd interrupts. “And there’s nothing wrong with running as an independent. The Kawakby politicos have always believed in the democratic process.” He puts the flask on the counter.

“Kawakby politicos,” says the old lady. “What a clever mouth on you.” She gives him a genuine smile, full of restored teeth.

“Not as clever as my hands when it comes to unraveling knotty problems, luckily.”

She ladles and the smells of cumin and lemon zest make Majd’s mouth water. He watches the news. The program cuts to a home planet segment; there’s a stock photo of Baalbek in northeast Lebanon on Earth. Majd recognizes it instantly for the Roman pillars and the fact that Jassim is stationed there on Earth-exchange. It’s the Kawakby ancestral city.

“Can you turn the volume up, Auntie?” Majd asks. “My brother’s out there.”

“Jassim’s in Baalbek?” she asks. Sound rises from the cube.

Majd nods, but his neck clenches rigid. He’s watching a video now, the aftermath of an explosion,

“ . . . at least two Amoya revolutionaries participated in the coordinated attack, which is thought to have targeted a satellite office of the Planetary Comrades, the Commune’s cadet division. Four have been confirmed dead by the local ministry. Witnesses say one human victim may have died pursuing the attackers . . . ”

A rose of worry blooms in the pit of Majd’s gut. Stop. There are 200,000 humans in Baalbek.

“God protect the boy,” says the ka’ak lady, and Majd wishes she hadn’t.

“One second.”

He wills on his Device, contacts his mother, splinter-studded fingers rapping testily on the counter.

The sound transitions from the soft murmur of the connecting signal to his mother’s wail—a wail so long and loud and animal that something breaks in Majd then, maybe his bones, maybe his ligaments, because he turns to jelly and drops to his knees in the cube.

The keening words are worse to hear than the wail: “They killed him. They killed my son.”

“No,” says Majd. “No.”

Because how could the truth hurt more than being speared in the chest? How could words bash into his brain, concussive?

And Jassim’s face, why can’t he call to mind Jassim’s face? Instead, Majd remembers the face of the sweet-smelling Amoya he massaged that morning, their forced propriety, their awkward politeness.

He is on his back, the ceiling of the cube a blurry geometry. He convinces himself to breathe the way he’s always breathed, the way his brother no longer will.

“Mama,” Majd says when Raneem steps off the planet-hopper, and impulsively reaches for her. Her Skin darkens as she heats it against the cold of Auroron-Hexler’s seeded wet season. The wind off the hopper’s engines lifts her hair, fanning it out. It is as glossy as he remembers, and smells as clean, but Raneem has dyed it in mourning. It is the white of the chalk mines on Auroron-Pallazk.

Finally Raneem pulls away. There are no platitudes she can offer him, he knows, but it hurts a little that she doesn’t try. Her eyes are bruised-looking above the cliff of her breathing visor.

“A security aide from Earth called this morning. Said there won’t be enough recovered of his body to warrant shipping the remains to Hexler.” She chokes on the word ‘body’, and Majd feels acid well in his tear ducts again.

It isn’t right. Bodies are something you wear, something you knead, give pleasure to, maintain. How could a body be what remained of his brother? Not even that.

“Mama. I—” Majd takes a huge, shuddering breath. “I’ve hired a Physical on Earth.”

“What the hell for, Majd?” Raneem snaps.

“I need to see for myself. Where it happened.” And how. And why. “There’s a big fleet of multisensory bots at Baalbek, high-quality ones. For all the distance tourists.”

“And the risk of a PDE? You want me to lose another son?” The betrayal in her voice is a vice.

“It’s a small risk. Jassim would have done it for me.”

Raneem shakes her head. “Your brother has never been a thrill-seeker.”

Majd is doubly wounded. It isn’t thrills he’s after. And Jassim and Jassim’s big dreams—no matter how many verbs his mother uses to tug him into the present—Jassim is gone.

“Mama, I thought, I hired—” Majd feels his teeth begin to chatter from cold or nerves, raises the heat in his own Skin, “I actually hired two Physicals. I thought you might want to come, too.”

His mother walks straight past him in the direction of the terminal building. Her form is sleek and dark in the suit, capped with the glacier of her hair. Her step, as ever, is sure and practiced.

It’s six AM, Auroron-Hexler still in darkness, two hours till star rise. Majd comes to himself in fetal position in his own bed. He’s covered in a thin sweat, blankets kicked to the floor. His hearing undulates. The bedroom smells like cheap joss sticks and Mint. Majd fights the urge to sneeze, his eyes scrunched painfully tight. If he sneezes he’s sure he will vomit.

“What did—?” He over-articulates the words, any words, to reassure himself that he’s human, and alive.

Mint. Mint.

Majd swings around to survey the bed behind him. It’s empty; the only impression that of his own damp body. His stomach lurches at the movement.

The last drug trip he’d had on a dissociator like Mint he picked up a Kawakby groupie, blessedly human, and brought her home. He’s since sworn off self-pity fucks, is extra-extra prudent while Raneem is running for office and all manner of eyes—compound, binary, olfactospatial, whatever—are on his tribe.

In scraps, memories of the night float to him. He’d dissociated to a mental construct of the Earth his great-great-grandparents knew. Common to Mint highs, Majd remembers the smells best: the antique fog of synthetic diesel, the fatty miasma of trapezoids of shawarma on the spit, the reaching scent of the soil, pervasive and dirty and burdened. Hexler’s soil, by contrast, is an inorganic-seeming silicate.

And there were cedar trees in his dreams, row after row of them, precious emblems of the Lebanese Republic, extinct in the wild then reintroduced a hundred years later from hardy saplings engineered off-planet and brought back to Earth. This variety had lasted longer before succumbing; two generations, three. Majd’s grandmother has image archives of a cedar-lined Baalbek of the twenty-second century. A tree at every street corner, a meticulous grid. Majd can view the images at the end of a thought should he will it.

Still—home planet feels impossibly distant, farther than all the light-years between Earth and Hexler.

Majd switches his Device on. He’s got clients to see, but not for a few hours. He rises to groom, stumbles on the swirl of blankets, feels ill again for a cresting instant.

Under crossbursts of warm antimicrobial cleanser, he flips through his diary again.

Noon, Thati. They’ve been working on the niggling pinched nerve in her shoulder.

Two o’clock, Raptaph. This time with doubled-up handling gloves.

Four, Amalyy Amotupannak Amalyy, old back injury. The Amoya. Again.

Majd’s annoyed, then suddenly hit by a grief so cruel he gapes in the flow of antimicrobial, feels it dribble into his eyes and past his lips. His brother is dead.

Harsh, to forget that, and have to remember.

“Cancel,” he breathes, spitting fluid. “Cancel four o’clock.”

His Device speaks back economically, in the voice of his inner thoughts. Sending cancellation to Amalyy Amotupannak Amalyy.

Majd counts his breaths. Cleanser fizzes gently against the clear snot on his hands.

Message from Amalyy Amotupannak Amalyy: Please do not cancel today. I am in pain. Let me pay you double to honor the slot.

One Kawakby blown apart in the street. Another Kawakby letting pocket money decide his course.

“Don’t cancel. Rebook four o’clock.” His words echo in the shower. On the second word, his Device nudges a silent acknowledgement against his mind.

Hexler is a small rock by home planet standards—it boasts one big, cosmopolitan city, self-named, and a couple of functional outpostings, research camps or relay towns. Majd has lived in Hexler City all his life, although he was born off-planet on Auroron-Pallazk while his mother held a post in the Planetary Commune. Today he navigates the streets with less ease than usual, avoiding silty puddles contracting like irises under the hot daylight of their star.

He heads for unfamiliar Phoros Lane, where his Physical booking is waiting.

The rentals cube meets the strict hygiene and upkeep standards, but it all feels forced, dust encroaching from the seams of the place. Rows of bodyfoam seats are arranged by species, poised to mold to variations in individuals’ shapes and sizes. Gunmetal scaffolding around each seat holds straps of tubing arrayed by color—nutrition, hydration, waste, anti-inflammatories, and sedatives. For proprioception, electrodes; for sound, bone conduction headphones tailored to various skulls. And just before it begins, there’ll be a little hit of Mint to make the taste buds and nose suggestible.

The human clerk finds his booking and sends it to Majd’s Device for review. “You’re just using one of the two today?”

“Just one today.” My mother wouldn’t come. My mother won’t bear witness.

The actual headsets are too expensive to leave out. The clerk digs one out from behind the counter, cradles it with both arms onto the desk.

“Your Physical’s proxy body is ready to go. It’s a model fifty-five full articulation bot and is set to start in front of the Roman ruins in . . . ” the clerk reads out, “Baalbek, Lebanon, Earth. 34.0069° N, 36.2039° E. Is that right?”

“Yes,” says Majd.

He rattles on through his list. “It’s extra for the non-depot starting location. Are you happy for us to invoice your Device?”

“Go ahead.”

“And confirm you’re aware, sir, of the dangers of a Physical Dissociative Event, which can lead to temporary or permanent impairment or death. You waive Phoros Physicals of liability if you acknowledge this with your Device recording.”

“Understood,” says Majd.

Minutes later, he is in the Physical, intubated, cocooned, gently tripping on Mint, but he is also light-years away, his arms suggesting themselves over articulated robot arms, his eyes looking out in high-definition, the road beneath his feet sun-warmed and pocked.

He looks up and sees Baalbek’s Roman ruins. The thought of Jassim passing the ruins daily is sharp and definite.

Majd can only stand it for a few minutes. When he comes back to Hexler, he is shaking with emotions he cannot name.

The next day, at the Amoya’s third massage appointment inside a week, Majd finds himself unable hold his tongue.

“You know, it’s rare that I get Amoya clients.” He’s got Amalyy front-down, is pressing thumbs into the soft muscle between their backplates. It’s ticklish, the little hook-hairs scrabbling against the tender meat of his palms. Majd breathes all the way out, stops his inhalations short. The smell, heavy and sensual like cake and stalagmites, will take a day to fully dissipate. He’ll catch it on his skin tonight when he undresses.

“We have not learned the joys of massage,” Amalyy says in Hexler pidgin.

“Mm.” The relaxation music in the background repeats a lilting refrain. Majd thinks about kicking the wall speaker in. “Is that allowed for you people? To strive for joy? What about sacrifice? Self-actualization through warfare?”

The Amoya’s back spiracles shrink shut, a defensive reflex. They slowly twist onto their back, lower amazingly human-like legs to the floor. Their footpads palpate the ground. “Is there a problem today, Majd Kawakby Auroron-Hexler?”

Majd raises useless fingers to a blaring headache. His face has stiffened with stoicism these last two weeks. “There’s no problem, Amalyy. Lie back. I apologize.”

“Not all of us are born to carry weapons. And not all humans are targets for our fight.”

Majd wishes the Amoya had faces he could read, something in the twitch of a cheek or the slant of an eye that he might latch onto. Instead, two primary eyes like wet lead blink at him; two secondary eyes, rusted copper rivets, track the most indiscernible of his movements. The shoulders, though, the torso, the chest—like the legs, these are almost too human.

Why did you do it? he wants to ask the Amoya. That was my baby brother.

“Have I dishonored myself?” Amalyy asks.

Majd chuckles, hears an awful keening escape his throat. “No. Lie back. Please.”

The Amoya does not. They reach forward, touch Majd’s forearm with their pronged, plated hand, a gentle suction in the pads. They tug softly on his forearm, an Amoya gesture of camaraderie.

“If another Amoya were to see you do that . . . ” Majd says, aghast.

“There are many things I would do, Majd Kawakby Auroron-Hexler.” They let go. “Many things that are forbidden, but not wrong.”

Majd is in the Physical for the second time. It’s near midnight in Baalbek. Apart from the proxy body’s occasional lag, it’s almost as good as being there. Transport carriages dot the sky, oblong, lit to glistening between their wires, liquid in a straw.

Majd crosses a street. In his great-great-grandparents’ time there would have been a cedar at every corner. Now there are marble urns on elaborate stands. Each bulbous urn carries a dedication from an off-planet benefactor, a famous daughter or son of Baalbek. The urns line up along the city grid then fan out into the distance as Majd moves past. The recreated scent of cedar wood pours from vents in the marble.

Majd stops between lanes to survey his surroundings; traffic splices around his bot with the neat dexterousness of machine intelligence, but car horns low deeply with the passengers’ irritation. He spots the famous Temple of Bacchus, four thousand years young, shimmering, upright, gilded by holograms that mend its cracks, plump its facade.

Majd uses the Physical’s local Device to pull up the set of coordinates and wills the proxy body into navigation mode.

The spot’s not far away.

Jassim would have seen the ruins one last time, depending on which way he was facing—they might have towered in the distance like a symbol emptied of meaning, or stood to his right, casting a long shadow like a rescue line. Majd feels a gong of sorrow.

The Physical is incapable of sprinting, though Majd wants it, wants to replay the chase, craves every one of his brother’s last sensations.

The Physical is also incapable of transmitting bodily pain, but Majd feels it anyway, though not through the electrodes, not the Mint, not the bodyfoam: the impossible pain of being ripped bodily to shreds. It annihilates him, this abrupt conclusion to a life. It leaves nothing intact except a hard pit in the middle of his heart.

He’s back in Hexler, heading home from Phoros Physicals, when Raneem contacts him.

“Majd. I have an Auroron-wide prospective leaders’ debate tonight,” she says. No hello. No how are you.

“On Hexler?” he asks. He hasn’t seen her since that night at the terminal.

“Right,” Raneem says. “Listen—your father and sister are out-system and I need a family member there.”

She doesn’t have to say the rest: that all the political players—not only the humans but the Noni, the Amoya, the minority Ka’tanni—expect displays of generational strength, showcases of the fecundity and prosperity of a prospect’s tribesname.

“You know I don’t do politics.”

“Habibi, none of us ‘do’ politics for the sake of it. Is that what you think?”

“Mama.”

“Majd. I don’t have a choice. Jassim was my . . . ” her voice goes. “Jassim used to be . . . ”

“Mama,” Majd says again. Guilt presses on him, a knuckle into a knot. He’s starving, feeling the aftereffects of the Physical—that his eyeballs are a foot in front of his face, that his legs won’t move along the correct vector to propel him forward. He saws around unsteadily in the street, lowers the temperature in his Skin.

“My son. It’s for your brother we do this. It’s for the dead. It’s to fix the calamities of Auroron. For everybody’s salvation. My God.”

Majd relents. A sloppy Mint comedown nap is his one private act of rebellion. When he wakes he shaves his head and beard to stubble, pulls on a species-neutral ceremonial gown, masks his scent with something respectful to all Auroron’s noses.

At the prospective leaders’ debate, he tails his mother’s Ka’tanni campaign partner, Pbaa, at a noncommittal distance.

Only when cornered by politicians or journalists does he recite the Kawakby tribe’s promises: an Amoya home state on Hexler, respiration-safe dwellings for people of all species, economic regeneration for outpost towns, a species-integrated government.

No, my mother has not broken with the Planetary Commune—both parties benefit from aligned objectives. However, the affiliation is no longer financial.

Yes, it’s true that my younger brother was killed serving with the Planetary Comrades on Earth. Thank you for your condolences. Yes, his final act was brave and honorable. Thank you.

There are questions that dig like burrs into the details of Majd’s own life. A Noni journalist stammers with excitement, breath buzzing, as they relate that the Amoya frontrunner has alleged that Raneem Kawakby’s surviving son is a degenerate and a wastrel.

My mother will not be discredited by unfounded personal attacks.

Pbaa wants to know why Majd has never made an appearance at a political event before.

“You are a well-made son.”

“Thank you,” Majd says.

“Even if you are not as well-groomed in morality as Jassim was,” Pbaa adds.

Majd nods, excuses himself to take a seat.

Raneem’s opening speech is fiery and articulate. The incumbent Noni leader fires back, accusing her of human-centrism and of siphoning money to Kawakby interests on Earth. Majd stops listening eventually, nods blankly at Pbaa’s hushed commentary, poses for photographs with his mother at the end. The smile feels horrible on his face.

It’s Fifthday, the busiest day, and when the Amoya returns, Majd is expecting them.

He’s courteous. He offers sap tea. He selects a reel of Amoya music, orchestral and melancholic. Raneem was wrong: the world is too delicate a political jumble considered from the above. Everything’s sturdier, more fixable, from the ground up.

“Your problem has passed today, Majd Kawakby Auroron-Hexler,” says the Amoya.

“My forename is good enough among acquaintances.”

Amalyy purrs beneath his massaging hands. Majd knows from Species Integration lectures at the Collegiate that the shivering membrane beneath their skin is for generating body heat or expressing pleasure. The purring raises goosebumps on his own arms, reflexes in communion.

“My problem is passing too,” Amalyy adds. “Now the pain is not so bad. Next week I will not need to come here.”

“But you should come,” says Majd. “For more tea.”

When a famous Amoya revolutionary song comes on, Majd whispers, “Why don’t you fight us, like the others? Don’t you care about freedom? Don’t you want Auroron back?”

Amalyy considers, facedown. Their backplates accordion with breath. “I heard about your brother’s martyrdom,” their voice is muffled by the massage bench. “I am happy for the release of his soul.”

They’re words of condolence. Majd stops kneading.

“My brother is not a martyr.”

“He died for his cause.”

“He died for nothing. Jassim was fifteen.”

Amalyy turns onto their back. The soft humanness of their front strikes Majd again, the scoop of the abdomen, the smooth cinnamon flesh like human skin.

“I am not a fighter, but I believe in our fight. These planets are ours. Majd.”

Majd puts his hands at his sides, but the skin-scent still fogs his thinking. “You kill human civilians on Hexler. Throughout the system. On Earth—”

“We all die. Dying a martyr is better.”

“You’re wrong,” Majd says. “Not if you don’t want to die a martyr. Not if you’re fifteen. If you’re just doing what’s asked of you by your family.”

“We all die,” says the Amoya.

The Temple of Bacchus. Giving chase. Uncertain. Torn apart. “Not like that.”

The expression is not human, but Majd thinks he sees something like a smile in the lift of Amalyy’s face-flanks. “But death is death.”

Majd steals a glance down the alien body on his massage bench. The Amoya only don clothing for warfare and ceremonies.

Amalyy sees him look, registers every flitting saccade of his eyes. Their face lifts higher.

Majd remembers this from the Collegiate too: that the Amoya don’t have external sex organs, reproduce asexually, but engage in elaborate coupling rituals to promote social bonding.

“And life is life,” they say. “And there are no dictates but freedom.”

Majd returns to Phoros Physicals. He can’t stay away.

This time it’s a dry weekend in Baalbek. Human and non-human tourists grip charred corncobs and cones of roasted chickpeas and seethe over the quietude of the ruins. Majd exits the cadet office of the Planetary Commune, passes the tiny memorial to his brother beside the fountain in the courtyard. He leaves behind the bright-smelling jasmine chain he bought from a hawker, draping it over Jassim’s nameplate.

The path to the Baalbek burial grounds throws up dust under his proxy body’s feet. On Hexler or on Earth or nowhere at all, Majd licks over chapped lips.

He’s been in the Physical a while, because he can’t remember what the interior of the Phoros cube looks like. He does remember Jassim quite clearly now: massive eyes shaped like unshelled almonds, white teeth, close-cropped hair and the scar on his crown from when a malfunctioning drone clipped him with a propeller. But Jassim’s eyes are wrong, molten, and another set of eyes—Amoya eyes—are brass buckshot pellets in his brow.

Majd sits beside the fresh earth of his brother’s grave. He recites ancestral poetry under his breath, words he’s never uttered outside of the Collegiate. They are verses about freedom, the yearning of all the oppressed people of his land. The slaves who raised the Temple of Bacchus. The shipbuilders who built Muawiyah’s navy. Muslims under the Crusaders, Maronites under the Mamluks, Levantines under the Ottomans, then generation after generation oppressed by war and strife and sent fleeing by the threat of planetary collapse. Spacefaring humanity subjugated first by the Noni, then the Amoya.

He imagines that every verse is about the Kawakby tribe, crushed beneath the heel of grief.

And he recites for Amalyy, for the eventual annexation of the Amoya home planets.

He goes through each verse tens of times, hundreds of times. When he is done, at the fresh grave of his little brother, Majd Kawakby Auroron-Hexler cannot recall how he arrived at this moment. Cannot recall how to move on to the next moment, how to keep going.

So he does what’s easiest. He lies back flat and goes to sleep.

The universe is an emptiness that balloons around the irritation of life just the way a pearl envelops a grain of sand.

Majd wakes up to his mother’s face shrouded in white.

He thinks a moment later that he is not supposed to be here.

“Habibi, are you awake?” she asks. She has not spoken so tenderly to him in years, and this is how he is sure that he has nearly died.

“Was it a PDE?” he asks. His voice doesn’t sound like it’s emerging from his own skull.

Raneem nods. “You wouldn’t come back when they tried to disconnect you.”

“How many days has it been?”

“Four.” Raneem puts a hand on his arm. It’s warm, or his own skin is ice cold.

It’s another three days before Majd’s sensations are moored enough to his skeleton that he can stand and pace the hospital cube. When he does, a Noni nurse brings him his belongings and his Device.

“You can go home tomorrow, Mr. Kawakby. Your Device creds have been broadcast to the Physicals on Auroron-Hexler—I’m sorry, but that’s the last time you’ll be able to use one.”

“So if I want to go to Earth again, I’d better pack?”

The nurse’s breathing sounds like cog teeth snapping an elastic band. “I’m afraid the doctors are worried about a relapse of your dissociative event if you visit a supra-c location. Stasis pods are a lot like Physicals.”

This takes a moment to mean anything. “No Earth?”

“No, sir. Anywhere in marvelous Auroron is fine.”

It feels like the syringing of a dense and heavy ichor from the depths of his gut, some ballast that had held him inside himself.

“Earth is my home.”

The nurse is gathering up his used gowns. “I thought the Kawakby children were born in Auroron?” they ask in Hexler pidgin.

“That’s not what ‘home’ means in our language,” says Majd.

He wills a connection to his mother’s Device, leaves a note. There’s still a Physical available. Paid for. You should go. For Jassim.

Then he contacts Amalyy and asks them over. There’s the thing they have been dancing towards.

Majd considers taking two doses of Mint, decides against it. He doesn’t want to protect his thoughts from their transgressions, not really. In Auroron, political congress is a fragile and new thing, sexual congress well outside the bounds of coexistence even to the most liberal of policymakers.

Raneem is not a liberal policymaker. Raneem would withdraw his tribesname. The world is too delicate a jumble considered from above.

Jassim, he thinks, would have grown up to understand.

Amalyy, too, understands. The two of them might stay combatants—enemies—in some sense, but not in all senses. That is the important part.

“He’d have been a doctor or a scholar,” says Majd, fingers tracing the hook-hairs between Amalyy’s backplates. “Or, to be honest, a politician. Fast wit. Politician’s voice—this loud honeyed voice. And a whip of a tongue. Even an Amoya would have fallen for him.”

“He was many things, this young Jassim Kawakby Auroron-Hexler,” says Amalyy. Majd winces at his brother’s full name.

Amalyy pitches their body closer on Majd’s bed, their purring a gentle vibration against Majd’s ribs. “Perhaps too much life in him to call him a martyr. As you said.”

“More life in him than in me,” Majd says, shifting away.

“Life is life, Unraveler,” Amalyy says, and shifts closer, and pulls Majd near, and holds him. “Death is death, and life is life.”

For A. and M., who might’ve chosen other titles.

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 hunts for the perfect almond croissant. Sara is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her fiction has recently appeared in Clarkesworld #110 and at Lackington’s, and you can find her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara.

Old Friends

Garth Nix

I’d been living in the city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, “irredeemably shit-shape.”

Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an additional excuse to use the stick, which was of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.

I had a short lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room, and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.

Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.

I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. ‘Caught’ being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut tight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.

I considered moving to the mountains or far inland, but that would merely delay matters. Only the true desert would be safe from my foe, but I could not go there.

So I watched the progress of the weed every morning as I drank my first coffee, usually leaning back in one white plastic chair as I elevated my supposedly injured leg on another. The two chairs were the only furniture in the apartment. I slept in the bath, which I had lined with sleeping moss, which was comfortable, sweet-smelling, and also massaged out the cares of the day with its tiny rhizoids.

The day before I adjudged the weed would reach its catalytic potential and spawn servitors, I bought not just my usual black coffee from the café downstairs, but also a triple macchiato that came in a heavy, heat-resistant glass. Because I lived upstairs they always gave me proper cups. The barista who served me, a Japanese guy who worked the espresso machine mornings and surfed all afternoon, put the coffees in a cardboard holder meant for takeaways and said, “Got a visitor today?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I will have shortly. By the way, I wouldn’t go surfing here this afternoon . . . or tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“That weed,” I replied. “It’s toxic. Try another beach.”

“How do you know?” he asked as he slid the tray into my waiting fingers. “I mean, you can’t . . . ”

“I can’t see it,” I said, as I backed away, turned, and started tapping towards the door. “But I can smell it. It’s toxic all right. Stay clear.”

“OK, thanks. Uh, enjoy the coffee.”

I slowly made my way upstairs, and set the coffees down on the floor. My own cup in front of one white chair, and the macchiato at the foot of the other. I wouldn’t be resting my limb on the spare chair today.

I had to wait a little while for the breeze to come up, but as it streamed through the room and teased at the hair I should have had cut several weeks before, I spoke.

“Hey, Anax. I bought you a coffee.”

The wind swirled around my head, changing direction 270 degrees, blowing out the window it had come in by and in by the window it had been going out. I felt the floor tremble under my feet and experienced a brief dizziness.

Anax, proper name Anaxarte, was one of my oldest friends. We’d grown up together and had served together in two cosmically fucked-up wars, one of which was still slowly bleeding its way to exhaustion in fits and starts, though the original two sides were long out of it.

I hadn’t seen Anax for more than thirty years, but we scribbled notes to each other occasionally, and had spoken twice in that time. We talked a lot about meeting up, maybe organizing a fishing expedition with some of the old lads, but it had never come together.

I knew that if he were able to, he would always answer my call. So as the coffee cooled, and the white plastic chair lay vacant, my heart chilled, and I began to grieve. Not for the loss of Anax’s help against the enemy, but because another friend had fallen.

I sat in the sunshine for an hour, the warmth a slight comfort against the melancholy that had crept upon me. At the hour’s end, the wind shifted again, roiling around me counter-clockwise till it ebbed to a total calm.

Even without the breeze, I could smell the weed. It had a malignant, invasive odor, the kind that creeps through sealed plastic bags and airtight lids, the smell of decay and corruption.

My options were becoming limited. I took up my stick and went downstairs once more to the café. The afternoon barista did not know me, though I had seen her often enough through my expansive windows. She did not comment on my order, though I doubt she was often asked for a soy latte with half poured out after it was made, to be topped up again with cold regular milk.

Upstairs, I repeated the summoning, this time with the chill already present, a cold presence of somber expectation lodged somewhere between my heart and ribs.

“Balan,” I called softly. “Balan, your luke-warm excuse for a drink is ready.”

The wind came up and carried my words away, but as before, there was no reply, no presence in the empty chair. I waited the full hour to be sure, then poured the congealed soy drink down the sink.

I could see the weed clearly in the breakers now. It was almost entirely one huge, long clump that spanned the length of the beach. The lifesavers had given up trying to break it apart with their jetskis and zodiac inflatables, and there were two ‘Beach Closed’ signs stuck in the sand, twenty meters apart. Not that anyone was swimming. The beach was almost empty. The reek of the weed had driven away everyone but a sole lifesaver serving out her shift, and a fisherman who was dolefully walking along in search of a weed-free patch of sea.

“Two of my old friends taken,” I whispered to the sun, my lips dry, my words heavy. We had never thought much about our futures, not when we were fighting in the war, or later when we had first escaped our service. The present was our all, our time the now. None of us knew what lay ahead.

For the third time, I trod my careful way downstairs. There were a dozen people outside the café, a small crowd which parted to allow me passage, with muffled whispers about blindness and letting the sightless man past.

The crowd was watching the weed, while trying not to smell it.

“There, that bit came right out of the water!”

“It kind of looks alive!”

“Must be creating a gas somehow, the decomposition . . . ”

“ . . . check out those huge nodules lifting up . . . ”

“. . . a gas, methane, maybe. Or hydrogen sulphide . . . nah . . . I’m just guessing. Someone will know . . . ”

As I heard the excited comments I knew that I had mistimed my calls for assistance. The weed was very close to catalysis and would soon spawn its servitors, who would come ashore in search of their target.

I had meant to ask the owner of the café, a short, bearded man who was always called “Mister Jeff” by the staff, if he could give me a glass of brandy, or at a pinch, whiskey. A fine armagnac would be best, but I doubted they’d have any of that. The café had no liquor license but I knew there was some spirituous alcohol present, purely for Jeff’s personal use, since I’d smelled it on his breath often enough.

But as I said, it was too late for that. Palameides might have answered to a double brandy, but I secretly knew that he too must have succumbed. It had been too long since his last missive, and I accounted it one of my failings that I had not been in touch to see where he was, and if all was well with him.

“Someone should do something about that weed,” complained a thickset young man who habitually double-parked his low-slung sports car outside the café around this time. “It really stinks.”

“It will be gone by morning,” I said. I hadn’t meant to use the voice of prophecy, but my words rang out, harsh and bronze, stopping all other conversation.

Everyone looked at me, from inside and outside the café. Even the dog who had been asleep next to one of the outside tables craned his neck to look askance. All was silent, the silence of an embarrassed audience who wished they were elsewhere without knowing why, and were fearful about what was going to come next.

“I am a . . . biologist,” I said in my normal tones. “The weed is a known phenomenon. It will disperse overnight.”

The silence continued for a few seconds, then normal service resumed, at a lower volume. Even the double-parking guy was more subdued.

I spoke the truth. One way or another, the weed would be gone, and likely enough, I would be gone with it.

As the afternoon progressed, the stench grew much worse. The café was shut, staff and customers retreating to better-smelling climes. Around five o’clock, nearby residents began to leave as well, at the same time the Fire Brigade, the Water Board, the police, and several television crews arrived.

An hour after that, only the firefighters remained, and they were wearing breathing apparatus as they went from door to door, checking that everyone had left. Farther afield, way down the northern end of the beach, I could see the television crews interviewing someone who was undoubtedly an expert trying to explain why the noxious odors were so localized, and dissipated so quickly when you got more than three hundred meters from the center of the beach.

The “DO NOT CROSS” tapes with the biohazard trefoils got rolled out just before dusk, across the street about eighty meters up from my apartment. The firefighters had knocked at my door and called out, gruff voices muffled by masks, but I had not answered. They could probably have seen me from the beach, but no one was heading closer to the smell, however well-protected they might be. The sea was bubbling and frothing with noxious vapors, and weedy nodules the size of restaurant refrigerators were bobbing up and down upon the waves. After a while the nodules began to detach from the main mass of weed and the waves carried them in like lost surfboards, tendrils of weed trailing behind them, reminiscent of broken leg-ropes.

I watched the nodules as the sun set behind the city, mentally mapping where they were drifting ashore. When the sun was completely gone, the streetlights and the high lamps that usually lit the beach didn’t come on, but that didn’t matter much to me. Darkness wasn’t so much my friend as a close relative.

The lack of artificial light caused a commotion among the HAZMAT teams though, particularly when they couldn’t get their portable generators and floodlights to work, and the one engine they sent down the street choked and stalled before it had even pulled away from the curb.

I had counted thirteen nodules, but more could be out in the weed mass, or so low in the water I’d missed them. My enemy was not underestimating me, or had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance.

I had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance, a foolish presumption built upon old camaraderie, of long-ago dangers shared, of the maintenance of a continuum. I had not thought that my friends, having survived our two wars, could have had a full stop put to their existence in more mundane environments, or at least not so soon. Which meant that they had met the same fate that now threatened to be mine.

“Anax, Balan, Palameides,” I whispered. By now there would be three new death-trees laid out in a nice row in the arboreal necropolis, with those nameplates at their feet. There was probably a Nethinim carving my name onto a plaque right now, and readying a sapling. They always knew beforehand, the carriers of water and hewers of wood.

I dismissed this gloomy thought. If my time had come, it had come, but I would not wait in a dark apartment, to acquiesce to my fate like a senescent king grown too tired and toothless to act against his assassins.

I took off the blindfold and tied it around my neck, returning it to its original use as a scarf. It became my only item of apparel as I shucked white cotton trousers, white T-shirt and underwear.

The stick I gently broke across my knee, sliding the two lengths of wood apart to reveal the sword within. I took the weapon up and made the traditional salute towards my enemies on the beach.

Courtesies complete, I shaded my skin, hair and eyes dark, a green almost heavy enough to match the blackness of the night, and with a moment’s concentration, grew a defensive layer of young bark, being careful not to over-do it, while overlaying the sheaths in such a way that it would not limit my movement. Novices often made the mistake of armoring up too much, and found themselves extraordinarily tough but essentially sessile. I had not made that mistake since my distant youth.

The wind lifted a little, and the stink of the weed changed, becoming more fragrant. I heard thirteen soft popping noises come from the beach, and knew that the nodules were opening.

There was little point in dragging things out, so I simply walked down the street to the beach, pausing to bid a silent farewell to the café. Their coffee had been quite good.

I paused at the promenade railing, near the block of stone surmounted by the bronze mermaid, and looked across the beach. There was a little starlight, though no moon, and I thought both sea and sand had never looked prettier. The humans should turn the lights off more often, though even then they would not see the way I saw.

The thirteen had emerged from their nodules, or perhaps I should call them pods. Now that I saw them clearly, I knew I had even less chance than I’d thought. I had expected the blocky, bad imitations of human women that looked like Bulgarian weightlifters, armed with slow, two-handed axes that though devastating when they hit, were fairly unlikely to do so provided I didn’t make a mistake.

But my enemy had sent a much superior force, testament I suppose to the number of times I had defeated or evaded previous attempts to curtail my activities. This time they were indeed what long-gone inhabitants of this world had called Valkyries: female human in form, tall, long-limbed, and very fast, and the sensing tendrils that splayed back from their heads could easily be mistaken for a wing’d helmet, as their rust-colored exoskeleton extrusions could look like armor.

They lifted their hatchets—twenty-six of them, as they held one in each hand—when they saw me, and offered the salute. I returned the greeting and waited for the eldest of them (by a matter of seconds, most like) to offer up the obligatory statement, which also served as a disclaimer, thrust all liability for collateral damage upon me and usually offered a chance to surrender.

“Skrymir, renegade, oathbreaker, and outcast!”

I inclined my head.

“Called to return eight times; sent for, six times.”

Had it been so many? I’d lost count. Too many years, across too many worlds.

“Surrender your sword!”

I shook my head, and the valkyries attacked before I could even straighten my neck, running full-tilt at the seawall that bordered the promenade. Six stopped short before the wall and six leaped upon their backs to vault the railing, while the last, the senior, stood behind in a position of command.

I lopped two heads as I fell back, the valkyries concerned momentarily confused as their major sensory apparatus went bouncing back down to the sand. As per their imprinting, they stopped still and if it had not been for the others I could have felled them then. But the others were there, attacking me from all sides as I danced and spun back to the road, my sword meeting the helves of their hatchets, nicking at their fibrous flesh, but their weapons in turn carved long splinters from my body.

If they could surround me, I would be done for, so I fought as I had not fought since the wars. I twisted and leaped and slid under parked cars and over them, around rubbish bins and flagpoles, changing my sword from left hand to right hand, kicking, butting, deploying every trick and secret that I knew.

It was not enough. A skilled and vicious blow caught my knee as I took off another head, and in the second I was down, a dozen other blows put paid to my legs. I rolled and writhed away, but it was to no avail. The valkyries pinned me down and began to chop away.

The last memory I have from that expression of myself was of the starry sky, the sound of the surf a deeper counterpoint to the thud of axework, and the blessed smell of fresh salt air, the stench of that particular rotten weed gone forever.

I cannot smell anything where I am now, nor see. I can sense light and shade, the movement of air, the welcome sensation of moisture on my extremities, whether above or below the earth.

Neither can I speak, save in a very limited fashion, the conveyance of some slight meaning without words.

But I am not alone.

Palameides is here, and Balan, and Anax too. They have grown tall, and overshadow me, but this will not last. I will grow mighty once more, and one day, They will have need of us again . . . and then, as we whisper, tapping with our roots, signaling with the rustle of our leaves, then our hearts will bud new travelers, and we shall go forth to do the bidding of our masters, and perhaps, for as long as we can, we four friends shall once again be free.

First published in Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann, 2008.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, public relations man, and literary agent before launching the best-selling “Old Kingdom” series, which consists of Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen, and The Creature in the Case. His other books include the “Seventh Tower” series, consisting of The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone, the “Keys to the Kingdom” series, consisting of Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday, Lady Friday, Superior Saturday, and Lord Sunday, as well as stand-alone novels such as The Ragwitch and Shade’s Children. His short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and Beyond. His most recent book are two novels written with Sean Williams, Troubletwisters: The Mystery and Troubletwisters: The Monster, a new standalone novel, A Confusion of Princes, and a new collection, Sir Hereward and Master Fitz: Three Adventures. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.

Winter’s Wife

Elizabeth Hand

Winter’s real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him Winter. He lived in an old schoolbus down the road from my house, and my mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out of her. It wasn’t even him that scared her, she hadn’t even met him yet; just the fact that there was this creepy-looking old schoolbus stuck in the middle of the woods with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and in the summer all kinds of chainsaws and stuff, and in the fall deer and dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig’s head with tusks which my mother said was scarier even than the coyotes. Which, when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can’t blame her for being freaked out. It’s funny now because her and Winter are best friends, though that doesn’t mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

The schoolbus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

Winter’s family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.

“I have Passamaquoddy blood,” Winter says. “If I moved somewhere else, I’d melt.”

He didn’t look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from having to duck through the door of the schoolbus all those years. He always wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE., and I can remember how shocked I was once when I saw him at a Town Meeting without his hat and he had almost no hair. He’d hunt and butcher his own deer, but he wouldn’t eat it—he said he’d grown up dirt poor in a cabin that didn’t even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle. So he’d give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher their livestock and gave him meat, he’d give that away too.

That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping through the snow carrying a big paper bag.

“You a vegetarian?” he said when she opened the door. “Everyone says there’s a lady from away living here who’s going to have a baby and she’s a vegetarian. But you don’t look like one to me.”

My mother said no, she wasn’t a vegetarian, she was a registered certified massage therapist.

“Whatever the hell that is,” said Winter. “You going to let me in? Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?”

See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage therapist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks, instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can’t even skate on the roads here because they’re all dirt roads and so full of pot holes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.

But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn’t put out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy lady from away had bought Martin Weed’s old rundown camp and now she was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.

So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up creosote which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who sold her the wood, which she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came by with a brand-new woodstove which was ugly but very efficient and had a sheath around it so a baby wouldn’t get burned if he touched it. And the day after that Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and he went to all the cabin’s windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and covered them so the cold wouldn’t get in, and then he showed my mother where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water jugs rather than buy them at the grocery door. He also gave her a chamber pot so she wouldn’t have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of someone who had a composting toilet they’d sell to her cheap.

All of which might make you think that when I say “Winter’s wife” I’m referring to my mom. But I’m not. Winter’s wife is someone else.

Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he’d split the wood so the people could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people can build houses with the lumber. He’s an auctioneer, and he can play the banjo and one of those washboard things like you see in old movies. He showed me how to jump start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to carve wood and build a treehouse and frame a window. When my mother had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the carpentry, and he taught me how to do that too.

He’s also a dowser, a water witch. That’s someone who can tell where water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in front of him. You’d think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.

But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do it. We were hanging out around Winter’s place, clearing brush. He let us use the hill behind the schoolbus for snowboarding, and that’s where we’d built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating too.

But now it was spring and since we didn’t have any money really to pay Winter for it, he put us to work clearing brush. Cody is my age, almost fourteen. So we’re hacking at this brush and swatting blackflies and I could tell that at any minute Cody was going to say he had to go do homework, which was a lie because we didn’t have any, when Winter shows up in his pickup, leans out the window and yells at us.

“You guys wanna quit goofing off and come watch someone do some real work?”

So then me and Cody had an argument about who was going to ride shotgun with Winter, and then we had another argument about who was going to ride in the truck bed, which is actually more fun. And then we took so long arguing that Winter yelled at us and made us both ride in the back.

So we got to the place where Winter was going to work. This field that had been a dairy farm, but the farm wasn’t doing too good and the guy who owned it had to sell it off. Ms. Whitton, a high school teacher, was going to put a little modular house on it. There’d been a bad drought a few years earlier, and a lot of wells ran dry. Ms. Whitton didn’t have a lot of money to spend on digging around for a well, so she hired Winter to find the right spot.

“Justin!” Winter yelled at me as he hopped out of the truck. “Grab me that hacksaw there—”

I gave him the saw, then me and Cody went and goofed around some more while Winter walked around the edge of the field, poking at brush and scrawny trees. After a few minutes he took the hacksaw to a spindly sapling.

“Got it!” Winter yelled, and stumbled back into the field. “If we’re going to find water here, we better find a willow first.”

It was early spring, and there really weren’t any leaves out yet, so what he had was more like a pussy willow, with furry gray buds and green showing where he’d sawn the branch off. Winter stripped the buds from it until he had a forked stick. He held the two ends like he was holding handlebars, and began to walk around the field.

It was weird. Cause at first, me and Cody were laughing—we didn’t mean to, we couldn’t help it. It just looked funny, Winter walking back and forth with his arms out holding that stick. He kind of looked like Frankenstein. Even Ms. Whitton was smiling.

But then it was like everything got very still. Not quiet—you could hear the wind blowing in the trees, and hear birds in the woods, and someone running a chainsaw far off—but still, like all of a sudden you were in a movie and you knew something was about to happen. The sun was warm, I could smell dirt and cow manure and meadowsweet. Cody started slapping blackflies and swearing. I felt dizzy, not bad dizzy but like you do when the schoolbus drives fast over a high bump and you go up on your seat. A few feet away Winter continued walking in a very straight line, the willow stick held out right in front of him.

And all of a sudden the stick began to bend. I don’t mean that Winter’s arms bent down holding it: I mean the stick itself, the point that stuck straight out, bent down like it was made of rubber and someone had grabbed it and yanked it towards the ground. Only it wasn’t made of rubber, it was stiff wood, and there was no one there—but it still bent, pointing at a mossy spot between clumps of dirt.

“Holy crap,” I said.

Cody shut up and looked. So did Ms. Whitton.

“Oh my god,” she said.

Winter stopped, angling the stick back and forth like he was fighting with it. Then it lunged down and he yelled “Whoa!” and opened his hands and dropped it. Me and Cody ran over.

“This is it,” said Winter. He pulled a spool of pink surveyor’s tape from his pocket and broke off a length. I stared warily at the willow stick, half-expecting it to wiggle up like a snake, but it didn’t move. After a moment I picked it up.

“How’d you do that?” demanded Cody.

“I didn’t do it,” said Winter evenly. He took the stick from my hand, snapped off the forked part and tossed it; tied the surveyor’s tape to what remained and stuck it in the ground. “Wood does that. Wood talks to you, if you listen.”

“No lie,” I said. “Can you show me how to do that sometime?”

“Sure,” said Winter. “Can’t today, got a towing job. But someday.”

He and Ms. Whitton started talking about money and who had the best rates for drilling. The next time my mom drove past that field, the drill rig was there hammering at the ground right where Winter’s stick had pointed, and the next time I ran into Ms. Whitton in the hall at school she told me the well was already dug and all geared up to pump 100 gallons a minute, once she got her foundation dug and her house moved in.

Not long after that, Winter announced he was going to Reykjavik.

It was after school one day, and Winter had dropped by to shoot the breeze.

“What’s Reykjavik?” I asked.

“It’s in Iceland,” said my mother. She cracked the window open and sat at the kitchen table opposite Winter and me. “Why on earth are you going to Reykjavik?”

“To pick up my wife,” said Winter.

“Your wife?” My eyes widened. “You’re married?”

“Nope. That’s why I’m going to Iceland to pick her up. I met her online, and we’re going to get married.”

My mother looked shocked. “In Iceland?”

Winter shrugged. “Hey, with a name like mine, where else you gonna find a wife?”

So he went to Iceland. I thought he’d be gone for a month, at least, but a week later the phone rang and my mom answered and it was Winter, saying he was back safe and yes, he’d brought his wife with him.

“That’s incredible,” said Mom. She put the phone down and shook her head. “He was there for four days, got married, and now they’re back. I can’t believe it.”

A few days later they dropped by so Winter could introduce us to her. It was getting near the end of the school year, and me and Cody were outside throwing stuff at my treehouse, using the open window as a target. Sticks, a Frisbee, a broken yo-yo. Stuff like that.

“Why are you trying to break the house?” a woman asked.

I turned. Winter stood there grinning, hands in the pockets of his jeans, his gimme cap pushed back so the bill pointed almost straight up. Beside him stood a woman who barely came up to his shoulder. She was so slight that for a second I thought she was another kid, maybe one of the girls from school who’d ridden her bike over or hopped a ride in Winter’s truck. But she didn’t have a kid’s body, and she sure didn’t have a kid’s eyes.

“Justin.” Winter squared his shoulders and his voice took on a mock-formal tone. “I’d like you to meet my wife. Vala, this is Justin.”

“Justin.” The way she said my name made my neck prickle. It was like she was turning the word around in her mouth; like she was tasting it. “Gleour mig ao kynnast per. That’s Icelandic for ‘I am glad to meet you.’”

She didn’t really have an accent, although her voice sounded more English than American. And she definitely didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen in Maine, even though she was dressed pretty normal. Black jeans, a black t-shirt. Some kind of weird-looking bright blue shoes with thick rubber soles, which I guess is what people wear in Iceland; also a bright blue windbreaker. She had long straight black hair done in two ponytails—one reason she looked like a kid—kind of slanted eyes and a small mouth and the palest skin I’ve ever seen.

It was the eyes that really creeped me out. They were long and narrow and very very dark, so dark you couldn’t even see the pupil. And they weren’t brown but blue, so deep a blue they were almost black. I’ve never seen eyes that color before, and I didn’t really like seeing them now. They were cold—not mean or angry, just somehow cold; or maybe it was that they made me feel cold, looking at them.

And even though she looked young, because she was skinny and her hair didn’t have any gray in it and her face wasn’t wrinkled, it was like she was somehow pretending to be young. Like when someone pretends to like kids, and you know they don’t, really. Though I didn’t get the feeling Vala didn’t like kids. She seemed more puzzled, like maybe we looked as strange to her as she did to me.

“You haven’t told me why you are trying to break the house,” she said.

I shrugged. “Uh, we’re not. We’re just trying to get things through that window.”

Cody glanced at Vala, then began searching for more rocks to throw.

Vala stared at him coolly. “Your friend is very rude.”

She looked him up and down, then walked over to the treehouse. It was built in the crotch of a big old maple tree, and it was so solid you could live in it, if you wanted to, only it didn’t have a roof.

“What tree is this?” she asked, and looked at Winter.

“Red maple,” he said.

“Red maple,” she murmured. She ran her hand along the trunk, stroking it, like it was a cat. “Red maple  . . . ”

She turned and stared at me. “You made this house? By yourself?”

“No.” She waited, like it was rude of me not to say more. So I walked over to her and stood awkwardly, staring up at the bottom of the treehouse. “Winter helped me. I mean, your husband—Mr. Winter.”

“Mr. Winter.” Unexpectedly she began to laugh. A funny laugh, like a little kid’s, and after a moment I laughed too. “So I am Mrs. Winter? But who should be Winter’s proper wife—Spring, maybe?”

She made a face when she said this, like she knew how dumb it sounded; then reached to take my hand. She drew me closer to her, until we both stood beside the tree. I felt embarrassed—maybe this was how they did things in Iceland, but not here in Maine—but I was flattered, too. Because the way she looked at me, sideways from the corner of her eyes, and the way she smiled, not like I was a kid but another grownup . . . it was like she knew a secret, and she acted like I knew it, too.

Which of course I didn’t. But it was kind of cool that she thought so. She let go of my hand and rested hers against the tree again, rubbing a patch of lichen.

“There are no trees in Iceland,” she said. “Did you know that? No trees. Long long ago they cut them all down to build houses or ships, or to burn. And so we have no trees, only rocks and little bushes that come to here—”

She indicated her knee, then tapped the tree trunk. “And like this—lichen, and moss. We have a joke, do you know it?”

She took a breath, then said, “What do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland?”

I shook my head. “I dunno.”

“Stand up.”

It took me a moment to figure that out. Then I laughed, and Vala smiled at me. Again she looked like she was waiting for me to say something. I wanted to be polite, but all I could think was how weird it must be, to come from a place where there were no trees to a place like Maine, where there’s trees everywhere.

So I said, “Uh, do you miss your family?”

She gave me a funny look. “My family? They are happy to live with the rocks back in Iceland. I am tired of rocks.”

A shadow fell across her face. She glanced up as Winter put his hands on her shoulders. “Your mother home, Justin?” he asked. “We’re on our way into town, just wanted to say a quick hello and introduce the new wife—”

I nodded and pointed back to the house. As Winter turned to go, Vala gave me another sharp look.

“He tells me many good things about you. You and he are what we would call feogar—like a father and his son, Winter says. So I will be your godmother.”

She pointed a finger at me, then slowly drew it to my face until she touched my chin. I gasped: her touch was so cold it burned.

“There,” she murmured. “Now I will always know you.”

And she followed Winter inside. When they were gone, Cody came up beside me.

“Was that freaky or what?” he said. He stared at the house. “She looks like that weird singer, Boink.”

“You mean Bjork, you idiot.”

“Whatever. Where is Iceland, anyway?”

“I have no clue.”

“Me neither.” Cody pointed at my chin. “Hey, you’re bleeding, dude.”

I frowned, then gingerly touched the spot where Vala had pressed her finger. It wasn’t bleeding; but when I looked at it later that night I saw a red spot, shaped like a fingerprint. Not a scab or blister or scar but a spot like a birthmark, deep red like blood. Over the next few days it faded, and finally disappeared; but I can still feel it there sometimes even now, a sort of dull ache that gets worse when it’s cold outside, or snowing.

That same month, Thomas Tierney returned to Paswegas County. He was probably the most famous person in this whole state, after Stephen King, but everyone up here loves Stephen King and I never heard anyone say anything good about Thomas Tierney except after he disappeared, and then the only thing people said was good riddance to bad rubbish. Even my mom, who gets mad if you say something bad about anyone, even if they hit you first, never liked Thomas Tierney.

“He’s one of those people who thinks they can buy anything. And if he can’t buy it, he ruins it for everyone else.”

Though the truth was there wasn’t much that he wasn’t able to buy, especially in Paswegas. People here don’t have a lot of money. They had more after Tierney’s telemarketing company moved into the state and put up its telephone centers everywhere, even one not too far from Shaker Harbor, which is pretty much the end of nowhere. Then people who used to work as fishermen or farmers or teachers or nurses, but who couldn’t make a living at it anymore, started working for International Corporate Enterprises. ICE didn’t pay a lot, but I guess it paid okay, if you didn’t mind sitting in a tiny cubicle and calling strangers on the phone when they were in the middle of dinner and annoying them so they swore at you or just hung up.

Once when she heard me and Cody ranking on people who worked at ICE, my mom took us aside and told us we had to be careful what we said, because even if we hated the company it gave people jobs and that was nothing to sneeze about. Of course a lot of those people who worked for ICE ended up not being able to afford to live here anymore, because Tierney gave all his friends from away the expensive jobs, and then they bought land here, which used to be cheap, and built these big fancy houses. So now normal people can’t afford to live here, unless they were lucky enough to already own a house or land, like my mom and Winter.

But then Tierney got caught doing something bad, sneaking money from his company or something, and ICE got bought by a bigger company, and they shut down all their operations in Maine, and all the people who worked there got thrown out of work and a lot of them who did own their own houses or land got them taken away because they couldn’t afford to pay their bills anymore. Then people really hated Thomas Tierney; but it didn’t do any good, because he never even got in trouble for what he did, I mean he didn’t go to jail or anything, and he didn’t lose his money or his house down in Kennebunkport or his yacht or his private airplane.

As a matter of fact, the opposite happened: he bought the land next to Winter’s. Winter dropped by the day he found out about it.

“That sumbitch bought old Lonnie Packard’s farm!” he yelled.

Me and Cody looked at each other and sort of smirked, but we didn’t say anything. I could tell Cody wanted to laugh, like I did—who the hell actually says “sumbitch?”—but at the same time it was scary, because we’d never seen Winter get mad before.

“I can’t blame Lonnie,” Winter went on, shifting from one foot to the other and tugging at his cap. “He had to sell his lobsterboat last year cause he couldn’t pay his taxes, and then he had that accident and couldn’t pay the hospital. And it’s a salt farm right there on the ocean, so he never got much out of it except the view.”

Cody asked, “Why didn’t he sell it to you?”

Winter whacked his palm against the wall. “That’s what I said! I told Lonnie long time ago, ever he wanted to sell that land I’d take it. But yesterday he told me, “Winter, your pockets just ain’t that deep.” I said, “Well Lonnie, how deep is deep?” And he pointed out there at the Atlantic Ocean and said, “You see that? You go out to the Grand Banks and find the deepest part, and I’m telling you it ain’t deep as Thomas Tierney’s pockets.””

So that was that. Tell you the truth, I didn’t give much thought to it. Where we snowboarded in the woods was safely on Winter’s property, I knew that; besides which it was late spring now, and me and Cody were busy working on that half-pipe behind Winter’s house and, once it was done, skating on it.

Sometimes Winter’s wife would come out and watch us. Winter had made her a bench from a hunk of oak, laid slats across it and carved her name on the seat, VALA with carved leaves and vines coming out of the letters. The bench was set up on a little rise, so that you could look out across the tops of the trees and just catch a glimpse of the ocean, silver-blue above the green. Vala was so tiny she looked like another kid sitting there, watching us and laughing when we fell, though never in a mean way. Her laugh was like her eyes: there was a kind of coldness to it, but it wasn’t nasty, more like she had never seen anyone fall before and every time it happened (which was a lot) it was a surprise to her. Even though it was warmer now, she always wore that same blue windbreaker, and over it a sweatshirt that I recognized as one of Winter’s, so big it was like a saggy dress. It could get wicked hot out there at the edge of the woods, but I never saw her take that sweatshirt off.

“Aren’t you hot?” I asked her once. She’d brought some water for us and some cookies she’d made, gingersnaps that were thin and brittle as ice and so spicy they made your eyes sting.

“Hot?” She shook her head. “I never get warm. Except with Winter.” She smiled then, one of her spooky smiles that always made me nervous. “I tell him it’s the only time winter is ever warm, when he is lying beside me.”

I felt my face turn red. On my chin, the spot where she had touched me throbbed as though someone had shoved a burning cigarette against my skin. Vala’s smile grew wider, her eyes too. She began to laugh.

“You’re still a boy.” For a moment she sounded almost like my mother. “Good boys, you and your friend. You will grow up to be good men. Not like this man Tierney, who thinks he can own the sea by buying salt. There is nothing more dangerous than a man who thinks he has power.” She lifted her head to gaze into the trees, then turned to stare at me. “Except for one thing.”

But she didn’t say what that was.

I had always heard a lot about Thomas Tierney, and even though I had never seen him, there were signs of him everywhere around Shaker Harbor. The addition to the library; the addition to the school; the big old disused mill—renamed the ICE Mill—that he bought and filled with a thousand tiny cubicles, each with its own computer and its own telephone. The ICE Mill employed so many people that some of them drove two hours each way to work—there weren’t enough people around Shaker Harbor to fill it.

But now it was empty, with big FOR SALE signs on it. Winter said it would stay empty, too, because no one in Paswegas County could afford to buy it.

“And no one outside of Paswegas County would want to buy it,” he added. “Watch that doesn’t drip—”

I was helping Winter varnish a crib he’d made, of wood milled from an elm tree that had died of the blight. He wouldn’t say who it was for, even when I asked him outright, but I assumed it was a present for Vala. She didn’t look pregnant, and I was still a little fuzzy about the precise details of what exactly might make her pregnant, in spite of some stuff me and Cody checked out online one night. But there didn’t seem much point in making a trip to Iceland to get a wife if you weren’t going to have kids. That’s what Cody’s dad said, anyway, and he should know since Cody has five brothers and twin sisters.

“I think they should make the mill into an indoor skate park,” I said, touching up part of the crib I’d missed. “That would be sweet.”

We were working outside, so I wouldn’t inhale varnish fumes, in the shadow of a tower of split logs that Winter sold as firewood. I had to be careful that sawdust didn’t get onto the newly varnished crib, or bugs.

Winter laughed. “Not much money in skate parks.”

“I’d pay.”

“That’s my point.” Winter shoved his cap back from his forehead. “Ready to break for lunch?”

Usually Winter made us sandwiches, Swiss cheese and tomato and horseradish sauce. Sometimes Vala would make us lunch, and then I’d lie and say I wasn’t hungry or had already eaten, since the sandwiches she made mostly had fish in them—not tuna fish, either—and were on these tiny little pieces of bread that tasted like cardboard.

But today Winter said we’d go into town and get something from Shelley’s Place, the hot dog stand down by the harbor. It was warm out, mid-August; school would start soon. I’d spent the summer hanging out with Cody and some of our friends, until the last few weeks when Cody had gone off to Bible camp.

That’s when Winter put me to work. Because along with the crib, Winter had started building a house—a real house, not an addition to the schoolbus. I helped him clear away brush, then helped build the forms for the foundation to be poured into. Once the concrete cured, we began framing the structure. Sometimes Vala helped, until Winter yelled at her to stop, anyway. Then she’d go off to tend the little garden she’d planted at the edge of the woods.

Now I didn’t know where Vala was. So I put aside the can of varnish and hopped into Winter’s pickup, and we drove into town. Most of the summer people had already left, but there were still a few sailboats in the harbor, including one gigantic yacht, the Ice Queen, a three-masted schooner that belonged to Thomas Tierney. According to Winter she had a crew of ten, not just a captain and mate and deckhands but a cook and housekeeper, all for Tierney; as well as a red-and-white striped mainsail, not that you’d ever have any trouble telling her apart from any of the other boats around here.

When he saw the Ice Queen, Winter scowled. But there was no other sign of Tierney, not that I could see. A few summer holdovers stood in line in front of Shelley’s little food stand, trying to act like they fit in with the locals, even though the only other people were contractors working on job sites.

And Lonnie Packard. He was at the very front of the line, paying for a hot dog with onions and sauerkraut wrapped in a paper towel. It was the first time I’d seen Lonnie since I’d heard about him selling his farm to Thomas Tierney, and from the look on Winter’s face, it was the first time he’d seen him, too. His mouth was twisted like he wasn’t sure if he was going to smile or spit something out, but then Lonnie turned and nodded at him.

“Winter,” he said. He pronounced it “Wintah” in this exaggerated way he had, like he was making fun of his own strong accent. “How’s it hanging?”

Winter poked at the bill of his cap and gave his head a small shake. “Not bad.” He looked at Lonnie’s hot dog, then flashed me a sideways grin. “Now that looks like lunch. Right, Justin?”

So that’s how I knew Winter wasn’t going to stay pissed about Lonnie selling his farm, which was kind of a relief.

But Lonnie didn’t look relieved. He looked uncomfortable, although Lonnie usually looked uncomfortable. He was a big rough-faced guy, not as tall as Winter but definitely plus-sized, with a bushy brown beard and baggy jeans tucked into high rubber fisherman’s boots, which kind of surprised me since I knew he’d had to sell his boat. Then I remembered all the money he must have gotten from Thomas Tierney; enough to buy another boat, probably. Enough to buy anything he wanted.

“Gotta run,” said Lonnie. “Got you an assistant there, eh, Winter?”

“Justin does good work,” said Winter, and moved up to the window to place our order. For a moment Lonnie stared at him like he was going to say something else, but Winter was already talking to Shelley.

Instead Lonnie glanced at me again. It was a funny look, not like he was going to speak to me, more like he was trying to figure something out. Lonnie’s not stupid, either. He puts on that heavy accent and acts like he’s never been south of Bangor, but my mother said he actually has a law degree and fishes just because he likes it better than being a lawyer, which I think I would, too. I waited to see if he was going to talk to me, but instead he turned and walked quickly to where a brand-new SUV was parked in one of the spots reserved for fishermen, got inside and drove off. I watched him go, then angled up beside Winter to get my food.

Shelley gave me a quick smile and went back to talking to Winter. “See you’re putting a house up by your place,” she said, and handed him a paper towel with two hot dogs on it, a container of fried clams for Winter, and two bottles of Moxie. Winter nodded but didn’t say anything, just passed her some money.

“Regular housing boom going on down there,” Shelley added, then looked past us to the next customer. “Can I help you?”

We drove back to Winter’s place and ate, sitting outside on a couple of lawn chairs and listening to woodpeckers in the pine grove. The air smelled nice, like sawdust and varnish and fried clams. When I was almost done, Vala stepped out of the schoolbus and walked over to me.

“Ertu búinn?” she said teasingly. “Are you finished? And you didn’t save any for me?”

I looked uncertainly at Winter, still chewing.

“Mmm mm,” he said, flapping his hand at me. “None for her! Nothing unhealthy!”

“Hmph.” Vala tossed her head, black ponytails flying. “Like I’d eat that—it’s nothing but grease.”

She watched disapprovingly as the last fried clam disappeared into Winter’s mouth, then looked at me. “Come here, Justin. I want to show you something.”

“Hey!” Winter called in mock alarm as Vala beckoned me towards the edge of the woods. “He’s on the clock!”

“Now he’s off,” retorted Vala, and stuck her tongue out. “Come on.”

Vala was strange. Sometimes she acted like my mother, grumpy about me forgetting to take my shoes off when I went into the schoolbus, or if me and Cody made too much noise. Other times, like now, she acted more like a girl my own age, teasing and unpredictable.

The way she looked changed, too. I don’t mean her clothes—she pretty much wore the same thing all the time—but the way that sometimes she would look old, like my mom does, and other times she’d look the same age as me and my friends. Which creeped me out, especially if it was one of those times when she was acting young, too.

Fortunately, right now she was acting young but looking older, like someone who would be married to Winter. For one thing, she was wearing his clothes, a pair of jeans way too big for her and cuffed up so much you couldn’t even see her shoes, and that baggy sweatshirt, despite it being so hot.

“I said come,” she repeated, and whacked me on the shoulder.

I stood hastily and followed her, wondering if everyone in Iceland was like this, or if it was just Vala.

Under the trees everything was green and gold and warm; not hot like out in the full sun, but not cool, either. It made me sweat, and my sweat and the dim light made the mosquitoes come out, lots of them, though they never seemed to bother Vala, and after a few minutes I ignored them and (mostly) forgot about them. The ground was soft and smelled like worms, a good smell that made me think of fishing, and now and then we’d go by a kind of tree that smelled so good I’d stop for a second, a tree that Winter calls Balm of Gilead, because its buds smell like incense.

Winter owned a lot of land, more than a hundred acres. Some of it he cut for firewood or lumber, but not this part. This part he left wild, because it joined up with Lonnie’s land—Thomas Tierney’s land, now—and because it was old-growth forest. People think that all the woods in Maine are wild and old, but most of it isn’t much older than what you’d find someplace like New Jersey—the trees were cut hundreds or maybe a thousand years ago by the Passamaquoddy or other Indians, and when those trees grew back they were cut by Vikings, and when those trees grew back they were cut by the English and the French and everyone else, all the way up till now.

So there’s actually not a lot of true virgin forest, even if the trees look ancient, like what you see in a movie when they want you to think it’s someplace totally wild, when it’s really, like, trees that are maybe forty or fifty years old. Baby trees.

But these trees weren’t like that. These were old trees—wolf trees, some of them, the kind of trees that Winter usually cuts down. A wolf tree is a big crooked tree with a huge canopy that hogs all the light and soil and crowds out the other trees. Wolf trees are junk trees, because they’re crooked and spread out so much they’re not much good for lumber, and they overwhelm other, smaller trees and keep them from growing up tall and straight so they can be harvested.

When I was little I’d go with Winter into the woods to watch him work, and I was always afraid of the wolf trees. Not because there was anything scary about them—they looked like ordinary trees, only big.

But I thought wolves lived in them. When I said that to Winter once, he laughed.

“I thought that too, when I was your age.” He was oiling his chainsaw, getting ready to limb a wolf tree, a red oak. Red oaks smell terrible when you cut them, the raw wood stinks—they smell like dog crap. “Want to know the real reason they call them that?”

I nodded, breathing through my mouth.

“It’s because a thousand years ago, in England and around there, they’d hang outlaws from a tree like this. Wolf’s-head trees, they called them, because the outlaws were like wolves, preying on weaker people.”

Where the wolf trees grew here, they had shaded out most other trees. Now and then I saw an old apple tree overgrown with wild grape vines, remnants of Lonnie’s family farm. Because even though this was old-growth forest, birds and animals don’t know that. They eat fruit from the farm then poop out the seeds—that’s how you get apple trees and stuff like that in the middle of the woods.

I was getting hot and tired of walking. Vala hadn’t said anything since we started, hadn’t even looked back at me, and I wondered if she’d forgotten I was even there. My mother said pregnancy makes women spacey, more than usual even. I was trying to think of an excuse to turn back, when she stopped.

“Here,” she said.

We’d reached a hollow on the hillside above the farm. I could just make out the farmhouse and barn and outbuildings, some apple trees and the overgrown field that led down to the ocean. There was no real beach there, just lots of big granite rocks, also a long metal dock that I didn’t remember having seen before.

It was still a pretty spot, tucked into the woods. A few yards from the farmhouse, more trees marched down to a cliff above the rocky beach. Small trees, all twisted from the wind: except for three huge white pines, each a hundred feet tall.

Winter called these the King’s Pines, and they were gigantic.

“These trees are ancient,” he’d told me, pointing up at one. “See anything up there?”

I squinted. I knew bald eagles nested near the ocean, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a nest. I shook my head.

Winter put his hand on my shoulder and twisted me till I was staring almost straight up. “There, on the trunk—see where the bark’s been notched?”

I saw it then, three marks of an axe in the shape of an arrow.

“That’s the King’s Mark,” said Winter. “Probably dating back to about 1690. That means these were the King’s Trees, to be used for masts in the King’s naval fleet. See how high up that mark is? That’s how old these trees are. Over three hundred years ago, this was a big tree. And it was probably at least three hundred years old then.”

Now, with Vala, I could see the King’s Pines jutting out above the other trees, like the masts of a schooner rising from a green sea. I figured that’s what Vala was going to show me, and so I got ready to be polite and act like I already didn’t know about them.

Instead she touched my arm and pointed just a few feet away, towards a clearing where trees had grown around part of the pasture.

“Whoa,” I whispered.

In the middle of the clearing was a bush. A big bush, a quince, its long thin branches covered with green leaves and small red flowers—brilliant red, the color of Valentines, and so bright after the dim woods that I had to blink.

And then, after blinking, I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes; because the bush seemed to be moving. Not moving in the wind—there wasn’t any wind—but moving like it was breaking apart then coming back together again, the leaves lifting away from the branches and flickering into the air, going from dark-green to shining green like metallic paint, and here and there a flash of red like a flower had spun off, too.

But what was even more bizarre was that the bush made a noise. It was buzzing, not like bees but like a chainsaw or weed whacker, a high-pitched sound that got louder then softer than louder again. I rubbed my eyes and squinted into the overgrown field, thinking maybe Thomas Tierney had hired someone to clean up and that’s what I was hearing.

There was no one there, just tall grass and apple trees and rocks, and beyond that the cliff and open sea.

“Do you see what they are?”

Vala’s voice was so close to my ear that I jumped; then felt my skin prickle with goosebumps at her breath, cold as though a freezer door had opened. I shook my head and she touched my sleeve, her hand cold through the cloth, and led me into the clearing, until the bush rose above us like a red cloud.

“See?” she murmured.

The bush was full of hummingbirds—hundreds of them, darting in and out as though the bush were a city, and the spaces between the leaves streets and alleys. Some hovered above the flowers to feed, though most flew almost too fast to see. Some sat on the branches, perfectly still, and that was the weirdest thing of all, like seeing a raindrop hanging in the air.

But they didn’t stay still; just perched long enough that I could get a look at one, its green wings and the spot of red on its throat, so deep a red it was like someone had crushed its tiny body by holding it too hard. I thought maybe I could hold it too, or touch it, anyway.

So I tried. I stood with my palm open and held my breath and didn’t move. Hummingbirds whizzed around like I was part of the quince, but they didn’t land on me.

I glanced at Vala. She was doing the same thing I was, this amazed smile on her face, holding both arms out in front of her so she reminded me of Winter when he was dowsing. The hummingbirds buzzed around her, too, but didn’t stop. Maybe if one of us had been wearing red. Hummingbirds like red.

Vala wasn’t wearing red, just Winter’s grubby old gray sweatshirt and jeans. But she looked strange standing there, eerie even, and for a second I had this weird feeling that I wasn’t seeing Vala at all, that she had disappeared and I was standing next to a big gray rock.

The feeling was so strong that it creeped me out. I opened my mouth, I was going to suggest that we head back to Winter’s house, when a hummingbird flickered right in front of Vala’s face. Right in front of Vala’s eye.

“Hey!” I yelled; and at the same instant Vala shouted, a deep grunting noise that had a word in it, but not an English word. Her hand flashed in front of her face, there was a greenish blur and the bird was gone.

“Are you okay?” I said. I thought the hummingbird’s sharp beak had stabbed her eye. “Did it—?”

Vala brought her hands to her face and gasped, blinking quickly. “I’m sorry! It frightened me—so close, I was surprised—”

Her hands dropped. She gazed at the ground by her feet. “Oh no.”

Near the toe of one rubber shoe, the hummingbird lay motionless, like a tiny bright green leaf.

“Oh, I am sorry, Justin!” cried Vala. “I only wanted you to see the tree with all the birds. But it scared me—”

I crouched to look at the dead hummingbird. Vala gazed back into the woods.

“We should go,” she said. She sounded unhappy, even nervous. “Winter will think we got lost and get mad at me for taking you away. You need to work,” she added, and gave me tight smile. “Come on.”

She walked away. I stayed where I was. After a moment I picked up a stick and tentatively prodded at the dead bird. It didn’t move.

It was on its back and it looked sadder that way. I wanted to turn it over. I poked it again, harder.

It still didn’t budge.

Cody doesn’t mind touching dead things. I do. But the hummingbird was so small, only as long as my finger. And it was beautiful, with its black beak and the red spot at its throat and those tiny feathers, more like scales. So I picked it up.

“Holy crap,” I whispered.

It was heavy. Not heavy like maybe a bigger bird would have been, a sparrow or chickadee, but heavy, like a rock. Not even a rock—it reminded me of one of those weights you see hanging from an old clock, those metal things shaped like pine cones or acorns, but when you touch them they feel heavy as a bowling ball, only much smaller.

The hummingbird was like that—so little I could cradle it in my cupped palm, and already cold. I guessed that rigor mortis had set in, the way it does when you hang a deer. Very gently I touched the bird’s wing. I even tried to wiggle it, but the wing didn’t move.

So I dropped the bird into my cupped palm and turned it onto its stomach. Its tiny legs were folded up like a fly’s, its eyes dull. Its body didn’t feel soft, like feathers. It felt hard, solid as granite; and cold.

But it looked exactly like a live hummingbird, emerald green where the sun hit it, beak slightly curved; a band of white under the red throat. I ran my finger along its beak, then swore.

“What the frig?”

A bright red bead welled up where the dead bird’s beak had punctured my skin, sharp as a nail.

I sucked my finger, quickly looked to make sure Vala hadn’t seen me. I could just make her out in the distance, moving through the trees. I felt in my pocket till I found a wadded-up Kleenex, wrapped the hummingbird in it and very carefully put it into my pocket. Then I hurried after Vala.

We walked back in silence. Only when the skeletal frame of the new house showed brightly through the trees did Vala turn to me.

“You saw the bird?” she asked.

I looked at her uneasily. I was afraid to lie, but even more afraid of what she might do if she knew what was in my pocket.

Before I could reply, she reached to touch the spot on my chin. I felt a flash of aching cold as she stared at me, her dark eyes somber but not unkind.

“I did not mean to hurt it,” she said quietly. “I have never seen a bird like that one, not so close. I was scared. Not scared—startled. My reaction was too fast,” she went on, and her voice was sad. Then she smiled, and glanced down at my jeans pocket.

“You took it,” she said.

I turned away, and Vala laughed. In front of the house, Winter looked up from a pile of two-by-sixes.

“Get your butt over here, Justin!” he yelled. “Woman, don’t you go distracting him!”

Vala stuck her tongue out again, then turned back to me. “He knows,” she said matter-of-factly. “But maybe you don’t tell your friend? Or your mother.”

And she walked over to kiss Winter’s sunburned cheek.

I muttered, “Yeah, sure;” then crossed to where I’d left the varnish. Vala stood beside her husband and sighed as she stared at the cloudless sky and the green canopy of trees stretching down to the Bay. A few boats under sail moved slowly across the blue water. One was a three-masted schooner with a red-striped mainsail: Thomas Tierney’s yacht.

“So Vala,” said Winter. He winked at his wife. “You tell Justin your news yet?”

She smiled. “Not yet.” She pulled up the sweatshirt so I could see her stomach sticking out. “Here—”

She beckoned me over, took my hand and placed it on her stomach. Despite the heat, her hand was icy cold. So was her stomach; but I felt a sudden heat beneath my palm, and then a series of small thumps from inside her belly. I looked at her in surprise.

“It’s the baby!”

“Eg veit,” she said, and laughed. “I know.”

“Now don’t go scaring him off, talking about babies,” said Winter. He put his arm around his wife. “I need him to help me finish this damn house before it snows.”

I went back to varnishing. The truth is, I was glad to have something to do, so I wouldn’t think about what had happened. When I got home that evening I put the hummingbird in a drawer, wrapped in an old t-shirt. For a while I’d look at it every night, after my mother came in to give me a kiss; but after a week or so I almost forgot it was there.

A few days later Cody got back from Bible Camp. It was September now. Labor Day had come and gone, and most of the summer people. School started up. Me and Cody were in eighth grade, we were pretty sick of being with the same people since kindergarten, but it was okay. Some days we skated over at Winter’s place after school. It was getting crowded there with the piles of split firewood and all the stacks of lumber for the new house, and sometimes Winter yelled at us for getting in the way.

But mostly everything was like it usually was, except that Vala was getting more pregnant and everyone was starting to think about winter coming down.

You might not believe that people really worry about snow all the time, but here they do. My mother had already gotten her firewood from Winter back in August, and so had most of his other regular customers. Day by day, the big stacks of split wood dwindled, as Winter hauled them off for delivery.

And day by day the new house got bigger, so that soon it looked less like a kid’s drawing of a stick house and more like a fairy tale cottage come to life, with a steep roof and lots of windows, some of them square and some of them round, like portholes, and scallop-shaped shingles stained the color of cranberries. I helped with that part, and inside, too, which was great.

Because inside—inside was amazing. Winter did incredible things with wood, everyone knew that. But until now, I had only seen the things he made for money, like furniture, or things he made to be useful, like the cabinets he’d done for my mother.

Now I saw what Winter did for himself and Vala. And if the outside of the little house looked like a fairy tale, the inside looked like something from a dream.

Winter usually carved from pine, which is a very soft wood. But he’d used oak for the beams, and covered them with faces—wind-faces with their mouths open to blow, foxes and wolves grinning from the corners, dragons and people I didn’t recognize but who Vala said were spirits from Iceland.

“Huldufolk,” she said when I asked about them. “The hidden people.”

But they weren’t hidden here. They were carved on the main beam that went across the living room ceiling, and on the oak posts in each corner, peeking out from carved leaves and vines and branches that made the posts look almost like real trees. There were huldufolk carved into the cupboards, and on benches and cabinets and bookshelves, and even on the headboard that Winter had made from a single slab of chestnut, so highly polished with beeswax that the entire bedroom smelled like honey.

So even though the house looked small from the outside, when you got inside you could get lost, wandering around and looking at all the wonderful carven things. Not just carved so the wood resembled something new, but so that you could see what was inside the wood, knots and whorls turned to eyes and mouths, the grain sanded and stained till it felt soft, the way skin might feel if it grew strong enough to support walls and ceilings and joists, while still managing to remain, somehow, skin, and alive.

It was the most amazing house I’ve ever seen. And maybe the most amazing thing wasn’t that it made me want to live in it, but that after spending hours working on it, I began to feel that the house lived in me, the way the baby lived inside Vala.

Only of course I could never tell anyone that, especially Cody. He would think I’d gone nuts from inhaling varnish fumes—even though I wore a dust mask, like Vala wore a fancy ventilating mask that made her look like Darth Vader.

She was working inside, too, building a stone fireplace. She found rocks in the woods and brought them up in a wheelbarrow. Big rocks, too, I was amazed she could lift them.

“Don’t tell Winter,” she whispered to me when I found her once, hefting a huge chunk of granite from the edge of the woods. “He’ll just worry, and yell at me. And then I will yell at you,” she added, and narrowed her spooky blue-black eyes.

Once the rocks were all piled inside she took forever, deciding which one would go where in the fireplace. When I made a joke about it she frowned.

“You do not want to make rocks angry, Justin.” She wasn’t kidding, either. She looked pissed off. “Because rocks have a very, very long memory.”

It was early morning, just after seven on a Saturday. My mom had dropped me off at Winter’s place on her way to see a client. It was a beautiful day, Indian summer, the leaves just starting to turn. I could see two sailboats on the water, heading south for the winter. I would rather have been skating with Cody, but Winter was anxious to get the inside of his house finished before it got too cold, so I said I’d come over and help trim up some windows.

Winter was outside. Vala, after yelling at me about the rocks, had gone up to the bedroom to get something. I yawned, wishing I’d brought my iPod, when upstairs Vala screamed.

I froze. It was a terrifying sound, not high-pitched like a woman’s voice but deep and booming. And it went on and on, without her taking a breath. I started for the steps as Winter raced in. He knocked me aside and took the stairs two at a time.

“Vala!”

I ran upstairs after him, through the empty hall and into the bedroom. Vala stood in front of the window, clutching her face as she gazed outside. Winter grabbed her shoulders.

“Is it the baby?” he cried. He tried to pull her towards him, but she shook her head, then pushed him away so violently that he crashed against the wall.

“What is it?” I ran to the window. Vala fell silent as I looked out across the yellowing canopy of leaves.

“Oh no.” I stared in disbelief at the cliff above the Bay. “The King’s Pines—”

I rubbed my eyes, hardly aware of Winter pushing me aside so he could stare out.

“No!” he roared.

One of the three great trees was gone—the biggest one, the one that stood nearest to the cliff-edge. A blue gap showed where it had been, a chunk of sky that made me feel sick and dizzy. It was like lifting my own hand to find a finger missing. My chin throbbed and I turned, so the others wouldn’t see me crying.

Winter pounded the windowsill. His face was dead white, his eyes so red they looked like they’d been smeared with paint. That frightened me more than anything, until I looked up and saw Vala.

She had backed against the wall—an unfinished wall, just gray sheetrock, blotched where the seams had been coated with putty. Her face had paled, too; but it wasn’t white.

It was gray. Not a living gray, like hair or fur, but a dull mottled color, the gray of dead bark or granite.

And not just her face but her hands and arms: everything I could see of her that had been skin, now seemed cold and dead as the heap of fireplace rocks downstairs. Her clothes drooped as though tossed on a boulder, her hair stiffened like strands of reindeer moss. Even her eyes dulled to black smears, save for a pinpoint of light in each, as though a drop of water had been caught in the hollow of a stone.

“Vala.” Winter came up beside me. His voice shook, but it was low and calm, as though he were trying to keep a frightened dog from bolting. “Vala, it’s all right—”

He reached to stroke the slab of gray stone wedged against the wall, reindeer moss tangling between his fingers; then let his hand drop to move across a rounded outcropping.

“Think of the baby,” he whispered. “Think of the girl  . . . ”

The threads of reindeer moss trembled, the twin droplets welled and spilled from granite to the floor; and it was Vala there and not a stone at all, Vala falling into her husband’s arms and weeping uncontrollably.

“It’s not all right—it’s not all right—”

He held her, stroking her head as I finally got the nerve up to speak.

“Was it—was it a storm?”

“A storm?” Abruptly Winter pulled away from Vala. His face darkened to the color of mahogany. “No, it’s not a storm—”

He reached for the window and yanked it open. From the direction of the cliff came the familiar drone of a chainsaw.

“It’s Tierney!” shouted Winter. He turned and raced into the hall. Vala ran after him, and I ran after her.

“No—you say here!” Winter stopped at the top of the stairs. “Justin, you wait right here with her—”

“No,” I said. I glanced nervously at Vala, but to my surprise she nodded.

“No,” she said. “I’m going, and Justin too.”

Winter sucked his breath through his teeth.

“Suit yourself,” he said curtly. “But I’m not waiting for you. And listen—you stay with her, Justin, you understand me?”

“I will,” I said, but he was already gone.

Vala and I looked at each other. Her eyes were paler than I remembered, the same dull gray as the sheetrock; but as I stared at her they grew darker, as though someone had dropped blue ink into a glass of water.

“Come,” she said. She touched my shoulder, then headed out the door after her husband. I followed.

All I wanted to do was run and catch up with Winter. I could have, too—over the summer I’d gotten taller, and I was now a few inches bigger than Vala.

But I remembered the way Winter had said You stay with her, Justin, you understand me? And the way he’d looked, as though I were a stranger and he’d knock me over, or worse, if I disobeyed him. It scared me and made me feel sick, almost as sick as seeing the King’s Pine chopped down; but I had no time to think about that now. I could still hear the chainsaw buzzing from down the hill, a terrible sound, like when you hear a truck brake but you know it’s not going to stop in time. I walked as fast as I dared, Vala just a few steps behind me. When I heard her breathing hard I’d stop, and try to keep sight of Winter far ahead of us.

But after a few minutes I gave up on that. He was out of sight, and I could only hope he’d get down to the cliff and stop whoever was doing the cutting, before another tree fell.

“Listen,” said Vala, and grabbed my sleeve. I thought the chainsaw was still running, but then I realized it was just an echo. Because the air grew silent, and Vala had somehow sensed this before I did. I looked at her and she stared back at me, her eyes huge and round and sky-blue, a color I’d never seen them before.

“There is still time,” she whispered. She made a strange deep noise in the back of her throat, a growl but not an animal growl; more like the sound of thunder, or rocks falling. “Hurry—”

We crashed through the woods, no longer bothering to stay on the path. We passed the quince bush shimmering through its green haze of feeding hummingbirds. Vala didn’t pause but I slowed down to look back, then stopped.

A vehicle was parked by the farmhouse, the same new SUV I’d seen that day down at Shelley’s hot dog stand: Lonnie Packard’s truck. As I stared, a burly figure came hurrying through the field, the familiar orange silhouette of a chainsaw tucked under his arm. He jumped into the SUV, gunned the engine and drove off.

I swore under my breath.

“Justin!” Vala’s anxious voice came from somewhere in the woods. “Come on!”

I found her at the head of the trail near the cliff. Through a broken wall of scrawny, wind-twisted trees I could just make out the two remaining pines, and the bright yellow gash that was the stump of the one that had fallen. The sharp scent of pine resin and sawdust hung in the air, and the smell of exhaust fumes from the chainsaw.

But there was no other sign of Lonnie, obviously, or of anyone else.

“Look,” said Vala in a hoarse whisper. She clutched me and pulled me towards her, her touch so cold it was like I’d been shot up with novocaine. My entire arm went numb. “There! The boat—”

She pointed down to the boulder-strewn beach where the dock thrust into the bay. At the end of the dock bobbed a small motorboat, a Boston Whaler. Further out, the hulking form of the Ice Queen rose above the gray water, sails furled.

She was at anchor. Several small forms moved across the deck. I squinted, trying to see if I recognized any of them. A frigid spasm shot through my ribs as Vala nudged me, indicating the rocks below.

“Is that him?” she hissed. “This man Tierney?”

I saw Winter loping across the beach towards the dock, jumping from one boulder to the next. On the shore, right next to the end of the dock, stood two men. One was tall, wearing an orange life vest and a blaze-orange watch cap and high rubber boots. The other was shorter, white-haired, slightly heavy-set, wearing sunglasses and a red-and-white windbreaker, striped like the Ice Queen’s sails.

“That’s him,” I said.

Vala fixed her intense sky-blue gaze on me. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen his picture in the newspaper. And online.”

She stood at the top of the trail and stared down. An angry voice rose from the rocks—Winter’s—then another voice joined in, calmer, and a third, calm at first then laughing. I heard Winter curse, words I couldn’t believe he knew. The third man, Tierney, laughed even harder.

I glanced at Vala, still staring at what was below us. One of her hands grasped the branch of a birch tree beside the path. She seemed to be thinking; almost she might have been daydreaming, she looked so peaceful, like somehow she’d forgotten where she was and what was happening. Finally she shook her head. Without looking back at me, she snapped the branch from the tree, dropped it, and started down the trail towards the beach.

I started after her, then hesitated.

The branch lay across the narrow path at my feet. Where Vala had touched them, the leaves had shriveled and faded, from yellow-green to the dull gray of lichen, and the white birch bark had blackened into tight charred-looking curls.

I tried to lift the branch. It was too heavy to move.

“It’s my land now.” Thomas Tierney’s voice echoed from the cliff-face. “So I suggest you get the hell off it!”

I looked down to see Vala’s small form at the bottom of the trail, hopping lightly from one boulder to the next as she headed for the dock. I scrambled down the path after her.

But I couldn’t go as fast. For some reason, maybe because first Winter and then Vala had raced down before me, rocks had tumbled across the narrow trail. Not big rocks, but enough of them that I had to pick my way carefully to keep from falling.

Not only that: in spots a white slick of frost covered the ground, so that my feet slipped and once I almost fell and cracked my head. I stopped for a minute, panting. As I caught my breath I looked away from the beach, to where the cliff plunged into a deep crevice in the granite.

There, caught in the gigantic crack so that it looked as though it had grown up from the rocks, was the fallen pine. It tilted over the water, black in the shadow of the cliff, its great branches still green and strong-looking, the smell of pine sap overpowering the smell of the sea. In its uppermost branches something moved, then lifted from the tree and flew out above the bay—a bald eagle, still mottled brown and black with its young plumage.

I couldn’t help it. I began to cry. Because no matter how strong and alive the tree looked, I knew it was dead. Nothing would bring it back again. It had been green when no one lived here but the Passamaquoddy, it had seen sailors come from far across the sea, and tourists in boats from Paswegas Harbor, and maybe it had even seen the Ice Queen earlier that morning with her red-and-white striped mainsail and Thomas Tierney on the deck, watching as Lonnie Packard took a chainsaw to its great trunk and the tree finally fell, a crash that I hadn’t heard.

But Vala had.

You stay with her, Justin, you understand me?

I took a deep breath and wiped my eyes, checked to make sure I could still see Vala on the rocks below, then continued my climb down. When I finally reached the bottom I still had to be careful—there were tidal pools everywhere between the granite boulders, some of them skimmed with ice and all of them greasy with kelp and sea lettuce. I hurried as fast as I could towards the dock.

“You don’t own those trees.” Winter’s voice rang out so loudly that my ears hurt. “Those are the King’s Pines—no man owns them.”

“Well, I own this land,” retorted Tierney. “And if that doesn’t make me the goddamn king, I don’t know what does.”

I clambered over the last stretch of rocks and ran up alongside Vala. Winter stood a few yards away from us, towering above Thomas Tierney. The other man stood uneasily at the edge of the dock. I recognized him—Al Alford, who used to work as first mate on one of the daysailers in Paswegas Harbor. Now, I guessed, he worked for Tierney.

“King?” Vala repeated. “Hann er klikkapor.” She looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “He’s nuts.”

Maybe it was her saying that, or maybe it was me being pissed at myself for crying. But I took a step out towards Tierney and shouted at him.

“It’s against the law to cut those trees! It’s against the law to do any cutting here without a permit!”

Tierney turned to stare at me. For the first time he looked taken aback, maybe even embarrassed or ashamed. Not by what he’d done, I knew that; but because someone else—a kid—knew he’d done it.

“Who’s this?” His voice took on that fake nice tone adults use when they’re caught doing something, like smoke or drink or fight with their wives. “This your son, Winter?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” said Vala, and under her breath said the word she’d used when I first met her: feogar.

But Winter didn’t say anything, and Tierney had already turned away.

“Against the law?” He pulled at the front of his red-and-white windbreaker, then shrugged. “I’ll pay the fine. No one goes to jail for cutting down trees.”

Tierney smiled then, as though he was thinking of a joke no one else would ever get, and added, “Not me, anyway.”

He looked at Al Alford, and nodded. Al quickly turned and walked—ran, practically—to where the Boston Whaler rocked against the metal railing at the end of the dock. Tierney followed him, but slowly, pausing once to stare back up the hillside—not at the King’s Pines but at the farmhouse, its windows glinting in the sun where they faced the cliff. Then he walked to where Alford waited by the little motorboat, his hand out to help Tierney climb inside.

I looked at Winter. His face had gone slack, except for his mouth: he looked as though he were biting down on something hard.

“He’s going to cut the other ones, too,” he said. He didn’t sound disbelieving or sad or even angry; more like he was saying something everyone knew was true, like It’ll snow soon or Tomorrow’s Sunday. “He’ll pay the twenty thousand dollar fine, just like he did down in Kennebunkport, he’ll wait and do it in the middle of the night when I’m not here. And the trees will be gone.”

“No he will not,” said Vala. Her voice was nearly as calm as Winter’s. There was a subdued roar as the motorboat’s engine turned over, and the Boston Whaler shot away from the dock, towards the Ice Queen.

“No,” Vala said again, and she stooped and picked up a rock. A small gray rock, just big enough to fit inside her fist, one side of it encrusted with barnacles. She straightened and stared at the ocean, her eyes no longer sky-blue but the pure deep gray of a stone that’s been worn smooth by the sea, with no pupil in them; and shining like water in the sun.

“Skammastu peî, Thomas Tierney. Farthu til fjandanns!” she cried, and threw the rock towards the water. “Farthu! Låttu peog hverfa!”

I watched it fly through the air, then fall, hitting the beach a long way from the waterline with a small thud. I started to look at Vala, and stopped.

From the water came a grinding sound, a deafening noise like thunder; only this was louder than a thunderclap and didn’t last so long, just a fraction of a second. I turned and shaded my eyes, staring out to where the Boston Whaler arrowed towards Tierney’s yacht. A sudden gust of wind stung my eyes with spray; I blinked, then blinked again in amazement.

A few feet from the motorboat a black spike of stone shadowed the water. Not a big rock—it might have been a dolphin’s fin, or a shark’s, but it wasn’t moving.

And it hadn’t been there just seconds before. It had never been there, I knew that. I heard a muffled shout, then the frantic whine of the motorboat’s engine being revved too fast—and too late.

With a sickening crunch, the Boston Whaler ran onto the rock. Winter yelled in dismay as Alford’s orange-clad figure was thrown into the water. For a second Thomas Tierney remained upright, his arms flailing as he tried to grab at Alford. Then, as though a trap door opened beneath him, he dropped through the bottom of the boat and disappeared.

Winter raced towards the water. I ran after him.

“Stay with Vala!” Winter grabbed my arm. Alford’s orange life vest gleamed from on top of the rock where he clung. On board the Ice Queen, someone yelled through a megaphone, and I could see another craft, a little inflated Zodiac, drop into the gray water. Winter shook me fiercely. “Justin! I said, stay with her—”

He looked back towards the beach. So did I.

Vala was nowhere to be seen. Winter dropped my arm, but before he could say anything there was a motion among the rocks.

And there was Vala, coming into sight like gathering fog. Even from this distance I could see how her eyes glittered, blue-black like a winter sky; and I could tell she was smiling.

The crew of the Ice Queen rescued Alford quickly, long before the Coast Guard arrived. Winter and I stayed on the beach for several hours, while the search and rescue crews arrived and the Navy Falcons flew by overhead, in case Tierney came swimming to shore, or in case his body washed up.

But it never did. That spar of rock ripped a huge hole in the Boston Whaler, a bigger hole even than you’d think; but no one blamed Alford. All you had to do was take a look at the charts and see that there had never been a rock there, ever. Though it’s there now, I can tell you that. I see it every day when I look out from the windows at Winter’s house.

I never asked Vala about what happened. Winter had a grim expression when we finally went back to his place late that afternoon. Thomas Tierney was a multi-millionaire, remember, and even I knew there would be an investigation and interviews and TV people.

But everyone on board the Ice Queen had witnessed what happened, and so had Al Alford; and while they’d all seen Winter arguing with Tierney, there’d been no exchange of blows, not even any pushing, and no threats on Winter’s part—Alford testified to that. The King’s Pine was gone, but two remained; and a bunch of people from the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club and places like that immediately filed a lawsuit against Tierney’s estate, to have all the property on the old Packard Farm turned into a nature preserve.

Which I thought was good, but it still won’t bring the other tree back.

One day after school, a few weeks after the boat sank, I was helping to put the finishing touches on Winter’s house. Just about everything was done, except for the fireplace—there were still piles of rocks everywhere and plastic buckets full of mortar and flat stones for the hearth.

“Justin.” Vala appeared behind me, so suddenly I jumped. “Will you come with me, please?”

I stood and nodded. She looked really pregnant now, and serious.

But happy, too. In the next room we could hear Winter working with a sander. Vala looked at me and smiled, put a finger to her lips then touched her finger to my chin. This time, it didn’t ache with cold.

“Come,” she said.

Outside it was cold and gray, the middle of October but already most of the trees were bare, their leaves torn away by a storm a few nights earlier. We headed for the woods behind the house, past the quince bush, its branches stripped of leaves and all the hummingbirds long gone to warmer places. Vala wore her same bright blue rubber shoes and Winter’s rolled-up jeans.

But even his big sweatshirt was too small now to cover her belly, so my mother had knit her a nice big sweater and given her a warm plaid coat that made Vala look even more like a kid, except for her eyes and that way she would look at me sometimes and smile, as though we both knew a secret. I followed her to where the path snaked down to the beach, and tried not to glance over at the base of the cliff. The King’s Pine had finally fallen and wedged between the crack in the huge rocks there, so that now seaweed was tangled in its dead branches, and all the rocks were covered with yellow pine needles.

“Winter has to go into town for a few hours,” Vala said, as though answering a question. “I need you to help me with something.”

We reached the bottom of the path and picked our way across the rocks, until we reached the edge of the shore. A few gulls flew overhead, screaming, and the wind blew hard against my face and bare hands. I’d followed Vala outside without my coat. When I looked down, I saw that my fingers were bright red. But I didn’t feel cold at all.

“Here,” murmured Vala.

She walked, slowly, to where a gray rock protruded from the gravel beach. It was roughly the shape and size of an arm.

Then I drew up beside Vala, and saw that it really was an arm—part of one, anyway, made of smooth gray stone, like marble only darker, but with no hand and broken just above the elbow. Vala stood and looked at it, her lips pursed; then stooped to pick it up.

“Will you carry this, please?” she said.

I didn’t say anything, just held out my arms, as though she were going to fill them with firewood. When she set the stone down I flinched—not because it was heavy, though it was, but because it looked exactly like a real arm. I could even see where the veins had been, in the crook of the elbow, and the wrinkled skin where the arm had bent.

“Justin,” Vala said. I looked up to see her blue-black eyes fixed on me. “Come on. It will get dark soon.”

I followed her as she walked slowly along the beach, like someone looking for sea glass or sand dollars. Every few feet she would stop and pick something up—a hand, a foot, a long piece of stone that was most of a leg—then turn and set it carefully into my arms. When I couldn’t carry anymore, she picked up one last small rock—a clenched fist—and made her way slowly back to the trail.

We made several more trips that day, and for several days after that. Each time, we would return to the house and Vala would fit the stones into the unfinished fireplace, covering them with other rocks so that no one could see them. Or if you did see one, you’d think maybe it was just part of a broken statue, or a rock that happened to look like a foot, or a shoulder blade, or the cracked round back of a head.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask Vala about it. But I remembered how the Boston Whaler had looked when the Coast Guard dragged it onshore, with a small ragged gash in its bow, and a much, much bigger hole in the bottom, as though something huge and heavy had crashed through it. Like a meteor, maybe. Or a really big rock, or like if someone had dropped a granite statue of a man into the boat.

Not that anyone had seen that happen. I told myself that maybe it really was a statue—maybe a statue had fallen off a ship, or been pushed off a cliff or something.

But then one day we went down to the beach, the last day actually, and Vala made me wade into the shallow water. She pointed at something just below the surface, something round and white, like a deflated soccer ball.

Only it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was Thomas Tierney’s head: the front of it, anyway, the one part Vala hadn’t already found and built into the fireplace.

His face.

I pulled it from the water and stared at it. A green scum of algae covered his eyes, which were wide and staring. His mouth was open so you could see where his tongue had been before it broke off, leaving a jagged edge in the hole of his screaming mouth.

“Loksins,” said Vala. She took it from me easily, even though it was so heavy I could barely hold it. “At last . . . ”

She turned and walked back up to the house.

That was three months ago. Winter’s house is finished now, and Winter lives in it, along with Winter’s wife.

And their baby. The fireplace is done, and you can hardly see where there is a round broken stone at the very top, which if you squint and look at it in just the right light, like at night when only the fire is going, looks kind of like a face. Winter is happier than I’ve ever seen him, and my mom and I come over a lot, to visit him and Vala and the baby, who is just a few weeks old now and so cute you wouldn’t believe it, and tiny, so tiny I was afraid to hold her at first but Vala says not to worry—I may be like her big brother now but someday, when the baby grows up, she will be the one to always watch out for me. They named her Gerda, which means Protector; and for a baby she is incredibly strong.

First published in Wizards: Magical Tales From the Masters of Modern Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 2007.

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of thirteen award-winning novels and four collections of short fiction. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” have been compared to those of Patricia Highsmith. She is a longtime critic and book reviewer whose work appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, the Boston Review, among many others, and writes a regular column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her books and short fiction have been translated into numerous languages and optioned for film and television. She teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London, where she is working on the fourth Cass Neary novel, The Book of Lamps and Banners.

Silver Machine:
Hawkwind’s Space Rock Journey
throughout Science Fiction and Fantasy

Jason Heller

From Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds to Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, a handful of music albums have adapted entire works of science fiction/fantasy. This month, the long-running British space-rock band Hawkwind will do the same with the release of The Machine Stops—an album that musically interprets E. M. Forster’s dystopian novelette of the same name, published in 1909.

Although Forster was better known for his realistic, contemporaneous novels, most famously A Passage to India, the Nobel-nominated author imbued “The Machine Stops” with a prescience that rivals the most forward-thinking science fiction classics. In it, the post-apocalyptic civilization of the future has been driven underground; people interact virtually through electronic devices and rely on the omnipotent Machine for all their needs.

Not only does Forster’s screed against technocracy bear chilling parallels to the most pessimistic views of the Internet today, it’s perfect material for Hawkwind. Since forming in the London neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove in 1969—sparked in part by Pink Floyd’s spacey songs of the ’60s like “Astronomy Domine,” “Interstellar Overdrive,” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”—the cult outfit has been one of rock music’s foremost champions of SFF.

Their best-known song, 1972’s British Top-Ten single “Silver Machine,” turned hypnotic, brutally psychedelic riffs into a vessel for extraterrestrial exploration, one that “flies sideways through time”—part of a “shamanistic space ritual,” as Rob Young calls it in Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, a description that echoes the title of Hawkwind’s epochal 1973 album Space Ritual Live Alive in Liverpool and London.

As willfully primitive as Hawkwind sounded, they incorporated cutting-edge synthesizers, playing them with rudimentary gusto rather than trying to make them sound neoclassical like so many of their progressive rock peers, such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As Dave Brock—co-founder of Hawkwind and the band’s only consistent member throughout its existence—said in 1990, “I prefer to be a barbarian with the machines as it were, and just muck around.”

That mucking around with emerging technology produced some of the most visceral yet cerebral rock ‘n’ roll ever made—a volatile alchemy that influenced electronic music as well as punk and heavy metal. That the band’s bassist and occasional lead vocalist in the early ’70s was Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister—who would go on to front the legendary metal trio Motörhead before passing away in December of 2015—certainly didn’t hurt in that regard.

Hawkwind isn’t the first band to have paid musical tribute to Forster’s The Machine Stops: The British jazz-pop group Level 42 released a song in 1983 titled “The Machine Stops” whose lyrics are based on the story. And Hawkwind’s The Machine Stops isn’t the first time Brock and crew have devoted an entire record to the work of a single science fiction/fantasy author. The Chronicle of the Black Sword, released in 1985, draws from the Eternal Champion stories of Michael Moorcock, specifically the characters Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius, with Moorcock receiving a songwriting credit for his lyrics on the track “Sleep of a Thousand Tears.” Ten years prior, Hawkwind plumbed the same source for much of their 1975 album Warrior on the Edge of Time; Moorcock’s concepts and poetry are incorporated into four of the record’s songs, including the eerie spoken-word track “The Wizard Blew His Horn.”

It only made sense that Moorcock’s words and ideas wound up on Hawkwind records. The author was not only a fan of Hawkwind—first seeing them perform in the early ’70s with one of his New Worlds cohorts, the young M. John Harrison, in tow—he wound up playing with Hawkwind. Moorcock also lived in Ladbroke Grove, then a melting pot of rock’s underground subculture, and befriended Brock, Nik Turner, Robert Calvert, and the rest of Hawkwind. Before long, Moorcock was collaborating with the band, not only bringing lyrics to the band but joining them from time to time onstage.

The track “The Black Corridor” from Space Ritual—an eerie, spoken-word piece laden with echoes and cosmic doom—was adapted from Moorcock’s 1969 SF novel of the same name (a collaboration with his then-wife Hilary Bailey); on the same album, “Sonic Attack,” was an original set of Moorcock lyrics recited by Calvert through oscillating, disorienting effects. “Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,” Calvert warns, and he doesn’t sound like he’s joking.

Moorcock also formed his own group called Michael Moorcock & the Deep Fix, aided by various Hawkwind personnel (including Simon House, who would go on to play with rock’s most successful exponent of SFF music, David Bowie, not to mention contributing the memorable violin part to one of best SF-themed songs of the ’80s, Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science”). As Moorcock remembers in London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction, “I think it was Dave Brock who encouraged me to do a demo of two songs I’d written, ‘Dodgem Dude’ and ‘Starcruiser’”—which led directly to The Deep Fix getting a recording contract of their own.

The Deep Fix’s resulting album, 1975’s New Worlds Fair, was named after New Worlds, the revolutionary SFF magazine Moorcock edited; that year he played banjo on Calvert’s second solo album, Lucky Leif and the Longships. Moorcock went on to play guitar on Calvert’s next solo album, 1981’s Hype. Also in ’81, he wrote lyrics for four songs on Hawkwind’s album Sonic Attack, one of them a revamp of the Sonic Ritual track.

Calvert, Moorcock’s closest friend in Hawkwind, left the band in 1979, suffering from bipolar disorder, which impaired his ability to make music collectively. Moorcock’s association with Hawkwind effectively ended three years later with his lyrics for Choose Your Masques. The 1982 album also featured Calvert’s last set of lyrics for the group, leftover from 1978 and titled “Fahrenheit 451” (based on the canonical Ray Bradbury novel). Moorcock’s association with the band continued, including a memorable concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1985—a lavish stage reenactment of the Elric storyline from The Chronicle of the Black Sword—during which Moorcock himself appeared onstage. In Ian Abrahams’ Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins, Moorcock recounts, “I distributed a bunch of Elric books, throwing them into the audience, and was shocked when people tore them to bits trying to get to them!”

Hawkwind wasn’t the only rock band Moorcock wrote for. His lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult aren’t as numerous as his output for Hawkwind—but they do boast the BÖC song “Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars,” which appear in the animated SFF film Heavy Metal. That said, the song reuses a Moorcock line from one of Hawkwind’s earlier, Eternal Champion-themed tracks, “Standing at the Edge.”

As if returning the favor, the campy SF novel Time of the Hawklords—billed as co-written by Moorcock and Michael Butterworth—starred thinly veiled members of Hawkwind. Lemmy, for instance, appeared as Count Motorhead, while Nik Turner became The Thunder Rider. Moorcock even pops up as the tongue-in-cheek surrogate Moorlock the Acid Sorcerer.

Moorcock, however, disowned the book and denied having anything to do with its authorship, although it’s based on many of Moorcock’s concepts. (Two sequels, the prose novel Queens of Deliria and the graphic novel Ledge of Darkness, dispensed entirely with the notion of Moorcock’s involvement.) Still, Time of the Hawklords—not to mention Hawkwind’s cameo in the Jerry Cornelius novel A Cure for Cancer—completed a profound circuit: Inspired by Moorcock’s sprawling mythology, Hawkwind became characters in that mythology.

Moorcock isn’t the only SFF legend Hawkwind has relied on for inspiration. Roger Zelazny, among the handful of American authors who wrote for Moorcock’s New Worlds, became another of the band’s literary muses. Three of their songs—1972’s “Lord of Light,” 1977’s “Damnation Alley,” and 1979’s “Jack of Shadows,” all either written or co-written by Calvert—were based on Zelazny novels of the same names, reiterating such themes as post-apocalyptic horror, magic meets computers, and how posthumanity dovetails with theology.

“Time We Left This World Today” from 1972 references the brain police from George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four; “D-Rider” from 1974 mentions dragons and recalls Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern; 1979’s “High Rise” adapts J. G. Ballard’s horrific urban dystopia of the same name; “The War I Survived” from 1988 contains a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; “3 or 4 Erections in the Course of a Night” from 1993 takes its title from a line in the SF movie Dreamscape; and “Alien (I Am)” from 1995 boasts a sample of dialogue from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Mind’s Eye.” Another song from the same album (Alien 4) is more blatantly named “Beam Me Up.”

Hawkwind’s love for Star Trek is reciprocal. William Shatner covered “Silver Machine” on his 2011 album Seeking Major Tom, lending his authoritative bombast to the astro-psychedelic masterpiece; two years later, former Hawkwind member Nik Turner made a guest appearance on Shatner’s tribute to progressive rock, Ponder the Mystery. In an interview in 2013, Brock enthused about Shatner’s vocals on a new version of “Sonic Attack,” which was supposed to appear on Hawkwind’s 2013 album Spacehawks. The remake of the song that wound up on Spacehawks, however, did not feature Shatner, and his version of “Sonic Attack” has yet to be released. One can only hope.

Not that Hawkwind draws only on other creators’ work for their SFF music—they’ve always had a healthy speculative imagination of their own. The ominous countdown of 1973’s apocalyptic “Ten Seconds Forever” has, according to Abrahams in Sonic Assassins, “the unlikely accolade of being the science fiction ‘Twelve Days of Christmas.’” The 1979 song “Uncle Sam’s on Mars” indulges two of Hawkwind’s other passions—radical politics and dark humor.

The unsettlingly mechanical “Automaton,” released in 1978 under the pseudonym The Hawklords, is answered by Hawkwind’s 1979 song “Robot,” which cites Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The elaborate scenario of “The Age of the Micro Man,” also from ’79, involves a nightmare future where millions of workers are enslaved to an industrial elite who believe that the aliens who guide them are angels. Instead of being inspired by a science fiction story, the 1988 song “Heads”—about a group of disembodied heads preserved “in glass booths” and wired together to generate enormous powers—actually predates Greg Bear’s similarly themed novella Heads by three years.

One of Hawkwind’s most ambitious original concepts played out on their 1976 album Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music. The title and cover art pay homage to the magazines of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, specifically John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction and Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories; each track was intended to stand as its own short story, like an anthology in song.

On the eve of the new millennium, Hawkwind brought their career in SFF full circle with In Your Area’s live version of “Aerospace Age Inferno” a song that originally appeared on Calvert’s 1974 solo debut, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. A fever dream of intergalactic travel, it calls back to “Silver Machine” with the line “The silver machine is worth more than you’re worth.” It also winks at one of Hawkwind’s early inspirations, Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” with the gleefully sinister rejoinder “Set the controls for the heart of the Earth.”

For all of Hawkwind’s heady cosmic mysticism—their “decades-long interstellar mission to explore the occult mysteries of the cosmos,” says Peter Bebergal in Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll—they remain rooted in the SFF community. They’ve played at SFF cons—most notably Seacon ’84 in Brighton, England, at which the band’s beloved Roger Zelazny served as a guest of honor, and Worldcon 45 in 1987 at the same location. Said drummer Richard Chadwick in 1989, a year after he’d joined the group, “Every gig we did was like a science fiction convention.” Weathering numerous lineup changes, schisms, deaths, and even an internal lawsuit over ownership of the name, Hawkwind long ago solidified its position as one of the most reliable—yet thankfully unpredictable—practitioners of SFF music.

The band itself hasn’t always seen it that way. Soon after the release of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music in 1976, Turner told the New Musical Express, “You can’t say there is a stereotype of what Hawkwind music should be, that it should be space rock or it should be all about science fiction or magic and sorcery.” Only seven years into its existence, the group was already feeling the squeeze of being pigeonholed. Calvert even went so far as to say in a 1978 interview with the same magazine, “I don’t like SF that much. Nobody in this band is particularly an SF fanatic,” adding, “Most SF is trash, actually.”

Bearing in mind Calvert’s mental issues at the time—later that year, his clinical depression resulted in the cancellation of a Hawkwind tour and his subsequent exit from the group—he may have simply been bucking against the space-rock stereotype that he’d wholeheartedly helped cultivate. Just one year earlier, he proudly told the fanzine Sniffin’ Flowers that he considered Hawkwind to be “a science fiction band [ . . . ] in actual fact we are the only band that is doing that sort of thing”—an exaggerated claim, but the point stands; the same year he boasted in another fanzine, Album Tracking, “We even get letters from University people, in the States in particular, who have found parallels between science fiction and the literature of the past and who can fit Hawkwind into that scheme. I still think we’re closely aligned with that.”

Calvert died in 1988 of a heart attack, just shy of Hawkwind’s twentieth anniversary. This year the band turns forty-seven, and The Machine Stops is their thirtieth studio album, not counting scores of live albums, archival collections, EPs, singles, bootlegs, and releases by their many offshoot groups and solo projects—almost all of them with a finger in SFF. And with The Machine Stops, Hawkwind shows no signs of letting that association lapse—instead, they’re doubling down on it, releasing one of the most extravagantly faithful SFF albums in their long, storied career. Or as Moorcock so speculatively put it in Sonic Assassins, Hawkwind is “like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten their mission, which had turned to art during the passage of time.”

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.

Transparency and Transformation:
A Conversation with David Brin

Chris Urie

If there ever was an argument in favor of sci-fi influencing scientific advancement, the work of David Brin would surely be a cornerstone. From his novels and ambitious short fiction to his research into cometary studies, optics, and spacecraft design, David Brin is not only dreaming about the future, but, in some ways, helping to make it a reality.

His newest collection of short fiction, and a couple of essays, highlights a singular author’s acute talent at peering just over time’s horizon to pick out what is coming next. Insistence of Vision features some of Brin’s finest short stories. People fly like gods, have their DNA completely transformed, or send varying waves of ever faster satellites to explore the deepest parts of space, each probe moving faster than the last. It’s a collection that highlights the many facets of one of science fiction’s sharpest minds.

David Brin is a scientist and New York Times bestselling author. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell awards. He helped to create the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, serves on the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, and has consulted with groups ranging from the CIA to Google. David Brin’s third collection, Insistence of Vision, was released in March by Story Plant.

You’ve published numerous novels and continue to work in the short fiction realm. What is it about short fiction that keeps you writing in that form?

The shorter the story, the more it resembles poetry, in that your aim is to achieve emotional power. The words in a short work are sonic, they combine as musical notes do. Whether the seed is a character, a problem-to-solve or an idea, there’s no room to spare for fluff or elaboration. The seed must crystallize into something with its own beauty. In contrast, a novel is worldbuilding, a future, a territory, a vast network of ripples spreading and overlapping from initial cause. You may write beautiful passages, but the words are less sounds than atoms in a much greater whole.

Transformation is a theme I’ve noticed running through some of the stories in this collection, particularly “Chrysalis,” with the reawakening of dormant human DNA. Do you think humans have evolved to a point where the next step in the process may be caused by science and technology rather than the way natural selection has proceeded in the past?

A theme that has long entranced me is adolescence, and how we individually—or as a species—wrestle with the dilemmas of growing up. Of deciding to be responsible, even if barely in the nick of time. (Which is how nearly all teenagers finally do it.) We are picking up the Tools of Creation now, in real time. And the possibilities for blowing it—for burning our fingers or maybe burning down the lab—are all around us. The universe may not care if we make it. Or else, perhaps it is holding its breath, waiting for us to decide whether we truly want to be apprentice gods.

When working on your novels or short stories, do you have a specific process in place when extrapolating forward into the future? Do you look through any particular forums or publications?

I accept that I am many. The mad poet has his uses. As does the scientist. They listen—to the rhythms or words and music that fill this brash civilization as well as to the summit discoveries of our leading minds. Learn to listen, to read and explore and knock on doors. If I tell students anything, it is to knock on lots of doors and ask: “Excuse me but what do you do here?”

Transparency has figured in a number of your stories. In particular, information about individuals is readily available at the twitch of an eyelid. What are your thoughts on the push and pull of privacy and transparency going on today?

Light wants to flow, it does flow. Our new tools will spread it everywhere. If we try to restrict it, all we’ll guarantee is that only elites will become omniscient. Elites of government, commerce, wealth, technology, criminality. But we’ll have blinded us—the common citizens. There is an alternative. Accept our duty to become partial gods. Knowing and free and behooved to become at least a little wiser.

It’s all right. We’ve done this before. Remember learning to fly? Our grandparents did that thing. It still amazes me. And it was allowed. It was beautiful. So will it be, when we are people who know.

In “Waging War With Reality” you write, “The brightest physicists play with Zen riddles, and some great engineers have also been noted artists or musicians.” Do you have any other hobbies?

In earlier decades I played violin, then guitar, and sang a bit. Some drums. Now all I have left is a mean harmonica! Painted a bit. But obviously words have been my colors. Writing and speaker-ing were my pastimes as a scientist till they took over. Now? It’s the science that I treat as my part-time art. I actually enjoy it more, that way.

You have an interesting view on criticism. You’ve mentioned that it is a gift from your enemies. Can you elaborate on that?

Human beings—all of us—are inherently delusional self-deceivers, rationalizers, and cheaters. History shows that no elite group can be trusted to rule wisely. No, not even the elites you happen to admire. Not even you. Not even me. Oh, some professions use hard-won tricks to reduce the total amount of self-delusion. The law tries. Science teaches millions some methods of honesty and reality checking. But scientists are still human.

Only here’s the interesting lesson that our greatest sages gradually realized: Pericles, Ben Franklin, they noted that we are pretty good at spotting the delusions of other people. I am not in love with your mistakes, the way you are, and hence I can point them out. And my own beloved errors? I am sure you’ll be happy to explain them to me. And here’s the great deal: you are willing to point out my mistakes . . . for free!

Criticism is a gift economy. We toss it as a freebie to our biggest foes. And if we are smart, we look at it that way, when they hurl critiques at us. Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error . . . CITOKATE. Oh sure, we hate it! That’s the biggest human tragedy, that we—almost all of us—have exactly the wrong reaction to criticism, which is the one thing that enables you to find your errors and correct them.

What projects are you working on now?

Novels, stories, nonfiction . . . how I wish I had the self-copying machine from Kiln People! Oh, and answering interview questions. Dang, I was planning to cut down on that . . .

Do you still hate Yoda?

Not so much hate as just a clear-eyed recognition that the nasty little green oven mitt is—beyond all question—the most evil and destructing character ever created, in the history of human mythology. Just that. Never wise, even once, at least he fails at every ambition, and good old Luke finally learns to ignore the awful little gnome! After finishing Star Wars on Trial, I have mostly ignored him, too!

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:
Technology Creates a New
Golden Age of Speculative Fiction

Margot Atwell

Typically, when readers think of technology and science fiction, they imagine spaceships, teleportation devices, and other fantastic contraptions. But technology isn’t just a great subject for sci-fi stories. Combined with new distribution methods, it has had a massive impact on genre fiction in the last decade. In that time, I’ve worked in various parts of the publishing industry: as an agent, an editor, publisher, and currently at Kickstarter, at the intersection of publishing and technology. I believe that recent intense innovation has changed what people write and read, and ushered in a new Golden Age of speculative short fiction.

For the last hundred years, trends and innovations in the publishing industry have influenced the types of writing that have been popular. Short fiction was critical to the establishment of the sci-fi genre. Many people trace the birth of modern science fiction back to Hugo Gernsback, who began “sneaking short stories into his electronics magazine [Modern Electronics],” according to Jim Freund, host of the speculative-fiction-oriented Hour of the Wolf radio show. Gernsback later founded Amazing Stories, a cheap pulp magazine where he could publish short stories openly instead of smuggling them into a venue with a different focus. Americans devoured the stories in that publication and other pulp magazines, in spite of the dubious quality of some of the work. Over time, low-paying pulp magazines gave way to digests, and editors began to approach the genre with a more critical editorial eye.

In 1939, the paperback book was introduced to the US market. Paperbacks were a cheap alternative to hardcover books—they sold for a quarter instead of $2.75, making novels accessible to a mass audience. They were more physically accessible as well: paperbacks were sold on newsstands and many other locations in addition to bookstores.

Publishing novels became more lucrative for authors than writing short fiction, and there was more cachet associated with them. Writers such as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke were encouraged to expand their stories into novels: recognizable favorites such as Fahrenheit 451 and Childhood’s End began as works of short fiction. Over time, markets for short fiction began to dry up. Dozens of science fiction and fantasy magazines ceased publication in the 1950s.

The significant costs of developing, printing, and distributing a book meant that publishers did not find it lucrative to publish shorter works such as a stand-alone novella. So writers focused on writing novels, and short fiction typically lived in the handful of remaining magazines.

But the internet and other digital technologies have brought major changes for publishers and readers over the last decade. It might seem hard to believe, but the first SONY e-ink ebook reader was sold in the US in September 2006, with Amazon’s first Kindle device following a year later. However, in 2007, both companies’ e-readers cost around $400, which was prohibitive for most consumers. In addition, few titles were available for sale in ebook format.

2010 was a year of significant change. The cost of the Kindle and SONY e-readers dropped below $200. Barnes & Noble had launched their Nook reader the year before, and Apple introduced the first iPad. The impact of the cheaper e-readers was almost instantaneous. These devices did for books what the iPod and other MP3 players had done for music: they made digital content portable, and therefore usable.

As a publisher just dipping a toe into the uncertain waters of ebook publishing, I was amazed to see my company’s ebook sales jump ten-fold after Christmas 2010. Suddenly, for the first time, people actually owned devices they could use to read ebooks! As smartphones became ubiquitous, that accelerated the acceptance of ebooks as a viable format for readers. Robust online sales channels were developed to distribute that media, with Amazon leading the charge to provide an easy way for readers to pay for electronic content to read on their devices.

Print-on-demand technology was also improving drastically around the same time, enabling authors and publishers to put out a book without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into a print run of thousands of copies before they knew whether or not anyone would want to buy the book. The decreased cost of publishing and distributing a book or magazine meant that becoming a publisher, or publishing one’s own work, was no longer out of reach for many authors and publishing hopefuls.

These radical shifts in technology, combined with the lower capital requirements to start a publishing venture, have created fertile ground especially in the technology-friendly world of speculative fiction. Over the past decade, more than a dozen professional and semi-pro science fiction and fantasy magazines have sprung up, along with many fanzines and online publications.

Since 2005, publications such as Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Forever Magazine, Clarkesworld itself, and other publications with significant or exclusively digital presences have been established. These publications have offered homes to the work of many writers writing short fiction in the speculative fiction genre, both established voices and new talents.

In addition, because the cost of establishing a publication or undertaking a project is lower, publishers and authors can take more risks. They can focus on niche subjects, or speak directly to reading communities that had previously been overlooked by publishers trying to cast the widest possible net.

Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon have also changed the publishing landscape by providing a simple, well-understood way for readers to support a project before an author or publisher commits resources to it. That means that anyone with an idea can reach out to their community to see if their project will capture the imagination of readers, instead of gambling that there will be an audience for a book once it’s published.

Projects such as the Long Hidden anthology edited by Daniel José Older and Rose Fox began as a Twitter conversation and ended up as an award-nominated anthology of over 150,000 words of short fiction “from the margins of speculative history.” The Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue of Lightspeed Magazine came into being, according to editor Christie Yant, when “we took hurt and rage and turned it into something beautiful.” In the coming years, I expect to see many more books and magazines that speak to readers who have been ignored or underserved by mainstream publishing.

The ability to publish and sell shorter works without incurring massive costs means that publishers can also experiment more with length, publishing and selling novellas, novelettes, and even single short stories. Tor.com Publishing has established a line specifically to publish novellas and short novels. Hugh Howey’s wildly popular novel, Wool, began as a stand-alone short story published via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. He later expanded it, experimenting with serial publishing to great success.

Very short stories and flash fiction, sold in collections or magazines or published online, are appealing to busy readers who want bite-size entertainment for their commute or while waiting for an appointment. O. Westin (@MicroSFF) tweets “very short, single-tweet, original science fiction/fantasy stories” for readers who are really in a hurry!

Social media has also given readers a direct way to follow the careers of the writers they love. Like old-school author fan clubs, Twitter and Facebook let fans support and follow writers. Connecting through these online channels can feel more intimate, more like a two-sided relationship between author and reader. What’s more, authors can communicate with readers when they sell a story to a publication or when an anthology features their work, so readers can discover and support these creative ventures.

Traditional publishers seem to be noticing this trend of great short fiction, as the past year has seen the introduction of at least two year’s best anthologies in the science fiction and fantasy genres: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, edited by John Joseph Adams and various co-editors, and the forthcoming The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke. These series will provide further opportunities for writers in the speculative fiction genre, and bring greater attention to these stories and the publications where they originate.

Ultimately, all these changes mean more options for readers: More stories, and more ways to read. A greater diversity of writers’ voices and subjects. And more ways for readers’ own voices to be heard by the people creating and publishing all of this literary abundance.

These technological changes have created a new Golden Age of speculative fiction in a variety of forms, which will help bring new readers into the genre and keep current readers intrigued, challenged, and entertained. I can’t wait to see how further innovation is adopted by publishers and authors in the service of connecting great stories with readers.

About the Author

Margot Atwell works with publishers and authors as the Publishing Lead at Kickstarter. She is the author of Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby and co-author of The Insider’s Guide to Book Publishing Success, along with articles for SF Signal, Moviefone, Derbylife.com, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Weekly, and The Huffington Post. She is also the publisher at Gutpunch Press. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets as @MargotAtwell.

Editor’s Desk:
Best. Wife. Ever.

Neil Clarke

Typically, the art I select for the cover doesn’t have any particular connection to that issue’s contents. I’ve always viewed the cover as its own feature, independent of the rest. During one of my recent monthly art quests, I came across Rudy Faber’s “Robot in Love” and I knew right away that I wanted it for this issue. No, it has nothing to do with any of the stories or articles. On April 1st, Lisa and I will celebrate our twenty-first wedding anniversary.

We don’t look like this couple, of course, but it’s easy to project our path onto theirs. I like to think they get past that awkward beginning phase and eventually get married. They have Peeps as hors d’oeuvres at the reception and rocket off to somewhere a bit warmer for their honeymoon. They sell a termite-infested house to buy the house to buy another one that they’ll raise their children in, and a few years later, they have a little cyborg running around. Three more years in and they have a set that never fail to entertain and inspire. Sure, they’ll be some rough spots: the loss of a third child in pregnancy; his mechanical heart failing and needing some organic parts to keep going; betrayals by friends, being fired, and more; but together they weather it all.

This robot/cyborg loves his wife and family. We know how lucky we are.

When our first son was born, Lisa quit her day job to stay home and raise the kids. Financially, it was tough, but we both valued that aspect of our childhoods and wanted our children raised that way. It’s meant that for the last sixteen years I’ve been the primary source of income for our family and that has meant continuing a twenty-seven year technology career in academia. For many years, I loved that career and I was happy doing it. Lisa humored and encouraged my side businesses—a bookstore, then a magazine and publishing company—and even started a few of her own (Polka Dot Cottage). I don’t think either of us suspected that one of these would present itself as a second career for me, however.

Since my heart attack, nearly four years ago, I’ve been actively trying to build Clarkesworld into that career. Each year is better than the last, and with Forever, The SFWA Bulletin, The Best Science Fiction of the Year series, and other anthology projects beginning to pile on the plate, I’m finally running into a wall: time. The day job is now an obstacle to future success.

Sixteen years since leaving the traditional workforce, Lisa is going back to work, not because she wants to, but so that I’ll be able to jump at some of the recent opportunities. Her job—when she gets one—will provide the health insurance we need and cover the income gap between the day job and editing income. It’s not here yet, but I’m simply overwhelmed by this gift, and promise that I’ll be working hard to make sure I can do the same for her sometime soon.

What else can I say but “Best. Wife. Ever.”

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 Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books this June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Robot in Love

Rudy Faber

About the Artist

Rudy Faber is a freelance illustrator, freelance concept artist and painter living in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. As a professional illustrator Rudy mainly works on children’s books and young adult novels, a branch of illustration he enjoys tremendously. In the weekends Rudy loves to paint realistic portraits and the human figure. Although Rudy considers oil painting as a mere (albeit very passionate) hobby and isn’t so much looking to pursue a professional fine artist career, a handful of his paintings have been on exhibit in places like Amsterdam, Melbourne (Aus) and Tucson AZ, as well as in his hometown of Leeuwarden. Rudy is mainly self taught in all of his techniques.