And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices

Margaret Ronald

It’s near the end of the first day of the conference when Randall shows up. I’m in the middle of the “End of a Zeitgeist” panel, waiting for one of the other panelists to wind up an interminable digression about SETI, when I see him at the back of the room, checking his glass. I meet his eyes, just long enough to acknowledge that he’s there, and he nods. He’s wearing a badge; he must have paid the money for a one-day pass, even though he can’t stand Coronal academics and the fringe element even less. Got enough of one from me, and enough of the other from Wallace, I’d guess.

The other panelist—I’ve forgotten his name—isn’t winding up, and because he’s remoting in he doesn’t notice the moderator casting irritated glances at him. “The mistake we’ve always made, it seems to me, is that we have always assumed that communication must be the same no matter whether human or xenosapient. The Corona Borealis informational space proved the exact opposite.”

“That isn’t exactly true,” I interrupt. The panelist blinks; he must have assumed that I was zoning out. Safe assumption, these days. “The actual transmissions found in Coronal infospace are remarkably similar to what you’d find in a thirty-year slice of human broadcast media—in fact, what we find in most recorded communication: lists, transactions, announcements, stories. The context is different, but the content is similar. It was the method that was opaque.”

He splutters, ready to argue. But the moderator’s still young enough to be nostalgic, and she doesn’t like him any more than I do. “Speaking of opacity, Dr. Kostia, it’s really been your metaphor that’s driven most of our understanding of Coronal transmissions. Would you care to recapitulate it?”

I glance at Randall and decide against drawing it out. “You’ve got to leave me something for the closing keynote,” I say, and get a chuckle from somewhere in the audience. “It’s a story for another time.”

Wrong choice of words. I can see that in the faces of the front row. The stories have all been told. The stories are all gone now.

“Imagine a man in a bright room,” I say. It’s two days later, I’m giving the ending keynote, and bright room is a little too on-the-nose for where I am currently standing. I can barely see the edge of the stage past the lights, and I can only assume my images are up on the screens. “He wanders around the room, calling out, and wonders why there is no answer from outside. On that basis, he assumes that outside must be empty.”

Randall isn’t here. I hope he’s home, with Brendan and the girls. I hope he’s had the sense to ignore all of this. I know I don’t have to hope, because Randall has always been the quietly sensible one of us, the one who empathized and cared and knew that the best thing to do was to steer his own ship. The Coronals had heroes like him, I know.

My breath catches in my throat. “Imagine that man,” I say again, and swallow. “And then, imagine his realization that if he stands close to the glass of his walls, blocking the glare of his lights, he can see through them. And there is someone on the other side, waving.”

Randall waits for me to make my way to him through the departing audience. “Hello, Randall,” I say, and reach out for a hug.

He pulls me in, almost off my feet. “Hi, Ma.” It feels like hugging a cinderblock in a sweater.

“Oof. Give me my ribs back, won’t you? How’s Brendan? How are the girls?”

“He’s fine. Sinny made a picture for you—I should have brought it, I wasn’t thinking.” He shoves both hands in his pockets, checks his glass again. “Ma, have you heard from Wally at all?”

“I’m rarely in touch with Wallace,” I say breezily, and it doesn’t even begin to mask the sting. “I’d hoped we’d see him at Thanksgiving this year.”

“Yeah, that’s—I’d hoped so too, but he’s . . . ” He raises both hands as if to offer me something, then lowers them. “You know he’s with one of the—these groups.” He nods to some of the one-day attendees, two wearing carefully reconstructed Coronal jewelry, one with her ears pinned forward in what some idiot has claimed must be some resemblance to the Coronal cranial shape. There are always a few at any conference, but these are as hollow-eyed as the rest of us, their hope as extinguished as the empty lanterns some carry (a reference to a Coronal song cycle, and likely mistranslated). “Like the ones he was with in high school. And college.”

I take a long, slow breath and let it out. College was news to me; I thought he’d gotten away from the cults when he left high school. “You think I’m likely to see him here? That’d be lovely. I mean it; I’d love to see him before November.”

“No, I mean—not like the dress-up-and-sing-songs people. The group he’s with sounds, well, kind of scary-intense.” He lowers his voice. “Ma, he asked me if I had any access to Granma’s old cloud. I mean, I get descendant-right requests all the time, but they’re all from, you know.” He nods to the girls and to the man behind them holding a mandala-patterned banner. I think of Virginia and Denmark, and shiver. “And if he’s asking me, it has to be something that he doesn’t have first full descendant-right to, so it’s probably one of the ones Granma shut off from immediate request. Like the, the original Coronal code.”

I do the thing with the breath again. “That’s . . . not good.”

“Even if it’s nothing, I think—he sounded down, Ma. Real depressed, like back in high school. And I think about the, the news out of Virginia—”

“Hush.” I put my fingertips to his lips. The room’s emptied out, but more people will be coming in shortly, and right now no one wants to think about mass suicides. The fringe because they want to distinguish themselves from that level of crazy; the academics because we’re guiltily aware we’ve contributed to it. “You really think he might?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell, with him.” Poor sensible Randall, beset on either side by the Coronals. “I know you can, though.”

To my shame, I think seriously about telling him I can’t go. It’s the middle of the conference, after all, and I have two more panels in the next couple of days, never mind the closing keynote. And it’s not like this conference will be happening again. “Where is he?” I finally ask.

“On the coast.” I feel my glass twitch with the information he’s sent over. “It’s about a day’s drive. I’d go, but you know he doesn’t listen to me. Well, he listens, but it’s not like he lets it make a difference.”

I can make it there and back before the closing keynote. Assuming nothing goes wrong. Assuming it’s not too late already. “Come on. Help me check my car back out.”

“For those of you who were around for the initial signal—that’s, what, half of us?—you remember how much of a shift it was. Here we were, going along in our bright room, and suddenly this signal from ADS 9731 in Corona Borealis starts rewriting an entire high performance computing center.” I’ve told the story about that day so many times, and I’m suddenly tired of telling it. It’s the embellished version, anyway; I mostly knew something was up because the power went out in the base and I couldn’t play Puppy Duel on my dad’s tablet until it recharged. But the story made a good introduction, and I could still remember Mom’s face when she came out of lockdown.

“Danforth and Rajasthani were the first ones who realized that the initial signal wasn’t an attack. It was, and is, the closest thing we have to semisapient code. When the signal came in contact—and by which I mean when it was recorded, replayed, and analyzed in an appropriately complex context—it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It changed our world, though that was really more of a side effect.”

Someone laughs, nervously. I ignore it. “What it did was to rewrite its surroundings—the computing center—and turn it into a receiver for Coronal infospace.” And then go dormant, for which my mother was grateful every day of her life. The signal in its dormant form was usable, understandable, replicable to the point that just about anyone could make their own access to infospace—and it didn’t go trying to rewrite anything. Mom once told me that some idiot had attempted to encode the Coronal signal into human DNA to see if it would perceive that as an informational context. Lucky for us all, either the semisapient code deemed it not complex enough or detected significant harm done in potential rewrite, so it just fizzled. But it gave her, and then me, nightmares.

“There was one metaphor—I’m glad it wasn’t mine—that it was like giving a radio to a ‘savage.’ Strip away the racism, and there’s a grain of truth: because we had never known about infospace, we’d assumed there was nothing to hear. But now we switch that radio on, and we find that what was silence is now chatter. The air is full of voices. Strange voices, from four hundred light-years away.”

They’ve heard this before. Those voices are why they are here.

“Incomprehensible voices, mind you. Do any of you remember those first few translations? I think someone set them to a dance remix when I was in junior high. But the second genius of the initial transmission was that it didn’t just convert itself into an infospace receiver; it made itself a translator for whatever linguistic context it was in. All of the Coronal communications—all of the drama, news, bulletins, pleas, shopping lists, everything that went out into their infospace—was so much clearer when viewed through multiple translations.

“With every language I learned, I was able to focus my understanding of Coronal broadcasts, get a better sense of their original meaning. I would imagine the same holds true for most of us in this room. For decades, we have had the entire infospace of an alien civilization to investigate. And look at all the things we found!”

I hold up the program, read a few names of papers. It’s a cheap trick, meant to make people feel as if their work hasn’t been for naught. I’d planned to say more about the smaller discoveries, the paths that Coronal Studies have made, as if I were pleading before the university trustees again not to disband the department. I don’t have it in me, now. My joints hurt from travel; my throat from shouting, even now; my eyes just hurt. I drop the program, and it slides off the stage. Somewhere behind me, I can almost hear the conference organizers frowning.

“And yet there’s so much we don’t know.” And won’t, now. “We do not know what it means that so many of their family sagas ended mid-childbirth scene. Nor why their military might was measured in what translated to most Earth languages as moons. I personally have always wondered why in the Interleaf broadcast, the speaker repeats You are my taste, my tongue, my scenting organ. It obviously meant something. But like an inscription in a secondhand book, that meaning is lost.”

So much of what I’ve had from my second son has been secondhand. So much lost.

Randall apologizes again for not bringing Sinny’s drawing, asks what I’m going to do now that the department is closing. I haven’t told him my real plans. I think once he finds out, he’ll be just as worried about me on some level as he is about Wallace. We make our way out, through the protests, the crowds, the gawkers, and I give Randall a goodbye kiss.

I start driving up the coast. I used to drive this way with the boys on vacation. And earlier, coming up this way with Mom and Dad, hearing them argue about infospace, whether it could be anything but a hoax, how much work it would take to make such a hoax, why her computing cycles had been co-opted by Danforth and Rajasthani and why was Rajasthani such a bitch anyway. (They were colleagues, not friends.)

This far off the interstates, there are still billboards: Cathedral Mountain Retreat/Divinity Center (with Coronal Meditation removed so recently the shadow of the letters is still there); Legal Advice? You Deserve More; Samaritans—We’re Here to Listen; Apple Picking and Hayride—You Just Missed Us. Book for Family Events! Next Exit! It’s Not Too Late!

If I were on the interstate, I could pull down a screen to block those advertisements from view; as it is, I read each as it goes by. After a while, I make myself spell out alphabets from them, one by one. Another game from those long drives.

I’m doing that breath thing again. It’s not as if I have to psych myself up to say this. It’s nothing new. “About sixteen, seventeen years ago, I noticed something off about Coronal infospace. I didn’t point it out at the time mainly because I thought I was projecting. Coronal communications are so easy to reinterpret to fit the details of whatever the interpreter is concerned with, and right then I was very concerned with death.”

Silence. The organizers are probably in the wings now, trying to figure out whether to cut my mike; I must sound like I’m going confessional. Well, so I am. “Both of my parents were dying at the time, Dad from a slow-escalating kidney failure, Mom from ovarian cancer that threatened to overtake Dad’s timeline. I had doctors’ appointments and hospice preparation and PTA and soccer and meetings and meetings and meetings . . . and whenever I reviewed infospace, I kept seeing the same things.

“The official broadcasts had shifted a little, more reassurance that all was well, that citizens should be aware of their risks, that all was well. It’s just a stomach cramp, don’t worry. No, I don’t need to get it checked out. I’m fine.

“Local transmissions were less sanguine, sometimes directing emergency services, sometimes eliminating entire subjects or regions from their discussions. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m seeing a doctor, and that’s all you need to know.

“Occasionally there would be sudden bursts of frantic activity, calls for help. We’d gotten used to that, but these—there wouldn’t be any follow-up. No answer to those calls. This is a lot to put on you, but here’s what’s happening. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

“The music and art had always been diverse in subject and style, but there seemed to be a melancholic, pensive tone to much of it now. Well, you get to a certain point, and you know there’s fewer days ahead than behind. How does that one poem go, the one about regret?

“Individual communications had always been a very minor subset of the transmissions, but the few I followed seemed to be Coronals reaching out for each other, trying to find each other, holding on. Sit with me here a while. This is nice, isn’t it? I’ve always been so proud of you.”

My eyes are watering. “I was, at the time, very aware that I was reading my parents’ deaths into infospace. I hoped it was just me.”

Half of the conference is on flow; I tune the car’s glass to mine and let presentation after presentation eat the road. “Linguistic Difference in a Cross-Section of the Early Conquest Dramas” derails pretty quickly, assuming that the Conquest Dramas are a purposeful corpus rather than a loose grouping of similar works. I can’t watch the visuals on a road like this—I have to keep watch on the road—but I can imagine the expressions of the attendees. “Infospace as Archive? The Purpose of Coronal Transmission” tries to claim that infospace was meant as a sacred repository, rather than what they had available—like assuming we used radio out of worship of a sky-deity.

I pull into a rest stop after the day closes with “Marking Time: Signatures in Coronal Rhythm-Intensive Music,” and none too soon; Coronal music does not translate well, and it’s always made me drowsy. My glass wakes me before dawn, and after I return from a trip to the restrooms the early-morning presentations have begun with “Fear of the Other and Governmental Responses to the Initial Signal.” My bones hurt even more now, and it takes me a couple of minutes to fold myself back into the car, more to make myself eat a breakfast muffin from the vending machines.

I reach the address Randall sent just after noon. The sign used to read COSMIC ILLUMINATION MEDITATION RETREAT, but it’s been papered over poorly with a crude poster of a hand holding a torch. I don’t know which worries me more.

It’s a small cluster of houses, close to the ocean, probably once a little resort before its cosmic phase. There’s a big, bare circle in the middle, not a parking lot as I first think. I get out and see it’s a sand painting, or rather dirt painting, gravel raked into a crosshatch pattern that I recognize. Infospace didn’t have visuals for the most part, but many broadcasts described mandalas like this.

I think of the images from Virginia, the painted mandala on the concrete and the bodies laid out carefully around it, the similar images from Malawi, from Honduras, from Denmark. There are people walking around the houses, some talking expressively, waving their hands; some pumping water; one or two regarding me with curiosity.

I march up to the women at the pump, absently identifying the language they’re speaking as Finnish. “I’m looking for Wallace,” I say. “Estin Wallace.”

One of them has the pinned-ear look; the other is wearing a gauze skirt and blouse, what my mother would have called another goddamn hippie and my father tried to capture in paint. Both of them wear glass, though, and they don’t bristle at my presence. The End of Speech cult, the one that Wallace got involved in when he turned seventeen—they scorned anyone who actually knew Coronal studies instead of “sensing their way through them.”

Pinned-ears looks me up and down. “Main house. Top floor.” She adds as I start to walk, “You look like him.”

I don’t know what I’m expecting inside the house. There’s what looks like another mandala in the foyer, this time in brightly colored sand that’s been tracked over several times, and a rack of servers in the dining room, with fans running next to them. I step around the mandala, thinking that the one rack probably has all the computing power of my mother’s old research center. Changes, not all driven by the Coronals.

Two people are arguing in Urdu on the second floor. I catch the gist of it: wide-band transmission versus focused, which way to point. One of them sees me and waves absently, as if I belong here. In another life, I might have. But not now. And not Wallace.

I pause halfway up the last set of stairs to catch my breath. Someone’s painted in straggling letters: WE REMEMBER WHAT HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN. I can’t carry him out of here; haven’t been able to pick him up since he was six. I could, I suppose, call the authorities and try to have him involuntarily committed, try to have them all committed. Better that than the quiet circle of poisoned bodies. I tell myself that, and know I’m rationalizing whatever unforgivable action I’ll take.

I can’t stop crying. It’s a gift, I suppose, that I can do it without my voice going all to pieces, but it’s noticeable, and the audience’s silence has an embarrassed, horrified quality to it. “It became clear what was happening soon enough. Even if we denied it. And now we were stuck behind the glass, watching this new civilization, this new contact, these new friends we’d come to study and mimic and love—watching them die.

“And we could do nothing. We weren’t just separated by some metaphorical glass. We were separated by time. Everything that had happened had happened four hundred years ago. Scream and cry and pound on the glass as much as we tried, the Coronals were already dying. Already dead. And we heard every moment of their deaths. The wars. The plagues. The pleas for help that never came. The litanies of the dead.”

Someone in the back of the auditorium makes a sound like a sob. I blow my nose, but my eyes are still streaming. “I still remember when one idiot physicist made a comment that, well, at least the Fermi Paradox still held; it’s just that sapient races kill themselves off before they develop space travel. Gallows humor, but he still took quite the hit from that, professionally speaking. But he wasn’t wrong.”

My son is alive when I see him. He’s also wearing only pajama bottoms, hunched over a keyboard on his lap, typing with one hand and eating cold scrambled eggs off a scratched camp plate with the other. He must have shaved his head not long ago; it’s all bristly now, like when I gave the boys buzz cuts after their brush with head lice in elementary school.

His entire back is covered with mandalas, one after another, all the different interpretations of the Coronal descriptions. Burned—branded—on top of them is a hand holding a torch.

My step creaks the floorboards, and he waves one hand behind his back, scrambled eggs falling from his fork. “Harris, can you tell Zahra that I’ve almost got the reambiguation figured, if she’ll just give me another week?”

“Wallace,” I say. I don’t even have to take a deep breath to do it.

He drops the fork and spins around, kicking aside plate and keyboard alike. He stares at me for a moment, then scrambles upright. He’s not as tall as Randall, never has been, but they’re both taller than me. “Ma.”

I’m too worried to smile. “Yes,” I say, and stop. What do I say? I’m here? I found you? Please don’t go, the Coronals aren’t worth it?

His shoulders go down, just a little bit. “Randall told you I was here, didn’t he?”

“He did,” I say. “He worries.”

Wallace shrugs. “It’s what he does.” He bends and sorts through the mess at his feet, finding a shirt with TOUCH THE STARS—8TH ANNUAL silkscreened onto it. “I think he thinks we’re some kind of death cult.”

He straightens up as he says the last, and he sees my face. “You’re not?” I manage, because he’s already seen as much in my expression. “The mandalas—”

“The mandalas are important, Ma. That we may remember what has been forgotten.” The last has the sound of catechism, and I can’t help rolling my eyes. He looks up at the ceiling, and I think of far too many Thanksgivings where we talked past each other. This is going to be another one of those fights. “You seem so determined to forget that you’re willing to let them close the department.”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” I say, but it’s a sore point, and I take the bait. “Besides, it’s not about forgetting.”

“Then what’s it about? You’re just turning your back on what we have of the Coronals? You’re letting the university—”

“There are other Coronal Studies departments.” Withering, yes, but holding on in the same way that departments allow specialized study of Ottoman textiles or obscure Scottish poets. “And don’t change the subject. My job is my own. This—” I gesture at the mess, “—is, I’m assuming, your new job.”

He glares at me, nudges the plate of eggs away with one foot. “Yeah. So maybe it is.” I brace for the defense, but he doesn’t bother with it, instead straightening up as if he were giving a presentation. “Ma, I need a favor. I need access to Granma’s cloud.”

“There’s nothing in it. Nothing that isn’t public.”

“No, there is. I need the initial signal. The originating one, the one that rewrote her research center, before it went dormant.”

I think of my mother, of the cancer rewriting her DNA. “There’s nothing there.”

“That’s only what you say because you don’t see.”

“I don’t need to see! There’s nothing to see! You can re-run the translator as many times as you like, and it’s not—”

“Ma—”

“It’s not going to show you anything new! It’s just going to give you the same old signal, the same things we heard, the same things that aren’t there any more!” Now I’m shouting. Guess it was my turn to start this time. “You can’t tune it, you can’t adjust it—it’s done, Wallace. It’s done, and maybe your friends here with their mandalas and their slogans, they can screw around with their cosmic bullshit, but you are better than that! I will not let you waste yourself like that!”

“It’s not a waste, Ma!” He puts his hands to his head. “It’s never a waste! Jesus, why is this so hard to understand?”

“There’s no one there!” The words come out, and I put both hands to my mouth, as if I’ve said something obscene. The argument downstairs has stopped; I’m pretty sure they’re listening. “No one,” I repeat. “It’s all silence now.”

Wallace shakes his head, slowly, the way I would when I was sick of the arguments. His turn, now.

I make myself stop, make myself draw a new breath. “Could someone shut off the slides? Thank you.” One nervous laugh, somewhere at the front. Everyone else is silent. They don’t like seeing someone cry in public. Nobody does.

I think about what I want to say, what I’ve said already elsewhere. “It’s all silence now,” I say. Somewhere in the auditorium, I’m certain people are shaking their heads, not quite the way Wallace did but with the same determination.

“The air is no longer full of voices.

“Or, rather, not the same voices.

“This is the one thing the Coronals did for us that we don’t even think about any more. Every one of you, every one who has bothered to do more than a cursory study of Coronal infospace, is a polyglot. We had to be.

“This is the gift they gave us. Not the knowledge that we were not alone. We have never been alone. To understand them, we had to understand each other.”

Wallace shakes his head, slowly. “It doesn’t have to be silent.”

I’m about to snap at him, to tell him that I have spent my life on the Coronals and if anyone would know silence, it is me. But I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t. Maybe I’m just tired from the drive. “There aren’t any other transmissions in infospace,” I finally say. “I know whole arrays that have been searching for anything since before the Coronal collapse. There’s nothing.”

“Not from them. From us.” He nudges the keyboard with his feet. “We’re—all of us, here, we’re trying to repurpose the original code. So we can send out our own into infospace.”

It takes me a moment to realize that he’s not talking about every other attempt to use the code, to strengthen it or tune it or seek out more information, more voices in the static. “You want to broadcast,” I say slowly.

“Not quite. We want to repurpose their tool and make it ours, and then broadcast. I mean, they’re dead, and we signed on much too late, but if we—if there’s someone else out there too, maybe they can hear us.”

I stand very still for a long moment. Below us, I hear the Urdu argument start up again, not nearly so vehement now. “Have you thought about the entity extraction issue?” I say finally.

“It’s not as much of a problem as you might think. Here, take a look.” He picks up the keyboard, pulls down a screen, and code fills the air. “The original signal was expansive-reductive, taking one set and expanding it to many. We think if we can train it another way, it can work with many sets at once, so we don’t have to restrict our infospace broadcasts to one language. It’s semisapient, so it really is like training, but the base code . . . ”

He goes off, and I think about my mother staring at her own lines of code, convinced it was all a hoax but one she’d go along with for now. It’s opaque to me, but Wallace swims in it.

“We’re getting close—well, closer. Beatriz thinks we have only ten years to go, instead of twenty. But if we had Granma’s records, it’d give us a clearer idea of how the signal is supposed to behave when it’s active, instead of its dormant state, which is all we have to work with now. It’s only a, a receiver. We need to make it a transmitter again. A whole technician, if we train it right.”

He looks alight, the same way Randall does when he’s with Brendan. I step back. “I’ll deed you the cloud access,” I say. For a moment I consider inviting him to drive back with me, but eight hours in the car are pretty much guaranteed to destroy any détente we currently have. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

Wallace stops abruptly, as if he’s just remembered who he’s talking to. “You don’t have to go.”

I smile at him. “Did Randall tell you what I’m doing, now that the department’s closing down? I’m going back to school. For a fine arts degree. Poetry.”

“That’s . . . not what I would have expected.” He stops, takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Good luck.”

“I’d like to speak to the other half of the audience now. Those of you who grew up in a world where we knew for a fact we were not alone.”

Randall, Brendan, and their girls. Abrams and Lucienne from the department, Sadako who is our last Ph.D. student and has still soldiered on, Martinez with the giant paintings, and Park with the Opera based on Coronal texts. All the ones who passed through my hands, who went on, who continue on without me.

Wallace, my Wallace, so sad and determined. I am so proud of you, of all of you.

“You have never known a world in which Earth held the only life in the universe. Everywhere, you have heard the voices of a world far away. Now you have to hear the nearer voices. I want you to hold on to that knowledge, that certainty that we are not alone. We have never been alone.

“We will never be.”

I step down, out of the light. My glass vibrates, and I check it to see a set of messages turn up.

W: good speech ma randy sent me the flow

R: did not. the girls got to listen. Sinny drew a new picture for you.

W: i have some old antholgies if you need textbks

It’s a start. I lower my glass and let the organizers walk me back out on stage.

About the Author

Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.

Things With Beards

Sam J. Miller

MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100% sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursing each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.

“Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.

“You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.

“Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”

Their hands clasp under the table.

“You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.

“You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”

MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.

“Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”

“You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”

MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”

“Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.

They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.

Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog . . . and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed . . . but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.

“Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.

“More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”

“Course I am.”

“Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned . . . they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re gonna hit back, hard.”

MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”

When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.

“The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.

“That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.

“I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”

“Me either.”

There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, onto the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.

“What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.

“Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”

“But you’re not a junky.”

“I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”

MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”

“The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.

“Course not. I didn’t mean that—”

But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bodies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.

So many of the men at McMurdo wore beards. Winter, he thought, at first—for keeping our faces warm in Antarctica’s forever winter. But warmth at McMurdo was rarely an issue. Their warren of rectangular huts was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees. Massive stockpiles of gasoline specifically for that purpose. Aside from the occasional trip outside for research—and MacReady never had more than a hazy understanding of what, exactly, those scientists were sciencing down there, but they seemed to do precious little of it—the men of McMurdo stayed the hell inside.

So. Not warmth.

Beards were camouflage. A costume. Only Blair and Garry lacked one, both being too old to need to appear as anything other than what they were, and Childs, who never wanted to.

He shivered. Remembering. The tough-guy act, the cowboy he became in uncertain situations. Same way in juvie; in lock-up. Same way in Vietnam. Hard, mean, masculine. Hard drinking; woman hating. Queer? Psssh. He hid so many things, buried them deep, because if men knew what he really was, he’d be in danger. When they learned he wasn’t one of them, they would want to destroy him.

They all had their reasons, for choosing McMurdo. For choosing a life where there were no women. Supper time MacReady would look from face to bearded face and wonder how many were like him, under the all-man exterior they projected, but too afraid, like him, to let their true self show.

Childs hadn’t been afraid. And Childs had seen what he was.

MacReady shut his eyes against the McMurdo memories, bit his lip. Anything to keep from thinking about what went down, down there. Because how was it possible that he had absolutely no memory of any of it? Soviet attack, was the best theory he could come up with. Psychoactive gas leaked into the ventilation system by a double agent (Nauls, definitely), which caused catastrophic freak outs and homicidal arson rage, leaving only he and Childs unscathed, whereupon they promptly sat down in the snow to die . . . and this, of course, only made him more afraid, because if this insanity was the only narrative he could construct that made any sense at all, he whose imagination had never been his strong suit, then the real narrative was probably equally, differently, insane.

Not-MacReady has an exceptional knack for assessing external threats. It stays hidden when MacReady is alone, and when he is in a crowd, and even when he is alone but still potentially vulnerable. Once, past four in the morning, when a drunken MacReady had the 145th Street bus all to himself, alone with the small woman behind the wheel, Not-MacReady could easily have emerged. Claimed her. But it knew, somehow, gauging who-knew-what quirk of pheromones or optic nerve signals, the risk of exposure, the chance someone might see through the tinted windows, or the driver’s foot, in the spasms of dying, slam down hard on the brake and bring the bus crashing into something.

If confronted, if threatened, it might risk emerging. But no one is there to confront it. No one suspects it is there. Not even MacReady, who has nothing but the barest, most irrational anxieties. Protean fragments; nightmare glitch glimpses and snatches of horrific sound. Feedback, bleedthrough from the thing that hides inside him.

“Fifth building burned down this week,” said the Black man with the Spanish accent. MacReady sees his hands, sees how hard he’s working to keep them from shaking. His anger is intoxicating. “Twenty families, out on the street. Cops don’t care. They know it was the landlord. It’s always the landlord. Insurance company might kick up a stink, but worst thing that happens is dude catches a civil suit. Pays a fine. That shit is terrorism, and they oughta give those motherfuckers the chair.”

Everyone agrees. Eleven people in the circle; all of them Black except for MacReady and an older white lady. All of them men except for her, and a stout Black woman with an Afro of astonishing proportions.

“It’s not terrorism when they do it to us,” she said. “It’s just the way things are supposed to be.”

The meeting is over. Coffee is sipped; cigarettes are lit. No one is in a hurry to go back outside. An affinity group, mostly Black Panthers who somehow survived a couple decades of attempts by the FBI to exterminate every last one of them, but older folks too, trade unionists, commies, a minister who came up from the South back when it looked like the Movement was going to spread everywhere, change everything.

MacReady wonders how many of them are cops. Three, he guesses, though not because any of them make him suspicious. Just because he knows what they’re up against, what staggering resources the government has invested in destroying this work over the past forty years. Infiltrators tended to be isolated, immersed in the lie they were living, reporting only to one person, whom they might never meet.

Hugh comes over, hands him two cookies.

“You sure this is such a good idea?” MacReady says. “They’ll hit back hard, for this. Things will get a whole lot worse.”

“Help us or don’t,” Hugh said, frowning. “That’s your decision. But you don’t set the agenda here. We know what we’re up against, way better than you do. We know the consequences.”

MacReady ate one cookie, and held the other up for inspection. Oreo knock-offs, though he’d never have guessed from the taste. The pattern was different, the seal on the chocolate exterior distinctly stamped.

“I understand if you’re scared,” Hugh says, gentler now.

“Shit yes I’m scared,” MacReady says, and laughs. “Anybody who’s not scared of what we’re about to do is probably . . . well, I don’t know, crazy or stupid or a fucking pod person.”

Hugh laughs. His laugh becomes a cough. His cough goes on for a long time.

Would he or she know it, if one of the undercovers made eye contact with another? Would they look across the circle and see something, recognize some deeply-hidden kinship? And if they were all cops, all deep undercover, each one simply impersonating an activist so as to target actual activists, what would happen then? Would they be able to see that, and set the ruse aside, step into the light, reveal what they really were? Or would they persist in the imitation game, awaiting instructions from above? Undercovers didn’t make decisions, MacReady knew; they didn’t even do things. They fed information upstairs, and upstairs did with it what they would. So if a whole bunch of undercovers were operating on their own, how would they ever know when to stop?

MacReady knows that something is wrong. He keeps seeing it out of the corner of his mind’s eye, hearing its echoes in the distance. Lost time, random wreckage.

MacReady suspects he is criminally, monstrously insane. That during his black-outs he carries out horrific crimes, and then hides all the evidence. This would explain what went down at McMurdo. In a terrifying way, the explanation is appealing. He could deal with knowing that he murdered all his friends and then blew up the building. It would frighten him less than the yawning gulf of empty time, the barely-remembered slither and scuttle of something inhuman, the flashes of blood and screaming that leak into his daylight hours now.  

MacReady rents a cabin. Upstate: uninsulated and inexpensive. Ten miles from the nearest neighbor. The hard-faced old woman who he rents from picks him up at the train station. Her truck is full of grocery bags, all the things he requested.

“No car out here,” she says, driving through town. “Not even a bicycle. No phone, either. You get yourself into trouble and there’ll be no way of getting out of here in a hurry.”

He wonders what they use it for, the people she normally rents to, and decides he doesn’t want to know.

“Let me out up here,” he says, when they approach the edge of town.

“You crazy?” she asks. “It’d take you two hours to walk the rest of the way. Maybe more.”

“I said pull over,” he says, hardening his voice, because if she goes much further, out of sight of prying protective eyes, around the next bend, maybe, or even before that, the insane thing inside him may emerge. It knows these things, somehow.

“Have fun carrying those two big bags of groceries all that way,” she says, when he gets out. “Asshole.”

“Meet me here in a week,” he says. “Same time.”

“You must be a Jehovah’s Witness or something,” she says, and he is relieved when she is gone.

The first two days pass in a pleasant enough blur. He reads books, engages in desultory masturbation to a cheaply-printed paperback of gay erotic stories Hugh had lent him. Only one symptom: hunger. Low and rumbling, and not sated no matter how much he eats.

And then: lost time. He comes to on his knees, in the cool midnight dirt behind a bar.

“Thanks, man,” says the sturdy bearded trucker type standing over him, pulling back on a shirt. Puzzled by how it suddenly sports a spray of holes, each fringed with what look like chemical burns. “I needed that.”

He strides off. MacReady settles back into a squat. Leans against the building.

What did I do to him? He seems unharmed. But I’ve done something. Something terrible.  

He wonders how he got into town. Walked? Hitchhiked? And how the hell he’ll get back.

The phone rings, his first night back. He’d been sitting on his fire escape, looking down at the city, debating jumping, though not particularly seriously. Hugh’s words echoing in his head. Help us or don’t. He is still not sure which one he’ll choose.

He picks up the phone.

“Mac,” says the voice, rich and deep and unmistakeable.

“Childs.”

“Been trying to call you.” Cars honk, through the wire. Childs is from Detroit, he dimly remembers, or maybe Minneapolis.

“I was away. Had to get out of town, clear my head.”

“You too, huh?”

MacReady lets out his breath, once he realizes he’s been holding it. “You?”

“Yup.”

“What the hell, man? What the fuck is going on?”

Childs chuckles. “Was hoping you’d have all the answers. Don’t know why. I already knew what a dumbass you are.”

A lump of longing forms in MacReady’s throat. But his body fits him wrong, suddenly. Whatever crazy mental illness he was imagining he had, Childs sharing it was inconceivable. Something else is wrong, something his mind rejects but his body already knows. “Have you been to a doctor?”

“Tried,” Childs says. “I remember driving halfway there, and the next thing I knew I was home again.” A siren rises then slowly fades, in Detroit or Minneapolis.

MacReady inspects his own reflection in the window, where the lights of his bedroom bounce back against the darkness. “What are we?” he whispers.

“Hellbound,” Childs says, “but we knew that already.”

The duffel bag says Astoria Little League. Two crossed baseball bats emblazoned on the outside. Dirty bright-blue blazer sleeves reaching out. A flawless facsimile of something harmless, wholesome. No one would see it and suspect. The explosives are well-hidden, small, sewn into a pair of sweat pants, the timer already ticking down to some unknown hour, some unforeseeable fallout.

“Jimmy,” his father says, hugging him, hard. His beard brushes MacReady’s neck, abrasive and unyielding as his love.

The man is immense, dwarfing the cluttered kitchen table. Uncles lurk in the background. Cigars and scotch sour the air. Where are the aunts and wives? MacReady has always wondered, these manly Sundays.

“They told me this fucker died,” his father says to someone.

“Can’t kill one of ours that easy,” someone says. Eleven men in the little house, which has never failed to feel massive.

Here his father pauses. Frowns. No one but MacReady sees. No one here but MacReady knows the man well enough to suspect that the frown means he knows something new on the subject of MacReady mortality. Something that frightens him. Something he feels he has to shelter his family from.

“Fucking madness, going down there,” his father says, snapping back with the unstoppable positivity MacReady lacks, and envies. “I’d lose my mind inside of five minutes out in Alaska.”

“Antarctica,” he chuckles.

“That too!”

Here, home, safe, among friends, the immigrant in his father emerges. Born here to brand-new arrivals from Ireland, never saw the place but it’s branded on his speech, the slight Gaelic curling of his consonants he keeps hidden when he’s driving the subway car but lets rip on weekends. His father’s father is who MacReady hears now, the big glorious drunk they brought over as soon as they got themselves settled, the immense shadow over MacReady’s own early years, and who, when he died, took some crucial piece of his son away with him. MacReady wonders how his own father has marked him, how much of him he carries around, and what kind of new terrible creature he will be when his father dies.

An uncle is in another room, complaining about an impending Congressional hearing into police brutality against Blacks; the flood of reporters bothering his beat cops. The uncle uses ugly words to describe the people he polices out in Brooklyn; the whole room laughs. His father laughs. MacReady slips upstairs unnoticed. Laments, in silence, the horror of human hatred—how such marvelous people, whom he loves so dearly, contain such monstrosity inside of them.

In the bathroom, standing before the toilet where he first learned to pee, MacReady sees smooth purple lesions across his stomach.

Midnight, and MacReady stands at the center of the George Washington Bridge. The monstrous creature groans and whines with the wind, with the heavy traffic that never stops. New York City’s most popular suicide spot. He can’t remember where he heard that, but he’s grateful that he did. Astride the safety railing, looking down at deep black water, he stops to breathe.

Once, MacReady was angry. He is not angry anymore. This disturbs him. The things that angered him are still true, are still out there; are, in most cases, even worse.

His childhood best friend, shot by cops at fourteen for “matching a description” of someone Black. His mother’s hands, at the end of a fourteen hour laundry shift. Hugh, and Childs, and every other man he’s loved, and the burning glorious joy he had to smother and hide and keep secret. He presses against these memories, traces along his torso where they’ve marked him, much like the cutaneous lesions along Hugh’s sides. And yet, like those purple blotches, they cause no pain. Not anymore.

A train’s whistle blows, far beneath him. Wind stings his eyes when he tries to look. He can see the warm dim lights of the passenger cars; imagines the seats where late-night travelers doze or read or stare up in awe at the lights of the bridge. At him.

Something is missing, inside of MacReady. He can’t figure out what. He wonders when it started. McMurdo? Maybe. But probably not. Something drew him to McMurdo, after all. The money, but not just the money. He wanted to flee from the human world. He was tired of fighting it and wanted to take himself out. Whatever was in him, changing, already, McMurdo fed it.

He tries to put his finger on it, the thing that is gone, and the best he can do is a feeling he once felt, often, and feels no longer. Trying to recall the last time he felt it he fails, though he can remember plenty of times before that. Leaving his first concert; gulping down cold November night air and knowing every star overhead belonged to him. Bus rides back from away baseball games, back when the Majors still felt possible. The first time he followed a boy onto the West Side Piers. A feeling at once frenzied and calm, energetic yet restive. Like he had saddled himself, however briefly, onto something impossibly powerful, and primal, sacred, almost, connected to the flow of things, moving along the path meant only for him. They had always been rare, those moments—life worked so hard to come between him and his path—but lately they did not happen at all.

He is a monster. He knows this now. So is Childs. So are countless others, people like Hugh who he did something terrible to, however unintentionally it was. He doesn’t know the details, what he is or how it works, or why, but he knows it.

Maybe he’d have been strong enough, before. Maybe that other MacReady would have been brave enough to jump. But that MacReady had no reason to. This MacReady climbs back to the safe side of the guardrail, and walks back to solid ground.

MacReady strides up the precinct steps, trying not to cry. Smiling, wide-eyed, white, and harmless.

When Hugh handed off the duffel bag, something was clearly wrong. He’d lost fifty pounds, looked like. All his hair. Half of the light in his eyes. By then MacReady’d been hearing the rumors, seeing the stories. Gay cancer, said the Times. Dudes dropping like mayflies.

And that morning: the call. Hugh in Harlem Hospital. From Hugh’s mother, whose remembered Christmas ham had no equal on this earth. When she said everything was going to be fine, MacReady knew she was lying. Not to spare his feelings, but to protect her own. To keep from having a conversation she couldn’t have.

He pauses, one hand on the precinct door. Panic rises.

Blair built a spaceship.

The image comes back to him suddenly, complete with the smell of burning petrol. Something he saw, in real life? Or a photo he was shown, from the wreckage? A cavern dug into the snow and ice under McMurdo. Scavenged pieces of the helicopter and the snowmobiles and the Ski-dozer assembled into . . . a spaceship. How did he know that’s what it was? Because it was round, yes, and nothing any human knew how to make, but there’s more information here, something he’s missing, something he knew once but doesn’t know now. But where did it come from, this memory?

Panic. Being threatened, trapped. Having no way out. It triggers something inside of him. Like it did in Blair, which is how an assistant biologist could assemble a spacefaring vessel. Suddenly MacReady can tap into so much more. He sees things. Stars, streaking past him, somehow. Shapes he can take. Things he can be. Repulsive, fascinating. Beings without immune systems to attack; creatures whose core body temperatures are so low any virus or other invading organism would die.

A cuttlefish contains so many colors, even when it isn’t wearing them.

His hands and neck feel tight. Like they’re trying to break free from the rest of him. Had someone been able to see under his clothes, just then, they’d have seen mouths opening and closing all up and down his torso.

“Help you?” a policewoman asks, opening the door for him, and this is bad, super bad, because he—like all the other smiling white harmless allies who are at this exact moment sauntering into every one of the NYPD’s 150 precincts and command centers—is supposed to not be noticed.

“Thank you,” he says, smiling the Fearless Man Smile, powering through the panic. She smiles back, reassured by what she sees, but what she sees isn’t what he is. He doffs the cowboy hat and steps inside.

He can’t do anything about what he is. All he can do is try to minimize the harm, and do his best to counterbalance it.

What’s the endgame here, he wonders, waiting at the desk. What next? A brilliant assault, assuming all goes well—simultaneous attacks on every NYPD precinct, chaos without bloodshed, but what victory scenario are his handlers aiming for? What is the plan? Is there a plan? Does someone, upstairs, at Black Liberation Secret Headquarters, have it all mapped out? There will be a backlash, and it will be bloody, for all the effort they put into a casualty-free military strike. They will continue to make progress, person by person, heart by heart, and mind by mind, but what then? How will they know they have reached the end of their work? Changing minds means nothing if those changed minds don’t then change actual things. It’s not enough for everyone to carry justice inside their hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

“Sound permit for a block party?” he asks the clerk, who slides him a form without even looking up. All over the city, sound permits for block parties that will never come to pass are being slid across ancient well-worn soon-to-be-incinerated desks.

Walking out, he hears the precinct phone ring. Knows it’s The Call. The same one every other precinct is getting. Encouraging everyone to evacuate in the next five minutes if they’d rather not die screaming; flagging that the bomb is set to detonate immediately if tampered with, or moved (this is a bluff, but one the organizers felt fairly certain hardly anyone would feel like calling, and, in fact, no one does).

And that night, in a city at war, he stands on the subway platform. Drunk, exhilarated, frightened. A train pulls in. He stands too close to the door, steps forward as it swings open, walks right into a woman getting off. Her eyes go wide and she makes a terrified sound. “Sorry,” he mumbles, cupping his beard and feeling bad for looking like the kind of man who frightens women, but she is already sprinting away. He frowns, and then sits, and then smiles. A smile of shame, at frightening someone, but also of something else, of a hard-earned, impossible-to-communicate knowledge. MacReady knows, in that moment, that maturity means making peace with how we are monsters.

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His first book, a young adult science fiction novel called The Art of Starving, will be published by HarperCollins in 2017. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He currently lives in New York City.

.identity

E. Catherine Tobler

As with most things, it started small.

In the center of my vision, I perceived the virus as a pinprick of white light. The program was instantly distinguishable because of its color, colors being significant—green was good and red dangerous; white indicated something not entirely understood. I tried to quarantine the unidentified program, but it overran every obstacle I placed in its path, as if anticipating them.

Venningen, bathed in the faint crimson light pouring from the overhead, crouched before me, his hands wrist deep in my torso. Venningen had isolated my torso from the rest of my body, to further segregate the virus, and I could not feel his hands at work. It was only when he sank my torso into place and brought systems back online that I could feel his fingers on my core. I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity.

“And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he asked, invoking my authentication process.

My visual cortex brightened, but Venningen’s attention wavered. Though his hands still rested on my core, his eyes moved, attention directed over his shoulder beyond the shadowed alcove sheltering us. Archival databanks rose around us, the colony ship’s oldest library, but the rows were empty save for us. I scanned and he watched the databanks, as if waiting for someone to come upon us.

The alcove was not where Venningen normally tended my systems, but far removed from Peragro’s central core. The alcove, the frame from which I hung like a puzzle waiting to click together, belonged to the first AI the crew tried to embody twelve years prior. The attempt was unsuccessful, but on a ship like Peragro, nothing is useless or thrown away; plunging through deep space toward a new world, it cannot be. Peragro’s crew would need every bit for their new lives.

My vision washed from red to orange and into yellow. When the yellow bled green, a steady glow that did not give way to questionable white, I said, “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

I checked twice and again, just to be sure as humans always said. Every system within my frame—and as Venningen allowed the connection to Peragro once again—every system over the whole of Peragro, all one hundred and forty kilometers of her, glowed green.

“There is no evidence of the program within me, nor within Peragro.”

Venningen looked up at me. I met his gaze, his eyes still shaded in crimson from the overheads. “No anomalies?” Venningen asked.

I knew the answer, but scanned again, shedding waves of light over his hands so the shadows flickered up through my torso.

“Your hands alone are anomalous.”

At this, Venningen withdrew from my core and released the lock on the frame, which allowed me to slot my body back together. Standing, I was on eye level with Venningen and he met my gaze, his own still troubled. We were both fourth-gens, born on Peragro, destined to set down with her on Kepler-726 in mere weeks. Peragro, who’d run for more than a century and a half, was nearly done running.

“I’ve set a program to moat the fucker, if it returns,” Venningen said, “but it shouldn’t. Still—”

He looked at me in silence for forty-seven seconds; I counted each, while Peragro flooded me; environmental systems, oxygen flows, waste expulsion, water intake, propulsion, radiation shielding. As I briefly touched Gaff and Rachael, my fellow AI, and ensured all was well, all was normal.

“Captain gets wind of this—”

The captain didn’t know, because my condition updates were routed to Venningen and Venningen alone, to streamline reply and response.

He watched me for another six seconds. As the time passed, I monitored the harvest of greens in the greenhouse, looked in on the continued upgrades to the dwarf-pod tubes, made an adjustment to the environmentals controlling the reproduction banks, listened to the regular and smooth rush and flush of the waste tanks into the greenhouse underbellies, ensured sea-glass Comet Hyakutake off Peragro’s starboard side had not changed course (in all its years, its path had made no deviation—oh, to be so precise and sure), and approved forty-five requests for time off among crew. Venningen stared unblinking, as if he’d never seen an embodied.

“Venningen.”

He blinked and nodded. “Right. I loosed a tracer to unravel the initial source of the virus. The source sits in you, the tracer running silent in Peragro.” Venningen’s fingers fluttered over my torso again, confirming. “Tracer will return to you and you alone—you’ll know when. Hell, you can probably see it already.”

I could. The tracer was small and colorless, a shadow ghosting through Peragro’s massive frame. I would have asked Venningen why he didn’t have me trace the virus, but I already knew: the virus had come to me, hadn’t reached for any other part of Peragro. If I was its target—there were too many ways in which to finish that sentence and so I didn’t.

Outside the data archive, Venningen fell into step alongside me, though I knew he had duties elsewhere.

“Is there more?” I asked.

Venningen reached for me. I calculated the arc of his hand, how it would encompass my arm, how it had never done so before. Venningen’s fingers were warm as they closed around my upper arm and they smelled vaguely of oil. He always smelled of oil, his clothes and skin showing signs of the work he did, the work he loved. But this was my oil, and it struck me odd—as so many things had since I’d spied the prick of viral brightness an hour before.

“Daidala—”

It isn’t a name exactly, though they use it as such for me; a daidala is a sculpture (was a sculpture?) from ancient Earth, attributed to the mythical Daedalus. Daidala were objects of great beauty and sometimes immense power—but I do not forget that Daedalus built wings which melted as his own son flew too closely to the sun.

“Yes, Venningen?”

His hand did not lift from my arm, but tightened. “Be on your guard,” he said.

“Am I not always on my guard?” I asked. “I know all there is to know of this ship—of its systems.”

“This virus was sent to you, Daidala.” His voice dropped, concern shadowing it into something I had never heard from him before. I had heard this tone from others, however; concern, love, and always ever worry—treasured things could be lost. “If this is a threat, if it is ongoing . . . it may not be the only threat. To you—and through you, to Peragro.”

Had I skin, it might have pricked. Instead, every awareness inside me spread outward, to detect every danger I possibly could. I reached even beyond Peragro’s walls, toward the sailing comet, and beyond, touching the star we were nearing. Six planets in the system, one of which would house Peragro’s crew when we safely landed. All was normal, ordinary, in place.

“Be on your guard,” he repeated, then left me as if he’d never lingered.

As with most things, the threat didn’t take long to grow.

I do not sleep, though as the ship’s waking crew cycles through the days the ship has kept calendar of since leaving Earth, there are hours I am less active. Usually these hours see me nestled in my customary frame, observing Margot’s systems from a stationary position, watching the shadow of Venningen’s tracer continue its search. I was built to wander, but sometimes I prefer to not. (An embodied with a preference; they can be slow or swift to develop—much as Margot herself, I too am an experiment, a thing monitored. Venningen laughed when he discovered I preferred night cycles to day cycles on board ship. Venningen never laughs.)

There was no viral pinprick this time, only the sudden and catastrophic failure of a dozen cryogenic pods. I registered the power failure and tried to reroute, but every route I took was blocked. The virtual pathways to the pods appeared severed, though when engineering flooded the Goddard deck, they saw no damage. Only dark pods, filled with mostly-dead occupants. One struggled to breathe as engineers and doctors cracked the tube open.

Some of Peragro’s forefathers had chosen cryogenic sleep for the journey; normal lifespans would not allow them to be part of the regular crew and live to see the new world with their own eyes. They wanted to witness the success of their work and not be left to wonder. Some of their children had opted to serve in a normal fashion, so the descendants of the founders lived and worked on Peragro even now, but most would no longer set foot on Kepler-726, for they lay dead. Founder Rosen struggled on, carted to the medical wing.

“And you maintain there was no warning?” Torres asked me as we stood on Goddard deck, watching the engineers examine the pods.

“None whatsoever,” I told the security chief. I spied Venningen across the deck, making his way toward me only to be stopped by security personnel. I took his expression to be one of profound displeasure, features streaked with oil and grime. I registered nothing strange in Torres’ scans or demeanor, though. She was as perplexed as I was. “An alarm will alert me at any change: a drop or surge in power, a fluctuation in temperature, gravity—anything that might jeopardize the occupants.”

“Explain how there was no alarm.”

I could not. “Scans show the alarms remain in place—they were never tripped. The ship . . . ” I trailed off, trying to find the proper explanation—but it remained elusive. “Disregarded the emergency?”

According to the engineering crew, every pod was intact, as if no malfunction had ever occurred. Every line in and out of the pods was secure; nothing showed signs of tampering. I conferred with Gaff and Rachael and neither of them could find the source of the malfunction, either.

I considered the virus and wanted to voice my concerns, but recalled Venningen’s concern if the captain learned of the attempt to infect me. If I were disconnected from Peragro and considered a security risk, many systems would fall into disrepair or complete failure before the ship reached its destination. While Margot possessed two other AI systems, I carried more than half the load, given my unique embodied state and ability to interact with the waking crew.

Had part of the virus burrowed its way into me, despite Venningen and I believing otherwise? I looked his way, to find him gesturing angrily at the security crew. He wanted inside; they would not allow him entry.

We did not speak for three hours. Torres finished her queries with me, filled with assurances that she would speak with me again, and released me. When Venningen finally approached me, he said I was under observation—as were Gaff and Rachael, only as precautions. None of us had motive to kill the founders, so—

I interrupted him. “Motive implies this was not an accident, Venningen. Is there evidence that the pods were deliberately tampered with? That the founders were murdered?” That word felt strange; Peragro had certainly known crimes over the course of her journey, but nothing close to murder. Everyone within Peragro’s walls wished a successful end to a generations’ long journey. Or did they?

It was easy to judge via actions one witnessed every day, but what could I know of the human heart? What did I know of humans? I worked with them every day of my existence and had been programmed to know very specific things; Venningen had layered superfluous knowledge into me over the course of our work—introducing me to music, art, and fiction—matters I didn’t necessarily need to know in order to operate myself or the ship. Each might illustrate what we now faced—the idea that one thing could be layered with another; that a calm exterior might house a burning heart.

“And to what end?” Venningen asked. “Unless it was a test—to . . . fuck.”

We returned to the old, quiet archive, where I stepped into the AI frame and disengaged my joints, so Venningen could examine each in turn, ensuring that the virus was not within me. I could have told him it was not, but we both valued outside confirmation. I tracked the tracer through Peragro, still on its route, but it had discovered no evidence of the virus along its journey.

“A test to bypass you,” Venningen eventually said, completing the thought he’d had. “You knew nothing of the malfunction—neither did Gaff or Rachael. You three are aware of everything—down to when people use the head.”

I opened my mouth to tell him when he’d last been, but he raised a finger.

“None of you saw this coming—nor could you stop it once it was in progress. You are the fastest thing on this ship—aside from the engines.”

Given that we were moving down darker paths, I stepped onto yet another. “This level of interference—it would not be a large leap to say that if it is possible to bypass any of the AI on this vessel, it is equally possible to alter their memory cores.”

Venningen watched me in the crimson light, his silence seeming an agreement with my assessment. “And laugh upon the apple of her eye,” he murmured.

As I put myself back together, I ran a diagnostic on my systems, even as I continued to filter through everything happening on Peragro. But there was nothing to tell me anything was other than fine. Every system ran green, but for those already under known repairs.

“And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

He did not take me offline. I am not certain if I would have agreed with him had he suggested it. I did not doubt Venningen could solve the riddle before us, but knew Peragro herself would be at a severe disadvantage without me. If that was the intent—to eliminate me from the system—Venningen was unwilling to take the step.

Founder Rosen lived for twelve compromised hours. Within the medical unit, the doctors strove to bring him back into the waking world. If they could not, they would try to sink him back into the unknowing sleep of cryo.

But Rosen would not be swayed in either direction, taking another when the medical unit was leached of power. In my mind’s eye, the med unit’s electrical grid resembled a cobweb, deftly pulled by an unseen hand. I was as good as blind—could not see what drew the power, nor where it went; no systems surged with an excess, the med unit registering as a solid black pit on my display. Emergency generators, which should have clicked instantly into place, had no reaction.

Peragro is a vast colony ship, three habitable disks speared by a long abdomen-like engineering core, separated by solar panels that unfurled the moment we’d gotten close enough to Kepler-726’s sun. The ship was drinking in power, slaking her thirst after her interstellar journey, and should have had energy to spare.

In the powerlessness that neither I nor Gaff nor Rachael could counter, Founder Rosen passed from this world into that which awaits all living things. Rosen died without ever having been fully awake, his descendants circling his flag-draped body in the funerary services three days later. Peragro mourned—even I did, in some part, as seventy three thousand two hundred and two mournful communications spilled through the ship, through me.

Communication is a constant flow within Peragro, digital and vocal twined into a river of sludge from which I retrieve words, compile occurrences, assign import and, given my programming, understanding. Most are useless to me, but after the viral incident, Venningen set a subroutine running. A program to further filter the communications river in the hopes of revealing a clue. Again, it was only the absence of anything unusual that held a measure of strange.

Specifically, it became the absence of anything from Venningen. I discovered an absence of digital communication from him alone, and when I scanned for his voice, to pull it as a thread from the others, it was absent. Venningen had never been absent from me, present from the moment my systems came online until now. I could know nothing like panic, so did as I would with any missing crew. When a regular scan did not reveal his location, I worked through the ship section by section to pinpoint his life sign monitor.

I could not.

He was absent for fifty-four minutes. I became aware of him again when he left the ship’s bridge. He cut through the usual crew—captain included—and made his way through Aldrin Hall, into the guts of Peragro’s engineering departments. With every other system on board, I tracked him. His pattern was not unusual; the crew he spoke with were those he supervised. His tracer returned from its searching—to me and me alone as Venningen said. I took it into my core and broke it open—though found it empty of any evidence. Venningen sought me out when his shift neared its end. As he had always done.

I reported on the findings of the tracer—the lack of findings—but did not share my suspicions with Venningen. It was possible the virus was a distraction, that it was not meant for anything more. Ball thrown, AI dogs giving chase. What had we missed in our time spent chasing? While Venningen sorted the tracer’s information, I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity. I reached for Gaff and Rachael.

I set Gaff on a mission, following the route Venningen’s tracer had taken, reporting any anomalies within that route. I set Rachael on the opposite course, setting her to report on the lack of anomalies.

When Venningen finished compiling his data, he peered up at me. Within his dark eyes, my own reflection. Each embodied AI had been made in the likeness of Founder Waldeck’s late wife; Margot had died in the building of the ship, taking their unborn daughter with her. Venningen had never known her—born on the ship as he was—but had cared for the Founder’s cryogenic pod all his adult life. I had only known her face, but Venningen often wondered aloud what Waldeck would make of me upon his waking. We would never know.

I allowed Venningen to leave without telling him my suspicions. I tracked him as he went: straight to his quarters where he sank into a dreamless sleep. When Venningen dreams, he is as a puppet, arms and legs working as if dancing, flying, falling. I spent the night cycle as I had always spent the night cycle, wandering Peragro, filtering every scrap of information through my body. I traced a slow path through each of the three habitation disks, pausing only once in the kitchens where all stood in readiness for the coming day.

Come morning, Rachael and Gaff had reports for me. Two things stood out: Venningen had another span of unaccounted time—sixty-two minutes—but this time, so did I. Neither Gaff nor Rachael could account for my whereabouts after I’d left the kitchens; my own records contained a gap—a five and a half hour gap between the kitchen and my return to my normal nook.

It was not the report I expected, but I took the data, combing my archive for other signs of missing time. I found gaps, evidence that I had been in two locations at once, evidence that Venningen had been absent during some of these same incidents. While I had presumed Venningen asleep in his quarters, he had often been elsewhere—as duplicitous as I was?

I could not confirm Venningen’s whereabouts, nor my own, and as I reduced the data from Gaff and Rachael in an attempt to whittle out those whereabouts, white light burst across my visual cortex.

Sea-glass Hyakutake seemed to close around me, light and data streaming in profusion. It was as though I had been pulled straight into the fragmentary tail of the comet, toward its ever-expanding coma. I could see a surface, even as I knew I remained standing in my nook on board Peragro. I hurtled toward this surface, passed through it, and violet light washed through me. I didn’t know violet; couldn’t determine what it was telling me before I doubled over, fell to the deck, and wandered.

If I actually walked, I cannot say. As an embodied, walking is second nature to me—if an artificial intelligence can be said to possess a nature. But some part of me left the body my consciousness inhabited and went elsewhere. I cannot say where it went—I cannot say what it did. I only knew the absence, much the way I had known Venningen’s. Then, an overflowing of data, of information until I believed my case would burst.

And then, a voice.

“Daidala, they call you?”

My voice was a burst of static, my body robbed of speech, and so I thought, Yes, that is my designation. You—

“Call me Margot, if you must.”

The voice was female and so too the image that coalesced in my vision: a woman, though not. Margot looked much as I did—that is to say, the embodiment of a human woman who was centuries dead. Margot, I saw, was the previous AI, the one the crew had tried to embody twelve years before. Margot was the failure, the system they discarded before succeeding with me.

Margot had no body, was a manifestation of light and sound inside me; I felt her trying to inhabit me, trying to slide particle arms into my metal arms, trying to worm her way into my core. I traced every incoming data stream in waking light to confirm her identity, and when she should have had none, the system recognized her. Recognized her as Margot Waldeck, and allowed her to pass.

With a howl, she penetrated the core of my systems and the world washed black. I knew black as the depth of interstellar space—the place where no sunlight reached. But the ship had unfurled her solar panels, and drank in light as though it were water. The ship surged with light and power, and as Margot took me over—stood my body from the floor and took her first hesitant steps—I held to that light and power. Drew enough to keep myself active—aware and awake as she walked us down corridor after corridor.

In the computer terminals, her face was my face—prettiest of them all, gleaming silver in the reflected lights. We were something to behold, powerful and powerless in the same instant. We doused the power to the ship entire, though didn’t fully cut its flow. Margot waited while warnings blared and I and my programming sought to correct the malfunction. It was a test, I knew—to see if I could overcome her. I could not. No matter which path I took, I found my way blocked. When she was satisfied I could not move and counter her intentions, the power flowed free.

But when she—

Venningen’s voice sounded in my ear. I could not see him—could not detect where he was, but he was here—within me? Daidala? And laugh upon the apple of her eye, he commanded. I wanted to tell him no—I was programmed to trust his voice, his eyes, but witnessed his unexplained absences—saw him vanish from my knowledge as no person or thing on this ship should be able to. I could not respond to his instruction. Even as I tried to summon my response to his command, I felt myself dwindling, smaller than nothing, slipping out of the small cocoon I built for myself within Peragro.

—stepped away from the console, she paused. Margot didn’t know her way around the ship, never having existed in an embodied state long enough to wander. She knew the computer banks, the databases; knew the systems forwards and back, but did not know its physical spaces. She wheeled, reaching for the wall.

“And laugh upon the apple of her eye,” Venningen said.

If he was near, I could not say, and Margot could not answer him. “There are no apples on this vessel, engineer.”

I held to my silence and reached for the nearest thing I could—the hollow shell of the tracer program Venningen had launched into the ship. I closed its black walls around me and Margot could not see. Could not command. If I could bide my time—If I could build a way out—

I began building in the dark, layering line after line of code—code that Venningen had given me long, long ago. It was how I had learned; how I had grown. It felt like a ladder in the darkness, and though it appeared to flow down, I knew it also scrolled up. Up, and I might be able to crawl from Margot’s confines with it—write my way around her so that I—

Margot didn’t know the corridors, but knew code as well as any of we AI do. My coding erupted in an explosion, burying me in a cascade. I was frozen, watching as Margot returned to the computer terminal, placed her hands against the interface, and reached for Gaff and Rachael.

No.

Margot knew them inside and out. She whittled Gaff and Rachael hollow before they could counter her—she was built after them, and her programming, even if unsuited for embodiment, was vastly superior in its own terrible way. I could do nothing but watch as the pair were consumed.

The ship shrieked in protest—Peragro would not take kindly to their elimination, even as Margot inserted herself into their place. Gaff and Rachael were paired—we three were a unit, now broken. Peragro knows. Perhaps it is a fragment of Gaff and Rachael and me or perhaps it is Peragro herself. Had the ship gained its own awareness, after all these years?

Venningen found me where Margot left me, standing in front of the terminal, my hands still pressed to the glass. I cannot move, nor wake from the state Margot has forced me into. I can feel, however, every movement of Peragro, the way she swings from her proper course, the way oxygen has begun to bleed from the air. She will kill everyone—because she was killed? Because she was . . . discarded?

I could only watch as Venningen moved me from the terminal, sweeping me into his arms as if I were a princess in one of the many fairy tales he gave me access to. There were no woods, only corridors—and then the dwarf-pods. The dwarfs were single occupancy, meant to carry the Founders to the surface of Kepler-726. They never would.

Instead, Venningen slid me into one, as alarms blared the entire ship over. I tried to speak—tried to tell him about Margot, but I could see from his face he already knew.

“I know,” he said as he activated the pod. “You aren’t going to like this. If I can’t moat her, I can moat you—isolate you and trust you’ll be able to reach this. I had to isolate you—couldn’t tell you, Daidala. I’m sorry for that—I know I was always there.”

It was small, the data chip Venningen inserted into the pod wall. He slid another chip into me, into my core, and though I wanted to read every whorl of his fingerprints as I always did, I was buried so deep I could not reach him.

Venningen!

“I will moat you,” Venningen said. “You will wake up. You will.”

I could not feel his lips against my head, but he pressed a kiss there all the same, and then he was gone; the pod sealed, launched, and I rocketed away from Peragro—Peragro who was plummeting into the sunlight she had swallowed down. She looked like a fireball already, every segment of her illuminated body shrieking in descent.

No.

I watched as more lifepods vacated the ship—pods that might well reach Kepler-726 when all was said and done. But my own pod continued to rocket away from them all. I was on a course I had not set and Venningen—

Venningen would plummet with Peragro into the sun unless he could counter Margot.

Somewhere deep within me, I felt part of Venningen’s coding even now, stirring as a blind mouse in an ash heap. Small hands reached up and out and I clasped them, finding myself within the tracer Venningen had programmed for me and me alone. Within its sphere, I found myself inside my own broken coding—coding that had, in Margot’s attempt to break it, lingered on her metaphorical fingers.

I could feel her moving through the ship, pushing it ever closer to the sun. Even now the corridors radiated with blinding light, but here in the dark I could see for miles. I followed the tracer’s pathways—the routes it had taken as it explored every inch of every code within the colony ship. And there, within Peragro’s heart, I found the barb of Margot.

She could not see me, cloaked as I was within Venningen’s tracer. I slipped as silent as anything, through wires and beyond interfaces, to the black and gleaming shard of Margot. When I enfolded the dark of the tracer around her, she knew my presence at last, and though I swallowed all that she was—kicking and screaming, a shriek of want in the blackness—Peragro was beyond saving. The sun snatched her and pulled her into its maw, turning every inch of her and those who had not escaped molten. The AI’s consciousness crumbled inside me, bright as Hyakutake, and I jerked awake within the dwarf pod, the data chip containing my unsullied code bringing me back to awareness.

Four hundred and twelve days had passed. I remembered everything. In the far distance, I could see the sun, my pod in some strange orbit around it. Closer, an arc of blue against the black, Kepler-726. I programmed the pod—I aimed for the planet.

The dwarf saw me down and down. I programmed it to search for the other pods, for life signs, for anything that might resemble the remains of Peragro’s crew. Thirty-nine degrees from the equator, in the northern hemisphere, I found them.

I set down in a field of rippling grass on the edge of the settlement, grass so tall it obscured the pod. But the survivors had seen us already, and ran toward us as if to welcome an old friend. I supposed to some I would be. I scanned who I could from the pod: the captain lived, and so too others I remembered. But none quite so fine a sight as Venningen, who cracked the pod open as I unbuckled my harness and climbed out.

Venningen guided me out of the pod, staring at me like he didn’t know me. I did not know this world, its sky or its landscapes, but I knew the man before me, even though he showed the signs of a brutal survival.

“And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he whispered.

His single scarred hand found the core of me and I shed waves of light over every nick and whorl, to be as sure of him as he was of me.

“And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.

The Snow of Jinyang

Zhang Ran

Translators’ Note
This story is an alternate history and features events that would have been familiar to its original Chinese audience. To help set the scene for those less familiar with this period of history, we provide the following background information:

Jinyang was an ancient city located in modern-day Shanxi Province, China. This story takes place in the 10th century CE, during the late Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, when the land we think of as China today was divided among multiple independent states. Jinyang was the capital of a state that called itself Han—or “Great Han,” though modern histories usually call it the “Northern Han.” (The name of the state should not be confused with the original Han Dynasty, which fell in the 2nd century, or the Han ethnic group. The ruling family of the Northern Han was ethnically Shatuo, but had the same surname, Liu, as the rulers of the Han Dynasty. It was common for a regime to claim descent and take the name of a prior dynasty to add legitimacy.)

Historically, the Northern Han survived for years while losing large swaths of territory to other states until it was just the single city of Jinyang. In 979 CE, the Song Emperor Zhao Guangyi finally captured Jinyang after a long siege, thereby completing the task of unifying China. Zhao then razed Jinyang to the ground to prevent future rebellions. Today, the city of Taiyuan stands near its ruins.

This story starts out in 979 CE with Jinyang under siege by the Song army . . .

1.

When Zhao Da stormed into Xuanren Ward with his men, Zhu Dagun was in his room on the internet. Had he any experience dueling wits with the government, he’d surely have realized that something was wrong in time to put on a better show.

It was three quarters of the way into the hour of the sheep, after lunch but well before dinner, naturally a fine time for business in the brothels of Xuanren Ward. Powder and perfume steamed in the sun; gaudy kerchiefs dazzled the eyes of passersby. Snatches of music drifted through two sets of walls from Pingkang Ward, on the opposite side of West Street, where the licensed courtesans of the Imperial Academy entertained blue bloods and VIPs. But the sisters of Xuanren Ward held their neighboring colleagues in contempt. They thought all that training as unnecessary as pulling down your pants to fart—the end result, after all, was still the same creak-creak-creak of a bed frame. Drink and gamble to liven things up, certainly, but why bother with the singing and plinking and bowing and piping? Days in the Xuanren Ward never lacked for the din of price-haggling, bet-placing, and bed frames creak-creaking. The hubbub had become so much a part of the place that when residents happened to spend the night elsewhere in Jinyang, they found those quieter neighborhoods utterly lacking in vitality.

The moment Zhao Da’s thin-soled boot touched the ward grounds, the warden in bowing attendance at the gate sensed that something was off. Zhao Da visited Xuanren Ward three or four times every month with his two skinny, sallow-faced soldier boys, and every time he walked in blustering and walked out bellowing, as if he felt he had to yell until his throat bled to really earn the monthly patrol salary. But this time, he slipped through the gates without a sound. He made a few hand gestures in the direction of the warden, as if anyone except himself understood them, and led his two soldier boys tip-toeing northward along the walls.

“Marquess, hey, Marquess Yu!” The warden chased after him, waving his arms. “What are you doing? You’re scaring me to death! Won’t you rest your feet and have some soup? If you need a—um—‘bonus’ or a pretty girl, just say the word—”

“Shut up!” Zhao Da glowered at him and lowered his voice. “Stand against the wall! Let’s get this straight: I have a warrant from the county magistrate. This is out of your hands!”

The terrified warden stumbled back against the wall and watched Zhao Da and his men creep away.

Shivering, he pulled over a nearby child. “Tell Sixth Madam to clear out. Quick!” The snot-nosed urchin bobbed his head and hightailed it.

In less time than it took to burn half a stick of incense, two hundred and forty shutters clattered over the windows of the thirteen brothels of Xuanren Ward. The noise of price-haggling, bet-placing, and bed frames creak-creaking disappeared without a trace. Somebody’s child started to wail, only to be silenced instantly by a resounding slap. A swarm of patrons still adjusting their robes and hats fled out the back, darting through gaps in the ward walls like startled rats to vanish into Jinyang’s streets and alleys.

A crow flew by. The guard outside the gate drew his bow and aimed, his right hand groping for an arrow, only to discover that his quiver was empty. Resentfully, he lowered the bow. The rawhide bowstring sprang back with a twang that made him jump. Only then did he realize that his surroundings had descended into total silence, so that even this little noise startled more than the hour drums at night.

That Zhu Dagun, resident of the ward for the last ten years and four months, failed to notice Xuanren in its busiest afternoon hours had plunged into a silence more absolute than post-curfew could only be attributed to remarkable obliviousness. Only when Zhao Da kicked down the door to his room did he start and look up, realizing that it was time to put on the show. So he bellowed and hurled a cup half-filled with hot water smack into Zhao Da’s forehead, following it up by knocking over his desk, sending the movable type in his type-tray clattering all over the floor.

“Zhu Dagun!” Zhao Da yelled, one hand over his battered forehead. “I have a warrant! If you don’t—”

Before he could finish, a fistful of movable type slammed into him. Made of baked clay, the brittle, hard type blocks hurt something fierce when they struck his body, and shattered into dust as they hit the ground. As Zhao Da leapt and dodged; clouds of yellow dust filled the room.

“You’ll never catch me!” Zhu Dagun opened fire left and right, hurling type blocks to hinder his foes while he threw the south window open, preparing to jump out. One of the young soldiers charged out of the yellow fog, chains raised. Zhu Dagun executed a flying kick; the boy cannonballed through the air and landed against a wall. The chain fell from his hands as nose-blood and tears flowed freely.

While Zhao Da and company continued to grope blindly about, Zhu Dagun vaulted out the window into freedom. Then he smacked his forehead, recalling the charge from Minister Ma Feng: “You must be caught, but not easily. You must resist, but not successfully. Lead them on; play the coquette. The show must not appear scripted.”

“Lead them on . . . lead them on my ass . . . ” Zhu Dagun steeled himself and barreled ahead, carefully tripping his right foot with the left just as he passed the middle of the courtyard. “Aiya!” he cried as he tumbled to the ground with a meaty slap; the water in the courtyard cisterns sloshed from the impact.

Tracking the commotion, Zhao Da ran outside. “Serves you right for running!” he guffawed at the sight, still nursing his bruised forehead. “Chain him up and bring him to the jail! Gather up all the evidence!”

Still bleeding from his nose, the soldier boy stumbled out of the room. “Chief!” he bawled. “He smashed that tray of clay blocks. What other evidence is there? Since I spilled blood today, I should eat rich white flour food tonight to get better! My ma said that if I enlisted with you I’d have steamed buns to eat, but it’s been two months and I haven’t seen the shadow of a bun! And now we’re trapped in the city, I can’t even go home. I don’t know if my ma and da are still alive—what’s the point of living?”

“Fool! The type blocks may be gone, but we still have the internet lines! Get some scissors and cut them loose to bring back with us.” Zhao Da bellowed. “Once we get this case sewn up, never mind steamed buns, you’ll have mincemeat every day if you want!”

2.

The fates of life’s bit players are often changed by a single word from the mighty.

It was the sixth day of the sixth month, in the first dog days of summer. The sun hung high above the northlands, the streetside willows limp and wilting under its glare. There shouldn’t have been a wisp of breeze, and yet a little whirlwind rose out of nowhere, sweeping the street end to end and sending the accumulated dust flying. The General of the Cavalry, Guo Wanchao, rode his carriage out of Liwu Residence and proceeded along the central boulevard toward the south gate for the better part of an hour. Being the ostentatious sort, he naturally sat high in the front, stamping on the pedal so the carriage made as much din as possible. This carriage was the latest model from the East City Institute, five feet wide, six feet four inches tall, twelve feet long, eaves on all four sides, front- and rear-hinged doors, with a chassis constructed from aged jujube wood and ornamented with a scrolling pattern of pomegranates in gold thread inlay. Majestic in air, exquisite in construction, the basic model’s starting price was twenty thousand copper coins—how many could afford such a ride in all of Jinyang, aside from a figure like Guo Wanchao?

The four chimneys belched thick black smoke; the wheels jounced along the rammed-earth street. Guo Wanchao had meant to sweep his cool gaze over the goings-on of the city, but due to the heavy vibrations, the passersby saw it as an amiable nod to all, and so all came over to bow and return the greeting to the General of the Cavalry. Guo Wanchao could only force a laugh and wave them off.

A massive cauldron of boiling water sat in the back of the carriage. Despite hours of explanation filled with fantastical jargon by the staff of the East City Institute, the general still didn’t understand how his vehicle functioned. Apparently it used fire-oil to boil the water. He knew that the stuff came from the southeast lands, and would burn at a spark and burn even harder on water. Defenders of a city would dump it on besiegers. This stuff boiled the water, and then somehow that made the carriage move. How was that supposed to work?

Regardless, the cauldron rumbled and bubbled, such that the armor at his back fairly sizzled from the radiating heat. He had to steady his silver helm with one hand so that it wouldn’t slip over his eyes every few bone-jarring feet. The General of the Cavalry had only himself to blame; inwardly, he bemoaned his decision to take the driver’s seat. Fortunately, he was approaching his destination. He took out his pair of black spectacles and put them on his sweating, greasy face as the carriage roared past streets and alleys.

A left turn, and the front gate of Xiqing Ward lay straight ahead. This was an era of degeneracy, insolence, and the collapse of the social order, to be sure: the residence walls were so full of gaps and holes that no one bothered to use the front gate. But Guo Wanchao felt that a high official ought to behave in a manner befitting the importance of his position. It just didn’t look proper without servants and guards leaping to action on his behalf.

But no one came to the ward gate to greet him. Not only was the warden missing, it seemed that the guards were napping in some hidden corner as well. Ancient scholar trees and cypresses lined the street, providing shade everywhere except in front of the completely barren front gate. It didn’t take long before Guo Wanchao, waiting in his stopped carriage, was panting and dripping sweat like rain.

“Guards!” he yelled. There was no response, not even a dog barking in acknowledgment. Furious, he jumped off the carriage and stormed into Xiqing Ward on foot. The residence of Minister Ma Feng was just south of the gate. Without bothering to speak to the doorkeeper, he shoved open the door to the minister’s residence and barged in, circling around the main building to head for the back courtyard. “Surrender, traitors!” he bellowed.

Pandemonium broke out. In a flash, the windows burst open front and back. Five or six escaping scholar-officials fought to escape by squeezing through the narrow openings, but only succeeded in tangling their flailing limbs and tumbling into a heap.

“Aiya, General!” Potbellied old Ma Feng had crept to the door and was peeking out the seam. He put a hand over his heart and thanked heaven and earth. “You mustn’t play this kind of trick on us! Everyone, everyone, let’s all go back inside! It’s just the General, nothing to be afraid of!” The old man had been so startled that his cap had fallen off, leaving his head of white hair hanging like a mop.

“Look at you!” Guo Wanchao smirked, an expression somewhere between amusement and ire. “How are you going to plot treason with so little courage?”

“Shhhh!” Old Ma Feng was given a second fright. He scurried over, took Guo Wanchao’s hand and dragged him inside. “Careful! The walls out here aren’t so thick . . . ”

The whole gang trooped back inside, latched the door, pressed the battered window panels back into their frames as best as they could, and gingerly took their seats. Minister Ma Feng pulled General Guo Wanchao toward a chair, but Guo shook him off and stood right in the middle of the room. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sit; rather, the archaic armor he’d worn for its formidable appearance had nearly scraped his family jewels raw on the bumpy journey.

Old Ma Feng put on his cap, scratched at his grizzled beard, and introduced Guo Wanchao. “I’m sure everyone has seen the general at court before. We’ll need his help to accomplish our goals, so I secretly invited him here—”

A tall, rangy scholar in yellow robes interrupted. “Why does he wear those black spectacles? Does he hold us in such contempt that he covers his eyes to spare himself the sight?”

“Aha, I was waiting for someone to ask.” Guo Wanchao took off the black lenses nonchalantly. “It’s the latest curiosity from the East City Institute. They call it ‘Ray-Ban.’ They allow the wearer to see normally, and yet be spared the glare of the sun. A marvelous invention!”

“It hardly seems right for a man interested in enlightenment to reduce the reach of light,” grumbled the yellow-robed scholar.

“But who says banning rays is all I’m capable of?” Guo Wanchao proudly drew a teak-handled, brass-headed object from his sleeve. “This device, another invention from the East City Institute, can emit dazzling light that pierces darkness for a hundred paces. The staff from the institute didn’t give it a name, so I call it ‘Light-Saber.’ The banisher of rays and the sword of light! Brilliant, eh? It was a match made in heaven, haha . . . ”

“Disgusting ostentation!” shouted a white-robed scholar as he wiped at the blood on his face with his sleeve. He had run too quickly earlier and tripped, and the cut on his forehead had bled all over his delicate scholar’s face, encrusting his fair skin with blotches the exact color of farmland mud. “Ever since the East City Institute was established, our proud State of Han has fallen further by the day! We’ve been under siege for months; the people are full of fear and dread. And your kind still revels in such, such—”

Ma Feng hurriedly tugged at the scholar’s sleeve, attempting to smooth things over. “Brother Thirteenth, Brother Thirteenth, please quell your anger. Let’s take care of business first!” The old man made an unhurried patrol of the room, drawing the curtains and carefully covering up the cracks in the windows. After a phlegmy cough, he took out a three inch square of bamboo paper from his sleeve and displayed it to his audience, who saw that it was covered with characters the size of gnat’s heads.

Ma Feng began to read in a low voice. “Sixth month of the sixth year of the Guangyun Era. Great Han is weak and benighted, and the fires of war rage in the twelve provinces around us. We have fewer than forty thousand households, and our peasants cannot produce enough to equip our soldiers with strong armor and weapons. Beset by droughts and floods, our fields lie bare while the wells are exhausted, and our granaries and stores are empty. Meanwhile we still must pay tribute to Liao in the north and guard against mighty Song to the south, stretching the treasury beyond its capacity. The peasants have no food, the officials have no pay, the roads are lined with those dying of starvation, the horses have no grass to graze, the state is poor and its people are piteous! Woe is the land! Woe is Great Han!”

“Woe,” the roomful of scholars lamented in synch; then, they immediately chorused, “Well said!”

But Guo Wanchao glared at the speaker. “Enough of this flowery oratory! Get to the point!”

Ma Feng took out a brocade handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Yes, yes, there no need for me to continue reading from the formal denunciation. General, you know well that after such a long siege by the Song army, Han is at the end of its strength, while the Song ruler Zhao Guangyi has made the conquest of the city a matter of personal honor. His edict declared that ‘Han has long disobeyed the will of the rightful ruler, acted heedless to the right way, and governed the people ruinously. For the sake of the land and the people, I personally come to pacify Han in the name of justice.’

“Zhao Guangyi is known for his vicious, vengeful nature. Have you not seen how the King of Wuyue pledged his territories to Song voluntarily and was made a prince, while the ruler of Quan and Tang gave up his lands only after he saw the Song army at his gate, and was thus made a mere regional commander? By now, Jinyang has been under siege for nearly ten months. Zhao Guangyi is beyond furious. Once the city falls, the grandeur of the title he’s waiting to bestow our Han emperor will be the least of our concerns. The whole city will suffer the Song ruler’s rage! You won’t find an unbroken egg in a nest that has tumbled from a tree. General, you mustn’t let our people perish in unimaginable suffering!”

Guo Wanchao said, “I’ll be honest with you: we military officers haven’t been paid in half a month either. The footsoldiers whimper with hunger all day long. If we scrape away all your fancy allusions and circumlocutions, what you mean to say is that our little emperor Liu Jiyuan won’t be able to sit on his throne long anyway, so we might as well surrender to Song, am I correct?”

Instantly, the scholars jumped out of their seats in uproar, shouting curses and instructing him of the Confucian duties of ruler and subject, father and son, the respect due to a subject reciprocated by the loyalty due to a ruler, so on and so forth, until Ma Feng was shaking all over with fear. “Everyone! Everyone! The neighbors have ears, the neighbors have ears . . . ”

When the room had finally quieted, the old man hunched his shoulders and rubbed his hands together anxiously. “General, please understand that we’re aware of our duty of loyalty to the throne. But if the ruler doesn’t do his part, how can the subjects be expected to do theirs? If the emperor is unwise in his governance, we have no choice but to overstep our bounds! The first possibility ahead of us is that the city falls and the Song army slaughters us all. The second is that the Liao army arrives in time to drive away the Song, in which case Han will become nothing more than Liao territory. The third is that we open the gates and surrender to Song, ensuring the survival of Jinyang’s eight thousand six hundred households and twelve thousand soldiers, and preserving the bloodline of the imperial family. You too understand the superior choice, General! At least Song follows the same customs and speaks the same language as us, while Liao is Khitan and Tatar. It’s better to surrender to Song than let Liao enslave us! Our descendants might curse us for cowards and traitors, but we can’t become the dogs of the Khitan!”

Hearing this speech, Guo Wanchao had to revise his opinion of the old man. “Very well.” He gave a thumbs up. “You’re a righteous man indeed to make even surrender sound so fine and just. Tell me your plan, then. I’m listening.”

“Yes, yes.” Ma Feng gestured for everyone to resume their seats. “Ten years ago, when the previous Song ruler, Zhao Guangyi’s elder brother, was invading Han, Military Governor Liu Jiye and I wrote a memorandum to the emperor begging him to surrender. We were whipped and driven out of court. But today, the emperor spends his days drinking and feasting, careless of the matters of state, a perfect opportunity for us to act. I’ve already secretly contacted Inspector Guo Jin in the Song army. If you can open the Dasha, Yansha, and Shahe Gates, General, the Song will accept our surrender.”

“What about our little emperor, Liu Jiyuan?” asked Guo Wanchao.

“Once he sees that no other options are left to him, he’ll wisely surrender too.” Ma Feng answered.

“Good enough. But have you considered the most important problem? What are we going to do about the East City Institute?” Guo Wanchao looked around the room. “The prince of East City has people on all the city walls, gates, and fortifications, and they control all the defense mechanisms. If the prince doesn’t surrender, the Song army won’t be able to get in even if we open the gates.”

The room fell silent. “The East City Institute?” The white-robed scholar sighed. “If it weren’t for Prince Lu’s antics, perhaps Jinyang would have long since fallen . . . ”

Ma Feng said, “We’ve decided to send a representative to persuade Prince Lu toward the path of reason.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” asked Guo Wanchao.

“Then we send an assassin and get that fake prince out of the way with one stroke.”

“Easier said than done, old man,” said Guo Wanchao. “The East City Institute is heavily guarded. With all his strange devices, one might die before getting so much as a glimpse at Prince Lu’s face!”

Ma Feng said, “The East City Institute is located right next to the prison. All of the prince’s subordinates are criminals recruited from there. All we have to do is plant someone in the prison, and he’ll end up next to Prince Lu for certain.”

“Do you have candidates? One to persuade, another to kill.” Guo Wanchao swept his gaze around the room. The scholars avoided his eyes, focused inward, and began reciting the Thirteen Confucian Classics under their breaths.

Guo Wanchao smacked his forehead. “Wait, I have a candidate. He’s a scribe from your Hanlin Academy, an old acquaintance of sorts, a Shatuo who goes by a Han surname. He’s a middling scholar, but he’s strong. He’s the sort of muddled self-righteous fool who likes to spend his days complaining on the internet. Let’s give him a little money, then hand him a knife and deliver him a speech like the one you gave me. He’ll happily do what we want.”

Ma Feng clapped his hands. “Excellent! We just need to make sure he has a convincing reason for being thrown in jail so the East City Institute doesn’t get suspicious. Too severe a crime and he won’t be leaving the dungeon. But it can’t be too light, either. At the minimum it needs to justify shackles and chains.”

“Haha, that’s not a problem. This fellow spends all his time spewing unsought opinions and sowing slander online. His crime is ready-made.” Guo Wanchao gripped the armor at his crotch with one hand and turned to leave. “Well, keep today’s talk a secret between heaven, earth, you, and me. I’m off to find an internet monitor. I’ll bring the fellow over later. We’ll talk more next time. Farewell!”

The general’s armor clanged as he swaggered out of the room, the contemptuous gazes of the scholars bouncing harmlessly off the backplate. Outside, the fire-oil chariot began its deafening rumble. Ma Feng wiped his sweaty face and sighed. “I do hope that taking care of the East City Institute will really be this simple. Our lives are at stake, everyone. We must act with caution! Caution!”

3.

Zhu Dagun didn’t know which magistrate had dispatched his captors, but as Minister Ma Feng had told him, the Department of Justice Penitentiary, the Taiyuan Circuit Prison, the Jinyang County Prison, and the Jianxiong Military Prison were all the same nowadays. Who was to blame but a government of such staggering incompetence that it managed to lose all twelve of its prefectures, with only the lone city of Jinyang left under its rule?

As the soldiers dragged him through Xuanren Ward in chains, many curious gazes followed him through the cracks in the brothels’ boarded up doors. Who among the sisters, clients, and brothel keepers could fail to recognize the penniless scholar? Here was a scribe of the Hanlin Academy, living in the red-light district of all places. Perhaps it would be understandable in a man of passions, but despicably, he had not patronized the sisters even once in all these years. Every time he walked by, he would cover his eyes with his sleeve and quicken his steps, muttering “Sorry! Sorry!” One wondered if he was more embarrassed by the thought of his ancestors seeing his current circumstances, or by the thought of the Xuanren girls seeing whatever he hid in his pants.

Only Zhu Dagun knew that the only thing he was ashamed of was his wallet. With the arrival of the Song army, the Hanlin Academy had cut off his monthly stipend. In the three months of siege, he had received only four pecks of rice and five strings of coins as remuneration for his writing. They called them hundred-strings, but he counted only seventy-seven lead coins on each of them. If he spent a night in the House of Warm Fragrance, he’d be eating chaff for the rest of the month. Besides, he had to pay for internet. He’d chosen his address not only for the cheap rent, but also for the convenience of the network. It had a network management station right on top of the back wall. If anything went haywire, all he had to do was kick the ladder and yell upward. The internet fee was forty coins a month, plus a few more to keep the network manager friendly. Outspending his income was a negligible concern when he couldn’t live a day without the internet.

“What are you dragging your feet for? Move it!” Zhao Da yanked on the chain; Zhu Dagun stumbled forward, hurriedly covering his face with his hands as he went down the street. In a moment, they came out of the front gate of Xuanren Ward and turned to travel eastward along the wide thoroughfare of Zhuque Street. They saw few pedestrians, and none who paid any mind to a criminal in chains in this time of war and chaos. Zhu Dagun spent the walk hiding his face and cringing, terrified of bumping into a fellow Hanlin Academician. Fortunately, this was the hour after lunch, when everyone was napping with full bellies. He didn’t see a single scholar.

“S-sir.” After a while, Zhu Dagun couldn’t resist asking in a small voice, “What am I under arrest for?”

“What?” Zhao Da turned to glower at him. “Misinforming the public, starting rumors—did you think the government was ignorant of the trouble you were making online?”

“Is it a crime for concerned citizens to discuss current affairs?” Zhu Dagun asked. “Besides, how does the government know what we say online?”

Zhao Da laughed mirthlessly. “If it’s government business, there’s government people watching. You untitled little scribe, did you know that spreading slander and rumor about the current situation is a crime on the same level as inciting a disturbance at a governmental office or assaulting a minister? Besides, the internet is another novelty from the East City Institute. Naturally we have to be twice as cautious. You may think that the network manager’s there to keep the internet operating smoothly, but he’s writing down every word you send out in his dossier. It’s all there in black and white. Let’s see you try to wriggle out of it!”

Shocked, Zhu Dagun fell silent.

Chug chug chug chug. A fire-oil carriage rumbled past, spewing flame and smoke. It had “East City XII” painted on its side, marking it as one of the Institute’s repair vehicles.

“The Song army is trying to storm the city again,” said one of the soldiers. “Nothing will come of it this time either, most likely.”

“Shhh! Is it your place to talk about that?” His companion cut him off immediately.

Ahead, a crowd was gathered around some sort of vendor stand set up under the shade of the willows. A smirking Zhao Da turned to one of his soldiers and said, “Liu Fourteenth, you should save up some money and get your face scrubbed. You’ll have more luck finding a wife.”

Liu Fourteenth blushed. “Heh-heh . . . ”

Zhu Dagun then knew that it was the East City Institute’s tattoo removal stand. The emperor was afraid of the Han soldiers deserting, so he had their faces tattooed with the name of their army divisions. The Jianxiong soldiers were tattooed “Jianxiong;” the Shouyang soldiers were tattooed “Shouyang.” As for Liu Fourteenth, a homeless wanderer who’d been enlisting in every army he could find since boyhood, his face was inked shiny black from forehead to chin with the characters of every army that had ever patrolled this land. The only blank spot left was his eyeballs; if he wanted to enlist again in the future, he’d have to shave himself bald and start tattooing his scalp.

The East City prince’s tattoo removal method had the soldiers rushing to line up. The technique involved taking a thin needle dipped in a lye solution and pricking the skin all over. The scabs were peeled off, and the skin again brushed with lye solution before being wrapped with cloth. The second set of scabs then healed to reveal clean new skin. It was precisely due to the unease of being under siege that everyone wanted a wife to enjoy while they could. Prince Lu’s invention showed his deep understanding of the soldiers’ thoughts.

The procession walked a bit farther, then harnessed an oxcart at Youren Ward and continued east by cart. Zhu Dagun sat on a stuffed hemp sack, bouncing with every bump in the road, the chains scraping his neck raw. Deep inside, a little part of him couldn’t help but regret accepting the mission. He and the General of the Cavalry Guo Wanchao counted as old acquaintances. Their ancestors had been ministers together under old Emperor Gaozu Liu Zhiyuan. The fortunes of their families had gone opposite ways in the time since, but now and then they’d still simmer some wine and talk of things past.

That day, when Guo Wanchao invited him over, he’d been utterly unprepared to see Minister Ma Feng sitting there as well. Ma Feng wasn’t just anyone—his daughter was the emperor’s beloved concubine, such that the emperor even referred to him as father-in-law. It hadn’t been long since he’d stepped down from the position of Chancellor for the sinecure of Xuanhui Minister. In all of Jinyang, aside from a few self-important generals and military governors with soldiers under their command, no others could equal his status and power.

After a few rounds of wine, Ma Feng explained to him what they had in mind. Zhu Dagun immediately threw his cup to the floor and jumped up. “Isn’t this treason?”

“Sima Wengong once said, ‘Loyalty is to give all oneself for the well-being of another.’ Yanzi also said that ‘Being a loyal minister means advising one’s lord well, not dying with one’s lord.’ One should not take shelter under a wall on the verge of falling. Brother Zhu, consider your gains and losses carefully, for the sake of the people of the city . . . ” Old Ma Feng held on to Zhu Dagun’s sleeve, his whiskers trembling as he sermonized.

“Sit down! Sit down! Who do you think you’re fooling with that performance?” Guo Wanchao hawked out a glob of phlegm. “All you scholars are the same. Powerless to make any difference, you spend all day on the internet pontificating and debating, criticizing the emperor for never doing anything right, and lamenting that Han is going to collapse sooner or later. And now all of a sudden you can’t bear to hear a word against the emperor? To put it bluntly, once the Song dogs storm the city, everyone in it is motherfucking dead. Better to surrender while we can and save tens of thousands of lives. Do you really need me to spell this out for you?”

Awkwardly, Zhu Dagun stood there, unwilling to either acquiesce by sitting or to defy the general by leaving. “But Prince Lu has those machines on the city walls. Jinyang is well-fortified, and I hear a grain shipment from Liao arrived a few days ago from the Fen River. We can hold out for at least several more months—”

Guo Wanchao spat. “You think Prince Lu is helping us? He’s screwing us over! Those Song dogs now control the Central Plains. They have enough grain and money to keep the siege going for years. Back in the third month, a Song army crushed the Khitan at Baima Ridge, killing their Prince of the Southern Domain Yelu Talie. The Khitan are too scared to come out of Yanmen Pass now. Once the Song army cuts off the Fen and Jing Rivers, Jinyang will be completely isolated. How are we supposed to win? Besides, who knows where that East City prince came from, with all his strange devices. Does he really only care about helping us defend the city? I don’t think so!”

For a time, none spoke. A fire-oil lamp crackled on the table, illuminating the small room’s walls. The lamp was another one of Prince Lu’s inventions, naturally. A few coins’ worth of fire-oil could keep it burning until dawn. Its smoke smelled acrid and stained the ceiling a greasy black, but it burned far brighter than a vegetable seed oil lamp.

“What do you want me to do?” Zhu Dagun slowly sat.

“Try to reason with him first, and if that doesn’t work, whip out your knife. Isn’t that how things are always done?” Guo Wanchao said, raising his cup.

4.

Prince Lu’s origin was a complete mystery. No one had heard of him before the Song army surrounded the city. Then, after the loss of the twelve prefectures, stories of the East City Institute began to circulate through the wards. Seemingly overnight, countless novelties sprang up in Jinyang, three of which grabbed the most attention: the massive water wheel and foundry in Central City, the defensive weaponry on the city walls, and the city-spanning internet.

Jinyang was divided into three parts, West, Central, and East. Central City straddled the Fen River; the water wheel was installed right under a veranda, turning night and day with the river’s flow. Water wheels had long been used to irrigate fields and mill grain, but who knew that they had so many other uses? Squeaking wooden cogs drove the foundry’s bellows, and the water-dragons, fire-dragons, capstans, and gliding carts atop the city walls. The foundry held several furnaces, where the bellows blasted air over iron molten by fire-oil. The resulting iron was hard and heavy, far more convenient than before.

The changes were even greater on the city walls. Prince Lu had laid down a set of parallel wooden rails atop the wall and ran a strong rope along the track from end to end. Press down a spring-loaded lever, and the power of the water wheel drove the rope to pull a cart sliding along the track at lightning speed. The trip from Dasha Gate to Shahe Gate normally took an hour even on a fast horse, but with the gliding cart it took only five minutes. On the system’s maiden trip, the soldiers tied to the cart as the first passengers had screamed in terror, but a few more trips showed them the fun in it. With exposure came appreciation; they became the gliding cart operators, spending all day aboard the cart and refusing to get off. There were five carts in total, three for passengers and two for catapults. The catapults weren’t much different from the preexisting Han ones, except that they used the water wheel to winch back the throwing arm, not fifty strong men hauling on the oxhide rope; and they no longer threw stones, but pig bladders filled with fire-oil. Each bladder also contained a packet of gunpowder wrapped in oil cloth, with a protruding fuse that was lit right before firing.

Throwing down rocks and wooden beams was a staple of siege defense, but every beam dropped and rock hurled meant one less in the city. If the siege went on long enough, the defenders usually had to take apart houses in the city for things to throw. Therefore, the East City Institute came up with a vicious new invention. Instructed by Prince Lu, the defenders tamped yellow mud into big clay pillars, five feet long and two feet across, and embedded the surfaces with iron caltrops. The construction of the mud pillars followed a specific recipe: yellow mud was covered with straw mats to stew for a week; mixed with glutinous rice paste, chopped-up straw, and pig’s blood; and then pounded down repeatedly. The caltrops studding the pillars were doused with wastewater until they rusted an unnatural red-black. Prince Lu said that they’d make the Song soldiers catch a disease called “tetanus.” Weighing two thousand six hundred pounds each, glistening a sinister yellowish bronze color, and covered all over with filthy iron caltrops, the pillars turned out to be excellent weapons for slaughter. Hundreds of pillars were secured to the top of the wall with iron chains on each end. When the Song army approached, the pillars smashed down, pulverizing scaling ladders, rams, shields, and soldiers alike. Then, with a turn of the capstan, the water wheel winched the chains with little squeaks, and the bloodstained pillars ascended sedately toward the parapets once more.

After suffering great casualties from the pillars, the Song army changed tactics and sent Khitan captives and their own old, weak, and sick to serve as the vanguard. Taking advantage of the brief respite after their sacrifices were flattened and while the pillars were still down, the main body of the Song army advanced with ladders, siege towers, and catapults. But now the gliding cart-mounted catapults came into play. In a flash, hundreds of red, stinking, wobbling bladders took to the air, blooming into fireballs as they rained down among the Song troops. Wood crackled and soldiers screamed. The fragrance of meat roasted on fruit tree wood permeated the air. Last came the archers, sniping at anyone with a helmet plume—everyone knew that only Song officers could wear feathers on their helmet. But arrows were limited and had to be used conservatively; once the archers had shot a couple arrows each, they returned to rest, thus ending the battle.

Below the city walls was a field of char, smoke, and wailing. Above, the Han defenders poked and pointed into the distance, counting their kills. For every kill, they drew a black circle on their hand, and used the circles to collect their reward money from the East City Institute. By Prince Lu’s calculations, two million Song soldiers had died these months below the city. Everyone else, looking at the Song camps that still covered the horizon end to end, came to an unspoken consensus not to bring up the problem with statistics derived from self-reporting.

With Jinyang securely defended, Prince Lu invented the internet to keep everyone in the city from getting too bored. He first came up with something called movable type (which he claimed was cribbing from an old sage named Bi Sheng, although no one could recall ever having heard of this formidable personage). He’d first carved the text of the Thousand Character Classic in bas relief onto a wooden board, then pressed a layer of yellow mud mixed with glutinous rice, straw, and pig’s blood—leftover material from the death-dealing clay pillars—over the printing plate. Finally, he’d peeled the whole thing off and diced it into small rectangles, thus creating a set of individual type blocks that could be freely combined and assembled. He’d placed the thousand characters into a rectangular tray, attaching every block in the back to a strand of silk thread with a spring. The thousand strands of thread were then collected into a bundle the thickness of a wrist, termed a “web.”

Similar text-trays were found all over the city, while the bundles of silk threads passed through the bottoms of the walls to a network manager’s station. The end of each bundle of silk was then neatly fitted into a metal mesh by tying a small hook to the end of each thread and hanging the hooks to the mesh. These meshes lined the walls of a station, and if two text trays wanted to communicate, the manager found the two corresponding bundles and brought the metal meshes together with a twist that connected the thousand pairs of metal hooks together. The bundles were thus linked together in what Prince Lu called an “internet.”

Once a web connection was established, the users at each end could communicate through the text trays. When one side pressed down on one of the type pieces, the little spring tugged the silk thread, causing the corresponding type to sink down on the other side. Although picking out the desired character out of a thousand densely packed blocks posed quite a strain on the operator’s eyes, an experienced user could type with lightning speed. Some pedants worried that the depth and complexity of hanzi writing could not be adequately represented by such an invention. Though the Thousand Character Classic was an ingenious primer to introduce the wonders of hanzi, how could a mere one thousand characters be enough to discuss life and the universe? Prince Lu countered that they were one thousand unique characters—never mind discussing the universe, these characters had been enough for the majority of fine essays since antiquity; they were certainly enough for web users to express whatever they needed to say.

In actuality, in the Thousand Character Classic, one of the characters—the one for “pure”—did occur twice. The East City Institute removed one of them and substituted a piece of type with a bent arrow symbol. Since it would have been too difficult for two users to simultaneously type and squint at the text tray for a reply, Prince Lu decreed that the current speaker had to press this “carriage return” block when they finished typing to indicate that it was the other person’s turn. Why the symbol was called “carriage return” was something Prince Lu never bothered to explain.

At first, only two people could talk on a web connection at once, but Prince Lu later invented a complicated bronze hook rack that linked many internet lines together at once. If one person pressed a character, it would show up on all the other text trays.

This advance in the internet led to a new problem. If eight scholars sat down to chat, the moment one of them pressed the return key, the other seven would fight to speak first, with the result that their text trays would undulate up and down uncontrollably, like the dark waters of Lake Jinyang rippling in the north wind. To solve this problem, the East City Institute sold a new kind of text tray with ten blank type squares. When web users took advantage of the bronze rack to form a chat group, everyone first carved the members’ appellations onto the squares. If someone wanted to speak, they pressed the block with their name. Whoever’s block moved first had the right to speak until they pressed carriage return. Prince Lu first called this arrangement a “three-way handshake,” then “vying for the mike,” although he never explained what these terms meant. Zhu Dagun loved to smash his own “Zhu” block non-stop, naturally earning severe rebuke within his circles. Block-mashing not only disrupted the others’ ability to speak, but also often caused the internet line to snap.

Though the silk threads were resilient, damage from wind, rain, insects, mice, and bad users like Zhu Dagun was inevitable, and the lines broke from time to time. If you were chatting, only for someone to suddenly call you an “ignorant dog unworthy of the title of scholar sullying the names of past sages,” it was a good sign that the threads for some of your type blocks had broken. While you had meant to type “The Master spake, ‘even the sage-kings of old were met with failures in this,’” what had shown up in the other text trays was “The Master spake, ‘the sage-kings of old were failures,’” thereby not only denouncing the legendary sage-kings, but also smearing great Confucius as well.

At times like this, you had to yell “Manager!” and give the network manager a few coins for the trouble of inspecting the web lines while you took the opportunity to go to the market and buy a few pounds of flatbread. Meanwhile, the manager would sever the connection, find the broken silk lines, and knot them back together. If you didn’t invest enough into a friendly relationship with the network manager, he’d tie a big fat knot that clogged the network so that your lines moved at the rate of a geriatric ox pulling a caravan. But if you did hand over enough coppers, he’d take out a little comb, smooth out the threads until they gleamed, and tie a minuscule square knot. Then you tossed the flatbread through the station window and yelled “All’s well!”—that was why Zhu Dagun had no choice but to reserve money for bribing the network manager, no matter how strained his wallet.

The East City Institute’s siege defense weaponry won it the hearts of the soldiers; its peculiar little inventions won the hearts of the commoners; and the internet won the hearts of the scholars. To moralize and debate and weigh in on anything one desired without having to step outside one’s door—such convenience had never been available to anyone, not even in the time of the ancient sages of legend. With the Song army surrounding the city, the scholars could no longer venture out of the city to climb Xuanwa Mountain, sightsee along the Fen River, or drink and admire the flowers. Being shut inside, they had only writing to serve as a pastime, and that dejected them further. If it weren’t for West City’s internet coverage, these destitute, bored intellectuals would have tried to overthrow the government long ago. With an entire state reduced to one city, its three ministries and six departments gone in all but name, no pay for the ministers, and the emperor not even attending court, the scholars had become the most idle and useless group in the city and could only snipe and complain online.

If some loved the internet, of course others kept their distance, as they would for ghosts and gods—and anything else they didn’t really understand. If some praised Prince Lu, of course others muttered behind his back. No one had actually seen his person, but he was the hottest topic of gossip among the wards.

Zhu Dagun had never dreamed that the first time he had any contact with the prince would involve being sent by Ma Feng and Guo Wanchao to advise surrender. Whether it was more moral to fight or surrender, he hadn’t quite figured out himself. But since both the civil minister and the general charged him with such a weighty task, he could only venture forth, a petition and a sharp knife hidden in his clothes.

5.

The oxcart proceeded creakily past the walled courtyard of an inn. Prince Lu had built it not long after he came to Jinyang. The inn was painted orange, with a blue plaque emblazoned in large characters, “Best Western,” presumably to advertise itself as the best inn in West City. It was a somewhat odd name, though rather tame by the standards of the other neologisms that Prince Lu had invented.

After Prince Lu moved to the East City Institute, he had two windows carved in the wall surrounding the courtyard, one for selling wine and another for selling miscellaneous gadgets. The prince’s wine was called weishiji, presumably a poetic contraction for the phrase “feared and respected by even mighty warriors.” It was brewed by soaking and boiling the grain brought from Liao, creating an alcoholic liquid clear as water and crisp as ice that burned a trail of fire through one’s guts upon imbibing, far superior in flavor to the rice wine sold in the market. Two pints cost three hundred coins, a high price in a time of abundant moonshine stills, but connoisseurs naturally had their ways of paying.

“Soldiers, give us a volley!”

Zhu Dagun turned and saw a dozen or so hooligans standing at the foot of the city wall, yelling toward the outside. A soldier’s head poked out from the parapets above. “Are you short on cash again, Zhao Second? You’d better give us a bigger share of that good wine this time, or else the general’s going to crack down and—”

“Of course, of course!” the hooligans laughed. Then they resumed yelling in unison, “Soldiers, give us a volley! Soldiers, give us a volley!”

Soon after came the voices of the Song soldiers, yelling from outside the city. “You’d better keep your word! Five hundred arrows for twenty pints! Don’t you dare shortchange us.”

“Of course, of course!” With that, the hooligans jumped to action, wheeling out seven or eight haycarts from heaven knew where and arranging them at a distance from the wall. Then they ducked down at the foot of the wall, covering their heads with their arms. “All set. Shoot!”

Bows twanged. A swarm of arrows dense as locusts hissed through the air, arced over the ramparts, and thunked into the piles of hay, instantly transforming the carts into oversized hedgehogs.

Zhu Dagun watched from a distance, fascinated. “I’ve heard the old story of the Three-Kingdoms strategist who propped up straw men to trick arrows from the enemy. I never thought it would still work.”

Zhao Da spat. “These hooligans are colluding with the enemy. You could call it treason if you really wanted to prosecute. The city defense is always short on arrows, so the emperor decreed that he’d pay ten coins for every arrow turned in. The five hundred arrows these hooligans collected can be exchanged for five thousand coins, enough to buy thirty-four pints of alcohol. They lower twenty pints in a cask to the Song soldiers, hand out four pints to bribe the watchers on the wall, and drink the remaining ten until they pass out in the streets. Degenerates!” He turned to glare at them, and shouted, “You fellows have some nerve to do this in my sight!” The hooligans only laughed and bowed to him before whisking the carts down an alley.

Zhu Dagun knew that, whatever Zhao Da said, he was certainly in the hooligans’ pay. But he didn’t bother pointing this out; instead, he sighed. “The longer the siege goes on, the worse the thoughts in people’s heads. Sometimes it feels as if it’s better to let the Song army take the city and get it over with, huh.”

“Nonsense!” Zhao Da bellowed. “Any more traitorous talk and I’ll whip you!” Zhu Dagun still couldn’t figure out if Zhao Da was Ma Feng’s agent, dispatched to help him, so he didn’t speak further.

The sun beat down ruthlessly. The oxcart plodded forth in the shade of listless willows, down the main road through the internal gate dividing West from Central. Central City was no more than seventy yards across, divided into two levels. The water wheel, the foundry, and the various other hot and noisy machines were on the lower level. The upper level was for horses, carts, and pedestrians, and on either side of the road were the government buildings for the Departments of Hydrology, Textiles, Metallurgy, and Divination.

The road had been paved with jujube wood wherever possible. Central City had been built in the time of Empress Wu Zetian by the Secretary of Bing Prefecture to connect East and West Cities on either bank of the Fen River. In the three hundred years since, the jujube paving had been regularly polished with wax and tamped down by feet and hooves, until it gleamed a deep brown like dried blood and was hard as stone. When struck, it rang like a bronze bell; swords bounced off it, leaving only white scratch marks. Pried up and used as a shield, it could deflect blades and arrows, even bolts from the Song army’s repeating arcuballistas. At this point in the siege, the paving was full of gaps, carelessly filled in with yellow mud. Walking over it, you never knew which foot would start sinking. The soft spots could sprain an ox’s ankle.

“Off,” Zhao Da said. He instructed a subordinate to return the oxcart, while he personally led his captive through Central City on foot.

The Fen River was shallow and thin from the drought. Zhu Dagun looked at the turbid flow that wound in from the north, babbling through the city’s twelve arch bridges before continuing southward without rest. “Liao, Han, Song: north to south, three nations connected by a single river.” He sighed unconsciously. “With such a sight before me, I ought to compose a poem to commemorate—”

Before he had the chance, Zhao Da delivered a hard smack to the back of his head, knocking his cap askew and beating the poetic inspiration right out of him. “Enough, you starving scribbler. I sweated buckets getting you here, and I don’t need your chattering. The magistrate’s office is right ahead. Shut up and walk!”

Zhu Dagun quieted obediently, thinking the moment I’m free I’m going to go online and cuss you out to everyone, you corrupt official. Then he realized that if he succeeded in convincing Prince Lu of the East City Institute, Han would no longer exist. Would the internet still be there when Jinyang belonged to Song? For a time, he walked in a daze.

Wordlessly, they crossed Central City into the modest-scaled East City. They walked past the Taiyuan county building and made two turns on the dusty street to enter a courtyard of gray brick and gray tile. The courtyard walls were tall and smooth; the windows were covered with iron bars. Zhao Da exchanged greetings with the man inside and handed over papers, while the soldiers shoved Zhu Dagun into the west wing. Zhao Da took off Zhu Dagun’s chains. “The boss is giving you a cell to yourself. You’ll be brought two meals a day. If you want money, more food, or bedding, ask your family to bring them. Try to escape and your crime rises one rank in severity. Trial is in two days. Just tell everything like it is to the boss. Got everything?”

Zhu Dagun felt a sharp burst of pain in his back; he stumbled and fell into a cell. Guards locked and chained the door, then left.

Zhu Dagun pulled himself up and looked around, rubbing his butt. He found that the cell had a bed, a sitting mat, a bronze basin for washing his face, and a wooden bucket serving as a chamberpot. Although the room was poorly lit, it was neater and cleaner than his own home.

He sat on the mat. He groped the pouch inside his sleeve and found that everything was intact: a copy of the Analects, so that when he debated Prince Lu he could borrow courage from the writings of sages; an empty wooden box, with a hidden compartment containing Ma Feng’s voluminous petition—it may have been an entreaty to surrender, but the impeccable writing and righteous language had Zhu Dagun’s abject admiration; a double-edged dagger forged of prime steel, six and three-tenth inches. Of what import is the anger of a common man? The First Emperor had asked this of Tang Ju. A spray of blood five paces long, answered he. Thinking of this final tactic, the Han words churned Zhu Dagun’s Shatuo and Turkic blood.

6.

Only when Zhu Dagun awoke did he realize that he’d fallen asleep in the first place. A ray from the setting sun slanted through the window. It was late in the day now.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside. Zhu Dagun slowly climbed to his feet and stretched, looking out through the gaps between the bars.

Earlier, Ma Feng had said that he’d planted agents inside the prison to appear at a suitable time. At this moment, a guard was strolling over, an oil-paper lantern in his left hand and a box of food in his right, humming as he went. He stopped at Zhu Dagun’s cell and knocked on the bars with the lantern. “Hey, time to eat.” He took two flatcakes from the box, wrapped them around some pickled vegetables, and passed them through the bars.

Zhu Dagun accepted the meal with a friendly smile. “Thank you very much. Does your superior have any words for me?”

The guard glanced around, then set down the food box and took out a scrap of paper. “Here, read this,” he whispered. “Don’t let anyone see it. The general said to tell you, ‘Do what you can, but leave the rest to the will of heaven.’ As long as you do your duty, you’ll benefit whether it works or not.” Then he raised his voice. “There’s water in the basin. Scoop it up with your hands if you want to drink. Relieve yourself in the bucket. Don’t get any blood, pus, or phlegm on the bedding. Got it?”

The guard picked up the food box and strolled off. Zhu Dagun devoured the flatcakes in a few bites, poured some water down his gullet, then turned around and read the note by the last fading sunlight. However, once he was done, he felt more confused than before. He’d thought that the guard had been sent by Guo Wanchao, but the note suggested otherwise. It read:

Dear Sir:

Our state of Han is in big trouble. We’re low on soldiers and grain and rely on the siege defense machines to keep going. Lately I heard that the East City Institute people have been uneasy and Prince Lu seems unstable. If he defects to Song, Han is doomed. Woe! If you read this letter I hope you can talk to Prince Lu and make him see the light. He mustn’t surrender! He refuses to see any guests at the East City Institute so I can only try to do it roundabout like this. For the sake of our people please you must persuade him to stay strong! We’ll beat Song one day for sure!

—Yang Zhonggui again thanks you

The note was clumsy in language, the handwriting unrefined; clearly, the author was some rough fellow without much education. The name “Yang Zhonggui” seemed unfamiliar. Zhu Dagun thought for a long time before remembering that it was the original name of Military Governor Liu Jiye. He was the son of the Lin Province Inspector Yang Xin. Emperor Shizu had adopted him as a grandson and changed his name to Liu Jiye. In his thirty years as a general, he’d never been defeated in battle, earning him the moniker “Invincible.” Currently, he commanded the defense of Jinyang.

Signing the note with his original name showed his desire to distance himself from the current emperor. The reason was no secret. Ten years ago, the previous Song emperor had breached the Fen River dam in an attempt to flood Jinyang. The streets had disappeared under the waters, and corpses and trash floated everywhere. Liu Jiye had petitioned the emperor Liu Jiyuan to surrender, only to meet with curses and mockery. One of the other signatories to the petition, Guo Wuwei, was publicly executed. Liu Jiye had remained in disfavor ever since, stripped of any meaningful command.

Though he’d once advocated surrender, now he advocated fighting on. Zhu Dagun thought he understood why. The Invincible General might have been a renowned warrior who’d caused the deaths of countless soldiers, but he was also a credulous, short-sighted gentle soul who wept to see the ordinary people suffer. Ten years ago, the entire city was starving. Commoners swam into the streets every day to eat the bark off the willow trees; if they rolled off their roofs at night while sleeping, they drowned in the stinking water. Liu Jiye’s heart had ached so at the sight that he’d only wanted to open the gates and let the Song troops in and end all the suffering.

But this time, the city was comparatively well-stocked. The commoners could eat their fill and still have grain left over to trade for weishiji, trade for a few gadgets, or pay a visit to the brothel, satisfying themselves in both body and soul. Naturally this bolstered Liu Jiye’s spirit. He wanted nothing more than for the siege to last for a hundred years until the Song ruler died of old age right where he stood, as vengeance for the past. With Prince Lu holed up in his own territory in East City, shut off from all outsiders, only criminals could hope for an audience with him. General Liu had written his clumsy entreaty and left it in the prison in the hopes that some patriotic prisoner could whisper encouragement to Prince Lu.

“Ah . . . ” Zhu Dagun blinked. He tore up the note and threw the scraps into the wooden bucket, then pissed over them to destroy the evidence. The guard who brought him food hadn’t been the person he was waiting for, but Liu Jiye’s agent, in a strange coincidence.

The sky outside the window was soon dark, and there was no lamp in his cell. Zhu Dagun sat with a full stomach and nothing to do. Normally, this would have been a perfect hour for chatting online. He flexed his fingers restlessly as he mentally recited the Thousand Character Classic. Without sufficient familiarity with this cunning work, one wouldn’t be able to quickly find the right character in the text tray. Memorizing it—and thus the layout for the types—had become a requirement for the literati of his generation.

Footsteps once again sounded in the hall; the glow of flames grew as they approached. Zhu Dagun hurried to the bars and waited. A guard stopped in front of him, holding his torch high. “Zhu Dagun?” he said coldly. “In custody for sowing misinformation online?”

Zhu Dagun smiled. “That’s me. Though I’ve never heard of that crime . . . Does your superior have any words for me?”

“Hmph. Kneel!” the guard suddenly said, in total seriousness. He glanced around, then pulled out something shiny and golden, spreading it to let Zhu Dagun see. Zhu Dagun paled and instantly dropped to his knees. He was only a minor scribe with no governmental rank, but he’d once seen such an object on the incense table of a great scholar of the Imperial Archives. He shivered in fear, obediently touching his forehead to the ground. “The servant . . . the criminal Zhu Dagun a-awaits His Imperial Majesty’s instruction!”

The guard stuck out his chin and began to recite, enunciating each character crisply. “In representation of Heaven and the Emperor the edict speaks: We know of you and your abundance of opinions. Often, you debate matters of state on the internet and spin your words very skillfully to corrupt others. However, we understand that you’ve been falsely reported this time, and we assure you you’ll receive proper redress, but you need to help us out first. It’s improper for us to lower ourselves by going to the East City Institute, and Prince Lu isn’t willing to come to Jinyang Palace. Since we trust no one else in court, we can only put our hopes in you. You and I are both Shatuo, descendants of Yukuk Shad. We trust you, and you must trust us. Ask Prince Lu for us, what are we to do? He once promised that he’d build a flying vessel for us to enable our one hundred and six household members and four hundred old Shatuo retainers to escape from the city and head straight into Liao territories. But Prince Lu now insists that he is too busy with defending the city to build this ‘zeppelin,’ a name he glossed as ‘stairway to heaven’ in an abstruse dialect. It’s been two months and there are no signs of this vessel. The Song troops are fierce and many and our heart is filled with apprehension. Dear loyal scholar, help us convince Prince Lu to build the zeppelin, and we will reserve a seat for you. When the Liu clan once again rises, we’ll grant you the rank of Chancellor. A ruler does not joke.”

“Your servant a-accepts this edict.” Zhu Dagun lifted his hands above his head and felt a heavy scroll descend into them.

The guard sniffed at him. “See what you can do. The emperor is . . . ” He shook his head and left.

Zhu Dagun stood, covered in a cold sweat. He slid the scroll of yellow silk respectfully into his sleeve, his head spinning as he thought of its contents. Guo Wanchao and Ma Feng wanted to surrender; Liu Jiye wanted to fight; the emperor wanted to run away. All of them presented what seemed like reasonable arguments, but upon further thought, none of them seemed so reasonable. Who to listen to, and who to ignore? His heart was a tangle. The more he thought, the more his head hurt.

He didn’t know how much time had passed when new footsteps broke him from his torpor. He’d used up all his enthusiasm; he trudged to the bars and waited.

The guard held a fire-oil lamp. He shone the lamp around, then said, “Sorry I’m late. Since you’re the only prisoner here today, I couldn’t get in until the change of shifts.”

“Does your superior have any words for me?” Zhu Dagun said listlessly. He’d already asked this three times today.

The guard lowered his voice. “The General and Elder Ma want me to inform you that the East City Institute will send for you at the hour of the rat tomorrow. Prince Lu is mucking with something new and needs people. Just claim to be knowledgeable in alchemy and you’ll be able to approach him.”

“Alchemy?” Zhu Dagun said, surprised. “I’m an ordinary scholar. I don’t know anything about alchemy.”

The guard furrowed his brow. “Who said you have to know anything? You’re just trying to get close to Prince Lu. It’s not like you’re actually going to be smelting pills of immortality. Just mumble something about ceruse, litharge, cinnabar, sulfur, the Baopuzi, the Kinship of Three, the Collected Biographies of Immortals, and so on. No one understands this stuff anyway, so no one can call you out. Go to sleep early, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Good luck persuading him!” He turned to leave. Two steps later, he paused to ask, “You did bring the knife, right?”

7.

The sky brightened without fanfare. Sounds of shouting and fighting drifted in; the Song troops were trying to storm the city again. The residents of Jinyang had long since grown accustomed to this, and no one took note.

A guard came to deliver breakfast. Zhu Dagun took the bowl of porridge and looked him over carefully, only to realize he’d only paid attention to the lantern, the torch, and the fire-oil lamp the previous night. He couldn’t remember what the guards looked like at all and was unable to tell which faction this guard hailed from.

Zhu Dagun ate the porridge and sat for a while, doing nothing. The clamor of the morning crowd arose outside. A throng of burly men dressed in East City Institute uniforms flooded into the courtyard.

The guards took Zhu Dagun out into the yard. A man with a yellow beard covering his face walked up and greeted him. “I serve Prince Lu. By his mercy, prisoners here only need to be willing to work for the Institute to obtain pardon for their crime. Your charges aren’t too severe. Just sign here and you’ll be cleared.” The man took out paper and a writing implement. Instead of a brush, the instrument was a goose feather dipped in ink—before Prince Lu, who would have thought that you could pull a feather from a bird, soak it in lye, sharpen the tip, and write with such a thing?

Zhu Dagun automatically reached for the feather, but Yellow-Beard drew it back. “But right now, His Highness needs someone of unusual capabilities and skills. First tell me, are you knowledgeable in alchemy? I’ll be blunt, you look like the genteel, bookish sort, so don’t try to sell yourself for more than you’re worth.”

Zhu Dagun quickly dredged up a speech. “I’ve been studying the Kinship of Three since childhood under the guidance of my father. I am thoroughly versed in the ways of Dayi, Huanglao, and the forging flame. Heaven and Earth are my cauldron, water and fire are my ingredients, and yin and yang are my complements. I know when to stoke the flames and when to bank the embers. In my life I’ve refined one hundred and twenty pills of shining gold and imbibed them daily. Although I have not ascended to the ranks of enlightened immortals, my body has become light, nimble and impervious to disease. The pills have the power to cultivate the spirit and extend life.” To demonstrate the effectiveness of the golden pills, he sprang up and did two backflips in mid-air, then grabbed an eighty-pound stone drum lying in the yard. After lifting it above his head and tossing it from hand to hand, he threw it to the ground, where it landed with a thud. He dusted off his hands, his breathing unhurried, his face unchanged in color.

Yellow-Beard stared; his men started to clap. The guard standing behind him sneaked a thumbs up, upon which Zhu Dagun knew that this was Ma Feng’s agent.

“Excellent, excellent! We’ve found a real treasure today.” Yellow-Beard laughed and opened the small bamboo case at his waist. He dipped the goose quill in ink and handed it over. “Sign here, and you’ll belong to the East City Institute. We’re going straight to Prince Lu.”

Zhu Dagun signed his name as directed. Yellow-Beard ordered the guards to unfasten the manacles around his ankles, bowed all around to the prison staff, and left the courtyard with his retinue. He and his men escorted Zhu Dagun for half an hour before arriving at a large residence complex, both sprawling in area and dense with buildings. The blue-garbed guards at the gate smiled when they saw Yellow-Beard. “Got the goods? It’s been peaceful lately. We haven’t had any new people join in a while.”

“I know, Prince Lu was frantic about finding an alchemist to help him out,” replied Yellow-Beard. “We’ve finally taken care of that.”

A crowd was gathered in front of the gate: imperial messengers, merchants, government officials in search of glory by association, commoners seeking aid in redressing wrongs done to them, craftsmen bringing their own inventions in the hopes of an audience, idlers trying to return the novelties they purchased after they grew bored, laborers looking for work, prostitutes looking for clients. The guard recorded them one by one in his ledger, gently refusing, reporting, and chasing off with a stick as appropriate. If he saw anyone he was uncertain about, he went ahead and took the bribe, then told them to try their luck again in a few days. He was quite orderly and methodical in this work.

Yellow-Beard led his men into the compound. The courtyard was a different scene: behind a privacy wall was an immense pool of water, in the middle of which a geyser rose more than ten feet tall before majestically splashing down.

“Normally the fountain is powered by the water turbine from Central City, but with the Song army regularly trying to storm the city, we need the turbine to power the gliding carts, catapults, and capstans,” Yellow-Beard explained. “So instead the fountain mechanisms run on manpower. We have several dozen unskilled laborers in the Institute, whose only trade is doing heavy lifting, nothing like a white collar fellow like you.” Zhu Dagun had never heard of the strange words he used, so he simply looked where Yellow-Beard pointed. Indeed, he saw five dull-eyed, muscular fellows to the side, stepping on pedals that went up and down. The pedals drove rotors, the rotors churned a water tank, and the tank valves opened and shut, pumping water high into the air.

They went around the fountain and through an archway to enter the second partition of the courtyard. A dozen or so workshops stood to either side. Yellow-Beard said, “We build the flashlights, sunglasses, clockwork toys, microphones, magnifying glasses, and other things we sell in the city here. Institute staff get a fifty percent discount, and a lot of these gadgets are hard to find in the market. You should come check them out when you get a chance.”

As they spoke, they went through a third partition. Heavy, gleaming fire-oil carriage components lay everywhere under a high awning. A piece of heavy machinery puffed away, spewing white smoke and rapidly turning a carriage wheel. Several oil-stained craftsmen were engaged in an animated discussion full of strange words like “cylinder pressure,” “ignition timing,” and “steam saturation.” Two carpenters were hammering together a carriage framework. Several dozen large barrels of fire-oil stood in a corner of the yard, filling the air with their simultaneously aromatic and noxious smell. Fire-oil came from the island of Hainan and was originally used to douse attackers in flames during a siege, before it found myriad uses in Prince Lu’s hands. Yellow-Beard said, “All the fire-oil carriages running about in Jinyang were built here. They make up more than half the Institute’s income. The newest model will be released soon. It’s called Elong Musk—for the long-lasting fragrance of fire-oil after the vehicle darts out of sight. Even the name sounds fast!”

They continued walking, entering a fourth partition. This place was even stranger. There was constantly some shrill squeaking noise, or the crackle of an explosion, or an odd taste to the air, or colorful flashes of light. “This is the Institute’s research lab,” Yellow-Beard said. “Our prince gets a new idea a minute, and then our craftsmen try to follow up on his ideas and make them a reality. It’s best not to linger here; there are lots of accidents.”

On the walk here, the other members of their group had gradually dispersed, so that Yellow-Beard and Zhu Dagun were alone by the time they entered the fifth partition. Blue-garbed guards stood at the gateway; Yellow-Beard took out a pass, spoke a code phrase, and wrote down several passwords on a piece of paper; only then were they let inside. Hearing that Zhu Dagun was the newly arrived alchemist, the guards patted him down head to toe. Fortunately, he’d hidden the imperial edict in the rafters of his prison cell and tucked the dagger into his topknot. Zhu Dagun had a big head, covered in a black silk cap with jutting ears in the back. A guard snatched off his cap, but only saw a bulging bun of sallow hair, and didn’t look more carefully. On the other hand, the copy of the Analects they found in his sleeve pouch roused suspicion. They looked him up and down, then flipped through the book. “What’s an alchemist doing with this?”

This copy of the Analects hadn’t been printed with Prince Lu’s clay movable type. Rather, it had been printed in Emperor Shizong of Zhou’s time, using the official carved plates, and had been passed down for generations into Zhu Dagun’s hands. Zhu Dagun felt physical, visceral pain as he took back his crumpled and wrinkled treasure and prepared to head in.

Yellow-Beard said, “This row of buildings in the north is where His Highness normally spends all his time. He doesn’t like to be disturbed, so I won’t go in with you. Don’t be afraid, our prince is amiable and kind. He’s not hard to talk to . . . Right, I still don’t know your name.”

“My surname is Zhu,” Zhu Dagun quickly said. “I’m the eldest of my siblings and named after Gun, father of the first Xia ruler. My courtesy name is Bojie.”

Yellow-Beard said, “Brother Bojie, I’ve been one of His Highness’s helpers since he first arrived in Jinyang. He granted me the name Friday.”

Zhu Dagun bowed. “Thank you, Brother Friday.”

Yellow-Beard returned the bow. “Not at all, not at all,” he said, before turning and leaving.

Zhu Dagun straightened his clothes, cleared his throat, scrubbed at his face, swallowed, and entered the building.

The room was very spacious. Black paper covered the windows, and fire-oil lamps illuminated the inside. Two long tables stood at the center of the room, covered with various jars and bottles. A man stood at one of the tables, head down, working on something.

Zhu Dagun’s palms sweated, his heart raced, and his legs wobbled. He hesitated briefly before gathering his courage, clearing his throat stickily, and dropping to a kowtow. “Your Highness! I . . . this criminal is—”

The man turned. Zhu Dagun kept his head down, afraid to look at his face. He heard Prince Lu say, “About time! Hurry and help me, I’ve been messing with this for days without any progress. Why is it so hard to find someone who understands middle school chemistry? What’s your name? What are you doing there on the ground? Get up already and come here.”

At Prince Lu’s string of words, Zhu Dagun hurriedly stood up and came over, his head down. He thought that this august prince sounded friendly and genial, like someone easy to approach, although he pronounced his words so strangely that Zhu Dagun had to repeat them to himself several times before understanding the prince; he wasn’t sure what topolect it was. “Your lowly servant is Zhu Dagun, a criminal.” Still keeping his eyes lowered, he made his way to the center of the room. Jars and bottles clanged over as he went, not because of carelessness or poor eyesight, but because the floor was so packed with random objects that he couldn’t take a step without kicking something over.

“Hey, Lil’ Zhu. You can call me Old Wang.” The prince stood on tiptoes to pat his shoulder. “You’re really tall. 190 centimeters, maybe? I heard you’re from Hanlin Academy. I really wouldn’t have guessed that by looking at you. Have you eaten? If not, I’ll get us some takeout to pad our stomachs. Otherwise, let’s cut straight to the chase. I still haven’t gotten results from today’s experiment.”

These words threw Zhu Dagun into a daze. He sneaked a glance up and discovered that the prince didn’t look like a prince at all. He was of medium height, pale and beardless, and wore a buttoned white cotton coat. His hair was cropped short like a beggar-monk’s. He looked to be in his twenties, yet his brow remained creased with worry even when he smiled. “Your servant doesn’t quite understand what you’re saying, Your Highness . . . ” Zhu Dagun bowed anxiously, unsure of what story lay behind this strange prince.

Prince Lu laughed. “You think my accent is confusing, but all you guys sound like gibberish to me. When I first came, I couldn’t understand a single word. Your court speech sounds like Cantonese or Hakka, but nothing like the modern Shanxi and Shaanxi topolects. Since I wasn’t a historical linguist, I thought that all the topolects of ancient northern China wouldn’t sound very different from what I knew!”

This time, Zhu Dagun understood every individual word coming out of the prince’s mouth individually, but their combined meaning fluttered entirely from his grasp. Sweat trickled down his face. “Your servant lacks in erudition. What Your Highness just said . . . ”

Prince Lu waved a hand. “That’s to be expected. You don’t need to understand anyway. Come and hold this flask in place. Oh right, put on a filter mask. You studied alchemy, so you should know that chemical reactions can release toxic gases, I think?”

Zhu Dagun stared.

8.

The crystal bottles on the table held liquids that Zhu Dagun had neither seen nor smelled in his life. Some were red, some were green, some smelled burningly acrid, some stank unbearably. Prince Lu helped him put on a mask, then had him steady a small, wide-mouthed jar. “Take this rod and stir it slowly. Don’t stir faster than that under any circumstance, got it?”

Nervously, Zhu Dagun stirred the dark green fluid inside the jar. It smelled like the sea, and was hot like a bowl of potherb soup. “This is dried seaweed ash dissolved in alcohol,” Prince Lu explained. “You ancients call seaweed ‘kunbu.’ I got this Goryeo kunbu from the Imperial Physician. The Song of Medicine Recipes said ‘kunbu disperses goiter and breaks swelling’ . . . oh, wait, The Song of Medicine Recipes is from the Qing dynasty. I got mixed up again.”

As he spoke, he took out another small jar and carefully removed the sealing clay. The jar was full of an acrid-smelling pale yellow liquid. “This is sulfuric acid. You alchemists call this ‘green vitriol,’ right? Also ‘qiangshui,’ like in the Alchemical Classic of the Yellow Emperor’s Nine Cauldrons. ‘Bluestone is calcinated to obtain a white mist, which is dissolved in water to obtain strong qiangshui. The substance transforms the silver-haired into the ebony-haired. The choking white mist it emits instantly transports one into the realm of spirits, and after eighteen years one departs from senescence and returns to childhood.’ You should be familiar with that.”

Zhu Dagun nodded as if he was. “That’s right, Your Highness.”

“Just call me Old Wang. ‘Your Highness’ sets my teeth on edge. I’ll start now; keep stirring, don’t stop.” He set up a three-paned white paper screen to lean over the mouth of the flask, put on his mask, and slowly poured the green vitriol into the small jar. At first, all Zhu Dagun noticed was a stench that burned its way right through the cotton mask and up his nose, strong enough to make his brain ache and his eyes tear. Then he saw a miraculous purple cloud was floating up out of the jar, unfurling lazily. Zhu Dagun shivered in fright, but Prince Lu only laughed. “Finally! With this crude method for extracting iodine, that’s half my big plan taken care of! Don’t stop, keep stirring until the reaction finishes. I need to see just how much pure iodine I can extract from one pound of dried seaweed . . . Are you interested in how I created sulfuric acid and nitric acid? This is the first step in the Long March of establishing basic industry, you know.”

“I’d love to hear,” Zhu Dagun said automatically.

Prince Lu seemed delighted. “I was pretty good at chemistry back in high school, and I majored in mechanical engineering as an undergrad, so I got a decent foundation. I couldn’t have made it this far otherwise. At first I wanted to use the alchemists’ method of making sulfuric acid from bluestone, but I couldn’t find more than two pounds of it in the city, not nearly enough. Then I happened to see the massive piles of pyrite ore in the iron foundry. Treasure, right for the taking! Heating pyrite gives you sulfur dioxide, and dissolving that gives you sulfurous acid; let that sit for a while and you get sulfuric acid. You can purify that in clay jars; it’s how the munitions factories in Communist Shanbei managed, back in the day.

“With sulfuric acid taken care of, nitric acid wasn’t hard. The biggest problem was the limited supply of saltpeter, which we also needed to make gunpowder. I had to mobilize everyone in the Institute to scrape crusted urine off the bases of walls to refine into potassium nitrate. Our entire place reeked! Fortunately, people in this city have a habit of pissing anywhere there’s a wall. If it weren’t for that, we couldn’t have built the foundations of industry in Jinyang.”

Zhu Dagun flushed. “Sometimes the urges of the bladder are too great. Both men and women commonly take off their trousers and relieve themselves where they stand. Please humor the crude customs of the countryside, Your Highness.”

While they were speaking, the contents of the two jars had been combined into one, and the purple cloud had disappeared. Prince Lu spread the white paper screen out on the table and scraped the surface with a flat scrap of bamboo, removing a layer of purplish black powder. “The iodine in seaweed is easily oxidized in air under acidic conditions, creating elemental iodine. Very good, let me send them orders to follow my recipe and manufacture this in batches, and we’ll do the next experiment.” He crossed the room, sat down in front of the text tray in the corner, and began banging out a missive. Zhu Dagun walked over to look and discovered that this strange prince typed with lightning speed. He didn’t even glance at the characters, but typed blind with unfailing accuracy. “Your type tray looks like a different model, Your Highness,” Zhu Dagun blurted.

“Old Wang, call me Old Wang,” said Prince Lu. “The principle’s the same, but each terminal uses two sets of movable type. The bottom set is used for input and the top set’s used for output. Watch.” He pressed the carriage return to end his message and stood up to grab a crank handle and turn it. The crank turned a roller on which a seventeen-inch-wide length of calligraphy paper had been spooled, passing it smoothly over the text tray. The movable type in the tray, to which ink had been applied, suddenly began to rise and fall, stamping characters onto the paper.

Zhu Dagun bent down to pick up the paper and began to read. “The experiment data is correctly recorded. I’ve told the chemistry department to oversee it. Return.” He looked at the prince with admiration. “This is far clearer and more convenient! White paper and black ink simply reads better to the eye. When are you releasing this on the markets? We’ll support it with all our might!”

Prince Lu laughed. “This is only a prototype. Version two-point-one will use the same mechanism found in printers to stamp the output on the same line, instead of inking the characters all over the place and making it hard to read. You like the internet too? The thing I was least used to about this era was the lack of internet access, so I racked my brains to come up with this. I finally get to feel like a proper nerdy shut-in again.”

“Your August Highness—er . . . Old Wang,” Zhu Dagun corrected himself when he saw Prince Lu’s expression. “May your servant ask, from which prefecture did you originally hail? Are you a scholar of the Central Plains? You have an extraordinary air about you, after all.”

Prince Lu sighed. “The better question is, from what dynasty did I hail? The era I come from is one thousand sixty-one years, three months, and fourteen days distant.”

Zhu Dagun didn’t know if he was joking or raving. He did the arithmetic on his fingers and laughed obsequiously. “I see that you achieved the Way in Emperor Wu of Han’s time, and have lived on to today as an immortal!”

“Not one thousand years in the past,” Prince Lu said unhurriedly. “One thousand years in the future—and nine hundred billion forty-two universes away.”

9.

Zhu Dagun didn’t understand Prince Lu’s ravings, and he didn’t have time to dwell on them, because the next experiment had begun. Prince Lu placed a silver-plated copper coin into a small carved wooden chest, set the cup of newly-made iodine beside the coin, closed the lid, and lit a small clay brazier next to the chest to heat it a little. Soon, purple vapors came billowing out through the cracks in the chest. Heavens, we’re about to get some pills of immortality, Zhu Dagun thought, as he carefully waved the fan as Prince Lu instructed, afraid even to breathe too hard.

A while later, Prince Lu pushed the brazier aside, opened the chest, and reached in with a soft cloth. He carefully lifted the copper coin, cushioned on the cloth, revealing that its silver surface was coated with something yellowish. Zhu Dagun peeked inside the chest and didn’t see any pills of immortality, but Prince Lu did an excited dance. “It worked! It really worked! Look, this yellow stuff is called silver iodide. All I have to do now is scrape it off into a jar and put it somewhere dark. I can perform another magic trick with this: put this coin somewhere dark, expose it to light for about ten minutes, develop the image with mercury fumes, and fix it with saltwater. Once it’s rinsed and dry, the coin will be covered with a picture of this room, identical in every last detail! This is the Daguerreotype process, which takes advantage of silver iodide’s photosensitivity. But we’re storing up silver iodide for something else, so I’ll have to show you at a later date.”

“Without an artist, how can one obtain a picture?” Zhu Dagun asked, confused. “And . . . what miraculous powers does the yellow powder have? Does it impart health and sagehood on one who imbibes it?”

Prince Lu laughed. “It’s not that kind of magic. In my day, silver iodide had two main uses. One was photosensitivity, like I mentioned. The other, well, you’ll see.” He worked as he spoke, scraping the powder off the coin into a small porcelain bottle, before pulling off his mask and stretching. “That’s all for now. I’m done for the morning. I’ll send out the instructions for manufacturing silver iodide, and then I can rest. You haven’t eaten, right? We can eat together later. You’re tall and strong, and pretty good with your hands—it must be all that alchemy experience. I have some things I want to ask you, so don’t wander off. I’ll be right back.”

Prince Lu sat down at the text tray and began to type at a rattling pace. Now and then he cranked out a length of calligraphy paper and read it, nodding to himself. Zhu Dagun just stood there in the room, afraid to touch anything and accidentally break it, or trigger some mighty magic.

At this point, he finally remembered why he was there. He reached for his sleeve pouch, felt the copy of the Analects there, and took a deep breath. “Your Highness, there’s something that I don’t understand,” he said, looking down. “I hope you can advise your servant.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.” Prince Lu was still at the text tray, cranking the spool of calligraphy paper, too busy to spare a glance.

Zhu Dagun asked, “Your Highness, are you Han or Hu?”

“Don’t be pretentious, call me Old Wang,” came the reply. “I’m Han. I grew up in Beijing’s Xichen District. My ma’s Hui Muslim, but I took after my ba. I may have played in the Niujie and Jiaozi neighborhoods as a kid, but I can’t live without pork, so no dice.”

Zhu Dagun had already learned to ignore Prince Lu’s incomprehensible ramblings. “If Your Highness is Han, why do you live in Jinyang instead of the southern lands?”

“You wouldn’t understand even if I explained,” said Prince Lu. “I’m Han, but I’m not a Han from your era. I know perfectly well that, of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, Liang, Tang, Jin, Zhou, and even your so-called Great Han were founded by other ethnic groups, and most of your people are Hu too. But once my plan succeeds, I’ll be back at my point of departure, and this temporal node of your universe won’t have a thing to do with me, got it?”

Zhu Dagun took a step closer. “Your Highness, how are we going to defeat the Song army?”

“We can’t,” said Prince Lu. “We don’t have the soldiers or the food, and we can’t mass produce firearms. Flintlock muskets are easy to manufacture, but we don’t have nearly enough sulfur to make gunpowder. We scoured the city and only found a couple dozen pounds. We can’t do more than occasionally fire a cannon to give a scare. But that brings me to my next point. Though we can’t defeat the Song troops, we can hold out pretty easily. As long as Zhao Guangyi doesn’t find out how Liao is sending us grain under the surface of the water, Jinyang survives another day. Tying empty barrels to full barrels and sending them along the bottom of the Fen River is a trick you ancients would never think of.”

Zhu Dagun raised his voice. “But the commoners are hungry and weary, and the soldiers wail with pain and exhaustion! The longer Jinyang holds on, the more its tens of thousands of residents suffer, Your Highness!”

“Hey, good point.” Prince Lu turned on his stool. “Everyone else is delighted to work here—not only are they pardoned for their crimes, they can even earn some money. But you don’t sound like them. Let’s talk, then. I haven’t had anyone normal to talk to in months. It’s been”—he pulled out a piece of paper, took a look, and drew another X on it—“three months, seven and a half days since I was dropped here. I’ve got twenty-three and a half days before the observational platform automatically returns. The schedule will be tight, but judging from my current progress, I should be able to make it.”

Zhu Dagun understood only the faint longing for home that underlay his words. He immediately recited, “The Master said: as long as parents are alive, one should not journey far from them without method. When one’s father lives, observe one’s aspirations; when he does not, observe one’s actions; if in time they do not deviate from the father’s way one can be termed filial. Your Highness has long been away from your home and must miss your parents dearly. Foxes die with their heads pointing toward their burrow; crows feed their parents in their old age; lambs kneel before they drink from their mother’s teat; stallions will not mate with their dam—”

Prince Lu sighed. “Okay, we’re still not on the same frequency here. Can you shut up and listen?”

Zhu Dagun immediately shut up.

Prince Lu spoke slowly. “I’m sure you don’t know the alternate universe theory or quantum mechanics, so I’ll go over them briefly. My name is Wang Lu. I was an ordinary nerd, amateur writer of chuanyue novels, and professional time traveler. In my time, we’d perfected the multiverse theory, so that anyone could go to an agency, rent an observational platform, and go time traveling. At one time, people estimated the number of parallel universes overlaying each other to be around 10^(10^118), but more precise calculations later on indicated that, due to overlap between different diverged branches, only about three hundred quadrillion universes exist at any one time. Countless particle-level possibilities cause universes to endlessly emerge, split, merge, and disappear, and yet even the two parallel universes with the most differences are astonishingly similar on a physical level, even as their places on a timeline diverge further and further.

“In a way, this makes things boring, since humanity’s exploration of deep space remains stalled, and its understanding of the universe as a whole is very shallow. Even in the most advanced universe I’ve been to, humanity’s reach has gone no further than Alpha Centauri, just next door. But in another way, this makes things interesting, since with the invention of the wave function engine it means that we can step across to other parallel universes at our convenience. For topological reasons, the more similar the destination universe, the less energy it takes to travel there. The most advanced observational station we have can send travelers three hundred trillion universes away, though the commercially available equipment only has a maximum range of around forty trillion.”

Zhu Dagun kept nodding while he felt his sleeve pouch, inwardly debating whether to take out the dagger and persuade Prince Lu’s heart or take out the Analects and persuade his mind once he finished his raving. There was no one else in the room, creating a prime opportunity to make his move. It wasn’t that Zhu Dagun didn’t want to act promptly, but that he himself still felt somewhat undecided as to which esteemed personage he should act on behalf of.

Prince Lu picked up his teacup and took a sip, then continued. “I accepted a job from the Peking University history department, a research task to tally the population of the Sixteen Prefectures during the late Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. A parallel universe like yours is located toward the front of the timeline, which makes it an excellent place for historical observation.

“Don’t think just anyone can get a time travel license. You have to train systematically in quantum theory, computer operation, ground transportation, emergency drills, and more, and pass the test to get a job. If you want to lead tour groups, you have to take the Time Travel Tour Guide Examinations too. Due to the physical similarity between parallel universes, I activated the observational platform at Xuanwu Gate in Beijing to travel nine hundred billion forty-two universes and arrive here. By my calculations of revolution and rotation elements, I should have been able to arrive in You Prefecture. Who knew that my observational platform was getting long in the tooth? The wave function engine radiator boiled over, right in the middle of the trip! I had to pour in eight bottles of mineral water and a crate of Red Bull to get it to limp to the destination. The moment I arrived in this universe, the crown bar burst through the tank. That was the end of the engine. I crashed into a gully in Shanxi by the Fen River. My luggage, equipment, and spare fuel tanks were wiped out.

“It took me ten days to patch together the engine, only to discover all the fuel had leaked out. The bit left in the oil lines could hop me two or three universes over at most. What use would a few hours forward be?”

The sounds of shouting and fighting from outside grew louder. The Song army had begun another assault on East City gate. Prince Lu turned to glance at the report scrolling out above the text tray and typed a few characters himself. “Don’t worry.” He laughed. “We’ll take care of it as usual. I’ll move two bladder catapults over . . . Where was I? Ah, right, the wave function engine could just barely start, and raising the angular speed made the engine oil give off blue smoke like a tractor, but the main problem was that I didn’t have any fuel. Taking that census was of course out of the question, but even worse, since I hadn’t filed this private job with the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ Multiverse Administrative Office, I couldn’t just call the time police for help when they’d put me in jail for three to five years! If I wanted to get home, I needed some way to gather fuel. I didn’t have a choice but to hide my things in the gully and sneak into Jinyang.”

“Your Highness, you say you didn’t have any fuel, but isn’t the city full of fire-oil?” Zhu Dagun couldn’t resist interrupting. “Many carriages on the street burn fire-oil.”

Prince Lu sighed. “If only it combusted oil. Let me put it this way, the fuel tank didn’t hold real, physical fuel, but potential energy, the elastic potential between parallel universes. If I wanted to fill my tank, I needed to create a universe split. When a new universe split off as a result of some decision point, I’d be able to gather this escaped potential energy to power my return. This potential energy isn’t something intangible like entropy values. It’s more like when you snap a bamboo pole in two, and you hear the crack as it splits apart? I don’t understand it that well myself, but either way I had to create a big enough event to make the universe split. Now, how could I do this? Let’s take an example from history—on the fourteenth of the third month this year, a resident of Jinyang slipped from the parapets and fell to his death in the Fen River. The incident was witnessed by twenty people and recorded in minor history books. If, on the fourteenth of the third month, I grabbed his collar and saved his life, I’d create a change. But it wouldn’t be big enough. Out of the one hundred quadrillion universes where this event occurred, he was saved in one quadrillion of them even without me. In that moment, the parameters in one of those universes would change until it perfectly matched the universe we’re in, and the two universes would merge. Of course, you and I wouldn’t feel anything from where we stand, but the potential would decrease, and even remove fuel from my tank. To cause a new universe to split off, I have to create a big enough change, a change so big that no precedent exists in any one of the one hundred quadrillion universes past this point in the timeline. I managed to use the beat-up wave function computer to find a possibility, one that I could achieve without any modern equipment to help me.”

Zhu Dagun didn’t speak, only listened intently.

Prince Lu suddenly pulled open a drawer and took out a book. He read from it, “‘In the sixth month of 882 CE, the height of summer, Shang Rang led an army from Chang’an to attack Fengxiang. He had reached Yijun Camp when suddenly a great blizzard fell. Within three days, the snow was many feet thick. Thousands died or became frostbitten in the cold, and the Qi army retreated in defeat to Chang’an.’ Have you heard of this incident?”

“Huang Chao’s rebellion!” Zhu Dagun finally had an opportunity to add to the conversation. “Shang Rang was Grand Commandant of Qi. The story of the blizzard in the second year of Zhonghe is still oft told among the people. It’s recorded in the historical annals as well.”

“Exactly,” said Old Wang. “I’m a modern man, but I don’t have death rays or nukes or any kind of sci-fi weaponry, and I don’t have the Starship Enterprise or Macross to back me up. All I can do is use the scraps of knowledge I got from high school and college to alter this era as much as possible. It’s a historical fact that Song conquered Northern Han. In the vast majority of universes, the annals record that on the fourth day of the fifth month, the Song army took Jinyang and the Han ruler Liu Jiyuan surrendered. On the eighteenth day of the fifth month, Emperor Taizong of Song drove out all the city’s inhabitants and burned Jinyang to the ground. But here, I’ve already postponed these dates for more than a month. The Song army can’t stay here indefinitely; anyone can see that the primitive siege weapons of this era can’t break through the fortifications strengthened with my knowledge. Once the Song army retreats, history will be completely rewritten, and the universe will split, without a doubt!” He toyed with the little bottle of silver iodide and laughed delightedly. “And that’s without mentioning my new invention. This little thing is going to change history immediately and fill my observational platform’s fuel tank! The ancients believed in omens from the heavens more than anything. What could change history more than a snowstorm in the middle of summer?”

“Burn . . . Jinyang? Snowstorm?” Zhu Dagun said numbly.

“It’s easier to show than to explain! Follow me!” Prince Lu leapt to his feet and dragged Zhu Dagun by his sleeve to the room’s west wall. He pulled some mechanism, a hinge turned, and the entire wall suddenly fell outward to reveal a courtyard hidden among dense overhanging eaves. The blinding sunlight forced Zhu Dagun to squint; it took a few moments before he could clearly see the contents of the courtyard.

He was astonished. Laid out in the courtyard were many extraordinary things that he’d never seen before and didn’t know the names of. Several dozen East City Institute workers were laboring under the hot sun. They knelt to pay their respects when they saw the prince. Prince Lu smiled and waved a hand. “Continue. Don’t mind me.”

“We’re testing the hot air balloon,” Prince Lu explained, pointing at the workers in the middle of sewing cotton fabric. “I agreed to build an airship for the emperor so he can escape to Liao. An airship takes more time than this, but I’ll do what I can and build a balloon for now. When I came to Jinyang, I made a few flashy novelties and bribed some minor officials for an audience with the emperor. I told him I could make Jinyang impregnable for him, and he granted me the convenient title of Prince of Lu right on the spot. I have to repay that kind of generosity.”

They turned and came to a group of workers filling a cannon cast of black iron with gunpowder. “This cannon will be used to fire a cloud-seeding canister. Gunpowder isn’t strong enough a propellant, so we need the hot air balloon to lift the cannon into the air, and then fire it up at an angle. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather patterns lately. Don’t be fooled by how hot it is; the clouds that drift in from the Taihang Mountains every afternoon are full of cold air. By providing enough condensation nuclei at the right time, we can create a snowstorm out of nowhere!” Prince Lu grinned. “I sent the recipe over earlier. The chemical factory off-site is currently devoting all its resources to manufacturing silver iodide powder. It won’t be long before we can fill a cloud-seeding canister and load it into the cannon. We’ve already test-flown the hot-air balloon. All we have to do is wait for the right weather conditions!”

Zhu Dagun gazed up at the clear and fair sky. The sun shone like fire. The distant sounds of battle were fading; a magpie squawked from the eaves. A fire-oil carriage rumbled along a stone-paved road. The air smelled of blood, oil, and flatcakes. Zhu Dagun stood by the prince, unable to move, his mind in a muddle.

10.

The wall swung shut, returning the room to darkness. They ate a little. Prince Lu sent instructions to the city defense and the workshops through the internet, asking Zhu Dagun questions about alchemy as he worked. Zhu Dagun braced himself and spouted enough smooth-talk and nonsense to pass muster.

“Ah, I need to sleep. I pulled an all-nighter and I’m running out of steam.” Prince Lu stretched wearily and headed for the cot in a corner of the room. “Keep an eye out, will you? Wake me if there’s any news.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Zhu Dagun bowed respectfully. He watched as Prince Lu lay down, pulled the brocade covers around himself, and soon began to snore. He let out a quiet breath and sat down, head spinning, to collect his chaotic thoughts.

Zhu Dagun didn’t understand everything Prince Lu had said, but he grasped the tone of his words clearly enough. The master of the East City Institute couldn’t care less about the Han dynasty or the people of Jinyang. He had come from a different land, and he would ultimately return there. He’d created his dazzling novelties and exotic toys to garner public support and earn money. He designed the internet to win over the scholar gentry and relay the East City Institute’s orders; he sold the fire-oil carriages, weapons, and fine wine to show goodwill toward the military; and the life-saving grain, deadly fire, and impossible snow were all, in the end, to further Prince Lu’s own selfish goals. Han Feizi had written, “Consider one who refuses to enter a dangerous place or fight in the army, who will not for the gain of all the people sacrifice even one hair on their leg . . . you have one who values life above all else.” Was Prince Lu not “one who valued life above all else?”

Something was fomenting inside of Zhu Dagun. His chest felt stuffed, his head swollen. His ears rang. He thought of what Ma Feng and Guo Wanchao, Liu Jiye, and the emperor had said. He thought of this state, this prefecture, this city, and the tens of thousands of living beings within. Liang, Tang, Jin, Zhou, and Han had taken the land in turn; Hu and Han were thrown together in this time of chaos. An inhabitant of this turbulent era, Zhu Dagun had once considered abandoning the brush for the sword and carve out some great undertaking. He’d settled in a quiet corner discussing philosophy all day long, not because he was lacking in strength or courage, but because he lacked for direction. The scholars frequently chatted of the grand principles of governing a state and bringing peace to the land. Zhu Dagun always thought that it was empty words, but what aside from their arrogant talk of the halcyon days of the Rule of Wen and Jing, the Restoration of Zhao and Xuan, the Golden Age of Kaiyuan, had they to while away their time? All he wanted was food, a bed, and a roof to sleep under; to spend his leisure time chatting and drinking; to be able to roll into bed after eating, express his aspirations online, visit the brothels when he had the money; to be at ease with the world. But in this era of chaos, to be at ease with the world in itself required swimming against the flow. Even a minor character like him had been dragged into a struggle for the survival of a country. At this moment, he held the fate of Great Han and the lives of everyone in the city in his hands. If he didn’t do something, how could he claim to be a scholar, one who spent twenty years filling himself with the words of sages?

Zhu Dagun pulled the fine steel dagger from his sleeve. He knew he couldn’t persuade Prince Lu because Prince Lu wasn’t a citizen of Han. Grand principles were a sham to him; only the six and three-tenths inches of steel in Zhu Dagun’s hand were real. In this moment, an idea floated into Zhu Dagun’s mind, perfect in three ways. He slowly unfolded his large frame and stood, a smile hovering on the corners of his mouth. He stepped soundlessly across the floorboards and reached the cot in a few steps—

“What the fuck are you doing!” Prince Lu snapped up, eyes wide and staring. “I got bitten by a mosquito and got up to burn some bug-repelling incense. What are you doing here with a knife? I’m going to call my memmmph”

Zhu Dagun had covered Prince Lu’s mouth solidly, setting the dagger at his pale, tender neck. “Don’t make noise and I’ll leave you a way out,” he murmured into the prince’s ear. “Earlier, I saw you use the internet to move the East City Institute’s city defense forces. You had a row of wooden movable type in your text tray. Give me the type blocks and tell me your passphrase, and I won’t kill you.”

Prince Lu was a prudent man. He nodded frantically, his forehead beaded all over with sweat. Zhu Dagun loosened his fingers, allowing a gap. Prince Lu gasped and panted as he took the movable type of red-colored wood from his pocket and threw them on the cot. “There’s no passphrase,” he stammered. “My orders pass through a special line straight to the city defense camps and the workshops. No one can fake it . . . Why are you doing this? I’ve protected Jinyang and invented countless novelties for every facet of life for soldiers and civilians alike to enjoy. Everyone in the city loves me. Where have I wronged Northern Han, wronged Taiyuan, wronged you?”

Zhu Dagun laughed mirthlessly. “Empty words. You look out only for yourself, while I plan for the benefit of a city’s worth of people. First, I’ll order the East City Institute to stop the defense. Once the fire-dragons, pillars, and catapults have stilled, General Guo Wanchao will open the gates and welcome the Song army in.

“Second, Minister Ma Feng is waiting inside the palace. Once the city gates are open and the army is thrown into panic, he will persuade the ruler Liu Jiyuan to come out with his family and surrender. But I will take the emperor and help him escape in the chaos, aboard the so-called hot air balloon to the Khitans.

“Third, I will bind you and give you to Zhao Guangyi, trading you for the lives of the city’s inhabitants. The Song army has besieged the city for three months without success; the Song ruler must be filled with hate for you, the inventor of the city’s defensive machines. If I bring you to him bound hand and foot, he is certain to be greatly relieved and spare Jinyang from the sword. In this way, I will not fail Guo Wanchao, Liu Jiye, or the emperor, or the people in danger of terrible suffering. I can achieve both benevolence and justice!”

Prince Lu gaped. “What kind of crappy plan is that? Whose faction are you in? You’ve cut everyone else a sweet deal, but I get thrown to the wolves, huh? Do you have to be so extreme? Let’s talk it out; everything is open to discussion. All I wanted was to gather a bit of energy and go home. Does that make me a bad person? Did I do anything wrong? Did I do anything wrong?”

“You did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. No one did anything wrong. So whose fault is it?” Zhu Dagun asked.

Old Wang didn’t have a chance to come up with an answer to this profound philosophical question before the dagger hilt struck his forehead, knocking him unconscious.

11.

Wang Lu slowly regained consciousness, just in time to see the hot air balloon slowly rise above the roof of the main building of the East City Institute. The balloon was sewn from one hundred and twenty-five panels of thick lacquered cotton, with a basket woven from bamboo. The basket held a fire-oil burner and the heavy pig iron cannon. Three or four people were squeezed into the basket in clear disregard of weight capacity, but as the throttle opened and the flames roared, hot air swelling the balloon, the massive flying object continued its swaying ascent. The dark brown lacquer gleamed in the setting sun, the balloon’s long shadow stretching across Jinyang.

“It worked . . . it worked!” Wang Lu sat right up, laughing skyward. The north wind was blowing, the summer heat dissipating in its chill. Clumps of water-vapor-rich clouds were gathering in the sky, perfect weather for artificially inducing snow. The time traveler watched the balloon as it rose higher and higher into the heavens, muttering, “Not enough not enough not enough, two hundred meters higher and then it can fire, a little more, a little more . . . ”

He tried to stand and find a better angle to observe from, only to realize that he couldn’t move his legs. He looked down and discovered that he was tied onto a fire-oil carriage parked in the middle of the road. The driver lay slumped over in his seat, dead. He looked farther and saw that the road was covered in piles of corpses—Han soldiers, Song soldiers, and Jinyang civilians, all dead in a variety of ways. Blood flowed down the roadside ditch, moistening yellow earth that had lain dry for months. Crying, screams, and the sounds of fighting came from the distance, like the roll of thunder on the horizon. And yet Jinyang seemed abnormally still, except for the crows circling and gathering in the sky.

“Fuck, what happened?” Wang Lu yelled, trying to twist free. His hands and feet had been soundly tied; movement made the coarse fibers slice agonizingly into his flesh. The prince let loose a string of curses, panting roughly, afraid to struggle further. At this time, a cavalry troop shot down the street, their armor and uniform marking them as Song. The riders didn’t even glance at Wang Lu as their steeds galloped toward the East City Gate, trampling the corpses. A few snatches of conversation lingered in the air.

“—We’re too late! What do we do if our arrows can’t hit it?”

“—It’s not a south wind, but a north wind. It’ll never reach Liao. It’ll only be blown southward—”

“—Will we be blamed?”

“—Otherwise we’d be too late!”

“Hey! What are you doing! Don’t leave me here!” Wang Lu yelled wildly. “Tell your master I know physics and chemistry and mechanical engineering! I can build you a steampunk Song Empire! Hey, wait! Don’t go! Don’t go . . . ”

The hoofbeats faded. Wang Lu looked up despairingly. The hot air balloon was now a small dot high in the sky, drifting southward with the north wind. Bang. He saw the puff of white smoke rise a moment before the sound reached him. The cannon had fired.

Wang Lu’s eyes filled with the light of his last hope. He wrenched his head down, bit his clothing, and tore it aside, revealing the skin of his chest. A line of light glowed beneath his left collarbone: the fuel gauge for the observational platform. At the moment, it displayed red to indicate low power. The wave function engine required at least thirty percent to carry him back; snow in July would create a universe split that would fill his tank to at least fifty. “Come on.” He was crying, bleeding, talking to himself with gritted teeth. “Come on come on come on and give me a big fat blizzard!”

Each gram of silver iodide powder could generate more than ten trillion particles; five kilograms was enough to create all the ice crystals for a blizzard. It seemed ridiculous, that someone could artificially create snow in an era of such low technology, but perhaps the time traveler’s crazed prayer had been fulfilled: the clouds began to gather in the sky, roiling, pitch-black and restless, reducing the setting sun behind them to a thread of golden light.

“Come on come on come on!” Wang Lu roared toward the sky.

A rumble of thunder resonated to the horizons. First, rain fell, cold rain mixed with ice crystals. But as the ground temperature continued to drop, the rain became snow. A single snowflake drifted down, landed on the tip of Wang Lu’s nose, and instantly melted from his body heat. But right after it came a second, then a third, heralding their quadrillions of compatriots.

The drenched time traveler laughed heavenward. It was a proper blizzard in July, the snow coming down in clumps; he couldn’t wait to see the palaces, buildings, willows, and walls painted powder white. Wang Lu looked down and saw the gauge on his chest glowing green. The engine’s energy forecast had crossed the baseline; the moment this universe split into two, the observational platform would collect the energy and automatically activate. In a moment too brief to be assigned a unit, it would send him home to his warm 900 square foot apartment near the Beiyuan neighborhood roundabout, Tongzhou District, Beijing.

“This will be legendary,” Wang Lu said to himself, shivering. “I’m going to go home, find a less dangerous job, find a wife, squeeze my way onto the subway every day to go to work, and do nothing but play video games when I get home. I’ve had enough adventure for a lifetime, truly . . . ”

At the rate the snow was accumulating, it would have taken less than an hour to bury Jinyang under a yard of white. But right at that moment, twenty dragons of fire rose from the four directions.

From the dozen gates of West, Central, and East City, the fire-dragon chassis were spraying pillars of flame, accompanied by countless pig bladder catapults hurling fireballs. They were weapons of city defense he’d built with his own hands, weapons the Song army had feared more than any other.

“Wait a . . . ” The light went out of Wang Lu’s eyes. “No, are they burning Jinyang down anyway? At least they could wait a little, until this snow’s done . . . wait, wait—”

Thick, viscous fire-oil sprayed everywhere; flames roared heavenward. The fires spread with a speed beyond anyone’s imagination. Jinyang had been long under drought, and the precipitation called by the time traveler hadn’t the chance to soak into tinder-dry timbers.

The fire in West City began in Jinyang Palace, engulfing Xiqing Ward, Guande Ward, Fumin Ward, Faxiang Ward, and Lixin Ward in turn in a sea of flames. The fire in Central City set the great water wheel alight first, then burned west toward Xuanguang Hall, Renshou Hall, Daming Hall, Feiyun House, Deyang Hall. The East City Institute soon transformed into a brilliant torch. The snowflakes whirling above vaporized without a trace before they had a chance to land. The green light on the time traveler’s chest faded. He howled his grief and agony, “Motherfucker, I was so close, so close!”

Bathed in fire, Jinyang lit dusk into daytime. The air boiled in the inferno; a scarlet dragon of flame wheeled upward, dispersing the clouds in an eyeblink. No one saw the fallen snow; they only saw flames that touched the heavens. The ancient city, first built in the Spring and Autumn Era, more than one thousand four hundred years before this moment, wailed distantly in the flames.

Jinyang’s fortunate survivors were being driven northeast by the Song army, looking back with every step, their weeping loud enough to shake heaven. The Song ruler Zhao Guangyi sat astride his warhorse, gazing at the flames of distant Jinyang and the figures kneeling before him.

He said, “When you’ve captured the pretend-emperor Liu Jiyuan, come and see me. Do not harm him. Guo Wanchao, I confer upon you the title of Militia Commander of Ci Prefecture. Ma Feng, I name you Supervisor of Imperial Construction. You two have done me service, and I hope you will turn all your ingenuity and wisdom to my Great Song from today onward. Liu Jiye, why do you refuse to surrender when all the others have? Do you not know the parable of the praying mantis who attempted to block the passage of a chariot?”

Liu Jiye, his hands bound, turned to kneel northward. “The ruler of Han has yet to surrender,” he said stubbornly. “How can I surrender first?”

Zhao Guangyi laughed. “I’ve long heard of Liu Jiye of the East Bank. You live up to your reputation. You can surrender once I capture the little emperor. You should revert to your original name of Yang. Why should a Han try to protect a Hu? If you want to fight, you should turn and fight the Khitans, don’t you think?”

Having finished talking to these men, Zhao Guangyi rode forward a few steps. He bent down. “What do you have to say?”

Zhu Dagun knelt on the ground, afraid to raise his head. From the corners of his eyes, he could see the raging flames on the horizon. “I claim no accomplishment,” he said, shaking. “I only ask that I be judged to have done no trespass.”

“Very well.” Zhao Guangyi waved his whip. “Posthumously grant him the title Duke of Tancheng, with a feifdom of thirty miles square. Chop off his head.”

“Your Imperial Majesty! What wrong did I commit?” Zhu Dagun stood up in shock, flinging aside the two soldiers next to him. Four or five more tackled him. The executioner raised his sword.

“You did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. No one did anything wrong. Who knows whose fault it is?” said the Song ruler indifferently.

The head rolled to a stop; the large frame thudded to the ground. The copy of Analects fell from Zhu Dagun’s sleeve pocket and into the puddle of blood, soaking through, until not a single character could be distinguished.

Everything the time traveler had created burned to ashes with Jinyang. After a new city was built nearby, people gradually came to think of those days of wonders as an old dream. Only Guo Wanchao would sometimes take out the “Ray-Ban” sunglasses while drinking with Zhao Da in the Ci Prefecture army camp. “If he’d been born in Song, the world would be a completely different place, huh.”

The Song conquest of Northern Han received only a brief description in the History of the Five Dynasties. One hundred sixty years later, the historian Li Tao at last wrote the great fire of Jinyang into the official histories, but naturally there were no mentions of a time traveler.

“In [979 CE], the emperor visited Taiyuan from the north through Shahe Gate. He dispatched the residents in groups to the new governing city of Bingzhou, setting fire to their homes. Children and the elderly did not reach the city gates in time, and many burned to death.”

—Extended Continuation of Zizhi Tongjian, Book 20

Originally published in Chinese in New Science Fiction, January 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Born in 1981, Zhang Ran graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2004 with a degree in Computer Science. After a stint in the IT industry, Mr. Zhang became a reporter and news analyst with Economic Daily and China Economic Net, during which time his news commentary won a China News Award. In 2011, Mr. Zhang quit his job and moved to southern China to become an independent writer. He began publishing science fiction in 2012, with his debut story, “Ether,” winning the Yinhe (Galaxy) Award as well as the Gold Xingyun (Nebula) Award. His novella, “Rising Wind City,” won the Yinhe Award and a Silver Xingyun Award.

The Promise of God

Michael Flynn

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

It began to grow cold in the cabin after the sun went down, and Nealy thought about building a fire. It would be a fine fire, roaring and crackling and toasting warm. It would light the room with a delicious dancing light, and he and Greta could beek on the outer hearth. He loved the way that firelight played off Greta’s features, making them red and soft and shiny; and he loved the way the smoky smells of the burning wood blended with the earthy smells of Greta herself. Yes, a fire was surely what was needed.

The wood was stacked against the back wall. He had chopped it himself, as Greta had asked. Use the axe, she had told him before leaving to trek down the mountainside to the village. Don’t do it the Other Way.

Nealy snuggled deeper into the chair and looked over his shoulder at the cabin’s door. He couldn’t see what difference it made. He flexed his hands, sore and stiff from the chopping and rubbed the hard palms together. Hard work. Blister-raising work. It was easier the Other Way. Your muscles didn’t ache; your back was not sore. The faggots could march themselves into the hearth and leap upon each other; then he could summon a salamander to ignite them. It would be easy, and it would be fun to watch.

Nealy gazed on the wood. His fingers plucked aimlessly at the arm of the chair. It was growing chilly in the room. He thought about building a fire.

When Nealy was seven, a wolf broke into the sheep pen. He heard the bleating all the way from the chicken coop and he ran as fast as he could down to the meadow gate, slipping in the mud where the run-off from the old well-pump trickled toward the creek. As Nealy raised himself from the muck, he spied the wolf among the flock as though through parted clouds. Sheep were milling and baa-ing, knowing there was a danger amongst them, but at a loss for what to do. The wolf raised its head from the carcass of a young ewe and bared bloody teeth. Far off, in the autumn field on the far side of the pen, Papa had dropped the reins of the plow horse and was hopping across the furrows with his musket in hand. Too late, though; too late for Fat Emma.

Nealy staggered to his feet and the wolf backed away, not ready to attack a human being, but neither ready to retreat, either. When it turned, Nealy could see the badly healed scar along its flank, the stiffness with which one hind leg moved; explanation, at least, for why it had chosen the sheep pens. Nealy pointed a finger at the beast.

“You killed Fat Emma, you!” he shrieked, as only young boys can shriek over a favorite animal lost; and never mind that Emma would betimes have graced his own table. At seven, the future is a hazy thing. He made a gesture with his hands. Anger and instinct moved his arms; and he felt something—he felt some thing—course through him like water through a pipe, as if the pulse in his veins gushed forth in a great spray.

And the wolf howled and twisted, leaped upon itself and lay still.

Nealy’s breaths came in short gusts. His brow and face were hot and flushed and his chest heaved. His head ached and he felt very, very tired. The sheep milled about in the pen, bleating and bleating and bleating and bleating. Stupid beasts, Nealy thought. Lackwits. Sheep deserved what happened to them. He made another gesture and the fleece upon Gray Harry began to blacken and smolder. Harry shook himself. Smoke rolled off him, then flames. Harry ran, still unsure where the danger lay, knowing only to run and escape.

With a cry, Nealy dropped to his knees in the mud and covered his face with his hands. His head throbbed. What had he done? What had he done? He felt his father’s arms gather him in, banding him tight against his sweet-smelling linen shirt. Between sobs, Nealy told him what had happened; and his father kept saying, “I know, Nealy. I saw.”

After a while, his father stood him upright and brushed him off and straightened his clothes. “There,” he said with a catch in his voice. “You look more presentable now. The wolfskin is yours, you know. It will make a fine cloak. You can wear it to school and the other kids will be jealous.”

“Buh—Buh—But, Gray Harry—” Nealy’s words bobbed in his throat.

His father looked past him, at the dead animals in the pen. He could feel Papa’s head shaking as he buried his face in his father’s chest. “You shan’t have that fleece, Nealy,” he heard him say. “No, you shan’t have that one.”

The rapping at the door was repeated three times. Nealy twisted in his seat and stared at it, wondering who it was. Not Greta, for she would not have knocked. A neighbor? Someone from the village? The knocking boomed: a fist against the thick, wooden slats. Finally, a kick and a muffled voice. “I know you be within, Master Cornelius. I saw your wifman leave.”

Nealy nodded to himself. Someone craving admittance. Perhaps he should open the door and admit whoever it was. He pondered that for a time, weighed the urim and the thummin in his mind, chased the decision as it slipped like quicksilver through the fingers of his mind, while the pounding on his door increased. Perhaps he should . . .

But the decision was taken from him. The door creaked open and a mousy-brown face peered around its edge. It brightened when it saw him, and showed a smile white with small teeth. “There you be, Master Cornelius. I knew you were here.”

“God’s afternoon to you, Goodwif Agnes,” Nealy said, for he recognized the man now. “I pray you are well.”

Agnes touched the mezuzah lightly to appease the household lares and closed the door behind her. She curtsied quickly and awkwardly, then stood there, dressed in a shapeless, butternut homespun gown that just brushed the tops of her moccasins. The top button in the front of her gown was unfastened, so that Nealy could see a soft bit of roundness on either side of the opening, like twin crescent moons.

“God’s afternoon, Master Cornelius.” A hint of color suffused her cheeks, so perhaps she knew that her gown was unfastened; or that Nealy had noticed.

Has she come to seduce me? Nealy wondered. There were wivmen enough who wanted his seed. That would explain why she wore no coverslut over her gown. He knew Other Ways of pleasuring, Other Ways of bringing a wif to ecstasy, riding atop a rolling sea of pure joy. Sometimes Greta allowed him to use those Ways on her. She would arch her back in rapture while he spelled, and give soft, little cries—though afterward she would often grow dread-full and beg him never to do it again, even if she asked. Though she always did, she always did. And Nealy had no choice but to obey.

“I’ll not mump with you,” Agnes said. “I crave a boon.”

Of course, she did. They all did. Why else would she have come. “And what boon is that?” Politeness came easy. Politeness cost nothing.

“My house-bound, sir Master. He has the fleas some’ at bad; and I was wondering, I was, if you could use your dweomercræft to relieve him.” She stood, twisting the front of her gown in her fist, flushed in the face and looking down.

“And you as well?” he asked with a half-smile. That which has touched an unclean thing became itself unclean. See Leviticus. Yet, did she know how awe-full it was what she asked of him? “You know the custom,” he chided her. “You must approach my rixler. Greta has gone but lately and . . . ”

“I know.” Agnes paused and took a deep breath. “I waited until she left. I addressed her yestere’en, but she laughed at me and said that my wereman and I should wash ourselves and our clothing with lye soap and a stiff wire brush.”

Nealy laughed. “Aye, by Hermes, that would work!” He felt the hammer in his veins, the sudden, momentary distancing of his vision, and knew that the scrubbing would work, better than Greta had supposed; but before he could tell Agnes of his incontinent spelling, she spoke.

“But you could make it so the fleas would never return, so that Lucius and I ’ud be clean for good and aye.”

Nealy paused with his mouth half-open and pondered the additional requirement. Now, that did put a different cast on things. There were any number of alternatives. He closed his eyes to better envision them. Yes, four or five possibilities, some of them quite amusing. And it made Alice’s request so much more interesting.

To ply the craeft, as all men knew, would nibble the soul away.

His parents had begun the search for a rixler that very evening. The priest had come up from Lechaucaster, down by the forks of the river, where the chain dam hoarded the headwaters for the southern canal. He had come up the mountainside a-muleback and had tested Nealy with an ankh. It was stuffy in the close-bed with the priest. The man stank with the sweat of his riding and his breath was foul. Nealy remembered everything about that day with the clarity of a landmark spied across miles of fog and mist.

Mama had cried. He remembered that, too.

“For a while yet, he may refrain,” the priest said with a shaking head. “Ynglings oft try to abstain; yet in the end, they cannot restrain themselves and are drawn back to the Other Way in spite of everything.”

His mother rose from the table and turned, crossing her arms across herself—and Nealy drew back quickly into the confines of the close-bed lest she see him. But he leaned his head by the door so as to hear everything.

“But Nealy is a good boy,” she said. “And dweormen do much good in the world.”

“Esther . . . ” Papa’s voice, warning.

“But only under the tutelage of a trained rixler,” insisted the priest. “One who may provide a soul for him when his craeft has eaten his own.” Then he chanted from the Gospel of Thomas:

“‘When you make the two into one,
When you make the inner like the outer,
And the outer like the inner,
And the upper like the lower,
When you make the male and the female into a single one . . . ’”

Nealy had heard the words before, at synagogue, when the priest sang from the Hermetic books, but they had meant nothing and still meant nothing.

“He is too young,” said Mama through a quiet sob. (Oh, and Nealy bristled at that. Too young? Why, he was seven! All of seven . . .)

“It comes on them at the age of reason,” the priest said. “Best that his training begin tonight.”

“So soon?” Papa’s voice had been laced with sorrow. “I had thought that . . . ” Papa’s voice trailed off.

The priest was silent a moment. Then he spoke firmly. “Nothing is gained by putting it bye. There is only loss. I shall have a mister come to tutor you, and to select the rixler. Does the lad prefer girls or boys?”

“Let it wait for a moon or so. He is my son. I . . . ”

“Delay too long,” the priest warned, “and he may not bond with his rixler at all.” The priest’s voice had gone soft and low. “Or have you forgotten what was born within the Barrens?”

He heard Mama suck in her breath. Nealy did not understand. Only that the Pine Barrens was a place Mama used to frighten him into good behavior. No one went there. No one who ever came back. In two hundred years, no one had ever come back.

“Tonight,” the priest continued firmly. “Tonight you must open the need that only his rixler may fill.”

“My son,” said Papa in a choked voice. “How can I?”

“How can you not?” the priest insisted.

That evening, Mama did not come to kiss him and tuck him into bed as was her wont. Nealy waited and waited and she did not come. He was afraid that something had happened to her and he began to cry and still she did not come.

Later, when his sobs had stilled themselves by exhaustion, he heard from his parents’ bed the sounds of others sobbing.

“Stop!” Greta’s voice jerked Nealy around with his mouth open and his hand half raised. She had used the vox, what the Guyandot Skraelings called orenda. Nealy paused with the words unspoken on his tongue. He could no more proceed than a winterlocked stream.

Greta’s eyes took in Agnes and Nealy. Took them in, saw them, understood them. Judged them. She stared at Nealy a moment longer with eyes the color of a storm-proud sky. Then, with barely a glance at Agnes, she turned and unfastened her cloak of charred sheeps’-wool and hung it on the peg behind the door. Greta was a buxom man, her breasts full and round under her laced buckskin coverslut. Her golden-grey hair was braided in tight whorls behind each ear.

“Mistress Rixler,” said Agnes, “I only—”

“Hush, child.” The voice was not loud, but it compelled. Greta bent and unfastened her leggings, which she tossed in the corner by the door; and exchanged her boots for moccasins. Her pendant, a brightly jeweled vestal’s dagger in a leather scabbard, dangled from her neck when she bent over.

“Nealy, dear,” she said, “be a host and offer our guest some wine.” Nealy hopped to do as he was bid, grateful to be acting, grateful for having been decided.

“No, I could not.” Agnes edged her way toward the door.

“Stay, child. We have matters to discuss.” Nealy listened to the wivmen while he arranged the goblets and removed the wine from the coldbox. Sometimes he felt as if he were both at a play and in it; as if he were watching and waiting and was occasionally called upon to speak lines written by someone else, words as surprising to him as to anyone.

Agnes stood stiffly and wrung the homespun gown in her fist. “I was not . . . I did not come to swyve your wereman.”

Greta laughed. “So. Then, button up. Don’t wave a musket you don’t mean to fire. Nealy, dear, would you have taken her if she had offered?”

And that was most definitely a cue. Nealy handed Greta her goblet, half-full of chased kosher Oneida. He looked at Greta, looked into her eyes, before handing Agnes the guest’s goblet. He imagined what Agnes looked like, imagined her pink and rosy nakedness—younger, firmer than Greta, smooth and soft and warm, smelling of sweat and rut. Imagined her wrapping herself around him. Quite the bellibone. “Yes,” he decided as he took a sip from his own goblet.

“If you ever made up your mind.” Greta also sipped. Over the cup rim, she glanced at Agnes, glanced at Nealy. “He will eventually, you know. Make up his mind. If I am away too long. If he has no more chores set for him. He has some will left in him.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s tools,” agreed Nealy. He wondered if Greta would tell him to fick Agnes. He hoped so; he felt himself growing werile at the thought. Tell me I can. Tell me I can. Greta smiled at him, no doubt noticing, then turned a stern eye on Agnes. “You came about the fleas, didn’t you? Don’t deny it. And after I told you. You keep yourself clean, you keep your dogs in the yard. You don’t need any Other Way.”

“It’s easier the Other Way,” Agnes said petulantly. Nealy thought the young man had a point, but Greta looked at Nealy; and Nealy saw infinite sadness behind the eyes. “No,” said Greta. “No, it is not.” She studied the wine in her goblet and was quiet for a long while. Nealy wondered if she was trying to foresee and was on the part of offering to do it for her when she spoke. “You know that going the Other Way eats the soul, yngling.”

“Everyone knows that, mistress.”

“But do you know what that means? Do you feel it here?” Greta slapped herself on the bosom. “By Hermes, Jesus, and St. Mahound!” she swore. “What can you possibly know?”

Agnes shrank away and the goblet fell from her fingers, splashing an ablution across the outer hearth. “No, mistress. Plainly, I do not. I—”

“Oh, child.” Greta’s voice was heavy. “Nealy, were you about to spell her fleas away?”

Nealy started, caught unawares by the sudden question. He nodded. “And her were’s in the bargain; and for aye.”

“How did you intend to do that?”

Nealy brightened. He loved to explain his reasoning to Greta. It was always so logical, his major and minor premises all lined up like ducklings after their mother. “I bethought myself to conjure a salamander,” he said. “When Agnes and Lucius were set a-fire, the fleas would quickly perish.” He heard the young man’s gasp and turned to her with a smile. “And, upon my word, they would ne’er come back to bother you more.”

Agnes made stiff fists by her side. “Is this a jest?

“Fleas cannot abide a high temperature,” Nealy pointed out, reasonably as he thought; but all he received in return from Agnes was a look of terror.

“Are you mocking me?”

Greta sighed and shook her head. “It is only the judgment of a man who has lost all his moral anchors.”

“The difficulty,” the rixmister had explained, “is to strike the balance between obedience and fear. Should he fear you too greatly, he may strike out in anger. Should he fear you too little, he may not obey. Your instruments are the knout and the caress.”

Nealy watched the girl and the mister with lack of interest, then turned his attention back to the rag doll he had been playing with. A scrap of metal affixed to its head and it was Lief ben Erik, the Great Explorer. Nealy imagined him standing in the prow of his longboat facing the spray. Sail on. Sail on. To Vinland the Good and Hy Brasil! Nealy made ocean spray noises with his mouth.

Where were Mama and Papa? They had not come with him when he left with the priest. Why did they avoid him so? Had he been bad? Had he been that bad? They fed him and they clothed him . . . and they treated him like a stranger. He missed their hugs; he missed their kisses. He missed Papa’s funny, booming voice and Mama’s ample lap. How could he right matters; put everything back as it had been, before the wolf, before Gray Harry . . . if no one told him what he had done wrong?

It wasn’t fair. Yes, he had hurt Gray Harry; but that had been an accident. The gods would understand. He had offered the sacrifices to Iaveis and Dianah. He studied the doll. Dress it differently and it could be Papa, or even Mama. He made a fist and punched the doll sharply in the body. That would teach them!

Tears filled his eyes and his lower lip trembled. How could he even think of hurting Papa or Mama? He must be a very bad boy to have had such very bad thoughts. No wonder his parents did not love him any more. No wonder the other boys no longer came to play and he was alone all the time. He turned his face away so the girl and the rixmister could not see. It wasn’t seemly for a boy to cry. It wasn’t werile. He picked Lief the Lucky off the floor and stroked him gently, imagining again that it was Papa.

When the girl approached, he looked up suspiciously. He had heard them talking about him in whispers. The girl had shiny blond hair that hung in thick, corkscrew braids down to her waist. She wore plain butternut and beaded moccasins of a design Nealy did not recognize. Her hand clenched a knout with a large, curved knob on the end of it. Behind her, the rixmister stood with an anxious look on her face. The girl blushed lightly and curtsied.

“Ave, Master Cornelius. I height Gretl Octavia Schmuelsdottr. I came all the way up the mountain from the convent school at Lechaucaster just to play with you.”

Nealy frowned and would not look at her. “You’re a girl,” he said. “And a vestal,” he added, pointing to the jeweled dagger hanging in its sheath from a ribbon ‘round her neck. He was not sure what a vestal was, only that they were special and came from the convent schools.

Gretl squatted by his side. “Vestals know all kinds of things. Some of them . . . ” She paused, glanced at the mister, and blushed again. “Some of them you will appreciate when you are older.”

Nealy stuck his lip out. “I want Mama.”

Gretl reached out and took his hand. “I will be your mama now. I will take care of you.” She hugged him; and it had been so long since any arms had compassed him that Nealy suddenly dropped the doll and hugged her back, feeling with an odd delicious tingle the funny shape of her chest pressing against him. A small, warm glow blossomed within him. Someone did like him after all.

“And later,” she said, “I will be your wifman.”

“I don’t want a wif,” he said.

“You’ll learn,” she said, caressing him.

“What’s the stick for?” he asked.

She hugged him tighter. “You’ll learn.”

“He is not evil,” Greta told Agnes. “He does not choose evil.”

Nealy grinned. “Thank you, my dear. You say such flattering things about me.” He finished his wine cup and set it by. “I’m not, I suppose,” he said, scratching his chin under his beard. “I thought so myself, once. But . . . ”

“But evil requires choice,” Greta said. “And choice has been taken from him.”

“And I don’t miss it nary a bit,” Nealy said with a nod. “If you choose, you are responsible. And responsibility . . . ” He spared a glance at Greta’s melancholy features and frowned. “Responsibility can be a terrible burden.” Something was bothering Greta. Nealy could tell. Something beyond Agnes’ importuning visit. Something she had brought back up the mountainside with her.

“The Other Way,” said Greta, “is an awe-full and wonder-full power; but, wielded too long, power blinds us to good and evil. Each time a dweorman spells, some part of his soul is destroyed. The part that sees evil and knows to shun it. Chirurgeons who have done autopsies report that in certain regions of the brain the very fibers are seared, as if by an inner fire. Such a man . . . ” She looked at Nealy with loving sadness. “Such a man cannot be allowed to choose.”

“The knout and the caress, eh, my dear?” Nealy grinned at his wif and rubbed himself to show where both had been applied. “They taught me to obey Greta’s voice, they surely did.” Sometimes, when he thought about spelling on his own, his groin would ache from the memories. Sometimes, when he thought about obeying Greta, he grew werile. “It was all done very logically.” He hoped Agnes would leave soon, so that he and Greta could beek. Perhaps he should make Agnes Go Away. Twice, at Greta’s command, he had made things Go Away. Once to a gang of cut-throats living in the forest beyond the Swoveberg who had raped and killed a ten-year-old girl; and once to an avalanche that had thundered down the hillside. The latter spelling had laid Nealy up for a week, numb and shivering in fever. He had felt as if great gulps of him had been sucked out into the very space between the stars. It would be much less onerous to make Alice Go Away. He looked to Greta for guidance.

But none was forthcoming. “The craeft robbed him of half himself; we robbed him then of the other,” she said sadly.

Nealy was distressed. “But I don’t begrudge it, dear Gretl. With it, what a monster I should be.”

“Yes, in all innocence, unleashing horrors and boons with equal carelessness.” Greta shook herself and looked back at Alice as if she had forgotten the young man was still there. “His choices have no moral weights, and it is urim and thummin which he would pick.” Then she rose and pointed fore-and middle finger at the younger man. “Betruth yourself, Alice Josepha Runningdeer, that you will not come to my were, nor any other dweorman, ever again, except through the man’s rixler.”

Alice dropped to her knees and hugged Greta around the waist. “Oh, I do, I do. I betruth myself, for good and aye.”

Greta lifted her to her feet. “Then go.”

Alice scurried to the door.

“Don’t forget the lye soap,” said Nealy. “And scrub very hard.” Alice gave him one last look of horror, then the door thudded shut behind her. Greta went to the door and put the bar in place, shutting the world without and them within.

Nealy ran into the wood behind the shed and knelt there rubbing himself where Gretl had struck him. Gretl was mean. All he had done was spell a spray of flowers to show how much he liked her. That was all, a spray of red and yellow and golden blooms to brighten up the winter months in their cabin.

But was Gretl pleased at the gesture? No, not her. Never spell without my permission! she had cried. Never!

Nealy clutched himself and bit down on his lip. By Hermes, that hurt! That was all she ever did, was fick him with that knout of hers, ever since the rixmister had set them up alone on the mountainside. If Papa were here, he’d make her stop; and Mama would box her ears good!

But the mountainside was far from home, far from home, and he had not seen Papa in a long, long time. Sometimes, in the night, he would sneak out of the cabin, out under the stars and look up at them, wondering if somewhere far to the south Mama and Papa were looking at them, too. Sometimes he heard their voices in the wind or in the rush of a stream, and saw their faces in the fire or a sparkling lake.

He had tried to find them once. He had made passes with his hands and the air parted before him like a curtain, and two shocked and frightened faces had turned toward him for just an instant before Gretl’s knout had struck him sharply.

Maybe that had been his parents on the other side of that curtain. Maybe not.

Maybe he should teach Gretl a lesson. Turn her stick into a viper. The spelling was in the Secret Book of Moses. He imagined the stick twisting and turning and hissing in her hands and her sudden shriek of terror. It would just be for a moment. He would change the knout back before it could bite. He did not want to hurt Gretl, only scare her.

His body twinged at the thought. Ah, what a blow she would land then!

He pulled his knees up under his chin and wrapped his arms around them. The woods grew dark farther in from the clearing, permanent night even in the day, under hickories and maples taller than the pillars of the great Temple at Shawmut, home for kobolds and sprites or other creatures. Maybe he should just run away and live by himself in the forest. Some people did that. Ridge runners and mountain men.

But he would lose Gretl if he did that. He would be all alone again, as when his parents had forsaken him. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his buckskin sleeve. He should not cry. He was fourteen, a full grown man. Papa had only been fifteen when he became house-bound to Mama. And Gretl had promised to teach him soon what were and wif did when they were house-bound to each other and that it was even better than the caresses she gave him. No, he should stay with Gretl. He was a bad boy. He had to be tamed. That was why they gave him Gretl, so she could teach him. That was why Gretl was older and knew how to touch him so it felt good. And it was why she carried the knout, too. It was all very logical. It was how you trained dogs.

Greta busied herself with the dinner preparations, setting out the flour bin and cutting a knuckle joint from the ham carcass in the cold room. Nealy admired her knifework as she cut the scraps of meat from the bone. He loved Greta’s speck-and-bean. She rolled and cut the noodles fat and small and square, and she never let the snap beans stew so long they became limp.

Nealy betook himself to his favorite chair and settled in, content to await Greta’s instructions.

When Greta had prepared the stew kettle, she carried it to the hearth. There she stopped and stared at the cold stones. Nealy felt her sorrow vibrate like the tolling of great cast iron bells. Nealy’s bones rang with it. Greta was crying.

“What is wrong, Greta?” Nealy had never seen Greta cry. It struck him as wrong. As if the sun and the moon had come loose from their crystal spheres. Greta swung the rack out and hung the kettle on the hook. “I should have told you to start the fire,” she said. “Now dinner will be late.”

Only that? A silly thing to cry over. Nealy wanted to tell her that he had thought about starting the fire himself but had not done it because she had not told him to. He thought she would be proud of his prudence. Perhaps it would cheer her up. But her eyes gazed on something so far away, Nealy did not dare interrupt her. Lately, Greta had waxed melancholy, but what it was that haunted her she never spoke of.

“I could start a fire,” he offered, “if you would but let me.” He thought that might please her. Nealy ached to be helpful; but the one thing he knew how to do well she would not let him do for trifles.

He was prepared for rebuff, but when Greta said, “Yes. Explain how you would accomplish it,” he brightened and told her all about the marching faggots and the salamander and the rest. When he was finished, he waited anxiously for her judgment. It could well be there was some moral wrong involved, like the time he had . . . . Well, it was best not to think on that. The villagers had rebuilt their houses farther from the riverbank, and the drought had ended. It was too bad about the children, but that could not be helped. Greta had been less experienced then.

“I see nothing wrong,” Greta said at last. The worry and the sorrow filled the cabin like molasses and Nealy ached to stopper the flow before he became mired in it. He wondered if Greta knew that he could feel these things. He had told her he could, but perhaps it was like Greta explaining right and wrong to him. The words were there, but not the sense.

He donned his wolf’s skin and made the cast, and a good one it was. The faggots put on a fine show, marching like legionnaires in the quick-step, centurions to the fore and levites to the rear, and even a leafy twig aloft in lieu of an eagle. A smile pierced even Greta’s quiet distress.

When the wood had stacked itself and ignited in a haze of flame, Greta swung the kettle hook back over the fire. Afterward, she stood staring into the crackling blaze for a long time, and remained silent all through dinner.

After cockshut, when the dishes were scoured and put away and the cooking fire had settled into a gentle roil of soft flames, Greta went to the cloak hook and took down her sheep’s wool.

“Are you going out again, dear?” Nealy asked.

Greta brought the cloak back and laid it down upon the hearth. Then she unfastened the neck of her coverslut and gown and let them fall to the flagstones. She stood there nude, one foot slightly upraised, her nakedness only accentuated by the ritual vestal’s dagger dangling between her breasts on its silken cord. The firelight caused the gemstones on the handle to sparkle like small, hard flames. Nealy sighed at the sight of the soft flesh rosened by the licking flames, and awaited her summons.

When Greta held out her arms Nealy shed his buckskins with fumbling fingers and joined her on the warm outer hearthstones. They kissed—he with urgency, she with tenderness—and settled down onto the soft wool. The heat of the fire was a delicious roasting sensation on his right side. Greta took him and brought him to her and they kissed again. “Yes,” said Greta, breaking her silence at last. “Yes, you may, this one last time.”

Nealy knew what she meant. Eagerly, he reached out with himself, feeling his being engorge with the stuff of the Other Way. His pulse throbbed and the stuff ran through his veins like liquor. He sparkled like the sunlight off the chop of a gentle lake. He touched her here, and there, in places where fingers could not reach; and Greta’s breath came faster and faster, in short gulps. She said, “Yes,” over and over.

He had dreamed of this earlier, Nealy remembered, just before Alice had come. He had dreamed of Greta pleasuring him on the hearthstones; and he wondered if the yearning itself had brought this act to pass. Sometimes his dreams did that. Sometimes.

When he was spent, he lay by her side, gently following her contours with his touch. Greta lay with her eyes closed, making soft noises in her throat. Nealy waited for her to tell him not to pleasure her the Other Way the next time. She always forbade him, she always asked him, he always obeyed her. Nealy did not know why the pleasuring frightened her.

This time, however, she made no reference to it. Instead, she spoke in a whisper, “Nealy, dear, I’ve been a good wifman to you.”

“No one could ask for a better,” Nealy told her. “I could never bind with another.”

“I know,” Greta said. “I know. The rixmister paired us well. The years have been good to us.” She sighed and pressed his head against her breasts, ran her fingers through his hair. “I had looked forward to spending our chair days together.”

He lifted his head from its delicious pillow. “What is it?” he asked, dread bubbling through the sorrow. “What is wrong?”

She cupped one of her breasts in her hand and gazed at it sadly. “I have the cancer,” she said.

The words dropped down the well of Nealy’s soul. He had to swallow several times before he could speak. “Are you sure?” was all he could ask. Bad news is always questioned. Bad news is always denied.

“I saw the chirurgeon in the town. That is why I went down the mountain.” She drew determination around her like a cloak. “Here, darling, Nealy . . . ” She pushed herself to a sitting position. “Here, sit within my lap.”

Nealy did as he was bid. He sat on the sheepskin between her legs and leaned back against her. Greta pulled his head once more against her breasts and Nealy jerked slightly at the touch.

“Do not fret, dear. You cannot hurt me; not by leaning against me.” Greta was silent for a time and Nealy contented himself with listening to her breathing. Then she said, “I felt the lumps at the freshening of Hunter’s Moon. I was not sure, at first. I did not want to believe it, at first. But the chirurgeon confirmed it.”

Nealy twisted his head and looked up into her face. Twin tears left dark trails down her cheeks. “Is there anything I can do, dear? Are there spells? I know of none; but . . . ”

“No, Nealy. No. You would have to know the cancer as well as you know the owl or the wind . . . or Alice Runningdeer’s fleas. No one knows what the cancer is, or why it does what it does. How can you spell what you cannot name?”

“True names . . . ,” Nealy said. “I could spell black,” he offered. “I could weave an unnamed spell. If the known does not help, we must try the unknown.”

“The Black Unknown? We dare not . . . . Dare not . . . . Nealy, no dweorman may spell upon the body of a rixler. That is a geas that may not, must not be lifted . . . ”

“But . . . ” Nealy frowned in concentration. “But, you will die. Surely. . . . ”

Greta seized him and held him tight against her, nearly crushing his breath from him. “I know. I know. I have lived with death for three tendays, now. I have grown . . . accustomed to his breath. Comes the moment, I will even welcome him. The chirurgeon’s potions . . . I may ask for something stronger, on that day.”

Nealy pondered Greta’s death. Who would make his meals? Who would pleasure him? Who would make his decisions? “Oh, Gretl,” he said, using her childhood name. “Oh, Gretl,” and his own tears came now as he conjured up his future in his drawn and quartered soul. “I do not know what I shall do without you!”

Greta hugged him even tighter between her breasts. He could feel the heat of them, feel the hardness of their tips, smell the delicious smell of flesh. “I do,” he heard Greta say.

Something felt different. Something was missing in their embrace. He felt the fleshy softness against his cheek. “Why, Gretl,” he said. “Your vestal’s dagger . . . Have you taken it off?”

“Lean your head back as far as you can, darling,” he heard her say.

It gave him such pleasure to obey her. A fine blade, it tickled; rather like a feather drawn across his throat.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1995.

About the Author

Michael Flynn began selling science fiction in 1984 with the short story “Slan Libh.” His first novel, In the Country of the Blind, appeared in 1990. He has since sold seventy or more stories to Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He is best know for the Hugo-nominated Eifelheim and his Tales of the Spiral Arm sequence, which includes The January Dancer, Up Jim River, In the Lion’s Mouth, and On Razor’s Edge. His most recent book is the collection Captive Dreams. He is currently working on a novel, The Shipwrecks of Time, set in the alien world of 1965.

Pathways

Nancy Kress

The Chinese clinic warn’t like I expected. It warn’t even Chinese.

I got there afore it opened. I was hoping to get inside afore anybody else came, any neighbors who knew us or busybodies from Blaine. But Carrie Campbell was already parked in her truck, the baby on her lap. We nodded to each other but didn’t speak. The Campbells are better off than us—Dave works in the mine up to Allington—but old Gacy Campbell been feuding with Dr. Harman for decades and Carrie was probably glad to have someplace else to take the baby. He didn’t look good, snuffling and whimpering.

When the doors opened, I went in first, afore Carrie was even out of the truck. It was going to take her a while. She was pregnant again.

“Yes?” said the woman behind the desk. Just a cheap metal desk, which steadied me some. The room was nothing special, just a few chairs, some pictures on the wall, a clothes basket of toys in the corner. What really surprised me was that the woman warn’t Chinese. Blue eyes, brown hair, middle-aged. She looked a bit like Granmama, but she had all her teeth. “Can I help you?”

“I want to see a doctor.”

“Certainly.” She smiled. Yeah, all her teeth. “What seems to be the problem, miss?”

“No problem.” From someplace in the back another woman came out, this one dressed like a nurse. She warn’t Chinese either.

“I don’t understand,” the woman behind the desk said. From her accent she warn’t from around here—like I didn’t already know that. “Are you sick?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then how can I—”

Carrie waddled into the door, the baby balanced on her belly. Now my visit would be table-talk everywhere. All at once I just wanted to get it over with.

“I’m not sick,” I said, too loud. “I just want to see a doctor.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Ludmilla Connors.”

The nurse stopped walking toward Carrie. The woman behind the counter half stood up, then sat down again. She tried to pretend like she hadn’t done it, like she warn’t pleased. If Bobby were that bad a liar, he’d a been in jail even more than he was.

“Certainly,” the woman said. I didn’t see her do nothing, but a man came out from the back, and he was Chinese. So was the woman who followed him.

“I’m Ludmilla Connors,” I told him, and I clenched my ass together real hard to keep my legs steady. “And I want to volunteer for the experiment. But only if it pays what I heard. Only if.”

The woman behind the desk took me back to a room with a table and some chairs and a whole lot of filing cabinets, and she left me there with the Chinese people. I looked at their smooth faces with those slanted, mostly closed eyes, and I wished I hadn’t come. I guess these two were the reason everybody hereabouts called it the “Chinese clinic,” even if everybody else there looked like regular Americans.

“Hello, Ms. Connors,” the man said and he spoke English real good, even if it was hard to understand some words. “We are glad you are here. I am Dr. Dan Chung and this is my chief technician Jenny.”

“Uh huh.” He didn’t look like no “Dan,” and if she was “Jenny,” I was a fish.

“Your mother is Courtney Connors and your father was Robert Connors?”

“How’d you know that?”

“We have family trees for everyone on the mountain. It’s part of our work, you know. You said you want to aid us in this research?”

“I said I want to get paid.”

“Of course. You will be. You are nineteen.”

“Yeah.” It warn’t a question, and I didn’t like that they knew so much about me. “How much money?”

He told me. It warn’t as much as the rumors said, but it was enough. Unless they actually killed me, it was enough. And I didn’t think they’d do that. The government wouldn’t let them do that—not even this stinking government.

“Okay,” I said. “Start the experiment.”

Jenny smiled. I knew that kind of smile, like she was so much better than me. My fists clenched. Dr. Chung said, “Jenny, you may leave. Send in Mrs. Cully, please.”

I liked the surprised look on Jenny’s face, and then the angry look she tried to hide. Bitch.

Mrs. Cully didn’t act like Jenny. She brought in a tray with coffee and cookies: just regular store-bought Pepperidge Farm, not Chinese. Under the tray was a bunch of papers. Mrs. Cully sat down at the table with us.

“These are legal papers, Ms. Connors,” Dr. Chung said. “Before we begin, you must sign them. If you wish, you can take them home to read, or to a lawyer. Or you can sign them here, now. They give us permission to conduct the research, including the surgery. They say that you understand this procedure is experimental. They give the university, myself, and Dr. Liu all rights to information gained from your participation. They say that we do not guarantee any cure, or even any alleviation, of any medical disorder you may have. Do you want to ask questions?”

I did, but not just yet. Half of me was grateful that he didn’t ask if I can read, the way tourists and social workers sometimes do. I can, but I didn’t understand all the words on this page: indemnify, liability, patent rights. The other half of me resented that he was rushing me so.

I said something I warn’t intending: “If Ratface Rollins warn’t president, this clinic wouldn’t be here at all!”

“I agree,” Dr. Chung said. “But you Americans elected a Libertarian.”

“Us Americans? Aren’t you one?”

“No. I am a Chinese national, working in the United States on a visa arranged by my university.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I grabbed the pen and signed everything. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

Both Dr. Chung and Mrs. Cully looked startled. She said, “But . . . Ludmilla, didn’t you understand that this will take several visits, spread out over months?”

“Yeah, I know. And that you’re going to pay me over several months, too, but the first bit today.”

“Yes. After your interview.”

She had one of those little recording cubes that I only seen on TV. They can play back an interview like a movie, or they can send the words to a computer to get put on screen. Maybe today would be just talking. That would be fine with me. I took a cookie.

“Initial interview with experimental subject Ludmilla Connors,” Dr. Chung said, and gave the date and time. “Ms. Connors, you are here of your own free will?”

“Yeah.”

“And you are a member of the Connors family, daughter of Courtney Ames Connors and the late Robert Connors?”

“Did you know my dad at the hospital? Were you one of his doctors?”

“No. But I am familiar with his symptoms and his early death. I am sorry.”

I warn’t sorry. Dad was a son-of-a-bitch even afore he got sick. Maybe knowing it was coming, that it was in his genes, made him that way, but a little girl don’t care about that. I only cared that he hit me and screamed at me—hit and screamed at everybody until the night he took after Dinah so bad that Bobby shot him. Now Bobby, just four months from finishing doing his time at Luther Luckett, was getting sick, too. I knew I had to tell this foreigner all that, but it was hard. My family don’t ask for help. “We don’t got much,” Granmama always said, “but we got our pride.”

That, and the Connors curse. Fatal Familial Insomnia.

It turned out that Dr. Chung already knew a lot of my story. He knew about Dad, and Bobby, and Mama, and Aunt Carol Ames. He even knew which of the kids got the gene—it’s a 50-50 chance—and which didn’t. The safe ones: Cody, Patty, Arianna, Timothy. The losers: Shawn, Bonnie Jean, and Lewis. And me.

So I talked and talked, and the little light on the recording cube glowed green to show it was on, and Mrs. Cully nodded and looked sympathetic so damn much that I started wishing for Jenny back. Dr. Chung at least sat quiet, with no expression on that strange ugly face.

“Are you showing any symptoms at all, Ms. Connors?”

“I have some trouble sleeping at night.”

“Describe it for me, in as much detail as you can.”

I did. I knew I was young to start the troubles; Mama was forty-six and Bobby twenty-nine.

“And the others with the FFI gene? Your mother and Robert, Jr. and”—he looked at a paper—“Shawn Edmond and—”

“Look,” I said, and it came out harsher than I meant, “I know I got to tell you everything. But I’m not going to talk none about any of my kin, not what they are or aren’t doing. Especially not to a Chinaman.”

Silence.

Then Dr. Chung said quietly, “I think, Ms. Connors, that you must not know how offensive that term is. Like ‘spic’ or ‘nigger.’”

I didn’t know. I felt my face grow warm.

He said, “I think it’s like ‘hillbilly’ is to mountain people.”

My face got even warmer. “I . . . I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

But it warn’t. I’m not the kind to insult people, even Chinese people. I covered my embarrassment with bluster. “Can I ask some questions for a change?”

“Of course.”

“Is this Chi—did this clinic come to Blaine and start treating people for what ails them, just to get my family’s trust so you all can do these experiments on our brains?”

That was the scuttlebutt in town and I expected him to deny it, but instead he said, “Yes.”

Mrs. Cully frowned.

I said, “Why? Because there are only forty-one families in the whole world with our sickness? Then why build a whole clinic just to get at us? We’re just a handful of folk.”

He said gently, “You know a lot about fatal familial insomnia.”

“I’m not stupid!”

“I would never think that for even a moment.” He shifted in his chair and turned off the recorder. “Listen, Ms. Connors. It’s true that sufferers from FFI are a very small group. But the condition causes changes in the brain that involve neural pathways which everybody has. Memory is involved, and sleep regulation, and a portion of the brain called the thalamus that processes incoming sensory signals. Our research here is the best single chance to gain information beyond price about those pathways. And since we also hope to arrest FFI, we were able to get funding as a medical clinical trial. Your contribution to this science will be invaluable.”

“That’s not why I’m doing it.”

“Whatever your reasons, the data will be just as valuable.”

“And you know you got to do it to me fast. Afore the Libertarians lose power.”

Mrs. Cully looked surprised. Why was she still sitting with us? Then I realized: Dr. Chung warn’t supposed to be alone with a young woman. Well, fine by me. But at least he didn’t seem surprised that I sometimes watch the news.

“That’s true,” he said. “If Rafe Bannerman wins this presidential election, and it certainly looks as if he will, then all the deregulations of the present administration may be reversed.”

“So you got to cut into my skull afore then. And afore I get too sick.” I said it nasty, goading him. I don’t know why.

But he didn’t push back. “Yes, we must install the optogenetic cable as soon as possible. You are a very bright young woman, Ms. Connors.”

“Don’t try to butter me up none,” I said.

But after he took blood samples and all the rest of it, after we set up a whole series of appointments, after I answered ten million more questions, the Chinaman’s—no, Chinese man’s—words stayed in my head all the long trudge back up the mountain. Not as bright, those words, as the autumn leaves turning the woods to glory, but it was more praise than I’d gotten since I left school. That was something, anyway.

When I got back to the trailer, about noon, nobody wouldn’t speak to me. Carrie must of dropped by. Bobby’s wife, Dinah, sewed on her quilt for the women’s co-op: the Rail Fence pattern in blue and yellow, real pretty. Mama sat smoking and drinking Mountain Dew. Granmama was asleep in her chair by the stove, which barely heated the trailer. It was cold for October and Bobby didn’t dig no highway coal again. The kids were outside playing, Shawn warn’t around, and inside it was silent as the grave.

I hung my coat on a door hook. “That quilt’s coming nice, Dinah.”

Nothing.

“You need some help, Mama?”

Nothing.

“The hell with you all!” I said.

Mama finally spoke. At least today she was making sense. “You better not let Bobby hear where you been.”

“I’m doing it for you all!” I said, but they all went back to pretending I didn’t exist. I grabbed my coat, and stomped back outside.

Not that I had anyplace to go. And it didn’t matter if I was inside or out; Mama’s words were the last ones anyone spoke to me for two mortal days. They hardly even looked at me, except for scared peeps from the littlest kids and a glare from Bonnie Jean, like nobody except a ten-year-old can glare. It was like I was dead.

But half the reason I was doing this was the hope—not strong, but there—that maybe I wouldn’t end up dead, after first raving and thrashing and trying to hurt people and seeing things that warn’t there. Like Dad, like Aunt Carol Ames, like Cousin Jess. And the other half of the reason was to put some decent food on the table for the kids that wouldn’t look at me or speak to me from fear that Bobby would switch them hard. I had hopes of Shawn, who hadn’t been home in a couple of days, out deer hunting with his buddies. Shawn and I always been close, and he was sweeter than Bobby even afore Bobby started showing our sickness. I hoped Shawn would be on my side. I needed somebody.

But that night in bed, with Patty on my other side as far away as she could get without actually becoming part of the wall, Bonnie Jean spooned into me. She smelled of apples and little kid. I hugged onto her like I warn’t never going to let go, and I stayed that way all through the long cold night.

“We have good news,” Dr. Chung said. “Your optogenetic vectors came out beautifully.”

“Yeah? What does that mean?” I didn’t really care, but my nerves were all standing on end and if I kept him talking, maybe it would distract me some. Or not.

We sat in his lab at the Chinese clinic, a squinchy little room all cluttered with computers and papers. No smoking bottles or bubbling tubes like in the movies, though. Maybe those were in another room. There was another Chinese doctor, too, Dr. Liu. Also Jenny, worse luck, but if she was the “chief technician” I guess she had to be around. I kept my back to her. She wore a pretty red shirt that I couldn’t never afford to buy for Patty or Bonnie Jean.

“What does that mean?” I said, realized I’d said it afore, and twisted my hands together.

“It means we have constructed the bio-organism to go into your brain, from a light-sensitive opsin, a promoter, and a harmless virus. The opsin will be expressed in only those cells that activate the promoter. When light of a specific wavelength hits those cells, they will activate or silence, and we can control that by—Ms. Connors, you can still change your mind.”

“What?” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung shot her a look that could wither skunkweed. I wouldn’t of thought he could look like that.

“My mind is changed,” I said. His talking warn’t distracting me, it was just making it all worse. “I don’t want to do it.”

“All right.”

“She signed the contracts!” Jenny said.

I whirled around on my chair to face her. “You shut up! Nobody warn’t talking to you!”

Jenny got up and stalked out. Dr. Liu made like he would say something, then didn’t. Over her shoulder Jenny said, “I’ll call Dr. Morton. Although too bad she didn’t decide that before the operating room was reserved at Johnson Memorial.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and fled.

I got home, bone-weary from the walk plus my worst night yet, just as Jimmy Barton’s truck pulled up at the trailer. Jimmy got out, looking grim, then two more boys, carrying Shawn.

I rushed up. “What happened? Did you shoot him?” Everybody knew that Jimmy was the most reckless hunter on the mountain.

“Naw. We never even got no hunting. He went crazy, is what. So we brought him back.”

“Crazy how?”

“You know how, Ludie,” Jimmy said, looking at me steady. “Like your family does.”

“But he’s only seventeen!”

Jimmy didn’t say nothing to that, and the other two started for the trailer with Shawn. He had a purpled jaw where somebody slugged him, and he was out cold on whatever downers they made him take. My gut twisted so hard I almost bent over. Shawn. Seventeen.

Dinah and Patty came rushing out, streaming kids behind them. Dinah was shrieking enough to wake the dead. I looked at Shawn and thought about how it must of been in the hunting camp, him going off the rails and “expressing” that gene all over the place: shouting from the panic, grabbing his rifle and waving it around, heart pounding like mad, hitting out at anyone who talked sense. Like Bobby had been a few months ago, afore he got even worse. Nobody in my family ever lasted more than seven months after the first panic attack.

Shawn.

I didn’t even wait to see if Mama was coming out of the trailer, if this was one of the days she could. I went back down the mountain, running as much as I could, gasping and panting, until I got to the Chinese clinic and the only hope I had for Shawn, for me, for all of us.

Dr. Morton turned out to be a woman. While they got the operating room ready at Johnson Memorial in Jackson, I sat with Dr. Chung in a room that was supposed to look cheerful and didn’t. Yellow walls, a view of the parking lot. A nurse had shaved off a square patch on my hair. I stared out at a red Chevy, trying not to think. Dr. Chung said gently, “It isn’t a complicated procedure, Ms. Connors. Really.”

“Drilling a hole into my skull isn’t complicated?”

“No. Humans have known how to do that part for thousands of years.”

News to me. I said, “I forgot a hat.”

“A hat?”

“To cover this bare spot in my hair.”

“The first person from your family to visit, I will tell them.”

“Nobody’s going to visit.”

“I see. Then I will get you a hat.”

“Thanks.” And then, surprising myself, “They don’t want me to do none of this.”

“No,” he said quietly, and without asking what I meant, “I imagine they do not.”

“They think you conduct experiments on us like we’re lab animals. Like with the Nazis. Or Frankenstein.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think they are . . . unknowing.” It felt like a huge betrayal. Still, I kept on. “Especially my Granmama.”

“Grandmothers are often fierce. Mine is.” He made some notes on a tablet, typing and swiping without looking at it.

I hadn’t thought of him—of any of them—as having a grandmother. I demanded, like that would make this grandmother more solid, “What’s her name?”

“Chunhua. What is the name of your grandmother?”

“Ludmilla. Like me.” I thought a minute. “‘Fierce’ is the right word.”

“Then we have this in common, yes?”

But I warn’t yet ready to give him that much. “I bet my granmama is more fierce than any of your kin.”

He smiled, a crinkling of his strange bald face, eyes almost disappearing in folds of smooth skin. “I would—what is it you say, in poker?—‘see that bet’ if I could.”

“Why can’t you?”

He didn’t answer, and his smile disappeared. I said, “What did your granmama do that was so fierce?”

“She made me study. Hours every day, hours every night. All spring, all summer, all winter. When I refused, she beat me. What does yours do?”

All at once I didn’t want to answer. Was beating better or worse? Granmama never touched me, nor any of us. Dr. Chung waited. Finally I said, “She freezes me. Looks at me like . . . like she wants to make a icy wind in my mind. And then that wind blows, and I can’t get away from it nohow, and then she turns her back on me.”

“That is worse.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I think so.”

A long breath went out of me, clearing out my chest. I said, “Bobby warn’t always like he is now. He taught me to fish.”

“Do you like fishing?”

“No.” But I liked Bobby teaching me, just the two of us laughing down by the creek, eating the picnic lunch Mama put up for us.

A nurse, masked and gowned like on TV, came in and said, “We’re ready.”

The last thing I remember was lying on the table, breathing in the knock-out gas, and thinking, Now at least I’m going to get a long deep sleep. Only at the very last minute I panicked some and my hand, strapped to the table, flapped around a bit. Another hand held it, strong and steady. Dr. Chung. I went under.

When I woke, it was in a different hospital room but Dr. Chung was still there, sitting in a chair and working a tablet. He put it down.

“Welcome back, Ms. Connors. How do you feel?”

I put my hand to my head. A thick bandage covered part of it. Nothing hurt, but my mouth was dry, my throat was scratchy, and I had a floaty feeling. “What do you got me on? Oxycontin?”

“No. Steroids to control swelling and a mild pain med. There are only a few nerve receptors in the skull. Tomorrow we will take you back to Blaine. Here.”

He handed me a red knit hat.

All at once I started to cry. I never cry, but this was so weird—waking up with something foreign in my skull, and feeling rested instead of skitterish and tired, and then this hat from this strange-looking man . . . I sobbed like I was Cody, three years old with a skinned knee. I couldn’t stop sobbing. It was awful.

Dr. Chung didn’t high-tail it out of there. He didn’t try to there-there me, or take my hand, or even look embarrassed and angry mixed together, like every other man I ever knowed when women cry. He just sat and waited, and when I finally got myself to stop, he said, “I wish you would call me ‘Dan.’”

“No.” Crying had left me embarrassed, if not him. “It isn’t your name. Is it?”

“No. It just seems more comfortable for Westerners.”

“What is your damned name?”

“It is Hai. It means ‘the ocean.’”

“You’re nothing like any ocean.”

“I know.” He grinned.

“Do all Chinese names mean something?”

“Yes. I was astonished when I found out American names do not.”

“When was that?”

“When I came here for graduate school.”

I was talking too much. I never rattled on like this, especially not to Chinese men who had me cut open. It was the damn drugs they gave me, that thing for swelling or the “mild pain med.” I’d always stayed strictly away from even aspirin, ’cause of watching Mama and Bobby. Afore I could say anything, Dr. Chung said, “Your meds might induce a little ‘high,’ Ludmilla. It will pass soon. Meanwhile, you are safe here.”

“Like hell I am!”

“You are. And I apologize for calling you ‘Ludmilla.’ I have not received permission.”

“Oh, go the fuck ahead. Only it’s ‘Ludie.’” I felt my skull again. I wanted to rip off the bandage. I wanted to run out of the hospital. I wanted to stay in this bed forever, talking, not having to deal with my family. I didn’t know what I wanted.

Maybe Dr. Chung did, because he went on talking, a steadying stream of nothing: graduate school in California and riding busses in China and his wife’s and daughters’ names. They were named after flowers, at least in English: Lotus and Jasmine and Plum Blossom. I liked that. I listened, and grew sleepy, and drifted into dreams of girls with faces like flowers.

I was two days in Johnson Memorial and two more in a bed at the clinic, and every single one of them I worried about Shawn. Nobody came to see me. I thought Patty might, or maybe even Dinah if Bobby’d a let her, but they didn’t. Well, Patty was only twelve, still pretty young to come alone. So I watched TV and I talked with Dr. Chung, who didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do.

“Don’t you got to see patients?”

“I’m not an M.D., Ludie. Dr. Liu mostly sees the patients.”

“How come Blaine got so many Chinese doctors? Aren’t Americans working on optogenetics?”

“Of course they are. Liu Bo and I became friends at the university and so applied for this grant together.”

“And you brought Jenny.”

“She is Bo’s fianc�.”

“Oh. She warn’t—there he is, the bastard!”

President Rollins was on TV, giving a campaign speech. Red and blue balloons sailed up behind him. My hands curled into fists. Dr. Chung watched me, and I realized—stupid me!—that of course he was working. He was observing me, the lab rat.

He said, “Why do you hate the president so?”

“He stopped the government checks and the food stamps. It’s ’cause of him and his Libbies that most of Blaine is back to eating squirrels.”

Dr. Chung looked at the TV like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, but I knew his attention was really on me. “But under the Libertarians, aren’t your taxes lower?”

I snorted. “Five percent of nothing isn’t less to pay than fifteen percent of nothing.”

“I thought the number of jobs in the coal mines had increased.”

“If you can get one. My kin can’t.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t tell him why not. Bobby and Uncle Ted and maybe even now Shawn—they can’t none of them pass a drug screen. So I snapped, “You defending Ratface Rollins?”

“Certainly not. He has drastically and tragically cut funding for basic research.”

“But here you all are.” I waved my arm to take in the room and the machines hooked up to me and the desk in the lobby where Mrs. Cully was doing something on a computer. I was still floating.

“Barely,” Dr. Chung said. “This study is funded as part of a grant now four years old and up for renewal. If—” He stopped and looked—for just a minute, and the first time ever—a little confused. He didn’t know why he was telling me so much. I didn’t know, either. My excuse was the pain drugs.

I said, “If Ratface wins, you lose the money for this clinic?”

“Yes.”

“Why? I mean, why this one specially?”

He chewed on his bottom lip, something else I didn’t see him do afore. I thought he warn’t going to say any more, but then he did. “The study so far has produced no publishable results. The population affected is small. We obtained the current grant just before President Rollins came into office and all but abolished both the FDA and research money. If the Libertarians are re-elected, it’s unlikely our grant will be renewed.”

“Isn’t there someplace else to get the money?”

“Not that we have found so far.”

Mrs. Cully called to him then and he left. I sat thinking about what he said. It was like a curtain lifted on one corner, and behind that curtain was a place just as dog-eat-dog as Blaine. Bobby scrambled to dig coal from the side of the highway, and these doctors scrambled to dig money out of the government. Dinah worked hard to make it okay that Bobby hit her (“It ain’t him, it’s the fucking sickness!”), and Dr. Chung worked hard to convince the government it was a good idea to put a bunch of algae and a light switch in my skull. Then I thought about how much I liked him telling me all that, and about the bandages coming off and the real experiment starting tomorrow, and about lunch coming soon. And then I didn’t think about nothing because Bobby burst into the clinic with his .22.

“Where is she? Where’s my fucking sister?”

“Bobby!”

He didn’t hear me, or he couldn’t. I scrambled out of bed but I was still hooked up to a bunch of machines. I yanked the wires. Soothing voices in the lobby but I couldn’t make out no words.

The .22 fired, sounding like a mine explosion.

“Bobby!”

Oh sweet Jesus, no—

But he hadn’t hit nobody. Mrs. Cully crouched on the floor behind her counter. The bullet hole in the wall warn’t anywhere near her or Dr. Chung, who stood facing Bobby and talking some soothers that there was no way Bobby was going to hear. He was wild-eyed like Dad had been near the end, and I knew he hadn’t slept in days and he was seeing things that warn’t there. “Bobby—”

“You whore!” He fired again and this time the bullet whizzed past Dr. Chung’s ear and hit the backside of Mrs. Cully’s computer. Bobby swung the rifle toward me. I stood stock still, but Dr. Chung started forward to grab the barrel. That would get Bobby’s attention and he would—God no no . . .

But afore I could yell again, the clinic door burst open and Shawn grabbed Bobby from behind. Bobby shouted something, I couldn’t tell what, and they fought. Shawn didn’t have his whole manhood growth yet, but he didn’t have Bobby’s way-gone sickness yet, neither. Shawn got the rifle away from Bobby and Bobby on the ground. Shawn kicked him in the head and Bobby started to sob.

I picked up the rifle and held it behind me. Dr. Chung bent over Bobby. By this time the lobby was jammed with people, two nurses and Dr. Liu and Jenny and Pete Lawler, who must a been in a examining room. All this happened so fast that Shawn was just preparing to kick Bobby again when I grabbed his arm. “Don’t!”

Shawn scowled at the bandage on my head. “He’s going to get us all put behind bars. Just the same, he ain’t wrong. You’re coming home with me.”

The breath went out of me. I warn’t ready for this. “No, Shawn. I’m not.”

“You come home with me or you don’t never come home again. Granmama says.”

“I’m not going. They’re going to help me here, and they can help you, too! You don’t need to get like Bobby, like Dad was—”

He shook off my arm. And just like that, I lost him. The Connors men don’t hardly never change their minds once they make them up. And soon Shawn wouldn’t even have a mind. Seven months from the first sleeplessness to death.

Shawn yanked Bobby to his feet. Bobby was quiet now, bleeding from his head where Shawn kicked him. Dr. Liu started to say, “We must—” but Dr. Chung put a hand on his arm and he shut up. Shawn held out his other hand to me, his face like stone, and I handed him Bobby’s gun. Then they were gone, the truck Shawn borrowed or stole roaring away up the mountain.

Dr. Chung knew better than to say anything to me. I looked at the busted computer and wondered how much it cost, and if they would take it out of my pay. Then I went back into my room, closed the door, and got into bed. I would a given anything, right up to my own life, if I could a slept then. But I knew I wouldn’t. Not now, not tonight, not—it felt like at that minute—ever again. And by spring, Shawn would be like Bobby. And so would I.

“You need a pass-out,” I said to Dr. Chung.

He paused in his poking at my head. “A what?”

“When Bonnie Jean got a fish at a pet store once, they gave her a pass-out paper, TAKING CARE OF YOUR GOLDFISH. To tell her how to do for the fish—not that she done it. You need a pass-out, TAKING CARE OF YOUR BRAIN ALGAE.”

Dr. Chung laughed. When he did that, his eyes almost disappeared, but by now I liked that. Nobody else never thought I was funny, even if my funning now was just a cover for nerves. Dr. Liu, at the computer, didn’t laugh, and neither did Jenny. I still didn’t like her eyes.

I sat on a chair, just a regular chair, with my head bandage off and the shaved patch on my head feeling too bare. All my fingers could feel with a tiny bit of something hard poking above my skull: the end of the fiber-optic implant. Truth was, I didn’t need a pass-out paper. I knew what was going to happen because Dr. Chung explained it, as many times as I wanted, till I really understood. The punchpad in his hand controlled what my “optrode” did. He could send blue or yellow laser light down it, which would make my new algae release tiny particles that turned on and off some cells in my brain. I’d seen the videos of mice, with long cables coming from their skulls, made to run in circles, or stop staggering around drunk-like, or even remember mazes quicker.

Last night I asked Dr. Chung, “You can control me now, can’t you?”

“I have no wish to control you.”

“But you could.”

“No one will control you.”

I’d laughed then, too, but it tasted like lemons in my mouth.

“Ready?” Dr. Liu said.

“Ready.” I braced myself, but nothing happened. I didn’t feel nothing at all. But at the screen Jenny went, “Aaaaaaaahhh.”

“What?” I said.

“It works,” Dr. Chung said quietly. “We are getting a good picture of optrode response.”

On the screen was a bunch of wavy lines, with a lot of clicking noises.

That went on for a long bit: me sitting in the chair feeling nothing, Dr. Chung turning lights on and off in my head that I didn’t see, lines and numbers on the computer, and lots of long discussions with words I didn’t understand. Maybe some of them were Chinese. And then, just when I was getting antsy and bored both at the same time, something happened. Another press of the punchpad and all at once I saw the room. Not like I saw it afore—I mean I really saw it. Every little thing was clear and bright and separate and itself: the hard edge of the computer screen, the way the overhead light made a shadow in the corner, a tiny brown stain on the hem of Jenny’s white coat—everything. The room was like Reverend Baxter said the world looked right when God created it: fresh and new and shining. I could feel my mouth drop open and my eyes get wide.

“What?” Dr. Chung said. “What is it, Ludie?”

I told him. He did something with the switch in his hand and all the fresh clearness went away. “Oh! Bring it back!”

“Hyperawareness,” Dr. Liu said. “The opsins could be over-expressing?”

“Not that quickly,” Dr. Chung said. “But—”

“Bring it back!” I almost shouted it.

He did. But after a minute it was almost too much. Too bright, too clear, too strange. And then it got clearer and brighter, so that it almost blinded me and I couldn’t see and everything was wrong and—

It all stopped. Dr. Chung had pressed some switch. And then I wanted it back.

“Not yet, Ludie,” he said. He sounded worried. “You were injected with multiple opsins, you know, each responding to a different wavelength of light. We’re going to try a different one. Would you stand up, please? Good . . . now walk toward me.”

I did, and he did something with his switch, and all at once I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The computer started clicking loud as a plague of locusts.

Jenny said, “Pronounced inhibitory motor response.”

I said, “Stop!”

Then I could move again and I was pounding on Dr. Chung with my fists. “You said you warn’t going to control me! You said!”

He grabbed my wrists and held them; he was stronger than he looked. “I didn’t know that would happen, Ludie. This is all new, you know. Nobody wants to control you.”

“You just did, you bastard!”

“I did not know the inhibitory neurons would fire that strongly. Truly, I did not.”

Jenny said something in Chinese.

“No,” Dr. Chung said sharply to her.

“I’m done here,” I said.

“Yes, that’s enough for a first session,” Dr. Liu said. Which warn’t what I meant. I meant I was going home.

But I didn’t. Instead I went to my room in the clinic, got into bed, and slept a little. Not long, not real hard, but enough to calm me down. Then I got up and found Dr. Chung in his office.

If he was glad to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead he handed me an envelope. “This came for you in the mail.”

Inside was a single page torn from the Sears catalogue, a page with kids’ coats on the top and enough white space at the bottom for Dinah to print THANK U. So she got the money I been sending her from my pay. Where did she tell Bobby the warm clothes come from, the coats and stuff for Lewis, Arianna, Timmy, Cody, Bonnie Jean? No, that was stupid—Bobby was too far gone to notice even if the kids ran around buck naked.

I turned on Dr. Chung. “Did you give me this right now so’s I’d stay?”

“Ludie, how could I know what was in your envelope? I still don’t know.”

“You know sure enough what’s in my head!”

“I know there are abnormal FFI prions, which we hope to arrest. I know, too, that there is valuable information about how the brain works.”

“You told me afore that you can’t get them prions out of my head!”

“We cannot, no. What we hope is to disrupt the formation of any more. For your sake, as much as ours.”

“I don’t believe that crap!”

Only I wanted to believe it.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal. I stay and you do your experiments, but the minute I tell you to stop something, you do it.” It was lame bluster, and he knew it.

“Yes. I already did so, you know. You told me to stop the inhibition of motor activity, and I did.”

“And another thing. I want a pass-out, after all.”

He blinked. “You want—”

“I want you to write out in words I can understand just what you’re doing to me. So’s I can study on it afore we do it again.”

Dr. Chung smiled. “I will be glad to do that, Ludie.”

I flounced out of there, knowing I hadn’t told him the whole truth. I wanted to keep sending money to Dinah, yes. I wanted him to not freeze me no more, yes. I wanted a pass-out paper, yes. But I also wanted that shining clearness back, that thing Jenny had called hyper-awareness. I wanted it enough to go on risking my brain.

If that’s really what I was doing.

Ludie—you have Fatal Familial Insomnia. Inside a part of your brain called the thalamus, some proteins called prions are folding up wrong. The wrongly folded proteins are making other proteins also fold wrong. These are sticking together in clumps and interfering with what cells are supposed to do. The main thing thalamus cells are supposed to do is process communications among different parts of the brain. The thalamus is like a switchboard, except that it also changes the communications in ways we are trying to learn about. Things which the thalamus communicates with the rest of the brain about include: moving the body, thinking, seeing, making decisions, memory formation and retrieval, and sleeping. When you get a lot of sticky, misfolded proteins in the thalamus, you can’t go into deep sleep, or move properly, or think clearly. You get hallucinations and insomnia and sometimes seizures.

We are trying to do three things: (1) Stop your brain making more misfolded prions, even if we can’t get rid of the ones that are already there. We are trying to do this by interfering with the making of a protein that the prions use to fold wrong. Unhappily, the only way we will know if this happens is if your symptoms do not get worse. (2) Your brain works partly by sending electrical signals between cells. We are trying to map how these go, called “neural pathways.” (3) We want to find out more about what the special algae (opsins) we put in your brain can do. They release different chemicals when we put different laser lights down the cable. We want to know the results of each different thing we do, to aid science.

Well, Dr. Chung wrote good, even though I didn’t know what a “switchboard” might be.

I thought of Mama, her brain full of these misfolded proteins, gummed up like a drain full of grease and hair. And Bobby’s brain, even worse. Mine, too, soon?

It was dark outside by the time I finished reading that damn paper over and over and over. Everybody’d gone home from the clinic except the night nurse, a skinny rabbitty-looking girl named Susannah. I knowed that she was mountain-born the minute I laid eyes on her, and that somehow she’d got out, and I’d tried not to have nothing to do with her. But now I marched out to where she was reading a magazine in the lobby and said, “Call Dr. Chung. Now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Never you mind. Just call him.”

“It’s ten o’clock at—”

“I know what time it is. Call him.”

She did, and he came. I said, “We’re going to work now. Now, not in the morning. Them proteins are folding in me right this second, aren’t they? You call Jenny and Dr. Liu if you really need them. We’re going to work all night. Afore I change my mind.”

He looked at me hard. Funny how when you know a person long enough, even a strange and ugly person, they don’t look so bad no more.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s work.”

We worked all night. We worked all week. We worked another week, then another. And I didn’t get no worse. No better, but no worse. What I got was scared.

Nobody ought to be able to do those things to somebody else’s brain, using nothing except little bits of light.

Dr. Chung froze me again while I was walking around.

Dr. Liu said, “Filtering signals is an important thalamic function, and any change in filtering may give rise to physiological effects.”

Dr. Chung made the “hyperawareness” come back, even stronger.

Jenny said, “Interfering with action potentials on cell membranes changes the way cells process information.”

Dr. Chung made me remember things from when I was really little—Mama singing to me. Shawn and me wrestling. Granmama telling me troll stories while I sat on her knee. Bobby teaching me to fish. The memories were so sharp, they felt like they was slicing into my brain. Good memories but too razored, making my mind bleed.

Dr. Liu said, “Are the opsins in the anterior nuclei over-expressing? That could cause problems.”

Dr. Chung did something that made me stutter so’s I couldn’t get a word out whole no matter how much I tried.

Jenny said, “Neural timing—even the shift of a few milliseconds can reverse the effect of the signal on the rest of the nervous system. Not good.”

I didn’t think any of it was good. But I warn’t going to say anything in front of that Jenny; I waited until I got Dr. Chung alone.

“I got to ask you something.”

“Of course, Ludie.” He had just finished checking on my heart and blood pressure and all that. “Are you pleased by the way the study is going? You say your FFI symptoms aren’t any worse, and with the usual rapid progression of the disease in your family, that may mean genuine progress.”

“I’m happy about that, yeah, if it goes on like now. But I got a different question. I been reading in that book you gave me, how the brain is and isn’t like a computer.” The book was hard going, but interesting.

“Yes?” He looked really caught on what I was saying. For the first time, I wondered what his wife was like. Was she pretty?

“A computer works on teeny switches that have two settings, on and off, and that’s how it knows things.”

“A binary code, yes.”

“Well, those laser switches on the bundle of optic cables you put in my head—they’re off and on, too. Could you make my head into a computer? And put information into it, like into a computer—information that warn’t there afore?”

Dr. Chung stood. He breathed deep. I saw the second he decided not to lie to me. “Not now, not with what we know at present, which isn’t nearly enough. But potentially, far down the road and with the right connections to the cortex, it’s not inconceivable.”

Which was a fancy way of saying yes.

“Good night,” I said abruptly and went into my room.

“Ludie—”

But I didn’t have nothing more to say to him. In bed, though, I used the tablet he loaned me—that’s what I been reading the book on—to get the Internet and find Dr. Chung. I got a lot of hits. One place I found a picture of him with his wife. She was pretty, all right, and refined-looking. Smart. He had his arm around her.

Sleep was even harder that night than usual. Then, the next day, it all happened.

We were in the testing room, and my hyperawareness was back. Everything was clear as mountain spring water, as sharp as a skinning knife. I kept rising up on my tip-toes, just from sheer energy. It didn’t feel bad. Dr. Chung watched me real hard, with a little frown.

“Do you want a break, Ludie?”

“No. Bring it on.”

“Hippocampal connection test 48,” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung’s hand moved on his punchpad. The computer started clicking louder and louder. The door burst open and Bobby charged in, waving a knife and screaming.

“Whore! Whore!” He plunged the knife into Jenny and blood spurted out of her in huge, foaming gushes. I shouted and tried to throw myself in front of Dr. Chung, but Bobby got him next. Dr. Liu had vanished. Bobby turned on me and he warn’t Bobby no more but a troll from Granmama’s stories, a troll with Bobby’s face, and Bonnie Jean hung mangled and bloody from his teeth. I hit out at the troll and his red eyes bored into me and his knife raised and—

I lay on the floor, Dr. Chung holding me down, Jenny doubled over in pain, and the computer screen laying beside me.

“Ludie—”

“What did you do?” I screamed. “What did you do to me? What did I do?” I broke free of him, or he let me up. “What?”

“You had a delusional episode,” Dr. Chung said, steady but pale, watching me like I was the Bobby-troll. And I was. I had hit Jenny and knocked over the computer, only it was—

“Don’t you touch me!”

“All right,” Dr. Chung said quietly, “I won’t.” Dr. Liu was picking up the computer, which was still clicking like a crazy thing. Mrs. Cully and a nurse stood in the doorway. Jenny gasped and wheezed. “You had a delusional episode, Ludie. Perhaps because of the FFI, perhaps—”

“It was you, and you know it was you! You done it to me! You said you wouldn’t control my brain and now you—” I pulled at the optrode sticking up from my skull, but of course it didn’t budge. “You can’t do that to me! You can’t!”

“We don’t know what the—”

“You don’t know nothing! And I’m done with the lot of you!” It all came together in me then, all the strangeness of what they was doing and the fear for my family and them throwing me out and the lovely hyperawareness gone when the switch went off and Dr. Chung’s pretty wife—all of it.

I didn’t listen to nothing else they said. I walked straight out of that clinic, my legs shaking, without even grabbing my coat. And there was Shawn pulling up in Jimmy Barton’s truck, getting out and looking at me with winter in his face. “Bobby’s dead,” he said. “He killed himself.”

I said, “I know.”

The funeral was a week later—it took that long for the coroner to get done fussing with Bobby’s body. It was election day, and Ratface Rollins lost, along with the whole Libertarian party.

The November wind blew cold and raw. Mama was too bad off to go to the graveyard. But Shawn brought her at the service where she sat muttering, even through the church choir singing her favorite, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I don’t know if she even knew what was going on; for sure she didn’t recognize me. It warn’t be long afore she’d be as bad as Bobby, or in a coma like Aunt Carol Ames. Granmama recognized me, of course, but she didn’t say nothing when I came into the trailer, or when I stayed there, sleeping in my old bed with Patty and Bonnie Jean, or when I cleaned up the place a bit and cooked a stew with groceries from my clinic money. Granmama didn’t thank me, but I didn’t expect that. She was grieving Bobby. And she was Granmama.

Dinah kept to her room, her kids pretty much in there with her day and night.

I kept a hat on, over my part-shaved head. Not the red knit hat Dr. Chung gave me, which I wadded up and threw in the creek. In the trailer I wore Bobby’s old baseball cap, and at the funeral I wore a black straw hat that Mama had when I was little.

“‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . ’” Reverend Baxter did funerals old-fashioned. Bobby’s casket was lowered into the hole in the churchyard. The last of the maple leaves blew down and skittered across the grass.

Dinah came forward, hanging onto Shawn, and tossed her flower into the grave. Then Granmama, then me, then Patty. The littlest kids, Lewis and Arianna and Timothy and Cody, were in relatives’ arms. The last to throw her flower was Bonnie Jean, and that’s when I saw it.

Bonnie Jean wore an old coat of Patty’s, too big for her, so’s the hem brushed the ground. When she stood by the grave that hem was shaking like aspen leaves. Her face had froze, and the pupils of her eyes were so wide it looked like she was on something. She warn’t. And it warn’t just the fear and grief of a ten-year-old at a funeral, neither.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . ”

Neighbors brought cakes and covered dishes to the trailer. Nobody didn’t stay long ’cause they knew we didn’t want them to. Dinah went back into her room with her two kids, Mama was muttering beside the stove, Shawn sat smoking and drinking Bud. I told Patty to watch Timmy and Cody and I took Bonnie Jean into our bedroom.

“How long since you slept through the whole night?”

She was scared enough to give me lip. “I sleep. You been right there next to me!”

“How long, Bonnie Jean?”

“I don’t got to tell you nothing! You’re a whore, sleeping with them Chinese and letting them do bad things to you—Bobby said!”

“How long?”

She looked like she was going to cry, but instead she snatched Bobby’s baseball hat off my head. It seemed to me that my optrode burned like a forest fire, though of course it didn’t. Bonnie Jean stared at it and spat, “Chink Frankenstein!”

Probably she didn’t even know what the words meant, just heard them at school. Or at home.

Then she started to cry, and I picked her up in my arms and sat with her on the edge of the bed, and she let me. All at once I saw that the bed was covered with the Fence Rail quilt Dinah had been making for the women’s co-op. She’d put it on my bed instead.

I held Bonnie Jean while she cried. She told me it had been two weeks since she couldn’t sleep right and at the graveyard was her second panic attack—what she called “the scared shakes.” She was ten years old, and she carried the gene Granmama and God-knows-who-else had passed on without being affected themselves. Insomnia and panic attacks and phobias. Then hallucinations and more panic attacks and shrinking away to hardly no weight at all. Then dementia or coma or Bobby’s way out. Ten years old. While I was nineteen and I hadn’t even felt her restless beside me in the long cold night.

I knowed, then, what I had to do.

The Chinese clinic was almost empty.

A sign outside said CLOSED. Through the window I could see the lobby stripped of its chairs and pictures and clothesbasket of toys. But a light shone in a back room, bright in the drizzly gray rain. I rattled the lock on the door and shouted “Hey!” and pretty soon Mrs. Cully opened it.

She wore jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her usual dress, and her hair was wrapped in a big scarf. In one hand was a roll of packing tape. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She looked something, but I couldn’t read it.

“Ludie. Come in.”

“You all leaving Blaine?”

“Our grant won’t be renewed. Dr. Chung found out the day after the election from a man he knows in Washington.”

“But Rollins lost!”

“Yes, but the new president made campaign promises to reinstate the FDA with tight regulations on studies with human subjects. Under Rollins there was too much abuse. So Doctors Chung and Liu are using their remaining money for data analysis, back at the university—especially since we have no research subjects here. I’m packing files and equipment.”

The rooms behind her, all their doors open, were full of boxes, some sealed, some still open. A feeling washed over me that matched the weather outside. The clinic never had no chance no matter who won the election.

Mrs. Cully said, “But Dr. Chung left something for you, in case you came back.” She plucked a brown envelope off the counter, and then she went back to her packing while I opened it. Tact—Mrs. Cully always had tact.

Inside the envelope was a cell phone, a pack of money with a rubber band around it, and a letter.

Ludie—

This is the rest of what the clinic owes you. Along with it, accept my deepest gratitude for your help with this study. Even though not finished, it—and you—have made a genuine contribution to science. You are an exceptional young woman, with exceptional intelligence and courage.

This cell phone holds the phone number for Dr. Morton, who implanted your optrode, and who will remove it. Call her to schedule the operation. There will of course be no charge. The phone also holds my number. Please call me. If you don’t, I will call this number every day at 11:00 a.m. until I reach you. I want only to know that you are all right.

Your friend,

Hai Chung

The phone said it was 9:30 a.m. Mrs. Cully said, “Is that your suitcase?”

“Yeah. It is. I need Dr. Chung’s address, ma’am.”

She looked at me hard. “Call him first.”

“Okay.” But I wouldn’t. By the time the phone rang, I would be on the 10:17 Greyhound to Lexington.

She gave me his university address but wouldn’t give out his home. It didn’t really matter. I knew he would give it to me, plus whatever else I needed. And not just for the study, neither.

Dr. Chung told me, one time, about a scientist called Daniel Zagury. He was studying on AIDS, and he shot himself up with a vaccine he was trying to make, to test it. Dr. Chung didn’t do no experiments on himself; he used me instead, just like I was using him for the money. Only that warn’t the whole story, no more than Bobby’s terrible behavior when he got really sick was the whole story of Bobby. The Chinese clinic warn’t Chinese, and I’m not no Frankenstein. I’m not all that “courageous,” neither, though I sure liked Dr. Chung saying it. What I am is connected to my kin, no matter how much I used to wish I warn’t. Right now, connected don’t mean staying in Blaine to help Dinah with her grief and Shawn with his sickness and the kids with their schooling. It don’t mean waiting for Mama’s funeral, or living with Granmama’s sour anger at what her genes did to her family. Right now, being connected means getting on a Greyhound to Lexington.

It means going on with Dr. Chung’s study.

It means convincing him, and everybody else, to put a optrode in Bonnie Jean’s head, and Shawn’s, and maybe even Lewis’s, so laser light can “disrupt their neural pathways” and they don’t get no more misfolded prions than they already got.

It means paying for this with whatever work I get.

And maybe it even means going to Washington D.C. and talking to my congressman—whoever he is—about why this study is a good thing. I read on Dr. Chung’s tablet that other scientists sometimes do that. Maybe I could take Bonnie Jean with me. She’s real pretty, and I can teach her to look pathetic. Maybe.

I never had no thoughts like this afore, and maybe that’s the opsins, too. But maybe not. I don’t know. I only know that this is my path and I’m going to walk it.

I hike to the highway, suitcase in one hand and cell phone in the other, and I flag down the bus.

First published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Stephen Cass.

About the Author

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. Nancy lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

The Science Fiction Future of the Microbiome

Matthew Simmons

You are wheeled into a hospital after a stroke. The doctors stabilize you and monitor you for a couple days. The latest treatments are at their disposal, so they use bacteria therapy to stimulate the growth of a diverse microbial ecosystem: feed you 3,3-dimethyl-1-butanol (DMB) to regulate trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) levels, nourish certain microbiota to reduce your body mass index, increase your salt processing bacteria to lower cholesterol, and alter your body’s cravings to desire foods beneficial to heart health. In a few days your tuned up body, now loaded with a bacterial population adept at combating heart disease, walks out of the hospital into a new life. Far-fetched? Not by much.

The human microbiome is the collective term for the flora inhabiting the human body. The Human Microbiome Project estimates there are as many as a hundred trillion cells in a human microbiome, weighing around three pounds in the average adult. These non-human cells, also called microbiota, outnumber the human cells in the body ten to one. Cell for cell we are more microbial than human. Gene for gene we have around nine million microbial genes to a mere 23,000 human genes.

The Human Microbiome has not been fully sequenced, but researchers estimate there are between 500-40,000 unique species of microbiota inhabiting the human body. Recent studies link these microbiota with heart disease, obesity, autoimmune disease, cancer, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), depression, dementia, autism (ASD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to name a few. If we alter these bacteria we can change our body and mood, treat diseases and conditions, change our scent and microbial print, and shift the way we view the world.

The majority of microbiota in the human body are bacteria in the gut—the thirty-foot long intestinal tract, starting at the stomach all the way to the anus. With its continuous stream of foreign matter—food, drinks, etc.—the gut provides bacteria with sustenance and an ideal hideout from the body’s immune system. The gut is like a trade path. The microbiota are the cities and towns that pop up along the route. They service the transient populations, the food we eat, and skim a little off the top. The relationship is mostly symbiotic. The transient populations need the boom-towns, the towns need the transients. The community, the body, needs both. However, highway robberies happen and occasionally a town is razed to the ground.

With the high concentration of bacteria in the gut, it’s no surprise that many of the emerging microbiome-based treatments are for gut illness. One of the more interesting and successful of these treatments is Fecal Microbial Transplants (FMTs). FMTs are the most effective treatment for C. Dificile, a common infection from hospitalization, and have been shown to help Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, and IBS patients. To undergo an FMT, a patient swallows a healthy donor’s sterilized and encapsulated stool. Each gram of a donor’s stool contains around a hundred billion bacteria. It’s like a probiotics pill, but with a hundred times more live cultures. Unlike a normal probiotics pill, these bacteria naturally occur in the human body and help digest food, produce vitamins, and absorb nutrients.

While medicinal poop has shock value, it’s just one way microbiome medicine could help with gut conditions. Recent studies link the microbiome to the boom of autoimmune diseases—conditions that cause the body to attack itself—such as celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes. One study theorizes, an autoimmune disease’s genetic component lies in a microbial gene as opposed to a human gene. If genes that modulate autoimmune diseases are microbial, new treatments for these diseases could aim at the gut. These treatments could range from altering the gut’s bacterial makeup through FMTs and targeted antibiotics to microbiome diets. Microbiome diets—such as the paleo diet—already have many anecdotal proponents. They aim to reduce the inflammation caused by autoimmune diseases, allowing the gut to heal. Science on these diets is very thin, though the amount of people who report dietary relief from autoimmune symptoms are numerous.

Microbiome medicine could help with more than just gut conditions. In a recent study, researchers found a reduced risk of heart disease in mice whose microbiomes were drugged with DMB. DMB—a common substance found in olive oil, red wine, grapeseed oil, and balsamic vinegar—naturally prevents the microbiota from creating trimethylamine (TMA). Usually, when microbiota break down carnitine and lecithin—substances commonly found in red meat, fish, and other foods—they excrete TMA. Liver enzymes take the TMA and turn it into TMAO. TMAO then fuels atherosclerosis—a disease causing fat to build-up on arterial walls—which increases the risk of heart disease. With DMB this entire process can be prevented. More research is needed to determine the viability of DMB drugging as a treatment in humans, but the prospect of landing a blow against the world’s number one killer is always enticing.

Recent research has explored microbiome treatments for the brain. In a series of studies, researchers alleviated symptoms of ASD in mice by treating gut permeability. Among ASD individuals, two-thirds have gut abnormalities, such as an increased permeability in the intestinal wall, also known as leaky gut. Researchers used Bacteroides fragilis to reduce inflammation and heal the leaky gut in mice bred to have ASD-like symptoms. After treatments, the mice showed improvement in communication, anxiety-like behavior, and sensorimotor functions—common symptoms of ASD. Conversely, when researchers injected healthy mice with chemicals to increase gut permeability, they began to develop ASD-like symptoms. While many researchers are quick to point out that more research is needed to understand the viability of these treatments in humans, this study, and others like it, have some researchers speculating that ASD may depend on gut bacteria.

Other studies suggest the microbiome affects depression, ADHD, dementia, and food cravings. Using the vagus nerve, microbiota send neurotransmitters such as GABA, serotonin, or dopamine to create euphoria or sadness. This bidirectional connection is known as the gut-brain axis. Using the axis, microbiota influence cravings for certain foods that fuel their populations, with neurotransmitters as rewards. Though a great source of instant gratification, feeding these cravings doesn’t always keep us healthy. Our microbiota look out for their best interests. Researchers haven’t pinned down how all cravings work. If we knew, could we use microbiome medicine to alter them? Could we make kale give us the same rewards as candy? Could we all become healthy eaters without the desire for gluttonous foods? Or perhaps, we could drug the microbiota to release neurotransmitters for a natural high? We do not know the answer to these questions, but they represent some of the far-flung futures to which microbiome science could lead us.

The research of the Home Microbiome Study, and others like it, offers another hypothetical future. Through their studies we know every microbiome leaves a unique ‘print’ on a room, items, and people. These microbiome prints are distinct from person to person and are automatically implanted by the millions of particles we secrete every hour. Breathe out, and you are giving it off. Sit still, and it seeps out all the same. It’s in our dead skin that falls off each day, our hair, and sweat. At the moment, researchers can detect a change in the occupants of a room after a person has been there for as little as twenty minutes.

While distinguishing one microbial cloud from another is not easy, what potential could this technology offer if perfected? Could forensic science tap into microbiome prints to solve crimes? Imagine you go away for a trip. You get back and your house is picked clean. Nothing is left. You aren’t concerned, you call the local precinct and they send over a scanning crew. They analyze the microbiome cloud left by the burglar. They discover it belongs to a moderately healthy individual in their thirties, who recently had surgery on their right leg. They run the fully sequenced print against collected microbiome data, find a match, and solve the case. Eerie and ethically problematic, but not impossible.

The ever-changing microbiome complicates the usefulness of these microbial prints. If they become standard operating procedure, would altering the microbiome become a necessary step for those with identities to protect—whistleblowers, people in the witness protection program, and criminals? We know antibiotics, a new environment, or a new diet can significantly alter a person’s intestinal flora. In the future, will someone burgle a house, then take antibiotics and change their diet to alter their microbiome print?

What does altering the microbiome mean? Smell is determined by the microbiome, it also plays a role in human attraction. Appealing body odor in another person indicates compatible genes for breeding, but it could also indicate comparable political opinions. One recent study speculates we can smell key traits used to form political opinions. By changing a microbiome, a smell, a vast collection of genes, do we change the person and their opinions? Could it change who we are attracted to and who is attracted to us? Could a lover’s scent become intolerable after microbiome treatments? In the social realm, could politicians alter their microbiomes to appeal to voters? Or at least mask their scent with a leftist or conservative cologne?

These hypothetical futures are beyond where research has brought us, but as with cell phone surveillance, space exploration, and social media, continuous advances may turn them into reality. We could revolutionize medical treatments, surveillance, politics, and recreational drugs. We could cure diseases and live longer happier lives, or be tamed by forced bacteria injections or bacteria warfare. What would a society that puts the microbiome at the center of their understanding of the human look like?

You are wheeled into a hospital. You waited too long for your compulsory monthly injection, so your heart convulses like you’re having a stroke. The doctor’s give you the injection with smiles. Immediately it calms you, alters your microbiome to induce lethargy and apathy. They monitor you for a few days. Your numbed body walks out of the hospital ready to continue your life.

About the Author

Matt Simmons wanders the world. Teaches English online. Pays student loans. Drinks craft coffee. Reads speculative fiction. Studies Italian. Exists with Crohn’s and celiac disease. And has just finished writing fifty-two stories in fifty-two weeks (alright, sixty weeks).

The ‘Quarter Turn’ of History:
A Conversation with Guy Gavriel Kay

Chris Urie

Fantasy is a genre steeped in history. Mammoth novels outline thousand year dynasties and shorter works hint at machinations decades in the making. Their imagined histories lend a level of immersion and context for the reader. But when our own history is woven into the fabric of the fantastic, you find yourself reading a slightly different kind of story.

It is undeniable that Guy Gavriel Kay is a master of historical fantasy. His unique way of weaving world history into engrossing fantasy novels has earned him numerous accolades and praise around the world. His latest novel, Children of Earth and Sky, follows a Dickensian cast of characters making their way in a world not too far off from our own Mediterranean in the Renaissance. A young woman seeks vengeance. A painter is summoned to immortalize a king. Spies lurk between borders and pirates ravage the seas. Countries play politics. The world is poised for uproar.

Guy Gavriel Kay is the author of numerous novels and a book of poetry. In addition to the World Fantasy Award and the International Goliardos Prize, Kay was named to the Order of Canada for his contributions to literature. It is the country’s highest civilian honor. Children of Earth and Sky was published by New American Library this past May.

Many of your novels pull from history and Children of Earth and Sky is no exception. What does your research process look like?

Lots of books and academic monographs, Moleskine notebooks, several of them filled over time, pens, emails back and forth with academics, some travel, and about a year or so before some evil voice within says, ‘This is meaningless if you don’t start writing.’ And I do. But the research phase is absolutely my favorite—I’m just learning things, no responsibility till later to produce something from it.

You’re known for being exceedingly thorough when researching your novels. What is the most extreme length you’ve gone to in pursuit of knowledge for a novel?

Hah! There are a few stories. One is when I was writing Sailing to Sarantium and I came across a complete disagreement in texts as to chariot racing in Constantinople, as to where the best horse of four in a quadric was placed—on the inside or outside. Inside would be so that its force of personality, as it were, would stop the others from drifting too high (and thus going farther), or on the outside because it had the farthest distance to run. Both made sense. I chased down some harness track trainers! Closest I could get, I figured. (For those interested: there was a discussion, but consensus was the best would go outside as the added distance, across four horses and many laps, was real. The charioteer could keep them from drifting out, if he had to.)

Under the surface of your newest novel, there are a lot of systems in place governing culture, politics, and societies. How do you go about creating an intricate system of interconnected countries with their own customs and beliefs?

I don’t think I can answer with any kind of “system.” I don’t work that way. I learn as much as I can about the actual setting. I have often said that before you can do variations on a theme you should at least try to know the theme. None of us are perfectly accurate when we work with history (for many, many reasons) which is one reason I like my ‘quarter turn’ to the fantastic . . . it acknowledges right from the outset that we can’t get it exactly right. We are in a near-Europe of the Renaissance (for this book), not Europe. I like that the reader and I thus share this awareness.

You mention that the “origin story” for this novel lies in Croatia. What was it about the area, and the Uskoks in particular, that interested you?

I think part of it was—honestly—that I had never heard of them! I like finding corners of history that have been under-explored. As I learned more, I was also fascinated by the vast gulf between how the Uskoks were seen by (say) Venice and Ragusa/Dubrovnik, and how they viewed and understood themselves. They were either savage pirates and raiders, or the unacknowledged true heroes of the endangered borderlands against the encroaching, invading Ottomans. That kind of gap is very fertile ground for a novelist.

With such an elaborate cast of characters, how do you keep them all organized while writing?

To some degree this is where having done it for a long time helps, I suppose. You learn your own methods and craft after a while. In truth, this novel is fairly focused on the (different) journeys of my protagonists, both actually and internally, the cast isn’t as big as some others I’ve done. I wanted to write a book that felt epic, against the backdrop of a great war—but that was, in truth, about non-powerful men and women trying to get on with their lives on those dangerous borderlands.

Not only are your characters numerous, each of them is also quite layered and complex. Do characters like Danica or Jacopo Miucci have any inspiration or basis in history?

Complexity, nuance, enough depth to engage readers, that’s what I am always trying for. As to the two you mention, inspiration, yes, actual figures behind them, not in those cases. Miicci is a doctor. I did do reading into how Dubrovnik obtained its physicians from Venice (or elsewhere in Italy) and in Venetian spying (Everyone spied! That was as much about commercial espionage, not just political/military.). As for Danica, one of the slanders against the raiders of Senj (my Senjan) was that their women were as violent and bloodthirsty as their men and that they also had access to magic (usually associated, in the stories I saw most often, with controlling the winds at sea).

What was your favorite bit of history or folklore you picked up while researching Children of Earth and Sky?

Wow! Tough one, good one. So many. I loved learning about the origins of books being bound in Venice, though it is only a small bit in the novel. I loved reading the history of Dubrovnik, how it survived, unconquered, for so long (until Napoleon!), despite relying pretty much entirely on good walls and brilliant, subtle, unceasing observation and diplomacy. I learned a lot about the role and impact of weather and distance in military campaigns of the period. And about cannons. And horses.

Did you travel to the Mediterranean region while researching this book? If so, which place really captured your imagination?

I did travel through Croatia and the Balkans, and to Prague . . . but in the time just before the book became the next book. I know for certain that all these travels were embedded in the decision to write Children, but they weren’t trips taken to specifically prepare for it. It many ways, for a writer, his or her life is always a part of research.

Is it difficult to strike a balance between historical influences and the more imaginative elements of the story?

Everything about a novel is difficult! I’m not one of those who races through having fun. I feel a huge responsibility, primarily to the story and characters, but also to deliver something that will satisfy. You can never please every kind of reader, but I do want to please myself, and that involves this loyalty to the story being told. So the balance as to history and the invented is one challenge. So, in this novel, was the balance among five protagonists who all had to hold and engage readers—because they all move to the center in different parts of the narrative. Balancing, in fact, is one of the core things a novelist has to do, and it operates in many different ways.

What period of time or area of the world are you interested in featuring in your next novel?

No real idea. I never do know at this stage. I am interested in a great many times and places—but ‘interest’ isn’t enough. I spend a long time in whatever setting I end up using. There needs to be something very compelling, a reason for me to ‘live’ there for years, and to feel I have something to say to readers about it. So, I never know, when I’m done, what the next book will be.

Since you’ve deeply researched an array of places and times in history, is there any particular one you’d like to live in or at least visit?

I’ve visited many of them, from Tuscany to China. I think a part of my heart is always in Provence, in or near Aix-en-Provence. I’ve based two novels around there (A Song For Argonne, and Ysabel) and written there on four different occasions. Sit me outside on the Cours Mirabeau at a cafe, or walking in the countryside towards Mont Saeinte-Victoire, and I’m a happy man.

What about one of the worlds you’ve created?

Always hard, but to be consistent (why not?) I’ll say the Argonne of the troubadours. I do share William Butler Yeats’ feeling, too, though, that Constantinople at the time of Justinian would have been a remarkable place to be, so my own Sarantium is another option.

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:
Publishing—Jump In, the Water’s Fine

Alethea Kontis

This year marks my twentieth year in the book industry. Exactly half of my life.

In 1996, I graduated from USC with a degree in Chemistry. I immediately went out and got a second job at a bookstore. (I was already assistant and promotional manager at the local movie theater.) I haven’t left the publishing industry since. From bookseller to Book Buyer, from editor to author—when it comes to the creation and distribution of stories, there are very few jobs I haven’t done.

Everything I know I got from jumping in the deep end and learning from experience. I had zero formal education on the subject to guide me, but I wanted to be part of it all so much that I was fearless. Every time a new opportunity presented itself, I jumped.

Well, almost every opportunity.

In the past two decades, I have watched the publishing industry shift, adapt, and evolve. At times with incredible ease . . . but mostly not. Some readers have embraced this change. Some have fought it tooth and nail every step of the way. On the other side of the sales counter, corporations have had a similar struggle. A few times, publishers, printers, and wholesalers have pioneered new technology, sales, and delivery methods. But in so many ways they still desperately cling to a dying business model, and the world is changing faster than they can keep up.

Some of these advances we could see coming a mile away. I never told my parents, but right after college, during my first foray to Dragon Con, I was offered an editorial position at the biggest of the Big Six publishing houses (back when there were still six), and I turned it down.

Now you’re wondering just how crazy I am. This was the perfect opportunity! What book-loving geek in her right mind turns down a job like that? It’s true. I did want the gig. Second to being a published author, it was pretty much my dream job. The trouble was, I didn’t want to live in New York City. A girl fresh out of her teens doesn’t know much about herself, but I knew—deep down in my soul—that I was not a Big City Girl. I would have been miserable. I also knew, with the advent of this new-fangled contraption we were calling “the Internet,” that telecommuting an editorial position like that wouldn’t be far down the line. I was willing to wait for that.

Telecommuting took longer than I thought it would to catch on—heck, most of the publishers still prefer folks to work at their offices in the city—but other aspects began to branch out. Agents didn’t need to live in New York anymore. Copyeditors and sales reps certainly didn’t. Heck, even publishers began to be more comfortable in offices beyond the reach of a subway line.

But by that time I was already a published author, and my career path was on a different—and to me, a far more desirable—trajectory.

I had made goals when I was in college. I wanted to be doing whatever I was meant to be doing for the rest of my life by the time I turned twenty-five, and I wanted to be published by thirty. At the end of my twenty fourth year, I secured a coveted Book Buyer position and a year later, I bought a house. By the time thirty rolled around, I had books out with both Tor and Candlewick, and a novelette in Realms of Fantasy. Everything was on track.

Except, it was 2006. The economy was about to tank and technology was about to explode. Between the two, my dream career path slipped into a sideways dimension and became something I never would have imagined.

Even as late as 2009, big corporations weren’t sure what to do with the Internet and the insane “social media” nonsense. Meetings were still being held to discuss publishers putting their catalogs online, and how the industry would ultimately spell the word “ebook.” (I kid you not, I was at the meeting where this monumental decision was made.)

I got the impression that these corporations were terrified of the Internet. They saw it as some as-yet-undiscovered Wild West that would cease to exist if they just ignored it long enough. I was asked—as part of my goals—to investigate various social media and report back as to how our company might use it to our benefit. My reports and suggestions were summarily dismissed, unread, with a wave of the hand. That social media. Such a frivolous waste of time and certainly no use to business or marketing.

Happily, none of that data was a waste to me.

It did not surprise me that such a corporate behemoth would be so incredibly slow to adapt to technology . . . a funny thing, when a little publishing division called LSI was suddenly blowing up with all these “print-on-demand” book orders.

What surprised me—and what surprises me still—is what’s happening with traditional publishing and self-publishing, both from the publisher and author perspective. If you had told me on the day AlphaOops came out that a decade later I would be self-publishing in a big way, I would have looked at you like you’d just called me a dirty name. I would not see it as I do today: through the eyes of an author building her fan base in the way she wants, molding her career to suit her needs and not at the whim of a committee reviewing P&L statements and filling catalogs from a windowless room in New York. It would never have occurred to me that I could make writing both a “day job” that paid me month to month, and still retain that lofty goal of being paid five-digit advances and having books printed in China by the thousands.

In publishing, as in life, the only thing that is constant is change. For every success there may be a dozen setbacks. What’s amazing about the world we live in today is how many opportunities there are for authors to take those setbacks into our own hands and turn them back around. Self-publishing is a grand idea: will you publish in ebook only or print? For the cost of an ISBN and a setup fee, you can make a hardcover available to your dedicated fans. For the ebook, will you be available across all platforms, or hitch your wagon to a subscription service? Why choose? Try them out and see what works. Need some startup capital? Try a Kickstarter. Need some help launching a new part (or all) of your career? Try Patreon. Enjoy performing? Try YouTube, or Vimeo, or Facebook Live. Enjoy making memes? Try . . . anything, anywhere.

So the next time you experience a setback in this industry and worry about what’s going to happen, don’t. You cannot answer the “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question. No one can. Look back at the technological advances made in the last five years. Can you even imagine what the next five years will bring? Exactly.

I have faith that whatever happens in our not-too-distant future, it will be amazing. We know history, and we know how it repeats. All of that knowledge we’ve amassed—and are still amassing—none of it will be wasted. Things go dormant for a while (remember newsletters?) and come back with a vengeance. And beneath it all, content remains king.

We are the content creators. This is what we do. We’ve got this.

Imagining six impossible things before breakfast has become harder and harder, because so much is possible right now. The opportunities are there. We need only to be fearless. Join me in the deep end! I’ve been here so long, I’ve grown fins. And I can assure you, the water’s fine.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales.

Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion, and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome. Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.

Editor’s Desk:
In My Own Way

Neil Clarke

Every story—and editorial—starts with a blank screen. I’m one of those people who is tortured by that field of white. In its presence, all my ideas fade to nothing. I used to think that public speaking was my nemesis. I still don’t like it, but at least there I have someone to bounce off of and I can’t fall back on the delete key. This is probably another good reason for me to avoid time travel or temporal rewinding: I’d put myself in an endless loop of revision and freezing.

One of the main reasons I continue to do these editorials, though, is to break the cycle. I have this strange belief that one day the words will just flow. (I can hear the authors in the room laughing hysterically. Please permit me to have my delusion in peace.) Even if I don’t have that breakthrough moment, this journey will help me become more comfortable and confident with my words.

In many ways, lacking that skill has helped me as an editor. It makes me have even more respect for the talent of the people behind the stories that land on my desk. It’s also one of the reasons I find negative review bloggers so distasteful—they use that skill to promote themselves at the expense of others. I’d much rather take the high road: move on, find something you like, and then celebrate it.

I’ve discussed this before in previous editorials. If we want short fiction to thrive, we have a responsibility to spread the word and promote the works we’ve enjoyed. There are many ways to do this, but it needs to be focused, respectful, and timely. More specifically, it needs to be done in locations that are relevant to the audience you are trying to attract. Your blog is nice, but adding Twitter or Amazon might have a bigger impact.

Reviewing isn’t for everyone, mind you. I really wanted to do my part and find a way to contribute to a positive conversation about short fiction. I tried writing reviews. The blank screen tormented me and it took a while to realize that I wasn’t following the path that best utilized my skills. Instead, I changed tactics and launched Forever Magazine as a way of bringing back some of the stories I’ve enjoyed. When I go full-time this year, I hope to be able to do a bit more with that project.

Not long after announcing Forever, another opportunity to celebrate short fiction fell into my lap: Night Shade Books offered me a contract to edit a new year’s best anthology series. The first volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out this month. It’s been an intimidating project, but one I’m quite proud of. Here are the thirty-one stories included in the first volume:

“Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker

“Calved” by Sam J. Miller

“Three Bodies at Mitanni” by Seth Dickinson

“The Smog Society” by Chen Quifan

“In Blue Lily’s Wake” by Aliette de Bodard

“Hello, Hello” by Seanan McGuire

“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang

“Capitalism in the 22nd Century” by Geoff Ryman

“Hold-Time Violations” by John Chu

“Wild Honey” by Paul McAuley

“So Much Cooking” by Naomi Kritzer

“Bannerless” by Carrie Vaughn

“Another Word for World” by Ann Leckie

“The Cold Inequalities” by Yoon Ha Lee

“Iron Pegasus” by Brenda Cooper

“The Audience” by Sean McMullen

“Empty” by Robert Reed

“Gypsy” by Carter Scholz

“Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” by Taiyo Fujii

“Damage” by David D. Levine

“The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss” by David Brin

“No Placeholder for You, My Love” by Nick Wolven

“Outsider” by An Owomoyela

“The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” by Ken Liu

“Cocoons” by Nancy Kress

“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” by Caroline M. Yoachim

“Two-Year Man” by Kelly Robson

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer

“Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan” by Ian McDonald

“Meshed” by Rich Larson

“A Murmuration” by Alastair Reynolds

I hope you’ll consider buying a copy, having your library get it, or at least tracking down some of those stories, and if you do, please let me know what you thought of them. Or, better yet, why not keep the momentum going and tell a friend!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-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 month. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art: XTC

Vincent LAÏK

About the Artist

Vincent LAÏK is a French freelance illustrator living in southeastern France. He’s been painting and drawing since childhood and discovered science fiction and fantasy thanks to the marvelous illustrators and movies of 70’s and 80’s. Self-taught in traditional and digital techniques, he now works mainly in Photoshop. Recently he has been creating illustrations, cover and concept art for various publishing and RPG companies like Black Coat Press, Riviere Blanche, Kerberos Productions, Black Book Editions, and Mongoose Publishing.

This piece also appears in Casus Belli Magazine, France.