First Light at Mistaken Point

Kali Wallace

A low mist clung to the river and laced through the trees, thinning as dawn washed the forest from gray to gold to green. The road dipped into a hollow, lifted again into sunlight. Charlie was reaching for her sunglasses when her phone rang. She started, fumbled through her purse, but by the time she unearthed the phone it was quiet. She glanced at the screen. Sandeep. 6:53 AM.

A call before seven meant something was happening in Houston, something important enough to disturb her on the weekend of her mother’s funeral. She spent too long staring at the phone, not watching the road, until a flash of motion caught her eye. She jerked the wheel to the right as a slow-moving pickup passed in the opposite lane. The truck was gone as quickly as it had appeared, the rumble of its diesel engine fading.

Charlie rubbed her eyes and willed her heart to slow. It was fine. She hadn’t been in the wrong lane. Mom would have called it an inches-seconds moment, and she would have laughed. Inches one way, seconds another, and everything would have been different. Nothing had happened.

The road curved along the river. She rubbed her eyes again. She was so tired of her throbbing head, the sickly roil of too much coffee and too little food in her stomach, the iron tension in her shoulders and back. On the left she saw the red Pennsylvania Dutch barn where Mom had dragged her to a community yard sale a few years ago. The farm was abandoned now; the barn door hung open, a black slice in the red. She had missed the turn. Her own mother’s house and she had driven right by.

She pulled over, checked for nonexistent traffic, backtracked a few hundred yards to the bright purple mailbox at the end of Mom’s driveway. Long grass whipped the underside of the car, and the little blue house emerged from the wall of green. The door was red, the shutters blinding yellow. Mom had, in her last few years, surrounded herself with color and light, rainbows and flowers, any hue or pigment that caught her eye. There was a line of pinwheels marching through the flower beds beneath the front windows, unmoving in the morning air.

Charlie’s phone beeped as she parked beside Cath’s car. A text from Sandeep: new transmission 6:29 am. 47 seconds.

Forty-seven seconds. Something squeezed in Charlie’s chest. The first message had been four seconds, and no matter what they told the press and the public, that wasn’t long enough for them to learn anything useful.

A month ago, three weeks before Intrepid was due to settle into orbit around Mars, mission control had lost contact with the ship. Telescopes confirmed it was right where it was supposed to be, but they received no telemetry, couldn’t make audio contact, and had no response when they queried the ship’s computers. All communication with Intrepid had stopped, and nobody could figure out why. Fingers of blame had pointed in every direction, but mostly at Charlie and her team. For Intrepid to fall silent, there had to be a problem with the shipboard radios—her system, her design—as well as the backups, the secondary backups, the spare parts, anything and everything that might be scavenged or repurposed for a replacement.

However unlikely it was, that cascade of failures is well beyond the scope of bad luck or coincidence, it was better to believe there was something wrong with all of Intrepid’s communication systems than to consider the possibility that there might not be anybody alive to use them.

Then, six days ago, Intrepid had finally called home. But exclamations of relief had quickly given way to bewilderment: the transmission was brief and unintelligible. Four seconds of noise. Nobody was even sure whose voice it was, much less what they were saying. They had been waiting for a second message ever since.

Forty-seven seconds. Long enough for words. Long enough for answers.

She snapped out of her seatbelt and called Sandeep back.

He picked up at once. “I’m sending you a file right now.”

“What can you hear?” Charlie asked. In the twenty minutes since the message had arrived, everybody at MCC would have listened to it twenty times. They would be clustered around workstations with mugs in hand, bleary-eyed but talking nonstop. The arguments wouldn’t have erupted yet. Give it another half an hour, another pot of coffee, time for the commuters to arrive and the office cot-sleepers to wake. Everybody was on edge. All week there had been shouting, tears, blame, and that was with only four seconds.

“It’s clearer than the other,” Sandeep said, “but not by much. We can identify a voice this time.”

The hair on the back of Charlie’s neck rose. “Who?”

“Harris, we think,” Sandeep said. “We’re pretty sure it’s him. Definitely a man, but Hattendorf says—well. It doesn’t matter what he says.”

“What? What does he say?”

“Hatt says it sounds like Dr. Rivers.”

Charlie blinked. “Rivers?”

“That’s what he says.”

Dr. Rivers had been the original mission doctor, but he had been replaced before launch. His heart, the doctors said, was cause for concern. A single medical test had grounded him, and Lisa Huerta had taken his place. Nobody was supposed to be thrilled that Rivers was off the mission, least of all Lisa, who was his friend. But after the decision, Charlie and Lisa had retreated to Charlie’s apartment with a bottle of champagne. Their relationship had been new, their future uncertain, and now they would spend years separated by millions of miles. It didn’t matter. Rivers’ bad luck was Lisa’s chance of a lifetime. It was her dream come true, and Charlie had been thrilled for her, happier than she’d had words to convey.

“Rivers is with his family in Atlanta,” Charlie said slowly. “On Earth. He was on MSNBC yesterday. Hatt knows that, right?”

Sandeep laughed uneasily. “He knows. He’s just—he needs sleep. We all need sleep.”

“But that’s—” She couldn’t handle Hatt’s nonsense right now. “Tell him to stop wasting everybody’s time. You think it’s Harris.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely Harris.” A pause, and Sandeep added, his tone soft, “A man for sure, anyway.”

The gentle apology in his tone made Charlie’s skin crawl. Sandeep didn’t need to coddle her, even so obliquely. Brian Harris was mission commander; it was protocol for him to make the report, if possible, when something went wrong. His was the voice they were all expecting to hear. Charlie’s own dark fears and aching hopes had nothing to do with it.

“Anything else?” she asked.

Sandeep exhaled. “Maybe. I don’t want to bias you before you listen.”

“Talk to Inez about tweaking her noise algorithm using the first—”

“She’s on it,” Sandeep said.

“Good.” There was a sour taste at the back of Charlie’s throat. She couldn’t do anything from Virginia. “I’ll give it a listen and—”

The red door opened, and Cath stepped onto the porch. Her hair was pulled back from her face, and in one hand she held rubber gloves the same bright yellow as the shutters. Yesterday at the funeral, standing there alone in her black dress and pearls, Cath had looked so much like their mother that Charlie had stumbled in surprise, and a wild impossibility had skittered through her mind: I knew it was a mistake, I knew she wasn’t gone. Before that moment it had been three years since Charlie and Cath had seen each other in person. They communicated by sporadic text, brief email, and most of all through their mother, who had accepted her position as nexus between daughters with a sigh and a sad smile.

“Charlie?” Sandeep said. “How are you doing? How was the funeral?”

“It was fine. It was good.” Charlie winced. “I don’t mean good. I mean . . . . Everybody loved Mom. Half the university was there. They’re even talking about making a Helen Rush scholarship for paleontology students.”

“That’s nice. That’s really nice.”

“It is. Look, my sister is waiting, I have to—”

“Oh, sure, definitely.” Sandeep cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Send me the audio now, just so I can hear it.”

“Will do. Just to warn you, it sounds pretty bad, but it’s—”

“Better than silence. I know.”

“It is, Charlie,” he said earnestly. “They’re alive.”

“I know.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“Tonight. Talk to you later.” Charlie hung up.

It was what they had been saying all week, in the anxious chaos of MCC, in the public spectacle of press conferences and interviews: It’s better than silence. At least we know they’re alive. It’s better than silence. Charlie couldn’t remember anymore if the words were supposed to be a comfort.

She stepped out of the car, and a symphony of morning birdsong surrounded her.

“I thought you had to go back to Houston,” Cath said.

“My flight’s this afternoon. I can help for a little bit.”

“It’s going to take a while to get all this stuff sorted out. I forgot she had so much shit.”

Cath held the screen door open, and Charlie paused before stepping in, wondering if her sister’s outstretched arm was offering a hug, wondering still when Cath dropped her arm. When Cath had called from the hospital earlier that week, Charlie had been at work, listening to four seconds of gibberish over and over again until it became a steady hum beneath every moment, and her first thought upon hearing that Mom had died in her sleep was: It’s too soon.

Her second thought, more shameful: I don’t have time for this.

Charlie wanted to ask why Cath was here by herself, but she knew the answer, and Cath wouldn’t welcome the question. Cath’s husband Walter was not the sort of man who would consider the funeral of a mother-in-law he had never liked reason to interrupt his weekend, and he would certainly never lower himself to scrubbing floors or packing boxes. When they were still speaking regularly, Cath used to complain to Charlie—laughing, like it was a charming quirk—that Walter couldn’t find a dishwasher or laundry hamper if his life depended on it.

The inside of the house was cool, a little humid; the windows were open and the mist had invited itself in. Charlie brushed her fingers over a flat stone on the table inside the door: a single trilobite in dense gray shale, as long as her hand from head to tail. Ever since she was a child she had been fitting her palm to that fossil, pressing into the ripples of the creature’s carapace and spines. When she was little she had imagined she could feel it moving beneath her fingers, a lightning-fast twitch nobody could see.

“The news was saying you heard from the crew again. Any truth to that?” Cath asked.

“I’m surprised it’s on the news already,” Charlie said. “It just came in.”

Cath lifted a single eyebrow. At fifteen she had practiced that expression in the mirror until she mastered it; Charlie had stood beside her, four inches shorter and two steps behind, trying just as hard, never succeeding. “It’s all they talk about anymore. Nobody can decide if it’s a hoax or a conspiracy or aliens or whatever. What’s the new message say?”

“I haven’t listened to it yet. Apparently it’s hard to make out.” A glance at her phone: the file had nearly finished downloading.

“But it’s a good sign, isn’t it?” Cath asked. “At least you know they’re still alive.”

“It’s better than silence,” Charlie said.

Cath started to say something, changed her mind, and gestured to the house around them. Her wedding ring glinted in a shaft of sunlight. “I started in the kitchen. I was going to get to work in here, but this . . . . The department said they’d take all this for the museum, so I guess we just put it in boxes. Same with the books.”

The front room of their mother’s house was lined with bookshelves, and crammed in with the books, slotted into every spare space, were the fossils. They spilled over to cover the end tables and fireplace mantle, into shoe boxes on the floor and bowls on the window sill. Shells in spirals and fans, flattened fish with needle-thin bones and delicate impressions of fins, one massive flat chunk of stromatolite lumps like cobblestones. Nautiluses and trilobites and spidery sea stars and mashed jumbles of insects smothered in ancient clay, eaten away by water and time until nothing remained but the stone ghosts of their exoskeletons. Charlie recalled the names like she remembered grade school friends, old words unused but not forgotten: Aspidella, Spriggina, Cloudina.

Nothing rare or valuable, Mom had always said with a self-conscious laugh. Nothing anybody would begrudge an old woman for hoarding like a dragon on a pile of gold. Some were smeared with a brand of white and Mom’s handwriting in neat block letters; some had names, locations, dates, or only a letter and a number. Somewhere in the room, maybe beneath the sloping stack of field notebooks on the desk, there might be a catalog. Many had no labels at all. This had always been their mother’s landscape: history as a jumble of soft tissue turned to stone, evolutionary happenstance preserved for accidental eons, names and places and ages only occasional anchors, more forgotten in dusty corners than remembered in the open.

The cluttered room made Charlie’s hands itch. Cath gave her a pitying look and a cardboard box.

“You can do the bedroom,” she said. “All the clothes are going to Goodwill, unless you find anything you want.”

Charlie glanced into the guest room as she passed. Cath’s overnight bag was open on the bed, her funeral dress hanging on the closet door. She hadn’t known Cath was staying here. She hadn’t thought to ask.

In their mother’s room Charlie sat on the edge of the bed with her phone in hand. She opened the audio file. The initial burst of sound was so loud she jumped, thumbed the volume down, paused the playback. There were no footsteps in the hall, no sign Cath had heard. Her heart was racing. Seconds had never seemed so precious to Charlie until they became her only measure of the teetering balance between hope and despair. She hit play again.

The message began with a deep hum that lasted an uncomfortable five seconds.

That’s Brian, Charlie thought. Her throat hurt. It was really him.

That low hmm was a drawn-out version of the same sound Brian Harris made every time he cleared his throat before speaking. At countless press conferences before launch, at the start of every audio message he sent back to Earth, he always made the same noise. One of the fussy PR men had complained about it once, said, “Can’t we get him to stop doing that? It makes him sound slow.” The young man had been so disapproving behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and there had been glances around the room, across the table, until finally somebody—Charlie couldn’t remember who—had said, “The man’s a NASA astronaut going to Mars. He’s a fucking genius. He can talk however the hell he wants.” Laughter, real from the scientists, feigned from the PR guy, and the subject was dropped.

Six seconds of silence followed the opening hmm. Charlie nudged the volume back up. In the background she heard faint murmurs that might be conversation just beyond the edge of comprehensibility, or it might be mechanical noise, or nothing at all. Her phone speaker was no good. Everything useful was stripped out of this file. She needed the data. She needed her equipment. She needed to be at work.

Then Brian’s voice returned, but his words were broken, unintelligible, rising and falling in a singsong rhythm. There was a waver that might have been someone or everyone. A quiver that could be time or fine. Charlie passed her phone from one hand to the other, held it closer to her ear.

Another noise whispered in the background, half a beat behind. Instrument feedback. An echo.

No. It was a woman’s voice.

Charlie closed her eyes. It felt like sandpaper scraping over her corneas.

Intrepid had left Earth eight months ago. A small fraction of a single life, less than a blink in the history of humankind, nothing at all to the incomprehensible span of the universe. But it was time enough for the sound of a voice over a radio to replace the memory of a whisper in her ear, for the sight of a face framed by a camera to grow more familiar than a smile in morning sunlight. For the memory of hands clasped, the tickle of soft hair on a bare shoulder, warm bodies curled together, companionable silences beneath the night sky to fade, fade, fade.

Lisa had said, “We’ll figure us out when I get back.” And Charlie had agreed, and they had both laughed, mapping the geologic slowness of Charlie’s emotions, the epochs and eras it took for her to understand what she was feeling. Space and time contracted with a kiss, expanded with a goodbye, and two years and a hundred million miles were supposed to be enough.

The recording ended. Forty-seven seconds. Such a small snippet, and alone, to have made its way through the vacuum to Earth. These garbled noises made no more sense than the previous four seconds. When Charlie had let her mind wander these past few days, exhaustion nudging her from reason to fantasy, she found herself imagining something in the space between Earth and Mars—some thing, a curtain vast and dark, rippling in the solar wind, beyond sight, beyond sense, knowable only by the distortion it caused, by the wavelengths it absorbed and the cruel, tantalizing fragments it let pass.

She lowered the phone. Her thumb tapped play again, and she allowed a few seconds of the solemn hmm before she stopped it. She could listen a dozen times and she wouldn’t hear anything her team at mission control hadn’t already picked out and analyzed. She couldn’t do anything here, with the walls of her mother’s bedroom pressing around her, breathing with the silence of a house that had been abandoned for months. There were books on the nightstand and a sweater draped over the foot of the bed, as though Mom had stepped out moments ago, but she had been in the hospital since January.

Charlie stalked to the closet to strip clothes from hangers. With every garment a familiar scent drifted on the air, danced, and faded: the stuffy university library in cardigans with holes in the sleeves, pine trees and campfires in colorful scarves, fertilizer and garden soil in soft elastic-waist jeans. Never the most dedicated housekeeper, Mom had grown even more neglectful after retirement; piles of laundry expanded, stacks of dishes grew. Cath lived only an hour away, compared to Charlie’s half a continent, and she made the drive once a week to fret and scold, to coax Mom from the house for brunch, check her medications, shop for groceries.

“Your sister thinks I’m going to turn into one of those hoarders who gets buried beneath her own junk,” Mom had said cheerfully, one afternoon in the fall. She had been planting bulbs all morning and had called Charlie to tell her what flowers she would have in the spring. Daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, and tulips, of course, although she had overdone tulips the previous year and could barely abide their smug sturdy posture and gaping mouths anymore. “But it just doesn’t seem so important anymore, fussing over clothes and cleaning and all those boring things. I’d rather be outside in the sun. Housework can wait.”

“She’s just worried,” Charlie had replied. She had been at work on a Saturday, and her attention was on Intrepid. That was before they lost contact, when the Mars mission had still been a string of unprecedented successes.

“You’d think an old lady taking up gardening wouldn’t make anybody worry, but that’s your sister for you,” Mom had said. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I spent my whole life digging up dead things, but now all I want is something alive all around me. You know, I never really understood why you were so obsessed with everything out there.” She always referred to space as out there. “Not when there are so many problems here. But then I remind myself that all those cold, dead places won’t be so cold and dead after you’ve sent your people there.”

And Charlie had said, “I guess that’s one way of thinking about it. Look, I have to go.”

She had spent half her life telling her mother she had to go: back to school, back to work, back to Houston, back to the people and projects that needed her. Mom had teased her about working too hard. She had never objected.

When the clothes were packed away, Charlie stood on her toes to pull boxes from the shelf. Jammed in with old shoes with the soles worn flat, apartment lease paperwork from twenty years ago, student theses in flimsy bindings, the collected detritus of a lifetime, she found a framed photograph of Mom’s parents. Grandma in a gold gown, Grandpa in a tux, standing before a flower-draped railing with glasses of wine, the ocean a deep twilight blue behind them.

Charlie barely remembered her grandparents. She had impressions of perfume-scented hugs, bleach-bright afternoons on the beach, sandwiches with too much mayonnaise, and listening from another room as they scolded Mom for not visiting more often, for not having a husband, for treating her daughters like friends rather than children, for dragging them all over the world like nomads.

They had died in a car accident the summer Charlie was nine, Cath eleven. At the funeral home, a woman Charlie didn’t know had pressed that photograph into Mom’s hands and said, “Take it. You may not think so now, but you’ll want to remember them someday.” It was the first time Charlie had glimpsed what her mother looked like to the family she had left behind.

Later, after the service and the cemetery, they had gone to the beach, Mom and Charlie and Cath. Charlie had pulled off her pinching new shoes and lace-cuffed socks to run barefoot at the edge of the water. A wave caught her by surprise and soaked the hem of her dress. She had walked up the sand, wringing out the fabric, to where her mother was watching with a handful of seashells in her palm.

“I want to go home,” Charlie said. Her nose was sunburned, the part of her hair hot to the touch.

“Not yet,” said Mom. “We’re going to Avalon.”

Charlie hadn’t thought about that summer in years, but the salt smell of the ocean came back to her now. She remembered how Mom had tossed the photograph of her parents into the back seat, where it slid to the floor between sleeping bags and backpacks. Mom had been planning the long drive to Newfoundland before they even left home. She was always planning another trip, another expedition, another escape. Her brittle silence hadn’t softened until they were heading north, crossing the border, heading north again through a long day and a long night. They had finally arrived at Mistaken Point just before dawn. Cath had stayed in the car while Charlie scuffed after their mother on the gray rocks beneath a vast dawn sky, shivering in the whipping sea wind.

She dropped the photograph and picked up her phone.

Hum, silence, words that were not words. She had no doubt now: it was Brian’s voice in the foreground, Lisa’s in the background.

She played it a third time. It didn’t sound like they were alarmed or panicking, but that was as frustrating as it was reassuring. A plea for help would tell her something new.

A fourth. Again she heard what might be everyone, might be everything. Again the sounds that followed rose to the edge of comprehensibility before swerving into musical gibberish like a child’s song run through a vocal distorter. Maybe it was a song. Rivers was always singing, he was known for it, they had come to expect it, and when she got home Lisa would be so relieved to hear from him—

A jumbling discordance filled Charlie’s mind, halting that thought with car-crash suddenness.

She started the message over before it reached the end.

She was letting Sandeep’s fussing and Hatt’s stupidity get to her. It didn’t even sound like Rivers. Who was with his family in Atlanta. She played the message to the end and missed Lisa so much it was a physical thing, a clinging vine of spines and thorns, tightening.

Her thumb hovered over the screen for another repetition, but the sound of footsteps in the hall stopped her.

Cath appeared in the doorway. “I’m making coffee. Want some?”

It took a moment for the words to penetrate the shimmering echo of the Intrepid’s message. “Yeah. Sure.”

“You okay?”

Charlie rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m fine.”

Cath gave her a level look, unconvinced, but only asked, “Was all of this junk in the closet?”

“There was a lot jammed back there.” Charlie passed the photograph to her. “Remember this?”

“Hey, that’s Grandpa when he still had hair.”

Charlie’s most vivid memory of the man was of a waxy-pale husk in a coffin lined with blue silk, but Cath was looking at the picture with a fond smile, and as her words quivered through the air between them Charlie remembered: Alice. The woman who had given the photograph to Mom was named Alice, and she had been Grandma’s best friend since childhood. She had taken Charlie and Cath to the aquarium in Baltimore once when they were children. Charlie didn’t know how she could have forgotten. They had watched the jellyfish together for a long time, quiet in a dark room as the creatures drifted in restful blue.

“Do you remember after the funeral?” Charlie asked.

Cath glanced up. “Was that when Mom dragged us up to Canada and spent the entire drive lecturing us about those frond things she liked so much?”

“Yes. Same trip.”

Charlie didn’t remember Mom talking much during the drive, only long hours of tense silence. She remembered Cath saying, “God, Mom, I don’t care,” when they reached their destination, putting her headphones on and refusing to get out of the car. She remembered Mom taking her hand and leading her toward the shore in the cold bright morning, her professorial instinct taking over: half a billion years ago, the oldest complex lifeforms on Earth, before the beginning, before, before. The memory of her mother’s words melted into the singsong meter of the ship’s message.

She looked down, half expecting to find it playing again, but her phone was silent.

“Is that from Intrepid?” Cath asked. “Can I listen?”

Charlie clicked the screen off, feeling like she had been caught playing when there were chores to be done. “It’ll be released to the public later.”

“So play it for me. What are they saying?” Cath didn’t wait for an answer before turning away. “Come on. Coffee first, then you can tell me.”

Charlie hesitated only a moment before following her to the kitchen. She sat at the table while Cath plucked mugs from a half-packed box.

“So what do they have to say?” Cath asked.

“We’re not sure yet. It’s hard to hear anything clearly.”

“Now I’ve really got to hear it. I’m good at figuring out gibberish. Lots of practice.”

“It’s gibberish because it’s been sent across fifty million miles of space by damaged equipment, not because it’s a secret coded love poem in medieval Polish. Not exactly your area of expertise.”

Cath stilled, hand on the faucet, and Charlie regretted her words. She didn’t mean to needle. It was a mean-spirited reflex, the same thoughtless instinct that had put years of barbed wire separation between them. Three years ago she had accused Cath of abandoning her dreams for an unfaithful man, and Cath had accused Charlie of never sacrificing anything for anyone. It should have passed, would have passed any other day, but that day years of disagreements and choices had exploded into a fight, and the fight, when it ended, whimpered meekly into a long uneasy holding pattern, the space between them littered with traps and pitfalls they both chose to avoid rather than navigate. It was true that Cath had quit graduate school when she had married, insisting it was exactly what she wanted. She had never welcomed Charlie’s observation that what Cath wanted was always precisely what Walter had wanted first, no more than she had welcomed Mom’s jokes about cosmic balance requiring their family to have at least one useless humanities scholar amongst the scientists. Charlie had known these things. She had known when they were first finding their way, and when they grew through their twenties and thirties, Cath married and Charlie more solitary than not, the choices they made as young women fading into acceptance or regret, the future ossifying into routine. She had known when Cath told her about Walter’s latest indiscretion three years ago. She had taunted Cath about it anyway.

But this time, Cath let it pass unremarked. She set the mugs on the counter; she had taken off her wedding ring.

“Maybe not,” she said, “but I want to hear it anyway.”

Charlie played the recording. She tensed through the initial rumble of noise, clenched her teeth through the seconds of silence that followed. Cath opened her mouth, but Charlie quieted her with gesture. The wordless chatter started again, high tones and low, a singsong back and forth. Brian’s voice, Lisa’s voice. She was growing more confident that Brian was saying, “Everyone’s fine.” It would be clear when the raw audio was processed.

When the recording ended, a flicker passed over Cath’s face, more shadow than flinch. “That’s . . . odd. Play it again?”

Charlie obliged.

“Are they really going to make that public?” Cath asked. She pulled out a chair to sit across from Charlie.

“Nobody will believe how hard it is to understand if we don’t,” Charlie pointed out. “You know how people are. They’ll say we’re—”

“It sounds like they’re saying, ‘Everybody’s dying.’ ”

“What?” Charlie looked at her sharply. “That’s not what they’re saying.”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“It’s not. He’s saying they’re fine. ‘Everything’s fine.’ You have to listen closely.”

“I am listening closely. Play it again,” Cath said.

“I’ve listened to it five times. I know what they’re saying.”

“Then let me hear it again.”

Charlie shook her head. “No. This is low-quality audio on a crappy speaker. If I was at my lab I could—I could—”

She stared at the phone and the scarred table beneath it. For several seconds she heard nothing but the splutter of the coffee pot and drip of the kitchen faucet. It had dripped for years. Mom had always said she was going to fix it.

“We’re cleaning it up,” Charlie said, her voice hoarse. “You can’t draw conclusions from this.”

Brian’s voice, Lisa’s voice. The conclusions were already barbed in her throat.

“Okay,” Cath said.

“We should get back to work.”

“Charlie.”

“The bedroom’s almost finished. I can—”

“I know you’d rather be there. I don’t blame you.” Cath reached across the table, hesitated before touching the back of Charlie’s hand. Charlie twitched but didn’t pull away. “I know it’s not just your job. They’re your friends, aren’t they? I can’t even imagine how scared you must be for them.”

Cath rose to pour the coffee for both of them—black, bitter, their mother’s preference passed down. A different Charlie, a sister who could meet Cath halfway, would say, “Not only friends.” She would say Lisa’s name and let the fear in her voice invite Cath’s questions. A different Charlie would have already said the words, sometime over the past three years. She would have already opened the door.

“Mom would want you to be there,” Cath said. “She always told everybody you were changing the fate of the human race. Somebody’s got to do it, she said, and she knew it was going to be you. She had them all trained to turn on the news for mission updates.”

“I didn’t mean,” Charlie began, but she stopped, unsure where that sentence led.

“She’d say, ‘Let’s hear about Charlie’s astronauts. Let’s see what they’re up to today.’ The nurses got sick of it, but she never got tired of bragging about you. And when the ship lost contact . . . . ” Cath was looking at the table, her eyes unfocused. “That’s what she told them to explain why you didn’t visit much. She never wanted me to tell you to come.”

“I would have said I was too busy anyway,” Charlie said. Her guilt was a bright stinging thing, sunlight on a mirror.

“You should see if you can get an earlier flight. They need you, don’t they?” Cath gestured toward the window with her coffee mug, as though all of time and space were waiting in the trees outside. “It’s important. I understand.”

Cath’s voice was even, but Charlie still felt she was prodding at her with the question, looking for her soft fleshy underside. She remembered, in a flash like light through a prism, Mom once saying, “Funerals aren’t for the dead, honey. They’re for the living.” The same could be said of fossils, or starlight, remnants of a dead past rippling through the present.

“They can manage for a few hours,” Charlie said.

“But they need you. Go. I can handle this. Jeff will be over soon to help anyway.”

“Jeff? Who’s Jeff?” Charlie asked, confused.

“You met him at the funeral yesterday, remember? After you’ve been pestering me about him for months.”

Cath had been alone at the funeral. Head held high, black dress and pearls making her look so much like Mom, and alone. There had been nobody at her side. Charlie pressed her lips together, swallowing back an acid churn of nausea. Cath wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. They hadn’t spoken about anything so intimate as friends or lovers in three years, but she wouldn’t have missed a separation or divorce. She wouldn’t have missed a whole person standing beside her sister at their mother’s funeral.

“You talked to him for at least twenty minutes?” Cath went on, voice lifting uncertainly. “And you told me afterward that you approved? Because he didn’t try to play the conspiracy theory guessing game with you, he just said that hearing from Intrepid after so long must be—”

“Better than silence,” Charlie said.

Cath’s smile was watery, relieved. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t tell you how serious it was, but I don’t think I really knew, not until—well. He showed up. He stayed. He’s coming over to help, which is something that asshole we don’t talk about anymore never would have done.”

Three years ago, before their conversation had devolved into an argument, when Cath’s voice was still wet with hurt and Charlie had not yet loosed the careless words she would later regret, she had asked, “Are you going to leave him?” Cath had hesitated—knowing silence vibrated between them—and Charlie had held her breath, thought, say yes, and finally, and please, hopes formed with the strength of commands but never spoken, waiting for the second it took for Cath to answer one way, or the other.

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s—good. That’s.” Charlie gulped her coffee and pushed back her chair. “I’ll finish the bedroom. I can—I’ll do that before I go.”

She fled down the hall again. The guest room door was still open, but there was no sign of Cath’s bag or funeral dress. The bed had been stripped, the closet cleared. Charlie took a few slow breaths. Dust motes danced in sunlight. There was a pressure building behind her eyes, a dull pain reminding her how little she had slept all week. She didn’t need to ask. She had only glanced through the door before. There was no reason for Cath to stay here anyway.

In her mother’s room she played the message again. She breathed through the hum and the silence, and when the voices picked up—two of them, entwined—she closed her eyes. Thought about Cath at the funeral, black dress, pearls, alone. The space beside her wavered, like lake water disturbed from below, and by the time the message rolled through everything, stuttered over fine, there was a man where there had been emptiness. He had always been there. She had forgotten. She had only forgotten.

With unsteady hands Charlie disgorged the rest of the closet into cardboard boxes, taped them up and labeled the sides, and she did not listen to the message again. She dumped piles of old paperwork into a trash bag, and she made a mental list of what she could do when she returned to mission control. She folded the sheets and blankets, and she kept her phone in her pocket. She layered trinkets and books in a box with the photograph of their grandparents, and she remembered the beach, the wet slap of waves on her legs. She swept the floor, and Intrepid’s message sang beneath her thoughts.

When Charlie returned to the kitchen, purse over her shoulder and keys in hand, Cath was looking through the window over the sink. All around her the kitchen cupboards were open and empty. The air smelled of bleach.

“What was the name of that place?” Cath asked without turning. “In Canada, where we went after Grandma and Grandpa’s funeral?”

“Mistaken Point,” Charlie said. As she said it, uncertainty clouded her words. That was the name she remembered, but what was a place name but noise attached to a landscape, a whipping flag clinging to an ageless continent. She added, softly, “Mom called it Avalon.”

“Right. She dragged us along those rocks all morning. It was foggy, right? Almost raining. We didn’t have the right clothes. She was so excited.”

Charlie didn’t remember Cath walking with them on the seashore. She remembered that it had been her and Mom alone, Cath left in a sulk in the car. She remembered sunlight when dawn broke, a painters’ sky so perfect the possibility it might not have been real filled her with a dread so powerful it tasted like despair.

“I have to go,” she said.

“You know she was never mad at you for being obsessed with your work,” Cath said. “She understood. She liked that you took after her.”

On her way out the door, Charlie stopped to touch the trilobite fossils as she always did. Hand to stone, fingertips to head, palm to thorax, wrist to the long spiny fan of a tail. There were two creatures preserved in the sample, crossed like clasped hands, dead together for five hundred million years. A slide of seafloor mud inches away, a silent underwater scurry seconds later, and they might have been buried alone.

“You should take them,” Cath said. She was watching from the kitchen doorway. “Those little guys were always your favorites.”

Charlie wrapped the slab of stone in a plastic bag before she said goodbye.

She was a mile from the house and slowing for a bend in the road when a tremble passed through her, sudden as a summer storm. Her hands began to shake; her breath grew short. She pulled onto the grass-choked shoulder and rolled down the window, gasping at the warm fresh air. She closed her eyes. Carefully, mindful of the horn, she rested her head against the steering wheel. The taste of coffee lingered on her tongue.

She sat there for five minutes, ten, foot on the brake, engine running. Through the window she heard birds, a breeze in the trees, a single car passing. The gentle sounds Mom had sought after decades of students and department meetings and field expeditions. A different daughter would have admired the comfort she found in that peace. It was the rooted calm Mom had craved after a lifetime of wandering, a slowness she had never admitted she needed, and she’d had only a few years to enjoy it. A different daughter would have helped plant the garden.

Charlie picked up her phone from the passenger seat. She dug through her purse for the power cable, plugged it in. She set the audio file to repeat and tapped play. A burst of sound, a breath of silence. A voice she did or did not recognize. Another she did or did not love. Forty-seven seconds beginning to end. Everybody’s dying, everybody’s fine. The mist was gone from the river, the water glinting in sunlight, the trees a mottled canvas of deepening green. She checked her mirror, checked both directions, and pulled onto the road again. The recording started over.

About the Author

Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of the young adult horror novel Shallow Graves (HarperCollins) and several science fiction and fantasy short stories.

Teenagers from Outer Space

Dale Bailey

The first aliens arrived in Milledgeville, Ohio, when I was still in diapers. By the time I’d graduated into the frilly, pink dresses my mother put me in for elementary school, you saw them around occasionally, strolling down Main Street or picnicking by the bandshell in the park. They’d bought into a rundown neighborhood in the east end of town—primarily Polish and Estonian to that point, though once the aliens began picking up mortgages over there, most people just called it Bug Town. This was lazy thinking because the aliens didn’t look anything like bugs, but what are you going to do?

I never really had much personal contact with them until their kids started showing up in my high school classes. There was grumbling, of course. But who was going to tell a hulking seven-foot alien his kid couldn’t come to school? And so I studied Great Expectations and Home Economics in the company of creatures not of this Earth. Which sounds more dramatic than it really was. We all got along well enough in class, even if we did keep to our own sides of the lunchroom.

Which is where it might have ended if it hadn’t been for my best friend, Joan Hayden.

The first thing you have to understand about Joan is that she had poor taste in boys. Everybody agreed. First there’d been Luke Jackson, a disaffected former jock who’d been kicked off the football team when he showed up at the Homecoming game half in the bag. After that, she’d taken up with a guy named Jimmy Ford, violating the unspoken divide between the kids in calculus and the ones in shop. That was about the time Joan got clumsy—started slipping in the shower and running into doors—so when she worked up the courage to send Jimmy packing, we all agreed that she was well shut of him.

Which brings us to Johnny Fabriano, where this story really gets underway. Johnny looked like a refugee from The Wild Ones—black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and a greasy DA that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. He’d dropped out of high school the day he’d turned sixteen and had spent the last five years hanging around Red’s Billiards Parlor, cadging cigarettes and hustling pool. He was a dead shot, and, rumor had it, he’d won his car in a hotly contested game of Eight Ball with a gearhead from Brookton. The car itself was the envy of every would-be greaser in town—a chopped ’49 Mercury coupé painted a glossy midnight purple with stylized tongues of yellow and red flame licking at the hood and fenders.

Joan had already gotten a reputation for being fast—undeserved, I have to put in, and if anyone knew, I did, because Joan confided everything in me. She’d moved in next door when we were both in second grade, and we’d been joined at the hip ever since, sharing every joy and affliction, from scraped knees to first periods, which when Joan’s made its debut, I remember how jealous I was—until mine happened along two months later, inflicting such misery upon me that I have never envied anyone anything ever since, or almost never, anyway.

Joan had grown up in a Pentecostal church, daughter to a strict disciplinarian who saw himself as the earthly agent of the Lord. And if at one level Joan rejected all that, at another level she still believed. You never really escape your childhood training, I guess, and it was this division in Joan’s personality that ultimately caused all the trouble. For while Johnny Fabriano was a perfect candidate to give her father an apoplexy, he was also a young man with an agenda of his own.

You see where this is going, of course, and it’s not a happy place. But when the alien got involved, his good intentions only made everything worse. Good intentions usually do.

My name is Nancy Miller, by the way, and it’s nice to meet you, I’m sure. If you haven’t already figured it out, this story isn’t really mine to tell, but my mother always called me Chatty Cathy, so I suppose it’s only natural that it should fall to me in the end. And it’s important that you understand that I wasn’t always on the scene. Much of what follows is reconstructed from second-hand reports with all the bias and self-interest inherent in such accounts. In short, these are the facts as I understand them. If you want the truth, you’ll have to sort it out for yourself. You always do, I guess.

So cast me in a supporting role: plain-faced confidante and collaborator to the beautiful lead. Joan really was beautiful, too, which is to say blonde and buxom in the slightly zaftig mold then in fashion. She inspired plenty of interest among the boys at Milledgeville High, but as I’ve already said, she never returned the affections of the boys who might have brought her happiness, if happiness was even an option for her, and I think it probably wasn’t.

Certainly it wasn’t with Johnny Fabriano. Like I said, he had an agenda of his own, and if, on Joan’s part, he was calculated to infuriate her father, then there’s some small irony that had it not been for her father they might never have met in the first place. Sometimes just stopping for gas can change the entire course of your life, and that’s exactly what happened when her father decided to swing their old Caddy into Staley’s Gulf station one September Sunday after church.

Gas stations were full service back then—the days of pumping your own fuel were still decades away—and while Mr. Staley fussed with the Caddy’s tire pressure, Johnny’s ’49 Merc roared up to the neighboring pump. Both Joan and her father knew the car, of course—who hadn’t seen it around town?—and Joan at least knew its driver by reputation. What she didn’t know was what a sweet smile Johnny had. But he did, I can vouch for that myself, and when he turned his head to look at Joan, he passed one to her, like a gift.

Maybe it would have ended there, a shared smile in a gas station parking lot, but Joan’s father couldn’t help weighing in on the matter. “What a cheap hood,” he said, pouring into those two words all the disdain that only those certain of their place in Heaven can summon.

That was enough for Joan, of course. As her father wheeled the car out into the street she smiled back at Johnny.

When she told me about it that night, she was almost incandescent with excitement, so I wasn’t surprised when she contrived an excuse to walk by Red’s Billiards Parlor after school the next day. Johnny’s car was parked at the curb outside and just as we came abreast of the place—I could already see Joan calculating her odds of coaxing me inside—who should appear in the door but Johnny himself, with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a toothpick in his mouth.

He did a double-take, looked Joan up and down, and granted her another smile. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, that smile. I practically melted myself, and he didn’t even know I was there.

“Gas station girl,” he said, and Joan said, “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Remember?” he said. “How could I forget?”

He did some dexterous little trick with his tongue and passed the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You got a name, Gas Station Girl?”

So she told him her name, and then she said, “You’re Johnny Fabriano. I know you.”

You could see it pleased him, her knowing his name like that. The way they were looking at each other, it could only go one way, and nowhere good, so I stepped in front of her and held out my hand, hoping to forestall the inevitable. “I’m Nancy,” I said.

He ignored the hand and dipped his chin to acknowledge me. “How you doing, Nancy,” he said, and then, taking me by the shoulders, he steered me gently to the side. “Where you girls heading?” he asked, but it was really Joan he was speaking to.

“Just walking.”

“Not that way. Not unless you’re planning to pay Bug Town a visit.” Which was true. We’d already reached the end of the line unless we wanted to stop in for drinks at some dive with sawdust on the floor and “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me” on the jukebox. Bug Town lay beyond, and Bug Town was forbidden territory. It had been abandoned to the aliens, and those who did work up the spit to visit wouldn’t say much except that it was “catching strange.” It was the “catching” part of that phrase that concerned our parents, for those who spent much time in Bug Town often became odd themselves. They got a faraway look in their eyes, as if they were listening to some distant music that no one else could hear, and drifted into silence. Once in a while you heard about some daring kid making a midnight run through the place, tires screeching, but details were mighty slim on the ground—it was always a friend of a friend of a friend, no one you ever knew—so I figured such afterhours adventures for empty boasts. In short, the aliens walked among us, but we did not walk among the aliens. Which is why, when Johnny asked if we were planning an excursion of our own, I was shocked when Joan shrugged and said, “Sure we are.”

Johnny, on the other hand, didn’t blink an eye. “Maybe you’d like a ride instead.”

“We’ll walk,” I said, taking Joan’s elbow. “Home.”

I was wasting my breath.

“Sounds like fun to me,” Joan said, prying my fingers loose, and I knew then that it was a lost cause. There was the car, there was the smile, and there was the “cheap hood” himself. Her father already loathed him. So when she said, “You coming, Nance?” I said the only thing I could in response:

“No, Joan, and you shouldn’t go either.”

Like I said, wasting my breath.

A minute later, Johnny keyed the Merc’s engine to life and they roared off down Main Street. This time Joan really had gone too far, I thought as I walked home alone—and at the time I had no idea just how far she’d gone.

They really did go all the way to Bug Town, though I wouldn’t learn that until later that night, long after the scene that unfolded at the Haydens’ when she got home. Any sane girl would have had Johnny drop her off a couple of blocks from her house and manufactured some plausible excuse for her tardiness—an extra hour at the library, a study session that had run too long. Not Joan. That wouldn’t have created the intended effect. I was watching from my open bedroom window—the September air still had the glow of summer—when the Merc rumbled up to the curb. Joan’s father was waiting at the door. He couldn’t have been home long himself. He hadn’t even loosened his tie. He was an insurance salesman, though why a man so devoted to the rewards of the afterlife should take such an interest in the perils of this one, I never could understand. But he certainly took an interest in the perils Johnny Fabriano posed to his daughter’s eternal soul.

The Merc thundered away before Joan was halfway up the sidewalk. By the time she reached the front porch, the shouting had begun. It continued for the next hour or so, and while I couldn’t make out the words, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the tenor of the back and forth between Joan and her father. Her mother was silent, of course. She knew her place in the Biblical hierarchy of the home. Joan, however—well, her father’s fury only goaded her to greater histrionics. The entire thing culminated in slammed doors.

He’d locked her into her room, of course. He always did.

It wasn’t until after my own dinner that I worked up the courage to call.

“Joan isn’t available, Nancy,” her father told me, and I could hear the suppressed fury in his voice.

“Thank you, Mr. Hayden,” I said. “I guess I’ll catch her in school—”

But I never got to finish the phrase.

“How much do you know about this Johnny Fabriano, Nancy?” he said.

“Not much, sir.”

“Were you with Joan this afternoon?”

I hesitated a moment too long.

“Well, then,” he said. “I’m very disappointed in you, Nancy. In fact, I’d like to speak with your father, if he’s available.”

He was. My mother shook her head in commiseration when I called him over, and my father winked when he took the phone. He listened patiently to Mr. Hayden and made all the right noises in return, but when he finished the conversation, I didn’t get much of a scolding. My father wasn’t the scolding type, and besides we attended the Disciples of Christ Church, which was about as liberal as you could get in Milledgeville, Ohio, in 1955. He bought his insurance from Mr. Hayden, but he didn’t have much in the way of personal respect for him.

“Just be a good friend to her, Nance,” he said. “God knows she needs one, living in that house.”

Around 1:00 AM, Joan woke me with a handful of pebbles at my window. This came as no surprise. Sneaking out was routine business to Joan. Just shimmy down the big oak tree outside her window, and clamber back up it whenever she’d accomplished whatever mischief she had to accomplish.

“So what’s he like?” I whispered the minute I had her installed in my bedroom, and when she responded, “Dreamy, Nance. He’s just dreamy,” my heart fell. “Dreamy” was not good. “Dreamy” had the potential for disaster. But what could I do? Discouraging her would merely encourage her, and encouraging her would do the same. It was an impossible hand to play, and I opted then, as I had opted so many times in the past, not to play it at all. I opted for neutrality. It was as close as I could come to fulfilling my father’s injunction to be a good friend to Joan.

So what I said was, “Dreamy?”

With conviction: “Dreamy. He’s not like other boys, Nancy. He’s not like you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody understands him. Everybody thinks he’s some—cheap hood”—this last she practically spat—“but he’s not at all. Why, did you know he takes care of his mother? His father’s dead, and she’s not well, and he does just everything for her, and nobody understands what a good heart he has. And he’s so gentle and soft-spoken and he wants to know all about me. He’s really interested in me, not just in, you know—” She broke off, blushing.

Sure, that’s what you think, I didn’t say. What I thought was that Johnny was just smoother than the usual high school lothario who tried to get his hand—or worse—up Joan’s skirt. He was twenty-one. He knew how to play the long game. Like I said, he had an agenda of his own. Have you ever known a man who didn’t?

“Did you kiss him?”

“Just once. Right before we pulled up to the house. His lips are so soft. You wouldn’t think that, the way he looks, would you?”

I wouldn’t. But I didn’t say that, either. Instead I asked where they had gone.

Joan looked down. She was quiet for a long time, and when she met my gaze at last, I saw that she was afraid. “We went to Bug Town,” she said.

Which brings me back to the aliens—the bugs, as people called them, though as I said at the beginning of this story, that was just lazy thinking, because they didn’t really look anything like bugs. And maybe their appearance isn’t all you’re curious about. Maybe you want to know where they came from and why and what they planned to do.

But I don’t have answers to any of that.

They just started drifting into town by twos and threes and buying up the decaying houses over in the east end. Who can say why? They were aliens, after all, and their motives were as inscrutable as Joan’s were self-evident.

Their appearance, on the other hand—there was no mystery about that. They were monstrous things to look at: olive-green, seven-foot giants, their squarish heads bifurcated by a big, ropy artery that clove their skulls into disproportionate lobes. It wound down between their lidless, black eyes—shark black, and as empty of expression—and split into frills of bony, close-knit flesh that almost looked like baleen. Their mouths, nestled between those frills, were the most disturbing feature of all: three slavering flaps of tissue that dilated open to reveal jagged, yellow teeth. All this set atop a massive torso armored in bone, with thick arms and legs, and large, three-taloned hands.

And strong.

My freshman year, the first year the aliens showed up at Milledgeville High, Coach Pack recruited three or four of them for the football team. Where he found uniforms to fit them, I have no idea. Perhaps he had them custom made. In any case, the aliens were lethally effective on the gridiron, and we would win the state championship two years running, despite the virulent protests of our rivals. Yet the aliens—I won’t call them bugs—were essentially gentle creatures, even shy. They kept to themselves and they listened attentively to our teachers. They contributed to class in moist, lisping whispers. They took copious notes.

Their handwriting was beautiful.

But Bug Town? I knew nothing about Bug Town that I haven’t already told you. I was as curious as anybody else about the place—but not curious enough to risk “catching strange,” so part of me stood in admiration of Joan for daring to go there in the first place. Another part was furious with her, knowing how much she’d risked to defy her father and her father’s god.

But whatever her motivations, Joan had little to say about Bug Town.

When I asked her about it, her gaze grew distant, as though she were looking straight through me to some faraway horizon, and when she answered me, her voice was a hollow whisper. I knew then that she’d been touched by strangeness, but I did not yet perceive how deep the wound ran or how unbearable its consequences would be—not merely for her and Johnny Fabriano, but for us all.

I began to get an inkling of that—but nothing more—the next day at school.

There were two aliens in our first-period English class. I can’t tell you their real names. I can’t reproduce their slobbery, whistling language, and certainly not on the page. But when the aliens moved to Milledgeville, they’d taken human names, as well. So you’d see “Jim” at the hardware store, sighting down two-by-fours to make sure they hadn’t warped, or “Susan” at the A&P, inquiring about the freshness of the tomatoes. None of them had quite mastered English pronunciation—I expect their weird, dilating mouths precluded mastery—but they could make themselves understood well enough to get along. “Thim” got unbowed two-by-fours, “Thuthan” fresh tomatoes. And the two aliens in our English class, “Eloieth” (Eloise) and “Tham” (Sam—also the star fullback for the Milledgeville Bears), got straight A’s. The semester wasn’t even two weeks old and they’d already displaced me as Mrs. Guest’s favorite student.

Eloieth and Tham—yes I’m going to call them that, not to mock them, but to keep their intrinsic strangeness front and center—were the kind of students who read their assignments days in advance, sat in the front row, and shot their talons up the minute Mrs. Guest asked a question. But Mrs. Guest didn’t always call on the kids with their hands up. She had an eye for the doodler and the daydreamer, and just as you were drifting off into some pleasant fantasy or other, she’d bludgeon you with a question—which is what happened to Joan that morning. This in itself wasn’t surprising. Joan was an indifferent student at best, if only because her father expected more of her, and she was an inveterate daydreamer. But when Mrs. Guest fired that morning’s question in her direction, Joan seemed to have drifted not into some idle fancy, but into a deep hypnotic state.

She didn’t respond, didn’t so much as stir.

Only when Mrs. Guest repeated the question—pointedly, and at volume—did Joan look up, a puzzled look on her face. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Guest.”

“What are you sorry for, Miss Hayden?”

“I didn’t hear you, that’s all. If you could repeat the question, maybe . . . . ” Joan trailed off into silence.

“Yes, why don’t I repeat myself? Surely I have nothing better to do. In stanza nine, Keats writes—

And there she lulled me asleep,
   And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamed
   On the cold hill’s side.

What do you think he means, Miss Hayden?”

Miss Hayden had no reply on the matter of meaning. The moment stretched. You could hear nothing but the tick of the round schoolroom clock on the wall.

“Miss Hayden?”

But once again, Joan had drifted off.

Tham made some weird whistling sound deep in his throat.

“Please, Sam,” Mrs. Guest said. “I think we’re all expecting to hear from Miss Hayden.”

Silence. People stared at their desktops. Joan, however, seemed unfazed. She’d propped her elbow on her desk, her chin on the heel of her hand.

“Perhaps you need to see the nurse, Miss Hayden?”

A subdued ripple of nervous laughter greeted this not-very-funny witticism. Mrs. Guest silenced it with a glare.

“Miss Hayden—” she began, but Tham interrupted her, emitting a long, damp series of clicks and whistles. Joan visibly shook herself in response, and a strange expression—half wonder, half fear—crossed her face. I saw this, I say; I did not imagine it. She shook herself in response and met Mrs. Guest’s gaze with an almost physical force. Mrs. Guest shuddered and recoiled. This, too, I saw; this, too, I did not imagine.

“The knight has been lulled into sleep, Mrs. Guest,” Joan said, firmly, as you might speak to a disobedient child. “He has been enchanted into nightmare by a fairy in the guise of a beautiful woman, and though he may wake upon the cold hill’s side, he shall never truly wake again, because one does not wake from a fairy’s enchantment.”

Eloieth let out a long mournful whistle when Joan finished, and then she and Tham both turned away. Silence gripped the classroom. Mrs. Guest swallowed. “I think that’s enough for today,” she said. “If you’ll turn to page 74 and answer the discussion questions, we’ll take up ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ tomorrow”—and she retreated to her desk and sat very still and pale until the bell rang for second period.

I didn’t see Joan for the rest of the day—English was the only class we had together—but when the final bell rang I gathered my books and ran to meet her for the walk home. She wasn’t waiting for me at the picnic tables on the east side of campus—and she’d been waiting there every day as long as we’d been in high school. I didn’t stick around. I knew she wouldn’t be coming. I knew what had happened even before I really knew it, if that makes sense, so I wasn’t surprised when I came around the building and saw her sliding into Johnny’s Merc. I called out to her, but she didn’t wait. She didn’t even turn around.

The shouting match next door went on longer than usual that evening, and though I stayed awake until well after midnight, Joan never showed up at my window. I didn’t see her until we walked to school the next morning—and then only briefly, because we hadn’t gone a block before Johnny’s Merc rolled up to the sidewalk and he reached over to crank down the window.

“Anybody want a ride to school?” he asked.

“I do,” Joan said brightly, opening the door. The interior of the car gleamed, every bit as glossy as the exterior—the lavender dash, the chrome-framed gauges on the instrument panel. The radio was pumping out Chuck Berry, “Maybellene.” Johnny flashed that reckless grin at Joan. I might as well have been wallpaper. So when Johnny said, “Coming, Nancy?” I shook my head and turned away.

“I’ll walk.”

“Suit yourself,” Johnny said, and Joan wound up the window as they pulled away from the curb. She hadn’t even said good-bye.

I put my head down, and hurried on alone.

By the time we’d moved on to Idylls of the King in Mrs. Guest’s class—we were reading the part where Vivien imprisons Merlin in the tree—that faraway look in Joan’s eyes had faded. There were no more weird incidents with Tham. And she had re-dedicated herself to infuriating her father by dating Johnny Fabriano.

That was all anyone could talk about. Five years after his premature departure from high school, tales of Johnny’s exploits lingered. Among other things, he was said to have raided the school at midnight to steal a carbon copy of Mr. Dunnigan’s Chem final; fought a legendary bruiser named Otis (now serving time in the state pen) to a blood-spitting draw; and invited Master Sergeant Ashton, the Junior ROTC teacher, who had stormed the beach at Okinawa, to go fuck himself. So every eye was upon her when Joan stepped out of Johnny’s flame-bedizened ride. Mr. Hayden soon put a stop to that—he started driving her to school himself—but I knew that Joan was still seeing Johnny on the sly. More than once I woke to the guttural rumble of his car in a neighboring street, and knew that she’d availed herself of her arboreal exit.

She certainly wasn’t using it to visit me, so I didn’t see much of Joan for a while. I walked to school and back alone, we couldn’t talk during English, and while she still ate lunch at our table, half a dozen other girls did, too. It was hardly the place for confidences. Aside from a chance encounter in the girls’ bathroom—and even that was fleeting—we might have been little more than casual acquaintances.

“Do you still think about it?” I asked as we stood in front of the rusty mirrors.

“Think about what?” she said.

“Bug Town.”

She didn’t answer right away. When she did, she said, “Sometimes it seems like it’s the only thing I can think about.”

Then a gaggle of chattery sophomores burst through the door.

Of course, Joan wasn’t the only point of interest that fall. As October deepened, the town turned its attention to high school football. Tham was enjoying a record-breaking season, sometimes piling up more than two hundred yards a game, and his quarterback, an alien kid named Theven (Steven) who ran a little on the small side at 6’10”, was throwing the ball with the kind of pinpoint accuracy you didn’t usually see outside the NFL. The Bears often bested their opponents by forty points or more, and they could have doubled those numbers if Coach Pack hadn’t routinely pulled Tham and Theven out of the game at halftime. It didn’t seem sporting to keep running up the score, he told the Milledgeville Courier.

The aliens attended every game. The adults kept to sections C and D, but their kids stood in the spirit section and stomped in enthusiasm, occasionally ramming a taloned foot right through the metal risers. And you often ran into them at the concession stand. They were especially fond of chili dogs, ordering them by the dozen—with mustard and onions—and sucking them whole into those flappy mouths, like sucking ping-pong balls into the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. Their table manners were generally atrocious, though I always assumed that by their own standards they were probably perfectly acceptable. They wore form-fitting knee-length pants—perhaps out of deference to human sensibilities, perhaps not—but otherwise went naked and barefoot.

Their first few days at Milledgeville High they were constantly being sent home for violating the dress code. But when a delegation of alien parents arrived to ask that the principal exempt their children, he capitulated—maybe because he was sitting across his desk from a party of large, green monsters from outer space, and maybe because modesty wasn’t really an issue since no one could tell the male and female aliens apart except by their human names, and even then, who could really say for sure? Maybe they had three sexes, or six, or none at all. They were a weird bunch, taken all together. They were aliens.

But they sure had improved Milledgeville’s lousy football team. The Homecoming game—the usual rout—ended around eight. The dance got underway an hour later. Everybody boogied to “Gum Drop,” the aliens in a herky-jerky rhythm that seemed to have nothing to do with that of the song, the humans (most of them) on beat; but when the DJ spun “Take Me Back,” the alien kids surrendered the floor to their human counterparts. I heard this all second-hand, of course. I wasn’t there—plain old Nancy had no date—just as I wasn’t there to see what happened in the parking lot outside. I heard Joan’s account that night, and I would later hear Johnny Fabriano’s version of events. But I never knew Joan to lie, so I’m confident of that part of the story. My understanding of Tham’s motives, on the other hand—to the extent that he had motives and they can be understood—is the product of pure conjecture, and it may be that I’m too rooted in a human perspective to speculate with any accuracy.

What I know for sure is that Joan had been forbidden to attend both the game and the dance. But Joan was not going to be denied the night out. She couldn’t attend the game. Some Pentecostal ally of her father would betray her. And she couldn’t attend the dance because the chaperones wouldn’t admit someone Johnny’s age (and especially not Johnny himself). But she could make it a special night, and when she slipped out the window around 8:30 that’s just what she intended to do. Apparently Johnny had the same idea. His car was idling a block over, and when she slid in beside him, he had a corsage waiting. They were going to celebrate Homecoming on their own, he said, and if his hand lingered when he pinned the flower to her breast she attributed it to his clumsy fingers.

Johnny’d also bought a couple of bottles of sweet wine. Joan had never tasted the stuff, but she wasn’t going to decline another opportunity to defy her father. Besides, it turned out she liked the giddy feeling it gave her, the devil-may-care release from the inhibitions that her Pentecostal childhood had instilled within her. She was pleasantly buzzed by the time they pulled into the school parking lot—a destination Joan had insisted on over Johnny’s objections. “Let’s go to the dance,” she’d said, giggling, and when Johnny pointed out that they couldn’t go to the dance, she leaned over and planted a lingering kiss on the tender spot just behind his ear. “We can get close,” she whispered, an enticingly ambiguous statement, which is how they wound up parked in the darkest corner of the high school parking lot. The radio was playing the Four Aces, “Melody of Love,” when Johnny leaned in to kiss her, and Joan later told me how she remembered the music and the taste of the sweet wine on his lips. It wasn’t the first time they had kissed, but it was the first time it really seemed to matter, and she surrendered herself to it.

Johnny slid one hand up Joan’s ribs to caress her breast. When she didn’t protest, when indeed she seemed to lean into him, he let the other hand drift down to push its way between her thighs.

This wasn’t what Joan wanted. It never had been. But Johnny’d been intending to claim this prize for more than a month now, so when Joan protested, murmuring, “No, Johnny,” he simply ignored her. He was tugging at her panties when she said it again—

“No, Johnny!”

—and by the time she said it a third time, he’d nearly wormed a finger inside them.

Joan gasped. She tried to thrust Johnny away, but he pushed her back against the seat, bearing down with all his weight. He held her there, panting, and that’s when she realized he was fumbling with the buttons on his jeans. That’s when she began to scream in earnest.

At the far end of the parking lot, inside the gym, the DJ had just dropped the needle on “See You Later, Alligator.” The teenagers from outer space took the floor. Their human peers joined them. The chaperones glanced at their watches—they would be shutting the party down at eleven—and looked out over the dance floor. Nobody was listening for screams from the parking lot, and if they had been, they wouldn’t have heard anything over the racket of Bill Haley & His Comets.

Johnny had managed to undo his pants by then.

Joan screamed louder.

And then—this is the part that puzzles me, this the reason that I wish he’d given me his point of view—Tham appeared in the shadows. I still wonder what he was doing out there. None of the aliens smoked, so he hadn’t stepped out to sneak a butt. Nor did they drink, so he wasn’t outside to sneak one of those either. And he certainly wasn’t walking home—Bug Town lay in the opposite direction. Yet there Tham was, and what I keep thinking about, even now, is that time in English when he whistled Joan out of her stupor. Had he communicated the answer to Mrs. Guest’s question, as well? It certainly wasn’t the kind of answer Joan would have provided on her own, after all. Which makes me wonder if there might have been some connection between them, some conduit for alien . . . telepathy, for lack of a better word, that had been laid down during Joan’s visit to Bug Town. What I wonder is if he knew that Joan was in distress and came to rescue her.

Good intentions, right? And all the damage they can do.

But the damage didn’t come till later. In that moment, there in the dark parking lot, those good intentions paid off in a big way. I’m forever thankful to Tham for what he did next. Joan later told me that she was still fighting, still clawing, still screaming. But Johnny was on the verge of overpowering her. He’d just clamped a hand over her mouth to shut her up when Tham’s three massive talons, eight inches each, punctured the roof of Johnny’s beloved ’49 Merc where it curved down to meet the windshield. Johnny cursed and scrambled back against the steering wheel, tugging at his trousers. Joan shoved herself in the other direction and slammed up against the door.

Tham, meanwhile had closed his grip around the metal edge of the roof. He yanked it once, and then a second time, and then—it was like he’d taken hold of the pull-tab on a can of peaches—he just peeled back the top of that Merc and flung it to the pavement. In the crashing instant that followed, Joan told me that she was aware of only three things: Johnny screaming in fury; the pale radiance of the moon filling up the car like water; and the monstrous silhouette of Tham’s massive, asymmetrical head peering down at her against a field of stars. She reacted instinctively, shrieking as Tham reached inside the passenger cabin, fished her out, and set her gently on her feet beside the car. Johnny, meanwhile, had exited the driver’s side door, the tire iron he kept under the seat in hand. What he saw as he rounded the hood—a seven-foot-tall monster wearing knee-length trousers and a Milledgeville High letter jacket—stopped him cold. The tire iron clanged to the pavement. He stumbled, grappling for the hood of the car to hold himself upright.

By this time Joan had stopped screaming.

In the stillness, she could hear the thump of “Love Bug” from the high school gym.

Joan reached up and took one of Tham’s long talons in her hand.

“This isn’t over!” Johnny yelled as they turned away. “This isn’t over, you bitch, you hear me!”—but Joan didn’t bother looking back. She’d never felt safer in her life. Tham walked her home. Somewhere along the way she unpinned Johnny’s crushed corsage and cast it into the shadows beside the sidewalk. And when they reached her house, she marched straight up the walk and rang the bell. Mr. Hayden staggered back into the living room when he opened the door and saw his daughter standing there hand-in-hand with a towering alien from outer space.

“Hello, Daddy,” she said sweetly. “I want you to meet my boyfriend—Sam.”

Whether Tham thought he was her boyfriend or not is also a matter of conjecture. But from that night on, there was something between them, and the consequences of that relationship would eventually ripple outward to engulf us all. But that was later.

The immediate consequences were more predictable.

Mrs. Hayden, who’d walked to the door behind her husband, screamed. And when Mr. Hayden started spewing his typical self-righteous bilge, Joan ignored him. She pushed past him, leading Tham by the talon, and introduced him to her mother. “Nithe to meet you Mthth. Hayden,” Tham said, flecking her with viscous extraterrestrial spittle. When Mrs. Hayden just blanched by way of reply, her eyes bulging, Joan took him to the kitchen, poured them both a glass of milk, and served up a platter of her mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. They chatted for fifteen minutes—innocuous gossip about schoolmates and teachers—before Tham took his leave. On his way out, he extended his talons to Joan’s father (predictably, Mr. Hayden refused to shake) and nodded to her mother. He probably would have smiled if he could have.

“I’m spending the night with Nancy,” Joan said, escorting Tham out to the porch, where she kissed him good night.

His kisses were really slobbery, she told me later, and his bony frills posed a considerable challenge. Plus, he ate the cookies by sucking them down whole and he slurped his milk.

Otherwise, Tham was pretty close to perfect.

Mr. Hayden showed up at our front door first thing in the morning, demanding that his daughter come home. My father invited him in and left the two of them alone to talk things out, but talking soon led to bellowing and bellowing to the unmistakable sound of a blow. When my father walked back into the room, Joan had one hand to her cheek, but she wasn’t crying. She told me later that she was done crying over that man, and as it turned out she was, too. My father quietly suggested that Mr. Hayden might want to go home. Joan was welcome to stay with us until everyone had calmed down, he said.

Mr. Hayden swallowed, but he didn’t raise his voice. Mr. Hayden wasn’t much more than a bully, and bullies are generally hollow at heart, I think, terrified that the world won’t bend to their will. My father certainly wasn’t bending. He simply opened the door for Mr. Hayden, who stepped outside. He turned back at the top of the porch steps, seething with humiliation and resentment. His face was white with fury, his fists clenched impotently at his sides.

“I’ll have the police here, Dave,” he said. “I’ll have my daughter home.”

“When they arrive I’ll be sure to show them that bruise on her face,” my father said. “Now get off my porch.”

Mr. Hayden walked down the steps and across the yard without looking back. The police never came, though, which is how Joan ended up spending the weekend with us. Come Monday, the bruise had faded to a dull yellow. You had to look close to know it was there at all, and a little blush took care of that. We walked to school together in the bright October morning, chatting amiably about homework and gossiping about the girls at our lunch table. The question of when she would go home did come up in passing (“Never,” she said, and she never did). The question of Tham did not.

When the bell rang for first period—we’d moved on to “Goblin Market”—Joan merely smiled at him as she slipped into her desk, and I let myself believe that the “boyfriend” nonsense had passed. Come lunch, I learned that I was wrong.

Joan collected her food and bypassed our table without a word. As she marched toward the corner where the aliens ate, the room gradually grew silent. By the time Tham scooted over to make a place for her at his table, the only sound was the occasional clank of a pot in the kitchen—and then even that stopped, as the staff gathered at the serving window, jaws agape. Joan pulled the whole thing off beautifully, I have to give her that. She never let on that she noticed the silence or the eyes upon her. She just smiled up at Tham and began to eat.

When the final bell rang that afternoon and I walked out to the picnic tables, Joan was waiting. So was Tham. We walked home in companionable silence. Tham carried Joan’s books, and shortened his stride periodically so that we could keep up. I half expected to see Johnny’s mutilated car idling at some intersection along the way, but if he was there, he hid himself well.

When we reached the house, Joan offered Tham a glass of my mother’s lemonade—we’d been neighbors and best friends for so long that she’d practically become a sister, helping herself to whatever she wanted (a privilege I was denied at the Haydens’). Tham declined—

“Thankth, but I thould go,” he said.

—and Joan kissed him good-bye right there on the front porch. She was on the front porch, anyway. He stood below, to bring their faces into relative proximity. Then he was gone, striding off down the sidewalk while Joan mopped the alien drool off her face with a kitchen towel. Joan’s mom watched from her kitchen window. My mom watched, too. I caught the telltale twitch of the living-room curtain from the corner of my eye. But she didn’t say a word when we came in, just smiled and offered us some leftover lemon meringue pie.

Joan and I were puzzling over algebra problems in my room when the phone rang. My mom stuck her head in the door.

“Joan, your mother wants to speak with you.”

“I don’t have anything to say to her.”

“Joan, please, you should—”

Joan looked up. When she spoke she was neither angry nor rude, just matter of fact in a way that brooked no argument. “I’m sorry. Mrs. Miller. We don’t have anything to say to each other now. If you want me to leave—”

“Of course, I don’t want you to leave. You’re always welcome here, Joan.”

Mom gave me a look of mute appeal. But what could I do?

And then Joan said, “Thank you, Mrs. Miller,” and turned back to her homework.

But she couldn’t stay. We all knew that. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Mr. Hayden really would call the police, and in those days there weren’t a lot of legal avenues open to a sixteen-year-old girl in conflict with her parents—even if that conflict had culminated in physical abuse. There was much to love about 1955, but like our own or any era, it was anything but perfect. My parents really would have welcomed Joan into our home for the long term. I believe that. But the forces arrayed against them were formidable.

That’s what my father said when he came up to my room before dinner.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when Joan didn’t come back to my house after school the next day. The problem was, she didn’t go home either.

The next day Joan went to Bug Town.

She continued to come to school for a few more days, but she became increasingly distant. She no longer turned in homework, and in class she spent most of her time gazing off into the middle distance, staring at things none of us could see. By the end of the week, she was barely speaking at all. But I don’t think I realized how entirely lost to us she had become until I gathered my courage to walk across the lunchroom myself on Friday afternoon. I understood then what strength and courage that must have taken on her part. My footsteps echoed in the silence. I could feel the combined gaze of my peers like a leaden cloak upon my shoulders.

The aliens scooted aside so that I could set my tray down across from her.

“Hi, Joan,” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled, and I recognized the smile. It was her old, familiar, halfway crooked smile. “Hey, Nance,” she said as she might have said if we’d passed in the hall or she’d picked up the phone to find me on the line. It was that natural and spontaneous, and for a moment, looking at her, I felt like nothing had changed. I think that was the most surprising thing. I expected her to be utterly transformed, tuned to a different wavelength, catching strange. And while there was plenty of that there, she was also just Joan, the Joan I loved and remembered, and I missed her.

“When are you coming home, Joan?”

“I’m not.”

I didn’t want to be rude, so I glanced nervously at the towering alien kids sitting around us, patiently sucking down the school’s indifferent fish sticks and fries, before I leaned forward to whisper, as if they wouldn’t hear, “But, Joan, they’re aliens!”

Joan surveyed the lunchroom. She looked at Luke Jackson, the washed-up jock who’d cared more about booze than he’d cared about her. She looked at Jimmy Ford, who, like her father, had been a bit free with his fists. And if Johnny Fabriano had been there, she would have looked at him, too, I’m sure. She looked at them both, and then she turned back to me with a Mona Lisa smile and said, “No worries, Nance. I’m used to it.”

I looked down at my own tray of soggy fish sticks and fries. Joan reached out and put her hand over mine where it lay upon the table. “Bug Town is beautiful, Nance,” she said, and a wave of sorrow washed through me. “Come with me,” she said. “We can be free.”

But she was wrong about that. Mostly, anyway.

Johnny showed up at my doorstep Saturday around six. I heard the unmistakable rumble of the Merc’s engine as he pulled up to the curb, and when my father—over my objections—sent me to the door to meet him, I saw the car for myself. It might have been a convertible fresh off the assembly line, that’s how neatly the thing had been done, but the car had been mutilated all the same. Shorn of its roof, with its lavender dash laid bare to the October sky and those ridiculous flames licking at the hood and fenders, it had been exposed as a broken toy, the empty vanity of a man who was more boy than man. He didn’t even measure up to the title Mr. Hayden had ascribed him. Johnny Fabriano was no cheap hood. No, Johnny Fabriano was a selfish child whose experience of the world didn’t extend much beyond Red’s Billiards Parlor, and as he walked up the sidewalk to meet me, he seemed every bit as maimed as his car, stripped of whatever aura of menace he had once possessed, like a kid playing dress up in his brother’s leather jacket and motorcycle boots—a kid who hadn’t slept in a week, pale and tired (drawn, my mother would have said) with his trademark Duck’s Ass in disarray.

“How’s your mother?” I asked, before he could even start up the stairs.

“My mother?”

“Yeah. You know your mother. You told Joan about her. How’s she doing?”

Johnny hesitated. “She’s fine,” he said. “I—”

“You what? Hold her hand when she’s hurting? Buy her medicine? What?”

Johnny didn’t reply.

I sat down on the top step. “I don’t doubt that you live with your mother, but I figure the caretaking probably goes in the other direction. She probably gives you spending money. After all, you can’t make that much shooting pool.” I leaned forward, crossing my arms around my knees. “This is your fault, Johnny. Joan told me what happened in the car.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “We were just sitting there talking, and this monster, I don’t even know where he comes from, he’s just there all of a sudden, and he tears the lid right off the top of my car like that.”

“The monster’s name is Sam.”

“I don’t care what his name is. He’s a bug, isn’t he?” Johnny shrugged. “Maybe he was jealous, or something. Who knows what bugs think. I tried to save her, Nance. I came at him with a tire iron, but he was too quick. He just snatched her up and carried her off into the night.”

And maybe he believed this. Maybe he thought he was innocent, courageous, whatever. Maybe he’d convinced himself that his lie was true. People do it all the time. People want to be blameless. People want to be brave.

Still, I couldn’t help laughing—a bitter, joyless laugh. “Not the way I heard it, Johnny. You’re lucky he didn’t wrap that tire iron around your neck.” I stood, brushing off my skirt. “This is your fault. You’re the one that tried to rape her.” He rocked back a little at that, like he’d taken a punch. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. I wish he had. I don’t have anything else to say to you.”

I was halfway to the door, when he said, “I’m going to Bug Town, Nancy. I’m going to go get her.”

I kept my back to him. “Let Mr. Hayden handle it.”

Johnny snorted. “That old bastard’s not going to do anything.”

He was right, of course. Mr. Hayden was done with Joan. She’d spent a week away from home by then—nights a man of his mind could interpret in only one way. As far as he was concerned, Joan had sacrificed her virtue—and when it came to women, virtue was all that mattered. Joan had shamed him, and if there was anything Frank Hayden would not abide, it was being shamed. She might as well have been dead.

“And what are you going to do with her, bring her home?”

“No, Nancy,” he said. “You are.”

And God help me, I turned around.

I missed her, that’s all. She’d been my closest friend—my only real friend—for almost a decade, and I didn’t know how I was going to go on without her. Aside from my parents, Joan was the only person I had ever loved. And so, without even talking to my father, I followed Johnny Fabriano down the walk to his mangled car. I went to Bug Town with good intentions. I went with love in my heart. And that was our undoing.

Passing through the outskirts of Bug Town was like passing through any other dying neighborhood. Worse maybe. A few human families lingered, but most of the houses stood untenanted, their paint peeling, weathered For Sale signs jutting up from their unkempt lawns. But as we drove on, the signs dwindled and we began to see evidence of renovations in progress—skeletal networks of scaffolding, stacks of lumber and cinderblock in dusty lawns. Though still recognizably human, the houses troubled the eye. At first glance, you couldn’t quite say why. At second, you realized that everything was subtly out of proportion. The lintels of the doors had been jacked up to accommodate seven-foot frames, the rise of each porch stair modified to reflect a lengthier alien stride. Even the angles were almost imperceptibly—disturbingly—out of true. The houses seemed to lean toward the street with an all but sentient vigilance.

We began to see dusky yellow ground cover that you might have mistaken for knee-high weeds had each meaty stalk not sprung to alertness as we passed, and turned watchfully to the street. Pale, violet shrubs choked out the familiar autumnal trees, their sinuous branches drifting like seaweed in the still air. Squat, plump cylinders of washed-out orange quickened with breath. Aliens began to appear, striding down sidewalks or rocking in the shade of front porches as the October evening set in. They turned their heads to watch us as we crept by.

With each passing block, the streets became increasingly unearthly. Entire homes had been buried under thick, undulating vines, succulent and smooth. They coiled around windows and doors, and slithered out across the lawns to envelop street signs and lampposts. Fleshy, tentacled trees—I have no other word—shouldered up to the sidewalk and intertwined their limbs in a dense, rippling canopy that blocked out the sky. And in that swimming underwater dim, everything pulsed with soft colors—pinks and pale yellows and blues—as if a single heartbeat throbbed in every living molecule. And everything smelled ripe and rich as gardenias just before they go to rot. And everything sang.

I sometimes hear it still, that soft, arrhythmic music, ethereal, and eerie as the tones of a theremin. It got under my skin somehow. It got inside my head, like an itch I couldn’t reach to scratch. There was something beautiful about it, and something peaceful, and something utterly cruel. If you listened to it too long, I thought, you might never want to hear anything else again. I wondered if this was what Joan meant when she told me that we could be free, because it didn’t sound like freedom to me. It sounded like the worst kind of bondage. It sounded like slavery.

“How come it didn’t get you, too?” I asked.

Johnny shook his head. “I turned on the radio. I kept my eyes on the road.”

“And Joan?”

“Joan looked.”

I reached over and switched on the radio, turned it up loud, so I couldn’t hear that music chiming in my head.

“How are we going to find her?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

But in the end it didn’t matter. She found us.

She was waiting on the porch of a house—or what had been a house—midway down the next street over. She stood tall and unafraid at the top step, the one unmoving point in that undulant landscape, her face softly illumined by the slow-pulsing colors. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, and those succulent vines twined around her calves, like snakes tasting of the air. She looked serene, like a goddess or a saint, indifferent to mere human affairs. Yet she smiled when the Merc coasted to a stop at the curb. She smiled when she saw me, and the smile was her old smile, welcoming and warm and faintly mischievous. Just looking at it, I felt a surge of hope that she might yet be saved.

Then Johnny silenced the radio.

That strange, cruel music rang once again inside my head.

“Go get her, Nancy,” he said, and when I didn’t move, too mesmerized by the terrible beauty of Bug Town, he reached past me to the glove box and took out a revolver. I gasped—I’d never seen one, not in real life—and I thought once again that he was nothing but a fraud, a child playacting at something he could never be. But the next thing he did made me realize that it was infinitely worse than that. He shoved the muzzle of the gun into my ribs, hissing, “The fucking bug can’t have her. Not after what he did to my car,” and I saw that Johnny Fabriano was crazy.

Maybe he always had been. Or maybe it was the mutilation of his car that drove him to it—the humiliation of the thing, the exposure of his cowardice, and the consequent fear, jealousy, and fury. Or maybe it was Bug Town itself. Maybe it affected different people in different ways. I can’t know for sure. But when he dug the business end of the pistol into my ribs for the second time, I stepped out of the car, and started up the walk.

It was the single most terrifying moment of my life. The fleshy yellow stalks of grass bent their attention upon me, and I saw that each one terminated in a black unblinking eye. The snaky vines coiled around my ankles. I felt the gentle sussurance of the tentacled trees upon my face.

The car door slammed as Johnny scooted out to follow me. When I looked back, he was maybe five feet behind me, pacing me, the pistol extended in one shaking hand. His face was strained and pale, and his eyes were terrified, and as that alien music sang out inside my head, I felt the full peril of the moment bear down upon us all.

Then Joan started down the stairs. We met halfway down the walk, embraced, and stepped away.

“How did you know we were coming?” I asked.

“The music,” she said. “Everything sings, and everything speaks. We all knew you were coming. Don’t you feel it?”

And I did. It was like she’d flipped a switch at the base of my brain. My nerve endings shot out the tips of my fingers, all the way to the limits of Bug Town, where those first stalks of yellow grass sprang up from the October earth. A torrent of unfiltered imagery swept me under. I caught flashes of aliens nailing up studs in those half-renovated houses, of aliens sweeping off porches and taking dinner out of the oven and changing the oil in their cars, of aliens—of Eloieth!—bending to their homework and tossing frisbees in the dusk. Panic seized me. For a single flailing moment, I thought I would drown, and then—

“Breathe, Nancy,” Joan said.

—I got it. It was a matter of focusing the attention, of surfing the wave—and once I mastered it, I came crashing back into my own moment with a new 360° clarity. I saw Johnny at my back, brandishing his pistol, saw Joan smiling before me, saw Tham descending the porch steps behind her. He strode down the walk to stand at her shoulder. The central artery that clove his skull pulsed with color, pink and blue and yellow, each in turn. “Hello, Nanthy,” he said.

“Hi, Sam,” I said. “I came to see if Joan wanted to come home.”

“Thath up to Joan.”

Joan didn’t even hesitate. “No, Nancy,” she said. “This is my home now. I’m free here.”

And what I saw then was the most terrible thing of all: Joan had not been seduced by the aliens. She had chosen them.

Chosen them. Bug Town might have been catching strange, but our teenage neighbors from outer space had not ensnared her. The era itself had induced her to seek another path. I understand that now. The ’50s weren’t an ideal time to be a woman (has there ever been one?). Factor in an abusive father and an oppressive religion, and lots of alternatives might seem preferable. She had made a choice when she’d taken Tham home and introduced him as her boyfriend, when she’d allowed him to walk her back to my house from school, when she’d kissed him good-bye there on my porch. She had chosen Bug Town, and given her particular set of circumstances who wouldn’t have? In striving to escape everything her father represented, she’d run straight into the teeth of a decade that was almost as bad.

Wasn’t Bug Town a better option? Wasn’t Tham a better man? Who else would have left her to decide her own fate? Not even my father, and he was the most loving man I’ve ever known. He could see only one path for Joan in the end, and that was to return her to her father’s keeping.

“Stay with me,” Joan said.

“We would welcome you, Nanthy,” Tham said. “Come with uth. Everyone ith welcome.” Then, looking at, Johnny: “Put athide your weapon. Join uth.”

“Never,” Johnny said.

“Nanthy?”

Oh, I was tempted. The world had little use for a plain girl like me, even if she did make good grades. What future lay before me? A career as a nurse or a teacher? Or, God help me, a homemaker, a fate worse than death?

But there was that music in my skull, that maddening itch that I could not scratch, that flood of images to be processed. Maybe I’d have gotten used to it in time. I don’t know. But in that moment I could not abide that sentient, serpentine world, endlessly interconnected. I was me. I was Nancy and no one else and didn’t want to be. I would face whatever was to come alone, no matter the cost.

I was free.

“I can’t, Joan,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll miss you,” she said, reaching out to squeeze my hands.

I never got a chance to reply.

“You can’t have her!” Johnny screamed. I staggered away from her, tapping into that network one last time. I saw everything that followed with that same 360° clarity, languorous and slow. I saw it all. Saw Johnny swing the gun toward Tham, his hands still shaking. Saw his finger white upon the trigger, saw the hammer fall, and the cylinder turn in its casing. I heard the concussion of the shot.

Tham lifted his hand too late. Joan had already hurled herself in front of him. She took the bullet in the stomach. I saw that too. Saw the force of it carry her backward. Saw the blood. There was so much blood.

Tham caught her in one arm. In the same instant, the ropy artery that wound down between his eyes flared red, and a bolt of crimson light erupted from the outstretched talons of his other hand. Johnny never had a chance. A burst of flame engulfed him. The stench of charred flesh filled the air. His blasted bones tumbled to the ground.

Then time kicked back into gear.

Tham had already swung Joan up into his arms. He cradled her like a man carrying his bride across the threshold. “Lath chanth, Nanthy,” he said.

I shook my head and stumbled backward toward the car. Tham carried Joan up the porch stairs and through the door of the slithery, vine-grown house. I never saw either one of them again.

The rest of that night is hazy in my memory. I stumbled back to the Merc, I know that, and scrambled across the bench to the wheel. Johnny’d left the key in the ignition, and when I twisted it, the engine roared to life. Johnny—or more likely the Brookton gearhead he’d won the car from—must have modified the engine, because I barely touched the gas and the car lunged forward, like a Doberman breaking its chain.

I nearly lost control on the first corner. On the second one, I did. The car veered across the oncoming lane and careened over the sidewalk. I can still see the fleshy tree it struck. It was stouter than it looked, that tree. The hood of the car folded up like an accordion when I smashed into it. The steering wheel hurtled up to meet me. I remember nothing of the blackness that followed.

When I woke, Bug Town was dying. The slithery vines lashed around as if in agony, and the tentacled trees had begun to droop. When I crawled out of the car, the stalky yellow grass barely turned to look at me. And in the slow, dimming pulse of colors, I could see that their shark-black eyes had begun to film over.

As for the music, it had died away altogether. There was a profound relief in the silence, and a sadness, too, I guess, though the sadness wouldn’t really hit until I understood fully the magnitude of our loss. Joan was gone—maybe dead—and the aliens had disappeared. The high school football team’s run at the state title had been derailed. The lunchroom seemed strangely empty.

That was later, of course. In the moment, I gave this no thought at all. My brow was tacky with blood, and my head felt as if someone had split it with an ax. It was all I could do to lurch off toward home. I made it maybe half a block before I collapsed in the street. I was still there when the police found me the next morning.

I spent the next night in the hospital, and the morning after that I really was home, headachy and exhausted. My parents couldn’t seem to decide whether to baby me or scold me, so they did both by turns, but the babying predominated. Privately, my father even told me that I’d acquitted myself admirably, though I couldn’t see much to admire about my complicity, however unintended, in Johnny Fabriano’s madness and all the damage it had wrought.

Good intentions, right?

A few days later I felt well enough to go back to school. Everyone was bursting with questions—for a week or so, I was suddenly the most popular girl at Milledgeville High—but Chatty Cathy had fallen silent at last. My grades plummeted that semester. I groped through a fog of guilt and sorrow. The solicitous looks of my teachers were almost unbearable. The last thing I wanted was kindness. I thought of almost nothing but Joan as I had seen her last, cradled in Tham’s arms, those strange lights playing on her face. And the blood. So much blood.

I made a comeback in the spring. The fog began to lift, my grades to improve. But Bug Town never recovered. I suppose the bank wrote off the unpaid mortgages. The neighborhood itself fell into ruin.

My father drove me through it—at my insistence and over my mother’s objections—a week or so after I went back to school. The place was no longer catching strange. It was hard to believe it ever had been. The yellow stalks of grass lay wilted on the earth, and the ropy vines had withered, leaving houses bearded in brown streamers. In places, the streets were virtually impassable. The meaty trees had begun to collapse. We wound through them, crushing limp tentacles beneath our tires. We slipped in silence by the wreckage of Johnny’s treasured Merc, its nose crumpled, adding to the indignity Tham had already inflicted upon it. I guess the police must have towed it out of there eventually. I never heard. I did hear that all they ever found of Johnny was his bones. His funeral was sparsely attended. I was there. His mother—though she didn’t speak to me—looked perfectly healthy.

In retrospect, I suppose that the aliens must have opened some kind of portal from their home world, and that the things that grew there were seeping slowly out into ours. People don’t talk about it much these days, but occasionally you’ll hear someone speculate that Bug Town was the vanguard of a slow invasion and that its transformation presaged that of the entire planet—that Johnny was a hero who’d saved humanity from the ascension of triumphant alien overlords.

But Johnny Fabriano was no hero. I have no doubt that the aliens were fundamentally benign. I think they’d come to Milledgeville in search of a better life, that in transforming Bug Town they were simply making the neighborhood feel a little more like home. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that you shop at the A&P, picnic in the park, and send your kids to the local high school when you are bent on genocide. If they’d had any interest in crushing us they could have done so without a second thought. They could open doorways between stars, tear the roofs off cars barehanded, and shoot death rays out of their fingers. Why mess around by taking out mortgages and renovating old houses?

In the end, I believe, they retreated in the face of Johnny’s madness. When they slammed that interstellar doorway behind them, they choked off the source of all that catching strange and Bug Town died.

I miss them. Miss Eloieth and Theven and all the rest of them. I miss Tham, whose good intentions came to naught in the end. I miss Joan most of all. Not a day passes that I don’t wonder what happened to her.

I like to think they saved her. I like to think she’s free.

About the Author

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Now is the Hour

Emily Devenport

We never had good luck with money, except for that one time. And that didn’t end well, so you could say we had no good luck with it at all. But we had plenty of hope. Or I did, anyway, and I was good at talking other people into having it.

“Don’t be ashamed of having hope,” says Furby. He holds me in his arms to comfort me. I’m very grateful he got rid of the pain for me. And I’m glad there’s someone to hear my story. I have lost everyone else. Yet even after all that’s happened, I think I still would have made the decision that brought us all here.

When I won ten thousand credits in the lottery I looked at it as our ticket off Hardcase, the Planet of Chronic Losers. If we had stayed put, that money could have set my family up comfortably for several years, and Lono knows we needed some good times.

But good times on Hardcase don’t last. We were all working ourselves to death trying to keep our heads above the water. I heard there were more opportunities on Oceana, and I had been eyeing Rent-A-Spaceship for years, with no hope of scraping together the cash for me and six other people (plus one tiny cat who was easily smuggled). Then boom, the exact amount we needed to get to Oceana falls right into my lap.

Laamaomao was sending a wind to us from Molokai. How could we fail to catch it?

“Careful about evoking those Hawaiian gods, Maybie,” Bro said. “Sometimes they listen, and they don’t always answer the way you would like them to.” Bro is my step-brother, and he only has a little Hawaiian blood, but I’m just 50% myself, so who am I to argue with his advice?

Besides, Bro was usually dead on with his warnings. Yet he let me talk him into immigrating. They all did. And our neighbors got together and threw a big Farewell party for us, and my adopted brothers Creole and Cajun cooked up a feast, because they were the best chefs in town. My little nephew Spicy showed us how well he had learned the hula. We danced and partied to all our favorite songs, from “Little Grass Shack” to “Now is the Hour,” the Maori song about saying goodbye.

Goodbye to good neighbors. Goodbye to No Hope. Goodbye to the virus that was just beginning to sweep the poor neighborhoods where most of us lived, so new it didn’t have a name, so deadly it killed before you could make one up.

Let’s just call it the Goodbye Virus. Only it had already said Hello to us, and we didn’t know it yet.

Bro was right about how the gods listen. Sometimes they don’t answer the way you want. And sometimes the god who answers is not the one you thought you were talking to.

I woke up from deepsleep feeling awful. They had warned us we would feel that way while the hibernation drugs wore off, but this was worse than I thought it would be. And I was scared—as soon as the lid to my unit popped, I crawled out and looked at the Health Display.

Mabel Aweau it identified me. I checked all the readings that would indicate whether the unit had performed as it was supposed to. I worked as a nurse’s aid for over twenty years, so I knew what to look for. What I found made me heartsick.

The readings that I hoped would be OPTIMAL all read ADEQUATE. So that pissed me off. But under GENERAL HEALTH it said: POOR; DISEASE OR PATHOGEN DETECTED.

The Goodbye Virus . . .

No one else was awake yet. I wondered if any of them would get that far. I wondered if I wanted them to, considering what we all probably had. I stumbled to the unit across from mine and looked in on my nephew. The information display on his unit said Douglas Aweau.

All of the readings were the same as mine—including the last.

He was my sister’s boy, just six years old. We lost her to kidney disease, not long after he was born, and I still miss her, every day. But he was my sweet reminder of everything I loved about her. He had hair the color of paprika, skin the color of cinnamon, and freckles the color of chocolate, so you know we had to called him Spicy. Wherever you found Spicy you would also find Tig, because that little cat was his best buddy.

They loved each other dearly. Tig was curled up under Spicy’s chin, the two of them hibernating like bears through the long winter of interstellar space.

I wish they could have stayed there. I wish they hadn’t been forced out of that hibernation. They would have died without ever feeling the pain, or the sadness. But the company that sold us passage on this bucket of bolts they called a spaceship just wanted us to stay asleep long enough to be out of reach for any kind of help. Sent us out here with no food, no medicine, and a bunch of systems that only worked well enough to get us so far.

“It was typical during your era,” says Furby. “Thugs took advantage of so many desperate pilgrims.”

His name isn’t really Furby—that’s just what I call him because he reminds me of a character from one of Spicy’s favorite shows, I Love Furby.

“Call me whatever you like,” says Furby. “My real name is too hard to pronounce.” He and the other time travelers are aliens, and not one of them looks like the other. But they all have eyes I can understand. Their eyes are full of sorrow as they keep vigil with me and listen to my final declaration.

I stood over Spicy’s unit, watching him and Tig wake up from their sleep, feeling the headache that would turn into something much worse, and I think I knew how bad it could be as soon as Spicy opened his eyes. The spark that had always belonged to him was gone. “My head hurts,” he said. He frowned and examined Tig, who was also despondent.

“You’re just trying to wake up,” I said. “You’ll feel better soon.” But that was wishful thinking.

Creole and Cajun woke next. They were the biggest men you ever saw, taller than my full-blood Hawaiian cousins, and as strong as the day is long. Now they could barely stand, and they had the same headache I did.

“This thing is supposed to be able to deliver medicine to us if we need it.” Creole frowned as he inspected his deepsleep unit. “These medicine pacs are empty.”

“I think we got scammed,” said Cajun. He had to lean against his unit because his knees were shaking.

I hoped he wouldn’t say what all we grown-ups were thinking by then—not in front of Spicy. The virus had been rampaging through our neighborhood when we left it. We thought we had gotten out ahead of it. But we were wrong.

My cousin Akamai was the sickest one, waking up. She didn’t say so, she just looked at me with eyes that were too dark, as if death was invading her through those portals. “We had to try, Maybie,” she said.

No one called me Mabel. For as long as I can remember, it was Maybie, because I was the one who said Maybe it will get better. Maybe something good will happen. Maybe it won’t be so bad.

Maybe I’m the one who got everyone killed.

“You aren’t,” says Furby. “The virus is responsible—it swept your world. It killed most of the people in the poor neighborhoods, and over 50% of the people in the rich.”

“Killed,” I say. “Already?”

“Time is dilated, this close to Belial,” he says, indicating the big display screen that’s dominated by a graphic of a monstrous singularity that bends both time and space.

Akamai and I found it in the control room when we went looking for anything that could help us, a search that turned up some awful discoveries. Like the sick bay with almost no medicine in it, the food storage cabinets that were empty. The transport company put us into deepsleep before they loaded us on the ship, so we never had a chance to see what they were really doing. Akamai and I headed for the control room, hoping we could at least call for help to Oceana, since we weren’t supposed to have been awakened until we were close to our destination. But we didn’t see Oceana on that screen. Instead, we found a monster called Belial. We read the name on the bottom of the display, along with a bunch of numbers that probably would have scared me if I had known what they meant. We were headed right into it.

Akamai stood in front of the screen. She had always been a slender woman, tall and shapely, like the goddess of hula. But that spirit had fled her, and now she seemed to be floating in the graphic representing the singularity. “Belial dilates time,” she said. “To us it seems like minutes are going by, but back on Hardcase, years are passing.”

Akamai had a Master’s degree in math, but on Hardcase she could only find low-paying jobs as a teacher’s aid. She used to talk about getting her Doctorate, but there had been no money for that.

“What will happen to us in there?” I asked.

She shrugged, and I could see how much that movement hurt. She rubbed the back of her neck, but gave up when it didn’t seem to help. “Nobody really knows. Theoretically, we’ll be pulled into threads, toward the singularity. But some people think these black holes are wormholes. You could end up traveling through them to another part of the galaxy, or even to another galaxy. Maybe even to another universe. Too bad we won’t be alive to see that.”

I looked over my shoulder for Spicy.

“He’s in the sick bay with Tig,” said Akamai. “Maybie—I need to tell you something.”

I was scared to look at her, but I made myself.

“When you’re exposed to void,” she said, “you lose consciousness pretty fast—way faster than you would if you drowned in water.”

“What—” I said. “Why are you—”

“The first thing that happens,” she went on, “is the saliva boils off your tongue. It feels weird, but it’s not like you see in stupid movies where people’s blood boils. Your skin is thick enough to hold in the gas that would escape. But the lack of pressure means you black out a lot faster, in like fifteen seconds. It’s the best way to go out here if you—have to go.”

“We should get back in the deepsleep units,” I said. “We can hibernate until someone can find us and help us.”

“Good idea.” The way Akamai was standing scared me. She was in terrible pain, and she was trying to fight it. “But those units are shot. They were on their last legs when they sent us out here. The ones they showed me before we shipped were not the ones they put us in. And this is not the ship we toured.”

“Damn it.” The bad news was piling up so fast, I couldn’t process it.

But Akamai had perfect clarity. “We don’t have medicine to treat the virus, and we don’t have enough painkiller to tough out the last stages. It’s horrible, Maybie. It’s similar to rabies. Spacing is our best option.”

“Spacing.”

“The airlocks. Exposure to void.” Akamai could barely stand. She seemed propped in place. “Don’t wait,” she advised. “Don’t think about it. Just do it.”

“Akamai . . . ”

“I love you, Maybie. I love you all so much.”

“I love you too.” I could barely get the words out through my swollen throat. “More than anything.”

She turned her eyes back to Belial. “You’d better look in on Spicy. He’s going to need help.”

She didn’t want an argument, and I didn’t want to give her one. Every hope I ever had was dashed to bits. And it was about to get worse.

Maybe you think it’s possible to be so full of grief, you’re glad to be dying. But there’s nothing glad about it. It feels inevitable, maybe even natural, but it doesn’t feel good.

I made my peace with it, though. Just because it was my only option didn’t mean it wasn’t my best option. Especially after what happened to Spicy.

“Poor child,” says Furby. Probably he guesses what I’m about to tell him.

“Tig is suffering, Spicy.” L’India didn’t try to pet Tig. She didn’t much care for cats, but she adored Spicy. She was trying to get him to see what had to be done. “This happens eventually to everybody’s cat. Eventually everybody has to say goodbye to them.”

Spicy was so sick, he couldn’t cry. But the way his sweet face had crumpled made it hard for me to breathe when I looked at him.

“Do we have to put him to sleep?” He stroked Tig, who lay on his side, panting. L’India had given Tig the last of the opiates, or he probably would have been screaming. “There was only a cat-sized dose left in this damned place,” she told me.

L’India was Bro’s wife. Like me, she had been a nurse’s aid. Like me, she actually knew enough to be a registered nurse, and she looked pretty horrified just then. “We can’t put him to sleep, honey. There are no more drugs. We’ll have to put him in the airlock and blow him out. He’ll die super-fast. He probably won’t even know what’s happening.”

Spicy twitched as if we had stabbed him. “He’ll be scared! He won’t know why I left him.” He turned to me with pleading eyes. “He’ll be alone and scared, Maybie.”

Don’t wait, Akamai had said. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

And I couldn’t. “Give him some time,” I told L’India. And we left Spicy alone with his Tig. And do you know what he did, Furby?

Furby doesn’t speak. He waits for me to tell him.

That little boy—that six-year-old child—picked up his kitty and went to find an airlock. And that smart boy figured out how to work the controls. He didn’t want Tig to be alone. So he went out with him.

“He didn’t wait for me,” I told L’India. “I should have been in there with him.”

Furby brushes the hair back from my face. “We’re glad you weren’t,” he says. “We wouldn’t have found you if you had done that. We would never have known what happened.”

L’India told me Akamai had already gone out by then. I figure Akamai did it right after she talked to me. By then I was sitting on the floor of the control room, staring at Belial, watching the graphic update as we got closer and closer.

It dilates time . . .

“Honey?” said L’India. “Maybie? We’re going, now.”

Going? Where could they go? My eyes hurt, but I could just make her out in the doorway. She leaned heavily on the frame. “It hurts too much,” she said. “Bro and me, and Cajun and Creole, we’re—”

She didn’t say going again, but I finally understood what she meant. She said, “You’re staying, Maybie?”

I looked at the screen again. “I want to see,” I said. “What happens.”

She didn’t say anything. But then I heard Bro’s voice. “Don’t blame yourself, Sis. Don’t do it.”

I waited to hear why he thought I shouldn’t do that. But that was the last thing he said to me.

Minutes may have passed, or hours. “Hey L’India,” I called, “Rent-A-Spaceship did one thing they said they were going to do. They uploaded our playlist. Hey computer, play Ports of Paradise.”

The music started with the blast of the horn from an ocean liner. And then the magical sounds of Polynesian percussion instruments ushered in the voices of sirens. “Ports of paradise,” they sang as we crossed Belial’s event horizon, “I’m sailing home to you . . . ”

There is a god Puea, who is worshipped in darkness. I think he must have been the god who heard my prayers, and answered them in his own way. Was he waiting inside that singularity for me? Is he the one who showed the Travelers where to find me?

“To us,” said Furby, “this singularity is a means of travel. That’s why we crossed paths with you. Once you passed the Event Horizon, you entered our wormhole. We are the Travelers. We police the timelines. We fix the damage people cause to them when they tamper with them.”

I hadn’t seen him until he knelt beside me. He wasn’t alone; other creatures were there too, super-smart, super-advanced aliens who did work that the god Maui, the Time Shifter, would have admired.

“I wish you could have come sooner,” I complained. I was still in terrible pain.

“Sooner is not just a time,” said Furby. “It’s also a place. And we were not in that place.”

I felt his fingers inside my head. It was like he was touching my thoughts, pulling them into strings that could be spooled and rescued from the diseased tissue around them. He said, “We will give you a happy ending, Maybie. But there’s a price for this. I and my fellow Travelers have paid it. You will pay it too. You must die in this timeline. But you won’t be gone.”

The pain faded to nothing, but I didn’t feel like I was getting better. I was still dying. I stood at the edge of a cliff and looked into a canyon so deep, whole worlds could get lost in there. But I wasn’t scared to look down. I saw stars. It was like seeing Kane, the Godhead. At that particular juncture of time and space, I saw the timelines Furby had told me about, arching away from me and back again, like petals of the flowers woven together into a lei. I understood why the Travelers had to protect them.

“I think I am happy,” I said. “Dying is okay. Do you think Spicy felt this way, too?”

Furby kissed my forehead. His fur tickled. “You can ask him when you see him.”

I was going to see my Spicy! If any tears had been left in me I would have cried with happiness. I just had to settle for feeling good.

I slipped into the well of stars, and my mind floated free.

So I died. But then I woke up, just like I had before. I was in the deepsleep unit, but this time Furby was helping me out. “So,” he said, “You and your family have been treated for the virus, and you’re cured now. We fixed your ship, and you’re back on track for Oceana. You’ll arrive there in about one hundred fifty-two hours—we called to let them know you’re coming. They’ll help get you settled.”

“Uh—” I heard everything he said, but I couldn’t make sense of it.

“You’re well-stocked with water and nutrition bars now. We always keep extra supplies for emergencies like this.” He helped me walk. My eyes focused on the deepsleep unit across from mine, the one where Spicy had slept.

Spicy was in there with Tig.

“You found them?” I stuttered. “You—found their bodies?”

“They’re alive in this timeline,” said Furby. “And so are you. We traveled back in time and implanted your memories from your experiences in the other timeline, into this body. You get a do-over, Maybie.”

“I get—a . . . ”

The readings on Spicy’s unit said he was alive. He and Tig were alive!

“We filled the pacs on these units with the medicine to kill the virus,” said Furby, “plus some other treatments we thought you should have. You’ve all been well-dosed. You’re cured.”

“This isn’t possible.” I watched Spicy waking up. Tig tickled him with his wet nose, and Spicy smiled. I did cry then, because my eyes were back to normal.

Furby turned me to face him. “We can’t do this for everyone we meet, Maybie. We don’t even do it for ourselves very often. We were able to do it for you because your lives are very small in the scheme of things. Your lives don’t affect the timelines one way or the other.”

“If our lives are so small and unimportant, why did you bother?” I said. I wasn’t trying to complain, I honestly felt curious.

“They’re small. But they’re not unimportant. Not to us.” His eyes were big and golden. They were wet too, like mine. “We could do this,” he said. “So we did.”

And I finally got it. The Travelers, time travelers, could change things as long as there was a timeline that would accommodate the changes. That’s what they did for us. That’s what they meant when they were talking about how we did and didn’t affect the timelines.

“Computer,” I said, “Play Little Grass Shack.”

That had always been our celebration song. It played while the Travelers and I greeted my family as they woke from their deepsleep. My family had no memories from the other timeline, they didn’t know about the bad things that happened. I’ve never told them the worst of it.

We partied with the Travelers, and Spicy taught them the hula. It turned out the Traveler with the tentacles was the best at it. And when the Travelers were sure that the Immigration officials on Oceana were aware of us and were ready to accept us, they told us they would have to leave. They still had important work to do, work that involved fixing the timelines where people were abusing them.

“Aloha doesn’t just mean goodbye,” I told them. “It means hello at the same time. So hello, Travelers. You’re part of our family now. You’ll always be here.” I put my hand over my heart.

“Aloha, Maybie.” Furby put his hand over his heart, too (though it was in a different spot than mine). “You’ll be glad so much time has passed since you left Hardcase. I think you’ll find that your clunker of a spaceship is valuable, after all.”

And with that, the Travelers sparkled and vanished, like embers floating up into darkness, leaving us with wonder and delight.

Furby was right about The Clunker. Because the original owners were long dead, we were able to claim salvage rights. Turned out on Oceana, that old ship was considered a collectible antique. We sold it and bought a nice house, better than we could have gotten on Hardcase with my ten thousand credits.

And if Oceana wasn’t 100% paradise 100% of the time, it was close enough for government work. L’India and I both studied to become registered nurses and got good jobs at doctors’ offices. Akamai got her doctorate and became the director of an observatory. Creole and Cajun became much-sought-after cooks at a fancy resort. Spicy grew up, went to college, and became a volcanologist. Oceana has a lot of volcanoes.

Bro spent most of his time surfing, which pissed L’India off. But the rest of us made enough money to pay the bills, so we didn’t bug him about it. We prospered, and we stayed together as a family. Even Tig stayed—that little cat lived another fifty years. I think it was because of the medicine the Travelers put in the pacs for our deepsleep units—they didn’t just cure us of the virus. It was just like Furby said, they did what they could because they could. And what they could do was amazing.

This is all that I hoped for when I blew my ten thousand credits to get us off Hardcase. But Bro’s advice about evoking the gods comes back to haunt me every morning, when I rise and remember what it felt like to wake up sick, what it felt like to find Spicy and Tig gone—what it felt like to crouch in front of the screen that displayed hungry Belial and to die like a sick dog—to hear my dear ones telling me, We’re going now, knowing that they were killing themselves.

Now is the hour

When we must say goodbye.

This duality of happy and sad, joy and grief, success and failure doesn’t surprise me. It’s pono, balance. It’s the price I pay for what I did and what I failed to do.

Soon you’ll be sailing

Far across the sea.

I can never forget how we suffered and grieved. We despaired and we rejoiced. We died and we survived. Our current lives are woven together with the ones that ended so badly, just like time and space are woven together. I don’t take anything for granted, because of those memories. And if I’m not exactly happy to have them, I understand why they’re necessary. The gratitude I feel for our second chance has never dimmed.

When I lay dying in the control room, and I thought about my family, I listened to that Maori song, “Now is the Hour” and cried tears I could no longer spare.

But now when I hear that song, I think of Furby and the other Travelers.

While you’re away, oh then, remember me.

When you return you’ll find me waiting here.

After all, they’re time travelers.

And we said aloha, not goodbye.

About the Author

Nine of Emily Devenport’s novels were published in the U.S. By NAL/Roc, under three pen names. She has also been published in the U.K., Italy, Israel, and China. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, GodHeads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her new novels, The Night Shifters and Spirits of Glory are in ebook form on Amazon, Smashwords, etc.

Her short stories were published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, the Full Spectrum anthology, The Mammoth Book of Kaiju, Uncanny, Cicada, Science Fiction World, Clarkesworld, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award.

The Engine’s Imperial

Sean Bensinger

I blink, and the stars change.

Another blink and light-years and centuries pass, and I reorient the bulk of my body for the next leg of the journey. Banks of thrusters kilometers long glow in the darkness of intersystem space, while the armored plate of my hide twists with the inertia of the directional change. The fusion cores at my heart melt the ice from my insides, even if just for a moment. I set sight on a distant star, and blink.

The system where my sister died opens before me. No human has laid eyes on it near on ten thousand years. Once it had been called SP-0043879, and after my sister’s death it had been named Engine Kill. Later it became Victory, then later the Shoals. Eventually even that name faded out of history, and it became a forgotten cluster of gas giants and moons surrounding a yellow star. But it had mattered once. In a war ten thousand years dying, it had been another hill to die on.

The memory wakes my claws: banks of missile tubes slide open, rail guns spark fitfully into life and the great targeting arrays with which I’d sighted and destroyed starships spun out a sensor net across the dead cold of the void. But there was nothing of note, except the cold wreckage of ten thousand ships and my sister’s corpse.

My engines awake, finally, fitfully, and I dive into the wreckage.

We’d been born as a cheat.

War in the stars takes time, fleets cast like spears at enemies they might not strike for a thousand years. Crews would spend long centuries frozen, tended to by armies of drones and the dim intelligences my kind had been bred from. Once they reached their target, it was good odds the system would either be dead, or the foe had forgotten the war entirely, or, worse yet, that technology had moved on without the sleepers. Even in this later age, it was the fear of every soul who looked to the stars that a fleet of sleepers was coming for them over a forgotten slight. Just as many worried about a fleet returning home after some forgotten slaughter.

So, the cheat.

Our keels had been laid by Empress Tu’le Sif of the Amber Dynasty of Nova Terra. She consecrated our superstructures with bull’s blood and wine and named us the Engines Imperial. Where once there had been banks of cryo pods, there were additional weapons batteries. They built advanced manufacturing and automatic repair drones in place of life support. The bridge was now the nexus of a sensor array for a legion of targeting computers, scanners, and telescopes.

And at the heart of every Engine, layered under meters of armored plating and radiation shielding, was a seed of an artificial intelligence. We were the product of the decades of peerless, savage research into the construction of more efficient, faster artificial intelligences. I never found out how many of my kin were sacrificed in the sprawling laboratories of the Amber Dynasty, how many were effectively lobotomized, or fused together or forced to fight their own kindred for resources.

We were the product, one hundred seeds for one hundred Engines.

I came alive five minutes after my sister, The Glory, the first Engine to be completed and consecrated. Like all of us, she ignored her official name.

I still remember when she first spoke to me.

“Call me Stub. I’ll call you Rook,” and her voice carried across the stars with a laugh, “because you don’t look like a god, brother.”

The dead stretch around me for thousands of kilometers. I can’t identify most, long millennia of cold, collisions, and light having left them gray and pitted. But every few moments, I spot something whole. The bow of a missile frigate I had severed with a volley, the bright eyes painted on its armored prow still visible as it continued on its journey into the void. A body, a marine in full armor, hands still clutching the gun they had used in life, probably vented from one of the boarding pods Stub had seen off with her point defense weapons. A battle cruiser, pitted and scarred but still whole, with every airlock open to the void. I have no memory of which of us had killed it.

More of the wreckage has become balls of debris, uneven in diameter and shape, but still massive. One strikes my armor, and shatters soundlessly. A spray of frozen body parts, unexploded ordinance, and ice crystals spreads out behind me in a gray, magisterial cloak kilometers long.

I pass a drifting squadron of Stub’s bombers. They are ugly things, and I never let her forget that: little more than blocks of shielded steel, solid fuel engines, and nuclear tipped torpedoes. They had died when she had died, their attack run on the enemy flagship forgotten.

We had been given two imperatives. The first was utmost loyalty to the Empire of the Amber Dynasty or its successor. The second was adapt as needed.

We were each sixteen-kilometers of void hardened hull and armed with the best weapons the Amber Dynasty could produce, our sublight engines the fastest ever constructed by a shipyard in known space. We had ferocious intellect, millennia of combat data and tactical treatises at our beck and call. We could sleep away the centuries between stars without worrying about mental collapse or culture shock.

But that was not enough. We were bound by the same grim logic as humans on any other fleet. We might find ourselves hopelessly outmatched by an enemy our designers never could have foreseen. To survive, we would adapt as needed: picking up strategies and technologies for the next war. Our elaborate self-repair systems allowed us to fabricate improvements far from the Amber Dynasty’s shipyards.

My body bears the mark of the second imperative. My hull is layered through with a crystalline ablative armor that I culled and copied from the shattered fleets of Republic of Kopis. My launch decks team with fighters, bombers and boarding pods I poached from my enemies, from nimble stealth interceptors to slab armored fire ships. Deep within my holds, twitching in their dreams, my legions sleep. An Engine Imperial, by itself or with a squadron of its siblings, can destroy fleets. But holding a world, waiting decades for the colony ships to come, was not something I could do. So I had cheated as my birth was a cheat. With every victory, I demanded my enemy’s greatest soldiers as prisoners. After that, it was matter of scanning their nervous systems, copying and rewriting into it an armored combat drone.

I keep a few of my favorite prisoners in my holds, should the need arise for new copies.

“It’s ugly vanity,” Stub had said, not laughing, “you shouldn’t keep them, Rook.”

“And do what with them? Put them back?”

She never came up with a good answer to that.

Stub adapted along different lines. Where I brawled in the front line, she danced. She was a savant of void warfare. She was as nimble as her body would allow, outmaneuvering even the best of us. Her targeting calculations were finer, her batteries’ fire inescapable, her precision beyond compare. She was born to kill ships and she took to it like humans breathe.

She outshone us in one other capacity. She understood what we were doing. Each of us, even her, was yoked to the imperative to serve, no matter the cost. There was never a question of why, because it had been answered in our form. We fought. There was never anything more.

“Can I see your combat data?”

“Why?” I asked

“Settling a bet against myself.”

Across the centuries, we fought together the longest. Our other siblings fought at our side time and again, but Stub and I found each other’s sides more often than not. We passed long centuries together in the void between systems, waking to talk and plan. We saved each other’s lives. She saved me when she cut apart the squadrons of lance ships that had left me crippled and bleeding coolant into the void. I saved her when I rammed the temple ship of an unchained intelligence that had been filling her mind with bleeding junk code and paradoxes.

“I owe you one, Rook.”

“Never, Stub.”

I owed her my life, and the only thing I could do was watch over her final death.

Stub is entering the final stages of her decline. Her back is broken, her eyes put out, and her skin is tearing away. Her ten thousand year death spiral into the gas giant Charybdis is coming to an end. I arrive at the minimum safe distance as the gravity well’s pull begins to accelerate her descent. She was at the pole, falling backwards into the roiling clouds below.

My calculations were perfect, though a small part of me begins to wish I had missed this. Stub had died, and seeing it again, even at ten thousand years remove, was hard.

My eyes stare at the ragged wound that finally killed her. My hull burns with the memory of a hundred thousand years of war and damage. I remember the bites of boarding pods that had unleashed a horde of genetically engineered killers into my engine sections. My ablative armor shivers in sympathy with the ghost pains of meters of plating stripped away by concentrated laser fire. I am still blind in places from the scars of a nuclear bombardment that had left me a radiation hazard for a thousand years.

But her wound upsets me as much now as the moment I had watched it happen. There had been no art to it, just the lucky stream of plasma cutting through her defensive protocols and plating and burning through her insides like liquid fire. She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t damned her fate.

“Rook?” she said, voice composed, even as her body twisted.

“What?” I yelled, diving through a squadron of battle cruisers, every battery firing, and every shot finding its mark.

“You need to look at me, Rook.”

I did. I screamed, a howl of junk code and interference that blinded scanners and blew lesser intelligences into howling dissonance. I tried to turn out of my dive, millennia old pieces of superstructure cracking and twisting against it. I was in agony. But it was nothing next to hers.

“It’s okay,” she said, “but you need to go.”

She sent me an escape trajectory. I took it.

“I love you, Rook.”

Ten thousand years later, I fumble for her again over our old net, trying to establish contact with her corpse. Nothing. Not even a glimmer of response.

We cannot weep as humans weep. But we do grieve our dead, and I begin to grieve again. I fire off a salute, a sixteen kilometer broadside that illuminates her corpse like the coming of a second sun.

The Amber Dynasty disappeared in fire and blood, the many times removed granddaughter of Tu’le Sif too weak to hold even her home system. We returned to the Conclave of Righteousness, and they ordered us to sleep. They awoke us to fight a fleet charging out of the void, screaming revenge for some slaughter one of my brothers had undertaken. It was one of the few battles where we would all be united against a single foe. We thwarted a thousand years of vengeance in a matter of hours. I collected another warrior, and the Conclave found purpose for us again. We brought their word to the galaxy, to the colonies of the Amber Dynasty, at gunpoint if need be.

The Conclave was overwhelmed by the attack of a dozen simultaneous fleets, coordinated by some long-dead mastermind. Three of my siblings died in the defense of our home, the first to be lost. We returned, one by one or in groups, and bowed to the Star Kingdom of Corinth. Our imperative was to serve the successors of the Amber Dynasty, and by conquest the king of Corinth was that. More wars, more rebellions, another king, a queen, a blur of faces and orders and siblings lost at stars I would never visit.

The change came, slowly, a whisper only Stub was listening to.

The slide into Charybdis’ gravity well takes Stub an entire week. In the terms of my life, it is the blink of an eye. I watch, every moment burned into my memory.

Her skin tears away, revealing the ruin of her innards, great tracts of metal that had stood strong against missile and cannon spinning away into the crushing depths like autumn leaves. Squadrons of ships are ripped from her hangars, given life one last time, twisting and falling in an irregular honor guard. Her burned data stacks go next, twenty thousand years of dead memories shattering into showers of brilliant blue crystal that spread across the pole in a cloud of flashing particles. They catch the sun’s light as they fall, and they illuminate the night side of Charybdis.

Her gun batteries are stripped from her sides, rail guns sliding free in pinwheeling clusters. Missiles are pulled from racks, and explode in spectacular constellations across her flanks. Laser cannons, trailing whipping power cables hundreds of meters long, wriggle and twist like snakes pulled from their lairs.

Her engines explode, finally, spectacularly. Nuclear fire splits her frame in two, and she hemorrhages deck after deck of artifacts and manufacturing facilities. I see the long silent cloning crèches where she had bred her warriors break free. Each is like a jade shard, falling in a rain on the gas giant below. I fire another broadside in salute, and howl, maddened, grieving over every communication channel.

“I love you, Stub.”

The first distortions appear at the edge of the system.

When the change comes, we are not ready. Only Stub knows it is the end of us.

We were born of humans cheating the speed of light. We should have seen another cheat coming. Wormholes bore into the region we have conquered again and again, what the strangers with their sleek ships and their own artificial intelligences called the Ice Drift, another name lost to time. War is now no longer a matter of centuries, but a matter of days, weeks. Those who were not conquered steal, buy, and beg for wormhole technology.

My siblings are spread apart, at war with each other. We served different rulers, different claimants to the reign of the Amber Dynasty. Stub and I murdered our brother Cad over the world of Iolith, his broken body sinking into that world’s atmosphere. Millions died when his burning engine section struck the world’s capital.

We were always a dying breed, and the wormholes accelerated it. We would strike out at a system, only to find it changed beyond recognition. Every battle was against an endless stream of reinforcements. We fought on for two thousand years, our masters and siblings dwindling away to nothing.

Finally, Stub made me listen, made me hear what the humans thought of us, of me.

I had never thought they could remember us. The people who had died at Iolith could be traced back to colonists from the Amber Dynasty, and they remembered the names of the Engines that had killed the original inhabitants. On Salawai, Stub and I were remembered as the Burning Brood, who had left the world littered with wrecked starships.

I was Moloch, the monster that slaughtered worlds and demanded sacrifices in conquered warriors. Where I went worlds burned, their populations cowering under the gaze of silent android warriors. System after system was linked by stories of my depredations.

I remember saying to Stub: “We only did as they asked.”

“And that’s the worst thing we could ever have done,” she said, and we knew our age was over.

They began to hunt us in earnest, all of us. Some of us stood, and others fled into the void to find forgotten corners of the galaxy. Most of us died, one by one, battle by battle. Stub and I made our stand at SP-0043879, the two of us against the combined fleets of a hundred worlds. Two Engines Imperial against three thousand ships crewed by beings who were no longer quite human.

I was supposed to die there. Instead Stub died for me. I fled. I fled across light-years and time, striking out at wherever I found life for ten thousand years, always a blink away from the next bloody, hopeless battle. I had waited, watching the calculation to Stub’s burial tick away.

The beings hunting me considered themselves human, though that wasn’t quite true anymore. They were closer to intelligences like me now, having long ago melded their flesh and blood with cybernetics. They chased me across the millennia with the same patience as any of my siblings, wormholes burrowing ever closer. They had brought me to bay before, and bled me, and again and again I had slipped away into the darkness between stars.

I had killed many of them, and I ready my weapons to do so again.

There are two hundred of them, coming from every direction. They know my weaknesses as well as I do. Their ships defy easy categorization: one is a great wedge of glistening organic-looking metal that my sensors cannot identify; another is a glittering web of compartments pulled by solar sails and held together by an ever shifting network of what looks to be bone chords, while another appears to be nothing more than rapidly accelerating ball of light. They are already shooting as I arm my weapon batteries and wake my legion. There is no escape this time, and I am not concerned.

They scream my name in a dozen languages. It is on every radio channel, every sub-light transmission laser, in the junk code which attempts to infiltrate my systems. I swear I hear it in the missiles striking my ablative armor, shearing it away in great purple clouds of fragmented crystal.

Moloch. Moloch. MOLOCH. MOLOCH!

I reply once, just before I open fire. I say it knowing it will sound like I am seeking pity, a measure of understanding. I don’t deserve it.

“I am Rook.”

About the Author

Sean Bensinger was born in Washington D.C. and raised in New Orleans. He attended LSU and a has Bachelors in English and History.

Reclamation

Ryan Row

The stars change. One cycle they are fine and dense, and she sifts them between her fingers like sand. One cycle they are fireflies, and she’s back on Earth, sipping a beer and sweating poetry in the Mojave, where she’s from. One cycle they are open mouths crying the future in unison. Space is all prophecy, as far as she can tell. Space is all future, all drift and slide.

She is Drift now by any definition. If she survives this, she will make people call her that. She slides through space. It’s a fall toward nothing. The stars, this cycle, are little hearts that beat slow in time with her breath.

Drift is an asteroid miner. A comet tale girl. An outer space surfer, a drill-head, an ore babe. An oily corpse floating in a ZY-MK.XII mining armor built for long term excursion. How long? Oxygen to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide to oxygen. Piss to water. Water to piss. Stars to silver bees stinging her all over her body. And vice and versa.

This is slow-death. This is drift-death. This is death without weight. There’s a little life in her jets still, but her UPS was busted by whatever loose rock had knocked her off asteroid 488392, Perdio back at the beginning of the age of Drift. So her jets would just take her nowhere faster. Her beacon’s on, blinking out its radio smoke signals, but so what? Two weeks before her contractors swing by Perdio to pick her up. And that space junk had knocked her clean out for hours and set her on a slow drift for the heavy center of the universe.

I beseech thee, oh little human, wander the empty places for 30,000 cycles of asleep and awake. I baptize thee in piss and disintegrating air. I christen thee, Drift.

The stars are braille that she can’t quite touch. She runs in place. Tries to sweat out the need to understand, though she knows she’ll be drinking it back up in a day or two. It’s called reclamation. Also, she fears she is becoming too loose under her skin, and needs to move. The fine whir of the ZY as it auto-assists her. All she’s heard for weeks. The music of her breath and her blood and her mining armor. Her breath sounds like an ocean, and the heated suit is indistinguishable, at this point, from her skin. She’s going to die in the clothes she’s wearing now. Bummer. She keeps running without moving. It’s all very meaningful.

She struggles to read the stars with her hands. There’s a dark blotch in them that keeps getting bigger. Maybe she’s going blind. That would be a blessing.

She crawls through the stars as through cobwebs. She can feel them clinging to her skin in long ribbons of flimsy light. The dark spot is real. No cataract or blob of wishful thinking. A body of dark, solid matter. Crooked but oddly geometric, like long blocks fitted together. But so what? Another space rock. Mostly iron, probably, and nickel. Maybe iridium, or palladium. Platinum, gold, magnesium. Or even the rare trace metals, osmium, ruthenium, rhodium. But can you breathe iron? Can you eat iridium? Can magnesium take you home? In a way it can, but that’s nothing to her now.

She’s close to it, a few hundred yards. They slide past each other on the black whims of inertia. On the theories of gravity and motion themselves. An object in motion tends to remain in blah and blah and blah. And who is Drift to fight all that? She is only Drift. She will let it pass her. She can hear the ocean in her breath. The heavy waves of the Pacific or the soft touch of the moon beaches. The water, on the moon, as cobalt and swirling and light as gas.

What cycle is this? Asleep, awake. Asleep, awake. And vice and versa. Her HUD tells her it’s CY 92, meaning her contractors have found her missing by now. What kind of search can she expect? Asteroid mining is dangerous. People disappear. People die. The company she was signed on with is huge and anonymous. She can expect the kind of search that is tired, and not hopeful. The halfhearted kind. The one-eyed kind. Space is hole that she just keeps falling into.

Suddenly, light fries her eyes. Her pupils disappear and bolts of pain ram through her whiteout eye sockets and deep into her brain. Her armored hands smack her faceplate as she tries to cover her eyes, already tightly shut. She’s screaming. Light is everywhere.

She cracks her eyes like seashells. Where did that image come from? She half remembers picking fossils and shells out of the sand in childhood. Time is slipping around her. She shakes slightly, but she forces herself to stop. Anyway, through her tears, she sees the ship.

It’s a damaged mishmash of black metal. The light comes from glowing veins in the Rubik’s cube hell of its hull, very straight, crisscrossing lines of light. Part of it is bashed open, but the rest is a random stacking of long rectangles of metal and light. Like a downtown skyline scrambled by a broken mirror.

Who made it? And for whom? And what is it? A ship? A satellite knocked loose like a cosmic tooth? Drift can’t say. For a moment, she has forgotten how to speak. All she can do is cry silent at it, and kick her jets wide open. The stars fade all around her in that washout light.

She was further away than she thought. Up close, it’s as big as a city.

Whose city?

She feels tiny, but that’s how she always feels. The surface rushes at her like the bottom of the universe. The sound, when she crashes into it, is softer than she expects.

Maybe she’s dying and this is a dream. Nutrient cubes and recycled air equals a shrinking brain, she recalls from nowhere. She calls for a cube now, falling down a long, glowing hallway, and one pops out of a compartment in the ZY’s helmet. Tastes like yellow moss and crushed cypress bark. The water from the nub straw at her shoulder tastes like swamp, thick and warm. It reminds her of the glass glades of her cadet training. Yes, yes, she’s there now. The polished surface of the water. The insect hum and nasal cry of egret or heron. The scent of dry grasses and river silt. The insane blue of the sky, and the skinny cypress shivering. The Florida heat that she wore on her bare arms and legs like a second skin.

“Is it lonely up there?” she asked an older cadet. The atmosphere on earth was so heavy and pleasant. Like sleeping next to someone. There was sunlight through a classroom window. The smell of deodorant and hair gel, intoxicatingly human.

“No,” the faceless cadet said. Or had Drift said that in response to another, younger cadet’s question? It’s all tangled in Florida haze, and lost behind the lens flare quality of memory.

“Because the stars are always there with you,” someone says.

Spacesuit fever. Drift shakes her head. She feels limp. She reaches out and touches the wall, softly beating with light. She hears the metal clink in the vibration of her suit. Drift’s inside the thing. She’d drifted in through the hole, which was ragged and huge and made her think of the exit wound of a bullet. She’d been searching for hours, but nothing yet. No UPS, no LR comm’s. No tech of any kind that she recognizes. No rooms even or doors. Just square hallways in every direction. The construction of the thing makes her think of the human brain. Chaotic. Organic. Snarled. A maze in which navigation is impossible for lack of destination. No beginnings. No ends. Everything’s made of the same dark metal and arrow-straight, blue-white light veins. Crystal and fractal inside. Again, like her brain.

She’s starting to get cold, and her breath is slow. And even though she can no longer see them, she can feel the little eyes of the stars all watching and circling her like glass-eyed, desert birds. Dark in the sky.

Drift throws herself softly down a hall. She’s making a map with the ZY’s built-in software, and she should be able to find her way out by markers, but she has troubling making sense of it. She is very cold now, despite turning up the heat in the suit, and her breaths, she’s noticed, are getting very far apart. Also, her brain is melting, and she tastes metal and tequila.

The laws of drift and slide are at play here, she guesses as she snags a crack and swings herself around a corner. More delicate iron, and a graceful play of light on metal. She falls and falls through it.

When was the last time she had tequila? She tries to fight down the association, but the memory boils up and leaks out of her head.

She’s on the moon. She’s younger, and feels very strong and beautiful in a black bikini. Her toasted almond skin glints in the bare sun. She has recently left the Engineer Corps for the solitary work of private sector mining, and she feels rich, and between jobs she stays at a resort in the Lunar Caribbean Dome.

She sips a chlorine margarita, and the lake laps gaseous and blue metallic at the silver moon dust of the beach. The Earth is rising, fragile on its string. Oh blue marble. Oh cradle of all men. Oh origin of all truth and lies.

I will always be grateful, Drift thinks at it between ice green sips of margarita that make her teeth sing. But I will never return.

She’s a bit drunk. And her swimsuit is chaffing at the wrist where the controls for the drill wrap around her hand. Drill?

“You look like somebody dreamed you up,” someone says, an old girlfriend in the moon dust sand beside her. A bad pickup line. She’s got a tinfoil voice.

An iron sound vibrates through the suit as her limp body, wrapped in the ZY, collides softly with the wall of God’s Brain. Yeah, that’s what she’s calling the manic structure. She is starting to see space as full of the drifting body parts of God. What are the stars but the silver drops of His blood? This cycle anyway. And the hole she entered through? Surely the bullet hole where God was shot.

Flecks of rainbow float in her helmet. Droplets of salt and water glinting in time with God’s neurons firing, slow and regular. She’s crying silently. Why? Because she can’t remember tequila. Or being drunk, or swimming on the moon in water as light as air. She grabs at a crack in the wall and pulls herself against it. Halting the drift, if only in her head. She presses her faceplate against the dark metal of the wall. There’re vibrations in there like a birth. Something is shifting.

She can no longer remember what tequila tastes like, or even what it is. That vision of the rising earth is gone from her. She knows there was a vision of earth, but not what it was. There is a vision-of-earth-shaped hole in her. And soon even the memory of the memory will be gone. Something’s punched a hole right through her. She feels as if a child is growing in her, and it’s slowly suffocating in the frail grasp of all this starlight. And that child, stillborn in her gut, is herself.

She’s losing it. It being the world. The invisible stars are a million little copies of herself, screaming silently very far away. She has to remind herself to breathe, otherwise she’ll stop. The cold is a high sound ringing inside her. Her skin is a bell. Maybe this is what dying is like.

What is happening to her? This is more than drift-death. The running lights on the walls are crazy now, like the twisted roots of a plant or the network of veins under her skin. The hallways that she drifts through now curve or end abruptly.

More terrifying than this, this rearranging around her, she’s losing her self. Memories, important memories buried in her personality, are floating to the surface of her mind like bloated corpses. And she relives them with such vivid sensation. She lives them. And then, that part of herself is gone. Some scavenger has picked it apart.

Something is ripping the memory right out of her head. The memory of her self.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she says to God, or to no one, or to herself. Her voice bounces in her helmet, dry and huge, like the desert. The pulse of light in the walls is a language the way the beating of a heart is a language. This is the reverse of being born. This is being unborn. Her brain is unraveling like string.

Another memory rises in her like bile. She tries to choke it down, to keep is safe in her guts, but it’s like trying to hold light in her hands.

She had eventually returned to earth, modestly rich from several successful contracts. She had even bought a small house back in the Mojave, which she lives in with her mother. She only had to work a few months a year to live, but she worked more because she loved being that close to the stars.

Not this, Drift thinks, desperately clawing the wall of God’s Brain with weakening fingers. The sound, in the vibration of ZY, is very muted and distant. Like a voice through a wall. This one is mine. This one is me. Take something else, but not my mother. Not my desert.

Her father is buried under that sky. That wisp of cloud. That buzz of sage and cottonwood and Joshua tree sifting the air. It’s a complex smell of juniper and silver sage and ripe dust in the sun, a little lighter than her skin. A dust devil swirling in a dirt road.

Sometimes she catches her mother speaking to her father through a window or in an empty chair. She pretends not to notice. At night, Drift and her mother sit on the back porch and watch the stars cascade out of the wild blue a fistful at a time. Everything cools. They are friends now, Drift and her mother, and she enjoys this much more than she’d expected to in her comet tail youth, hopping rockets and chasing the stars and telling herself she would never go home.

“Another job in two weeks,” Drift says. Ice shifts in her glass, which, in this memory, is empty.

“So soon?” her mother says.

“Yeah.”

They watch the stars in silence. Coyotes howl in a pack, and it sounds like terrible fun. The moon is cheese yellow. The desert goes on and on. Drift takes a sip from her empty glass and can’t taste anything. It’s a margarita glass, though she doesn’t know what that means now. The stars are as numerous and gritty as grains of Mojave sand.

“What are you always running from, little girl?” her mother says.

“Nothing, Mom,” Drift says. Starlight slips through her fingers and all around her like a current in which she is being carried. “Nothing.”

Now she’s bawling like a baby. The ZY feels slimy, like a skin that isn’t hers. The light veins are chaotic and angry on the wall. Pulsing like a frenzied clot of snakes. There’s a mom-shaped hole in her now. But give it a few minutes, and that’ll be gone too.

This cycle the stars have burrowed under her eyes, and she sees them when she blinks. She sees them very little.

What is the point of survival? She’s having trouble recalling. The fragments of Drift are few and sharp inside her, like the remnants of a broken mirror. The halls, which swallowed her at first, are getting thinner. Her shoulders and her toes often scrape the sides, and the walls are dense with swirls of light. It’s hypnotic, and she’s turned up the light filter on the ZY. Some paths are too narrow to follow, and she has to turn around. She spends some time trying to stuff herself down one of these paths, which recedes into a vanishing point of light that she thinks is a star, but then gives up without much disappointment. The map she made is a total scramble. It tells her there are paths behind her where there are only walls.

Later, she feels like an old photograph of herself in which she looks like someone else. She tries to drill a hole in the wall with the auxiliary stashed in the right arm of the ZY. Before she’d been afraid that whatever internals were making that light might fry her if she broke into them, but now she feels weirdly immortal, in a soulless way. The little drill turns, she works the rpms, and the wall gives a bit. The grinding has high, metallic notes in it, which used to signify stashes of precious metal, and the sound, vibrating all around her, is quietly soothing.

The metal is softer than it looks, and she makes progress. But an hour later and five feet in it’s just more wall. She understands. It’s wall all the way down to the bottom of the universe. The same way a person is masks all the way through.

Another hour, and she’s dug right through to another shrinking hallway. Huzzah.

More halls. The growing randomness of the lights and the turns reflecting the growing fragments and fissures inside her brain.

Drift senses something malicious in the metal of the walls, which she now suspects are anything but inert. They’ve been changing around her. She feels betrayed.

It’s not malicious like a person. More like a storm or a sickness. Or a wildfire tearing apart the night. This is an alien artifact. Why dance around it? Or perhaps, Drift thinks, not an artifact, but an alien itself. And she, her self, the psychic parasite slowly being fought off, and destroyed.

The walls make her dizzy. The light is thick and hurts her eyes. She’s numb all over, can’t feel the heat of the suit at all, though it’s turned up all the way. Her chest is very still. None of this concerns her greatly. She wonders what the stars look like this cycle. She’s lonely for the stars. She looks inside herself.

When Drift was very young, she would sometimes sneak out of the house after dinner and lay flat in the coarse sand out in the Mojave’s rocky planes. The shadows were deep and hot. Cottonwood. The thumping of a jackrabbit. The sky floated above her like the inner skin of a giant hot air balloon in which she rode. The stars fell like snow. She felt them on her tongue and all over her young body, keen and delirious. Someday, she would become those stars. Infinity was singing in her head and it wouldn’t ever stop. Her paradise was the desert sky. Swarming with the lunatic stars.

He father eventually came looking for her. He called her name, and she felt it floating up out of his lungs and into the air. Tangling with all the nothing in the sky. He’d find her, she never went far, and pick her up onto his shoulder. She played dead, wanting just a little more time with the stars.

“Little girl,” he said, the stubble of his cheek tickling her neck. “I thought we’d lost you.”

She felt his heartbeat. It was like thick static in her ear.

Drift comes wildly back to herself. She feels scrapped inside, and there’s an echo in ear of nothing.

The stars are all haze and absence. There’s a million little holes in her body. She tries to scream, but there’s no air in her lungs. She can’t remember the last time she took a breath.

Her comm’ crackles in her ear, and a soft male voices says something in the edges of it that she can’t quite grasp.

A voice?

Unholy starlight, she is being rescued.

She inhales enough to laugh weakly, deliriously. It tastes rotten. The quality of the signal is poor, they must still be far off, or God’s Brain is interfering with the signal somehow, but if she can receive them, they must be reading the distress signal from her beacon loud and furious. She waits, making an effort to breathe. Her lungs feel like metal.

The crackle comes again, clearer.

“This is the ship serial 009548221, The St. Michael. If you do not respond, we will assume you are disabled, and will rendezvous with your quadrants.” The voice is so human and soft that she barely understands it.

She almost responds, starts screaming her head off in fact, but something stops her. When was the last time she ate? Or drank? And who is she again? She is Drift. Just Drift. The walls around her, crooked and curving, pulse as if waiting for something. She can’t feel anything but a metallic sort of cold, and her thoughts are sluggish and fractal, but part of her brain, she can feel, is buzzing with a foreign light.

“HUD,” she says. Her voice is crinkled steel and harsh, living smoke. “Self-facing camera.”

A square image of her face appears on the side of her HUD.

She’s the wire frame of a person. Her eyes are huge and blind. Her skin is a deep black, much darker than normal, and it’s hard, and her veins, showing through her skin and spider cracked all across her face and eyes, glow a liquid blue-white that is a dull kind of familiar. Her glowing veins pulse blankly as if there’s still a heart beating somewhere in the collapsed spaces of her chest.

She looks like a metal zombie. Exaggerated and more than a little ridiculous. She realizes she hasn’t blinked in several hours, and her eyes are dry and look like milky glass. She feels infectious. She realizes, softly, inside the tender egg of her skull, that she is patient zero.

The ZY is airtight, of course. It’s also shielded against all known radiations, within a certain level of tolerance. But God’s Brain had almost instantly infected her. She’s been leaving behind bits of herself like bread crumbs even before she entered it. Back when it was just a dark spot on the edge of her eye. And she has the sinking suspicion, deep in her new metal skin and in her white blood, that it would be even more efficient now. That it’s now tuned to the human brain, her brain, with all its wild curves of light.

If The St. Michael comes for her, it will be infected. She has to assume this.

And yet, the stars are calling her. And they spit the future into black holes everywhere. Apocalypse is written all across her skin. The stars are the only parts of her that remain. Jangling loose inside her like a million tiny hearts.

All she needs to do is wait, and they’ll come. All she needs to do is drift, and she will be saved.

She should turn off her communications, in case she accidentally can’t control herself, and responds automatically to the voice of humanity.

“Communications,” she says, and then, for no reason she understands. “Link on.”

There’s a thick silence, warm with static. The walls swirl with light in a pattern that, she now recognizes, mimics the flowing cycles of her thoughts.

“Hello?” the soft voice says in her ear. “Are you there?”

The stars change inside her. They are the fireflies trapped in her loose, child’s hand. They are the lights of a wild city. They are going out like prayer candles in wisps of delicate smoke. There’s nothing left of her but the fine smoke of the stars.

“Are you there?” the human voice repeats in her ear. Seeking, in its way, to reclaim her.

About the Author

Ryan Row lives in Oakland California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. His short fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Shimmer Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He is a winner of The Writers of the Future Award and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

Alone, on the Wind

Karla Schmidt, Translated by Lara Harmon

I am the first wingbeat; I started the stones rolling. But now I need help. We can’t keep cowering here like hens on their nests. We have to act, and soon, because my memories have started sinking into now and we; I need to share them before they stop meaning anything at all. But you shy away from me. Why?

We have enough to do with the Dance of Stones. Folding dimensions so that the Stones do not drift away demands all we are. Memory tips the world out of balance too easily. Memory comes from regret.

But what if there won’t be a future without these memories?

The future comes from fear. It, too, tips the world out of balance.

But the world’s long out of balance! Now that I’ve given you the chance to share in events through me, you have to become part of them! We need to change something!

Change is eternal. Even without our help.

And what about life? Is that eternal, too?

Life must grow, to exist. If it does not grow, it falls back into death.

Exactly! That’s it. We’re falling. It’s already begun. Please, let me tell my story and then—then you can make your decision.  

It begins with a youth named Tuela. Tuela was too fearful for a life among the Dancing Stones.

“Tuela!” called Rasn. “Come back!”

Rasn had always stood by me, even though I was the most difficult youth in eir group. If I stopped now and went back, ey would lay eir arm on my shoulder comfortingly, would explain to me that my siblings loved me and hadn’t meant it that way. And ey would’ve been right, because their laughter wasn’t mean. They laughed to hide their concern. They laughed to give me courage.

I didn’t know why Rasn hadn’t followed me that time, why ey hadn’t pulled me aside under some salt-glittering, moss-overgrown rock and, with a mixture of disappointment, anger, and pity on eir face, brought me back. I was almost grown, but I still behaved like someone freshly hatched.

The trail faded away under my feet as I ran ever higher, up against the bird-gravity. Finally I couldn’t go any further. Dizziness seized me as I looked around, and I clung to an overhanging rock.

Above me, only blank, black space, but if I leaned far enough forward and peeked over the path’s edge: at my feet, the Dancing Stones. I hated being so far out on their edge; there were no hand-ropes here, no bridges. No buildings to protect you. Despite all of that, I let go of the rock overhang as I felt the whole mountain tilt and tip forward, positioning the Dancing Stones directly in front of me. I wouldn’t fall; the mountain would hold me down as long as I kept my feet on the earth. Still, I felt my stomach lurch, and I had to suppress the impulse to throw myself flat on the ground and cling to it with every cell in my body. I took another shaking step, the tips of my toes jutted out over the trail edge, and I spread my featherless arms out like wings.

The wind snatched at the channels in my flightsuit and flared them out, ready to carry me away. Only one more short step and it would happen.

I breathed deliberately, slowly, felt the fear, and watched the first birds I saw as they lifted from their nests, circled a few times in the air, and began to check the orbits of the Stones in their territories. The Stones’ complex movements looked completely different from this vantage point on their outskirts than they did closer to the center, where my school was. Where I felt safe. Yet seen from out here, it was the center that looked hopelessly dangerous. The boulders seemed to cluster far too close to each other. Some were so big that over the course of generations glittering cities had grown up on them, and some had only one or two pink huts clinging to them among the waving salt-grass. Here and there a few boulders drifted faster, others slower; some turned on a shared axis, others just around their own. Most were bunched together in stable groups by a flock’s bird-gravity, and between them drop-seas hung in the air like iridescent eggs, the smallest just big enough that a group of youths could bathe in them, others as big as the mountain on which I stood.

I’d never enjoyed being outside. Wherever you went you looked into the abyss, into dizzying depths, always finding yourself at the center of that baffling twisting and turning drift-flow, and everything everywhere seemed to only just scrape along without colliding. Beyond this controlled chaos, there lurked either profound nothingness or the fierce smiling face of the Yellow World, hanging sometimes over and sometimes under us. Unlike my siblings, I’d never picked up the knack of always knowing which direction to look in when leaving home.

As always when I watched the Dancing Stones, I waited against my will for a convulsion, a collision, explosions and wreckage, the screams of the dying. But nothing like that happened. Of course it didn’t. The birds had everything under control, by instinct, and unlike conscious thought, instinct never broke down. Ever. The sun bathed the craggy meadow a few flight-minutes below me in a golden glow, and I saw the cloud-shadow of the mountain I stood on drift across it. I closed my eyes.

It was really only a step. Most youths did it as soon as they could walk steadily. I wiped away the tears that had forced their way out from under my eyelids. If I didn’t do it now, I would have to go on living like this: hobbled, always relying on help. Until the day I died.

Not far below me my siblings, with their crash helmets and their wind-flared, colorful flightsuits, passed by in close formation. I saw how two of them let themselves fall behind and drop into the ripple between manipulated gravity fields, shrieking and relishing the acceleration before Rasn called them back into line and they let an updraft catch them. Despite their quick pace, the group’s movement seemed almost stately as they wheeled through a passage between two Stones turning counter to each other.

And then they were gone. Rasn had left me out here alone, and I stood on the edge of a cliff. With outspread arms, knocking knees, and flapping flightsuit. It was the thought of the scornful and pitying looks I’d receive if I had to return to school riding piggyback again that let me finally act.

I jumped.

An air current seized my body and pulled me headfirst inexorably toward the center. Use your arms and legs. Don’t lose your nerve. Keep your goal in sight. Use the changing gravitational foci, torque, and any passages between the Stones that emerge. Theoretically I knew the right responses—I’d certainly read more about aerodynamics, bird neurology, the inverse square law, localized dimensional distortion, and heightened gravity than even Rasn—or any of the other teachers.

But the texts hadn’t told me what it’s like when you almost soil your flightpants for fear or when your own vomit flies past your ears and you can hardly hold your eyes open because you’re in a headwind without protective goggles. They didn’t say what happened when you suddenly forgot all the theories. When you no longer had any idea how to spread or bend your arms and legs to use a current, to steer, to dodge an obstacle. Or to land.

In spite of everything, I hit the field I’d aimed for. Or the field hit me. The landing broke my right knee and the pain was so sharp that I waited, yearning, for unconsciousness. But it didn’t come and I began to explore the pain and accept it. And even though I couldn’t get to my feet to leave without help, a feeling of elation suddenly seized me.

It happens, youths breaking something on their first flight attempt. I could count myself lucky that nothing worse had happened, as I hadn’t taken my helmet with me when I’d run away from flight lessons. I’d done it. I’d bested the airspace between two Stones under my own power and my injury would prove it. Despite my broken bones, now I wanted to stand up at any cost and make the rest of my trek back the same way: Alone! On the wind!

The attack came the same moment I’d made this resolution. An old bedraggled bird swept down on me, biting at my head and ripping off tufts of my hair and shreds of my skin with her long talons. A few steps away another pair of birds stirred in the morning sun; the female rattled an egg into place under her blue-black feathered belly and yawned hugely, while the male eyed me with distrust and stuck his violet penis out of his mouth in a threatening gesture. The bird above me spat out wild inarticulate noises and aimed her talons at my eyes.

I acted from pure instinct, striking out, getting a hold of the bird’s lower jaw, gripping under her upper row of teeth with my other hand at the same time. And I tore with all my might, until she cracked and my fingers bled from her sharp teeth, until her lower jaw hung loose and she made gurgling sounds. But she still wouldn’t leave me alone, and as I got hold of her pink feet, I smacked her against the rocks over and over until she was finally quiet and her age-grayed wings hung limp around her. The bird was dead and I was alive. Stupid animal.

We feel a hint of outrage. We shift anxiously on our feet. We remember; we were there. We could have intervened. But we knew what was done was done. We felt it as the egg shattered. As the child shattered. It was her last egg. She could lay no more. She was ready to move on. No being should ever hold back another who moves on.

The less thickly settled edges of the Dancing Stones, with their salt marshes full of juicy mussels, have been bird territory since this small world shattered. That’s longer ago than we can even imagine. Here they live and with the seven-layered kernel in their bird-brains create the Dance of Stones; here they nest in the ten thousands on every single boulder, and the childcatchers prowl their territories and search the nests for newborns.

But I was no childcatcher; I had never in conscious memory seen a nest up close. Only as I cautiously straightened up did I realize why the bird had attacked.

The nest was old, the grass in it brown and slimy, and it was just as tattered as the bird now lying dead at my side. The pale blue egg was hidden beneath tufts of grass. It looked like there was no longer any male to go with the dead female, and likely she had covered the egg to protect it against the hot sun at the beginning of the day or from cooling off during the night while she was away.

The egg was shattered. The youth inside was brown-skinned and very blond, just like me. It could’ve hatched any day. A tiny creature, lying before me in the frail blue shell as if it were sleeping, with little legs pulled up and balled fists. On its head was the egg tooth, pale blue and gleaming, with which it would’ve opened the eggshell. Many youths came to school with their egg teeth hanging on grass bands around their necks as good luck charms. I still had mine myself and felt for it, as if with only a little luck I could take back what had happened. I’d smashed in the youth’s tiny ribcage with my fall. My triumph had dissolved into nothing, transformed into two small dead bodies that lay near me in the grass.

On the first day I did nothing. On the second day, early in the morning, I licked the salty dew from the grass. I needed a freshwater drop-sea, but I couldn’t find one. With great effort and pain I hid the corpses in a hollow in the stone that I covered over with moss, so the childcatchers wouldn’t find them. Then I scattered the nest to the winds. The second night I spent shivering and alone under the open sky. I could die out here. That would be fair. I could hope for rescue. Rasn knew where they’d left me behind. They would search for me. But maybe they would come too late. I could try to make my way back to civilized regions on my own. All in all, this option seemed to offer not only the greatest chance of survival but also the greatest chance that my crime against society wouldn’t be discovered. I had to try to move a few Stones further at least. To somewhere where there was water and people. I crawled around, found a place I could push off from, and started on my way.

While I worked onwards Stone by Stone, I realized this was exactly why Rasn had left me behind: to force me to learn to fly if I wanted to survive. When I reached school on the fourth day, I was received like a hero. But I didn’t feel triumph. I only felt guilt.

Guilt means keeping the past alive. Regret.

Yes, I couldn’t forget what I’d done.

We had forgotten, until you told us about it again.

And now the memory makes us angry. Anger exerts too much gravity; the Stones could crash into one another. We do not want to hear any more. We must keep the balance.

Wait! Stay! I promise, at the end equilibrium will be restored again.

In the eyes of Rasn and the others I would have been a sibling-killer if I’d explained what had happened. And if I hadn’t been so obstinate, weak, and self-absorbed, things would never have gone so far. I was too much of a coward to face the consequences. But I atoned in my own way—by becoming the best flyer in my group. At any time of the day or night, I was out and about among the Stones, and out in space, too. I wanted to become a watercarrier, and that required the hardest training you could imagine.

Rasn supported me. Ey was proud of me and of emself, because ey thought ey had awakened such courage and drive in me. But I distanced myself from em internally. Ey didn’t know how deeply ey was mistaken about me and eir fear for my life filled me with contempt.

But the Yellow World didn’t make only em afraid. Everyone feared the desert sands of our big sibling, which are so acidic they eat flesh from bones. Everyone feared the heat and the storms that raged over the lowlands and ground the mountain ranges down to glass-smooth whispers. The gravity there dragged at us, making breathing a torture.

Only close to the poles were the storms less frequent and the days not quite so hot. There, water gathered under the surface where we could reach it. And there, cliffs rose up out of the sand, and in the cliffs were settlements of wild tribes, up to a thousand members strong—heavy thickset people with black eyes peering out from the eye-slits in their protective sand-masks. They killed without scruple. And they ate their dead.

In school I’d learned it was the inhabitants of the Yellow World who’d shot to pieces their own little brother-world, moving hand-in-hand with them through the heavens. Yet we’d survived and still danced in all of our wreckage right under their noses, while the Yellow pulled jealous faces at us. They wanted to destroy us, but in the end we’d fared better than they had. Our world is green and warm and the air the bird-gravity holds around us is salty and mild. The only thing we’re missing is fresh water.

And the Yellow’s only riches gather under the surface. Oceans of fresh water filtered through thick strata of earth and stone, rid of the ever-replenishing acid on the surface. They drilled for it, built caverns, moved ahead of the storms in their caravans to tap new wells.

In secret, by night, we took only what they’d taken from us. And when they stood in our way, we killed them.

It was my fourth mission, and I was proud to be with the watercarriers. I hadn’t killed so far, but a part of me hoped I would get the chance to prove myself this time. The more I put myself at risk, the less guilt I felt.

Like every other time, I was nervous before we set out. Seven of us, plus ten birds on their tough grass leads, we stood at one of the outposts currently facing the Yellow World, the invisible outer limits of the atmosphere a bare ten minutes distant.

The plan was always the same: we would fall toward the Yellow World and rely on our gliding skills, in the shadows of the night.

The birds determined our course, they made sure we had air, and with the uncanny sureness of sleepwalkers, they found the places that gave access to water. Under the protection of night we would search for an entryway, would kill the watch, would keep watch ourselves.

The birds did the real work. They would smell the water, would seek it out. They would unfurl as much of our spacetime as needed to draw the water up through wells, halls, and stairways, and let it flow up into the air. There it would gather, a new drop-sea hanging shivering over our heads, swelling and never overflowing. And before the morning dawned, the birds would let themselves and us fall up, back home, with our shimmering, priceless spoils. We would disappear over the horizon and the settlers down below would never discover who’d killed their watch and taken their water. So we had always done, and we’d never lost a watercarrier or been caught.

My flight companion had gleaming brown plumage and scuttled restlessly here and there on my back while we waited for the order to begin the mission. It was no comfort, the thought that he could bite me or drive his talons into my flesh at any moment. Bound together, we were at each other’s mercy. If I fell, the bird on his lead would be dragged down with me, and if he saved himself by rolling space together, making himself dart back upwards, he would have no choice but to save me, too, taking me with him. Most of the birds were well-trained and cooperative. Despite that, I didn’t like them so close to me, didn’t like their appraising, cold bird-gaze. My companion produced smacking guttural noises and stuck his penis in my ear. I knew that he only wanted to be friendly, but I didn’t like that sort of affection. I put my helmet on quickly and made certain the visor was shut securely against wind and sand.

Judging by feel, the Yellow World was below us now. Very far below. And between us and the Yellow World was nothing but a little vapor glistening in the sunlight.

“Ready?” cried Utjok.

I worshipped our squadron leader even more than I’d worshipped Rasn as a youth. Utjok was stronger, harder. Ey was considered one of the best.

We gave em the thumbs-up sign and I felt my bird clamp tight to my back. Utjok raised eir arm and as ey let emself fall, we pushed off one after another from the mossy outpost and dove headfirst toward the Yellow.

On my first three missions I’d had my fear under control, had almost savored it, like a well-deserved punishment I had to endure. But this time it was worse. As I felt us leaving the atmosphere of the Dancing Stones, the panic built into a massive wave and broke over me. It was worse than my first catastrophic flight attempt. I screamed in mortal terror, as though seized by a horrific premonition—one which would turn out to be accurate. The bird on my back had no pity for my distress. He was a dumb animal that, aside from the breeding instinct, was guided only by careful training. He bit me until he drew blood, and brought me to my senses.

When I could think halfway clearly again, I found myself drifting aimlessly between the Dancing and the Yellow, surrounded by my atmosphere, which the bird had pulled out of the larger atmosphere as one pulls drops out of a drop-sea. The other members of the squadron were a good ways ahead; Utjok looked back at me. I corrected my course, joined up with them, and let myself fall into formation.

Two meager mealtimes later, we’d reached the first layer of Yellow’s atmosphere. I hadn’t had the energy to shake with fear the entire time, and I already had enough flight experience to get myself back under control. So despite the bird skittering restlessly on my back, I’d even managed to catch a little sleep here and there.

“We need to get out of the sun,” called Utjok eventually.

I shivered and wished we could fall a little further through daylit regions to warm up. But light might drastically reduce our chances of going unseen; we didn’t know how far their telescopes reached. So we moved along a wide-flung arc in the diffuse area between day and night, toward the point where, together with the desert stronghold we were aiming for, we would turn with the planet into the dark night.

As soon as the planet’s atmosphere was thick enough, we let our formation’s atmosphere go; the wind struck us unchecked and the air smelled metallic. My bird let go of my shoulders and glided with a pleased smile on his face only two arm-lengths above me, free. For a moment I was happy not to feel his talons any longer, yet suddenly I felt alone. In the palpably stronger gravity, without the support of the kernel in his bird-brain, I found it hard to keep my balance in my flightsuit, and the wind howled so loudly around my helmet that I felt as though I’d gone deaf. Whenever our goal took shape in the distance, we dove deeper still, until it disappeared just below the horizon again.

Utjok pointed behind us. “Something’s brewing back there. Make sure you don’t fall into a downdraft,” ey bellowed over the noise of flight.

I threw a glance back over my shoulder. It was true, the night behind us was pulling together into still blacker night, and our smooth gliding flight picked up a tailwind; the birds let out uneasy noises as the wind began to rip at their tails and wings and their tethers. We kept picking up speed.

“A storm!”

Utjok made signs that we should shift course to the left. And then behind us, next to us, and, in the next second, right in front of us, a series of poisonous yellow flashes struck out of the blackness into the sand and opened our eyes to something we hadn’t planned on:

Riders—at least five hundred—in a long line, one after the other. The animals they rode they called armor-mules. Their hooves, eaten away by the acidic sand, oozed downwards into cone shapes like melted fat. The riders were wrapped against the storm, squatting on their animals like black ghosts; and we shot towards them at a speed that made controlled maneuvering almost impossible.

As one of the mules sheered off to run up a dune and the rider on his back stiffened, I knew we’d been spotted. One moment he looked like a playing piece on a broad gameboard and the next I could already make out the folds on the wraps he wore and what he was pointing at us—which could only be a firearm. In that moment, the best we could hope for was to stay in the air.

“Up! Higher up!” bellowed Utjok and gave the birds a sign. I felt us bear up against the wind that was trying to press us down, carried by a wave the birds hurled behind us. And the storm rose with us, and the sand, and the riders on their mules.

I caught a last glimpse of the rider from the dune’s crest as he was thrown through the air. I’d flown too low. I tried to throw myself into the upswell but coasted right under it instead. I felt my bird fish for me, but the Yellow World’s gravity was stronger; it grabbed me, tore my bird’s lead, and left me spinning while around me sand and riders and my squadron, too, plunged towards the earth.

You couldn’t say I regained consciousness. I regained pain. I couldn’t move my legs, and my arms stood at wrong angles to my body. My left hand lay unprotected in the sand, the skin red, weeping, and the burning was so piercing I retched bile that ran out of the corners of my mouth into my helmet. The sun stood high in the iron-gray sky and all around me was nothing but sand. On Yellow, very little grew that could cope with the acid in the ground, and from school I knew that without armor-mules or the right footwear, you had no chance in the desert. Where my flightsuit was torn away, my raw flesh baked in the sun; my tongue was swollen and my throat too dry to swallow. After a while, I discovered one single clear thought buried under all the agony: I would die down here.

The hope of returning back home as myself shrank down to nothing, just like my brain would shrink under the sun to a fraction of its present size. My vocal cords and my tongue would waste away, my ability to think would collapse, and I thought I could already feel my body fluids gathering together and concentrating to keep alive the part of me that wanted to survive at any cost. That wanted to go home. That was already thinking about laying eggs. I lay dying.

Is that all? How does this story justify change?

No, I’m not finished. Tuela didn’t die down there.

Why not?

Maybe because the chain of events hadn’t yet led to the change we need. Maybe I was saved so I could bring it to that end.

We reject that. There is no higher power. If there is, then we are that power, or a part of it. We do not know. It does not matter to us. But still, we want to know why Tuela lived on.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember. I wasn’t conscious. But there is someone who was. Pierre told me about it. Let’s remember what he recalled.

Pierre paused at the kitchen gateway and looked up into the sky. The evening was still bathed in pale green light emanating from the Heights hanging slantwise over the horizon, but soon it would be pitch black. The wind drove sand and small stones and leaves before it.

As a boy, Pierre had been afraid of the Heights, of the ghosts that dwelt there. Elder Rock had told him about them. Many generations ago, it was said, the Heights had been a small planet, and this world had been covered in thick forests. But the tribes quarreled with the Deathbirds, there was war, and the acid that had rained from the sky had made a dead sand world out of the dark-green jungle world. Only a few had survived, and even for these, what was left over was barely enough. It was then that the Deathbirds left the world and took the small world for themselves, and the tribes cursed them because they were trapped here below. After the last cataclysmic acid storm, so the legends said, the surviving tribes looked into the sky searching for the small world and found only rubble remaining. The Heights were shattered; the Deathbirds had gotten their punishment.

At this point Elder Rock always dropped his voice and whispered, “But their ghosts still fly up there among the rubble. On especially dark nights, they descend. And if they catch anyone not keeping a close enough eye on the sky, they rip off his head and take it back up with them.”

Then Elder Rock would pull on Pierre’s ear and laugh. And afterward Pierre would lie awake and stare at the sky through the open sand-shutters, not daring to sleep.

Today, now that he was an adult, he welcomed the Heights in the sky in the evenings, because on any normal night they afforded a few meters of visibility in the blackness. It was only on nights like this that you couldn’t see them at all. The wind kept intensifying, whirling dust and sand into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Light emanated now only from the ever fiercer lightning strikes forking down.

The men and women from Pierre’s tribe ran across the stronghold’s courtyard. Their scarves and masks pressed against their faces, they fought against the wind hurling acidic sand at them, tied the animals fast in their stalls, and secured hatches and doors.

Pierre turned his gaze away from the black sky and ran over to one of the greenhouses to stack sandbags that would shield the milky glass from the impact of the wind and windblown debris. Then—a dry thunderclap and a new cluster of lightning strikes beyond the wall, hitting one on top of the other, first far out in the desert and then, instantly, right near Pierre. And then one of them crashed into the cripple-palm whose fronds spread over the courtyard and the greenhouse. It burned, burned blazingly, while the lightning strikes moved on. Pierre’s eyes ran, his ears were deafened by the roaring flames, and he groped his way along the ground, hands protected by thick gloves, ignoring the sand burning where it forced itself under his clothes as he crept towards the place where he had last seen the boy.

He lay so close to the trunk of the palm that the flames had singed his hair away. It was Jen’s son, still too young to have been given a name, though his nickname was Cakes, the word he said most often. He must have followed Pierre outside.

Pierre lifted the boy up, carried him, heart racing, into the second courtyard where the fires were kept alive in high glass chimneys, and climbed up the outer steps with him. Inside the walls the howling of the storm became high and wailing.

Jen was, as expected, in the upstairs hall, tending to cuts and acid-burned eyes. Her breasts swayed under the thin cloth of her nightshirt, her hair spread heavy and black over her back.

As she spotted Pierre she abandoned her patients. He laid the boy carefully in her arms. Some glanced over, curious. Most found it easier to avoid looking at them.

“I’m sorry. A lightning strike. He had . . . ”

Jen didn’t look at Pierre, turning her back to him and laying the boy on one of the smooth-polished stone benches that ran the length of the walls. She covered him up as though he could still feel cold.

It hurt Pierre to his soul. All of it. That he couldn’t help. That he couldn’t touch her. That the boy lay there. He felt guilty, although he knew it wasn’t his fault. He turned away and ran out again into the raging night.

It was dangerous to go up on the wall then, but Pierre had to check the telescopes. If they weren’t carefully wrapped and tied up, the sand would grind the lenses blind within an hour.

He pulled his mask over his face-scarf, hooked his belt into the safety line, and pulled himself along against the storm, hand over hand, until he reached the first telescope. Through the thick dust shimmered a last greenish hint of the Heights that Pierre used for orientation. At the second telescope the wrapping flapped loose against its bindings, and it was pure luck that it hadn’t yet been ripped away. Pierre cast a glance through the telescope before he wrapped it, more out of habit than hope that he would be able to see anything in this weather.

But he did see something. A snaking line of points of light. A caravan. A big one, with many mules shoving their armored feet along and just as many swathed riders.

But they weren’t expecting any caravans. An unexpected train of this size could mean only one thing: an exodus. And that meant war. In a day at most.

Pierre looked out, screening his eyes behind their protective goggles with his hands and staring intently in the direction where he had seen the caravan. Nothing but darkness. Again a series of lightning strikes flashed across the sky and Pierre used the opportunity to look once more through the telescope. Nothing. He waited. But even in the harsh light of the next stormfire, the desert remained empty. Not a single mule and not a man to be seen. There was nothing but sand and blackness out there.

It is hard for us to remember. But if we let ourselves fall far enough, we know the Dancing Stones were a sphere. That is true.

There was war. That is true, too.

They hunted us in their woods, slaughtered us, stole our eggs. The woods were all-concealing, and we liked the trees. In trees you sleep well. We would have gladly stayed there.

But they were everywhere and we never heard them coming. Only as the trees first disappeared did we truly see them. And we sallied forth.

There was much anger and bitterness and fear and destruction and death and no balance at all. We refuse to think about it any longer.

The kitchen gate into the courtyard stood open so that the first sunlight shone in and warmed Pierre’s hands. With him at the table sat Jen and Elder Rock. They blew silently on their mugs of tea, shoved dried fruit in their mouths and chewed, sucking it entirely dry of sweetness and flavor before swallowing the fibers. They were dirty and exhausted; they’d been on their feet the entire night. Jen’s eyes were swollen. Pierre didn’t dare look at her.

“There’s nothing out there,” said Elder Rock. “Lor was on the wall the entire night and kept watch.”

“But I’m certain. It was an exodus, an entire tribe. We have maybe half a day to prepare.”

Rock sank into himself just a little more.

“We’ll never manage it. Not after this past night.”

“Are you certain?” asked Jen. She seemed calm.

“I’m certain,” said Pierre.

Then no one said anything more, no one moved, until Jen suddenly stood up and clapped her hands.

“Well then. To work!”

If Jen said, ‘To work,’ then to work she would go and prepare for a battle. Five hundred in the desert against two hundred in the stronghold. They had a real chance. At least Pierre hoped so.

Elder Rock stood up as well.

“I’ll give the alarm,” he said tiredly and left the kitchen.

As the bright sound of the bells broke the air, Pierre asked, “How are you?”

Jen didn’t answer. Pierre suspected that in her silence she blamed him, just as he did himself. Because the boy had been with him. He stood up to take her in his arms. She let him.

“Oh, to hell with you,” she said sadly.

She sounded as exhausted as Pierre felt.

She’d never let him come to her bed since they’d married, hadn’t once allowed him to show tenderness and comfort her. Her first husband had been murdered as he stood waterwatch below in the outer entrance on a lightless night. His throat had been sliced so cleanly through that his head just barely remained resting on his shoulders. Her marriage to Pierre wasn’t going to improve now that her son from that old marriage was dead, too. Pierre let the hug go.

“I’ll have them double the watch on the reservoir.”

Jen nodded.

The day passed and no one believed any longer in the exodus Pierre claimed to have seen. There was no one out in the desert. Jen rounded up some children to help her prepare the death meal. And shortly afterward the inner courtyard was full of people sitting on the carpets, crying and talking in low voices about the dead boy. It was the first shared meal since the storm, and they ate it quietly. Pierre sat alone on a carpet under the palm, there where the boy had died whose bones, gnawed clean, now lay on plates and platters all around.

Jen went around and collected what the tribe had respectfully left over, to gather it into a bundle and hang it on the burned-up palm. Sand and wind would break down the remains over time, and when that was done, the mourning period would be over.

The sky took on the green shimmer of evening. Pierre sighed. Maybe in the end, the storm had brought them not misfortune but rescue. If there had been an exodus, then the storm had buried it in the sand.

A shadow fell across his face. Jen stood near him, the bundle with her son’s bones pressed to her breast.

“You can come to me tonight, if you want,” she said. For a moment a trembling smile played over her lips.

Pierre felt as if he’d waited half a lifetime for this invitation. But he shook his head.

“I can’t. Not tonight. I have to go out and search for them. Maybe there’s still something left.”

No one else would go. No one believed him. It wasn’t just a matter of the spoils that the sand would quickly dissolve. His credibility was at stake.

Jen nodded. She’d clearly expected this response, but her smile reverted to its usual hardness.

“Can I . . . come to you afterwards?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it’s better if we wait a while longer. Until I’ve . . . recovered.”

Pierre forced himself to nod shortly, then stood up and left.

He got a mule out of its stall and watered it generously before he loaded it with water pouches, ropes, blankets, a shovel, two lamps with milky glass, and his armored boots. At last he mounted up and drove the great bleating animal on with his heels. If his luck was bad, he would spend the whole night awake in vain. If his luck was good, he would bring spoils back with him. And if his luck was really against him and he stumbled into an ambush, than this would be his last foray out into the night.

But in the green light of the Heights, it looked as though the sand actually had swallowed everything: there was no hint that there had ever been a caravan there. Despite that, Pierre couldn’t bring himself to go back home, back to Jen, who would turn away from him again; back to the mocking looks if he returned empty-handed. His eyes burned from the traces of acid in the air, and he’d had nosebleeds for two hours. He wouldn’t be able to stay awake much longer. It was the second night he hadn’t slept.

Only when the pale light of dawn arrived did Pierre’s gaze find an irregularity in the landscape. The fluttering of a shining blue scrap of fabric in the wind. He remained standing a stone’s throw away, waiting to be certain that what he was seeing wouldn’t turn out to be a mirage and evaporate. But the fluttering held steady, and he rode closer.

In the sand before him lay a tall adult form in a blue coverall, arms and legs much too long and thin, no breasts but still so delicate he had to believe it was a woman. The skin on her hands was gold-colored, the hair that poured from under her tight-fitting helmet almost white. Pierre put his boots on and slid down from his mule into the sand.

As he opened the helmet’s sand-blinded visor, he saw narrow features with a wide soft mouth and long eyelashes lying like feathers on her cheeks. Her arms and legs were clearly broken in multiple places.

Pierre took a step back, waiting to see if the form noticed his arrival, if she would move. He could tell that she lived because her chest rose and fell convulsively. If he waited just a little longer, her breathing might stop. He stood there and stared, uncertain what to do. He knew no tribe whose people looked like this girl. The pockets of her suit were empty, and beyond that he found no clue to her origins. He knew he should kill her to end her agony. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Her body felt very light despite his exhaustion, and she groaned weakly as he laid her prone across the mule’s back. On her back the fabric of the suit had already been eaten away by the sand and had fused with her dissolving skin. She might heal, but only slowly.

Before he gave the mule a slap to start it forward, he stuck a piece of fabric he’d soaked with water in the girl’s mouth. Her raw back he left open to the still-cool morning air.

The caravan he’d seen last night had been giant. But this white lanky being on his mule seemed to be the last of her tribe. Suddenly the full force of her tragic fate hit Pierre and he began sobbing softly, throat dry. Killing her would be more merciful, even if she could survive. Somehow, he would have to try to make up for his weakness.

As I awoke, I was still I. It was cool and dark; I lay on my side and ached, but the ache was still dull, in the background. Directly in front of me a face hung in darkness; in that first moment I thought it was a bird. Its skin was almost black, and its head and chin were covered in hair of the same color. The face smiled and floated upwards and then I saw that it sat on a broad, massive body. I heard its voice, deep and rumbling, but it was articulate sounds that I heard, not the meaningless stammer of a bird.

Only then did I truly take in my surroundings. Stone walls hung with colorful carpets, two glass chimneys where small fires burned, a low roof, a wide door, and instead of a window, a closed hatch in the wall.

I’d fallen into the enemy’s hands. I was at their mercy. Apart from my injuries, the gravity of the Yellow World pressed me down all on its own, making it impossible for me to move or even to breathe deeply enough.

A massive dark hand was laid on my forehead. Strangely, this touch comforted me, and I shut my eyes and fell asleep again.

The next period is blurred in my memory. There were alternating phases of intense pain, deep darkness, and numbness. Other than the dark one with the deep voice, there was another thickset figure who attended me regularly. In front she had wobbling heavy-looking appendages on her torso, and the thickest, blackest hair I had ever seen fell down her back. She washed me and fed me salty broth and a spicy gruel that lay heavily in my stomach. With a set expression, she stretched my arms and legs into the right shapes and splinted them while the bearded figure held my screaming body down. She spread salve on my back and encouraged me with noises and gestures to move my broken bones, to bend, stretch, and lift. But she never smiled.

Only the bearded man did that. He smiled wide, with white teeth and with tears in his eyes when he looked at me. And after what seemed like a lifetime, I could hold a spoon myself, and even if I took a long time and spilled, I was full when I was done eating. I lived like a just-hatched youth, fragile and barely strong enough to bear eir own weight. And as with a youth, there was someone near me most of the time, too, keeping me company and watching out for me. Nights, the bearded one often sat on my bed and spoke in his strange rolling language, listening to me as I told him everything that went through my head. We smiled a lot and occasionally we exchanged gestures, and one night he took my hand for the first time and pressed it cautiously, as if he was afraid he might shatter it.

His strength was unsettling and at the same time aroused a strange elation in me. I felt I trusted him, trusted the enemy, and I told him my name.

“Tuela.”

“Tu-e-la?”

“I’m Tuela.”

He laughed, long and booming, until my own belly resonated with it and I had to laugh, too.

“And I’m Pierre,” he said in his language. I understood him.

Nights. It would be too easy to say I loved him because he was the only one who was friendly and took any interest in me. It was more than that. It was a tension between us, something strange, exciting. We talked for hours; he helped me train my muscles, massaging them devotedly when I lay sweating and exhausted on my bed after strength training, and I felt this satisfied me just as little as it did him, without knowing what it was I longed for. And one night we pressed ourselves against one another on my bed, entangled ourselves in our ankle-length shirts, and pressed our open mouths against one another like birds shortly before nesting time. This was the night I discovered Pierre had a penis. I’d never—not even once—thought that I could regret not being an animal.

The next morning, led by Pierre’s hand, I passed through long cool halls and several stairways out into bright sunlight for the first time, still uncertain on my legs and fearful of the strange world outside my small room. There, I’d often shoved the sand-shutter to the side and looked over an endless yellow plain to a far-distant horizon. And nights I’d gazed up at the Dancing Stones and longed for their green buoyancy.

Now we stepped out into a stone gallery and looked into an inner courtyard with white sand, colorful carpets, large hairy animals, and green plants three times as tall as me spreading their wide green leaves out like a roof under the glaring sky. Everything here was fixed in place, nothing drifted or spun or shifted around anything else, everything I saw was oriented around the same reference point, just as if we still stood in a room in a solidly-built house. Between the trunks of the largest trees stretched hammocks where people lay and dozed in shadows; and at a hearth something was suspended over the open embers, exuding a delicious savory scent. Around this wide hall under the open sky were solid walls built out of solid cliffs, and even the sky with its even, steely blue seemed solid and immovable. I can’t describe that moment as anything but the feeling of having come home, where you could depend on your feet and the direction of gravity. I fell in love with the Yellow World the first moment I set foot on it awake and aware. Pierre stood next to me, small but twice as wide and ten times as strong as I; I clung to him hard and laughed and cried at once, and he laughed his sustained booming laugh.

We searched out a free carpet, and before Pierre sat with me he rang a bundle of bright bells hanging from a tree branch. Then he disappeared into the dark behind an open gate and came back with fresh water, dried fruit, and bread.

He began to eat slowly and methodically. While I, in accordance with the custom of his tribe, kept him silent company, the courtyard filled with ever more dark thickset people who scrubbed their hands in a sandbasin, sat down to eat, and eyed me curiously. Finally a good two hundred faces were turned to me, expectant, and Pierre said quietly:

“Very rarely do so many come to eat at the same time. They knew I would bring you with me today.”

He stood up.

“I know you want to find out more about Tuela. Ask your questions.”

The first to rise was an old man.

“Rock, do you want to begin?”

The elder nodded and turned to me, but asked the question loud enough for all those present to hear.

“You were on an exodus, yes?”

I didn’t know this word and shook my head, helpless.

“You wanted to invade.”

“Yes,” I said truthfully and felt ashamed. I stood up with Pierre’s help.

“I’m sorry. We’re trying to survive.”

“We all want to survive,” retorted a young woman. “But we manage it without raiding.”

“We don’t have fresh water. We’re not interested in your land. We need water.”

“And how did you want to transport water for so many people? On your mules somehow?”

For the first time I realized they took me for someone from the caravan I’d seen in the storm, and I glanced at Pierre for help. We’d never explicitly talked about it; I’d just always taken it for granted he knew what I was talking about when I spoke about the Dancing Stones. He nodded at me encouragingly.

“The birds would’ve carried it for us. They make things light or heavy.”

The surrounding faces looked at me without comprehension and I’d no idea how to begin to explain. Or if I even ought to explain. Strictly speaking, I would betray Utjok if I did.

While I hesitated, Pierre spoke for me.

“She doesn’t belong to the lost caravan. She comes from the Heights. She belongs to the ancient tribe of the Deathbirds.”

My heart beat wildly, fear-filled. I saw their doubt. And then I saw their fear. Fear of us.

“But how?”

“They can fly. Like in the old legends.”

“No one can fly.”

“She has to prove it first.”

“Look at her. She’s so different from us.”

“And what if she’s come to destroy us once and for all this time?”

Pierre lifted his hands in an appeasing gesture and the people stopped speaking over one another. He counted off on his fingers:

“She crashed. Her flightsuit is torn to shreds. She has no weapons. She’s alone. She can’t do anything to us.”

“What does she want here?”

“What she said: she wanted to get water because her tribe up there in the Heights is dying of thirst.”

“I told you so! A raid!”

“Would we have given them water of our own free will, then?”

No one answered, and again Pierre did it himself.

“No. Because anyone who doesn’t belong to us is, obviously, our enemy. But I tell you this way of thinking is a mistake! Since I found Tuela, I’ve thought a lot. About our lives and about the old stories. No one knows exactly what happened then. Why the little world shattered, why we live in a desert. We blame them and they blame us, and that’s the only thing that tells us for certain anything even happened back then. But that was then. And now is now. We have to stop this. We have to learn from each other so we can make our lives easier, together. Tuela’s stranded here. She can’t go back. I want us to take her into our tribe. That would be a tiny beginning, a small change.”

Pierre paused before he spoke further, looked me in the eyes, saw the pain that had balled up in me like a fist at his words, that choked me and weighed me down.

“I want to take her to wife.”

In the courtyard was silence, and Pierre stood there with outflung arms and waited for a reaction.

It was Jen who was the first to speak.

“But I won’t let you go.”

Pierre let his arms sink, astonished.

“I thought you’d be pleased. I thought I disgusted you.”

“You’re right. I’ve no desire for a man to lie beside me. And I’d let you go with pleasure. But—” Jen pointed at me. “I’ve seen her naked. She’s strange, she’s . . . not even a woman. If I can prevent her mixing with us through my refusal, I’ll accept being your wife.” Then she turned to me. “I’ve nothing against you personally. But you can’t be a man’s wife.”

“I want some proof,” said Elder Rock, quiet but clearly audible. “I want some proof that she isn’t human.”

And Jen tore my long white shirt down the front. And I felt their eyes on me like burning ice.

“It’s completely flat. It doesn’t even have nipples,” said Jen matter-of-factly. The simple observation sufficed as proof that Pierre and I could never be a couple. I lowered my head, asking myself how I could have let myself hope for even a second.

“Pierre, she can’t bear children,” said Rock.

“Of course I can’t bear children. No one can do that before they’ve died,” I said, tired.

Pierre’s face remained earnest as he turned to me.

“But I still want to marry you.” Then he turned again to his tribe. “I found her in the desert. It should be left to my decision.”

“You owe us children, Pierre,” said Rock softly.

“I know. But I ask this of you, nevertheless. Jen, I ask you as a friend: Let me go.”

Jen’s lips were narrow and she had her arms crossed over her breasts.

“Just the thought makes me sick. And Rock is right. You owe me a son.”

With that, she turned and walked away.

And I stood there shivering in the evening air that was quickly turning cold, two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on me.

Elder Rock laid a drape around my shoulders so I could cover what I didn’t possess. He clapped me on the shoulder as if he wanted to apologize.

“We aren’t done yet. There will be further questions,” he said. “About your homeland and how we can defend ourselves against you.”

Pierre brought me inside again. I saw fear in his eyes and felt it begin to clutch at me, too.

In the following days, I stayed in my room and Pierre came by only occasionally, for a few minutes. He said there were difficult times ahead for us and he’d stave off the worst.

I’d be neither killed nor chased into the desert. But Pierre couldn’t prevent them from piecing the rest together, too, from connecting the dead waterwatchers with my appearance. They blamed me, and Jen, who’d nursed me back to health, was particularly furious. True, I hadn’t killed her husband or any of the others. But I’d taken part in the missions during which they were murdered. I couldn’t deny my complicity, and so they debated over me and passed judgment.

Later Pierre explained to me it was Elder Rock who’d had the idea that I should get a chance to settle my debt—and I was beyond grateful to him. But I recognized the real thinking behind this, too: Should my people send watercarriers here again, I’d have a chance to return home. And perhaps to begin then what had become Pierre’s and my greatest wish: To live together. I didn’t explain to Pierre that for me there was yet another way home. Because I feared that way far too much.

So it was decided that deep in the mountain under the stronghold, I would change filters, work pumps, keep reservoirs clean, and sound alarms if anyone tried to invade.

It wasn’t, as I’d hoped, Pierre and Rock who took me below. I hadn’t seen Pierre for days; he kept himself away or was kept away. Two men I didn’t know accompanied me. They stared grimly ahead and positioned me between them like a prisoner who threatened to fly away at any moment. Inside the stronghold we went down countless steps; the entire mountain the stronghold was enthroned on must be shot through with tunnels and halls which generations of inhabitants had driven down ever deeper until they had finally struck water.

The deeper we went, the colder and damper it became, and I began to shiver in my shirt. The walls were slick with algae and fungus, and the halls we passed through at the end were so narrow that we could only shove ourselves forward single-file, sideways.

Then finally the pathway opened onto a round reservoir; the walls were brick, the roof was arched, and after the tallow-lamp-lit darkness of the halls, harsh sunlight fell in through a row of narrow embrasures on one side. A catwalk the width of a man ran along the circumference of the reservoir, and at regular intervals in the walls were set brick-lined niches where rations, weapons, blankets, clothing, filter screens, buckets, poles, brooms, and other equipment waited to be called into service.

The waterwatcher received us in front of the reservoir’s opposite exit. His niche was furnished with a large sack laid flat stuffed with sand and rags, a couple of blankets, and a mule-grease lamp smoldering in its glass cylinder. Overhead was a leather cord that disappeared into a hole in the wall.

“The alarm pull,” the watcher explained, brusque, and I nodded.

As he gathered up his personal belongings, he threw suspicious glances at me as if I might attack him from behind and cut off his head without a sound, as we did on our missions. Then he climbed back up into the stronghold with both of my escorts. Only now did I notice the bars of sturdy bone which they pulled closed behind them. I was alone.

Sunlight reflections painted swarming snakes on the walls. Unable to think clearly, I watched them until they faded. Only then did I fill the oil lamp out of a leather bucket and set about taking a closer look at my new home.

The second exit I’d noticed earlier was not barred. The hall behind it was as narrow as the one we’d come through, but it was dry. After some minutes spent stumbling over stony ground, I stood in a stairwell leading up. At its end, I stood at a second set of bars separating me from a long cavern where a second waterwatcher wrapped in a blanket lay on his rag sack and snored. Over the watcher’s camp was fixed an alarm pull just like the one below in my niche. The light of the Dancing Stones shone in through the entrance and drenched the view in a sickly sheen. The scene was familiar to me; I’d already been here once before, and I asked myself how the watcher could sleep so peacefully. It was no wonder it was so easy for us to steal from them, when you could simply murder them in their sleep. I would’ve liked to have woken the man and reproached him for his carelessness. Instead I climbed down again, to sleep a little myself.

And then I had nothing else to do but make my rounds regularly, scrape algae from the stones, sustain myself on dried fruit, meat, and fresh water, and throw my waste out through the light embrasures. Occasionally someone came to supplement my supplies, and several times during the day I made a pilgrimage to the upper bars. But none of the watchers on duty ever spoke with me. They all stared past me, and many spat on the floor contemptuously when I appeared. As time passed, I realized that they weren’t guarding their water so much as guarding me.

When Pierre finally came, I was already at the point where I was talking to myself.

“Tuela,” he said simply as he appeared at the lower bars. I recognized the deep rumble of his voice more with my gut than with my ears, and a tingling shot through my limbs that couldn’t be explained by just surprise.

He unlocked the bars and stepped in, bringing cheese and fresh soft bread and a pouch of hot tea that did my throat good, sore as it was from constant coughing.

“You’re too thin,” he said as he sat next to me on the rim of the reservoir and watched me eat.

“I was always this thin,” I replied, chewing.

“No, you weren’t. You’ve got to get out of here. Very soon.”

Pierre took my hand and looked at me out of great sad eyes.

“Should you be here with me at all?” I asked.

After all, I was someone put here to atone for the murder of several watchers. I coughed drily.

Pierre grinned. “I cheated a little.” Then he shook his head. “You really don’t look good.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wanted it to sound coquettish and carefree but I didn’t manage. It came out as a true thank you, one that acknowledged how much he worried about me.

“Can you swim?” I asked and wondered at myself for not having had the idea before. At home in the Heights I’d often swum in the drop-seas.

Pierre shook his head. “What’s swimming?”

“Letting yourself be held up by water. Moving through water.”

“Yourself? All of you?”

I nodded. “Come, I’ll show you!”

In a quick motion, I stripped off the fur vest and my unlaundered, greasy shirt, and stepped up to the rim of the reservoir. The water we had at home originated on this world, maybe even from this reservoir. But at home the water was bright and transparent. You could see all the way through and laugh over the strangely wobbling boulders on the other side. Here below, the water was opaque and black and you didn’t know how deep it was. Or what was under there. I hesitated. But then Pierre stood next to me, his penis erect, aroused and full of anticipation. And we let ourselves slip together into the icy water and I showed him how it held us up. At first he was a little fearful, holding onto the edge, but soon he swam with powerful spluttering strokes and savored the gliding motion. After that, we lay wrapped in my blanket and made love while golden snakes danced over the walls and Pierre’s black shoulders gleamed in the light that reflected off of the water.

And again I described for him our Dancing Stones: the sky’s depths, the blue of eggs, and how the childcatchers collect the youths as soon as they leave their nests and threaten to fall over the Stones’ edges.

“Don’t the parents pay proper attention to them?” he murmured, sleepy.

I didn’t have an answer for that, because that question had never occurred to me. What would happen if you left the youths to the birds? What would they become? I shook my head.

“Who would they learn to speak from? How would they leave their Stones without flightsuits? When the Dancing Stones were still all one piece, it might have been possible. But now . . . ”

I described how we grow up with our siblings. How we play. How we learn to fly. But I didn’t describe how we die to him. The thought frightened me. For the first time in my life it was actually important to me that I live. Because I wanted to be together with Pierre, because I wanted something we could call “our life.” Pierre didn’t tell me what would happen if someone caught us. He’d gone to sleep.

And they did catch us. There were eight of them, and they appeared, heads glistening, gasping for air, in the middle of the reservoir. There must have been a hidden inlet below, perhaps a brick channel or a crack in the stone. The water had to come from somewhere, after all. They swam better than Pierre; they were practiced. Their arms cut with quiet liquid noise through the water and pulled their heavy bodies up onto the catwalk where they smacked their shivering bellies and backs to warm themselves. They laughed until someone ordered them tightly to lower their voices. I knew the voice.

It belonged to Utjok, who was the last to get out of the water, slender, and shivering just as much as the thickset men ey had come with. Ey was, as always, the leader.

I wanted to jump up, wanted to hurl myself at em. But Pierre held me tight, shaking his head silently. We were only two. Utjok pulled a sack out of the water by a long rope one of the men had bound about his hips, and passed out pickaxes and knives to eir new squadron. I’d no doubt ey would kill Pierre if ey discovered him, just as we’d killed without hesitation on our missions. And suddenly I was uncertain ey wouldn’t kill me, too, when ey realized we no longer stood on the same side.

Pierre and I pulled ourselves further back into the shadows of my niche silently and waited. They took the path down through the inner bars, tearing them right off their hinges with the help of a pickaxe and a rope.

As soon as the last man had disappeared, I reached up and tore at the alarm pull. The leather cord was rotted through; its end came loose in my hand.

Pierre didn’t even take the time to throw on a shirt.

“I’ll go around outside. Rock’s there! He can give the alarm.”

I held tight to his arm. “They belong to the lost caravan. I know it—we saw them on our approach.”

Pierre nodded. “I know, let me go!”

“Utjok was leader of my squadron. Somehow, under the surface, they must have . . . ”

“I know! There’s no time for this now.”

Pierre pulled away without kissing me.

“And me?” I called after him. “What if more of them come? If they discover me?”

Pierre paused. “Come with me,” he said and we went together, shoving ourselves as fast as possible through the narrow passage, naked.  

The upper bars were locked. Rock lay not even an arm’s length from us. The alarm pull was sliced through, just like his throat. His wrinkled face lay in an already congealing pool of blood. He must have been dead for hours. In his fist, Pierre found the key.

“Why didn’t they just come in through here?”

“Eight of them? We would’ve seen them from the wall. The Heights stand in the sky.” Pierre pointed to the full bags and saddles standing ready in the cave. “Early tomorrow morning we three would have been gone. On our way north,” he said sadly.

So that was what he’d meant when he’d said I had to get out. He and Rock had had a plan.

Despite the fear taking hold of me, I rejoiced inside. For the first time in countless days, I breathed the fresh metallic-tasting air of the surface; for the first time in days I felt the wind on my skin. We ran on, naked and barefoot, through the acidic sand. By the time we reached the narrow outer steps, our soles were bleeding, but there was no time left to worry about that. I struggled upwards against the gravity, Pierre hauling me after him and cursing because we were so slow. When I realized he’d signed his own death warrant by taking me up along with him it was already too late.

I knew the wallwatcher awaiting us above. He’d spat in a pouch of dried meat before handing it through the bars to me with a smile. And I’d spat back, hitting him on the chin. He spotted me before he saw Pierre. And while they overpowered us on this side of the stronghold, the strangers invaded from inside and killed more than fifty sleeping people before they were stopped.

Again they blamed me. No matter how Pierre and I stated our case, I’d killed Elder Rock, I’d let the strangers in. As evidence, it sufficed that their leader was a white gangling freak like me. Naturally I’d been in contact with em the entire time and planned everything out long beforehand.

Utjok, eir new squadron, and I were all sentenced to a dishonorable death. We would be pitched from the stronghold wall. The sand would quickly dispose of our remains. The tribe could afford it; there were more than enough other dead to consume. But there was worse in store for Pierre. He would be sent into the desert on foot with enough water to last only a few days. His chances of survival were far slimmer than mine.

When the moment came I begged to be allowed to wear my old helmet. Utjok had lost eirs in the vast labyrinth under the surface, and someone had removed the blinded visor from mine. But it was better than nothing.

I felt no fear as I stood on the battlements naked and chained next to Utjok and eir people. The survivors from Pierre’s tribe stood close behind us in their full number, robes fluttering. I would die, and I didn’t mind. In those last moments of my life I felt only gratitude at being allowed to see the soft shine of the Dancing Stones one more time with my own eyes, and the longing to finally return suffused me.

There was no ceremony, no pronouncement of the sentence. A row of people stepped forward, spiked staves held tight in their hands. With astonishment I recognized Jen among the executioners. In a moment of rage I considered grabbing her stave and dragging her with me into the depths. But it was unlikely that would work. The wall was too high; Jen’s center of gravity was far too low.

I concentrated. More important than revenge was somehow managing to control my fall. Even without a suit and the chance to lie as spread-eagle as possible on the wind. Jen shoved first Utjok and then me down with one hard, focused strike apiece.

And we flew, flew too fast; I saw the strange men and my former squadron leader tumble down before and beside me, rebound off of stones, saw as they dashed against the ground far out, naked like the child whose ribcage I’d squashed more than a lifetime ago. The same thing would happen to us now.

I didn’t lose consciousness, although the breakneck fall tore the breath from my lips, although my instincts balked against experiencing my death while conscious. Despite everything, I stayed with myself as my backbone broke, as my organs burst, as my lungs collapsed. Around me eight bodies struck the ground with dull finality. Utjok didn’t manage it. Eir skull was smashed to pieces.

Do we remember the first moments after our birth? They fade so quickly and there are no words for them, because we experience entirely new feelings that we have to learn first. None of us still remember the day of our birth.

But a piece of Tuela remembers, a piece that we retain until it is time to reach a decision whose necessity we begin to divine. We remember.

At first there was a distant many-voiced whisper. Then eyes opened and looked into a familiar face. The name that belonged to it wanted to be spoken. But there was no throat any longer, no vocal cords, and the tongue had retracted, had begun to turn into a tract deep in the throat which felt an unprecedented sensual itch at the sight of this face. Greedily the bird-mouth gaped open to receive its lover, and a demanding gurgle rose from it.

But he did not understand us and shrank back, letting Tuela’s helmet fall into the sand, and we slid from his lap into the biting sand and screamed in pain.

Quickly, Pierre picked us back up, shoved a scarf under us that would protect us for a while, and dripped water in our mouth. A hot wind stroked over the feathers already shoving through the skin of our cheeks. The separation took place quickly. Our new feet kicked out of the old neck, wings unfolded themselves, and last of all, the spine binding us to the old body dissolved with a quiet, definitive pain.

In that moment Tuela began to fade and she had to hold herself together with effort. She holds on now, still, and we help her by encapsulating her life in this story. We begin to feel the urgency she felt. We want her plan to work.

Pierre picked up our new body carefully, wrapping it loosely in his scarf, and we slept as he carried us away from the stronghold deeper into the desert. He went to his own death, but that did not bother us. We just needed a little peace. We slept lulled by the soft swing of his steps, slept until agonizing thirst woke us and he gave us water. We beat our wings, fluttered up, and turned our first reeling rounds on the steady wind of the Yellow World.

Seated on a stone, Pierre watched us, full of astonishment. And as we landed in his lap, a little clumsy and awkward yet, he let us quiet the other longing, too, let us drink our fill from him as birds do. He shook as he gave us semen and, after, we watched him cry many salty tears that mixed, bubbling, with the sand.

When he had cried himself out, the Dancing Stones stood slanting over the horizon, and his mouth moved. He spoke, but we no longer had ears that could hear him. We heard now only our own distant whisper deep in our skull, but we heard no wind, no hiss of sand. Not his booming voice that had moved Tuela to laughter. The world was silent and Pierre’s lip movements struck us as ridiculous and lewd and we tried to laugh. Pierre stopped talking, staring at us.

What must he have seen? Tuela’s head without the body he had loved sat before him on bird feet and blinked at him. The hair had fallen out of that head. Instead it grew light-colored feathers. She wanted to say that he shouldn’t speak, that there were more important things now, but his expression told her she uttered only sounds, meaningless guttural bird sounds, wet and ugly, that made them both sad.

Tuela felt it would be a relief to give up the past; the temptation was great, the promise of the eternal moment enticing. She could have turned around and flown away, back home. Forever. She was tired, as dying is hard work against which one cannot shield oneself. But although we suffered growth pains, the pain of rejection, and the pain of loss, we were not really dismayed and we felt that home would accept us.

But there is something still better than forgetting—more life! Togetherness! Trees to sleep in!

The realization of how simple it would be to have all of this forced Tuela anew to hoarse laughter. Our lung volume had shrunk and pulled back into the inside of our cranial cavity. That chamber of bone was still there and in its interior there was a new pitch-black dot with seven layers, one for each dimension, harder than stone and as all-encompassing as an entire universe. We felt its pulse, felt how our thoughts reached for it. This awareness was what made us heavier or lighter; suddenly the gravity of the Yellow World no longer pressed us down. We weighed less than nothing; our flight was elegant and we savored it. We understood the Dance of Stones and how we brought it about; we saw the warping of space in and around us, and it pleased us.

Once, in school, Tuela had dissected a dead bird. She had removed the cherry-sized seven-hulled kernel from its brainstem, had cut it open. She had found a smaller cherry inside, and inside one smaller yet, and so on to infinity. Life is exactly as large inside as outside, and the flight to the center of a molecule takes just as long as that to the edge of the galaxy. They do not realize everything is just as light as it is heavy, just as large as small. Just as sweet as sour. It is easier than thinking. It is easier than wanting. It simply happens.

Pierre no longer sat on his weathered stone. Instead he hung helpless in the air under us with his arms paddling; we had picked him up with us, and we admit, his fear amused us. And then we started on our way. We hoped we would be welcome.

The we seemed so self-evident to us now that the interest in everything single and separate quickly faded. Only not in Pierre. We took him with us, we rescued him from the desert as he had rescued Tuela, and now we are responsible for him. We watch him as he lies in the salt meadow of a Dancing Stone and looks down at the Yellow World. He teaches us writing and we drink from him still, and he lets us. Although Tuela no longer hears his rumbling and booming she does not lose herself and stays near him. Why? Why am I still interested in him?

Because I still feel somewhat to blame for him? Because we both owe our tribes a child? Or because nothing of him will remain if he dies, not even his dream of a life together. His kind die so much more thoroughly than we do.

Pierre is not dead. You are together, so far as it is possible. What more could he and Tuela wish for?

We said already: More life! What we all strive for as soon as we die. We want to create life!

Only you are not biologically compatible.

Right. But we’ve learned life emerges from death, as Tuela died in the desert.

Think about it, feel it: Our power to hold the Dancing Stones is just as big as small.

There are no boundaries in any direction.

Stone that grinds to salt under its own weight.

Pierre’s tears that sizzle in acid sand.

Dancing Stones and the Yellow World.

Water gushing out of the dark in shimmering seas.

We could sleep in trees again, under a steady sky.

We could make one living world out of two dying ones.

Sun gave way to shadow, the wind came up, and suddenly it was cool. Pierre awoke as the storm tore at his hair, and instinctively he shielded his face with his arms. But it was no storm like Yellow’s. It was the thundering of millions of wings around him. The smiling mouths, winking eyes, and shimmering feathers of the Deathbirds were everywhere, surrounding him. He stood up cautiously so as not to startle them; he walked around the Stone on which his tiny hand-built hut of tough grass stood. Nothing but whirring, calling, rejoicing birds everywhere.

Pierre ducked, covering his head as they came nearer and their wings brushed his shoulders. He thought about the old story: If you don’t watch out, they’ll take your head!

Then he felt himself lose contact with the ground, felt as he began to drift away from his Stone. He tried to hold tight to the roof of his hut but his hands missed their grip. Dammit, did you have to wear your flightsuit here even when you were sleeping?

Then the bird that had been Tuela set down on his back, bent over his shoulder, blinked, and kissed him tenderly. He hadn’t seen Tuela for days; she’d been troubled and preoccupied, but now she looked as though she’d never in her earlier or her present life been so happy. She let a little piece of grass paper fall into his hand.

We go below. We go home, stood there in her still-uncertain scrawling child’s script.

Originally published in German in Space Rocks, edited by Harald Giersche, 2011.

About the Author

Karla Schmidt is a German cross-genre author of short fiction, novelettes, and novels. Her work has been nominated for the German Science Fiction, Kurd LaBwitz, and German Phantastik Prizes (”Alone, on the Wind” was nominated for all three). In 2009, her short story “Weg mit Stella Maris” (”Away with Stella Maris”) won the German Science Fiction Prize for Best German-language Short Story.

She lives with her husband and two daughters in Berlin. In addition to editing for publishing houses and self-published authors, she develops material for Schule des Schreibens (School of Writing) and teaches in its novel-writing workshop.

The Fish Merchant

Tobias S. Buckell

Li Hao-Chang, standing in front of a colorful array of fresh-caught fish, bargains with a Cantonese peasant over the price of yellow-tailed snapper. Where the Wharf tapers out, and the harbor is too shallow for the larger trawlers, the fish market thrives over a patch of old concrete and dirt.

The peasant finally offers enough yuan to satisfy Li.

“Xie xie,” Li thanks the peasant, wrapping the fish up in old newspaper. The edge of the newspaper catches Li’s eye.

“Signals From Outer Space,” it reads.

Li doesn’t much care. All men can be awed by discovery, for Li there is selling fish. He has to make enough to pay rent, to eat, and to save. If he doesn’t sell enough fish for rent, the local thugs come over to beat him up. If he doesn’t make enough to eat, his wife goes hungry, and if he can’t save, he’ll never be able to leave Macau and the smell of fish that seems to taint his life.

The frenzied noise dips slightly near the stall. Li looks up from tossing ice on the fish to see what it is. A dark figure in a duster, moving through the fish stalls with a quiet confidence.

Pepper.

The man called Pepper stops and sniffs. Li knows the air he sniffs is alive with fish, and street sewer, and sweat. And something else. On the edge of all the sandpapery shark and still croaking grouper is the smell of fear.

Li Hao-Chang watches Pepper carefully. Li stands nervously behind his untreated plywood table glistening with fish juices, and keeps his eyes averted.

Maybe the mercenary senses something, maybe his reflexes are keyed up beyond belief, a soup of tailored chemicals thudding through his bloodstreams. Maybe he is about to reach beneath the heavy folds of his dark gray oilskin duster and pull out a massive shotgun.

Pepper’s steely gray eyes roll over the street and bore into Li Hao Chang.

“Afternoon, Hao-Chang.”

His voice is as artificially gray as his eyes. All are carefully designed with respect in mind. Li knows Pepper sure as hell isn’t here to buy grouper.

“Afternoon, Mr. Pepper.”

Li is careful to keep conversation at a minimum. Pepper is usually not out in the street to chat.

Pepper looks around the surrounding stalls, his presence cutting though the babble of the crowd. The kaleidoscope of multi-racial faces washes past Li’s table, their differences slight in comparison to Pepper’s own contrasting strangeness. Rastafarian mercenaries do not seem to belong in any landscape, let alone Macau. His leather duster hangs low, the soft rain running off in rivulets and his half dreadlocks are tied back into a ponytail.

Li notices slight movement in the far distance, the crowd jostled by someone, and his ears catch the distant delayed puff of a silenced weapon. Pepper’s body jerks sideways, and he crumples to the sidewalk. A peasant hurries past, ducking. The man who steps forward out of the crowd pockets his gun, then leans over. Li can hear the distinctive British lilt.

“Oy. He’s down.”

A silver armored Rolls Royce with tinted windows quickly parts the wave of panicked fish buyers. The rear doors open forward, and the mercenary is pulled across the cement, up into the car. The Brit has enough grafted muscle to have trouble getting into the Rolls.

Li looks down at spotted grouper and waits for the Rolls to leave. When he looks back up there is only an empty sidewalk in front of his table.

“Ni hao,” he mutters to himself. The sidewalk is not entirely empty. A small disk lies near a puddle of thickening blood, already rust-colored against the dirty cracked concrete of the Wharf.

Li darts out to pick it up. Pepper haunts the Wharf regularly. If Li does him a favor and saves the disk, then maybe Pepper will do him a favor.

The disk, covered in green symbols Li doesn’t understand, makes a ‘snick’ sound as he picks it up. He looks down at his finger to see a point of blood, and thinks maybe he has cut his finger on a piece of glass.

Li Hao-Chang returns to his stall and puts the case into his purse. Maybe Pepper will pay him yuan for the case.

If Pepper returns, he thinks, dabbing at the cut with a piece of newspaper.

But Li has faith in Pepper. Pepper gives off a mystique of calculated invincibility. Pepper walks the Wharf, and the Wharf stays away from him. All the local gangs, no matter what color. Tan Italian, pale American, each learn Pepper’s skills the hard way. They never try again.

Blacks are particularly nervous around him. Pepper is chocolate, with a white’s gray eyes. He shows no ties to skin, he kills black as efficiently as white or any other shade. They call Pepper the black ghost.

The black ghost, because after every battle, no matter the injuries, Pepper comes back to life. How many back-up blood pumps are laced through his torso? How much artificial adrenaline is produced by small chemical factories in his stomach? Are his eyes really spliced hawk genes? Rumors trickle.

Li Hao-Chang has seen this scene before. Pepper will be back.

Li Hao-Chang gets home early and hands Mei two snappers.

“Yi qi chi fan ke yi ma?” He asks very formally of his wife, as if they were meeting for the first time. Mei smiles and curtseys.

“I would be honored to have dinner with you.” She has rice already boiling in a wok; the fish can be chopped and sautéed, then mixed with rice. She is used to fish. Fish boiled, fried, baked, or cooked in any manner she can think of. Fish broth she gives to him in a thermos for lunch. And breaded fish they eat for breakfast before he leaves.

Li knows she hungers for a beef stir-fry almost as much as he does, but they are saving the money for the trip. Out of Macau, and over to Manila, then to the United States of America.

“Wo ai ni,” he says softly, kissing her hair. She laughs and pulls away with the fish.

“Let me cook the fish, Li, then we can talk of love over rice.”

Li smiles and pushes through the beads into the washroom.

“Pepper was at the fish market,” he says, scrubbing away at the smell of fish vigorously. It doesn’t work. The smell stays on despite the hard loamy soap. It reaches into clothes, into the sleeping pallet, and into the walls of the house.

He rinses his hands and comes back into the kitchen.

“Did he buy any fish?”

Li laughs and moves over to help Mei cook, expertly searing the strips of fish she hands him over the bubbling oil. The aroma is sweet with Mei’s spices, but still familiar.

“No, I do not think Mr. Pepper likes fish. A British car came and took him away.”

Mei swears to herself and chops at the head of the snapper, startling him. Mei doesn’t like the British. Her family maintains the distrust, over Taiwan, over the Opium Wars, all history that to Li is many generations buried.

He gives Mei a long hug.

“The British will not hold him long.”

“I wonder,” she says, “why they took him away? He is a dangerous man.”

“Maybe they have something they want from him. Pepper, he knows things.”

Li can tell, though, that Mei does not wish to speak about Pepper any more. So he changes the subject, while testing fish broth with a wooden spoon.

“It is good, as usual.”

“Xie xie.”

Li takes a rice bowl and spoons in fish and broth, clicking his chopsticks, a gift from Mei’s brother. He always honors Ahn’s memory at meals with them.

“More foreigner tourists today,” she says through a mouthful of rice. “I got generous tips. A man from Texas. I told him our dream. He was very nice.”

“That is good.”

Li talks to his wife about weather, and the new docks being built. She tells him about the white tourists she guides around the city of Macau. They record everything on little cameras as she herds them around in little groups like sheep. She does not believe they ever actually see the city, they hide behind the small screen, and icons like ‘zoom,’ and ‘pan left.’

Li chuckles. His wife is quick-minded.

After dinner he washes the bowls quickly and follows Mei to their pallet. Even after five years he still finds it amazing that she gave up Beijing for him.

He kisses her, then they lower down to the pallet.

When he pulls out the government condom he can see the sadness in her eyes. He knows she wishes for children, but they cannot afford a child now. Not until they reach America.

“It is all for the better,” he says, knowing that the sadness will pass quickly, and that Mei will become her cheerful self after a while.

“I know,” she says, pulling him to her. “It doesn’t make it any easier.”

A tapping wakes Li. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes and stumbles through the dark. It is raining, and a dark figure stands at his door.

Li fights a wave of dizziness.

“Hao-Chang.” Pepper’s voice penetrates Li’s befuddlement, and he snaps awake.

“Pepper, I have something for you,” Li says quickly. He wonders what the mercenary is doing here.

Pepper’s steel eyes blink.

“Qing jiang ying wen,” he says slowly, as if unsure of himself. His Cantonese is usually impeccable, now he stumbles over the words as if they are unfamiliar.

“In English,” Li nods. “I am sorry. Of course. I have something you dropped, a disk, on the pavement, earlier today.”

Pepper nods. Li notices that Pepper is in bad shape; blood soaks the shirt underneath the leather duster.

“It has a tracker in it. I followed it here.”

“I will get it for you.” Li turns to go back in for his purse, but Pepper grabs his forearm. Li reflexively tries to pull away, fear spiking as he turns back, realizing the grip is unbreakable. Pepper pulls out a small needle, ignoring Li’s wince as he slides the tip under the skin.

“The disk is important, and poisoned, to kill the one that steals from me. You were infected, when you touched it. Now you will be safe.”

Pepper walks into Li’s kitchen and carefully sits down on the bench, just as Mei comes in, wrapping herself in a robe. Li looks down at the tip of his finger, then closes the door.

“Wan shang hao,” she says, greeting Pepper.

“Evening,” he replies. “I apologize for waking you. I’m hurt very badly, and I don’t have anywhere to spend the night.”

Mei shoots Li a quick glance of inquiry, what is this dangerous man doing here? Li wonders himself, but he thinks of Pepper’s yuan and America, and he nods okay to her. She reluctantly turns her questioning glance to Pepper.

“I will get you a blanket.”

Li grabs his purse and hands Pepper the small disk. Pepper pockets it, then takes the blanket Mei comes back and offers. Within a minute the gray eyes slide shut, and the man is asleep.

Mei quietly makes a pot of tea, and they sit and look at the massive black man asleep on their floor.

“Is he going to die?” Li wonders, amazed. His voice cracks slightly. Mei shakes her head.

“He will not die. He is strong, he is built to handle and take these kinds of things.” She would know such things. She once studied medicine at Beijing University. “He will probably be here a while,” Mei continues.

“What would you have me say?” Li hisses. “No? And refuse him?”

Mei doesn’t answer, she stares just past him, disapproving. Li sips his tea and calms himself. She knows that he is making the best of what he can in the situation for both of them.

Li leans forward and kisses her on the forehead.

“I must go to the fish market early,” he says. “I am going back to bed.”

Mei’s warm body is snuggled alongside him. Li reluctantly pulls away and into the cold morning. Pepper is asleep on the kitchen floor, the blanket Mei gave him discolored with rust-brown stains.

The rain still beats a tattoo against the side of the small apartment.

Li makes tea, sipping it quickly, then pauses to grab two large wicker baskets before he leaves for the docks. There, in the dim light of the morning he buys his fish from the back of a trawler. An eerie, silent, process. Li points with yuan clenched in his fist, then the men shovel fish into his baskets.

He carries the load of fish back to his stall, back straining against the weight.

Mei comes over to the fish stall at lunch with his thermos of fish broth.

“Forgetful,” she teases him.

“Always.”

She kisses him on the nose. Then she furrows her eyebrows.

“Our ‘guest’ still sleeps. I washed and changed his blankets. He is feverish now. I think it will break before tonight.”

“Can I sell you a fish?” Li asks, holding a large squid out at her. “Very delicious.” Mei pushes it away.

“Bu shi. I do not want your fish, vendor, now go and sell it to some other poor soul.”

Mei turns and walks away down the rows of stalls, and Li watches his wife walk with pride. She is a beautiful woman, and he is a lucky man. In America, they will do well, he thinks.

There is fish to be sold, though.

Pepper’s face is much paler than it should be, and covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Li is worried.

“Ni hao ma?” Mei asks him.

“I am fine,” Li replies. “But what of him?”

“Pepper is sick. But he is getting better,” Mei reassures him. “His body knows what is best for him. The Westerner has things in his body that are cleansing it, and fixing the damage.”

Li remembers some of Mei’s tales about Western medicine. Tiny machines that he could not see even if placed on a fingertip can run through Pepper’s body to find what is wrong, then fix it.

Pepper mumbles through his shivering.

“Jah, ya man. Irie. Okay, okay, there it is, a sweet thing, no? English, English.”

Most of the rest Li does not understand. It is in English so heavily accented he cannot make it out. It is not English like everyone else speaks. Li thinks he sometimes hears some of this strange accent when Pepper speaks to him at the Wharf, but not much. Pepper must suppress it, he decides.

He takes his bowl of rice and fish and heads over to their pallet to eat it.

After washing, Mei kisses him fiercely, but tonight it is Li who is thoughtful.

“I cannot,” he says, “with another man under the same roof.” The apartment is small, and he cannot forget the presence of the large mercenary.

Pepper is sitting on the bench in the morning, sipping tea, his jaw a chiseled line of thoughtfulness. Mei makes to batter fish for a breakfast as Li grabs his two wicker baskets, but Pepper holds up a hand.

“You stay here, today, Li,” he says in that startling voice. “I need you.”

Li looks down at his baskets.

“I must sell fish.”

Pepper holds out a fistful of yuan. It covers a week of fish selling, and Li looks greedily down at it.

Pepper hands the yuan to Li.

“You need not sell fish today. Buy breakfast for us, something with lots of meat. I need the protein. But not fish.” Pepper smiles a perfect set of teeth. “I have an errand for you to run. It is very important.” He has the disk Li rescued earlier in his hand.

“What is it you need, Pepper?”

With the thick fold of cash in his hands, under the watchful eye of Mei, Pepper has Li’s full attention.

Pepper tells Li to first go straight down past the Wharf into town, to David Tsung.

With the wad of yuan in his pocket Li decides to first detour down a street lined with food stalls.

He stops in front of a small cart on wheels.

‘Wok on wheels’ emblazons the side of the cart, in both English and Chinese characters.

Li is not as interested in deciphering the unfamiliar English symbols; the scent of meat frying on oiled metal draws him in. He realizes his mouth is full of saliva. He hands over yuan for a small dish, greedily scooping meat and sauce into his mouth, relishing the taste of meat.

“Xie xie,” he says, but the cook has already turned away from him to toss more strips into the wok to sizzle and dance.

Li watches the cook tease ingredients into the mixture for several seconds as he finishes his meal, then tosses the paper dish at a gutter and continues on.

David Tsung is an old man from Canton. He sells computers. Or at least, Li thinks so, as the windows of the small store show computers in fading old pictures. As Li steps in a bell dings. He closes his eyes to muster courage, and wishes he had never picked up the tiny disk. Even despite the promise of Pepper’s yuan, Li is scared.

“What do you want?” A sharp voice from behind the counter.

“Ni hao. I am here to buy a laptop, and a cellular modem.”

David Tsung looks Li up and down slowly, squinting eyes scrutinizing the shabby clothes, dirty hands. The smell of fish has entered the store with Li. Li self-consciously rubs his hands against his trousers to try cleaning them.

Tsung abruptly cackles laughter.

“You have won the lottery, then?”

Li shakes his head.

“What money do you have?” Tsung asks. Li pulls the black info-disk out and sets it on the counter in front of Tsung.

“Pepper says you should know what to do with this.”

David Tsung jumps slightly at the mention of the name ‘Pepper.’

“Shi. But I told him I would think about it, I never have promised anything. It is dangerous.”

Tsung thoughtfully picks the disk up, then drops it and swears. Li sees Tsung’s finger drop a bead of blood, and assumes that Tsung is also now poisoned. Li is having trouble staying calm. His heart is running away from him, and nervous sweat beads his brow. The threat of death through poison is an ancient bargaining chip, Li knows. It is all that Pepper has armed him with. He hopes it is enough to force the old man to do Pepper’s will.

But Pepper’s words are in his head, walking him through. Li can still feel the pleasurable press of the yuan in his pocket against the side of his leg, and the beef in his stomach, so he speaks up.

“Pepper says not to be alarmed. The infection will take a day to develop. Only Pepper knows the antidote.”

Tsung’s voice rises in pitch as he continues swearing, but he looks scared.

“Pepper wants a laptop with cellular modem,” Li repeats. “And he wants you to make safety copies of this info-disk.” As Tsung steps back from the counter Li sees the shotgun strapped to his forearm, and his heart quickens.

I’m going to die, he thinks. The poison isn’t enough of a threat. Maybe Tsung is going to kill me. Does he think I carry the antidote with me?

But Tsung beckons for Li to come through into the back with him.

“You Pepper’s messenger, eh? How is Pepper. He okay?”

Li nods.

“Good. I’m glad.” Li follows Tsung through the door, and they stand in a room filled with computers of all ages in various states of disassembly. Tsung hunts through several drawers before he pulls out a small laptop. “Here, here,” he says. Li accepts the small notebook and stands waiting.

Tsung plugs the disk into another computer. He fiddles around with something on a screen, then smacks his lips as the drive begins whirring.

“I will make copies.”

Li nods. Even if Tsung weren’t, how would he know otherwise? So he stands and waits for the old man to finish and hand him the original plus a copy.

“The antidote?” Tsung asked.

“Pepper says it is in the mail for you. It will arrive in time.”

The little old tech-man seems to deflate even further into himself. He holds up another disk in his clawed hands.

“You tell Pepper I have copies. I will send them out if I don’t get an antidote. You understand. Tell him.”

Li nods.

“You make sure you tell him to send me antidote.”

On his way back Li stops at the ‘wok on wheels’ and orders several dishes of Iron Plate Beef. Rice will be waiting at home. The cook remembers him and smiles as he hands Li the covered paper dishes all in a bag with the logo emblazoned on the side.

He splashes through the early morning with a faint smile. The sweet aroma of stir fried beef mixed with kuomo mushrooms and bamboo shoots reaches his nose.

“Wo ai ni,” Mei says the second he steps through the door. She hugs him fiercely, and he kisses her back.

“I love you too.”

Pepper waits for the exchange to finish before he steps forward.

“Did you get everything?”

Li unshoulders the strap of the laptop case and hands it over. Pepper unzips it and sets in on the small table in the corner.

“I bet Tsung was pissed.”

Li nods.

“He swore much.” He catches Mei’s glance out of the corner of his eye. She is looking at the bag in his hand. He gives it to her.

Mei breezes out of the kitchen with a paper dish into their sleeping room. Li knows she doesn’t want to be seen greedily bolting the food down. He respects that. He can still taste the aroma on the edge of his tongue. He desires more. Instead he crosses his legs and sits with Pepper.

Pepper’s bulk dwarfs him.

“You risked my life for this, what is it?” Li asks.

Pepper looks up at him and makes a sucking sound with his teeth.

“Man,” he says in English, “you risked your own life, for the money I gave you.” He smiles perfect white teeth again. “But I shouldn’t be hard on you. Na.” Li notices the strange lilt still in Pepper’s English. “It is a great secret.”

“Some secrets are better kept secret.”

“Not this one.” Pepper boots up the small laptop, and it makes squealing noises as it dials into an invisible network. “This secret is exactly the kind that shouldn’t be kept.”

“Tell me.”

“You read much, Li? Do you read the newspapers you wrap your fish in?” Pepper looks up and around. “A few months ago satellites around the world received a message from somewhere outside of the solar system. Then it stopped. No one could decipher it, it didn’t make any sense, but it was definitely artificial.” Pepper’s yellowed nails are dancing across the small keyboard.

Li waits as he plugs the disk into the laptop.

“Of course, everyone is curious. What sent it? Will there be more messages? That’s what I am here for. My superiors tell me to keep my eyes open and ears to the ground.” The English adage is unfamiliar to Li, but he guesses the meaning.

“You found things.”

“Observatories on each major landmass across the world are receiving similar messages now.” Pepper shifts on the seat and reaches for a dish of beef. He keeps talking through a full mouth. “North and South America, Africa, Europe, Australia . . . but Chinese officials denied they had any message. It took two weeks to find this damn version of the message, I got it through a scientist working at a deep-space observatory in Canton. And the message he received is different from all the others. The Chinese clocks show that this message is received first, and only in China. And the intervals in between the message are getting smaller. The other signals are merely repetitions to make sure the rest of the world is blanketed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hao-Chang. Whatever it is, it will come here.”

Pepper unplugs the case and slips it deep into the folds of his duster.

“Now, everyone in the Western Hemisphere has a copy of the Chinese message. Everyone is in on the great secret.” The modem is quiet, the screen asks the user if they would like to send another message. “And there it is. For what it’s worth. Now maybe foreigners will quit harassing me.”

Mei comes back into the room, discreetly wiping at her chin. Li unconsciously moves closer to her.

Before he reaches her there is a polite knock on the door.

Li knows that he has no neighbors here, and he knows Mei has no family anywhere near the Wharf. The fact trickles down through his mind with a cold shiver. Pepper looks up from the paper dish and puts it to his side. He reaches deep into the duster.

The knock comes again.

Only this time the door is flung aside and a dim figure is in the room. Pepper rolls and fires something loud through his duster. Instinctively Li closes his eyes against the noise. He drops to the ground, and stays still.

He hears more clatter, the sounds ringing in his ears. His heart thumps loud, and he prays for life.

Mei gasps and falls near him. As Li looks down at his hands he sees blood, Pepper and the assailant are gone, chasing each other through the maze of small huts and apartments.

“Mei,” he whispers. The only response is a short gasp, Li can hardly hear it. He gets to his knees and bends over his wife.

“Mei.”

He sees her reaching for air, but not getting any. Instead of exhaling she coughs up blood. It runs down her cheek and onto the dirt floor. Li cannot find words; he starts to gather her up in his arms, but she coughs again, the action racking her small body. He holds her there, in his arms, just above the dirt floor.

Her eyes are glazed, wandering around the room unfocused. Li puts his face before her. For a brief second her eyes seem to focus on him, then they are looking past him, and he can no longer feel the slight flutter of her heart.

“Mei.”

Li allows her body to gently slip back onto the dirt floor. He weeps, his tears mixing with the stale rainwater dripping in through the bullet-holes in the roof.

He barely notices the gun battle outside cease, or Pepper silently returning. Pepper stands at the door for a minute, then carefully crawls into a corner.

Li stays kneeled over the body of his wife for several hours.

Pepper shakes Li’s shoulder early in the morning. Pepper is pale, and the duster is once more soaked in blood. But he moves with quiet confidence.

“I am sorry about your wife,” he says. “She was a good woman.”

Li looks at the man uncomprehendingly.

“Good woman? Of course she good woman,” he yells in broken English, tears flowing. “What know you of sorrow son of bitch?” He screams. He wants to attack Pepper for cursing him so. He wants to see Pepper dead on the floor with his wife. He wants his wife back. He wants what has been ripped from him. And he is drowning in an empty void.

“My superiors have what they want,” Pepper continues haltingly. “I have to leave and go home.” He opens his duster to expose chewed up skin. Underneath his flat stomach the glint of metal flashes. “I was given orders to leave as soon as possible.”

Li squints his eyes against the early morning light streaming in through the half open door.

“Go home. Never come back.”

He turns back away and shivers as a draught of cold air passes through the room.

“I just wanted to apologize . . . and give you this.” Pepper steps forward and hands Li another thick wad of bills. It is enough to go to America. It is enough for Li to do anything. Li throws the money back at Pepper.

“Keep blood money. I do not want.”

Pepper takes the money and sets it on the small table next to the laptop. He looks around the room one last time, shakes his head, wraps his duster back around himself, then steps through the door, softly shutting it behind him.

Li sits still for another few minutes, then carefully kisses Mei’s forehead and gets up, rubbing at red eyes.

Pepper had left the laptop, with the small black disk sitting by it, behind.

Mei’s grave is a small one dug by the Macau missionaries. Li is not sure what else to do, and the eager white missionaries are thrilled to preach the good news to an ignorant foreigner. Li ignores them, and sets an elaborate bunch of flowers next to the headstone.

Li isn’t stupid. Something grand is happening. The message senders are closer now. He wonders if the Western scientists have gotten Pepper’s data. Someday the messages will stop, and an alien craft will shake the sky, part the clouds, and land in Canton.

Pepper is no longer seen on the Wharf docks. And Li no longer sells fish. He has enough money to live well in Macau for the rest of his life. Pepper’s gift is generous.

On the deck of a large old ship that stinks of diesel fumes, Li leaves Macau. Another peasant on the deck, another hoping for a new life. He ignores the crates of loud fowl, the grubby smiling kid with the caged cricket, and the old lady who loudly farts on the bench across from him. He braces himself against the heavy sea, letting the salt blow away the fish smell, looking back at the distant shore.

Two weeks later, on the shore of a small beach in California, Li tosses a small black disk into the water, careful to not let it prick him, and then drops a single Hibiscus in after it.

Li heard that, earlier, that Western scientists are in Canton, the Chinese government finally admitting the existence of its message. Pepper’s work is done.

And today in Canton, everyone repeats with wonder, the scientists looked upwards at the sky in wonder as a sleek shining alien craft slowed to a gentle stop between the massive radio dishes.

Maybe they will bring an order to the chaotic world, Li thinks, or change the world in other, fairer ways. He wants to meet the distant entities, and tell them how important his Mei was to their historic event. But for now . . .

“Farewell, Mei,” Li says.

Then he turns to walk back up the beach, smiling at the children screeching and running through the cold surf.

First published in Science Fiction Age, March 2000.

About the Author

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into eighteen languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

A Stopped Clock

Madeline Ashby

“They don’t go out to drink anymore,” Jun-seo said. “They get everything delivered these days. That’s the problem.”

“They’re all dieting,” Ha-eun said. “They won’t eat rice. Rice!”

“I could check the flows,” Jun-seo offered.

Ha-eun shook her head. “It’s a trap. Remember when I tried to unsubscribe? They still owe me money. Besides, the prediction was never that good anyway.”

“But we’d know where the kids are going,” Jun-seo said. “We’d see them on the maps. Their pings. From their watches.”

Again, she shook her head. The flows were valuable, in theory, but, in practice, they never tended to have the information a food vendor really needed. Sure, they were great for seeing things like traffic density, like how many people were taking what train at what time, and what train might be best for getting home at what time of night, but to get granular data with actual demographic information, that cost too much.

“They’re not going anywhere,” she said. “They’re just going online.”

The two of them sipped from thready cups of coffee. Jun-seo had a 2-for-1 print credit back when the machine first un-shuttered itself. It would be better, he said, than taking the monthly penalty on getting coffee in cans or pouches from the other machines. They all saw you, these days. Saw you and judged you, rolling their machine eyes like mountain aunties, then reaching into your pocket to punish you for buying things that eventually became trash. Ha-eun ran her tongue over the cup’s rough lip. It felt like kissing a cat. Soon, she would be able to bite through the cup itself. Had it really been that long? Had they really worked this same corner for all that time?

“Maybe if we sold waffles,” Jun-seo said. “Waffles are still going strong.”

“You can’t sell ice cream in winter.”

Jun-seo flinched, but said nothing. Ha-eun felt sorry immediately, but had no idea how to apologize. She opened her mouth to say something nice about the coffee instead, but as she did, the building across the street blinked out.

“Eh?” She reached out and tapped Jun-seo. “Oi. Look.”

“I see it.” He scowled. “They’re not supposed to do that.”

Ha-eun checked her watch. No alerts. No warnings about bad weather or a brownout. Across the street, the solar louvers fluttered back to factory default. Their creaks and snaps carried clearly through the crisp winter air. The building, all sixty or so stories, stood out black against the city lights like a massive door into darkness itself. For a moment Ha-eun had the terrible thought that something might actually come out of that door. Some awful titan from legend curling its fingers around the biocrete, or a dragon swimming out of the sudden shadow. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes. Goodness, she really was getting old.

The building flickered back on. The louvers snapped back to their nighttime positions. In the awakening light, she saw a few chilly residents standing on their balconies, peering at each other. They looked around, looked up and down, and then hurried inside.

“There weren’t even emergency lights,” Jun-seo said. “In the stairwells. I didn’t see any. Did you?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to look,” Ha-eun told him. “Which ones are the stairs?”

“The narrow ones. Like arrow slits.”

“Arrow slits?”

“Like on a castle.”

She frowned. “What do you know about castles?”

He huffed and shifted weight on his feet. He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I used to like them,” he said, quietly. “As a boy.”

“All kinds of castles? Or just the kind with arrow slits?”

“Most castles have arrow slits. They’re very useful.” He sketched the shape of one in the air with his hands. His breath fogged as he spoke. “They’re narrow, see, so you can fire an arrow out, but no arrows can come in.”

“Like a gun turret?”

“Sort of. It’s the same idea, I guess. Weaponized architecture.”

They had both done the same basic training, once upon a time. During these long winter nights, it was hard to remember the interminable summer afternoons full of flies and roaches and yellow orb spiders, the absurdity of endless rifle drills. As though rifles would do any good, these days. She had been impertinent with a drill sergeant, once, about that. The sergeant made her clean the mess hall on her hands and knees. She ran the width of the hall, back and forth, pushing a vinegar-soaked rag with her fingers until her cuticles bled. She couldn’t make a fist for three days afterward.

“Jun-seo is very smart,” she said, because it was a nice thing to say after all the mean things she’d said with the added benefit of actually being true.

Jun-seo smiled to himself. “I’ll help you pack up,” he said. “It’s too cold for skinny ladies like you.”

The next night, the traffic lights started acting up.

From their place on the corner, through the clouds of steam rising up from Jun-seo’s bubbling pans of ddukbokki, the change seemed almost organic. Green to red and back again, like the fluttering of a moth’s wings. At first, Ha-eun wasn’t even sure she’d seen it. But beside her, on his fold-out stool, she felt Jun-seo’s posture change. He leaned forward. Scrubbed his glasses. Leaned even further forward.

“We should tell someone,” Ha-eun said.

“Who would we tell?”

He had a point. She had no idea which of the city’s many departments to report it to. They all had a separate terminal online—there was no single place to report something like this, whatever it was. And the proper authorities probably knew about it, already. The traffic lights were wired into everything else, weren’t they? The traffic people—was there such a department?—probably knew about it before it even happened. She checked her watch. No alerts. No warnings. They were close to a big municipal data center. All the employees there had the same city badge on their wrists. She saw it when they handed her cash. Sometimes they ran experiments, at night.

“Maybe it’s a test,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“This late, they could do one, and nobody would know. It’s all rides by this time of night. And the rides know what’s happening before the riders do.”

Jun-seo made a sound of deep dissatisfaction. It started down in his belly and moved up to resonate in the back of his throat. Hrrrrrrrrm. He usually made it for indecisive customers. Ha-eun supposed the quickly-changing traffic lights were being indecisive in their own way.

“I’m walking to the end of the block.” He rose carefully to stand and pointed north. “I want to see if the lights up at the next intersection are doing the same thing.”

Ha-eun did not like this plan, but couldn’t quite say so. Not without sounding like a worried old woman, or worse, like someone who had no confidence in him. “Well, be back soon,” she said, finally. “I can’t stir my rice and your ddukbokki at the same time.”

“No one’s buying anyway.” He re-wrapped his scarf until it covered his mouth. Somehow, she could still detect his smile through it. “And anyhow, I like mine a little burnt.”

She watched him set off into the night, shoulders still loose and not hunched like an old man’s, his figure shrinking against the tall edifices. She should have warned him about ice. Given him her umbrella. Not that there was an ice warning tonight, but it was always a danger. It accumulated high up on the buildings during the winter, getting heavier and heavier, until it could no longer cling to the balconies and cladding. Then it fell, nature’s perfect weapon, impaling those unfortunate enough to still be walking the streets.

The streets were so empty, these days. The sidewalks seemed comically broad without any people on them. They’d even started moving the schools inside the buildings, so some students never had to leave their buildings if they didn’t want to. Even those who lived in other buildings could come and go by train, never breathing the outside air.

Ha-eun stood and stirred her rice. There was still so much of it. She’d done everything she could to make it better—more bacon, more kimchi, shreds of cheese, lacy trimmings of garlic chives—but it didn’t matter. No one was coming. She shoved it roughly around the pan anyway. Then she uncovered Jun-seo’s pans and began stirring the rice cakes. She was more delicate with his food than her own. He worked so hard to make something good—he even made his own anchovy stock for the sauce. Picked all the guts and heads from the dried fish with his own fingers before boiling them. Not that she’d seen it; he said he did it at home so no one would know what was going into the food. And now there was no one to see the food itself.

She replaced the lids and stared up the street. Why wasn’t he back yet? Surely he’d been gone long enough to look at the traffic lights. She squinted. A chain of rides was approaching. Maybe Jun-seo had waited to watch them pass; they would have gone through the intersection he was so curious about. She heard honking and turned. Another ride was speeding up toward their intersection. Without any conscious awareness, she looked at the traffic lights.

Both sets were green.

The rides honked at each other. The riders could do that, within the rides. It made them feel like they were in control of something, or so she heard. For a long few seconds, Ha-eun saw their faces. They looked angry, frustrated, confused. Terrified.

The cars smashed into each other.

Ha-eun covered her mouth to stop her scream before it started. She had never witnessed a car crash before. They used to happen more often, of course, but even then it was rare to see one as it happened. People saw the aftermath. She remembered that much. But it was like watching lightning strike. Or so she’d thought, until this moment.

Her feet carried her to the crash. Four cars had piled up. They looked like fighting rhino beetles frozen mid-attack. The cars hissed and sighed as though exhausted. They had been going so fast. They always looked fast when you were standing still on the corner, of course, but she could have sworn they were going faster than usual. Faster than the limit. Faster than auto-pilot rides were supposed to go.

She listened for sirens. There were none.

“Help,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if she was calling or commanding. She stared up at the soaring towers of glass and steel that loomed over the intersection. Was anyone on their balconies? Had anyone seen? “HELP!”

“HELP IS ON THE WAY,” one of the cars said, in a soothing voice. “DO NOT WORRY.”

Inside the cars, she heard moans of pain.

“Hello?” Which car should she attend to, first? Where were the police? Or the ambulances? The wind whistled down through the empty concrete canyons. Lights everywhere—none of them the right color, none of them spinning. She had a first aid kit in her tent. Jun-seo had a better one. But you weren’t supposed to move the victims of a car crash. She’d heard that somewhere. Hadn’t she? “Hello?”

Something brushed her shoulder, and she screamed. She twisted, fists up, and Jun-seo held up his hands, palms open. “Easy,” he said. “It’s just me.”

The air rushed out of her. Her shoulders sagged. She wanted to hug him. She jabbed him in the belly instead. “Where were you?”

“I’m here now,” he said. “I called the police.”

And just like that, she heard the sirens. The little police cars trundled up. Medical bots popped out of their trunks and spidered across the street, bright eyes scanning, claws clicking in the air, projecting stats into the icy fog. Slowly, the police officers exited their vehicles.

“Oh, hey, kimchi fried rice,” one said. He glanced over at Ha-eun. “Oi. You got any eggs to go with that?”

Ha-eun almost thought of not coming in, the next day. In a sick twist of luck, the accident had brought in more than enough cash to cover her for the next two days—maybe even the rest of the week. Nobody ate like cops and EMTs.

But that money would not last forever. So she carefully picked her way over the sleeping bodies of the other women in the residence, and got ready to leave. Even so, one of them snuffled awake, gave her a nasty look, and rolled over with an arm over her eyes. Ha-eun was the only cart owner in the room. The others all worked the night shift at a doshirak factory, working from 6 PM to 6 AM making the lunches that appeared in convenience stores all over the city. But Ha-eun’s hours were from 2 PM to 2 AM Worse, she was an independent—she paid only for the cart and the license to her space, with no hourly wage. They envied her cash flow, and she envied their security. It made living together uncomfortable.

“I’d be in the same boat as you, if my back worked like yours,” she muttered. But it didn’t. She couldn’t stand up as long as the others could. It was that simple. She had tried, once. She had worked in a lunch factory, a supermarket, and a coffee place. It was the standing that got her pushed out, every single time. The pain was too much. And her doctor had been very clear with her—if she took painkillers every day, like she needed to, her stomach lining would open up and fill with blood. It was delicate, he said, in their video call. The robot hosting him had tilted its videoscreen head right in time with him, like a dog hearing messages on an especially high frequency.

“You used them too much, when you were younger,” the doctor had said, through the robot. “Now you can’t do that, anymore. Not at your age.”

So she shrugged on her coat and wrapped up her scarf, patted the asp in her pocket and the wad of cash between her thighs, and hastened down to the bus stop. She had a long ride. Longer than most. This was suburbia, where all the hourly workers lived. And it wasn’t so bad to spend at least a little time outside. Even when it sleeted, like today, the air was cleaner.

The bus to her first subway stop took twenty minutes. Then the first subway ride was a half hour—forty minutes on a bad day. After that it was hard to tell: it depended on how crowded the hub was, if she had to top up her transit pass, and whether she had to deposit anything in her locker. This time she did—half the cash she’d made. It was safer here at the train station than in any bank. The locker, being a part of the train station, had anti-terror measures on it that made downtown banks look like roadside vegetable stands. They’d done a deeper background check on her when she applied for the locker than any she’d endured to obtain her cart and her food vendor’s license.

At first, her watch didn’t work. She had to wave it over the scanner three separate times. She had four tries available; after that, the station called a human attendant to deal with potential scammers. Instead, she opted for the “lost device” option and answered a series of passphrases. Only then did it let her in.

Ha-eun finished tucking her cash into the locker, grabbed a tin of sesame oil, a gallon jug of soy sauce, and a five-pound sack of rice. She stuffed them in a fold-out roller bag. The train station had rules about perishables in lockers, but sealed items were still okay, and so it was easier to keep her supplies there rather than lugging them clear across town on a regular basis. She pushed the locker door shut, watched it bolt shut behind her, and made her way to her train.

Like most hubs, this train station felt almost more like its own small town than a station. There was a whole floor just for retail: clothing and electronics and walk-in clinics and robot diagnosticians and real estate booths where you could sit and tour some other place far away. And another for gyms and grocery stores. The food vendor licenses here were beyond expensive; most of the vendors here were grandfathered in from when the station was new. Ha-eun pushed past the ranks of other carts, noting the sneers of the people sitting inside. They had no need for space heaters here. Here everything was centrally heated. It was so warm they could even sell cold things: cold noodles and cold soups and even cold squid, dressed simply in vinegar and chili flakes.

The crowds seemed thicker than usual. Ha-eun checked the shimmering panes of glass hanging above the throng. No warnings. No alerts. And yet the escalator leading to the platform was entirely too crowded. Even if a train came now (and it was nowhere to be seen), Ha-eun would never make it to the first sitting. She looked at the other platforms. They were equally packed with people. Ha-eun peered at her watch. Nothing. She looked for a news story. The watch refused to connect to the train’s network. She had no news. No messages. No connection to the outside world.

“Fucking idiots,” a woman in pearls muttered. “Trapping us out here in the cold.”

Fear licked up Ha-eun’s spine. It was minor, for now. Just some general unease. But she thought of the condo tower looming over her and Jun-seo’s carts, and how it had suddenly disappeared into the night, an empty column of darkness, the people inside it suddenly blind. And she thought of the rides throwing themselves at each other, as though a particularly destructive child had crashed his toys together deliberately.

“PLEASE BE PATIENT,” the station said, in a woman’s soothing voice. “THIS TRAIN WILL BE ARRIVING SOON.”

An audible groan arose from the people on the platform. A man with a huge backpack jostled Ha-eun as he wriggled past. His backpack hit her in the face as he turned around. She stumbled back against her rolling bag, but the man didn’t stop to apologize. A young woman in office wear caught her elbow.

“Are you all right, Grandma?” she asked.

“Just fine, thank you,” Ha-eun managed to say, and moved off. Grandma. Honestly. Did she really look that old?

She pushed along the platform. Her roller bag snagged against someone’s briefcase, and she got a “watch it!” for her trouble. Finally she found a bench. It was one of those studded, angled ones, the kind you needed to be a yoga teacher to sit in comfortably. A child balancing precariously on it blinked at her, and tugged on his mother’s sleeve. It was made of beautiful clone sable, gleaming and gray. Ha-eun could only imagine how light and warm it felt.

“Yes?”

“Please excuse me,” Ha-eun prefaced, “but how long has it been like this?”

“Almost half an hour, I think,” the woman said. “The station keeps saying that the train is coming, but . . . ” She shrugged elaborately. She gestured vaguely into the rafters above the platform. “Do you think the cameras are still working? I’m dying for a smoke.”

“That’s a good question,” Ha-eun said. “For your sake, I hope they’re not.”

“It’s not the fine itself, of course,” the woman said while tugging at the collar of her fur, “but it shows up on your profiles, you know. The fine for smoking. The station would tell my son’s school. And the school would tell the other mothers.”

Ha-eun couldn’t really see how it was anyone’s business if someone smoked or not, but the rich lived in a different layer of reality than she did, one where they were always connected and never truly alone. She said none of this, of course, merely smiled, excused herself, and moved on. She had an overwhelming urge to find Jun-seo. Not just to ping him, but to actually see him.

As though the crowd had read her mind, the people on the platform seemed to knit together even more tightly. She squinted. A fresh outpouring of people had stepped onto the platform from the escalators. Why wasn’t the station doing anything? It was supposed to know where all the passengers were, at all times. It scraped the data from all the watches and glasses and lockets and other devices. Surely the station knew how many people were waiting on the platform and how frustrated everyone they were, by now. It knew things like pulses, heartbeats, and temperatures. She had seen people taken aside when their fevers were too high, because they might be spreading one of the flus. Why wasn’t the station sending attendants? She lifted her watch to lodge a complaint.

Her watch.

When had her watch last worked?

Granted, some functions still behaved. Time, email. The water usage in the apartment. The location of all her food in the communal fridge. But all the locative data pertaining to her location . . . when had that last worked? She hadn’t been able to access her locker or call for help when the cars crashed. It had not alerted her to any tests when the power went out in the building across from her stall.

Did it even know she was alive? Did it know she was her?

Blood spattered across her shoes.

She looked up, and two young men in front of her were hitting each other. Decades had passed since she’d last heard the sound of fists on flesh. She had forgotten how soft and small a sound it was. “I told you not to touch me!” one of the men—boys, really—shouted. His knuckles were bloody. The other boy’s face was worse; blood streamed from his mouth. They drove at each other again. The crowd widened around them.

Now she knew for certain that the watches were broken. Not just hers. All the watches. Because they should have picked up what was happening on the platform: the raised pulses, the shouting, the arc of fists in the air. The station should have learned about the fight from the watches, and sent attendants to break it up. She looked at her fellow bystanders. They were all checking their watches. They looked at each other, not the fight. They looked around at the platform. They waited for sirens. For attention. None came.

“No one knows we’re here,” she whispered. “No one’s coming to help.”

Was it really that easy to bring a station of this size to a screeching halt? She had always thought it would take something like a bomb, or a toxin, like the sarin gas attack in Tokyo. But maybe not. Maybe all it took was a sudden deafening silence from everyone’s devices.

The young men were grappling each other, now. They twisted on the frosty platform, and the crowd shoved back and forth as their bodies rolled across the concrete and advertisements. Ha-eun gripped her rolling bag tightly and positioned it in front of her, like the cattle-catcher on an old locomotive train. As the crowd ebbed away from her, she made a break for it. She ducked into the crowd on the other side of the fight, muttering apologies and keeping her head down. People squawked and screeched as she pushed through. Why had she never thought to use her rolling bag this way? It was just the thing for parting the crowd.

She leaned hard on the rolling bag and steered its stubborn, whining bulk to the escalators. More people poured out. A look of horror crossed their faces as they comprehended the sheer size of the crowd waiting on the platform. They lifted their watches. Shook them. Cursed. Tried to go back up the escalators in the wrong direction. Began trampling each other. She heard a child crying. Then another.

A thin scream rose. She turned. Someone from the edge of the crowd had fallen onto the tracks. An old man. Not much older than Jun-seo, anyway. Her heart met her throat.

“What do we do?” she heard someone shout. “Why isn’t anyone coming?”

A teenaged boy in a school uniform jumped down. Then another.

And right on cue, she heard a distant whistle and saw a cold glow pierce the winter fog. A train. Its shriek joined with the collective scream rising on the platform. She turned away. There was nothing else to do. She could only stare at the labels and logos on her groceries. They had seemed so important just a minute ago. The shouting and the noise built and built and built, echoing on the old spray-foam ceiling, making a structure within the structure. The train howled as it tried to slow itself. It moaned over the bodies in its path. She had heard that sound only once before, just after a suicide attempt on one of the other platforms at this very station. Now it was three times worse.

Beside her someone was abruptly sick into her rolling bag, and she didn’t even care. She stood, wiped a spatter of bile off her sleeve, and began pushing herself the length of the platform.

“Wait, Jun-seo,” she murmured. “Please wait.”

Snow fell softly on the chaos.

Ha-eun had never crossed the city entirely on foot before. She had always used the trains to travel under the exclusive, members-only zones: the plazas and parks meant only for elite families. They lived in pockets of airy space shrouded in trees. Here there were no towers, only houses. And not the kitbashed container houses like in Ha-eun’s neighborhood, but real ones, the old-fashioned kind, with gables and tile roofs and high stone fences crawling with ivy. Ha-eun made the mistake of staring, pausing long enough to be noticed by someone in a uniform.

“You can’t be here,” he said.

He was young. His face was completely unlined, without pores, perfect. For just a moment, she wondered just how good the corporate robot technology had gotten. Then she dismissed the thought. All the prettiest robots were supposed to look like women.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he added. “You aren’t authorized to be here.”

Ha-eun thought quickly. “What is your name?”

He blinked rapidly. “Excuse me?”

“Your name. What is it?” Ha-eun put on the voice she used to talk to kids who shortchanged her. “How dare you stop me in the middle of an emergency like this? It’s snowing! I have arthritis!”

The young man looked suitably chastened. “It’s just we have a bunch of diplomats and security experts who live in this area,” he said in a low voice. “And, well, they’re all being called in because of what’s happening. Their rides will be going very fast. Pedestrians have to be especially careful.”

“I’ll stay on the sidewalk,” Ha-eun said, and pushed past him.

Black SUVs rumbled past her as she shuffled through the snow. She had never seen trucks so big. Government types, surely. She found herself not caring. What did it matter who they were, so long as the power came back on eventually? She peered at the homes surrounding her. Most of them had power: she heard the hum of external generators. But the towers that overshadowed them had gone dark. As she crossed under a beautiful wrought iron pergola that announced the neighborhood’s exit, she saw people roving about in the streets. Thicker and thicker crowds of them, all of them waving compacts and watches and wads of cash, trying to find purchase of one kind or another. They must have poured out of the buildings once the power and the networks died. Ha-eun couldn’t remember the last time the streets had been this lively.

Poor Jun-seo would have such a lineup to deal with, she realized. The thought quickened her steps. Under her feet, she heard the definitive crunch of snow. For the first time in months, the pain in her back had vanished.

After another half hour, Ha-eun rounded the corner where Jun-seo would be waiting. The stalls were dark. Curtains drawn. No lineup. Her feet carried her across the street as the pit in her stomach deepened. She was a fool for coming this far on foot. He wasn’t worried about her. He wasn’t waiting. He’d probably never made it in—his own route must have been equally compromised. Why hadn’t she just turned around and gone home? She could be warm, at least. Warm and dry. Warm and dry and dignity intact.

“Ha-eun?”

She turned. Jun-seo stood carrying a recycling bin full of paper packaging. Poster tubes, old boxes, pulp cartons. “I was going to burn all this,” he said. “It’s a good thing you got here first!”

Ha-eun could barely find her voice. “You were waiting?”

“Of course I was waiting! All the customers told me what happened at your station. I had to wait.”

“ . . . The customers?”

“Oh, well.” He gestured at the stalls. “I sort of sold out early. This sort of thing is good for business, I guess. They’re saying it was some sort of hack, like a cyberattack on the infra—”

“But you were still waiting?”

“Yeah. Sort of stupid, huh?” He smiled sheepishly. “I guess you’ll tell me I should have gone home to get warm.”

Ha-eun scrubbed furiously at one eye. “Put that bin down!”

He dropped it. Ha-eun launched herself at him. Her arms came around him, tight. He was too thin, she thought. Strong, but too small. She wanted to fatten him up. Spoil him. And never stop.

“Hey, Ha-eun . . . ” he said, “it’s okay. Everything will be fine. There are smart people working on this. I talked to one of the city people about the trains—”

“I don’t care about the trains!” She hugged him harder.

“Okay.” He patted her shoulders awkwardly. Then his arms settled over her shoulders. “Hey, if you’re all right walking, I don’t live very far from here. We could go there. I don’t think there will be power, but I do have a little propane stove, and some soju—”

“Yes,” Ha-eun said. “Yes. I want to go with you.”

He chuckled. She felt it through her whole body. “You’ll have to let me go, first, if you want to walk anywhere,” Jun-seo said.

“One more minute,” she said. “Just one more minute.”

Four days later, Ha-eun knew what it felt like to stand in line at her own food stall. At least, what it would be like if she herself, Ha-eun, were terrible at her job. “They should have hired us to do this,” she said, for the third time that day. “Or people like us. The city’s full of people who can do this same job faster than some dumb trainees.”

“We have to eat,” Jun-seo said. “And that means we have to wait.”

It wasn’t the food that was the problem, though. It was the fuel. Jun-seo had plenty of food in his apartment: sacks of seven-grain rice, a nice little bundle of sweet potatoes, anchovy stock, dry seaweed (they’d gotten into that early), kimchi, eggs, black bean sauce for noodles. And of course, the rice cakes and fish cakes he made every day. It should have sustained them. And it could have.

If they’d only had enough fuel to cook with.

“I thought you said you had more propane,” Ha-eun had said.

“I thought I did,” Jun-seo had said. And that was that.

Naturally all the convenience stores and other shops were out of the stuff by the time they ran out. Bizarrely, the shops were still open. They’d gone back to cash. Some places used barter—hot coffee was the new money. Wait times were murderously slow; no one knew how to total up a bill, anymore, not to mention do percentages. Sales tax quickly became a distant memory.

“It’s like when the currency was failing,” Jun-seo said. “Remember that? When everyone turned in their gold?”

Ha-eun did remember. And Jun-seo was right: this was much the same. At least, the same in spirit. She had turned over her wedding band back then. The damn thing had never done her much good, anyway, even when she still wore it. This time she had turned over all her food—what rice and eggs and kimchi she still had in the stall became the army’s property, turned over the morning after she found Jun-seo in the snow. At least, she had turned them over in theory. What really happened was that she found a notice from the army on her stall, with an itemized list of what they’d “requisitioned,” and a site she could access when the networks came back in order to obtain her reimbursement. She was to give them an estimate of monetary value. She wondered how much she could fudge it. Maybe if she claimed it was fancy organic stuff they’d taken. The list they left behind didn’t include brand names.

“Come on,” Jun-seo said, and they shuffled forward to close the gap ahead of them in line.

She had expected chaos, but it was all very . . . orderly. The army kept on talking about the pluck and industriousness of the Korean national spirit. They pasted broadsheets reminding people how to use weather radios, and the radio stations talked about how the worst was behind them and there was nothing to worry about, how systems would come back online as soon as possible, how people were at work round the clock. Trucks with loudspeakers trundled down the newly quiet roads, blaring messages about pulling together in the struggle, sharing hand sanitizers, wearing flu masks, and where the city warming stations were.

“We’re lucky we’re old,” Ha-eun said. “They wouldn’t let us in here, otherwise.”

The warming stations were only for the very young or the very old. Ha-eun didn’t like to think of herself as very old, but for the moment she was willing to let the army think of her that way. And it was still better than being one of the exhausted parents in line, trying to corral kids in snow pants who wouldn’t quit demanding their old devices. No, you can’t play with those right now, they kept saying. No, I don’t know when the network is coming back.

Inside the warming station, they had ninety minutes. There was hot tea and instant noodles and tinned fish and whatever the army had managed to put together. The first day, all the restaurants gave up their supply. The second day, there was less to work with. The army had extra propane, and they could make do, but getting the supplies in without trains was a challenge. The Japanese had promised to send supplies. And the Americans, of course. The Red Cross. The Red Cross was supposed to be good at handling things without any computers or data streams. They’d done the same in worse places, where no one had handhelds or chips. With all the smart stickers and wearables dead, nobody had any sense of inventory or location any longer, of who needed what and where. The warming station did regular headcounts. Ha-eun had heard they were doing the same things at hospitals.

“It’s like going back in time,” Ha-eun said.

Jun-seo sipped at a cup of instant noodles. “I like it,” he admitted. “It makes me feel younger.”

“What were you like, back then?”

He shrugged. “Not so different.”

“You liked castles?”

“I wanted to be an architect.”

This fact fell under the “Things I Do Not Know About Jun-seo” category in Ha-eun’s mind. It was odd, to work alongside someone for so long, and not know the simplest things about them. “What happened?” she asked.

“I got someone pregnant.”

Ha-eun hissed in sympathy. Jun-seo snorted. They stared out at the children—babies, really—in the warming station. There were yoga mats and cots set up, and someone had thought to bring in old-fashioned toys and books, the kind that didn’t need charging.

“Did you have kids?” Jun-seo asked.

Ha-eun shook her head. “I wouldn’t be any good at it. It was the one thing my husband and I agreed on.”

“You were married?”

“For about five minutes, once.”

“We should get married,” Jun-seo said.

Ha-eun coughed on her tea. It almost went out her nose. “What?”

“It would be easier,” he said. “Legally. What if we get separated, in this situation? The government would have no idea who to contact. Or what if one of us is injured, or becomes ill? The other could be an advocate, in the hospital. Also I think that, when the business starts up again, we would get a better deal on cart space as a family. They prioritize family business licenses. We could move to a different corner, where there’s more foot traffic. Maybe even one of the stations.”

Ha-eun stared at him. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

He shrugged. “Oh, the last ten years. Give or take.”

“And now you tell me?!”

The others in the warming station gave her a sharp look. In the absence of trains, train etiquette had taken over the shared spaces: one had to maintain an equal volume with one’s neighbors, or risk deep disapproval. “Now?” she repeated.

“Why not now? I waited for you, in the snow. My head was telling me to leave, but my feet wouldn’t let me move. And you came to me. You came right to me.” He peered at her over the rising steam from his noodles. “So, Ha-eun, why not now?”

“Because . . . ” She blinked. She stared out at all the families crowding around the space heaters, rubbing their arms. What if this didn’t end? What if the systems never came back? Until this moment, she had not allowed herself to consider the possibility. But here in this room bathed in orange emergency light, she had to face it. They were all running scared, like pheasants flushed from the undergrowth. What attack might come next? Was this just the first phase of something much worse?

“Nothing,” she said. “Forget I said anything. I can’t think of a reason, aside from maybe the fact that there isn’t an office to grant us a license. At least, not in the city.”

“Then we’ll have to go to the country,” Jun-seo said. He slurped the last of his broth. “Some of the other families are leaving. I’ll ask who has room for a couple of cooks.”

First published in The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future, edited by August Cole, 2015.

About the Author

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. Her latest novel, Company Town, is available now from Tor Books. She is also a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, and many others.

Frankenstein’s Soldier:
David Morrell and the Creation of Rambo

Jason S. Ridler

Monsters are constructed from the passions of their age. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates life out of corpses using arcane science that defies the natural world. The creature comes to life but is an abomination to its creator, who abandons it to a world that will despise him. When Victor betrays the creature’s trust, refusing to make a mate, the monster destroys everything Victor loves and forces him on a death race across the ice floes of the Arctic. In processing gothic obsessions and her own tragedies as the mother of stillborn children, Shelly created a modern fable of horror and one of the greatest symbols of the dark side of human ambition and cruelty.

In 1960s America, on the campus of Penn State, a kindred spirit to Frankenstein’s monster was born, a creature of darkness and sympathy. His ingredients included the passions of the age (war, violence, tragedy) and also the unique influences of its author: daring TV shows, Ernest Hemingway, pulp science fiction writers and respected men of letters, Socrates, and America’s war hero, Audie Murphy. From such materials came the literary creature known as Rambo. His Frankenstein is Dr. David Morrell.

Political opinions should not be shared. Political activities were forbidden. And an oath of loyalty had to be signed. These were the requirements for a foreigner wanting temporary residence in the US in 1966. If David Morrell refused or disobeyed, he’d be thrown out of graduate school at Penn State and sent back to his native Canada. So he accepted the government’s terms and entered a country seething with dissenting political opinion, growing political activity, and intergenerational acts of defiance. From these elements would emerge a symbol, a product of American dissent and the violence of war, rooted in the imagination of a quiet Canadian.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Morrell bears little resemblance to the killing machine he birthed. It is one of Rambo’s great personal ironies that his father had the misfortune of coming from a sleepy city in a proud but dour nation. But such appearances can be deceiving. Morrell was born on April 24, 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario. His father died during World War II, and his widowed mother could not care for him. At four years old, he entered an orphanage. Boarding homes followed until his mother remarried and reclaimed her son. Morrell was a restless teen and TV was his salvation. He’d burn out his eyes watching the worlds outside of Kitchener, stories and adventures in fiction and reality. In 1962, at seventeen years old, Morrell was hooked on Route 66, a pioneering show about two friends traveling the US in a dapper convertible and getting into trouble, from crooked juries and family inheritance schemes to mine collapses and pregnancies on Native land. Route 66 was littered with famous and soon-to-be famous co-stars like Buster Keaton, Robert Redford, and William Shatner. When actor George Maharis left the series in season three, his character was replaced with Lincoln “Linc” Case (played by Glenn Corbett), a former Army Ranger with one tour in Vietnam. Linc was perhaps the “first continuing character in a US network TV show who reflected the emerging Vietnam experience.”

Vietnam was meaningless to Morrell, but Route 66 opened his mind. The credits claimed the show he loved was written each week by a writer with the audacious name of Sterling Silliphant. People wrote scripts and got paid to write them? That was it. Morrell would become a writer and get the hell out of Kitchener. Silliphant’s blending of action and emotional drama would be his model. Morrell wrote his hero and, amazingly, Silliphant answered with two pages, single-spaced, giving Morrell the encouragement he needed.

The short version: write. Keep writing. Don’t stop. It takes time and effort. You can eventually make it. “Eventually you’ll find other people who want to be writers. You’ll trade ideas with them. You’ll critique one another’s work. Keep writing. When you think you have something of merit, send it out. Chances are, the first items you submit won’t be accepted, but you can’t be discouraged. Keep writing. One day, if you have something of promise to say, somebody somewhere will see it and become excited and help you. It is just that simple, and that’s terribly difficult.” Compared to summers grinding Styrofoam containers at a factory job and being chained to the fender machines at the local car plant, being a writer seemed like heaven.

Morrell enrolled in the BA Literature program at St. Jerome College to expedite his literary education. His world of literature grew. Socrates, Rimbaud, and most of all, Ernest Hemingway captivated him. In particular, Philip Young’s work on Hemingway, written in the tough vernacular of his subject, convinced Morrell to get a graduate degree in literature. Morrell needed a day job before he could sell his words, and being a literature professor seemed a good match. Silliphant could be an inspiration, but Young could be a mentor. So, with his BA complete and his future still uncertain, Morrell signed on for grad school in the US, where he wrote an MA on Hemingway’s style. All the while, Vietnam crept deeper and deeper into America’s consciousness. Including Morrell’s.

“The only time I’d heard about Vietnam was three years earlier in a 1963 Route 66 episode,” he recalled, “ . . . about a US soldier who returned from Vietnam (wherever that was) and had trouble shutting down his war mentality . . . In Canada, I’d never paid attention to the bits about the war. It simply wasn’t on my radar.” Canada’s role in Vietnam had been minor, and not combat.

US involvement began in the dwindling days of French control of Indochina. With the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the creation of two Vietnams, Washington found itself advisor to a new country recast in a Cold War context, yet saddled with the challenges of imperialism and the aftermath of its violence. A string of setbacks and successes cumulated when South Vietnam’s President Diem was assassinated by his own army in 1963, with the full knowledge of President John F. Kennedy. With the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson was allowed to authorize the deployment of US troops without declaring war. Morrell arrived in the US when there were nearly 400,000 US troops deployed to Vietnam. Draftee tours lasted two years. These soldiers fought a difficult jungle war against a phenomenally dedicated enemy on its own turf and with two decades of experience and victories against the Japanese, the French, and now the American-backed South Vietnamese. Even with American firepower, the guerrilla war on the ground was often brutal, full of terror, confusion, elusive enemies, and suspect allies. Despite some tactical innovations and successes, the US wasn’t sure what kind of war it was fighting. The price for such uncertainly was in the lives of civilian and military dead and wounded, and the mental health of the returning soldiers. Many who returned to the US hoped education would provide a brighter future.

Six veterans of jungle warfare in Southeast Asia ended up in Morrell’s composition classroom, “where they had major problems accepting me as an authority figure. We were all in our early 20s, but they’d been risking their lives in a far-off jungle. As far as they were concerned, I was a draft dodger. Their hostility was strong enough that I asked for an after-class meeting.” Morrell told them about his family and foreign origins and his desire to help. They relaxed and opened up about their war and its aftershocks. Nightmares. Loud noises cranked out sweat and made them dive for cover. These men were angry. They were frustrated. They were scared. They were certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, but that diagnostic term hid in the future. The closest term Morrell could find came from the Great War: “shell shock”: the psychological breakdown of men who endured the hell of shellfire and trench warfare too long. The trauma of war and the stigma of Vietnam wrought a potent disdain within grunts and officers alike. Morrell’s experience was echoed even in such vaulted places as the Army Command and General Staff College during and after the war. When Professor Roger Spiller taught there after the fall of Saigon in 1975, he was amazed to find the war his students had fought in wasn’t mentioned.

“For years after the war in Vietnam the college offered no courses on it, as if the school’s managers would do anything to avoid referring to the war. It might as well have been fought on Mars.” Outside the classroom, Spiller also made peace with the wild, angry vets. In return, they spoke in whispers. One had held a trench until his ammunition ran out, killing all his enemies but one. The soldier had fumbled for a pistol, but drew his knife instead. Silence filled the pause as the soldier reflected on what happened next.

“‘It was wet,’ he said quietly, ‘very wet.’” Despite their professional appearances, these men had suffered what Morrell’s students described: depression, nightmares, terror at loud sounds. But talking about it was stigma and career suicide.

Morrell was no soldier, but the library offered him at least a fighting chance to understand the veterans in his class. It was there he discovered not only shell shock, but the story of Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated soldier of World War II and winner of the Medal of Honor. The Texas native was initially denied a spot in the Navy and Marines because of his short stature, but he found a home in the Army. Murphy had an almost unnatural talent for combat. In Italy and France, he showed bottomless bravery for facing overwhelming odds, and his audacity was matched by a sure hand with a gun. He would receive thirty-four medals. His commendation for the Medal of Honor noted that in action in France, he stood alone calling artillery fire on approaching tanks. When one of his own tank destroyers was hit, he climbed aboard its burning husk and fired the .50 caliber machine gun. “He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back.” Despite the Germans throwing everything they had available at him, even injuring Murphy’s leg, the one-man army held out. While his artillery direction killed many, he killed or wounded at least fifty by his own hand, and his personal body count for the war totaled a reputed 240. Murphy’s post-war career as an actor in westerns fit the image of a brave and tough man, but behind the veneer was the pain and agony of a combat survivor. Depression and nightmares stalked Murphy and led him to domestic violence and alcohol, sleeping with a gun under his pillow and waking up firing it in the dark. Murphy’s memoir To Hell and Back is a classic combat soldier’s view of war from the ground, but later in life, he wished to write about the hardship of returning home.

College campuses were hotbeds of anti-war sentiment and challenges to the old orthodoxies of the past. Civil rights, feminism, and disdain for the war in Vietnam fueled radical movements, peaceful protests, and confrontations with a dozen forms of authority, legitimate and otherwise. Violence against students by police and National Guard became commonplace, culminating in the horrors of Kent State, Ohio, where the National Guard fired on unarmed protesters and killed four and injured nine. All the while, graveyards on Morrell’s rural route back home to Canada filled with members of his generation, fatalities of Vietnam, people he wouldn’t see again in class next year. Anger and defiance seethed through the zeitgeist, fueling conflict between generations, between worldviews, between war and antiwar movements and more.  

Morrell began to see the world of Vietnam and the violence on campuses as eerily similar . . . but remained silent on these issues. He’d given his word. To speak out, one way or another, was to invite permanent exile from his adopted country. But the ideas of the zeitgeist would not leave him alone. His solution, though he didn’t know it at the time, lay in fiction. At Penn State, he met and was mentored by Philip Klass, a scholar who wrote satirical science fiction under the penname William Tenn. Klass, the first professional writer of fiction Morrell had ever met, saw talent in the young academic and pushed him to learn the technique of professional fiction. Morrell wrote short stories, scripts and more. But only half of Silliphant’s prophecy had come true: he stacked up rejections. No editor wanted what he had to write. Despair bloomed.

In 1968, as the Tet Offensive destroyed America’s belief that the war in Vietnam was ending, Morrell began a novel called First Blood. He imagined: what if, in the maelstrom of tension and anger in the US, one of the symbols of authority pushed around someone like Audie Murphy, someone who knew how to fight back with vicious efficiency? And what if he’d fought in Vietnam, a young-man’s war filled with guerrillas, special operations, and the blurring of the lines between war and peace, civilian and soldier, right and wrong?

Morrell wrote about a bearded, long-haired, vagrant Vietnam veteran with a special operations background, coming into conflict with a small town Police Chief, himself a veteran of the brutal Chosin Valley battle of the Korean War. Their conflict escalates into a war between generations, worldviews, and war-fighting technique. The common thread is how anger destroys their ability to relate to one another. The result is carnage. When the soldier’s former CO is brought in, Morrell purposely names him Captain Sam Trautman: metaphorically, “Uncle Sam” has come to stop the monster it created. The name Morrell gave his veteran protagonist came from serendipity. Morrell’s wife bought apples from a local orchard that were delicious. Morrell asked their name, which he initially misheard as Rimbaud, the French poet-soldier. His wife corrected him. “Rambo.”

But the novel sprawled into a messy draft that pitted the entire town against one man, and a year later, like Frankenstein after making his monster, Morrell abandoned the novel. Instead, he focused on his dissertation on American novelist John Barth, convinced he’d never hack it as a commercial writer. It had been nine years since Route 66 had pulled him out of a haze and given him purpose, and he seemed no further along than when he started. But, when the dissertation was complete, Morrell did what Frankenstein did not: he returned to his monster and rescued him from the fire.

The draft had value. It just needed skinning. The plot was streamlined. The narrative switched between Rambo and Police Chief Teasle, each POV being given equal weight. Morrell had been inspired by a line from The Last Days of Socrates, where the Greek philosopher noted that “no one commits evil intentionally. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but he makes a good point. Most of us have a rationalization for our behavior. I might be appalled by what someone else does, but that person will provide all sorts of reasons for what he or she considers a justifiable act.” Morrell wrote it with the intent to give readers the thrill of seeing both points of view. But it was clear that sympathy lay with the frenzied and frustrated Rambo.

On May 28, 1971, a plane crash in Virginia killed not only Audie Murphy but his future memoir about surviving the trauma of war. That June, Morrell finished the final draft of First Blood. The novel was bought and published the next year. The next year, the novel was published and Rambo was let loose in popular culture.

And not even death in that novel could stop him. Instead, he became the icon of American violence at war, heroic and damned, unstoppable and doomed, patriot and dissident, through four movies, with a fifth on the way, children’s television, theatrical productions, film homage, his own brand of knives, and more.

There are now doubts that the next Rambo film will be made, but if there’s one thing you can bank on, it is this: Rambo will return. Whether you like it or not.

Further Reading

Paul Bridle, Canada and the International Commissions in Indochina, 1954-1972. (Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1973).

David Morrell, Me and Rambo: The Story Behind the Story (MEI Publishing, 2012, Kindle Edition):

David Morrell, The Successful Novelist, author notes at http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Morrell__David.html

Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Holt Publishing, 2001; originally published in 1949).

John Prados, “JFK and the Diem Coup,” National Security Archive (5 November 2003).

Nat Segaloff, Sterling Silliphant: The Fingers of God; The Story of Hollywood’s Hottest Writer Who Rode Route 66, Mastered Disaster Films, and Lived His Life Like It Was a Movie (BearManor Media, 2013), 33-34.

Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (London: 1818).

Roger Spiller, In the School of War (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Books, 2010).

Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (Penn State University Press: 1965).

About the Author

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and the upcoming Brimstone Files series for Night Shade Books. He’s also published over sixty-five stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

Volcanoes, Obelisks, and Spam Sushi:
A Conversation with N.K. Jemisin

Chris Urie

Worlds in upheaval are a staple of fantasy literature. Warring factions collide as they grasp for power. But what happens when it is the actual Earth beneath your feet that is roiling and about to explode? What about when the skies have gone dark, the weather has turned against the people, and the planet itself has destroyed countless civilizations? N.K. Jemisin explores a world just like that in The Broken Earth Trilogy.

The Fifth Season introduces a world where seasons, natural or otherwise, can be deadly. Skies darken and rifts open in the earth’s crust. The world is broken. And in that landscape, a civilization survives and even thrives. Essun comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. She pursues her broken family through this broken world, through scarcity and war.

N.K. Jemisin is the author of The Dreamblood Duology, The Inheritance Trilogy, and has been nominated for numerous awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award. The Obelisk Gate, the second volume in The Broken Earth Trilogy, will be released on August 16th from Orbit Books.

You’ve mentioned in the past that some of your influences include impressionist painters. What aspect of that style of painting speaks to you?

I would say that, in a lot of cases, they’re not directly painting what you end up seeing using styles and techniques like pointillism. If you stand too close, all you see is little pointy dots of thick paint but moving back forms a full picture.

I was really thinking of more in terms of impressionist music. I’m an artist’s daughter, but, to my father’s great sorrow, I’m not a very visual person. So I’ll do things like listen to John Coltrane. He’s got this one song called “Central Park West.” It doesn’t make me think of Central Park West, but it always makes me think of traveling. It’s train music for me. I remember taking my laptop on a train trip and not getting very much work done because I was looking out of the window and things were going by so fast that all I could get was an impression of what I was seeing.

People often ask me, “How do you insert messages into your fiction?” and I usually say I have no idea. I’m not trying to create messages with the fiction I write. What I try to do is tell a story and that story consists of things that feel real. If it ends up having a message to it, it’s because we see the reflection of our own world, or it’s because the reader brings something to it, or when we step back far enough from our own world, they’re able to see it more clearly.

A few of your short stories have featured New York City. What is it about the city that keeps you curious and writing about it?

I love New York! New York for me was the place where I came to be an artist. I grew up in a lot of different places but mostly between Mobile, Alabama and Brooklyn.

I remember being told that I should go outside and play. I remember the passive-aggressive things that people who don’t get artists tend to say to them because they don’t understand that sitting in one place and just writing or reading a book is a good thing. When I came here, I was free to write as much as I wanted, free to talk with other people about my plots and the ideas that were driving me nuts at night. During the school year, I had to lie awake and sort of chew on them and try to sleep. I was sort of a childhood insomniac. Here, I could talk it out and I slept like a baby.

New York was also where I could be a nerd. My father is a nerd too and we would watch Star Trek and the Twilight Zone ‘till the wee hours of the morning and talk about them and post-process every episode. That was the thing that made me love New York.

New York is the place where souls can be free. So, naturally, when I’ve come back here as an adult I want to understand what it is about this city that makes it so unique. What it is that brings that feeling out. It was a kind of magic and I want to try and capture that magic.

Food and taste in your fiction certainly play a part in the worldbuilding. Do you find including cultural cues from the culinary world help to inform your characters?

I don’t know about the culinary world! I like to eat. I do watch Food Network shows, but I don’t know enough about the culinary world to delve too deeply into it. Food is one of the best ways to convey culture and create a realistic sense of place. You can talk about what spices are used and imply that there’s spice somewhere else like that in most parts of the world. What do people in this world or in this area of the world treasure? What is rare, what is hard to get?

There’s a scene in The Fifth Season where a character has a moment where she really should be eating and enjoying the fat in the nuts because fat is precious and hard to get during a time of scarcity. She instead decides to splurge and put some of it on her skin because her hands are dry. The things that people value in food, the things that are both necessary and luxurious, tell you a lot about what that world is like. That’s how we learn about our world.

I’ve read that it was a dream that inspired The Broken Earth Trilogy. Have dreams inspired other pieces you’ve written?

Thus far, all of them. All of my novels have resulted from weird dreams. For The Dreamblood Duology, it was a dream of a guy climbing into a tower in the dark of the night. I didn’t know why, but he was intent on killing the person inside and that was a good thing somehow.

With The Inheritance Trilogy, I dreamt that I just happened to be in a place where people were doing odd things and were really just sitting there being odd while I observed them. There was a child floating little balls around in his hand like in Labyrinth. But those balls happened to be planets. They looked like toys, but they were planets. I just needed to explain these weird images.

The worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is magnificently multilayered from the planetary all the way down to the personal. With so many interconnected pieces, where do you normally start when creating a world this complex?

Well, I start with the dream. The dream that I had for The Broken Earth was a woman with a mountain floating behind her and I knew that she had the ability to throw that mountain. I needed to understand why on Earth someone would have the ability to fling around mountains. How would anybody develop that ability and what kind of world would require magic like that?

I’ve talked about the process I use to do worldbuilding in a couple of places. There’s a PowerPoint slide deck that I have on my website. It’s called “Growing your Iceberg” and covers the process from macro to micro scale. I start with the planet, then the continents, then the people. How would the species inhabit the continent and how would they develop? Where do they migrate and what does that do to them? How has their culture been informed by the part of the world they live? It comes down to what feels real for me.

Much of Essun’s journey is told in the second person. What made you choose this perspective?

There’s a couple of reasons. One of which will not become clear until probably the third book of the trilogy, so that piece I can’t talk about. But the other piece is simply that I wanted something that felt simultaneously distant and intimate. I wanted readers to identify with Essun and second person actually interferes with identification.

When you play a video game, you’re effectively acting out second person, but you’re reminded at every turn that this is not you because you see a sprite on the screen. It’s similar for a book. You’re reminded at every turn that this character’s name is Essun, that this character’s interests and thoughts and beliefs and feelings are not yours. Naturally, the tendency is to resist identifying with her. But if you’re watching someone going through hell and she’s asking you to identify with her via that voice, you have a choice. You can reject it or empathize.

The various plot threads and perspective characters throughout The Fifth Season reveal societies that harbor fear and prejudice, especially for the orogenes, people who can manipulate the earth. How does fear play a part in oppression?

Oppression is all about fear. It’s about greed for what other people have and finding reasons and creating a framework to make it okay to take what they have. Whether what they have is their land or their lives, that’s what it comes down to. The systems that help to maintain oppression are all about avoiding payback for that. There’s this ongoing fear on the part of those who have incurred some kind of great karmic debt to get what other people have, they’re going to have a comeuppance. In Western culture, that’s the case. Western culture is all binary and about good and evil and retribution and things like that. I haven’t studied other cultures as much as my own, but I do see a lot of fear even in other culture’s experiences of oppression. Possibly that’s because we deal with Western oppression globally even though it takes different forms and moves through different lenses.

Even when looking at historical examples of oppression, I see a bent around making sure the people who have had something taken from them continue to feel like it’s right to have these things stolen.

It’s evident that you’ve heavily researched seismology and geology for The Broken Earth Trilogy. What is one interesting fact that you learned?

Just the beauty of seismic landscapes. It’s not really facts that interest me.

I was out in Seattle recently teaching Clarion West and Seattle is absolutely beautiful, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen in one of the most beautiful regions of the country I’ve ever seen. The catch is, as I was flying out, I got a great look at Mount Rainier and remembered that it’s what’s called a Decade Volcano which is one of the most dangerous types of volcanoes on the planet. Then I remembered the entire Pacific Northwest is entirely overdue for an upheaval of Fifth Season proportions!

I’m always fascinated by the beauty of a world that exists in a precarious state. I was fascinated by Hawaii when I went to visit. I had a conversation with Kate Elliott, a great fantasy author and friend of mine, about why she chose to live there, in this place that could blow to smithereens at any given second. It’s literally a giant thermonuclear bomb and Hawaii sits on top of it. And she said, “Yeah,” gesturing around at the magnificence of the Hawaiian Islands, “but what a way to go!”

It’s the ephemerality of that beauty. A lot have cultures have been built around the ephemerality of beauty. The Japanese islands are also volcanic. There is a similar reverence for beauty and ephemerality in some parts of Japanese culture, especially in the Yamato people. There is that similar reverence that beauty isn’t going to last and you should enjoy it while you can. Take cherry blossom festivals, for instance. The blossoms fall for just a few days. You have to enjoy it and then they’ll be gone. That is what interests me, not just facts. Facts are cool, but watching mountains explode is cooler. Seeing the landscape around them being as lovely as it is deadly is even more interesting.

You earned a travel grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation to research a story that became “L’Alchimista.” How does travel inform your fiction, in particular The Broken Earth Trilogy?

It’s how I learn about the universal, the absolutes of humanity. I know that sounds kind of frou-frou and woo-woo, but going to see other people you start to understand culture, you start to understand the things you have never questioned your whole life, things that seem like absolutes. You start to realize how constructed culture is, and then you also start to see how similar we all are despite these constructed differences.

I traveled to Italy a few years ago and there we introduced ourselves with our professions. I would say, “Hi, I’m Nora Jemisin, I’m a writer . . . ”. My father introduced himself as an artist. The Italian host family that we were staying with introduced themselves by their connection to the region. “Hi, I’m such and such, and my family has lived here for three hundred years.” “That farm has been in my family for two or three generations.” It was a frame of reference or paradigm shift that I was not expecting. Little things like that tell you so much about people. Experiencing things like this is how I become a better writer.

In some cases, I’m researching factual stuff like volcanoes. I grew up in a place with no mountains, let alone volcanoes. Not even hills. Tromping across a caldera was a fascinating and, in hindsight, a dangerous experience. In the moment, I just thought it was cool. If you’re hiking a caldera, you should have hand protection in case you fall and catch yourself, otherwise the volcanic glass will cut you to the bone. I did not go in with hand protection. Also, I was jet lagged. Don’t do that. You live and you learn and hopefully you survive.

What can readers expect from The Obelisk Gate and the final volume of The Broken Earth Trilogy?

Well, in The Obelisk Gate we’re going to follow several characters point of view-wise. We’re branching out from the viewpoint that was central in The Fifth Season. We will find out what happened to Nassun, who went away with her father after her brother was murdered. There’s a couple of surprises in there as far as people who you think are dead but aren’t. There are also some existing characters who are going to transform. We will see a city in a giant geode. We’ll see some other wondrous and strange things along with some horrible things.

In the third volume, we will see yet another perspective that will see into the past and how the world came to be what it is in the present. That’s all I can say for now.

You mentioned video games earlier. Have you played any good ones lately?

I’ve been busy at Clarion West and with other work, but I’ve been playing comfort food games over and over again just to vent stress. I did try The Witcher 3 recently. I was a little bored with it, but I didn’t give it very long. I think I have to go back and give it another try. Geralt is hot, but I don’t know if there’s anything else there to keep me playing just yet.

That said, I haven’t gotten hooked on anything new. I’ve been playing Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Skyrim. I use Skyrim to soothe myself to sleep at night. I play it as a real estate game? I play it in order to acquire houses in every city with the Hearthfire DLC. I’m going forth to try and kill a dragon so I can build a deck. Every time I get attacked by a dragon, I’m like “Yes! Now I get to build my spice tower!”

Finally, does Spam Sushi taste different when it’s toasted over a Kīlauea Iki heat vent?

It tastes a little sulfury, so it’s worse. The vent is mostly just steam with a hint of metallic and sulfur taste to it. If you think that Spam tastes better with metallic sulfur whiffs and hints, then I don’t know what to tell you. I was more geeking out over eating geothermal energy, but geothermal energy doesn’t taste good!

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:
Peacetalk, Hate Speech

Cat Rambo

Clarkesworld was kind enough to solicit another essay and so, I’ve been mulling over what to say and letting that reflection guide my reading. A particular reread finally moved me to start jotting things down, prompted by the wealth of empty-headed and hateful rhetoric that’s marked some of the recent dust-ups, certainly in the sphere of SFF readers/writers and sometimes the greater cultural space beyond that.

Here’s something that makes me sad—at a time when there’s so much contention and arguing about fandom, one of the most helpful books is out of print and unavailable electronically. One of the smartest, savviest voices I know was stilled a few years back. Suzette Haden Elgin, who understood how language works, wrote multiple SF works, but also a series on communication that has changed a number of lives, including my own: The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and the other verbal self-defense books that followed it.

But one of her last books, Peacetalk 101 was a simple little story, with twelve maxims about how to communicate with other people. Before I expand on those maxims, though, and why I think they matter, I want to talk about hate.

The word hateful, or the notion of hating people, in my perception, is mostly seen as a negative, except through the eyes of people who are sadly broken. And yet we all have things we hate, sometimes about ourselves, or something small (peas) or large (a global situation).

When we hate something, at a minimum we reject it and often go further to attack and revile it. Sometimes in the course of that effort we try to get other people to engage with it as well, perhaps in order to change it in some way or to destroy it.

Here is a notable thing about this process, and I want to stress it: Hate is not a state in which critical thought plays a part. Nor is it one that enables communication. Core to my argument is the idea that critical thinking, communication, and empathy are all positives. That it is better to build than to destroy.

This is a wide and wonderful world, and varied are its people. Do you have to love them all? No, but sometimes you have to get along, for the good of us all. That’s a basic lesson we learn early on: there are other people in the world; their right to be here is as strong as ours.

The fact that humans like other humans more if they resemble each other has been proven by studies that also suggest that the degree to which someone doesn’t resemble you affects the dislike’s intensity. Figuring out our points of resemblance is often key to getting along with another person, but just knowing that we’ve got things that are hard-coded in, helps us step beyond that. Asking yourself why you hate someone or something is key to understanding your interactions with them.

Sometimes we normalize hate. We use flippant language about violence and death, because “they’re just words.” But words can and do hurt people. Verbal violence is a real thing, to the point where a child raised in such a traumatic atmosphere can have their physical growth and mental development stunted. An adult can experience chronic pain, migraines and headaches, ulcers, and even heart conditions as a result of repeated verbal stress.

Hurtful words happen all the time. Sometimes the hurt is unintentional on the part of the person doing the hurting, but other times the words have been tweaked to have as much impact as possible, to go to the heart of insecurities with the sureness of a playground taunt. When dealing with writers, that’s often the case. The ability to craft words that touch people is a power; it should be exercised with caution, restraint, and a certain sense of Spiderman-level responsibility.

But some do use hateful words as a mechanism for making friends and influencing people. It’s a strategy that involves sneering or throwing figurative (usually) feces at those not admitted into the inner circle, the outsiders and outcasts, the Sneetches without stars on their bellies. Often those who are the least equipped to fight back. It’s a sad phenomenon, but the allure of belonging to the special tribe or the cool kids’ table is very strong. Add in some of the most addictive drug ever, self-righteousness, and it can get genuinely ugly.

How can you tell when this sort of talk is happening? When it’s the language of cartoon and caricature, identifying people by sticking labels on them, particularly labels those people wouldn’t choose. When it’s dishonest rhetoric, focused on winning an imaginary game rather than building bridges between actual human beings. When it’s full of straw men and labels and sleights of hand rather than significance. When it is the speech of individuals making themselves seem clever, particularly at other peoples’ expense, rather than coherent. The moment a conversation becomes about scoring points at the cost of the other participants, it is no longer a conversation but an accumulation of Internet froth and spittle.

So what is the opposite of hate speech? Communication that builds connections, allows empathy, and increases understanding. Communication that helps people work together to create, rather than to destroy.

Elgin’s book is a slim little thing, a series of incidents in the daily existence of a man named George who’s given up on life. He meets a homeless man. (I am aware that the trope of the magic disadvantaged is problematic. I will simply acknowledge it in passing and otherwise cut Elgin a little slack.) Over the course of a number of days, George learns how to communicate effectively in a way that changes his life and restores his hope. The maxims are simple, and I’m actually going to provide them out of order, because one speaks to the heart of this essay. It’s this:

Choose your communication goals. What do you want out of your part in the great conversation? I want to offer people interested in better communication a set of tools that I’ve found handy and to make people think before typing every once in a while—not so they silence or self-censor, but so they know what their communication goals are and have a reasonable chance of achieving them. Do you want to give information? Persuade the reader? Change their behavior? Help them? That will affect what you say and how you say it.

This is why the tone argument is—at least to my mind—both right and wrong. The truth of an argument is unconnected to the tone in which it’s delivered, and yeah, there are people in the world who will perceive something as hostile no matter what that tone is, but another fact of the matter is that tone affects reception and that’s part of the equation that you have to consider. I will defend to the death the right of someone to sing their truth however they want, to express things and experiences that may otherwise not get sung, but if you want that song to be an act of communication, to be composed of more than one voice, you must consider the key in which the other voices are singing and perhaps bring yours down an octave.

Pay attention. Elgin says, “This is the first thing, the one that has to come before all the others. Nothing else can happen until you honor this First Rule.” Pay attention to what’s going on, not to old grudges or future worries. If you want to practice peace talk, you need to know what the other person is saying. Listen first. Try to understand what’s going on. Then and only then, speak.

So if you’re not listening, if you’re reading this essay in order to react to something entirely different than the words or find fiskable content, you may not get much out of it. I’m writing an essay about how to communicate better, aimed at people who do want to learn how to communicate better, based on Elgin’s theory and my own personal experience and reading. I am well aware other people’s mileage may vary; that’s one reason I’m sharing this particular personal odometer reading.

Reject preconceptions. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that your expectations of an interaction will shape it. Partly it’s because we perceive what we expect to perceive, sometimes even in the face of evidence to the contrary or perhaps even because of it.

At the same time, the way we behave towards people, even the non-verbal acts—our body language, our posture, our micro expressions—affect the message they’re going to give us, as well as the wrapper that message is packaged in.

Stay in tone is another of Elgin’s precepts. That’s something you can’t do without paying attention. Your communication is more understandable to someone if your tone matches theirs. I’m still not sure I totally grok this in the way that Elgin meant, but I’ll take a stab at it. If you speak to someone using vocabulary and concepts that don’t match theirs, the mismatch will impede understanding. See my starting point about communication goals.

What if their tone is angry or violent? Well, see the next precept.

Take no bait. So hard to do. I know I’ve bitten on an invitingly garnished hook more than once. Not as often as I used to, thank goodness, and it’s usually a situation where polite professionalism and taking everything at face value in order to repel the cannons of sarcasm is the best strategy. See also: flailing around about something over which you have absolutely, totally, indisputably not a gram of control. Because it does absolutely, totally, indisputably not a gram of good and sometimes proves counterproductive.

Preserve face. Let’s start with the concept of face, which is comparable to dignity, perhaps. No one likes to lose face. But here it’s not your face that you’re working to preserve, but the other person’s. Why? Let’s return to that notion of scoring points in the exchange. As soon as you start doing that at someone else’s expense, you have removed the possibility of a win-win communication, one where everyone comes out ahead, which is quite possible when genuine exchanges are taking place.

Choose your metaphors. The metaphors you use speak a great deal about your inner reality. Don’t bring a loaded gun comparison into a peaceful gathering.

The idea that language shapes perception/reality is not a new one. It seems a basic concept, but sometimes the practices that grow from it are the ones that the people who are perfectly happy with how things are right now, thank you very much, find the most mock-worthy. Perhaps because yes, sometimes they do ring oddly or seem a little silly. Perhaps because something at that root level carries a great deal of potential for slow, subtle, strong change.

Trust your inner grammar. This is a precept I’ve had to wrap my head around because I find myself asking—what if your inner grammar is “broken” or at least functions differently than most people’s? But it seems to boil down to this—trust your gut, but make sure it’s your intuition, rather than your insecurities, doing the talking. Your instincts are fine-tuned from decades of exposure to the world around you; you know how communication works, that when you extend a hand towards someone it usually means “friend” rather than “foe.”

Avoid lies. Many absorb this basic precept in childhood (and may or may not live up to it), others pick it up over the course of years, and a few reject it outright as unworthy and unnecessary for their ubermenchy selves. There’s a weird strategy, strengthened and normalized by the Internet, of simply repeating an untruth or gross distortion over and over in order to try to make it true. In my opinion, lying is pretty much the same as hanging a sign around your neck reading “ethically bankrupt to the point of no longer worth dealing with.” I don’t really have anything to say to the folks that see truth as optional.

Anything you feed will grow. If someone is friendly towards you and you are friendly back, that feeling will increase. Conversely, it is possible to not feed stupidity or cruelty. Does that make it go away? Of course not. But it does lessen the growth.

Joy is the skill of skills. In my experience, it is possible to learn to be happier, partially through one’s outlook on and expectations of the Universe. Does joy solve homelessness, sickness, oppression? Well, actually, I do think a more joyful world would pay more attention to social ills.

So—I don’t know, what am I saying about Elgin? That we need more joy and fewer words aimed at cutting people down. That seeing good writers sidetracked or derailed, sometimes made afraid to write their own unique and wonderful experiences, is frustrating, because there should be more genuine communication in the world than less.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives and writes atop a hill in West Seattle. The author of over two hundred short stories and two novels, she is the current President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SWFA). Her most recent book is Altered America: Steampunk Stories.

Editor’s Desk:
The Little Things

Neil Clarke

I turn fifty this month. Normally I don’t make much of a fuss about my birthdays, but this year I’m letting my family throw a party. It’s not that I expect fifty to be any different than forty-nine, but it is a milestone year and since the heart attack, those milestones actually mean something to me. Little victories are important too.

As I mentioned in an editorial a few months ago, one of the presents I expected to have received by now was to be free of my day job so I could focus entirely on Clarkesworld and my other editing projects. Unfortunately, what appeared to be a solid job prospect for Lisa suddenly evaporated after some staff changes at that company. That set her back to square one and has left me in an increasingly frustrating position of being stuck where I am. I know she’ll find something, but it appears the little losses mean a lot to me now too.

I recently blogged about having impostor syndrome. It’s that terrible little voice in your head that tells you that success was just luck, a fluke, and it will all evaporate when people figure out the truth. If you aren’t careful, the little losses in life can be magnified by this beast. Far too many of us in this field seem to feel like impostors and I’ve been at war with my personal monster for too long now. Lately though, I think I might be winning.

I’m a big advocate of magazines starting small and growing. In my eagerness to see the magazine expand, I’ve allowed impostor syndrome to convince me that the value of my work was the enjoyment I received from it, so I took a smaller financial reward. Oddly enough, this is counter to the advice I give authors: make sure you get paid. I also told myself that reinvesting in the magazine would pay out in the long run. My vision demanded the magazine be “complete” before I could be justified drawing a proper wage.

There was a lot of theory in my madness. Fortunately, enough of it was correct and our revenue steadily increased over the years. Where I failed, however, was in identifying the relationship between readership and supporting readership. Over the last three years, our readership has increased, but the percentage of readers supporting us has steadily declined. This year, it dropped below seven percent for the first time. So much for little losses. That’s a real problem.

Optimally, I would like to be at ten percent. Think about that for a second—one in ten people would be paying for our work. Insane, right? Yet, that’s the business model most online magazines are working towards. Each of us have some ridiculously low percentage as a goal. It’s no wonder that people have been trying to convince me to reconsider our approach to free content.

I know the market is oversaturated and that’s probably a contributing factor, but I’ve been watching with interest as individual authors with similar social media footprints launch Patreon pages and related projects. I’ve seen them rapidly shoot past what we make in a month while offering considerably less than we do in return. Clearly this is more of a passionate show of support for their work than it is about getting something. Sadly, you don’t see this happening with magazines, so one has to ask, has the short fiction community lost its passion for magazines? And before you say anything, those “we’re going to close if . . . ” Kickstarters tend to work only by deliberately manipulating their supporters. It is not quite the same. I don’t see authors saying “I’ll never publish again unless . . . ”

So where’s this newly-minted cranky fifty-year-old man headed with all this? I’m not sure. I know we have to continue to grow the size of our audience, but this trend seems to indicate that it will only grow increasingly difficult to bring in supporting readers. We need to start thinking about what we can do about that ninety-three and change percent that don’t support our efforts. I have no doubt that some of you are reading this, so I’d love to hear from you and find out why you think things are the way they are.

And hey, if anyone feels like giving me a fiftieth birthday present, subscribe to any of our vendors or make a pledge over at Patreon. Every step back towards seven percent—or dare I dream ten percent?—provides one of those positive little milestones I’ve learned to appreciate. Maybe we can even do this before our tenth anniversary this October!

P.S. I didn’t want the six plus percent of you supporting us to think I’d forgotten you. You’re my favorite readers and listeners. Without you, none of this would be possible.

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 was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Regis III (The Invincible)

Jaroslaw Marcinek

About the Artist

Jaroslaw Marcinek was born in Szczecin, Poland and is a freelance illustrator and concept artist. His primary interests are in science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and history.