Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 101

Table of Contents

The Last Surviving Gondola Widow

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Indelible

by Gwendolyn Clare

The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill

by Kelly Robson

Meshed

by Rich Larson

The Osteomancer's Son

by Greg van Eekhout

It Takes Two

by Nicola Griffith

What in the World Do They Want, Anyway? The Myth of the Friendly Alien

by Mark Cole

A Little Paranoia: A Conversation with Liza Groen Trombi

by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The Spurred Storyteller: A Conversation With Tang Fei

by Ken Liu

Another Word: YA is the New Black

by Dawn Metcalf

Editor's Desk: The Next Hundred

by Neil Clarke

Lady and the Ship

Art by Atilgan Asikuzun

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Last Surviving Gondola Widow

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I slipped in for the motion picture. Regalese had set up a private screening in a tiny little theater near 19th and Dearborn, on the other side of the street from Bed Bug Row. I felt itchy just being there, and not only because of the proximity to the vice clubs, but also because I felt obviously out of my element.

Still, I dressed for the neighborhood. I wore my bobbed hair under an engineer’s cap I confiscated from one of the Gondola widows when I found her years before. My baggy shirt and filthy overalls hid my assets, such as they were, but one of the other Pinkertons told me—kindly, he thought—that it was impossible to hide the female nature of my backside.

The memory of his comment always reminded me to wear everything baggy except my steel-toed boots. I would put a little bit of char on my face, and I’d learned to grunt low and hard whenever I wanted to say hello or good-bye or get the hell out of my way. I kept my head down a lot too.

Not that it mattered much in this theater. Designed for burlesque shows mostly, the theater had a red velvet curtain that pulled back to reveal a real silver-painted screen. The screen was the fanciest thing about the place.

Regalese sat on benches with straw scattered across the floor beneath to absorb the crap on the patrons’ foul-smelling boots. The straw hadn’t been changed in weeks, if ever. Even though Regalese and I were the only two people in here, besides the projectionist and the organist, the place still stank of tobacco, sweat, and human fluids of a kind I didn’t want to contemplate.

Regalese had told me to come for the motion picture, but hadn’t told me how he’d first seen it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, either. I worked with men who patronized the Levee District, but I liked to pretend they didn’t.

The gaslights dimmed, and the motion picture started up. The organist started blaring some mock Sousa march, which besides being deafening was just damn offensive, given the nature of the images we were about to see.

Some so-called director had taken stereoscopes, still photographs, and silver addies, and had somehow—Using His Own Magical Abilities! the poster in the lobby blared—combined them into a herky-jerky semblance of a real film.

I didn’t need to see the pictures, even speeded up. I’d been on Michigan Avenue the day the Gondolas died, and what was flickering on that screen was nothing like what really happened.

When I tell that story, I leave out most of the details. Like the way Chicago smelled before the attack. The city smelled new. The recently completed buildings were made of terracotta, marble, brick, and limestone. When the downtown air wasn’t smelling like Lake Michigan fish, it smelled of newly milled stone dust. After the Great Fire, the city fathers had mandated all new construction—especially downtown—be made of fireproof stone.

I’d moved to the city five years after the fire, and had fallen in love immediately. The day the Gondolas died hadn’t changed my love affair with the Windy City. In some ways, that day had reinforced it.

That day, I’d been on the job. I was the third woman Allan Pinkerton had ever hired in Chicago. The other two no longer worked for him. One had died—murdered horribly—and the other had fled when she realized what the job entailed.

Me, I found freedom in investigations. The role-playing, the games, that tiny bit of magic I could use to add a luster to everything, all combined to make me one of the city’s greatest detectives. When no one could figure out what happened, the Pinkertons got called in. When no Pinkerton could figure out what happened, they called me.

Which was why I was just outside Cook County Bank & Trust that spring morning, dressed like a proper woman on a hot day. Shirtwaist, skirt with bustle, long auburn hair pinned to the top of my head, parasol to keep out the sun, and (for my sins) a corset, cinched so tight I hoped like hell I wouldn’t have to run after anyone. The high-button shoes I wore with enough heel to help me pass for five-seven wouldn’t have made it easy either.

I was supposed to determine bank balances by portraying the young wife of our target, an elderly millionaire who claimed he no longer had the funds to pay us. I’d been fighting to close the parasol before going inside, which was why I was on the sidewalk when someone gasped and pointed. Gondolas covered the sky over Lake Michigan like multicolored storm clouds. The whirring sound of their spiky engines sounded like heavy rain on water.

We’d heard about the Gondolas, but most of us hadn’t believed they existed. Not in America anyway, and certainly not made by the South. Reconstruction had ended the year before, and everyone knew the South was bankrupt. How it could afford not one, not two, but several fleets of Gondolas stretched the imagination.

Only later, we learned that Great Britain supplied much of the material in exchange for cotton. Britain really didn’t want the cotton as much as it wanted to see the Gondolas in action—

And it got to. The day the Gondolas died was the reason Britain stopped nurturing its own Gondola fleet and started building more ironclads instead.

But that switch was years away. We had to go through the horrors of that day, the death, the destruction, and what some call the Second Great Chicago Fire, before we came out the other side.

Or before some came out the other side.

The rest of us remained enmeshed in the War of Southern Aggression, even though the battlefield had emptied.

The motion picture captured none of that day’s essence, although it had much of the day’s symbolism. The Sousa march didn’t help. All that happy brass music, with a parade beat, made me want to steal Regalese’s pistol and shoot the organist in the back of his pomaded head.

Instead, I sat on my bench, hands clasped, watching moving images I’d seen before as photographs. The images didn’t move naturally or even well, which was good, since I probably would have run screaming out of the theater if the motion picture had been anything close to accurate.

The motion picture was set up well. First, the Gondolas appeared, their artistic sphere-shaped balloons hovering over Chicago, perilously close to the great stone buildings on Michigan Avenue. Then the images became distant, showing the clouds gathering over Lake Michigan. The images clicked and clicked and it became clear that those clouds weren’t clouds at all, but hundreds more Gondolas, coming in from the South, ready to rain hell on the Midwest’s greatest city.

Then the sparks, like tiny fairy creatures, spread out across the sky, looking like flaws in the photographs, followed by the next series of images—fires erupting on all of the Gondolas, smoke pluming, the sky alternating dark and light.

Finally, the motion picture focused on the destruction: the Gondolas breaking apart, falling to the buildings below—shattering the Tiffany skylight of the Cook County Bank & Trust—and landing, in flaming pieces, on the streets and Grant Park and into the lake itself.

I shuddered. I couldn’t help it. That day, the stupid parasol had saved me. If I had gone up the marble steps and through the brass handled double doors, I would have been one of those pathetic creatures burned alive inside Cook County Bank & Trust, after being showered with expensive glass and pelted with flaming Gondola parts.

No one had survived the inferno inside that bank.

No one.

When I had realized what was happening, I had run up the bank stairs. I had figured we had to pull people out before the situation got worse (I had no idea how bad it was) but as I reached the top of the steps, the windows exploded outward

I ducked, covered my face, and screamed as shards penetrated the back of my hands and arms. My black skirt, shirtwaist, and corset protected me from damage anywhere else, although I did spend the evening trying to clear slivers from my waist-length auburn hair.

That was the night I bobbed my hair, not because I was making a political statement years before the rest of America’s women would, but because I couldn’t get all of the glass out.

That day was more than images. It was smoke so black and smelly that anything it touched had to be destroyed. It was the stench of burning canvas and searing flesh. It was heat so intense that skin dried and turned red blocks away from the flames.

It was—and I can attest to this—hell on earth.

The motion picture made the disaster look small. Tiny Gondolas, sparks like fireflies, smoke rising from the multicolored balloons—and the silence, always the silence, because the images made no noise.

Or maybe I couldn’t hear anything. The organist was supposed to have been playing, but I didn’t hear it. I got lost in the memories.

That day had been filled with noise, noise that still woke me from a sound sleep. Screams and cries for help, sirens and the roar of flames, explosions and more explosions, followed by even more explosions.

My hands are still scarred from the burns I received as I grabbed a metal doorknob, as I tried to put out burning clothing before it seared flesh. My own magic, a little tiny bubble of protection, protected my skirts from catching fire. Still, like so many others, I ran to Lake Michigan. I plunged my arms into water—frigid despite the burning bits of debris on its surface—and that, doctors later said, prevented loss of motion.

I clenched my scarred hands as the images continued. Up—the burning sky; down—the fleeing and injured humans. Up—the debris falling off terra cotta roofs; down—the smoldering pieces of Gondola lying in the street.

The motion picture ended with a snap-snap-snap of the projector, and the bright silver light of an empty screen.

“See her?” Regalese asked.

I frowned at him. Regalese was fifteen years older than I was, a wanderer who had come to Chicago for the hunting after the day the Gondolas died. He freelanced for the Pinkertons. They didn’t like his trigger-happy nature, even as they relied on it.

“Her?” I asked.

“Run it again,” he said to the projectionist. I started to protest, but he grabbed my hand in his own. I knew he felt the crabbed, scratchy quality of my damaged skin, and I knew he didn’t care.

The organist sat up, hands over the keyboard.

“Without music,” Regalese added.

The motion picture started again. I wanted to close my eyes against the images, but I didn’t. I made myself watch.

Regalese hadn’t let go of my hand. I think he had expected me to look away, because he shook my fingers as one of the Gondolas toppled onto State Street.

“See her?” he asked again.

I squinted. The imagery had changed, away from the Gondolas and onto the poor unfortunate souls burning, and dying, their bodies littering the streets of this great city.

“See?” he asked, still shaking me.

The images were overlaid on each other. I had no idea how the compiler had done this, made it all look like it was actually moving, but when I stared I could see the different photographs, and this series had been taken in sequence.

Debris fell. People injured. Some looked up. Gondola basket toppled off the rooftop. People fled.

A woman fled.

She was thin and dressed in an oilskin coat with a matching cap, a bandana, and engineer’s goggles around her neck.

A Gondola widow, big as day, escaping south.

A lot of Gondola widows escaped that day. Gondola wives as they still thought of themselves that afternoon. Widows only came later, when it became clear they would be considered heroes if they managed to get back to the South.

Warriors all of them, defending God and country—the Unrepentative Confederate States of America. Feted, celebrated, protected.

Until Reconstruction began anew in the aftermath of the attack, shoved down the throats of the unreformed Rebels by the dogged determination of the Congressional delegation of the Great State of Illinois.

“What’s so special about her?” I asked.

“You don’t recognize her?” He turned toward me.

I squinted, waved my hand, made the projectionist run the damn motion picture again. There she was, running, a half-turn toward the camera, a shot of fear. I was about to ask for the actual photograph when my brain supplied the answer Regalese was seeking.

“Oh, my god,” I said. “That’s Maizy Farmington.”

First Lady. Wife of the current Governor of the Great State of Illinois.

It’s bad form to accuse the wife of the Governor of treason against the Republic without some kind of proof. Especially in an election year. Proof wasn’t hard to get against Gondola widows, but making proof stick, making it seem like it wasn’t a dirty trick played by Governor Farmington’s opponent—that was a little harder.

We needed witnesses other than ourselves. And that wasn’t the usual way Regalese or I worked.

We’d caught dozens of Gondola widows in the aftermath of the day the Gondolas died. Gondolas, married to their female engineers, responded to the engineer’s voice and the touch of her hand. First the voice. Then the Gondola would locate its engineer—its wife—and fly toward her.

What Regalese and I did was gather up the remaining pieces of the Gondolas and take them to potential widows. The pieces would respond to the voice, and float to the engineer, identifying her as a Gondola wife/widow.

Once the women were identified by the remains of their Gondolas, most of the women broke into tears. They mourned the loss of their great flying warships as if mourning the loss of an actual spouse.

Many of the women believed their lives were no longer worth living, and gave up without a fight. The rest attacked us as if we personally had destroyed their ships.

We hadn’t destroyed their ships. I couldn’t have, and Regalese hadn’t been here.

The real heroes of that day had been coalburners, most of whom had died for their bravery.

As the Gondolas gathered over the Mississippi, telegraph operators tracked them, growing alarmed at the increasing numbers of ships and the fact they had come from the Deep South. Messages about this impending crisis didn’t come to the authorities; they traveled north through the coalburner network, tracking the ships.

Coalburners have a sparking magic, dangerous and hard to control. They use bits of the Earth—not just coal, but flint as well—to spark fires. Coalburners often have to live underground or on lakes, just to prevent fires.

And after the Great Chicago Fire, coalburners were banned from the city proper, although they snuck in to fight the Gondola attack. No one ever discovered who helped the coalburners onto the roofs of the city, and no one knew how they managed to coordinate the release of sparks, but everyone agrees that the coalburners saved us—even though all of the Chicago area coalburners had died that day.

I hadn’t even noticed the coalburners, but I had seen some of the newly created widows pull themselves from burning Gondolas. The women tried to flee, but most were too injured to get away.

Those that did get away hid in flophouses south of the Loop. It took little to track them down, and even less to identify them.

Regalese had joined our search in the weeks after the crisis, when it became clear that a handful of women had escaped the city. He and I partnered to find them—he often playing a jilted husband, and me a heartbroken sister as we enquired about lost loved ones.

We thought we’d caught all of them, until this motion picture showed up and revealed an even greater perfidy than we had realized. What was she planning for the Great State of Illinois?

“It shouldn’t be hard to trap her,” Regalese said to me as the moving images ended for a third time. “All we need are the Gondola pieces.”

I bowed my head. He had moved to other jobs, including one investigating the magic behind moving images. That had been how he had discovered this bit of ephemera in the first place.

“Right?” he asked, his hand still holding mine.

I didn’t want to speak in front of the projectionist or the organist. Instead, I thanked them both, stood, adjusted my overalls, and headed outside, blinking in the pale sunlight of the afternoon.

We stood alone on the sidewalk. The Levee didn’t come alive until twilight.

“What am I missing, Lou?” he asked. He almost never used my name. No one in the Pinkertons did. It was too dangerous. But he caught my mood, and he then needed my attention. My name was the only way to do so.

“We destroyed them,” I said softly.

His eyes narrowed. He lived for the job, the hunt, the search for the next great magical threat. He stopped in Chicago only when he was in the area, when he needed the work, or when he had something to share with our version of the local constabulary.

“Destroyed what?” he asked, even though his tone told me he suspected what I was about tell him.

“Every last bit of the Gondolas,” I said.

“Because . . . ?” he asked.

“Because they started to reassemble, and we had no engineers that we trusted,” I said.

He looked away. He knew I had just lied. We had an engineer, trustworthy and capable. She just wasn’t willing. She had declined to bond with any kind of vessel, and she would continue to do so for the rest of her natural life.

I knew that for a fact—because that particular engineer was me.

Large magics, small magics, we all have a mix of them. My largest reservoir of magical talent fell into the engineering category. I could make machinery dance, and if I wanted to become part of it, let it chew a bit of my soul, I could make it do my bidding as long as it (and I) existed.

But I had embraced my small magic, the glamour that got people to talk to me, the tiny glow that made the casual observer look away unable to remember exactly what my voice sounded like, and what my face looked like. Perfect for detection. Less dramatic, and less emotionally exhausting than engineering magic.

At least, it had been until the day the Gondolas died. Then I had to go after women just like me, women who had made a different choice, women who had decided to give up their entire lives, their entire beings, to a ship and someone else’s dream.

In the case of these Gondolas, the dream had been a second Civil War. It had failed so far, although many of us believed a third Civil War might flare up if the Federal Government ever did away with the Second Reconstruction. I tried to ignore the punishing cruelty of that new system, which had started as retaliation for the near-loss of my city, by staring at my hands, and realizing that so many Chicagoans never came home the day the Gondolas died. All those people had done was go to work, visit a bank, or sit on a park bench, enjoying an afternoon by the lake.

“A new Gondola won’t do, will it?” Regalese asked.

I shook my head. “She simply could refuse to ignite her magic.”

I had done that countless times.

“We need her ship,” I said.

Her ship from years before. Her ship from the attack. Her ship, which I knew, had already been destroyed.

It took planning to approach her. I couldn’t do it alone without revealing myself as engineering/magical. Regalese needed to be there to interrogate.

But we both knew that interrogations wouldn’t work, at least in this instance. We would have to find another way to work.

I contacted the head of the detective agency, Allan Pinkerton, and asked him to use his contacts. Allan knew everyone who was anyone, and he’d lost a lot of personal friends on the day the Gondolas died. In fact, he’d lost so many friends that he hated the way the news rags had labeled the day, thinking the label should be closer to the day Chicago died. So many elites died in the firestorm because they’d been at their banks or their high-class offices or tending their high-class hotels.

They—or what was left of them—were all buried at Graceland Cemetery, so that Chicago’s royalty could stride into the afterlife together.

I planned to use Chicago’s royalty, which was something I didn’t tell Allan. Because he was going to be appalled.

But my initial plan—using survivors of the attack—hadn’t just been cruel; it had been heartless. Because there had been a good chance they could have died.

So once I formulated that plan, I tossed it without telling Regalese.

I came up with another plan. One I thought more benign.

Somehow, Allan convinced the head of the War Widows and Orphans Fund to hold a ceremony honoring the war dead. The Governor, a Union veteran, loved those kinds of events. He had a series of speeches that somehow roused the crowd, and made everyone decide to vote for him. He even made cemeteries feel like the appropriate place to hold a rally.

I’d seen him speak several times, but I’d never heard his wife talk. The newspapers claimed Illinois’ First Lady was shy and retiring, standing beside her man, but never speaking for him—the way a proper woman should.

Such a vision of womanhood.

Such a lie.

I made sure that Allan insisted the only way the Governor could talk was if Maizy laid a wreath on the monument to the Gondola dead. Maizy had to give a small speech before she set the wreath down. She couldn’t have the Governor do it for her.

For a few days, the Governor’s office tried to negotiate the conditions—apparently Maizy claimed she got ill whenever she had to address a crowd. But someone—Allan, the head of the fund, someone convinced Maizy (or, more likely, convinced the Governor) that to lay a wreath without comment would be a slap in the face to the entire city.

I had chosen that location inside Graceland carefully. It was in the center of the elite row, where so many of the wealthy dead from that day rested.

What I had forgotten until I approached the crowd that stormy afternoon was that the monument to the Gondola dead wasn’t far from Lorado Taft’s sculpture, Eternal Silence, which some wag had named “The Statue of Death.” The creepy thing was as tall as a person, and was faceless, with an arm raised over the empty hood, blocking the place where a mouth would be.

I saw more than one attendee stop in surprise as they saw the statue. Even Regalese stopped, eyes wide as he looked at me.

“Wow,” was all he said.

Wow, indeed.

The Gondola Dead monument paled in comparison. It had taken the city years to decide what to do. So many locals wanted a memorial downtown, but the businessmen and Governor Farmington (under the influence of his wife?) did not want reminders near the heart of the city. So the monument got shuffled to Graceland, and became smaller and less ornate as the designs went through various stages.

Now it was just a bronze spire, with a square base embossed with that day’s date and some pious statement I had forgotten the wording of, and couldn’t currently get close enough to see. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the wreath, the podium, and the fact that Maizy Farmington had arrived.

Appropriately, Maizy Farmington wore black. The outfit almost looked like widow’s weeds, but was a bit too fashionable for that. The skirt was short enough to show her ankles (appropriately covered in well-worn high-button shoes) and the blouse was covered with a gray shawl that seemed somber but didn’t make Maizy Farmington look like she was mourning.

About a hundred people showed up on this fine morning. More than I would have expected, given the haphazard nature of the invitation to this event. Surprisingly, to me at least, a goodly number of the crowd were women even though we weren’t allowed to vote. I suspected most of them had husbands or male family members they thought they could influence.

Influence. I didn’t exactly know her agenda, but I knew that Maizy Farmington was like all the other wives out there. She did what she could to influence her husband.

Heaven knew what kind of subtle damage her whispers in his ear had done. The power behind the throne—and he probably hadn’t even realized it.

I stood at the back of the crowd, behind two women with hats that had more feathers than half the birds in the state. I didn’t want my magic to be obvious to Maizy, and I achieved that at this distance.

Regalese stood behind the people who had gathered closest to the podium. I warned him that he needed to stay away from Maizy. He was clearly trying to stay close but far away at the same time.

He knew what was coming.

Or what I hoped was coming.

I also hoped that Maizy didn’t know. She had fled that day; she had no idea what people had died of. She probably thought everyone died of burns.

In fact, I had thought that too, until I focused some while thinking of that initial plan. Initially, I had thought to use survivors to reveal Maizy’s treachery. Most of those survivors still had Gondola fragments stuck inside their bodies. The burning fragments had gone in, cauterized the wounds, and had somehow prevented gangrene or other horrid deaths.

But, I realized, many of the dead also had Gondola shrapnel in their bodies. Most of the dead had died of something else—flames, falls, too many wounds. Still, I was counting on that shrapnel to make my case.

And if Maizy Farmington actually knew how people had died, she never would have shown up.

But she was here, fidgeting beside her husband, clutching a mourning wreath in her black-gloved hands. A phalanx of women from the War Widows and Orphans Fund stood behind her, as if being close to her conferred some validity upon them.

The Governor stood beside her. He had pushed his hat back from his face, and he kept looking sideways at her as if he expected her to bolt. Twice he leaned over and squeezed her arm.

Everyone said he loved her. And if I had learned anything in this job, love was a treacherous thing.

Finally, the ceremony started with the head of the fund—a stout woman whose gray hair suggested her status as a Civil War widow—giving an interminable speech about what we owed our honored dead.

As she spoke, my cheeks heated. I had just found another flaw in my plan. I wasn’t honoring the dead—at least in the way that their widows and children would want to see. It wouldn’t mean much to catch a Gondola widow, not with the horrors these women were about to endure.

I needed to abort the plan.

I moved away from the women in the back, starting to thread my way to the front of the crowd. The only way I could stop Maizy from speaking would be to make my presence known.

I was halfway to the front when the head of the fund finished her interminable talk. She turned, and loudly introduced the First Lady of Illinois.

For a moment, Maizy looked terrified. Then she nodded and headed toward the monument. Even though the organization had insisted she speak, she clearly wasn’t going to.

Then a man yelled, “Speech!”

As others took up the cry, I realized that the first shout had come from Regalese. I hadn’t had a chance to warn him about the flaw in our plan.

“Speech! Speech! Speech!”

She headed doggedly toward the monument, and her husband trod after her. He caught her arm. She shook her head, and he smiled at her, a pleading little smile that told me more about their relationship than I wanted to know.

Then he led her back to the podium.

She glanced at him, looking trapped. The shouters grew quiet. She whispered something.

“Speak up!” Regalese shouted.

“Can’t hear in the back!” one of the women shouted.

Maizy closed her eyes, then squared her shoulders. “Ten years ago,” she said, “a group of Rebels tried to reignite the flames of our late war . . . ”

Popping sounds echoed all over the graveyard, followed by banging and thudding. I saw bits of wood propel themselves from belowground. Other pieces—some larger than I wanted to think about—slammed out of nearby crypts, making gigantic holes in the stone.

People screamed, and several men dropped to the ground, hands over their heads. Veterans, still reliving the war.

Maizy looked horrified. She raised a hand, and all of the wood gathered around her.

“Go away!” she screamed, waving her hand. “Go away! You’ll ruin everything!”

I stepped over the prone bodies of the men, saw the sobbing women around me, and noted how many graves had burst open.

Maizy pivoted so that she could run away, but the wood itself trapped her. It was trying to rebuild itself into her Gondola—and there were a lot of charred and goo-covered pieces, so that it could probably make a small replica of itself.

The Governor’s face had gone white. His hat had fallen to the ground, revealing his bald head. The wood shoved its way around him as if he hadn’t existed, and had gathered around her.

“Maizy,” he said, trying to get close to her. “Maizy, what is this?”

But the wood pushed him away. Besides, it was pretty clear what this was: he’d been sleeping with the enemy, and he had just realized it.

Still, he tried to get close, only to be pushed away.

I passed the Governor, saw even more pieces of wood approaching from farther away in the cemetery, along with bits of the metal gears.

Maizy was shaking her head, and muttering, “No, no, go away,” over and over again, as if she had forgotten how to control her Gondola.

“Take off your gloves,” I snapped in the same tone my mentor had used as she trained me on magical equipment.

Maizy stopped muttering. Her gaze met mine, and her mouth fell open as she understood I had a similar magic.

“You can control your Gondola with your hands,” I said. “You know that.”

“You do it,” she said softly, so only I could hear her. “You know how. For the Cause. We’ve got to try again. You know that. You need to help me.”

“I don’t need to help you, you traitor,” I said.

My words carried over the panicked screams of the crowd. Everything grew quiet, and everyone was suddenly watching me.

I didn’t want them to look at me. I wanted them to see her.

“I’m not a traitor,” she said to me. “I’m loyal to my country.”

“The Confederate States of America,” I said.

She glanced around the wood, still trying to reassemble, but she probably couldn’t see how many people were actually watching us. The wood had almost completely encircled her.

“Like you,” she said.

“I’m no Rebel,” I said.

“Maizy.” The Governor sounded heartbroken. “Maizy, what’s going on?”

“Let me tell you, Mr. Governor,” I said. “You married the Last Surviving Gondola Widow.”

At that moment, screams echoed around me. Women streamed forward, grabbing at Maizy, clutching her, pulling at her. The Governor took a step back, then nearly fell as Regalese yanked him out of the way.

The wood was trying to form a protective shield, but the shield wasn’t being designed by Maizy so it had no real shape. Or maybe she really had forgotten how to use her magic effectively. She still wore her gloves.

Then the women of the Widows and Orphans Fund behind her tackled her and threw her to the ground.

The shrieks and cries and shouts of fury did not rival the sounds I heard on the day the Gondolas died, but they were hideous all the same.

Regalese covered the Governor’s face as they both turned away. More widows and veterans ran to the podium and piled on the woman they had only moments before honored.

The Governor shook off Regalese and ran back to the mess, trying to pull people away. The wood remained gathered in a circle. Then it confusedly reassembled into the places that the pieces had probably held when they were part of the Gondola.

Regalese pulled me away from the melee.

“You don’t want to see this,” he said.

But, weirdly, I did. I didn’t want to climb into the pile and take my revenge. I had taken my revenge by arresting the Gondola widows, and making cases against them that then led to the arrest of the traitors who had masterminded this attack all over the South.

Clearly they were planning a new attack, and Maizy had been in position to prevent a response to it. Or channel information to the attackers. Regalese and I would inform the Pinkertons, and they would inform the government. The United States Government.

Not that they’d miss this event. It was hideous.

The wood wobbled in place, and then the pieces toppled to the ground. I let out a small sound, and realized what that meant.

Maizy Farmington was dead.

My heart twisted for a moment. Was I responsible for that? I had orchestrated this event, after all.

Then I realized that all it would have taken was one mistake on her part, one softly spoken word, one laugh at a rally, and shrapnel from any survivors in the audience would have come toward her, just like it had here.

She had managed for four years to remain silent. But those first words, spoken almost like a confession, had condemned her.

Regalese almost put his arm around me, then thought the better of it. He nodded, I nodded, and we left the cemetery, walking past the Statue of Death, past the entrance, and onto North Clark.

To our south, the city rose. The tall stone buildings, castles near the lake, dominated the downtown skyline.

They had survived the day the Gondolas died, a testament to the vision of the post-Fire leaders. The city—the state—would survive this as well.

Just like the country had survived the attempt at a Second Civil War.

Just like it would survive a third.

I squared my shoulders and glanced over at Regalese. Somehow we had stopped something big. And only because we’d been doing our job.

We’d found the last of the Gondola widows.

And I hoped to God we would never see any more.

About the Author

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a Hugo-award winning editor and writer. Her novels have hit bestseller lists around the world, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times of London. Although she’s best known for her science fiction and fantasy, she’s also an award-winning bestselling novelist under two other names, Kris Nelscott (mystery) and Kristine Grayson (paranormal romance). She’s recently returned to editing with the critically acclaimed anthology series, Fiction River, where she acts as series editor with her husband Dean Wesley Smith, and as project editor on several volumes. Her latest project is a doozy. In partnership with WMG Publishing, she’s putting out the last six books in her Anniversary Day Saga in 2015. The saga, a story told inside her Retrieval Artist universe, was already two novels long when the third, A Murder of Clones, appeared last month. This month, Search & Recovery appears. One more novel will appear each month until the final book in the saga, Masterminds, appears in June.

Indelible

Gwendolyn Clare

“You’re not Shurkar.”

With confusion or doubt, with a hint of distain, dismissively, or amused. They say it with pity, with soft genuine concern for my mental health. Sometimes they sound deeply offended. Or they say nothing at all, and keep walking.

“Have you seen these marks before?” I say, lifting hair off the back of my neck and turning to show them.

“Sir, Ma’am, Sir, Sir, Mx,” I say all afternoon. “Do you know a family with marks like this?”

They give the same non-answer, each one lacing the words with their own subtle meaning. What is she doing here? Is this a joke? Unfathomable human. What mockery is this?

You’re not Shurkar.

The needle burned across my vertebrae. A relief when the artist migrated away from the spine and onto the shoulder. He paused, adjusted his hold on the machine’s grip, grumbled about the difficulty of matching the pattern exactly—I only brought the one photo for him to copy from. We had always been so careful to keep my sister’s marks hidden.

A single photo. All I had left of her marks. All I had left of the real her, the core of her, the only part that wasn’t a mimicry of my human phenotype.

The part another Shurkar might recognize.

Phaakoh practices growing tentacles.

We’re up on the wall. The overcast night sky glows a washed-out blue, clouds like old bruises in the light from Shurkar City. Phaakoh makes a suctiony wet sound every time ze unfurls a tentacle. Still seems strange how freely Phaakoh morphs, how insignificant an action it is for zer, the way a bored human might fiddle with a pen. So unlike how it was with my sister.

I flip open my knife, gather up my hair in the other hand, saw at the strands with the blade. Would be easier if I had a pair of scissors. One more on a long list of hard-to-come-by things, now I’m in the City.

“Cheng.” Phaakoh calls me by my surname. Just likes the sound better. Or maybe ze’s trying to tell me something, in that indirect way the Shurkar have. A sly, sideways shuffle closer to the truth. When I don’t reply, ze says again, “Cheng. Whatcha doing?”

“It’s always in the way,” I say.

Ze harrumphs. “Dunno if the hair’s the problem.”

“Well it sure isn’t yours,” I quip. Ze doesn’t have any hair today.

Phaakoh laughs and wraps a tentacle around my ankle, gives a playful tug. The suction’s surprisingly strong. I slide along the concrete and almost drop my knife over the edge of the wall. Severed strands of hair rain down, like wisps of black descending shadow. “Stop, stop it!”—but now I’m grinning too.

We made a tent of her bed sheets, flashlights in hands. I sucked in my cheeks and puckered my lips like a fish. My sister grew her fingers spidery long and wiggled them in front of my nose. I clapped a hand over my mouth to hold in the oncoming wave of giggles. If we’d been caught, Mom would’ve been furious.

Not about us staying up past bedtime. About the other thing.

Humans don’t morph.

“What are you going to say?” Phaakoh asks.

“Huh?” My mind is elsewhere. Nighttime always reminds me of her, the time when she could truly be herself with me. In the day we looked alike, but it was when we were alone in the dark that we were closest.

“If you find your sister’s bloodkin, what do you plan to tell them?” Ze slowly nictitates zer inner membranes over shiny inkwell eyes. “You must have thought about it.”

I shrug. “That she died.”

Phaakoh makes a soft noise in zer throat. Keeps staring at me. I might fall into those bottomless pupils and never find my way out. Of course that’s not all I’d say—not all I need to say—and ze knows it. I would tell them I tried to protect her. Too hard, or not hard enough, I’m not sure. But what else? How do I sum up a life, even one so short? She was happy. She wasn’t alone. She was loved.

For a time, she was my sister.

The Shurkar came seeking asylum. An ethnic minority persecuted among their own species for their inappropriately strong familial bonds. After coming so far, their reward was four square miles of dirt, with walls and guards to surround it. Rusted shipping crates and scrap metal grudgingly offered up as construction materials. A power grid built from cannibalized engines, rendering their ships useless and departure impossible.

They had hoped we would understand them. Welcome them. If they’d been more like the rest of their species—born and bred for interspecies interaction, ambivalent to their own kind—perhaps they would have foreseen it.

Humans aren’t very understanding.

There’s smoke in the air, redolent of oil and spices, wafting down the rows of marketplace stalls. A pair of singers perform for a crowd down at the other end. Sounds like an out-of-tune viola married to a melancholy bagpipe. After years of my mother’s classical flute, the dissonance makes me wince. I try not to let it show. No need to telegraph my humanness any more than I already am.

Phaakoh’s with me today, perching on an empty crate while I show the tattoo to passersby. The music meanders slowly into a new key, and ze laughs at my expression.

“So glad my auditory pain amuses you,” I say, stifling a smile. “Don’t you have work to go to?”

“Not today,” Phaakoh says, adjusting zer position to lounge with a comfort that borders on insouciance.

Phaakoh works—though not with any regularity—in one of the biotech sweatshops that produce the City’s only approved exports. The Shurkar tend to choose their work shifts in accordance with some ambiguous sense of social responsibility, a sort of voluntary communism. Still not sure how it actually works.

I stop a trio of shoppers as they walk by. “Excuse me, sirs. Have you seen marks like these on anyone?”

Seeing Phaakoh behind me, and that we’re evidently here together, they respond politely. Though all that really matters is they respond in the negative.

The cool air is turning breezy, and I’ve been out here for over an hour in a tank top to leave the marks visible. Gooseflesh prickles along my arms, but I ignore it.

“Mx, sorry to bother you. I’m looking for kin with these marks.”

Shaken heads, quizzical raised eyebrows, soft apologies. Don’t know anymore if I expect to ever get a different answer.

Suddenly there’s a shawl draped over my shoulders, and Phaakoh’s slender knuckly fingers tucking it close. I have no idea where ze got it from. “You’re cold.”

“Not everyone can just crank up the endotherm gene expression,” I say with a scowl.

“It wasn’t a criticism.”

I pat zer hand, regretting my defensiveness. “I know.” I don’t need to tell zer I’m just frustrated. Ze’s been here with me before.

“And when it’s done?” ze says softly. “What will you do then?”

“Done’s an odd word for it.” As if grief had an expiration date.

Phaakoh gives me a look that says, you’re avoiding the question, but ze lets it slide. Shurkars aren’t wont to press.

“I’m not going back,” I say. “Even if I found her bloodkin today, I wouldn’t go back.”

Ze presses zer lips together in drawn out mm-hmmm, the tone rising and falling with exaggerated musicality.

“I mean it. There’s no ‘back’ to go to. This is who I am now.”

Ze fusses with a fold of the shawl, for once looking worried. “Too tainted for your own kind, not tainted enough for mine? That’s how you want to spend your life?”

I don’t know how to think about my life. Don’t want to think about it at all—decades upon decades yet to come, every day with the hole my sister used to fill. I don’t know what I will do, but I’m sure of what I won’t: return to my own species.

I never found who ratted us out. A neighbor, probably. Certainly made enough fodder to keep the gossip mill grinding for months.

Can you believe the Chengs were harboring a Shurkar this whole time? They seemed so nice. They seemed so normal. I let my little Suzie play at their house once. Well I went to their Fourth of July barbecue. So shocking. I guess you just never really know people, do you?

The marketplace is slow today. Or maybe it only seems that way with Phaakoh off at work and no one to provide distraction. The singers have gone, and the low, repetitive chugging sound of the closest power nexus carries in their absence. There’s a hint of dry, chemical smell in the air, from a ceramics kiln I think, and though it doesn’t bother me I wonder if the food vendors are cursing it. Shurkar can have such sensitive palates.

A couple passes me by without answering, though they stare as if watching a sideshow attraction. An androgyne points out, for the hundredth time this week, that I am not Shurkar. Takes a monumental effort not to reply with really? I hadn’t noticed.

Phaakoh is right—I’m trapped between what I was born and what I chose. I rub the back of my neck with one hand. Can’t feel the marks, but it’s comforting to touch them all the same.

A peacekeeper, doing his rounds, waves his reader near my badge, scowling when the display reports me to be a licensed vendor. Was hoping for some action, I guess—unlicensed humans can be thrown out of the City. I have nothing to sell, just the marks and my have you seen routine, but I paid good money for a valid license to get me inside, so the peacekeeper can’t do worse than scowling.

Part of me savors every moment of the peacekeeper’s frustration. None of them approve of civilians mixing with the Shurkar. But I’m not a child anymore, I came prepared, I can resist. Doesn’t mean that grain of terror in my gut will ever leave me alone.

When the peacekeeper moves on, the Shurkar weaver with the stall on the corner offers me a sympathetic smile. “Don’t let them rattle you, dear,” she says knowingly. “If you seem confident, they’ll leave you alone. Nervous, and they’ll come back to bother you again. Bad for business.”

I thank her, and we get to talking. Turns out the shawl I have, the one Phaakoh gave me, is her handiwork. Small world.

Nothing brings people together like weathering the perpetual onslaught of the peacekeepers’ harassment. Ironic. They want to keep humans apart from the corruptive Shurkar influence, but it’s them who drive me ever closer.

When they came to take my sister away, Mom screamed. Understandable. The swarm of men with assault rifles, body armor, gas masks. The shattered door jamb, the shattered silence. After years of fear slowly receding from the shoreline of everyday life, we met the sudden impossible end of it all—a storm surge of militant segregation.

I had a more practical response. I grabbed my sister and hung on with every ounce of strength I had.

I knew they wouldn’t take me, so I yelled at her, don’t let go. And she didn’t. She morphed in my arms, clinging to me with everything she could think of, understanding the urgent need to become literally inseparable. My ribs creaked under the strength of half a dozen limbs. Her hair snaked around both our necks. She oozed around my skinny wrists and hardened there like armor.

Despite the circumstances—or because of them?—my sister’s transformation seemed a thing of glory. All that raw potential, hidden for so long, now finally unleashed. My heart swelled with pride, and in that moment, I glimpsed my beautiful sister’s true face.

Phaakoh lounges on the corrugated metal of a shallow rooftop. It’s sunny, for once, and ze has zer skin toned dark purple against the radiation. A good look for zer, though looks don’t carry the same weight among the Shurkar. Too easily changed.

“You want to head down to the marketplace?” Phaakoh says.

“Not yet.” Ze’s not the only one enjoying the warmth of the sun. The metal roofing is almost hot beneath my palms.

“Slacker,” ze teases.

I give zer a sideways look. “Learned from the best, didn’t I?”

Phaakoh taps zer chest with one finger. “Zen master of doing nothing.”

I laugh. No idea where ze picked up that reference—not from me, I don’t think. It’s odd, the bits of human culture that trickle through the City. And the bits that don’t.

Enmeshed in my sister’s embrace, I felt an odd blurring sensation, as if I could not quite be certain where I ended and she began. She filled my field of view, so I could only imagine the soldiers must step back at the awesome sight of her. How could they not? How could anyone not pause to stare at such a wonder? For that moment, I thought it would work. I thought we’d won.

They couldn’t pry us apart, while she was alive. So they killed her.

The doctors had to cut the pieces of her corpse off of me.

I stare as Phaakoh’s purple skin gradually darkens across zer angular cheeks, chromatophores responding to the intensity of light as the sun rises toward noon. Zer inner eyelids are closed, making it impossible to guess whether or not ze knows I’m looking.

I have to shift my weight off my left wrist. The usual pain has settled in for a visit—a dull constant ache that comes and goes ever since the doctors’ aggressive “decontamination” procedure. One section of my sister’s corpse was so difficult to remove they dislocated the joint in the process. I rotate the wrist, trying to relieve the ache, and the tendons make a none too pleasant popping sound. As if I need another reminder.

And suddenly, I realize I can’t bear to hear those oft-repeated words even one more time: you’re not Shurkar.

“Phaakoh . . . ” I say, hesitant. “To morph into new shapes, you have to build up a genetic repertoire, right? By absorbing genomic information from other organisms?”

Ze nods. Zer inner lids slick back to reveal those fathomless inkwell eyes.

“So . . . could you also donate genetic information? Shurkar genes,” I say, “into a different species.”

Ze sits up and watches me for a moment before replying, “It’s possible.”

I take a breath, let it out slowly. “Do it.”

Phaakoh gives me a knowing smile, a took you long enough smile.

Ze takes my left hand, laces our fingers together. A tingling sensation crawls up my arm, like the reawakening of nerves.

About the Author

Gwendolyn Clare resides in North Carolina, where she tends a vegetable garden and a flock of backyard ducks and wonders why she ever lived in the frozen northlands. She has a PhD in mycology, which is useful for identifying wild mushrooms but not for much else. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Analog, Asimov’s, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others.

The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill

Kelly Robson

“I rise today on this September 11th, the one-year anniversary of the greatest tragedy on American soil in our history, with a heavy heart . . . ”

—Hon. Jim Turner

September 9, 2001

Jessica slumped against the inside of the truck door. The girl behind the wheel and the other one squished between them on the bench seat kept stealing glances at her. Jessica ignored them, just like she tried to ignore the itchy pull and tug deep inside her, under her belly button, where the aliens were trying to knit her guts back together.

“You party pretty hard last night?” the driver asked.

Jessica rested her burning forehead on the window. The hum of the highway under the wheels buzzed through her skull. The truck cab stank of incense.

“You shouldn’t hitchhike, it’s not safe,” the other girl said. “I sound like my mom saying it and I hate that but it’s really true. So many dead girls. They haven’t even found all the bodies.”

“Highway of Tears,” the driver said.

“Yeah, Highway of Tears,” the other one repeated. “Bloody Sixteen.”

“Nobody calls it that,” the driver snapped.

Jessica pulled her hair up off her neck, trying to cool the sticky heat pulsing through her. The two girls looked like tree planters. She’d spent the summer working full time at the gas station and now she could smell a tree planter a mile away. They’d come in for smokes and mix, dirty, hairy, dressed in fleece and hemp just like these two. The driver had blond dreadlocks and the other had tattoos circling her wrists. Not that much older than her, lecturing her about staying safe just like somebody’s mom.

Well, she’s right, Jessica thought. A gush of blood flooded the crotch of her jeans.

Water. Jessica, we can do this but you’ve got to get some water. We need to replenish your fluids.

“You got any water?” Jessica asked. Her voice rasped, throat stripped raw from all the screaming.

The tattooed girl dug through the backpack at Jessica’s feet and came up with a two-liter mason jar half-full of water. Hippies, Jessica thought as she fumbled with the lid. Like one stupid jar will save the world.

“Let me help.” The tattooed girl unscrewed the lid and steadied the heavy jar as Jessica lifted it to her lips.

She gagged. Her throat was tight as a fist but she forced herself to swallow, wash down the dirt and puke coating her mouth.

Good. Drink more.

“I can’t,” Jessica said. The tattooed girl stared at her.

You need to. We can’t do this alone. You have to help us.

“Are you okay?” the driver asked. “You look wrecked.”

Jessica wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m fine. Just hot.”

“Yeah, you’re really flushed,” said the tattooed girl. “You should take off your coat.”

Jessica ignored her and gulped at the jar until it was empty.

Not so fast. Careful!

“Do you want to swing past the hospital when we get into town?” the driver asked.

A bolt of pain knifed through Jessica’s guts. The empty jar slipped from her grip and rolled across the floor of the truck. The pain faded.

“I’m fine,” she repeated. “I just got a bad period.”

That did it. The lines of worry eased off both girls’ faces.

“Do you have a pad? I’m gonna bleed all over your seat.” Jessica’s vision dimmed, like someone had put a shade over the morning sun.

“No problem.” The tattooed girl fished through the backpack. “I bleed heavy too. It depletes my iron.”

“That’s just an excuse for you to eat meat,” said the driver.

Jessica leaned her forehead on the window and waited for the light to come back into the world. The two girls were bickering now, caught up in their own private drama.

Another flood of blood. More this time. She curled her fists into her lap. Her insides twisted and jumped like a fish on a line.

Your lungs are fine. Breathe deeply, in and out, that’s it. We need all the oxygen you can get.

The tattooed girl pulled a pink wrapped maxi pad out of her backpack and offered it to Jessica. The driver slowed down and turned the truck into a roadside campground.

“Hot,” Jessica said. The girls didn’t hear. Now they were bitching at each other about disposable pads and something called a keeper cup.

We know. You’ll be okay. We can heal you.

“Don’t wait for me,” Jessica said as they pulled up to the campground outhouse. She flipped the door handle and nearly fell out of the truck. “I can catch another ride.”

Cold air washed over her as she stumbled toward the outhouse. She unzipped her long coat and let the breeze play though—chill air on boiling skin. Still early September but they always got a cold snap at the start of fall. First snow only a few days ago. Didn’t last. Never did.

The outhouse stench hit her like a slap. Jessica fumbled with the lock. Her fingers felt stiff and clumsy.

“Why am I so hot?” she said, leaning on the cold plywood wall. Her voice sounded strange, ripped apart and multiplied into echoes.

Your immune system is trying to fight us but we’ve got it under control. The fever isn’t dangerous, just uncomfortable.

She shed her coat and let it fall to the floor. Unzipped her jeans, slipped them down her hips. No panties. She hadn’t been able to find them.

No, Jessica. Don’t look.

Pubic hair hacked away along with most of her skin. Two deep slices puckered angry down the inside of her right thigh. And blood. On her legs, on her jeans, inside her coat. Blood everywhere, dark and sticky.

Keep breathing!

An iron tang filled the outhouse as a gout of blood dribbled down her legs. Jessica fell back on the toilet seat. Deep within her chest something fluttered, like a bird beating its wings on her ribs, trying to get out. The light drained from the air.

If you die, we die too. Please give us a chance.

The flutters turned into fists pounding on her breastbone. She struggled to inhale, tried to drag the outhouse stink deep into her lungs but the air felt thick. Solid. Like a wall against her face.

Don’t go. Please.

Breath escaped her like smoke from a fire burned down to coal and ash. She collapsed against the wall of the outhouse. Vision turned to pinpricks; she crumpled like paper and died.

“Everything okay in there?”

The thumping on the door made the whole outhouse shake. Jessica lurched to her feet. Her chest burned like she’d been breathing acid.

You’re okay.

“I’m fine. Gimme a second.”

Jessica plucked the pad off the outhouse floor, ripped it open and stuck it on the crotch of her bloody jeans, zipped them up. She zipped her coat to her chin. She felt strong. Invincible. She unlocked the door.

The two girls were right there, eyes big and concerned and in her business.

“You didn’t have to wait,” Jessica said.

“How old are you, fifteen? We waited,” the driver said as they climbed back into the truck.

“We’re not going to let you hitchhike,” said the tattooed girl. “Especially not you.”

“Why not me?” Jessica slammed the truck door behind her.

“Most of the dead and missing girls are First Nations.”

“You think I’m an Indian? Fuck you. Am I on a reserve?”

The driver glared at her friend as she turned the truck back onto the highway.

“Sorry,” the tattooed girl said.

“Do I look like an Indian?”

“Well, kinda.”

“Fuck you.” Jessica leaned on the window, watching the highway signs peel by as they rolled toward Prince George. When they got to the city the invincible feeling was long gone. The driver insisted on taking her right to Gran’s.

“Thanks,” Jessica said as she slid out of the truck.

The driver waved. “Remember, no hitchhiking.”

September 8, 2001

Jessica never hitchhiked.

She wasn’t stupid. But Prince George was spread out. Busses ran maybe once an hour weekdays and barely at all on weekends, and when the weather turned cold you could freeze to death trying to walk everywhere. So yeah, she took rides when she could, if she knew the driver.

After her Saturday shift she’d started walking down the highway. Mom didn’t know she was coming. Jessica had tried to get through three times from the gas station phone, left voice mails. Mom didn’t always pick up—usually didn’t—and when she did it was some excuse about her phone battery or connection.

Mom was working as a cook at a retreat center out by Tabor Lake. A two hour walk, but Mom would get someone to drive her back to Gran’s.

Only seven o’clock but getting cold and the wind had come up. Semis bombed down the highway, stirring up the trash and making it dance at her feet and fly in her face as she walked along the ditch.

It wasn’t even dark when the car pulled over to the side of the highway.

“Are you Jessica?”

The man looked ordinary. Baseball cap, hoodie. Somebody’s dad trying to look young.

“Yeah,” Jessica said.

“Your mom sent me to pick you up.”

A semi honked as it blasted past his car. A McDonald’s wrapper flipped through the air and smacked her in the back of the head. She got in.

The car was skunky with pot smoke. She almost didn’t notice when he passed the Tabor Lake turnoff.

“That was the turn,” she said.

“Yeah, she’s not there. She’s out at the ski hill.”

“At this time of year?”

“Some kind of event.” He took a drag on his smoke and smiled.

Jessica hadn’t even twigged. Mom had always wanted to work at the ski hill, where she could party all night and ski all day.

It was twenty minutes before Jessica started to clue in.

When he slowed to take a turn onto a gravel road she braced herself to roll out of the car. The door handle was broken. She went at him with her fingernails but he had the jump on her, hit her in the throat with his elbow. She gulped air and tried to roll down the window.

It was broken too. She battered the glass with her fists, then spun and lunged for the wheel. He hit her again, slammed her head against the dashboard three times. The world stuttered and swam.

Pain brought everything back into focus. Face down, her arms flailed, fingers clawed at the dirt. Spruce needles flew up her nose and coated her tongue. Her butt was jacked up over a log and every thrust pounded her face into the dirt. One part of her was screaming, screaming. The other part watched the pile of deer shit inches from her nose. It looked like a heap of candy. Chocolate-covered almonds.

She didn’t listen to what he was telling her. She’d heard worse from boys at school. He couldn’t make her listen. He didn’t exist except as a medium for pain.

When he got off, Jessica felt ripped in half, split like firewood. She tried to roll off the log. She’d crawl into the bush, he’d drive away, and it would be over.

Then he showed her the knife.

When he rammed the knife up her she found a new kind of pain. It drove the breath from her lungs and sliced the struggle from her limbs. She listened to herself whimper, thinking it sounded like a newborn kitten, crying for its mother.

The pain didn’t stop until the world had retreated to little flecks of light deep in her skull. The ground spun around her as he dragged her through the bush and rolled her into a ravine. She landed face down in a stream. Her head flopped, neck canted at a weird angle.

Jessica curled her fingers around something cold and round. A rock. It fit in her hand perfectly and if he came back she’d let him have it right in the teeth. And then her breath bubbled away and she died.

When she came back to life a bear corpse was lying beside her, furry and rank. She dug her fingers into its pelt and pulled herself up. It was still warm. And skinny—nothing but sinew and bone under the skin.

She stumbled through the stream, toes in wet socks stubbing against the rocks but it didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. She was good. She could do anything.

She found her coat in the mud, her jeans too. One sneaker by the bear and then she looked and looked for the other one.

It’s up the bank.

She climbed up. The shoe was by the log where it had happened. The toe was coated in blood. She wiped it in the dirt.

You need to drink some water.

A short dirt track led down to the road. The gravel glowed white in the dim light of early morning. No idea which way led to the highway. She picked a direction.

“How do you know what I need?”

We know. We’re trying to heal you. The damage is extensive. You’ve lost a lot of blood and the internal injuries are catastrophic.

“No shit.”

We can fix you. We just need time.

Her guts writhed. Snakes fought in her belly, biting and coiling.

Feel that? That’s us working. Inside you.

“Why doesn’t it hurt?”

We’ve established a colony in your thalamus. That’s where we’re blocking the pain. If we didn’t, you’d die of shock.

“Again.”

Yes, again.

“A colony. What the fuck are you? Aliens?”

Yes. We’re also distributing a hormonal cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone to keep you moving, but we’ll have to taper it off soon because it puts too much stress on your heart. Right now it’s very important for you to drink some water.

“Shut up about the water.” She wasn’t thirsty. She felt great.

A few minutes later the fight drained out of her. Thirsty, exhausted, she ached as though the hinge of every moving part was crusted in rust, from her jaw to her toes. Her eyelids rasped like sandpaper. Her breath sucked and blew without reaching her lungs. Every rock in the road was a mountain and every pothole a canyon.

But she walked. Dragged her sneakers through the gravel, taking smaller and smaller steps until she just couldn’t lift her feet anymore. She stood in the middle of the road and waited. Waited to fall over. Waited for the world to slip from her grasp and darkness to drown her in cold nothing.

When she heard the truck speeding toward her she didn’t even look up. Didn’t matter who it was, what it was. She stuck out her thumb.

September 10, 2001

Jessica woke soaked. Covered in blood, she thought, struggling with the blankets. But it wasn’t blood.

“What—”

Your urethra was damaged so we eliminated excess fluid through your pores. It’s repaired now. You’ll be able to urinate.

She pried herself out of the wet blankets.

No solid food, though. Your colon is shredded and your small intestine has multiple ruptures.

When the tree planters dropped her off, Gran had been sacked out on the couch. Jessica had stayed in the shower for a good half hour, watching the blood swirl down the drain with the spruce needles and the dirt, the blood clots and shreds of raw flesh.

And all the while she drank. Opened her mouth and let the cool spray fill her. Then she had stuffed her bloody clothes in a garbage bag and slept.

Jessica ran her fingertips over the gashes inside her thigh. The wounds puckered like wide toothless mouths, sliced edges pasted together and sunk deep within her flesh. The rest of the damage was hardened over with amber-colored scabs. She’d have to use a mirror to see it all. She didn’t want to look.

“I should go to the hospital,” she whispered.

That’s not a good idea. It would take multiple interventions to repair the damage to your digestive tract. They’d never be able to save your uterus or reconstruct your vulva and clitoris. The damage to your cervix alone—

“My what?”

Do you want to have children someday?

“I don’t know.”

Trust us. We can fix this.

She hated the hospital anyway. Went to Emergency after she’d twisted her knee but the nurse had turned her away, said she wouldn’t bother the on-call for something minor. Told her to go home and put a bag of peas on it.

And the cops were even worse than anyone at the hospital. Didn’t give a shit. Not one of them.

Gran was on the couch, snoring. A deck of cards was scattered across the coffee table in between the empties—looked like she’d been playing solitaire all weekend.

Gran hadn’t fed the cats, either. They had to be starving but they wouldn’t come to her, not even when she was filling their dishes. Not even Gringo, who had hogged her bed every night since she was ten. He just hissed and ran.

Usually Jessica would wake up Gran before leaving for school, try to get her on her feet so she didn’t sleep all day. Today she didn’t have the strength. She shook Gran’s shoulder.

“Night night, baby,” Gran said, and turned over.

Jessica waited for the school bus. She felt cloudy, dispersed, her thoughts blowing away with the wind. And cold now, without her coat. The fever was gone.

“Could you fix Gran?”

Perhaps. What’s wrong with her?

Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything.”

We can try. Eventually.

She sleepwalked through her classes. It wasn’t a problem. The teachers were more bothered when she did well than when she slacked off. She stayed in the shadows, off everyone’s radar.

After school she walked to the gas station. Usually when she got to work she’d buy some chips or a chocolate bar, get whoever was going off shift to ring it up so nobody could say she hadn’t paid for it.

“How come I’m not hungry?” she asked when she had the place to herself.

You are; you just can’t perceive it.

It was a quiet night. The gas station across the highway had posted a half cent lower so everyone was going there. Usually she’d go stir crazy from boredom but today she just zoned out. Badly photocopied faces stared at her from the posters taped to the cigarette cabinet overhead.

An SUV pulled up to pump number three. A bull elk was strapped to the hood, tongue lolling.

“What was the deal with the bear?” she said.

The bear’s den was adjacent to our crash site. It was killed by the concussive wave.

“Crash site. A spaceship?”

Yes. Unfortunate for the bear, but very fortunate for us.

“You brought the bear back to life. Healed it.”

Yes.

“And before finding me you were just riding around in the bear.”

Yes. It was attracted by the scent of your blood.

“So you saw what happened to me. You watched.” She should be upset, shouldn’t she? But her mind felt dull, thoughts thudding inside an empty skull.

We have no access to the visual cortex.

“You’re blind?”

Yes.

“What are you?”

A form of bacteria.

“Like an infection.”

Yes.

The door chimed and the hunter handed over his credit card. She rang it through. When he was gone she opened her mouth to ask another question, but then her gut convulsed like she’d been hit. She doubled over the counter. Bile stung her throat.

He’d been here on Saturday.

Jessica had been on the phone, telling mom’s voice mail that she’d walk out to Talbot Lake after work. While she was talking she’d rung up a purchase, $32.25 in gas and a pack of smokes. She’d punched it through automatically, cradling the phone on her shoulder. She’d given him change from fifty.

An ordinary man. Hoodie. Cap.

Jessica, breathe.

Her head whipped around, eyes wild, hands scrambling reflexively for a weapon. Nobody was at the pumps, nobody parked at the air pump. He could come back any moment. Bring his knife and finish the job.

Please breathe. There’s no apparent danger.

She fell to her knees and crawled out from behind the counter. Nobody would stop him, nobody would save her. Just like they hadn’t saved all those dead and missing girls whose posters had been staring at her all summer from up on the cigarette cabinet.

When she’d started the job they’d creeped her out, those posters. For a few weeks she’d thought twice about walking after dark. But then those dead and missing girls disappeared into the landscape. Forgotten.

You must calm down.

Now she was one of them.

We may not be able to bring you back again.

She scrambled to the bathroom on all fours, threw herself against the door, twisted the lock. Her hands were shuddering, teeth chattering like it was forty below. Her chest squeezed and bucked, throwing acid behind her teeth.

There was a frosted window high on the wall. He could get in, if he wanted. She could almost see the knife tick-tick-ticking on the glass.

No escape. Jessica plowed herself into the narrow gap between the wall and toilet, wedging herself there, fists clutching at her burning chest as she retched bile onto the floor. The light winked and flickered. A scream flushed out of her and she died.

A fist banged on the door.

“Jessica, what the hell!” Her boss’s voice.

A key scraped in the lock. Jessica gripped the toilet and wrenched herself off the floor to face him. His face was flushed with anger and though he was a big guy, he couldn’t scare her now. She felt bigger, taller, stronger, too. And she’d always been smarter than him.

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, I’m fine.” Better than fine. She was butterfly-light, like if she opened her wings she could fly away.

“The station’s wide open. Anybody could have waltzed in here and walked off with the till.”

“Did they?”

His mouth hung open for a second. “Did they what?”

“Walk off with the fucking till?”

“Are you on drugs?”

She smiled. She didn’t need him. She could do anything.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re gone. Don’t come back.”

A taxi was gassing up at pump number one. She got in the back and waited, watching her boss pace and yell into his phone. The invincible feeling faded before the tank was full. By the time she got home Jessica’s joints had locked stiff and her thoughts had turned fuzzy.

All the lights were on. Gran was halfway into her second bottle of u-brew red so she was pretty out of it, too. Jessica sat with her at the kitchen table for a few minutes and was just thinking about crawling to bed when the phone rang.

It was Mom.

“Did you send someone to pick me up on the highway?” Jessica stole a glance at Gran. She was staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, maybe listening, maybe not.

“No, why would I do that?”

“I left you messages. On Saturday.”

“I’m sorry, baby. This phone is so bad, you know that.”

“Listen, I need to talk to you.” Jessica kept her voice low.

“Is it your grandma?” Mom asked.

“Yeah. It’s bad. She’s not talking.”

“She does this every time the residential school thing hits the news. Gets super excited, wants to go up north and see if any of her family are still alive. But she gives up after a couple of days. Shuts down. It’s too much for her. She was only six when they took her away, you know.”

“Yeah. When are you coming home?”

“I got a line on a great job, cooking for an oil rig crew. One month on, one month off.”

Jessica didn’t have the strength to argue. All she wanted to do was sleep.

“Don’t worry about your Gran,” Mom said. “She’ll be okay in a week or two. Listen, I got to go.”

“I know.”

“Night night, baby,” Mom said, and hung up.

September 11, 2001

Jessica waited alone for the school bus. The street was deserted. When the bus pulled up the driver was chattering before she’d even climbed in.

“Can you believe it? Isn’t it horrible?” The driver’s eyes were puffy, mascara swiped to a gray stain under her eyes.

“Yeah,” Jessica agreed automatically.

“When first I saw the news I thought it was so early, nobody would be at work. But it was nine in the morning in New York. Those towers were full of people.” The driver wiped her nose.

The bus was nearly empty. Two little kids sat behind the driver, hugging their backpacks. The radio blared. Horror in New York. Attack on Washington. Jessica dropped into the shotgun seat and let the noise wash over her for a few minutes as they twisted slowly through the empty streets. Then she moved to the back of the bus.

When she’d gotten dressed that morning her jeans had nearly slipped off her hips. Something about that was important. She tried to concentrate, but the thoughts flitted from her grasp, darting away before she could pin them down.

She focused on the sensation within her, the buck and heave under her ribs and in front of her spine.

“What are you fixing right now?” she asked.

An ongoing challenge is the sequestration of the fecal and digestive matter that leaked into your abdominal cavity.

“What about the stuff you mentioned yesterday? The intestine and the . . . whatever it was.”

Once we have repaired your digestive tract and restored gut motility we will begin reconstructive efforts on your reproductive organs.

“You like big words, don’t you?”

We assure you the terminology is accurate.

There it was. That was the thing that had been bothering her, niggling at the back of her mind, trying to break through the fog.

“How do you know those words? How can you even speak English?”

We aren’t communicating in language. The meaning is conveyed by socio-linguistic impulses interpreted by the brain’s speech processing loci. Because of the specifics of our biology, verbal communication is an irrelevant medium.

“You’re not talking, you’re just making me hallucinate,” Jessica said.

That is essentially correct.

How could the terminology be accurate, then? She didn’t know those words—cervix and whatever—so how could she hallucinate them?

“Were you watching the news when the towers collapsed?” the driver asked as she pulled into the high school parking lot. Jessica ignored her and slowly stepped off the bus.

The aliens were trying to baffle her with big words and science talk. For three days she’d had them inside her, their voice behind her eyes, their fingers deep in her guts, and she’d trusted them. Hadn’t even thought twice. She had no choice.

If they could make her hallucinate, what else were they doing to her?

The hallways were quiet, the classrooms deserted except for one room at the end of the hall with 40 kids packed in. The teacher had wheeled in an AV cart. Some of the kids hadn’t even taken off their coats.

Jessica stood in the doorway. The news flashed clips of smoking towers collapsing into ash clouds. The bottom third of the screen was overlaid with scrolling, flashing text, the sound layered with frantic voiceovers. People were jumping from the towers, hanging in the air like dancers. The clips replayed over and over again. The teacher passed around a box of Kleenex.

Jessica turned her back on the class and climbed upstairs, joints creaking, jeans threatening to slide off with every step. She hitched them up. The biology lab was empty. She leaned on the cork board and scanned the parasite diagrams. Ring worm. Tape worm. Liver fluke. Black wasp.

Some parasites can change their host’s biology, the poster said, or even change their host’s behavior.

Jessica took a push pin from the board and shoved it into her thumb. It didn’t hurt. When she ripped it out a thin stream of blood trickled from the skin, followed by an ooze of clear amber from deep within the gash.

What are you doing?

None of your business, she thought.

Everything is going to be okay.

No it won’t, she thought. She squeezed the amber ooze from her thumb, let it drip on the floor. The aliens were wrenching her around like a puppet, but without them she would be dead. Three times dead. Maybe she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.

“Why didn’t you want me to go to the hospital?” she asked as she slowly hinged down the stairs.

They couldn’t have helped you, Jessica. You would have died.

Again, Jessica thought. Died again. And again.

“You said that if I die, you die too.”

When your respiration stops, we can only survive for a limited time.

The mirror in the girls’ bathroom wasn’t real glass, just a sheet of polished aluminum, its shine pitted and worn. She leaned on the counter, rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her reflection warped and stretched.

“If I’d gone to the hospital, it would have been bad for you. Wouldn’t it?”

That is likely.

“So you kept me from going. You kept me from doing a lot of things.”

We assure you that is untrue. You may exercise your choices as you see fit. We will not interfere.

“You haven’t left me any choices.”

Jessica left the bathroom and walked down the hall. The news blared from the teacher’s lounge. She looked in. At least a dozen teachers crowded in front of an AV cart, backs turned. Jessica slipped behind them and ducked into the teachers’ washroom. She locked the door.

It was like a real bathroom. Air freshener, moisturizing lotion, floral soap. Real mirror on the wall and a makeup mirror propped on the toilet tank. Jessica put it on the floor.

“Since when do bacteria have spaceships?” She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it over the mirror.

Jessica, you’re not making sense. You’re confused.

She put her heel on the sweater and stepped down hard. The mirror cracked.

Go to the hospital now, if you want.

“If I take you to the hospital, what will you do? Infect other people? How many?”

Jessica, please. Haven’t we helped you?

“You’ve helped yourself.”

The room pitched and flipped. Jessica fell to her knees. She reached for the broken mirror but it swam out of reach. Her vision telescoped and she batted at the glass with clumsy hands. A scream built behind her teeth, swelled and choked her. She swallowed it whole, gulped it, forced it down her throat like she was starving.

You don’t have to do this. We aren’t a threat.

She caught a mirror shard in one fist and swam along the floor as the room tilted and whirled. With one hand she pinned it to the yawning floor like a spike, windmilled her free arm and slammed her wrist down. The walls folded in, collapsing on her like the whole weight of the world, crushing in.

She felt another scream building. She forced her tongue between clenched teeth and bit down. Amber fluid oozed down her chin and pooled on the floor.

Please. We only want to help.

“Night night, baby,” she said, and raked the mirror up her arm.

The fluorescent light flashed overhead. The room plunged into darkness as a world of pain dove into her for one hanging moment. Then it lifted. Jessica convulsed on the floor, watching the bars of light overhead stutter and compress to two tiny glimmers inside the thin parched shell of her skull. And she died, finally, at last.

About the Author

Kelly Robson attended the Taos Toolbox writing workshop, where she studied with her heroes Connie Willis and Walter Jon Williams. She has a novella forthcoming at Tor.com (June), a short story in Asimov’s (August), and a short story in the anthology New Canadian Noir (March). She and her wife, SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, recently moved to Toronto after twenty-two years in Vancouver. This is her first published story.

Meshed

Rich Larson

In the dusked-down gym, Oxford Diallo is making holo after holo his ever-loving bitch, shredding through them with spins, shimmies, quicksilver crossovers. He’s a sinewy scarecrow, nearly seven foot already, but handles the ball so damn shifty you’d swear he has gecko implants done up in those supersized hands. Even with the Nike antioxygen mask clamped to his face, the kid is barely breathing hard.

“He’s eighteen on November thirtieth, right?” I ask, cross-checking my Google retinal but still not quite believing it. I’m sick as anyone of hearing about the next Giannis Antetokounmpo, the next Thon Maker, but Oxford Diallo looks legit, frighteningly legit.

Diallo senior nods. Oxford’s pa is not one for words; that much I already gleaned from the silent autocab ride from hotel to gym. Movie star cheekbones, hard sharp eyes. The stubble on his head has a swatch of gray coming in. He’s not as tall as his son, which is like saying, I don’t know, the Empire State Building is not as tall as Taipei 101. They’re both really fucking tall, and the elder’s got more heft to him, especially with the puffy orange fisherman’s coat he has on. I guess he’s fresh enough from Senegal that the climate-controlled gym feels cold to him.

On the floor, Oxford moves to a shooting drill, loping between LED-lit circles, catching and firing the ball in rhythm. High release, smooth snap of the wrist. The nylon net goes hiss hiss hiss. He makes a dozen in a row, and when he finally misses it jolts me, like a highlight compilation has somehow gone wrong. That’s how good the stroke is.

“Form looks solid,” I say, because I don’t think his pa would understand if I told him watching his son shoot jumpers is like freebasing liquid poetry.

“He works hard,” Diallo senior allows. “Many shots. Every day.” His retinal blinks ice blue. “Excuse me, Victor.” He picks a small plastic case off the bleacher and heads for the lockers. Normally I’d think it’s some kind of bit, leaving me alone to contemplate in silence, but he’s been doing it like clockwork since I picked him and his son up from the terminal at SeaTac. Some kind of lung condition. It’s not hereditary, so I didn’t bother remembering the name of it.

I’m already sold, I’ve been sold for the past half hour, but Oxford starts to slam anyways. He launches the ball high for an alley-oop, hunts down the bounce and plucks it out of the air, lofting up, hanging hard like gravity’s got the day off. He swipes it right-to-left behind his back and flushes it with his offhand in one mercury-slick motion.

“Fuck,” I breathe. “We have got to get this kid meshed.”

I mean, seeing it is one thing. Being able to feel it via nervecast, feel that impossible airtime and liquid power, have the rim float towards you in first person while your muscles twitch and flex, is going to be something else entirely.

After a few more goes at the rack, Oxford sees me waving and jaunts over, looping the ball between his lanky legs on repeat. He takes after his pa facially but his eyes aren’t as sharp yet, and when the antioxygen mask peels free with a sweat-suction pop, he’s got a big white Cheshire grin that would never be able to fit into Diallo senior’s mouth.

“Oxford, my man,” I say. “How do you like the shoes?”

He curls his toes in the factory-fresh Nikes, flexing the porous canvas. The new thing is the impact gel, which is supposed to tell when you’re coming down hard and cradle the ankle, mitigate sprains and all that. But they also happen to look bomb as fuck, lime green with DayGlo orange slashes. I told my girlfriend Wendee I’m getting her a pair for her birthday; she told me she’d rather get herpes.

“I like them well,” Oxford says reverently, but I can tell his vocabulary is letting him down. The look in his eyes says bomb as fuck.

“Better make some room in your closet,” I say. “Because we’re going to get you geared up to here. All the merch you can handle. Anything you want.”

“You want to sign me,” Oxford grins.

“Oxford, I want you to eat, breathe, and shit Nike for the foreseeable future,” I tell him, straight up. “I would say you’re going to be a star, but stars are too small. You are going to be the goddamn sun about which the league revolves in a few years.”

Oxford pounds the ball thoughtfully behind his back, under his shinbones. “The sun is a star. Also.”

“And a smartass, too,” I say. “Fanfeeds are going to love you.” I start tugging the contract together in my retinal, putting the bank request through. Sometimes the number of zeroes my company trusts me to wield still floors me. “We’ll want your mesh done for Summit, which might take some doing. Technically nerve mesh shouldn’t go in until eighteen, but technically it also has health-monitoring functionality, so with parental consent we should be able to bully in early. I’ll do up a list of clinics for your pa—”

I stop short when I realize the grin has dropped off Oxford’s face and down some chasm where it might be irretrievable.

“No,” he says, shaking his head.

“No what?”

His eyes go hard and sharp. “No mesh.”

What do you mean he’s not getting meshed? my boss pings me, plus a not unusual torrent of anger / confusion emotes that makes my teeth ache.

“I mean he doesn’t want it,” I say, sticking my hands under the tap. “He says he won’t get the mesh, period.”

I’m in the bathroom, because I couldn’t think up a better excuse. The mirror is scrolling me an advertisement for skin rejuvenation, dicing up my face and projecting a version sans stress lines. The water gushes out hot.

Do they even know what it is? Did you explain?

“They know what a nerve mesh is,” I say indignantly. “They’re from Senegal, not the moon.” I slap some water on my cheeks, because that always helps in the movies, then muss and unmuss my hair. The mirror suggests I try a new Lock’n’Load Old Spice sculpting gel. “But yeah,” I mutter. “I, uh, I did explain.”

Once Oxford’s pa got back to the bleachers, I gave both of them the whole wiki, you know, subcutaneous nodes designed to capture and transmit biofeedback, used to monitor injuries and fatigue and muscle movement, and also nervecast physical sensation and first-person visual to spectators. If we get our way, with a little swoosh in the bottom left corner.

It’s not something I usually have to sell people on. Most kids, even ones from the most urban of situations, have saved up enough for at least one classic nervecast of Maker sinking the game-winner for Seattle in the ’33 Finals, or Dray Cardeno dunking all over three defenders back when he was still with the Phoenix Phantoms. Most kids dream about getting their mesh how they dream about getting their face on billboards and releasing their own signature shoes.

The Diallos listened real intent, real polite, and when I was finished Oxford just shook his head, and his pa put a hand on his shoulder and told me that his son’s decision was final, and if Nike wasn’t willing to flex on the nerve mesh, another sponsor would. At which point I spilled some damage control, got both of them to agree to dinner, and bailed to the bathroom for a check-in with my boss.

It’s a zero-risk procedure now, for fuck’s sakes. You can do it with an autosurgeon. Change his mind. A procession of eye-rolling and then glaring emotes, all puffing and red-cheeked.

“What if we just put a pin in the mesh thing and sign him anyways?” I say. “We can’t let this one get away. You saw the workout feed. We sign him unmeshed, let things simmer, work it into the contract later on as an amendment.”

If he’s playing at HoopSumm, he needs a mesh. That’s the coming out party. How the fuck are we supposed to market him without a mesh? Skeptical emote, one eyebrow sky-high. I thought you could handle this one solo, Vic. Thought you wanted that recommendation for promo. Am I wrong?

“No,” I say quick. “I mean, you’re not wrong.” I yank a paper towel off the dispenser and work it into a big wad with my wet hands. I never elect biofeedback when chatting someone with the power to get me fired; if I did there would be some serious middle-finger emotes mobbing his way.

Figure out if it’s him or the dad who’s the problem. Then use the one to get to the other. It’s not brain surgery. There’s a chortling emote for the pun, then he axes the chat.

I’m left there shredding the damp paper towel into little bits, thinking about the promotion that I do want, that I absolutely do want. I’d finally be making more than my old man, and Wendee would be happy for me for at least a week, and maybe during that blissed out week I would get up the balls to ask her to move in.

But first, I have to get the Diallos to sign off on a nerve mesh. I’m not exactly bursting with ideas. That is, not until I go to toss the towel in the recycler and see a rumpled napkin inked with bright red blood sitting on top. Then I remember Oxford’s pa and his little plastic case. I shove it all down and head back to the gym, only pausing to order a tube of that new hair gel.

I take them to a slick new brick-and-glass AI-owned bar, because taking them up the Space Needle would be too obvious. A little holohost springs up at the entry, flashes my retinal for available funds, and takes us straight to private dining. We pass a huge transparent pillar full of chilled wine, which I notice Oxford’s pa look at sideways. More important is Oxford himself staring at the shiny black immersion pods set into the back of the bar. I send them a subtle ping to start scrolling ad banners for some fresh League nervecasts while we settle in around the table.

“Fully automated,” I say, as the waiter rolls up to start dispensing bread baskets, arms all clicking and whirring. “Not bad, right?”

Oxford’s pa nods his head, looking weirdly amused.

“They have AI cafés in Dakar,” Oxford informs me, scrolling through the tabletop menu. “Since last year.”

He’s already put in an order for scallops, so I guess it’s too late to head for the Space Needle. Instead I ping the kitchens for oysters and a few bottles of whatever wine has the highest alcohol content, which turns out to be something called General Washington. I pull up a wiki about vintages to give Oxford’s pa some background, seeing how I can barely tell the difference between a white and a red.

“To the Diallos,” I say, once me and him have our glasses filled and Oxford is nursing a Coke.

“Cheers,” Oxford beams.

We make some chatter about the length of the flight, about the stereotype that it always rains in Seattle but how really it’s mostly just cloudy. My mouth is more or less on autopilot because I’m watching for Oxford to peer over at the immersion pods. When I catch him at it the third time, I give him a nod.

“Have a go, man,” I say. “Company tab. We’ll grab you when the food is here.” Oxford grins and lopes off without any further convincing, leaving me with Diallo senior. I lean over and top off his wine glass. “You started off playing in the African leagues, isn’t that right, Mr. Diallo?”

He takes a drink and makes an approving glance at the bottle. “Yes,” he says. “Then Greece.”

“You must have been a terror back then,” I say. “To drag Trikala all the way to the A1 finals.”

Oxford’s pa shrugs, but looks nearly pleased.

“I watched a few highlight reels,” I say modestly. “Part of the job, isn’t it, checking out the pedigree.” I swish my wine back and forth and take a big gulp. “Oxford gets it from somewhere.”

“From more than me or his mother,” Diallo senior says. “From who knows where. Maybe God.”

But he’s glad enough to talk about the stint in Greece for a while, about how he was nearly picked up by Cordoba in the Liga ACB before the bronchiectasis reared its head and suddenly he couldn’t run how he used to. I ping the kitchens to hold the food.

When the bottle is gone and Oxford’s pa is finally slumping a bit in his chair, eyes a bit shiny, I spring the question. “Why doesn’t your boy want a mesh?” I say.

Oxford’s pa flicks his gaze over to the immersion pod where his son is jacked in. “His grandfather had a mesh,” he says. “My wife’s father. He was a soldier.”

I kind of startle at that. I mean, I know, in theory, that the nerve mesh technology was military before it went commercial—so was Velcro—but I never thought about it getting use over in fucking West Africa.

“They used them to track troop movements,” Oxford’s pa continues. “And to monitor the health of the soldiers. To monitor their anxiety.”

“Ours do that, too,” I say. “Mental health of our players is a top priority.”

“They did more than that.” Diallo senior empties his glass with a last gulp, then sets it down and looks over at the second bottle. “They wired them for remote override of the central nervous system. You have heard of puppeteering, yes?”

I shake my head. I already know I’m not going to like whatever it is.

Oxford’s pa opens the new wine bottle with his big spidery hands, looking pensive. “It means a soldier cannot break ranks or desert,” he says. “A soldier cannot turn down an order to execute six prisoners taking up too much space in the convoy. Someone else, someone far away, will pull their finger to pull the trigger.” He sloshes wine into his glass and tops mine off, gesturing with his other hand. “A soldier cannot be interrogated, because someone far away will lock their jaws shut, or, if the interrogation is very painful, unplug their brainstem.”

He mimes yanking a cord with two fingers, and I feel suddenly sick, and not from the wine. “That’s fucking awful,” I say. “Christ.”

“Not our invention,” Diallo senior says.

“But that’s nothing like what we do with ours,” I say. “We don’t control anything. Not a thing. If you could help your son to understand that—”

“Not a thing,” Diallo senior echoes. He snorts. “You think knowing a million people are going to be watching out of your eyes does not control what you do?”

“If you’re talking about off-court fanfeeds, those are entirely optional,” I say, but I’m not sure that’s what he’s talking about. “The fans love them, of course,” I add. “But it’s not contractual.”

“Oxford does not want you inside his body,” Diallo senior says. “He does not want you behind his eyes. He does not want the mesh.”

Then his retinal blinks blue, and it’s a good thing, because I don’t have a good response. He excuses himself to the washroom with his kit, weaving just slightly on his way, which leaves me sitting with a full wine glass and the mental image of some mutilated soldier having his brain shut down by committee.

But that’s nothing like our mesh.

I nab Oxford out of the immersion pod while his pa’s still in the washroom. He climbs out looking all groggy, craning his head to see where the scallops are at.

“What’d you think?” I say. “You like the nervecast?”

Oxford nods, almost reverently. “I crossed up Ash Limner,” he says.

“That could be you in there, you know,” I say, tapping the pod. “People would be paying to be you in there.”

Oxford gives the pod a look with just a bit of longing in it.

“Everyone has a mesh,” I say. “Ash Limner is meshed. Dray Cardeno is meshed. Why not Oxford Diallo, huh?”

Oxford chews his lip. “I promised,” he says.

“To your grandfather?” I ask.

He looks surprised. “Yes.”

“But this mesh is different, Oxford,” I say. “We don’t call the shots. You call the shots. We’re just along for the ride.”

Oxford frowns. “He said the mesh is a net you never get untangled from.”

“You said you liked the nervecast,” I say. “That’s kind of hypocritical of you, don’t you think? You enjoying someone else’s nervecast when you won’t get a mesh for yourself?”

“No,” Oxford says simply. “They chose.”

“They chose, yeah, of course,” I say. “It’s always a choice. But they made the right choice. Man, you have a gift. Your dad said it himself. You have a gift from God.” I put my hand on the pod again. “You owe it to the world to make the most of that gift. I’m never going to know what it’s like to slam how you do. I could barely dirty-dunk back in high school. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of people are never going to know what it’s like. Unless you let us.”

I can sense him wavering. He’s looking down at the pod, looking at his reflection in the shiny black mirror of it. I feel guilty in my gut, but I push right through, because this is important, getting this deal, and he’ll thank me later.

“You owe it to us,” I say. “Your dad’s in the washroom. You know what he’s doing in there?”

Oxford looks up, startled. Nods.

“Hacking up blood,” I say. “He’s never going to run again. Not how he used to. You don’t think he’d like a chance to feel that again? To hit the break? To get out for that big dunk in transition, pound up the hardwood, slice right to the rack, drop the bomb like wham.” I clap my hands together and Oxford flinches a bit. “You owe it, man,” I say. “You owe it to your dad. He got you here, didn’t he? He got you all this way.”

And that’s when Diallo senior comes out of the washroom, and I couldn’t have done it any better if I choreographed it myself, because he staggers a bit against the wall and looks suddenly old, suddenly tired. Oxford looks at him, looks scared as hell. Maybe realizing, for the first time, that his pa won’t be around forever.

I reach as high as I can and put my hand on his shoulder. “You know the right call, yeah?”

He hesitates, then slowly nods, and I want to bite off my tongue but I tell myself it’s worth it. Tell myself the both of them will thank me later.

Supper is quiet. Oxford is obviously still thinking about what I said, stealing odd glances over at his pa, and his pa is trying to figure out what’s going on without actually asking. It’s a relief for everyone, I think, when the oysters are finished and we head back outside.

The Seattle sky’s gone dark and the air is a bit nippy. Oxford’s pa pulls on a pair of gloves while we wait for the autocab. When it pulls up, Oxford announces he’s not ready to head back to the hotel yet. He wants to shoot.

“Yeah, alright,” I say. “Can head back to the gym. Got it rented for the whole day.”

“No,” Oxford says. “Somewhere outside.”

So we end up doing loops through the downtown until GPS finds an outdoor court at some Catholic school ten minutes away. There’s no one else there when we show up, and the court has one of those weird rubbery surfaces, but Oxford doesn’t seem to mind. He zips off his trackies and digs his ball out of his duffel.

His pa keeps the gloves on to feed him shots, moving him around the arc, hitting him with nice crisp passes right in the shooting pocket. You can tell that this whole thing, this whole tableau, with him under the net and Oxford catching, shooting, catching, shooting, is something they’ve done a million times on a million nights. The bright white floodlights make them into long black silhouettes. Neither of them talk, but little puffs of steam come out of Oxford’s mouth as he moves.

I watch from the chain-link fence, leaning back on it. Oxford’s form is still smooth levers and pistons, but when I get a glimpse of his face I can see he is not smiling how he smiled in the gym. I manage to lock eyes with him, and I give him a nod, then give him some privacy by walking down to the other end of the court. I hear him start talking to his pa in what my audio implant tells me is Serer.

I’m thinking the contract is as good as signed, and I’m about to tell as much to my boss when I hear the ball slam into the chain-link fence, sending ripples all down the length. I turn to see Oxford’s pa shrugging off his orange jacket, face tight and livid mad. He looks right at me, the sort of look you give something stuck to the bottom of your bomb-as-fuck shoe, then turns to his son.

“You think I cannot remember what it feels like to run?” he says. “You pity me?”

Oxford shakes his head desperately, saying something in Serer again, but his pa is not listening.

“We will play, then,” he says, and I get that he’s talking in English so I’ll understand. “You beat me, you can get the mesh surgery. Yes?”

“I did not want . . . ” Oxford trails off. He stares at me, confused, then at his pa, hurt.

“It will be easy,” Diallo senior says. “I am old. I have bad lungs.” He scoops the ball off the pavement and fires it into Oxford’s chest. His son smothers it with his big hands but still has to take a step back, maybe more from the surprise than from the impact.

Oxford puts it on the floor and reluctantly starts his dribble. “Okay,” he says, biting at his lips again. “Okay.”

But he sleepwalks forward and his pa slaps the ball away, way quicker than I would have thought possible. Diallo senior bullies his son back into the post, hard dribble, fake to the right and then a short sharp jump hook up over his left shoulder. It’s in the net before Oxford can even leave his feet.

They’re playing make it take it, or at least Oxford’s pa is. He gets the ball again and bangs right down to another post-up, putting an elbow into Oxford’s chest. Oxford stumbles. The same jump hook, machine precision, up and in. The cords swish.

“I thought you want it now,” Diallo senior says. “I thought you want your mesh.”

Oxford looks stricken, but he’s not looking over at me anymore. He’s zeroed in. The next time his pa goes for the hook, he’s ready for it, floating up like an astronaut and slapping the shot away hard. Diallo senior collects it in the shadows, brings it back, but the next time down on the block goes no better. Oxford pokes the ball away and dribbles it back to the arc, near enough to me that I can hear a sobbing whine in his throat. I remember that he’s really still a kid, all seven feet of him, and then he drills the three-pointer with his pa’s hand right in his face.

And after that it’s an execution. It’s Oxford darting in again and again breathing short angry breaths, sometimes stopping and popping the pull-up jumper, sometimes yanking it all the way to the rack. He’s almost crying. I don’t know if they’re playing to sevens, or what, but I know the game is over when Oxford slips his pa on a spin and climbs up and under from the other side of the net, enough space to scoop in the finger roll nice and easy, but instead his arm seems to jack out another foot at least, impossibly long, and he slams it home hard enough that the backboard shivers. He comes down with a howl ripped out of his belly, and the landing almost bowls his pa over, sends him back staggering.

Diallo senior gathers himself. Slow. He goes to pick up the ball, but suddenly his grimace turns to a cough and he doubles over. The rusty wracking sound is loud in the cold air and goes on forever. Oxford stands there frozen, panting how he never panted in the gym, staring at his pa, and I stand there frozen staring at both of them. Then Diallo senior spits up blood in a ragged parabola on the sticky blue court, and his son breaks the frieze. He stumbles over, wraps his arms around him.

A call from my boss blinks onto my retinal, accompanied by a sample from one of the latest blip-hop hits. It jangles back and forth across my vision while I stand there like a statue. Finally, I cancel the call and take a breath.

“You don’t have to sign right away,” I say.

Oxford and his pa both look up, remembering I’m there. I shouldn’t be.

“You can think about it,” I stammer, ashamed like I’ve never been. “More. About the contract.”

I want to tell them to forget the contract. Forget the mesh. We’ll make you famous without it. But instead I skulk away, out through the cold metal gate, leaving the Diallos huddled there under the floodlight, breathing a single cloud of steam.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and at 22 now works in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. His cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears or is forthcoming in Interzone, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, BCS, Apex Magazine, On Spec and many others, including anthologies Year’s Best SF 32, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Upgraded, Futuredaze and War Stories.

The Osteomancer’s Son

Greg van Eekhout

The bus comes to a stop at Wilshire and Fairfax, just a few blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits. When the doors hiss open, the tar smell washes over me. Thick and ancient, it snakes through my sinuses and settles in the back of my brain like a ghost in the attic.

“Get off or stay on,” the driver says, impatient. So I step off into the haunted air.

The walk to Farmer’s Market is too short. Not enough time for me to change my mind. For a moment, I wonder if looking at my wallet photo of Miranda would give me some more courage. I know every detail by heart: She’s smiling and squinting into the camera, her face sun-dappled and brilliant. The ice cream cone I bought her on her third birthday is a pink smear across her face.

It’s easier to think of her that way than to contemplate the handkerchief inside my bowling bag and the small bone contained within its linen folds.

I put my head down and keep walking, entering a maze of stalls and awnings, of narrow paths crowded with bins and baskets and little old ladies with sharp elbows. Shopping carts bark my shins and roll over my toes. Ranchero music and some kind of Southeast Asian pop bounces off my head.

“Hey you got problem?” A man behind the counter beckons with a hooked finger, his face brown and creased like a cinnamon stick. “You got problem, yeah. I can tell. I got just what you need.” With a knife, he sweeps bright orange dust into a little paper envelope. It looks that the dehydrated cheese powder that comes with instant macaroni.

“What’s that?” I ask.

His smile reveals several gold teeth. “Come from dragon turtle. You see giant dragon turtle wash up in San Diego? You see that on news?”

“I’m not really up on current events.” Especially not as regurgitated by state-controlled news organizations.

He nods enthusiastically and edges more powder into the envelope. “This come from San Diego dragon turtle. Wife’s younger brother, he lifeguard. He scrape some turtle shell before Hierarch’s men confiscate whole carcass.”

“What’s it for?” I ask, indicating the powder-filled envelope.

“All sorts of stuff. Rheumatism, kidney stones, migraine, epilepsy, bedroom problems . . . All sorts.”

“No, thanks,” I say as I try to shoulder my way back into the crowd.

“Get you girls,” he calls after me. “Make you animal! Guaranteed!”

Dragon turtle can’t do any of those things, of course. Not that it’s genuine turtle he’s selling. I figure it for flour and sulfur, with maybe the tiniest pinch of rhinoceros horn thrown in. You can’t even put a street value on the genuine stuff these days.

I know. I’ve experienced the genuine stuff. It’s in my bones.

One Sunday afternoon I found a piece of kraken spine while walking down Santa Monica Beach with Dad. It was a cold day, the sand a sloping plain of gray beneath a slate sky, and we were both underdressed for the weather. But it was Sunday, the one day of the week we had together, and I had wanted to go the beach.

I spotted the spine in the receding foam of the surf. It was just a fragment, like a knitting needle, striped honey and black. I showed it to Dad.

“Good eye,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t see many of these outside a locked vault.” In his white shirt and gray slacks, he looked like one of the seagulls wheeling overhead. I imagined him spreading his long arms to catch the wind and float to the sky.

I, on the other hand, took after my mom—short and stocky, skin just a shade paler than terra cotta. “Your father is made of air,” Mom once told me. “That’s why he’s so hard to understand; he’s not always down here with us. But you and me, kid, you and me are plain as dirt.”

Dad held out his hand for the spine. “Kraken live in the deeps,” he said. “They hunt for giant squid and sperm whale. Sometimes, in a fight, the spines break off and they wash ashore.” He smelled the spine, inhaling so deeply it was almost an act of aggression. “You’ve found good bone, Daniel. Better than mammoth tusk.”

“Really?” John Blackland had never been known to lavish idle praise.

“Better than all the La Brea stuff, in fact. The kraken is even older. Smarter.”

I waited while my father’s thoughts followed their own silent paths. Then, brightly, he told me to find a shell. “Abalone would be perfect, but I’ll take anything from the sea I can use as a crucible.”

Within a few minutes I’d located half a mussel shell. We sat on the sand, the shell between us, and Dad cooked the tip of the kraken spine over the flame of his Zippo. Thin tendrils of smoke rose from the spine, smelling of salt and earth and dark, deep mud.

When a single drop of honey-colored fluid oozed from the tip of the spine into the shell, Dad killed the flame. “Okay,” he said. “Good. Now, do like me.” He lifted the shell to his mouth and lightly touched his tongue to the fluid. I did the same. It burned, but not more than a too-hot mug of cocoa. The oil tasted exactly as it smelled, like something that had come from dark and forgotten places, but also from inside me.

“Quick, now, Daniel. Hold my hand.”

For a few moments, the waves crashed ashore and the gulls cried overhead and I shivered in the cold. Then it started. A prickling sensation ran across my skin, raising goose bumps. The tiny hairs on my arms stood at attention. Then, popping in my body, as though my blood were carbonated. It hurt, and I felt it in my lips and eyes, a million pinpricks.

I looked at Dad. His face was a blur. He was actually vibrating, and I realized I was, too, and he smiled at me. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, his voice shuddering. “Trust me.”

I wasn’t afraid. Or, rather, the scared part of me was smaller than the part that was thrilled at the power of my father, the power of the kraken, the power inside me.

Lightning struck. Silver-white, cracking bursts.

Pain filled me. I screamed, desperately trying to let some of it out, but there was only more. My body was a sponge for it, with limitless capacity. Pain replaced everything.

When my world finally stilled and my eyes could once again see, Dad and I were surrounded by a moat of liquefied sand. Black, gooey glass smoked and bubbled.

“The kraken is a creature of storms,” Dad said. “Now, a part that will always rage inside you. That’s the osteomancer’s craft: To draw magic from bones, to infuse it into your own.” He looked at me a long time, as if to see if I understood.

The pain was over, but the memory of it roiled inside and around me, like smoke from a fire.

Trust me, he’d said.

“Don’t tell your mom about this. That kraken spine could have paid for your college education.”

Farther back in the recesses of Farmer’s Market, closer to the Tar Pits, the smell of asphalt clogs the air. Black ooze seeps through cracks in the alley, and when I walk, my shoes stick to the ground. There’s black tar under the pavement. Pockets of gas lurk beneath the sidewalks like jellyfish.

Storage sheds and small warehouses line the alley, guarded by guys, teenagers, just a few years younger than me. They conceal their hands in the pockets of their roomy pants and watch me make my way down a row of cinderblock structures. I stop before a building with a steel roll-down door, and four guards converge on me, forming a diamond with me at the center.

“You must be lost,” one says.

They all have eyes the color of coffee ice cream and the same face. Not just similar in appearance, but identical. Maybe they’re quadruplets, but more likely they’re mirror-spawn. It takes pretty deep magic to create them, but when it comes to the Hierarch and his interests, no expense is ever spared. These guys aren’t just rent-a-cop security. These guys are weapons.

“Are these warehouses?” I say, waving vaguely at the buildings around us.

The four share a look and nod in unison.

“Then I think I’m in the right place.”

“You’d have been better off lost,” says the one behind me. “What’s in the bowling bag?”

“A bowling ball.”

“What kind?”

“Brunswick.” That’s the name written on the bag.

“I like to bowl,” they all say together. Then, just the one behind me: “Let’s take a peek inside.”

Two of them unzip the bag, while the other two keep their eyes on me. I reach into my coat pocket and all four get ready to pounce. “Relax,” I say, pulling out my leather glasses case. “Just putting on my shades.”

Which, really, is all I do.

Frowns form on the faces of the four mirror-spawn. They blink. They work their lips a little. “What are you looking at?” they all ask of each other.

“Nothing,” they all decide.

Their diamond formation loosens, and they go back to whatever they were doing before I showed up. I take my bowling bag and continue looking for the right warehouse.

When my first baby tooth fell out I tucked it under my pillow, just as Mom had told me to. The next morning the tooth was gone but I found no coin. Mom and Dad were arguing in the living room. I wanted to go out and see Dad, but not until the fight was over.

I read some comics.

I glued plastic tusks on my Revel Colombian Mammoth model.

With my tongue, I probed the empty socket where my tooth had been.

Finally, the noise in the other room died down, and I heard the front door open and shut. Moments later, a car started and drove away: Dad going back to his apartment.

“From now on,” Mom said, standing in the doorway, “when you lose a tooth, put it in an envelope for your father.”

“What for?”

She gripped the doorjamb so tight her hand shook. “So he can eat them.”

By that age, I already knew Dad worked for the Hierarch—the most powerful osteomancer of all—and I knew that made my father a very important man.

It wasn’t until years later, until after the Night of Long Knives, that I knew Dad was a traitor.

This, I found out from Uncle Otis, my father’s brother, who took me in after Dad was murdered and Mom defected to Northern California.

I’d left Otis when I turned sixteen and had nearly no contact with him until two weeks ago. I knew he helped out Connie and Miranda with money, dropped in on their little apartment in Boyle Heights to make sure they were okay, but I’d never asked him to do that and I refused to be grateful.

The door jingled as I entered his shop for the first time in seven years.

“You never got tall,” he said by way of greeting.

He wasn’t alone. On a stool behind a glass display counter of jewelry and cigarette cases and Zippo lighters sat a thin-shouldered man in a sweater the color of wilted lettuce. He gave me a smile with his lipless turtle mouth and took a sip from a Dodgers coffee mug.

“Nice to meet you, Daniel.”

I took note of the turtle man’s skin, teeth, fingernails. They were by no means healthy colors, but neither were they the deeply embedded telltale brown of a practicing osteomancer. I figured him for a supplier, like Otis.

I should have turned around, gone back home. Trafficking in osteomancy had been a bad idea since the Night of Long Knives—I was surprised Otis hadn’t been caught yet—and I always got the feeling the Hierarch’s eyes were on me, being the son of John Blackland.

Otis tried to introduce me to the turtle man. “Daniel, this is Mr.—” But the turtle man cut him off with a sharp look. Otis settled on telling me he was a friend of my father’s.

I took “friend” as a codeword for former co-conspirator. Dad had been a darling of the Hierarch until he’d decided there was too much power concentrated in the Hierarch’s hands, and he hadn’t been alone in this belief. Magic wants to be free. But after the Night of Long Knives, what had been the seeds of a revolution had degenerated into merely a black market for osteomantic materials. Now, it was just about skimming a bit off the Hierarch’s profit.

I wanted no part of it. Not a sliver. But there was the lure of money and pangs about how little I was doing for Miranda. “Is this a bag job?”

Otis nodded. “The sort of thing you’re good at.”

I had kept myself out of the family business, but that didn’t mean I’d been walking the straight and narrow. Part of the reason I’d left Otis’s care was because I felt he wasn’t dealing fairly with me when fencing stuff I’d boosted from houses and businesses.

“It’s a tricky job, in a place hard to get into and even harder to get out of.”

“Government warehouse, I suppose?” Which was tantamount to a suicide mission.

The turtle man looked at me with dark eyes. I recognized that look. In his head, he was stripping me of clothing and skin. He was wondering what my skeleton looked like. “It’s not just any government warehouse, Daniel. We’re sending you into the Ossuary itself.”

The Ossuary. The dragon’s greatest treasure trove. The Hierarch’s own private stash.

I didn’t bother explaining what an impossible task that would be. These guys were veterans. They wouldn’t risk exposure in a pointless exercise. But they would risk my life to get their hands on the Hierach’s riches.

I, on the other hand, would not. “Thanks, Otis,” I said, turning my back and heading for the door. “Don’t call me ever again.”

I heard the turtle man’s coffee cup clank against the glass counter. “You haven’t even heard our terms.”

“And I’m not going to,” I said. “My daughter deserves a living father.”

“Daniel, I have something for you.” I stopped and watched Otis place a folded handkerchief on the glass counter. The look on his face was infinitely sad as he peeled back the corners of the handkerchief and revealed a small distal phalanx. A finger bone. A child’s finger bone, not white, but already turning brown. The bone of a child who has been fed bone. When I was a kid, that’s what my bones would have looked like, because even then, Dad was preparing me.

“It belongs to Miranda,” the turtle man said. “Do the job or we’ll piece her out, bit by bit.”

Dad lived in the back of his osteomancer’s shop, and that’s where I spent most of my time with him during weekend visits. Six years after that afternoon on the beach, I was in his workroom, watching a pair of horn-rimmed glasses bob inside a kettle of boiling oil. The lenses were blanks, but the frames were special, carved from the vertebrae of a Choctaw sint holo serpent. I was certain that Dad didn’t have legal access to such materials. He’d probably obtained it in one of the back-alley exchanges he’d become increasingly involved with. Things had been different for him, lately. Once one of the Hierarch’s chief men, he was more and more on the fringes of things.

Dad stirred the oil with a copper spoon, sniffing the vapors that rose from the pot. He quizzed me: “Any idea what these glasses will do?”

I was bored. Only eight blocks away there was a mall full of video games and CD’s to shoplift and girls. I couldn’t remember the last time Dad and I had talked about anything other than bones and oils and feathers and powders. Dad’s world was full of dead things that stank.

“I have no idea what they do,” I said. It was true, but it wasn’t what Dad wanted to hear.

He breathed a small sigh. “Smell it, Daniel. You can tell by smell. Smells are ghosts. Let them in and they’ll talk to you.”

He wouldn’t give up until I did as he asked, so, sullenly, I admitted the phantoms. Figuring out what they were trying to tell me was a process requiring the kind of patience and attention I could seldom be bothered to exhibit. I lowered my nose to the kettle.

First, there were my father’s tells, not just because he was in the room, but because the kettle contained his magic. There was clean sweat. Old Spice. And tar. Deeply embedded, way down to the marrow of Dad’s bones. My father’s living ghost. And also something of me. Maybe some of my baby teeth. The smells were all mixed up, and I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.

“What do you think?” Dad whispered, bending close to my ear.

“It’s like . . . something I can’t hold onto. Like confusion.”

Dad straightened. “It’s in your bones, now, Daniel. You know how to let the old bones inside you. You only need to listen to them, and they’ll tell you how to do whatever you need to do. That’s osteomancy. That’s deep magic.” He gestured at his work counter, littered with jars and vials and little envelopes. “All else is merely recipe.”

From outside, the sound of a helicopter rotor pounded the air. The phone rang. Dad went to the front room to answer it, and I stayed behind, eavesdropping on his conversation.

“Not a good time, Otis.” Then, his voice dropped. “Yes, I’ve got something cooking right now.”

The sound of the helicopter grew closer, and now it sounded as though there were more than one. I went to the door and saw the look on Dad’s face, the way the lines deepened, the haunted shadows of his eyes. “Who else did they get?” he said into the receiver, craning his neck to peer out the living room window. Dad listened to whatever Otis’s answer was, his eyes shut tight. When he opened them, he saw me standing in the doorway. “Will you take care of him, Otis? Will you promise me?” There was a pause, and then he put the receiver back in its cradle.

Out on the street, car doors slammed. Dad came over to the workroom doorway and pushed me back inside. “The glasses aren’t ready yet,” he said. “Wait as long as you can before putting them on. Don’t come out till you’ve heard the thunder. When you walk, make no noise.” With that, he shut the door on me.

A few moments later, I heard shouting in the living room, a scuffle. And then cracks of thunder, so close, like bombs detonating in my head. The loudest thing I’d ever heard.

Silence followed, broken by soft footsteps outside the workroom. The doorknob jiggled. Another beat of silence, and something impacted the door. Wood splintered.

I ran to Dad’s work counter. The glasses still tumbled inside the boiling oil. With a pair of copper tongs, I lifted out the glasses and put them on, hissing in pain as I burned my fingers and temples and the backs of my ears and the bridge of my nose. My skin blistered, and whatever substance Dad had used to fashion the frames leeched into me.

With another blow the door gave, hanging on one hinge, useless as a broken arm. Half a dozen cops surged in. A gray-haired man in a blue windbreaker, marked with the Hierarch’s skull insignia, pushed to the front of the group. I backed up against the workbench. The man in the windbreaker was close enough to touch. He looked at me, right at me, and raised his hand as if to reach out and grab my throat. I remained silent, and he only blinked stupidly in my general direction.

My heart pounding, I forced myself to walk slowly past the cops, who flinched as though brushed by cobwebs. In the living room were four charred bodies. The flesh on their faces and hands bubbled, black and red. The room stank of ozone and meat and kraken.

Dad hadn’t managed to get them all. He was on his back. Three cops were cutting the skin off of him with long knives. They’d already flayed his arm, exposing the deep rich brown of his radius and ulna. And they’d peeled his face back to expose his coffee-brown skull.

That night, I ran. Away from Dad’s place, away from the rotor blades and searchlights. I ran until I could only walk, walked until I could only stumble, stumbled until I could only crawl. When morning broke, I woke up in wet sand and bathed myself in the cold waves that rolled in on the edge of a winter storm. I will live here, I thought. I will live here on the beach, and I will never take off these glasses, and I will live here as a ghost.

He was already dead, I told myself. When the men cut open Dad to take his bones, he was already dead.

I would keep telling myself that until I could believe it.

The route to the Hierarch’s ossuary takes me through a network of tunnels buried so deep beneath the city that, after a while, I can no longer feel the rumble of traffic from Wilshire Boulevard. The stench of tar and magic is almost a solid wall here, the ghosts so thick I can practically scoop them out of the air with my hands. Using the turtle man’s collection of lock picks, stolen keys, alarm codes, passwords, and my father’s glasses, I eventually find myself at the threshold of the Hierarch’s ossuary.

Let’s say you’re sickeningly wealthy. And let’s say what you’re rich in is gold, and you want a big room in which to hoard your treasure. What could be more fitting, then, than a room built of solid gold bricks? The Hierarch’s ossuary is kind of like that, only it’s built of bone. The walls are mammoth femurs stacked end-to-end. The floor, a mosaic of various claws and delicate vertebrae and healing jewels pried from the heads of Peruvian carbuncles. Overhead, mammoth tusks form the domed ceiling. And from the dome hangs a chandelier of unicorn horns, white as snow.

I remind myself to breathe.

Six sentries carry bayonets with basilisk-tooth blades. They exchange uneasy glances as I step deeper into the room. I’ve been warned by Otis and the turtle man that anyone I encountered this far inside the Hierarch’s stronghold will have received advanced training. They will have tasted deep-magic bone.

“Hoss, you okay?” says one of the sentries.

Another shakes his head, looking directly at me. “Nope. Something’s creeping me out.”

“Yeah, me too. Think we should get the hound in here?”

“Yeah.” The sentry reaches for a wall-mounted phone.

I unlace my boot and pry it off. With everything I’ve got, I chuck it up at the unicorn chandelier. The horns shatter like glass, the sound of children shrieking. I backpedal to avoid the rain of shards.

The sentries look up in horror. They’re in charge of protecting a lot of money, and something’s just gone dreadfully wrong. They flutter about the mess like maiden aunts over a collapsed soufflé.

I retrieve my boot and make a dash for a passageway into an even larger room.

The entrance of bone was made to impress. This place, large enough to berth an ocean liner, houses yet greater wealth. Floor-to-ceiling shelves occupy most of it, but there are also fully assembled skeletons in chain-link cages: a serpent at least 100 yards long, a feline body as large as an elephant with a boulder-sized skull. And suspended overhead looms a kraken—flat, shovel-shaped head, tail half the length of a football field, and running down the tail, dozens of spines as long as jousting lances. The stench of its power makes my stomach churn.

There is really only one reason Otis and the turtle man chose me for this job. One thing I can do better than anyone else. There’s a scent I’m sensitive to, one I can pick out like a bright white stripe on a black highway. I follow it to a row of towering shelves and bring over a ladder on wheels. I climb. Stacked on the shelves are long cardboard boxes. In front of my face is the one containing my father’s bones.

His remains are powerful weapons. I understand why Otis and the turtle man and whoever else is in their cabal wants them.

Most of Dad is missing. Probably sold off. All that’s left are some of the small bones of his hands, and some ground powder, just a pinch, in a glass vial. I unzip my bowling bag and dump the remains inside.

A voice from below: “Come down off that ladder, son.”

In a linen button-down shirt and tailored black slacks, the Hierarch isn’t exactly what I expect, but I recognize his face from coins and postage stamps. He’s thin and dark as bones from the tar pits, his fingernails, teeth and eyes saturated with magic.

“Those glasses of yours are very clever,” he says, inhaling deeply. “Sint holo serpent bones and Deep Rhys herbs. Two sources of invisibility, mixed together, along with your own essence. That’s good work. But it’s not fooling me, so you might as well come on down now.”

I grip the ladder to keep my hands from shaking. I can smell him. His magic is old. “So, you really hang out in your own warehouse? Don’t tell me you drive the forklifts.”

He smiles indulgently. “No, that takes special training I lack. But when thieves get this far past my defenses, I take personal interest. Now, please, come down.”

“Not just yet. I like the view from up here. You have a lot of nice things. Is that really a sphinx?” I wonder if he’s noticed my legs shaking.

“Yes. One of only three ever found.”

“Where are the other two?”

“I smoked them.” And he spits at me. He fires up a dark brown glob that splatters on my cheek. It burns me like acid, hurting so bad, filling me with pain and surprise, that I can’t even scream.

A curtain of gray descends over my vision, and I lose balance, falling off the ladder, eight feet down to the concrete floor. I huddle there at the Hierarch’s feet, struggling not to give in to the tempting relief of unconsciousness. My cheek burns. And I think I’ve broken my right arm. But somehow—reflex, dumb luck, who knows?—I’ve managed to hold onto the bowling bag containing father’s bones. Some of the bones have fallen out. The vial of powder lies shattered, its contents spilled.

I have to get to my feet. I can do this. I can make myself do this. Using my good arm to push myself up, I manage to drive my palm into the tiny shards of glass from the broken vial.

“Are you okay?” the Hierarch asks. I can hear the flesh on my face sizzle.

I try to say “fine,” but the word won’t come out.

“So, who’s that in the bowling bag?”

“John Blackland,” I rasp. “He was an osteomancer.”

The Hierarch puts his hands in his pockets and bounces on the balls of his feet, as if stretching out his calf muscles. “This entire section of the ossuary is full of osteomancers. It’s the osteomancy section. I suppose you’re John Blackland’s son?”

The Hierarch’s spit continues to burn. “Yeah,” I gasp. “Daniel Blackland.”

It feels like someone’s drilling into the cracked bones of my right arm. And my cheek . . . the air hits exposed bone.

The Hierarch squints at the hole in my face as if checking out a door ding on a parked car. “If it’s any comfort, you got farther than most. No doubt you’ve come equipped with some powerful osteomantic weapons. But look at me.” He holds his brown hands up toward my face. “I’ve smoked, eaten, inhaled, and injected more ancient and secret animals than anyone alive. I’m the Hierarch.”

“How could I have done this better?” I ask.

“I do make public appearances, you know. You could have tried a car bomb. Or a high-powered rifle. You revenge-obsessed boys have extraordinary passion, but it seems to get in the way of achieving practical goals.”

He thinks this is about vengeance, not simple theft. I’m out of courage, and hope, and pretty much everything. But then Dad talks to me. He begins softly, through weak and subtle scents that waft up from his scattered bones: tar, the salt tang of kelp, and a trace of something clean and dark and old from the sea bottom.

That’s the osteomancer’s craft. To draw magic from bones, to infuse it into your own.

My father turned me into a weapon. And while I was off, screwing around, I let inheritors of my father’s noble cause turn Miranda into a weapon. I’ve still got her in my bowling bag. I am a vessel carrying three generations of power. But I’ll die before I use my daughter in that way.

Broken arm. Face being eaten away. Glass splinters in my good hand. I put my palm to my ruined cheek. Screaming, I rub the residue of my father’s ground-up bones into my raw flesh.

Firecrackers pop under my skin.

The Hierarch sees what I’ve done, and he begins to exude something. A toxic stench, thick as mud, fills my head, more and more until I hear myself shrieking with blind pain.

The Hierarch coughs, and he coughs and coughs, and his eyes never leave mine. His jaw unhinges like a snake’s, and brown fluid gushes out of him. Where it hits the floor, concrete liquefies and boils away.

“If there’s anything left of you,” he says, his voice gargly, “I’ll drink it with green tea.”

I don’t know if I’ll live, but I know the Hierarch has lost. Because, overhead, the spines of the kraken skeleton vibrate and sing. And just before the Hierarch unleashes another torrent of magic from inside, the storm I called with Dad strikes. The bolts come down. The bolts come out of me. They come from Dad’s bones, soaked with Dad’s magic, mixed in my blood. They come from spirits and memories.

When it’s over, the Hierarch’s charred body melts into a puddle of brown, sizzling fluid.

Ding-dong, dead.

I should just walk out of here. With my glasses, I can get past the guards and get as far from the ossuary as a guy with a broken arm and a ravaged face can get.

But the residue of the Hierarch is thick, powerful magic. There’s got to be a sponge and bucket around here somewhere.

We’ve been driving all day and all night and have been for a few days. Connie rides with Miranda in the back, singing Spanish lullabies, trying to get her to stop crying. I cooked up a salve for her hand, and I don’t think it hurts her any longer, but the girl misses the tip of her finger. Of course she does. How could she not? When she’s older, maybe I’ll give it to her and she can wear it on the end of a necklace.

And once that thought is complete, I want to hit myself. Isn’t that the sort of thing Dad might do?

At least once every hour I’m tempted to turn the car around and head back to Los Angeles. There’s a fight being waged there between high-ranking ministers and osteomancers, between freelancers and opportunists and twisted idealists like Otis and the turtle man. I shouldn’t be tempted to head back and join in, but I am. I’m pretty sure I would prevail. After drinking the Hierarch’s remains, I may well be the most powerful osteomancer in all the Californias. Possibly the most powerful on the entire continent. Part of me wants that power. There’s something in my bones that craves it.

But then, when the hunger gets too strong, I lean back and get a whiff of Miranda. She carries the taint of magic, a scent much older than she is, and I won’t stop driving, till all I can smell is baby powder and shampoo and clean, soft skin.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2006.

About the Author

Greg van Eekhout is the author of several novels, including California Bones, Pacific Fire, Norse Code, and the middle-grade books, Kid vs. Squid and The Boy at the End of the World. He lives in San Diego.

It Takes Two

Nicola Griffith

It began, as these things often do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead of the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, “You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal type job, where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?”

“You forgot Friday.”

“What?” They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

“I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—”

“Right,” Cody said. “Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?” An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. “I just took a job,” he said. “A no-travel job.”

“Ah, shit.”

They had met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which was wild because he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they’d both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn’t told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, boot-strapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But a no-travel job meant only one thing, and going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. “Where?”

“Chapel Hill. And it’s not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really. It’s with a new company, a joint venture between WishtleNet and the University of North—”

“See.”

“Just let me finish.” Richard could get very didactic when he’d been drinking. “Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I’ve got six months to get the software on the market, even if it is garbage.”

“I hear you on that.” Except that Vince, Cody’s COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.

“It’s cool stuff, Cody. All those things we’ve talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“—they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff.”

Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn’t remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.

“Starts next month,” he said.

Cody felt very tired. “So you won’t be in Atlanta.”

“Nope.”

“Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus.”

“On your own? What about all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes?”

The muscles in Cody’s eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. “It’s Boone I’m not looking forward to. Boone and his sleazy strip club games.”

“He’s the customer.”

“Your sympathy’s killing me.”

He shrugged. “I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream.”

Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.

“That’s what you told us in—now where the hell was that?”

“Dallas.” Might as well get it over with.

“You were really into it. Are you blushing?”

“No.” Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that her coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.

She swallowed the last of her tequila. Oily, ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.

“I’m out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone’s slimeball games? Didn’t think so.” She pushed her shot glass away and stood.

“That Atlanta meeting’s when? Eight, nine weeks?”

“About that.” She dropped two twenties on the bar.

“I maybe could help.”

“With Boone? Right.” But Richard’s usually cherubic face was quite stern.

He fished his phone from his pocket and put it on the bar. He said, “Just trust me for a minute,” and tapped the memo icon. The icon winked red. “Whatever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you.”

Cody slung on her jacket. “Cue ominous music.”

“It’s more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” But she caught the bartender’s eye, pointed to their glasses, and sat.

“I did my Atlanta research too,” he said. “Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key,” she said, nodding. Common knowledge. The sun rises, the government taxes, Boone listens to bids and takes everyone to the Golden Key.

“—but what I need to know from you is whether or not, to win this contract, you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures.”

She snorted. “Five figures against a possible eight? What do you think?”

He pointed at the phone.

“Fine. Yes. I can approve that kind of expense.”

He smiled, a very un-Richardlike sliding of muscle and bone, like a python disarticulating its jaw to swallow a pig. Cody nearly stood up, but the moment passed.

“You’ll also have to authorize me to access your medical records,” he said.

So here they were in Marietta, home of the kind of Georgians who wouldn’t fuck a stranger in the woods only because they didn’t know who his people were: seven men and one woman stepping from Boone’s white concrete and green glass tower into an August sun hot enough to make the blacktop bubble. Boone’s shades flashed as he turned to face the group.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And Jill,” with a nod at Cody, who nodded back and tried not to squint. Squinting made her look like a moron: not good when all around you were wearing sleek East Coast summer business clothes and gilded with Southern tans. At least the guy from Portland had forgotten his shades too.

They moved in a small herd across the soft, sticky parking lot: the guy from Boston would have to throw away his fawn loafers.

Boone said to the guy from Austin, “Dave, you take these three. I know you know where we’re going.”

“Sure do,” Dave said, and the seven boys shared that we’re-all-men-of-the-world-yes-indeedy laugh. Cody missed Richard. And she was still pissed at the way he’d dropped the news on her only last week. Why hadn’t he told her earlier about not coming to Atlanta? Why hadn’t he told her in Seattle? And a university job: what was up with that? Loser. But she wished he was here.

Boone’s car was a flashy Mercedes hybrid in silver. He opened the passenger door with a Yeah-I-know-men-and-women-are-equal-but-I-was-born-in-the-south-so-what-can-you-do? smile to which Cody responded with a perfect, ironic lift of both eyebrows. Hey, couldn’t have managed that in shades. The New York guy and Boston loafers got in the back. The others were climbing into Dave’s dark green rental SUV. A full-sized SUV. Very uncool. He’d lose points for that. She jammed her seatbelt home with a satisfying click.

As they drove to the club, she let the two in the back jostle for conversational space with Boone. She stared out of the window. The meeting had gone very well. It was clear that she and Dave and the guy from Denver were the only ones representing companies with the chops for this contract, and she was pretty sure she had the edge over the Denver people when it came to program rollout. Between her and Dave, then. If only they weren’t going to the Golden Key. God. The thought of all those men watching her watch those women and think they knew what she was thinking made her scalp prickle with sweat. In the flow of conditioned air, her face turned cold.

Two days before she left for Atlanta she’d emailed Vince to explain that it wasn’t her who would be uncomfortable at the strip club, but the men, and that he should at least consider giving Boone a call and setting her presentation up for either the day before or the day after the others. She’d got a reply half an hour later, short and to the point: You’re going, kid, end of story. She’d taken a deep breath and walked over to his office.

He was on the phone, pacing up and down, but waved her in before she could knock. He covered the receiver with one hand, “Gotta take this, won’t be long,” and went back to pacing, shouting, “Damn it, Rick, I want it done. When we had that meeting last week you assured me— Yeah. No problem, you said. No fucking problem. So just do it, just find a way.” He slammed the phone down, shook his head, turned his attention to her. “Cody, what can I do for you? If it’s about this Atlanta thing I don’t want to hear it.”

“Vince—”

“Boone’s not stupid. He takes people to that titty club because he likes to watch how they behave under pressure. You’re the best we’ve got, you know that. Just be yourself and you won’t fuck up. Give him good presentation and don’t act like a Girl Scout when the nipples start to show. Can you handle that?”

“I just resent—”

“Jesus Christ, Cody. It’s not like you’ve never seen bare naked ladies before. You want to be a VP? Tell me now: yes or no.”

Cody took a breath. “Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. Now get out of here.”

The Golden Key was another world: cool, and scented with the fruity overtones of beer; loud, with enough bass to make the walls of her abdomen vibrate; dark at the edges, though lushly lit at the central stage with its three chrome poles and laser strobes. Only one woman was dancing. It was just after six, but the place was already half full. Somewhere, someone was smoking expensive cigars. Cody wondered who the club paid off to make that possible.

Boone ordered staff to put two tables together right by the stage, near the center pole. The guy from New York sat on Boone’s left, Dave on his right. Cody took a place at the end, out of Boone’s peripheral vision. She wouldn’t say or do anything that wasn’t detached and ironic. She would be seamless.

A new dancer: shoulder-length red hair that fell over her face as she writhed around the right hand pole. She wore a skirt the size of a belt, and six inch-heels of translucent plastic embedded with suggestive pink flowers. Without the pole she probably couldn’t even stand. Did interesting things to her butt, though, Cody thought, then patted surreptitiously at her upper lip. Dry, thank god. Score one for air conditioning.

New York poked her arm. He jerked his thumb at Boone, who leaned forward and shouted, “What do you want to drink?”

“Does it matter?”

He grinned. “No grape juice playing at champagne here. Place takes its liquor seriously.”

Peachy. “Margarita. With salt.” If it was sour enough she wouldn’t want to gulp it.

The dancer hung upside down on the pole and undid her bra. Her breasts were a marvel of modern art, almost architectural.

“My God,” she said, “it’s the Hagia Sophia.”

“What?” New York shouted. “She’s called Sophia?”

“No,” Cody shouted back, “her breasts . . . Never mind.”

“Fakes,” New York said, nodding.

The drinks came, delivered by a blonde woman wearing nothing but a purple velvet G-string and a smile. She called Boone Darlin’—clearly he was a regular—and Cody Sugar.

Cody managed to lift her eyes from the weirdness of unpierced nipples long enough to find a dollar bill and drop it on the drinks tray. Two of the guys were threading their tips under the G-string: a five and a ten. The blonde dropped Cody a wink as she walked away. New York caught it and leered. Cody tried her margarita: very sour. She gulped anyway.

The music changed to a throbbing remix of mom music: the Pointer Sisters’ “Slowhand.” The bass line was insistent, pushing on her belly like a warm hand. She licked her lips and applied herself to her drink. Another dancer with soft black curls took the left hand pole, and the redhead moved to center stage on her hands and knees in front of their table, rotating her ass in slow motion, looking at them over her shoulder, slitting her eyes at them like a cat. Boone, Dave, all the guys had bills in their hands: “Ooh mama, I’ve got what you need.” The redhead backed towards them in slow motion, arching her spine now in apparent ecstasy—but not so far gone as to ignore the largest bill at the table: Boone’s twenty. She let him tease her with it, stroking up the inside of her thigh and circling a nipple, before she held out the waistband of the pseudo-skirt for the twenty. They probably didn’t notice that she plucked them of their bills in order—Boone’s twenty, Dave’s ten, the two fives. Then she was moving to her right, to a crowd of hipster suits who had obviously been there longer than was good for them: two of them were holding out fifties. The dancer pretended to fuck the fifty being held out at pelvis level. She had incredible muscle control. Next to Cody, New York swallowed hard, and fumbled for his wallet. But it was too late. The hipster was grinning hard as the redhead touched his cheek, tilted her head, said something. He stood and his friends hooted encouragement as he and the redhead disappeared through a heavily frosted glass door in the back.

“Oh, man . . . ” Dave’s face was more red than tan, now. He pulled a fifty from his wallet, snapped it, folded it lengthways, and held it out over the stage to the remaining dancer. “Yo, curlyhead, come and get some!”

“Yeah!” said New York in a high voice. Portland and Boston seemed to be engaged in a drinking game.

Boone caught Cody’s eye and smiled slightly. She shrugged and spread her hand as if to say, Hey, it’s their money to waste, and he smiled again, this time with a touch of skepticism. Ah, shit.

“Sugar?” The waitress with the velvet G-string, standing close and bending down so that her nipples brushed Cody’s hair, then dabbed her cheek.

Cody looked at her faded blue eyes and found a ten dollar bill. She smiled and slipped it into the G-string at the woman’s hip and crooked a finger to make her bend close again.

“I’d take it as a personal favor if you brought me another of these wonderful margaritas,” she said in the woman’s ear, “without the tequila.”

“Whatever you say. But I’ll still have to charge for the liquor.”

“Of course you do. Just make sure it looks good.” Cody jerked her head back at the rest of the table.

“You let me take care of everything, sugar. I’m going to make you the meanest looking margarita in Dixie. They’ll be amazed, purely amazed, at your stamina. It’ll be our little secret.” She fondled Cody’s arm and shoulder, let the back of her hand brush the side of Cody’s breast. “My name is Mimi. If you need anything, later.” She gave Cody a molten look and headed for the bar. The skin on her rotating cheeks looked unnaturally smooth, like porcelain. Cosmetics, Cody decided.

Curlyhead had spotted Dave’s fifty and was now on her back in front of their table. Cody imagined her as a glitched wigglebot responding to insane commands: clench, release, arch, whip back and forth. Whoever had designed her had done a great job on those muscles: each distinct, plump with strength, soft to the touch. Shame they hadn’t had much imagination with the facial expressions or managed to put any spark in the eyes.

Breasts swaying near her face announced the arrival of her kickless drink. She slipped a ten from her wallet and reached for Mimi’s G-string.

Mimi stepped back half a pace, put her tray down, and squeezed her breasts together with her hands. “Would you like to put it here instead, Sugar?”

Cody blinked.

“You could slide it in real slow. Then maybe we could get better acquainted.” But like the wigglebot, her eyes stayed blank.

“You’re too hot for me, Mimi.” Cody snapped the bill into her G-string and tried not to feel Mimi’s flash of hatred. She sipped her drink and took a discreet peek in her wallet. This was costing the company a fortune.

Boone watched Dave and New York with a detached expression. Then he turned her way with a speculative look. An invitation to talk?

She stood. And turned to look at the stage just as a long-haired woman in cowboy boots strode to the center pole.

For Cookie it was all routine so far, ankle holding up better than she thought it might. The boots helped. She couldn’t remember when she’d written that note to herself, Cowboys and Indians! but it was going to be inspired. She flexed and bent and pouted and pointed her breasts on automatic pilot. Should she get the ankle X-rayed? Nah. It was only a sprain. Two ibuprofen and some ice would fix it.

Decent crowd for a Tuesday night. Some high spenders behind the pillar there, but Ginger had taken them for four lapdances already. Well, hey, there were always more men with more money than sense. She glanced into the wings. Danny had her hat. He nodded. She moved automatically, counted under her breath, and just as the first haunting whistle of Morricone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” soundtrack echoed from the speakers she held out her hand, caught the hat, and swept it onto her head. Ooh, baby, perfect today, perfect. She smiled and strutted downstage. A woman at the front table was standing. Cookie saw the flash of a very expensive watch, and for no particular reason was flooded with conviction that tonight was going to go very well indeed. Cookie, baby, she told herself, tonight you’re gonna get rich.

And with that catch of the hat, that strut, just like that, Cody forgot about Boone and his contract, forgot about being seamless, forgot everything. The dancer was fine, lean and soft, strong as a deer. The name Cookie was picked out in rhinestones on her hat, and she wore a tiny fringed buckskin halter and something that looked like a breechclout—flaps of suede that hung from the waist to cover front and back, but not the sides—and wicked spurs on the boots. She looked right at Cody and smiled, and her eyes were not blank.

Part of Cody knew that Boone had seen her stand, and was now watching her watch this dancer, and that she should stop, or sit, or keep walking to Boone’s end of the table, but the other part—the part that liked to drink shots in biker bars, to code all night with Acid Girls pounding from the speakers and the company’s fortunes riding on her deadline, the part that had loaded up her pickup and left Florida to drive all the way to the West Coast on her own when she was just nineteen, that had once hung by her knees from a ninth floor balcony just because she could—that part cared about nothing but this woman with the long brown hair.

The hair was Indian straight and ended just one inch above the hem of the breechclout, and the way she moved made Cody understand that the hat and spurs were trophies, taken from a dead man. When the dancer trailed her hands across her body, Cody knew they held knives. When the male voices began their rhythmic chanting, she could see this woman riding hard over the plain, vaulting from her pony, stripping naked as she walked.

The music shifted but again it was drums, and now Cookie swayed like a maiden by a pool, pulling the straps of her halter off her shoulders, enough to expose half her breasts but not all, and she felt them thoughtfully, and began to smear them with warpaint. When she had painted all she could see, she pushed the buckskin down further, so that each breast rested like a satsuma on its soft shelf, then she turned her back on the audience, twisted her hair over one shoulder and examined the reflection of her ass in the water. She turned a little, this way and that, lifting the back flap, one corner then another, dropping it, thinking, stroking each cheek experimentally, trying to decide how to decorate it. Then she smoothed the buckskin with both hands so it pulled tight, and studied that effect. She frowned. She traced the outline of her G-string with her index finger. She smiled. She stuck her butt out, twitched it a couple of times, hooked both thumbs in the waistband of her G-string, and whipped it off. The breechclout stayed in place. She was still wearing the halter under her breasts.

And the little dyke liked that, Cookie could tell. She smiled smooth as cream, danced closer, saw the stain creeping up the woman’s cheeks, the way her lips parted and her hands opened. Professionally manicured hands; clothes of beautifully cut linen, shoes handmade. The men in the room faded to irritation. This was the prize.

One of the men at the table reached out and slipped a twenty between the rawhide tie of her breechclout and her hip, but Cookie barely took her eyes from the woman. Twenty here or fifty there was small change compared to this. For you, she mouthed and turned slightly, and tightened down into a mushroom of skin-sheathed muscle, took off her hat, and reached back and pulled the flap of her breechclout out of the way.

She was aware of some shouting, the tall guy with the red face and the fifty but she kept her eyes fixed on the woman.

And then the music changed, and Ginger was back from her lapdance, and she saw Christie was hand in hand with a glazed-looking mark, about to leave for the backroom, and it was time for her to put some of her clothes back on and work the floor.

Five minutes, she mouthed to the woman.

Cookie, Cody thought, as the dancer flicked the suede flap back in place, stood gracefully, and put her hat back on. Cookie. She watched as Cookie left the stage and took all the heat and light with her. She would come back, wouldn’t she? Five minutes, she had said.

“Cunt!” Dave shouted again, “my money not good enough for you? Goddamned— No, you get off of me.” He pushed Boone’s hand from his arm, then realized what he’d done. “Shit. That’s— It’s just— You know how it is, man. But fifty bucks . . . ”

“Hell, Dave, maybe she knew it was counterfeit,” Boone said jovially.

Dave forced a laugh, thrust the bill in his pocket. “Yeah, or maybe she just doesn’t understand size matters.” Boone laughed, but everyone at the table heard the dismissive note.

“Maybe it’s time to call it a night, folks.”

But Cody wasn’t listening because Cookie was standing before her: no hat, buckskins and G-string back in place.

“Okay guys, looks like we lost Cody.” Boone laughed, nothing like the laugh he’d given Dave. “Hey, girl, you make sure you get a cab home, hear? Mention my name to the doorman. Come on guys, we’re outta here.”

“Cody. Is that your name?” said Cookie, and took her hand. Cody nodded dumbly. “I’m Cookie. It’s so good to find another woman here.”

Another nod. How are you? Cody wanted to say, but that made no sense.

“Would you like to dance with me? Just you and me in private?”

“Yes.”

“We’d have to pay for the room.”

“Yes.”

“I love dancing for women. It gets me going, turns me on. I understand what women want, Cody. Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” said Cody, and was mildly amazed when her legs worked well enough to follow Cookie to the frosted glass door.

Midnight in her hotel room. Cody sat on the bed, naked, too wired to lie down. Streetlight slanted through the unclosed drapes, turning the room sodium yellow. The air conditioning roared, but her skin burned. Cookie. Cookie’s lips, Cookie’s hips, Cookie’s cheek and chin and belly. Her thighs and ass and breasts. Oh, her breasts, their soft weight on Cody’s palms.

She lifted her hands, turned her palms up, examined them. They didn’t look any different. She unsnapped her watch rubbed her wrist absently. Cookie.

Stop it. What the fuck was the matter with her? She’d gone to a strip club and had sex for money. It was a first, okay, so some confusion was to be expected, but it was sordid, not romantic. She had been played by an expert and taken for hundreds of dollars. Oh, God, and Boone . . . She had made a fucking fool of herself.

So why did she feel so happy?

Cody, you’re so beautiful, she’d said. Oh, yes, yes, don’t stop, Cody. Give it to me, give me all of it. And Cody had. And Cookie had . . . Cookie had been perfect. She had understood everything, anticipated everything. What to say, what to do, when to cajole and goad, when to smile and be submissive, when to encourage, when to resist. Like a mind reader. And she had felt something, Cody knew it. She had. You couldn’t fake pupil dilation, you couldn’t fake that flush, you couldn’t fake that sheen of sweat and luxuriant slipperiness. Could you?

Christ. She going mad. She rubbed her eyebrows. Cookie was a pro, and none of it was real.

She got up. The woolen carpet made her bare feet itch. That was real. Her clothes were flung across the back of the chair by the desk; they reeked of cigar smoke. No great loss. She’d no idea why she’d chosen to wear those loose pants, anyway. Hadn’t worn them for about a year. Hadn’t worn that stupid watch for about as long, come to think of it. Cookie hated the smell of cigars, she’s said so, when she was unbuttoning—

Stop it. Stop it now.

She carried her pants to the bed and pulled the receipts from the pockets. Eight of them. She’d paid for eight lapdances, and the size of the tips . . . Jesus. That was two month’s rent. What had she been thinking?

We have to pay for the room, Cookie said, but I’ll pay you half back. It’s just that I can’t wait. Oh, please, Cody. I want you again.

“God damn it!” Her ferocity scared her momentarily and she stilled, listening. No stirrings or mutterings from either room next door.

Give me your hotel phone number, Cookie had said. I’ll call you tomorrow. This has never happened before. This is real.

And if it was . . . She could reschedule her flight. She’d explain it to Vince somehow.

Christ. That huge contract gone, in a flash of lust. Vince would kill her.

But, oh, she’d had nearly three hours of the best sex she’d ever had. It had gone exactly the way she’d imagined it in her fantasies. I know just what you want, Cookie had said, and proved it.

But Cody had known too, that was the thing. She had known when the hoarse breath and clutching hands meant it was Cookie’s turn, meant that Cookie now wanted to be touched, wanted to break every single personal and club rule and be fucked over the back of the chair, just for pleasure.

Cody stirred the receipts. She couldn’t make it make sense. She had paid for sex. That was not romance. But she had felt Cookie’s vaginal muscles tighten, felt that quiver in her perineum, the clutch and spasm of orgasm. It wasn’t faked. It hadn’t been faked the second time, either.

Cody shivered. The air conditioning was finally beginning to bite. She rubbed her cold feet. Cookie’s feet were long and shapely, each toe painted with clear nail polish. She’d twisted her ankle, she’d said. Cody had held the ankle, kissed it, stroked it. Cookie’s smile was beautiful. How did you sprain it? Cody had asked, and Cookie had told her about falling five feet from the indoor climbing wall, and they had talked about climbing and rafting, and Cody had told her of the time when she was seven and had seen Cirque de Soleil and wanted to be one of the trapeze artists, and that led to talk of abdominal muscles, which led to more sex.

She padded into the bathroom, still without bothering with the light. When she lifted her toothbrush to her mouth, the scent on her fingers tightened her muscles involuntarily. She dropped the toothbrush, leaned over the sink, and wept.

A blue, blue Atlanta morning. Cody hadn’t slept. She didn’t want breakfast. Her plane wasn’t until four that afternoon.

She’d lost the contract, lost a night’s sleep, lost her mind and her self-respect, and flushed two months’ rent down the toilet. She would never see Cookie again—and she couldn’t understand why she cared.

The phone rang. Cookie! she thought, and hated herself for it.

“Hello?”

“Your cell phone’s off, but I called Vince back in Frisco and he told me you were at the Westin.”

Boone. She shut her eyes.

“Plane’s not til four, am I right? Cody, you there?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“If you’re not too tuckered out, maybe you wouldn’t mind dropping by my office. We’ll give you lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Yep. You know, food. Don’t they do lunch on the West Coast?”

“Yes. I mean, why?”

He chuckled. “Because we’ve got a few details to hammer out on this contract. So should we say, oh, eleven-thirty?”

“That’s, yes, fine. Good,” she said at random, and put the phone down.

She stared at her bag. Clothes. She’d need to change her clothes. Was he really giving her the contract?

The phone rang again. “Hello?” she said doubtfully, expecting anyone from god to the devil to reply.

“Hey, Cody. It’s me.”

“Richard?”

“Yeah. Listen, how did it go?”

“I don’t . . . Things are . . . ” She took a deep breath. “I got the contract.”

“Hey, that’s great. But how did last night go?”

“Christ Richard, I can’t gossip now. I don’t have the time. I’m on my way to Boone’s, iron out a few details.” She had to pull it together. “I’ll call you in a week or two, okay?”

“No, wait, Cody. Just don’t do anything you—”

“Later, okay.” She dropped the phone in its cradle. How did he know to call the Westin? What did he care about her night? She rubbed her forehead again. Food might help with the contract. The headache, she meant. And she grinned: the contract. She’d goddamned well won the contract. She was gonna get a huge bonus. She was gonna be a Vice President. She was gonna be late.

In the bathroom, she picked up the toothbrush, rinsed off the smeared paste, and resolutely refused to think about last night. Cookie dialed the hotel.

“This is Cody. Leave a message, or reach me on my cell phone,” followed by a string of numbers beginning with 216. San Francisco. That’s right. She’d told Cookie that last night: San Francisco with its fog and hills and great espresso on Sunday mornings.

That might be okay. Anything would beat this Atlanta heat.

Boone didn’t want to talk details so much as to laugh and drink coffee and teach Cody how to eat a po’ boy sandwich. After all, if they were gonna be working together, they should get to know each other, was he right? And there was no mention of strip clubs or lapdances until the end when he signed the letter of intent, handed it to her, and said, “I like the way you handle yourself. Now take that Austin fella, Dave. No breeding. Can’t hold his liquor, can’t keep his temper, and calls a woman names in public. But you: no boasting, no big words, you just sit quiet then seize the opportunity.” He gave her a sly smile. “You do that in business and we’ll make ourselves some money.”

And somehow, with his clap on the back, the letter in her laptop case and the sun on her face while she waited for the car for her trip to the airport, she started to forget her confusion. She’d had great sex, she’d built the foundations of a profitable working relationship, she was thirty-one and about to be a vice president, and she didn’t even have a hangover.

The car came and she climbed into the cool, green-tinted interior.

She let the outside world glide by for ten minutes before she got out the letter of intent. She read it twice. Beautifully phrased. Strong signature. Wonderful row of zeroes before the decimal point. If everything stayed on track, this one contract would keep their heads above water until they could develop a few more income streams. And she had done it. No one else. Damn she was good! Someone should buy her a great dinner to celebrate.

She got out her phone, turned it on. The signal meter wavered as the car crossed from cell to cell. Who should she call? No one in their right mind would want to have dinner with Vince. Richard would only want all the details, and she didn’t want to talk about those details yet; he was in the Carolinas, anyway. Asshole.

The signal suddenly cleared, and her phone bleeped: one message.

“Hey. This is Cookie. I know you don’t go until the afternoon. If you . . . I know this is weird but last night was . . . Shit. Look, maybe you won’t believe me but I can’t stop thinking about you. I want to see you, okay? I’ll be in the park, the one I told you about. Piedmont. On one of the benches by the lake. I’m going there now, and I’ll wait. I hope you come. I’ll bring doughnuts. Do you like doughnuts? I’ll be waiting. Please.”

Oooh, you’re different, ooh, you’re so special, ooh, give it to me baby, just pay another thousand dollars and I’ll love you forever. Sure. But Cookie’s voice sounded so soft, so uncertain, as though she really meant it. But of course it would. That was her living: playing pretend. Using people.

Cody’s face prickled. Be honest, she told herself: who really used who, here? Who got the big contract, who got to have exactly what she wanted: great sex with no complications, and on the expense account no less?

It was too confusing. She was too tired. She was leaving. It was all too late anyhow, she thought, as the car moved smoothly onto the interstate.

A woman sitting on her own on a bench, maybe getting hot, maybe getting thirsty, wanting to use the bathroom. Afraid to get up and go pee because she might miss the one she was waiting for. Maybe the hot sweet scent of the doughnuts reminded her she was hungry, but she wouldn’t eat them because she wanted to present them in their round-dozen perfection to her sweetie, see her smile of delight. She would pick at the paint peeling on the wooden bench and look up every time someone like Cody walked past; every time, she’d be disappointed. This one magical thing had happened in her life, something very like a miracle, but as the hot fat sun sinks lower she understands that this miracle, this dream is going to die because the person she’s resting all her hopes on is worried she might look like a fool. Or doesn’t want to admit she had used a woman for sex then thrown her away.

Cody blinked, looked at her watch. She leaned forward, cleared her throat.

The driver looked at her in his mirror. “Ma’am?”

“Where is Piedmont park?”

“Northeast of downtown.”

“Do we pass it on the way to the airport?”

“No, ma’am.”

She was crazy. But all that waited for her at home was a tankful of fish. “Take me there.”

Without the hat and boots, wearing jeans and sandals and the kind of tank top Cody herself might have picked, Cookie looked young. So did her body language. Her hair was in a braid. She was flipping it from shoulder to shoulder, twisting on the bench to look to one side, behind her, the other side. When she saw Cody, her face opened in a big smile that was naked and utterly vulnerable.

“How old are you?” Cody blurted.

The face closed. “Twenty-six. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.” Cody didn’t sit down.

They stared at each other. “Dirt on my face?”

“No. Sorry. It looks . . . you look different.”

“You expect me to dress like that on my day off, too?”

“No! No.” But part of her had. “So. You get a lot of days off?”

A short laugh. “Can’t afford it. No expense accounts for me. No insurance, no 401(k), no paid vacation.”

Cody flushed. “Earning two thousand bucks a night isn’t exactly a hard luck story.”

“Was I worth it?”

Her smell filled Cody’s mouth. Yes! she wanted to shout. Yes, a hundred times over. But that made no sense, so she just stood there.

“You paid twenty-two hundred. The house takes sixty percent off the top. Out of my eight eighty, Danny takes another twenty percent and, no, he’s a bouncer, not a pimp, and I’ve never done that before last night. And, no, I don’t expect you to believe me. Then there’s costumes, hair, waxing, make up . . . ” She leaned back, draped both arms along the back of the bench. “You tell me. Would fucking a complete stranger for three hours be worth five hundred dollars?”

Her mouth stretched in a hard smile but her eyes glistened. She put one ankle up on the other knee.

“Does your ankle still hurt?” It just popped out.

Cookie turned away, blinked a couple of times. Cody found herself kneeling before the bench.

“Cookie? Cookie, don’t cry.”

“Susana,” she said, still turned away.

“What?”

“Susana. It’s my real name. Susana Herrera.” She turned to Cody, and her face was fierce. “I am Susana Herrera. I’m a dancer, I’m not a whore, and I want to know what you’ve done to me.”

“What I’ve . . . ?”

“I dance. I tease, I hint. It makes you feel good, you give me money, which makes me feel good. Sometimes I give a lapdance, but always by the rules: hands on the armrest, clothes on, a little bump and grind, because I need the extra tips. I dance, you pay. It’s my job. But this, this isn’t a job! I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. I let you—” Her cheeks darkened. “And I would do it again, for no money. For nothing. It’s crazy. I feel . . . It’s like . . . I don’t even know how to say it! I want to talk to you, listen to you talk about your business. I want to see your house. I didn’t sleep last night. I thought about you: your smile, your hands, how strong it made me feel to give you pleasure, how warm I felt when you wrapped your arms around me. And I’m afraid.”

“Me too,” Cody said, and she was, very, because she was beginning to get an idea what was wrong with them and it felt like a very bad joke.

“You’re not afraid.” Susana folded her arms, turned her face again.

“I am. Cook— Susana, do you suppose . . . Shit. I feel ridiculous even saying this. Look at me. Please. Thank you. Do you suppose this is what l—”

She couldn’t say it. She didn’t believe it.

After a very long pause, Susana said, “Dancers don’t fall in love with the marks.”

That cut. “Marks don’t fall in love with whores.”

“I’m not a—”

“Neither am I.”

They stared at each other. Cody’s phone rang. She thumbed it off without looking. “My full name is Candice Marcinko. I have to fly back to San Francisco this afternoon but I could come back to Atlanta at the end of the week. We could, you know, talk, go to the movies, walk in the park.” Jesus, had she left any stereotype unturned? She tried again. “I want to meet your, your cat.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“Or your dog,” she said. Stop babbling. But she couldn’t. “I want to learn how long you’ve lived in Atlanta and what kind of food you like and whether you think the Braves will win tonight and how you feel when you sleep in my arms.” She felt like an idiot.

Susana looked at her for a while, then picked up the box at her side. “Do you like Krispy Kreme?”

When Cody turned her phone on again at the airport, there was a message from Richard: Call me, it’s important. But she had to run for her plane.

In the air she leaned her head against the window and listened to the drone of the engines.

Susana, sitting on the bench while the sun went down, thinking, Love, love is for rich people.

A cream labrador runs by, head turned to watch its owner, running alongside. Its tongue lolls, happy and pink. Dogs love. Dogs are owned.

She tears the last three doughnuts to pieces and throws them to the ducks.

On Thursday, Vince and the executive team toasted her with champagne. She took the opportunity to ask for Friday and two days next week off. Vince couldn’t say no without looking chintzy, so he told her VPs didn’t have to ask permission.

VP. She grinned hard and for a minute she felt almost normal. VP. Top dog.

Friday morning she had just got out of the shower when the doorbell rang. She was so surprised she barely remembered to pull on a robe before she opened the door.

“Well, that’s a sight for sore eyes.”

“Richard!”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture but could you please tighten that belt, at least until we’ve had coffee? Here you go, quad grande, two percent.”

She went to get dressed. When she emerged, drying her hair with a towel, he was sitting comfortably on the couch, ankle crossed at the knee, just like Susana in the park.

“I envy you that dyke rub-and-go convenience.”

She draped the towel round her neck, sat, and sipped the latte. “To paraphrase you, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the coffee, but . . . why the fuck are you here?”

He put his phone on the table next to her latte. “Remember this?”

“It’s your phone?”

He took a thumbdrive from his laptop case and gave it, then her, a significant look.

“Richard, I’ve had a real weird few days and I’m on a plane in four hours. Maybe.” Maybe she was crazy, maybe she should cancel . . . “Anyhow, could you please just get to the point?”

“Drink your coffee. You’re going to need it. And tell me what happened on Tuesday night.” He held up his hand. “Just tell me. Because my guess is you had a hell of a night with a lovely young thing called Cookie.”

She didn’t say anything for a long, long time. “Susana,” she said finally.

“Ah. You got that far? Susana Herrera, aged twenty-four—”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-four. Trust me. Mother Antonia Herrera, father unknown. Dunwoody community college, degree in business administration—oh, the look on your face—and one previous arrest for possession of a controlled substance. Healthy as an ox. Not currently taking any medication except contraceptive pills.”

“The pill?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“No known allergies to pharmaceuticals, though a surprising tolerance to certain compounds, for example sodium thiopental and terpazine hydrochloride.”

Cody seized on something that made sense. “Wait. I know that drug. It’s—”

“RU486 for the mind. That’s the one.”

“Oh, Jesus, Richard, you didn’t give her that! You didn’t make her forget what happened!”

“Not what happened Tuesday.”

Cody, confused, said nothing.

He plugged the thumbdrive into his laptop and turned the screen so she could see the sound file icons. “It will all make sense when you’ve listened to these.”

“But I don’t have time. I have a plane—”

“You’ll want to cancel that, if it’s to Atlanta. Just listen. Then I’ll answer questions.”

He tapped play.

“ . . . ever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this tape except you.”

“Cue ominous music.”

She jumped at the sound of her own voice. “What—”

“Shh.”

“—more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” Pause. Clink.

“I’ve done my research, too. Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key.”

“—but what I need to know from you is whether or not you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures to win this contract.”

He touched pause. “Ring any bells?”

“No.” Cody’s esophagus had clamped shut. She could hardly swallow her own spit, never mind the latte. But the cardboard was warm and smooth in her hand, comforting, and behind Richard her fish swam serenely back and forth.

“Terpazine is a good drug. We managed to calculate your dosage beautifully. Susana’s was a bit more of a challenge. Incredible metabolism.”

“You said you didn’t give her—”

“Not in the last couple of weeks. But you’ve had it six times, and she seven. Now keep listening.”

Six times?

“—the exploration of memory and its retrieval. So exciting. A perfect dovetail with the work I’ve been doing on how people form attachments. It’s all about familiarity. You let someone in deep enough, or enough times, then your brain actually rewires to recognize that person as friend, or family.”

Pause.

“There are ways to make it easier for someone to let you in.”

Clink of bottle on glass.

“I’ve told you about those studies that show it’s as simple as having Person A anticipate Person B’s needs and fulfill them.”

“So don’t tell me again.”

She sounded so sure of herself, bored even. A woman who had never thought to use the world love.

“—jumpstart the familiarization process. For example, person A works in a bookshop and is lonely, and when she’s lonely chocolate makes her feel better. And one day person B arrives mid-afternoon with some chocolate, says Hey, you look sorta miserable, when I’m miserable chocolate makes me feel better, would you like one? and A eats a chocolate and thinks, Wow, this B person is very thoughtful and empathic and must be just like me, and therefore gets slotted immediately into the almost-friend category. It’s easy to set something like that up. You just have to know enough about person A.”

Know enough.

Cody pushed the laptop from her. “I don’t believe this.”

“No?”

Cody didn’t say anything.

“You sat in that Seattle bar, and you listened, and then you signed a temporary waiver.” He placed a piece of paper on the table by her hand. It was her signature at the bottom—a little sloppy, but hers. “Then you took some terpazine and forgot all about it.”

“I wouldn’t forget something like this.”

He held up his hand. Reached with his other and nudged the sound file slider to the right.

“Take the pill.”

“Alright, alright.” Pause. Tinkle of ice cubes. “Jesus. That tastes vile.”

“Next time we’ll put it in a capsule. Just be grateful it’s not the vasopressin. It would make you gag. I speak from experience.”

He tapped the file to silence. “It really does. Anyhow, a week after Seattle I came here and you signed a more robust set of papers.” He handed her a thick, bound document. “Believe me, they’re bombproof.”

“Wait.” She dropped the document on her lap without looking. “You came here? To my apartment?”

“I did. I played the recording you’ve just heard, showed you the initial waiver. Gave you that.” He nodded at her lap. “You signed. I gave you the sodium thiopental, we had our first session. You took another terpazine.”

“I don’t remember.”

He shrugged. “It happened.” He tapped the paper in her lap. “There’s a signed waiver for every session.”

“How many did you say?”

“Six. Four here, twice in North Carolina.”

“But I don’t remember!”

The fish in her tank swam back and forth, back and forth. She closed her eyes. Opened them. The fish were still there. Richard was still there. She could still remember the weight of Susana’s breasts in her hands.

“You’d better listen to the rest. And read everything over.”

He tapped play.

“Okay. Think about what it would be like if you knew enough about someone and then you met: you’d know things about her and she’d know things about you, but all you’d know is that you recognize and trust this person and you feel connected. Now imagine what might happen if you add sex to the equation.”

“Good sex, I hope.”

“The best. There are hundreds of studies that show how powerful sex bonding can be, especially for women. If a woman has an orgasm in the presence of another person, her hormonal output for the next few days is sensitized to her lover: every time they walk in the room, her system floods with chemical messengers like oxytocin saying Friend! Friend! This is even with people you know, consciously, aren’t good for you. You put that together with someone compatible, who fits—whether they really fit or just seem to fit—and it’s a chemical bond with the potential to be human superglue. That’s what love is: a bond that’s renewed every few days until the brain is utterly rewired. So I wanted to know what would happen if you put together two sexually compatible people who magically knew exactly—exactly!—what the other wanted in bed but had no memory of how they’d acquired that knowledge . . . ”

It took Cody a moment to pause the sound. “Love,” she said. “Love? What the fuck have you done to me?”

“You did it to yourself. Keep listening.

And she did. After she had listened for an hour, she accepted the sheaf of transcripts Richard handed her from his case.

She looked at the clock.

“Still thinking about that plane?”

Cody didn’t know what she was thinking.

“Is it refundable?” he said. “The flight?”

Cody nodded.

“Give me the ticket. I’ll cancel for you. You can always rebook for tomorrow. But you need to read.”

She watched, paralyzed, as Richard picked up the phone and dialed. He turned to her while he was on hold, mouthed Read, and turned away again.

So she began to read, only vaguely aware of Richard arguing his way up the airline hierarchy.

After the first hundred pages of Subject C and Subject S, he brought her fresh coffee. She paused at one section, appalled.

“What?”

“I can’t believe I told you that.”

He peered over her shoulder. “Oh, that’s a juicy one. Stop blushing. I’ve heard it all before. Several times now. Sodium thiopental will make you say anything. Besides, you don’t remember telling me, so why bother being embarrassed?”

She watched her fish. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. She picked up the paper again and plowed on. May as well get it over with.

Somewhere around page three hundred, he went into the kitchen to make lunch. She didn’t remember eating it, but when she set aside the final page at seven o’clock that evening, she saw that the plate by her elbow was empty, and heard the end of Richard’s order to the Chinese takeout place on the corner. It was clearly something he’d done before. From her phone, in her apartment. And she didn’t remember.

She wished there was a way to feed him terpazine so he would forget all those things she’d never said to another soul before.

She tried to organize her thoughts.

He had asked for her permission to use her in an experiment. It would mean she would feel comfortable at the club in Atlanta, that she might even have a good couple of hours, and it would further his work while being paid for to some extent by her expense account. He had traveled to the Golden Key and picked Susana as the most likely dancer to fit her fantasies—and he knew a little about her preferences from that stupid, stupid night in Dallas—and made the same pitch to her. Only Susana got paid.

Twice, Cody thought. I paid her too.

And so Richard had flown to Cody’s apartment in San Francisco and given her sodium thiopental, and she had talked a bluestreak about her sexual fantasies, every nuance and variation and degree of pleasure. In North Carolina, she had talked about her fantasies again, even more explicitly, encouraged to imagine in great detail, pretend it was happening, while they had her hooked up to a functional MRI and other machines.

Richard put down the phone. “Food in thirty minutes.”

Cody forced herself to stay focused, to think past her embarrassment. “What were the fMRIs for, the fMRIs, blood-gas sensors, and—” she glanced at the paper, “—TMS during the, the fantasy interludes?”

“We built a kind of mind and hormone map of how you’d feel if someone was actually doing those things to you. A sort of super-empathy direction finder. And one from Susana, of course. We played your words to each other, along with transcranial magnetic stimulation to encourage brain plasticity—the rewiring.”

“And,” she hunted through the pages for the section labeled Theoretical Underpinnings. “You gave me, us, oxytocin?”

“No. We wanted to separate out the variables. You supplied the oxytocin on your own, later.” He beamed. “That’s the beautiful part. It was all your own doing. Your hopes, your hormones, your needs. Yours. We made a couple of suggestions to each of you that you might not have come up with on your own: that expensive watch and the loose clothes, Cookie’s hat and spurs. But the rest was just you and Cookie, I mean Susana. But you two were primed for each other, so if that wasn’t the best sex of your life, I’ll eat this table.” He rapped the table top in satisfaction.

All her own doing.

“You can’t publish,” she said.

“Not this, no.” He picked up one of the fMRIs and admired it. “It’s enough for now to know that it works.”

She waited for anger to well up but nothing happened. “Is this real?”

“The project? Quite real.”

Project. She watched him gather all the documents, tap them into a neat pile.

“Not the project,” she said. “Not the TMS, the fMRIs, the terpazine. This.” She tapped her chest. “Is it real?”

He tilted his head. “Is love real? A lot of people seem to think so. But if you mean, is that what you’re feeling, the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t think a scan could give you that answer. But it could tell us if you’ve changed: your data have been remarkably clear. Not like Cookie’s. Susana’s.” He held the fMRI image up again, admired it some more, then put it back in the pile.

“What do you mean?”

“The data. Yours were perfectly consistent. Hers were . . . erratic.”

“Erratic.” Her mind seemed to be working in another dimension. It took an age for the thought to form. “Like lying?”

“She’s lied about a lot of things.”

“But she could have been lying to me? About how she feels?”

He shrugged. “How can we ever know?”

She stared at him.“The literature,” she said, trying to force her slippery brain to remember what she’d just read. “Its says love’s a feedback loop, right?”

“In terms of individual brain plasticity, yes.”

“So it’s mutual. I can’t love someone if she doesn’t love me.” If it was love.

He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. “The data don’t support interdependence.” He paused, said more gently, “We don’t know.”

Pity, she realized. He pities me. She felt the first flex and coil of something so far down she couldn’t identify it. “What have you done to me? What else have you done to me?”

“To you? For you.”

“You made me feel something for a woman who fucked for money. Who had her mind fucked for money.”

“So did you, if you think about. Just at one remove.”

“I didn’t.”

“So, what, you did it for science?”

Cody changed direction. “Does Susana know?”

“I’m flying to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Do you have her sound files with you?”

“Of course.”

“Let me hear them.”

“That would be unethical.”

Unethical. “I think you might be a monster,” she said, but without heat.

“I have a strange way of showing it, then, wouldn’t you say? For the price of a few embarrassing experimental sessions you won’t ever remember, I won you a contract, a girlfriend and a night on the town.”

She stared at him. “You expect me to be grateful . . . ”

“Well, look at this place. Look at it. Bare walls. Fish, for god’s sake.”

“Get out.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Out.”

“By tomorrow it will all fall into perspective.”

“I swear to god, if you don’t leave now I’ll break your face.” She sounded so weirdly calm. Was this shock, or was it just how people in love, or whatever, behaved? She had no idea. “And you can put those papers down. They’re mine, my private thoughts. Leave them right there on the table. The thumbdrive, too.”

He pulled the drive, laid it on the papers, stowed his laptop and stood. She held the door open for him.

He was halfway through the door when she said, “Richard. You can’t tell Susana like this.”

“No?”

“It’s too much of a shock.”

“You seem to be coping admirably.”

“At least I already knew you. Or thought I did. You’ll be a complete stranger to her. You can’t. You just can’t. It’s . . . inhumane. And she’s so young.”

“Young? Don’t make me laugh. She makes you look like an infant.” He walked away.

Cookie danced. She didn’t want to think about the phone call. Didn’t want to think about any of it. Creep.

But there was the money.

The lights were hot, but the air conditioning cold. Her skin pebbled.

“Yo, darlin’, let’s you and me go to the back room,” the suit with the moustache and bad tie said. He was drunk. She knew the type. He’d slip his hands from the chair, try cop a feel, get pissed off when she called in Danny, refuse to pay.

“Well, now,” she said, in her special honey voice. “Let’s see if you’ve got the green,” and pushed her breasts together invitingly. He flicked a bill across her breasts. “A five won’t buy you much, baby.”

“Five’ll buy you, babydoll,” he said, hamming for his table buddies. One of them giggled. Ugly sound in a man, Cookie thought. “Five’ll buy you five times!”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that, honey?”

“The fuck?” He looked confused.

“I said, your brain must be smaller than your dick which I’d guess is even smaller than your wallet, only I doubt that’s possible,” and she plucked the bill from his fingers, snapped it under her G-string and walked away.

In the dressing room she looked at herself in the mirror. Twenty-four was too old for this. Definitely. She had no idea what time it was.

She stuck her head out of the door. “Danny!”

“Yes, doll.”

“Time is it?” She’d have to get herself a watch someday. A nice expensive watch.

“Ten after,” Danny said.

“After what?”

“Ten.”

Three hours earlier on the West Coast. She stacked her night’s take, counted it, thought for a minute, peeled off two hundred in fives and ones. She stuck her head out of the door again. “Danny!”

“Here, doll.”

“I’m gone.”

“You sick?” He ambled up the corridor, stood breathing heavily by the door.

“Sick of this.”

“Mister Pergoletti says—”

“You tell Pergoletti to stick it. I’m gone. Seriously.” She handed him the wad of bills. “You take care of these girls, now. And have a good life.”

“Got something else lined up?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

There was one bottle of beer in Cody’s fridge. She opened it, poured it carefully into a glass, stared at the beige foam. A glass: she never drank beer from a glass. She poured it down the sink. She had no idea what was real anymore but she was pretty sure alcohol would only make things worse.

She made green tea instead and settled down in the window seat. The sun hung low over the bay. What did Susana see from her apartment? Was her ankle better? Contraceptive pills, Jesus. And, oh, the smell of her skin.

She was losing her mind.

She didn’t know who she hated more: Richard for making the proposal, or herself for accepting it. Or Susana. Susana had done it for money.

Or maybe . . . But what about those contraceptive pills?

And what if Susana did feel . . . whatever it was? Did that make it real? It was all an experiment, all engineered. Fake.

But it didn’t feel fake. She wanted to cradle Susana, kiss her ankle better, protect her from the world. The Richards of the world.

She picked up the phone, remembered for the tenth time she had neither address nor phone number. She called information, who told her there was no listing under Susana Herrera in the Atlanta Metro area. She found herself unsurprised.

She got the number for the Golden Key instead.

A man called Pergoletti answered. “Cookie? She’s gone. They always go.” The music thumped. Cody’s insides vibrated in sympathy, remembering.

“—don’t have a number. Hey, you interested in a job?”

Cody put the phone down carefully. Sipped her tea. Picked up the phone again, and called Richard.

It was open mic night at Coffee to the People. Richard was in the back room on a sofa, as far from the music as possible. Two cups on the table. One still full.

“You knew I’d call.”

“I did.”

“Did you program that, too?”

“I didn’t program anything. I primed you—and only about the sex.” He patted the sofa. “Sit down before you fall down.”

She sat. Blinked. “Give me her phone number.”

“I can’t. She gave me a fake. I called her at the club, but she hung up on me.” He seemed put out.

“What does she know?”

“I talked fast. I don’t know how much she heard. But I told her she wouldn’t get the rest of the money until we’d done follow up.”

The singer in the other room sang of love and broken hearts. It was terrible, but it made Cody want to cry anyway.

“How long does it last?”

“Love? I don’t know. I avoid it where possible.”

“What am I going to do?”

Richard lifted his laptop bag. “I planned for this eventuality.” He took out a small white cardboard box. He opened it, shook something onto his hand. A gray plastic inhaler.

“What is it?”

“A vasopressin analogue, formulated to block oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. That is, the antidote.”

They both looked at it.

“It works in voles,” he said. “Female voles.”

Voles. “You said it tasted bad.”

“I’ve used it. Just in case. I prefer my sex without complications. And I’ve had a lot of sex and never once fallen in love.” He arched his eyebrows. “So, hey, it must work.”

The elephant whistle hypothesis. Hey, Bob, what’s that whistle? Well, Fred, it keeps elephants away. Don’t be an asshole, Bob, there aren’t any elephants around here. Well, Fred, that’s because of my whistle.

“Cody.” He did his best to look sincere. “I’m so very sorry. I never thought it would work. Not like this. But I do think the antidote might work.” His face went back to normal. He hefted the inhaler. “Though before I give it to you, I have a favor to ask.”

She stared at him. “On what planet do I owe you anything?”

“For science, then. A follow up scan, and then another after you take the antidote.”

“Maybe I won’t take it. Give me the info you have. Give me the number.”

“Love is a form of insanity, you know.”

“The number.”

In the other room, the bad singing went on and on.

“Oh, all right. For old time’s sake.” He extracted a folder from his bag, and a piece of paper from the folder. He slid it across the table towards her, put the inhaler on top of it.

She nudged the inhaler aside, picked up the paper. Hand written. Susana’s writing.

“Love’s just biochemical craziness,” he said, “designed to make us take a leap in the dark, to trust complete strangers. It’s not rational.”

Cody said nothing.

“She screwed us.”

“She screwed you,” Cody said. “Maybe she fell in love with me.” But she took the inhaler.

Cody sat in the window seat with the phone and the form Susana had filled in. Every now and again she punched in a different combination of the numbers Susana had written and got the Cannot be completed as dialed voice. Every now and again she touched the form with the tip of her middle finger; she could feel the indentation made by Susana’s strong strokes. Strong strokes, strong hands, strong mouth.

She didn’t think about the gray inhaler in its white box, which she had put in the fridge—to stay viable a long time, just in case.

After a while she stopped dialing and simply waited.

When her phone lit up at 11:46 she knew who it was—even before she saw the 404 area code on the screen.

“Do you feel it?” Susana said.

“Yes,” and Cody did. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it was there, as indelible as ink. She wanted to say, I don’t know if this is real, I don’t know if it’s good. She wanted to ask, Had you ever had sex with anyone for money before me? and Does it matter? She wanted to know, Have you ever loved anyone before? and, How can you know?

She wanted to say, Will it hurt?

Walking through the crowds at the airport, Cody searched for the familiar face, felt her heart thump every time she thought she saw her. Panic, or love? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything except that her throat ached.

Someone jostled her with his bag, and when she looked up, there was the back of that head, that smooth brown hair, so familiar, after just one night, and all her blood vessels seemed to expand at once, every cell leap forward.

She didn’t move. This was it, the last moment. This was where she could just let the crowd carry her past, carry her away, out into the night. Walk away. Go home. Use the inhaler in the fridge.

That was the sensible thing. But the Cody who had hung from the ninth story balcony, the Cody who had risked the Atlanta contract without a second thought, that Cody thought, fuck it, and stepped forward.

You couldn’t know. You could never know.

First published in Eclipse Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Nicola Griffith is an English novelist (now dual UK/US citizen) living in Seattle. Author of six novels (Hild, Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, and Always) and a multi-media memoir (And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer’s early life). Co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer f/sf/h stories. Essayist. Teacher. Blogger. Winner of the Nebula, Tiptree, World Fantasy, and six Lambda Literary Awards. (Also a BBC poetry prize, some Gaylactic Spectrum awards, the Premio Italia, and a few others.) Married to writer Kelley Eskridge (they are co-founders of Sterling Editing). Currently lost in the 7th centuryworking on the second novel about Hild of Whitby. Emerges to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.

What in the World Do They Want, Anyway?

The Myth of the Friendly Alien

Mark Cole

It was one of those typical open line nights on Art Bell’s late night radio show, the talk drifting easily between the serious, the bizarre and the ludicrous. Somehow—perhaps the recent release of both Independence Day and Mars Attacks! started it—it settled into a discussion of how the movies have portrayed aliens. Why did so many films feature alien invasions one caller wondered, and so few peaceful aliens? Why weren’t there more SF films like The Day the Earth Stood Still? He argued that it took a lot more imagination to come up with a convincing reason for a friendly visit.

Perhaps. But wasn’t that far too simple an answer?

And was Klaatu’s mission really all that peaceful?

This is a very familiar problem, one that many SF authors have tried to wrestle into submission. When we think of contact with other intelligent beings, we most often envision alien invasions of one sort or another—unless they are outnumbered by all those stories of UFO abductions. However, they hardly count as they are more mythic than SF (and who knows what the Grays’ real motives are, anyway?).

Even when aliens aren’t invading, they usually are up to no good, whether they’re harvesting us (Nigel Kneale’s ITV serial Quatermass, the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”); or using our bodies for transplants (Gerry Anderson’s series UFO); or collecting our blood (Not of This Earth); or stealing our endorphins for recreational drugs (I Come in Peace, Liquid Sky, Children of Earth); or using us in their experiments (Dark City, The Forgotten); or stealing our women (Mars Needs Women); or hunting us for sport; or using us as pawns in their galactic politics (as Kirk and the Klingons do to an undeveloped alien planet in “A Private Little War”); or expecting us to worship them (Stargate); or just dropping by to annoy the hell out of us (as in Fredric Brown’s classic novel, Martians Go Home).

Even something as innocuous as trying to understand love can get perverted into something terrible in the hands of an alien who thinks it will give her a military advantage (Ole Bornedal’s “scary movie for children,” The Substitute).

Nor is it always obvious whether the aliens have come in peace or not. The Village of the Damned (1960) and its sequel The Children of the Damned (1963) demonstrate how little difference there can be. The situation is nearly identical: an unseen alien presence has impregnated women around the world, and these children have extraordinary mental powers. However, in the first film, they are terrifying, very alien, and destroy anyone who they think is trying to harm them. We learn nothing of their intentions, or why they’ve come. While they have murdered quite a few people, they have done so to defend themselves, although with a total, unrestrained ruthlessness. Clearly, whether they are hostile or not, they are a terrible threat—and not just to those around them but to the whole world.

In the sequel, however, the children seem more like ordinary children (and, it’s interesting to note, they no longer look alike). While they are still feared and the government still tries to destroy them, they decide in the end not to kill those who intend to harm them, even though it costs them their lives. Ultimately, those who plot to use them as weapons seem far more dangerous.

It would be easy to blame H.G. Wells. After all, while it wasn’t quite the first alien invasion story (earlier ones include J.-H. Rosny’s 1887 short story Les Xipéhuz and Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892)), The War of the Worlds painted a stunning vision of an England devastated by a rampaging alien army. However, Wells had borrowed his basic concept from the wave of invasion novels that followed in the wake of the stunning German victory in the Franco-Prussian war. The Germans had shocked the world by smashing the largest army in Europe in a mere two months, thanks to an array of new technologies, including breech loading cannon and steam trains. Within the year The Battle of Dorking burst into publication, shocking England with a vision of a successful invasion. Some four hundred similar novels followed before the beginning of World War I.

Ironically, it was not the fear of the alien, of things different from us, the fear that is so often blamed for such portrayals of alien beings, that inspired Wells, but a very real fear of real enemies, and of the danger posed by advanced technology in the hands of such an enemy.

It was a similar fear—although of an even more devastating weapon, in the hands of an even more dangerous enemy—that haunted the golden age of SF cinema. While the Fifties began hopefully, with tales of journeys to other planets, darker, more paranoid efforts soon followed. Ultimately, in Quatermass 2 and The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (and even such schlock as The Invisible Invaders), we are taken over and become the invaders ourselves.

But, as strange as it may seem, the bomb seems to have brought almost as many peaceful aliens, bent on saving us from our own folly in such films as Stranger from Venus, The Cosmic Man, The Twenty-Seventh Day, and The Cosmic Monsters. Or perhaps it wasn’t that strange as most of them were retreads of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The problem is that, on closer examination, the alien visitors in The Day the Earth Stood Still aren’t all that peaceful. Klaatu does not offer us peace, but a warning (one might even be tempted to call it a threat). His race created robot peacekeepers which are completely independent of their control, and which vaporize anyone who poses even the slightest threat to their “peace.” We have a temporary respite, but if we continue using nuclear weapons, they will destroy us all—despite the fact that we never agreed to be policed by Gort and his friends in the first place.

One has the horrible suspicion that, rather than make peace, a lot of panicky leaders, driven by fear and desperation, would lash out at this threat, whether they had any hope of winning or not. On the whole, the most likely result would leave the Earth a charred cinder.

The Twenty-Seventh Day gives us an even more frightening “peaceful” option: the aliens give us the means to destroy each other and twenty-seven days to use it or not. But they actually have another, hidden plan: we can reprogram the capsules and use them to selectively kill every enemy of human freedom in the world. Exactly what qualifies them as threats to freedom is never explained, but in theory we can make peace by eliminating a few thousand people.

Despite the film’s anti-Communist reputation, this sounds far more like the Leninist belief that they could usher in the Workers’ Paradise if they simply eliminated all the “wreckers.” It shocked the revolutionaries that they had to keep killing and killing, but it was one of those projects that, once started, they had to follow to the end. Somehow one suspects that using such a weapon would kill most of mankind—particularly if it eliminated those who objected to the solution.

Arthur C. Clarke (with a little help from Olaf Stapledon) created an entirely different breed of friendly alien visitor in his 1946 story, “Guardian Angel.” Their mission is to help us evolve into bodiless superbeings. The story became the basis for his novel, Childhood’s End, and it underlies his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Even within Childhood’s End, this is at best a mixed blessing, as the transformation results in the death of all the remaining normal humans and the destruction of the Earth itself. But virtually the same goal drives the colossal evil of the demonic Martians of Quatermass and the Pit. Like the monoliths in 2001, their spaceship sparked the evolution of man from ape and it is now giving us extrasensory powers. They did this to recreate their dying race and transfer their race memories into the new beings they made. They then plan to “cleanse the hive” of those who do not measure up.

Even a well-intentioned evolutionary intervention is not necessarily that welcome. In Babylon Five, we eventually learn that the horrific Shadows have had exactly the same goal as the seemingly angelic Vorlons: both want to encourage the young races to evolve. The difference is that the Shadows have more of an Ayn Rand philosophy, and think the best way to do this is through conflict. Or, in other words, they’ve been fomenting galactic wars just to help us.

Gee, thanks.

However, while both races do want to help us (well, they think it’s help), their underlying motives aren’t quite so noble: they have a running feud with each other (it seems far too personal to be called a “Cold War”), and are using us as their pawns in a massive struggle over a philosophical point (or perhaps theological might be closer).

Evolutionary interventions rarely come with clearly stated motivations, however, beyond some idea that they act out of a more evolved morality. Obviously, we can have no experience of such a moral code, but the problem is that real moral philosophies aren’t the products of “pure” reason. Instead, they are deduced from first principles, and the end result depends on where you started (something that can be seen all too clearly in most of the moral debates of our age). Even those which claim to be “scientific,” ultimately rest on metaphysical assumptions, for example that what is most useful for the most people is also the most moral. As someone once pointed out, the statement that there are no metaphysics is, in fact, a metaphysical statement.

A less extravagant type of superior alien race appears in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact (and in Robert Zemekis’ fine film version). They haven’t overseen our evolution (or if they did, they aren’t letting on) nor do they seem much interested in our future evolution. Instead, they want us to join their galactic civilization to trade with them and share our culture.

This is one of the more plausible reasons yet offered for a visit from benevolent aliens. Even what the aliens tell us about their reasons for making contact sound right: in the novel, they emphasize that even relatively primitive cultures like ours have interesting things to offer to their intergalactic community—unique gifts like “lovingkindness.” In the movie, connecting to other intelligent beings throughout the universe is the only thing that makes their emptiness bearable—in effect, both a substitute for religion and a cure for boredom.

But one has to wonder what the status of a new member entering this vast community would be. Would we be “equals” with societies whose accomplishments we could barely grasp, or would we end up becoming more of a colony, or perhaps a vassal state?

An even more plausible reason for alien contact appears in the Spierig Brothers’ splatter comedy Undead. What appears to be an invasion is instead a medical mission, sent to quarantine and cure a spaceborne zombie plague. We regularly send medical teams to fight diseases in some of the poorest and most remote regions of the world. While we do so out of a genuine desire to help others, it is also very practical to set up teams like this, ready to be sent anywhere in the world and stop a disease before it has a chance to spread.

There is, in fact, a common thread in the alien visits we find most plausible, whether they be cops in pursuit of alien criminals (Hal Clement’s Needle, The Hidden); or refugees (Alien Nation, District 9); or tourists (the human time travelers in Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore’s “Vintage Season” probably got here first); or even Douglas Adams “teasers,” rich kids who visit planets that haven’t made alien contact and strut around in front of some poor boob no one will ever believe “wearing silly antennae and going beep-beep”: all of them speak to situations we recognize and drives we know we have.

Crossing the appalling wastes of deep space to stop by for a visit isn’t something anyone would attempt lightly. Even if they have the fastest FTL drives, luxury accommodations, fully automated ships with regenerative buffets and ramscoop engines, such a trip still represents a huge investment of time and effort. It leaves us with the question, why here and not somewhere else? What can be attractive enough to convince someone to sacrifice perhaps years of his life for the trip?

This, ultimately, is why invasion and conquest seem so likely to us. We know who we are and our own history. We know that we are never satisfied with what we have; we know that, even when we go out of our own way to help other people, we never entirely forget our own interests. We know that, throughout history, people have fought for wealth, lands and power—or sometimes just for fame and glory. Even when good men have tried their best to respect the people and customs of the new lands they visited—like the Jesuit missionaries who went to China and then spent years studying its culture and philosophies, and gave them new artistic techniques like Cloisonné enamel in return—worse men followed them and took advantage of the good will they worked so hard to build. We remember that it was always the honest, decent men who negotiated the treaties with the Native American tribes, but it was left to the politicians to enforce them.

Why do we fear the aliens have come to vaporize our cities, steal our women and stomp on our flowerbeds? It isn’t a lack of imagination. Rather, it is because we know ourselves far too well. While we like to think they can’t possibly be as bad as we are, we can’t ever complete lose that fear—and yet that very fear can make even the best-intentioned first contact deadly. Ray Bradbury can try to convince us that a bodiless alien would have no reason to sin (“The Fire Balloons”) but we know very well that people can be envious or proud of almost anything—even of how humble they are. The Outer Limits can show mankind evolving out of hatred and violence not long after we gain that “Sixth Finger” but we sure haven’t see any sign of it happening yet.

Let’s face it: we are the only intelligent species we happen to know intimately. And we wouldn’t want to invite ourselves around to visit if we could help it.

So, please, keep trying to think of reasons the good aliens might come to visit. It won’t be easy. There are quite a few out there, but they aren’t easy to find. After all, only the demented Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo can get away with the explanation Julio gives at the end of Extraterrestrial—

“There’s no reason.”

“You came for the hell of it?”

“We extraterrestrials are like that.”

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

A Little Paranoia:

A Conversation with Liza Groen Trombi

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Liza Groen Trombi is Editor-in-Chief of Locus magazine, taking over from founder Charles N. Brown in 2009. Born in Oakland, California, she has a degree in literature from San Francisco State University and studied editing with Editcetera in Berkeley before joining the magazine. She runs the SF Awards Weekend in Seattle, serves on various awards juries, and has published several titles for the Locus Press imprint. Trombi also serves as Board President of the Locus Science Fiction Foundation. She has won four Hugo Awards for Best Semiprozine (2005-7, 2012) for her work at Locus and was a finalist the four interceding years.

She still lives in Oakland, with her two young daughters.

I first met Liza in San Antonio, Texas during the 71st WorldCon. We were on a panel called “What Makes a Review Great?”, in which I discovered how persuasive Liza can be, and after the panel we got to talking. The conversation continued at the Locus table in the dealer’s room, and then via email. A few months later I found myself taking over the Locus roundtable blog.

You’ve mentioned you’ve always been a hardcore science fiction reader. Where did that passion come from?

It’s a pretty familiar path, I’d say, where you’re in fourth or fifth grade and you start reading mythology. I remember reading a lot of non-fiction about poltergeists, hauntings, different mythologies. In sixth grade I was talking about books with one of my friends—it was actually Abi Sutherland, who now moderates Making Light—and she said to me, “Have you ever read Lloyd Alexander?” I hadn’t. I read it and said, “Okay, now what?” She pointed me to Anne McCaffrey, and there was no turning back.

A year or two later, my mother’s boyfriend, who had owned a bookstore, still had all of his stripped paperbacks, copies that hadn’t sold and which were supposed to be destroyed. Anyway, he asked if I wanted any of them, and he had a lot of them. And I said, “I want the whole science fiction and fantasy section!” So I got maybe ten or twelve boxes of stripped books that were all sf/f—a miraculous event in the life of a twelve year old who was kind of shy and was having trouble with her peers.

It was a great way to find things, because as a young adult you spend a lot of time asking people, “Who’s the next author I’m supposed to read through?” I did my stint with Larry Niven and with Isaac Asimov, tried Robert Forward, read Heinlein and others, and got stuck happily in the field. Though today I still read some fantasy, my heart belongs to science fiction. At least my twelve-year-old heart does! My forty-four-year-old heart is trying to have more breadth—while being careful not to suffer palpitations.

What was it like to become Editor-in-Chief of Locus in 2009? Had you and Charles N. Brown created a transition plan?

By 2006, I was in place to take over when he retired. In the past he had had several people lined up in this position previously, but in his heart of hearts he wanted to be the only one that could put out Locus. It was his baby. But by the time I got there he was ready to not be carrying such a workload. I wrote editorials with him, we went through books together, looked at reviews, and I would go to all of his meetings at conventions; I was also doing interviews.

The biggest and scariest part of the transition is that he had this incredible institutional knowledge from not only having a nearly photographic memory, specifically for text, but because he’d grown up in the Golden Age (he was born in 1934) and lived through that period where you could read everything that came out. By the 2000s he had said, “There’s no way anybody can read all of this,” and he was leaning on reviewers more and doing his best to keep up.

As far as whether or not there was actually a path toward me taking over . . . . I had done the bookkeeping for the business for a long time, so I understood the financial ins and outs. I was making decisions with him about things. We were together for five days a week for seven years. There was certainly a lot of education through exposure. And he would say, “Well you decide, you’re taking over the magazine.” Sometimes it was sort of a sideways version of teaching someone how to take over. It wasn’t like, “Here, now you will learn this thing and you will know it forever.” I was flexible. I was very happy. He and I got along really well. We agreed on a lot of stuff. We disagreed vehemently about other things but it didn’t get in the way.

When it actually happened, it was shocking. There was a phone call at eleven o’clock at night, and then there was going into work the next day having not slept at all, having spent all night having physical panic attacks. Trying to figure out all of these things, and coming up with a strategy for releasing the news in a way that felt respectful and appropriate to all the friends he had.

And then there was just doing it without him. Not having his giant brain around was challenging. Somebody’s name would pop up in the news, and he’d be like, “Oh yeah, that guy. He started five different publishing companies in the fifties.” We don’t have that incredible institutional knowledge on tap anymore. So the change was hard. But he had named me as Editor-in-Chief upon his passing, so there was no confusion about how things were meant to move forward. That helped.

Since taking over the Locus reins, what’s been the greatest challenge? And your most rewarding experience working on the magazine?

I think the greatest challenge is the same thing that would have happened if Charles Brown were still here, which is how to deal with electronic publishing—only that it was accelerated by the economics of the time. Pre the 2008-2010 downturn, publishers were advertising, sending print galleys, people were excited, there was a lot of support for authors. Then the economic downturn came and advertising budgets got shut down.

Digital publishing, which was poised to have a boom already, was really pushed into it with a sudden new excitement and growth. It seemed like it was essentially free in ways that print publishing hadn’t been. Why send out physical galleys when they could be sending out digital galleys, for example? Of course, you know, comes time enough you realize it’s not actually free—the work is all still there, the only part you’re not being charged for is paper and shipping.

Keeping track of everything is also challenging. I have one publisher that sends print galleys every week, just like they always did. That’s great: I can see every galley, send them out to reviewers. Then I get a hard copy, I can list it, put it on the recommended shelf for the end of the year. But other people are sending me PDFs, or solicitation emails asking whether I’d like a review copy. When we get eighty to a hundred emails an hour during business hours, we just can’t answer them all, and we don’t read half of them if they’re just publicity releases.

Being in the magazine business right now is also hard. Charles would say, “When I die, you can sell all the books, and you guys can take the money and go do whatever.” I don’t think he thought Locus would keep going. He wanted it to, but I don’t know that he thought it could.

In terms of rewarding experiences, we all love working here. It’s kind of a fantastic job! We get to see the books, meet the authors, hang out with people, go to conventions. Everyone I work with is very smart and loves what we’re doing.

Congratulations on the 2012 Hugo for Best Semiprozine. How did that feel?

We hadn’t won for several years before that, and really for me it felt like our post-Charles recognition. That was really important to me. People had been saying, “Locus just wins because Locus wins.” I mean, we have a lot of rockets, so I can understand that. After that win, rules were changed to get us off the slate. Now I think officially we’re pretty much ineligible for any award [laughs]. Anyway, it’s a beautiful Hugo; it’s the glass-and-steel winged one.

Interviews published in Locus follow a unique format, omitting questions and giving us just the interviewee’s thoughts. How did that come about?

That’s a really good question. I don’t know why Charles shifted to that format. It’s been that way for years and years. It could have been laziness on Charles’ part, that he didn’t like to prep questions formally. What we do is sit down and have a conversation with people. We just talk. And at the end of the conversation our transcriptionist writes out the whole thing longhand, and we strip ourselves out and put it all together.

I always have two recorders going, by the way, because it’s very hard to reproduce an interview. And it’s completely disheartening if you realize you’re going to have to ask all those questions again! Though one time we were talking to Charlie Stross in San Francisco for forty-five minutes and decided to take a small break (we usually talk for a little over an hour). We were in a hotel lobby. I looked at the recorder and the light was on, as it should have been—but the pause switch had been turned on. When we got back I said, “I’m really sorry, but apparently we weren’t recording.” And he said it all again in about ten minutes, speaking really quickly. Only Charlie Stross could do that. It was amazing. I was very relieved. So I’ve learned that a little paranoia goes a long way.

That would be a great editor’s motto.

Right? I usually go in with a pretty good idea of some things I want to talk about. Obviously, if someone has a new book, we want to cover that. If they’re a new author we want to talk about their entry into the field. But the format gives a lot of flexibility and freedom to talk about whatever actually becomes interesting in a conversation. Sometimes the conversation is amazing and goes places you never thought it would have.

The hardest interview I ever did, I actually said to the author, “You’re going to have to give me longer answers.” Because I was getting these ten-word sentence answers from him. He was a really nice guy, a brilliant author, just uncomfortable in the interview. But then he hit this one thing, and he just kind of went—he was energized, started talking very quickly. After that he shut back down. When we were done Charles and I looked at each other and said, “Oh, that’s going to be a rough one.” But on paper, it’s actually one of the most interesting interviews we’ve done! Other conversations are fascinating and lovely in person, but then on paper they’re . . . light. You wish you could transmit the patter and the beats that happened, but we take the beats out, so you don’t get that.

What you also never have is “intruding interviewer-itis,” where the interviewer has more to say than the interviewee. Or the interviewer is trying to be clever and the author clearly gets irritated.

At the end of the day, I don’t think the reader cares what I ask. They want to hear from the author. If we can turn twenty pages of interview manuscript into three pages of interview, then that’s a win for the reader. Better that than ten questions with twenty-five to fifty word answers, and then a rote “Thank you, it was a pleasure” at the end.

Thank you, it was a pleasure.

[Laughs]

Can you walk us through a day at Locus? Is there such a thing as a typical day?

There are different versions of days at Locus. Usually there’s somebody that’s scouring for news, and somebody else is going through emails. We also get buckets of mail from the post office, probably twenty to fifty physical books and ARCs a day. We get over two hundred titles that we list a month, and that doesn’t include galleys. We’re getting a lot of self-published stuff right now, but unless we have some prior knowledge about an author or there’s some other reason to pay attention to their self-published work, it really has to stand out or we don’t read it. Reading a self-published book turns us into slush readers, which we can’t be. There’s just not enough time.

There’s also a lot of questions. I probably get asked a question every three to five minutes. And then, depending on when we are, we’re asking, “Do we have columns from this person?” or “Did we get these photos?” or news is going up on the website or people are laying out the magazine. It’s kind of wacky! We’re up in the hills in Oakland, in a no-shoes office. It’s casual, and people usually joke around in the morning. Closer to deadline we order lunch and all eat in together. It’s fairly collegial and happy—when not stressed.

Back in 2009 you mentioned plans to run Charles’ huge SF collection as a private library. What’s the current state on that?

We were hoping that when the economic problems of 2009 ended, advertisers would come back. But they didn’t. I mean, we still have some, and rely on that—it’s useful for them and great for us—but advertisers that use to advertise once a month now do it three times a year instead of twelve, and so on. So a lot of the efforts I’d hoped to put into creating a private library out of Charles’ collection for academics and researchers have ended up being redirected into keeping the magazine going. We’re doing a bit of restructuring this year, and we’ll be pushing for more donations.

We ran a Kickstarter in 2012 and got money for the preservation of archival material, forty thousand photos and letters and index cards typed by famous authors that you wish you had met. As part of the Kickstarter we had put in a stretch goal to catalog Charles’ collection, because I don’t have an accurate catalog of what we have on site. We have some thirty thousand volumes, but we don’t know exactly what we have. If you asked me, “Do you have this?”, I could hazard a guess but I wouldn’t be sure.

A proper catalog would be the first step towards a private library. I would love to do it. We had a plan to open it for research by appointment. I have other shelved ideas. Like a writer-in-residence program, because this is a house. People could come and live here for a month or two. Write while living at Locus. It would be cool!

Recently two auctions of items from the collection of Charles N. Brown were held to benefit Locus. How did they go? Are you considering more auctions in the future?

It was fine. Charles was an avid collector of stuff. He collected pottery and baskets and masks and statuettes. Everywhere he went he grabbed stuff, and he didn’t really care if it was a real antique or not. So we have all this stuff, which makes this a wonderful environment to work in, but it isn’t helping our mission. So we decided to call in an auction house to sell some of it off.

They came in and were very enthusiastic. We thought, “This is going to be great!” The next time they came they were a little less enthusiastic. In the end they didn’t actually take that much stuff. We made some money, which was nice, but Locus costs a lot a money to produce per month. I’d say that from the auctions we probably made a week and a half’s worth or running Locus. And I don’t have to worry about having 500 BCE ceremonial urns on the shelves anymore. At some point I think it’s going to be the right move to not be in this house anymore—as lovely as it is here—but to move to a proper commercial space.

The other auction was for his mystery novels. He also collected sea stories and historical fiction. We’ll probably sell those off too, because having that stuff is nice but doesn’t help us. The money would. But auctions aren’t a revenue stream. That’s what I’m more focused on right now, revenue streams.

Any plans for the magazine that you can share?

Right now we’re prospecting for new reviewers. I’m hoping that by next year we’ll have a dedicated young-adult column and potentially better coverage of epic fantasy.

There’s going to be some revamping on the website. Possibly a move to make a lot more content available. The plan isn’t fully fleshed out, but I’m excited by the idea of having the website match the actual magazine content more closely. The content might be behind a New York Times-style pay-wall, where you can read a number of articles and are then reminded that you’re not a subscriber. I think it would be a really good thing for us, because we have a ton of content, and too many people think that Locus is the website. It’s hard to explain to them that we’re not, unless they’re looking at the print magazine. So it would help to ameliorate that differential.

But, you know, there are always plans. In 2009 I was going to make a private library!

How do you spend your time when you’re not working on Locus?

Mostly I’m with my kids. I have two daughters, who are five and seven. When not with them, I like to swing dance. I started doing it a couple of years ago, and it’s good for me. It’s exercise and it’s social, and nobody knows who I am [laughs].

About the Author

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.

The Spurred Storyteller:

A Conversation With Tang Fei

Ken Liu

I met Tang Fei in person for the first time at the Chinese Nebulas in 2014. Though everyone in attendance was dressed up, she carried a backpack in the shape of a floppy-eared rabbit, and I knew right away that we’d get along. In email as well as conversation, she is chatty, vivacious, funny, and also direct—she’s perfectly comfortable letting me know that she doesn’t think something I wrote is any good, which makes her positive comments all the more valuable.

A native of Shanghai who presently makes her home in Beijing (though she tries to get away from the city as often as she can), Tang Fei says that she has always felt more at home in large metropolises like London and New York with their robust public transportation networks and well-curated museums. Rather than rushing through places like a tourist, she prefers to linger in each city when she travels, couch surfing or staying at hostels until she has had a chance to observe the life of the locals with her photographer’s keen eyes.

Having switched careers five times after graduating from college (including stints as a neuroscience research assistant and as a barista), Tang Fei now works as a freelance magazine writer while continuing her artistic pursuits in fiction and documentary photography. A prolific author, she has published the equivalent of over one hundred twenty-five thousand words of short fiction in a lot of different genres: fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, wuxia, etc., though she always seems to write in a way that transgresses strict genre classifications.

It was a pleasure to interview her for Clarkesworld. Our interview was conducted in Chinese, and I did the translation myself.

The act of storytelling recurs as a theme in your fiction. “Call Girl” and “Pepe” are both about storytellers; trying to make sense of the world via narrative is a key element in “A Universal Elegy.” What does storytelling mean to you and why is it important?

“Call Girl” and “Pepe” were both written about seven, eight years ago. I was having a hard time back then, and I felt I needed to do something so that the world and I could forgive each other: writing stories was the only means for mediation.

With my stories, I don’t just express my feelings; I’m also trying to understand the society around me, the age I’m living through, everything that I witness or experience. Sometimes events overtake us like speeding cars, and we need the time and means to digest them.

Thanks to your question, I went back and reread the stories again. In a way, they could be read as mirroring each other. In “Pepe,” the narrator treats reality as part of his story, and by using his only skill—the ability to spin tales—he manages to disguise himself as a human and thereby survive. The men in “Call Girl,” on the other hand, become nonhuman through stories divorced from reality.

While it’s interesting to compare and contrast these two stories in this way, I think the treatment simplifies both of them—an outcome most repugnant to an author. Like many other elements, “stories” appears in my fiction not just as literal “stories,” but as metaphors. They rather resemble the restless, destructive, dark energy found inside young girls—at least that’s the case in these two stories.

By the time I came to write “A Universal Elegy,” I was starting to have a kind of self-awareness as a writer—that is, although stories still served the same needs for me mentioned earlier, they were also running ahead of me. Stories were born for their own sake, and I was nothing but their vessel. Under the influence of this new perspective, I began to doubt the narrator. Coincidentally, the way the media chose to report on certain happenings at the time also baffled me. These events conspired to make me suspicious of the narrator.

In “A Universal Elegy,” the narrator is unreliable. Yet, the reliability of the narrative has to be built on such a shaky foundation. From the very start, the narrative takes the form of indirect quotations with quotation marks added.

I also want to point out that in modern Chinese, “story” and “fiction” are not exact equivalents. A story is more rooted in the folk and oral traditions, and thus possesses more resilience and vitality. This is why I’ve always called myself a storyteller.

Story, for me, is a word infused with magic. Every time I say it, I feel a joy in my spirit and pleasure in my senses.

Tell us a little about your photography. Any favorite images you want to share with readers in the US? Do you think photography is also about storytelling?

Though I haven’t studied photography for long, the process has been filled with fortunate encounters. My first teacher was a math instructor in college who went by the nickname “Yi Mao” (“One Hair”): erudite, careless of his dress, and filled with insights about photography. Because of him, I managed to avoid many beginner’s pitfalls, for which I’m forever grateful.

Later, I studied at a photography studio where I worked on some interesting projects, including designing and making books by hand. I participated in a group show called “Homecoming” and produced an album of photographs about my childhood. I wrote a letter to my departed grandfather, burned it, and then collected the ashes in the last frame in the album.

My chosen style of photography, documentary photography, requires a great deal of effort. To complete a project, it isn’t unusual to have to take pictures for four or five months, and many projects require the investment of several years—all for an unpredictable, uncontrollable outcome, which includes the very real possibility of failure. For a freelancer faced with the need to make a living, the pressure can be easily imagined.

I was lucky in that I managed to complete my first independent documentary project, a set of portraits of contemporary LGBT life in China, and got it published on QQ.com, China’s largest web news platform [KL: This site is run by the Chinese web giant Tencent, whose name may be more familiar to American readers].

In 2013, I had the good fortune of being invited to participate in a workshop run by the famous photographer Shen Wei, who is based in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. From him, I learned the diverse expressive possibilities of photography as a contemporary art form. One of my dreams is to systematically study photography at a top art academy.

While it’s possible to tell a story with pictures, narrative is not the main purpose of photography. The presentation of a photograph is very important: whether in a book, in an exhibit, or incorporated into a multimedia work.

This is a moment I captured in a park. See? A photograph is perfectly capable of being the vehicle for a story. But where does it start? Where does it end? Is it fiction or documentation? Even without any kind of post-processing, the story is already permeated by uncertainties.

Does writing inspire your photography? What about the other way around?

Taking pictures and telling stories share at least one thing in common: the focus on details. As art forms, both are selective in their expression. You cannot re-present reality completely: one, it’s technically infeasible; and two, doing so would be meaningless because complete reality is chaos. But, sometimes, practitioners go to the other extreme and rush to impose ideology on their art, too eager to fix the meaning, no, the nature of their work.

For my own photography, I won’t use post-processing to eliminate so-called “clutter” or “flaws” because they are real and vivid, and at the moment I press the shutter, I usually account for them in my composition subconsciously. When I write, I won’t force any concepts into the story either, but prefer to let the characters speak in their own voices and make their own decisions.

Creators shouldn’t impose their conclusions or views on the audience. No matter how we try to control the work by picking certain details and the form of their presentation, the artwork itself will always display the complexity inherent in the subject, which often exceeds the expectation of the creator in pleasantly surprising ways. I’ve grown ever firmer in my faith that storytelling and photography are both ways to help me understand this world.

I’m also interested in other art forms such as film, sculpture, drama, and drawing, but my passion is dance theater. When I was an undergraduate, I used my spare time to attend a year’s worth of classes at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. In 2011, I attended a butoh workshop held in Beijing by Yukio Waguri, a student of Tasumi Hijikata, one of the founders of butoh. To express the notion of death directly with the body was more than a shocking experience—it was terrifying. All these other art forms probably influenced my writing in imperceptible ways.

How would you describe the sort of stories you like to tell?

My stories are my fruits. Like a tree, bearing fruit is my burden, my duty, my need, and the reason for my existence. The meaning fruits hold for the fruit tree is far greater than the meaning the tree holds for the fruits. At the same time, I also hope that these fruits could bring a bit of light and beauty to this world, akin to a voice that declares “life is difficult, but it is important to continue to live with honesty and dignity.” Even if one day my works will turn to dust to be scattered by the wind, they deserve all my efforts to bring them into being.

If works of art are supposed to resemble people, I think my stories all contain a trace of wickedness: they don’t follow the rules and possess prickly spurs and dark places.

You once told me, “For the most part, writing a story is based on the author’s misunderstanding of the world. But translating a story is about understanding another person and grasping their work.” Can you elaborate on this?

You have a good memory!

I think a writer tells a story based on her understanding of the world. But the real world is complicated. No matter how much effort the observer puts into it, her perspective necessarily distorts the resulting observation. I’ve always tried to keep this in mind: I am limited; my understanding of the world is biased. Even if I devote my entire life to experience the infinite world with my individual self, the effort will not make up for this kind of bias. The best that an individual can achieve is to asymptotically approach that understanding of the infinite.

Translation, on the other hand, is a re-creation of an existing work. The entire effort of the translator is devoted to the work, itself an already distorted image. How has the author misunderstood the world? This touches upon the very heart of the work’s nature. A translator must expend all his energy to precisely convey this misunderstanding to a reader from another culture, as though copying deformed contours.

Can you tell us a bit about differences in translators’ approaches to your work and what you’ve found interesting about such differences?

Sometimes I’m incredulous at my luck: I’ve had two Hugo winners be my translators! My observations below are necessarily limited by my appreciation of the subtleties of English.

There’s an obvious advantage to having writers act as translators. Their command of language effectively frees the works they translate from the stiltedness that plagues many translations, turning them into something more vibrant, better adapted to a new soil (I’m thinking of Xia Jia’s translations into Chinese of works originally written in English). Interestingly, mature writers have their own aesthetic which they imprint upon their translations like a signature.

As a sensitive and keen writer, John Chu is best at capturing the hard, treble voices in my work. He’s also meticulous about details. In “A Universal Elegy,” for example, he suggested “Dieresian” as the translation for the name of the alien race, which I just love. He captured the heart of this story with a perfect name that also fits the title of the piece.

You, on the other hand, are good at understanding what I meant between the lines—indeed, sometimes you manage to read and absorb not just the meaning, but a subtle emotional tone. In “Call Girl” and another unpublished translation, I was surprised at how you, as an adult man, could grasp the hidden currents within the hearts of schoolgirls and then re-express them fluently in another language. And I appreciate your depth of cross-cultural understanding, which allowed you to suggest the title of “Call Girl,” which is not a literal translation at all but achieves a similar effect.

Translation requires talent, perseverance, and dedication. I’m grateful to both of you for your excellent work.

What were some of the most memorable experiences for you at the WorldCons in San Antonio and London?

I love going to WorldCons. Through them, I’ve managed to become friends with many writers from other countries. I met John Chu, for example, at Emily Jiang’s reading. I also had the fortune of meeting Rachel Swirsky that same year. Ever since my friend Wang Meizi, a translator, recommended her “Eros, Philia, Agape” to me, I’ve been a fan.

I also like to introduce the works of Chinese writers who I like but who are not considered mainstream to readers in other countries. In London, I brought with me some printouts of English translations of Qitongren’s work [KL: “Qitongren” is a penname that literally translates to “The Bucket Rider”]. As it turned out, I vastly underestimated reader interest and ran out of copies. Sorry!

Since WorldCons are relaxed in mood and filled with activities, it’s like a holiday where I get to do things I normally don’t get to do. In London, I got to participate in the Masquerade, cosplaying an Ood girl. I had a great time.

I’m also working on a project documenting my WorldCon experiences. The current plan is to take pictures over five years—assuming things work out. Some of the photographs from 2013 have been curated into a small book.

What are you working on?

In the first half of 2015, I plan to finish my big fantasy novel, which I’ve been working on for six years. It started as a short story I wrote eight years ago. For two years, I didn’t think about it, but then the outline for a novel just popped into my head—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the outline had always been present in my mind but it took me two years to discover it. Once I decided to work on it, I wrote it at the average rate of one chapter per year. The writing itself didn’t consume much time, but most of the time was spent waiting for the story to emerge naturally. I’m like Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree.

Based on what I’ve got so far, this is going to be my favorite work.

In the second of half of 2015, I plan to finish three wuxia novellas. And, of course, I’m going to keep on working on my photography projects.

About the Author

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.

Another Word:

YA is the New Black

Dawn Metcalf

*taps microphone* *winces at squealing feedback* *clears throat*

Hi. My name is Dawn Metcalf and I write YA. And, okay, I’ll admit it’s been a while since my age had any “-teen” suffix attached, but I love writing for teens because it asks the best question: what does it mean to be human?

All great stories, as far as I can tell, explore what it means to be human. Writing for underage humans is about their journey to become the kind of grown-up human they’d like to be instead of the screwed-up, nihilistic, know-it-all humans that run the world now. Tap into that exact moment when a parent, teacher, principal, boss or bully said, “That’s just the way it is because I said so” and savor that visceral, burning, righteous fury you felt when you knew that answer was so wrong! That’s the beating heart of YA.

I honestly thought I’d been writing science-fiction/fantasy, my favorite genre, for all those years that I’d been putting pen to paper and fingers to keys until one fateful day when someone official mentioned that my protagonist was in that magical “sweet spot” between the ages of twelve and eighteen and therefore, I could be writing YA. Who knew? So when agents and editors asked if I wrote YA, I said “Yes.” (Ghostbusters taught me something, after all!) I wrote YA because I said I wrote YA, ergo, I was a YA writer. End of story.

. . . and, possibly, career. Because it became painfully obvious after reading tons of YA literature that there’s a lot more to writing for teens than simply the age of your protagonist. Ask any kid. If you’ve ever had a kid, knew a kid or been a kid, you know that they are the first ones to smell B.S. and call you on it. You can’t talk down to them, you can’t pretend to know the lingo, you can’t be squeamish or pull punches and you can’t hope they’ll wait for the payoff and keep reading or give you the benefit of the doubt—you have to deliver the good, hard truths, the real emotions and no pandering “lessons” that belong in afterschool specials. In fact, they don’t even know what an afterschool special is anymore! Your youngest readers were born in 2003. (And by the way, they’re not “cell phones” or “smartphones,” they’re just “phones.”) I had to learn this the hard way by applying the tried-and-true method prized by many a writer: by making lots and lots of mistakes.

To be fair, back when I was a young adult, there was no such thing as “Young Adult” books, so I didn’t grok the subtleties until I was in the thick of things, the golden post-Hogwarts age of fantasy writing. Fortunately for me, I’d grown up with my nose in fairy tales so it was a logical step from Judy Blume, Katherine Patterson, Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey to William Gibson, Spider Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Joan D. Vinge, Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman. Now I was reading Holly Black, Laini Taylor, A.S. King, Steve Brezenoff, John Green, Libba Bray, Maggie Stiefvater and Brenna Yovanoff. Looking back at my shelves, most of my favorite characters were teens, so, okay, maybe I could write scifi-fantasy for teens.

But, as I mentioned, there’s a big difference between writing for teens and slapping the word “sixteen” on a character sheet. If you write a story where the main character—dare I say the “strong female protagonist?” No, I daren’t. ((shudder))—has the knowledge, power, talent and freedom to make their way in the big, cruel world, it’s not YA. If your characters have something to teach us, a lesson to be learned, it’s not YA. And if it’s a mash-up of Harry Potter-meets-Twilight, then trust me on this one, it is not YA.

YA is about having imposed limits, living under rules you didn’t invent and forced into systems outside your control; it’s about testing the boundaries, finding the chinks, discovering allies who think like you and enemies who don’t. It’s about throwing yourself kicking and screaming, at unfairness, and seeing who cares enough to kick back. It’s about learning who you are as opposed to who you’ve been told you ought to be. YA is the journey of becoming a human being.

Raised on a diet of aliens and elves, this concept wasn’t a giant leap. Wasn’t everyone in high school an alien (or alienated, or alienating)? Sci-fi writers were MADE for this!

As a long-time gamer geek, youth advocate and skiffy chick, I can tell you there’s plenty out there that drives me up the proverbial wall sans paddle, so when I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by trusted goofballs and geeky intellects (a.k.a. my fellow writers, family and friends), I can trust-fall into that potent brew of random thoughts and rabid fandom, which sparks the kinds of conversations one might have at 3 a.m. while avoiding more productive things like writing and/or sleep.  (In my experience, one can rarely have both.) Half-awake and fully charged, I can vent about all the tropes and triggers that make me bonkers, question the what-ifs, the why-nots and the what-hasn’t-yet-beens, poke at the status quo because the status is not quo, shaking loose all kinds of nutty, half-baked, chewy ideas from whence all good books (and chocolate chip cookies) are made.

It starts with the question “What if . . . ?” then spirals, stream-of-conscious-like out into the unknown. Pick your favorite subject to rant about and your favorite subject to geek out about. Now pull a Monty Python and get into an argument (not a contradiction). Note the push-and-pull, the absolute need to be heard, to win someone over, the want to understand and to be understood, the grinding frustration when you fail and the smug, glorious glee when you succeed. That’s the heat which fuels the fire and keeps the story burning, adding anger and passion and a pinch of righteous indignation that unifies all humans who have ever uttered the words, “It’s not fair!”

Here’s a blatantly self-serving example: my current series, the Twixt, spawned from the complaint, “Why oh why is it always the immortal male who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old human girl and then shows her the way to love?” GAH! I knew a lot of teen girls—heck, I was one myself!—and the whole trend felt off, tired and overdone. So I thought, why not flip it? Why couldn’t the girl know her own body and mind? Why couldn’t the immortal guy have a few “firsts” for a change? What if he’s immortal, but hasn’t got a clue? I loved characters like Peter Pan, Joe Black and Edward Scissorhands, powerful, boyish not-quite-humans who didn’t know the difference between a thimble and a kiss.

That single question about the not-so-quo birthed a dozen others that I got to answer. Eventually, these mental ramblings became Indelible Ink, Joy Malone, Monica Reid and Graus Claude along with an entire cast of characters living in two worlds kept apart by old, broken rules. The struggle to be together, to bend the rules, to change the world, became the basis of a YA story arc currently on its third installment.

*end plug*

So why write YA?

YA is the New Black and lots of authors have been making the leap, which makes some people nervous and others skeptics, but that doesn’t serve the genre. YA is very popular with teens, tweens and adults, which has a lot of experts scratching their heads trying to figure out why. The truth is it has nothing to do with the texting generation, the rise of online gaming or—heaven help us—the dumbing down of literature; it’s the simple fact that it’s familiar. It speaks to us. We were all there once.

We know how it feels to question authority, to fall in love, to be betrayed, to have a best friend be closer than family, to have our hearts broken and to feel utterly alone for the very first time. Adolescence is the great unifier because everyone knows what it’s like, and for those readers who don’t know or haven’t gotten there yet or only vaguely remember, it’s a friendly guide from a fictional someone who “gets it.”

Growing up may manifest differently across countries and cultures, generations and genders, but everyone on the planet knows what it’s like to feel alienated, to wonder who we really are and ask ourselves what it means to be human.

I did. And then I grew up. And now I write YA.

*wink* *grin* *mic drop*

About the Author

Dawn Metcalf is the author of the Twixt series (Harlequin TEEN), which includes Indelible, Invisible and Insidious, due out July, 2015. She is an educator, advocate and amateur ninja living in northern Connecticut with her family and feline companion. If they had a sign, it would say: Confounding the Neighborhood Children Since 1999.

Editor’s Desk:

The Next Hundred

Neil Clarke

Last month, we published our milestone one hundredth issue. Today, we start on the path to the next hundred. Unlike last time, I can start this journey knowing Clarkesworld can make it there, but I’d be foolish if I claimed I knew what it will look like when we arrive. Our first hundred happened during a time of immense change for both print and digital publishing and it doesn’t look like that turmoil is over. I’ll put money on that continuing to be a good thing. Coming from a technology background, I’ve always viewed change as an opportunity.

When we just focus on the next year or so, it becomes easier to describe what we’d like to see happening. If you’ve paid attention to our Patreon, Joyride, or Kickstarter campaigns, you’ve already caught a glimpse of that agenda, but let me break it down here for you.

Include Four Original Stories in Each Issue

At present, we’re alternating between three and four original stories per issue. The fourth story has been funded by our Patreon (patreon.com/clarkesworld) supporters, who, at this moment, are within fifty dollars per month of funding three more stories per year and three hundred short of achieving the complete goal.

Include a Translated Story in Every Issue

I’ve already made my position on the importance of translation clear in a previous editorial. Last year’s Kickstarter campaign helped us secure our first-year funding for a translation slot, but we want this to continue. To ensure the future of this program, we need to make a focused push to increase our subscriber base.

Other Fiction Changes

At this time, I don’t have plans to increase our original fiction content past the five mentioned above, but when the budget can sustain it, the length cap will be raised. Over the last year, several of our reprints have crossed into the ten thousand word territory. Call it an experiment or a taste of things to come.

Changes and Improvements to Our Podcast

Since Joyride (getjoyride.com/shows/clarkesworld) is podcast-oriented, we’ve mentioned a few of our plans for this area over there. Our first goal there is to build a budget to allow us to make improvements to the quality of our audio. That covers everything from better equipment and software to hosting costs for higher quality audio files. There is always room for improvement and we want to make sure we can provide the best we can for our listeners.

After reaching that first goal, we’re going to work on content-related projects like making sure the audio budget for the translations is in place and bringing some of our non-fiction content over to the podcast.

The Future of Our Non-fiction

Due to time considerations, Daniel Abraham has stepped down from his every-other-issue commitment to our Another Word column. We’re sad to see him go and wish him all the best, but his absence will have an impact on the future of the column. We are currently evaluating what direction we should take next and you may notice some experimentation over the next year.

You might have noticed that we have two interviews this month. Expect this to happen a bit more often in the future. The focus on these will be foreign authors and artists. I’m particularly interested in featuring them in some way and think this is a good way to spotlight them.

As I mentioned, we’d also like to produce non-fiction content in the podcast. Just reading the article from our issue might be ok, but when we go in that direction, I’d like to see something that embraces the medium and discusses the article. Maybe we could do a live Q&A that is released later as a podcast. There are a lot of opportunities to do something different and some of those will likely bleed back into the way we publishing the material in text form.

Subscriptions & Anthologies & Print Issues

This month, we started offering people the opportunity to subscribe (or give gift subscriptions) directly through us. We’re employing the infrastructure that we created to provide our Kickstarter rewards, but have plans to expand upon it as more people use it. If you have an existing subscription elsewhere, we don’t want you to drop those and switch. That would impact our sales rankings at those sites and maintaining or improving those values is important to attracting new subscribers. We’re aiming this system towards the first-time subscriber.

Our annual anthologies are going to continue to be published in print and ebook formats. Starting with Year Nine, the volumes will be split into two books due to size. Year Seven (February 2015) and Year Eight (July 2015) will be single volume books.

Discussions about print subscriptions are ongoing. We will offer them in a more convenient way, but shipping costs remain a concern and will have an impact on pricing. Some of our readers have made it clear that we should aim for the best we can do and then let them decide how much is too much, so that’s what we plan to do. It could be another month or two before we have this nailed down.

Staffing

With the exception of some changes or additions to our regular slate of interviewers or narrators, I don’t foresee any changes to our staffing. The long-term goal for this category remains pay increases. I made this a top priority after my heart attack and while we’ve made gains in this area, we still have a long way to go. As I’ve said before, if we convert just ten percent of our non-subscribing readers, we can achieve this and many of the goals mentioned above.

Funding

Every now and then a concerted push is needed to move an organization forward. To that end, here are our six-month goals for funding:

1. Increase subscriptions by five hundred (less than 1.5% of our readership, securing translations and minor pay increases for staff)

2. Reach the $1000 goal at Patreon (securing our fourth fiction slot)

3. Reach our $250 goal at Joyride (establishing our podcast improvements budget)

4. Fill all advertising slots on website (staff budget)

You’ve been on this road with us and I thank you for your support and feedback. If you would like to help us or just give some thoughts on our plans, please drop me a line at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com.

Speaking of feedback, our annual Reader’s Poll and Survey is now open at http://clarkesworld2014.questionpro.com! Please vote before February 23rd for your favorite 2014 Clarkesworld story and cover art. Results will be published in our March issue and a few lucky voters will be given copies of Clarkesworld: Year Seven!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:

Lady and the Ship

Atilgan Asikuzun

About the Artist

Atilgan Asikuzun was born in Turkey/Istanbul and has been a professional artist since 2006. He currently lives in Istanbul where he works as a freelance and in-house artist. His concept art and matte paintings have been used in the making of three feature films.