Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 108

Table of Contents

Cremulator

by Robert Reed

Loving Grace

by Erica L. Satifka

Preserve Her Memory

by Bao Shu

The Algebra of Events

by Elizabeth Bourne

The Occidental Bride

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Canary Land

by Tom Purdom

Sea Change

by Una McCormack

The Next Generation of DNA Sequencing

by Dan Kobolt

Traitors and Tough Decisions: A Conversation with Seth Dickinson

by Chris Urie

Another Word: On Sunshine and Shadows

by Jason Heller

Editor's Desk: The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews

by Neil Clarke

New World Coming

Art by J. Otto Szatmari

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Cremulator

Robert Reed

My hometown wasn’t much, but when I was fourteen I felt as if I lived in the busy center of all things interesting. Several thousand human mouths and who knows how many human urges, and there were no secrets. Three seniors were pregnant, two by the same boy. There was a snobby couple who drove Cadillacs but couldn’t get their checks cashed anywhere in the county. It was common knowledge that our local banker shotgunned cats for sport. And in a day when this kind of behavior mattered, my English teacher happened to have a girlfriend in the city.

Of course the young lady never discussed sexual peculiarities. Paid to teach English, that’s exactly what she did, and what made her more intriguing, at least to one fourteen-year-old boy, was that she was pretty. I also liked her name, which was Gwen, and watching her move in front of class was a small, trusted pleasure. She had a pleasant strong, but very girly voice, and I particularly liked the big glasses that seemed too much for her little nose. I didn’t have a crush. Not really. But it’s fifty years later, and I’ll find myself thinking about the day a buddy of mine tried to do a wheelie with his desk. Got the front end up and then came the crash when the desk flipped, slamming the back of his head against the floor. Our teacher bent to help him or to punish him. I don’t remember her motives. But one of the buttons had come loose on her shirt, and her padded bra pulled away at the perfect moment. That was the second or third time in my life that I ever saw a woman’s breast. It’s my “girl in the white dress” moment. You know, that line from Citizen Kane. Half a century later, and I can’t count the times that image has gotten into my head, or how many times I’ve told the story to people who truly don’t care.

But I’m telling a different story now.

This was a different day. October in 1973, and I’m sure about that because of what was happening in the world beyond. And I know it had to be Monday because our English teacher had driven back from the city the night before. She told us that much. No, girlfriends weren’t mentioned, or what she might have been doing in the city. Maybe she didn’t realize what everybody knew. But my class was her first class of the day, and Miss Gwen was worked up enough to describe driving on the highway last night when the sky above suddenly got bright and beautiful.

Those were her words. “Bright and beautiful.”

There weren’t any storms last night, were they? She asked us that. A room of fourteen-year-old meteorologists. No, we couldn’t remember lightning. But war was running wild in the Middle East. I remember that detail. People on the news and adults around town were talking about us getting swept into the big fight. Which I’m guessing is why my teacher was so keyed up. Late at night, driving home in a time of war, and she saw something huge and totally unexpected.

“It was the most beautiful blue light,” she told us.

She did turn cagey when we fished for details. For instance, she wouldn’t admit the exact time. But I can imagine the circumstances. Abandoning the love of her life, she was returning to the inbred community where she had to feel trapped. And then a mysterious light poured across the world. Was this the big missile attack? Were the Soviets going to kill us all? But the light lasted only a couple seconds, bright enough to be seen over the countryside and maybe farther. Did anybody else notice it? None of us did, no. But I wished I had. And after the light faded, the young teacher, so impressed or so rattled, had pulled onto the shoulder to watch the otherwise empty autumn sky.

And here comes the oddest part of her story.

Standing on the highway’s shoulder, not a cloud in the world, and little bits of grit started falling. Started hitting her. It reminded her of sleet, except there wasn’t any ice. Using a couple index cards, she managed to sweep up a sampling of her mystery, and that’s what she brought out for us to observe. To interpret.

“I don’t believe in flying saucers,” she told us.

I once saw this woman’s breast and now she was telling me her disbeliefs. Kids didn’t usually get that familiar with teachers.

“Pretend this is science class,” she said. “Your eyes are probably better than mine. Pass the sack and hand lens around, okay?”

This seemed like a wondrous day. Everybody ahead of me saw bits of sand and busted glass—the kinds of crap on every road’s shoulder. But I was going to do better. It was my mission. So while she was trying to teach us something useful about MacBeth, I squinted harder than I ever had in my life, and I found something new, something nobody could doubt if they took a second look.

“I see a tooth,” I said.

That got people giggling.

“A chip of a tooth, at least,” I said.

More laughing, and then she said, “Yes,” and everyone went quiet. “That’s what I thought I was seeing too.”

I remember everything. I was watching those big glasses and the breath going in and out of her cute nose, and better than seeing any breast, those few seconds stuck in my head. Which made everything worse later.

In 1975, my English teacher was riding inside her girlfriend’s car. They were driving fast on a different highway, and they had been drinking, according to those who knew. The car was alone when it left the road and rolled, and one door came open and a body was thrown free and then crushed.

Nothing else mattered in the world. Make all the noise you want about gossips and narrow-minded farmers, but everybody liked Miss Gwen. School was let out so that her students could attend the service in the city. And to see the famous girlfriend. Several people claimed that she was a graduate student in math or something like math, and I know I had ideas about what she would look like. But no, Gwen’s lady proved to be big and plain and a little fat. Bruises and guilt didn’t help her appearance either, and it was impossible to miss her, sitting to one side and alone, openly drinking from a bottle now and again. Our teacher came from a gigantic family, I learned, and none of them wanted the girlfriend close. But they made a show of weeping and holding each other, and Miss Gwen’s students filled in the back rows, crying a little or more than than a little. I gave my tears to the show. Except I couldn’t figure out one part, and I couldn’t let it go.

“Where’s the casket?” I asked.

“Oh, they cremated her,” a classmate whispered.

Cremation happened on the banks of Ganges. Not in our part of the world, at least not in 1975.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because, Walt,” he said, grimly happy to know things that I didn’t know. “She got torn to pieces under the car.”

That hard news was absorbed with a sob and a handful of unasked questions. Including me wondering whatever happened to that white chip of a tooth that rained down on her. That chip was suddenly important to me, and I don’t know why.

This is what life has taught me:

People are peculiar.

A person can spend every day of his life finding examples of our spectacular oddness, and if that’s what he likes to do, then his life is destined to be full and rich.

Reagan.

I mean, really.

Where did we fail so spectacularly that we deserve to have Ronald Reagan on the news every night?

No, I’m not talking politics. This isn’t about Republicans, or even white male assholes. And despite what people think, I’ll never waste my breath talking about the man’s intolerance to people like us. Ask Melanie. We have friends who were hoping Reagan’s son would reveal a hunger for other men. Except that is a fool’s game. If you think Ronald Reagan would change his attitudes because of one dancing child, then you live in a simple and dangerously sentimental world—a world where every opinion and policy is ready for radical revision with every first shove.

Honestly, I would hate that kind of world.

Melanie says I’m cold, and she likes that about me.

She warns me that I’m fooling people, meaning everybody except her. But that’s how I survived four years in the boondocks, teaching future farmers how to read the works of dead men and a few women.

I love Melanie, as best I can. But I know she gets tired of me.

I get tired of me.

But Reagan, yeah. What makes me angriest about our President? He comes into office, and overnight our government’s official policy is to act brazen in the face of every trivial threat. Like the Soviets, who don’t look to me as if they’ve got more than a few years of life remaining. In Reagan’s world, we have to be geared up to fight a foe that could barely feed its own people. And meanwhile, our real troubles have to be mocked. Global warming. Nuclear proliferation. Corrupt governments supported by my tax dollars and everyone’s complacency. This is the mess that one arrogant man has stirred with his cock, and we’re into the second term of this bullshit, and I’m just hoping there’s still time to save the world before we have nothing but hope remaining.

Melanie wants me to be calmer.

Except the storms are inside me. Most of the time, at least in public, I’m sporting the calmest face in the room.

She says she mostly agrees with me. In fact, with her mind and her skills, Melanie is in an even better place to comprehend the enormous risks standing before this world.

People do ask about the two of us.

And I’m talking about people who hold our ideals. Gay friends have questioned things, and my family never stops asking.

I do prefer women.

It’s my wiring, my constitution. Some fundamental talent of DNA coupled with a superior aesthetic.

I don’t know what it is.

“But why her?” my sister can’t stop wondering aloud.

“Because,” is never an adequate answer. Except that is the answer, of course. “Because.”

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t like your friend,” my sister constantly tells me. Which underscores how little regard she has for Melanie. And that’s before she delivers all of the usual reasons.

“The drinking,” says my sister.

My “friend” has a habit, yes. I see it and I can’t really approve, and sometimes, yes, the alcohol is in control.

“Her appearance,” my sister mentions.

“Appearance” can mean quite a lot. But my sister isn’t talking just about the disheveled clothing and her weight. That doesn’t cut to the heart of what’s wrong. Melanie isn’t pretty enough. That’s what she and probably the rest of my family believes. My brothers, for instance. All three of them would accept a starlet, high tits and a narrow waist. Or at least they could come to terms with my nature a little easier, seeing that at the family gatherings.

“And besides,” my sister always says. “I don’t like . . . none of us enjoy . . . how your Melanie treats you.”

“It’s none of your business how she treats me,” I have told her.

A statement both true and useless.

I have mention that my sister’s husband is a beery brute, and maybe she should take care of her own life before charging into mine.

That tactic never works, but it does spice up Thanksgiving.

On other occasions, I’ll say nothing. The cool, unreadable Gwen can nod in a way that’s both noncommittal and only a little bit angry. Because frankly, how often can I disagree with an opinion that I myself share?

Melanie can be difficult.

I admit that, yes.

If I dialed my life back to my twentieth birthday, then maybe I would avoid her and the nearly two decades that followed. I would fall in love with somebody else. Shit, maybe I’d surrender to convention, ending up with a heavy and often drunk man and three kids, and I’d be teaching my soul out in some boondock bend in the goddamn road.

But then I would have missed the rest of it.

I’m smart and always have been. And my interests are broader than most people’s interests. For example, I happen to be one of the great scientists among Literature majors, and if it comes down to it, I can do a better job describing quantum mechanics and high-energy physics than a lot of the geniuses who work with nothing else.

Melanie taught me.

Talk about your gifts.

She drinks too much. No question about it. And her hygiene could be improved. And we’ve settled into that old-dyke mentality where sex is relegated to special occasions. But sex isn’t anyone’s business, and what I get seems to be enough for me, and I don’t hear her complaining much at all. And during all these years together, the woman has never stopped giving me the most amazing tales about space and time and that truer wonder called spacetime.

I feel fortunate.

And all my lady gets from me are angry words about an old man who might kill the world but hasn’t yet and has only two years left in his second term.

Anyway, here’s my point in this roundabout story.

This winter, in Chicago. Melanie and I were attending one of her conferences, some of the big people in her business talking about neutrinos and Senators with pull and that huge underground ring they were building in Texas. Physicists wanted the ring finished, but there were a lot of complaints about the billions being spent. And I might have said a few carelessly skeptical words about the venture. But no, I really wanted the ring to happen, if only because my Melanie has assured me that we would learn a lot.

Except that’s not quite it.

“I’ll learn a lot, and that’s what matters.”

She’s an arrogant broad. In every sense of the word, and she’d be happy to hear me say it.

Chicago.

Yeah, we were at the conference. A six-inch snow made the city prettier than it deserves to be. Fermi people and their wives, and by chance, I was standing outside waiting for the bus that was supposed to shuttle us to another event. And that’s when the blue light came. Brilliant and silent at first, but then we heard the crack of what wasn’t thunder and was definitely far from normal.

I knew that instantly.

And nobody debated my ignorant assessment.

Maybe a dozen geniuses were gawking at a sky that made no sense, listening to that long odd roar. And then every light in the city went out. Power was down across all of northern Illinois, although we didn’t know it then. Maybe half of the scientists proposed that a suborbital nuke had generated some kind of blistering pulse. Except the glow didn’t come from one point but seemed to be generated everywhere, and this was strange as hell, and what impressed me most was how excited they became, these brilliant men and that one woman who happened to be standing beside me, giggling with nervous joy at the idea of something that they couldn’t quite explain.

Which would have been enough, obviously.

I couldn’t have imagined anything stranger than that.

But then the little bits of teeth and bone began falling on us and on millions of other people, and later came the soft ash that was never thick but easy enough to see on the fresh snow. And the scientists collected up samples along with snowballs, and a day later someone came out with the news that the ash and those tiny bits of teeth were human.

And again, foolish as can be, I told myself that the story couldn’t find a stranger gear.

Grandparents wanted to see the kids. That’s why we came back.

My hometown lured us in because we were tired of dealing with renters from a thousand miles away. But selling Gwen’s old house meant cleaning it up first and probably seeing a new roof put on, and I would have preferred it if my folks could have volunteered to part of that work for us. That was my secret thought. But Gwen actually said it. She isn’t normally that mouthy, but the town and her still remembered each other, and I suppose it’s always going to be that way.

And there’s another reason to return: My firm was sending me overseas, probably for the next several years, and what with time distance and the vagaries of health, there was a respectable chance that one of my parents would never see our kids again.

Vagaries. Gwen dwells on little else, some days.

“I loved this place,” she confided to me.

We were standing in front of her former home. The last of the renters had vanished, evicted and possibly now being pursued by various authorities. And they had left behind exactly the kind of mess you’d expect.

“You loved this place when?” I asked.

Knowing the possible answers.

“When I sat on this porch. Remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

I was home from college and she was sitting in the shade. The English teacher with a tragic past. She was looking at me as I strolled past. I have no recollection about where I was going. Probably down to the Sinclair for a Pepsi, and it was definitely summer, just like today. It was bright and hotter than normal for morning. Not unlike now. Which I suppose is why my wife brought up that critical moment in both of our lives.

“You said my name,” I said.

She laughed and said, “No.”

“Yes.”

“You misheard me. I’ve told you that.” She kept laughing, looking for a place to sit again. Except there were no chairs, just black plastic sacks jammed with sour food and Walmart-crap toys. So she leaned against the railing, saying, “Water.”

“Walter,” I said.

“ ‘I could use some water,’ I mentioned.”

“I heard Walter.”

Some stories never get old. We shared the laughter and I touched her on the cheek, my wife and the mother of two kids that I adored nearly as much as this bright, taciturn lady.

And just like that, she gave me the look.

We went inside, into that house that needed to be burned more than cleaned and sold. That big worn house with the wide porch and dark deep rooms, including the bedroom upstairs, hot then and hot now. But it didn’t slow us down any, neither time. And just like that, I felt like I was twenty again, screwing my English teacher, and her taking as much pleasure as any girl I would ever know.

Maybe other women are more passionate with their men.

I can’t say.

A bold and worldly fellow would have bedded a hundred women before giving up. But then again, I’m not that way.

We finished and dressed, and Gwen asked, “Should we rescue your parents?”

“Someday.”

Then we walked back out onto the porch, ready to resume our cleaning.

A pair of locals were strolling past. Older ladies, and I knew their faces if not either name. But they absolutely recognized us. One nudged the other, and then they looked away when we started offering our eyes.

It pissed me off, just enough.

I didn’t live here anymore. And I sure as hell wasn’t the twenty-year-old kid sleeping with his ex-teacher. Who was twenty-nine at the time, I could have pointed out to those fine ladies. Who was nine years my senior, do the math, and Gwen was a hundred times better than either of them were on their best days.

Maybe I would have shouted something like that.

But what was a bright day suddenly turned infinitely brighter, and every piece of machinery, car and generator and working radio, stopped working. And that scorching bright blue light turned into darkness just before the pulverized bits of enamel started raining down.

Funny the ideas that come to you.

We were wading through teeth and then the soft bony ash, and I was actually a little bit happy. Some incredible volcano had come to life nearby. That was my only working theory, regardless how crazy it sounded. And now the town was going to be destroyed, and we’d just been saved from that awful business of cleaning out the filthy old house.

Except of course pretty much everybody else in North America was suffering nearly as badly as we were.

It was two weeks before life began to look normal.

And another two weeks before our car was cobbled back together well enough to drive. The kids were in back. The radio was filled with news about the disaster and how President Gore was making new laws, keeping order over the mayhem. And that was the first time, a month after the nightmare began, when we heard the name Dr. Melanie Baxter.

I was driving.

Gwen cranked up the volume, listening to something about a paper written back in the 70s.

“The late Dr. Melanie Baxter,” the voice said.

Shouting, Gwen ordered me to pull over.

I already was.

We happened to be in a low spot not many miles from town. What had been several inches of ash and bone was being worked by the wind, stripped away in places and drifting deep in other places, accenting just how strange and awful the disaster had been. Experts were definite, certain, convinced. Judging by the DNA, these were human remains that had tumbled from the sky. A phenomenal mass of material, by any measure. And the blue flash was some sort of high-energy discharge, not predicted by anybody except a woman from a quarter century ago—a suddenly famous doctoral student who was killed while driving alone one night.

Drunk, Melanie had been.

They didn’t mention that fact, and/or that the fatal crash happened after a fight with my wife.

That’s why Gwen was crying now. I assumed. The memories of quite a lot were coming back. It sounds awful, but I have always been secretly glad that Gwen’s first love was utterly lost, and the shock and guilt of that car crash was what gave me everything that I enjoyed today.

I patted my wife’s little hand, accomplishing nothing.

“I remember that paper,” she muttered. “She told me . . . what did she tell me . . . ?”

I wished for a second blast of light, our car radio dying all over again.

“About spacetime,” she said. “About things bending until they break.”

And I’m thinking: “Isn’t that true for all of us?”

Here’s the joke:

“What’s the difference between poets and physicists?”

And the punchline:

“Poets get two more productive years than physicists get.”

Not true, of course. Yeats lasted for decades, if I remember. And bless his heart, Einstein kept trying. Although really, if you want to be honest, how many times can one person do the impossible?

Once is enough for most us.

Which is why poets and the rest of us usually give up so soon. Being smart, we know the odds, and why waste fifty years dancing with endless failure?

Now ask me why I drink.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “She’s washed up and hates herself and her failed genius and why wouldn’t she drink?”

Is that the true story?

Or maybe . . . maybe there’s some sad tale at work. Emotional. Human. Nothing about mathematics or the deepest structure of our universe. That would help explain the old drunk, giving her that necessary human dimension. She had a love once, someone better than she deserved, but that woman left her for some sorry, ordinary reason, or worse, for no reason in particular. That’s a tale worthy of a poet, not a professor, and hearing it, people would feel sorry for me, explaining fifty years of failure under the light of pain.

Why does pain produce light?

That’s what I want to know.

We need a poet to explain this conundrum. Find a poet. Ask her, “Where’s the brilliance in misery?” Because I’ve known all kinds of hurt in life, too many to count, and even during the worst days, my pain has never shown me anything but hard cold blackness.

The blue light.

Yeah, that bastard was plenty bright.

Not that I saw it, of course. I was comfortably done with my day. And regardless what you think, even if I had seen the event, I wouldn’t have guessed the source. That kind of knowledge took data and huge calculations that we wouldn’t be able to make anywhere in the world, at least for another half year.

Sad to admit, I don’t possess superhuman talents ready to unleash.

In fact, let me tell you this: On her finest day, the finest scientist doesn’t know shit about almost everything. But that’s the fun of it. That’s why people want to be scientists. It’s the dose of adrenalin that comes when you feel as lost as can be.

Drunk, I happily slept through the blast and the first half hour of the emergency.

I might have slept until dead, but neighbors remembered me and broke down my front door, dragging me out into the ash before the whole building came down. I don’t know about where you lived, but we had nearly six feet of human remains dropping out of that black pain-rich sky, and half the local buildings were flattened, and I don’t know how many died.

Without power or any infrastructure, being a scientist was tough. But I managed to work. It was easy to see the bits of teeth, and there was the rumor that these were human remains. Someone in Atlanta or Stockholm figured that out early, and I don’t know where I heard it. But right there, that was an astonishment. One cremated human body yields about five pounds of tooth and crumbled bone. But the entire population of the world, women and men and fat children, won’t render up more than forty billion pounds of nastiness. Which is nothing. Two million tons. That isn’t enough material to fill up an old strip mine in Wyoming.

A lot more than that fell on our heads.

For a full year, I lived in one refugee camp after another.

Honestly? I’ve never been happier. No drinking, mostly. And a lot of basic shit to get done. I’ve always been good at figuring out problems, and everybody in authority wanted help with the most basic water-food-shelter conundrums. Which makes me wonder: Is this what physicists did before we solved the universe? Did we just find new ways to clean old water and make plants grow in the graveyard?

The important people eventually found me in New Mexico. A team flew all the way from the provisional capital in Portland. They just wanted to talk. But nobody flies that far, not anymore, and certainly not because of the need to chat. Those visitors kept calling me, “Dr. Baxter,” and thanking me for my good work here and before. But I could see where they were heading, which is why I said, “Spacetime shattered on us. Didn’t it?”

There were five of them, but one man did most of the talking.

“Why do you believe that?” he asked, sounding like a cop.

“Nothing else explains it,” I said, stating the obvious. “The event took our entire planet, which is just one planet. But for an instant of an instant, we were linked with billions of other Earths.”

Everybody nodded in agreement.

Except for the man in charge. “Billions,” he repeated, acting as if he wasn’t happy with that estimate.

So I gave him my true numbers.

Then I said to them, “But you already know this. Plenty of others must have done the arithmetic.”

The man shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no.

“Of course we’re not just talking about Earths,” I added. “What we’re talking about is our Earth fusing with one tiny piece of ten trillion other Earths. The same piece repeated infinitely. And judging by the evidence, I’d say that what fell on us was the remains of one person ground halfway to dust inside a cremulator.”

Nobody spoke.

Even my main interrogator knew to hold his thoughts inside.

So I added to my analysis, explaining, “If you find enough DNA, tracking down the dead person would be easy enough.”

Which was when the woman in back—the person who was really in charge of this vital, unthinkable mission—finally spoke out.

“Perhaps that already happened,” she said.

And I laughed, right up until I noticed fear inside those various stares.

“It’s someone from our world,” I guessed.

Eyes were focused on nobody but me.

So I made the obvious guess. “These are my ashes.”

Which was when the man laughed, saying, “That’s an arrogant attitude.”

And his boss said, “No. But according to records, back in college and for several years, you knew the lady in question.”

I rarely get to meet legends.

Despite a reputation for combativeness, this particular legend was nothing but pleasant. And even though we’d all heard stories about failing health and a lousy sense of dress, Dr. Baxter looked fit enough to run, and her clothes hadn’t been slept in more than one brief night.

We met her inside her office.

Surrounding us were a million miles of tubes and tunnels, superconductive magnets and enough energy to make the Earth jump.

That’s what she wanted to make happen.

Who else in the world could have asked for permission to make the Earth jump?

I was the least important person in the room. A career lawyer, at the end of my days, I was part of a team trying to determine the liability of the latest experiment.

“We want to send a message to a tiny fraction of our neighboring Earths,” Dr. Baxter was saying.

Funny how easily you accept the amazing, particularly after reading a hundred briefings on the subject.

“We’ll use diamonds,” she said. “Tiny and very pure and marked in a variety of ways.”

“But you’re just sending a few grams of diamonds,” someone said.

I was listening and I wasn’t listening. There was a picture frame on the woman’s desk, faces and places changing while the debate unfolded.

“A few grams is all we can afford,” said Melanie Baxter. “The energy required is enormous enough as it is.”

“But how could anyone notice us?” our doubter had to ask.

“Because,” I interrupted. Surprising myself as much as the others.

Coaxing me with a small, grim smile, the genius said, “Please, continue.”

“We won’t be the only people sending diamonds,” I offered. “There’s an infinite number of Earths, and some infinite slice will run the same experiment at the same time.”

“But we’re sending diamonds to just one other Earth,” the doubter continued. “And if there are infinite targets . . . ”

“Randomized distributions,” said the genuine expert.

And the rest of us fell into a studious silence.

“Some Earths will receive two shares, some won’t get anything at all. But a few, a very few, are going to experience ten million shares. There’ll be a visible EM display in the sky, and then the diamond grit falls and gets collected and people who look similar to us or exactly like us are going to peer into their microscopes, finding delicate messages etched in languages that might or might resemble their own.”

It was a fun moment, watching every face become awestruck.

Even Melanie’s face.

Then I remembered another piece of the story.

“Time,” I blurted.

“What’s that?” the doubter asked.

“This is all going to be random in time too,” I offered. Then I looked at the woman behind the desk, wondering if I was totally wrong.

But I wasn’t, no.

“We’ve worked out the distribution curve,” she said. “Earths occupying our moment are the most likely targets, but the curve isn’t particularly steep. That’s why there’s one chance in about five trillion chances that our diamonds will end up several years before today. And there are equal odds that they’ll travel ahead in time instead.”

“And once in a great while, they get noticed,” I said.

“Sending messages back in time,” the doubter said, except he was sounding more intrigued by the moment. “How far back in time will we reach?”

“This is a distribution curve applied to infinities,” Melanie said. “When dealing with a trillion quadrillion zeros, things can turn fairly strange.”

To the best of our abilities, each of us wrestled with that notion.

And then the genius looked off at the ceiling, her heavy old face changing. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that she was suddenly sad enough to make me ache and happy enough to make me fly. That’s what I saw in that one face, and because of that stark show of emotion, everybody else grew uncomfortable.

Our leader decided it was time to leave.

Except for me. I lingered at the office door. A couple people said, “Walt,” but I ignored them. Then Melanie shut her eyes and sighed and opened her eyes, finding me watching the young face filling the picture frame on her desk.

“I knew your wife,” I said.

The next smile was brighter, fending off every misery.

“My condolences,” I said.

She said, “Thank you.”

Then after a moment, “How did you know Gwen?”

“She taught me about Shakespeare during high school.”

Melanie laughed and said, “Think of these odds.”

It was fun to see the coincidences, yes.

“She was a good teacher,” said the widow.

“Really good,” I agreed.

“Six months gone, and it feels like zero time has passed,” she confided. Then she suddenly rose, saying, “Funerals.”

“Excuse me?”

“Gwen’s ceremony didn’t satisfy me,” Melanie confessed. “And I’ve been thinking about what else to do.”

I nodded.

The woman leaned against her desk, lost in endless thought.

Needing something to break the silence, I said, “Yeah, Gwen was an excellent teacher.”

The woman looked at me for the final time.

“Tell me about your class,” she said.

What came to mind was spellbinding, but I couldn’t share that. So instead, I smiled in a wistful way, saying, “A friend of mine was playing around and then spilled his desk in class. And she instantly helped him.”

Another nod, and the eyes dropped.

“No,” she said. “My Gwen would have kicked his ass for screwing around. And that’s the woman I loved.”

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

Loving Grace

Erica L. Satifka

When Marybeth’s number comes up in the employment lottery, Chase goes with her to her orientation, but they won’t let him inside the operating theater.

Chase and Marybeth had watched the videos together on YouTube, though, so he knows what she’s in for. Two small holes are drilled at the temples. That’s where the wires go in. The intestines they put in a bucket for easy drainage. No muss, no fuss. All other parts are distributed around the cubicle, either hung on thick hooks or slid into drawers for safekeeping.

“You’ll wait for me?” she asks via speakerphone, right before they download her into the drone.

“Of course,” Chase answers. His stomach still roils from the surgery clips.

The Employment Bureau sends him a holo of Marybeth, to replace what they’ve taken away. Every night since she left, Chase sits on the couch with the holo next to him. It has slight corporeality. When it pats his thigh, the touch feels like a kitten’s paw. “Can you get me some ice cream, honey?”

He doesn’t feed it ice cream. He doesn’t make eye contact with it, even though it looks just like his wife. Marybeth’s amateur charcoal drawings line the mantle above the television, a reminder he can’t bring himself to stash away.

When things get bad, he takes a walk around the neighborhood.

And when things get really bad, he goes to see the storyteller.

“Gather around the fire,” says the storyteller. The two dozen people collected in the parking lot of the old strip mall edge in closer to the wizened old man, their ties and linen skirts nearly brushing the coals. The storefronts are empty sockets, their gaudy paint peeling and faded. “Let me tell you a story.”

Chase hangs around the back, near an old fiberglass statue of a lumberjack once used to sell maple syrup. He can barely hear the storyteller’s words above the crackling of the fire and the humming of the drones overhead. He looks up at the drones. He thinks about Marybeth.

“This is a tale about an ant,” continues the storyteller. He paces the parking lot, his wooden cane thumping like a heartbeat. “She was a very good ant, and knew her place in the colony. She was born to fill a role and she filled that role with great competency. The ant loved her queen. One day, the little ant’s mound filled with a thick green smoke. The ant felt herself changed. She couldn’t lift a piece of food ten times her size anymore. She couldn’t quite march in line with the other ants. And she began to have doubts about the queen.”

Chase has heard this story before, except it used to be about a bee. Regardless, he listens. It’s better than returning to the sparse apartment with the holo in it.

“The little ant, she thought and thought. ‘Why am I thinking this way?’ the little ant pondered. And then the little ant realized what the problem was. She was thinking.”

Chase looks up, up. The drones aren’t recruiting now, but they still drift in a river of lights above him, rear thrusters twinkling like eyes. So many eyes.

“The little ant had a choice to make. She was free of her programming, but her epiphany made her realize that she had only a short time left to live. Armed with that fateful knowledge, she departed the colony she’d been sheltered in for such a long time—all of her tiny life—and went to see the world.”

Chase lights a joint and lets himself relax. The night air is so cool. A brisk wind picks up, letting the embers of the fire scatter. He rests his spine on the lumberjack’s shin and stretches his feet out. He feels very far away from the apartment at times like this.

“The little ant was free! She was so happy. She picked her way along, paying no attention to the scent trails left by her sisters. She knew that only a few days’ walk away there was a great city full of food. Maybe there were other ants out there who had been touched by the green gas. They would understand.

“Then a hiker stepped on the little ant and ground her into dust.”

When full automation made human employment superfluous, the first reaction was panic. Pink slips fell like confetti. Even Chase had protested against the coming of the machines at first, though Marybeth hadn’t.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” she’d said. “Relax, Chase. It’s the way things were meant to be. Machines can do things better than we ever could.”

The early days of the Shift were a time of great upheaval, as people who’d spent their whole lives working suddenly found themselves without a job, a purpose. The solution was drastic: a complete social safety net, and a draft. Every day, a few people were called for employment, targeted by the drones that also swept the city clean, monitored crime, and performed chit drops. Stretches of employment varied from a few months to a few years.

You’ll come back, the Employment Bureau said. Everyone will come back. We count on it. Chase knows nobody who has returned, but that doesn’t prove anything.

The draft wasn’t needed, not exactly. The drones ran on their own, filling all necessary roles with machine intelligence alone. But you couldn’t just give people something for nothing. Not in this country. People liked to feel useful.

Marybeth and the others were the wetware. They gave the drones that special human touch. That flash of recognition you felt when a drone faced you across a parking lot: human eyes. The gentle way they’d scold you for dropping your litter on the sidewalk before they picked it up: human voice. The Employment Bureau said it was a good thing to be uploaded into a drone. That it was everyone’s patriotic duty.

One by one, Chase’s neighbors file out of their boarded-over apartment buildings dressed in their best business casual, waiting for the drones. He doesn’t want to look at the others, their faces frozen in rictuses of fear, so he drops his eyes to the squeaky-clean sidewalk. A stalk of fennel pokes through the asphalt, reaching toward the cuffs of his rumpled trousers. He doesn’t look up, not even when one of his neighbors screams. Especially not when she screams.

It might be an hour later, or it might be fifteen minutes. But every day, there’s a palpable sense of relief as the passed-over people realize they haven’t been taken.

Some, the ones who still find themselves purposeless, are upset. Most are not.

Chase thinks of organs in drawers, and of the holo on his tattered couch. Then he takes a deep breath and heads to the coffee shop. The pink-haired barista places his order when he comes in. He’s a regular.

“Slow day?” he asks. The barista is the only person he knows who has a job doing anything except running a drone. A child of privilege, she inherited this place, and runs it more as a lark than anything else. The shop’s walls are lined with posters advertising music festivals and political protests, all of them over a decade old. He wonders how many places like this still remain, places run by human operators instead of machines. Probably not very many.

“Sandy was taken last night.”

“Last night?” The employment drones never show up at night. The barista has to be mistaken.

The barista shrugs. “Guess they’re expanding into the night shift.”

Chase’s veins run cold. “Are you sure it was the drones?”

“Her girlfriend got the holo this morning.” The barista shakes her head. “Terrible.”

“But . . . ” Chase’s throat begins to close up. Knives of fear cut into his skin, slicing him up. Destroying him.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” the barista says, obviously trying to make Chase feel better.

It’s too late. Chase is already worried about it. He slaps down his chits on the scratched tile counter, sucks down the foul-tasting coffee, and sprints to his apartment. He doesn’t look up.

“This is the story of the bird who laid golden eggs,” says the storyteller. From his vantage point outside the sacred semicircle, Chase leans in to listen, though he’s heard this one before.

I’ve heard them all before, Chase thinks. But he misses Marybeth, and the holo’s still creeping him out, six months after it arrived on his doorstep.

“The bird wasn’t unhappy to be owned. She knew that her shining eggs, though worthless to her, brought great joy to the prince of the kingdom. The bird’s power made her unusual, she knew, and she was quite willing to forego the garden outside the barred window of her cage to bring delight to the prince and his kingdom. All was well for many years.”

The storyteller takes a swig of water from the mason jar at his side. He smacks his lips.

“Then came a day when the prince brought in the royal scientists to study the bird. They made copies of her DNA and inserted them into other birds. The bird that laid golden eggs was no larger than a wren, you see, and even ten of her eggs could make only one small crown, even when melted down. They started with a chicken, then an eagle, then finally worked their way up to an ostrich. For a while, the little bird was even happier! She was no longer alone, and though the aviary was now crowded with many different species of gold-laying birds, not all of whom got along, her life was much less dull than it was before. She was so grateful to the prince.”

Chase makes eye contact with a young woman illuminated by the soft moonlight. Her jacket is shredded on one side and her hair is lank and dirty, but she smiles at him warmly. He smiles back.

“For a few years,” the storyteller says, “things remained as they were. The little bird, and all the other gold-laying birds, got along as well as they could. The eagle still sometimes pestered the little bird, but even the eagle knew that they all had a job to do. Then, one day, the royal scientists unveiled their greatest creation ever! They handed a jewel-encrusted box to the prince.

“ ‘What is this contraption?’ said the prince.

“ ‘It’s a replicator, a grand replicator. With this box, you can produce all the gold you could ever want. You don’t need the birds anymore. You can set them free.’

“The prince paused. He looked at the aviary. The birds had never known life outside their cage. Could they be trusted to be free? Would they even want that? He thought for seven days and seven nights, as the grand replicator passed out brick after brick of solid gold, forged from nothing at all.”

Chase inches closer to the woman, drawn like a magnet to her, though he doesn’t know why. His breath catches in his throat. On a night like this he feels so lonely he can’t even think straight.

“At the end of a week of intense deliberation, the prince threw the key to the birdcage from the top of the tallest tower in the kingdom. There was no need to tell the birds about the grand replicator. They were only birds, after all.”

The following Monday, Chase sees the woman from the park in the automated grocery store. She’s wearing a dress with a large stain on the front and one kitten heel. Her other foot has twigs between the toes.

Just go talk to her, he thinks. You’ll regret it if you don’t. Chase runs a hand through his own greasy hair and nonchalantly bumps her cart with his own.

“Hey,” he says, “nice shoe.”

She looks at her bare foot. “I don’t get my chits for two weeks. Their products aren’t as good as they think they are.”

Chase has noticed that too. “We met last night. But I don’t remember your name.”

Her eyes dart around. The storyteller’s sermons aren’t illegal, exactly—freedom of assembly and all—but it’s still not considered patriotic to attend. “Victoria,” she says, holding out a hand.

“Chase.” They shake.

She looks in his cart. It’s a typical bachelor’s spread: crackers, Velveeta, microbrew. None of it is real, all of it made, packaged, and delivered by drones. “I’ve seen you there before.”

“I go sometimes. It’s something to do.”

“Yeah, it’s nice to go out when they can’t get you.”

Chase doesn’t tell her what the barista told him, about the recruitment drones expanding into the night shift. It probably isn’t true, and anyway, he was still going out at night. “There’s another one tonight. Would you like to go with me?”

Her forehead scrunches up, the gears working. Finally, she smiles. “I wonder which one he’ll tell this time. The one about the ant or the one about the leopard?”

Chase laughs a little too forcefully. “He doesn’t really have a lot of range, does he?”

It’s the one about the ant, so instead of listening, Chase and Victoria sneak behind the lumberjack and pass a beer back and forth. It isn’t until the off-service drone overhead lights up its rear thruster that he sees a pale line of skin encircling her brown finger.

“You were married?”

“He offered himself up, oh, four years ago. After they instituted the program.”

Chase frowns. “Offered himself?”

“He said it was his patriotic duty to ensure full employment, even after the Shift. We had a huge fight because I wouldn’t go. He called me lazy. I suppose I am.”

“And your skin isn’t back to normal after four years?”

“The ring was an implant. I had to go to a doctor to remove it.” She holds out her hand, fingers splayed. “True love forever.”

Her curly hair glistens in the dronelight. She’s pretty, though nothing like Marybeth. No, he thinks, stop it. You’re married.

“My wife is there,” Chase blurts out. “In a cube. She didn’t volunteer, they just took her.”

Victoria places her hands over his. “I could tell.”

“She’ll be back someday.”

She stares at him hard, her dark eyes like glassy rocks. “Has anyone ever come back from employment, Chase?”

“Just because we haven’t seen them return—”

“No. They don’t come back. I’m sorry.”

Over by the fire, the storyteller wraps up his yarn. The listeners stand and stretch. Chase and Victoria get up, link hands, and walk to Chase’s apartment.

He can tell the holo isn’t happy, but he doesn’t even care.

Chase leads Victoria through the worn doorway of his coffee shop. The barista quirks one pierced eyebrow at their entwined hands, then makes a kissy face at him.

“Stop it,” he says, though he can’t even pretend to frown.

Victoria’s gaze flickers around the cramped, colorful room. The coffee shop is like a time capsule, Chase realizes, a glimpse into the aging barista’s pre-Shift life. Chase can barely remember these not-so-long-ago times, and that depresses the hell out of him.

“Let’s go to the shore,” he says, “Just the two of us.”

“We can’t go far. We have to be here in case we’re drafted.”

Drafted for a job that we’re not really needed for, he thinks. Sent to be carved up and shoved into drawers, never to return. He still can’t believe that, even if he’s acting as though it’s true. “We could go out to the coast on Friday afternoon, camp for two days, and be back in time for the next draft.” Saturdays and Sundays were always free, a vestige of the pre-Shift weekly routine.

“Supposed to be nice out there,” says the barista as she wipes down the countertop the old-fashioned way, with a rag.

Victoria only has to think for a moment. “Yes. Let’s do it.”

The barista sighs and folds her hands into the shape of a heart. Chase throws an empty sweetener packet at her. “Go back to work.”

They all laugh at that.

The holo pouts as Chase packs a duffel bag with his least-scuffed casual wear. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?”

It’s not talking about Victoria. It can’t form any memories. He lies anyway. “No, it’s not. And you don’t exist anymore, sweetheart.”

It pauses, then repeats the same line in the same stilted tone.

Chase doesn’t have time for this. He has only a scant forty-eight hours in the country with Victoria, away from the drones, away from the holo. He throws an extra set of socks into his bag and zips it up. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.”

He knows it’s not sentient. He knows it’s not Marybeth. Her body is in the drawers of her cubicle and her mind is in a drone. It still hurts when the holo locks itself in the bathroom and turns on the tap.

The doorbell rings. Victoria.

She locks eyes with the holo, then glances at Marybeth’s sketches. The blood runs to Chase’s ears, and before Victoria can ask any questions he takes her bag and throws it over his shoulder with his own.

“It’s a good likeness,” Victoria says, but Chase doesn’t ask if she means the holo or his charcoal image.

The path to the nearest transit station is littered with all the nervous people thronging the sidewalks, taking their daily constitutionals to nowhere. For the first time in ages, Chase feels no desire to look at the drone-flecked sky. It feels like freedom.

“After you,” he says, dropping two chits into the turnstile.

The drones kept the light rail running, even after the Shift, so Chase and Victoria take it all the way to the end of the line. The burbland stretches out forever, its abandoned houses like diseased teeth in a gaping maw. Nobody can afford to live so far away from the lottery, except a handful of off-gridders testing the patience of the Employment Bureau. Chase had grown up in such a suburb, near a different city. He looks over at Victoria.

“What are you thinking about?”

“You. The ocean. I don’t know.” She yawns, and it turns into a smile.

Chase puts an arm around her. There’s nothing more to say.

Brakes screech as the train pulls into the station. They’ll have to walk the rest of the way to the sea. Chase helps boost the barefoot Victoria over a guardrail. His hands become slick with the watery blood from her heel. She must have scratched it somewhere.

I should have bought her new shoes with my extra chits, he thinks. Too late now.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she says, though he hasn’t even asked her, and he knows she’s lying.

“Not too much longer.”

“I think I can hear the ocean from here.” Another lie, but Chase can forgive it. He wants it to be true too. They walk down the stretch of highway hand in hand, and he feels only a small pang of guilt at that, a tiny knot that rests at the bottom of his chest.

When the heat makes the asphalt below them into a hot griddle, he and Victoria set up a picnic on the median strip. The not-cheese and ersatz crackers taste terrible, but they gobble them all down anyway.

“What was your husband like?”

She frowns. “A serious man. Lived for his work. He was an investment banker. No need for them after the Shift. I think a part of him died when it happened. Before, he didn’t come home until ten most nights. Now he doesn’t come home at all.”

“Marybeth was the opposite. She loved her freedom, loved the drones for freeing her from something that was pointless. She was an artist.” Chase shakes his head. “It should have been me.”

“Don’t say that.” Victoria removes a strand of hair from Chase’s eyes.

It’s true, he thinks.

The sun is below the horizon when they finally make it to the coast. Chase scouts a rickety shack half-buried under the white sand. There’s a mattress there, with not too many spiders on it, and the springs scream as they collapse onto the thin foam. Victoria falls asleep right away, but Chase lingers for a few minutes, enjoying the feel of her supple body against his.

Not a holo, he thinks. Never a holo.

They’re playing in the ice-cold water when a drone passes by, but it’s Sunday, so they don’t have to worry. Probably maintenance, Chase thinks, tidying up the beach that nobody ever visits.

He’s naked as a buzzard’s head. So is Victoria, her clothes stacked neatly near a dune. Her feet are still raw and bleeding, but she claims the salinity of the ocean helps.

They’re safe. But when the drone nears, they still hold their breath, waiting for it to pass by. It’s a little one, no larger than a toaster, and it’s heading straight for Victoria.

Please, Chase thinks, no.

The small maintenance drone reaches out two feelers and strokes her cheeks. It digs its claws into the brown rings of her hair. It beeps one, twice. Victoria trembles.

“Get away!” Chase yells. He splashes through the shallow water and thumps the drone on its side with his fist. “Go!” Please.

The drone turns. It whirs. It squares its glittering optical sensors with Chase’s eyes, and within the glass bubbles of the sensors he can see a miniature version of himself staring back at him. He feels a moment of sickening recognition before the drone speeds away.

No. It can’t be her. Chase shakes his head, letting the insane thought pass.

Victoria collects her clothes. “We should go. We’ll be late.”

They retrace their steps along the highway. Chase doesn’t tell her what he saw, or what he thinks he saw. He doesn’t say much at all.

When they finally get back to the station, the light rail is running a major delay. They’re late for the draft.

Chase doesn’t see Victoria the next day, or the day after that. Thursday is a storyteller day, and so he goes to the abandoned strip mall. He knows there must be some grave consequence for skipping the draft, but it hasn’t come up yet. Maybe it never will.

Or maybe it’s happening now, he thinks.

“Gather round, friends,” says the storyteller. “This is a story about a very brave, but very shortsighted leopard.”

Victoria is nowhere in sight. He leans against the lumberjack’s shin and lights up. Above his head, drones zip along, watching over all of them with foul intent disguised as loving grace.

The story is terrible, but he listens all the same.

About the Author

Erica L. Satifka’s work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issue. When not writing, she works as a freelance editor and writing instructor. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse Rob and three needy cats.

Preserve Her Memory

Bao Shu

One o’clock in the morning. Heavy rain.

Ye Lin, her clothes drenched, stands at the edge of the roof of the three-hundred-story Future Tower. She shivers uncontrollably as the gale, whipping freezing rain, slices across her skin like an ice knife. From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.

They look up at me like a princess in the heavens. But do they understand how cold and alone I am?

In the metropolis below, a scintillating net woven from thousands of glowing streets, infused with lust, greed, and fame, ensnares thirty million men and women and binds her the tightest of them all. She once thought herself one of the lucky few who found a rare morsel of happiness, but she had not realized that the spider of fate had already closed off all avenues of escape behind her.

All right, it will all be over soon. I’ll have eternal freedom and peace.

Ye Lin takes a deep breath and steps forward. There is nowhere to set her foot down except empty space.

And so she falls. Like a drop of rain, she plunges toward the gleaming city, toward the abyss of death.

Police Captain Jiang Yong, head of the investigations unit, took off his helmet and let out a long sigh. “You dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night for this? Who found her?”

“I did, Captain,” said a young woman with long hair. Liu Ningning was a new addition to the investigations unit. By the looks of her swollen eyes, she had been crying. “The impact damaged the body to such an extent that we couldn’t ID her, and DNA analysis was going to take some time. I decided to access her memories, and found out that . . . she’s Ye Lin, the actress. I called in a report immediately.”

“No wonder the bureau told me to handle it.” Jiang Yong yawned. “She’s a big star. I imagine those vulture reporters will be swarming here soon, and this is going to be all over the headlines in the morning . . . But the case doesn’t look that complicated. The memory replay indicates that it was suicide. All you have to do is follow the procedures.”

“But since the deceased is such a celebrity, there will be a lot of attention focused on us,” said another detective. “The bureau didn’t want anything to go wrong, and they specifically asked for you to review the investigation.”

“I don’t care if she’s a celebrity or some average Jane Doe,” Jiang Yong harrumphed. “I have no sympathy for suicides.”

“No! This is murder, pure murder!” Liu Ningning cried out, her voice full of anguish.

Jiang Yong frowned. “Ningning, I know you’re a fan of Ye Lin, but you can’t allow your personal feelings to interfere with police work.”

“But . . . but . . . ” Ningning wiped at her eyes. “You’ll understand if you replay more of her memories.”

Intrigued, Jiang Yong put the helmet back on, and data flooded into his mind from the memory black box.

The memory black box was the product of advanced research in neuroscience, information technology, nanotechnology, and other fields. The recorder consisted of a biochip smaller than the head of a pin implanted into the hippocampus and nanosensors embedded throughout the body. Normally, the system lay dormant. But as soon as it detected severe deviations from the norm in various brain activity parameters—indicative of the stress caused by imminent death or great danger—the black box would automatically contact the police and record the short-term memory in the hippocampus via molecular scanning. In the event of death, about one to two minutes of memories preceding the cessation of brain activity could be decrypted from the black box. The device was invaluable for tasks such as criminal investigation, accident inquiry, insurance adjustment, and so on.

Although the chip was expensive, it didn’t require a craniotomy to install; instead, molecule-sized nanomachines were injected into the bloodstream, and they assembled themselves into the recorder and sensors in the requisite areas of the body without causing any discomfort. Many celebrities and the wealthy installed memory black boxes not only for the benefits in the event of death, but also to deter criminals who would wish them harm. Since the invention of the memory black box, the murder rate had plunged, accompanied by a corresponding rise in the percentage of solved murders.

The induction helmet used to replay the memories had originated in virtual reality gaming. Not only could the helmet replicate the recorded visual data and other sensory information with high fidelity, but it could also induce in the wearer the memories and emotions experienced by the deceased through artificial bioelectric fields localized to specific regions of the brain. Someone wearing the helmet would feel as though they were taking the place of the deceased, gazing through her eyes, hearing through her ears, experiencing everything she felt.

. . . As Ye Lin fell, she seemed to turn into a raindrop, one falling faster than the other raindrops. The blasting wind whipped the rain against her face as the windows of the skyscraper—some lit, some dark—flashed by her, the unconnected scenes seen through them like a string of memory fragments.

From the depths of his soul, Jiang Yong experienced terror, despair, and a profound, unrelenting hatred.

Many on the verge of death experienced a final flash of lucidity during which innumerable memories surfaced from the unconscious in a final farewell performance. Ye Lin was one of them. As she fell, millions of memory fragments danced and flickered like the ever-changing, chaotic patterns found in a kaleidoscope. The most fascinating type of experience recorded by the memory black box was this pre-death recollection. Someone replaying it through the induction helmet would even experience time as passing more slowly. Although the recollected scenes were hazy and fragmentary, when enhanced with the emotions felt by the deceased, they effectively conveyed the hidden depths and meanings behind each memory, allowing the helmet-wearer to empathize intensely with the deceased. Thus, decrypted pre-death recollections, when sold through legal channels, made a mesmerizing, fantastic entertainment product.

Jiang Yong saw the funeral of Ye Lin’s mother when she was a little girl; saw how she had lived in poverty with her alcoholic father, and vowed before a mirror, with tears staining her face, to change her fate with the one gift life gave her—her extraordinary beauty; and then, as she was stopped in the street by a talent scout, Jiang Yong experienced Ye Lin’s ecstatic heartbeats.

Once she entered the movie business, the talented Ye Lin threw herself wholeheartedly into her performances. One moment she was in period dress as she fought against the other empresses and consorts in palace intrigue; the next she was a graceful woman in a modern metropolis; and in another moment she was an adventurer in the jungle of an alien planet . . . She achieved success, accepted award after award, and became a star known in every household. She left poverty behind as she jetted around the world, hobnobbing with other international celebrities, laughing and chatting at parties . . .

And then that man appeared. At first, he was only a lowly cameraman in one of her movies who timidly manufactured excuses to be closer to her. One day, he finally found the courage to hand her a letter, which she promptly tossed into the trashcan without even unsealing. But the man didn’t give up. He stayed by her side as he advanced in his career, taking care of her and watching out for her in numerous ways, big and small. Gradually, she began to notice him, and finally, one night, after they were both drunk, the flame of romance sprung into life . . .

Jiang Yong was familiar with the basic biographical details of Ye Lin’s life, and he knew that the man in her memories was Xue Kai, a famous director and Ye Lin’s ex-husband. The memories weren’t too different from what she had revealed in her interviews and biographies, but the specific, vivid details he experienced had been absent from mere text. There was no question that if the contents of this black box were brought to market, they would become an instant best-seller.

Ye Lin was still falling. For a body to traverse the full distance between the roof of a thousand-meter-plus skyscraper and the ground, impeded by air resistance and the strong wind, would take tens of seconds, plenty of time for those important memories to play through. The sweet memories winked out of existence in a flash, and all that remained were acute pain and deep hatred.

Jiang Yong saw Ye Lin ignore the objections of the studios and retire from her acting career. She put on the white wedding gown and stood by Xue Kai in the cathedral. By now, Xue Kai was gaining some renown as a director. Soon after, Ye Lin became a joyful, expectant mother. But then a string of misfortunes arrived: she found intimate photographs of Xue Kai with other women on the computer . . . Fights between the couple flashed before Jiang Yong’s eyes; her shock, rage, and despair roiled his heart; and then Xue Kai walked into their home holding the hand of another woman, arrogantly showing her that he didn’t care—and after shoving and pushing and screaming, she rolled down the stairs, blood flowing from between her legs in a torrent. The terrified Xue Kai ran away . . .

What a shithead, Jiang Yong said to himself.

After the miscarriage, a frightened Xue Kai swore that he would break off all contact with his mistress. At the hospital, he cared for her day and night without complaint. Finally, Ye Lin forgave him. But half a year later, cruel truth revealed itself: Xue Kai abruptly disappeared. After a few days, rumors said that he had been seen with his mistress in another city, and when Ye Lin went to the bank to check her account, she found that more than thirty million yuan in savings—the couple’s joint property—had vanished. She fainted.

Courts and lawyers were useless, and even after the divorce was finalized, she couldn’t get a single yuan back. After her loss was reported in the tabloids, Xue Kai attacked her by claiming that she had defamed him. Nude pictures of her surfaced on the web from anonymous posters, and rumors spread that she was actually the mistress of some important party official or the sexual plaything of a wealthy businessman. The tabloids printed damaging “news” about her without cease, and she was dogged by threats and hurled abuses. Even contracts she had reached agreement on were rescinded. Though she knew that Xue Kai was the one making trouble for her, she had no recourse. Xue Kai had seized the public narrative. She felt she was being driven insane . . .

The concrete ground loomed before her eyes. After a momentary flash of utter despair and horror came the eternal darkness. No more memories.

Jiang Yong took off the induction helmet and exhaled deeply. Though he was used to the multitude of tragedies humans put one another through, it was hard not to be moved after experiencing such memories. The heartbreaking scenes seemed to linger before his eyes. He understood how Ningning felt—rage burned in his chest, too.

“I couldn’t believe her life was like that.” Jiang Yong heaved a heavy sigh. “When I used to read the gossip about her, I just thought she was one of those celebrities with an immoral, extravagant lifestyle. I had no idea there were such painful secrets behind the scenes.”

“It was all because of that asshole Xue Kai!” Ningning exclaimed. “He killed Ye Lin. Why can’t that son of a bitch die?!”

“He didn’t commit any crimes,” said Jiang Yong. “The law can’t punish him for what he did.”

“There is a cosmic balance at work though,” said Ningning. “Karma will catch up to him.”

Ye Lin’s death shocked the nation—no, the world. Her memory black box, of course, became the focus of media attention. As both of her parents had died, and she had no children, her legal heir, an aunt, soon declared that she would place Ye Lin’s memories on auction. Many memory entertainment companies swarmed to bid, and in the end, the black box was sold for fifteen million yuan to a megacorp, which promptly brought the memories to market. Anyone could pay the requisite fee and then experience the memories of Ye Lin on the verge of death.

And in this manner, the truth of Ye Lin’s life, which had been buried under a flood of ugly rumors while she had been alive, surfaced. Xue Kai’s despicable acts became public knowledge, and no matter what he said to defend himself, the power of those vivid memories triumphed over his rhetoric. Soon, he was buried by the tide of public opinion, and became the favorite target of the shaming mob. Many companies pulled out of contracts with him and his girlfriend; his friends stayed away; fans knocked on his door to give him a piece of their minds; and some even sent him death threats. He dared not show his face in public—one time, he was recognized in the street, and a mob harassed him and attacked him until he was afraid for his life.

This lasted half a year.

And then, Xue Kai, now at the nadir of his career, braced himself and emerged from seclusion to attend a televised gala. The other guests all kept their distances, and even the host made him the butt of several jokes. Fortunately, a fifteen-year-old girl in the audience claimed to be his die-hard fan and asked for his autograph, allowing him to save a bit of face. But as Xue Kai grinned and signed his name, the young woman pulled out a dagger and stabbed it into his belly. Then, as the shocked host and guests watched, she proceeded to stab him again and again on live TV . . .

Xue Kai died as millions watched. Afterward, the young woman received a sentence of sixteen years. However, public opinion stayed on her side, and many even opined that she should be deemed innocent for eliminating a waste of human flesh.

A few more months passed, and it was the anniversary of Ye Lin’s death. Liu Ningning, being a loyal fan, visited Ye Lin’s grave during the day and then returned to the site of Ye Lin’s suicide at night.

At one in the morning, Ningning opened the door to the rooftop platform of the Future Tower. A blast of wind greeted her, making her shiver. Imagining how Ye Lin felt on that day a year ago, Ningning stepped toward the edge where she had jumped. There was no rain on this night, and a crescent moon hung in the sky, the motley neon radiance of the metropolis spread out under its glow.

Suddenly, Ningning noticed a hazy figure standing at the edge of the roof. Startled, she almost screamed. But as she looked closer, the figure was Jiang Yong.

“Captain, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of . . . ending . . . ”

“Nothing like that.” Jiang Yong’s voice was placid. “I saw you post on NanoShare that you were thinking about coming here. I figured I’d join you.”

“Right. Hard to believe it’s been a year already. I guess Xue Kai got what he deserved. I hope Ye Lin can rest in peace.”

“I’ve replayed hundreds of pre-death memory records, but hers affected me the most. Even now, as soon as I close my eyes, I seem to be falling through the air again.” Jiang Yong gazed at the horizon and sighed.

“Your face is always so serious,” said Ningning. “I had no idea that you were . . . so sensitive.”

“Why? Do you think I’m an emotionless, case-solving robot?” Jiang Yong chuckled without mirth. “No, crime investigation requires understanding the passions that move people. Otherwise, it’s impossible to see through some cases, like this one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ningning, do you remember how you insisted that this was a murder a year ago? You were right.”

“Of course! Even though Ye Lin jumped from here, Xue Kai was the one who made her do it.”

“No. The truth is just the opposite. This was a meticulously planned murder, but Xue Kai was the victim,” Jiang Yong said.

“What . . . what are you talking about?” Ningning’s eyes widened in shock.

“Ye Lin used her own death to seek revenge against Xue Kai. Everything was planned.”

“How?”

Jiang Yong smiled. “Ye Lin knew that the contents of her memory black box would be disseminated widely after her death. She thus consciously designed and arranged her recollections. Indeed, even jumping from the Future Tower was part of her plan. This is the highest building in the city, and the long fall gave her the time to marshal her memories for maximum emotional impact. As she fell, she deliberately recalled the events of her life related to Xue Kai and invoked her intense hatred and rage. As millions replayed her memories, they weren’t just a passive audience watching a movie; instead, they experienced the same powerful emotions she did. In a sense, Ye Lin infected everyone with the fervor of her feelings. The girl who killed Xue Kai on impulse was one of the infected.”

“Are you calling her memories untrue?”

“Of course they were real, but they weren’t the entire truth.” Jiang Yong said. “After Xue Kai’s death, I replayed his memories as well. Many of his recollections conflicted with Ye Lin’s, and that was when I became suspicious. I gathered numerous other documents and evidence, and after comparing and contrasting, I discovered that Ye Lin was not entirely innocent of fault. For example, she didn’t become a star merely because a talent scout found her. In fact, she had gotten her break by trading sexual favors with producers and casting directors, and maintained a quid-pro-quo relationship with many of them long after. She also undermined competitors in the business in unethical ways, and arranged sexual liaisons for powerful executives—”

“But she never did anything to hurt Xue Kai. She loved him!” Ningning interrupted.

“True. She really did love Xue Kai. But people are complicated. She also kept many secrets from Xue Kai, who, after finding out about some of them, became angry with her. Ye Lin was also jealous and overbearing, and she insisted on monopolizing all decisions regarding the couple’s finances, which damaged the bond between them . . . There’s no doubt Xue Kai’s behavior was wrong, but he didn’t deserve to die.”

“So you’re saying . . . ” Ningning’s tone was thoughtful. “Ye Lin sought vengeance, and she used her own death to drag Xue Kai into the abyss? She was responsible for Xue Kai’s death?”

“No, the real killer of Xue Kai was someone else.”

“Who? You mean the young woman who stabbed him?”

“Ningning,” Jiang Yong said as he turned toward her and locked gazes. “The one who really sent Xue Kai down that road from which he would not return was you.”

“What kind of sick joke is this?” Blood drained from Ningning’s face.

“Contempt and resentment for Xue Kai blinded me at first as well. But once I began to suspect Ye Lin’s memories didn’t tell the whole story, I replayed her record several more times. I noticed that the record had been edited, and the final section, the few seconds right before she struck the ground, had been deleted. Whoever performed the edits was very skilled, but still, traces of tempering were left behind. Do you know what the deleted memories were?”

Ningning bit her bottom lip, refusing to answer.

“Recollections that troubled Ye Lin’s conscience, additional private details from her life with Xue Kai, happy scenes from her life, memories of her childhood, and a moment infused with deep regret right before her death. Ye Lin made a mistake. She thought she hated Xue Kai enough to desire revenge against him through her death. But she was wrong: death made everything meaningless, including vengeance itself. Her resolve, held together with great effort, collapsed at the end. In that moment before death, she no longer hated Xue Kai . . .

“And if the public had experienced the entirety of her memory record, they would have been able to view this matter with more sense.

“But the first person to decrypt and retrieve her memory was you, the loyal fan. Because of your sorrow at her death, and to protect her image, you censored those parts of her memory that were unfavorable to her. You shouldn’t have done it.”

“I . . . ” Ningning’s lips trembled as though she wanted to argue, but in the end, she gave up. “Yes, I did it! I don’t care what wrongs Ye Lin might have done, all I know is that a scumbag like Xue Kai deserved to die. I wanted to make sure the truth was more clearly presented.”

Jiang Yong shook his head. “You were wrong. A partial truth is the same as a lie. Everyone’s memories and feelings are subjective, and we’re each trapped in our own perspectives. But the differences between perspectives, collectively, create objectivity. You had no right to impose your views on others. Perhaps you have no legal responsibility for Xue Kai’s death, but as an officer of the law, tampering with the evidence subjects you to criminal prosecution. Let’s go.”

Ningning said nothing the whole time Jiang Yong drove her to the police station. But just as she was about to be brought into the detention cell, she turned around and asked, “Captain, may I ask you one more question? I can’t figure out how you managed to recover the data I deleted. I was sure I had erased it completely, and I know I didn’t make any technical mistakes.”

“I didn’t recover the data,” said Jiang Yong. “All I had were traces that deletion had occurred. You’re the only one who knows what the deleted memories were.”

“Then how were you able to tell me the contents?”

“I just guessed.” Jiang Yong sighed again. “No one can hold onto hatred in the moment before death. They always remember the earliest memories of childhood: the kind faces of loving parents, the flashes of joy and happiness—love for the beautiful parts of life always triumphs over hatred, and that is the essence of life. Ye Lin finally figured it out the moment before she died. It was too late for her, but it was better than not knowing that truth.”

Originally published in Chinese in Super Nice Magazine, July 1, 2012.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Bao Shu writes stories about the future. Published works include the novel Three Body X: The Universe of the Mind’s Eye and his short stories have been published in Sci-fi World, Super Sweet, and ZuiB.

The Algebra of Events

Elizabeth Bourne

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The alarms vibrated while I was in the comfort room sharing essence with M’m’shamir. We immediately untethered so I could couple into my duty station. The unthinkable had occurred. In the myriad calculations of probable choices guiding us to colony Whole/Three/Green the sym encountered the chance of failure and slotted it.

Everyone knows that failure is a possibility, just as everyone knows that antawa are accident-prone, and yet the antawas’ ease of use has made them ubiquitous. The risk is worth the convenience. Statistically it is so unlikely as to be nearly impossible for a probability engine to miscalculate. And yet, what is failure but one chance among many, driven by viable choices? The mathematics are beyond me, but I smell that it is so.

Panic tinged the conversation spray in the room containing the probability fields. The sym had been cut from the calculating engine and isolated. There was no question of reconnecting it. The calculation had damaged it beyond repair, and besides, the isolation had been done so quickly the sym’s delicate tissues were discolored with multiple hematomas. I’m no jampiri so I can’t say for sure, but it didn’t smell to me like the sym would survive. All we could hope for now was that the mechanicals worked and that perhaps, the sym had calculated the chance of finding a survivable planet in reachable distance.

I will make these notations as long as I can.

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Holy be the Primes, there is a planetary body within reach. The silq’uy has ordered us into freeze for the duration. It is better than remaining aware, and yet I emit fear, as do all who experienced the probability fail. This is not a planet we would pick for a colony. It is too variable, too extreme with sections of hot and cold, dry and wet. There are too many orbiting bodies. The local star is the wrong color. And the smells will be strange. We will need adaptive devices if we are to make any sense of this planet.

But the atmosphere is breathable, and as long as the bacteria farms remain in good health we should be able to survive, at least for a time. My first task on landing will be to take some of our native bacteria and begin breeding it for resistance and adaptation with whatever the alien equivalent is. Though now, I suppose we are the aliens. That is a very odd thought to smell.

M’m’shamir exudes terror, and asks if lehr could stay in my location. My friends would say this is what comes of sharing with passengers, but M’m’shamir smells enticing in a way no being has for many rota. Even though there is no time for sharing, my vestigial gill nodes flutter when M’m’shamir is close. I welcomed lehr to take comfort in my space, though we will have to part at the freeze. Colonist passengers are maintained in separate pod banks.

The silq’uy agrees a record is important, and has added making notations to my official function. My odor is increased with this honor, though a part of me now worries my emissions will be inadequate. The walls are pulsing. It is time for us to become solid. The ship’s mathematician will lead us in a conjugation of the perfect irrational to relax us into the proper state for freeze. I almost look forward to it.

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The mechanicals failed to adequately correct for this world’s gravitational pull and our landing went badly. I will never scent M’m’shamir again. We lost 30.783% of our colonists as the ship crashed, 10.56% of our crew. The probability engine cracked and raw probability calculations are even now seeping into this world.

Could it be any worse?

27.245% of my being has gone solid with grief, and there are others even more solid. The colonists are useless, seized up as they are in fear. Even the silq’uy is 12.794% solid, a sign that our situation is dire.

But lehr is urging us to fluid activity for the good of the survivors and we are all moving as best we can to repair what has been broken. The bacteria farms, holy be the Primes, are functioning well, and I have suited up already to collect native samples for use. We haven’t yet developed appropriate adaptives for this world, so all I can say is that it smells chaotic and feculent. There is no sense to be found in it, but then I am no translator.

A small group of natives approached—solids! At least on the exterior. The interior was comfortingly liquid, which the ship’s jampiri claims proves the theory that intelligent life can only exist in a fluid state. After dissecting one of the creatures lehr said that the gelatinous matter in its hard top shell was remarkably similar to our sym’s. It might, with work, be possible to create a sym replacement. This is good news.

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It has now been forty-eight rota since The Event, and we are exhausted. Much of what we have learned has been shocking. We cannot share information with the natives. We captured some of the solids for testing. They use a vibratory system, and while we can feel the patter of their vibrations on our membranes, it is beyond our translators’ abilities to understand. The native beings do not comprehend our odor-based communication, indeed it appears to cause a strong physical reaction. I myself have witnessed them falling, flailing their extremities, as they expel chaotic smelling liquids from their openings when we scent to them.

Also, this world is hostile to our embodiment and we must wear protective gear outside the ship. That alone would prevent us from feeling vibrations, so is there even a point in learning it? With regret the conclusion has been that this world may be survivable, but we can not stay here.

Against the silq’uy’s orders, our jampiri budded, using a combination of sym and native material as starter. My understanding of how he did this is imperfect, but he successfully implanted buds within the top hard parts of the natives we had in stasis. Miraculously, the buds rooted and his team is monitoring these creatures to see if they survive.

Research into the compatibility between native tissue and sym tissue has been successful. It should be possible to create a sym from the matter contained within the round top parts, but so far native matter will not thrive outside of its container. Even with the best nutrients, even spliced with matter from its native shell, it is not enough to keep this tissue alive long enough to bud. The jampiri’s team is still working on it, but this is disappointing.

There is some good news. The bacteria farms have adapted to the native bacteria (thank the Primes there are constants in the universe), and we are able to replenish ourselves with this new mix. Now we have some resistance to the effects of this hostile world.

I know this is an official notation, but it eases me to emit how much I miss M’m’shamir. What started out as a mere temporary sharing now has the overwhelming scent of memory. The two of us might some day have exchanged reproductive material, had there been time. Perhaps there might have been a new embodiment for us to nurture together. I am 7.8% solid with grief. My shipmates are kind not to mention it.

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The alarms vibrated mid rota. Solids were attacking the ship. Do they learn nothing? Again, the ones close enough were iced, then brought inside for study. Again, the ones beyond the ship’s reach ran from us. After three rota had passed a new solid approached with its extremities outstretched in the way a young embodiment might extend its pseudo pods in play. It made vibrations at us that the translators are sure are attempts to disseminate information.

Doesn’t the act of wanting to communicate indicate intelligence? Perhaps this was the deeply remote possibility that enticed our sym—that such creatures exist—and it could not resist. I comfort myself by tasting the numbers at the edges of this thought.

Our jampiri argued for a trial of one of the made things, communicators he calls them so as not to offend the translators that accepted his bud. There are seven in total. Twice that number failed. Silq’uy agreed. We watched anxiously on gels as our communicator walked stiffly toward the solid. When the solid sensed our communicator liquid ran from its organs of vision. It made very strong vibrations, then fell slapping at the ground. Then a thing we did not understand happened.

The solid pulled a weapon it had hidden beneath its decorative protective membranes and plunged it into our communicator’s front. The communicator’s physical functions have been replaced by hybrids of the jampiri’s workings so it merely blinked. Then the solid sawed at the connecting tissue between the communicator’s lower parts and the round hard part on top. (A few of the jampiri’s team hold this part, connected by so thin a stalk, is a bud. I do not believe this is true. We do not understand how these solids function.) When the native solid sawed the round thing off, our communicator fell. All the while the solid made tremendous vibrations while liquid, salt water the analysis said, ran down its membrane.

Not everyone agrees but I believe the native solid experienced emotion—that it felt the same kinds of feelings I felt when M’m’shamir was no more. Except a solid cannot turn solid with grief, so perhaps they turn liquid and that was the meaning of the salt water. I do not know if I am right, but it smells like a constant prime to me. I remain 2.46% solid. I do not think I will ever become 100% fluid again.

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It is now 248 rota since The Event, and 171 rota since the first communicator was field tested. I am very tired. My membrane is thin, and the bacteria farms are no longer adequate to maintain my optimal health. The jampiri advised me to bud several rota ago. Now my own buds are mature enough to take over my assignments, just as the jampiri’s buds did 57 rota ago. We do not live as long as we should on this world, but we hope to produce generations of buds, and perhaps someday we will also merge reproductive material again (once tests confirm the local radiation and magnetic fields are harmless). Silq’uy 1-3 (at the jampiri’s urging, the silq’uy budded earlier than any of us) says that this will be so. We will remember home. We will return some day.

I hope that is true.

Much has been learned. After many communicators were disassembled, and many more solids taken for testing, we have begun to understand each other. This species has no organ for smell, or at least not one that functions in a meaningful capacity. While no longer surprising, it remains shocking.

Jampiri 1-7 and jampiri 1-2 deduced that the solids communicate through vibrations that are registered and interpreted by a series of small sticks and membranes they call an “ear.” Really, the ear is so tiny compared to their mass it is amazing they can communicate at all.

The top round part was never a bud, but is called a “head,” and the viscous interior a “brain.” They are covered by a membrane called “skin” and additional, removable membranes called “clothes.” Their powers of movement are determined by tissues called “muscle” that levers long, calcinated sticks called “bones.” Instead of flowing, they move like machines with levers and gears and sockets. They are marvelous and repellant.

Silq’uy 1-3 has made an agreement with the solid that controls this clutch. This being has the designation Valmarka. Brain matter from this species will not splice with the sym, at least not once the head is removed. But there is compatibility. Valmarka confirmed this by communicating that soon after we crashed, colors invaded their territory. This confused and frightened them. They believe we are gods. Our sym team deduced that they experience the probability field through their highly developed organs of sight. Called eyes, I think. So many parts to remember.

We must splice sym genes with the living beings. An experiment was conducted on Valmarka, which changed lehr’s reproductive material. Beginning with lehr’s offspring, through careful breeding and an occasional boost of sym genetics, we can create a new sym. It will take time. I will not live to experience that day.

Silq’uy 1-3 has granted my request.

I will take the orb that has maintained what is left of M’m’shamir, mere scraps without enough intelligence to bud. I will ingest lehr. Then we will go outside and dissolve to become part of this strange, solid place. Our genetic material will merge with the small creatures I have always loved: bacteria, molds, yeasts, and so in some little way we will help alter this world. I am glad. Holy be the Primes.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bourne has previously published short fiction in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, and Clarkesworld. She’s currently working on a second world fantasy novel and a mystery set in prohibition age San Francisco. Bourne grew up in Lovecraft country and assures you that his work wasn't fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and is advised on her writing by her dog, Kai, who eats the bad pages.

The Occidental Bride

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

New Year: the train eels along a landscape of red snow and shadow-dust, on carbonate tracks haloed in anemic light. Heilui keeps half the window opaque to block out the field of endless machine-dead, the sight of satellites pressed against the skyline like bruised mouths on a gash. The other half she fills with a news feed: disasters in montage, kaleidoscope of calamities—cities gone dark and still, streets turned to web-cracks and sidewalks impact-raised into briars, balconies smeared in blackened lymph and rust-red blots.

She has watched it many times; has been made to, during the interrogation. The footage never fails to pull at her heart like the moon exerting its gravity on the acid tides. Pulling at her like the questions from back then, the faces and names lined up and Did you associate with this woman? This man? This woman? This man, this man, this man.

Heilui’s hands are clammy with the sweat of remembered terror, the memory of teetering on the edge of freefall. She wipes them dry. Her lap is heavy with gifts prepared by relatives: engagement boxes of jade bangles and figurines, silk slippers threaded in gold, a bag of crystallized fruits. A kintsugi bowl: black pottery broken and mended in silver, the seams radiant with age. Foreign antique, contributed by a wealthy adventurer aunt.

The train notifies her that another passenger will be joining her, transferred after one of the carriages have detached for another station. She sweeps up the gifts and blanks out the news feed.

The compartment opens in a murmur of dry, rustling leaves. A young man takes the seat opposite, giving her a respectful distance. They exchange small talk: he is heading southwest for a research lab, armed with a postgraduate grant from the University of Rajamongkol.

“And you, older sister?”

She cups her palm over the antique bowl, fingering its chimera texture, rough earth striated with the velvet smoothness of precious metal. “I’m on my way,” Heilui whispers, “to meet my bride.”

The Institute, the halfway house, sits ensconced in the hothouse hill: mantled in rough foliage, insulated from the machine ruins and their radiative hunger. This close, ignoring the wasteland of charred clay and half-alive intelligences is impossible, though Heilui tries to focus elsewhere, lash her attention to the interior of the car and the imminent appointment. Some of the interference nevertheless slips through, crooning ancient lullabies of wars eons gone, status dispatches from combat centuries ended. Some are foreign, some are in Putongwa and Fukginwa. Others are in Dakman with a smattering of Yingman recounting casualties. Strange-sounding names crowd in a white-noise fog, synthetic and toneless.

Within the Institute’s walls the wasteland sky is blocked out by a seashell husk, bred into immensity to shield the entire compound. She is received at the gate by a guidance routine taking the form of a red-beaked crane. It gives her directions in a perky tourmaline voice and instructs her to avoid contact with candidates other than her own. Heilui is glad to comply, though she does steal glances at the manicured topiary and moss-ridden trellises, the small gazebos and polished benches. Young women and younger men, ghost-pale and exotic, in muted cosmetics and pastel dresses. They drift eyes downward or sit prim and quiet. She can’t spot any of them in conversation with one another; they arrange themselves as though hyper-conscious of an audience.

The crane guides her to a private vestibule, where a low table waits with tea and covered wicker baskets. Heilui lifts the lids to find radish pastries and steamed red-pork buns. She doesn’t sample either; no point leaving crumbs all over herself and marring that first impression. Instead she stacks up the gifts. Briefly she wonders if she should have brought a bouquet—the culture of her bride’s birth values flowers as a courtship sign, though she imagines their bouquets must be as translucent as their people, frosted leaves and ivory petals, flora gone extinct when that continent heaved and broke.

It is then that the crane starts speaking in her interrogator’s voice. Heilui nearly leaps out of her seat.

“Relax, Doctor Lan,” says the interrogator, that same mild contralto she remembers. “We chose you for the case because we believe you better equipped than most to manage her. The subject has been neutralized entirely and you needn’t fear that she will be a danger.”

“I’ll do my best.” Heilui licks parched lips.

“This isn’t a test, though when the operation concludes successfully your profile will be cleaned up. No longer a person of interest, no more record of your unfortunate—but entirely innocuous of course, as you’ve proven—association with occidental terrorists. Good luck.”

The line cuts. The vestibule’s partition folds aside and Heilui’s bride enters.

Kerttu is tall and large-boned, as her people often are, bred in a land of giant-myths and arctic blaze. In echo of this image her hair is pale as snowdrift. Eyelashes mascara-gilded, eyelids faintly dusted copper, cheekbones accentuated to skeletal sharpness as though to compensate for the unreality of her pallor. The only spot of color above her neck is the fuchsia on her lips, applied to hone the corners of her mouth to crisp edges. Her bodice is closely fitted, the sleeves gradating from peach to oxblood cuffs, the skirt narrow and long: the colors are some of Heilui’s favorites, the style close to what she might herself wear. The Institute has been attentive.

So ordinary, Heilui thinks, and tries to visualize Kerttu as she once was—in a lab coat, imperious over her empire of living matrices, her gleaming hives of bioweapons. But she can’t quite picture it, this woman as the engineer of genocides.

Kerttu gives an antique bow, one fist cupped inside her palm. “Happy new year, Doctor Lan.”

“Heilui will do, please. Sit. Have you eaten?” She nods at the dishes, wondering if Kerttu can use chopsticks. “Your Gwongdungwa is excellent.” An odd, piquant accent but she’s hardly going to criticize.

“You honor me. I’ve had fine teachers.”

A conversational dead-end. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

One long, slow blink. The occidental woman’s pupils are unnervingly black, emphasized as they are by irises the hue of jellyfishes. “Why did you pick me, Doctor?”

Heilui turns the teacups upright. Pours. A distinct scent of plum rises. “Perhaps I spotted you in the Institute database and recognized destiny at first sight.” She pushes a cup over. “In Jatbun, they say that a red thread joins fated partners and you only need to pursue it to the other end. When you find yours, at once you will know it—the tug in your blood through your thumb as your fortune draws taut as pipa strings.”

Kerttu curls her fingers around the teacup without flinching from the heat. “I don’t think it was my looks. There are others here younger than I am, more aesthetically pleasing. Is it the novelty of having a former mafia researcher and tamed war criminal for a wife?”

“You are a person, not a novelty object,” she says. “The Institute recommended you, I thought it a fine suggestion, and I’m under some pressure to wed.”

“Many factors affect the making of a purchase. Desirable attributes go on one side of the scale, the price tag on the other. This is perhaps the most honest form of marriage.” Kerttu sips gingerly, her expression pinching at the sourness, the unfamiliar. “Is that why you opted for the Institute instead of selecting from your peers? Though I think the latter might have been cheaper.”

“I wanted my options from a different pool, and I chose you. Is that not enough? You can say no.”

“I won’t.” This is said quickly, breathless like a gunshot.

Heilui holds out her hand. “Shall we try to make this work?”

Kerttu takes it, and with those painted lips kisses Heilui’s fingertips one by one.

They marry on the train, the world’s ruin rushing past in silent witness. Kerttu hands over a fistful of gold earrings as though they burn her and, with detached grace, accepts the small mountain of dowry. She puts on the one bangle large enough for her wrist as the portable altar officiates: simulated incense and ancestors, two-dimensional gods rotating to give them blessings—mercy, prosperity, fertility. Kerttu’s identity rearranges itself to Lan Kerttu, alphabet to calligraphy.

“There’s usually much more ceremony,” Heilui says, apologetic, “and nine courses of food. And your family would see you off . . . ”

“This is fine.” Her wife cradles the kintsugi bowl, thumb running laps around its rim. “The last wedding I attended was a conflagration of opulence with a twenty-course banquet—one could die of abundance, asphyxiate on splendor. But it also involved people getting shot in the head and a couple of poisonings, though at least both grooms were unscathed. I also haven’t had a family since I was six.”

That factoid Heilui knows, though she can’t conceive of being kinless. There should have been relatives to raise her, a small herd of uncles and aunts and in-laws. “How did you like the Institute?”

“All of us hid our old lives; we never discussed our history and if we recognized each other from before, we pretended ignorance. Many of us wear scars.” Kerttu holds up her wrists, showing them unmarred and smooth, and points at her throat: just as clean, all the access points to arteries without scars. “Not me, though. I’ve never been able to stand the sight of my own blood, the weight of my own pain. What we discussed all the time, where the cameras didn’t reach, was our prospective clients. Who they might be, what sort of services we might be required to provide. Until a week ago, Doctor, I had no inkling of who you were.”

“I’d have liked an introduction sooner, but their protocols are so strict. They did treat you well?” A needless question; the Institute keeps its charges in the greatest comfort.

“I never wanted for anything.” Kerttu sets the bowl aside. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

The subject has been neutralized entirely. “Why would I need to be afraid of my bride?”

In good time they arrive home, a complex of four tapered serpent-buildings wound loosely around a central hall. Redwood columns clad in bismuth crystal, flat roofs topped in gunmetal tiles, a modest lake: from what she knows Kerttu lived in more sumptuous arrangements, a spider citadel of phantasmagoria matrices and psychedelic weave, but her wife nevertheless widens her eyes as they disembark. “How many live here?” Kerttu asks softly. “I thought you only lived with your family.”

“I do. Extended family. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?” Heilui pulls up a layout of the estate, cupping the display in her palm like an egg of enameled rime. “The southwest hall belongs to my grandparents and some great-grandparents, the southeast one—oh, Aunt Daruwan lives there but she’s not in. Probably off unearthing crash sites or mapping crisis regions, you’d like her. Here, we’re in the northeastern one, the Tangerine.”

By luck it is dinner hour, most of the family is assembled in the communal hall. No one is there to crowd in and overwhelm them when they enter the Tangerine’s sunset corridors. Kerttu’s luggage trails behind them, as silent as its owner. Even her suitcases are Institute-mandated for refinement, matte-black leather and copper filigree. Heilui suspects that when they unpack, Kerttu’s wardrobe will precisely match Heilui’s tastes. That is something she will need to remedy—a trip to the city, a stop at a tailor’s boutique. The Institute is exacting and thorough in how it molds its charges, but that level of micromanagement bothers her despite the brittleness of all this, the fraught weight of Kerttu’s presence.

Heilui’s segment of the house spans three units, study, bedroom, and a simulator box where she does most of her work. “I’ll get you your own bed.” She gestures at a modular divan. “Until then, I hope you won’t mind that?”

“You don’t wish me to share yours?” Kerttu absently pets her luggage, but her attention is on Heilui. A smile grows on her lips, like weeds, like thorns. “I would, sincerely, find it no chore.”

Talons of heat sizzle on the back of Heilui’s ears. “Please make yourself comfortable. The bath is down the corridor.”

“Thank you.” Kerttu twists apart the sleeves of her dress as though about to disrobe on the spot, casting off the fabric the way a snake molts. “May I ask a question?”

“By all means.”

“What did I cost you?” She is loosening the collars. A glimpse of clavicles, nearly paper-white, veins shining through. “I know that no money changed hands; the Institute takes currencies much more nebulous. But there is an essential truth that governs existence, greater and stronger than any force, and it is that on every object there is a price. What was mine?”

Heilui laughs, faltering. The dress recedes and a shoulder comes bare, rounded and marked with a tattoo that declares Kerttu’s former allegiance. Butterflies congregating on a corpse, proboscises sipping sweat: the crest of a cartel, the symbol of ownership. “It’s more complicated than that. We could discuss it one day. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my family.”

At breakfast, everyone convenes to see the foreign bride.

She sits like a mannequin of frost and plaster, consuming porridge and condiments as solemnly as a funeral meal. The Lan children gawk at her openly; one of Heilui’s youngest nieces whispers—audibly—speculating whether Kerttu’s pallor might leave white smudges on the utensils and tea-bowls; whether it might rub off on the furniture like icing. Their parents shush them, but adult scrutiny is hardly more discreet. Heilui’s mothers regard Kerttu with pointed appraisal, no doubt already cataloguing many faults and improprieties.

On her part Kerttu behaves as though she is by herself, facing an empty room, the round ivory-and-teak table all her own rather than occupied by fifteen. Occasionally, as though she is remembering from etiquette training, she puts food on Heilui’s plate—a knot of pork floss, a slice of yaujagwai. This is done stiffly and gingerly. Kerttu, Heilui recalls, wouldn’t be used to sharing food this way; where she came from each person keeps to their own dish, even among family and intimate friends.

Heilui makes desultory conversation and asks after Aunt Daruwan. She knows that once her family can corner her alone she’ll be barraged with questions; she has told none of them of Kerttu’s background, allowing them to believe that her choice of spouse is conventional and untied to any state interest. Already an uncle and two cousins are bombarding her with messages. She mutes the notifications and, at the first polite opportunity, excuses herself. Kerttu makes her obeisance, courtly, to family elders and follows Heilui’s suit.

They find a spot by one of the garden gates, behind an enclosure of hybrid bamboos and ceramic partitions. Kerttu arranges her skirts—fuller today, loosely made; another style Heilui herself likes—and folds herself like a paper puppet. “Am I making things difficult?”

“They’ll come around, everyone just needs time to adjust.” Heilui silences another message, unread, and extends her palm. “Here’s a prototype I’ve been working on. Very unfinished, more a framework than anything.”

“It appears to be an anthropological modeling program.” Kerttu tilts her head. “Not my field, Doctor. I was a biochemist.”

“It’s a sim of the shattered continent. I’ve been ambitious with the scope and detail, so I would like—” She gives a laugh, makes a helpless gesture. “An authenticity check, maybe? I’ll get you your own shell, it’s last-generation and I haven’t upgraded it for a while, but . . . ”

“It was a research subject that you required then, not a spouse.”

“Not at all!” Heilui says quickly. “Why don’t we go into the city? You can pick out your own clothes.”

“You’re treating me extravagantly for a person you purchased.” The biochemist turns the shell this way and that, her painted nails a shock of aqua against her phantom skin. “I’m not saying that to be judgmental or bitter—I’m neither; I’ve been owned since I was young, treated as investment, my intelligence bought and traded for. I understand my position perfectly. There’s no need to woo me. Ask and I will serve.”

A frisson sings through Heilui, chased by a wash of nausea: for a moment she could understand the sick supremacy of commanding utter, total power over another human being. “Come on. Let’s get you to a tailor.”

She loads her spare shell with the modeling client and turns that over to Kerttu, who engages the program with the rapt concentration of a sniper on her target. When they reach the commerce arcade, Kerttu looks up blinking as though jolted from a trance. She folds the shell away and surveys the velvet web of shops, the walkways weaving through them like ribbons. Tension pinches her expression as they join the crowd’s flow, families in New Year finery, children and young couples out to spend their red envelope money.

Surreptitiously, Heilui searches the faces around them for a trace of the foreign, perhaps a declaration of suspicious intent etched into the downturn of a mouth, sewn into the hem of a skirt or sleeve, a glimpse of the butterflies emblem. But she finds nothing, sighting no set of features that is not everyday and ordinary to her, no complexion as startling as Kerttu’s or a nose so angular. She does not find the man who slaughtered countries, the man who once owned her wife.

“Something’s making you uncomfortable.” Heilui loops her arm through Kerttu’s. “What is wrong?”

“I’m the only foreigner here.” Kerttu has switched to Dakman, harsh and rolling.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry—the staff here is perfectly used to foreigners. There are expatriates all over Kowloon, of every nationality you can imagine. I’ll put you in touch with them, if you like.”

“By law I’m forbidden from making contact with those from the shattered continent, just as I’m forbidden from pursuing my previous specialty. I’m wearing certain implants to ensure my compliance. I appreciate your thought, Doctor.”

At the tailor, Kerttu is imaged by a dozen mannequins that revolve slowly on their feet, laughing and animated as they flicker from style to style, season to season. In the end she chooses a postmodern keipou, unpatterned black sheathing her like carapace. Sleeveless, high crescent collars, unrelieved contrast between fabric and complexion making a monochrome print of Kerttu. “I lost much and there was never a funeral,” she explains the color. “I need to mourn. I expect I’ll always be mourning.”

But this, like everything else, is said with distance as though discussing someone else’s grief.

Their next stop is the Shau Kei Wan Temple, where Tinhau presides. Not the most traditional choice when it comes to matrimony, but Heilui has a special fondness for the sea goddess, and this temple is one of the few where Kwunyam is depicted in her male aspect while the war god Kwantai is presented as a woman: green-robed and armored, puissant with restrained fury. Heilui shows Kerttu the correct paper offerings to make, the right number of virtual incenses to ignite. They shake kaucim cups side by side, have the cast of their fortune read by streamed oracles.

It belatedly occurs to Heilui, on their way back, to ask Kerttu if she is a monotheist. Her wife shrugs, a peculiarly foreign gesture. “My faith rests in the belief that the human capability for innovation and malice is infinite. I admit no other gods, pray to no other pantheon. I’ve never been disappointed.”

Back at the Lan house they are ambushed at the gate, a gaggle of nieces and nephews swarming over Kerttu. Heilui presses a sheaf of red envelopes into her wife’s hand, each filled with account chips. “One per head,” she says, grinning. Under the shade of a butterfly tree, one of her mothers is waiting; she knows what that look means. “Don’t let them get greedy. Make them say the magic phrase first.”

Kerttu holds the envelopes loosely and stares in bemusement, to a high-pitched chorus of gong hei fat choi. Heilui draws aside to join Mother Meitin under the fluttering, winged canopy. “We need to talk.” Meitin does not quite glance sidelong at Kerttu. “About . . . that.”

“She’s not a that, Mother.”

“Are you going to have children with her?” Meitin frowns. “They’d turn out looking rather dead. And her table manners! I thought the Institute had the foreign ones trained well?”

“She will adapt.” Equivocating. “And she is unique. I don’t think I could have found anyone like her at the university or through any of your friends, or . . . ”

Her mother sniffs. “An acquired taste, I’m sure. Well, your choices are your own and you’re a woman grown. At least she’s educated, I suppose.”

Heilui refrains from pointing out that as a biochemist, Kerttu’s credentials are more impressive than most. Instead she watches her wife keep the envelopes out of the children’s reach in one hand, distributing them with the other to the niece or nephew who has approximated a correct pronunciation of Aunt Kerttu.

Over the next weeks Kerttu drifts uneasily within the family home, colliding with or grazing past elders. She does not succeed in endearing herself to them, though Heilui notes with relief that the children have taken a liking to Kerttu, for her occidental novelty if nothing else. Any time she has a free moment, Kerttu would obsessively spend it on the simulation.

Heilui monitors Kerttu’s progress, trying to use the map of her wife’s virtual wanderings to create an image that would pierce the inscrutable, remote shell. A crucial piece that would make the Kerttu she is seeing cohere with the Kerttu the mass murderer who created weapons that destroyed the shattered continent, the war criminal. Often she thinks of asking, Did you understand what you were doing? At the beginning, she mustn’t have, a prodigy whose supple intelligence was exploited, whose mind was slowly conditioned to regard her work as normal.

Even then it is difficult to be afraid of Kerttu, who inhabits Heilui’s life with the soft focus of a ghost. Difficult to connect her with those atrocities, the solidity of statistics and the hard industrial edges of war. But then it is difficult to connect the shattered continent—smooth and pretty while it lived—with its history of dialects born and annexed, its first contacts negotiated through a language of exploitation and expansion.

“You’ve been distant. Am I boring you?” Kerttu asks one evening as they share a dinner out in the city.

“Certainly not,” Heilui says, laughing. “You have been nothing but delightful.”

Kerttu cuts her pasta into fine, thin slices, scraping off the layer of plum sauce. The restaurant purports to serve the cuisines of the shattered continent, though perhaps less authentically than Kerttu is used to. “I don’t think your family would agree, though I’ve made efforts.”

“My family is your family too.” Heilui rests her chin on her hand. “Some of them you’ll never win over, it’s just how they are. There have been feuds where siblings couldn’t forgive each other on their deathbeds. Lan elders are hard to please, no doubt about that.”

“Except you are harder still. You haven’t . . . ” A frown. “You haven’t asked anything of me. Yet you must have bought me to fulfill a function, and I don’t think it’s to satisfy the fantasy of possessing a person whole and entire. You haven’t done anything to exert your ownership.”

“I like you just the way you are. Is that so hard to believe?” She glances at her shell, taking a sip of honeyed lime. Expecting to hear her interrogator’s voice again. Even today she remains ignorant of the woman’s name or rank. Black ops. Counter-terrorism. “Would you like to try the simulation in immersive mode, Kerttu? You need a headset and will have to plug into the server I’ve got at home. Not perfect, but perhaps . . . ?”

Kerttu’s breath hitches, audibly, as though that idea has shocked her pulse to a halt. “I would love nothing more. You do me too much kindness.”

“Not at all—we’ll immerse together, yes? You can grade me on the simulation.”

Several nights later, she starts awake to a hand over hers, long-fingered and tentative. Blearily she sits up to find Kerttu kneeling by her bed, a shadow dressed in gossamer lace. “Doctor.” Kerttu’s voice comes petal-soft. “Will you invite me in?”

Wide awake now, Heilui rubs at her eyes and stares at her wife, then at the bed on the other end of their shared room. “I think you misunderstand. I’m not—what’s between us doesn’t have to be a transaction, not like that.”

Kerttu’s hand withdraws. “I should earn my keep, my care. I have said before that it’s no ordeal—unless I hold so little appeal?”

“It’s not that.” Heilui scoots inward, making room. “Come in. We can sleep together, in the most literal sense.”

“Like sisters?” A trick of filtered moonlight makes it seem as though ice crystals have caught on Kerttu’s eyelashes. A snow-woman of Jatbun myth, visiting in the night to drink her lover’s spirit.

“Like wife and wife. Not all marriages need to be heat and desire. Or at least that’s not what I want. If it’s what you . . . you can find others for that. I wouldn’t mind. But for me—”

“Oh.” Exhaled surprise. “I see, I think.”

Kerttu climbs in beside her, awkward, hesitating. A sigh loosens from her lips as she settles in against Heilui’s warmth and her arm snakes over, one hand splayed on Heilui’s stomach. “Is this all right, Doctor?” Asked as though she fears she might singe Heilui with that much contact, that much closeness.

She laces her fingers through Kerttu’s. “It’s lovely.”

They spend the night like that, entwined. They spend the next likewise, and the next after, learning the rhythm of each other’s breath, the curve of each other’s spine and the width of each other’s waist. A nascent dialect of touch, a first contact negotiated through comfort. A slow formation of matrimony like the founding of a country, while Heilui swallows back the secret code of guilt.

The first time they stand in front of the server together is a clear morning where icicles crackle on the window like chimes. The simulator box is built of blueshift alloy, radiant with cold, an artifact of the world’s ruin and its eternal winter. With a command Heilui logs in and draws out two headsets. One she turns over to Kerttu, the other she slips around her own temple, a mesh with the texture of satin.

“Anything particular you’d like to see?” she asks.

“The city.” Kerttu touches the headset’s lattice. “The club.”

Within the offspring of Heilui’s thought, cities throng the shattered continent like firmaments lit up in their thousands. But she knows from watching her wife which one Kerttu means—the city of her birth, the capital of her native land.

The program pushes under their skin, flares across their senses, a susurration of colors and ice. Then they are side by side in the Tavastia, backstage. Darkened interior, hexagon walls dressed in facets and prism coins. Overhead, mannequins sway gently, many-jointed arachnid limbs painted in patterns of cracked granite.

Kerttu pushes at the mannequins, making them clack. At her height they are in easy reach; she strokes their bald heads and thumbs their ovoid eye sockets. “My mother always longed to sing here. I don’t remember her face, her voice, even her name. At six she sold me to the syndicate. I fetched a good price—a mind such as I own doesn’t come by every day—and I wonder if she ever got her wish, to perform on a Tavastia stage. The first ten years I was kept entirely in the citadel to be imprinted for loyalty. By the time I was allowed to leave, she was gone. Or didn’t want to be found.”

“I’m sorry,” Heilui says before she can stop herself.

“No need, Doctor. My mother, she wasn’t an educated or well-off woman. The syndicate gave me a life of ease and refinement, my intelligence nurtured and honed to its utter best. Had my mother raised me according to her means, today I’d be just another refugee in the camps, if I even survived.” Kerttu clasps her hands behind her back—in the virtuality she wears not her grieving black but a peridot shirt and gray trousers, an overcoat in duochrome indigo. “There are no people here.”

She follows her wife to the stage. It is full of unmanned instruments made from jagged blades and razorglass tendons. The floor is strobe-lit but empty of dancers; puppets sit by the side, prim and inanimate. “Anything I populate this world with would just be automatons—as complex a set of heuristics as I can buy, but they wouldn’t emulate human behavior with any degree of verisimilitude. I’ve thought of modeling you, actually.”

“I hope you’ll agree that it is not hubris but fact that makes me point out I’m not exactly a population average. Not culturally, not in disposition, not in politics. Modeling those from the camps would likely yield better results.”

“A population comprised entirely of averages would be terribly unrealistic, but I take your point.”

Kerttu tugs at her sleeve as though to test whether the physics engine holds up to scrutiny. “I have a request to make of you, Doctor. You may believe me ungrateful—”

“Please,” Heilui says. “I’ve no reason to think that.”

“May I go into the city on my own? I wish to familiarize myself with its ligatures and arteries, to find my own path climbing its ribs and vertebrae all sharp with salt. I wish to know this island where I will spend the rest of my life as your wife.”

Heilui’s pulse picks up. “You hardly need my permission. Your shell should be loaded with guidance routines, but if you run into any trouble you only need to call me.”

“You are far more generous a client than I could ever dream of.” Kerttu makes again that ancient bow, as elegant as it is incongruous with her outfit. Heilui realizes with a start that no matter the correctness of her gesture, no matter her fluency in Gwongdungwa, Kerttu will never fit quite right.

On Kerttu’s initial excursions, Heilui refrains from trailing her. Her wife comes home late each time; Heilui never asks questions and simply waits in bed, her arms bangled in moonlight. When Kerttu has bathed and changed she would come to card her fingers through Heilui’s hair, root to tip, until they fall asleep.

It is on Kerttu’s fifth outing that Heilui tracks her—a bite of conscience, a twist of shame. She monitors her wife’s wanderings through markets that snake up pagodas, through secret streets behind amber pavilions, past the honeycombs of waterfront gardens where hybrid peacocks strut in sunset trails. Heilui tells herself Kerttu is monitored in any case, but she can’t get rid of the certainty that she’s committing a small betrayal.

When Heilui at last follows her wife in person, it is down the harbor where beaked ferries knife the waters to white ribbons. She sits on the mezzanine of a floating restaurant, watching the world through sea spray. Watching as Kerttu enters the planetarium in her black keipou. Soon a man in the same shade follows her. Tall like Kerttu and just as colorless, a creature of her race and nation, raised on snow nova-bright. Heilui studies him: he is gaunt to the point of starvation but well-dressed, hair a few shades darker than Kerttu’s, a skull of cadaverous planes. In the Institute, no doubt his caretakers would have warmed his features with cosmetics to make him less startling to prospective clients.

The two do not leave together; the man lingers behind, his gaze intent on Kerttu as she exits. From this far Heilui cannot appraise his expression—those harsh angles make him, like Kerttu, difficult to read—but she thinks he seems painfully lost. As much as a dangerous terrorist can seem lost. She tries to imagine him as the shadow behind assassinations of heads of state, the shadow behind the sales of private armies and weaponry and untold destruction. But as with Kerttu, she can only see an ordinary man. Foreign, but merely mortal. He doesn’t even sport the corpse-butterfly tattoo anywhere that she can glimpse.

A wanted man who surfaces, exposing himself, just to retrieve Heilui’s wife.

The second time he comes for Kerttu, it is on a rooftop maze.

An art installment writ large, the maze is composed—syllabaric symphony—of elemental strands: wood and metal, fire and earth, and water to complete the quintet. Batik lions move against jade tortoises on a steam tapestry. Patchwork topiaries flourish on inked wires and luminous nesting dolls. Guidance materializes as a calligraphic girl, torso and limbs all made of brushstrokes, shedding proverbs and verses to give Heilui directions. She waits for the creature to begin whispering in a mild human contralto, but it remains only rote and routes. Overhead, starlings flit from candle-roof to platinum bough.

By the time Heilui reaches Kerttu, the girl is down to quartered ink and halved characters.

She takes cover behind a spread of bronze longma and marble rabbits. And there they are, a tableau like theater-dolls awaiting an audience: he a statue in black from neck to ankle, elongated limbs sheathed in crisp, expensive tailoring. Kerttu is seated on a bench of braided rime and gridded kites, her hair a pale corona. As if given life by Heilui’s spectating gaze, Kerttu stirs to motion and turns away from him. On her lap she holds the kintsugi bowl. “Yes,” she is saying, “I imagine the bowl holds enough genetic material with which to forge identity templates and authenticate my release from Institute trackers.”

“Good.” His voice is a scratch of stone chipping at wood. He runs a knuckle down his lapel, smoothing the impeccable fabric, a nervous tic. “That should suffice. I’ll contact you again when I’ve made the necessary arrangements.”

“No.”

The man’s hand slows then goes still, as of an automaton winding down. “Are you afraid, Kerttu? I’ve never known you for a coward.”

She looks up, her gaze ensnaring his, the gravity of a pyre drawing in moths. Heilui has learned her wife’s moods and in that moment she knows there’s no hesitation. Kerttu’s corneas seem like lamp-glass to a flame, small but absolute. “I’ve never been afraid. I’m just not leaving with you.”

A gunshot like a soldier’s final breath. An eruption of starlings, crying out.

The man falls, too fast for someone who should be bird-light, for a body that ought to float like gossamer or shredded ghosts. Where his blood touches Kerttu’s clothes it does not show; where it lands on Kerttu’s head it beads ruby-vivid against the snowdrift of her hair, the white slope of her brow.

Bursts of communication, armored men and women spilling from between the maze’s strands: a rush of black, acid tides. They collect the man’s body, quick and efficient, folding him into a casket. A puppet returning to its box.

Between all this, Kerttu’s expression never changes, as though his death belongs to someone else.

A day later, Heilui receives a copy of her dossier. It has been wiped clean as if nothing has ever happened, as though she’s never been made to sit shivering in a metal chair, to answer question after question. To single out faces for betrayal. The copy deletes itself after one read. She doesn’t hear from her interrogator; she doesn’t expect she ever will. A vulgar touch—several sums transferred into her account, absurdly large, acrimoniously transactional. She doesn’t return them, knowing she can’t afford the luxury of pride.

She finds her wife kneeling before the server, already plugged in. She follows.

The church is carved from solid rock, a copper-roofed globe drenched in bronze evening. The floor murmurs quartz canticles underfoot. Kerttu is enclosed in a pebble-rounded pew, a carpet of white furs and ice crystals mounded at her bare feet. “I was never religious,” she says without turning, “but I liked Temppeliaukio. It is—was—a good hideout when I wanted to think. When I wanted peace, but usually it was too crowded. In a way, you’ve created the perfect version of my country for me.”

“Kerttu—” Heilui draws a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

Her wife turns around. Rime cracks at her movement, sloughing off her shoulders in flecks and teardrops. “There’s no need, Doctor. I always knew I was released from the Institute for a purpose and he was a priority target. Of all his surviving associates, I made the best bait. I’m only curious why you did it. Is it simply patriotism? Frightening as his reputation was, I don’t think he would have resumed his work. He meant to lie low, disappear. Change his face again and become just an ordinary man.”

“Five years ago occidental terrorists infiltrated my university and I got close to one of them, a woman I thought I could marry. She . . . made use of me to access our archives, I don’t remember anymore what data she got. I was arrested as a potential accessory and though found innocent, it scarred my records. This—I was offered amnesty. My name cleared.” Within the virtuality she is not subjected to involuntary reactions, the tyranny of cortisol and serotonin, but she’s accustomed to configuring her avatar to reflect her real body as much as possible. Her throat is sore and thick. “Why didn’t you? Go with him.”

Kerttu folds her hands. Snow blooms, unmelting, on her knuckles like wedding rings. “Ultimately it is a question of whose property I am. What did he offer? A life on the run, dogged each step by terror. The past is past. There’s no use resurrecting a hill of ashes. The dead do not come back. The arrow of time doesn’t reverse.”

Heilui purses her mouth, opens it. Exhales. “My contract with the Institute isn’t permanent. There’s been no further . . . instructions. After what’s happened, you should have this choice. You can go back to the Institute and they’ll find you another client.”

“Is that what you want, Heilui?”

A painful-sweet wrench in her chest: like love, like cardiac arrest. It is strategically placed and cannot be inadvertent, but even so. “You’ve never called me by name before, like that, ever.”

“The Institute appears to be done with me. I’m of no further use to them and therefore I’m now granted freedom, after a fashion, as long as they can track me and I’m tethered to a client.” Kerttu looks, unblinking, at Heilui with her aquatic eyes. “A future can be had and a new life can be built. That is what you offer me and I’d like to take you up on it.”

Logical. Transactional, as this has been from the beginning. And yet Heilui finds herself smiling. “No, you’re right. And if you were gone, I’d miss you. I’ll have to talk my family around, but my mothers at least I think I can convince.”

“I will do my best to be the daughter-in-law they can tolerate. They will be my family, my mothers.”

Heilui laughs, surprising herself, the sound of a scale tipping in her heart. “So they would. I never asked you properly before, did I, so—Kerttu, will you be my wife?”

Kerttu gathers Heilui in her arms and kisses her brow, soft and warm. “Yes. Let’s try to make this work together.”

At their feet, the frost of Kerttu’s country thaws: a pool clear as the first water of spring, blue-green and sharp with salt.

Out in the world of mortal flesh and unbearable history, on the island surrounded by storm and sea, the occidental bride never dons black again.

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

Canary Land

Tom Purdom

Back home in Delaware County, in the area that was generally known as the “Philadelphia region,” the three guys talking to George Sparr would probably have been descended from long dead ancestors who had immigrated from Sicily. Here on the Moon they were probably the sons of parents who had been born in Taiwan or Thailand. They had good contacts, the big one explained, with the union that “represented” the musicians who played in eateries like the Twelve Sages Cafe. If George wanted to continue sawing on his viola twelve hours a day, thirteen days out of fourteen, it would be to his advantage to accept their offer. If he declined, someone else would take his place in the string quintet that the diners and lunchers ignored while they chatted.

On Earth, George had played the viola because he wanted to. The performance system he had planted in his nervous system was top of the line, state-of-the-art. There had been weeks, back when he had been a normal take-it-as-it-comes American, when he had played with a different trio or quartet every night, including Saturday, and squeezed in two sessions on Sunday. Now his performance system was the only thing standing between him and the euphoric psychological states induced by malnutrition. Live music, performed by real live musicians, was one of the lowest forms of unskilled labor. Anybody could do it, provided they had attached the right information molecules to the right motor nerves. It was, in short, the one form of employment you could count on, if you were an American immigrant who was, when all was said and done, only a commonplace, cookbook kind of biodesigner.

George’s grasp of Techno-Mandarin was still developing. He had been scraping for money when he had left Earth. He had sold almost everything he owned—including his best viola—to buy his way off the planet. The language program he had purchased had been a cheap, quick-and-dirty item that gave him the equivalent of a useful pidgin. The three guys were talking very slowly.

They wanted to slip George into one of the big artificial ecosystems that were one of the Moon’s leading economic resources. They had a contact who could stow him in one of the carts that delivered supplies to the canaries—the “long term research and maintenance team” who lived in the ecosystem. The contact would think she was merely transferring a container that had been loaded with a little harmless recreational material.

George was only five-eight, which was one reason he’d been selected for the “opportunity.” He would be wearing a guaranteed, airtight isolation unit. Once inside, he would hunt down a few specimens, analyze their genetic makeup with the equipment he would be given, and come out with the information a member of a certain Board of Directors was interested in. Robots could have done the job, but robots had to be controlled from outside, with detectable radio sources. The Director (George could hear the capital, even with his limited knowledge of the language), the Director wanted to run some tests on the specimens without engaging in a direct confrontation with his colleagues.

There was, of course, a very real possibility the isolation suit might be damaged in some way. In that case, George would become a permanent resident of the ecosystem—a destiny he had been trying to avoid ever since he had arrived on the Moon.

The ride to the ecosystem blindsided George with an unexpected rush of emotion. There was a moment when he wasn’t certain he could control the sob that was pressing against the walls of his throat.

He was sitting in a private vehicle. He was racing along a strip of pavement, with a line of vehicles ahead of him. There was sky over his head and a landscape around him.

George had spent his whole life in the car-dominated metropolitan sprawls that had replaced cities in the United States. Now he lived in a tiny one room apartment, in a corridor crammed with tiny one room apartments rented by other immigrants. His primary form of transportation was his own legs. When he did actually ride in a vehicle, he hopped aboard an automated cart and shared a seat with someone he had never seen before. He could understand why most of the people on the Moon came from Asiatic countries. They had crossed two hundred and fifty thousand miles so they could build a new generation of Hong Kongs under the lunar surface.

The sky was black, of course. The landscape was a rolling desert composed of craters pockmarked by craters that were pockmarked by craters. The cars on the black strip were creeping along at fifty kilometers per hour—or less—and most of the energy released by their batteries was powering a life support system, not a motor. Still, he looked around him with some of the tingling pleasure of a man who had just been released from prison.

The trio had to explain the job to him and some of the less technical data slipped out in the telling. They were also anxious, obviously, to let him know their “client” had connections. One of the corporation’s biggest products was the organic interface that connected the brains of animals to electronic control devices. The company’s major resource was a woman named Ms. Chao who was a big expert at developing such interfaces. Her company had become one of the three competitors everybody in the field wanted to beat.

In this case the corporation was upgrading a package that connected the brains of surveillance hawks to the electronics that controlled them. The package included genes that modified the neurotransmitters in the hawk’s brain and it actually altered the hawk’s intelligence and temperament. The package created, in effect, a whole new organ in the brain. You infected the brain with the package and the DNA in the package built a new organ—an organ which responded to activity within the brain by releasing extra transmitters, dampening certain responses, etc. Some of the standard, medically approved personality modifications worked exactly the same way. The package would increase the efficiency of the hawk’s brain and multiply the number of functions its owners could build into the control interface.

Their Director, the trio claimed, was worried about the ethics of the other directors. The reports from the research and development team indicated the project was months behind schedule.

“Our man afraid he victim big cheat,” the big one said, in slow Techno-Mandarin pidgin. With lots of emphatic, insistent hand gestures.

It had been the big one, oddly enough, who had done most of the talking. In his case, apparently, you couldn’t assume there was an inverse relationship between muscle power and brain power. He was one of those guys who was so massive he made you feel nervous every time he got within three steps of the zone you thought of as your personal space.

The artificial ecosystems had become one of the foundations of the lunar economy. One of the Moon’s greatest resources, it had turned out, was its lifelessness. Nothing could live on the surface of the Moon—not a bacteria, not a fungus, not the tiniest dot of a nematode, nothing.

Temperatures that were fifty percent higher than the temperature of boiling water sterilized the surface during the lunar day. Cold that was grimmer than anything found at the Antarctic sterilized it during the night. Radiation and vacuum killed anything that might have survived the temperature changes.

And what happened if some organism somehow managed to survive all of the Moon’s hazards and cross the terrain that separated an ecosystem from one of the lunar cities? It still had to cross four hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum and radiation before it reached the real ecosystems that flowered on the blue sphere that had once been George’s home.

The Moon, obviously, was the place to develop new life forms. The designers themselves could sit in Shanghai and Bangkok and ponder the three-dimensional models of DNA molecules that twisted across their screens. The hands-on work took place on the Moon. The organisms that sprouted from the molecules were inserted in artificial ecosystems on the Moon and given their chance to do their worst.

Every new organism was treated with suspicion. Anything—even the most trivial modification of a minor insect—could produce unexpected side effects when it was inserted into a terrestrial ecosystem. Once a new organism had been designed, it had to be maintained in a sealed Lunar ecosystem for at least three years. Viruses and certain kinds of plants and insects had to be kept imprisoned for periods that were even longer.

According to the big guy, Ms. Chao claimed she was still developing the new hawk control interface. The Director, for some reason, was afraid she had already finished working on it. She could have turned it over to another company, the big guy claimed. And the new company could lock it in another ecosystem. And get it ready for market while the Director thought it was still under development inside the old company’s ecosystem.

“Other directors transfer research other company,” the big guy said. “Show him false data. Other company make money. Other directors make money. His stock—down.”

“Stock no worth chips stock recorded on,” the guy with the white scar on the back of his fingers said.

“You not commit crime,” the big one said, with his hands pushing at the air as if he was trying to shove his complicated ideas into George’s dumb immigrant’s brain. “You not burglar. You work for Director. Stockholder. Director have right to know.”

Like everything else on the Moon, the ecosystem was buried under the surface. George crawled into the back of the truck knowing he had seen all of the real Topside landscape he was going to see from now until he left the system. The guy with the scarred hand kept a camera on while he stood in the sterilizing unit and they talked him through the “donning procedure.” The suit had already been sterilized. The donning procedure was supposed to reduce the contamination it picked up as he put it on. The sterilizing unit flooded him with UV light and other, less obvious forms of radiation while he wiggled and contorted. The big guy got some bobs and smiles from the third member of the trio when he made a couple of “jokes” about the future of George’s chromosomes. Then the big guy tapped a button on the side of the unit and George stood there for five minutes, completely cased in the suit, while the unit supposedly killed off anything the suit had attracted while he had been amusing them with his reverse striptease. The recording they were making was for his benefit, the big guy assured him. If he ran into any legal problems, they had proof they had administered all the standard safety precautions before he entered the ecosystem.

The thing that really made George sweat was the struggle to emerge from the container. It was a cylinder with a big external pressure seal and they had deliberately picked one of the smaller sizes. We make so small, nobody see think person, the big guy had explained.

The trick release on the inside of the cylinder worked fine but after that he had to maneuver his way through the neck without ripping his suit. Any tear—any puncture, any pinhole—would activate the laws that governed the quarantine.

The best you could hope for, under the rules, was fourteen months of isolation. You could only hope for that, of course, if you had entered the ecosystem legitimately, for a very good reason. If you had entered it illegally, for a reason that would make you the instant enemy of most of the people who owned the place, you would be lucky if they let you stay inside it, in one piece, for the rest of whatever life you might be willing to endure before you decided you were better off dead.

The people on the “long term research and maintenance team” did some useful work. An American with his training would be a valuable asset—a high level assistant to the people on the other side of the wall who really directed the research. But everybody knew why they were really there. There wasn’t a person on the Moon who didn’t know that coal miners had once taken canaries into their tunnels, so they would know they were breathing poisoned air as soon as the canaries keeled over. The humans locked in the ecosystem were the living proof the microorganisms in the system hadn’t evolved into something dangerous.

The contact had placed the container, as promised, in the tall grasses that grew along a small stream. The ecosystem was supposed to mimic a “natural” day-night cycle on Earth and it was darker than any place George had ever visited on the real planet. He had put on a set of night vision goggles before he had closed the hood of the suit but he still had to stand still for a moment and let his eyes adjust.

His equipment pack contained two cases. The large flat case looked like it had been designed for displaying jewelry. The two moths fitted into its recesses would have drawn approving nods from people who were connoisseurs of bioelectronic craftsmanship.

The hawks he was interested in were living creatures with modified brains. The cameras and computers plugged into their bodies were powered by the energy generated by their own metabolism. The two moths occupied a different part of the great borderland between the world of the living and the world of the machine. Their bodies had been formed in cocoons but their organic brains had been replaced by electronic control systems. They drew all their energy from the batteries he fitted into the slots just behind each control system. Their wings were a little wider than his hand but the big guy had assured him they wouldn’t trigger any alarms when a surveillance camera picked them up.

Insect like this in system. Not many. But enough.

The first moth flitted away from George’s hand as soon as he pressed on the battery with his thumb. It fluttered aimlessly, just above the tops of the river grasses, then turned to the right and headed toward a group of trees about a hundred meters from its launch site.

At night the hawks were roosters, not flyers. They perched in trees, dozing and digesting, while the cameras mounted in their skulls continued to relay data to the security system.

George had never paid much attention when his parents had discussed their family histories. He knew he had ancestors who came from Romania, Italy, Austria, and the less prominent regions of the British Isles. Most of them had emigrated in the 19th Century, as far as he could tell. One of his grandmothers had left some country in Europe when it fell apart near the end of the 20th Century.

Most of them had emigrated because they couldn’t make a living in the countries they had been born in. That seemed to be clear. So why shouldn’t he “pull up stakes” (whatever that meant) and head for the booming economy in the sky? Didn’t that show you were made of something special?

George’s major brush with history had been four sets of viewer-responsive videos he had studied as a child, to meet the requirements listed on his permanent educational transcript. His parents had chosen most of his non-technical educational materials and they had opted for a series that emphasized human achievements in the arts and sciences. The immigrants he was familiar with had overcome poverty and bigotry (there was always some mention of bigotry) and become prize-winning physicists and world famous writers and musicians. There had been no mention of immigrants who wandered the corridors of strange cities feeling like they were stumbling through a fog. There had been no indication any immigrant had ever realized he had traded utter hopelessness for permanent lifelong poverty.

There had been a time, as George understood it, when the music in restaurants had been produced by electronic sound systems and unskilled laborers had carried food to the tables. Now unskilled labor provided the music and carts took orders and transported the food. Had any of his ancestors been invisible functionaries who toted plates of food to customers who were engrossed in intense conversations about the kind of real work people did in real work spaces like laboratories and offices? He had never heard his parents mention it.

Battery good twenty minutes. No more. Moth not come back twenty minutes—not come back ever.

He almost missed the light the moth flicked on just before it settled into the grass. He would have missed it, in fact, if they hadn’t told him he should watch for it. It was only a blip, and it was really a glow, not a flash. He crept toward it in an awkward hunch, with both cases in his hands and his eyes fixed on the ground in front of his boots.

The small square case contained his laboratory. The collection tube attached to the moth’s body fit into a plug on the side of the case and he huddled over the display screen while the unit ran its tests. If everything was on the up and up, the yellow lines on the screen would be the same length as the red lines. If the “Director” was being given false information, they wouldn’t.

It was a job that could have been handled by eighty percent—at least—of the nineteen million people currently living on the Moon. In his lab on Earth, there had been carts that did things like that. A four wheeled vehicle a little bigger than the lab case could have carried the two moths and automatically plugged the collection tube into the analyzer. He was lurching around in the dark merely because a cart would have required a wireless communications link that might have been detectable.

The first yellow line appeared on the screen. It was a few pixels longer than the red line—enough to be noticeable, not enough to be significant.

The second yellow line took its place beside the second red line like a soldier coming to attention beside a partner who had been chosen because they were precisely the same height. The third line fell in beside its red line, there was a pause that lasted about five hard beats of George’s pulse, and the last two yellow lines finished up the formation.

The moth had hovered above the hawk’s back and jabbed a long, threadlike tube into its neck. The big changes in the bird’s chemistry would take place in its brain, but some of the residue from the changes would seep into its bloodstream and produce detectable alterations in the percentages of five enzymes. The yellow lines were the same length as the red lines: ergo, the hawks were carrying a package exactly like the package they were supposed to be carrying.

Which was good news for the Director. Or George presumed it was, anyway. And bad news for him.

If the result had been positive—if he had collected proof there was something wrong with the hawks—he could have radioed the information in an encrypted one-second blip and headed straight for the nearest exit. His three bodyguards would have helped him through the portal—they’d said they would anyway—and he would have been home free. Instead, he had to pick up his equipment, close all his cases, and go creeping through the dark to the other hawk nest in the system. He was supposed to follow the small stream until it crossed a dirt utility road, the big guy had said. Then he was supposed to follow the road for about four kilometers, until it intersected another stream. And work his way through another two kilometers of tangled, streamside vegetation.

The habitat reproduced three hundred square kilometers of temperate zone forest and river land. It actually supported more plant, animal, and insect species than any stretch of “natural” terrain you could visit on the real 21st Century Earth. Samples of Earth’s soil had been carried to the Moon with all their microorganisms intact. Creepers and crawlers and flying nuisances had been imported by the hundreds of thousands.

You couldn’t understand every relationship in a system, the logic ran. People might not like gnats and snakes but that didn’t mean the system could operate without them. The relationship you didn’t think about might be the very relationship you would disrupt if you created a wonderful, super-attractive new species and introduced it into a real habitat on Earth. A change in relationship X might lead to an unexpected change in relationship Y. Which would create a disruption in relationship C . . . .

And so on.

It was supposed to be one of the basic insights of modern biological science and George Sparr was himself one of the fully credentialed, fully trained professionals who turned that science into products people would voluntarily purchase in the free market. The fact was, however, that he hated insects and snakes. He could have lived his whole life without one second of contact with the smallest, least innocuous member of either evolutionary line. What he liked was riding along in a fully enclosed, air conditioned or heated (depending on the season) automobile, with half a dozen of his friends chattering away on the communications screen, while a first class, state-of-the-art control system guided him along a first class, state-of-the-art highway to a building where he would work in air conditioned or heated ease and continue to be totally indifferent to temperature, humidity, illumination, or precipitation.

Which was what he had had. Along with pizzas, steaks, tacos, turkey club sandwiches, and a thousand other items that had flavor and texture and the great virtue that they were not powdered rice flavored with powdered flavor.

There had been women whose hair tossed across their necks as they gave him little glances across their music stands while they played quartets with him. (He had made the right decision, he had soon realized, when he had chosen the viola. The world was full of violinists and cellists looking for playing partners who could fill in the middle harmonies.) There had even been the pleasure of expressing your undiluted contempt for the human robots who were hustling like mad in China, Thailand, India, and all the other countries where people had discovered they, too, could enjoy the satisfactions of electronic entertainment, hundred year lifespans, and lifelong struggles against obesity and high cholesterol levels.

George Sparr was definitely not a robot. Robots lived to work. Humans worked to live. Work was a means, not an end. Pleasure was an end. Art was an end. Love and friendship were ends.

George had worked for four different commercial organizations in the eleven years since had received his Ph.D. He had left every one of them with a glowing recommendation. Every manager who had ever given him an evaluation had agreed he was a wonderful person to have on your payroll on the days when he was actually physically present. And actually concentrating on the job you were paying him to do.

The dogs weren’t robots, either. They were real muscle-and-tooth living organisms, and they had him boxed in—right and left, front and back, with one prowling in reserve—before he heard the first warning growl. The light mounted on the dog in the front position overwhelmed his goggles before the control system could react. An amplified female voice blared at him from somewhere beyond the glare.

“Stand absolutely still. There is no possibility the dogs can be outrun. You will not be harmed if you stand absolutely still.”

She was speaking complete sentences of formal Techno-Mandarin but the learning program she had used hadn’t eliminated her accent—whatever the accent was. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to understand every word. He knew the dogs were there. He knew the dogs had teeth. He knew the teeth could cut through his suit.

“I’m afraid you may have a serious problem, patriot. As far as I can see, there’s only one candidate for the identity of this director they told you about—assuming they’re telling you the truth, of course.”

The ecosystem was surrounded by tunnels that contained work spaces and living quarters. They had put him in a room that looked like it was supposed to be some kind of art gallery. Half the space on the walls was covered with watercolors, prints, and freehand crayon work. Shelves held rock sculptures. He was still wearing his suit and his goggles, but the goggles had adjusted to the illumination and he could see the lighting and framing had obviously been directed by professional-level programs.

They had left him alone twice, but there had been no danger he would damage anything. The dog sitting two steps from his armchair took care of that.

The man sitting in the other armchair was an American and he was doing his best to make this a one-immigrant-to-another conversation. He happened to be the kind of big bellied, white faced, fast-food glutton George particularly disliked, but he hadn’t picked up the contempt radiating from George’s psyche. He probably wouldn’t, either, given the fact that he had to observe his surroundings through the fat molecules that puffed up his eyelids and floated in his brain.

George could understand people who choked their arteries eating steaks and lobster. But when they did it stuffing down food that had less flavor than the containers it came in . . . .

“Do you understand who Ms. Chao is?” big-belly said.

George shrugged. “You can’t do much biodesign without learning something about Ms. Chao.”

The puffy head nodded once. They hadn’t asked George about his vocational history but he was assuming they had looked at the information he had posted in the databanks. The woman had asked him for his name right after she had taken him into custody and he had given it to her without a fuss.

“Your brag screen looked very promising, patriot. It looks like you might have made it to the big leagues under the right circumstances.”

“I worked for four of the largest R&D companies in the United States.”

“But you never made it to the big leagues, right?”

George focused his attention on his arms and legs and consciously made himself relax. He pasted a smile on his face, and tried to make it big enough Mr. Styrofoam could see it through his eye slits.

“The closest I ever got to the other side of the Pacific was a weekend conference on La Jolla Beach.”

“That’s closer than I ever got. I was supposed to be a hardwired program genius—a Prince of the Nerds himself—right up to the moment I got my transcript certified. I thought if I came here I could show them what somebody with my brain circuits could do. And make it to Shanghai the long way round.”

George nodded: the same sympathetic nod and the same sympathetic expression—he hoped it was sympathetic anyway—that he offered all the people who told him the same kind of story when they sat beside him on the transportation carts. Half of them usually threw in a few remarks to the effect that “doughfaces” didn’t stand a chance anymore. He would usually nod in sympathy when they said that, too, but he wasn’t sure that would be a good idea in this situation. His interrogator was putting on a good act, but the guy could be Ms. Chao’s own son, for all George knew. George had never seen an Asian who looked that gross, but Styrofoam’s mother could have decided anybody cursed with American genes had to possess a special, uniquely American variation on the human digestive tract.

“The database says you’re a musician.”

“I’ve been working in a restaurant. I bought a performance system when I was on Earth—one of the best.”

“And now you’re serenading the sages and samurai while they dine.”

“That’s why I’m here. They told me I’d be thrown out of my job if I turned them down.”

“Ms. Chao had a husband. Mr. Tan. Do you know him?”

“I’ve heard about the Tan family. They’re big in Copernicus, right?”

“They’re one of the families that control the Copernicus industrial complex. And make it such a wonderful place to work and raise children. This Mr. Tan—It’s clear he’s connected. But nobody knows how much. Ms. Chao married him. They went through a divorce. Somehow he’s still sitting on the Board. With lots of shares.”

“And he thinks his ex-wife is trying to put something over on him? Is that what this is all about?”

Chubby hands dug into the arms of the other chair. Arm muscles struggled against the low lunar gravity as they raised the bloated body to an upright position. The Prince of the Nerds turned toward the door and let George admire the width of his waistline as he made his exit.

“You’re the one who’s supposed to be coming up with answers, patriot. We’re supposed to be the people with the questions.”

There was a timestrip built into the base of George’s right glove. It now read 3:12. When they had brought him into the working and living area, it had read 3:46.

George’s suit was totally self-contained. He could breathe and rebreathe the same air over and over again. But nothing comes free. Bacteria recycled the air as it passed through the filtering system. Other bacteria generated the chemicals in the organic battery that powered the circulation system. Both sets of bacteria drew their energy from a sugar syrup. In three hours and twelve minutes, the syrup would be exhausted. And George could choose between two options. He could open the suit. Or he could smother to death.

The second interrogator was a bony, stoop shouldered woman. She spoke English with a British accent but her hand gestures and her general air of weary cynicism looked European to George’s eye. She glanced at the timestrip—it now read 2:58—and sat down without making any comments.

The woman waved her hand as if she was chasing smoke away from her face. “You were hired by three people. They coerced you. They claimed you would lose your job if you didn’t work for them.”

“I didn’t have any choice. I could come here or I could find a good space to beg. Believe me—this is the last place I want to be.”

“You’d rather play little tunes in a restaurant than work in a major ecosystem? Even though your screens say you’re a trained, experienced biodesigner?”

George offered her one of his more sincere smiles. “Actually, we play almost everything we want to most of the time. Mozart quintets. Faure. Krzywicki. Nobody listens anyway.”

“The three men who hired you told you they were hired by Mr. Tan. Is that correct?”

So far George had simply told them the truth—whatever they wanted to know. Now he knew he had to think. Was she telling him they wanted him to testify against Mr. Tan? Was Ms. Chao trying to get something on her ex-husband?

Was it possible they had something else in mind? Could they be testing him in some way?

“They’re very tough people,” George said. “They made a lot of threats.”

“They told you all the things Mr. Tan could do if you talked? They described his connections?”

“They made some very big threats. Terminating my job was only part of it. That’s all I can tell you. They made some very big threats.”

The woman stood up. She bent over his timestrip. She raised her head and ran her eyes over his suit.

George didn’t have to tell the canaries he didn’t want to join them. Nobody wanted to be a canary. In theory, canaries didn’t have it bad. They didn’t pay rent. The meals they ate were provided free, so their diets could be monitored. They got all the medical care they needed and some they could have done without. They could save their wages. They could work their way out of their cage.

Somehow, it didn’t work that way. There was always something extra you couldn’t do without—videos, games, a better violin to help you pass the time. The artificial ecosystems were a little over thirty years old. So far, approximately fifteen people had actually left them while they still had the ability to eat and drink and do anything of consequence with women whose hair tossed around their neck while they played Smetana’s first quartet.

And what would you really have, when you added it up? George had done the arithmetic. After twenty-five years in an ecosystem—If you did everything right—you could live in the same kind of room he was living in now, in the same kind of “neighborhood.” With the same kind of people.

The other possibility would be to buy yourself a return trip to Earth. You’d even have some money left over when you stepped off the shuttle.

The timestrip read 2:14 when the woman came back. This time she put a glass bottle on a shelf near the door. George couldn’t read the label but he could see the green and blue logo. The thick brown syrup in the bottle would keep the bacteria in his life support system functioning for at least ten hours.

He was perfectly willing to lie. He had no trouble with that. If they wanted him to claim his three buddies had told him they were working for Mr. Tan, then he would stand up in front of the cameras, and place his hand on the American flag, or a leather bound copy of the last printed edition of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, or some similar object of reverence, and swear that he had clearly heard one of his abductors say they were employees of the said Mr. Tan. That wasn’t the problem. Should he lie before the canaries let him out? And hope they would let him out? Or should he insist they let him out first? Before he perjured himself?

And what if that wasn’t what they wanted? What if there was something else going on here? Something he didn’t really understand?

The people he was talking to were just the fronts. Back in the city there were offices and labs where the babus who really counted made the real choices. Somewhere in one of those offices, somebody was looking at him through one of the cameras mounted in the corners of the room. Right now, when he looked up at the camera in the front left hand corner, he was looking right into the eyes of someone who was sitting in front of a screen sixty kilometers away.

If they would take away the cameras, he could just ask her. Just tell me what they want, lady. We’re both crawling around at the bottom of the food chain. Tell me what I should do. Will they let me out of here if I cooperate first? Will I get a better deal if I tough it out right to the last minute? Are all of you really working for Mr. Tan?

And what would he have done with her answers when he got them? Did any of the people in this place understand the situation any better than he did? In the city, he hobbled around in a permanent psychological haze, surrounded by people who made incomprehensible mouth noises and hurried from one place to another on incomprehensible missions. In the ecosystem, the canaries puttered with their odd jobs and created their picture of the world from the information that trickled onto their screens.

“I understand there’s a visitor’s lounge attached to the outside of the ecosystem,” George said.

“And?” the woman said.

“I’ll be glad to tell you anything I know. I just want to get out of here—out of the system itself. There’s no way I can get away if you let me get that far—just to the lounge. I’ll still need transportation back to the city, right?”

The woman stood up. She stopped in front of the syrup bottle and picked it up. She turned it around in her hand as if she was reading the label. She put it back on the shelf. She glanced at the dog. She slipped out the door.

The time strip read 0:54 the next time the woman came back. The dog turned her way and she shook her head when she saw the soulful look in its eyes.

“You’re putting a strain on his toilet training,” the woman said.

“Suppose I do give you a statement? Is there any guarantee you’ll let me go?”

“Are you trying to bargain with us?”

“Would you expect me to do anything else?”

“You think you’re better than us? You think you deserve all that opportunity you thought they were going to give you when you left Earth?”

George shrugged. “I couldn’t get a job on Earth. Any kind of job. I just came here to survive.”

“They wouldn’t even pay you to play that music you like?”

“On Earth? There would have been twenty thousand people lined up ahead of me.”

“There’s no way you can bargain with us, George. You answer the questions. We relay the answers. They decide what to do. There’s only one thing I can guarantee.”

“In fifty-four minutes, I’ll have to open the suit and stay here.”

“Right.”

They didn’t let him out when they had his statement. Instead the woman poured syrup into the flask that fueled his life support system. Then she walked out and left him sitting there.

The urine collection system on his leg was a brand name piece of equipment but he couldn’t empty the receptacle without opening the suit. He had already used the system once, about an hour after they had captured him. He didn’t know what would happen the next time he used it. No one had thought about the possibility he might wear the suit more than five hours.

The woman smiled when she re-entered the room and caught him fidgeting. The first dog had been replaced a few minutes after it had communicated his message but no one even mentioned his problem.

The woman had him stand up in the middle of the room and face the left hand camera. He repeated all his statements. He told them, once again, that the guy with the scarred fingers had mentioned Mr. Tan by name.

The timestrip said 3:27 when they left him alone this time. They had given him a full five hour refill when they had poured in the syrup.

The timestrip read 0:33 when they put him in the security portal. Big-belly and the woman and three other people stared through the little square windows. A no-nonsense voice talked him through the procedure in Hong Kong British.

He was reminded that a lapse in the procedure could result in long-term isolation. He stood in an indentation in the floor. He stuck his hands into a pair of holes above his head. Robot arms stripped the suit. Heat and radiation poured into the portal.

George had never been a reader, but he had played in orchestras that accompanied two operatic versions of the Orpheus legend. He kept his eyes half shut and tried not to look at the door that would take him back to the ecosystem. When he did glance back, after the other door had swung open, the woman and big-belly looked, it seemed to him, like disappointed gargoyles. He started to wave at them and decided that would still be too risky. He walked through the door with his shoulders hunched. And started looking for the two things he needed most: clothes and a bathroom.

The lounge was just a place where drivers and visitors could stretch their legs. There was a bathroom. There was a water fountain. There was a kitchen which checked his credit when he stuck his thumb in the ID unit. And offered him a menu that listed the kind of stuff he had been eating since he arrived on the Moon.

He queried taxi services on the phone screen and discovered a trip back to the city would cost him a week’s wages. He had never been naked in a public place before and he didn’t know how to act. Were the canaries watching him on the single camera mounted in the ceiling?

“I didn’t do this because I wanted to,” he told the cameras. “I don’t even know what’s going on. I just want to get out of here. Is that too much to ask?”

A truck entered the garage space under the lounge. A woman who was old enough to be his mother appeared in one of the doors and handed him a wad of cloth. The shirt was too long for him but it was the only thing she had. He stood around for an hour while she ate a meal and talked to people on the phone. He couldn’t shake off the feeling he was wearing a dress.

He had missed a full shift at the Twelve Sages Cafe but the first violinist had left him a message assuring him they had only hired a temporary replacement. They could all see he was jumpy and preoccupied when he joined them at the start of the next shift but no one said anything. He had always been popular with the people he played with. He had the right temperament for a viola player. He took his part seriously but he understood the give-and-take that is one of the primary requirements of good chamber playing.

The big guy lumbered into the Twelve Sages Cafe a month later. He smiled at the musicians playing in the corner. He threw George a big wave as he sat down.

They were playing the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s A Major quintet. George actually stumbled out of the room with his hands clutching his stomach. He managed to come back before the next movement started but he lost his place three times.

The second violinist took him aside after the last movement and told him he was putting all their jobs in danger. She came back to his apartment after the shift ended.

Six months later a woman came up to George during a break and asked him if he gave lessons in style, interpretation, and the other subjects you could still teach. Eight months after that he had seven students. The second violinist moved in with him.

Then the first violinist discovered one of the most famous restaurants in the city was looking for a new quartet. And George did something that surprised him just as much as it surprised everyone else. He told the first violinist they should abandon the other viola player, develop their interpretation of two of the most famous quarters in the repertoire, and audition for the other job. They would have to spend all their leisure, non-sleeping hours studying Chi-Li’s Opus 12 and Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 2, but the second violinist backed him up. The other two were dubious but they caught fire as George guided them through the recordings and interpretative commentaries he selected from the databanks. The restaurant owner and her husband actually stood up and applauded when they finished the last note of the Chi-Li.

The restaurant paid unskilled labor real money. It was also a place, George discovered, where some of the customers actually listened to the music. They were busy people—men and women who were making fortunes. Someday they might buy performance systems themselves and enjoy the pleasure of experiencing music from the inside. For now, they sat at their tables like barons and duchesses and let the commoners do the work. Once every three or four days somebody dropped the musicians a tip that was bigger than all the money their old quintet had received in a week.

The other members of the quartet all knew they owed it all to George. Anyone could buy a performance system and play the notes. George was the guy who understood the shadings and the instrumental interactions that turned sounds into real music. He had created a foursome that worked well together—a unit that accepted his ideas without a lot of argument.

George had occasionally exercised that kind of leadership when he had been playing for pleasure on Earth. Now he did it with all the intensity of someone who knew his livelihood depended on it.

George searched the databanks twice. He didn’t like to spend money on things he didn’t need, even after he began to feel more secure. As far as he could tell, Ms. Chao was still the chief designer in her company. Mr. Tan resigned from the board four months after George’s visit to the canary cage. Then he rejoined the board six months later. It occurred to George that Ms. Chao had somehow tricked Mr. Tan into doing something that looked stupid. But why did she let him rejoin the board later?

The second violinist thought it might have something to do with family ties.

“Everybody says the Overseas Chinese have always been big on family ties,” the second violinist pointed out. “Why should the off-Earth Chinese be any different?”

The whole business became even more puzzling when one of George’s students told him she really was glad “Tan Zem” had recommended him. Three of his first four students, George discovered, had looked him up because Mr. Tan had steered them his way. Had Mr. Tan felt guilty? Had he been motivated by some kind of criminal code of honor? Finally George stopped trying to figure it out. He had a bigger apartment. He had a better job. He had the second violinist. He had become—who would have believed it?—the kind of immigrant the other immigrants talked about when they wanted to convince themselves a determined North American could create a place for himself in the new society humanity was building on the Moon.

He had become—by immigrant standards—a success.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January, 1997.

About the Author

Tom Purdom lives in downtown Philadelphia where he spends his days writing science fiction, reviewing classical music for an online publication called The Broad Street Review, and pursuing the pleasures of urban life. Tom started reading science fiction in 1950, when it was just emerging from the pulp ghetto, and sold his first story in 1957, just before he turned twenty-one. In the last twenty-five years, he has produced a string of novelettes and short stories that have mostly appeared in Asimov’s. Fantastic Books recently published two collections of his Asimov’s stories, Lovers and Fighters, Starships and Dragons and Romance on Four Worlds, A Casanova Quartet.

Sea Change

Una McCormack

We went back to Callie’s bedroom after evening classes pretending we were going to force-feed ourselves Chinese verbs. Really we were talking about what we’d do with the tutor if we could get our hands on him. You’ve seen the Level 12 ’casts, you know the guy I mean. When I realized all our witty lust had turned into monologue, I glanced over at Callie. She was sitting back in the sofa with her feet up on the table, her tongue sticking out, and a piece of glass pressed up against her forearm.

“You’ll ruin the carpet,” I said.

“Fuck the carpet.”

“Mm, you know, I think I’ll pass.”

I watched with interest, wondering how far she’d get. God only knows how she’d found something sharp—everything round here is so smooth, no rough edges. Nothing to mark you, no way to leave your mark. Callie cut into the flesh, and blood surged out, a shock of bright color. She went paler beneath her skin bleach and her hand started to shake. “Shit,” she muttered, as blood dripped onto the table. Her mother had told me at least twice how expensive that had been, so I dread to think how often she must have said it to Callie.

I took the piece of glass from her. “I’ll do it.” One quick surgical strike from me, and her tracker was out. It’s been bugging her ever since it went in. Ho ho. By now Callie was starting to get a thin, papery look—sort of see-through—so I wrapped a towel tight around her arm and made her hold it above her head like they’d shown me in the public hospital when I was getting my social credits. Then, to show moral support, I nicked my finger tip. A ruby red bead welled up, and I waved my hand at Callie. “Hey, we can be blood sisters!”

She pulled a face. “That’s disgusting!” Maybe, but it made her forget to feel sick, and she jumped up and went over to the door that led out onto the balcony. “Let’s go out.”

“Out? It’ll be hot, Cal, you won’t like it.”

“I mean really out. Leave your key on the table.”

I knew then what she had planned for us. I glanced over at the tutorial that was still playing through, and bit my lip. Callie hissed with impatience. “Come on! We’ve got to be there in ten minutes!”

Well, it’s Callie’s home, and I’m the guest, so I unclipped my key from my belt, and put it on the table next to her tracker. Off we went, leaving the tutor talking to the empty room, and all the while our accounts were racking up the study points for the modules he labored through.

We walked down the main lane that runs through the estate. All the houses are on one side and the school stuff on the other. We went past the arts block and then along by the tennis courts where the teams were out practicing. We were heading roughly towards the cinema, but before we got there, Callie led me down a side path. We cut through some bushes, and soon we came to the wall, smooth and tall and impregnable. Except for a gap where it ended and the railings began, where the bushes hadn’t grown thick. Someone very slim could slip through. So we did.

We started down the road into town. There was still pavement most of the way, although in some places it had gone completely and there was only dust. Callie was already complaining about her shoes. The road was walled on either side of its entire length, the back of our estate and another one, and I think some government agency has houses round here. I’d been down this road in the car hundreds of times, but it’s a lot different up close with those walls looming over you. The not-so-homely home counties. After about five minutes, Callie stopped by an old bus shelter and said, “Okay, now we wait.”

“Are we getting the bus, Cal?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I don’t have any actual money, that’s all—”

“Don’t be stupid.”

A couple of cars sped past, and each time my heart jumped—I look young for fifteen and you don’t tend to see people hanging around much on the main roads. But soon enough a car pulled up, and this guy—nineteen, maybe twenty—leaned out. “Hi, Cal,” he said. “Hop in.” He looked at me, hanging back, and laughed. “And your little friend too, if she’s coming.” I went red and scrambled into the back while Callie graced the passenger seat.

If we’re speaking geographically, I’ve no idea where we went, but it was a party, of course, and it was up in a second-floor flat. Music was thumping out of the open windows and inside it was all sweat and noise and bodies. How Callie finds out about this kind of thing I don’t know, but somehow she manages. She was in the thick of it straight away, but I stayed back near the drinks table and tried not to look conspicuous.

It wasn’t long before some guy started talking to me—well, yelling, really; he had to, over the music. “You from that estate up the road? The one with the school?”

“Yeah.”

“Very nice.” He was tanned, and when he smiled I noticed his bottom teeth were slightly crooked.

I shrugged. “It’s all right.” Usually I can do more than monosyllables, but it was really noisy and his smile had made me feel self-conscious. “Bit dull.”

“I bet.” He nodded at Callie. “That your friend?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s something else, isn’t she?”

That’s me—gateway to Callie. I did what I was there for and introduced them, although he didn’t get very far with her, because about five minutes after that the police kicked the door in and started yanking us all out. They’d put an emergency dispersal order on the place. I suppose one of the neighbors had got fed up with the noise.

The police pulled me and Callie out of the crowd right away. It’s not that they profile, but . . . look, I know it sounds bad, but a lot’s been spent on the two of us, from before we were conceived, and our skin looks good and our hair looks good and our teeth look good, and . . . you can just tell, all right? That there’s money around. As we were taken off to a car everyone else was being piled into vans. I saw the guy we’d been talking to, and he shrugged at me and gave me his crooked smile, as if to say, “What can you do?” When we got to the station, a policewoman made us tea while Callie’s mother drove out to get us. She was laughing and apologizing as she paid the fine, but once we were in the car it came out about the tracker and that was the cue for tears and shouting.

“I’m particularly disappointed in you, Miranda.” Mrs. Banville glared back at me in the rear-view mirror. She’s monstrous; done far too much to her face. “I would have expected you to have shown more sense. For gratitude’s sake, if nothing else.”

I stared out of the window at the walls speeding past. Of course. I’m supposed to be glad to have a home. But what could she expect, from someone with my background?

“The whole idea,” Penny said later, “is to keep you safe.” They were in Bombay—or was it L.A.? I didn’t quite catch it. They move around a lot because they can’t live here and won’t get citizenship anywhere else out of principle.

“I know . . . ”

“The Banvilles are being exceptionally kind letting you stay with them.”

“I know . . . ”

“I know we can’t always be perfect, Em, but you really shouldn’t be causing them any trouble.”

A tiny white scar had formed on my fingertip, like the shadow of the crescent of my nail. Most of the time I’m never quite sure where they are. Why can’t I go exploring for once?

“What we need to consider now are your options,” Fran said. “The school’s saying they’ll have to invalidate all this year’s marks.”

That stupid tutorial. If only I’d switched it off before we left. “I did that once!”

“We believe you, Em,” Penny said, kindly. Talking to them together can be like good cop, bad cop. One with the teapot, the other with the van. “But we’re not the ones handing out the marks. As far as the school can tell, every single one of your credits this year hasn’t actually been earned.”

I slumped back in my chair. All that work. Sometimes I could murder Callie. But who’d look after her, if I didn’t?

“So here’s what I’ve got planned,” Fran said, laying it out briskly, clearly, and with no room for argument. This is why she makes so much money as a lawyer. Penny winked at me like she always does when Fran gets going, but I felt too miserable to wink back. “I’ve got a much better plan,” I said, when Fran finished. “I come and join you and we can be a family again.”

My mothers glanced at each other. “Em,” Penny said, “I know you think it’d be chic, and cosmopolitan, but actually it’s dreary. Plane, hotel, plane, hotel—you can’t tell one from the other.”

“This way you’re getting a proper education,” Fran said.

“Both of us are working all the hours god sends, sweetheart—you’d be alone most of the time, you’d get bored, and lonely—”

“—not to mention you’re getting the passport, and I surely don’t need to outline the tangible benefits of that—”

“You’ll be at college soon, love. Then you won’t want to bother with us at all.”

See what I mean? After all that, saying, but I’d still rather be with you, just sounds lame, so I said nothing, and studied my tiny scar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them look at each other and smile. Mother’s face softened, mum’s went sort of serene. They’re still crazy about each other, even after all this time, and all the trouble. I think that scares me most—that maybe now that I’m not there, they’re discovering how much I got in the way. That maybe they shouldn’t have gone to all the bother of having me in the first place.

“Sweetheart, we’ve got to go now—”

“I’ll speak to the Banvilles and fix it all up. We’ll talk to you from Toronto.”

“Take care, love. And try to be good. Remember—back home, you’re our ambassador. For the cause.”

We blew kisses at each other, and they finished the call. And I was left sitting here alone, in this expensive house on this exclusive estate, thinking I would give up everything just to be with them. All the money doesn’t matter. Because ‘round here, in this stupid narrow strip of the world, I’m the one whose parents had to go and live abroad. I’m the one with dykes for mummies.

So Callie and I were packed off to Scotland for the summer. The idea was to make up all the invalidated work, but really we were doing time for breaking out.

Our home for the holiday was on Mull. My mothers had bought a house there when they got married, but when the law changed back and they had to either leave the country or split, they’d signed it over to me. That’s me—absentee landlady. We’d never come here much even when we were all together; it’s a long journey up by road and of course—as Mrs. Banville reminded us—it’s not the done thing to take too many internal flights. She and Mr. B. were flying off the day after we left to go skiing in Queenstown.

Anila drove us up. Anila was going to be our tutor, not to mention our personal jailer. Callie’s father trades in academic bonds, so it had been easy for him to get hold of someone. Anila was quiet and slim and neat and . . . sort of faded, really. Part of the background, like wallpaper. If Callie spoke to her, it was always past her, at a point to one side of Anila’s right ear. It’s exactly how her mother talks to me. Except when she shows me off to her friends. Then I’m the second child she never had. “This is Em,” she’ll say. “We’re taking care of her while her mothers have to be away.” How could you not be impressed at that? Such good work, for such a worthy cause.

Callie hadn’t said a word about our banishment, but I knew she was seething. She’d had plans for the summer, I think, down in the city. Ever since we’d been caught, and another tracker installed, she’d only worn short sleeves, so you could always see the scar on her left arm where the other one had been. Like some weird kind of fashion accessory. She spent the whole trip up with sunglasses on, staring out of the car window and not talking. It made the journey pretty boring, particularly when we came back down off the expressway past Birmingham. The whole north is terraced, straight lines of olive groves and vineyards. Dead dull. The only entertainment came when we went through a toll and new adverts came on. Mine are always insane, because of the trust money. Callie’s were all for vitamin supplements or local jobbing doctors.

At Carlisle, Callie insisted on stopping, and Anila bought us ice cream, like we were children. Callie devoured hers in seconds, but I let mine have the chance to melt, so I could chase the vanilla and the raspberry as it dripped along my fingers and down my hand. Anila had done the same, and we both realized this at exactly the same moment, both of us licking up syrup, and catching each other’s eye. Her face flowered into a smile, and she was suddenly something human. I went shy, and ran off to the toilets to find Callie. She said she was feeling sick from the heat and the sugar, and while she was throwing up, I stood behind her in the door of the cubicle and picked at the gaffer tape covering the foreign language instructions for the sharps box. You get to go to all the best places with Callie. When she was done, I cleaned her face and smoothed her hair, and took her back out to the car where Anila was waiting.

We took the ferry, and were over at the house by eight o’clock. Callie disappeared right away, and I took my supper outside and sat looking at the wall of sea between me and the mainland, smooth as glass and offering no purchase. Round about half-nine, Anila called softly from inside that perhaps I should think about going to bed, so I left my plate with her, and did what I was told. But I lay awake for hours, trying to hear the sea beneath the throb and the backbeat of bass coming through the wall from Callie’s room. That was our first night on the island.

The next morning, Anila established our routine. I got up early and swam some lengths in the pool before breakfast, and then the morning was for studying. Anila kept us at the grindstone till one o’clock, and then we were free to do what we liked. As prisons go, it wasn’t a bad one—I mean, it was hardly one of those places on the fen islands you see on shockumentaries. There was the pool, and the lush lawns and bright flowers, and those twisted citrus trees with the knobbly misshaped oranges. Pen had installed a decent library with proper books. There was a path down to the private strip of beach—yellow sands and palm trees—and everything we could want in the house itself. A good job, really, given how grounded we were. Leaving the house and gardens was clearly and strictly forbidden. A prison is a prison all the same.

I spent most afternoons on the beach. When it was too hot, I would just sit in the shade and read, but I liked to be in the water, and poke around the rock pools, and wave at the pleasure boats. One day I built sandcastles just to watch the tide wash them away. Callie mostly stayed indoors watching films from after the second war, but she would join me now and again, and sit smothered in sun cream beneath a big umbrella, staring out to sea and chain-smoking. She wore her sunglasses and a headscarf, like something from one of the pictures she’d been watching. I’ve no idea how she’d got her hands on cigarettes. Could have been smugglers for all I know.

Anila went off in the afternoons. I didn’t know where she went or what she did, but supper was ready at seven o’clock. I took it out to my spot on the wall, and tried not to hear Callie thumping around the house. Anila would come and sit with me sometimes, maybe one night out of three, although we didn’t talk much. It’s weird to think back on it now, that month we spent alone together on the island. Just the three of us, flitting around that place, like moths trapped in a bell jar, or spirits of a house that couldn’t find rest. I imagine that’s how Callie felt most of the time.

Obviously we were heading for a massive storm. When it came it was faster than the Norwich tornado, and might have done as much damage too if I hadn’t intervened.

I suppose it had been brewing for a couple of days. When people are stuck together like that it’s always going to be a pressure cooker, but it had been getting hotter, and that day was the hottest yet. The sky was unnaturally blue, almost fluorescent. We were slogging through one of the set texts, and Callie was sitting in her usual position, leaning forward on her desk with her hand shielding her eyes. I didn’t mind doing all the work again—I was never going to struggle with the exams, and now I could just enjoy it for its own sake. It was a good feeling, sort of magical, but I probably don’t need to say how pissed off Callie was about having to do it again.

Even Anila was hard pressed to conjure up her usual enthusiasm. Anila always dressed very properly, in a gray suit—she never took the jacket off—and with her hair tied back. This morning wisps of hair had started to escape, and the jacket looked heavy and uncomfortable. She kept glancing across at Callie, and you could see that the way Callie was sitting was beginning to annoy her. As it was meant to.

“Callie, could you sit up, please?”

Callie remained motionless for a second or two, and then she eased back in her chair. She kept the shield up though.

“And put your hand down so I can see your face, please.”

There was another pointed delay, and then Callie moved her hand—to pick up her sunglasses and perch them on her nose.

“Oh, come on, Callie!”

“I have to wear them,” Callie said primly. “I had the laser thing done and my eyes are very sensitive.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure your parents would have mentioned that—”

Callie shrugged. “You can ask them if you like.”

“Given they’re halfway around the globe and almost certainly asleep, I’ll have to wait ‘till we’re sharing waking hours to do that. In the meantime—take the glasses off. Please.”

“It was very expensive surgery. They’ll be furious if you make me ruin it.”

“Callie, you know you’re just being rude. Take them off, and we can get back to work. The summer’s well underway and we have a lot of work to make up yet.”

At that, Callie stretched back lazily in her chair. “Do you really think I care?” She looked very cool and relaxed. She’d been taking tips from those old films, and had outfitted herself in crisp white linen, and a black scarf with little gold beads to match the frames of those stupid glasses. She was Audrey Hepburn to Anila’s Jane Eyre.

“You should care,” Anila said. “Your future’s hanging on it. Or, if this one gets through to you, a lot of your parents’ money is being ploughed into educating you—”

Callie stopped her with a laugh. “You can’t really think I’m going to fail any of this, can you?”

This was actually a pretty good point. Callie’s A-starred like me, fast-tracking in all fifteen subjects. She just can’t be bothered most of the time.

“This time next year I’ll be starting on the Law Prelims.,” Callie went on. “And a year after that I’ll be passing them. What will you be doing then, Miss Gray? Teaching someone else’s five-year-olds how to spell and wipe their arses? Hardly the Brontës, is it, or Shakespeare? What about the year after that, Miss Gray, and the year after that? Not long now and I’ll be at the bar, and you’re right—the parents will pay for the lot. How long exactly till your bond’s paid off? All that education, it doesn’t come cheap, does it?”

Anila had been getting redder and redder through all of this. Maybe Callie should have remembered that Anila must have been smart to get herself this far. At least as smart as Callie herself. When Callie was done, Anila tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear, and took a moment or two to compose herself.

“You’re quite right, Miss Caroline,” she said. “It’s a sad life, if you think too much about it. But I do have some points in my favor. I don’t have to hide from my own face. And I certainly don’t have to shove a finger down my throat every time I eat.”

Callie went rigid. Then she was out of her chair and heading through the door, shouting back, “You’d better believe I’m telling my parents about this when they’re up!”

“You do that,” Anila called after her. “If in doubt, run to daddy.”

I’d been sitting watching all of this with my hand over my mouth. Once Callie was gone, Anila heaved a deep, shaky sigh. She stood up, took off her jacket, and threw it over the back of the chair. She started pacing around the room, finally coming to a halt by the window. She looked tired and a lot older. I didn’t know what to do so I just sat and nibbled my nail, but when she didn’t move at all, I said, “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “I’m well and truly sacked.”

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “She smokes, you know.”

Anila looked back at me, sharply. “What?”

“Callie. She’s got a stash of cigarettes somewhere.”

“I see.” Anila drifted back towards her table. She picked up her jacket and straightened it, then tidied her hair. Then she gave the ghost of a smile. “I see. Thank you, Miranda.”

“Em.”

When she looked up at me, her smile blossomed again, and I realized I liked seeing it. Liked earning it. “Thank you—Em.”

It was enough to stop Callie. The health premiums would have rocketed and her parents would have killed her. So it was stalemate—for a couple of days. Until Callie made her next bid for freedom.

The next evening, I discovered where Anila went when she wasn’t with us. I was looking for Callie, and after the likely places hadn’t turned her up, I started on unlikely ones, which meant the library. It has a small first floor, a mezzanine really, and there’s a door up there that leads out onto a balcony. I saw lamplight, and a shadow moving, so I went to check.

Anila was sitting out on a deck chair. Her bare feet were up on another one, and when she saw me, she moved so I could sit down. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders and she didn’t have make-up on. It made her look nearly as young as us. She smiled at me and carried on rubbing value brand lotion into her hands.

“What would you have done?” I said. “If you had got sacked, I mean?”

She stopped rubbing, and that tired and faded look returned. “I don’t know. I owe a lot of money.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what that felt like. “What will you do when it’s paid?”

She went back to massaging her hands. “Years before that, Em.”

“Still, though. If you could choose.”

“Well, I’d get my own passport then. So travel, maybe. Teach—I do like it, despite everything . . . ” She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe having the choice is what matters most.” She looked out across the sea and the deepening sky and the generous sprinkling of stars that helped it all go down. “I’m lucky. Far worse places to live. Far worse ways to live.”

“I’m glad it all turned out okay. With Callie.”

“Well, me too!” We grinned at each other, and then all of a sudden I felt bad. She was so nice and I was so rich. She was looking at me like she felt sorry too. I stood up and was about to say goodnight, but then she said, “You do know, Em, don’t you, that it’s not your job in life to pick up after Callie?”

“Why? Because it’s yours?”

She smiled. “It’s not my job either, not really—but they do give me money for it.”

Strange thing to say. I didn’t quite understand, so I left her to the stars and her peace. I ended up going to bed later than usual that night, and without finding Callie.

When I woke up, it was that weird and hazy hour between two and three. My head was throbbing. I got up and pulled back the curtains. Light was pouring out of the window along from mine, from Callie’s room. Was she awake too? I padded out to the corridor and knocked on her bedroom door. “Cal?”

No answer. Thunder rumbled overhead. When I went in, the room was empty and Callie’s stuff from class was dumped on the bed. She wasn’t in the bathroom. Wherever she’d been all day, she hadn’t got back yet.

I went downstairs. There were no more lights that I could see, inside or out. The thunder rumbled, much closer, and the air felt charged and crackling. I didn’t find her, in either the usual or the unusual places. I felt stupid, knocking on Anila’s door in the middle of the night, but there was a quick way to track Callie down and wandering aimlessly around the house wasn’t it.

We found her by the swimming pool, lying half-in and half-out of one of the changing rooms, translucent in the moonlight. I was glad Anila was there. She checked Callie’s pulse and said, “Go and call the coast guard, please, Em.” They were over in no time, and Anila went with Callie, leaving me in the house. I spent the rest of the night sitting out on Anila’s balcony, with my arms around my knees, listening to the thunder and whispering words like charms to get the storm to break. Sometimes your mood can mirror the weather. Sometimes it mirrors the sea.

It didn’t rain. The next morning was clear and very hot, and Anila came back to take me over to the hospital. Callie was propped up in bed, looking teenaged and frightened. The Banvilles got back the following day, and started taking it out on Anila. They only stopped when I pointed out that Callie’s poison of choice was the antitoxin Mrs. Banville has to take with the anti-ageing drugs she’s getting under the counter from her tame doctor. I bet Callie did that on purpose. The police would be interested in that, I thought, and saying that to them, that felt good, like electricity. I wasn’t sure at first how much I could get away with, but when I told them to write off Anila’s debt, they didn’t put up a fight at all. All of which finished me with them, but it didn’t matter much, because in the middle of all this, I turned sixteen. Other people get parties when they become citizens. I got to see what it looks like to have your stomach pumped. And, yes, I think Callie did that on purpose too.

I stayed on at the house on the island for a few months. Fran and Penny said to come and join them, but they were in Paris and I wanted to be somewhere colder. The time had passed and they hadn’t been there and I didn’t want to be their little girl any more. Like I’d never wanted to be their ambassador, or Callie’s lapdog, or the Banvilles’ charity case. Besides, I had access to the trust now and while I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do with it, it was like Anila had said, that sometimes it’s more about having the choice than making it. I got a really great haircut, and some expensive clothes. I’ve been thinking of setting up scholarships—I could buy whole schools if I wanted, and run them however I liked. If I knew the best way. I might go and study myself, although I don’t know what. I might just get my eyes tinted instead.

As for Anila—she did travel. I didn’t expect anything, but I get a message, now and then, from all over. The last one came after what happened to Beijing—she’s often there, in the wake of disasters, clearing up. Her note is always short and exactly the same: To Em—wherever you are now in your brave new world.

First published in Foundation, #100, Summer 2007.

About the Author

Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling author of novels based on Star Trek and Doctor Who. Her most recent novel, The Baba Yaga, is in the Weird Space universe created by Eric Brown. Her audio plays based on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 have been produced by Big Finish. She has a doctorate in sociology and teaches creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

The Next Generation of DNA Sequencing

Dan Kobolt

In 2001, an international team of researchers led by the NIH announced the completion of the Human Genome Project. Sequencing all 3.2 billion base pairs of our genetic code had cost ten million dollars and taken almost a decade. Now, just fourteen years later, we can sequence a human genome in four days, at cost of about twelve thousand dollars.

This rapid advance was fueled by the development of a single disruptive technology called massively parallel DNA sequencing. A company called Illumina (San Diego, CA) has emerged as the market leader. Their approach first breaks up the long DNA molecules into short fragments (a process called fragmentation), and then loads them to be sequenced simultaneously on a high-density microscopic array called a flowcell. Going from tissue sample to DNA sequence essentially involves four steps:

1. Isolation of DNA from a tissue sample. This is usually a blood sample, but could also be a small piece of a tumor, a skin punch, or other tissues of interest.

2. Creating a sequencing library. The long molecules are sheared into fragments of a few hundred base pairs by a sonicator, an instrument that uses high-amplitude sound waves to break DNA. At each end, we attach (by ligation) a sequencing adapter that allows DNA polymerase to attach and do its thing.

3. Loading the library onto the flowcell. It contains millions of tiny wells, each of which will host a single DNA fragment. Usually, that fragment is duplicated (by PCR) in the well so that there are many identical copies to boost the “signal strength” in the next step.

4. Sequencing by DNA synthesis. A complementary DNA strand for each fragment is synthesized in a base-by-base reaction called a cycle. Each cycle adds one base to the growing DNA strand. A very sensitive (and expensive) camera records which base (one of the nucleotides A, C, G, or T) was incorporated.

After one hundred fifty cycles, we have “read” one hundred fifty bases from each end of the DNA fragment. This may not seem like much, given the size of a human genome, but each flowcell produces millions of these short reads for a given sample. On average, we sequence each base in the genome about thirty times, from thirty different unique fragments.

It might seem counter-intuitive that we can sequence one genome so many times in a single experiment. True, almost every cell in the body has just two copies of each chromosome—one from mom, and one from dad—but the DNA samples we use comes from a tissue sample that contains thousands of cells. All of those DNA molecules are randomly fragmented when we create a library (step 2 above), which means that any position in the genome is represented on numerous different fragments.

The Computational Challenge

Once all of the short sequencing reads are generated, the lab work is essentially complete. Next, we turn to computers and software to help us assemble and make sense of the genetic data. The first step is to identify, for each sequencing read, the region of the genome from which it came. Here, we benefit from knowing the sequence of the human genome already. Rather than trying to reconstruct the entire genome sequence from scratch, we can use the short DNA sequence like a search query. Once we know where it came from, we line up the read sequence to the reference and compare them one base at a time.

Typically, 99.9% of the sequenced bases will match the known reference. The other 0.01% might represent either sequencing errors, or genetic variants in the individual’s genome. Each of us has around three million such variations, which are most commonly a single base substitution, but can also be insertions or deletions of bases or even large-scale structural rearrangements.

Applications of Next-Generation DNA Sequencing

This “next-generation” sequencing technology makes it possible to sequence entire genomes quickly and at a reasonable cost. Rapid, inexpensive genome sequencing provides many avenues of important research. For example, sequencing can be used:

- In cancer treatment, to compare the genomes of a patient and his or her tumor. This not only reveals the mutations that caused the disease, but may identify possible drug targets for personalized cancer therapy.

- In genetic research, to uncover the genetic architecture of inherited diseases and possibly find ways to treat them.

- In agriculture, to identify the genetic variation underlying favorable traits like drought resistance, pest resistance, and better yields.

- In forensics, to rapidly identify human/animal remains, match DNA from crime scenes to suspects, etc.

- In archaeology, to learn about human history, migration, and speciation from the clues left in ancient DNA samples.

These are just a few of the potential applications for the current state of next-generation DNA sequencing technology. But the evolution of that technology is still under way.

Next-Next Generation Sequencing Technologies

One of my favorite emerging technologies for DNA sequencing is made by a company in the United Kingdom called Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Their technology relies on feeding a single molecule of DNA through a very tiny hole (a nanopore) and inferring the sequence from fluctuations in electric charge. They’ve developed a prototype instrument called the MinION that’s about the size of a thumb drive and plugs into the USB port of your computer. I’ve got to get me one of those, mostly so I can walk around with a DNA sequencer in my pocket.

Another company called Pacific Biosciences has developed a technique to sequence single DNA molecules several thousand base pairs at a time (in contrast to the one hundred fifty base pairs). This is advantageous in certain regions of the human genome that contain highly variable sequences, such as the “human leukocyte antigen” (HLA) region on chromosome six, which is important for matching organ donors to recipients. Very long reads also help us improve the accuracy of the human genome reference in “repetitive” regions of the genome that are difficult to sequence with short read technologies.

Clinical Sequencing

One of the major near-term goals for DNA sequencing is to get it into the clinic, where genetic information could be used to improve patient diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. There are a number of practical and ethical hurdles that must be overcome to do this. First, we need to establish that next-generation sequencing can provide consistent, accurate results on par with current genetic tests. Given the random processes on which the technology relies, this may be one of the most difficult tests to pass.

There are ethical concerns, too. Because of the discovery power of sequencing, it’s also important to establish guidelines about the results that may be returned to a patient after sequencing. Genome sequencing may uncover predisposition to late-onset diseases (like Huntington’s disease) that are unrelated to the reason a patient is in the hospital. Routine DNA sequencing of multiple family members may also reveal unexpected results, such as “non-paternity events” (you can guess what those are) or two parents who turn out to be second cousins. Whether or not to return such “secondary findings” is an area of contentious debate among researchers and clinicians.

The Future of DNA Sequencing

It’s impossible to look at a technology like DNA sequencing and not speculate about the possibilities for the near or distant future. In the short term, I think that DNA sequencing will become a routine part of healthcare for many people, especially those affected by genetic diseases. As our knowledge of the human genome grows, this information will have more and more predictive power, too. In other words, based on an individual’s genome sequence along with clinical and environmental information, it should become possible to estimate his or her lifetime risk for various diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. These will probably be reported in terms of probabilities: twenty-one percent chance of stroke, fifteen percent chance of prostate cancer, etc. It might resemble that baby-is-born scene from Gattaca, though I doubt we’ll be able to deliver the information in seconds, or predict the manner of a person’s death. On the bright side, legislation like the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA) in the United States will hopefully prevent employers and other organizations from discriminating against people based on their genetic makeup (as they do in the movie).

In many cases, these assessments will only be informational in nature. Even if lifestyle changes could reduce the risk of a certain disease, I wonder whether that will be enough motivation for many people to do them. Just look at how many people use tobacco products in spite of their scientifically proven links to cancer, heart disease, and other problems.

What if we could instead use genetic information to correct “defects” that are likely to have a negative impact on an individual’s health? For example, there are more than three thousand genetic disorders for which the responsible gene is known. In theory, if we knew the mutations that gave individuals a severe disorder, correcting that genetic defect might be the only way to prevent the disease. Numerous “gene therapy” clinical trials are under way to accomplish this by, say, using an engineered virus to deliver a fully functioning copy of a gene to individuals who are sick because they don’t have one.

Even better would be to permanently correct the genetic variant in a patient’s genome. A new technique that enables precise “genome editing” in living organisms—called CRISPR/Cas9—might one day provide this capability. Yet that would also be a tremendous responsibility to undertake, even for healthcare providers. It’s messing with nature, and not everyone is going to be on board with that. Case in point: earlier this year, to the alarm and distress of the larger biomedical research community, a group in China used CRISPR/Cas9 to modify the genome of human embryos as a “proof-of-principle” experiment.

Although their success rate was abysmal, and their work widely criticized by the rest of the research community, the Chinese group brought forth a discussion that we need to have about the capabilities of genetic technology and what it means for our future.

About the Author

Dan Koboldt is a genetics researcher who has co-authored more than sixty publications in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals. Every fall, he disappears into Missouri’s dense hardwood forests to pursue whitetail deer bow and arrow. He lives with his wife and three children in St. Louis, where the deer take their revenge by eating all of the plants in his backyard.

Dan also writes fantasy and science fiction. His debut novel The Rogue Retrieval, about a Vegas magician who infiltrates a medieval world, will be published by Harper Voyager on January 19th, 2016.

Traitors and Tough Decisions:

A Conversation with Seth Dickinson

Chris Urie

The first story I ever read by Seth Dickinson was published right here in Clarkesworld. With “Morrigan in the Sunglare,” I was introduced to an author concerned with complexities and subtleties, power, and hate. His stories dive deep under the emotional and societal surface to explore the more challenging parts of being human.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, his debut fantasy novel, comes out from Tor Books September fifteenth and is a fascinating look at someone bringing down a tyrannical government from the inside. Through the eyes of Baru Cormorant, we see the conquest and cultural subjection of an entire society as it is assimilated into the larger empire of the Masquerade. Baru’s life, her family, her home, and her sexuality are all under attack and she must use her sharp mind to use the systems in place to save herself and her people.

Seth is a graduate of University of Chicago, a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU, an alum and instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, and used to write item descriptions for video games at Bungie studios. His work has been published in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Lightspeed, Analog, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

For a time, you studied social neuroscience as a doctoral student at NYU. Has that influenced your writing?

Oh, man, right to the heart of things. Yeah! Behavioral science colors everything I write. My time in academia ripped up a lot of my assumptions about people and the world. We used brain imaging, eye-tracking, and a lot of behavioral measures to study how decisions can be swayed by invisible social forces.

My project involved millisecond-level simulations of the role of racial bias in police shootings. We were trying to create a firearms training program that would lead officers to make fair choices. My colleagues worked on a huge range of experiments studying prejudice, power, and implicit attitudes.

I guess I’d point to three big takeaways—

People don’t understand their own behavior. Every day, we make choices driven by social cues and weird heuristics that we don’t notice. That’s okay. It doesn’t take away our agency. But we do have a responsibility to look at our own behavioral outcomes and try to understand what drives them.

Prejudice is real, powerful, and endemic. Certain mechanisms in our brain soak up subtle (and unsubtle) prejudice from the cultural bath. And it sways key decisions—hiring policy, shoot/don’t shoot choices, even our facial microexpressions. But at the same time, many things we think of as biological facts are actually cultural constructs! That suggests we may be able to reprogram ourselves.

Last (and greatest) is my love of really tough moral dilemmas. I grew up on the Milgram experiment, Hannah Arendt, the Robber’s Cave, and the Asch paradigm—scary, cutting insight into human moral behavior. I want to know how people behave in extreme circumstances. I want to look at evil rationalized as good, good dressed up as evil, territories where ethical systems break down, the clash between utilitarian and deontological ethics, and—in the end—the human, emotional cost of making impossible choices.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is about a woman who will do anything to achieve her goal of world liberation, because she believes the goal is so good it justifies any sacrifice. And it’s about how much that hurts.

I also picked up a bunch of cognitive tricks to keep readers engaged, but I’m pretty sure writers already know them!

“Morrigan in the Sunglare” appeared in the March 2014 issue of Clarkesworld. While a very different story, I think it has some similar themes to your novel. Have you found a common thread running through your work?

I think it’s this idea of the necessary, monstrous choice, the Sophie’s Choice. Back as a teenager writing embarrassing fanfiction, my heroine had to blow up a space station to save the universe, which became the blood calculus in “Anna Saves Them All”; in “Worth of Crows” the necromancer chooses to mercy-kill the man; in “Never Dreaming (In Four Burns)” (here in Clarkesworld!) Nur Zaleha has to choose between death and losing what she believes in. In ‘Morrigan’, Laporte and Simms struggle with the psychology of combat, and they each find their own way to justify violence.

But I’m not necessarily interested in worshipping or valorizing that choice. The Hard Choice often sees use as a justification for atrocity—torture, murder, breach of due process. I want to look at the cost of it. Sometimes it’s important to stick to your principles. Sometimes that makes for a better, warmer world.

And I want to look at the space after the choice. My favorite structure operates in two parts—the first part pushes the protagonist out, away, into lonely ruthless spaces, and the second part asks them to come back, mend their wounds, and accept a world of human compassion and solidarity, if they can. If you’ve put away trust, love, and the possibility of redemption, can you get them back? Will that jeopardize your victory? Maybe community and compassion are a better way to get what you want.

That’s the driving tension of the ‘Morrigan’ sequel, and the next Baru Cormorant novel.

What made you choose to go from writing short fiction to a trilogy of novels? Has your writing and process changed with this longer project?

I’ve always wanted to write a novel, and it was the right time. I wanted to tell a story about the forces that create oppression and conflict. I knew I’d need a novel to do it justice.

My process changed a fair bit. I picked up Scrivener to help me organize research and scenes. I had to relax my prose a little, so I wouldn’t drive myself mad polishing every sentence. I spent a while practicing a sentence-level tension cycle that I hoped I could use to make the book taut, paranoid, and gripping.

I worry a lot more about my physical and mental health now. I could always produce short stories in a burst of creativity over a couple days. But now that I’m under contract, and I’m nervous about letting people down, I have to care for my resources and attention. It’s tough! I haven’t really figured it out yet.

In The Traitor Baru Cormorant, you give us a peek at a very complex world in varying stages of social, political, and economic unrest. What were some of the challenges you faced creating this world and the systems within it?

I think the biggest challenge was teaching that complexity! I wanted a world that felt as dynamic, unpredictable, and many-layered as ours—like tumbling through a storm of money and ideas. But I also wanted the reader to feel like Baru. She has a gift for understanding these big, complicated things.

I decided that Baru would look at the balance of power around the Ashen Sea as a game. I hoped readers would follow along and develop a kind of joyful game-knowledge of the world. Each of Aurdwynn’s Dukes has a political game, a natural resource, and a web of likes and dislikes. Baru learns how to play that game to win. And when the world refuses to obey her game-map, she makes mistakes.

(One of my favorite beats in the novel comes when Baru watches an army take shelter under hwacha bombardment. Hwachas are badass rocket-propelled arrow launchers. Baru watches the arrows strike the army, and instinctively understands how the different military budgets, shield-making materials, and tactical doctrines within the army come together to explain the pattern of casualties. I love seeing a huge chain of events and decisions being brought to a reckoning.)

I also thought a lot about how to defeat any suggestion of biological destiny. I want the cultures and ‘races’ in Baru’s world (I use scare quotes because these races are sociopolitical constructs, not descriptive maps of biological difference—Falcrest in particular is an expert at the tactical redefinition of races to aid its imperial goals) to be impossible to map directly to any real-world society or history. And I wanted the development of systems of oppression to occur via mechanisms specific to the history of this world. I don’t think I completely succeeded, but that’s where I aim!

I want the cultures of Baru’s world to feel like the product of their own climates, geographies, and histories. I think the fantasy secondary world is a great chance to say, hey, our world isn’t an inevitable and correct end state! We could’ve gone some other way!

Baru is a fascinatingly complicated and conflicted character that wears many masks. Instead of joining an outright rebellion, she chooses to fight the Masquerade from the inside by more subtle means. Why have her do this? Is it sometimes better to change something from within?

History is full of sobering, awful situations where the powerful stepped on the powerless.

We have a lot of stories about the exceptions: successful resistance, defiance against all odds. I wanted to write a novel about triumph in the worst case—a solitary woman targeted by intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia, fighting a long war against a powerful and intelligent empire who’ve passed over crude force in favor of efficient, calculated psychological warfare.

Few of us, reading this, are ever going to join an armed uprising. All of us are going to try to make a difference from the inside, by choosing how to live our lives in a world that makes us complicit in awful systems.

I also thought it would make for a straight-up awesome story, full of secrets, gambits, devastation, and different shades of victory.

At some point while writing, did any of the characters surprise you by taking on a life of their own? Some of them have so many secrets.

Xate Yawa! She’s hiding so much. I would love to see the story from her angle. She’s desperately trying to manage everything towards a specific objective, and Baru jeopardizes her life work.

I found Muire Lo a huge relief to write because he was able to express simple, direct caring in a way most of the other characters couldn’t. Tain Hu’s incredible strength, power, and confidence was a gift to me—I could always rely on her to cut through Baru’s webs and say, look, here is what we have to do, I believe in you, let’s get it done. Tain Hu puts her oaths and her beliefs above all other things, which is a great foil for Baru’s philosophy of exigency.

Many of the Dukes really came into their own during drafts. I think Duchess Erebog and Unuxekome both surprised me, particularly Unuxekome’s romanticism and Erebog’s level-headed pragmatism bouncing off Ihuake. But of all of them the ones I wish I could spend more time with are Nayauru, Autr, and Sahaule. I want to know how they work!

And, of course, I love the characters who are clearly living in their own story that just briefly intersects Baru’s. I’ll leave those for the reader to discover!

Your novel pulls from a variety of different areas: social engineering to Joseon Dynasty siege weaponry. Could you expand more on the other influences in your novel?

Cognitive psychology. Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars. Fantasy’s neglect of the Islamic Golden Age, the Indian Ocean trade system, and other dynamic, vital sections of history. Code Name Verity, indirectly—I hadn’t read it yet but people kept talking to me about it. Partible paternity in Amazon Basin societies. Naval warfare between Japan and Korea. The ugly history of eugenic ideology. Admiral Keumalahayati. 1984. Online discussion about who was and wasn’t allowed to be the protagonist of an epic fantasy novel, because some people would, it was said, be ‘too oppressed to do anything.’ Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen of Attolia. C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station. Civilization IV, but not V. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Everyone at the Alpha workshop who talked about making things hurt more. Yoon Ha Lee. Sundiata Keita. We Have Always Fought, by Kameron Hurley. Agh! I wish I could remember everything.

Is there anything you can tell us about the next book in the trilogy?

I think I can! If you read the letters at the end of the first book, you’ll find a lot of clues. The naval battle off Treatymont triggers tension between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo, and a second Armada War looms—kind of a fantasy Cuban Missile Crisis. The tension draws in Baru’s old friend Aminata, Baru’s second cousin Lao, and a laman named Tau-indi Bosoka, who’s one of the Oriati Federal Princes. Together they confront Falcrest’s monstrous ideologies, the many colorful characters in Parliament and the Throne, and the threat of total civilizational collapse in a whirlwind of plague, war, beetles, and cancer.

The first book was a very focused, emotionally rigorous story. I thought of it as a scalpel. I want the second book to have much more emotional range, to spend more time on day to day life, compassion, and friendship—even as we move from the testing grounds of Aurdwynn into the arena of Falcrest politics. Falcrest is a very different place, where the Masquerade enforces its ideology in subtle, hands-off ways. Baru can no longer count on being the smartest one in the room. And Baru has to learn to trust and love if she’s going to survive and maybe (eventually) be happy.

I think of the second book as a novel in conversation and argument with the first one.

Do you have any other projects in the works for after the Baru Cormorant trilogy?

Nothing formal. I have a space opera epic I’d like to write, Exordia—you can get a glimpse of it in my Shimmer story “Anna Saves Them All.” And I’ve been playing with a young adult novel, kind of Portal meets Marathon 2: Durandal, about a pair of sisters who build a gate out of our world and end up in command of a haunted starship. For now, my eyes are on Baru. We’ll see where things go!

Since you’re an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, do you have any advice for budding authors?

Read! Read good authors, take apart their prose, read outside your favorite genres, read history, read discussion and criticism. The world is larger and stranger than you can imagine.

Write to satisfy yourself, and to express what you believe. Don’t pin your self-worth on your writing. Don’t let yourself feel like a failure if you don’t get published as soon as you want. There’s a long time ahead of you, and no timer on success.

Finally, which is more difficult to write: a trilogy of novels or video game item descriptions?

Ha! Destiny was trickier to write for, because I couldn’t micromanage every detail to make it all work.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:

On Sunshine and Shadows

Jason Heller

For someone who was born in Connecticut and now lives in Colorado, I sure do wonder a lot about Florida. As it turns out, so does science fiction/fantasy. My excuse? I lived in the Sunshine State between the formative ages of four and thirteen. SFF’s excuse? Well, that’s a bit more complicated.

My first memory of Florida involves fireworks. Not just any fireworks, either. When I was four, my mom, my little brother, and I moved to the small Gulf Coast town of Englewood, Florida. The year was 1976. I remember watching the Bicentennial fireworks at the beach during that Fourth of July holiday. The magnificent explosions reflected in the waves, blooming underwater as well as in the sky, forming vast symmetrical patterns that seared themselves onto my tender gray matter.

Florida never stopped being magical. As I got older, I collected bugs, lizards, and frogs in picnic coolers, a fascination with creepy-crawly things that didn’t seem odd to me at all, at least not until other kids my age started pointing out my oddness, in the way that kids know how. As we moved from Englewood to nearby towns like North Port, Venice, and Port Charlotte, I learned to seek out the half-finished canals and abandoned construction sites deep in the swampy woods. My few friends and I once found a huge slab of Styrofoam in one of these lumber-strewn graveyards. We used it as a raft, to pole down those mucky, rain-filled proto-canals, like some kind of modern-day, mosquito-bitten Huck Finns. Along the way we’d carve hearts of palm out of wild palmetto bushes and eat them raw, dirt and all.

And then there was the Space Shuttle. In the early ’80s, I’d stand in our doorway to watch Shuttle launches, even though they were happening all the way across the state on the opposite coast. I could turn up our TV and hear the sound of the launch while seeing the silent, tiny trail of exhaust form on the eastern horizon, like a zipper being gracefully opened in the fabric of the sky.

In Florida, though, such magical things went hand in hand with horrific ones. My family moved so often because my family was poor. We were running out on rent, dodging angry landlords, occasionally getting evicted. I started over in new schools more times than I can count, perpetually the new kid in dirty, uncool clothes, marked for ridicule. At home, I regularly witnessed drug dealing, drug use, drunkenness, and brutal domestic abuse. For a while, my mom dated an African-American man—one of the few authentically nice boyfriends I remember her ever having—and I got to see what racism looked like firsthand, through the stares and remarks of strangers around me. An uncle of mine even wound up in prison in Florida, and having to visit him there became a frightening ordeal. In retrospect, though, it was no less frightening than the instability, intolerance, and economic hardship that seemed to suffuse the Sunshine State with shadows.

I discovered SFF in Florida. I’d ride my bike to the local library, then check out as many books by authors like Fred Saberhagen, Gordon R. Dickson, Anne McCaffrey, John Varley, and Roger Zelazny as I was allowed. I’d take them home to devour in the geeky sanctity of my room.

Imagine my awe when I discovered a fantasy series by an author named Piers Anthony that was set in Xanth: a magical realm that was shaped precisely like the peninsula of Florida. Xanth was tenuously connected to our world, which Anthony called Mundania.

The funny thing is, even at the age of ten, I got Anthony’s admittedly bad joke—but I didn’t agree with it. Florida may have been stultifying, but it was anything but mundane. Or rather, its mundaneness was part of its weirdness. Things in Florida moved so quietly, so slowly, so utterly hopelessly, that it seemed like some kind of primordial being held over from prehistory. The fact that the state is geographically estranged from the mainland, and surrounded by bodies of water on all sides, seemed to symbolize its otherness: Florida, a vestigial tail of a place, an embryonic island affixed forever to the mainland by a peninsular umbilicus, a pocket dimension into which unwanted things (like me and my family) fell.

I moved to Denver when I was thirteen. There I grew up, or at least older. As an adult I found out that the beloved Xanth books of my youth were, to put it very mildly, somewhat problematic in regard to their depiction of women (even more so than most of those books’ contemporaries in the ’70s and ’80s)—something I wrote about a little more extensively for The A.V. Club a couple years ago. But that sense of Florida as a liminal mundanely magical, magically mundane place never left me.

A few years back I wrote a couple short stories, “Behold: Skowt!” and “The Raincaller” (the former was published in Apex Magazine, the latter in Sybil’s Garage). They starred the same character, Oso, a hustling, graffiti-slinging street-kid struggling to survive in a post-collapse dystopia. They weren’t set in Florida—the world I built was a bit nebulous in that regard—but they could have been, right down to a canal-raft made of salvaged Styrofoam.

I’m not the only speculative fiction author who’s been drawing inspiration from Florida lately. Most famously, Florida native Karen Russell’s Pulitzer-finalist novel Swamplandia! took place in a magic-realist version of the Sunshine State, and dealt with, among many other things, alligator wrestling. (Two years earlier, I featured alligator wrestling in “The Raincaller.” Having alligators pop up occasionally in your backyard as a kid will leave that kind of mark on you.)

More recently, Laura Van Den Berg’s post-pandemic novel Find Me follows a young, virus-resistant woman’s path across America, one that ends in a dreamlike iteration of Florida; conversely, Jeffrey Rotter’s post-collapse fable The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering starts out in Florida before winding elsewhere across the globe. Rotter’s vision of Florida is particularly interesting to me—and particularly chilling. In his novel, America’s current climate of anti-intellectualism has resulted in a complete rejection of science and reason. In this return to a pre-Copernican cosmology, the ruins of Cape Canaveral have come to be known as “Cape Cannibal.” As someone who once watched the ’80s Space Shuttle launches from across the state—and who painfully remembers the Challenger disaster in 1986, as well as the Shuttle program’s more recent tragedies and dissolution—I found Rotter’s wry, bittersweet satire especially poignant. Even Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X, the indeterminate setting of his excellent Southern Reach Trilogy of last year, bears striking resemblances to the Floridian landscape. Then again, VanderMeer is a Tallahassee resident. Like I said, the place seeps into your blood.

In real life—and with all apologies to friends and colleagues who still live there—Florida is not always a wondrous place. It’s plagued by dodgy politics, class disparity, voter suppression, and, well, sinkholes that swallow people whole. (One of my favorite, bone-chilling headlines of all time, from USA Today in 2013: “Fla. sinkhole is considered victim’s grave.” The article even uses the term “chasm,” eerily reminiscent of the infernally deep gorge known as the Gap Chasm in Anthony’s Xanth books.)

Granted, every state in America has its problems, my adopted Colorado very much included. But there’s just something about Florida—that stark contrast between its mundaneness and its magic, between its sunshine and its shadows—that makes the speculative mind wonder. And wander. And if it’s not careful, fall in.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.

Editor’s Desk:

The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews

Neil Clarke

I’m often asked why we don’t have a review column in Clarkesworld, particularly one with a focus on short fiction. The answer has always flowed pretty quickly: “There’s no shortage of people writing reviews. I’d rather dedicate our time and effort towards something else.” What I don’t say is that with rare exception, they don’t have much value.

The sad truth about short fiction reviews is that the overwhelming majority of them have little-to-no impact on readership. After monitoring the incoming traffic for the online version of this magazine for nine years, I can say that the typical review has a statistically insignificant impact on the readership of a story or issue. The only notable exception to this has been reviews on high traffic sites, like io9 or Tor.com, that focus specifically on a single story. As the number of stories in a review increases, there’s a dramatic drop-off in story readership.

“Oh, but that’s not the purpose of a review.” Yes, reviews have many purposes and sometimes their impact on readership can be secondary. For example, a good review in Locus may indicate good chances at being on their recommended reading list. That might have an influence on other award nominations as well. If a story happens to make one of those ballots, it definitely has an impact, but that’s a very small percentage of the stories reviewed in a year.

Shouldn’t reviews of good stories have the effect of encouraging people to read the story? At this point, the average variation on “you should read this” with a link on Twitter is significantly more effective than the majority of reviews.

Could it be that most people are looking for “read this,” rather than “here’s a bunch of stories I read?” It’s beginning to feel like that’s the case. Are reviewers trying to cover too much territory in their reviews and thus diluting their influence?

As an aside, there’s one more place reviews have an impact: Amazon. Yes, it’s disconnected from this editorial’s comments on online readership, but it’s pretty clear that Amazon reviews have a significant impact on the sales of print and digital books and magazines. Buying a book after looking at the reviews is not all that unlike following a link to (or Googling) an online story after reading it’s review. It’s timely and influencial.

The last decade has been a time of significant change for publishing and perhaps even moreso for short fiction. There’s no shortage of outlets for short fiction. Very few of us have the time to read all of it, so having help finding the best stories is more important than ever. In some ways the same can be said of reviews. There’s no shortage. Perhaps that’s hurting their influence?

Social media levels the playing field and allows everyone to help fill the gap. The Twitter mentions and Amazon reviews are still largely the domain of the regular reader and even now, we need more people, reviewer and reader alike, adding their valuable perspectives. If we want short fiction reviews to have influence again, we have to work together on it . . . and go where the readers are.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series will be launched by Night Shade Books in 2016. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:

New World Coming

J. Otto Szatmari

About the Artist

J. Otto Szatmari is a Hungarian artist currently working in the entertainment and video game industry. He studied art at the University of Art and Design-Cluj Napoca. In 2009, he discovered digital painting and he’s been learning ever since.