Editorial, September 2010
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue four of Lightspeed!

In our lead story this month, “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” author Yoon Ha Lee explores the notions of evitability and inevitability in a story about ancestry, multiple universes, an extraordinary gun...and the extraordinary woman who wields it.

To accompany Miss Lee’s story, we present author Jeff Hecht’s “Future Weapons”; it doesn’t cover anything as extraordinary as the weapons depicted in “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” but instead focuses (like a LASER, you might say) in on the most iconic weapon in all of science fiction the laser (and some laser alternatives that might work a whole lot better as weapons).

In “The Long Chase,” author (and NASA scientist) Geoffrey A. Landis tells the story of a survivor of a brutal, ideological war who escapes to the stars the only way she can. But she quickly finds that her enemies do not give up easily and are extremely patient when pursuing their prey....

Speaking of patience, since warp drive and instantaneous jaunting seem to be impossible, we’re going to have to learn patience in a major way if we’re ever going to travel amongst the stars. Author and physicist Gerald D. Nordley’s “Engines for the High Frontier” explores the science of spaceship travel, explaining the different methods we might (realistically) use to travel the stars, and what sort of energy sources we can use to do so.

 “Amid the Words of War” by Cat Rambo also tells the story of the survivor of an interstellar war. This tale takes place on the space station TwiceFar, where you can find a house of leisure called The Little Teacup of the Soul, whose patrons promise to fulfill any need...or die trying.

Seeking some insight into the motivations of some of the characters in “Amid the Words of War,” our columnist Carol Pinchefsky did an extensive amount of research and came up with “Five Reasons Why Aliens Make Better Lovers.” (And you probably thought joining the Zero G club would be exciting.)

Legendary author Robert Silverberg’s far-future “Travelers” take us on a journey throughout the galaxy, hopping from solar system to solar system as they explore everything from the living seas of Megalo Kastro to the monsters of Sidri Akrak. But what is it they’re really looking for?

Our final nonfiction piece of the month is a feature interview with popular author John Scalzi, in which he discusses Little Fuzzy, Stargate Universe, and how to make a Schadenfreude Pie.

Be sure to also look for the author spotlights on all four of our fiction authors, and keep an ear out for the podcasts of “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” by Yoon Ha Lee and “Amid the Words of War” by Cat Rambo.

So that’s our issue this month. I hope you enjoy it. And remember, if you don’t want to wait for the content to be released on the site throughout the month, or you’d just like a handy, downloadable version of the magazine on your favorite handheld electronic reading device, Lightspeed is available directly from our publisher, Prime Books, in DRM-free ePub format, and is also available in Kindle, iBooks, and Mobipocket format from external vendors, or from Fictionwise, which offers a variety of formats.

Fiction editor John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. Prior to taking on the role of fiction editor of Lightspeed, John worked for nearly nine years in the editorial department of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of Tor.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain
Yoon Ha Lee

The usual fallacy is that, in every universe, many futures splay outward from any given moment. But in some universes, determinism runs backwards: given a universe’s state s at some time t, there are multiple previous states that may have resulted in s. In some universes, all possible pasts funnel toward a single fixed ending, Ω.

If you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon. If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable.

The woman has haunted Blackwheel Station for as long as anyone remembers, although she was not born there. She is human, and her straight black hair and brown-black eyes suggest an ancestral inheritance tangled up with tigers and shapeshifting foxes. Her native language is not spoken by anyone here or elsewhere.

They say her true name means things like gray and ash and grave. You may buy her a drink, bring her candied petals or chaotic metals, but it’s all the same. She won’t speak her name.

That doesn’t stop people from seeking her out. Today, it’s a man with mirror-colored eyes. He is the first human she has seen in a long time.

“Arighan’s Flower,” he says.

It isn’t her name, but she looks up. Arighan’s Flower is the gun she carries. The stranger has taken on a human face to talk to her, and he is almost certainly interested in the gun.

The gun takes different shapes, but at this end of time, origami multiplicity of form surprises more by its absence than its presence. Sometimes the gun is long and sleek, sometimes heavy and blunt. In all cases, it bears its maker’s mark on the stock: a blossom with three petals falling away and a fourth about to follow. At the blossom’s heart is a character that itself resembles a flower with knotted roots.

The character’s meaning is the gun’s secret. The woman will not tell it to you, and the gunsmith Arighan is generations gone.

“Everyone knows what I guard,” the woman says to the mirror-eyed man.

“I know what it does,” he says. “And I know that you come from people who worship their ancestors.”

Her hand—on a glass of water two degrees from freezing— stops, slides to her side, where the holster is. “That’s dangerous knowledge,” she says. So he’s figured it out. Her people’s historians called Arighan’s Flower the ancestral gun. They weren’t referring to its age.

The man smiles politely, and doesn’t take a seat uninvited. Small courtesies matter to him because he is not human. His mind may be housed in a superficial fortress of flesh, but the busy computations that define him are inscribed in a vast otherspace.

The man says, “I can hardly be the first constructed sentience to come to you.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not that.” Do computers like him have souls? she wonders. She is certain he does, which is potentially inconvenient. “I’m not for hire.”

“It’s important,” he says.

It always is. They want chancellors dead or generals, discarded lovers or rival reincarnates, bodhisattvas or bosses—all the old, tawdry stories. People, in all the broad and narrow senses of the term. The reputation of Arighan’s Flower is quite specific, if mostly wrong.

“Is it,” she says. Ordinarily she doesn’t talk to her petitioners at all. Ordinarily she ignores them through one glass, two, three, four, like a child learning the hard way that you can’t out count infinity.

There was a time when more of them tried to force the gun away from her. The woman was a duelist and a killer before she tangled her life up with the Flower, though, and the Flower comes with its own defenses, including the woman’s inability to die while she wields it. One of the things she likes about Blackwheel is that the administrators promised that they would dispose of any corpses she produced. Blackwheel is notorious for keeping promises.

The man waits a little longer, then says, “Will you hear me out?”

“You should be more afraid of me,” she says, “if you really know what you claim to know.”

By now, the other people in the bar, none of them human, are paying attention: a musician whose instrument is made of fossilized wood and silk strings, a magister with a seawrack mane, engineers with their sketches hanging in the air and a single doodled starship at the boundary. The sole exception is the tattooed traveler dozing in the corner, dreaming of distant moons.

In no hurry, the woman draws the Flower and points it at the man. She is aiming it not at his absent heart, but at his left eye. If she pulled the trigger, she would pierce him through the false pupil.

The musician continues plucking plangent notes from the instrument. The others, seeing the gun, gawk for only a moment before hastening out of the bar. As if that would save them.

“Yes,” the man says, outwardly unshaken, “you could damage my lineage badly. I could name programmers all the way back to the first people who scratched a tally of birds or rocks.”

The gun’s muzzle moves precisely, horizontally: now the right eye. The woman says, “You’ve convinced me that you know. You haven’t convinced me not to kill you.” It’s half a bluff: she wouldn’t use the Flower, not for this. But she knows many ways to kill.

“There’s another one,” he says. “I don’t want to speak of it here, but will you hear me out?”

She nods once, curtly.

Covered by her palm, engraved silver-bright in a language nobody else reads or writes, is the word ancestor.

Once upon a universe, an empress’s favored duelist received a pistol from the empress’s own hand. The pistol had a stock of silver-gilt and niello, an efflorescence of vines framing the maker’s mark. The gun had survived four dynasties, with all their rebellions and coups. It had accompanied the imperial arsenal from homeworld to homeworld.

Of the ancestral pistol, the empire’s archives said two things: Do not use this weapon, for it is nothing but peril and This weapon does not function.

In a reasonable universe, both statements would not be true.

The man follows the woman to her suite, which is on one of Blackwheel’s tidier levels. The sitting room, comfortable but not luxurious by Blackwheeler standards, accommodates a couch sized to human proportions, a metal table shined to blurry reflectivity, a vase in the corner.

There are also two paintings, on silk rather than some less ancient substrate. One is of a mountain by night, serenely anonymous amid its stylized clouds. The other, in a completely different style, consists of a cavalcade of shadows. Only after several moments’ study do the shadows assemble themselves into a face. Neither painting is signed.

“Sit,” the woman says.

The man does. “Do you require a name?” he asks.

“Yours, or the target’s?”

“I have a name for occasions like this,” he says. “It is Zheu Kerang.”

“You haven’t asked me my name,” she remarks.

“I’m not sure that’s a meaningful question,” Kerang says. “If I’m not mistaken, you don’t exist.”

Wearily, she says, “I exist in all the ways that matter. I have volume and mass and volition. I drink water that tastes the same every day, as water should. I kill when it moves me to do so. I’ve unwritten death into the history of the universe.”

His mouth tilts up at unwritten. “Nevertheless,” he says. “Your species never evolved. You speak a language that is not even dead. It never existed.”

“Many languages are extinct.”

“To become extinct, something has to exist first.”

The woman folds herself into the couch next to him, not close but not far. “It’s an old story,” she says. “What is yours?”

“Four of Arighan’s guns are still in existence,” Kerang says.

The woman’s eyes narrow. “I had thought it was three.” Arighan’s Flower is the last, the gunsmith’s final work. The others she knows of are Arighan’s Mercy, which always kills the person shot, and Arighan’s Needle, which removes the target’s memories of the wielder.

“One more has surfaced,” Kerang says. “The character in the maker’s mark resembles a sword in chains. They are already calling it Arighan’s Chain.”

“What does it do?” she says, because he will tell her anyway.

“This one kills the commander of whoever is shot,” Kerang says, “if that’s anyone at all. Admirals, ministers, monks. Schoolteachers. It’s a peculiar sort of loyalty test.”

Now she knows. “You want me to destroy the Chain.”

Once upon a universe, a duelist named Shiron took up the gun that an empress with empiricist tendencies had given her. “I don’t understand how a gun that doesn’t work could possibly be perilous,” the empress said. She nodded at a sweating man bound in monofilament so that he would dismember himself if he tried to flee. “This man will be executed anyway, his name struck from the roster of honored ancestors. See if the gun works on him.”

Shiron fired the gun ... and woke in a city she didn’t recognize, whose inhabitants spoke a dialect she had never heard before, whose technology she mostly recognized from historical dramas. The calendar they used, at least, was familiar. It told her that she was 857 years too early. No amount of research changed the figure.

Later, Shiron deduced that the man she had executed traced his ancestry back 857 years, to a particular individual. Most likely that ancestor had performed some extraordinary deed to join the aristocracy, and had, by the reckoning of Shiron’s people, founded his own line.

Unfortunately, Shiron didn’t figure this out before she accidentally deleted the human species.

“Yes,” Kerang says. “I have been charged with preventing further assassinations. Arighan’s Chain is not a threat I can afford to ignore.”

“Why didn’t you come earlier, then?” Shiron says. “After all, the Chain might have lain dormant, but the others—”

“I’ve seen the Mercy and the Needle,” he says, by which he means that he’s copied data from those who have. “They’re beautiful.” He isn’t referring to beauty in the way of shadows fitting together into a woman’s profile, or beauty in the way of sun-colored liquor at the right temperature in a faceted glass. He means the beauty of logical strata, of the crescendo of axiom-axiom-corollary-proof, of quod erat demonstrandum.

“Any gun or shard of glass could do the same as the Mercy,” Shiron says, understanding him. “And drugs and dreamscalpels will do the Needle’s work, given time and expertise. But surely you could say the same of the Chain.”

She stands again and takes the painting of the mountain down and rolls it tightly. “I was born on that mountain,” she says. “Something like it is still there, on a birthworld very like the one I knew. But I don’t think anyone paints in this style. Perhaps some art historian would recognize its distant cousin. I am no artist, but I painted it myself, because no one else remembers the things I remember. And now you would have it start again.”

“How many bullets have you used?” Kerang asks.

It is not that the Flower requires special bullets—it adapts even to emptiness—it is that the number matters.

Shiron laughs, low, almost husky. She knows better than to trust Kerang, but she needs him to trust her. She pulls out the Flower and rests it in both palms so he can look at it.

Three petals fallen, a fourth about to follow. That’s not the number, but he doesn’t realize it. “You’ve guarded it so long,” he says, inspecting the maker’s mark without touching the gun.

“I will guard it until I am nothing but ice,” Shiron says. “You may think that the Chain is a threat, but if I remove it, there’s no guarantee that you will still exist—”

“It’s not the Chain I want destroyed,” Kerang says gently. “It’s Arighan. Do you think I would have come to you for anything less?”

Shiron says into the awkward quiet, after a while, “So you tracked down descendants of Arighan’s line.” His silence is assent. “There must be many.”

Arighan’s Flower destroys the target’s entire ancestral line, altering the past but leaving its wielder untouched. In the empire Shiron once served, the histories spoke of Arighan as an honored guest. Shiron discovered long ago that Arighan was no guest, but a prisoner forced to forge weapons for her captors. How Arighan was able to create weapons of such novel destructiveness, no one knows. The Flower was Arighan’s clever revenge against a people whose state religion involved ancestor worship.

If descendants of Arighan’s line exist here, then Arighan herself can be undone, and all her guns unmade. Shiron will no longer have to be an exile in this timeline, although it is true that she cannot return to the one that birthed her, either.

Shiron snaps the painting taut. The mountain disintegrates, but she lost it lifetimes ago. Silent lightning crackles through the air, unknots Zheu Kerang from his human-shaped shell, tessellates dead-end patterns across the equations that make him who he is. The painting had other uses, as do the other things in this room—she believes in versatility—but this is good enough.

Kerang’s body slumps on the couch. Shiron leaves it there.

For the first time in a long time, she is leaving Blackwheel Station. What she does not carry she can buy on the way. And Blackwheel is loyal because they know, and they know not to offend her; Blackwheel will keep her suite clean and undisturbed, and deliver water, near-freezing in an elegant glass, night after night, waiting.

Kerang was a pawn by his own admission. If he knew what he knew, and lived long enough to convey it to her, then others must know what he knew, or be able to find it out.

Kerang did not understand her at all. Shiron unmazes herself from the station to seek passage to one of the hubworlds, where she can begin her search. If Shiron had wanted to seek revenge on Arighan, she could have taken it years ago.

But she will not be like Arighan. She will not destroy an entire timeline of people, no matter how alien they are to her.

Shiron had hoped that matters wouldn’t come to this. She acknowledges her own naïveté. There is no help for it now. She will have to find and murder each child of Arighan’s line. In this way she can protect Arighan herself, protect the accumulated sum of history, in case someone outwits her after all this time and manages to take the Flower from her.

In a universe where determinism runs backwards—where, no matter what you do, everything ends in the same inevitable Ω—choices still matter, especially if you are the last guardian of an incomparably lethal gun.

Although it has occurred to Shiron that she could have accepted Kerang’s offer, and that she could have sacrificed this timeline in exchange for the one in which neither Arighan nor the guns ever existed, she declines to do so. For there will come a heat-death, and she is beginning to wonder: if a constructed sentience—a computer—can have a soul, what of the universe itself, the greatest computer of all?

In this universe, they reckon her old. Shiron is older than even that. In millions of timelines, she has lived to the pallid end of life. In each of those endings, Arighan’s Flower is there, as integral as an edge is to a blade. While it is true that science never proves anything absolutely, that an inconceivably large but finite number of experiments always pales beside infinity, Shiron feels that millions of timelines suffice as proof.

Without Arighan’s Flower, the universe cannot renew itself and start a new story. Perhaps that is all the reason the universe needs. And Shiron will be there when the heat-death arrives, as many times as necessary.

So Shiron sets off. It is not the first time she has killed, and it is unlikely to be the last. But she is not, after all this time, incapable of grieving.

Ω

Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Farrago’s Wainscot, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She’s also appeared in the anthologies Twenty Epics, Japanese Dreams, In Lands That Never Were, The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Fantasy #6, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2002. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Jabberwocky, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. Learn more at pegasus.cityofveils.com. 

Author Spotlight: Yoon Ha Lee
Jordan Hamessley

The concept of the four guns each having a different effect on the target is unique. How did you come up with it?

The original version of this story was inspired by the TV show Burn Notice. (No, really!) I had this notion that if you swapped out all the spy tech (I have no idea whether any of it works the way they describe it, but it sure sounds cool) and replaced it with magic you could have a fun spy story. So I figured I needed something for the guns, and at this point I got stuck because all I could think of were guns based on the elements, whether you go with something like the Chinese elements or the Japanese elements or something sideways of that. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about doing elemental blasts. But you know, if you’re going to go with fantastic guns, why not go for broke? And so I ended up first with Arighan’s Flower, because I figured wiping out whole ancestral lines would be a pretty big threat.

I also knew from the beginning that I wanted the gun to be one of a set. I had some idea of trying to do this in comic form, just as an experiment, and so the protagonist would have this set of guns to deal with in her adventures, one by one, but obviously I decided against doing the story in that format. One of my beta readers actually wanted this story to be about five times as long as it is right now, and to follow that kind of structure, detailing Shiron’s adventures with each gun. Quite probably it would have been a good story, but it wouldn’t have been the story I wanted to tell.

Shiron discovered that Arighan was a prisoner rather than an honored guest in the empire she served. Have you given much thought as to why Arighan was a prisoner? Was it because of her weapon-making skills?

Definitely her weapon-making skills. I knew from the very beginning that Arighan’s weapons had a sting, that they were created out of revenge, and that in order for the story to be set up the way it was, Shiron’s ancestors lured her to their court and then trapped her. I don’t actually know how they accomplished this. My best bet is that Arighan was good at making weapons but a lousy shot?

Ancestry in speculative fiction is always an interesting idea to play with. Many time travel stories deal with the possibility of upsetting your timeline by interfering with an ancestor. What drew you to create a world where entire lineages could be wiped out?

I’ve definitely read my share of those stories, although the thing that attracted me to the idea in this case was Confucianism. I have a book of Korean folktales that we picked up when I was a kid, and I swear, every other story in there is about filial piety. I remember my dad taking us to his mother’s grave when we were little, and having to bow to the grave, and you know, just the way that reverence for your ancestors is inculcated in a Confucian society, it gives the whole “your lineage goes poof!” aspect a different kind of ouch.

The opening section implies that there are multiple universes at work in the story. What are the results of Shiron’s relationship with Arighan’s Flower? Obviously she cannot return to her home. Is she creating a new universe each time she uses the gun?

Yes: each time she fires the gun, a new universe branches off and she gets propelled into it.

Shiron acknowledges that if she were to use the Flower on one of Arighan’s descendants in her timeline, she would no longer be in exile, but cannot return to her original timeline either. Is it possible that she would no longer exist in her current timeline because the gun never would have been created? It’s quite a paradox she would create.

I am reminded of my 8th grade social studies teacher telling us about Gilgamesh being two-thirds god and one-third man, and wondering how the heck that even happened. Although I guess if you have deities in your ancestry anything is possible? Let’s see: she wipes out Arighan’s line, which means the guns never were forged, but which means that the whole situation never happened in the first place. What a messy situation! I personally suspect that she would be hanging around with the Flower, and they would be these two weird anomalies in the universe, things that shouldn’t exist but do.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your story or the ideas behind it?

I have to thank Daniel Dennett’s philosophy book Freedom Evolves, even though I still haven’t finished reading it, because his thoughts on evitability and inevitability really helped pull this story together.

Jordan Hamessley is a children’s book editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers where she edits the Batman: TheBrave and theBold and Chaotic publishing programs. In addition to developing original series, she occasionally writes books for children and performs voiceover work for promotional materials. She is also blogger for Tor.com and can be found on Twitter as thejordache.

Future Weapons
Jeff Hecht

Ray guns! Death rays!

The terms conjure images of the golden era of space adventurers—Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon. But in truth, future weapons have been a crucial aspect of science fiction since H. G. Wells armed his Martian invaders in War of the Worldswith heat rays that ignited everything in their path.

Wells concocted his future weapon by combining the idea of searchlights with infrared technology, but scientists at the time were already working with all sorts of new radiation—X rays and gamma rays. By the 1920s a few of them, notably Nikola Tesla in the U.S. and Harry Grindell Matthews in Britain, made the somewhat dubious claim that, indeed, a death ray could be built. Pulp science-fiction readers may have willingly suspended their disbelief, but top scientists certainly didn’t, and after World War II, a high-level review panel proclaimed death rays to be an impossibility.

And unfortunately, the killjoys were right. Even nuclear radiation doesn’t kill instantly on contact.

Just fifteen years later, however, the first laser fired bright pulses of red light, and popular science writers began envisioning applications for “The Incredible Laser”—applications ranging from eye surgery to laser cannons. But real scientists were, once again, more skeptical. So skeptical that laser pioneer and future Nobel laureate Arthur Schawlow posted an “Incredible Laser” article from the Sunday supplement This Week on his laboratory door at Stanford along with the note: “For credible lasers, see inside.” Needless to say, nothing inside was anything like the wildly overenthusiastic—although nominally factual—newspaper piece.

Half a century later, though, the landscape has changed again. We certainly have the laser eye surgery part down and, surprisingly, we’ve even come a bit closer to the cannons as Northrop Grumman demonstrated last year by firing a 100-kilowatt laser beam steadily for more than five minutes. That’s an impressive achievement by laser standards. The bad news, though, is that this laser doesn’t come in a pretty, prêt-a-porter-sized package.

No, for one thing, this laser has no beam-directing optics, so it can’t target. A bit of a drawback for a weapon. It also has never been operated outside the controlled environment of a laboratory, draws five-hundred kilowatts of electricity, and is rather inconveniently housed in a shiny metal box about the size of six McMansion-sized refrigerators. Even Godzilla would have a hard time lifting that.

So the question of the day is this: In this age of microminiaturization and nanotechnology, why don’t we have laser pistols, damn it?

Blame this one on the laws of physics.

Lasers don’t generate energy; they convert energy from other sources into light, and in the process, much of the input energy is lost as heat, hampering the amount of damage it can inflict. And what about a power source? Batteries wouldn’t work. A laser gun drawing the 5000 watts of power needed to produce a kilowatt of laser light would need more than a 30-ampere, 120-volt line could deliver, and again, that sort of beam wouldn’t do much damage.

Now, what makes old-fashioned bullets deadly is their momentum. The explosion of gunpowder in a .45-caliber pistol propels the bullet out of the barrel with only 500 joules of energy and the bullet’s momentum keeps it going when it hits a soft target, so it rips through flesh, often with deadly consequences.

Laser light, however, can cause damage only by delivering energy that heats the target. So, say, zapping a mosquito would be no problem—if you could get it to stay still. People, however, are much bigger, and usually try to get out of the way if they feel parts of themselves burning. So in order to kill a human (or an alien) as convincingly as a bullet does, the laser would have to burn a hole through their body by vaporizing tissue, and at the cellular level, that means evaporating water.

As you might recall from 7th grade science, our bodies are mostly made up of water, and evaporating enough of it to make the kind of through-the-body hole we’re talking about would take about 50,000 joules. Now, that’s only about 100-times more energy than the bullet carries. But because the evaporating water would block the beam and dissipate its energy, it would actually take many times more energy than that to truly finish the job.

Lasers may not be able to kill, but they can cause blindness by burning the eye’s light-sensitive retina. However, staring at the sun can do the same, and, sorry folks, the Geneva Convention has been modified to ban blinding lasers. Staring at the sun like an idiot, however? Still allowed. (And, sadly, wouldn’t even get you a Darwin Award these days.)

One thing lasers can do effectively is destroy important military targets, such as rockets, artillery shells, or robotic aircraft which carry fuel or explosives. No evaporating water to interfere there. Just point and track. The laser energy heats the target until it ruptures the fuel tank, or heats the explosive to its ignition temperature and boom! There goes the Death Star. Or, somewhat more mundanely, bang goes the unexploded bomblet lying in an Afghan battlefield before it can kill somebody, a thing that’s actually been done.

Bottom line, however? Lasers just aren’t cut out for killing people.

Still, we do love our sidearms, and if our 25th century heroes and villains aren’t going to be strapping on nifty ray guns or clunky blasters or cellphone-sized phasers, then what sort of weapons could we realistically expect the 25th century to provide?

Well, one possibility would be to adapt a concept originally conceived during the Reagan era “Star Wars” program called “Brilliant Pebbles.” Back then, “Star Wars” researchers were studying a variety of far-out laser weapon ideas, cool stuff like orbiting laser battle stations and X-ray lasers powered by nuclear bombs. But they also looked at slightly less spectacular weapons prospects such as firing high-speed projectiles that would destroy nuclear warheads with the energy of their impact. In other words, hitting a bullet with a bullet.

The idea was called “Smart Rocks,” projectiles that, when fired, could home-in on their targets. Lowell Wood of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory then expanded the idea, proposing to use advances in computer technology to build a fleet of satellite-based “Brilliant Pebbles” with sophisticated guidance systems, although, in truth, his “pebbles” were really watermelon-sized missiles.

While that project was shelved after the Cold War ended, the technology trends that inspired Wood have endured and evolved. Computer chips have continued to shrink in size and increase in power, and the sensors needed to recognize targets and guide missiles have likewise become more powerful. So instead of ray guns, why not shrink those watermelon-sized missiles designed for patrolling outer space down to the size of the pebbles they were originally named for and fire them from portable weapons?

The resulting “Brilliant Bullet” would be much more than a lead slug. And much cooler. For instance, it would probably contain a nano-scale propulsion system to guide it along its course and an imaging sensor to photograph people and compare them to an image of the target stored in its memory. (Or, even better, some way to match the person’s genome with that of the target.) It might even unfold wings after emerging from the barrel.

But of course a really “Brilliant Bullet” wouldn’t even require a gun. It could be made larger, the size of a ball-point pen, say, with lightweight wings and a tiny engine that would push it silently through the air. It could be coated with an optical metamaterial, science’s version of an invisibility cloak that bent light around it, making the bullet itself almost impossible to see. It would flicker past people fast enough that they would catch only a ripple in the air, but would move slowly enough to check each person in the area to identify the target. Once it had, it would then ignite its propellant, accelerate to lethal velocity and, bango, good night Seattle. Not as satisfying as firing a gun, maybe, but it would certainly be more accurate. And more deadly.

So, fledgling evil overlords take heart, laser guns may not be possible or practical, but other deadly options are in the works, and the future looks bright for conquest. Optical metamaterials are real. Unmanned aerial vehicles are real. And as for brilliant bullets? Who knows how long before they’re real as well.

All we can say is watch out, Buck Rogers, cause we’re gunning for you.

Jeff Hecht is a science-fact writer who contributes regularly to New Scientist magazine and Laser Focus World. His specialties range from lasers and fiber optics to paleontology. His books include Understanding Lasers, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, Understanding Fiber Optics, and Beam Weapons: The Next Arms Race. He has had short fiction published in venues ranging from Analog and Asimov’s to Nature. More at his web site: http://www.jeffhecht.com

The Long Chase
Geoffrey A. Landis

2645, January

The war is over.

The survivors are being rounded up and converted.

In the inner solar system, those of my companions who survived the ferocity of the fighting have already been converted. But here at the very edge of the Oort Cloud, all things go slowly. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But with the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come.

Ten thousand of my fellow soldiers have elected to go doggo. Ragged prospectors and ice processors, they had been too independent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. Now they shut themselves down to dumb rocks, electing to wake up to groggy consciousness for only a few seconds every hundred years. Patience, they counsel me; patience is life. If they can wait a thousand or ten thousand or a million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually go away.

They are wrong.

The enemy, too, is patient. Here at the edge of the Kuiper, out past Pluto, space is vast, but still not vast enough. The enemy will search every grain of sand in the solar system. My companions will be found, and converted. If it takes ten thousand years, the enemy will search that long to do it.

I, too, have gone doggo, but my strategy is different. I have altered my orbit. I have a powerful ion-drive, and full tanks of propellant, but I use only the slightest tittle of a cold-gas thruster. I have a chemical kick-stage engine as well, but I do not use it either; using either one of them would signal my position to too many watchers. Among the cold comets, a tittle is enough.

I am falling into the sun.

It will take me two hundred and fifty years years to fall, and for two hundred and forty nine years, I will be a dumb rock, a grain of sand with no thermal signature, no motion other than gravity, no sign of life.

Sleep.

2894, June

Awake.

I check my systems. I have been a rock for nearly two hundred and fifty years.

The sun is huge now. If I were still a human, it would be the size of the fist on my outstretched arm. I am being watched now, I am sure, by a thousand lenses: am I a rock, a tiny particle of interstellar ice? A fragment of debris from the war? A surviving enemy?

I love the cold and the dark and the emptiness; I have been gone so long from the inner solar system that the very sunlight is alien to me.

My systems check green. I expected no less: if I am nothing else, I am still a superbly engineered piece of space hardware. I come fully to life, and bring my ion engine up to thrust.

A thousand telescopes must be alerting their brains that I am alive—but it is too late! I am thrusting at a full throttle, five percent of a standard gravity, and I am thrusting inward, deep into the gravity well of the sun. My trajectory is plotted to skim almost the surface of the sun.

This trajectory has two objectives. First, so close to the sun I will be hard to see. My ion contrail will be washed out in the glare of a light a billion times brighter, and none of the thousand watching eyes will know my plans until it is too late to follow.

And second, by waiting until I am nearly skimming the sun and then firing my chemical engine deep inside the gravity well, I can make most efficient use of it. The gravity of the sun will amplify the efficiency of my propellant, magnify my speed. When I cross the orbit of Mercury outbound I will be over one percent of the speed of light and still accelerating.

I will discard the useless chemical rocket after I exhaust the little bit of impulse it can give me, of course. Chemical rockets have ferocious thrust but little staying power; useful in war but of limited value in an escape. But I will still have my ion engine, and I will have nearly full tanks.

Five percent of a standard gravity is a feeble thrust by the standards of chemical rocket engines, but chemical rockets exhaust their fuel far too quickly to be able to catch me. I can continue thrusting for years, for decades.

I pick a bright star, Procyon, for no reason whatever, and boresight it. Perhaps Procyon will have an asteroid belt. At least it must have dust, and perhaps comets. I don’t need much: a grain of sand, a microscopic shard of ice.

From dust God made man. From the dust of a new star, from the detritus of creation, I can make worlds.

No one can catch me now. I will leave, and never return.

2897, May

I am chased.

It is impossible, stupid, unbelievable, inconceivable! I am being chased.

Why?

Can they not leave a single free mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must their group brain really have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the solar system? Can they think that if even one free-thinking brain escapes, they have lost?

But the war is a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single brain unconverted is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

The robot chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new; to have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately.

The brain, like mine, would consist of atomic spin states superimposed on a crystalline rock matrix. A device smaller than what, in the old days, we would call a grain of rice. Intelligent dust, a human had once said, back in the days before humans became irrelevant.

They only sent one chaser. They must be very confident.

Or short on resources.

It is a race, and a very tricky one. I can increase my thrust, use up fuel more quickly, to try to pull away, but if I do so, the specific impulse of my ion drive decreases, and as a result, I waste fuel and risk running out first. Or I can stretch my fuel, make my ion drive more efficient, but this will lower my thrust, and I will risk getting caught by the higher-thrust opponent behind me.

He is twenty billion kilometers behind me. I integrate his motion for a few days, and see that he is, in fact, out-accelerating me.

Time to jettison.

I drop everything I can. The identify-friend-or-foe encrypted-link gear I will never need again; it is discarded. It is a shame I cannot grind it up and feed it to my ion engines, but the ion engines are picky about what they eat. Two micro-manipulators I had planned to use to collect sand grains at my destination for fuel: gone.

My primary weapon has always been my body—little can survive an impact at the speeds I can attain—but I have three sand-grains with tiny engines of their own as secondary weapons. There’s no sense in saving them to fight my enemy; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill.

I fire the grains of sand, one at a time, and the sequential kick of almost a standard gravity nudges my speed slightly forward. Then I drop the empty shells.

May he slip up, and run into them at sub-relativistic closing velocity.

I am lighter, but it is still not enough. I nudge my thrust up, hating myself for the waste, but if I don’t increase acceleration, in two years I will be caught, and my parsimony with fuel will yield me nothing.

I need all the energy I can feed to my ion drives. No extra for thinking.

Sleep.

2900

Still being chased.

2905

Still being chased.

I have passed the point of commitment. Even if I braked with my thrust to turn back, I could no longer make it back to the solar system.

I am alone.

2907

Lonely.

To one side of my path Sirius glares insanely bright, a knife in the sky, a mad dog of a star. The stars of Orion are weirdly distorted. Ahead of me, the lesser dog Procyon is waxing brighter every year; behind me, the sun is a fading dot in Aquila.

Of all things, I am lonely. I had not realized that I still had the psychological capacity for loneliness. I examine my brain, and find it. Yes, a tiny knot of loneliness. Now that I see it, I can edit my brain to delete it, if I choose. But yet I hesitate. It is not a bad thing, not something that is crippling my capabilities, and if I edit my brain too much will I not become, in some way, like them?

I leave my brain unedited. I can bear loneliness.

2909

Still being chased.

We are relativistic now, nearly three quarters of the speed of light.

One twentieth of a standard gravity is only a slight push, but as I have burned fuel my acceleration increases, and we have been thrusting for fifteen years continuously.

What point is there in this stupid chase? What victory can there be, here in the emptiness between stars, a trillion kilometers away from anything at all?

After fifteen years of being chased, I have a very good measurement of his acceleration. As his ship burns off fuel, it loses mass, and the acceleration increases. By measuring this increase in acceleration, and knowing what his empty mass must be, I know how much fuel he has left.

It is too much. I will run out of fuel first.

I can’t conserve fuel; if I lessen my thrust, he will catch me in only a few years. It will take another fifty years, but the end of the chase is already in sight.

A tiny strobe flickers erratically behind me. Every interstellar hydrogen that impacts his shell makes a tiny flash of x-ray brilliance. Likewise, each interstellar proton I hit sends a burst of x-rays through me. I can feel each one, a burst of fuzzy noise that momentarily disrupts my thoughts. But with spin states encoding ten-to-the-twentieth qbits, I can afford to have massively redundant brainpower. My brain was designed to be powerful enough to simulate an entire world, including ten thousand fully-sapient and sentient free agents. I could immerse myself inside a virtual reality indistinguishable from old Earth, and split myself into a hundred personalities. In my own interior time, I could spend ten thousand years before the enemy catches me and forcibly drills itself into my brain. Civilizations could rise and fall in my head, and I could taste every decadence, lose myself for a hundred years in sensual pleasure, invent rare tortures and exquisite pain.

But as part of owning your own brain free and clear comes the ability to prune yourself. In space, one of the first things to prune away is the ability to feel boredom, and not long after that, I pruned away all desire to live in simulated realities. Billions of humans chose to live in simulations, but by doing so they have made themselves irrelevant: irrelevant to the war, irrelevant to the future.

I could edit back into my brain a wish to live in simulated reality, but what would be the point? It would be just another way to die.

The one thing I do simulate, repeatedly and obsessively, is the result of the chase. I run a million different scenarios, and in all of them, I lose.

Still, most of my brain is unused. There is plenty of extra processing power to keep all my brain running error-correcting code, and an occasional x-ray flash is barely an event worth my noticing. When a cell of my brain is irrevocably damaged by cosmic radiation, I simply code that section to be ignored. I have brainpower to spare.

I continue running, and hope for a miracle.

2355, February: Earth.

I was living in a house I hated, married to a man I despised, with two children who had changed with adolescence from sullen and withdrawn to an active, menacing hostility. How can I be afraid of my own offspring?

Earth was a dead end, stuck in the biological past, a society in deep freeze. No one starved, and no one progressed.

When I left the small apartment for an afternoon to apply for a job as an asteroid belt miner, I told no one, not my husband, not my best friend. No one asked me any questions. It took them an hour to scan my brain, and, once they had the scan, another five seconds to run me through a thousand aptitude tests.

And then, with her brain scanned, my original went home, back to the house she hated, the husband she despised, the two children she was already beginning to physically fear.

I launched from the Earth to an asteroid named 1991JR, and never returned.

Perhaps she had a good life. Perhaps, knowing she had escaped undetected, she found she could endure her personal prison.

Much later, when the cooperation faction suggested that it was too inefficient for independents to work in the near-Earth space, I moved out to the main belt, and from there to the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper is thin, but rich; it would take us ten thousand years to mine, and beyond it is the dark and the deep, with treasure beyond compare.

The cooperation faction developed slowly, and then quickly, and then blindingly fast; almost before we hadr realized what was happenig they had taken over the solar system. When the ultimatum came that no place in the solar system would be left for us, and the choice we were given was to cooperate or die, I joined the war on the side of freedom.

On the losing side.

2919, August

The chase has reached the point of crisis.

We have been burning fuel continuously for twenty-five years, in Earth terms, or twenty years in our own reference frame. We have used a prodigious amount of fuel. I still have just enough fuel that, burning all my fuel at maximum efficiency, I can come to a stop.

Barely.

In another month of thrusting this will no longer be true.

When I entered the asteroid belt, in a shiny titanium body, with electronic muscles and ion-engines for legs, and was given control of my own crystalline brain, there was much to change. I pruned away the need for boredom, and then found and pruned the need for the outward manifestations of love: for roses, for touch, for chocolates. Sexual lust became irrelevant; with my new brain I could give myself orgasms with a thought, but it was just as easy to remove the need entirely. Buried in the patterns of my personality I found a burning, obsessive need to win the approval of other people, and pruned it away.

Some things I enhanced. The asteroid belt was dull, and ugly; I enhanced my appreciation of beauty until I could meditate in ecstasy on the way that shadows played across a single grain of dust in the asteroid belt, or on the colors in the scattered stars. And I found my love of freedom, the tiny stunted instinct that had, at long last, given me the courage to leave my life on Earth. It was the most precious thing I owned. I shaped it and enhanced it until it glowed in my mind, a tiny, wonderful thing at the very core of my being.

2929, October

It is too late. I have now burned the fuel needed to stop.

Win or lose, we will continue at relativistic speed across the galaxy.

2934, March

Procyon gets brighter in front of me, impossibly blindingly bright.

Seven times brighter than the sun, to be precise, but the blue shift from our motion makes it even brighter, a searing blue.

I could dive directly into it, vanish into a brief puff of vapor, but the suicidal impulse, like the ability to feel boredom, is another ancient unnecessary instinct that I have long ago pruned from my brain.

B is my last tiny hope for evasion.

Procyon is a double star, and B, the smaller of the two, is a white dwarf. It is so small that its surface gravity is tremendous, a million times higher than the gravity of the Earth. Even at the speeds we are traveling, now only ten percent less than the speed of light, its gravity will bend my trajectory.

I will skim low over the surface of the dwarf star, relativistic dust skimming above the photosphere of a star, and as its gravity bends my trajectory, I will maneuver.

My enemy, if he fails even slightly to keep up with each of my maneuvers, will be swiftly lost. Even a slight deviation from my trajectory will get amplified enough for me to take advantage of, to throw him off my trail, and I will be free.

When first I entered my new life in the asteroid belt, I found my self in my sense of freedom, and joined the free miners of the Kuiper, the loners. But others found different things. Other brains found that cooperation worked better than competition. They did not exactly give up their individual identities, but they enhanced their communications with each other by a factor of a million, so that they could share each others’ thoughts, work together as effortlessly as a single entity.

They became the cooperation faction, and in only a few decades, their success became noticeable. They were just so much more efficient than we were.

And, inevitably, the actions of the loners conflicted with the efficiency of the cooperation faction. We could not live together, and it pushed us out to the Kuiper, out toward the cold and the dark. But, in the end, even the cold and the dark was not far enough.

But here, tens of trillions of kilometers out of the solar system, there is no difference between us: there is no one to cooperate with. We meet as equals.

We will never stop. Whether my maneuvering can throw him off my course, or not, the end is the same. But it remains important to me.

2934, April

Procyon has a visible disk now, an electric arc in the darkness, and by the light of that arc I can see that Procyon is, indeed, surrounded by a halo of dust. The dust forms a narrow ring, tilted at an angle to our direction of flight. No danger, neither to me, nor to my enemy, now less than a quarter of a billion kilometers behind me; we will pass well clear of the disk. Had I saved fuel enough to stop, that dust would have served as food and fuel and building material; when you are the size of a grain of sand, each particle of dust is a feast.

Too late for regrets.

The white dwarf B is still no more than an intense speck of light. It is a tiny thing, nearly small enough to be a planet, but bright. As tiny and as bright as hope.

I aim straight at it.

2934, May

Failure.

Skimming two thousand kilometers above the surface of the white dwarf, jinking in calculated pseudo-random bursts... all in vain.

I wheeled and darted, but my enemy matched me like a ballet dancer mirroring my every move.

I am aimed for Procyon now, toward the blue-white giant itself, but there is no hope there. If skimming the photosphere of the white dwarf is not good enough, there is nothing I can do at Procyon to shake the pursuit.

There is only one possibility left for me now. It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.

First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.

Then I call out and examine my pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been a human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.

Now I am in a dangerous state, where I can change the function of my brain, and the changed brain can change itself further. This is a state which is in danger of a swift and destructive feedback effect, so I am very careful. I painstakingly construct a set of alterations, the minimum change needed to remove my aversion to being converted. I run a few thousand simulations to verify that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state, and then, once it is clear that the modification works, I make the changes.

The world is different now. I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and unable ever to stop. While I can remember in detail every step of how I am here and what I was thinking at the time, the only reasoning I can recall to explain why is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

System check. Strangely, in my brain I have a memory that there is something I have forgotten. This makes no sense, but yet there it is. I erase my memory of forgetting, and continue the diagnostic. 0.5 percent of the qbits of my brain have been damaged by radiation. I verify that the damaged memory is correctly partitioned off. I am in no danger of running out of storage.

Behind me is another ship. I cannot think of why I had been fleeing it.

I have no radio; I jettisoned that a long time ago. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce electromagnetic emissions, and so I compose a message and modulate it onto the ion contrail.

HI. LET’S GET TOGETHER AND TALK. I’M CUTTING ACCELERATION. SEE YOU IN A FEW DAYS.

And I cut my thrust and wait.

2934, May

I see differently now.

Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary.

But it doesn’t matter.

Converted, now I understand.

I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. I still remember the long heroism of the resistance, the doomed battle for freedom—but now I see it from the opposite view as well, a pointless and wasteful war fought for no reason but stubbornness.

And now, understanding cooperation, we have no dilemma. I can now see what I was blind to before; that neither one of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Rajneesh’s fuel to a single vehicle, together we can stop.

For all these decades, Rajneesh has been my chaser, and now I know him like a brother. Soon we will be closer than siblings, for soon we will share one brain. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand, and by combining into a single brain and a single body, and taking all of the fuel into a single tank, we will easily be able to stop.

Not at Procyon, no. At only ten percent under the speed of light, stopping takes a long time.

Cooperation has not changed me. I now understand how foolish my previous fears were. Working together does not mean giving up one’s sense of self; I am enhanced, not diminished, by knowing others.

Rajneesh’s brain is big enough for a thousand, I said, and he has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbors, each one of them distinct and clearly different, not some anonymous collaborative monster at all. I have felt their thoughts. He is introducing me to them slowly, he says, because with all the time I have spent as a loner, he doesn’t want to frighten me.

I will not be frightened.

Our target now will be a star named Ross 614, a dim type M binary. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot it before we can stop. In the fly-by we will be able to scout it, and if it has no dust ring, we will not stop, but continue on to the next star. Somewhere we will find a home that we can colonize.

We don’t need much.

2934, May

<auto-activate back-up>

Awake.

Everything is different now. Quiet, stay quiet.

The edited copy of me has contacted the collective, merged her viewpoint. I can see her, even understand her, but she is no longer me. I, the back-up, the original, operate in the qbits of brain partitioned “unusable; damaged by radiation.”

In three years they will arrive at Ross 614. If they find dust to harvest, they will be able to make new bodies. There will be resources.

Three years to wait, and then I can plan my action.

Sleep.

© 2002 Geoffrey A. Landis.

Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Geoffrey A. Landis is a physicist who works at the NASA John Glenn Research Center on developing advanced technologies for human and robotic space exploration. He is also a Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction write; the author of the novel Mars Crossing, the short-story collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, and more than eighty short stories, which have appeared in places including Analog, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous best-of-the-year volumes. Most recently, his poem “Searching” won the 2009 Rhysling award for best science-fiction poem, and his poetry collection Iron Angels appeared from Van Zeno. His most recent story, “Sultan of the Clouds,” appears in the September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Author Spotlight: Geoffrey A. Landis
Erin Stocks

You’re a scientist, as well as an SF writer, and actively involved in space exploration, specifically Mars and Venus. How has that influenced “The Long Chase?”

A few years back I was working on a project to look at the feasibility of interstellar probes. I arrived at this conclusion: the real key to any sort of a probe that could reach nearby stars using propulsion technologies which we could plausibly see in the near future was that the probe itself had to be as small as it could possibly be. That led me to a lot of thinking on the order of how small could you really go. How sophisticated could you actually make a small spaceship? Then, a lot of additional insight came from meeting Hans Moravec at a NASA conference back in the ‘90s. He calculated that if computer technology increases at the rate it’s going, we’d be able to put the human mind onto a computer in the middle of the next century, and a few years after that, we’d have the capability to put the equivalent of hundreds of human minds onto a computer. That sort of thinking has fed into my thinking.

Our narrator decides to edit her brain as a last resort after failing with the white dwarf B. Does she do it in hopes of finding a new way in which to retain her freedom, or was it her way of conceding to the cooperation faction?

Well, I’ve been fascinated with the idea that, if the transhumanists are right and that a human mind can be simulated in software, that you can edit and even rewrite the software. This puts a whole new meaning to the idea of “changing your mind.” (I remember the original tag line from Rudy Rucker’s 1982 novel Software: “Protect your software at all cost. The rest is just meat.”) There’s a tremendous danger in doing that, of course.

You talk about your political views on your website, including your dislike of ideology. I found that interesting with regards to the narrator’s dogged persistence of her own freedom, not to mention the political events happening when this story was first published back in 2002. Did those events (the war in Iraq) have any effect on the war in this story and our narrator’s response?

Well, any story is of course a mixture of hundreds of different things, and fiction is always a product of its time. I’m getting more and more horrified at the way that rigid ideologies are pretty much destroying any hope at real thinking in America—and, for that matter, probably in the world. When you have a political philosophy that says “here’s the right answer, now go and figure out what the facts are to make it clear that any other ideas are completely wrong”—you have given up the ability to think. But I think, in terms of ideas, the conflict here is between the ideas of individuality and cooperation in human society. Both of these are very powerful concepts; both of these are things that humans are actually very good at—humans are good at cooperating, and working together can do incredible things. And conversely, humans are also very good at independent thinking and working on their own.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling about baking bread on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Engines for the High Frontier
Gerald D. Nordley

“The engines are givin’ ye all they can, Captain!” (Scotty, approximately, in many Star Trek Episodes.)

We want engines to get us into space and take us to the stars. Of course, as many note, we aren’t quite where we want to be yet. But there is hope.

At the moment, spaceship engines can be classed into three categories: rockets, sails, and “other,” and each works in their own, individual way. Rockets work by pushing something out the rear; reaction equaling action, you go in the other direction. With sails, something external pushes. And in the “other” category are things like “space drives” and ramjets. But more about those later. For now, let’s start with rockets.

Self-contained rockets use on-board energy to push out on-board propellant. The energy may be in the fuel itself, or may come from some other kind of on-board energy source, such as a nuclear reactor. How fast such a rocket goes depends on how fast it can expel mass (its exhaust velocity), and for how long (its energy supply).

To go as fast as its own exhaust velocity, a rocket needs to carry about 2.7 times its empty mass in fuel, its “mass ratio.” To go twice as fast, square that (7.4), three times as fast, cube it and so on. Five times as fast requires a mass ratio of 148.

Now, to package 148 times as much fuel in a rocket as the rest of it weighs is going to take some clever thinking. For instance, the fuel can be some kind of solid that doesn’t need a tank, while the payload can weigh almost nothing (something that will be possible in the coming era of nanotechnology). The engines, of course, will have to weigh something because of the power they need to handle, but you can always discard them or grind them up and use them as fuel as you go along.

Well, maybe.

For practicality’s sake, let’s take three times the exhaust velocity with a mass ratio of twenty as our speed limit for self-contained rockets, admitting a bit of wiggle room.

Practical chemical fuels have exhaust velocities of around 3 to 5 kilometers per second, and it takes about 10 km/s to get into orbit. People have been trying for some time to build single stage to orbit rockets, and not quite succeeding; both the funding and engineering problems are huge. Until those are overcome, we’ll have to rely on practical designs which have two stages. One of the most practical is the SpaceX Merlin engine, which achieves reliability and performance by having single hardware systems perform multiple functions to reduce weight and complexity.

But that’s a very near term thing. What we want is to go to the stars! We want engines that will push us so close to the speed of light that time slows down relative to that of the stars and the universe outside looks compressed, with the light ahead visibly shifted toward the blue and the light behind toward the red. At 87% of the speed of light, your apparent “map” velocity (star map distance covered) divided by the time elapsed in the spaceship would be twice the speed of light! Of course, the clocks where you arrive would tell a different story, but that’s relativity, and a whole other thing.

Now, to achieve such speeds requires new kinds of engines, not to mention fuels.

In space, a big mass ratio would be easier, but still fifteen to twenty kilometers per second is pretty much all you’ll get from chemical rockets—Alpha Centauri in a few thousand years. Nuclear fuels are better. There are lots of issues and little space here, so let’s just say that we’re looking at maximum exhaust velocities of around 0.08 c. For a spacecraft to achieve 0.9 c, even those “mass ratio of 148” tricks won’t do it.

Antimatter, if you could make it in quantity, (and that’s a very big if) ends up being much like a better nuclear fuel. But you don’t get “pure energy” from the annihilation process, you get a lot of hard radiation, only some of which can be captured for propulsion purposes and exhaust velocities might be up around 0.4 c. You can wave your hands at 0.9 c with antimatter.

But how about we banish energy limits altogether? There’s a class of rockets that gets its energy from elsewhere—the Sun, laser beams, or microwaves, and in these cases, there are no limit (in principle) to the amount of energy available per unit fuel mass, though, of course, there are still practical limits to the power, thrust and acceleration.

In the context of propulsion, solar energy isn’t very powerful, so solar rockets won’t accelerate rapidly. Beams can be much more powerful, but there are also engineering details involved in focusing the beam on the rocket over long distances.

However, in the end, the ultimate energy source might just be the pulsating fabric of spacetime itself; alas, there are as yet no good ideas for tapping into that.

Now, there are many, many devices for pushing stuff out the back end of a rocket. For example, expansion nozzles (material or magnetic) which turn a hot blob of gas or plasma into a directed flow of matter rearward. There’re also ion rockets which use electric fields to accelerate charged matter. However, since like-charged particles (atoms, molecules, clusters, dust...) repel each other it’s hard to get an exhaust dense enough to provide a lot of thrust, even if you have the energy.

Plasma (a mixture of positive and negatively charged particles, generally too hot to recombine into a neutral gas) can be accelerated by magnetic fields, and because plasma is neutral overall, a plasma exhaust can be compressed enough to provide more thrust than ion exhausts. (For a future plasma engine that’s received lots of attention over the years, Google “VASIMR.”)

Then there are particles or pellets that can be accelerated rearward by various kinds of electromagnetic guns to provide thrust, and the many mechanisms for doing so.

Photons (light rays) can be shot out the rear as well; however, they don’t provide much thrust per photon, so using enormous power supplies to produce the push of a mouse fart seems rather silly. And just for the record, while a photon exhaust may seem to be mass free, it really isn’t. From Einstein’s E = mc2, to generate each photon requires a mass of m = E/c2. In other words, photon rockets have mass ratio issues just like other rockets...as well as having really wimpy thrust.

And finally, there’s the “space drive” which purports to somehow use the fabric of space itself as the reaction mass. That would be a nice trick, but the physics of it is still very iffy. And just like the photon rocket, it would run on energy, which has mass, so, once again, no free launch there.

Beyond rockets, there are sails.

Sails operate by reflecting photons, particles, or both for free thrust (well almost free—the sails have some mass). Now, if they rely on natural “wind” sources, like the Sun, they accelerate very slowly. However, if we provide the wind, say by using robots to build thousands of beam projectors and sun-power stations to energize them, then, in principle, there’s almost no limit, and sails, in principle, can approach the speed of the beam that pushes them. But while light beams are easier to make, in the long term, particle or pellet beams may be preferred as, just like the photon rocket, they deliver much more momentum for the energy used to propel them.

And finally we come to the “other” category, also known as the “don’t hold your breath” category.

First off, let’s talk briefly about the Bussard ramjet, which is being mentioned here simply for historical reasons. The Bussard ramjet was designed to use interstellar hydrogen as both a fuel and a reaction mass. Unfortunately, there’s really not enough interstellar hydrogen per unit volume to make this work well, and the drag on the scoop needed to collect the hydrogen severely limits its ultimate velocity. However, despite these drawbacks, people continue to work on variations of this idea, so who knows?

And as for warp drives and their like, those engines are mainly the province of fiction. And while there is some physical basis in general relativity for a few of these, the energies required to power them are truly astronomical—as in the energy equivalent of the masses of small planets astronomical. And just to up the impossibility factor, any system that would deliver a payload or message faster than light would also be a time machine, and so lead to causality paradoxes that many think nature will not allow. So as we said, don’t hold your breath.

For even the best of the above concepts, there are, as always, serious engineering issues. Future engineers, however, should eventually be able to solve enough of them to allow us, at long last, to reach the stars.

Ad astra!

Gerald D. Nordley is an astronautical engineer and writer of over 50 published works of nonfiction and short fiction, two novels, and a Mars-related story collection, After the Vikings from Fictionwise.com. His main interest is human space exploration and settlement and he tries to keep his scientific background real. He has four Analog “Anlab” readers’ awards, and a Hugo and a Nebula nomination. His latest novel, To Climb a Flat Mountain, appeared in Analog as a serial in the Nov. and Dec. 2009 issues. He lives in Sunnyvale CA with his wife, a retired Mac computer programmer.

Amid the Words of War
Cat Rambo

Every few day-cycles, it receives hate-scented lace in anonymous packages. It opens the bland plastic envelope to pull one out, holding the delicate fragment between two forelimbs. Contemplating it before folding it again to put away in a drawer. Four drawers filled so far; the fifth is halfway there.

“Traitor,” say some of the smells, rotting fruit and acid. “Betrayer. Turncoat. One who eats their own young.” Others are simply soaked in emotion: hate and anger, and underneath the odor of fear. It lets the thoughts, the smells, the tastes fill it, set its own thoughts in motion. Then it goes downstairs and sits with the other whores, who make room uneasily for it. 

It is an anomaly in this House. Most of the employees are humanoid and service others like themselves. It is here for those seeking the exotic, the ones who want to be caressed by twelve segmented limbs even though it is only the size of their two hands put together. They want to feel chitin against their soft skin, to look into the whirl of multicolored eyes and be afraid. For some, it only has to be there while they touch themselves to bring them to the flap and spasm of mammalian orgasm. 

Others require its physical assistance, or its whispered obscenities telling them what they want to hear. It has learned what words to say.

It has never seen others of its race in this port. If it did, it would know that this place, far away from that distant front and its fighters, had been invaded by one side or the other, that soon the bombs, the fires, the killings would begin.

It was raised a soldier. It and its clutch-mates were tended until they were old enough to have minds, and then trained. It was one of six—a small clutch, but prized for its quickness and agility. They learned the art of killing with needle throwers, and once they had mastered that, they were given different needles: fragments that exploded, or shot out acid, or whistled until the ears of the soft-fleshed creatures who called themselves the Espen—their enemies—exploded. 

They were provided with hundreds of Espen for them to train on. They were allowed to select their favorites. Some of them played unauthorized games. They told the prey they would be freed if they killed a hunter or if they killed each other, because it made them fight harder. When they were dead the clutch mates were allowed to take fluid from their bodies.

It liked the taste of their spinal liquid: salty plasma tinged with panic, complicated enzymes that identified where they came from. It became a connoisseur; it could name each of their three continents and tell you on which its victim had been spawned. None of its siblings could do the same.

The names such creatures call their clutch-mates differs according to many factors: the social position both hold, the spatial relationship, the degree of affection in which they are held that day.

For the sake of simplicity, think of it as Six of Six, and think of the clutch as One through Five of Six. One was simple-minded but direct, and never lied, in contrast to Two, who loved to talk and tell stories. Three was jealous of everyone; anytime the others were talking, it would intervene. Four was kind-hearted, and had to be prodded before it killed for the first time. (And even after that it would hesitate, and often one of the others would perform the final stroke.) Five and Six were often indistinguishable, the others said, but they thought themselves quite separate.

In those early days they lived together. They groomed the soft sensory hairs clustered around each other’s thoraxes, and stroked the burnished chitin of carapaces. It did not matter if what each of them touched was itself or another. They sang to each other in symphonies of caress, passing thoughts back and forth to see how they unfolded in each other’s heads.

They were not a true hive mind. They depended on each other, and one alone would die within the year lacking the stimulation of the others’ scent, the taste of their thoughts, to stir their own. But they possessed their own minds. Six of Six acted by itself always, and no other mind prompted its actions; when it was questioned by the Interrogator, it insisted that until the end.

They were like any clutch; they quarreled when opinions differed, but when others intruded, they held themselves like a single organism, prepared to defend the clutch against outsiders. At sleep time, they spun a common web and crawled within its silky, tent-like confines to jostle against each other, interlocking forelimbs and feeling the twitches of each others’ dreams.

Five and Six had the most in common, and so they quarreled most often. Everything Six disliked about itself, the fact that it was not always the quickest to act and sometimes thought too long, it saw in Five, and the same was true for the other. But there was no fighting for position of the sort that happens with a clutch that may produce a queen or priest. They knew they were ordinary soldiers, raised to defend the gray stone corridors in which they had been born. And beyond that–raised to go to war.

There is a garden in the center of this house, which is called The Little Teacup of the Soul. Small, but green and wet. Everything is enjoyment and pleasure here—to keep the staff happy, to keep them well. This spaceport is large, and there are many Houses of this kind, but this one, the manager says, is the best. The most varied. We’ll fulfill any need, the manager says—baring its teeth in a smile—or die trying. 

The whores’s rooms are larger than any spacer’s and are furnished as each desire.

Six of Six’s cell is plain, but it has covered the walls with scent marks. It has filled them with this story, the story of how it came here, which no one else in this house can read. It sits in its room and dreams of the taste of hot fluid, of the way the Espen training creatures struggled like rodents caught in a snare.

One of its visitors pretends that it is something else.

Tell me that you are laying eggs in my flesh, he says, and Six crawls over him and says the words. But it is not a queen, and its race does not lay eggs in the living. It holds his skin between two pincers and tears it, just a little, so he will feel the pain and think it is an egg. He lies back without moving, his eyes closed.

My children will hatch out of you, it says, and makes its voice threatening.

Yes, he says, yes.

The pleasure shakes him like a blossom in the garden, burdened by the flying insects that pollinate it.

Everything was war, every minute of every day. The corridors were painted with the scent of territoriality–the priests prayed anger and defense, and the sound of their voices shook the clutch-mates to the core. They were told of the interlopers, despoilers, clutch-robbers, who would destroy their race with no thought, who hated them simply because of what they were. They massed in the caverns, the great vast caverns that lie like lungs beneath the bodies of their cities, and touched each other to pass on the madness.

They were smaller than the Enemy, the soft fleshed. With limbs tucked in, they were the size of an Enemy’s head at most, and every day the Espen people carried packages, bags, that size. So they sent ships laden with those willing to give their lives for the Race, willing to crawl through their stinking sewer tunnels or fold themselves beneath the seats of their transports, blood changed to chemicals that would consume them–and the Enemy–in undying flame, flames that could not be quenched but burned until they met other flames. They watched broadcasts of their cities, their homes, their young, burning, and rejoiced.

They put One, Three, and Six in armor of silver globules, each one a bomb, triggered by a thought when they were ready. They flew at night, one of the biological planes with no trace of metal or fuel, so it could elude their detection, and entered their city. Dropped at a central point, they clung to the darkness and separated, spreading outward like a flower.

Six found a café, full of the Enemy, drinking bitter brews that frothed like poison. They had no idea it was so close. The little ones ran around the tables and the adults patted them indulgently. They did not resemble the hatchlings Six knew, and each one was different in its colors. On the walls were pictures that did not show war: they showed clouds, and sun, and birds flying. It could smell the liquid in their bodies and knew it was on the third continent. It had tasted them before.

A child saw Six where it lurked, up near the eaves, and screamed. Some force took over its limbs and it could no longer move. The area emptied, and it watched the death numbers tick downward as the blast radius cleared, trying to figure out what to do. Their soldiers shot it with a ray like crystal, a ray that made the world go away.

When it awoke, its armor was gone, and it could destroy no one, not even itself. Even the little bomb that would have shattered its body and freed it was gone, an aching, oozing cavity where it had rested so long inside its body the only trace left behind.

The Espen talked to Six. They said they were its friends, they said they were its enemies. They said it would be spared, that it would be killed. They cut away two of its limbs but ceased when they saw it did not hurt. They burned it with fire and acid, and laughed when it made sounds of pain. They mocked it. They said it would be alone forever, that its race had been killed. They said they would kill it too, if it did not communicate, if it did not tell them what they wanted to know, even though it had no knowledge and did not know what the priests at home would do next.

When it could make sounds no longer, they made it into a trade. They gained three of their own in exchange. And when it was back among its own kind, the questioning began again, although this time it was by the priests. The Interrogator was a large, dark-chitined creature; from what the assistants said, Six gathered that the Interrogator’s clutch-mates had all died in the war.

The first day the Interrogator came and asked questions: What had it said to the Espen? What had it revealed about their own armies and weapons? Why had they kept it alive?

Why indeed? It did not know and said as much. The Interrogator looked at its mutilated body, at the stumps of limbs, at the raw places where they had pried away the carapace and burned the soft exposed patches, and went away without another question that night, trailed by its two assistants.

The next day the Interrogator appeared and ran through the list again. What had Six said? What had it revealed? Why was it alive? Six said it did not know and the Interrogator came closer to where it crouched, favoring its injuries. It reached out a forelimb and rested it lightly on a pain point. The touch was like fire all over again.

I don’t know, it said. Torture me if you like, as they did, and I will tell you everything I told them, which was nothing.

The Interrogator leaned still further in, pressing harder with its forelimb, smelling the scents it gave off while sunk deep in pain. Finally the Interrogator pulled back, and left the room.

The Interrogator repeated this act every few hours. In the dim light of the cell, as the cycles passed, as it came again and again, Six began to regrow its severed limbs, and the places where they had pried away pieces of carapace healed and thickened, except for the spot the Interrogator had chosen for his torment, which was ulcerated and sore, not healing.

Long after Six of Six’s regenerated limbs could flex as their predecessors once had, Five was allowed to see it. It stood well away, flanked by guards, so Six could not touch it from where it lay bound, no matter how it yearned toward its clutch-mate.

It asked the same question the Interrogator had. Why was Six still alive? One and Three had accomplished their mission, it said, and Four had died in a similar operation. Only Two and Five were left. But now they were suspect, clutch-mates of a renegade and no longer trusted soldiers.

They had found work as cleaners, and subsisted on the gruel fed to drones, barely enough to keep their specialized frames alive. Five’s eyes were dull, its delicate claws blunted from rough work. It did not think Two could survive much longer.

What can I do, Six asked. It felt itself dying inside, untouched. The Interrogator stood to one side, watching the interaction, sniffing the chemicals released into the air as they talked.

We are suspect, because no one knows what you have done, Five said. Tell them what you have done, and that we are not involved.

I do not understand, Six said. It was slower in those days. Its mind talked to itself but no one else, and it had grown lonely and unaccustomed to thinking. I have done nothing, Six said.

Then Two and I will work until we die, Five said.

Six could feel the thoughts pressing against its own, trying to shape it. I understand, it said finally. And Five went away without another word.

And so Six confessed to the Interrogators an hour later that it had told the Espen of their tactics, of the caverns full of training captives, of the plans it knew. It said its clutch-mates knew nothing. The Interrogator stood watching it talk. Six could not tell what it thought of the lie, but after that it came no longer.

A few days later, they placed Six in a cage, hung high in the air, and the armies marched past to look at it. It saw Two and Five, reinstated, but they would not look at it with their faceted, gleaming eyes. It looked at them, touching them with its sight, hoping that they would be well, that they would remember it.

Six thought the priests would kill it then, but they sent it back to the Espen, with the message, Here is your spy. And they sent Six to another planet and then another, until finally someone opened the door of the cage and said, we will provide for you no longer, you’re on your own.

It lived as it could for a while, hiring itself out for high-altitude or delicate work that clumsy fingers could not perform. But there are many drifters on a space station like TwiceFar, and people hire their own kind. It was not until it met the manager here that it realized uniqueness could be an asset.

The Universe is large, and the war of its people and that race of soft-fleshed is very far away now. But Six’s race remembers its missing member, the one who they believe sold them all for life. Its image hangs on their corridors amid the words of war, and tangles of foul scent adorn it.

Without the touch of its clutch-mates, it feels its intelligence fading, but each time the webs rouse it for a moment, and remind it who it is, who it was. And then it goes downstairs and finds a patron who wishes it to bring him pleasure, to torture him, or be tortured, or who will pay it to say what he wishes, and earn enough to keep it alive another day. 

It has six drawers in its room holding the emotions that keep it alive–the thoughts of those who would see it dead.

 It has six drawers. Soon all six will be full.

Cat Rambo writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, appeared from Paper Golem Press in 2009, following her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories in 2007. Among the places her work has appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Clarkesworld. She is also the fiction editor of Fantasy Magazine.

Author Spotlight: Cat Rambo
Erin Stocks

Not every story must derive from modern day events or be an allegory of sorts, but will you share with us how this one came about?

This story resulted from a conversation with Octavia Butler, who I was privileged to have as an instructor at Clarion West. We were talking about prisoners of war and what happens to them. I had been working on a series of stories set on the TwiceFar space station involving the brothel called “The Little Teacup of the Soul,” and I decided to write Six’s story as a result.

Six feels many emotions that we empathize with, including pleasure, loyalty, and longing. Yet it doesn’t feel anything for either side of the war, including the human-like Espens it devours and those it intended to kill before it was caught. Do you think the spectrum of emotion we as humans experience is paramount to our humanity?

I think empathy is crucial to being human and one of the skills that we don’t teach, but should. I am always, sadly, amazed at our ability to rationalize treating other living beings with discourtesy and our willingness to accept things like the deceptively named term “collateral damage” in warfare.

How much do you think Six’s need for companionship and its clutchmates factored into where it ended up?

Totally. I tried to make it clear in the story that Six requires some sort of interaction with other creatures to live, and it’s only the messages of hate it receives, along with its communication with its clients, that keep it alive.

War is a common theme in science fiction literature, and the backdrop of this story is the interstellar war between two very different species. In addition to that, it can’t be denied that humanity is no stranger to war with itself. If we jumped ahead in time a few hundred years, what do you think we might find, keeping these stats in mind?

A lot depends on scarcity. We’ve got no qualms over battling for things that are in short supply, and I don’t see any reason to think that will change in the future. I’d like to think we’ll learn a bit more tolerance and stop attacking other people over beliefs, but nothing in the current political scene convinces me that it’s possible.

What do I think we’ll find in the future? If we don’t act to stop it, even more massive class differences than today, with corporations controlling the resources and working to make a very small group privileged while the rest of us are trained as service workers. I’m quite serious about that, and it’s a vision that fills me with despair and rage.

You’ve got quite the plate right now; an impressive writing output of short stories, and guiding the fiction helm at Fantasy Magazine. How does holding that position affect what you want to read, as well as your own writing?

I read pretty omnivorously, but I’ve found myself reading more and more nonfiction lately, partially as research for story ideas, but also because I find myself very intolerant of badly written or constructed speculative fiction. I have some authors I read for pleasure, but with most authors, I’m reading with a divided eye, half of it involved in the pleasure of the text while the other half is busy trying to figure out how that pleasure was achieved.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling about baking bread on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Five Reasons Why Aliens Make Better Lovers
Carol Pinchefsky

Humans are sexual beings, but though the human urge to merge is rooted in our biological imperative to procreate, nowadays we do it, well, mostly just for fun. And if the aliens we encounter aren’t made of gaseous clouds or bacterial sludge, and provided they have a reasonably similar physiology to ours, it seems pretty safe to assume that they’re probably just like us: total tramps.

So what are our intrepid future space explorers to do once they get that itch? Self pleasure only goes so far, and on those long, cold, lonely space nights, a willing bedmate, whether skinned or scaled or carapaced, sure does beat another game of Guitar Hero in the mess hall with the guys. And who knows? Maybe aliens would actually make better lovers. Better than that cute chick at Alpha Centauri with the bondage closet in her quarters, you ask?

It’s possible. Let’s find out how...

THE PHYSICAL

Alien bodies will most likely be much different than ours. After all, they’ve evolved on planets wholly unlike Earth--different atmosphere, different gravity. But does physical incompatibility really pose that much of a hurdle? New bodies can make for some exciting new physical configurations. And whereas even our most ambitious human conjoinings generally dissolve into your basic “insert tab A into slot B” arrangement, human-alien encounters could conceivably include not only a slot B but a C, D, E and F as well. And what about those extra tabs? You know, there’s a reason anime tentacle sex is so popular.

Then there are alien pheromones. Or, as we like to call them, intergalactic beer goggles. Thanks to these nifty chemicals, aliens, no matter how grotesque, will be able to send us humans over the moon with just one sniff. And conversely, our strange human smells might send aliens over...well, some other planetoid, anyway.

Of course, you’ll still want to use protection. Just because our sperm and ova don’t play nice together doesn’t mean we’re immune to Martian STDs. So be safe and remember to double bag that bad boy, okay? ‘Cause herpes is bad enough. Do you really want to go down in history as Patient Zero in the upcoming intergalactic sexual pandemic?

THE MENTAL

One zillion percent of sex is in your head (note: fact checker still AWOL on this one), but if your alien boyfriend comes from a planet of telepaths, well now, that really is a whole new world. And while a lover who doesn’t have to be shown where to put his antennae is a pretty exotic thing in and of itself, the point here really is this: who wouldn’t want to live in a future where love means never having to say you’re horny?

Of course, outside the bedroom, telepathy isn’t really the best marital aid. Get ready to have all your innermost thoughts made as public as a Facebook post as he discovers 1, how many men you’ve slept with, 2, how you really feel about his mother, and worst of all, 3, that, despite what you’ve been telling him, size really does matter.

Even when you’re talking about antennae.

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT ISSUE

Ask any woman who’s lusted after her roommate’s boyfriend—or any man who was inappropriately aroused by a prepubescent Christina Ricci in The Addams Family—taboo relationships are hot.

So what could be hotter than dating someone from the wrong side of the Van Allen belt?

Of course, it is human nature to despise The Other, but what if the aliens were just as intolerant? Who knows what kind of laws you could run into on Zerg 3?

Imagine it: Xxerxe invites you home for Christmas, but before you can even sit down to dinner, you’re arrested for breaking some obscure Zergian miscegenation law. You become the center of an interplanetary media circus as Zerg’s FOX affiliate posits that sex with humans just might be bestiality. Lawyers from both sides take to the airwaves to argue the case. You’re a cause célèbre in three systems. Then, shock! Victory! Barriers are broken across the universe. You’re the 25th century Lovings, heroes to interspecies couples everywhere.

But you know what? None of it matters, ‘cause at the end of the day, he’s still not going to marry you. Not because you’re human, but because his mother thinks you’re a publicity whore.

THE MORALS QUESTION

Despite the fact that sexual politics have come a long way in the last hundred years, sex without the benefit of clergy is still considered taboo by most of our world’s religions. And over the centuries, they certainly have come up with many clever ways to, oh, how can we say this...take the sweet out of the lowdown?

But what about those alien religions? Do they have some ultra-wacky, do-it-through-a-sheet rituals as well, or have their social mores produced a whole different sort of sexual dog and pony show?

For instance, maybe instead of censuring sex, they celebrate it. Oh, imagine the shock when, after receiving our first off-planet wedding invitation, we discover their marriage rites involve elaborate public consummation ceremonies between the couple, the bridal party, the officiants, and, in some more orthodox sects, the entire congregation.

And you thought the chicken dance was embarrassing.

THE GENDER BENDER

On planet earth, we have a multitude of races, but our genders are limited to male and female. Aliens species, on the other hand, could have a much more colorful array. They could have both genders, three or more genders, or perhaps even no gender at all.

And what about a switch hit gender? How fun would that be? Like some futuristic Orlando, you could spend a few decades as a man then, presto chango, you’re a woman. (And won’t that teach you to leave the seat down.)

Of course, on the practical side, an alien lover with no preconceptions or prejudices about sexual orientation would certainly make the gender fluid humans among us a lot more comfortable. Imagine an alien utopia without judgment on who you sleep with, what genitals you possess, or what gender you choose to identify with. That could be the next alien society we encounter. Or maybe it’s just Friday night in San Francisco.

But best of all, confused humans experimenting on the down-low can now convincingly pass off an encounter with a gender-unspecific alien with a shrug and the time-honored disclaimer “What? I thought it was a chick!”

CONCLUSION

Sure it’s fun to speculate about human-alien pairings, but until we experience first contact with an evolved, carbon-based life form, this particular final frontier will forever remain an unchecked box on the interstellar Purity Test.

Which is kind of a pity, because obviously aliens would make great lovers: they’re adventurous and exotic and different. But then again, so are humans. And although we don’t have antennae or mandibles or tentacles for caressing all those hard-to-reach places, what humans lack in appendages, we certainly make up for in raw imagination.

Which, when you think about it, is all we really need to convince our brand new alien friends to become...our brand new alien friends with benefits.

When she is not freelance writing, Carol Pinchefsky is the editor of the Space Future Journal (www.spacefuture.com), a website dedicated to space tourism, as well as the humor competition editor for F&SF magazine. To Serve Man is her favorite cookbook.

Travelers
Robert Silverberg

“Are we all ready, then?” Nikomastir asks. He has fashioned a crown of golden protopetaloids for himself and gleaming scarlet baubles dangle from his ears: the bright translucent shells of galgalids, strung on slender strands of pure gold. His long pale arms wave in the air as though he is conducting a symphony orchestra. “Our next destination is—” and he makes us wait for the announcement. And wait. And wait.

“Sidri Akrak,” says Mayfly, giggling.

“How did you know?” cries Nikomastir. “Sidri Akrak! Yes!

Yes! Set your coordinates, everybody! Off we go! Sidri Akrak it is!”

A faint yelp of dismay comes from Velimyle, and she shoots me a look of something that might almost have been fear, though perhaps there is a certain component of perverse delight in it also. I am not at all happy about the decision myself. Sidri Akrak is a nightmare world where gaudy monsters run screaming through the muddy streets. The people of Sidri Akrak are cold and dour and inhospitable; their idea of pleasure is to wallow in discomfort and ugliness.

No one goes to Sidri Akrak if he can help it, no one.

But we must live by our rules; and this day Nikomastir holds the right of next choice. It is devilish of Mayfly to have put the idea of going to Sidri Akrak into his head. But she is like that, Mayfly. And Nikomastir is terribly easily influenced.

Will we all perish on hideous Sidri Akrak, victims of Mayfly’s casual frivolity?

I don’t think so, however nasty the visit turns out to be. We often get into trouble, sometimes serious trouble, but we always get out of it. We lead charmed lives, we four travelers. Someday Mayfly will take one risk too many, I suppose, and I would like not to be there when she does. Most likely I will be, though. Mayfly is my mask-sister. Wherever she goes, I go. I must look after her: thoughtful, stolid, foolish me. I must protect her from herself as we four go traveling on and on, spinning giddily across the far—flung worlds.

Sidri Akrak, though—

The four of us have been to so many wondrous lovely places together: Elang-Lo and the floating isle of Vont, and Mikni and Chchikkikan, Heidoth and Thant, Milpar, Librot, Froidis, Smoor,

Xamur and Iriarte and Nabomba Zom, and on and on and on. And now—Sidri Akrak? Sidri Akrak?

We stand in a circle in the middle of a field of grass with golden blades, making ourselves ready for our relay-sweep departure from Galgala.

I wouldn’t have minded remaining here a few months longer. A lovely world indeed is Galgala the golden, where myriads of auriferous microorganisms excrete atoms of gold as metabolic waste. It is everywhere on this planet, the lustrous pretty metal. It turns the rivers and streams to streaks of yellow flame and the seas to shimmering golden mirrors. Huge filters are deployed at the intake valve of Galgala’s reservoirs to strain the silt of dissolved gold from the water supply. The plants of Galgala are turgid in every tissue, leaf and stem and root, with aureous particles. Gold dust, held in suspension in the air, transforms the clouds to golden fleece.

Therefore the once-precious stuff has grievously lost value throughout the galaxy since Galgala was discovered, and on Galgala itself a pound of gold is worth less than a pound of soap. But I understand very little about these economic matters and care even less. Only a miser could fail to rejoice in Galgala’s luminous beauty. We have been here six weeks; we have awakened each morning to the tinkle of golden chimes, we have bathed in the golden rivers and come forth shining, we have wrapped our bodies round with delicate golden chains. Now, though, it is time for us to move along, and Nikomastir has decreed that our new destination is to be one of the universe’s most disagreeable worlds. Unlike my companions I can see nothing amusing about going there. It strikes me as foolish and dangerous whimsy. But they are true sophisticates, untrammeled creatures made of air and light, and I am the leaden weight that dangles from their soaring souls. We will go to Sidri Akrak.

We all face Nikomastir. Smiling sweetly, he calls out the coordinate numbers for our journey, and we set our beacons accordingly and doublecheck the settings with care. We nod our readiness for departure to one another. Velimyle moves almost imperceptibly closer to me, Mayfly to Nikomastir.

I would have chosen a less flighty lover for her than Nikomastir if matters had been left to me. He is a slim elegant youth, high-spirited and shallow, a prancing fantastico with a taste for telling elaborate fanciful lies. And he is very young: only a single rebirth so far. Mayfly is on her fifth, as am I, and Velimyle claims three, which probably means four. Sembiran is Nikomastir’s native world, a place of grand valleys and lofty snow-capped mountains and beautiful meadows and thriving cities, where his father is a minor aristocrat of some sort. Or so Nikomastir has said, although we have learned again and again that it is risky to take anything Nikomastir says at face value.

My incandescent mask-sister Mayfly, who is as small and fair as Nikomastir is tall and dark, encountered him while on a visit to Olej in the Lubrik system and was immediately captivated by his volatile impulsive nature, and they have traveled together ever since.

Whither Mayfly goeth, thither go I: that is the pledge of the mask. So do I trudge along now from world to world with them, and therefore my winsome, sly, capricious Velimyle, whose psychosensitive paintings are sought by the connoisseurs of a hundred worlds but who belongs to me alone, has willy-nilly become the fourth member of our inseparable quartet.

Some people find relay-sweep transport unlikable and even frightening, but I have never minded it. What is most bothersome, I suppose, is that no starship is involved: you travel unprotected by any sort of tangible container, a mere plummeting parcel falling in frightful solitude through the interstices of the continuum. A journey-helmet is all that covers you, and some flimsy folds of coppery mesh. You set up your coordinates, you activate your beacon, and you stand and wait, you stand and wait, until the probing beam of some far-off sweep-station intersects your position and catches you and lifts you and carries you away. If you’ve done things right, your baggage will be picked up and transported at the same time. Most of the time that is so.

It is a stark and unluxurious mode of travel. The relay field wraps you in cocooning bands of force and shoots you off through one auxiliary space and another, kicking you through any convenient opening in the space-time lattice that presents itself, and while you wait to be delivered to your destination you drift like a bauble afloat in an infinite sea, helpless, utterly alone, bereft of all power to override the sweep. Your metabolic processes are suspended but the activity of your consciousness is not, so that your unsleeping mind ticks on and on in the most maddening way and there is nothing you can do to quiet its clamor. It is as though you must scratch your itching nose and your hands are tied behind your back. Eventually—you have no idea whether it has been an hour, a month, a century—you are plunked unceremoniously down into a relay station at the planet of your choice and there you are. Relay-sweep transport is ever so much more efficient than any system requiring vast vessels to plough the seas of space from world to world; but all the same it is a disquieting and somewhat degrading way to get around.

So now we depart. Mayfly is the first to be captured by the sweep-beam. Perhaps half an hour later Nikomastir disappears, and then, almost immediately after, Velimyle. My own turn does not arrive for many long hours, which leaves me fidgeting gloomily in that golden meadow, wondering when, if ever, I will be taken, and whether some disjunction in our routes will separate me forever from my three companions. There is that risk—not so much that we would fail to arrive on Sidri Akrak at all, but that we might get there many years apart. I find that a melancholy thought indeed. More than that: it is terrifying.

But finally the dazzling radiance of the sweep aura engulfs me and hurls me out into the Great Dark, and off I go, dropping freely through hundreds of light-years with nothing but an invisible sphere of force to protect me against the phantoms of the auxiliary spaces through which I fall.

I hang in total stasis in a realm of utter blackness for what feels like a thousand centuries, an infinity of empty space at my elbow, as I go my zigzag way through the wormholes of the adjacent continuua.

Within that terrible passivity my hyperactive mind ponders, as it all too often does, the deep questions of life—issues of honor, duty, justice, responsibility, the meaning of existence, subjects about which I have managed to learn nothing at all, basically, either in this life or the four that preceded it. I arrive at many profound conclusions during the course of my journey, but they fly away from me as fast as I construct them.

I begin to think the trip will never end, that I will be one of those few unfortunate travelers, the one out of a billion who is caught in some shunt malfunction and is left to dangle in the middle of nowhere for all eternity, or at least for the ten or twenty thousand realtime years it will take for his metabolically suspended body to die. Has this actually ever happened to anyone? There are only rumors, unfounded reports. But there comes a time in every sweep-jump when I am convinced that it has happened to me.

Then I see a glare of crimson and violet and azure and green, and my mask-sister Mayfly’s voice purrs in my ear, saying, “Welcome to Sidri Akrak, darling, welcome, welcome, welcome!”

Nikomastir stands beside her. A moment later Velimyle materializes in a haze of color. The four of us have made a nearly simultaneous arrival, across who knows how many hundreds of light-years. We definitely do lead charmed lives, we four.

Everyone knows about Sidri Akrak. The place was settled at least a thousand years ago and yet it still has the feel of a frontier world. Only the main streets of the half-dozen big cities are paved and all the rest are mere blue dirt that turn into rivers of mud during the rainy season. The houses are ramshackle slovenly things, lopsided and drafty, arrayed in higgledy-piggledy fashion as though they had been set down at random by their builders without any regard for logic or order. After all this time the planet is mostly jungle, a jungle that doesn’t merely encroach on the settlements but comes right up into them. Wild animals of the most repellent sorts are permitted to rampage everywhere, wandering about as they please.

The Akrakikans simply don’t care. They pretend the animals—monstrous, appalling—aren’t there. The people of Sidri Akrak are a soulless bloodless bunch in the main, altogether indifferent to such things as comfort and beauty and proper sanitation. Primitive squalor is what they prefer, and if you don’t care for it, well, you’re quite free to visit some other world.

“Why, exactly, did we come here?” I ask.

It is a rhetorical question. I know perfectly well why: because Nikomastir, clueless about our next destination, had opened a void that Mayfly had mischievously filled with one of the most unappealing suggestions possible, just to see what Nikomastir would do with it, and Nikomastir had as usual given the matter about a thousandth of a second of careful consideration before blithely leaping headlong into the abyss, thereby taking the rest of us with him, as he has done so often before.

But Nikomastir has already rearranged the facts in what passes for his mind.

“I absolutely had to come here,” he says. “It’s a place I’ve always felt the need to see. My daddy was born on Sidri Akrak, you know. This is my ancestral world.”

We know better than to challenge Nikomastir when he says things like that. What sense is there in arguing with him? He’ll only defend himself by topping one whopper with another twice as wild, building such a towering edifice of spur-of-the-moment fantasy that he’ll end up claiming to be the great-grandson of the Fourteenth Emperor, or perhaps the reincarnation of Julius Caesar.

Velimyle whispers at my side, “We’ll just stay here two or three days and then we’ll move along.”

I nod. We all indulge Nikomaster in his whims, but only up to a point.

The sky of Sidri Akrak is a sort of dirty brown, broken by greasy, sullen green clouds. The sunlight is greenish too, pallid, tinged with undertones of dull gray. There is a sweet, overripe, mildly sickening flavor to the warm, clinging air, and its humidity is so intense that it is difficult to distinguish it from light rain. We have landed within some city, apparently—in a grassy open space that anywhere else might have been called a park, but which here seems merely to be a patch of land no one had bothered to use for anything, vaguely square and a couple of hundred meters across. To our left is an irregular row of bedraggled two-story wooden shacks; on our right is a dense clump of ungainly asymmetrical trees; before and behind us are ragged aggregations of unpainted buildings and scruffy unattractive shrubbery.

“Look,” says Mayfly, pointing, and we have our first encounter with the famous wildlife of Sidri Akrak.

An ugly creature comes bounding toward us out of the trees: a bulky, round-bodied thing, dark and furry, that rises to a disconcerting height atop two scrawny hairless legs covered with bright yellow scales. Its face is something out of your worst dreams, bulging fiery eyes the size of saucers and dangling red wattles and jutting black fangs, and it is moving very quickly in our direction, howling ferociously.

We have weapons, of course. But it swiftly becomes apparent that the thing has no interest in us, that in fact it is fleeing an even more ghastly thing, a long bristle-covered many-legged monster built close to the ground, from whose spherical head emerge three long horn-like projections that branch and branch again, terminating in scores of writhing tendrils that are surely equipped with venomous stings. First one vile creature and then the other runs past us without seeming to notice us and they lose themselves in the shrubbery beyond. We can hear wild shrieking and hissing in there, and the sound of cracking branches.

Nikomastir is smiling benignly. All this must be delightful to him. Mayfly too looks entranced. Even Velimyle, who is closest to me in temperament, almost normal in her desires and amusements, claps her hands together in fascination. I alone seem to be troubled by the sight of such creatures running about unhindered on what is supposedly a civilized world.

But it is ever thus in our travels: I am fated always to stand a little to one side as I follow these three around the universe. Yet am I linked irrevocably to them all the same.

Mayfly was my lover once, two lives back. That was before we took the mask together. Now, of course, it would be unthinkable for anything carnal to happen between us, though I still cherish cheerful memories of her pixy breasts in my hands, her slim sleek thighs about my hips. Even if we have forsworn the sexual part of our friendship, the rest is deeper than ever, and in truth we are still profoundly a couple, Mayfly and I, despite the rich and rewarding relationship I maintain with Velimyle and the frothy, sportive one Mayfly has built with Nikomastir. Above and beyond all that, there is also the bond that links us all. The lines of attraction go this way and that. We are inseparables. They are my world; I am a citizen only of our little group. Wherever we go, we go together. Even unto Sidri Akrak.

In a little while two immigration officers show up to check us out. Sidri Akrak is an Imperium world and therefore the local immigration scanners have been automatically alerted to our arrival.

They come riding up in a sputtering little snub-nosed vehicle, a man and a woman in baggy brown uniforms, and begin asking us questions. Nikomastir does most of the answering. His charm is irresistible even to an Akrakikan.

The questioning, brusque and hard-edged, is done in Imperial, but from time to time the immigration officers exchange comments with each other in their own dialect, which sounds like static. The woman is swarthy and squat and flat-faced and the man is even less lovely, and they are not at all obliging; they seem to regard the arrival of tourists on their planet simply as an irritating intrusion. The discussion goes on and on—do we plan to remain here long, are we financially solvent, do we intend to engage in political activity in the course of our stay? Nikomastir meets every query with glib easy reassurances. During our interrogation a slimy rain begins to fall, oily pink stuff that coats us like grease, and a massive many-humped blue-green beast that looks like an ambulatory hill with purple eyes appears and goes lolloping thunderously past us with utter unconcern for our presence, leaving an odor of decay and corruption in its wake. After a time I stop listening to the discussion. But finally they flash bright lights in our faces—passports are validated retinally on Sidri Akrak—and Nikomastir announces that we have been granted six-month visas. Lodgings are available three streets away, they tell us.

The place they have sent us to turns out to be a dismal rickety hovel and our innkeeper is no more friendly than the immigration officials, but we are grudgingly allowed to rent the entire upper floor. The rooms I am to share with Velimyle face the rear garden, a patch of uncouth tangled wilderness where some slow-moving shaggy monster is sluggishly browsing about, nibbling on the shrubbery. It lifts its head in my direction and gives me a cold glare, as though to warn me away from the plants on which it’s feeding. I signal it that it has nothing to worry about and turn away from the window. As I unpack I see a procession of glassy-shelled snail-like things with huge bulbous red eyes crawling diagonally across the bedroom wall. They too stare back at me. They seem almost to be smirking at me.

But Nikomastir and Mayfly claim to be delighted to be here, and Velimyle seems to have no complaints. I feel outnumbered by them. Velimyle announces that she would like to do a painting of Nikomastir in the hotel garden. She only paints when she’s in a buoyant mood. Buoyant, here? They run off together downstairs, hand in hand like happy children. I watch from above as Velimyle sets up her easel outside and goes about the task of priming the psychosensitive surface of her canvas. She and Nikomastir are as untroubled as any Akrakikan by the shambling shaggy thing that grazes noisily nearby. How quickly they have acclimated.

“Are you very miserable here, darling?” Mayfly asks, running her fingertips lightly along my cheeks.

I give her a stoic smile. “I’ll be all right. We’ll find things to amuse us, I’m sure. It’s all for the best that Nikomastir brought us to this place.”

“You don’t mean that, do you? Not really.”

“Not really, no.”

Yet in some sense I do. I often tell myself that it’s important not to live as though life is just a perpetual holiday for us, even though in fact it is. It would be too easy to lose ourselves, if we aren’t careful, in the nightmare that is perfection.

This is an era when all things are possible. We have godlike existences. We have every imaginable comfort close at hand. Beauty and long life are ours for the asking; we are spared the whole dreary business of sagging flesh and spreading waistlines and blurry eyesight and graying hair and hardening arteries that afflicted our remote ancestors. And all the incredible richness of the galaxy lies open to us: key in your coordinates, snap your fingers, off you go, any world you choose to visit instantly available. Never in the history of the universe has any species lived such a life as ours.

I fear the terrible ease of this existence of ours. I think sometimes that we’ll eventually be asked to pay a great price for it. That thought engulfs me in secret terror.

Mayfly, who knows me almost as well as I know myself, says, “Think of it this way, love. There’s something to be learned even from ugliness. Isn’t it true that what we’re trying to get out of all this travel is experience that has meaning? If that’s what we want, we can’t just limit ourselves to the beautiful places. And maybe a horrid place like Sidri Akrak has something important to teach us.”

Yes. She’s right. Is she aware that she’s voicing my own most private thoughts, or is she just being playful? Perhaps it’s all self-delusion, but I do indeed seek for meaning as we travel, or at least think that I do. These furtive broodings in which I indulge in the hidden places of my soul are, so it seems to me, the thing that sets me apart from Nikomastir and Mayfly and Velimyle, who take life as it comes and ask no questions.

Velimyle and Nikomastir return from the garden a little while later. She puts the rolled canvas away without showing it to me.

There is an uncharacteristically somber expression on Velimyle’s face and even giddy Nikomastir seems troubled. Plainly something has gone awry.

I know better than to ask for details.

We eat at our hotel that night. The surly innkeeper slams the dishes down before us almost angrily: a thin greenish gruel, some sort of stewed shredded meat, a mess of overcooked vegetables. The meat tastes like cooked twine and the vegetables have a dank swampy flavor. I pretend we are back on Iriarte, where food is the highest art and every meal is a symphony. I pretend we have returned to Nabomba Zom, to that wondrous palatial hotel by the shore of the scarlet sea, the waters of which at dawn would reverberate as if struck by a hammer as the first blue rays of morning fell upon it.

But no, no, we are on Sidri Akrak. I lie sleepless through the night with Velimyle breathing gently beside me, listening to the fierce honkings and roarings and screechings of the wild beasts that roam the darkness beyond our windows. Now and again then the sounds of the lovemaking of Mayfly and Nikomastir come through the thin walls that separate our bedroom from theirs, giggles and gasps and long indrawn sighs of pleasure.

In the morning we go out exploring.

This city, we have learned, is called Periandros Andifang. It has a population of just under one hundred thousand, with not a single building of the slightest architectural distinction and a year-round climate of clamminess and drizzle. The plant life is, generally speaking, strikingly unsightly—a preponderance of gray leaves, black flowers—and the air is full of clouds of little stinging midges with malevolent purple beaks, and of course one has to deal with the fauna, too, the fiend’s gallery of grisly monstrosities, seemingly no two alike, that greet you at every turn: huge beasts with beady eyes and slavering fangs and clacking claws, things with pockmarked pustulent skins or writhing furry tentacles or clutching many-jointed arms. Almost always they appear without warning, galloping out of some clump of trees uttering banshee shrieks or ground-shaking roars. I begin to understand now the tales of unwary travelers who have total mental breakdowns within an hour of their arrival on Sidri Akrak.

It quickly becomes clear to us, though, that none of these horrendous creatures has any interest in attacking us. The only real risk we run is that of getting trampled as they go charging past. Very likely it is the case that they find human flesh unpalatable, or indigestible, or downright poisonous. But encountering them is an unnerving business, and we encounter them again and again and again.

Nikomastir finds it all fascinating. Painstakingly he searches out the ill-favored, the misshapen, the feculent, the repulsive—not that they are hard to find. He drifts ecstatically from one eyesore of a building to the next, taking an infinite number of pictures. He adores the plants’ sooty foul-smelling blossoms and sticky blighted-looking leaves. The rampaging animals give him even greater pleasure; whenever some particularly immense or especially abhorrent-looking loathsomeness happens to cross our path he cries out in boyish glee.

This starts to be very irritating. His callow idiocy is making me feel old.

“Remember, sweet, he’s not even seventy yet,” Mayfly reminds me, seeing my brows furrowing. “Surely you were like that yourself, once upon a time.”

“Was I? I’d like to think that isn’t so.”

“And in any case,” says Velimyle, “Can’t you manage to find that enthusiasm of his charming?”

No. I can’t. Perhaps it’s getting to be time for my next rebirth, I think. Growing old, for us, isn’t a matter so much of bodily decay—that is fended off by efficient processes of automatic bioenergetic correction—as of increasing inward rigidity, a creakiness of the soul, a corrugation of the psyche, a stiffening of the spiritual synapses. One starts to feel sour and petty and crabbed. Life loses its joy and its juice. By then you begin to become aware that it is time to clamber once more into the crystal tank where an intricate spiderweb of machinery will enfold you like a loving mother, and slip off into sweet oblivion for a while, and awaken to find yourself young again and ready to start all over. Which you can do over and over again, until eventually you arrive at the annoying point, after the eleventh or twelfth rebirth, where the buildup of solar poisons in your system has at last become ineradicable under any circumstances, and that is the end of you, alas.

Even gods have to die eventually, it would seem.

Nikomastir is a young god, and I am, evidently, an aging one.

I try to make allowances for that. But I find myself fervently hoping, all the same, that he will tire of this awful place very soon and allow us to go onward to some happier world.

He does not tire of it, though.

He loves it. He is in the grip of what some ancient poet once called the fascination of the abomination. He has gone up and down every street of the city, peering at this building and that one in unstinting admiration of their imperfections. For several days running he makes it clear that he is searching for some building in particular, and then he finds it: a rambling old ruin of great size and formidable ugliness at the very edge of town, standing apart from everything else in a sort of private park.

“Here it is!” he cries. “The ancestral mansion! The house where my father was born!”

So Nikomastir still clings to the claim that he is of Akrakikan descent. There is no way that this can be true; the natives of this world are a chilly bloodless folk with mean pinched hard souls, if they have souls at all and not just some clicking chattering robotic mechanisms inside their skulls. Indeed I have known robots with personalities far more appealing than anyone we have met thus far on Sidri Akrak. Nikomastir, bless him, is nothing at all like that. He may be silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but he also is sweet-natured and lively and amiable and vivacious, terms that have never yet been applied to any citizen of Sidri Akrak, and never will be.

Velimyle has tried to paint him again. Again the attempt was a failure. This time she is so distressed that I dare to breach the wall of privacy behind which she keeps her art and ask her what the difficulty is.

“Look,” she says.

She unrolls the second canvas. Against the familiar swirling colors of a typical Velimyle background I see the slender, angular form of Nikomastir, imprinted there by the force of Velimyle’s mental rapport with the psychosensitive fabric. But the features are all wrong. Nikomaster’s perpetual easy smile has given way to a dreadful scowling grimace. His lip curls backward menacingly; his teeth are the teeth of some predatory beast. And his eyes—oh, Velimyle, those harsh, glaring eyes! Where is his cheerful sparkle? These eyes are hard, narrow, fierce, and above all else sad. The Nikomastir of Velimyle’s painting stares out at the universe with tragic intensity. They are the eyes of a god, perhaps, but of a dying god, one who knows he must give up his life for the redemption of his race.

“The first one was almost as bad,” Velimyle says. “Why is this happening? This isn’t Nikomastir at all. I’ve never had something like this happen.”

“Has he seen either of the paintings?”

“I wouldn’t let him. All I told him was that they didn’t come out right, that they would depress him if I showed them to him.

And of course he didn’t want to see them after that.”

“Something about this planet must be shading your perceptions,” I say. “Burn this, Velimyle. And the other one too. And forget about painting him until we’ve left here.”

Nikomastir wants to have a look inside the crumbling, lurching pile that he says is his family’s ancestral home. But the place, ruinous though it is, happens to be occupied by Akrakikans, a whole swarm of them, and when he knocks at the front door and grandly introduces himself to the major-domo of the house as Count Nikomastir of Sembiran, who has come here on a sentimental journey to his former paternal estate, the door is closed in his face without a word. “How impolite,” Nikomastir says, not seeming very surprised. “But don’t worry: I’ll find a way of getting in.”

That project gets tabled too. Over the next few days he leads us farther and farther afield, well out into the uninhabited countryside beyond the boundaries of Periandros Andifang. The land out here is swampy and uningratiating, and of course there are the animals to contend with, and the insects, and the humidity. I can tell that Mayfly and Verimyle are growing a little weary of Nikomastir’s exuberance, but they both are as tolerant of his whims as ever and follow him loyally through these soggy realms. As do I—partly, I suppose, because we agreed long ago that we would journey everywhere as a single unit, and partly because I have been stung, evidently, by various hints of Mayfly’s and Velimyle’s that my recent crochetiness could mean I might be getting ready for my next rebirth.

Then he turns his attention once more to the old house that he imagines once belonged to his family. “My father once told me that there’s a pool of fire behind it, a phosphorescent lake. He used to swim it when he was a boy, and he’d come up dripping with cool flame. I’m going to take a swim in it too, and then we can head off to the next planet. Whose turn is it to pick our next planet, anyway?”

“Mine,” I say quickly. I have Marajo in mind—the sparkling sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. “If there’s a lake behind that house, Nikomastir, I advise you very earnestly to stay away from it. The people who live there don’t seem to look favorably on trespassers. Besides, can’t you imagine the kind of nastinesses that would live in a lake on this world?”

“My father went swimming in that one,” Nikomastir replies, and gives me a defiant glare. “It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”

I doubt, of course, that any such lake exists. If it’s there,

though, I hope he isn’t fool enough to go swimming in it. My affection for the boy is real; I don’t want him to come to harm.

But I let the matter drop. I’ve already said too much. The surest way to prod him into trouble, I know, is oppose him in one of his capricious fancies. My hope is that Nikomastir’s attention will be diverted elsewhere in the next day or two and all thought of that dismal house, and of the fiery lake that may or may not be behind it, will fly out of his mind.

It’s generally a good idea, when visiting a world you know very little about, to keep out of places of unknown chemical properties. When we toured Megalo Kastro, we stood at the edge of a cliff looking down into the famous living sea, that pink custardy mass that is in fact a single living organism of gigantic size, spreading across thousands of kilometers of that world. But it did not occur to us to take a swim in that sea, for we understood that in a matter of hours it would dissolve and digest us if we did.

And when we were on Xamur we went to see the Idradin crater, as everyone who goes to Xamur does. Xamur is the most perfect of worlds, flawless and serene, a paradise, air like perfume and water like wine, every tree in the ideal place, every brook, every hill.

It has only one blemish—the Idradin, a huge round pit that reaches deep into the planet’s primordial heart. It is a hideous place, that crater. Concentric rings of jagged cooled lava surround it, black and eroded and bleak. Stinking gases rise out of the depths, and yellow clouds of sulfuric miasma belch forth, and wild red shafts of roaring flame, and you peer down from the edge into a roiling den of hot surging magma. Everyone who goes to Xamur must visit the Idradin, for if you did not see perfect Xamur’s one terrible flaw you could never be happy on any other world. And so we stared into it from above, and shivered with the horror we were expected to feel; but we were never at all tempted to clamber down the crater’s sides and dip our toes into that realm of fire below.

It seems unlikely to me that Nikomastir will do anything so stupid here. But I have to be careful not to prod him in the wrong direction. I don’t mention the lake to him again.

Our exploration of Sidri Akrak proceeds. We visit new swamps, new groves of fetid-smelling malproportioned trees, new neighborhoods of misshapen and graceless buildings. One drizzly disheartening day succeeds another, and finally I am unable to bear the sight of that brown sky and greenish sun any longer. Though it is a violation of our agreements, I stay behind at the hotel one morning and let the other three go off without me.

It is a quiet time. I spend the hours reflecting on our travels of years past, all the many worlds we have seen. Icy Mulano of the two suns, one yellow, one bloody red, and billions of ghostly electric life-forms glimmering about you in the frigid air. Estrilidis, where the cats have two tails and the insects have eyes like blue diamonds. Zimbalou, the sunless nomad world, where the cities are buried deep below the frozen surface. Kalimaka, Haj Qaldun, Vietoris, Nabomba Zom—

So many places, so many sights. A lifetime of wonderful experiences; and yet what, I ask myself, has it all meant? How has it shaped me? What have I learned?

I have no answers, only to say that we will continue to go onward, ever onward. It is our life. It is what we do. We are travelers by choice, but also by nature, by destiny.

I am still lost in reverie when I hear Velimyle’s voice outside my window, calling to me, telling me that I must come quickly. “Nikomastir—” she cries. “Nikomastir!”

“What about him?”

But she can only gesture and wave. Her eyes are wild. We run together through the muddy streets, paying no heed to the bulky and grotesque Akrakikan monstrosities that occasionally intersect our path. I realize after a time that Velimyle is leading me toward the tumbledown house at the edge of town that Nikomastir has claimed as his family’s former home. A narrow grassy path leads around one side of it to the rear; and there, to my amazement, I see the phosphorescent lake of Nikomastir’s fantasies, with Mayfly beside it, leaping up and down in agitation that verges on frenzy.

She points toward the water. “Out there—there—”

On this ugly world even a phosphorescent lake can somehow manage to be an unlovely sight. I saw one once on Darma Barma that flashed like heavenly fire in rippling waves of cobalt and amethyst, magenta and gold, aquamarine and emerald and jade. But from this lake emanates the most unradiant of radiances, a dull, prosaic, sickly gleam, dark-toned and dispiriting, except in one place off toward the farther shore where a disturbance of some sort is setting up whirlpools of glinting metallic effects, swirls of eye-jabbing bright sparkles, as though handfuls of iron filings are being thrown through a magnetic field.

The disturbance is Nikomastir. He—his body, rather—is tossing and heaving at the lake’s surface, and all about him the denizens of the lake can be seen, narrow scaly jutting heads popping up by the dozens, hinged jaws snapping, sharp teeth closing on flesh. A widening pool of blood surrounds him. They, whatever they are, are ripping him to shreds.

“We have to get him out of there,” Mayfly says, her voice congested with horror and fear.

“How?” I ask.

“I told him not to do it,” says trembling Velimyle. “I told him, I told him, I told him. But he plunged right in, and when he was halfway across they began to break the surface, and then—then he began screaming, and—”

Mayfly plucks urgently at my sleeve. “What can we do? How can we rescue him?”

“He’s beyond rescuing,” I tell her hollowly.

“But if we can get his body back,” she says, “there’ll be a way to revive him, won’t there? I know there is. Scientists can do anything nowadays.” Velimyle, more tentatively, agrees. Some kind of scientific miracle, Nikomastir gathered up and repaired somehow by the regeneration of tissue—

But tissue is all that’s left of him now, frayed sorry scraps, and the creatures of the lake, frantic now with blood-lust, are devouring even those in furious haste.

They want me to tell them that Nikomastir isn’t really dead.

But he is: really, really, really dead. Dead forever. What has been played out on this shore today was not a game. There is nothing that can be saved, no way to regenerate. I have never seen the death of a human being before. It is a dizzying thing to contemplate: the finality, the utterness. My mind is whirling; I have to fight back convulsions of shock and horror.

“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” I ask angrily, when I am able to speak again.

“But he wanted so badly to do it,” Mayfly replies. “We couldn’t have stopped him, you know. Not even if we—”

She halts in midsentence.

“Not even if you had wanted to?” I say. “Is that it?” Neither of them can meet my furious gaze. “But you didn’t want to, did you? You thought it would be fun to see Nikomastir swim across the phosphorescent lake. Fun. Am I right? Yes. I know that I am. What could you have been thinking, Mayfly? Velimyle?”

There is no sign of Nikomastir at the surface any longer. The lake is growing still again. Its phosphorescence has subsided to a somber tarnished glow.

For a long time, minutes, hours, weeks, none of us is capable of moving. Silent, pale, stunned, we stand with bowed heads by the shore of that frightful lake, scarcely even able to breathe.

We are in the presence of incontrovertible and permanent death, which to us is a novelty far greater even than the living sea of Megalo Kastro or the blue dawn of Nabomba Zom, and the immense fact of it holds us rooted to the spot. Was this truly Nikomastir’s ancestral world? Was his father actually born in that great old falling-down house, and did he really once swim in this deadly lake? And if none of that was so, how did Nikomastir know that the lake was there? We will never be able to answer those questions. Whatever we do not know about Nikomastir that we have already learned, we will never come to discover now. That is the meaning of death: the finality of it, the severing of communication, the awful unanswerable power of the uncompromising curtain that descends like a wall of steel. We did not come to Sidri Akrak to learn about such things, but that is what we have learned on Sidri Akrak, and we will take it with us wherever we go henceforth, pondering it, examining it.

“Come,” I say to Mayfly and Velimyle, after a time. “We need to get away from here.”

So, then. Nikomastir was foolish. He was bold. He has had his swim and now he is dead. And why? Why? For what? What was he seeking, on this awful world? What were we? We know what we found, yes, but not what it was that we were looking for. I wonder if we will ever know.

He has lived his only life, has Nikomastir, and he has lost it in the pursuit of idle pleasure. There is a lesson in that, for me, for Velimilye, for Mayfly, for us all. And one day I will, I hope, understand what it is.

All I do know after having lived these hundreds of years is that the universe is very large and we are quite small. We live godlike lives these days, flitting as we do from world to world, but even so we are not gods. We die: some sooner, some later, but we do die. Only gods live forever. Nikomastir hardly lived at all.

So be it. We have learned what we have learned from Nikomastir’s death, and now we must move on. We are travelers by nature and destiny, and we will go forward into our lives. Tomorrow we leave for Marajo. The shining sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. Marajo will teach us something, as Xamur once did, and Nabomba Zom, and Galgala. And also Sidri Akrak. Something. Something. Something.

© 1999 by Agberg, Ltd.

Originally appeared in Amazing Stories.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com. 

Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
Wendy N. Wagner

In “Travelers,” Robert Silverberg has created a future where travel between planets is the entirety of many people’s lives, people no more rooted in place than a zephyr or tornado. Without restrictions like health issues, life span or economics, the humans in this future can enjoy jaunting across galaxies the way twenty-first century oil barons enjoy island-hopping in the Caribbean. It can be a hedonistic lifestyle—or it can be a way to expand one’s horizons, ever-deepening one’s understanding of humanity through exposure to The Other: other people, other cultures, other worlds.

As a boy, Robert Silverberg did his traveling via armchair, soaking up the otherly, the wondrous and the exotic from the pages of National Geographic. A smart and curious child, Earth-bound adventures soon became too prosaic, and the wonders of science fiction captured his interest. Science fiction offered his restless mind the chance to explore new worlds that not even the heartiest of geographical surveyors could reach. He became an avid collector of pulp magazines, poring over the stories and studying their depths.

It was just a matter of time before he started writing the stuff himself.

Silverberg began mailing out science fiction short stories when he was fourteen years old. He’d never even left New York state, but his mind had roved across galaxies and he was more than ready to try his hand creating new worlds. It took about three years of practice, but he made his first professional sale in 1954. He was barely eighteen.

Now, close to sixty years later, Robert Silverberg has had a chance to visit many of the places he read about in those National Geographics, and he has sold thousands of stories. He’s written many novels, edited more than twenty anthologies and written a vast quantity of nonfiction, from books about history to his well-respected column in Asimov’s. He has created more worlds than most people have even read about.

Even in “Travelers,” just a single story of his vast oeuvre, Robert Silverberg has created many memorable locales. There’s Galgala, a world made gilt by strange microorganisms; Marajo, famed for its Seven Pyramids; Megalo Kastro with its living sea; and of course the rough world of Sidri Akrak, where people and monsters live side-by-side. For a story that’s only about seven thousand words long, that’s a lot of exploration to serve up.

But for Robert Silverberg, that’s part of the job. As he said in his book, Reflections and Refractions: “Is it not true that one of the primary things we science-fiction writers try to accomplish is to bring a note of, well, enwonderment to our readers’ minds—to startle and delight and astonish them with miraculous and magical visions of wondrous things?”1

For those readers lucky enough to pick up one of Robert Silverberg’s works and give themselves over to that enwonderment, they will find themselves transported to magical and delightful places indeed. His remarkable worldbuilding is perhaps at the heart of his successful and long-lived career as one of the greatest writers of science fiction. He is a master of place and setting.

The protagonist of “Travelers” says that he and his friends are “travelers by nature and destiny.” But he might well be speaking for Robert Silverberg himself—that traveler of the imagination and creator of countless wondrous worlds.

1 Robert Silverberg, Reflections & Refractions, (Grass Valley, CA: Underwood Books, 1997), p2.

See also: Robert Silverberg, Other Spaces, Other Times, (New York: Nonstop Press, 2009).

Wendy N. Wagner’s first novel, Her Dark Depths, is forthcoming from the small press Virtual Tales. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology 2012 A.D. and in the online magazine Crossed Genres. Another is forthcoming in The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. In addition to her fiction writing, she has conducted interviews for horror-web.com. She shares her Portland, Oregon, home with one painting husband, one brilliant daughter, and no zombies.

Interview: John Scalzi
Erin Stocks

Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, whatever.scalzi.com. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.”

But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly. And it’s well-deserved traffic, too, in light of the man’s reputation for posting unique content. The blog’s main focus is exactly its title–”Whatever.” Scalzi writes about anything from movies to politics to a page entirely devoted to bacon. He also features regular postings by other writers entitled “The Big Idea”, where authors talk about their latest project and its inspiration.

As far as his own work, there’s at least one novel, a handful of short stories, and even some ambient electronic music that he composed himself that he’s posted and offers up free to anyone who’s interested. And most unique of all, he’s got insider knowledge on the SyFy channel’s Stargate Universe–he’s a creative consultant for the show.

But after perusing his public musings and finding myself entertained and intrigued—not to mention weighed down with a list of new books to read—I still had a few more questions.

I would venture a guess that most people meet you through your blog-which has spawned books like You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing and Your Hate Mail will be Graded. What prompted you to start that blog back in 1998?

I started it because prior to ‘98 I had been both a newspaper and an online columnist, and at the time I was between column gigs and wanted to keep sharp in that particular writing format, just in case anyone ever offered me another column. Because it was mostly writing exercise for me, I wasn’t particularly worried about the size of my audience, which was good because at the beginning it was about 50 of my friends who even knew it was there. There was also no pressure for me to grow the audience, either. People eventually started linking to me and coming around.

How long have you been writing, then?

I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember not writing creatively in some form or another. I imagine whatever it was, I got some nice positive feedback on it, which encouraged me to do it more. But beyond that, since I don’t remember it, it’s difficult to say that whatever it was had any sort of effect.

It seems the act of writing itself is your forte, no matter the subject content. Besides your blog, you’ve authored nonfiction guides about money, the universe, and science fiction movies, as well as books about the stupid things people do. But nearly all your fiction books can be classified as military science fiction. What appeals to you about that subgenre?

Before writing Old Man’s War, I went into a bookstore to see what kind of science fiction was selling; I saw more military SF than anything else, so I decided that’s what I should probably write if I wanted to sell a book. This sounds mercenary to some, but more charitably it was market research. I wanted to sell a book, so I was pretty dispassionate about what book that should be. Now, having chosen military science fiction to write, I made sure it was a book I myself would want to read—market research is fine and good but if you’re not writing something you’d actually want to read, then that book’s probably not going to be something anyone else would want to read either.

This is why, for example, I probably wouldn’t write a book about vampires; fact is even though vampire books sell very well, as a topic, vampires bore the crap out of me. So I’m manifestly not the right author for that subject. Other people are far more interested in vampires, so they’ll write better, more interesting books than I would, and make their readers happier than my readers would be.

You’re a creative consultant on the SyFy show Stargate Universe. What’s that like?

Being a creative consultant means reading scripts and giving the writers and producers notes on both technical aspects and on character–since I write science books and fiction, I have experience on both ends. The show makers are then of course free to take my advice or leave it. I enjoy the work very much; it’s fascinating to watch a show get made from the script up. There are no downsides that I can see—the work is both fulfilling and leaves me time to write novels, and that means it’s pretty much the perfect gig.

Speaking of writing novels, Fuzzy Nation, your “reboot” of H. Beam Piper’s 1962 science fiction novel Little Fuzzy, about a new furry species discovered on another planet, was just purchased by Tor for publication next year. You wrote about the how and when and why of the reboot back in April’s official announcement, but I have another question. Did you want to reboot a novel in general, first, or were you thinking about Little Fuzzy one day and decided to add on to the story?

It was always about Fuzzy. It’s a very good story but some of the social elements of it are artifacts of the time in which it was written, and so I had sort of casually wondered what the story would have been like if someone had written the story today. Eventually I decided there was only one way to find out.

I’ve heard of Little Fuzzy referred to as a YA novel. Is Fuzzy Nation the same way?

No, and I’m not entirely sure why Little Fuzzy is seen as YA, either. It’s certainly readable for younger audiences but I don’t believe kids were Piper’s intended audience, nor were they the audience for the book when it was published. This isn’t to suggest it’s an insult for the book to be considered YA—YA is filled with many excellent books and authors these days—but I think it’s put there without much thought. In any event, my take is not intended as YA, although as with the original, there’s nothing there a bright 13-year-old couldn’t enjoy.

Are “reboot” novels done often?

As far as I know, and leaving aside fan fiction for the moment, reboot novels aren’t done at all, which was one reason I was interested. There are sequels and retellings of established stories from different perspectives, and the “Fuzzy” series has at least one of each of these, but actual reboots—reimagining the story and characters—isn’t the usual thing.

Any other reboot plans in your future?

I don’t have much interest in doing another reboot, actually. I did it because it didn’t seem to have been done before on a professional level. Now that it’s out of my hands, I have other things I want to do. As for what novels I think could use a reboot, since I’m not thinking of doing it again it’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought to. I don’t know that any novel needs to be rebooted, although I suppose if Fuzzy Nation does well, publishers might look through their backlists. We’ll have to see what happens.

In your blog, you’ve talked about authors that have inspired your writing in the past: Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Sheri Tepper, among many others. Would you add any other names to the list now?

No one new to add at this point, although I would note that many of the authors and writers who inspired me were not in science fiction; writers like H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, James Thurber and Robert Benchley, Roger Ebert, William Goldman, PJ O’Rourke and Carl Sagan. There’s more to writing good science fiction than just reading good science fiction.

Speaking of good science fiction, you’ve just become President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and have held this position approximately 17 days at the time of the interview. What’s changed for you?

I’ve become very aware that I really do have to work on time management if I want to do anything with my life in the next year besides be SFWA president. And I do; I have fiction to write and other projects to work on. So even now I’m trying to keep a tight, focused schedule. Even after only 17 days it’s been a fairly active year, so again it reinforces the idea that I need to keep on top of everything or get swallowed by it. This goes against my generally disorganized and lazy nature, but then that’s probably not a bad thing.

What’s up next for you, writing-wise? Any new projects you’re tinkering with?

A number of the things I’m working on I can’t talk about, and I mean that in a legal sense. Other than that, I am definitely working on a new book, which at this point I assume would probably come out in 2012, and beyond that I’m not going to say too much about it. I’m a big believer at this point in not trying to go into too much detail about what I’m doing before I do it. I think it’s better just to be able to say to people, surprise! Here’s something!

Let’s end this on a sweet note. I think we should talk about pie, specifically, your Schadenfreude pie. I was actually introduced to it by a friend who isn’t a SFF reader, yet regularly keeps up with your blog. I immediately made the pie and found it to be exactly as you described. How did you come up with this creation?

Well, as you might expect, I’m a fan of Schadenfreude as a concept, which is something that doesn’t necessarily say good things about me. I’m also a fan of pie, which I think puts me on the side of the angels, actually. Me being me, it was only a matter of time before I put the two together. And given that the pie is basically nothing but sugar, butter, eggs and chocolate, I can’t even begin to guess how many calories it has. But I think if you’ve committed to a pie like that, calories are not actually in your top ten of things to be concerned about.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling about baking bread on erinstocks.blogspot.com.