Editorial, October 2010
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue five of Lightspeed!

We’re doing a little something different this month. Because October is Halloween month, and Halloween is a time for scary stories, we thought it would be appropriate to make October “Horror Month” here at Lightspeed. But never fear, we haven’t changed our scope completely—each story in this issue is still science fiction; it’s just that you’ll be getting your daily dose of sensawunda but also a liberal helping of whadafrakwuzzat as well.

Here’s the teasers for this month:

In our lead story this month, “Hindsight,” horror author Sarah Langan tells the story of an apocalypse-in-progress, a world in which the laws of physics no longer seem to behave properly, and a mysterious cosmic anomaly called Black Betty. The last remaining survivors have one last hope, but can the technological singularity defeat the threat of a gravitational one?

In the related nonfiction, astronomer Dr. Pamela Gay discusses what there was before the Big Bang, gravity, the mediocrity principle, and just what might happen if two universes collided.

In “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” author Joe R. Lansdale tells the tale of a mad scientist and his family who spend twenty long, hard years Down Under waiting for the war to end. By doing so, they manage to survive the end of the world, but when they go back Topside, they find a world very different than the one they remember—a world in which even a rose is supremely dangerous...and not just because of its thorns.

In our feature interview this month, Matt London talks to Marc Laidlaw—creator of Valve Software’s Half-Life series—about video game creation, his literary and gaming influences, and the intersection of SF and horror.

Imagine you’re awakened early from cryonic stasis aboard a starship traveling to a colony world where tens of thousands of starving colonists will die if you don’t get there to help them. John R. Fultz’s chilling “The Taste of Starlight” explores whether the lives of many outweigh the lives of few, as we experience the lengths the good Doctor Pelops is willing to go to in order to ensure his mission’s success. Would you—should you—be able to do the same thing?

The idea of cryonic suspension has been around nearly as long as science fiction itself, but just how plausible is it? And if it is scientifically viable—would it be a good investment? Scientist (and SF author) Dr. Gregory Benford weighs all the (cold, hard) facts, figures, and probabilities in “Considering Cryonics.” 

There are few authors in the world about whom you can honestly say “he needs no introduction.” But when you’re talking about Stephen King, that’s most certainly the truth. “Beachworld,” one of the horror master’s rare forays into straight-up science fiction, follows the plight of the two survivors of a far-future interstellar spaceflight, who crash land on a harsh and unforgiving planet. (Reprint)

And if you think that place would be a terrible planet to crash land on, well, you’d be right. But, in case you’d like a little variety when choosing your final extraterrestrial resting place, author Genevieve Valentine scoured the cosmos and found “Five Planets that Will Kill You Dead.”

That’s it for our fiction and nonfiction selections, but be sure to also look for our author spotlights, and keep an ear out for the podcasts of “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” by Joe R. Lansdale and “The Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz. 

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), The Living Dead 2, 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 The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Hindsight
Sarah Langan

Second Coming is docked two miles underground. She’s made of a collapsible, repulsion-attraction subatomic slurry that the astrophysicists are convinced will survive the gravitational anomaly called Black Betty. Yes, the ship will survive; it’s her human cargo that’s doomed.

Sarah Vaughan walks between rows of gurneys in heavy Van der Waals boots. She’s been aboard Second Coming six months now, and has gotten to know the feel of this ship: her soft, organic skin; her hissing breath; her ceilings and floors, which flip-flop depending on the capriciousness of gravity. At first, buried so deeply under Omaha’s dirt, Second Coming was a citadel. But this close to the end of it all, ghosts inhabit the cabins of every room. Sarah hears voices over the speakers that aren’t quite human, and sees memories from life back in Scottsbluff that feel real enough to touch. “Doctor,” Sarah’s patients groan in a Greek Chorus that reverberates like microphone feedback, “Help me!”

Sarah, a stout, practical woman of forty, surveys the wide wasteland of them, and wonders where to start.

Click! The overhead sick bay speaker buzzes to life. She strains to hear through the ion static:

“Good Morning, Citizens of Second Coming!” Osgood Blunder, Captain and Emperor of the Second Coming, announces in monotone. His tracheotomy makes him sound like a drive-through fast food booth operator.

“As you know, impact with Black Betty is less than four hours away, but our diligent computational engineers made a breakthrough last night. The upload of human consciousness to the safety of Second Coming’s mainframe is finally at hand. Rejoice! The flesh will fail, but the spirit, dear Romans, will endure!”

Osgood Blunder breaks for applause, and throughout the ship, even in the infirmary, manic screams of victory burst and then disappear like collapsing stars. Blunder’s corporation, Kliffoth Cybernetics, funded Second Coming, and hand-selected its passengers. Without Blunder, there would be no ship at all. During their long captivity down here, the crew have come to think of him as a God.

“I’ll see some of you on the other side. The rest, fear not, for you witnessed the next leap in human evolution, when mankind became his own God,” Blunder says as static whines. “We’ll be calling lottery numbers throughout the day. Remember, transgressors will be shot and stored as protein, so please Respect your Authority, and stand by.”

Sarah picks a path through the prostrate bodies. There are 2,104 colonists; 1,693 have surrendered their names for numbers and logged into her greenly-lit sick bay. Some occupy gurneys; others lean against walls or curl themselves fetal. She piles her tray with needles and liquid Valium. They’ll need it today because she gets the feeling that their luck is an upside-down horseshoe, all run out.

She calibrates, measures, injects. It’s routine by now. There’s no medicine left except for this. All day, all night, it’s Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt! Then move on to the next. And the next. And then next. Each have numbers branded against their foreheads. It’s best to look there, and not in their eyes.

Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!

Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!

Sarah stops paying attention at patient thirty-four, and almost gives the guy an air bubble heart attack. He wouldn’t notice—he’s insane. You can tell which patients have Black Betty’s Disease, because they’ve got no whites to their eyes. It’s like their souls are drowning.

Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!

Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!

Best not to think about the Hepatitis she’s spreading. Or worse. It’s a mercy, she tells herself when she gets to patient 342, who’s just eight years old, with impossibly knobby knees.

Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!

He looks up at her with eyes that are entirely black, and there is movement between pupil and iris. There is something swimming in there, trying to break out.

“It’s really happening. They’ve started,” Sarah’s husband Joe Vaughan calls as he enters the sick bay wearing heavy boots that suction the slurried ground. His fine, blonde hair floats like jellyfish strands in this diminished gravity.

“Blunder went first, of course,” Joe continues. His voice sounds far away, but it echoes, too, so the words collapse on each other like overlapping Venn Diagrams. “He’s in the machine. The hard scientists are next, then they say we’re up.”

“Oh, Christ,” Sarah answers. “I’m not ready. Are you?” Though Blunder has the textbook knowledge, he wants her life experience as a physician in the system. He’s promised to upload her family, too. But this close to the end, nothing is certain.

Joe hops up and down a couple of times. His boots make a slurping sound, and the image of him blurs as if he’s moving extra fast. Quite literally, he’s not the man she married. The closer they get to Black Betty, the more it messes with the chemistry of their brains. Like a magnet pressed against a head full of metal.

“We’d better get to the engine room with the kids. They’ve already shot some line cutters. There’s going to be a riot,” Joe says.

Sarah looks at her tray of meds, and across the room, too. She flicks on the sick bay’s satellite viewer, which shows images of space and of Earth.

It’s shocking, how quickly the planet has changed... Unfathomable quantities of garbage spin like Saturn’s rings around the Earth’s fattened waist. Sea water laps the continents; across Central America, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans kiss.

Joe reaches the knobs, and sharpens in on Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where they used to live. A lone wanderer wearing an atmosphere suit scavenges through a drifting pile of husked wheat from a broken silo, but the grain pelts him hard and fast. It’s like sand slipping through his fingers.

Joe puts his arm around her, and, with their eyes, they follow the wheat through the air, and into space, and finally, through Black Betty..

“Hand me the Valium, will you?” Sarah asks.

Joe squints with bad eyes until he finds the proper bottle. He’s been eating carrion; Sarah suspects prion infection.

“We could wind-up stuck inside Second Coming, part of the machine,” Sarah says. “It might be better to die.”

She’s said this before, or Joe has. Each time the issue arises, they assume opposite sides of the argument, and fight until they’re tired of words. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to do it, no matter what.

“We’ve got to go,” Joe says. She hears the words again and again, even though she knows he says them only once.  Déjà vu. Time is slowing and spreading. Her ghost of five minutes ago injects an eight-year old boy with dead eyes. Comfort him, her present self wants to scold. He’s all alone.

The sick bay is a field of bodies. Abandoned. Forsaken, because the engineers believe their insanity will infect the machine. They’ll meet Black Betty in corporeal form from this room, while the lucky few whose numbers get picked will live on inside Second Coming. Technological Singularity trumps Gravitational Singularity. It’s a boxing match: Mankind in one corner, God in the other.

“Let me finish with the injections, so at least they’re calm when it happens,” Sarah says.

Joe shakes his head. The kids are waiting, is what he’s saying without words. The kids come first. Before morality. Before their parents’ survival. Before the rest of the human race, if necessary. She knows this. All parents know this. But still, she can’t leave her patients without offering them some solace.

Onscreen, the closer they get to the anomaly, the more she expands, like a pupil exposed to dark. Just inside her edges, something moves. Something like life.

Or maybe something like God.

Three more hours to impact, and counting.

Joe punches his suction boots against Second Coming’s slurry floor, which is becoming less solid with every passing second. “Okay,” he says. “For you.”

Then he lifts a syringe, and together, they Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!, until every patient in the ward is drugged or dead.

From the corner, the ghost boy watches.

The day Black Betty appeared, Sarah was still home on maternity leave with baby Sally, but she’d known something was coming. Already, magnetic north had reversed without warning. You could see the Northern Lights as far south as Costa Rica. Migratory birds’ internal radar had jammed, too. They flew outside the troposphere, then plummeted from loss of oxygen. Roads and roofs and empty farmland hosted their open graves. No one knew how their loss would affect the ecosystem, but mornings without their songs seemed more bereft.

Baby Sally was swinging happily in her rocker that morning, and three year-old Bradley toddled between the kitchen and television room, calling out names of things: Shoe! Knee! Strawberry! Sally!

On the radio, the regular morning program got interrupted for a special report. “Jack the Jerk-Off” cut off a geriatric Salieri clone’s rendition of “Me and My Shadow,” and read:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, do not be alarmed!”

Sarah listened as she rinsed a glass baby bottle. The water spun counterclockwise.

“Initial reports are sketchy as an Etch-A-Doodle, but the Department of Defense, in tandem with Kliffoth Cybernetics…. Is this a joke?”

Sarah walked over to the radio. Bradley bobbled between her legs, then out, then in, like a maypole dance: “Mommy… mommy… mommy… leg!”

Static flushed the frequency even though it was a clear, Nebraska day. Jack the Jerk-Off returned:

“Okay, folks, they say it’s not a joke, but so did Orson Wells, so we’ll see. Put it this way, if they’re wrong, sue somebody else. I’m not liable, bitches! Anyway, Kliffoth Cybernetics, the American Government contractor for science, health, incarceration, propaganda, the national and state lotteries, consumption, toxicology, humanitarian aid, and defense, says they think the reason polarity shifted so suddenly and completely is because of an anomaly about twenty million miles between Earth and Mars…”

Sarah braced herself against the counter while Sally chirped like a small bird in her swing, and Bradley danced.

“It’s a gravitational anomaly,” Jack finished. “They say it’s growing.”

Joe came home an hour later. He’d been working on a case for Santo Monico, a subsidiary of Kliffoth Cybernetics. They wanted reparations from all the rice farmers in India who’d used old strains of seed, instead of buying the new patent.

The entire Vaughan family sat in front of the television as Kliffoth Cybernetics’ CEO appeared on every Network and Webcast. The static made his talking head seem far away. “The best we can figure, a separate universe is spreading across the Milky Way. The laws of physics and time act differently once we approach the barrier of this new universe, which has collapsed on top of ours. The easiest way to think of it is like ink diffusing through a glass of water, only its source is self-generating and for our purposes, limitless. Pretty soon, the entire glass will be black as night,” Osgood Blunder announced in a ragged voice that Sarah recognized as sickly. “We think it came from another dimension—it tore a wormhole through either space or time. What’s unique about this particular anomaly, is that its barrier, or event horizon, to borrow from black hole terminology, ought to  be dark, and so infinitely dense with gravitational singularities that light can’t escape. But we’ve detected movement within Black Betty’s perimeter.

“There might be life in there.”

Outside that day, an entire flock of birds crashed through the Vaughan’s detached garage on Fort Triumph Street. Seagulls, thousands of miles from either ocean.

Sarah microwaved popcorn for dinner. The whole family fell asleep in front of the television. She dreamed about how she’d never cooked nutritious meals, and that this neglect had carved her children’s bellies with scurvy holes, into which insect mothers had laid their eggs.

“Well, how in the heeeck are we gonna survive?” The Oprah Winfrey Holo-Host™ asked her science guest, esteemed astrophysicist Ipswitch Gustavson, the next day.

Sally peered out from under Sarah’s breast. She was a tiny, helpless thing that smelled like sweet milk. Bradley sat cross-legged and too close to the television. She noticed that his hair was especially staticky, like he was touching a novelty Eye of the Storm.

On the television, Gustavson frowned, like he couldn’t figure out if the hologram’s creators were imbeciles, or just writing her program that way for good television. “The anomaly—Black Betty, after my daughter who died of mercury poisoning from Santo Monico rice—she’s rolling in fast, and she’s getting bigger.”

“Well, what does that mean?” Oprah asked with exaggerated, amused concern. Her shimmering eyelid winked.

“She’s like a bucket of paint, splattering in real time, at this very moment across the Milky Way. As she rolls toward us, she’s changing our laws of physics, and pulling Earth and the rest of the solar system off orbit. Even if we could exist under the new laws of this alternate universe, we won’t have a sun, or the ground under or feet, or a food supply…”

“Is this fake, like global warming?” Oprah asked.

Gustavson shook his head. “I give the human species ten years on the outside. Probably less.”

Sarah got up from the couch, walked very slowly to the kitchen, and vomited in the sink. The water swirled, all wrong.

Months passed like everything was normal, even as the birds finally went extinct, the old died of pulmonary and cardiac disease at accelerated rates, and Black Betty’s Disease took root. People’s sclera’s disappeared, and their irises widened, so their eyes seemed entirely brown or blue or green. These colors contracted and expanded within their pupils, and the victims often lost their sense of balance, along with sight. Occasionally, they were violent. More often they babbled about the end of the world, or got stuck in loops of their own histories, where they repeated old conversations over and over again.

Joe won his case for Santo Monico, and the Vaughan family used the money to secure their seats on Kliffoth Cybernetics’ Black Betty escape pod, Second Coming.

Sarah reported back to work at the clinic where she’d performed abortions until it became illegal, and now delivered high risk babies with congenital defects such as organ dysplasia and spina bifida. Most died soon after they entered the world, and wound-up in county graves or donated to science. To commemorate them, Sarah and the rest of the staff took turns carving numbers into small quartz stones, then piling them in the courtyard where the nurses smoked their Winstons. Scottsbluff was the only high risk birthing clinic in six states, and at first, it had seemed heartless not to name them. But after a while, it was only practical.

In the lobby during those days after Black Betty, more and more women showed up high risk. Betty was altering the genetic structure of living things, and bending it in all the wrong ways. The clinic waiting room television, tuned to news, often aired real-time human sacrifice, as well as a reality television program based in Los Angeles called “That’s My Monkey!”.

In the delivery room, Sarah spent her days pulling crowning babies from between their mothers’ bleeding legs while picketing Jesus freaks warned about The Rapture through the windows. The worst part was consoling the mothers when it was over. Always, they’d convinced themselves that the tests were wrong, and their babies would be born alive.

Betty spread. Relativity turned fungible. Small objects floated up, and into space.

It started with plastic grocery bags, moved on to the engraved quartz stones in the clinic courtyard, and after twelve months, ended with human beings. They held each other, a chain that lasted for miles, until, one by one, they were gone. Some got lost in space, others ended up spinning with the garbage around the Earth’s orbit, like Saturn’s rings.

Sarah and Joe boarded their windows from rioters and stopped going to work. She was sorry for the women who would surely die in labor without her help, but not sorry enough to continue. By now, the infants had become disfigured abominations.

The Vaughans waited, and waited, and waited some more, for news that Second Coming was complete. Fresh food by then was gone, but they’d stockpiled cans, which was better, at least, than those who starved, or resorted to cannibalism.

On air one morning, Jack the Jerk-Off and the rest of his morning show killed themselves. With the laws of physics so confused, the bullets didn’t penetrate like they should have. They fired dozens of rounds, and still died slow.

Sarah, Joe, Bradley, and Sally listened to the slaughter from the kitchen floor. “It’s not real; it’s make-believe,” Joe assured the children while Sarah wound Sally’s favorite music box. Carved men spun tiny circles around a painted wooden peak while “Climb Every Mountain,” played.

Toward the end of life above, the cars and mobile homes took flight, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Finally, the lights went out, and never came back.

Joe cashed his money into gold, and stole a gravity car. The family set out for the military base in Omaha, in the hopes that Second Coming was complete. They made it halfway before the engine died. The rest of the trip, carrying their gold bricks that were light as styrofoam, they walked. By then, the sky was dark, even during the day. The animals were gone. In two days, they reached the Kliffoth-American Military Base, eating only burrowing insects, and to slake their thirst, the blood Joe drained from his arm, and offered them to suckle.

Can you love someone more after something like that? Can it restore your faith in a mad world? Sarah Vaughan thought so.

When they arrived, Second Coming edged out from the earthy plains like an alien spaceship. Her skin was black and organic; her organs a neural net that glowed like jellyfish phosphor. For a quarter-mile in all directions, people gathered, and seemed, from the way they bowed and moaned, to worship. Some held each other. Others tied themselves to the cemented fences that would soon come loose. Armed guards lined every entrance.

They learned things as they pushed through the throng. It grumbled with intelligence, the way crowds do:

“They’re not letting anybody in, even if you’ve got a ticket!”

“It’s un-American!”

“They say if you’re good looking... They want breeders.”

“They say Osgood Blunder has gone mad...”

“They say the doctors all killed themselves. Same with the artists.”

“I have eight million dollars worth of gold,” Joe announced when they finally got to the front of the line. A small, thin guard stepped ahead of the rest, and pushed the nub of his flamethrower to Joe’s chest.

“Money’s no good,” the guard said.

Sarah and Joe held their children tight, as if trying to make them unborn.

“We have a right! We’re on the list!” Joe shouted, and then broke into tears. At the sight of their father’s surrender, the children, and Sarah, began to cry, too.

“Let us in, you murderer,” Joe continued. “We’ve got children. We have tickets. We’ve got gold.”

If only she was pretty, and could offer herself up to them, Sarah thought. If only Joe had married a trophy wife, like the rest of his rich friends, he’d be able to sell her now, and their kids would survive.

“Move along,” the guard said. “I don’t want to kill you in front of your children.”

They didn’t move. The launcher clicked, and methane loosened from its nose. Joe gasped. Probably, even with a direct hit, he would die slow.

Sarah remembered something from the crowd. “I hear Blunder is sick, and that your doctors refused to board because of crimes of conscience. I’m a surgeon. I’ll cross the strike line. I can operate,” she said.

The gun moved away from Joe, and to the center of Sarah’s back. It felt surprisingly heavy.

By the time they get the kids, it’s forty minutes before impact. The ship has turned to a soft slurry that does not stick to the bottoms of their boots, but instead oscillates in tidal pools toward the bow. Onscreen, along the vibrating corridor walls, Sarah can see images of Black Betty. They’re close enough now that she can see inside the anomaly’s pitch black edges.

Something moves.

It’s familiar, like the reflection inside a madman’s eye, and she’s reminded of the last child she delivered in Scottsbluff, who was born without skin.

In the engineering room, techies shout. Their voices reverb so deeply that she can’t make out what they’re saying. Some have gone mad with Betty’s Disease. They’re hitting their heads against soft walls, and chasing their own watery physical trails like dogs. Blunder’s body lays at the bottom of a pile of about two-hundred crewmen. They live in the machine now. She can feel their cold, atomic consciousness within the ship’s slurry, and in the vibrations under her feet.

The speaker crackles. It’s Blunder’s voice, just as monotone from the tracheotomy she gave him, only now, it has flattened into some less than human.. “The Vaughans,” Blunder says. “It’s so cold in here. A family. We could use a real family, to keep us warm.”

The First Mate beckons them to four upload gurneys, equipped with used needles and tubes. It’s supposed to be a quick process—only seconds, since they’ve been imprinted already.

The ship by now has condensed. Its walls close in like waves.

Ten minutes to impact. Joe walks with the children toward the gurneys. Sarah cannot conceive of strapping baby Sally onto one of these tables, then leaving her for the crew to toss to the pile. She cannot conceive of never touching her children again, or never again making love to the man whose blood she drank. But perhaps this will be better than death.

Yes, she reasons. She must believe it is better.

The speakers now are gone. The ship is about to merge with Betty, and become fluid and solid and infinite. Onscreen, Sarah can see ghosts inside the perimeter of this new universe. She can see her own body, strapped into a gurney, screaming: “No. Stop. For the love of God! It’s not too late.”

Joe straps Bradley to the table. Then Sally. Sarah watches.

The ship’s oxygen is low enough that they’re gasping and cold, but it’s a pleasant sensation, like floating. Words no longer echo. Sound is gone. Thought is gone, too. It’s just images, reflections, memories of the past and present and very near future with no particular distinction.

She doesn’t want to do it. All her instincts tell her not to do it, just as they told her not to leave those women in Scottsbluff, and not to operate on Blunder, but instead to slit his monster throat. Just like they told her not to feed her husband and children human flesh. “There are fates worse than death,” Joe argued that first time, but even then, weeping, they’d known how it would end. They’d taken their rations, and told the kids it was chicken.

Joe’s hand is on her shoulder. He straps her in, then himself. There’s no time to kiss goodbye. They will lose their love, she knows. Its ineffable constancy will not translate into the machine. She is wet with regret.

The upload is quick. Suddenly, she sees her body from the outside, looking in. She races through the ship, looking for her family.

But the ship is a slurry. It opens up, and breaks free from the Earth’s crust, hurtling toward Black Betty.

Her babies. Where are her babies?

She sees inside the anomaly, even though she doesn’t have eyes. It’s ghosts in there. Three billion people. Flipper children eating poison rice, garbage rings, birds circling a gyre. It’s her family in there, looking back at her. It’s that moment on the road, when they shared blood, and did not know that the hardest time was also the best time. It is past, and present, but not future. It is Betty’s Disease, and like everyone else before her, Sarah Vaughan is drowning in it.

The Second Coming and Black Betty collide.

Sarah knows now, what drove her patients mad. It is the unspeakable truth about what caused Black Betty. It’s Second Coming, so dense with the ghosts of humanity’s regret, that she weighted through time and tore the past to warn them. Black Betty is the Second Coming.

Sarah remembers the doctors who killed themselves, and the women at her office, and the babies, all those babies, piled like rocks. It was their future she was marking, stolen from them by their idiot parents. It was the end of the world she was reminiscing, though she did not know it.

Black Betty and the ship crash together. The two become one. All things become one. There is no sound. The anomaly splatters across space, black and beautiful.

“My babies,” Sarah cries, as she swims through an ocean of infinitely dense ghosts. 

And then, like a star, the anomaly collapses, as if it never was. It sucks past and present and future, and makes all of humanity unborn.

Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.

Author Spotlight: Sarah Langan
Erin Stocks

The image of garbage spinning around the Earth like the rings of Saturn haunted me long after I finished reading this story. Where did the idea for “Hindsight” come from?

The idea came to me like a bolt of lightning. I’d been researching technological singularity, and started to wonder, what would happen to us, if we all uploaded at the same time? Would the density of our consciousness create a gravitational singularity, and if so, would we be hastening our own end, rather than avoiding it?

On top of that, I’ve been thinking about black holes for a long time, and was happy to use this story as an excuse to research them. Their existence seems like proof of an afterlife to me, as much as that can be proven. I wound-up calling Betty an anomaly instead of a black hole because I was trying to respect the hard science aspect of the story, but couldn’t resist peppering my anomaly with black holes, and an Event Horizon. The symbolism is too perfect.

To be truthful, I go more for emotion than realism. It’s rare that I have honestly original ideas—typically characters and emotions are my strong suit, and I shoot for realism with a monster or two thrown in, to add tension. For that reason, this story was especially satisfying to write. It’s a total departure.

Fear is a powerful motivator. We see examples of this over and over throughout history and in current events; political leaders and governments using fear to influence people one way or the other. This story is no exception, as Kliffoth Cybernetics announces the disaster, and then the CEO, who (coincidentally?) is also the President of the US, creates and secures the only escape pod, Second Coming. Why do you think there weren’t any other escape pods created?

Demagogue is one of my favorite words. It’s practically German, it’s so specific. Anyway, the world is full of them, and it’s easy to fall prey, especially when you have people in your life that you’ve got to protect. You wind up taking the safe route, instead of the moral one.

In my imagining of this story, the Second Coming is the only ship because it’s headquarters for the Offutt Military Base, and in the near future, corporatized America has destroyed the rest of the world. There are no other ships because there are no other places with an accumulation of resources.  

What inspired you to turn the Second Coming into both the cause and effect of the end of the world?

I was having my regular, weekly lunch with a friend who writes horror, and he asked, “Would you kill zombies who weren’t trying to kill you?”

My answer was essentially: “It’s their nature to eat people, so of course I’d kill them, even if they were picking flowers and protesting the bomb, I’d kill them. I’ve got a daughter to think about.”

His eyes got wide, and he said, “Mothers are a scary thing.”

He was right. What’s scary about being a parent, and an American, is the temptation to make decisions that are best for loved ones, but worse for the larger world, and the future of humanity. We pollute, but we pay the college fund by doing so. We declare preemptive wars. We eat animals that are treated worse than Bubonic Plague, but the meat is cheap, and we’ve got families to support.

It’s these constant compromises that erode our character, I think. Humans are compassionate, and our fundamental natures are good, but we make Faustian bargains in the name of love that wind-up destroying our very futures, and the thing about us that is worthwhile.

Why did the guard initially refuse to let Sarah and her family on the ship despite their paid passage, only allowing them entry after she revealed she was a physician?

The Vaughans were allowed on the ship because Sarah had a skill that the Emperor needed. It was a corrupt regime, so it didn’t matter whether they had a legitimate right to be there, or not. 

Sarah wonders if it’s possible to love someone after the degrees to which they’ve stooped to, but she doesn’t swerve from her commitment to her husband and children. Did her love for her family play a part in her survival (until the end)?

Yes; their love for each other is what kept them alive, and also what drove them to make compromises that hastened the demise of mankind.

Let’s imagine for a moment that they succeed, that the Second Coming didn’t cause the Black Betty, and there is a happily ever after, as much as possible. What did they accomplish (besides survival) by downloading minds into the mainframe of the ship? What happens next for these people whose consciousness’ are crammed together into the mind of this biological ship?

I think that’s an interesting question. My guess is, they’d all be pretty miserable, trapped together for eternity with a homicidal maniac and what have you. I don’t necessarily think technological singularity is a bad idea—just in this specific story. In general, I like the idea of transcending flesh, and never getting sick, but I also like the option of keeping the flesh and blood around, too. There’s a temptation to imagine technological singularity as the Borg, but just as easily, it could truly be a leap in human evolution. Maybe there’d be less mental illness, disease, and sadness. Maybe we’d be able to explore space, which would be pretty cool. “Hindsight’s” Singularity is based on compromise—they’re scared of death. Ideally, Singularity wouldn’t be a tool to deny the inevitable. It would be an expansion of consciousness.

Your highly acclaimed novels are marketed as horror. For a reader who is more familiar with science fiction, which of your books do you recommend they start with?

That’s a tough one. I wrote a story called “Independence Day” in an anthology edited by Harrison Howe called Darkness on the Edge: Stories Inspired by Bruce Springsteen that science fiction fans might like. It’s about a young girl in the near future, who turns her father in to the thought police.

Of my three novels, I’d suggest my most recent, Audrey’s Door, since it’s got some speculative elements. It’s about a woman who moves into a haunted apartment building. Once there, her latent obsessive-compulsive-disorder flairs, and she begins to build a door.

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.

When Universes Collide
Pamela L. Gay

Once upon a time, in an age before civilization, before humanity, before the dinosaurs, even before the Big Bang, our universe...wasn’t. Nothing, nada. Void. It’s scary but true. Once upon a time, our universe didn’t exist, not even as a twinkle in God’s eye.

Now, you might say why bother talking about a time we can’t observe. You might say it’s pointless, unscientific. You might say a lot of such things, and guess what, you’d have a point. Because even for the greatest scientific minds in the world, any speculation about that time before time would be nothing more than an educated guess. Our universe, and all that is in it—including mass, energy and time—all began at the moment of the Big Bang, and we have no observational way of learning anything about what came before, or even what caused, that first moment, that first Bang, to start and to unfold into our present space-time continuum. This great unknown is perhaps one of the most annoying facets of physics and the ultimate unanswerable test question.

But we want to know. As scientists—as humans—we want to know everything, the how, the where, the why of it, and so finally answer the most fundamental questions of our universe’s origins.

Some of the greatest thinkers in the world—mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, clerics—have applied their minds to this question, all looking for answers that are consistent both with what we can observe and that also leave space for more. The scientific among them, the ones confining their thought experiments to the realms of science and logic, are guided in their search by one simple precept: the mediocrity principle. 

The mediocrity principle states that we don’t live in a special time or a special place, that life on Earth depends on just a few basic molecules, and that those molecules probably also exist in other parts of the universe. Ergo: we’re not special.  But holding this belief means that any theory we come up with (for the void, for the Bang) must explain how we then came to arrive as a sentient species in a universe that, to all outward appearances, seems finely tuned for life.

But the more we learn about our universe, the more we realize that life actually wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Consider gravity for a moment. We don’t know of any underlying reason that it must work as it does. It simply does.  But if gravity had been just a bit stronger, the universe would have collapsed down to black holes in the first mega millennia or so. And if gravity had been a bit weaker, stars might not have formed at all. Instead, gravity, for no required reason, is just right to sustain a universe with life. This fine-tuning is just one example of all the many fine tunings—from factors affecting molecular bonding to factors affecting electricity—that keep our universe chugging along. And the more we look at our universe, the more it actually does seem as if someone tweaked the preference knobs—the universal file settings if you will—over and over again until things were tuned just right for life.

But then we remember our one guiding principal: that we aren’t special, that we don’t live anywhere special.  That we are...mediocre.

So how do we reconcile these two conflicting ideas?

Well, actually, there are two scientific ways to cope with the fact of a finely tuned universe and the principle that our universe isn’t special.

The first is that we say that there could be, should be, must be some underlying physics that dictates a universe has to look like ours. It just is and that’s that.  This concept explains the fine-tuning by saying that the way things are is the only option. It’s a straightforward answer, and one that, happily for us, produces a single universe with a single set of physics. It doesn’t help us understand where we came from, sure, but it certainly makes the now a rather pleasant place to be.

And then there’s the alternative, where we conjecture that, instead of one universe, there could be an infinite number of universes out there, each one bubbling forth from some sort of quantum foam, forming with their own physics and their own set of functions and final preference values that may or may not support life. In this multi-verse scenario, our universe isn’t particularly special, just the result of throwing a handful of dice over and over and every once in a while ending up with Yahtzee.

There is at once something awesome about this idea and something terrifying. The concept of a multi-verse gives the question of origins a potential answer by making us just another fluctuation in an infinite series. And while infinites are uncomfortable, they are, at least, an answer.  But at the same time, it also opens up the idea of other places, other ages, other universes filled with people living other lives. The multi-verse concept makes anything possible because over infinite time, everything is probable. Everything.

Including universe collisions.

If you’ve ever watched a child blowing bubbles, you’ll know that most of the time, the bubbles burst. Every once in a while, however, they combine. And if our universe is just one of many in a free-floating, soap bubble-like multi-verse, there is a chance, a slim one, but a chance, that our universe and another could collapse in on each other, merging like two iridescent soap bubbles meeting in the wind.

We have no idea what would happen as a result. We might simply wink out—Poof! Gone!—Our entire universe ceasing to be in a single moment. Or perhaps the laws of physics as we know them might unravel, changing to take on characteristics from the new universe. If this happened we’d also likely cease to be: How could life survive if the laws that keep our planet together and our star burning suddenly changed? It’s also doubtful we could survive the effects these changes might have on our DNA. Luckily though, we probably wouldn’t even have time to realize we were going extinct.

According to the laws of our universe, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Assuming the merging universes keep that one rule (or replace it with a faster speed of light or instantaneous travel), then the changes would rush across our universe at the speed of light. We’d never see them coming, though, because just as an image of the stars tearing apart reached our eyes, the new laws of physics would be upon us, and we’d be torn apart as well.

Unless, of course, the merging universe brings with its slow roll of destruction a slower speed of light or some other strange physics. In this case, we might experience our own “Neverending Story” as we watch the stars wink out and a Great Nothing consume all we know, making way for something new to form and take its place.  Or we might get to watch, terrified, as everything around us transforms, including ourselves, if the propagation is slow enough, and perhaps suffering awfully as the physics ruling our body changes, with no child to dream us back again.

We don’t know how many universes came and went (or failed to come and go) before ours. We don’t know how many times life has (or hasn’t) experienced the merging of two universes. We don’t know many things. I don’t actually know if our universe will last long enough for you to read these words I’ve written. But for all that we don’t know, I feel safe in saying that, while anything is possible, it is, in fact, highly unlikely that our fragile human race will ever witness the merging of our universe with another.

After all, the exciting stuff always happens to someone else.

Pamela L. Gay is an astronomer focused on communicating science by engaging everyday people in active research through Zooniverse citizen science projects (including Moon Zoo and Galaxy Zoo). She is co-host of the Astronomy Cast, and on the faculty at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In her spare time she rides her horse Skye.

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back
Joe R. Lansdale

From the Journal of Paul Marder

(Boom!)

That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane.

No. Probably so I can read it and feel as if I’m being spoken to. Maybe neither of those reasons. It doesn’t matter. I just want to do it, and that is enough.

What’s new?

Well, Mr. Journal, after all these years I’ve taken up martial arts again—or at least the forms and calisthenics of Tae Kwon Do. There is no one to spar with here in the lighthouse, so the forms have to do.

There is Mary, of course, but she keeps all her sparring verbal. And as of late, there is not even that. I long for her to call me a sonofabitch. Anything. Her hatred of me has cured to 100% perfection and she no longer finds it necessary to speak. The tight lines around her eyes and mouth, the emotional heat that radiates from her body like a dreadful cold sore looking for a place to lie down is voice enough for her. She lives only for the moment when she (the cold sore) can attach herself to me with her needles, ink and thread. She lives only for the design on my back.

That’s all I live for as well. Mary adds to it nightly and I enjoy the pain. The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost-like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears.

That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.

Each night I bare my back eagerly to Mary and her needles. She pokes deep and I moan in pain as she moans in ecstasy and hatred. She adds more color to the design, works with brutal precision to bring Rae’s face out in sharper relief. After ten minutes she tires and will work no more. She puts the tools away and I go to the full-length mirror on the wall. The lantern on the shelf flickers like a jack-o-lantern in a high wind, but there is enough light for me to look over my shoulder and examine the tattoo. And it is beautiful. Better each night as Rae’s face becomes more and more defined.

Rae.

Rae. God, can you forgive me, sweetheart?

But the pain of the needles, wonderful and cleansing as they are, is not enough. So I go sliding, kicking and punching along the walkway around the lighthouse, feeling Rae’s red tears running down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my much-stained canvas pants.

Winded, unable to punch and kick anymore, I walk over to the railing and call down into the dark, “Hungry?”

In response to my voice a chorus of moans rises up to greet me.

Later, I lie on my pallet, hands behind my head, examine the ceiling and try to think of something worthy to write in you, Mr. Journal. So seldom is there anything. Nothing seems truly worthwhile.

Bored of this, I roll on my side and look at the great light that once shone out to the ships, but is now forever snuffed. Then I turn the other direction and look at my wife sleeping on her bunk, her naked ass turned toward me. I try to remember what it was like to make love to her, but it is difficult. I only remember that I miss it. For a long moment I stare at my wife’s ass as if it is a mean mouth about to open and reveal teeth. Then I roll on my back again, stare at the ceiling, and continue this routine until daybreak.

Mornings I greet the flowers, their bright red and yellow blooms bursting from the heads of long-dead bodies that will not rot. The flowers open wide to reveal their little black brains and their feathery feelers, and they lift their blooms upward and moan. I get a wild pleasure out of this. For one crazed moment I feel like a rock singer appearing before his starry-eyed audience.

When I tire of the game I get the binoculars, Mr. Journal, and examine the eastern plains with them, as if I expect a city to materialize there. The most interesting thing I have seen on those plains is a herd of large lizards thundering north. For a moment, I considered calling Mary to see them, but I didn’t. The sound of my voice, the sight of my face, upsets her. She loves only the tattoo and is interested in nothing more.

When I finish looking at the plains, I walk to the other side. To the west, where the ocean was, there is now nothing but miles and miles of cracked, black sea bottom. Its only resemblance to a great body of water are the occasional dust storms that blow out of the west like dark tidal waves and wash the windows black at mid-day. And the creatures. Mostly mutated whales. Monstrously large, sluggish things. Abundant now where once they were near extinction. (Perhaps the whales should form some sort of GREENPEACE organization for humans now. What do you think, Mr. Journal? No need to answer. Just another one of those little scientist jokes.)

These whales crawl across the sea bottom near the lighthouse from time to time, and if the mood strikes them, they rise on their tails and push their heads near the tower and examine it. I keep expecting one to flop down on us, crushing us like bugs. But no such luck. For some unknown reason the whales never leave the cracked sea bed to venture onto what we formerly called the shore. It’s as if they live in invisible water and are bound by it. A racial memory perhaps. Or maybe there’s something in that cracked black soil they need. I don’t know.

Besides the whales I suppose I should mention I saw a shark once. It was slithering along at a great distance and the tip of its fin was winking in the sunlight. I’ve also seen some strange, legged fish and some things I could not put a name to. I’ll just call them whale food since I saw one of the whales dragging his bottom jaw along the ground one day, scooping up the creatures as they tried to beat a hasty retreat.

Exciting, huh? Well, that’s how I spend my day, Mr. Journal. Roaming about the tower with my glasses, coming in to write in you, waiting anxiously for Mary to take hold of that kit and give me the signal. The mere thought of it excites me to erection. I suppose you could call that our sex act together.

And what was I doing the day they dropped The Big One?

Glad you asked that, Mr. Journal, really I am.

I was doing the usual. Up at six, did the shit, shower and shave routine. Had breakfast. Got dressed. Tied my tie. I remember doing the latter, and not very well, in front of the bedroom mirror, and noticing that I had shaved poorly. A hunk of dark beard decorated my chin like a bruise.

Rushing to the bathroom to remedy that, I opened the door as Rae, naked as the day of her birth, was stepping from the tub.

Surprised, she turned to look at me. An arm went over her breasts, and a hand, like a dove settling into a fiery bush, covered her pubic area.

Embarrassed, I closed the door with an “excuse me” and went about my business—unshaved. It was an innocent thing. An accident. Nothing sexual. But when I think of her now, more often than not, that is the first image that comes to mind. I guess it was the moment I realized my baby had grown into a beautiful woman.

That was also the day she went off to her first day of college and got to see, ever so briefly, the end of the world.

And it was the day the triangle—Mary, Rae and myself—shattered.

If my first memory of Rae alone is that day, naked in the bathroom, my foremost memory of us as a family is when Rae was six. We used to go to the park and she would ride the merry-go-round, swing, teeter-totter, and finally my back. (“I want to piggy, Daddy.”) We would gallop about until my legs were rubber, then we would stop at the bench where Mary sat waiting. I would turn my back to the bench so Mary could take Rae down, but always before she did, she would reach around from behind, caressing Rae, pushing her tight against my back, and Mary’s hands would touch my chest.

God, but if I could describe those hands. She still has hands like that, after all these years. I feel them fluttering against my back when she works. They are long and sleek and artistic. Naturally soft, like the belly of a baby rabbit. And when she held Rae and me that way, I felt that no matter what happened in the world, we three could stand against it and conquer.

But now the triangle is broken and the geometry gone away.

So the day Rae went off to college and was fucked into oblivion by the dark, pelvic thrust of the bomb, Mary drove me to work. Me, Paul Marder, big shot with The Crew. One of the finest, brightest young minds in the industry. Always teaching, inventing and improving on our nuclear threat, because, as we’d often joke, “We cared enough to send only the very best.”

When we arrived at the guard booth, I had out my pass, but there was no one to take it. Beyond the chain-link gate there was a wild melee of people running, screaming, falling down.

I got out of the car and ran to the gate. I called out to a man I knew as he ran by. When he turned his eyes were wild and his lips were flecked with foam. “The missiles are flying,” he said, then he was gone, running madly.

I jumped in the car, pushed Mary aside and stomped the gas. The Buick leaped into the fence, knocking it asunder. The car spun, slammed into the edge of a building and went dead. I grabbed Mary’s hand, pulled her from the car and we ran toward the great elevators.

We made one just in time. There were others running for it as the door closed, and the elevator went down. I still remember the echo of their fists on the metal just as it began to drop. It was like the rapid heartbeat of something dying.

And so the elevator took us to the world of Down Under and we locked it off. There we were in a five-mile layered city designed not only as a massive office and laboratory, but as an impenetrable shelter. It was our special reward for creating the poisons of war. There was food, water, medical supplies, films, books, you name it. Enough to last two thousand people for a hundred years. Of the two thousand it was designed for, perhaps eleven hundred made it. The others didn’t run fast enough from the parking lot or the other buildings, or they were late for work, or maybe they had called in sick.

Perhaps they were the lucky ones. They might have died in their sleep. Or while they were having a morning quickie with the spouse. Or perhaps as they lingered over that last cup of coffee.

Because you see, Mr. Journal, Down Under was no paradise. Before long suicides were epidemic. I considered it myself from time to time. People slashed their throats, drank acid, took pills. It was not unusual to come out of your cubicle in the morning and find people dangling from pipes and rafters like ripe fruit.

There were also the murders. Most of them performed by a crazed group who lived in the deeper recesses of the unit and called themselves the Shit Faces. From time to time they smeared dung on themselves and ran amok, clubbing men, women, and children born down under, to death. It was rumored they ate human flesh.

We had a police force of sorts, but it didn’t do much. It didn’t have much sense of authority. Worse, we all viewed ourselves as deserving victims. Except for Mary, we had all helped to blow up the world.

Mary came to hate me. She came to the conclusion I had killed Rae. It was a realization that grew in her like a drip growing and growing until it became a gushing flood of hate. She seldom talked to me. She tacked up a picture of Rae and looked at it most of the time.

Topside she had been an artist, and she took that up again. She rigged a kit of tools and inks and became a tattooist. Everyone came to her for a mark. And though each was different, they all seemed to indicate one thing: I fucked up. I blew up the world. Brand me.

Day in and day out she did her tattoos, having less and less to do with me, pushing herself more and more into this work until she was as skilled with skin and needles as she had been Topside with brush and canvas. And one night, as we lay on our separate pallets, feigning sleep, she said to me, “I just want you to know how much I hate you.”

“I know,” I said.

“You killed Rae.”

“I know.”

“You say you killed her, you bastard. Say it.”

“I killed her,” I said, and meant it.

Next day I asked for my tattoo. I told her of this dream that came to me nightly. There would be darkness, and out of this darkness would come a swirl of glowing clouds, and the clouds would melt into a mushroom shape, and out of that—torpedo-shaped, nose pointing skyward, striding on ridiculous cartoon legs—would step The Bomb.

There was a face painted on The Bomb, and it was my face. And suddenly the dream’s point of view would change, and I would be looking out of the eyes of that painted face. Before me was my daughter. Naked. Lying on the ground. Her legs wide apart. Her sex glazed like a wet canyon.

And I/The Bomb would dive into her, pulling those silly feet after me, and she would scream. I could hear it echo as I plunged through her belly, finally driving myself out of the top of her head, then blowing to terminal orgasm. And the dream would end where it began. A mushroom cloud. Darkness.

When I told Mary the dream and asked her to interpret it in her art, she said, “Bare your back,” and that’s how the design began. An inch of work at a time—a painful inch. She made sure of that.

Never once did I complain. She’d send the needles home as hard and deep as she could, and though I might moan or cry out, I never asked her to stop. I could feel those fine hands touching my back and I loved it. The needles. The hands. The needles. The hands.

And if that was so much fun, you ask, why did I come Topside?

You ask such probing questions, Mr. Journal. Really you do, and I’m glad you asked that. My telling will be like a laxative, I hope. Maybe if I just let the shit flow I’ll wake up tomorrow and feel a lot better about myself.

Sure. And it will be the dawning of a new Pepsi generation as well. It will have all been a bad dream. The alarm clock will ring. I’ll get up, have my bowl of Rice Krispies and tie my tie.

Okay, Mr. Journal. The answer. Twenty years or so after we went Down Under, a fistful of us decided it couldn’t be any worse Topside than it was below. We made plans to go see. Simple as that. Mary and I even talked a little. We both entertained the crazed belief Rae might have survived. She would be thirty-eight. We might have been hiding below like vermin for no reason. It could be a brave new world up there.

I remember thinking these things, Mr. Journal, and half-believing them.

We outfitted two sixty-foot crafts that were used as part of our transportation system Down Under, plugged in the half-remembered codes that opened the elevators, and drove the vehicles inside. The elevator lasers cut through the debris above them and before long we were Topside. The doors opened to sunlight muted by gray-green clouds and a desert-like landscape. Immediately I knew there was no brave new world over the horizon. It had all gone to hell in a fiery handbasket, and all that was left of man’s millions of years of development were a few pathetic humans living Down Under like worms, and a few others crawling Topside like the same.

We cruised about a week and finally came to what had once been the Pacific Ocean. Only there wasn’t any water now, just that cracked blackness.

We drove along the shore for another week and finally saw life. A whale. Jacobs immediately got the idea to shoot one and taste its meat.

Using a high-powered rifle he killed it, and he and seven others cut slabs off it, brought the meat back to cook. They invited all of us to eat, but the meat looked greenish and there wasn’t much blood and we warned him against it. But Jacobs and the others ate it anyway. As Jacobs said, “It’s something to do.”

A little later on Jacobs threw up blood and his intestines boiled out of his mouth, and not long after those who had shared the meat had the same thing happen to them. They died crawling on their bellies like gutted dogs. There wasn’t a thing we could do for them. We couldn’t even bury them. The ground was too hard. We stacked them like cordwood along the shoreline and moved camp down a way, tried to remember how remorse felt.

And that night, while we slept as best we could, the roses came.

Now, let me admit, Mr. Journal, I do not actually know how the roses survived, but I have an idea. And since you’ve agreed to hear my story—and even if you haven’t, you’re going to anyway—I’m going to put logic and fantasy together and hope to arrive at the truth.

These roses lived in the ocean bed, underground, and at night they came out. Up until then they had survived as parasites of reptiles and animals, but a new food had arrived from Down Under. Humans. Their creators, actually. Looking at it that way, you might say we were the gods who conceived them, and their partaking of our flesh and blood was but a new version of wine and wafer.

I can imagine the pulsating brains pushing up through the sea bottom on thick stalks, extending feathery feelers and tasting the air out there beneath the light of the moon—which through those odd clouds gave the impression of a pus-filled boil—and I can imagine them uprooting and dragging their vines across the ground toward the shore where the corpses lay.

Thick vines sprouted little, thorny vines, and these moved up the bank and touched the corpses. Then, with a lashing motion, the thorns tore into the flesh, and the vines, like snakes, slithered through the wounds and inside. Secreting a dissolving fluid that turned the innards to the consistency of watery oatmeal, they slurped up the mess, and the vines grew and grew at amazing speed, moved and coiled throughout the bodies, replacing nerves and shaping into the symmetry of the muscles they had devoured, and lastly they pushed up through the necks, into the skulls, ate tongues and eyeballs and sucked up the mouse-gray brains like soggy gruel. With an explosion of skull shrapnel, the roses bloomed, their tooth-hard petals expanding into beautiful red and yellow flowers, hunks of human heads dangling from them like shattered watermelon rinds.

In the center of these blooms a fresh, black brain pulsed and feathery feelers once again tasted air for food and breeding grounds. Energy waves from the floral brains shot through the miles and miles of vines that were knotted inside the bodies, and as they had replaced nerves, muscles and vital organs, they made the bodies stand. Then those corpses turned their flowered heads toward the tents where we slept, and the blooming corpses (another little scientist joke there if you’re into English idiom, Mr. Journal) walked, eager to add the rest of us to their animated bouquet.

I saw my first rose-head while I was taking a leak.

I had left the tent and gone down by the shore line to relieve myself when I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. Because of the bloom I first thought it was Susan Dyers. She wore a thick, woolly Afro that surrounded her head like a lion’s mane, and the shape of the thing struck me as her silhouette. But when I zipped and turned, it wasn’t an Afro. It was a flower blooming out of Jacobs. I recognized him by his clothes and the hunk of his face that hung off one of the petals like a worn-out hat on a peg.

In the center of the blood-red flower was a pulsating sack, and all around it little wormy things squirmed. Directly below the brain was a thin proboscis. It extended toward me like an erect penis. At its tip, just inside the opening, were a number of large thorns.

A sound like a moan came out of that proboscis, and I stumbled back. Jacobs’ body quivered briefly, as if he had been besieged by a sudden chill, and ripping through his flesh and clothes, from neck to foot, was a mass of thorny, wagging vines that shot out to five feet in length.

With an almost invisible motion, they waved from west to east, slashed my clothes, tore my hide, knocked my feet out from beneath me. It was like being hit by a cat-o-nine-tails.

Dazed, I rolled onto my hands and knees, bear-walked away from it. The vines whipped against my back and butt, cut deep.

Every time I got to my feet, they tripped me. The thorns not only cut, they burned like hot ice picks. I finally twisted away from a net of vines, slammed through one last shoot, and made a break for it.

Without realizing it, I was running back to the tent. My body felt as if I had been lying on a bed of nails and razor blades. My forearm hurt something terrible where I had used it to lash the thorns away from me. I glanced down at it as I ran. It was covered in blood. A strand of vine about two feet in length was coiled around it like a garter snake. A thorn had torn a deep wound in my arm, and the vine was sliding an end into the wound.

Screaming, I held my forearm in front of me like I had just discovered it. The flesh, where the vine had entered, rippled and made a bulge that looked like a junkie’s favorite vein. The pain was nauseating. I snatched at the vine, ripped it free. The thorns turned against me-like fishhooks.

The pain was so much I fell to my knees, but I had the vine out of me. It squirmed in my hand, and I felt a thorn gouge my palm. I threw the vine into the dark. Then I was up and running for the tent again.

The roses must have been at work for quite some time before I saw Jacobs, because when I broke back into camp yelling, I saw Susan, Ralph, Casey and some others, and already their heads were blooming, skulls cracking away like broken model kits.

Jane Calloway was facing a rose-possessed corpse, and the dead body had its hands on her shoulders, and the vines were jetting out of the corpse, weaving around her like a web, tearing, sliding inside her, breaking off. The proboscis poked into her mouth and extended down her throat, forced her head back. The scream she started came out a gurgle.

I tried to help her, but when I got close, the vines whipped at me and I had to jump back. I looked for something to grab, to hit the damn thing with, but there was nothing. When next I looked at Jane, vines were stabbing out of her eyes and her tongue, now nothing more than lava-thick blood, was dripping out of her mouth onto her breasts, which, like the rest of her body, were riddled with stabbing vines.

I ran away then. There was nothing I could do for Jane. I saw others embraced by corpse hands and tangles of vines, but now my only thought was Mary. Our tent was to the rear of the campsite, and I ran there as fast as I could.

She was lumbering out of our tent when I arrived. The sound of screams had awakened her. When she saw me running she froze. By the time I got to her, two vine-riddled corpses were coming up on the tent from the left side. Grabbing her hand I half-pulled, half-dragged her away from there. I got to one of the vehicles and pushed her inside.

I locked the doors just as Jacobs, Susan, Jane, and others appeared at the windshield, leaning over the rocket-nose hood, the feelers around the brain sacks vibrating like streamers in a high wind. Hands slid greasily down the windshield. Vines flopped and scratched and cracked against it like thin bicycle chains.

I got the vehicle started, stomped the accelerator, and the rose-heads went flying. One of them, Jacobs, bounced over the hood and splattered into a spray of flesh, ichor and petals.

I had never driven the vehicle, so my maneuvering was rusty. But it didn’t matter. There wasn’t exactly a traffic rush to worry about.

After an hour or so, I turned to look at Mary. She was staring at me, her eyes like the twin barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. They seemed to say, “More of your doing,” and in a way she was right. I drove on.

Daybreak we came to the lighthouse. I don’t know how it survived. One of those quirks. Even the glass was unbroken. It looked like a great stone finger shooting us the bird.

The vehicle’s tank was near empty, so I assumed here was as good a place to stop as any. At least there was shelter, something we could fortify. Going on until the vehicle was empty of fuel didn’t make much sense. There wouldn’t be any more fill-ups, and there might not be any more shelter like this.

Mary and I (in our usual silence) unloaded the supplies from the vehicle and put them in the lighthouse. There was enough food, water, chemicals for the chemical toilet, odds and ends, extra clothes, to last us a year. There were also some guns. A Colt .45 revolver, two twelve-gauge shotguns and a .38, and enough shells to fight a small war.

When everything was unloaded, I found some old furniture downstairs and, using tools from the vehicle, tried to barricade the bottom door and the one at the top of the stairs. When I finished, I thought of a line from a story I had once read, a line that always disturbed me. It went something like, “Now we’re shut in for the night.”

Days. Nights. All the same. Shut in with one another, our memories and the fine tattoo.

A few days later I spotted the roses. It was as if they had smelled us out. And maybe they had. From a distance, through the binoculars, they reminded me of old women in bright sun hats.

It took them the rest of the day to reach the lighthouse, and they immediately surrounded it, and when I appeared at the railing they would lift their heads and moan.

And that, Mr. Journal, brings us up to now.

I thought I had written myself out, Mr. Journal. Told the only part of my life story I would ever tell, but now I’m back. You can’t keep a good world-destroyer down.

I saw my daughter last night and she’s been dead for years. But I saw her, I did, naked, smiling at me, calling to ride piggyback.

Here’s what happened.

It was cold last night. Must be getting along winter. I had rolled off my pallet onto the cold floor. Maybe that’s what brought me awake. The cold. Or maybe it was just gut instinct.

It had been a particularly wonderful night with the tattoo. The face had been made so clear it seemed to stand out from my back. It had finally become more defined than the mushroom cloud. The needles went in hard and deep, but I’ve had them in me so much now I barely feel the pain. After looking in the mirror at the beauty of the design, I went to bed happy, or as happy as I can get.

During the night the eyes ripped open. The stitches came out and I didn’t know it until I tried to rise from the cold, stone floor and my back puckered against it where the blood had dried.

I pulled myself free and got up. It was dark, but we had a good moonspill that night and I went to the mirror to look. It was bright enough that I could see Rae’s reflection clearly, the color of her face, the color of the cloud. The stitches had fallen away and now the wounds were spread wide, and inside the wounds were eyes. Oh God, Rae’s blue eyes. Her mouth smiled at me and her teeth were very white.

Oh, I hear you, Mr. Journal. I hear what you’re saying. And I thought of that. My first impression was that I was about six bricks shy a load, gone around the old bend. But I know better now. You see, I lit a candle and held it over my shoulder, and with the candle and the moonlight, I could see even more clearly. It was Rae all right, not just a tattoo.

I looked over at my wife on the bunk, her back to me, as always. She had not moved.

I turned back to the reflection. I could hardly see the outline of myself, just Rae’s face smiling out of that cloud.

“Rae,” I whispered, “is that you?”

“Come on, Daddy,” said the mouth in the mirror, “that’s a stupid question. Of course it’s me.”

“But... You’re... you’re...”

“Dead?”

“Yes... Did... did it hurt much?”

She cackled so loudly the mirror shook. I could feel the hairs on my neck rising. I thought for sure Mary would wake up, but she slept on.

“It was instantaneous, Daddy, and even then, it was the greatest pain imaginable. Let me show you how it hurt.”

The candle blew out and I dropped it. I didn’t need it anyway. The mirror grew bright and Rae’s smile went from ear to ear—literally— and the flesh on her bones seemed like crepe paper before a powerful fan, and that fan blew the hair off her head, the skin off her skull and melted those beautiful, blue eyes and those shiny white teeth of hers to a putrescent goo the color and consistency of fresh bird shit. Then there was only the skull, and it heaved in half and flew backwards into the dark world of the mirror and there was no reflection now, only the hurtling fragments of a life that once was and was now nothing more than swirling cosmic dust.

I closed my eyes and looked away.

“Daddy?”

I opened them, looked over my shoulder into the mirror. There was Rae again, smiling out of my back.

“Darling,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“So are we,” she said, and there were faces floating past her in the mirror. Teenagers, children, men and women, babies, little embryos swirling around her head like planets around the sun. I closed my eyes again, but I could not keep them closed. When I opened them the multitudes of swirling dead, and those who had never had a chance to live, were gone. Only Rae was there.

“Come close to the mirror, Daddy.”

I backed up to it. I backed until the hot wounds that were Rae’s eyes touched the cold glass and the wounds became hotter and hotter and Rae called out, “Ride me piggy, Daddy,” and then I felt her weight on my back, not the weight of a six-year-old child or a teenage girl, but a great weight, like the world was on my shoulders and bearing down.

Leaping away from the mirror I went hopping and whooping about the room, same as I used to in the park. Around and around I went, and as I did, I glanced in the mirror. Astride me was Rae, lithe and naked, her red hair fanning around her as I spun. And when I whirled by the mirror again, I saw that she was six years old. Another spin and there was a skeleton with red hair, one hand held high, the jaws open and yelling, “Ride ‘em, cowboy.”

“How?” I managed, still bucking and leaping, giving Rae the ride of her life. She bent to my ear and I could feel her warm breath. “You want to know how I’m here, Daddy-dear? I’m here because you created me. Once you laid between Mother’s legs and thrust me into existence, the two of you, with all the love there was in you. This time you thrust me into existence with your guilt and Mother’s hate. Her thrusting needles, your arching back. And now I’ve come back for one last ride, Daddy-o. Ride, you bastard, ride.”

All the while I had been spinning, and now as I glimpsed the mirror I saw wall to wall faces, weaving in, weaving out, like smiling stars, and all those smiles opened wide and words came out in chorus, “Where were you when they dropped The Big One?”

Each time I spun and saw the mirror again, it was a new scene. Great flaming winds scorching across the world, babies turning to fleshy jello, heaps of charred bones, brains boiling out of the heads of men and women like backed-up toilets overflowing, The Almighty, Glory Hallelujah, Ours Is Bigger Than Yours Bomb hurtling forward, the mirror going mushroom white, then clear, and me, spinning, Rae pressed tight against my back, melting like butter on a griddle, evaporating into the eye wounds on my back, and finally me alone, collapsing to the floor beneath the weight of the world.

Mary never awoke.

The vines outsmarted me.

A single strand found a crack downstairs somewhere and wound up the steps and slipped beneath the door that led into the tower. Mary’s bunk was not far from the door, and in the night, while I slept and later while I spun in front of the mirror and lay on the floor before it, it made its way to Mary’s bunk, up between her legs, and entered her sex effortlessly.

I suppose I should give the vine credit for doing what I had not been able to do in years, Mr. Journal, and that’s enter Mary. Oh God, that’s a funny one, Mr. Journal. Real funny. Another little scientist joke. Let’s make that a mad scientist joke, what say? Who but a madman would play with the lives of human beings by constantly trying to build the bigger and better boom machine?

So what of Rae, you ask?

I’ll tell you. She is inside me. My back feels the weight. She twists in my guts like a corkscrew. I went to the mirror a moment ago, and the tattoo no longer looks like it did. The eyes have turned to crusty sores and the entire face looks like a scab. It’s as if the bile that made up my soul, the unthinking nearsightedness, the guilt that I am, has festered from inside and spoiled the picture with pustule bumps, knots and scabs.

To put it in layman’s terms, Mr. Journal, my back is infected. Infected with what I am. A blind, senseless fool.

The wife?

Ah, the wife. God, how I loved that woman. I have not really touched her in years, merely felt those wonderful hands on my back as she jabbed the needles home, but I never stopped loving her. It was not a love that glowed anymore, but it was there, though hers for me was long gone and wasted.

This morning when I got up from the floor, the weight of Rae and the world on my back, I saw the vine coming up from beneath the door and stretching over to her. I yelled her name. She did not move. I ran to her and saw it was too late. Before I could put a hand on her, I saw her flesh ripple and bump up, like a den of mice were nesting under a quilt. The vines were at work. (Out go the old guts, in go the new vines.)

There was nothing I could do for her.

I made a torch out of a chair leg and old quilt, set fire to it, burned the vine from between her legs, watched it retreat, smoking, under the door. Then I got a board, nailed it along the bottom, hoping it would keep others out for at least a little while. I got one of the twelve-gauges and loaded it. It’s on the desk beside me, Mr. Journal, but even I know I’ll never use it. It was just something to do, as Jacobs said when he killed and ate the whale. Something to do.

I can hardly write anymore. My back and shoulders hurt so bad. It’s the weight of Rae and the world.

I’ve just come back from the mirror and there is very little left of the tattoo. Some blue and black ink, a touch of red that was Rae’s hair. It looks like an abstract painting now. Collapsed design, running colors. It’s real swollen. I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

What am I going to do, Mr. Journal?

Well, as always, I’m glad you asked that. You see, I’ve thought this out.

I could throw Mary’s body over the railing before it blooms. I could do that. Then I could doctor my back. It might even heal, though I doubt it. Rae wouldn’t let that happen, I can tell you now. And I don’t blame her. I’m on her side. I’m just a walking dead man and have been for years.

I could put the shotgun under my chin and work the trigger with my toes, or maybe push it with the very pen I’m using to create you, Mr. Journal. Wouldn’t that be neat? Blow my brains to the ceiling and sprinkle you with my blood.

But as I said, I loaded the gun because it was something to do. I’d never use it on myself or Mary.

You see, I want Mary. I want her to hold Rae and me one last time like she used to in the park. And she can. There’s a way.

I’ve drawn all the curtains and made curtains out of blankets for those spots where there aren’t any. It’ll be sunup soon and I don’t want that kind of light in here. I’m writing this by candlelight and it gives the entire room a warm glow. I wish I had wine. I want the atmosphere to be just right.

Over on Mary’s bunk she’s starting to twitch. Her neck is swollen where the vines have congested and are writhing toward their favorite morsel, the brain. Pretty soon the rose will bloom (I hope she’s one of the bright yellow ones, yellow was her favorite color and she wore it well) and Mary will come for me.

When she does, I’ll stand with my naked back to her. The vines will whip out and cut me before she reaches me, but I can stand it. I’m used to pain. I’ll pretend the thorns are Mary’s needles. I’ll stand that way until she folds her dead arms around me and her body pushes up against the wound she made in my back, the wound that is our daughter Rae. She’ll hold me so the vines and the proboscis can do their work. And while she holds me, I’ll grab her fine hands and push them against my chest, and it will be we three again, standing against the world, and I’ll close my eyes and delight in her soft, soft hands one last time.

© 1986 Joe R. Lansdale.

First appeared in Nukes edited by John MacLay.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and two hundred short pieces, fiction and non-fiction. He has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stokers, the British Fantasy Award, and many others. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was made into a movie of the same name.

Author Spotlight: Joe Lansdale
Erin Stocks

Where did the idea for this story come from?

I think there are way too many places for me to know for sure, but I did grow up in the fifties and sixties, when the fear of The Bomb, was at its height. I also grew up on numerous science fiction and monster stories about creatures created by radiation and so on. I knew that I wasn’t actually writing Science Fiction, so much as I was writing science fantasy, as far as the idea of the immediately created bomb creatures, instead of an evolution altered by radiation that might lead to some kind of monstrous change. But, it was a trope of the old films, and a lot of the science fiction written at that time, so I used that idea as the back beat of the story. I’m sure other things, like Day of the Triffids, novel and the early film, were influences. As well as the films Night of the Living Dead and Panic in Year Zero had something to do with it.

Marder asks Mary to start tattooing him that day after Mary accuses him of killing their daughter, Rae, and he admits it. Given the pain through the needles, his experience brings to mind paying penance. What do you think he was trying to achieve?

It was like flagellation. That was the idea. That he was punishing himself with the tattoos, and Mary was doing the punishing. She blamed him for Rae’s death, and he blamed himself.

I will never look at roses the same way again after reading this story. They’re more triffid-like—or carnivorous—than flower. What’s your take on their existence?

For the story I decided they were an evolutionary twist caused by the nukes, but underneath it all, I saw it as symbolic of humanities punishment for its own stupidity. Again, I knew it was bad science, and I’m not a scientist, but I also knew symbolically it was good story. Something beautiful turned ugly and dangerous.

Marder and others survive for over twenty years Down Under before they risk going Topside. It’s likely those twenty years did drive him mad, which he considers. What would you imagine they did down there, for that long

Down below I suppose there was a slow dissolve of humanity. As long as there’s leisure and free time and plenty to eat and drink, a certain amount of comfort, humans are all right. Take all of that away, put them all in one place, it might become more difficult.

A good bit of your writing falls into the horror genre. For the science fiction buff, what works of yours would you recommend?

I think, for me, science fiction is more in attitude then in actual science. But, here goes: Short fiction, Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down, In the Cold Dark Time, Letter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogodoches, Fish Night, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, possibly the novel, The Drive In, and its sequels, Zeppelins West, Flaming London. There are others, but with a slight twist of the head, they could be seen as horror or fantasy or whimsy. I really think of all my work as Lansdale story. I’m not worried about labels.

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.

Interview: Marc Laidlaw
Matt London

Marc Laidlaw is the author of several novels, including Dad’s Nuke, The Orchid Eater, The 37th Mandala, and The Third Force, a novel set in the world of the computer game Gadget. Such a book served as a perfect lead-in to his current career as a senior designer at Valve Software, writing for a series of games that is on everyone’s “Best of” list: Half-Life.

Tell us about the books you read growing up. What were your favorites, and which novels/stories do you think have had the biggest impact on you in your current career as a video game designer?

I have early memories of “The Telltale Heart” and The Martian Chronicles being read to me by my parents. The book that made me want to be a writer myself was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (to which I finally managed a small tribute in the story called “Sweetmeats”). The books I read most repeatedly were Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. But we cannot discount the influence of the Happy Hollisters or “Are You My Mother?” which earned me the nickname “Snort” owing to what in retrospect must have been chronic nasal allergies. The biggest literary influence on my approach to game design, however, was one of the writers I worshipped as a teenager: Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree had one particular recommendation for starting a story: “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” This is precisely how we begin Half-Life. It was a deliberate antidote to the many game openings that involved pages and pages of backstory presented in scrolling text.

What games are you playing right now?

I just tore through Limbo, which I loved, and that was on the heels of Red Dead Redemption, which I played somewhat obsessively. I’m enjoying a radically fun co-operative building game called Minecraft, which is still in beta. In general, I find a lot of freshness in the indy gaming scene, where you can see the work of individuals and tons of idiosyncrasy without having to scratch through layers of corporate packaging. Not to say that the Triple A titles don’t still enthrall me from time to time. I finally broke down and bought a PS3, so I am looking forward to spending some quality time on Demon’s Souls, Uncharted, and before too long the next game from the Ico team [The Last Guardian].

Take me through a day in the life of the meetings, the proposals, the playtesting.

Described from an external perspective, it looks quite boring: I drive to downtown Bellevue, Washington, where Valve is situated; I ride an elevator, walk up to my standing desk, and stand there all day long, mostly annoying my fellows with emails full of random thoughts, of which perhaps two percent concern game design. The rest tend to find some Cthuluvian perspective on lolcats. For the first years of Valve’s existence, I lived a fulfilling but lonely existence as the only writer here. But I’ve since been joined by others, of whom I am perpetually in awe. For instance, I am standing next to Ted Kosmatka, who is also standing. Have you read “Divining Light”? You really should. I am thrilled by the prospect of what a writer of Ted’s caliber will bring to our games. There are design meetings peppered throughout our days, and playtesting every afternoon, and somehow in the midst of that we manage to write content for the games as well.

You have said that you would have been into video games if they had been around when you were a kid. If you could travel back in time and give young Marc one game to play, hoping it would blow his mind, what would it be?

Well, I’m pretty sure it would have to be Half-Life. It’s not hard for me to imagine being a kid, playing that game. I have heard from plenty of kids who played it, and were warped by it to the extent that they wanted to grow up to make games. After Half-Life and HL2, it would have to be Thief, which inhabits a world as rich and weird as those in my favorite fantasy novels. And then Zelda, of course. Lots and lots of Zelda. My fear, I suppose, is that with all these games to play, I might never have stopped to create anything. On the other hand, I devoured books nonstop; I’m still not quite sure how I found time to write them. Oh, wait, now I remember. I didn’t have a job!

Take me back to the beginning of development for Half-Life 2. The original Half-Life was contained. The whole game takes place in the Black Mesa facility, excluding a brief jaunt into an alien dimension. Half-Life 2 opens a whole world to the player, including cities, sweeping countrysides, townships, and dark citadels. What was the process for expanding the world, while staying true to the mythos of the original game?

It was very difficult to find a way to connect the two. We wanted the second game to be another world, a completely new experience, without losing the connection to Black Mesa. We nuked Black Mesa because we did not want to give ourselves the easy out of going back there for the sequel. Yet Half-Life 1 posited absolutely nothing about the world beyond Black Mesa, so we had nothing on which to build when we decided to weave more world beyond its walls. The key, finally, was characters. Once we realized that our random set of HL2 characters could actually be the surviving science team from Black Mesa, we were able to reinvent everything else. It was the best possible way for linking the games because we were also investing heavily in the technology that would let us create real characters—especially facial animation systems.

What is your proudest achievement in one of your games?

After hearing people like Steven Spielberg say for years that the first game that made you cry would be a cultural landmark, we were quite content to hear from many players that they wept at the end of the HL2: Episode 2. Not that we were the first to evoke this emotion, I believe; I certainly choked up playing Ico. I don’t know about its cultural impact, but it was certainly a personal landmark for me to hear how many people had been moved by that game’s climax.

What is something you wrote that you loved but somehow couldn’t incorporate into the final game?

In Half-Life, there were quite a few ideas we had that we couldn’t pull off; the best of those ended up in Half-Life 2. Therefore, I will have to refrain from spoiling ideas for great things we haven’t done...yet.

Most people would label the Half-Life series as science fiction, but there are many elements of horror as well, from the dark, empty corridors of the original game, to Ravenholm, to the traumatic ending of HL2: Episode 2. What were some of your horror influences, and how do you find a balance between a game’s horror, action, and lighter elements?

Half-Life was conceived as horror first, and always intended to be scary above all else. The atmosphere shaded toward dark, dystopian SF in HL2, but in Half-Life 1 we treated the game as a Technological Gothic, with Black Mesa playing the role of the spooky old castle. The science fiction and horror elements set each other off nicely. At Valve, we are all about contrast. Unrelieved horror, like unrelieved anything, gets tedious, so we make sure our games are rarely flat: You’re either climbing toward a peak, plunging into a chasm, or approaching a dark corner. And when there’s no overt menace, you should be really nervous. Initially, in the Half-Life games, we crafted scripted encounters in a linear fashion, in the manner of a funhouse ride. More recently we have begun to pioneer dynamic or procedural pacing devices like our “AI Director,” which monitors the way players are actually playing the game, and modulates the experience in response to their actions. This method is showcased in Left 4 Dead, and I expect our other games will benefit from lessons we have learned in L4D. Pacing is, of course, a basic tool of storytelling, but like all the traditional narrative devices, you have to find a form that suits the medium of games. To make matters more complicated, every game is its own thing; there are very few tricks that can be used over and over again without tuning and tweaking them for each new challenge. The sledgehammer is the least used tool in a designer’s toolbox.

The horror in Half-Life is quite diverse, ranging from war brutality, to zombies, to giant bugs. The scares also span the spectrum, from the cold chills of coming upon the aftermath of a violent conflict, to the surprise of a head crab jumping out of the darkness at you. What kind of brainstorming goes into the development of moments like these, and how are they implemented in the game?

We usually start by coming up with compelling gameplay, and dressing that in visual elements that portray a world that, I hope, stands on its own as an original SF creation not mainly in comparison to other games or SF movies, but as the best of written SF. Good SF is always the model when it comes to creating the story. Of course, we build things up one grain at a time, so currently we are nowhere near rivaling the best literature. Baby steps! When we were making Half-Life, players of first person shooters were conditioned to expect they would have a gun in their hand from the very first moment. Violating that expectation felt like a huge risk to us, and we were nervous to learn if it would pay off. As we push the conventions farther, we invariably establish new ones, which we then feel honor-bound to subvert or dismantle. The opening “train ride” that felt fresh in Half-Life has now become a conventional opening for first person games. I lie awake nights thinking about cool ways to destroy it.

One of the things that has always impressed me with the Half-Life series is the environmental storytelling. It seems like it would be hard to build a world as complex as that of Half-Life using only objects and backgrounds. What is the biggest challenge, and when do you know these elements are working?

For Half-Life, our visual design philosophy has been to create a believable world first, and then mine it with alien details that tell you something about the way the world is changing. The mundane landscape must always feature some exotic element, and the most alien artifact must always appear in tension with something familiar. One of the reasons the final Xen sequence of Half-Life 1 proved so unsatisfying (apart from the double-jump mechanic that made it unplayable for many) is because the environment is purely alien, with no familiar elements. Those steeped in SF and in love with the idea of alien worlds, enjoyed these sections, which were created with classic otherworldly SF in mind. But many gamers don’t necessarily have that nerdish passion. We learned a valuable lesson there, and more importantly, we learned not to ship a game before discovering where the problems lie. We now playtest our games endlessly, throughout development, so that we can identify where players are having trouble, losing interest, or getting confused. This is ultimately how we know when our world is working as well.

You have said no author’s work has meant more to you than H.P. Lovecraft’s. Your short story “Leng” appears in the inspired-by-Lovecraft anthology Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow. Can you talk about Lovecraft’s influence on you, and the Half-Life series?

The Lovecraftian influence is buried pretty deep in Half-Life—perhaps you can spot it in the sense we try to create of mankind being a tiny speck in a vast cosmos. The most Lovecraftian passage is probably Dr. Breen’s speech at the end of Half-Life 2, when he is trying to entice Eli with glimpses of the wonders he has been shown by the Combine. This sort of teasing view of things beyond imagining is one of Lovecraft’s techniques, on display most clearly in “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

You have also mentioned Philip K. Dick as an inspiration. Where can we find PKD’s spirit in your work today?

I’m still searching for the way to do the perfect Phildickian twist in a game. One problem is that everything in a game is so patently false that it takes very little to jar you back to reality and remind you that you’re playing a game. It’s hard to imagine a revelation more disappointing than the one where you suddenly show the player that the completely artificial world they’ve been exploring is...not real! But the spirit of Dick is never far off, because he wrote idiosyncratic, original SF, and that’s what we’re trying to do, in our own way.

The success of Half-Life has led to sequels, expansions, and a popular spin-off: Portal. The influence of Half-Life on Portal is clear, but how have other Valve games like Portal and Left 4 Dead influenced Half-Life?

The learning runs in all ways at once. We share people freely between projects, so lessons learned on one team quickly percolate through into others. We also learn from the fan community, which picks up our tools and runs off to make its own games with them. In some cases, we bring those people into the company, sharing what we know, while gaining a continual infusion of freshness, creativity, innovation. With pretty much every game we make, I can see specific things that might be applied to Half-Life. The dynamic narrative tricks and replayability of Left 4 Dead are tremendously exciting to me.

Before working at Valve, you were a science fiction writer, penning novels such as Dad’s Nuke and The 37th Mandala. You have also published dozens of short stories including collaborations with Gregory Benford and Rudy Rucker. After a lull, you have published several stories in the last few years. What inspired the sudden resurgence? Can we expect more short fiction from you soon? Is it possible a new novel is in the works?

I never really stopped writing short stories, it just takes them a long time to get into print. I have stopped writing novels, however. The concentrated energy that a book requires seems to be very similar to the work that goes into making a game. This is more or less what I hoped would happen. The Orchid Eater and The 37th Mandala were books I had wanted to write for a long time; I carried them around in my mind and they grew and grew until I managed to get them down on paper. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been incubating others, but so far I have contented myself with writing short stories. This is one of the ways I keep my tools sharp for game writing, too. Recently Rudy Rucker talked me into running a chapter of one of my incubating novels in Flurb and working over the chapter got me thinking about the book again. The idea for God Mode was conceived when I was about to get into the game industry, so in some ways it is harder to write now because I know too much, and the industry has changed dramatically, so my extrapolative SF concepts now seem rather tame. The core idea is still strong, but everything around it needs drastic rethinking. Meanwhile, I’ve got a few more short stories either making the rounds, or coming out shortly. Classics Mutilated, from comics publisher IDW, is running my Pokemon-Grizzly Man mash-up in October: It’s called “Pokky Man, A Film by Vernor Hertzwig.”

I don’t see any classes in rocket launcher operation in the MIT course of study. Where did Gordon Freeman pick up his combat skills?

It is established canon that he built a tennis ball cannon when he was a kid. That’s about all we know for sure.

In a world of fast-talking heroes, Gordon remains the strong silent type. He also manages to woo Alyx, even though only terrible things happen to her when he is around. What’s the secret to Gordon’s success as a ladies’ man? Was a side effect of the resonance cascade that it gave him more mojo than any theoretical physicist on the planet?

Of course, every player of Gordon has their own personal relationship with Alyx. For me, it’s more of a big-brother thing. I’m not quite sure how Alyx feels about him. Eli seemed to think between the two of them they could solve the world’s population problem, but, well...that’s a sensitive subject. There is no question though that some of our fans have developed strong feelings for Alyx, and are waiting to see how that relationship plays out. We are well aware that expectations are high. Oh, now I’m reminded of one of the things we could never figure out how to get into Half-Life 2...a shower scene.

What advice would you give to aspiring video game writers and designers? What’s the secret to a game’s success? How does one break in to this competitive industry?

The best advice for someone who wants to be a writer is to write. Similarly, the best advice for someone who wants to write for games is to write for games. A good game, even the smallest indy game created by one or two people, can gain plenty of attention and devoted fans. Learn some coding:  C++ is fun. (I can’t believe I said that, but I am having fun learning it in fits and starts.)  If you can find a team making a mod that needs a writer, offer your services. If you can’t find one, see if you can learn to use some of the basic tools of game design to start your own game. Writing for its own sake is great, but it is not the same as writing in the service of a game; you need to take on the challenges of writing for the medium, which often means working well with a group of enthusiastic programmers, artists, animators, and sound designers. Playtest your game; incorporate feedback; learn from your mistakes; and ship something. The world will tell you how you’re doing. Learn from that and keep going. It doesn’t hurt to write stories, in the meantime. The bar for fiction has had many years to reach lofty heights. It’s good to have impossibly high standards for your writing, and bring those standards to your work writing for games. That is one reason why I continue to write fiction and see how far short my work falls from that of my idols: It reminds me of how far games have to go, and how much better we can do.

It looks like Portal 2 drops in February of 2011, and HL2: Episode 3 is on the horizon. What comes next for Valve? (You have permission to coyly dodge this question.)

I must take advantage of your offer!

Matt London is an author and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and a columnist for Tor.com and Realms of Fantasy. His story “Mouja” appears in John Joseph Adams’s anthology The Living Dead 2. He has no less than three escape plans should the zombies take Manhattan.

The Taste of Starlight
John R. Fultz

Pelops wakes gasping and shivering inside the CryoPod. A thin layer of ice crystals coats his cheeks and hands, pricking at his exposed skin. Crackling and moaning, he raises hands to his eyes and pries their lids open, shedding ice shards like tears. The curving glass surface before him is cracked into a mass of spidery lines. Struggling to inhale the frozen air, he pushes against the glass. The door of the pod refuses to move. He is entombed.

He moans as he raises his right leg, shedding a cloud of crystals. Boot against the fractured glass, but without much strength. His muscles are still asleep, slightly atrophied by years of stasis. Again he kicks, and draws in a burning lungful of cryonic air. A third time his booted foot meets the glass and it shatters, toppling him forward in a shower of ice and fragments. Instinct pulls his hands up, and he lands on them instead of his face. Splinters cut into his palms and fingers, but he can breathe freely now.

Lying on the floor, he rolls onto his back and looks sideways along a flickering corridor of cryonic niches. Here stand the stasis pods of his thirteen fellow sleepers. Even the chill metal of the floor feels warm compared to the ultimate cold of the CryoPod.

Something has awakened him early. A mistake? An emergency? Staggering to his feet, he clings to the cables along the walls and checks the nearest pod. A calm face, eyes closed, just visible through the cloudy glass. Digital display reads “Thompson, J.” and the indicator light glows green. No fissures. Pod intact. He checks the next one, and the next one, until he finds another cracked pod lid with the display reading “Tanaka, Y.” No frost at all on this lid. A blue face stares at him from inside. Asian eyes open. Mouth slack.

Pelops tries the release lever. Nothing. He tears at the rim of the pod’s lid. Finally, he kicks in the glass like he did his own, this time from the opposite side. Tanaka falls out, stiff and dead. She was a good woman, and fine physicist. She would have been an asset to the Dantus colony. Must have suffocated when her stasis was interrupted. Like being buried alive. He might weep for her, but his eyes still feel frozen. He knows he’ll have to eject her body into space, but he’ll wait until he regains his strength.

He lays Tanaka gently on the floor and checks the last few pods. Twelve remain intact.

The frost coating his skin and flight suit melts into cold water. Droplets fly from his beard and hair, grown to primordial length while he slept. What could have happened?

He stumbles along the corridor beneath the pulsing florescent lamps, follows the plastic maps posted at each intersection, and finally reaches the sealed door of the bridge. A gleaming hand plate accepts his touch. The nerve center of the Goya opens before him, a spacious cockpit of flashing neon display grids and blinking digital interfaces. Above it all, a vista of interstellar wonder, a great oval viewport looking out into the universe. He stares into the bottomless void, captivated by the glimmering of ancient stars. A purple nebula clouds the starfields ahead, and the sheer beauty of the galactic deeps overwhelms his waking senses. Sinking into a vast gulf of infinity. Distant fires grinning and sparkling, the eyes of a demon legion.

You don’t belong here, the stars whisper. This is the Great Emptiness. The stronghold of Death. Soon it will consume you. Utterly.

Pelops tears himself away from the celestial vision and goes to the control panels. He is no pilot, no navigator, but he is a man of science. He has been on ships before. He scans the displays and finds that the ship’s thrusters have gone offline. He switches the relays to instigate backup power.

A lurching and shuddering tells him the ship has resumed its full-speed journey. He falls into the captain’s chair and punches his fingers at the keyboard, requesting a status report. A holographic display emerges, dancing before him like a ghost. It’s the Goya, a gleaming bottle-shaped vessel surrounded by pinpoints of rushing starlight. A scarlet line enters the left side of the display, trailing a cloud of sparks. A comet. It crosses the forward hull of the ship, bathing the vessel in a cloud of scintillating motes.

He reads the print display below the hologram.

Radiation cloud. Unidentified in nature…

A short-circuiting of the ship’s power grid, disabling the auto-drive.

Severe turbulence resulting in damage to two CryoPod units.

No shit.

Communications permanently disabled. No messages going out or coming in. Not until the com techs on Dantus install a new stack of relays. Absolute radio silence. The report ends and the curved panels blink silently. Course renewed. Power reserves engaged. Everything nearly back to normal. But now Pelops is awake. And completely alone.

He accesses the logs for time, date, and distance.

Time elapsed since launch: 6 years, 2 months, 3 days, 9 hours, 52 minutes, 39 seconds.

Time remaining to destination: 1 year, 4 months, 2 days, 7 hours, 18 minutes, 3 seconds.

Sixteen months. Alone on this ship.

He considers waking the rest of the crew. Walks back to the pod corridor and almost does exactly that, when it hits him: A terrible, gnawing hunger in his gut. And the realization…what is he going to eat? Nobody was supposed to wake until a few hours before touchdown. This ship isn’t equipped for manned flight.

He finds his way through the labyrinth of steel into the airy cargo hold. The massive bulk of the twenty-five UV converter domes loom like black hills beneath plastic tarps. In the far corner he finds what he is looking for. Emergency Supply Kit.

A man-sized chest (like a coffin). Inside, a collection of boxes, tins, and tubes of dry rations. A map on the lid reveals the location of emergency water tanks. He breathes a little easier. There’s enough water in those tanks to keep a man alive for three years. However, he’s not so sure how long the food will last. He’ll worry about that later.

Cracking open a plastic box, he tears through an aluminum pouch and devours the beef jerky inside. Famished and relishing every bit, the salty taste of it on his tongue, the familiar warmth as it fills his belly. In a few seconds the entire package is gone. He curses himself.

He’ll have to ration this out if he’s going to survive. He can’t indulge himself in such feasts. He closes the lid and makes his way along the bay to the water tanks, where he turns a valve and fills a bucket with drinking water. He drinks his fill of the cold liquid.

He surveys and logs the emergency foodstuffs, planning out subsistence portions. Drops his pen and slides to the floor. Someone was supposed to load more emergency supplies than this. Someone did not. There’s barely enough food here to keep him eating at a base survival level for a hundred days.

Three months. If he does not wake anyone else.

If he does, that time will be cut in half.

Three months of food. Sixteen months until reaching Dantus.

Nothing else here.

Nothing to eat.

After three months he will begin to starve.

Pelops carries Tanaka’s rigid body into the airlock, says a quick prayer, and ejects her into space. He should be grateful. One less mouth to feed.

He races back to the two open CryoPods and tries to get them operational. Spends hours working on them, up to his elbows in grease and cryonic residue. But it doesn’t matter. They’re both totally out of commission, their transparent lids shattered. And even if they weren’t, the pods cannot be put back into service once they’ve been opened. The only way to do that would be to introduce more cryogen…which can only be done by CryoPod contractors.

No way to re-freeze himself. No way to avoid the twelve weeks of bare subsistence and the slow, lingering starvation that will surely follow. He envies Tanaka her quick death.

He lies on the floor of the pod corridor, weeping, remembering his look into the void. The whispering stars and their message of doom. And he knows it’s true. This is the realm of Death and he has entered it willingly.

He wails and gnashes his teeth and smashes the floor with his fists. Eventually he falls asleep and enjoys the mercy of a warm oblivion.

Pelops wakes sometime later, trembling on the cold metal floor. He gets up and returns to the bridge. His stomach growls, but he denies it. He sits in the captain’s chair and stares out at the numberless stars.

With Tanaka dead, he is the only one capable of getting the UV converters up and running on Dantus. And the future of the colony depends on those machines. Wolf 359 is a red dwarf star, and not enough crops grow in its infrared glow. The colony’s population has grown too fast for its agricultural systems to handle. Setting up the converter domes and transforming the star’s radiation to ultraviolet light is the only way to boost food production and end the famine. The only way to feed thousands of brave families who settled there. Eleven thousand men, women, and children already, with an exponentially expanding birth rate. They’re all depending on Dr. Andrew Pelops.

I have to survive, he thinks. All those lives depend on it. This mission has to succeed. Everything else is secondary.

Think about those people. Those children. Think about those hungry mouths, so many more than yours.

The mission must succeed.

For the first three months Pelops eats frugally and his body grows lean. The flight suit hangs loose on his frame. He cuts his beard and hair with a pair of infirmary scissors, but they always grow back into a hermit’s nest of tangles. The boredom is deadly. He spends most of his waking hours on the bridge, staring into the glittering void. He charts constellations…Scorpius, Serpens, Hydra. He sails through a gulf of myth and darkness. At times he fears the demon-eyes of the stars, and at other times he laughs at them. He carves images of ancient monsters into the deck floor with a screwdriver. He sleeps.

Sometimes he talks to the sleeping crew, sharing his knowledge of photonic chemistry, tales of his failed marriage, and his dreams for the future. They lie cold and still inside their coffins and listen to his every word. They are the perfect listeners.

Sometimes he imagines they reply to him.

Whispering like the distant stars.

Pelops eats the last bit of the dried jerky from the emergency chest. There is nothing else inside. Only the empty carcasses of plastic and tin where the faintest scent of edible things lingers. For days afterward he endures the grinding of his stomach, drinks himself to bloating at the water tanks, endures the hunger pangs that stab in his guts.

He babbles to the sleeping crew, telling them tales of hunger strikes.

“You see the body persists on glucose energy for the first three days of starvation,” he says, walking between the rows of frosty faces. “At that point the liver starts feeding on body fat as ketosis begins. Thanks to the natural reserves of the human body, you don’t really begin to starve until after three weeks. Now the body extracts nutrients and substance from the muscles and organs. Bone marrow too. Here’s where the real danger begins…”

He imagines himself gnawing the meat off a large bone, slavering like a hound.

“Most hunger strikers die after fifty days…but are incapacitated long before that. We can’t allow that to happen. The mission is all that matters. It must succeed…at all cost.”

He hopes they understand.

After ten solid days of starving, he dreams of his father. The stars are bright and blinking above the Colorado mountains. He’s twelve years old, and his father has killed a deer. Pelops helps skin and prepare the carcass. They roast the venison over an open flame and enjoy its wild, savory flavor. His father’s eyes glisten like the stars as he smiles through a frosty beard:

You know what you have to do, son.

Pelops wakes remembering the taste of greasy venison.

He staggers to the infirmary and finds a laser scalpel. In the cargo bay tool cabinet, a trio of gas-powered welding torches. He picks one up and presses the switch. A blue flame emerges, dancing before his eyes like a beacon of hope.

The flame is hot and perfect.

I have no other choice.

He punches the release lever on Thompson’s pod. A hiss of escaping vapor, a white fog rushing about his feet. He lifts the lid and looks at the man’s sleeping face, blue-white with a mask of rapidly melting frost. As the eyes begin to flutter against their icy hoods, Pelops raises the hypodermic needle. He’s found a powerful sedative in the infirmary cabinet. He injects the drug into Thompson’s jugular and pulls him from the pod, slinging him over his shoulder.

I could use the scalpel on myself, he thinks. Cut my own throat…quick and painless.

Is it wrong to kill a few people to save thousands?

He already knows the answer. It sits in his chest like an iron weight, far heavier than a single human body.

On the infirmary operating table he lays Thompson out, strips him of flight suit and undergarments. Bathes his body with fresh water from the tanks. Removes most of the body hair with scissors and razor.

He has never killed a man before. His nerves are electric. His hands tremble, and he begins babbling again. He knows the unconscious Thompson can’t hear him. He could wake him up and have a real conversation first…but that would only make it harder.

“During World War II this type of thing was fairly common,” he says. “Take the Siege of Leningrad. Eight hundred and seventy two days. The survivors trapped inside the city ate all the pets, birds, and rats before they were forced to…So it’s not as if this sort of thing is completely without precedent. The mission must succeed, Thompson. At any cost.”

I’m so sorry.

He switches on the laser scalpel and draws the blade of light across Thompson’s soft throat. A fountain of red flows across the table and drips onto the floor, where Pelops has spread a tarp and bucket to catch it.

He dons a surgeon’s mask to avoid the smell and proceeds to butcher the carcass. First he separates the limbs from the torso, then the head. The heat of the laser provides partial cauterization, but not enough to keep blood from leaking through tiny holes like puncture wounds in the raw, pink muscle tissue. A wave of nausea and weakness claims him, so he leaves the segmented body for later and takes Thompson’s lower leg into the cargo bay. With the scissors he lacerates and peels the skin from the hock of meat. Then he arranges the calf and foot on a metal spit, propped between two crates above the three activated welding torches. The blue-white flames cook the flesh nicely…the smell of it roasting both titillates and nauseates him. He wretches, but has nothing inside him to throw up.

It’s only venison, he tells himself.

After a few minutes he turns the spit, browning the other side.

He catches himself drooling and wipes his lips.

He cannot bear to wait for it to fully cook, so he settles for medium rare.

Picks it up like a massive chicken leg and takes his first bite, sinking teeth deep into the tender flesh. Tearing a mouthful from the bone. He chews, remembering that trip with his father…sitting around the camp fire. Eating what he’d killed.

Veal.

The exact consistency of fresh and tender veal.

He takes another bite. Expects to wretch it all up, but doesn’t. He swallows the second bite, and a third. A great contentment settles over him. For the first time in six years his belly is full. He falls asleep on the cargo bay floor, the hock of gnawed meat lying on his chest.

He dreams of brown gravy and hot, steaming biscuits.

Less than a week.

Less than a week, and the meat has all gone bad. Energized and renewed by a succession of hunger-free days, Pelops realizes his mistake. Once the pods are open they won’t freeze again. There is no freezer on the ship—it was never meant to sustain awake beings for more than a few hours at a time. He has no way to keep the meat from spoiling.

The next few days he makes himself sick by eating the rotten flesh. Half of his kill has been ruined. He smashes a naked shinbone against the wall in frustration.

He checks the time log on the bridge again. Just over eleven months to go. Eleven functioning CryoPods. Eleven bodies to sustain him. But only if he does things differently.

It all depends on me, he reminds himself. Eleven thousand men, women, and children.

If he keeps eating spoiled meat, he’ll die. So he shoves the rest of Thompson into the airlock and ejects it into space.

What a waste. Just like Tanaka.

He waits as long as he can for the hunger to catch up with him again. Stares at the cold stars beyond the bridge viewport. Gazing into an emptiness that mirrors the void in his belly. He abstains as long as he can possibly stand it…nine days this time.

He harvests the next pod.

Staggs, E. Male. Big, guy, good physique.

Pelops thaws him out, sedates him, and straps him to the operating table. He can’t kill this one like he did Thompson. He has to keep the meat fresh.

He dry heaves into a plastic waste bin…there is nothing inside him to throw up.

Think of Dantus. All those people…all those hungry people.

Wiping his wet eyes, he starts with the left leg, severing it at the knee.

Like last time, he roasts it and relieves his initial hunger. This time his guilt and nausea are drowned beneath a torrent of sheer gratitude. The meat (venison!) is savory, red and juicy on his tongue. His teeth tear through it with gusto. This man was an athlete…lots of tender muscle. Protein…nutrients…flavor.

Thompson was veal. Staggs is prime beef.

He waits as long as he can between each meal. Finally settles on eating once every 48 hours. In this way, he calculates his meat will last until Dantus. Eleven months. Sure, he’ll suffer from lack of carbohydrates and vitamin C…but men have survived on all-meat diets for longer than that and been just fine. After this ordeal, after the converters are installed on the colony farms, there will be vegetables and fruits aplenty. A bounty to replace what he has lost. And the crew of the Goya will be remembered as heroes.

He pumps Staggs full of fresh sedative on a daily basis. The man remains oblivious as his legs and arms disappear, replaced by careful tourniquets that prevent him from bleeding to death. Pelops cleans him, looks after his bodily functions, makes sure he stays alive. Preserves as much of the man’s dignity as he can.

Later, when only the head and torso are left, Pelops has to be more careful. Tricky to harvest a torso without killing the subject. He starts with a crude appendectomy. Next, he removes the liver. Then the spleen and stomach. Eventually, when Staggs is truly dead, he cracks open the chest cavity and removes the fist-sized heart.

Filet mignon,he tells himself. That’s all it is.

He cooks the heart a special way, cutting it open to butterfly the meat.

Eats it sitting before the viewport, gazing into the abyss of blinking stars.

It is the finest piece of meat he’s ever tasted. The heart, he decides, must be the choicest morsel in the human body. The prime muscle. The lights of the console blink across his face as his molars grind the meat and it slips down his gullet into his grateful stomach.

Staggs’ brain, sliced in two, provides a double meal.

Tastes like stringy roast chicken.

Gray matter. White meat.

Pelops harvests the next pod in the same way, but runs out of sedative after ten days. First Officer Bernard Hoffman wakes up on the table, restrained and entirely legless. His panicked screams draw Pelops into the infirmary.

“Shhhhhh…” Pelops comforts him. Gives him cool water to drink. “Take it easy, Hoffman.”

“What…what’s happening?” asks the terrified man, his brown eyes pleading.

“Shhhh…it’s all right. It’s just a bad dream. The mission is going to be a success. We’re only ten months from Dantus. Go back to sleep.”

Hoffman writhes against his restraints, tearing at the leather straps. The stumps of his legs begin to bleed. “What the fuck are you talking about? You look…look…where are my legs? What happened to my legs?” More screaming. He’s only just noticed his missing appendages.

Pelops breaks down. He apologizes and explains everything. Tells Hoffman about the comet, about the radiation, about the pods, the lack of food, how he must ensure the mission’s success. Reminds him of the thousands of people depending on his UV converters.

But Hoffman doesn’t get any of it. He just screams.

Screams and screams until he makes himself hoarse.

Pelops begs him to stop, but the screams go on and on. He knocks Hoffman unconscious. But the man only wakes up screaming again. Pelops stuffs a rag in his mouth and leaves him on the table. In a few days, he won’t have the strength to make any more noise.

Pelops uses a local anesthetic now instead of sedative. Hoffman may have to be awake during his amputations, but he won’t feel a thing. His eyes grow large as golf balls as he watches Pelops remove his left arm, then later his right. He finally stops trying to scream. Spends most of his time unconscious now. Sometimes he wakes and mutters nonsense, so Pelops sits in a chair next to him, his belly full, and listens.

He reminds Hoffman that this sacrifice makes him a hero. One of the Saviors of Dantus colony.

When he harvests the torso this time he learns to salvage the intestines, filling them with minced organ meat. He discovers how to make a week’s worth of sausages in this way before Hoffman’s heart finally gives out.

He decides to keep the white bones instead of flushing them into the void.

He’ll bury them on Dantus, beneath a growing field of wheat. With stone monuments.

He comes to this decision over dinner.

The next pod contains a gorgeous blonde woman. Mewes, C.

After he gets her onto the table, he wakes her and talks at length about their situation. Lets her know the heroic role she will be playing in the mission. She weeps, begs, pleads with him. He sobs with her, sharing in the tragedy of the situation. He unbuckles her restraints and embraces her tenderly.

“Don’t worry,” he whispers in her ear, arms wrapped around her. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

He chases her down when she slips away from him, but manages to corner her in the cargo bay and knocks her senseless with a crowbar.

I could let her join me, he thinks. It wouldn’t be so lonely then. Maybe there’s enough meat in the pods for both of us…

He smacks himself across the face. Stupid! He knows two people surviving the rest of this journey is impossible. There’s simply not enough food. Both would starve and Dantus would die.

So it’s back to the table where the harvesting begins. Still a good supply of sedative, so she won’t feel any pain.

Somehow, she wakes in the middle of things and starts wailing. The sound pierces his ears in a way that Hoffman’s guttural bellows never could. He has to gag her so he can finish.

Later, enjoying the last of her, he smacks his lips and remembers the lovely blue of her eyes. So delectable on his tongue, like tender Swedish meatballs.      

The void persists, and so does his hunger. It returns like clockwork every forty-eight hours.

He doesn’t bother looking at the name of his next harvest. He cuts out the tongue first to avoid any more conversation.

A few days later he goes to the table-bound crewman, removes the gag and offers him a taste of his own thigh meat. The man eats ravenously, saving his questions until his own hunger is sated. Then he stares at Pelops and tries to form words. The stub of his tongue rattles around inside his mouth. His mute eyes plead desperately. They remind Pelops of the blonde’s blue eyes.

He eats them next.

The human body is indeed an amazing thing.

So many different flavors.

Five and a half months left, five CryoPods unopened.

With proper rationing, he will make it. However, the anesthetic is nearly gone.

This complicates things, but is in no way a barrier to success.

The mission is all that matters.

He has it down to a science now: Open the pod. Tie the sleeper’s hands and feet with copper wire before they come fully awake. Drag them to in the infirmary, strap them to the table. Remove the tongue, put the gag in place. Ignore the screams. Ignore the blood. Slice. Tourniquet. Ignore the squirming, the moans of pain. The tears, the squealing.

Forty-eight hours later. Slice. Tourniquet. It’s no longer a person, despite all the writhing and moaning and muffled screams. It’s only meat.

Forty-eight hours after that. Slice. Tourniquet. They’re usually too weak to scream much more after this.

Some are lucky enough to sleep through the whole process from this point on.

Three more crew members and thirteen weeks later. Only two months away from Dantus.

His next meal is the last female. But this fact barely registers; Pelops no longer sees them as women or men.

They’re only meat.

All of us…charting the course of history…only meat.

Yet this one is something special. When he slices into her abdomen he finds her secret. The command board would have grounded her had they known. Or maybe she didn’t know. Two months along before Cryo, he estimates. Her eyes are glazed by the time he discovers the prize inside her. Strapped, gagged, limbless, and unblinking, she stares at the antiseptic ceiling as he vivisects her. And there it is…

A tiny thing…only eighteen centimeters. Barely recognizable as human. More like something amphibian…a vestige of our marine origins.

Miniscule arms more like fins, or flippers. The stubs of barely formed legs. Round head  no larger than an orange.

So we begin…the seed from which all of us grow.

Expanding and developing meat on a rack of expanding and hardening bone.

He carries it to the bridge, shows it to the stars. He imagines the universe itself as one big womb…an inescapable uterus containing planets, stars, and galaxies.

In the end, it’s little more than a snack.

Sweet, a bit crunchy. A fresh flavor.

Bit of a fishy aftertaste.

Its mother lasts another eight days.

In these months he’s decided to put all those bones to good use. At first he carves them into tiny figurines: goblins, serpents, scorpions, or wholly new creatures birthed in his imagination. Then he decides on a project. A sculpture. He drags all the bones and skulls onto the bridge and works nonstop in the pale starlight, baring his creative spirit to the naked universe.

Directly ahead, a red star shines. Wolf 359. His destination, the color of spilled blood gleaming brightly in a mantle of eternal night.

A new god observes and blesses the success of the mission. Its lofty head is a ring of ten bleached skulls gazing in every direction. Its body is a tangled conglomeration of leg bones, arm bones, and rib cages. It wears a necklace of finger and toe bones. With screws and caulk and ductile adhesive he has brought it to life.

He sits before it in the captain’s chair, discussing with it the secrets of the universe, watching the void outside and the red star that is their final destination.

His creation tells him things, terrible things that he has long suspected, now confirmed in the glaring honesty of cold starlight. He eats his meals before it, calling upon it to bless the meat.

He tears into his latest chop, red and quivering.

Fresh and raw, that is the only way to eat meat.

His new god approves.

With two months to go and two CryoPods left, Pelops gets careless.

The man inside (Harmon, Sgt. G.) revives while he’s being tied, his frosty eyelids flickering open. Some fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in and he knocks Pelops from the opened pod, spilling out on top of him.

“Wha…” he stammers. “Whaaaaa…”

Pelops tries to club him on the head with a wrench but Sgt. Harmon is already too fast. He rolls away and pulls his hands free of the wire. He kicks Pelops in the side of the head. Stars swim crazily in Pelops’ eyes.

Pelops regains his senses to find Harmon holding him against the wall, pressing the tip of a screwdriver against his neck. The sergeant is still cold and reeks of cryonic fluid. He breathes hotly in Pelops’ face, the crystals on his beard beginning to melt.

“Who are you?” he asks. “And what the hell are you doing?”

He shoves the screwdriver painfully into Pelops’ skin, drawing a trickle of blood.

“I’m Dr. Pelops,” he says. “I had to…awaken you prematurely.”

Harmon looks around the corridor. Sees the empty pods. All but one now missing its inhabitant.

“Where are they?” His teeth are gritted as his black eyes bore into Pelops’. “Tell me!”

“Dead…” Pelops admits. “There was a comet, or a meteor…some kind of radiation cloud…took out the auto-drive and the pods. I was lucky.”

Harmon blinks, thinking. Considering. He knows I’m not telling him everything. His eyes fall upon the last functioning CryoPod.

“Why didn’t you wake Captain Tyler?”

“I…I was going to,” says Pelops.

Harmon grabs Pelops’ throat in an iron grip. “Then why tie me up? Huh?”

Pelops says nothing. Gasps for air.

“You look like hell,” says Harmon, examining him. Hair and beard a matted rat’s nest. Face sunken, skin sallow. Nails long as claws.

Can he smell the dead on my breath?

“How long?” asks Harmon. Rams his knee into Pelops’ groin. Pelops falls to the cold floor. Harmon bends and holds the screwdriver’s tip to his eye. “How long?” he shouts.

“F-f-fourteen months!” cries Pelops.

Shock spills across Harmon’s shaggy face. “Fourteen…” He looks again at the empty rows of CryoPods, stares down the corridor in either direction. Sniffs the air like a suspicious hound. “Fourteen months…how did you survive?”

Pelops clutches his throbbing groin and says nothing.

Harmon kicks him in the stomach.

“How? Tell me! Say it!”

Pelops tells him. Doesn’t look at his face. Hears him start to wretch.

“All that matters is the success of this mission…” Pelops growls. “And I’m the only one who can get those converters up and running.”

Harmon is strangely quiet.

“We’ve got two more months,” says Pelops.

Harmon’s boot comes down hard on his face.

Darkness.

“He’s a sick fuck!”

Pelops regains consciousness, wrapped in a web of pain. No, it’s the copper wire. He’s propped upright inside one of the defunct pods. In the corridor Harmon stands arguing with another man. The inhabitant of the last pod, the ship’s captain (Tyler, Capt. H.). A sinking feeling as he realizes that Harmon has revived Tyler far too early. He tries to move his arms and legs, but he’s securely bound. He listens to their conversation, watching them in the corner of his eye.

“I know how you feel, soldier,” says Captain Tyler, still wiping frost from his flight suit, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “But Pelops is the only one who knows how to set up those UV converter domes and get them operational. We can’t just execute him.”

“Execute? Who said anything about an execution? You don’t execute a mad dog, captain. You put it down. And that’s what we have here. He fuckin’ ate them! Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you, son.” A weary sigh.

“Come on,” says Harmon. “Let me show you the nice little present he built for us on the bridge. Once you see that I’m sure you’ll agree to shoving him out the airlock at the least.”

The sound of their boots tramping down the corridor.

Pelops waits.

Prays.

Mutters poems to his bone god.

Eventually the voices return, growing in volume, punctuated by the sounds of boots on metal.

“…even if we do this, we’re still going to starve. There’s no food left on board and we can’t enter Cryo again. This is the end of the line for us.”

“Then it doesn’t matter, does it? Let me kill him. One last good thing before we die. Then we’ll set the auto-destruct…go out in a blaze of glory. Better than starving to death.”

Captain Tyler has no response to that.

The two men stand before the open CryoPod now, looking at Pelops.

“Captain…” Pelops says, “you know as well as I do—”

“Shut up, freak!” Sgt. Harmon’s fist slams into his gut. The air rushes from his lungs, along with the words he failed to utter.

Harmon lifts a service pistol to Pelops’ chin, the barrel digging into his jawbone.

“All of us may have to die,” Harmon tells him, “but you’re going first you cannibal fu—”

Thud.

A flash of silver above his head, a meaty sound, and Harmon goes down. Captain Tyler stands over him with the wrench in his hand. Its round end drips dark blood like syrup, and a clot of hair and skin hangs there.

Tyler drops the wrench and peels the coils of wire away from Pelops’ wrists and ankles.

The captain is silent for awhile as Pelops rubs his limbs to get the circulation flowing again. Tyler stares at his fallen officer, leans against the wall. Tired. Ready to accept his fate.

“You did the right thing doctor,” says Tyler. His sunken eyes turn toward Pelops. They are as black and glittering as the void. “The famine on Dantus could kill tens of thousands. This mission has to succeed.”

Pelops nods. His stomach growls. He is ravenous.

“Can you still make it work?” asks Tyler.

Pelops stares down at the unconscious soldier. Makes a few mental calculations. Rubs his sore temple.

“Yes,” he says. “With your help, the mission will still succeed.”

Tyler helps Pelops carry Harmon into the infirmary.

Pelops carefully rations out pieces of Harmon over the next few weeks. Tyler holds out for sixteen days but eventually joins him for a slight meal. Pelops insists.

“It’s imperative to this mission that you stay alive captain,” he says. “Just a little while longer.”

Tyler won’t go near the infirmary. The blow to Harmon’s head inflicted some kind of brain damage, so he remains comatose as he’s carved to bits day after day. Just as well. No screams to deal with, but still Tyler takes it hard. He sits on the bridge in his chair most days…staring at the red star growing ever brighter directly ahead.

Pelops thought the captain would dismantle the bone god…but Tyler doesn’t seem to mind it. Or perhaps he’s frightened of it. Too frightened of its power to risk desecrating it. He must know that it, not him, now rules the Goya.

Harmon would have lasted longer if Pelops did not share him with Tyler. However, Tyler ate so very little…only enough to keep himself alive for another month. Finally, when the last of Harmon has been consumed and his bones have been added to the god’s intricate frame, Tyler comes to Pelops. A broken man, emaciated, begging to be put out of his misery.

“It’s all my fault,” Tyler tells him, weeping. Pelops listens. “It was my responsibility to make sure we had extra emergency kits. I didn’t do it.”

Pelops leads him into the infirmary.

Tyler babbles, weeping. “Trying to maximize profits…cut corners…it should have been a simple trip. I did it to save money, Pelops. I killed us all for money…”

“Not all of us, Captain,” says Pelops.

Tyler nods, wipes his swollen eyes. He must be thinking of those starving families on Dantus now.

“I am sorry there is no more anesthetic for this Captain.”

“Just do it,” says Tyler. He unholsters his pistol, lays it on a nearby counter. “Get it over with. Kill me. For Dantus…for all those children. Kill me now…”

“If you wouldn’t mind lying on the table first,” says Pelops. Tyler complies.

Pelops straps him down securely and prepares the laser scalpel.

“What are you doing?” asks Tyler. “One shot between the eyes will do it. Make it quick, Pelops.”

Pelops hesitates.

It seems the captain has misunderstood his role here.

“We’ve still got over a month of travel time, sir…” Pelops explains. “If I kill you now, I’m afraid you’ll spoil before we reach Dantus.”

Tyler’s shock registers as a moment of silence. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, you can eat for two or three weeks, and the last few days you can go without. You’ll be fine…as soon as you touch down you’ll have food on Dantus. You don’t need me to last that long, Pelops!”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” says Pelops. “But I don’t like to go hungry.”

He ignores the captain’s screaming and writhing as he puts the gag on him. Same old reaction. Pulling against the restraints, wearing the throat raw with grunts and smothered screams.

“It’s for the mission,” Pelops reminds him.

He starts with the legs, as usual.

Tyler, once a strong and vital man, lasts nearly three weeks on the table.

In the end, with the last few scraps of Tyler gone, Pelops still has six days left to starve.

The red star swells brighter than ever among the starfields in the viewport.

Pelops sits in the captain’s chair and stares into the shimmering void.

Everything from plants to mammals is fueled by the light of stars. Sunlight fuels photosynthesis, which feeds the plants that in turn feed the animals we eat on earth. Photons and atoms being constantly recycled and reinvented, a molecular dance of destruction and creation that never ends. Everything consumes and is consumed.

We are all made of starlight.

Brilliant starlight, pulsing bright as blood inside us.

It’s all energy…and energy is neither created nor destroyed.

His stomach growls.

In the glow of a red sun, the Goya touches down atop a broad plateau littered with wrecked vehicles and rusting machines. Pelops stumbles from the open hatch into the ruddy glow. He walks with a single crutch made of bones. His right leg is missing below the knee, a fresh tourniquet wrapped tight about the stump.

He held out for two difficult days before the hunger won its final victory.

Still, he has made it to this place. A nice prosthetic limb waits in his future.

He blinks in the harsh glow of infrared daylight and stares across the plateau at the colonial city.

He stumbles through the wreckage toward the dilapidated walls. The wind hurls black sand against him, raking like claws across his flight suit and his exposed cheeks, coating his beard with dirt.

Where is everyone?

There should be a welcoming party to greet him. They’ve waited seven years.

The famine won here, he realizes. I’m too late.

He walks through dried fields where crops have died in geometrical rows. Now only the fossilized stubs of cornstalks rear from the smothering sand.

He sees the distant towers more clearly now. Skeletal and stark they stand against the purple sky. He walks with his crutch among the hulks of dead machines, until the sun sinks below the flat horizon. The ruined city looms before him. No signs of life.

Hunger did this. Is there anyone left at all?

He calls out. His voice echoes between crumbling walls, along vacant streets.

The bleak stars emerge to glimmer in the night sky.

We are all made of starlight.

Finally a group of thin shadows emerges from a ramshackle hut near a fallen tower.

Survivors. They converge upon him like wary dogs trailing rags.

He sees their young faces, smudged with dirt and lean as wolves.

They smile, showing rotted teeth. He waves.

They carry sharp knives that gleam in the twilight.

“Wait!” he says. “My name is Pelops—from the earth ship Goya. I’ve brought what you need.”

“Yes, I see that,” says a raggedy woman, brandishing her knife. “We can always use fresh meat.”

It is impossible for him to run on a single leg.

Their knives sink deeply, a dozen whispers of metal.

John R. Fultz lives in the Bay Area, California, but is originally from Kentucky. His fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Black Gate, and Space & Time, as well as the comic book anthologies Zombie Tales and Cthulhu Tales. His graphic novel of epic fantasy, Primordia, was published by Archaia Comics. John’s literary heroes include Tanith Lee, Thomas Ligotti, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, William Gibson, Robert Silverberg, and Darrell Schweitzer (not to mention Howard, Poe, and Shakespeare). When not writing stories, novels, or comics, John teaches English Literature at the middle/high school level and plays a mean guitar. In a previous life he made his living as a wandering storyteller on the lost continent of Atlantis.

Author Spotlight: John Fultz
Erin Stocks

I had to put this story down a few times while I was reading it because it was too much for me to stomach at once. You’ve done a great job at getting us inside Pelops’s skin while he experiences horror, revulsion, relief, to name a few emotions. Where did this story come from, and what was writing it like for you?

Thank you for that comment...it’s exactly what I was hoping for in my ideal reader. This story represents a departure from the kinds of tales I usually write (i.e. heroic fantasy and dark fantasy). It was a challenge for me to see if I could write a tale that achieves that intense level of disgust or anxiety. I wouldn’t want to meet the person who isn’t disturbed or “grossed out” by it. Like many of my favorite horror tales, it is definitely meant to disturb, and from your reaction, I can see that it succeeded.

Where did it come from? To be honest it was inspired to a large degree by Chuck Palahniuk’s story “Guts,” which is probably the most disturbing and visceral piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. It literally makes people pass out during public readings. My goal was to achieve that kind of intensity in a science-fiction setting, and that goal was inspired by an offhand comment from editor John Joseph Adams in one of his interviews from a couple years back. The whole “Dr. Pelops” thing is reminiscent of my favorite horror writer Thomas Ligotti. He has plenty of creepy “Dr.” characters that show up in his surreal and metaphysical tales of cosmic horror. So there was definitely some Ligotti influence here, since I’m way more into his work than that of Palahniuk.

The second part of the question is interesting because I did make myself rather nauseous at various points during the writing of “The Taste of Starlight.” Seriously, I was not able to eat meat of any kind for about twenty-four hours after I finished the story. Once the images began to fade I was able to have a burger again. Overall, the experience of writing this story does inspire me to eat less red meat.

Once the sedative runs out, Pelops is forced to face his peers, his unintentional victims. He tells them the truth, and even weeps with them, yet that doesn’t help them accept the situation any better (naturally). Yet he doesn’t want them to judge him. He believes he’s doing the right thing. What do you think, from a moral perspective?

You’ve put your finger on the moral question at the very heart of the story: Do the needs of the many (the colony) truly outweigh the needs of the few (the ship)? Does “the mission” always take priority? Or should basic morality—human decency—outweigh all else? I think it’s more important for the story to pose that question than to answer it. Pelops certainly believes he’s making the right decision...but human beings often cloak their moral or immoral decisions beneath a mask of “doing the right thing” or “serving the greater good.”

We are a species that is prone to self-deception. We tell ourselves comfortable lies: “That war is a necessary war. Yeah, it’s too bad civilians had to die, but that’s war... We had no choice!” So in a way this story is about the lies we tell ourselves to justify our horrendous actions. If you consider the end of the story and the terrible discovery that Pelops makes, you might find that the story makes its own statement on these kinds of self-deceptions. Of course, it’s easy to judge people in these situations when you are not in them yourself. Who can say what he would do when faced with the prospect of his own demise? There are a couple of references in the story to forced cannibalism documented in the pages of history...there are many, many more to be discovered if one does the research. People do what they need to, for survival. That’s exactly what Pelops does, and what the few remaining colonists are doing.

And the justification of Pelops’ actions are what I found most frightening. Pelops could be any one of us, thrown into a terrible situation when someone makes a bad decision, like Captain Tyler, regarding the rations. Pelops claims the colony needs him to survive. Whether that’s true or not, do you think he’s convincing himself of that?

I think that, once he reaches a certain point, it no longer matters. He has become something else. He has traded his humanity for a certain type of bestiality...he has descended or de-evolved back toward a more primitive state of existence. At first he believes his own rationalization...but after awhile he’s just stark raving mad.

After his confrontation with Mewes, he considers his loneliness for the first time, and even of allowing her to join him. Ultimately, of course, that doesn’t happen. What kind of impact do you think his loneliness had on the choices that he made?

The loneliness is as damaging as the cannibalism is to his psyche. There is nobody to “share” in his crime (except his victims). Hence he creates his “bone-god” to share in his savagery. This is part of his return to the primitive. Humans are tribal/social beings—loneliness can and will drive you mad if you let it. It will kill you as certainly as starvation...it just takes a lot longer. Loneliness can also be the gateway to madness; that’s certainly the case here. There is nobody else to judge, condemn, or confirm him while he descends into this primal state of survival, so there is no accountability. Consider also that most serial killers are twisted loners.

Might he have created the god of bones as a way to honor those who have unwillingly died for him? Or is it because he needs someone else to take full responsibility for these murders?

This is a great question because it hints at what lies behind religion and the whole concept of gods: Does humanity create its gods so it will have someone to blame for its misfortunes? Or someone to justify its cruelties? Or because man cannot stand to be alone in the vast cosmos, so he creates cosmic “powers” who watch over and communicate with him? Perhaps the answer involves all three of these reasons. The easiest answer is that Pelops is simply, utterly insane. Yet there is more to it if you peel back the layers of his motivation. Once again, the humanity at the heart of this character is his drive for survival, his self-deception, and his drive to escape cosmic loneliness. He’s a mad space-cannibal with delusions of grandeur.

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.

Considering Cryonics
Gregory Benford

From submarines to robots, much of the technology we take for granted today was originally conceived, not by scientists or inventors, but by that biggest of dreamers: the science fiction writer. Once thought wildly impossible, cryonics—the freezing of the recently dead, to be revived and repaired in the future when technology allows—seems to be following that same path. 

In 1931, Neil R. Jones published the story “The Jameson Satellite” in Amazing Stories about a professor who, obsessed with immortality, launches his body into space and is eventually picked up, forty million years later, and revived by alien science. The story was quite popular at the time, eventually becoming a series and influencing future writers like Isaac Asimov as well as thinkers such as the young Dr. Robert Ettinger who, in 1964, wrote the nonfiction book The Prospect of Immortality, which explored cryonics in detail and eventually earned Ettinger the title The Father of Cryonics. 

Since then, cryonics has become, if not yet a fully respected science, certainly a seasoned science fictional notion, employed in stories such as Clifford Simak’s “Why Call Them Back From Heaven?” and Fred Pohl’s“The Age of the Pussyfoot,” as well as in innumerable space adventure stories such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aliens where the crew is turned into corpsicles (thank you, Larry Niven) for long term storage during flight.

However, as cryonics’ determined subculture—clustered around a few companies such as Alcor—labors to make the theoretical into a reality, how close are we to actually making cryonics a real path to immortality? 

Well, in large measure, cryonics is real right here and now.

Today, about a hundred people—including baseball legend Ted Williams who was frozen in 2003—lie in liquid nitrogen baths awaiting resurrection and the cure for what ailed them.

Reviving these pioneers with today’s technology, however, would be impossible as scientists are still missing the second, more crucial, half to the cryonics puzzle: how to repair brain cells damaged by shear stresses in their decent to the temperature at which patients are stored, seventy-seven Kelvin.  Especially since, when you reheat them, the cells are damaged even more.

There is, however, a promising future solution to this problem: nanotechnology.

Still in its nascency, nanotech, in fact, seems promising for a whole host of medical applications, theoretically being able to treat disease and decay at their fundamental levels.  Combining that technology with cryonics, however, will allow doctors to create the ultimate cure: the extension of life beyond death.  And, as cryonicists interpret “death” as having one’s identity destroyed beyond the limits of any conceivable future technology to recover, perhaps even redefining the end of life itself. 

Exciting, yes. The bad news?  It will take approximately fifty years, if not a century, to develop nanotech to the point that it is able to repair the damage freezing and thawing does to human cells. Good thing about being frozen, though: you aren’t going anywhere. What’s another hundred years or so?

So barring the development of functioning nanotechnology, is cryonics still as fantastically implausible as even many thoughtful people consider it? (Even science fiction writers who were fascinated by the idea—Simak, Clarke, Heinlein, Sheffield—never made arrangements to be “suspended.”) Could there be some other, biological answer to the problem?

Well, consider that the Canadian painted turtle and several species of frogs, fish, and insects routinely make it through the winter by freezing and reviving and emerge in spring seemingly no worse for wear. Responding to the low temperatures of autumn, these creatures are able to move water out of their cells so that ice crystals form outside delicate membranes. They also produce a cocktail of glucose, amino acids, and glycerol (a kind of natural antifreeze). And while, yes, they do have special adaptations, their body chemistries are, from a human point of view, not so bizarre.

Preventing ice crystal formation is, of course, the crucial element in a successful revival from cryonic suspension, and the key to that is the use of those cryoprotectant glycerols. The only stumbling block here is that in animals, such refined physiological adjustments are the product of thousands of generations of evolution.  As warm-blooded mammals, our bodies have not developed the many fine adaptations to our physiology that would be required to ensure efficient uptake, use, and, later, flushing of the cryoprotectants. Rest assured, however, that biotechnologists are avidly working on extending these abilities to humans.

But aside from the questioning of its actual scientific and medical feasibility, the idea of cryonics has also suffered from a rather unfair charge: that it’s pointless. And creepy. 

Well, as far as creepy goes, the practice of being frozen actually seems rather less so than, say, becoming food for worms or being consumed by fire. In fact, when cremation started out commercially, bodies were burned during the religious services.  Cremation businesses, however, quickly had to add organ music to cover the sudden, loud bang that frequently interrupted the funeral as the deceased’s skull exploded. Now that’s creepy.

So if we rule out creepy, what about the charge of cryonics being pointless? Or, to be more precise, a pointless outlay of money. Are cryonicists making a reasonable bet? Why do even so many of those intrigued by the prospect of life extension not take the gamble? 

To wax numerical a bit more, suppose you look at cryonics purely as an investment. Does it yield a good return?

Well, what’s a person worth? Most Americans will work about fifty years at a salary in the range of around $30,000 to $40,000 per year—the national average today. In other words, they will make somewhere between one and two million dollars in their lifetime.

So one crude way to size up an investment is to take the probability of success (say, 10%—a guess) and multiply it by the expected return (two million dollars, earned by the revived person). Your expected return is then 10% of 2 million or $200,000. This is more than what cryonics costs today (about $50,000 to $100,000.) So, it’s a rational gamble, especially when you consider that cryonicists buy life insurance policies which pay their organization upon their death; it doesn’t have to be plunked down all at once.

The goal of cryonics, however, is not money but time—a future life. So another way to see if cryonics is a rational strategy is to take a person’s expected life span (about 75 years) and divide it by the expected gain in years if they are revived in the future—which would be, perhaps another 75 years—or possibly even centuries. In that case, the ratio of gained years to present life span is, say, 150 years divided by 75 years, or a factor of 2. (It could be higher, of course.)

Then, even if the probability of success is only 1%, say, the probable yield from the investment of your time would be 2 x 1% = 2%. And when viewed from that perspective, it makes sense to invest 2% of your lifetime earnings (say, $20,000 to $40,000) or of your lifetime—a year or so of effort.

But two percent is a conservative estimate, and the real realm of plausible probabilities seems to lie, actually, between one and, for the real optimists in the crowd, thirty percent. (And what are people who bet on science finding a cure for death itself if not the ultimate optimists?)

Ray Bradbury once told me he was interested in any chance of seeing the future, but when he thought over cryonics, he realized that he would be torn away from everything he loved. What would the future be worth, he asked, without his wife, his children, his friends? No, he told me, wouldn’t take the option at any price.

This is an example of the “neighborhood” argument, which says that mature people are so entwined with their surroundings, people and habits of mind, that to yank them out is a trauma worse than death. One is fond of one’s own era, certainly. But it seems to me that ordinary immigrants from every era have faced similar challenges and managed to adjust and make freer, better lives in their new homes. Just ask your grandparents.

So it must be with any way of thinking quantitatively about our future. We cannot see the range of possibilities without imposing our own values and views, mired in our time, culture, and place. Often, these are the things we value most—our idiosyncratic angles on the world.

But despite that, there is one clear advantage to cryonics: it does allow one to die with hope.

Gregory Benford has published over thirty books, mostly novels, of which nearly all remain in print, some after a quarter of a century. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in both astrophysics and plasma physics.

Beachworld
Stephen King

FedShip ASN/29 fell out of the sky and crashed. After a while two men slipped from its cloven skull like brains. They walked a little way and then stood, helmets beneath their arms, and looked at where they had finished up.

It was a beach in no need of an ocean—it was its own ocean, a sculpted sea of sand, a black-and-white-snapshot sea frozen forever in troughs and crests and more troughs and crests.

Dunes.

Shallow ones, steep ones, smooth ones, corrugated ones. Knife-crested dunes, plane-crested dunes, irregularly crested dunes that resembled dunes piled on dunes—dune-dominoes.

Dunes. But no ocean.

The valleys which were the troughs between these dunes snaked in mazy black rat-runs. If one looked at those twisting lines long enough, they might seem to spell words—black words hovering over the white dunes.

“Fuck,” Shapiro said.

“Bend over,” Rand said.

Shapiro started to spit, then thought better of it. Looking at all that sand made him think better of it. This was not the time to go wasting moisture, perhaps. Half-buried in the sand, ASN/29 didn’t look like a dying bird anymore; it looked like a gourd that had broken open and disclosed rot inside. There had been a fire. The starboard fuel-pods had all exploded.

“Too bad about Grimes,” Shapiro said.

“Yeah.” Rand’s eyes were still roaming the sand sea, out to the limiting line of the horizon and then coming back again.

It was too bad about Grimes. Grimes was dead. Grimes was now nothing but large chunks and small chunks in the aft storage compartment. Shapiro had looked in and thought: It looks like God decided to eat Grimes, found out he didn’t taste good, and sicked him up again. That had been too much for Shapiro’s own stomach. That, and the sight of Grimes’s teeth scattered across the floor of the storage compartment.

Shapiro now waited for Rand to say something intelligent, but Rand was quiet. Rand’s eyes tracked over the dunes, traced the clockspring windings of the deep troughs between.

“Hey!” Shapiro said at last. “What do we do? Grimes is dead; you’re in command. What do we do?”

“Do?” Rand’s eyes moved back and forth, back and forth, over the stillness of the dunes. A dry, steady wind ruffled the rubberized collar of the Environmental Protection suit. “If you don’t have a volleyball, I don’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on the beach?” Rand asked. “Play volleyball?”

Shapiro had been scared in space many times, and close to panic when the fire broke out; now, looking at Rand, he heard a rumor of fear too large to comprehend.

“It’s big,” Rand said dreamily, and for one moment Shapiro thought that Rand was speaking of Shapiro’s own fear. “One hell of a big beach. Something like this could go on forever. You could walk a hundred miles with your surfboard under your arm and still be where you started, almost, with nothing behind you but six or seven footprints. And if you stood in the same place for five minutes, the last six or seven would be gone, too.”

“Did you get a topographical compscan before we came down?” Rand was in shock, he decided. Rand was in shock but Rand was not crazy. He could give Rand a pill if he had to. And if Rand continued to spin his wheels, he could give him a shot. “Did you get a look at—”

Rand looked at him briefly. “What?”

The green places. That had been what he was going to say. It sounded like a quote from Psalms, and he couldn’t say it. The wind made a silver chime in his mouth.

“What?” Rand asked again.

“Compscan! Compscan!” Shapiro screamed. “You ever hear of a compscan, dronehead? What’s this place like? Where’s the ocean at the end of the fucking beach? Where’s the lakes? Where’s the nearest greenbelt? Which direction? Where does the beach end?”

“End? Oh. I grok you. It never ends. No greenbelts, no ice caps. No oceans. This is a beach in search of an ocean, mate. Dunes and dunes and dunes, and they never end.”

“But what’ll we do for water?”

“Nothing we can do.”

“The ship... it’s beyond repair!”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Shapiro fell quiet. It was now either be quiet or become hysterical. He had a feeling—almost a certainty—that if he became hysterical, Rand would just go on looking at the dunes until Shapiro worked it out, or until he didn’t.

What did you call a beach that never ended? Why, you called it a desert! Biggest motherfucking desert in the universe, wasn’t that right?

In his head he heard Rand respond: No shit, Sherlock.

Shapiro stood for some time beside Rand, waiting for the man to wake up, to do something. After a while his patience ran out. He began to slide and stumble back down the flank of the dune they had climbed to look around. He could feel the sand sucking against his boots. Want to suck you down, Bill, his mind imagined the sand saying. In his mind it was the dry, arid voice of a woman who was old but still terribly strong. Want to suck you right down here and give you a great... big... hug.

That made him think about how they used to take turns letting the others bury them up to their necks at the beach when he was a kid. Then it had been fun—now it scared him. So he turned that voice off—this was no time for memory lane, Christ, no—and walked through the sand with short, sharp kicking strides, trying unconsciously to mar the symmetrical perfection of its slope and surface.

“Where are you going?” Rand’s voice for the first time held a note of awareness and concern.

“The beacon,” Shapiro said. “I’m going to turn it on. We were on a mapped lane of travel. It’ll be picked up, vectored. It’s a question of time. I know the odds are shitty, but maybe somebody will come before—”

“The beacon’s smashed to hell,” Rand said. “It happened when we came down.”

“Maybe it can be fixed,” Shapiro called back over his shoulder. As he ducked through the hatchway he felt better in spite of the smells—fried wiring and a bitter whiff of Freon gas. He told himself he felt better because he had thought of the beacon. No matter how paltry, the beacon offered some hope. But it wasn’t the thought of the beacon that had lifted his spirits; if Rand said it was broken, it was probably most righteously broken. But he could no longer see the dunes—could no longer see that big, never-ending beach.

That was what made him feel better.

When he got to the top of the first dune again, struggling and panting, his temples pounding with the dry heat, Rand was still there, still staring and staring and staring. An hour had gone by. The sun stood directly above them. Rand’s face was wet with perspiration. Jewels of it nestled in his eyebrows. Droplets ran down his cheeks like tears. More droplets ran down the cords of his neck and into the neck of his EP suit like drops of colorless oil running into the guts of a pretty good android.

Dronehead I called him, Shapiro thought with a little shudder. Christ, that’s what he looks like—not an android but a dronehead who just took a neck-shot with a very big needle.

And Rand had been wrong after all.

“Rand?”

No answer.

“The beacon wasn’t broken.” There was a flicker in Rand’s eyes. Then they went blank again, staring out at the mountains of sand. Frozen, Shapiro had first thought them, but he supposed they moved. The wind was constant. They would move. Over a period of decades and centuries, they would... well, would walk. Wasn’t that what they called dunes on a beach? Walking dunes? He seemed to remember that from his childhood. Or school. Or someplace, and what in the hell did it matter?

Now he saw a delicate rill of sand slip down the flank of one of them. As if it heard

(heard what I was thinking)

Fresh sweat on the back of his neck. All right, he was getting a touch of the whim-whams. Who wouldn’t? This was a tight place they were in, very tight. And Rand seemed not to know it... or not to care.

“It had some sand in it, and the warbler was cracked, but there must have been sixty of those in Grimes’s odds-and-ends box.”

Is he even hearing me?

“I don’t know how the sand got in it—it was right where it was supposed to be, in the storage compartment behind the bunk, three closed hatches between it and the outside, but—”

“Oh, sand spreads. Gets into everything. Remember going to the beach when you were a kid, Bill? You’d come home and your mother would yell at you because there was sand everywhere? Sand in the couch, sand on the kitchen table, sand down the foot of your bed? Beach sand is very...” He gestured vaguely, and then that dreamy, unsettling smile resurfaced. “... ubiquitous.”

“—but it didn’t hurt it any,” Shapiro continued. “The emergency power output system is ticking over and I plugged the beacon into it. I put on the earphones for a minute and asked for an equivalency reading at fifty parsecs. Sounds like a power saw. It’s better than we could have hoped.”

“No one’s going to come. Not even the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys have all been dead for eight thousand years. Welcome to Surf City, Bill. Surf City sans surf.”

Shapiro stared out at the dunes. He wondered how long the sand had been here. A trillion years? A quintillion? Had there been life here once? Maybe even something with intelligence? Rivers? Green places? Oceans to make it a real beach instead of a desert?

Shapiro stood next to Rand and thought about it. The steady wind ruffled his hair. And quite suddenly he was sure all those things had been, and he could picture how they must have ended.

The slow retreat of the cities as their waterways and outlying areas were first speckled, then dusted, finally drifted and choked by the creeping sand.

He could see the shiny brown alluvial fans of mud, sleek as sealskins at first but growing duller and duller in color as they spread further and further out from the mouths of the rivers—out and out until they met each other. He could see sleek sealskin mud becoming reed-infested swamp, then gray, gritty till, finally shifting white sand.

He could see mountains shortening like sharpened pencils, their snow melting as the rising sand brought warm thermal updrafts against them; he could see the last few crags pointing at the sky like the fingertips of men buried alive; he could see them covered and immediately forgotten by the profoundly idiotic dunes.

What had Rand called them?

Ubiquitous.

If you just had a vision, Billy-boy, it was a pretty goddam dreadful one.

Oh, but no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t dreadful; it was peaceful. It was as quiet as a nap on a Sunday afternoon. What was more peaceful than the beach?

He shook these thoughts away. It helped to look back toward the ship.

“There isn’t going to be any cavalry,” Rand said. “The sand will cover us and after a while we’ll be the sand and the sand will be us. Surf City with no surf—can you catch that wave, Bill?”

And Shapiro was scared because he could catch it. You couldn’t see all those dunes without getting it.

“Fucking dronehead asshole,” he said. He went back to the ship.

And hid from the beach.

Sunset finally came. The time when, at the beach—any real beach—you were supposed to put away the volleyball and put on your sweats and get out the weenies and the beer. Not time to start necking yet, but almost. Time to look forward to the necking.

Weenies and beer had not been a part of ASN/29’s stores.

Shapiro spent the afternoon carefully bottling all of the ship’s water. He used a porta-vac to suck up that which had run out of the ruptured veins in the ship’s supply system and puddled on the floor. He got the small bit left in the bottom of the shattered hydraulic system’s water tank. He did not overlook even the small cylinder in the guts of the air-purification system which circulated air in the storage areas.

Finally, he went into Grimes’s cabin.

Grimes had kept goldfish in a circular tank constructed especially for weightless conditions. The tank was built of impact-resistant clear-polymer plastic, and had survived the crash easily. The goldfish—like their owner—had not been impact-resistant. They floated in a dull orange clump at the top of the ball, which had come to rest under Grimes’s bunk, along with three pairs of very dirty underwear and half a dozen porno holograph-cubes.

He held the globe aquarium for a moment, looking fixedly into it. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,” he said suddenly, and laughed a screaming, distracted laugh. Then he got the net Grimes kept in his lockbin and dipped it into the tank. He removed the fish and then wondered what to do with them. After a moment he took them to Grimes’s bed and raised his pillow.

There was sand underneath.

He put the fish there regardless, then carefully poured the water into the jerrican he was using as a catcher. It would all have to be purified, but even if the purifiers hadn’t been working, he thought that in another couple of days he wouldn’t balk at drinking aquarium water just because it might have a few loose scales and a little goldfish shit in it.

He purified the water, divided it, and took Rand’s share back up the side of the dune. Rand was right where he had been, as if he had never moved.

“Rand. I brought you your share of the water.” He unzipped the pouch on the front of Rand’s EP suit and slipped the flat plastic flask inside. He was about to press the zip-strip closed with his thumbnail when Rand brushed his hand away. He took the flask out. Stenciled on the front was ASN/CLASS SHIP’S SUPPLIES STORAGE FLASK CL. *23196755 STERILE WHEN SEAL IS UNBROKEN. The seal was broken now, of course; Shapiro had had to fill the bottle up.

“I purified—”

Rand opened his fingers. The flask fell into the sand with a soft plop. “Don’t want it.”

“Don’t... Rand, what’s wrong with you? Jesus Christ, will you stop it?”

Rand did not reply.

Shapiro bent over and picked up storage flask #23196755. He brushed off the grains of sand clinging to the sides as if they were huge, swollen germs.

“What’s wrong with you?” Shapiro repeated. “Is it shock? Do you think that’s what it is? Because I can give you a pill... or a shot. But it’s getting to me, I don’t mind telling you. You just standing out here looking at the next forty miles of nothing! It’s sand! Just sand!”

“It’s a beach,” Rand said dreamily. “Want to make a sand castle?”

“Okay, good,” Shapiro said. “I’m going to go get a needle and an amp of Yellowjack. If you want to act like a goddam dronehead, I’ll treat you like one.”

“If you try to inject me with something, you better be quiet when you sneak up behind me,” Rand said mildly. “Otherwise, I’ll break your arm.”

He could do it, too. Shapiro, the astrogator, weighed a hundred and forty pounds and stood five-five. Physical combat was not his specialty. He grunted an oath and turned away, back to the ship, holding Rand’s flask.

“I think it’s alive,” Rand said. “I’m actually pretty sure of it.”

Shapiro looked back at him and then out at the dunes. The sunset had given them a gold filigree at their smooth, sweeping caps, a filigree that shaded delicately down to the blackest ebony in the troughs; on the next dune, ebony shaded back to gold. Gold to black. Black to gold. Gold to black and black to gold and gold to—

Shapiro blinked his eyes rapidly, and rubbed a hand over them.

“I have several times felt this particular dune move under my feet,” Rand told Shapiro. “It moves very gracefully. It is like feeling the tide. I can smell its smell on the air, and the smell is like salt.”

“You’re crazy,” Shapiro said. He was so terrified that he felt as if his brains had turned to glass.

Rand did not reply. Rand’s eyes searched the dunes, which went from gold to black to gold to black in the sunset.

Shapiro went back to the ship.

Rand stayed on the dune all night, and all the next day.

Shapiro looked out and saw him. Rand had taken off his EP suit, and the sand had almost covered it. Only one sleeve stuck out, forlorn and supplicating. The sand above and below it reminded Shapiro of a pair of lips sucking with a toothless greed at a tender morsel. Shapiro felt a crazy desire to pelt up the side of the dune and rescue Rand’s EP suit.

He did not.

He sat in his cabin and waited for the rescue ship. The smell of Freon had dissipated. It was replaced by the even less desirable smell of Grimes decaying.

The rescue ship did not come that day or that night or on the third day.

Sand somehow appeared in Shapiro’s cabin, although the hatchway was closed and the seal still appeared perfectly tight. He sucked the little puddles of sand up with the porta-vac as he had sucked up puddles of spilled water on that first day.

He was very thirsty all the time. His flask was nearly empty already.

He thought he had begun to smell salt on the air; in his sleep he heard the sound of gulls.

And he could hear the sand.

The steady wind was moving the first dune closer to the ship. His cabin was still okay—thanks to the porta-vac—but the sand was already taking over the rest. Mini-dunes had reached through the blown locks and laid hold of ASN/29. It sifted in tendrils and membranes through the vents. There was a drift in one of the blown tanks.

Shapiro’s face grew gaunt and pebbly with beard shadow.

Near sunset of the third day, he climbed up the dune to check on Rand. He thought about taking a hypodermic, then rejected it. It was a lot more than shock; he knew that now. Rand was insane. It would be best if he died quickly. And it looked as if that was exactly what was going to happen.

Shapiro was gaunt; Rand was emaciated. His body was a scrawny stick. His legs, formerly rich and thick with iron-pumper’s muscle, were now slack and droopy. The skin hung on them like loose socks that keep falling down. He was wearing only his undershorts, and they were red nylon, and they looked absurdly like a ball-hugger bathing suit. A light beard had begun to grow on his face, fuzzing his hollow cheeks and chin. His beard was the color of beach sand. His hair, formerly a listless brown shade, had bleached out to a near blond. It hung over his forehead. Only his eyes, peering through the fringe of his hair with bright blue intensity, still lived fully. They studied the beach

(the dunes goddammit the DUNES)

relentlessly.

Now Shapiro saw a bad thing. It was a very bad thing indeed. He saw that Rand’s face was turning into a sand dune. His beard and his hair were choking his skin.

“You,” Shapiro said, “are going to die. If you don’t come down to the ship and drink, you are going to die.”

Rand said nothing.

“Is that what you want?”

Nothing. There was the vacuous snuffle of the wind, but no more. Shapiro observed that the creases of Rand’s neck were filling up with sand.

“The only thing I want,” Rand said in a faint, faraway voice like the wind, “is my Beach Boys tapes. They’re in my cabin.”

“Fuck you!” Shapiro said furiously. “But do you know what I hope? I hope a ship comes before you die. I want to see you holler and scream when they pull you away from your precious goddam beach. I want to see what happens then!”

“Beach’ll get you, too,” Rand said. His voice was empty and rattling, like wind inside a split gourd—a gourd which has been left in a field at the end of October’s last harvest. “Take a listen, Bill. Listen to the wave.”

Rand cocked his head. His mouth, half-open, revealed his tongue. It was as shriveled as a dry sponge.

Shapiro heard something.

He heard the dunes. They sang songs of Sunday afternoon at the beach—naps on the beach with no dreams. Long naps. Mindless peace. The sound of crying gulls. Shifting, thoughtless particles. Walking dunes. He heard... and was drawn. Drawn toward the dunes.

“You hear it,” Rand said.

Shapiro reached into his nose and dug with two fingers until it bled. Then he could close his eyes; his thoughts came slowly and clumsily together. His heart was racing.

I was almost like Rand. Jesus!... it almost had me!

He opened his eyes again and saw that Rand had become a conch shell on a long deserted beach, straining forward toward all the mysteries of an undead sea, staring out at the dunes and the dunes and the dunes.

No more, Shapiro moaned inside himself.

Oh, but listen to this wave, the dunes whispered back.

Against his better judgment, Shapiro listened.

Then his better judgment ceased to exist.

Shapiro thought: I could hear better if I sat down.

He sat down at Rand’s feet and put his heels on his thighs like a Yaqui Indian and listened.

He heard the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys were singing about fun, fun, fun. He heard them singing that the girls on the beach were all within reach. He heard—

—a hollow sighing of the wind, not in his ear but in the canyon between right brain and left brain—he heard that sighing somewhere in the blackness which is spanned only by the suspension bridge of the corpus callosum, which connects conscious thought to the infinite. He felt no hunger, no thirst, no heat, no fear. He heard only the voice in the emptiness.

And a ship came.

It came swooping out of the sky, afterburners scratching a long orange track from right to left. Thunder belted the delta-wave topography, and several dunes collapsed like bullet-path brain damage. The thunder ripped Billy Shapiro’s head open and for a moment he was torn both ways, ripped, torn down the middle—

Then he was up on his feet.

“Ship!” he screamed. “Holy fuck! Ship! Ship! SHIP!”

It was a belt trader, dirty and buggered by five hundred—or five thousand—years of clan service. It surfed through the air, banged crudely upright, skidded. The captain blew jets and fused sand into black glass. Shapiro cheered the wound.

Rand looked around like a man awaking from a deep dream.

“Tell it to go away, Billy.”

“You don’t understand.” Shapiro was shambling around, shaking his fists in the air. “You’ll be all right—”

He broke toward the dirty trader in big, leaping strides, like a kangaroo running from a ground fire. The sand clutched at him. Shapiro kicked it away. Fuck you, sand. I got a honey back in Hansonville. Sand never had no honey. Beach never had no hard-on.

The trader’s hull split. A gangplank popped out like a tongue. A man strode down it behind three sampler androids and a guy built into treads that was surely the captain. He wore a beret with a clan symbol on it, anyway.

One of the androids waved a sampler wand at him. Shapiro batted it away. He fell on his knees in front of the captain and embraced the treads which had replaced the captain’s dead legs.

“The dunes... Rand... no water... alive... hypnotized him... dronehead world... I... thank God....”

A steel tentacle whipped around Shapiro and yanked him away on his gut. Dry sand whispered underneath him like laughter. “It’s okay,” the captain said. “Bey-at shel! Me! Me! Gat!”

The android dropped Shapiro and backed away, clittering distractedly to itself.

“All this way for a fucking Fed!” the captain exclaimed bitterly.

Shapiro wept. It hurt, not just in his head, but in his liver.

“Dud! Gee-yat! Gat! Water-for-him-Cry!”

The man who had been in the lead tossed him a nippled low-grav bottle. Shapiro upended it and sucked greedily, spilling crystal-cold water into his mouth, down his chin, in dribbles that darkened his tunic, which had bleached to the color of bone. He choked, vomited, then drank again.

Dud and the captain watched him closely. The androids clittered.

At last Shapiro wiped his mouth and sat up. He felt both sick and well.

“You Shapiro?” the captain asked.

Shapiro nodded.

“Clan affiliation?”

“None.”

“ASN number?”

“29.”

“Crew?”

“Three. One dead. The other—Rand—up there.” He pointed but did not look.

The captain’s face did not change. Dud’s face did.

“The beach got him,” Shapiro said. He saw their questioning, veiled looks. “Shock... maybe. He seems hypnotized. He keeps talking about the... the Beach Boys... never mind, you wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t drink or eat. He’s bad off.”

“Dud. Take one of the andies and get him down from there.” He shook his head. “Fed ship, Christ. No salvage.”

Dud nodded. A few moments later he was scrambling up the side of the dune with one of the andies. The andy looked like a twenty-year-old surfer who might make dope money on the side servicing bored widows, but his stride gave him away even more than the segmented tentacles which grew from his armpits. The stride, common to all androids, was the slow, reflective, almost painful stride of an aging English butler with hemorrhoids.

There was a buzz from the captain’s dashboard.

“I’m here.”

“This is Gomez, Cap. We got a situation here. Compscan and surface telemetry show us a very unstable surface. There’s no bedrock that we can targ. We’re resting on our own burn, and right now that may be the hardest thing on the whole planet. Trouble is, the burn itself is starting to settle.”

“Recommendation?”

“We ought to get out.”

“When?”

“Five minutes ago.”

“You’re a laugh riot, Gomez.”

The captain punched a button and the communicator went out.

Shapiro’s eyes were rolling. “Look, never mind Rand. He’s had it.”

“I’m taking you both back,” the captain said. “I got no salvage, but the Federation ought to pay something for the two of you... not that either of you are worth much, as far as I can see. He’s crazy and you’re chickenshit.”

“No... you don’t understand. You—”

The captain’s cunning yellow eyes gleamed.

“You got any contra?” he asked.

“Captain... look... please—”

“Because if you do, there’s no sense just leaving it here. Tell me what it is and where it is. I’ll split seventy-thirty. Standard salvor’s fee. Couldn’t do any better than that, hey? You—”

The burn suddenly tilted beneath them. Quite noticeably tilted. A horn somewhere inside the trader began to blat with muffled regularity. The communicator on the captain’s dashboard went off again.

“There!” Shapiro screamed. “There, do you see what you’re up against? You want to talk about contraband now? WE HAVE GOT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

“Shut up, handsome, or I’ll have one of these guys sedate you,” the captain said. His voice was serene but his eyes had changed. He thumbed the communicator.

“Cap, I got ten degrees of tilt and we’re getting more. The elevator’s going down, but it’s going on an angle. We’ve still got time, but not much. The ship’s going to fall over.”

“The struts will hold her.”

“No, sir. Begging the captain’s pardon, they won’t.”

“Start firing sequences, Gomez.”

“Thank you, sir.” The relief in Gomez’s voice was unmistakable.

Dud and the android were coming back down the flank of the dune. Rand wasn’t with them. The andy fell further and further behind. And now a strange thing happened. The andy fell over on its face. The captain frowned. It did not fall as an andy is supposed to fall—which is to say, like a human being, more or less. It was as if someone had pushed over a mannequin in a department store. It fell over like that. Thump, and a little tan cloud of sand puffed up from around it.

Dud went back and knelt by it. The andy’s legs were still moving as if it dreamed, in the 1.5 million Freon-cooled micro-circuits that made up its mind, that it still walked. But the leg movements were slow and cracking. They stopped. Smoke began to come out of its pores and its tentacles shivered in the sand. It was gruesomely like watching a human die. A deep grinding came from inside it: Graaaagggg!

“Full of sand,” Shapiro whispered. “It’s got Beach Boys religion.”

The captain glanced at him impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous, man. That thing could walk through a sandstorm and not get a grain inside it.”

“Not on this world.”

The burn settled again. The trader was now clearly canted. There was a low groan as the struts took more weight.

“Leave it!” the captain bawled at Dud. “Leave it, leave it! Gee-yat! Come-me-for-Cry!”

Dud came, leaving the andy to walk face-down in the sand.

“What a balls-up,” the captain muttered.

He and Dud engaged in a conversation spoken entirely in a rapid pidgin dialect which Shapiro was able to follow to some degree. Dud told the captain that Rand had refused to come. The andy had tried to grab Rand, but with no force. Even then it was moving jerkily, and strange grating sounds were coming from inside it. Also, it had begun to recite a combination of galactic strip-mining coordinates and a catalogue of the captain’s folk-music tapes. Dud himself had then closed with Rand. They had struggled briefly. The captain told Dud that if Dud had allowed a man who had been standing three days in the hot sun to get the better of him, that maybe he ought to get another First.

Dud’s face darkened with embarrassment, but his grave, concerned look never faltered. He slowly turned his head, revealing four deep furrows in his cheek. They were welling slowly.

“Him-gat big indics,” Dud said. “Strong-for-Cry. Him-gat for umby.”

“Umby-him for-Cry?” The captain was looking at Dud sternly.

Dud nodded. “Umby. Beyat-shel. Umby-for-Cry.”

Shapiro had been frowning, conning his tired, frightened mind for that word. Now it came. Umby. It meant crazy. He’s strong, for Christ’s sake. Strong because he’s crazy. He’s got big ways, big force. Because he’s crazy.

Big ways... or maybe it meant big waves. He wasn’t sure. Either way it came to the same.

Umby.

The ground shifted underneath them again, and sand blew across Shapiro’s boots.

From behind them came the hollow ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud of the breather-tubes opening. Shapiro thought it one of the most lovely sounds he had ever heard in his life.

The captain sat deep in thought, a weird centaur whose lower half was treads and plates instead of horse. Then he looked up and thumbed the communicator.

“Gomez, send Excellent Montoya down here with a tranquilizer gun.”

“Acknowledged.”

The captain looked at Shapiro. “Now, on top of everything else, I’ve lost an android worth your salary for the next ten years. I’m pissed off. I mean to have your buddy.”

“Captain.” Shapiro could not help licking his lips. He knew this was a very ill-chosen thing to do. He did not want to appear mad, hysterical, or craven, and the captain had apparently decided he was all three. Licking his lips like that would only add to the impression... but he simply couldn’t help himself. “Captain, I cannot impress on you too strongly the need to get off this world as soon as poss—”

“Can it, dronehead,” the captain said, not unkindly.

A thin scream rose from the top of the nearest dune.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! Leave me alone! All of you!”

“Big indics gat umby,” Dud said gravely.

“Ma-him, yeah-mon,” the captain returned, and then turned to Shapiro. “He really is bad off, isn’t he?”

Shapiro shuddered. “You don’t know. You just—”

The burn settled again. The struts were groaning louder than ever. The communicator crackled. Gomez’s voice was thin, a little unsteady.

“We have to get out of here right now, Cap!”

“All right.” A brown man appeared on the gangway. He held a long pistol in one gloved hand. The captain pointed at Rand. “Ma‑him, for-Cry. Can?”

Excellent Montoya, unperturbed by the tilting earth that was not earth but only sand fused to glass (and there were deep cracks running through it now, Shapiro saw), unbothered by the groaning struts or the eerie sight of an android that now appeared to be digging its own grave with its feet, studied Rand’s thin figure for a moment.

“Can,” he said.

“Gat! Gat-for-Cry!” The captain spat to one side. “Shoot his pecker off, I don’t care,” he said. “Just as long as he’s still breathing when we ship.”

Excellent Montoya raised the pistol. The gesture was apparently two-thirds casual and one-third careless, but Shapiro, even in his state of near-panic, noted the way Montoya’s head tilted to one side as he lined the barrel up. Like many in the clans, the gun would be nearly a part of him, like pointing his own finger.

There was a hollow fooh! as he squeezed the trigger and the tranquilizer dart blew out of the barrel.

A hand reached out of the dune and clawed it down.

It was a large brown hand, wavery, made of sand. It simply reached up, in defiance of the wind, and smothered the momentary glitter of the dart. Then the sand fell back with a heavy thrrrrap. No hand. Impossible to believe there had been. But they had all seen it.

“Giddy-hump,” the captain said in an almost conversational voice.

Excellent Montoya fell on his knees. “Aidy-May-for-Cry, bit-gat come! Saw-hoh got belly-gat-for-Cry!—”

Numbly, Shapiro realized Montoya was saying a rosary in pidgin. Up on the dune, Rand was jumping up and down, shaking his fists at the sky, screeching thinly in triumph.

A hand. It was a HAND. He’s right; it’s alive, alive, alive—

“Indic!” the captain said sharply to Montoya. “Cannit! Gat!”

Montoya shut up. His eyes touched on the capering figure of Rand and then he looked away. His face was full of superstitious horror nearly medieval in quality.

“Okay,” the captain said. “I’ve had enough. I quit. We’re going.”

He shoved two buttons on his dashboard. The motor that should have swiveled him neatly around so he faced up the gangplank again did not hum; it squealed and grated. The captain cursed. The burn shifted again.

“Captain!” Gomez. In a panic.

The captain slammed in another button and the treads began to move backward up the gangplank.

“Guide me,” the captain said to Shapiro. “I got no fucking rearview mirror. It was a hand, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I want to get out of here,” the captain said. “It’s been fourteen years since I had a cock, but right now I feel like I’m pissing myself.”

Thrrap! A dune suddenly collapsed over the gangway. Only it wasn’t a dune; it was an arm.

“Fuck, oh fuck,” the captain said.

On his dune, Rand capered and screeched.

Now the threads of the captain’s lower half began to grind. The mini-tank of which the captain’s head and shoulders were the turret now began to judder backward.

“What—”

The treads locked. Sand splurted out from between them.

“Pick me up!” the captain bawled to the two remaining androids. “Now! RIGHT NOW!”

Their tentacles curled around the tread sprockets as they picked him up—he looked ridiculously like a faculty member about to be tossed in a blanket by a bunch of roughhousing fraternity boys. He was thumbing the communicator.

“Gomez! Final firing sequence! Now! Now!”

The dune at the foot of the gangplank shifted. Became a hand. A large brown hand that began to scrabble up the incline.

Shrieking, Shapiro bolted from that hand.

Cursing, the captain was carried away from it.

The gangplank was pulled up. The hand fell off and became sand again. The hatchway irised closed. The engines howled. No time for a couch; no time for anything like that. Shapiro dropped into a crash-fold position on the bulkhead and was promptly smashed flat by the acceleration. Before unconsciousness washed over him, it seemed he could feel sand grasping at the trader with muscular brown arms, straining to hold them down—

Then they were up and away.

Rand watched them go. He was sitting down. When the track of the trader’s jets was at last gone from the sky, he turned his eyes out to the placid endlessness of the dunes.

“We got a ‘34 wagon and we call it a woody,” he croaked to the empty, moving sand. “It ain’t very cherry; it’s an oldy but a goody.”

Slowly, reflectively, he began to cram handful after handful of sand into his mouth. He swallowed... swallowed... swallowed. Soon his belly was a swollen barrel and sand began to drift over his legs.

© 1984 Stephen King.

First appeared in Weird Tales.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Stephen King is the best-selling, award-winning author of innumerable classics, such as The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, and The Dead Zone—all of which have been adapted to film, as have many of King’s other novels and stories. Other projects include editing Best American Short Stories 2007, writing a pop culture column for Entertainment Weekly, scripting for the Vertigo comic American Vampire, and a collaboration on a musical with rocker John Mellencamp called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. His most recent books are the novels Blockade Billy and Under the Dome, a thousand-plus-page epic he has been working on for more than twenty-five years. Forthcoming in November is Full Dark, No Stars, a short fiction collection of four all-new, previously unpublished stories. Another recent collection, Just After Sunset, came out in 2008. Other recent short stories include a collaboration with his son, Joe Hill, called “Throttle,” for the Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend, and “UR,” a novella written exclusively for the Amazon Kindle. His other work includes classics such as The Stand, The Dark Tower, Salem’s Lot, among others.

Five Planets that Will Kill You Dead
Genevieve Valentine

It’s an iconic image, and a touchstone of science fiction: a cadre of spacefarers, having survived a devastating crash, emerge from the wreckage to take their first look around at the planet with which they will have to contend. On this new world they will either make a home, or perish. (Cue any nubile space maidens, insect warriors, or Federation representatives you may have backstage.)

But aside from the many Class-Ms on which Captain Kirk had disastrous dates, let’s face it: there really is no good planet on which to crash. And if things have already gone so badly that your brave, space-faring expedition has to make an emergency landing on some mapped-but-untested interstellar hinterland, you’re already pretty much up a creek.

However, since Murphy’s Law is the overriding constant of the universe, things can always be worse. And with these five planets (some of the galaxy’s wildest), we’ll show you just how bad a planetary crash-landing can get.

1. HD 149026 b

This planet’s star, HD 149026, is 257 light-years from Earth, so if you’re unlucky enough to crash land on this backwater, you can forget about a rescue. AAA’s roadside service does not extend to the Hercules constellation. We checked.

And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.

HD 149026 b is 114 times as massive as the Earth, and so close to its yellow subgiant of a star that a full orbit takes less than three days to complete. It’s also so dense that it has an effective albedo of zero, meaning that it absorbs close to 100% of the light and heat generated by HD 14026.

What that boils down to—literally—is that the surface of HD 149026 b is an impressive 2,300 Kelvin. That’s 3,680.33 degrees Fahrenheit. It only takes 2,797 degrees to melt iron; you do the math.

So, since the planet’s staggering heat and density (probably up to 10 times Earth gravity) means your chances of survival are pretty nil, the best suggestion we’ve got for you as you plummet toward the surface is to start taking bets on what’s going to kill you first: the impact or HD 149026b’s simmering atmospheric bouillabaisse.

After all, you might as well make a few bucks before you go.

2. OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb

The chances of you ever having to make an emergency landing on this tongue-twisting celestial body are, thankfully, pretty miniscule. OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is a whopping 20,000 light-years from Earth, circling a likely red dwarf star near the center of the Milky Way at an orbit a little wider than that of Mars.

Being so far from such a relatively small, cool star means OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb (we recommend “Blig” for short) is chillier than a lot of other extrasolar planets. And when we say chilly, we mean average atmospheric temperatures close to 50 Kelvin- a crisp -400 degrees Fahrenheit. So remember to bring ski gloves, ‘cause setting up camp is going to be a little tricky if your fingers start falling off from frostbite. Good news, though, for all you Polar Bear Clubbers out there: if you ever dreamed of sliding across a glacier of frozen methane, have we got the ice shelf for you!

On the off chance that you are stranded on OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, you do have one thing going for you: this planet is under quite a bit of observation. Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork/Robotic Telescope Network (PLANET/Robonet), Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), and Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) are credited with joint discovery of the planet and may still have their monitors set on the place, which means there’s a reasonable chance at least one of them might pick you up on their scopes. If they do, hopefully you’ll be waving for help and not mooning the camera.

Course, your biggest problem now isn’t some space geek’s snapshot of your bare ass. It’s how to kill time for the next 20,000 years while you wait for that rescue team to show up.

Anybody bring the Jenga?

3. Venus

Let’s say your expedition is particularly rickety, and you don’t even make it out of the solar system before something short-circuits. Don’t worry! With a quick course correction you can simply touch down on Venus for emergency repairs.

That’s assuming you can land, of course. Venus is surrounded by dense clouds of sulfuric acid that long prevented astronomers from getting a decent read on the inner atmosphere. In fact, when Project Magellan arrived in 1990, it had to take pictures via bursts of microwave energy, because the opacity of the upper atmosphere precluded standard optical equipment. Let’s hope your navigator is on the ball.

If you manage to survive your acid bath entry and actually land on Venus’ inviting surface of volcanic rock, you get to head out for repairs in an atmosphere largely made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide. And if you’re planning on using any implements, watch out for those spectacular lightning storms. Or, at least don’t be surprised when your new ‘do’s a perm.

But the best part about Venus is, with an atmospheric pressure 92 times that of Earth, walking around is going to feel like you’re taking a stroll a kilometer under water. (You do remember your astronaut SCUBA training, right?) Even with a re-breather, though, you’re still not going to get far before the winds knock you over. Down on the planet’s surface, the wind isn’t particularly fast, but with that kind of density it doesn’t have to be, and what would be a pleasant spring breeze on Earth, on Venus feels like getting hit with a sackful of pudding. (You do remember your astronaut “getting hit with a sackful of pudding” training, right?)

For a planet so close in core composition to the Earth, and with tantalizing evidence of the prior presence of water, Venus is remarkably inhospitable. Which is surprising coming from such an unassuming planet orbiting so close to home.

But you know what they say: it’s always the quiet ones who break your heart.

4. 51 Pegasi b

51 Pegasi b, nicknamed Bellerophon because of its star’s location in Pegasus, was one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered.

Good news for you, though, is that this guy’s only 50 light-years from Earth.

Of course, you’re still dealing with a gas giant, which means it may have a rocky crust stable enough to land on, but you’re not going to make it that far; the roiling sodium and silicate clouds that most likely form this planet’s atmosphere are hot and corrosive enough to vaporize magnesium. And that’s assuming that its star, 51 Pegasi, doesn’t react with b and erupt in a superflare intense enough to melt a planet...not to mention you.

Plus, not to put a crimp on your fix-it plans or anything, but Bellerophon is tidally locked to 51 Pegasi, which means that this planet doesn’t spin on an axis. Instead, it circles the star like a ball on a string, so depending on where you land, you’re either in for one scorching day or one hell of a long night.

And you thought Alaska had it bad.

5. Gliese 581 g

Your mission has gone as planned for 20 light-years, taking you into the Libra constellation and its star Gliese 581. Then, disaster strikes. But with any luck, you’ll arrive at the right time of year to touch down on Gliese 581 g.

Gliese 581 g, classified as a super-earth, occupies the bolometric-luminosity sweet spot known as the habitable zone. For the layperson, astronomers have adorably nicknamed it “The Goldilocks Zone.” (Awwww!)

Though Gliese 581 g circles its star every 37 days, making its orbit even shorter than Mercury’s, Gliese 581 is a red dwarf with less than 2% of the sun’s light and heat, making the closer orbit ideal for the support of life. Gliese 581 g is tidally locked to its star, which means there’s none of earth’s orbital rotation — you’re looking at some seriously sweltering summer days - but there’s sufficient atmosphere to support life, and the temperature in the twilight region, called “the terminator,” should be just about right for life.

And the good news doesn’t stop there. Conditions here will probably be shockingly similar to those on Earth, both in atmosphere, geological makeup, and temperature: the terminator regions are estimated to average between -31 to 10 degrees Celsius, which, while not bikini weather, is hardly fatal.

So, on paper, Gliese 581 g sounds like an ideal planet on which to be stranded, and as far as atmosphere and terrain go, it’s actually pretty safe. That is, of course, until you take into account the invisible variant that makes this situation so unflaggingly scary: the extremely limited company you’ll be stuck with. In other words, hell isn’t a catastrophic crash or a sulfuric atmosphere. It isn’t even a bone-chilling ice planet. Hell, in this universe, is the rest of your life spent with the same 5 annoying shipmates.

So when you make that first brave step out of the wreckage, take a good look around at your fellow adventurers. Sure, they look harmless now, but according to well-researched sci-fi statistics, you’ve got two days, max, before those bodies turning up in the cargo hold prove that one among you is a preternaturally calm, stone-cold killer. (If you're in a movie, you only get forty to ninety minutes. Think fast!)

On the other hand, if everybody else looks stable, then the one who’s cracked is probably you. Make the most of it! Polish a murder implement, hum off-key, and prepare to chew some of that inhospitable extraterrestrial scenery.

It’s odd to think that with all the earthquakes, twisters, and franchise reboots here on Earth, it’s still the safest planet to call home, but the extrasolar evidence doesn’t lie. So if a cocky, girdled spaceship captain ever invites you to partake in a fantastic voyage of adventure to faraway stars—decline. Not even an eternal life in syndication is worth the silicate storms, ice giants, and massive clouds of acid you now know you’re going to encounter.

And in the future, if you ever feel yourself regretting all the wonders you might have missed on a planet far, far away, just slap yourself with a sackful of pudding.

That ought to fix it.

For More Information on Planets That Will Kill You Dead:

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, www.exoplanet.eu

Exoplanets: Database and Sky Map, media4.obspm.fr/exoplanets

NASA information page on Venus, nasa.gov/worldbook/venus_worldbook.html

Extrasolar Visions, extrasolar.net

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, Federations, The Living Dead II, The Way of the Wizard, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. In addition to writing fiction, she is a columnist for Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine.