Editorial, December 2010
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue seven of Lightspeed! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

Our lead story this month, “In-fall,” by Ted Kosmatka, puts us aboard a ship hurtling through space. Aboard this ship, two men—mortal enemies—await their inevitable deaths, although that means something very different for each of them.

In our first nonfiction article this month, “Black Holes: Starving and Misunderstood,” Dr. Pamela Gay gives us another perspective on black holes. Did you know they’re simply longing for attention, maybe a little extra companionship? And they’ll do whatever they can to get it, so it’s best if you stay out of their way.

“The Observer,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells the story of a woman separated into various parts of herself. However, there’s always a dominant side. And that side will do whatever it can in order to survive.

In our feature interview with Greg Bear by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, Bear discusses writing for Halo; his new novel Hull Zero Three; his collaboration with Neal Stephenson, The Mongoliad; and advising the Department of Homeland Security.

After reading our third piece of fiction for the month, “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, you might do a double take when you see your colleague coughing by the water fountain. A seasonal cold, he says, but are you certain that’s the case? Maybe it’s something more serious.

In the related nonfiction article, “Five Upcoming Plagues (We’re Doomed),” Genevieve Valentine keeps us up to speed on when and if we should pull out those face masks. Better stock up—just in case.

For our final story this month, we present “The Silence of the Asonu” by Ursula K. Le Guin, which allows us a glimpse into a race of people that do not speak as we do, but have plenty of other ways to communicate, some which may be more powerful than our own.

And for our final piece of nonfiction, we have an article by Lawrence M. Schoen, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Klingon language. In “Linguistic Expectations,” he explains how if we’re ever going to understand alien speech, we’d better ditch our current expectations and start thinking above and beyond the norm.

That about does it for our fiction and nonfiction selections for December, but be sure to also look for our author spotlights, and keep an ear out for our podcasts of “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman and “The Silence of the Asonu” by Ursula K. Le Guin, along with a resyndication of Drabblecast’s performance of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Observer.”

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.

In-fall
Ted Kosmatka

The disc caved a hole in the starshine.

Smooth, graphene skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum—black on black, the perfect absence of color.

It was both a ship and not a ship.

The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.

In truth, the disc was a projectile—a dark bolus of life-support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.

This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.

From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.” And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw.”

A black hole like none ever found before.

By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three hundred eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well—connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematicians called it a line.

The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.

Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.

Slowly at first, but gradually, on the fourth day, the ship that was not a ship changed course and began to fall.

The old man wiped blood from the young man’s face.

“Ulii ul quisall,” the young man said. Don’t touch me.

The old man nodded. “You speak Thusi,” he said. “I speak this, too.”

The young man leaned close and spat blood at the old man. “It is an abomination to hear you speak it.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed.

He wiped the blood from his cheek. “An abomination,” he said. “Perhaps this is true.”

He held out his hand for the young man to see. In his hand was a scalpel. “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.

Light gleamed off the scalpel’s edge. This time, it was the old man who leaned close. “I’m here to cut you.”

The old man placed the scalpel’s blade on the young man’s cheek, just beneath his left eye. The steel pressed a dimple into his pallid skin.

The young man’s expression didn’t change. He stared straight ahead, eyes like blue stone.

The old man considered him. “But it would be a kindness to cut you,” he continued. “I see that now.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thumb along the young man’s jaw, tracing the web of scar tissue. “You wouldn’t even feel it.”

The young man sat motionless in the chair, arms bound to the armrests by thick straps. He was probably still in his teens, the beginnings of a beard making patchy whorls on his cheek. He was little more than a boy, really.

He had probably once been beautiful, the old man judged. That explained the scars. The boy’s psychological profile must have shown a weakness for vanity.

Or perhaps the profiles didn’t matter anymore.

Perhaps they just scarred them all now.

The old man rubbed his eyes, feeling the anger slide out of him. He put the scalpel back on the tray with the other bright and gleaming instruments.

“Sleep,” he told the boy. “You will need it.”

And the universe ticked on.

“Where are we going?” the boy said, after several hours.

Whether he’d slept or not, the old man wasn’t sure, but at least he’d been silent.

The old man rose from his console on creaking knees. Acceleration accreted weight into the soles of his feet, allowing the simple pleasure of walking. He brought the boy water. “Drink,” he said, holding out the nozzle.

The boy eyed him suspiciously, but after a moment, took a long swallow.

“Where are we going?” he repeated.

The old man ignored him.

“They have already tried to interrogate me,” the boy said. “I told them nothing.”

“I know. If you told them what they wanted, you wouldn’t be here.”

“And so now they’re sending me someplace else? To try again?”

“Yes, someplace else, but not to try again.”

The boy was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “For that they have you.”

The old man smiled. “You are a smart one.”

Rage burned in the boy’s eyes, and pain beyond measuring. The earlier interrogations had been harsh. He pulled against his straps again, trying to jerk his arms free.

“Tell me where you are taking me!” he demanded.

The old man stared down at him. “You are scared,” he said. “I know what you are thinking. You want out of your restraints. You’re thinking that if you could get loose… oh, the things you would do to me.” The old man glanced toward the tray of gleaming steel. “You wish you could use that blade on me. You wish that you were in my shoes, that I was sitting where you are.

“But you don’t understand,” the old man said, then leaned forward again and whispered into the boy’s ear. “It is I who envy you.”

The ship hummed as it fell. Charged ions blasted carbon skin.

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

The boy repeated the question every few minutes.

Finally the old man walked to the console and pressed a button. The wall revealed a view screen, exposing deep space, the looming maw. “There,” the old man said. “We are going there.”

The black hole filled half the screen.

Abyss, if there ever was one.

The boy smiled. “You try to scare me with death? I don’t fear death.”

“I know,” the old man said.

“Death is my reward. In the afterlife, I will walk again with my father. I will tread the bones of my enemies. I will be seated at a place of honor with others who fell fighting for the side of God. Death will be a paradise for me.”

“You truly believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That is why I envy you.”

The boy was a mass murderer. Or a freedom fighter.

Or maybe just unfortunate.

The old man looked at the boy’s scars, noting the creative flourish that had been lavished on his face during previous interviews. Yes, unfortunate, certainly. Perhaps that above all.

Life in deep space is fragile. And humans are as they have always been.

Bombs though, are different.

In space, bombs can be much, much more effective.

If placed just right, a simple three pound bomb can destroy an entire colony. Open it to the sterilizing vacuum of the endless night. And ten thousand people dead—a whole community wiped clean in a single explosive decompression.

He’d seen that once, a long time ago, when this war first began. Seen the bodies floating frozen inside a ruptured hab, the only survivors a lucky few who scrambled into pressure suits. A lucky few like him.

Because of a three-pound bomb.

Multiply it by a hundred colonies and a dozen years. Three airless worlds. A fight over territory, culture, religion. The things man has always fought over.

Humans are as they have always been. In space though, the cost of zealotry is higher.

A thousand years ago, nations bankrupted themselves to raise armies. It cost a soldier to kill a soldier. Then came gunpowder, technology, increased population densities—gradually leveraging the cost of death along a sliding scale of labor and raw materials, until finally three pounds of basic chemistry had the power to erase whole swaths of society. Ever more effortless murder, the final statistical flat-line in the falling price of destruction.

“What is your name?” the old man asked him.

The boy didn’t answer.

“We need the names of the others.”

“I will tell you nothing.”

“That’s all we need, just the names. Nothing more. We can do the rest.”

The boy stayed silent.

They watched the viewscreen. The black hole grew. The expanding darkness compressed the surrounding star field. The old man checked his instruments.

“We’re traveling at half the speed of light,” he said. “We have two hours, our time, until we approach the Schwarzschild radius.”

“If you were going to kill me, there are easier ways than this.”

“Easier ways, yes.”

“I’m worth nothing to you dead.”

“Nor alive.”

The silence drew out between them.

“Do you know what a black hole is?” The old man asked. “What it is, really?”

The young man’s face was stone.

“It is a side-effect. It is a byproduct of the laws of the universe. You can’t have the universe as we know it and not have black holes. Scientists predicted them before they ever found one.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

The old man gestured toward the screen. “This is not just a black hole though, not really. But they predicted this, too.”

“Do you think you can frighten me with this game?”

“I’m not trying to frighten you.”

“It makes no sense to kill me like this. You’d be killing yourself. You must have a family.”

“I did. Two daughters.”

“You intend to change course.”

“No.”

“This ship has value. Even your life must be worth something, if not to yourself then at least to those whose orders you follow. Why sacrifice both a ship and a man in order to kill one enemy?”

“I was a mathematician before your war made soldiers of mathematicians. There are variables here that you don’t understand.” The old man pointed at the screen again. His voice went soft. “It is beautiful, is it not?”

The boy ignored him. “Or perhaps this ship has an escape pod,” the boy continued. “Perhaps you will be saved while I die. But you’d still be wasting a ship.”

“I cannot escape. The line that pulls us can’t be broken. Even now, the gravity draws us in. By the time we approach the Schwarzschild radius, we’ll be traveling at nearly the speed of light. We will share the same fate, you and I.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The old man shrugged. “You don’t have to believe. You have merely to witness.”

“This doesn’t make sense.”

“You think it has to?”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear more from a Godless tathuun.”

“Godless? Why do you assume I am Godless?”

“Because if you believed in God, you would not do this thing.”

“You are wrong,” the old man said. “I do believe in God.”

“Then you will receive judgment for your sins.”

“No,” he said. “I will not.”

Over the next several hours, the black hole swelled to fill the screen. The stars along its rim stretched and blurred, torturing the sky into a new configuration.

The boy sat in silence.

The old man checked his instruments. “We cross the Schwarzschild radius in six minutes.”

“Is that when we die?”

“Nothing so simple as that.”

“You talk in circles.”

The old mathematician picked up the scalpel. He touched his finger to the razor tip. “What happens after we cross that radius isn’t the opposite of existence, but its inverse.”

“What does that mean?”

“So now you ask the questions? Give me a name, and I’ll answer any question you like.”

“Why would I give you names? So they can find themselves in chairs like this?”

The old man shook his head. “You are stubborn, I can see that; so I will give you this for free. The Schwarzschild radius is the innermost orbit beyond which all things must fall inward—even communications signals. This is important to you for this reason: beyond the Schwarzschild radius, asking you questions will serve no purpose, because I will have no way to transmit the information. After that, you will be no use to me at all.”

“You’re saying we’ll still live once we pass it?”

“For most black holes, we’d be torn apart long before reaching it. But this is something special. Super-massive, and old as time. For something this size, the tidal forces are more dilute.”

The image on the screen shifted. The stars flowed in slow-motion as the circular patch of darkness spread. Blackness filled the entire lower portion of the screen.

“A black hole is a two dimensional object; there is no inside to enter, no line to cross, because nothing ever truly falls in. At the event horizon, the math of time and space trade positions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“To distant observers, infalling objects take an infinite period of time to cross the event horizon, simply becoming ever more redshifted as time passes.”

“More of your circles. Why are you doing this? Why not just kill me?”

“There are telescopes watching our descent. Recording the footage.”

“Why?”

“As warning.”

“Propaganda, you mean.”

“To show what will happen to others.”

“We aren’t afraid to die. Our reward is in the afterlife.”

The old man shook his head. “As our speed increases, time dilates. The cameras will show that we’ll never actually hit the black hole. We’ll never cross the threshold.”

The boy’s face showed confusion.

“You still don’t understand. The line isn’t where we die; it’s where time itself ceases to function—where the universe breaks, all matter and energy coming to a halt, frozen forever on that final mathematical boundary. You will never get your afterlife, not ever. Because you will never die.”

The boy’s face was blank for a moment, and then his eyes went wide.

“You don’t fear martyrdom,” the mathematician gestured to the viewscreen. “So perhaps this.”

The ship arced closer. Stars streamed around the looming wound in the starfield.

The old man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He touched the scalpel to the boy’s throat. “If you tell me the names, I’ll end this quickly, while you still have time. I need the names before we reach the horizon.”

“So this is what you offer?”

The old man nodded. “Death.”

“What did you do to deserve this mission?”

“I volunteered.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“I’ve been too long at this war. My conscience grows heavy.”

“But you said you believe in God. You’ll be giving up your afterlife, too.”

The old man smiled a last smile. “My afterlife would not be so pleasant as yours.”

“How do you know this is all true? What you said about time. How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the telescopic images. Previous missions spread out like pearls across the face of the event, trapped in their final asymptotic approach. They are there still. They will always be there.”

“But how do you know? Maybe it’s just some new propaganda. A lie. Maybe it doesn’t really work that way.”

“What matters is that this ship will be there for all to see, forever. A warning. Long after both our civilizations have come and gone, we will still be visible. Falling forever.”

“It could still be false.”

“But we are good at taking things on faith, you and I. Give me the names.”

“I can’t.”

The old man thought of his daughters. One dark-eyed. The other blue. Gone. Because of boys like this boy. But not this boy, he reminded himself.

The old man looked down at the figure in the chair. He might have been that boy, if circumstances were different. If he’d been raised the way the boy was raised. If he’d seen what he’d seen. The boy was just a pawn in this game.

As was he.

“What is death to those who take their next breath in paradise?” the old man asked. “Where is the sacrifice? But this…” and the old man gestured to the dark maw growing on the screen. “This will be true martyrdom. When you blow up innocents who don’t believe what you believe, this is what you’re taking away from them. Everything.”

The boy broke into quiet sobs.

The horizon approached, a graphic on the screen. One minute remaining.

“You can still tell me,

—there is still time.

—perhaps they are your friends, perhaps your family.

—do you think they’d protect you?

—they wouldn’t.

—we just need names.

—a few names, and this will all be over. I’ll end it for you before it’s too late.”

The boy closed his eyes. “I won’t.”

His daughters. Because of boys like this boy.

“Why?” the old man asked, honestly confused. “It does not benefit you. You get no paradise.”

The boy stayed silent.

“I take your heaven from you,” the old man said. “You will receive nothing.”

Silence.

“Your loyalty is foolish. Tell me one name, and I will end this.”

“I will not,” the boy said. There were tears on his cheeks.

The old mathematician sighed. He’d never expected this.

“I believe you,” he said, then slashed the boy’s throat.

A single motion, severing the carotid.

The boy’s eyes flashed wide in momentary surprise, then an emotion more complicated. He slumped forward in his bonds.

It was over.

The old man ran a palm over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “May it be what you want it to be,” he said.

He sat down on the floor against the growing gravity.

He stared at the screen as the darkness approached.

The mathematician in him was pleased. A balancing of the equation. “A soldier for a soldier.”

He thought of his daughters, one brown-eyed, the other blue. He tried to hold their faces in his mind, the final thought that he would think forever.

Not the reverse of existence, but its inverse.

And he waited to be right or wrong.

To be judged for his sins or not.

Ted Kosmatka is the author of numerous short stories and novelettes. His work has appeared in F&SF and Asimov’s, the anthology Seeds of Change, and has been reprinted in seven best-of-the-year anthologies, serialized over the radio, and translated into Hebrew, Russian, Polish, and Czech. He is a winner of the Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His first novel, The Helix Game, is forthcoming from Del Rey. Ted worked for most of the last decade in laboratories in Indiana but now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, where he writes science fiction video games for a living.

Author Spotlight: Ted Kosmatka
Erin Stocks

What gave you the idea of using the Schwarzschild radius, and the afterlife, as a bargaining chip?

I was reading about black holes and the way in which certain extreme environments seem to cause physics to break down into its constituent parts. Physics gets strange at the extreme edges. There are some good theories floating around about what happens inside black holes, with some theories more favored than others, but the truth is that they’re all we have right now, theories, because no one has ever crossed over and then come back to say what’s on the other side. In this way, black holes remind me a lot of death. Or as an ancillary to that, religion. I was thinking of black holes and religion when I came up with the idea.

You play with the loyalty of the reader in this story. We might feel sympathy for the young man at first, the tortured, zealous freedom fighter, but then the old man reveals he is a survivor of the community wiped out by the young man’s people. Did you create this dichotomy intentionally? Is there really a right or wrong side here?

There is a right and a wrong, I think, that exists independent of perspective. But still, most widely held positions are defendable on some level, even though they may ultimately be dead wrong. People do things for reasons; evil doesn’t exist in a vacuum for its own sake. I intentionally created the dichotomy in the story as a way to explore that idea in my own head.

The young man is faced with a martyrdom unlike any he expected—the hope of an afterlife will be removed if he doesn’t give the old man names, yet he doesn’t cave. Why do you think that is?

Because to him, in his twisted view of the world, what he’s done is right. But where is the sacrifice in a martyr who believes he’ll live eternally in paradise? I was trying to think about the idea of true martyrdom—the sacrifice of not just your life, but of the hope for an afterlife. How much are you willing to sacrifice for your beliefs?

Despite him holding out, the old man kills him anyway, although his superiors will surely see this through the cameras. It’s an act of mercy, and perhaps defiance, too, against those in charge. Do his choices here have anything to do with his daughters?

I think his choice does have something to do with his daughters. Beyond that, I do have my own ideas about his reasons, but the story belongs to the reader here.

The old man waits, at the end, to be frozen in time. Hypothetically, he’ll never find his judgment, yet he seems to have a fair amount of peace regarding his fate. Why is that?

All afterlives are not created equal. Beyond that, again, I’d rather defer to the reader.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about this story?

A thought just popped into my head. Like physics, maybe religions get strange at the extreme edges.

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 and Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Black Holes: Starving and Misunderstood
Pamela L. Gay

The lonely black hole.

It is, perhaps, the most misunderstood entity in all of astronomy.

The popular image of the black hole, fostered by books and movies, is of a giant, swirling maw vacuuming up space, sucking in everything far and wide as it dangerously marauds through the galaxy. The reality, however, is not quite that sinister.

In isolation, black holes are just overly dense bits of matter with, alas, no planet-eating superpowers. And the science fiction idea of using them to tunnel through space is, well, fiction. They can’t change the orbits of pulsars any more effectively than stars of the same mass. All they can do is sit there, emitting no light, and hope that maybe something passes by, just close enough, just by accident, and happens to fall into their gravitational gullets.

Black holes are so dense that their escape velocity is greater than light’s speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. Not even Superman can go fast enough to fly off of that. And anything can become a black hole if it’s made dense enough. An atom, a star, it’s all the same to physics. Make the volume of something—anything—small enough and it will become a black hole.

So consider, for instance, our own planet Earth. As it stands now, our world is a people hole. I, in all my athletic might, might try to jump to the stars. But at best I’ll make it three feet up (if I were a basketball player, which I’m not). I’d lift off at an amazing seven point six meters per second, but instantly, gravity would pull me back down, reducing my velocity to zero before a second had even passed. Bottom line: even if I jump as hard as I can, I will never escape Earth’s gravitational pull.

Now, Superman on the other hand, well, he has super powers. With his superhero legs he can lift off at speeds greater than a speeding bullet, an amazing eleven point two kilometers per second, over 1,000 times faster than me. Only an object with that amazing starting velocity (or that can constantly accelerate like, say, a rocket) can make it off the Earth. So Earth is a human hole, but supermen and Saturn rockets can escape because of their great initial velocity and their great engines respectively.

But even our mighty Earth, placed in a large enough interstellar trash compactor, could be compressed into a black hole.

Now, in the world of heavenly bodies, size does matter. Make our planet four times smaller, shrinking the radius to something a bit less than our Moon’s, and suddenly you’ll have to go twice as fast to get off Earth’s face. Shrink it again, 1,000 times smaller, reducing the radius to the size of a small town, and the escape velocity will magnify to 1,120 kilometers a second. Now, this is still a far cry from 300,000 kilometers per second, but if you just keep shrinking the volume, shrinking and shrinking the planet all the way down to just eighteen millimeters North Pole to South, you will eventually hit the point where the escape velocity from the surface of this new pea-sized Earth is the speed of light.

As an interesting side note, if this did happen, the Moon would just keep orbiting. This is because the Earth’s pull—even a pea-sized Earth’s pull—on the moon only depends on mass. In making the Earth into a black hole, all we changed was the radius. The Moon never has, and never will, care about the Earth’s size. So, conversely, if we grow fat with age (and global warming bloats out our oceans a bit around the middle), the Moon still won’t care.

And in the event that our Earth was to shrink to the radius of an Earth-massed black hole, it might actually eat less than it eats today. Every moment our planet sweeps up interplanetary dust as it orbits the Sun. Every day small pebbles burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. And every once in a while, boulders careen all the way to our planet’s surface. How much stuff we sweep up is determined in part by our size. Just like a janitor’s broom might clean an entire hallway is a single swipe, while a small hand broom will only sweep a small swath, so, too, a tiny black hole actually won’t sweep up as much stuff in space as a full-sized planet.

But most black holes aren’t so small.

In the wild, black holes form when giant stars die and collapse in on themselves. The smallest known black hole, unpoetically named XTE J1650-500, is just three point eight times the mass of our Sun and 10,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation Ata. This tiny real-universe black hole is just fifteen miles (twenty-five kilometers) in diameter, and is close enough to a companion star that it’s able to slowly grow by sucking matter off this sorely abused neighbor. This is an unusually lucky-to-be-feeding black hole. Most are not so lucky.

For instance, the largest black hole in the Milky Way sits swirled in the center of our galaxy. Coming in at three million times the mass of the Sun, this giant object has nothing to eat. It is literally starving. Stars orbit nearby, at distances not too different from the range of the Voyager space probe to the Sun. That’s about 120AU or seventeen light hours. Or, if you like your numbers really large, eighteen point four billion kilometers. And remarkably, those stars are safe just where they are. Yes, occasionally, like moths to a lamp, some random objects do plunge into the Milky Way’s center and get consumed, but this, unfortunately for the black hole, is rare.

Black holes do want to eat. They want to be that swirling maw of death we imagine gobbling up all the stars and planets and heavenly bodies in their way, filling their greedy, dense gullets like pigs at a trough. Their gravities pull and pull and pull all the time, trying to suck things in. But in our modern universe, black hole food is scarce and stars tend to orbit at safe and stable distances. Billions of years ago, when mighty Quasars ruled the heavens, food was more abundant and black holes fed more often as they sat lazy and full in the centers of many galaxies.

Today though, like some kind of cosmic parasite, most black holes are, sadly, starving and misunderstood.

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.

The Observer
Kristine Katheryn Rusch

And so we went in.

Combat formation, all five of us, me first, face masks on so tight that the edges of our eyes pulled, suits like a second skin. Weapons in both hands, back-ups attached to the wrists and forearms, flash-bangs on our hips.

No shielding, no vehicles, no nothing. Just us, dosed, altered, ready to go.

I wanted to rip something’s head off, and I did, the fury burning in me like lust. The weapons became tools—I wanted up close and I got it, fingers in eyes, fists around tentacles, poking, pulling, yanking—

They bled brown, like soda. Like coffee. Like weak tea.

And they screamed—or at least I think they did.

Or maybe that was just me.

The commanders pulled us out before we could turn on each other, gave us calming drugs, put us back in our chambers for sleep. But we couldn’t sleep.

The adrenaline didn’t stop.

Neither did the fury.

Monica banged her head against the wall until she crushed her own skull.

LaTrice shot up her entire chamber with a back-up she’d hidden between her legs. She took out two MPs and both team members in the chambers beside her before the commander filled the air with some kind of narcotic to wipe her out.

And me. I kept ripping and gouging and pulling and yanking until my fingertips were bone. By then, I hit the circuits inside the door and fried myself.

And woke up here, strapped down against a cold metal bed with no bedclothes. The walls are some kind of brushed steel. I can see my own reflection, blurry, pale-skinned, wild-eyed.

I don’t look like a woman, and I certainly don’t look like me.

And you well know, Doc, that if you unstrap me, I’ll kill the thing reflected in that brushed metal wall.

After I finish with you.

You ask how it feels, and you know you’ll get an answer because of that chip you put in my head.

I can feel it, you know, itching. If I close my eyes, I can picture it, like a gnat, floating in gray matter.

Free my hands and I’ll get it out myself.

Free my hands, and I’ll get us all out of here.

How does it feel?

By it, I assume you mean me. I assume you mean whatever’s left of me.

Here’s how it feels:

There are three parts to me now. The old, remembered part, which doesn’t have a voice. It stands back and watches, appalled, at everything that happens, everything I do.

I can see her too—that remembered part—gangly young woman with athletic prowess and no money. She stands behind the rest of us, wearing the same clothes she wore to the recruiter’s that day—pants with a permanent crease, her best blouse, long hair pulled away from her horsy face.

There are dreams in her eyes—or there were then. Now they’re cloudy, disillusioned, lost.

If you’d just given her the money, let her get the education first, she’d be an officer or an engineer or a goddamn tech soldier.

But you gave her that test—biological predisposition, aggression, sensitivity to certain hormones. You gave her the test, and found it wasn’t just the physical that had made her a good athlete.

It wasn’t just the physical.

It was the aggression, and the way that minute alterations enhanced it.

Aggression, a strong predisposition, and extreme sensitivity.

Which, after injections and genetic manipulation, turned her into us.

I’m the articulate one. I’m an observer too, someone who stores information, and can process it faster than the fastest computer. I’m supposed to govern the reflexes, but they gave me a blocker for that the minute I arrived back on ship, then made it permanent when they got me to base.

I can see, Doc; I can hear; I can even tell you what’s going on, and why.

I just can’t stop it, any more than you can.

I know I said three, and yet I didn’t mention the third. I couldn’t think of her, not and think of the Remembered One at the same time.

I’m not supposed to feel, Doc, yet the Remembered One, she makes me sad.

The third. Oh, yeah. The third.

She’s got control of the physical, but you know that. You see her every day. She’s the one who raises the arms, who clenches the bandaged and useless fingers, who kicks at the restraints holding the feet.

She’s the one who growls and makes it impossible for me to talk to you.

You know that, or you wouldn’t have used the chip.

An animal?

She’s not an animal. Animals create small societies. They have customs and instinctual habits. They live in prides or pods or tribes.

She’s a thing. Inarticulate. Violent. Useless.

And by giving her control of the physical, you made the rest of us useless, trapped inside, destined to watch until she works herself free.

If she decides to bash her head against the wall until she crushes her own skull or to rip through the steel, breaking every single bone she has, if she decides to impale herself on the bedframe, I’ll cheer her on.

Not just for me.

But for the Remembered One, the one with hopes and dreams and a future she squandered when she reached for the stars.

The one who got us here, and who can’t ever get us out.

So, you say I’m unusual. How nice for me. The ones who separate usually kill themselves before the MPs ever get into the chamber. The others, the ones who integrate with their thing, get reused.

You think that the women I trained with—the ones not in my unit, the ones who didn’t die when we got back—you think they’re still out there, fighting an enemy we don’t entirely understand.

I think you’re naïve.

But you’re preparing a study, something for the government so that they’ll know this experiment is failing. Not the chip-in-the-brain thing that allows you to communicate with me, but the girl soldiers, the footsoldiers, the grunts on the ground.

And if they listen (ha!) they’ll listen because of people like me.

Okay. I’ll buy into your pipe dreams.

Here’s what everyone on Earth believes:

We don’t even know their names. We can call them The Others, but that’s only for clarity purposes. There are names—Squids, ETs—but none of them seem to stick.

They have ships in much of the solar system, so we’re told, but we’re going to prevent them from getting the Moon. The Moon is the last bastion before they reach Earth.

That’s about it. No one cares, unless they have a kid up there, and even then, they don’t really care unless the kid is a grunt, like I was.

Only they don’t know the kid’s a grunt. Not until the kid comes home from a tour, if the kid comes home.

Here’s what I learned on our ship: Most of the guys never came home. That’s when the commanders started the hormonal/genetic thing, the thing that tapped into the maternal instinct. Apparently the female of the species has a ferocious need to protect her young.

It can be—it is—tapped, and in some of us, it’s powerful, and we become strong.

Mostly, though, no one gets near the ground. The battle is engaged in the blackness of space. It’s like the video games our grandparents used—which some say (and I never believed until now)—were used to train the kids for some kind of future war.

The kind we’re fighting now.

What I learned after a few tours, before I ever had to go to ground, was that ground troops, footsoldiers, rarely returned. They have specific missions, mostly clearing an area, and they do it, and they mostly die.

A lot of us died that day—what I can remember of it.

Mostly I remember the fingers and the eyes and the tentacles (yes, they’re real) and the pull of the face mask against my skin.

What I suspect is this: the troops the Others have on the ground aren’t the enemy. They’re some kind of captured race, footsoldiers just like us, fodder for the war machine. I think, if I concentrate real hard, I remember them working, putting chips places, implanting stuff in the ground—growing things?—I’m not entirely clear.

And I wonder if the talk of an invasion force is just that, talk, and if this isn’t something else, some kind of experiment in case we get into a real situation, something that’ll become bigger.

Because I don’t ever remember the Others fighting back.

If Squids can look surprised, these did.

All of them.

So that’s my theory for what good it’ll do.

There’s still girls dying up there. Women, I guess, creatures, footsoldiers, whatever they want to create.

Then we come back, and we become this: things.

Because we can’t ever be the Remembered Ones. Not again.

But you know that.

You’re studying as many of us as you can. That’s clear too.

I’m not even sure you are a doc. Maybe you’re a machine, getting these thoughts, processing them, using some modulated voice to ask the right questions, the ones that provoke these memories.

Since I’ve never seen you.

I never see anyone.

Except the ghosts of myself.

So what are you going to do with me? Reintegration isn’t possible; that’s been tried. (You think I don’t remember? How do you think the Remembered One and I split off in the first place? Once there was just her and the thing. Now there’s three of us, trapped in here—well, two trapped, and one growling, but you know what I mean.)

Sending us back won’t work. We might turn on our comrades. Or ourself. (Probably ourself.)

Sending us home is out of the question, even if we had a home. The Remembered One does, but she’s so far away, she’ll never reintegrate.

Let me tell you what I think you should do. I think you should remove the chip. Move me to a new location. Pretend you’ve never interviewed me.

Then you’d just be faced with the Thing.

And the Thing should be put out of its misery.

We should be put out of its misery.

Monica and LaTrice weren’t wrong, Doc. They were just crude. They used what methods they had at their disposal.

They were proactive.

I can’t be. You’ve got all three of us bound up here.

Let us go.

Send us back, all by ourselves. No team, no combat formation. Hell, not even any weapons.

Let us die.

It’s the only humane thing to do.

© 2008 by Kristine Katheryn Rusch
Originally appeared in Front Lines,
edited by Denise Little.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Hugo-award winning author Kristine Katheryn Rusch publishes fiction in many genres under many names. Her novels have appeared in fifteen countries, and her short stories have appeared in many year’s best collections. Once upon a time, she edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, but she gave all that up for writing. Over the next three years, WMG Publishing will put her entire backlist into print, including all of her short stories (in electronic form). For more information on her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathyrn Rusch
Erin Stocks

This story, while short, packs a horrific punch. Where did you get the idea?

A lot of what I write is about the horrors of war. I became a history major just after Vietnam to understand why humans went to war in the first place. I never really did figure that out, but it led to a lifelong obsession. This is a companion story to my tale, “Elites,” which I wrote just after I finished a mystery novel set in 1969 that dealt with Vietnam. (The novel is War at Home, which I published as Kris Nelscott.) “Elites” deals with PTSD. But I got to thinking about the women who couldn’t be rehabilitated. What happened to them in this future world? And with that, I came up with “The Observer.”

Why did the narrator, or rather, the Remembered One, sign up for these tests in the first place? Was it as simple as just recruiting for the armed forces, or did she have an idea of what might be at stake?

She had no idea what was at stake. I don’t think anyone does who hasn’t been to a real war. This war is extreme, of course. Even in non-extreme circumstances, though, the battlefield can break the toughest person. She signed up for the benefits, which of course, she cannot enjoy because of what has happened to her.

The maternal instinct, which we all know (and if we didn’t, we do now) is a strong, almost primal force of its own. Why do you think this instinct was extracted from the women, rather than (or with) the paternal in men?

Women never really get credit for the ferocity with which they protect their own. Women can be even more violent in those circumstances than any man. Societies throughout history have used male warriors, partly because they don’t lose time to pregnancy. Once birth control became common, the viability of female soldiers became possible. So I just extrapolated, thinking if I wanted the most ferocious warriors, I would use women protecting their young. Then this idea was born.

The narrator separates into three personalities, which doesn’t happen to all the women. Why do you suppose it happens to her? Something in her genetic, or even emotional, make-up?

I think it had to do with her emotional make-up. And probably her intellect.

If she’s right, and there’s not a war, what do you imagine is the purpose of the experiments and research?

There’s always a war, just not the one that we think we’re fighting. Besides, advanced cultures are always preparing for war. I think she’s part of the preparation.

There’s no way they’re going to give her what she wants, is there?

Sadly, no. That’s part of the horror in this story, I think. The futility of it all. (Which is probably why it’s so short. I can’t stay in this emotional mode as a writer very long.

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 on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Featured Interview: Greg Bear
John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley

Hugo and Nebula Award winning author, Greg Bear, has authored over forty books, including Quantico, Eon, Slant, Darwin’s Children, and The Forge of God. His latest novel is Hull Zero Three, and Halo: Cryptum—book one in the Forerunner Saga—is due out in January.

In his books, Bear frequently taps into the idea of “observance,” whether its aliens, computers, organisms, or us, doing the observing of someone or something else. He’s also credited with being one of the first authors to write about nanotechnology, in Blood Music. In the past, Bear has served on as an advisor for the Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, and many more.

This interview first appeared in io9’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Visit io9.com/tag/geeksguide to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

Tell us a little bit about your latest novel Hull Zero Three.

It’s kind of my take on a classic science fiction theme: the generation starship. I always loved those kind of books and on this one I decided to up the ante a little bit and make it a little more scientifically convincing about how we might actually travel between the stars. And how things also might go very, very wrong.

Tell us a little bit about the science that you put into the book.

Well, back in my college days in the late 1960s I had an astronomy professor who pointed out that to have a starship reach sufficient speed to get between the stars in any reasonable period of time, you’d have to have a mass ratio of reaction mass fuel to the mass of the starship that would just be impossible on the order of a billion or a trillion times. And then it occurred to me that there was one way to do that: go out to the Oort cloud and strap your starship to a giant ice moonlet out there, and slowly build it up with a somewhat sophisticated drive and use the entire moonlet for your fuel supply. So that’s what happens in Hull Zero Three. We actually have a three-part starship strapped to a giant ice moon.

Your recent novels Quantico and Mariposa are set in the very near future. How have real world events developed since you first thought up those books and what have been some similarities or differences between that and what you imagined?

I think both Quantico and Mariposa have turned out to be alarmingly spot on. I mean Quantico, which was finished back around 2004, postulated that the United States would be heading into a major economic downturn caused by spending without taxation and spending on wars without paying for them and all that sort of thing. Turns out that’s exactly where we are. As far as the religious wars go that I laid out in Quantico, we’re still there. We probably will be there for another thirty or forty years. In Mariposa, I wanted to write a more upbeat story at the same time I wanted to finish off the cycle that I began in Quantico, and also lead into the politics that I describe in earlier novels like Queen of Angels and Slant. In Slant, I had Green Idaho developing which was kind of a secessionist state in the northwest. It looks like we’re heading into that region now with states like Texas threatening to secede or at least hinting that they might like to.

What are some of the imaginary technologies used in those books?

In Quantico we had a lot of bio-threat analysis material equipment. We had what I called a WAGD, a Wright Assay Germ Detector which the users called the death stick because what you would do is you would rub it over a surface and it would pick up any of the pathogens that might be on that surface, analyze them, and report to you and tell you whether you needed to get the hell out of there or not. That’s pretty close to being used now. We also had a lot of networking equipment built into the glasses and the uniforms and so on, that FBI agents and other police officers would wear along with soldiers, of course. So they would be able to have a team of investigators networked and talking to each other, and also recording in eyeglass video what they’d be seeing so they could use it later for forensic evidence, or just to defend themselves against charges of any sort. That’s pretty much coming true now.

I just gave a talk this year about the possibility of a society being too closely observed where nobody can get away with anything. That becomes a little alarming because I think we do need to get away with a few things. It kind of acts as a lubricant on our society. To have your errors pointed out to you in endless detail could really be, I think...not a positive thing.

One of your other current projects is you’re collaborating with Neal Stephenson and others on an experimental fiction project called The Mongoliad. What’s that all about?

Mongoliad got started about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now. Neal is a passionate follower of swordplay and western martial arts and so he got a group of those together and we started practicing first with gentleman’s canes—it’s called Bartitsu, or the Barton-Wright School of Self-Defense. We found out that gentleman’s canes, even if they only have wooden tips, are a little too dangerous to mess around with so we decided to switch over to swords, another of Neal’s passions, and we’ve been practicing with swords, which moved us into the notion of writing a really accurate novel about the use of swords in history. And we looked all the way back from the 13th and 14th centuries, to 1241, and realized we actually have the beginning of an epic history novel dealing with the farthest western region of the Mongolian hoards to a Polish German town called Legnica in 1241. We would take that and send a group of valiant knights—basically knight-monks—and send them east to try to prevent further problems in Europe. And that’s the beginning of what’s probably the last great epic of European literature. That’s why they call it The Mongoliad.

Could you talk about the distribution of it? It’s being released through apps?

Yeah, we have an app now available on the iPhone. I believe our iPad app is coming shortly. We’re working on the Droid and Kindle apps. And you can read it on your computer right now. So for ten dollars a year, which is quite a bargain considering the length of text you’ll be getting, we deliver a subscription of a chapter every now and then to be read on your machine or eventually to be printed up and put into a book.

In addition to your writing, you’ve also served as a consultant for various government agencies. What can you tell us about your work doing that?

Up until 2008 I did a lot of work with a number of people, mostly with Homeland Security most recently, and that was great fun hanging out with them and finding out what’s going on with their protective technology. That’s a huge organization and the fact that it works at all is astonishing. I think they’ve had some major successes recently and of course they’ve undergone a lot of criticism and some of it’s justified. And of course when you’re doing something that difficult, a lot of people are involved and so you have a lot of possibilities of doing things wrong. But I think, overall, Homeland Security is one of the more fascinating experiments in government security recently, and to talk with them directly, and take notes and stick them into Quantico and Mariposa and everything was quite a privilege.

There was a time after 9/11 when government people were really, really concerned that they weren’t catching up on all the things that could happen, and so they brought writers in, screenwriters, science fiction writers, and had us discuss things with them. That became kind of a fairly standard gig for people who were able to think odd thoughts about security and about possible dangers. My consulting actually began back in the 1980s when I worked with the Citizens Advisory Council on national space policy, along with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and a large group of people including NASA administrators and astronauts and rocket scientists and generals and so on. We were discussing everything from what became known as the Star Wars defense to the privatization of space. One of our last meetings in the late 90s occurred with Dan Goldin, an administrator of NASA, in which he asked for our advice on how to grease the wheels of privatization of space. We’re seeing some of the results of that work now.

You’ve also just written a book set in a Halo universe. How did that come about?

My son introduced me to Halo games many, many years ago and I watched him play them and dipped into them myself a little bit—he’s much more expert than I was. So when Tor Books came to me and said would you like to write the Forerunners trilogy, the story of the origin of the Halo universe, of the forerunners who actually built the giant circular worlds known as halos, I said well, that would be interesting. I’ve got an expert in my house that can help me, and it’s also classic science fiction. I get to work not only with some of the best minds in gaming but with some of the ideas that emerge from or are inspired by classic science fiction novels.

One of your most popular books is Eon, and that’s one that I read as a teenager that really made a big impression on me. Can you talk a little bit about the response to that book and do you have any ideas about what made it so popular?

That was a difficult time. In the early 1980s, publishing was undergoing a real kind of turbulent period and so my career got started in the middle of all of that. Eon was passed around as sample chapters and an outline to a number of publishers. One publisher turned it down for political reasons, which I thought was interesting, a very conservative publisher. Later, he regretted that mightily. Another publisher had the possibility for a three book contract. They picked Blood Music and Infinity Concerto but let Eon go. Another major publisher, several major publishers, turned it all down and then finally Jim Frenkel at Bluejay Books picked it up, and they marketed it overseas in the U.K.

In the U.K., Malcolm Edwards and Anthony Cheetham were getting started with Century Hutchinson, which became Random Century. Anthony Cheetham was a fairly major publisher in the U.K. and he read this book on Malcolm Edward’s advice, and he said “Why, this is the Gone with the Wind of science fiction.” And lo and behold, he publicized the heck out of it in the United Kingdom and all of the territories. In South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and England, this book became a very, very substantial bestseller. That propelled more interest in the United States.

When Tor came out with the paperback edition of the book, they sold a lot of copies, which helped buy our house in Seattle and move us up here and from that point on it was a matter of, well, how do you manage all of this? Do I want to write Eon books for the rest of my life? Do I want to move off and do other things? And eventually it ended up it was an Eon trilogy beginning with Eon, of course, but also time-wise starting out with Legacy then moving on to Eternity following off from that. So those three books kind of wrap up the whole Thistledown Trilogy.

In your novel Forge of God, you presented one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. Could you tell us about that?

The planet scientists have recently said there could be billions of Earthlike worlds out there, based on their calculations and recent observations, and I agree with that. So very likely, it’s a very, very complex ecosystem out there in the galaxy. Years ago, talking with David Brin back in ‘82 and ‘83, I kind of argued with him about why we hadn’t been visited yet. And my thought was well, if you’re in a jungle and there’s dangerous creatures out there, you don’t want to make a lot of noise. So quite possibly we don’t hear other civilizations too much because they’re concerned about being picked up by dangerous von Neumann probes or whatever. When this finally came down to writing a story about it, I realized combining the notion of robot intelligences, of nasty ecological foundations and principles leading to the Forge of God, still the notion we have been cheeping like birds in a nest in a very dangerous jungle and there are snakes out there just waiting to come upon the nest and eat us up.

So how do you feel about SETI then? Do you think that it’s imprudent for us to be advertising our presence?

I think it’s something that should be part of a worldwide discussion. I don’t believe that small groups of nerds should be making these decisions by themselves. I think it’s highly unlikely that we’re actually dealing with an angelic universe where all of the people out there are like, you know, the radiant beings of Arthur Clarke or Close Encounters. But I think it should be part of a worldwide discussion, and I highly disapprove of sending high-powered messages of any sort out there at this point.

You’ve done some work with the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, right?

My wife and helped put it together. Astrid and I were on the first committee and became co chairs with Donna Shirley and worked with Vulcan Corporation to put together the advisory team and help design the museum, so yeah, we think it’s a very nice museum and some of the exhibits in there just bring tears to our eyes to this day. It’s just wonderful.

I heard that you’re expanding sort of into fantasy and horror as well.

Yeah, they’re working together a big horror exhibition, which should be fun. I’ve always been a fan of horror and H.P. Lovecraft and all of the different aspects of horror, including movies. And that’s a part of this, making the statement about pop culture being so prevalent. We should also, I think, ultimately get into the whole comic book area which, you know, the influence of people like Julius Schwarz in the 1950s and everything. If you go back to the origins of comic books, Siegel and Schuster were both science fiction fans and they both followed Superman as a science fiction character. And so a lot of that area of comic books and superheroes come out of the science fiction culture. I’d like to see that explored as well. But also, you know, H.P. Lovecraft, one of our great horror writers, thought of himself as a science fiction writer. He was he was very proud of selling to Astounding Stories. His combination of Edgar Alan Poe and Olaf Stapledon and all of those mixes of things makes for a really potent mythology.

You were talking about The Mongoliad earlier, which is sort of an e-publishing effort. What do you think about e-publishing in general and do you yourself use any sort of electronic reading device?

Oh yeah, I’ve got a Kindle. I have a thousand books on it now, and am really enjoying using that. I look forward to other devices so I can read art books and color magazines and so on, eventually. The iPad looks quite gorgeous. I think something like that will probably dominate the market. For pure reading, a Kindle, I think, is better than the iPad at this point. But as far as electronic books go, I warned people about these changes in the publishing industry starting back in the 1980s. In fact the HP device is called the Slate which is what I called my devices in Eon. So I don’t know how much they were influenced by that, it’s a reasonably obvious name, but that goes back to 1985. In 1992, I was giving talks in New Zealand and Seattle about the coming electronic book revolution and carrying mockups. Actually, I was carrying an HP calculator about the size of a Kindle today, and I used that as a model for what would be a reading unit in ten or fifteen years. And I wrote articles in the 90s, mid to late 90s, warning the publishing industry that not only were they facing challenges from video games from movies from TV shows, all of the expected challenges but that this revolution of electronic books would really start affecting the revenue streams. Only in the last year and a half or so has the New York publishing industry actually paid attention to electronic books, and now they’re the biggest growth area. I hope they are able to catch up in time because, of course, this has been going on for a very long time.

Reading over interviews with you, I came across repeated references to the author Nikos Kazantzakis. Could you talk about who he is and why he’s a favorite of yours?

Back in the 1960s I had a whole range of authors that I absolutely loved both for their philosophical angle, their writing skills, and their imagination. I compared Olaf Stapledon and Nikos Kazantzakis in one of my early college papers, which my professor flunked me on. But my feeling was that Nikos Kazantzakis was one of those visionary writers who could just knock your socks off. He was most famous for writing the novel Zorba the Greek, which was made into a motion picture in the 1960s. Zorba the Greek was wonderful, but Kazantzakis also did these amazing explorations of both local history for Crete, his homeland, and also Greece, for the world in general. He wrote a sequel for The Odyssey called The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel which actually sold quite well in the United States; it’s a monumental work, takes Odysseus on a whole new range of adventures, all done in epic poetry style.

He also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, which was also made into a very good film, directed by Martin Scorsese. An astonishing novel. It takes the notion that Jesus on the cross has a vision of what his life would have been like had he not taken the difficult path, had he taken the domestic path. There’s his semi-autobiography. All of these books by Kazantzakis written originally in Greek—and translated quite well into English, I think—had a huge influence on me when I was younger. To this day I still pick up Kazantzakis books and just thoroughly enjoy dipping into them and reading and remembering, you know, the greatness that he was capable of.

What sort of parallels did you draw between him and Olaf Stapledon?

He and Stapledon both kind of emerged out of the 19th century ferment of writers like Nietzsche. Olaf Stapedon was primarily a philosopher—that was his training. But he also wrote these amazing science fiction novels, among them the first one was a book called Last and First Men, a visionary spiritual vision, of eighteen different species of the human race over the next two billion years. So when that came in 1930, it knocked the socks off of everybody. I mean, we’re talking about in the 1930s; we have H.G. Wells, a few writers like John Taine, Aldous Huxley doing Brave New World, and then along comes Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men. It put the capstone on the reach of science fiction, what was just beginning to be called science fiction in 1930.

Later on he would top this by writing a book called Star Maker, which was a history of the entire universe. But he also did more intimate novels like Odd Job the story of a superhuman intellect trying to survive in a more normal human species and then almost philosophical books like A Man Divided, kind of a biographical examination of dealing with the fact that most of your life you’re stuck in a kind of dead zone of intellectual capacity and spiritual capacity. What if suddenly something would happen that would lift you up to a higher level but you could function at full capacity? All of these ideas tie in, in my mind, to the searching notions of people like Kazantzakis and this giant quest coming out of the 20th century: who are we, what are we going to become, and how are we going to deal with it? And science fiction became a major part of that in the ‘40s and ‘50s and they were highly influenced by Olaf Stapledon.

Who are some of the lesser-known science fiction authors that you think deserve greater recognition?

There’s a lot of European writers that don’t get published very often in America. I’d like to see more of them be brought over here. And I think with the electronic books revolution that might happen more often. I was in Leipzig, Germany recently at a small convention called Elstercon, and I got to hang out with a lovely bunch of bunch of German writers, and most European writers just don’t get published over here. It’s very rare to have someone like Stanislaw Lem come along and get published well here. I was able to dine with the Strugatsky brothers in the 1980s along with Doris Lessing who later went on to win the Noble Prize, and that was a delightful evening. As far as new writers go, my son, Eric Bear has an original comic book series coming out next year called Hope Scouts.

Speaking of Doris Lessing, I saw that she praised you very highly.

Yes, I was quite pleased by that. She actually read my books after meeting in Brighton in 1987 and gave me some very, very nice words I can quote. And then, happily for her she went on to win the Nobel Prize! And, you know, she may be one of the first self-described science fiction writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize. She was actually one of the Guest of Honors in Brighton for the World Science Fiction Convention. The Golden Notebook and The Four Gated City were both somewhat science fiction, but it was her Shikasta series that she explored Stapledonian visions, mixing them along with biblical visions, which made an interesting mix.

Are there any other recent or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

I think the people need to take a look at Hull Zero Three. Physical copies are now in the publisher’s office. I’m looking forward to seeing them—a starred review in Publishers Weekly which is quite, quite a pleasure. Lots of good early reader response on that one. Then we have coming out in a few days in fact a paperback of Mariposa, which, I think, is going to be very interesting to see how science fiction writers bridge the gap between science fiction of twenty years ago and techno-thrillers of today. The transition between artificial intelligence that leads to books like Moving Mars, and so on, begins in Mariposa. We have The Mongoliad which is ongoing, you can get it now; subscribe and dip in and watch our videos and send comments and help contribute to our universe. We’ve got thousands of people actually contributing to the wiki that we’ve created on the site, and that’s going to be growing and growing.

Eventually we’re going to be expanding it into an electronic game. January 4th we’ve got Cryptum, the first Halo novel, and so anyone who’s a Halo fan is going to enjoy the collaboration between the people in [Microsoft’s] 343 [division]—Frank O’Connor and Kevin Grace—and myself and my son Eric who consulted on this, in addition to a lot of other key people, artists and creators at 343 to help construct the origin stories, not just of the forerunners but—as it turns out—human beings as well.

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, 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, The Way of the Wizard, 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 joining Lightspeed and Fantasy, 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.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers, and is the other co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in New York.

Jenny’s Sick
David Tallerman

It’s a cold day in February, and Jenny’s sick again.

I ask what it is this time and she just looks at me with ghastly eyes, staring out from over swollen, purpling flesh. She’s sitting bolt upright, propped by pillows, and there’s so much sweat everywhere that it’s like condensation in a steam room. I’ve seen her look bad before but never quite this bad. Where did she get this shit? How long is it going to last this time?

I can’t be the one to deal with this. We’ve been living together for maybe two years; we started sleeping together and ended friends, but mainly we just hit it off, and sharing a place seemed a good idea. I thought we had things in common then, that maybe we were going the same places. But I’m looking to finish studying as soon as possible, to carve out a career, and I have no idea what Jenny wants.

Maybe she just wants to die.

I think it was about a year ago she got into this, though you never know, do you? People are like oceans, the powerful stuff moves deep down and you almost never see it. So perhaps there was always something there, just waiting for an outlet.

Either way, it’s about a year ago that I find out. There’s a campus bulletin going around over a new drug, the usual about watching for strange behavior in our fellow students: absenteeism, mood swings, that kind of thing. I figure it’s the same old government stuff, rooting for subversives and trouble-makers. There’s always some new drug or faction or threat, and the next week you’ll hear that the campus police have been out, then maybe there’s a face missing in your next lecture. If you keep your nose clean and stay in the right groups it isn’t that big a deal.

So there’s buzz about this drug, without any real details. I don’t think anything of it until I get in one evening and there’s this noise coming from Jenny’s room, like nothing I’ve heard. Though a couple of months later it will be all too familiar, this first time I don’t know what to think. I mean, I’ve heard coughing before. But this isn’t clearing-your-throat coughing; this is a cruel, hacking bout that goes on for two full minutes, while I stand in the hallway, not sure what I’m hearing.

By the time I knock on her door it’s started again. When I open it the cough is shaking right through her, throwing her about like a rag doll. I don’t know what to do, whether I should try and help, so I just stand watching and for a while she doesn’t seem to know I’m there. Then finally there’s a break, and she looks up. “I’m sick,” she tells me. She says it with a weird grin, like she’s challenging me.

“What do you mean? Nobody gets sick. There’s nothing left to get sick with.”

Instead of answering, she holds up a small plastic bottle. Somebody has written the word CHOKE across it in blue permanent marker. I can see one small green and white capsule rattling around inside.

“What the hell is that?” She only grins at me again, then starts on another fit of coughing.

I find out later that this first time, it’s influenza. She spends two days with it, wrapped fetal in bed, skin like wet flour, choking until near the end I can see blood mixed with the filth she’s bringing up.

Then, abruptly, it goes away. It always does. I figure out eventually that the second capsule, the green one, is the cure. She takes it and an hour later she’s well. Except each time she goes a little longer without taking the green pill: One hour, five hours, a day.

After that, we don’t talk about it, and I guess we drift apart pretty quickly. Jenny’s out a lot, she doesn’t bother to make classes or lectures, and I know there’s a crowd she hangs out with but I don’t see them. Mainly I’m worried that she’ll get caught and that somehow they’ll blame me as well. I study harder, as though that will make up for her absences, I will the days away, and I feel scared. As much as I like Jenny, I like the thought of my future more.

Maybe I should try and talk to her about it, but we don’t talk about anything very much. When I do see her, it’s because she’s sick, too sick to go out. I don’t know what she tells the campus authorities each time. I don’t know where the pills come from. All I know is every month there’s a new bottle with a name written on it, like PUKE or BURN, in the same messy blue highlighter.

As much as I try to keep away from it, and from Jenny, it’s more and more a part of my life, a dirty secret I can’t help but hide. After a few months I start downloading old medical texts from the library’s archive. I figure maybe PUKE is gastroenteritis, but I’m majoring in Information Analysis not Science History; a lot of what’s in those books goes way over my head, and it’s not like I can ask anybody.

I wonder if I should try to help, to look after her somehow, but I’m too scared. Deep down, there’s a part of me that’s so damn afraid that one day she’ll decide not to take the green pill. I’ll come in to find her cold and still, and when the police find out what happened, that will be my life over too.

Christmas comes and goes, and I’m glad of the break and to be with my folks for a few weeks, except that Jenny and her weird obsession have got into my head and my parents’ healthiness seems strange somehow: their perfect skin, their smiles, and their peace of mind. Having Jenny in my life is damaging me, but I only recognize it properly in that gap, in the exposure to normality and discovering how alien it seems.

When I get back to the flat I’ve already made my mind up that I have to move out. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it sooner. Almost a year’s gone by and it never crossed my mind that I could just leave.

When I see Jenny I realize why. There’s something so frail about her, even when she’s not sick, a depth in her eyes that breaks my heart. I don’t even know if she likes me anymore—maybe she hates me—yet suddenly all I can think about is the touch of her skin those times we slept together, the smell of her sweat mixed with the scent of her hair.

“I’m going to look for somewhere else to live.”

She looks surprised, if only for a second. “Sure. This place is kind of cramped. I can manage on my own.”

I choose to think that she means financially, but I’m not sure. I don’t mention the sickness. I hope she will, but I know she’s not going to. The way she is now, all of that is something that happens to another person. Right now, she seems so damn normal; except for that look in her eyes, that sense of unfathomable depth. “That’s what I figured,” I say, “I figured you could manage.”

By February, I’ve found a place—a couple of guys with a spare room—and I’m living midway between the two flats while I shift the last of my things. I don’t know why I’m not hurrying more. I could have been moved two weeks ago. Instead I drag my heels, take over a box every couple of days, and tell myself it’s easier this way.

Then I come in and hear the coughing, not like the first time but slow, drawn-out, more of a dry wheeze. I go in and it’s the worst I’ve seen her. She looks hollow, like a discarded shell, and more than anything she reminds me of these old porcelain dolls my grandmother used to keep: skin white, except where age had yellowed it, with black eyes that didn’t look even remotely human.

“What is it this time?”

No answer, just a stare, and a half-smile through flaking lips.

I go out and load up the trolley that I’ve borrowed with my last four boxes. I don’t even say goodbye.

The next time I run into Jenny is two years later. I just happen to take a certain corner on a certain street and there she is.

I can tell right away that she’s dying. I’ve never seen anyone die, not for real, but it’s some kind of instinct in my gut that tells me because suddenly I want to run away, to be anywhere else.

Instead, I make small-talk. It’s very small because there’s so damn much I know we can’t talk about. Jenny was my friend and for a while something more. And I walked away, for two years I’ve kept her out of my mind. “How are you doing?” I ask. It feels like about the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.

But she nods and smiles, and says, “I’m okay, you know? I feel pretty good.”

She doesn’t look good. I think about suggesting we go for a coffee, but I know she always hated those places. She called them “obscenely clean,” and there was only one bar she’d ever drink in, a place that had dropped so far off the map that the Hygiene Inspectorate didn’t know it existed. “What are you doing now? How did uni go?” What I mean is: Did you drop out? Did they catch you?

Jenny dodges the question, with all its implications. “Yeah, I’m getting by. And you, how are you?”

“I finished with a pretty good grade. Serious data dissection work is hard to come by but I’ve got a couple of interviews coming up, it’s looking promising. It’s pretty tight these days, I guess, but I’m hopeful.” Why do I feel guilty saying this? I’m not the screw-up here. I’m not the disease junky.

“Yeah? Well, that’s good.” She tries to sound like she means it. I feel as if we’re on different planets, separated by a million miles. All I can think is how I want to be somewhere else, and maybe that’s why I say what I do. “Jenny, you look really fucking sick.” It’s out of my mouth before I know it.

But she’s not even fazed. “Yeah?” She smiles. “Oh, yeah: I’m dying.”

This time, I don’t even try and make an excuse. I turn and walk away, and the closest I come to apologizing is that I try not to run.

That night I dream about Jenny, cold and blue and somehow happy, grinning up at me from some deep dark place with a rictus smile cut over her lips. The dream hangs beside me all the next day, like smoke in the air, and I feel like I’m caught in Jenny’s gravity, like I’m plummeting.

But it’s a week on from that chance meeting in the street, just when I’ve almost managed to forget, that my phone rings. I don’t recognize the name or face, except that she looks familiar somehow. For a moment I get that same gut feeling, that urge to run. I pick up anyway. “Hello. Can I help you?”

“My name is Linda Ulek. I’m sorry to intrude on your time, but it’s very important, and there really isn’t anybody else.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” Then I remember where I’ve heard the name Ulek before. “You’re Jenny’s mother.”

I met her once. Jenny’s parents came to the flat and looked uncomfortable and left as quickly as they could. Jenny told me once that they were both high up in some obscure branch of the government. That explains how she got hold of my private number.

“As I say, I’m sorry to intrude, but Jenny doesn’t have any friends that we know of and we remembered your name, and that the two of you lived together, and were close at one point. Of course we’d like to go ourselves, of course we would, but we’re in Rome this month and we have commitments. And the doctors are adamant that somebody who knows her should be with her—”

“I’m sorry; I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Jenny’s in hospital,” she says. “She’s very sick and the doctors have asked us to visit her, as part of her treatment. As I say, we can’t do that. We thought that perhaps you could.”

I didn’t know there were any hospitals left. In a world with a cure for everything, I figured the common hospital was as extinct as the common cold. Whatever I’m expecting, the Rondelle Panacea Clinic isn’t it. It’s just another nondescript building, a few klicks out of the city, like the office I work in or the flats I live in. I press the buzzer beside the doors, and a few moments later a young woman in a white suit appears. When I tell her who I am she says, “You’re here for Jenny Ulek,” and ushers me inside.

The woman, who gives her name as Doctor Meier, leads me through blank-walled corridors, into a small office, and offers me a seat. It occurs to me that Jenny must hate this place, that in fact it’s everything she despises. White walls, white furniture, white people in white suits. If somebody had to design a personal hell for Jenny it would look a lot like this.

Doctor Meier sits opposite me and says, “It was good of you to come.”

I nod. There’s no point telling her how close I came to saying no.

“You’re aware of Jenny’s case history?”

“Some of it. We lived together for a while. I know she likes to get sick.”

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but in essence, yes, Jenny takes a certain gratification from physical illness. Recently Jenny has introduced a disease into her system that, left untreated, will be terminal within the next two months.” She pauses for just a moment, to let that sink in. “We could cure it, of course, completely eradicate it. Or we could use more outmoded techniques to keep it in check.”

“Why would you do that?”

Doctor Meier has clearly prepared her answer. She looks the type to have prepared an answer for anything I could hope to ask. “Because if we were to let Jenny out into the world tomorrow she would immediately find a way to infect herself again, with the same disease or perhaps with something worse. Put bluntly, the condition we need to treat in this case—if Jenny is to survive in any meaningful way—is not the physical one.”

I nod again. Sure, I get that. From these peoples’ point of view, Jenny is crazy. I guess if I’d thought about it I would have come to the same conclusion, but somehow it never occurred to me. “So, what’s the alternative?”

“There are two options. The first, perhaps the easiest in many ways, will involve gene therapy, some alteration of memories, intrusive brain surgery. Put bluntly, we would correct Jenny’s personality to a degree where she can function safely in society. It sounds, perhaps, more drastic than it is. But at the end of it Jenny will, obviously, not be quite the same person she is now.”

Damn right it sounds drastic. “There’s another option?”

“There is. It’s slower, and there are no guarantees, but we have excellent psychologists on staff, and similar cases have been treated with a high degree of success.”

I know that there’s going to be a “but,” it’s written all over her face.

“While there’s a good chance that Ms. Ulek can become well with sufficient help and support, it will take more than the kindness of strangers. What she will need is someone she knows, someone who knows her, who will devote time and—”

“No.”

“If you’ll just let me explain—”

“No, I can’t do that. I have a career, I have my life.” Suddenly, my heart has sunk right down into the pit of my stomach. “I haven’t seen Jenny in years, I don’t think I mean anything to her at all, and I can’t possibly do that.” Listening to my own voice, I know that what I’m saying is true, and yet at the same time I know it’s not the truth. But what would be? That I couldn’t say.

“We’d only ask that you spend some time considering it.”

“Sure, I will. I’ll consider it, and then the answer is still going to be no. It’s just not something I can do.”

Doctor Meier nods. She stands up and moves towards the door. I can tell she’s bluffing, that she hasn’t quite given up yet. “We’ll call you in a few days, when you’ve had time to consider.”

I guess I know myself better than Doctor Meier does, because when she calls three days later the answer hasn’t changed. I didn’t make Jenny sick. I didn’t make her want to be sick. I have another interview coming up, and I can’t be asked to abandon that for someone I barely know. But I don’t tell her that. I don’t have to explain myself.

Only, the nightmares keep coming. In some way, a way I don’t much like, it seems that Jenny is still a part of me. I find myself remembering, more and more, those months we lived together. Jenny has become a ghost, and I don’t know if I can escape her.

A week after my visit I phone the hospital. I don’t recognize the doctor who answers so I have to explain who I am, the whole situation, before I can finally get to saying it: “I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to help.”

This new doctor, male and middle-aged, looks away from me for a moment. When he looks back he says, very flatly, “Ms. Ulek’s procedure was completed yesterday morning. She’s due to be released at the end of the week, but perhaps you could visit her in the meantime. I’m sure she would appreciate the company.”

I don’t kid myself that I go for Jenny’s sake.

Doctor Meier meets me at the door, and she’s all smiles: “The procedure went well,” she says, “we’re very optimistic.”

She leads me through corridors again, presumably in a different direction this time, but it’s all so indistinguishable that I honestly can’t tell. Either way, we wind up at a particular door and she steps back and says, “I’ll let you go in on your own. I’ll wait here until you’re finished.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Take as long as you need.”

I won’t be long. I don’t need long. I’m only here to say goodbye.

I push through the door and the room on the other side is a lot like the corridor, only wider. Jenny is propped up in bed, with some glossy magazine spread over her knees. When she hears the door, she glances up and looks confused for just an instant, then turns her puzzled look into a smile and says, “Hi there. You’ve come to see me.”

“Jenny. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m great. They cured me. They found a cure.”

If she’s telling the truth then it’s strange, because I’ve never seen her look this bad. I can’t put my finger on why, because she seems as healthy as I’ve ever known anybody to be, not only not sick but radiant with health. For some reason I find myself remembering again those porcelain dolls of my grandmother’s, with their white skin, their black eyes, all of their flawed perfection.

For the first time, I think I understand Jenny. Not this Jenny sitting in front of me, with her neatly-styled hair and her faultless smile, but the Jenny I cared about all those years ago. Suddenly I want to feel sickness writhing in my gut; I want decay and impurity, and fever burning under my skin. More than anything I want to know I’m alive. It occurs to me that this place, this clinic, was never designed for living things to inhabit.

I look at the pristine walls, dizzyingly white like the face of the sun. “Shit,” I say, “it’s all so ugly.”

Jenny only smiles back at me, uncomprehending. “It’s kind of boring, isn’t it? They’ve taken good care of me, though.”

“Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad to hear that.” I cough and scuff my feet, no longer sure how to say what I came to say. Then I realize it’s really very simple. “Listen, I had an interview a couple of days ago, and, well—I have a job. They’re flying me out to Portugal next week, and I really just came by to see how you were and to say goodbye.”

“That’s great. It’s what you always wanted.”

It is, isn’t it? Suddenly I’m not so sure anymore. Still, I’ve done what I came for. Not knowing what to do next, I lean over and kiss Jenny on the cheek. Her skin is astonishingly smooth. My stomach revolts, just for an instant.

“Goodbye,” I say again, and she smiles and waves back as I walk out the door.

Outside, I pause to lean against the wall. My thoughts are a whirlpool, and my breath comes in shudders. “Goodbye, Jenny,” I whisper, one final time. It’s not meant for the stranger in the room beyond, but for that impossibly fragile girl I walked away from. Probably I’m the only one who knows to grieve her passing, but a whispered farewell is all the mourning I can offer. Because I can’t carry her in my head anymore.

I’ve got what I wanted; has Jenny as well? She’s gone through health and found something beyond, something as virulent as any disease. She’s annihilated herself as certainly as any suicide.

I wonder if the doctors realize how she tricked them.

David Tallerman is the author of around a hundred short stories, numerous poems, reviews, comic scripts, and at least one novel. His stories have appeared in a variety of publications, such as Chiaroscuro, Space and Time, Flash Fiction Online, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Pseudopod. He’s also sold work to Aoife’s Kiss, the anthologies The Living Dead (edited by John Joseph Adams) and Barren Worlds, and the British comic Futurequake. He is a graduate of York University, where he specialized in the literary history of witchcraft.

Author Spotlight: David Tallerman
Erin Stocks

What gave you the idea of a world where people aren’t allowed to die? And in that particular world, what did Jenny find so unappealing?

The story began with Jenny and her peculiar addiction, and the world grew out from there. For Jenny’s situation to be unusual, it made sense that she’d live in a culture that was actively hostile towards it.

However, I wouldn’t say that people aren’t allowed to die, exactly. Death is heavily discouraged, just as it is in our own culture. This society has eradicated illness, and most people, of course, see that as a good thing. But the more you fix things, the more you have to watch to make sure they don’t start falling apart again, and so a great deal of energy goes into protecting against a return to what, again, most people perceive as the bad old days. Inevitably, that’s cost a few freedoms, created a few new hardships.

Partly Jenny is rebelling against that, the sterility of a world kept spotlessly clean. But it’s important to remember that Jenny is an addict, and it’s that more than anything that motivates her actions. I guess that one of the story’s themes is how anything can be addictive, even—or rather, especially—things that damage us.

The narrator seems to feel more indifference for Jenny than anything else, at first. Do you think he might have had more patience and understanding with her addiction, and/or condition, had he had loved her more?

I think the narrator is actually very fond of Jenny, though he’s perhaps too emotionally cut off to understand it himself. But by the time we meet them, what he perceived as a casual relationship has taken this whole new turn, and he simply isn’t invested enough to go the extra distance. Not only does he not understand why Jenny’s doing what she’s doing, he’s terrified that she’ll bring trouble down on him.

In fairness, though, I suspect most people would react in a similar way, and I don’t know if patience, understanding, or even love could have turned Jenny away from the course she chooses.

Despite the fact that he doesn’t want anything to do with her being sick—it’s taboo—he finds himself looking up more information on the matter. What intrigues him so much, and why?

For that matter, why doesn’t he just walk away in the first instance, or try and force help on Jenny? His feelings are more complex than he dares to admit. Again, it’s partly an addiction thing. The narrator is telling himself that he wants a certain lifestyle, but there’s a definite lure to what Jenny offers—danger, non-conformity, and as you say, something extremely taboo.

In a way, they’re two very similar characters undergoing a parallel experience. Jenny’s addicted to her sickness and the narrator is addicted to Jenny—at least as long as she’s sick.

Doctor Meier goes over options available for Jenny, and what’s not included on the list is letting Jenny die, which seems to be what she wants. Why has this society removed that as an option?

For the same reason ours has, I suppose. I guess the logic is that suicide is an irrational impulse, ergo anyone who’s suicidal is irrational and shouldn’t get to decide whether or not they stay alive. I’ve always been fascinated and a little bewildered by the fact that until the 1960s you could be legally prosecuted in the UK for trying to kill yourself. To some extent, “Jenny’s Sick” is that taken to an extreme.

Then again, Jenny isn’t suicidal at the beginning of the story. She has the option not the take the green pill, but she always does. So Doctor Meier may be right in seeing her will to die as another symptom of her sickness. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this one!

Our narrator struggles with knowing what to do for Jenny: does he let her go through gene therapy, or does he stay by her side through rehabilitation. Although he immediately agrees to the former, why do you think he struggles inwardly with his decision?

It’s important to remember that “Jenny’s Sick” takes place over a number of years. Imagine being called upon to take care of someone you’d been intimate with, say, three years ago, it’s certainly not something you’d rush into. Also, throughout the story, the narrator is wrestling with his own fears. Another aspect of the society in “Jenny’s Sick” is that good, well-paid work is extremely scarce. The narrator is astute enough to realise that if he doesn’t intervene, the results for Jenny could be catastrophic; he knows, if perhaps not consciously, what Jenny’s “cure” will involve. But taking the time to help her, and thereby missing a rare job opportunity could be almost as disastrous for him.

In a way, Jenny achieved the death she wanted in the first place. Do you think she hoped for that all along?

That was definitely how I felt when I wrote the story. Now, I’m less sure. Coming back to “Jenny’s Sick” after a few month’s absence, I wonder how much we can trust our narrator here. Is he perhaps too interested in wrapping up his own part of the tale? If Jenny was really cured, could he justify walking away the way he does? Jenny is profoundly damaged, in conflict with her society and herself, and she has an addiction that she can’t control, which escalates as the story progresses. People don’t get hooked on hard drugs because they want to die, and yet many, many people die from drugs.

Okay, I’m going to come right out and actually answer one of these questions! No, I don’t think Jenny wanted to die all along. I’m not even convinced that she’s destroyed herself by the story’s end.

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 on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Five Upcoming Plagues (We’re Doomed)
Genevieve Valentine

Every contemporary civilization looks at the medical practices of ages past and marvels at how far they’ve come since those dark days. 15th-century Venetian plague doctors mocked the medieval idea of illness as possession by the Devil as they slipped on the bird masks that would repel the “evil smell” of The Plague. Victorians, in turn, laughed at the use of those bitchin’ bird masks to protect from the Black Death even as they prepared to amputate limbs with surgical instruments that couldn’t slice a tomato. No matter what era you may be living in, your medical forbears all seem somehow both quaint and terrifying in comparison to the shiny medical advances of your time.

Of course, now we’re living in an era of face transplants, flu vaccines, and bionic lungs, and can develop a cure for bird flu practically in real time; so...we’re in the clear, right?

You wish.

We may seem like we know what we’re up to, but in reality, whenever you do something as seemingly innocent as buy grocery-store chicken cutlets or knock back another round of antibiotics left over from the last time you had strep, you’re actually contributing to the rise of superbugs and other pandemics that will devastate future populations and make our current world health practices look like one long biological suicide attempt. (Oops.)

With that in mind, below please find five pandemics your descendants will probably have to live with—if they live, that is.

(Chances are not good.)

1. Botulism

It’s a sweet irony of our time that our celebrities, contractually mandated to look twenty-seven forever or be mocked on the cover of US Weekly, are being kept beautiful by discreet, carefully-placed injections of Botox, a highly neurotoxic (and really grody) disease. And when those injections go horribly wrong (and they will), we’ll at least have the comfort of knowing that we brought it on ourselves.

Though the botulism toxin is currently considered a relatively rare disease, the botulism bacterium (Clostridium botulinum) has all the positioning to become a serious threat. It has multiple transfer mediums: it’s found in soil, improperly raised livestock and fermented raw foods, it can easily colonize open wounds, and it tends to attack infants. And while different variations currently affect livestock and humans, a rise in global antibiotic resistance means that it has potential to go cross-species—and that’s when we really get in trouble.

Even the inert spores are dangerous; while the botulism toxin can be cooked out of food, the spore itself survives long past the toxin’s kill-point, and can produce the toxin just as effectively later. And once the toxin has taken effect, it’s difficult to treat.

Now, oddly, even this is not a long enough list of dangers to keep people from injecting it right into their faces, which will make a bad situation worse when the pandemic does come; we’ll be all out of actors who could make breezy romantic comedies to take our minds off it.

2. The Plague

What, that old thing?

The Black Plague, which ravaged Europe and Central Asia in the Middle Ages (peaking between 1347 and 1351), is generally considered to have been an outbreak of bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis). And though we tend to think of it as a past evil, chances are we probably haven’t seen the last of it.

Now, bubonic plague, on the surface, is less scary than many other superbugs that loom on the horizon. It can be effectively treated with existing antibiotics, for one thing. And the most conventional way it spreads is so disgustingly specific as to seem out of the realm of possibility for many. (The main cause of initial contagion in the Middle Ages was flea barf: infected fleas exhibit starvation behavior by biting humans, being unable to swallow the blood, and vomiting the blood—and the disease—back into the open wound. Bon appétit!)

However, there was a perfect storm of factors making the severity and spread of the disease possible then. A widespread crop shortage meant malnourished populations were more susceptible to illness; the rise of insects in increasingly-crowded areas provided ready carriers; and the ability of Yersinia pestis to manifest as pneumonic (lung-based) plague meant that it could be spread quite easily among people. The elimination of any one of these factors would mitigate the impact of any outbreak. Of course, do you really want to bet the farm (much less your life) on that?

It may seem like a far-away worry, but cases are already appearing again worldwide, and given recent global trends of overcrowding, food shortages, and insect infestations, the next perfect storm could already be brewing. The best way to keep yourself safe in this worst-case scenario is 1) avoid cities, 2) grow your own food and 3) start stockpiling the Frontline.

Cause, let’s face it, the nastiest part of this little bacterial blight has got to be the flea barf.

3. MRSA

Remember how we talked about you tossing back antibiotics at the first hint of illness? Well, thanks to you and a billion other knuckleheads, the antibiotic-resistant staph infection MRSA is what we’ve got.

MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is just one of a stable of antibiotic-resistant diseases that has risen in genetic response to our culture’s often-irresponsible and unnecessary use of antibiotics, as those bacteria who survive these rounds of antibiotics breed and become increasingly harder to kill. However, MRSA is the most prevalent of the super-strains, transfers easily via respiration (and even occasionally with skin contact), and if not treated within the first forty-eight hours can easily become necrotic, flesh-eating pneumonia. (So think about that the next time you watch a zombie horde on late-night TV.)

The good news here, however, is that MRSA has unlikely enemies: lemongrass oil and tee tree oil are surprisingly effective at inhibiting the growth of MRSA cultures. The bad news is, with the current global rate of deforestation, we’ll run out of both of those pretty soon.

Our best suggestion: when this pandemic really hits, make sure you’re the first in line at The Body Shop.

4. Pseudomonas aeruginosa

This mouthful is probably the scariest bacteria on our list, not only because of what it does, but because of where it lives.

Molecular multitasker that it is, a pseudomonas aeruginosa infection can hit almost anywhere in the body, usually choosing major organs like the lungs and liver. And even if it doesn’t concentrate, it can get into the bloodstream and cause sepsis (blood poisoning), which is often fatal.

Though treatable, the regimen must be administered with intravenous antibiotics that are determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the type and severity of infection, meaning that those without access to sufficient medical care are in a pretty nasty situation.

And if that wasn’t enough, Pseudomonas aeruginosa can survive inside almost any living thing...and on anything else. An avid species-jumper, this superbacterium is also capable of surviving indefinitely on inorganic objects and is often found, for example, on sterilized hospital instruments.

Yikes.

Interestingly, this seems to be a case of every era getting the pathogen it deserves; one of the hidden talents of Pseudomonas aeruginosa is its ability to absorb oil from oil spills. Good news for the next oil spill, and bad news for anyone who just signed up for any BP-sponsored medical studies.

5. The Flu

Oh, come on, you knew this was going to happen. Next to the common cold, Influenza is so widespread a virus that it’s impossible to guard against all strains. Plus, being viral, it can reappear in the same patient repeatedly.

Influenza can also species-hop and create new, stronger strains, such as in the recent pandemics of the more-severe-than-usual swine flu and bird flu. Bonus: it evolves so fast that the CDC has to develop a new flu shot every year, because the old one just doesn’t cut it anymore. (Apparently they’re trying to solve this catch-up issue with genome mapping, which sounds suitably sterile but a little slow for those of us holding our breaths on the ground.)

And of course, on top of everything else, influenza usually transmits via breathing, the hardest transmission to protect against.

All of which kind of makes you think that when Agent Smith sat down with Morpheus to talk about humanity as a virus, we should all have been taking better notes.

Bottom line? Take the blue pill.

Even though the recent emergence of swine flu, bird flu and SARS really scared the bejesus out of us, it’s entirely possible that the superbugs of our future have yet to appear; that they’re still hovering in the cells of their first critical carrier, mutating quietly while they wait for the right time to strike. However, given our spotty history at erasing even past pandemics, and the difficulty of treating initial cases as they re-emerge worldwide, (such as the recent cholera epidemic in Haiti), the only way we’re going to avoid some serious trouble is to start looking at health as a worldwide issue, and treat all cases with the seriousness they deserve.

And for the love of Pete, lose the Cipro already.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her World-Fantasy-Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more.

The Silence of the Asonu
Ursula K. Le Guin

The silence of the Asonu is proverbial. The first visitors believed that these gracious, gracile people were mute, lacking any language other than that of gesture, expression, and gaze. Later, hearing Asonu children chatter, the visitors suspected that among themselves the adults spoke, keeping silence only with strangers. We know now that the Asonu are not dumb, but that once past early childhood they speak only very rarely, to anyone, under any circumstances. They do not write; and unlike mutes, or monks under vows of silence, they do not use any signs or other devices in place of speaking.

This nearly absolute abstinence from language makes them fascinating.

People who live with animals value the charm of muteness. It can be a real pleasure to know when the cat walks into the room that he won’t mention any of your shortcomings, or that you can tell your grievances to your dog without his repeating them to the people who caused them.

And those who can talk, but don’t, have the great advantage over the rest of us that they never say anything stupid. This may be why we are convinced that if they spoke they would have something wise to say.

Thus there has come to be considerable tourist traffic to the Asonu. Having a strong tradition of hospitality, the Asonu entertain their visitors courteously, though without modifying their own customs. Some people go there simply in order to join the natives in their silence, grateful to spend a few weeks where they do not have to festoon and obscure every human meeting with verbiage. Many such visitors, having been accepted into a household as a paying guest, return year after year, forming bonds of unspoken affection with their quiet hosts.

Others follow their Asonu guides or hosts about, talking to them continually, confiding their whole life stories to them, in rapture at having at last found a listener who won’t interrupt or comment or mention that his cousin had an even larger tumor than that. As such people usually know little Asonu and speak mostly or entirely in their own language, they evidently aren’t worried by the question that vexes some visitors: Since the Asonu don’t talk, do they, in fact, listen?

They certainly hear and understand what is said to them in their own language, since they’re prompt to respond to their children, to indicate directions by gesture to inquiring tourists, and to leave a building at the cry of “Fire!” But the question remains, do they listen to discursive speech and sociable conversation, or do they merely hear it, while keeping silently attentive to something beyond speech? Their amiable and apparently easy manner seems to some observers the placid surface of a deep preoccupation, a constant alertness, like that of a mother who while entertaining her guests or seeing to her husband’s comfort yet is listening every moment for the cry of her baby in another room.

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

Some visitors to their world are convinced that the lips of these quiet people are locked upon a knowledge which, in proportion as it is hidden, must be valuable—a spiritual treasure, a speech beyond speech, possibly even that ultimate revelation promised by so many religions, and indeed frequently delivered, but never in a wholly communicable form. The transcendent knowledge of the mystic cannot be expressed in language. It may be that the Asonu avoid language for this very reason. It may be that they keep silence because if they spoke everything of importance would have been said.

To some, the utterances of the Asonu do not seem to be as momentous as one might expect from their rarity. They might even be described as banal. But believers in the Wisdom of the Asonu have followed individuals about for years, waiting for the rare words they speak, writing them down, saving them, studying them, arranging and collating them, finding arcane meanings and numerical correspondences in them, in search of the hidden message.

There is no written form of the Asonu language, and translation of speech is considered to be so uncertain that translatomats aren’t issued to the tourists, most of whom don’t want them anyway. Those who wish to learn Asonu can do so only by listening to and imitating children, who by six or seven years old are already becoming unhappy when asked to talk.

Here are the “Eleven Sayings of the Elder of Isu,” collected over four years by a devotee from Ohio, who had already spent six years learning the language from the children of the Isu Group. Months of silence occurred between most of these statements, and two years between the fifth and sixth.

Not there.

It is almost ready [or] Be ready for it soon.

Unexpected!

It will never cease.

Yes.

When?

It is very good.

Perhaps.

Soon.

Hot! [or] Very warm!

It will not cease.

The devotee wove these eleven sayings into a coherent spiritual statement or testament which he understood the Elder to have been making, little by little, during the last four years of his life. The Ohio Reading of the Sayings of the Elder of Isu is as follows:

“(1)What we seek is not there in any object or experience of our mortal life. We live among appearances, on the verge of the Spiritual Truth.(2) We must be ready for it as it is ready for us, for (3) it will come when we least expect it. Our perception of the Truth is sudden as a lightning-flash, but (4) the Truth itself is eternal and unchanging. (5) Indeed we must positively and hopefully, in a spirit of affirmation, (6) continually ask when, when shall we find what we seek? (7) For the Truth is the medicine for our soul, the knowledge of absolute goodness. (8, 9) It may come very soon. Perhaps it is coming even now in this moment. (10) Its warmth and brightness are as those of the sun, but the sun will perish (11) and the Truth will not perish. Never will the warmth, the brightness, the goodness of the Truth cease or fail us.”

Another interpretation of the Sayings may be made by referring to the circumstances in which the Elder spoke, faithfully recorded by the devotee from Ohio, whose patience was equaled only by the Elder’s:

Spoken in an undertone as the Elder looked through a chest of clothing and ornaments.

Spoken to a group of children on the morning of a ceremony.

Said with a laugh in greeting the Elder’s younger sister, returned from a long trip.

Spoken the day after the burial of the Elder’s sister.

Said while embracing the Elder’s brother-in-law some days after the funeral.

Asked of an Asonu “doctor” who was making a “spirit-body” drawing in white and black sand for the Elder. These drawings seem to be both curative and diagnostic, but we know very little about them. The observer states that the “doctor’s” answer was a short curving line drawn outward from the navel of the “spirit-body” figure. This, however, may be only the observer’s reading of what was not an answer at all.

Said to a child who had woven a reed mat.

Spoken in answer to a young grandchild who asked, “Will you be at the big feast, Grandmother?”

Spoken in answer to the same child, who asked, “Are you going to be dead like Great-Auntie?”

Said to a baby who was toddling towards a firepit where the flames were invisible in the sunlight.

Last words, spoken the day before the Elder’s death.

The last six Sayings were all spoken in the last half-year of the Elder’s life, as if the approach of death had made the Elder positively loquacious. Five of the Sayings were spoken to, or in at least in the presence of, young children who were still at the talking stage.

Speech from an adult must be very impressive to an Asonu child. But, like the foreign linguists, Asonu babies must learn the language by listening to older children. The mother and other parents encourage the child to speak only by attentive listening and prompt, affectionate, wordless response.

The Asonu live in close-knit extended-family groups, in frequent contact with other groups. Their pasturing life, following the great flocks of anamanu which furnish them wool, leather, milk, and meat, leads them on a ceaseless seasonal nomadic circuit within a vast shared territory of mountains and foothills. Families frequently leave their family group to go wandering and visiting. At the great festivals and ceremonies of healing and renewal many groups come together for days or weeks, exchanging hospitality. No hostile relations between groups are apparent, and in fact no observer has reported seeing adult Asonu fight or quarrel. Arguments, evidently, are out of the question.

Children from two to six years old chatter to each other constantly; they argue, wrangle, and bicker, and sometimes come to blows. As they come to be six or seven they begin to speak less and to quarrel less. By the time they are eight or nine most of them are very shy of words and reluctant to answer a question except by gesture. They have learned to quietly evade inquiring tourists and linguists with notebooks and recording devices. By adolescence they are as silent and as peaceable as the adults.

Children between eight and twelve do most of the looking after the younger ones. All the children of the family group go about together, and in such groups the two-to-six-year-olds provide language models for the babies. Older children shout wordlessly in the excitement of a game of tag or hide-and-seek, and sometimes scold an errant toddler with a “Stop!” or “No!”—just as the Elder of Isu murmured “Hot!” as a child approached an invisible fire; though of course the Elder may have used that circumstance as a parable, in order to make a statement of profound spiritual meaning, as appears in the Ohio Reading.

Even songs lose their words as the singers grow older. A game rhyme sung by little children has words:

Look at us tumbledown

Stumbledown tumbledown

All of us tumbledown

All in a heap!

Older children cheerfully play the game with the little ones, falling into wriggling piles with yells of joy, but they do not sing the words, only the tune, vocalized on a neutral syllable.

Adult Asonu often hum or sing at work, while herding, while rocking the baby. Some of the tunes are traditional, others improvised. Many employ motifs based on the whistles of the anamanu. None have words; all are hummed or vocalized. At the meetings of the clans and at marriages and funerals the ceremonial choral music is rich in melody and harmonically complex and subtle. No instruments are used, only the voice. The singers practice many days for the ceremonies. Some students of Asonu music believe that their particular spiritual wisdom or insight finds its expression in these great wordless chorales.

I am inclined to agree with others who, having lived a long time among the Asonu, believe that their choral singing is an element of a sacred occasion, and certainly an art, a festive communal act, and a pleasurable release of feeling, but no more. What is sacred to them remains in silence.

The little children call people by relationship words, mother, uncle, clan-sister, friend, etc. If the Asonu have names, we do not know them.

About ten years ago a zealous believer in the Secret Wisdom of the Asonu kidnapped a child of four from one of the mountain clans in the dead of winter. He had obtained a zoo collector’s permit, and smuggled her back to his home world in an animal cage marked “Anamanu.” Believing that the Asonu enforce silence on their children, his plan was to encourage the little girl to keep talking as she grew up. When adult, he thought, she would thus be able to speak the innate Wisdom which her people would have obliged her to keep secret.

For the first year or so it appears that she would talk to her kidnapper, who, aside from the abominable cruelty of his action, seems to have begun by treating her kindly enough. His knowledge of the Asonu language was limited, and she saw no one else but a small group of sectarians who came to gaze worshipfully at her and listen to her talk. Her vocabulary and syntax gained no enlargement, and began to atrophy. She became increasingly silent.

Frustrated, the zealot tried to teach her his own language so that she would be able to express her innate Wisdom in a different tongue. We have only his report, which is that she “refused to learn,” was silent or spoke almost inaudibly when he tried to make her repeat words, and “did not obey.” He ceased to let other people see her. When some members of the sect finally notified the civil authorities, the child was about seven. She had spent three years hidden in a basement room, and for a year or more had been whipped and beaten regularly “to teach her to talk,” her captor explained, “because she’s stubborn.” She was dumb, cowering, undernourished, and brutalized.

She was promptly returned to her family, who for three years had mourned her, believing she had wandered off and been lost on the glacier. They received her with tears of joy and grief. Her condition since then is not known, because the Interplanary Agency closed the entire area to all visitors, tourist or scientist, at the time she was brought back. No foreigner has been up in the Asonu mountains since. We may well imagine that her people were resentful; but nothing was ever said.

©2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin

Originally published in Orion.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Author Spotlight: Ursula K. Le Guin
Stacey Friedberg

Ursula K. Le Guin is easily one of the most accomplished authors in science fiction and fantasy today. She has been a prolific writer of both adult and children’s books since the 1960s, and is the winner of a variety of prestigious awards, including Hugos, Nebulas, a Pushcart Prize, a Newbury Medal, and a National Book Award. She is best known for her Earthsea book series, as well as her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

In this Author Spotlight, we asked author Ursula K. Le Guin to tell us a bit about the background of her story for Lightspeed, “The Silence of the Asonu.”

How did you come up with the idea of the Asonu?

As well as I can remember, it came from talking to my cat—you know the kind of things you say to your dog or your cat, “What a handsome fellow you are,” “Are you thinking about dinner already, greedy gut?”—nonsense like that. And then thinking how grateful I was that he didn’t talk back—how restful and thoughtful the silence of an animal can be.

The Asonu Elder responds primarily to young children. Why is that?

Five of the eleven sayings were addressed to children. They were, after all, still speaking, and had asked a question, or needed to be praised or warned.

The Asonu Elder seems to be very aware of his own mortality. What are the Asonu’s feelings towards death?

To me the fourth, ninth, and eleventh Sayings of the Elder of Isu might indicate both a stoical acceptance of mortality, and a conviction that an individual death is not the end of everything.

Do you know why are the Asonu are actually silent?

The story-teller didn’t ask them, since it wouldn’t do any good to ask them. Some of the more intelligent speculations about their silence are in the story, shortly before the Sayings of the Elder: that they don’t speak because they are listening; because they are hiding something; because language is incapable of expressing their mystical knowledge and if they spoke everything of importance would have been said.

Or perhaps it’s just a genetic thing—like kittens, who mew a lot, but grow up into cats who are often almost entirely silent. The increasing silence of the kidnapped girl would tend to support this explanation. My assumption would be that she ceases to speak because she is an Asonu, and the Asonu gradually cease to use speech as they mature.

But of course she may have been forced into a very different kind of silence, the muteness of a terrified, brutalized child.

Stacey Friedberg is currently completing her last semester at Emerson College, where she will earn her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. Previously, she has interned at Penguin Group (USA), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Publishers Weekly. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Linguistic Expectations
Lawrence M. Schoen

Learning a language is the most cognitively complex thing we do in our lives, and we’ve nailed the better portion of it by our fifth birthday. Most of this process happens without our awareness, and indeed we all possess unconscious knowledge of the rules of our native tongue that never rises to our realization unless we encounter another language that does things differently. Only then do we notice the barest tip of the iceberg that is our command of grammar. And on those rare occasions when we think about the nature of language at all, we do so through the filter of our own expectations, conflating “language” in the broad sense with our individual and intimate experience of it. That’s reasonable, sensible, and understandable.

And, of course, completely wrong.

There are more than 6800 languages left in the world, and while they all allow two native speakers to share the ideas in their respective heads, they all accomplish the trick in different ways, with different phonological systems, different syntaxes, and different grammars. The rules of a language define how we organize the world around us. Some languages—English, for example—have tense, and their speakers effortlessly describe when actions occur relative to any point in time. Other languages may lack that feature but instead possess the alien concept (to us, anyway) of aspect; these speakers can instead talk with ease about whether an action is completed, in progress, perpetual, or even intentional. Neither system is superior to the other. There is no value judgment here. Languages simply differ from one another, in ways both great and small. If you’re a linguist, it’s part of what attracts you to the field. And if you’re not...it can be confusing because every least little bit you know about how language operates is false somewhere else in the world.

Our expectancy of what language should look like gets in our way when we go looking for language elsewhere in the world (let alone out there in the galaxy). And with millions of other animal species here on Earth, we have yet to find any that seem to possess their own language—at least not as we define the term. Linguists are divided on just what makes a communication system a language. Fortunately, a menu of properties has been proposed, and all known languages possess all these properties; other communication systems—defined as not language—lack one or more.

Wolves aren’t considered to have language because while they can communicate certain ideas very effectively (on the order of “Danger!” and “Let’s get it!”) they can’t discuss the insights to be gained from a reading of Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds.” They lack an open-ended communication system, or what linguists call productivity. Song birds may meet the requirement for infinite variation, but that variation is random and as such is neither learnable nor passed on. Thus, no language. And the oft-touted “dance of bees” also fails to qualify because it lacks prevarication, and this ability to lie is typically seen as an intrinsic property of language.

Examples of other properties include being able to communicate about communication, the ability to both send and receive signals in the language, and an arbitrary relationship between the form a symbol takes (in the case of spoken language, the assortment of speech sounds) and the thing it represents. Because all of these (and other) qualifications are found in all known human languages, they quite naturally pass the test of our own expectations. Or to put it another way, they provide further support for a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. The irony here is that despite the evidence that language can take seemingly infinite forms, humans limit that infinity by the shape and flavor of our expectations.

Science fiction can take language as we know it, and ask the question what would it be like if we took away one or more of these required characteristics while insisting the result was nonetheless still language—language used by intelligent beings from beyond our comfortable home.

Authors have created aliens whose language had no conception of falsehood, and in the tradition of Classic SF extrapolated such a premise throughout culture and society. We’ve read stories of fully fluent, space-faring creatures who nonetheless lack the capacity to comment on the language they use. And then there are the tales of beings who emerge from egg or womb with their language fully developed. And if a group of people ceases to produce speech as they mature, but can still clearly comprehend it, have they sacrificed the right to call it language?

We have to question our expectations about language, and accept that they stem from a bias older than our first memory of conscious thought. We know our language, but we don’t know language in all its glory, as it might exist in communication systems beyond our own species but within the reach of our imagination.

Language is a system that assigns symbolic meaning to arbitrary combinations of signals in our environment. That can just as easily be the two consonants and vowel that come together in the right order to give us DOG, as a progression of fragrances, or chemical reactions, or pattern of juggling colored balls to convey the same meaning.

If we’re to get anywhere in our search for nonhuman languages, we will first need to let go of our linguistic expectations.

Lawrence M. Schoen holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. He’s also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Klingon language. In 2007, he was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer and in 2010 received a Hugo nomination for best short story. His first novel, Buffalito Destiny, about a stage hypnotist turned CEO and his alien animal companion that can eat anything and farts oxygen, came out last year. Its sequel, Buffalito Contingency, launches in March 2011 at Lunacon, where he is the author Guest of Honor.