Editorial, April 2015

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-nine of Lightspeed!

In case you missed it, just a reminder that last month saw the publication of Operation Arcana, my new anthology of military fantasy, which was published by Baen on March 3. Operation Arcana contains sixteen never-before-published tales (about 100,000 words of material), from Glen Cook, Myke Cole, Genevieve Valentine, Elizabeth Moon, Django Wexler, Weston Ochse, Yoon Ha Lee, Jonathan Maberry, Tobias S. Buckell & David Klecha, Ari Marmell, Tanya Huff, Carrie Vaughn, T.C. McCarthy, Simon R. Green, Seanan McGuire, and Linda Nagata. The stories run the gamut from military epic fantasy to military urban fantasy to military historical fantasy — and everything in between. You’ll find a reprint of Linda Nagata’s story, “The Way Home,” in the March issue of Lightspeed. If you’d like to learn more about the book, read additional stories from the anthology for free online, or read interviews with the authors, visit my Operation Arcana website at johnjosephadams.com/operation-arcana.

• • • •

Also recently released was Wastelands 2, the sequel to my bestselling — and first! — anthology, Wastelands. It contains nearly 200,000 words of fiction, including stories by George R.R. Martin, Seanan McGuire, Hugh Howey, Nancy Kress, David Brin, Ann Aguirre, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lauren Beukes, and Junot Díaz, among others. Learn more about it at johnjosephadams.com/wastelands-2.

Speaking of Wastelands, Titan also just recently released the original Wastelands in mass market paperback edition. So if you’ve been wanting to read it all these years and just couldn’t abide paying more than $7.99 for it, now’s your chance!

• • • •

In other anthology news, The End Has Come, the third and final volume of The Apocalypse Triptych, which I’m editing with Hugh Howey, will be coming out a bit later than initially anticipated. Due to various factors, Hugh and I decided it would be best for us to delay the release of The End Has Come by another month, so instead of April 1, it’ll come out May 1. (We had previously already delayed it from March 1 to April 1.) Initially, the delay was just to put some space between the release of Wastelands 2 and Operation Arcana, but then we ran into some additional issues that made us decide that delaying the book another month would be the best thing for it. Sorry to disappoint all of you who have been patiently waiting for the book, but we do hope that this will be the last delay before publication.

• • • •

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original science fiction by Kat Howard (“The Universe, Sung in Stars”) and Jason Gurley (“Quiet Town”), along with SF reprints by Carolyn Ives Gilman (“The Invisible Hand Rolls the Dice”) and John Barnes (“The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Joseph Allen Hill (“We’ll Be Together Forever”) and Dale Bailey (“The Ministry of the Eye”), and fantasy reprints by Sonya Taaffe (“A Wolf in Iceland is the Child of a Lie”) and Ken Liu (“The Ussuri Bear”).

This month, we’re excited to share a feature interview with Chris Williams, the co-director of Disney’s Big Hero 6. We also have our latest book review column, an interview with this month’s fantastic cover artist, and of course interviews with all our authors.

For our ebook readers, we also have a novella reprint from Kate Elliott (“On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New”) and three novel excerpts, including The Rebirths of Tao, by Wesley Chu, The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu, and a sponsored excerpt from Acheron Books, Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets by Alessio Lanterna (translated by Kate Mitchell).

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Acheron Books, the first publishing house to produce Italian fantasy, science fiction and horror fiction and distribute it worldwide in the English language in ebook format. Learn more at acheronbooks.com.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Universe, Sung in Stars

Kat Howard

There is music in the stars. The stars, the planets, the asteroids, the galaxies. Everything that is flung, whirling in orbit through space and time. We dwell inside an enormous, ever-changing symphony, and each of the many universes sings a song of its own.

I replicate them. I make clockwork universes, astraria and orreries, planets and stars and galaxies made microcosm and set ticking in orbit. Gears of bronze and iron and titanium, planets of marble and stars of precious faceted stones, diamonds that twinkle in the light. Each orbit in perfect harmonic distance so that the piece performs the music of the spheres. It’s a different kind of beauty from that of the living universes, one artificial and made in miniature, but the songs are no less real for it, and the beauty no less true.

There’s a joy, too, in making things precise. The music of a universe, like the music of a symphony, will never be perfect. There will be dropped notes, missed rests, accidental sharps or flats. They are living things, and so they are flawed. Orreries are mechanical. If I do my work properly, there is no unexpected variance in their song.

I had just finished setting a rhodolite in the turning rose of a nebula when Carina walked into my workshop. She had a universe spinning around her as well — stars blinked in the darkness of her hair — but hers was living.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, picking up my loupe so I could examine it more closely. Pocket universes weren’t as rare as they used to be, but I had never seen one in resonance with a guardian before.

I walked an orbit around Carina. A comet flamed through the wildness of her curls, then flashed and died, bright echoes of its passing sparking like inverse shadows in the darkness.

“You should talk to them, Vera,” she said. “They’re always looking for qualified guardians, and you’ve kept that star going longer than anyone expected.”

My hand went to the nape of my neck, where a white dwarf cooled. I only wore it outside when I was working. Potential customers were fascinated by it.

“I don’t think it will last much longer.” It was becoming more and more atonal, which was usually an indication of imminent death.

“All the more reason to see if you can be approved for a universe.” A galaxy whirled like a halo at the back of Carina’s head, and I could hear its resonance. “I’ll put in a recommendation for you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

• • • •

I unwound the star from my hair when I got home that night, rolling it from palm to palm, watching the pattern of shadows made as its light shone through my skin. The discovery of the pocket universes had proved the Titius-Bode law — all orbital systems of the pocket universes had stable and self-correcting orbital resonances with each other. In those resonances was the music of the spheres, and in those resonances, my calling.

The discovery had been dismissed as ridiculous at first — singing universes were impossible to take seriously as proper science. But then the pocket universes started dying. In some cases, they would collapse in on themselves almost as soon as they were born.

So the pocket universes, and the salvageable pieces of the dying ones, were assigned guardians. Someone to ground the resonance until they were stable, or to help ease the passing of the dying stars. Someone to play them music until their own songs were known. That last was the key. Without music, the pocket universes could not survive on their own.

I had built a musical universe for my dying star. A rotating cylinder inside a clockwork box that plucked a series of steel teeth I had etched with constellations. I had, as much as I could, calculated backwards, based on the white dwarf. I had considered its probable orbit and origins, and designed the music box to play the song of the dying star’s universe. Hearing it, I hoped, would make the star less lonely in its passing.

The music box only played when I hung the star inside of it. I closed the mechanical universe around the solitary star, and listened as the quiet lullaby began.

• • • •

Approval, when it came to custody of a universe, didn’t mean paperwork and background checks. It meant being walked through a white room, full of universes being born. Tiny explosions of infinity becoming finite. It gave me vertigo.

“Don’t worry,” the tech said, her hand gentle on my elbow as she led me through the rows. “That happens to most people. The vertigo is actually an indication of who will make a good guardian. If you resonate at the right frequency for one of the universes, it stops.”

I nodded once, not trusting myself to speak through the dizziness without vomiting. But then the vertigo cleared. I could hear the beginnings of a song, bits and pieces of it, something that was almost familiar. I leaned closer, and stretched my hand out, and the universe in front of me expanded into it. The dying star in its musical cage next to my chest pulsed once, a bass thrum. The young universe wound itself around me, making me a fixed point in its spin.

The song grew louder.

• • • •

When a universe is being born, it hasn’t yet settled into itself. Much like a child learning to speak, there are mistakes. Babbles. So I didn’t pay any special attention to the shift in the music of my universe, the way the song changed from what I had originally heard. Not at first.

Carina’s universe had expanded enough that if I stood close to her, I could hear it sing. “I’d like to commission an orrery,” she said. “Something that has the same song. Ridiculous to get so attached, I know, but I’m afraid when it’s time for this one to leave me, I won’t be able to sleep without hearing it.”

“Of course.” I began taking the necessary measurements, recording orbits, and wavelength, and brightness.

“I’m sorry for the death of your star,” Carina said.

The new universe orbiting my head meant that I had stopped wearing the star when I worked. “It hasn’t died. I have it right here.” I unhung the star from its orrery, and held it in my hand.

Carina stepped back. “That can’t happen. You could contaminate your universe. You have to get rid of it.”

I wasn’t about to murder a dying star. “I had it when I went in to the birthing room, and I was wearing it when this universe chose me. The resonance was there, and the songs aren’t atonal with each other.”

“You’re supposed to stabilize your new universe as it’s being born, not change it.” Carina said.

“I don’t think I have.”

When she left, I sat down, and listened. To the expanding symphony of my borning universe, and the places that echoed the music I had created to make a star feel less alone in its dying. To the fluttering thrum of that star, ringing a counterpoint. It sounded, I thought, less hesitant than it had. Stronger. I removed it from its cage, and held it up.

There was a great ringing clang, as if every instrument in an orchestra was dropped mid note. The star lifted from my hand, and then pushed itself in to the universe’s orbit.

The song of the universe began again. Changed.

• • • •

It doesn’t happen often, but stars can escape their galaxies. The ones that do are called hypervelocity stars, some large and flung from the center of the galaxy. Some are much smaller, and their escape route remains unknown. All that is certain is that they are gone, crashing out elsewhere into the universe.

That is not their only name, these stars that are flung out of the galaxies they are born in. They are also called outcast stars.

Every so often, these outcast stars make new homes for themselves. They crash into other galaxies. In these explosions, new stars are born.

• • • •

My original star, the white dwarf, made itself at home in the young universe. I could hear its song getting stronger, and integrating itself into the resonances of the new system, and the song of that universe steadied and expanded. It incorporated parts of the dying star’s music into its own song, variations on a theme, movements in a minor key.

The new universe flung out stars in a kind of ecstasy of birth. They fell like rain, shedding themselves down my back, and into my workroom. They hung themselves in corners, cobweb galaxies, chiming like bells, ringing like cymbals.

Stars sparked from the ends of my fingers as I worked, formed constellations in my orreries, orbiting on wires next to planets made from glass. They added new choruses to older, established songs.

It seemed like chaos, but when I listened, they matched the existing songs in rhythm and tone. When I measured, they fit exactly in the orbits they were predicted to, resonating with the other pieces.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before,” Carina said, as she examined the orrery she had come to pick up. The song of her universe was nearly complete — it would be ready to leave her soon.

“I’ve measured and checked. All of the new stars obey Titius-Bode. All of them sing in harmony with the music of the spheres.” It might not have been usual, but it was possible.

Stars tumbled down my arm, and Carina pulled into herself, her chair scraping backward on the floor. “You’ve changed things. That isn’t what a guardian is supposed to do. You are supposed to keep the new universe safe while it learns how to sing. That’s all.”

“What better to teach it how to sing than something that already knows?”

She shook her head. “But what happened changed the song.”

“Yes,” I said. “It did.”

• • • •

I had grown used to the feeling of a universe constructing itself around me, to hearing the music become more assured as the pieces of it settled into stability. But a pocket universe cannot stay anchored to its guardian, and it came time to let it go.

“It may not work, you know,” Carina said. Her own universe had been recently released, and she seemed curiously smaller without its singing orbit. “There is always the chance of collapse, and who knows how your superfluity of stars will affect things?”

The white dwarf star still orbited in the young universe, and other, smaller stars still fell like rain from my hair.

The escape of a universe from its guardian is much like the escape of an outcast star. One piece is flung out of resonance with the other. I found and sang a note that was atonal to the music of this universe. It pushed itself up and away from me until I was no longer a part of its orbit. It sang its own song, all of the pieces in harmony.

All of them. Even the dying star.

And then. Outcast once more, it plummeted from where the universe had been, falling to the ground, disintegrating and burning itself up as it fell. But even without that star, the music stayed the same. The song did not falter.

I heard the song still, even as the new universe disappeared from my sight, and from what should have been the range of my hearing. The music box orrery was playing. I opened the door. At its heart, spinning, a small white star.

© 2015 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty-five pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in magazines including Nightmare, Clarkesworld, and the Journal of Unlikely Cartography, and a variety of anthologies. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press, and her debut novel, Roses and Rot, will be out in 2016 from Saga Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

The Invisible Hand Rolls the Dice

Carolyn Ives Gilman

At 35,000 feet over the Indian Ocean, Lee Pao Nelson paused to re-evaluate his life. There was plenty of tangible evidence to score himself by. It was his thirtieth birthday, and here he was in first class, a piquant glass of merlot on the tray table in front of him, leather upholstery underneath him, his understated Joseph Abboud suit shrugging off the wrinkles. Most people would have felt smug to be sitting in the market segment he had achieved. And yet the clicking of stylus against screen across the aisle was a torture of indignity. The overweight man in seat 3B was hunched over his notebook, daytrading intently on the personality market — where Lee, despite all his achievements, was not yet listed.

Defiantly flipping open his own notebook, Lee checked today’s styles to find if he needed to upgrade anything before landing. His personal shopbot was recommending a new watch with a holographic orrery display. Before he could decide whether it would add to his ensemble, the flashing email icon distracted him.

WE HAVE WHAT YOU DESIRE glowed in his inbox, in defiance of the best spam filters available. He deleted it irritably and tried to concentrate on a way of customizing the watch to display his individuality, taste, and access to information. Consumption took more skill and attention every day. If only he were publically traded he would be able to deduct the cost of a true personal shopper, not just a bot that could only respond to trends. He could set trends then. In fact, he would be expected to.

WE HAVE WHAT YOU DESIRE, the email materialized again in his inbox. He stared at it, a little insulted that such a downmarket come-on had gotten through to him twice. His stylus hovered over the delete box, but somehow, when he clicked, it was on “open.”

An entrancing face stared out from his screen through a veil of visible pixels. It was a cheap, poorly resolved video clip, but that only seemed to enhance the mystery of her expression. She had Asian features, pearl-skinned and waiflike, and there was unmistakable apprehension in her look, as if she saw and recognized Lee as her destiny. Then she looked down shyly and a smile touched her lips, almost too subtle to be sure it was there. In it, Lee glimpsed the wisdom of generations of captive women shaped by cruel custom to excel in ancient arts of delighting and easing men. The combination of vulnerability and knowing seized his heart and a portion of his anatomy considerably below that.

The face was gone almost as soon as he saw it and was replaced with some tinny Asian music and the cover of a catalog of mail-order women. These deliteful Asian ladies will fill you home with satisfaction, the ad copy went. Lee clicked through page after page of thumbnail photos, searching for the waif he had seen so briefly.

The man in 3B closed his notebook cover with a satiated sigh. Lee quickly changed screens to make it look like he was doing work. “That was a good session,” Mr. 3B said.

“Oh?” Lee said absently. “Who were you trading?”

“You wouldn’t recognize them. I get ’em before they’re household names. The up-and-comers — you know, media personalities, politicians, hedge fund managers. High risk, high reward. You traded?”

It was just a conversation opener, Lee told himself, not a calculated putdown. “No,” he said casually. “How about you?”

“Since I was eleven years old,” 3B said. “I was one of those Young Entrepreneur picks.”

Lee felt a slow burn of hatred.

“At fourteen, I founded a company that pioneered ME2ME commerce, cutting out the aggravation of dealing with other people. By the time I was nineteen, I’d paid off my parents’ initial investment. I haven’t owed the old bag and goat a thing since then.”

Lee was still struggling to repay his own parents’ investment — not that they pressed him for it. They seemed to think it was all a gift, all those diapers and hockey lessons and premium schools. It made Lee guilty whenever he saw them, to know how bad a return they had gotten.

“I’ve issued a dividend every year since my IPO,” the man went on — then without asking, pointed his business card at Lee’s notebook and beamed him the information. “Check out my web page.”

When 3B lurched up to weave down the aisle to the bathroom, Lee took the chance to look him up. He felt a malicious satisfaction to see the man had a “sell” rating from Morgan Stanley. He’d been counting on Lee not to do the research.

Back to the problem of the watch, Lee racked his brains for some distinct characteristic to set his watch apart, some creative individual touch. Something that wouldn’t bring disrepute on his market segment or skew his profile or make him less employable. A message blinked into being in his inbox: THE WATCH IS NOT WHAT YOU DESIRE.

With a frisson of paranoia, Lee clicked on the message, and it took him back to the catalog of women. He shook his head, admiring the company’s marketing software in spite of himself. He paged through, looking at faces — pleading, brazen, dull, glamorized faux Western — but none with the ineffable Asian mystery that had gripped him. The message was right, he thought; the watch was not what he desired. The lack of something had him in an itchy state of vacillation and restlessness, unable to land.

There was a search box at the bottom of the screen. He typed, “I want” but did not finish, and did not send the message. He was not sure what to search for.

YES, I KNOW. The words appeared in his inbox. YOU WANT.

“I want to see her again,” Lee typed.

YOU SHALL.

“When?”

TONIGHT. ALL HER LIFE HAS BEEN PREPARATION FOR THIS NIGHT.

A tug of yearning made his thighs hot and his palms clammy. “Where?”

PETALS. RANGOON SKYMALL. 9:00.

“How much?”

There was a slightly disapproving pause. WE ARE NOT IN THE PROSTITUTION BUSINESS, MR. NELSON.

Blushing in spite of himself, Lee typed, “Then what?”

WE SELL LIFE FULFILLMENT. TO HAVE WHAT YOU DESIRE YOU MUST GIVE MORE THAN MONEY.

What more was there?

The answer flashed onto his screen in the form of a sales contract. Scanning it quickly, Lee decided it was an immigration scam. He would sign a declaration of his intention to marry the woman provided. Within a month he could cancel the contract with no obligation, but by then she would presumably be settled in one of the countries in his pocketful of citizenships. His unspoken reward was a month of her companionship.

There was something altruistic in it, he thought as his stylus wavered over the “Reject” box. She must be fleeing something, whatever caused that alluring glow of anxiety in her face. Instinctively, he knew it would not be simple. She was in danger, some third-world danger he could not understand — something inscrutable and exotic. It had to explain the urgency of the marketing.

Caution told him not to get involved. It could entangle him with international smugglers, identity thieves. The thought was distasteful . . . and thrilling. Ten minutes ago, his future had seemed mapped out before him. His stock options would vest, and he would settle down. First would come the house in a gated community and, with it, major appliances. He would trade in his neglected Maserati for a family armored vehicle. There would come the backyard swimming pool, the European ski vacations, the entertainment center, the exercise room, all the major life acquisitions. And the dogged work to pay for it all, to stay ahead, not to fail . . .

How many chances would he get to do something risky, shady, out of character — in fact, to be a hero?

He typed, “Will it be . . .”

IT WILL BE HER, the answer came. YOU HAVE BEEN MATCHED BY OUR SOFTWARE DOWN TO LEVEL 8. SUCH A DEEP MATCH IS UNUSUAL.

Marketing shtick, he knew. At the same time, he had sensed an affinity, like a key fitting in a lock. High risk, high reward. He felt reckless and brave as he clicked on the “Accept” box and pressed his thumbprint on the scanpad to seal the contract. THANK YOU FOR DOING BUSINESS WITH DIGITAL DESTINY, INC. flashed cornily on the screen. Lee settled back with the smile of an unfooled but satisfied customer. The publically traded Mr. 3B was on his third Vodka Blitz; Lee felt a deep sense of superiority. He might not be listed on the personality exchange, but he now had a rendezvous with a woman who would fit him like a Speedo.

• • • •

Lee’s business meeting that afternoon was in one of the finance capital towers of Rangoon. He had been there many times but had no idea what it looked like from the outside. It was not necessary to go outside to get there from the air terminal; it was connected via the immense skymall. After showing his Proof of Insurance at the immigrations booth (passports were passé; liability was all local nations cared about), Lee flagged down an electric rickshaw. It whisked him through bright corridors lined with Harrods and Gap stores. They passed a towering atrium featuring one of the Kipling’s colonial-revival theme parks, where Burmese children in pink plastic pith helmets rode mechanical elephants, and a chorus line of costumed Gurkhas sang “On the Road to Mandalay.” At last they arrived at the lobby of the business tower, where an actual façade from Angkor Wat had been shipped in and reassembled, stone by stone, to frame the elevator doors. Lee rode to the forty-seventh floor.

The prospective franchisee, Abdul Yousefi, turned out to be an austere, business-suited sheik with a dark beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses. Lee shook his hand, then greeted the financier, Anatoly Rubichek, a beefy Romanian in sunglasses with a rose-red pimple on his chin. Gangster, Lee thought behind his smile. The success of the business had attracted a kind of character he preferred not to deal with; but capital was capital.

“Take a load off this,” Rubichek said jovially, holding out his wrist. On it was a watch with a holographic orrery display. “It is, as you Yanks say, planetary, man.”

Lee tried to strike just the right note of interest and sophisticated disdain, while silently blessing his stars that he had not bought the watch. He had to reprogram his shopbot.

“I expect Mr. Lee is quite familiar with such things,” the sheik said in impeccable Oxford English.

“Nelson,” Lee corrected him.

“Pardon me. You are American, then?”

Always a difficult question. “Originally,” Lee said. “Now, who knows?” He shrugged, smiling.

“Yes, indeed,” Yousefi said thoughtfully. “Who does know?”

An office assistant entered with a tray of Turkish coffee, herb tea, and chai — drinks prepared according to the specifications entered on each man’s notepad and automatically broadcast in answer to the room’s wireless LAN query. Lee used the interruption to tap into the web and retrieve the files he would need. When the pleasantries were over, he was ready to launch his sales pitch.

He always started with a short video. The room lights dimmed and one wall filled with a series of images invoking the anxieties of the postnational world: denuded hillsides, squalid slums, rioting extremists, flooded coasts, lootings and shootings. A woman’s voice said, “The world is such a dangerous place. How can I know my property will be safe and my children will grow up? Who can I turn to? Who can I trust?” The sounds of violence and disorder reached a crescendo, succeeded by silence and blackness. Then the screen lit with an aerial shot of a sylvan lake. The camera swooped down, birdlike, between autumnal hills and over tranquil water, to show a grandfather and child fishing, all to the familiar strains of the World Church’s theme song, “Someone Loves You,” heard in daily ads on television sets worldwide. The calm, melodious voice of the Church’s spokesman, Dr. Bob, said, “You have a friend here. You’ll always have a friend at the World Church.”

The video never failed to move Lee. He was that rare thing, a salesman who actually believed in his product. He knew, rationally, that the wise and fatherly Dr. Bob was a fictional construct with a carefully crafted biography; he had even participated in the panicky strategy sessions when the actor who played him died in a Mexican motel. At a deeper level, it didn’t matter. What Dr. Bob symbolized was what counted. Belonging, trustworthiness, support.

The video went on to show impressionistic glimpses of life in World Church franchise communities: childcare centers, health clubs, diet groups, creativity retreats, addiction recovery clubs. There were the ceremonies to mark life transitions — welcomings for babies, marriages, funerals — all within a tolerant, multiethnic community. It showed congregations in the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, Indonesia, harmoniously celebrating the same beautiful traditions, free of ancient prejudice and passion.

When the video ended, Lee waited for Abdul Yousefi’s reaction, but the Arab was silent. In a tone that didn’t break the mood, Lee said, “You see, our product is contentment.”

The sheik said, “A life of no risk.”

“Well, we can’t make any express warranties. But —” Lee handed over the beautifully designed print packet outlining the company’s church-related products — “in here you’ll find information on our Sheltering Arms insurance program. It’s the most comprehensive you can buy.”

Still Yousefi said nothing. It was making Lee nervous; there was quite a lot riding on this meeting, and it would be seen as a test of his skills. Expansion into the Middle East was one of the World Church management’s top priorities. It was the only major market they had not yet penetrated.

“Our package has been designed with the most exhaustive market research in the industry,” Lee said. “We test every product to make sure it is what people really want from their church.”

“What about God?” Yousefi said unexpectedly.

“We find that varies with the franchise area,” Lee said. “Some congregations prefer a God, others don’t. We go with the community norm, determined by polling. But it’s our policy to keep God-references low-key and generic. In keeping with our multicultural mission.”

“Ah,” Yousefi said. “McGod.”

Lee smiled. He did not find it insulting to be compared to a fabulously successful global corporation. “In the demographic we’re aiming at, the cultural contrasts have already been smoothed out. I mean, they all grow up watching CNN and Disney, no matter where they’re from.”

“What about pre-existing religions?” Yousefi asked. “Do you ever encounter resistance from them?”

“Chain religions are constantly being accused of driving mom-and-pop churches out of business. Our research shows it’s simply not true. They have their market, we have ours. Look, Christianity is a wonderful religion if you’re downtrodden and depressed about it. Islam is great if you’re downtrodden and angry. We’re not targeting the downtrodden. The World Church is for the overachievers, the shareholders in society.”

Yousefi raised one eyebrow. “Is it expensive to join?”

“We go on a percentage-of-income basis.” Lee had learned it was best not to mention the exact percent at first. “It’s very advantageous to our members because we have an investment in their success and do all we can to promote their advancement.”

“How do you do that?”

“To begin with, our services reduce the stressful distractions of home life. We give members a nurturing, affirmative social network. And then, for members who opt for it, we will provide suggested courses of action in dilemmas, based on customized risk-benefit analysis.”

“Like the astrological advice in the paper?” Yousefi’s voice was ironic.

“No! This is based on actuarial science.”

Yousefi shook his head in disbelief. “Pardon me, these concepts are very . . . Western. Do you offer no morals, no precepts to guide a person’s action?”

Personally, Lee found commandments a turn-off, but some customers wanted them. “Our press has pulled together some compilations of the best Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist precepts,” he said. “They are the ones our polls showed to have the highest positive ratings, cross-culturally. You’ll find a catalog in your packet.”

The sheik rose from his chair. Lee noticed that his drink was untouched — not a good sign. He seemed to be struggling with some internal problem. Lee wondered if he should launch into the profit-margin figures, but some instinct told him to stay quiet.

With his back turned, Yousefi said, “I cannot believe this is right — that this is the way we should worship.”

With his alligator boots on the coffee table, Rubichek the financier spoke up. “You can’t argue with success, Sheik. The company’s got a rocket up its ass.”

Lee agreed with his point, though not with his vulgar choice of metaphors. “We have 439 franchises in thirty-three countries, with more opening at a rate of three a month. Our stock has split twice in two years. Our profits are —”

Yousefi turned an impaling gaze on him. “That proves your price. Not your value.”

Earnestly, Lee said, “You don’t have to take my word for our value, Mr. Yousefi. You can look to a force beyond our power. We cannot manipulate that force, or falsify it.”

“What force?” Yousefi said.

“The market. The market is perfectly rational, perfectly informed. It cannot be fooled. It has weighed us in the scales against all other human enterprise, and has found us valuable. It is the one verdict you can truly believe.”

There was a short silence as Yousefi gazed at his clasped hands. “My apologies, Mr. Nelson,” he said at last. “I had taken you for a man without faith.” He sat down again with a resigned expression. “The fact is, my government believes it is in the state’s interest to prevent the security needs of our middle class from finding political expression. We need to deflect their demands, so that the free market may continue to enrich us.”

“Good,” said Rubichek. “Then tax-exempt status won’t be a problem.”

“I believe not,” Yousefi said. “It will be a public service.”

They dived into the details then. Lee was feeling giddily elated, a voice in his head singing, I did it! By the time they pressed their biometric signatures to the contract and Rubichek broke out the caviar and martinis, Lee barely needed the alcohol to feel that the world was going his way.

His mood lasted as he strolled out into the mall afterwards, waving off the rickshaw drivers. Before him, a glass-roofed atrium stretched away into hazy distance, six stories high with palm trees growing down the middle. And every floor was lined with bright and bustling shops. As he walked along the promenade, invisible lasers caught his retina scan and empty walls lit up with ads geared to his Lifetime Purchasing Record. It made him feel at once unique — he was proud of his LPR — and at one with the great community of shoppers.

It was in places like this that he could feel the numinous presence of the market all around him, the great collective mind and will that rewarded the deserving and punished the uncompetitive. The shops were beginning to decorate for some local festival modeled on the American Christmas. You could practically hear a global heartbeat: the majestic, seasonal ebb and flow of commerce, marking off time and business cycles. Life itself was a series of seasons, each with its own colors, theme songs, and logos. There was a time for every purchase under heaven.

Turning away from the balcony overlooking the atrium, his eye caught a Lexus ad, and he checked furtively to see who it was aimed at. There was no one nearby but a gaggle of teenagers and a cleaning woman. A kiosk that had been hawking Nikes to the teens transformed into a De Beers display as his eyes swept past it. Secretly delighted, he pretended not to notice. He walked away down a busy corridor, transforming the walls with his presence, drawing envious glances. The glorious sense of power was quickly eroded by puzzlement. Pausing before a drugstore where a panel enticed him to buy an upscale brand of cocaine, he took out his notebook. Either his LPR had gotten mixed up with someone else’s or something had happened.

The explanation was in his inbox. He stared at the message, barely able to breathe. Half an hour ago, he had been approved for listing on the personality exchange.

It was a chasmic event. It had catapulted him into a whole new market segment, and the advertisers had found out before he had. Henceforth, untold capital would be his. He would have a worth, a market value. Swelling with elation, he started to jot down things he would have to do. Send out a press release. Circulate his résumé. Call his parents and offer them some options.

And then his eye fell on the last entry in his To Do list for the day: Petals, 9:00. It was as if the exhilarating slope had turned to ice underneath him. The risk he had taken earlier that day, when he had been a mere private individual, was yawning before him. He could not shack up with a woman ordered off the Internet — not Lee Pao Nelson, Publically Traded. Investors would be searching out information about him. The disclosure laws meant his life, his finances, would be an open book. He had to buy her off, cover her up.

His mind raced ahead as his stylus hovered over the screen. If he tried to track down Digital Destiny and cancel the contract, he would just draw attention to it. No, the buyoff had to be an untraceable cash deal, and then he could claim the purchase had gotten on his LPR by mistake. Such things happened, random IP address flukes. But he would have to make the rendezvous and hand over the cash himself.

He checked to see what hotel he was booked at, and immediately realized it wouldn’t do. It was a hotel appropriate for his old persona, not for the new man he had become. He sent out his shopbot to get him a new reservation. A woman with shopping bags pushed past him to get into the drugstore, and he nearly shouted at her, “Can’t you see what respect I am due? Just look at these ads around me!”

He had not expected success to be so stressful.

• • • •

The Rangoon skymall had so many wings that the architects had differentiated them by themes for the orientation of lost shoppers. Passing through that evening — on foot, because he was too jazzed to sit — Lee saw the Self-Improvement wing, the Medieval wing, and the Space wing before arriving at his destination, the Vietnam War wing, where Petals was located. With mirrorshades to block the retina scans, a layer of latex over his fingerprints, and his notebook set to “anonymous,” he was no longer preceded by expensive ads, mockingly showing all he stood to lose. It gave him an eerie sense of unreality. Without identity, he was reduced to the state of the elemental animals: He had no credit, no history, no achievements, no life.

The nightclub was six stories high and six stories deep, but even so, there was a long line of people waiting to get in. It snaked out into the mall courtyard, where the walls were draped with camouflage netting incongruously decorated with Christmas lights, and a tank teetered precariously over a fiberglass embankment, as if about to crash down on the waiting crowd. Standing there, watching the glass elevator go up and down the windowed stories of the club, Lee felt distracted; his thoughts flew about like malarial mosquitoes, unable to focus or concentrate.

He had always assumed he would get married to someone custom-designed for his lifestyle. Her résumé would be educated and professional. She would be able to carry on a cocktail conversation and run a household with precision. He pictured her in a pastel business suit, perfectly made up, perfectly organized, a colleague ready to manage the procreational portion of his life.

The mental image left him feeling hungry; he checked his watch. 8:54. It was tantalizing standing out here, watching people enjoying themselves inside the glass walls, unable to get in. It left him in a consuming state of mind.

By 9:05, the line seemed not to have moved, and he began to fret at his inaction. After another five minutes of vacillation, he left his place in line and went to the door, where a Burmese hostess in a spandex dress stood barring the way.

“Reservation?” she asked him.

“No — that is, I don’t know. I was supposed to meet someone at 9:00. Maybe she made the reservation.”

“Her name?”

Of course, he didn’t know her name. He took out the cash chit he had gotten from a Swiss bank that specialized in the lucrative business of records erasure. Its surface reflected the light like a bull’s eye on her forehead, but she did not react. So he leaned close and whispered, “Digital Destiny.”

“Mr. Nelson?” she said far too loudly.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“You may enter.”

Inside, the noise was like a physical force that battled gravity. Music throbbed up his legs, lifting him; loud laughter and conversation scattered his thoughts. He went to the bar to get a drink. With a glass anchoring him down, he turned to survey the room. Though it seemed very crowded, it was difficult to tell how many people were actually there, because everywhere the view was interrupted by pillars and panels of reflective glass that multiplied and concealed the patrons. A woman in a dress of netting passed in front of a mirror, and he saw her nipples duplicated a hundred times around the room.

He took out his notebook and set it on “receive” to find out who was there. As people passed him, their own notebooks broadcast whatever information they wished him to know. He picked up a wheeling kaleidoscope of names, incomes, web addresses, business cards, marital statuses, STD ratings, sexual preferences . . . There were sexual market segments here he had never even dreamed of.

The women were as glossy as photographs, shining with a shrink-wrap of style and sophistication. He could not help but admire the packaging. But she did not belong here. She was a child of the countryside, that unknowable place beyond the mall, beyond even the laws of exchange — a place so primal there was weather. She was a creature of dreaming mist, jade, and bamboo, not acrylic and hair spray. This place violated her very being.

He set the notebook to search for faces, and photographs of the patrons in the room started flashing on his screen, but none of them was her. Satisfied she was not in the room, he went to the spiral staircase in the center of the club. For a moment he hesitated, debating which way to go, then decided on down.

A hostess greeted him on the next level, and he shouted over the din, “I’m here to meet someone. Do you know if anyone is waiting?”

She laughed. “There are a lot of people waiting. We’re all waiting.”

“Never mind,” he said.

This floor was, if anything, more obscure than the one above. Neon outlines of dancers undulated, mimicked precisely by real ones, or apparently real, their shadows made multiple by wheeling lights. The laughter and conversation had a buzzing overtone, as if piped in over strained loudspeakers. On screens around the room, projected faces laughed uproariously at jokes he couldn’t hear. He fled downward.

The drink had somehow made him thirsty, so he went to the bar and started to order when he realized the bartender was only a photo cutout advertising something. He looked around for a waitress, but no one was there, so he helped himself. It made him feel transgressive.

This floor had a minefield theme. Whenever a dancer stepped on a mine, smoke would billow from the floor and silvery confetti would rain down. Around the edges of the room, burners intermittently erupted in pillars of flame, luridly lighting nearby revelers. A group of young people were calling out to each other in Japanese, laughing in drunken hilarity. One of them came over to help herself to liquor at the bar. Lee tried to look up her name in his notebook, but she wasn’t sending. “Have you been here before?” he asked, then winced at what a lame line it sounded like.

She nodded. “Every night. I work here.”

“Oh, I thought you were with them,” he nodded at the rest of the group.

“I am. We’re all actors.”

“What are — oh, I get it. It’s like one of those murder mystery parties, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what it’s like. Exactly.”

He wanted to ask more, but she waved at him and dashed away, jumping over a burner just before it shot flame to the ceiling. He headed for the stairs. Down.

The next floor was partitioned off into booths of smoked Plexiglas enclosing red vinyl banquettes. Almost all were occupied, but he found a free one and sat down. Through the partition he could indistinctly see the booth next to him, crowded with a group of Australians (by their accents) smoking something which (by the smell) was stronger than tobacco. They were making a raucous din, but it suited Lee. It had become obvious that he was not going to find her by wandering this place. If he had known her name he could have performed a search on his notebook. But she knew his. He was going to have to broadcast it and wait for her to find him.

He set his notebook to send his name. His drink was gone. The waitress kept coming to serve the Aussies, but never even glanced at him. He drew patterns in the water rings on the red formica tabletop, slowly growing irritated. And then he looked up and saw her.

She was separated from him by several layers of frosted glass, but he would have known that slim form anywhere. She was looking for him anxiously, with that shade of controlled desperation that made him feel so powerful, so crucial to her. He waved, but she didn’t see him. Jolted from his seat, he found his path barred by partitions. Trying to keep her in sight, he rounded booth after booth, searching for a way through the translucent haze. Only the merest second did he lose sight of her, but when he breathlessly rounded the last corner, only a plaster cast of her was left, her face projected onto a blank white face-screen, urgently beautiful. The image faded as he watched.

Now he knew that someone was messing with him. Returning to his seat, he passed the booth where the Australians sat. They were all manikins, and their boisterous conversation was a recording.

With a sudden clarity, it occurred to him that there might not be a single genuine customer on this floor but himself. When he checked his notebook, no credit histories popped onto the screen. Just as he had expected, nothing here was authentic. Nothing but her. She, he was convinced, was real, as much a victim of this place as he was.

Down he went again. The next floor was entirely unlit. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the room filled with a swarm of moving dots fluorescing under invisible blacklights. They seemed to be patches worn by dancers; his imagination readily filled in the bodies, but there was no way to tell for sure. He moved gingerly forward into the dark, expecting to collide with someone.

A hand touched his shoulder from behind. He wheeled around. In the dark, his eyes strained vainly, but he felt her nearby.

“Do not look at me,” she said. Her voice was soft, with an accent he could not place.

“Don’t be ashamed,” he said. She was self-conscious about her simplicity, thinking he actually wanted one of these women so perfect you could almost see the mold lines.

“Lead me out of here,” she said.

He had come to buy her off. The cash chit was a hard lump in his pocket. He could give it to her and go back to his life, leaving her without personhood.

Turning back to the steps, he said, “Follow me.” It was an insane act. He could not risk being seen with this woman, so foreign to everything about his life. What was he doing?

The explanation struck him as he set foot on the first step, and it felt like the most profound drunken revelation of his life. Sex was like commerce. Not in the superficial ways everyone could see, but on a deeper level. Both were like thermodynamic systems: They generated energy from contrast. As a battery creates electricity from reservoirs of contrasting chemicals and a water wheel generates power from contrasting levels of water, so commerce could only exist where there was difference — otherwise, what would there be to trade? Difference generated the energy that drove the flow of goods and ideas, and it was generating the sexual energy propelling him up the stairs.

He almost turned to tell her, but she said again, “Do not look at me.”

The staircase seemed much longer going up than it had coming down. He kept passing floors he could not remember, and his legs began to ache with endless effort. Ten flights, twenty — how many had he climbed?

He knew he was near the exit when the hostess in the spandex dress barred his way, demanding payment. She handed him a computer printout of his tab, and it unfolded clear to the floor. As if a mere bill could deter him. Laughing derisively, he whipped out his plutonium credit card with its half-million-dollar limit. “Do you know who I am?” he said. “I am the chosen of the market. I walk among you, a negotiable instrument made flesh!” For a moment his attention was caught, fascinated, by the reflection of his own face in the surface of the card. Then he shifted it ever so slightly, to reflect what lay behind him.

For the merest instant he saw her face, suffused with dismay. Then there was an explosion of shattering glass, as if a whole tray of crystal goblets had gone down. Whipping around, he saw that she had broken into a million pieces; they bounced and skittered across the floor. With a cry of anguish, he fell to his knees, trying vainly to gather up the glittering shards. Already people were walking through them, scattering them, crunching them into atoms.

“What got broken?” someone asked.

“My wife,” Lee said. His soulmate, his beloved, the only authentic thing he had ever purchased. The fragments sifted through his fingers. “My fragile wife,” he said.

© 2001 by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Originally published in Interzone.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Ives Gilman has been publishing fantasy and science fiction for twenty years. Her first novel, Halfway Human (Avon/EOS 1998), was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF” by Locus magazine. Her most recent novel, Dark Orbit, is due out summer 2015. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, and Realms of Fantasy. She has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award. In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. She lives in St. Louis and works for the Missouri History Museum as a historian and curator.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

Quiet Town

Jason Gurley

She was in the laundry room, bent over a basket of Benjamin’s muddy trousers and grass-stained T-shirts and particularly odorous socks, when a rap sounded on the screen door. She didn’t hear at first; she’d noticed, bent over there, a cluster of webbed, purplish veins just below her thigh, beside her knee. She didn’t like seeing them there. They were like a slow-moving car wreck, those veins, a little darker, a little more severe each time she looked. They bothered her.

The front porch creaked, and the screen door rattled on its hinges as the knock came again.

Bev eased up to standing, still clutching a mound of laundry against her middle. She pinned the clothes with one hand, and with the other, looped the hair out of her eyes.

“Yeah?” she called over her shoulder.

“Me,” the answer came.

Bev took in a long breath, let it fill up her lungs and raise her voice to a tone one might reasonably mistake for pleasant.

“Come on in, Ezze,” she hollered. “Coffee cake on the table, you want some.”

The screen door complained a bit, and not for the first time Bev made a mental note to oil the damn thing. But she knew she’d forget between now and the next time Ezze hobbled over. The door banged shut, followed by the scuff of the dining chair being pulled out, the expulsion of breath as Ezze dropped, too heavily, onto it. The chair wouldn’t take such abuse forever. Bev sometimes wished it would give out, and then felt guilty for thinking such things. Beneath her gravel and bluster, Ezze was just lonely.

Bev stuffed the clothes into the wash and spun the old machine up. It rocked agreeably, knocking with a small clatter into the dryer beside it. Bev leaned against the wall, just for a second, just to take a few breaths before going in to the kitchen. The back door was open, its own screen door shut. Gray light spilled through the window, leaked through the uneven gaps in the doorjamb. She could see the pale, lumbering clouds that scraped the tops of the houses around hers. Most of those houses were empty now.

Just me and Benji, Bev thought.

From the kitchen, a smacking sound, the clink of a serving knife against the platter.

Just me and Benji and Ezze, Bev corrected.

She didn’t like the wind out there today. The Aparicios had left laundry on the line when they moved out — in a hurry, like everybody these past few weeks — and almost all of it was scattered around the neighborhood now, T-shirts and pantyhose and thermal underwear caught up in bare tree branches, soaked and plastered in gutters. Almost all of it, except for the heavy quilt, heavier now from all the rain, that dragged the laundry line low. The wind caught even that, lifted it nearly horizontal, a cheerful, soggy flag.

“A bit dry, dear,” came Ezze’s voice.

Bev turned away from the screen door. Cold air breathed around it, pushing through the gaps, and Bev shivered. But she left the inner door open for Benjamin, and went into the kitchen.

“How’s the hip?” Bev asked, ignoring Ezze’s comment.

Ezze groaned theatrically. “I’d give anything for a new one,” she said. “But who’s got money for that?”

Her gray cane rested against the table beside her, tipped up on two of its four stubby feet. The rubber nubs on the end of each were damp and clumped with gray earth and grit. Bev sighed and picked up the cane and carried it onto the porch. Ezze didn’t say anything. Bev cranked the spigot attached to the house. It choked and sputtered, coughing up a weak stream. Bev rinsed the cane, then propped it against the house, and went back inside.

Ezze regarded her irritably as Bev spritzed a paper towel with Windex, then wiped up the mud the cane had left behind.

“That’s for windows, dear,” Ezze said, watching Bev from beneath her glasses.

Bev didn’t say anything, just balled up the towel and dropped it into the wastebasket. The plastic lid swung twice, stopped.

“That’s why it’s called Windex,” Ezze went on. “Windows. Windex.” She wrinkled her slug of a nose and squinted up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Don’t know where the ex part came from, though.”

Bev went into the kitchen, her hands searching for tasks. Perhaps if she appeared to be busy, Ezze would leave. But the countertops were tidy, the sink free of dishes.

“Your linoleum’s soft,” Ezze said. Bev looked up to see the woman bouncing lightly in the chair. Below her, the linoleum bowed. “It’s cheap stuff. I’ve got the same in my place.”

“Well, stop making it worse,” Bev said.

Ezze laughed as if this was funny. “You should see mine,” she said. “Sagging all over the place.”

I wonder why, Bev thought but did not say.

Ezze took another bite of coffee cake, then made a show of gagging on crumbs. “Water,” she croaked, putting one damp hand to the loose skin around her throat. “Water.”

Bev filled a glass from the tap, then put it down in front of Ezze, who stared at it in horror, her stage act forgotten.

“Dear,” Ezze said. “You’re not drinking it, are you? There’s a warning. It’s all over the TV.”

“We don’t have a TV,” Bev said flatly. “What warning?”

“Contaminated supply or something. I don’t know.” Ezze waved her hand about. “Real problem is what I came over to tell you about, though. You’re not going to believe it.”

Bev took the glass of water away from Ezze, crossed back into the kitchen and dumped it aggressively into the sink. Then the fight faded from her, just as quickly as it seemed to have risen up. Ezze didn’t mean any harm, she reminded herself again. She was old; she was alone. It wasn’t her fault, none of it. Can’t fight age. Can’t make people stay.

“What’s that?” Bev asked, brushing her hair back again. “Believe what?”

The back screen door banged open then, and Benji clattered into the kitchen like a runaway shopping cart. He was out of breath, his pants rolled up to his knees. He held his tennis shoes in one hand, but whatever he’d gotten into, he’d taken them off too late. They were caked with gray mud, and his legs were splashed with it.

Ezze looked at Benji, who gasped like a fish, trying to get some words out.

“He knows,” Ezze said. “Don’t you, boy.”

Bev looked wide-eyed at Ezze, then back at Benjamin. “Knows what? Benjamin, you’re filth —”

Benjamin shook his head and held up a hand, working on just breathing.

“Oh, fine,” Ezze said. “I’ll tell her.”

“Tell me what?” Bev asked. “What the hell is going on?”

Benjamin, cheeks strawberry-colored against his pale skin, said, “Water — water —”

Bev turned to fill her glass again, but Benji lurched forward and grabbed her hand.

“No,” he said, chest heaving. “Water’s — the water —”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Ezze said. “The water’s here, Bev.”

• • • •

What was it Gordy had said?

“When ice melts, the glass don’t spill over.”

Bev had leaned against him in the porch swing, comforted by his disbelief, while he told her about a column he read when they were in college, by that brainy woman who answered people’s letters. Someone wrote in and asked the woman if you were to fill a glass with ice cubes, then run tap water right up to the rim of the glass, what would happen when the ice melted? And the brainy woman said something about melting ice cubes displacing the same amount of water as the frozen ice.

It’s not my fault, Bev thought now. It’s his fault, not mine. His. She wasn’t the fool. It was him. He was.

But that wasn’t fair. Gordy hadn’t taken the news seriously, but at the time, nobody had. They’d been on the porch, listening to the radio while the neighborhood noisily settled in for the night. Benjamin had been scrambling around in the front yard, kicking dried-out pinecones around like footballs.

“You remember the oddest things,” Bev had said, and Gordy had laughed. There had been plenty of laughter in those days. Those days, that’s how Bev thought of them. As in: those days when life was good. Those days when there were still people around. When the sun blazed and they called it a nice summer day, not an ice-melter like everyone did now. Those days. When Gordy was still around.

But Gordy had been wrong. The brainy woman had been wrong. The radio warning all those years ago, when Benji was small, had been wrong. Fifty years, they’d said. In fifty years, the coastlines will be different. Your homes will be underwater. Fifty years.

They’d listened to the talk shows afterward, the pundits arguing that nobody knew what the next ten years would look like, much less the next fifty. It’s all a farce, they argued. It’s a campaign strategy. A ploy. Fifty years — ha!

It had happened in five.

Gordy went and died before it got serious, and on summer evenings, when the skies went purple and orange, Bev and Benjamin and sometimes Ezze, even, would wander down to the sea wall with the rest of the town, and they’d all stand on the wall and look down at the water level. When they couldn’t see the high-water mark, somebody would motor out in a rubber boat and spray a new line of paint on the wall.

Soon enough, someone could just lean over the rail and spray that new line. The water kept rising. When it was a few inches from the top of the wall, people started leaving town. In a month’s time, the village had emptied.

Ezze scooped up her cane and went heavily down the porch steps. Benji tugged on Bev’s hand. He held it tightly as they walked, following the older woman as she puffed along. Bev barely registered his grip until it was too tight, and she yelped.

“Sorry, Mama,” he said.

She saw Gordy in Benji’s eyes. They weren’t a child’s eyes anymore. Benji was nearly thirteen, and already his eyes were narrow slots. He and Gordy both had a Clint Eastwood squint, and she could see the boy’s jawline, his cheekbones, sharpening. His hair was already drawing back on his head, though. She didn’t dare break his heart by telling him now, but he’d lose most of it by twenty, probably, just like his father.

The thought that he might not see twenty was a block of ice in her gut.

“I knowed about it when Pippa came home with a crabshell in her mouth,” Ezze said, huffing as she waddled ahead. “Came right on home with it. No place else she could’ve gotten it. Had to have washed up over the wall. Fresh, too. She’d pulled half the meat out, but I swear the thing was still twitching.”

The street was gritty under their feet. Bev padded along in her flip-flops, and as Ezze fell silent, Bev’s shoes pock-pocked like tennis balls. There was a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. Used to be a court down by the high school, and on quiet days, you could hear the distant sound of rackets pocking the balls, back and forth, back and forth. The sharp shriek of tennis shoes on the clay, too. People grunting and shouting excitedly.

Quiet town.

“I saw your Rascal,” Benji said. “I tried to fix it, but . . .”

He trailed off.

“Your Rascal?” Bev asked.

Ezze stopped for a moment, breathing heavily. “Yeah,” she admitted, bending over a bit, leaning on the cane. “I rode down there on it with Pippa to see for myself. Battery died right up at the wall. There were some boys putting down sandbags, and they tried to help me with it, but it’s just dead. One of them walked me back home. Nice kid. I don’t know whose kid. Not many left, you know.”

Benji said, “It’s still where you left it. There’s some seagull shit on it, but —”

“Benjamin Howard Marsh,” Bev said sharply.

Benji sighed and muttered, “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

“Never mind that,” Ezze said loudly. She pounded the rubber feet of her cane on the concrete. “Look.”

They all looked down to see a thin ribbon of water. It cascaded between their feet, and they all watched in a hush as it passed them by, gathering up bits of leaves and fine gravel. The water kept going, making its way down the street until they couldn’t quite make out its leading edge. It was here now, Bev thought.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ezze cried. She high-stepped around her cane as another rivulet ran through the yellowed grass on the shoulder of the road. And in the quiet then they could hear it: the water, its thousand narrow fingers, creeping through the dead lawns and over the bleached asphalt. They could see it, stream after stream of it moving across empty driveways, splitting around the stop sign post, and then the thousand fingers of it bled together until the water was a blue-gray sheet, rippling along beneath the darkening sky, claiming the land for its own.

“Mama,” Benji said.

The water spilled around their feet, thin but here.

“Mama,” he said again, tugging Bev’s hand. She looked up at him, then at Ezze, whose stern features had folded into a new shape, a softer, more honest mask, a fearful one.

“Mama, we gotta go,” Benjamin said.

Such a fool, Bev thought to herself again. What would Gordy have done? But it didn’t matter what he would do now. It mattered what he had done then, and what he had done then was laugh, then die.

We should’ve had a TV, she thought absurdly.

She looked at Ezze. The fading sun caught the faint whiskers on Ezze’s cheeks, turning them into tiny glowing filaments. Benji stared at her, his narrow eyes still fierce with hope and promise, his skin rosy where it faced the sunset, and dusky purple on the opposite side, in shadow, as if he was already dead, and there was no way around it.

© 2015 by Jason Gurley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Gurley is the author of Greatfall and The Man Who Ended the World, among other novels. His novel Eleanor is forthcoming from Crown Publishing, and his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Help Fund My Robot Army!!!, Synchronic, The Robot Chronicles and others. He lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest, and can be found online at jasongurley.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees

John Barnes

Stephanie Ilogu knew the Southern Ocean was supposed to be cold. Lars had been battling to cool the ocean since Stephanie was seven years old. If my teeth chatter, I’m disrespecting my husband’s success.

Maybe I wouldn’t think so much about my numb feet and face, or the dank sogginess leaking into my hair through my watch cap, or how much cold air leaks in under this huge parka, if I had something to do besides listen to my husband and his ex-wife make history together, so I can write about how great they both are.

Lars had warned her about his ex’s enthusiasm. “Bigger than Brazil in less than three months!” Nicole leaned far out over the railing, risking a five-meter plunge into the dense mat, which looked like floating spinach. Below the first surface meter, black, oily fibre extended forty meters down, so dense and deep that the Southern Ocean’s surface was nearly flat despite a face-stinging headwind.

Lars wore his parka hood up, and from behind him Stephanie could not watch his expression as Nicole arched her back, revealing Greek-statue glutes under glistening skin the colour of hot chocolate. Twisting tightly at the waist, she grasped the sampling pole beside her, hooked heel behind knee around the rail, and dangled over the green, motionless, freezing sea.

She wore her thin one-piece bathing suit for company or cameras and no other reason. Naked except to broadcast, Nicole had walked on Mars, swum under the ice on Europa, and spent four years outdoors in methane snow and slush on Titan. If Nicole fell into the slimy cold mess below, to her, the icy sea that could chill a human to death in minutes would call for a slight speedup of her fusor. She could then tread water for weeks, swim north to Cape Town, or walk on the sea floor to Davis Antarctic Station.

Nicole whipped up in a back flip and lighted as neatly on the ice-coated deck as if she’d been wearing sneakers on a dry sidewalk. Stephanie reminded herself that those bare toes had dealt with far worse.

Nicole peered through the sample jar. “Mat’s still spreading outward at eighty kilometers a day. And if this sample is like every other one, there’s more genetic diversity in this jar than we’ve found in the solar system up till now. The million new species we’ve catalogued have DNA less like anything on Earth than a Europan tentacled clam or a Martian braidworm. The ocean still has surprises! I love it!”

“I hate surprises,” Lars said. “Surprises are what good management is supposed to control.”

“I love surprises,” Nicole said. Her huge grin invited Stephanie into the conversation. “No surprises, no news media, no job for Steph. And the sea should surprise us.” Her sweeping, circular gesture embraced the horizon; Clarke’s bow cut ceaselessly into the featureless plain of mat, stern jets churning a darker path that closed up in less than a kilometer. “Science is about knowing enough to know what’s just uncommon and what’s a real surprise. Most people are —”

Clarke cleared its forward intake screens. An immense stream of green and black mat shot upward and forward, sounding like God’s clogged toilet clearing. The headwind blew the plume, the colour and texture of black bean and broccoli soup, back onto them.

“I think we’re done, for the moment,” Lars said.

Just before going below, shivering and holding her breath against the stench like rotten fish and cabbage, Stephanie looked back at Nicole bobbing for another sample. Her beautifully muscled legs wrapped around the railing in a figure-four; beyond her upward-reaching feet, all the way to the horizon, the Southern Ocean was a bright green sheet in the clear wet sunlight.

Stephanie usually liked undressing in front of Lars, but the fresh memory of Nicole, her body as fine today as when it was built, made her hesitate. Lars grabbed the hem of her parka and pulled it up over her head, stripping her into the refresher slot until he knelt to remove her safety boots. “Now you do me.”

The freezing, stinking seawater that had drenched him spattered onto her as she removed his parka, but she didn’t mind when she saw the smile as his gaze caressed her.

He gently stroked her hair, forehead, and cheek, his hands still warm and damp from his glove. “She has too many muscles,” Lars said, reading Stephanie’s mind, “and not enough colour contrast.” He folded his all-but-paper-white fingers gently into her deep brown ones, where she had been caressing the forearm stroking her cheek, and guided her hand to the back of his neck. His hand returned to her cheek, and trailed down along her neck, and over her collarbone. “See? An old poop like me needs high contrast or he’d never be able to find his way around. Now let’s boil the stink and cold off ourselves.”

In the roaring hot shower, she scrubbed his shaven head fiercely, the way he preferred; he relished lathering her and rinsing her off. When they had washed and kissed enough, he said, “Well, now at least we don’t reek of spoiled sardines.” They towelled each other off in the small space between the bed and the closet, close enough to feel each other’s warmth. “I’m feeling a little more secure,” Stephanie said. “It’s just — oh, everything. She’s so beautiful.”

“They built her that way,” Lars reminded her, “because they thought the planetary exploration program would be more politically sustainable if the people out there doing it could attract fans on Earth. And my god, they were right. We had a hell of a fight to bring the six of them back to Earth and put them on useful projects; even today almost half the population wants to watch new exploration shows with the humaniforms bouncing around on some useless rock out in space.”

“It makes me think she’s not really human,” Stephanie said. “You took away everything she was made for and everything she lived for — yet she came back here and married you. That’s not a person. A real person couldn’t do that.”

“A person without much choice can do all kinds of things.” He fastened his clean tunic. “We married each other to establish that the six of them were persons and citizens. Otherwise the corporations would’ve used humaniform technology to make billions of slaves. Can you imagine beings like Nicole spending six hundred years as a nanny, a butler, or a sex toy?”

“She says she likes to work.”

“She likes to exercise her abilities, which are those of a very capable oceanographer and marine biologist. She’ll enjoy figuring out why all this crap is growing in the ocean —”

“I wish you could just order her to fix it.”

“As a bureaucrat, I might like that, but as a person who was once married to that person, I don’t want obedience, I want her best work, things I’d never have thought to ask for that solve problems I didn’t know were problems.”

“But you hate surprises. And she has every reason to hate you and you don’t know why she’s helping instead.”

“I was a reasonably decent husband for a guy who started late without a clue. As for why humaniforms live with us, work with us, and don’t seem to be too pissed off that we took them away from the environments they were made for — well, they seem to like us. They’ve all been married to plain old biological people. Nicole herself has had two husbands since me. She’ll probably have a good solid twenty more, in the next few centuries. She likes people. And you’d have to be a jerk not to like her, once you get to know her.” He hugged Stephanie. “Look, she’s beautiful, she’ll live a long time, and she can go places we can’t. Otherwise she’s about as superior to us as a really great athlete combined with a pretty smart scientist. Haven’t you ever met any humaniforms before today?”

“No, I haven’t. Think about it, Lars, when would I? I got the reporting job straight out of school, and by that time you were already courting me. My parents were high level bureaucrats in West Africa, which isn’t a very important province; it was just Dad’s good luck that you knew him from school, but we weren’t anywhere near the social level where the humaniforms circulate. And I’m not sure I’d have taken the chance to meet one if I could. To tell you the truth I’m scared of them. They creep me out.”

“All right. Well, you’ve got the biggest opportunity of your life right now, to report this story.” His voice was strangely cold; the small and frightened person inside her could not turn to him for the usual comfort, and she felt horribly alone, looking into his matter-of-fact, judging eyes. “So you can bail on the opportunity, right now, and I’ll find someone who can talk to Nicole to record this story. Or you can get over feeling ‘creepy’ and talk with her. Drop the job or drop the feeling, Stephanie.”

He’s scared I’ll drop the job. That decided her. “All right. I’ll learn to deal with her.” But she’s so beautiful and Lars slept with her for ten years. A ten-year marriage couldn’t have been just to prove a legal point, a month would have done that. Why didn’t I realize that till now? “At least I’ll try.”

He looked like he tasted something bad. “You’re meeting a remarkable person, not undertaking an ordeal. Have you paid any attention to any accurate source about humaniforms or just to the junky, scary stuff in the media?”

That hurt. “Lars, okay, obviously you think I’m a bigot or a phobe, so what should I know about Nicole?”

“Mostly how much she’s like you — smart but not freakishly smart, with more empathy, emotional stability and sense of duty than most people have. That fusor in her chest, her ability to adjust her sensations to stay comfortable and sensitive, that body made of materials that tolerate very wide temperature and pH ranges — that’s a spec sheet, that’s not her. If you prick her, she won’t bleed, she’ll block the pain. If you tickle her, she’ll laugh because she likes to laugh. She’d be hard to poison but hydrofluoric acid would work, and she’d die.”

“See, but what bothers me is, ‘And if you wrong her, shall she not revenge?’ Lars, you took away the job she loved and was born to do, and —”

“You’d feel she was more of a person if she said, ‘All you fleshy bastards can just die?’”

“Maybe.” Stephanie sighed. “I still think of her as a fast computer running smart software inside a tough, pretty mannequin. I wish she’d never —”

Nicole knocked on their door. “No need to come up on the deck but there’s something you urgently need to see.”

They wore their parkas hood down and without hats through Clarke’s unheated corridors, but slipped out of them in the bathygraphy room. “It’s easiest to see on the combined display, over here,” Nicole said, “but the truth is it’s so plain that a World War II destroyer’s sonar could have picked it up. All the meson scanning, x-ray boundary analysers, and phase-shifted sonar just add more vivid detail. Now just look.” Stephanie leaned forward to peer into the holographic barrel.

Beside her, Lars said, “What the hell are those? And how big are they?”

Stephanie found the scales and legends. In an almost perfectly circular area about four hundred kilometers across, a bull’s-eye in the much bigger circle of mat, arranged in equilateral triangles about a kilometer and a half on a side, towers two kilometers high and a hundred meters across reared up from the ocean floor. “Hunh,” Stephanie said, “how big is a redwood?”

“Good comparison,” Nicole said. “Because up at the top these things, that green mist in the holo, represent crowns — or one big canopy, I guess — of filaments, some as thick as your thigh, some thinner than your hair,” Nicole said. “At a guess, they’re the roots for upside-down trees.”

“Upside-down trees?”

“Well, not trees per se, but that canopy looks like a feeding structure attached to those trunks, if that’s what you want to call them, and since it’s all more than a kilometer below the surface, it’s not leaves. So a trunk with roots on top is an upside down tree, at least till we have a better name. Anyway, I’m going to swim down and have a look.”

Lars looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “You most certainly are not —”

“I’m not under your direction,” Nicole pointed out. “And I want to know what’s going on down there, and I’m more capable than any robot. I’ll just throw my deepwater bag together, and dive.”

Lars looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “The publicity situation is already a mess. If we wait for a robot, that will look bad, but if we lose one of the best-loved humaniforms, it will look worse. We have no idea what’s going on down there, and if we let you go —”

“You won’t be letting me anything,” Nicole said. “I’m a citizen, my contract is with the Oceanographic Institute and they have a separate one with the company that operates Clarke. Nothing stops me from just going over the side. Do you want to have been consulted or not?”

“I do,” Stephanie said. “Time for an interview before you dive in?”

“Sure,” Nicole said. “Well, Lars, do you want your wife to write that you were dithering?”

Lars shrugged. “It’s something to do while everything spins out of control.” He stared down into the holo image of the huge structures on the bottom of the ocean, squeezing his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. “A surprise with big stakes and a good chance of guessing wrong. I hate those.”

Nicole looked away. “Stephanie, I know it’s miserable for you up top, and once I’m up there I’m just going to dive over the side, so if you don’t mind sitting in a corner of my cabin while I pack —”

“If I can stick my autorec to the wall —”

“Sure. Then just run up with me to shoot vid of me going over the side. You’ll only have to be out in the freezing weather for a few seconds.”

Nicole’s cabin completely overthrew Stephanie’s expectation of Spartan pragmatism. Space she saved by having no clothes and needing no bed enabled a wild chaos of piles of books, tools, instruments, and papers. Every wall was covered by paste-on screens, displaying a rotating profusion of scenery from all over the solar system, pictures of ex-husbands and families, major awards, and the other five humaniforms. The physical chaos of the floor was exceeded only by the informational chaos of the walls. Stephanie had to smile.

Nicole said, “What?”

“Oh, just noticing that this is a place where somebody works with a passion,” Stephanie said. That I didn’t expect from a robot.

Nicole nodded. “I wish I’d been designed to sleep; night watches in here are lonely. I think that spot by the bathroom door will work for your autorec. Fire away.”

Tip her off guard. “Do the oceans ever bore you?”

“I’ve been down in every ocean the solar system’s still got,” Nicole said, “and walked the dry bottoms of the ones that’re gone, and a thousand years would not suffice to see just the cool parts of one.”

Great answer, they’ll quote that everywhere. Now the bread and butter. “For the record, what’s going into that bag and what are you going to do?”

“Sampling tools, suction gadgets to capture fluids, blades and drills for solids, containers for everything. Acoustic, gamma, meson, and positron scanners. I’m going to strap lights on my forehead and forearms, fill my lungs with diving fluid, turn my temperature up, and dive down through the canopy. Then I’ll cut pieces off these upside-down trees, drill holes, bring back stuff to analyse, and look around in general.”

“Any idea what you’re going to look for?”

“I’d like to know where all the sea life that was here went,” Nicole said. “Because of the iron fertilization, there were immense populations of everything from microbes up to whales around here, and there haven’t been any migrations or any population increases in the adjacent uncontaminated areas. Maybe two million marine mammals and six billion fish and sharks are gone, and god knows how many invertebrates, along with four hundred billion tons of plant life. I’m pretty sure they’re dead, but where are all the bodies?”

“No idea?”

“Biomass is energy and whatever that is down there required a lot of energy to make. Beyond that, I try to keep an open mind and just tell the world to surprise me.”

Another great answer. Now something for the personal interest. “Here’s what people are going to ask me — what’s she really like?”

Nicole slipped the last tool into the bag and started strapping a utility light and tool holster to her left arm. “Hunh. I really like surprises, the deep, wild, turn-over-the-world kind. I do know what you mean, but honestly, how would I know what I’m like? That happens out there with everyone else, and in here, there isn’t anyone to compare to.” Nicole hesitated, looked at her directly, and said, “You’re not very comfortable talking to a humaniform, are you?” She pulled the lighted helmet onto her head and fastened the chin strap.

“Have my questions been too blunt?”

“Well, many times, people talk to me bluntly for the same reason they talk to any machine bluntly, because it’s not a person,” she said. “People swear at a screwdriver because they don’t care what the screwdriver thinks of them.”

Whoa, that one made me squirm. Turn it around. “And you do care what I think of you.”

Nicole nodded, as if reaching inside herself for the answer. “I do; I usually care what people think of me.”

“That’s a pretty good argument that you’re a person. Welcome to the club.”

Nicole surprised her by laughing. “Wow, I’m oversensitive today, and not in a way I can adjust.” She stepped carefully over a couple of construction-block-sized instruments and surprised Stephanie with a warm, tight hug.

I’d’ve thought she’d feel like a heated couch, but this is nice. She stroked the bare skin of Nicole’s shoulder: like nubbly fabric, softer than raw silk but not as slick as satin. Stephanie felt at once that Nicole’s skin was as sensitive, as responsive, as easy to feel as her own. When Nicole kissed her cheek, the lips felt warm, and slightly rough. “We’ll be friends. You’ll see. Right now I have to run.”

“Of course. Don’t let me use up your daylight.”

Nicole smiled, shaking her head. “Now, as a reporter —”

“Duh, of course, it’s always dark down there.”

Out on the deck, Stephanie recorded Nicole putting the tube into her mouth and inhaling diving fluid; it looked like watery brown pudding. Then Nicole calmly stuck the needle into her abdominal cavity, then her sinuses, filling all with the same goo. She had body cavities to give her a normal speaking voice, to process repair materials in the field, and be normally proportioned without having to haul excess weight; for ocean-bottom work, being fluid-filled prevented her from collapsing.

Filled with fluid, Nicole couldn’t speak, so she waved with a merry smile, and flipped over the side in a dive. The big splash flung up green and black gunk, which slid down Clarke’s side. Alone and cold, Stephanie went back below.

“How’d it go?” Lars asked, after they had both been quietly working in their cabin for more than an hour.

“I think it’s going to be easier than I imagined,” Stephanie said. “You’re right, she’s hard not to like.” The memory of Nicole’s warm, different texture, and the strength of those arms holding her, was distracting, but very pleasant.

They had eaten dinner, and darkness had long since fallen, when texts popped up on their screens. Nicole had returned, and they would meet her in the conference room with the other scientists in twenty minutes. “I bet she doesn’t want anyone recording how she removes diving fluid,” Stephanie said.

“Nicole always said she felt about it like human women feel about changing a tampon — no big deal but too messy for public. She can collapse each cavity completely in one stroke, so in three quick motions, she clears her lungs through her mouth, her sinuses through her nose, and her abdominal —”

“Gosh, I’m looking forward to her presentation.”

At the meeting, Nicole looked like the kid who just had a perfect Christmas. “All right, I’m scared and worried, and I’ll explain why in a second, but what I just found is so awesome — like in the really old sense, the way Nix Olympica is awesome — that I hope you’ll forgive me for babbling. First of all, those vertical structures are mostly made out of calcium hydroxylapatite, with a highly complex internal structure.”

Someone said, “Bone.”

“Exactly. The towers are gigantic bones. The root-canopy above is a huge digestive organ, which did its damnedest to digest me. Luckily nothing it excreted was a me-solvent. So we have tree trunks, which are bones; and roots, which are stomachs, intestines, and livers, floating in a cloud above them. Two kilometers high and growing on an exceptionally cold and deep abyssal plain, across an area the size of Pennsylvania, and I think it might all be one big organism; definitely a lot of the tubes in the canopy hook to more than one trunk. Everyone will now please experience some real awe and surprise, okay?”

Lars’s expression was flat, drawn, almost angry. “You said you are worried and scared.”

“Two kilometer high bones with a curtain of guts floating above them sounds like plenty to worry about to me,” Stephanie said.

Lars turned his Shut up, you’re just a reporter glare on her — actually it wasn’t easy to tell it from shut up, you’re just my wife, Stephanie thought spitefully.

Nicole winked at her, startling her into silence more effectively than Lars’s glare. “Well,” Nicole said, “When I drilled cores, I found the outer walls are riddled with little tubes and pockets, and what’s in them is chopped Earth life. Seafood salad, you might call it, bugs and fish and seaweed and whales, all pretty much blenderized and packed in. That’s where some of the marine life went — ground up and stuffed it into those pockets in the bone. Incidentally, Stephanie, at a guess, the three vanished people from that capsized yacht very likely ended up in there, too, so you may want to watch how you break this news until someone talks to their families. Anyway, there’s roughly a twenty-meter-thick wall, according to the positron activation scan, that’s all that pocketed bone. Inside that, which I couldn’t drill to, and the positrons couldn’t penetrate to, the acoustic probes showed drastic changes of density, and NMR plus meson tomography eventually teased out what’s in the middle layer and the core.

“The middle layer is larger and smaller alternating chambers, all about seventy meters from the outer wall to the inner wall, laced with reinforcing struts of more bone. The larger chambers, which extend about eighty meters in the direction of the trunk, contain very high purity hydrogen peroxide, which is so unstable around biological material that there must be a special coating or something on the inner surfaces of those chambers to keep it from dissociating violently. Between hydrogen peroxide chambers, there are smaller forty-five-meter-long chambers filled with a mix of twenty percent toluene, seventy percent octane, and ten percent heptane — whoever said gasoline, that’s it. And the core is a two-meter-thick bone wall surrounding an empty —”

The intercom hooted the signal for an emergency announcement. “This is the captain. Bathygraphy room wants you all to know that the imaging is showing all those big structures are now floating upwards, pushing right up through that canopy. They all let loose at once, and they’re rising at about a meter and a half per second, so they’ll be breaking the surface here in about twenty minutes. We can’t run two hundred kilometers in the thirty minutes before they surface — all we can do is try to dodge the big towers as they float up and keep our intakes clear of all that canopy gunk. I know you’ll want to observe whatever’s happening; please be careful in moving around the ship and remember that we could have a sudden collision with one of those huge things. They seem to be staying upright as they rise, and if that continues there should be space between them.”

“They’ll be at the surface in twenty minutes?” Nicole said. “Come on, people, grab your parkas and come up and see this!”

Most of the scientists stood, but Lars gestured for them to sit. “We have work to do, don’t we? Alerting the rest of the planet, making sure they know what’s going on so that if we don’t make it they have our information? And perhaps deciding what we should do? Shouldn’t we —”

Nicole said, “I am useless for most of that, and if you want me, phone me. Specifications of what I found are on the big screen here.”

“And this is my chance to interview Nicole and record whatever comes up,” Stephanie said, and followed her out. Lars said nothing and didn’t look at either of them, intent on putting together his “response teams” and “brainstormers” and “issue teams,” but Stephanie saw by the set of his shoulders that he was as angry as he permitted himself to be in public.

Out on the deck, the sky was clear, and after Nicole spoke on her wristcom with the bridge, they turned off running lights; the sky was instantly powdered with stars, with hundreds of minute shooting stars crossing from northeast to southwest.

“The iron,” Stephanie said, staring up at it. “Lars is so terrified that that is what has caused this . . . um, this whatever this is.”

“Well, he might be right, but that’s not a reason for him to be upset, if I’m guessing right. The iron enrichment did what it was supposed to do and took an immense amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, and it fed a lot of people along the way. Nothing to be ashamed of for that.”

“What are you guessing?”

Nicole extended her hand. “Come on over here; it’s more exposed but we can see better. Let me lay out this thought. Before we towed asteroids into orbit around the earth, fastened robots onto them, and started shooting chunks of iron into the atmosphere above the Southern Ocean, what was the main reason why this area wasn’t producing much biomass?”

“Well, lack of iron, obviously.”

“And where did the little bit of iron there was come from?”

“Meteors. That was the argument for why it was safe to do this. Because the process was completely natural, and they were just ramping it up.”

“There you go. Now just watch and think about all these meteors for a while; see if I can lead you onto my guess. I’ve got a better grip than you, so let me hold you so you don’t have to worry about slipping off.”

Her strong arms gripped around Stephanie’s waist, holding her tight, and Nicole’s body shielded her from the wind, now coming from astern; she gazed up at the unending procession of shooting stars, streaking down into the atmosphere as the bombardment from the asteroid chunks continued. Some people wanted this shut down as soon as the strange growth started, but there was no proof that the iron was driving it, and the artificial meteor shower has been going on for decades, Stephanie thought. But that’s politics and policy, and Nicole doesn’t care about those things, so that isn’t what she’s trying to make me see.

What does she care about? I barely know her.

The horizon-to-horizon smear of stars was streaked everywhere with swift shooting stars. Nicole’s arms and body held her warm and safe on the freezing deck. The shooting stars plus the security turned her mind to thoughts of being a small girl, back when father had told her the forest might die from the heat and the dryness, back when she had watched the little screen and seen her father’s old friend, Lars, explaining what they would have to do, because there was no longer time for anything gradual . . .

That awakened other memories on the screen, of Lars standing with Nicole, the police arresting him, the trial scenes, the moment when he and Nicole came down the steps with arms raised in triumph . . .

She thought of the short videos, when she was in grade school, of the solar sail rigs dragging chunks of the iron asteroids, as big as airplane hangars, into Earth orbit, of the toy-truck-like pebblers, tunnelers, melters, and shooters crawling over surface of each chunk of iron like so many swarming termites, of the dozen barrels on each shooter spraying bits of iron, anything in size from a sesame seed to a tennis ball, out at a rate of dozens per minute . . . Lars’s voiceover explaining how a million little meteors a day could cool the Earth, bring back the rains, feed the fish to feed the people . . .

Of her graduating class trip, the first time she had been south of the equator, standing on the deck of the big tour ship and watching the iron come in to make the oceans bloom . . . just a couple of years, then, before she met Lars . . .

And Nicole had been here all that time, fresh back to Earth when the plan was announced, walking the seabed and swimming between the icebergs before the first artificial meteors fell . . .

Nicole had lived a whole lifetime before hers, and how was she to judge it or understand it? She knew only that she trusted the person holding her, and knew that humaniform and human, daughter of the far planets and daughter of Africa, at least shared wanting to know more than wanting to govern, and placed truth before rules.

She thought until she said, “You think this is a natural process. Those . . . um, gasoline trees grow whenever the ocean blooms for long enough.”

“That’s what I think,” Nicole agreed.

“What are they for?”

“Stephanie, evolution doesn’t have a purpose; they’re not for anything. The question is what they do.”

Stephanie let her back press backward slightly, turning and raising her shoulders for a more secure place in Nicole’s hold. She thought for an instant that the warmth on the back of her neck, between cap and collar, was Nicole’s breath, then realized she didn’t breathe; it was the radiated warmth from her face. “Do you know what they do?”

“I have one idea that’s pretty crazy,” Nicole said. “That’s why, while we’ve been standing here, I’ve been sending the captain my text about it, and that’s why I’m going to hold onto you till we go below.”

“You’re predicting something big?”

“These things rushing up toward the surface are about twenty times as big as the biggest redwood, back before the warming killed them. The safest thing, the almost-Lars-in-its-tepid-chicken-shitness thing, that I can possibly say is, ‘I’m predicting something big.’”

Stephanie said, “I probably shouldn’t laugh at him. He’s my husband.”

“Didn’t mean to put you in an awkward spot. I still love him, myself, and how many ex-wives can say that after a few decades? But he’s about safety and security, making the world more certain than it would be otherwise. It’s a necessary part of the ecology of life. But so is surprise and amazement and wonder. And considering he married me . . . and now he’s married to you . . . I think he knows that he needs some of that in his life, too.” Her grip tightened, pulling Stephanie closer. “Whatever is about to happen should happen in the next minute.”

The ship barely rocked; overhead, the flurry of meteors continued, dug from the asteroids, fired into the Earth, politically guaranteed forever by the International Fishing Association, as Stephanie had said once in an article. The stars twinkled, and the ocean’s surface all around them began to rise into dark pools. The ship’s jets fired and Clarke scooted two hundred meters at top speed, almost throwing them to the deck, her stern swinging round to stop her just as quickly with another blast of the jets. As they scrambled to their feet, the dark pools welled up, into swellings, springs, hills of water punching through the thick mat, geysers, immense towers of seawater reaching toward the stars above them.

Nicole’s hands found the hip-belt of Stephanie’s parka, and for one absurd second she thought her husband’s ex intended to pants her out here. She started to laugh, but the sound was lost in the boom of seawater rushing into the sky; she closed her mouth as water poured down over the deck, and opened her eyes on the site of immense black columns, far bigger than any skyscraper ever built, rising slowly out of the sea, all around, a forest or a downtown of these mighty pillars.

Nicole pulled Stephanie down to the icy deck and lay across her, pinning her on her back, yanking the hood of the parka around her ears and screaming “ . . .your hands over your ears!”

Stephanie’s mittens stretched the parka hood tight around her head as she forced them in, covering her ears. The icy sea water poured down around her but with Nicole’s chest sheltering her face, she could breathe. Nicole’s more-than-human arms cradled her tight. She had only a moment to think, Now, what?

The light was blinding, even through closed lids; the shock was worse, and then they were flying, floating, until the sea slammed into Stephanie’s back, and she felt the burning sensation. It was only then that she knew her clothes had been on fire and that she was singed, salt water stinging at burns where the terrible heat and light had blasted away her thick winter clothing and left a pathway to her skin.

Far under the deadly cold water, she wanted to scream, but Nicole fastened her mouth over Stephanie’s, worked some strange trick that opened both jaws, and released Stephanie’s breath before giving her a burst of air, unneeded in a fusion-driven humaniform, from Nicole’s lungs. Three more times as they rose to the surface, Nicole fed her mouth-to-mouth air; she shuddered with cold, her skull contracted and squeezed her brain terribly, the salt in her bare flesh stung fiercely, but she lived.

As the water broke around her and she drew a free breath, she felt Nicole grab, slide, push, and a moment later, Nicole’s body was pressed against hers inside the oversized parka. Nicole swam on her back, forcing Stephanie’s head up into the air, kicking with great force, steering and adjusting with Stephanie’s arms along for the ride; she could no more have stopped Nicole from moving the arms than she could have pushed back against a bulldozer.

Within the parka, the seawater became blood-warm; Nicole had cranked up her fusor and was heating the space inside the coat to keep Stephanie from hypothermia.

Stephanie shook her head to clear the hair from her face, and gasped, “Thank you.”

“Look up,” Nicole said, still stroking. “Look up, don’t miss this.”

Stephanie became aware that the black and green sea surface was lighted as if by a spotlight, brighter than day. She arched her back, pressing her belly hard against Nicole’s, and looked overhead, into the brilliant welding-arc white lights that filled the sky. She watched, numb with wonder, as the warm, delicate surface of Nicole’s skin brushed against her, warming her, rippling with the effort of moving them across the sea, supporting her. Stephanie gazed into the sky, and the brilliant lights grew dimmer and smaller as the distance increased. In a flurry of no more than five seconds, the bright lights all flared for an instant, then dimmed into a faint red glow that faded into the dark of the sky, where the stars were coming out again.

Nicole shouted “Clarke ahoy!” a few times before one crewman, still fighting a fire in the superstructure, heard her. A few minutes and some hard work with a winch, and they were hustled across the wreckage on the deck, and down into the intact, if scrambled, guts of the ship.

At the door to Stephanie’s and Lars’s cabin, Nicole said, “You’ll want to be there when I present in a few minutes.”

“Yeah.” Stephanie was shaking with the terror of the last few minutes. “Just . . . hey, thank you.”

“I’m glad there was one human witness, by naked eye, and it was you.” Nicole moved to kiss her cheek; Stephanie turned to take it on the mouth. Gently, Nicole turned Stephanie’s face away. “You’re still married. And this is a stress reaction. Now, take a shower, and I’ll have everyone together in the main conference room in a few minutes.”

The meeting was delayed while they stabilized broken bones on two scientists and treated Stephanie’s burns, but that gave Captain Pao time to establish that Clarke was “floating, functional, and able to take us home,” as she put it, in the opening remarks to the meeting. Besides the scientific and technical people, as many of the crew as did not have other duties were packed in to hear Nicole talk. The captain added, “When I took this job, I wondered why a science ship was armoured and equipped like a nukeproof International Patrol disarmer, but I promise I’ll never wonder again. We’ll limp, but we’ll limp clear to Cape Town. For the rest — Nicole?”

Nicole stood. “I think the first thing you’re entitled to know is the answer to what everyone shouted during the burst: What the hell was that? So here goes. I think we’ve just confirmed one of the main hypotheses about why Martian and Europan life are so similar to Earthly life. The answer is what I called the ‘upside-down trees,’ what Stephanie calls the ‘gasoline trees,’ and what I just heard Captain Pao call the ‘big rocket bush.’ I think it’s one path of panspermia — life spreading through space.

“The seed or spore of the gasoline tree arrived, perhaps, in a chunk of bone, tumbling through our air in a slow enough approach not to burn up or destroy the life it carried, sometime in the last half-billion years. It grew on the sea floor as slowly and coldly as stalactites on a cave ceiling. But now and then, a big meteor shower; or a cloud of interstellar dust; or the temporary capture of an asteroid inside Earth’s Roche limit; or the right volcanic eruption, or perhaps the right impact on the moon, caused iron to rain down for a few decades, creating an immense bloom in the Southern Ocean, or one of its ancestor oceans. Or, in this case, the human race, in an increasingly warm soup of its own brewing, decided to clear out centuries of excess carbon dioxide in the air with rapid growth of phytoplankton.

“When such a bloom persists long enough to fill the waters with life, the gasoline tree releases, or maybe synthesizes, the millions of species that make up the mat. The mat traps everything it can in that huge area of ocean, and drags it all to the centre, where some of the biomass is shredded and put in the bone cavities, and nearly all of it is oxidized for energy to fuel the construction of the bone towers, which are, just as Captain Pao said, rockets.

“Those rockets have just launched. A sampling of a few billion tons of Earthly life is on its way out beyond the solar system, to wherever it may come down; at a guess, the bone will crumble slowly into small pieces, each still pocketed with Earth life, and most of it will just continue through space forever, but some small fraction will rain down on many worlds as grains and bits, across perhaps as long as a billion years. On already-living worlds, Earth’s genetic material will introduce new possibilities; on worlds not yet alive, it will provide many possible bases for a start. In any case, what we have just witnessed is as natural as the swarming of bees, the blowing of cottonwood fluff, or the sudden hatching of shrimp in dry salt lakes after a rainstorm fills them — just on such a long cycle that spring, or the rain, doesn’t come very often. We may have similar events from time to time, here or elsewhere. Now —”

Lars asked, “And what must we do to prevent these eruptions?”

“What must we do to stop spring?” Nicole said. “Or continental drift? Or beaver pond succession? Lars, a natural process is a natural process; eventually we understand it and fit the way we live around it. Unless you want to go down in history with the people who controlled every forest fire, put levees on every river, and drained every estuary to create beachfronts. You remember how that worked out.”

Letting the autorec pick up the rest of the meeting, Stephanie edited her main story. Her file of possible follow-on ideas grew and burgeoned like . . . like the mat, she thought. Grab everything and throw it to the centre, wrap it up for others or use it for propellant.

She didn’t always understand Nicole’s conversations with the scientists, but she realized Nicole had at least established her explanation of the gasoline trees as the one to beat.

Meanwhile, Lars, who had looked sick and old at the start of the meeting, seemed to awaken and youthen by the minute. He reminded Stephanie of the way she’d first seen him, down on the floor playing with her and the other children, on the television explaining the plan to cool the planet, defying mobs of protesters during his marriage to Nicole — like the return of the hero she had committed her life to.

Except maybe committing my life to a hero isn’t what I want to do. Except it might be. Except . . .

The meeting wound down; on the way out, Nicole touched her shoulder, gently, and murmured, “As the more experienced wife-of-Lars, I want to suggest that you go straight to your cabin. He’ll be in there fretting.”

“Didn’t take much experience to know that. And thanks for everything.”

Back in the cabin, he was crying, big hard wracking sobs, and she was holding him before she had time to think what to do.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you. Then afterward there wasn’t a spare private second to tell you how glad I was you were alive.”

She held him close. “You must be upset, too, that every plan you’ve made and everything you’ve done to tame the planet is undone now. You have to start all over.”

He sank his pale fingers into her dark curls and guided her face close to his, as if afraid he’d lose sight of her. “Ten thousand interrelated things to put right, right away? Utter chaos where there needs to be order? What’s not to like? I’ve been bored out of my mind ever since the Rapid Sequestration Initiative turned out to work. But I was so afraid I’d lost you. I didn’t know what I could do with my life if you weren’t there.” He kissed her. “I’m declaring that there’s nothing to be done until the science team reports, giving them six months, and ordering them to use it all. You and I are going somewhere, somehow, to celebrate the start of another lifetime of chaos and challenge, the best work there is.” He kissed her again, slowly and tenderly, as if making sure he remembered. “So this might be our longest vacation for a decade to come. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?”

“Surprise me,” she said.

© 2010 by John Barnes.

Originally published in Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Barnes has commercially published twenty-nine volumes of fiction, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy and one mainstream YA novel, plus two self-published novels, and around forty short stories. His most recent books are science fiction novel Daybreak Zero, young adult novel Losers in Space, and political satire Raise the Gipper! and the novel The Last President. His personal blog is thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com and he contributes frequent articles about analytics and metrics in business to AllAnalytics.com. He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a wonderful spouse, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie

Sonya Taaffe

But I know the one there is, and this is not his story.

• • • •

This is mine: I might have spent the summer in Tuscany, if my mother had visited Iceland in 1968. I could have found a boy in Siena with the face of an Etruscan faun and read him D.H. Lawrence among the vineyards and the oak-groves, olives silver in the sun; in Brittany, paced the stones of Carnac and the pine-dark tumuli and looked out for a reaper’s broad-brimmed hat in the bars of Carnac-Plage and La Trinité-sur-Mer; maybe even, if I had accepted Rohit’s invitation to stay a few weeks in Kyoto, shared sake and fried tofu with a girl met at the foot of Fushimi Inari-taisha, her hair as fiery cinnabar as its torii, her eyes lit amber like a fox’s. In Belfast, in Brno, anyone at all. Or solitude, some postcards, a secondhand book: I could have drunk hot chocolate at the Museo del Prado and spoken to no one. Kept a diary. But my mother’s stories were there ahead of me, a planted pale of anecdotes marking out the globe more strictly than capitals or date lines, and at least in Reykjavík none of them could shadow me — student riots in Paris, endlessly feuding in-laws in Bonn, opera buskers in London and missionaries in Thessaloniki and an ill-fated shortcut across the Connemara bogs. Black, she said when I asked among their litany for a description of Iceland, black and white. Lava and ice, as stark and shuttered in time as all her photographs of that year. All she had seen was half an hour of tarmac and 707s under snowy overcast, the airport at Keflavík where every other transatlantic flight was laid over for the weather, their passengers dispersed to hostels and gistihús and their own devices, but hers flew on to Glasgow and she could only look backward at frost and fire, the earth spilling up through the sea: not blue remembered hills, but fjords and burning fells; unclaimed. She saw Zeffirelli’s Tosca at Covent Garden. She made her backpacker’s grand tour of the Continent while I dreamed sketchily of Ultima Thule, looping Sigur Rós and Thom Yorke for six hours above the North Atlantic; she learned how to say I am a good girl, leave me alone in Cretan Greek and I took a man from last call on Austurstræti back to my room at the Hjálpræðisherinn because his hair was a ramshackle grey and his face too young for the fine lines awled into it and even on the dance floor he shivered in his overcoat, crowded up with strangers and crashing bass. Straddled under me, he looked thin and lost, as though he could not remember where to start with hands or hips or silence, his eyes painfully closed under drift-ice brows. I had to snap out the lights, draw the dormer curtains before he would unfasten his jeans, pull over his head the dark fisherman’s jersey that left his hair hackled up like winter, boyish against his bunched shoulders, and I felt all over him the scars I could not see. I could hear him in the bathroom afterward, throwing up. The solfatara smell of hot water came back to bed with him, but a cold sweat was on his shoulders and his mouth tasted rusty, tongue-bitten, and the second time we fucked was something starving: weight and nails, aftur með gaddavír sem rífur upp gamalt gróið sár, er orðinn ryðguð sál. I thought he was starting to retch again, but it was laughter. You should try my father . . . His eyes were lighter than brandy, resin-yellow. My mother brought home a Moleskine of names from trams and churches, museums and pubs, and folded anonymously with my pickup in a single bunk, asleep at all the wrong angles to one another, I had my first nightmares since leaving Baltimore: scoria, torch-smoke, the seethe and mutter of spattering rock; an icefield sky-bright under freezing steam; the sun circling endlessly at the horizon’s rim. The four black paws anchored in his naked human feet, the black wolf’s head that had mimed him across the radiator, the fixtures and brackets as he reentered the room. The walls were filled with daylight where there should have been dawn. I woke in their Christ o’clock brightness, so cold I thought I was alone; startled by a feverish heat when I touched the tight bones of his back. He breathed beside me in small pants and whimpers, a badly dreaming child. Last night’s stubble showed up silvery, black-ticked, like his hair; less transparently, the old weals roped up and down his arms, streaked whitely at his throat. My Reykjavík snapshot, my rúntur souvenir. I left him sleeping in the inarguable sunlight, camera in hand to Hallgrímskirkja and the whale-bellied clouds. Whatever we had drunk up and down Laugavegur under the white-night neon reel, the waning daymoon, his shadow by morning rucked and splayed over the crumpled sheets, curled in on itself, nose to tail. When did it ever stop me, knowing someone’s name? All I had called him that night was shape-changer.

• • • •

I know his story; I nearly write it sometimes. The girl at the last bed-and-breakfast in Höfn named one of her sheepdogs Disraeli, after Kaori Yuki rather than Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield. I laugh when I find out, Váli eyes us both tiredly, un-bishounen in the tousling wind that shears the clouds up against the mountains, spits everyone’s hair but Ásta’s into their eyes. His hands are in his pockets, so neither of us can see his bitten nails; his head rises as though he has forgotten something at each yap and bark. In Sauðárkrókur, we drink store-bought brennivín like winos on the curbside with an archivist whose English is as flawed and fluent as his Portuguese, Icelandic, Malayalam, watching sunrise and moonset cross the same luminous sky: Váli makes a telescope of the bottle’s black-ringed glass and repeats, dreamily cursing, the names of his nephews, fire-jawed pursuers of light. He takes terrible pictures of me on the Dutch-spread bed in Kirkjubæjarklaustur, camisole straps falling down and toothpaste on my fingers. I retaliate on the asphalt-colored sands of Vík í Mýrdal, where he flinches with each wave that explodes against the basalt stacks. Between his diffident hands and the confusion of flash adjustment with shutter speeds, the better shots are jags and spurs of light, seepage, and clipped signals; his profile frays into the bare blue sky. We are in Breiðdalsvík, the night he finally goes out alone. Back at Pravda, he had stared at me with eyes I took for drink-dilated hazel and said doggedly, My brother’s blood is on my hands. You don’t know. I watched them put my father away, sounding more like a medieval penitent than a bragging ex-con, and I thought he was lying either way. Now he crouches away from me in the bedside light, a wet holly spray in his frost-rick of hair, scarlet-spattered across his winter-haunted face, his coat’s hem trailing as darkly as the shadow that whines and worries at his heels, and when at last I have gathered him trembling into my arms, all ribs and elbows, hot as a hawk, I can hear his heart hammering the black miles of Surtshellir. Egilsstaðir, Seyðisfjörður with its ferries and nineteenth-century clapboards and the tide rolling green up to green-springing turf, we run the ring round the island that makes a crime scene’s chalk of glaciers, and it is not the last night he comes home with blood in his teeth. Sheep-killer, I think. Not hikers, backpackers: lovers some bored or aching hour under the pale sun-stifled sky. Are there girls in black mackintoshes and emptied throats, cast up under the birches of Skaftafell? Boys with surprised, wind-roughed faces billowing like ghosts in the white water of Barnafoss? The next butcher’s mess he chokes up into the sink or the shower stall, in a ditch or a byre somewhere, laid open to the heavens and the Allfather’s single eye. I am not your brother, I whisper into his sleeping mouth. He kisses me goodbye at the terminal with almost the same dazed, curious submission, as if he never bit me, or I fucked him till both of us bled. You think of these things at half past three in the morning, when the streetlight filters through frozen rain on the windows, a dead tintype wash you can just read by. Maybe it ends when he kills me. A brief mortal interlude, getting on for Götterdämmerung. Or maybe I introduce him to my mother. I shouldered my bag off the carousel at JFK and — travel-stickered, slightly hungover and still on Greenwich Mean Time — declared nothing more than a bottle of svarti dauði, duty-free, two novels in translation, and a roll of unshot film. He was gone by the time I came back from the cathedral, only the sun reflecting on the very clean walls, my bruises slowly fading in; a smell of sex and iron in the sheets, as of chains cankered by the sea.

• • • •

One day, the one you love will tear your throat out. One day, the sun and the moon will fall to their wolves. The Earth will flash to clinker in the red-giant rush of stellar evolution, the universe drift to static and silence resolved, and the gods walk quietly across wind-hushed Iðavöllr. One night I dreamed of his father under the earth and the ice, burning in his chains at the core of the world, and I had no answers from him, either. He watched me with eyes the color of white wine, flickering softly as if a candle’s flame bobbed and drew before him. I had imagined him slight, sly, and sharp-edged, not sinewy as old yew and taller than his lean-boned son, but his hair was spiky, cindery, cider-red, and the same untraceable light shadowboxed in it; I had been asking him questions, but even in the dream I could not remember what he had replied. He should have been skinned bones and screaming. No one had knelt ministering at his side in years. (She left him in 1938, when Grímsvötn’s fissures boiled over and the ice of Vatnajökull smoked, bucking in blind agonies as the earth ran. I knew this from the dream, as I knew I would never see the serpent that hung above us in coils as black as the frostbitten dead, the venom that still trickled and dropped, fire-gold, sweating a sticky sundew light, the plain, ash-wood, palm-worn bowl she had set down, carefully, to kiss her husband on the mouth where he could not feel it for the poison running from his eyes like tears. Tall as a valkyrie, a fair-haired woman with stiffened, scarred hands, never lowering her gaze. I imagined her in Oslo or Copenhagen, looking at Viking ships or the paintings of Edvard Munch; alone of her family, looking as though she moved through time. Her eyes were not blue, but the fine gray of gulls’ wings. I do not know if any of this is true.) But the echoes of his voice had crackled to silence against the dark undercurve of stone, the smallest sounds of snowfall and settling ash; all that remained was the smile twisting among the runestone lines of his face. Implicit, inextricable. The vulnerable, catching flame. Not for the son haunting Reykjavík’s nightlife like a half-recalled einheri or the son whose guts were shackles on his father’s skin, for the wolf or the world-serpent or the daughter half-frozen in the dark, but because I had smiled so easily back, I said for the last time, “Why?” and his smile only deepened, or did not change at all.

“Why does fire burn the hand that holds it?”

I whispered, “Your son isn’t fire.”

Sudden as delight, I saw his real smile, hair and eyes and scars all the same swift leap, flaring up like cinnabar, in their afterimages all the shapes he had once taken and the ones he never would, even at world’s end. “Megir mínir,” he said softly. I expected to hear a salmon’s slick flip in it, a mare’s whinny or the snapping stems of mistletoe. The roar of the volcano was only the stutter of blood in my ears; the plumbing in that ward-white room on Kirkjustræti had been louder. I heard his son, asking me nothing in the middle of the night.

“All of you are.”

I woke in the winter dawn that silvered rather than warmed, ash-gilding book-spines, jewel cases, a salt grass-streaked set of sake cups. The clock radio on the floor by the chipped green dresser was playing Radiohead, so appositely I knew it had been seeping into my dreams. I wanted sex with someone. I settled for gunpowder tea, drunk scalding in the poured-out, brightening air as the studio’s raddled heating whistled and pinged to life around me. We are accidents waiting, waiting to happen . . . A little before New Year’s, Rohit called me from the last payphone in D.C. with two suitcases, no gloves, and enough change for cab fare; still the same chapter and a half from the end of his dissertation, broken up with a bunraku puppeteer, he slept on my fold-out couch with the last four volumes of the OED until he could get hold of the conservationist at the Freer and Sackler who had once offered him an internship, digitizing kabuki playbills. Ásta emailed me weekly until suddenly she stopped, and then in early February I checked my departmental mail in Gilman and found a postcard of the harbor at Höfn, Prussian blue under brightly painted sailboats and a lyme-grass fringe, the clouds plumed like Eyjafjallajökull. I sent my mother photographs from the trip. Ragnarök is always coming. How else could we get on with our lives? One day, I will hold my hands out to be burned, and burn back. And I do not dream of either of them, anymore.

© 2011 by Sonya Taaffe.

Originally published in Not One of Us.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in anthologies including Aliens: Recent Encounters, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, and The Best of Not One of Us. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats. Her blog is Myth Happens [sovay.livejournal.com].

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

We’ll Be Together Forever

Joseph Allen Hill

Audrey took her dinner quietly, without words beyond the obligatories (please, thank you, no, work was fine), and I obliged her the silence. We just ate, together but not together, in that way that you do when there are too many things to say. The meal in question was on the bad side of decent, days-old stir-fried noodles from the Japanese place down the street from her apartment, reheated and reconstituted into a slimy Pan-Asian gruel with the addition of fish sauce, soy sauce, sriracha, curry powder, chili powder, and neglect. I thought it was on the bad side of decent, at least. She pushed the noodle slurry around her plate with her fork, picking out the vegetable bits for inspection and wrinkling her nose like the vegetable bits had farted and then piling a heap of noodle slurry onto the fork along with the vegetable bits and then shoving the loaded fork into her mouth and then making a show of chewing, chewing, chewing and then swallowing it all in a cowish gulp. They were her leftovers, but they seemed to be making her very unhappy. She was making an expression that I lacked the perspicacity to put name to, and it seemed to cover more and more of her face with each bite I took.

“You can’t just expect me to make food for you whenever you want,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? I’ve never asked you to just make food for me,” I said.

“When you come over here, it’s just expected that I’m the one who’s making the food. You invite yourself over whenever you want, and suddenly I’m the fucking Barefoot Contessa.”

“I think you’ll need a lot more butter if you want to be the Barefoot Contessa. Like, gallons. Have you read one of those cookbooks? I experienced coronary distress just looking at the table of contents.”

“That’s not funny. I’m trying to have a serious discussion about boundaries.”

“Do you want me to make food for you? Whatever. Next time, I’ll come over and make you a chicken nissoi or some shit.”

“That’s not what I’m asking, Anthony. You’re not listening.” She was articulating all her consonants very precisely, as if she were trying to teach me English as a second language. I hated when she did that. It was like she was summoning the spirit of her ancestors to put the negro in his place. I know she didn’t mean it that way, but it was difficult to ignore the subtext. I was always fond of close readings, perhaps overly so when it came to relationships. “Sometimes, I just want very badly for you to not be so . . . you.”

I recognized the look on her face then: spoilt revenge. She wanted me to say the food was gross, so she could say I should’ve brought my own food. That I hadn’t was killing her. I tried not to smile. It was petty, I know, but seeing her impotent anger was far more delicious than the noodles with which she had meant to undo me. I didn’t say anything after that. There was no point. This was a proxy argument. The real argument was about us moving in together. I had been passive-aggressively suggesting it was time for the past two months, and she hadn’t reacted well. She had a lot of blah blah about independence and boundaries and whatever.

I just thought it was time. Two years is a long time to be with someone without moving in. Friends of ours who hadn’t been together when we met were married now. People were starting to talk. We’d had dozens of proxy arguments since I started pulling on the thread, thunderous screaming matches and sighful pout-offs both. We’d made up every time, but the rancor was starting to wear on us. The things you say stick around even after the anger is gone, half-forgotten, half-obsessed over, condensed into hateful little mnemonics, know-you-thinks and remember-you-saids haunting every future argument and frosting every past remembrance, splinters in the mind’s eye.

The petty revenge and the vengeful pettiness followed naturally from there.

I finished first, as I had chosen to eat like a reasonable human adult. I was still hungry, but to ask for some of Audrey’s food, either from her plate or fridge, would only invite upset. Instead, I got up, walked to the stove, started stirring the pot of blood on the burner. It was reducing nicely. Maybe ten more minutes until it was done. I pulled a plastic baggie out of my pocket and poured the contents, a mélange of locally sourced mystery herbs, into the pot. A column of purple smoke rose from the pot, swirled around the room in silken tendrils, broke off into wispy cartoon hearts that faded away in the breeze from the window. It smelled like soap and something else, something sweet at the edge of memory. Or maybe it was a memory that evoked a scent, something implicit, almost neotenous. Does fertilization produce an odor? Does meiosis?

Audrey still had food left, but she was as finished as she was going to be. She took her plate and my plate from the table and put them in the sink. There was a look on her face like maybe she was sorry about something she had said or done, but couldn’t decide what. I tried to put the same look on my own face; I’m not sure if I meant it or not. She turned on the water and squirted some soap.

“I was going to do that,” I said.

“It’s fine. You’re making the potion.”

“I would’ve done it. Both of them. I’m an amazing dishwasher.”

“I know,” she said. She didn’t look up.

“You know I would, or you know I’m amazing? ’Cause I am a for-real god-king champion virtuoso at doing the dishes.”

A smile? No, not quite. She wasn’t there yet. Just an almost-wrinkle at the corner of her mouth. Barely noticeable, but for a moment it was all I cared about.

“My doing of the dishes should not be taken as commentary on your own abilities in this area.”

“I’m really great at it, though. I once applied for a job as dishwasher on a cruise ship as a joke. I might’ve gotten it if I had been more serious about maritime ablutions.”

“I know you have the talent. But do you have the will? Can you go the dishwashing distance? Are you a champion or a chumpion?”

“That’s terrible.”

She dredged a soapy fork from beneath the bubbles and jabbed in the direction of my throat.

“Answer the question, coward. J’accuse.”

I threw up my hands.

“If it came to it, I would wash dishes on the moon for you. I would fuck up a Martian, steal his cookware, and scrub ’til the sparkle rivaled the stars.”

She was finished with the dishes, and she walked up behind me, wrapped her arms around my stomach, squeezed. I closed my eyes, and I put my hands on her hands. It was nice, the sort of moment that made dabbling in the black arts seem reasonable.

I poured the almost-completed potion into two large bowls. His and hers. We took them into her living room. Into Audrey’s bowl, I dropped the following: a hair freshly plucked from the top of my head, a selfie freshly printed from a popular social media networking website, a medium-sized globule of spit, and a secret delivered in a low whisper just above the rim. She did similarly with the bowl in front of me. Both bowls began to glow a color I had never seen before, a color from beyond the radioactive spectrum, and I could hear the far-off sound of flapping wings, and I had a major epiphany about the interconnectedness of all peoples and the smallness and largeness of things, and it was beautiful.

“Have you seen Love, Actually?” she asked.

“What?”

“Love, Actually? The movie. It’s got Hugh Grant. It’s a pretty good movie.”

“No, I have not seen Love, Actually.”

“This sort of reminds me of that.”

“How could this possibly remind you of Love, Actually?”

“It’s just a feeling. This is the same feeling I get watching Love, Actually.”

“We’re about to do some for real black magic voodoo shit. We just saw a color no one else in the world has ever seen. What does Love, Actually have to do with anything?”

“You haven’t seen the movie. How would you know what it’s like?”

“That’s deranged. You’re deranged.”

“Are we going to do this or not?” she asked.

She started humming “All I Want for Christmas is You.” She was like this sometimes, going off on weird tangents and getting lost in obscure metaphors, and I could never tell if she was messing with me or what. Sometimes it made me feel like I could never love anybody else, and sometimes it made me wish I had the ability to explode.

“Just a second,” I said.

I picked up the book from the shelf and checked the page on the love potion again. Just one last time. To be sure. It was thick and leather-bound with yellowed pages that had that vomit smell that library books get sometimes, not the vaguely pleasant bookstore musk that booky people wax rhapsodic over, but the acrid stink that gets into old books and spreads through the stacks like a weird, Lovecraftian contagion. Audrey had stumbled upon it at the library and had checked it out for the pictures alone. I sort of fell in love with it. All manner of esoterica was contained within. Anatomical diagrams of mythical creatures, lists of the secret names of common objects, maps of nearby astral planes, instructions on the performance of various spells and rituals, and, of course, recipes for magical potions. I was immediately drawn to the page on the love potion, as I am romantic by nature and also there was a finely drawn picture on the opposite page of a human heart made of snakes.

I thought it would be sort of psychedelic, a fun new drug experience without the hassle of drug dealers or the risk of police. Flash fact: Eye of newt is not a controlled substance. Blood isn’t super easy to get, but it’s doable, and most of the other junk could be found by hitting up a few occult bookstores and an underground farmer’s market.

I also thought that maybe, if me and Audrey could experience love like we had at the beginning, if only for a few hours, she would see how great I was, and how great it would be if we moved in together, how we wouldn’t fight so much anymore if we were with one another all the time, how a show of commitment would force us to be good to each other in all things, how we would finally be real adults for the first time in our lives.

I didn’t include this in my pitch to her. She had been leery, not really believing in magic or holding much respect for mysterious tomes, but I had been very persuasive. In exchange, I would go on a hike with her later that month. In the woods. Like animals. A heavy bargain, but there was no other option.

“À la tienne,” I said, lofting my bowl up into the air.

“Chienne,” she said. She clinked the rim of her bowl with mine. It was dumb joke we shared. To your health, bitch. Things that rhyme are funny.

We drank.

Nothing happened in the moments immediately following. We waited quietly for a while, but that got boring, so we started doing other things. Audrey picked up her acoustic and started strumming, and I idly flipped through the pages of the book.

Audrey was an excellent guitar player, talented in both classical and pop modes. She wanted to be a professional session musician or a composer, or, when she was drunk enough to admit it, a rock star, but she mostly worked as an office temp. We met in school while she was getting her Bachelor’s in music. My main jam then was ancient languages, the translation and interpretation thereof, hence my affinity for the magic book. It was written in a language that was something like a cross between Cyrillic and a broken spider-web, but I was able to work out a rough translation over the course of a few weeks. The trick was cross-referencing the pictures in the front with the index in the back and also using Google a bunch. I had thus far worked out the love potion fully, and I was very close on what I believed to be a shrinking spell and a flying spell and a spell to double a heifer’s milk production (they can’t all be whimsical).

Audrey started to play a little song. It was nice, vaguely tropical and mad soothing. She sang too, but I didn’t really pick up the words. I just luxuriated in the sound. I think Audrey’s voice was the seat of my attraction to her. It was revelatory, radio-smooth, and resonant beyond measure, like she had an extra chamber hidden somewhere in her body that no one else had, wherein the sound produced by her vocal cords could warm and reflect and thicken and sweeten. It was beauty on top of beauty on top of beauty, like Beyoncé singing Beethoven.

I found myself thinking that that last bit was unnecessarily poetic and a little hyperbolic, and I realized, as she finished the song, that I had closed my eyes.

So I opened my eyes again, and I saw her face.

“Oh fuck,” I said, except I’m not sure if I really said it, since all I could hear was the thump of my heart and this swirling white noise in my ear. Blood or maybe heaven. She was beautiful, impossibly so. How had I not noticed this before? I mean, I knew she was pretty, but now she was mirabile visu for reals, sublime in all aspects, callipygous and curvilinear, possessed of all the comeliest adjectives, a sonnet in short-shorts. I felt like my soul was going to melt. More than anything, I wanted to be with her, as close to her as possible, as one as two people could be.

Her face was frozen. She was looking at me, staring at me, eyes wide, breath shallow, skin red. I’d probably be blushing, too, if I had the pigmentation for it. Her guitar slipped off her lap and hit the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. I only caught it out of the corner of my eye. Then she smiled, and I nearly died. It was like every Christmas and birthday and cute animal picture and MDMA pill and sunshine on a warm day and breeze on a hot day and kindness and joy I had ever experienced all at once and more. What little breath I had left was gone.

Before I could recover, she threw her arms around me and started licking my face. I wanted to lick her face too, but it was difficult to really get in there while she was licking my face. Occasionally, our tongues would meet and we would approximate kissing, but we were mostly in it for the licks. She tasted like homemade ice cream and old-time religion and sweet release.

“I love you,” I or she said.

“I love you,” the other said.

“You’re incredible.”

“You’re incredible.”

“I’ll never leave you.”

“I’ll never leave you.”

This went back and forth for a few minutes. We ended up exchanging Facebook passwords and getting engaged. My tongue ended up working its way down to her shirt, which was also delicious. I normally hated that shirt. It was a t-shirt with the logo of my favorite white people band, purchased at a concert which I was not invited to nor even informed of. Since they were “her favorite band first” and “her actual, unqualified favorite band,” it was apparently not worth her time to tell me she was going, or even that the concert was happening. It usually annoyed me whenever she wore it, but I didn’t say anything, since I tried to keep my pettiness as subtextual as possible. But now I didn’t care. I just thought it was amazing, like her. The colors were amazing and it smelled amazing and it was so soft against my cheek. And then I realized that she had been wearing it all day. It had been next to her all day, today and other days reaching back into the recent past and grasping onto her and holding close to her beyond closeness.

“I have an idea,” I said.

“What sweetheart? Honeybunch? Doodlebop? Mumpystreudel? Bibbityboo? Lolomonkey? Kibby-kewwy-susu-wirly . . .”

It trailed off into straight gibberish there, but I kept listening, as I closed my eyes again for a moment to enjoy it, but then I remembered I had work to do, and I forced myself to interrupt her little cadenza.

“Give me your shirt.”

She took off her shirt.

I looked at her, then at the hallway, then her again. I was on fire, but I had to be steadfast.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said. “Don’t forget me while I’m in the kitchen.”

“No!” she screamed, so loud and high that it hurt my ear. “Don’t go!”

“I have to go. I’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll miss you more than words can say.”

“I’ll miss you more than that.”

I grasped her hand and squeezed it, and then I put her fingers in my mouth, and then I touched my left eye with one of her fingers, and then I put two of the fingers in my ear. She made cooing noises. It was all very sweet.

I dashed out of the room, down the hall and into the kitchen, as fast as fast could go. I pulled an empty pot from the cabinet, threw the shirt in, filled it halfway, put it on the stove, and turned up the heat. The wait was interminable. Time seemed to have forgotten how to move. Universes were created and destroyed between ticks of the clock. Whole lives were lived and forgotten. An infinity of could-be precious moments were lost forever, stretched out into illegible, interminable blurs of time-stuff. How I missed her in those empty stretches of absence, how my heart ached. O Audrey, whom I loved more than all people and things, so far from me as I toiled in that culinary wasteland. Was I fool for having left her, driven by a mendacious dream of more, more, more? Was I a maniac?

Then there was a bubble in the water. Then another and another. A full-on boil came quickly. I let it go for a few minutes after that, so it could really cook, but I did not have the patience to wait for long. I poured the contents it into a large bowl and placed it on the kitchen table. I went at it first with a spoon, blowing on each spoonful just enough to keep it from burning me. When it was cool enough, I grasped the bowl above my head and drank it down in gulps. Audrey’s flavor was light but recognizable, playing delicately on my palate like an appetizer in a gastronome’s dream.

When there was no more Audreywater left, I started eating the shirt. It was tough, I will grant you that. But I have teeth, and I am a man. There was nothing I couldn’t do for Audrey. I ripped it apart as an animal might, slowly tearing it with the sharpness of my canines, savoring each of the little pieces when they hit my tongue and my throat and my belly. They felt warm inside me, not from the heat of the stove but from being so near to Audrey, for being hers, for being something she loved.

I walked back down the hall with a smile on my face, slowly, so that I could feel the warmth slosh in my stomach. I found Audrey sitting on the floor of the living room. Her shorts were gone too now, and I wondered if maybe if maybe I had eaten them and forgotten in a lovesick stupor, but I realized that was ridiculous, since there was no way that the consumption of her pants would not linger among my treasured memories. She was surrounded by very many sheets of paper, dozens at least. I picked one up on my approach.

Mrs. Anthony Walker, it said, in script more florid than I had ever seen from her hand, somewhere between cutesy and calligraphic. It was written again and again and again, such that the every inch and every moment was covered. She had done it to all the paper in the room, notebook paper and printer paper and the pages of the books on the bookshelf. Mrs. Anthony Walker. Mrs. Anthony Walker. Mrs. Anthony Walker. Mrs. Anthony Walker. All scattered around the room.

Now she was writing it on herself in black marker. Her arms, legs, chest, and stomach were completely covered. She had a hand mirror and had marked up half her face. I was struck with worry. Clearly, the love potion was affecting her badly. She was perfect and everything, but this was a little bit crazy. But before I said anything, I ate the piece of paper I had picked up because it was so beautiful that I never wanted to be apart from it ever again.

“I’m back, darling,” I said.

“Oh God!” she squeaked. She dropped the mirror and ran to me and jumped in my arms. We fell to the floor, as I am not a muscleman nor a brute, and I could not hold all of her.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m wonderful now. You’re back.”

“No. I mean, with the writing and stuff.”

“I missed you so much. I wanted to feel like I was a part of you again. I know this is sort of crazy. We’re acting kind of crazy. But I need us to be together. Look.”

She pointed at one of the Mrs. Anthony Walkers.

“This is us. Me and you together. A million times. All over me. So we can be together forever. We have to be.”

I nodded my head. She was making a lot of sense. “I know what you mean. I kind of ate that shirt you gave me. It was amazing.”

She tilted her head and furrowed her brow at me. Oh no. Had I gone too far? Was eating your girlfriend’s t-shirts a major violation of relationship etiquette? Could she see through the haze of ardor into me, into my grotesque heart?

“That’s actually kind of brilliant,” she said.

“Really?”

“I love it. I love you.”

“Do you want to eat something of mine?”

“Sure.”

I took off my pants and handed them to her. She got a wild look in her eye and put her teeth to the seams. I watched her for a number of precious moments. Then I caught sight of her guitar lying on the floor by the couch. She’d had it for years, a gift from her mother. A glossy rosewood body and mother of pearl inlays. She loved that guitar more than anything. More than me, certainly. She might’ve loved it more than she loved living. The only thing that rivaled it in her eyes was music itself.

I licked my lips.

I stood and picked up the guitar. She had taught me to play a little bit. I wasn’t very good. I played trombone in high school, so I knew enough music theory to get the gist, but my fingers were heavy and graceless. I played a G and a C and a D. Classic rock. Beautiful.

“I’m going to eat this,” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“I really think I should eat this.” I held up the guitar to make my intent as clear as possible. Clarity is important in relationships. Clarity and communication. Without them, we are forced to guess at things, to match wits with phantoms and waste kisses on shadows. I decided that I would be clear in all things from that moment on, and thus my own thoughts would be conveyed to her as purely as they existed in my own head, without artifice or embroidery.

The corners of her mouth drooped. My heart stopped, and I almost fell to the floor, seeing her like that, so pathetic and unhappy, the first time since the consumption of the potion that her beautiful smile had left us. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

“It’s like you said. Me and you together. It makes perfect sense. I’m yours and this is yours. Me and it will be together, so I’ll be closer to you. I’ll be your instrument.”

“My guitar, though.”

“Our guitar.”

She opened her mouth like she was going to say something but nothing came out. It was like she was stuck, absent almost, like a computer with too many programs open at once. I saw a glisten in the corner of her eye. At the time, I thought it was a tear of joy. She was so happy that I was doing this for us. I was the best boyfriend in the world. Who else would go so far as me for love? Who else would eat his beloved’s guitar for a chance at the real, true, forever?

“I’ll be back soon,” I said.

I turned and walked down the hall. I did not run, and I held the guitar gingerly in my hands, as if cradling a baby. Our baby. The physical symbol of our love, a little us, a miniature we. I loved it; It was going to be delicious. When I got to the kitchen, I gently laid it on the table. First things first, I had to figure out how I was going to prepare it. Boiling worked for the shirt, but it would not do for the guitar. That would be gross, like boiling a fine steak. I could burn it and eat the ashes, but then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the flavor. It would just be the taste of the burn. All heat, no meat.

Then it came to me. Roasting. That would be great, rustic and romantic and pleasantly Promethean. Seal in the flavor. Lock in the love. Yes. I set the oven to 450 degrees. While it heated, I began to prepare a rub/marinade. There was some yogurt in the fridge, and I smeared it all over the guitar’s surface. Next, I poured lemon juice over the strings. Then salt and black pepper and red pepper and garlic, powder on top, cloves inside sound hole. I chopped some onions and stuffed them inside too. The smell was heavenly, and I began to salivate as an animal might. I knew it wasn’t going to fit in one piece, so I decided to break apart the neck and stuff the pieces inside. There was a hammer in the drawer by the sink. I held it in my hand and lifted it high, and I aimed for the seventh fret.

Audrey appeared in the doorway just before I could strike. Seeing her again reminded me of my deep love for her, and I had to steady myself on the table. But then I noticed there were tear streaks running down her face. I couldn’t breathe. She had the magic book in one hand, opened to one of the bookmarked pages, and in the other were my translation notes, which I recognized even with the feverishly scrawled Mrs. Anthony Walkers on the back side of the paper. It wasn’t as nice as before, no longer curvy and loopy and loving. It was itchy, hurried, desperate.

Fuck. I still loved it.

“Not my guitar,” she said. “I know something better. I think I figured this out. It’s not exactly shrinking. It’s like Love, Actually.”

She began to speak in an impossible language. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she made a sign with her hands, and the sign etched itself into my vision, like I had stared too long into a light bulb. The strange color from before began to drip from her fingers. There was a sound like styrofoam and electricity and hell, and a smell like old sunshine.

She broke apart. Into two. Each half as tall as she had been before. Like bacteria in a film strip. Her clothes ripped in the process, and both of the resultant Audreys were naked. Then she split again. And again. Suddenly, they all rushed at me, jumped on me. I fell to the floor; I could not hold all of her. So many of them. They continued to split as they crawled over me. Like rats. Maybe I could’ve swatted them off, but I couldn’t have risked hurting her. Not on purpose, anyway. Dozens of them. More and more. Too many to count. A few of the larger of them held my arms, and a few more began licking my mouth.

“Stop,” I said.

They took the opportunity to crawl into my mouth. She/they tasted amazing, like the Audreywater and the shirt from before, only more so. It was the most intense sensation I had ever experienced, and I could do nothing in those first few moments but enjoy it. I understood her now. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? I closed my eyes and moaned from the ecstasy, and I felt them start to crawl down. I limply tried to flick them away with my tongue and cough them out, but she was tenacious, fueled, I guess, by a powerful love, which conquers all things, even throats.

I had a very odd moment then. I remembered the first time I realized that I liked Audrey. It was the week after my birthday, and I had deluded myself into believing my friends were throwing me a surprise party. I was imagining all the things that they were going to do, the gifts and the decorations and the food, and the idea of Audrey making me a cake popped in my head, and I got an erection. It surprised me. Probably the most surprising erection of my life. Up ’til then, I thought of Audrey as some white girl I hung out with sometimes who was kind of cool but kind of annoying, and I had never been into the whole homemaker-wife-baker-lady thing. But actions speak louder than words, I guess, even cake boners.

I don’t know why she ever loved me.

They massaged my esophagus on the way down, so soft and comforting, like their hands were made of the cool side of the pillow. They hit my stomach with an explosion of satiation. I gave up. She won. I let the stragglers through without resistance, the ones who held me down and held my lips open. I let them slide down my throat and gently caress my insides. I felt like I would never have to eat again. I began to weep, that she had loved me so much as to do this for me.

I could feel them all, moving inside. They kept getting smaller and smaller, I think. I was suffused with little loving pinpricks. I could feel them in my arms and legs. My feet. My fingers. My heart. I lay there for a long time. Rapturous, grinning like the cat who — . I thought maybe I should do something great for her. Something wonderful maybe. I could write an amazing poem. I could get it published. No, I could get it on TV. I would get on some reality show, and then I would go into the confessional and drop it on America. I could set it to music and crack the Top 40. I could figure out that flying spell and fly to the moon and write it in giant letters on the surface.

I fell asleep. I dreamed of Audrey. We were together forever. It was fucking awesome. The love potion had worn off when I woke up.

“Oh shit,” I said, and then I said it seventeen or eighteen more times.

I had fucked up. We had fucked up. This was impossibly bad.

“Audrey?” I called out. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

My hand moved. I didn’t mean for it to move, but it did. And then it moved again. And my other hand. And my legs. Twitching, shaking, flexing back and forth. The movements were clumsy but irresistible, as if I were a marionette tangled in its own strings. I stood up. I could still move myself, but so could she, or they, I guess. There was little buzz inside me, bouncing around, like if the feeling of getting your blood drawn had a sound associated with it, a disquieting onomatopoetic tingling back and forth across my limbs. I think they were playing telephone. A giant, microscopic game of telephone.

We stumbled to the guitar. I picked it up. It was disgusting. The yogurt was caught between spoiling and curdling. And the spices cut through the morning air like old vomit. I couldn’t see. Too many tears in my eyes. Everything a blur. Just light and color and shape. Indistinct. They positioned the guitar in my hands so we could play it. We strummed a few notes. Sloppy, but recognizably music.

I opened my mouth, and a tin choir poured out.

“Anthony,” they sang, softly. An accusation.

We played guitar for a while after that. We got sort of okay at it. Better than I was, not as good as she was.

I was full, but I think they were hungry. They stumbled to the fridge, pawed at the door until it opened, found a stick of butter, shoved it in my mouth.

“À la tienne,” I whispered.

There was no answer. We just ate, together but not together, in that way that you do when there are too many things to say.

© 2015 by Joseph Allen Hill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Allen Hill is a Chicago-based writer and bon vivant. He has also spent time in Georgia and New Jersey. He has a marginally useful degree in Classics and enjoys making music in his spare time. He can be reached on Twitter @joehillofearth2.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

The Ussuri Bear

Ken Liu

February 11, 1907

By the time we arrived in the Manchu settlement of Tanbian, the Russian expedition had already left a day earlier.

For the last five days, we have been moving through deep snow and dense primeval forest in the Changbai Mountains, trying to catch up. The superiority of the mechanical horse is becoming clearer with each passing minute.

Look at these magnificent creatures. Observe each steel foot confidently stepping forward, gripping the snow with meter-wide lattice-work snowshoes. Be amazed at the smooth ride as they effortlessly carry five men and eight hundred kilograms of supplies. Marvel at the frictionless joints flexing and bending in complete silence, lubricated by whale oil. Hear the overlapping metal plates slide over each other as the horses leap over dangerous crevasses. Feel the rumbling warmth as you run your hand over the chrome skin, heated by the pumping engine within while feathery snow falls all around you.

I cannot imagine conducting the current expedition using dog sleds. Dogs require sustenance and rest, but mechanical horses do not. Taking turns to rest on horseback while our companions held the reins, we have been moving nonstop.

“Yirin,” I call to our Manchu guide — barely sixteen, hardly more than a boy. “How much further to the spot you spoke of?”

“Maybe as long as it takes to drink a pot of tea, Dr. Nakamatsu,” he replies, brushing his mop of unruly black hair out of his eyes. “Soon, very soon.”

As Yirin knows no Japanese and I no Manchu, we are forced to converse in Chinese.

Hissssss. The horses open the exhaust valves located in their mouths, and white steam ascends into the frigid Manchurian winter air like smoke rising out of the crater on Mount Changbai.

The Imperial Army, which paid for this expedition, has supplied us with ten Type Ten mechanical horses, each costing as much as a small gunboat. These were designed for cold climate operation in anticipation of an inevitable second war with Russia in Manchuria in the future. Part of my mission is to field-test them.

So far, I think they are passing with flying colors.

“We’re here,” Yirin says. “This is where my father and I saw the bear last spring.”

We emerge from the forest into a clearing, in the middle of which lies an enormous heap of bones.

• • • •

I still remember that night, almost four decades earlier, as though it were yesterday.

I woke to the sound of a loud crash. As I sat up and opened my eyes, I did not understand what I was seeing. The eastern wall of our one-room house had disappeared: in its place, the howling wind, made visible in the moonlight by swirling drifts of snow.

“Jokichi, run!” Father called to me.

He stood in front of me, trying to block me from a shadowy figure seen indistinctly through the snow. My mother lay before him, unmoving. As I watched, the shadow came closer, stood up like a man, and loomed over my father.

The shadow growled, a sound that made me shiver. I saw the great, black, furry head, the sharp white teeth — the front ones curiously notched, like a key, the outstretched paws promising a deadly embrace.

I screamed.

My father shouted and rushed forward, his spear aimed at the bear’s heart. But the bear swiped at him with a speed and agility unbelievable in a creature of such size. The spear snapped like a toothpick. A moment later, my father flew through the air like a rag doll, his head already crushed by the bear’s paw.

I forgot how to move. The bear shuffled closer, and the smell of rotting meat and animal sweat was overwhelming. I felt as if I sat at the bottom of a mountain, a mountain of flesh, fur, and death.

I closed my eyes, waiting to die, the bear’s hot breath on my face.

A searing white flash of pain, then nothing.

Later, the rescuers told me twenty-six men, women, and children were killed by the bear that night. I lost a father, a mother, and my right arm.

Today, if you go to the place where the village once stood, tucked into a cove on the western coast of Hokkaido, you will find a stone monument with the names of the victims in the spot where our house used to be.

I have visited once every few years to say a prayer for my dead parents and to make a promise.

The bear was never found.

• • • •

I pace from one end of the skeleton to the other, examining each bone.

The Ussuri bear — Ursus arctos lasiotus — of Northeast Asia is the ancestor of the American grizzly. A fierce and powerful predator, it has no equal in its domain — indeed, it regularly seizes prey from Siberian tigers and even occasionally kills the big cats. On Hokkaido, the native Ainu used to worship the Ussuri bear as a god.

The largest Ussuri bear I have ever laid my eyes on weighed 650 kilograms. Alive, the one before me would have weighed three times as much.

“It is too large to be an Ussuri,” I say to Shiro Ito, our weapons master.

He nods, awed into silence.

Many cultures in Northeast Asia have legends of a race of gigantic bears. The Ainu speak of the god who possesses the mountains. The Manchus and Koreans tell stories of enormous bears that live near the peaks of the Changbai Mountains. The Chinese call the great bears xiongjing, or bear spirit.

In these stories, besides their enormous size, the bears are distinguished by their ferocity and the possession of near-magical abilities of healing and regeneration. Most fantastic of all, they are supposed to be highly intelligent and able to take on the form of a man when desired.

I do not put much credit in the superstitious elements of these tales. All bears occasionally stand on their hind legs, and it is easy to see how frightened peasants could mistake such a posture for a magical transformation.

But other aspects of the legends have the ring of truth. The Chinese put much stock in the medicinal qualities of bear gallbladder, and a fast-healing bear may well teach something of use to a man of science. The Army is certainly interested in such knowledge as well as the possibility of taming and training such intelligent bears for military use. Like the mechanical horses, bear-soldiers might prove to be the decisive factor for victory in the harsh conditions of remote Manchuria.

Such are the official goals of our expedition.

I run the fingers of my right hand, the one made of metal, over the large ribs gently. The prosthetic is outsized, thicker and longer than a real arm, dangling past my knees. The actuators hiss as the chrome fingers flex and bend, tapping against the bones like delicate hammers striking against the keys of an oversized xylophone. The sound is muffled, indicating that the skeleton is not very old, likely picked clean by scavengers.

The position of the skeleton is curious. The body has been arranged so that the bear lies on its back, face pointing up and the hind limbs kept straight, with the forelimbs folded across the chest, like a man having gone to sleep.

But it is the bear’s teeth that are of most interest to me; the lone front tooth remaining in the jaw is curiously notched, like a key. I lean down and stare at it, trying to match it to a child’s memory.

I take out a compass and verify that the bear’s head is pointed directly south.

This is not how wild animals die.

“My father and I were tracking a herd of wapiti last spring when we followed a doe into this clearing,” Yirin offers.

“Did you move the skeleton?”

“We took some finger bones and teeth as proof, but nothing else.”

“No one in the village had ever seen it before?”

He shakes his head.

“You are certain that there are no villages closer to here than Tanbian?”

“I’m certain.”

I dismiss him and continue to examine the skeleton. He probably is telling the truth. If other villagers had seen the bear, they would have taken more of the bones, which can be quite lucrative for bone carvings or as ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine. It would have been a hard secret to keep. Indeed, Yirin and his father had sold the teeth they took in Mukden, which was how we heard about the discovery in the first place.

I had seen one of those notched teeth and immediately pushed for the expedition.

So I can safely rule out human intervention as the cause of the skeleton’s strange posture.

I gaze into the hollow eyes of the bear’s empty skull, almost as large as my torso. I try to match it to the shadow in my memory.

Could the legends be true? Could this skull once have housed a deadly mind as intelligent as a man’s?

I pick up one of the arm bones.

Even after all these years, I can still feel my phantom right arm, the arm that the bear took away from me on that night.

As I lift the phantom arm, the impulses in my severed nerves charge tiny capacitors, which amplify the signals via resonator circuits. The signals, in turn, drive electromagnets that are attached to governor gears, altering the power the steam engine sends to the intricate gear train until my piston-driven steel arm has assumed the posture of my phantom one.

I will my phantom fingers to squeeze, and my metal fingers follow suit. I will my phantom fingers to squeeze harder, and as hundreds of gears grind, the pistons of my hand are brought to their full power, and suddenly, the bone in my hand shatters into a thousand pieces.

The grin in my memory matches the grin in the skull, perfectly.

This is the bear that attacked my family decades ago.

I will not be able to keep my promise to my family after all. The bear is already dead.

“Dr. Nakamatsu,” Yirin calls from the edge of the clearing. “You must come see this.”

I walk over. Yirin is pointing to a dead man’s hand sticking out of the snow.

• • • •

“The Russians did beat us after all.” Daiki Hayashi is our mechanic.

“Not that it matters,” says Ginnosuke Abe, the medic, “by the look of things.”

We dig through the snow. Altogether, we find the remains of six bodies.

One is remarkably complete, missing only a hand. The others are less intact. Of the last one, only a stump of a foot is left, the oozing blood frozen into tiny icicles.

Ginnosuke bends down and warms the frozen blood with his hand, sniffs.

“Less than two days old,” he declares. He examines the bite marks and the way the bodies have been flattened. “The bear that did this isn’t quite as large as the skeleton. But still, it must weigh nearly a thousand kilograms.”

I bend down to examine the bite marks myself. The cold has preserved the wounds in remarkable detail. I can even see the lines made by the individual teeth: like scraping marks left by a key.

“It will be back tonight,” Shiro says.

“Why?” asks Daiki.

“The bear is still hungry,” I reply. “It’s been using the snow as an icebox to keep the food fresh. Let’s set up camp and perimeter defenses.”

• • • •

Daiki has arranged the ten mechanical horses in a circle around the campfire: their hindquarters facing us, their heads facing out.

In the flickering firelight, they stand still, without the fidgeting and snickering that real horses would have engaged in. Now that their boilers are set to low heat, their shells have cooled and the falling snow soon covers them, turning them into snow sculptures.

But wisps of white steam continue to escape from their chrome nostrils, melting the snow over their faces and rising into the crisp night air. Their eyes glow red with the heat deep inside.

I brush the snow off the horses and open each belly, taking out the rolls of paper covered with holes arranged in neat patterns and replacing them with new ones. The old rolls were for marching, the new ones for defense.

“What do the holes do?” Yirin asks.

“Have you ever seen a player piano?” I ask.

Yirin nods. “When I went to Mukden with my father to sell the bear teeth.”

“It’s the same principle. The holes are instructions like the scores for the pianos. It’s called Lovelace code. If anything approaches from outside the camp, with a light tap, the man keeping watch can make the horses come to life without a rider. They will then move in accordance with the directions on the paper to fight the intruder.”

Yirin touches the metal skin of the horse gingerly. I see he has gained a new respect for the horses. They are more than mere beasts of burden.

Shiro shoots a half dozen hares for our dinner. Ginnosuke sets them to roasting over the fire. We sit in a circle sipping from cups filled with tea made with melted snow water, waiting.

“They’re ready,” Shiro says.

I reach into the flames with my metal hand, pull out the meat, and pass the pieces around the fire.

“Dr. Nakamatsu,” Yirin asks, as he accepts his portion. “Is it strange to have a metal hand?”

“I’m used to it.”

He continues to stare at my hand, and I smile, indicating that he may touch it.

Watching him approach my hand and arm the way he approached the mechanical horses gives me an odd feeling, as though I am looking at myself through the eyes of a stranger.

• • • •

The bear attack had occurred a few years after the Emperor took his power from the Shogun, the beginning of the Meiji Restoration.

My family was not from Hokkaido. Samurai loyal to the Shogun, including my father, had come to Hokkaido to set up a separate country.

“The Emperor wishes for us to use the foreigners’ machines and to learn to think like them,” my father said. “He wants to make Japan no longer Japan. We must chart a separate course.”

I nodded, secure in my father’s wisdom.

There was much that had to be done: chopping down trees to build houses and to clear out fields for the crops; burning charcoal for the weaponsmiths’ forges to fashion the best samurai swords; hunting for bears and wolves to make the land secure so that we could sleep at night.

I still have fond memories from that time, following my father around with a toy sword, stabbing at imaginary bears.

But the Emperor did not leave my father and his companions alone. The Emperor’s soldiers, masses of peasants armed with European guns, came to Hokkaido, surrounded the samurai, and slaughtered most of them in a battle with little honor. My father had been lucky to escape, hoping to hide with my mother and me in an obscure village.

But the bear had found him.

To show compassion to his former enemies, the Emperor’s men took me, an orphan, back to Tokyo.

At first I did not wish to study the things my teachers wanted to teach me. I sat in silence and held onto my empty sleeve with my left hand.

“Japan must remain Japan,” I said stubbornly, repeating the words of my father.

“Japan must change to remain Japan,” my teachers said, “or else the foreigners with their gunboats will turn us into meat lying upon a butcher block.”

A child could resist only so long. Eventually, I was given a proper and modern education and fitted with a series of new arms.

At first, my arm was carved out of wood, like the arms that had been given to cripples for hundreds of years. It could not do much save for filling out the right sleeves of my robes.

Then, as the country humbly learned the secret of steam and machinery from the Western powers, my arm also began to change.

When I was ten, I was given a clockwork arm, full of springs and gears and a key that I could wind with my left hand so that the iron fingers of my right hand could open and close. I studied mathematics and works of science translated from English and French while mills and workshops sprang up around me like mushrooms after rain.

When I was twenty, I was given an arm driven by steam. It was bulky and heavy and the boiler sometimes burned me. I had to keep it fed with water and coal, but it was also strong and hardy. I entertained my friends with feats of strength and helped them carry their heavy luggage as we went to the harbor to get on ships bound for Europe and America, where we were to study the latest knowledge of Western science. As I left for America, I waved to the new gunboats of the Imperial Navy in the harbor, modeled on British ships.

When I was thirty, I returned to Japan as a doctor of biology. My arm was now much lighter and stronger, and it was powered by electricity stored in a battery. Just by pressing a few buttons I could make it flex and bend, and by twisting a few knobs I could make the fingers open and close and hold any position. And I remember waving it in the air as everyone in the city celebrated Japan’s defeat of China and the conquest of Taiwan and Korea. We were on the rise, like a blast of steam from the exhaust at the top of a factory.

When I was forty, I finally received my present arm. It was the first arm that obeyed my will directly, its wires and components embedded into my nerves and flesh, its gears and levers driven by a steam turbine. As I and the others rejoiced in disbelief at our victory over Russia in Manchuria — the first victory by an Asian power over a European one for as long as people could remember — I felt an electrical surge from my joyfully pumping heart to the tips of my steel fingers.

Just as my country had transformed itself from a feudal backwater into a world power under the Bright Reign of the Meiji Emperor, finally, this foreign thing, this piece of machinery, had been transformed into a part of me under the light of science.

But through it all, I never forgot the bear.

In my years in America, I traveled widely, studying the habits of grizzlies and learning their lore. And after my return, I crisscrossed Hokkaido for many years without ever finding any signs of the bear that attacked my family. Yet, I did not believe it had died. I could feel it still out there in the world, mocking me.

And now it seems that the bear had left his home to wander the world just as I did, and the bear had multiplied.

• • • •

“That’s enough,” I tell Yirin and pull my arm away from him. “It’s late. Time for rest.”

Shiro agrees to take the first watch while the rest of us sleep.

Exhaustion from the past five days finally catches up to me, and I welcome the oblivious embrace of sleep almost immediately.

• • • •

I wake up to a nightmare.

For a moment, I do not understand what I am seeing. Under the moonlight, bits of torn paper are everywhere, swirling with drifts of snow in the howling wind.

Then I notice that nine of the mechanical horses have the flaps under their bellies hanging open, the space inside, where the scrolls of code should be, is empty.

A dark shadow is crouched next to the last horse.

I am frozen. I have forgotten how to move or speak.

The shadow rises from next to the horse. It is a bear standing on its hind legs: a big bear, as big as any Ussuri I have ever seen.

A figure lies unmoving next to the bear: Shiro. The bear must have killed him first as he was the watchman.

An electrical tingling in my mechanical arm rouses me from my stupor. “Daiki!” I call out. “Ginnosuke! Yirin!”

Daiki rises from next to me. He fumbles for his gun.

In a second the bear is next to me. He growls, and I shiver.

The bear swipes and Daiki is hurtling through the air, like a flying fish leaping out of the water, casting a graceful arc across the falling snow, through the cold Manchurian moonlight.

The bear continues to grab onto everything in camp and tosses it out of the way. Boxes and bundles — a few that might have been Ginnosuke and Yirin in sleeping bags — are flung afar like broken toys. The bear is like a typhoon, an unstoppable force of nature.

I roll away from the chaos and find myself next to the last horse, the one horse that still has its fighting instructions.

I reach up and tap the switch next to the horse’s neck.

And then I am flying through the air too, and as I land in the soft snow, I feel a searing pain in my thighs. I try to stand up but can no longer make my legs obey.

The bear growls and lumbers through the snow towards me. I smell the rotten stench of its breath and sweat. The bear’s eyes are inches from mine. There is nowhere for me to run, even if I could move.

The bear opens its mouth and growls again, lunging towards me. Without thinking, my right arm shoots out and my steel fist connects with the great snout. The bear backs off in pain, surprised by the power in my arm. But it shakes the blood from its nose and is back in an instant, and swipes at me.

We wrestle and I grab the bear’s arm with my metal fingers. I squeeze, trying to crush its bones. But the bear seems to feel nothing as it leans down, slowly pinning my mechanical arm to the ground with its weight.

I look towards my steel fingers and see that I am holding onto a thick branch. The bear has fooled me. It had swiped at me with a club like a false arm.

I close my eyes. I have been outwitted by a bear, a bear that does not behave as one. I will die as my father before me. The pressure on my chest is crushing and I cannot breathe.

Suddenly, the bear roars in pain and the weight on me is gone.

I open my eyes and see that the mechanical horse has finally come alive. It rears up its forelegs and stomps them on the hard-packed snow.

The bear limps a bit, and I can see a swelling lump on its back where it was kicked. It stands up warily to face this new menace, this mechanical foe.

Animal and machine rush at each other, clashing in the snow. The sound of claw scraping against metal grates at my ears, accompanied by the labored breath of the bear and the straining whine from the horse’s boilers. The two pit their strengths against each other: one an ancient nightmare, the other a modern wonder.

Gradually, the horse appears to gain the upper hand: it pushes the bear ever so slowly backwards. The bear strains, tries to hold its position, but its legs tremble with the effort. It stumbles back a few steps and with a roar halts the retreat momentarily, but in a few seconds stumbles back again.

I smile. Muscle, after all, cannot match piston.

But my smile freezes as I realize that the bear is shifting direction, lurching backwards towards me. The wily beast, knowing that I am paralyzed, is pretending to lose. Since I cannot move, I will be crushed either by the bear’s paws or the horse’s hoofs as the pair step over me.

The horse pushes forward relentlessly, oblivious to the scheme. Animal intelligence has found a weakness in my programming.

A gunshot cracks.

I see that Daiki is sitting up in the snow, his gun cradled in his lap as he aims at the bear’s head for a second shot.

The bear, realizing its weak position, roars and shoves the horse back, ducks and rolls out of the way, surprisingly agile. The horse stumbles, loses balance, and crashes to the snow. The bear, now ten meters away, gets back up on its feet and begins to run.

Another gunshot, another miss.

The bear disappears into the swirling snow and dark night.

The mechanical horse regains its feet. Now that the threat is no longer nearby, it stops moving, though its red eyes continue to glow in the darkness, like night lanterns at a harbor.

Daiki and I stare at each other, unable to believe our luck.

Suddenly, the horse comes back to life and rears up on its hind legs.

“It’s us! Don’t shoot!” someone shouts.

Ginnosuke stumbles back into camp, his leg wounded. Behind him comes Yirin, who is also limping, a hand on his back. Their faces are white, the look of haunted survivors.

The bear had indeed thrown them out of the camp in its frenzy. They are lucky to be alive.

All four of us look towards the unmoving body of Shiro, not nearly as lucky.

• • • •

“To stay here is madness,” Ginnosuke says. “All of our horses, but one, have lost the ability to fight. Our best warrior is dead. Your legs are broken and the rest of us are injured. The only course is to admit defeat and retreat.”

Ginnosuke speaks sense, but I cannot help being who I am. If I cannot have my vengeance against the bear, I must have it against the bear’s children. I cannot forget that night so many decades ago. Our obsessions are a part of us, like our scars and phantom limbs.

“We cannot return empty-handed,” I say. “The bear who attacked us last night was juvenile. We have not yet seen the adult who killed the Russian team. We must capture both.”

Ginnosuke, Daiki, and Yirin look at me as though I am mad. Perhaps I am, a little.

• • • •

I sit in the middle of the camp. Snow has covered the shredded tents and our scattered boxes of supplies, turning them into misshapen mounds of snow. Now and again, I brush the snow off of myself.

Before they left, Ginnosuke and Daiki took off a pair of legs from one of the horses to fashion splints for me. At least the pain is now bearable, even if I cannot move.

My companions have taken the other horses and left me behind. The giant bear skeleton alone keeps me company.

Slowly, oh so slowly, the light fades, and evening falls.

A roar fills the woods, and winter birds, roused from their sleep, burst into the sky in panic.

The second roar is much closer.

I pull my coat tighter around me. The electrical tingling shimmies through my arm again. I open my metal fingers and look at the tiny glass vial held inside, filled with a clear liquid that refuses to freeze in the sub-zero cold.

This is my secret weapon: There is enough neuropoison in that vial to paralyze a great whale. We brought it to tranquilize any bears we catch.

The bear roars again, and I look towards the edge of the clearing. The trees shake and tremble as though they are in the middle of a storm.

The ground shakes, and a large shadow steps into the clearing, a shadow that is a reflection of the one I have seen a thousand times in my dreams.

The great bear rears up on its hind legs and opens its mouth. I see the notches in its teeth glinting in the moonlight.

Then it plunges back to the ground and snow explodes around it like icebergs calving. Its demon eyes are bright in the moonlight.

“You’re from Hokkaido,” I say.

The bear cocks its ear, as though listening. Then it grins. It growls lightly in answer, like a chuckle.

“I have been looking for your father,” I say.

It stares at me for a while, then nods and lumbers forward, slowly at first, and then gradually picking up speed.

I curl my hand and lay my arm down in the snow, an obvious target. After all these years of searching and plotting, my plan has come to this: I must allow it to take my arm into its mouth, where I can crush the vial and release the toxin. I am both the bait and the bear trap.

The bear stops a meter away from me, breathing hard. We stare into each other’s eyes. Who is the hunter and who is the prey?

The bear looks down at my mechanical arm and shakes its head. I tense. Has it divined my plan?

Quicker than I can believe is possible, it pounces on my arm and the weight of its massive forepaws immobilizes my artificial limb. I am pulled to the ground and groan as my broken legs are jostled. The bear grins, contemptuous.

But my arm has tricks that the bear does not know. Unlike an arm of flesh, my prosthetic arm is capable of continuously turning in its socket in the same direction like a wheel. As I turn my arm one revolution after another, I move the bear’s weight off of it like a slab rolling off of a log.

The bear, surprised, is too late to react as I grab onto its forepaw and squeeze with every bit of strength my gears and levers can muster. It howls, an inhuman sound. The pain immobilizes it. I continue to increase the pressure, a force that no flesh can compete with. I hear the bones in the bear’s arm crack and shatter.

A momentary lull in the swirling snow allows the moonlight to glow brighter, and shadows stir behind the bear. Three mechanical horses emerge from the snow. Their riders hold guns aimed at the great bear.

I grin back at the bear and let up the pressure for a moment. “I have you now.”

The bear bites down hard to stop the howling. It turns its head and sees the riders. Behind them, the rest of the horses appear, tied together with chains so that they form a moving wall of iron. Though the horses can no longer fight, they still have their riding instructions and will follow a rein. No matter how strong the bear is, it will not be able to break that wall.

The bear roars, a sound of surprise and despair.

The real trap has sprung. My companions have been hiding behind a nearby hill. They have cut off the bear’s route of retreat. The bear will die today in this clearing, even if I die with it.

I see Daiki, Ginnosuke, and Yirin raise their guns. I begin to laugh. Finally, after all these years, my nightmare is about to end. I squeeze my mechanical hand even harder, wishing to literally rip the bear’s arm off.

The smallest of the three riders — it must be Yirin — drops his aim, grabs his gun like a club and swings it at the heads of the other two men before him. Without any sound, the two of them fall from their horses. Yirin jumps off his horse and lets the reins dangle.

I do not understand what I am seeing.

Now bereft of guidance from their riders, all the horses stop moving.

Yirin alone approaches the bear and me. He points his gun at me. “Stop.”

I let the bear’s arm go.

“Father, please excuse my tardiness,” Yirin says in perfect Japanese, and bows to the bear.

• • • •

I watch, mesmerized, as Yirin transforms into the bear who broke my legs last night, and then back to Yirin again. I watch, wonder filling my heart, as the great bear transforms into an older version of Yirin, a tall and broad-shouldered giant of a man with a head of hair and a beard as bushy as a hedgehog. He cradles his bloody, broken arm as we talk.

“My name is Airin.” His voice is deep and resonant, sorrowful but calm.

I look into the man’s eyes. “Your father killed my family, almost forty years ago.”

“As yours did mine.”

I shake my head, not understanding.

“Since time immemorial, our clan of bear-men have lived in the snowy forests of Hokkaido, away from the presence of men.

“Then, gradually, more and more men from the southern islands came, and began to cut down the ancient trees of the forest, to burn down our home so that they could have flat fields on which to plant their crops.

“And they hunted us, killed us as we slumbered in winter.”

I remember how my father’s people had to make homes for themselves in the wilderness of Hokkaido, how they had to tame a land that was uncultivated, how they had to kill the bears to make the village safe. The bears had to make way for people.

“A blood debt demands payment in blood,” Airin says. “My father went to your village to avenge the deaths of his brothers.”

I feel my mechanical arm tingle, the phantom limb in pain.

“But more men soon followed those he killed, and eventually we had to flee Hokkaido altogether and come to this new land, where the smell of men is faint. But blood always calls for more blood.”

I look at Airin. Who between us is the prey and who the hunter?

“What do you want?” I ask.

“To change.”

• • • •

I watch as Daiki cuts my arm away from me. The pain is excruciating. Losing my arm a second time is even worse than the first.

Ginnosuke helps by separating the nerves and blood vessels that have grown into the spaces between the wires and gears with a scalpel. He cauterizes the wounds with a heated iron. I know that the cauterization process, though necessary to save my life, will make it impossible to receive a new arm.

“Drink,” Ginnosuke says, and feeds me a burning liquor that will bring me sleep.

You have not left us alone. I hear the words of Airin through a haze. Every year, men cut down more trees, burn more grass, open up more fields. You can do it so much more efficiently now with the aid of your machines, powered by belching mechanical engines.

Our magic has always come from the earth, the raw soil of endless life. But men have torn open the earth to plunder the energy locked away in death, for coal and oil, and for lumber and stone with which to build. They have bound Manchuria in iron chains laid across her so that steam-powered monsters could huff and puff over the land and haul the goods to the sea.

Drowsy, I watch as Ginnosuke and Daiki work together to attach my arm to Airin. An arm for an arm, the oldest law of the world. The amputation of his broken, useless arm is every bit as brutal as a scene from a butcher shop, with bone saws and gushing blood and gore-soaked tourniquets. But Airin endures it all without making any sound.

Yirin watches anxiously.

“Do not make a mistake,” he says. He makes his voice menacing but it is hardly necessary. Ginnosuke and Daiki remember well what he had done on the night he killed Shiro.

Daiki has reinforced and thickened the mechanical arm with components from the horse legs to fit Airin’s size. As Daiki clamps the mechanical arm to Airin’s stump, and Ginnosuke begins the process of suturing Airin’s nerves and blood vessels to the wires, Airin hisses but does not otherwise make any sound. He bites down on his lower lip until blood oozes from his mouth.

We have run out of places to hide. We can feel our old magic seeping away as the land loses its life, its energy. It is the same as how it was in Hokkaido. There will be a time when we will want to do nothing but to sleep, even knowing that in slumber men will slaughter us.

If we cannot fight your machines, we must learn to adopt them: your iron horses, your iron arms. The machines have given you power, and perhaps they will give us power, too.

They used the teeth of their father to lure us here, I think. They’ve learned to exploit the energy locked away in death, too.

I watch as the bear-man and the mechanical arm become one. Even with his powers of healing, it will take some time before he learns how to wield this new arm, how to stop feeling the revolting alienness of metal laid over a phantom. But by then he will have felt the power, understood the beauty of cold, invincible steel.

Starting tomorrow, the bears want me to teach them the art of programming the mechanical horses, so that they can be taught to fight. They want Daiki to instruct them in the art of horse maintenance. They want to learn from Ginnosuke how to meld flesh and metal. When they have learned enough, they will let us go.

As I drift towards sleep, I imagine an army of bear-men augmented with mechanical limbs and mechanical horses making a stand against the ever-encroaching tide of men. I imagine a race losing an old magic as they learn to live with a new one. I do not know if I should feel pity or terror.

Airin’s flesh and the metal of the arm will fuse into one, as tangled as blood debts, as beautiful and strange as the great metropolis of Tokyo, where ancient rice-paper lanterns now glow with the burning heat of tiny lightnings, voltaic arcs created by electricity leaping across leads.

I close my eyes and give in to sleep, though my phantom arm throbs with an old magic that refuses to die.

© 2014 by Ken Liu.

Originally published in The Beast Within 4, edited by Jennifer Brozek.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

The Ministry of the Eye

Dale Bailey

Mornings were queues and cigarettes.

Queues for the underground turnstiles and queues for the train, queues for stale bagels and queues for lukewarm coffee at the kiosk outside the station. By the time he queued up at the west gate of the pit, Alexander Gerst — tall and grizzled at forty-five, slope-shouldered and running slowly to fat — was lucky if he wasn’t already halfway through his daily ration of tobacco. He rolled the first one as soon as he woke up and hauled himself out of the corona of Janet’s warmth, smoked it while sitting on the edge of the bed, and mashed it out in the ashtray on the night stand. Then a cold shower and a quick check on Sam, this maybe the best moment of Gerst’s day, standing there in the quiet of his son’s bedroom, breathing of the small boy’s calm and of his warm sleep, as the city bestirred itself around him like a warren of ants. Sometimes it was all Gerst could do to tear himself away, roll another one, and smoke it on the three-block walk to the underground station. Then the chronic irritant of the subway, the press of the platform and, worse yet, the crowded carriage: the stink of too many people, the jerk and clang of couplings as the battered cars leaned into the curves, and the flying bars of light and shadow as another train plunged by in the tunnel, the ashen faces opposite blurring into a single hurtling smear, like the strangled visage of the city itself.

Gerst was already exhausted by the time he emerged from the station. And today was worse than usual. Today brought a lowering sky and a thin, stinging rain, icy against his face and underneath the collar of his woolen overcoat. It was all he could do not to loosen his tie. The goddamn thing was already choking him and the morning not even really begun. Instead, Gerst took shelter beneath the awning of a paycheck-advance dodge and rolled number three. When he was done he flipped it into the frothing brown gutter. And why shouldn’t he? Gerst thought as he wound his way across the clogged street to queue up for coffee.

It was an ugly place, Acheron, a gray place. Crumbling brick walk-ups crowded the narrow thoroughfares. A clamor of rust-eaten cars, sagging panel trucks, and taxis thronged the age-fissured pavement, belching noxious clouds of exhaust. A fug of sewage steamed from the sluggish black river that snaked through the shipping district. And always, at the center of the encircling labyrinth of streets, pulsing like the diseased red heart of the city, seethed the pit.

Against this, frail and stunted, caught in glimpses by those few who had the eyes to see it: beauty. And it was beauty that startled Gerst as he turned away from the kiosk, cheap coffee scalding his tongue: the iridescent swirl of motor oil in a rain-spattered pool, fugitive and ephemeral, color in a colorless place. He stared at it for a heartbeat, and then the rat-faced man behind the counter was shouting at him to move on, he was holding up the line.

“What?” he demanded. “You got a problem with the coffee?”

“No, the coffee’s fine,” Gerst said.

Rat-face merely shook his head, waving his hand in dismissal. When Gerst turned back to the rain, that sheen of color was gone. The puddle was just a puddle again, and he felt the loss of something as the momentum of the street swept him up. It carried him through the forsaken zone surrounding the pit and deposited him ten minutes later at the west gate: a complex network of gates actually, designed with the ministry’s usual efficiency to direct the mobs of pitmen in their insulated blue coveralls — it was shift change down below — and the host of nine-to-fivers like himself who staffed the buildings above. Gerst queued up — again — flashed his ID, muttering “Citizen” to the sentries manning the gate, and slipped into the massive facility beyond, a maze of fourteen-foot fencing topped by coils of concertina wire and anchored by sniper towers. He would have to queue up and flash his ID twice more before he gained the ministry itself, a sprawl of squat soot-streaked brick buildings. In the meantime, wreckage, a blasted wasteland of cinders and iron patrolled by men with dogs and automatic weapons. Here vast heaps of chopped wood, there towering mounds of glittering coal — fuel for the ravenous furnace of the pit — and far in the distance, away to the east, the intake center where the damned arrived every hour, spilling hooded and shackled from cramped semis and cattle cars, to be herded by men with electric prods into the mouth of the abyss itself. The acrid reek of smoke burned in the air, and the miasma of human agony, a stench of blood and charred bone and screams.

By contrast, Gerst’s building exuded the musty odors of floor wax and yellowing files. A deep, pervasive silence reigned there, unbroken but for the constant hum of the fluorescent bars suspended high above. Gerst flashed his ID for the final time at the building’s checkpoint. Then he was inside, plodding down a crowded tiled corridor. By the time Gerst found his cubby and shucked his coat, a woman — a gray, affectless specimen of the sex with whom he had never exchanged a word — had already arrived with a wheeled cart piled high with four-by-eight inch punch cards. Gerst would spend the rest of the day sliding them into the nine color-coded slots in his desk, each a different shade of red. The distinctions were subtle (they ran from rust to dried blood) and the work demanded his full attention. But today, preoccupied with that swirl of color on the puddle, Gerst couldn’t concentrate. Keller, in the next cubicle, poked his head up.

“Lunch?”

“Maybe,” Gerst said, reaching for another card. But it was no good. The coffee sat sour on his stomach. His mouth tasted of stale nicotine. His fingers trembled as he matched each card to its slot, and there was something obscurely unpleasant about the buzz of the hidden teeth that seized it, drew it in, and dispatched it to some unknown destination for some unimaginable purpose. By ten he’d barely made a dent in his day’s quota, and by noon, he saw that he’d have to work through lunch — he sent Keller on without him — if he wanted to get out on time.

At last — it was two o’clock by then — Gerst rolled a cigarette, lit it, and stretched, exhaling a stream of blue smoke at the ceiling. Once again his mind fixed on that eddy of color in the muddy pool. He wished suddenly that he could share it with Janet and Sam, but they were deep into their own days by now, Janet as a cashier at a shabby grocer, Sam at the state-run crèche.

By the time he extinguished the cigarette another ten minutes had slipped by. It would be six-thirty before he got out, maybe seven. But it was nearly seven-thirty when he finally shrugged on his overcoat and trod down the corridor, heels echoing, into the wasteland beyond, virtually empty at this twilight hour: the sentries at their stations, another nine-to-fiver or two running late, a handful of pitmen working their way through the checkpoints. And still that scrap of beauty lingered in his mind.

Maybe that’s why Gerst did what he did next. He didn’t think about it anyway, just leaned down by impulse and hooked a knot of wood from one of the towering heaps as he passed, a whorled chunk the size of his fist and polished to a sheen, so that the grain stood out in lovely swirls. Scooped it up and dropped it into the pocket of his overcoat. Didn’t even look around, just kept walking, head down, another weary bureaucrat homeward bound beneath a heavy-bellied sky.

Gerst steeled himself for the gates, certain that he was going to be pulled aside and searched. Each time, though, the sentries passed him through with barely a glance. Then he was outside in the forsaken zone, still walking, his shoulders hunched in expectation of a cry, the bay of pursuit. But he passed into the maze of surrounding streets unmolested. The crowd of commuters had cleared by now, and without the comforting anonymity they might have provided, the dry certainty that he was being followed — that he’d been seen — more than once seized Gerst. The echo of footsteps behind him, another pedestrian, the passage of a car in the street: these things unleashed new floods of paranoia.

Tension knotted his shoulders, and, despite the cool air, sweat beaded on his forehead. He walked two blocks to the nearest underground station, the chunk of wood swinging in his pocket. It wasn’t too late to step into an alley and chuck it into a dumpster. Rid himself of the evidence at least. It was the only sensible thing. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He ducked into the station instead and pushed through the turnstile. Below, the newsagents and cigarette vendors were closing up for the night. The station was almost empty, maybe a dozen and a half commuters — a woman in gray scrubs by the tracks, a man in an overcoat staring at the platform opposite.

But the great banners suspended overhead, the posters behind their scratched plastic frames — these were still there, had always been there, would always be there, timeless as Acheron itself. They loomed everywhere, sentinels with two vigilant rubies, like tiny red eyes, affixed to their collars. Gerst felt the weight of their blue, bombardier’s eyes, doubled and redoubled, merciless and cold as time.

Ever Watchful.

“Citizen.”

Gerst started as a transit cop strolled by. “Citizen,” he said, half expecting to be asked for his papers, but the cop merely nodded and moved on.

Gerst boarded a local ten minutes later; twenty minutes after that he was home. The third floor apartment was lit up to receive him — the pawn shop below had long since locked its roll-down gates for the night — and he felt a warm rush of relief as he unlocked the street-side door. Two flights of stairs and three locks later, he let himself into the apartment. Sam — four years of boundless energy — launched himself into Gerst’s arms, and Gerst had a sudden sense of just how much he’d put at risk. Gerst lifted him high and swung him in a circle, the boy shrieking —

“Dad, you’re home. We thought you’d never come.”

“Well, here I am,” Gerst said, setting the boy down, and as he did so, he felt Sam’s fingers brush his pocket.

“Hey, what’s that? Did you bring me a present? What did you bring me?”

“Nothing,” Gerst said, but in that moment, he knew that it was Sam’s, that he’d stolen it for the boy, and that a time would come when it would pass into his hands.

“No seriously, Dad. What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said hanging his coat by the door and adjusting it so that the bulge in the pocket would be invisible. He turned and there was Janet, leaning in to kiss him. “Run along,” he said to Sam, swatting him lightly on the rear end, but in a breath — he’d hardly gotten to say hello to Janet — Sam was back, brandishing a coarse page torn from a coloring book. “Look, Dad.”

Gerst took the paper and held it to the light: the black and gray sigil of the Ministry of the Eye, filled in with a four-year-old’s scrawling strokes. Gerst uttered a humorless little laugh, feeling a glacier calve inside his heart. “We’ll have to tape it to the refrigerator,” he said.

They did.

• • • •

In some dead hour of the night, Gerst woke dry mouthed, short of breath. For a moment, he thought he must have dreamed the whole lurid thing — but no, it had been all too real. Janet stirred, mumbling. He’d never hidden anything from her before and he felt now how precarious his condition was, how lie led on to lie and to the final lie at last, yet unspoken, jammed, in haste, by impulse, into the pocket of his coat.

Gerst heaved himself out of bed. He shut the bathroom door behind him and pulled the light chain. The bulb swung, chasing shadows, Janet’s improvised paper shade little softening its glare. He urinated, washed up, examined the sallow stranger in the mirror. He’d once found matching each card to its slot calming, the hum as the mechanism inside seized it and drew it in somehow gratifying. But somewhere along the way — Gerst couldn’t pinpoint when or why — the work had deteriorated into an endless grind that he could neither enjoy nor escape. There was Janet to think of, after all, and there was Sam. His work at the ministry had given them a life of relative comfort and security. But now he’d put it all at risk.

Gerst pulled the light chain.

In the main room — cramped kitchen and living area together — he lit a cigarette and stood at the window, staring out past the shell of his own face. The reflection of the pit flickered like a red eye in a low ceiling of cloud. He studied it while he finished the cigarette. Then he checked on Sam, curled in a tangle of sheets. Gerst straightened them and stood by the bed, taking in the fragrance of his son’s sleep, matching him breath to breath. Something tidal moved within him, ancient, deep. He might have crawled in beside the boy but for the chunk of wood in his coat pocket.

Instead, Gerst turned away to retrieve it and sat on the sofa. He placed it on the coffee table by Sam’s coloring book, and stared down at them side by side, a still life of everything he’d jeopardized: the coloring book and its picture of a black-clad sentinel; the fan of crayons, a palette of blacks, grays, browns; the glossy chunk of wood. And what was he to do with the thing now? Chuck it? Still the wisest course. Hoard it away somewhere for his own miserly pleasure? What pleasure could such peril bring him? Sell it? He snorted softly. What did a man like him know of the street?

Gerst picked it up and turned it in his hands, feeling its weight and heft, and abruptly something came back to him, his own strange thought, that he had done this for Sam, that someday it would pass to him. A paradox. He would not endanger the boy for all the contraband beauty in Acheron. Yet that was exactly what he had done, and for what? A chunk of polished wood so lustrous that he could almost see himself in it, or imagined he could.

And then, pensively:

No, not himself he saw, but something else, a shape inside the grain; maybe that was what he had perceived from the start: not merely the outward allure of the thing, but that inward shape, sensed but yet unseen. He turned the chunk of wood, studying it, held it to the window and the red sky beyond. Yes, it was there. With a blade — the right blade — with time and with skill — he could discover it.

“Alex?”

Janet. From the bedroom, her voice frowzy with sleep.

He stood. “Yeah. Coming.”

In the kitchen, he took out a sheet of butcher paper out of a drawer. He wrapped the lump of wood hastily, opened the coat closet, and shoved it to the back of the upper shelf. He closed the door and made his way to the bedroom.

“Where were you?”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Something bothering you?” she mumbled.

“It’s nothing. I don’t know.”

“Tell me, hon.”

“I don’t know. I told you. Bad dreams, I guess.” He lay down, the mattress sagging beneath his weight.

“Love you,” Janet murmured, pillowing her head upon his shoulder, and as he drifted into sleep Gerst wondered that he had risked all this and more, and wondered too that he was going to risk still further, and most of all, where he would find a blade.

• • • •

Morning then. Bleary with lack of sleep, Gerst stood at the sticky counter of the street-side kiosk, stirring powdered creamer into his usual swill, and the man shoving in beside him, says, “I saw you.”

Gerst felt something give way inside him, subsidence, the floor dropping out of his heart. He ditched the plastic stirrer in the overflowing bin. Fumbling with a top, he shouldered his way onto the sidewalk. The man stayed at his elbow, a blue-clad shadow, smelling faintly of sulfur, saying, “There’s no use denying it. I saw you.”

“Are you talking to me?” Still not looking up.

“Don’t be a fool,” the man said.

“I haven’t done anything.”

They stopped at the clogged intersection: horns blatting, the stink of exhaust. The light changed. Pedestrians surged into the street. Gerst wove his way through the cars, thinking of Janet and Sam, a kind of numb terror filling him. Surely he would wake up any minute now. But he did not wake. The blue presence stayed at his side, matching his pace, silent now, until at last, midstreet, Gerst turned and confronted him: twenty-something, maybe thirty, close shorn dark hair, with thick work-scarred hands. When he met Gerst’s eyes, Gerst saw that his face too was scarred. A knotty white cicatrix perhaps an inch long ran under his left eye. He stared a moment too long.

“Shiv,” the young man said. “One of them turned on me. Lucky I didn’t lose the eye.”

The buzzer started going. Gerst swung around to see the Don’t Walk sign blaring at him, the flashing countdown commence — 15, 14, 13. . . Another surge of pedestrians, hurrying to beat the light. The young man clapped him on the back, steering him to the curb.

“Let’s not make a scene, shall we?” he said. “Not healthy for either of us. Not safe.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“See, that’s just the attitude I’m talking about, Alex. You’re in it now, like it or not.”

His name. Gerst felt another shock wave roll through him.

“Who are you?”

“Call me Clive.”

“What do you want, Clive? I haven’t any money.”

“You’re richer than you think. You have an eye for the stuff, don’t you? That’s as good as money.”

“Are you —”

“Don’t be a fool, Alex.” Then: “We can be of service to one another. If you don’t want to cooperate, well.” The young man — Clive — shrugged.

“Cooperate?”

“Look close, see well, collect what you can.”

“Beau —”

“Don’t even say the word,” the young man said. “Not here. Don’t be a fool. We can work something out in trade.”

A blade, Gerst thought, risking another glance. He must have said it aloud, for the other man nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I can see why, too. You can keep what you have. Bring something else, bring what you can. I’ll see what I can do.”

“But where?”

“I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, I’ll be watching for you, yeah?”

And he was gone, dropping back into the crowd. But that phrase —

 — I’ll be watching for you, yeah? —

 — echoed in Gerst’s head as he passed through the checkpoints and into the ministry itself. When he sat at his desk to begin slotting cards, his hands were shaking.

• • • •

A week passed. The knot of wood remained safely on its shelf in the coat closet, the stranger on the street made no more appearances, and Gerst’s paranoia gradually waned. It never went away — in Acheron such things never did — but the screaming terror of that first night dwindled to a constant subliminal hum, like the buzz of the fluorescent lights suspended from the shadowy heights of the ministry’s ceiling.

His morning routine re-asserted itself. Queues and cigarettes, the throng of the underground at rush hour. Nights, he colored at the coffee table with Sam and talked with Janet, feeling constantly the weight of his deception. Then bed. In the deepest cradle of the morning, Gerst lay wakeful, brooding on the knot of wood hidden away in the coat closet, trying to see the shape hidden in its whorled and polished surface. Twice, he dared to take it from its secret place, unwrap the butcher paper, and stare smoking down at it on the coffee table. The first time, he used a kitchen knife to shave away a single paring of the wood — or tried to, anyway. The knife was dull to the task, the wood too hard. The second time he almost got caught. He was turning the thing in his hands, and teasing out with his eyes the shape hidden within when suddenly Janet’s voice was in the doorway.

“What are you doing, Alex?” she asked.

Casually, he leaned over and slid the chunk of wood under the skirt of the couch, and if she saw him she didn’t say.

“Thinking,” he said.

“What are you thinking about? You seem to think all the time anymore.”

He hesitated. Then, tentatively, like a man making his way step by step across a frozen river, he said, “Do you ever wonder if things could be different than they are?”

She sat beside him. “Different how?”

“I don’t know. Nothing seems like enough anymore.”

“Aren’t we enough, Sam and I?”

“That’s just it, isn’t it? Sometimes I want more for you.”

“Like what, Alex?

“Today” — had the ice grown thinner? —”today, I saw a scrap of fabric —”

“Fabric?”

“That’s right. It was caught in a stunted tree in the forsaken zone. It must have blown there.”

“There’s all kinds of litter in the forsaken zone.”

“No. But this was different.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned to look at her. “It was yellow, bright yellow.”

She simply stared at him, her face flickering with shadow and light. She started to speak — stopped — started again, and he felt the ice groan under his feet. “Yellow,” she said.

“Very bright.” He hesitated. “Like the sun had punched a hole in the sky.”

She laughed humorlessly. “When did you begin to say such things, Alexander Gerst?”

When indeed? The words had risen unbidden to his lips.

“I — I don’t know.”

Her brow furrowed. “Well, you mustn’t, you mustn’t say them,” she said. She said, “You didn’t take it, did you?” and the ice cracked beneath his feet, revealing the dark rushing water underneath.

Gerst turned back toward the distant shore. “No. Of course not.”

But how well she knew him, for hadn’t he had to fight the impulse to snatch the thing from the leaf-barren tree where it twisted like a flag in the cold wind keening across the desolation? There in plain sight of the sentries in their towers, alone on that blasted ring of earth, late again and hurrying back into the endless web of the surrounding city — there, in that forsaken zone, hadn’t he had to resist the overwhelming yearning to possess the thing for himself, to treasure it up as a hedge against the indifferent malice of Acheron? And hadn’t he failed? Wasn’t it even now hidden in his overcoat pocket, a scrap of sun-bright beauty, waiting to be folded with the knot of polished wood into the sheet of wrinkled butcher paper and stowed away on the back shelf of the closet?

And not because of the cold thousand and maybe more that it would fetch on the black market either — double, triple, quadruple their monthly income. Not even because of the scarred man’s imperative.

Because he wanted it.

Yet it was in the former that he sought refuge, saying, “I merely thought of the thing’s value, how much we could use that kind of money.”

He forced a laugh.

Janet laughed, too, a nervous kind of laugh. “Alex, if you see such a thing again, you mustn’t even look at it. It would go hard for us all if they even suspected you. It would mean . . .”

But she didn’t say it. She didn’t need to. They both of them knew it.

“Okay,” he said. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

She took his hands. “Promise me, Alex” — and he thought once again of how lie led on to lie and to still more lies after that.

“I promise,” he said, that too a lie — for it was a promise he knew he could not keep. All his life, Gerst had walked the streets of Acheron blind to their secret beauty. For more than four decades, he’d lived in a city almost devoid of color, and what there was of it so washed out that it might as well have been no color at all — for yellow the lemony blur of its overcast sun, far away and bereft of warmth; for red the brownish rust that everywhere bloomed in its perpetual damp; for blue the gunship gray of its beleaguered inhabitants’ faces. How had such a thing happened? Had he been born blind to color, or had it been drilled out of him in the city’s crèches? He could not say, only that he had not been alone in his impairment. How long had that yellow flag flown from that stunted tree before someone in the passing multitude even saw it for what it was, a dazzling scrap of beauty blown in to brighten this dismal world? And of those few with the power to see, he wondered, how many had the reckless courage to seize it for themselves?

Yet Gerst, who had no courage, could not stay his hand. That iridescent swirl of motor oil had startled him awake. Now he caught fleeting glimpses of beauty everywhere around him — in the reflected neon glare of a rain-slick street, there and gone again in the blink of an eye, or in a blade of grass, that astonishing green that sprang from a crevice in the pavement, wilted, died. He took to wandering the streets after work in search of it, riding the subway to distant boroughs so that he could walk sidewalks he had not walked before. And if each new district of the city was as squat and ugly and impoverished as the last, each too unveiled its own ephemeral wonders. The water-smoothed stones (he pocketed one) he found along the riverbank before the tidal surge swept them away — how could he have missed them before? That scatter of bones, it must have been a bird, bleached white along the shore (these too he gathered up)? The feather of a spendthrift crow (he took it from the air as it drifted down the heavens)? It was everywhere, beauty — in the wind-torn smoke blue above the chimney pots or the diaphanous gossamer of a spider’s nightly labor.

Then, one weary morning on his way to work, a stranger stumbled against him on the rush-hour train —

“Sorry,” he muttered, pushing past Gerst as the doors whooshed open.

 — and a few minutes later, digging into his pocket for change, Gerst’s fingers closed about a slip of paper. He withdrew it: a typewritten date — tomorrow — a time, an address. He shoved it back in his pocket, and queued up for coffee, but it tasted bitter and he dumped the cup into an overflowing wastebasket half a block away. He stepped into an alley a dozen yards farther on, rolled a cigarette with shaking fingers — he spilled as much tobacco as he got into the creased paper — and smoked. Then the west gate, his cubby. He was slow that day, his hands tremulous with the cards.

That address loomed in his thoughts. Maybe it wasn’t too late to dump or destroy his cache of contraband beauty. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe the scar-faced man was an agent of the Eye. Yet in the end he knew that he would go. He was too far in it now; he had no other choice. Too deeply he desired to shape the wood and unveil for himself — for Sam — the shape hidden inside it.

That night Gerst slipped out of bed after Janet had gone to sleep.

He stepped into the bathroom with the slip of paper, memorized it, tore it into tiny pieces, and flushed them down the john. Back in the bedroom, he lay down and pulled the covers up. Janet rolled over and hooked her leg across his thighs.

“You all right?” she mumbled.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I’m fine.”

• • • •

Gerst was loathe to give up his half-Saturday with Sam, but the next morning he embarked on a tangled route of subway lines and diesel-reeking buses. It took him into mean, vicious-looking districts that made his own impoverished neighborhood seem prosperous. This induced new heights of paranoia in Gerst. He found himself scanning the Saturday-morning crowds nervously and waiting until the last moment to dart between the subway’s doors as they hissed closed. He emerged from the final station in a dank borough of the city he’d never seen before, a dying quarter of crumbling houses where shades flapped in broken windows, and somewhere, inconsolably, a baby wailed.

He had begun to despair of finding the address when Clive — if that was really his name — fell in beside him, clad in jeans and an insulated denim jacket, that strip of keloid tissue below his eye, his hands chapped and scarred.

“Wondered if you would show,” he’d said.

Gerst lit a cigarette. “You didn’t give me much choice.”

“You made your choice when you stole that piece of wood.”

“And if I hadn’t come?”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? You did.” Clive stopped in front of a squalid brick row house, shuttered, deteriorating, scrawled with graffiti. “Here we are.” Narrow concrete steps led down to a square of neglected garden, a single barred window, a battered door a dozen feet below the sidewalk. Across the street, a handful of girls, nine, maybe ten years old, skipped rope to the rhythm of some old rhyme. Gerst couldn’t make out the words.

“You haven’t been a fool, have you, Alex?” Clive said.

“Of course I’ve been a fool,” Gerst said. “I’ve been tramping all over the city for days. If someone spotted me —”

“If someone had spotted you, you wouldn’t be standing here now.”

“No,” Gerst said, “I suppose not.” Then: “What about the fellow who cut you?”

“It wasn’t a fellow. It was a child. You needn’t worry. She won’t do it again.”

A child, Gerst thought in shock. A little girl. “What could a child have done —”

“I don’t know,” Clive said. “It’s not my business to know.”

“What did you do to her?”

“You don’t want to know about that, do you, Alex?”

Gerst felt something give way inside him. He thought of Sam and what a man like Clive might do to him. There was knowing and there was knowing, he thought, and he flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

“Let’s go, then,” Clive said, leading Gerst down the moss-grown steps. He knocked on the door.

A tall, heavily muscled man admitted them into the dim interior. “He’s been waiting for you,” he said as he swept aside a beaded curtain. “He’s not happy, either. I mean what the fuck, Clive?”

Clive didn’t answer, merely pushed his way through the curtain into the room beyond. Inside, candles — two dozen or more, on every available surface — and the scent of incense, and beauty. So much that Gerst drew a sharp breath, staggered by the sheer volume of it, the colorful tapestries that draped every wall, the flaring candelabra of polished brass. A fat man — enormously so, his blue eyes slitted, his sensuous mouth a red wound in the flickering light — reclined in a caftan on a chaise of patchwork bright, before him an ebony table of such lustrous beauty that it fairly staggered Gerst.

“You want me to search him?” the muscle said from his station by the wall.

The fat man looked Gerst over, taking his time about it. “Oh, I think he’s harmless enough, Marlon. He’ll surrender his trophies in time.” And then: “This is what you have brought me, Clive?”

“He has an eye.”

“Does he, then? Alexander Gerst, you say. Do you have an eye for pretty things, Alexander Gerst?”

“I don’t know,” Gerst said. “I don’t know what I have.”

“Clive tells me you work in the ministry. The Ministry of Iron. Such a charming name. Such a charming mission. Tell me: Whatever is it that you do there?”

“I sit in a cubicle, slotting punch cards.”

“Punch cards.”

Idiotically: “They’re color coded.”

“Why?”

“I have to make a living.”

“No. Why punch cards? What are they for?”

“I — I don’t know.” This the question that Gerst had shunted aside for seven years now and he wondered suddenly if his hands were any cleaner that Clive’s — if some foul, invisible matter did not besmirch them. A child. Dear God, a child.

“Maybe you should ask yourself that.”

“Is what you do any better?”

“Oh, I think it is,” the fat man said. He lifted his hands to take in the entire room. “I bring some light to the darkness of Acheron, and if I’m well paid for it — well, I take upon my shoulders an enormous risk, do I not?” Then, leaning forward: “What did you do to attain your position?” — this too something Gerst didn’t like to think about.

The answer cleaved to his tongue.

“What’s the point of this, Lewis?” Clive said. “You know what he did. He did the same thing as everyone else.”

“Hush, Clive,” the fat man — Lewis — said. And then, to Gerst, “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

Gerst, stiffly. “Of course, it’s true.”

“And who was it that you surrendered to the fire?”

Gerst hesitated. “I won’t talk about that,” he said.

“Very well.” The fat man shrugged. “I suppose we all serve the pit in our way. Tell me: Will you give me up, as well?”

“No.”

“That’s right. Because to give me up, you must surrender yourself, too.”

The candlewicks sizzled in the silence that followed. Lewis smiled. “But enough. We’re all friends here, are we not? United in service to the rare beauties of Acheron. I understand we are to make a trade. Show me, then, show me what you have brought.”

At these words, Clive leaned forward in anticipation — even Marlon stirred. Gerst felt the weight of their attention and knew that he did not have enough, that his were but paltry gifts, a mere pocketful of pretty things, to offer a man accustomed to such luxury. Yet what choice did he have? Clive was right: He was in it now. And so he fetched out the river-smoothed stone, which he had so often caressed in his pocket. Lewis swept it up in one great hand and held it to the light, and Gerst saw it as he must see it, a smooth gray stone, nothing more.

“Well, this is something, I suppose. But so common. Surely you have done better than this. You cannot expect me to trade for such everyday baubles. Why, this would bring but a pittance on the street.”

Yet he secreted it in the folds of his kaftan all the same.

“What else?”

Reluctant now — what a fool he had been! — Gerst brought forth the scrap of yellow cloth. At this, the fat man leaned forward, abruptly all attention. “Color,” he whispered, and Gerst saw now that his chaise had been upholstered of such patchwork stuff. Lewis reached out and took it. He smoothed the weave between his fingers. “Ah, the feel of it,” he said. “Do you know what this is, Marlon? Clive, do you know?”

Another silence followed.

“Silk,” Lewis said, and he rubbed it once again between his forefinger and his thumb. “Like water on the flesh. Where did you find such a thing?”

“Hung up in a stunted tree in the forsaken zone.”

“Taken right before the ministry, then. You are a foolhardy man indeed.” Eagerly now: “What other pretties have you brought me?”

Gerst reached in his pocket and scattered the gleaming white bones across the table. The fat man laughed. “You bring me bones?”

But Gerst could see their beauty. It shone out at him, as yet disarranged. Lewis was wrong. To prove it, Gerst leaned over the table and shifted the delicate bones until a sense of rightness began to possess him — not yet, not yet. He nudged one bone a centimeter to the left, another to the right — and there, just so. He let out a breath he had not known he was holding, and now the potential he had seen there anyone could see. Gerst knew it to be so, because Lewis let out a bated breath, and Clive, as well, and so it was decided, he would keep the feather for himself.

“Oh, you do have an eye,” Lewis said. “A very fine eye, an artist’s eye. Mounted so — on an ebony square — ah, I do not know if I could bring myself to part with it.” The mercenary cast to his face momentarily departed and a kind of benevolence transformed his features, an appreciation of the thing itself. He exhaled again, and looked up at Gerst from where he leaned over the table. “My friend,” he said, “you have bought yourself a blade.”

• • • •

Blades, actually. An entire set of gleaming miniature tools — scoops and curved scalpels and v-shaped cutting edges, razor sharp — all of them nestled in velvet cradles in a scarred metal box suitable for the streets of Acheron. How well they seemed to fit Gerst’s hands. That night in the sleeping apartment, when he drew the chunk of wood from its hiding place on the shelf, his fingers found a rhythm of their own, as if this all along was the work they had been made to do. He spread the butcher paper at the coffee table to catch the shavings, and let the blades find their way almost without conscious volition. Minutes passed — five, ten, more — between each tissue-thin shaving as it tumbled from his edge. After an hour or so — his hands, unaccustomed to such fine work, had begun to ache — Gerst emptied the handful of shavings into the trash, shoving them down under the day’s refuse. Then he rolled the chunk of wood in its butcher paper and stowed it away. He could not see it yet — he could merely sense it — but already something had begun to take shape there. His tools would find the way.

But soon his post-midnight hours began to take their toll. Things grew strained between him and Janet: muted conversations over Saturday morning coffee, tense meals where Sam alone could find something to say, regaling them with halfway coherent tales of the crèche. Sometimes she called him back to bed at night. She asked him drowsily what kept him up so late, and if she didn’t press, even he could see that his explanations — he couldn’t sleep, he had things on his mind — were inadequate. He looked haggard and pale in the morning mirror when he shaved. His clothes were rumpled, his hair unbarbered and only halfway combed, his fingers tremulous on the cards. His efficiency rate plunged. He fell behind in his daily quota.

“What’s wrong, Alex?” Keller asked, this at rundown diners on the outskirts of the blasted zone or over scalding coffee on the crowded lunchtime streets. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Nothing, nothing’s wrong, Gerst said, but his heart had turned traitor to his work. Ever more, he hoarded the secret of his sculpture. So he dared now to think of it now. Not the massive, brooding monoliths of Acheron’s crumbling public squares or naked parks, but something delicate and abstract, mere inches tall: a woman, maybe, or anyway the suggestion of a woman, the line of her hips and shoulders lovely as a wind-blown reed.

And Sam? If anything, they grew closer. Tell me a story, he asked one night, and Gerst, who had never told a story before, found himself improvising wild tales of talking rats and crows, and boys on quests for a tribe of lost children in the labyrinth of a vast and crumbling metropolis, and the great dragon shackled at the heart of the pit, the very root of the fire itself, weeping tears of blood. When he finished this last, he looked up to find Janet standing in the doorway to the boy’s room, a shadow against the flickering crimson sky.

“Good night, Sam,” he said, gathering the boy into his embrace, “I love you more than anything in Acheron.”

The boy’s eyes were strange in the half dark, moist and red, as though they had caught some stray reflection of the pit. “I love you, Dad,” he said.

Gerst pressed his lips to Sam’s head and pulled the covers tight around him.

Outside, Janet said, “Where did you learn that story?”

“I made it up,” he said, and only then did he realize how strange the words sounded. I made it up, he said silently, taking the taste of the phrase. I made it up, he thought, and a locked gate opened in his heart on a wide, green country where clear streams ran.

“Oh, Alex,” she said as he took her in his arms. “I don’t want you to make things up. You mustn’t.”

But how could he not, he wondered, if the words were in him?

Turning away, he crossed the room. He lit a cigarette and put his lighter beside the ashtray on the coffee table. Rain pecked at the window, running down the glass like tears. Janet sat across from him with folded hands, and he saw that tears trembled at the corners of her eyes, as well.

“Janet —”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t, Alex.”

They were silent for a time.

“I thought maybe another woman,” she said at last.

“No,” he said, “there’s never been anyone but you.”

“But what was I to think, Alex? You’re late from work every day, you’re up all hours of the night —”

“I’ve told you. Things are difficult at work. I can’t afford to lose my position. We’d lose everything.”

“That’s rich, Alex.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, and she unfolded her hands and he saw that she held the feather.

“I found it in the pocket of your coat,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful. Even I can see that much.”

Gerst swallowed. He did not venture speech. Only the sound of the rain tapping at the glass.

“You have been unfaithful, haven’t you, Alex?”

What could he say?

“Please tell me you haven’t been selling such things.”

“No, of course not. I would never risk —”

“And you haven’t been collecting them, either.”

“No.” Lie upon lie upon lie.

“This is all that you have in this apartment.”

“Yes.”

“I needn’t search. I needn’t turn over my own home like . . . like an agent of the Eye to ensure my family’s safety.”

Yes, and here was the chance to make everything right, he thought. A full confession, an entreaty for forgiveness, a doorway out of this maze of deception. Yet he could not do it. Something in him cried out in anguish at the idea.

“No,” he said. “You needn’t do that.”

“We have to destroy this,” she said. She placed the feather on the coffee table by his lighter, a silvery reflective thing that held the flaming sky inside it — a tool, nothing more, purely utilitarian. Yet it too had its beauty, he now saw, and he saw something else, as well: The crime was not merely in what he had taken and secreted away; the crime was in his heart. An eye for beauty had opened there, and having seen the fleeting loveliness to be had in Acheron — that gossamer web sewn to the fabric of the night, that luminous smoke blue against the evening sky — he could not ever unsee it.

“You do it, Alex,” she said. “I want to see you do it.”

She reached down and extended the feather. He took it from her with a reluctant hand. He held it aloft in the space between them. Her face was hard and vigilant. There could be no lie now. This was a test. He picked up the lighter and held the two together, feather and flame. Flipping back the lighter’s lid, he struck the hateful thing to life. Blue flame snapped upright, unwavering in the still air — and he could not do it. Could not. There was an active resistance in his muscles, a wrestling match in his heart.

“Do it,” Janet said.

Gerst did.

Brought the flame to the feather and held it over the ashtray. Each tiny filament glowed blue and crumbled into ash. The bony stalk between them drooped, and then the fire consumed it. Gerst released it, cursing, for it had seared his fingers, and cursing, too, that he had done such a thing. He let the tiny nub that remained tumble into the bed of twisted cigarette butts. It glowed red for a moment and was gone.

“Daddy,” Sam said.

Startled, they both looked up, he and Janet.

The boy stood there in his pajamas. He rubbed his fists in sleepy eyes and yawned. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Gerst said.

And Janet: “We’re just talking.” She stood. “Come back to bed, okay? It’s late.”

She hurried the boy into his room. Gerst reached for his tobacco pouch and rolled another cigarette. He sat smoking for a long time, listening to rain peck at the window. Let me in, it said. Let me in.

• • • •

So many things clamoring to get inside in those days: Lewis and Clive and Keller, and the boy most of all. How much he looked like Gerst’s brother! And how was it that Gerst had never noticed, or let himself notice, before? He still kept a snapshot of his brother, much creased and faded, tucked in his wallet, in a forgotten sleeve behind his ministry ID, his cash, his official papers. He’d nearly forgotten that, too, until one Saturday morning at the kitchen table, dazed from lack of sleep, his fingers brushed it as he fumbled for a handful of rumpled bills Janet could take to the open-air market: wilted lettuce and gray-tinged meat. They’d once spent that time together. But now Janet did the shopping, and Gerst spent Saturday mornings with Sam, a rare hour, much prized, that he’d carved out of his half-day from the ministry.

But then his fingers brushed the scalloped edge of the photo — they must have done that a thousand times before and him not noticing — and for reasons he could not articulate, Gerst slipped it free and unfolded it. “What’s that?” Sam asked over his breakfast, and Janet said, “I thought you threw that old thing away years ago.”

“I guess not.”

“Well, you should have,” she said, leaning down to kiss him on one unshaven cheek. “See that you do it today. There’s no use hauling it around anymore.”

“Sure,” he said, and she told him she loved him, not to worry so much.

“Love you, too,” he muttered, distracted —

“I love you, Mommy!”

 — and then they were alone, he and Sam.

“Let me see it, Daddy,” Sam said.

“Don’t drop it in your cereal.”

“I’m done,” said Sam, and Gerst handed it across the table. He got up and took the bowl. He was straining the milk into a jar when Sam said, “Who is it?”

“Your uncle.”

“I didn’t know I had an uncle.”

“No.”

“What was his name?”

Gerst capped the jar and put it in the refrigerator. “Frank,” he said. “Your uncle Frank.” He sat down beside the boy. They studied the snapshot together: Frank at thirty-six, the guts of a portable radio arrayed on the table — this very table — before him. He’d been handy with mechanical things — he had a job in a garage, working on the sleek Hawks you sometimes saw in the street — and he’d offered to fix the radio for them when it had gone bad. Something about a new tube, Gerst couldn’t remember what, only that the radio still worked. They had it in the living room now: children’s broadcasts and the Governor’s speeches and the occasional program of martial music, fuzzy through the static. They used to drink in those days, back when Gerst still worked as a bartender; sometimes they got to drinking together, Gerst and Janet and Frank and the girl Frank had been seeing — what was her name? — and they would trade rounds long into the morning.

She’d slapped Gerst, the girl, there at the end.

Another memory crying to get in.

“How come I’ve never met him, Daddy?”

“He’s gone now,” Gerst said, folding the photo into his wallet, and what he could not say — damned, consigned to fire — came into his mind, but Sam seemed to have lost interest. He wanted to play a game of Sentinel instead, and that was fine with Gerst. Yet Frank stuck with him as they placed the tokens on the board. He couldn’t focus. He kept coming back to the day he’d put in for work at the ministry — the bizarre application, ministry letterhead, a single line centered on the page below. Name. “Not your name,” the guy behind the counter had said, and without really thinking about it — smote by a swift vision of the way he sometimes caught Frank looking at Janet — Gerst’d scrawled his brother’s name there. Then he was on the street, no regrets, they needed a two-bedroom place, they were thinking of a baby, he and Janet. Frank had evaporated a few days later, and the offer from the ministry had come two weeks after that.

Months had passed — Janet was pregnant, they’d gotten the new place — and Frank’s girl had shown up at the door. She’d slapped him there on the landing. “You monster,” she’d said, and then she’d gone clattering down the stairs to the street, and after that he’d never seen her again. But now the word came back to him — monster — that too clamoring to get it in, and he found himself thinking of Clive, Clive’s thick, scarred hands. Clive, who appeared at his shoulder on Gerst’s homeward commute the following Monday, and steered him into a saloon not two blocks from the forsaken zone: noisy and dim and packed with stained blue coveralls and disheveled bureaucrats fresh off work, hard-faced men and women who didn’t spare them a second glance when they leaned against the bar. The place stank of the beer-soaked sawdust on the floor.

Clive ordered whiskey, doubles with beer backs. He toasted Gerst and grinned. Gerst sipped, whiskey burning in his throat. He fumbled for a cigarette. He said, “I thought we were done.”

“Lewis is never done.”

“Then I’m done with him.”

“Not a wise move,” Clive said.

“What do you mean?”

“Let me put it this way: It’s a fine line you’re walking. On the one hand, Lewis and his friends, who’d as soon kill you as let you get away. And on the other, the Eye. You’d be luckier if Lewis killed you. The Eye isn’t interested in death. The Eye is in the business of suffering.”

“You ought to know something about that,” Gerst said. “What did you do to the girl?”

“Ah, the girl. You keep coming back to that, don’t you?” Clive touched the scar with one finger. “You really want to know, I flayed her fucking hands to the bone, and fed her the flesh. I did that and I do a hundred other things you don’t even want to think about it and I do them every day.”

Gerst felt the shock of it roll through him.

“Oh, it gets worse.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“But you do or you wouldn’t keep asking.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up, Alex. You think you’re any better than me? Who do you think routes me my instructions? Huh? What do you think your cards are for?” Clive threw back his shot, chasing it with a swig of beer. “You think your hands are so fucking clean. They’re soft, but they’re not clean.”

Gerst took a slug of whiskey. “I didn’t know.”

“And now that you do?”

Gerst shook his head in denial.

“That’s what I thought. You applied to the ministry the same as I did. You’re just lucky they didn’t put you in the hole. You’re not careful, you might end up there anyway. Lewis has channels, right? He’s like a fucking spider, Lewis, channels into the ministry, channels into the Eye, channels everywhere in the city. He sits at the center of his web and twitches a thread and somewhere somebody goes into the pit. You’d be lucky if he killed you. You want to think about your family, Alex. Do you understand me?”

Gerst nodded, thinking of Sam. A child. Clive would do something like that to a child. He would do that to Sam. To Frank. Somewhere somebody — maybe one of the men or women in this room — was doing something like that to Frank. Every hour of every day. And once again, the girl’s words came back to him: You monster.

“What I’m saying,” Clive told him. “What I’m saying is this is an opportunity for you — a chance to provide some of the finer things in your life to your family.”

“And risk everything.”

“You’ve already put everything at risk, Alex,” Clive said. “There’s no going back now.”

Gerst sighed. For a breath, they were silent. Gerst finished his whiskey. He mashed out his cigarette. “What does he want?”

“He wants to see the work you’re doing with your tools.”

“It’s mine,” Gerst said, thinking that it wasn’t his at all, not really. It was Sam’s, and someday, when the boy was old enough to understand, it would pass into his keeping.

“Fine. It’s yours. I don’t think he’ll object to that. But you’re not going to stop at one, are you?”

Gerst said nothing.

“I didn’t think so. What are you planning to do with them, decorate your apartment?”

Again, nothing.

“Right. And how do you plan to get wood to make them? Are you going to steal it from the ministry? Because you’re not going to get away with that again.” Clive sipped his beer. “So Lewis gets you wood, you do the carvings, Lewis sells them and cuts you in on the profit.”

“What about you?”

Clive shrugged. “I get my percentage too. A finder’s fee. Everybody wins.”

Gerst turned to look at the other man full on. “Why does he need to see what I’m working on then?”

“He wants to assess your talent, that’s all.”

So this was how it was to be. There would be no hiding it from Janet, would there? How long could he continue to work late into the night before she woke and caught him out? The feather came into his mind, blue flame devouring its filaments one by one. It would be a hard thing. “Tell Lewis it’s an unnecessary risk,” he said at last. “He can assess the second one.”

“Fine. I think he’ll find that acceptable. I’ll let you know. Deal?”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“I don’t think you have any choice at all, Alex.”

“Okay. Fine. It is what it is.” He finished his beer, fumbled for his wallet, threw down a couple of bills. Then he was outside in the cool air, alone in the ashen stench of the pit, steadying himself against the alcohol. He started off to the underground, late again.

That was the night he cut his finger.

• • • •

Some things are better done out of love than anger, he would later come to understand. But it was anger that possessed him that night, an impotent rage that he could neither hide nor control. Over dinner, he snapped at Sam, and later, in bed with Janet, Gerst found himself lying again, an unnecessary lie, wretched and mean. And such a simple thing, too.

“What’s wrong?” she’d asked.

“Nothing,” he’d said. “Just a mood.” And when she did not respond: “A bad day at work, I guess,” which silenced her. Work was off limits, the ministry had sworn him to secrecy seven years ago, when — he thought of Frank with a sudden stab of longing — he’d taken the oath of service. Yet why shouldn’t he tell her? Out and be done with it, this lie of omission. Tell her about the cards and tell her what they meant, and tell her, too, about the carving stowed away in the coat closet. Out with it all, he owed her that.

Yet even simple honesty eluded him, for when she asked if he’d been drinking, Gerst responded with another lie. Lie upon lie upon lie, and afterward a cold fury with Clive, with Lewis, with himself most of all. When Janet’s breathing steadied into sleep, he slipped out through the darkness and took the carving down from its shelf. This was the work he’d been born for, his gift, yet he took up his tools that night with anger, short, sharp strokes of the blade instead of the slow, meditative work of hands guided by an almost unconscious force, apart from him and at the core of his identity both. He profaned the work of his soul, or so he would later — too late — come to believe, so when the blade slipped and sliced deep into his thumb he should not have been surprised. The pain was immediate and sharp. Blood welled up from the wound to stain the pristine wood, and he bit down on his cry so hard that he bloodied his mouth, as well.

Grimacing, he put the sculpture on the table. In the kitchen, he ran cold water over his thumb. When he looked up, Sam stood by the coffee table.

“Did you hurt yourself, Daddy?”

Gerst turned off the water. He reached for a towel, wrapped his thumb, said through gritted teeth: “Go to bed, Sam.”

“But you’re hurt. I should get Mommy.”

“No, Sam — No. I’m fine. Just a little cut that’s all. A boo-boo.” But it throbbed like a bastard, this boo-boo, and the towel was already damp with blood. Gerst squeezed the wound, applying pressure with a sharp intake of breath.

Sam looked at the tools arrayed on the table. He reached for one of the blades, glittering in the red light from the sky beyond the slatted blinds.

“Sam!” Gerst said, and the boy froze. “You’ll cut yourself.”

And Sam — he was a good son, he always had been, loving and obedient — drew his hand back from the razor-edged tools. He took up the sculpture instead, tracing with his fingers the rough edges where Gerst had planned to sand it smooth when the blade-work was done.

“What is it, Daddy?”

“Please, Sam, it’s late. We don’t want to wake your mother.”

“But what is it?”

“A small thing, Sam. It’s nothing. I need you to go to bed.”

“It’s pretty.”

“It’s just a piece of wood.”

Sam turned the sculpture in his hands, studying it, and then he set it upright on the table. Gerst watched him, his thumb throbbing, the towel sodden with blood. He’d cut himself almost to the bone, and already — he couldn’t help himself — he was thinking about how a scar would restrict his range of motion. It would interfere with his work — his true work. He adjusted the towel in something like despair, applying fresh pressure to the wound. “Sam,” he said. “Please.”

Sam met his gaze, his face solemn. “Okay, Daddy.” And then: “Will you come tuck me in?”

“Sure. As soon as I can,” Gerst said. “You go on and try to get some sleep, okay? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Goodnight, Daddy.” And with a final glance back at the little carving — woman and reed, neither and both at the same time — he padded back through the shadowy doorway into his room.

Gerst stood looking after him. Then, still clutching his pounding thumb, he leaned his forehead against the cool surface of the refrigerator, fighting back tears. When he pulled away at last, he found himself staring at the picture Sam had torn from his coloring book and posted there so long ago. He found himself staring at the sigil of the Ministry of the Eye.

• • • •

“So what happened?” Keller asked over lunch, two or three blocks south of the forsaken zone, amid the clash of dishes and the clink of silver, the muted din of conversation. The End-of-the-World Café, rundown and drab: rump-sprung vinyl booths and peeling laminate tables, dead flies in the windowsills.

“What are you talking about?” Gerst asked, pushing food around on his plate.

“Your thumb is what I’m talking about. What do you think?”

Gerst had bandaged it hastily in the dark last night. By this morning it had leaked through, staining the gauze a muddy brown, and in the bathroom, alone awake in the dawn apartment, he’d dressed it more carefully, chewing three aspirin for the pain, and pocketing the bottle. When he left, Janet had been stirring. “Love you,” she’d mumbled, half awake in her nest of sheets, extending one arm to him, fingers splayed. He gripped them in his good hand, squeezing, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. Then he slipped into Sam’s cramped bedroom. He stood over the boy tangled in the bedclothes, thinking of last night —

 — what is it, daddy? —

 — and longing for his lost life, coffee and cigarettes, the daily slog, innocent of the nature of his job. And his half day on Saturday, just this Saturday last, for instance: Sentinel done (Gerst had let Sam win, he always did), they’d improvised a road on the linoleum in the living room and raced Sam’s secondhand toy cars, a pair of battered and peeling diecast Hawks, simulating the roar of the engines, banging the chassis together, flipping them spinning on their roofs now and again, crash! Boy’s play, Janet said when she came in from the market with a paper sack of drooping vegetables. Swinging through the door, smiling her harried smile, every Saturday morning the same: Boy’s play.

“It must be killing your efficiency,” Keller said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You can’t handle the cards with a busted thumb.”

“I handled them fine.”

“Whatever you say. You’re at least an hour behind.”

“How do you know I’m behind?”

“I’m not blind am I?”

“Well, it hurts.”

“Fine. It hurts. How did you do it?”

“In the kitchen. Whatever.”

The waitress swung by to top off their coffee. She laid the check face down on the table.

“Yeah. Whatever,” Keller said. He slumped in his seat. “Look, we’re friends, Alex. I’m worried about you. You’ve really slipped lately.”

Gerst poured creamer into his coffee and stirred. “Maybe I don’t want a future at the ministry.”

“What are you going to do, go back to tending bar? You’ve got a family now.”

And then, like stepping to the edge of precipice, and not even aware that he was about to do it, Gerst said, “Who’d you give up to get your position, Keller?”

For a long time — a minute, maybe two — they stared across the table at one another. Despite the lunchtime rush — despite the clatter of dishes and conversation and the tinny echo of a distant radio in the kitchen — it seemed to Gerst that a bubble of absolute silence had enclosed them.

“You ask me that? We’re friends and you ask me that?”

Gerst said nothing.

Finally, Keller shrugged. “I just wrote down a name is all. I made it up.”

“It doesn’t work that way and you know it.”

“Then it’s none of your business. Who’d you give up, Alex?”

“My brother.”

Keller picked up the check. He flung a handful of bills on the table. “Lunch is on me,” he said. “We have to get back.”

Gerst didn’t move. He just sat there. “I know what the cards are for, Keller.”

“Come on, Alex, don’t do this to me. You’re breaking my balls here.”

“Listen —”

“I don’t want to know, all right?” Keller stood, shrugging on his coat, and started for the door. Gerst sat a moment longer, and then he followed. Outside a thin rain slanted down. Gerst paused under the awning to fumble with tobacco and papers, but his thumb was throbbing and he made a hash of it. “Here, give me that,” Keller said. “Let me do it.” He twisted up a cigarette. Gerst lit it, dragging smoke deep into his lungs. He wanted to cry. He didn’t know why.

They walked in silence. Traffic buzzed and hummed around them, horns blowing. Pedestrians shouldered past, heads ducked in the rain. An old woman without a leg sat at the edge of an alley, holding out a jar, and Gerst, who’d passed her without a glance a hundred times or more during his years at the ministry, stopped and dug in his pocket for a handful of change. Keller stood by watching. When they started moving again, he said, “Please, Alex. You’ve got to get your shit together. They don’t just let you walk away from a job in the ministry.”

Gerst flipped his cigarette into the street.

They’d nearly reached the pit itself when Keller spoke again. “My ex-wife,” he said. “She never did a thing to me.”

They walked on through the blasted zone then, through the rain and the gates and past the mountains of fuel for the pit and the final checkpoint into the ministry itself. Their heels echoed on the tile and everything smelled of wax and damp wool, everything smelled of death.

Gerst did what he could with the cards, but his thumb throbbed and he couldn’t think of much other than what he’d tell Janet about it. He’d have to tell her everything, he supposed. He supposed it was time.

But it turned out he didn’t have to tell her anything at all.

• • • •

They were waiting inside when he got home, two of them. He saw them just as he turned the final lock and swung open the door, ready to catch Sam up in his rain-damp arms, to lean in for a kiss from Janet, to let the day slough away. “What did you do to your thumb?” she would ask and he would tell her the truth. Together they would figure out what to do — a path out of this labyrinth of deception. All this and more but half envisioned, his guts knotting with anxiety as he turned the key in its lock and —

He sensed their absence in the apartment as the door swung open — a hollow echo in the kitchen, a flat lifeless reverberation, the dead air of an abandoned place. Gerst had a moment to think that Janet might have discovered him, the carving and the box of tools, or maybe the blood-sodden dishtowel he’d shoved under the sink to deal with later. Then the two men at the kitchen table stood, jackboots and black tunics with tiny rubies affixed to starched upright collars, faces thin and sharp.

“Papers,” the taller one — they were both tall — demanded, and Gerst, terrified, fumbled his wallet, spilling its contents: a paltry scatter of cash, his ministry ID, his official papers, folded and stamped, everything in order. And the photo of Frank, as well. For a fleeting second — as he went to his knees to scrape it all together — it occurred to Gerst that he might run, but where in Acheron could he flee that the Eye would not follow? And how? They’d catch him before he reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he had the papers. He looked up, unfolding them. The boot caught him full in the chin, spinning him back toward the door. He threw out a hand to catch himself, and his thumb caught the floor, unleashing a wave of agony. Then he was down, curled fetal as they kicked him, back and kidneys, a boot in his solar plexus. His breath burst out of him with a plosive whoosh, and for a heartbeat he was choking, drowning on dry land, papers forgotten. Then he could breathe again, great whooping gasps, begging, “Please, please” — shamed at this cowardice, how easily they had broken him. Then another kick, this one driving into the small of his back — Gerst screamed — then nothing at all. Just silence, a hitch of weeping that he recognized only dimly as his own.

The two men hauled him to his feet. They slammed him into the wall, wrenched his arms behind him, cuffed him, cinching the bracelets too tight. A moment later he was blind, shoved hooded out the door. Hands wrenched at his arms as they wrestled him down into the night. A cold torrent of rain molded the hood clammy against his face. Another shove, his head banging against metal with a flat thud. A car door clapped shut behind him, and his momentum carried him sprawling across the slick bench. The engine roared to life, the jerk of movement leaving a sick lurch in his stomach. He leaned forward in the seat, thinking of the pit, the taste of terror bright and shiny as a new coin under his tongue. He had not known he would be this afraid.

“Please,” he said, “I’m going to be sick.”

Nothing. Only hurtling momentum. Gerst threw up, choking, nostrils clogged. He fell sideways and rolled into the foot well, his jaw pressed into the warm stew of his own puke. After that mere snatches of consciousness. The lurch of traffic. The reek of his own vomit. Rifts of welcome darkness.

Then he was awake again. He didn’t know how much time had passed, only that the pain was back, a raw wire sawing at his guts. The door opened. The sentinels yanked him out of the car. Gerst staggered as they tore the hood away to reveal the intake center. The stench of the pit, sulfurous and ashen, simmered in the air. Fourteen-foot fences, coils of concertina wire, sniper towers stood black against the bloodshot sky. Cattle cars and tractor trailers disgorged endless streams of the damned — hooded, bound, herded by pitmen — into a vast, muddy, chain-link enclosure, like cattle in the killing chute. When someone stumbled or staggered out of line, the air sizzled with the ozone stink of the electric prods.

So this was how it ended, Gerst thought. In conflagration and in torture, inflicted by dutiful men like Clive, with his eye for beauty and horror alike, who followed the instructions whisked to them daily on a thousand thousand red-hued punch cards. An image of the little girl flashed through his mind, flayed hourly alive and forced to eat her own raw and bleeding flesh. He saw them now, the children in the stockade, dozens of them, hundreds, more. Ten-year-olds and toddlers and mere babies clutched to their mothers’ breasts. What could they have done to bring them to such a place? To what terrible fates would the ministry condemn them?

Gerst thought of Sam.

In the next moment he saw him.

The black-clad men unlocked Gerst’s cuffs and thrust him staggering toward the corral. He laced his aching fingers in the metal links and stared as the blue coveralls within slammed two figures into the fence. Janet gazed at him through strands of sodden hair, her eyes upraised, uncomprehending, as the rain hammered down upon her. “How?” she whispered. “Why, Alex?”

But Sam. Sam’s face was cold, his chin lifted in pride, his eyes unforgiving chips of glittering sapphire, and in that moment, Gerst saw how it must have been — the crèche and the sigil of the Eye so proudly displayed on the refrigerator, the prohibition against beauty drilled into him from the start. What is it, Daddy? he’d asked and A small thing, Gerst had said, and afterward the boy, It’s pretty. How could he not have seen?

“Sam,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Then the press of the dead swept them away, toward the waiting intake officers, to be branded and dispatched into the fire. “Wait,” Gerst cried. He chased them along the fence line, slipped, fell, stumbled to his feet and fell once again. They were gone, disappeared. He pressed his face into the cold mud and wept. When his captors once again lifted him to his feet, they didn’t bother with the handcuffs or the hood. He shuffled like an old man as they led him toward the idling car, and suddenly a terrible understanding seized him.

“No!” Gerst cried, lunging away from them. He wheeled back toward the enormous, brooding facility of the pit, where always streamed the endless deluge of the condemned. His feet slipped in the mud. He threw out his arms too late and came crashing down on his side, his bruised torso screaming as he rolled, clawing for his feet. But it was too late. He was too weak, too tired. All he could do was crawl, groping in the mud for tussocks of wiry grass and dragging himself a foot at a time, two feet, nothing more. He collapsed facedown into the soupy earth to weep.

“Shhh, Mr. Gerst,” said a voice at his ear. “You must calm yourself.”

“No,” he gasped, “my family. I want to burn.”

The voice laughed quietly in the rain. “Sometimes there are worse things than burning, no? You need your rest. You have a long day at work tomorrow. And many days after that. Here now, let me help you to your feet.”

Reeling toward the car, Gerst wept, “It should have been me. My son —”

“Be still now, you will have many years yet to think of your son.”

Clive’s words came back to Gerst then —

 — the Eye is in the business of suffering —

 — and he saw how it was to be with him hereafter, queues and cigarettes, and long days at the ministry, dispatching punishments to the pit below, his hands tremulous upon the cards.

© 2015 by Dale Bailey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has been a three-time finalist for the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award. His International Horror Guild Award-winning novelette “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for film by director Joe Dante as part of Showtime Television’s anthology series, Masters of Horror. His collection, The End of the End of Everything: Stories, will be out in 2015.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New

Kate Elliott

Out on the water, paddling a canoe, the four women could speak without fear of being overheard. It was a windy day, sloppy water instead of steady swells, and their canoe battled an east wind blustering in over the bay. Mai set paddle to water, pulled, and lifted it out and forward to cut back in again, following the rhythm of the woman in the first seat.

“There’s a spy in Bronze Hall,” said the woman in the seat behind Mai.

“What makes you think so, Tesya?” Mai called the question back over her shoulder.

“Yesterday Marshal Orhon’s courier bag went missing. The bag contained his orders for which reeves were to shift station, which to come home to roost, and which to stay where they were and what routes they were to patrol. Good information if you were wanting to trap reeves stationed out in isolated eyries.”

“Orders can be changed,” said the woman in the first seat, Zubaidit.

“Neh, it’s worse than that,” said Tesya. “There are eyries which are well hidden. Observation posts known only to Bronze Hall reeves. Not even fawkners like me know them. Those places have been kept secret for generations. Furthermore, the marshal’s cote is locked and guarded at night. There’s no shoreline to bring up a boat, and no lights anyway. No one could have stolen it except someone who lives on the island.”

Mai blinked eastward into the wind. The barrier islands lay too far away to be seen except for scraps of cloud caught on their low peaks. “So you believe a reeve, a fawkner, or one of the hall-sworn stewards stole it. If that’s so, then who is the spy working for?”

“I think we all know the answer to that, don’t we, Mai?” said Tesya too sharply.

Before Mai could answer, a set of choppy waves rocked the canoe. The long float lashed by wooden arms to the left of the canoe skipped twice on the water’s surface.

In the last seat, steering, old Fohiono spoke brusquely. “Get your minds back in the boat, sisters. Weather’s coming up. Best we turn back to shore.”

The steerswoman angled her paddle against the curve of the hull. The canoe swept a wide half circle. Mai called a change, and they each swung their paddle over to the other side, Mai paddling opposite Zubaidit and Tesya. As the canoe straightened, Zubaidit set them a steady pace for the town of Salya, barely visible as a scar of brown walls and white stone against the vibrant green of the mainland.

They paddled for a while in silence. Sweat and sun and spray glistened on Zubaidit’s brown back. Out on the bay Zubaidit usually stripped down to just her linen kilt. It was easy to see her muscles working as she cut the paddle in and out of the water.

Eventually Mai felt obliged to speak.

“It’s exactly the kind of information King Anjihosh will want. He does not like what he cannot control. He will do whatever he feels is necessary to bring Bronze Hall under his command. He believes it is best for the Hundred to be ruled by a strong man with a clear vision and a firm hand.”

“It’s true he saved us from a terrible civil war,” said Zubaidit.

“I was there when Copper Hall was burned down and my comrades slaughtered,” added Tesya. “That was a dark day. I admit I was glad when King Anjihosh and his army of outlanders stood up to fight the Star of Life and its cruel army. I cheered their victory.”

“He did not act alone,” remarked Fohiono.

“He did not,” agreed Mai. “Many acted. They just acted under his leadership.”

“You had some part in it, I have heard,” the steerswoman continued.

“Maybe I did. And Anji might thereafter have chosen to retire to a quiet life, as I have. But that is not the kind of man he is.”

“By all accounts, you could have been his consort and ruled beside him here in the Hundred,” said Tesya.

Zubaidit flashed a glance back over her shoulder.

“Watch your rhythm!” said Fohiono with more tartness than usual.

Once the memories might have brought tears to her eyes and a lump in her throat. But the wide waters and hard winds of coastal Mar had scoured the remnants of regret right out of her.

“I could have remained his possession, however well I was treated and no matter how beautifully I was dressed. Honestly, my friends, even though I was offered a palace of my own and all the fine silks and sweets and soaps and tender kisses I could desire, I would rather be out here in this wind paddling with you and with my back screaming and my shoulders like to freeze up. Just a dawn paddle to catch a few fish and discuss matters of life and death! I didn’t think you would take us out so far, Fo.”

That got them laughing.

“You’re the youngest among us,” barked Fohiono, chuckling. “When the year turns, you’ll be able to count twenty-six years, won’t you? You ought to be ashamed to complain.”

“I am! You can be sure I am bitterly ashamed! But I still hurt!”

Waves slapped the hull. The float skimmed the tops of wavelets. The sun glowered in a sky beginning to turn the sulky blue-green that marked a storm blowing in from the ocean.

“You know the man best,” remarked Fohiono. “If the theft is his doing, what does he want?”

Mai considered the character and ambitions of the man she had once called husband. “He has had eight years to settle his new government in the north. According to report, he’s gained control of the major trade roads, so all is peaceful and secure and to his liking. Now he’ll turn his gaze to those regions of the Hundred that have not fully bent their heads to his rule. He already has agents here in Salya.”

“Watching you!” cried Tesya. “We would have a quieter time here in Salya and at Bronze Hall if you hadn’t settled here.”

“Yes, he has agents in town watching me.” Mai had accepted the consequences of leaving him but she knew some resented the complications her presence brought despite the success of her mercantile dealings. “But it isn’t as if I am the sole reason he keeps spies here. Bronze Hall is the only one of the six reeve halls that has not acknowledged him as its commander. That makes Bronze Hall’s reeves suspect in his eyes. They might foment disorder. They might urge the councils and guilds hereabouts to rebel.” She glanced again over her shoulder. “Tesya, have you anyone in the hall you distrust?”

As a fawkner in the reeve halls, handling the huge eagles, Tesya had earned impressive scars. They glittered like fireling’s threads scored across her left cheek and down her neck to her left shoulder. The scars twisted as she grimaced. “A new reeve flew in with his eagle two months ago. I’m sure you’ve all seen him.”

Fohiono whistled appreciatively. “That young, pretty fellow? Sure I’ve seen him.”

Tesya went on, her tone sour. “Folk at Bronze Hall say he’s the kind who visits the Merciless One’s temple as often as he can. What do you think of him, Zubaidit?”

Zubaidit was the ruling priestess in charge of the local temple of Ushara, goddess of Love, Death, and Desire. Her even stroke did not slacken as she answered, while her tone remained entirely neutral. “You know I can’t reveal who enters the temple, nor what is said within the Devourer’s garden, but I do know who you mean. What makes you think he might be a traitor and spy, Tesya?”

“He tells a funny story of where he and his eagle come from. The tale doesn’t hang together, if you take my meaning. Then after he arrived, little things started disappearing from around the hall. A carry bag. An eating knife. A celadon tea cup.”

“That seems clumsy, and pointless,” said Zubaidit.

Tesya shook her head stubbornly. “Some of us at Bronze Hall have got to thinking that a spy would start by stealing little things, so we get accustomed to thinking we’ve got a petty thief on our hands. A spy might hope to cast suspicion onto the boatmen who bring supplies. What a newcomer can’t know is the boatmen are never allowed off the dock onto the island.”

As Salya’s busy piers hove into view, Mai broke into the discussion. “If you know you have a spy in your midst before he knows you know, you can cause the spy’s master more trouble than the spy is worth.”

“How might one do that?” demanded Tesya.

“I’ll think about it,” said Mai.

They approached Gull Pier with its pilings encrusted with barnacles to the high water mark and its banner-posts topped with beautifully carved gulls at rest. Zubaidit released a hand from her oar and scooped up her vest from the sloshing trickles of water running under their feet. She slid an arm through one arm-hole, flipped the paddle to her other hand, shrugged into the vest, and managed to cut right back into the stroking rhythm the others had kept up. Men at work on nearby piers shouted ribald comments at Zubaidit, to which she replied with insults so bald that the words made Mai’s ears burn even as she could not help but laugh. This was not the kind of town she had grown up in! There, a woman would never talk back to a man.

“You’re not the catch we went out for,” called Fohiono to the men mockingly, for she had no doubt done the same as Zubaidit when she was young.

“At least we caught something,” said Mai, still laughing.

The catch amounted to a paltry fourteen muhi-fish, just enough to give the women an excuse for going out on the water on a morning when they might have been expected to be preparing for the Ghost Festival. They slipped past Gull Pier to Gull Beach, being raked clean by a pair of boys. Several young men came running to help them carry the canoe up into the canoe shelter. Fohiono’s clan’s canoes rested under a thatched roof above the wrack of the high water line.

Mai gave a kiss to Fohiono and a more formal goodbye to Tesya.

Zubaidit gestured with a quick chop in the hand-talk that meant, “I’ll see you later.”

Mai fetched the cotton taloos she’d left folded atop a crossbeam. She draped the length of cloth around her body and, after shucking the linen kilt she wore when out on the water, wrapped the taloos with the elaborate tucks and folds that turned it into a dress. The short kilt and tightly laced vest were the only practical thing to wear out on the bay. But unlike many of the women here, she could not bring herself to wear kilt and vest while walking around town. She had grown up in a different world, where women young and old covered their legs and never displayed any glimpse of midriff or breast. It was not so easy to leave that world behind, even though it had been almost ten years since she had been carried away from her desert oasis home. Certainly she had been accustomed as a girl to selling produce in the market — nothing exceptional in that! — but to show so much skin, in public! That she could not do, not even now.

She grabbed her paddle and her leather bottle, draped a silk shawl to cover her shoulders, and set off. The waterside district was lively this morning as last-day shoppers made ready for the Ghost Festival. Folk greeted her as she passed; a few men greeted her with hopeful grins but she knew how to smile to warn them away. She reached the Grand Pier and headed inland up the wide avenue locally known as Drunk’s Lane. The town rose in tiers on the hillside beyond; she could see the sprawl of her porch and the bright yellow walls of her compound against the hillside. Usually walking up an avenue lined with inns and drinking houses posed no problem before midday, but because no ship would be caught out on the water during the Ghost Festival, the establishments were crowded with bored sailors stuck here for three days.

A rather young and good-looking stranger stopped stock still and whistled under his breath, nothing crude, more a comment to himself. Judging by his gear and his clean-shaven chin, he was a sailor from out of town. Beneath his unlaced open vest and snugly tied sailor’s kilt, he had a stunningly attractive body, all taut planes and wiry muscle. He caught her looking, and recognized immediately the manner of scrutiny she was giving him. A reckless smile flashed on his face. He touched all five fingers together, then opened them with an emphatic flourish, the hand-talk for “startling beauty!” as in a flower blooming.

His companion was a woman some years older and similarly fit. She grabbed his elbow and steered him toward one of the inns. “Kellas, that kind of beauty is always dangerous to chase. Anyway, you’re not allowed to have sex when you’re working. . . .”

They ran up the steps of the Inn of Fortune’s Star. The heat in Mai’s cheeks faded, although her pulse was still racing. It wasn’t as if she could risk inviting a man to her bed, even had she time for one. Anji had taken care of that.

The young man had been wearing a ring, quickly glimpsed when he’d made the gesture. Was its wolf’s head design familiar, or did it only seem so because she was thinking of Anji?

On one inn porch busy with men drinking at low tables, voices raised ominously. A fight broke out with a rolling crash worthy of an unexpected thunderclap. A man slammed against a wooden pillar, the shudder quivering through the whole edifice. This provocation was enough for men already half sauced. Sailors, idle laborers, artisans who had closed their workshops until the dawn of the new year, all swarmed up off the thin cushions they had been sitting on. Drunk already! Think of what a mess they would make, which someone else would have to clean up.

As she tried to hurry past, a pair of tussling men stumbled off the inn’s porch. She raised her paddle to fend them off. One’s fist connected with another’s nose, and blood spattered down his face. The injured man grabbed the other man by the shoulders and began to swing him around; her heart raced as she skipped back, sure they were about to slam into her. A baton swept down from behind her and, with a swift pair of whacks to their shoulders, commanded the attention of the belligerent men.

“Heya!”

The combatants separated and backed up, hands in fists. Up on the inn porch the innkeeper was shouting furiously as his help started to knock heads together.

“My thanks, ver,” said Mai to the unseen person behind her but she did not wait for him to reply. She strode onward, wanting suddenly to enjoy the peaceable quiet of her home where she could expect a measure of blessed solitude.

The man with the baton hurried up alongside. “You took no hurt, verea?”

He was a reeve. That reeve. Young and pretty enough to look at twice, and with an intangible quality of melancholy that made you look yet again.

She feigned a limp. “No, nothing.”

“You are hurt!”

She bit her lower lip as if wincing in pain. “No, it’s nothing, truly.”

“If it pleases you, verea, I will just walk you up to your home, to make sure you do not falter.”

Roping him in was almost too easy. “Yes, with my thanks.”

“Can I carry the paddle for you, verea?” he asked as they started walking.

Shouts, laughter, and the blaring whistles blown by the harbor militia floated up after them. “Neh, I can manage. You’re newly come to Bronze Hall, are you not? I fear I don’t know your name. I’m Mai. People call me Mayit in the local way.”

“Mayit,” he agreed. “I’ve heard of you.” Then he blushed furiously and stammered something too thickly accented for her to understand.

“You’re not from the south,” she said encouragingly. “Where did you train?”

“Horn Hall.” Now that she knew what to listen for she heard the way he struggled to form his words so that indescribably thick dialect did not crawl out. “I were born and raised in the far north. It is surely a long way from my home village to all other places in the Hundred. No one has ever been there. I mean, we in the villages live there. But no one ever came there. Then I was jessed, and I was found by —”

He broke off and pinched his lips closed over the name he’d been about to say.

“Were you transferred to Bronze Hall?” she asked with her best coaxing smile.

He frowned, a fleeting expression quickly controlled. “The story of how I came here has many twists and turns.”

They climbed stairs to the residential terraces where she made her home. “You never told me your name,” she said.

“Badinen. My eagle’s Sisit.” He glanced skyward, a habitual motion she had become accustomed to in the reeves she counted as friends. She counted three eagles circling, on patrol or possibly just aloft waiting for their reeves to finish business in town.

“For your kindness, ver, surely you’ll take tea with us before you go back to your duties?”

“Oh. Eh.” He was shier than she expected, especially given that he was a young man about the same age as she was. It was an appealing trait, she decided, watching him sidelong as he matched his stride to hers.

She asked him how he liked Bronze Hall, and piece by piece coaxed out opinions so bland — the food was good but that twice-spicy barsh was an odd thing to eat in the morning; the winds were chancy; the ocean’s roar kept him awake at nights — that the answers made her suspect he was hiding something.

As she walked down her own street, her neighbors greeted her. Mistress Firuliya was out with her girls decorating the porch with wire baskets filled with sweet rice balls and adorning the delicate potted trees with garish festival hats in bright red for the upcoming year. The woman looked the reeve up and down in a way that made him half trip on a step and again stammer into that incomprehensible northern dialect, while Firuliya’s girls giggled.

“Here we are,” Mai said, too loudly.

She waved gaily at the red-capped fellow loitering at the corner, one of Anji’s silent watchers. The red cap was Anji’s pointed reminder to her that things could have been different had she made a different choice. The man lifted a hand to acknowledge her, as this one with the broken nose always did. The others weren’t as polite.

She led Badinen up onto the spacious porch with its spectacular view of the bay sparkling in the sun. From this height you could see the weather coming in as a blustery haze. She had some time before the rain came.

She rattled the bell and made a fuss about taking off her shoes by the mats. “Please, Reeve Badinen, sit down.”

She gestured toward the quilted cushions that ringed the tea table, little islands of color around a glossy sea. As he hesitated she pulled out her hair-sticks so the wind- and water-mess of her hair tumbled down, its ends reaching to her lower back. She smiled at him, thinking very hard of sex, imagining naked limbs, bellies brushing, sweat and the musk of love-making.

He sat, felled like an ox that has just taken a blow to the head. Cheeks darkening, he looked away.

“I’ll bring tea,” she said.

The door slid easily, and she left it open behind her so he could see in to the sparsely furnished front room with its low table for doing business and seating pillows stacked neatly to one side on the matted floor. She never entertained visitors there; the porch was her front room, where she spoke to male visitors right out in the public eye. That was the way it had to be.

She felt Badinen’s gaze follow her as she crossed the front room and passed through the covered walkway that led to the kitchen. She had given her hirelings the festival off to spend with their families. Her sister-by-adoption, Miravia, was at the market doing the last shopping. Miravia’s husband Keshad was at the warehouse doing the final accounting before he sealed the books and the doors for the year. The girls had run around the corner to spend the morning with Mai’s former slave, elderly Priya and her husband O’eki, who treated the young ones like grandchildren.

In the kitchen, Edi was sweeping in preparation for the last bout of cooking. On the stove a big-bellied pot simmered, cooking down four chickens whose meat and broth would anchor tonight’s feast. He smiled as well as he could with his scarred face. Besides Keshad, Edi was the only male who lived at the house, safe because of his disfigurement and his youth; he was only twelve.

“Go on,” she said as she ladled water from the barrel into the kettle and set it over the flames. “I’m just making tea. Where is your mother?”

“Garden.” The word was difficult to understand unless you knew how to listen for the consonants. He’d not spoken at all when he and his mother had come to them four years ago; he’d been too ashamed. “Choosing vegetables for slip-fry.”

She nodded and walked along the side walkway to the tidy vegetable garden in the back, its obedient rows framed by fruit and nut trees. Derra stood when she saw Mai, her apron sagging under tiny green tomatoes, white radish, pale cabbage, and bold red peppers.

“I was just worrying about Miravia,” said Mai. “I should have gone with her to the market, her so close to her time.”

“You said you had business down harborside, Mistress,” said Derra in her soft voice. “Afterward, I told Miravia I would go with her. But she said neh.”

“As if anything I, or you, would have said could have made the slightest difference once she decided to go. Aui! But now I’ve got to serve tea to a reeve, so I’m wondering if you would go after her. Help her carry things up? She’ll not refuse if you’re down there. You can say you need — oh, anything — something we’re lacking for our feast. I had a sudden craving for durian, maybe.”

Derra snickered, knowing perfectly well that Mai had never managed to develop a liking for the fruit because of its appalling smell.

“I’ll take this into the kitchen.” Mai took the apron from Derra and carried it back to the kitchen, where she set it down on the big table. Then she followed Derra out onto the front porch. The woman gave Badinen a startled look, followed by a polite nod and a skittish smile, and descended the stairs to the street. The red-capped man watched Derra walk away down into town.

Mai settled on a cushion at arm’s length from the reeve. “Last minute festival shopping. You know how that is.”

“I suppose so.” He wiped a hand with charming awkwardness over his short black hair. “Where I grew up, we have no market. We grew and raised everything our own selves. I never saw a market until I came south.”

“Is that so?” Mai said, and though she had deliberately set herself to charm him, she did not need to feign astonishment. “You must have grown up in a very out-of-the-way sort of place, truly.”

“We had no hirelings, that’s for sure,” he said as Derra vanished around a corner with a final glance back over her shoulder and an expression that too closely resembled a smirk. “I don’t miss home much, I guess. But the weather was a cursed sight better there. Not so hot as it always is here.”

Derra’s look back had made Mai self-conscious. She grabbed for whatever words came to hand. “You think it’s hot here?”

“Here in the south? I should think so! It’s all muggy like the breath of a sea monster in your face all the time.”

She laughed. “That’s a fine way to phrase it. Is that from one of the tales?”

His blush crept up his cheeks as if her laughter was suggestive. “No. Just a way of speaking.”

“Tell me more about where you grew up.” A limpid gaze turned on him, the slight cant of her body toward him, brought him alive as water kisses seedlings in a desert garden and brings their passion into bloom.

He told her about where he grew up. She listened as she had learned to do in her childhood home, which lay so far from the Hundred that its dusty confines and rigid customs seemed like a bad dream. But that life had made her what she was; she saw no reason to scorn it. Nor did Badinen complain of his own humble upbringing. He spoke easily and affectionately of those childhood years, even though it was clear he had been a superfluous son treated with mild affection and casual disregard. Becoming a reeve had been a more magnificent destiny than any other end he might have hoped for. He had seen terrible things, the massacre of an entire reeve hall, but he had weathered it and kept on.

Really, what else could you do but keep on?

It’s what she had done.

A door snapped open inside the house. Dragging footsteps announced Edi’s approach with the tea. He came out onto the porch and set the tray on the tea table. At the sight of Edi’s grotesquely scarred face, Badinen’s eyes widened and his lips tightened.

“Edi, where are the girls?”

He gestured up the street in the direction of Priya’s home, unwilling to speak in front of a stranger.

“Can you go fetch them? They need to help prepare dinner.” At his look of horror, she laughed. “I know. I know. But they’re not really that bad, are they?”

“Are,” Edi mumbled.

“Maybe Arasit is,” she acknowledged with a sigh. “But your mother is already gone down to the market to help Miravia carry up the shopping. So there’s no one else to fetch them. You can wait until they finish whatever Priya has them doing. No hurry.”

His glance flickered toward the reeve, who rose.

“I’m called Badinen,” said the reeve, straight to his face. “And you?”

“Edi,” he said with a sudden lopsided smile that stretched his scars. He paused, as if wondering what else he could say to an admired reeve who deigned to speak to him, but then grabbed his cane from beside the door and clumped down the steps.

Badinen watched him go.

So did the red-capped man, who knew perfectly well how many people lived in the house and that Mai was now alone in the compound. It was his duty to know such things.

With steady hands, Mai poured tea.

The reeve turned back to her. “What in the hells happened to that poor lad? Blessed Taru! He looks like he fell head first into a fire after having half his face cut up.”

“That’s about it.” She did not look up from the stream of tea as it filled a cup. “His father tried to kill him. Thought another man had sired him.”

He whistled sharply. The red-capped man looked around, although the reeve was looking at her, not at the man with the broken nose lounging so still and silent in the shadows that it was easy to forget he was there.

“That’s a cursed wrong-headed thing to do. If he had a dispute, surely it was with his wife or with the other man, not with the blameless child.”

“It would seem so, would it not? Tea?” She handed him the cup in both hands. His skin brushed hers as he took it with a hopeful smile.

They both sipped in silence. The brew was sharp, fitting for the season. There was more than one way to flush out a spy, to hit Anji back in a way that would spoil his triumph.

She rose as he watched her over the rim of his cup. “Come in and help me prepare a bit of a meal,” she said.

Slowly, he set down the cup. She had not even finished hers; a shimmer of heat still spun from its surface. She went to the door. Poised on the threshold, she glanced over her shoulder at him. He rose with a shy smile. Like any man born and bred in the Hundred, he saw nothing odd in entering a house with a woman, even one he was flirting with.

“Eh, truly,” he said, the older accent wakening in his voice, “my aunties used to make me chop the vegetables. Said it were best when done by a man.”

Then a flush darkened his skin again, as if he had said something he ought not.

As if the words had two meanings, as they often did in the Hundred.

He would go inside with her, all alone into the compound. They would chop vegetables in the kitchen — that was all — and the others would return, and maybe he would take the feast with them and return to the reeve hall after. And at some time in the next few weeks he would die an unfortunate death. Because Anji would order it. He would not be able to help himself, being what he was. He’d have to kill the spy he’d sent to steal Bronze Hall’s secrets, for the crime of having been alone with the woman Anji still considered his wife.

That would teach Anji, wouldn’t it?

But what if Tesya was wrong about Badinen?

A wave of disgust swamped her, its taste so bitter she wanted to spit. How could she even think of luring this man into a situation he could not understand and was in no way responsible for? Maybe he was Anji’s willing and eager agent. Maybe he was just obeying orders forced upon him. Obviously, even if that were true, he had not been warned what would happen to men known to have been alone with her. So even if he were Anji’s agent, Anji considered him expendable. No one could look at Badinen and not see that women might find him attractive. Anji might even have sent him to test Mai, without warning the poor reeve.

Eiya! Down these paths branched a maze of possible threats, promises, motives, and outcomes. All she knew for sure was that important documents had been stolen from Bronze Hall.

She stepped back onto the porch, slammed the door shut, and turned to the young reeve. “A thousand pardons, Reeve Badinen. I entirely forgot that I promised to go over to my neighbor’s —”

Breaking off, she strode forward, grabbed her cup, and drained the tea. The liquid burned on her tongue, making her eyes water. She set it down so hard on the table that he jumped.

“Why have you come to Bronze Hall?” she said, keeping her voice low.

“I-I beg your pardon, verea?” He took a step away from her, as if just now wondering if she might be demented. “Did I offend you in some way? I had no intention —”

“Surely you know a courier bag has gone missing. As the only newcomer to the hall you are the chief suspect. Did you know people believe you’re working as a spy for King Anjihosh?”

His mouth opened, worked wordlessly, and shut again.

“I heard something about a courier bag in the hall at dawn this morning, before I flew here. . . . They think I stole it?” He covered his eyes with a hand, shook his head, and lowered the hand to stare at her helplessly. “No, of course they would blame me. I’m the only new reeve among them. Peddonon warned me this might happen.”

“Peddonon? The reeve Peddonon? He warned you what might happen?”

“He and many others transferred from Horn Hall to Bronze Hall after the war. King Anjihosh never trusted them, knowing they had been close companions to the previous reeve commander. But at that time, right after the war, I was a novice reeve. Because I needed training I had an excuse to stay behind. So they left me as their agent within Horn Hall. All these years I’ve faithfully sent information to them when I could . . . but now that I’ve finally left there, no one trusts me here.”

His words fell like so many leaves scattered by a gusting wind: hard to grasp hold of. “Are you saying you have been Peddonon’s spy in Horn Hall all this time?”

He looked as guileless as the unclouded sun. “Yes.”

“But then why did you leave there just now . . . ?” She trailed off. His gaze did not leave her face.

After a moment, he said, very softly, “You’re the one, aren’t you? I didn’t realize.”

“I’m what one?”

“Discipline is so tight at Horn Hall that there was a joke among the reeves that ‘Nothing escapes the King Anjihosh.’ Then the rejoinder was, ‘Except one.’ So if anyone ever made some comment like, ‘Everyone knows that,’ or ‘Everyone must do that,’ then someone would always respond, ‘Except one.’ It’s you, isn’t it?”

Heat flamed up her cheeks so fast that he looked away.

“My apologies,” he muttered. “I should never have spoken it.”

“Best you go,” she said more curtly than she intended. “If you see Reeve Peddonon, tell him I wish to see him as soon as he can trouble himself to get here.”

Badinen glanced up at the sky. The sun blazed at zenith, clouds parting around it as if afraid to veil its fierce disk. “My apologies, verea,” he repeated.

“Neh, neh, do not say so. It was nothing. But I need to speak to Peddonon right away. Do you understand?”

With his hands he sketched the gesture used in the tales to indicate goodbye and fare well. “I’ll go at once.”

“If you go up this street to its end and through the gate there,” she added, “you’ll find the hill top has a perch built out in the open. Your eagle can land and launch from there.”

“My thanks,” he murmured, still so embarrassed that he could not meet her gaze as he took his leave.

She watched him go and then, at last, met the gaze of the curious red cap. After all, she was not as ruthless as she ought to be. He tipped his cap in mocking salute, a strenuously polished ring glinting on his left hand. A wolf’s head ring. She refrained from grabbing the pole used to raise and lower the lamps, running down onto the street, and smashing him right on his already once-broken nose. How she hated them and their surveillance! But she would not become like the man she had left. She would not. Instead, she went back to the kitchen.

Once a year a spray of plum blossoms was delivered to Mai’s door by a cadre of Anji’s elite Black Wolves. Once a year she refused to accept the flowers, and the riders left bearing the message implicit in her refusal. That was the only communication between them. She kept hoping Anji would give up but so far he had not. The only thing stopping him from riding into town with his troops and making her a prisoner was his pride.

She had built a fine life as far away from him in the Hundred he ruled as she could manage. In the region of Mar, in the port town of Salya, she had family, a business, friends, and a network of interlacing community in which she was deeply involved and, she believed, was respected. She had a daughter to raise. She had allies, whatever that meant, but it meant something when part of your life involved a rearguard action fighting to own yourself.

“Mai! You’re slaughtering that innocent brinjal root. You must be thinking of Anji.”

Miravia lumbered in, belly leading, and gave Mai a kiss on the cheek before she swung the basket she was carrying onto the table. Derra followed with a basket balanced on each hip.

Mai set down the knife, seeing the spray of white tuberous brinjal flesh in splinters across the wooden cutting board. “Oh.”

“Yes,” agreed Miravia. “Let me do that.”

“You should sit down after tramping all over town.”

“I can’t. I feel very restless.”

Mai glanced at Miravia’s huge belly. “Do you think the baby is coming?”

“I think so. It’s exactly how I felt with the other two.”

Mai handed her the knife. “It wouldn’t be like this if all ties had been severed. I would simply have moved on. But I am constantly reminded that I can’t. For example, I would like to have a man in my arms again someday. I would like to not worry that my friends in Bronze Hall are under constant siege. I fear he may find an excuse to send his soldiers to occupy Salya even though the town council pays taxes faithfully every year.”

Miravia smiled ruefully as she lined up scrubbed radish and began chopping, but she made no reply. Her hair was bound back in a scarf, and her cheeks were round and moist with sweat from the excursion. She began to tell Mai the gossip she’d heard in the market, and what news there was of ships and sheep and merchants from exotic lands come to sell exotic wares for a season in Salya in the hopes of earning enough to buy Mar-grown spices and delicacies to take back to their homes.

Mai let the words flow past. What manner of person was she that she had even for an instant entertained the notion of inviting Badinen inside to innocently help her prepare a meal with the full expectation that this unexceptional act would get him killed? She hadn’t any proof he was a spy nor any reason to think so except what Tesya had said. Was she so caught up in this silent war with Anji that she would throw the innocent to the wolves just to prove that she could?

The two girls came running in, towing big Edi and little Raida. Arasit’s shrieks filled the kitchen area before calm Eiko pulled her away to go set up the dining room for the feast. Raida toddled loyally after the big girls as always. Edi went out to haul in fuel and water and extend the awning so they could leave the dining room doors open on the sunside. Miravia chattered on with an entertaining if far-fetched tale about sea-going ships whose hulls were magically woven with the shadows of birds so that they would fly faster over the ocean.

Keshad returned carrying the accounts books, which he sealed into the chest hidden beneath the floor, to be opened after the Ghost Days, at dawn on the first day of the new year. Then he supervised the girls as they put up the festival decorations on the porch. Within the routine of daily life Mai kept her hands busy, and slowly the churning mire of her thoughts settled.

Late in the afternoon, when she had gone into the garden to harvest fresh shoots for the slip-fry, Zubaidit strolled into the garden, her hair braided and coiled up atop her head and an undyed cotton taloos suitable for the Ghost Days tightly wrapped around her lithe body.

Mai rose and kissed her, holding her dirty hands away from the cloth, then said, “You have something you want to say to me in private about Tesya.”

Instead of replying Zubaidit raised a hand, cautioning silence. Boots thumped on the walkway. Reeve Peddonon trotted down the steps and strode across the walled garden. He was big for a reeve, tall and thickly built without being fleshy. Zubaidit relaxed at once, and gave him a sisterly kiss on either cheek, then stepped aside so Mai could greet him in the same way.

“You got my message,” Mai said. “I hope there’s no need to look so grim.”

“What message? I got no message. I have terrible news.”

His mouth had a harsh line she’d not seen since the days of the war. “What’s happened?”

“Marshal Orhon is dead.”

“Dead?” The word shaped easily, but it made no sense. “But I just saw Orhon last week for our usual tea . . . There’s been no word of sickness . . . Dead? How can he be dead?”

“He was murdered.”

“Murdered? How can you be sure?”

“The knife and the blood.”

“Knife? Blood?” She kept repeating words as if Peddonon had lapsed into speaking a language she did not know.

“He was stabbed up under the jaw.”

“The hells,” murmured Mai, to say something. Her head felt raked clean of all but one word: Murdered.

“A knife to the brain is one of the ways the acolytes of Ushara mark their killings,” said Zubaidit quietly.

“Have you killed a person in that way?” Peddonon asked, examining her from top to toe.

“No.” Zubaidit had the deadly grace of a person whose body is honed like steel, her assured posture very like that of the flirtatious young man Mai had seen on the street. “Neither I nor any of my people in my temple were involved with this death. Orhon was my ally in keeping this region free of King Anjihosh’s iron fist. Might a disgruntled reeve or fawkner have killed him?”

Peddonon shook his head. “Unlikely. He was rigid and often unpleasant but he was also fair and consistent. People in the hall grumbled but they respected the way he kept Bronze Hall independent when the other five reeve halls bent under the thumb of the king.”

Mai nodded. “Anji met Orhon only once. As I recall it, Orhon flatly rejected his overtures to have Bronze Hall join with the other reeve halls under Anji’s command. I’m sure Anji never forgave him for that. It’s the kind of thing he can’t forgive.”

“That does make his involvement likely. But I don’t understand how someone could have gotten into the marshal’s cote to do it, at night, on an island surrounded by cliffs where no stranger is allowed to stay and where there is only one place to put a boat. The pier is guarded day and night. It makes more sense if it was someone already inside.”

“What about that new reeve, Badinen?” Mai said. “This morning Tesya accused him of stealing a courier bag. Could he have murdered Orhon last night and flown here to Salya this morning? Because he was here.”

He rocked back on his heels as at a hit. “Tesya accused him! It can’t be. Badinen was working for me in Horn Hall.”

“Was he?” said Zubaidit, exchanging a glance with Mai. “You never told us!”

Peddonon shrugged ruefully. He was such a good-natured man that Mai could never be angry with him. “It seemed safer that only I and Marshal Orhon knew. What did Tesya say?”

“That there is a spy and a thief in Bronze Hall, and he is the only newcomer so therefore the chief suspect. Do you think he could have turned on you?”

“Anything is possible. But he’s old-fashioned, our Badinen, from the upcountry north where the old ways are the only ways anyone knows. This business of an outlander riding into the Hundred and declaring himself commander over all the land is not a thing a country lad like Badinen takes lightly. Nor is he infatuated with the idea of being part of an outlander’s army, or the reorganized reeve halls, or the way Anjihosh set himself up as king with spies and soldiers to do his bidding.”

“What made Badinen come here now?”

Peddonon’s lips curled into a sardonic smile. “There was a woman involved. Threw him over for another man.”

“Not that you heard it from me,” Zubaidit murmured, “but I might I have heard that story in Ushara’s garden. Either it’s true, or he’s a cursed good liar.”

“I believe Badinen,” said Peddonon. “We’ll miss having an ear in Horn Hall, but I could not force him to stay any longer, him being so miserable. Seven years is a long time to live a lie.”

“If I were Anji, I would have been foresighted enough to place a spy or two in the group who left Horn Hall with you seven years ago.” Mai brandished her knife, with its one blunt and one sharp edge. “So here’s another way to look at it. Tesya might accuse Badinen of being a spy to draw attention off of herself while she stole the bag and afterward killed Orhon”

“Hammerer’s Balls!” Peddonon ground a boot into the gravel, rubbing it around like killing the idea. “You’ve a cruel imagination, Mai.”

“I think Mai has a practical turn of mind, myself.” Zubaidit reached for a stalk of proudhorn and snapped it off. “But Tesya could not have wielded the knife herself. She spent the night in Ushara’s temple with one of the acolytes. If she’s the one, then she had an accomplice and we are back where we started.”

“I just think it’s odd she was so quick to go after Badinen,” said Mai. “She could have been setting Badinen up by making little thefts herself.”

Peddonon ran a thumb along his short beard. “I’ve not heard of any little thefts in the hall. But it’s not necessarily the kind of thing that would be brought to my attention.”

“Send Tesya to Horn Hall for a year,” said Mai. “If she’s loyal, she’ll report back on what she hears, and meanwhile Anji will know we suspect he has had a hand in the disruption at Bronze Hall. If she is the real traitor, then Anji will wonder how much we know and how we knew it.”

She thought of the men with red caps who kept watch outside her compound. She thought of the attractive man on the street wearing a wolf’s head ring.

“Or if there is a spy in Bronze Hall, maybe they are only there to pass on information,” she went on. “Anji knows about the existence of Ushara’s hidden acolytes, the ones who can be hired to kill. We all know he will have considered training his own stable of skilled and lethal people.”

Her words produced a simmering silence. A bird flitted like a spy through shrubs of sweet-scented muzz before fluttering off.

Zubaidit began pacing restlessly, odd to see in a woman who usually could absorb any shocking news without a murmur. “The murder has the taste of a deliberate assassination meant to let us know that the man who did it can act whenever he wishes. Even the chief of my order would not act as a lackey to a man who calls himself king when there was never a king before in the Hundred. So I think you are right. He has decided to create his own executioners and spies, who act only on his behalf. Just as a tyrant must.”

Peddonon scratched his head. “Why act now?”

Mai caught Zubaidit’s wrist and drew her to a halt, so the three of them stood tightly together. “He is giving us notice that he is done letting Bronze Hall maintain its autonomy. He’s moving in. This means our uneasy truce is over. We truly are at war with Anji now.”

Zubaidit tapped a foot on the ground as she shook her head. “We have always been at war with him, since we all broke with our superiors and came to live here. I’d best return to the temple. I will speak to you both after the Ghost Days.”

She kissed Peddonon on the cheek and Mai on the mouth, and left.

Mai resumed picking shoots into the shallow basket set on the earth. Peddonon sat on a bench, tapping one foot on the ground, watching her.

“I should have been able to prevent Orhon’s murder,” he muttered.

“Can you prevent something you never expected?” She smiled sadly at him. “Do you know, it’s my old dreams that plague me most, the story I told myself of how the tale would have a fine, romantic ending. In my heart, I guessed that the tales of true love and noble adventure where justice wins and wrongdoing is crushed were a sort of falsehood. I saw the evidence for that every day in the home in which I grew up, for it wasn’t a happy place! But I wanted to believe so badly. The bold captain! The shy fruit-seller he plucks out of the market! I thought with Anji that my tale was one of those rare few that would have a happy ending. So after all, it’s really myself I betrayed, isn’t it, by insisting on something that could not be true?”

“I don’t think so, Mai. I think he betrayed all of us, and you most of all when he stole your son. As for the rest of us, he brought us peace, at a cost. But peace nevertheless. He’s a fair man in his own way. That he is also a tyrant simply makes the situation more complicated.”

“Now that I think about it more clearly, Anji would never agree to send a good-looking man like Badinen to spy on me. His weakness is that he believes he cannot hold onto a thing he desires without a chain to leash it.”

Peddonon’s was an observant gaze, and he had an even temper even in such circumstances, but his anger was visible in the deep lines at his eyes. “Is peace and order nothing more than a harness that keeps us bound?”

“I can’t answer for the other people of the Hundred. I made my choice by leaving Anji.”

“You lost your child.”

As sharp as a well-honed blade, that pain would never ease. She scooted to a parallel row and began stripping dill for a garnish. “The boy had already been taken from me. I see now I could never have gotten him back.” She shook her head to throw off the old sorrow. “I think of my beautiful little Atani every day, but he calls another woman ‘mother’ and I have to believe that she cherishes him or I would not be able to sleep at night.”

“War, then,” said Peddonon with a sigh. “I did not much like Orhon but I respected how he ran Bronze Hall. His ‘old ways’ were what kept Bronze Hall from being absorbed into the new reeve hall structure imposed by King Anjihosh. That, of course, and your presence here in Mar.”

“Yes.” Her lips twisted as the memory of her months as Anji’s wife floated before her. Those days had been sweet because she had been so ignorant and so young. “I still have power over him, of a kind, because he still desires to possess me. But he is not a man who chooses to reveal his weaknesses, so up until now he has held Mar at arm’s length because I live here. I suppose that sounds terribly vain, but I fear it is true.”

“One thing you are not is vain.”

“Certainly not! That is why I own the finest collection of silks in Salya and likely all of Mar. Not liking to risk my complexion being seen contrasted with second-quality silk.”

He laughed.

She shook her head as her smile faded. “I’m not minded to acquiesce. Are you?”

“I am not.”

“Then we must plan our own campaign.”

The bell rang from the kitchen.

“You’ll stay for the feast?”

“Of course. Let me go make sure all is settled with my eagle.” Broad face creased with a frown, the reeve crunched away over the garden path.

She lingered in the garden and when she was sure he was well gone she entered the house by a hidden entrance that led directly into her private chamber. In a narrow storage room lined with shelves stacked with more gorgeous silk than any one woman could realistically wear — silk was her weakness — she fished a chain off a hook. An iron ring dangled from the chain: the wolf’s head that was the sigil of the clan she had been born into in a faraway desert town. She already knew it was the same design as the one the young man in the street was wearing. She studied it for a while, thinking of the man she had married, the son he had taken from her, and the daughter he had left behind.

Then she put the ring back and joined the others.

Old Priya and her husband O’eki walked down from their house for the last meal.

Together the household made the proper offerings, sang the customary songs, and ate their feast in the prescribed order, finishing with the sweet pudding just as the night bells rang down the end of the day, and the end of the year, across the town. Three-day candles were lit in ceramic holders and set one in each room and two on the porch to mark the entry. All the doors were left open so wandering ghosts could exit as easily as they entered. The girls, tucked into bed, made silly jokes about ghosts and giggled a lot. Keshad, Peddonon, and O’eki got into a long and involved discussion about the nature of ghosts as they cleared and washed the dishes with Edi helping. The women sat on the porch, sipping the fermented petal wine that was only drunk during the Ghost Days.

“I hope the baby doesn’t come during the Ghost Days,” whispered Miravia, stroking her belly. Her gaze shifted inward for a space before she offered them a weary smile gilded by candle-light.

Priya said, “How often is your womb tightening?”

“Just now and then,” said Miravia. “I suppose I should never have walked down into the market today.”

“The child will come when it will come,” said Priya more gently. “Best you rest now. Come inside.” She rose with Derra’s help and at the door the three women turned. “Mai, are you coming?”

“I’ll sit the first watch,” said Mai. “I’m not tired yet.”

She sat in the gloom beyond the reach of the candlelight and watched the empty street. Strangely no red cap was visible in the accustomed place. Maybe even the red caps feared to walk at night on the Ghost Days. With no red cap to trail her a woman might walk right down off the porch and into the ghostly city and go anywhere, really, walk to the inn where that good-looking young man was staying. But no person moved about at night during the Ghost Days except for the fire watch, who walked in pairs during these ill-omened nights and besides that went attended by picked ordinands of Kotaru specially blessed and trained to cast off ghostly assaults.

On Ghost Nights, after the end of the old year and before the priests of Sapanasu rang in the new year, ghosts walked freely at night. You were only safe if you remained within the boundaries of your own compound sealed by offerings and prayers and with the doors left open so no ghosts got trapped inside. Mai did not worship the Hundred’s gods, but she accepted their pre-eminence and followed the customs of her adopted home. So she stayed on the porch and sipped petal wine and listened as the wind sighed over the town.

“Mai?” Peddonon stepped out from inside the house, then yawned, stifling it behind an open hand.

“I’m well enough. You sleep now and take the late watch.”

He bent to kiss her in a brotherly way — the only way he would ever kiss a woman — and went back inside to sleep.

She sat as the silence drifted down around her like settling dust. Peace kissed her, as on wings. These quiet Ghost Nights held a special place in her heart now, an interval suspended out of time in which she might allow her worries and aggravations to sleep. She tasted on her tongue the waxy lavender scent of the three-day candles. The bones of the house creaked softly. The world breathed, and if she made herself very, very still in the midst of it all, she could hear the pulse of the land’s bright heart, a thread of blue-white light that tangled with her own being.

“Momma?”

She startled back to awareness. “You’re meant to be in your bed, Arasit.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” said the girl with her mouth turned down and one foot scraping on the planks as though sweeping them. She had Anji’s features more than Mai’s, those brilliantly intense eyes. That absolutely stubborn intransigence was Anji’s as well, although he had learned to hide it while playing at being the most reasonable of men. “I want to see a ghost. I’ve never seen a ghost, even though I peek every year. I don’t think there are ghosts.”

Mai beckoned, and the girl snuggled into the curve of her mother’s arm. “There are ghosts. Your father could see them.”

“I can’t see ghosts. And I’ve never met my father, so how do I know he even exists? He might be a pretend person you made up. I think my father ran away because he didn’t want me. Because I’m a brat. I wish I had a father like the other girls do.”

Arasit was still young enough that Mai knew how to stroke her scalp so as to relax her. “I tell you what, little one. You close your eyes until I count to ten, but if you open them before I’m done, I have to start over. Then afterward, I’ll tell you a story. One. Two . . . Three. . . .”

By “seven” the girl was asleep, all curled up like a flower in bud, waiting for the dawn to open. Mai despaired of Arasit sometimes. She was a brat, full of wild outbursts usually calmed only by Miravia and Keshad’s eldest child, Eiko, who was the same age and as steady as Arasit was difficult. But it was more than that. The girl wore a strangeness about her. If a thunderstorm boomed down over town the girl would rush outdoors and refuse to come in. Once in the midst of a frightening crash of lightning and thunder she had climbed up onto the roof and Keshad, raging and cursing, had had to clamber up and actually wrestle her down, not an easy task for she had kicked and screamed the entire time. She adored Priya, though, and would spend entire days there patiently helping grind herbs and blend medicinal pastes. She and Eiko were old enough to attend the children’s school, and Mai would soon have to let her go, although she feared the child would become disruptive or that Anji would send soldiers to kidnap her . . .

A noise scattered her thoughts into the wind. Her heart lugged, and sweat flushed on her brow, and then she realized she was hearing the unhurried clop of horse’s hooves. More than one.

Did spirits truly pass through the streets of villages and towns and drag unwilling victims into their saddles and away into one of the hells? She had heard plenty of tales of ghostly vengeance taken for an old grievance. The tales were full of insubstantial Night Riders who abducted people bold and foolish enough to chance the darkness of a Ghost Night, or who unpredictably left dangerous and precious gifts on porches.

She shivered despite herself. But, in truth, the clip-clop sounded like perfectly ordinary hooves. Rising, she stepped in front of Arasit’s sleeping form just as the shadowy figures of three riders sifted out of shadow into view on the street. Anger scalded her, succeeded by fear for her child and, if she were honest, for herself. She knew those silhouettes instantly. She recognized the distinctive armor and stocky horses of Qin soldiers as if they were the familiar profiles of kinfolk, and in some way they were. She had grown up thousands of mey from the Hundred in an oasis town ruled by the Qin, nomadic raiders who built an empire by capturing what they desired to possess. She had been married off to a prince of the Qin, although at the time she had thought he was a simple captain. She had borne to him two children. Once, she had believed she loved him.

Now, with a long in-drawn breath to steady herself, she walked to the steps and waited for the riders to halt on the street below. The second rider dismounted stiffly, burdened by the thick weight ringing his torso, and approached. He halted at the base of the steps so she could identify his face.

“Chief Tuvi!” Heedless of the strictures of the Ghost Days, she descended the steps in a rush and, without thinking, caught the chief by the shoulders and kissed each weathered cheek. He mewled with a faint noise of discomfort. Startled, she stepped back to see his familiar and much loved smile as he looked her over.

“You look well, Mistress. I am pleased to see you healthy and blooming.” His voice sounded perfectly normal, just as she remembered it, not mewling at all.

She glanced past him at the two soldiers, still mounted, but they were not men she knew. “Chief, you and your men must come inside. We have a stable, mattresses for visitors, something to drink . . .”

Then she recalled that Orhon had just been murdered.

“I cannot stay, Mistress.” He watched her with the intent gaze she remembered. He was Anji’s most trusted retainer, the man to whom Anji had given the duty of protecting his wife, back when Mai was his wife. “I have been sent by the king.”

“Tuvi.” She hesitated, not wanting her words to a man she respected to be angry. She could not accuse him of the murder, even though she knew he was capable of killing without regret or hesitation. However, most Qin hated the water, and few of them could swim.

His attention had already dropped to what she had at first imagined was a belly grown large from too much eating and drinking in the palace of the Hundred’s new ruler. Instead, he unwrapped a swaddling bundle and held it out before her. The candles gave off just enough light that she could discern the thing he had been carrying against his body as he rode.

It was an infant child, not more than ten days old and boasting a head of coal-black hair.

“Merciful One, cast your blessings upon the innocent,” she murmured reflexively.

“Will you take him?” Tuvi asked.

“Take him?” The anger poured out in a rush. “What, does Anji mean to offer a trade? This infant in exchange for Atani, whom he stole from me and allows another woman to claim as her son? Or is this his way of trying to bind me back to him, to make me surrender — ?”

“Mistress,” he said in that way he had of cutting her off without raising his voice or showing the least sign of irritation. “That is not what this is.”

She closed her mouth over the rest of her furious words. With a curt gesture she signaled that she would listen to what he had to say.

“There was another boy-child born before this one, a few years ago. The king’s mother got to him first and had him killed.”

She sucked in air as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

“She had him killed so no younger son could threaten Atani’s place as the heir,” he went on, and that only made it worse, knowing that the son she had lost had been the cause of a blameless infant’s death. “She feared that if Lady Zayrah raised a son borne out of her own womb she might come to prefer it over one born to another woman. This baby, this infant boy, would have met the same fate as the other one, smothered at birth. But the king smuggled the infant out of the palace and told his mother the baby was stillborn.”

Rage simmered in her heart. The baby was so small, helpless against the ruthless machinations of the adults surrounding it.

He nodded as if she had spoken her thoughts aloud. “King Anjihosh had to decide quickly whom he could trust to raise the boy kindly and with affection. Whom he could trust to never attempt to bring the child into conflict with his heir. So he thought of you.”

“He thinks of me too much, Tuvi,” she said, for once allowing her bitterness to leak into her voice.

He inclined his head. “When it comes to you, he will never change.”

“What if I agree to take the baby only in exchange for Anji letting go of me?”

“I cannot bargain. You must either accept the burden, or reject it. All else remains as it was.”

She was by now trembling. Anji knew her too well. At that instant, the baby stirred. A dark infant gaze fixed on her and the little person smacked delicate rosebud lips, thinking of inchoate hungers. She wanted to take him into her arms but she took a step back instead.

“Maybe you cannot bargain, Tuvi, but I can, and he knows I will. If he sent the child to me only as a way to bribe me back to him, it will not work. I will not raise a child as a hostage. But if he genuinely wishes the child to live and thrive, then he must give me room. Let him keep his red caps watching the house if he is so selfish that he cannot bear for me to ever again have sexual love with a man. However brilliant he is, in this matter his mind is very narrow. I have love in plenty. But let him leave Bronze Hall alone.”

“Bronze Hall? The reeve hall?”

“He sent two agents to steal a courier bag and murder the marshal. They’re staying at the Inn of Fortune’s Star.”

He said nothing. Either he was ignorant of the matter, which she doubted, or he knew better than to give away the game too early.

She offered him her market smile, offering much and promising nothing. “I know Anji. If he truly cares for the child he will have given you permission to bargain with me. Bring me the courier bag and your sworn word that he will leave Bronze Hall alone, and I will take the baby as my own. I trust you to fulfill any promise you make to me here.”

In the deathly hush, every least sound seemed heightened: a splash of wash water being thrown over stones; an unidentifiable thump, heard once and not repeated, like a body falling heavily onto a floor; many streets over the clapping sticks of the fire watch on patrol. A night-jar trilled its delicious song like a spark of unexpected joy.

He met her gaze with his steady one. “Whatever else, Mistress, he does truly care about the welfare of his children. Let it be done. On my honor as a man and a soldier, I make this bargain on his behalf.”

“Give him to me,” she whispered hoarsely, extending her arms. “What is his name?”

He settled the infant in her arms. “He has no name. To give him a name would acknowledge his life, and he is dead to the palace. He must remain dead. The child you hold has no mother but you.”

She had already taken in the baby into her heart. In her arms he bided restfully, his earnest infant gaze fixed on her mouth and eyes. She caught Tuvi’s gaze and held it. “Please tell me, Tuvi-lo. How is Atani? Is he taken care of? Is he healthy? Is he happy? Does he have companions?”

He sighed as though the words pained him. “He is cherished by all who know him, Mistress. He is a good boy, an obedient boy, perhaps a bit timid.”

“Has he any playmates, so he isn’t lonely?”

“He is just a year older than the eldest of his sisters. He adores her, and she has courage enough for both. He is gentle and kind with his other younger sisters, and they think he is the sun in their sky. He is intelligent, like his father. He studies hard to master all that he should at the palace school, where there are boys his own age who treat him with the respect he deserves. The Lady Zayrah treats him as her own. She loves him with true affection, if that is what concerns you.”

“Does Atani love her as a mother?” she asked, the words bitter on her lips as she closed her eyes against the knife of grief. She’d thought the wound healed, but it would never heal.

“He does, Mistress.”

She could not speak. The baby fussed a little, and she opened her eyes as she rocked him enough to distract him. Raggedly, she said, “That is well, then. That is well.”

“We must be gone long before the dawn, so none suspect where the child came from. We’ve been giving him sheep’s milk.”

“Miravia will give birth in a day or two. She can nurse him with his cousin.”

To her surprise, he touched her on one arm, an astonishing display from the tough old soldier. “Be well, Mistress. Do not think I have forgotten you.”

“I know where your duty lies.”

She wanted to ask if the women of the palace treated him well, if they had found a proper wife for him, to replace the one he had been forced to leave behind in the Qin homeland so many years ago because he had followed his duty, which was his captain. But she thought the question would be cruel, for what if they had not? What if no one but her cared anything for Chief Tuvi except as a weapon serving the commander?

He smiled, as if she had spoken with her expression. “I found a good woman, a widow, an older woman. We deal together very well, she and I. I thought you would want to know.”

With tears on her cheeks she embraced him as a niece would embrace a beloved uncle.

“I will deliver what you are owed,” he said, handing over a leather pouch with some small items for the baby. “Be well, Mistress.”

She let him go, as she must. He mounted, and the riders vanished into the darkness. The fall of hooves on stone faded. The distant shush of the incoming tide swallowing the tidal flats soon became the only sound in the sleeping town except for Arasit’s restful breathing. The bag included a leather bottle with a bit of fresh sheep’s milk still left. Mai fed the baby as ghosts slipped noiselessly past her on the dying winds of the old year and the birthing winds of the new.

Footsteps scuffed the silence. She looked up to see the young man stroll effortlessly out of the darkness. She was surprised and yet not surprised, at once sorting through possible responses and potential lines of attack. He halted at the base of the steps, unslung a bag from his shoulder, and swung it as if to loft it onto the porch with a flourish.

“Quietly. There’s a child sleeping.”

Catching it deftly on the backswing, he set it on the ground at his feet and grinned at her. Lamplight caught on the interesting planes of his face. He was a few years younger than she was, still a little raw and unformed except for the absolutely sure way he held himself, a man who could manage any sort of physical feat.

“You wear the wolf’s head ring,” she said in a low voice. “It’s the badge of the king’s elite soldiers, the Black Wolves. They carry out his most dangerous missions, so it is said.”

His grin got cockier but didn’t lose its essential sweetness.

“Did you murder Marshal?” she added.

His smile vanished. “I stole the bag. But I would have killed him, had I been given that order instead.”

“How did you get on the island?”

“That was simple enough. We paddled out on one of those lovely canoes, and then swam the last part, and climbed the cliffs. Not nearly as difficult as it sounds.”

“An interesting statement considering everyone believes it can’t be done.” She studied him carefully and precisely: taut arms, strong calves, a lean waist, and slim hips. He was still wearing the kilt, although he had laced up the vest, thus concealing his attractive torso. His shoulders were beautiful. “But if anyone looks fit for the part, it would be you.”

His eyes widened at this unexpected compliment, and he gave her such a frankly sexual look-over, as if only now contemplating that they might actually find themselves tangling together on a bed, that she felt the heat of his thoughts pour right through her flesh. She had bested Anji once, hadn’t she? She had wrested her freedom from his possessive grasp. Anji’s weakness was that even though he knew she was as brilliant as he was, he could only see her as a woman who ought to belong to him. He knew only one way to fight.

“Aren’t you afraid of ghosts and Night Riders?” she asked, filling the silence.

With a flick of his fingers the man gestured to show he had no worries. “My life is not my own. It belongs to the king. Thus I walk without concern because I am already dead.”

“You don’t look dead,” she retorted, meaning the words in so many different possible ways. It had been years since she had so thoroughly enjoyed ogling a man.

The smile emerged again as he picked up on the energy surging between them. “May I ask your name, verea?”

“If you have to ask, then you’re not a very good spy.”

A blink acknowledged this hit. His gaze cast around the spacious porch, pausing briefly on Arasit before returning to her. “Are these your children?”

The baby had fallen asleep in her arms, the feel of his little body like balm healing the old pain in her heart. With perfect contentment and an almost blistering sense of triumph, she said, “They are, ver. My daughter and my son.”

He caught in a breath, as if realizing he had made a mistake, and took a step back. The night drew its shadows over him so he was half obscured, almost a ghost himself. “My apologies if I have rudely intruded upon you, verea. I will bid you and your family a quiet festival and an auspicious new year.”

But she caught him with a look before he could walk away. She hooked him with her market smile. “I have fewer encumbrances than it may seem. Will I not see you again, ver?”

Almost he reeled under this onslaught, but he was well trained and well honed, prepared for the most strenuous challenges. “If that is an invitation, then someday you will, verea. When you least expect me.”

She allowed him the last word and thus said nothing as he touched a kiss to his fingers and flew it to her, then padded away into the night. This new armistice between her and Anji was not peace but merely a prelude to a more complicated struggle that she would wage with patience and flexibility in place of swords and spears. She laughed to herself as she went down the steps to the street to fetch the courier bag. Surely a man who could paddle, swim, and climb to reach a reeve hall famous for its inaccessibility could easily penetrate the guard of her red-cap sentries and find a way into her house.

If he did not, her life would not change from what it already was. The expectations, pleasures, and goals she held now were perfectly satisfying.

If he did, then anything might happen. The sex might be tedious, or it might be gratifying . . .

“Mai?”

Startled, she turned.

Peddonon emerged from the interior, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “In my dreams I thought I heard the sound of hooves. It woke me, so I came to take my share of the watch . . . Mai! Come up off the street! Don’t you know the Night Riders steal beauty when they can catch such people out of doors on Ghost Nights?”

He stepped around the sleeping Arasit as Mai mounted the steps and slung the courier bag at his feet.

“The hells! Where did you get that?” Then he saw the bundle in her arms and gave a confounded second look as he shook himself into full alertness. “What are you holding?”

“A baby,” she said. “The Night Riders brought me a perilous and beautiful gift. Just like in the tales.”

© 2015 by Kate Elliott.

Originally published in The Very Best of Kate Elliott.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Elliott has been writing stories since she was nine years old, which has led her to believe that writing, like breathing, keeps her alive. She is the author of over twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic), the Crossroads Trilogy (Spirit Gate), the seven-volume epic fantasy Crown of Stars (King’s Dragon), the Novels of the Jaran, and her short fiction collection, The Very Best of Kate Elliott. Her YA debut Court of Fives will be published in August, and a new epic fantasy novel, Black Wolves, arrives in October. She lives in Hawaii with her archaeologist spouse, paddles outrigger canoes for fun, and nurses along an aging schnauzer.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

Acheron Books Presents
Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets
(novel excerpt)

Alessio Lanterna
Translation by Kate Mitchell

Last night, a dot in the middle of four zeros

I bang the boot of the car shut and light myself a cigarette. The smoke drifts away into the oily night of Nectropis. Thick, rank, sticky city air, it snakes into your lungs every single fucking day, if there’s any point in using that term to describe a period of twenty-four hours during which the sun barely glimmers for little more than the length of a decent fuck.

I take a deep breath of poison. After all, when you find two idiots and a cop, dead in a nicked aviomobile and twenty kilos of special stout in the boot, worrying about the long-term oncological risks is just about on the same level as wondering what excuse to make to the surgeon who’s going to have to stitch your backside back together while you’re about to be raped by an entire male basketball team.

Not even forty yet, it’s not like I can say that I’m close to retirement, or anything. No wife, no children, a mother who hits the bottle so much she doesn’t even realise who or what crosses the threshold of her own home. And the Brunette would have let someone else bang her. Fact. Shit, it all sounds a bit pathetic put like that. But, at the end of the day, I nearly screwed over one of the biggest bigshots in Nectropis, along with his entire family of tie-wearing arseholes. Not bad as a finale. Pity no one would have lived to tell the tale.

The cigarette butt flies straight into a puddle. A short hiss. At this point there’s no use asking myself if I’m sure I want to do it. Even if I wanted to ask myself this moronic question, my three dead friends would quickly remind me there’s no going back.

Either me, or that immortal bastard with rabbit ears and the rest of the gang in one go. I’d give myself odds of sixty to one. If I weren’t the bookie, obviously. After my last cigarette, the only thing left to do is knock back the last dregs of whiskey, rake my hand through my hair, sit in the car and think, soaring towards one of the highest spires in the city, about how the hell it came to this.

Just like any other Wednesday

It’s raining. What a surprise. On the pavement in front of the ramp there’s a gathering of lower-class hookers, they’re taking full advantage of the sluggish traffic and putting their goods on display in the sodium yellow from the few street lights that still work. They cross the traffic lanes and try to pick up drivers, oblivious to the rain. The Seventh Level, to hell with it, nothing but a revolting cesspool. A small greenish figure wrapped up in filthy rags leaps onto the bonnet brandishing a windscreen wiper which is far dirtier than any vaguely transparent windscreen. One horizontal pointy ear and half an ear like a cone, heading north like an antenna abortion.

Fucking gremlins. Only such a parasite would be dumb enough to try and clean car windscreens in the pouring rain after washing fourteen other levels. According to scientists, it’s living proof of a demonic invasion that took place about a thousand years ago. Common mortals call it the “Failed Apocalypse.” Their genetic code is totally different to that of any other life form on the planet. As far as I’m concerned, they’re no better than rats — in fact, they churn out sprogs at about the same rate; about the Apocalypse, the Seventh Level seriously questions the theory that it failed. Without even so much as glancing down.

Motioning to the filth to get the hell off my car is utterly in vain. Worse, it starts dirtying up the windscreen with that shit-spreader in its hand. It’s gone too far. Suddenly I swerve onto the hard shoulder, the local streetwalkers are thrown into a panic, prancing away and cursing in my general direction, the gremlin hits the windscreen. So I slam on the brakes. The rag bag rolls a few metres, but it’s not dead, dammit. It gets up and hauls itself away, melting into the infinite number of cracks in the city. I’d mow it down but I wouldn’t want to damage the car.

• • • •

A siren, it’s directed at me. The metropolitan police is incredibly efficient when it’s totally pointless. They pull up behind my car and one of the two officers approaches. Unbe-fucking-lievable, the town council is broke again and patrol cars station themselves near the ramps so they can slap a fine on anyone who jumps the queue.

A knock on the windscreen.

“Sir, this lane is reserved for emergency vehicles . . .”

I press my ID badge against the window, right in front of his nose.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry . . .” — a gulp — “Lieutenant, sir.”

He races off to his car like he’s just seen Satan and, before I can even switch the ignition on, he’s vanished. The effect a Federal Guard badge has on cops is just amazing. I used to be a cop, when I was young, I remember it clearly: “Whatever it is you see, if the Guard is there, just flee.”

Everything is easier in the emergency lane. All you have to do is give the hookers time to get out of the way. I should have got into this lane straightaway, even though I’m not on duty.

It takes me just ten minutes to get to the address I was given. A grimy alley in front of Godur restaurant. A small huddle of curious onlookers practically crowding on top of each other tells me this is the right place. I double park, on double yellow lines.

“Out of the fucking way, lowlife,” I say to a half-ogre. He’s got a face that would make even a boss-eyed sow throw up and he’s blocking my way. He turns round, with a menacing air, but cools down pretty damn quick when he sees my badge. Dropping his fists, he moves off. This scene is repeated a few more times, with variations on the theme, until I reach the police cordon. Luckily it’s a narrow, dead-end street, otherwise the two officers would have had problems holding back the rabble. I just vaguely wave my badge around to get past.

A third guy in a dark raincoat, about twenty-five, moves away from the body and comes towards me.

“Hello. Excuse me, but who —”

“What have we got here?” I cut him off, without even looking at him. My complete attention is on the corpse, and I start to go towards it. The young kid stands in front, blocking the way. He must be new. I can smell the fear coming off the two guards without even sniffing the air, which, incidentally, reeks of the sickly stink of Godur takeaways.

“I asked who you are. This area is —”

“Lieutenant Arkham, Federal Guard, organised crime department. I asked you what we have here.”

In the end, I bestow one of my tried-and-tested harsh stares on him. It hits the mark, they always do. However, this kid is not your average sprog and he takes it on the chin, though with the slightest of squirms. He’s good-looking, as far as I can tell, not that I’m an expert on fellas, deep blue eyes and a lady-killer goatee, neatly trimmed. Bet the ladies in his neighbourhood adore him.

“Elf, apparent age —”

“Elf?”

“Yep.”

Instinctively, I glance around. A filthy alley in the Seventh. Holy crap, what’s an elf doing here? I get closer and lean over her. She’s very slight, delicate embroidered silk clothes, probably masterpieces by some giant spider who inadvertently became a star of haute couture. Girlish breasts, manicured nails.

“Don’t touch! We’re waiting for forensics!”

“Good luck. Have you brought a tent?”

“But —”

“How long have you been on the force?”

“Eight months.”

“A premature birth.”

Naturally her face is breathtakingly beautiful. I think an elf’s pointy ears are just ludicrous in principle — that’s where the nicknames “asses” and “rabbits” come from — but the overall effect is stunning. Her green, slanting eyes are staring wide. Copper-coloured hair, even though some silver strands interrupt the harmony. Her lips are parted in sheer terror. The top of her skull is smashed in. Her curls, bone, and grey matter are all fatally mashed up together. Leaving this detail aside and after a quick warm-through in the microwave, this corpse would make even the most God-fearing of men discover the joys of necrophilia.

“Apparent age, eight hundred,” I continue.

“Eight hundred? Are you sure? I would have estimated —”

“I couldn’t care less. I definitely know more about Elves than you do, boy. Trust me.”

“I do have a name, Lieutenant.”

“Oh really.”

“Inspector Nohl Cohl.”

“Excellent, boy. Say it out loud now and then, so you don’t forget it.”

I close my eyes and breathe in, concentrating.

“Lieutenant?”

“Shut up.”

A smattering of words, in an ancient language, murmured. A Na gesture. I open my eyes again and look beyond the thin shroud which separates the land of the living from the torment of spectres. Shadows from beyond the grave seem to chase each other, snapping at heels, until they become aware of me. They freeze, possibly surprised, maybe annoyed. They close in on me, the intruder against the universal object of vendetta. My survival instinct sets off all the innate alarm bells in every single fibre of my being, trying to persuade me to get the hell out. I don’t belong here. For a second I catch sight of a humanoid outline, curled up like a foetus, wailing, desperately wailing — but it’s just a vague silhouette, a ghost which has been searching for peace for so long that it is almost indiscernible from the shadows. A second Na gesture brings the spell to a close — blinking rapidly, I find myself once again in the filth-ridden alley in the land of the living. Despite everything, its much more preferable to its parallel beyond the grave. Need a scotch.

“Was that . . . magic?”

I take a moment or so to catch my breath.

“She didn’t die here.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Did you find spatters of blood? Globs of brain stuck to the walls?”

“It’s pouring down!”

“Not over there it isn’t,” I reply, pointing to an area of wall covered by a ledge a bit higher up, right behind the corpse. “If a blow to the head had cracked her skull open here, there would be clear signs.” Nohl comes closer, while I remain crouched, repeating to myself that it’s just the usual beyond-the-grave stuff, that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that I’ve already seen it a hundred times before — rummaging around in my pocket, in search of a cigarette. It’s finished, I repeat to myself, lighting up with trembling fingers.

“There’s nothing there,” says Nohl, doubtfully. Then adds, as if making excuses, “Anyway, this is a job for forensics.”

Dickhead kid.

“Have you already talked to the people at Godur?”

“No, I was waiting for forensics and crime scene back-up.”

Even though I’ve still got the shakes, the kid still manages to make me laugh.

“With you around, delinquents can work until they die of natural causes,” I say, while my words are drowned out by the rain which is coming down harder.

“What?”

“Go to the takeaway!” I yell at him, adding an exasperated “fuck” under my breath. “I’ll join you in a second.”

Cohl patently disapproves of my working style, but he’s got no choice but to set off, muttering some half-baked curse under his breath. I finish my smoke sheltered by the building and stare at the corpse while trying to block the trembling.

Copyright © 2015 by Alessio Lanterna.

Excerpted from Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets by Alessio Lanterna.

Published by permission of the author and Acheron Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alessio Lanterna was born in 1983 in Pavia, where he still lives. He has a degree in Political Science, with a major in Political Theory. He also works as a web and game designer, and he’s an active organizer and promoter of live RPG events.

Saga Press Presents
Grace of Kings
(novel excerpt)

Ken Liu

CHAPTER ONE: AN ASSASSIN

Zudi: The Seventh Month in the Fourteenth Year of the Reign of One Bright Heaven.

A white bird hung still in the clear western sky and flapped its wings sporadically.

Perhaps it was a raptor that had left its nest on one of the soaring peaks of the Er-Mé Mountains a few miles away in search of prey. But this was not a good day for hunting — a raptor’s usual domain, this sun-parched section of the Porin Plains, had been taken over by people.

Thousands of spectators lined both sides of the wide road out of Zudi; they paid the bird no attention. They were here for the Imperial Procession.

They had gasped in awe as a fleet of giant Imperial airships passed overhead, shifting gracefully from one elegant formation to another. They had gawped in respectful silence as the heavy battle-carts rolled before them, thick bundles of ox sinew draping from the stone-throwing arms. They had praised the emperor’s foresight and generosity as his engineers sprayed the crowd with perfumed water from ice wagons, cool and refreshing in the hot sun and dusty air of northern Cocru. They had clapped and cheered the best dancers the six conquered Tiro states had to offer: five hundred Faça maidens who gyrated seductively in the veil dance, a sight once reserved for the royal court in Boama; four hundred Cocru sword twirlers who spun their blades into bright chrysanthemums of cold light that melded martial glory with lyrical grace; dozens of elegant, stately elephants from wild, sparsely settled Écofi Island, painted with the colors of the Seven States — the largest male draped in the white flag of Xana, as one would expect, while the others wore the rainbow colors of the conquered lands.

The elephants pulled a moving platform on which stood two hundred of the best singers all the Islands of Dara had to offer, a choir whose existence would have been impossible before the Xana Conquest. They sang a new song, a composition by the great imperial scholar Lügo Crupo to celebrate the occasion of the Imperial tour of the Islands:

To the north: Fruitful Faça, green as the eyes of kind Rufizo,

Pastures ever kissed by sweet rain, craggy highlands shrouded in mist.

Soldiers walking next to the moving platform tossed trinkets into the crowd: Xana-style decorative knots made with bits of colorful string to represent the Seven States. The shapes of the knots were meant to evoke the logograms for “prosperity” and “luck.” Spectators scrambled and fought one another to catch a memento of this exciting day.

To the south: Castled Cocru, fields of sorghum and rice, both pale and dark,

Red, for martial glory, white, like proud Rapa, black, as mournful Kana.

The crowd cheered especially loudly after this verse about their homeland.

To the west: Alluring Amu, the jewel of Tututika,

Luminous elegance, filigreed cities surround two blue lakes.

To the east: Gleaming Gan, where Tazu’s trades and gambles glitter,

Wealthy as the sea’s bounty, cultured like the scholars’ layered gray robes.

Walking behind the singers, other soldiers held up long silk banners embroidered with elaborate scenes of the beauty and wonder of the Seven States: moonlight glinting from snowcapped Mount Kiji; schools of fish sparkling in Lake Tututika at sunrise; breaching crubens and whales sighted off the shores of Wolf’s Paw; joyous crowds lining the wide streets in Pan, the capital; serious scholars debating policy in front of the wise, all-knowing emperor. . . .

To the northwest: High-minded Haan, forum of philosophy,

Tracing the tortuous paths of the gods on Lutho’s yellow shell.

In the middle: Ring-wooded Rima, where sunlight pierces ancient

Forests to dapple the ground, as sharp as Fithowéo’s black sword.

Between each verse, the crowd bellowed out the chorus along with the singers:

We bow down, bow down, bow down to Xana, Zenith, Ruler of Air,

Why resist, why persist against Lord Kiji in strife that we can’t bear?

If the servile words bothered those in this Cocru crowd who had probably taken up arms against the Xana invaders scarcely more than a dozen years ago, any mutterings were drowned out by the full-throated, frenzied singing of the men and women around them. The hypnotic chant held a power of its own, as if by mere repetition the words gained weight, became more true.

But the crowd wasn’t close to being satisfied by the spectacle thus far. They hadn’t seen the heart of the Procession yet: the emperor.

The white bird glided closer. Its wings seemed to be as wide and long as the spinning vanes of the windmills in Zudi that drew water from deep wells and piped it into the houses of the wealthy — too big to be an ordinary eagle or vulture. A few spectators looked up and idly wondered if it was a giant Mingén falcon, taken more than a thousand miles from its home in faraway Rui Island and released here by the emperor’s trainers to impress the crowd.

But an Imperial scout hidden among the crowd looked at the bird and furrowed his brows. Then he turned and shoved his way through the crowd toward the temporary viewing platform where the local officials were gathered.

Anticipation among the spectators grew as the Imperial Guards passed by, marching like columns of mechanical men: eyes straight ahead, legs and arms swinging in unison, stringed marionettes under the guidance of a single pair of hands. Their discipline and order contrasted sharply with the dynamic dancers who had passed before them.

After a momentary pause, the crowd roared their approval. Never mind that this same army had slaughtered Cocru’s soldiers and disgraced her old nobles. The people watching simply wanted spectacle, and they loved the gleaming armor and the martial splendor.

The bird drifted even closer.

“Coming through! Coming through!”

Two fourteen-year-old boys shoved their way through the tightly packed crowd like a pair of colts butting through a sugarcane field.

The boy in the lead, Kuni Garu, wore his long, straight, black hair in a topknot in the style of a student in the private academies. He was stocky — not fat but well-muscled, with strong arms and thighs. His eyes, long and narrow like most men from Cocru, glinted with intelligence that verged on slyness. He made no effort to be gentle, elbowing men and women aside as he forced his way forward. Behind him, he left a trail of bruised ribs and angry curses.

The boy in the back, Rin Coda, was gangly and nervous, and as he followed his friend through the throng like a seagull dragged along on the tailwind of a ship, he murmured apologies at the enraged men and women around them.

“Kuni, I think we’ll be okay just standing in the back,” Rin said. “I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Then don’t think,” Kuni said. “Your problem is that you think too much. Just do.”

“Master Loing says that the gods want us to always think before we act.” Rin winced and ducked out of the way as another man swore at the pair and took a swing at them.

“No one knows what the gods want.” Kuni didn’t look back as he forged ahead. “Not even Master Loing.”

They finally made it through the dense crowd and stood right next to the road, where white chalk lines indicated how far spectators could stand.

“Now, this is what I call a view,” Kuni said, breathing deeply and taking everything in. He whistled appreciatively as the last of the semi-nude Faça veil dancers passed in front of him. “I can see the attraction of being emperor.”

“Stop talking like that! Do you want to go to jail?” Rin looked nervously around to see if anyone was paying attention — Kuni had a habit of saying outrageous things that could be easily interpreted as treason.

“Now, doesn’t this beat sitting in class practicing carving wax logograms and memorizing Kon Fiji’s Treatise on Moral Relations?” Kuni draped his arm around Rin’s shoulders. “Admit it: You’re glad you came with me.”

Master Loing had explained that he wasn’t going to close his school for the Procession because he believed the emperor wouldn’t want the children to interrupt their studies — but Rin secretly suspected that it was because Master Loing didn’t approve of the emperor. A lot of people in Zudi had complicated views about the emperor.

“Master Loing would definitely not approve of this,” Rin said, but he couldn’t take his eyes away from the veil dancers either.

Kuni laughed. “If the master is going to slap us with his ferule for skipping classes for three full days anyway, we might as well get our pain’s worth.”

“Except you always seem to come up with some clever argument to wiggle out of being punished, and I end up getting double strokes!”

The crowd’s cheers rose to a crescendo.

On top of the Throne Pagoda, the emperor was seated with his legs stretched out in front of him in the position of thakrido, cushioned by soft silk pillows. Only the emperor would be able to sit like this publicly, as everyone was his social inferior.

The Throne Pagoda was a five-story bamboo-and-silk structure erected on a platform formed from twenty thick bamboo poles — ten across, ten perpendicular — carried on the shoulders of a hundred men, their chests and arms bare, oiled to glisten in the sunlight.

The four lower stories of the Throne Pagoda were filled with intricate, jewel-like clockwork models whose movements illustrated the Four Realms of the Universe: the World of Fire down below — filled with demons who mined diamond and gold; then, the World of Water — full of fish and serpents and pulsing jellyfish; next, the World of Earth, in which men lived — islands floating over the four seas; and finally the World of Air above all — the domain of birds and spirits.

Wrapped in a robe of shimmering silk, his crown a splendid creation of gold and glittering gems topped by the statuette of a cruben, the scaled whale and lord of the Four Placid Seas, whose single horn was made from the purest ivory at the heart of a young elephant’s tusk and whose eyes were formed by a pair of heavy black diamonds — the largest diamonds in all of Dara, taken from the treasury of Cocru when it had fallen to Xana fifteen years earlier — Emperor Mapidéré shaded his eyes with one hand and squinted at the approaching form of the great bird.

“What is that?” he wondered aloud.

At the foot of the slow-moving Throne Pagoda, the Imperial scout informed the Captain of the Imperial Guards that the officials in Zudi all claimed to have never seen anything like the strange bird. The captain whispered some orders, and the Imperial Guards, the most elite troops in all of Dara, tightened their formation around the Pagoda-bearers.

The emperor continued to stare at the giant bird, which slowly and steadily drifted closer. It flapped its wings once, and the emperor, straining to listen through the noise of the clamoring, fervent crowd, thought he heard it cry out in a startlingly human manner.

The Imperial tour of the Islands had already gone on for more than eight months. Emperor Mapidéré understood well the necessity of visibly reminding the conquered population of Xana’s might and authority, but he was tired. He longed to be back in Pan, the Immaculate City, his new capital, where he could enjoy his zoo and aquarium, filled with animals from all over Dara — including a few exotic ones that had been given as tribute by pirates who sailed far beyond the horizon. He wished he could eat meals prepared by his favorite chef instead of the strange offerings in each place he visited — they might be the best delicacies that the gentry of each town could scrounge up and proffer, but it was tedious to have to wait for tasters to sample each one for poison, and inevitably the dishes were too fatty or too spicy and upset his stomach.

Above all, he was bored. The hundreds of evening receptions hosted by local officials and dignitaries merged into one endless morass. No matter where he went, the pledges of fealty and declarations of submission all sounded the same. Often, he felt as though he were sitting alone in the middle of a theater while the same performance was put on every night around him, with different actors saying the same lines in various settings.

The emperor leaned forward: this strange bird was the most exciting thing that had happened in days.

Now that it was closer, he could pick out more details. It was . . . not a bird at all.

It was a great kite made of paper, silk, and bamboo, except that no string tethered it to the ground. Beneath the kite — could it be? — hung the figure of a man.

“Interesting,” the emperor said.

The Captain of the Imperial Guards rushed up the delicate spiral stairs inside the Pagoda, taking the rungs two or three at a time. “Rénga, we should take precautions.”

The emperor nodded.

The bearers lowered the Throne Pagoda to the ground. The Imperial Guards halted their march. Archers took up positions around the Pagoda, and shieldmen gathered at the foot of the structure to create a temporary bunker walled and roofed by their great interlocking pavises, like the shell of a tortoise. The emperor pounded his legs to get circulation back into his stiff muscles so that he could get up.

The crowd sensed that this was not a planned part of the Procession. They craned their necks and followed the aim of the archers’ nocked arrows.

The strange gliding contraption was now only a few hundred yards away.

The man hanging from the kite pulled on a few ropes dangling near him. The kite-bird suddenly folded its wings and dove at the Throne Pagoda, covering the remaining distance in a few heartbeats. The man ululated, a long, piercing cry that made the crowd below shiver despite the heat.

“Death to Xana and Mapidéré! Long live the Great Haan!”

Before anyone could react, the kite rider launched a ball of fire at the Throne Pagoda. The emperor stared at the impending missile, too stunned to move.

“Rénga!” The Captain of the Imperial Guards was next to the emperor in a second; with one hand, he pushed the old man off the throne and then, with a grunt, he lifted the throne — a heavy ironwood sitting-board covered in gold — with his other hand like a giant pavise. The missile exploded against it in a fiery blast, and the resulting pieces bounced off and fell to the ground, throwing hissing, burning globs of oily tar in all directions in secondary explosions, setting everything they touched aflame. Unfortunate dancers and soldiers screamed as the sticky burning liquid adhered to their bodies and faces, and flaming tongues instantly engulfed them.

Although the heavy throne had shielded the Captain of the Imperial Guards and the emperor from much of the initial explosion, a few stray fiery tongues had singed off much of the hair on the captain and left the right side of his face and his right arm badly burned. But the emperor, though shocked, was unharmed.

The captain dropped the throne, and, wincing with pain, he leaned over the side of the Pagoda and shouted down at the shocked archers. “Fire at will!”

He cursed himself at the emphasis on absolute discipline he had instilled in the guards so that they focused more on obeying orders than reacting on their own initiative. But it had been so long since the last attempt on the emperor’s life that everyone had been lulled into a false sense of security. He would have to look into improvements in training — assuming he got to keep his own head after this failure.

The archers launched their arrows in a volley. The assassin pulled on the strings of the kite, folded the wings, and banked in a tight arc to get out of the way. The spent bolts fell like black rain from the sky.

Thousands of dancers and spectators merged into the panicked chaos of a screaming and jostling mob.

“I told you this was a bad idea!” Rin looked around frantically for somewhere to hide. He yelped and jumped out of the way of a falling arrow. Beside him, two men lay dead with arrows sticking out of their backs. “I should never have agreed to help you with that lie to your parents about school being closed. Your schemes always end with me in trouble! We’ve got to run!”

“If you run and trip in that crowd, you’re going to get trampled,” said Kuni. “Besides, how can you want to miss this?”

“Oh gods, we’re all going to die!” Another arrow fell and stuck into the ground less than a foot away. A few more people fell down screaming as their bodies were pierced.

“We’re not dead yet.” Kuni dashed into the road and returned with a shield one of the soldiers had dropped.

“Duck!” he yelled, and pulled Rin down with him into a crouch, raising the shield over their heads. An arrow thunked against the shield.

“Lady Rapa and Lady Kana, p-pr-protect me!” muttered Rin with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. “If I survive this, I promise to listen to my mother and never skip school again, and I’ll obey the ancient sages and stay away from honey-tongued friends who lead me astray. . . .”

But Kuni was already peeking around the shield.

The kite rider jackknifed his legs hard, causing the wings of his kite to flap a few times in rapid succession. The kite pulled straight up, gaining some altitude. The rider pulled the reins, turned around in a tight arc, and came at the Throne Pagoda again.

The emperor, who had recovered from the initial shock, was being escorted down the spiraling stairs. But he was still only halfway to the foot of the Throne Pagoda, caught between the Worlds of Earth and Fire.

“Rénga, please forgive me!” The Captain of the Imperial Guards ducked and lifted the emperor’s body, thrust him over the side of the Pagoda, and dropped him.

The soldiers below had already stretched out a long, stiff piece of cloth. The emperor landed in it, trampolined up and down a few times, but appeared unhurt.

Kuni caught a glimpse of the emperor in the brief moment before he was rushed under the protective shell of overlapping shields. Years of alchemical medicine — taken in the hope of extending his life — had wreaked havoc with his body. Though the emperor was only fifty-five, he looked to be thirty years older. But Kuni was most struck by the old man’s hooded eyes peering out of his wrinkled face, eyes that for a moment had shown surprise and fear.

The sound of the kite diving behind Kuni was like a piece of rough cloth being torn. “Get down!” He pushed Rin to the ground and flopped on top of his friend, pulling the shield above their heads. “Pretend you are a turtle.”

Rin tried to flatten himself against the earth under Kuni. “I wish a ditch would open up so I could crawl into it.”

More flaming tar exploded around the Throne Pagoda. Some struck the top of the shield bunker, and as the sizzling tar oozed into the gaps between the shields, the soldiers beneath cried out in pain but held their positions. At the direction of the officers, the soldiers lifted and sloped their shields in unison to throw off the burning tar, like a crocodile flexing its scales to shake off excess water.

“I think it’s safe now,” said Kuni. He took away the shield and rolled off Rin.

Slowly, Rin sat up and watched his friend without comprehension. Kuni was rolling along the ground as if he was frolicking in the snow — how could Kuni think of playing games at a time like this?

Then he saw the smoke rising from Kuni’s clothes. He yelped and hurried over, helping to extinguish the flames by slapping at Kuni’s voluminous robes with his long sleeves.

“Thanks, Rin,” said Kuni. He sat up and tried to smile, but only managed a wince.

Rin examined Kuni: A few drops of burning oil had landed on his back. Through the smoking holes in the robe, Rin could see that the flesh underneath was raw, charred, and oozing blood.

“Oh gods! Does it hurt?”

“Only a little,” said Kuni.

“If you weren’t on top of me . . .” Rin swallowed. “Kuni Garu, you’re a real friend.”

“Eh, think nothing of it,” said Kuni. “As Sage Kon Fiji said: One should always — ow! — be ready to stick knives between one’s ribs if that would help a friend.” He tried to put some swagger into this speech but the pain made his voice unsteady. “See, Master Loing did teach me something.”

“That’s the part you remember? But that wasn’t Kon Fiji. You’re quoting from a bandit debating Kon Fiji.”

“Who says bandits don’t have virtues too?”

The sound of flapping wings interrupted them. The boys looked up. Slowly, gracefully, like an albatross turning over the sea, the kite flapped its wings, rose, turned around in a large circle, and began a third bombing run toward the Throne Pagoda. The rider was clearly tiring and could not gain as much altitude this time. The kite was very close to the ground.

A few of the archers managed to shoot holes in the wings of the stringless kite, and a few of the arrows even struck the rider, though his thick leather armor seemed to be reinforced in some manner, and the arrows stuck only briefly in the leather before falling off harmlessly.

Again, he folded the wings of his craft and accelerated toward the Throne Pagoda like a diving kingfisher.

The archers continued to shoot at the assassin, but he ignored the hailstorm of arrows and held his course. Flaming missiles exploded against the sides of the Throne Pagoda. Within seconds, the silk-and-bamboo construction turned into a tower of fire.

But the emperor was now safely ensconced under the pavises of the shieldmen, and with every passing moment, more archers gathered around the emperor’s position. The rider could see that his prize was out of reach.

Instead of another bombing attempt, the kite rider turned his machine to the south, away from the Procession, and kicked hard with his dwindling strength to gain some altitude.

“He’s heading to Zudi,” Rin said. “You think anyone we know back home helped him?”

Kuni shook his head. When the kite had passed directly over him and Rin, it had temporarily blotted out the glare of the sun. He had seen that the rider was a young man, not even thirty. He had the dark skin and long limbs common to the men of Haan, up north. For a fraction of a second, the rider, looking down, had locked gazes with Kuni, and Kuni’s heart thrilled with the fervent passion and purposeful intensity in those bright-green eyes.

“He made the emperor afraid,” Kuni said, as if to himself. “The emperor is just a man, after all.” A wide smile broke on his face.

Before Rin could shush his friend again, great black shadows covered them. The boys looked up and saw yet more reasons for the kite rider’s retreat.

Six graceful airships, each about three hundred feet long, the pride of the Imperial air force, drifted overhead. The airships had been at the head of the Imperial Procession, both to scout ahead and to impress the spectators. It had taken a while before the oarsmen could turn the ships around to bring them to the emperor’s aid.

The stringless kite grew smaller and smaller. The airships lumbered after the escaping assassin, their great feathered oars beating the air like the wings of fat geese struggling to lift off. The rider was already too far for the airships’ archers and stringed battle kites. They would not reach the city of Zudi before the nimble man landed and disappeared into its alleys.

The emperor, huddled in the dim shadows of the shield bunker, was furious, but he retained a calm mien. This was not the first assassination attempt, and it would not be the last; only this one had come closest to succeeding.

As he gave his order, his voice was emotionless and implacable.

“Find that man. Even if you have to tear apart every house in Zudi and burn down the estates of all the nobles in Haan, bring him before me.”

Copyright © 2015 by Ken Liu.

Excerpted from The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu.

Published by permission of the author and Saga Press.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.

Angry Robot Books Presents
The Rebirths of Tao
(novel excerpt)

Wesley Chu

CHAPTER ONE

The problem Vladimir had with this damn country was that everything was too damn big. The cars were too big, the music was too loud, and the ridiculous trees in this forest were too tall. The raggedy group he led detoured around the giant redwood tree blocking his path. Blasted thing was big as a house. And the stupid trees weren’t even red, though in this pitch-black darkness, he could barely see Alex clinging to his hand, let alone determine the color of tree bark. His eyes wandered up to the forest canopy. It was so thick he couldn’t see the stars. That made it nearly impossible to navigate. Where the hell was south?

At least the food portions here were healthy. That was something Vladimir approved of. He’d never had such a large breakfast before, much less in the middle of the night. Who eats burritos with five eggs in the middle of the night, anyway? His little group did, and to be honest, it was pretty good. It was too bad the meal had been two days ago.

“I need to rest,” Sachin said, leaning against the too-damn-tall tree. He propped his rifle against it and slid down to the mossy ground.

Vladimir reminded himself that the seventy-year-old Indian man had spent the majority of his life in a classroom at the Institute of Technology, recruiting promising students for the cause. The professor wasn’t used to running around the forest in the middle of the night, fleeing armed assailants. Vladimir looked down at his daughter and gave her a gentle nudge. She pulled out a canteen and walked over to Sachin, who drank his fill, pouring water down his chin and neck, letting it dribble down his shirt. Alex took out a rag and wiped the old man’s brow. Vladimir shook his head. She was a good girl, so much potential. She deserved better than this.

Somewhere in the distance, the barking of dogs in pursuit pierced the otherwise quiet night. Vladimir closed his eyes and listened. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes behind. His gaze moved from his daughter and Sachin to the other refugees: Petr, a Russian colonel he had had dealings with in the past, Rin, the Japanese nuclear physicist, Marsuka, her research assistant, Ohr, the former South Korean Senator, and the remaining survivors of the Siberian Epsilon Shock team.

He grimaced. His entire life had collapsed in the blink of an eye. His fortune confiscated, his wife murdered, and now he was nothing more than a destitute refugee with a teenage daughter in a land unfriendly to his kind, a far cry from the affluent businessman and power broker he had been just a few weeks earlier. He looked back at Alex, still helping the old professor. Well, at least part of his wife escaped. Tabs would continue living in his daughter.

Move. Every second of delay is costly.

“Yes, Ladm.”

“Break is over,” he barked. “We go. Now.”

He walked over, hooked an arm under Sachin’s armpit, and lifted him to his feet. “Let’s go, old man. You can rest when you’re safe. Or dead.” He looked over at his daughter standing on the other side of the elderly professor. “Alex, help him walk.”

The small group continued south, following the twisting and winding paths when they could, and making new ones when they had to. Vladimir was sure they had missed the rendezvous. The coded message at the diner back in Portland had said to hit 42°, -123° and follow the river. However, they had gotten picked up by a Penetra net and had had to deviate from their course. The scanners the Quasing invented to detect others of their kind residing within a living creature were now used by the humans to hunt them down.

Now, nine hours later, the federals were closing in, and the group was completely lost. They passed another giant tree, this time so big Vladimir couldn’t see its edge in the predawn darkness. The dogs’ barking was getting louder and louder.

This group would be a prize capture. None of them would allow their Quasing to be taken, though. Vladimir looked down at his beautiful daughter. All except for Alexandra. Vladimir didn’t care about sacrificing himself for Ladm, but no one was going to hurt his little girl, Quasing or no Quasing. There had to be a way out for her.

Do not forget your place, Vladimir.

They picked up their pace and for a while, it seemed to keep their pursuers at bay, but soon enough, the exhausted group began to lag again, Sachin most of all. As the first rays of light peeked through the forest canopy, Sachin broke. By then, he was stumbling badly. He fell to his knees and rolled onto his back. He shooed Alex away when she tried to help him up. Instead, he leaned against a tree trunk and looked up at the lush leaves overhead, and then at the greenery of the forest. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Come on, Sachin,” Rin urged.

He waved her off and kept his eyes closed. After a few seconds, his pained face changed. He nodded and looked at the rest of the group. “This place is beautiful and peaceful, like a painting. The air is clean and there is abundant life. Mawl would find serenity here.”

“Shut up, old fool, we’re all in this together,” Vladimir growled. “We’re not leaving you in the wild.”

Sachin struggled to his feet and slung his rifle around his shoulder. “It’s already settled. Mawl is at peace with this and by Brahman, I look forward to it. There are worse places to meet my maker, and for him to live free. Get moving. Go. I’ll buy you time.”

Vladimir moved to grab him. “I said we’re not leaving . . .” Sachin spun around and aimed his rifle at Vladimir, then slowly lowered it to point at Alex. “I mean what I said, you stubborn Russian. You have your little girl to think about. Now get out of here before what time I buy you doesn’t amount to anything.”

Do it. I have only known Mawl a short while on this planet when we fought together against the Bolsheviks. He will be remembered. I will return one day to find him.

Vladimir bit his lip. “Crazy fool.” He walked forward and embraced Sachin roughly. “Until the Eternal Sea, my friend. Mawl, stay out of sight of humans. Your part in this is over for now. Ladm will return for you one day, if not this lifetime, in the next.”

“Mrithyur maa amritham gamaya, my friend,” Sachin said, then turned around and limped in the direction of the sounds of the pursuing dogs.

Alex took a few steps after the professor and made the traditional Hindu sign of peace. “Phir milenge, Mr. Sachin. Goodbye, Mawl. Tabs says she’ll see you in the Eternal Sea.”

The sounds of humans shouting added to the increasingly loud barking of the dogs. By Vladimir’s estimate, they were probably no more than a few minutes behind them now. He put his arms around his daughter’s waist and hurried her along. “No time for sentiments. Let’s go!”

Vladimir sprinted into the darkness, pushing Alex ahead of him. The others would keep up with him, or maybe they wouldn’t. He had survived with them for weeks now, sharing food, sleeping in the same beds, fighting alongside them. But now that things were looking their worst, and the group was about to be captured, it was every man for himself.

All he cared about was getting his daughter to safety, even at the cost of his own life, or those of his companions, if necessary. Maybe if he outran the rest of the group, they would buy him some time to escape their accursed pursuers. Vladimir felt ashamed for thinking this, but when it came to Alexandra, nothing else mattered.

Do not feel ashamed. My only regret is involving her in this situation. Tabs should never have inhabited her when her mother died.

“I don’t blame you or Tabs, Ladm. I blame those assholes that killed Marta and these damn Americans breathing down our necks.”

Unfortunately for this plan, everyone else was in better shape than Vladimir, so they all kept up pretty easily. A few minutes later, the unmistakable sound of a Kalashnikov pierced the early morning air, its familiar peck-peck-peck joined by a chorus of higher-sounding rat-tat-tats. Flocks of birds took off, flying around trees as the forest came to life. The exchange continued for a few minutes, and then stopped. The forest settled and became silent again. The group stopped in unison and looked back into the thickets.

“Be well, Sachin,” Rin bowed. “May you find a--”

“Later! We don’t have time to mourn.” Vladimir shoved her forward urgently. “We have to keep going.”

Ohr looked at the others and then shook his head. “It’s no use running. We’re not going to outrun dogs and federals in their own country.” He pointed at a small ledge off to the side. “That is as good of a point as we’re going to get. I say we make a stand there and die fighting. I refuse to be run down like an animal, with my back to the enemy.”

Vladimir shook his head.

He is right.

“No,” he said, looking down at Alex. “We keep going.”

There is no other chance. You have a day’s worth of forest in front of you and the enemy only minutes behind. This will be the only time you can choose the battlefield. This ledge is an elevated spot facing west, your back will be against the sunrise. It is the right strategy.

Vladimir grimaced. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it seemed the damn federals had forced their hand. He swung his rifle from his back and stomped toward the stone ledge. The others followed suit, climbing up the steep slant and stripping themselves of their gear. He watched as the surviving Epsilons attached their signature bayonets to their rifles and pistols, and then huddled together and prayed. Vladimir wished he had that sort of fervor. Over the past few months, his faith had been shaken.

A few minutes later, the group was entrenched in a defensive formation around a cluster of boulders elevated several meters above the ground. Vladimir hated to admit it, but Ladm and the others were right. By now, the sounds of the barking dogs were all around them, and he expected to see their hunters any minute. Hiding would be useless; no doubt the federals were carrying portable Penetra scanners.

Vladimir turned to Alex and pointed at a small crevice off to the side. “I want you to hide in there until this is all over. Don’t come out until I get you. If we fall, you keep running, understand?” His daughter made a face and drew her pistol. Vladimir snarled. “Definitely not. You are not . . .”

She cocked the pistol in one smooth motion. “Don’t be silly, Papa. I cannot escape the scanners. Besides, you’ll need me. I’m a better shot than you.”

Vladimir stared at his daughter, half with terror that she was about to wander into a firefight and half with pride. He dropped to a knee and drew her close. “Your mother would be so proud. Keep your head down. Shoot only when you have a clear target.”

“I got movement,” Marsuka hissed.

The others scrambled to the edge and took up position behind cover. Vladimir pressed his back to a boulder and unclipped his satchel of spare magazines. He placed three on the ground and handed the bag to Ohr, who was kneeling against the other side of the boulder. He looked over at Alex on the other side of him, positioned in between two smaller rocks. Dark figures emerged from woods, moving in between trees and brush, flanking them on both sides.

“They know we’re up here,” Petr growled. “Fire at will before they entrench.”

He opened fire and the rest followed suit. Within seconds, the dark forest was lit up by yellow bursts of enemy muzzle flashes. The rattling exchanges punctured the previously calm dawn. The sky came to life as hundreds of birds took to the air, adding to the chaos and confusion. The fight went well at first. Between the skill of the Epsilon-trained operatives and their elevated position, the body count initially skewed heavily in his group’s favor. The federals had far superior numbers though, and as Vladimir’s group’s casualties began to mount, so did the enemy’s ability to sustain the fight. Slowly, the tide changed.

To his left, Polski, one of the Epsilons, took a bullet to the head. Vladimir pulled Alex from the edge and pointed at the body. She nodded and scampered on all fours to rifle through the dead Epsilon’s coat for spare magazines. She found four and tossed one to Vladimir.

He caught it mid-air and pointed at the other end of the ledge. “See if the others need some as well.”

He glanced to his right as Ohr pulled back to reload. He only had one magazine left on the ground next to him.

All of them must be running low by now. Ammunition wasn’t light after all, and most of their carry weight was reserved for food and supplies. He heard Marsuka call out that he was dry. He looked to his left as Alex slid another magazine toward the scientist.

No sooner did Marsuka pick up the magazine, than he stiffened, a bullet puncturing his neck. Alex dodged out of the way as his fell to the ground and rolled toward her. Vladimir’s heart broke. She was far too young to witness such things. Then, if it was even possible, the situation took a turn for the worse. Just as Vlel, Marsuka’s Quasing, rose into the air, a jet of flame shot up from below and consumed him. The small group watched horrified as the millions-year-old being evaporated into the morning sky.

Their dwindling group fought on with renewed vigor. Vladimir shot two more federals before he had to reload, and then four more. By that time, only Rin had ammunition left. A few seconds later, she had run out as well. They had lost, and this ledge would become their grave. The gunfire became one-sided, until eventually, someone below ordered a ceasefire.

“Come out with your hands over your heads, aliens,” a voice bellowed through a bullhorn. “We know there are five of you up there. We have scanners. There’s no escape.” Vladimir held Alex tightly as he desperately prayed for an escape. The best he could hope for was the so-called Alien Containment facility, a top-secret prison where the Western countries incarcerated and ran tests on the Quasing. The worst and most likely outcome was torture and death, and with that, the death of Ladm as well.

The time has come to surrender to the Eternal Sea.

That was the logical thing to do. Give Ladm, Tabs, and the others a chance, but Vladimir had never been one of those fanatics. He had come to Ladm later in life and had never developed the zeal that many others of his rank possessed. He looked over at Rin and Ohr; those two weren’t hardliners either. All three were just smart, capable people who saw an advantage with the Quasing and took it. Now it had led them here.

His gaze wandered to Petr. He was as fanatical as they came. If his Quasing told him to kill everyone in the group to allow the others a chance to escape, he would do it. Right now, the man was praying with his eyes closed, preparing to sacrifice himself. That was the group’s next move. That was the only move they had left.

Logically, it is the right decision. Make your peace.

Vladimir squeezed Alex tightly and knew he couldn’t do it. She was an innocent; she had her whole life ahead of her. Surely the federals would show mercy. Not even they could be so cruel.

“You have one minute before we gas your location, aliens,” the voice from below called through the bullhorn. “I cannot guarantee your safety then.”

Petr finished his prayer. There was going to be little mercy from either him or the federals, but as of this point, he knew on which side his little girl would have a better chance of surviving.

Before Petr could carry out that last deadly deed, Vladimir took his rifle and swung it with everything he had at the man’s face, knocking him out cold. Before the others could stop him, he stood up and held his hands over his head. “There is a child here. We are unarmed.”

This is unacceptable! You know what will happen to us.

“Shut up, Ladm,” growled Vladimir aloud.

“Drop your weapons and come down off the ledge. Keep your hands over your head,” the voice below said. “We can track all of you so don’t even think about trying anything.”

Vladimir grabbed the unconscious man’s feet. “Ohr, help me pick up Petr.” The Korean grabbed the colonel’s arms, and together, they carried him down the ledge.

As soon as they reached ground level, they were surrounded by eight uniformed men. There were nine bodies on the ground. Vladimir grunted in satisfaction. At least they had put up a good fight. Still, only the end result was important. In this case, the result was defeat. Vladimir slumped his shoulders as all five of them were handcuffed and forced to kneel down. Even Alex. Seeing her like this brought tears to his eyes. How had it come to this?

“Agent Kallis, we have the group of aliens rounded up,” the lead agent spoke into a small black box attached at his shoulder. “Bagging and tagging now.”

“Good,” a voice crackled back.

“We have a new signature,” one of the federals standing near the back barked. “Just appeared out of the blue. Behind that tree.” The team of federals standing out in the open scrambled for cover, leaving Vladimir and his people kneeling on the ground.

“How many?” the man with the bullhorn said.

“Just one. Stationary.”

Six of the federals spread out facing the giant redwood on the western edge of the clearing. Two remained behind to guard their prisoners.

“Come out with your hands up,” the leader yelled through his bullhorn. “You are outnumbered and we have the rest of your kind held captive. No one has to get hurt.”

Two soft pings came from the east and the two men guarding Vladimir’s group dropped. Then three more pings, and two federals on the outer edge of the clearing fell. The remaining federals, now believing themselves flanked, dove for cover.

“How many signatures?” the leader yelled.

“Still one!”

“Damn it, they must have ghosts with them.”

Another ping, this time from the west. The federal with the scanner fell.

“Drop your weapons,” a voice called out from the forest, “and the rest of you can live.”

The surviving four federals swiveled in all directions, trying to determine where the shots were coming from. Finally, one of them dropped his gun and held his hands up. Two others, after a second, followed suit. All eyes were on the remaining armed federal, the one with the bullhorn, as he considered his options. There was a soft ping from the forest and the dirt between his feet kicked up. He finally followed suit and dropped his rifle.

“Always a guy in the bunch a little slower than the others, almost ruining it for everyone else,” a figure said, stepping out of the woods. He was dressed in camouflage and a hoodie, and carried a small assault rifle. He walked into the clearing, gun still trained on the four remaining federals.

Vladimir studied their savior. The man didn’t look or sound familiar, at least not by the descriptions from their contact’s dossier, considering their contact was supposed to be a woman. Most of his face was covered with a pair of dark brown aviator sunglasses and a scraggly beard, and the rest of his head was hidden by a skullcap.

“On your knees, folks.” He squinted at the leader who had carried the bullhorn, who squinted back. “You know me, Boy Scout?” he said finally.

The now de-bullhorned agent scowled. “Yeah, you’re a ghost.”

“Not just a ghost. The Ghost.” The man grabbed the comm from the agent’s shoulder and lifted it to his mouth. “Hello. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

“Special Agent Kallis of the Interpol Extraterrestrial Task Force. Who the fuck is this?” the voice snapped.

“It’s your favorite human traitor.”

“Rayban Ghost? You bastard. What have you done with my men?”

“They’re fine. How are you? How is the family?”

“Well, you shot my guys, so pretty damn terrible right now. And how many times do I have to tell you to never bring up my family?”

“Well, I used the electric tranqs on the guys I hit. They should be fine. You still got some live ones here, and they’ll stay that way if you follow my demands. There’s six North Korean Nationals at Guantanamo I need released within the hour. I also need fifty million dollars wired to a Swiss account.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Okay, how about we compromise and you just donate four thousand bucks, a thousand for each of your surviving men, to the Eureka Animal Shelter. Then we’ll call it square.” He looked over at the kneeling federals. “Maybe one-point-five for that big guy over there.”

“You better watch your back, Rayban Ghost. I’ll get you one day.”

“And my little dog too?” the Ghost grinned, clearly enjoying this exchange. “Like you said, no one else has to get hurt.” The Ghost turned to the men in front of him. “Face down with your hands behind your back. You know the drill. I got half a dozen others in the forest who I had to convince to not blow your brains out and toss your bodies into vats of acid.”

A few minutes later, the federals made a neat little line of trussed-up bodies as they squirmed face down in the dirt. The Rayban Ghost took the time to tie up the unconscious ones as well. Vladimir wondered why the man was using non-lethal force. Satisfied with his work, the Ghost spoke into his own throat mic and then signaled for Vladimir and his group to stand and follow him.

“Thank you, uh, Rayban Ghost,” Vladimir said as the stranger hauled him and his group to their feet. Unfortunately, their skin did not touch through the thick layers of clothing, though by now, he was pretty sure this man wasn’t a vessel.

“Hey, what about us?” the de-bullhorned agent shouted. “You can’t leave us here. We’ll die like this! Why even bother sparing our lives then?”

“Rayban Ghost, we had a deal,” Kallis’s voice shouted over the comm.

The Ghost picked up the receiver. “You’ll get your men back. I told you before, Kallis. We’re the good guys. I’ll call a forest ranger for them later on.” Then he tore the comm unit from its cord. He turned and gestured to Vladimir’s group. “Shall we?”

The Ghost marched them fifteen minutes deeper south into the forest. When he was satisfied they were far enough away from the federals, he called for a stop and studied the group.

“Thank you, brother,” Vladimir said.

“Authenticate yourself.”

“To advance without the possibility being checked . . .” Vladimir began saying.

The passphrase died in his mouth when the Rayban Ghost cut him off. “Shut it, Genjix. I don’t care about that.” Then Vladimir realized who had saved them. At this point, he wasn’t sure if they were better off being prisoners of the Interpol Extraterrestrial Task Force than with this man. At least with the IXTF, his people had a chance of being released by their people on the inside. With the Prophus, he expected nothing more than a quick death as soon as they got whatever they wanted out of him.

“I want names; you and your Quasing’s,” the Ghost said. “Full names and origins. Now.”

Both Ohr and Rin looked to Vladimir for direction. He shook his head and spoke in a clear and loud voice. “Vladimir Mengsk. Ladm. I am a businessman from Moscow, and this is . . .”

“I can speak for myself, Papa,” Alex said. She took a step forward and lifted her chin. “Alexandra Mengsk. My job is to be my papa’s daughter, betrayer.” She jutted her chin out at the Ghost as a challenge.

Vladimir stiffened as the Ghost approached his daughter and dropped to a knee. “Feisty little one, eh? And what’s your Quasing’s name, Alexandra Mengsk, Papa’s daughter?”

Alex shook her head, refusing to speak. The Ghost looked up at Vladimir.

“It’s all right,” Vladimir said. “Go ahead and tell our friend here.”

“Tabs,” the name came out of her reluctantly.

The Ghost smiled. “Thank you, child. I hope she guides you well.” He stood up. “What about the rest of you?” Petr, unsurprisingly, refused to divulge any information.

The colonel clamped down and looked away, refusing even to acknowledge the Rayban Ghost’s existence.

The Ghost sighed. “Like I said, always someone screwing it up for everyone.” He grabbed Petr by the shoulder and kneed him in the stomach, doubling him over. The Ghost knocked him to the ground and drew his pistol, jamming it into his forehead. He looked over at Rin. “His name and Quasing. Now.”

“Petr. Coruv,” she said reluctantly, eyes down on the ground.

Petr glared. “Weak runt.”

His name must have meant something to the Rayban Ghost, who took a renewed interest in Petr. “Coruv. Russian by your accent.” He looked down and saw the bayonet holster on each side of Petr’s boots. “You’re one of Vinnick’s dogs?”

“What’s it to you, betrayer?” Petr snarled.

“There’s little I can do with a rabid animal.” The Ghost took off his aviator sunglasses. “The Russians killed thirty Prophus refugees escaping the Chinese Inquisition two years ago. I had some friends there.”

“I took great pleasure partaking--” Petr said.

“My name is Roen Tan, you mass-murdering asshole.”

“You! You and your bitch were the ones that betrayed us to the humans!” Petr lunged at him and collapsed from a single gunshot through the chest. His sparkling Quasing rose from his body and fluttered about as if a wisp among these giant trees.

“Get out of here, Coruv, and consider yourself lucky I don’t have a flamethrower on me.” Roen Tan turned and faced the rest of the group. “Anyone else want to release their Quasing? I’ll be more than happy to oblige.” He stared each of them down before finally adding. “Here’s the deal. I can kill you now so your Quasing can find a host among the redwoods for a few centuries, or you can cooperate and come with me. Oh, by the way, if you were expecting your contact, sorry, but I think her Quasing is now living the good life in an anteater. What will it be?”

The small group exchanged looks, and the rest of them looked to Vladimir. He stepped forward. “We will cooperate, Prophus.”

“Good.” Roen gestured to Ohr. “Authenticate yourself.”

“Excuse me, Mr. uh . . . The Ghost,” Rin asked. “Why don’t you just use the vessel the Penetra scanner had detected earlier? He can just identify us through touch instead of going through this charade.”

Roen Tan shook his head. “I had to send him off ahead. His mom’s going to kill us. He’s already late for school.”

Copyright © 2015 by Wesley Chu.

Excerpted from The Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu.

Published by permission of the author and Angry Robot Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 2014, Wesley Chu was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award. Chu’s debut novel from Angry Robot Books, The Lives of Tao, earned him a Young Adult Library Services Association Alex Award and a Science Fiction Goodreads Choice Award Finalist slot. The sequel, The Deaths of Tao, continues the story of secret agent Roen Tan and his sarcastic telepathically bonded alien, Tao. Chu has two books scheduled for 2015. The last book in the Tao trilogy, The Rebirths of Tao, is coming out April 7th. Time Salvager, published by Tor Books, featuring an energy stealing time traveler with addiction issues, is slated for July 7th, 2015.

Interview: Chris Williams

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Chris Williams has been with Walt Disney Animation Studios for twenty years, working on a variety of projects, including Mulan, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Bolt. He also co-directed Big Hero 6, winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your new movie is called Big Hero 6; how did this project come about?

There were actually two directors on the movie, I’m one of them and Don Hall was the other. It really began with Don and his passion for the superhero genre. He grew up loving superhero stories and reading comic books and he also loved animation, and that’s what brought him to Disney. He was coming off of directing Winnie the Pooh and he expressed to our boss, John Lasseter, how much he would like to work in that genre and, at the same time, try to defy peoples’ expectations of what you might do with that genre. John is very passionate about passion, and when he sees that people are excited about something, that gets him revved up. So he asked Don to go off and explore. Don found this original Marvel property called Big Hero 6. It was, obviously, on a bit more of the obscure side. He pitched it to the other directors at Disney Feature Animation, and to John as well, and at that point, about three and a half years ago — you don’t pitch an in-depth plot; you don’t get into the minutia — he just pitched a broad overview of the emotional potential for the film, and he talked about the idea of a young protagonist who loses his brother but is left with his older brother’s creation, this robot Baymax, who would become his surrogate older brother. He focused on that, and it got everybody really engaged. At that point, John green-lit the film and the last three and a half years has really been about this attempt to realize the emotional potential that Don laid out.

As far as myself, I came on the show about a year and a half ago as a storyboard artist, and I’d been on it for a few months when Don asked me to join him as the co-director. He was in a very similar situation to the one that I was in when I was directing Bolt; I got a certain ways down the line and realized I just couldn’t be in enough places. At that point, I reached out to Byron Howard, who had been storyboarding on the film and was a powerhouse story artist and someone who had been along for the journey, so it was a great transition for him to join me as co-director.

Do you remember, specifically, at what point in the project you were first introduced to the Big Hero 6 and what your first impressions of it were?

Don brought it to our attention; I’d never heard of it before then. Because it was a little known property, we had a lot of flexibility; we knew the audience wasn’t going to come with a preconceived notion of what this movie should be, or what these characters should be. We knew we were going to have to take a lot of liberties and create something fairly new.

I haven’t read the comic books but, doing a little research, it seems like, as you say, that there are a lot of changes. For people who haven’t read the comics, what are they like and what were some of those big changes?

I’m not an expert on the original comic; I sort of took a glancing look at them. At the point where I joined the show, I almost thought that it would be better for me to be an outsider from the original source material. Don is more familiar with the ins and outs of the original comic. But probably the biggest change is the character of Baymax himself: He’s physically very different. He’s a robot, and not able to transform into lots of different things, and the idea of him being a nurse robot created by Hiro’s brother — it was all new stuff that was there to serve our story.

Where did your concept of Baymax come from, this sort of friendly, inflatable robot? Were there any influences on that?

I love Baymax. He is purely selfless, purely good, and I love these kinds of naïve characters that have almost a newborn’s perspective on the world; they’re seeing the world with fresh eyes. To me, you can trace the lineage back to characters like Bambi or Dumbo, some of the original Disney characters, where there is this innocence and purity to them that is a big part of their appeal. I was really drawn to that.

No character is strong in a vacuum; it’s always about how they relate to the characters around them, so it was also important to make sure that Hiro and Baymax would work well as a duo. We didn’t want Baymax to be a human in a robot suit; we wanted him to be robotic and very deliberate and methodical in the way he made decisions and the way that he moved. So we figured the best contrast would be to have Hiro be someone who was very young, energetic, sort of manic. He’s a really smart guy; he’s got a thousand thoughts a second, and to have all that energy next to Baymax and to have these two characters working at very different paces, we knew that they would be great foils for each other. To me, it was about examining and pushing the dynamic between them, so each made the other funnier and more interesting.

I heard that you guys actually know some robotics students, and that Baymax was at least partially inspired by students who were making inflatable robots. Is that true?

This was before my time on the film, but Don had gone to Carnegie Mellon and done a bunch of research. He had gone to a lot of robotic schools and things, but he had a real epiphany there. He was introduced to the idea of inflatable robotics, and they did say that it was something that would have practical applications in the medical field: They’re soft, and they can’t hurt people, and they’re not intimidating-looking like robots can sometimes be, so people are very comfortable with them.

A light bulb went off for Don at that point, and for us, that was a real Hallelujah moment, because, if you work in Disney animation, and certainly if you work for John Lasseter, and you embark to tell a story that features a robot, he’s going to ask you to put up an image of every iconic robot that’s ever existed in movies or TV shows or anything and then say, “Give me something new.” And that is a great exercise; it was the same thing on Bolt — he asked us to put up iconic dogs — and that forces you to not go with your first impulse; it forces you to really go out and explore and find something original. When Don came back and had these sketches and ideas, we all realized that we’d found a very special version of a robot. Once we had that, the character design got resolved pretty quickly, so we’ve had that for a long time.

When you were putting all of those iconic robots up on the wall, which of them were your favorites? Or which ones did you think were the most interesting?

I think we all have a soft spot in our hearts for the Terminator, and Robocop — the original one is a great movie; one of my favorites — but we looked at a lot of Japanese robots, and you had your Mechagodzilla up there. We also looked at some of the original anime and one of the things I was first turned on to as a kid was a show called Battle of the Planets, that was just repackaged Gatchaman — which is a really old anime series — and some of the robot designs in that were really cool. You end up putting them all up, everything you can think of: Johnny 5 would be on the board. It makes you aware of all the things you’d forgotten about and forces you to stretch.

How about the Iron Giant? My friends and I sort of saw this movie, in a way, as a spiritual successor to the Iron Giant.

Sure, that would’ve been up there, and just to be mentioned with that movie is a real compliment; it’s one of my favorites. I was so moved emotionally. You know, you have those special experiences watching movies that you remember as much as you remember the movie itself, and I saw that movie with my family. I’m from Canada, originally, and I’d been living in the States at that point and I was back home and we went to see a matinee, and my brother and I both erupted in tears at the end. It was just a powerful movie: that whole moment where he flies up into the sky. I get emotional just thinking about it.

The other robots in this movie that really struck me are the microbots, which I thought were just amazingly cool on-screen.

That was another element in the story that was really inspired by the research; they had sort of discovered this swarm technology, where tiny robots — some of them were on the ground and some of them could actually fly — can react to each other and they can form a pattern, and that was something that was a real springboard. You really can’t underestimate the importance of research in our process; once we pitch a simple version of a story or an idea, we’ll always be asked to go out and do lots of research. The goal is to do research before you’ve had your story take shape, because if you don’t, there’s a danger that you’ll always try to twist the research to serve your story as opposed to being really inspired by and letting the research inform the story. One of the things with a movie like this, where we’re trying to have it feel like it’s a slightly futuristic and fantastic world — at the same time, you want it to feel plausible and grounded and based in a real science, so we were drawing from cutting edge technology. But one of the dangers is that the actual technology moves so quickly that you have to work extra hard to make sure you’re ahead of it when the movie actually comes out. We weren’t really worried about the idea of telekinesis — that’s one of the things in the movie: The microbots are controlled through telekinesis. Ten months ago, maybe eight, I was driving in my car and there was a news report about people actually testing out telekinesis, and they had one guy who was able to make another guy move his finger involuntarily — they were both hooked up to a computer — and that just floored me.

Speaking of rapidly advancing technology, I heard that it was a technological challenge to show the microbots on-screen; that it required all sorts of fancy computer equipment. Can you talk about that?

One of the biggest breakthroughs that was employed in this movie was the Hyperion Rendering System; that was a thing that was developed in-house. Again, I am not very technologically savvy myself, so I wouldn’t be able to get into a ton of detail about it, but it was something that allowed for us to have the light behave more authentically: Light coming from a light source would bounce many more times in our movie than any movie that have come before. You feel it when you watch Big Hero 6, where we’re in a city with a lot of light sources, and there’s just something that feels more grounded and real than anything you’ve ever seen before. This new system allowed us to set the movie in a city as dense as San Fransokyo. It’s also something that you see front and center because one of our main characters, Baymax, is a vinyl robot and light is passing through him and bouncing around inside of him, and it does feel like a soft vinyl surface that he’s made out of, and I don’t think we would’ve been able to capture that with the technology that we had before.

The decision had to be made, a few years ago, as to whether we were going to use this new technology — it was hot off the presses and still needed some development — and I think there’s just something culturally here at Feature Animation that I felt has been growing over the years, especially since John and Ed took over — about eight years ago — where nobody wants to back away from a challenge. So they said, “Let’s go for it,” and they created this thing, and suddenly we were able to have this incredible world and that pushes the story, because we’re all in-house; we’re all in one building together. And so then the creative side gets energized, and they create something that’s bigger and better than anything we’ve tried before, and that motivates the technology side. It’s very cyclical, and I think that’s something that’s pretty unique to this place.

You mention San Fransokyo, this wonderful setting that you guys came up with. Could you talk about the process of developing that?

It came about because the original source material, Big Hero 6, was a Japanese superhero team, so that’s why that was in our heads. At the same time, one of the things we love to do is create new worlds, so we wanted it to be not on our Earth as we know it; that got the creative juices going. I think it was Don Hall who first conceived of this idea of San Fransokyo, this hybrid — this blending — of east and west, of San Francisco and Tokyo.

To me, it’s cool, it’s different, but one of the things I like the most about it is that it’s a visual indicator of something that’s very important to the movie, which is this idea of synthesis. Because we knew that this movie was going to be blending what Disney is and what Marvel is and what the superhero genre is, and one of the things that I was very mindful of was that, even genre-wise, we had a melding of two things: We had a superhero origin story, but we also had a boy and his dog — or robot — story, and we had to tell these stories without telling one at the expense of another; they needed to come together.

I heard that the city was procedurally generated, so it was sort of randomized to develop the whole city?

To some extent. I know that they started with the actual map of San Francisco; all the streets, all the buildings are accurate; the layout of San Francisco, all the topography. But then everything was heightened: The hills were made twice as tall, and the buildings maybe two or three times as high, and then it was given an injection of a Japanese aesthetic. So to some extent, I suppose there would be some random generation, but really, once you create the shots, you have to go in and design the city; you can’t just let a computer do it. It really comes down to our Art Director and our Production Designer, Scott Watanabe and Paul Felix, and our incredible Visual Development department to really figure out how to bring together these two aesthetics without it feeling slapped together. Scott Watanabe was essential to that; he had lived in Tokyo and San Francisco, and is just an incredible artist. He did it in a very thoughtful way.

I love the establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, where it has this Japanese architectural styling to it.

I love it too. Those are the kinds of things I can’t take credit for; we definitely benefit from an amazing visual development crew and I look at that shot and my mouth is agape.

Are there any other details like that, that you might not notice as a casual viewer but, working on the movie over this long period of time, caught your eye?

One of the things that’s nice about San Francisco is that it is a very iconic city; I really love the treatment of Coit Tower, the way it’s been given a new aesthetic; the Transamerica building — it’s fun to look at these things that you know and then see how they were treated. There were also a few Easter eggs; little hidden things that people can look for in the city.

One thing about this movie that my friends and I really liked was how positive it was about science and being a nerd. At what point in the process did that idea come to you, or how did you include that in the story?

I think it came pretty naturally. One of the things to bear in mind is that working at Disney Animation is sort of a mecca of nerdom in its own right, and a lot of us grew up spending a lot of time in our bedrooms writing stories and drawing pictures, lost in our own heads.

We started from a point where we wanted to have Hiro and his brother both be really intelligent, and we knew that Baymax was going to be designed and built by Hiro’s older brother, Tadashi, so it just naturally made the college setting right for us. We knew that we wanted to have our heroes not be powered by superpowers or magic or anything like that; it was going to be something that was using technology. We knew that was going to be fundamental to the story. We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback, and one of the things that is most satisfying is what you’re talking about: I hear people say that they saw the movie with their kids and their kids were excited and inspired and told their parents they want to go to college — making being smart and curious cool. We essentially wanted to make a really fun and emotionally engaging movie, but if it in any way inspires scientific curiosity, then I’m all for that.

You mentioned doing scientific research for the robots; did you have to do any research for the plasma lasers and mag-lift stuff?

Yeah; and again, I wasn’t actually on those trips. That was Don Hall. Those are cutting edge technologies that we were excited about and wanted to put in the film. He spent a lot of time visiting campuses and seeing what people are into these days.

Which aspects of the film were you the most involved with?

Basically the story; I come from a story background. I’ve been at Disney Animation for twenty years now in the story department, and I’ve been a storyboard artist and director. I spend most of my time in the story room or recording room, or in editorial. That’s my passion, and that’s where I’ll always want to be.

You mentioned growing up reading a lot of books and comics; which particular books or comics got you into this so passionately?

As far as comic books, I tended to be drawn more to the artist. Joe Kubert was one of my favorites, and I’m never convinced I’m pronouncing his name properly, but he did Sgt. Rock and I collected all those and there was just something about his drawing style; he was able to suggest an entire forest with a few well-placed brushstrokes. To this day, I aspire to draw more like him.

How did you go from being a kid looking at the art to actually working at Disney?

I think it was almost pre-destined; all I did as a kid was draw and write and I would create these stories and make these worlds out of Plasticine and I got into making motion capture — not motion capture — stop-motion —

You had a motion-capture rig in your house growing up?

That would be a strange story. No: Stop-motion films when I was a kid. It was just something that was in me, but at the same time I don’t think I had quite worked out a master plan as far as what I ought to do with my life. I studied fine arts up in Canada for a few years, and then it was my mom that encouraged me to go to Sheridan College and study animation. At that point, I was interested in animation but I wasn’t that much of an expert on it, and it was there that I discovered how much I loved it and made it my focus. They had an international program there where I would study for two summers and then a Disney recruiter came up and looked at my portfolio, and they asked me to come down to the Florida studio as an intern to study story, animation, layout, backgrounds, and all sorts of things. But I kept turning every assignment into a story assignment and that’s where I really discovered that, and that Disney figured out, that’s what I was best at and passionate about. So they sent me to California and I’ve been here ever since. That was about twenty years ago; my first film was Mulan.

When you say that you studied story, what would you say are some of the big lessons you’ve learned about doing a story for an animated film?

One of the things that I’ve come to really value is a collaborative environment; that’s one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, as far as constructing a great story. It’s a small team of us that make these stories — a director or two, a writer or two and then maybe six to ten story artists, and then also an entire crew who will see internal screenings and give you their feedback — and I think that if you can foster an environment where people feel comfortable volunteering their ideas, and even comfortable disagreeing with each other or me, that’s when you really start cooking. A lot of people aspire to a collaborative environment, but in a lot of ways it fights human nature. It’s nice to just be reaffirmed all the time and be told you’re brilliant and every idea you have is great, but ultimately it’s not going to allow the movie to get better.

When I first started, I had a lot of confidence; I know story, I know what works and what doesn’t, and I was probably headstrong and saw things more black and white. And then one of the things you come to accept and understand over the years is that even when you’re absolutely certain that you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong.

Are there any specific instances where you were absolutely sure you were right and then later decided that you were wrong?

There was a scene where Hiro and Baymax fly through the city together — we call that scene “First Flight” — and it’s really dynamic and cinematic and let a lot of our departments show their stuff; the lighting and the layout is just fantastic. After that, there’s a very quiet scene between Hiro and Baymax. Initially in the reels, that scene didn’t just have Hero and Baymax on top of the wind turbine; it had all six of the Big Hero 6, and it was more of a comedic beat. I was convinced that was the right thing to do; I felt we needed to hear the teams’ voices again and get them more engaged and structurally it seemed very sound. But when we put the whole movie up, you just felt there was something missing from Hiro and Baymax’s relationship, so at that point we looked at that scene again and realized it would be much stronger, and serve the movie better, if it was a quieter and sweeter scene just between Hiro and Baymax. That was a late change in our schedule, and it paid huge dividends. It’s the scene in the movie where we realize how deeply Hiro and Baymax care about each other; I think it’s the point where the audience invests in those characters as a duo in a way they hadn’t until that point.

That’s one [instance] that comes offhand, but it’s a constant process of stating your point of view and then being able to be flexible.

I have a couple random questions I wanted to get to: Which of the characters in the movie do you identify with the most?

Being a fan of superhero movies and science fiction — and just movies in general — there’s some Fred in me and a lot of us here at Feature Animation. His awareness of the tropes of the genre is something that I think is always kind of fun. There’s also a certain goofiness in Honey Lemon that I probably possess, but I aspire to be as cool as Go Go. I might give a different answer on a different day. I suppose I would also aspire to be as good and selfless as Baymax, but I suppose that’s impossible for us humans.

Fred’s technique for stretching out his underwear use: Who came up with that?

That’s funny, because we do spend years on these things. We debate everything and go into the minutia, and that line and his exact methodology did evolve; it was a different order of events for his front-back-inside out and all that. At one point T.J. Miller, who plays Fred — he’s a master ad-libber — came up with some of his own versions. Even John Lasseter, who goes from being engaged on a macro level to a very micro level at times, gave his point of view on what the line should be. I can’t remember when exactly we landed it, but it certainly went through some growing pains.

Have any of the reactions you’ve gotten to the movie from fans been particularly interesting or memorable?

The one that I especially appreciated was the one that I mentioned: The idea that people are talking about the fact that it’s making nerds, and especially science and technology, cool. That’s something that I really was taken aback by. After the years of working on the film — and it involves late nights and working weekends and a lot of sacrifice and missing time with my kids, and everybody on the crew makes sacrifices; they are dedicated, professional people who work hard and are committed to making something great — I got to go see it in a proper theater with a proper audience; to hear people laughing and especially to have people get as emotionally engaged as they were — you hear the sniffling and things like that — is so gratifying and makes the whole journey worthwhile. I’ve seen it a few times now, and all three times there was applause at the end, and it means everything to us. To me, it really is high stakes; when you embark on making one of these films, it’s just a few people, but as you move forward in the production, you have hundreds of people investing their creative energy and their time into this one thing. And that’s where the stakes get very high. It cannot be a bad movie; it cannot be an okay movie. It has to be a great movie. That’s a very motivating thing to me; I think about the crew and the sacrifices they’re making.

How about the Stan Lee cameo at the end? Was that something you always planned to do, or was that something that developed at some point in the process?

We did try to keep that under wraps, but at this point I think the cat’s out of the bag. We were making this very ambitious film — it’s huge in scope, the sets are massive and there’s a lot of characters — and so Don and I both said, “Boy, it would be great to have some kind of end credit button, but I don’t know if we have the bandwidth or time or crew to do that.” We were just trying to work on the movie itself and make sure it was where it needed to be.

So we put it off and I remember Don and I both had the same experience when we went, opening weekend, to see Guardians of the Galaxy; the movie ended and nobody budged. Everybody knew to just sit and wait. Don and I, that Monday morning, basically ran to each other and we were like, “We got a problem,” because yes it’s a Disney film, but everyone knows there’s a Marvel connection. What if people sit and wait through the credits and there’s nothing? Then the last emotion they experience would be disappointment. And we said, “We can’t let that happen.” This was very late stages of the production, so we knew we had to come up with something quickly. I went off and wrote the “button” and storyboarded it very roughly and laid it out on my floor, and I called Don over and pitched it to him and he laughed. But I knew that the challenge was just going to be the logistics of it; we were running out of time, the crew was very busy, and that would make it more expensive.

Then something great happened: When I was pitching the button, our producer, Roy Conli, walked in just as we got to the big joke, and Roy busts out laughing, and we knew at that point that it was going to happen, because Roy is the money man of the movie and he’s someone that puts the movie first and he knew it was a good idea. One of the things that we did, and a lot of people don’t know this: We actually kept that button a secret from our own crew, which is nearly impossible here at Disney Feature Animation; all the computers are linked up so you can look at each other’s work. Our visual effects supervisor, Kyle Odermatt, went in and created a secret area where people wouldn’t know it was hiding, and we brought in this skeleton crew — representatives from each of the departments — and let them in on the fact that we were going to create this button. We had these secret meetings with secret knocks behind closed doors where we were designing the Stan Lee character.

When we had our wrap party, where we present the film — finished in its entirety for the first time — to our crew, we screened the movie, got through the credits, and right when it goes to black the crew started standing up, and then that first shot comes on of Fred’s mansion. I heard this incredible gasp echo through the theater, and people say, “What is this?” And they sat down and watched and I knew we’d actually kept the secret. That was one of the most thrilling moments of the entire production. For me, being able to — if only briefly — direct Stan Lee was a life goal I didn’t even dare to have.

Because we were keeping it a secret from our crew, we didn’t record Stan Lee in our building; we went to another studio. When we got there, they had booked it on a second floor studio, and there were no elevators, so we knew that Stan Lee was going to have to walk up this long flight of stairs. And none of us had ever met Stan Lee, but we knew he was in his nineties, so we didn’t know how frail he would be. The whole time we’re waiting for him, we’re like, “Okay, when we go up the stairs, we’re going to position ourselves behind him so if he falls we can catch him. We cannot be responsible for killing Stan Lee, because then we would be marked men.” But I got to say, when the car rolled up, Stan Lee was full of energy, he was funny, he had the voice, the persona. He was amazing; he took those stairs like a champion and he was everything you’d want him to be. Being able to record with him was a thrill. That was the icing on the cake of making this movie.

Is that button canon going forward? If there’s a sequel, will Stan Lee appear as one of the heroes?

It certainly feels like we’re setting something up there. We were just thinking about a funny button and we just finished the movie not that long ago, and Don and I are in a place where we’re just getting some distance from the film and looking forward to some vacation soon. It is important to step away and let the adrenaline die down a bit — do some traveling, do some reading, and see what you feel connected to — and not race back into something. So we’ve had no discussion about a sequel.

It is a funny thing that happens, when you are in these story rooms and working with the animators; these characters start to become very real to us. We know how they would behave in any situation. You feel connected to them, and when the movie is released, you feel like a proud parent and your kids are going off to college and are going to live lives without you and be exposed to new people. You really grow to love them, so the idea of working with them again someday certainly has its appeal, but it’s not something we’re actively thinking about right now.

Is there anything else you want to say about upcoming projects? I hear maybe you’re doing a Philip K. Dick thing that you may or may not be able to talk about?

I think I know what you’re referring to, but I’m not working on that show. At home, I’ve always got my little piles of ideas and characters and genres that I’m excited about, but I’m trying to make a real point of not racing back into something.

Unfortunately, we’re all out of time, so I think we’re going to need to wrap things up. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show; it’s been a real pleasure.

Thank you very much; this has been fun!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Book Reviews: April 2015

Andrew Liptak

Welcome to the Lightspeed Book Review column! Every month as I work toward figuring out which books I’m going to review here, I start off with an overly ambitious list that’s whittled down by the number of pages left, divided by the time I have available, but in that rush, I find that the books that I end up with tend to come down to a similar theme. That’s the case this month with two books that I read recently: Paolo Bacigalupi’s forthcoming novel The Water Knife, and Edan Lepucki’s powerful debut, California. In this month’s column, we’ve ended up with two books that look at the collapse of society in very different ways.

California
Edan Lepucki
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0316250818
Little, Brown and Company, July 2014
400 pages

Edan Lepucki came to the literary world’s attention through the efforts of one Stephen Colbert last year, at the height of the Hachette-Amazon struggle. It’s a good thing, too. Lepucki’s fantastic debut novel, California, takes stock of a number of post-apocalyptic tropes and packages them through the eyes of its lead characters, Frida and California.

These two figures are eking out a living in the midst of the California wilderness, somewhere outside of Los Angeles. Prior to this, society had been engaged in a slow collapse: prices were rising, people were out of work, and society was coalescing into exclusive communities in which a select few could enjoy food, work and security. Everyone else has been forced to live in any way that they can: Frida and California live off the land, growing their own food and preserving what little they have from their former lives. Everything changes when they discover that they’re not too far from the Land, a social collective of others who make their way under none other than Frida’s brother, Micah, who had been presumed killed in a suicide bombing.

Lepucki deftly uses this book as an examination of class, and the efforts people will go to in order to uphold and maintain a system of wealth and privilege for those who enjoy it, while others work to undermine and change the system for those shut out of the system. California is really an examination of the concept of sacrifice in the face of the greater good. On their own, Frida and Cal have to contend with their own issues, but once they’re brought to the Land, they’re forced to navigate a complex set of internal politics from a group that has become hardened in order to survive. They’ve given up their children, fought off attacks from pirates, all as they labor to ensure that they, as a community, can survive. Frida and Cal learn more about Micah and his intentions with the Land; it’s clear that there’s more to his motivations than just playing by the rules: his eventual goals include long-term revolution to disrupt the existence of the communities.

Lepucki takes this further — the exclusive communities have their own agendas, and much of what Frida and Cal experience and observe turns out to be an even more elaborate set of manipulations: the pirates and scattered nature of some of the settlers is far more organized than at first glance, designed to keep the gated communities safer by ensuring that no groups can threaten their existence. When we finally see the inside of one of these communities, they’re a parable of the 1950s lifestyle, where everyone has a house and family, but with an added amount of security and surveillance to ensure that everyone in the settlement is playing by the rules.

California takes on a personal look at what the end of the world might mean for people, and makes a good case for what people might hold on to when they’ve lost just about everything around them.

The Water Knife
Paolo Bacigalupi
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0385352871
Knopf, May 2015
384 pages

On the other side of the post-apocalyptic spectrum, Paolo Bacigalupi’s long-awaited adult novel (as opposed to the three excellent YA novels he’s released since 2009’s The Windup Girl) The Water Knife is an exercise in a different sort of end of the world story. Like last year’s The Doubt Factory, his latest carries with it a ripped-from-the-headlines feel as dwindling water supplies in the American Southwest force various cities and organizations into conflict with one another. It’s a desperate fight for survival in the middle of a desert, and the winners will come away with the one thing that’s needed to survive: water.

At some point in the very near future, major cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas find themselves with an influx of capital from Chinese investors, who begin to construct major arcologies to house their local populations. The habitats are a pinnacle of desert survival: water is plentiful and captured, their citizens maintain opulent and secure apartments, and they’re able to select out the undesirable individuals who can cause problems. To help maintain Las Vegas’s hold on their water supplies, Catherine Case hires out people such as Angel Velasquez, a Water Knife, to help keep her habitats secure, whether that means helping to secure legal documents and persons of interest, or occasionally breaking legs.

When a fellow journalist is murdered in Phoenix, Angel meets Lucy Monroe, a journalist covering the slow decline of the city, and the potentially game-changing set of legal documents that can change everything for the city on its way out. Finally, a young Texan refugee, Maria Villarosa, finds herself in the mix when she comes between powerful interests that will stop at nothing to get what they need. The three come together in a violent and desperate clash as the southwest comes apart.

In many ways, The Water Knife is Bacigalupi’s follow-up to his landmark debut, The Windup Girl. It follows a very similar structure, mixing discrete, personal stories against larger corporate and faceless interests, showcasing a fantastic portrait of a declining civilization.

Bacigalupi’s works frequently feel all too real, and there’s an uncomfortable quality to The Water Knife, a feeling that his future is one that we’ll probably come up against at some point in the not-too-distant-future. Already, the American West is gripped in the midst of a major drought: viral pictures of reservoirs, news footage of major forest fires, and bans on watering lawns all capture our attention. In many ways, this novel shows that in spite of it all, life continues on: small groups of people will collect in the cracks, clinging on and learning to thrive in their environments, despite the hardships.

While an excellent example of the climate fiction genre, Bacigalupi looks beyond environmental hardship with this novel: wealth inequality is a major focus as the country dries up. As resources become harder to come by, those who can afford to hold onto the remaining supplies of water do everything in their power to hold on to every last drop, using money to buy out stores, lawyers when that doesn’t work, and men with guns when all else fails. The arcologies of Las Vegas and Phoenix do more than just hold people comfortably in the scorching desert: they’re a symbol of what wealth can buy: life, where it shouldn’t exist. Everyone else is left to fight over the scraps on the outskirts.

The Water Knife is a fine follow-up and companion to The Windup Girl, one that takes a good, hard look at how we use resources and people when we can’t afford to, and the lengths which we’ll go to hold onto what we’ve got when we run short.

• • • •

Together, both novels examine a comparable topic, the collapse of civilization, and both have some overlap in how societies die. Lepucki puts together some fantastic descriptions of her gated communities, imagery that is hard to shake away. These are entire micro-states governed by strong private interests that welcome a very select few. Likewise, The Water Knife presents much the same picture: major business interests erect monuments to wealth, all while leaving the poor, immigrants, and others out to die in the outskirts. Both Bacigalupi and Lepucki seem to agree that when pushed to the edge, people will rally around what is familiar, and will push away anything or anyone deemed to be a threat. It’s stark commentary for today’s world, and both books serve as an excellent mirror for the world we could very well head toward.

What both authors don’t seem to agree upon is how people will react to this. Lepucki’s Frida and Cal seem willing to accept whatever they need to do in order to survive with their child. Lucy Monroe, on the other hand, is willing to undermine the entire structure and push for radical change when the opportunity is presented to her, although not all of her companions seem willing to make such sacrifices.

In either case, however, reality for their characters is grim, and each of their personal struggles exacts a major toll, threatening their well-being and the lives of those around them. While both books have their flaws and drawbacks, each serves as an outstanding speculative work — not because they deal with the collapse of civilization or the typical post-apocalyptic tropes, but because they explicitly deal with characters confronting revolutionary changes in their everyday lives, changes brought on by the failings of the present day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus, and Armchair General and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Artist Gallery: Elena Bespalova

Elena Bespalova was born in 1986 in Moscow, Russia. She graduated from the 1905 Memorial Moscow College of Art. She has worked as a lead character artist for the fantasy MMORPG Allods Online. She is currently working on various freelance projects and a graphic novel. She lives and works in Moscow, Russia. Visit hellstern.deviantart.com to learn more.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Elena Bespalova

Henry Lien

Did growing up Russian predispose you to science fiction/fantasy? William Gibson famously said that Japan is the “global imagination’s default setting for the future.” However, that probably wasn’t true before the 1980s. For many decades, it seemed like the Soviet Union was the most science fictional country on Earth: a totalitarian government, obsessed with technology, space, and war; an inhospitable natural environment; cities filled with heroic public sculpture and stark, monolithic architecture. Is that a fair view of the former Soviet Union or is that an overly Otherized Western portrait of it? If the former, did growing up in Russia influence your interest in science fiction/fantasy?

In some ways, it did. I have a lot of Soviet science fiction books at home. It was a dream come true to visualize what I’d read about. I had all that I needed to satisfy my growing passion for what can lie far beyond our imagination. Travel to distant planets, mysterious anomalies, glorious achievements, and unfortunate deaths. As a child, I was sure that humanity could achieve almost anything and that we were on the brink of full-scale exploration of our universe.

Your science fictional work is filled with shades of blue, stark, graphic compositions, negative space, and the romance of bleakness. Your fantasy works are warmer in colors, busier in composition, and more filled with ornament and detail such as spiraling cloth, hair, and water. Do you deliberately try to divide your work into these two styles? Do you ever collide science fiction with fantasy?

In my opinion, the fantasy genre is usually interpreted as an idealized Middle Ages. Not only in the modes of living, but as a place where all myths and legends of that time became real. If we look at what that means visually, it usually means a huge amount of decoration. People of the past were inspired by their surroundings, and their arts and crafts were filled with stylized elements of nature, including pagan symbols, which used spirals and circles a lot.

In contrast, modern life, which is getting closer and closer to science fiction, is filled with designs that are driven by more practical solutions while still remaining pleasant to the eye. Neat and plain. New materials and textures give artists many other ways to express themselves, instead of just using heavy decoration. I try to catch the essence of both genres, and the result is the difference of shapes and color schemes that you refer to. I don’t split up the stylization intentionally; I usually just go with the flow. In some cases, I do merge fantasy and science fiction.

Talk to us a little bit about technique. Is what we are looking at entirely digital? It can be hard to tell, especially with some of the fantasy works.

When I was in college, we did all our works traditionally. After graduating, I switched to digital. It gave me more opportunities to find a job and still sharpen my skills as an artist. I also appreciate not being limited in my work space (such as not needing to have a dedicated place to put a painting easel and paints, etc.) or in the materials I work with.

Nonetheless, I still like the feeling of real paint. I sometimes try to achieve this look in my paintings, by using texture brushes and carefully applying strokes. It feels like creating an illusion of layers of paint. However, it is all being done on a flat screen.

Your “pen name” is Hellstern, which sounds like the name of a valkyrie or a dominatrix or a female Olympic shot-putter. Do you have a unified persona for yourself as an artist that you are trying to convey through the pen name as well as through your work itself?

I picked up the name in high school as a web nickname. From the German for “light star.” For a teen, it was quite dreamy and romantic, a fantasy name. And it just stuck. In English, it sounds quite different, and it is funny how people usually tend to see this side first.

What has your experience been as a woman working in science fiction/fantasy illustration? How does your identity inform your work, both from a business standpoint and in the substance of your art? If at all.

I never feel that I should stick to a gender role as an artist. I don’t identify my choices as male or female choices before I make them, I just act. Professionally, what really matters is the final result. Thus, I have had no issues as a woman working in science fiction/fantasy illustration.

What is your dream project?

I’m still working with my scriptwriter on several comic book stories. I’ve had this dream for a long time, and I’m going for it in small baby steps. I draw all my projects in my free time. I hope to publish at least one of them next year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, Asia, Europe, and South America. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate. He has sold stories to publications including Asimov’s, Analog, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and been nominated for the Nebula. He is originally from Taiwan. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

Sandra Odell

“The Universe, Sung In Stars” is a beautiful study of creation as much through art as through glorious happenstance. Where did you take inspiration for this story?

Thank you so much! In a way, I had the inspiration for this story far before I ever thought about writing. It came from the idea of the music of the spheres — the idea that the movements of the moon and planets have their own tones or harmonies that are based on the proportions of their orbits. I first learned of the concept studying Shakespeare in high school, but it’s an idea that has fascinated me whenever I’ve come across it. I wanted to write a story set in a universe where, rather than just being a philosophical concept, the idea of the music of the spheres was a scientifically useful one.

The story dips its toes in poetry, a trait shared by many of the better stories in science fiction and fantasy. As a reader, who do you turn to when you find yourself in the mood for beautiful wordplay and intricate plots?

Well, I mean, let’s get Shakespeare out of the way first. And I read a lot of poetry — Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Mary Oliver, Mary Szybist, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Craig Arnold — I could go on, but I really do try to read some poetry every day to get exposure to writers who use words more elastically than those of us who write prose. In terms of prose writers, I love the way Sofia Samatar, Kelly Link, Rachel Swirsky, Cat Valente, Liz Hand, Sarah McCarry, and Nova Ren Suma combine language and plot.

One of the central facets of the story is a science that defies real world expectations even as it is grounded in sound musical and physical theory, blurring the line between science fiction and fantasy. What are your thoughts on the use of genre labels in fiction?

I like them when they’re useful. I mean, when I want to read a romance novel, I like knowing that, yes, indeed, romance is a major component of the book I am about to pick up. I don’t like them when they become a grudge match over status. There are good stories and bad stories in all genres — one is not inherently better/smarter/more rigorous than then others.

You have created an intricate, detailed world in just a few words. If you were to return to this world in a future story, what tale would you like to tell?

As of right now, I don’t see myself returning to the world of this story, though of course I would never rule anything out. Maybe a symphony of universes? (Note to self: Find composer to collaborate with.)

With the sale earlier this year of your debut novel Roses and Rot to Saga Press, you became Kat Howard the novelist. How does this differ from being Kat Howard the short story writer?

In a way, it doesn’t feel any different yet. I had been working on Roses and Rot at the same time that I was writing short stories, and I’m still working on novel-length and shorter fiction right now. I’m sure that feeling will change as I get closer to my release date in early 2016.

What’s next for you? What tasty bits can readers look forward to in 2015?

I have some short stories coming out in 2015, and I’m also working on a new novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Carolyn Ives Gilman

Patrick J. Stephens

What appealed to you most when writing “The Invisible Hand Rolls the Dice”? What compelled you to finish the story?

This is a story about the commodification of absolutely everything. It portrays a future world where culture, religion, and people themselves are consumer goods bought and sold on the open market. No one in the story thinks they are living in a dystopia; they cheerfully collaborate and celebrate their own commodification — until they can’t any more.

I have exaggerated to make a point, but everything about Lee’s world is consistent with our own. Fifty years ago, hospitals were run by religious, charitable, and non-profit organizations, and a science fiction story about a world where health care was monopolized by corporations — and priced as a luxury so that only the wealthy can afford it — would have been read as a dark dystopia. Yet that is the world we live in today. We don’t appear to find it immoral. Some people defend it. From that, it is a short leap indeed to a world where religion is franchised like hamburgers and people sell stock in themselves. In fact, I’m a little surprised no one has thought of the latter idea — although you could argue that that is exactly what student loans are: banks buying a share of a person’s future income. The main difference from indentured servitude is that the bank doesn’t dictate what the student must do to pay them back.

The art of business is a very strong element in this story. What elements from “The Invisible Hand Rolls the Dice” do you feel are reflected in the modern world?

This is one of several stories I have written about economics (see also “The Economancer”), because it is a “science” that shapes our daily lives far more than rocketry or nanotech. Moreover, economics lends itself to the surreal and weird. It is even dominated by what I would call magical thinking. Yet surprisingly few science fiction writers tackle it. I wonder why not.

Controlling destiny in a world where others wish to control it for you brings up an interesting concept. What would you do in the situation that Lee has presented?

The “Invisible Hand” of the title is not, of course, destiny, but a quote from Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, who observed how, in a market economy, self-interested participants are “led by an invisible hand” to actions that promote the common good. And yet, all you have to do is turn on MSNBC to find people conflating Smith’s theory with destiny, or even divine will. It gets transformed into the “wisdom of the marketplace” and “greed is good.” But the all-knowing, benevolent market has a dark side. And when the illusion shatters, we’re left with nothing but our humanity to fall back on.

Businessmen want to believe, even more than most of us, that the future is predictable and human behavior is controllable. Billions of dollars are spent to model the future. My advice to Lee would be, don’t fall for it — but of course, he doesn’t listen to me. If he did, there wouldn’t be a story.

What might we be seeing from you in the near future?

My next novel, Dark Orbit, will be published by Tor in July. It is a story set on a newly discovered planet that challenges everything its explorers think they know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Jason Gurley

Jude Griffin

What was the inspiration for “Quiet Town”?

In 1986, when I was seven years old, a volcano called Mt. Augustine erupted. It was nearly two hundred miles away from Anchorage, Alaska, where I lived, but we wore protective masks when we went outside, and ash fell like snow for a little while. Volcanoes were pretty exciting stuff to a kid like me. I remember seeing a documentary, or maybe just a TV news story, about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, when I was too young to know it had happened. I looked forward to seeing the mountain explode, and I was really surprised when they told the story of Harry Truman, the veteran who refused to leave the mountain, and who died when it blew. I suppose since then I’ve always been curious about people who stay when others go, who dig their heels in while the rest grab their things and run. “Quiet Town” is the first time I’ve explored the idea in fiction, I think.

The space in a short story is so compressed — can you talk about the choices you had to make in terms of what to leave in, what to leave out?

In the case of “Quiet Town,” I left almost everything out. The story takes place over just a few minutes one afternoon, though it tiptoes lightly into the past via some brief flashbacks. There are plenty of stories in the world about cataclysmic climate change; I wanted instead to capture a single moment — that painful, dreadful moment when someone realizes that they’ve been very, very wrong, and that it’s going to cost them immeasurably. Anything that wouldn’t serve that moment was left out of the story.

How does “Quiet Town” reflect larger themes present in your work?

I suppose I tend to think of myself as a quiet writer, meaning that when given the opportunity to write about something big — like destructive climate change, for example — I’ll usually look inward for the emotional struts that get knocked over by such life-changing events. With so many bombastic, epic destruction stories in our lives — the “disaster porn” of modern cinema a prime example — I often find myself most moved by the portrayal of believable, honest people who are unfortunately living in the shadow of such towering events. This has been a recurring theme for many of my short stories and novels.

Whose science fiction do you reread?

I go back to the novels I love over and over again, and there are many, but two in particular are well-worn: Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Sagan’s Contact. I’ve read them both often enough that I’ll just pick them up and open them at random. I always find something new in them, and even if I don’t, the atmosphere of both books recharges me. I strive to write characters as curious as Sagan’s Eleanor Arroway; I often attempt to recreate the hushed tones of “Rocket Summer” in my work. These are beautiful books that I deeply treasure.

Any news you want to share?

Marvelous news, really — my novel Eleanor, which I self-published in the summer of 2014 after spending fourteen years writing, has been acquired by Crown Publishing. I’m very excited about this, as it means the book has an opportunity to reach readers who might otherwise never have discovered it. The book is likely to be published by Crown in January of 2016; I’m furiously revising a final draft of the novel now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: John Barnes

Robyn Lupo

What was the inspiration for “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees”? I was struck by the idea of being able to explore the oceans the way Nicole does; do you snorkel or scuba dive yourself?

Nope. I don’t even like swimming at the beach, and prefer a lap pool. Actually very little of my fiction comes from direct personal experience of physical events; usually I just make stuff up. In my younger days, I used to go out and do things to try to get them right in fiction; as I get older, I realize that in the first place I’m writing for an audience that mostly stays in a chair at a screen and isn’t really all that interested in reality or much of a judge of it, and besides, the complexities of what people say and do with each other are more interesting. I still put a fair bit of research into how things work and what it’s like to be in a given place/situation, but I recognize more now that most readers don’t care very much about that, and the research is something I do for me. See thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2011/12/political-economy-of-experience-and-not.html for a whole lot more about that.

Did you have other models for the panspermia, or did the idea of the gasoline trees come first?

I was more interested in the idea of someone being jealous of a superhuman because of the hopelessness of that condition, and the difficulty people have in trusting love. All that science stuff was paraphernalia for this story, the way guns and whiskey are for a hardboiled mystery story. I needed something to be very odd and menacing at the start of the story and then go BOOM and nearly kill the viewpoint character later on. That was the first idea I thought of that fit the criteria.

What was it about panspermia that captured your imagination?

I was mildly tickled, certainly not captured, by the thought that Earth is probably about a fourth-generation (across the history of the universe) living planet; that is, about three planetary lifespans of living worlds have probably gone all the way from first replicating molecules to dead husks before we even started. So if there was panspermia, it would have had plenty of time to evolve; there’d be panspermic organisms, genes, etc. because life that had them would outcompete life that didn’t. And the most likely place for such a thing to be lurking on Earth undetected seemed to be in the oceans — bigger area, better place to land, and so on. After that, I just tinkered up some other technical ideas, like using asteroid dust to fertilize the Southern Ocean, that were sort of lying around in the files, to create a background where the viewpoint character could feel as desperately insecure as possible.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a book about Singapore Math for parents, then will probably finish a long-delayed YA mainstream unless it turns out I’m still not ready to finish it. After that, novels in the Jak Jinnaka and Daybreak series, maybe the final novel in the Giraut books. Or something else. I’m often as surprised as anyone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Lupo has been known to lurk around Southwestern Ontario, complaining about the weather. She helped destroy flash-sized science fiction in 2013 and hopes to wreck poetry for decent people everywhere soon.

Author Spotlight: Sonya Taafe

Sandra Odell

“A Wolf in Iceland is the Child of a Lie” has a different sense of poetry and rhythm, one harkening back to the old Icelandic myth cycles. What inspired you to write this story?

When I was in second grade, I fell in love with D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants (1967). I fell in love with Loki, fire-sly, shape-changing, gender-changing, liminal. He is one of my oldest mythological imprints and — possibly for that reason — one of the figures I have written least about. For years I didn’t even try. Eventually his daughter Hel turned up in a poem [stonetelling.com/issue3-mar2011/taaffe-persephone.html], but she belongs to the underworld and got in on her own merits.

The thing is that Loki doesn’t have only the three monstrous children with Angrboða, the ones Odin variously imprisoned or flung down into the sea or the underworld — the Fenris-wolf, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, the half-faced girl-child Hel. His two sons with Sigyn are half-Æsir. It doesn’t protect them. When the gods decide to punish Loki for his part in the death of Baldr, they transform one of his sons into a ravening wolf which immediately tears out the guts of the other; it is with the entrails of his own child that Loki is bound for eternity beneath a venom-dripping serpent and the earth that shakes and fumes when he writhes in pain. (Understandably, the D’Aulaires leave this particular twist out of their picture book.) The name of the slain son is either Nari or Narfi, according to Snorri Sturluson in Gylfaginning. The wolf-son is named Váli. He does not appear again in the mythological record — Snorri may have invented him out of a confusing reference to Odin’s better-attested son of the same name — but he’s haunted me for fourteen years. The violence is part of it, the disposability with which Loki’s half-god children become, like their mother, collateral damage of their father’s crimes. But so is the silence, the idea that if none of the myths say how Váli’s life ended, then maybe he’s still out there. The possibility has not been closed down.

I tried to write about Váli for the first time in my junior year of college, right after my first few short stories had been published. It was not a success. I don’t know why I tried again in 2010, during a painful drought in my writing life — by the time I finished the story in December of that year, it was the first piece of fiction I had managed to complete since early 2008 — but this time it took. To date, it’s still my only successful attempt at Norse myth in fiction.

The story is lush with references to Nordic cities and culture, offering bottles of wine on the city streets and hearty meals at local bed-and-breakfasts. Many writers have explored the Iceland of the past, but your setting is rooted in the present. Have you ever spent time in Iceland?

I have never been to Iceland. My mother visited briefly, in 1968; the narrator’s mother shares many experiences with mine, although I think our relationship is better. I’d have loved to be able to afford a research trip, but instead I looked at vast amounts of photography, history, geology, pop culture, and all the assorted timesinks they led to. Some of the story was written to Sigur Rós. I couldn’t find anywhere to work in the Móðuharðindin, but the fact that Eyjafjallajökull was erupting during the writing of the story had an effect.

With this story you explore themes of love, loyalty, and death in some of their most brutal forms. Much of Western genre fiction has shied away from such intimate studies of real world histories and beliefs, feeling that to do otherwise might alienate readers. Do you have any particular thoughts on the value of mythical history as a stepping stone to building the future?

I don’t know if I think first of myth in terms of its future utility, but I do think it’s critical to look at stories as they were and are told (in all their polyphony and contradiction; almost nothing in myth is single-voiced), not just at the simplest or the most comfortable versions. Otherwise all you are seeing is a gloss or an illusion of familiarity: Oh, yes, just like us with different names. Alienation is important, if it’s what’s true. I die inside a little every I see Athene referred to as the Greek goddess of wisdom, because it makes her sound all judgment and prudence, a dispassionate encyclopedia. She is the goddess of μῆτις — cunning, tricky thought, creative intelligence; the ability to think around corners and into the future. Mētis is the reason Athene is associated with the technically intricate, metaphorically loaded craft of weaving; it is the shared trait that makes her so fond of Odysseus, the consummate trickster hero of Greek myth. You are far and away the best of mortals at designs and stories, while I am famous among all the gods for craft and cleverness. (Songs are woven; so are stories; so are lies.) Μῆτις makes Athene the goddess of war — not the blind berserker violence of Ares, but tactics and strategy. Take the shrewdness out of Athene and what’s left looks like white marble without the paint. It looks the way we all know Greek statues to have looked, abstract and austere, which they never did. Classical statues were loud with color. The idea is very off-putting to some people. Tough luck! You can still see the traces, especially under high-intensity and ultraviolet light. The past is inaccessible enough already; we don’t need to fuzz it out further with extra inaccuracy. That was a nonviolent example, but it goes toward the whole idea of romanticizing instead of accepting — brightly painted statues are gaudy and vulgar, virgin goddesses of wisdom are loftier than asexual female tacticians. (And who makes these judgments? What attitudes do they reinforce? What divisions do they uphold?) If the past is what you build the future on, you had better know what it really contained.

I have to ask. Are you familiar with the Scandinavia and the World web comic?

I am afraid I’ve never heard of it, although reading the question out loud seems to have occasioned some traumatized shouting from my husband.

“Matlacihuatl’s Gift” won the Rhysling Award in 2003, and “Follow Me Home” appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: 21st Annual Collection. Do you find there to be a difference in expressing ideas through poetry or prose?

Yes; I couldn’t turn most of my poems into stories or vice versa, although they can address the same subjects or concerns. What’s still slightly strange to me is how many more poems I’ve written than short stories, when for years I wrote (mostly bad, half-completed) fiction and did not think in poetry at all, although I enjoyed reading it. The year I started writing stories that were good enough to be published was the year I started writing poetry, ditto. I suspect I am better known for it now than for my fiction. Seventeen-year-old me would be so confused to hear that.

What’s next from Sonya Taaffe? What can readers expect?

I have a new collection, Ghost Signs, just out from Aqueduct Press and short fiction and poems upcoming in An Alphabet of Embers and Spelling the Hours (ed. Rose Lemberg), Genius Loci (ed. Jaym Gates), How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens (ed. Joanne Merriam), and various magazines like Not One of Us, Ideomancer, Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium. Subjects include dybbuks, classical history, secret history, demon weddings, saints, birds, the dead of beloved memory, and a dream I had once of the fourth-century siege of Tyre.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Joseph Allen Hill

Lee Hallison

What inspired this story?

The original spark came when I was brainstorming an urban fantasy novel that I ended up shelving. It was meant to be about young people in the city doing magic stuff while having a lot of young people feelings. The image of people using a love potion like a recreational drug was the only bit that stuck with me. As a trope, magical love potions are usually presented in ways that are either really goofy or really troubling, and I was interested getting at both of those aspects, as a way of meditating on some of the ways romantic relationships can be both goofy and troubling.

The story twists in such a funny/horrible way once they drink the potion. Did you have this in mind from the start, or did the story take you there?

I think the original conception was a little quieter and more contained. When I first started writing, the potion was going to cause them to act more like Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet, deeply “in love” but still possessed of human reason and the ability to form thoughts that were not complete nonsense. That idea ended up just going in circles. Since they already start off loving one another, though in the context of a failing relationship, the potion doesn’t really make them “fall in love” so much as turn them into grotesque parodies of what they hope and fear love is. Any scene that didn’t escalate in some way from the previous felt like I was just repeating myself. Once I realized that, it got weird really quickly.

Almost every emotion is touched upon in the story. Are you a very emotional person or did Anthony and Audrey as characters inspire that aspect?

I guess a little of both. I’ve certainly been accused of being a young man with more than my share of feelings, and I’ve always been fond of fiction with a little opera to it. At the same time, I think that the love potion as a plot device almost demands a certain level of grand emotionality. It’s such a big, goofy conceit to begin with, it’s very easy and fun to have the characters go big, too.

What draws you to writing? Have you always written, or do you work in other creative mediums?

I’ve been writing since I was a young teenager. I got into it mainly to write rip-offs of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on anime forums, and it’s become a big part of my life. I feel that literature is the most effective way to convey the experience of being, and I enjoy the interplay of words and concepts and images. Plus, sometimes people pay you to make jokes about butts. I also dabble in music. I used to play in bands, though now I mostly do boring computer music and banjo covers of popular songs.

What are you currently working on?

I have a couple short stories kicking around in various states of completion, and I’m working on a novel. It’s sort of a science fiction/fantasy riff on Internet relationships, which mainly entails cosmic superheroes and unfathomable ultra-monsters posting pictures of hamburgers on Twitter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs — among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu

Christie Yant

Welcome back, Ken! Your story “The Ussuri Bear” in this issue was a surprise to me — a Ken Liu steampunk story! Jokichi Nakamatsu’s prosthetic arm reminds me that steampunk and robotics have much in common in fiction. What led you to set this in an alternate past instead of a possible future?

To me, steampunk is a genre that straddles the border between fantasy and science fiction, with one foot in each camp. It’s also a genre that is inextricably bound up with the history of colonialism and empire. As such, it’s particularly suitable for telling metaphorical stories about the impact of technology as one aspect of cultural invasion and the responses of the colonized peoples.

The modern history of Japan, China, and much of the rest of East Asia and Southeast Asia can be viewed as a long process of self-mutilation, self-modification, and self-transformation in response to the technological superiority of the West (and the implied superiority of Western culture) by incorporating Western “technology” (broadly defined). This story is an exploration of that perspective.

The area where your story is set has been — and continues to be — deeply important to multiple cultures. Mount Changbai, for instance, has been known by at least a dozen names by various peoples. What are the considerations unique to writing about a multicultural setting and cast, even an admittedly fantastical, alternate history steampunk one? Did your work as a translator come into play as you put this story together?

The modern conception of the nation-state as a relatively homogeneous population bonded by common culture, blood, and territory is a relatively new invention. For much of our history, most of our ancestors lived in close proximity to neighbors who would be considered “strangers” with odd customs but who shared the land and had to be accommodated in some sense. A lot of historical fiction inappropriately projects the modern lens of the nation-state onto the past, and many of my stories try to pierce through the fiction of the nation-state to look at historical settings that were inherently “multicultural.”

My work as a translator has made me keenly aware of the various ways that the use or non-use of various languages — and the necessity for translation — can come to signify prestige, power, dominance, and other qualities. I tried to add some of this awareness into the story as well.

You had the opportunity to visit China last year, where you were honored for your tremendous translation work with a Xingyun Award for special contribution to Chinese Science Fiction. What was your visit like for you, and how do you think it might influence your work in the future?

It was a really amazing visit. I got to meet many of the writers I’ve translated for the first time in person (including Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem), and I was introduced to many other talented writers whose work I hadn’t had the pleasure to read before. The community of Chinese SF writers is relatively small compared to the Anglo-American SF writers’ community, but it is also very tightly knit and enthusiastic, and they made me feel very welcome.

As for my future work, I’m hoping that I’ll have a chance to translate the works of more writers — though my increasingly tight schedule is making that goal difficult to achieve.

Finally, congratulations on the release of your first novel, The Grace of Kings, which comes out this month! What can we expect from the book and its sequel, which I hear you’re hard at work on?

Thank you so much!

As I mentioned once before, The Grace of Kings is the first in a planned silkpunk epic fantasy series. Based on a loose re-imagining of the historical legends surrounding the rise of the Han Dynasty, the book describes the plight of two men who rebel together against tyranny only to find themselves on opposite sides of the struggle for the future of a vast fantasy archipelago. Besides politics and intrigue and love and betrayal, it also has many “cool” silkpunk elements like bamboo airships, biomechanics-inspired submarines, fantastical creatures of the deep, and magical tomes that tell the future written in our hearts. I’m really excited to share it with readers.

The second book, on the other hand, is “more of the same, but different” (in the words of Mary Robinette Kowal, who shared some lessons for writing a series). Whereas the first book may be thought of as a book about the meaning of heroism in a time of war, the second book may be thought of as being about the meaning of heroism in a time of peace — a far harder task, as it turns out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Dale Bailey

Patrick J. Stephens

With such strong and elegant themes presented, how do you feel “The Ministry of the Eye” was influenced by — or reflects — current society?

I was thinking a lot about totalitarian states, and how insidiously they turn people against one another, making them complicit with great evil. Obviously, the Nazis and such states were in my mind; among many other things, the pit is a concentration camp. But I was thinking about the war on terror, as well — especially the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

What appealed to you most when writing “The Ministry of the Eye”? What compelled you to finish the story?

This is such a hard thing to sort out. The various betrayals were part of it — the way such states take the finest things in us, our love for others, our love for beauty, and turn them into razor blades to slash one another up with. But the language was also important. I hope there’s some beauty in the language to compensate for the ugliness in Gerst’s world.

With such a strong selection of characters, which one do you most identify with and why?

Oh, definitely Gerst. We’re about the same age, we’re both fathers and spouses, and we’re both involved, at whatever level and with whatever the cost, in making art, I can sympathize very much with the way he’s torn between various loyalties and responsibilities.

In the right circumstances, what would you do if you happened to work for the Ministry? Where would your place be?

Well, I’d like to think I would be courageous enough to stand up against it. But I fear I might not be so brave.

What might we be seeing from you in the near future?

I’ve got a collection of short fiction coming out in April — The End of the End of Everything. A novel, The Subterranean Season, will follow in the fall. No short fiction on the immediate horizon, but I have some things cooking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and has published two books since his return. Aurichrome (and Other Stories) and Sondranos: the Narrative of Leon Bishop are both available in free ebook form and hard copy.

Author Spotlight: Kate Elliot

Laurel Amberdine

Where does this story fit in with your Crossroads Trilogy?

The novelette takes place after the events of the Crossroads Trilogy (Spirit Gate, Shadow Gate, Traitors’ Gate). The main character, as well as several of the secondary characters, originally appears in the Crossroads Trilogy. The title feels appropriate because it is, I think, a tale of a person who has one foot in the past and one in the future, just as we all do.

I will note that for people who absolutely hate spoilers of any kind, the story does necessarily include a few specific spoilers for the Crossroads Trilogy books. However, given that the third and final book in the Crossroads Trilogy, Traitors’ Gate, was published in 2009, I felt it was time to let the novelette enter the publishing world despite this risk. Somewhere or other, the idea that the Crossroads Trilogy is a seven book series has gotten traction. It is not. It is a complete, standalone trilogy. It begins, it ends, it’s done.

Of course it pleases me that so many readers have asked for more about the world and the characters. My goal is always to write settings that have life beyond the last page and worlds that contain multiple stories. I have yet to write a world in which I could not have written more novels.

It has taken me a while, and in fact in the interim I wrote the Spiritwalker Trilogy and then Court of Fives (the latter my YA debut, coming in August), but I’m excited to say that my new epic fantasy Black Wolves (November) is set in the same universe as the Crossroads Trilogy. It’s great to be back.

I love the giant eagles. What inspired such an idea?

The eagle reeves — police officers in a fantasy setting — are originally my spouse’s idea. He worked as a police officer for ten years before going back to school to study archaeology. For years he bugged me to write sheriffs in a fantasy land who patrol on giant eagles.

It wasn’t until I started seriously developing the Crossroads Trilogy that the reeves and their eagles fit into one of my story worlds. I came up with the harnessing system for them. Leaving aside the entire issue of whether eagles the size of Cessnas are “realistic,” I did not feel it worked (for my purposes) to have the reeves ride atop the eagles; I liked the “hang-glider” position of reeves slung beneath the eagles because it seemed less likely to get in the way of the wings as well as give the reeves an amazing breadth of vision.

Reeves play a major role in the Crossroads Trilogy, with its examination of themes of justice and corruption, and also, honestly, they are just plain fun to write. There is a lot more — way more — about reeves in the Crossroads Trilogy and in the forthcoming Black Wolves series.

I know you’ve discussed how the inclusion of romantic elements has traditionally led to SF/F novels being dismissed, but I think that tide is turning. Do you have any advice for writers who want to add romance to their speculative fiction?

Situate the love story within the world and the characters’ lives.

After many decades of life, it has been my observation that almost all people live (whether miserably or well) within a network of relationships with other people. Add to that the biological imperative toward sex, and a writer can find in any culture or setting a way to build a love story into their plot if they want to or if one unfolds within the plot (as always, it is not a requirement to include a love story).

Here are some thoughts:

Don’t assume a love story is extraneous to a story. It is perfectly possible to write a novel or an epic whose major plot is war or politics or adventure or discovery, or some combination of those things, and also have characters whose journey includes love. People multitask every second of our lives. We are evolved to multitask emotionally, intellectually, and physically.

Don’t assume depictions of positive consensual sex are extraneous to a story. Of course you don’t have to include them if you prefer not to, and of course not every story involves sex, just as not every character (or person) is interested in sex. But sexual feelings exist in many people and thus are as appropriate in story material as any other aspect of human life.

Decide if you want the romance to be the central plot around which the other elements circle, or if you want the romance to be one of the secondary plots that circles around the main plot. Either can work; it’s a matter of emphasis.

Consider what “romantic love” means in the culture(s) your story is set in. Infatuation/sexual love exists in every culture, but marriage based on sexual love does not necessarily fit into every culture. In fact, not every culture thinks of romantic love as a positive. In some cultures, it is seen as a disruptive and negative force.

Marriages historically were contracted for reasons having to do with family alliances, economics, treaties, security, and/or producing children. Figure out how your culture(s) sees romantic love and write the love story with that in mind. Rigid societal expectations create some of the best obstacles for romantic love and furthermore can offer the story an ending that is hugely triumphant or horribly tragic, depending on which path you take when you write the story.

As for the individuals involved in the romance, as the writer, you have to decide what tone you want their story to take. The great thing about writing love stories is that our own personal histories tell us that however familiar the generic story is, each of our own love stories (however they fall out) are unique.

Where does each character start? What assumptions do they bring to their interaction with the love interest(s)? How do they themselves respond to feelings of infatuation and (sexual) interest? People can be intrigued, reluctant, angry, excited, impulsive, reserved, or pretty much any other adjective you care to add.

People have reasons to fall in love. Sometimes it is a purely physical response of sexual attraction. Sometimes it is a slow build from friendship into love. Sometimes antagonism turns to understanding.

I could go on listing different kinds of character dynamics, but the point is that who each character is and how they fit into their surroundings will define how they react to others, and those others will each themselves have a personality and social place in society. Differences of class, religion, economics, politics, status, prejudice, personality, life goals, or just being in a fraught situation where outside forces separate hopeful lovers: All of these, and more, can frame a love story.

Think about the tension between the often seemingly overwhelming emotional and physical desires brought about by infatuation and the pragmatic need to carry on with the world outside yourself. People who are falling in love can be obsessive about the object of their desire while at the same time having to keep about their regular life. If their life includes adventure, war, discovery, and/or political intrigue, imagine how much more heightened the love story can become within those constrictions.

Finally, never forget that a love story can be the anchor of characters’ lives. The romance itself doesn’t necessarily have to be the drama; it can be the steady thing a character can rely on.

There are as many ways to write a love story as there are people to have them.

When I write a romance into a larger story, my goal is always to make the love story seem natural for the characters within the plot and world — just as it is in many of our own lives.

What are you working on now?

My YA debut, a fantasy called Court of Fives, publishes in August and the first volume of my new epic fantasy, Black Wolves, in November.

I am currently working on a second YA and on volume two of the epic fantasy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by C. C. Finlay (“Time Bomb Time”) and Seanan McGuire (“The Myth of Rain”), along with SF reprints by Sean Williams (“Ghosts of the Fall”) and Mary Robinette Kowal (“The Consciousness Problem”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Helena Bell (“Mouth”) and Matthew Hughes (“The Blood of a Dragon”), and fantasy reprints by Merrie Haskell (“Sun’s East, Moon’s West”) and R. C. Loenen-Ruiz (“Breaking the Spell”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, in June we’ll be presenting a special anniversary issue: Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, guest-edited by Seanan McGuire. Written and edited by queer creators, it will feature twice as much SFnal goodness as our regular-sized issues, so be sure to keep an eye out for it. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

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Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues  — and ebook back issue bundles  — of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine  — all 57 issues  — for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.