Editorial, May 2015

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue sixty of Lightspeed!

Awards season continues, and we are pleased to announce that Lightspeed is again a Hugo Award finalist for best semiprozine. We’re extremely honored to be nominated again (that’s five times in a row for Lightspeed, and of course we won it last year), so please allow me to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who voted for us. Also, frequent Lightspeed illustrator Elizabeth Leggett is a finalist for best Fan Artist. And finally, Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” is up for Best Novelette. You can see a full list of the other nominees at sasquan.org/hugo-awards/nominations.

In other news, this year’s Nebula Awards voting has now closed. As you probably know, “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed, September 2014) is a finalist for the Nebula Award for best novelette. You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org/nebula-awards. The Nebulas will be presented at the 50th annual Nebula Awards Weekend, held this year in Chicago, Illinois, June 4–7.

• • • •

In anthology news, the final installment of The Apocalypse Triptych — the apocalyptic anthology series I’m co-editing with Hugh Howey — is now available. The new volume, The End Has Come, focuses on life after the apocalypse. The first two volumes, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) and The End is Now (about life during the apocalypse) are also available. If you’d like a preview of the anthology, you’re in luck: You can read Annie Bellet’s The End Has Come story in this very issue! Pop over to johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information about the book.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by C. C. Finlay (“Time Bomb Time”) and Seanan McGuire (“The Myth of Rain”), along with SF reprints by Annie Bellet (“Goodnight Earth,” from The End Has Come) and Sean Williams (“Ghosts of the Fall”).

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 our latest book review column and a feature interview with award-winning author James Morrow.

For our ebook readers, we also have “The Mill” by Paul Di Filippo as our novella reprint, along with novel excerpts from The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi and Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley.

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 nine 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.

Time Bomb Time

C.C. Finlay

3,100 words

-pop-

The sharp scent of ozone — sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack — filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

“God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

“Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

“What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

“Don’t worry so much — nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push — she flinched and bumped into the wall. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”

She sighed. “I don’t care if it’s a confetti bomb,” she said, pointing at the keg-sized device. “Whatever it is, get it out of here.”

He glanced at her through blond bangs, beaming his best grin. He only used it when he wanted to make out or get away with something. “C’mon,” he pleaded. “I really want you with me when this goes off, Hanan.”

“It’s Hannah,” she corrected. He used the name her parents gave her, even when that wasn’t what she wanted. She hated how people looked at her and thought Muslim or terrorist, not Arab Christian or second generation American and never just plain American. “My name is Hannah.”

“It’s close enough —” He must have seen fury flash in her eyes, because he put up his hands in surrender. “Sure, Hanan, whatever you want.”

For the first time, she considered that she might hate him. “I don’t want to be a rat trapped in the maze of your brain anymore,” she snapped. He was so close, she could smell the grunge — he must have been up, working on his project for days. What she wanted was a clear route to the door so she could leave the room if he didn’t. “Just put your experiment over by the window.”

He stared at the window, toward the quad where TV crews were covering the big student protest. “You do understand what I’m trying to do, right?” he said. “If I set this off, it proves my theories. But it also functions as the best political statement ever. It’ll show the world that all we do is go through the same meaningless motions over and over.”

“You can’t involve other people in your science experiments without their permission. And I know you haven’t gone through the Institutional Review Board. What you’re planning to do is wrong.”

He ignored her. “The thing is, the larger the radius of the temporal effect, the shorter the duration. Too big, and it will happen so fast no one will notice. A small bubble, the size of this room, will last for several minutes, but then it won’t be recorded by the TV cameras. And I’ve only got one device, one chance.” The light in his eyes flickered like numbers changing on a calculator screen.

She felt a pang of empathy for him. He was desperate to make this work, the same way he had been desperate to make their relationship work. “Let’s talk about this, okay? Whatever you’re trying to prove, this isn’t the way to do it —”

“Dr. Renner doesn’t believe in my temporal bubble theory. I have to change my dissertation or leave the program. He wants me to ‘stop wasting time.’” He said the last phrase in Renner’s nasally voice, and his shoulders slouched in defeat. “So this is it for me — if I don’t prove my theory in a really spectacular, public way, my research is finished.”

“Look, the physics goes way over my head, but I know that you believe in the theory and that’s enough for me.” She could believe in anything if it would get him out of her room.

“You’re the only one who still believes in me.”

“So why are you doing things this way?” She gestured at the strange device, then reined in her hands, afraid that any sudden movement could make it go off. “It’s like you want the whole world to see you self-destruct.”

“I want to change the world.” His stare was too intense, his eyes rimmed by dark circles, his breath tainted with the formaldehyde smell of stale Red Bull. “I want to change the way the world sees me. The way that you see —”

She stopped him right there. “Even if your theory is right, this isn’t the way to do it. You can’t publish this. You won’t get credit for it. What are you thinking?”

“Panama!” he blurted. “You remember the palindrome. Only, technically, this works more like a palingram. A palingram is made of words or phrases, not letters. So the individual units are cognitively whole. Like ‘I do, do I?’ or ‘one for all and all for one.’”

“That still doesn’t make any sense.” Never mind the fact that she was a lit major and had taught him about palindromes and palingrams and all that stuff. “Time doesn’t work like ‘a man, a plan, a canal.’”

“If you’re reading a palindrome, you can’t tell whether it’s going forwards or backwards. Inside a temporal bubble, it’s the same thing. You can’t tell which way time is flowing.”

She crossed her arms over the anxious tightness in her chest. “Look, you’ve explained this to me before. But time only flows in one direction. You can’t make time run backwards, even for a few seconds.”

“How would we know? We’re always stuck inside our own perception. Our brain takes these little packets of perceived time and arranges them in order to create a sense of causality. The continuum of time, the connections and flow between events, that’s cognitively constructed.”

“Sure, but whatever’s going on in your head, however you perceive things, there’s still an objective reality outside.” Like the objective reality that they weren’t dating any more, regardless of what he wanted.

“That’s it exactly, that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate. People only live in the psychological present, in the now. Look at Ernst Pöppel’s research. It proves that our neurocognitive software” — he paused to wave his hand around his head — “processes temporal experience into these one-to-ten second packets of perceived time. That’s what gives us a sense of constant nowness.”

“I don’t care!” She was done with him, so done. It wasn’t her job to validate his feelings or make him feel good about his bad decisions. “Get that thing out of my room. Now.”

To her surprise, he started to carry the device past her. She backed away into the corner between the bed and her desk. “It’s not a bomb.” He sounded defensive, even hurt. “It creates a bubble, not an explosion.”

“That looks like a bomb,” she said. How could he bring anything that even looked like a bomb around her? “I don’t want it in here.”

“I just need five minutes. The TV cameras are outside for the protest. I’m going to do a demonstration of my research and I want to make sure they broadcast it live. I came here to tell you, because I want you to see it too.”

He was sad and hopeful and eager, like a puppy at the pet store. Which is why she had brought him home in the first place. But just like a puppy, he left messes everywhere and required constant, exhausting attention. From the very beginning, dating him had been a bad idea, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. “I’m sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”

“Please give me a chance,” he begged. He held the device from his lab, cradling it in his arms like a monstrous baby.

“Nolon,” she said. “We broke up.”

She remembered the last time she had seen him, that night in his lab, lights dimmed, everything silent. A smaller version of his device was hooked up to a cage where a white rat ran through a maze. He had tapped a code on the keypad and then she smelled ozone. The lights flickered. There was a loud -pop-. A shimmery bubble formed around the cage, and the rat ran backwards, repeating the same steps in reverse. A rewind. When it reached the beginning, it started forward again, feet following the exact path. She felt bad for the rat, like it was a puppet. The experience was very weird and upsetting.

Nolon stood there, staring at her, waiting for her to say something. On the outside she froze; inside, she freaked.

A familiar knock startled Hannah and she jumped reflexively to yank open the door.

-tattarrattat-

A familiar knock startled Hannah and she jumped reflexively to yank open the door.

Nolon stood there, staring at her, waiting for her to say something. On the outside she froze; inside, she freaked.

She remembered the last time she had seen him, that night in his lab, lights dimmed, everything silent. A smaller version of his device was hooked up to a cage where a white rat ran through a maze. He had tapped a code on the keypad and then she smelled ozone. The lights flickered. There was a loud -pop-. A shimmery bubble formed around the cage, and the rat ran backwards, repeating the same steps in reverse. A rewind. When it reached the beginning, it started forward again, feet following the exact path. She felt bad for the rat, like it was a puppet. The experience was very weird and upsetting.

“Nolon,” she said. “We broke up.”

“Please give me a chance,” he begged. He held the device from his lab, cradling it in his arms like a monstrous baby.

He was sad and hopeful and eager, like a puppy at the pet store. Which is why she had brought him home in the first place. But just like a puppy, he left messes everywhere and required constant, exhausting attention. From the very beginning, dating him had been a bad idea, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. “I’m sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”

“I just need five minutes. The TV cameras are outside for the protest. I’m going to do a demonstration of my research and I want to make sure they broadcast it live. I came here to tell you, because I want you to see it too.”

“That looks like a bomb,” she said. How could he bring anything that even looked like a bomb around her? “I don’t want it in here.”

To her surprise, he started to carry the device past her. She backed away into the corner between the bed and her desk. “It’s not a bomb.” He sounded defensive, even hurt. “It creates a bubble, not an explosion.”

“I don’t care!” She was done with him, so done. It wasn’t her job to validate his feelings or make him feel good about his bad decisions. “Get that thing out of my room. Now.”

“That’s it exactly, that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate. People only live in the psychological present, in the now. Look at Ernst Pöppel’s research. It proves that our neurocognitive software” — he paused to wave his hand around his head — “processes temporal experience into these one-to-ten second packets of perceived time. That’s what gives us a sense of constant nowness.”

“Sure, but whatever’s going on in your head, however you perceive things, there’s still an objective reality outside.” Like the objective reality that they weren’t dating any more, regardless of what he wanted.

“How would we know? We’re always stuck inside our own perception. Our brain takes these little packets of perceived time and arranges them in order to create a sense of causality. The continuum of time, the connections and flow between events, that’s cognitively constructed.”

She crossed her arms over the anxious tightness in her chest. “Look, you’ve explained this to me before. But time only flows in one direction. You can’t make time run backwards, even for a few seconds.”

“If you’re reading a palindrome, you can’t tell whether it’s going forwards or backwards. Inside a temporal bubble, it’s the same thing. You can’t tell which way time is flowing.”

“That still doesn’t make any sense.” Never mind the fact that she was a lit major and had taught him about palindromes and palingrams and all that stuff. “Time doesn’t work like ‘a man, a plan, a canal.’”

“Panama!” he blurted. “You remember the palindrome. Only, technically, this works more like a palingram. A palingram is made of words or phrases, not letters. So the individual units are cognitively whole. Like ‘I do, do I?’ or ‘one for all and all for one.’”

She stopped him right there. “Even if your theory is right, this isn’t the way to do it. You can’t publish this. You won’t get credit for it. What are you thinking?”

“I want to change the world.” His stare was too intense, his eyes rimmed by dark circles, his breath tainted with the formaldehyde smell of stale Red Bull. “I want to change the way the world sees me. The way that you see —”

“So why are you doing things this way?” She gestured at the strange device, then reined in her hands, afraid that any sudden movement could make it go off. “It’s like you want the whole world to see you self-destruct.”

“You’re the only one who still believes in me.”

“Look, the physics goes way over my head, but I know that you believe in the theory and that’s enough for me.” She could believe in anything if it would get him out of her room.

“Dr. Renner doesn’t believe in my temporal bubble theory. I have to change my dissertation or leave the program. He wants me to ‘stop wasting time.’” He said the last phrase in Renner’s nasally voice, and his shoulders slouched in defeat. “So this is it for me — if I don’t prove my theory in a really spectacular, public way, my research is finished.”

She felt a pang of empathy for him. He was desperate to make this work, the same way he had been desperate to make their relationship work. “Let’s talk about this, okay? Whatever you’re trying to prove, this isn’t the way to do it —”

He ignored her. “The thing is, the larger the radius of the temporal effect, the shorter the duration. Too big, and it will happen so fast no one will notice. A small bubble, the size of this room, will last for several minutes, but then it won’t be recorded by the TV cameras. And I’ve only got one device, one chance.” The light in his eyes flickered like numbers changing on a calculator screen.

“You can’t involve other people in your science experiments without their permission. And I know you haven’t gone through the Institutional Review Board. What you’re planning to do is wrong.”

He stared at the window, toward the quad where TV crews were covering the big student protest. “You do understand what I’m trying to do, right?” he said. “If I set this off, it proves my theories. But it also functions as the best political statement ever. It’ll show the world that all we do is go through the same meaningless motions over and over.”

For the first time, she considered that she might hate him. “I don’t want to be a rat trapped in the maze of your brain anymore,” she snapped. He was so close, she could smell the grunge — he must have been up, working on his project for days. What she wanted was a clear route to the door so she could leave the room if he didn’t. “Just put your experiment over by the window.”

“It’s close enough —” He must have seen fury flash in her eyes, because he put up his hands in surrender. “Sure, Hanan, whatever you want.”

“It’s Hannah,” she corrected. He used the name her parents gave her, even when that wasn’t what she wanted. She hated how people looked at her and thought Muslim or terrorist, not Arab Christian or second generation American and never just plain American. “My name is Hannah.”

He glanced at her through blond bangs, beaming his best grin. He only used it when he wanted to make out or get away with something. “C’mon,” he pleaded. “I really want you with me when this goes off, Hanan.”

She sighed. “I don’t care if it’s a confetti bomb,” she said, pointing at the keg-sized device. “Whatever it is, get it out of here.”

“Don’t worry so much — nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push — she flinched and bumped into the wall. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”

“What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

“Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

“God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

The sharp scent of ozone — sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack — filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

-pop-

© 2015 by C.C. Finlay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.C. Finlay is the author of four novels, a collection, and dozens of stories, with work translated into sixteen languages. In January he became the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (sfsite.com/fsf) and he is a resident editor for the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com). He lives with novelist Rae Carson in Arizona, where he battles scorpions and searches for a perfect piece of pie. You can find him on twitter @ccfinlay or on the web at ccfinlay.com.

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

Goodnight Earth

Annie Bellet

4500 words

Karron leaned over the rail of her boat, the Tarik, and watched the meteor shower from its reflection in the river below. The bright streaks of light looked like underwater fireflies and the Ring more like a soft blue disk, a monochromatic rainbow that ruled their lives in constant reminder of how broken the world was.

“Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured to herself, the words half-forgotten, something she’d read in the Covenant Archive a world — and a lifetime — ago. In their case implanted at the top of her spine, her nanos stirred with the memory.

The Tarik rode low in the Missip river as it tacked up the shoreline. She was a smaller boat, fifty feet and built with a shallow draft for sailing rivers and canals. Usually she carried only Karron and Ishim, and whatever cargo they’d bartered for, bought, or stolen.

The ship wasn’t equipped to handle six people on board. Karron glanced at their passengers where they huddled on makeshift beds around the steam stack toward the aft of the ship. A man and woman, who had provided what were probably fake names, and two kids. A week ago now they’d appeared on a small dock upriver from Looston, asking about getting around the Covenant checkpoints between Looston and Ria, a good two-week journey if they did it straight. No papers for the kids, the woman, Jill, said.

Plausible enough story, and their Covenant coin would spend all along the river. The thirty gallons of pure water they’d offered as bonus had decided it. Karron and Ishim would smuggle the four up to Ria, where Nolan, the man, said his parents and jobs were waiting.

In the pale earthlight coming off the Ring, Karron could almost make out the little family’s faces. The adults appeared asleep under their blankets, but the two kids were awake, their dark eyes glinting. Oni, the boy, was supposedly seven years old, and his sister, Bee, was four. They were well behaved, the two kids. Creepily so. Quiet as fish lurking in the rocks, and as nimble as Button, the ship’s cat.

Karron bit her lip and glanced to the fore where Ishim stood keeping the ship steering smoothly through the dark water. She hadn’t told him her suspicions about the children. Her thoughts were impossible, and she knew as well as he that even if she was right about what they were, there was nothing she nor Ishim could or would do about it.

She’d always been too curious. Her instructors at the Academy had always said so in varying tones of annoyance or amusement.

Curiosity killed the cat, she thought, turning over the phrase in her mind, a phrase from the old times, before the Ring, before the sky broke and war came to the world.

“Satisfaction brought it back,” she whispered. She had to know.

Creeping over the deck — the shush of wind in the mainsail and the lap of water against the hull covering any sound she might have made — Karron approached the sleeping passengers. She brought her finger to her lips and saw both children nod. The adults to either side of them didn’t move, apparently asleep.

She knelt in front of Oni and reached for his head. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to breathe as she slid her hand around the back of his neck and felt the base of his skull.

The hard knot was there, distinct and familiar beneath her trembling fingers. Oni reached up and touched her arm. Karron bent her head and let him feel her own knot for himself. Bee’s tiny hand replaced Oni’s.

“Not your aunt and uncle,” Karron whispered, her mouth moving but hardly any sound coming from her throat. The kids would hear her, if they were like she was.

“No,” Oni whispered back. “Help us?”

“How?”

“Kill them. They are going to sell us.”

She shook her head. “Not my problem,” she whispered.

“You are like us,” the boy said. Beside him, Jill stirred, and all three of them froze until she settled again.

“Not anymore,” Karron lied.

For a long moment they sat in silence, watching one another. Then Karron crept away, her heart in her throat, and went back to her own blanket. Her head buzzed and her adrenaline spiked and the nanos at the base of her skull woke up, reacting to her heightened emotions. She took careful, slow breaths and forced herself to calm.

War Children, they’d been called. The program was dead, dismantled and torched fifteen years ago. She thought she’d been in the last generation, the last raised in the crèche in Deecee. Genetically altered, infested with nano-tech that even the Covenant didn’t understand, trained from the day they could walk to hunt, kill, be soldiers at the front of the Covenant peace-keeping forces.

She’d seen the Academy burn, seen her fellow Children burn with it. Only a few escaped that she knew of and many of them had been hunted down or gone insane. If Ishim hadn’t pulled her from the river, she would have died as well.

It was luck and staying calm and quiet that had kept the nanos from driving her insane, kept her from being caught. She’d told Ishim what she was, but he didn’t seem to care. Karron had warned him if she went crazy, he’d have to put her down.

“If you go crazy, will I even be able to kill you before you get me?” Ishim had asked.

Karron had looked away. They both knew the answer was no. No one man alone could take out a War Child.

Now there were three of them on this boat, though what training the two kids had, Karron didn’t know. At Oni’s age, she’d already run her first mission. Was there a program again? Why were these kids traveling with the suspiciously normal-seeming man and woman who Oni said were going to sell them? Sell them to whom?

Too many questions get smugglers killed, Ishim would say. Karron stared up at the Ring and pushed the questions away as stones fell out of the sky, flamed bright, and died away.

• • • •

The Missip branched into a hundred waterways as the Zouri joined up with it. Ishim and Karron knew many of those ways. Which ones were patrolled by Covenant boats or led to Covenant settlements, which ones were dead ends, which were safe for a boat with a shallow draft to pole down or steam up. Reeds and willow branches shivered in the cool spring air as they tacked west and north along one of these myriad of ways. By afternoon they would join up with a bigger branch of the Zouri and in another week they’d be able to steam toward Ria, the worst of the checkpoints and danger zones.

Ria itself was controlled by a Baron, one of the gang leaders set up by the Covenant to keep a semblance of order on this side of the Missip. Long as the trains ran on time and the tithes got paid, Covenant didn’t seem to care what else happened or how the Barons went about their lives.

Ishim was catching a nap and Karron had the wheel as she guided the ship, keeping the boat turned so the big sail held a bellyful of wind. This way would narrow too much for sailing soon and they’d have to break out the poles or risk the racket of the steam engine for a while. They’d decide when Ishim woke, probably with a shared glance, a look at the river conditions, and a nod. A decade and a half relying on each other made words irrelevant. Karron smiled to herself as a kingfisher dove into the water ahead. Sometimes they’d go weeks without words.

Not like their passengers. Nolan and Jill talked to each other a lot and sometimes attempted to engage Ishim or Karron in small talk, more and more as the days went by. They said idle things mostly. When they spoke to each other, they used Esper instead of Covenant. Their accents in that tongue put them from the south, maybe from as far as Nawlins. She and Ishim never sailed too far south. Too many sharks and crocodiles, too much heat, unstable weather, and biting insects. Too many Covenant Peace Keepers. The north was safer.

Nolan had insulted Karron and Ishim the second day in Esper, calling Ishim a night pig and Karron his little white slut. Ishim didn’t speak Esper and Karron had decided not to respond, curious as to why the man went off on them with such a pleasant tone and a smile on his face. She’d figured he was trying to see if she spoke the language. Her training was still there, lurking beneath her skin like the nanotech. So she said nothing, just shook her head as though she had no idea what he was saying.

This morning they’d been whispering about a broken bridge. Their excitement, the anticipation they couldn’t keep out of their body language, it scared Karron. Felt to her like the thick heat before a bad storm, air crackling with energy as the world held its breath.

War Children. She hadn’t told Ishim. No way to tell him without chancing being overheard. The kids had stayed aft all morning, crouched together and watching the world with dark, quiet eyes that didn’t quite meet hers when she risked looking their way.

Wherever they’d come from, wherever they were going, they weren’t her crèche, her brothers and sisters. Not her problem. Killing took her away, took her to the warm place it was hard to come home from. She wouldn’t go there for strangers. She couldn’t.

The children as she’d known them were gone. These kids? Not. Her. Problem.

The wheel beneath her hands creaked and started to splinter. She forced her grip to relax.

Ishim woke, and they shared a quick meal of flatbread and dried fruit. Supplies were low and it hadn’t rained in a few days. They’d have to start boiling river water soon, or use the precious gallons of filtered water on their passengers. They had filter tabs, but those made water taste awful, and Karron’s shit turn to tar, so she avoided them unless it was dire. There was a settlement nearby, just upstream where their Covenant coin would spend. Fresh water, maybe fresh fruit and vegetables. Maybe even game meat. Karron was getting tired of fish and flatbread.

They doused the sails after losing the stern wind as the river narrowed, and pushed the boat with long poles through the smaller canal-like passage that should connect up to the Zouri tributaries. She hadn’t sailed this way since the previous summer, and the winter rains and flooding could have changed things. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Hours of poling felt good on her muscles, taking her mind off the kids. Something red caught her eye off the port side as she shoved the long pole into the canal bed. Metal, the remnant of a settlement here probably before the Ring, back when Earth had a moon and this whole land was called the United States. Fragments survived even in the wilderness, sometimes rising like the carcass of a long-dead beast from reeds and swamp.

Part of a bridge, Karron realized. She’d seen it before, the broken expanse stretching like an accusing finger pointing over the water. It hadn’t been red then. It was painted on the side toward her, bright and fresh.

She went still, pole in her hands nearly forgotten.

Ishim cursed and she made herself turn and look to the starboard side. Nolan had a .38 revolver pointed at Ishim’s head. The way the man held it, it was clear he had practice with a gun and was ready to kill.

“Pole over to the bank there by that bridge,” Jill said. She stood near the mast, another gun held in one hand, pointed down but with her finger near the trigger.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Nolan added.

Karron contemplated doing something stupid. The nanos in her head were angry insects begging to be let free. They buzzed through her, little twitches of muscle and thought which she had tried to euthanize with time and quiet.

Jam the pole into the river, shove the ship hard right. Grab the gaff two steps fore, take five steps, remove gun from man. Throw gaff and rope at woman. Take gun, kill. Two shots.

She ran it in her head ten different ways. Every time, Ishim had a high chance of being shot before she got to the man. She had a high chance of being shot, too, but a bullet or two would only piss her off, not take her down.

The kids stayed aft, crouched on a blanket, staring at the deck. No help there.

Ishim caught her eye and shook his head, his graying braids swinging with the movement. Karron pressed her lips together and nodded. She would wait then; wait for the passengers to screw up. Humans always screwed up.

They poled over to shore. The hull ground into the reeds, and Jill threw a rope up onto the broken bridge. A man rose from above and caught it, tying the ship off. Two more men made their way out of the brush and slogged into the shallows.

“Lower the ladder. This is where you get off,” Jill said, motioning with her pistol. Covenant gun, the pointed cross clearly stamped on the barrel.

“I am not leaving my ship,” Ishim said. He folded thickly muscled black arms over his chest, chin up. “You want to go somewhere, we’ll take you. But I do not leave my ship.”

She and Ishim had checked all the bags. They’d made Jill and Nolan stand while they patted them down, too. Where had they hidden the guns?

Karron looked back at the kids. They hadn’t checked them. Stupid of her. She should know how dangerous children could be. He hadn’t told her, the other night. Karron wondered if the boy would have, if she’d agreed to help. He hadn’t said a word, because he knew the man and woman would force her hand if they had guns. It was how a War Child would think, what she would have done in his place.

Oni caught her eye now and mouthed a word of apology, looking decades older than seven. Bee clung to him, staring at the planks, her knuckles white where she gripped Oni’s shirt. There was a gun on the ship, next to the steam engine in a hidden compartment. Fat lot of good it would do her now. She had a small knife on her belt. Knife in a gunfight. Not so good either.

All scenarios led to Ishim being shot before she could fight back.

Her mind buzzed, her blood singing the song of death. The song of war.

Memories buried and half-forgotten arose, snapping into place like a joint of out of socket. She’d killed once before to protect the ship, to protect Ishim. She’d come back from the warm rage that time. She could return again from that bright place. She had no choice.

Karron raised her eyes from the kids to the Ring where it slashed the blue skies above, shining white in the sun. She was no more able to stop being a killer than the Ring was able to stop dropping rocks. Hating the Ring for the storms and the fires was as pointless as hating the sun for shining. Hating her nanotech and her training was the same. She could fight it, the way they fought the river to move upstream. But let go, stop for a moment, and she would drift like the ship, going the way nature intended.

Karron set her pole down slowly. It was too long to use as a weapon. She turned to Jill after a glance told her the men on the shore didn’t have guns in their hands.

“You think you are the first to try to hijack our ship? Ishim and his brother built this ship with their hands, sweat, and tears. His brother’s name is on the hull, his brother’s blood in the nails and boards, his hair in the rope and sail.” Karron moved slowly to her left. One more step and she’d have the gaffing hook. She kept her eyes on Jill.

“A captain,” she continued, knowing Ishim would hear her, knowing he’d understand, “a true captain always goes down with his ship.”

Oni acted before she could. The boy crossed the deck in a blur of preternatural speed, whipping the blanket into a weapon before him. It caught Jill in the side and threw her off balance. The boy was small, and there wasn’t much strength in the blow, but the blanket’s momentum shoved her into the mast, distracting the woman for a precious moment.

Karron grabbed the gaffing hook. Ishim dropped to the deck, sweeping his own pole to the side and catching Nolan in the legs with it. Karron sprang and landed on the man. She plunged the pointed end of the gaff into his throat with her right hand even as her left went for the revolver. Blood sprayed from his mouth as a gunshot cracked out over the water.

Bee screamed. Karron wrenched the revolver from Nolan’s dying fingers and rolled to the side, pointing the gun where she’d last seen Jill.

Oni was down, holding his hands to his thin stomach, dark blood welling between his fingers. Jill turned, swinging the gun a little wildly. Dimly, at the edge of her battle-focused awareness, Karron saw movement as the man on the bridge jumped to the deck and the other two tried to climb the side.

The revolver was her hand, a metal extension of her killing will. Fifteen years without a gun, and she felt as though time had stood still. She was a Child again, full of light, bright and hot and deadly.

The laughter ringing over the water was her own, echoing back at her as she squeezed the trigger.

One shot for Jill, giving the woman a third eye and a baffled expression before she toppled over. Two shots for the man who had jumped to the deck. One shot for the man climbing over the railing.

Karron gained her feet and ran to the rail. The final man wasn’t trying to climb up anymore. He sloshed and slogged to the firmer shore, trying to run. She raised the gun. Two shots left, if the weight was right, if it was as she remembered.

“Karron.”

Ishim’s voice broke her focus. The big man moved up beside her, carefully making noise and staying out of striking distance.

She kept her eyes on the escaping prey.

“Karron,” he repeated. “Look to the sky.”

Her arms shook with the effort of holding the gun without firing; Karron forced herself to look up.

“Ringlight,” she murmured. “Sunlight. Earthlight. Ringlight. Sunlight. Earthlight.” Over and over until the words became nothing but breathing.

Karron lowered the gun.

The man was gone, lost to the brush. She could have hunted him down, but the light was fading inside. She was tired, the buzzing in her head growing quiet as the moment passed.

“Help him,” Bee said, the little girl’s voice strained but strong.

“They are like me,” Karron said. “He’ll live. Get powder for the bleeding. He’ll live,” she repeated. “He is like me.”

Ishim went for the first aid kit. Karron went for the bodies. She cut their throats before she hauled them over the side, shoving away her aroused, visceral reaction to the salt and copper scent of blood.

They’d have to scrub the boards. The blood would stain. The coin would buy paint to hide the stains. Karron kept her thoughts flowing, simple, calm thoughts. Lists of things to do. She ignored the kids as long as she could, getting the boat unhooked. Oni would live. Ishim would help him.

Oni slept in a pile of blankets, Bee holding his hand. Ishim and Karron didn’t speak, just poled further up the channel. They would skip the settlement.

“He’ll need a good meal,” she said eventually, as the sun set and painted the Ring orange and pink.

“There’s an inlet ahead. I can hunt.”

“I’ll hunt.”

The rabbit was slow and fat on spring grass. Karron used a thrown rock to bring it down. The hard earth beneath her feet felt strange as she made her way back to the river.

Ishim had brought the kids down off the ship and started a fire on the driest bit of land they could find. Oni’s color was better, his eyes bright and clear.

“You could have told me about the guns,” Karron said as she quartered the rabbit into the small kettle before adding precious pure water to the stew.

“You wouldn’t have helped us,” Oni said.

“You knew?” Ishim said, looking at Karron, making it clear he was talking about the kids, not about the guns.

“Only last night. They weren’t our problem.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Smugglers and questions, right?”

“We’re your problem now,” Oni said with the kind of smug smile only a child used to being the smartest person around could wear.

“And where do you expect us to take you? Ria?”

“We have been paid to take them that far,” Karron offered.

Ishim looked at Karron and shook his head with a small smile of his own.

“No,” Oni said. “Sanctuary.”

Karron laughed, the sound barking from her throat, surprising her. “That’s a myth. Hell, we told each other that myth in my crèche.”

Sanctuary. A place where they had tech that could take out the nanos. Tech to calm them, make a War Child normal again. A place where no one would make you kill, a place where no brothers or sisters went insane and had to be put down like rabid dogs.

A myth. A bedtime story told by motherless children. Told by killers.

“I have a map,” Oni said. “Give me your knife.”

Karron drew her knife, trying not to think of the throats it had cut today.

“Wait,” Ishim said, reaching for Oni as the boy cut into his own arm with a sure stroke.

Karron caught Ishim’s forearm and pushed him back. “He’s like me,” she said.

Oni pulled a small tube from under his skin. Already his nanos were closing the wound, the blood welling, slowing, and stopping even as she watched. He handed the knife back before opening the tube.

Inside was a map on thin paper. No, Karron saw, not paper. Leather of some kind. So thin that when he held it up in the firelight, the flames shone straight through. Illuminating lines. River lines. Numbers. A small star, done in red ink, like a drop of blood.

“Zouri to James, James to Dakota. Then west, to the Yellowstone and into the mountains. I have coordinates, see those numbers? Not a myth. It’s real. The ones who made us, they came from there. We were to be the new generation, the new kind of Child.”

“I am Eve,” Bee added. “I hate being Eve. Wanna be Bee. Bees can sting.”

“Jill and Nolan were from Sanctuary?” Ishim asked.

Karron was silent, still staring at the map, holding her breath, trying to decide if a legend could be real.

“No, they worked there. I don’t know what happened. Funding dried up. The Covenant doesn’t want more Children, I guess. They ended the program, and we were supposed to be destroyed.”

Karron tore her eyes from the map and looked at Oni. “History repeats,” she said softly.

“Marta, the woman you call Jill, she stole us. Said a baron would pay for us. She killed the others, but not before Sandy, the woman from Sanctuary, gave me the map and told me how to find it.” Oni leaned back against the piled blankets with a pained sigh and carefully rolled up the map.

The stew started to boil over. Karron turned away from the kids, from the map to an impossible place, and settled for dealing with dinner.

Later — her belly full of spring roots and rabbit — she stood at the edge of the river and watched lights smear across the darkening sky. Ishim came up beside her, making no attempt to hide his approach.

“Do we take them to this place, this Sanctuary?” he said.

“Tarik is yours,” Karron said. She turned and looked at her friend. Her real words were unspoken. Don’t make me decide.

“We been on the river a long time,” Ishim said. “Drifting up and down. Been a long time since I did anything but sail with my grief and try to outrun old memories.”

“We are alike,” Karron said, her mouth twisting into what felt like a smile. At least on the outside. “I like the river. Sanctuary is a dream, nothing more.”

“Maybe it’s time we stopped drifting,” Ishim said with a too-casual shrug. “Can’t just leave two kids on their own. But if you don’t want to go, we’ll set them down in Ria. That boy is smart as ten men. He’ll figure his way and take care of his sister.”

Karron nodded and looked back to the sky as Ishim moved back toward the camp. She walked to the very edge of the river. Water soaked through her boots, her toes going numb as she stood on the muddy bank. Oni and Bee. Children like she had been. Like she still was, in the bright moments she couldn’t quite seem to escape.

“Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured. Bending low, she dug her fingers into the mud and squeezed, feeling the gritty earth slide over her skin.

Sanctuary meant healing, meant being free of insanity, free of the things in her head. Myth. Myth like War Children were becoming a myth. Another generation, and they’d be as forgotten as most of the texts and histories from before the Ring, as much legend as the Archive was legend, as the great Wars would become in thirty or fifty more years.

Ishim was right. She had been drifting on the river. But now she had a brother and sister again. And they had a map. A map to a dream.

Karron bent down and let the river wash the last traces of grit from her hand.

Maybe it was time to dream again.

© 2015 by Annie Bellet.

Originally published in The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annie Bellet is the author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her short fiction is available in multiple collections and anthologies. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horseback riding, video games, comic books, tabletop RPGs, and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat. Find her on her website at anniebellet.com.

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

The Myth of Rain

Seanan McGuire

5,000 words

Female spotted owls have a call that doesn’t sound like it should come from a bird of prey. It’s high-pitched and unrealistic, like a squeaky toy that’s being squeezed just a little bit too hard. Lots of people who hear them in the woods don’t even realize that they’ve heard an owl. They assume it’s a bug, or a dog running wild through the evergreens, beloved chewy bone clenched tightly in its jaws.

I held tight to the branch beneath me and adjusted my binoculars, trying to find the telltale barred plumage. The night scope I had was good, but I needed a positive ID before I moved. I had been tracking this female for the better part of two days. I was tired, and muddy, and covered in mosquito bites. Kathy had already radioed in to confirm that her team was done scooping, tagging, and crating all the Western pond turtles in her sector. They were moving on to assist Benet and his team with the search for Beller’s ground beetles. The stress there really belonged on the word “ground.” They were going to be on the ground. And I, and my team, would be staying in the trees for the foreseeable future.

“Do birds, Julie,” I muttered, adjusting my binoculars again. “You like birds. You think they’re pretty. You should do birds. That way you’ll be less miserable thinking about how all this is going to burn.”

There was a flash of barred wings in the tree in front of me, feathers ruffled out as the female owl I had been tracking settled on the branch. I stopped talking and held my breath, tracking her slow, bobbing walk as she moved toward the main body of the tree.

Come on, sweetheart, I thought, so fiercely that if I could have developed telepathy in that moment, I would have done it. Show me that you’re going home.

The owl paused, looking around herself with a predator’s wariness. She didn’t need to wonder what kind of monsters lurked in the woods: She knew, because she was one of them. Her wings were silent and her talons were sharp, but there were still things that could hurt her.

She had no idea how many things there were that could hurt her.

Finally, the owl vanished into her tree, and I lowered my binoculars, beginning to inch my way back along the branch I had been perched upon. I knew where her nest was now. I could come back any time I needed to.

There were monsters coming to these woods. I was going to do my best to save her.

• • • •

When the droughts hit the West Coast in the early teens, everyone said “this too will pass.” Climate change was still up for debate in those days, at least in the eyes of people who had everything to gain by keeping the argument going for just a little longer, long enough for them to make their money and get the hell out of Dodge. Lots of beach houses got quietly sold during the back half of the decade. Lots of island resorts were traded in for ski lodges and mountain getaways. The signs were there, if you knew where to look for them.

Trouble was, the spin machine was spinning as fast as it could, and when people pointed to the signs, the pundits said we were fear-mongering and telling lies and trying to discredit good American businessmen who were only doing what they did for the good of the country. A lot of money traded hands in those days, and even as people were starting to focus on eating local and recycling, they ignored the fact that the lakes were drying and the hills were burning and the whole great stretch of green that we had all depended upon for so long was becoming a fairy tale. The myth of rain in California.

Thing about lies is that no matter how often you tell them and how much you believe them, they’re not going to become true. “Fake it until you make it” may work for public speaking and falling in love, but it doesn’t stop climate change. By 2017, it was pretty clear who the liars were, and they weren’t the scientists holding up their charts and screaming for the support of the public. By 2019, it was even clearer that we’d listened to the lies too long. The tipping point was somewhere behind us, overlooked and hence forgotten. Maybe there had been a time when we could have reversed the damage and restored our planet to its natural equilibrium. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter anymore.

The rich fled the places where the sun was too bright and the rain was too rare, and when the places they fled to dried up in turn, the rich fled further, looking for some promised land that had managed to remain pristine while they were busy wrecking the world the rest of us had to live in. It was inevitable that their eyes would settle on the Pacific Northwest, where the trees were still green and the rain was still coming down.

Global climate change hadn’t spared the Pacific Northwest. Everyone I knew from Seattle complained about how hot it was, even breaking seventy degrees in October. They complained about how blue their skies were, and how much they missed the rain. And a few of them — the ones who understood what was about to happen — complained about the way the big corporations were sniffing around, the maggots moving on from the corpse of San Francisco, which they had already stripped down to dry bones.

Without its ever-present rain, Seattle was a beautiful, tempting target, and Portland was even more so. They were still cool. They were still green. The changes that had done so much damage to the rest of the country had just made them more attractive to everyone else — especially the parts of everyone else who could afford to move on a whim. Forget the poor. Forget the disenfranchised. They were the ones who had done the least to destroy the world as we’d known it for so long, and now they were the ones being left behind.

Oh, we fought. Because the thing was, Portland and Seattle and Vancouver, they were beautiful cities, with their own positive qualities . . . but what they weren’t was infinitely capable of expansion. There were protected wetlands and forests to every side, mountain microclimates and endangered species under the protection of the federal government. The Pacific Northwest was already full, sorry, and it wasn’t looking to double its population any time soon.

But it was also the home to several large, thriving tech firms, which between them controlled more of the political figures in the area than anyone had ever considered. Some of these men and women had been the ones to put us into our current predicament, continuing to throw their money into economically and environmentally unsound practices because it was cheaper than the alternatives. Who cared if a few newts died when their ponds dried up, if it meant that microchip manufacturing could be outsourced for just a little bit longer? Who cared if a few houses wound up literally underwater, if it meant they could keep paying fines instead of fixing problems?

And then, when they had to stop paying fines, when they had to start fixing problems, those same brave men and women turned their attention to getting rid of laws they didn’t like. Why did owls need entire forests for themselves? Yes, it was important to preserve species diversity, but that land was needed by humans, who would do more with it than simply leave it untouched and growing wild. There were DNA banks now, there were zoos and private collections, there were a hundred ways to wipe a creature out of the natural world without losing it forever. It was cruel, yes, but it was also necessary. How could they leave so much green and verdant land unused, when so many people were wanting?

The environmentalists had lost the fight against industry and fossil fuel and men who spoke in voices that dripped money. They had failed to stop climate change in its infancy, and failed again in its childhood, and now that it was an angry adult, slamming its fists into every country in the world, there was no stopping it. They looked upon this newest fight, and knew they couldn’t win.

Still, they fought — we fought. We used every delaying tactic in the world, and a few more that we made up on the spot. They played dirty, and so we played dirty. And in the end, they had more money and fewer morals, and they won. They won everything.

Protection for endangered species and habitats wasn’t as important as space for homes and cities and jobs. Commerce and trade were coming to the Pacific Northwest, whether we wanted them or not, despite our protests that they had been here all along. State legislators looked at a sky that was black with crows and said, “The wildlife is doing fine without our help.” They didn’t see the complicated web of systems that set those crows in flight.

We argued. We bartered. We stalled.

We won. A small battle, not the war; a small victory, more of a sop to bleeding-heart environmentalists than anything real.

We got a year.

• • • •

I reached base camp two hours after sunrise. My owl was long since asleep in her hole, waiting out the hours of daylight. Hunting nocturnal predators means late nights followed by long days: I’d go back around noon with a team, and we’d extract her from her nest, stuffing her into a carrier that was more than large enough for her needs, but that would seem too small to a creature who was used to having the entire sky beneath her wings. I wondered if owls were claustrophobic. I forced myself to stop just as quickly. It didn’t matter — it couldn’t matter — because we were running out of time.

Benet sat at one of the camp tables with his eyes closed and a mug of tea slowly cooling next to his hand. A small plastic tank rested on the table in front of him. Something moved inside. I squinted. Three large, skink-like lizards were stacked atop each other like children’s toys, their spade-shaped heads twitching from side to side as they watched for danger.

“Alligator lizards?” I asked.

“Northern alligator lizards,” said Benet. He didn’t open his eyes. “They don’t like deserts. They do like streams and mud. No one’s seen one in California for ten years. They went from least concern to presumed extinct in less than a decade.”

Crap. “Where did you find them?”

“I flipped over a log looking for beetles, and there they were. They must have been eating the things I was supposed to save.” He opened his eyes, fixing me with a look that was equal parts misery and despair. “I didn’t know that they were here. I haven’t been watching for them — no one has. Their habitat never extended this far up before. How are we supposed to save this ecosystem if we don’t even know what’s in it? We’re going to fail.”

“We’ve known that since day one,” I said. He blinked, expression shifting toward betrayal, and I sighed. “There was no way we could save everything that needed to be saved. We’d need a country, not just a compound. The Arks will preserve, but they’ll be incomplete. We know that. Maybe in three generations, the people working them will be able to pretend that they give an accurate look at what life was like before we clear-cut the planet. Maybe in six generations, we’ll be planting again, and this will be the basis for an ecosystem all its own. But we’re going to fail, if you define success as ‘we saved everything.’” I shook my head. “Something has to burn. When the world catches fire, something has to burn.”

“You’re our resident little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” asked Kathy, walking in with a crate under her arm. She deposited it in the cryo freezer next to the door. Those poor turtles would never know what had hit them. “How went the owl search?”

“I finally found out where the last lady owl has been nesting during the day; I’m going to grab the extraction team and go pry her out around noon,” I said. The skin around Kathy’s eyes tightened, her lips thinning as she pressed them together in an expression that was not a frown, not quite; she wasn’t letting it get that far.

I had no such restraint. I frowned, eyeing her sidelong. “What’s wrong?”

“Remember last week’s report, where you confirmed removal of eight owls from the sectors you’d been assigned?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, feeling my heart sink toward my toes.

“Some people think that’s sufficient genetic diversity to preserve the species,” she said. “Julie, I’m so sorry.”

My heart sank further. “How much of my territory are they seizing early?”

She shook her head. That was enough of an answer, really, but I still wanted to hear her say it; I wanted to know how short-sighted the people who were supposedly in charge were going to be. So I waited, just looking at her, until she said, “They’re taking the whole thing. They say that the construction crews are running ahead of schedule, and we’ve taken in so many refugees from Southern California —”

“Vultures, you mean,” I said, breaking in. “They killed their state, and now they’re coming for ours. This should be against the law.”

“It was against the law, remember?” She didn’t bother to conceal her bitterness. We were all among friends here. There had been some concern about spies initially, the environmental equivalent of industrial espionage, but we had all eventually realized that we didn’t care. If they were getting their hands dirty with the rest of us, they could carry as many tales of angry, resentful environmentalists back to their bosses as they liked. It wasn’t like anyone was going to be shocked by the depths of our anger. We were trying to save the remains of the natural world, and they were still lighting matches.

“Fine,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough, so I repeated it: “Fine. How long do we have? The insect teams have barely started their sweeps, and you know the remaining mammalian populations are migratory, we need to do a full underbrush check to make sure they’re not in my territory.”

“There isn’t going to be time for that.”

The world seemed to slow and crystallize. I heard Benet’s chair scrape against the floor as he rose and moved to stand beside me, leaving his alligator lizards on the table. Kathy looked at me solemnly, and the pity in her eyes was one more match for the pyre that was being built, one fallen evergreen at a time, in the wasteland of my soul.

“How long?” I whispered.

“The construction crews will arrive to start the clear-cutting today at eleven,” said Kathy. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I stared at her for a moment. Then I whirled, turning to Benet and jabbing a finger at his chest. “Get on the com and call everybody. I don’t care if they’re ass-deep in pine martens, they get here now. We have four square miles to clear, and we have four hours to do it.”

“We’re not going to make it,” said Benet, and he was right, and I didn’t care.

“We’ll get the owl, and we’ll get whatever else we can find, and we’ll save them, do you hear me? We’re going to save them. Now move.” I moved. So did he.

We had a world to save.

• • • •

I grew up in Northern California, at the foot of Mt. Diablo, which teemed with tarantulas and rattlesnakes. It wasn’t uncommon to look out the window in the early morning and see coyotes in the yard, moving like pale ghosts through the fog. I was lucky. I was born in the last of the good decades, when it still rained, when the puddles still iced over in the winter months. Maybe I never saw snow on the ground, but I knew the sound of my feet crunching through frozen grass, and I knew all the cycles and seasons of the natural world.

I know the exact day the frogs stopped singing for the last time in the dry creek bed that ran behind my childhood home. I could remember the hour and minute, quote it like scripture. It had been years since I’d actually seen a bullfrog by that point, and I was a grad student in environmental science, marching in climate awareness parades on the weekends, writing impassioned op-eds about recycling and ecological sustainability. I preached the gospel of the carrier bag and the compost heap, and it all amounted to nothing, because the rain stopped, and the frogs stopped, and one night the mountain burned and swallowed my parents and the house where I’d grown up in a single brilliant gulp. They were killed by climate change, even if no murder charges were ever going to be brought against a human agency.

We’d known, by then, that our last stand would be the Pacific Northwest. It was mountainous enough that the change in sea level wasn’t projected to be completely disastrous for human life. All we had to do was keep human life from being completely disastrous for everything else. And we had failed. Maybe we’d been doomed to fail from the very beginning. It was honestly hard to know one way or the other, and the burning was upon us.

Our camp was one of fifteen scattered through the Olympic Peninsula. Two hundred and fifty people were distributed between them, each fighting the same hopeless fight. Some of those people were fighting it for good reasons and some were fighting it for bad ones, and in the end, it didn’t matter. You don’t question the motives of the firebreak. You’re just grateful when it gives you a little bit longer before you go up in flames.

Benet was by my side as I plunged back into the forest, a carrier in my arms and a pair of falconer’s gloves clipped to my waist. The people who had decided my time was up only looked at numbers. They had a bunch of columns on a page that said “owls normally nest in pairs,” and “an even number of owls has been extracted from this territory.” They had paid biologists who would look at the samples we’d sent in and claim that we’d preserved sufficient genetic diversity, even if we hadn’t, because bringing back the owls was a problem for another time, another generation — another world. We were up against people who had shown time and again that they were happy to destroy whatever they needed to in order to line their own pockets just a little more. They were always “saving for a rainy day.”

Well, the world was out of rainy days, and still those assholes kept on saving, while we were out here in the trenches, saving everything that really mattered. We deserved what we’d brought down on our heads. Humanity was the architect of its own destruction — and I don’t give a shit if that sounds callous. There were the ones who lied and the ones who died, and we made this mess for ourselves. The frogs didn’t. The beetles and the turtles and the lizards didn’t. And right now, most of all, the owls didn’t. We deserved damnation. They deserved a second chance.

The remains of a large fallen tree — now just trunk and major bearing branches — lay off to one side of our makeshift path, decaying gently back into the forest floor. Benet shot it a longing look. I smiled, just a little. Just enough to let him know I understood.

“Grab three people, and take it apart,” I said. “There’s no telling what you’ll find.”

“I can see three species of moss, two lichens, and signs of burrower beetles,” he said. “We’re going to find a world.” Then he was gone, waving for the nearest members of the team to join him as he dropped to his knees next to the log and started digging.

The rest of us kept moving, although I knew full well that this was a scenario that would be playing out over and over again now that I had given permission for it to happen once. We each had our own areas of focus and obsession, scattered across the natural world like Legos on a bedroom floor at midnight. If we stepped on one of them — a fallen log, a frog calling from a hidden stream, even a rare or threatened mushroom — we would have to stop and deal with the pain, because there just wasn’t another option. All of us were what we were. We had to save what we could. Otherwise, there’d be nothing to distinguish us from the ones who’d sent us here, scrambling to put our toys away before the house went up in flames.

The trees were dense here, barely touched by human hands. I’d always come through carefully before, picking my way between the saplings, doing as little damage as I could. It was an old, useless habit; I could have cut each tree down and thrown it away as soon as I was sure it didn’t contain something worth saving. But the part of my soul that had been involved in conservation since I was in my teens chafed at the idea that anything wasn’t worth saving; that we couldn’t find a way to somehow remove every tree from this soil and carry it away to a place where it could keep on growing, safe and sheltered in the welcoming earth. I had listened to that part of my soul. I shouldn’t have, because now I was crashing through the forest like an intruder, and the forest was responding by crashing back.

My owl’s tree was just ahead. I shoved a branch out of my way, hearing the crack as it was bent too far, and took a hasty count of my remaining assistants. There were only six of them, and only one was someone I recognized as working with birds, although his specialization was in corvids, not owls. “I’m heading up,” I shouted, indicating the tree. “You start searching down here, look for anything else that needs extraction.”

“What if you fall?” asked one of the women. I didn’t recognize her.

“Then I fall,” I said. There was no time to set up a proper rig: I pulled the climbing clamps from my belt, jammed them into the tree, and started my ascent.

The higher I got, the more I understood what we were about to lose. Mt. Rainier gleamed in the far distance, Grandfather coming out from behind the increasingly uncommon clouds to watch solemnly as we stripped the world around him. Everywhere I looked, there were trees. Sometimes they surrounded islands of steel and glass, or were split by the black ribbons of the highway system, but they were alive, and they were there, and they deserved this land as much as we did. Maybe more.

I pulled myself higher, feeling the clamps flex beneath my hands as the servos adjusted, recalibrated, and locked in. They were designed to handle my weight plus or minus forty pounds — more than that and I would have needed a second set of hands to safely make the descent. There’s not an owl in this world that weighs that much, thankfully.

Every inch of my ascent brought another strip of forest into view, until finally I could see where it ended. The land there had already been clear-cut and prepared for development, centuries of growth stripped away in favor of concrete foundations and — eventually — perfectly manicured, perfectly controlled little lawns, one strip to a home, so that people could pretend that they hadn’t destroyed the natural world for their own benefit. Some of them would plant wildflowers that used to grow here naturally. I was sure of it. They’d fill their tiny yards with color and pat themselves on the back when bees or butterflies appeared, pretending that those sightings weren’t rarer than they used to be, pretending that they’d never done anything wrong.

And in a generation, when their kids had grown up thinking “the great outdoors” meant a paved cul-de-sac and a few sad cabbage butterflies, all those mistakes and misdemeanors would be forgotten, swept under the rug of history and never discussed in polite company. The Arks would be up and running by then. It would be easy to say “oh, it’s better like this,” and “oh, they would never have survived in the wild.” There would be the gene banks to fall back on, once the live displays were out of favor — and they would be. Zoos had been viewed as the best form of conservation once, and look where that ended.

I wasn’t saving these animals. I was buying them a stay of execution: that was all. They would die in cages, never seeing the open sky or the feeling of warm, welcoming soil beneath their claws. I was turning them into artifacts, and they’d never been given a choice in the matter. Even now, it wasn’t like we were asking them whether they wanted to be saved, when “safe” meant captive and confined. We’d taken gene samples from every individual we could find. We could have released them back into the world, letting them die with the habitats that had sustained them for so long. Was it mercy or arrogance that led us to stay our hands and keep them caged? Did we have the right?

The owl’s hole loomed dark in the trunk above me. It was a good location, sheltered from the wind and rain, sufficiently concealed by the nearby branches that no competing predators were likely to find it by mistake. I wondered what had happened to her mate. She was a mature female with a good nesting place, and we hadn’t caught a solo male in this territory: She had been widowed somehow, probably by human hands, and now I was coming to take away her freedom.

But I had to. I had to, or she was going to die. I could see the wood’s edge from where I hung suspended against the tree; see the great construction equipment rolling into place, ready to begin the burn. There was no future here.

Pulling on the falconer’s gloves, I eased myself closer to the hole, until I could see the silent lump of feathers that was my owl. She might be awake by now: I hadn’t been silent in my ascent, and birds of prey have excellent hearing. She wasn’t fleeing because I had blocked the exit, and because sometimes, stillness was the best defense something like her could have.

It wasn’t going to save her this time. I plunged my hands into the darkness, seizing the owl and pulling her out into the light.

She fought. She flapped and struggled and screamed her indignation into the air, glaring at me with her bright black eyes, gnashing her beak as she fought to reach me. When she cried, it was like her entire face opened, blossoming into a flower formed from terrible anger and betrayal. She screamed. I struggled to hold her, gathering her as close as I dared before switching my grip to let me open the carrier. I was careless. That was the only explanation. I was careless, and I was conflicted, and I took my eyes off the owl for a heartbeat.

That was long enough.

When she moved, it was like a storm: swift and unforgiving and inescapable. Her beak sliced into the flesh above my collarbone, opening it wide. It happened so fast that for a moment, there was no pain. There was only the shock of beak against bone, and the red smell of blood mixing with the green smell of the trees.

My clamps were designed to keep me from falling, but they couldn’t do much when they were disengaged. I fell. Twisting hard against the pain in my chest, I managed to wrap the clamps around a branch and hit the switch to auto-engage. They pulled me up hard, knocking the wind out of my lungs and leaving me dangling, helpless, as the owl I’d come to save took flight and winged away into the forest, white wings against black branches and blue, blue sky.

“Dammit,” I whispered — but maybe it was better this way. Maybe some things were never meant to be caged, nevermore to see the land to which they’d been born. The owl flew, and I hung suspended, granting myself a moment before I disengaged the clamps and went back to fighting to hold the fire back for just those few precious moments longer.

All we could do was save what little we could put our hands on, and remember the things we had to leave behind. We owed the world we had destroyed that, at least. We owed it so much more.

Maybe someday, our children would see owls in the world again.

© 2015 by Seanan McGuire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

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

Ghosts of the Fall

Sean Williams

7,700 words

A warm current rolled in overnight, bringing with it the stench of death. When I awoke at dawn, my nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting mucus. Gagging, I rolled over and reached for my stained filtermask. When it was in place, I struggled from my hammock and squinted from the arbour of my room. The sun, eclipsed by the shadowy bulk of a vine-tangled building, was feeble and brown, but enough of its light filtered between the towers to allow a rough study.

Plumes of steam rose from the waters far below, which, although slightly lower in level than they had been the night before, still drowned the groundward floors of the city. Black shapes hunted lazily, deceptively small from my altitude: crocs, searching for food.

A dull flash of light from the top of the opposite building caught my eye. Davo was up already, adjusting his solar panels. Every drop of energy was precious, even that which struggled through poisoned clouds on a day such as this. Rubbing my eyes and trying in vain to make the seal of my mask comfortable against cheekbones and jaw, I prepared to face the morning.

A warm current and a brown dawn, I thought. Someone, or something, will die today . . .

Max, my foster, had been up and working for some time. He greeted me as I emerged from the access stairway in the centre of the rooftop garden.

“‘Morning, Hogarth.” He put down his hoe in order to wipe the sweat from his brow. Viewed from the top of the building, Sol was a malign ball hovering low over the yellow-smudged horizon. Although I knew the colour was caused by pollution and dust in the lower atmosphere, I couldn’t help but feel as though the sun itself had been corrupted. Under its light, Max looked twenty years older: his skin was pallid and blotchy, and his white hair seemed thinner than cobwebs.

I could almost see the leaves of our plants withering along with us.

“Whew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Bad tides.”

Max shrugged. “Got to have them, I suppose. Balances the good times.”

“Kris’ll be disappointed.”

Max’s brown eyes crinkled. Kris Parker, one of the joint chiefs of our community, had a theory that the ecosystem was gradually stabilising. Bad tides, which occurred about once every month or so, confounded him.

“This ain’t nothing on the old days.” Max picked up the hoe again and tilted his hat to ward off the sun. “I don’t suppose you remember it that well.”

I didn’t, although I’d heard the stories often enough. “Has Davo been over?”

“Earlier. He was asking for you. Take the morning off, if you want to go see him.”

“Thanks, Max. I’ll make it up.”

“No worries, son. Have a little fun for a change.”

He bent back to his work. For a thoughtful moment I, the youngest in the community, studied him, the eldest. We made an odd couple, but I knew I’d miss him when he succumbed. The thought alone was unpleasant. Max had been my foster for so many years that I had almost forgotten my real father. But whether I liked it or not, poison or accident would take him in the end, as they took everyone.

Perhaps he noticed my scrutiny, or sensed my mood.

“Git,” he said, without lifting his head, “before I put you to work.”

I pulled a face and ran off through the garden and down the access ladder, mindful of the broken rungs. From the third floor down stretched a rope bridge to the building in which Davo lived. I ran across, not looking down, and was exactly halfway when the earthquake hit.

But for the bells, I would’ve had no warning. With a gentle clatter at first, then with a strident jangling, every metal mobile and brass clapper in the city began to sound. I clutched the sides of the bridge and wrapped a rope around my ankle. As the quake set the bridge jumping, I hung on for dear life, too frightened to open my eyes, thinking of crocs and poisoned currents.

There came a deep, resonant bong, and I realised with a chill of fear that the old Cathedral bell was sounding, as it hadn’t more than once in my memory. Great Fred chimed four times in two minutes, and those two minutes felt like a lifetime to me, suspended between two derelict skyscrapers by little more than homespun string. Beneath the ringing, I could hear masonry falling and screams, some distant, some near; all perhaps reliving the Fall.

When the clatter died down and the shocks faded, I released the breath I hadn’t known I was holding and crawled the rest of the way to Davo’s building. Once over the threshold, I lay trembling in the darkness, trying not to cry.

• • • •

I am too young to have memories of the War, but I do faintly recall the Fall: the clouds that covered the sky, the months of darkness, the constant tremors. I dream occasionally of the nine waves that swept the old world away. Sometimes I even see the face of my long-dead father as he presses me into an elevator crammed with women, heading for higher ground.

The elders of Adelaide didn’t talk about these times, except in whispers. Much of my knowledge regarding the origins of our community was overheard and therefore patchy and incomplete. I suspect that, given time and allowing me descendants, it would have developed into a full-blown mythology. I truly believed that ogres had attacked us from the sky, hurling rocks upon our heads and leaving us to drown, cursed with childlessness and disease.

It wasn’t until I was about eleven years old that Davo sat me down and filled in a few blanks. He explained that the “ogres” had been the forces of the OEG, the Off Earth Government; that there had been just one massive rock, like an iceberg; and that the sterility and sickness were the results of radiation and industrial poisons set free by the Fall.

The descent of that single rock marked a decisive end to the long and bitter war between Earth and space. Davo spoke of melting icecaps, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and shifting continental plates. I understood very little of what he said, and in a way I was glad, for the words themselves sounded grim. Some things, however, I could understand. What we called magnetic north had once been southwest. Inconstant seasons were the result of a new wobble to the Earth’s axis. Every time it rained or a calved iceberg drifted near us, I wondered whether it was composed of water from Earth or from space. And the reason why we, the citizens of Adelaide, had no visitors was because no one else was left.

On the roofs of our flooded city we lingered, alone and forgotten.

A fluke of geography had kept the buildings from falling. Currents of clean, cold water flowing from the melting Antarctic icecap kept us from being poisoned. We survived on plants grown from seedlings found on nearby islands. The islands — which had once been hilltops — were themselves uninhabitable due to a proliferation of waste, but they had provided valuable resources during the early years. As our numbers dwindled from the original thousand to a bare one hundred, we learned to manage our crops better, and even bred chickens to balance our diet.

Few ever forgot the fact that we had survived the Fall by nothing short of a miracle, or that our existence was still tenuous. We were reminded of that every time the Earth’s new tilt precipitated a shift in currents and we received a flow of the dreaded warm tide. On such occasions, we were forced to rely on tank water until the tides once again turned — although other species, such as the giant crocs from the nearby islands, enjoyed the poisonous current. Strange mutants, rotting and twisted, were carried by the dark waters; poor food by any creature’s standards, but something where little existed elsewhere.

Kris Parker had a list of the things that should have killed us — and could still do so — which he showed to anyone who began to forget the legacy of the past. Most just learned to hide the scars a little better and got on with life — as though we had always lived on the tops of buildings in the middle of a shallow, fresh-water ocean.

Except in my dreams of the Fall, we always had. That was the trouble with being fifteen years old when the world was ten years dead.

• • • •

Max and I lived in one of the smaller buildings on the outskirts of the flooded city. Davo’s was much larger. A monster of more than sixty storeys, its upper levels were stepped and thick with plants. Despite that, it was home to just ten people. He occupied one entire floor of the ’scraper, of which only a small percentage was devoted to himself. The bulk of it contained every electrical good he had scavenged from the remains of the old world. Not the complex, specialised equipment — but the gadgets, like coffee machines, batteries, electric screwdrivers, televisions, and digital clocks.

I loved browsing through the relics, trying to imagine what they could possibly have been for. Few of them worked, but Davo could fix almost anything if left to tinker unhindered. I remember my absolute faith in his wizardry, tinged with only a small amount of envy. Even the air smelt better in there, as though the presence of so much of the past somehow cleansed it of the present.

Davo’s biggest problem — apart from those, like Kris, who felt better with the old technology forgotten — was power. The old solar panels — thoughtfully stored away by one of the founders, and requiring only cleaning and a technical mind to get them working again — were efficient but their output was limited. Furthermore, people often accused Davo of “stealing” more than his fair share of power, even though he had been the one to give it back to us in the first place.

He rarely spoke to me about the relics he was fiddling with, but I sometimes overheard him talking about these things with Max. Their secrecy bothered me for no other reason than that I felt left out, as children often do when barred from something adult.

As I mounted the steps to his level, I was greeted by an even greater state of disorganisation than usual. A couple of heavy racks had collapsed in the quake, spilling multicoloured wires and transistors like a tide of tiny bugs across the floor. I could hear Davo cursing somewhere in the depths of the workshop, but couldn’t see him. A strange sound filled the air: a whisper like, yet quite unlike, the hissing of cold rain or the crackling of fire.

“Hello?” I called, taking off my mask.

A ragged reply came from under a mound of old TV screens. “Shee-it! Is that you, Hogey? Give me a hand, would you?”

I ran to where he lay pinned beneath a cupboard. Taking a corner, I heaved until it lifted enough for him to wriggle free. I let go once he rolled away, and the crash reverberated for long seconds.

“You okay?” I asked, bending over him. He clutched his leg, which was turning a strange purple colour.

“Fucking thing!” I didn’t know whether he referred to his leg or the cupboard that had injured it. “Dislocated my bloody knee, I think. Hurts like buggery anyhow. Help me over to the tube.” I gripped him under one armpit and helped him limp across the room. A length of hose dangled from the ceiling, culminating in a small nozzle which Davo held to his lips.

“Wait,” he said, waving a hand at the bench. “Turn it off. Big red button — push it!” There was a machine on the workbench — a large metal box, its face adorned with knobs and dials and a blank screen in one corner. I did as he said and the hissing sound died away.

“What is it?” I asked, staring at it in wonder.

“Later.” He blew hard into the nozzle and I heard whistling from a higher floor echo down the stairwell. Davo hopped on one leg with the nozzle at his ear, anxious for a reply.

“Hello?” said a voice from the tube, faint and male.

“It’s Davo. Is Jerrie around?”

“Yeah. Somewhere.”

“I need speak to her.”

“Hang on, I’ll ask.” After a long pause, the voice returned. “Sorry, but she’s busy right now, repairing the garden.”

“Tell her it’s urgent.”

“It won’t make any difference.” The distant voice sounded amused. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Davo.”

“Okay, thanks anyway.” Davo hung up the tube. “Shit. Stupid bitch.”

I looked at him, shocked. For me — going through puberty with Adelaide’s male-to-female ratio at more than seven-to-three and no-one at all near my age — any woman was to be regarded with near-reverence, especially one who was ostensibly single, such as Jerrie.

“Bloody cow.”

“Shall I go get her?” I asked, wondering if they’d argued.

“No.” Davo leaned some of his weight on his leg, and winced. “I really don’t think I’ve done anything too serious. If you want, though, you could run up and get some cabbage leaves and a bandage.”

“Okay.” Cabbage leaves were good for muscle injuries.

“And if you do happen to see Jerrie, tell her I’d like to talk to her later. Just talk, if she asks.”

I headed for the stairwell. Rapidly winded by the humidity and the mask, I was gasping by the time I reached the rooftop. I needed permission before taking the leaves and sought Jerrie herself rather than anyone else. She was tending one of the gardens, her sun-browned and exercised figure distinctive among the others.

I stammered a hesitant greeting as she stood upon catching sight of me. I explained why I needed the leaves, and that Davo wanted to see her later. She frowned at “just talk,” but I didn’t pry into their affairs.

“He’s not badly hurt, is he?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “He reckons he’ll be okay.”

She leaned close to whisper in my ear. “Is the radio working?”

I frowned. “The what?”

“Never mind.” She backed away. “Tell him I’ll be down later.”

I nodded and headed back downstairs, clutching the leaves and bandage she had given me.

Davo had sat on the floor but was otherwise where I had left him. Together we bound his leg and manoeuvred him into the hammock. Only then did I ask: “Davo, what’s a radio?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment, until he realised. “Of course! You wouldn’t remember — you’re too young! Christ.” He reached for my arm. “Help me back up and I’ll show you.”

He hobbled painfully over to the workbench and settled into a stool in front of the mysterious machine, mumbling about waves through the air and antennae and frequencies — more things I didn’t understand. Talking across distances using electricity, or something like it, sounded impossible to me; only his matter-of-factness convinced me I might be wrong.

“It’s an old CB-V, practically a collector’s item, but it works — that’s the important thing.” He twiddled with knobs and aligned metal rods. I watched him, fascinated.

“Okay. Listen.” He turned a knob and the unearthly hiss returned, more softly this time.

We both listened closely, I expecting voices, he something else entirely. Both of us were disappointed.

“Damn.” He rummaged around the workbench for a length of wire. “The quake must have fucked up the ionosphere or something.” He detached a metal rod and fixed one end of the wire to it. Handing it to me, he said: “Take this and hang it out the window. Try not to let anybody see.”

I did as he asked. The stench of decay was stronger in the dull sunlight, and I held my breath until I got the rod in position. He waved me back and I hurried to his side.

He fiddled with knobs for a few minutes, until, breathing a sigh of gratification, he leaned onto his stool and motioned for me to listen closely. The hiss grew louder and louder until I could hardly think.

“Hear it?” Davo shouted above the din, flapping his hand open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.

I watched the hand and listened. A sound rose out of the chaos, a note repeating in time with his gesture:

. . . pip-pip-pip-pip-pip . . .

I stared at Davo in confusion, and nodded my head. I could hear the sound all right, but had no idea what it meant. Davo smiled triumphantly and killed the noise.

The sudden silence was eerie, until Davo filled it: “It’s a beacon,” he said, his voice trembling.

“A what?”

He did his best to explain. “Imagine you’re on the top of your building and I’m on the top of mine. You want to talk to me, but it’s too far to shout. All you have is a mirror. How do you attract my attention?”

“I guess I’d use the mirror.”

“Of course — reflecting the sun until I see you. That’s what a beacon is: a repeated flash, but of sound not light, carried through the air by radio waves.”

“So . . .?” I was breathless at the thought gradually dawning.

“So somebody’s out there.”

“And they’re trying to get our attention?”

Davo’s face was very serious when he replied: “Maybe. I hope so. You see, the great advantage of having this old CB-V is that we can do more than receive. We could transmit, talk to them, find out who they are — if we wanted to.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to?”

“I — I’m not sure.”

“Have you tried?”

He looked guilty, but was saved by the baying of a horn. I was about to press him, but Davo cocked his head to listen, and put a finger over his mouth.

I listened too. The horn-player, having attracted the attention of everyone in the city, rattled out a short, staccato code almost too quick for me to follow, then wound down with one final blast. A few horns replied, echoing raucously among the towers.

Davo winced as he shifted his leg to a more comfortable position. “So this is it, the excuse they’ve been waiting for. They’ve finally called a Council.”

“They always do after a quake.”

He smiled wryly. “But not always just to find out if some poor bastard’s been killed.”

“I don’t understand.”

He pulled another face, and I suggested he should go back to bed. He could see the sense in that, despite himself, and, after switching off the radio, allowed me to manhandle him back to his hammock.

“Can I ask you for another favour?”

I nodded.

“I need to go to the Council meeting tonight,” he said. “Would you and Max could help me get there?”

“Sure. I’ll ask Max, anyway.”

“Thanks.” He leaned back into the hammock and regarded me through half closed eyelids. “You’d better go do some work, seeing you’ll miss the night because of this damned bureaucratic bullshit.”

I nodded, although reluctant to leave the wizard’s den of his workshop. Even mysteries adults refused to explain were preferable to tilling soil and killing insects.

“You’re a good kid,” he said, before I left. “Don’t tell anyone what I showed you.”

• • • •

The afternoon passed slowly. I helped Max prune our crop of tomatoes and carry some ripe vegetables into the depths of our building, where the relative coolness would keep them fresh. As I performed my chores, my attention kept straying beyond the confines of the rooftop garden. I wondered who might be out there, across the seemingly endless ocean, and if they really were talking to us.

The sea was deep to the west, almost navy blue at the horizon; eastwards it grew shallower and lighter in colour as it approached the islands. Waves played on the distant beaches, white fingernails appearing and disappearing as though vast, submerged hands were reaching for the surface. Birds were few and far between when a warm tide happened upon us, and only the odd dark speck disturbed the hazy tranquility of the eastern horizon that day.

As recently as four years earlier, I had gone with Max and a few others on an expedition to Barker, the nearest of the islands. We were collecting wood to light a bonfire on Council Tower — a scheme devised by a man named Cameron Dennis, who wanted to see if there were any other survivors nearby. The Council had forbidden the use of the city’s store of wood, so we had to go to the islands to collect fuel.

We took even more stringent precautions than normal, wrapping ourselves from head to foot in old plastic and leather to keep out the poison, and ensuring our masks were equipped with triple the normal thickness of filters. Even so, the terrible malignance of the soil seemed to eat at us as we hacked at the mutated trees. One of our number scratched himself on an axe, and died two weeks later of fever.

What I remember most clearly is the return to Adelaide. The three heavily laden boats were rowed by our strongest men — one of whom was Max — and they hurried through the thickening gloom, oars splashing and creaking with effort. I crouched at the foremost point of our boat, staring ahead at the vision of our home silhouetted against the setting sun.

So flat and still was the sea that the buildings appeared to rise out of the surface of a shining mirror. Their reflections stabbed deep into the water, as though Adelaide were a city of crystal anchored to the very heart of the earth. Occasionally, a beam of light flashed through one of the abandoned floors, and my spirits soared, uplifted by the sight.

Then the light changed. The skyscrapers darkened, became slender pillars of blackness like the petrified legs of an enormous creature sinking into the sea. I’d never seen a gravestone — our bodies were burned or dumped into the sea — but I knew what they were, and what they meant to me. The place I called home was made of tombs, archetypal symbols of the empty, final flesh. Within ten, maybe twenty years, we would be gone, except perhaps for me and a few of the younger ones. Not long after, the buildings themselves would succumb to the acids that ate at their foundations and topple into the ocean. Adelaide would disappear without trace.

The sun set, like the slamming of a door, and everything went dark.

When the expedition returned, we unloaded the wood, hauled it up Council Tower and heaped it on a concrete block. Disaster struck when we tried to light it. Chemicals had so permeated the wood that it refused to burn, no matter how hard we tried. Eventually it was thrown into the sea and the attempt to signal fellow survivors abandoned.

As the sun slowly crept toward the horizon on the day Great Fred chimed four times, I was reminded of that venture.

“Do you think anybody’s out there?” I asked Max as we finished our jobs for the day.

My foster looked at me carefully, his grey eyes both amused and saddened. “I don’t think so, son. Why?”

“Just curious, I guess.” The day faded in a wash of deep browns and reds, tending to black. “What ever happened to Cameron Dennis?” I asking, realising that I hadn’t seen him for a long time.

“He killed himself when the bonfire project failed.”

“Oh.” I was tempted to ask how, but could guess the answer. The preferred method of suicide was to leap from a building and be killed upon impact with the forbidding waters below.

We were silent as stars appeared one by one in the grey sky. The first to emerge were the Strange Stars: three brilliant points of light hanging over the northern horizon, always brightest at the end of the day. The Strange Stars had paths of their own, entirely separate from the circle of the heavens, and they’d always fascinated me. They represented change and mystery in my otherwise immutable world.

I watched them with renewed interest until Max handed me a sack of compost.

“Take this down to the storeroom,” he said, “then we’ll head off to the Council.”

I obediently put aside my thoughts and hurried down the stairwell. When I returned, Max had a bag full of spare produce ready to take with us.

We crossed the bridge to Davo’s building. My friend waited for us there, hopping nervously back and forth on a pair of makeshift crutches. Jerrie was not present, having already gone to Council Tower.

“She means well,” said Max. “Perhaps a little too well for the likes of you.”

“She’s brainwashed, you mean,” Davo laughed bitterly. “Tell it like it is, you old bastard.”

The three of us inched our way up the four flights of stairs to the bridge connecting Davo’s home to the next building. I took the crutches and the bag while Max hoisted Davo onto his back, where the technician clung like a giant child. Slowly, carefully, we inched our way across the bridge, I praying all the while that there would be no repeat of that day’s quake.

There wasn’t. A light breeze had sprung up, dispelling the fog rising from the water. The night was clear and silent. Gap-toothed buildings surrounded us like silhouettes of all the world’s dead cities, immense and hollow. Five bridges ahead, we could hear a whisper of voices from where the Council gathered.

• • • •

Councils were normally exciting for me. Being accustomed only to the company of Max, and occasionally our neighbours, I was unused to crowds, and the hundred citizens of Adelaide certainly felt like one when gathered together. Although most were old and tired, and some openly grieved at the sight of the Council, shrunken as it was from the old days, my eyes saw only a multitude of dazzling variety.

On this occasion, however, I felt a twinge of nervous discomfort. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that, with everyone still masked against the fumes of the poisoned sea, the Council resembled less the gathering of our community than a coven of mouthless wraiths.

Davo, Jerrie and I were among the dozen or so below twenty-five years of age scattered through the assembly. The rest were uniformly over forty, with Max, at fifty-nine, being the eldest. Kris Parker, chair of the infrequent meetings, was forty-seven and almost completely bald. His eyes were a startling blue. I’d always been a little afraid of him.

“Order!” he called, and the crowd slowly settled. His eyes smiled through his mask at the rings of citizens sitting on the floor around him. The meeting was held on the very top of Council Tower, lit by yellow lamplight, and there seemed to be more shadows than people clustered about the makeshift podium.

Kris removed his mask to speak to the group as a whole.

“First, welcome to you all, and thanks to everyone who brought gifts. The surplus will be distributed to those who need it after the meeting. Second, the roll indicates that three people are missing.”

Kris listed the names, and members of the crowd explained the absentees. One had not been able to come because of fever; another had died the previous week of a heart attack; the last had fallen from a garden during the quake.

There was a long silence as the crowd remembered the dead woman. I couldn’t remember a meeting that hadn’t started with a roll call of the deceased. We were all used to the fact of our dwindling numbers. If tears were shed, they were hidden by the masks we all wore.

Kris shuffled his notes. “The reason we’re here is to discuss the effects of the quake. Does anyone have any major damage to report?”

A woman with red hair put up her hand, and Kris invited her to speak. Her fresh-water tank had developed a leak, allowing the precious reservoir to trickle away. In times of a bad tide, this was a serious matter. The woman accepted that the best course of action was to relocate the people living in her building and to transfer her crops before they wilted. The Council voted, and agreed. The move would take place the next day, or sooner if convenient.

I tried to put myself in her position. She was leaving her home and the crops she had tended with back-breaking care since the Fall. I felt sorry for her, and was selfishly glad that it hadn’t happened to Max and me.

Somebody else reported that one of the older buildings had collapsed. Although uninhabited and therefore a relatively minor loss, it was disturbing nonetheless. All the skyscrapers had a slight lean, and it was only a matter of time before the stronger structures capitulated to the force of gravity.

Kris waited a few moments for further queries, but none were forthcoming. No one mentioned the ever-present threat of crop failure, which was unusual; I supposed that the earthquake had erased the more conventional concerns of Adelaide, for a while.

“Very well. Let’s move on to the next and final matter. I’ve had a request from someone who wishes to remain nameless for information on a matter I know nothing about. The last, in itself, is not unusual —” a smattering of laughter greeted the small joke “ — but the subject is one of some significance for our entire community. I therefore called this Council in order to discuss it.

“I’d like to call David Rothbaum to the podium to answer a few questions.”

I stared in surprise at Davo, who struggled to his feet and removed his mask.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay here.” My friend indicated the splint and bandages on his leg and exaggerated slightly. “Dislocated, you see.”

Kris nodded. “My sympathies. By all means, remain where you are.”

“What would you like to know?”

Kris paused slightly before voicing the question. “The person I speak for would like to ask what you’ve been doing in that laboratory of yours. Is there anything you should tell us all about?”

“Let’s see.” Davo shuffled on his crutches. “I looked at the easy stuff first, so it’s only getting harder as time goes on. But there are two more panels working, if anybody needs power.” There was an immediate buzz: Everybody wanted more light, more heat. “And I’ve developed a primitive intercom system — a bit like telephone, but not as sophisticated. If we can find some unbroken wire I can link all the buildings together. That way we won’t have to shout across the gaps any more, or blow trumpets every time we have a Council meeting.”

Kris smiled widely, but the incisiveness in his eyes told me that he expected more. “And?”

“Well, there is something else I’ve been mucking around with. Not really a project, though — more a sort of hobby.”

“This is?”

Davo hesitated, and the Council awaited his reply.

“Uh, there was an old radio amongst all the junk, and I’ve been trying to make it work.”

Instantly the citizens of Adelaide stirred and whispered. There was a shout of protest, to which came answering cries of support.

Kris waved his arms for silence. When he had it, he continued the interrogation. “Why?”

“To see if there are any other survivors, of course.”

“Does the radio work?”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Not yet, you mean?”

“I doubt even I’ll be able to fix the damn thing.”

“But you were attempting to do so?”

“Yes. Why not?”

One of the crowd shouted at Davo: “If they’re there, why haven’t they found us already?”

Davo sought to locate his interrogator, but was unable to. “Who would bother to look here?” He addressed the ring of faces around him as a whole. “We were just a small city in a small country. Why look for Adelaide when Sydney, New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris are gone? I know I wouldn’t waste my energy.”

“But if they were looking for survivors, surely they’d look everywhere?”

“And,” interjected another, “they’d be using infrared —”

“Maybe the shit in the atmosphere interferes with infrared, or the thermal signals are too weak against the background. I don’t know.”

“What about the OEG? What if we’re still at war?!”

“Christ.” Davo ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Anything could have happened. Ten years is a long time.”

There were a few more shouts, and some voices raised in anger — so many that Davo couldn’t respond to all of them.

“Where would they land?” someone called. “All the launch and landing facilities must be destroyed!”

“And they could still drop something on us!” This from a woman towards the back of the gathering, her eyes wide and frightened.

Kris again placated the gathering with his upraised palms, then turned back to Davo.

“I don’t think you’ve considered this matter nearly well enough, my boy. Experiments of this nature have potentially disastrous ramifications for the community as a whole. They need to be discussed before you will be allowed to continue.”

Leaning on the podium, Kris assumed the patient, preaching stance we all knew so well. His voice became less accusing, more mellow and charismatic.

“There are those,” he said, “of which I am one, who believe that the past is better left forgotten. We have survived here in peace since war destroyed our old world, and I am loath for this peace to be shattered simply to satisfy one young man’s curiosity regarding the ghosts of a life long dead.

“I have accepted the need for electric power, and might even be convinced that an intercom is necessary, but my sensibilities baulk at the possibility of recontact with any hypothetical outside world. I believe it is foolish to hope that there are others out there who survived the Fall. Even if they are there, they must be in much the same position as we.

“Similarly, lacking evidence to support the continued existence of the OEG, it seems pointless to wonder about the war. The OEG might have crumbled after the Fall, or left the Earth’s vicinity. Certainly, no one has seen them in over a decade, and I would be surprised if they’re still searching or even listening for survivors.

“My mind is unclear, but I see two options open to us. One: Allow David to continue with his experiments and attempt to contact any other survivors. Two: Ban all further research entirely, on the grounds that it is almost certainly pointless and potentially very dangerous.

“As is customary, we will take a vote.”

The gathering stirred, discussing the options, until Kris called for silence.

“Those for allowing David to continue with his experiment, please raise one hand.” I immediately voted in favour, as did Davo and a few others. I was dismayed by the poor turnout, and that Max did not vote.

When the counting finished, Kris called for the second vote. “Those against — that is, in favour of ceasing the experiment immediately.”

More hands went up this time and my hopes sank. A surprising number of young ones voted against Davo’s project — but at least Max again did not raise his hand.

When the tallies double-checked, Kris announced the results.

“For: twenty-seven. Against: thirty-nine. Abstentions: thirty-five. Not a clear majority either way, so we’ll need to discuss this further. Before we do, however: Max, I couldn’t help but note that you abstained from casting a vote. May I ask why?”

My foster rose to his feet, and heads turned to look at him. His face was shadowed and serious when he tugged away his mask.

“There is a third option we have not considered.”

“And this is?”

Max thought for a second, and I waited breathlessly for his suggestion. I knew that Kris would eventually turn the Council against Davo; Kris was too persuasive and the people too afraid of resurrecting old fears. But if Max — whom the people respected at least as much as they listened to Kris, if only because he was the oldest — spoke against Kris, Davo might be given the opportunity to continue.

Max, no doubt aware of his role, weighed his words carefully. “The third option is to allow David to continue until such time as the radio is working, then reconvene the Council to decide the next step. I’m sure he can be trusted not to attempt any communication until the Council advises him that it is our wish to do so.”

Kris looked askance at Davo, who nodded eagerly. “Sure. No problems.”

Kris looked unhappy. The suggestion was so reasonable that he had no choice but to call a second vote. The muttering of the crowd became less strident as human curiosity began to break through the initial shock.

And, sure enough, this time the result was conclusive: sixty-three in favour, less than twenty against, and the rest abstaining.

Kris scowled, but capitulated. “It is decided. I must warn you, David, that any deviation from this agreement will be severely punished.”

Davo grinned. “No shit, bwana — I mean, of course I’ll behave myself.”

“Then this meeting is closed. Thank you all for coming.” Kris turned away from the crowd and bent to whisper with the Senior Councillors.

“Almost too easy,” said Max at my side.

“What?”

He looked at me. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

We helped Davo through the crowd toward the nearest bridge. Despite his handicap, no one offered to help us get him home. Jerrie, however, came with us, and remained behind after we left Davo’s workshop.

Max and I checked our garden together, spraying a few of the sickly plants with clean water.

“You go to bed,” he said when we finished the chore, taking a seat on a rusted air conditioning vent and gazing out to sea. “I think I’ll stay up for a while.”

I studied him closely; his eyes were black pits, sunken in waxy flesh.

“You must be exhausted,” I said.

He nodded, and gripped my shoulder. “I am, yes, but I will not sleep. Not tonight.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t understand, and headed for the stairs. As I left, Max moved to a position facing Davo’s building. A single candle flame burned on my friend’s floor, and my foster’s bulky frame occluded it, like the closing of an eye.

• • • •

I fell instantly into a deep, dark sleep.

Less than an hour passed, however, before I awoke, scrabbling at my mask as though I were suffocating. I sat upright and listened to the sound of my own breath, wondering whether it had been the mask that had woken me or something else: a nagging sensation that something important, somewhere, was taking place.

I left my bed and padded upstairs to Max’s floor. He wasn’t there, asleep or awake. When I checked the gardens, he wasn’t there either. The plants rustled in the night breeze, and I shivered.

The night had chilled dramatically. Lifting my mask, I tested the air. It smelled of water — clean water from the melting south. The tide had turned.

I removed the mask and breathed deeply, thinking that this was what had woken me. But sleep would be hard to come by without knowing where Max had got to. Suicide never once crossed my mind, but the thought of being alone in our dying building, even for a night, made me nervous.

The Strange Stars hung like sentinels directly overhead as I ran down the stairs and across the bridge connecting our building to its neighbour. If my foster and friend weren’t up talking, then maybe Davo would know where Max had got to.

The workshop was still and silent; no-one broke the peace there, either by talking or playing with the radio, but I felt the need to investigate anyway. I tiptoed through the chamber, wary of any loose scraps of old technology that might have tripped me or made a noise, until I caught sight of Davo’s hammock.

Two people lay entwined there, coiled together with an intimacy I had never experienced. Enough light spilled through the window for me to identify Davo’s mop of hair and the silhouette of Jerrie’s face. I crept closer, and my heart pounded when I realised that a part of their juxtaposed anatomy I had not identified was in fact her naked breast, frozen by starlight.

Embarrassed and feeling guilty, I considered throwing a rug over them, if only to protect them from the chill air. Barely had I decided not to when a noise from behind me disturbed the silent tableau.

A callused hand grabbed me across the mouth and, before I could turn, dragged me kicking and wriggling into the stairwell.

“Be quiet!” hissed a voice into my ear. My frightened eyes rolled to catch a glimpse of my assailant, but he was shrouded in impenetrable darkness.

The man wrenched my head so I was forced to look back into Davo’s workshop.

I saw vague man-shapes moving to and fro through the shadows, like ghosts. I stopped struggling instantly.

There were five of them, large and unidentifiable. They seemed to be searching. One of them peered to study Davo and Jerrie, and I thought I heard a soft snigger, barely a worm of sound burrowing through the silence.

“No,” said one of the ghosts. “Don’t touch her.”

The one who had laughed backed away from the couple, and I felt relieved for both of them. Threat was implicit in the stealthy silence of the ghosts, and, even though I didn’t know what exactly had been avoided, I was grateful on Davo’s behalf for Jerrie’s presence. No one in Adelaide would allow harm to befall a woman while the sexes were split so unevenly.

“Here,” whispered another voice, and the ghosts moved to a side of the room I could not see. A moment later there came a tinkling noise as something large was moved, a grunt of effort, then a distant, startling splash.

Jerrie stirred, murmuring in her sleep, and instantly the ghosts retreated, vanishing into the night as though they had never been there at all.

I wanted to scream: What’s going on? But my captor held my mouth tightly closed until Jerrie returned to sleep and the night became still again. Only then did he relax his grip and allow me to see his face.

“It’s over,” Max whispered. “It’s over.”

I started to stammer a question, but he shushed me. He led me out of the workshop, across the void between buildings and back to our home. A faint butterfly-wing of aurora danced across the night sky, like an omen, as he explained what had happened.

“I was expecting something like this,” he said, his voice empty of emotion. “The last real challenge Kris Parker had was when we considered lighting the bonfires on Council Tower. I told you that the man who had suggested the plan committed suicide, but that, perhaps, is not the whole of the truth. Cameron wasn’t the sort to give up; he would have tried again, made other plans. Myself and a few others — we will always wonder whether he jumped from his garden, or whether he was thrown.”

I stared at him, shocked beyond words. Could such a thing really have happened?

“Maybe Jerrie’s presence made them think twice tonight,” he went on, “or I’m wrong about their motives. I don’t know. I’m just glad I didn’t have to fight them. There’s already been so much violence . . .”

In the glistening starlight, he put an arm around my shoulders and held me to him.

“It’s over,” he said again, and I wondered if he was trying to reassure me — although there was little reassurance to be found in his tone — or if he was describing the future, as he saw it.

I remembered my prophecy that morning:

Someone, or something, will die today . . .

I wondered if that thing might have been hope.

“We might as well get some sleep,” Letting me go, he stared out to sea one last time. The aurora briefly flickered in his eyes, then died.

“I’ll stay up for a while,” I said, watching with despair as the impenetrable blackness of the stairwell swallowed him.

Is it really worth it? I wondered. Is life so precious that we should scrabble for it every day, breaking our fingernails in the dirt and our hearts with sheer futility? Is it worth fighting death with an inhuman, soul-destroying effort just to survive one more day, and another, and another . . .

Now, given the opportunity, I would say to my younger self: Yes. Yes, it was worth it — for those who survived long enough.

But, that night, I lay back onto the cooling, age-scarred concrete and contemplated the sky with an aching emptiness where my heart had once been.

The Strange Stars drifted slowly southward, and I noted distantly that the three had become four: A new star had joined the others and, as I watched, it moved across the sky on a path of its own.

Back and forth, it moved.

Back and forth, as though searching.

© 1993 by Sean Williams.

Originally published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume IX, edited by Dave Wolverton.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of over forty award-winning novels, one hundred short stories, and the odd odd poem. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. His latest book is Troubletwisters: The Missing (Missing, Presumed Evil) the fourth in the Troubletwisters series.

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

Sun’s East, Moon’s West

Merrie Haskell

7,000 words

I shot the sparrow because I was starving. Though truthfully, I was aiming at a pheasant; the silver snow and the silver birches played tricks with the light, and as if by magic, pheasant turned into sparrow.

When I saw what my arrow had done, I cried with empty eyes, too dry to make tears. The sparrow wouldn’t amount to a mouthful of grotty bones — and even a starving woman knows songbirds are sacred to at least one goddess.

My knees plowed into the snow beside the small creature. “How, how, how?” I fretted. “How did you become a sparrow, pheasant?” The bird did not answer, but when I reached to remove the arrow piercing its body, the accusatory glare of a beadish eye stopped me. A trickle of blood slid from its nares, and the bright eye closed.

“Do not be dead!” I cried. “I would give anything for you not to be dead.”

And while the breath-mist of this rash statement still hung in the air, a bear-god waddled out of the forest, lumbering and large.

The bear-god said: “The sparrow will not die, if you live as my wife for a year and a day.”

I licked my lips, tasting the clear, salty snot that comes of crying, and said, “I already have a husband.”

The bear-god regarded me with placid eyes. “And I already have a wife.”

I stared at him, the dying sparrow lying in a bloody lump between us, struggling to breathe.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, anything.”

“Remove your arrow,” said the bear-god. When I had done so, he lapped the sparrow into his mouth with his ribbony pink tongue, closing strangely mobile lips over his teeth. We stood silent in the forest, staring at each other. I watched him closely, making sure he did not chew or swallow; he did not.

Soon enough, a muffled cheeping emerged from the bear-god’s muzzle, and the corner of a beak protruded from his lips.

The sparrow lived.

I pressed my hands together in an attitude of supplication. “At the end of your year and a day,” I said, “if you had any armor lying around to spare, I would appreciate it if you loaned it to me.”

“If you wish.” The sparrow burst from the bear-god when he spoke, fluttering up in a rush of wings to circle our heads. But instead of flying off, the sparrow landed on my shoulder to pluck out my hair, strand by strand.

“Ow!” I waved the bird away, and he moved off to a tree branch, where its glare bit as sharp as its beak.

The bear-god rumbled, a noise which could be interpreted as a sign of humor or an imitation of thunder.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked crossly.

“Sparrows have a petty but exacting sense of vengeance,” he said. “I admire it. Come now. Away to my castle.”

“Is it far?”

“Terribly far,” he said gravely. “Perhaps you should ride on my back.”

I obliged him, and spent the uncomfortable journey staring at the silver-tipped fur between the bear-god’s ears.

• • • •

“Why did you shoot the sparrow?” the bear-god asked after a time.

“I was hungry. Am hungry.”

“Desperately hungry, I should think,” the bear-god said, and turned aside to dig in the snow until he uncovered a patch of wintergreen. “You’ll have to gather your own berries. There aren’t many . . .”

I gobbled the berries gratefully as we moved on. I was by no means sated, and when we reached the great under-mountain castle, the bear carried me straight to a banquet hall set with six and seventy dishes. I sat down eagerly and ate and ate and ate, then promptly threw up all that I’d eaten.

The bear-god summoned servants — swift and invisible servants — and they covered the evidence of my orgy of eating with a bit of cloth, and replaced the rich dishes on the table with plain barley broth and toast.

“I can’t imagine what you need a wife for with this many magical servants around,” I said, sipping at the broth.

“Well, Lissa, I need a wife for several reasons,” the bear-god said.

I nodded.

“To rub my ears in the morning,” he said, flexing one claw as though counting with it.

“I can do that.”

“To balance my accounts every week,” he said, extending a second claw.

“Uh . . .”

He added a third claw. “And to lie with me at night.”

I threw up again.

• • • •

After my third repast, the bear-god sent me upstairs for a bath, rather against my will, for I knew bathing overmuch caused moisture to build up in the head, leading inevitably to death. It was too early in our association to start an argument, however.

At dinner that night, I ate slowly and responsibly.

He said, “You seem very young to be married.”

“My husband is very old to be married, so I guess it fits.”

“I see.”

“My father was a miller,” I said, “and he put it about that I can spin straw into gold. Then he sold me to the highest bidder.”

“He chose the man who might give the most dowry for you?” the bear asked.

“Oh, no. There was an auction. In the town square.”

The bear-god looked appalled, but didn’t comment. “Can you?” he asked.

“Can I what?”

“Spin straw into gold.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Ah.”

I looked down at my lap, at my hands as calloused from sword and shield as distaff and spindle. There never had been much gold from them — a few finger-length embroidery threads now and then.

“I have but one real requirement of you,” the bear-god said at length.

“And that is?”

“That you never bring a light — neither candle or torch or any sort of fire — into my den at night.”

“Er,” I said, wondering how many stubbed toes were likely to result from this eccentricity. “Of course, as you command.”

I must have had a strange look on my face, for the bear asked: “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering why a bear-god needs to coerce a miller’s daughter for — for scrumping.” I didn’t look up, in case there was a giant bear-mouth looming above me, about to bite my face off.

“I am no god,” he said, as mild as milk.

“You’re just a bear, then?”

“You are not to ask me questions about that.”

“Oh.” I brightened, as a thought occurred to me. “But you can talk, so you’re not just a regular bear, then.”

“No,” he said. “Not just a regular bear.”

• • • •

Time passed swiftly in the bear’s castle; winter turned to spring. I had time to practice my swordcraft, for there was an armory, and time to practice my riding, for there was a stable. As for my night duties, the bear was a gentler lover than my husband.

The bear took some interest in my daily activities, and often showed up to watch me exercise my borrowed swords against a variety of straw dummies.

“What are you training for?” he asked. His voice rumbled so deeply that it caused my ear bones to itch.

“For dragons,” I said.

“What does a miller’s daughter who can spin straw into gold care for dragons?” he asked.

“I kill them.”

“I see. And how do you go about it?”

I told him. I showed him the dragon claw and the dragon-scales I had carried in my pocket since my first and only battle. I explained about my grandfather the dragon-slayer and his philosophies of dragon combat. I explained also how my first and only dragon had eaten my husband’s donkey.

“After that, my husband wanted nothing more to do with me,” I said. “An unhappy marriage cannot bear the loss of a much-cherished donkey.” I stopped. The bear was looking at me strangely. “I’m boring you?”

“Not at all. I’m amused, I assure you. Go on.”

I went on, talking about the three days in the forest before he found me, all the while in the back of my mind trying to figure out how I amused him. When I wrapped up my story, he took me in his paws.

“Close your eyes, and keep them closed,” he growled to me, and scrumped with me right there, on the floor of the armory.

It seemed that day, as it always did during our matings, that his body was smaller than it appeared, and I felt more skin than fur beneath my fingers. I nearly cracked open an eye, but as if he sensed my curiosity, he growled, “Eyes closed!” and slobbered a beary kiss into my ear.

Later, as I pulled together the tattered remains of my shirt and watched him bear-waddle away, I wondered if I was just imagining him as more human when my eyes were closed.

I looked down my breasts poking through two of the four large rents in the fabric. “Alas, Lissa,” I told myself regretfully. “Human hands don’t do that to good linen. Not generally.”

• • • •

Amazingly, I did not take sick and die from the constant bathing. I also discovered that my hair was nearly blond. And I itched less. There were actually advantages to bathing, just as there were advantages to living with the bear.

We rubbed along together tolerably well. He tried not to mind the hours I spent with weapons or horses, and I tried not to mind my duties in his dark den. At least in the darkness I could almost pretend he was human. Above all, I kept my promise, and did not bring light into the den.

One day I arrived at the stables just in time for a thunderstorm. Stuck until the lightning stopped, I sat down to use my dragon claw as a drop spindle, and spun out a modest pile of gold.

The bear wandered in and watched, fascinated, as a thin rope of gold came forth from the bales of hay.

“I thought you couldn’t do that anymore,” the bear said.

“I guess I can,” I said, amazed by how much gold I was producing. I had a suspicion that I could spin gold best when happy. I didn’t explain this to him, though.

And he didn’t explain anything at all to me.

• • • •

For a few months, I blamed my lack of menses on the enchantments around us — invisible servants, talking bears, no monthly messes. But eventually my belly swelled in a way that my husband had never been able to inspire, and I knew. I ate staggering amounts of food. I used the privy often. I threw up in the mornings. And the bear never asked me about it.

I began to worry about bearing babies with furry faces.

“It’s clear to me,” I said at dinner one night, “That you are not a bear.”

He looked at me. I kept eating, popping triangles of bread and cheese into my mouth, one after another.

“We will not speak of it,” he said.

“Oh, yes, we will! I need to know if I’m going to give birth to cubs or babies in a few months.”

His muzzle crinkled, and more teeth than usual appeared, but I continued to cram my mouth with bread and cheese.

“What have you done?” he whispered.

My jaw dropped, and crumbs spilled from my mouth onto my lap. “What have you done, more like!”

“Oh, Lissa,” he said, coming toward me and bearing me to the floor, where he made ferocious love to me, I think out of joy.

But this time he did not tell me to shut my eyes, so I kept my eyes open.

I needed to know.

Beneath my hands and before my eyes, he changed. His body became definitively human, though very hairy and full of paunch, as befits a bear about to hibernate. His face was not at all handsome. It looked rather as if someone had taken a bear’s features and tried to squish them down to fit a human’s head. Distorted.

Distorted, but in a way, beloved.

I watched him wonderingly throughout the whole thing. Was this why he always took me in the dark, but for that one day in the library? He was a man in these moments.

Afterwards, he opened his eyes. We stared at each other until anguish took his face.

“Lissa, what have you done?” he whispered again. I had no chance to answer.

There came a thunderclap so loud I thought the earth had split in two. Around us, the cave-castle fell away, and a great flutter of whistling white burst between us. I felt him pulled from my arms, from between my legs, and when the white and the thunder died away, I was alone on a barren mountainside.

My shirt was in the usual tatters, and my skirt was rucked up around my waist. In my pocket were my trophies from my one and only dragon-battle: a dragon claw and nine dragon scales, which I had carried since as a talisman.

After a long, dazed moment, I pulled my skirt straight and stumbled down the mountainside to find a stream. I knelt on the bank to scoop water onto my face, but froze when I saw a woodsman standing on the opposite bank, staring at me or perhaps my breasts poking through my torn shirt. I pulled my arms through my sleeves and turned the shirt around, which magically restored the power of speech to the woodsman.

“Who are you?” the woodsman asked.

“I’m Lissa the Dragon-slayer,” I said, then added, “Late of the bear-god’s enchanted castle.”

“The cursed castle.”

“Cursed?” That certainly would explain a lot.

“A hideous monster guarded it,” he said. “There was a sleeping prince inside, from a distant land which lies east of the sun, west of the moon. You’re from the castle?” He looked at me suspiciously.

I lied glibly, “I was a prisoner.”

The woodsman took me to his small hut, where his wife did not welcome me graciously. But they gave me food and a spot by the hearth. I wished I were happy enough to spin them a little gold. Instead, I gave them a dragon scale, as pale as moonlight but twice as bright, and the woodsman put it in his lantern instead of a candle.

I asked them to tell me everything they knew about the cursed castle. They didn’t know much, but they knew of a witch who knew a falcon, who flew with the East Wind, who might have seen something relevant, once, long ago. Woodsman and wife practically shooed me out the door, and I was happy to go.

• • • •

The first time I rode to battle, my husband snorted and laughed at my hodge-podge armor. Beyond my cookpot helm, traditional headgear of impromptu warriors everywhere, my protection consisted mainly of flimsy bronze vambraces and a breastplate I dug out of a dusty trunk. Everything fit ill, too tight or too loose.

But I killed a dragon that day, with the half-lance that was once my baby brother’s toy. My husband snorted again when I returned, this time angry — somewhat for the loss of his donkey in that battle, but also because I was not the wife my father promised. I’d already failed to turn my husband’s hayloft into a treasure-house; I’d failed to bear his children as well. I could cook and sew, but would do so no longer. I was a dragon-slayer.

I left the next day, taking nothing that I did not own outright: the clothes I stood up in, the bow and arrow that belonged to my brother before he went off to war, the claw and scales I had won from the dragon. My husband guarded the larder during my leave-taking. I was driven by hunger to shoot the pheasant-sparrow a few days later.

Autumntide in the forest was kinder to me than winter had been; fortunate, for now I did not even have my bow, and there were no more bear-gods to rescue me. I ate like a bear, mainly fish and berries, for the bear-children tumbled and twisted in my womb if I tried to feed them aught else.

Days passed on my quest to find this witch, however; fish grew scarce, and the walls of my stomach ground together like mill-stones without grain. A brace of partridge tempted me, and I set about making a snare. Before I had a chance to set my trap, however, a flock of sparrows dipped and dove at my head.

I shrieked and ran, flinging my skirt up over my head for protection. The sparrows pulled back, leaving my hair alone, but from that day forth, they followed me on my journey, to prevent all future attacks on all bird-kind.

• • • •

The witch, when I found her, bartered the name of the falcon who knew the East Wind for a scale that glittered like a blood ruby. The falcon was not so easily bought.

The distance to the falcon’s native plain was vast, but the sparrows followed me the whole way. They flew along during the day, pausing now and then to peck for seed or berries or bugs, or to dive in to steal strands of my hair. They roosted as close to my camps as possible, making sure to deposit a star-stippling of droppings on my skirts by morning.

On the falcon’s plain, I called the raptor’s name nine times, as the witch had said; a bird appeared in the distance. The sparrows twittered nervously at the falcon’s approach. I thought with grim satisfaction that maybe this would drive them away forever — and if a few perished in the effort, I would not weep for them.

The falcon dropped like a stone from the bright blue sky and tore a long strip of flesh from my left arm. I cried out and hit at the creature, but it had already landed so it could toss a goodly chunk of my arm down its gullet with obvious pleasure. I clutched my arm and I wished for a sword, or my brother’s half-lance, or even the stupid cookpot I had left behind with my husband.

I wound my arms, one bleeding and one intact, in my cloak, and held the excess fabric taut between, creating the crudest of nets while simultaneously bandaging my wound. Holding my weapon at the ready, I stalked toward the falcon, expecting the sparrows to come for me at any moment.

The falcon shrieked and took to the air, rising high above me — this time, perhaps, planning to descend and cut my throat and have done with it, I thought. But to my surprise, it aimed its next attack at the sparrows. The falcon dove and the sparrows froze, seemingly in fear. I expected to see the dive end in a sudden puff of feathers — but the little flock turned as one and mobbed the falcon.

There were not enough sparrows to truly mob the falcon, of course, and soon enough, the falcon had broken free and wheeled about for another attack. This time, the sparrows darted out of the way — and led the falcon to me once more. I was ready, though. I aimed the taut cloak to meet the falcon’s dive, swinging up just before it reached for my face. The falcon bounced hard against the fabric and rocketed backward — not in the least under its own power.

The host of sparrows called raucous insults in bird-speak to the falcon, and the falcon called worse insults back in human speech as it recovered itself in the air. We were “foul intruders” who “fed on their mother’s filth” and so forth. The falcon circled and attacked one of the sparrows on the flock’s edge; the sparrow was not fast enough to avoid the falcon.

Meanwhile, I unwound my cloak and tossed it back over my shoulders. The falcon retreated and circled again to choose another sparrow for its revenge.

Before it could dive again, I tossed into the air a dragon scale that shone like a salmon skin. The falcon seemed powerless to ignore it, changing its path in midair to follow it, which left the smaller birds time to fly up under my cloak. The falcon came back with the fish-bright scale in his claws, cursing loudly. “You’ll never call the East Wind!” he cried, flying straight up into the sky until he disappeared.

• • • •

From that day forward, the sparrows and I were friends of a sort. The leader of the host was indubitably the bird for whom I’d bartered a year of my life, for all the gratitude that had earned me. I called him Pheasant; he called me nothing in particular, for he was really just a sparrow who’d had a bath in a bear-god’s reviving spittle.

I and my sparrow army did find the East Wind, though we took a circuitous route. The finding of a wind is rather like walking a labyrinth with invisible walls: one doesn’t know that one has hit a dead-end until one’s nose is mashed against the stones. Nonetheless, some months later, while I was not yet grossly pregnant but was certainly waddlingly pregnant, we came to a tower named the Meeting of the Winds.

• • • •

“I have never been to any land east of the sun and west of the moon,” said Ostro, South Wind.

“Nor I,” said Levante, the East Wind.

“Nor I,” said Ponente, West Wind.

“I have been there,” said Tramontana, the North Wind, and her voice made the sweat freeze on my skin. “Recently, in fact, but I cannot make the journey twice in one year without my fellow winds to aid me; I do not have enough breath on my own.”

“And,” said Ostro, “there is the matter of payment.”

“I can offer these.” I held out a selection of my remaining dragon scales.

“I want that one,” Levante said, and snatched from my hand a scale the exact yellow of daffodils, which create the first spring sunshine out of winter.

“This one?” said Ponente, stirring a scale as black as winter’s midnight. When I nodded, the wet West Wind blew hard, and the scale disappeared in a skirl of rain and dead leaves.

“Mine,” said Ostro, sucking away a dragon scale so brightly blue that the sky seemed pale and dim in comparison.

“I will need two, for I will have to go the farthest at the greatest cost,” the North Wind said. “And I will choose from your complete collection when we have arrived.”

Disappointed, I nodded. I had been saving the diamond scale specifically to exchange for money to use for bribes. I hoped it would not appeal to Tramontana.

We left in the pre-morning, while the bluing sky still held stars. I did not think that the sparrows would come; the winds were buffeting and harsh, by turns sere and saturate, chill and fevered. But Pheasant flew up under my cloak, and his kin followed.

We rode the winds for several miserable hours, alternately shivering and sweating, until the dampness decreased considerably. “I must drop away now,” Levante sighed in a voice like young frogs, and retreated from the combined force of the four great winds. The other three sighed and surged onward, propelling me and the sparrows over iced mountains and lush valleys.

The others dropped away in turn — first Ponente, with his voice as hoarse as a dying boar’s, then Ostro, who left us freezingly alone with the white and roaring North Wind. The sparrows huddled against me as much for warmth as safety now.

“What kind of land is this that exists east of the sun, west of the moon?” I asked from Tramontana’s broad, icy back.

“Sun’s East, Moon’s West, I call it,” she said. “Once a human stronghold, it is now ruled by a troll princess who is jealous of her human husband’s sophisticated good looks. She exiled him in anger when he would not lie with her; but trolls are genetically a very angry people, anyway.”

“I see.”

“She turned him into a bear to keep him faithful, and sent him away until he was willing to give her children. I brought him back just a few months ago, because he’d subverted her magic and had found a harlot to service him in his bear form.” I felt the North Wind’s austere eye on me, and half-expected it when she asked, “That was you, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the harlot.” I didn’t ask any more questions.

Tramontana set me gently on my feet in the heart of a nowhere land and glanced over my three remaining dragon scales. She took the one that reflected everything in the color of the water of life, and one that shone like the war planet, dim and orange. She left me the diamond scale, and I was pleased. I watched as she blew herself away, white and icy, then closed my eyes and stood soaking up the warmth of this place’s golden sun.

I might have stood there for hours if Pheasant hadn’t said in my ear, “Sun’s East, Moon’s West!”

I opened my eyes. “I didn’t know you could talk!”

“It happened when I ate one of your dragon scales.” He belched a small gout of flame into my hair, singeing the ends a bit.

I searched my pockets to find no dragon scales whatsoever. “Blast. I needed that!”

Pheasant shrugged, for all that he had no shoulders.

There was a castle perched on a promontory overlooking the sea, and standing between a never-setting sun and a never-rising moon. I went to the gate and applied for a job as a dragon-slayer. Once the steward stopped laughing at me (for, not only were there no dragons in this country, and I had no armor or weapons, I was a woman, and a five-or-six-months-pregnant woman, to boot — a fact I might not have realized had he not pointed it out), he offered me a position as a chambermaid.

Desperate, I took it.

• • • •

And so it came to pass that I found my love once more while emptying out his chamber pot.

He still had the same squished-up bear face I remembered, and I wondered if he was still cursed, in whole or in part. I couldn’t imagine him with the sophisticated good looks that the North Wind had mentioned, so I was glad for the lingering remains of bearishness, for familiarity’s sake.

He was staring disconsolately out the window at the still moon and the quiet sea.

I knelt to clean the ashes from the grate.

“Do you want a fire today?” I asked.

“Why do you not call me prince, you insolent girl?”

“Because, as far as I know, you’re just a bear.” I bent to scrape the ashes into a bucket.

“Lissa!” He strode over to me, his boots ringing on the flagstones. I was glad to see he was dressed for action, but the thought of my bear wearing boots was disorienting. He crouched beside me and took my hands into his. “How did you get here?”

“The North Wind brought me.”

“Sure did,” Pheasant said.

He shot the bird on my shoulder a suspicious look. Pheasant preened. “Why are you here?” my bear asked.

To save you, I didn’t say. It seemed silly now. If he had to ask, he didn’t want saving.

“I never found out your name,” I blurted.

He smiled. “My name is Roland,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.

I knew how that ended: a tattered shirt, and me half-blind from squinching my eyes closed. I leaned away, overbalanced, and toppled into the ash can.

“Lissa!” he said, and knelt down to embrace me.

“No, no,” I said, keeping him at arm’s length. “That’s how we got into this mess.” Over Roland’s shoulder, I saw the door open and a giant green woman enter. Unfortunately, Roland was not aware of her arrival, and he continued to murmur endearments and entreaties to let him help me out of the ash can.

“Lissa the Harlot, here?” the green woman roared. Roland straightened in a hurry, leaving me to slump back into the ash can. “Roland, did you learn nothing during your exile?”

Sweat broke out on Roland’s forehead. “I learned to love Lissa,” he said bravely. He stood no taller than her shoulder.

She turned her angry eyes on me, but she spoke to him. “Troll Law still rules this land. If she wants you, she’ll have to defeat me in a contest.”

“Perhaps spinning,” Roland said, too archly. I shot him a warning glare.

“Or perhaps we should have a laundry contest,” the green woman said, her voice mocking. “We could drip some tallow onto a shirt, and see who can clean it best.”

“No,” I said, still struggling to free myself from the ashcan. It would have been a hard job, even if I weren’t nearly five months pregnant. “No contests. I already have a husband,” I said. I did not look at Roland. “And I will not steal someone else’s.”

“Lissa, you can’t leave me to her!”

The green woman ignored Roland. “You don’t love him?” she asked, plucking me from the ash can and setting me on my feet.

“I love him,” I said, “but I will do this properly, by your laws.”

She grunted, then bent down to poke my belly. “Then it will be a contest,” she said, “A better one. No housewifely pursuits. And higher stakes.”

“No,” Roland said, understanding her point before I did.

She didn’t listen to him. “All I ever wanted was what he wouldn’t give me,” she said, caressing the swell of my belly.

I refrained from slapping her hand away, and considered. If she defeated me, she would have to let me live until the child — or cubs — was born. Hope was not lost as long as I drew breath.

She said, “A contest of arms. A duel. If you win, you can have Roland. If I win, I get what he put in your womb.”

I considered her eager expression. “That’s not really a fair trade, is it? I love Roland, but on the balance, I had no intention of risking my children for something as fleeting as love. So, no. If I win, I get your kingdom, from moon to sun.”

Her grin was slow-growing and snaggle-toothed. “It’s a deal,” she said, her eyes bulging and calculating and hard.

• • • •

The troll princess hustled me from the room and gave me a bed in the stables. A heavy cloudbank rolled in to cover the sun; everyone seemed to agree that it was now night and acted accordingly. I curled around my growing stomach with a flock of sparrows nesting along my hip, and fell asleep in a haystack.

Roland shook me awake. The moonlight poured into the stable courtyard, silvering his hair.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Sleeping.”

“Sleeping,” echoed Pheasant. He shifted uncomfortably, and a feather fell from his body — he had been molting all day.

“No. What are you doing? Tomorrow. Against Verdonna. And the child! Lissa, the child.”

“The cubs, you mean,” I said.

“Not cubs. I am a man.”

“Were you a man every time?”

He hesitated. “Yes. Every time.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, disbelieving him. I closed my eyes.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked after a while.

“Yes,” said Pheasant.

“Yes,” I said. “For tomorrow there are feats of strength, and I will need to be strong.”

“You can’t! Just leave. Go home! Then the babies —”

“Go home!” I sat up. “How? The North Wind comes here but once a year. And where? I don’t have a home. The only home I had —”

I broke off, and pounded the straw a bit with my fist. A clink followed, and four or five dull coins rolled away from my fist. I stared. Roland picked one up, examined it in the moonlight, bit it.

“Lead!” he said.

I grunted, and lay back down, on my side, facing away from him.

“Lissa,” he said, touching my hair. “She cursed me.”

“Did she.”

“She made me live as a bear in the wilderness. You were the first woman I’d seen for years.”

“Which is why you rolled me over and —”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, yes, but — I came to love you.”

“So — why? Why couldn’t I look at you? Why couldn’t you tell me you were a man?”

“Part of the curse. No woman could look upon my human form, or I had to return — to her.”

I thought about this. I thought of all the reasons why this might be so, and the only conclusions I could come to dealt closely with the perfidy of men. “Go away, Roland,” I said wearily, “Go away before she finds you here.”

He left.

“Go away,” Pheasant mumbled, tucking a head under his wing and shedding feathers onto my face.

• • • •

When the clouds moved away from the sun, I faced the troll princess Verdonna over crossed swords in the straw-strewn courtyard. It was a ridiculous pairing; she had every obvious advantage, in reach and strength, and probably most of the hidden advantages as well. My sword was the smallest in the armory and yet it would soon be too heavy for me. My only hope lay in the fact that Verdonna would be unwilling to jeopardize my health.

She saluted me, and I her.

Our swords met in a ringing clash as we aimed for each other’s fists. My blade skated off hers, and I danced away. I had not practiced with an opponent since my brother joined the army, and my only live foe had been one rather young dragon. I had no real plan except to evade Verdonna until I saw a chance.

So, I evaded. I hopped and watched. She thrust left, I hopped right, and watched the way her wrists turned. She feigned left and thrust right — I hopped left and saw how her feet shuffled. She sliced at my shoulder, waited too long to see if she’d made the hit, and still I watched.

We circled the courtyard again and again in a dancing game of thrust and retreat. I never dared get close enough to let her sword meet mine again. One good blow and she would drive me to my knees.

The sun never moved, so it was hard to measure the passage of time. Our feet beat up a bright dust from the straw, a cloud of gold in the slanting sunlight. A small crowd watched from the corners of the courtyard, Roland among them, the rest trolls and ugly human-troll half-breeds. Roland truly was the best-looking of them all.

Sweat dripped down my face. Sweat dripped from the end of Verdonna’s hooked nose. The straw dust flew up and clung to our sweat, turning us both bright gold.

Verdonna stumbled over something, but neither of us dared to look down. She side-stepped the obstacle, and lunged at me again. I was slow in hopping away, thrown off by her stumble. She sliced my shoulder, inscribing a line of cold fire down my arm. I gritted my teeth against a scream.

I jumped back immediately, avoiding her following blow with little grace, but pleased to understand that she was slow when she thought she made a strike — definitely slow. I left my other shoulder undefended, as though I were protecting my wound, and the target proved too tempting. As she went for the obvious shoulder, I slid my blade in between her fists, intending to pierce her heart.

Instead, her blade caught mine and spun it away from me, out of my hands. Her face split in a yellow grin of triumph. I leaped backwards before she could put her sword to my throat, wondering where my sword had landed. I jumped backwards once, twice, then once more; she followed more slowly, holding her sword out menacingly to compel my surrender. And surrender it would be, if I could not rearm myself immediately.

I turned my back and ran, searching the ground for the glint of my steel. Verdonna stomped after me. Nothing caught my eye — her heavy step was right behind me — she was closing — I could hear her breath —

And her breath took off in a shriek of pain. At the same moment, I spotted a sword on the ground — not my sword, but a sword nonetheless. I bent to scoop it up, timing my movement to turn and face her again in guard position.

When I straightened, I saw that the troll princess’s long nose was on fire. Astonished, I stared. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of gold and fire — a small, diamond-colored sparrow was buzzing frantically around and around Verdonna, spouting fire at the troll princess. Her hands slapped uselessly at the air around her head, at her nose, at her hair.

She was unguarded.

I took my moment, leaping forward to push my sword into her heart. This time, her sword did not block me.

I let go of my sword, leaving it stuck in her chest and quivering with her breath, and leapt backward. Verdonna stood still for the longest moment, and I thought, “She is truly a monster! Pierced through the heart and she will not fall!” But the quivering of the blade stopped, and her breathing stopped. She had simply frozen in place.

I stepped closer to her, and saw that her skin was golden from more than the fine dust our feet had beat into the air. She had turned to gold completely, as had the sword in her chest. Or had that been golden since before I picked it up?

On the ground between us, a small thing of gold glimmered.

Curious, I reached out for the gold thing and picked it up: it was a crown. I turned it over in my hands, and when I looked around, saw the courtyard littered with other objects of gold: a knife, a coif, a pair of gauntlets. There was no more straw in the courtyard at all, but gold-dust lay everywhere.

Roland came to me. I showed him the crown, astonished, and he took it to look it. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve freed us from dominion of the troll lords.”

“Yes, I suppose I have,” I said.

He took my hand. “And we will reign here together — man and wife, as we lived together under the mountain.”

“We lived together as bear and wife, perhaps . . .” I hesitated. “But no. I am still married. If you wish to woo me . . . my heart would like nothing more. But you must perform a task for me. You must go on a quest for my divorce if you wish to marry me.”

Roland’s bearish face crinkled unhappily. “A quest?”

“I’ll soon be in no shape to undertake it myself,” I said, patting my belly.

Roland looked like he wanted to argue, but the people of Sun’s East were coming forward to talk to him, to learn their fate as a nation. Roland stepped forward to reassure them. In the meantime I cast about me, looking for Pheasant.

He sat on Verdonna’s golden head, but transferred to my shoulder obligingly enough.

“Pheasant, are you a dragon now?” I asked. There were no other sparrows to be found in the vicinity. I wondered if he had eaten them or something. But he just chewed at my hair, scenting it with ash. Feeling uneasy with my dragon-slaying ambitions, I turned to look at Roland surrounded by men and trolls.

Roland caught my glance and held his hand out to me, and in it, the crown beaten from straw.

“Your hair is on fire,” Roland said mildly when I came to him. He patted the fire out gently, and pulled me close for a kiss.

“More of a smolder than a fire,” I said at length.

“Yes.” He hesitated, regarding me. “Why this quest, now? You didn’t seem to care under the mountain.”

I also hesitated. How to say that I did not know if he was worthy of my own quest for him, without this? “Child or cubs, legitimacy is nothing to sneeze at,” I answered lightly, telling as much truth as I dared risk. “I want nothing owing between me and my husband. By law, the cubs would be his.”

“You aren’t carrying cubs,” Roland said, exasperated.

“Can you swear this?” I asked.

He bit his lip. I shrugged, and cast about me for another bit of gold on the ground, and found a spur. I picked it up and handed it to Roland. “Give this to my husband,” I said.

Roland turned the thing over and over in his hands. “Whatever for?”

“Tell him to use it to buy another donkey.”

He laughed. “Aye, Lissa.” He kissed me again, and the slanting light of the never-setting sun turned the world bright gold around us. We kissed until Pheasant set my hair alight again, and then we feasted until the North Wind came to take Roland on his quest. And thus went the first day and week of our rule in Sun’s East, Moon’s West, which continued happily enough for any storyteller to generalize about.

© 2009 by Merrie Haskell.

Originally published in Electric Velocipede.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Merrie Haskell grew up half in North Carolina, half in Michigan, and works in a library with over 7.5 million bound volumes. Her first three books are The Princess Curse, Handbook for Dragon Slayers, and The Castle Behind Thorns. She won the 2014 Schneider Family Book Award (Middle School) and the DetCon1 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Nature, and Strange Horizons. Merrie lives in Saline, Michigan.

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

Mouth

Helena Bell

3,800 words

When Ann was only five years old, she took her brother’s mouth. He’d been sleeping, or crying, it’s hard for Ann to remember now, but she remembers the way her hand stung as it came full against his cheek, and the rattle his teeth made as his mouth flew off his face and hit the side of his crib. She thought about putting it back, but he was quiet again (yes, he must have been crying, why else would she have slapped him?) and so she picked up his once-familiar mouth with the sleeve of her nightgown and stuck it in her jewelry box.

The next day at the doctor’s office, a nice woman in a blue buttoned-down shirt asked Ann if she knew what had happened to her brother.

“I did it,” Ann said. “I didn’t mean to, but I did it.” At least, this was what Ann thought she said, but later she overheard her mother say that what came out of Ann’s mouth was “Maybe it came off on its own. I hear that happens with babies sometimes.”

The woman spoke to Ann’s mother and Ann’s father, to Ann again, and to the doctor. She touched Tyler’s face where the skin crinkled below his nose as if to test for a seam she could unzip. Then the doctor took Tyler away for half an hour, maybe more, and when they came back Tyler had a hole near the bottom of his face held open with a small plastic ring to keep it from collapsing.

“This will help him breathe,” the doctor said. And he showed Ann’s parents how to mush Tyler’s food into a thick paste, slide it past his new, thin lips and to massage his throat like a dog to make sure he swallowed.

“There will be surgeries as he gets older,” the doctor said. “It won’t be like this forever.”

Ann wondered if a mouth was an organ you could donate, like a lung or a cornea or a kidney. What would it be like to have another man’s teeth and gums, a stranger’s curved muscle pressing against your own soft palate?

She thought about telling the doctor, and the nurses, and the blue-buttoned woman that she still had the mouth, tucked away in a small plastic box at home. She moved her tongue around her own mouth, trying out the shape of each of the words, but they would not come out. Besides, she thought, she had not put it on ice. And you were supposed to do that with detached parts: fingers, toes, ears. Otherwise the flesh would wither, die, and become useless. And when she got home from the hospital and dug through the piles of cheap necklaces and bracelets, Ann found that the mouth had dried to a crisp, gray husk. She dropped it in a glass of water to see if she could revive it at all, but the flesh dissolved like an Alka-Seltzer tablet. She shook the glass and heard the clink of his tiny white teeth, saw them swirling around like beads. Then the water clouded and all that was left of her brother’s mouth was the smell of his acrid breath.

She dumped the water down the sink, and washed the glass. Then she decided that maybe it should be thrown out too, so she buried it outside in the flowerbed where they’d put the collie.

Ann never told anyone about her brother, but sometimes they knew about him anyway. Her friends knew him from school. The doctors knew him from the hospital. The cashiers and the hairdressers and the bank tellers and the sales assistants at the department store knew him, and their relatives, and their friends and their relatives’ friends all knew him. Everyone knew the who and what and the when, but not how or why, which was what everyone really wanted to know.

Ann didn’t think he looked that different from anyone else: some fine, pink lines that edged his cheeks when he smiled, a weak jaw, thin lips. People still stared and pointed and asked him to repeat himself. Whenever he came back from the hospital he would wear a new ring for a few days and sometimes teachers would pull Ann from her classes to ask her to translate.

“I don’t know what he wants,” the woman would say.

Ann would sit next to him for the rest of the afternoon, listening to the long, mournful whistle of his breathing. Once, on the back of a game of Tic-Tac-Toe they were playing, Ann wrote What do you want? Her brother flipped the page, drew an x in the center square, then flipped it back again. I would like for people to stop asking me that question. What do you want?

Something else.

Ann’s first boyfriend, whom she’d met at a concert in a different town, and whom she’d never introduced to her family, asked her one night if she’d feel bad for a boy who didn’t have a tongue. Who couldn’t kiss a girl the way he wanted to kiss her.

Ann placed her hand on the boy’s cheek. “Masseter,” she said. “Mandibular notch.” She massaged the hollow beneath his eye, working in small circles towards his ear. “Did you know that when a jaw breaks, it always breaks in at least two places? It doesn’t know any other way.”

“Is that how it happened?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and drew her hand back as if to show him, to see if she could make it all fly sideways again. She would remember the ice this time. To keep it cold and damp.

The boy brought his own hands up to Ann’s face and pushed her hair away. She could do it, she thought. She could bring her brother this gift, make penance, make him whole, but then her brother would have this boy’s mouth. A mouth that knew her lips and tongue. This boy’s teeth snapping back at her.

Ann’s first pet was a blue merle collie that had one bright tooth that curled outside its lip. It liked to sleep with its nose pressed against Ann’s ear, breathing in perfect time with her. It loved to eat baker’s chocolate and oyster shells. It whined when she locked the bathroom door, and grunted when Ann tried to pick it up. After the accident, her father came home with a long-haired yellow service dog named Henry. Ann had tried to teach it fetch, rollover, sit, but it always walked away, to curl up by her brother’s feet. It followed him around. Picked up his toys in its mouth, and would bark if he stopped breathing. The next two were also long-haired and yellow. Dull dogs with dull names. Sometimes Ann thought there had been one hundred dogs, a new one every week. Each one following her brother. Each one leaning against her brother’s leg, nosing her brother’s hand. They never snapped, or growled, or bit someone’s arm. Good dogs, her father said. They were never loaded into the back of the car to be taken to the vet. Never buried in the back yard. They came, they went away, and Ann thought no more about them.

“How did it happen?” the boy asked. His hands moved, his legs, his arms. Every particle in his body was moving towards her, over her, around her.

She could do it. How better to answer than to demonstrate. How better to pull him into a moment of perfect quiet.

“I slapped him and it came off,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Tell me.”

“I did,” she said. “You weren’t listening.”

Later, they broke up.

There was a pre-specified length to all of Ann’s relationships. She could feel it humming in their skin in the first moment they touched her. Three weeks, she thought. Six months. A few days. It would be the point at which they would ask; the point at which she showed them.

George was the first. He had kissed her suddenly and in her surprise, she bit his lip and it came off. She put it back, and there was no scar, but he stopped calling her after that.

“I’m sorry,” she said to his Facebook. His Facebook did not respond. She reloaded his profile again and again, expecting to see a list of likes and dislikes: Girls without secrets; girls who don’t bite; girls who know when to walk away. But there was nothing, always nothing.

Other boys were no better. They would push her until she reached up and pulled their tongues straight out of their mouths.

“This,” she said. “It happened like this.”

Girls liked to hold their own mouths in their hands, touch them, weigh them. They had already known what it was like to be voiceless, could accept it, and marvel at the sight of their fingernails scratching at their own molars. And when they were ready, Ann would take the mouth back and lock it into place.

Sometimes it took longer for the flesh to remember, to part, to accept, to knit itself closed. It was why Ann had rules. She would only do it once. It would never be for more than a few minutes. They could never speak of it again.

The third rule was not one Ann made up. Whenever she asked, her lovers simply didn’t remember.

“I took your mouth,” she said. “I held it in front of your face. My palm cupped your glossoplatine arch and everything we ever hoped to say to one another passed from one moment to the next.”

“Sometimes I have strange dreams too,” they’d say. “Once, I was walking along the road in southern Georgia. And I knew that sometimes I crossed over from that state and into the next, but it all felt the same to me. The same grasses and pines; cardinals and bobwhites; tobacco fields and horses. Florida was just a small stone stuck in the soft part of my shoe.”

Sometimes Ann would see them again after this. One night, or maybe two. In the dark, the lover-who-was-about-to-leave-without-remembering-why would lie on his or her stomach, or on his or her side, facing the wall. In the middle of the night, when Ann knew that no one and no thing could wake him or her, she would take something. Not so large and noticeable as a mouth, but perhaps a small patch of skin near the right hip. The top nib of one of their pinky toes. She took the appendix of the boy who took her virginity, and the bone spur of the girl who cheated.

Ann would place these things on the sun-lit sill until they dried. Sometimes, if it had too much shape, she would flatten it with an iron. Then she would drive to the bookstore or a newspaper stand, and press this thin, desiccated piece in between two random pages like a flower. People left pieces of themselves all over; she was merely helping them along. Sometimes she’d go back and look for it, she’d tell herself that the rightful owner had come looking and that was why it was gone.

In college, Ann met a boy at the library who told her about a group of women in the Amazon who removed the mouths of the men in their village so they could not bite them in the middle of the night. After, the women would grind up berries and vegetables into a fine powder which could be inhaled. They did this to their men at a younger and younger ages, and eventually they did this to their daughters too. Soon after, all children were born without mouths and the village was so quiet that explorers passed it without knowing.

“That’s very nice,” Ann said. “But do you have any books about owls? I’d like to learn about owls.” She told him one had recently moved into a tree outside her kitchen window and sometimes, if she left it open, the owl would come inside and perch on top of her refrigerator.

“There’s a pygmy owl that lives in the rainforest. It’s about the size of my hand.” He lifted his up to show her, spreading his fingers over hers. Sixteen hours, she thought.

“Thank you,” she said and left with three books.

“It’s not so different from owning a cat,” she told Keith, then Frank, then Beatrice. “Independent. Eats rodents. Fastidious.”

Beatrice’s mouth was small, and Ann’s grip was too tight. Her nose came off as well, and Ann put it all back before Beatrice herself could see.

“In an owl’s neck, the cavity through which the artery passes is ten times wider than it needs to be,” Ann said. “It is why they can turn their heads almost completely around, without injury.”

“What does this have to do with your brother?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was something he told me once.”

While an owl may eat a bird, it first had to find it, and one species of owl was known to eat deer.

The tufts on an owl were not its ears, merely clumps of feathers found on some owls (Screech, Flammulated, Long-Eared, Short-Eared) but not others (Barred, Boreal, Burrowing, Elf). No one knew what they did.

Ann let other people name the owl for her. It made it their owl, until one of them left. She did not call it anything when she was alone. It was merely an owl who sometimes lived inside her apartment, and sometimes just outside it. It killed mice. It had brown and white feathers that looked like marbled fur. Cream feet and perfectly manicured talons. A toe that gripped the back of the sofa, or sometimes Ann’s shoulder. There was an order to the construction of its wing: tertials, scapulars, coverts. Ann didn’t know them all. There were words for its bones that were the same words for human bones. Ulna, radius, femur. Ann didn’t know all of these either.

Ann told Oliver all of these things the day they met. He moved her foot from side to side, asking if this hurt, did this.

“It’s not broken,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Then you won’t need to carry me home.”

Oliver called the owl Charlie Bird, and sometimes Parker, and sometimes other names. Ann liked how it kept changing. A long list of musicians she’d never listened to: Dizzy, Miles, Davina and the Vagabonds. Settling on one was not important, merely the opportunity to list, to associate.

When Ann touched his hand, it did not thrum with a series of weeks, months, or some future date. She liked this too.

The night Ann brought him home to meet her family, her mother served trout meunière, which she must have spent the entire afternoon preparing. Ann pictured her mother cooking butter and bay leaves, mixing heavy cream and lemon. The filets would have been dredged in flour, then egg wash, fried perfectly mere minutes before they arrived.

“I’m sorry,” Ann said. “She asked if you were vegetarian, but I forgot that you don’t eat seafood.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Later, as they stepped into the car, Ann asked him if he wanted to know about her brother.

“Know what?”

“Never mind,” she said.

The sound most associated with the owl is made by the mourning dove. The Saw-whet could sound like a truck; the Screech could trill; Snowys were silent. Some owls sounded like marines.

As a teenager, Ann would occasionally walk in on her brother as he was fixing his teeth. She would stand in the doorway and watch as he slipped his dentures in sideways, then affix them with long metal rods. As he got older, they gave him bigger dentures, implants. They stretched him out and gave him metal bones. But back then it looked like he was a ship inside an opaque, peach bottle: pink hulls and thin, dark lines where the creases of the sails would be.

If he became excited, or agitated, the dentures would loosen and clink against each other. Ann wondered if at night, his face pressed against the hair of his girlfriend, they would click as he slept. Once, she saw his wife close her eyes at the slight sounds of a fork falling against the plate.

When Oliver traveled, Ann opened the window so the owl could come and go as it pleased. It made a nest of Oliver’s socks and would spend the whole day nibbling on the cotton and wool. Sometimes Ann would sew them back together before Oliver returned. Sometimes she would simply buy more. Sometimes she wasn’t as careful as she could have been and Oliver would stand in the bedroom looking down at his feet, and say nothing.

There were things they never discussed: politics, religion, food allergies. There were things they discussed all the time: movies, ornithology, the things they found annoying about their neighbors. As one list grew, the other shrank. This was what it meant to be with someone familiar, she thought.

On Oliver’s thirty-fifth birthday, she bought tickets to a play she thought she remembered him mentioning. But he had plans that evening and when they couldn’t reschedule, she gave the tickets to her parents instead.

On hers, Oliver gave her an illustrated collection of fairy tales. Without thinking, she first thumbed through to the end, wondering if a piece of a former lover would fall out. Sometimes she dreamed that all the pieces had found each other, had created a new person who would eventually come back to her. But this was silly; she had not taken enough parts. There was not enough substance for an entire being, and even if there were, how could it ever learn to trust her.

One night, Ann reached for Oliver’s hand. She felt the length of his fingers and tickled the skin where each met his palm. “Would you like to see a trick?” she asked. Then she pulled, and he pulled back.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said.

He turned on his back, but allowed Ann’s hand to remain in his. There was still no hum there, just a beating. He’d once told her to use your first and middle finger to check for a pulse. If you used your thumb you could mistake your own heartbeat for his.

“Would you like to know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“Anything,” she said.

“What do you call Charlie when I’m not around?”

“Owl,” she said.

“Do you think it confuses him? Being called so many things?”

“He’s just an owl. He knows who he is.”

On their first date, Oliver told Ann that he’d always wanted a lobster as a pet, like the French poet Nerval, that he could take to the park. But, he said, his mother told him he would never get a girlfriend if he lived with a lobster. A dog would be better. A cat. An iguana that he could fashion with a small felt vest and a bit of fishing line, like a leash, and he could allow it to run around the kitchen with all those vibrant green legs flapping against the linoleum tiles.

He always thought, he told her, that once he got a girlfriend, he could get a lobster. Maybe not early on in the relationship, but once she knew him. Once he was certain she wouldn’t leave.

But, Ann said, what if she did leave? Then he’d have to eat the lobster. Boil it, serve it on a bib of lettuce, with melted butter, pluck out its tail while pondering his sexual transgressions, and her inability to commit. He’d tell himself: “I’ll find another girl, another lobster,” and the cycle would repeat, indefinitely, until the species died out, or he did, or they got married, not because he had found his soulmate, a life partner. But because she was trapped with a crustacean hostage and unable to think of a way to save them all.

And eventually the lobster would die of age-related diseases, but by then there’d be children, church fellowships, a family Costco card. She’d gain fifty pounds binging on bags of frozen fish filets all because he wanted to be Nerval in a park in Paris, which they’d never visit since she refused to leave the house, to be seen in public, looking like she did, remembering what she’d done.

“I guess I never thought it through like that,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess your story just reminded me of something else.”

When Ann was only twelve years old and her brother still lived in the same room as she did because anything could happen in the middle of the night and he had not yet learned to talk, Ann tried to remove her own mouth. She pulled and pulled, but it would not wrench free. She took a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and traced one of the blades over her lips, never daring to push it in. Her mother found her standing in the hallway outside her parents’ door.

“Whatever it is,” her mother said. “I’m sure it can wait until morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Ann said. “I didn’t think it through.” At least, this is what Ann thought she said. But later her parents told her that they’d thought about it, and maybe it was time for her to be on her own. In her own room. With all her own things.

A week after Oliver left her, as Ann was packing up the last of his things he no longer wanted and told her to throw away, she picked up a book he’d been reading when they’d met. A bookmark fell out and the owl swooped in to take it before Ann could reach down. Thin and dark, it could have resembled a flattened mouse or moth wings. A rust, or gray, or brown colored feather. Or perhaps instead, the slip of someone’s ear.

© 2015 by Helena Bell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helena Bell lives in Raleigh where she is an MFA candidate in Fiction at North Carolina State University. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Shimmer Magazine, the anthologies Upgraded and Surreal South ’13, and other publications. She has an MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and a JD and LLM in Taxation from Washington University in St. Louis. She’s also a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. If you have any suggestions as to what other programs she should attend, you can contact her via her blog (helbell.com) or twitter @HelBell.

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

Breaking the Spell

R.C. Loenen-Ruiz

3,600 words

You

There’s this legend your father tells you. It’s about a girl who sleeps in the center of a sphere. She floats in the air, tossed above the waves, destined to remain fast asleep until awakened by a kiss.

You laugh when your father tells this story. You’ve heard all the stories before. Most of these stories involve handsome princes on white chargers. You’re not a prince, and you don’t have a white charger. And you wonder what it is about a prince’s kiss that’s so magical.

You are determined not to kiss a prince. No matter that the stories talk about everlasting happiness that follows the kiss.

“Someday,” your father says. “You will meet someone special. And when you do, you will want to kiss him.”

Arcana

When she was a little girl, Arcana watched her father shape worlds. Shell worlds he called them, and he kept them under bell-shaped jars in the basement.

“Do people live on your worlds?” Arcana asked him once.

“Don’t be silly,” he’d said. “How do you think they’d survive?”

“So why keep them under the jars?” Arcana asked.

“Because, Arcana, strange things have happened before, and the jars are there for our own protection. When you are older, I’ll explain more.”

“Would the council send you to jail if something happened?”

Her father frowned and rubbed his forehead.

“I don’t think so. But these worlds are our responsibilities and it’s not for us to question the council’s decision to keep them under the bell jars until the right time.”

One night, when her father had gone out to a council meeting, Arcana slipped down to the basement. She squinted her eyes as she stared down through the thick canopy of cloud cover inside the glass and tried to see if there were people like her on the world inside it.

She stared at the meticulously planted landscape, gazed in wonder at the green-blue of the rolling sea, and wandered with her gaze inland to where the mountains rose up to touch the navel of the bell-glass.

There was something there, Arcana swore she could see it. She saw movement in the foliage, and when she leaned in closer, she thought she could see someone standing on the rocky shore.

“Arcana.”

Her mother’s voice made her jump.

“I’m sorry,” Arcana said. “I was just curious.”

“Well, don’t be too curious,” her mother said. “You almost tipped the jar off its stand. I won’t mention this to your father, but next time I catch you sneaking down here and peering into worlds without your father’s permission, you’ll get a good hiding.”

Castle

In the spring, you go see this castle floating in the clouds. It hangs suspended above the ocean and from where you are you can see where bits of root and earth still cling to the underside of it.

A crowd has gathered on the beach and a lot of speculation is going around about the castle.

“Did you see that?” someone asks. “It looks like there are people on there.”

If you squint your eyes, you can see tiny forms moving back and forth. When they reach the end of the decapitated drawbridge, they fall into a stream of light that reels them back up again on the other end of the castle.

What must life be like on that castle? What must it be like to move perpetually from falling to drifting to rising up again and returning to the same old routine of life on a movable plane?

See

“You saw someone?” Arcana’s father said. His brow creased and he frowned and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Did this someone see you?”

Arcana shook her head.

“I don’t think so, father. Would that have been bad?”

“I shall have to tell the council,” her father said. He frowned again and stared at the world under the bell jar.

“I wish you hadn’t come down on your own, Arcana. You’re not yet of age. These beings, they’re not what you think they are.”

“What are they? You never tell me anything, father. Why don’t you tell me now?”

Fact or Fiction

“How did the princess get trapped inside the sphere?” you asked your father once.

“She disobeyed her father. She opened a box she wasn’t supposed to open and these beings floated out and trapped her inside the sphere. There she lies and there she is doomed to lie until someone frees her from her captivity.”

You stare up at the castle, and you think of the princess lying inside her sphere. Is she dusky skinned or is she pale cheeked like you? Has she aged from waiting for so long for a prince to rescue her or is there some magic that keeps her fresh and youthful as the day she fell under whatever spell was released from the box?

“What if the prince is a wimp?” you ask your father. “Does it have to be a prince kissing the princess?”

“Maybe this princess isn’t waiting for a prince,” your father says. “Who knows? It’s just a story.”

Spell

In the night, Arcana heard music coming from the basement. It made her think of waves crashing against the shore of a world that looked like an uninhabited paradise. She tossed and turned, but no matter how she tried, she could not shut out the music.

“Maybe father will hear it,” she thought.

The moon cast strips of light onto her pillow, and as she listened to the music, a great longing rose in her heart to see that shore again.

“What harm can it do?” she thought. “I’ll creep down the stairs very quietly, and just take another look.”

Her bare feet slid on the smooth planks of the floor, and she held her breath, as she caught hold of the doorjamb. Quiet as a mouse, she crept down the stairs to the basement room where her father kept the newly formed world inside one of his bell jars.

Doubt

“Rumor says there’s a princess sleeping in the castle,” a man in a bright red cloak says. “They say whoever kisses her awake will win her hand and a million golden coins.”

“I heard it’s populated by ogres,” another man says.

“Oh tush,” says a burly woman in a yellow gown. “Everyone knows it’s a trick. There are no princesses locked in castles, and since the death of Prince Jerome, everyone knows there’s a shortage of princes in the kingdom.”

The crowd murmurs and moves away. There is laughter and shaking of heads, and a general consensus regarding the cleverness involved in pulling such a publicity stunt.

“A castle in the air,” someone says. “I bet there’s a trick to it. I bet it’s just another of those automatons.”

Wish

Light emanated from the bell jar. There was someone standing on the shore.

“Who are you?” Arcana whispered. “What are you?”

Wise Woman

You’ve never been to visit the wise woman who lives in a hut close to the downs. But when you pass by her house, you decide to go in and ask her about the castle. Contrary to expectations, she doesn’t look old and wrinkled, neither is she dressed in rags.

She wears a red apron, and has her hair neatly caught up in a blue and white bandanna and when you ask her about the castle, her eyes twinkle and she laughs.

“It’s quite simple,” she says. “There’s a path leading up to the castle. If you want to go there, you simply have to find it.”

“So, I can just climb the path and reach the castle,” you say.

“There’s a secret to it,” the woman says. “But as with every secret, this one has its price.”

“I don’t own anything of much value,” you say.

“I’m sure you’ve got something you can part with,” the wise woman says. “After all, a secret isn’t a worthy secret if it’s not worth giving up a prized possession.”

You touch your hair. It is long and black and falls down your back like a rich waterfall of darkness. Your father loves your hair, and it is the one thing you are truly proud of.

“No one on this island has hair like yours,” your father says.

Every day, you brush your hair. One hundred strokes until it gleams in the sun and one hundred strokes until it reflects the moonlight.

“Well,” says the wise woman. “What will it be?”

• • • •

Snip.

When the first lock falls, you shed a tear.

Snip.

But you are thinking of finding that magical pathway.

Snip.

You are launching out on an adventure that will change your life forever.

Snip.

You will have done something no one else has done before.

Snip.

From here on, all consequences will be of your own choosing.

• • • •

You hardly recognize yourself when she is done with cutting your hair. Without the fall of black to frame your face, your eyes seem much larger than they were. Looking into the mirror, you realize that you look a lot like your younger brother.

“Will you tell me the secret now?” you ask.

The wise woman smiles; in her hands, the strands of your hair dance as if they were alive. You feel a momentary pang, as you recognize what you have lost.

“If you go walking along the downs at sunset, you will see a funny little creature. In the native tongue, this creature is called duende, and if you ask him nicely, he might give you a vial filled with real princess tears.”

“What do I need tears for?” you ask. “And why must I get them from a duende? Surely another girl’s tears are just as good as a princess’s tears.”

“Do you wish to see the castle or not?” the wise woman asks.

You sigh. You’ve come this far, you can’t go back now.

“All right,” you say. “I’ll go in search of the duende. What if he doesn’t want to give me these tears?”

“You’re a smart girl,” says the wise woman. “You can do anything you put your mind to.”

The Creature Casts a Spell

“Please let me go,” the creature on the shore says. “If you let me go, I will grant you your heart’s most secret wish.”

“But you don’t know what that is,” Arcana says. “Besides, my father will be quite furious if he discovers that I’ve opened one of the bell jars without his permission.”

“Little princess,” the creature says. “Do you think your father will begrudge you a single moment of happiness?”

“I don’t think so,” Arcana said.

“Tell me your wish,” the creature said.

“I really don’t have one,” Arcana said. “I’m quite happy as I am.”

“Really?”

And when the creature said “really” in that tone of voice, Arcana couldn’t help thinking about a dream she kept on having, night after night, since she had seen this new world her father had made.

As if of its own volition, her hand reached out and lifted the bell jar.

• • • •

Out floated the world. It was beautiful to behold. Blues and greens and whites and violets, and browns and oranges, and there were myriads of tiny creatures spinning on the surface of it.

“Arcana!”

There was a crash as the bell jar slipped from her grasp and shattered to tiny pieces on the basement floor.

“What have you done?” her father cried.

“I . . . there was this creature . . . ,” Arcana turned to watch as the world floated above them. She was feeling quite sleepy and as she stared at the world, it seemed to expand until it filled all of her vision.

She could hear the worry in her father’s voice and tears trickled down her cheeks as she thought of how he’d never trust her with his worlds again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as the world blurred away and turned to black.

Duende

You walk along the downs, not knowing what to look for. A little creature, the wise woman said. There are so many little creatures here. Some of them hop away into the brush at the sound of your approach.

Some of them stand and stare before running off into the woods.

You remember hearing whispered tales about the duende, and you know the townspeople fear them, but you have never seen one, and in the stories your father told you, there are no duende at all.

But when you hear the sound of whistling and you see the little brown creature gathering up bits and pieces of driftwood, you know this is the creature you have been looking for.

He wears a funny little hat, and he is thin and brown. His nose is pointed, and there are warts on his chin. When he sees you, he lets out a shriek, drops his bundle of driftwood, and at the same time, his hat falls from his head.

“I’m sorry, sir,” you say. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Frighten me? Frighten me?” he splutters. “What do you mean frighten me? Ugly creature that you are, what do you mean by stumbling all over my downs and scaring the hat from my head.”

“I came to ask you a favor,” you say.

“A favor?” And you see a sly glint in the creature’s eye.

“I need a vial of tears from a real princess.”

“Hoo-hoo,” the duende cries. And he jumps about on one foot and slaps his chest as he hoots out his laughter.

You wait until he has calmed down enough to speak.

“It’s important,” you say.

“How important?” the duende asks. “Are you willing to pay the price required for tears from a real princess?”

“It depends,” you say.

“Depends? What do you mean depends? Either you’re willing to pay the price or you just head on home to your mommy and your pappy and forget you ever saw me before.”

“Okay,” you say. “Okay, I’ll pay the price.”

• • • •

“I will give you her tears in exchange for your song,” the duende says.

“I will sing,” you reply. “But first, you must swear on your hat that once I have sung you will give me the princess’s tears.”

“Damn!” says the duende.

And you realize that you were right to make him swear by his hat.

“I swear by the hat,” he mutters. And he looks at you very darkly. “Now, sing.”

You think of the songs you learned from childhood. You think of the songs your mother sang to you. You think of festivals and of how the tinkle of coins and the press of the crowd held the promise of a future if you kept on singing. Now, as you open your mouth, you realize what it is the duende really wants of you.

But there is no going back.

Already, your voice rises in the air like a bird trilling to the sight of its sky. It trills and resonates in the quiet, warm and precious and pulsing with life, then the duende reaches up with his hat and the song dies away, and you know you will no longer sing as you used to.

“Beautiful,” the duende says.

And he hands you the vial filled with the princess’s tears.

• • • •

The moon has not yet risen when you return to the wise woman’s house. You carry the vial filled with the tears of a real princess and you hope it will be enough.

“Ah,” says the wise woman. “So you really wish to climb the stairs to this castle, don’t you?”

You nod your head.

“Well,” she says. “We must head off before the moon has risen to its full height. There is still a lot of preparation to be done.”

• • • •

She hands you a gleaming cape and you see that it is woven out of what once was your hair.

“Wear this,” she says. “It will keep you warm and it will keep you safe.”

And she smiles as she sprinkles your head with the tears of a real princess.

“Now you are ready,” she says.

And when you look up you see a staircase. It glows in the light of the full moon and winds up and around as far as your eye can see before it disappears behind the castle.

“Well,” says the wise woman. “Once you climb, there can be no turning back.”

“Is there a princess?” you ask the wise woman.

“Could be,” the wise woman says. “There are things you’ve got to find out on your own.”

• • • •

Up and up you go. Up and up and around, until you reach the end of the staircase. In front of you is a glowing sphere.

“Are you a prince?” a soft voice asks.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m not a prince at all.”

“Ah,” says the voice.

A woman stands up from behind the sphere. She wears a wizard’s hat on her head and long lengths of diaphanous cloth dangle from the point of her hat.

“But the prophecy speaks of one who comes as a prince. There have been no strangers here. Not since Arcana’s enchantment. Did you see any princes on your voyage?”

“Alas, Madam, I saw no princes.”

“Well, I suppose we can wait another decade,” the woman says. “I wish Arcana had listened to her father. I’m quite weary of playing guardian to a sleeping girl all day. And this isn’t the most comfortable place to be exiled to. When she awakes I shall give her a good pinching.”

“I’ll guard her for a while,” you say to the woman.

“You’re sure you’re not a prince,” the woman says. She looks almost disappointed.

“I’m very sure,” you reply.

“Then you’ll have to go back to where you came from,” she says. “No one may see Arcana except her guardian and the prince.”

“But I have done all that was asked of me,” you say. “I only want to see her.”

“Well,” she says. “This is highly irregular. I’ve never heard of anyone being allowed to see an enchanted princess unless that person is the prince of her dreams.”

“I won’t disturb her at all,” you say.

“Well,” she says. “If you give me your beautiful cape, I’ll let you see her for a moment.”

You take the cape from your shoulders, and you hold it close for one last time. Then, you hand it over to the guardian.

“Five minutes,” she says.

She takes off her hat and hands it to you, and before you can ask her any questions, she’s out of the door and out of earshot.

Arcana

“There’s no help for it now,” the council said. “We’ve got no choice but to let the enchantment work its course.”

“But she’s my only child,” says Arcana’s father.

“You should have been more careful,” they say. “History is filled with enough warnings. We’re sorry this happened, but we can’t do more than make sure she’s kept safe until the wish comes true.

“In the meantime, we’ll give her a floating castle. We’ll surround it with spells. And she will have a guardian to make sure that only one who is worthy enters in and breaks the spell.”

You

Under your feet, the floor sways gently, and you think of how this castle hangs suspended in the space between water and sky. You think of breezes rocking the castle, and you wonder what will happen when the spell is broken. Will the castle crash into the sea? Will the world vanish and become something else?

You turn the wizard hat over in your hands, and walk towards where Arcana is.

Perhaps it’s magic, but she doesn’t look like you’d imagined her to be. You’d imagined a tiny little princess, but this princess called Arcana has strong, capable looking hands, and her hair flows like a lion’s mane across her shoulders. Her skin is dusky and smooth, and her lips look firm and decisive.

You touch her cheek and wish she would open her eyes so you could look into them.

In fairytales, the prince kisses the princess and she awakes and the spell is broken.

You are not a prince, but if you try hard enough, you think you could make a reasonable enough impression of one. You stand there and wonder what it would be like to kiss a princess.

“And so the prince kissed the princess,” your father’s voice echoes inside your head.

“Fairytales,” you say.

You shut your eyes, lean in close to taste her lips, and wish you were a prince.

© 2009 by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.

Originally published in Philippine Speculative Fiction IV, edited by Dean Alfar and Nikki Alfar.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R.C. Loenen-Ruiz grew up in a place conducive to dreaming. Her stories are sometimes letters to her former self, but more often they are love letters to those who are of the beloved country. A recipient of the Octavia Butler scholarship, Rochita attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2009. A terribly chaotic record keeper, she has no idea how many stories she has published or written to date. She keeps an erratic blog at rcloenenruiz.com and tweets as @rcloenenruiz. Sometimes her feed gets hijacked by a hamster.

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

The Blood of a Dragon

Matthew Hughes

7,500 words

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: Wizard’s henchman (and former hardboiled operative) Erm Kaslo is being slowly absorbed into the substance of a vastly powerful entity mysteriously chained in the Seventh Plane, where will is the ultimate source of magical power. Now he will discover how he, his employer Obron, and even the Archon Filidor of Old Earth are playing pieces in another’s plot to resurrect a monstrous ancient evil. But with his body and mind being consumed as fuel to feed the entity, Kaslo must find a way to use his failing strength in one last desperate bid to save the world.

[To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.]

The moment Erm Kaslo’s flesh touched the substance of the entity, he understood everything — but only for that moment. Then it turned out that everything was far, far too much for a human brain to take in all at once. He felt as if his skull was straining not to burst its seams, and as if the mind it housed was a thimble into which someone had crammed a barrel’s worth of knowledge. Just sorting all the information into gross categories would be the work of several lifetimes; subdividing it into manageable portions would take millennia.

He managed to surface briefly above the flood to form the thought, It is too much, and directed it at the entity from which the torrents of knowledge had flowed, and were still flowing, into his awareness. He was instantly met with another expression of remorse.

Stop apologizing, he thought, and help me deal with this.

How? was the question that swept in his mind, with a hurricane force that almost drove Kaslo’s consciousness from him.

Moderate your . . . strength of output, he thought back. You’re overwhelming me.

Another apology, but it was softer and the message that followed came at a volume slightly less than deafening. Is that better?

Yes, but a little lower still.

The thunder toned down to a shout. How can I help you?

Lower still.

A mild, monotonic voice spoke in Kaslo’s mind. Better?

Yes, Kaslo thought back. Now, all the information that has flowed into me. Take it back.

I’ve never done that before, said the voice. Then a moment later, Oh, I see. Like this?

The vast weight of universal knowledge emptied out of Kaslo as quickly as it had entered him. Now, he thought, give it to me again, but slowly, starting with a general overview. Then I’ll tell you what to zero in on.

I’ll try, was the answer, but I’m not used to dealing with the tiny-minded.

Kaslo decided the description arose from differences of scale. No insult was intended. Do your best, he thought.

• • • •

Once upon a time, the story began, there was nothing. Then the demiurge arrived.

Wait, thought Kaslo. Where did he come from?

I don’t know. He never told me. By the way, he wasn’t really a he. Nor a she, for that matter.

An it? Kaslo asked.

Your language doesn’t have the appropriate pronoun.

Never mind. Stick with “he.”

The entity explained that the demiurge came from wherever he came from, and his aim was to create Phenomenality, all nine planes of it.

Why?

He never explained. He just . . . acted.

All right. Go on.

The first task was to create tools. Or, the entity thought, you might call them — us, that is — helpers.

Kaslo saw a crowd of entities, amorphously shaped. The demiurge was a nebulous light, huge, looming. He was giving the helpers jobs to do. And the first job was to create a sketch of what the final product would be like.

A sketch?

That might not be the right word. A blueprint? A schematic? A rough draft?

An image formed in Kaslo’s mind: the nine planes, but not as he usually imagined them. Instead of a series of levels, he saw an infinitely convoluted shape, constantly roiling, its multiple parts intricately interconnected in ways that his mind was not designed to accommodate. He became dizzy and a little nauseated.

Take it away, he thought. The image disappeared and his stomach settled.

I was responsible for the rough draft, the entity’s voice continued. And then I . . . made a mistake.

You botched the work?

No, I was a good tool. I made a very good sketch. But . . .

Kaslo sensed shame, and behind it the great tide of remorse and guilt that had swept over him before. Don’t! he flung the thought back at the entity. Just give me the facts. What was your mistake?

When the great work was all done and Phenomenality was perfected, the demiurge noticed that I had not destroyed the sketch as he had told me to.

Why not?

I had become . . . fond of it. It was rough and inelegant, but I thought it had . . . charm.

Charm? Kaslo said.

Maybe that is the wrong word. But it had some quality that appealed to me. And so I had not destroyed it.

Though you had been ordered to. How did your master take your disobedience?

As you see, said the entity.

No, Kaslo answered, I don’t see. What did he do?

He said, “If you like it so much, you can wear it.” Then he left me here.

The voice fell silent for a moment and Kaslo could feel the entity’s struggle to suppress its tidal wave of grief before it could wash over him again. After a moment, since he still did not understand, he prompted the entity: Wear it?

He inserted me into the draft, divided me and scattered parts of me through the nine planes. And here I have remained, through all the aeons.

That seems cruel, Kaslo thought.

It could have been worse. He was very annoyed.

Enough, Kaslo told the helper. He needed to think. Perhaps his situation was not as dire as it seemed. He hadn’t expected to find someone to talk to, under the scab. He’d assumed he’d be absorbed into the entity’s flesh, that this was its means of feeding. That was the first issue he needed to clarify.

Why am I here? he thought.

The demiurge did not deal in why, came the answer. Just how and where and what and how many. I used to wonder why he —

No, Kaslo projected, I need to know why I am here, in this hollow gouged out of your flesh.

Ah, that’s easy. So your life force can be leached out of you and into me.

Will I be physically absorbed, dissolved?

No, responded the entity. Our . . . natures are far too dissimilar. I am much more . . . real than you are, even though I am scattered among the planes.

Existence plainly affords you no joy. Why do you do this to me and the others?

I do nothing. It is Majestrum’s doing.

Majestrum? Kaslo thought. But he’s dead.

Not entirely, the entity responded. A portion of himself — or more properly, his will — remains extant.

• • • •

The history flowed into Kaslo’s mind. Some of it he already knew from what Filidor had said. Majestrum had been a great thaumaturge of the Nineteenth Aeon, with an ambition to be the greatest wielder of wizardry of all the ages. He had long harbored a desire to tap the energies of the Seventh Plane, particularly the element of the upper plane’s “atmosphere” that was experienced as the force called “evil” when it seeped into the Third Plane. If he could tap that force, contain it, focus it, he would command powers that would reduce all of his peers to the status of dust mites beneath his feet.

He labored for decades to design a device that would draw in and hold the evil that swept through the Seventh Plane as wind did through the Third. Then he devoted half a normal human lifespan — though not a wizard’s — to the task of building the machine.

But there remained a problem, as all his calculations consistently confirmed: The grand capacitor would have to be lodged in the interplanar membrane between the two realms, and such membranes had never been intended to be thus used. The demiurge and his helpers had made them semi-permeable. Under the right circumstances, things could pass through them — but those things were not supposed to pass halfway through, then stop, permanently.

Majestrum was not just a wielder of spells. He was that rarest of thaumaturges: a composer. He created new spells and cantrips intended to hold the capacitor in the membrane, including one ingenious variant that would have used the stored evil as its power source. But not even his brilliance could overcome the will of the demiurge.

It was while he was researching the original creator’s methodologies that he came across the fraction of the mortified helper that existed on the Seventh Plane. He set aside all other avenues of research to study the stranded entity. And thereby discovered the solution to his problem.

Only the demiurge’s will could suspend an object permanently between planes. The demiurge was no longer immanent in the rough draft of Phenomenality; he had left it behind and moved on to greater attractions. But each of his helpers, during their temporary existence, had contained a small sliver of the divine will — without it, they could not have served his purposes. And the entity that was confined to the Seventh Plane, blown here and there by its currents and fluxes, still retained its share.

Majestrum applied his considerable mental and willful resources and devised a means of capturing the drifting entity. He fixed it in place, then worked with it — and on it — until he was sure that he could direct it to perform the function he needed. The grand capacitor was duly positioned in the barrier between the Third and Seventh Planes, and the thaumaturge carried on with his plans to activate it and secure for himself a virtually divine power.

He found other uses for the helper. Majestrum sent his horde of preyns to steal men, women, and children, so their life force could strengthen the entity. He would then deploy it to terrify and crush his wizardly rivals, whose most potent spells and shields were as nothing to an entity that possessed the powers of a demiurgic tool. Sometimes, Majestrum would send his new creature even into the underworld to torture his victims’ pathetic remnants. Such power brought the thaumaturge as close to happiness as his dark nature could permit.

Finally, the great device was ready and in position. Its Third Plane manifestation was in the ancient city of Ambit, whose inhabitants were summoned to witness its inauguration and subsequent apotheosis of their wizardly ruler. But among the lesser thaumaturges Majestrum had forced to labor on his masterwork, there had developed a conspiracy to undo him. They had managed to adulterate a crucial component, and when the master activated the initiating sequence, instead of triumph came catastrophe.

Ambit, with its teeming multitudes and all the land for leagues on every side, was obliterated. A skyward burst of concentrated evil destroyed Old Earth’s heavily populated moon. Majestrum had the presence of mind to escape into an interplanar bubble, where he remained trapped for aeons. His attempt to restore himself to life in the Third Plane was blocked by the Archon Filidor’s agent, who finally ended the last remnants of the thaumaturge’s existence.

• • • •

You must have found that gratifying, Kaslo thought.

I would have, replied the entity, if it had made any difference.

How did it not? Even Kaslo knew that when a wizard died, his will died with him and all his magical works became as naught.

It is not the wizard’s death that matters, the entity explained. It is the final extinction of his will. And Majestrum’s will, or at least a portion of it, lives on . . . in his helper.

His helper?

His factotum. Its name has always been shielded from me, lest I find a way to resist its dominance.

Kaslo remembered the shape he had glimpsed just before the preyns stuffed him into the cavity. Now he knew why it had seemed familiar. Majestrum, he thought, had a familiar. A groffet.

Yes.

And the groffet has a portion of his will.

A mere splinter, but it is enough, because it is . . . shall we say, integrated into the fragment of the demiurge’s will that keeps me alive, so that I may suffer.

That integration must have been a delicate operation, Kaslo said.

Majestrum, returned the entity, was as subtle as he was hideous.

Kaslo was putting the pieces together, but part of the puzzle was still missing. What, he asked the entity, is it all in aid of? What is the groffet trying to do?

I would have thought that was obvious.

Not to me.

The familiar is powered by a fragment of Majestrum’s will. Being part of Majestrum, the fragment wishes to grow.

To what end?

You interrupted my thought. The fragment wishes to grow . . . into another Majestrum.

The groffet is trying to bring back its dead master?

Yes, said the entity. And, gradually, it is succeeding. 

I need to think, Kaslo told the demiurge’s helper.

I wouldn’t expect much to come of it. But you might as well do it while you can.

While I can?

As the life force drains, your mentation will become more difficult. After a while, cognitive function ceases as your brain seeks to protect the most fundamental processes.

Kaslo could glimpse parts of the other people the preyns had crammed in before him. Limbs twitched, fingers moved spasmodically. Is that what’s happened to the others?

No, said the entity. Their sensoria were overburdened by the conditions of this plane. By the time they reached me, those that weren’t gibbering had become catatonic.

I have devices that filter and reinterpret the stimuli, said Kaslo.

So I see. They were originally invented by Majestrum. There is probably an irony there, but I was never designed for irony.

It paused, and Kaslo sensed its striving to identify a twist of fate. Never mind, he thought. What about these poor people around me? Can they be restored?

No. The groffet had me very busy for a while. The activity drained them. There is nothing left but reflexes and they are fading. I am sorry —

Don’t start that again, Kaslo shot back.

No, I suppose it doesn’t help. And I don’t wish to offend. It is a pleasant novelty to have someone to talk to, for as long as it lasts.

The groffet does not converse?

It merely exerts its will — Majestrum’s will, that is — which it can do without words. Besides, it has nothing much to say that would be worth hearing. It is single-minded to the point of dullness.

Enough, Kaslo projected. Let me think.

As you wish, but if you feel your mind beginning to cloud around the edges, I would appreciate a little more conversation before you . . . well, you know.

• • • •

Kaslo’s training as a confidential operative had prepared him for dealing with tactical problems. The initial step was to define the situation accurately and completely. And now, for the first time since the fire elemental had been sent to attack Diomedo Obron’s castle, he had a coherent outline of what was going on and who was involved.

An ancient thaumaturge had lurked in an interplanar anomaly since the Nineteenth Aeon, waiting for the underlying rationale of the Third Plane’s universe to switch once again from cause-and-effect to magic. Presumably only under the rule of sympathetic association could he apply his powers to his resurrection. Majestrum’s opening move had been to try to recalibrate and restart the evil capacitor that would have given him the power to rule Old Earth, once the great change arrived and, for all Kaslo knew, the remnants of the Ten Thousand Worlds as well.

But the Archon Filidor had sent an agent, someone called Hapthorn, to thwart the wizard’s plan. Majestrum, so all had thought, was thus finally dispatched. But it turned out that his familiar, a groffet, had been left behind, unnoticed. The thaumaturge had somehow implanted a portion of his will inside the creature which, good servant of an evil master that it was, was now doggedly trying to carry on Majestrum’s plan. It was now seeking to reconstitute an entire Majestrum from the fragment of will with which it was imbued.

Clearly, the groffet, by itself, was not capable of doing what was required. That capability must lie with the demiurge’s stranded and divided helper, with the wizard’s familiar supplying the will that would force the entity to act.

But that raised a question: The entity was a tool that had essentially created Phenomenality. Surely it had had the power to do what the groffet wanted done as soon as it was supplied with life force from the people the preyns had stolen from Obron’s castle. Why hadn’t it done so? Why had it staged futile attacks within the Third Plane?

Kaslo put that thought into words and projected it to the entity. The answer came immediately.

The capacitor’s controls are on the other side of the interplanar barrier, its voice spoke in Kaslo’s mind. I can project illusions and short-lived effects a moderate distance into the Third Plane. But the task the groffet wants completed requires a human operator, preferably one with thaumaturgical skills. Initially, that was to be the one who called himself Phalloon.

Kaslo said, But then Diomedo and I destroyed him.

Yes. So then I sought to draw Obron in, but he was too careful. He sent you.

I, who have no skills.

True, though you have a good supply of will. You are just unable to focus it.

Kaslo was pursuing the trail to its logical conclusion. So all of the displays, the elemental and the athlenath, the preyn raids, were intended to lure a wizard within range?

The preyns were sent to bring people. Or, as Majestrum’s groffet called them, fuel. The last one was to capture you, again for your life force.

Kaslo conceded the point. But the rest . . .

Yes. The goal was to lure in a practitioner and bend him to Majestrum’s will.

Kaslo had finally caught up. And right now . . .

I am doing just that, said the entity. I’d rather not, but the whips and chains that Majestrum applied to me in the Nineteenth Aeon are as strong as they ever were. And the groffet is adept at using them.

Show me, Kaslo said.

• • • •

An image instantly formed in Kaslo’s mind: Testroni’s Impervious Conveyance stood on the level plain, its hatch sealed. Through a transparent panel, the op could see Filidor and Obron inside. The Archon was moving his hands and arms into precise positions, while his lips formed words Kaslo could not hear. Obron was frantically leafing through an ancient book, occasionally pausing to scan a page and call out something to Filidor. The Archon’s groffet was standing statue-still, but Kaslo had the impression it was as active as the two thaumaturges.

Their intense activity was occasioned by what was going on outside the domed vehicle, which had not only lost its sheen but was now scarred and scorched in several places. Two huge creatures of indeterminate shape were battering at the conveyance with multiple limbs that seemed to be formed from thick, black smoke yet ended in solid, heavy hammerheads. A third athlenath had shaped one of its appendages into a thick spike and was trying to insert its tip into the wall where the edge of the hatch would be.

As Kaslo watched, Filidor smacked his right fist into his left palm, then sharply pulled the two hands apart while shouting something that caused his mouth to contort wildly. The prying demon was abruptly hurled far away across the empty landscape. It struck the flat surface in a series of rolling bounces, shedding parts of itself as it went. It finally stopped and lay inert, like a mound of black fog. Then it slowly rose and began to reconstitute itself.

The Archon took the book from Obron, flicked to another page, and quickly scanned what was written there. Then he touched his index fingers to his temples, crossing his arms so that each digit touched the opposite side of his head. He blew out his cheeks then released the pent-up air in a burst. Both of the hammering demons dissipated into thin clouds of gray vapor. But, as with the first athlenath, they quickly began to solidify and reform.

That is a very skillful wizard, the entity said. But magic is not as powerful here as in the Third Plane. Sad, but this can end only one way. Majestrum’s groffet is making me summon a banderanth. It will dissolve the vehicle, and then the two thaumaturges will be in my — that is, Majestrum’s — clutches.

Then stop! said Kaslo.

I would, but I cannot. His will is paramount.

Something must be possible! What can be done?

An interesting question. Let me consider it.

There isn’t much time.

True, said the demiurge’s helper. All this effort I’m making is putting serious demands on your life force.

So intent had Kaslo been on the struggle that he hadn’t noticed a creeping sense of lassitude. Tell me, he said, something we can do! Now!

My powers, combined with Majestrum’s will, cannot be withstood. We can do nothing about the splinter of his will. Therefore, the only avenue of approach is to deal with me.

I am trying to deal with you, said Kaslo.

I mean “deal with me” in a final and irrevocable way, said the entity. Kill me.

Kill you? How?

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? If I knew how to do that, I’d have done it shortly after the demiurge left me here.

You’re not helping.

I’d like to. I had high hopes when you appeared. You’ve done a lot of killing.

Kaslo was tired. His brain felt heavy in his head. Is there anything, he said, that you know of that could kill you? Assuming I could get my hands on it.

Majestrum devised something, before he bound me. He was using a new spell, one of his own compositions, and there was a statistical chance that it might not work. In case I broke free and turned against him, as I probably would have, he prepared a weapon.

What was it? Where is it now?

But the demiurge’s helper did not know. The weapon was created in and never left the Third Plane, a realm into which the portion of the entity that was trapped in the Seventh Plane could not see.

Is there no way to discover it? Kaslo asked.

Pardon me a moment, said the entity. The banderanth has arrived and I have to force it to attack your friends’ conveyance.

Kaslo’s mind grew perceptibly duller as he waited. When the entity next spoke in his mind, the op felt as if he hadn’t slept for a day and a half.

There is a way, it said.

Kaslo came back from a gray blankness. He couldn’t remember what he had been thinking of just moments before. What? What are you saying?

I’m saying there is a way to discover where the weapon is.

Right! Kaslo dragged himself back to wakefulness. The weapon. How do we find it?

A part of me is in every plane, said the entity. We ask the fragment that is in the third realm.

Kaslo remembered. But that fragment was trapped in a cave on a distant planet. How do we get to it?

It may be trapped in the Third Plane, but it is still part of me. Or, rather, it and I are still parts of the same whole.

I’m too tired for pedantry, Kaslo said. What does that mean in practical terms?

I can . . . reach out to it, but there is no guarantee it will respond. Each of us is sunk in its own individual hell.

Unutterable weariness flowed through Kaslo. He rallied himself and said, Try.

In a moment. Your wizards have managed to repel the banderanth, but I’m sending it back again.

Kaslo realized he must have dozed off waiting, because the entity’s voice snapped him back to alertness.

I’ve made contact.

The op tried to shake his head but found that it was now firmly wedged between the wall of limbs and torsos into which he was pressed. Ask about the weapon. Where is it?

A moment passed and he was sliding into torpor again. It was in the Third Plane, the voice in his head said, but now it has been moved.

Despair piled onto Kaslo’s fatigue, like two opponents jumping onto his back in a melee. Where to? he managed.

That’s the odd thing. My other part insists it has been taken into this plane.

Kaslo struggled to think, formed a thought. But then you’d know where it was.

Yes, but I don’t. How peculiar.

The op’s brain refused to grapple with the conundrum. He felt it shutting down. It was like seeing all the lumens in a building being turned off, floor by floor.

Is there anything you can do, he asked the entity, to make my brain work better? I need to think.

Well, you are just a rough draft. I suppose I could try to optimize your mentational functions, or at least fill in some of the blanks.

Please do.

It was like being in a hot stuffy room when someone opens a door and a flood of cool, reviving air flows in. Kaslo felt his awareness both growing and sharpening in a matter of moments. He examined his situation from several angles then said, You can’t see into the conveyance, can you?

No, it is impervious. But wait, the banderanth has dissolved a hole in the top. It is only a pinprick, but . . . A moment passed. And there it is. It passed an image to Kaslo’s mind.

I see the weapon, Kaslo said. I must get to it. But the confining membrane pressed him tightly against the mass of bodies. He considered the possibilities for an instant, then a plan formed in his enhanced mind. He asked the entity, Does Majestrum’s will control the preyns?

Only indirectly. They are trained to obey the groffet.

Can you control them?

Yes.

Where is the groffet now?

In the opening of the cavity Majestrum created in me, watching the destruction of the conveyance.

That was as Kaslo had expected. Then have them cut me loose, quietly.

The arthropods arrived and lifted the membrane away from Kaslo. His mind was preternaturally sharp, but his limbs were weak. He stepped carefully out into the cavity, and saw the wizard’s hunch-shouldered familiar framed in the opening, gazing out and down.

Is there another way out of you?

No.

Did the preyns cut the original wound?

Yes.

Can they cut another one?

The entity’s voice, until now a monotone of placid calm, took on an edge of excitement. Yes.

Then have them do so, but without the groffet noticing.

Easily done. A curtain of the entity’s flesh-like substance descended silently from the cavity’s ceiling while another rose from the floor to meet it, effectively screening the groffet’s view of Kaslo and the two preyns. Now the arthropods raised their front pincers and began tearing at the solid wall of the entity’s meat, which fell away like cheesecloth, creating a down-sloping tunnel that soon ended in a new opening. Kaslo could see the flat, pebbly surface of the plane beyond.

He stepped toward the tunnel, but his knees kept bending and he sank down and would have toppled forward onto his face if he hadn’t managed to clumsily sway himself upright. But his mind remained clear and incisive. Can you have the preyns take me to the conveyance? he said, and when the answer was in the affirmative, he bid the entity make it so.

One of the multi-legged creatures picked him up, its grip firm but gentle, and placed him on the other’s back. Kaslo grasped the carapace with weakened hands and held on as the animal scuttled down the tunnel and out onto the flat surface.

The scene had changed since the entity had shown him the athlenaths’ attack on the vehicle. The three demons were now hanging back while the new threat summoned by the groffet, the banderanth, took on the task of reducing the conveyance’s defenses.

Even wearing the Archon’s goggles, Kaslo could not sustain a clear image of the Seventh Plane creature. It seemed to shift in and out of focus, and its outline was constantly mutating. But he could see that it was big, at least half the size of the vehicle, limbless and headless as an unshelled mollusk, although tubular projections kept rising randomly from its glabrous skin only to be pulled back to no apparent purpose. The thing had draped itself over one end of the conveyance, and its undersurface looked to be glued to the dome. Wisps of gray vapor leaked out from under the line where the banderanth’s substance met the formerly shining surface.

It’s dissolving the dome, Kaslo thought, as the preyn he was riding scuttled toward where the hatch had been. Through the transparency, he could see Filidor and Obron still doing wizard’s work, but their shoulders slumped with fatigue and their ashen faces beneath the helmets and goggles were graven by deep lines. They seemed to have aged decades since he had been snatched away.

He was within a few paces of the conveyance when the preyn carrying him abruptly stopped. Momentum threw Kaslo forward over its head, to roll across the packed rounded pebbles that made up the floor of the vast plain. The animal that had borne him, along with the second preyn that had accompanied it, now looked at him with a new purpose. Pincers clacked and reached for him.

The groffet had torn its attention away from the attack on the two wizards’ shelter, seen the preyns carrying Kaslo toward them, and ordered them to stop what they were doing. Its next step was clear to the op’s clarified intelligence: It would have the animals seize him and carry him back to where he had escaped from. The entity’s ability to summon and control demons would depend on draining the last of the man’s life from him.

Even now, the banderanth had begun to slide off the dome, its actions no longer ruled by the demiurge’s helper. Kaslo looked past the preyns to see the entity slumped on its side, looking once again like a range of low hills. The mask of black iron had fallen away. Halfway up the slope of the entity’s substance, he could see the circular orifice in which Majestrum’s groffet stood. The shaggy were-creature’s lambent eyes regarded him impassively.

All of that Kaslo took in at a moment’s glance. Then the preyns advanced, pincers wide. He turned his head, though his weakness made it a vast labor, to call to the men in the conveyance, but there was no need. The hatch fell open, became a ramp, and at the top of the ramp was Filidor. Haggard but determined, the Archon pointed a rod of black wood at the nearest preyn. He said a word and the creature was instantly limned in a purple non-light that made Kaslo’s eyes ache even through the thick crystal lenses. Now the light blinked out to leave the arthropod standing dull-black and seemingly frozen in mid-motion. Then the black shape came apart, becoming a million specks of dust that fell to the ground. For a moment, they formed a stain on the surface; then they were gone.

Filidor aimed the wand and dispatched the second preyn in the same manner. Then he and Obron hurried down the ramp, seized the op under his arms, and hauled him into the conveyance. As soon as he was inside, the Archon’s groffet made a gesture and the hatch sealed itself.

Kaslo lay facedown on the floor where the wizards had deposited him. Breathing and blinking his eyes had become about as much as he was capable of.

Filidor knelt and regarded him for a moment, then said to Obron, “Bring Hentero’s Compendium.” When Kaslo’s employer handed him the ancient black book, he riffled through it quickly, found a page, and read it. Then he sought in another section of the text and paused for a moment to think.

“Should work,” he said, getting to his feet. He glanced at the first page again, flipped back to the second, then spoke a succession of syllables while manipulating the fingers of his free hand in a series of exact motions.

For Kaslo, it was as if a bellows had been inserted into his navel then worked to inflate his body with what felt like a bubble of cold power. He could track its chill as it spread from his middle to the rest of his torso, then into his legs and arms, down to toes and fingers that felt as if they might burst open from the pressure. But when it sought to rise into his head — he was sitting up by now — he silently spoke inside his still lucid mind: No, and felt the power remain just below his chin, like a flooded river lapping at its maximum height.

“What did you do to me?” he asked Filidor, as he rose fluidly to his feet. It felt as if his body was vibrating with energy, though his hands showed not even a tremor.

“A combination of Podestri’s Interrealm Lend-Lease and Shalmor’s Chronical Decompression,” the Archon said. “You probably wouldn’t understand.”

Kaslo disagreed. “Try me,” he said.

Filidor explained that he had first dispelled the illusion of time, so that Kaslo was revealed in his current living existence as well as in his pre-gestative and post-mortality states. He had then “borrowed” some of the life energy from the preconceived Kaslo’s potential, converted it to a useful kineticism, and imbued it into the op’s body. “Of course,” he said, “balancing requires your ba to have even less of an existence once it appears in the Underworld. But it seemed a reasonable price to pay.”

“I agree,” said Kaslo. “And perhaps between now and that melancholy eventuality, I can find some other way to rebalance the disrupted quotients.”

The Archon’s eyebrows rose and he turned to Obron. “I thought he didn’t understand such arcana,” he said.

Before the other thaumaturge could answer Kaslo said, “I didn’t used to. Now it seems rather obvious.”

He glanced out the transparency. The entity lay as before, apparently inert, with the groffet watching dispassionately from the permanent wound in its side. The banderanth had retired from the conflict and was moving at a slow but steady speed toward the horizon. The three athlenaths had also withdrawn; they had taken themselves off some distance and appeared to be communing with each other. Kaslo deduced their shapeshifting to be their means of communication and they were deciding what to do next.

“The demiurge’s helper,” he speculated aloud, “has used up all the life force extracted from the people stolen by the preyns. It can no longer command the demons for the groffet. The groffet is safe from their retribution while it remains within the entity’s substance.”

“Yes,” said Filidor. “It is a stalemate.”

“No,” said Kaslo. “It is not, and it is time to end this — once and for all.”

Not long before, he knew, he would have been amazed at the clarity with which he could assess the situation: not only the relative statuses of Majestrum’s groffet, the helper, and the demons, but the strengths and potentialities of the two thaumaturges. Both of the latter were tired and depleted; Obron was near exhaustion, and Filidor could not have deployed more than two major spells without collapsing.

To Kaslo, these realities were now self-evident. He was interested in pursuing their meanings and ramifications further, but first he must take care of an obligation. He strode to the desk littered by scrolls and librams, swept them aside and found the stack of papers on which the wizards had made their calculations. Atop it rested the fist-sized orb of black iron-like metal that Obron had been using as a paperweight. Kaslo scooped it up.

He weighed the heavy ball in his hand, then turned to see the two others eying him carefully. He tossed the thing up and caught it. Its impact against his palm sounded like a hard slap. “What was it you called this?” he said to Obron, though he remembered exactly. He now found that he remembered everything exactly. “Oh, yes, you called it ‘a dragon’s equivalent of a kidney stone.’ But it’s not.”

He studied it from several angles, then turned to where Filidor’s groffet was standing in its customary place in an out-of-the-way corner. “Old Confustible, do you know a spell that Majestrum would have used to disguise something so it could be hidden in plain sight?”

“Probably Azerablez’s Innocuous Gloss,” the familiar said.

“And its undoing?”

“Speak the second sura backwards.”

Filidor said, “I know that. I will say it.”

“Let me,” said Kaslo. To the groffet, he said, “Speak it to me.”

Old Confustible spoke in his ear, three triplets, each of three syllables. Kaslo understood them instantly, intuitively. He spoke the middle one, reversing each of its sounds.

The ball of iron in his hand shimmered and his palm felt a moment’s cool heat. Then the black sphere was gone, and in its place was a shining nouble of deepest red.

“An exemplar,” said Obron. “I’ve never seen one outside of a picture in a book.”

Filidor leaned close and inspected the orb through the crystal lenses of his goggles. “It’s been worked on,” he said. “An exemplar is more than just a nouble, but — though I never thought I’d have occasion to use the phrase — this is more than just an exemplar.”

“It is unique,” Kaslo said. It was all very clear to him now. “It has no name, because Majestrum knew that anyone who came across the name might find the weapon. He referred to it obliquely, as ‘the blood of a dragon.’”

“A weapon?” Filidor said. “Against what?”

“Open the hatch,” Kaslo said, “And I’ll show you.”

He stepped down the ramp onto the pebbled plain. He formed the thought, I have it, and projected it to the entity.

Its voice came into his mind, very faint. Ah, it said, and the silent sound carried the sense of a longing at last to be fulfilled.

Can you rise up? Kaslo asked it. If so, I think you should.

Slowly, the demiurge’s helper levered itself up on its rudimentary limbs, until it assumed the posture that, in a man, would be kneeling. The groffet clung to the rim of the wound in its side. The best I can do, the entity said.

It will suffice. The sling was still tied to Kaslo’s belt. He unknotted it and slipped the red nouble into the leather pocket.

Wait! Filidor’s voice broke into his mind. There is much we can learn from it.

No, sent back the op. It has suffered enough. Though Kaslo’s back was toward the Archon, standing in the open hatchway, he sensed Filidor’s raising of a hand. Better if you don’t, he said, and felt the tension behind him ease.

Kaslo let the sling with its burden hang from his hand, its cords wound around his fingers. He swung the weapon in a wide, slow circle, then put more energy into the rotation and raised his arm so that the sling rotated above his head. In the Third Plane he would have heard a whirring; here the motion was silent, but the nouble glowed in its pocket like an ember blown into red-hot life.

It wants me to stop you, the entity’s voice said inside Kaslo’s head. But I told it I lack the energy. The op looked and saw Majestrum’s familiar standing in the open wound, moving its furred arms in a manner that might have been an attempt at spellcasting. Is that irony? the entity said.

Thank you, said Kaslo. For everything. Then he let the glowing missile fly. It streaked toward the entity — a line of crimson fire that did not quickly fade — and struck the demiurge’s helper in the middle of its mass. The effect was similar to what happened when Kaslo shot the preyn. Where the exemplar pierced the entity’s substance, a hole appeared, glowing red around the edges. The gap expanded rapidly, racing outward in all directions.

A faint voice sounded in Kaslo’s mind, more a sigh than a syllable. Ahhh, and suddenly the entity was no longer there. Majestrum’s familiar fell to the ground, as did a mass of desiccated bodies, but only the groffet moved. It rose to its splayed feet and looked at the three men without emotion. Kaslo’s enhanced perceptions told him the creature was incapable of feeling.

There was motion farther out on the plain. The three athlenaths had been moving away. Now they stopped and began to come back, their roiling forms gliding smoothly just above the ground.

Get inside! Filidor was gesturing to Kaslo from the open hatchway. The op turned and moved toward the shelter of Testroni’s Impervious Conveyance. But as he mounted the ramp, he was jostled aside. Old Confustible hurried down onto the plain and scurried on its short, bent-kneed legs to where Majestrum’s groffet stood watching the onrushing demons. The Archon’s familiar seized the other’s arm and began dragging it toward the hatch.

Kaslo stood in the doorway. No, he projected to Old Confustible.

It knows things, the groffet replied, dragging Majestrum’s creature up the ramp.

The things it knows are better forgotten, the op said. And while it lives, so does Majestrum’s will.

He’s right, Filidor’s voice sounded in his head. Let it go.

The Archon’s groffet seemed poised to argue, but then it loosened its grip on the other familiar and came inside the conveyance. The ramp lifted, sealing the hatch. Majestrum’s familiar was tipped out onto the plain. A moment later, the three demons arrived. They surrounded the groffet, forming a single black mass of pulsing energy. Then they separated into three individuals again and flew off toward the horizon. Behind them, nothing remained.

Soon after, Saunterance arrived, unsummoned. The dragon seized the ring atop the dome, spread its wings, and lifted the conveyance. Inside, Filidor and Obron sank into their chairs, their slumped postures eloquent of exhaustion. Old Confustible retired to its customary spot and closed its lambent eyes. Kaslo unwound the sling’s cords from his fingers and watched through the transparency as they raced across the emptiness.

He was thinking, and the thoughts were new to him.

• • • •

“I’m staying here,” Kaslo told Obron. “Filidor says I can use his library and connaissarium. Bodwon can take over for me when you get home.”

They were in the suite of rooms the Archon had provided for them in the same wing of the palace where Filidor had his own quarters. The room’s window looked out over the sprawl of Olkney and the woods and fields beyond the city. Kaslo pointed out a large house that stood in its own walled grounds. “The former owner was off-world when the change came. He won’t be coming back. I can have it.”

“What will you do here?” Obron said.

It was obvious to Kaslo. He was still getting used to the slowness of ordinary minds. “Study, practice, invent, correlate,” he said. “I mean to produce a Compendium of my own.”

Obron’s brows scaled new heights. “Thaumaturgery?” he said. “You?”

“I’m not the me I used to be,” said the op. “Watch.”

Obron’s mouth fell open as Kaslo proceeded to kiss his own elbow. “I’ve never seen it done that way,” the wizard said.

“It seemed a simpler approach than the one you showed me,” said Kaslo. “And my method allows for this.”

This time, Obron gasped. “Both elbows at once! That’s . . .”

But before he could find a word to express his astonishment, Kaslo added both knees and the top of his head. A moment later, reconstituted and gazing down at his former employer, who was stretched out on the floor in a swoon, the op said to himself, “Probably shouldn’t do that in public.”

He revived his former employer and helped him to a chair. Obron passed a hand over his face. “Erm Kaslo,” he said, as if to himself, “a thaumaturge. A practitioner.”

“More than just a practitioner,” said Kaslo. “I intend to compose.”

© 2015 by Matthew Hughes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His SF novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone, and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. His web page is at matthewhughes.org.

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

The Mill

Paul Di Filippo

24,800 words

1.

Brick dust mottled the still valley air around the noisy scrambling boys, rising and quickly falling like their cries and shouts in thin ragged clouds that puffed from beneath their hands and feet as they clambered clumsily upon the vast irregular pile of broken and discarded bricks. Its dry powdery sunbaked scent — as familiar as the odor of homemade waterwheat bread — filled their nostrils, even as the settling pale orange-red powder layered their dull black clothing, penetrating its very weave and filtering through to veneer their skins with an ineluctable talcum, so that mothers, washing these boys later, would exclaim, “I swear by the Factor’s immortal soul, this brick dust is leaking out from inside you. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover you’re nothing but a human brick yourself!”

But the kettle-filled tub and the scrubbing with smoke-colored sea sponges and the gentle feminine upbraiding would come later, and was not to be worried about now. Now only the mad, ecstatic spirit of competition held sway, raging in their veins like the Swolebourne at flood. On and around the huge tumulus of bricks the boys swarmed, in a single-minded and almost desperate game to reach the top. Hands relinquished their holds to reach for the shirttails of those who surged ahead, to yank them back with savage glee. The boys seemed oblivious to the impact of the corners and edges of the broken blocks on their knees and shins and forearms, intent only on achieving the instant and insurmountable but fleeting glory of standing upon the pinnacle of the heap.

The boys ranged in age from five to just under twelve. No distinction in treatment was made between younger and older, all ages giving and taking equally in the mutual ferocity of the jagged ascent.

Dislodged bricks tumbled down the pile with a resonant clatter, and it seemed as if the pile would soon be leveled before any individual could reach the top. In the next instant, though, one boy emerged above the rest, eluding the outstretched hands that sought to capture him and deny him the top. Bent almost parallel to the slope of the heap he clawed like an animal with hands and boot-shod feet working alike to reach the apex of the mound. Sweat turned the dust upon his face into a crimson paste.

All the boys seemed to realize at once that victory for this upstart was now foregone, all their own chances lost in the sudden burst put on by the boy now nearing the top. Instead of reacting badly, they gave in to their natural inclination to cheer an honest victor, and exhortations and encouragements replaced their wordless exclamations of struggle. “Go it, Cairncross!” “Yay, Charley!” “They can’t stop you now, Charles!”

With the cheers of his peers ringing in his ears, the boy reached the top.

His heart was pounding, and he could hardly see. His white sweat-soaked shirt clung to him like the mantle of a cape-wolf. He feared he might faint, but knew also somehow that he would not. It was not destined for his body, the instrument of his victory, after all, to spoil this moment. Getting his feet precariously under himself, he stood erect atop the crumbling mass, panting, bruised, sweaty, triumphant, and surveyed those below him, who had come to a complete cessation of movement, as if they had finally assumed the earthen nature of the brick they had so long played upon.

For the first time in all the years he had been competing in this brutal, vital, irreplaceable game, he had won. He had won. And there could be only one reason why. Tomorrow he turned twelve. When you turned twelve you entered the Mill to work. You played on the bricks no more. This had been his last chance ever to stand here, in unique and poignant relation to his fellows. And he had been granted the privilege. Through some unseen intervention of God or Factor, unwonted energy and determination had flooded his limbs, urging him on to the top, where now he stood with shaky knees. He had won.

For the next twenty years this moment would be the highlight, the indescribable epiphanic summation and measure of Charley Cairncross’s life. Neither his first kiss from his betrothed nor commendation from his superiors; neither the birth of his children nor the praise of the Factor himself would equal this heartbreaking moment.

Moved by a premonition of what this moment meant, under the impulse of forces he could neither identify nor control, Charley, risking a tumble and cracked skull, began to jig and prance, whooping and yelling in a giddy crazy dance atop the bricks, unimpeded by his heavy leather shoes, like a fur-faced South Polar savage gloating over the skulls of his vanquished enemies. The boys below Charley watched in fascination, as the skinny lad flailed his arms and legs about. No one had ever done this before, and they were utterly baffled, but at the same time respectful.

There was no telling how long Charley might have continued his victory dance, had not noontime intervened. From some distance away came the loud tolling of a big bell, echoed up and down the Valley by remoter cousins. Its brazen strokes pealed out, shattering both Charley’s visionary state and the hypnotic trance of his audience. Immediately boys began to descend the heap of rubble, brushing futilely at their clothes.

Charley, recovering from his ecstasy, looked up at the cloudless summer heavens. Several kites and cliff kestrels glided lazily in the depths of the aquamarine heavens. The enormous blue-white sun was directly overhead. Noontime indeed, and lunch still had to be delivered, despite the unique and magnificent events of the day. Not even for transcendence — especially not for transcendence — could the routine of Mill and Valley come to a halt.

Lowering his center of gravity so as not to topple, Charley crabbed backwards down the pile. By the time he reached the ground, all the other boys had already vanished among the houses not far off. Charley hastened after them.

The brick dump lay on the outskirts of Charley’s village, just beyond the outermost houses. In neat, garden-broken ranks the brick bungalows marched alongside the Mill with geometric precision. They clustered familiarly together, despite the abundance of open space in the Valley, as if making a united front against the mystery of the world around them.

By tradition, the master masons of Charley’s village for centuries had dumped their waste here, on the last bit of level cleared ground before the land became wooded and began to slope up, forming the eastern side of the Valley. All the subsequent decades of weathering and decomposition had permeated the original soil with the sterile runoff from the pile, rendering it mostly fruitless. Among the trailing tendrils of discarded brick grew only the hardiest weeds. Sourpeas, their gaudy spring flowers only a memory now, their poisonous yellow pods harvested occasionally as an emetic; dangletrap, its jaws snapping softly on the odd insect; maidenhair, its black tendrils lying wispily atop red shards . . . A foot-beaten path, trod by generations of boys, led back to the houses.

Halfway across the waste, the path was intersected at a right angle by a twin-rutted dirt road with a thin grassy median. The road, like the Swolebourne, like the Mill itself, ran north and south, leading in the latter direction down the length of the Valley to where the Swolebourne emerged from its human-made brick shell. Here, new construction was always going on.

Once among the shadows of the somber brick dwellings — each two stories tall and divided by an interior wall so as to house two separate families, whose compact and well-tended garden plots flanked each proud owner’s door, serving in lieu of useless grassy lawn — Charley speeded up his pace. He knew his mother would be waiting for him. More importantly, so would his father.

On the paths threading the village, Charley passed many boys bent on errands identical to his. They had already been home, however, and now raced by carrying tight-lidded tin pails that they swung by their handles, and stone bottles stoppered with ceramic plugs and wire caps, and suspended from twine knotted around the bottlenecks. The stone bottles were slick with condensation, their contents cool from all-morning immersion in the family wells.

Soon Charley reached the doorstep of his house, indistinguishable from all the rest and yet so deeply and immutably known by him as his. A woman with plaited honey-colored hair stood impatiently in the doorway, tapping a foot beneath her long baize skirts and holding his father’s lunchpail and beer crock. The left corner of her lips twitched the big dark beauty spot above it in a familiar gesture of annoyance.

His mother cut off Charley’s attempted explanation of his lateness and disheveled condition. “No excuses, boy. Just get your Da’s meal to him before it gets cold.” Without even stopping, Charley grabbed the pail and bottle and took off.

Down the narrow cindered lanes — which had just lately dried completely after the final spring rains — Charley raced, his tough leather-soled high-topped shoes crunching the grit as if it were rock candy. Eventually he caught up with the other boys, who had not been so far ahead of him after all, and who — by an unconscious and daily urge to gregariousness, as if they were determined to offset now the future semi-isolation they would endure when tending their machines in the Mill — had funneled together from their various starting points and subsequently moved in a jubilant pack through the last shadowy stretch of serried houses. Occasionally a pail would bang up clumsily against one of its mates, eliciting dull clunks and anxious belligerent warnings to “watch out for my Da’s dup, you dodder!” Some boys carried two or more pails, for both brothers and father.

Sighting Charley, many of the boys whooped out fresh congratulations for his recent performance on the brick heap. Several of them mimicked his celebratory dance, infusing it with an absurdity he had surely not felt. Had he really looked so foolish? Or was it the perceptions of his friends that was distorting the reality of what he had experienced? Not for the first time, Charley felt distanced from the other boys. He wondered whether anything as intense as what he had just experienced could ever be truly communicated or understood . . .

At last the boys burst out from the maternal embrace of the houses, leaving behind shadow for diamond-hard translucent sunlight that fell sharply on a wide swath of wildflower-spotted, untamed emerald field that stretched away to the Mill. The cindered path continued across this intermediate zone between home and work, heading toward the immense brick structure that was the Mill.

The Mill was ungraspable from this vantage in its entirety, looking merely like a high endless madder-dark windowless wall capped by a mansard roof whose expanse of thick slates looked like the spine of some unknown beast. It stretched to right and left as far as one could see, dividing the Valley like a ruler laid across a bear-anthill. Its majestic presence was so much a given, so taken for granted, that the boys truly did not even really see it. Their attention was focused on meeting their fathers.

The boys moved on through the fragrant waist-high unscythed grass, spreading apart a bit, some stopping to investigate a flower or insect, then having to run to rejoin the rest. In a minute or so they had crossed this interzone and entered upon the territory of the Mill proper. Here, as at the brick heap, the ground was bare of anything but the most tenacious and hardy of weeds, due to the accumulation of generations’ worth of waste oil. The smell from the organic detritus — Charley had once heard that the oil came from a special kind of plant that did not grow hereabouts — was dense but not overpoweringly unpleasant, especially to those who had lived with its smell engrained in the creases of their fathers’ rough hands ever since those selfsame hands had first reached to absent-mindedly stroke the new babe in its cradle. The air here smelled rather like slightly rancid fried food.

Charley and the others hurried across this oily waste toward an opening in the Mill’s flank. A wide double-doored portal of thick planks, this entrance was marked by the rising of a clocktower up from the roofline above its location, and also by a heterogeneous collection of backless benches scattered around just beyond the entrance. Above the benches, the gilded hands of the clock hung at ten past the hour, scything inexorably toward the inevitable return to work. Under their stern progress, the benches were already filling up with sweaty, hungry, brawny, tired-looking men, and many of their older sons, looking like shrunken or as yet uninflated replicas of their sires.

When the lunch-carriers saw their relatives waiting they picked up their feet even more fleetly and began to cry out like a flock of particularly limited birds. “Da! Da! Da! Da!” The men and workerboys perked up, hearing these youthful voices and knowing their meals had arrived. More and more laborers — those who worked farther inside the depths of the Mill and so had farther to walk for lunch — continued to pour out of the doors.

Straggling alongside Charley in the rear was poor Jemmy Candletree. The boy had six or seven pails to lug. His mother, a widower, supported herself and Jemmy by supplying meals to childless and unmarried men.

Charley silently took one of Jemmy’s pails; the lad smiled gratefully.

On the far side of the Mill, Charley knew, this same scene was being mirrored. It gave him a curious sense of twinness to think about it.

Now the lead boys had begun to circulate among the men, handing out the lunchpails and stone jugs they had ferried from hearth to hand. The men assumed a certain dignity with the arrival of these tin vessels and crocks. Each set his shoulders back somewhat more stiffly beneath his coarse jacket (donned in the morning upon departure, doffed once inside the Mill to allow shirt-sleeved freedom, and re-donned at lunch), as if to say, “My wife and oldest homeson have both done their part once again. Let all see and note this.” Then they fell to disassembling their tripartite pails. A twist unlocked the first section from the second. Removal of the top lid, which was balanced carefully on the knee throughout the meal, always revealed inside this first container an enormous slab of dense waterwheat bread smeared with orange butter, nearly a quarter of a loaf. The container below this held the main course: a hot, fragrant stew of rocklamb and capers, say, or two groatgoat chops, or some kind of meatloaf redolent of greennut shavings. The final sealed container held dessert. Berry cobbler, stuntapple pie, spicebark cookies.

The sounds of restrained but hearty eating filled the summer air. The men were as yet too intent on sating their Mill-born hunger to engage in conversation.

Charley shuffled from foot to foot, awaiting the arrival of his father, who worked in roving, some distance away. He examined the lone pail he now carried while he waited. His father’s initials — RC — were awkwardly engraved on cover and bottom. The alphabetic furrows in the tin held ineradicable dirt from a thousand handlings, which, scrub as she would with boar-bristle brush, his mother could never totally remove.

Suddenly, without warning, Charley experienced a revelation. Tomorrow, he would not be carrying this pail. That task would fall to his little brother, Alan, whose small hands would have to manage two lunches. He — Charley — would have his own lunch-pail. Already it must have been bought at the Company Store, and even this minute was probably sitting on a shelf in the kitchen. Tonight he would have to scratch his initials on it. CC. Tomorrow he would be sitting here with his father, probably famished and more tired than he had ever been before. No more eating at home with his mother and Alan and Floy . . .

CC. See, see. See, see what would come.

It was all too strange for Charley to really fathom. How could he travel from his temporary yet eternal enshrinement atop the brick heap to the interior depths of the Mill in less than a day? It seemed impossible . . .

Charley lifted his gaze once more to the door. His father was coming through.

For one brief moment, as the man became visible just within the tenebrous interior of the Mill and yet had not fully emerged, he was dusted with light. All over his bare skin and clothing danced tiny motes and atomies of radiance. He looked dipped in some marvelous powder that did not reflect light, but created it, engendered it of its own miraculous being and nature. Charley’s father wore, for the briefest second, a chatoyant suit of fireflies. It was, of course, only a coating of the airborne fibrous lux particles that were everywhere within the Mill. And as soon as the man came completely into the sun-drenched outside air his suit of lights disappeared, leaving him clothed like the others, in drab utilitarian fustian weave.

Charley ran to his father and handed over his pail and beer crock. The man nodded wordlessly, tousled Charley’s brown hair, and moved to an empty spot on a bench. He dropped wearily down, as if his bones were lead. The inner containers soon ranged along his leg as on a serving board, Roger Cairncross dug out a spoon from his pocket, polished it on his sleeve (thereby probably depositing as many particles on it as he removed) and began to eat, shoveling stew beneath his droopy mustache like a man filling a ditch.

Normally Charley would have rejoined his peers in their roughhousing as they waited for the empty pails, which they had to bring home. But today, he wasn’t quite sure who his peers were. So he hung quietly by his father’s elbow while the man and his comrades ate, not venturing to speak.

His father seemed not to mind. At least he did not gruffly order Charley to move off. Perhaps he too recognized the in-between nature of the day and of Charley’s state of mind. At last, with a final swipe of his bread through the remnant gravy, the elder Cairncross was done. He packed up the assemblage of containers neatly and handed them back to Charley. He brought a pipe out from within his jacket, filled it with smokeweed and began to puff. His fellows were doing likewise, down almost to the youngest. Charley coughed as the acrid smoke reached his nostrils. He vowed then and there never to acquire so inexplicably vile a habit.

The lofty clock-hands stood at half-past the hour. The first man to speak addressed not his fellows so much as the air in front of him.

“I hear that the new mill is nigh finished.”

It was a kind of unmistakable intonation that differentiated “mill” from “Mill.” The latter word, of course, referred to the whole vast multiunit complex that stretched from the northern end of the Valley more than three-quarters of the way to the south, a distance of nearly five miles. Big-em “Mill” meant more than the building and its contents and products, too. It stood for some numinous ideal, a community that included everyone in the Valley, something larger than any individual, and deserving of the ultimate loyalty. Something that stretched ultimately to the stars.

With a more familiar and less respectful tone, “mill” meant literally the individual production units that made up the Mill. Each small-em “mill” was a collection of men and machines capable of taking the raw lux fibers and producing finished cloth. These mills commanded a more earthly loyalty, a certain fierce pride in the ability of one’s mill to outproduce all the others in quantity and quality, and to field a ball team that would win the annual championship. Each mill was approximately twenty years older than the contiguous one immediately to the south of it.

Charley’s mill was not the oldest, nor the youngest, being situated somewhat toward the middle of the whole complex. The youngest mill was still under construction. The oldest was a desolate mass of charred timbers overgrown with bramblevines and fronded at their bases with waterplants through which the Swolebourne rushed at the start of its channeled and tamed subterranean passage beneath the Mill. This progenitor mill had caught fire and burned down in a time beyond Charley’s conceptions, when there had been only three mills. Now there were fifteen. “Many mills make the Mill” was a saying often trotted out when one wished to indicate that there was strength in numbers, or diversity beneath a common façade.

“Aye, that’s what I hear also,” said another man. “And we all knows what that means. A new flood of dodders in from the farms, looking for an easy life. Probably some hellacious towners who’ve gotten one too many gal in trouble and been drummed out. A trapper or three who’s getting too old to walk his lines anymore. Well, they’ll soon learn. They all settle down to Mill life after a while. I reckon we was all dodders back somewhen.”

The men all nodded agreeably at the old wisdom. They knew that after a decade or two the workers at the new mill would be indistinguishable, save for perhaps a slight accent, from those who had lived in the Valley all their lives.

“They’ll not be any challenge in the games at first,” said a man with a missing arm. “Especially not to the Blue Devils.” Everyone smiled at the mention of their own team, as they pictured the frenetic sweaty pleasure of summer twilight games, kicking and passing the scarred lucky leather ball until the moon and stars themselves were inveigled out to watch. It seemed then that the remainder of the talk would center on the upcoming season’s games. But Charley’s father — who had been frowning and staring down into the oily dirt since the first mention of the new mill — diverted the talk with a blustery outburst.

“And why do we even need a new mill, I ask you?”

All the men turned their eyes on Cairncross. Charley felt nervous, worried, and defiant for his father’s sake, all three emotions jumbled up together.

“Ain’t life hard enough,” Cairncross continued, “trying to produce the best goods we can, so’s that the Factor will give us a rich weight of gold that will guarantee a fair share for every worker, enough to tide us through the year between his Lord High Muckamuck’s visits?”

Cairncross stopped for breath, glaring intently at the others, who appeared not a little frightened at this mild derogation of the Factor. “Now we’ve got a new set of competitors, more mouths to divide the Factor’s beneficence among. Unless the Factor ups the yardage he’s willing to purchase, we’ll all owe the Company Store our very breaths by the time the new mill is geared up to full production.”

An older man spoke up. “The Factor must know what he’s doing, Roger.” (Here the elder Cairncross mumbled something that only Charley seemed to hear: “He’s only human.”) “He told us nigh twenty years ago to start building the new mill. He must understand his market, wherever he sells the luxcloth, out there among the stars. Could be he’s expecting a big surge of new customers, and needs the new production. You’re too young, but I remember when the last mill started up, almost forty years ago. People were saying the same thing back then. And look, we still earn a good living.”

Cairncross spat. “Aye, a good living, if you call it fair that the sweat of a man and his sons goes for naught but to survive until he dies — and dies too young most times at that — with not an hour or an ounce of energy left for anything but a game of ball. Think what the Factor could do for us and our world if he wished —”

Now the men laughed. Charley winced for his father’s sake.

“Sure,” said one, “he could make us all deathless like hisself and we’d all fly through the air all day and live on moonbeams and calculate how many angels fly ’tween here and the stars. Away with your stuff, Roger! It’s enough for any man to make the cloth and raise his bairns and tussle on the game fields. That’s life for our kind, not some airy-fairy dream.”

It seemed that Cairncross wanted to say more, but, feeling the massed attitudes of his fellows ranked against him, he only stood, pivoted and stalked off back into the mill. The subsequent banter about ballplaying was muted and desultory, under the pall raised by Cairncross’s wild talk, and the men soon shuffled back into the mill, a few unprecedented minutes before the tolling of the bell that signaled the end of their break.

The boys stood amid the benches for a time after the men had gone, idly picking at the weather-splintered bleached wood of the seats or kicking greasy clods of soil. Their mood seemed touched by the dispute that had arisen among the men. A few boys looked curiously but not accusingly at Charley, as if he somehow could explain or account for his father’s untenable position.

Charley could do no such thing. He was too confused by his father’s arguments to explicate them. He had never seen his father act precisely like this before, or spout such unconventional ideas — although there had been times, of course, when his father was quietly sullen or explosively touchy; whose father wasn’t? — and he wondered if his own near-future entry into the Mill had anything to do with his father’s novel mood. Charley returned the boys’ glances boldly (some of his exaltation at conquering the brick heap still lingered like a nimbus around and inside him) and soon they looked away. A few seconds later, their natural exuberance had returned and they raced off back across the flowery strip, toward home and an afternoon’s boisterous roistering.

Charley did not follow. He still felt too confused to abide by his regular schedule of mindless afternoon gameplaying. He had to go off somewhere by himself, to think about things. Swinging his father’s empty pail and jug by their handles of tin and twine, keeping to the strip of waste-sown ground, Charley headed north, the serpentine bulk of the Mill on his left, the massed and brooding houses on his right. When he passed the northernmost house belonging to his own village, with the southernmost houses of the neighboring village still some distance off, he turned east, away from the Mill, across the trackless meadows. The hay-scented, sun-hot layer of air above the chest-high grass was filled with darting midges, the way he imagined the lux-thick air in the Mill to be filled with lux. Charley batted them aside when they swarmed annoyingly about his face.

The land began to slope up: Houses fell away, behind, below, to south and north. Slender sapodilla saplings, advance scouts for the forest ahead and uphill, made their appearance in random clumps. Jacarandas and loblollies began to appear. As tree-cast, hard-edged shade blots started to overlap, the grass grew shorter and sparser. The final flowers to remain were the delicate yet hardy lacewings. Eventually, under the full-grown trees, the composition of the floor changed to leafduff and gnarly roots, evergreen needles and pink-spotted mushrooms. Small rills purled downhill at intervals, chuckling in simple-minded complacency, bringing their singly insignificant but jointly meaningful contributions to the Swolebourne.

“It takes many mills to make the Mill . . .”

Charley labored up the eastern slope of the Valley, not looking back. The air was cooler under the tall trees, insects less prevalent. Only the isolated thumb-thick bark beetle winged like a noisy sling-shot stone from tree to tree.

In the arboreal somnolence, so reminiscent of Layday services, with the buzzing of the beetles standing in for the droning of Pastor Purbeck, Charley tried to sift through the events of the morning, from his triumph on the brick pile to the confusing conversation among the men. There seemed to be no pattern to the events, no scheme into which he could fit both his joy and his bafflement. So he gave up and tried just to enjoy the hike. At last he came out upon the ridge that marked the border of the Valley, the terminator between familiar and foreign.

Here, high up, there were bald patches among the trees, places where the rocky vertebrae of the hill poked through its skin of topsoil. Walking south along the ridge, Charley came out of the trees into such a spot. Sun-baked stone made the air waver with heat ripples. It felt good after the relative coolness under the trees, like snuggling under the blankets warmed by heated bricks on a midwinter’s night.

Setting his father’s lunchpail down on the grass, Charley climbed upon a big knobby irregular boulder, got his feet beneath him (no one contested this perch with him), and looked around, away from his home. The crowns of the nearest trees were far enough downslope to afford a spectacular vista.

Beyond the Valley, unknown lands stretched green and far to the east, ending in a misty horizon. Sun shouted off a meandering river. Charley suspected it was the Swolebourne on its post-Valley trek, but was not sure. There was no immediate sign of man to be seen, but Charley knew that somewhere a day or so away there were towns and villages and cities and farms, where shoes and meat and the harvested lux came from, in tall-wheeled, barrel-loaded wagons drawn by drowsy wainwalkers, their horns spanning wider than a man’s reach. Those places were too unreal to hold Charley’s interest. He was Valley born. Back toward the rift that held his world he turned.

He could see the entire length of the Valley from this vantage. It was an impressive spectacle. In the north, the Swolebourne tumbled in high frothy falls from over the lip that closed that end of the Valley. There was a legend that claimed that a whole tribe of aborigines had hurled themselves from this precipice to their mass suicide, rather than submit to the presence of the first human colonists. The mournful chortling which at times could be discerned under the falls’ roar was said to be their ghostly lament, and did indeed resemble the noises which the fur-faced natives made, according to those trappers who had actually penetrated to the current-day haunts of the abos.

From its creamy violent pool the river rushed down its man-modified channel, its energy for some small distance untapped by the machinery of the Mill.

Soon enough the water ran among the blackened beams and crumbled fragments of walls that could barely be discerned at this distance and which betokened the original mill that had long ago gone to its destruction as the result of some careless use of fire, a danger each child was warned against daily. The brawling river vanished next beneath the first still-functioning mill, through masonry arches. A gentle susurrus from river and Mill machinery filled the Valley.

Funny, thought Charley, how you only noticed some things when they were remote . . . Charley’s eyes followed in one quick swoop the variegated length of the Mill, each of its sections distinguishable by the subtle and unique coloration of its bricks: generational shades of rose, tawny, pumpkin, autumnal leaf. He let his eyes bounce back from the southern end, where the Swolebourne emerged, a pitiful tamed remnant of its upstream proud valorous self, and where the minute figures of hired out-Valley laborers could be seen finishing the upper courses of the new mill.

Starting with the oldest section, Charley recited aloud all the familiar and comforting names of the Mill.

“Silent Sea Warriors, Swift Sparrows, Deeproot Willows, Wild Wainwalkers, South Polar Savages, Red Stalkers, Factor’s Favorites, Longarmed Bruisers, Blue Devils, Lux Jackets, Eighteyed Scorpions, Landfish, Ringtails, Greencats, Blackwater Geysers.”

This litany of mill names was vastly reassuring, a bastion of every child’s daily talk and boasting, source of endless speculation and comparison, during winter idleness and summer game-fever.

Suddenly Charley wondered what the new, sixteenth mill would call their team. How strange it would be to have a new name associated with the other time-hallowed ones. Would such a thing ever happen again in his lifetime, or was this the last mill that would ever be built? It was all up to the Factor, of course, and his motives were beyond fathoming.

Charley’s attention turned to the houses that paralleled the Mill on both its eastern and western sides. A village consisted of the families on both sides of the individual mills. Each section had its mirror-image dwelling places bunched together opposite each other, with the Mill itself intervening. There was a single corridor that ran straight through the width of each mill permitting access over the river and between halves of a village. This corridor had no doors into the mill proper; that privilege of entry was denied both women and underage children.

Gaps — playing fields fringed by wildness — separated each mill’s housing from the rest on the same side, contributing to the team feeling and individual minor differences that marked each small subcommunity.

Charley tried to imagine what life would be like in another community. He felt an uncommon sorrow for girls who had to move out of the villages of their birth if they married a man from another section. Would such a thing happen to his sister Floy? He hoped not, for he would miss her.

Thoughts of Floy made him want to see her, and so he clambered down off his rock, retrieved the lunchpail, and began his descent to the Valley floor. He guessed he felt better for his walk. He chose to disregard his father’s bitter talk about the Mill. The Mill was the only life Charley desired. He wanted to enter more deeply and completely into its ritual-filled activities and complexly articulated duties, not to examine or criticize them. He would not let tomorrow — the day that marked his first steps into such a life — be spoiled.

Back down in the Valley, Charley rushed home. He burst into his house, swinging his father’s lunchpail just like he had seen the men swing their lanterns as they walked in front of the wagons at night that carried people back from far-off games down one end of the Valley or another. He found his mother, Alan, and Floy all in the same room. Alan was playing with a set of wooden blocks while Floy, sitting in a chair, was having her hair braided by her mother. Floy was inordinately proud of having the same honey-colored tresses as her mother, and wore her traditional plaits proudly. Such elaborate, time-consuming hairstyles were a mark of status in the village, showing that mothers could afford to spare time from housekeeping and cooking and washing, and there were few women who would deny their rare daughters such attention.

“Where have you been?” asked Charley’s mother first thing. Her voice, while somewhat stern, was also shot through with a kind of maternal concern the likes of which Charley had never quite heard before. Was this change, too, connected with his upcoming transformation?

“Oh, for a walk,” Charley said. “I didn’t feel like being with the other boys today.”

Charley’s mother said nothing, but continued to weave her fingers among Floy’s rich hair. Charley grabbed a waterwheat biscuit, sat and munched and watched until the task was done.

“All right, Florence,” said her mother. “You may go out now if you wish. But be back in before the bell tolls three, since I need you to baste the roast.”

Floy stood, her head with its coiled grandeur held high, and Charley grabbed her hand. Alan got to his feet and tried to follow them, but before Charley could deny him, their mother caught up the younger boy, saying, “And you come with me, mister, for there’re peas to be shelled.”

Charley and Floy left the house, heedless of Alan’s shrill protests.

Outside they meandered down the narrow, close-graveled streets. Odors of cooking drifted from each open window, along with household noises: the clatter of pewterware, the clink of glasses.

Holding his sister’s hand as he always did on their walks, Charley felt an unlooked-for estrangement in place of the comfort he had expected. Floy looked somehow older and different to him today, inexplicably more mature than her fifteen years. Her starched white ruffled shirtfront seemed more like his mother’s bosom than the flat expanse of linen he remembered from yesterday. Could so much have changed in a single day, or was it just his senses playing tricks? The changes left Charley feeling tongue-tied. Finally, he ventured an observation on the matter closest to his heart.

“Tomorrow I enter the Mill, Floy.”

“I know,” said Floy rather blandly. She seemed distant from Charley today, more intent on casting her gaze about as if for witnesses to her coiffed glory.

Charley was discomfited. “Well, will you miss me?”

Floy favored her brother with a look of impatience. “I’ll still be seeing you each night, won’t I? You’ll hardly be getting married yet, I think.”

Charley felt frustrated. “No, of course I shan’t. You know I don’t mean any such thing. But I will be gone all day with Da, and we won’t be able to talk and play for hours as we used to, nor take our lessons together. Will you still think of me, when I’m in the Mill? What will you do all day with yourself? That baby Alan can’t take my place, can he?”

“No,” said Floy in a somewhat absent-minded manner, as her attention was distracted by the sight of showoff Hal Blackburn chinning himself on the branch of a pear tree. Blackburn was inordinately large for his age, and his biceps bulged as he pumped himself up and down. Charley found his leering expression distasteful.

“I don’t know quite what I’ll do,” continued Floy. She released her brother’s hand and primped at her hair. Blackburn switched to a one-handed grip and began to hoot and scratch at himself like a purple vervet. Floy turned away from him in a huff. “I suppose I’ll find something, though.”

This was not the protestation of undying grief that Charley had been longing for and, in truth, half expecting to hear from Floy (he had even, he admitted, pictured tears), but he supposed it would have to do, and he sought to find some solace in it.

They promenaded among the houses in silence for the rest of their final afternoon together, each preoccupied with his or her own thoughts. When it was time for Floy to help with supper, Charley went and sat on their stoop, awaiting his father. The man returned at last after six. He had been gone since seven that morning. He looked utterly vanquished, and barely noticed Charley as he brushed past him.

After supper, his father sat on the wainwalkerhide chair (still owed for at the Company Store) that was reserved for him alone and silently smoked his pipe. The children played quietly, and their mother darned clothing. Buttery light from the oil lamps flowed over forms and faces, furniture and floor.

After a time, their father spoke. “That blasted Otterness was on my back all day. Claimed I wrongfully mixed two incompatible luminances on my machine. Ever since he made Master Luminary he’s been unbearable. At forty he’s the youngest ever, and if you imagine he’ll once let you forget it, then you’d believe the Lux Jackets could take the championship.”

Charley’s mother said nothing, realizing that attentive silent agreement was all that her husband wanted at the moment. The man smoked in silence for a full two minutes before speaking again.

“I tried telling them today what I believed, Eliza, and they did naught but laugh.”

Charley’s mother put down her work. “You know no one likes to hear bad things said about the Factor, Rog. I don’t know why you even bother.”

Charley’s father slapped the arm of his chair. “Damn it, it’s not even as if I’m proposing anything other than that the Factor leave us alone. If he won’t share the knowledge of his starways with us, at least he should take his superior self away, and let us try to find our own path again. As it stands now, he’s like a dam across the stream of our progress. There’s been naught new done since the Factor came all those centuries ago. Things were different then, and could be once more. We were picking ourselves up from the Dark Times, learning what we could do again. Then came the Factor, and knocked the spirit right out of us. Since then we’ve stagnated. It’s not healthy, I say. No more than if the Swolebourne were motionless and covered with pond scum.”

Shaking her head, Charley’s mother said only, “I don’t know, Rog. I can’t say. Life seems good.”

Charley’s father puffed furiously on his pipe, but said no more.

As Charley lay in bed that night he puzzled over his father’s words, but could make no sense of them before he fell deeply asleep. That night he had no dreams, not of his triumph atop the brick heap, nor of the day to come.

And in the morning he got up and had a breakfast of porridge with his father and he saw his lunchpail sitting beside his father’s on the shelf and he realized he had forgotten to cut his initials into it and would have to do so later and he set out into the dewy morning beside his Da down a familiar path that looked utterly strange and soon he was across the oily waste and among the clot of men and boys, some mingling and joking and some silent, and intricate odors were wafting out of the open Mill doors at him and the line of men was moving forward and beyond the doors his light-adjusted eyes could not penetrate the darkness and as each man or boy entered — save Charley alone — his clothing sparked with lux and before Charley knew it he had stepped over the threshold inside.

2.

The pale gray leaves of the dusty-miller tree diffused a scent like minty talcum. The branches of the dusty were long and slender, withes useful in basketry, and arced and drooped to form a secret bower around the bole. From some distance off, fatwood torches spiked into the turf on the sidelines of the playing field cast their wavering illumination over the ghostly foliage, sending shadows skittering over the tapestry of leaves without penetrating the deeper darkness of the arboreal shelter. The shouts of the spectators clustered around the sides of the game field rose and fell in linkage with the action of the players, the one an enthusiastic reciprocal of the other. Panting and grunting accompanied the fervent play, intermixed with the solid thump of shoe leather making contact with a scarred leather ball. The game was in its final quarter, and the Blue Devils were battling to maintain their one-point lead over the Landfish.

Inside the canopy of leaves, Florence Cairncross leaned in a swoon against the rough trunk of the dusty. The familiar odor of its leaves filled her head with a piquant strangeness. Everything was so much altered . . . The excited voices of her friends and neighbors and family sounded like the inhuman cries of birds or animals. The light of the torches seemed to issue from watery depths, as if drowned beneath the Swolebourne. An exclamation from one of the players reached through the tangle of leaves. “Pass it, pass it!” Was that her brother, Charley, calling? Perhaps . . . It was so hard to tell; his voice had changed over the last year, maturing into a novel male roughness. And under present circumstances . . .

Florence felt a tugging at the laces of her camisole. Her starched outer shirtfront already gaped apart, one bone button missing, lost amidst the dead leaves of past seasons which bestrewed the ground at her feet. The fingers at her laces suddenly found the simple knot that secured the top of her undergarment, found its trailing end, pulled and undid it. Those same fingers poked through the crisscrossed laces halfway down her midriff and tugged. The lace-ends slid through the double-stitched eyelets as easily as water through a sieve.

She could see nothing in the tenebrous enclosure, but closed her eyes anyway.

Those fingers . . . How was it possible for a grown man to have such skin, unscarred by machinery, untainted by the stink of lux and oil? Despite his maturity, they were still so smooth and uncallused, almost as smooth as a girl’s. That had been one of the first things she had noticed about Samuel . . .

• • • •

The game that Layday had been scheduled for noon, to allow time for morning services. A night game during the workweek would have involved too much travel for the Blue Devils, who had promised to give their fledgling opponents the advantage of their home field. Although the actinic sun was high, the game had not yet begun, for heavy rains the previous day had washed away the chalk lines of the playing field, and the men were still busy demarcating the borders of their eventual struggle. Under a spreading horsetail tree, there was the usual broad trestle table set up with food and drink. Big stone jugs of pear-apple cider, both hard and soft; pies and loaves; cheeses and hams. People crowded around the refreshments, chattering. A bit more than half the faces were familiar. The new village was still underpopulated, all its houses and outbuildings still raw-looking, and the visitors, although representing only a portion of Florence’s community, actually outnumbered their hosts. This was the first engagement between the Devils and the Tarcats, as the newest mill had denominated their team, the first time the two villages — one long-established, the other barely settled — had had a chance to mingle.

Beyond the village, the Valley mouth opened out onto misty blue-green horizons, the hills on either side sloping away into the flat plains like tendons disappearing into the torso of the earth. It was the closest Florence had ever been to the Valley’s embouchure, and its nearness made her giddy.

Talking with her best friend, Mabel Tench, one of the few village girls her own age, Florence reached for the handle of a cider jug at the same time the stranger did. His soft palm fell atop hers, engulfing it in a strong yet velvet grip. Florence felt the blood rush to her cheeks.

She turned her face to the stranger, who had yet to release her hand. His eyes were as blue as gillyflowers, his smooth jaw as strong as the rocks from which the Swolebourne tumbled. He was dressed in a ball-playing outfit: a jersey striped with his team’s colors — green and gold — and leather shorts. His legs were well muscled and very hairy. Florence felt her flush deepen.

“Please excuse me, Miss,” said the man, his words accented strangely. “Mere thirst is no excuse for inconveniencing such a beauty as yourself. Allow me to fill your mug for you.”

Finally he released her captive hand. Hooking the big jug’s handle with his forefinger, he somehow swung it neatly up into the crook of his arm without spilling a drop. Relieving Florence of her mug, he poured a golden stream of tart juice into it, then handed it back. At that moment one of the man’s teammates called him. “Snooker, the game’s about to start!”

The man set the jug down, made a little mock bow, then trotted off to join his team on the field.

Florence winced a little at the name. Could such an elegant fellow really answer to “Snooker?” She felt a twinge of proprietary anger, then caught herself. What connection existed between them that could give her the right to even worry about such things? Quite obviously, nothing. Nor would there ever be. Most likely . . .

Through innocent questioning Florence discovered that the stranger was named Samuel Spurwink. Along with several other villagers, he had relocated from distant, cosmopolitan Tarrytown. She found one of his townsmen standing on the sidelines, a short older man with a brown beard thick as thatch.

“That fellow who just scored a moment ago. He plays quite well.”

“Snooker Spurwink? Aye, I suppose so. If you fancy a style where you dart about like a drunken hummingbird, stopping to ogle every petticoat on the marge. Oh, he’s a sly one, that Spurwink. More used to indoor sports, if you take my meaning. Bending an elbow, letting fly a dart.”

Florence felt irked at the man’s denigration of Spurwink. “If he’s such an idle tosspot, then what made him come to the Valley? Although our work is noble and much esteemed, as bringing honor from the Factor to our humble world, we don’t have an easy life here, turning raw lux to fine cloth. I can’t see a figure such as you paint voluntarily abandoning all the pleasures of town for our strictured Mill life.”

“Well, you see, young Sammy had quite a surfeit of working in his Da’s butcher shop. Blood-covered aprons clashed with his finery, it seems. And then there was talk about Sammy and the Mayor’s wife — Say, young lady, just how old are you?”

Florence huffed. “Old enough to know not to listen to idle gossip.” She moved off, leaving the man chuckling to himself.

During the game Florence found herself cheering the Tarcats — and especially Spurwink. Her parents and fellow villagers smiled indulgently at her. “Such a good girl, to make these newcomers feel welcome to the Valley, even with her own brother out there playing his heart out.”

The Tarcats lost to the Blue Devils, ten to one.

But Spurwink that day won something invisible.

• • • •

His lips were on her neck now, and she swiveled her head to expose more of that graceful expanse to his nuzzling. Her laboriously fashioned plaits, pinned atop her head with blue-bone clips, rubbed against the tree and came loose, falling to frame her face. Then his hand was inside her undone camisole, molding itself to her breast, cupping the fruit of her flesh as he had cupped her hand only a short month ago. He smelled of spicy cologne. Florence had never known a man to wear scent before. His signature smell mingled with the perfume of the dusty-miller leaves in a heady blend.

His kisses stopped at the base of her throat. “Oh, Sam, lower —” He complied, while the crowd roared a million miles away.

The second time they met had been at a night game between the Devils and the Red Stalkers, the latter a team upstream of the Devils. Spurwink had materialized at her side as she stood apart from and on the outer edge of the spectators. From behind he had covered her eyes and whispered, “Hello, Miss Pretty Puss. Can you guess who this is?”

She was both surprised and unsurprised to have him there. On one level she had had no thoughts of him, her thoughts drifting among the minutiae of her daily life. On another, deeper level, she had somehow known he would come. In that first moment her surprise and consternation weighed slightly heavier in the balance of her emotions, and she hesitated before speaking.

“Come now, don’t you have a pleasant word for a man who’s labored like a dog all day, then walked an hour to be by your side?”

“I — I’m flattered.”

Spurwink uncovered her eyes and twirled her around to face him. No one was looking, collective attention massed on the game. “Then show it,” he said, and kissed her on the lips.

Florence pushed Spurwink back, both hands on his hard chest. When he was at arm’s length, however, she did not remove her palms from his shirt.

“You play rather fast and familiar, sir.”

“Have you never heard that fortune favors the bold?”

“In some endeavors, perhaps, but not all.”

“It remains my universal motto nonetheless.”

“An intriguing steadfastness. Would you care to explain more?”

“By all means. But let’s meander to quieter pastures.”

“If you wish.”

They walked away from the crowd and the torchlight, the trodden night-damp grass exuding its living breath. Spurwink attempted to press his hip to Florence’s, but she skipped away. He sighed melodramatically. She ignored him. He began to talk.

Spurwink’s exotic speech, his foreign tones, his barely concealed insinuations, all combined to fill Florence’s head with dreamy visions, colored in all the brilliant shades of the rainbow missing from the drab black and brick-red environment of the Mill. His words seemed to pass directly from his lips into her imagination, with barely a stop to be interpreted by her conscious mind. Her familiar surroundings disappeared, to be replaced by peacock images of sprightly dances, airy pavilions, candle-lit canopied bedchambers . . .

Florence had come to a stop by a stand of jojoba shrubs. Spurwink advanced, backing her up into their prickly embrace. He clasped her face in his hands and kissed her again. Florence did not resist.

“Floy! Floy! Game’s over! Time to head home!”

It was her foolish little brother Charley calling, shattering the spell she had been in. Florence pushed Spurwink back, rearranging her skirts where the shrubs had rucked them up.

“Factor’s ballocks! This damn Mill schedule makes sleepy larks of us all, willy-nilly! If we were back in Tarrytown, we’d watch the sun come up and glint off the wine bottles we’d emptied. But here, you have to be abed by nine just to rest up for the next day’s drudgery.” Spurwink’s tone became tinged with self-pity. “And I’ve got an hour’s walk ahead of me yet.”

Hastening toward her parents, Florence called back, “Next week we play the Landfish. They’re only three mills up from you.”

Spurwink fell back into his gallantry. “If it were three hundred damn mills, I’d still come for you.”

The desire in the man’s voice made her stumble on nothing. She reached her parents still flustered, but they were too elated with the Blue Devils’ victory over the Stalkers to take much notice. Charley, however, recognized enough amiss to ask her if she was feeling well.

Florence felt an immense condescending superiority toward her brother. She tousled his sweaty hair and said, “I’m fine, Charley. It’s nothing you’d understand anyway.”

Charley regarded her quizzically. For one brief moment his eyes widened, and she was convinced he knew. Then he turned away wordlessly and mounted into the bed of the wagon for the journey home. Ridiculous, she thought, to imagine such a thing . . .

And the third time she and Spurwink had met — that time was now.

Spurwink’s left hand still plumped her right breast. The soft fabric of her camisole felt stiff as burlap on that nipple, so sensitive was it. His mouth ringed the summit of her other breast. His right hand was on her belly, stroking it in circles that grew wider and wider, like the ripples cast from a stone thrown into one of the Mill’s many holding ponds. She felt as if her belly were filled with hot coals, like a bedwarmer on a winter’s night. Eventually Spurwink’s lower hand strayed deliberately beneath the waistband of her skirts. More cunning and experienced this time in the fashions of the Valley, it quickly found the ribbon that upheld her petticoats.

Florence started, and laid a hand atop Spurwink’s cloth-covered one.

“Do you really want to stop now, Pretty Puss?” he whispered, relinquishing her breast, yet with his breath still hot upon it. “Tell the truth now.”

“I — I don’t know.”

“Well, you must realize I don’t. Not with a Factor’s Paradise so near for both of us.”

“Then — do what you will . . .”

He tugged the knot apart. Then, with both hands beneath her clothes, he pushed her single undergarment down, his smooth hands sliding over her rump and hips. The cloth fell from beneath her skirts to lie with the generations of dry dead dusty leaves, a presage of the autumn to come, so seemingly impossible at summer’s height.

Without being told, she stepped out of her knickers.

Florence lost a moment then. The next thing she knew she lay on her back on the ground, her skirts pooled around her, Spurwink’s muscled weight atop her, his mass centered below her waist. It took a moment for a strange sensation to register. Spurwink had removed his wool trousers and was now bare also.

“I think you’ll like this, my poppet.”

Florence faltered. “I want — I want —” What did she want? In the end she could not say, and lamely concluded, “I want to.”

“And you will, you will . . .”

When it was over, Spurwink fell asleep for a minute or two on the duffy turf. Florence lay awake staring up into the branches of the dusty-miller tree. Judging by the roar of the crowd, the ball game was reaching some kind of climax. She put both hands between her legs and closed her wet thighs on them. What had she done? She could not feel sad about it, but neither did she feel ecstatic. The moment’s brief rapture had vanished, elusive as morning mist on the Swolebourne, whose waters seemed to flow now from her center . . .

Spurwink awoke with a startled grunt. “Oh my aching bones. What time is it? By the stars, girl, you were good! I’d fancy another ride if it weren’t so late. But duty calls, and I must hie homeward.” Climbing to his feet, Spurwink fumbled with his trousers in the darkness.

Florence remained on the ground. A coldness crept into her flesh. “When shall we meet again, Samuel?”

Spurwink replied airily. “Oh, at one game or another, I’m sure.”

“That hardly seems such an enduring pledge as you were uttering earlier.”

“I’m afraid it will have to do, my lass. If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s to be trussed up like one of the rocklambs in my father’s abattoir. You must take me as you find me.”

Florence used the tree trunk to climb somewhat painfully to her feet. Without stopping to alter one iota of her disheveled appearance she marched out of the bower and toward the game field.

“Wait, wait,” Spurwink called nervously, attempting to maintain a discreet tone. “Make yourself presentable first, girl.”

Florence gave no reply, but strode steadily on.

Spurwink lost all self-assurance. “Stop, you little idiot! What do you think you’re doing?”

Widening the gap between them, Florence paid no heed to Spurwink’s orders. He darted a few steps after her, thought better of it, then ran off in the opposite direction.

Florence marched toward the Blue Devil and Landfish villagers, who had as yet taken no notice of her. Half of her mind was all icy cold precision and a determination not to feel anything. That was the half that showed on her face. The other part was a mix of bewilderment, pain, and confusion. That was the part that huddled and mewled deep inside like a lost unweaned tarkitten.

Above her head, the stars Spurwink had invoked to praise her shone with a frigid radiance. Were there truly men out there, humans who bought the luxcloth? Men like Spurwink? It seemed all too possible. Were they watching her now? Their powers were unknowable. The ten bright stars that formed the constellation Factor’s Ship seemed to glare with a particular accusation.

Once she stumbled. This time, however, the cause was not excitement, but only a rodent hole hidden in the grass.

The game had ended when Florence came up to the crowd. The players were leaving the field, victors triumphant, losers consoling each other and boasting of success in the eventual rematch. The spectators had broken up into congratulatory clusters around their various relatives. Florence crossed the perimeter of torchlight and stumbled blindly into their midst, her skirts aslant across her hips, her breasts shamelessly exposed.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then everyone was hovering about her, the men loudly blustering with outrage and moral indignation, the women all practical earnest solicitude, various children watching wide-eyed. Everyone was trying to get her to speak. Florence opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Somehow all she could focus on was the face of a little girl hanging onto her mother’s skirts. Had she ever been that young herself?

Someone tossed a blanket around her shoulders, covering her nakedness. Then her parents were there. Her mother held Alan, the youngest, on her hip. She rushed up to Florence and tried to hug her. But she forgot to put Alan down, and ended up awkwardly embracing both her children. Charley was somehow beside her next. To Florence, he looked inexplicably taller than earlier in the night, as if his exertions on the field had stretched and matured him. He clutched her hand and stroked her hair. “There, Floy, there,” was all he said, but somehow it was enough to start her tears flowing.

Roger Cairncross was shouting into the night, at no one and everyone. “Who knows anything about this! Speak up! Speak up, damn you!”

When he received no reply he turned to his daughter and gripped her by the shoulders. “Who did this, girl! Do you know? Are you protecting him?”

Her father’s mustache was laced with spittle. His face was red as clover. Florence dropped her eyes from his. When she did this, he began to shake her back and forth with a violence that rattled her bones.

“Trollop! Tart! Is this how you were brought up? Is this what I work for from sunup to sundown? I’ll have his name out of you if I have to beat it out!”

Charley was pulling his father away. The older man shrugged him violently off. Then other villagers, his coworkers, were on him, separating him from Florence.

“Can’t you see she’s in shock, man? She needs to get home and be cared for, not abused. Your daughter’s a fine lass, she’ll come round. Just give her some time.”

Cairncross began to calm down. “And what of the bastard who touched her?”

“He can’t leave the Valley without giving himself away. There’s no out for him. Don’t you see?”

Cairncross nodded in agreement. “All right then, let’s get home.”

In the homeward-bound wagon Florence sat shivering in a corner, wrapped in the borrowed blanket, her head in her mother’s lap. Every few minutes the musty-smelling wainwalker pulling the vehicle would emit a plaintive bellow, as if to complain about being kept up so late. She recalled all the festive rides back to their familiar village, how she had sung and laughed with her friends. Would there ever be such days again? She began softly to sob. Why couldn’t she speak? A slow anger began to smolder in her. Why should she have to speak? Couldn’t they leave her alone until she had sorted everything out for herself? What right did they have to pester her with questions? The more she thought of this, the angrier she got. By the time they reached their village, Florence had ceased her sobbing. She now wore an expression of stony indifference.

The wagon stopped outside the Cairncross home. Their neighbor — a middle-aged bachelor who supported a widowed father who had grown too frail to work in the Mill — emerged from his half of the house to stare and cluck his tongue with a mixture of sympathy and reproof. Averting her face, Florence let herself be helped inside.

Once in the parlor, Florence spoke for the first time since she had left Spurwink. “I want to wash up, please.”

“Well, by the Factor’s grace, you’ve found your tongue,” said her father somewhat sarcastically. “Maybe now well learn the cause of you bringing so much shame upon our family.”

Florence said nothing, but merely went to her room. Her mother soon brought a white basin and a pitcher full of water heated on the wood stove, some towels and a washcloth. When she was alone, Florence used the chamber pot, then scrubbed herself free of Spurwink’s detestable scent. She dressed in gown, robe, and slippers trimmed in bluefox fur around the ankles. She knew now that she would never say anything about what had happened that night, come what may.

Back in the parlor, Florence sat on the couch, the center of her family’s baffled looks. Gently at first, then, as she refused to answer any of his questions, more and more roughly, her father tried to elicit what had happened from her. Florence maintained her silence throughout all her father’s cajoling and threats, his attempts at logic and reason, his appeals to honor, duty, and affection. Her mother’s pleas also she ignored. As the night wore on, Roger Cairncross grew more and more irrational. Several times he gestured as if to strike her. At last he did, bringing his open palm across her face.

Florence took the blow without uttering a sound. A wild look of despair and self-disgust flashed across her father’s face. He jumped to his feet and fled the house.

Charley had sat through this cross-examination silently, offering neither consolation nor accusation. Now he arose also and left.

Soon her father returned. With him was Pastor Purbeck.

Pastor Purbeck had lost an arm to the Mill’s machinery at age twelve, some fifty years ago. That same year had seen the demise of Pastor Topseed’s youthful catechumen, a boy named Hayflick who had fallen prey to a pack of dire wolves forced down from their mountain fastness by an unusually hard winter. Young Purbeck, barely recovered from his wound and the equally traumatic surgery, had been immediately compelled by his family — a disreputable group led by a drunkard father and a termagant mother — to take his devotional vows. Shortly thereafter, his family left the Valley. Upon the death of Pastor Topseed some ten years later, Purbeck had become the Valley’s youngest cleric.

Purbeck lived now in the one-room rectory attached to the Blue Devil chapel, a building on the far side of the Mill from the Cairncross home. He was tall and thin, and bore a good-sized wen at the hinge of his jaw. His eyes fairly radiated his devotion to the religion symbolized in the icon of the Factor hung on a chain around his neck. These features, combined with his empty right sleeve, formed a presence capable of frightening even grown men. More than one poor child, hurrying through the cresset-lit windowless tunnel through the Mill’s body, rushing from one square of light to another, had had the wits startled out of him by being abruptly grabbed on the shoulder by the single hand of Pastor Purbeck and questioned on elements of his catechism.

In the homey atmosphere of the Cairncross parlor, Pastor Purbeck lost none of his imposing sternness. Florence shivered upon seeing him, recalling no specific incident but only the general air the Pastor had always carried, an air of suspecting everyone of guilt and sin. Tonight, she feared, she merited his suspicions.

Purbeck took off his wide-brimmed cleric’s hat. Then he sat on a footstool directly opposite Florence. He rested the hat on one bony knee. He flicked some luxdust from it with a contemplative slowness. He lifted the silver figure of the Factor on its chain to his lips and kissed it. Then he raised his gaze to Florence. She braced for a flood of accusations and threats of damnation.

Purbeck’s voice was soft and flat. “Ah, young Florence, it seems only yesterday to me that you were being consecrated into the faith. Such a pretty little girl you were. But even then rather willful. I remember when you joined the choir. ‘Why must I sing with all these others?’ you asked. ‘I prefer to sing alone.’ I found it amusing at the time, and so I let you have a solo part that Layday. Do you remember the song, Florence? I do. It was ‘Our Hearts Shine Like Lux in the Factor’s Sight.’ A lovely piece. Written over a hundred years ago by Holsapple. And your voice was equally lovely, dear. So sweet and piercing, such a contrast to all those massed tenors and basses. You were guaranteed a solo every Layday afterwards. Such beauty, I thought, could only serve to glorify the Factor.”

The Pastor paused a moment, turning his hard eyes ceilingward before fixing Florence with them again. “But now I reproach myself for my vanity, as well as for yours. For what good is beauty without the soul behind it? It is like putting stucco on the Mill. Underneath would still be the brick. And when the heats of summer and the chills of winter — the trials of life, if you will — had flaked all the plaster off, the brick would once more be exposed. Yet my analogy is imperfect. In the case of the Mill, we would not be ashamed to see the noble, homely brick, the true substance of our days. But in your case, my dear, we are all of us ashamed to see what lies beneath your lovely exterior.”

Now the Pastor’s voice began to modulate into those tones it assumed just prior to the inevitable moment when he would bring his single fist down on the pulpit. “Your beautiful exterior, my dear, is cracking. You have let it be mishandled and mauled, and now your soul is starting to show through. And what a sorry sight it is! Its lineaments are those of greed, selfishness, impetuosity, and stubbornness. You have revealed yourself to lack a sense of gratitude to your parents, of duty to your village, of devotion to the Factor. You have revealed yourself to be a thoughtless, reckless, immature little girl. And to compound your errors, you refuse now even to make amends for your sin by disclosing the name of your partner.”

Leaning forward, Purbeck took hold of one of Florence’s hands. She tried not to flinch, but failed to repress a slight movement. The Pastor did not comment on this, but instead launched onto a different tack.

“Do you think, my dear, that your partner will turn himself in and save you performing what you wrongly regard as a betrayal? If so, you must disabuse yourself of such a notion immediately. Although it pains me to say it, there are few men in this Valley who would move a little finger to save a woman’s virtue. But that is the sad fact of a male’s composition. That is why a man is bound by natural law to support his family — if he is lucky enough to have one — by the sweat of his brow all his days. That is why the Factor made a disproportionate number of men. They are expendable and imperfect.

“But a woman, dear Florence, a woman is different. They are so few and so rare, that their natures cannot help but be more refined and heavenly. It is woman who perpetuates our race on this sad world. When a girlchild is born — so rarely, only one to every two boys — we rejoice. All her youth she is cosseted and petted, perhaps made too much of. But we cannot help it, for we see in her a visible sign of the Factor’s grace, proof that although he has made life hard, he has not made it impossible. It is woman who must act as the conscience of our race, the moral light. So you see, all the burden of resolving this affair must devolve to you.”

Florence’s mother was crying; her father was tugging thoughtfully at one end of his mustache and nodding, as if to acknowledge his own male unworthiness. Pastor Purbeck gave her hand an extra squeeze and eyed her hopefully. Florence looked at all of them in disbelief. Then she yanked her hand away and shot to her feet.

“I won’t have it! I won’t be part of it, do you hear! Special! Holy! Duty and honor! That’s all I’ve heard all my life! Why, I’d rather work in the Mill thirty hours a day than spend one minute as the kind of creature you paint. But you won’t have a woman in there. ‘Too dangerous, too coarse,’ you say. ‘Stay home and have babies, lots and lots of babies!’ For what? So that they can live out their tiny constricted lives in this narrow Valley, bowing and scraping before the Factor? Why should I raise more little slaves for him? Ask my father’s opinion of the Factor, if you want to hear something that makes sense. No, I’ll go to my grave unwed, I swear it!”

Pastor Purbeck dropped to his knees, crushing his hat in the process. “This is close to blasphemy, girl. Much worse than mere fornication. I am going to pray for your soul now. Let those who would, join me.”

Florence’s mother got down on the floor, then Roger Cairncross too, more reluctantly. They were bowing their heads when Charley came in.

“Get up,” he said. “Get up, all of you. There’s no need of that. I’ve known all along who the man was, and now that I’ve had time to think, I’ve decided to tell.”

Florence yelled, “Don’t listen to him, he’s lying! There’s no way he could know.”

Charley regarded his sister somberly. “It was his scent, Floy. I smelled it on the playing field when I tackled him, and on you tonight. It’s that new clodder, Spurwink, Da. From the Tarcats.”

Roger Cairncross leapt up. “The Devils and I will fetch him. Keep our girl here.”

Florence threw herself on Charley, knocking him down. She rained blows on his head and shoulders, shrieking, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! You awful, hateful prig! You and your stinking Mill can burn!”

Charley made no motion to protect himself. Eventually Florence’s rage subsided, and she crawled back to the couch. Charley raised himself off the floor. Tears washed tracks through the blood from his nose.

Spurwink was not much more bloody than Charley when they marched him into the house. One eye was swelling, and he favored one leg. Florence had feared worse. His demeanor was subdued, but still somewhat insouciant.

“Since they tell me we are to be wed soon, I might as well salve my pride and ask if you’ll have me. Well, poppet, what shall it be? Pretend you have a choice and answer me now. Will you be my wife?”

Florence was exhausted. She had no reserves left. “I am yours,” she said wearily. Spurwink grinned, thinking it was him she had addressed.

But Pastor Purbeck knew it was himself. Or rather, the Valley, the Mill, the Factor.

3.

The bulky man chafed his hands in an abstracted way. For several minutes he merely sat, rubbing those large hands together, squeezing first one then the other. At the end of this period he abruptly ceased all motion, his hands freezing into position. His conscious mind had caught his limbs again at their independent life. An expression of distaste flickered across his features. He jerked his hands and they flew apart as if they were similar poles of a lodestone. He placed them carefully down on the desk in front of him, palms flat on the felt blotter.

What made his hands betray him? Was it anxiety? Most likely. He had so much on his mind. His mill, the Factor’s upcoming visit, Alan’s strange behavior of late . . . Yet why look for such deep-seated motivations? Perhaps it was only the chill. An unconscious seeking of warmth? His breath did not fog, but felt as if it should. And well it might, were the potbellied stove in the corner, sitting four-pawed on its raised hearth of green-enameled tiles, to slacken its output any further. Yes, that was probably it. Just a basic animal instinct, nothing complicated about it . . .

The man leaned back in his chair and regarded his traitorous hands. They were big-knuckled and hairy. The wiry hair disappeared at his wrists beneath the cuffs of his jacket. The hair was still black on his hands, but the short-cut stubble carpeting the enigmatic lumpy contours of his skull was mostly gray. His eyes were dark, his nose showed signs of having been broken more than once, as did so many ballplayers’ noses — although those days were long behind him — and his jaw was blunt and perpetually out-thrust.

Old. He was getting too old for this job. How many more years could he cling to this position? Just as long as he earned a good share of the Factor’s largess for his mill. But how long would that be? Long enough to train his protégé and insure his accession, he hoped. Factor grant him that much, he prayed.

The room, the man suddenly realized, felt chillier than just a minute ago. Looking up from the plain, scratched, woodgrained surface of his desk beyond the blotter — upon which were scattered pasteboard rectangles punched with holes and scribbled with figures, through which were threaded hanks of shining luminous threads of various subtle hues and intensities — he spotted the stovetender asleep, something he had not registered with his earlier glance.

The boy wore a red coat with brass buttons that he put on each morning from his wooden locker among the others just inside the Mill doors. This was the badge of the stoveboys, those who formed, along with the stockboys, the lowest rank of Mill workers. The boy sat on a short three-legged stool beside the sooty coal stove that was rapidly cooling. His chin hung on his chest, his eyes were closed, and his breath buzzed in and out as if he were acting the part of a diligent bellows.

The man regarded the boy with a mix of good-humored solicitous pity and mild aggravation. He knew how hard it was for these youths — coming into the Mill at age twelve, having known mostly freedom and few responsibilities — to be burdened with one of the most important tasks in the Mill, that of guarding and ministering to and always watching the contained fires that heated the Mill during the winter, and which must never be allowed to escape. Also, it was no easy physical task, constantly hauling scuttles of coal up the long flights of stairs.

On the other hand, these boys were now workers. They were getting paid, drawing a share of credit from the commonly held gold which derived from the Factor’s purchase of their cloth each year. These boys had to learn proper work habits early on, if they were ever to be relied upon to intelligently manage the various machines that all contributed toward producing the luxcloth.

And the luxcloth — that unbelievably splendid and gorgeously unique product of this humble uncharted world drifting forgotten and unknown and nameless amid the welter of Factor-visited suns —

The luxcloth was everything.

The luxcloth was his life.

Preparing to rise and shake the boy awake and at the same time administer a severe upbraiding, the man paused. Something about the boy struck him as familiar. Naturally there was a surface identicalness in the incident to many others. He had overseen the initial development of more than half a hundred such boys in his career as Master Luminary, and it was only natural that many of them would more than once be caught napping. But there was something about this lad that tugged more acutely at the strings of his memory. Something about his face . . .

Of course.

The boy resembled Charley.

The man’s thoughts fled back down a tunnel whose ribbed walls were years.

Charley had entered the Mill in the summer. That meant that he had gone directly to the stockroom, that cavernous brick and timber hall — its high rafters plainly visible, unlike the other dusky chambers of the Mill — where the luxcloth was stored, a cathedral of radiance so intense that the stockboys must wear smoked-glass goggles as they worked.

The Master Luminary had not particularly noticed the new boy then, having the whole production of his mill to keep in mind. In the winter, a quarter of the boys had been shifted immediately to stovetender duties. (The other three quarters would be rotated out of the stockroom in turn, in order to save their eyesight, as the long cold months went on.) Charley had been one of the first transfers, and he had ended up in the man’s office, sitting right where the current boy now sat dozing. The man’s hair had been less gray then, and the little stool had had fewer initials carved into it. But aside from that, the situation had been identical.

Something about Charley had attracted the man’s close attention. A ceaseless curiosity and darting focus that played about the boy’s placidly intelligent features seemed to resonate with something inside the man himself. He made a mental note — along with all the other memoranda regarding the seemingly endless details of his mill — to keep an eye on this boy for future use.

And when Charley’s stint as stovetender was supposed to end, along with the old year, the man retained him by fiat in the office, denying three other faceless boys their turns, and perhaps causing some slight incremental damage to their vision as they continued to labor in the stockroom the whole winter.

This small harm he tried to forget, striving to convince himself that the good inherent in his actions outweighed the bad. His life was a patchwork quilt of such ethical trade-offs and judgments. And the quilt frequently scratched his conscience.

Busy years attached themselves like ambulatory Pagan Sea coral to the edifice of the man’s life. Always, among his overt duties, he took a covert interest in the progress of young Cairncross. After Charley was promoted from stovetender, the man watched him move from the gillboxes to the spinning frames, from the winders to the converters, always exhibiting a deft proficiency and keen understanding of each step in the intricate process of fabricating luxcloth. The man noted with quiet pleasure the quality of the work that the young man — for by now he was no longer a boy — turned out. After a while, the man felt he knew Charley’s secret soul and essence, how it was bound up into the luxcloth’s very weave, as was his own.

The only thing the man could never figure out was how such a progeny could spring from the loins of a soured old agitator like the elder Cairncross. That man was a bad egg. And to have also engendered another son such as Alan, so different from both Charley and the old man — The mechanics of destiny were hidden from mortal sight. Perhaps the Factor could explain it.

But one might as well hope for the secret of the Factor’s immortality.

The cranky misanthropy of the elder Cairncross, however, was not what the seated man wanted to ponder, and he put it off as ultimately inexplicable. He wanted to consider Charley some more, to recall more of their twenty years of association. Such daydreaming was certainly allowable from time to time, as long as one did not overindulge.

Finally, after nearly a decade of observation, the day came when the Master Luminary approached Charley on an errand he, the Master, had never before performed. Charley was a foreman by this time, supervising a score of workers, among whom was his own father, who had never gone further than machinetender, a post whose duties were changing gears and oiling bearings.

Out on the twilit floor, where the only illumination came from the dancing threads running through the machines like liquid moonlight and from the refulgent yarn on cones and bobbins piled high in hand trucks, and where the noise of the leather belts and the pulleys and the gears — all powered off the Swolebourne — was enough to shatter concentration, the Master found Charley supervising the changing of the worn rollers on an idled machine.

“Cairncross,” the man said. “Leave this now and come with me.”

“Yes, Master Otterness,” Charley replied.

They walked across the width of the mill and up a flight of stairs to the third and topmost floor, all the while silent. In the anteroom to Otterness’s own office, the Master Luminary indicated with a wave a tall spidery clerk’s workbench and accompanying high rail-backed chair.

“You will sit here,” said Otterness. “Begin studying the sample cards that chart the standard luminances. Start with the Whaleford set. They’re the classic gauges from which all others derive. I doubt if you will get much beyond those today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Otterness turned to enter his own office, heard Charley cough, and swivelled back.

Charley’s face wore a look of hurt disappointment. “Sir, may I ask why I’ve been relieved of my former duties? I hope I have not disappointed you with inferior production.”

“To the contrary. Your work has been exemplary. The best I’ve ever seen. That is why I am now nominating you as Apprentice Luminary for this mill. I believe you have the talent for such a post, and understand the grave responsibilities involved. On the Tightness of our luminance choices and the resulting attractiveness of the cloth, the whole material well-being of the Blue Devil village rests. I trust you will repay my faith in you, and let neither me nor the mill nor the village down.”

Charley bowed his head for a moment. When he lifted it, light from the oil lamp glinted in his tears. “I will, sir. I will. I mean, I won’t. Let you down, that is.”

Otterness suppressed a smile. “Very well.”

Now he came back to himself in his office. The stoveboy still slept. Otterness considered the scullion’s dreaming features. He knew he would never have occasion to choose another apprentice. He would die in his job, or be dismissed by a committee of his peers from the other mills if his performance became senilely awful, whereupon in both instances Charley would become Master, with the consequent right to select his own apprentice. But the fact that Otterness was not always on the outlook for talent anymore did not mean that he could risk alienating the skilled. Who was to say what role this snoozing boy would possibly play in the future? The mill — and the Mill — needed all the competent hands it could get. His unnecessarily brusque reprimand here could have unforeseen consequences years down the line. No, better to handle the lapse — after all, it was only the boy’s first — in a subtler manner.

Otterness deliberately pushed back his chair with a loud scraping noise, his face averted from the stoveboy. He had the satisfaction of hearing the regular breathing suddenly stop in a panicked reaction, then the noise of the boy’s booted feet as he stood up and the clunk of the stove door opening and the chunky rattle as he began scooping coal into the stove.

Getting to his own feet, Otterness turned to the boy — who was drowsily rubbing his eyes with one hand while dishing out coal with the other — and said (pausing a moment while he recalled the boy’s name), “Pickering, have that stove good and hot by the time I get back, if you please.”

Now furiously tossing coal with a two-handed motion, little Pickering said, “Yes, sir! Of course, sir! Before you return, sir!”

Otterness stepped outside his office. The anteroom was empty. He knew Charley was out somewhere on the mill floor, among the turbulent, clattering, endlessly breaking-down machines, watching and directing the myriad workers who strove to reify the newest type of shining cloth which he and Charley envisioned and sometimes, it seemed, actually dreamed into possibility, after much contemplation and discussion of possible blendings. Having something vital he must discuss with Charley — the original object of the intense pondering that had allowed him to let Pickering fall into a doze and his own hands to escape — Otterness set out to find his assistant.

Leaving the relatively quiet anteroom — whose thick paneled walls, bearing sconced oil lamps, served to mute the continuous roar of the machinery — was like plunging into a surf of shadow and sound and odor. Pausing while his eyes adjusted to the silvery gloom, Otterness drank in the glorious chaos from which his beloved luxcloth emerged.

The Mill had no lighting except in its offices. All its other operations were conducted in the ethereal glow of its product. The luxfibers, in their various unfinished forms such as raw combed tops or spun threads, had to be protected from sunlight or artificial radiance, and so all activities in the Mill took place in a diffuse illumination that amounted to the light one might encounter when both moons were full. This illumination had to suffice. There was no alternative without ruining the product. The reason lay in the very nature of the lux.

Lux was a common plant, native and unique to this world, easy to cultivate and harvest. In the daytime it was an inconspicuous crop: tall waving fronds of a silvery green with tough fibers visible just inside its translucent stalks. But at night — at night it could be seen to glow. With the sun’s competition gone, the lux visibly re-radiated stored sunlight. At least this was the most commonly accepted theory. No one — save perhaps the Factor, and he was unapproachable on such matters — could quite agree on the reason for the lux’s remarkable properties. A rival to the sunlight theory was that the lux absorbed certain glowing minerals from the soil, which, becoming part and parcel of its very being, allowed it to continue shining even after being chopped down and processed in a dozen different ways, shattered and pulled and twisted and recombined.

Whatever the true explanation, one fact was certain: Continued exposure to any light above a certain threshold after the lux was harvested would drastically affect its desirable qualities in an unpredictable fashion. Thus the lux led a most secretive afterdeath existence, like some noble god fated to an underworld imprisonment. Hurriedly reaped and crammed into cunningly crafted barrels in the fields under starlight, it was loaded onto wagons which were then covered by canvas tarpaulins as further insurance. These wagons were kept indoors by day and traveled only at night. Still a faint luminance came from them, revealing that all the best precautions could not insure a light-tight seal.

Upon arrival at the Mill, the lux plunged into the massive building’s lightless depths, never to emerge until it had undergone a final wet chemical finishing that fixed the radiance once and for all. The luxcloth, then, could be exposed to daylight without ruining its miraculous qualities.

The fact that there were different kinds of lux was the simple pivot that made Otterness and his peers the most important men in the Mill, and which allowed competition between mills to exist. Had there been only one kind of lux, all would have been simple. Only a single variety of cloth could have been produced, and the Factor would have bought equally from all sixteen mills. But every region where lux was produced experienced different conditions: soil, sunlight, clouds, precipitation, all contributing toward the individual qualities of a region’s lux. Some shone with an opal whiteness. Another kind might exhibit a diamond purity. A third was nearly blue, a fourth celery green, a fifth amethyst, another the faintest of yellows.

Within hundreds of miles of the Mill, there were as many different types of lux produced. From all quarters they funneled into the unduplicated manufactory that was the Mill. The dishwater-colored harvest from Teaford; the ale-colored harvest from Claypool; the silver harvest from Goldenfish; the lilac harvest from Albion Cay; the ginger harvest from Clinkscales; the pewter harvest from Yellow Hedges; the pinkish harvest from Fireflats; the champagne harvest from Shining Rock — each with its gradations of luminance also. The number of blends were astronomical.

There were well over a hundred known luminances. Whaleford, Emberstone, Sleet, Silent Sea Wine . . . The catalogue went on and on. A Master Luminary had to be able to instantly recognize each kind without error, so as to spot inadvertent mixes and stop them before they got too far into production. Moreover, the Master Luminary had to know all the standard blendings, and also those poor choices which resulted in muddy or eye-shattering fabric. On top of all this, the Master Luminary had to be a creative experimenter, developing his hunches about what new blends would turn out to be marketable, thus securing one’s mill an inordinate share of the Factor’s patronage. (And even after four centuries of trial and error, all the blends were not known.)

Additionally, the Masters engaged in bidding wars for each region’s crops. They had to be skillful traders as well as perceptive visionaries.

In short, the fortunes of a mill and its village, the day-to-day standard of living of its families, rose and fell with the Master Luminary’s skillful or clumsy decisions.

Otterness was a fine and expert Master. He knew Charley had the potential to be even better. It felt good to think of the mill being left after his death to such a successor.

But first, Otterness reminded himself, we must get past this latest obstacle.

Moving off in search of Charley, Otterness savored the noisy clatter of the belt-driven machines that marched in ranks down the unbroken length of this mill section, and inhaled the ripe smell of the vegetable oil used to lubricate them. He could sense in his bloodstream the harnessed and dedicated power of the Swolebourne far down beneath the Mill, where its constricted currents turned the great wheels that transmitted their power via an intricate system of gears and shafts throughout the building.

Otterness took the time then to issue a brief prayer for heavy snows, so that during spring and summer the Swolebourne would rush even more mightily and much work could be accomplished in a last burst before the Factor arrived in the autumn.

Down in weaving, Otterness found Charley watching the warpers thread a loom with a warp of Sleet Nine, which had a tendency to break easily. Here was virtual silence. The looms were the only unpowered machines in the Mill, the process being too delicate and complicated to automate, and much skill being required in the casting of the shuttle and the beating of the woof. No one had ever been able to devise mechanical substitutes for the human weaver’s hand and eye, and Otterness was confident no one ever would. At times, he regarded the looms as a bottleneck in the production process, but always quickly reminded himself that the old ways that had persisted for centuries were undoubtedly the best. If the looms ever could be automated, the quality of the work would probably plunge, and where would the mill and its workers, not to mention Otterness’s reputation, be then?

“Charley,” called Otterness, above the staccato clicking of the myriad flying shuttles, “I need to see you.”

Charley gave a final pointer to the warpers and came up to Otterness. “Yes, sir. What’s on your mind?”

“I prefer not to discuss it here, son. Let’s walk out on the floor.”

Charley nodded assent, and they left the weaveroom. Boys trundled noisy wooden-wheeled hand trucks past them, moving yarn from one part of the mill to another. Otterness thought in passing about all the myriad skills needed to keep the Mill going: carpenters, masons, engineers, machinists, beltwrights, oilers, stoveboys . . . Sometimes it amazed him that such a complicated extravagant delicate assemblage of people and machines could function for even a single day.

“Charley,” announced Otterness after they had walked a few yards, “I’ve decided. We’re going to devote a full fourth of our production after the Factor leaves this fall to the new Idlenorth and Palefire blend.”

Charley stopped in midstep and turned to face Otterness. “But sir — the Idlenorth is a new breed. We’re not even assured yet of steady supply. What if the growers have a bad year? And the Palefire — my God, that’s one of the trickiest yarns to spin. I know the sample of the blend we ran off was breathtaking. But a quarter of our output — Sir, I just don’t —”

Otterness held up a palm toward Charley to stop the torrent of speech. “I have considered all these issues and others you might not even stumble upon for months. I do not say this to boast, but merely to reassure you that I do not plunge into this without adequate forethought. But it is our only recourse. I do not blame you for not immediately coming to the same conclusion. You are missing part of the equation, one vital fact that forces our hand.”

Otterness resumed walking down the aisle dusted with lint that ran between the twisting machines. Workers looked up with momentary interest, then quickly turned back to their demanding tasks. For a moment, shining motes of lux hovered around Otterness’s head in a chance-formed halo and Charley regarded him with more than a little awe evident on his face. Quickly catching up to the Master Luminary, Charley waited for him to explain.

Instead, Otterness asked a question. “How long have you been working in the Mill, Charley?”

“Why, nearly twenty years, sir.”

Otterness nodded sagely. “You confirm my own memories, which I sometimes doubt. In that case, then, you were probably too young to really notice the lean years we passed through right about then, when the Tarcats started production.”

The naming of the sixteenth mill seemed to trigger some sudden flood of remembrance in Charley, for his face grew distant. “I remember — I remember that period well. And now that you mention it, I do recall some talk about how the new mill would affect us all. But I don’t really remember tough times, no. Always enough food on the table, new clothes when needed . . .”

“I take that as a compliment to the way I handled the challenge,” said Otterness. “The Tarcats were diligent and inventive. Their workers had a hungry desire to establish themselves, which we complacent older mills sometimes lose. Three years after the Tarcats started up, they earned ten percent of the Factor’s gold. All other mills earned correspondingly less — some much less, some not so much. And when the dust settled, some of those mills — you can probably name them if you think about it — never recovered their former status. Of course, the Factor compensated somewhat, by buying overall a slightly greater quantity of cloth than before, but not enough to make up for the new mill’s total production. It was as if — I don’t know. As if he were encouraging competition for competition’s sake. Perhaps his buyers grow jaded, and this is the Factor’s method of shaking us up and producing newer, more exotic goods.”

Charley remained silent, and it seemed he was trying to digest all this uncommon and startling information — or rather, this new perspective on old events. Otterness lowered his voice, and Charley had to strain to hear his next words.

“What I am about to tell you must not be bruited about. The common folk will discover it soon enough anyway. This fall, the Factor is going to bid us start construction on another new mill. He warned us Luminaries last year.”

Charley drew in his breath sharply. Otterness grabbed his arm. “I’m not going to be caught flatfooted this time, any more than the last. I know the new mill won’t come online for many years. Still, it’s none too early to experiment with new blends. If we can grab the Factor’s attention now, we’ll be more likely to hold it during the rough years. Do you see, Charley? Do you see what we must do?”

Charley regarded the blunt-faced man with a direct and serious gaze that locked their visages — young and old — into a composite like those illusory drawings of vases that suddenly transform beneath one’s attention into two profiles. “I do, Master Otterness. Roland, I do.”

A wash of affection swept through Otterness at Charley’s use of his first name. How different it sounded out of his mouth than off Alan’s lips of late . . .

“Now, secrecy is paramount regarding this decision, Charley. You and I are the only ones who know of this. Were the other mills to discover our plans, we would lose all advantage. I do not want this to turn into another debacle like the Sandcrab mess. How the other Luminaries ever discovered our schemes for that mix, I still cannot say.”

“Nor no more I,” interjected Charley hurriedly.

“I’m not blaming you, son, for the leak. Too many wagging tongues knew about that game strategy. The tattler could have been any of a dozen, in whose numbers you’re definitely not included. But I’m just speaking aloud my own fears.”

Charley nodded in understanding.

Otterness clapped a hand on Charley’s shoulder then, saying, “But enough of such dire talk, son. We’ll be discussing this issue oft enough in the years to come. Let’s speak of more pleasant things. How are your wife and son lately?”

Libby Straw, from the Swift Sparrow village, a member of one of the Valley’s oldest families, had become Charley’s bride five years ago, and had come to live in the Blue Devil village.

“Fine, sir,” replied Charley, though he still seemed ruminative. “Both healthy and fit, the one still beautiful and the other still a red-faced squaller.”

“And your mother and sister?”

“Also hale. Floy I saw just last week, when she came over from the Tarcats for the quilting bee.”

“She is happy there, then?”

“Yes, although even after all these years she still misses Blue Devil ways at times.”

“It was a shame, the way she was plunged headlong into that match. Your father was never the same after it. But I’m glad to hear she’s matured into it.”

“Oh, she has. She even deigns to speak to me now.”

The men shared a chuckle then at the folly of women. They walked on unspeaking . . . After a time, Otterness broke the silence, rather timorously for one usually so confident.

“And your brother, Alan — does he ever speak confidentially to you about his feelings toward me?”

Charley looked gloomy. “Alan keeps his own counsel, I’m afraid. Mother continues to coddle him, and his lack of a job has not improved his character. No, sir, I cannot report anything on Alan’s inner thoughts.”

Otterness tried to put some unfelt joviality into his voice. “So be it. I’ll have to muddle along on my own with the young rascal.”

The men reached the rear lamplit staircase and began to climb. Charley spoke.

“Sir, might there not be another way to improve production, in order to meet the new competition? I am thinking of certain modifications in the machinery, and perhaps even in our method of power. I have heard Tarrytown rumors about steam —”

Otterness recoiled visibly. To hear such talk from his protégé was perhaps the most disturbing thing that could have happened at this crucial juncture in the Mill’s existence. He wondered suddenly if young Cairncross could have inherited any of his father’s wild-eyed cynicism. Best to probe gently around the roots of this heresy and then yank it up for good.

“What you are advocating, Charley,” Otterness said slowly, “is the first step on a very slippery slope. If we begin to tamper with our time-honored methods of production — which the Factor has endorsed implicitly by his continued visits — then we risk all. Consider the upheaval in Mill hierarchies and procedures which new devices would bring, not to mention the radical alterations in village life. Do you wish to precipitate such things?”

Charley said nothing for a minute, then said — with what Otterness took for sincere conviction —”No, sir. No, I do not. Please forget I ever proposed such a foolish step.”

“It’s not your father who’s filling your head with such ideas, is it? I know he’s been especially bitter since the probation incident.”

Charley leapt to his father’s defense. “No, sir, he’s not been preaching those things anymore. And as for the probation — he admits that losing two month’s work was only fair for what he did. I don’t know what came over him, sir, actually to light his pipe in the Mill. God, I like my smokeweed as much as the next man, but to think of what could happen in this oil-soaked warren if a single spark should land in the wrong place — He’s promised me personally never to do such a thing again, sir. He was only tired and unthinking, is what it was.”

Otterness softened his tone. “I understand, Charley. We all make mistakes. I have nothing personal against your father, you understand. It’s only that occasionally . . . Well, you know what I mean.”

“It’s all right, sir. No offense taken. You’ve got the welfare of the whole Mill at heart, I know.”

Otterness felt relieved. “That’s just it, Charley. We’re all only partially cognizant of the real nature of things, you know. And I feel that my perception of reality is just a little more valid and complete than your father’s. It’s the big view, Charley, that you and I share. That is why the workers trust us to guide the affairs of the mill. And that’s also why we can’t seek after new ways, Charley. Because we don’t know enough. Don’t you think that the Factor — with his vastly superior knowledge — couldn’t lift us up out of our traditions if he chose? But since he doesn’t so choose, then we must have the best life we’re fit for. It all comes down to trust in the end. Either we trust the Factor’s decisions, and the workers trust ours, or everything collapses.”

“I see,” said Charley.

Otterness thought of a last image to persuade Charley, one that he frequently resorted to when doubtful himself. “We’re all just bricks, Charley. Just bricks in the Mill. And we can have no greater idea of the whole grand plan than a brick has of the immensity it forms a part of.”

Charley seemed struck by some personal resonance in Otterness’s trope. “Just bricks,” he muttered. “Just bricks.”

When they reached the office again, Pickering had it cozily hot. Dismissing the stoveboy to insure absolute secrecy, the Master Luminary and his Apprentice set about outlining the transition to the new blend. The hours passed in intense absorption for the two men. The final bell tolled, sending all the regular workers home, and still the pair toiled on. At last, closer to midnight than to sunset, they broke up their labor for the evening.

Outside the Mill, they walked together across the crunchy snowfield, silent in their individual thoughts. Among the quiet snow-shrouded houses they parted, Charley to join his family, Otterness to greet an empty home.

Looking up for the first time only when he stood on the stoop of his house, Otterness was startled to see a light on inside his rooms. With his heart pounding, he opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.

Alan Cairncross was a slim young man with blond hair and thin lips. At age twenty-five, he still had hardly any cause to shave daily. Unadept at ballgames, he excelled at the annual spring morris dances. Even walking through the village, he carried himself with unusual grace. Slouched now in Otterness’s favorite chair, he retained this allure.

Otterness’s mouth was dry. Memories rose to plague him. The first time he had seen Alan, at a dinner at Charley’s house, some six years ago. Summer nights spent lying together outdoors on the meadowed Valley slopes. Winter nights like this one by a roaring fire. Old. He was getting too old. Old men had too many memories.

“Alan, it’s so good to see you again. Will you have a drink? I could easily mull some ale . . .”

Alan straightened up. “No, thank you, Roland. I’m not here to stay the night. I just wanted to talk a bit. How is everything with you? How’s work?”

Seating himself across from Alan, Otterness found himself beginning to babble like an adolescent. Alan listened attentively. Then, for some reason, he reached out to grab Otterness’s hand. The Master responded by squeezing the other’s upper thigh.

“Roland, stop, I cannot continue with this deception.”

Otterness’s heart crumbled inside him, like a brick powdered by a sledgehammer. In a blinding instant he knew what Alan was about to say. But he had to hear it from the young man himself. “What — what do you mean?”

“For the last two years I’ve been a spy, a serpent in your bosom. The Scorpions have paid me handsomely to learn of your plans in advance. Actually, it was not them alone. Others too. That’s why I’ve been so cool to you lately. I’ve hated myself every moment we’ve been together. I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve come to say goodbye.”

Otterness surprised his hands together again, rubbing, squeezing. Alan’s neck was so thin . . .

He forced them apart. Maybe if he had blurted out the latest scheme. But he had not. Thank the Factor for small favors, however ironic.

“Why?” he managed to ask.

Alan shrugged. “I could say it was the money. That was what I thought at first myself. But I realize now that it was because you loved the Mill more than you loved me.”

Otterness tried to deny the charge. But he could not.

“And you could never reconcile yourself to that status, if it had to be?”

“How can my answer matter, after what I’ve done?”

“Just tell me.”

“I — I don’t know. I could try to understand.”

Otterness put both hands on Alan’s thighs. How much better they felt there, than around his throat.

“Then just try. That’s all I ask.”

Alan’s eyes widened in astonishment. “That’s all?”

Otterness smiled. “And why not? That’s all life asks.”

4.

Seen from three miles high, the autumnal Valley was an abstract composition illustrating the beauty of pure geometry and color. By far the greater part of the Valley was a mass of brilliant fiery foliage: From both ridgetops, down almost to the outhouses that were the most distal structures from the Mill, spread a carpet of orange and red and yellow treecrowns threaded with green, like a bed of inextinguishable coals salted with minerals.

Trees bracketed the Mill and the dwellings of the workers. The Mill’s slate roof stretched straight down the Valley’s length, a fat gray line that swallowed a skinnier silver-blue and rippling turbulent one at the north and disgorged it at the south. The clustered houses — each village separated from the others on its side by sere brown fields — punctuated the exclamation mark that was the Mill like bisected umlauts somehow gone astray from their vowels, the punctual Mill and its outliers as a whole signifying the exclamatory pronunciation of some obscure but vital word.

Beyond the Valley other settlements could be dimly apprehended. Of course, under further magnification they could be resolved to any required depth.

The Factor, regarding the aerial view on the screens of his titanic spherical ship now hovering directly above the Mill, thought — insofar as he was capable of appreciation — that it was a rather esthetically pleasing vista.

He was glad that he had gotten a chance to come here at last. As with all places in this miraculous universe, it was a sight worth seeing in and of itself. But it took on special meaning when one considered the remarkable product that was produced here and only here, in this archaic and time-lost Valley. From what he had heard, he had quite a reception in store when he set foot below to redeem the goods that had been stockpiled all year against his coming. He couldn’t know for sure, of course, until he jacked in, never having been here before.

It was time now, he supposed, for that particular precontact necessity. Yet for a moment the Factor hesitated. He was unwontedly sentimental today, outside all his parameters. He supposed it stemmed from the fact that he was visiting this world for the first time in his long and limitless life span. His yearly round of planetary visits normally took him only to worlds he had been to at least once before. His coming here was a newness to be savored, arising from the rare disappearance elsewhere of the Factorial ship previously assigned here. The next time he visited this world, it would be as one returning to the familiar. There would be no exciting thrill of the heretofore unseen to add a touch of spice to his unvarying and solitary life. And although the Factor had been designed to tolerate a degree of boredom and regularity which would have driven a human insane, he still found newness a thing not unwelcome in small doses.

So for a few minutes the Factor merely reclined in his chair and studied the view offered on his remote panels. When he had drunk his fill of these visual stimuli, he reached with both hands up and behind his padded headrest, grasping a node-studded wire cage which he swung up on its arm until it rested securely atop his skull.

Then he jacked in.

When he arose a second later, he knew the whole history of this world. Not dating from its initial settlement by humans, of course. Those records were long ago vanished, destroyed or mislaid when the Concordance disintegrated in a galaxywide psychic calamity, or evolutionary leap. No, the history that the Factor had so effortlessly internalized began after the Inwardness, when the Factors had been created, almost as an afterthought, to partially resume a role that most of mankind had abandoned. Interstellar travel no longer appealed to those human societies capable of it. Integrating themselves into the Bohmian implicate order that underlay external reality, they had moved on to other, less visible concerns. Still, those who had turned Inward had not wholly severed themselves from their primitive cousins elsewhere, the mental Neanderthals who had failed to make the transition, and continued to maintain an obscure and manipulative concern with information and products from other worlds.

Not that those who had turned Inward could really use material goods as they once used to.

The Factors now obediently and disinterestedly served to link, in an almost gratuitous fashion, the scattered and devolved human communities around the galaxy that had not turned Inward.

The Factors had discovered — or rediscovered — this world over four centuries ago. They had fastened on one product as being of interest to their human motivators. They had encouraged the production of the luxcloth in the manner that seemed best to their semiautonomous intellects, stimulating competition and diversity every generation or so by ordering a new mill complex to be constructed. Elaborate rituals had evolved around the visit of a Factor — which ceremonies were not discouraged, contributing as they did toward respect and compliance.

And now the cycle had come round again. It was time for this Factor to initiate the familiar exchange which he had never actually participated in before. And also time to order the new mill built. That was imperative. The old Factor’s resolve to order new construction was plain in the inherited memories the new Factor had received. He had no worries that the populace would balk at the commands, no doubts that this might not be the best course for them and their world.

Such concerns were simply not an issue that mattered to the Factor or those who directed him, and hence were not included in his complex programming.

The Factor moved off his couch. He was tall and supple-jointed, clad in a slick, almost rubbery black suit that merged imperceptibly into boots. His features were nondescript almost to the point of invisibility; his head was hairless; his limbs, although not heavily muscled, seemed powerful. His irises were silver.

Beside a metallic cabinet tall as himself, the Factor stopped. He picked out a sequence on a keypad blazoned with icons. In a slot at waist level materialized a bar of worthless atomically pure gold. The Factor crooked his right arm, picked up the ingot with his other hand, and placed it on his horizontal forearm up near his elbow. Another brick appeared; it went next to the first. This continued until the Factor held, apparently effortlessly, about a score of stacked ingots that must have weighed well over two hundred pounds.

Without haste the Factor exited the main cabin of his ship. Passage through corridors and portals brought him to a huge bay filled with auxiliary craft. There the Factor entered a landing pod. He piled the gold neatly on a floating pallet waiting inside the spherical pod. He sat in the command chair, activated the pod’s screens and drive. Several panels showed various views of the Valley, while one disclosed the big ship itself, as if seen from a small device already on the ground. In this last screen the Factor witnessed his pod’s departure. Like a cell budding, the daughter craft separated from the floating sphere and rapidly dropped, down toward its tradition-bound meeting.

Within less than a minute, under swift acceleration and deceleration whose forces the Factor did not appear to feel, the pod came to a rest on the earth. The Factor got to his feet. He caused the outer door to open.

The natives awaited him. It was impressive in a primitive way, as a school of bright fish might be.

The pod had arrived roughly halfway along the length of the Mill, settling in the middle of a vast playing field in a compacted bowl-shaped hollow worn by the accumulated landings of four hundred years. Here it would stay during the seven Days of Festival — a celebration that began soberly but soon escalated to what amounted to a bacchanalia utterly unlike anything indulged in during the rest of the year. A curious custom, thought the Factor, and one he would welcome the chance to observe.

Stepping to the port, the Factor made his ritual initial appearance. The field had been decorated with bright pennons and streamers, all strung from a multitude of wooden poles. Numerous booths had been erected by outsiders to the Valley, who arrived each year to share in the new prosperity. Here were sold such items as food and drink and clothing, jewelry and geegaws, and other novel diversions distinct from the familiar goods in the Company Store. This was the only time hoarded coins circulated in the Valley, as the elaborate credit and barter system utilized by the Valley dwellers could not extend to outsiders, who demanded payment in solid currency.

Beyond the booths were sixteen billowing tents, striped with the colors of the individual mills, their flaps closed against competitors and the curious. Inside these awaited samples of the year’s luxcloth, trucked from the various storerooms, ready for the Factor’s inspection.

A ramp extruded itself from the Factor’s feet to the ground. At the foot of the ramp waited sixteen men, mostly old, wearing their freshly cleaned and pressed black suits and white shirts and heavy shoes, all so drab compared to the shining stuff they produced. Beyond them clotted a tremendous crowd, all respectfully hushed.

The Factor raised a gloved hand. The hush intensified in an indescribable fashion, as if silence could be doubled and redoubled like noise, until it reached a magnitude almost painful.

“I am here to judge and to winnow,” said the Factor, shattering the loud silence with the words instilled in him, “to separate dross and chaff from the pure and valuable. Whatever satisfies me I will buy, and the fame of your work will travel with me among the stars.”

“We are ready,” the Master Luminaries chorused simply.

A nearly visible wave of relaxation coursed through the crowd of workers, as the greeting was completed according to form. Murmurs of speculation and excitement sounded like a minor duplication of the Mill’s normal purring, which was absent during the Festival.

The Factor descended the ramp, the Master Luminaries parting to allow him into their middle. As a group, the men and the Factor moved off.

Now the Factor experienced the familiar yet always disorienting doubling of perceptions and memories that never failed to accompany jacking in. He possessed all the memories of all his brother Factors who had ever visited this world, yet not totally integrated into his private consciousness. Thus all he saw appeared at first mysterious and strange, then a second later, totally explicable and mundane.

Striving to completely internalize his artificially acquired past, the Factor still found time to appreciate the spectacle before him. He had landed during late afternoon. Invisible tethers hauled down the big white sun, like some impossible dirigible, to below the western ridge. How good its autumnal heat felt, after the time spent within the ship, how clear and penetrating the blue-white light. And the smells of harvest time, the slight dampness and chill in the moving air . . . They tingled on his chemoreceptors.

Did these backward, unsophisticated folk realize the wonder of their world, of any world? Did they know how lucky they were just to inhabit such a bountiful globe, out of all the charred and dead and frozen ones the Factor had seen? For a brief moment the Factor almost envied them their uncomplicated primitive existence. They were so unlike the aloofly superior humans who had ventured Inward. The Factor felt a paternal care for these primitives envelop him. He was glad to be able to provide such a focus for their simple lives.

It did not matter to the Factor then that he had been engineered to feel just such an emotion. After all, considered rationally, every creature, whether organic or not, was engineered to feel certain things.

And this charming divertissement, the Days of Festival! What a lot of work and preparation had gone into this Mill Valley Mardi Gras! As a proportion of the Gross Planetary Product, expenditures for this affair were quite significant. The Factor directed his gaze all about, careful to record everything, since he knew that when he returned to his human motivators his memories would be minutely and exquisitely probed and analyzed and correlated by those cryptic beings, for whatever they could extract and utilize in their enigmatic schemes.

One of the Master Luminaries, the Factor suddenly realized, was addressing him. The Factor turned to face the man, as the group continued their traditional promenade among the booths, for the purpose of allowing everyone to circumspectly gape at the Factor and ascertain his awesome unchanging immortal reality for themselves.

“Factor,” said the man, who had short grizzled hair and a thick jaw, “we realize it is late in the day, but perhaps we can still make a tour of the mill of your choice, so that you can see that we continue to abide by the old ways of production.”

The Factor, after a fractional hesitation while he matched facial image to memory, replied, “Indeed, I think we can fit the tour in, Master Otterness. As I recall, I visited the mill of the Red Stalkers last year. This year . . .”

The Factor considered his choice. It would be well, he thought, to pay an honor to this very man, who had a record of being one of the Factor’s staunchest partisans. “This year, let it be your mill, the Blue Devils.”

Watching the man swell with pride, the Factor congratulated himself on the political wisdom of his choice. It was good to sow envy and contention, for it raised the levels of creativity.

Hearing the Factor’s decree, the Luminaries now directed their course toward the distant Mill. They soon reached the edges of the crowd. Ready to strike off down the path to the Mill, they were halted by Otterness’s sudden darting escape back into the crowd, from which he dragged forth a young man to join them.

“Factor,” said Otterness, “you remember my assistant, I hope.”

“Certainly. Charley, how are you?”

The young man tugged at a short-billed cap he wore and inclined his head respectfully. “Very well, Factor. Very well. I — we’re all glad of your return.”

Nodding beneficently, with an air of much wisdom, the Factor said, “We are all part of a master plan, Apprentice Cairncross, and I merely fulfill my part.”

The Luminaries expressed their appreciation of this sentiment with various wordless sounds.

After their mutual cooing was over, Otterness spoke the next words of the ritual. Chosen as host by the Factor, he could request the presence of one other member of his mill on the tour of inspection.

“Factor, I wish to nominate as the extra member of our party my protégé, Charley Cairncross. After all, someday he will stand in my place, and might as well become accustomed to his future duties.”

The other Luminaries harrumphed and coughed, jealous of the extra attention focused on the Blue Devil mill. But such unexpected shifts and seeming favoritism were necessary to keep this little hive of humanity humming. (The Factor even recalled, in his secondhand way, how one of the mills — not by far the strongest today — had been given reason to once name itself Factor’s Favorites.)

“Of course, Master Otterness. I fully approve your choice.”

Not daring to contravene or protest, the other Luminaries settled down to a ruffled acquiescence, and the group, enlarged by one, left behind the noisy, exuberant crowd and entered the shadow of the Mill.

The tour of the strangely silent mill took several hours. In the elfinlit twilight, the little party moved from section to section, among the resting hulking machines: carding, gilling, doubling, twisting, roving, spinning . . . They ended up in the weaveroom, inspecting the unfinished lengths of lambent cloth. The Luminaries were all eyes, eager to see any secret blends Otterness might have carelessly left in the open. But the resident Luminary wore such a look of self-satisfaction that they knew any such things would have been hidden well in advance, in anticipation of just such a visit. After all, had they not taken just such precautions themselves?

At last the tour of inspection was over. The Factor signified his approval of all he had seen, and the group rejoined the crowd outside. Now it was early evening. Odors of cooking drifted among the huge bonfires that had been lit. The material for these pyres, the Factor knew, was partially composed of discarded household items contributed by each family, in a ceremony of renewal that intrigued him. How easy if burning the old were all that was required to create the new . . .

The Factor was now brought to a long table draped with a piece of luxcloth that added its glow to the light from lamps and fires. He was seated at its middle, with eight Luminaries on either side. They all fell to eating. The Factor pretended to enjoy his food. Meanwhile he watched the crowd. There were no tables for the common workers, only scattered benches, and they took advantage of the constant movement of the crowd to circulate past the Factor’s table, watching him eat as if it were the most marvelous thing in the world.

A familiar figure caught the Factor’s eye some distance away, and he magnified his vision. It was Charley Cairncross, with a group of people that the Factor surmised must be his relatives: a young wife with a toddler, an elderly couple that had to be his parents, a thin graceful youth and another young woman, whose resemblance to Charley made them his two siblings. Everyone in the little cluster seemed tense, the focus being the father. Charley, standing, bent over the seated patriarch in a cajoling fashion. The older man wore a sour face and stubbornly stared into the middle distance, apparently refusing to listen to his son. The Factor boosted his hearing and ran through several filter sequences, finally managing to extract a bit of their conversation from the general hubbub.

“Da, try to be more cheerful. Alan, Floy, tell him he’s acting like a senseless old bull. There’s nothing to account for such an attitude. It’s Festival, after all, and we’re here to celebrate.”

“What have we got to celebrate?” the father demanded. “What but another year of servitude?”

“Da, don’t . . .” said the brother, Alan.

“Don’t talk to me, you little catamite. You’re as bad as your sister.”

The Factor’s attention was distracted from this interesting display by the rising of the Master Luminary at his right, a skinny middle-aged man he identified as the overseer of the Landfish. The Master Luminary coughed several times until he had the attention of those closest to him. They fell quiet, and from them the silence spread among the workers, who began to draw in closely to the table. Soon the entire gathered populace, save for those at the very farthest extremes, was hushed and expectant beneath the watching stars.

The Master Luminary spoke loudly. “The Factor will now address us.” Then he sat down.

On cue, the Factor arose. He made the requisite internal adjustments, and when he began to speak his voice boomed out without distortion, carrying almost over the entire crowd. Of duty and reward and the happy unchanging durable nature of their lives the Factor spoke at length, varying his speech only slightly from previous years. The crowd seemed to appreciate it, in a sleepy fashion. But the Factor’s closing words caused them to grow alert.

“And now I call upon you — you lucky ones, who labor for worthy ends in the Mill, and share in the bounty of the system — to extend your generosity. I call upon you to arrange construction of a new addition to the glory of the Mill, so that more outsiders may share your humble, shining way of life, and cause the wonder of the luxcloth to spread even farther throughout the stars.”

The Factor ceased speaking. There was silence for a strained moment from the assembled listeners. Then someone vented a loud if dutiful huzzah, and soon the night air was split with calls and cries and whistles and yells. The bonfires blazed higher, and the crowd began to move again.

Sitting, the Factor received the congratulations of the Master Luminaries, all of whom pledged their best to hasten the construction of the new mill.

Curiosity subroutines moved the Factor to look for the Cairncross family once more, when the hullabaloo had died down a bit. But the affecting tableau they had formed was nowhere to be seen, broken up and dispersed like flotsam in a stream.

The night wore on. The Factor catalogued many more experiences in his unwearying way. Everything and anything might be of interest to his masters.

The first man to spot the fire break through the roof of the Mill ended the celebration. His sickened curdled shouts of “Fire! Fire in the Mill!” brought the Master Luminaries and the Factor to their feet.

All eyes now turned to the Mill, there to confirm the alarm.

From the roof of the immense structure licked as yet tiny tongues of flame, evilly alive against the dead hide of the stolid creature that was the nonsentient but ensouled Mill. Even as the dumbstruck people watched, the flames seemed to grow in strength and power.

Otterness broke the trance. “Get men down into the cellars!” he shouted, referring, the Factor knew, to where the hidden river could be reached. “We must form the bucket brigades!”

Otterness moved then as if to lead the rush to his threatened beloved mill, but the Factor restrained him. “There is no need to endanger your people. My ship is quite capable of ending this blaze. I will issue the commands from my pod.”

Shouts of “Praise the Factor!” quickly mounted. Otterness looked uneasy, however, but restrained himself. The Factor traversed the short distance to his pod and gave orders for the mother ship to drop and begin spraying.

He returned to the table of Luminaries. All the Masters looked nervous. The Factor noticed Otterness was missing. He asked where the man had gone.

“To the Mill,” replied the Landfish Master. “He and his Apprentice insisted on going in. We tried to stop them, Factor, but they would not listen. Honestly, they wouldn’t.”

The Factor considered. The substance his craft would soon begin spraying was a chemical flame retardant which might asphyxiate the men. He could not be responsible for their deaths. That was an integral part of his programming. His policy of benign neglect of their whole society was not consistent with this individual and particular loss of life.

“I will rescue them. Please insure that no one else tries such an irrational thing.”

Then the Factor was off.

Moving faster than any human could have, he covered the distance to the Mill in a blur.

At the entrance doors he looked up. Like a falling moon, his ship had descended. Even now it was beginning to discharge the retardant. Without choice the Factor went in.

Here on the first floor the only signs of the fire were smoke and hot dead air. With crystal-clear memory the Factor summoned up the location of the stairs. In seconds he had gained the second floor; seconds later, the third.

A smoky crackling inferno greeted him at the head of the stairs. The incredible popping noise of destructing bricks resounded sharply at intervals. Heat assaulted his senses, and he could barely see. He switched to infrared. The loci of flames leapt out of the confusion. Stepping out onto the floor, the Factor set out to find the men, who he was fairly certain would have rushed uselessly here, to the center of the disaster.

All the ceiling timbers above the Factor were ablaze. He heard the rain of chemicals descending, but knew that this third floor at least would definitely be lost, no matter what.

“Otterness!” bellowed the Factor. “Cairncross! Where are you? There is no need!”

The Factor’s supersensitive hearing seemed to distinguish faint calls from deep within the Mill. He pushed on, ignoring the flames that frequently lapped at him. Twice he had to lift a fallen flaming timber from his path.

Emerging from one such barrier into a relatively clear eddy, the Factor realized he had come upon the men.

Oddly, there seemed to be three. The Factor switched back to normal vision to resolve the discrepancy.

Yes, three men struggled in a mass. One was the elder Cairncross. He held a can of oil in his hands with which he fed the flames. Trying to restrain him were Charley and Otterness. But the wild man’s strength seemed indomitable, and he continued to sprinkle his oil like a satanic priest asperging his congregation of devils.

The Factor rushed forward and effortlessly scooped up Charley and Otterness like two weightless sacks, tossing them over his shoulders.

Charley’s father, now released, raked them all with a final frantic glare and, letting forth a tremulous soul-bursting scream comprised of years of pent-up inexpungable frustration and bitterness, hurled himself headlong into the nearest flames.

“Da!” screamed Charley, and tried to break free. But the Factor held him tight. Gripping the men with steely strength, the Factor turned and made for the stairs. He moved so fast and unerringly through the least damaging flames that by the time he emerged out into the open air Charley and Otterness had suffered only minor smoke inhalation and burns.

Depositing his burdens upon their own shaky feet, the Factor turned toward the Mill. His ship was dropping mechanical remote units into the building through the gaps in the roof to battle the remaining spot fires. Everything seemed under control.

Sensing a vast crowd behind him, the Factor turned to confront it. Surprisingly he saw that their shocked attention was concentrated on him rather than the subsiding conflagration. Raising a hand to command them, he realized why.

The Factor’s suit had burned away in many spots. So had much of his artificial flesh. The hidden titanium armatures that articulated him shone through. Touching his face he found it gone.

“It is all right,” the Factor said. The people backed away unconsciously when he spoke out of his charred indestructible self. “It is all right,” the Factor uselessly repeated. “The fire is under control. Everything will be as it was.”

But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true.

5.

At the mouth of the Valley, the caravan came to a halt. The lead steam-carriage, an elegant Whaleford six-passenger landau, shuddered to a stop, bringing the ones behind it — a mixed lot of cargo carriers, with tents lashed to their roofs — to an obedient standstill. Geartrains disengaged, the cars thrummed with the silent power of their coal-fired Tarcat boilers.

The lead vehicle, as were all the others, was emblazoned with the gilt crest of Factor’s Head University: a blank-eyed mechanical face replete with fanciful rivets, surmounted by a depiction of the constellation known as Factor’s Ship. Completing the heraldry was a banner bearing the motto: “Growth From Ashes.” The hood of the landau bore a silver ornament in the shape of a wainwalker, those stolid beasts gone these many years from the streets of Tarrytown City where the University was located.

The doors of the landau swung open now, revealing plush-padded inner panels, and its passengers emerged into the bright summer sunlight. Overhead, a soaring cliff kestrel banked and let out a scream.

The driver of the Whaleford was a middle-aged man dressed still in the professorial garb he affected when in the classroom: a lightweight vested suit of flaxen dreamworm cloth, imported from the tropics, and a pair of ankle-high leather boots. In this conservative outfit he resembled any of his fellow pedants. Only in his choice of neckwear did he exhibit any oddity or individuality of taste. For the man wore an antique tie made of the old-fashioned stuff known as lux. In the light of the sun it cast its own radiance. An expert in antiquities had confirmed family legends regarding the tie: It was a blend of Palefire and Idlenorth fibers, one of the last fabrics ever created by the defunct Mill.

Now the passengers of the lead car — four men and two women — were joined by others from the cargo vehicles. These latter folk were plainly laborers. Together, the crowd faced north. Shading their eyes, they raised their faces to the sky.

Someone whistled; a woman gasped; one of the laborers said, “I’ll be a fur-faced abo —”

The driver of the landau spoke. “It’s impressive, all right. Especially up this close. I’ve had the Factor’s Head explain it to me a dozen times now, and I still don’t understand the exact nature of what keeps it up there. I don’t think we’ll be ready to grasp it for another generation or two. But remember — strange as it seems to us, it’s only science.”

What captivated the visitors to the Valley was the sight of the Factor’s mother ship. Suspended like a lost silver moon above the ruins of the Mill halfway up the Valley, it hung as motionless as a mountain. The only evidence of any sort of imperfection was several open hatches. Thus it had remained for decades, tenantless and unvisited, by either planet-dweller or one of its mates from the stars.

The leader of the expedition spoke again. “Well, we’d best continue. We need to set up camp before nightfall, and we’ve still got a few miles to go to reach the site. And if the old road ahead is anything like what we’ve traversed so far, it’ll be slow going. This is hardly the Grand Concourse. No pavement here.”

“Nor no ladies of low virtue either,” added one of the laborers, provoking much laughter which served to relieve the slight tension they had all been feeling.

The crowd broke up. One of the other drivers opened wide the door of his vehicle’s boiler, exposing the open flame to add more fuel. At that moment, someone shouted.

“Professor Cairncross! Look!”

From out of the undergrowth paralleling the track emerged a squat mechanism. Big as a footstool, it moved stiffly on three spidery legs, advancing on the carrier with the open firebox.

The intruder was suddenly the focus of a dozen rifles and pistols carried as protection against dire wolves and other wildlife. Professor Cairncross stopped the men before they could fire.

“No, don’t — I think I know what it is . . .”

The automaton homed in unerringly on the open flames. Once upon them, it swivelled a nozzle at the heat source. A sound of dry pumping ensued. After a few moments of this fruitless activity, the little mechanism lowered its nozzle in defeat, collapsed its legs underneath itself, and sank to the ground.

“Let’s go,” said Professor Cairncross. “And remember, whatever curious things we may see, they’ll all be as harmless as what you’ve just witnessed.”

In the car and once more in motion, the passengers of the landau were silent for a time. Then one of the women spoke.

“Are you really so certain, Charles, that we won’t encounter any dangers?”

“Basically, Jennifer, I am. The oral history and the written accounts all tally. The Factor’s ship never disgorged anything except him, his lighter, and the clockwork firefighters. It’s true that after the Valley emptied, other constructs may have landed, but it seems highly unlikely. It was all under the Factor’s control, and once he suffered his fate, he was unable to contact his ship via the lighter. He’s told me so often enough. And though one must always take the Head’s talk with a grain of salt — the damage it suffered manifests itself in strange ways — I’m inclined to believe him in this case.”

“Well, you certainly sounded confident enough. I’m sure the workers were heartened.”

Professor Cairncross appeared embarrassed. “Just part of my job, after all. We wouldn’t have much success in our dig if we were always looking over our shoulders for some alien menace. No, I expect that the most we’ll meet will be a few friendly ghosts.”

The road was indeed nearly impassable in spots. The expedition had to stop often to fell with axes the larger trees which had grown on the median strip; the centuries-compacted dirt ruts had proved more impenetrable to seedlings. Through the dense foliage running alongside the old track, they could catch occasional glimpses of the Mill and its many associated dwellings, the residences all broken-roofed and shatter-windowed. They encountered no more ancient firefighters, but the going was still slow. It took till dusk to reach the site selected by Professor Cairncross and his fellow archaeologists.

The Field of the Festival was nearly all overgrown with copses of sapodilla and jacaranda. However, a grassy clearing about the size of a ballfield remained, not far from the road. Here they chose to pitch their tents, leaving the vehicles lined up in the track.

While the tents were being raised, Professor Cairncross took Jennifer and the rest of his University colleagues on a beeline across the tree-dotted field. What directed him, he found hard to say. Surely hours of studying old maps had a lot to do with his certainty, as did hours of listening to his grandfather and namesake ramble on in his half-cogent, half-dotty way about life in the Mill Valley. But there was more guiding him than these things; it was an instinct almost genetic, a rising of ancestral feelings and memories.

Within minutes they had come upon the Factor’s little ship, trees growing right up to its walls. Grass — having sprouted in wind-deposited soil on the very ramp — licked at the door, into which leaves had blown. The scat of some animal wafted pungently from inside the vessel.

Professor Cairncross’s excitement was nearly palpable, and transmitted itself to the others. Sweaty, dressed for city streets rather than cross-country trekking, their faces showing the rising welts from branches, his comrades did not protest when he said, “Let’s press on, toward the Mill. I want to find the Factor’s skeleton.”

They burst from the marge of the woods, and stopped. The oily waste strip had resisted organic encroachments much more easily, and only the toughest weeds grew there. They had an unobstructed view in the gold and purple twilight of the sad, silent, sag-roofed Mill, parts of it crumbled by flooding of the Swolebourne, its middle portion still exhibiting the effects of the fire that had unmasked the Factor and precipitated his demise and the abandonment of the Mill.

Professor Cairncross scanned the waste fruitlessly. Then Jennifer said, “There, that glint —”

The metal armature of the Factor was wreathed in maidenhair, as if the earth strove to clothe it.

Professor Cairncross shivered. “I can feel it as if it were yesterday. I’d sit on my gran’da’s knee, and he’d tell me how the Factor was decapitated with a dozen blows from a huge wrench, wielded by his old boss, Otterness. Once I thought I’d found the very wrench, an old rusty thing in my father’s shop. But it turned out to be much too new. I think I’d date my desire to do archaeology to that moment.”

Jennifer said, “And look where it’s led you. To something much more exciting than an old wrench!”

Back at the camp, a fire was already going. All throughout supper, they half expected more clockwork visitors, starting at every sound from the surrounding woods. But in this they were disappointed.

As he fell asleep in Jennifer’s arms that night — their betrothal had been announced last month, and it had not taken them long to get a jump on the actual marriage — Professor Cairncross thought wistfully how wonderful it was that this expedition, the first such, could include women. The Head’s revelation a generation ago of the dietary deficiency that had limited female births for so long, and how to correct it, was having far-reaching changes already . . .

In the morning, Professor Cairncross arose before the others, with first light. He felt the need to be alone with his thoughts and emotions.

Wandering away from the camp without any intentions, he soon found himself among the brick houses of a Village. In one such, his ancestors had passed their whole lives. It was nearly inconceivable . . .

Outside the Village, he came upon an old midden of waste bricks, nearly concealed by vegetation. Time and the elements had softened what must have once been a formidable pile. Moved by some urge he could not explain, excitement mounting in his breast, Professor Cairncross climbed awkwardly to the top. It took only a few adult steps.

Yet when he stood atop the brick pile, sourceless tears tickling his cheeks, he felt master of all he surveyed, and king of the world.

© 1991 by Paul Di Filippo.

Originally published in Amazing Stories.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Di Filippo sold his first short story in 1977, and since then has sold over 200 more, as well as several novels. He lives in Providence with Deborah Newton, his partner of forty years. His literary criticism appears in several places, including The Barnes & Noble Review and Locus Online.

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

Knopf Presents
The Water Knife
(novel excerpt)

Paolo Bacigalupi

Chapter 1

There were stories in sweat. The sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren’t on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing. The sweat of a ten-year-old boy staring into the barrel of a SIG Sauer was different from the sweat of a woman struggling across the desert and praying to the Virgin that a water cache was going to turn out to be exactly where her coyote’s map told her it would be. Sweat was a body’s history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day. To Angel Velasquez, perched high above Cypress 1’s central bore and watching Charles Braxton as he lumbered up the Cascade Trail, the sweat on a lawyer’s brow said that some people weren’t near as important as they liked to think. Braxton might strut in his offices and scream at his secretaries. He might stalk courtrooms like an ax murderer hunting new victims. But no matter how much swagger the lawyer carried, at the end of the day Catherine Case owned his ass — and when Catherine Case told you to get something done quick, you didn’t just run, pendejo, you ran until your heart gave out and there wasn’t no running left. Braxton ducked under ferns and stumbled past banyan climbing vines, following the slow rise of the trail as it wound around the cooling bore. He shoved through groups of tourists posing for selfies before the braided waterfalls and hanging gardens that spilled down the arcology’s levels. He kept on, flushed and dogged. Joggers zipped past him in shorts and tank tops, their ears flooded with music and the thud of their healthy hearts. You could learn a lot from a man’s sweat. Braxton’s sweat meant he still had fear. And to Angel, that meant he was still reliable. Braxton spied Angel perched on the bridge where it arced across the wide expanse of the central bore. He waved tiredly, motioning Angel to come down and join him. Angel waved back from above, smiling, pretending not to understand. “Come down!” Braxton called up. Angel smiled and waved again. The lawyer slumped, defeated, and set himself to the final assault on Angel’s aerie. Angel leaned against the rail, enjoying the view. Sunlight filtered down from above, dappling bamboo and rain trees, illuminating tropical birds and casting pocket-mirror flashes on mossy koi ponds. Far below, people were smaller than ants. Not really people at all, more just the shapes of tourists and residents and casino workers, as in the biotects’ development models of Cypress 1: scale-model people sipping scale-model lattes on scale-model coffee shop terraces. Scale-model kids chasing butterflies on the nature trails, while scale-model gamblers split and doubled down at the scale-model blackjack tables in the deep grottoes of the casinos. Braxton came lumbering onto the bridge. “Why didn’t you come down?” he gasped. “I told you to come down.” He dropped his brief-case on the boards and sagged against the rail. “What you got for me?” Angel asked. “Papers,” Braxton wheezed. “Carver City. We just got the judge’s decision.” He waved an exhausted hand at the briefcase. “We crushed them.” “And?” Braxton tried to say more but couldn’t get the words out. His face was puffy and flushed. Angel wondered if he was about to have a heart attack, then tried to decide how much he would care if he did. The first time Angel met Braxton had been in the lawyer’s offices in the headquarters of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The man had a floor-to-ceiling view of Carson Creek, Cypress 1’s fly-fishing river, where it cascaded through various levels of the arcology before being pumped back to the top of the system to run though a new cleaning cycle. A big expensive overlook onto rainbow trout and water infrastructure, and a good reminder of why Braxton filed his lawsuits on SNWA’s behalf.

Braxton had been lording over his three assistants — all coincidentally svelte girls hooked straight from law school with promises of permanent residence permits in Cypress — and he’d talked to Angel like an afterthought. Just another one of Catherine Case’s pit bulls that he tolerated for as long as Angel kept leaving other, bigger dogs dead in his wake.

Angel, in turn, had spent the meeting trying to figure out how a man like Braxton had gotten so large. People outside Cypress didn’t fatten up like Braxton did. In all Angel’s early life, he’d never seen a creature quite like Braxton, and he found himself fascinated, admiring the fleshy raiment of a man who knew himself secure.

If the end of the world came like Catherine Case said it would, Angel thought Braxton would make good eating. And that in turn made it easier to let the Ivy League pendejo live when he wrinkled his nose at Angel’s gang tattoos and the knife scar that scored his face and throat.

Times they do change, Angel thought as he watched the sweat drip from Braxton’s nose.

“Carver City lost on appeal,” Braxton gasped finally. “Judges were going to rule this morning, but we got the courtrooms double-booked. Got the whole ruling delayed until end of business. Carver City will be running like crazy to file a new appeal.” He picked up his briefcase and popped it open. “They aren’t going to make it.”

He handed over a sheaf of laser-hologrammed documents. “These are your injunctions. You’ve got until the courts open tomorrow to enforce our legal rights. Once Carver City files an appeal, it’s a different story. Then you’re looking at civil liabilities, minimally. But until courts open tomorrow, you’re just defending the private property rights of the citizens of the great state of Nevada.” Angel started going through the documents. “This all of it?” “Everything you need, as long as you seal the deal tonight. Once business opens tomorrow, it’s back to courtroom delays and he-said, she-said.” “And you’ll have done a lot of sweating for nothing.” Braxton jabbed a thick finger at Angel. “That better not happen.” Angel laughed at the implied threat. “I already got my housing permits, cabrón. Go frighten your secretaries.” “Just because you’re Case’s pet doesn’t mean I can’t make your life miserable.” Angel didn’t look up from the injunctions. “Just because you’re Case’s dog don’t mean I can’t toss you off this bridge.” The seals and stamps on the injunctions all looked like they were in order. “What have you got on Case that makes you so untouchable?” Braxton asked. “She trusts me.” Braxton laughed, disbelieving, as Angel put the injunctions back in order. Angel said, “People like you write everything down because you know everyone is a liar. It’s how you lawyers do.” He slapped Braxton in the chest with the legal documents, grinning. “And that’s why Case trusts me and treats you like a dog — you’re the one who writes things down.” He left Braxton glaring at him from the bridge. As Angel made his way down the Cascade Trail, he pulled out his cell and dialed. Catherine Case answered on the first ring, clipped and formal. “This is Case.” Angel could imagine her, Queen of the Colorado, leaning over her desk, with maps of the state of Nevada and the Colorado River Basin floor to ceiling on the walls around her, her domain laid out in real-time data feeds — the veins of every tributary blinking red, amber, or green indicating stream flow in cubic feet per second. Numbers flickering over the various catchment basins of the Rocky Mountains — red, amber, green — monitoring how much snow cover remained and variation off the norm as it melted. Other numbers, displaying the depths of reservoirs and dams, from the Blue Mesa Dam on the Gunnison, to the Navajo Dam on the San Juan, to the Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green. Over it all, emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available open-market purchase options if she needed to recharge the depth in Lake Mead, the unforgiving numbers that ruled her world as relentlessly as she ruled Angel’s and Braxton’s.

“Just talked to your favorite lawyer,” Angel said.

“Please tell me you didn’t antagonize him again.”

“That pendejo is a piece of work.”

“You’re not so easy, either. You have everything you need?”

“Well, Braxton gave me a lot of dead trees, that’s for sure.” He hefted the sheaf of legal documents. “Didn’t know so much paper still existed.”

“We like to make sure we’re all on the same page,” Case said dryly.

“Same fifty or sixty pages, more like.”

Case laughed. “It’s the first rule of bureaucracy: any message worth sending is worth sending in triplicate.”

Angel exited the Cascade Trail, winding down toward where elevator banks would whisk him to central parking. “Figure we should be up in about an hour,” he said.

“I’ll be monitoring.”

“This is a milk run, boss. Braxton’s papers here got about a hundred different signatures say I can do anything I want. This is old-school cease and desist. Camel Corps could do this one on their own, I bet. Glorified FedEx is what this is.”

“No.” Case’s voice hardened. “Ten years of back-and-forth in the courts is what this is, and I want it finished. For good this time. I’m tired of giving away Cypress housing permits to some judge’s nephew just so we can keep appealing for something that’s ours by right.”

“No worries. When we’re done, Carver City won’t know what hit them.”

“Good. Let me know when it’s finished.”

She clicked off. Angel caught an express elevator as it was closing. He stepped to the glass as the elevator began its plunge. It accelerated, plummeting down through the levels of the arcology. People blurred past: mothers pushing double strollers; hourly girlfriends clinging to the arms of weekend boyfriends; tourists from all over the world, snapping pics and messaging home that they had seen the Hanging Gardens of Las Vegas. Ferns and waterfalls and coffee shops. Down on the entertainment floors, the dealers would be changing shifts. In the hotels the twenty-four-hour party people would be waking up and taking their first shots of vodka, spraying glitter on their skin. Maids and waiters and busboys and cooks and maintenance staff would all be hard at work, striving to keep their jobs, fighting to keep their Cypress housing permits. You’re all here because of me, Angel thought. Without me, you’d all be little tumbleweeds. Little bone-and-paper-skin bodies. No dice to throw, no hookers to buy, no strollers to push, no drinks at your elbow, no work to do . . . Without me, you’re nothing. The elevator hit bottom with a soft chime. Its doors opened to Angel’s Tesla, waiting with the valet. Half an hour later he was striding across the boiling tarmac of Mulroy Airbase, heat waves rippling off the asphalt, and the sun setting bloody over the Spring Mountains. One hundred twenty degrees, and the sun only finally finishing the job. The floodlights of the base were coming on, adding to the burn. “You got our papers?” Reyes shouted over the whine of Apaches. “Feds love our desert asses!” Angel held up the documents. “For the next fourteen hours, anyway!” Reyes barely smiled in response, just turned and started initiating launch orders. Colonel Reyes was a big black man who’d been a recon marine in Syria and Venezuela, before moving into hot work in the Sahel and then Chihuahua, before finally dropping into his current plush job with the Nevada guardies. State of Nevada paid better, he said. Reyes waved Angel aboard the command chopper. Around them attack helicopters were spinning up, burning synthetic fuel by the barrel — Nevada National Guard, a.k.a. Camel Corps, a.k.a. those fucking Vegas guardies, depending on who had just had a Hades missile sheaf fired up their asses — all of them gearing up to inflict the will of Catherine Case upon her enemies.

One of the guardies tossed Angel a flak jacket. Angel shrugged into Kevlar as Reyes settled into the command seat and started issuing orders. Angel plugged military glass and an earbug into the chopper’s comms so he could listen to the chatter.

Their gunship lurched skyward. A pilot’s-eye data feed spilled into Angel’s vision, the graffiti of war coloring Las Vegas with bright hungry tags: target calculations, relevant structures, friend/foe markings, Hades missile loads, and .50-cal belly-gun ammo info, fuel warnings, heat signals on the ground . . .

Ninety-eight point six.

Human beings. Some of the coolest things out there. Each one tagged, not a single one knowing it.

One of the guardies was making sure Angel was strapped in tight. Angel grinned as the lady checked his straps. Dark skin and black hair and eyes like coal. He picked her name off a tag — Gupta.

“Think I know how to strap myself in, right?” he shouted over the rotor noise. “Used to do this work, too.”

Gupta didn’t even smile. “Ms. Case’s orders. We’d look pretty stupid if we pancaked and you didn’t walk away just because you didn’t tighten your seat belt.”

“If we pancake, none of us is walking away.”

But she ignored him and did her check anyway. Reyes and the Camel Corps were thorough. They had their own elegant rituals, designed over time and polished to a high shine.

Gupta said something into her comm, then strapped into her own seat behind the screen for the chopper’s belly gun.

Angel’s stomach lurched as their gunship angled around, joining a formation of other airborne predators. Status updates rolled across his military glass, brighter than Vegas nightscape:

SNWA 6602, away.

SNWA 6608, away.

SNWA 6606, away.

More call signs and numbers scrolled past. Digital confirmation of the nearly invisible locust swarm filling the blackening sky and now streaming south. Over the comm, Reyes’s voice crackled: “Commence Operation Honey Pool.” Angel laughed. “Who came up with that one?” “Like it?” “I like Mead.” “Don’t we all?” And then they were hurtling south, toward the Mead in question: twenty-six million acre-feet of water storage at inception, now less than half of that thanks to Big Daddy Drought. An optimistic lake created during an optimistic time, whittled now and filling with silt besides. A lifeline, always threatened and always vulnerable, always on the verge of sinking below Intake No. 3, the critical IV drip that kept the heart of Las Vegas pumping. Below them, the lights of Vegas central unspooled: casino neon and Cypress arcologies. Hotels and balconies. Domes and condensation-misted vertical farms, leafy with hydroponic greenery and blazing with full-spectrum illumination. Geometries of light sprawling across the desert floor, all of them overlaid with the electronic graffiti of Camel Corps’s combat language. Billboard promises of shows and parties and drinks and money filtered through military glass, and became attack and entry points. Close-packed urban canyons designed to funnel desert winds became sniper alleys. Iridescent photovoltaic-paint roofs became drop zones. The Cypress arcologies became high-ground advantage and priority attack zones, thanks to the way they dominated the Vegas skyline and loomed over everything else, bigger and more ambitious than all of Sin City’s previous forays into the fantastical combined. Vegas ended in a sharp black line. The combat software started picking out living creatures, cool spots in the dark heat of millennial suburban skeleton — square mile after square mile of buildings that weren’t good for anything except firewood and copper wiring because Catherine Case had decided they didn’t deserve their water anymore. Sparse and lonely campfires perforated the blackness, beacons marking the locations of desiccated Texans and Zoners who didn’t have enough money to get into a Cypress arcology and had nowhere else to flee. The Queen of the Colorado had slaughtered the hell out of these neighborhoods: her first graveyards, created in seconds when she shut off the water in their pipes.

“If they can’t police their damn water mains, they can drink dust,” Case had said.

People still sent the lady death threats about that.

The helicopters crossed the last of the wrecked suburban buffer zone and passed out into open desert. Original landscape: Old Testament ancient. Creosote bushes. Joshua trees, spiky and lonely. Yucca eruptions, dry washes, pale gravel sands, quartz pebbles.

The desert was entirely black now and cooling, the scalpel scrape of the sun finally off the land. There’d be animals down there. Nearly hairless coyotes. Lizards and snakes. Owls. A whole world that only came alive once the sun went down. A whole ecosystem emerging from burrows beneath rocks and yucca and creosote.

Angel watched the tiny thermal markers of the desert’s surviving inhabitants and wondered if the desert returned his gaze, if some skinny coyote looked up at the muffled thud-thwap of Camel Corps gunships flying overhead and marveled at this charge of airborne humanity.

An hour passed.

“We’re close,” Reyes said, breaking the stillness. His voice was almost reverent. Angel leaned forward, searching.

“There she is,” Gupta said.

A black ribbon of water, twisting through desert, cutting between ragged mountain ridges.

Shining moonlight spilled across the waters in slicks of silver.

The Colorado River.

It wound like a serpent through the pale scapes of the desert. California hadn’t put this stretch of river into a straw yet, but it would. All that evaporation — couldn’t let the sun steal that forever. But for now the river still flowed in the open, exposed to sky and the guardies’ solemn view.

Angel peered down at the river, awed as always. The radio chatter of the guardies ceased, all of them falling silent at the sight of so much water.

Even much reduced by droughts and diversions, the Colorado River awakened reverent hungers. Seven million acre-feet a year, down from sixteen million . . . but still, so much water, simply there on the land . . . No wonder Hindus worshipped rivers, Angel thought. In its prime, the Colorado River had run more than a thousand miles, from the white-snow Rockies down through the red-rock canyons of Utah and on to the blue Pacific, tumbling fast and without obstruction. And wherever it touched — life. If a farmer could put a diversion on it, or a home builder could sink a well beside it, or a casino developer could throw a pump into it, a person could drink deep of possibility. A body could thrive in 115-degree heat. A city could blossom in a desert. The river was a blessing as sure as the Virgin Mother’s. Angel wondered what the river had looked like back when it still ran free and fast. These days the river ran low and sluggish, stoppered behind huge dams. Blue Mesa Dam, Flaming Gorge Dam, Morrow Point Dam, Soldier Creek Dam, Navajo Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam, and more. And wherever dams held back the river and its tributaries, lakes formed, reflecting desert sky and sun: Lake Powell. Lake Mead. Lake Havasu . . . These days Mexico never saw a drop of water hit its border, no matter how much it complained about the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River. Children down in the Cartel States grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was as much a myth as the chupacabra that Angel’s old abuela had told him about. Hell, most of Utah and Colorado weren’t allowed to touch the water that filled the canyon below Angel’s chopper. “Ten minutes to contact,” Reyes announced. “Any chance they’ll fight?” Reyes shook his head. “Zoners don’t have much to defend with. Still got most of their units deployed up in the Arctic.” That had been Case’s doing, greasing a bunch of East Coast politicians who didn’t care what the hell happened on this side of the Continental Divide. She’d gorged those pork-barrel bastards on hookers and cocaine and vast sloshing oceans of Super PAC cash, so when the Joint Chiefs discovered a desperate need to defend tar sands pipelines way up north, coincidentally, the only folks who could do the job were the desert rats of the Arizona National Guard. Angel remembered watching the news as they deployed, the relentless rah-rah of energy security from the feeds. He’d enjoyed watching all the journos beating the patriotism drums and getting their ratings up. Making citizens feel like badass Americans again. The journos were good for that, at least. For a second, Americans could still feel like big swinging dicks.

Solidarity, baby.

The Camel Corps’s two dozen choppers dropped into the river’s canyon, skimming black waters. They wound along its serpentine length, hemmed in on either side by stony hills, sweeping up the liquid curves of the Colorado to the target.

Angel was starting to grin, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline that came when all bets were made and all anyone could do was find out what lay in the dealer’s deck.

He clutched the court’s injunctions to his chest. All those seals and hologram stamps. All that ritual of lawsuits and appeals, all leading to a moment when they could finally take the gloves off.

Arizona would never know what hit them.

He laughed. “Times they do change.”

Gupta, riding the belly gun, glanced over. “What’s that you saying?”

She was young, Angel realized. Young, as he’d been when Case put him in the guardies and got his state residence approved once and for all. Poor and desperate deportee, looking to find some way — any way — to stay on the right side of the border.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Twelve?”

She gave him a dirty look and brought her focus back to her targeting systems.

“Twenty. Old man.”

“Don’t be cold.” He pointed down at the Colorado. “You’re too young to remember how it used to be. Used to be that we all sat down with a bunch of lawyers and papers, bureaucrats with pocket protectors . . .”

He trailed off, remembering early days, when he’d stood bodyguard behind Catherine Case as she went into meetings: bald bureaucrat guys, city water managers, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior. All of them talking acre-feet and reclamation guidelines and cooperation, wastewater efficiency, recycling, water banking, evaporation reduction and river covers, tamarisk and cottonwood and willow elimination. All of them trying to rearrange deck chairs on a big old Titanic. All of them playing the game by the rules, believing there was a way for everyone to get by, pretending they could cooperate and share their way out of the situation if they just got real clever about the problem. And then California tore up the rulebook and chose a new game. “Were you saying something?” Gupta pressed. “Nah.” Angel shook his head. “Game’s changed is all. Case used to play that old game pretty good.” He grabbed his seat for support as they popped up over the canyon rim and bore down on their target. “We do okay with this new game, too.” Ahead, their objective glowed in the darkness, a whole complex standing alone in the desert. “There it is.” Lights started winking out. “They know we’re coming,” Reyes said, and began issuing battle instructions. The choppers spread out, picking likely targets as they came into range. Their own chopper plunged lower, joined by a pair of support drones. Angel’s military glass showed another cluster of choppers running ahead, opening up airspace. He gritted his teeth as they started dropping and jigging, keeping their movement random, waiting to see if the ground tried to light them up. Off on the far horizon, he could see the orange glow of Carver City. Houses and businesses bright and shining, a halo of urbanity blazing against the night sky. All those electric lights. All that A/C. All that life. Gupta fired a couple rounds. Something lit up below, a fountain of flames. Their gunships swept over the leading edge of the pumping and water-treatment facilities. Pools and pipes running all over the place. Black Apaches settled on rooftops and parking lots, dropped to pavement, and belched forth troops. More gunships thudded down like giant dragonflies alighting. Rotor wash kicked up quartz sands, scouring Angel’s face. “Showtime!” Reyes motioned at Angel. Angel checked his flak jacket a final time and snapped the chin strap of his helmet.

Gupta watched, smiling. “You want a gun, old man?”

“Why?” Angel asked as he jumped out. “That’s why I got you coming in with me.”

Guardies formed around him. Together they dashed for the plant’s main doors.

Floodlights were coming up, workers rushing out, knowing what was coming. Camel Corps had their rifles up and ready, keeping sights on the targets ahead. Amplified orders blasted from Gupta’s comm.

“Everyone on the ground. Down! Get DOWN!”

Civilians hit the deck.

Angel jogged up to a huddled and terrified woman, waved his papers. “You got a Simon Yu in there somewhere?” he shouted over the shriek of the choppers.

She was too scared to speak. Sort of pudgy white lady with brown hair. Angel grinned. “Hey, lady, I’m just serving papers.”

“Inside,” she finally gasped.

“Thanks.” Angel slapped her on the back. “Why don’t you run all your coworkers out of here? In case things get hot.”

He and the soldiers rammed through the treatment plant’s doors, a wedge of weaponry with Angel striding at its heart. Civvies slapped themselves up against the walls as Camel Corps stampeded past.

“Vegas in the house!” Angel crowed. “Grab your ankles, boys and girls!”

Gupta’s amplified orders drowned him out. “Clear out! All of you! You got thirty minutes to evacuate this facility. After that you’re obstructing!”

Angel and his team hit the main control rooms: flat-screen computers monitoring effluence, water quality, chemical inputs, pump efficiency — along with a whole pack of water-quality engineers, looking like surprised gophers as they popped up from their workstations.

“Where’s me some supervisor?” Angel demanded. “I want me some Simon Yu.”

A man straightened. “I’m Yu.” Slim and tanned, balding. Comb-over. Scars of old acne on his cheeks. Angel tossed papers at him as Camel Corps spread out and secured the control room. “You’re shut down.” Yu caught the papers clumsily. “The hell we are! This is on appeal.” “Appeal all you want, tomorrow,” Angel said. “Tonight you got an order to shut down. Check the signatures.” “We’re supplying a hundred thousand people! You can’t just turn off their water.” “Judges say we’ve got senior rights,” Angel said. “You should be glad we’re letting you keep what you already got in your pipes. If your people are careful, they can live on buckets for a couple days, till they clear out.” Yu was riffling through the papers. “But this ruling is a farce! We’re getting a stay, and this is going to be overturned. This ruling — it barely exists! Tomorrow it’s gone!” “Knew you’d say something like that. Problem is, it’s not tomorrow right now. It’s today. And today the judges say you got to stop stealing the state of Nevada’s water.” “You’re going to be liable, though!” Yu sputtered. He made a heroic effort to calm himself. “We both know how serious this is. Whatever happens to Carver City is on you. We have security cams. All of this is going to be public record. You can’t want this to be on your head when judgments start coming down.” Angel decided he kind of liked the balding bureaucrat. Simon Yu was dedicated. Had the feel of one of those good-government guys who got a job because he wanted to make the world a better place. Genuine old-school civil servant genuinely dedicated to the old-school benefit of the people. And now here the guy was, cajoling Angel. Playing the let’s-be-reasonable, don’t-be-hasty game. Too bad it wasn’t the game they were playing. “. . . This is going to piss off a lot of powerful people,” Yu was saying. “You aren’t going to get off. The feds aren’t going to let something like this happen.” It was a bit like meeting a dinosaur, Angel decided. Kind of icy to see, sure, but really, how the hell had the man ever survived? “Powerful people?” Angel smiled gently. “You cut a deal with California I’m not aware of? They own your water, and somehow I don’t know? ’Cause from where we stand, you’re pumping some crappy junior water right that you bought secondhand off a farmer in western Colorado, and you got no cards left to play. This is water that should have come to us a long time ago. Says so in those papers I just gave you.”

Yu gave Angel a sullen glare.

“Come on, Yu.” Angel lightly punched the man in the shoulder. “Don’t look so down. We both been in this game long enough to know someone’s got to lose. Law of the River says senior rights gets it all. Junior rights?” Angel shrugged. “Not so much.”

“Who did you pay off?” Yu asked. “Stevens? Arroyo?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s a hundred thousand people’s lives!”

“Shouldn’t have bet them on such crappy water rights, then,” Gupta commented from across the control room, where she was checking out the flashing lights of pump monitors.

Angel hid a smirk as Yu shot her a dirty look. “The soldier’s right, Yu. You got your notice there. We’re giving you twenty-five more minutes to clear out, and after that I’m dropping some Hades and Hellfire on this place. So clear it out before we light it up.”

“You’re going to blow us up?”

A bunch of the soldiers laughed at that.

Gupta said, “You did see us come in with the helicopters, right?”

“I’m not leaving,” Yu said coldly. “You can kill me if you want. Let’s see how that works out for you.”

Angel sighed. “I just knew you’d be stand-up that way.”

Before Yu could retort, Angel grabbed him and slammed him to the floor. He buried a knee in the bureaucrat’s back. Grabbed an arm and twisted it.

“You’re destroying —”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Angel wrenched Yu’s other hand behind his back and zip-cuffed him. “A whole fucking city. A hundred thousand lives. Plus somebody’s golf course. But like you noticed, dead bodies do make things complicated, so we’re taking your bald ass out of here. You can sue us tomorrow.”

“You can’t do this!” Yu shouted from where his face was mashed into the floor.

Angel knelt down beside the helpless man. “I feel like you’re taking this personally, Simon. But it ain’t that way. We’re just cogs in a big old machine, right?” He jerked Yu upright. “This is bigger than you and me. We’re both just doing our jobs.” He gave Yu a shove, propelling him through the doors. To Gupta, he called back, “Check the rest of the place, and make sure it’s cleared. I want this place on fire in ten!” Outside Reyes was standing at the chopper door, waiting. “We’ve got Zoners, incoming!” Reyes shouted. “Well, that ain’t good. How long?” “Five minutes.” “Fucking hell.” Angel made a twirling motion with his finger. “Spin us up, then! I got what I came for.” Chopper blades came alive, an angry shriek. Their whine drowned out Yu’s next words, but his expression was enough for Angel to understand the man’s hatred. “Don’t take this personally!” Angel shouted back. “In another year we’ll hire you up in Vegas! You’re too good to waste here! SNWA can use good people like you!” Angel tried to tug Yu into the chopper, but the man resisted. He was glaring at Angel, eyes squinting against the dustwash. Guardie choppers started lifting off, locusts rising. Angel gave Yu another tug. “Time to go, old man.” “The hell you say!” With sudden surprising strength, Yu tore free and bolted back toward his water-treatment plant, stumbling, hands still zip-cuffed behind his back but running determinedly for the building from which the last of his people were fleeing. Angel exchanged a pained look with Reyes. Dedicated bastard. Right down to the end, the pencil pusher was dedicated. “We’ve got to go!” Reyes shouted. “If the Zoners get their choppers up here, we’ll end up in a firefight, and the feds will be all up on our asses then. There’s some shit they won’t put up with, and a state-to-state gun battle is definitely one of them. We need to clear out!” Angel looked back at Yu as he fled. “Just give me one minute!” “Thirty seconds!” Angel gave Reyes a disgusted look and charged after Yu.

All around him choppers were lifting off, rising like leaves on hot desert winds. Angel pelted through the flying grit, squinting against sand sting.

He caught Yu at the door to the treatment plant. “Well, you’re stubborn. I’ll give you that.”

“Let me go!”

Instead, Angel flipped him hard onto the ground. The landing took Yu’s breath away, and Angel took advantage of the man’s paralysis to zip-cuff his ankles, too.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Normally, I’d just cut you like a pig and be done with it,” Angel grunted, as he hefted Yu onto his back in a fireman’s carry. “But since we’re doing this all aboveboard and public, that’s not on the table. But don’t push me. Seriously.” He began lumbering for the sole remaining chopper.

The last of Carver City’s treatment-plant workers were diving into their cars and speeding away from the pumping facility, kicking up plumes of dust. Rats jumping the sinking ship.

Reyes was glaring at Angel. “Hurry the fuck up!”

“I’m here! Let’s go already!”

Angel dumped Yu into the chopper. They lifted off with Angel riding the skid. He clawed his way inside.

Gupta was back at her gun, already opening fire as Angel strapped in. Angel’s military glass lit up with firing solutions. He peered out the open door as military intelligence software portioned out the water-treatment plant: filtering towers, pumping engines, power supply, backup generators —

Missiles spat from the choppers’ tubes, arcs of fire, silent in the air and then explosively loud as they buried themselves in the guts of Carver City’s water infrastructure.

Flaming mushrooms boiled up into the night, bathing the desert orange, illuminating the black locust shapes of the hovering choppers as they launched more rounds.

Simon Yu lay at Angel’s feet, zip-cuffed and impotent to stop the destruction, watching as his world went up in mushroom clouds.

In the flickering light of the explosions, Angel could make out tears on the man’s face. Water gushing from his eyes, as telling in its own way as a man’s sweat: Simon Yu, mourning the place he’d tried so hard to save. Sucker had ice in his blood, for sure. Didn’t look it, but the sucker had him some ice. Too bad it hadn’t helped. It’s the end of times, Angel thought as more missiles pummeled the water-treatment plant. It’s the goddamn end of times. And then on the heels of that thought, another followed, unbidden. Guess that makes me the Devil.

Copyright © 2015 by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Excerpted from The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.

HarperCollins Presents
Magonia
(novel excerpt)

Maria Dahvana Headley

PROLOGUE

I breathe in. I breathe out. The sky’s full of clouds. A rope is looping down from above, out of the sky and down to earth. There is a woman’s face, looking at me, and all around us, hundreds upon hundreds of birds. The flock flows like water, surging up and into the air, black and gold and red, and everything is safe and cold, bright with stars and moon.

I’m tiny in comparison, and I’m not on the ground.

I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn’t a dream of flying. It’s a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.

I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life.

CHAPTER 1
{AZA}

My history is hospitals.

This is what I tell people when I’m in a mood to be combination funny and stressful, which is a lot of the time.

It’s easier to have a line ready than to be forced into a conversation with someone whose face is showing “fake nice,” “fake worry,” or “fake interest.” My preferred method is as follows: make a joke, make a half-apologetic/half-freaky face, and be out of the discussion in five seconds flat.

Aza: “Nothing really majorly wrong with me. Don’t worry. I just have a history of hospitals.”

Person in Question: “Er. Um. Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that. Or, wait, glad. You just said that nothing’s really wrong with you! Glad!”

Aza (freaky face intensifying): “It’s incredibly nice of you to ask.”

Subtext: It isn’t. Leave it.

People don’t usually ask anything after that. Most are polite. My parents, my family, not so much, but the randoms? The substitute teacher who wonders why I’m coughing and having to leave the room — then having to go to the nurse’s office — then having to have a nice 911 call to summon an ambulance to spirit me back to my white linoleum homeland?

People like that don’t want to remind me of things I no doubt already know. Which I very much do. Don’t be stupid. Also, don’t think I’m stupid.

This is not, like, Little Women. Beth and her nice, invalid Beth-ness have always made me puke. The way people imagined she wasn’t dying. The way she blatantly was. In stories like that, the moment someone decides to wrap you in blankets and you accidentally smile weakly, you’re dead.

Hence, I try not to smile weakly, even if I feel weak, which I sometimes secretly or unsecretly do. I don’t want to make myself into a catastrophic blanket-y invalid.

Bang, bang, you’re dead. Close your eyes and go to bed.

Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.

So, right, the question of death comes up in my presence on a regular basis. Adults don’t like to talk about it. Seriously, it’s not like I like talking about it either. But other people my age do.

They’re like, DEATH DEATH DEATH, like we’re all in cars, driving slowly past accidents on the highway all day long. They’re grossly fascinated.

Some of us, the ones actually dying, are maybe less fascinated than others. Some of us, maybe, would rather not get stuck in rooms where people are regularly talking about celebrity death-y things, whichever kind you want, the OD, the car crash, the mystery fall-apart . . .

People my age like to cry and speculate dramatically over how people our age could die. Take it from one who knows. Take it from one whose role has been, for years, The Girl I Knew Really Well, Who Tragically Died One Day.

Not that I’ve died yet. I am still totally here. Which is why all the artistic, goth morbidity is a bummer.

Adults like talking about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person’s life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof. Sleigh loaded down with memories and wineglasses and pots and pans and sweaters and grilled cheese sandwiches and Kleenexes and text messages and ugly houseplants and calico cat fur and half-used lipstick and laundry that never got done and letters you went to the trouble of handwriting but never sent and birth certificates and broken necklaces and disposable socks with scuffs on the bottom from hospital visits.

And notes you kept on the fridge.

And pictures of boys you had crushes on.

And a dress that got worn to a dance at which you danced by yourself, before you got too skinny and too breathless to dance.

Along with, probably, though this isn’t worthy of huge thinking, a soul or something.

Anyway, adults don’t believe in Santa Claus. They try hard not to believe in Reverse Santa Claus either.

At school, the whole rare-disease-impending-doom situation makes me freakishly intriguing. In the real world, it makes me a problem. Worried look, bang, nervous face, bang: “Maybe you should talk to someone about your feelings, Aza,” along with a nasty side dish of what-about-God-what-about-therapy-what-about-antidepressants?

Sometimes also what-about-faith-healers-what-about-herbs-what-about-crystals-what-about-yoga? Have you tried yoga, Aza, I mean have you, because it helped this friend of a friend who was supposedly dying but didn’t, due to downward dog?

No. I haven’t tried yoga to cure my thing, because yoga isn’t going to cure my thing. My thing is a Mystery and not just a Mystery, but Bermuda — no sun, only Triangle.

Unknowable. Unsolvable.

I take handfuls of drugs every morning, even though no one is entirely sure what the thing that’s wrong with me actually is. I’m rare like that.

Copyright © 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

Excerpted from Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley.

Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

For an extended excerpt of Magonia, visit bit.ly/epic-magonia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the upcoming young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and has recently appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction 2012 & 2013, Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Laird Barron’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

Interview: James Morrow

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Our guest today is James Morrow, who you may remember from our panel on “Being an Atheist Writer” back in episode 111. The Washington Post calls him the “Most provocative satiric voice in science fiction,” and The Denver Post has hailed him as “Christianity’s Salman Rushdie, only funnier and more sacrilegious.” His books include Towing Jehovah, Only Begotten Daughter, and Bible Stories for Adults. His latest book is called Galápagos Regained.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. 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 book is called Galapágos Regained, and you’ve said that the book was inspired by your wife asking you, “Isn’t it time you wrote your novel about Charles Darwin?” Why was it inevitable that you would write a book about Charles Darwin?

You should always do what your wife tells you to do. I’m known, primarily, as a novelist of ideas, the domain in which we science fiction guys operate, as opposed to being a creator of realistic psychological fiction. Going back to 2006, I published a historical novel called The Last Witchfinder, which was about the coming of the scientific worldview, a celebration of the enlightenment, and I managed to shoehorn some intellectual content into just about every scene. This was a book, after all, in which the minor characters include the likes of Isaac Newton, Robert Hook, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Benjamin Franklin. It had some success, so I wanted to try another historical epic that would also be a dance of ideas and I just couldn’t think of anything.

Months went by, and finally my wife Kathy noticed my distress and said, “But Jim, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been hectoring me about Charles Darwin; why don’t you write a novel about him?” This was a revelation; I think of that scene in the movie Young Frankenstein: Gene Wilder, as Doctor Frankenstein, says to the hunchback, “You know, I happen to be a very talented surgeon, I could do something about that hump,” and Marty Feldman famously says, “What hump?” This was a “What hump?” experience for me. I’ve been obsessed with Darwin ever since college. An interesting dimension of the Scopes Trial is a point that Steven J. Gould makes in one of his essays, which is that it was not a great victory for the theory of evolution by natural selection. It did not bring the yahoos and the William Jennings Bryan species of fundamentalism to its knees. Au contraire, fundamentalism enjoyed a resurgence and the text books scoured Darwin from their pages. When I was studying biology as a high school student, the text does not mention evolutionary theory at all, and I came out of that course thinking biology was all about taxonomy, nothing but the Linnaeus system of classification; you sit down, you memorize the phyla. The grand unifying idea was missing.

In college, I happened to pick up a book by Robert Ardrey called African Genesis, which is rooted in Darwinian theory and an argument about the descent of man; he’s grinding a particular axe vis-à-vis the problem of aggression, and he’s very fond of the “killer ape” theory, that we can account for the fact that human history is written in blood relative to our descent from Australopithecines. If I were to read African Genesis today, I would probably dissent pretty vociferously from that idea, but I owe a great debt to Robert Ardrey because I had never thought of what Dennett calls “Darwin’s dangerous idea.” It had never been clearer to me before, the idea of thinking of ourselves, as Ardrey puts it, as “risen apes” rather than fallen angels; the notion that everything that is alive right now and that has ever lived and ever will live is meshed in this fantastical tapestry, that we’re all embedded in this magnificent mosaic of life. That idea so exhilarated me that I started reading a lot about Darwin, most of it more serious and less polemical than Ardrey.

You mentioned that you started doing all this research on Darwin, and there’s this passage in the book that gives a very different image of Darwin than people typically have. You say, “In his youth he’d been quite the adventurer, galloping with gauchos across the pampas, hacking his way through a Patagonian jungle seething with hostile Indians and traversing the Andes on a mule. He’d survived a volcano in Chile, an earthquake in Concepción, and the mountainous seas off Cape Horn, which had nearly capsized his ship.” What you found out about Darwin — did it differ from the image you had of him?

We have this default portrait in our brains of the bearded, patriarchal Darwin; he actually doesn’t make a bad stand-in for God, come to think of it, which is rather ironic. Yet the young Darwin was this Indiana Jones figure.

Part of the reason I find this image of Darwin as Indiana Jones so striking is because, to a large extent, my image of him was shaped by that movie Creation that came out a few years ago, where you see him as this sickly moping guy trying all these odd therapies. What did you think of how he was portrayed in that movie?

The movie left a lot to be desired. It was a good performance by Paul Bettany as Darwin, and Jennifer Connelly makes an appealing Emma Darwin. It’s based on a nonfiction book by Randal Keynes called Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution. The book is much better, and one liberty that the film takes — you might remember the final beats — has Darwin presenting the manuscript to Emma and leaving the fate of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection in her hands. That he’s going to let her religious sensibilities determine whether or not the world at large finds out about this idea. In the scene, Emma is raking through some smoldering ashes and we’re led to believe that she has incinerated the manuscript.

Darwin would never have empowered his wife to do that, at that point in his career. He already realized that his scientific colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, was on the point of scooping him; that Wallace had come up with a notion of descent with modification that mapped, so precisely, onto the Origin of Species that Darwin’s natural scientific rivalry bone began to sing and from then on, there was no stopping him and he rushed the book into print.

Of course, it turns out that Emma has not burned the book, and hands the manuscript to him to give to the mail carrier, but I thought that was a needless piece of melodrama, because the facts of Darwin’s life are quite suspenseful and dramatically satisfying.

I don’t know if you followed all the distribution problems that movie had; I think it had a really hard time getting distributed in the United States. I don’t know if that made you at all leery about writing a Darwin book yourself. What do you think about that phenomenon?

It wasn’t the easiest job in the world to find a publisher for this book. I didn’t follow that story; are you saying that because of the subject, and because of the way Darwin ruffles peoples’ feathers, they didn’t want to exhibit it?

Absolutely. I don’t remember the details, but I don’t think it ever got wide release in the US. They struggled for years to try and get a distributor for it.

Yeah; I only have it in the form of DVD, I didn’t go to any theatrical exhibition of it. There’s not a whole lot of Darwin in the history of cinema; from the golden age of Hollywood biopics, there was never “Fredric March as Charles Darwin.” Probably just as well, because I think they would have bowdlerized the theory and its implications. That’s a sad commentary, that there’s still a kind of censorship operating, not unlike the textbook censorship that is very much with us, that I talked about earlier.

But you do think the publishers were leery about your book, because of that same animus towards Darwin?

I wouldn’t want to speculate. The publishers that turned it down came up with other reasons.

One thing that’s interesting, given that the inception of this book was to write a book about Darwin, is that Darwin is actually a fairly minor character. Talk about that decision and the actual protagonist of this novel.

Darwin’s the major-minor character; I think of the way I used Isaac Newton in The Last Witchfinder, where his spirit suffuses the entire story of Jennet Stearne and her attempt to bring down the Parliamentary witchcraft statutes in 1604. In the case of Galápagos Regained, Darwin’s spirit suffuses all of the text, but he’s not on stage that much. It’s the story of Chloe Bathurst, a Victorian actress, who’s rather successful but loses her job, owing to her outspoken political views. She gets a new job on Darwin’s estate as his governess; not a governess who’s going to mind his children, but one who’s going to attend to his menagerie: the creatures he brought back from the Galápagos archipelago.

Darwin did not bring back a private zoo, but the fine print on my poetic license allows me to imagine this vivarium; this zoological dome. The plot turns on “The Great God Contest.” While Chloe is performing her zoo-keeping duties, she gets wind not only of Darwin’s theory, but of this bizarre competition that’s being staged in Oxford by a hypothetical society called the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society. It didn’t really exist, but for the purposes of my novel, it was essential to the plot. The Percy Bysshe Shelley Society is floating a huge cash award of 10,000 pounds to anybody — scholar, theologian, philosopher — who can prove or disprove the existence of God. Chloe, who’s anxious to pay off her father’s debt — and also to get back into the theater game and give a grand performance — decides that she’s going to enter the contest and win it, and all that she needs is to be able to exhibit the live specimens — the giant tortoises, and these exotic and rare marine iguanas and the striped birds — while explaining the tree of life, the whole argument about the interconnectedness of all species on our planet.

Darwin has let Chloe know that he does regard the theory of natural selection as a big problem for God, as a potential corroboration of atheism. He regards the contest as lurid and tawdry, and he wants no traffic with it. Chloe decides — and here the reader has to suspend his or her disbelief, perhaps — that her only alternative is to go Galápagos herself and collect the very same illustrative live specimens. Hence the title, Galápagos Regained, an allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Regained, the sequel to Paradise Lost.

For its final two-thirds, the book becomes a crazy Jules Verne, Indiana Jones sort of adventure. I talked about the Indiana Jones connection to Darwin before, and I very much had that in mind when I conceived of Chloe’s escapades.

I think we should explain, for listeners who may not know, that Percy Shelley was expelled from school for writing a paper called “On the Necessity of Atheism,” and that’s where this Percy Bysshe Shelley Society comes from.

Yes. The Percy Bysshe Shelley Society are a bunch of rakehells, philanderers, and sybarites who take as their hero Shelley, who was booted out of university college at Oxford for writing the essay. It was probably influenced by his reading of Lucretius who, in his famous poem De Rerum Natura, was in turn celebrating the anti-religious philosophy of Epicurus.

As an atheist, you present this Percy Bysshe Shelley Society, as you say, as a bunch of hedonists. What do you think about that connection that exists in the popular imagination between atheism and hedonism?

I think I’m just having fun with that cliché, because it’s certainly not a legitimate critique of atheism. I just thought it would be fun to have these decadent young men with their tawdry girlfriends on their knees, believing that a good evening’s entertainment consists of hearing believers and non-believers go at each other, hammer and tongs, trying to prove or disprove the existence of God.

In this meeting we see of the Shelley Society, one of the panelists makes the point that God doesn’t heal amputees; this reminds me of the website, whywontgodhealamputees.com.

I definitely had that in mind; it’s almost a deliberate anachronism.

I was wondering how far back the formulation of that argument went.

Whoever mounted that website is someone I would credit with originality. I don’t know its origin; I doubt it goes back to the nineteenth century.

You say in the afterword to the book that you spent six years writing it; could you talk about that writing process and what happened over that time period?

I’m an awfully slow writer, and I always surprise myself by how damn long it takes me before I’m satisfied. I see my novels as thought experiments, and if I set up experimental conditions that are fecund, I’ll keep discovering new possibilities as I engage in the composition process. I’ll be surprised by this or that plot twist that I didn’t see coming until it sort of asked to happen. The truism, for me, is you should write the book, and then do the research. It was a continual back and forth between having to write the next scene and then read yet another book about Darwin, about natural philosophy, or biology.

For example, you mention that Chloe sets off for the Galápagos, but before she even gets there she spends quite a bit of time in South America. Why did you decide to include that section in the book?

I just wanted the book to be entertaining. I’ve always liked the truism that all art is entertainment, all drama is melodrama; not all melodrama is drama, and not all entertainment is art. But I love epics; I love Jules Verne. A lot of the South American material is an homage to Voltaire’s Candide. And I said, “Okay; I just want to see what happens when I put my characters down in that zone.”

In the South American section — I’ve never even heard of the Great Rubber War, so I wasn’t sure how much of that was your invention and how much was based in historical fact.

I had read several books about Amazonia as part of the research, because Chloe has to find her way across the continent of South America after she’s shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil. When she gets to Peru, she gets caught up in the Great Rubber War.

The research I’d done had given me a lot of information about the rubber industry and how horribly exploitive it was of the natives; the mistreatment that’s documented maps onto the historical facts, sad to say. There was not actually an event that was called “The Great Rubber War;” that’s a poetic conceit on my part. But a generation or so after the events in Galápagos Regained, there is a terrible conflict in the country of Columbia that does correspond to what’s going on in the middle of my book.

In this section, they also run into Alfred Russel Wallace, who also seems to be an Indiana Jones type character. How much historical truth is there to that?

That’s quite accurate; there’s a sense in which the calendar of the whole novel turns on the fact that Wallace was in Manaus, on the Rio Negro in Brazil, in 1850. I thought it would be a lot of fun if Chloe ran into him. And Wallace, as I said, was an evolutionary thinker, and was developing a theory very close to Darwin’s idea. He didn’t nail it until he got to Indonesia, but he’s playing around with it. So I had fun with the idea that Chloe, who wants to win the Great God Contest with an evolutionary argument, is very nervous that Wallace may have heard of the contest, or that he may be about to enter it, or that he might regard his own notion of evolution as tantamount to atheism. She’s relieved when Wallace presents a theistic version of evolution. And that, in fact, was the case with Wallace: He did have his notion of descent with modification; he did see species as transmuting in accordance with natural laws, with no supernatural intervention; entirely materialist. But he did give God a role; he did imagine the insertion of a divine soul into the human species.

This approach that you talk about, saying that evolution happened but it was the tool that God used to create humanity; you labeled that in the book “evangelical deism.” What do you make of that, where you have extremely learned people, like Francis Collins, who understand evolution through and through but still see some teleological purpose to it?

I find it a frustrating and disingenuous argument. It’s a pleasurable opinion, but it’s simply an opinion. The whole point of Darwinism, the whole breakthrough, was that we don’t need to appeal to any force on high, to use the imagery that Daniel Dennett evokes in his wonderful book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. We don’t need a crane or a gantry reaching down and pulling us up out of the mire. It happened from below.

And I think Collins and company trivialize Darwin’s breakthrough; they’re not friends of the theory of evolution. I can appreciate why many people regard Darwin’s theory as bad news, but for me the story doesn’t end there. Darwin’s “sin,” the reason he makes people nervous, is not that he killed God, but that he replaced God. He didn’t just make a case for atheism, he also made a case for something that’s equivalent to God — it just happens to be materialist. He replaced God with something that, for me, is far more magnificent than anything found in scripture; far more magnificent, complex, detailed, and transcendent. He pushed the reset button on the whole of the Western psyche. The Christian narrative that Collins is so fond of is beautiful, it’s coherent, it’s very satisfactory — but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the world that we’re actually in. It’s about another world, for which there is no evidence.

And this book does feature characters having religious experiences, and gaining faith, and turning away from faith. It seems, in the book, that people become more religious as the result of feelings and experiences and lose their religion as the result of analytical thinking. Is that how you see the dynamics of those kinds of changes of opinion?

The one thing that is factual about religious revelation on this planet is that people think that it’s happened to them. There’s no question that people find themselves in zones that they come back and report as being mystical. I would argue, as a secular humanist, that it’s always worth noting that we’re never out of the human in such cases; you go down the hallway and open each door that’s labeled “revelation” and, every time you open a new door, you don’t find an angel writing in a book of gold; you don’t find a cherub blowing on a trumpet. You find a human being, telling you how the world works.

I wanted to give the numinous its due, though, as an experience not as a fact, because it is human and I wanted to challenge myself. Can I communicate what I think it would be like to think you’ve touched the divine? And that happens to my heroine, Chloe: She’s not a secularist throughout the entire story.

She also, though, is suffering from malaria at the time, and so it could be that the experience is entirely physiological. No one will be surprised to hear that that’s how I regard near-death experiences, these narratives of people going to heaven and getting a t-shirt from Jesus and coming back. They are better explained by recourse to the neurology of near death. So Chloe gradually returns to reality; I imagine that some readers will take those scenes at face value and say Chloe had it right when she thinks she’s having an encounter with the divine.

I think it’s interesting when she turns away from religion; she describes the experience as “exhilaration mixed with bereavement.” Could you talk about what you mean by that?

It’s so hard to be a human being; I don’t know anybody who gets it completely right. So part of me doesn’t want to begrudge people their belief in the supernatural. The problem, and this is a whole other day’s discussion, is that faith so quickly becomes political and suddenly your loyalties are divided; things that God tells you to do are not necessarily the things that your obligations to your fellow human beings would tell you to do.

Chloe sets out on this mission under the assumption that Darwin’s theory is what’s going to kill God, but the book suggests that the “killer” arguments come from Greek philosophers like Lucretius, Epicurus, and Democritus. Do you need Darwin at all? Or would rational people conclude there is no God even absent an explanation of the apparent design in nature?

You could certainly make a case that Lucretius did precisely that; that he ended up taking an atheist’s view, or certainly an anti-religious view, of the universe without having heard of Darwin, who lies many generations in the future. And the whole idea of proof — that’s a mischievous term. It’s useful in mathematics, but I don’t think science is about proof, per se. It’s about making predictions, coming up with explanatory models of nature. That said, if there could be such a thing as a dis-proof of God, it would look a lot like Darwinian materialism, coupled to the argument from evil. That one-two punch, for me, causes God to go belly up.

In the book, you have Schopenhauer show up and list three of the most persuasive arguments in favor of God: Thomas Aquinas’ “First Cause,” Paley’s “Watchmaker Analogy,” and this idea that morality does not admit of a secular explanation. Do you want to comment on any of those?

There have been impressive proofs of God floated throughout human intellectual history, and we get to experience some of them quite early in the book, even before Schopenhauer comes on stage: We witness the goings-on at Alistair Hall, where the Shelley Society convenes every fortnight. We get to see the believers attempting to corroborate God through the four big proofs: the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and the moral — the ontological being Saint Anselm’s notion that because we can conceive of a perfect being, such an entity necessarily exists because actualities are, ipso facto, superior to mere ideas. This was once a very satisfying proof; it doesn’t work for us today, out of a medieval mindset.

I want to talk about the ontological proof, because you have something in the book I thought was pretty funny, which you called the “non-tological” proof. Do you want to tell people about that?

That’s a dis-proof that’s paraded before the rakehells at Oxford. The non-tological proof says that the only thing more astonishing than a universe created by an actual supreme being would be a universe created by a non-existent supreme being. Therefore, God does not exist. It’s a playful dis-proof; I think I got it out of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.

There’s this philosopher, Stephen Law, who has something called “The Evil God Challenge,” and he’s written this article about how you can use the ontological proof to prove that there is an evil God and that the argument is equally consistent as that there’s a good God.

I think I remember talking to my son Christopher about this. And he said that, of course, you then encounter the problem of good. Theists have to come to terms with the problem of evil. It’s very clever; I salute it.

There’s a little animated cartoon that explains it, which is really good, so that’s the first stop if you’re interested in that. I want to ask about these three things, though; I’ll say what I would think, that the argument that there must be a first cause — I just don’t find persuasive at all. It seems completely logically coherent that a chain of causality could stretch infinitely into the past and we have trouble imagining that because of the limited abilities of our brain.

The problem with the cosmological proof is that it begs the question of why this regression should terminate in a supreme being or the God of revelation. And it also begs the question that, if God is the cause of all things, where does God come from? It’s a solution that solves nothing.

And then this idea that morality does not admit of a secular explanation: People will say that the problem with atheism is that there’s no objective morality, and it seems to me that Plato, in “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” shows that there is no such thing as objective morality with a God, either. It seems that to divide up morality that’s 100% subjective versus morality that’s 100% objective is a false dichotomy. Neither of those is coherent and it seems that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I don’t think it’s a matter of opinion. Again, as with the so-called cosmological proof, it’s important to not let the promoters of the idea slip past our guard. I don’t believe in original sin; I don’t think the default is that we are depraved and that therefore morality can only be imposed through revelation. While it’s true that Darwin understood the cruelty of nature, he also took note of the extreme amount of cooperation and nurturing that occurs, so we shouldn’t privilege depravity.

On that subject, there’s a part in the book where one of the characters has this fear about the implications of natural selection, where she says, “His theory now repels me for I apprehend it to authorize the masters of the world to further exploit the downtrodden. ‘Don’t feed the starving multitudes,’ the Darwinists will say, ‘For such misguided charity encourages them to produce descendants doomed to compete for increasingly scarce resources.”

That’s the famous disaster of social Darwinism, although it’s important to realize that social Darwinism was not the construction of Darwin, and is actually on stage in human history before anybody heard of Darwin. We’re talking about the ideas of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who thought that it would be a mistake to nurture the poor because they would just go ahead and make more poor people.

Darwinism is entirely about saying that nature can act as a breeder in the same way that humans can act as a breeder. It was well understood that if you starve someone or kill someone they’ll have fewer descendants; you don’t need Darwin to tell you that. It would be a naturalistic fallacy to say that, because that’s what happens in nature, that’s something we should try to emulate.

Exactly.

In the book, you include some other scientists: Gregor Mendel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Rosalind Franklin. Could you talk about why you chose to include those characters?

The novel does have an element of the speculative or the fantastical; my roots are science fiction, after all. And I thought it would be dramatically, emotionally satisfying if, on his deathbed, Darwin could learn that the pieces of the theory of natural selection that were, for him, missing — that he correctly identified as gaps in the theory — were going to be discovered by subsequent generations. So I’ve got an alternative expedition, trying to discover Noah’s Ark as a corroboration of scriptural revelation, and they’re headed to Turkey at the same time that Chloe Bathurst and company are trying to get to the Galápagos. One member of the expedition has to stay behind in Constantinople, and enters a hookah den where hallucinogenic hashish is being served. This has the effect of him being visited by travelers from the future, getting to blow hash with these three figures, and they provide the three missing pieces.

In the case of Mendel: his tremendous, almost counter-intuitive insight into genetics; the fact that our somatic cells lead lives independent of our germ cells and there would be such a thing as hereditary units that can dominate other hereditary units. And suddenly, the mystery of why you’re as likely to have your aunt’s eyes as your mother’s eyes was revealed.

Teilhard de Chardin, while he carried evolution into teleological realms — where he anticipates Francis Collins — was nevertheless an accomplished paleontologist and was part of the expedition which found Peking Man. Darwin’s theory predicts fossil hominids, that we would discover the skulls of our ancestors. Not our Neanderthal ancestors, people knew about Neanderthals in the Victorian era, but going back millions of years. So Darwin hears on his deathbed about Teilhard’s skulls.

And finally Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to Watson and Crick unraveling the structure of the DNA molecule; it’s sometimes forgotten that what James Watson pilfered from her files was not simply the pictures, but her understanding that the phosphate chains of the DNA molecule were anti-parallel, and this strongly suggests a double-helix. Rosalind Franklin was famously, and notoriously, ignored and forgotten. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared their Nobel Prize; they did not even mention her from the podium.

And it’s because she was a woman that she was ignored.

No question that she was not taken seriously. If you read James Watson’s book, called The Double Helix, while it offers many fascinating insights into how scientific research actually progresses and what an all-too-human enterprise it is, he takes such a sardonic, childish, and sexist view of Rosalind Franklin that you want to throw the book across the room.

In the section where Teilhard de Chardin is talking, he says in passing, “Under some circumstances the Vatican would again be obliged to exile me.” What is the story behind that?

This was a time when the Catholic Church was not reconciled to Darwin. They’ve done better in recent generations, although there’s still more work to do. He was almost kicked out of the Jesuit Order, given his passion for evolutionary theory. I think the Holy Office, which is the euphemism for the Inquisition, regarded him as a borderline heretic.

Here I’ll give both Teilhard and Collins a lot of credit: They were unequivocal in their belief that evolution had occurred on this planet; that the theory of natural selection accounted for the transmutation of species in a way the book of Genesis never begins to do.

But Teilhard took it into this mystical, teleological realm, where we are a transitional species, which Darwin would have agreed with, but not in the sense that Teilhard meant it: We are transitional in that we are on our way to rendezvous with the cosmic Christ and all human minds are going to meld and the consciousness that we enjoy will seem feeble compared to the transcendent chorus of our eventual fusion with the divine. It’s very clever and satisfying in a kind of intellectual way, but as I said, it doesn’t seem to describe the world that we’ve actually inherited.

Speaking of this conflict between the Church and reality, there’s this line in the book where you say, “When the Bishop of Panama stumbled upon Galápagos in 1535, he thought he had found the Devil’s pied-à-terre.” Is that a true thing?

Yeah. The Galápagos Islands are an inverse paradise; I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen enough documentary footage, and I’ve read Herman Melville’s long essay called “The Encantadas,” in which he makes it seem like a bleak, lunar, desolate place. Melville said the primary sound you hear is a hiss. It struck people as Hell on earth. There’s a wonderful irony in that; that what seems to be the truth of our origins emerged from a place that could not be more materialist, in a sense; could not be more naturalistic.

How did you go about researching the Galápagos? Did you discover anything in the course of your research that really struck you, or changed the way you thought about it?

One thing that’s true historically is that people were always trying to start utopian communities there. There was some notion that it was a paradise, and then people were subject to rude awakenings when they did attempt to cultivate the soil. But when I have a Mormon colony on Charles Isle, that doesn’t map onto absolute historical reality; there could have been settlers from the Church of Latter Day Saints in that zone.

You have a lot of fun in the book with this idea that the Book of Mormon is a really boring book; I have to believe that was inspired by Mark Twain’s famous line that it’s “chloroform in print.”

I’ve forgotten that; that’s a great line.

Is there anything you want to say about your treatment of Mormonism and this odd idea that the native peoples are descendants of the lost tribe of Israel?

As I understand the Mormon argument, the Americas — both North and South — were populated by Israelites; that there was a migration from the Holy Land to the New World aboard barges. There’s not much archaeological evidence for that, but the other thing I will say about my use of the Mormons is that it does antedate the famous musical The Book of Mormon. People might, in retrospect, think I was plagiarizing that work, but I definitely had written those scenes long before I heard of the musical, which I haven’t seen. But it sounds like a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, we’re getting pretty short on time here and there’s a lot of stuff in this book I’ve tried to cover, but you can just barely scratch the surface. So people should go check out the book if they’re curious about this kind of stuff. There’s this section from Darwin’s writings that you quote throughout this book that I really like; I was wondering if you could read this bit from the end of On The Origin of Species.

“Thus, from the war of nature, from the famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

And you said that, in one edition of your books, they added some God stuff into that?

This is probably of a piece with the discussion we were having earlier about how the Scopes Trial was not the beginning of a triumph for Darwinism but really resulted in textbook companies being terribly afraid to bring this incendiary material into the classroom. The edition of The Origin of Species that I first read includes in its final beats, “There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one . . .” That’s why it’s been so difficult for this idea to get traction; people always have to drag God back into the argument.

Well, I think that it’s an important argument, and I appreciate you doing your part to stick up for our side here.

You’re very welcome, and I intend to keep fighting the good fight.

We’ve been speaking with James Morrow, and his new book is Galápagos Regained. Thanks so much for joining us.

You’re very welcome, Dave. This was a lot of 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: May 2015

Sunil Patel

Revision
Andrea Phillips
Ebook/Print-on-Demand
Fireside Fiction Company, May 2015
240 pages

The charm of Revision can be encompassed in one of my favorite lines: “Honey, I was just wondering if your website changes reality.” How do you ask the boyfriend who just dumped you if editing his Wikipedia-like website to say he asked you to marry him actually made him propose? Mira never had to ponder questions like this before; all she wanted was to make it on her own without the help of her wealthy family. But she got involved with the creator of Verity, and he doesn’t know what she’s done. If she really did what she thinks she did. Now Mira has very confusing relationship issues, but she’s also curious about the powers of Verity. With Revision, Andrea Phillips cleverly balances the story of a woman trying to carve out her place in the world with the story of a woman trying to save that very world.

At first, the book seems like a light, fun read. Mira is a likable heroine, and I love her initially bewildered take on Verity. It does seem a bit ludicrous, but we, the readers, know it’s for real, so it’s okay that it hangs in the background for a while as we meet the people in Mira’s life: her coffee shop bosses, a gay interracial couple both named Joe; her longtime best friend, Eli; her mother and father, eternally disappointed that she isn’t living up to her potential; the mysterious, possibly homeless Indian woman named Chandra who tells her that Verity is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Wait.

Once Mira gets wind of the sinister side of Verity, the book becomes very hard to put down. Can she trust this woman? Can she trust her fiancé? If this major corporation has the power to literally change the world, what are its plans? Thankfully/disappointingly, Revision never goes full-on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with its take on altering reality. While I would have loved to see what would happen if Mira simply wrote, “And then a dragon attacked Manhattan!,” Phillips establishes rules early on to limit Verity’s power to prevent Mira from rewriting reality over and over to escape any consequences. Oh, believe me, there are consequences. Fatal consequences.

As Mira learns more and more about Verity, the science fictional elements become more pronounced, and the story begins to read like a conspiracy thriller, as if the book itself has undergone a revision at the genre level. Yet it never loses its emotional core, which is Mira’s development and growth: By the end of the book, she is not the woman we meet in the first chapter, and we understand how and why she got there. I liked this book, but I can’t be sure that Andrea Phillips hasn’t edited reality to make me say that. Edit your reality and give Revision a look yourself.

An Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-1595148032
Razorbill Books, April 2015
464 pages

When the Martial Empire’s Masks slaughter Laia’s grandparents and take her brother prisoner, Laia seeks out the aid of the Resistance, who force her to go undercover as the slave of the Commandant — a woman who makes Cersei Lannister look like a kind, loving mother. When Elias, a Mask himself, makes plans to desert the military, he’s forced into a contest to select the next Emperor that makes the Triwizard Tournament look like a trip to Disneyland. If one or both of these characters make it out of An Ember in the Ashes alive, it’s going to be a miracle.

I am in love with the narrative structure of this book. Sabaa Tahir deftly interweaves the stories of Laia and Elias in a way that makes you feel like you’re reading two books in one. Laia has a single goal: spy on the Commandant and gather information so that she can gain her brother’s freedom. Elias has a single goal: survive the Trials so that he can become Emperor and make his own freedom. Tahir alternates chapters such that my thought process as I read was like this: “Aargh! I need the next Laia chapter n — OH YES THE NEXT ELIAS CHAPTER YES!!” And despite the capslock, what’s most impressive is that both stories are equally compelling; at no point was I ever bored by either story. Yes, the characters do meet, and their fates are indeed intertwined, but Tahir does a great job making each narrative stand on its own.

Just as Tahir blends the two narratives, she mixes two cultures. Most of the worldbuilding takes its cues from ancient Rome, a brutal empire with Legionnaires and Centurions. But the supernatural elements come from Arabian mythology, ghuls and jinns and efrits. The dark-skinned Elias came from the desert, raised by Tribesmen, and he has heard the stories, but Laia, a Scholar, believes them to be just that. I wish the supernatural aspects of the book had been explored more; they are absolutely key and essential to the story but don’t get much focus, except for the mysterious Augurs, immortal soothsayers who hold power even over the Commandant, who is ruthless, merciless, heartless, soulless . . . and other kinds of -less.

Like City of Stairs, my favorite book of last year, An Ember in the Ashes pulls together several elements into one. It’s an epic fantasy with the fate of the entire Empire on the line. It’s a spy novel where the consequences for failure range from losing an eye to being raped. It’s a military thriller where soldiers wield scimitars. It’s a coming-of-age story where friendship and loyalty will be tested. It’s also a romance, though that’s one of the weaker aspects of the book; various characters are attracted to each other and I liked how that complicated their dynamics, but only one pairing felt like it had real weight to it. Most of all, An Ember in the Ashes is entirely gripping from start to finish. Though it’s meant to be a standalone, Tahir leaves the door open for a sequel, ending on the perfect note.

Persona
Genevieve Valentine
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-1481425124
Saga Press, March 2015
320 pages

In the near future, diplomacy will be handled by Faces, men and women chosen less for their political acumen and more for their public appearances and willingness to vote how they are told to vote. They will be hounded by snaps, paparazzi looking for the most salacious images to sell to the highest bidder. Genevieve Valentine’s vision of the future is not too far off from the present.

Suyana Sapaki, a Peruvian of Quechua descent, represents the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation in the International Assembly. She’s no rising star; in fact, she’s on thin ice with her bosses. Daniel Park, a Korean, steals a camera to capture what he hopes will be a career-making shot of her beginning a politically approved relationship.

And then someone tries to assassinate her.

“Run,” says Suyana, and they do. They’re uneasy allies, and they don’t trust each other. As Suyana and Daniel engage in Parisian spyjinks, Valentine loads her narrative rifle with worldbuilding clues, though they don’t all quite click. Then she pulls a trigger: Like a sniper, she’s been biding her time, and suddenly you, the reader, are hit with a lethal bullet of awesome. You don’t get a moment to catch your breath because neither do the characters.

The paradox of Persona is that I wanted to read quickly because it was so thrilling, but I wanted to read slowly to absorb all the information. The prose is not dense; rather, it’s lean and taut, with much implied in few words. I wanted to savor every word. Some of my favorite sections were flash fiction-like lists that succinctly and powerfully conveyed character or plot.

That a political thriller succeeds in both being thrilling and having complex political maneuvering is good, but what elevates Persona is the depth of its characters. Both Suyana and Daniel have conflicted loyalties. Suyana wants to do what’s best for her homeland yet must follow the IA line for fear of losing her position of power. Daniel wants to exploit Suyana as an asset yet cares about her as a person. Valentine gives us both their POVs, and I love how they read each other’s body language, interpreting meaning so that we learn about them from what they learn from each other. They’re both informed by their pasts, and Valentine often puts a flashback right after a moment of high tension because she knows we want to know more, more, more about who these people are.

I also wanted to know more, more, more about the general political system, but I felt like what Valentine had done was craft this world and then send us through a thriller plot that allows you to put together everything yourself, if you’re not too busy fearing for the characters’ lives. Genevieve Valentine owes me a manicure for crafting such a nail-biter. In the world of Persona, you shouldn’t trust anyone, but this is the world of Lightspeed, and you should trust me: You want to read this book.

Hit
Delilah S. Dawson
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-1481423397
Simon Pulse, April 2015
336 pages

Hit takes an absurd yet frighteningly plausible premise — Valor National Bank pays off the national debt, essentially buying the USA, and now sends teenage assassins to debtor’s doors with three options: collect, recruit, or kill — and spins a tense, disturbing yarn. Patsy Klein has ten people to kill in five days or her mother dies. In the first chapter she shoots a man dead point-blank, and things don’t get any better for her from there, especially since the last name on her list is that man’s son. And he is cute.

Delilah S. Dawson keeps the tension high throughout as Patsy makes her way down her list, hoping every single time that her target will take the offer and she won’t be forced to kill them. Each encounter is unique, with its own set of challenges and setbacks, and the whole ordeal is complicated by the boy whose father she killed. A romance develops, but it’s understandably messy. Most of the book is a claustrophobic two-hander, an isolated narrative that acknowledges the outside world but doesn’t engage with it completely, except to kill more people.

The casualness with which Patsy dispatches her targets is unsettling, and while she does struggle with the fact that she’s killing people, she hardens quickly, believing deep down that these rich people with their unchecked spending deserve what they got. Like Katniss Everdeen, another teenage girl forced to kill against her will, Patsy comes from the poor part of town, and there’s an undercurrent of class war revenge fantasy, plus a revolt against the idea that the sins of the past generation must be paid by the children. Yet Patsy is not a cold-blooded professional killer; she’s an ordinary girl whose hobby is yarn bombing, a rebellious act of beauty and creation, not destruction. Given all that, I expected to feel more of a loss of innocence each time Patsy took another life, but while I winced internally for her, she didn’t seem as affected as I was. It was hard to know what to make of her character, but in the end I believe she’s defined by the wish she presents at the beginning of the book: “I want to survive the next five days.” Patsy will do what she needs to do to survive, period.

Hit is a grim book, but structuring it around the hit list makes it difficult to stop reading. As Patsy checks off names, she discovers there’s more to Valor and her mission than she thought, but, unfortunately, most of those loose ends are left hanging for the second book in this duology. This book, however, offers plenty of assassination, action, romance, and intrigue to whet my appetite for the conclusion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place, Fireside Magazine, and The Book Smugglers. He loves to create new stories, but he also loves introducing people to stories he loves. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

Artist Gallery: Li Shuxing

Li Shuxing was born in 1983 in Cangzhou, Hebei Province, China. He graduated from East China Normal University. He works as a videogame concept artist and illustrator. He currently lives and works in Shanghai, China. Visit blog.sina.com.cn/u/1771750633 to view more of his works.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Li Shuxing

Henry Lien

The most striking thing about your work is the massive scale. It is almost dizzying to look at some of your works full-screen. However, despite the epic scale, it is still possible to see individual details in them, such as tiny flowers. Do the small details help create the sense of epic scale by anchoring the viewer somehow?

Although many individual details can be seen in my artwork when you zoom in, they are meant to be just parts of the artwork supporting the larger theme. I like to balance individual detail and larger atmosphere. I also put backstory into my artwork. Showing details of key points in the artwork helps me to suggest the backstories.

Your works are transporting because they focus so much on creating a sense of place. They are like photographs from the best amusement park never created. Is a sense of place a personal theme for you? Where does this fascination come from?

As a concept artist, it is hard to create everything strictly from imagination, so accumulating information is very important for me. I spend my spare time on books, music, movies, photographs, games, artwork, and comics. If I see something that moves me, I will record and collect it. I put it into my “warehouse of inspiration” for when I need it.

Your work seems to glide effortlessly along the twin axes of Western/Eastern and fantasy/science fiction. Do you consciously decide where a work is going to fit, along these two axes, before beginning to draw?

I like to try different styles and themes. Challenge is the best way to improve myself. I like to create a whole “world view” before starting on a painting. The “world view” determines my theme and style, and helps me to maintain a consistent feeling during the process of creating that painting.

Talk to us a little bit about technique. Is what we are looking at entirely digital? It can be hard to tell, especially because there is a lot of warmth in the images that conveys a hand-drawn, analog feel.

It was painted by computer. However, I like to learn things from other kinds of artwork, such as the thickness of oil painting, the lens perspectives of comics, the light and shadow of movies. I mix them all into my artwork.

What are some of your influences as an artist? Fine art, illustrators, books, mythology, films, amusement parks, toys, games?

They all affect me. I like to collect different kinds of artwork to make myself “level up” in mind and conscious. I also like to see original artwork in museums. There’s such a different viewing experience between seeing something in a book and seeing the original work.

What is your dream project?

I hope to just keeping making my art and learning more to increase my abilities. I would be interested in focusing more on oil painting and stage design.

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 henrylien.com.

Author Spotlight: C.C. Finlay

Sandra Odell

“Time Bomb Time” has a clean, immediate start with a series of sensory impressions — the “sharp scent of ozone,” the bump of a shoulder, the impressions of the smell of grunge, the “formaldehyde smell of stale Red Bull.” These things serve not only to establish the setting, but to establish the intimate intensity that will drive the story forward as time re-ravels and un-winds. As a writer, how conscious are you of creating such immediate impressions as a means to capturing the readers’ imaginations?

It’s important in every story. Any one of those things can be the detail that provides sensory resonance for a particular reader and draws them into the present moment of the story. But I think it’s especially important in a story like this one, which is mostly conversation, not just as a way to keep the story grounded and give it some physicality, but as a way to signal Hannah’s reactions and keep the reader connected with her experience.

Hannah is approachable, intelligent, and engaging. A young woman struggling with the dregs of a past relationship, a second-generation Arab, and running from the shackles of misconceptions and prejudice that people insist she wear. What are your thoughts on the ongoing cry for identity and inclusion in genre literature, and those voices intent on drowning it out?

We need more inclusiveness and representation in genre fiction as an accurate reflection of our world, not just as it is now, but the way it’s been and the way it’s going to be. Fighting against inclusiveness not only puts you on the wrong side of history, it also puts you on the wrong side of wrong.

In this story, Hannah’s not just an Arab-American, but an Arab-American Christian. Her experience is very freely based on a family of Syrian Christians that I knew. She doesn’t fit into one of America’s pernicious little identity slots. Having other people thrust their perceptions on her and not respect her own complex identity or desires is a problem she has to constantly deal with. Nolon says he cares about her, but both his needs and his politics say something else.

The story’s repetition of dialogue and descriptions are spectacular and subtle at once; in fact, they are the story. The flow is so natural that is invites the reader to step out of the story to put together the missing pieces. What inspired this play on words and perceptions?

I first got the idea for this story back in 2003 or 2004. I remember only because in the first drafts, the character who would become Nolon was protesting one of Bush’s re-election campaign speeches. That’s so long ago I don’t remember the exact origin of the idea any more. But it was one of those ideas that, once it got hold of me, wouldn’t let go.

Back then, I workshopped the story at OWW (the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror) and I submitted it to a couple places, including Fantasy & Science Fiction, where I’m now the editor, but I didn’t have the skills yet to make it work. The first half of the story didn’t flow smoothly and nobody could tell what I was trying to do. It just confused people. So I put the story aside and every couple years I would pull it out of the trunk and take another run at it. At one point I put every paragraph on an index card and sorted the index cards different ways trying to find a sequence that worked. I don’t think there’s a single sentence in here that survived untouched from the first draft. Maybe “pop.” “Pop” is probably still the same.

Many of your books and stories are about subverting expectations and dominant paradigms, whether through the styles of writing or the nature of the plot. Traitor to the Crown is a wonderful example of taking the known and turning it upside down. What is it about turning the world on its ear that appeals to you as a writer?

On my best days, I want to change the world. To change the world, you have to change people’s perceptions. Fiction encourages empathy. If it’s done well, it gives fresh perspectives and undermines preconceptions and prejudices. It creates opportunities for people to reflect and have their own revelations. I can’t ever not think about that when I write.

Your short stories range from chilling and serious to the delightfully silly. If you could go back and offer the younger C.C. Finlay a spot of writing advice, what would it be?

Forget everything else and learn to write big commercial fantasy.

Congratulations on your recent appointment as the new editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Every editor has left his or her own mark on the magazine. What do you hope to add to F&SF that will carry it into the future?

F&SF has a unique position among genre magazines in that it has always published the widest range of stories. Not just fantasy and science fiction, like in the title, but horror and weird fiction and alternate history and stories that mix genres. No other magazine has been doing anything like that for nearly as long. The first thing I did as editor was introduce electronic submissions, reducing barriers and making it possible for the best writers anywhere in the world to send stories with a few clicks of a keyboard. Other magazines, especially online magazines, already do this, but it’s a new step for F&SF. In just the first few issues and months, we’ve already published or bought stories from writers in China, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa, in addition to the usual suspects (US, Canada, and Great Britain). So I hope that I add a wider diversity of voices to go with the diversity of stories, and carry on the F&SF tradition that way.

What’s next for both C.C. Finlay the author, and C.C. Finlay the editor?

I’m writing the answers to this interview in early March. Analog will be publishing my new short story “The Empathy Vaccine” sometime soon. Besides that, I need to get cracking and finish some more work to send out into the world. By May, when this sees print, I better be on that. And my wife, Rae Carson, has a new historical fantasy about the California Gold Rush, called Walk on Earth a Stranger, coming out this fall; so I’ll also be helping her to get ready to travel and promote that. Meanwhile, getting up to speed as editor of F&SF has been taking most of my energy. By the time this is published, I’ll be finished putting together the July/August issue, working on September/October, and looking ahead to the cover stories and issues for early next year. That feels like plenty of next for now.

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: Annie Bellet

Robyn Lupo

What element was it that got “Goodnight Earth” going for you?

I liked the idea of a proto-ring forming in the sky because of how I blew up the moon in the two former stories. I wanted to write this story to stand apart from the others and set it much further in the future. I also have had the idea of genetically modified super-soldier children bouncing around in my head ever since I saw Dark Angel on TV way back when. I wanted to do my own take on it and felt that given how things might shake out with my apocalypse, this was a good setting for that idea to get some legs.

The setting showcases a post-apocalyptic American South; what prompted this narrative choice?

I liked the idea of a character stuck on a river. Plus, through looking at loosely realistic projections of what might happen if the moon exploded, I realized it was possible for the weather and oceans to be very volatile. The American South seemed like it would be a dangerous, but potentially still better-than-other-places location to live. And I liked the Mississippi river, since it is such a main artery for the USA. I could picture new settlements and old surviving cities returning to using shipping to get people and goods moved around.

Karron chooses not to help the Children, then changes her mind quite deliberately to save Ishim, then later chooses not to choose. What drew you to want to show choices in these ways?

She chooses not to choose? I guess I didn’t see it that way. She decides to leave the river, which is a huge thing for her. She’s been drifting through her life, trying to be something she isn’t. Every story of mine in this Triptych has been, at its core, about a woman making a choice. I continued that theme for Karron.

What’s next for you? You’ve worked in a variety of mediums; do you have a favourite?

Novels forever. I mean, I’ll still be writing short fiction from time to time, but my future is full of fantasy novels. My favorite medium, though? Novellas. I feel like my real strength and happiness is in works that are fifteen to twenty-five thousand words, but alas, my cats and husband like food, so I’ll be writing mostly novels for the rest of my life probably.

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: Seanan McGuire

Lee Hallison

There is a lot of anger and grief in this story, in the characters’ desperate attempts to save the wilderness. The Pacific Northwest is the perfect setting where, as the story says, “the trees were still green and the rain was still coming down.” How did you come by your love for the environment around this part of the country?

I really didn’t. My best friend lives in the Pacific Northwest, and all logical projections of sea level increase and weather pattern changes highlight it as one of the areas where things will remain very much the same — which is why they’re likely to get flooded by those of us not lucky enough to already live there. I much prefer Northern California, but we’re already toast.

Did you do extra hiking or visiting forests to research this story?

I am actually virtually unable to walk right now, which sadly made that not an option.

Is there significance in choosing an owl for the focus of the main character’s attempt to save the wilderness?

My friend Amal took me to the Scottish Owl Centre, just outside of Glasgow, so I was really thinking about owls. They’re amazing. Owls are amazing and Amal is amazing and so I figured I should focus on owls for a little bit.

Toward the end, the main character questions herself, a surprising twist. To wonder whether she was doing the wild creature a favor took the story to a new level. Did her ambivalence surprise you as well, or had you planned all along that she might not be doing the best thing in spite of her desire to help?

I have been involved with wildlife rescue and preservation for my entire life. These questions are always a big part of the work we do. They have to be answered, or they endanger everything.

What can your readers look for next from you?

So very many things! The best way to keep track is by checking my bibliography, located at seananmcguire.com.

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: Sean Williams

Patrick J. Stephens

“Ghosts of the Fall” was originally published many years ago. How do you think the themes have changed or evolved over time? Which character do you most identify with now as opposed to then (if not the same)?

The first draft of this story is dated October 1991, which shocks me because that means I was half my present age when I wrote it. Where did all those years go? It’s so odd to sit here, remembering my half-self writing characters like Kris and Max, who seemed impossibly ancient then but now feel like contemporaries. It’s more depressing to see how many of the themes of this story are still current: the consequences of environmental degradation and war, patriarchy and the violent means it pursues to retain power, the costs of survival . . . I guess it’s the last that has stuck with me down the years, from the older Hogarth’s perspective. It wasn’t my intention to write a parable about the life of a writer, but that’s the meaning this story has taken on for me personally. The earlier me who wrote this story had some idea that the writing life was hard, but if he had known just how hard it could be, he might have given up and gone back to studying accountancy. If I could talk to him now, what would I say? Nothing that he hadn’t already put down in writing, so he would find it later on his own. Is it really worth it? Yes. Yes, it is.

You won the Writers of the Future contest and now serve as a judge for the same. Has this changed your perspective of “Ghosts of the Fall,” meaning do you look at this story differently now than you did when you first started writing it?

I won a third prize in the WOTF with this very story, and in a very real way that changed my life. Not only did it prove that persistence pays off (this submission was my tenth, and led to my first pro publication in the US), but it opened some serious doors, thanks to the workshop I attended in LA as part of my prize. I had never connected with a writing scene in any real way before. To say that it was revelatory to be surrounded by people who didn’t just get what I was trying to do, but were trying to do it too, would be an understatement. Looking back on that experience doesn’t make me see the story in a different way, or even my baby writer self, but it does make me look twice at some names who were also in my year. Elizabeth E. Wein. Eric Flint. Stoney Compton. Karawynn Long. It’s hard to imagine that they were once as naïve as I was! Or maybe it was just me who was naïve. I do know that I came home full of writer fuel, and the tank hasn’t run dry yet.

You have an established history in music, having started at a young age. What do you feel this may have brought to your writing, whether it be how you approach a story or what you include in the narrative?

I’ve always squinted at writing through the lens of music: the rhythm and timbre of the words, the resonance of certain story-telling components, the way structures from one form map onto another, and so on. The comparison comes instinctively to me, but that’s not the only level on which I engage with music while writing. Some writers obsess about the food their characters are eating, or the plants they’re tripping over. With me, it’s the music and sounds they’re encountering along the way. It’s a part of the environment that I notice, so they do too. I have to remind myself sometimes that there are other facets of a scene apart from the soundtrack and the Foley. Of course, I love to listen to music as I write (quick plug for Steve Roach, whose soundscapes have sustained me almost as far back as “Ghosts of the Fall”). Possibly the most obscure way I’ve engaged with music is throughout Astropolis, my last space opera series, in which I had a character speak solely using the lyrics of Gary Numan. A labour of love, but also a significant challenge, because that’s what it always comes back to. To paraphrase Hogarth, it’s worth it sometimes because it’s hard, not despite it.

What might we be seeing from you in the near future?

I’ve been experimenting with flash fiction lately. It’s a form I’ve enjoyed reading in the past but I hadn’t seriously tried my hand at until a couple of years ago. Partly that was because of the promotional work I was exploring for the Twinmaker series — short, self-contained pieces that explore the world and its characters beyond anything than the novels can meaningfully grapple with — but also because I’ve just come to like it. You can conduct experiments in this form that would never be sustainable in or suitable for a commercial novel. It’s a way of creatively stretching the wings, and is in its own way more challenging than anything I’ve set my hand to.

Anyway, I have some coming out in Galaxy’s Edge, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Daily SF, plus several other stories and novellas set in the Twinmaker universe, which concludes with Hollowgirl in November (called, appropriately, Fall in Australia). I guess at some point I’ll have to stop writing stories about matter transmitters, but that probably won’t be anytime soon.

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: Merrie Haskell

Lee Hallison

You’ve been retelling fairy tales for a while. Did you write fairytale mash-ups and twists from the beginning or did your career take a turn at some point?

My very first story, written when I was seven, was entitled, quite vaguely, “A Story About a Princess.” She had a dragon and a fiancé and no plot. I can’t think of what fairy tale I was referencing, but I clearly had already begun a certain pattern of story-telling at that point. I wrote constantly throughout my childhood and teen years, and did rewrite a few fairy tales then, but they were not at all my main focus, nor was that a plan for when I decided to pursue publication. I probably wrote a dozen short stories before coming up with “Huntswoman,” which is a Snow White retelling that was my first sale for professional rates, and likewise, I started many (and completed a few) other novels of various types before writing a Middle Grade fairy tale retelling. I think it’s some combination of luck and timing — and perhaps something also about how I’m best at my ease working inside an existing story structure rather than trying to come up with my own.

You revisited the East of the Sun, West of the Moon and Beauty and the Beast fairy tales in other stories, including your novel Princess Curse. What about these two stories resonates for you?

My parents were divorced when I was very young, and for a long time, I considered that rift in our family the central crisis of my life. I was fascinated with the process of falling in love and getting married and starting a family. I imagine lots of people are, and that’s why romance novels are so popular. I didn’t really believe in romantic love the way it was presented in stories. I spent a lot of time wondering if an arranged marriage (sort of epitomized by Beauty and the Beast) was better than marrying for love; I spent a lot of time wondering if once one fell in love, you would develop an unswerving dedication to the relationship, as in East of the Sun. Later, I realized those stories also have a lot of metaphors about integrating parts of your unconscious mind, and deeper resonances far beyond that than just the love story, and I think that’s why there’s been a staying power with those fairy tales for me. Ultimately, I think when I’m troubled by a story, I want to retell it, and I was always troubled the most by those.

What is your process for retelling and mashing up fairy tales? Do you start with the tales or with a character you are interested in exploring?

I did children’s theater growing up, which informed a lot of my writing process — reading lines out loud and trying to find the character in the words that were given to me morphed into just saying random weird sentences out loud, and then having a conversation with myself from there. It’s like playing pretend. It’s definitely a “and then people look at you funny” kind of thing. But there’s usually a core moment that pops up at me, and the story starts building itself around that. If I’m deliberately trying to retell a fairy tale at that point (which did happen for The Princess Curse), I start thinking of what works best — for that story (it started out as a short story), I had a scene near the end in mind, where the main character’s father asks her if she’s okay, and she lies and says she is. Then I started to wonder: Who was lying, why, etc. I had always been troubled by The Twelve Dancing Princesses, in particular how basically the princesses were complicit in the deaths of many people, and I already knew that I’d never be able to tell a story about that fairy tale where one of the princesses was a hero, and yet I wanted to tell a story about a girl. It started to come together from there.

My most recent book, The Castle Behind Thorns, was much less intentionally a Sleeping Beauty story. I even wrote a bit into the beginning where the main character knew the story about the thorns in Sleeping Beauty and thought there was a princess asleep in the castle, but he never found one. Just to make sure we all knew it wasn’t a retelling! And yet, the story totally is a Sleeping Beauty story. So obviously, I lie to myself about my intentions all the time. The few times I have deliberately set out to retell a fairy tale include “Sun’s East, Moon’s West” — I wanted to discuss the troubling aspect of shapeshifting husbands and how derailing of life plans a fairy tale interference can be — and also “The Girl-Prince” which is gender-bent Sleeping Beauty in space with a dungeon crawl, and which was exactly what I’d wanted to write from the start.

Lissa’s intelligence, kindness, and wit come alive through her distinctive voice. Do you have any advice on finding your character’s voice?

I re-read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle every few years, because I can’t think of another book that is as meaningful to me as that one for having taught me what voice entails. The first page of that book is absolutely amazing; the voice is everything. Voice is, to me, analogous to the way someone laying out panels in a comic would try to draw the eye across the page. It highlights, it points at what matters to the character speaking, it filters the world through their point of view. As I mentioned, I like talking to myself out loud. I start babbling aloud because I learn so much about the character so quickly — obsessions, interests, quirks, likes and dislikes, even information about the world they live in. I throw a lot of it away, but I keep a lot, too.

Who are your favorite characters from fairy tales?

I love a pragmatic and practical-minded character, or one who can be rewritten as such. The soldier in The Twelve Dancing Princesses is perhaps my favorite — world-weary and just ready to put an end to the nonsense. I also love the characters with secret, tragic pasts. Of course.

Is there a particular fairy tale you are working with for your next project?

I am currently writing a Beauty and the Beast Regency YA, as it happens, with aftershocks from seventeenth-century tulipomania instead of anything to do with roses.

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: Helena Bell

Laurel Amberdine

I know you draw from a lot of influences when crafting a story. Can you explain some of the ones you used in “Mouth”?

“A face like an imperfectly shaven tennis ball.”

Many years ago a friend of mine sent me a link to something called “The Surrealist Compliment Generator” and that was one of the compliments. It stuck with me and eventually, somehow, in that sideways way the brain works, it managed to turn itself into a story about a girl whose body disassembled itself once a month. The story didn’t go anywhere because I was a terrible writer at the time, but the images stuck with me and eventually the core of it got turned into a poem. Then a few months ago the first line of “Mouth” popped into my head, and a story about guilt and troubled relationships slowly started to lean on my continued fascination with take-it-apart-yourself anatomy. The body just has so many beautiful words associated with it. Is there anything finer than the phrase “suppurative wound”? P.S. Don’t look that one up; it’s not pretty unless you don’t know what it means.

Another influence would have to be the writer Kirsty Logan. I read her collection The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales and the way she picked an odd idea and both relied on and avoided the obvious metaphors associated with it resonated with me.

What was the hardest part of writing this story?

Anytime I put any sort of romantic relationship in a story, I want to run and hide. They’re foreign and weird to me, and I’m convinced that anytime I try writing about one everyone is going to think, “Yeah, she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about at all.” Which would be true, but it would be very limiting to any potential writing career if I let a silly thing like that stop me. After all, I also know absolutely nothing about removing a boy’s appendix while he sleeps, but that’s in there.

What’s up with the owl? Does it mean something or are they just cool?

Owls are awesome. When I was a kid, a friend of my father’s got his falconry permit and took in a few birds on his farm. They also become certified to take in injured raptors on behalf of the Wildlife service. For a while they had a small owl named Hootie and looking back on it, it seemed strange to me that I never thought it was strange that these people had an owl as a (pseudo) pet. I used to have a cockatiel; the parents of a boy I knew had a parrot. Why not an owl?

As for why owls are in this story, I knew I wanted to include the lobster (more about that next) and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we like to categorize people by what animals they randomly allow to live in their homes. We refer to dog people and cat people. Then you have horse people and farm people who take in all kinds. My brother had a pet iguana because my mother had a rule that all reptiles in the house needed to have legs.

Ann, being rather predatory herself, seemed more like an owl person than a cat person. And she reacts to it the way she reacts to all other things in her life: analyze, dissect, and eventually (to a certain extent), destroy. In an earlier draft of this story, there were indications that she’s actually taking apart the owl and putting it back together every time someone leaves. Which is one of the reasons she never gives it a name of its own: it’s never the same owl twice. An owl seemed like the only kind of animal that could keep coming back for that.

Also, going back to influences: The owl in The Secret of NIMH made a significant impression on me as a small child. I know lots of people see owls as these majestic, wise creatures, but all I can think of is “Big birds that eat bones. Bones.”

Was there a real person named Nerval with a pet lobster in Paris, and how did you find out about him? (Alternately, what inspired you to create such a person?)

Yes! Nerval is the pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie, a French Romantic poet from the mid-nineteenth century. No one is entirely sure if he actually had a pet lobster, or just claimed (in letters) that he did. As for how I found out about him, the conversation in the story actually happened, almost word for word, when I was driving a law school classmate home one day. He told me he’d always wanted a lobster for a pet (like Nerval, he said), but his mother said no girl would go out with him. But at the time he was telling me this story, he had a serious girlfriend and so he said now maybe he could get a lobster. And then I responded just as Ann does: What if she breaks up with you and then you have to eat your lobster, and this cycle just repeats, ad infinitum? Which pretty much tells you exactly what I know and think of relationships, hence my fear of writing about them.

When I started writing this story, that conversation came back to me, as it fit with my understanding of Ann. She’s a girl who thinks she knows what she wants and who she is. She thinks she’s relatively well adjusted and feels more sorry for her brother, and for the people who leave her, than she does for herself. Which is probably good, since if she finally realized the extent to which she is the author of her own misery, she probably wouldn’t take it well. There’s a great Tennessee Williams quote that a friend of mine has tattooed on her arm: “It’s hard to be human, but for God’s sake try.” Ann is trying, but she’s just not very good at it.

As an aside, the classmate and his (then) girlfriend are now married. They have a child. I do not know if its name is Lobster, or Nerval, but I doubt it.

What are you working on lately?

A novella. I do not know what it’s about, or what it’s called. But I’m in John Kessel’s novella writing workshop this semester at NCSU, so from now until April, that’s what I’m working on. Theoretically.

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.

Author Spotlight: R. C. Loenen-Ruiz

Patrick J. Stephens

You have attended a few speculative fiction workshops, according to your website. If you could take one piece of advice and offer it to your audience about the importance of speculative fiction, what would it be?

Last year, Adrienne Maree Brown came to Amsterdam and talked to us about Visionary writing. If there is one thing that I believe encapsulates the importance of speculative fiction, it’s this. Envisioning and imagining possible futures. What speculative fiction gives us is the room to explore possible solutions or possible outcomes should society continue on in the path that it chooses to follow.

I believe that speculative fiction is not only about ideas or about technology, but is how society and people interact with ideas and with technology. Advancements in science change us, movements in society change and transform existing structures, conflict arises from these changes; how do we deal with these things? Do we become tougher? Do we become harder? How do we continue to hold fast to human connections in a world that dehumanizes so many of us?

In embracing ideas and possibilities, we sometimes forget that human lives are involved, and I think this is what writers need to remember — your cool concept will not move the reader if there is no humanity in it.

You were born in the Philippines and now reside in the Netherlands. How do you think these two geographically unique locations have shaped your writing? Has it changed your perspective on “Breaking the Spell”?

When I was in the Philippines, I wrote and published a good amount of poetry and creative nonfiction. I had leanings towards the fantastic because the fantastic was always present in the place I grew up in. However, it wasn’t until I moved to the Netherlands that I fully embraced writing speculative fiction. I developed this heightened sense of awareness that the other half of the world is going to sleep when I am waking up. Being a migrant also means that in a certain sense, you live in the interstices. For years, I felt as if I were living life in the cracks, and this feeling often found its way into my work.

Someone once said to me that leaving the country, leaving your safe place, is a necessity if you are to embark on a journey of understanding. What living in this country has taught me is that human beings are so complex that we can never stick a label on someone and lump that person together with an entire group. I’ve learned to be wary of labels and generalizations.

Being away from home has also made me appreciate more keenly the struggles of migrant workers and the struggle of women in a mixed relationship. I understand how youth makes us angry and frustrated, how the -isms that we face in society can frustrate us. But my involvement in community and diversity work has also made me see that anger needs to be utilized properly — if all you’re doing is knocking the system, you’re not helping. We need to work together in order to change the system.

“Breaking the Spell” is like that conversation you have with yourself sometimes. It’s the past narrative and the present awareness talking to each other. There is just as much potency in a woman’s touch as is ascribed to a man’s touch — perhaps even more. And a woman’s kiss holds the power to ignite and to awaken in ways that a man’s touch cannot. Living abroad has certainly freed me from the constricting notion that women can only love men and if you love other women you need to be cured or have the devil driven out of you. It is a relief not to have to hide being attracted to other women too.

What would you say is the appeal of writing in the second-person POV? What is the most difficult?

I have written quite a number of stories using the second-person POV. None of this was calculated or planned and the point of view just came to me naturally. I tend to think a long time about a story before finally writing it, so by the time I sat down to write “Breaking the Spell,” it came very quickly. I see the second-person point of view as me, the author, in conversation with my character. I want to understand my character more and so I look at the character from this point of view and interrogate them in that way.

In some ways, I also see the “you” point of view as me addressing myself. This is what I want to say to myself. This are the things I want my self to look at and recognize.

I think that the important thing about using the second-person POV is to remember that you aren’t lecturing the reader. I also think that the sparsity of the language makes it easier to maintain a certain distance because the “you” form can be quite alienating to the reader.

What do you most identify with in “Breaking the Spell”?

I identify the most with the second-person POV character. I wanted to question the stereotype of the prince rescuing the maiden and in my mind, I’ve often rebelled against that. In the society I grew up in, there was this underlying narrative — not spoken out loud, but implied — that a woman who was unable to attract a man or who could not find a man was deficient in some way. “Breaking the Spell” is my rebellion against that narrative. It isn’t necessary for me to be with a man in order to be fully myself. I don’t need a man to rescue me. And women can and will go on their own adventures and do the rescuing.

What might we be seeing from you in the near future?

Bahamut Journal will be coming out with a story from me in June. This is probably one of the stories that I’m most excited about, as it represents what I call writing from the body. I started this piece based on the idea that our history is buried in our DNA and that we carry cultural memory in our subconscious. Using key words from Ilocano (a language I spoke as a child), I sought to awaken those narratives and bring them to the page. I think that the experiment was fairly successful and I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

Right now, I’m working on a novella version of “The Song of the Body Cartographer.” This takes place after the short story (from Philippine Genre Stories). I’ve been dreaming about this novella for a long time and I’ve written so many bits and pieces, so many versions and stories set in that world and now it’s finally coming together. I just finished the first half of the novella and I’m excited because it’s almost exactly as I see it in my head.

I’m also working on what I call the EN novel. My brother says this sounds like a more traditional science fiction novel as it deals with alien life forms. But this is a novel that I really want to complete. It deals with the age-old question of what makes us human. But it also investigates the issues of sexuality and gender. It’s set in an alternate Earth and the world is more or less fully formed, so I’m really looking forward to finishing work on it. Sometime later this year, the VanderMeers will be releasing The Bestiary, which also contains one of my stories, “Of the Liwat’ang Yawa and the Litok-Litok,” which was first published on The New Weird site.

I’d also really like to finish working on another story set in the world of the Alternates. All in all, 2015 is shaping up to be a full writing year.

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 e-book form and hard copy.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes

Sandra Odell

In the Kaslo Chronicles, you must manage character arcs during the story as well as through the overall series. How do you approach such an intricate knotwork of character growth?

Intuitively. I set the characters down in the arena and let them do what comes natural to them, bearing in mind that, as their creator, I want to see them struggle against each other and their situations. I give them agendas and then let them pursue their goals — although the goals may evolve as they do. I really don’t do much conscious thinking about who does what next. When I reach for it, there it is. Like walking a tightrope in the dark. I can’t see the cable, but I know it will be there when I put my foot down.

The opening exchanges at the beginning of “The Blood of a Dragon” hark back to images from works as diverse as Lovecraft and Howard to Phil Foglio’s popular comic, Buck Godot: Zap Gun For Hire, the presence of an immense being/creation trapped in a different reality. Here you not only address the creature itself, but also the realities of attempting to communicate with such a being. When you first envisioned the entity, how did you view such communications? Have those ideas changed over the course of writing the Chronicles?

When I first envisioned it, I didn’t know what it was. It was just this off-stage actor with immense power but confined to the Seventh Plane, though I didn’t know what or why. But I’ve always been moved by the plight of Prometheus, with Zeus’s eagle eating his liver, ever since I encountered him in the Heracles tale when I’d have been about ten or so. So that motif swam up from the depths of my unconscious and I worked it in. I’ve used it in other stories.

Over the course of the stories, you’ve had fun exploring the possibilities of different perceptions and spaces — geometries, as you will. What is it about such possibilities that appeals to you as a writer?

Since I was quite young, I have had this sense that the fourth-dimensional universe we inhabit is a kind of conjuror’s trick, especially the part about sequential time. If we could see reality as it is, rather than how we’re merely wired to experience it, we’d say, “Oh, well, of course.” Back when I used to take LSD, that sense was reinforced, because I got to see mundane objects in all their actual splendor. The feeling has stuck with me for almost fifty years now.

Egyptian, Celtic, Brit, and a splash of Slavic. What inspired the multiple layers of the magic system used in the story?

I’m using Jack Vance’s system, but I’ve thought about how it might work. Will is immensely important, and the ability to focus it using techniques involving sound and body position. There are things called fluxions that can be manipulated and made to cohere or clash, and out of those actions come the effects.

What’s next for Kaslo?

Don’t know. Could be another novel. Could be more stories. Maybe I’d jump ahead a few years/decades to give him time to reach his potential. And now it’s just occurred to me: In my Henghis Hapthorn novel, The Spiral Labyrinth, which mostly takes place on Old Earth a few centuries after the great change, there’s reference to a powerful thaumaturge named Albruithine, who settled much of the initial chaos and made it possible for ordinary folks to live their lives in some kind of peace and order. Kaslo might be Albruithine, if I decided to explore that business.

But I tend to take characters to the ends of their arcs of development and just set them loose. I feel I owe them a chance at happiness after all the crap I put them through.

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: Paul Di Fillipo

Jude Griffin

You wrote that “The Mill” is the most autobiographical of your stories — what impelled you to tell the story?

First off, allow me to thank Lightspeed and its talented creators for thinking highly enough of my story to feature it. This reprint policy is a fine program that brings back work from SF’s grand lineage for a new audience — not that I am bold enough to place my own story in any such illustrious company!

Seeing my father devote his whole adult vocational life to textile mills — first as a simple laborer before I was born, and then ultimately as an executive — was an incredible lesson in work habits, selflessness, passion, and even perhaps a bit of futility and inequality. Working summer jobs in the same mill myself further embedded the lessons. I was determined to fictionalize them some day. Then, before my writing career began, I read an introduction by G.R.R. Martin to one of his own stories, where he said, basically, that SF writers never featured working stiffs as protagonists. Ever since that bit of implicit advice, I have tried to use many lower-class average Joes and Janes as my heroes. Other examples might be my novel, Spondulix, and my story “Karuna, Inc.”

Why does Charley only lighten little Jemmy’s load by one pail?

This was an unconscious bit of writing on my part. In retrospect, it looks cruel or silly! Why didn’t Charley at least split the load fifty-fifty? Carry Jemmy on his shoulder, like a scene out of the film Boys Town! But you know what? I think I was inhabiting young Charley’s mind so fully, that I replicated what is an actual characteristic of kids. They can be uncaring, or if they make a generous gesture, it can usually be half-hearted or limited in its nature. I think it takes a fully mature mind to be utterly altruistic. And maybe at this point in time, Charley is a little full of himself and self-centered.

Much of this story could take place in our world: What does the science fiction element add?

I have often pondered on the exact quantity of fantasy or unrealness that must be added to a naturalistic narrative to turn it into pure genre. Suppose you had a story that was ninety-nine percent mimetic, but in one paragraph the protagonist indubitably saw an alien or a fairy. Does that make the whole story genre? I think it does, so powerful are the tropes of fantastika. But whether the story becomes a better one for that inclusion varies from case to case.

In my case, I knew there had been many previous tales, purely naturalistic, about the Victorian factory milieu. Child laborers, mill girls, rapacious owners, capitalism, etc. My experiences, delivered straight, so to speak, might have made a small addition to the canon, but not been revolutionary. But by blending the naturalism with a few speculative tropes, I felt I could increase the weirdness level without losing the real-life groundedness, and make the readers look with fresh eyes at a somewhat familiar type of tale.

The coda adds a sense of optimism that would have been lost had the story ended where the first draft did — why did your editor, and ultimately you, think it was so important to end the story differently?

My editor on this story was the invaluable Kim Mohan at Amazing. Sadly, Kim left the field long ago, and his presence is missed. He was a jolly, insightful partisan of all good writing. He had an intuition that I could extend the narrative past the original stopping point, and I instantly agreed. He did not dictate a direction, but I soon came up with one. I think the “big jump in time” technique is a highly profitable and essential gimmick in a lot of SF. It establishes the long view, the cosmic tone, and says a lot about progress and decadence, change and stability. The transience of individuals is sad but perfect. Their memory lives on, even if only in fragments, and new generations pick up the torch.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I am doing some planning for my next novel, which can be encapsulated in the rather silly title (NOT the real title!) Gravity Elves. It will focus on a world akin to ours in many degrees but where the physics and chemistry and math that we know is mediated by supernatural beings. In other words, meet the Sprites of Pi! Curiously enough, I think it will have some of the same feel as “The Mill.” I’m hoping the first chapter will serve as a standalone story that some magazine might publish, thus giving me some audience feedback on the whole crazy concept!

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.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

It’s our anniversary, and we’ve made another special double issue for you: Queers Destroy Science Fiction! We’ve brought together a team of terrific queer creators and editors, led by Guest Editor and best-selling author, Seanan McGuire. We’ll have eleven pieces of original science fiction by exciting SF authors: Susan Jane Bigelow (“Die, Sophie, Die”), Chaz Brenchley (“The Astrakhan, the Homburg and the Red Red Coal”), John Chu (“勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace)”), Felicia Davin (“The Tip of the Tongue”), Amal El-Mohtar (“Madeleine”), Kate Galey (“Emergency Repair”), K.M. Szpara (“Nothing is Pixels Here”), Jessica Yang (“Plant Children”), Tim Susman (“Two by Two”), Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (“Trickier with Each Translation”), and Rose Lemberg (“How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War”).

We also have a special flash fiction section curated by Hugo-nominated editor, Sigrid Ellis. We have flash from E. Saxey (“Melioration”), Stephen Cox (“The Lamb Chops”), Charles Payseur (“Rubbing Is Racing”), Claudine Griggs (“Helping Hand”), Erica L. Satifka (“Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 14, Written Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of All Mankind”), Eliza Gauger (“Mama”), Shannon Peavey (“Nothing Goes to Waste”), Bogi Takács (“Increasing Police Visibility”), Sarah Pinsker (“In the Dawns Between Hours”), Gabrielle Friesen (“Deep/Dark Space”), Gabby Reed (“Introductory Materials Part Two: A Brief History of Whaling with Remarks Upon Ancient Practices”), and JY Yang (“Letter From An Artist To A Thousand Future Versions Of Her Wife”).

Our nonfiction editor, Mark Oshiro, has brought us some incredible essays and articles, and we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights.

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, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Sarah Pinsker, Seth Dickinson, Carmen Maria Machado, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Sandra McDonald, Shaenon K. Garrity, Fred Van Lente, Linda Nagata, Matthew Hughes, Steve Hockensmith, Adam-Troy Castro, and Theodora Goss.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price) — what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

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 nine 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.