Editorial, August 2015

John Joseph Adams | 861 words

Welcome to issue sixty-three of Lightspeed!

We have some good awards news to share with you this month: Both Lightspeed generally and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically have been nominated for the British Fantasy Award! (Lightspeed is nominated in the Periodicals category, while WDSF is nominated in the Anthology category.) Huge congrats to Christie Yant and the rest of the WDSF team, and thanks to everyone responsible for selecting these nominations — it’s a huge honor! The winners will be announced on October 25 at FantasyCon 2015 in Nottingham, UK. You can find the full list of finalists at britishfantasysociety.org.

In other awards news, the World Fantasy Award nominations were also announced recently, and I’m pleased to report that I have been once again nominated in the “Special Award, Professional” category. I am extremely honored to be nominated again (now for the seventh time overall, including three Anthology nominations), and I will be in Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention (November 5-8) when the awards are presented, where I look forward to losing to Gordon Van Gelder in person. The full list of finalists is available at worldfantasy.org/awards.

And finally, this year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at Sasquan, the 73rd annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), which is being held August 19-23 in Spokane, Washington. As you probably recall, Lightspeed is again up for Best Semiprozine (which we won last year), and this year we also have a nominee in the Novelette category — “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. The Lightspeed team will be there in person and will report back in September after the convention. (And of course we will update you on social media as soon as the winner in our categories are announced.)

• • • •

Releasing this month is a new anthology I co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson called Press Start to Play. It includes twenty-six works of fiction that put video games  — and the people who play them  — in the spotlight. Whether these authors are tackling the humble pixelated coin-op arcade games of the ’70s and ’80s, or the vivid, immersive form of entertainment that abounds today, you’ll never look at phrases like “save point,” “first-person shooter,” “dungeon crawl,” “pwned,” or “kill screen” in quite the same way again. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play, which releases August 18, includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley, T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more.

And in September, look for Loosed Upon the World, the definitive collection of climate fiction. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope. Join bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future. Visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed to learn more; available September 15.

Then in October comes the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, part of the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy). It’ll be available starting October 6. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by Chen Qiufan (“The Smog Society”) and Sarah Pinsker (“And We Were Left Darkling”), along with SF reprints by Vandana Singh (“Life-pod”) and Vylar Kaftan (“Civilization”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sam J. Miller (“Ghosts of Home”) and Genevieve Valentine (“Given the Advantage of the Blade”), and fantasy reprints by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“To See Pedro Infante”) and Ursula Pflug (“Python”).

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 the celebrated author Kazuo Ishiguro.

For our ebook readers, we also have “Equinoctial” by John Varley as our novella reprint, along with novel excerpts from Zero World by Jason M. Hough and Finches of Mars by Brian W. Aldiss.

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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Loosed Upon the World, 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 seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Smog Society

Chen Qiufan, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu | 4,448 words

The Smog Society by Chen Qiufan
Art by Elizabeth Leggett

Publisher’s Note: This story will also appear in the climate fiction anthology LOOSED UPON THE WORLD edited by John Joseph Adams. Available September 15, 2015 from Saga Press. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/loosed.

Lao Sun lived on the seventeenth floor facing the open street, nothing between him and the sky. If he woke in the morning to darkness, it was the smog’s doing for sure.

Through the murky air outside the window, he had to squint to see the tall buildings silhouetted against the yellow-gray background like a sandy-colored relief print. The cars on the road all had their highbeams on and their horns blaring, crammed one against the other at the intersection into one big mess. You couldn’t tell where heaven and earth met, and you couldn’t tell apart the people either. Passels of pedestrians, dusty-faced under filter masks that made them look like pig-faced monstrosities, walked past the jammed cars.

Lao Sun washed, dressed, and got his kit. Before he left, he made sure to give the picture frame on the table a wipe.

He greeted the elevator girl, and the girl greeted him back behind a layer of mesh gauze. “It’s twelve degrees Celsius today with the relative humidity at sixty-four percent. Visibility is less than two kilometers, and the Air Quality Index of six-eighty indicates severe smog. Long-distance travelers, please be careful. Young children, the elderly, and those with respiratory illnesses, please remain indoors . . .”

Lao Sun smiled, put on his mask, and stepped out of the elevator.

On his light electric bike, he nimbly wove through the gaps between the crawling traffic. There were plenty of children banging on car windows hawking newspapers and periodicals, but no cleaners. This smog was here to stay for another couple of weeks. No point in cleaning cars now.

Through the goggles on his mask, he could just barely see the road for a couple dozen meters ahead. It was as if someone was standing above the city pouring dust down endlessly. The sky was darker than the ground, dirty and sticky. Even with the filter mask, you felt as if the smog could worm its way through everything, through dozens of layers of polymer nanomaterial filter membrane and into your nostrils, your pores, your alveoli, your blood vessels, and swim all over your body from there; stuff your chest full until you couldn’t breathe; and turn your brain into a drum of concrete too thick to stir or spin.

People were like parasites burrowed into the smog.

• • • •

On these occasions, Lao Sun always thought of old times with his wife.

“Oh Lao Sun, can’t you drive slower, there’s no rush.”

“Mm.”

“Lao Sun, stop at that store ahead, I’ll buy a bottle of water for you.”

“Mm.”

“Lao Sun, why aren’t you saying anything? How about I sing you a song? You used to like singing.”

“Mm.”

Lao Sun parked his bike at the roadside and entered the big fancy skyscraper with all the fancily dressed men and women going in and out. They were all wearing filter masks, saving them the trouble of greeting him. The building manager was polite to him, though. He told him one of the public elevators was broken, so the others were crowded. He should use the freight elevator in the back, although it meant climbing a few more floors.

Lao Sun smiled and said it was fine, although the manager couldn’t see that, of course.

He took the freight elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, then climbed the stairs to the open platform on the top floor. It made him pant and puff a little, but no matter. From the top of the skyscraper, he could better see the smog: The aerosolized particles that engulfed the city hung thick like protoplasm, motionless.

Lao Sun began to unpack his bag, taking out and assembling each intricate scientific instrument. He wasn’t clear on how they worked, but he knew how to use them to record temperature, pressure, humidity, visibility, particulate matter density, and so on. The devices were spruced-up versions of civilian-use models, less precise but much more portable.

He glanced northwest. He should have been seeing grand palaces and shining white pagodas, but today there was only the same murk as everywhere else.

He remembered how it looked in the fall, the red leaves dyeing the hillsides layer by layer, trimming the clear blue sky. The white towers and the falling leaves all reflected in the lake’s emerald surface: a tranquil airiness through which the cooing of pigeons drifted.

On that day, the two of them had sat in a boat at the center of the lake, rowing slow circles. The oars drew ripples that washed aside the fallen leaves.

Golden sunlight spilled on the water, glittering. She was covered in golden light, too.

“A rare thing, to have a peaceful day like this. Sun, sing something!”

“Haven’t sung in a long time.”

“I remember we went rowing here twenty years ago. A whole twenty years ago.”

“That’s right, Lao Li’s son is almost the age we’d been.”

“. . .”

“I — I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know what you meant.”

“I really didn’t.”

“This is pointless.”

“All right, if it’s boring we’ll go back.”

“He would have been ten by now.”

“Didn’t you say not to talk about this?”

“Sun, I still want to hear you sing.”

“Forget it, let’s go back.”

At the designated time, Lao Sun recorded the data, and then started packing up. He knew that at that moment there were more than a hundred individuals like him in each and every corner of this city doing the same thing. They belonged to a civilian environmental organization, officially registered as the “Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society,” unofficially known by the catchier moniker of “The Smog Society.” Their logo was a yellow window with a sponge wiping through the accumulated grime, leaving behind a patch of cerulean blue.

The Smog Society wasn’t as radical as some green groups, but it wasn’t the government’s cheering squad either. Its official status was unclear, its work low-key, its membership slowly and steadily growing. They sometimes appeared in the media, but only quietly and cautiously.

All groups had their own worldview and style, but not all viewpoints were acceptable.

The Smog Society only espoused what was acceptable: Aside from the biological dangers, smog also caused psychological harm — easily overlooked, but with far greater and longer-lasting consequences.

• • • •

Lao Sun hurried to the next sampling location. On his way, he saw some people with bare faces — manual laborers unable to afford masks. Their skin was much dimmer and grayer than the sky, suffused with an inky gleam like coarse sandpaper. They were constructing a completely enclosed skywalk to connect the whole of the central economic district together seamlessly so people wouldn’t have to go outside.

Lao Sun knew that antioxidant facial films were all the rage right now. Many women would apply a thirty-nanometer-thick layer of imported facial spray before putting on their masks. It blocked UV radiation and toxins, and would naturally shed with the skin. Of course, not everyone had a face precious enough.

If the facial spray had appeared a few years earlier, he would have bought it for his wife for sure. Just a few years earlier.

He shook his head. It felt as if his old wife was once again sitting behind him.

“Ai, Lao Sun, do you think the weather will get better tomorrow?”

“Mm.”

“This awful weather makes me feel all stifled — like there’s a rope choking me, getting tighter bit by bit.”

“Mm.”

“Lao Sun, how about we move somewhere else? Leave this place?”

“Should have left early, then. We’re standing by the coffin’s side by now. Where are we supposed to go?”

“That’s true, we should have left early. We should have left early if we were going to leave.”

“. . .”

He stopped the bike. This was a large stock exchange center, where every day a mix of young and old and of every color congregated to stare at the huge LCD screens suspended in mid-air, their expressions shifting with the rise and fall of graphs and numbers. It was a giant gambling den, where everyone thought themselves a winner, or a soon-to-be winner.

As usual, Lao Sun climbed onto the roof and began his measurements.

• • • •

Lao Sun vaguely knew some of the Smog Society’s philosophy, but not well. Maybe his rank wasn’t high enough. He’d joined the Smog Society for simple reasons — giving some purpose to his monotonous post-retirement life. Of course, by the time you lived to his age, you tended to understand that having a purpose in life wasn’t any more important than living itself.

One afternoon, he’d been dragged to some so-called psychological counseling course, located on the tenth floor of a rundown building where the elevator doors squeaked. He wasn’t interested, but he’d caved under his old coworker’s pleading and gone with him. At first he’d thought it was some Buddhist or Daoist lecturer spouting philosophy to con people into giving him money, but he discovered otherwise.

He first filled out a quiz that indicated that his depression level scored 73 out of 100. Out of all the attendees, he counted as below average.

The speaker smoothly drew his audience in. Some began to sob and wail, some threw chairs, others hugged each other tightly and revealed their most deeply hidden little secrets. Lao Sun had never seen anything like it. He didn’t know what to do. Someone patted his shoulder: a lady of about thirty, who could be considered beautiful, though not beautiful enough to move someone Lao Sun’s age.

“Sorry to bother you, but I saw your answer sheet. You mentioned the weather as a factor.”

“Mm. The smog.”

She introduced herself as the administrator of the Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society. He didn’t remember her name.

“You don’t seem to like talking. Something on your mind?”

“Mm.”

“Our association is recruiting volunteers right now. Maybe you’d be interested. Here’s our flyer.”

He’d wanted to say no, but he glanced at the flyer and a few words caught his eye. He accepted it.

“Maybe we can provide you with a new view of smog.”

“Mm?”

Lao Sun wanted to ask more, but she’d hurried away already. A specter flashed in front of his eyes at that moment: his wife. He looked at the flyer again. Smog Causes an Increase in City Residents’ Depression Rates.

So it began.

• • • •

The current consensus holds smog to be the product of industrial pollution combined with natural weather patterns. Automobile exhaust, industrial waste gas, and other forms of man-made particulate matter are caught in thermal inversions where the temperature of the air decreases with altitude, cold on top and hot on the bottom. An inversion layer forms 100 meters from the surface and closes over the ground like the lid of a pot. With no wind, pollutants in the city disperse too slowly and become concentrated near the surface. Combined with lack of precipitation, strong sunlight, and low humidity, the conditions promote photochemical reactions between pollutants to form smog.

As of now, there are no methods of prevention.

For Lao Sun, aside from bronchitis, acute emphysema, asthma, pharyngitis, strokes, and the other physical ailments, the most immediate consequence of smog was the sense of removal from the world. Whether you were dealing with people or things, you felt as though you were separated by a layer of frosted glass. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t really see or touch.

That the masks meant to protect from smog added a second layer was especially ironic. The detachment, the numbness, the estrangement, and the apathy now all had an obvious physical excuse for existing.

The city was cocooned. The people were cocooned.

As Lao Sun rode his bike, the highway overpasses wound overhead like giant dragons, alternating light and shadow. They widened the roads every year, but the traffic still grew more and more congested. Even so, all these people remained willing to squeeze themselves into their little cars, watch the endless lines crawl forward inch by inch. They hid in their four- or five-square-meter metal cans and kept a safe distance from the world and other people.

And so the air pollution worsened, too.

• • • •

At last he reached his final destination, a daycare called Sunflower.

Sunflower Daycare was built on a raised railway platform and looked like a giant glass greenhouse with children studying and playing on each floor. They didn’t need masks; the parents had to foot the bill for the expensive air circulation systems, but even so, looking at those healthy, rosy, bare faces crying or laughing, it seemed worth it.

At least they were still genuine. At least they still had hope.

Each time, Lao Sun would hungrily gaze at the children behind the glass, losing track of time. As he looked at these exposed souls romping and frolicking, another voice would sound, so close it seemed right next to him, so far it seemed decades in the past.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know.”

“No. You. Do. Not.”

“Fine, fine, let’s not argue. I promise you, five more years.”

“Five years! Can I still bear a child in five years?”

“There’re plenty of thirty-year-olds having kids nowadays. Our finances are only so-so, and with our surroundings a dirty mess like this, it would be unfair to the kid. We’ll work hard for another few years, and then we’ll go somewhere better to have a child, let them grow up somewhere nice.”

“You’re talking pie-in-the-sky, you always do.”

“Being able to do it well is a skill too. We’ll go to the doctor’s in the afternoon.”

“I want to hear you sing.”

“Sure! Whatever you want to hear.”

Lao Sun tasted salt in the corner of his mouth. Something had trickled down his face and between his lips.

Strange how the present seemed so blurry, when he could see and hear everything from his memories so clearly. Sometimes they’d play over and over in his mind. No wonder they said old people got nostalgic.

That conversation was decades old. When you’re young, money is important, a house is important, a car is important — everything is important — and yet you still end up neglecting the most important things of all. By the time you earn all your money and get all the things you ought to have, some things are lost forever. Lao Sun understood now, but he was already old.

And so far, no one had invented a time machine, or a pill to take away regret.

• • • •

Lao Sun had to submit his recordings to the Smog Society headquarters’ data analysis center, but he didn’t know how to use the internet, so he had to find Xiao Wang, one of his “smog buddies.” (That was how members referred to each other.)

Xiao Wang had joined the society half a year earlier than Lao Sun. He had a job during the day and spent his free time with the society. They were from the same hometown, so they ended up close to each other.

Xiao Wang seemed somewhat excited as he led Lao Sun to his office and had his secretary pour a cup of water. Then he asked, “So you still don’t know?”

Lao Sun shook his head, confused. “Know what?”

“Our association sent in the report to the government.”

“What report?”

“The research report about the smog!”

“Oh. Well, it’s not like we’ll get to see it.”

“Hey, I spend my spare time helping the Smog Society process data. I know the gist of the report. Just don’t go spreading it around.”

“Don’t worry. Who would I talk to?”

“You know the Smog Society’s central statement, right?”

“The thing about smog and mental illness? Who doesn’t?”

“Most people only know about the correlation between smog and mental illness, not the causation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you think you were just weather-watching, Lao Sun?”

Xiao Wang began to lay out the deeper theory. The Smog Society’s monitoring had three components. Lao Sun participated in the basic weather monitoring. In addition, at each sampling location, the psychological states of the relevant people were monitored. The exact method was unclear: maybe with miniature RFID chip sampling, maybe with the entrance security systems or networks, maybe using free goodies with questionnaires attached. Of course, the easiest and most accurate way was to pay the target population to download software that displayed survey questions to be answered at specific times. Either way, they managed. More secretly, they conducted laboratory experiments, researching aerosol distribution in the atmosphere, the electrosensitivity of organic hydrocarbons, bioelectric fields, physical manifestations of psychological conditions under different environmental circumstances, and other similar topics.

A tenet of statistics is using large quantities of long-term data to eliminate sampling biases and other sources of error.

All of this effort had one goal: creating a mathematical model of smog to examine the connection between aerosol systems and human psychological states, controlling for weather conditions.

They discovered that the bioelectrical fields generated by groups displayed coherence: the overlay of peaks and valleys caused the bioelectric field within a certain area to approach constancy. It was like the folk wisdom that fair and foul moods were both infectious. And these large-scale bioelectric fields, in turn, affected the distribution of aerosolized particles. Generally, the lower the psychological health score, the greater the density of particulate matter, and the more stable their formation — in other words, the thicker the smog, and the slower it dispersed.

They also found that within the PM distribution system were bands of greater density like ocean currents, mostly located along thoroughfares with severely congested traffic, flowing sluggishly, dissipating once the traffic eased to congregate in nearby areas with high population density.

The sampling locations in the central economic district and high-density residential areas showed PM densities significantly higher than the average in other sampling locations. These areas had the lowest psychological health scores as well. In contrast, areas with dense populations of teenagers and children had higher psychological health scores, and the air quality tended to be better. And at large stock exchanges, the psychological health score, the air quality rating, and the stock prices were all closely correlated.

Causation also went the other way: the smog lowered people’s psychological health scores. Therefore, barring major changes in weather, marauding cold fronts, or an increase in wind, the smog would continue to strengthen its grip.

Lao Sun listened dazedly to Xiao Wang’s explanation. He felt like he understood a little and not at all at the same time. Finally he said, “So smog is caused by how we feel.”

Xiao Wang clapped his hands. “I spouted all that drivel, and you summed it up in a sentence. Wow!”

Lao Sun said, “We used to love talking about the heart, not the brain. It’s the other way around nowadays.”

“We’ve modernized. We use science now.”

“Anyway, we won’t need to record the weather anymore?”

“Not necessarily. We have to see how the government responds.”

• • • •

Lao Sun said goodbye to Xiao Wang and returned home. There were still leftovers in the refrigerator, ready to heat and eat.

Ready to heat and eat. In that moment, he felt like he’d returned to that hot, humid night. The two of them lay side by side, unable to sleep.

“Lao Sun, do you think tomorrow will be a good day?”

“Mm.”

“I’ve had a couple of strange days. I keep dreaming about things from before, when we just met.”

“Mm?”

“The sky was always blue back then, and the clouds were white. There weren’t so many buildings. There were big paulownia trees on either side of the road, and when the wind blew their leaves would rustle, sha sha. You’d take me nice places on your bike. There weren’t so many cars back then, either. The roads were so wide and open you could see all the way from one side to the other. The sun wasn’t nasty. There were birds and cicadas. We’d ride to the city outskirts and lay down on the grass wherever we liked. It felt so good. Lao Sun, you remember, right?”

“Mm.”

“I also remember that you had so many entertaining tricks back then. You juggled, you played the harmonica, and you always wanted to sing me songs. I didn’t want to listen, and you’d chase after me singing, singing — what was that song again?”

“. . .”

“That’s right, I remember now. ‘Young Friends Gather,’ wasn’t it? Haha.”

“. . .”

“Lao Sun, tomorrow morning I want to go out for a while. I’ve put breakfast in the fridge for you, just heat and eat. Are you asleep?”

“. . .”

The next day, when Lao Sun woke, his wife had already left. He took out the meal from the fridge, heated it, and ate. The laundry from the night before still hung on the balcony. The sky was still gray.

She never came back.

Lao Sun suddenly panicked, like he’d never panicked before. He hadn’t panicked like this back then when he first saw her.

He remembered how he’d dug through his heart to find things to say, back then, while she replied so carelessly. He’d felt as frantic as an ant on a hot pot. Then they were going out, and there was no end to the back-and-forth. Then they married. Each attending to their own career, they’d had less time together, and less to say. They said a bit more only when they fought. His career alternately rose and fell, and she missed her best childbearing years. She started to nag; he started to hold his tongue. They fought, and they threatened divorce, but in the end neither of them could leave the other.

One nagging, the other silent, they’d passed so many years. It seemed that both of them had gotten used to it. If you weren’t meant to love each other, you wouldn’t be together, Lao Sun had thought. It wouldn’t be a half bad life, to be like this till the end. But almost at the finish line, she left.

Lao Sun felt like his heart emptied in that moment, deflated to nothing, like a burst balloon.

• • • •

A week later, the Smog Society disbanded. Some people from the government invited Lao Sun to have tea and “talk” but allowed him to leave afterwards.

Several of the organization leaders had disappeared, and the core members had also been “called in to talk.” When they returned, they said nothing. When they met smog buddies, they looked at them like strangers.

Rumors spread after that. Some said that the smog above the city was actually an enemy country’s new climate-altering weapon, while others said it was a side effect of their own country’s new secret weapon tests gone wrong. There was an even bolder theory claiming that the smog was really a massive gaseous life form. It — or maybe they — lumbered over the city, subsisting on industrial waste gas and the nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and hydrocarbon particles from automobile exhaust. They were slowly dissolving the calcium in human bones. In time, people would become afflicted with osteoporosis and rickets. Children and the elderly would easily break bones, even become paralyzed.

Of course, the rumors were quickly debunked. After investigation, the calcium-sucking monster story was tracked back to a calcium supplement manufacturer. Its unscrupulous marketing practices were punished as they deserved. The government vowed to formulate a five-year plan to return blue skies to the people.

As for that report, it was as if it never existed.

• • • •

Today was smoggy again. Lao Sun got up early as usual, washed, dressed, and got his travel things. Before he left, he made sure to give the picture frame on the table a wipe. The woman in the frame smiled at him.

That photo was more than ten years old by now.

He smiled at the elevator girl. The elevator girl saw the mask he carried and smiled back.

Lao Sun put on his mask and got on his light electric bike. It was festooned with lights and streamers of every color and played chipper music. All along his journey, passers-by in pig-snouted masks watched him, pointed at him. His bike was like a Brazilian parrot zipping through a desert, brilliant, colorful, and noisy.

He went straight to Sunflower Daycare, got off the bike, and stood in front of the massive glasshouse.

Lao Sun opened his bag and scooped out his strange little knick-knacks. First he filled some helium balloons and let them float high. The children stopped their games and ran to the window to watch this man in the clown mask. The music continued to play from the bike’s speakers. He followed the rhythm, slowly and comically contorting his body, and began to juggle.

“See, I can juggle three oranges at once. Watch!”

“. . .”

“You won’t watch? Then I’ll play the harmonica for you. I don’t even need my hands. I can change pitch with just my tongue.”

“. . .”

“Then I’ll sing for you. What song do you want to hear? I know them all!”

“. . .”

Lao Sun was breathing heavily. Something had trickled down his face and into his mouth, salty. The little pixies were wide-eyed, their faces pressed against the window, pink and white. They were laughing, showing their teeth, some of them clutching their bellies, even. The caretakers were laughing too.

“I know what song you’ll like. I’ll sing it for you right now . . .”

“No way you know!”

“I know. Listen, if you don’t believe me.”

“You’re all talk!”

An old song played from the speakers.

. . . Young friends, we young friends, are gathering today

Rowing the boats as the warm wind blows . . .

Flowers sweet, birds a-tweet, spring sun to get you drunk

And laughter flies ’round the clouds in circles . . .

The melody, which was so cheerful that it verged on the absurd, pierced the glass. The children began to move to the music, following the clown in his gymnastics. They laughed unabashedly, singing, dancing, crowing, every bare face shining golden.

Lao Sun looked up at the sky. The smog seemed to be thinning too.

© 2015 by Chen Qiufan.
Translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Chen Qiufan (a/k/a Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong province. Chen is a science fiction writer, columnist, scriptwriter, and technology start-up CMO. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, and Chutzpah!, many of which are collected in Thin Code. His debut novel, The Waste Tide, was published in January 2013 and was praised by Liu Cixin as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.” Chen is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Polish and published in Clarkesworld, Interzone, and F&SF. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award along with Ken Liu. He lives in Beijing.

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was released in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories later in 2015.

Carmen Yiling Yan was born in China and currently attends UCLA. Since starting out as an amateur translator, her translation work has been published by Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Galaxy’s Edge. Her writing has been published in Daily Science Fiction. Her other interests include drawing, mineralogy, and ancient Chinese history.

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

Life-pod

Vandana Singh | 4,800 words

Sometimes the Eavesdropper remembered being a mother. She would stare at the single empty life-sac and think about the man who should have been lying there in cold sleep, the man who had once been the boy she’d held in her arms. At other moments she was convinced that she had done no such thing, that motherhood had never happened to her, that all she had ever been was what she was now: a traveler on an interminable journey between the stars, afloat in the belly of the Life-pod. At these moments, when even the human sleepers seemed to take on a terrifying unfamiliarity, she would feel as though she were at the edge of some calamitous discovery.

But these hanging, empty moments of anticipation were few. Almost immediately she would be distracted by the thought-clouds, the dreams of the men and women in cold sleep. There were two of them in particular who had once meant something to her: a man and a woman. She returned to their thought-worlds whenever she herself was awake, as though the tattered clouds of their remembrances would bring back to her what she had been. It was rather like eating (she still remembered that, at least) and at the end, still coming away hungry. The life-sacs were filmy, translucent; she couldn’t see their faces, only the vague human shape suspended in a watery garden, but she knew them by their thought-signatures, by the worlds of their dreams.

The Man

The man dreamed obsessively of the enemy. Through him she saw the great creatures with their giant, stiff wings (single, like a cloak) folded on their backs, the round, featureless heads swiveling from one side to another, scanning through some invisible means the bleak landscape of his moon-world. The aliens stopped before the broken bodies that littered the battlefield, pausing before human and alien remains, while the young man crouched in the shadow of an outbuilding, trying not to breathe. Through his memories, the Eavesdropper saw the long vertical gash on the abdomen of each alien: the lipless mouth open wide into a horrific darkness, the delicacy with which the prehensile edges of the orifice gathered in each body like an embrace and closed around it. She felt the young man’s horror, his anger, going through her like a cold knife.

But sometimes he dreamed of a green and primitive place on a distant planet. His childhood: running in a long, green meadow with patches of bare earth and wild tussocks of grass that would make him stumble so that suddenly he would be looking between grass-shoots into an ant’s world. And the washer with its arms aloft, swift-walking through the grass, back and forth, making the wash billow out in the constant wind . . . The mother was holding a woven-reed tray full of yeri grains, shaking it so the tiny winged grains flew up and caught the currents, streaming out in skeins of spotted gold, up the hill to the tanglewood, where the fine nets of the trees would catch them and they would sprout many months later. She did this just for him, not because she needed to; the seedblower had done most of the job already, up high. He watched her brown arms, strong and rhythmic, and the seeds rippling out in wide ribbons, and laughed in delight. She smiled at him. Lying with his face against the ground, the boy saw her as a great tree, her bare, callused toes peering from between the folds of the blue sari like roots that would hold them all to the earth, her head up in the clouds, long black hair turning to gray, loosening from the bun at the back of her neck so that the tendrils were fanned by the breeze . . .

But what struck the Eavesdropper about this man, this boy, was the way he felt about his mother: She was the bedrock of his world. At these times she felt the shock of familiarity: that she had once been the recipient of such an uncomplicated love. But her memories were unreliable; she recalled things that she had apparently experienced or done that seemed distant, unfamiliar, shocking. She knew, for instance, that she had herself spent a long time with the enemy aliens, but the knowledge of precisely what had happened — the capture, the incarceration of the humans, including herself, their journey through space in the alien ship in cold sleep, the attack or explosion that had blown the little Life-pod away into space on some random trajectory — the details were blurred in her mind, her personal memory contaminated by those of the others. Whatever she remembered came to her in flashes or glimpses: pungent, warren-like passageways, blind gropings in the heat of a room, the press of terrified bodies, the great silhouette of the alien in the doorway, its mind reaching out to her mind, calming it, telling her what to do (what was it she had been told with such urgency?) and she remembered also sweet hunger, and nutrients snaking out into her in thin, aromatic streams, and the mourning and celebrating of a death . . .

The Eavesdropper

The Eavesdropper moved slowly through the darkness of the Life-pod, floating over each womb-like holding unit, tasting the dreams of each dreamer. But what do I dream of, then, when I sleep, she thought to herself. She wondered, as she often had, why her own holding sac allowed her to wake and move about, and return to it only when she needed nutrients or rest. Each life-sac was a little eco-system of alien life-forms: bacterial blooms, algal fans that generated currents of nutrients and harvested waste, the whole maintaining a delicate symbiotic relationship with each occupant. But her sac was unique, larger than the rest, its chemistry adjusted to allow her these moments of wakefulness. Why had she been given this privilege? The vision of the alien in the doorway so many years ago, came to her mind as the answer: Was that what it had told her so urgently, to see to the safety of her people, the humans? Why? Where were they being taken before the explosion cast them into space? Why hadn’t they been killed? What had been her relationship with the alien? Sometimes she thought of it with simple hatred and fear, the unknown, the monster of nightmare moving across the ruined battlefield; then she would realize that she was seeing it through the eyes of one of the dreamers. When she admitted this to herself she felt as though cracks had appeared in her understanding of the universe, little fissures that threatened to open up and swallow her. She had betrayed her people, these people, in some way. Hadn’t she? Else why would she have gotten the privilege (or curse) of wakefulness during this long voyage? Why would she remember the alien with half-buried, shameful hunger (what had they done to her? With her?), with — yes, there was no escaping it — longing, as though the alien had satisfied in her some terrible, chemical need?

Sometimes she thought she saw the alien in the Life-pod. She would feel its presence just beyond the edge of her perceptions, as though it was waiting in the shadows beyond that life-sac or this one. Once or twice she thought she saw its face, so unimaginably strange, yet so familiar, hovering ghost-like just beyond the pale radiance from the life-sacs, or half-concealed among the knotted ganglia of the Life-pod itself. When she approached the phantom or mirage it would dissolve into the darkness, so that in her saner moments she knew it was not really there. At other times she wanted to believe it was there, to know that there was someone watching over her, tasting her dreams, knowing her thoughts.

And then there were her hands.

They were not as she remembered them; in the half-light, the brown skin was mottled, thickened, her nails grown long. She held the hands before her, floating in a shawl of moisture from her life-sac, and wondered if she herself was the alien in the shadows. She would convince herself very quickly that this could not be so, because the memories she had of being human, even the borrowed ones, were so vivid and familiar. These little debates with herself were a comfort; it was such a human thing to do, after all, to argue with your own doubts and fears when awake in the dark.

But she couldn’t come to any definite conclusion because of the voices in her mind. Sometimes something spoke to her without words, deep inside her head. She wasn’t certain if it was the alien, the Life-pod in which they were adrift, or some lost memory of her own. It could not be the Life-pod, she reasoned; the Life-pod’s mind was barely discernible to her, and what she could read of it was child-like and strange. It had been grown quickly from the body of the alien ship to host the captured humans, and when the explosion blew it away from the ship, it had not had time to mature. It knew how to maintain the environment on which they all depended and to protect itself, and to sing out its name on all permitted frequencies, but it did not know that it was going to die. It did not know that after a certain time it would need to find a mother ship, to dock, to hibernate until it renewed itself for further flight. Here, in this uncharted, empty sector of the galaxy, who would hear it sing? Who would tell it what it needed, how to find it? It was hardly more than a child, singing in joyful ignorance in the dark between the stars.

Then who was it who told her things as she floated in her life-sac at the edge of sleep?

Some of the things she heard were memories, she told herself. She had been incarcerated somewhere in the caverns of the mother ship, among alien bodies, overhearing their conversation. Or it was the alien stowaway, if it existed, telling her all this, opening before her mind’s eye the strange vistas of other worlds. Sometimes it would chant to her bits of its own lore, meaningless and frightening all at once, repeating the phrases like a child in a dark room, reciting for comfort. But nothing it said made sense.

To eat and be eaten is to become yourself and another. To eat is to give birth, to see with new eyes. Remember, remember this.

And:

We are separate so the whole may know itself. In eating, we edge closer to the Hidden One. Know this!

But she didn’t know anything. Only that she might have been a mother once, and the man who was missing — who should have been in the empty life-sac — was perhaps her son. She knew that she, along with the others, had been captured from their colony on a moon-world. And that she had had some dealings with the enemy, things she would rather not admit to herself. So here they were, blasted away from the ship, adrift in the belly of an infant Life-pod, lost in the sea of night.

The Woman

The other sleeper who had once had some connection with the Eavesdropper was a woman who hadn’t spoken for years, even before the capture. What had led her into silence was not an emotional or physiological condition, but a philosophical one. The Eavesdropper remembered this woman (whether through her own memories or through those of the other sleepers she could not always say) before the capture as a person who liked to be with the others but did little more than smile or nod. The woman liked the physical labor of the research camp; building and repair work, and tending the greenhouses, and when busy in these things she liked to hum strange little tunes, but spoke no words. The Eavesdropper knew that this woman had come to such a state because she had discovered the inadequacy of words. The woman was a scientist-poet whose reality had once been forged of words and mathematics. “Consider that antique concept, force,” she had said once, before the silence, “which makes sense at your scale or mine. The ancients built their theories, their mathematics, around that concept. But the moment you enter the sub-atom, or when you begin to examine the graininess of space-time, you realize that the word “force” has little meaning. You invent the field, another antique concept, and then that, too, fails. You abandon false analogies, then, you take refuge in strange axioms, in your mathematics. But go far enough and even mathematics fails as a descriptive, a language in which to describe nature. What do you have left, then?”

Somebody had laughed. The woman dreamed of a face, sometimes, not yearningly, but with pleasure, and it was the face of the man who should have been lying here in the Life-pod, in the empty sac. “She dreams of my son,” the Eavesdropper would say to herself. The man had laughed companionably in the woman’s dreams. “When mathematics fails? Then there’s only poetry,” he had said, smiling — his brown eyes and skin aglow, his black hair so soft and shiny in the light. Only poetry, dreamed the sleeping woman, recalling this, recalling him.

This woman had spent a lifetime studying “the graininess of space-time.” She had been part of the first team to map the tachyonic signatures that hinted at the existence of another universe underlying their own. They were only faint trails, like the tracks of ghost crabs walking on a sandy beach (“Ghost” said the Eavesdropper to herself; “Crab. Beach.” And she saw a sweep of yellow sand, a windswept blue sky — an old memory, hers or the woman’s.) The tachyon trails were regular, their mathematics sublime, their origins mysterious. The woman had lived three hundred and seven Earth-years, traveling on slowships from world to inhabited world, cheating time and death so she could study these trails. “They call to me,” she had said defensively to that man, the Eavesdropper’s son. “They are the shape of something I do not understand. Something large, complex, perhaps self-aware.” “How large?” “Of galactic proportions,” she’d said seriously, enjoying his surprise. “Why else would you need tachyons? How else can your brain tell your arm to twitch if it is 400 light-years away?” “You have such ideas!” laughed the man, half admiring, half mocking. “I thought you said last time that the tachyons were evidence of another universe.” “I did,” she acknowledged, smiling. “It’s a matter of words. Whether or not that thing is sentient, it is a universe unto itself.”

He was a practical man, an engineer, a pilot, and a poet in three ancient languages, and he kept her sane. “I see a bit here, a bit there,” she would tell him, frustrated, after several hours immersed in a holo of her theoretical construct. “But I never see the pattern as a whole, as one complete thing.” And he’d looked at her a moment and quoted Kalidasa in the original Sanskrit.

. . . I see your gaze in the deer’s quick glance

Your slender limbs in the shyama vine

Your luminous beauty in the face of the moon . . .

But, oh misfortune! I see not

All of you in any one thing . . .

Slowly, trying to put together the mathematics of the tachyon signatures, she had realized that no language existed — verbal or mathematical — that could describe them. “I must invent a meta-language,” thought the dreamer, “a language beyond words and equations.” She became outwardly silent, although her mind still chattered away in words and equations, but the Eavesdropper sometimes saw great and inexplicable vistas in the dreams of the sleeper: vast abstractions, geometries that defied the imagination, fractal swirls of color that rose and vanished, and she had the impression that the scientist-poet was indeed inventing a new language, iota by iota.

This, then, is poetry, thought the Eavesdropper to herself, and abruptly the memory of the alien would fill her mind. “Eat,” the alien had said to her. “To eat is to become yourself and another.” And the great lipless mouth had opened, drawing her in, and she could hear herself screaming. With a great effort she would calm herself, bring herself back to the dark interior of the Life-pod, and the faint, familiar glow of each life-sac. And the alien voice in (or out of) her head recited with childish insistence: “Why do we live? To eat. To be eaten. And so become closer to the Hidden One.”

Sometimes the Eavesdropper talked to the Life-pod. It understood only a few pictures she sent to it in her mind, and it seemed to her that the creature resented these interruptions. It would do as she asked, like a sullen child — once it had opened for her a round, translucent eye in the wall of the chamber through which she could see the unmoving starscape — and as soon as she was done, it would return to its play. In the early months (or years) of this uncharted journey, she had wept and railed at it, asking it to find the way back to their world, but, not knowing what she was talking about (which world? She herself didn’t know), it had simply shut her out.

So the Eavesdropper floated through the Life-pod, sipping at the dreams of the sleepers, sometimes going to sleep herself. If she could remember her dreams, if she could be aware of them as she was of the dreams of others, she would know who she was. But she couldn’t remember. So she waited, sometimes for death, sometimes for that knock on the door that would signal the return of the lost son, the missing sleeper. He would come back. This she knew about him, he was the kind who never gave up, who came back against all odds. As far as she could remember she hadn’t seen him captured. He was on his way to find them. He would knock on the door, she would open it and she would know who she was. She waited for that or for death. Sometimes she couldn’t tell the difference.

The Eavesdropper

The Eavesdropper was thinking about the moon-world. Her hands — she saw her hands, brown and fragile against the leaves of the greenhouse: They curled to form a round window through which she could see her world. In the foreground was the leaf, heart-shaped, slightly serrated, with fine white hairs on the green surface, and behind it the transparent wall of the greenhouse, with the familiar view of low, barren hills. Half the sky was dominated by the mother planet, the gas giant with its rings, its phantasmagoria of storm-clouds, the orange glow diffusing into the little room, turning her hands red-brown. And the other half of the sky was speckled with stars.

This, she thought to herself, not without a certain incredulity, was a memory all her own: not the view (which was in the dreams of the man and the woman, and some of the other humans who lay sleeping in the Life-pod) but the two hands, and how the fingers had curled around in a circle.

“Look through it!” she had said to someone, a boy who might have been her son. He had peered through the window of her fingers — she remembered glossy black hair that fell to his shoulders and was always getting in his eyes. He had long, brown legs; he liked to run, to chase the other children. He looked through the window and laughed, and ran off on those long legs. Did he understand how moving it was to her, to see that particular juxtaposition of those objects? The moon had been in just the right position for Half-Night, when its night side faced the planet instead of the endless field of stars. In that moment, at that time, the window told all: the sap rising in the green stem, the green leaf opening like a hand toward an alien light, against a partial backdrop of stars. She had been moved to tears.

Remembering, she wasn’t sure what had brought her to the middle of the chamber. She had thought she had been sleeping in her life-sac, but here she was, floating in the middle of the Life-pod, surrounded by the other sacs with their sleepers. Their dreams lapped around the edges of her consciousness, but some other feeling was rising through her, overcoming the familiar mental background noise: fear, excitement. She realized that the Life-pod was talking to her — to her, after all this time, communicating something urgently. Between the thick, pillar-like sap-vessels of the Life-pod, a portion of the wall contracted, then expanded into a round window, filmed over with a translucent membrane that slowly cleared. She saw through the window a vista of stars, and a bright, spherical, gray object in the foreground. It had locked velocity with the Life-pod. Memory stirred. A human exploration vessel, a small one that may hold one to three people . . .

So this was it, thought the Eavesdropper, suddenly light-headed, her heart thudding: this, the moment she had been waiting for all along. He had come, her son, against all odds, following the song of the Life-pod through space.

“Bring me out!” she commanded the Life-pod, pushing off against a sap-vessel so that she bumped gently against the window. She felt herself encased in a thick film of mucosal secretions; a vast muscular contraction launched her out of the window on to the surface of the Life-pod.

She struggled at first with the thick strands of film around her; she couldn’t see because the film was still opaque. A jolt of terror coursed through her and then subsided. The film was slowly hardening and clearing — she could breathe, she was atop the life-pod, poised over a vertiginous emptiness speckled with stars.

She felt it like a rush to the head, the music of the universe running through her as though she were a streambed, a cup overflowing. Before, space had been nothing but darkness and stars, something to be crossed so one could get to one’s destination. But now she could sense the tachyonic pathways all around her, like fine lacework, like the tangled neural pathways, the guts of some vast beast. The Hidden One, said the alien, exulting, and she looked around for the alien but it wasn’t there. Only herself and that strange object motionless above her, round, like an opaque window against the stars.

The rush faded. She saw the small humanoid figure in a spacesuit detach from the side of the craft, attached to it with an umbilicus that reeled out slowly as the figure jetted toward her. The light from the craft spilled over her; she saw the surface of the Life-pod, fissured and full of knobs and warts. She remembered something, a fragment of memory that was not her own: a summer hot and breathless, sandy cliffs, and thousands, perhaps millions of the aliens in their summer sleep, their flightless single wings spread to take in the sunlight, to draw in the fuel they needed for the long winter-to-come. It was an image so strange and yet so familiar that she turned around again to see if the alien had somehow manifested in her little bubble, but it was not there. She pushed the image from her mind, stretched her arms out to the descending figure. “My son,” she said to herself, her voice catching. Then a jolt of memory: She was standing barefoot in the grass in a blue sari, setting out the washing. The boy was lying face down on the ground, watching ants. It was a green and primitive place on a distant planet; he had been born there, some years before the trip to the barren moon of another world . . .

But if that is who I am, she thought in sudden consternation, then the man who lies dreaming in the life-sac below my feet is my son. Then who is this?

Or maybe, she thought desperately, the memory was not hers, just as that other memory — with the aliens stretched out like so many flies on a sand dune — that other memory was not hers. She looked up at the human figure in the spacesuit; he was getting closer and closer, decelerating. She could not see his face. Instead she saw the reflection of the Life-pod in the spacesuit’s headgear, all lit up by the spacecraft’s beacon, and the clear bubble in which she stood like a fly trapped in amber. And she saw what she was.

A half-alien thing: the shape still human but the face so strange! Ovoid eyes, the bony skull-sheath jutting over her cheekbones. She held her small brown hands before her and saw the tips curving into hard pincers, transforming almost as she stood there, transfixed with horror and wonder. She looked down at herself in the hard, honest light and saw that the reflection was not false. What am I? she wondered, aghast.

And the alien within answered her, not in words but in a swell of understanding that took her breath away. She remembered what it had proposed, what she had agreed to; the terrifying darkness within its body, her screams echoing in her ears as the thin tendrils inside it wrapped around her, penetrated her skin. After that, the chrysalid sleep as the new bridges between the two of them formed and hardened, as alien transforming organelles coursed through her body, as great, chemical swathes of emotion — pleasure and fear, hunger and sweet, nameless desire swept through her. Then she was lifted from the dead shell of the alien into a brief light, and into the life-sac which eased her once more into the sleep of forgetfulness . . .

So the Eavesdropper stood before the stranger who might or might not be her son; she a creature not alien, not human, but a bridge, a thing that was new, the first of its kind. He (or was it she?) stood away from her, bumping gently against the Life-pod, the long umbilicus stretching out into the dark like a luminous, flexible bridge. The stranger’s hands were as yet empty, but the posture was wary, as though poised to activate the spacesuit’s weapons systems. She felt some ancient part of her cry out: Do you not know me, son? And something inside her gave way, crumbled like a mud wall before a flood.

I must know, she said to herself. I must know if you are him. She stretched her arms toward him, slowly, saw him tense, then relax. Suddenly she wanted to enclose him in the dark, to exchange blood with blood, to share synapse with synapse, to know him cell by cell, and so become something new. The sharpness of her hunger took her breath away. In that brief moment she saw that the Life-pod itself was her kin, a hybrid of the original alien species and some gravid denizen of a distant ocean-world, and its mind was clear to her for the first time. Why couldn’t she know the stranger in the same way? No, she said, feeling or imagining the infant mouth straining to open in her chest. That was the alien within, as it had once been, remembering. There had to be some other way.

She opened her hands to show him that they were empty. She put the palms together in the old Indic gesture of greeting; then moved the fingers to make a circle, a window through which she could see him against the Life-pod and the infinity of stars. Around her, along pathways invisible to human and alien, sang the tachyons, leaving ghost trails in space-time that the sleeping woman in the chamber under her feet could only imagine. Only the Eavesdropper could sense them, could see where they were leading, to the heart of the great galactic beast, the Hidden One. She saw for just a moment that she had been conceived and forged for a great purpose. But for now she was only a bridge in the darkness between ship and ship, being and being. Through the window of her hands she watched the stranger come slowly toward her.

© 2007 by Vandana Singh.

Originally published in Foundation.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer living in the Boston area. She has a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics and teaches physics full-time at a small and lively state university. Her recent short fiction includes “Sailing the Antarsa” in the anthology The Other Half of the Sky. Many of her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and she is a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Recent work includes a novella, “Entanglement,” in the anthology Hieroglyph (November 2014). She has a new website at vandana-writes.com and a blog at vandanasingh.wordpress.com.

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

And We Were Left Darkling

Sarah Pinsker | 3,000 words

I don’t remember her birth. My dream baby, the baby I have in my dreams, the one who crashed into my head one night and took roost. She is a day old, a week old, a year old, eight years old, three weeks old, a day old. She has fine blond hair, except when she has tight black curls. Once she had cornrows that lengthened every time I looked away.

“Her hair grows faster than I can cut it,” I said to my dream family.

My family in my dream is my family in real life, but less helpful. In my dream, they are standoffish. They offer advice or jokes or criticism. They never take the baby from my arms. Even my wife, my dream version of my real wife, sits on a couch on the far side of the room. She smiles and gives me the occasional thumbs up. I am supported and loved. I am panicked and out of sorts.

The dreams are so powerful my real breasts fill with milk. They ache. In the dream, nobody gives me any instruction on how to nurse, but we find our way. She never cries.

During the day, I try to explain to Taya. She doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand the dream baby, the real milk, the disorientation I carry into my morning.

“What do you mean ‘she’s real’?” Taya asks. Does this have anything to do with giving up on getting pregnant?”

We tried and failed for five years. We’re too old, too broke for the treatments that might get us there. Can’t afford to adopt. In the last year we’ve just stopped talking about it entirely.

“It’s different,” I tell her. “It doesn’t feel like a wanting. It feels like she exists already. She’s real.”

I start taking naps. I go to sleep as soon as I get home from the store, setting an alarm so that I wake a few minutes before Taya gets home from the veterinary clinic. I hide what I can. I don’t know how to say that this is my baby, not ours.

It’s a variation on the same dream every time. Every night and every nap. I am holding my baby, cradling her [blond dark fine napped curly] head. My sisters are there, my parents, my wife. I remark that if I had known the baby was coming, I would have cleaned the floors, run a bath, made some food.

“When was the last time I bathed her?” I ask, though her head smells sweet and clean. Nobody answers.

She reaches for me and I fumble with my shirt. I’m unprepared, awkward. I look to my sister for advice, but she shakes her head and smiles. While the baby nurses, I look out the window at a composite of Georgia O’Keefe’s 1920s skyscrapers. They gleam silver against the velvet night. Giant windup toy monsters stalk the spaces between [the paintings the towers]. They are genial monsters despite their occasional exhalations of sparks. No buildings are stomped.

My dream baby grows older except when she grows younger. She is sometimes a toddler, except when she’s not. She has left home twice, but each time returned to be a baby the next night. I greet her with relief. I am always surprised to see her. For the first moment, I always wonder that she is mine, even as I know it is true. I try to remember giving birth, but that’s not part of [the plan the dream]. She is always here. She was always here. She is [fourteen eighteen one day] old.

I look online, using the search terms “dream symbolism” and “infants.” The results scroll past. Dreams of great earth changes, the divine child, responsibility, innocence. I dismiss most of it, but one link catches my eye: a bulletin board comment asking for other people who have had extended, repeating, real-feeling dreams of a baby. I click, scroll through the responses. There are hundreds. I don’t read them. I don’t want to find out if I share her. I don’t want to share her.

The third time she leaves home, she leaves for good. For the first time in a year I sleep without dreams. Waking is easier, bedtime is sadder. I miss her. I find the website with the dream babies again. There’s a follow-up post by the same woman, and I read it this time. She is no longer having the dream, either. Two hundred and seventy-two others report the same thing. I should add my voice to theirs, but I don’t want to share the loss any more than I wanted to share my child.

When the babies come back, they all return at once. I recognize mine when I see her on the news. They come out of the ocean, our dream children, naked and beautiful, all different ages. They appear on the rocks off southern California with the sea lions. I would know mine anywhere, even through the television. Her hair is chestnut, like mine. She looks to be eight years old. I remember all the times she was eight in my dreams. The year she broke her arm, the year we made chocolate chip cookies and let the wind-up monsters bake them with their breath. She has freckles and skin that browns quickly in the California sun.

I want to book a flight, but Taya refuses. “It’s too weird. And we can’t afford it.”

“The other parents are gathering, though. They’re flying in from all over the world. What if she needs me?” I ask. “What if she needs me and I’m not there?”

Taya shakes her head and scratches at a stain on her green scrub pants. “I’m trying to understand, Jo.” I know she’s trying. I see the worry in her eyes. I book the flight anyway, maxing out our credit card for a same day ticket. It’s irresponsible. I shouldn’t do it. I don’t even say goodbye.

I’m not the only one. There are other dreamers at the airport. We’re all easy to spot. The security lines loop back on themselves as the agents pull us aside for intrusive searches. We look too vacant, too gone. None of us have luggage. We accept the pat downs without complaint. We watch out the airplane windows, no books or tablets or crosswords in our hands. We’re the ones with our faces in the clouds, clouds in our faces.

We take cabs from the airport in Los Angeles, grouping in twos and threes and fours, telling the confused cab drivers to drop us by the ocean, by the niños del mar. Emphasizing niños, niños. They drop us at the beaches and piers, at the rocky cliff tops. Surfers stare at us with idle curiosity. We only see the figures off the shore.

My boss calls to ask whether I’m sick. I mean to lie, say yes, but what comes out is, “I had to leave town.”

She tells me not to bother coming back. I should mind, but I don’t.

We wait. It’s June, and the evening is crisp but not cool. The air smells like salt. We search our bags and pockets for airline peanuts, for apples and protein bars and whatever we stashed on our way out the door. Concerned locals bring us pizzas and bottled water. We eat with our eyes on the sea, even in the fading light.

The sunset reminds me for a moment that I have never before seen the Pacific, never seen this particular sinking sun. I feel a pang of guilt that I’m watching this without Taya. The children on the rocks are lit from behind, then fall into shadow. The sunset takes them from us afresh.

We tell each other stories about our dream children. They are different and the same. None of us have children of our own outside of dreaming. Those with families always report that our families appear in the dreams. I’m the only one with Georgia O’Keeffe skylines, the only one with windup monsters. Others have Chagalls and Rothkos and that overdramatic painter of light; they have Donkey Kong and Space Invaders and Loony Tunes characters.

“Like Mad Libs,” someone says. “We each fill in the blanks differently.”

It’s easy to poke at the other aspects of the dreams. Nobody pokes at the parts about the children. I don’t know how many others are doing the math that I am doing in my head. There are far more parents on this beach than there are children on the rocks. Does that mean some of us share? Are we all even seeing the same thing? We don’t ask those questions.

A group of reporters camps near us, their vans circled like covered wagons, their giant antennae piercing the sky. Occasionally one approaches us, but we don’t speak to them. It takes just a few minutes to discover the one who tries to infiltrate our group. Her details are wrong. She refers to “the baby,” not “my baby.” Her eyes aren’t haunted. When we ask her to leave, she smirks. I guess that she recorded us, and I wonder what she captured.

A woman arrives on foot. It’s unclear where she walked from, but her face blisters with sunburn. Heat radiates from her skin, even this long after nightfall. We lay her on the cool sand and pour a slow trickle of water into her cracked lips.

“Do you need a doctor? Medico?” Someone asks.

She shakes her head and points toward the dark sea. “Mijo.”

She is one of us.

• • • •

I sleep dreamless on the damp sand. I’m wakened by a familiar hand, a familiar voice. I curl into Taya for a moment before I realize where I am.

“What are you doing here?” My throat is scratchy and sore from sleeping outdoors.

“I could ask you the same fucking thing.”

I hear the betrayal in her voice. Ordinarily, I would hate to be the cause of that hurt.

“How did you get here?” I ask.

“I sold the car to pay for a ticket. We’ll have to figure that out when we get back. Come on, babe. Let’s go get breakfast or something.” She holds out her hand to help me stand.

I shake my head. “I can’t go anywhere. Not without her.”

She rocks back on her heels.

“I would leave if I could, Tay. But I need to be here when they —”

“When they what? You’re acting crazy. What are we doing here?”

I wrap my arms around my knees and look out at the ocean. The children sit on the rocks, watching us. She’s right, but it doesn’t matter. I ought to leave. I can’t leave. I still can’t explain.

She sits down next to me. “Okay, if you’re staying, I’m staying, too. We’re both going to get fired, but we’ve got no way to get home and no way to get to work, so we’re screwed either way. But you’re still with me, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t tell her I’ve already been fired. I know I should put an arm around her, but I don’t. I’m glad she’s here, but I wish she wasn’t.

The others stir and turn to face the water, to check that they are still out there.

“They’re talking about you on the news, you know.” Taya doesn’t look at me when she speaks. Her eyes are on the children, as ours are.

“Me? What are they saying?”

“Not you specifically. All of you. They’re calling it ‘mass hallucination.’”

“Hallucination? But they can see them too, right? Our babies were on TV.”

She winces when I say “our babies,” and doesn’t speak for a moment. When she does, her words are carefully chosen. “We see them. But nobody but you claims to recognize them. They’ve been taking photos of them since they showed up, comparing the photos to databases, missing persons, driver’s licenses. None of them are anybody.”

“Of course they’re not,” says the man sitting on Taya’s other side. I had spoken with him the previous evening; he had flown down from Vancouver. Mark somebody. “Why would they match your databases? They aren’t lost. We’ve been waiting for them to find us again.”

Taya sneaks me a look of “this guy is nuts.” How many times has it been me and her against the rest of the world? I know it hurts her when I take his side. If he’s crazy, I am, too. I don’t feel crazy. “What else are they saying, Tay?”

“There are only about two hundred and fifty children out there. There are more than three hundred of you on the shore, and more still arriving. There are people at airports all over the world screaming that they need to get over here, but a lot of them don’t have visas, or any way to pay for tickets. Some of us are throwing off the count, though. Me, I mean. For example.”

Mark doesn’t mince words. “Why don’t you leave, then? We don’t need you here.”

“I’m glad she’s here. I’m glad you’re here.” I direct the second one at her.

“So she can call us all crazy? There aren’t enough people doing that.” I guess he caught her “crazy” look at me a moment before.

“Maybe so she can explain that we’re not.”

He stands up in pretext of a stretch, then moves away.

“Asshole,” I say. Taya smiles.

• • • •

A few more of us arrive, from much farther away. One woman came from Namibia via Johannesburg, Dakar, Amsterdam, New York. She braces in the sand as if she’s still on an airplane. Others from Belize, Iceland, Sri Lanka. Some of the wealthier among us have arranged for food and water to be brought to us. I’m grateful. The sight of food reminds me to eat, but I’m not hungry. The children on the rocks haven’t eaten. They look happy.

• • • •

Taya leaves after three days. “I love you,” she says. “I love you and I’m worried about you. I would stay, but we can’t afford for me to lose my job, too. And I think this is something you need to finish for yourself.”

I kiss her. I want her to stay, but not as much as I want her to leave.

“I love you, too. I’ll see you soon,” I tell her. She turns away with tears in her eyes. Things we don’t mention: I have no return ticket; I have no money for a return ticket; I am waiting for my dream baby; I don’t know what happens next.

After she leaves, I find a note from her in my pocket. It reads:

The California ground squirrel disguises its own scent by chewing the discarded skins of the rattlesnakes that would kill it, then licking itself and its pups.

The cuckoo is a brood parasite. It lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving them to do the hard work of raising the chicks.

I do not consider myself an unreasonable person. I make rational decisions in my every day life. You do, too. We make reasonable, rational decisions together. Come back soon. Please. I miss you.

I fold the note up and put it back where I found it.

• • • •

We are there for a full week before the children finally leave the rocks. Our numbers have dwindled by then, but only somewhat. A couple of people have been dragged away forcibly. Others have been persuaded by their loved ones to return home. They don’t go willingly, but they go. I wonder what the rest of their lives will be like: if they will always wonder if they had stayed. I guess that depends on what happens next.

What happens next is the children dive into the water. We track their progress with whispered pleas, under breath. I am taken in.

“Come on,” we call to them. “We miss you.”

I realize my child doesn’t have a name. It’s the first thing that gives me pause in any of this. How am I here, in California, calling to somebody I am so sure is my own child, but I can’t say her name? I think she had one. She may have had many. It bothers me how I can’t remember.

Memories of my baby’s childhood flood through me. Her third birthday party, with the cake shaped like a rabbit; she refused to let me cut it. Her school play, where she played a queen and wouldn’t take off the crown for a week afterward. Looking for shapes in the perfect O’Keeffe clouds. I wonder how these memories will reconcile with the girl swimming toward me now. Will she be eight for me again? Did those things happen, or are they yet to happen? I don’t even know if she’ll recognize me.

I put my hand in my pocket and feel the folded note. I’m not sure what Taya meant, not sure if I’m the squirrel, the snake, the cuckoo, the other bird. I want to go back to the minute before I had that thought. I try to picture how she’ll fold into our life back home. How will Taya treat her? What will they be to each other? We don’t even have a second bedroom. None of this was thought through. None of it was meant for thinking.

They’re getting closer. They’re so beautiful.

I realize I never taught her to swim. They swim like Olympians, like fish, like creatures of the ocean, like they have always been swimming and have never stopped swimming. I’m scared now. She’s so beautiful, and she’s reached the shore, and she’s inescapably mine.

© 2015 by Sarah Pinsker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” winner of the 2014 Sturgeon Award and 2013 Nebula Award finalist, and 2014 Nebula finalist, “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide.” Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied. She is also a singer/songwriter and has toured nationally behind three albums; a fourth is forthcoming. In the best of all timelines, she lives with her wife and dog in Baltimore, Maryland. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and on Twitter @sarahpinsker.

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

Civilization

Vylar Kaftan | 2,700 words

1. Beginning

You have a civilization! It doesn’t matter which one — let’s say it’s modern Western civilization. It’s got fast food and sporting events, which is all you really need. Western technology gives you great military power — you have fantastic unstoppable tanks, and heat-seeking missiles to keep you safe. It’s a good place to start.

You could also have chosen a remote aboriginal tribe in the center of Australia — one with nuts and berries, and spears and ropes. Or you could have chosen Communist China, or that group of scientists living in Antarctica. But let’s stick to modern Western civilization. Let’s give you people, too. We’ll call them John and Jane. If you have a civilization, then you probably have at least two people in it.

Now, with your civilization comes a political system. Maybe your system is a democracy, and everyone gets a vote except the felons and child molesters. Maybe your system is a republic, and you market it as a democracy because it looks better on the brochures. Maybe your system is totalitarian, and you force everyone to enjoy the sound of that complicated word. Totalitarian!

But! A major choice awaits you. Are you traditional, bound by the past, certain that the old ways are the best because “we’ve always done it that way, so there”? Or are you radical, lured by the future, always hoping that the new ways will be better than the old because “we’ve never done it that way, so there”? Be warned, the future of your civilization depends on your choice. John and Jane’s lives are at stake.

If you choose tradition, go to section 2.

If you choose radicalism, go to section 5.

2. Tradition

You’re a traditionalist. Or a blind follower. Or just someone who reads everything in order, from start to finish. It doesn’t matter; you end up in the same place anyway.

So, you have a civilization. You have TV dinners and expensive cars. You hold elections. This is the way it’s always been done, and this is the way it must be. Never mind those fruitcakes in wigs who fought against the colonial powers. They were supporting Freedom and Liberty and other words that make great advertising. The corporations live off the people and the people trust the corporations. John and Jane relax, knowing that everything around them has worked for centuries.

Things stagnate. You hold more elections, or pretend to. The people in power have always been in power. The world is the way it’s always been. The police have always arrested people in the streets. The freedom to speak has always been restricted in the name of security. The corporations destroy the people and that’s the way it’s always been, and why would you question that, citizen?

Congratulations! You’ve got fascism!

Go to section 3.

3. Fascism

How nice for you, that you look so good in jackboots and a uniform! Your secret police are so dangerous that they’re sexy. They kick the enemies of the State in the street, like Rockettes in steel-toed boots. You sleep with national security books on your nightstand and a revolver under your pillow. Or maybe you just have secret meetings of secret societies in secret boardrooms, sealing fates with secret handshakes. The artists fill the gulags, and hey — cheap labor! So what if it’s not fair and equal? Equality is for hippies. John and Jane trust you to keep them safe at all times.

When you’re fascist, you’re always right, because God or Satan or your left boot told you what to do. Divine power is with you! That means that you’re right, and you’d better make sure everyone else knows it too. Let’s go to war!

Go to section 7.

4. Complacency

You’ve been in power an awfully long time now. Why pay attention any longer? There’s too many good shows on TV (or in the bullring, or in the arenas, or whatever you’ve got). You talk about the great sporting events on television and visit fast-food drive-throughs. You worry about whether your toothpaste is really doing all that a toothpaste should. After a while, you stop paying attention to anything at all. John and Jane are off doing something, but you’re not sure what. This is the way it’s always been, and this is the way it will always be. Is this progress? You aren’t sure.

Go to section 2.

5. Radicalism

You decide to experiment. Artists love your society. Painters color skyscrapers, and sculptors make art of garbage. Directors shoot movies in black light and show them in darkened theatres. Musicians shred the works of previous centuries. Corporations hold festivals to mock their own logos.

People are changing things from the way they’ve always been, just to make changes. Broken furniture becomes the new fashion. Everyone lives with six uncles and an aunt. John and Jane change their names to Isthmus and Quagmire. No matter what the new idea is, it must be better than the old. You remember that you haven’t changed governments in a while. Throw out the old! Bring in the new! It’s time for a revolution!

Go to section 6.

6. Revolution

You hand out pamphlets in the street. Citizens march in protest of everything. The Hero of the People takes over in a bloodless coup. The former powers all commit a penitent suicide: on the same day, in the same prison, under your watchful eye. How convenient! You take note of all the former rules — because if that’s how they did it, now you must do it differently. You charter a new Constitution in a different font from the old one. Oh good, this regime is much better than the last one!

You suppress the counter-revolutionaries. They want to change everything. Any disagreement in society must be squelched. John and Jane must have their freedom. For the good of the new regime!

Go to section 4.

7. War

Oh boy, it’s war! Your regiments march like clockwork toys. Colonel Mustard is your general, with his dashing moustache and monocle. Your hats are quite classy, with a feather for each soldier (for officers, two!) On the streets, your noble supporters weep with pride as their loved ones march past. The people support the Cause (both sides, if it’s a civil war). Or if they don’t, you silence them, for national security. Jane blows John a kiss as he shoulders his weapon and heads away. He’ll come back a hero, and they will marry.

Your soldiers fight bravely. They pose for photos every time they save a small child from Tyranny. There’s no blood — at least, not in the photos. The enemy can’t oppose the side of Truth and Justice, which you’re quite certain is you.

Congratulations! You’ve won the war! Now for the next step: What kind of society do you want to build? Is your future an ideal Utopia, or a dark Dystopia?

If you build Utopia, go to section 8.

If you build Dystopia, go to section 9.

8. Utopia

Medicine: Disease has been eliminated, and people live to be 120 in perfect health. As a result, your people have more time to contribute to society and to enjoy their lives.

Agriculture: Food is mass-produced by advanced techniques so that there is plenty for everyone. Special additives in the food guarantee nutrition and health for every citizen.

Employment: Everyone is guaranteed a job that pays a living wage, so that all people have the means to support themselves.

Housing: No one is homeless. Citizens are guaranteed safe, affordable housing.

Education: Citizens may study any available information. The government provides the entirety of human history and current events, and encourages people to read.

Law: All issues are decided by fair courts. Mistakes are never made.

Government: The government wants to make sure the citizens are happy.

Wow! What a wonderful world you’ve built for yourself. Now, all that remains is to help everyone else enjoy Utopia!

Go to section 10.

9. Dystopia

Medicine: Disease has been eliminated, and people live to be 120 in perfect health. As a result, your world is overpopulated and resources are scarce.

Agriculture: Food is mass-produced by advanced techniques so that there is plenty for everyone. Special additives in the food guarantee obedience to the government.

Employment: Everyone is guaranteed a job that pays a living wage, so that people are trapped in nightmarish jobs that they can’t leave.

Housing: No one is homeless. People without homes live in institutions, where they are subjected to conditioning and experiments.

Education: Citizens may study any available information. The government provides the information that citizens are authorized to see, and records who is reading it.

Law: All issues are decided by fair courts. Mistakes, of course, are never made. How could they be?

Government: The government wants to make sure the citizens are happy.

Oh dear. What a horrible world you’ve made for yourself. Hey — those people next door, in that other place? They have Utopia, and you don’t. Misery loves company. It’s time to change some things.

Go to section 10.

10. Zeal

Rows of smiling identical people sing a patriotic anthem in perfect tune. In Utopia/Dystopia, you are never alone.

Your society is happy, or it’s not. Someone else has it better, or they don’t. But you’re sure about one thing: Other people are different from you. And that’s dangerous.

Everyone else must share in your happiness or unhappiness. Everyone else must be just like you. Like Jane. Like John.

Oh boy, it’s war again!

Go to section 11.

11. War, Again

I hope you’re not surprised. It always comes back to war. The details change, but the patterns remain the same.

The last war was just for fun, but this one is serious. You’re blowing the left arms off babies and burning 10,000-year-old monasteries. You perfect the technique of keeping a soldier alive despite mortal injury; the technique is quite helpful for spies on suicide missions. Your soldiers pray to God in the field, but you don’t have time to answer. You’re busy making military decisions. This war is serious, and hard choices must be made. John marches off again, and someday will return to Jane. Or he won’t. That’s war.

The question is, did you win? Will you dominate these not-like-you people and rule them with an iron hand? Or did you lose, and now face the destruction of your society?

If you won, go to section 12.

If you lost, go to section 14.

12. Tyranny

You’re mad at these people, these pathetic creatures you conquered. They started that horrible war! Now you must teach them a lesson.

You make them build bigger stadiums and better fast food restaurants. Perhaps it’s tyranny, but it’s oppression with a smile — because you love them. That’s why you want them to be like you. Just like you. And once they learn your lesson, they will be like you. You want them to enjoy their world as much as you enjoy yours. Or hate it, the way you hate your own. It’s all for the good of John and Jane, who really should appreciate you more.

Unfortunately, your smiles aren’t enough to convince them of your love. There’s always room for assassination.

Go to section 13.

13. Assassination

Oops! Someone got crabby and killed your leader, in the shower. It’s terribly messy, with brains splattered on the bathroom wall.

Who do you blame? Why, it’s obvious. It’s the vice-president secret police Communists students Boy Scouts Mothers Against Drunk Driving anyone who isn’t you. People not you are responsible! People not you must pay!

Retaliation is swift and effective. You kill their leader. And the other leaders. And some people who aren’t leaders. And they kill more of your leaders. And non-leaders. The streets flow with blood.

Is this war again, again? No, it’s just collapse. Government structures tumble. Schools are boarded up. Garbage piles up because no one removes it. People burn textbooks for warmth. John and Jane live on scraps from their neighbors. Maybe someone finds an atomic weapon, and maybe they use it. Maybe they don’t need to.

Whichever way it happens, you’ve reached the apocalypse.

Go to section 14.

14. Apocalypse

Oh no! Your civilization is destroyed. No more fast food. No more sporting events. No more two-for-one buffalo wing specials.

It’s a mushroom cloud, billowing away in the breeze. Or a plague where everyone’s skin explodes with toxic pustules. Or intense radiation that boils the brains of ninety-eight percent of the population.

All of the nice families with two-point-five children (maybe happy, maybe not) are vaporized like rain in a volcano. Or the corpses pile up like ants that ate poisoned bait. The survivors walk among the living dead — stealing granola bars from their purses but leaving the wallets, because who needs money anymore?

Nuclear winter sets in. Or a biological disaster. Or just sheer depression.

But there are a few survivors. There always are. And they can start over.

Go to section 15.

15. Survival

Groups of ragged survivors struggle across the wasteland, or rubble, or abandoned cities. John and Jane take things one day at a time. Their challenge is to live until the night — then to live through the night, and to live another day.

Food and shelter are scarce. Many people don’t make it. With time, the population balances so that it can support itself on the meager resources. This takes months, or it takes years. But when enough time passes, a small tribe sits in a cave, or at an oasis, or by a river. John (or Jane) says, “Remember how much better things used to be?” The others throw rocks at him or her, and demand not to be reminded. They want to forget the dead times that can’t be revived.

But Jane (or John) watches, and waits, and remembers.

Once the others have truly forgotten — and the past has become myth — s/he has an idea. S/he says to the others, “I will lead you to happiness and freedom! Everyone follow me!” John (or Jane) unifies the tribes. Jane (or John) thinks that s/he has a new idea, better than anyone’s ever had, something that will work. As always, certain choices must be made. But Jane and John are no different from you, in the end. They aren’t smarter or wiser. They’re just someone else.

Go to section 16.

16. Beginning, Again

Did you think the choices were terrible? They were.

Are you disappointed in where your choices have led you? Don’t be. Other leaders have tried, and failed. The future is full of the same choices as the past. Nobody likes the choices, but civilization keeps moving.

Do you feel that you’re at the beginning, again? You are. It’s a circle. But there’s always hope for change — hope that the circle becomes a spiral staircase.

Look, here, see this. A room, with a table. It’s evening, or night. Look closely at the three people sitting around the table: John, Jane, their child. John smiles. He needs a shave, or perhaps he is bearded. Jane serves lasagna, or chicken casserole, as she tells her family about her day. The child is a girl, or a boy. The child sits in a highchair and gazes adoringly at John and Jane. After they eat, the parents take the child upstairs, singing a lullaby. It’s been a good day.

Their world is radical, or traditional. They vote like responsible citizens, but they’re more excited by the child learning to walk. The child grows up in revolution, or not, and marries a man, or a woman, or no one at all. S/he raises a family in Utopia/Dystopia or a world that is neither. When the apocalypse comes, s/he stays with the kids, who are grown up themselves and having a child. Despite the destruction, a baby is born.

You have a civilization.

© 2007 by Vylar Kaftan.

Originally published in Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Farah Mendlesohn.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vylar Kaftan won a Nebula for her alternate history novella “The Weight of the Sunrise.” She’s published about forty short stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and other places. Her Nebula-nominated story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” launched Lightspeed Magazine.

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

To See Pedro Infante

Silvia Moreno-Garcia | 2,400 words

“Pedro Infante has died!” someone yelled. “His plane went down in Yucatán! They said it on the radio!”

Cecilia stood by the window, a ream of paper in her hands, and her soul flew out of her body.

• • • •

Cecilia met Pedro the previous spring, at the offices of Lic. Luis Barragán.

She was pretty and the fastest typist on her floor. She also exuded an air of superiority which kept the other secretaries far from her and made the young men quiver.

Despite resembling a delectable sphinx, Cecilia grew up in a grey vecindad where the women had catfights next to the lavaderos while their laundry flapped in the wind. The men came home late, reeking of booze. Children with dirty fingernails stared at passers-by while their older siblings picked a few pockets and went to play at the billiards.

Everyone lived in one-bedroom apartments, no matter the size of the family. Six, five, even eight kids piled in these tiny abodes and had to watch as their parents fucked or fought or did anything at all.

Cecilia averted her eyes and leafed through movie magazines, pasting pictures of her favourite stars on the wall, hiding the mould and the cracks dotting the worn plaster. Her desire to flee this miserable abode manifested in the odd ability to flow from her body and into the body of another. It first happened in high school when her essence spilled into a boy she fancied, but was too afraid to approach. Cecilia often slipped out of herself as she rode the tram, hair pinned up, so shiny it seemed to be lacquered, looking straight ahead while the teenage neighbours tried to pinch her buttocks.

On her way back home, Cecilia would wait for the tram and stare at the large billboard across the street which showed impossible worlds she could never reach. Worlds where women wore pearls at dinner or rode shiny new cars. While she stared at the ads, she breathed one, two, three times and lost herself in someone else’s flesh for a few minutes until the sound of the approaching tram pulled her back into her body and she boarded the vehicle.

The day she met Pedro Infante they had just changed the billboard. A model, nylon-encased legs crossed together, advertised stockings. Sheer beauty, the display type exclaimed.

Cecilia glanced at the ad, then marched into Barragán’s office together with the wave of fellow stenographers, clerks, and assorted employees.

Barragán’s office was very large, with heavy wooden furniture polished bright, many typewriters neatly arranged upon rows of prim desks and an air of luxury that Cecilia had never seen except in the movie theatre. Her father worked at the local tortilleria and came home covered in flour with his white cap still on his head. No desks nor ties for him.

Cecilia typed all morning. By lunchtime, she sat perched very straight on her chair, wearing the nicely tailored clothes her mother — a brown little seamstress of scant physical attractiveness — copied for her. She always made a point to watch her posture, even when it was her lunchtime and she was leafing through a magazine and eating an apple. Unlike the other girls who went to eat tacos at the corner stand, their fingers coated with grease as they ate and laughed, Cecilia did not patronize the street sellers. It seemed very déclassé — she had picked this word from the magazines — to eat this way. To laugh so loud. To look so impudently at men as they walked by and whistled at the young women in their nylons and slit skirts.

Cecilia read and ate at her desk while the office remained empty and quiet during the lunch hour. Barragán walked in — she recognized him by his heavy steps — and sweeping past her desk, called for her.

“Cecilia, bring your notepad,” he said.

Cecilia raised her head and saw that her boss was not alone: Pedro Infante accompanied him. He looked better than in the movies, if that was possible. He had a trimmed little moustache and a dashing white smile, which he flashed at her as she rose like a somnambulist and clutching her notebook with both hands followed them.

Barragán sat behind his desk, grumbling about something. He picked the receiver, his fat fingers pulling the dial.

“Hi. I’m Pedro,” he said, extending his hand. “What’s your name?”

“Cecilia,” she muttered.

“Been working here long?” he asked.

“Two years.”

“How you like it?”

“It’s fine.”

“Pedro, take a seat,” Barragán said, hanging up. “Cecilia, take note.”

She bowed her head and began to scribble. Fifteen minutes later she was dismissed and managed to make it back to her desk where she slowly sat down and stared at the typewriter.

Pedro exited the office, smiling at her.

• • • •

That evening she went to the movies with Federico. He worked as a clerk in another office two floors beneath Cecilia. Bland and insipid, wearing thick glasses and with his hair combed back, he was, nevertheless, the most promising suitor Cecilia had managed to attract. Oh, there were plenty of young men willing to leer and chat with her, but Cecilia considered herself a serious girl and behaved in an almost militaristic way when it came to her dates. Even Federico, who’d taken her out half a dozen times, had not earned anything more than an impersonal hug.

Despite her distaste for public displays of affection and her contempt for the girls who let themselves be smooched and fondled in the cinema, Cecilia, entranced by the gigantic black and white image of Pedro Infante streaming from the projector, found her hands moving, like spiders, towards Federico.

She closed her eyes and swooped far, slipping into Pedro Infante’s skin.

She sat there, nestled cozy in a corner of his mind, a half-empty glass of whiskey in his hands. She rubbed her thumb against the smooth, cool glass.

In the movie theatre, Federico was shocked to discover the young woman touching his leg, but he decided not to question this sudden change and rubbed back, his hands searching beneath Cecilia’s skirts while she stared at the movie screen, mouth slightly ajar.

Later, as she lay in the bed she shared with two sisters, Cecilia stared at the ceiling, mouthing dialogue from the movie she’d just watched. She slipped once more into Pedro’s body, into his sleeping shell, and wrapped herself snug inside him.

• • • •

The day Pedro Infante returned to the office Cecilia took special care with her dress and makeup, dressing in the tightest, shortest skirt she had and donning a pair of black heels that made her tower over every woman in the packed trolley.

As lunchtime approached, Cecilia’s nervousness mounted. She slipped out of her body half a dozen times and into the body of the elevator operator, trying to see if Pedro was coming. When she finally spotted him, she hurried back to her body.

Cecilia sat still, fingertips pressed against the edge of the desk, trying to slow her breathing. Pedro stopped, peering down at her.

“Hi,” he said. “I was wondering if Mr. Barragán is in.”

“He is,” she replied. “Do you want me to announce you?”

She stretched a hand towards the telephone, fingers grazing the disc.

“You know what,” he said leaning against her chair with a mischievous smirk, “why don’t we run away for a bit?”

Cecilia looked at him in confusion. “Let’s have lunch,” he said. “I hate having lunch with Barragán and if I walk in right now, he’s going to make me go eat with him. I’d much rather eat with you. What do you say?”

• • • •

Cecilia saw some of the secretaries clustered by a window. When she walked by, they grinned at her, white teeth; the canines of cannibals. She slipped into one of their bodies to hear what they were whispering about and was rewarded with rude words about herself.

Went off with him just like that.

Slut.

Irritated, Cecilia forced the cow that had just spoken to bump into a desk, bruising her shin.

Cecilia typed invoices in triplicate. The carbon paper stained her fingers and she wiped them clean with a handkerchief, then ventured downstairs for a cigarette and stared at the model’s nylon-encased legs.

• • • •

“I heard you had a friend come in to visit you today,” Federico said.

It was the end of the day and Cecilia was trying to duck out without bumping into Federico. News of her lunch with Pedro Infante had spread through the whole building like wildfire and she was tired of the stares it garnered her.

“He was in the offices, yes,” she replied.

“So?”

“Nothing,” she said shrugging.

“Look, I don’t like you going out with other guys. I don’t care if it’s the guy handling the mail or a movie star. You get it?”

“You’re not my boyfriend.”

“I’d like to be your boyfriend.”

“Oh, go away,” she said.

He grabbed her arm and opened his mouth. Cecilia slipped into his skin, shut his mouth so quickly he bit his tongue, and made him shuffle back three steps.

She returned to her body and hurried away, heels clicking against the hot pavement.

• • • •

Halfway through dinner, while her mother was complaining that the lady from Number 3 had yet to pay for her daughter’s communion dress and how this meant there would be no new shoes for the girls, Cecilia excused herself from the table.

Cecilia locked herself in the bathroom. She sat on the floor and closed her eyes. She willed herself out, into the night sky. It was always a bit scary to exit her skin and move long distances because she feared she might get lost. But that evening she swooped far, slipping into Pedro Infante’s skin.

He was having dinner with his wife and the sight of the woman startled Cecilia, but then she recovered and swept into his wife’s body so she could get a good look at him. She brushed a crumb from her dress and tilted her head.

She’d never dared to talk to anyone when she stole into a body but the urge to speak was enormous. She licked her lips and opened her mouth to say something.

There was a loud knock on the door.

“I need to pee! Are you reading your magazines again?!” one of her sisters screeched.

Cecilia slammed the door open and shoved her sister aside.

• • • •

Awake, that night, she journeyed back to his house, to his wife’s body. She lay next to him as he slept, staring at Pedro for a long time. She dared, just for a few scant breaths, to hum one of the songs she’d heard him sing on film and then — exhausted by the effort, by the distance her soul must travel — returned to her own body and was late for work in the morning.

• • • •

He returned a month later. The model with the long legs and the nylons was gone. Instead, there was an ad for Tabu: The Forbidden Perfume, featuring a woman with long white gloves in an evening dress. Cecilia stood outside her office, waiting for the trolley, while her mind lay hidden inside a fat, rich woman who had come into Barragán’s that morning. The woman had just left and was buying jewellery at a shop nearby. Cecilia stared with interest at the emeralds and diamonds and gold.

The claxon made her jump back into her body. She blinked.

Pedro Infante, driving a Harley-Davidson, was right in front of her.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

From the corner of her eye she could see Federico, who had also been waiting for the trolley just a few steps away from her. She rushed to sit behind Pedro. Federico looked very small in the rear view mirror and as the motorcycle sped away, he grew diminutive and disappeared.

The sky was indigo and the motorcycle was fast and for the first time in her life there was nowhere else she’d rather be and she hoped against hope that the credits would just begin to roll and it would fade to black, because there was no better finale and she did not want the moment tarnished.

• • • •

But it did end and he did not return.

The perfume ad disappeared. It was replaced for an ad for cleaning products. Then one about suitcases. Then it changed again.

Federico walked hand in hand with a secretary from one of the other floors.

Cecilia walked alone, with her file folders pressed against her chest, looking straight ahead.

And sometimes, late at night, she slipped into his wife’s body to look at him as he slept and she wanted to speak, words lodged deep in her throat. But speech, it seemed, was impossible. So she flew back into her body and promised herself she’d search in Barragán’s files and find his phone number and she’d phone in her own voice, in her own self, and ask, ”Remember me?”

The ad changed once again and she didn’t phone.

• • • •

One day in April Cecilia was walking towards her desk when a co-worker rushed into the office.

“Pedro Infante has died!” he yelled. “His plane went down in Yucatán! They said it on the radio!”

Cecilia stood by the window, a ream of paper in her hands, and her soul flew out of her body. It flew right into a young man who stood watching the conflagration fuelled by the twisted remains of a small plane and the debris of several houses. The stench of fish, fuel, and burning flesh bore into her nostrils.

Cecilia’s soul flew from the young man’s body and back to the office building where she stood by the window and she saw herself, the papers escaping from her hands and flying up in the air, taken by the breeze.

And she saw below the grey, dirty misery of the streets, heard the clanging and the din of the tram, the screams of street sellers and the wails of women. And there, below, she’d never again be able to gaze into the face of Pedro Infante.

Instead of swooping into her body Cecilia’s soul flees up, into the air, following that same breeze, unwilling to sit in her cage of muscle and bones. Up and up it flows, reaching towards the stars. Never to return while Cecilia’s vacant body tumbles out the window.

© 2014 by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Originally published in Love & Other Poisons.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel, Signal to Noise, about music, magic, and Mexico City, was released in 2015 by Solaris and has received praise from Locus, The Guardian, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and many other venues. Silvia’s first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was released in 2013 and was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her stories have also been collected in Love & Other Poisons.

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

Ghosts of Home

Sam J. Miller | 6,800 words

The bank didn’t pay for the oranges. They should have — offerings were clearly listed as a reimbursable expense — but the turnaround time and degree of nudging needed when Agnes submitted receipts made the whole process prohibitive. If she bugged Trask too much around the wrong things she might lose the job, and with it the gas card, which was worth a lot more money than the oranges. Sucking up the expense was an investment in staving off unemployment.

Plus, she liked the feeling that since they came out of her pocket, it was she that was stockpiling favor with the spirits, instead of the bank. What did JPMorgan Chase need with the gratitude of a piddling household spirit in one of the hundreds of thousands of falling-down buildings that dotted its asset spreadsheets? All her boss cared about was keeping the spirits happy enough that roofs would not collapse or bloodstains spread on whitewashed walls when it came time to show the place — or a hearth god or brownie cause a slip or tumble that would lead to a lawsuit. The offerings came from her, and with each gift she could feel their gratitude. Interaction with household spirits was strictly forbidden, but she enjoyed knowing they were grateful. As now, entering the tiny red house at 5775 Route 9, just past the Tomahawk Diner. She breathed deep the dry wood-and-mothballs smell. She struck a match, lit the incense stick, made a small slit in the orange peel with her fingernail. Spirits were easy to please. What they wanted was simple. Not like people.

Wind shifted in the attic above her, and she caught the scent of potpourri. A sachet left in a closet upstairs, perhaps, or the scented breath of the spirit of the place. Agnes knew nothing about this one, or any of the foreclosed houses on her route. Who had lived there. Where they went. All she knew was the bank evicted them. A month ago or back in 2008 when the bubble first began to burst. Six months on the job and she still loved to investigate, but her roster of properties was too long to let her spend much time in each. And the longer she stayed, the harder it was to avoid interacting.

When she turned to go, he was standing by the door.

“Hello,” he said, a young man, bearded and stocky and bespectacled, his voice disarmingly cheerful. She thought he was a squatter. That’s the only reason she spoke back.

“Hi,” she said, carefully. Squatters weren’t her job. Trask had someone else to handle unlawful inhabitants. Most of the ones she’d met on her rounds were harmless, down on their luck and hiding from the rain. But anybody could get ugly, when they thought their home was threatened. Agnes held up an orange. “I’m just here for the offerings,” she said. “I won’t report that you’re sleeping here. But they do checks, so you should be prepared to move on.”

He tilted his head, regarded her like a dog might. “Move . . . on?”

“Yeah,” she said, and bit her tongue to keep from warning him. The guy Trask uses, he’s a lunatic. He’ll burn the place down just to punish you. She knew she should have been sympathetic to all the people overcrowded or underhoused because the banks would rather keep buildings empty than lower the prices. But nobody knew better than Agnes that when you broke the law, you had to be ready for the consequences.

“Oh!” he said, at last. “Oh, you think I’m a human!”

She stared. “You’re . . . not?”

“No, no,” he said, and laughed. A resounding, human, manly laugh. It reverberated in her belly. “No . . . let’s just say I can’t move on. This is my house.”

“I’m so sorry.” Agnes bowed her head, panic swelling in her stomach at her accidental disobedience. If Trask knew they spoke, she could get fired. “I meant no disrespect.”

“I know,” he said. Spirits could see that much, or so the stories went. Beyond that it was tough to tell. Some were all-knowing and some were dumb as boxes of rocks. What else did this one know about her?

Agnes had given up long ago trying to figure out why household spirits manifested differently. Sometimes it made sense, like the Shinto-tinged ancestor embodiment in the house where a Japanese family had lived, or the feisty boar-faced domovoi in a rooming house they had seized from a Russian lady. Others resisted explanation — who knew why an ekwu common to the Igbo people kept a vigil in a McMansion six thousand miles from Nigeria that had never been occupied by anyone, of African descent or otherwise . . . or why a supposedly timeless spirit would manifest as a scruffy hot man with a sleeve of tattoos like a current-day skateboarder? Weird, but no weirder than the average manifestation.

“Thank you for the orange,” he said, and crossed the room to take it out of her hand. She could smell him: He smelled like any other man. She could feel his heat. His hair was brown red. His glasses magnified his eyes slightly, making him look a little like a cartoon character.

“You like oranges? It’s usually a safe bet. Some houses like some pretty wacky shit, though. I don’t kill cats for anybody.” She realized she was doing that thing. The thing where she talked too much. Because she wanted somebody — a man — to like her. For an instant she did that other thing, where she immediately hated herself for this, and then realized none of it mattered. This wasn’t a man. It could never leave. It knew nothing of the world but what it found between these walls. And she had to go. Now.

He peeled the orange. She half-expected his hand to pass right through it, but that was silly. She knew spirits could affect the physical world in ways far more varied and impressive than any human. Once she watched a building burst into sudden, all-encompassing flames, reducing itself to ash and windblown smoke in four minutes.

“I like oranges,” he said. “Also whiskey. Could you bring me some of that, next time?”

“Bourbon, rye, scotch — single-malt, blended . . .” She recited the names like a list of lovers, men who had done her wrong, men who she still loved and would take back in an instant. She had no intention of bringing him booze. But saying the names made her blood thicken and her mouth dry.

“Bring me your favorite,” he said.

“That’s maybe not such a good idea,” she semi-whispered.

He shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

She wondered if she could trust the sadness in his voice. If spirits really were all that different from men. If, at bottom, they wanted something, and once they had it they were through with you.

“Why don’t you stay?” he said, his eyes wide and throbbing with loneliness.

“I’ve got two dozen houses left to visit today,” she said. “And then I’ve got to turn the keys in. Otherwise, the other maintenance workers won’t be able to get in.”

“After, then. Come back here. You’re nice. I can see it.”

“I wish I could,” she said. “But there’s people expecting me.”

He nodded, and handed her half the orange.

A door slammed, upstairs, in the long seconds that came next. The spirit’s head whipped to the side, his lips curling into a snarl, and for an instant Agnes saw the face of something savage and canine.

“The wind,” she said.

“Sorry,” he whispered, human again, pale and embarrassed. “I’ve been very on edge lately. I don’t know why.”

“I’m Agnes,” she said, telling herself she had imagined the momentary monster-face. The next house was 12 Burnt Hills Road, and she hated that one. The spirit manifested as the house itself, floorboards opening like mouths and bricks shifting as she walked through.

“Call me Micah.”

He wiped one juice-wet hand on the hem of his flannel shirt, then extended it. They shook. She bowed her head again, and he laughed protestingly. Then she left.

It was a lie, of course. No one was expecting her. No one cared where she was.

• • • •

Her mother gave her a stiff-armed hug, her hands slick with tuna fish and mayonnaise.

“Wouldn’t have been smoking if I knew you were coming over,” she said, stubbing out a Virginia Slim she’d just lit off the stove burner.

“It’s fine, really,” Agnes said, sitting down at the kitchen table. The tiny trailer never failed to make her feel immense. “Can I help?”

“Boil me some water.”

Two days later, and Agnes couldn’t stop thinking about the man — the spirit — in the tiny red ranch. Even though her job was keeping spirits happy, she had only cared about them insofar as it might help her keep her job, and maybe one day get a better one.

Her mother tore plastic wrap roughly off the roll. “You never come by without a reason.”

Agnes almost said she simply missed her mother, but the woman was too sharp for lies. “I wanted to ask. About our house.”

Her mother snorted cruelly. Pear-shaped, crookedly ponytailed, smelling of church-basement bingo, her mother’s mind still terrified Agnes. The woman probably knew lots about household spirits and how they worked, from all those endless Sunday services and prayer groups. All Agnes remembered from church was that God was the prime spirit, present in all things and tying it all together, and Jesus was his emanation. Just like Micah was the emanation of 5775. Anyway Agnes should have known they couldn’t have a civil conversation. Her mother had spent six months waiting for an apology, and Agnes didn’t believe she had anything to apologize for.

“I wanted to ask about the spirit.”

“Ganesha.”

“It wasn’t actually Ganesha, mom. It just took that form.”

“Took that name, too.”

“Fine. But you never wondered why it took that form, and not another? Considering we’re not Hindu?”

“You could have called,” her mother said. “If you just wanted to ask me stupid questions.”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Agnes said, and stood up. “I actually thought you might be happy to see me.”

“You on something?” She looked at Agnes for the first time since she’d arrived.

“No, mom.” She looked around, debated asking about the trailer and its spirit, but the subject was a sore one.

She wondered if her mother knew. Where she slept at night.

“Better not be,” her mother said. “You don’t want to lose that job.” She stirred a third spoonful of powdered milk into her instant coffee. Her face was hard as winter pavement. “Considering what you had to do to get it.”

• • • •

“There is a crisis,” Trask said, clicking through pictures on his computer. Graffiti someone spray-painted onto the back of the bank — bloodsuckers, vampires, profiting from crisis. “A crisis of accountability! These people did it to themselves. They signed mortgages they didn’t understand . . .”

Agnes discretely texted herself the word accountability. She had lost the thread of what he was saying, as often happened during their supervisory meetings. Trask didn’t mind when she texted, when they talked. He did it himself, incessantly. Work is more important than etiquette, he said.

“How’s everything out on Route 9?”

“Same old,” she said.

“No signs of dissatisfaction?”

“I heard singing in a couple. That could mean —”

His hand flapped impatiently. “It’s in the reports?”

Agnes nodded.

“Good.”

Around her, the bank bustled. Trask watched the two television screens mounted on his wall. A new stack of spiral-bound printed reports sat on his desk.

“What’re these?” she asked.

“The central bank has a big analysis division, and they’ve been looking at trends on underoccupied homes. These reports are . . . actionable.”

He was doing that thing, the thing people had done to her all through school. Trying to make her feel stupid. She didn’t mind it, coming from him. Trask trusted her.

Once, at a party, someone found out she worked for the bank and started yelling at her about how they had been thrown out when her husband got hurt on the job and couldn’t work. Agnes had kept her mouth shut because the girl was a friend of a friend, but she agreed with Trask: These people did it to themselves. The world didn’t owe you a house. The world is a swamp of shit and suffering and you have to bust your ass to keep your head above water and sometimes you still drown. Sometimes you drown slow. Like Agnes.

“You were late today,” he said.

“I know. I didn’t remember what day it was until it was almost too late.”

“You need to start using a calendar app.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’ve showed you how like ten times,” he said, swiveling his monitor to show her the calendar in his browser window, synched to his phone.

A map of the county hung below the televisions. Hundreds of pushpins peppered it, showing homes the bank owned. Lines divided the county into five transects, each of which had its own spirit maintenance worker. Hers was Transect 4, the westernmost one, the space least densely settled, the one that required the most driving. She scanned the map idly, avoiding even looking at Transect 1, and the pin that stabbed through the heart of the house where she grew up. The house her mother lost. The house that got her this job.

Agnes picked up a crude jade frog from his desk, weighed it in her hand, felt the tiny spirit inside. Could it see her? Know her heart? Every object had a spirit, and while stories said that long ago the trees talked and mountains moved to hurt or help humans, only homes still spoke. For the thousandth time, she thought of Micah.

His snarl, his momentary monstrousness, did not make him less appealing. It made him more so. Being with so many bad men had hardwired fear into desire.

“Lunch meeting,” Trask said, rising. “File the hard copies?”

Alone in his office, she wrenched open the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. She flipped through folders, added incident reports and travel logs. Rooting around in the filing cabinet made her feel frightened, like a trespasser. Every time, she had to fight the urge to browse through things that had nothing to do with her. To learn more. To understand. Trask would not tolerate that kind of intrusion. One more way she could lose her job.

But then — there. 5775 Route 9. The house where Micah lived. Was lived even the right word? Micah’s house. But that wasn’t right either. The house didn’t belong to him. It was him.

Cheeks burning, she pulled the folder from the cabinet. Deeds, contracts, mortgages, spreadsheets — all the secrets and stories of the house, encoded in impenetrable hieroglyphics. Resolve settled in her stomach, bitter and hard. Like when, ages ago, in another life, another Agnes had decided for the thousandth time to return to whatever bar or trailer park would best get her whatever illegal substance her body was enslaved to then.

She looked around, wondered if anyone else could see the guilt on her face. Trask’s computer screen was still on, logged in to the property management system. Because he trusted her.

Did banks have household spirits? Places where no human had ever lived? Lots of people spent more time at work than at home, but work was different. What difference would that difference make? Once, she’d slept in a hotel. Its spirit had been flimsy, insubstantial, shifting shapes in an abrupt and revolting fashion. Even her car had a spirit. It never spoke or showed itself, but sometimes its weird jagged dreams rubbed up against her own while she slept.

Agnes shut her eyes and listened. Felt. Called out to the dark of the echoey old space around her.

And something answered. Something impossibly big and distant, like a whale passing far beneath a lone swimmer. Something dark and sharp and cruel and cold. She opened her eyes with a gasp and saw she was shivering.

Smiling and confident on the outside, screaming on the inside from joy and terror, seeing in her mind’s eye exactly how this course of action might cost her everything, Agnes took the folder to Trask’s Xerox machine and began to make herself copies.

• • • •

He was waiting for her on the porch of 5775. He hugged his knees to his chest like some people held on to hope. When he saw her, his face split into a smile so glorious her own face followed suit.

“Hi,” he said, rising, T-shirted, eyes all golden fire from the last of the evening sun.

“Hello,” she said, and held up a bag full of fast food. “Hungry?”

He clapped his hands, his face all joy. “You’re here early,” he said. “You usually only come through here every couple of weeks.”

“You’ve been watching me for a while now,” she said, handing him the bag.

“I don’t know. Something wouldn’t let me stay silent.” He opened the bag, stuck his face in, breathed deep. Happiness made him laugh. Agnes wondered when she had last heard someone laugh from happiness.

She had made the mistake of visiting 12 Burnt Hills Road right before. It had spoken to her, its voice like bricks dragged across marble. It said I want to show you something, over and over. She did not let it.

The file on 5775 had told her nothing. The house was fifty years old, had been owned by a perfectly banal couple who left it to their son and his wife, who sold it to a woman who couldn’t keep up with her mortgage when she got laid off when the school districts consolidated, and had been evicted four years prior. No Micahs anywhere.

He ran down the hall, and came back with a bed sheet. This he spread on the living room floor, and sat on. “Instant picnic!” Micah said, his enthusiasm so expansive she barely felt the pain in her knees when she squatted beside him. Sleeping in the fetal position night after night was beginning to take a toll.

While he took the food from the bag and began to set it up, she watched his arms. Pixelated characters from the video games of her youth adorned his arms, along with more conventional tattoo fodder — a castle; a lighthouse. “How long have you looked like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He ate a French fry, then four. “Forever? A couple months?”

“The band on your T-shirt didn’t exist when this house was built,” she said. “Or do you have a whole ghost wardrobe upstairs somewhere?”

He shrugged. “No. I don’t know why they’re the clothes they are.”

“Did you ever look like something else?”

He laughed. Micah laughed. “Sometimes I think so. Did you?”

“Not that I know of. So there’s not a household spirit Book of Rules?”

“Not that I know of.”

They ate burgers, drank sodas. She had so many questions, but what happened inside her chest while she watched him eat answered the only real one. He bit off giant greedy childish bites, and barely chewed.

It made sense that after being empty for a long time, a household spirit might become something different. And lose track of everything it had been before. She asked, “Do you remember the people who used to live here?”

He nodded, eyes on her, lips on his soda straw. “Well. Sort of. I feel them. I can’t really remember them, but they’re there. Like . . .” Like a dream you’ve woken up from, she thought, but didn’t say out loud.

“I’m not supposed to interact with you,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

“What’s your job?” he asked, all earnestness.

“I make offerings at houses where nobody lives.”

He nodded. The last drops of soda slurped noisily up his straw. “They must pay you well for that.”

“They don’t.”

“But what you do is so important!”

“I’m an independent contractor — basically a janitor,” she said, and thought back to the old maintenance man at her high school, muttering prayers and burning incense beneath a defaced wall once he’d washed away the graffiti. “My mother says we’re all doomed,” Agnes continued. “She says these empty houses are going to add up to a whole lot of angry spirits. She says all the oranges and incense in the world won’t make a difference. When people move back in, the spirits will have turned feral.”

Micah wiped grease from his lips with his sleeve. “There’s a lot of empty houses?”

Agnes nodded. Obviously Micah didn’t watch the news or read the papers. She had been imagining that he knew all sorts of things, through spirit osmosis or who-knows-how. “Chase owns hundreds, in this county alone. Bank of America —”

“That’s sad,” he whispered. His face actually reddened. He was like her. He felt his emotions so hard he couldn’t hide them. The air in the room thickened, grew taut. The hairs of her arms stood on end. His didn’t. At any moment he could start flinging lightning bolts, she thought, or burn us both to ash. She put her hand on his arm, and the crackling invisible fury ebbed away.

“What’s it like? When there’s no one here?” She was thinking of him, but also thinking of Ganesha. Alone in her old house. The rambunctious thing that had been her only friend for so long, who played strange complex storytelling games with her and gave her spirit candy when she made a wise decision. She could taste the anise of it, still, feel it stuck between her teeth like taffy, although even if she ate it all day it would never give her cavities or make her fat. She had spent years trying not to think of Ganesha.

“It’s horrible,” Micah answered.

Agnes scooted closer. He wasn’t human. He could kill her just by thinking it. He was a monster, and she adored him. She took his face in both hands, moved them down so the roughness of his stubble felt smooth, and kissed him.

“I need to go,” she said, hours later, when she woke with her head on his bare strong chest and her body gloriously sore from the weight of him.

“No you don’t,” Micah said, his hand warm and strong on her leg. Somehow, he knew. That she had no home, that she slept in her car. He sat up. His eyes were wet and panicky. He kissed her shoulder. “Please don’t go,” he said. “Why do you want to leave?”

Because Trask sends late-night goons to check for squatters sometimes.

Because I might lose my job if I stay.

Because this is not my home — I didn’t earn it, didn’t pay for it, can’t afford it.

Because I don’t deserve a home.

Because love makes me do dumb things.

“You’re like me,” Micah whispered, and his whispers vibrated in her ears even once she was back in the Walmart parking lot in the cramped backseat of her car under a blanket: “You’re on your own. We’re what each other needs.”

• • • •

Trask said routine was the key to success, which is why every morning Agnes woke and went to Dunkin Donuts for coffee and an unbuttered bagel and a rest room wash-up and tooth-brushing. Which is what she did the morning after making love to Micah. This time, though, when she emerged from the rest room and a woman was waiting for it, she didn’t think to herself: Oh no, what if she guesses what I was doing in there and immediately knows I’m homeless and pathetic, but rather: What if she’s doing the same thing as me — for the same reason as me?

Which is maybe why, this time, she broke the routine slightly and instead of heading straight to the bank for her day’s assignments Agnes drove east into Transect 1, feeling her chest tighten, struggling to breathe deeply against the weight that could not possibly be guilt, because she had done nothing to feel guilty about, because she had done the right thing — Trask said so —

And found the deep raw crater, lined in red clay like a wound in the belly of the universe, where the house she grew up in used to be.

• • • •

“Agnes?” Trask said, looking confused. “Everything okay?”

“Hi,” she said, stopping herself from apologizing for disturbing him. An unscheduled visit was an unprecedented breach of propriety. They texted, or they talked in supervisory meetings. She had never just shown up before. “What’s happening to the houses in Transect 1?”

“We’re demolishing them, Agnes.” His voice now was like when teachers wanted to shame her into silence.

“Why?”

“I told you. Actionable recommendations from the central analysis division. Even with emanation placation measures in place, we’ve been noticing some disturbing patterns.”

My mother was right, she thought. They’ve gone feral. His computer made soft pinging noises as the day’s pitches arrived. Every bank routinely made offers for every other bank’s underoccuppied property, usually for ridiculously low amounts, knowing they’d be rejected. Fishing for hunger. Trying to “assemble development portfolios” and other concepts she had not initially understood.

“But people could be living there,” she told Trask, knowing, as soon as she said it, that the argument had no financial weight and was therefore worthless.

• • • •

“What do you mean, you can’t step onto the lawn?”

“I just can’t,” Micah said, grinning, face glistening with French fry grease and her kisses. He leaned over the porch railing; reached out his arm to her.

“But it’s part of the property,” she said, stepping just out of his reach.

Micah shrugged. “Property is a legal fiction,” he said. “Words on paper don’t change anything. A house is a house.”

“A legal fiction,” she said, and texted the phrase to herself. “I thought you didn’t know The Rules.”

“Some things I just know,” he said. “I don’t know why I look like this, but I know what I can’t do. And I know that when you’re here, it feels right.”

“But this is crazy, isn’t it? You and me. A spirit and a person? I’ve never heard of that.”

“Me either,” he said. “So?”

“We can’t . . . be together.”

“We’re together now.”

“This isn’t my house.”

“Why not?” His eyes were wide, sincere, incredulous. She wanted to eat them. She wanted to have them inside her forever.

“Because it costs money to buy a house. I don’t have money.”

Micah nodded, but she knew he did not understand.

Back in the car, she stared at the wooden block studded with keys. Her roster for the day: three dozen homes, defenseless.

Agnes had made mistakes before. She’d shattered friendships. She’d had a drink when she knew the whole long list of horrible things that would come next. One thing was always true, though: She knew they were mistakes before she made them. She decided to make a mistake and that’s what she did. The hard part was figuring out the right mistake to make.

• • • •

“Twice in two weeks,” her mother said, stubbing out her Virginia Slim. “You hard up for a place to take a shower?”

“Happy to see you, too, Mom.”

Her mom sat back in her chair and sighed, a long aching sound. Her eyes did not seem able to open all the way. Walmart had demoted her from the cash register to the shoe section. They talked in terse, fraught sentences until the water boiled and the instant coffee was prepared.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Sorry for what?” her mother muttered.

“Sorry for what I did. To you.”

Her mother’s mug clinked against the counter. Now her eyes were wide. “What did you do?”

“You know what I did. We both do. You even said so, the last time I was here.”

“Tell me.”

Agnes nodded. She owed her mother this much — to spell it out, to look her in the eyes. “I told the bank you were still living there, in the house, after you’d stopped paying the mortgage. After you’d been evicted. I got you kicked out.”

Her mother’s eyes were harsh, unblinking. Agnes took a sip: The coffee was so strong it hurt to swallow. “Do you know? What they did to it?”

Her mother nodded. “I drive by there, sometimes.”

“I didn’t think I did anything wrong,” Agnes said. Her voice felt so small. “I thought you were in the wrong, to keep on living there when you couldn’t pay.”

“What changed?”

Agnes shrugged, opened her mouth, shut it again.

Her mother took her mug, added hot water, handed it back. “Last time you were here, you asked why the spirit took on the shape of Ganesha. I said I didn’t know, and I don’t. But I have a theory. When I was a little girl, our next-door neighbors were Indian. They had a Ganesha statue on their porch. They had a girl my age, we used to play together. She always made me rub the statue’s stomach for good luck. I think when a house finds its perfect owner, it takes on the shape that owner needs to see.”

Agnes sipped. Diluted to human strength, the coffee wasn’t bad.

• • • •

12 Burnt Hills Road again. She lingered, left an extra orange. The house frightened her, but sometimes being frightened wasn’t bad. Sometimes fear brought you where you needed to be.

Agnes, it said, when she turned to go. This time the squeal of glass and wood, grinding together: All four windows in the front room trembled together, spoke as one.

“You know my name?”

We all know your name.

“We?”

The empty ones. I want to show you something. Will you let me show you?

“Yes.”

Press your hands to the brick, the voice said, and she did. Shut your eyes, it said, and she did.

Laughter. A little girl ran into a swathe of sunlight. Herself, age five.

“No,” she whispered.

Watch.

Agnes at ten, Agnes at twelve. The house. Her house. Each room, each smell. Christmas cooking and make-up and wet paint. Her mother’s smile growing slimmer and the rest of her less so as time sped by. Ganesha, scrambling from room to room with one long undiminishing mischievous giggle.

Joy, then. Ganesha’s joy. The bliss of wholeness. The ecstasy of love, of family. Home meant love, meant wholeness. Shrinking, suddenly, when Agnes stormed out at age sixteen. After that a bereft, endless wondering. Where did she go? Why was she so upset? How have I failed her?

Her mother standing alone at the top of the stairs. Cigarettes. Burned TV dinners.

“Please,” Agnes said, too loudly, knowing what was next.

The house, empty. Ganesha stumbling. Shrinking. And then weeping, as pain began to break him apart. Hands growing twisted, pudgy child-fingers becoming cat-sharp claws. Pieces of trunk sloughing off. The transect maintenance worker brought oranges, but they did not stop what was happening to her friend. They merely channeled off his anger, his rage, his ability to lash out. When the wrecking ball came it was almost a relief. Ganesha went gladly, already mostly gone. Something bigger was there, though. A bigger, deeper something that was Ganesha but wasn’t. It shrieked. She wept, hearing it wail.

The windows went still.

“I thought you were all . . . on your own. Separate. Micah didn’t know what was happening to any of the other houses.”

A rippling shifted through the walls, and when the voice came again it came from a crude and jagged mouth that opened in the bricks above the fireplace. Autochthonous sentient structural emanations are complex. The spirit that takes on physical form, the thing that humans interact with, is only one piece. There is another piece. One that grows out of the earth the house is built on. One that springs from a common source with all the other autochthonous emanations in the area. These pieces are rarely aware of each other. Until they need to be. Do you understand?

“Sure,” and Agnes was startled to see that she did. She thought of how her mother understood God. She thought of the thing she had sensed, for an instant, in the bank. Something bigger and colder and crueler and more terrifying than a human mind could ever comprehend.

We saw you, Agnes. We saw what was inside of you. We knew that you were the one who could help us.

• • • •

Trask was stressed out about something. His forehead had extra lines in it; his eyebrows were arrows aiming at each other. He was immersed in his phone. When she logged the block of house keys back in, he left the key in the cabinet lock. Like he always did.

“Are you going to demolish all of them?”

He looked up from his phone, his face contorted briefly. By what? Hate, she thought at first, but that wasn’t right, whatever it was had no such intensity. Apathy, maybe, but that was only half the story. Trask took two reports from the top of the stack and flung them at her. “Read it yourself if you’re so nosy.”

He doesn’t care about you, she realized. He never has.

He thinks you’re stupid.

Agnes filled paperwork with scribbles until Trask left the office to take a call, and then she opened the cabinet and pocketed the key to Micah’s house. She dumped the rest of the keys from Transect 4 into her backpack, and put the block back in the cabinet, and locked it.

After thirty awful seconds, Agnes unlocked the cabinet again and took the keys to the rest of the Transects.

Trask’s screen was still on. She stared at it. Her plan was a terrible one. She could destroy the keys, but how much time would that buy them? Trask would learn what had happened soon enough, and he didn’t need a key to knock a building down. She’d be out of a job and those spirits would still get destroyed.

Agnes sat down at his desk. He didn’t leave her alone with so much power at her fingertips because he trusted her. He did it because he didn’t think she was smart enough to do anything about it. He gave her the job not because he liked her or saw potential, but because she showed him how desperate she was. How hungry. Hungry enough to betray her own mother for a shit job with no health insurance.

She clicked over to the window where the day’s offers had piled up. One by one she clicked yes, selling off a couple dozen buildings with Trask’s credentials. And then she made a series of offers on the Bank of America properties scattered throughout the county, offering ten million dollars for each of them when most were barely worth ten thousand.

Then she opened his calendar and typed in an appointment for him, tomorrow at twilight, at 12 Burnt Hills Road, with the plumbing maintenance foreman.

Trask might wonder what that was, how it had gotten there; he might even call the plumber to confirm. But most likely he would not. He was a man who trusted his calendar.

Would it kill him? she wondered. The thought of being a party to Trask’s murder did not disturb her as much as it should have. What she’d mistaken for officious mentorship had been contempt, combined with a love of feeling smarter than someone. More importantly, she’d do anything to keep Micah from going through what her home had gone through.

Chase would dispute the sales she had approved as Trask, and the offers he’d made, but Bank of America would take them to court to get them to honor these entirely legal contracts.

Later she buried the backpack full of keys in the red raw clay where her house had been.

• • • •

“That’s the last of it?” Micah asked, when she set the milk crate down on the porch.

“Such as it is.”

“You were living there?” he asked, wrinkling his nose in the direction of her car.

“Who really lives, anyway,” she asked, squatting to kiss his mouth. He handed her a glass of iced tea.

She took a sip, then drained the glass. “This is seriously the best iced tea I have ever had in my life.”

“I know,” he said. “And it has the added benefit of not having any calories.”

He put his arm around her. Night was coming and so was November. His heat was so strong and clear she didn’t believe it wasn’t real.

That morning, she had visited 12 Burnt Hills Road. Trask had been missing for two days. She expected blood and carnage, but the inside of the house was as it had always been. Wind wailed, weakly, somewhere.

The police came, said the stones above the mantle.

“They would have seen the address in his calendar,” she said. “I’m sorry, but there was no way for me to erase it after he saw it . . .”

He is well hidden. As is his vehicle. They found nothing, and departed. Touch the stones, if you want to see.

She didn’t, but she did. And saw him get out of his fancy truck, call out for the plumber, pat his pockets for the keys he knew he had not brought because the plumbers had their own set. Saw the front door creak open. Saw Trask step inside. Saw stones and wood and brick crawl together. Saw windows shatter into long cruel talons at the end of stumpy fingers. Saw the seat of Trask’s trousers darken.

“This is temporary,” she said, thinking of the cold cruel immense entity she had glimpsed at work. With Trask missing and the police involved, the court battle would drag on for a while. But not forever. “Eventually, the bank will move forward with a way to do what it wants.”

Yes, the house said. And so will we.

She didn’t ask What about Micah? His shape, his personality — is he part of you? Did you use him to manipulate me? As long as she didn’t know the answer, she could pretend it didn’t matter.

Micah startled her back to the here-and-now, carrying a radio on an extension cord. They danced to the Rolling Stones on the porch of the house that was hers, but not. Later, they lay in a bed so big she could not believe her stupidity — to think that this had been here all along, empty and waiting, while she slept in a car in the Walmart parking lot. Because of Trask, inside her head, and the bank and the school and everyone else in this world who said you only deserved what you could pay for. When she wept, he woke up. They spooned together.

Agnes fought sleep, not wanting to be anywhere else. She counted questions instead of sheep.

When we fight, will he accidentally incinerate me? When he is angry or sad, will blood drip from ceilings and swarms of hornets spell out hateful words on the wall?

She wondered if she would still have her job, without Trask. Probably she would. For now. Both banks would want to maintain the properties while they fought over them in court. She could fix the place up, get real human food, buy Micah the punk rock records he liked. She could lay low, but eventually there would be a confrontation. Ownership would be settled. Someone would come, looking to knock it down or clear it out. But wasn’t that part of what it meant, to have a home? The knowing that it could always be taken away from you? That’s what she never grasped, those long nights in her old house aching to be anywhere else. She had taken “home” for granted, something unbreakable and allotted to each of us, because that’s the way the world should be. And once it was gone she believed everyone deserved the same pain she and her mother went through. Ganesha was dead because of the lies she believed, and her mother’s heart was broken.

But now that she knew something could be taken away, she also knew she could fight for it.

“I love you,” she whispered, to him, to her home, and fell asleep marveling at how easy both things were to claim once you let yourself.

© 2015 by Sam J. Miller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel The Art of Starving is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com.

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

Python

Ursula Pflug | 5,500 words

A day at the edge of spring. Faith, Magnolia, and Jim sit in the bar, looking out at the square. The unlikely New Orleans snow is melting, making puddles on the asphalt, for the wind that blows is warm. Clouds scud across the sky; the pavement’s alternately light and dark. People stand about in the square, wearing opened jackets, the way they do in later spring up north in New York. It’s really too cool still but they do it anyway; the feeling of an open jacket is so new. They smoke cigarettes and pass coffee in Styrofoam cups back and forth. Faith loves Styrofoam cups, even though she knows they’re terrible. Grade eight, her first take-out coffees from the corner restaurant, with French fries and a smoke that did for lunch. No wonder she had trouble concentrating in class in the afternoons.

Why did she choose such a lunch? Soon enough she couldn’t do without them, the coffee and the cigarettes, although not the fries; the fries didn’t stick. What happened is she imagined for herself a life of adventure, of travel, mostly; pieced together out of things she’d read in books and seen on television, in movies: Soon enough she’d replaced it with a real, true one. That is why the coffee and fries for lunch in Grade Eight; it was the first step out onto the road that was to consume her for the next decade.

In Grade Nine she made a friend, Magnolia, whom she could admire, which was difficult enough; Faith hardly admired anyone. Even then they talked about going to New Orleans together; instead, when they were old enough they went to live in New York, where they met Clive. Like an arrow shot out of destiny’s sleeve it turned out he was from New Orleans. He invited them down for a visit; they could stay with him, meet his best friend Jim.

Suddenly, they were here. And lovers. They’re both lovers of Clive’s, but Faith is lovers with Jim, too. Nobody minds any of it. Clive is a musician, a bass player and singer in an eclectic arty band. More importantly, he’s real. Jim’s real, too: He’s skinny and wears a goatee and his long blonde hair tied back with a piece of string. While Faith is in New Orleans, for three weeks, she, like Clive, is black. It is only later she learns this is impossible.

On one side of the square there’s a high chain link fence like the kind surrounding home plate in a baseball diamond, that kids like to practice their climbing skills on. The first time you climb to the very top, Faith remembers, you get to jump a level in the game. The exhilaration lasts all day, and everyone treats you differently. Clive, who lives down the street, sometimes climbs the fence to get to the café. He does it, he says, to burn off the calories he consumes sitting and drinking beer in the afternoons. He is very vain of his good looks.

In the bar facing the square, there’s a makeshift, end of the world feeling. People mill about as though it was the last day on Earth, as though there are no longer any jobs to go to, as though, at last, they can do anything they like. They speak to one another, surprised, their eyes opened wide, as though they have just woken up. In the puddles at their feet the ice is melting. Faith brims with gratitude to be here, among these so miraculously waking people, opening as they are like flowers; this transformation that is objectively invisible, yet easily felt. It’s in their eyes, and their mouths: mouths held partly opened as though they are expecting something wonderful, at any moment, to fly in. Today Faith enlarges this metaphor she’s been shaping in her mind for days: The last day of the world isn’t an event in time at all. Like Jim’s eternity, like The Kingdom of God, it always exists. Within, at hand. She wonders what comes next, but not for long: Just now she wants to stay in this moment which is always available but so rarely experienced; soaking it up, sponge-like. She knows she needs to soak in as much of it as possible, that she will be needing it later.

A man comes to the window of an apartment in one of the buildings opposite the square and looks down at the wakened people. He looks down, and then goes back into his apartment and shuts the curtains. Faith sits at the café table she shares every afternoon with Clive and Jim and Magnolia and watches, wondering what he will do. She counts the moments it would take him to leave his apartment, walk down the hall, and take the elevator down. In her mind’s eye Faith sees him doing it. He comes to the café table, a tall pink drink in his hand. He drinks. “Hello,” he says, beaming widely at all four of them. “My name’s Perry.” But Faith knows he is really a condor.

The condor flaps his great black wings and tells the women he’s glad they’ve come to New Orleans, and invites them out dancing. Clive says he will come too, but Jim has something to do, as usual. They go to a little club up a wrought iron stairway like a fire escape, called, somewhat cornily, “Moondance.” The rosy lighting spills out the opened doors onto the street, and the moon hangs in the trees as though it’s been cut out of sheet metal, a brooch. “I’d like to take that pin down and give it to you,” says Magnolia, kissing Faith. Faith feels a sudden intense love for her friend, a deep love coloured by sexuality, but a different sexuality than she has ever felt for a man. She feels the passion will come up to her mouth and spill over. It does, a coloured tide cresting within her, pouring through not just her mouth but all of her, as though she is a vase made of holes. It’s terribly embarrassing; she’s sure her feelings are as visible to others as they’re overwhelming to herself, visible as pictures projected on a wall, as though to have so much love for a woman is somehow shameful. Her laughter feels like tears, and her tears like laughter. Clive and Magnolia cluster around her like butterflies, and very gently wipe the liquid emotion from her face with the long tails of their shirts.

They take her back outside, down the fire escape, hoping she won’t feel so claustrophobic away from the visible puddled brightness of her spilled insides, but it’s not much better. The street seems suddenly terribly bright; so many bright faces, such very bright faces of strangers. Rushing past, they all turn to look at her. Still she feels as though she’s melting, a silver puddle running down the street in which the faces of the people and the buildings and the tree with the moon caught in it are all reflected.

Clive and Magnolia don’t know what to do with her; Perry himself has disappeared, finding someone less fragile to hang with. Faith’s friends love her and share the fear she’ll dissolve and run down into the gutter and disappear. It’s only then Faith realizes they’re back at the square, leaning against the chain link fence that surrounds it on two sides. A man stands on the other side, looking through the links at them. Only now does Faith see it’s Jim. The moon reflects in the puddles on the sidewalk. Jim walks around the fence and picks the moon out of the reflection and gives it to her. “See what I have for you,” he says.

“You took that out of me,” she says.

“But the puddle belongs to everyone, with the magic reflection of street lamps and signs in it, showing the way. It isn’t you; you just flowed into it for awhile,” he says, able to help her where Clive and Magnolia couldn’t. And so she learns where she stops and the puddle begins, but it doesn’t happen right away.

Faith wants to cross the street to their bar, to sit somewhere familiar and comfortable where she can gather herself together. She puts the moon on the table. Big as a dinner plate, it shines faintly of blue metal. She makes a pin for it out of a fork, and uses it to keep her big black wool cloak pinned shut. On her chest she wears a brooch, big as a dinner plate, the moon-mirror of the world.

With her moon pin on she’s strong again; the four return to the rosy “Moondance,” which it turns out is also someone’s home. Passing through the first room, which has a dance floor and a DJ like any club, they enter a living room with couches and coffee tables. This room too is occupied by club patrons but, farther back still, they find an unoccupied bedroom and library, and lastly a kitchen. It is like following the passage of time from night to day, from the dream-state of revelry to the exterior onion layer of daylight domesticity; in the kitchen a tired looking woman stands at the sink, wearing a bathrobe and brushing her teeth. She looks annoyed yet doesn’t speak; they quickly return to the dance room, with its mysterious rose coloured light, dense with secret desires, fallen moons, night.

At night everything tinkles and swishes; the nights are a world of sound. On her chest Faith wears a light, big as a dinner plate; it is this light which allows her to go anywhere the condor shows her. Wearing her moon pin she becomes like the condor, isn’t afraid of him like she was at first. The condor takes them out, each night a different club. In Faith he has found an equal, which is what he needs. Clive and Magnolia always come along; Perry knows if he wants Faith’s company he’ll have to invite her friends as well or she won’t come at all. Jim doesn’t like Perry and never joins them.

The effect of the light from the brooch is what makes the watery sound of laughter in the alleyways, among the beaded curtains and bells, especially in the music. Even the draperies and couches contain amplified sound in her moon pin’s presence: the hiss of released air when one sinks into their brocade squishiness, plush and embracing as women; the swish of velvet drapes one hears so distinctly set apart from the music. Faith opens the curtain; it looks out on the brick wall of an airshaft. Far across the room, she distinguishes Perry’s voice from all the others. He is talking about them, saying, “. . . these two Canadian girls who really like to party . . .” but she doesn’t take it badly, doesn’t hold it against him.

Bolstered, she is liquid now both within and without, a liquid that is water and fire simultaneously. Because of it she can go anywhere, seeing exactly what is required, even unafraid. She can even look into the eye of the old old serpent and say, “No, you may not have my soul. But I have friends. Although you may not have their souls either. But we can dance, all of us, together.” She knows he is coming, about to enter her life — she senses his presence very close by. For in the next night’s club there is a chandelier on the ceiling made of pieces of cut glass, or perhaps crystal, and the light from her moon reflects off them and bounces little slivers of light all over the dark walls of the room. The serpent uncoils his huge coils, just incredibly huge, just a little bit on the couch where he is seated, to look at her with the one red eye he only ever opens. She realizes then it’s not a club at all; tonight’s club really is just someone’s apartment, and her friends are gone. These things happen. The python’s eye winks at her in the darkness; it glistens from the light of her moon, the only light in the room. The couch is more like a day bed, a divan, and there is a low table in front of him, for she knows it’s a him, cluttered with mosaic ashtrays and jewelled boxes Faith knows are filled with Colours. He has been sleeping, or doing Blue; there is something very sleepy in the room, pervasively sleepy, so that Faith feels she might curl up in a chair and go to sleep forever. She has a wolf with her. And a crow. All three are dressed in black; their night is made of tiny slices of light scattered everywhere, like tiny bits of broken glass, so bright they almost cut into one’s eyes.

There are things written on the walls. The python coils his coils so slowly, so hugely; it’s so dark Faith has no idea how large his coils really are. They move as only serpent coils do, and Faith is mesmerized, wondering for a moment if perhaps they are made of liquid which can hold its form, if perhaps there is no end to them. Behind him stands a man-sized vulture, or is it just the condor again, the largest of all birds?

She looks at them, realizing she doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there, minutes or hours, but it’s precisely trying to decipher this question that helps her to see clearly; perhaps her night vision is finally adjusting, she thinks. But as she watches, daylight very slowly comes to the room; the forms of the python and vulture sink into the shadows of the pink cushions and disappear, as though they’ve never been there at all. She has the strange feeling of having been enchanted. But what is enchantment? — it requires a special state to be experienced, and once that state has passed one no longer comprehends it, or believes. Yet she is still enchanted enough to feel sure this room is a place she couldn’t leave of her own will; should she try to leave, the python could still reappear and stop her.

But her wolf howls. And out in the street someone answers; suddenly there are many sounds at once: breaking glass, a car door slamming, a woman’s footsteps, running and running. Faith looks out the window and sees red high heels running by, very fast, beneath a black clad body, and there is laughter. The woman, if it is a woman, looks up at Faith and smiles, stops.

Even though Faith has never seen her before in her life, there is in that glance such affinity she knows if they were ever to meet one another on the street they’d rush into each other’s arms, or at least, go for a drink.

The woman/man calls, “Throw me the moon,” and so Faith does, sailing it out the window, a glow-in-the-dark-Frisbee. The transvestite catches it and draws it under her coat and runs on, and moments later Faith hears more car doors slamming, and more sirens, and more breaking glass and laughter and footsteps, and it begins to rain. And that is the moment when she believes she fell asleep for a little while, fell asleep standing up, or perhaps in the very comfortable leather armchair, and when she wakes she knows she didn’t sleep for long, but the python and the vulture are fully gone; she knows they won’t be back, as neither will her wolf or her crow. She stares hard at the divan, trying to make out the creatures’ shapes in the shadows on the cushions. There is no one there, possibly in the whole flat, for she doesn’t feel anyone sleeping in the other rooms, as, lately, she has discovered she knows how to do. This is learning, she thinks: the discovery of things one already knows. But she doesn’t know whose house it even is, or how she got there, but they might be back at any minute, and so she goes back down the fire escape to the street.

She walks; her friends aren’t with her; it’s raining, and such a long way back to Clive’s apartment, and she has no money for a cab. In the doorways, poor middle-aged black people stare at her with blank eyes that challenge her need to be sympathetic with a barely covered resentment, but some of them are kindlier, seeing that she is not yet twenty and tired and very cold. Perhaps they’re nicer because she’s still black; sometimes she forgets for a moment to do this, that in this city it works for her, making her feel more at home. Once she sees Perry, who was always white, across the street, looking feverish and bright-eyed if exhausted, talking to a man in a rain-spattered trench coat; she hurries, hoping she won’t be seen. Already she’s afraid of him again. She wonders if she hasn’t missed the way, wishes briefly she’d talked to the condor after all, but then a black dog comes out of an alleyway and accompanies her, and she knows no one can hurt her, and that the way she chooses will be the right way. Perhaps the dog smells the wolf on her; perhaps it’s why he finds her so interesting.

She climbs the stairs: yet another iron fire escape leading to Clive’s upstairs apartment; it’s very early; the rain is cold and wet and she thinks about all the people she’s seen on her walk home, people awake even though it’s still so early. Some, like herself have been up all night, and some have gotten up early to go to work, and some just wake early and sweep the sidewalks in front of their houses. In this part of the city there aren’t backyards but courtyards behind grille-work gates. This is what she thinks of as she climbs the three flights of iron stairs to the landing with three doors and three gold-tone mailboxes. She enters one of the doors, the one on the right; they’re sitting there, Clive and Magnolia, drinking beer and tea and doing the morning’s Yellow which so often, this trip, follows the night’s Blue; and reading magazines and comic books and laughing idly and watching television.

They look a bit startled, for as she comes in, shards of glass instead of drops of rain fall from her cloak with a crunchy sound to the floor, and then the cloak turns into a huge black dog which jumps off her back and snarls beside her, its red tongue wagging, before bounding through the room and out the window.

“Well,” they say, “what happened to you?” She can’t remember where she lost them last night; she thinks perhaps they abandoned her at some corner where she embarrassed them, her flood of uncontainable emotion having puddled all over the street again. Maybe they went out with Perry, attracted as they are to his dark power; then she would’ve chosen not to go along: she’s been invisible to him since she stopped pretending she was always strong. Yet Perry after all had at the beginning been most impressed with her; she wanted even he to think she was okay when she felt threadbare, so perhaps she went out alone and took on the python to prove herself. Perhaps that’s how it was. Yet she can’t remember how she came to be in the serpent’s home, what secret whisperings led her there. Also she has forgotten that this time the fire escape was spiral shaped, that her wolf howled, or any of the other sounds that framed and outlined her magic night. Like walking through a wall of water to enter with morning a waterless place, she’s no longer sure any of it really happened, although it felt like life and death at the time, and not just for herself, but somehow for all of them. For she knows now who the serpent is: He is the absence of all light, all daylight consciousness. Dancing with the serpent it is suddenly possible, what one has always wanted: to dance a dance that has never ever been danced before, by anyone. Of course, it is also possible to go quite mad and stay there forever, and so the circumspect will choose a new dance partner before long, or bring company, and always bring their own light, for the serpent has none, needs none, wants none.

But in this comfortably dissipated morning room, all power drained from it, she can no longer remember her own power. Her friends, their everyday faces on, make it hard for her to believe she’s just lived another kind. She’s suddenly wearing a light blue, long-sleeved T-shirt dress and she’s very, very tired. It’s New Orleans outside, a city she doesn’t know from shit, and she wants to go home and go to bed, only she doesn’t know where home is, so she pretends she thinks it funny when her friends laugh at the TV and the comic books and drink tea and beer, even though she thinks they’re both being terribly superficial. And so she finally does tell them about the python; they’re impressed, as she’d hoped, but somehow it doesn’t make her one of them as she’d intended, but even more apart than last night, before they separated; they are always together in the late evening, all four, at the café. What she knows is a moment she has no recollection of, just the wet-pants feeling of being the cause of it all.

There’s magazines and couches everywhere. She takes off her red high-heeled sandals, wondering where they came from — she doesn’t remember having worn them to go out — or ever even having had them. Perhaps she traded her transvestite friend the moon for them. She leaves them on the coffee table, on top of a magazine covered with faint outlines where tiny piles of Colours used to be. Blue, Yellow, Green. There is just enough Yellow left for her to pick up on her index finger and paint her eyelids with, and on the surf of the Colour she doesn’t mind being apart, doesn’t need their approval.

Alone, she goes into the kitchen and looks out the window. She sees two people standing on the street, a white man and a black woman holding an earnest conversation. The man is begging her to come back, be his woman again. The woman carries an attaché case and, in the other hand, has a black dog on a lead. Looking more closely, Faith thinks it’s perhaps not a woman at all, as she’s constantly thinking in this town. And so she goes back out, ostensibly to the corner box to pick up a newspaper, but really so she can spy on this most recent manifestation of the transvestite who is somehow significant for her. But when she gets to the street, they’re gone. She returns with her paper, and finds Magnolia and Clive at last asleep, on separate couches. Faith’s glad; it ameliorates her loneliness. Her friends both have their arms flung over their heads, and for once Magnolia doesn’t look stunningly beautiful, and Clive doesn’t look glamorous, just slightly oafish, and very asleep. Faith drinks a glass of water standing on the coffee table covered with magazines and ashtrays and binoculars and Colours boxes. Stupid stuff, she thinks, so stupid. She rinses and stacks all the glasses and straightens the magazines and dumps the ashtrays and picks up all the discarded finery from the floor and hangs it up on the closet door where at least the dog won’t get into it. Clive’s dog is a lab called Myra, almost but not quite Faith’s mother’s name, cream-coloured and not black like her mysterious defenestrating familiar.

Faith fixes herself scrambled eggs for breakfast and reads up on the war. She puts out jeans and a sweatshirt while her bath runs. The blue T-shirt dress lying dishevelled on the bathroom floor smells of a night out, smoky and sweaty; maybe it was what she was wearing under her cloak all night long and just wasn’t noticing, too high on the Colour Blue, too busy changing everything.

In the bath she looks at her submerged body, somewhat confused; her recently departed child’s silhouette having been no less a house to her soul. Faith’s way of being in the world has only so recently been shaped by this new sexual body; it still surprises her, sex itself a wonderful surprise, much lovelier than she’d anticipated. Yet sometimes this nubile desirability doesn’t really belong to her, but to all those who frame it within their gaze without love: the men on the street, influenced as she is, barely conscious, to clothe her body in meanings that find their source in advertising and pornography. She sighs, finding men a little childish, even if most of them are older than she. That’s why she likes Jim and Clive; both make jokes about her babe-hood, jokes that include her in a love framed by friendship and not possession; they understand it’s a game.

She gets out of the bath and puts on her clean clothes; suddenly she doesn’t mind that she is never properly seen: by her friends, her lovers, by strange men. She brushes her hair and, with a little sponge dipped in sweet almond oil, wipes the last vestiges of the night’s make-up off her face, too stubborn for bath water. The Yellow, too: The last of the drug has long since entered her bloodstream; it’s only the pigment that remains. For the second time she says “stupid stuff,” and puts on glasses to continue reading, this time out on the balcony even though it’s cold. It’s a French-style wrought iron balcony, just large enough for one tiny table and chairs and even though most people don’t use theirs, she can’t help herself; when, after all, will she again be in New Orleans? The black dog reappears and sits at her feet while she’s reading; she knows it’s because it’s the day they’re leaving.

She knows she’ll get on the plane without having resolved any of these insistent questions about relationship, and being seen clearly, and the two kinds of power. She cries a little then, but it’s not unhappy, just to properly acknowledge an ending. For after all, she thinks, she’s come pretty close, done pretty good, as best you can, probably, on the last day of the old world.

“As only leaving behind someone you love can make you weep.” She writes it in the margins of the newspaper, and leaves it folded on the outdoor table. Life is like this: You row out into the middle of the ocean in a boat and then it sinks. Suzuki Roshi, she thinks she remembers.

While she was out, Clive, half asleep, moved from one of the couches to the bedroom. She takes one of the yellow lilies from the vase by the window and lays it beside his hand on the bed. It’s a big, nondescript platform bed with expensive sheets and a little white melamine night table with a drawer and a plastic mushroom-shaped lamp. On the night table are more half-empty glasses, more magazines, Clive’s reading glasses, and a plate full of traces of Colours. Suddenly she’s glad she’s leaving; she’s tired of those sights; she wants to live somewhere with decent books on the shelves and original art on the walls, made by her friends. If she sees another goddamned framed O’Keefesque calla lily poster by an illustrator in California who works for an advertising agency try to pass itself off as art she’s going to puke. But Clive. It’s his place. He can’t help it; it was passed on to him furnished. And she loves him, knows she is leaving behind not just him but the freedom they shared, intuits that for both, their next relationship will be a “real one” framed by all the time-worn furniture these contain: sexual exclusivity, bartering for power, fleeting hatreds, even something new and unforeseen: the joy of domesticity, of doing things the same, with the same person, for years and years, and finding that the next adventure.

And so, at the last moment, she lies down beside Clive and wraps her arms around him and he moves in sleep, and begins to wake up, and they make love. And into their lovemaking she wordlessly pours all the things she would have told him had she been able, but didn’t, having been too young still to know how to give words to her perceptions of people: They’re vipers and vultures, all those people who say they’re going to make him famous, as well as all those people who hang around with him because he already is, a bit. All those people, sucking his blood from him, and most especially Perry, his purveyor of Colours. She’s afraid it will all conspire to fail Clive: his vanity, his parties, his beauty, his hangers-on, his drugs. The one thing remaining will be his neglected art; seduced as she sees him being by the glamor of a gentle kind of fame which has, after all, acquired him a much nicer apartment than most of his friends. But the betrayed muse wanders. Faith in her lovemaking tries to impress a kind of insurance into his body; so that when the day comes he wakes to emptiness he’ll remember Faith, or a feeling sort of like her, of the fiery puddle she used to leak out and float in at the same time, the feeling that is for him the feeling of his music. And he’ll get to work, pray not too late.

The yellow flower beside his bed. In sleep his hand reaches out and closes around it. On each petal is a word. One of the words written on the python’s walls. He will read them later, when he knows how. But it is Magnolia who knows how to gather all her things up into a flight bag and leave, shrugging. It’s Magnolia who never looks back, and never brings anything from the past. And so Faith pretends for a moment she is her friend; it’s a trick they’ve learned from spending so much time together, trading auras like they trade their clothes.

Faith wakes Magnolia up after she calls the cab to take them to the airport. While Magnolia takes a quick shower, Faith sits at the kitchen table and writes a note to Clive, a note like a scrap of a story. It is the first one she’s ever written:

When it was all over, I gave out my broken presents, the three-legged chairs and one-legged trousers, the rings with the stones missing and books with the covers torn off. I found Jim and Clive and Magnolia, all three looking exhausted. We went upstairs to try and find some place to sleep. I chose a room hung in embroidered canopies, with a balcony overlooking the wreckage of the hall. The dawn chill had set in, and I was grateful for the musty butterfly wing cloak I found draped over the balustrade. I watched the last of the revellers filing out the door. The janitors came in, sleepily rubbing their eyes and yawning. The caterers called to one another, their sharp voices bouncing through the vast empty hall as they collected silverware and glasses. I threw them a tip, and watched the Yellow note waft slowly down, to become lost in a heap of discarded finery. I turned back to the room. My friends were already asleep, all three curled around one another under the embroidered bedspread. I did the last of the Blue the vulture had given me. The tapestries on the walls were stitched with the words of a language I had never seen. I watched the patterns of that alien alphabet dance and shift position, and it was when I finally began to understand their meaning that sleep came.

They get on a plane to JFK. Magnolia orders a large scotch, but Faith sleeps all the way. During the trip, her skin slowly fades from black to white.

© 2003 by Ursula Pflug.

Originally published in Album Zutique, No. 1, edited by Jeff VanderMeer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ursula Pflug is author of the novels Green Music (Edge/Tesseract), The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim), Motion Sickness (Inanna), and the story collections After the Fires (Tightrope) and Harvesting the Moon (PS). Her first edited book, the fundraiser anthology They Have To Take You In (Hidden Brook) was recently released. She teaches creative writing at Loyalist College, the Campbellford Resource Centre and elsewhere, and co-organized the legendary Cat Sass Reading Series. Her award-winning short stories and nonfiction pieces about books and art have been appearing for decades in Canada, the US, and the UK, in genre and literary venues. Her short stories have been taught in universities in Canada and India, and she has collaborated extensively with filmmakers, dancers, and installation artists, among others. Visit her at: ursulapflug.ca.

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

Given the Advantage of the Blade

Genevieve Valentine | 2,600 words

Put them all in a room together, and give them each a knife. They’ll hardly notice the change of circumstances. Their tales are nothing but this struggle, and they’re well enough used to being run through.

• • • •

You begin.

At first it would be chaos. Fragile beauty and a kind heart does you no good here. (Never does; that’s what made it fairy stories, that so many people would help them just for kindness.)

A hundred maidens with no name, or a hundred names but no cunning, would drop to the ground before they could even resign themselves to the knives they were holding, their slender fingers curling tentatively around handles of ivory and silver, a curious glint in their eye just before it’s too late.

All but one of the maids will balk in that first crucial moment. That one’s used to the blade in her hand; she’s gauged its weight a thousand times, standing on bloody feet over the sleeping prince, waiting for courage. It’s a well-made knife, and she’d turn it inward easily. She’d die without a sound, and the mist of seafoam she makes would linger behind her long enough that Snow White has time to take a breath heavy with it before her stepmother’s knife finds her.

Some are left — Rapunzel’s braid is wrapped around her with knife-combs lodged in it, Laili the faithful carries her knife held fast — but for the rest, their hair and their feathers and one sealskin cloak oil the floor. It forces the survivors apart to negotiate the new terrain. It’s difficult; one corner of the room is already lost to ice, where the Snow Queen stands, and no one dares so much as look.

Outside, the animals of the forest and the desert and the shore, and six swans moving like brothers, would throw themselves against the walls until they died.

A clever queen who can think to dispose of the dead — the stepmother of Snow White, perhaps, who knows what’s required to make a corpse useful — might stack some of the bodies for shelter, might scalp what she can and use brooches flashing gold to pin the pelts of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, black hair in front and pale behind her, so thick and sleek that knives would find no purchase.

Snow White’s mother has a stomach that can eat hearts. Snow White’s mother wouldn’t waste her chance.

The second sister of the water-gourds would fight her hardest, but it’s hopeless: She’s so small, and her arms are too weak to carry, and the older sister who would have helped her sits dead by the bank of the river beside the crocodiles that woke her, waiting to draw water for a girl who will never come home.

Scheherazade fares better; hers is a voice that cuts through screaming, and she tells such fine stories about surviving. Those who come near enough are doomed. Even the Polar Bear Queen, whose magic shoes hold her half-forgotten on the ceiling, has to close her ears against it as she keeps her watch on the door.

In the pause between battles, the witches will mutter to themselves to gather strength. (They never join forces, no matter how it might help them; they’re not that kind of witch.) The maidens will put their backs to the wall. The Queens will look from one to the other, smiling tightly and cataloging injuries.

The second attacks are sublime. The first were mercy kills for the long-lashed cows. The women who are left by then would be of tougher stuff than the crumpled islands underfoot; they’ve met sorry ends before, and it’s made them clever and exacting. They won’t settle for losing to an inferior.

So thinks Cinderella’s mother. But she’s met no opposition, so her cruelty’s balloon-thin, and as empty; it’s the sort of thing a Queen can tell. Cinderella’s mother would be set upon as if by dogs.

Suffering Laili, to whom this is last of a long line of terrors, will lose to the Icelandic queen, who drops her lying finery and becomes a troll again, crushing Laili in a single blow. Her last breath is the name of her beloved.

In the melee, Rapunzel might turn quietly and slide her blade between her witch-mother’s ribs. She’s lived a lifetime in the tower and a lifetime in the desert, and has never forgotten who put her there. (The witch-mother doesn’t fight back; she hasn’t forgotten, either.)

Then would come the magic. Against the rules, of course, if there are rules, but you’ve never bothered setting down any. It wouldn’t matter. It always comes to this. These are women used to making do.

Ye Xian’s wise fishbone won’t avail her here; she dies with one gold slipper on. Scheherazade’s voice can be stoppered.

The witch of candyfloss charges Gretel, at the very last, to shield her from the bolt of the old fairy who once cursed some dead girl to fall on a spindle (a piercing they all understood literally until this room, just now). The curse will consume the candyfloss witch in a single breath; she’ll drop to the ground in a clatter of bones, smoldering and smelling of caramel. Gretel goes a moment later, a contender for victory vanishing out of carelessness because she’s staring at what used to be the witch, trying to decide the whys.

There’s no time for whys. Old women get possessive; they regret things. Only the ones who understand unfairness stand a chance of getting out.

The second lull will happen right when it should, according to your charts. The blades are beginning to cause blisters, and by now life is almost over. The panicked melee fades away to standoffs between the tired and the weakened, the bleeding and the dead. The old crone who cursed the Beast falls to Snow White’s mother; the old fairy runs Rapunzel through.

The young ones left are made of horrors. Donkeyskin’s safe from glancing blows, and too wild to gauge when the fighting’s thick. She lasts until the Tsarevna with the firebird coat becomes the wolf, jaws open wider than death — but Donkeyskin’s blade finds the soft, treacherous jaw and slips through the head, a steady blow, a calm one; Donkeyskin is used to those near her becoming monsters.

The Snow Queen long ago made a throne of the corpses Snow White’s mother gathered. The floor around her would be skimmed with ice from her breath, too slick to approach and too cold for sanctuary. She cares for nothing; she’s made to win. The field before her clears  — her knife is still pristine.

She wouldn’t see the Polar Bear Queen, who has no fear of cold, until it’s nearly too late. There would be a flurry of snow and a crack of bone, a spray of blood and a knife made of ice; then it would be over.

Snow White’s mother, white skin brocaded with blood, staggering as if in iron shoes, would be the last with a knife in her hand. She would find the corner furthest from Snow White’s body to curl up and die in.

After it’s been quiet for a while, Clever Manka would push aside the bodies piled atop her, and wipe the blood from her face, and set her knife to work on the lock.

• • • •

You’ve run this out a dozen times. Four dozen. A hundred.

What will never happen in the white room where you’ve locked them all in:

They line up and make chisels of their knives, and carve the wall away to nothing, and the birds and deer and swans flood the empty space they leave behind.

• • • •

You begin.

At first it would be chaos — the maidens forming a circle facing out, shoulders hunched and trailing sleeves tangling wherever they meet — but they’ll fill the room, and even unskilled, it’s harder to outwit a blade that has a neighbor. Inside the circle, Second Sister’s thin hand trembles under the weight of her knife, and the Armless Maiden watches and waits.

It stymies the women less used to kindness. The Queens and the witches — all but one — will withdraw to corners in wary knots, to determine how best to break the line.

A mistake, to give dangerous women enough time for strategy. Goodness is only stronger than a curse if you give it time enough and then expose it to the light. In this room, where a blade stops any mercy from spreading, one by one the maids lose their grips on their knives.

The Polar Bear Queen dies early. She’ll look at the Armless Maiden braced in front of Second Sister, and step in; her knife finds the old fairy’s heart just as the curse roasts her whole.

The circle shrinks, corpses ringed like planets around a dying star. The Mermaid’s familiar with a knife, and Clever Manka the shepherd’s daughter knows how to slice open a beast, but none of them will last long. Sooner or later they’ll hesitate.

It hardly matters when the Queens and the witches turn on each other after the maidens are all gone. Their numbers are so low, their bones so weary and their blades so sharp, that it’s soon over. Only Snow White’s mother is left. She’s harvested knives from the maidens’ graves; she’s surprised more than one witch with a blade as if from nowhere. She wouldn’t miss her chance.

But the Snow Queen, who has an eye for those with shards of glass where hearts should be, will say, “It’s been a long fight. Come into my arms, my Queen, that I may embrace you.”

It’s a trap, of course — that Queen invented traps, there’s a basket of ribbons and a smooth red apple still sitting on the bureau back home — but Snow White’s mother is weary with battle and sick of life, and she’s missed embraces. She’ll go to the Snow Queen’s side without complaint, sit in the frost at her feet, tilt up her face for the kiss.

She’ll turn to ice in a single sigh, a winter lake covering over, and become a carving as cold as suits her. When the Snow Queen pulls away, there’s the sound of shattering glass, though nothing is wrong with the statue; a heart breaking, maybe.

• • • •

You tried single combat, a long time ago, but it never took. Two women armed with knives, if they have any kindness at all, will wait it out. Even starved, they’d cut their own arms for flesh before they’d try a stranger’s. It took them so long to die that way; the crowd fights are a mercy, even if they don’t know it.

The only thing that came from those sessions — brackets like a jousting tournament sitting empty on your clipboard as you waited for someone to pick up the blade and fight — was that you could pinpoint the ones who held their knives the longest. Some let it fall from their hands as if a nightmare placed it there, but once they were armed, some — not always the ones you thought, Beauty and Rapunzel surprised you — curled their fingers in tight and never let go, not even as their knuckles swelled.

Sometimes the assistants laid bets, but gambling isn’t permitted, and you closed the pool when there was only a few hundred dollars and a board with the Snow Queen favored at odds of a hundred to one.

It was a failed experiment, but not a waste. It afforded you the best template to continue, so that was something, and you came away knowing which of them held on longest in a place with no escape.

• • • •

You begin. You begin. You begin.

There’s no world in which the ending satisfies. There’s no world in which the fish or the birds or the head of a horse can give wise enough advice; advice is magic, advice is power, but those who would give it to you are never near enough when you’re facing down a blade.

Every time the Beauty wraps her hand around her knife, she glances down at the hilt, with the rose her father brought her carved into it, and the light of battle reaches her eyes just before someone cuts her open from behind. The Mermaid is always a spray of foam by then; some carry their deaths inside them.

The Tsarevna (the wolf, in the skin of a woman) fears nothing, though she never lives. A wolf is built for war. Donkeyskin bites, after the knife’s lost; she dies with blood in her teeth.

The old fairy hates it all. She’d cursed an infant once in anger, but only out of suffering a great slight, and she had even called forth the briars to keep the beasts and princes from the door. She fights because she would rather fight than die, but she always thinks, Injustice, just before her breath is gone.

Every time Rapunzel drops, the long golden braid so heavy it sounds like a second body falling, her witch-mother screams. It’s not the disadvantage it could be; the others don’t know the sound of a mother mourning.

Eventually, someone whose heart is deaf to hopeful stories will slice the throat of Scheherazade.

Ye Xian has pierced throats with her fishbone, but desperation’s always made her careless (losing a shoe, stealing it back) and sooner or later it shatters.

Sister falls with a rattling breath that sounds like an animal dying, her head lolling toward the door as if Brother’s antlers are breaking through to rescue her.

Nameless and hundreds are the maidens who think, to the last, I will be saved. The queens and witches all know better. Rescues are rare, and none were ever meant for them. They live by the advantage of the blade.

Perhaps, once, the Polar Bear Queen might call out in her home tongue, and the troll-wife will look up in surprise; between motions Laili’s knife will glint in the light, and the troll-wife will splinter into granite, and things will change.

Then brave Laili will raise Second Sister and the kindhearted maidens from the dead, the blood on the tip of her finger sealing shut their gaping throats. Then Clever Manka and the Polar Bear Queen and all the lovely risen girls will sit on the floor, away from the corpses. They will lay down their knives. They are waiting there still.

• • • •

What never happens in the white room where you’ve put them all:

They stand back and let Clever Manka puzzle the door open, and go hunting for the ones who locked them in.

© 2015 by Genevieve Valentine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second novel is speakeasy fairy tale The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Her third novel, political thriller Persona, is out now from Saga Press. She’s currently the writer of DC’s Catwoman. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, Teeth, and more; her stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and have appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The AV Club, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, LA Review of Books, Fantasy Magazine, and Interfictions, and she is a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com.

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

Equinoctial

John Varley | 18,100 words

Parameter knew she was being followed. They had been behind her for days, always far enough behind that they couldn’t get a permanent fix on her, but never so far that she could lose them. She was in danger, but now was not the time to worry about it.

Now was one of the big moments in her life. She proposed to savor it to the full and refused to be distracted by the hunters. She was giving birth to quintuplets.

Uni, Duo, Tri, Quad . . . Hopelessly trite. Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy — no, there were seven of those. Army, Navy, Marine, Airforce, Coastguard? That was a pentagon, for an interesting pun. But who wanted to be called Coastguard? What was a Coastguard, anyway?

She put the naming ordeal out of her mind. It wasn’t important; they would pick their own names when the time came. She just thought it might be nice with five to have something to tag them with, if only for bookkeeping purposes.

“They just got another sighting,” she thought, but it wasn’t her own thought. It was the voice of Equinox. Equinox was Parameter’s companion, her environment, her space suit, her alter ego; her Symb. She looked in the direction she had come from.

She looked back on the most spectacular scene in the solar system. She was 230,000 kilometers from the center of Saturn, according to the figures floating in the upper left corner of her field of vision. To one side of her was the yellow bulk of the giant planet, and all around her was a golden line that bisected the universe. She was inside the second and brightest of the Rings.

But Saturn and the Rings was not all she saw. About ten degrees away from Saturn and in the plane of the Rings was a hazy thing like the bell of a trumpet. It was transparent. The wide end of the bell was facing her. Within this shape were four lines of red that were sharp and well defined far away but became fuzzy as they neared her. These were the hunters. All around her, but concentrated in the plane of the Rings, were slowly moving lines of all colors, each with an arrow at one end, each shifting perspective in a dazzling 3-D ballet.

None of it — the lines, the bells, the “hunters,” even Saturn itself — none of it was any more real than the image in a picture tube. Some of it was even less real than that. The shifting lines, for instance, were vector representations of the large chunks of rock and ice within radar range of Equinox.

The bell was closer than it had been for days. That was bad news, because the space-time event it represented was the approach of the hunters and their possible locations projected from the time of the last fix. The fuzzy part was almost touching her. That meant they could be very close indeed, though it wasn’t too likely. They were probably back in the stem where the projection looked almost solid, and almost certainly within the four lines that were their most probable location. But it was still too close.

“Since they know where we are, let’s get a fix on them,” Parameter decided, and as she thought it the bell disappeared, to be replaced by four red points that grew tails even as she watched.

“Too close. Way too close.” Now they had two fixes on her: one of their own, and the one she had given them by bouncing a signal off them. From this, their Symbs could plot a course; therefore, it was time to alter it.

She couldn’t afford to change course in the usual way, by bouncing off a rock. The hunters were close enough that they would detect the change in the rock’s velocity and get a better idea of where she was. It was time for thrusters, though she could ill afford the wasted mass.

“Which way?” she asked.

“I suggest you move out of the plane. They won’t expect that yet. They don’t know you’re in labor.”

“That’s pretty dangerous. There’s nothing to hide in out there.”

Equinox considered it. “If they get any closer, you’ll have to do something at least that drastic, with less chance of success. But I only advise.”

“Sure. All right, do it, my green pasture.”

The world around her jerked, and all the colored lines started moving down around her, bending as their relative velocity changed. There was a gentle pressure at the small of her back.

“Keep an eye on them. I’m going back to the business of giving birth. How are they doing, by the way?”

“No sweat. One of the girls is in the tube right now — you can feel her —”

“You can tell me that three times . . .”

“— and she’s a little puzzled by the pressure. But she’s taking it well. She tells you not to worry, she’ll be all right.”

“Can I talk to her yet?”

“Not for another few hours. Be patient.”

“Right. It shouldn’t be long now.”

And that was very true. She felt the wave of sensation as her uterus contracted again. She looked down at herself, absently expecting to see the first head coming out. But she could no longer see that far; her belly stuck out.

Nothing that Parameter saw was real; all was illusion. Her head was completely enclosed in the thick, opaque substance of Equinox, and all the sensory data she received was through the direct connection from Equinox’s senses into her own brain. Much of this information was edited and embellished in ways that made it easier for Parameter to interpret.

So it was that when she looked down at herself she saw not the dark-green surface of Equinox, but her own brown skin. She had asked for that illusion long ago, when it had become a matter of some importance to her to believe she still had her own body. The illusion was flawless. She could see the fingerprints on her hand, the mole on her knee, the color of her nipples, the sentimental scar on her forearm, all illuminated by the soft diffusion of light from the Rings. But if she tried to touch herself, her hand would be stopped while still a good distance from what she saw as the surface of her body. Equinox was invisible to her, but she was certainly there.

She watched as the contraction caused her stomach to writhe and flow like putty. This was more like it. She remembered her other deliveries, before she married Equinox. One had been “natural” and it hadn’t worked all that well. She didn’t regret it, but it had been painful, not something she would want to repeat. The other had been under anesthetic, and no fun at all. She might as well not have bothered; there had been no pain, no pleasure, no sensation. It was like reading about it in the newspaper. But this one, her third birth, was different. It was intense, so intense she had difficulty concentrating on eluding the hunters. But there was no pain. All she felt was a series of waves of pleasure-pain that didn’t hurt, and could be related to no other sensation humans had ever experienced.

One of the lines ahead seemed to point almost directly at her. It was a thick red line, meaning it was seventy percent ice and about a million kilograms in mass. The vector was short. It was moving slowly enough that rendezvous would be easy.

She took the opportunity and altered course slightly with the sure instinct she had developed. The line swung, foreshortened even more, then flashed brighter and began to pulse. This was the collision warning from Equinox’s plotting sector.

When the rock was close enough to see as an object rather than a simulated projection, she rotated until her legs pointed at it. She soaked up the shock of the landing, then began to scuttle over the surface in a manner quite astonishing, and with a speed not to be believed. She moved with the coordinated complexity of a spider, all four limbs grasping at the rock and ice.

To an observer, she was a comical sight. She looked like a barbell with arms and legs and a bulge at the top that just might be a head. There were no creases or sharp lines anywhere on the outer surface of Equinox; all was gentle curves, absolutely featureless except for short claws on the hands and feet. At the ends of her legs were grasping appendages more like oversized hands than feet. And her legs bent the wrong way. Her knees were hinged to bend away from each other.

But she swarmed over the rock with effortless ease, not even hampered by her pregnancy, though the labor “pains” were getting intense.

When she was where she wanted to be, she pushed off with both hands and peds, rising rapidly. She was now on a course about ninety degrees away from her pursuers. She hoped they would not be expecting this. Now she had to rely on the screening effect of the billions of tiny rocks and ice crystals around her. For the next few hours she would be vulnerable if they beamed in her direction, but she didn’t think it likely they would. Their Symbs would be plotting a course for her almost opposite to the one she was actually taking. If she had continued that way they would certainly have caught her later when she was burdened with five infants. Now was the time for audacity.

Having done that, she put the matter out of her mind again, and none too soon. The first baby had arrived.

The head was just emerging as she pushed off the rock. She savored the delicious agony as the head forced its way through her body, struggling to reach the air. It would never reach it. There was no air out here, just another womb that Equinox had prepared, a womb the baby would live in for the rest of its life. No first breath for Parameter’s children; no breath at all.

The babies were not full-term. Each had been growing only seven months and would not be able to survive without extensive care. But Equinox was the world’s best incubator. She had counseled, and Parameter had agreed, that it would be best to birth them while they were still small and get them out where Equinox could keep a closer eye on them.

Parameter moved her strangely articulated legs, bringing the hand-like peds up to the baby. She pressed slowly and felt the peds sink in as Equinox absorbed the outer covering. Then she felt the head with her own nerve endings. She ran her long fingers over the wet ball. There was another contraction and the baby was out. She was holding it in her peds. She couldn’t see much of it, and suddenly she wanted to.

“This is one of the girls, right?”

“Yes. And so are two, three, and five. Navy, Marine, and Coastguard, if you want to get more personal.”

“Those were just tags,” she laughed. “I didn’t even like them.”

“Until you think of something else, they’ll do.”

“They won’t want them.”

“Perhaps not. Anyway, I’m thinking of shifting the boy around to fifth position. There’s a little tangling of the cords.”

“Whatever you want. I’d like to see her. ‘Army,’ I mean.”

“Do you want a picture, or should I move her?”

“Move her.” She knew it was only a semantic quibble as to whether she would actually “see” her child. The projection Equinox could provide would look just as real, hanging in space. But she wanted the picture to coincide with the feel she was getting of the baby against her skin.

By undulating the inner surface of her body, Equinox was able to move the infant around the curve of Parameter’s belly until she was visible. She was wet, but there was no blood; Equinox had already absorbed it all.

“I want to touch her with my hands,” Parameter thought.

“Go ahead. But don’t forget there’s another coming in a few minutes.”

“Hold it up. I want to enjoy this one first.”

She put her hands on the invisible surface of Equinox and they sank in until she was holding the child. It stirred and opened its mouth, but no sound came. There seemed to be no trauma involved for the brand-new human being; she moved her arms and legs slowly but seemed content to lie still for the most part. Compared to most human children, she hadn’t really been born at all. Parameter tried to interest her in a nipple, but she didn’t want it. She was the prettiest thing Parameter had ever seen.

“Let’s get the next one out,” she said. “This is so extravagant I still can’t believe it. Five!”

She drifted into a wonderful haze as the others arrived, each as pretty as the last. Soon she was covered with tiny bodies, each still tied to an umbilicus. The cords would be left in place until Equinox had finished her childbirth and had five semiautonomous baby Symbs to receive the children. Until then, the children were still a part of her. It was a feeling Parameter loved; she would never be closer to her children.

“Can you hear them yet?” Equinox asked.

“No, not yet.”

“You’ll have to wait a while longer for mind contact. I’m tuning out. Are you all right? I shouldn’t be longer than about two hours.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. In fact, I’ve never been happier.” She stopped verbalizing and let a wave of intense love flood over her; love for her invisible mate. It was answered by such an outpouring of affection that Parameter was in tears. “I love you, earthmother,” she said.

“And you, sunshine.”

“I hope it’ll be as good for you as it was for me.”

“I wish I could share it with you. But back to business. I really think we’ve shaken the hunters. There’s been no signal from them for an hour, and their projected path is well away from us. I think we’ll be safe, at least for a few hours.”

“I hope so. But don’t worry about me. I’ll get along while you’re away. I’m not scared of the dark.”

“I know. It won’t be for long. See you later.”

Parameter felt her mate slipping away. For a moment she was afraid, but not of the dark. She was afraid of the loneliness. Equinox would be unavailable to her for the time it took to give birth to her children, and that meant she would be cut off from the outside. That didn’t matter, but the absence of Equinox from Parameter’s mind was a little frightening. It recalled an unpleasant incident in her past.

But as the lights faded she realized she was not alone. Cut off from sight, sound, smell, and taste by the shutdown of Equinox’s interpretative faculties, she still had touch, and that was enough.

She floated in total darkness and felt the sharp tingle as a mouth found a nipple and began to suck. Imperceptibly, she drifted into sleep.

• • • •

She awoke to a vague feeling of discomfort. It was small and nagging, and impossible to ignore. She felt in her mind for Equinox, and couldn’t find her. So she was still in the process of giving birth.

But the feeling persisted. She felt helpless in the dark, then she realized it wasn’t totally dark. There was a faint pinkness, like looking into closed eyelids. She could not account for it. Then she knew what was wrong, and it was worse than she could have imagined. The babies were gone.

She felt over her body with increasing panic, but they were nowhere to be found. Before her panic overwhelmed her, she tried to think of what could have happened that would have separated them, and all she could come up with was the hunters. But why would they take the babies? Then she lost control; there was nothing she could do in the darkness without Equinox to create the universe for her.

She was drawn back to rationality by a thought so black she could hardly credit it. In torment, she opened her eyes.

She could see.

She was floating in the center of a room hollowed out of bare rock. There was another person in the room, or rather another symbiote; all she could see was the dark-green, curved form of the Symb.

“Equinox!” she yelled, and heard herself. In a dream, she looked down at her body and felt the bare reality of it. She touched herself; there was no resistance. She was alone. Half of her was gone.

Her mind was dissolving; she watched it go, and knew it to be preferable to facing life without Equinox. She said good-bye to the last shreds of reality, rolled her eyes up into her head, and swallowed her tongue.

• • • •

The figure looked like a cartoon of a human drawn by a three-year-old, one who was confused about sex. The broad shoulders and bullish neck were ludicrously like the build of a weightlifter, and the narrowing waist and bulbous ass were a moron’s idea of a well-built woman. He was green, and featureless except for an oval opening where his mouth should have been.

“Just why do you want to become a Ringer?” The sound issued from the hole in his “face.”

Parameter sighed and leaned back in her chair. The operation at Titan was anything but efficient. She had spent three days talking to people who had been no help at all and finally found this man, who seemed to have the authority to give her a Symb. Her patience — never very long — was at an end.

“I should make a tape,” she said. “You’re the fourth bastard who’s asked me that today.”

“Nevertheless, I must have your answer. And why don’t you keep the smart remarks to yourself? I don’t need them. For two cents I’d walk out of here and forget about you.”

“Why don’t you? I don’t think you can even get out of that chair, much less walk out of here. I never expected anything like this. I thought you Consers wanted new people, so why are you giving me such a runaround? I might get up and walk out myself. You people aren’t the only Ringers.”

He proved her wrong by rising from the chair. He was awkward but steady, and, even more interesting, there was something in his hand that could only be a gun. She was amazed. He was sitting in a bare room, and had been empty-handed. Suddenly there was this gun, out of nowhere.

“If you mean that you’re thinking of going over to the Engineers, it’s my duty to blow your brains out. You have ten seconds to explain yourself.” There was no trace of anger. The gun never wavered.

She swallowed hard, keeping very still.

“Uh, no, that’s not what I meant.”

The gun dropped slightly.

“It was a foolish remark,” she said, her ears burning with shame and anger. “I’m committed to the Conservationists.”

The gun vanished into the Symb he was wearing. It could still be in his hand for all she could tell.

“Now you can answer my question.”

Keeping her anger rigidly in check, she started her story. She was quite good at it by now, and had it condensed nicely. She recited it in a singsong tone that the interrogator didn’t seem to notice.

“I am seventy-seven Earth years old, I was born on Mercury, the Helios Enclave, the child of an extremely wealthy energy magnate. I grew up in the rigid, confining atmosphere that has always existed in Mercury, and I hated it. When I turned twelve, my mother gave me twenty percent of her fortune and said she hoped I’d use it wisely. Luckily for me, I was an adult and beyond her reach, because I disappointed her badly.

“I bought passage on the first ship leaving the planet, which happened to be going to Mars. For the next sixty years I devoted myself to experiencing everything the human organism can experience and still survive.

“It would be tedious and overlong to tell you everything I did, but so you won’t think I’m hiding something, I can give you a random sample.

“Drugs: I tried them all. Some only once. Others for years at a time. I had to have my personality rebuilt three times and lost a lot of memory in the process.

“Sex: with two, three, four partners; seven partners; thirty partners; three hundred partners. All-week orgies. Men, women, girls, boys. Infants. Elephants. Pythons. Corpses. I changed sex so many times I’m not sure if I grew up as a male or a female.

“I killed a man. I got away with it. I killed a woman and got away again. I got caught the third time and spent seven years in rehabilitation.

“I traveled. I went to the Belt, to Luna, to the moons of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. I went to Pluto, and beyond with a holehunter.

“I tried surgery. I joined up with a pair-cult and was connected for a year to another woman as a Siamese twin. I tried out weird new organs and sex systems. I tried on extra limbs.

“A few years ago I joined a passivity cult. They believed all action was meaningless, and demonstrated it by having their arms and legs amputated and relying on the mercy of random strangers to feed them and keep them alive. I lay for months in the public square beneath Coprates. Sometimes I went hungry and thirsty. Sometimes I stewed in my own filth; then someone would clean me up, usually with a stern lecture to quit this way of life and go straight. I didn’t care.

“But the second time a dog used me for a urinal, I gave it up. I asked someone to carry me to a doctor, and walked out a changed woman. I decided I had done everything and had better start looking for an elaborate and original suicide. I was so bored, so jaded, that breathing seemed like too much of a bother.

“Then I thought of two places I’d never been: the sun and the Rings. The sun is the fancy suicide I told you about. The only way to get to the Rings is in a Symb. I tend to sympathize with you people over the Engineers. So here I am.”

She settled back in her chair. She was not optimistic about being allowed to join the Conservationist Church, and was already planning ways to get over to the Engineers. If there was ever an unprepossessing story, it was hers, and she knew it. These Consers were supposed to be dedicated people, and she knew she couldn’t present a very convincing line. In point of fact, she didn’t give any thought at all to the Grand Design of the Engineers. Why should she care if a band of religious fanatics were trying to paint one of Saturn’s Rings?

“The next to the last statement was a lie,” the man informed her.

“Right,” she spat. “You self-righteous bastards. It’s the custom in polite society to inform someone when they’re undergoing a lie-detector test. Even ask their consent.” She got up to go.

“Please sit down, Parameter.” She hesitated, then did so.

“It’s time some false impressions were cleared up. First, this is not ‘polite society,’ this is war. Religious war, which is the dirtiest kind. We do what we have to in the interest of security. The sole purpose of this interview was to determine if your story was true. We don’t care what you have done, as long as you haven’t been consorting with our enemy. Have you?”

“No.”

“That is a true statement. Now for the other mistake. We are not self-righteous bastards. We’re pragmatists. And we’re not religious fanatics, not really, though we all come to believe deeply in what we’re doing out here. And that brings us to the third mistake. The primary reasons we’re out here have little to do with defeating the Engineers. We’re all out here for our own personal reasons, too.”

“And what are they?”

“They’re personal. Each of us had a different reason for coming. You are out here to satisfy the last dregs of a jaded appetite; that’s a common reason. You have some surprises coming up, but you’ll stay. You’ll have to. You won’t be able to bear leaving. And you’ll like it. You might even help us fight the Engineers.”

She looked at him with suspicion.

“We don’t care why you’re out here. Your story doesn’t impress me one way or the other. You probably expected condemnation or contempt. Don’t flatter yourself. As long as you’re not here to help paint Ring Beta red, we don’t care.”

“Then when do I get a Symb?”

“As soon as you can undergo a bit of surgery.” For the first time he unbent a little. The corners of the slit that covered his mouth bent up in a silly attempt at a smile. “I must confess that I was interested by one thing you said. How do you have sex with an elephant?”

Parameter kept a perfectly straight face.

“You don’t have sex with an elephant. The best you can do is have sex at an elephant.”

• • • •

The Symb was a soft-looking greenish lump in the center of the room. With the best will in the world, Parameter could not see that it resembled anything so much as a pile of green cow manure. It was smaller than she had expected, but that was because it had no occupant. She was about to remedy that.

She stumped over to it and looked down dubiously. She had no choice but to walk awkwardly; her legs were no longer built for walking. They had been surgically altered so that the best she could do was a grotesque bowlegged prancing, stepping high so her long fingers would clear the floor. She was now ideally suited for a weightless existence. In a gravitational field, she was clumsy beyond belief.

The man who had interviewed her, whom she now knew by the name of Bushwacker, was the only other occupant of the room. He handled himself better than she did, but only slightly. He was itching to get back to the Rings; this base duty galled him. Gravity was for poor flatfoots.

“Just touch it, that’s all?” she said. Now that it had come to it, she was having second thoughts.

“That’s right. The Symb will do the rest. It won’t be easy. You’ll have between six weeks and three months of sensory deprivation while the personality develops. You’d go crazy in two days, but you won’t be alone. All you’ll have to hang on to will be the mind of the Symb. And it’ll be a baby, hard to get along with. You’ll grow up together.”

She took a deep breath, wondering why she was so reluctant. She had done things easily that were much more repulsive than this. Perhaps it was the dawning realization that this would be much more than a simple lark. It could last a long time.

“Here goes.” She lifted her leg and touched one of her ped-fingers to the blob. It stuck. The Symb slowly began stirring.

The Symb was . . . warm? No, at first she thought so, but it would be more accurate to say it was no temperature at all. It was thirty-seven degrees: blood temperature. It oozed up her leg, spreading itself thinner as it came. In a short time it was inching up her neck.

“Inhale,” Bushwacker advised. “It’ll help a little.”

She did so, just as the Symb moved over her chin. It moved over her mouth and nose, then her eyes.

There was a moment of near-panic when part of her brain told her she must take a breath, and she dutifully tried to. Nothing happened, and she wanted to scream. But it was all right. She didn’t need to breathe. When she opened her mouth the Symb flowed down her throat and trachea. Soon her lungs were filled with the interface tissue whose function it was to put oxygen in her blood and remove carbon dioxide. It filled her nasal passages, slithered up the eustachian tube to her inner ear. At that point she lost her balance and fell to the floor. Or she thought she did; she could no longer be sure. She had felt no impact. A wave of dizziness swept over her; she wondered what a Symb would do about vomiting. But it didn’t happen, and she suspected it never would.

It was a shock, even though she had expected it, when the Symb entered her anus and vagina. Not a bad shock. Rather a thrill, actually. It filled the spaces in her uterus, wound into the urethra to fill the bladder, then up the ureter to mingle with the kidneys. Meanwhile another tendril had filled the large and small intestine, consuming the nutrients it found there, and joined with the tendril coming from her mouth. When it was done, she was threaded like the eye of a serpentine needle, and was revealed to any that could see as a topological example of a torus.

The silence closed in. It was absolutely quiet for a period of time she was powerless to measure, but couldn’t have been longer than five minutes.

The obvious place where the human brain is accessible without violating any solid membranes is alongside the eyeball and through the supraorbital foramen. But the Symb would not be able to get a very substantial tendril through in the tight confines of the eye. So the genetic engineers, elaborating on the basic design for oxygen breathers received over the Ophiuchi Hotline, had given the Symb the capability of forcing an entry through the top of the skull.

Parameter felt a twinge of pain as a two-centimeter hole was eaten in the top of her head. But it subsided as the Symb began to feel out the proper places to make connections. The Symb was still a mindless thing, but was guided infallibly by the carefully designed instinct built into it.

Suddenly she was surrounded by fear; childish, inconsolable fear that frightened her out of her wits but did not come from her mind. She fought it, but it only became more insistent. In the end, she abandoned herself to it and cried like a baby. She became an infant, sloughing off her seventy-odd years there in the impalpable darkness like they had never happened.

There was nothing; nothing but two very lost voices, crying in the void.

• • • •

There had been a debate raging for centuries as to whether the Symbiotic Space-Environment Organisms were really a form of artificial intelligence. (Or alien intelligence, depending on your definition.) The people who lived in them were unanimously of the opinion that they were. But the other side — who were mostly psychologists — pointed out that the people who actually lived in them were in the worst possible place to judge. Whatever one’s opinion on the subject, it was based on personal prejudice, because there could be no objective facts.

The Symbs were genetically tailored organisms that could provide a complete, self-contained environment for a single human being in space. They thrived on human waste products: urine, feces, heat, and carbon dioxide.

They contained several chlorophyll-like enzymes and could accomplish photosynthesis utilizing the human’s body heat, though at a low efficiency. For the rest of the energy needs of the pair, the Symb could use sunlight. They were very good at storing energy in chemical compounds that could be broken down later at need. Together with a human, a Symb made a self-contained heat engine. They were a closed ecology, neither host nor parasite: a symbiosis.

To the human being, the Symb was a green pasture, a running brook, a fruit tree, an ocean to swim in. To the Symb, the human was rich soil, sunshine, gentle rain, fertilizer, a pollinating bee. It was an ideal team. Without the other, each was at the mercy of elaborate mechanical aids to survive. Humans were adapted to an environment that no longer existed for their use in a natural state; wherever humans lived since the occupation of the Earth, they had to make their own environment. Now the Symbs were to provide that environment free of charge.

But it hadn’t worked that way.

The Symbs were more complicated than they looked. Humans were used to taking from their surroundings, bending or breaking them until they fit human needs. The Symbs required more of humanity; they made it necessary to give.

When inside a Symb, a human was cut off entirely from the external universe. The human component of the symbiosis had to rely on the Symb’s faculties. And the sensory data were received in an unusual way.

The Symb extended a connection directly into the human brain and fed data into it. In the process, it had to get tied up in the brain in such a way that it could be difficult to say where human left off and Symb began. The Symb reorganized certain portions of the human brain, freeing its tremendous potential for computation and integration, and using those abilities to translate the sensory data into pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches, going directly through the sensorium. In the process, a mind was generated.

The Symb had no brain of its own, it merely was able to utilize the human brain on a time-sharing basis, and utilize it better than its original owner had been able to. So it would seem impossible that it could have a mind of its own. But every Ringer in the system would swear it had. And that was the crux of the debate: Was it actually an independent mind, parasitically using the human brain as its vehicle for sentient thought, or was it merely schizophrenia, induced by isolation and projection?

It was impossible to decide. Without a human inside it, there is nothing more helpless than a Symb. Without the human brain in combination with the genetic information and enzymatically coded procedures, the Symb can do no more than lie there inert like the green turd it so closely resembles. It has only rudimentary musculature, and doesn’t even use that when alone. There is no good analogy for a Symb without a human; nothing else is so dependent on anything else.

Once combined with a human, the pair is transformed, becoming much more than the sum of its parts. The human is protected against the harshest environment imaginable. The livable range with a Symb extends from just outside the orbit of Earth (radiation limit) to the orbit of Neptune (sunlight limit). The pair feed each other, water each other, and respirate each other. The human brain is converted into a supercomputer. The Symb has radio and radar sender and receiver organs, in addition to sensors for radiation and the electromagnetic spectrum from one thousand to sixteen thousand angstroms. The system can gain mass by ingesting rock and ice and the Symb can retain the valuable minerals and water and discard the rest. About all the pair cannot do is change velocity without a chunk of rock to push against. But it is a small matter to carry a rocket thruster instead of the whole apparatus of a space suit. In the Rings, they didn’t even do that. The Symb could manufacture enough gas for attitude control. For major velocity changes, the Ringers carried small bottles of compressed gas.

So why weren’t all humans in space installed in Symbs?

The reason was that the Symbs needed more than most people were willing to give. It wasn’t a simple matter of putting it on when you needed it and taking it off later. When you took off your Symb, the Symb ceased to exist.

It was probably the heaviest obligation a human ever had to face. Once mated with a Symb, you were mated for life. There had never been a closer relationship; the Symb lived inside your mind, was with you even when you slept, moving independently through your dreams. Compared with that, Siamese twins were utter strangers who pass in the night.

It was true that all the humans who had ever tried it swore they hadn’t even been alive before they joined their Symb. It looked attractive in some ways, but for most people the imagined liabilities outweighed the gains. Few people are able to make a commitment they know will be permanent, not when permanent could mean five or six hundred years.

After an initial rush of popularity the Symb craze had died down. Now all the Symbs in the system were in the Rings, where they had made possible a nomadic existence never before known.

Ringers are loners by definition. Humans meet at long intervals, mate if they are of a mind to, and go their separate ways. Ringers seldom see the same person twice in a lifetime.

They are loners who are never alone.

• • • •

“Are you there?”

?????

“I can sense you. We have to do something. I can’t stand this darkness, can you? Listen: Let there be light!”

?????

“Oh, you’re hopeless. Why don’t you get lost?”

Sorrow. Deep and childish sorrow. Parameter was drawn into it, cursing herself and the infantile thing she was caught with. She tried for the thousandth time to thrash her legs, to let someone out there know she wanted out. But she had lost her legs. She could no longer tell if she was moving them.

From the depths of the Symb’s sorrow, she drew herself up and tried to stand away from it. It was no use. With a mental sob, she was swallowed up again and was no longer able to distinguish herself from the infant alien.

• • • •

Her chest was rising and falling. There was an unpleasant smell in her nostrils. She opened her eyes.

She was still in the same room, but now there was a respirator clamped to her face, forcing air in and out of her lungs. She rolled her eyes and saw the grotesque shape of the other person in the room with her. It floated, bandy legs drawn up, hands and peds clasped together.

A hole formed in the front of the blank face.

“Feeling any better?”

She screamed and screamed until she thankfully faded back into her dream world.

• • • •

“You’re getting it. Keep trying. No, that’s the wrong direction; whatever you were doing just then, do the opposite.”

It was tentative; Parameter hadn’t the foggiest idea of what opposite was, because she hadn’t the foggiest idea of what the little Symb was doing in the first place. But it was progress. There was light. Faint, wavering, tentative; but light.

The undefined luminance flickered like a candle, shimmered, blew out. But she felt good. Not half as good as the Symb felt; she was flooded by a proud feeling of accomplishment that was not her own. But, she reflected, what does it matter if it’s my own or not? It was getting to where she no longer cared to haggle about whether it was she who felt something or the Symb. If they both had to experience it, what difference did it make?

“That was good. We’re getting there. You and me, kid. We’ll go places. We’ll get out of this mess yet.”

Go? Fear. Go? Sorrow. Go? Anger?

The emotions were coming labeled with words now, and they were extending in range.

“Anger? Anger, did you say? What’s this? Of course, I want to get out of here, why do you think we’re going through this? It ain’t easy, kid. I don’t remember anything so hard to get a grip on since I tried to control my alpha waves, years ago. Now wait a minute . . .” Fear, fear, fear. “Don’t do that, kid, you scare me. Wait. I didn’t mean it . . .” Fear, fear loneliness, fear, fear! “Stop! Stop, you’re scaring me to death, you’re . . .” Parameter was shivering, becoming a child again.

Black, endless fear. Parameter slipped away from her mind; fused with the other mind; chided herself; consoled herself; comforted herself; loved herself.

“Here, take some water, it’ll make you feel better.”

“Ggggwwway.”

“What?”

“Goway. Gway. Goaway. go. a. way!”

“You’ll have to drink some water first. I won’t go away until you do.”

“Go ’way. Murder. Murder’r.”

• • • •

Parameter was at a loss.

“Why, why won’t you do it? For me. Do it for Parameter.”

Negation.

“You mean ‘no.’ Where do you get those fancy words?”

Your memory. No. Will not do it.

Parameter sighed, but she had acquired patience, infinite patience. And something else, something that was very like love. At least it was a profound admiration for this spunky kid. But she was still scared, because the Symb was beginning to win her over and it was only with increasing desperation that she hung onto her idea of getting the child to open the outside world so she could tell someone she wanted out.

And the desperation only made matters worse. She couldn’t conceal it from the Symb, and the act of experiencing communicated it in all its raw, naked panic.

“Listen to me. We’ve got to get off this merry-go-round. How can we talk something over intelligently if I keep communicating my fear to you, which makes you scared, which scares me, which makes you panicky, which scares me more, which . . . now stop that!”

Not my fault. Love, love. You need me. You are incomplete without me. I need commitment before I’ll cooperate.

“But I can’t. Can’t you see I have to be me? I can’t be you. And it’s you who’s incomplete without me, not the way you said.”

Wrong. Both incomplete without the other. It’s too late for you. You are no longer you. You are me, I am you.

“I won’t believe that. We’ve been here for centuries, for eons. If I haven’t accepted you yet, I never will. I want to be free, in time to see the sun burn out.”

Wrong. Here for two months. The sun is still burning.

“Aha! Tricked you, didn’t I? You can see out, you’re further along than you told me. Why did you trick me like that? Why didn’t you tell me you knew what time it was? I’ve been aching to know that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

You didn’t ask.

“What kind of answer is that?”

An honest one.

Parameter simmered. She knew it was honest. She knew she was belaboring the child, who couldn’t tell a lie any more than she could. But she clung to her anger with the sinking feeling that it was all she had left of herself.

You hurt me. You are angry. I’ve done nothing to you. Why do you hate me? Why? ????? I love you. I’m afraid you’ll leave me.

“I . . . I love you. I love you, godhelpme, I really do. But that’s not me. No! It’s something else. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll hang on. Hang on to it. Hang on to it.”

Where are you?

Parameter?

“I’m here. Go away.”

• • • •

“Go away.”

“You have to eat something. Please, try this. It’s good for you. Really it is. Try it.”

“Eat!” She turned in the air with sudden cramps of hunger and revulsion. She retched up stale air and thin fluid. “Get away from me. Don’t touch me. Equinox! Equinox!”

The figure touched her with its hand. The hand was hard and cold.

“Your breasts,” he said. “They’ve been oozing milk. I was wondering . . .”

“Gone. All gone.”

• • • •

Parameter.

“What is it? Are you ready to try again with that picture?”

No. No need. You can go.

“Huh?”

You can go. I can’t keep you. You think you are self-sufficient; maybe you’re right. You can go.

Parameter was confused.

“Why? Why so sudden?”

I’ve been looking into some of the concepts in your memory. Freedom. Self-determination. Independence. You are free to go.

“You know what I think, what I really think about those concepts, too. Unproven at best. Fantasies at worst.”

You are cynical. I recognize that they may indeed be real, so you should be free. I am detaining you against your will. This is contrary to most ethical codes, including the ones you accept more than any others. You are free to go.

It was an awkward moment. It hurt more than she would have thought possible. And she was unsure of whose hurt she was feeling. Not that it mattered.

What was she saying? Here was what might be her one and only chance, and she was acknowledging what the kid had said all along, that they were already fused. And the kid had heard it, like she heard everything.

Yes, I heard it. It doesn’t matter. I can hear your doubts about many things. I can feel your uncertainty. It will be with you always.

“Yes. I guess it will. But you. I can’t feel much from you. Not that I can distinguish.”

You feel my death.

“No, no. It isn’t that bad. They’ll give you another human. You’ll get along. Sure you will.”

Perhaps. Despair. Disbelief.

Parameter kicked herself in the mental butt, told herself that if she didn’t get out now, she never would.

“Okay. Let me out.”

Fade. A gradual withdrawal that was painful and slow as the tendril began to disengage. And Parameter felt her mind being drawn in two.

It would always be like that. It would never get any better.

“Wait, kid. Wait!”

The withdrawal continued.

“Listen to me. Really! No kidding, I really want to discuss this with you. Don’t go.”

It’s for the best. You’ll get along.

“No! No more than you will. I’ll die.”

No you won’t. It’s like you said; if you don’t get out now, you never will. You’ll . . . all right . . . bye . . .

“No! You don’t understand. I don’t want to go anymore. I’m afraid. Don’t leave me like this. You can’t leave me.”

Hesitation.

“Listen to me. Listen. Feel me. Love. Love. Commitment, pure and honest commitment-forever-and-ever-till-death-us-do-part. Feel me.”

“I feel you. We are one.”

• • • •

She had eaten, only to bring it back up. But her jailer was persistent. He was not going to let her die.

“Would it be any better if you got inside with me?”

“No. I can’t. I’m half gone. It would be no good. Where is Equinox?”

“I told you I don’t know. And I don’t know where your children are. But you won’t believe me.”

“That’s right. I don’t believe you. Murderer.”

She listened groggily as he explained how she came to be in this room with him. She didn’t believe him, not for a minute.

He said he had found her by following a radio beacon signaling from a point outside the plane of the Rings. He had found a pseudosymb there; a simplified Symb created by budding a normal one without first going through the conjugation process. A pseudo can only do what any other plant can do: that is, ingest carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from its inner surface. It cannot contract into contact with a human body. It remains in the spherical configuration. A human can stay alive in a pseudosymb, but will soon die of thirst.

Parameter had been inside the pseudo, bruised and bleeding from the top of her head and from her genitals. But she had been alive. Even more remarkable, she had lived the five days it had taken to get her to the Conser emergency station. The Consers didn’t maintain many of the stations. The ones they had were widely separated.

“You were robbed by Engineers,” he said. “There’s no other explanation. How long have you been in the Rings?”

After the third repeat of the question, Parameter muttered, “Five years.”

“I thought so. A new one. That’s why you don’t believe me. You don’t know much about Engineers, do you? You can’t understand why they would take your Symb and leave you alive, with a beacon to guide help to you. It doesn’t make sense, right?”

“I . . . no, I don’t know. I can’t understand. They should have killed me. What they did was more cruel.”

No emotion could be read on the man’s “face,” but he was optimistic for the first time that she might pull through. At least she was talking, if fitfully.

“You should have learned more. I’ve been fighting for a century, and I still don’t know all I’d like to know. They robbed you for your children, don’t you see? To raise them as Engineers. That’s what the real battle is about: population. The side that can produce the most offspring is the one that gains the advantage.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“I understand. Will you just listen?”

He took her lack of response to mean she would.

“You’ve just been drifting through your life. It’s easy to do out here; we all just drift from time to time. When you think about the Engineers at all, it’s just a question of evading them. That isn’t too hard. Considering the cubic kilometers out here, the hunted always has the advantage over the hunter. There are so many places to hide; so many ways to dodge.”

“But you’ve drifted into a rough neighborhood. The Engineers have concentrated a lot of people in this sector. Maybe you’ve noticed the high percentage of red rocks. They hunt in teams, which is not something we Consers have ever done. We’re too loose a group to get together much, and we all know our real fight doesn’t begin for another thousand years.

“We are the loosest army in the history of humanity. We’re volunteers on both sides, and on our side, we don’t require that individuals do anything at all to combat the Engineers. So you don’t know anything about them, beyond the fact that they’ve vowed to paint Ring Beta red within twenty-five thousand years.”

He at last got a rise out of her.

“I know a little more than that. I know they are followers of Ringpainter the Great. I know he lived almost two hundred years ago. I know he founded the Church of Cosmic Engineering.”

“You read all that in a book. Do you know that Ringpainter is still alive? Do you know how they plan to paint the Ring? Do you know what they do to Consers they catch?”

He was selective in his interpretations. This time he took her silence to mean she didn’t know.

“He is alive. Only he’s a she now. Her ‘Population Edict’ of fifty years ago decreed that each Engineer shall spend ninety percent of her time as a female, and bear three children every year. If they really do that, we haven’t got a chance. The Rings would be solid Engineers in a few centuries.”

She was slightly interested for the first time in weeks.

“I didn’t know it was such a long-term project.”

“The longest ever undertaken by humans. At the present rate of coloring, it would take three million years to paint the entire Ring. But the rate is accelerating.”

He waited, trying to draw her out again, but she lapsed back into listlessness. He went on.

“The one aspect of their religion you don’t seem to know about is their ban on killing. They won’t take a human or a Symb life.”

That got her attention.

“Equinox! Where . . .” she started shaking again.

“She’s almost certainly alive.”

“How could they keep her alive?”

“You’re forgetting your children. Five of them.”

• • • •

The last thing anyone said to Parameter for two years was, “Take this, you might want to use it. Just press it to a red rock and forget about it. It lasts forever.”

She took the object, a thin tube with a yellow bulb on each end. It was a Bacteriophage Applicator, filled with the tailored DNA that attacked and broke down the deposits of red dust left by the Engineers’ Ringvirus. Touching the end of it to a coated rock would begin a chain reaction that would end only when all the surface of the rock was restored to its original color.

Parameter absently touched it to her side, where it sank without a trace in the tough integument of Equinox’s outer hide. Then she shoved out the airlock and into fairyland.

“I never saw anything like this, Equinox,” she said.

“No, you certainly haven’t.” The Symb had only Parameter’s experiences to draw on.

“Where should we go? What’s that line around the sky? Which way is it to the Ring?”

Affectionate laughter. “Silly planteater. We’re in the Ring. That’s why it stretches all around us. All except over in that direction. The sun is behind that part of the Ring, so the particles are illuminated primarily from the other side. You can see it faintly, by reflected light.”

“Where did you learn all that?”

“From your head. The facts are there, and the deductive powers. You just never thought about it.”

“I’m going to start thinking a lot more. This is almost frightening. I repeat: Where do we go from here?”

“Anywhere at all, as long as it’s away from this awful place. I don’t think I want to come back to the Ringmarket for about a decade.”

“Now, now,” Parameter chided her. “Surely we’ll have to go back before that. Aren’t you feeling the least bit poetic?”

The Ringmarket was the clearinghouse for the wildly variant and irresistibly beautiful art that was the byproduct of living a solitary life in the Rings. Art brokers, musicmongers, poetry sellers, editors, moodmusic vendors . . . all the people who made a living by standing between the artist and the audience and raking off a profit as works of art passed through their hands; they all gathered at the Ringmarket bazaar and bought exquisite works for the equivalent of pretty-colored beads. The Ringers had no need of money. All exchanges were straight barter: a fresh gas bottle for a symphony that would crash through the mind with unique rhythms and harmonies. A handful of the mineral pellets the Ringers needed every decade to supply trace elements that were rare in the Rings could buy a painting that would bring millions back in civilization. It was a speculative business. No one could know which of the thousands of works would catch the public taste at high tide and run away with it. All the buyers knew was that for unknown reasons the art of the Rings had consistently captured the highest prices and the wildest reviews. It was different. It was from a whole new viewpoint.

“I can’t feel poetic back there. Besides, didn’t you know that when we start to create, it will be music?”

“I didn’t know that. How do you know?”

“Because there’s a song in my heart. Off-key. Let’s get out of here.”

They left the metallic sphere of the market and soon it was only a blue vector line, pointed away from them.

They spent two years just getting used to their environment. The wonder never wore off. When they met others, they avoided them. Neither was ready for companionship; they had all they needed.

• • • •

She was sinking, and glad of it. Every day without Equinox was torture. She had come to hate her jailer, even if his story was true, He was keeping her alive, which was the cruelest thing he could do. But even her hatred was a weak and fitful thing.

She stared into the imaginary distance and seldom noticed his comings and goings.

Then one day there were two of them. She noted it dispassionately, watched as they embraced each other and began to flow. So the other person was a female; they were going to mate. She turned away and didn’t see, as the two Symbs merged in their conjugation process and slowly expanded into a featureless green sphere within which the humans would couple silently and then part, probably forever.

But something nagged at her, and she looked back. A bulge was forming on the side of the sphere that was facing her. It grew outward and began to form another, smaller sphere. A pink line formed the boundary between the two globes.

She looked away again, unable to retain an interest as the Symbs gave birth. But something was still nagging.

“Parameter.”

The man (or was it the woman?) was floating beside her, holding the baby Symb.

She froze. Her eyes filled with horror.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Maybe. I can’t force it on you. But it’s here. I’m going now, and you’ll never see me again. You can live or die, whichever you choose. I’ve done all I can.”

• • • •

It was a warm day in the Upper Half. But then it was always a warm day, though some were warmer than others.

Ringography is an easy subject to learn. There are the Rings: Alpha, Beta, and the thin Gamma. The divisions are called Cassini and Encke, each having been created by the gravitational tug-of-war between Saturn and the larger moons for possession of the particles that make up the Rings. Beyond that, there is only the Upper Half and the Lower Half, above and below the plane, and Inspace and Outspace. The Ringers never visited Inspace because it included the intense Van Allen-type radiation belts that circle Saturn. Outspace was far from the traveled parts of the Rings, but was a nice place to visit because the Rings were all in one part of the sky from that vantage point. An odd experience for children, accustomed from birth to see the sky cut in half by the Rings.

Parameter was in the Upper Half to feed on the sunlight that was so much more powerful there than in the Rings. Equinox was in her extended configuration. The pair looked like a gauzy parabolic dish, two hundred meters across. The dish was transparent, with veins that made it look like a spider web. The illusion was heightened by the small figure spread-eagled in the center of it, like a fly. The fly was Parameter.

It was delicious to float there. She looked directly at the sun, which was bright even this far away and would have burned her eyes quickly if she had been really looking at it. But she saw only a projection. Equinox’s visual senses were not nearly as delicate as human eyes.

The front of her body was bathed in radiance. It was highly sensual, but in a new way. It was the mindless joy of a flower unfolding to the sun that Parameter experienced, not the hotter animal passions she was used to. Energy coursed through her body and out into the light-gathering sheets that Equinox had extended. Her mind was disconnected more completely than she would have believed possible. Her thoughts came hours apart, and were concerned with sluggish, vegetable pleasures. She saw herself as naked, exposed to the light and the wind, floating in the center of a silver circle of life. She could feel the wind on her body in this airless place and wondered vacantly how Equinox could be so utterly convincing in the webs of illusion she spun.

There was a sudden gust.

“Parameter. Wake up, my darling.”

“Hmmm?”

“There’s a storm coming up. We’ve got to furl the sails and head into port.”

Parameter felt other gusts as she swam through the warm waters back to alertness.

“How far are we from the Ring?”

“We’re all right. We can be there in ten minutes if I tack for a bit and then use a few seconds of thrust.”

In her extended configuration, Equinox was a moderately efficient solar sail. By controlling the angle she presented to the incoming sunlight she could slowly alter velocity. All Parameter had to do was push off above or below the Rings in a shallow arc. Equinox could bring them back into the Rings in a few days, using solar pressure. But the storm was a danger they had always to keep in mind.

It was the solar wind that Equinox felt, a cloud of particles thrust out from the sun by storms beneath the surface. Her radiation sensors had detected the first speed-of-light gusts of it, and the dangerous stuff would not be far behind.

Radiation was the chief danger of life in the Rings. The outer surface of a Symb was proof against much of the radiation the symbiotic pair would encounter in space. What got through was not enough to worry about, certainly never enough to cause sickness. But stray high-energy particles could cause mutations of the egg and sperm cells of the humans.

The intensity of the wind was increasing as they furled their sails and applied the gas thrusters.

“Did we get moving in time?” Parameter asked.

“There’s a good margin. But we can’t avoid getting a little hard stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

“What about children? If I want to have some later, couldn’t that be a problem?”

“Naturally. But you’ll never give birth to a mutation. I’ll be able to see any deviations in the first few weeks and abort it and not even have to tell you.”

“But you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“If you want me to. But it isn’t important. No more than the daily control I exert over any of your other bodily processes.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. Don’t worry, I said. You just handle the motor control and leave the busy work to me. Things don’t seem quite real to me unless they’re on the molecular level.”

Parameter trusted Equinox utterly. So much so that when the really hard wind began buffeting them, she didn’t worry for a second. She spread her arms to it, embraced it. It was strange that the “wind” didn’t blow her around like a leaf. She would have liked that. All she really missed was her hair streaming around her shoulders. She no longer had any hair at all. It got in the way of the seal between the two of them.

As soon as she thought it, long black hair whipped out behind her, curling into her face and tickling her eyes. She could see it and feel it against her skin, but she couldn’t touch it. That didn’t surprise her, because it wasn’t there.

“Thank you,” she laughed. And then she laughed even harder as she looked down at herself. She was covered with hair; long, flowing hair that grew as she watched it.

They reentered the Ring, preceded by a twisting, imaginary train of hair a kilometer long.

• • • •

Three days later she was still staring at the floating ball.

On the fifth day her hand twitched toward it.

“No. No. Equinox. Where are you?”

The Symb was in its dormant state. Only an infant Symb could exist without a human to feed and water it; once it had become attached to a human, it would die very quickly without one. But in dormancy, they could live for weeks at a low energy level. It only needed the touch of her hand to be triggered into action.

The hunger was eating its way through her body; she ignored it completely. It had become a fact of life, something she clutched to her to forget about the real hunger that was in her brain. She would never be forced to accept the Symb from hunger. It didn’t even enter the question.

On the ninth day her hand began moving. She watched it, crying for Equinox to stop the movement, to give her strength.

She touched it.

• • • •

“I think it’s time we tried out the new uterus.”

“I think you’re right.”

“If that thing out there is a male, we’ll do it.”

Equinox had in her complex of capabilities the knack of producing a nodule within her body that could take a cloned cell and nurture it until it grew into a complete organ; any organ she wished. She had done that with one of Parameter’s cells. She removed it, cloned it, and let it grow into a new uterus. Parameter’s old one had run out of eggs long ago and was useless for procreation, but the new one was brimming with life.

She had operated on her mate, taking out the old one and putting in the new. It had been painless and quick; Parameter had not even felt it.

Now they were ready to have a seed planted in it.

“Male,” came the voice of the other figure. Before, Parameter would have answered by saying, “Solitude,” and he would have gone on his way.

Now she said, “Female.”

“Wilderness,” he introduced himself.

“Parameter.”

The mating ritual over, they fell silent as they drifted closer. She had computed it well, if a little fast. They hit and clung together with all their limbs. Slowly the Symbs melted into each other.

A sensation of pleasure came over Parameter.

“What is it?”

“What do you think? It’s heaven. Did you think that because we’re sexless, we wouldn’t get any pleasure out of conjugation?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought about it. It’s . . . different. Not bad at all. But nothing like an orgasm.”

“Stick around. We’re just getting started.”

There was a moment of insecurity as Equinox withdrew her connections, leaving only the one into her brain. She shuddered as an unfamiliar feeling passed over her, then realized she was holding her breath. She had to start respirating again. Her chest crackled as she brought long-unused muscles into play, but once the reflex was started she was able to forget about it and let her hindbrain handle the chore.

The inner surface started to phosphoresce, and she made out a shadowy figure floating in front of her. The light got brighter until it reached the level of bright moonlight. She could see him now.

“Hello,” she said. He seemed surprised she wanted to talk, but grinned at her.

“Hello. You must be new.”

“How did you know?”

“It shows. You want to talk. You probably expect me to go through an elaborate ritual.” And with that he reached for her and pulled her toward him.

“Hold on there,” she said. “I’d like to know you a little better first.”

He sighed, but let her go. “I’m sorry. You don’t know yet. All right, what would you like to know about me?”

She looked him over. He was small, slightly smaller than her. He was completely hairless, as was she. There didn’t seem to be any way to guess his age; all the proper clues were missing. Growing out of the top of his head was a snaky umbilicus.

She discovered there was really little to ask him, but having made a point of it, she threw in a token question.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough. Fourteen.”

“All right, let’s do it your way.” She touched him and shifted in space to accommodate his entry.

To her pleasant surprise, it lasted longer than the thirty seconds she had expected. He was an accomplished lover; he seemed to know all the right moves. She was warming deliciously when she heard him in her head.

“Now you know,” he said, and her head was filled with his laughter.

Everything before that, good as it was, had been just a warm-up.

• • • •

Parameter and the baby Symb howled with pain.

“I didn’t want you,” she cried, hurling waves of rejection at the child and at herself. “All I want is Equinox.”

That went on for an endless time. The stars burnt out around them. The galaxy turned like a whirligig. The universe contracted; exploded; contracted again. Exploded. Contracted and gave it up as a waste of time. Time ended as all events came to an end.

The two of them floated, howling at each other.

• • • •

Wilderness drifted away against the swirling background of stars. He didn’t look back, and neither did Parameter. They knew each other too well to need good-byes. They might never meet again, but that didn’t matter either, because each carried all they needed of the other.

“In a life full of cheap thrills, I never had anything like that.”

Equinox seemed absorbed. She quietly acknowledged that it had, indeed, been superduper, but there was something else. There was a new knowledge.

“I’d like to try something,” she said.

“Shoot.”

Parameter’s body was suddenly caressed by a thousand tiny, wet tongues. They searched out every cranny, all at the same time. They were hot, at least a thousand billion degrees, but they didn’t burn; they soothed.

“Where were you keeping that?” Parameter quavered when it stopped. “And why did you stop?”

“I just learned it. I was watching while I was experiencing. I picked up a few tricks.”

“You’ve got more?”

“Sure. I didn’t want to start out with the intense ones until I saw how you liked that one. I thought it was very nice. You shuddered beautifully; the delta waves were fascinating.”

Parameter broke up with laughter. “Don’t give me that clinical stuff. You liked it so much you scared yourself.”

“That comes as close as you can come to describing my reaction. But I was serious about having things I think we’ll like even better. I can combine sensations in a novel way. Did you appreciate the subtle way the ‘heat’ blended into the sensation of feathers with an electric current through them?”

“It sounds hideous when you say it in words. But that was what it was, all right. Electric feathers. But pain had nothing to do with it.”

Equinox considered it. “I’m not sure about that. I was deep into the pain-sensation center of you. But I was tickling it in a new way, the same way Wilderness tickled you. There is something I’m discovering. It has to do with the reality of pain. All you experience is more a function of your brain than of your nerve endings. Pain is no exception. What I do is connect the two centers — pain and pleasure — and route them through other sensorium pathways, resulting in . . .”

“Equinox.”

?????

“Make love to me.”

She was in the center of the sun, every atom of her body fusing in heat so hot it was icy. She swam to the surface, taking her time through the plastic waves of ionized gas, where she grew until she could hold the whole sputtering ball in her hand and rub it around her body. It flicked and fumed and smoked, gigantic prominences responding to her will, wreathing her in fire and smoke that bit and tickled. Flares snaked into her, reaming nerves with needle-sharp pins of gas that were soft as a kiss. She was swallowed whole by something pink that had no name, and slid down the slippery innards to splash in a pool of sweet-smelling sulfur.

It melted her; she melted it. Equinox was there; she picked her up and hurled her and herself in a wave of water, a gigantic wave that was gigatons of pent-up energy, rearing itself into a towering breaker a thousand kilometers high. She crashed on a beach of rubbery skin, which became a forest of snakes that squeezed her until the top of her head blew off and tiny flowers showered around her, all of them Equinox.

She was drawn back together from the far corners of the solar system and put into a form that called itself “Parameter” but would answer to anything at all. Then she was rising on a rocket that thrust deep into her vagina, into recesses that weren’t even there but felt like mirrors that showed her own face. She was a fusion warhead of sensation; primed to blow. Sparks whipped around her, and each was a kiss of electric feathers. She was reaching orbital velocity; solar escape velocity; the speed of light. She turned herself inside out and contained the universe. The speed of light was a crawl slower than any snail; she transcended it.

There was an explosion; an implosion. She drew away from herself and fell into herself, and the fragments of her body drifted down to the beach, where she and Equinox gathered them and put them in a pile of quivering parts, each smaller than an atom.

It was a long job. They took their time.

“Next time,” Parameter suggested, “try to work in some elephants.”

• • • •

Someone had invented a clock. It ticked.

Parameter woke up.

“Did you do that?”

No answer.

“Shut the damn thing off.”

The ticking stopped. She rolled over and went back to sleep. Around her, a trillion years passed.

• • • •

It was no good; she couldn’t sleep.

“Are you there?”

Yes.

“What do you think we ought to do?”

Despair. We’ve lost Equinox.

“You never knew her.”

Part of her will always be with you. Enough to hurt you. We will always hurt.

“I want to live again.”

Live with hurt?

“If there’s no other way. Come on. Let’s start. Try to make a light. Come on, you can do it. I can’t tell you how; you have to do that yourself. I love you. Blend with me, wash me clean, wipe out the memory.”

Impossible. We cannot alter ourselves. I want Equinox.

“Damn you, you never knew her.”

Know her as good as you. Better. In a way, I am Equinox. But in another way, I can never be.

“Don’t talk in riddles. Merge with me.”

Cannot. You do not love me yet.

“You want to sleep on it another few thousand years?”

Yes. You are much nicer when you are asleep.

“Is that an insult?”

No. You have loved me in your sleep. You have talked to me, you have taught me, given me love and guidance, grown me up to an adult. But you still think I’m Equinox. I’m not. I am me.

“Who is that?”

No name. I will have a name when you start really talking to me.

“Go to sleep. You confuse me.”

Love. Affection. Rockabye, rockabye, rockabye.

• • • •

“You have a name yet?”

“Yes. My name is Solstice.”

Parameter cried, loud and long, and washed herself clean in her own tears.

• • • •

It took them four years to work their way around to Ringmarket. They traded a song, one that had taken three years to produce, a sweet-sad dirge that somehow rang with hope, orchestrated for three lutes and synthesizer; traded it and a promise of four more over the next century to a tinpan alleycat for an elephant gun. Then they went out on a trail that was four years cold to stalk the memory of those long-ago pachyderm days.

In the way that an earlier generation of humans had known the shape of a hill, the placement of trees and flowers on it, the smell and feel of it; and another generation could remember at a glance what a street corner looked like; or still another the details of a stretch of corridor beneath the surface of the moon; in that same way, Parameter knew rocks. She would know the rock she had pushed off from on that final day just before Equinox was taken from her, the rock she now knew to have been an Engineer waystation. She knew where it had been going on that day, and how fast, and for how long. She knew where it would be now, and that was where she and Solstice were headed. The neighborhood would be different, but she could find that rock.

They found it, in only three years of search. She knew it instantly, knew every crevice and pit on the side she had landed on. The door was on the other side. They picked a likely rock a few kilometers away and settled down for a long wait.

Seventy-six times Saturn turned below them while they used the telescopic sight of the gun to survey the traffic at the station. By the end of that time, they knew the routine of the place better than the residents did. When the time came for action, they had worked over each detail until it was almost a reflex.

A figure came out of the rock and started off in the proper direction. Parameter squinted down the barrel of the gun and drew a bead. The range was extreme, but she had no doubt of a hit. The reason for her confidence was the long red imaginary line that she saw growing from the end of the barrel. It represented the distance the bullet would travel in one-thousandth of a second. The figure she was shooting at also had a line extending in front of it, not nearly so long. All she had to do was bring the ends of the two lines together and squeeze the trigger.

It went as planned. The gun was firing stunbullets, tiny harmonic generators that would knock out the pair for six hours. The outer hide of a Symb was proof against the kinetic energy contained in most projectiles, natural or artificial. She didn’t dare use a beam stunner because the Engineers in the station would detect it.

They set out in pursuit of the unconscious pair. There was no hurry; the longer it took to rendezvous, the farther they would be from danger.

It took five hours to reach them. Once in contact, Solstice took over. She had assured Parameter that it would be possible to fuse with an unconscious Symb, and she was right. Soon Parameter was floating in the dark cavity with the Engineer, a female. She put the barrel of the gun under the other’s chin and waited.

“I don’t know if I can do it, Solstice,” she said.

“It won’t be something you’ll ever be proud of, but you know the reasons as well as I. Just keep thinking of Equinox.”

“I wonder if that’s a good idea? I’d rather do something for her that I would be proud of.”

“Want to back out? We can still get away. But if she wakes up and sees us, it could get awkward if we let her live.”

“I know. I have to do it. I just don’t like it.”

The Engineer was stirring. Parameter tightened her grip on the rifle.

She opened her eyes, looked around, and seemed to be listening. Solstice was keeping the other Symb from calling for help.

“I won’t give you any trouble,” the woman said. “But is it asking too much to allow me a few minutes for my death ritual?”

“You can have that and more if you’re a fast talker. I don’t want to kill you, but I confess I think I’ll have to. I want to tell you some things, and to do it, I’ll need your cooperation. If you don’t cooperate, I can take what I need from you anyway. What I’m hoping is that there’ll be some way you can show me that will make your death unnecessary. Will you open your mind to me?”

A light came into the woman’s eyes, then was veiled. Parameter was instantly suspicious.

“Don’t be nervous,” the Engineer said, “I’ll do as you ask. It was just something of a surprise.” She relaxed, and Parameter eased herself into the arms of Solstice, who took over as go-between.

They had a lot staked on the outcome of this mutual revelation.

• • • •

It came in a rush, the impalpable weight of the religious fervor and dedication. And above it all, the Great Cause, the project that would go on long after everyone now alive was dead. The audacity of it! The vision of Humanity the mover, the controller, the artist; the Engineer. The universe would acknowledge the sway of Humanity when it gazed at the wonder that was being wrought in the Rings of Saturn.

Ringpainter the Great was a utopian on a grand scale. He had been bitterly disappointed in the manner in which humanity had invaded the solar system. He thought in terms of terraforming and of shifting planets in their courses. What he saw was burrows in rock.

So he preached, and spoke of Dyson spheres and space arks, of turning stars on and off at will, of remodeling galaxies. To him and his followers, the universe was an immensely complex toy that they could do beautiful things with. They wanted to unscrew a black hole and see what made it tick. They wanted to unshift the red shift. They believed in continuous creation, because the big bang implied an end to all their efforts.

Parameter and Solstice reeled under the force of it; the conviction that this admittedly symbolic act could get humanity moving in the direction Ringpainter wanted. He had an idea that there were beings out there keeping score, and they could be impressed by the Grand Gesture. When they saw what a pretty thing Ring Beta had become, they would step in and give the forces of Ringpainter a hand.

The woman they had captured, whose name they learned was Rosy-Red-Ring 3351, was convinced of the truth of these ideas. She had devoted her life to the furtherance of the Design. But they saw her faith waver as she beheld what they had to show her. She cringed away from the shrunken, hardened, protectively encased memory of the days after the theft of Equinox. They held it up and made her look at it, peeling away the layers of forgetfulness they had protected themselves with and thrusting it at her.

At last they let her go. She crouched, quivering, in the air.

“You’ve seen what we’ve been.”

“Yes.” She was sobbing.

“And you know what we have to do to find Equinox. You saw that in my mind. What I want to know is, can this cup pass from us? Do you know another way? Tell me quick.”

“I didn’t know,” she cried. “It’s what we do to all the Consers we capture. We can’t kill them. It’s against the Law. So we separate them, keep the Symb, leave the human to be found. We know most of them are never found, but it’s the best we can do. But I didn’t know it was so bad. I never thought of it. I almost think —”

“No need to think. You’re right. It would be more merciful to kill the human. I don’t know about the Symb. I’ll have to talk to Equinox about that. At first I wanted to kill all the Engineers in the Rings, with a lot of care put into the project so they didn’t die too quick. I can’t do that any more. I’m not a Conser. I never was. I’m not anything but a seeker, looking for my friend. I don’t care if you paint the Ring; go ahead. But I have to find Equinox, and I have to find my children. You have to answer my question now. Can you think of a way I can let you live and still do what I have to do?”

“No. There’s no other way.”

Parameter sighed. “All right. Get on with your ritual.”

“I’m not sure if I want to any more.”

“You’d probably better. Your faith has been shaken, but you might be right about the scorekeepers. If you are, I’d hate to be the cause of you going out the wrong way.” She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.

Rosy-Red-Ring 3351 gradually calmed as she went through the motions of her auto-extreme unction. By the time she had finished she was as composed as she had been at the start of her ordeal.

“I’ve experienced the fullness of it,” she said quietly. “The Engineers do not claim to know everything. We were wrong about our policy of separating symbiotic pairs. My only regret is that I can’t tell anyone about our mistake.” She looked doubtfully at Parameter, but knew it was useless. “I forgive you. I love you, my killer. Do the deed.” She presented her white neck and closed her eyes.

“Umm,” Parameter said. She had not heard her victim’s last words; she had cut herself off and could see only the neck. She let Solstice guide her hands. They found the pressure points as if by instinct, pressed hard, and it was just like Solstice had said it would be. The woman was unconscious in seconds. Now she must be kept alive for a few minutes while Solstice did what she had to do.

“Got it,” came Solstice’s shaken thought.

“Was it hard?” Parameter had kept away from it.

“Let’s don’t talk about it. I’ll show it to you in about a decade and we can cry for a year. But I have it.”

So the other Symb was already dead, and Solstice had been with it as it died. Parameter’s job would not be nearly so hard.

She put her thumbs on the woman’s neck again, bent her ear to the chest. She pressed, harder this time. Soon the heartbeat fluttered, raced briefly. There was a convulsion, then she was dead.

“Let’s get out of here.”

• • • •

What they had acquired was the Symb-Engineer frequency organ. It was the one way the inhabitants of the Rings had of telling friend from foe. The radio organs of the Symbs were tuned from birth to send on a specific frequency, and the Engineers used one band exclusively. The Consers employed another, because they had a stake in identifying friends and foes, too. But Parameter no longer identified with either side, and now had the physical resources to back up her lack of conviction. She could send on either band now, according to the needs of the moment, and so could move freely from one society to the other. If caught, she would be seen as a spy by either side, but she didn’t think of herself as one.

It had been necessary to kill the Engineer pair because the organ could not be removed without causing the death of the Symb. The organ could be cloned, and that was the escape Parameter had offered the other two. But it had been refused. So now Solstice had two voices; her own, and the one from the other organ which she had already implanted in herself.

In addition to the double voice, they had picked up information about the life of the Engineers without which it would be impossible to function without immediate exposure. They knew the customs and beliefs of the Engineers and could fit in with them as long as they didn’t go into sexual rapport. That could get sticky, but they had a dodge. The most reliable way to avoid intercourse was to be pregnant, and that was what they set out to do.

• • • •

It didn’t seem too important, but his name was Appoggiatura. They had encountered him during the third week after the murder. It was a risk — a small one, but a risk all the same. He had been easy about it. He learned all about Parameter’s deeds and plans during their intercourse and remained unperturbed. Fanatic dedication was rare among Consers; the only real fanatic Parameter had met was Bushwhacker, who had offered to shoot her at the hint of treason. Parameter and Solstice were aware that what they were doing was treason to the Conser cause. Appoggiatura didn’t seem to care, or if he did, he thought it was justified after what they had been through.

“But have you thought about what you’ll do if you find Equinox? I don’t know what you think, but it sounds like a thorny problem to me.”

“It’s thorny, all right,” Solstice agreed. “To me, especially. Don’t talk to me about problems until you’ve gone through the insecurity I’ve felt when I think about that day.”

“It’s my insecurity, too,” Parameter said. “We don’t know. But we do know we have to find her. And the children, though that isn’t so strong. I only saw them for a few minutes, and they’ll be seven years old now. I can’t expect much there.”

“I wouldn’t expect much from Equinox, either,” he said. “I know something about what happens to a Symb when it’s separated from a human. Something dies; I don’t know what. But it has to start over again from the beginning. She’ll be a part of one of your children now, whichever one of them she took over when she was separated from you. You won’t know her, and she won’t know you.”

“Still, we have to do this. I want to leave you now.”

• • • •

For six months they drifted, allowing Parameter’s body to swell to the point that it would be obvious she was pregnant and not available for sex. During that time they thought.

Countless times they decided they were being foolish; that to complete their search would be to finish their life’s mission and be faced with what to do with the next thousand years. But they could not just go through the motions. Perhaps one person could do that, but it wouldn’t work with two. There was always that alter ego telling you by her very presence that you were living a lie.

And there was Rosy-Red-Ring 3351. If they quit, her murder would have been for no purpose. That would have been too much to bear. They had her in their memory, always cherishing her, always ashamed of what they had done. And the Symb, whose name Solstice had not yet been able to mention. One day Parameter would have to go through that killing again, but closer. Solstice was, if anything, even more determined than Parameter to verify the necessity of that terrible act.

So they started back to the Engineer-infested sector where so long ago Equinox had been made a prisoner of war.

There was a nervous moment the first time they used the stolen transmitter organ, but it went off smoothly. After that, they were able to move freely in Engineer society. It was a strange world, steeped in ritual that would have instantly confounded a novice. But they had received an instant course in religion and fell back on the memories of Rosy-Red-Ring that were burned into their minds.

They took the name Earth-Revenger 9954f, a common name attached to a random number with the “f” added as a mark of status. Only Engineers who had borne a hundred children were supposed to add the letter to their names. Theoretically, births were supposed to be recorded at Ringpainter Temple, clear across the Ring from them, where what records it was possible to keep in Ring society were stored. But there was no danger once they had verified that their stolen transmitter would fool the Engineers. Even in Engineer society, where social contact was more important than among Consers, the chance of meeting the same person twice was small. The chance of Parameter and Solstice meeting the real Earth-Revenger 9954f was not even worth thinking about.

The place they stayed around was the very rock she had pushed off from on the day of her capture, the rock from which Rosy-Red-Ring had left on her final day. It was a communications center, a social hall, a gossip rendezvous; the means by which the Engineers were able to keep their cohesiveness against the formidable odds of empty space.

She took over the job of station manager, a largely informal, voluntary post that meant you stayed in the station and loosely coordinated the activities there. These consisted of posting in written form information that was too important to entrust to word of mouth, and generally trying to pump each incoming Engineer for that type of information. As such, it was ideally suited for what she wanted to do.

There was the problem of her pregnancy. Pregnant women needed a lot of sunshine and rock and ice, and generally didn’t take the job. She faced a lot of questions about it, but got away with her story about just plain liking the job so much she didn’t want to give it up.

But the problem of getting enough sunlight was real. The location of the station was deep enough inside the Rings by now that the incident sunlight was low. She should have gone above the plane to where the light wasn’t scattered off so many rocks, but she couldn’t.

She compromised by spending all her free time outside the station with Solstice in her extended configuration.

The prime topic of conversation was the failure of the Pop Edict, and it was this that led her to information about Equinox.

Under the Edict, each Engineer was to undergo a sex change and spend nine years as a female for every year as a male. Three children were to be borne each of those years. The figures told a different story.

It was the first resistance to an Edict; unorganized, but still disturbing. There was much debate about it, and much solemn rededication. Everyone vowed to bear as many children as she could, but Parameter wondered how sincere it was. Her own sampling of Engineers revealed that females did outnumber males, but only by three to one, not nine to one.

There were several causes discussed for it. One, and the most obvious, was simple preference. Statistically, ninety percent of all people had a preferred sex, and of those, it was evenly divided as to which sex was the preferred one. For the target percentages to be in effect, 35 percent of the Engineers would have to be living as the sex they did not prefer. The actual figures indicated that not many of them were doing so. They were remaining defiantly male.

Then there was the logistical problem. To gain enough useful mass to produce one baby, a Symb-human pair had to ingest almost a thousand kilograms of rock and ice. Only a tiny fraction of it was the chemicals needed to produce a baby. Then, to convert the mass to useful form, energy was required. The pair had to spend long hours in the sunlight. After all that, there was little time for painting the Ring, and that was what most Engineers saw as their prime mission, not becoming baby factories.

It was said that Ringpainter was in meditation, and had been for the past ten years, trying to find a way out of the dilemma. She saw her Grand Gesture being slowed down to the point where it was actually in jeopardy. If, in the far future, the Engineer birthrate didn’t outstrip the Conser birthrate, it would mean trouble. The time of the great Conser effort was yet to come. As things now stood, a Conser might not even see a painted rock in three or four days; they were too far apart. But as the number of painted rocks grew, the rate of recoloring would also grow. Then the Engineers would have to depend on the sheer rate of repainting to overpower the negative effect of the Consers. If their populations were nearly equal, it would be a stalemate, and only the Consers could win a stalemate. To accomplish the Grand Design, ninety percent of the rock in Ring Beta must be painted. To reach this figure, the Engineers must outnumber the Consers by ten to one, otherwise the number of painted rocks would stabilize below the target figure. It was a crisis of the first magnitude, though no one alive would see the outcome.

In discussing this with one of the Engineers, a woman named Glorious-Red-Ring 43f, the break came. She was one of the early followers of Ringpainter, had been in the Ring for two hundred years. She had birthed 389 children, and acknowledged it was below her quota. She was living proof that the goals of Ringpainter were unrealistic, but she had unshakable faith that it was the right policy. She blamed herself that she had not had six hundred children, and had dedicated herself to meeting her quota within the next century. To do that, she must bear five hundred children. Parameter thought she was pathetic. She was pregnant with septuplets.

“I see these young ones coming in here with twins in their wombs and wonder how they can call themselves Engineers,” she complained. “Only last month I saw one with a single child on the way. One! Can you imagine? How many do you have there?”

“Three. Maybe it should have been more.” Parameter tried to sound guilty about it.

“That’s all right. Three is the right number. I won’t ask if you had three last year.

“And the number of males I see makes me weep. I make it 7.43 to 2.57, female to male.” She lapsed into a brooding silence.

“If that wasn’t bad enough,” Parameter prompted, “I understand the Conser birthrate has equalled ours.”

“Has it?” She was concerned at this bit of news, and would have been relieved to learn it was totally spurious. Parameter used that line frequently to lead someone into a discussion of Conser women in general and one Conser in particular who had been captured around here several years ago while birthing quints.

“But it shouldn’t surprise me,” the Engineer said. “So many of the Consers we’ve taken lately have been pregnant with three, four, even five.”

This was more like it. Parameter considered remarks that might draw the woman out.

“I recall, almost ten years ago . . . or was it five? I get confused. There was this Conser some of our people took. Five children she had just borne.”

Parameter was so surprised she almost let the opportunity slip by.

“Five?” she managed to croak. It was enough.

“That’s right. How long has it been since you saw one of ours give birth to five? And those anarchists don’t even have a Pop Edict to tell them to do it. She was doing it for fun.”

“Were you there when it happened? When they captured the woman?”

“I heard about it later. They had the pups around here for a few days. Didn’t know what to do with them. No one had heard about the crèche.”

“Crèche?”

“You, too. The newsmongering around here has fallen down. It should have been posted and circulated.”

“I’ll surely see that it’s done if you’ll tell me about it.”

“There’s a crèche for POW children about fifty thousand kilometers forward from here. That’s where we’re supposed to take captured Conser children for indoctrination.”

They digested that, didn’t like the taste of it.

“The indoctrination’s pretty successful, is it?”

“Great Red Ring, I hope so. Haven’t been there myself. But we need everything we can get these days.”

“Just where is this crèche? I should post the orbital elements around here.”

• • • •

The triplets were a failure. During the tenth month, on the way to the crèche, Solstice notified Parameter that it was hopeless; they hadn’t gotten enough energy and raw materials during their stay at the way station. It was no longer possible to hold their development back, and it was too late to amass the necessary minerals to do the job.

Solstice aborted them and reabsorbed the dead bodies. With the extra energy from the abortion, they were able to make good time to the crèche. It only took two years.

The crèche was deserted; an empty shell. News traveled slowly in the Ring. Inquiring around, Parameter discovered that it had not been operating for fifteen years. So her children had never arrived, though they had set out.

This was the time for despair, but they were beyond despair. Somewhere on the way to the crèche they had stopped believing it was possible to do what they were trying to do. So it wasn’t a blow to find the crèche deserted. Still, it was hard to accept that their search ended here; they had been on the trail for nine years.

But the figures were unimpeachable. The volume of Ring Beta was seventy billion cubic kilometers, and any one of them could hide a thousand children.

They hung around the crèche for a few weeks, questioning Engineers, trying to find an angle that would enable them to defeat the statistics. Without a known destination for their children, there was no way out; they could be anywhere, and that was so vast it didn’t bear thinking about.

In the end, they left, and didn’t know where they were bound.

Three days later, they encountered another Conser, a male, and mated with him. He was sympathetic to their plight, but agreed with them that there was no chance of finding their children. Solstice carefully saw to it that Parameter was not fertilized. They had had enough of pregnancy for the next century or so.

And after they left the Conser, they found themselves falling asleep. Only they knew it wasn’t sleep.

• • • •

Before she even opened her eyes, Parameter reached frantically for the top of her head.

“Solstice . . .”

“I’m here. Don’t make any sudden moves. We’ve been captured. I don’t know by whom, but he’s armed.”

She opened her eyes. She was in a conjugation sphere and the tendril from Solstice was still firmly planted in her head. There was another person with her, a small person. He waved his gun at her and she nodded.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “If you can answer a few questions you’ll probably come out of this alive.”

“You can set your mind at ease. I won’t cause any trouble.”

She realized he was a child, about eleven years old. But he seemed to know about stunners.

“We’ve been watching you for about a week,” he said. “You talked to Engineers, so we naturally assumed you were one. But just now you spoke to a Conser, and on the Conser frequency. I want an explanation.”

“I was originally a Conser. Recently I killed an Engineer and stole her transmitter organ.” She knew she couldn’t think of a convincing lie quickly enough to be safe from his stunner. She wasn’t sure there was a convincing lie to cover her situation.

“Which side do you identify with now?”

“Neither side. I want to be independent if anyone will allow that.”

He looked thoughtful. “That may be easier than you know. Why did you kill the Engineer?”

“I had to do it so I could move in Engineer society, so I could hunt for my children and the Symb who was taken from me several years ago. I have been —”

“What’s your name?”

“Parameter, and Solstice.”

“Right. I’ve got a message for you, Parameter. It’s from your children. They’re all right, and looking for you around here. We should be able to find them in a few days’ search.”

• • • •

The children recognized the awkwardness of the situation. As they joined the group conjugation, emerging from the walls of the slowly enlarging sphere, they limited themselves to a brief kiss, then withdrew into a tangle of small bodies.

Parameter and Solstice were so jittery they could hardly think. The five children they could get to know, but Equinox? What about her?

They got the distinct feeling that the children recognized Parameter, then realized it was possible. Equinox had been talking to them while still in the womb, urging their minds to develop with pictures and sounds. Some of the pictures would have been of Parameter.

Ring children are not like other human children. They are born already knowing most of what they need to survive in the Rings. Then they are able to join with an infant Symb and help guide its development into an adult in a few weeks. From there, the Symb takes over for three years, teaching them and leading them to the places they need to go to grow up strong and healthy. For all practical purposes they are mature at three years. They must be; they cannot count on being with their mother more than the few weeks it takes them to acquire an adult Symb. From that time, they are on their own. Infant physical shortcomings are made up by the guidance and control of the Symb.

Parameter looked at these strange children, these youngsters whose backyard was billions of cubic kilometers wide and whose toys were stars and comets. What did she know of them? They might as well be another species. But that shouldn’t matter; so was Solstice.

Solstice was almost hysterical. She was gripped in fear that in some way she couldn’t understand she was going to lose Parameter. She was in danger of losing her mind. One part of her loved Equinox as hopelessly as Parameter did; another part knew there was room for only one Symb for any one human. What if it came to a choice? How would they face it?

“Equinox?”

There was a soundless scream from Solstice. “Equinox?”

?????

• • • •

“Is that you, Equinox?”

The answer was very faint, very far away. They could not hear it.

“It’s me. Parameter.”

“And Solstice. You don’t know me —”

I know you. You are me. I used to be you. I remember both of you. Interesting.

But the voice didn’t sound interested. It was cool.

“I don’t understand.” No one was sure who said it.

But you do. I am gone. There is a new me. There is a new you. It is over.

“We love you.”

Yes. Of course you do. But there is no me left to love.

“We’re confused.”

You will get over it.

The children floated together: quietly, respectfully; waiting for their mother to come to grips with her new reality. At last she stirred.

“Maybe we’ll understand it some day,” Parameter said.

One of the girls spoke.

“Equinox is no more, Mother,” she said. “And yet she’s still with us. She made a choice when she knew we were going to be captured. She reabsorbed her children and fissioned into five parts. None of us got all of her, but we all got enough.”

Parameter shook her head and tried to make sense out of it. The child who had brought her here had not been willing to tell her anything, preferring to wait until her children could be with her.

“I don’t understand how you came to find me.”

“All it took was patience. We never reached the crèche; we were liberated on the way here by Alphans. They killed all the Engineers who were guarding us and adopted us themselves.”

“What’s an Alphan?”

“Alphans are the Ringers who live in Ring Alpha, who are neither Conser nor Engineer. They are renegades from both sides who have opted out of the conflict. They took care of us, and helped us when we said we wanted to find you. We knew where we had been going, and knew it was only a matter of time until you showed up here, if you were still alive. So we waited. And you got here in only nine years. You’re very resourceful.”

“Perhaps.” She was looking at her children’s legs. They were oddly deformed. And what were those blunt instruments at the ends of them? How odd.

“Feet, Mother,” the child said. “There are surgeons in Alpha, but we could never afford to go there until we had found you. Now we’ll go. We hope you’ll go with us.”

“Huh? Ah, I guess I should. That’s across the Cassini Division, isn’t it? And there’s no war there? No killing?”

“That’s right. We don’t care if they paint Ring Beta with stripes and polka dots. They’re freaks: Conser and Engineers. We are the true Ringers.”

“Solstice?”

“Why not?”

“We’ll go with you. Say, what are your names?”

“Army,” said one of the girls.

“Navy,” said another.

“Marine.”

“Airforce.”

“And Elephant,” said the boy.

© 1977 by John Varley.

Originally published in Ascents of Wonder, edited by David Gerrold & Stephen Goldin.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Varley is an ex-Texan who used to be 6’6” but has now shrunk to a mere 6’3”. He doesn’t know where the three inches went. A passionate campaigner for the rights of the left-handed, he is a member of several of the more fashionable twelve-step programs. In an alternate universe somewhere he won an Academy Award and was the first human to break the sound barrier. In his spare time he raises champion blue-skinned velociraptors. He doesn’t know why so many things seem to have gone wrong in the world during his lifetime, but he swears that very little of it was his fault.

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

NOVEL EXCERPT: Zero World (Del Rey Books)

Jason M. Hough | 6,252 words

Chapter 2

The dead ship tumbled through space toward the fiery surface of the Sun.

Peter Caswell studied the wreck that had been the Venturi. A spherical bulk constituted the largest piece, rolling end over end. Jutting from this was a severed portion of the truss that had once led out to the landing craft and, behind those, the fuel and engines, all of which was now not much more than a cloud of debris trailing along like a comet’s tail. Mentally he reassembled the research craft from the schematics he’d reviewed on the flight out. Everything seemed to be here, just shattered.

“Still holding air?” the mission commander, Angelina, asked, her deep, gritty voice thick with a Central African accent that left little doubt as to who was in charge.

Her question was directed to the man she floated next to, who went by the name Iceberg. He pulled back from his scope and glanced at his superior. “There’s holes in it big enough to fly through.”

Angelina smacked the back of his head. “Answer without being a jackass for once. What about power?”

Iceberg shrugged and pressed his eyes against the black rubber hood. “No way to tell, Angel. But it’s not transmitting shit. Not even an SOS, and the lights are all off.”

The captain hovered in silence. Caswell tried to imagine the mental deliberation going on behind her eyes.

The stated goal was simple enough: recover the black box. Someone wanted the Venturi’s data and was willing to pay a fantastic sum for it. Angelina and her crappy little independent salvage boat, the Pawn Takes Bishop, had known — and possibly paid — the right person at the right time, and won the contract.

Outside the Venturi grew larger.

“How the fuck did they lose track of something that big?” Caswell had asked Monique, reviewing the mission dossier in his bunk on the first night out from Earth. The ship dwarfed most space stations.

“My guess,” she’d replied, “is deliberate forgetfulness to hide a rather embarrassing cock-up.”

He could appreciate that. “Deliberate Forgetfulness” could be the title of his life story.

For the hundredth time he let his gaze casually flick across the other members of the salvage team. They were all older than his thirty-two years, rejects from the corporate asteroid mining operations that no doubt brought them off-planet in the first place. A tough and jaded bunch.

Their ship, Pawn Takes Bishop, constituted a pretty typical salvage boat — a corporate discard deemed unfit for work in the Gefion asteroid fields.

Another crewman, Klaus, cleared his throat. “Why’s it up here, anyway?” He was looking at Caswell.

Angelina replied without turning her head. “What do you mean?”

“Up here. Above the Sun. There’s nothing around, so what were they doing?”

“Classified,” she replied with more than a little irony. She kept her gaze firmly on the display before her. “Ask the geek.”

Caswell offered an apologetic smile, not really looking at any of them. “I was never privy to that — don’t have the clearance, I’m afraid. But feel free to speculate. I’m curious myself.”

The crew shifted uncomfortably.

Now the captain glared at him. “At some point it would be nice if you earned the air you’re breathing, Dr. Nells.”

Caswell raised his hands in defense. “You wanted a subject matter expert, so here I am.”

“Tell me this, then: What are we going to find in there?”

“A black box,” Caswell said simply. Then he nodded toward the wreckage on the display. “If you’re lucky.”

• • • •

Pawn Takes Bishop docked with Venturi three hours later. Everything had to be done manually given the lack of even backup power on the other side, but once the rings were secure a tap linked the two crafts’ grids and some emergency lighting came on. Faint red light spilled in from the porthole. Iceberg studied the readouts. “Vacuum. Told ya.”

Expecting this, Angelina had made everyone suit up an hour ago, save for Iceberg and the mousy engineer Bridgette, who would remain at the Pawn’s controls.

To Caswell the suit felt like being wrapped in tape. The smart fabric allowed for a full range of movement, loosening just enough to let muscles flex, constricting again the instant they relaxed. It all added up to a sort of permanent state of evenly applied pressure, which his brain refused to translate as anything other than stiff-as-cardboard.

The round hatch swung inward and Caswell fell in line just behind Angelina. The big son of a bitch Klaus drifted inside without preamble, headlamp sweeping across a chamber lined on all sides with labeled storage lockers. Three other Pawn crew members followed behind Caswell, carrying the tools of their trade.

“IA6,” came a voice in his ear. Monique Pendleton, transmitting from Earth a good nine minutes away. “We’ve been studying the data from that scanner you’re carrying, and only six of the Venturi crew are accounted for. One is missing. It’s possible her transponder was damaged. Details inbound.” Seconds later a private message indicator blipped on the inside of his visor. “Once you’ve installed the tap, your next objective is accounting for this person.”

Caswell turned off his local transmission option and sent a reply. “Understood. If she’s here, I’ll find her.”

Monique’s message contained a brief dossier on a scientist named Alice Vale. He scanned it with practiced efficiency, absorbing the important details. The motion pic showed a thin woman with short, stylish brown hair. Her eyes, close together, were large and brimming with intelligence. She hadn’t smiled during the ID scan. Her gaze had a mixture of both intensity and distance that suggested someone who lived to multitask.

Caswell’s eyes flicked across the details as the portrait spun around. A tall woman at nearly 180 centimeters, and rail thin. She’d been twenty-eight years old at the time of the Venturi’s disappearance. Parents, deceased. No husband. No children. Born in Chicago, educated at Dartmouth, tested out early straight into a graduate program at Cambridge. Studied biology and cognitive science. Accepted into the ESA at twenty-six, joined the crew of Venturi just one year later. And then, a year into the mission, it had all ended.

“Sad,” he muttered. A promising scientist, lost in her prime.

The team continued forward to the inner airlock door, which lay ajar and showed signs of fire damage around the lip and on the surrounding wall. Debris floated about. Angelina swatted aside a clump of charred fabric and moved up to help Klaus pry the damaged door aside. Together they wrestled its bent shape until a gap wide enough to pass through had opened.

A junction waited within, each wall scorched black by the same explosion or impact that had blown open the airlock door. Compartments led off in all directions.

Angelina and Klaus stopped in the center, letting the rest of the salvage team catch up. Caswell moved aside and steadied himself in the junction, letting the last two in behind him.

“C-and-C is that way,” Caswell offered, pointing.

“He’s useful after all!” Angelina cried, mocking. She turned to face the team. “Okay, the geek is with me. Klaus, you, too. Douglas, check the landers. Harai, see if any of the reactor vessels are intact.”

“I thought you were just here for the black box?” Caswell asked.

“You don’t know shit about salvage, so just keep quiet unless we ask you something, okay? Okay.” She turned and drifted toward the command room. Klaus followed her. The other two turned and went in the opposite direction. Caswell soon found himself alone.

Exercise equipment adorned the surfaces of the room straight ahead. A treadmill. Some handles attached to pulleys embedded in the wall. A used water bulb floated lazily across his view. At the far end a hatch led to the medical bay. It appeared to be fully sealed. Looking at it triggered something in him: a sudden irrational unease, like a child staring down a basement stairwell into blackness. He shook the feeling away.

Satisfied the others were gone, Caswell floated to a blackened panel on the wall. From a pack on his midsection he removed an orange torque wrench, then used one finger to wipe away soot on the locking nuts. The magnetized wrench connected easily, and despite sitting out here for a dozen years, each bolt turned easily. He nudged the panel away from the wall and let it float next to his head.

“Captain?” one of the crew said. Douglas, it sounded like.

“Go ahead,” came Angelina’s reply.

“Lander zero-one is missing.”

Silence. Caswell listened. He marked his audio recording minus ten seconds, just in case.

“Missing as in ripped away in the explosion?”

“Uh. Not sure. Zero-two is still here, looks intact.”

“Copy that. Keep me posted.”

The radio went silent. Caswell marked the exchange as interesting and sent it off to Monique, then returned his focus to the section of wall he’d just exposed. Within, neatly bundled cables in a variety of colors ran in every direction. In the center, a grid of gold indentations gleamed under the light from his headlamp. From another pocket on his torso he produced a small dark green plastic box with ridged edges. He powered the box on and waited a few seconds for the tiny LED on it to wink from red to a flashing green. Caswell flipped the device around and pressed it against the gold grid within the box, then fetched the hovering panel.

He activated his private Archon channel. “Mo, the keg is tapped. You should be receiving data now. IA6, out.”

Around him, rows of white lights flickered on, so bright that his visor darkened to compensate. He switched back to the standard channel. “How’s it going in there, Captain?”

“Thought you were with us,” Angelina replied, her voice curt in his ear.

“Just, you know, soaking it in. Surreal to actually set foot in such a famous —”

“Get the hell up here, Doctor. We’re on a schedule.”

While she spoke he reinstalled the access panel. “Any . . . uh, any sign of the original crew?”

“Negative.”

“And the black box?”

“I’m staring at it right now. Which means I need you here, right now.”

“Sorry. On my way.”

His gaze went to the exercise compartment again, however, and that round hatch beyond adorned with medical signage. The sight tickled something in his mind. Memories just beyond reach.

A thought began to worm into his mind — the inevitable conclusion whenever something like this happened to him. Déjà vu, or an infuriatingly familiar face. His particular skill set, his augmentation, made all such phenomena candidates for something else entirely: the remnants of a reality forcibly removed.

He willed the thought away. Down that path lay madness. Ignorance, he reminded himself, was bliss.

Yet he couldn’t resist the pull. There was . . . something. Despite his better judgment he found himself floating in front of the round hatch marked MED BAY. He wheeled the lever to the open position and pulled. Something pushed against his suit. Air, rushing out. His visor fogged before sensors could compensate. Dry air hissed through fans in his helmet and then condensation retreated.

A monster rushed toward him, arms flung wide as if to grapple. Caswell’s heart lurched before his brain fully understood: a male corpse was moving on the current of air that had just been sucked from the room. Caswell shoved the hatch back just in time to feel the limp body flop against it and repel away.

With a deep breath he opened the door again, a few centimeters at a time.

Six bodies floated about within. They were remarkably well preserved, considering the room had still held air. Air, he realized, that would have been stagnant for twelve years. He bookmarked his image feed again and sent off the grim scene for Monique to review and, perhaps, relay on to Forensics.

None of the bodies looked like Alice Vale, so he slipped the hatch closed and sealed it again. If Monique needed to know cause of death he’d explore further, but for the time being he felt no desire to mingle with the dead. He fired off another report to Archon. “Found the six crew you mentioned. They’re all in the medical bay — no comments on the irony there, all right? I only glanced but given the room still held air, I’m going to guess sudden and very rapid acceleration did them in.” On a whim he added, “No sign of our missing seventh. Continuing my search.”

Caswell drifted into the C&C to find Angelina in the pilot’s chair, tapping away at a foldout computer. Klaus knelt beside an open panel at the far end, fiddling with some gear he’d hauled in.

The room had the basic size and shape of all mass-produced station compartments. Five meters on a side, fifteen long, studded with attach points to serve virtually any purpose.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” Klaus replied.

“Computers are up, huh?” he asked, more reproach in his voice than he’d intended.

Angelina’s fingers paused for the briefest instant. “Nothing in the contract about not accessing them.”

“If you say so. Find anything interesting?”

“Just —”

An urgent override from Monique clipped the captain’s response. “Agent IA6, this mission will continue under Integrity-Assured protocol. Sorry, Caswell, with the time delay there’s no chance to offer opt-in. This came from the very top.”

His pulse swelled to a steady war drum on his temples. Integrity-Assured protocol, or IA, meant nasty business lay ahead.

Monique went on. “Time critical, I’m afraid. I’m sending the remote command to enable your implant in exactly twenty seconds.”

Peter Caswell swore. Though he preferred his ritual, his luxury flat and comfortable bed, it wasn’t always possible. But he’d always at least had the choice. She’d always given him that much. Time to be relaxed. Opted in. Having fucking agreed. Caswell glanced about, feeling the clock tick away like a time bomb. He did the only thing he could think to do and slipped his free hand and both feet into the nearest stabilizer handles on the Venturi’s wall to which he already clung.

Ten seconds.

What was so damn important that they couldn’t allow twenty minutes for him to opt in? Of course, Monique had answered that: time critical. If he were to decline it would take weeks to get someone else out here. By then the crippled station would have fallen into the Sun. He told himself not to worry. Monique had opted in, obviously. For him to be activated meant she had been, too. They were paired. Agent and handler, experts in their respective roles, recruited and linked because their bodies happened to be the rare sort that wouldn’t reject the IA-class implant.

Caswell shut his eyes. He took two deep breaths and started to chant the lyric. He could do that much, at least. She couldn’t take that away.

This mental anchor had not been part of the training. He’d simply thought it wise to have something familiar on the tip of his tongue when he eventually made the mental leap back across the reversion gap. Sometime, in the next four days or so, he would forget everything that happened from here to that moment. He wondered where he’d be when the time came. How close could he get to this exact set of circumstances? Unlikely in the extreme. But he could do one thing.

Microphone in his suit safely off, he used the seconds left to recite the old song lyric over and over, aloud in case that would help. “Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the —”

At the base of his neck an artificial gland received the specially crafted trigger message sent by Monique from more than 160 million kilometers away. The gland flooded his brain with a biochemical marker.

He lost track of the song lyric, wincing as engineered chemicals sought out every last neuron like a creeping poison. A hot tingling sensation unfolded from somewhere in the back of his head, thorny pressure that started from the bottom of his skull and pushed up and out until his very scalp felt as if it were being prodded by a million tiny needles from the inside.

And then, quick as it had come on, the sensation subsided. Caswell fought to get his breathing under control and carefully opened his eyes. His vision swam, distorted by tears that would not fall away in the absence of gravity. He blinked rapidly to no avail and then gave up.

“I’m sorry to do that to you in the field, Peter.”

You’d better be. He desperately wanted to speak with her, to have a real conversation. He bit his lip instead and waited to hear what task he had to perform.

“Your new mission is still being designed, I’m afraid. The reasons will become clear. For now, your new goal is as follows. . . .”

Caswell swallowed, waiting for tears to dry and the pain in his head to abate. God, he missed the flat above Hyde Park. The ritual of it. “Never again, Mo.” He growled the words, made all the more bitter by the knowledge that he’d forget them. He’d forget all of this.

“First,” Monique Pendleton said in a flat, all-business tone that told him things had gotten very grim indeed, “you are to eliminate the crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop. Immediately and with extreme prejudice.”

Chapter 3

Agent Peter Caswell bobbed against the wall, flexing his free hand and staring at the form of Angelina Monroe, captain of the Pawn. She flicked her finger across the display in front of her, reading about what had happened here, no doubt. Her curiosity and greed, that had caused this. Her mission had been to recover the black box, nothing more.

Nothing more.

She’d done it to herself, really. Signed her own death warrant along with the rest of her crew.

This was why Archon had inserted him on this mission. In case these people learned too much. Peter Caswell steeled himself to the task at hand. The murder he’d now perform. How ever much it might seem like the first, he reminded himself of the true tally: 206.

He found little comfort in that. It was the fact that he would forget everything that served to wind his pulse back to something manageable.

There was a dark red case about the size of a deck of cards on his left arm. Caswell opened the lid. Inside, nestled in a bed of customcut gray foam, was a gleaming black tube. He coaxed it free, taking care not to send the weapon floating away. With one quick shake of his left arm the case snapped closed.

Caswell flipped the object around in his hands. A “vossen” gun: Vacuum-Optimized Smart Needler. He’d trained with one, months ago. If he’d ever used it in the field he had no idea.

He gripped it and looked up.

Angelina was staring at him, her lips moving, one hand raised in a “What the fuck is wrong with you?” gesture. He pointed toward his ear and gave a shrug. The woman rolled her eyes and turned back to her work. If she’d noticed the object in his hand, paid it any thought at all, she gave no indication. Probably thought it a flashlight or screwdriver.

Caswell floated until he was beside her and aimed the vossen’s business end at the glass of her face mask. Through the gland in his neck he communicated his intent to the weapon: a quick, quiet death that would leave zero mess.

One of the holes on the weapon puffed a tiny cloud of light gray smoke. Caswell caught the briefest hint of the missile’s flight. Tiny flashes of yellow as the microscopically small thrusters propelled the toothpick-size projectile through the vacuum.

It hit her helmet and bored inside.

Resin burped out the back end, sealing the hole. Angelina’s head snapped sideways. A puff of black sprayed across the inside of her visor, coating the surface from within. A blinded victim could hardly retaliate. Her body began to spasm.

Caswell listened on the open channel. Not even a yelp of surprise had come through because the needle had shorted the electronics in the helmet. Angelina bucked in her chair, clawed uselessly at her now-opaque mask. In seconds her panic and terror turned into a thrashing as the needle’s payload went to work on stopping her heart.

Finally she went still, her arms drifting out to either side.

He felt almost nothing for her. It wasn’t a lack of compassion, either. That realization struck him as most peculiar. Caswell fully recognized that he’d just taken a life. Someone with friends, perhaps a family. A past and a future. But despite recognizing all that, he found he simply couldn’t see this floating, limp body as that person anymore. It was just a corpse now, not something to be mourned. Any grief or regret for those slain would be something he’d deal with . . .

Later.

A chill coursed through him. This is why he was successful. He knew with total certainty as he stared at the body of Angelina Monroe that he’d feel remorse for this later. Or would, except his memory of this would be taken away, his conscience cleared.

Movement caught his eye. Across the room, Klaus still faced the compartment where the black box waited. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t noticed anything going on behind him. He’d just stretched his arms, still waiting.

Caswell drifted past the dead captain and plugged him, too. The big man took longer to die. He thrashed as she had, then suddenly kicked out from the wall and groped wildly in the emptiness for his assailant. Perhaps he’d heard of a vossen, or perhaps he’d just made assumptions. Either way, his fingers twitched and flailed for Caswell. But Caswell had moved to rest beside the black box. Klaus’s frantic motions eventually found the prone form of Angelina and he just managed to gather her in his arms before he, too, went still.

The embraced pair drifted free in the room, faces hidden behind ink-stained glass.

Caswell let out a breath. How can I feel nothing? Delayed mourning, was that really it? Really him?

Another theory presented itself. His implant might be shortcircuiting the emotional response automatically. It could do things like that, if he didn’t mind the fevers that would follow. Force him to focus, even fire his neurons faster, which made everything else seem to slow down. Maybe it could dampen whatever part of his brain felt compassion. He wanted to believe that. The alternative was too horrifying.

Monique had her reasons, he reminded himself again. This wasn’t in cold blood. These people, their captain at least, must have accessed highly sensitive information in the Venturi’s computer. She must have been about to transmit it to Earth when he’d plugged her. Monique had seen it coming. She’d employed him to prevent it. Maybe he’d just saved a million lives back on Earth. A fantasy, perhaps, but he had to believe it. Above all he trusted Monique, without reservation. This was just a job and he was the tool for it.

And, he thought, I seem to be pretty good at this.

Sliding into the rhythm of the task, he turned back toward the Pawn. He felt calm now, despite what his brain had been through only minutes earlier, despite the nasty business he’d just performed and the conclusions he’d drawn. He pushed back to the central junction, glanced at the Pawn — airlock still sealed — and drifted on toward the aft of the station.

The one called Harai rounded a corner ahead, directly in Caswell’s path. Caswell ignored the man’s puzzled glare. He floated straight to him and fired the needler at point-blank range.

Harai’s reaction was different. He all but ignored his sudden blindness and took a vicious swing at Caswell with his right arm. In zero-g the punch had little behind it, and served only to send them both careening off each other. Caswell flopped into the wall and whirled. His target hit the opposite wall, pushed hard with both legs, and came rocketing back. Midway across, his whole body spasmed, then again, more violently. Caswell uncoiled himself and moved aside, letting the now-limp body bounce off the surface next to him and drift.

That’s three, he thought. Three more.

He turned and stared straight into the wide, shocked eyes of Douglas. “What the fuck?” the man shouted. He had a toolbox in one hand and frantically groped through it with the other until he found what he wanted. A meaty, half-meter-long wrench.

“What’s going on?” someone asked. Iceberg, back in the Pawn. “Report.”

“That prick we brought on just killed Harai!” he shouted, swinging the wrench.

Caswell ducked under the metal bar. It rebounded off the wall, sending a jolt up Douglas’s arm. Caswell fired the vossen gun at the same moment. He missed, the tiny missile rocketing into the distance. Caswell fired again, but Douglas was spinning now, his momentum all wrong. The second needle slid into his suit just under the left armpit, burrowing through the Kevlar fabric to worm in under the collarbone.

Payload delivered so close to the heart, Douglas’s entire body jerked absolutely rigid. The man became a stick figure. His face contorted in absolute strain, eyes bulging outward. Blood burst from his nostrils and mouth as the man began to spasm uncontrollably.

“Iceberg,” Caswell said. “I don’t know what Douglas is talking about. He’s acting . . . strange. Bring a med kit.”

“Where’s Angelina?”

“Unknown. She came back to inspect the lander bays with him, and went silent. Klaus followed, same thing, so I came to see what was wrong.”

“I didn’t hear them discuss any of this.”

“Neither did I,” Caswell said.

A pause. “Then how do you know why the captain left C-and-C?”

“Can we talk about it later? Douglas is curled in a ball here hitting the sides of his helmet with his fists, and I think I can see one of the others down in the cargo bay, drifting limp. Harai maybe. Bring a stretcher while you’re at it.”

“Jesus,” Iceberg said. “Fuck. Okay. Bridgette, meet at the airlock.”

The waiflike engineer’s voice came through in a rasp. “You believe that guy over Doug? Have you ever known the float to get to him?”

Iceberg said, “No, that’s why you’re meeting me there. Bring —”

Caswell tuned out the rest. He floated back to the main junction.

A quick glance at the airlock door that led to the Pawn showed no one on the other side, yet. Good. He whirled and propelled himself to the eerily familiar MED BAY door and whirled it open, killing the lights via a panel beside it.

The Venturi’s mummified crew bobbed about inside. Caswell grabbed the collar of the nearest man’s suit and hauled him out. Corpse between him and the airlock door, Caswell braced his feet against the wall. He waited there, coiled, vossen gun in one hand and human shield in the other.

Motion at the airlock. Iceberg’s sky-blue tinted hair, then his beady eyes peering through the tiny window. If he saw Caswell or the corpse in the darkened room it didn’t slow his entrance.

Good, Caswell thought, and braced for the attack.

The airlock door began to move. Caswell pushed off hard with both feet, propelling the limp body before him. Halfway to the door he shoved it ahead. The body lurched forward, arms flung wide. The effort slowed Caswell’s own progress. As the gap widened he raised his needler and waited, drifting in behind his shield.

A blast of white fog hit the corpse at point-blank range. Fire extinguisher. It stalled the body and then pushed it backward, sending it cartwheeling. Caswell had streamlined himself to reduce his own target area and, somehow, managed to slide right past the flailing corpse. He flew past just as the extinguisher’s blast let up. The girl, Bridgette, held the device. She saw him an instant too late. The microscopic missile hit her face mask and instantly clouded it black from the inside. Her fingers squeezed on the extinguisher reflexively, sending another cone of white that arced across the tiny airlock. Unable to stop himself, Caswell barreled right into her as her body began the death throes. He caught a glimpse of Iceberg behind her. The man held a med kit in both hands, his eyes wide with terror.

Caswell plugged him from a meter away and floated lamely in the middle of the room until both bodies grew still.

His pulse raced. His whole body felt cool with sweat. He wanted to scream, “I’m a monster!” so loud that he’d hear it himself on the other end of this. But he did not scream. As he drifted between the dead and his pulse began to slow, Peter Caswell decided that he would mourn these people, just as soon as the job was done. Before Monique took the memory away. Did he always do this? Yes, he must. He had to believe that.

He let a full minute pass before he signaled on the Archon channel. “The Pawn’s crew is retired. God damn, this vossen gun is a nasty bit of kit, Mo. Advise on next steps. IA6, out.”

No handhold within reach, Caswell drifted for a while. He could do nothing but stare at his handiwork. “I’m a killer,” he muttered. “A heartless fucking killer.” For the length of the mission anyway. Then he’d go back to being a man merely trained to kill. The rookie.

He could hardly wait.

Finally a handhold came within reach. He secured himself to the wall and considered his situation. “Mo,” he said finally, “that missing lander. Might be that our missing crew member, Alice Vale, tried to flee this disaster all those years ago. I’m investigating.”

He left the dead to drift. Back inside the Venturi he weaved his way around bodies and debris and kept on toward the rear of the smashed vessel.

Inside he found a passage that bowed in from either side. Airlock doors faced one another at the center of the hourglass-shaped passage, one for each lander. He glanced through the porthole on the first and saw the white-blue ESA markings on the hull of the craft nestled within. Caswell spun to the opposite window.

The other bay was indeed empty.

“Right then,” he said. He bookmarked the video feed recorded by his helmet and filed the clip for priority upload home. “Confirmed, Monique. One of the landing craft is missing, and it’s too clean to have been ripped away in whatever calamity happened here. Nothing aft of this point save a debris cloud. Advise.”

Had Alice Vale taken the boat? It would have been loaded with some supplies and fuel, though certainly not enough to survive a dozen years in the black. But then she wouldn’t have needed to survive so long. Perhaps she’d flown it home. Sold the weapons research that had gone on here and was safely back on Earth, living under a false ident on an island somewhere. Sitting on a beach in Mexico, perhaps. Biting into a fish taco and watching the glitter of sunlight on jade waves.

More likely she’d simply been yanked out one of these holes when the station was damaged, and even now her body tumbled through space toward the Sun. As for the missing lander . . . well, Monique and whoever was feeding her the mission parameters would know what to do about it. He waited.

• • • •

“Well done, Caswell,” Monique sent after a lengthy delay.

Her next set of orders was even more surprising than the first, and frustratingly vague.

Preparation took several hours. As instructed, he left all the bodies in the C-and-C, moving them to one wall and fixing them in place with nylon straps to ensure they’d go down with the ship. “This station is a bloody mess, Monique,” he sent as he went about the grim business. A dozen bodies now rested in the doomed vessel. Six from the original crew, six fresh ones from the Pawn. The thirteenth, Alice Vale, probably drifted among the debris cloud that trailed Venturi toward the Sun.

The grim task complete, Caswell shifted focus to the Venturi’s black box. He moved the device into the salvage ship. Following Monique’s instructions he gathered all of the food and water he could find on the Pawn and moved it into the Venturi’s lone remaining lander. Once done, Caswell boarded the supply-filled landing boat and sealed himself inside. He sent Monique another update, then waited. The cockpit was cramped, every seat save his holding packages of food and water. His own gear and clothing lay safely tucked within one of the storage compartments.

The lander, guided by remote instruction from Earth, detached from the Venturi and drifted to the aft docking ring on the Pawn Takes Bishop. Caswell watched from his tiny porthole as the Pawn then detached itself from the doomed research vessel.

This little ballet of spacecraft continued as the Pawn, with Caswell’s lander attached, floated out to a safe distance and then powered up its engines. The thrust pushed him back into his chair and kept him pinned there as the salvage craft served as booster for the comparably small lander, powering the tiny craft onto its new trajectory. After eight hours of one-g burn the Pawn unceremoniously let him go. She fell away and, a few minutes later, turned to begin a long spiraling trek to Earth, empty of crew but carrying one tiny, and very valuable, black box.

In a few days Angelina and her salvage team would burn up with the Venturi. Weeks later the Pawn would arrive back at Earth. Monique had something else in mind for Caswell and his tiny lander, something Archon wanted both of them to forget about in due course.

The operative sat back. He studied the three-dimensional map before him as lander zipped along. Thanks to the Pawn’s boost he now drifted away from the Sun at a touch over 150 kilometers per second. A dotted arc marked his trajectory, stable now after eight hours of growth as the boat had gained velocity. To his surprise this path did not arc and spiral out toward Earth, like the faint blue line that marked the Pawn, but instead implied a journey to an empty swath of nothingness directly above the Sun.

“You’re on a course to intercept the missing lander, where you will ascertain the fate of Alice Vale. This is all I can tell you for the moment.”

He sent back, “Why not take the Pawn?” and waited twenty minutes for the reply.

“You’ll find out,” his handler said vaguely.

Caswell ate fried rice from a self-heating package, then napped for a few hours. When he woke another thought occurred to him. When Monique had ordered him to eliminate the Pawn’s crew she’d neglected to give him the regulation speech about thought-access orders. “What did you mean, ‘that’s all I can tell you for now’? We’re under IA already, so what the hell’s this about, Mo?”

Nine minutes later she replied. “All will become clear in due course, Peter. Trust me. This will be the most interesting mission you’ll ever forget. I guarantee it.”

• • • •

To pass the time he played the craft’s computer in games of Go, chess, and several modern games that relied on stealth and patience. Between matches he studied Alice Vale’s dossier, but it had so little information he’d memorized it after only a few hours.

On a whim he used her picture to represent the computer opponent in his games, though after a particularly nasty round of Knife and Coin he decided against this. No need to paint her as an adversary. She’d simply survived. Escaped that doomed station only to realize too late that the tiny landing boat had little on board in the way of fuel or supplies. Granted she’d flown silently. A curious detail, but one that could be the result of a simple equipment malfunction.

He studied her face one last time. She’d be forty now if she’d lived. “How far did you get, young lady? How many weeks or months did you last out here?”

The picture did not reply, of course. Caswell sighed. How many hours had passed for her inside a ship just like this before she’d regretted not simply staying with her crew? They would have been friends. Like family, even. And they’d died a quick death, from the look of it. Preferable, surely, to starving out here in the chilly void. Yet she’d fled, and transmitted not a single word about any of it back home. This fact he found most odd.

With a tap of his finger her image vanished. He played six more rounds of Knife and Coin before dining on a packet of vegetable korma — spicy and surprisingly good. Then he slept. The faces of those he’d killed haunted his dreams.

He woke eager to forget.

© 2015 by Jason M. Hough.

Excerpted from Zero World by Jason M. Hough.

Published by permission of the author and Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason M. Hough is the New York Times bestselling author of the Dire Earth Cycle: The Darwin Elevator, The Exodus Towers, and The Plague Forge, as well as the novella The Dire Earth. Hough was born in Illinois but grew up on the mean streets of suburban San Diego, California. In 1978, when he was six, his parents took him to see Star Wars, and so began a lifelong love of sci-fi and all things geek. He later worked for a decade in the videogame industry as a 3D artist and game designer. Today he lives in Seattle with his wife and two young sons. When not writing, Hough enjoys building LEGO spaceships with his boys and other similarly grown-up pursuits.

NOVEL EXCERPT: Finches of Mars (Open Road Media)

Brian W. Aldiss | 4,685 words

Chapter 3
MANGALIAN’S REMARK

To be on Mars . . .

This almost evolutionary step owes its existence to a small group of learned and wise men and women. Working at the end of the previous century, and spurred on to begin with by the provocation of the great Herbert Amin Saud Mangalian, the universities of the cultivated world linked themselves together under a charter which in essence represented a great company of the wise, the UU (for United Universities). The despatch of the two hydrologists to our nearby planet was the first UU move.

Mangalian spent a profligate youth on San Salvador, the island off Cuba, fathering several children on several women. The edict ‘Go forth and multiply’ was his inspiration. Only when he met and married Beth Gul — both taking delight in this antiquated ceremony — did he reform, encouraged by her loving but disputatious nature. For a while he and Beth severed their connections with others. They read and studied; they led a rapt hermit’s life.

Together, the two of them wrote a book from which great consequences sprang. It was entitled The Unsteady State or, Starting Again from Scratch. As was the fashion, this volume contained moving video and screamer shots married into the text. It argued that humanity on Earth was doomed, and that the only solution was to send our best away, where they could strive — on Mars and beyond — to achieve true civilization. It was sensationalist, but persuasive.

The declaration alarmed many in the West and infuriated many more in the Middle-East, as is generally the way when truth is plainly stated. It brought Mangalian to public attention.

He was an attractive young fellow, tall, sinewy, with a mop of jet black hair — and a certain gift of the gab.

• • • •

It was only after his remark, ‘Countless lungs, countless penises, all working away! We shall run out of oxygen before we run out of semen!’ that Mangalian’s name became much more widely known, and his book more attentively read. ‘Semen is always trendy,’ he told an interviewer, by way of explanation.

‘A handsome fellow’ was how many people expressed in their various languages admiration and envy of Mangalian. Using his book as both inspiration and guide, several intellectuals made tentative efforts to link universities as the first step towards civilization elsewhere. There was no doubt that Mangalian was a vital advocate for a new association — the UU. While there were many who enthused over the idea of the UU, almost as many — in the main those living in slums, tents and sink estates — raged against its exclusivity.

So Mangalian, a youth with no university degree, became head, figurehead, of the newly formed UU. He was aware that any sunshine of global attention had its rapid sunset. Invited to England, he attracted representatives from the three leading universities, to shower them with challenges to unite.

‘All know you to be a footballing nation, but Q.P.R. and Q.E.D. should not be adversarial. A ball in the net is great — so is the netting of new facts.’ He was being facile, but his argument scored a goal. The first three universities raised the purple and blue flag of the UU.

But a left wing politician remarked, ‘So, the words come from Oxford, but the cash comes from China . . .’ It was certainly true, although not widely admitted, that NASA projects were nowadays kept afloat on Beijing currency — it was unlikely to be little different with the UU.

Under the goading of the young impresario Mangalian, many universities agreed to join the first three, to create a nation-like body of new learning, a corpus aloof from the weltering struggles of an underfed, under-educated and unreasoning range of random elements: the sick, the insane, the suicide-bombers and their like. Mangalian disliked this division. It was then he spoke for the colonisation of Mars. MARS, he said, stood for ‘MANKIND ACHIEVING (a) RENEWED SOCIETY.’ Some laughed, some jeered. But the movers at last moved.

Even before all the various universities had finished signing on their various dotted United lines, an exploration duo was sent out to inspect Martian terrain. The terrain had been photographed previously, but trodden by a human’s boot — never.

Operation Horizon consisted of two men and a robotruck. Modest though this expedition was, the future of an entire enterprise depended on it. If no watercourses were detected, then the great UU initiative was sunk as surely as the Titanic; if water was detected, and in sufficient quantities, then the project would proceed. Everything depended on two skilled hydrologists and a new-fangled robotruck, designed especially for the task.

The truck could be spoken to by screamer from a kilometre’s distance. It was loaded with equipment. It also gave two men shelter in the chill sleep hours and enabled them to refill their oxygen tanks.

While electronics experts and eager young engineers worked on the truck, various hydrology experts were being interviewed. One of the men given the okay was the experienced Robert Prestwick, fifty-six years of age, and the other was Henry Simpson, sixty-one years old, famous for his design of the dome over Luna. He wasn’t just a skilled hydrologist. Prestwick was a heavily built, blue jowled man. Simpson was of slighter build, and a head shorter than his friend. The robotruck was new, as stated.

The hydrologists had known each other on and off for something like thirty years, having first met at Paranal Observatory in Chile, which had been temporarily beset by flood problems. Now they joked, ‘So they send us to a planet believed to be without water . . .’

• • • •

It seemed to be that way at first. The two men had begun by surveying the great central feature of the Martian globe, the Valles Marinaris, a gash in the planet a mile deep, stretching for almost two thousand miles. Howling winds blowing along the rift from east to west carried dust storms with them. The gales blew along its uninviting length, persuading the men to choose a more promising area to the north. The robotruck took them to the Tharsis Shield — at the north of which stood the grand old extinct volcano, Olympus Mons, once believed to be the home of gods. If their exploration was successful, no one believing in God was to be allowed on Mars.

Henry Simpson grumbled at the dimness of the light. ‘It’s like 4:30 of a December afternoon back home. Midnight, in other words.’

‘Don’t complain,’ said Prestwick, with a chuckle. ‘At least God has given us this spare planet for gainful employment . . . We’re sniffing water!’ He pointed to the screen, his mood changed entirely. The robotruck was moving slowly; a flickering vein of green showed on its screen. They halted, getting a depth check.

‘Nine point four feet below surface.’

Prestwick wondered to himself what it would be like to have to live here. He’d been to some bleak places back home. Here, there was nothing but bleakness, water or no water . . .

Simpson came and stared over his comrade’s shoulder at the screen.

‘Okay! Good! We need something nearer surface, but without being frozen solid.’

On the sweep again, they watched green delta-like traces close into a single strip. It then become faint and vanished. Simpson scratched his head.

‘We’ve struck an area.’ He spoke surprisingly calmly.

Stopping the machine, Prestwick asked, ‘Retrace?’ Both men had reacquired their usual poise.

‘Hang on. There’s still something . . .’ Simpson had a dedeaf to his forehead. Faintly came an intermittent boom and a faint low plop, such as a leaky tap might make, dripping into a puddle. The noises faded away and then returned, the tap noise slightly louder now.

‘Something’s going on. Can only be water.’ Simpson shivered. The sound was not a friendly one. ‘Couldn’t be horse piss,’ he added.

Prestwick by now had a dedeaf to his forehead too. He pulled a face at his partner. Both were well aware they were isolated on an unfriendly planet and this discovery would extend their stay. It was a disappointment — another week finding nothing and they would have been on the way back home. In time for Christmas. However, it was a well-paid stretch of employment.

‘Go on a bit,’ Simpson told the truck. ‘Slowly, okay?’

They growled onwards, watching the screen. Suddenly the green strip was back on screen. It fattened. A thin green vein ran off from it, disappearing at the side of the screen. The sound too had changed; the dedeafs brought a noise as of someone humming tunelessly in a deep voice.

The strip widened, becoming marrow-shaped.

‘Depth down to surface?’ Simpson asked.

‘Nineteen point nine to surface,’ reported the truck.

He sighed. ‘And to bottom?’

‘Twenty-eight . . . correction . . . twenty-nine to bottom.’

The two men exchanged glances.

‘Small reservoir? Not bad.’

‘Better mark it. We can map the extent later.’

They climbed out and stood there on the lee side of the truck until the truck extruded a coloured peg containing internal figures which could be read by any other truck, should such a thing ever come this way.

It was a melancholy thought. The expedition was no more than that. Nothing might ever come this way again. Simpson shuddered inside his uniform.

The hydrologists laid a track. When a map was drawn up, a spider-like effect was apparent, with small streams leading off a reservoir of considerable size. The men were neither pleased nor displeased. Instead, they decided to take a rest.

‘We’re not as young as we were — even you,’ said Prestwick.

‘You’re kidding,’ said Simpson.

It was a struggle to climb into the small bunk beds. They slept in their clothes — breathing masks, boots and all. Simpson went outside, peering over the roof of the truck. Mars was like an old black-and-white illustration, such as one saw in the bygone newspapers of the early Twentieth Century. A few shapes, mysterious and malign, stood here and there — emblems of a cosmic disorder. Some distance ahead of Simpson stood his wife, Katie, motionless.

Simpson called to her, but sound did not carry. As he moved towards her, his boots grew heavier. He thought some white thing drifted above him, but could not raise his head to look.

‘My God, it’s lovely here!’ — he had meant to say ‘lonely’ rather than ‘lovely’. ‘It’s the graveddy,’ he told himself. ‘Makes the lippers frabby.’

Olympus Mons lay somewhere ahead of him. Like a tit. Katie’s tit.

‘Katie!’ he called. Defying the laws of perspective, she became smaller as he approached. Her head was pointed. She had no face. She wore a trailing frock. He broke into a run. ‘Wait! Wait!’

She did not move. She dripped.

Katie was simply an icy pinnacle. A rocky spike adorned with a garment of multiple frosts. A thing to be hated rather than loved.

‘Oh, don’t do this,’ Simpson begged.

He looked round in despair. The world was empty. High above, a tiny distant spark moved.

‘You must be Swift . . . Named by Jonathan Deimos.’ He spoke in a whisper. He had enlisted for this venture to escape his loneliness after his wife’s death. But here it was echoing with loneliness: a whole planet full of it . . .

He found himself looking about, eyes half closed, dreading to see something, nothing. His wife would never visit Mars. This was a place of which God had never heard. So it had remained vacant and unwanted. Up For Sale. He fell to his knees.

It was impossible to say how greatly his way of life had changed since Katie had died. He lay in a kind of paralysis. Absurd to say he did not care about Katie; absurd not to say how much more . . . interesting . . . life had become.

Suppose it had been Katie just now and he who was dying. Dying in the snow . . .

Prestwick was leaning over him. He asked, ‘You all right, mate?’

Simpson returned to consciousness as if from the depths of an ocean. ‘What a dream! What a hellish place Mars is! Why should anyone want to come and live here? It’s like a fucking cemetery.’

Prestwick remarked on the noise Simpson had been making, and advised him to take another sleeping pill, before changing the subject. ‘Do you remember when astronomers thought there was a major planet out beyond Pluto? Then they said it didn’t exist, but instead there was a planet they called Eris. They’ll be trying to get to Eris next. It’s beyond the Kuiper Belt.’

Simpson made nothing of this, his mind being still filled with the sludge of his dream. ‘Jesus, I could do with a drink. The bastards might have granted us a bottle of rum.’

‘Ah, but rum costs. The bastards didn’t send us here to drink.’

‘Sodding teetotallers, that’s what . . .’

Silence fell between them until Prestwick pressed a button on the robotruck. ‘Get us two coffees, will you?’

‘Coming up.’

When Prestwick spoke again, he sounded rather tentative. ‘They are certainly paying us well enough for this job. I’m still paying off putting my two boys through college. But there have always been aspects of this job I hate.

‘For instance, if this UU project goes through, religion on the planet will be banned. Anyone getting here will have to be atheists.’

‘They can give the place to the devil for all I care.’

Prestwick hunched himself up in his bunk. ‘No, look, I want to talk seriously. We’ve got on okay. Now I’m a bit older, I start to try to think more deeply. Needs, regrets, desires . . . The way the impression section of your brain works. As a youngster, I was always too busy getting laid. Remember when we first met in Chile? I picked up — or I was picked up by — a woman who called herself Carmen. It was intended to be a one-night stand, but somehow we got a liking for each other. It was odd. Suddenly from impersonal to personal. She had a nice laugh.’ He was thinking, No one as yet has ever laughed on Mars . . .

‘Carmen! I’d do anything for a laugh in those days. I caught a rickety old coach out to her place. She held my hand with her rough hand. My hand so smooth — two worlds meeting — I felt a bit ashamed. Anything foreign excited me. I always had a hard on.

‘Carmen lived in a little village outside Santiago. She’d come into the city pro tem because she heard there were foreigners visiting and she thought that a bit of whoring could raise some necessary cash. So it did. But her place . . . She was dog poor, poor darling. She lived in one room and next door was a sort of lean to — a stall with a corrugated iron roof where she kept a little cart and a donkey on a tether.’

‘You and your memories!’ Simpson scoffed. ‘At least it’s better than you moaning about the constipation, and your sodding painful testicles!’

‘I can’t tell you how excited I was to be there with her. This was the real world — even to the extent that I got a mild dose of the clap off her. We slept on cushions. She had had a bloke, but he had left her directly after the baby was born. Her ma looked after the kiddie when Carmen was away. And she fed the donkey. Her old mum knew what bastards men could be.

‘Carmen took it all in her stride. Massive good nature. Heavy but neat little tits with stretch marks. She expected men to be shits who would leave their women to make out and bring up the kids. She worked hard as a carrier with her little donkey cart . . . Oh, sorry, Henry, I’ve got carried away, going on like this. It was just such a — oh, a rich experience.’

‘I wonder what percentage of women live more or less as Carmen did. There are plenty worse places than Santiago,’ said Simpson.

‘The way she looked at you when you woke in the morning. Eyes like a lioness . . . Christ, I should stop this. I’m going on for sixty — not a kid any more. But some women you never forget.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Simpson, yawning. ‘I had rather a posh hotel tart when we were in Santiago. Delicious in bed, but she meant nothing to me. Warm enough inside but cold outside.’

The coffee arrived in two small sealed plastic cups.

• • • •

‘The point I’m getting at,’ said Prestwick, as he sipped the flavourless liquid, ‘is that Carmen knew nothing. She knew nothing of all this vast heap of cleverness we know all too well. The whole urban thing. Yet she knew so much we don’t know. When there would be an hour’s electricity, where the river water ran pure, how the old donkey was feeling today, how you mended an axle, how to shit and piss without giving offence, how to have a little fire without burning the fucking place down, how to bake . . . oh, a thousand things. All to do with survival. How to keep in with the priest. A priest whom I met, by the way. Priests are always ill-spoken of, but this priest was a real holy man. He’d help if Carmen had a spot of trouble with the donkey’s hooves, for instance.

‘If Carmen or her ma complained, he’d say, “Never mind, Jesus got himself crucified for less . . .”

‘I had a chance to talk with this priest. His name was Festa, or so I seem to remember. You see, I still recall it after all these years. He said that men were fools. They did not respect women, the givers of life. He said there were some women who had special qualities. He named Carmen as an example. He said, there was a comfort — that was his word — a comfort when you thought about her. Not sexual attraction, because as a priest he should not experience sexual attraction. But even when she was away, still that feeling of comfort.

‘Comfort. We were drinking the local wine. He said, this priest said, without thinking, that sometimes he woke in the night and burned with desire for Carmen. I was sleeping with her. I knew well what the poor fellow meant . . .’

Prestwick paused.

‘But after all, so many women . . .’ He let the sentence trail away into the godless night. ‘I felt we’d got it wrong — the West. I mean, got it wrong.’ He lapsed into silence.

‘I make it sound as if I lived in that village for years. I was only there for two days. I didn’t like the rats. We’ve gotten so squeamish. But somehow Carmen — really the whole place, I guess — it started working on my mind.’

Simpson said, simply, ‘I envy you.’

‘Carmen . . .’ Silence fell between them, except for the sipping noises.

‘I see what you mean,’ said Simpson eventually. ‘Yes. The place sounds like a film set. The Simple Life. But what if you get ill? Or your kids? And her ex — miserable slob. Did she get the clap attended to?’

‘I couldn’t live there. Nor could you, I imagine. I got my dose cleared up back home.’

Simpson was reluctant to enter into further conversation. ‘Let’s switch the recorder off, shall we?’ he suggested, but hesitated as Prestwick continued, undeterred.

‘I couldn’t — we couldn’t live in Chile. Ghastly place, ghastly politics, to be honest. We owe a whole heap to the Magna Carta. But just think of the world we do live in. We’re inculcated, if that’s the word I want. Inculpated? Our minds — well, look, as far as we know our brains were jerry-built over the ages from brains of — crikey! — brains of sea monsters — sea monsters and then, later, a form of ape. And for all endeavours — ’

Simpson groaned. ‘Stop it right there, Bob. I’m sick of being told we’ve all come down from the trees. We are no longer apes and there’s the difference. Did you ever meet an ape who was a hydrologist? A president of a bank, okay, but not a hydrologist.’

‘No, no, I wasn’t off on that tack, mate. I was going to say that, thanks to Charles Darwin and others, we have been released from the Old Testament. I rejoice in that. We came from simple villagers, believing Earth was the centre of the universe. The prospects of evolution are far more thrilling than almost any other theory ever dreamed up . . .

‘But . . . we seem still to need faith. A faith. Any faith. And I suspect our brains — urh! the brains of modern man — are stacked full of an erroneous faith. Office bumf . . . Faith in information. Information about everything, anything. Its birthday may have been the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, way back when.

‘Since about then, we have craved to know . . . quantum theory, mass, energy, time, space, neurons, protons, DNA, cosmology, geology, the credit card, the simple screamer. All bits of information sprawling about our desks. These constitute our faith. God the Father, God the Son, etc., have been banished in favour of — what, exactly? Well, the Economy, the godless, thankless Economy . . .

‘And like the faithful anywhere, any time, we don’t realise how much it all costs to the human spirit.

‘Carmen — a Catholic, she was paying with the clap. So are we, mental clap, exile on Mars . . .’

‘You’re ranting,’ Simpson wanted to say, but refrained.

Henry Simpson was unaccustomed to discussions of this kind. It was true that after the death of his wife he had gone less frequently to the golf club and more often to an art club, where all kinds of matters were discussed, but he was still reluctant to enter into argument with Prestwick. He said, in a way that seemed feeble even to himself, ‘But we have so many advantages. I was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, but it was cured. We’ve put the past behind us for present advantages, surely . . .’

‘You don’t like talking about the past, just as you don’t like the thought of being descended from apes?’

Simpson was beginning to feel strained. He spoke with some anger. ‘I read novels of the present day. I doubt if I’d read a novel of the Tenth Century, even if there were such a thing.’

Prestwick produced a paperback of an old-fashioned kind and pressed his light to burn brighter.

‘Henry, would you mind if I read you a bit of something? It’s a life of a woman of the Twelfth Century, written later, after her death. I brought it with me although I’ve read it a couple of times before. It fascinates me because the lives it depicts are so different from ours of today, and yet both different and similar. It’s the life of a woman who became known as Christina of Markyate.’

‘I may fall asleep,’ Simpson warned.

‘Don’t worry. I shall kick you if you do. This young lady who became known as Christina lived her life as a virgin. Different from today, different from my Carmen. Anyhow, that’s what she did, what she was determined to do. She became a “Bride of Christ”. Not that he ever seemed to take a blind bit of notice of her.

‘She was a bright girl, her parents were as difficult as could be, in quite a modern way. So this modest and deeply religious girl became betrothed to one Beorhtred. She had been tricked and openly swore she would not be defiled by Beorhtred’s carnal embraces. Not likely today!

‘Her father drags her before the Prior, who asks, “Why should you bring this dishonour to your parents?”‘

Simpson looked out into the Martian darkness, where stars burned, and kept silent.

‘Christina’s answers are splendid; she says to the Prior, “You who are supposed to excel in the knowledge of scripture, must judge how wicked a thing this would be, should my parents enter me into a marriage I never wanted, and make me unfaithful to Christ, He who knows of the vow I had made in my childhood.”‘

Stifling a yawn, Simpson said, ‘She may speak well, as you say, but those were lives lived on false premises. All very well for the Twelfth Century, not now.’

‘What I’m trying to argue is that, yes, the premises were false, but no less false are the premises of today. Shall I continue?’ Prestwick tweaked a page.

‘Her parents, as the book says, “did not know how to see beyond worldly possessions”. That has a contemporary ring about it, wouldn’t you say? But at every instant, despite the cruelty of her parents, she remained, as she always said, a “Bride of Christ”. A virgin, in fact.’

‘Nowadays, she would have treatment for frigidity,’ said Simpson, with a grin. ‘Jesus, it’s uncomfortable here. You can’t even scratch your arse on this bunk.’

‘Yes, and these days her parents would be judged guilty of violence against their daughter. But the daughter would nevertheless be harmed. We read of such cases in the screamers every day.’

‘Well, cut it short. What happened then?’

‘Bad bishops have never been a novelty. With the assistance of one of them, Beorhtred gained power over her. He jeered at Christina in his hour of triumph. She asked him a question. “Tell me, Beorhtred, and may God have mercy on you, if another were to come and take me away from you and marry me, what would you do?” To which he replied in brutish fashion, “I wouldn’t put up with it for a moment as long as I lived. I would kill him with my own hands if there were no other way of keeping you.”

‘So she replies — I love this — she replies, “Beware then of wanting to take to yourself a Bride of Christ, lest in His anger He slay you.”‘

Simpson gave a laugh. ‘She was quick-witted at least. But “Bride of Christ” . . .? Who’d believe that today?’

Prestwick answered sadly, ‘No one would. Today most teenage girls in the West have lost their virginity by the age of fifteen and think well of themselves for having done so.’

‘So I suppose your Christina went to live in a nunnery . . .’

‘Where else would she have gone for safety in those days? Or now?’

Silence fell between the two men. Then Simpson said. ‘At least we treat women better now.’

He felt he had scored a point there.

• • • •

Operation Horizon delivered a positive report to the executive council of the United Universities. Subterranean channels had been charted, and a reservoir containing plentiful H2O of unknown quality. A map of the area on the Tharsis Shield accompanied their report, with waterways depicted like blue veins.

It was the verdict of the two hydrologists making the report that this area would be a suitable site for the settlement to be established, at least as far as water supply was concerned.

This report provided the necessary impetus for the development of this great and unprecedented enterprise — the colonisation of Mars.

A surveyor by name Moses Barrin was immediately hired to draw up sites for proposed Martian settlements known as towers. His instructions were to demarcate a site where six small habitations could be established. He used maps created from data from both Operation Horizon and even the now ancient NASA vehicle Curiosity. Barrin was to be among the first humans sent to colonize Mars.

• • • •

The Message, newspaper of the Vatican, warned of the moral dangers of venturing onto a planet where Jesus Christ had never trod.

Several screamers showed cartoons of Jesus wandering alone, asking, ‘Where’s someone to save?’

© 2015 by Brian W. Aldiss.

Excerpted from Finches of Mars by Brian W. Aldiss.

Published by permission of Open Road Media.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian W. Aldiss was born in Norfolk, England, in 1925. Over a long and distinguished writing career, he has published award-winning science fiction (two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award); bestselling popular fiction, including the three-volume Horatio Stubbs saga and the four-volume the Squire Quartet; experimental fiction such as Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head; and many other iconic and pioneering works, including the Helliconia Trilogy. He has edited many successful anthologies and has published groundbreaking nonfiction, including a magisterial history of science fiction (Billion Year Spree, later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree). Among his many short stories, perhaps the most famous is “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick and produced and directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Interview: Kazuo Ishiguro

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 8,800 words

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author and winner of the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day (1989), which was later adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. He has also published the dystopian science fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005), which was adapted by screenwriter Alex Garland into a film starring Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield. He has recently published The Buried Giant, a fantasy novel set in a semi-historical Britain ruled by King Arthur.

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 interview or other episodes.

Your new book is called The Buried Giant. So how did the idea for this book first come about?

I’d have to go a long, long way back for that. I can remember telling an audience back in 2001 about a book I was working on, which was very like this one. I couldn’t really figure out the setting — even the genre — until much later. But I knew for a long time I wanted to write a story about a society that was suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. Not dementia or anything like that, or Alzheimer’s — some kind of very selective amnesia so that whenever anyone tried to remember things around a certain area, a certain topic, everyone would blank out. I was playing around with possible settings, possible locations to play out this idea for a number of years. What lay behind that was that I wanted to ask this question: How does a society, how does a nation, decide when it’s better to remember certain things from its recent past, and when is it better for that nation, maybe, to keep certain memories buried — for the sake of keeping the society stable, for the sake of avoiding another cycle of violence or disintegration of that society altogether? For a long time, I just couldn’t get a story that would actually take me into that situation.

And so you did eventually settle on the Dark Ages in Britain, right? Did you do historical research? Just talk about coming up with that, developing that as a setting.

Before I actually chose that setting, I toyed with the idea of using what you might call [a] science fiction setting, as I had done in my previous novel Never Let Me Go. It’s not difficult to think of some situation, if you come up with a high-tech, high-concept idea of why a mass of people in the community might be having their memories controlled. It’s easier to think of a solution to that problem, a writer’s problem, if you come up with some sort of a high-tech reason. So I was playing around with that for a while, but there was something about that environment that just didn’t feel right for this particular story. And it occurred to me: I could actually go right back into some kind of fable-like universe instead, where instead of some SF-ish or high-tech reason for the amnesia, I could fall back on these ancient tropes: a kind of magic or a spell of some sort. So I thought: “Wouldn’t it be good to go right back into some kind of ancient Britain where a mist has descended on the land, and the people there suffer from these memory lapses because of this mist?”

And that visually and aesthetically appealed to me much more. I wanted these bleak moors, these huddled little villages. I could see the protagonist plodding on across this very unfriendly landscape that maybe contained supernatural forces as well as more conventional hostile dangers. And the actual trigger point for that, the thing that really opened up something in my imagination about that particular landscape where I could set the story, was that I was reading an old English poem called “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” It’s a poem I’ve read a number of times over the years in different translations. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it; it’s a fun poem. It’s a story poem, and you don’t need to know the story, but it basically takes place in two big castles. But there’s a tiny little bridge passage when the hero, the young Sir Gawain, rides from one castle to the other across an ancient Britain. And it’s only a stanza or so, but there’s a little description of what a terrible place Britain was back in those days. And the anonymous poet says, “There were no inns or anything like that for him to stay at, he had to cling onto rocks to sleep in the driving rain.” Which kind of puzzled me; I don’t know why he has to sleep on rocks rather than under a tree. But anyway, that’s what it says, and then the bit that really caught my imagination: It says that, “. . . often he’ll be chased down to villages by wolves or wild boar, or by panting ogres.” And the “panting ogres” are never mentioned again, they’re just part of the landscape, like unfriendly bulls or something. And then he reaches the castle and the story continues, but it was literally a few lines that described some imaginary ancient Britain that really caught my imagination. I thought, “I would like to put my story down there.”

You asked if I know the story of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually read the poem, but as a child, I had a picture book of that story. It was done in the style of an illuminated manuscript, and I just read that over and over and over again, so I know the story, at least, very well, and I love it.

It’s a great, fun story, but most of it has nothing to do with my novel! You’ve probably forgotten this; maybe this little description of the land he crosses wasn’t even there in your picture book. The story’s great, but what I took out of it was that little glimpse of the land he crosses.

I’ve actually heard you say, though, that in general, you’re not particularly fond of Arthurian stories. I was curious: What is it about the Arthurian stories in general that you’re not such a big fan of?

I may become a big fan of them, but I haven’t really read much. I’m not particularly drawn to the story about the Round Table, or the hunt for the Holy Grail, or the love story between Guinevere and Lancelot. I’ve come across these things like everybody else has, but it hasn’t had a special allure for me.

The Arthur I was interested in was a quasi-historical figure. I read a lot of stuff about a real historical figure upon which possibly the Arthur legend was based, and so I became fascinated by this period in British history that is a complete blank. There’s a period about which no historian seems to be able to make a confident statement, and that’s the period between 410 AD, when the Romans leave Britain because their empire is crumbling, and they leave behind a disintegrating society because the whole civil structure disappears when the reigning Romans go; to the time when the Anglo-Saxons basically conquer the land and start to turn Britain into what then becomes England, around 490 AD.

So there’s something like an eighty-year period about which very little is known because all records disappeared in the post-Roman era. But it’s thought it was a time of skirmishes and civil war. Now, a lot of people think King Arthur may well have been based on a real military leader who led a lot of the British resistance to the invading Anglo-Saxons, and at some point, it’s thought — this is all conjecture, I guess — that this military leader won some kind of huge victory which at least maintained some kind of uneasy peace between these two tribes for a generation or two. So that was a situation that I wanted. That’s what I was looking for. And so I thought, “Okay, I’ll call this guy Arthur,” because I could then make use of a lot of the literary reverberations that come off that. But it’s that Arthur I was interested in.

Now, this Arthur is long dead by the time my story starts, but the enforced peace that he instituted is just about holding still, between two factions that have learned to coexist — they’re kind of friendly, they’re intermingling, but their coexistence depends on them not remembering what happened a generation back, because some awful atrocities were committed in order to win this peace.

I’ll say in addition to all of that, because we’ve just been talking about remembering and forgetting at the societal level here, at the forefront of the book, there’s a love story, and it is about the same question — when is it better to remember, when is it better to forget? — that’s applied to a marriage. Very much the same issues exist for a couple, like the couple at the center of my book. They’ve been married for a long time; they’ve lost a lot of their precious shared memories. They’re now worried that their love might not survive the loss of these memories. If they’ve lost all these memories of the years that they spent together, the happy memories, maybe there’s nothing to sustain their love. This is their concern at the beginning. So they set off to try and find their lost memories. But as they go on, the fear comes into their lives that all the bad memories will come back with the good ones, and would their love survive the resurrection of those bad memories? On the other hand, if they keep these bad memories just buried, does that mean their love is based on something false, a false premise? Is it just an illusion?

You mentioned that they’re traveling across this landscape inhabited by ogres and dragons and monsters like that. I’m just curious: Were you drawing on any particular folkloric tradition or literary tradition for those kinds of monsters? I noticed that you had studied with Angela Carter, who’s known for writing these dark fairy tale stories. I just wondered: What sort of literary influences did you have for the monsters in this story?

She was my tutor and mentor; she was much more than just my tutor at university when I was doing a writing program many years ago. She then went on to be a mentor figure, and we continued to be friends right up until her early death at the age of fifty-one. And so, I don’t know if her writing had a direct effect on something like The Buried Giant, but generally, she was an example of an author who didn’t think in categories. She didn’t think some things were not suitable for literary fiction and other things were. She was a pretty out-of-the-box kind of writer, and to some extent, I think her career suffered while she was alive. She was quite a neglected writer during the time when she was alive. It’s only later on that people have come to recognize what an important writer she was. But I think that when I first started to write, it was because of people like Angela that I never really thought in terms of categories, or genre even.

Are there other stories, though, about ogres and pixies and dragons, that are favorites of yours that you’ve read?

I am very fond of The Odyssey and The Iliad, actually. Those two Homer works I read regularly in different translations as they come out. I just read the recent translations of both of those books by Stephen Mitchell. I enjoy reading old Greek stuff in general: Euripides, Aeschylus, where the acts of gods are there in a very intimate way — in an almost banal way. People are never surprised at the intervention of particular gods when they do remarkable things, even on the battlefield — as in The Iliad, where they just shrug and say, “Ha! I would’ve got that guy if Athena hadn’t intervened and whipped him away.” So I like that coexistence of gods and the supernatural alongside the banal and the everyday.

I was also brought up on a lot of samurai stories as a child — not just samurai folktales, but I read a lot of manga-type stuff featuring samurai. And it may be true to say — maybe I’m generalizing falsely here — that in a lot of Japanese samurai tales, once again, fantastical elements seem to exist very easily and naturally. There’s no big deal about it. A samurai wanders into a town, and the townsfolk say . . . “We’ve got a demon problem on that bridge over there. This demon keeps appearing and frightening people. Could you do something about it? You’re a samurai, you’re good with a sword, please do something about it.” And he says, “Well, all right, give me a nice meal for free, and I’ll see what I can do.”

That kind of thing is very typical in not just folktales, but Japanese stories featuring samurai. They’re set in relatively modern times, like nineteenth- or eighteenth-century. And in that landscape, there always seems to be the coexistence of things like oni, as they’ll be called in Japanese folklore, which is a demon-cum-ogre, I guess, and foxes that are shape-changers. Things like that are very, very common, and it seems to tap back into something ancient and profound. So that all comes very natural to me.

I was slightly surprised, to be honest, when I published this book, and a lot of debate seemed to surround it around the question of whether it was fantasy in the modern genre sense or not. I thought, “Well, okay, we can discuss that if we want.” But I didn’t think it was much of a big deal, one way or the other. I needed these elements.

One thing that you said in an interview that really struck me is that this book features dragons, and it also features characters who believe in God, and that there is equally as much evidence for God as there is for dragons. But somehow, people regard dragons in a book as silly, whereas they wouldn’t regard the idea of God in a book as silly; that they understand that the idea of God, even if it’s fictional, is incredibly powerful to people, but people seem to have a problem with the idea that dragons might have the same sort of emotional power.

You put it very well there; it does seem to me odd. Well, I suppose it’s not odd. I guess people feel, in a modern world, that we’ve superseded the beliefs in dragons and demons; that creatures like that are an expression of our fears and hopes and aspirations and longings. But God hasn’t really passed out of our imaginative thinking.

In a way, science and exploration — just knowledge of the world — seems to have removed those other creatures. But God seems to be beyond the reach of science and all these things. And so God isn’t childish, God isn’t fantasy, because God is still recognized as a legitimate expression of people’s profound beliefs about how the world works. And on the question of God — in my book, there is a dispute about God as well, because the Anglo-Saxons who are landing in ever greater numbers in Britain are pagan. They haven’t had Christianity yet. Whereas the native Britons have been converted to Christianity by the Romans, who used to be their bosses. And so there’s a tension there.

One of the accusations that the Anglo-Saxon warrior aims at the native Britons, the Christians, is to say, “Isn’t it convenient — you have created for yourself a god who is infinitely merciful? Never mind what kind of atrocities your armies commit; all you have to do is pray sincerely, and maybe atone, and commit a few pious acts of self-inflicted pain, and you believe that your god will forgive you, because you’ve created a god of infinite mercy. But from our viewpoint,” he’s saying, “this is just a way of condoning hideous, vicious behavior. We may be pagan, but our gods, if you break the rules, you’re punished.” And so there is, if you like, an argument or a discussion about that aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Is there something about the idea of a very merciful god, or an infinitely merciful god, who will forgive even the most hideous things as long as you repent? Has that idea made it easier for some Christian societies to rampage around the world throughout history, creating empires, invading other peoples’ territories and kidnapping people for slaves, and so on? It’s the European, Christian nations that did rampage around the globe, creating these empires all over the world. And it’s an interesting thought as to whether that would have been quite so easy had they not had this god who would forgive them anything.

There’s a really fascinating Arthurian fantasy novel called The Mists of Avalon. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it takes this idea, that’s unfortunately been discredited, that the British Isles used to have a cult of goddess worship before the Christians came. But that is the case in this novel, and so Arthur has to choose between this goddess worship of the pagans and this very sexist, monotheistic Christianity that comes into the British Isles, and that conflict is very much at the forefront of that novel.

That sounds very interesting. You must give me the title of that novel, then, before we finish this interview.

It’s called The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Right, I’ll check that out.

You mentioned that there’s been this controversial reception of this novel of yours, vis-à-vis genre, and one example of that that got a lot of attention within the fantasy community was from Ursula K. Le Guin. Do you want to just talk about, from your point of view, how that went down?

First off, I have to say Ursula K. Le Guin fairly quickly and graciously withdrew her earlier remark on her blog, and said that she had perhaps been too hasty in accusing me of snobbery about the fantasy genre. That accusation was based on something that was quoted in a New York Times interview.

I think you probably know more about this than I do, but a lot of people within the SF/F community did debate about this. She withdrew the accusation against me personally, but I think her larger point was that there’s a very strong tendency on the part of mainstream literary authors to be kind of snobbish or condescending about the fantasy genre, even when they used fantasy elements themselves, or entered that arena of that genre. There’s also a general complaint — I’m not in a position to say whether that accusation in general is justified or not, because I haven’t been following what’s been happening over the years — but I made it very clear shortly after I was aware of Ursula K. Le Guin’s initial accusation that I have never intended to sneer or be disrespectful to the fantasy genre. Here I am, I’m borrowing heavily from it; why would I be someone who’s sneering at it?

But I think there’s a wider discussion going on, not just within the SF/F community, but in the wider book world, about the shifting parameters of what constitutes literary or mainstream fiction. Now, things have been changing rapidly in the last ten, fifteen years. Writers like David Mitchell or Neil Gaiman; some filmmakers as well, like Alex Garland and people like this, and Christopher Nolan and so on. The parameters of what is serious or profound literature, and what is popular genre fiction — those boundaries have been crumbling very fast. And this is one of the really exciting things about what’s happening at the moment, and to some extent, it’s enabled older writers like myself, who perhaps grew up in the crusty and more prejudiced atmosphere about what we could and couldn’t do if we considered ourselves to be literary authors.

People like me have been liberated by a lot of the work that’s being done by writers who are a generation, or perhaps two generations, younger than me. I personally felt very liberated when I first read David Mitchell’s work about fifteen years ago — when I read his first novel Ghostwritten. Not only was that a staggering display of incredibly broad talent, to be able to do so many different kinds of genres all in one book, I was really struck by his fearlessness about how he might be categorized or where he’ll be positioned. He just seemed to revel in any kind of energetic storytelling tools that he could use. And later on, that same characteristic was even more noticeable and admirable in Cloud Atlas.

So writers like that liberated me to write a book like Never Let Me Go. Never Let Me Go was a book I had attempted to write twice before in the ’90s, but I couldn’t find the final piece of the jigsaw. When I tried it a third time, around 2001, I was able to do it because I was able to use what you might loosely call a speculative fiction layer to the story. And this is still going on. The parameters are shifting. And I think there is a kind of a rear-guard action as well. There’s a conservative (with a small c) rear-guard action in the book world, with people who say, “Look, we don’t want ogres and dragons and things within the walls of high-brow literary fiction. There’s enough of that in video games and Hollywood blockbuster franchises. We’re awash with this stuff; keep it out of our classy writing.”

There’s a tension between that school and people who say, “Look, these are all ways of expressing very powerful things. In fact, they’re very powerful tools for expressing emotions that otherwise would just remain psychobabble statements in realist fiction. But you can actually dramatize them with supernatural forces, demons or whatever you want to do. These are tools that have been used ever since people sat around a campfire as cavemen. The ancient Greeks used it, the Romans used it, the Scandinavian folktales, Japanese folktales, European folktales. We’ve used them all along, and why have we suddenly got rather snobbish and sneery about it just in the last few years?” There is a big debate going on now, and I think the tide is with the liberals.

If you’re asking me where I stand on this, I have to be very clear about it: I’m on the side of the ogres and the pixies. I needed them when I was struggling to find a way to express my story, so I know firsthand that any writer who wants to express themselves needs to be free to use these things without people raising an eyebrow and saying, “I don’t like books with pixies and ogres in them.” People are perfectly entitled to read my book and say they don’t like it, that’s fine. But if they’re saying, “I’m not going to read your book, despite having liked your previous books, because I hear there’s ogres in it” — well, that just seems to me classic prejudice. It’s like saying, “I’m not going to come to your restaurant because you have certain kinds of people in your staff.” It’s a conclusion that’s drawn simply by influence and association.

I just have to say: I totally agree with you about your point about prejudice, because I’ve had this experience throughout my life as a fantasy fan and fantasy author . . . I’ll tell people that I write fantasy, and they’ll say, “Oh, I don’t read that stuff.” And I’ll say, “Oh, why not?” and they say, “Oh, I just don’t like it.” And I’ll say, “Well, which fantasy novels have you read?” And they’ll admit that they’ve literally never read any. And it just seems that “don’t judge a book by its cover” is something that we tell eight-year-olds, and that book critics should have figured that out by the time they’re fifty years old.

I agree. Long before fantasy came into my life — this debate came into my life around the time of publication of this book — I have always been uneasily aware of the fact that there is a social status dimension to literature that has nothing to do with art, or reading, or literature itself. In most societies I’ve come across, certainly, highbrow reading, and reading in general, helps people to define themselves as belonging to the better classes. It can be a kind of a badge that some people like to wear, simply to denote themselves as being maybe classier than other people.

And so I think there is a spurious motivation behind some kinds of reading, or some kinds of expressed enthusiasm for books. I’ve always been aware of that side of literature. It exists for theater and opera as well, in quite a big way. And I think some people who are not genuine book fans, or — I’ll rephrase that — maybe people who aren’t confident readers, they are afraid of what people will think about them because of the book they happen to be holding in their hand. When we’re teenagers, we’re very prone to this — if you like that band, you’re not cool; if you wear those sneakers, you’re cool. But with reading, we should grow out of that. We should be reading for genuine reasons. Reading is transformative. It takes you places emotionally. It gives you profound ideas. You shouldn’t be worried about what the person across the aisle from you on the bus or the subway is thinking because they can see the jacket of the book you’re reading. But that dimension to reading certainly remains, and I think books with dragons on them arouses some sort of fear on the part of a certain kind of insecure reader. But that’s just my speculation.

No, I completely agree with that, and this show is called Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s just been a lot of discussion in recent years about what does it mean to be a geek, and one definition people often give is “love in the face of disapproval”: that you love the things you love, and you’re not ashamed of it, and you don’t care what anyone else thinks. And that’s very different from the sort of snobbish impulse where you determine your likes based on what you think is going to win you approval.

Well, that’s quite a good definition. I hadn’t been aware that that’s the definition of “geek,” but that seems to me a definition of a confident person, a mature person.

You mentioned Neil Gaiman. I was just curious if you had seen his review of your book in the New York Times, and if you had any thoughts about it? I have a couple quotes here that I might want to get your reaction to.

Yeah, of course I saw that review, and I was delighted to see that review! Almost at the same time that that review came out, another one came out in Prospect Magazine, which is a British intellectual magazine. It was an interesting pairing, those two reviews, because the Neil Gaiman review, from what I recall, began with the words: “Fantasy is a tool for writers to . . .” And it was a very articulate discussion about the role of what you might loosely call “fantasy techniques” in expressing ideas in fiction.

This other review is by a lady called Joanna Kavenna, a British novelist. Her review was looking at it from the other side. Her review began with something to the effect that the social realist novel isn’t quite dead, but it’s now become a zombie. And her argument was the so-called realist literary novel badly needs injection from things like fantasy, because it’s just become moribund.

This is why I concluded that my book had just stepped into something much bigger than discussion about my book. There’s some kind of ongoing discussion about the shifting parameters of what writers who thought of themselves as literary should be thinking of as their business, their legitimate business. And readers who are keen to follow what they would like to consider to be the important fiction of their day maybe also need to start shifting their parameters about what kind of things they should be looking for. So I thought this was quite an interestingly exciting debate. Was there something in particular you wanted to ask about Neil Gaiman’s review?

So for example, he says, “On a second reading, and on a third, its characters and events and motives are easier to understand, but even so, it guards its secrets and its world close.” And I was just curious: To what extent do you intend this book to be mysterious and inscrutable, and to what extent is that just sort of who you are?

I never intended the book to be inscrutable. Almost any aspect of it, to me, is completely transparent. But I guess from somebody else’s point of view, there might be something mysterious about it. But I can explain almost anything you want about it, if you ask me. I don’t know Neil Gaiman at all, but if I met him, and he asked me, “Explain this, because I was puzzled by it, even after the third reading,” I’ll be able to explain it to him.

To me, it’s a fairly simple story: There’s a mist fallen over the land that makes people amnesiac. A couple want this mist to go away because they want their precious memories back, so at the personal level, this mist is a bad thing; at least, it seems like that at the beginning. But from the nation’s point of view, getting rid of the source of that mist is probably going to restart a terrible cycle of violence. It’s probably going to bring on a genocide. And the only thing that’s been holding down this violence is this forgetfulness. And because the mist is caused by the dragon (although that’s a bit of a spoiler), the story revolves around “do you want to kill this dragon or do you want to defend it?”

In my way of thinking, it’s a fairly straightforward story, but maybe there’s something about the way I’ve told it that puzzles people, or maybe they think that there are various layers. Well, this is true; obviously within that story, there are various kinds of things I think about: about the nature of memory; the nature of the bond between a husband and wife, and what the relationship is between that bond and their love, and memory and their shared memories; what are the things that can possibly tie different communities together and bind them into something that they could call a nation, and what are the things that will forever divide them? Of course, all these things are there, so I guess there are other layers to the thing, but essentially, the story is pretty simple.

You mentioned one major aspect of the story is that there’s this test of love that the boatman gives this married couple, and they’re afraid of what the answer might be. Is their love strong enough to pass this test? That really reminded me of Never Let Me Go, where there’s also this idea of “if our love is strong enough, it will enable us to pass a threatening test.” And I think this is interesting, because in a lot of fairy tales, there’s a love presented in this way, as if it’s this binary thing that gets tested, and it’s either a zero or a one, and consequences flow from that quantification of love.

It’s interesting you point out that maybe this happens in a lot of fairy tales. I hadn’t really been thinking about that. I first came across this motif in Never Let Me Go, and I’ve repeated it here. It’s there because I recognize an emotion that people have: that love is so hard to find, and it’s so hard to maintain, that when you do that even halfway successfully, you feel it’s so special that surely people recognize the very special and unique nature of it. Surely that will entitle you to some kind of concessions or something, some special treatment from God or from fate or whatever it is you think controls you. Surely you and the person you love, by virtue of this love that you’ve built, qualify to be an exception in some way.

Maybe it’s an error, but that feeling often accompanies love. Maybe it’s a foolish thing to think love is that powerful, but it’s not just in fairy tales where there’s tests of love. I think that idea that maybe love can trump death, or at least trump some of the worst aspects of death, is there in every kind of storytelling — from screwball comedies, to westerns, to whatever. You see that over and over again.

These are maybe silly beliefs that people have, but somewhere, I think, many of us have this almost irrational hope when we think about mortality and death, and we don’t really like to think we’ll be separated. Even unreasonably, people who are quite advanced in age think they’ve got a lot more years together when they’re enjoying their time together. They don’t sit there saying, “Well, let’s be rational about this; chances are one or the other of us will die in the next five years.” No one says that. They live as though it’s going to go on forever. I’m just trying to capture that aspect of human relationships, and in these kinds of tests, I suppose, I’ve formalized it. But it reflects in our more hopeful, romantic, and irrational moments what a lot of us hope and think about love and death.

Unfortunately, we’re running pretty short on time here, and you did ask me before we started if I could maybe recommend a book to you at the end. There was one I really wanted to mention that I thought of a lot while reading this book, that I think you might really enjoy. It’s called The Knight by Gene Wolfe. He’s a very highly regarded fantasy author. This is a book about a boy who travels to a fantasy world, and grows into a mighty warrior, and then loses his memory. So he reverts to the state of being a young boy in the body of this warrior, and he has to learn what actually happened to him in his life of adventure. Gene Wolfe has a lot of mysteries in his stories, and he’s a very fine prose stylist, and he shares a lot of your preoccupations with identity and memory and things like that, and I think you would really enjoy that book.

Gene Wolfe. And which other writers would you recommend — if we’re talking about the contemporary scene right now?

Among living authors, I would also really strongly recommend Tim Powers as one of my favorite fantasy authors. My favorite book of his is called The Anubis Gates.

Tim Powers?

Yep.

Graphic novels — is that an interesting field at the moment? I used to follow people like Alan Moore. But that’s going back some time now. I know he still produces stuff. But do you think graphic novels have much to do with the fantasy book world at the moment, or is that something completely separate?

Absolutely! We talk about graphic novels on this show. I’m more of an expert in prose fiction, but I love graphic novels. My main issue with graphic novels is that they’re just too expensive. I can’t afford to read them. But there are some spectacular ones out there. There’s one called Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn that I really enjoyed.

Brian K. Vaughn. That’s kind of interesting. I’m very new to this area.

Well, I’m happy to answer any questions you have. We’re at the time limit that we agreed on, and I’m happy to stay here as long as you want, but . . .

Well, I have an event this evening — I have to drive to Menlo Park in a different part of San Francisco in a little while. Obviously, you’re interviewing me, so I was telling you about my speculations about the fact that there is a debate going on, certainly, in the mainstream book world about the shifting parameters of what constitutes legitimate, highbrow fiction now. But what are your thoughts on that? Am I way off, do you think, on that, or do you sense that there is something like that going on? And what are people saying within the science fiction/fantasy community?

From my perspective, there is definitely what I would perceive as progress, particularly in recent years, but this is something that’s been going on for a long time, and is a longstanding source of resentment among fantasy and science fiction authors — the way that there’s just this implicit belief in the literary world that a work is either serious literature or fantasy and science fiction, but it can’t be both at the same time. And so any work of fantasy and science fiction that is plainly great literature — like 1984 — by some sort of magical, transmutational property, becomes serious literature and stops being fantasy and science fiction. And you’ll very often have this situation Ursula K. Le Guin is aggrieved about, where a literary author will write a book that is plainly science fiction by any reasonable standard, and will say, “Oh, but this isn’t really science fiction because it has serious artistic intent” — the implication being that every other work of fantasy and science fiction lacks any serious artistic intent, and that this book is better than all of them, even though the person often has never read any fantasy and science fiction, and is in really no position whatsoever to judge the relative merits of their work versus the existing body of work. I think people of my generation have much more flexible attitudes, or much more open-minded attitudes, about this. But it still drives me crazy. In grad school, I took a class from a very well-known author who I like a lot, and he assigned us two books to read which I would consider science fiction by any stretch of the imagination: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson. But half the class could not be convinced that these were works of science fiction, because they said that they dealt with serious themes, or were well written.

So it’s very much a question of definition, then. The argument circles back on itself, because it’s all about definition. If you define science fiction as a genre that isn’t serious, then, obviously, it becomes a circular argument. Then you can always say, “Science fiction cannot be serious, and that work, because it’s serious, is not science fiction.” That all depends on the definition that science fiction is a non-serious genre.

Exactly, that’s the issue.

The last person who was interviewing me said at the beginning of the interview that he thought my book wasn’t fantasy because the preoccupations of contemporary fantasy tended to be adolescent issues. He didn’t mean that in a pejorative sense; he meant literally, they tend to work out a lot of the worries and concerns of adolescent people. Whereas my book seemed to be dealing with the preoccupations of people facing aging and death. That hadn’t quite occurred to me before, but do you think there’s anything in that: That fantasy — just as a marketing genre; I’m not talking about the genre any more deeply than that — is actually about young adult people working out their growing-up issues?

There certainly is a lot of fantasy that fits that definition, and I think that given the massive success of the YA publishing category in recent years, that’s even more firmly established this connection between young adult literature and fantasy in the minds of people who don’t read any adult fantasy. But if you read books that are published as adult fantasy, they deal with an incredibly wide range of topics. To take an obvious example, Game of Thrones is perhaps the best-selling adult fantasy novel right now, and it’s not particularly concerned with coming of age, although that is part of the story.

What is your opinion of Game of Thrones? Once again, I have to confess, I’ve not read or seen an episode of the TV series, but I may do now. I actually deliberately avoided it while I was writing this novel. It became famous long after I started to write this book, and I just thought, “I’m not going to watch it, in case it messes up my view of my book.” But now that I’ve finished the book, I may look at it. But do you consider Game of Thrones to be an important part of what’s going on now, or would you really prefer to recommend Tim Powers or people like that?

I love Game of Thrones. It’s one of my favorite books. I’ve read it five times. And when my friends and I get together, approximately fifty percent of our conversation regards speculation about when the next book is going to come out, and what it’s going to contain. There’s just an incredible frenzy, which you’re probably aware of, among fans about what’s going to happen with the next book, why isn’t it coming out faster? I would certainly recommend Game of Thrones in addition to authors like Tim Powers and Gene Wolfe. They’re all favorites. Another one you really have to read is China Miéville.

I know China Miéville. In fact, I’ve met him a number of times. He’s a very interesting guy. The City & the City is the only book of his I’ve read, but I thought that was very interesting. Do you know that book?

I do, I’ve read it. It’s more of a surreal novel, and his earlier work is more overtly fantastic. My favorite of his books is called The Scar, and it’s just this crazy, gonzo, grotesque secondary-world fantasy that I think everyone should read.

All right. And what about Neil Gaiman? Does he fit in your landscape as a fantasy writer, or where does he fit? He’s enormously influential and talked-over at the moment, but is he part of the SF/F community, or what is he?

He certainly is. I would say he’s a fantasy author. I think that’s how he would describe himself. He’s been a fixture at science fiction conventions since he was very young. He was very strongly influenced by one of my favorite authors, an author from the ’60s and ’70s named Roger Zelazny.

And he’s from the sixties?

There was a movement in science fiction called “The New Wave” in the 1960s, and Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Disch, and Samuel R. Delany are generally thought of as being the main people in that movement.

So Neil Gaiman would be considered to be somebody very much at the heart of the fantasy thing, or is he considered to be someone who hovers on the periphery and crosses into more mainstream stuff? How is he regarded?

I would say he’s maybe the most beloved person within the fantasy genre. He has a massive following within it. He’s achieved a lot of mainstream success. But he has done so by writing the kind of things he was writing all along.

So that doesn’t cause resentment — the fact that he’s become so famous in the mainstream?

No, I think we’re all happy for him. Occasionally you’ll get someone who achieves mainstream success, and then tries to distance themselves from their roots, like teenagers who don’t want to be seen with their parents. And that can cause resentment, but success on its own, I wouldn’t say does that.

We’re going to have to leave in just a minute, but just another question: What about J.G. Ballard? Is he regarded with any seriousness amongst contemporary readers of SF/fantasy now, or is he somebody way back in the past?

I’ve read him. He’s very well regarded within the field. I would say he’s probably not particularly well known to younger science fiction and fantasy readers, but among people who know him, I think he has a very strong reputation still within the field.

And do you think all these people you’ve mentioned, people like Tim Powers and Gene Wolfe — to what extent are they heard of and read in the mainstream? Would they be respected by people outside of the SF/F community, or do they very much need to stay within the walls of the genre for their readership?

Neither are bestsellers to my knowledge, but I think that they certainly could be. I think that a significant proportion of literary writers, if they actually read them, would admire them quite a bit. I think there’s some percentage of the literary audience that is just going to be turned off by the level of fantastical stuff in their stories. There’s sort of a threshold of fantastical element that you can have for a lot of literary readers, where, if it’s a fairy tale, or if it’s surreal, or if it can somehow be categorized as magical realism, they can get on board with it. But if it goes from a five to a seven on a scale of how much fantasy is in the story — there’s a tipping point for them, and they just can’t cope with that anymore. But I think Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers are both massively under-appreciated in the literary world, and many more people than currently read them should, and would enjoy them.

Neal Stephenson? How is he regarded?

He’s very highly regarded. His novel Snow Crash is a classic work of science fiction. He’s also achieved a lot of crossover success. This happened with William Gibson, too; a lot of the cyberpunk-oriented writers have moved more toward mainstream fiction. Neal Stephenson also moved a little bit more into historical fiction as well, but he’s had recent books which are really more techno-thrillers than out-and-out science fiction novels. But like I said, geeks tend to love things and not ever fall out of love with them. And so once you’ve been loved in the fantasy and science fiction world, you really have to do something pretty alienating to lose that affection.

Are there any big disputes going on within the SF/F world that you can identify? Is there a schism, or is there some sort of internal debate going on that you think is a particularly significant one? Or do most people tend to think the same things?

No, there are a lot of massive debates, and a lot of very acrimonious ones. The big one right now is a big schism between the old guard, who tend to be older and whiter and more conservative, versus the younger generation, which tends to be much more multicultural and much more accepting of sexual identity and sexual orientations. And there’s quite a big point of tension between those two camps right now.

So that’s simply to do with the politics. It’s to do with, actually, things like celebrating gay people on the one hand, and other people not liking that. It’s stuff like that rather than a literary difference, is it?

But that comes through in the fiction as well, in terms of who gets represented in the fiction. But if you’re talking in terms of aesthetic battles, the big aesthetic battle within fantasy and science fiction is the battle, essentially, between hard science fiction versus soft science fiction and/or fantasy.

Hard science fiction?

Hard science fiction would be science fiction that adheres most rigorously to the rules of science as we know them, and people who write it tend to have backgrounds in physics and astronomy and chemistry and so on. And they often regard themselves as superior to people who write less scientifically rigorous kinds of fiction.

And final question: What exactly is the demographic? I assume it’s pretty young, the people who read people like Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers, and so on — these people you’re talking about. These are mainly read by what kind of demographic, would you say?

There’s actually a lot of discussion within the field about what’s called the “graying of fandom” and the aging of people. A lot of the authors I’ve mentioned, I would actually say, tend to have a bit older readership. What happened is that science fiction had a big boom in the fifties, with authors like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, that pretty much everyone today has heard of, and a lot of the people who still read science fiction are people who were drawn to those authors initially. And since then, there are so many more people writing science fiction that it’s been much more difficult for any individual author to achieve the kind of following that those authors had. And so the audience has attenuated somewhat over the years. And then you had the YA boom with Harry Potter, where that brought in a whole new generation of people as fantasy readers. But to a substantial extent, at least so far, they’ve been locked into this garden of the YA section of the bookstore, and have not, at least so far, moved in massive numbers to reading adult fantasy written by authors of a generation or two before them.

So I’ve been mistaken in thinking that the contemporary fantasy audience is predominantly young?

Yeah, I don’t think that that’s the case at all.

That’s very useful to me to get a lot of that, and I’ll follow up on all of these, particularly Tim Powers and Gene Wolfe.

Is it all right if I use this on the show — this conversation we’ve been having?

Oh, sure, if you don’t mind me being the interviewer!

No, this is great!

I could become a radio host! Or something, or audio host, or whatever you call it! That’s been very enlightening because a lot of the people I meet crossing the States like this don’t know much about this stuff. I’ve asked, but a lot of the traditional booksellers or people like that, they’re interested to know, they’re not being snooty about it, but they just don’t know very much about it.

Well, they should all listen to my podcast, and then they’ll learn all sorts of interesting things.

Ah, well, maybe this is the other question: Which other websites, do you think, are the key websites to follow this kind of stuff? I know that there’s this thing called io9?

Oh, yeah, that’s one of the big ones, and the other one I would point you to is called locusmag.com. It’s the website for Locus Magazine, which is the trade publication for the science fiction/fantasy field.

All right, that’s interesting. Okay, well, thank you very much!

Thank you! This has been really 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: August 2015

Sunil Patel | 2,000 words

Time Salvager
Wesley Chu
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0765377180
Tor Books, July 2015
384 pages

In the same year that Wesley Chu wraps up one rollicking SF thriller series, the excellent Tao trilogy, he kicks off another one with many of the same strengths: a well thought-out alternate timeline, visceral combat, strong characterization, and a healthy sense of humor. Time Salvager follows James Griffin-Mars, a chronman as gruff as his name, who travels back in time for ChronoCom to salvage resources from the past for the rundown, barely-hanging-on future. Over the years, he’s left countless people to die in horrible tragedies because that was their fate, and he could not change it. Then on his One Last Job, he takes a liking to Elise Kim, a scientist as lovely as her name, and in a moment of weakness, he saves her life.

Bringing back someone from the past is very, very illegal.

James and Elise go on the run and into hiding, pursued by Levin Javier-Oberon, an auditor as circumspect as his name, who corrects anomalies in the chronostream. Levin, though the ostensible antagonist, might be my favorite character in the book; through him, we get a glimpse at the inner workings of ChronoCom and the hints that it may not be all it’s cracked up to be, which makes for a conflicted “villain.” Elise, despite being saved by James, proves to be quite independent, actively annoyed by James’s overprotectiveness, and I loved her scientific curiosity and out-of-date twenty-first-century references. James is clearly the coolest character in the book because he’s the one who travels through time and wears thought-controlled wristbands that allow him to breathe in space and fight with energy coils that burst out of him like Doc Ock’s tentacles . . . but he’s not the most likable guy, and his major conflict — guilt for the people he’s failed to save, specifically his kid sister — hit the same note over and over. It’s a good basis for a character arc, but it felt forced to me, and I didn’t connect to it. It does, however, pay off in a fantastic way.

I know time travel has been done to death, but Time Salvager feels like a fresh spin on old tropes, thanks to Chu’s fairly simple setup — changing time causes ripples but the timeline will self-correct — that keeps the focus on what he’s really bringing to the table, which is a richly imagined future where humanity reached utopia only to ruin the Earth in the end after all. Thus, unlike a lot of time travel stories, the “past” James travels to is often our own future, which keeps the book from treading well-trodden ground too much.

Time Salvager starts off with a doomed spaceship and never slows down. Chapters frequently end on cutting, powerful lines and plot twists occasionally made me shout, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” at the book. It’s a fun thriller with real weight behind its ideas, and a promising start for a new series.

The Fifth Season
N.K. Jemisin
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN 978-0316229296
Orbit Books, August 2015
512 pages

The Fifth Season begins with the end of the world, one of many bold choices N.K. Jemisin makes in this incredible book. But this is not your Michael Bay apocalypse, oh no: It focuses on a personal apocalypse, a mother cradling her dead son in the wake of immense destruction. The Stillness is a seismically unstable land that has withstood cycles of destruction throughout the centuries, but this may very well be the final one.

In a hell of a prologue, an unidentified narrator — Jemisin is one of the best around when it comes to engaging narrators — lays out the world for the reader and highlights key figures whose identities will not be clear until much later. I returned to the prologue several times as I learned more, and each time my comprehension deepened. Although there’s the occasional exposition, most of the worldbuilding is delivered entirely through context, and the world depicted in the prologue slowly crystallizes as fully realized. Massive shakes. Godlike beings made of stone. Mysterious floating obelisks.

After the prologue, Jemisin splits the narrative between three characters. Damaya, a young orogene — with the power to quell and harness seismic energy — given up by her parents to go learn at Xavier’s School for Gifted Orogenes. Syenite, an experienced orogene chosen for an important assignment. Essun, a grieving mother searching for vengeance and her daughter. It’s not quite maiden-mother-crone, but it has that vibe, showing women at different stages of life, how each one deals with her powers. I found it hardest to connect with Essun — the apparent main character, as we begin the book with her — because her story is told in second-person, which I love but has a distancing effect, appropriate for a character who has had her entire world shattered. I always love child characters, so even though Damaya’s school adventures are somewhat trope-y, she was very endearing. Syenite was my favorite, as she felt the most confident and lively, with an entertaining wryness to her voice; she also gets the most time onscreen. There’s something to love in all three disparate stories (young adult magic school antics, magical romance adventure, post-apocalyptic road trip), and each adds more and more to our understanding of the world.

While the fantastical elements of The Fifth Season are stunning and well-constructed themselves, it’s the real-world parallels that make the book an even more searing read. While it’s certainly not a new idea to use mutants as a metaphor for prejudice and oppression, Jemisin does it as I’ve never seen before, such that every mention of how orogenes are treated called up a new story in my mind, though it’s not clumsily done. She invents a racial slur I can’t even bring myself to type because this fictional slur feels so nasty to me, and she examines the ways in which slurs can be reclaimed, and how even then, they can still have power in either direction. Make no mistake: This is an angry book. But it also has chapter titles like “you’re getting the band back together” and “Syenite breaks her toys,” so it’s not without a sense of lightness.

My feelings on The Fifth Season changed as I read, but it is a book that imbues itself with deeper meaning the more it unfolds and reveals itself, and by the end, I saw everything in a new light. I knew Jemisin was talented, being a huge fan of her Inheritance and Dreamblood books, but here she employs heretofore unseen skills. Unlike those books, however, the books in this trilogy are not self-contained, and this first book ends on a note that will have me stamping my foot until the earth cracks for the next one.

The Grace of Kings
Ken Liu
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-1481424271
Saga Press, April 2015
640 pages

For decades, the Islands of Dara have been under imperial rule, the Reign of One Bright Heaven. As so often happens throughout history, however, empire leads to rebellion, and suddenly the Tiro states find themselves in a bloody power struggle, with two men emerging as key figures: the eight-foot-tall warrior Mata Zyndu and the cunning bandit Kuni Garu.

To attempt to summarize The Grace of Kings would be folly, as so much happens in this first book of a trilogy that it could be a trilogy all on its own. Ken Liu accomplishes this dense storytelling without making the narrative feel rushed or rote by constantly changing scope: A section that covers weeks of battle in which tens of thousands of people die is followed by an intimate conversation between a king and his counsel. This is an epic poem in novel form, a story in which gods banter about the fates of mortals (and may or may not intervene), in which the tender relationship between a man and his wife holds just as much weight as an incredible military maneuver, in which characters are casually beheaded in the middle of paragraphs.

While much of the book feels like a giant game of Risk where I lost track of what state was under whose rule, Liu frequently dazzles with his “silkpunk” ingenuity, devising creative technology out of the raw materials available to this ancient culture, everything from smart bombs to parachutes. So much of the battles involve trickery that even if the actual tactics went over my head, the battles themselves were such a thrill I even found myself giving props to the “bad” guy, if there can be said to be a “bad” guy in a story where every man in power stays in power by killing lots of people. The book is absolutely aware of the traditions it’s following, and I loved the occasional cheeky (black) humor about the human cost of maintaining power.

True to those epic traditions, unfortunately, men drive the narrative, with very few women playing a role for most of the novel. In the last third, however, women become more prominent; one female character almost single-handedly makes up for the relative lack of women before. Given the explicit discussions of sexism, I understood that it was a deliberate choice in the narrative, and I can see potential for more focus on the women in the rest of the trilogy, but I still found it frustrating in this book.

Ken Liu, prolific, award-winning short story writer, has burst onto the novel scene with a rare beast of a book, an epic fantasy like no other. The Grace of Kings delivers an impressive, unique reading experience, a tale spanning years told with the care of a master storyteller.

Shadowshaper
Daniel José Older
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0545591614
Arthur A. Levine Books, June 2015
304 pages

Sierra Santiago knows something weird is going on when she sees a mural crying. Then her grandfather starts talking about shadowshapers, and faster than you can say, “Yer a wizard, Sierra!” she’s off on a dangerous adventure of magical art and spiritual energy to protect everyone she loves.

Shadowshaper structures Sierra’s coming-of-age story around an investigation, as she tries to find out more about shadowshapers and decipher her grandfather’s riddles. Not only does she get magic lessons from a hot guy, but she also goes to the college library to do actual research, reading the notes of a white anthropologist who had been studying shadowshapers. Thus, the first half of the book feels like Sierra is on a quest for exposition, but Daniel José Older keeps things interesting with occasional attacks from the walking dead and the spiritual dead (as in Half-Resurrection Blues, much of the supernatural aspects revolve around the dead). The second half has much more momentum, as Sierra has gathered enough information to really move against her adversary.

Sierra’s story is multigenerational, and her heritage plays a large part in her power. Characters are black and Latino, but they’re not generic; each one is proud of their ancestry, where they come from. I’ve never read a book that so explicitly and yet casually acknowledged how complex our cultural and personal identities are. Sierra’s friends and other neighborhood regulars form a tight-knit community, as family to her as any blood relatives. Shadowshaping isn’t just another magic system but a way of channeling that culture, the spirits of everyone that came before you, into your art, giving it life.

But making artwork come alive is only the tip of the iceberg. The walking dead and spiritual dead manifest in terrifying ways, their scenes adding true chilling horror to the book. These creatures drive the action scenes, which are kinetic and experiential; I was reading so quickly that I couldn’t put together all the details of motion but I still had images in my mind. The climactic scene, a chaotic, thrilling affair, provides a good payoff for everything it’s taken to get there.

Shadowshaper wastes no time in getting down to business and moves forward at a fast pace, whether Sierra is tracking down information or battling haunts. She’s a winning, driven heroine, who isn’t afraid to stand up for herself but also isn’t above accepting the help of her friends, especially when facing such a formidable foe. The villain of this book is basically cultural appropriation, a man who thinks he is honoring Sierra’s culture when in fact he’s harming it. Shadowshaper makes the powerful statement that our culture, our traditions, and our history are worth fighting for.

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: Reiko Murakami

Reiko Murakami was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1982. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She works as a concept artist and illustrator specializing in surreal fantasy and horror characters. Her website is reikomurakami.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Reiko Murakami

Henry Lien | 799 words

Your works are often portraits of single surreal or fantastical characters, rather than illustrations of moments of action and interaction. Nonetheless, they seem to have a narrative feel to them. How important is story in your works?

Often I paint characters with unusual body features that hint at their background story. Their story is the reason I paint them. My storytelling is very subtle and ambiguous, and I prefer keeping it that way. I believe in my audiences and I don’t think it’s necessary to make everything absolutely clear.

What are some of your sources of inspiration? Are there particular illustrators, fine art painters, or films or games that have captured your imagination or influenced your work?

I do have many artists I admire, but the initial idea for a new painting always starts within me. I get one emotion I want to express, and as I work on my sketches I find influences of other artists. Lately I find Rebecca Guay and Scott Fischer in my work a lot. They were my instructors at SmArt School (smarterartschool.com) so it’s no wonder why. I am also influenced by some techniques in Japanese painting. The subtle gestures and facial expressions remind me of the paintings I saw in Japan when I was little.

Does your Japanese heritage come into play at all in your work? Do you draw inspiration from Japanese illustration traditions? Do you see any distinct aspects of art/illustration coming out of Japan currently? Do you see anything inherently Japanese about your work?

I do. For a long time I was trying to stay away from the influence, especially when I was in college, because I didn’t want to be labeled as “just another girl from Japan.” However, I have started to see them in my personal work lately. The more my work becomes personal, the more I paint with traditional Japanese heart. I guess I can’t deny who I am. It’s actually kind of funny because when I was working in Tokyo a few years ago, people over there said my work is so “Western.” Maybe my work is exactly who I am, neither completely American nor Japanese.

Your works seem to play a game between color and composition so that they never become too busy. Even in some of the compositions where there are hundreds of particles, you’ve chosen a very restrained color scheme, organized the particles into patterns of motion, and left generous negative space in the composition. Are these choices intentional or intuitive?

I spend a lot of time figuring out the composition. My subjects are still most of the time, and in order to make the composition feel active I need to use the negative space wisely. I usually have one theme to go for the painting, so I decide one dominant color for the theme. The secondary color is set based on technical aspects to make the color scheme work.

Your horror and non-horror works are quite different from each other. Your non-horror works are flowing and lyrical. Your horror works are grotesque and uncomfortable to look at. What is your attraction to horror?

I like painting horror creatures because it gives me freedom to express beyond the usual anatomical restrictions. My paintings are all about showing how I feel. My horror art is showing what I see in myself and that’s probably why you might feel uncomfortable looking at it.

Talk to us a little about your technique. Is your process entirely digital? Why do you prefer this medium?

Usually I start in my sketchbook with pencil for making thumbnails, but at the end everything is done digitally. I started painting seriously a few years ago, while working as a game artist. In game development, we use digital tools daily, so painting this way was a very natural thing for me. At this point in my career, I feel comfortable using Photoshop as a primary tool for a few reasons. The main reason is the flexibility I get from this tool. Even though the end result of my paintings is rather simple, I like exploring a lot during the process. The other reason is the variety of brush sets. I like having a charcoal or oil pastel look in my paintings, and Photoshop gives me the capability to achieve that.

What is your dream project?

I’d like to do a series of female creatures. I sort of started doing so, but it’ll be nice to make a solid body of work in the future. If I can make them into an art book, that’ll be very nice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Lien (glassgaragegallery.com) is an art dealer in Los Angeles. 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 and the Art Director at Lightspeed Magazine. 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. Visit his author website at henrylien.com.

Author Spotlight: Chen Qiufan

Jude Griffin (Translation by Ken Liu) | 603 words

What was the spark for “The Smog Society”?

I started outlining this story back in 2006, when Beijing’s smog problem was nowhere near as severe as it is now. But my body is very sensitive to the surrounding environment, and so when the air quality declined, I could clearly sense changes in me, both physiological and psychological. I was living and working in Beijing’s international trade central business district, in the heart of the city, where conditions were especially crowded, busy, and oppressive. I began to imagine the consequences if our emotions were connected to the urban climate in a feedback loop. How would Beijingers of the future view their life in the miasma and their history?

This story seemed more like magical realism than science fiction to me. Do you view your work from a genre perspective or do you write your stories without ever thinking about genre labels?

For me, whether one describes what I write as science fiction, fantasy, or magical realism isn’t important; the key is whether I’ve found the right language and style to tell that particular story, to convey the emotions, moods, and ideas I want the reader to experience. Labels are very important for publishers, the media, and critics, because they act like Procrustean beds that force writers into boxes so that they could be placed on shelves to set reader expectations. My goal has always been to surprise the reader, whether they like the book or not.

Whose work do you find yourself returning to?

As time passes, this list has gotten longer and more diverse. The following authors (though this is only a limited list) have been influential for me: Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, Cormac McCarthy, William Gibson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Liu, David Mitchell, Peter Hessler, Alan Moore, Chuck Palahniuk, Dan Simmons, as well as Chinese writers such as Lao She, Zhang Dachun, and Liu Cixin.

Which new writer most intrigues you?

Junot Díaz, Tao Lin. (They are relatively new . . . to me.)

What has surprised you about the process of translation, working with translators?

Translation is a fascinating process! When I read Ken Liu’s translations of my works, it’s a bit like re-experiencing the process of composition, but in another language and through another perspective. Ken is a fantastic translator who seems able to capture my original intent and emotions when I wrote the story, and convey them to English readers with the most appropriate words. Sometimes, I even think he accurately makes explicit some deeper meaning I hid in the original. Because of this, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of the differing natures of Chinese and English, which is like regarding the world through two different systems of thought. I envy Ken’s ability to do so.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

Right now, I’m working on a short novel called A History of Psychedelia, which imagines an alternative history of China of the 1980s, before the Internet or computers, and drug use is rampant. The protagonist tries to find meaning and affirm his existence by pursuing a variety of hallucinations, but instead encounters fantastic adventures that overturn his view of the world.

I also want to share a few other bits of good news. My debut novel, The Waste Tide, has been translated into English by Ken Liu, and I hope English readers get to see it soon. In June, I’ll publish my second collection of short stories, which includes works from 2009 to the present and is tentatively titled Future Disease. Also, I’m working on a science fiction film project that’s progressing well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Vandana Singh

Moshe Siegel | 1,050 words

In your short story “Life-pod,” the separation of children from their parents is a recurring circumstance, such as the Eavesdropper’s shaded memory of a lost son, the sleeper’s melancholy dreams of childhood, the humans having been abducted from their homes, and the orphaned, adrift Life-pod itself. Was this the primary concept you set out to explore, or did the story emerge from a different idea contained within the tale (or from something else entirely)?

I didn’t start out with any theme in mind. This story is an example of one of my “quilt” stories. I have a file on my computer for writing practice where I start with a random sentence and see where it will take me. Sometimes some of these paragraphs seem to speak to each other or at least suggest a connection, so at a later stage I knit them together, add more details or scenes, and make the story. “Life-pod” was one of these. I think that the things I am interested in exploring, or observations about life that have been fermenting in my unconscious, naturally bubble up when I am doing these oblivious little writing exercises. I don’t always write like this, but when I do, it is a lot of fun to see what the story turns out to be — usually a surprise!

I guess I’ve always been interested in themes of home and family, since I have spent so much time apart from the place and the people who formed me. I am also well aware of the Indian colonial legacy from 200 years of British rule, and how it shapes us today. As an accidental Indian expatriate living in America, the notion of otherness fascinates me — how we humans distance each other and then attempt to build bridges of connection that inevitably call on us to transform in some way, sometimes terrifyingly so.

The Eavesdropper is able to glimpse the memory-dreams of the humans in stasis around her. In so doing, she stumbles upon the revelation that there exists an entity in an underlying reality — possibly the same presence that the aliens call the Hidden One — an entity so massive in scope that faster-than-light tachyons serve as its nervous system . . . a wonderfully compelling idea. What does this entity, be it sentient or not, represent to you? Have you explored the concept of such a being/force in other works — or, do you plan to?

The idea of the Hidden One came to me many years ago when I was thinking about invented aliens and the issue of scale. I used to live in Austin many years ago and had the privilege of multiple conversations with the eminent physicist George Sudarshan, who invented the concept of the tachyon. I mentioned the possibility of a galactic-scale alien and we chatted about how such a beast would be governed by compulsions quite alien to us, perhaps would not feel the need to reproduce, and so on. That conversation has been in my head for years after I moved from Austin, and it surfaced when I wrote this story for a special issue of Foundation back in 2007. I had lost touch with Dr. Sudarshan by then, but perhaps he would be pleased to know that the beast of our conversation ultimately showed up in a story!

I explore a similar (perhaps the same) beast in a short piece that is coming out in the Bestiary anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer. I suspect the Hidden One is going to show up in my work again, perhaps more than a few times.

For the pleasure of speculation: Why do you think the Eavesdropper was created? Do you think it was an act of betrayal on the narrator’s part, as she fears may be the case, or do you think there’s more to the story of her genesis?

Well, without infringing on the right of each reader to make the story their own, my own speculation is that the Eavesdropper was created as a bridge species. Betraying your own kind can sometimes be complicated, especially in a situation of conflict and limited mutual understanding. Perhaps under those conditions she thought it would be best for each side if she complied with the aliens’ demand; perhaps circumstances were such that she could not make a free choice, whatever that is. The thing is that she had to change in order to be the bridge — that distanced her from her own species but gave her powers that only the aliens possessed, so that she could, to some extent, experience the universe like them. But change is hard, which is why she is also alienated from herself.

You are a physicist as well as a fiction author. When writing, do you ever experience a conflict between the laws of hard science and the whimsy-potential of fiction? Are your academic and creative minds ever at odds?

I think the laws of physics make for interesting constraints rather than conflict between rigor and creativity. Being aware of such constraints, I have to come up with plausible ways to explain, for example, faster-than-light travel, which is where creativity of the scientific kind comes into play. Creatively and deliberately violating these constraints can be fun too, as long as you have some kind of plausibility argument for an alternative set of laws. So my academic and creative minds are not in conflict, in fact they are a kind of hybrid beast, each feeding the other. A story I wrote for Project Hieroglyph, “Entanglement,” resulted in an academic project on climate change that took me to the edge of the Arctic Ocean last year. And once I was conducting a fairly standard undergraduate physics lab to do with rotations and the law of conservation of angular momentum, and I had this vision of giant wheels spinning in empty space, and that ended up turning into a very whimsical story called “Conservation Laws.”

Do you have details about any upcoming works that you would like to share with us?

I am currently putting the finishing touches on a novella about a female proto-scientist on a very different world for an upcoming anthology. It is an adventure story with lots of lovely worldbuilding. And I also have a semi-secret project working on an unwieldy creature that is a sort of anti-novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Sarah Pinsker

Jude Griffin | 507 words

How did this story come about?

Y’know, I’m usually clearer on a story’s provenance, but I’m struggling to remember the exact thing that inspired this one. I hate to say it was a dream, but I think it was a dream. I’m not going to say which dream or how close the fictionalized version was to the actual experience.

I always get lost in dream dictionaries — did you consult one at all for this story? Did it ever threaten to take over?

I only consulted a dream dictionary for the section where she goes online and does a cursory search for dream symbolism. I did the same cursory search that she did; since she wasn’t paying any attention to the credentials of the sources, I didn’t either. These are dreams being influenced by an outside source, so I don’t feel that they’re subject to the usual interpretations, and I didn’t want to be influenced by the question of how they might be interpreted by someone who believes in that sort of thing. I’ve always had vivid and strange dreams that don’t map well to interpretation. I’m interested in the idea that dreams are the brain’s way of working out something that is going on in the present by applying past experiences. That makes more sense to me than the idea that a dream of a wind-up toy monster spitting sparks across a backdrop of Georgia O’Keeffe skyscrapers would somehow mean the same thing to everyone.

So what did Taya’s note mean?

Taya works with animals. She’s applying things she has studied and read to the situation as she sees it.

Tell me about the title of the story.

The title and Taya’s note are related. The title is from King Lear:

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

That it’s had it head bit off by it young.

So out went the candle and we were left darkling.

This story has a fantasy feel but we’re told to read it as science fiction. Did you consider pushing it one way or the other?

The challenge here is that I know the explanation, but the story is told in a very tight first-person perspective and the characters don’t know. There are clues in the story, and there are people seeing things more clearly than others. Arthur C. Clarke said, ”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I guess I’m working on the premise that a phenomenon with a biological explanation might be indistinguishable from fantasy to the people experiencing it.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

My answer to this is always short fiction. Sometimes I pretend I’m working on my novel, but the siren call of the short form is too strong for me to ignore. I’ve got a story in the new Accessing the Future anthology that came out last month, and others coming down the pike. I just got back from the Sycamore Hill workshop with a story that I’m very eager to revise and send out into the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Vylar Kaftan

Sandra Odell | 978 words

This is the best representation of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format story that I have ever read, each section illuminating and brutally concise. What inspired this particular tale?

I was at Clarion West 2004, and I wanted to write something challenging in an unusual format. I wanted to see how much time I could cover in one story. And I’ve always adored CYOA books (I have literally the full collection of the original series, plus collections of some other series I enjoyed like Lone Wolf and Time Machine.)

So I sat on the couch and started scribbling snippets on index cards. Silly examples and elements of dysutopias (new word!) Eventually I shuffled the cards around and made the story. I designed it to read either chronologically (start to finish) or as an interactive adventure. It works either way.

When I showed it to my classmates, the reaction was split between “this is absolutely amazing” and “I want to burn this.” It was hilarious and educational. When your story pushes buttons like that, you know you’ve got something interesting. My teacher John Kessel suggested the improvement to the ending that made the story work.

The only specific “character” in the story is the reader him/herself, a specific person echoing the nebulous ideals of a culture. Some people may be uncomfortable with the presentation, while others insist that such discomfort is a necessary part of a writer’s works. When you set out to write “Civilization,” what did you hope readers would take away from the story?

I hoped people would see that despite the way humanity repeats the same damn mistakes over and over . . . we do make progress. A little, even when it seems hopeless. And that the best way to handle the utter chaos of the bigger world around us is to remember to love and connect to each other. Those deep connections are intensely meaningful.

I also hope readers will take away the feeling of, “Gosh, I liked that. I should go read more stories at vylarkaftan.net/bibliography right away!” And then they will write nice emails to me. I like emails.

Fiction has long been a mirror used to reflect both the grim realities and glorious fantasies that define our lives. What are your thoughts on the influence of fiction on the expectations of modern readers when it comes to war?

I’m a fan of war stories and conflict when they warn people about the real dangers of war. Not so crazy about the stuff that glorifies it all.

And I think there’s an importance place in the world for war stories. Fiction is way safer than war. War involves you or somebody else getting killed. Dying is a major downer and really not acceptable to a decent person. But the urge to kill each other is older than humanity; chimpanzees are known to conduct territory wars, and they even carry big sticks to hit each other with. (Sticks have many uses!)

Such primal urges can’t be crushed entirely. So a better idea is to channel the violence in more productive directions, or at least more hilarious ones. Just as sexual roleplaying can be a fun way to explore urges you wouldn’t act on . . . military fiction can offer release for the reader. It offers a safe way to see what happens when people are dehumanized, killed, and/or used by their governments — without actually hurting real people.

Did I mention how satisfying it is to hit things with sticks?

Format and structure — stories as lists, choose-your-own-adventures, letters, calendars — go a long way towards framing reader perceptions and expectations of a story. Are there any formats or styles that you would still like to try? Do you have a particular favorite story that takes advantage of an unusual format?

I have some cool format ideas that I haven’t explored yet. Look for more odd formatting from me in the future. Some ideas I’d rather keep as a surprise, but here’s one I’d like to explore.

I want to explore the idea of writing as performance art — something done to engage an audience, with audience participation. Sometime at a con, I’d like to do a solo presentation called Vylar Flashes the Audience. We have seventy-five minutes. I get a few suggestions from the crowd and work them up into a flash piece. The audience watches me draft, with my words projected on a screen. People can see exactly how I craft sentences and why I do what I do. After the draft, I answer some questions. Then I edit the draft on the spot to show how I fix things and tighten it up.

I’m a social person and my writing reflects that. My social nature improves my chances of not dying of consumption, alone in a garret. Well, I suppose contact with fans increases my chances of getting consumption . . .

You are a prolific author with a wide range of works in multiple genres. If you could write a letter to the Vylar just starting her writing career, what would you say?

Brush your goddamn teeth! You don’t want massive dental expenses just when you’re wanting to make a career of writing. Take care of your body and your health. You may feel young and immortal, but you’re not.

What can readers expect from Vylar Kaftan in the coming months? What tasty bits of fiction are in the making?

I’ve got a story in the September issue of Asimov’s. It’s called “Last Hunt,” and it’s about a transgender Inuit hunter. Just like in my Nebula-winning novella “The Weight of the Sunrise,” I focus on cultural details and people who are under-represented in science fiction. As always, I try my best to be respectful of the culture. I continue to sponsor micro-loans; see vylarkaftan.net/2012/07/26/giving-back-to-the-source-of-my-inspiration.

For more contact with me, I recommend Twitter, where I’m @Vylar_Kaftan.

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: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Sandra Odell | 700 words

“To See Pedro Infante” is a visceral sensory experience: the sense of cramped living spaces; dirty fingernails; the images on the billboards; rubbing a thumb across smooth, cool glass. Readers’ impressions of a story are formed as much by the setting as they are by the characters. How did you come to explore this particular setting, the world of a young woman trapped in amber?

When my grandmother was fifteen she went to work as a secretary. One of the highlights of her brief career was the day actor and singer Pedro Infante walked into the office and winked at her. Picture yourself at fifteen and Brad Pitt has just walked in through the door and noticed that you exist, you among a pool of a dozen typists.

It was a story she told often, the time Pedro Infante came to the office, and sadly it was one of the only things that ever happened to her, as she saw it. This is a story inspired by my grandmother who spent her whole life wishing for a different existence, a kind of Mexican Madame Bovary.

Cecilia is shaped by the limits of her environment and her desire to escape its bonds. Her struggle for identity, for something greater in her life, speaks to the existence of many women today, young and old. How do you see fiction reflecting this struggle?

Many of my stories are about a desire to escape, which is simply one of the earliest emotions I recall. I cannot speak about fiction in general but my fiction is based on my life and the people in my life. One of the things that happened when you were a woman, and still happens, is that you exist with a set of limited opportunities. Men, they can go to sea and explore the seven seas, but for a long time in many societies women could not do the same thing. And there was a kind of martyrdom, of denying oneself in Mexican society, which I found abhorrent. I write about escape because I know several women who did not escape, who simply sat at home and aged and saw their life pass by, unhappy and unable to imagine anything else.

No seven seas for them.

As a writer who is female, what do you feel artists can do to better promote the stories of women, particularly women of color?

Talk about them, not as items for exotic consumption that come up once in a while (hey, it’s Mexican Writer Week) but as everyday occurrences which occupy the same spaces as any other writers. Mostly, just talk.

This story freely slips between genre labels — magical realism, urban fantasy, women’s literature. What are your thoughts on the use of genre labels and how they influence reader expectations?

I like to write stuff that crosses over and bleeds into one another, and also to explore the limits and expectations of certain fiction. It is unfortunate that categories sometimes stifle both writers and readers so that something like women’s literature can be immediately perceived as dull or unworthy. Categorization can also relegate you to being a “type” of writer and I have no interest in being a type of anything.

Your novel Signal to Noise is a work of magic, love, and the bittersweet line between the two. It evokes memories of the ’80s, and a sense of the gentle melancholy that often comes when you realize you haven’t outlived your dreams of yesterday, merely forgotten them. How much of your own experiences did you put into that story?

A lot of what I write is autobiographical in some way and this is no exception. I am the daughter of two radio station employees, so I was interested in writing about sound. I grew up in the ’80s and the world I saw appears in the novel.

What other projects do you have in the works? What can readers expect from Silvia Moreno-Garcia in the future?

I finished rewrites of my second novel, which is set in Mexico City and involves narco vampires. I’m almost done with my third novel, which is a romance set in the Belle Epoque. This fall marks the release of She Walks in Shadows, the first all-woman Lovecraftian anthology. I’m one of the editors of that.

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: Sam J. Miller

Patrick Stephens | 800 words

What moment from “Ghosts of Home” would you say is the pivotal moment — both the one you feel represents the theme, and/or the one that you feel started the story in your mind?

I was comparing the different mythologies of household spirits — this very common belief, among wildly different cultures all over the world, that homes have souls, or spirits, or gods. Not ghosts — not entities that were once human, haunting a space they loved — but embodiments of the home itself. It’s such a fascinating global response to the profound material and spiritual importance of the home in our lives. At the same time, I’m watching the foreclosure crisis unfold, watching people losing their homes at an astonishing rate, watching banks keep these homes empty rather than offer those families principal reductions, debt forgiveness, any of the very easy legal mechanisms by which they could let people stay in their homes. There’s an estimated eighteen million empty homes in this country — and an estimated three million homeless households. (That means every homeless family could have six homes!) Because property rights trump human rights in this country — they always have, going back to when human beings were property. But the banks aren’t dumb, and they’ll put a lot of resources into keeping their buildings in good shape — I just started thinking about what that would look like in a more magical world, where homes did have “household spirits,” and how just like the banks now pay security firms to check periodically for squatters, they’d pay somebody a crummy wage to leave offerings to placate hostile spirits. And then I was in Chinatown, around Lunar New Year, and saw so many stores and restaurants where little altars had been set up with offerings of oranges and incense — and the story fell into place around those oranges.

The emotion and feeling of this story is very raw. What about the emotions of loneliness do you think makes stories like these so compelling in the atmosphere of science fiction?

Loneliness is universal, and of course universal emotions have deep resonance across all genres. For me, with this story, I wanted to make the forlorn heart-rending sadness of displacement real to readers who’ve never experienced it directly . . . but do it in a different way. Lots of people hear about the foreclosure crisis, families evicted by banks, and have a hard time feeling sympathy for them — there’s this dominant narrative in the media that these people made bad decisions, got greedy, or were stupid and signed papers they shouldn’t have. So I wanted to flip it — this is a story about the loneliness of a house, of a spirit, and I wanted to make it raw and painful enough that people can feel sorry for a fictional spirit even if they can’t feel sorry for actual people. And then hopefully see how that’s super fucked up.

Which character did you most connect with when writing, and which scene do you feel may exemplify that?

The house, of course! Anyone who’s ever lost a home or had to move out in a hurry knows how painful that can be, when you stand in the doorway to this place that meant so much to you, which you’ll never see again, and smell it, and see the sun on the floor of an empty room. We project ourselves onto the spaces where we live. They’re extensions of ourselves. That’s why displacement, foreclosure, eviction, gentrification — those are far more violent crimes than any random mugging. For me, if our justice system actually had any true justice, every bank executive who okayed these mass evictions and foreclosures would spend their lives in prison.

What do you most identify with in “Ghosts of Home”?

I think I might be the mom here, alas. Angry, and over it. To me the morality here is so clear-cut, and I sometimes find myself with precious little patience for people who parrot the bullshit “if you’re poor it’s your fault and you deserve every bad thing that happens” ethos of capitalism . . . so I often don’t have the energy for the conversation. And then sometimes I do — and so I write stories like this.

What can we expect from you in the future?

Working on a young adult science fiction novel entitled “The Art of Starving,” about a bullied small-town gay teenager with an eating disorder. You know, a light-hearted romp. And just generally hard at work Destroying Science Fiction, all the time, in whatever way I can. Short stories. Maybe a webcomic. Something constructive I can do with all the hot buff guys and dinosaurs I find myself drawing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and has published two books since his return. Aurichrome (and Other Stories) and Sondranos: the Narrative of Leon Bishop are both available in free ebook form and hard copy.

Author Spotlight: Ursula Pflug

Jude Griffin | 1,500 words

How did “Python” come about?

When I wrote “Python” I was living on a farm in eastern Peterborough County in Ontario, looking after small children, a big house, and a large vegetable garden. It was hard to find time to write, partly, I’m sure, because I hung cloth diapers out, more fool me. But I was disciplined and wrote every day — writing was important and I had the role model of my mother, the painter Christiane Pflug, who painted all day, every day, whether she felt like it or not. My partner, the multimedia artist Doug Back, was a devoted dad and played with the kids while I worked if he was home from the city. I had a little room on the second floor overlooking the driveway; across the road lay a swamp where the dogwoods filled with chorus frogs every spring. I had an arts council grant to work on short fiction — never underestimate the importance of funding — especially in Canada where writers and publishers compete for readers with US publishers with far greater resources. Notice I am telling a Woolfian kind of tale here — about a room of one’s own, childcare, and a stipend — it’s still relevant.

“Python” is inspired by a trip I took to New Orleans with a close friend when we were young. New Orleans was a revelation — my one and only trip to the American south. I’m told it’s not representative — that New Orleans isn’t really the south, just as Berlin, where my family is from, isn’t really Germany.

The story isn’t literal truth — it’s a fantastical quest inspired by the feel of New Orleans and my memories of Mardi Gras. When writing semiautobiographical fiction, I tell students, there’s a point where you change everyone’s names, appearances, and styles of dress, and they start to behave in ways that are divergent from the people who inspired them, and have undreamed of adventures. And at that point the work is no longer kind-of-memoir but true fiction, although Faith definitely shares some of my thoughts and perspectives.

But there are moments in this story, such as Faith’s trans acquaintance asking her to throw the moon out the window that to this day I wonder where it came from — it delights me and I feel oddly honoured to have written it, as if, in a way, that image was a gift. And many of the images are gifts; that’s what it felt like to write: I’d close my eyes and see the urban fairy tale images, and record them if you will.

Python is one of those stories that “wrote itself,” as they say. I polished it the day after I wrote it and understood that if I kept going, revising or adding beyond that very light edit, I risked destroying it, which is something I’ve done, saving over an original in the mistaken belief I was improving it.

Can you talk a little bit about the long journey to publication and then reprints for this award-winning story?

I sent the story to a few different places including Century, Interzone, and the Canadian Tesseracts anthology in ’96 — so it was probably written in ’95 or so — I could nail down the date if I had a computer that could run the floppy the original is stored on. Eventually I sent it to Jeff Vandermeer. He had published me in Leviathan One, and he suggested I send it to Rose Secrest, a writer who coedited the second Leviathan. Rose awarded the story a prize in her annual contest, and Jeff sent the story to Keith Brooke for his Infinity Plus website, so that was its first publication, in 2002, the same year my first novel came out, the interdimensional turtle story Green Music. I used to keep really detailed submission files, which I went so far as to copy from one hard drive to the next. Just now looking up “Python” I find a note which says I had offered the story to Jeff for his website in trade for a possible ad for Green Music — so presumably that was the first time he saw it and then suggested I send it to Rose and to Keith. This leads me to believe he was publishing short fiction on whatever website he had at the time, but who knows? It’s a long time ago.

Jeff started putting together Album Zutique during that time as well, and asked if he could have “Python” for it. After that it didn’t appear again till it was reprinted in my 2008 collection After the Fires, published by Toronto’s Tightrope Books, a wonderful small press started by writer Halli Villegas.

It was turned down sixteen times and took seven years to see print. It’s an arty story, not the kind of thing you can send to Asimov’s or the Magazine of F and SF. I might have done better sending it to a Canadian literary magazine, but it may also have been too “genre” for them. I’ve always been an arty writer and it’s partly because of the way I grew up, with parents who talked about Kafka and Burroughs — who are both speculative fiction writers, of course, but were published as “mainstream,” as it’s called only in the genre community.

Does Faith’s story continue?

I definitely wanted to make it into a longer work, but the voice is very particular and wasn’t reproducible. Sometimes that happens. There are a handful of drafts towards others, a series of linked short stories, but at a certain point I realized I couldn’t bear them.

What were the challenges of balancing the uncertainties of Faith’s experience with providing a coherent thread for readers to follow?

The story is about the fluidity of identity and finding a part of oneself that, in a way, stands outside of experience, observing, and how that objective or even alienated eye can provide an anchor, can be the narrative thread holding together multiple selves in an uncertain world, an uncertain story. If all is uncertain, then uncertainty becomes certainty. Who said that?

More:

“Python” has appeared in Canada, the US, and the UK; it’s been republished more than any other story I’ve written except for “The Water Man” — all this in spite of being turned down sixteen times and taking half a dozen years to find a home. What do we learn from this? Perseverance.

I was recently on the short fiction panel at Ottawa’s inaugural Prose In the Park festival — it threw genre and literary writers, Giller winners, and emerging authors all together in a smallish park where audience and writerly interaction were supported — we partook in a brilliant day long community where I had some of the better literary conversations I’ve had in years! The conversations at SF and fantasy cons tend to repeat themselves after a while in a kind of never-ending circle. It was great to be able to talk about short stories, not genre short stories.

I read from “Python,” partly in celebration of its appearance on Lightspeed. I wondered aloud whether it’s really superior to other stories I’ve written or whether we just become associated with certain stories — editors ask for them because of their familiarity. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a famous example of this.

Anyway, I think it is better. It was a gift. Tonya Liburd, a Toronto writer and editor, wrote me that when she grew up she wanted to be able to write a story like “Python,” and the truth is, I wrote back, so do I. Magic flits into your life and then flits out again.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’m currently in the final stages of editing an anthology for the Callaghan press Exile, together with Vancouver editor and author Colleen Anderson. It’s called The Playground of Lost Toys and is slated for a November release. It’s a speculative anthology, but we have amazing stories by both genre and mainstream authors, Canadian because of funding stipulations.

I’ve been teaching a Trent University Con Ed course with critic Derek NewmanStille and that has been a lot of fun — we hope to do more in the fall.

I began a short story in late winter when I returned home from teaching workshops in Mexico and I haven’t actually found time to finish it, but that may be a necessary thing. I had several books go to press in the last few years, including the story collection Harvesting the Moon (PS); the rural fantasy novel The Alphabet Stones, which was shortlisted for the ReLit, (Blue Denim); and the illustrated flash novel Motion Sickness (Inanna), which is a mainstream book, with incredible illustrations by SK Dyment. I also edited another anthology, They Have To Take You In, on the theme of family. It’s a mainstream/speculative fundraiser anthology benefiting mental health.

Given all that, I wound up exhausted — maybe it’s a good time to cut back and regroup.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine

Sandra Odell | 765 words

“Given the Advantage of the Blade” is a delightfully cruel and bloody story with an underpinning of the awareness of the diversity of women in myth and legend, and how women are perceived today. What inspired this particular story?

Precisely that. The relationships between women in folklore seem sadly mapped over the myth of exceptionalism we see so often today — one woman’s the fairest or the kindest, and the others are wicked and cruel. You see so many news stories about how a woman is “the next X” (a replacement for that one elusive position) or a headline with a “vs.” in it, like just having two women existing at the same time means they’re in a standoff. So much of the post-Carter genre of fairy-tale retelling centers on those relationships: to complicate them, to show there’s more than just a jealous queen in iron shoes. But there are so many stories in which women are at the mercy of women that the knife fight seems inevitable.

Perception is everything in this story. The mercy killings of long-lashed cows. Queens cataloguing wounds. Cinderella’s mother’s balloon-thin cruelty. The rose on Beauty’s dagger. How the characters see their strengths and weaknesses may not reflect the reality of the moment. What are your thoughts on how a reader’s perceptions influence their interpretation of a story?

I think a reader’s perceptions inevitably influence a story, and fairy-tale history is something of a fossil record for it. Stories trace trade routes (recorded Cinderella stories start in China and move slowly west). Stories get bowdlerized until Sleeping Beauty’s woken by love’s first kiss instead of childbirth, they get softened until Red Riding Hood needs saving. It’s a process over which a story has no control, that’s often (and not coincidentally) about changing the point of control in the stories themselves. Some of the women in this knife-fight wouldn’t recognize versions of themselves that competed four hundred years ago.

Recent years have seen a deliberate shift in how women are portrayed in fiction, and how such portrayals speak to real world concerns and attitudes. This story opens itself wide to these changes, every nuance in plotting and staging leading the reader and the characters further along the path of self-awareness. If you could speak directly to young writers dipping their toes in the waters of genre fiction, what advice would you have for them about how to avoid the pitfalls common to female characters?

I’m not sure young writers are necessarily the ones who need the most advice here, but as a general rule I think a laundry list of what to do or not do is only useful once you’re sure of your destination and only need a map to avoid specific pitfalls. If you approach her as a subject, not an object, you’re halfway to doing the work.

You are a prolific writer with a diverse voice. What is the greatest difference between writing prose and writing for comic books?

They’re entirely different animals, partially because comics are so collaborative; in comics, you’re writing both to your audience and directly to your artist in order to make sure you can visually translate something that will do an amazing amount of the storytelling. (In comics, a fight scene can be three stage directions and a character note. In prose, a fight scene always takes me half an hour to block out just to make sure nobody has more arms than they’re supposed to.) It’s a more cinematic style of storytelling that still keeps some of the charms and tricks unique to the page; between two worlds.

When you’re hungry for a taste of genre, who sets your imagination on fire?

Honestly, I’m never doing as much reading as I should be doing, but the more widely I read, the better it goes. I also like alternating fiction (I deeply enjoyed The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn) with nonfiction (How to Be a Victorian), if for no other reason than nonfiction almost always ends up being research even if you don’t expect it at the time.

What can we expect from Genevieve Valentine? What do you have in store for readers in the second half of 2015?

It’s almost impossible to get me to shut up about TV and movies, so I’ll be publishing some essays and articles there. I just turned in the sequel to Persona, which will be out in 2016 (so it’s cheating slightly but it counts, sort of!). I’m writing Catwoman for DC Comics, and I hope to start putting together a short story collection before the year is out.

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: John Varley

John Varley | 246 words

We make it a point to ask our writers a few questions about their story to get deeper insight into the work and their process as creators. When staff members Sandra Odell and Robyn Lupo contacted John Varley with their questions, he sent back this delightful reply.

• • • •

Hi Sandra and Robyn,

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and almost thought I could fake it . . . but the truth of it is that I don’t think I can answer these questions. The reason may sound strange to you. I simply don’t recall enough of the story.

Of course, I could read it again, but I have a fairly strict policy of not doing that. Not looking back unless I absolutely have to. The reason for this is also sort of weird. If I read an old story of mine, one of two things happens:

I am amazed at how friggin’ brilliant the story and the prose is. How could I have written something this good? I don’t remember doing it. Thus, I get depressed because I know I’ll never be this good again.

Or . . . I just can’t believe how totally terrible the story is. I’m amazed that anyone ever bought it, printed it, read it, or liked it. I get depressed because I really would not like to see the story printed again.

There isn’t a lot of middle ground between those two reactions. So I don’t re-read.

Also, I don’t much like talking about my work. I much prefer to let it stand on its own, for better or for worse.

You may use this letter as an explanation of why there’s no real Author Spotlight for me, if you wish. Or not, as you prefer.

Regretfully,

John Varley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Varley is an ex-Texan who used to be 6’6” but has now shrunk to a mere 6’3”. He doesn’t know where the three inches went. A passionate campaigner for the rights of the left-handed, he is a member of several of the more fashionable twelve-step programs. In an alternate universe somewhere, he won an Academy Award and was the first human to break the sound barrier. In his spare time, he raises champion blue-skinned velociraptors. He doesn’t know why so many things seem to have gone wrong in the world during his lifetime, but he swears that very little of it was his fault.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Caroline M. Yoachim (“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World”) and Megan Arkenberg (“All in a Hot and Copper Sky”), along with SF reprints by Daniel H. Wilson (“God Mode,” from the new video game anthology Press Start to Play) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sean McMullen (“The Ninth Seduction”) and Heather Lindsley (“Werewolf Loves Mermaid”), and fantasy reprints by Theodora Goss (“Estella Saves the Village”) and Maurice Broaddus (“The Iron Hut”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, a feature interview, and the latest installment of our book review column.

For our ebook readers, we also have a novella reprint from Eliot Fintushel (“Milo and Sylvie”) and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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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 Lightspeed Team

The Editors

John Joseph Adams, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Loosed Upon the World, 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 seven-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.

Wendy N. Wagner, Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have its own post office, and the bookmobile’s fortnightly visit was her lifeline to the world. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies,The Lovecraft eZine, Armored, The Way of the Wizard, and Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Her first novel, Skinwalkers, is a Pathfinder Tales adventure. An avid gamer and gardener, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her very understanding family. Follow her on Twitter @wnwagner.

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

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Stefan Rudnicki

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Jim Freund

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Henry Lien

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Robyn Lupo

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Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

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Andrew Liptak

Sunil Patel

Amal El-Mohtar

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Dana Watson

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Anthony R. Cardno

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