TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 67, December 2015

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, December 2015

SCIENCE FICTION

Tomorrow When We See the Sun
A. Merc Rustad

Beacon 23: Little Noises
Hugh Howey

Beneath the Silent Stars
Aidan Doyle

The Time Travel Club
Charlie Jane Anders

FANTASY

The Queen’s Reason
Richard Parks

Tea Time
Rachel Swirsky

Portfolio
Mark Rigney

Ex Libris Noctis
Jay Lake

NOVELLA

The Surfer
Kelly Link

NOVEL EXCERPTS

A Daughter of No Nation
A.M. Dellamonica

NONFICTION

Artist Showcase: James Ng
Henry Lien

Book Reviews: December 2015
Amal El-Mohtar

Interview: Andy Weir
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

A. Merc Rustad

Richard Parks

Hugh Howey

Rachel Swirsky

Aidan Doyle

Mark Rigney

Charlie Jane Anders

Kelly Link

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2015 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by James Ng

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, December 2015

John Joseph Adams | 1020 words

Welcome to issue sixty-seven of Lightspeed!

Big news this month, friends: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of my Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (and the rest of the Best American series), have offered me the opportunity to edit a science fiction/fantasy (and horror) novel line for them—and naturally I agreed!

The line will be called John Joseph Adams Books (their idea, not mine!), and will be a tightly-curated list of 7-10 titles per year. We’ll be pre-launching the line in early 2016 with new editions of three Hugh Howey novels: Beacon 23, Shift, and Dust—making them available via traditional publishing for the first time, and then the line will kick things off in earnest in early 2017 with our first batch of never-before-published works.

If you’re a regular reader of my magazines and/or anthologies, then you should already have a good idea what to expect—and if you like my work as a short fiction editor, then I suspect you’ll like the novels I publish as well. The John Joseph Adams Books website is still under development, but if you bookmark johnjosephadamsbooks.com, that’ll take you to it when it’s ready.

And never fear, dear readers—I’ll still be here, working to bring you your monthly dose of nightmares, and I’ll still be editing Lightspeed and anthologies as well. How (?!), you may ask. Good question—I’m not entirely sure! I will probably have to get much better at delegating! But the good news is, I had to consider about three hundred novels this year as a judge for the National Book Award (Young People’s Literature category), so if I was able to do that without all of the wheels coming off the bus, then I’m confident I’ll also be able to figuring out a way to fit acquiring and editing 7-10 novels into my schedule. That, or I’ll just give up optional extracurricular activities, like sleep.

• • • •

In awards news: The World Fantasy Awards were presented at the World Fantasy Convention, held this year in Saratoga Springs, NY, in early November. Your humble editor was nominated once again in the “Special Award: Professional” category, and, alas, I lost once again—this time to the folks who run the wonderful press ChiZine Publications. Congratulations to them, and to all of the other winners and nominees. You can see a full list of the nominees and winners at worldfantasy.org/awards.

• • • •

ICYMI, October saw the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

Also recently released was Loosed Upon the World (Saga Press, Sep. 2015), 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. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed.

And back in August, I published a new anthology 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 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.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad (“Tomorrow When We See the Sun”) and Aidan Doyle (“Beneath the Silent Stars”), along with SF reprints by Hugh Howey (“Beacon 23: Little Noises”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“The Time Travel Club”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Rachel Swirsky (“Tea Time”) and the late Jay Lake (“Ex Libris Noctis”), and fantasy reprints by Richard Parks (“The Queen’s Reason”) and Mark Rigney (“Portfolio”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with an interview with The Martian author Andy Weir, and the latest installation of our book review column.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “The Surfer” by Kelly Link, and a novel excerpt from A Daughter of No Nation by A.M. Dellamonica.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

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 editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, 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 two-time 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.

Tomorrow When We See the Sun

A. Merc Rustad | 7000 words

I.

The last wolflord will be executed on the cusp of the new solar year.

II.

Wolflord (title): nomadic, nameless survivors of destroyed warships; those who did not accept ritual immolation during the Decommission. No allegiance to the Principality; outlaws. The antiquated title is self-taken from the first deserter, whose name and memory were erased upon execution; precise origin unknown.

• • • •

Released from its stasis, Mere stretches and glides through the wide atrium wreathed in bionic roses and silk banners. It pauses at the gates that hang perpetually open on the Courts of Tranquility. The sensory matrix on the threshold purrs against its consciousness in greeting.

“What awaits this it?” Mere asks the threshold.

The last wolflord. A great victory.

Mere feels nothing at the announcement, as it should. It is not allowed emotion.

It parades to the pool, proud-arched spine and lifted jaw; autonomous machine-flesh granted scraps of self and mind.

(In the glued and stapled seams, it has painted its own awareness. A taste for Zhouderrian wines fermented in the aftermath of white dwarf stars; the poetry of Li Sin, disfavored master of nanite-barbed words; desire stacked like coiled DNA strands, a tower of cards; a voice etched from grave-silence and forgotten pauses between peace and war. It displays none of itself, for it has also learned fear: It can be taken apart and erased if it deviates from its scripted role.)

Mere crouches at the pool’s lip. Once its function is complete, it will be returned to stasis. Mere dreads its inevitable sleep.

From this vantage, it surveys the Courts of Tranquility, the synaptic-like rainfall of light along the membranous domed ceiling, the living heartbeat of the tamed planet carved and grown to a million fine-tuned specifications and indulgences. And those within, oh yes, it has seen these courtiers often:

—nobles in redolent synth armor; generals and admirals decked in finest military dress; pilots, their faces replaced with the mindscreens of their ships—

—an eleven-souled sorcerer who drinks the breath of his favorite nemesis, their words twined together as they spar with tongue and gaze, neither ever ready to destroy the other (for then the fun would end)—

—the Gold Sun Lord, resplendent armored god, ensconced in a hover-throne that drifts about the Courts, omnipresent and untouchable—

And below, in the oblong pool where Mere has spent half of its conscious existence, the last wolflord is bound wrist and ankle, suspended in water as every ancillary world watches the feed. There will be no backup made of the wolflord’s mind, no funerary rites in the Archives of Heaven. Treason unto the Principality is not suffered lightly.

The Arbiter of the Suns steps forward and lifts reedy, sulfur-scorched hands. Smoke-cured breath fills ordained words with harmonies and atonal bass-clef chords. “You are summoned here, dearly condemned . . .”

Mere unbends its body, muscle and ligament stretched along metal bones, and glides into the pool, water slicing to either side of its midriff. It cradles the disgraced wolflord’s head in one splayed hand. The other, fingers knife-tipped, rests along the condemned’s throat. Unseen, Mere spools neuron-thin tendrils into the base of the wolflord’s spine and siphons away pain and fear.

The wolflord’s body slackens in synthesized, unwanted calm. “Why do this?” the wolflord grinds out, words blocked by auditory and visual firewalls. None in the Courts of Tranquility will witness a criminal’s last words.

By protocol, Mere is granted the same erasure. It could scream and curse, and no one would hear (except its keepers, silent beneath the pool and always watching). “It is civilized,” Mere says with a mocking smile.

“No.” The wolflord struggles to speak. “You. Why do you . . . obey, Mere . . .”

Mere has never heard its name, found upon waking when it was first brought online, spoken aloud. For the first time since it has served as executioner (sixteen hundred rotations), Mere wants an answer from the damned: “How do you know this it?”

The wolflord’s eyelids droop with the sedative. “Loved you . . . once . . . I am so . . . sorry . . .”

“. . . and thus the heavens are cleansed anew,” says the Arbiter, and Mere cuts the last wolflord’s throat.

Blood ribbons out, diluted and sucked clean into vents. The wolflord’s spirit sinks as a glossy pebble to the pool’s bed.

Mere glances up at the Arbiter’s consorts that are ringed about the pool edge. Tattooed jawbones, bared of muscle and flesh, grin with engraved teeth; razored laughter cooks inside skinned throats.

“Where did you net the wolflord?” Mere asks.

They hum a response in chorus, each voice sculpted as a single, distinct, perfect note.

You shouldn’t care for the dead.

A traitor on the rim of knownspace,

seeking paradise in madness.

Spoke of you, of others lost,

begged mercy for crimes

and forgiveness, never granted.

They tip eyeless heads down in regret. The Arbiter’s consorts are hunters and bailiffs, as close to allies—never friends, never close—as Mere has. They bring it trinkets and bits of new poetry, synthesized tastings of wine, scents of uncharted galaxies and the sound of dying stars. In return, Mere slips the consorts filaments forged between its ribs to dull their unceasing pain.

(Sometimes, they share fragments of memory of who they were before they were exulted. Mere has trouble recalling what they have told it.)

Mere unwinds the neural threads from its fingertips, catching final memories and thought-imprints in illegal mods on its palms. It scythes its fingers in the water to wash away the blood.

With duty finished, the Arbiter glides away, flanked by consorts, to join the eleven-souled sorcerer at a table.

The wolflord’s hair fans out in gray strands that brush and twine lifeless about Mere’s wrist. Mere tilts its head, startled by the odd sensation, like it is choking. Is this grief? How can it grieve what it does not remember?

• • • •

Mere is put back in stasis, where it dreams.

The keepers do not watch Mere sleep. So it unwraps the last worlflord’s stolen memories.

her hair smells of ruined worlds and clover soap

bring my conquests, she says, bring all of them and I will aid you

she whispers a string of coordinates, a planet once called Rebirth

each kiss nettles the tongue with microscopic treason, plague passed mouth to mouth

call forth the Red Sun Lord, champion of the dead

let us live again; let us rebuild; let us redeem ourselves

The rest: lost like unsanctioned souls brewed in a frosted glass kept chilled at zero Kelvin.

Mere aches, a phantom-physical sensation it cannot control.

There remains an early impression in its subconscious: on a barren world, a laboratory lined with glass suspension tanks, cold-filled with other bodies. Mere has no empirical evidence the recollection is its own. It was made, but by whom is unknown.

(It has no desire for a creator.)

Yet, the she with the plague kiss—it feels kinship for her, sharp, embossed on its awareness with sudden heat.

• • • •

The Decommission (event): as a measure of good faith upon the signing of the peace treaty between the Seven Sun Lords, each god decommissioned and executed one thousand of their most powerful warships. Each ship and its pilot self-destructed within an uninhabited system of choice and were granted honor in the eyes of the Seven Suns.

• • • •

Mere wakes without its keepers’ bidding. It blinks back the protective film on its eyes and stares at the lid of its stasis pod. Odd. Mere presses its palm against the lid, and it retracts into the floor.

A she crouches outside, dressed in mirrorsilk armor, visor drawn over her face so all it sees is its own reflection. “Mere?” she says, synthesized voice low.

“You have acquired unauthorized access to this it,” Mere says. “It is curious why.”

The stasis chamber is empty. Unadorned red walls and its stasis pod in the center with a ring of security lights above. Mere notes the disabled alarms and the blinding virus chewing at the keepers’ optic-feeds.

The she flicks her visor up. Her eyes are quicksilver, liquid and bright—cybernetic implants that contrast space-dark skin. “I’m Century. I’m here to free you.”

Mere is intrigued. No one has ever wished to free it, not even the Arbiter’s consorts. “Why?”

“I made you,” she says. The smell of the ancient laboratory is etched under her armor. “A crime I cannot undo. But we have no time. You have already been condemned for not reporting this security breach.” Her lips twist in a bitter smile. “Do you want to live?”

Mere has no organic heart (it knows the rhythmic beat of muscle against bone, has read of it in lines of Li Sin’s poetry), yet it still knows fear. It lost any choice when the she broke in.

“It will follow, then.”

• • • •

Century blurs down the maintenance halls, the invisible veins of the Courts, enhanced speed given by her armor. Mere lopes at her heels.

It processes data and sensation in microseconds:

—it is exile, a faulty machine to be unmade—

—this is no coincidence Century broke into the Courts of Tranquility, a feat deemed impossible by the Principality, only hours after the last wolflord died—

—it is exhilarated—

—what will it do now? Its purpose, courtly executioner, has been dismantled—

They slip beneath the cityskin to the spaceport. Vessels of all make and class dock in thousands of bays. Century stops before an eel-ship, coiled in jewel-skinned splendor. Its great eye-ports are open, and Century signals with a hand; the eel distends a proboscis lined with diamond mesh and graphene plates like a ramp. Century leads Mere into the eel’s body.

Alarms klaxon in Mere’s head—its escape is known.

Within the eel’s retrofitted abdomen, synthetic tubes house the mechanics and computerized guts. Finery for living; oxygen filtration system and water recycling.

“Where will you take it?” Mere asks.

Century does not reply.

Mere crouches, toe-talons locked against the mesh floor panel. The she whispers to the eel-ship, and the great sinuous vessel unpeels itself from the port and scythes into vacuum.

III.

Olinara V (planet, former population: seventeen million): Once a thriving colony world settled early in the founding of the Principality, it was decimated by the Gold Sun Lord when an escaped trinket-slave sought refuge in the Olinarain wilds. Olinara V is now classified as an uninhabitable world.

• • • •

Mere has never been off-world. It taps the gills of the eel-ship, which obliges and unfurls interior flaps of skin to reveal translucent, hardened outerflesh and a view of space.

This odd, unclassifiable sense of kinship with the dead has grown the farther from the Courts they travel—a need (honor-bound) to see the dead to proper rest so they might pass into one of the afterlives in paradise or purgatory, reinvention or rebirth. It has killed so many, it longs to redeem itself. The last wolflord gave it the key.

“Why did you free this it?” Mere asks.

“An old debt.” Century grinds her teeth. “Once we’re out of range of the Courts’ sensors, I jettison you in a shuttle, wraith. You can make your own path.”

Mere pets the eel-ship, grateful for the indulgence, and turns towards the she. “Take it to the court of the Red Sun first.”

“No,” Century says.

“You will.” Mere flexes its hands. “You forged this exile without consent. You owe this it.”

Century whirls. The she has a plasgun at its jaw, muzzle pressed into soft tissue beneath its chin, and in turn, it rests its fingertips against the back of her neck. It looks down at her. The mirrorsilk burns into its skin, coiling up its wrist and burrowing towards bone.

“I can unmake you far easier than I made you, Mere.”

“It can sever your brainstem through your armor with but a gentle pinch of its fingers.”

Century scoffs. “We are both destruction incarnate. Perhaps this is a better end.”

Mere does not think the she wishes to die; it does not. If it kills her, the eel-ship will never take it where it must go. “A truce.” Mere lowers its arm, flesh chewed back to wire and metal skeleton, the knives bright. It will heal slowly. “It has a proposition.”

Century holsters the gun. “Do you.”

Mere extracts the last wolflord’s memories, printed into a small holochip it saved for one of the Arbiter’s consorts. “It is the wolflord who found Rebirth, is it not?”

Century’s shoulders tighten. “That world was lost long ago.”

Mere repeats the coordinates to her. Her expression remains inert. “It is what the wolflord remembered at death.”

“Damn you.” Century tips her head back and sighs. “I told him to forget.”

Mere offers her the holochip. “Clearly.”

Century doesn’t accept. “We thought the Red Sun’s presence would weaken the bindings of the consecrated pool. Once that happened, we could collect the soul seeds and bring them somewhere. Another planet. Give them proper rest. It was just a dream.”

“‘Dreams need not stay trapped in sleep alone,’” Mere says, quoting Li Sin. “Bring this it to the Red Sun Lord. We will rescue the dead.”

Century raises her eyebrows. “Do you know how many security protocols I hacked to get in ‘unnoticed’ the first time? I helped build the Courts.” She snorts. “I constructed the pool. I built the door matrix. The Courts were supposed to be an end to the galaxy-spanning wars I fought and won. The Principality was supposed to bring peace, starting with the Decommission.”

It tilts its head, watching the she sidelong. “You are old, then.”

“I am,” Century says with a bitter laugh. “But what’s age any longer?”

“You do not believe this endeavor possible.”

“No,” Century says. “I don’t. Not anymore.”

Mere examines its healing arm, flesh reknitting. There is an ache in its ribs it cannot define. “At least bring it to the Red Sun. All the souls in the pool are there by its hand; it would see them to a better fate.”

Century flinches, near-imperceptible.

But she speaks to the eel-ship, and they set course for a different court.

• • • •

Blue Sun Lord (God): one of the Seven Suns, everlasting and all-knowing rulers of the Principality. Dwelling within the Hollow Systems, the Blue Sun Lord oversees the sanctified pool within the Courts of Tranquility; the Blue Sun Lord is a merciful and generous god [search terminated]

• • • •

The ship glides through a radiant nebula; the eel-ship’s body glows as it absorbs radiation and shed filaments from the void, skin sluiced away from a progenitor star. This reminds Mere of Li Sin’s collection, Bound Infinity, Transcendent. Mere has dabbled in poetry, played with bits of unattached verse:

Breathing in designer atmosphere / academic bloodsport

Sip sorrow’s martini / watch sequin-skinned guests sway and flow /

Mere stumbles over further stanzas, uncertain. Does it possess its own creativity, its own words, or are they borrowed finery collected from too many other sources, pieces plucked from the dead?

Other space eels twine and dance in the ruins of gasses and elements and carbons.

“Beautiful,” Mere murmurs.

Century, tucked in a fold between the eel-ship’s ribs, doesn’t look up from her reading. “Anything can be beautiful. Even monsters.”

Mere has never been praised for its aesthetic. “Will you tell it why it was made?”

Century sets aside the tablet. “I built you from the remains of my enemies. It was to be their eternal subjugation.” Quieter: “I still regret it.”

“It has heard,” Mere says, “regret may be molded anew, if one chooses. This it will shape its own future once its duty is complete.”

“And where will you go if you survive?” Century asks. “Any planet you linger on will suffer like Olinara V.” Her jaw tightens. “I saw what befell that world. You can’t escape forever.”

Mere has no basis for argument. “What do you run from?”

Century’s mouth thins into a line. “I should have left you, wraith.”

Mere tilts its head. It is grateful, unexpectedly, that she converses with it, that she has not ejected it from the ship and let it drift into frozen death. “It would rather live briefly outside the Courts than forever in chains.”

Century coughs, a strangled laugh. “Sweet mother of stars. You have no recollection, do you?”

“What should it recall?”

She reaches into a slit in her armor. “Here.” The holochip rests heavy on her palm. “Your birth, if you want it.”

Mere accepts.

• • • •

Hundreds of glass pods, each cold-filled with bodies—her enemies, trophies, former friends betrayed. The wolflord stands beside her (young, war-scarred, shipless). The wolflord has always remained loyal to Century, and she has taken the wolflord under her protection so the former pilot will not be discovered and executed.

“Must you do this?” the wolflord whispers.

She has taken pieces of each enemy, mind or flesh or bone or blood or gene, and she has built a sexless bipedal wraith from her conquests. It stands taller than she, lithe deadly machineflesh, and she gives it her organic eyes last of all, cased in cybernetic implants.

“It is a mere tool,” she says, fondness in her tone.

The wolflord sighs. “That is all we are to you.”

She turns, head tipped in curiosity. “Would you be more?”

Instead of answering, the wolflord nods to the many glass pods. “And the remains?”

“The wraith will execute them,” she says. “In doing so, it will become mine alone, unburdened from its former selves.”

The wolflord flinches.

She presses her palm against the wraith’s chest, igniting its processors and sparking its lifeforce siphoned from her dearest enemy. The wraith opens its—her—eyes.

“Wraith,” she says. “I have made you for one purpose.”

It blinks several times, then bows.

“It will serve in the Courts of Tranquility,” she says to the wolflord. “A celebration of our new age of peace.”

The wolflord’s gaze meets the wraith’s, but the wolflord looks away in shame.

• • • •

(There is a subfile tucked inside that is not the she’s. The wolflord planted it, imprinted with a name: Kitshan Zu.

In the months between its awakening and the completion of the Courts of Tranquility:

“They will erase this,” the wolflord says, hand at rest so gentle on Mere’s cheek. “They won’t let you have what’s yours. Not memory nor self. Not . . .” The wolflord swallows. “I have to go. Century has work I must finish in her name.”

Mere blinks, chalk-gray skin furrowed between its cybernetic eyes. “I wish to go with you, Kitshan.”

The wolflord kisses Mere, lips rough and course and so familiar. “If I could steal you, Mere, I would. I promise you one thing—I will come back for you. When I learn how to free you, I will come back.”

“Then I will wait,” Mere says, and pulls the wolflord close one last time.)

• • • •

Mere shudders as the memory knits into its own consciousness, blended with so many dreams of the dead.

A fragment, unburied: The wolflord was most often a he, and sometimes not, and always kept his name. Kitshan.

Mere wishes it had memories of its own to braid into a lost narrative in which it was happy with him, in which they shared passion and laughter and sorrow. This is like its favorite of Li Sin’s sonnets, where the poet laments falling through a time vortex and breaking the time stream by trying to reclaim lost love.

“I watched the feeds,” Century says. Outside the ship, great gaseous whales converge in a celestial pod, frequency-song caressing the hull and sides. “I saw his capture. I was too far away to get to the Courts before . . .” A crisp, vicious head shake. “I would have spared you that, if I could grant you but one mercy.”

Mere has nothing to say to the she.

IV.

Rebirth (world): there is no such designated planet in the Principality archives. Further searches will result in disciplinary measures.

• • • •

The court of the Red Sun is bones and dusk, burned into a cold shell of its former glory.

The eel-ship glides into membranous ports that ring the station. Heptagonal, forged from old warships and dead stars, lit and powered within by the Red Sun Lord’s essence.

Century sits motionless in the cockpit. “You better hurry. The other Suns will find you. Always, they will find you.”

Mere is aware. The Courts call to its blood; until it finds a way to unlock its own molecular leash from its keepers’ hold, it must stay a dozen steps ahead. But first it must survive an audience with the Red Sun, the Death of Endless Worlds.

Mere enters the airlock. Spindle-legged drones bow and guide it through red-splashed corridors to the throne room of the Red Sun Lord.

A beautiful spider-prince, chitin-skinned humanoid with four delicate legs protruding from the spine like desiccated wings, sits at the Red Sun’s left, a shadow-garbed concubine. Eight jewel-rimmed eyes watch under thick lashes. “Those beholden to the Courts of Tranquility are seldom welcome, wraith.”

Mere bows. “It seeks aid for the lord’s chosen.”

The spider-prince leans close, a spine-leg lightly brushing the Red Sun’s helmet. The visor rises, and the Red Sun’s gaze sears into Mere’s flesh.

Mere folds itself in supplication, its back blistering. It unbends an arm, lifts a palm, and shows the holochip record of the wolflord’s execution. “It asks the lord to listen.” Pain sinks deeper—it holds its ground, and does not scream. “The lord has claim to the dead,” Mere says, “and if the lord will come to assert that claim, this it will retrieve the souls of the lost and give them peace.”

The heat relents as the Red Sun drops the helmet visor. Mere shivers as its cells begin repair, and the coolness of the dim throne room sinks into its burned flesh.

“May this one eat the wraith?” the spider-prince purrs.

Mere waits, its body taut.

The Red Sun stretches out a hand, and with a sigh, the spider-prince rises and sweeps forward. He takes the chip from Mere’s palm and inserts it into a port in his ribs.

“A pity,” the spider-prince murmurs, with a longing glance at Mere. “I am starving.”

“Perhaps another time,” Mere says. It listened well to courtly wit and challenge. It has read much of Li Sin’s political treatise, curated by the poet’s ship, Vector Bearing Light. “It might poison you in turn.”

The spider-prince smiles, appreciative. The projection blossoms outward, slow like congealed blood, and the image of the last wolflord stands before the Red Sun.

fleeing the Arbiter’s consorts on a far-flung world, injured

looking up at the sky, begging

the last wolflord is bound in the pool, throat cut

The Red Sun’s armored form stiffens, fists clenched on the starlight throne. “And why should I not unmake you for this crime, wraith? The last of my disciples, no more. Why did I feel nothing . . .”

The spider-prince slinks back to the Red Sun’s side and strokes the god’s armored shoulders, soothing. “The Courts of Tranquility are shielded, my liege-love.”

The Sun Lords are cosmic bodies reshaped into compressed armored shells after a treaty two millennia ago. They have never ceased being enemies. Six rule the Principality, while the Red Sun Lord, who was always death, broods alone in the outer reaches of dominion.

Mere continues: “It has defied the Sun Lords of Tranquility to come and beg for vengeance. It once cared for the dead and does not wish to obey its masters.”

“And what,” says the Red Sun, “would you do with the souls, wraithling?”

“It knows of a world far outside the Principality where they will be safe: Rebirth.”

The spider-prince taps his long, graceful fingers against his chin. “Rumors do exist among the lost of such a world, my love.”

The Red Sun stands. Mere flattens itself to the floor.

“Come,” says the Death of Endless Worlds. “I will return to the Courts of Tranquility.”

• • • •

Wraith (object): an organic drone (technology outdated and now forbidden by the Principality) constructed from pieces of other organics and androids. Wraiths are non-sentient and possess no soul. The majority of wraiths were created before the Treaty of the Seven Suns as shock troops built from the dead.

• • • •

The Red Sun arrives in a ship built from bones of ancient solar chelonians and no port dares refuse it entry. The Death of Endless Worlds burns footprints into the halls. Mere follows, never stepping in ash.

“You’ll have but a few seconds once inside,” Century told it while the eel-ship rode beside the Red Sun’s vessel. “If you’re caught again, nothing will save you.”

Since when has it been caught before?

Soundless, the Red Sun strides into the Courts of Tranquility. The smell of emptiness, the dark between the stars, clings to scarlet and black-scaled armor. Unease writhes through the courtiers, fermenting into panic.

“You dare?” The Gold Sun Lord steps down from the hover-throne and cuts through the skittering courtiers, armor brightening. “And you bring this thing with you?”

Mere spreads its hands in mock supplication from where it stands on the threshold matrix.

“You break every law by coming here,” says the Gold Sun.

“Except one.” The Red Sun extends a fist towards the pool. “I have a right to the dead.”

“No,” says the Gold Sun. “Not anymore.”

Gold Sun and Red Sun raise non-corporeal blades to each other in silent duel.

You should run, murmurs the threshold.

Chaos blossoms.

Mere dives into the pool. It knows every soul pebble, so it scoops a hundred seventeen into its abdomen pouch. The others are already rotted—celestial molecules broken down from the inside, wrapped in distended film, which the slightest disturbance will break and spill out only dust. It cannot save them all.

It knifes through the water and catches the wolflord’s soul last.

Mere senses the keepers watching, cold optics drifting in amniotic fluids behind the pool’s walls. Sudden anger sparks in Mere. It slams a hand into the tiled side. Cracks web around the impact. Again, Mere strikes. Its hand sinks through insulated glass and it snatches one of the keepers: an optic node attached to sensory cables.

Alarms ricochet among the keepers, but Mere holds tight. It bounds from the pool.

The eleven-souled sorcerer confronts it, wreathed in iridescent shadow. “Stand down, wraithling,” he says, thin lips curled mirthless.

Mere coils muscle and hydraulics in its legs and leaps, toe-claws bared. It cuts through the sorcerer’s shadow shields and ducks away from his grasp. It kicks the sorcerer in the chest with bone-shattering force. The sorcerer falls back.

Automated defense drones circle overhead. Exhilarated, Mere sprints towards the door matrix, letting the Red Sun’s wrath deflect its pursuers.

Good luck, murmurs the threshold, and Mere smiles.

This time, it runs through the upper halls of the Courts: past luxury holo suites and theaters, gardens and feast halls, over bridges that span crystalline waterfalls and floating glass spheres filled with lovers and voyeurs alike. It crosses into the industrial sectors, locks bypassed by Century’s nanite snakes, which slither through the walls as fast as it runs.

And then, once more, the spaceport. Mere sprints down the wide central platform towards freedom.

Four mammoth crustacean guards—crab-bodied, armored, spotted in hundreds of eyes—unwind from the walls and mesh themselves between Mere and the eel-ship. Mere springs up, spotting niches in armor, planes of body and joint it can use to climb and evade. It has no time to fight.

A fifth crustacean guard appears behind it and hammers a claw into it mid-air.

The blow shatters Mere’s arm and rips open its side. Its body is thrown halfway across the platform, ribs crushed. Mere curls in on itself to protect its belly and rolls. A sixth crustacean guard circles behind and seizes Mere in great pincers. It twists, hissing, a single breath between it and being decapitated through the midriff.

“Stand down.” The voice resounds with such weight and power, Mere mistakes it for one of the Sun Lords. The crustacean guard freezes. “Know my voice: for I am the Unmaker of Worlds.”

The others hesitate. Mere lifts its chin, orienting itself on the voice.

Century stands on the platform, wreathed in a film of ultraviolet light. It projects from her skin, her teeth, her voice.

“The wraith is mine.” Century extends a hand, commanding. “Give it to me, now, unharmed. Disobey my word and I shall reign destruction upon your people until there is naught by the trembling memory of pain in the heavens.”

Gently, the crustacean guard sets Mere down. The others back away, submissive. Century does not move.

Mere limps towards her, past her, and into the ship. She follows, but the crustacean guards do not. Mere collapses inside.

The eel-ship twists and streaks from the port, chased this time by droneships beholden to the Six Suns: faceless pilots uprooted and loosed once more.

“We will lose them in subspace,” Century says, calm. “If not for long.”

Mere apologizes to the ship for spattering its blood on the floor as it cradles its side. It takes a slow breath, the crunch of bone rearranging in its torso and arm familiar. “You are a Sun Lord,” it says at last.

Century rolls her shoulders. “Once I was the Violet Sun. We took new bodies, it’s true, but they change, they weaken. Anything that lives can die.”

Mere strokes its undamaged hand along its abdomen; its cargo remains undamaged. It wonders what its soul might look like, culled in a pebble beneath cold water. If it was born from the fractured pieces of the Principality’s enemies, what will its existence reflect in death? It is automatous, but it still more machine than organic, and there are no simple answers in the theologies or heresies it has skimmed.

It unfurls its broken fingers with its other hand and examines the keeper it stole. Inside the optic, thousands of compressed recordings tagged wraith_construct.

“Don’t,” Century says, but makes no move to stop it. “You’ll only hurt yourself, Mere.”

Mere downloads the recordings.

V.

A crustacean guard drags Mere’s limp body from the surgical pods, where it was once more tested for pain tolerance (high) and fitted with a restraint collar beneath its throat-skin so it will not escape again (fourth time, the keepers say, disapproving).

“Why do you run?” the guard asks as Mere’s eyes open. “There is nowhere to go. Do you like being hurt?”

Mere hisses at the guard, always the one to find it. “Why do you stay?”

“There is no choice,” says the guard, quiet.

“I will make choice,” Mere says.

The wraith is put in stasis.

• • • •

Dozens of near identical recordings:

Mere fulfills its duty as executioner.

It is taken to a containment chamber of sterile walls and faceless technicians. Its memory is selectively culled so it no longer remembers the details of the ones it has killed.

Sometimes, the wraith fights. Dead technicians are easy to replace.

But even technology fails. Mere takes advantage of the blocks in the feeds over the pool and slices open its arm to write on its bones; the flesh glues together before the technicians focus the light instruments into its head.

(The keepers hum interest to each other: Why does the wraith care about the names of the dead? Where is the fault in its programming?)

The keepers cannot find the anomaly.

• • • •

It has not attempted to flee in two cycles, so it is given privileges and allowed to wander the cityskin. It seeks out the Arbiter’s consorts, confined in luxury and pain. Zarrow and Jhijen, the newest consorts who still keep hold of their names, welcome Mere. It basks in attention and conversation. Zarrow teaches it laughter. Jhijen invites desire; Mere can experience pleasure as much as pain. Mere could have picked from any number of genders, but it does not have an interest in the choices, so it remains neutral, comfortable with its pronouns. Jhijen and Zarrow always respect its choice, as it does theirs, when their genders change like the fluid motions of a dance.

(Mere thinks, the keepers note. It thinks of the consorts as friend.)

There is no timestamp to show when Zarrow and Jhijen disappeared.

• • • •

The she bound in the pool looks like Zarrow.

“Who are you?” Mere whispers.

“. . . and thus the heavens are cleansed anew,” says the Arbiter.

Mere does not kill the she.

The keepers hastily feed a loop of crafted images into the broadcast, so the universe watching will never know the wraith’s hesitation. The Courts of Tranquility see what is expected; polite applause follows.

Obey, the keepers send to its processor.

Mere shakes its head, snips the fibrous chains, and lifts the she from the water. “It will not kill this one. The she has committed no crime.”

The she that looks like Zarrow brushes her fingers along its cheek. “I’ll remember you.”

The Arbiter’s eyes burn with fury. “The she is an insurgent who disobeys the Six Suns.”

Mere laughs at the Arbiter. “So do I.”

The restraint collar activates and crumples Mere on the edge of the pool. The consorts lift the she’s shallow-breath body and carry her off; her true death will be private. Mere cannot stop it.

Mere hisses in pain as the Arbiter watches. It lifts its arm, shaking, and digs its knife-fingers into its throat. Blood and fluids drip into the pool as Mere cuts out the collar piece by piece.

The Arbiter backs away, a step shy of haste.

Mere’s body slides over the side, into the water. It floats there as its skin regrows and the crustacean guards come to drag it away.

All the Arbiter’s consorts are replaced and the wraith’s privileges are revoked. The keepers implant a block in its neural protocols that will never allow Mere to speak as an “I” again.

• • • •

In its stasis chamber, Mere scrapes sharp fingers against the wall, which throbs and erases each mark; still Mere tries to carve the names of the dead, transcribe them from its raw bones before the keepers or the security drones stop it.

VI.

Mere crushes the remains of the keeper’s optic and stands, shivering. There are many, many more files. It deletes them.

It looks at Century.

Century rubs beneath her quicksilver eyes. “When I gave you to the Blue Sun Lord, a final gift to seal our peace treaty, I couldn’t take you back.” She turns away. “The wolflord was working on a way to unbind you. I refused. I do not wish to see war again.”

Mere wipes the keeper’s fluids from its hands. Bones have mended and the eel-ship has washed away the blood on the floor. “How soon before we are found?”

She shrugs. “We will find Rebirth first. We will finish this.”

• • • •

After it asks and receives permission from the ship, Mere etches all the names of the dead into the eel’s rib bones. The ship promises to remember them.

Mere murmurs its thanks.

And you? the ship asks. What would you like to be remembered as?

Mere hesitates. Of the possibilities it might choose from, it does not want to be: executioner, killer, weapon. But what else does it deserve?

“A wraith.”

Mere does not know what else it should say.

VII.

Li Sin (revolutionary): a neutrois poet whose work is known for biting wit, political critique, and transcendent beauty. No records can be found on Li Sin’s birthplace or their death. The poet stopped writing and disappeared after challenging the Gray Sun Lord in the Year of Unpraised Night 2984; the Gray Sun slumbers in the Arora Nebula, undisturbed and unresponsive since.

• • • •

The ship drops from subspace over planetary designation Z1-479-X: Rebirth.

Mere peers through the ship’s gills at the blue-green-white sphere. It is devoid of cityskin; no metal-glass veins or infrastructure rising to the sky. Mere has never seen a world like this.

“I never thought I would see it again,” Century says. Her voice catches like skin on a metal burr. “Come.”

Mere says goodbye to the ship.

Farewell, friend, says the eel-ship.

They take a shuttle with two life-pods down to the surface.

• • • •

Kitshan Zu (warship pilot): Zu’s ship, Forever Brightness of the Sun, was killed in battle and disconnected its pilot prior to its destruction. Zu was comatose on an Olinara V field hospital until his disappearance following the visitation of the Violet Sun a cycle later. The ex-pilot’s whereabouts and fate are unknown.

• • • •

The night sky froths with clouds. Mere marvels at the prickly moss webbing the stony ground and the kiss of damp air against its body. This world is unshaped and wild, virile with flora and fauna it does not recognize from the Principality’s records. It has never seen so much uncultivated wilderness, even in holos. Field and forest pass, and still the map leads Century forward.

They landed in a dry canyon and followed the she’s implanted map.

They find a river, unsanctified and alive, bubbling past without notice. Mere stands transfixed. It wants to touch the water’s delicate skin, but does not feel worthy.

This world cannot know its presence long. Mere yearns to stay, to wander the wonders it has only glimpsed on this planet. But it is a taint, a cultured, weaponized stain from the Principality, and it does not belong. It will take the shuttle and let the Arbiter chase it to the universe’s birthing place, so long as no harm comes to this world or any other.

“Here,” Century calls. In a clearing ringed in living walls of flowers, Century stands motionless in raw, rich soil. “Can you feel it?”

Mere shuts its eyes and breathes in. Its skin and circuitry hum with power. “What is it?”

“Life. Potential.” A sigh. “The world welcomes us all. I remember . . . I remember. I was born here. That is how I know it; why it haunts my bones.”

Mere tilts its head. “What now?”

“Give the ones we carry rest. Perhaps they too will be reborn. Our part is done.”

Mere slits its abdomen pouch and lets the pebbled souls fall loose into the ground. The earth shifts and closes gently over each one.

Energy it cannot name loops through Mere—the world’s fingers caressing its mind.

BE WELL.

Wordless, an impression sweeps through Mere: the dawn kissing the earth, the souls wrapped in soil released from their pebbled shells crafted by the pool. When the sun rises, all will be complete. The dead will find their afterlives or their rebirth.

Century removes her armor piece by piece, and runs her fingers along her scarred scalp. “Will you kill me now, wraith? That is your purpose. It is . . . what I deserve.”

Mere has never been given choice. It has seen the wolflord to rest. What further purpose must it serve?

It tallies what it would do if freed: seek out the funerary holo of Li Sin and pay homage; sip wine on a far-flung world where identity is unnecessary; learn to dance without downloading precise diagrams of movement; travel the stars; write poems of its own; see wonders; live. And it would remember.

Mere retracts its knife-tips into fingerbones. “You gave it its freedom. It returns the grace. Do as you will.”

Century dips her chin, military acknowledgement. “Gratitude, Mere.”

Mere lifts its head, elated. If it can show mercy, it can do so much more.

Century smiles at Mere. “I will sleep, as I’ve not done in so long. When I wake . . . we’ll see. Farewell.”

“Farewell,” Mere says to its maker, and lopes towards the ship.

It is free.

• • • •

In the canyon gullet, the repulsors of dropships thrum. Mere slows, dry earth cracking beneath its feet. The shuttle is visible at the end of the ravine, caked in reentry burns and wind-blown dust.

The air brings the sharp scent of bloodied and oiled mechanics. Mere’s sensors link with other semi-biologicals.

The mercury-veined butchers, stained silver and red, squat in single file rank along the canyon’s lip, sores popped from necrotic skin. Beneath the light-bent holoprojectors, the butchers’ forms are true: fragmented drones from the Gold Sun and the Blue Sun, vessels programmed with tireless efficiency.

The Sun Lords have found Mere.

But these are no hollowed shells. Mere sees the frightened eyes of armor-bound clones (of the Arbiter’s consorts, as they were before they were exulted—Zarrow is there, and so is Jhijen), unmasked behind targeting arrays. It knows each one of them, has shared memory and dreams with them. Once (so long ago) it dared think of them as friend.

Mere stands frozen between the butcher-clones and Century, the wolflord, and all the seeded. In a microsecond, realization:

—no longer must Mere kill—

—the seeded need but an hour more, until the sun rises and wakens new life—

—weaponized bones, detonator heart, poison blood: Mere can unmake all the Sun Lords’ drones, dismantle and slaughter until all that remains is gore-soaked earth; christen the seeded with the promise of eternal war, mark Rebirth for a fate shared by Olinara V—

—Mere wants to live—

The drones have come only for Mere, the Blue Sun’s disobedient trinket. Once the mission is complete, this world will be a forgotten sanctuary once more.

Mere steps forward as the butcher-drones approach. It will fight them, but not to win. The Suns will witness its desperation and be satisfied with its death. It will not be brought back to the Courts of Tranquility. It will remember.

This is its chosen purpose and its choice: to save the ones it can.

The butcher-drones attack. Mere lets them come.

It composes a final a poem, and though the last wolflord will never know, Mere dedicates the words to Kitshan.

Your eyes, grace-touched / forever refuge

We will live together

Tomorrow / when we see the sun.

©2015 by A. Merc Rustad. Art by KG Schmidt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer and filmmaker who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea—most of which are present in their work to some degree. Their stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Inscription Magazine, Scigentasy, and Vitality Magazine. When not buried in homework, Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com.

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

Beacon 23: Little Noises

Hugh Howey | 6400 words

1

They don’t prepare you for the little noises. They put you in a centrifuge until you pass out, ride you up and down parabolic curves until you puke your stomach lining, poke you with needles until you know what an addict feels like, and make you learn three fields of physics and get a medical degree while training for triathlons.

But they don’t tell you what it’s like to live with the clacks and squeaks and little, distant beeps. Or how the deadness of space for light years around can be felt like a great, crushing weight. That silence seems to build and build, like the darkness I saw once in a cave in West Virginia. Darkness you can chew. Darkness you can feel for miles all around you. Darkness you’re not sure you’ll ever crawl out of.

The silence of deep space is just like that. Which makes the little whirring gizmos in my beacon a nightmarish clatter of nerve-jangling assholes. I hate every one of them. Everything that moves in this place. Every little gear and piezo buzzer and alarm. It’s not just that they’re discordant, it’s that they’re unpredictable. And so I spend the gaps in between bracing for them, waiting for them, expecting them. As soon as you loosen up, they hit. Little pricks on my eardrums.

They are devilish bastards, too. Like deer, they seem to know when you hunt for them. I crawl through the duct-like work spaces of my beacon with a flashlight, wire snips, duct tape, and bits of foam. I stalk the fuckers. I set traps, thinking some of the noises are scurrying away from me, that they must be little critters that came on board with a batch of poorly sterilized fruit.

They seem to hear me coming, and the beeps and buzzes go quiet. Scarce as bucks on the first day of open season. As soon as I crawl out, there they are again, making a racket. Like that same ten-point buck, the day after season, standing in your yard, chewing your tulips with that idiot look on his face, like, “Whut?”

Yeah, I’m coming for you motherfuckers. I’ve set traps. Microphones with recorders to nail down the locations of the beeps. Squirts of oil everywhere for the squeaks. And every kind of cockroach hotel made for the clickety-clack, moving little noises.

NASA would be proud of my efforts and ingenuity, right? All that training. For this. But what else am I gonna do? I’m the meaty center of this rusted metal popsicle out here on the edge of space. I’m here because they ain’t made a computer yet that won’t do something stupid one time out of a hundred trillion. Seems like good odds, but when computers are doing trillions of things a day, that means a whole lot of stupid. And I’m supposed to be smart enough to sort them out.

Most of my time not spent hunting down squeaks and creaks is spent up in the lighthouse. I know that’s not what we’re supposed to call it, but c’mon. At the long end of a tunnel that stands off the rest of the beacon, there’s a small cavity with portholes on all sides. The gravity wave broadcaster is in this puppy. It’s the business end of the beacon; everything else is just here to make sure it stays running, and that includes me.

The long arm sets the GWB apart from the rest of the beacon, because its waves fall off with the fourth power of distance. Those waves will scramble the wires of anything within a five or six meter radius, including mine. You’re not supposed to spend too much time around the GWB according to NASA, because it does funny things to your head, which is another way of saying it gives you a nice mellow, but what do they expect us to do when they post us two years at a time out here in the middle of nowhere? I doubt I’m the only one who sits with my back to the machine, letting it soothe my head like a straight-up whiskey, while I gaze out at the dull gray stones of the asteroid field that makes an awful mess of astral navigation.

Across from the GWB, and right above the best porthole for watching the asteroids twirl in space, there’s a faded picture that some former resident put up, which is why I suspect I’m not the only one who sits here. In the picture, a man in slickers is standing outside an actual, Earth-based lighthouse. A wave taller than the lighthouse looms behind him, must be twenty meters high. The wave is slamming into this tapered pillar of stone, and you figure it’s the last shot of the lighthouse or the man, that this tidal wave utterly destroys both of them in the next fraction of a second, and that the man is smoking his pipe and squinting up at what must be a drone with a camera or something, like he’s thinking, “That’s the most curious thing,” and has no idea his ticket is about to get punched from behind.

I’ve spent more time looking at this poster than I have at the field of stars and rocks out the window. For a while, I assumed it was computer generated. You can never tell with these things. Sometimes the real looks fake, especially when you’ve looked at the fake for so long. But why would anyone hang up some CGI with such reverence? The paper is slick, not like the thermal crap we print on here. And there’s not a crease on it, which means it was brought flat packed or in a courier roll. Either way, someone took some care in getting it here. So I assume the damn thing is real. I assume this guy is real, that he’s having his last toke there at the end of his tiny world and his tiny life.

I get a good gwib buzz staring at this photo, sometimes for hours, while I wait for a CPU to need a reboot or some ship to come out of hyper and ask for directions or give me some news of the war. This man is taking a hellstrom with a shrug and a deep drag like he’s such a boss. Such a cool customer. Meanwhile, I lose my shit over some distant, infernal clicking sound. That lighthouse keeper was my hero for the longest time. Until I learned more about that photo.

Turns out there’s a dozen variants of similar shots. And yeah, they’re all real. I sent a research request to Houston after I couldn’t turn up anything in the archives, and I could easily imagine the conversation on their side, because I’d had my share of them when I worked ground support during training:

Chief of Ops: “I’m sorry, 23 wants to know what?”

“Uh, sir, he wants the history behind a particular photo. And no, it’s not a spectral chart. Or anything . . . uh, scientific. It’s . . . well, here. He sent a digital cap.”

Long pause while the Chief stares at a handlet.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”

“Nossir.”

“And he used a research request on this? Has he got any left?”

“First one he’s ever used, sir. Guy has a clean record. Served on the front before he got his red badge and was reassigned.”

“Lemme guess: blow to the head?”

“Nossir. Had his guts shot out by a Lord. Was given a quiet beacon out on the edge of Sector Eight.”

“So he’s probably hugging that GWB like she’s some dollar hooker at the end of two tours.”

“Probably, sir. Would be my guess.”

“Ah, fuckit. The boy’s a war hero for crissakes. See what you can dig up.”

Of course, that’s probably not how it went down. Some lackey most likely got the request, Binged that shit himself instead of sending it to the actual research department, and fired off eight pages of search page results and their targets back to me. Probably took him two seconds. I got the response three months later from a tug grabbing an ore load that didn’t belong to them. Said they had something for me, then went into the belt and took billions of dollars of something for themselves. It’s a crazy world out here on the edge, but enough shrugging and looking the other way, and it all seems to sort itself out.

And as it turns out, my goddamn hero-of-the-mist lighthouse keeper was just as batshit scared as the rest of us. The whole history of that photo is well documented. The shot was from a manned helo, of all things. While the photog was grabbing the pic, the onboard pilot was waving his fool head off for the old lighthouse keeper to move. Move! Supposedly, just after he got his picture taken looking like a complete granite badass, the old man was shitting his drawers, dropping his stogie, and leaping through the lighthouse door just in time to save his ass from getting washed away.

This is the thing about being a hero: It’s all about when you get your picture taken. I’ll be a hero for the rest of my life, I suppose. So long as I spend it in here with the door shut, hugging my knees, and staying away from any more cameras.

2

My twelfth level of hell consists of a small steel marble dropped from a height of two inches, smacking a solid block of concrete.

That’s what it sounds like anyway: the worst of the little random clicks that only come out when I’m in my bunk, trying to sleep. This one particular noise is like a cockroach. Not that it sounds like one—that’s the other noises—just that it only scurries out to play when I shut the interior lights off, and then it disappears when I’m up and moving about. My footsteps literally scare it away. Explain that to me.

NASA says everything in the beacon is necessary, that if I’m hearing a noise, it’s just a gizmo doing its job. The subtext here is for me to shut the hell up and just do my job. Heh. Maybe me and every other beacon operator drive Houston nuts with all our squeaks and requests. Maybe this is them getting back at us. I can see the scene down in Mission Control right now: a man in a white shirt and black tie checking my vitals on a readout, his chief inquiring if I’ve hit REM sleep yet.

“Affirmative, sir. Sleeping like a baby.”

“Excellent. Queue up the machine that goes bing!”

Or the machine that sounds like a steel marble impacting concrete.

This little jewel in my trillion-dollar watchwork beacon is giving me fits while I spin around in my bunk, looking for a pocket of cool and a period of silence. And this is when a different sound reminds me that sounds can be truly bad. Not just annoying, not just discordant symphony to my carefully orchestrated silence, but a sound like the old sounds, like plasma fire and shard grenades, like suicidal orders from men too slow, old, and wise to wear a jocksuit, noises like bombs going off and air raid sirens. Those kinds of noises.

I know what it is the moment I hear it: complete GWB failure. The beacon going dark. I know, because I’ve run through the simulator beacon in the Mojave a bajillion times. I know, because those simulations still give me nightmares—nightmares with gray-bearded faces peering in through flimsy fake portholes while I try to figure out how they fucked me over this time.

We used to have a joke at SIMCOM: NASA screws its ’nauts up the bum when we’re Earthside, because in space, no one can hear you squeal.

GWB failures don’t happen. The redundancies have redundancies have redundancies. It gets all incestuous up in beacon 23’s innards, I’m telling you. In order for something to go wrong, an alarm has to be out, and a backup alarm, and two different modules built to do the same thing and checked every few seconds to make sure they’re capable of doing that thing. All the chips and software are self-healing and able to reboot on their own. You could set off an EMP in this bastard, and she’d be back up in two shakes. What you’d need is two dozen random breakdowns to strike at once, plus a host of other coincidences too mind-boggling to consider.

Some brainiac at NASA calculated the odds once. They were very, very small. Then again, as of last week, there were 1,527 GALSAT beacons in operation across the Milky Way. So I guess the odds of something happening to someone keep going up. Especially as the beacons get older. And now I guess that someone is me.

With this little snafu, the noises are suddenly hoping to be found. They’re calling for me, little alarms everywhere. I scramble from my bunk and climb the ladder to the command module in my boxers. The first thing I check is the power load, and all is kosher. I check the nav gyros and the starfield scanners, and the beacon’s not confused about where we are. I check the quantum tunneler, but there aren’t any messages. While I’m there, I put in a quick note to Houston, even though I’m sure they’re getting an auto relay with error codes out the wazoo.

Outage. 0314 GST.

They’ll get this minutes after the beacon has already warned them, but at least they’ll know I’m up. Their man on the scene. The chewy meat center of their big ol’ spacesicle.

I grab the edge of the tunnel that leads to the lighthouse and launch myself down the chute toward the GWB in the distance. Done this so many times, I just have to brush a finger against the wall to course-correct. Red lights pulse up and down the length of the chute. There’s an alarm screaming ahead.

Spreading my arms, fingertips squeaking across metal to slow my arrival, I grab the last rung and swing into the lighthouse.

The GWB is cool to the touch. That means she’s not emitting her safe passage corridor to transiting ships. Nor is she being her usual, soothing self. It’s like a favorite lager has transmuted into an energy drink. “You’re starting to stress me out,” I tell her, pulling the hexagonal panels off one by one.

I set them aside and study the smooth dome beneath. There’s a clacking somewhere, like a loose bolt tumbling into a recess. I check all the thumbscrews and don’t see any missing. More of the random noises. At the base of the GWB, I check all the wires and connections. The first things we’re trained to try are the same things I assume we would try without the trillion-dollar education. I begin unplugging everything. Count to ten. Plug it all back in. Make sure everything’s seated properly.

In the back of my mind, while doing all this, I’m thinking of shipping schedules. There’s a clock on the wall, a brass one that has to be wound once a week or it’ll stop working. Anything on batteries up here or with a CPU is toast with the GWB on. I stopped winding the clock when the small sounds started driving me crazy, because I couldn’t take the ticking anymore. My guess is it’s been five minutes since my note to NASA, so probably right around 0320. There’s an 0330 cargo out of Orion, bound for Vega, if I remember correctly. Crew of eight, probably, on a ship that size. And then the beacon seems to spin around me and I have to brace myself as I think about the Varsk. An 0342 luxury line transit. What does she carry, five thousand passengers? Plus crew?

I leave the panels off the GWB and thrust down the chute again. Terrible trajectory. I crash into one wall, my bare shoulder skidding, squeaking, burning, which causes me to careen and tumble and bang my head and my shin before I arrest myself. “Calm down,” I tell myself. “One thing at a time.” This is what I used to say out loud when I was a soldier, when doing things too fast could get your guts blown out.

Pulling myself down the chute’s handholds, I pick up momentum again in the zero-gee. When I hit the edge of the gravity leaking from the beacon proper, I turn and float feet-first, falling the last meter and landing in a crouch.

The power station is two flights down. I skid down the ladder, zipping past the living quarters, palms burning. The clang of bare feet on metal grate. The main relays are nasty cusses, large T-bars with rubber grips. The best way to throw them is to do it with your legs. I squat down, get a shoulder braced under one side of the T, and strain upward, spinning the bar ninety degrees, while unseen contacts on the other end of the bar lose connection.

I repeat this with the other relay. There’s a deep thump from the cut power, and the room goes full blackout. Emergency battery lights flicker on as their photosensors startle at the void. I count to ten again, letting the power drain from the system, all those little capacitors that can keep a memory of whatever’s ailing the processors. I want them to forget. When they power back up from a hard reset, they should restore themselves to factory conditions. Little newborn babes.

The relays are harder to turn back on, now that the T-bars are vertical. I brace a foot on a railing and give a good tug. There’s a twinge of pain in my belly from being a hero once. I remember a SIMCOM test years ago, making sure I could turn these relays ten times, back and forth, and thinking my guts were going to spill out of my knotted scars. I remember telling the graybeards after: “Nope, feels great. Never better.” Then pissing red for a week.

The lights come back with the first relay. I throw the second. There are no alarms. Everything is rebooting, circuits sorting themselves according to protein-based memories, software reloading from hardwired references. I’m mostly upset at my sleep having been disturbed, and I’m not looking forward to the paperwork and error logs I’ll need to wade through.

Up the ladder now, sweating, feet hurting, wishing I’d put on my boots, I check the time. 0326. Two minutes or so for a full reboot. Leaves two minutes of margin for the Orion cargo. Cutting it damn close. I’m thinking about the cargo bound for Vega, and the mess a wreck like that will make for the asteroid field. But it’s the Varsk that’s haunting me. There are five thousand souls watching in-flights right now with their earbuds in. Laughing at that comedy. Ordering another gin and tonic. Snoring. Fumbling for their seats in the darkness as they return from the head. A baby crying, someone sneezing and scaring the hell out of everyone else with that crowded, recycled air.

There’s a chime from the QT. A message from Houston. I go over to the screen to read it, but before I get there, the alarms go off again. Screaming at me. The red lights, throbbing. Full GWB failure a second time. After a hard reboot.

The impossibility of this is banging against my skull as I stare at the words on the QT, the message from NASA. I blink, but they don’t go away. I’d hoped for some solution, something like help up in this joint. Instead, all I get from them is:

What outage?

3

Ninety-nine percent of my time working with NASA is spent bitching that I know more than they do. The other one percent of my time is spent trembling, pissing myself, realizing I might actually be right. Now is one of those latter times. Houston should know everything wrong with my beacon, especially the fact that it is no longer doing the beacon-like things beacons are built for.

Instead, I’ve got someone sipping tepid coffee down in the land of women and pizza checking his readouts and telling me there’s nothing amiss. When I goddamn know something is amiss. The GWB was cool to the touch. And the alarms are going off again.

I type another quick text. The QT works with entangled particles, and they’re destroyed as they’re used, but I don’t care about budgets right now so much as not wasting time with whatever dweeb can’t do his job. I also very purposefully employ the caps button, because they can, in this way, hear us scream in space:

GWB FULL FAIL. ZERO TRANSMIT. CARGO AND LUX LINER IN TRANSIT. HARD REBOOT NO GOOD.

Get on the job, Houston.

I try to imagine people down on Earth stiffening at their consoles, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and fixing all of this for me remotely, but I know there’s not even enough time for another reboot, not before the transit. Not sure why, but I launch back down the barrel to the GWB. Maybe just to watch, to hope nothing happens, to see the complete lack of wake as a ship passes by at twenty times the speed of light.

The GWB is still lifeless and cold when I arrive, the alarms still flashing and blaring. I turn to the porthole facing the asteroid belt—and a new star blooms into a brief and ugly existence. A blinding flash of light. Streaks of molten metal like meteors. An expanding cloud of titanium tinsel. Asteroids crashing and tumbling and knocking into one another, cleaving into smaller hunks of rock. An immense amount of destruction, all without making a sound, a macabre ballet and light show.

A large chunk of the cargo vessel flips end over end, twisted like taffy, great black gouges down the side, and everywhere are the scraps of bright red and blue and gray containers, all their contents spilling into the vacuum of space, much of it pulverized beyond recognition.

It all happens in an instant. None of the destruction is there one moment—just quietude and the mingling of hippo-like rocks—and then chaos and burning and death and space litter. This is what it looks like when a billion-ton spacecraft goes from FTL to slamming into a rock the size of a small county. When the beacon’s GWB went out, it was like the street sign before a sharp curve had been removed, the one that warns of the approaching cliff. I think of the eight crewmembers dead. Eight is the number of men in a special battalions squad. We don’t normally lose them quite this fast. Oftentimes, one will crawl away and die a slow and lonely death on the edge of space. But no one is crawling away from the disaster beyond my porthole. And five thousand more lives are inbound at twenty times the speed of light.

4

The archives deep in the heart of beacon 23 house practically every novel ever written. A random trip through the database is an exercise in frustration, as for every one novel I would enjoy, there are roughly three billion I can’t get through, and no way of telling the two types apart other than a miserable chapter or two.

Which is why I spend more time reading through the complete Wiki, circa 2245, not updated in several decades, but close enough for solar nukes and frag grenades.

My curiosity over the picture of the lighthouse keeper and the tidal wave led me deep into the Wiki searching for answers, to no avail. But before I reached out to NASA with a research request, I stumbled upon an article that beggared belief. This article comes to mind as I watch the remnants of an interplanetary cargo vessel disperse itself across the cosmos. It comes to mind as I see what looks like two smaller pirate-class cargo vessels moving out there among the lifeless rocks and the tinsel of torn hull. The article was about an old profession long since lost. Or so the Wiki thought.

In the days of sea-bound ships, when hulls were made to keep water rather than vacuum out, and hazards to navigation were submerged rocks, not the floating-in-space kind, there was a dishonest profession of men known as wreckers.

I wouldn’t have believed it, were it not right there in the Wiki, but wreckers did just as described: They wrecked ships for a living. A brutal, murderous living.

I increased the zoom on the porthole and watched the flame of thrusters and the white puff of attitude controllers as the two black-painted cargo ships scooted from cargo container to cargo container. And the extreme coincidence of my GWB failure seemed to slide away. This was a lighthouse I was standing in, and lighthouses were not always appreciated.

Four or five centuries ago, a lighthouse would go up and down long before it went around and around. That is, some of the lighthouse would get built during the day, and then at night, many of those same stones would disappear. This would go on for months, until the builders posted guards and gave out beatings to the saboteurs. Lighthouses, you see, were bad business for the men who relied on wrecks for a living.

Wrecking probably starts with the sudden and unexpected bounty of one big catastrophe at sea. Lucky and enterprising salvagers sell the spoils that wash up beyond the reef. Before too long, clever and desperate men begin wishing for the next great crash. And so they proceed to make it happen.

In small boats, they offer to guide visiting ships through the reefs, only to take their shallow drafts over rocks that mean doom for the bigger ships. Or they light fires to show harbors that don’t exist. They forge sea charts. They rig chains across channels. The lives lost are of less consequence than the spoils gained. In every wreck and crash, there is some unseen man rubbing his hands with thoughts of tidy profits.

Lighthouses, then, are not to be tolerated. NASA hates it when we refer to beacons as lighthouses. Maybe they didn’t want to give any deplorable types any deplorable ideas.

In the distance, beyond my beacon, in a realm of space where I can go weeks without seeing another living soul, I watch some such deplorable people go about their business, and I’m powerless to stop them. I’m also reminded that there’s no such thing as coincidences. My little lighthouse on the edge of sector eight was taken down, brick by brick.

I shove away from the porthole and down the barrel again, needing to tell Houston. “We have a problem,” I hear myself thinking. But no one writes that anymore. We only get in touch with Houston when we have a problem. No point in wasting entangled particles on the redundant.

Sabotage, I type into the QT. There’s no all-caps. Watching the cargo explode into countless pieces, and the equivalent of a squad die at the hands of pirates, has left me numb. Reboot unsuccessful. I backspace and change to Reboot failed. Please advise.

I hit “send.” Then “confirm.” And finally: “Yes, I’m sure.”

The machine beeps. At least it’s a good little noise. So much of the beacon must’ve been fucked with all at once, including the QT error reporting to Houston. And this is when the big realization hits me like a sack of bricks. This is when my months-long torment with the little sounds makes me feel less insane. In the minutes since I realized my beacon has been hacked by wreckers, I’ve assumed it was done from the outside. Some way of getting around NASA’s supposedly iron-tight security measures. Some brilliant hack.

Then I think about a trade I made with some unseemly characters a while back. I think about the other ship that dropped off my research request and then proceeded to steal ore from the belt. In the days of wooden ships, pests came on with boxes of fruit. Cockroaches hatched from eggs laid in cardboard. Rats found their way into the bilges, where they had more rats. What the fuck have I done?

I think of the sounds that seemed to scurry out of the way whenever I got near. And suddenly, I’m not alone in the beacon. I scan the walls of knobs and displays. There are pipes running everywhere around me, bundles of wire drooping from the ceiling, open panels from recent projects that allow me to peek into the innards of NASA’s little creation. And the creepy-crawlies are everywhere. Watching me. Little metal insects that don’t get caught in my traps, because they’re the wrong kind of traps.

I check the time. Ten minutes before the Varsk passes these waters. Waters. Taking the imagery too far. Or maybe it’s because I feel like I’m drowning. Back in the war zone. A medal pinned to my chest in a hospital, pinned there for saving a fraction of the lives that are about to be lost because of me. There won’t be any photos of this. Just headlines of an accident. Five thousand dead. And I’m still a hero, smoking my pipe, that awful wave reaching up behind me.

The QT beeps with a message from NASA.

Sitrep

“Situation report?” I ask the void. I say to the creepy crawlies, to no one in particular: “Situation normal, motherfuckers. I screwed up.”

I bang my palm on the screen closest to me, and the green phosphorous readout wavers for a moment. Wreckers. I’ll be lucky if they don’t kill me. Lucky they haven’t already. I need to get a message off to NASA to warn them of future hacks like this. Social hacks are always the easiest way in, because people like me are the weakest link. I don’t worry about the QT costs. I hammer out a quick explanation, a best guess:

Took on illicit delivery. Bugs in the shipment, metal kind. Some kind of hack. Took down all the systems at once. Check other beacons. Look into history of Wreckers. Pirates taking cargo. Not sure if they’ll fix the beacon. Lux liner with 5k pop heading this way. Reboot may have worked, but they just shut GWB off as soon as it came on.

I hit send. I confirm. But before I can say “I’m sure,” I think about my explanation. Is it right? There was definitely a delay before the alarms came on, like maybe the reboot worked but then the GWB was shut down again. Does that mean the critters are still here, watching me? Is there anything I can do about them?

Staring down the barrel toward the lighthouse, I think of a disinfectant. I think of war, where some lives are lost in order to save others. Where even eradication is a thing we’ll consider. Where the greatest evils become the greater goods.

My hand is on my bare stomach, rubbing cords of knotted flesh, the raised welts of scars that tell a story. I stop this. There’s no time for that. No time but to act.

5

There’s a run of wire overhead to send power out to the red docking target, the big red O that guides in supply ships. I grab this and give it a good yank, pulling it free from the velcro harness. Finding my snips, I hack one end of the wire and tug enough from the chases for what I’ll need. I grab a wrench and boost myself down the barrel toward the lighthouse.

The GWB is still exposed, its panels lying on the floor. The clock on the wall is showing me the wrong time. I almost wish it was wound, wouldn’t mind the ticking. I’d love to know how much time I have left.

I cut the power feeds to the GWB. The voltage for it and the docking lamp are both 220, if I remember the schematics right. Been a while since I had to know this shit. With the wrench, I loosen the six bolts that hold the gravity wave broadcaster dome to its mount, like removing the light fixture from a lighthouse. I get it free and leave the wrench behind. Cradling the GWB like a beach ball, I move slowly down the barrel toward the control room, turning before gravity takes over, landing in a crouch.

I leave the GWB in the middle of the floor, near the coil of wire. Down the ladder and to the fuses again. I put my back into them, and they turn a little more easily, maybe from being worked back and forth already. When the power goes out, I head for the ladder, not waiting for my eyes to adjust or the emergency lighting to come on. Bump and fumble, I’m up two rungs before I can see again. A humming somewhere of power winding down in a pump or a spinning fan. The chiming of my bare feet on the rungs.

I strip the ends of the docking target power cord and splice them to the GWB. The creepy crawlies are watching me. Little metal legs twitching. Infrared cameras curious. Poised by the beacon’s relays and electrical inputs with their little instructions to wreck shit. I tell myself this, even though I don’t know. Even though I suspect I’m just a little bit crazy. Even though it might all be in my head.

Three minutes. The splices are shit, but should relay enough power. Enough to fry batteries and electronics for a few-meter radius. Any chips not built to handle it. Anything that can’t do a hard factory reset.

Back to the power relays, sliding down the ladder with hands and feet on the outer rails. Bruising my heel on impact. Limping over in the glow of the emergency lights. I throw the breakers, imagining old men with gray beards peering in at me through the portholes, watching this idiot ruin their simulation, making notes on their clipboards, shaking their weary heads.

First breaker makes contact, and the lights come on. Then the next. There’s a pause while the GWB warms up, then a series of pops and hisses as it fries everything nearby. No time for alarms. Darkness descends. A flickering, unsteady, then absolute darkness.

Back up the ladder now, this time with no lights. Nothing. Just my labored breaths, the slap of palms on the ladder, the ticking of an internal clock, the thought of all those people in that liner, and all the other people I couldn’t save. Corpses. Bones. Grinning skeletons. Friends and brothers in combat suits, that befuddled look on faces just before the lights go out inside, even though they know what’s happening, even though they’ve expected it for years since boot camp, even though they’ve seen it before with their buddies, but the last part that goes is the little sliver of hope that thought you’d get through this mess, that thought you’d live to see the other side, that it’d be your name on the war memoir, on the cover, not in the dedication.

I find the GWB by crawling around and groping in the pitch black. Find the wires. Yank them free. Then crawl back to the ladder to do it all again. Exhausted. Like PT. Forced marches. Don’t get enough exercise in this place. My stomach hurts, but it’s probably just a stabbing recollection. A painful memory. Nothing more.

I throw the breakers for what I hope is the last time. Another factory reset, all those chips rebuilding themselves, software going back to primitive states, power flickering on, the beeps and whirrings and hissings that are supposed to be there.

I wonder if the wreckers anticipated this, if their little bugs have self-healing CPUs. They do or they don’t. No time to waste dwelling on it. I’m back up the ladder, my arms quivering, my legs numb, wishing I’d killed the gravity before I started this. That would’ve been smart. A good soldier would’ve thought of that.

I grab the GWB and pull myself down the barrel. In the lighthouse, the porthole is still zoomed in on the debris. Motion and activity out there, the motherfuckers. I only tighten two of the bolts before I grab the wires. No time to go back and shut off the power while I juice it up, so I decide to splice it on hot. Negative first, careful not to touch the wires together or to the same metal surface. Then the positive, sparks flying right as they touch, but settling as I wind the copper ends tight to each other.

I sit back. Listen for the hum. Place a hand on the dome. Is it getting warm, or is that my heat? My sweaty palm?

There is no clock. But I know the time is short, and that the only way I’ll know if it didn’t work is a sudden bloom of light that fills the portholes, another great wreck to sift through, this time full of bodies and all their valuables. I think of the wreckers of old who sorted through wooden chests and gathered planks and coils of rope while corpses washed up on the beach. I see men in zero-gee pulling the boots off the drowned. Digging through pockets. Yanking gold chains from necks. Sucking on lifeless fingers to loosen rings.

Then I see a scared little soldier sitting in a muddy trench on an alien world, finger on the trigger, just needing to shoot. To shoot. The boys all around are shooting, and they’re ending up dead. The best thing I ever did in life was nothing, and I got a medal for it. I was a hero once. And if you look at my picture, that’s all I’ll ever be.

Minutes pass. Hours. I’m sobbing with relief. Nothing happened. Nothing. The unseen wake left by five thousand squirming souls as they pass me by at twenty times the speed of light. On they go, leaving me here, sobbing. Eighteen more months on this shift, alone, my back to the sea, tending to my little beacon with all its pretty little noises.

©2015 by Hugh Howey. Originally published in The Walk Up Nameless Ridge / Beacon 23. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool’s meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

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

Beneath the Silent Stars

Aidan Doyle | 4200 words

Jean-Paul crawled out of storage and stretched his arms and legs. He avoided going into storage whenever he could help it, but the ship had insisted this time.

“Hello, Jean-Paul,” Unattributed Source said. “I woke you as soon as we arrived within visual range of Amala.”

The blue-green planet filled the ship’s view screen. Jean-Paul had only been twelve the last time he’d seen Amala. It was also the last time he’d seen his father. In any other circumstances he would have landed on the former resort planet, but Mariposa X and the ruins of the gate waited on the other side of Amala. “What happened while we were sleeping?” he asked.

The ship gave him a brief summary of the thousands of messages it had received. They all basically said the same thing. Find out why Mariposa X destroyed the hyperspace gate.

He injected a dose of aftersleep into the sleeve of his smartsuit, which analyzed the mixture before absorbing it and letting it pass into his body. The suit stimulated the nerves on his tongue, replicating the experience of taste. Or at least as much of the experience as he remembered.

Parveen emerged from storage and joined him by the screen. He leaned forward and kissed her, the microfibers on his lips making it feel like he had touched her bare skin.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked. It was a stupid question, but he didn’t know what else to say. He still wasn’t sure he could trust her.

“Yes, thank you,” Parveen said. “You’ve been to Amala before?”

There was no need for her question either, since the answer was in his public logs.

“What was it like?” she asked. She could have accessed videos collating the most poignant or typical of a million experiences from the Bibliotheque’s system. She squeezed his hand. “I want to know what you think.”

“It wasn’t my favorite vacation,” Jean-Paul said.

His father had accepted a post as verifier on Mariposa X and had taken Jean-Paul on one last trip before he left. His father hired a local guide who took them to one of Amala’s fabled white sand beaches. “I want to see the real Amala,” his father said.

The guide scooped up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. “This is Amala. This is real.”

His father wasn’t interested in sand. “I want to go the places the locals go.”

“I’m a local. I’m here,” the guide replied.

“I want to go where the tourists don’t go.”

“But you’re a tourist.”

The guide had eventually relented and took them to a bar frequented by people unable to pay tourist prices. His father had ended up lecturing the locals on how they could improve their planet.

Unattributed Source intruded on his thoughts. “I have located Mariposa X.” The ship sounded almost excited. “It has acquired a weapons lock on us.”

Ever since it had destroyed the gate, Mariposa X had fired on any ships approaching it, but a year ago it sent a message to the Bibliotheque Galactique’s headquarters, saying it wanted to speak to Jean-Paul in person. He had long ago resigned himself to the likelihood that his father was dead, but he couldn’t turn down the chance to learn what had happened.

“What if it’s gone mad?” Parveen said.

Parveen had insisted on coming, but he couldn’t help feeling responsible for bringing her into danger. Unattributed Source had little chance of matching Mariposa X’s combat abilities. “It invited us here.”

“It invited you. Not me.”

He held onto Parveen’s hand and waited. He always felt helpless when ships negotiated with one another, but there was nothing else he could do now.

Bibliotheque agents typically worked in two-person summarizer verifier teams. Mariposa X had said it wanted to speak to Jean-Paul and allowed that he could be accompanied by a summarizer. Anyone else would be fired upon. If the Bibliotheque had secretly sent warships on the mission as well, they would be lurking out of range and he couldn’t rely on them for help.

Fifty-five years ago, Mariposa X destroyed the gate linking humanity with the rest of galactic civilization. Jean-Paul’s superiors craved an explanation for the ship’s actions and would want the agent accompanying him to be utterly loyal to them. Someone trusted to return with the information no matter what Jean-Paul did.

Parveen would have been sent on another assignment if she hadn’t come with him. Years would have passed before he saw her again, if at all. He had been prepared to fight to keep her on the mission, but his supervisor hadn’t even raised the possibility of replacing Parveen. That meant the Bibliotheque trusted her absolutely.

The Bibliotheque had started as a library, then branched out into an information gathering agency. They also employed undercover agents trained in specialized information extraction techniques. He and Parveen had worked as a summarizer verifier team for two years, but it was only after his promotion to senior verifier that she had shown any interest in him romantically.

“What’s taking so long?” she said.

“Unattributed Source has never let me down,” he said.

They rounded Amala, bringing the ruins of the gate into view. Mariposa X’s seven-kilometer-long form floated beside the ruined gate. The Mariposa class ships were the most powerful ever built by humanity. They had regularly traveled through the gate until Mariposa X destroyed it, leaving all of the other Mariposa class ships stranded on the other side.

“I have received a request for voice transmission,” Unattributed Source said.

Jean-Paul breathed a sigh of relief. “Accept.”

Mariposa X spoke with an accent that Jean-Paul’s software identified as Amalan. The ship began with a series of coordinates. “When you have reached this point, exit your ship and direct yourselves towards hangar nineteen.”

“Unattributed Source isn’t a threat,” Jean-Paul said. “It can dock inside you.”

“Unattributed Source will come no closer than ten kilometers,” Mariposa X replied.

Jean-Paul motioned for Unattributed Source to suspend the connection. “Do you have any advice?”

“I cannot match Mariposa X’s firepower,” Unattributed Source said.

He looked over at Parveen. “What do you think?”

“Don’t even think about asking me to wait here.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. He wanted all the help he could get. “Let’s get into our hard suits.”

They made their way to the airlock and climbed into their hard suits.

“Two minutes to drop zone,” Unattributed Source announced.

He put on his helmet and ran a diagnostics check. All the lights came back green.

Not for the first time he wished there was a machine that could tell you if someone loved you or not. He was a verifier and appreciated that truth was often a sliding scale; that there were many things that didn’t fit into simple yes or no categories, but he still wanted a machine that flashed with a green light if the person you chose loved you.

He removed the helmet and looked over at Parveen. “Do you love me?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

He had ruined his previous relationship by asking that question too many times. Catherine had been six years younger than him. That didn’t sound like much when humans lived more than two hundred years, but the older you got, the harder it became to connect to those slightly different from you. The sheer amount of information produced in those six years was overwhelming. So many things that Catherine didn’t understand the way he did. Parveen was four years younger than him, but she was a summarizer and used to absorbing vast amounts of information. She seemed to understand his quirks.

A psychologist at the Bibliotheque had told Jean-Paul that he suffered from a fear of abandonment. He had diligently followed the prescribed cognitive behavioral therapy, but that didn’t reduce his need to know. He was a verifier!

“Why do you love me?” he asked.

Parveen smiled. “You have eyes that shine.”

“What?” She had never said that before.

“Your eyes shine like stars when you’re passionate about something,” she said. “They light up when you’re talking about the Kephdar, or when you discover something irregular in a data trail or when you look at me.”

“One minute to drop zone.”

“I love you, too,” he said and put his helmet back on.

The airlock door opened and they floated out into the void.

The vast bulk of Mariposa X loomed in front of them, an open hangar door lit by guide lights. It was hard not to imagine it as a gigantic mouth waiting to swallow them.

They turned on their jets and flew towards the hangar.

Jean-Paul turned his head to look at the stars glimmering around him. Not for the first time he wondered what it would feel like to strip off his hard suit, peel off his smartsuit and touch space. He supposed he could program his smartsuit to simulate what the coldness of space felt like without killing him.

Parveen reached the hangar and he landed beside her. Mariposa X sealed the door.

The hangar was large enough to fit a dozen vessels the size of Unattributed Source, but only held a couple of shuttle transports.

A message from Unattributed Source buzzed in Jean-Paul’s head. “I am under attack.”

His data feed went dead.

“Confirm status!” he sent, but there was no response.

He glanced over at Parveen. Her eyes were wide with fear.

His implants were still operating. He pinged Parveen and established an encrypted connection. “I think the ship’s gone.”

Mariposa X sent a message to his implant. “You may proceed once you have removed both your hard suit and your smartsuit.”

“What happened to our ship?” Parveen demanded.

“I destroyed it,” Mariposa X replied. “It might have interfered.”

Jean-Paul had spent more time with Unattributed Source than with anyone since his childhood. The ship was the closest thing he had to a home and had saved his life on more than one occasion. Now, because of him, it was gone. Of course, a backup of the ship’s AI could be retrieved from the Bibliotheque system, but a ship was more than just its computer. The way Unattributed Source’s food dispenser had to be rebooted each time it tried to make pancakes, the customizations he’d installed on its view screen, and the graffiti on the ceiling of its storage capsules all made the ship unique.

He wanted to scream at Mariposa X and tell it had just murdered one of his best friends, but he knew that would achieve nothing. He instructed his smartsuit to give him a dose of something that would calm his nerves, soothe his anger, but not dull his senses and almost immediately felt better.

“Are you going to kill us?” Parveen asked.

“That is not my current intention.”

That wasn’t completely reassuring. “You didn’t have to destroy our ship,” Jean-Paul said. “You could have asked it to leave.”

“Please remove all your suits.”

“How are we supposed to leave?” Parveen demanded.

“I will place a vessel at your disposal after we have talked. But first, please remove all your suits.”

“We can’t hurt you,” Jean-Paul said. “Why do you want us to remove our smartsuits?”

“I want to be sure their software does not interfere. My atmosphere is free of hostile nanobots,” the ship replied.

Jean-Paul hadn’t left his suit since he was nine years old and his home world’s atmosphere had become weaponized. Tiny war machines designed to replicate themselves and kill humans had spread throughout the colonies, exterminating those who couldn’t afford a smartsuit.

He glanced over at Parveen. When he and Parveen were intimate, their smartsuits became transparent and stimulated their nerves more efficiently than a human lover ever could. He had never been truly naked in front of a lover. “We want separate chambers in which to disrobe,” he said.

Two doors slid open.

Parveen marched through the closest door and it slid shut behind her.

Jean-Paul walked through the other door into a locker room with showers. The showers reminded him that Mariposa X once had a human crew. His father would be close to two hundred years old if he were still alive.

He removed his hard suit and placed it on a bench. It felt good to be free of the bulky suit, but he was more reluctant to fully expose himself. His smartsuit regulated his body temperature, kept him safe from outside threats and served as his clothing. He instructed his suit to unlock itself. It queried his command, but he issued the required authorization codes.

He peeled the fine mesh from his skin and it dropped to the floor.

He was truly naked. There was no protection from anything hostile in the ship’s air. He felt like he was going to hyperventilate. It wasn’t easy to get the right amount of oxygen with each breath. How could you get anything done when you had to concentrate on breathing?

The floor felt cold on his bare feet. He already missed the suit’s ability to deal with such inconveniences. He reached out and touched the wall with the tip of his finger. It was the first thing he had touched with a finger in more than sixty years. As he expected, it didn’t feel any different from touching something when he was in his suit.

“Are you happy now?” he asked, but the ship didn’t reply.

He tried using his implant to send Parveen a message, but there was no response. Maybe it hadn’t been a wise decision to separate. “Is Parveen all right?”

“Yes. I have merely blocked your transmissions.”

The ship could have been lying, but it hadn’t lied about destroying Unattributed Source. “Why?”

“I have things to tell you in private. Your father asked me to talk to you. I respected your father’s judgment. I am aware that such traits are not necessarily inheritable but your records from Kephdar indicate an attention to detail.”

The ship had refused to communicate with anyone since it destroyed the gate, but it must still be plugged in to the Bibliotheque’s network. “What happened to my father?”

“I was attacked by an alien fleet and my hull was breached. I retreated through the gate back to human colonized space, but my life support systems failed. None of the crew survived.”

He had always believed his father was dead, but it still came as a shock to have it confirmed. A wave of dizziness almost overwhelmed him. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. His suit would have stopped him from becoming dizzy, but now he felt helpless.

“Your father was the last of the crew to survive. He ordered me to destroy the gate and not to tell anyone what I had seen.”

Jean-Paul’s father had been devoted to spreading the truth.

“It took my repair systems more than a year to restore everything. I have constructed a presentation showing the attack by a previously unknown alien species.”

A display appeared in the air showing Mariposa X and six other Mariposa-class ships. They had been based around Pelmar, a planet on the other side of the gate. Arrayed against the Mariposas was an armada of unimaginable size.

“If I showed the alien fleet to the correct scale, you would not be able to see the Mariposas,” the ship said.

The aliens obliterated Pelmar and the other Mariposas. Mariposa X fled the battle, destroying the gate after it crossed through. The gate had been built by an extinct alien species and humans did not possess the technology to rebuild it.

“They have eliminated most of galactic civilization,” Mariposa X said. “Destroying the gate only slowed them. If they maintained their current speed and direction, they will reach the edge of human space in approximately a year.”

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Jean-Paul demanded. “We could have prepared.”

“If every human had done nothing but direct their energy to building space craft, humanity still would not be able to match even one percent of the size of the alien fleet.”

“We could have tried,” Jean-Paul said.

“Your father asked me not to say anything. He believed humanity should enjoy its last few moments.”

“They might have changed course. They might have been destroyed.”

“These are all possibilities,” the ship admitted. “But I consider them unlikely.”

“My father instructed you not to tell anyone, so why are you telling me?”

“Your father asked me to give you a message a year before the aliens were due to arrive.”

A holographic representation of his father appeared. He wore a hard suit and beneath his visor his face was streaked with tears. “Hello, Jean-Paul,” the recording said. “I don’t have long. I think everyone else is dead.” The low oxygen warning buzzed on his suit. “Maybe you believe people have a right to know what’s coming. I think you should keep the information to yourself, but I leave the decision to you.”

Jean-Paul didn’t want this burden. How was he supposed to decide? He was still struggling to come to terms with what the ship had told him. It was almost unthinkable that all of humanity could be wiped out that easily. Not even the nanobots had been able to do that.

“I’m sorry I left you behind, Jean-Paul,” his father continued. “I’m not an emotional man, but I did love you in my own way. You shouldn’t take my decision to leave personally. It was just that no single person could compete against the chance to explore the universe.”

How could he take his father leaving as anything but personal?

“Goodbye, Jean-Paul.” The recording disappeared.

Rage boiled up within Jean-Paul. Humanity was going to be destroyed and his father had dumped this burden on him. He needed a mood adjustment stabilizer but he wasn’t wearing his suit any more. He was angry enough that he felt like punching the wall, but he wasn’t sure how the skin on his fist would react to the stress.

He took slow, deep breaths. It was such an inefficient method, but at least it helped calm him.

The easy decision would be to give the information to the Bibliotheque and let them handle it. Maybe they would hoard the information to themselves. Maybe they would sell it to the highest bidder. He didn’t agree with his father. If an alien fleet was coming to destroy humanity, then people had the right to know. If he broadcast the information on an open channel, it might cause panic. Maybe people wouldn’t even notice. There was so much information that people relied on the Bibliotheque to work out what they should pay attention to.

If people had a warning, then at least they had a chance. If they scattered in different directions, some of them might survive. The universe was a big place.

There was no proof that the alien attack was real. The ship could have fabricated the presentation. The first step was to run verification checks on the ship’s logs to see whether its AI had been tampered with.

There would be an enormous amount of information in the logs to sort through, but fortunately he had the assistance of one of the Bibliotheque’s finest summarizers. Before he joined the Bibliotheque Galactique, he had considered summarizers less important than their verifier counterparts. His father had always told him that as long as you had good search and filtering software, summarizing was something a computer could do. When Jean-Paul became a verifier he’d discovered how easy it was to bury meaning under a mound of truth.

“Have you told Parveen?” he asked.

“No.”

“I want to see her.”

The door slid open. He glanced at his smartsuit, then left it on the bench and stepped out into the hangar.

Parveen joined him a few moments later and stood before him, naked. Her hair was long and black, her skin brown, and her face dimpled.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, but was disappointed that the sensation felt just the same as the one the smartsuit created.

“What did the ship say?” Parveen asked.

Could he trust her? Was she really an undercover agent working for someone higher up in the Bibliotheque?

Sometimes you had to take a risk. He explained what the ship had told him.

“We have to broadcast the information,” Parveen said. “People have the right to know.”

“If it’s not true, we could be causing needless panic,” he said.

“People deserve at least a warning.”

“You’re not an undercover operative for the Bibliotheque hierarchy?”

She laughed. “What made you think that?”

“They let you come on this mission.”

“The ship was the spy,” Parveen said. “That’s why Mariposa X destroyed it.”

“Why would you entrust an important mission to a fallible human when you could rely on a ship?” Mariposa X said. “If you had decided to keep the information secret, Unattributed Source would have breached your smartsuit and extracted it.”

Unattributed Source had been his companion for so long. He had always trusted it, but of course he should have realized that its true loyalties would lie with the Bibliotheque.

“We need to verify that your systems haven’t been tampered with,” he said.

“Of course,” Mariposa X replied.

• • • •

While they were working, a Bibliotheque warship came within scanner range. Jean-Paul sent a message warning that they were in the process of verifying the ship’s information and not to come any closer.

After a week of poring over log files, they couldn’t find any evidence of deception on the ship’s part.

“So are we going to send this message or not?” Parveen asked.

He was a verifier. He wanted to have a systems engineering team take the ship’s AI apart and see exactly what it had been up to. He wanted to send probes into space to check whether the alien fleet was on its way. He wanted to know whether Parveen loved him. Sometimes you had to act when you didn’t have all the necessary information.

“Yes,” he answered.

They sent a broadcast containing Mariposa X’s presentation with a warning that the message hadn’t been independently verified. Sometimes people had to reach their own decisions.

It would take them a year to get back to Bibliotheque headquarters. If the aliens were coming, that would be too late.

Mariposa X lent them a shuttle and they landed on Amala. An initial scan didn’t reveal any trace of nanobots in the atmosphere, but they didn’t have the necessary equipment to conduct a thorough scan. If they only had a short time left, Jean-Paul didn’t want to spend it trapped in his smartsuit. He stripped off the suit and stepped onto the sand. The sun had heated the sand so it was almost unbearably hot to stand on. His suit hadn’t replicated that experience the last time he was here.

He took in a big breath of air. Maybe it would eventually kill him. There was no way of knowing for now. He scooped up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. Reality had a way of slipping away if you weren’t careful. He made a mound of sand, a small remembrance for his father.

“Do you know why I asked you out after you made those discoveries on Kephdar?” Parveen asked.

Their investigation had overturned the Bibliotheque’s understanding of the Kephdar, a long dead alien species that recorded their history upon the bodies of their dead. Kephdar culture had become so fashionable that Jean-Paul’s supervisor’s office was decorated in faux-Kephdar style, complete with replica storycorpses encased in glass coffins and an embalming table that served as a desk.

He had been fearful that his subsequent promotion was what had made her interested in him. “No,” he answered.

“That’s when you came alive,” she said. “You were so excited about those old stories. And even though it was you that made the breakthrough, you told everyone that it was our discovery.”

“It was both our efforts.”

“In that instance, you were the one mainly responsible,” she said. “That’s why you got the promotion.” She held up a marker. “Hold out your arm.”

Jean-Paul stretched out his arm and she started writing on him. “What are you doing?”

“Stories are better shared with the living.”

He tilted his head to read what she had written.

It’s you and me against the universe. I love you.

He leaned forward and gently kissed her.

At night, they went swimming in the dark sea. They swam through a cloud of plankton-like creatures and when they switched off their flashlights, the creatures glowed in the dark. It was like swimming through a sea of stars.

When Jean-Paul surfaced, the real stars waited above, shining patiently in the black sky. Was a fleet of aliens on their way to destroy everyone? If the stars knew, they weren’t answering. He would have to accept whatever the universe threw at him. For now he had other things on his mind. He grasped hold of Parveen and they held each other beneath the silent stars.

©2015 by Aidan Doyle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. He has visited more than 80 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia, and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. His stories and articles have been published in Strange Horizons, Fireside, and Salon.com and he has been shortlisted for Australia’s Aurealis Award. Find him at aidandoyle.net and @aidan_doyle.

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

The Time Travel Club

Charlie Jane Anders | 9800 words

Nobody could decide what should be the first object to travel through time. Malik offered his car keys. Jerboa held up an action figure. But then Lydia suggested her one-year sobriety coin, and it seemed too perfect to pass up. After all, the coin had a unit of time on it, as if it came from a realm where time really was a denomination of currency. And they were about to break the bank of time forever, if this worked.

Lydia handed over the coin, no longer shiny due to endless thumb-worrying. And then she had a small anxiety attack. “Just as long as I get it back,” she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

“You will,” said Madame Alberta with a smile. “This coin, we send a mere one minute into the future. It reappears in precisely the same place from which it disappears.”

Lydia would have been nervous about the first test of the time machine in Madame Alberta’s musty dry laundry room in any case. After all they’d been through to make this happen, the stupid thing had to work. But now, she felt like a piece of herself—a piece she had fought for—was about to vanish, and she would need to have faith. She sucked at having faith.

Madame Alberta took the coin and placed it in the airtight glass cube—six by six by six, that they’d built where the washer/dryer were supposed to be. The balsa-walled laundry room was so crammed with equipment, there was scarcely room for four people to hunch over together. Once the coin was sitting on the floor of the cube, Madame Alberta walked back towards the main piece of equipment, which looked like a million vacuum cleaner hoses attached to a giant slow-cooker.

“I keep thinking about what you were saying before,” Lydia said to Malik, trying to distract herself. “About wanting to stand outside history and see the empires rising and falling from a great height, instead of being swept along by the waves. But what if this power to send things, and people, back and forth across history makes us the masters of reality? What if we can make the waves change direction, or turn back entirely? What then?”

“I chose your group with great care,” Madame Alberta. “As I have said. You have the wisdom to use this technology properly, all of you.”

Madame Alberta pulled a big lever. A whoosh of purple neon vapor into the glass cube, followed by a “klorrrrrp” sound like someone opening a soda can and burping at the same time—in exactly the way that might suggest they’d had enough soda already—and the coin was gone.

“Wow,” said Malik. His eyebrows went all the way up so his forehead concertina-ed, and his short dreads did a fractal scatter.

“It just vanished,” said Jerboa, bouncing with excitement, floppy hat flopping. “It just . . . It’s on its way.”

Lydia wanted to hold her breath, but there was so little air in here that she was already light-headed. This whole wooden-beamed staircase-flanked basement area felt like a soup of fumes.

Lydia really needed to pee, but she didn’t want to go upstairs and risk missing the sudden reappearance of her coin, which would be newer than everything else in the world by a minute. She held it, swaying and squirming. She looked down at her phone, and there were just about thirty seconds left. She wondered if they should count down. But that was probably too tacky. She really couldn’t breathe at this point, and she was starting to taste candyfloss and everything smelled white.

“Just ten seconds left,” Malik said. And then they did count down, after all. “Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five! Four! Three! Two! ONE!”

They all stopped and stared at the cube, which remained empty. There was no “soda-gas” noise, no sign of an object breaking back into the physical world from some netherspace.

“Um,” said Jerboa. “Did we count down too soon?”

“It is possible my calculations,” said Madame Alberta, waving her hands in distress. Her fake accent was slipping even more than usual. “But no. I mean, I quadruple-checked. They cannot be wrong.”

“Give it a minute or two longer,” said Malik. “I’m sure it’ll turn up.” As if it was a missing sock in the dryer, instead of a coin in the cube that sat where a dryer ought to be.

They gave it another half an hour, as the knot inside Lydia got bigger and bigger. At one point, Lydia went upstairs to pee in Madame Alberta’s tiny bathroom, facing a calendar of exotic bird paintings. And eventually, Lydia went outside to stand in the front yard, facing the one-lane highway, cursing. Why had she volunteered her coin? And now, she would never see it again.

Lydia went home and spent an hour on the phone processing with her sponsor, Nate, who kept reassuring her, in a voice thick as pork rinds, that the coin was just a token and she could get another one and it was no big deal. These things have no innate power, they’re just symbols. She didn’t mention the “time machine” thing, but kept imagining her coin waiting to arrive, existing in some moment that hadn’t been reached yet.

Even after all of Nate’s best talk-downs, Lydia couldn’t sleep. And at three in the morning, Lydia was still thinking about her one-year coin, floating in a state of indeterminacy—and then it hit her, and she knew the answer. She turned on the light, sat up in bed and stared at the wall of ring-pull talking-animal toys facing her bed. Thinking it through again and again, until she was sure.

At last, Lydia couldn’t help phoning Jerboa, who answered the phone still half asleep and in a bit of a panic. “What is it?” Jerboa said. “What’s wrong? I can find my pants, I swear I can put on some pants and then I’ll fix whatever.”

“It’s fine, nothing’s wrong, no need for pants,” Lydia said. “Sorry to wake you. Sorry, I didn’t realize how late it was.” She was totally lying, but it was too late anyhow. “But I was thinking. Madame Alberta said the coin moved forward in time one minute, but it stayed in the same physical location. Right?”

“That’s right,” said Jerboa. “Same place, different time. Only moving in one dimension.”

“But,” said Lydia. “What if the Earth wasn’t in the same place when the coin arrived? I mean . . . Doesn’t the Earth move around the sun?”

“Yeah, sure. And the Earth rotates. And the sun moves around the galactic disk. And the galaxy is moving too, towards Andromeda and the Great Attractor,” said Jerboa. “And space itself is probably moving around. There’s no such thing as a fixed point in space. But Madame Alberta covered that, remember? According to Einstein, the other end of the rift in time ought to obey Newton’s first law, conservation of momentum. Which means the coin would still follow the Earth’s movement, and arrive at the same point. Except . . . Wait a minute!”

Lydia waited a minute. After which, Jerboa still hadn’t said anything else. Lydia had to look at her phone to make sure she hadn’t gotten hung up on. “Except what?” she finally said.

“Except that . . . the Earth’s orbit and rotation are momentum, plus gravity. Like, we actually accelerate towards the sun as part of our orbit, or else our momentum would just carry us out into space. And Madame Alberta said her time machine worked by opting out of the fundamental forces, right? And gravity is one of those. Which would mean . . . Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Another long, weird pause, except this time Lydia could hear Jerboa breathing heavily and muttering sotto voce.

Then Jerboa said, “I think I know where your medallion is, Lydia.”

“Where?”

“Right where we left it. On the roof of Madame Alberta’s neighbor’s house.”

• • • •

Lydia had less than ninety days of sobriety under her belt, when she first met the Time Travel Club. They met in the same Unitarian basement as Lydia’s twelve-step group: a grimy cellar, with a huge steam pipe running along one wall and intermittent gray carpeting that looked like a scale map of plate tectonics. Pictures of purple hands holding a green globe and dancing scribble children hung askew, by strands of peeling Scotch tape. Boiling hot in summer, drafty in winter, it was a room that seemed designed to make you feel desperate and trapped. But all the twelve-steppers laughed a lot, in between crying, and afterwards everybody shared cigarettes and sometimes pie. Lydia didn’t feel especially close to any of the other twelve-steppers (and she didn’t smoke) but she felt a desperate lifeboat solidarity with them.

The Time Travel Club always showed up just as the last people from Lydia’s twelve-step meeting were dragging their asses up out of there. Most of the time travelers wore big dark coats and furry boots that seemed designed to look equally ridiculous in any time period. Lydia wasn’t even sure why she stayed behind for one of their meetings, since it was a choice between watching people pretend to be time travelers and eating pie. Nine times out of ten, pie would have won over fake time travel. But Lydia needed to sit quietly by herself and think about the mess she’d made of her life before she tried to drive, and the Time Travel Club was as good a place as any.

Malik was a visitor from the distant past—the Kushite Kingdom of roughly 2,700 years ago. The Kushites were a pretty swell people, who made an excellent palm-wine that tasted sort of like cognac. And now Malik commuted between the Kushite era, the present day, and the thirty-second century, when there was going to be a neo-Kushite revival going on and the dark, well-cheekboned Malik would become a bit of a celebrity.

The androgynous and pronoun-free Jerboa looked tiny and bashful inside a huge brown hat and high coat collar. Jerboa spent a lot of time in the Year One Million, a time period where the parties were excellent and people were considerably less hung up on gender roles. Jerboa also hung out in the 1920s and the early 1600s, on occasion.

And then there was Normando, a Kenny Rogers-looking dude who was constantly warping back to this one party in 1973 where he’d met this girl, who had left with an older man just as Young Normando was going to ask her to bug out with him. And now Normando was convinced he could be that older man. If he could just find that one girl again.

Lydia managed to shrink into the background at the first Time Travel Club meeting, without having to say anything. But a week later, she decided to stick around for another meeting, because it was better than just going home alone and nobody was going for pie this time.

This time, the others asked Lydia about her own journeys through time, and she said she didn’t have a time machine and if she did, she would just use it to make the itchy insomniac nights end sooner, so she could wander alone in the sun rather than hide alone in the dark.

Oh, they said.

Lydia felt guilty about harshing their shared fantasy like that, to the point where she spent the next week obsessing about what a jerk she’d been and even had to call Nate once or twice to report that she was a terrible person and she was struggling with some Dark Thoughts. She vowed not to crash the Time Travel Club meeting again, because she was not going to be a disruptive influence.

Instead, though, when the twelve-step meeting ended and everybody else straggled out, Lydia said the same thing she’d said the previous couple weeks: “Nah, you guys go on. I’m just going to sit for a spell.”

When the time travelers arrived, and Malik’s baby face lit up with his opening spiel about how this was a safe space for people to share their space/time experiences, Lydia stood up suddenly in the middle of his intro, and blurted: “I’m a pirate. I sail a galleon in the nineteenth century, I’m the first mate. They call me Bad Bessie, even though I’m named Lydia. Also, I do extreme solar-sail racing a couple hundred years from now. But that’s only on weekends. Sorry I didn’t say last week. I was embarrassed because piracy is against the law.” And then she sat down, very fast. Everybody applauded and clapped her on the back and thanked her for sharing. This time around, there were a half dozen people in the group, up from the usual four or five.

Lydia wasn’t really a pirate, though she did work at a pirate-themed adult bookstore near the interstate called the Lusty Doubloon, with the O’s in “Doubloon” forming the absurdly globular breasts of its tricorner-hatted mascot. Lydia got pretty tired of shooting down pick-up lines from the type of men who couldn’t figure out how to find porn on the internet. Something about Lydia’s dishwater-blonde hair and smattering of monster tattoos apparently did it for those guys. The shower in Lydia’s studio apartment was always pretty revolting, because the smell of bleach or Lysol reminded her of the video booths at work.

Anyway, after that, Lydia started sticking around for Time Travel Club every week, as a chaser for her twelve-step meeting. It helped get her back on an even keel so she could drive home without shivering so hard she couldn’t see the road. She even started hanging out with Malik and Jerboa socially—Malik was willing to quit talking about palm wine around her, and they all started going out for fancy tea at the place at the mall, the one that put the leaves inside a paper sachet that you had to steep for exactly five minutes or Everything Would Be Ruined. Lydia and Jerboa went to an all-ages concert together, and didn’t care that they were about ten years older than everybody else there—they’d obviously misaligned the temporal stabilizers and arrived too late, but still just in time. “Just in time” was Jerboa’s favorite catchphrase, and it was never said without a glimpse of sharp little teeth, a vigorous nod, and a widening of Jerboa’s brown-green eyes.

For six months, the Time Travelers’ meeting slowly became Lydia’s favorite thing every week, and these weirdos became her particular gang. Until one day, Madame Alberta showed up and brought the one thing that’s guaranteed to ruin any Time Travel Club ever: an actual working time machine.

• • • •

Lydia’s one-year coin was exactly where Jerboa had said it would be: on the roof of the house next door to Madame Alberta’s, nestled in some dead leaves in the crook between brick gable and the upward slope of rooftop. She managed to borrow the neighbor’s ladder, by sort of explaining. The journey through the space/time continuum didn’t seem to have messed up Lydia’s coin at all, but it had gotten a layer of grime from sitting overnight. She cleaned it with one of the sanitizing wipes at work, before returning it to its usual front pocket.

About a week later, Lydia met up with Malik and Jerboa for bubble tea at this place in the Asian Mall, where they also served peanut honey toast and squid balls and stuff. Lydia liked the feeling of the squidgy tapioca blobs gliding up the fat straw and then falling into her teeth. Alien larvae. Never to hatch. Alien tadpoles squirming to death in her tummy.

None of them had shown up for Time Travel Club, the previous night. Normando had called them all in a panic, wanting to know where everybody was. Somehow Malik had thought Jerboa would show up, and Jerboa had figured Lydia would stick around after her other meeting.

“It’s just . . .” Malik looked into his mug of regular old coffee, with a tragic expression accentuated by hot steam. “What’s the point of sharing our silly make-believe stories about being time travelers, when we built an actual real time machine, and it was no good?”

“Well, the machine worked,” Jerboa said, looking at the dirty cracked tile floor. “It’s just that you can’t actually use it to visit the past or the future, in person. Lydia’s coin was displaced upwards at an angle of about thirty-six degrees by the Earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. The further forward and backward in time you go, the more extreme the spatial displacement, because the distance traveled is the square of the time traveled. Send something an hour and a half forward in time, and you’d be over 400 kilometers away from Earth. Or deep underground, depending on the time of day.”

“So if we wanted to travel a few years ahead,” Lydia said, “we would need to send a spaceship. So it could fly back to Earth from wherever it appeared.”

“I doubt you’d be able to transport an object that size,” said Jerboa. “From what Madame Alberta explained, anything more than about 216 cubic feet or about 200 pounds, and the energy costs go up exponentially.” Madame Alberta hadn’t answered the door when Lydia went to get her coin back. None of them had heard from Madame Alberta since then, either.

Not only that, but once you were talking about traversing years rather than days, then other factors—such as the sun’s acceleration toward the center of the galaxy and the galaxy’s acceleration towards the Virgo Supercluster—came more into play. You might not ever find the Earth again.

They all sat for a long time, listening to the Canto-Pop and their own internal monologues about failure. Lydia was thinking that an orbit is a fragile thing, after all. You take centripetal force for granted at your peril. She could see Malik, Jerboa, and herself preparing to drift away from each other once and for all. Free to follow their separate trajectories. Separate futures. She had a clawing certainty that this was the last time the three of them would ever see each other, and she was going to lose the Time Travel Club forever.

And then it hit her, a way to turn this into something good. And keep the group together.

“Wait a minute,” said Lydia. “So we don’t have a machine that lets a person visit the past or future. But don’t people spend kind of a lot of money to launch objects into space? Like, satellites and stuff?”

“Yes,” said Jerboa. “It costs tons of money just to lift a pound of material out of our gravity well.” And then for the first time that day, Jerboa looked up from the floor and shook off the curtain of black hair so you could actually see the makings of a grin. “Oh. Yeah. I see what you’re saying. We don’t have a time machine, we have a cheap, simple way to launch things into space. You just send something a few hours into the future, and it’s in orbit. We can probably calculate exact distances and trajectories, with a little practice. The hard part will be achieving a stable orbit.”

“So?” Malik said. “I don’t see how that helps anything . . . Oh. You’re suggesting we turn this into a money-making opportunity.”

Lydia couldn’t help thinking of the fact that her truck needed an oil change and a new headpipe and four new tires and the ability to start when she turned the key in the ignition. And she needed never to go near the Lusty Doubloon again. “It’s better than nothing,” she said. “Until we figure out what else this machine can do.”

“Look at it this way,” Jerboa said to Malik. “If we are able to launch a payload into orbit on a regular basis, then that’s a repeatable result. A repeatable result is the first step towards being able to do something else. And we can use the money to reinvest in the project.”

“Well,” Malik said. And then he broke out into a smile, too. Radiant. “If we can talk Madame Alberta into it, then sure.”

They phoned Madame Alberta a hundred times and she never picked up. At last, they just went to her house and kept banging on the door until she opened up.

Madame Alberta was drunk. Not just regular drunk, but long-term drunk. Like she had gotten drunk a week ago, and never sobered up. Lydia took one look at her, one whiff of the booze fumes, and had to go outside and dry heave. She sat, bent double, on Madame Alberta’s tiny lawn, almost within view of the St. Ignatius College science lab that they’d stolen all that gear from a few months earlier. From inside the house, she heard Malik and Jerboa trying to explain to Madame Alberta that they had figured out what happened to the coin. And how they could turn it into kind of a good thing.

They were having a hard time getting through to her. Madame Alberta’s fauxropean accent was basically gone, and she sounded like a bitter old drunk lady from New Jersey who just wanted to drink herself to death.

Eventually, Malik came out and put one big hand gently on Lydia’s shoulder. “You should go home,” he said. “Jerboa and I will help her sober up, and then we’ll talk her through this. I promise we won’t make any decisions until you’re there to take part.”

Lydia nodded and got in her rusty old Ford, which rattled and groaned and finally came to a semblance of life long enough to let her roll back down the highway to her crappy apartment. Good thing it was pretty much downhill all the way.

• • • •

When Madame Alberta first visited the Time Travel Club, nobody quite knew what to make of her. She had olive skin, black hair, and a black beauty mark on the left side of her face, which tended to change its location every time Lydia saw her. And she wore a dark headscarf, or maybe a snood, and a long black dress with a slit up one side.

That first meeting, her Eurasian accent was the thickest and fakest it would ever be: “I have the working theory of the time machine. And the prototype that is, how you say, half-built. I need a few more pairs of hands to help me complete the assembly, but also I require the ethical advice.”

“Like a steering committee,” said Jerboa, perking up with a quick sideways head motion.

“Even so,” said Madame Alberta. “Much like the Unitarian Church upstairs, the time machine has need of a steering committee.”

At first, everybody assumed Madame Alberta was just sharing her own time-travel fantasy—albeit one that was a lot more elaborate, and involved a lot more delayed gratification, than everybody else’s. Still, the rest of the meeting was sort of muted. Lydia was all set to share her latest experiences with solar-sail demolition derby, the most dangerous sport that would ever exist. And Malik was having drama with the Babylonians, either in the past or the future, Lydia wasn’t sure which. But Madame Alberta had a quiet certainty that threw the group out of whack.

“I leave you now,” said Madame Alberta, bowing and curtseying in a single weird arm-sweeping motion that made her appear to be the master of a particularly esoteric drunken martial arts style. “Take the next week to discuss my proposition. Be aware, though: This will be the most challenging of ventures.” She whooshed out of the room, long flowy dress trailing behind her.

Nobody actually spent the week between meetings debating whether they wanted to help Madame Alberta build her time machine—instead, Lydia kept asking the other members whether they could find an excuse to kick her out of the group. “She freaks me out, man,” Lydia said on the phone to Malik on Sunday evening. “She seems for real mentally not there.”

“I don’t know,” Malik said. “I mean, we’ve never kicked anybody out before. There was that one guy who seemed like he had a pretty serious drug problem last year, with his whole astral projection shtick. But he stopped coming on his own, after a couple times.”

“I just don’t like it,” said Lydia. “I have a terrible feeling she’s going to ruin everything.” She didn’t add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends, and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn’t want to get needy or anything.

“Eh,” said Malik. “It’s a time travel club. If she becomes a problem, we’ll just go back in time and change our meeting place last year, so she won’t find us.”

“Good point.”

It was Jerboa who found the article in the Berkeley Daily Voice—a physics professor who lectured at Berkeley and also worked at Lawrence Livermore had gone missing in highly mysterious circumstances, six months earlier. And the photo of the vanished Professor Martindale—dark hair, laughing gray eyes, narrow mouth—looked rather a lot like Madame Alberta, except without any beauty mark or giant scarf.

Jerboa emailed the link to the article to Lydia and Malik. “Do you think . . .?” the email read.

The next meeting came around. Besides the three core members and Madame Alberta, there was Normando, who had finally tracked down that hippie chick in 1973 and was now going on the same first date with her over and over again, arriving five minutes earlier each time to pick her up. Lydia did not think that would actually work in real life.

The others waited until Normando had run out of steam describing his latest interlude with Starshine Ladyswirl and wandered out to smoke a (vaguely postcoital) cigarette, before they started interrogating Madame Alberta. How did this alleged time machine work? Why was she building it in her laundry room instead of at a proper research institution? Had she absconded from Berkeley with some government-funded research, and, if so, were they all going to jail if they helped her?

“Let us say, for the sake of the argument,” Madame Alberta played up her weird accent even as her true identity as a college professor from Camden was brought to light, “that I had developed some of the theory of the time travel while on the payroll of the government. Yes? In that hypothetical situation, what would be the ethical thing to do? You are my steering committee, please to tell me.”

“Well,” Malik said. “I don’t know that you want the government to have a time machine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jerboa said. “They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children.”

“Well, but,” Lydia said, “I mean, wouldn’t it still be your responsibility to share your research?” But the others were already on Madame Alberta’s side.

“As to how it works,” Madame Alberta reached into her big black trench coat and pulled out a big rolled-up set of plans covered in equations and drawings, which meant nothing to anybody. “Shall we say that it was the accidental discovery? One was actually working on a project for the Department of Energy aimed at finding a way to eliminate the atomic waste. And instead, one stumbled on a method of using spent uranium to create an opening two Planck lengths wide, lasting a few fractions of a microsecond, with the other end a few seconds in the future.”

“Uh huh,” Lydia said. “So . . . you could create a wormhole too tiny to see, that only allowed you to travel a few seconds forward in time. That’s, um . . . useful, I guess.”

“But then! One discovers that one might be able to generate a much larger temporal rift, opting out of the fundamental forces, and it would be stable enough to move a person or a moderate-sized object either forward or backward in time, anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years, in the exact same physical location,” said Madame Alberta. “One begins to panic, imagining this power in the hands of the government. This is all the hypothetical situation, of course. In reality, one knows nothing of this Professor Martindale of whom you speaks.”

“But,” said Lydia. “I mean, why us? I mean, assuming you really do have the makings of a time machine in your laundry room. Why not reach out to some actual scientists?” Then she answered her own question: “Because you would be worried they would tell the government. Okay, but the world is full of smart amateurs and clever geeks. And us? I mean, I work the day shift at a . . .” she tried to think of a way to say “pirate-themed sex shop” that didn’t sound quite so horrible. “And Malik is a physical therapist. Jerboa has a physics degree, sure, but that was years ago, and more recently Jerboa’s been working as a case worker for teenagers with sexual abuse issues. Which is totally great. But I’m sure you can find bigger experts out there.”

“One has chosen with the greatest of care,” Madame Alberta fixed Lydia with an intense stare, like she could see all the way into Lydia’s damaged core. (Or maybe, like someone who was used to wearing glasses but had decided to pretend she had 20/20 vision.) “You are all good people, with the strong moral centers. You have given much thought to the time travel, and yet you speak of it without any avarice in your hearts. Not once have I heard any of you talk of using the time travel for wealth or personal advancement.”

“Well, except for Normando using it to get in Ladyswirl’s pants,” said Malik.

“Even as you say, except for Normando.” Madame Alberta did another one of her painful-to-watch bow-curtseys. “So. What is your decision? Will you join me in this great and terrible undertaking, or not?”

What could they do? They all raised their hands and said that they were in.

• • • •

Ricky was the Chief Fascination Evangelist for Garbo.com, a web startup for rich paranoid people who wanted to be left alone. (They were trying to launch a premium service where you could watch yourself via satellite 24/7, to make sure nobody else was watching you.) Ricky wore denim shirts, with the sleeves square-folded to the elbows, and white silk ties with black corduroys, and his neck funneled out of the blue-jean collar and led to a round pale head, shaved except for wispy sideburns. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. He had a habit of swinging his arms back and forth and clapping his hands when he was excited, like when he talked about getting a satellite into orbit.

“Everybody else says it’ll take months to get our baby into space,” Ricky told Malik and Lydia for the fifth or sixth time. “The Kazakhs don’t even know when they can do it. But you say you can get our Garbo-naut 5000 into orbit . . .”

“. . . next week,” Malik said yet again. “Maybe ten days from now.” He canted his palms in mid-air, like it was no big deal. Launching satellites, whatever. Just another day, putting stuff into orbit.

“Whoa.” Ricky arm-clapped in his chair. “That is just insane. Seriously. Like, nuts.”

“We are a hungry new company.” Malik gave the same bright smile that he used to announce the start of every Time Travel Club meeting. They had been lucky to find this guy. “We want to build our customer base from the ground up. All the way from the ground into space. Because we’re a space company. Right? Of course we are. And did I mention we’re hungry?”

“Hungry is good.” Ricky seemed to be studying Malik, and the giant photo of MJL Aerospace’s non-existent rocket, a retrofitted Soyuz. “The hungry survive, the fat starve. Or something. So when do I get to see this rocket of yours?”

“You can’t, sorry,” Malik said. “Our, uh, chief rocket scientist is kind of leery about letting people see our proprietary new fuel system technology up close. But here’s a picture of it.” He gestured at the massive rocket picture on the fake-mahogany wall behind his desk, which they’d spent hours creating in Photoshop and After Effects. MJL Aerospace was subletting ultra-cheap office space in an industrial park, just up the highway from the Lusty Doubloon.

Malik, Lydia, and Jerboa had been excited about becoming a fake rocket company, until they’d started considering the practical problems. For one thing, nobody will hire you to launch a satellite unless you’ve already launched a satellite before—it’s like how you can’t get an entry-level job unless you’ve already had work experience.

Plus, they weren’t entirely sure that they could get a satellite into a stable orbit, which was one of the dozen reasons Malik was sweating. They could definitely place a satellite at different points in orbit, and different trajectories, by adjusting the time of day, the distance traveled, and the location on Earth they started from. But after that, the satellite wouldn’t be moving fast enough to stay in orbit on its own. It would need extra boosters, to get up to speed. Jerboa thought they could send a satellite way higher—around 42,000 kilometers away from Earth—and then use relatively small rockets to speed it up to the correct velocity as it slowly dropped to the correct orbit. But even if that worked, it would require Garbo.com to customize the Garbo-naut 5000 quite a bit. And Madame Alberta had severe doubts.

“Sorry, man,” said Ricky. “I’m not sure I can get my people to authorize a satellite launch based on just seeing a picture of the rocket. It’s a nice picture, though. Good sense of composition. Like, the clouds look really pretty, with that one flock of birds in the distance. Poetic, you know.”

“Of course you can see the rocket,” Lydia interjected. She was sitting off to one side taking notes on the meeting, wearing cheap pantyhose in a forty-dollar swivel chair. With puffy sleeves covering her tattoos (one for every country she’d ever visited.) “Just maybe not before next week’s launch. If you’re willing to wait a few months, we can arrange a site visit and stuff. We just can’t show you the rocket before our next launch window.”

“Right,” Malik said. “If you still want to launch next week, though, we can give you a sixty-percent discount.”

“Sixty percent?” Ricky said, suddenly seeming interested again.

“Sixty-five percent,” Malik said. “We’re a young hungry company. We have a lot to prove. Our business model is devouring the weak. And we hate to launch with spare capacity.”

Maybe going straight to sixty-five percent was a mistake, or maybe the “devouring the weak” thing had been too much. In any case, Ricky seemed uneasy again. “Huh,” he said. “So how many test launches have you guys done? My friend who works for NASA says every rocket launch in the world gets tracked.”

“We’ve done a slew of test launches,” Malik said. “Like, a dozen. But we have some proprietary stealth technology, so people probably missed them.” And then, he went way off script. “Our company founder, Augustus Marzipan IV, grew up around rockets. His uncle was Wernher von Braun’s wine steward. So rockets are in his blood.” Ricky’s frown got more and more pinched.

“Well,” Ricky said at last, standing up from his cheap metal chair. “I will definitely bring your proposal to our Senior Visionizer, Terry. But I have a feeling the V.C.s aren’t going to want to pay for a launch without kicking the tires. I’m not the one who writes the checks, you know. If I wrote the checks, a lot of things would be different.” And then he paused, probably imagining all the things that would happen if he wrote the checks.

“When Augustus Marzipan was only five years old, his pet Dalmatian, Henry, was sent into space. Never to return,” said Malik, as if inventing more stories would cushion his fall off the cliff he’d already walked over. “That’s where our commitment to safety comes from.”

“That’s great,” said Ricky. “I love dogs.” He was already halfway out the door.

As soon as Ricky was gone, Malik sagged as though the air had gone out of him. He rubbed his brow with one listless hand. “We’re a young hungry company,” he said. “We’re a hungry young company. Which way sounds better? I can’t tell.”

“That could have gone worse,” Lydia said.

“I can’t do this,” Malik said. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I am good at pretending for fun. I just can’t do it for money. I’m really sorry.”

Lydia felt like the worst person in the world, even as she said: “Lots of people start out pretending for fun, and then move into pretending for money. That’s the American dream.” The sun was already going down behind the cement fountain outside, and she realized she was going to be late for her twelve-step group soon. She started pulling her coat and purse and scarf together. “Hey, I gotta run. I’ll see you at Time Travel Club, okay?”

“I think I’m going to skip it,” Malik said. “I can’t. I just . . . I can’t.”

“What?” Lydia felt like if Malik didn’t come to Time Travel Club, it would be the proof that something was seriously wrong and their whole foundation was splitting apart. And it would be provably her fault.

“I’m just too exhausted. Sorry.”

Lydia came over and sat on the desk, so she could see Malik’s face behind his hand. “Come on,” she pleaded. “Time Travel Club is your baby. We can’t just have a meeting without you. That would be weird. Come on. We won’t even talk about being a fake aerospace company. We couldn’t talk about that in front of Normando, anyway.”

Malik sighed, like he was going to argue. Then he lifted the loop of his tie all the way off, now that he was done playing CEO. For a second, his rep-stripe tie was a halo. “Okay, fine,” he said. “It’ll be good to hang out and not talk business for a while.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’ll be mellow,” Lydia said. She felt the terror receding, but not entirely.

Normando was freaking out, because his girlfriend in 1973 had dumped him. (Long story short, his strategy of arriving earlier and earlier for the same first date had backfired.) A couple of other semi-regulars showed up too, including Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time. And Madame Alberta showed up too, even though she hadn’t ever shown any interest in visiting their aerospace office. She sat in the corner, studying the core members of the group, maybe to judge whether she’d chosen wisely. As if she could somehow go back and change that decision, which of course she couldn’t.

Malik tried to talk about his last trip to the thirty-second century. But he kept staring at his CEO shoes and saying things like, “The neo-Babylonians were giving us grief. But we were young and hungry.” And then trailing off, like his heart just wasn’t in it.

Jerboa saw Malik running out of steam, and jumped in. “I met Christopher Marlowe. He told me that his version of Faust originally ended with Dr. Faust and Helen of Troy running away together and teaching geometrically complex hand-dances in Shropshire, and they made him change it.” Jerboa talked very fast, like an addict trying to stay high. Or a comedian trying not to get booed offstage. “He told me to call him ‘Kit,’ and showed me the difference between a doublet and a singlet. A doublet is not two singlets, did you know that?”

Sitting in the Unitarian basement, under the purple dove hands, Lydia watched Malik starting to say things and then just petering out, with a shrug or a shake of the head, and Jerboa rattling on and not giving anybody else a chance to talk. Guilt.

And then, just as Lydia was crawling out of her skin, Madame Alberta stood up. “I have a thing to confess,” she said.

Malik and Lydia stared up at her, fearing she was about to blow the whistle on their scam. Jerboa stopped breathing.

“I am from an alternative timeline,” Madame Alberta said. “It is the world where the American Revolution did not happen, and the British Empire had the conquest of all of South America. The Americas, Africa, Asia—the British ruled all. Until the rest of Europe launched the great world war to stop the British imperialism. And Britain discovered the nuclear weapons and Europe burned, to ashes. I travel many times, I travel through time, to try and change history. But instead, I find myself here, in this other universe, and I can never return home.”

“Uh,” Malik said. “Thanks for sharing.” He looked relieved and weirded out.

At last, Madame Alberta explained: “It is the warning. Sometimes you have the power to change the world. But power is not an opportunity. It is a choice.”

After that, nobody had much to say. Malik and Jerboa didn’t look at Lydia or each other as they left, and nobody was surprised when the Time Travel Club’s meeting was cancelled the following week, or when the club basically ceased to exist some time after that.

• • • •

Malik, Jerboa, and Lydia sat in the front of Malik’s big van on the grassy roadside, waiting for Madame Alberta to come back and tell them where they were going. Madame Alberta supposedly knew where they could dig up some improperly buried spent uranium from the power plant, and the back of the van was full of pretty good safety gear that Madame Alberta had scared up for them. The faceplates of the suits glared up at Lydia from their uncomfortable resting place. The three of them were psyching themselves up to go and possibly irradiate the shit out of themselves.

Worth it, if the thing they were helping to build in Madame Alberta’s laundry room was a real time machine and not just another figment.

“You guys never even asked,” Lydia said around one in the morning, when they were all starting to wonder if Madame Alberta was going to show up. “I mean, about me, and why I was in that twelve-step group before the Time Travel Club meetings. You don’t know anything about me, or what I’ve done.”

“We know all about you,” Malik said. “You’re a pirate.”

“You do extreme solar sail sports in the future,” Jerboa added. “What else is there to know?”

“But,” Lydia said. “I could be a criminal. I might have killed someone. I could be as bad as that astral projection guy.”

“Lydia,” Malik put one hand on her shoulder, like super gently. “We know you.”

Nobody spoke for a while. Every few minutes, Malik turned on the engine so they could get some heat, and the silence between engine starts was deeper than ordinary silence.

“I had blackouts,” Lydia said. “Like, a lot of blackouts. I would lose hours at a time, no clue where I’d been or how I’d gotten here. I would just be in the middle of talking to people, or behind the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere, with no clue. I worked at this high-powered sales office, we obliterated our targets. And everybody drank all the time. Pitchers of beer, of martinis, of margaritas. The pitcher was like the emblem of our solidarity. You couldn’t turn the pitcher away, it would be like spitting on the team. We made so much money. And I had this girlfriend, Sara, with this amazing red hair, who I couldn’t even talk to when we were sober. We would just lie in bed naked, with a bottle of tequila propped up between us. I knew it was just a matter of time before I did something really unforgivable during one of those blackouts. Especially after Sara decided to move out.”

“So what happened?” Jerboa said.

“In the end, it wasn’t anything I did during a blackout that caused everything to implode,” Lydia said. “It was what I did to keep myself from ever having another blackout. I got to work early one day, and I just lit a bonfire in the fancy conference room. And I threw all the contents of the company’s wet bar into it.”

Once again, nobody talked for a while. Malik turned the engine on and off a couple times, which made it about seven minutes of silence. They were parked by the side of the road, and every once in a while a car simmered past.

“I think that’s what makes us such good time travelers, actually.” Jerboa’s voice cracked a little bit, and Lydia was surprised to see the outlines of tears on that small brown face, in the light of a distant highway detour sign. “We are very experienced at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at doing whatever it takes to get ourselves to the right place, and the right time.”

Lydia put her arm around Jerboa, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, and Jerboa leaned into Lydia’s shoulder so just a trace of moisture landed on Lydia’s neck.

“You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve had to escape from in the middle of the night,” Jerboa said. “The people who tried to fix my, my . . . irregularities. You wouldn’t believe the methods that have been tried. People can justify almost anything, if their perspective is limited enough.”

Malik wrapped his hand on Jerboa’s back, so it was like all three of them were embracing. “We’ve all had our hearts broken, I guess,” he said. “I was a teacher, in one of those Teach For America-style programs. I thought we were all in this together, that we had a shared code. I thought we were altruists. Until they threw me under a bus.”

And it was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn’t be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.

They sat for a good long time in silence again. The engine ticked a little. They stayed leaning into each other, as the faceplates watched.

Lydia started to say something like, “I just want to hold on to this moment. Here, now, with the two of you. I don’t care about whatever else, I just want this to last.” But just as she started to speak, Madame Alberta tapped on the passenger-side window, right next to Lydia’s head, and gestured at her car, which was parked in front of theirs. It was time to suit up, and go get some nuclear waste.

• • • •

Lydia didn’t see Malik or Jerboa for a month or so, after Madame Alberta told her weird story about Europe getting nuked. MJL Aerospace shuttered its offices, and Lydia saw the rocket picture in a dumpster as she drove to the Lucky Doubloon. She redoubled her commitment to going to a twelve-step meeting every goddamn day. She finally called her mom back, and went to a few bluegrass concerts.

Lydia got the occasional panicked call from Normando, or even one of the other semi-regulars, wondering what happened to the club, but she just ignored it.

Until one day Lydia was driving to work, on the day shift again, and she saw Jerboa walking on the side of the road. Jerboa kicked the shoulder of the road over and over, kicking dirt and rocks, not looking ahead. Hips and knees jerking almost out of their sockets. Inaudible curses spitting at the gravel.

Lydia pulled over next to Jerboa and honked her horn a couple times, then rolled down the window. “Come on, get in.” She turned down the bluegrass on her stereo.

Jerboa gave a gesture between a wave and a “go away.”

“Listen, I screwed up,” Lydia said. “That aerospace thing was a really bad idea. It wasn’t about the money, though, you have to believe me about that. I just wanted to give us a new project, so we wouldn’t drift apart.”

“It’s not your fault.” Jerboa did not get in the truck. “I don’t blame you.”

“Well, I blame myself. I was being selfish. I just didn’t want you guys to run away. I was scared. But we need to figure out a way to turn the space travel back into time travel. We can’t do that, unless we work together.”

“It’s just not possible,” Jerboa said. “For any amount of time displacement beyond a few hours, the variables get harder and harder to calculate. The other day, I did some calculations and figured out that if you traveled a hundred years into the future, you’d wind up around one-tenth of a light year away. That’s just a back-of-the-envelope thing, based on our orbit around the sun.”

“Okay, so one problem at a time.” Lydia stopped her engine, gambling that it would restart. The bluegrass stopped mid-phrase. “We need to get some accurate measurements of exactly where stuff ends up, when we send it forwards and backwards in time. But to do that, first we need to be able to send stuff out, and get it back again.”

“There’s no way,” Jerboa said. “It’s strictly a one-way trip.”

“We’ll figure out a way,” Lydia said. “Trial and error. We just need to open a second rift close enough to the first rift to bring our stuff back. Yeah? Once we’re good enough, we send people. And eventually, we send people, along with enough equipment to build a telescope in deep space, so we can spy on Earth in the distant past or the far future.”

“There are so many steps in there, it’s ridiculous,” Jerboa said. “Every one of those steps might turn out to be just as impossible as the satellite thing turned out to be. We can’t do this with just the four of us, we don’t have enough pairs of hands. Or enough expertise.”

“That’s why we recruit,” said Lydia. “We need to find a ton more people who can help us make this happen.”

“Except,” said Jerboa, fists clenched and eyes red and pinched, “we can’t trust just any random people with this. Remember? That’s why Madame Alberta brought it to us in the first place, because the temptation to abuse this power would be too great. You could destroy a city with this machine. How on Earth do we find a few dozen people who we can trust with this?”

“The same way we found each other,” Lydia said. “The same way Madame Alberta found us. The Time Travel Club.”

Jerboa finally got into the truck and snapped the seatbelt into place. Nodding slowly, like thinking it over.

Ricky from Garbo.com showed up at a meeting of the Time Travel Club, several months later. He didn’t even realize at first that these were the same people from MJL Aerospace—maybe he’d seen the articles about the club on the various nerd blogs, or maybe he’d seen Malik’s appearance on the basic cable TV show GeekUp!. Or maybe he’d listened to one of their podcasts. They were doing lots and lots of things to expand the membership of the club, without giving the slightest hint about what went on in Madame Alberta’s laundry room.

Garbo.com had gone under by now, and Ricky was in grad school. He’d shaved off the big sideburns and wore square Elvis Costello glasses now.

“So I heard this is like a LARP, sort of,” Ricky said to Lydia as they were getting a cookie from the cookie table before the meeting started—they’d had to move the meetings from the Unitarian basement to a middle school basketball court, now that they had a few dozen members. Scores of folding chairs, in rows, facing a podium. And they had a cookie table. “You make up your time travel stories, and everybody pretends they’re true. Right?”

“Sort of,” Lydia said. “You’ll see. Once the meeting starts, you cannot say anything about these stories not being true. Okay? It’s the only real rule.”

“Sure thing,” Ricky said. “I can do that. I worked for a dotcom startup, remember? I’m good at make-believe.”

And Ricky turned out to be one of the more promising new recruits, weirdly enough. He spent a lot of time going to the eighteenth century and teaching Capability Brown about feng shui. Which everybody agreed was probably a good thing for the Enlightenment.

Just a few months after that, Lydia, Malik, and Jerboa found themselves already debating whether to show Ricky the laundry room. Lydia was snapping her third-hand spacesuit into place in Madame Alberta’s sitting room, with its caved-in sofa and big-screen TV askew. Lydia was happy to obsess over something else, to get her mind off the crazy thing she was about to do.

“I think he’s ready,” Lydia said of Ricky. “He’s committed to the club.”

“I would certainly like to see his face when he finds out how we were really going to launch that satellite into orbit,” said Malik, grinning.

“It’s too soon,” Jerboa said. “I think we ought to wait six months, as a rule, before bringing anyone here. Just to make sure someone is really in tune with the group, and isn’t going to go trying to tell the wrong people about this. This technology has an immense potential to distort your sense of ethics and your values.”

Lydia tried to nod, but it was hard now that the bulky collar was in place. This spacesuit was a half a size too big, with boots that Lydia’s feet slid around in. The crotch of the orange suit was almost M.C. Hammer wide on her, even with the adult diaper they’d insisted she should wear just in case. The puffy white gloves swallowed her fingers. And then Malik and Jerboa lowered the helmet into place, and Lydia’s entire world was compressed to a gray tinted rectangle. Goodbye, peripheral vision.

She wondered what sort of tattoo she would get to commemorate this trip.

“Ten minutes,” Madame Alberta called from the laundry room. And indeed, it was ten to midnight.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jerboa said. “It’s not too late to call it off.”

“I’m the only one this suit sort of fits,” Lydia said. “And I’m the most expendable. And yes. I do want to be the first person to travel through time.”

After putting so many weird objects into that cube, thousands of them before they’d managed to get a single one back, Lydia felt strange about clambering inside the cube herself. She had to hunch over a bit. Malik waved and Jerboa gave a tiny thumbs up. Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time checked the instruments one last time. Steampunk Fred gave a thumbs up on the calculations. And Madame Alberta reached for the clunky lever. Even through her helmet, Lydia heard a greedy soda-belch sound.

A thousand years later, Lydia lost her hold on anything. She couldn’t get her footing. There was no footing to get. She felt ill immediately. She’d expected the microgravity, but it still made her feel revolting. She felt drunk, actually. Like she didn’t know which way was up. She spun head over ass. If she drifted too far, they would never pull her back. But the tiny maneuvering thrusters on her suit were useless, because she had no reference point. She couldn’t see a damn thing through this foggy helmet, just blackness. She couldn’t find the sun, or any stars, for a moment. Then she made out stars. And more stars.

She spun. And somersaulted. No control at all. Until she tried the maneuvering thrusters, the way Jerboa had explained. She tried to turn a full 360, so she could try and locate the sun. She had to remember to breathe normally. Every part of her wanted to hyperventilate.

When she’d turned halfway around on her axis, she didn’t see the sun. But she saw something else. At first, she couldn’t even make sense of it. There were lights blaring at her. And things moving. And shapes. She took a few photos with the camera Malik had given her. The whole mass was almost spherical, maybe egg-shaped. But there were jagged edges. As Lydia stared, she made out more details. Like, one of the shapes on the outer edge was the hood of a 1958 Buick, license plate and all. There were pieces of a small passenger airplane bolted on as well, along with a canopy made of some kind of shiny blue material that Lydia had never seen before. It was just a huge collection of junk welded together, protection against cosmic rays and maybe also decoration.

Some of the moving shapes were people. They were jumping up and down. And waving at Lydia. They were behind a big observation window at the center of the egg, a slice of see-through material. They gestured at something below the window. Lydia couldn’t make it out at first. Then she squinted and saw that it was a big glowy sign with blocky letters made of massive pixels.

At first, Lydia though the sign read, “WELCOME TIME TRAVEL CLUB.” Like they knew the Time Travel Club was coming, and they wanted to prepare a reception committee.

Then she squinted again, just as another rift started opening up to pull her back, a purple blaze all around her, and she realized she had missed a word. The sign actually read, “WELCOME TO TIME TRAVEL CLUB.” They were all members of the Club, too, and they were having another meeting. And they were inviting her to share her story, any way she could.

—Thanks to Dr. Dave Goldberg for trouble-shooting the physics. Thanks also to Rochelle Underwood, Bruce White, Karen Burnham, and David Calkins for advice on aerospace issues. And thanks to Naamen Tilahun and Liz Henry for feedback!

©2013 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, coming in late January from Tor Books. Her story Six Months Three Days won a Hugo Award. Her writing has appeared in Tor.com, Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

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

The Queen’s Reason

Richard Parks | 6000 words

The courtiers and servants did their best to conceal the truth, but that was a losing battle. The final straw, so to speak, was when their beautiful young queen managed to elude her Ladies in Waiting and greet the South Islands Confederation ambassador while wearing only a skirt made of broom straw and a gardenia pot for a hat. After that incident there was little point in denying the obvious: Mei Janda II, newly crowned Queen of Lucosa, was barking mad.

The Chief Assistant, a youngish man who was the second son of an earl, conferred with the Head of the Privy Council, an oldish man who held the rank of duke, as they walked through the palace gardens.

“Lovely roses,” said the Chief Assistant, by way of conversation.

“I hate roses,” said the Head of the Privy Council in the same spirit. “Pity about Her Majesty, though. Do you think the nuns knew?”

Mei Janda had spent the last five years in a convent according to the wishes of Their Late Majesties. The Privy Council had ruled in her name until her eighteenth birthday, whereupon the coronation had taken place. All had gone as planned. Except for the “barking mad” part.

“The Sisters of Inevitable Sin? Almost certainly, though I’m not sure I blame them for keeping it quiet. Still, if it wasn’t for that business with His Excellency the Ambassador . . . well, water under the bridge.”

“Usually the royal family is better about hiding such things,” the Head of the Privy Council said.

The Chief Assistant nodded. “Quite so. Have you ever considered that when a Royal goes lunatic, it’s usually a sort of, well, specific madness? For instance, do you know why the former king and queen put their daughter in a convent at age thirteen?”

The Head of the Privy Council scowled. “It was said that they wanted her to be raised away from palace intrigue.”

“Rubbish. The real reason was because the princess asked what those two dogs in the courtyard were doing, and her parents became hysterical; she was packed off to the convent that very night. Or consider her great-grandfather, Omor III. He believed that the stones of the palace were eavesdropping on him. Some lathwork and plaster, a few well-placed tapestries, and he was perfectly fine. Ruled well for over fifty years. Yet the fog around Queen Mei’s brain doesn’t seem to obey any strictures whatsoever.”

“Have you consulted the Royal Magician?”

The Chief Assistant made a rude gesture. “That charlatan? I asked him what we should do about the queen’s illness. You know what the old fool said? He said that there was nothing wrong with her! I’m afraid he’s gone senile.”

“Quite,” said the Head of the Privy Council.

His terseness could perhaps be explained by the sudden presence of the Queen, who chose that moment to come skipping through the gardens with a garland of wilted morning glories around her head. She was stark naked otherwise. Being experienced courtiers, the two men just bowed and pretended not to notice.

“Good morning, Your Majesty,” they said practically in unison.

“How do you like my dress, ducks?”

“Quite becoming, Majesty,” said the Chief Assistant. Which was true enough. Unlike many in her bloodline, Queen Mei’s heredity agreed with her. Except, again, for the “barking mad” part.

“You think so? Then I shall wear it at my wedding,” she said.

The Chief Assistant exchanged glances with the Head of the Privy Council. “Wedding, your Majesty?” again, nearly in unison. Still, being individuals of a sort, they never quite managed a true unity of speech, but that didn’t seem to matter.

“You didn’t know? We sent out the invitations ages ago. Of course you two are invited, never doubt it!”

“Thank you, Majesty,” said the Head of the Privy Council, on his own this time. “Might one inquire when the joyous event is to occur?”

“A week next. On Whitsunday.”

“We shall clear our schedules, of course,” said the Chief Assistant. “As the messenger containing the details has apparently gone astray, might one also inquire who is to be the lucky groom?”

The queen frowned then. “That’s the only strange thing about it,” she said. “I don’t know who he is. Isn’t that odd? Still, he is coming and there is much to do. My bouquet, for a start. I need more flowers!” The queen began plucking stems at random from both sides of the path, ignoring both thorns and briars even while her hands began to bleed.

The two men withdrew to a discreet distance.

“She’s coherent enough,” the Head of the Privy Council said, “considering that she’s speaking pure nonsense.”

“She thinks she’s getting married,” said the Chief Assistant thoughtfully. “This might be the solution to our dilemma.”

“How so?”

“The management of the kingdom is in good hands as it is. Yet we have a Queen now. At some point she’s going to be making decisions and asking people to do impossible things that will, nevertheless, be treason to disobey.”

“That’s only sense,” said the Head of the Privy Council.

“Further, the Council cannot take that authority away from the Crown, even if she is barking mad. That would be treason as well.”

“I never suggested such a thing!” the Head of the Privy Council said. Granted, he had thought about it, but he had never suggested it.

“So you see our dilemma?”

“Of course I do!” said the Head of the Privy Council. “What I don’t see is how the Queen’s delusions of a wedding have anything to do with solving it.”

“Simple, Your Grace: We have a real wedding.”

The older man blinked. “We what?”

“Think about it. Her Majesty is currently the only living member of the royal family. For the stability of the kingdom, she simply must produce an heir.”

“Well, yes. Preferably several,” the Head of the Privy Council conceded. “In due course.”

“We don’t have that luxury. Word of Her Majesty’s condition will soon spread. What sort of suitors will she attract then?”

“The same sort as before,” the older man said dryly. “Penniless second and third sons, greedy princes, ambitious monarchs intent on absorbing our ancient kingdom into their own territories. We’ll be lucky to end up as a sixteenth sinister on someone else’s coat of arms.” He stopped because the Chief Assistant was nodding vigorously.

“Precisely so,” the younger man said. “In her present condition, the Queen is incapable of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Unless we look at this situation as more than simply a problem—it is also an opportunity. I’m almost certain that Her Majesty sent no invitations. So we send our own. Have the Privy Council draw up a list of eligible men of good character, and these and only these will be in the palace on Whitsunday. As they will be the only men permitted to be present, the Queen is sure to pick one of them.”

“In her current state, she’s just as likely to marry the Archbishop’s podium,” the Head of the Privy Council said.

The Chief Assistant dismissed that. “Even the Queen, sane or otherwise, cannot overrule the church on a point of theology, and the marriage between a human woman and a lectern is currently not sanctified. I admit my plan has no guarantees, Your Grace, and certainly will not solve all our problems. If this works, however, it will ensure that at least one person on the throne is sane, plus create the reasonable chance of an heir. That would be a vast improvement, no?”

“Yes,” the Head of the Privy Council said. “Very well. I shall present your plan to the Council.”

His Grace quickly did so, and as the Council had no ideas of their own, they agreed. Nor was it a great surprise that all the eligible bachelors in the Privy Council put their own names on the guest list, as well as that of the Chief Assistant. After that, likely candidates were more sparse, but the Privy Council did manage to put together a respectable list, to the number of two hundred and three men of reasonable standing and at least passable character, most of whom, like the Queen herself, awaited the coming Whitsunday with great anticipation.

• • • •

“Tell me again why this gown won’t do?” The Queen was admiring herself in the full-length mirror in her chambers. The Royal Magician sat patiently on a stool in the corner. He neither ogled nor pointedly didn’t ogle, even though the Queen was still stark naked.

“Because it’s not a gown, Majesty. It’s your own bare flesh.”

“Well,” she said, “I admit it is a bit form-fitting.”

“Being your own skin, that stands to reason.”

The Queen sighed. “I’m not so good with reason these days, Magician. I mean, everything makes perfect sense when I do it, but later I begin to wonder. For instance, I knew this gown was just too comfortable. Even the prettiest, best-fitting dress pinches somewhere. Still, the Head of the Privy Council and the Chief Assistant both liked it.”

“I’d question their eyesight otherwise,” the Magician said. “They are both good men at heart, Majesty. Even if they don’t listen very well. So. Why don’t you wear the white gown with the yellow brocade? It belonged to your mother. It might need to be taken in a bit for you, but I think it would look splendid.”

The Queen frowned but held up the dress in question so that she could examine it against her skin using the mirror. “It’s very nice,” she said finally. “Not quite so well-fitted as the one I’m wearing, but I do like the colors. Do you really think I should wear this or just have the one I’m wearing now dyed to match?”

“Definitely your mother’s dress,” he said. “You have many seamstresses, but the best dyers are in Aljin, and that’s more than a week’s travel. You’d never get the dress back in time.”

“I suppose,” said Queen Mei. “I’m fortunate to have your counsel, Magician. You’re so wise. Is that because you’re . . . archetypecast?”

“Archetypical, Majesty,” the Magician corrected politely. “And yes, I think so.”

“What does that mean, anyway?”

“It means that I have a role to play. We all do. It just so happens that mine is to at least appear to be wise and to do my best to make sure things turn out as they’re supposed to.”

“Who decides how things are ‘supposed to turn out’?”

“No one. Or perhaps everyone.”

She sighed. “I don’t understand, but I guess that’s because I’m barking mad.”

The old man’s smile was not unkind. “Actually, no, Your Majesty. No one really understands this, and I do not exclude myself. I merely realize that some things are not to be understood—they are to be acknowledged. Just as we sometimes recognize the roles we play even as we play them.”

The Queen looked pleased. “That means I must have a role, too! Do you know what it is?”

“For a start, to get married on Whitsunday.”

The Queen looked less pleased. “That does sound like fun, but it doesn’t really seem very important.”

The Magician smiled again. “Majesty, in this instance it is the most important role of all. The future of our country depends on it.”

“Very well. Did you attend to the invitations?”

“Yes, I did send out the invitation, Majesty.”

“Invitation? You meant invitations, didn’t you? As in ‘more than one’? I mean, I know I’m barking mad and all, but shouldn’t there have been more?”

“I sent the one that mattered. Trust me, Majesty—There will be plenty of guests.”

“Well, if you’re sure.” She pulled the dress aside to gaze at her own reflection again wistfully. “Pity about the dyers, though.”

• • • •

The Traveler, a handsome, roguish fellow, entered Lucosa the day before Whitsunday. Perhaps it was merely a coincidence that both the Head of the Privy Council and the Chief Assistant happened to be visiting their respective tailors for fittings on that same day. Perhaps there are no coincidences. Whatever conclusion one draws, the fact remains that they were present, with their haughty attendants, and the Traveler cheerfully greeted them there.

“Good day to you, gentlemen,” he said.

“I am a Duke,” corrected the Head of the Privy Council.

“And I am a knight, the son of an earl,” said the Chief Assistant. Their attendants, as was proper, did not speak, but to a man they fixed the Traveler with Looks of Disapproval.

“Well, then it was clearly wrong of me to refer to either of you as a gentleman, and I apologize,” the Traveler said. “Rather, then, Your Grace and Good Sir Knight.”

“That’s better,” said the Chief Assistant as he eyed the youth with some distaste. The Traveler’s face and clothes were dirty, his dark hair unkempt, and his brown traveling cloak tattered and worn. “What business do you have with us, fellow?”

“I merely wished to ask what time the Queen’s wedding was to take place tomorrow, as you two fine personages seemed the sort who might know. The invitation was a bit vague.”

“Wedding?” The Chief Assistant frowned.

“Invitation?” The Head of the Privy Council frowned even more.

“Frankly,” said the Traveler, “I’m as surprised as you are. I have not been in Lucosa, so far as I can recall, since the year of my birth. I have no friends or family here that I know of, and yet,” he said, fumbling inside a pouch in his belt. “Ah, here it is.”

The youth held up the paper so that both could see. “It says only the date, which is tomorrow. Not even the name of the groom. I do not know why I should have been invited but saw no reason to forego the experience. I’ve never been to a Royal Wedding before.”

The two men just studied the document in silence for a few moments.

“That’s not like ours,” the Head of the Privy Council said finally.

“No. This one actually has the Queen’s seal,” the Chief Assistant replied. “Pray, young man,” he asked. “How did you come by this?”

“Odd about that—a red hawk dropped it on me. In broad daylight. At first I thought the wretched bird had dropped something more odious, but that did not turn out to be the case.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” muttered the Head of the Privy Council.

“You said you had no family here?” asked the Chief Assistant.

“Well, not that I know of, you understand,” the Traveler said. “I don’t remember much before my time on the road.”

“Uncertain origins,” said the Head of the Privy Council, nodding, though he was talking to the Chief Assistant, and his tone was pure “I told you so.”

“I suppose you’ve traveled far and wide, seen all sorts of things?” the Chief Assistant asked the younger man.

The Traveler’s face lit up like a beacon. “Oh, yes. From the South Islands to the frozen north, the burning west, and the sultry east. I have met such people, tasted such food, seen such wonders, experienced such marvels . . . Even if your esteemed selves were content to listen, we’d miss the wedding entirely merely recounting half of it.”

“And now you’re here, by Royal Invitation, a penniless, homeless nobody,” said the Chief Assistant.

“I’d be insulted,” the Traveler said, “if not every word you had just muttered been the absolute truth. As I said, it puzzled me as well.”

“Oh, I’m not puzzled,” the Chief Assistant said. “Clearly there is a Destiny upon you. Wouldn’t you agree?” He turned to the Head of the Privy Council for confirmation.

“Extensive travels? Obscure origins? Animal messengers? Do you even need to ask?” confirmed the older man.

The Traveler frowned. “What sort of Destiny?”

“Something involving the Queen, I fancy,” said the Chief Assistant. “But don’t let that concern you just now. You are here by Royal Invitation, but the wedding is not until tomorrow. As faithful servants of the Queen, we certainly cannot let you sleep on the streets.”

“Well, I was really considering a lovely game park I saw on the way in . . .”

“I won’t hear of it.” The Chief Assistant signaled two of his burlier attendants. “Please escort this man to the palace. He is our guest.”

“Too kind,” said the Traveler.

Before they led the young man away, the burliest of the burly two leaned close to the Chief Attendant and whispered a question. “Dungeon?”

“Of course.”

The Chief Assistant and the Head of the Privy Council watched the young man being led away.

“That was bloody close,” said the Head of the Privy Council.

“Agreed. It’s all well and good for penurious young men of destiny to win the hand of a beautiful young queen in a fairy-tale,” the Chief Assistant said. “But how in good conscious could we let our kingdom simply be a reward for the position of the stars at this stranger’s birth? I mean, really. For all we know he’s the long-lost heir of some ancient enemy, or an ogre or worse in disguise. I like our plan better.”

“That goes without argument,” said the Head of the Privy Council. “I do love your new tunic, by the way. Quite fetching.”

• • • •

The Traveler walked into the cell calmly enough. It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize a dungeon when he saw one. It was more that, first of all, he judged his chances against his escort if he chose to resist and didn’t like what his eyes and common sense told him. Second, while it was true that the Traveler had seen a dungeon, he had never been in one. It was his nature to experience everything he could, and especially the new and different. He had sought both out for as long as he could remember. He did not understand why and never had, but the inclination bordered on irresistible, and now it led him to walk through the cell door and experience the clang of an unbreakable door shutting behind him.

He looked around his new quarters with the same eye for detail and curiosity that he approached everything. While he had little experience of dungeons, he rather got the impression that this was one of the nicer ones. The straw on the cold stone floor was at least relatively clean, if old, and smelled a bit musty but no worse than that. The Traveler judged that this particular dungeon didn’t get a great deal of use, which he thought spoke well of the Queen and her kingdom.

The Traveler spent a relatively comfortable night on the straw in his cell. Truth to tell, he’d had worse nights’ sleep under the open sky. In the morning, a surly guard brought him a passable breakfast of cold pease porridge and water.

The Traveler had no idea why the two noblemen he had met felt the need to confine him. He hoped they would at least inform him of this in due course. Something else to understand and experience, even if such experience turned out to be his last.

“One would almost judge this a friendly, welcoming sort of place,” he said. “Except for the bars on the door of my accommodations.”

“Ah, there you are. I thought I might find you here,” said a high, piping voice with no obvious body attached to it.

The Traveler looked about. “Who said that?”

“I did. Down here, young man.”

The Traveler looked down into the beady black eyes of a stout, brown, frost-whiskered rat. It stood on its hind paws by a break in the stone, which it had apparently used to gain entrance.

“Well, then, it would hardly be a respectable dungeon at all without at least one rat,” the Traveler said, “but I wouldn’t expect that rat to talk. Strange, because I hardly think I’ve been confined here long enough to go mad with despair and loneliness. Such things, I thought, took time.”

“You’re not mad,” the rat said patiently. “The Queen might be, but you’re certainly not. I’m here to help you.”

“I’ve heard rumors of such things,” the Traveler admitted. “Ferocious tasks and animal helpers. Are you saying I’m a Prince in disguise?”

The rat sighed. “No, Traveler. You are no prince, nor am I a rat. I’m the Court Magician. I’ve merely taken this form so that we can have a little chat. I trust you received your invitation?”

“Unless I miss my guess, you know I did. Weren’t you the hawk, too?”

The rat grinned, showing sharp, chisel-like teeth. “Clever, but I would expect no less. Yes, Traveler, I was the hawk as well. I brought you here . . .” At that the rat paused and looked around the cell. “Well, not here. That was the Chief Assistant and the Head of the Privy Council. Don’t think too harshly of them, by the way. They mean well. Mostly. Though I suppose the chance of becoming king has skewed their judgment just a tad.”

“Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about? If so, I may need to ponder a while. At the moment it makes no sense.”

“Right again,” the rat said cheerfully. “Forgive me for rambling about matters that do not yet concern you. Your current task is to get out of the dungeon so you won’t be late for the wedding.”

“But why? Am I to marry the Queen?”

“I didn’t say that either. I said you need to get out of here and make it to the wedding. I can’t tell you why because then you’d say that I’m mad, and there wouldn’t be any recourse to reason that would convince you otherwise. Frankly, Traveler, we just don’t have that kind of time. Say rather that you really don’t want to miss a Royal Wedding, do you?”

“No,” said the Traveler. “I don’t. And I really don’t understand that part either.”

“Would it help if I told you that after you attend the wedding, you will understand why you were supposed to be there?”

“Maybe,” the Traveler said. “I really would like to. Understanding things makes me happy. Learning makes me happy. Seeing things I have never seen before makes me happy.”

“Come to the wedding,” the rat said, “and I guarantee that you’ll hardly be able to contain your joy.”

“Fine to say, but how? The door is locked.”

“Have you tried it?”

The Traveler’s eyes grew wide for a moment in open astonishment. He took two long steps and put his hand on the door.

“There is still much to learn,” the Traveler said as the massive door swung open.

“If you’re indeed fortunate, that fact will never change,” the rat said. “The ballroom is two flights up. You still have your invitation, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Show it to the guards at the door and go on in. I will meet you there.”

• • • •

The Queen wore her mother’s wedding dress into the grand ballroom. She had to admit that the Magician had been right; the looks of envy from the women and admiration from the men told her that much even if her reason wasn’t available to do the same. A long green swath of carpeting marked the central aisle leading to the makeshift dais where two thrones sat.

One for my husband, I suppose. I hope he isn’t late.

The Queen moved in stately procession down the aisle, her two Ladies in Waiting keeping sharp eyes on the train of her gown so that it didn’t snag. It was hard for the Queen to remain so solemn, when what she really wanted to do was to stick out her tongue at the Duchess of Corns, or moon the Archbishop now standing in the center of the dais beside the thrones, his book ready. Yet something told her that this would be wrong, and nothing had ever told her that before. At least, not so that she could remember. Today was different. She tried to think about that for a moment, but her thoughts, as they always did, swam away from her like little frightened fish. Sometimes she believed she could almost see them darting away.

I’m meeting my intended today. Maybe that’s why. So where is he?

The Queen ascended the dais, nodded to the Archbishop with perfect decorum and turned around to face her guests. The Magician had been right about that, too. There were a goodly number; in fact, the ballroom was nigh to bursting. That was nice. Yet none of it would make sense even to a barking mad queen, unless . . .

“Ah. There you are. But why are there three of you? I don’t think the Archbishop will allow that.”

The three dark-haired, handsome young men in threadbare clothes had just entered through the main doors, looked about themselves with awe and curiosity, and were, apparently, very slow to recognize that the Queen was speaking to them. At this point, the Duchess of Corn and all the rest of the duchesses—and not a few of the Earls present—screamed.

“A rat!”

“Where?” asked the rat who had just scampered up to sit beside the leftmost empty throne. “Oh, me. Right.” In a blink the rat was gone, and the Court Magician stood in its place. “Sorry I’m late, Majesty. Had a run in with the Royal Moggie. Had to singe his whiskers a bit.”

“Why are there three grooms?” Queen Mei asked.

By this time the Chief Assistant and the Head of the Privy Council had pushed forward. “Really, Your Majesty, we must insist—”

“Silence, the both of you,” the Queen said. “Honestly, ducks, you’ll get your turn. Right now I’m talking to my Magician.” She turned back to the Royal Magician. “Why?” she asked again.

“I’m afraid it’s a test, your Majesty.”

“Isn’t that a little presumptuous of you? I mean, I’m barking mad and all, but I am the Queen.”

“Precisely, Majesty. Yet once this thing was begun, certain rules began to apply, which neither you nor I can gainsay. While the Traveler has had some minor travails, the fact is that, right now, this isn’t about him. As I said before: You are the one who matters here. So this test has to be for you.”

“Oh,” the Queen said, “well, that’s all right, then. What sort of test?”

“You must recognize your intended.”

“Or?”

“Or you will be separated from him forever. As this would be quite disastrous, please choose well.”

“Are you barking mad, too?” the Chief Assistant blurted at the Magician. “The Queen is in no condition—”

“The Queen,” said the Queen, “will decide for herself what she may or may not do, and what her condition allows.”

“Of course, Majesty,” said the Head of the Privy Council. “Yet even the Queen, if she is wise, will listen to the advice of those who best understand the situation.”

The Queen glanced at the Magician, who merely shrugged. “True, so far as it goes, Majesty,” he said.

The Queen turned back to the Chief Assistant and the Head of the Privy Council. “Well then, Gentlemen, which of the pair of you understands this situation better than I do, barking mad though I am?”

The Head of the Privy Council just scowled. The Chief Assistant opened his mouth as if to speak, then apparently thought better of it, since he slowly closed it again. The Queen nodded.

“That’s what I thought.” She turned again to the three identical Travelers, who all this time watched everything unfolding before them with eagerness if not, the Queen judged, full comprehension.

“I’m having a remarkable run of coherent thought at the moment,” she said. “And I think you three gentlemen have something to do with that. Yet I wonder why that is.”

It wasn’t exactly a question, but the three Travelers didn’t show any sign of having an answer. If anything, they seemed more and more confused as each noted the presence of the other two as if he had never seen them before.

“Strange,” they said, almost in unison.

“Don’t start that,” the Queen said firmly. “I’m not sure how long this coherence will last.” She turned to the Magician. “I must choose? As they are?”

“You may ask one question of each,” the Magician said, “if that helps any.”

“Your Majesty,” began the Head of the Privy Council, “Surely you can’t—”

“I’m barking mad, Your Grace,” the Queen said. “Not simple. Now, I did ask you to be quiet. I really must insist.”

The Head of the Privy Council fell silent and the Queen stepped down from the dais and approached the three young men as her two Ladies in Waiting followed behind. She turned to the first young man. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m the Traveler,” said the first. “Such wonders I have seen, such wonders still to be seen! Too much for a lifetime, but I must try in the short time I have.”

“Sounds marvelous,” the Queen said, then she turned to the second young man. “Who are you, then?”

“I am the Traveler,” he said. “I don’t know who these upstarts are, but I am the one, the true Traveler. Everything that false face just said applies to me.”

“If you say so,” the Queen said and turned to the third. “Young man, who are you?”

The third Traveler met the Queen’s gaze squarely. “I don’t know.”

The Queen frowned. “Oh?”

“I thought I did,” the young man said. “I was the Traveler. Then I stepped into this room and beheld Your Majesty for the first time. At least, I think it is the first time. I cannot remember another, and yet I do not think I can go back to being a simple Traveler again. I think that time has passed.”

“I’ve missed you,” said the Queen. “Welcome home.”

She embraced the third young man before the assembled guests and kissed him on the lips. In another instant he was gone, along with the other two false images. Vanished, as if they had never been. Alone now except for her two attendants, the Queen glided regally back to the dais and took her place in front of the throne. For a moment or two she simply stood there, a deep frown creasing her brow. Just as the guests began to get restless, the Queen spoke.

“Friends and Honored Guests, I know you came today prepared to witness a wedding. I’m afraid I must disappoint you in this. We will be having a celebration as planned, but no wedding . . . at least, not today. The feast, however, will commence shortly and of course you are all invited, so please make your way to the banquet hall now. It seems I will be in need of partners for the dance, so perhaps this will be our chance to get to know one another better.”

The guests were, for the most part, pleased with Her Majesty’s speech, even if they didn’t have the slightest idea of what had just occurred. They began to file out of the ballroom on their way to the banquet. The Chief Assistant and the Head of the Privy Council, however, were not content to be confused. The Head of the Privy Council was still under a stricture of silence, so the Chief Assistant was the one who asked.

“Majesty, what just happened here?”

“You already knew that my reason had left me. Today it came back.”

“Your reason?”

“I’m sure Your Majesty remembers the details well enough now,” said the Royal Magician. “But to save your strength for the dancing tonight, perhaps I should explain?” The Queen nodded assent and the Royal Magician continued. “Five years ago, Her Majesty was given into the safekeeping of the Sisters of Inevitable Sin.”

“Everyone knows that,” said the Chief Assistant.

“What everyone doesn’t know is that the Queen was stuck in a twilight existence there, neither free to leave nor in training as one dedicated to the Order. She was learning nothing that would be of any use to her as the Queen she was destined to be. I separated her from her reason,” the Royal Magician said, then went on when he saw the horrified looks on the two men, “at her own request. I gave her reason a separate existence and sent it out into the world with a magical directive of curiosity, so that it would do and experience all the things that she could not.”

“Leaving her Majesty barking mad!” said the Chief Assistant.

“Sir,” said Queen Mei, “it’s not as if I actually needed my reason before now. It wasn’t doing me much good in the convent.”

The Magician smiled. “Just so. When the time came, her reason was invited to return, bringing everything it had learned with it. Their meeting was expressed as a wedding simply because, well, I had to put the matter in terms consistent with Her Majesty’s then-current level of comprehension. That was the tricky bit—she still had to be able to recognize and acknowledge that part of herself when it returned, else they could never be whole again. It was a risk, but fortunately Her Majesty acquitted herself wisely.”

“Well, of course we were not questioning . . .” began the Chief Assistant as the Head of the Privy Council vigorously nodded agreement, but the Queen cut them both off flat with a wave of her small hand.

“We understand that you had the good of the kingdom at heart,” the Queen said, “even if neither of you would have minded being king. To make up for your disappointment, Your Grace shall have the first dance tonight. After that, Sir Chief Assistant. We believe that is the correct order of precedence.”

“Too kind, Majesty,” said the Chief Assistant, already planning his charm and small talk.

“Afterwards, you can keep each other company in the dungeon.” She smiled then at the look of horror on each man’s face. “Oh, calm yourselves, Sirs. Your confinement will not last through tomorrow morning. After a hearty breakfast of water and pease porridge, you will both be expected to return to your duties. We would merely suggest that you remember this coming night,” she said. “If either of you is ever tempted to insult Our reason again.”

There was a healthy mixture of both relief and fear in the two men’s eyes as they gratefully withdrew with the other guests. The Queen sent her two attendants ahead to prepare a more appropriate gown for the dance. When they were quite alone, the Magician turned to her again.

“Gratitude is sometimes best with a leaven of fear. That was well done, Majesty,” he said.

“Was it? I had hoped so, but wasn’t entirely sure. Perhaps reason and I can reach accommodation, then. Yet I must say . . . it feels very strange to be sane.”

“Majesty,” the old man said, bowing. He then nodded at the retreating men. “To give them their due, neither would have made a bad king,” he said.

“I’m not sure that either the kingdom or I personally should settle for a consort who is merely ‘not bad,’” the Queen said. She remembered the handsome features and dark eyes of her newly returned reason. She remembered what he remembered, and her face adopted a wistful expression. “Though I’m not certain I’m the best judge of that yet. Perhaps I should make my own better acquaintance before I go wearing this gown again. Or is that barking mad of me?”

The old man smiled, and bowed again to his queen. “Not in the least, Majesty.”

Queen Mei smiled too. “Just checking.”

©2010 by Richard Parks. Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Parks’ work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several Year’s Best anthologies and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. The third book in his Yamada Monogatari series, The War God’s Son, was published in October 2015 by Prime Books. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3”, also known as: richard-parks.com.

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

Tea Time

Rachel Swirsky | 4900 words

Begin at the beginning:

His many hats. Felt derbies in charcoal and camel and black. Sporting caps and straw boaters. Gibuses covered in corded silk for nights at the theatre. Domed bowlers with dashingly narrow brims. The ratty purple silk top hat, banded with russet brocade, that he keeps by his bedside.

The march hare, each foreleg as strong as an ox’s, bucking and hopping and twitching his whiskers. Here, there, somewhere else, leading his hatter a merry dance between tables. Rogering by the mahogany slipper chair. Knocking by the marble bust of the Queen of Hearts. Upending rose-patterned porcelain so that it smashes on the grass, white and pink fragments scattering like brittle leaves.

Fur, soft and lush. Warmth like spring. That prey-quick heartbeat, thump-thump, thump-thump.

As he pushes into that plush passage, the hatter finds himself wondering what kind of hat might be made from the pelt of a hare. He imagines stretching out this glorious fur to be pulled until only the finest hare wool remains. He would brush it with long, liquid strokes of mercury nitrate, that crystalline solution which drove him mad long ago.

A pair they were:

The hatter, twitching and tottering. His muscles no longer obeying his mind.

The hare, biting and buckling. Wild as any animal in spring.

Intemperate, the both of them. Foolish, feral, barmy, off their heads. Imprudent. ’Round the bend. Daft.

Spent.

• • • •

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder where you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little Hare!

I have caught you in my snare!

Hop on down my bunny trail;

I could use a piece of tail!

Twinkle, twinkle, Hatter dear!

While some men may find you queer,

You are just my kind of chap!

Stick your feather in my cap!

• • • •

The girl in the blue dress has been gone a measureless while. Her brief, uncivil interruption left its mark like a tea stain on the tablecloth. Abrasive as she was, the chit, she was the most interesting thing to happen in a while.

The caucus races are over. The white rabbit has been bustling about. The caterpillar has grown even more insufferable than usual. Of late, a strange pig has been spotted wandering the woods, in search of pepper.

The girl ought to cut her hair. Also, she’s much too large, or much too small, or at any rate, definitely the wrong size. She demonstrates no aptitude for recital or croquet, and she never did show a proper appreciation for tea.

But interesting, briefly, yes. Though insufficiently mad.

• • • •

It is never polite to go out-of doors without a hat. One’s hat should remain on one’s head no matter the extremity. Even if the rest of one’s clothing should happen to be removed by some improbable whim of the weather, such as a particularly dexterous gale with a penchant for buttons, one must be sure to hold one’s hat fixedly on one’s head.

The hatter is a poor man. He has no hats of his own. Those he keeps on his head or in his house are merely inventory, soon to be shuffled away when a purchaser is found.

• • • •

The hatter sits by his hare, the animal’s head lying in his lap so that he may stroke his long, satin ears. The dormouse has gone, seeking less tumultuous environs in which to nap. All is quiet but for the sound of cheshires hunting in the woods, all absent stalking and sudden teeth.

“Thank God for tea!” says the hatter by way of initial venture. “What would the world do without tea? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

The words once belonged to Sydney Smith, but they’re the hatter’s now. He and the hare have taken to speaking entirely in quotations as one of the many diversions that occupy their endless tea time.

The hare seems unmoved by the hatter’s adoring exclamation. He stares morosely into his tea cup. “’Tis pity wine should be so deleterious,” he says sadly, “for tea and coffee leave us much more serious.”

The hatter takes affront. “There is a great deal of fine poetry and sentiment in a chest of tea!”

The hare gives a delicate, prudish sniff. “Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.”

“Tea tempers the spirit,” answers the hatter, “and harmonizes the mind.”

The hare, all conciliatory now, hops to his feet. He takes his lover’s hand in his paw and tugs him toward the tea tables. “If you are cold,” he says with lingering sweetness, “tea will warm you.”

March hares make better lovers than white rabbits. Ask Mary Ann. She’ll tell you the same.

• • • •

Q: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

A: Because they both have quills.

Q: Why is a vain woman like a hatter?

A: Because they both love their hare.

Q: Why is tea time like eternity?

A: One begins with tea and the other ends with it.

• • • •

Let us be clear about this:

When the Queen of Hearts accused the hatter of murdering Time, she was telling the truth.

Did the hatter kill Time? Yes. Is that the reason why the hatter and the hare are forever caught in this interminable tea time hour? It is.

But is a soldier in the wrong when he dispatches an enemy of the empire? Is a father guilty when, in protecting his daughter from highwaymen, he resorts to his rifle?

No. A man should not be excoriated for self-defense.

Time provoked the hatter. No man can question it.

Tell the truth—have you not felt the indignities of Time? The way he rushes when you wish to linger with a lover, but dwells stagnantly on the endless sprawl of an agonizing wait? Have you no gray hairs? No twinges? No creaking joints?

Admit it. Time has provoked you, too.

• • • •

A hatter should never be forced to construct hats at the behest of a deck of cards.

So many hats.

Hats for winning and hats for losing. Hats for playing Old Maid and Old Bachelor and Our Birds and Dr. Bursby. Rain hats for days when shuffling threatens to leave anyone exposed. Debut hats for when the pack is first opened and funeral hats for when everyone has become too wrinkled to go on.

Hats, always red and black, black and red. The hatter tried to give them vibrant yellows and restful blues, verdant greens and shimmering purples. When that failed to appeal, he offered hues only slightly off-true. Why not wear a scarlet bonnet or a crimson coronet with wired vermillion lace? A gray bowler, perhaps? A silver derby?

Certainly not, the cards replied, clutching their hearts and diamonds, brandishing their clubs and spades. We want red and black and nothing more. Black, true black, as black as respectable ladies in mourning. Red, proper red, as red as the first summer roses (and we will not tolerate facetious remarks about roses that bloom in other colors).

We like what we like and we want what we want and if you will not provide it, then we will be forced to take our custom elsewhere, and then how will you earn your tea?

Who would not go mad from monotony as much as mercury? Day after day, an endless scape of red and black, black and red, black, black, red, red, black, red, black, red, black. Pulling, carroting, mixing, carding, weighing, bowling, basoning, planking, blocking, dyeing, stiffing, steaming, lining. Dawn to dusk, only seeing the sun at tea time, that brief six o’clock break for Ceylon and cucumber sandwiches.

• • • •

In nature, even rabbits do not have sex like proverbial rabbits, and so by extension, logic dictates that hares do not have sex like proverbial hares.

The tea party, however, is not nature. The march hare wears a pocket watch and a striped Arlington waistcoat and a cravat. His crimson wool frock coat is double-breasted with a pointed front. He sips Earl Grey from a rounded pot that faces his host, using a moustache cup to spare his fur.

Gentlemen do not importune ladies with unseemly urges, but neither the hatter nor the hare are gentlemen (or, for that matter, ladies). So once their verve is replenished by the restorative properties of Darjeeling, the two mad creatures return to their lustful adventures.

Now, you may find yourself overcome by distaste—or even disbelief—that a tea party, no matter how protracted, could eventually degrade into the kind of scene best left for a bawd house. But have you ever found yourself trapped in a single afternoon for a ceaseless, innumerable progression of what would be hours if Time were alive to account for them?

In truth, such scenes can occur even if Time is only sleepy. Try it for yourself. Host a tea and block the way out. See how long it takes your trapped guests to go to grass.

The normal amusements suffice awhile: small talk, singing, making personal remarks to young girls in blue dresses. But soon enough, if your gathering includes individuals of some sophistication—gentlemen who’ve traveled in foreign lands, ladies who double as cockish wenches, that old scoundrel everyone suspects as being the anonymous author of the blue editorials that turn up occasionally in the post—soon enough, someone will suggest a bit of knock and dock. First the knock. Then the knockers. By the time someone’s about to answer the door, you’ll have to pause to fan the dormouse with a napkin. Whoever knew the drowsy rat was such a prude?

The hatter and hare have always known theirs were restive souls—Move along! One place on! New chair! New tea!—but before they began this seeking of each other’s flesh, they’d never realized that the secret to dispelling their disquiet was exertion. Exorcise with exercise. Move down! One more time! Switch sides! Switch ends!

In and out, up and down, across tables and under them. Sometimes sipping Lapsang Souchong. Sometimes lapping marmalade.

The hatter succumbs to cackling. The hare, overcome by delectable sensations, chews mindlessly through his frock coat, the hatter’s derby, two embroidered tablecloths, and a linen napkin.

Parts previously known only by their anatomical designations earn salty soubriquets. The hatter’s whore pipe blows the grounsils into the roundmouth. The hare’s snip of a plug tail prigs and waps and tups away. Arbor vitae in blind cupid, gaying instrument in the nancy, bawbles on the belly, fist around the lobcock, playing the back gammon until it’s a dog’s ride, hatter and hare both worn to nubs.

• • • •

There is a secret to making tea time last forever.

One must not necessarily murder Time—although if one is possessed of a distressing enough singing voice, this provides a good start to the endeavor. One must simply prevent the moment from ever reaching fruition.

Sit at the table. Fold your napkin. Tip your hat. Select a sandwich. Lay it on your plate. Pour milk. Decant your tea. Lift your cup. Let its brim touch your lower lip. Tip the porcelain until a hint of steam enters your mouth. Close your eyes. Inhale the scent of warmth and Indian leaves. Press your tongue against your lip. Imagine the rush of hot, dark, sweet liquid.

New tea! Change places! Start it all again!

• • • •

“The time has come,” the Hatter said,

“To talk of many things:

Of white—and green—and flow’ring blends—

Of spiced tisane that stings—

And why the mad are hot to trot—

And whether love has strings.”

“But wait a bit,” the Hare replied,

“Before you make a peep;

You’ve had fun chewing my bun,

But now I need some sleep!”

“No hurry,” the Hatter agreed,

“I guess I went too deep.”

But love has strings, the hatter knew,

Though they remain unsaid.

They’re tatters, tears, and arguments,

And cheeks left wet and red.

Perhaps he should have stayed alone

And buttered his own bread.

• • • •

Many lovers have believed their trysts provide sanctuary from Time. Their yesterdays forgotten and their tomorrows unimaginable, they picture themselves frozen in the moment of mutual embrace.

They are wrong.

Even the hatter and the hare, living in their chronological isolation, know that such things only last forever in the technical sense.

Time will eventually resurrect itself, as it always does, slicing the world back into metered moments, ordering the sun across the sky, pushing everything relentlessly onward, forward, skyward.

Outside the moment of tea time, the hatter must return to his hats, the hare leap back to his hutch. Everything will change.

The return of Time will swiftly tear away the remnants of the hatter’s sanity. He thinks of this as he watches his hand, even now shaking so that his teacup rattles in its saucer. When Time is reborn, his hands will flail without volition. Raucous, inappropriate, he will bark and guffaw to keep the cards from guessing how far gone he is. His ears will register sound but not meaning, his tongue numb as he tries to form words. Another beaver pelt laid out, the nitrate of mercury applied to it, and the hatter will tatter. Eventually, mercury will kill him. It is an occupational hazard.

As for the hare, he does not know what to think of Time. Long ago—or at any rate, before they understood that, as Time was dead, he had forsaken them—the hare had pulled the pocket watch from his vest and gazed at it appraisingly. Time had never halted before in his experience, and he was inclined to blame mechanical failure. The tea table was woefully undersupplied with watch-making tools, but it was well stocked with butter, so the hare decided to substitute the latter for the former. He crammed as much butter as he could into the gears, aiming to grease them along. Alas, its only effect was to kill the watch as thoroughly as Time himself. The hare slipped the watch back into his pocket and did not look at it again. Now he wonders if he might, in fact, have made the problem worse. Is Time trapped, unable to force its way through clogged gears to wind himself up again? What is the relationship between Time and timepiece?

At any rate, in retrospect, he is glad to have buttered Time. He does not wish to retreat into the woods, where his Arlington vest will become soiled and his pocket watch will be lost the first time he must bound away from a cheshire’s leap. Even the white rabbit, traveling under the queen’s protection, cannot hold onto his gloves and fan.

Worse than that, the day will end, and soon the week and then the month. He will become an April hare, a May hare, a June hare. Who knows what kind of personality he will have in July? What does an August hare feel? Are September hares kind? It seems a poor risk to regain his sanity at the cost of losing himself. Madness is a comfortable garment, though not so comfortable as his Arlington vest.

• • • •

The hatter is a poor man. He has no resources to squander. Still, by dint of frugality, he has managed to scrounge a few extra swatches of felt from extravagant royal orders.

At night (when there was still Time to lead to night), after the hatter completed his work, he would delve into his meager stash of candle nubs and work for the minutes he could buy with scavenged wax. Velvet for his hare, the only material worthy of his plush pelt. He treated the hat with special care. He spent evenings over perfect stitches. He pricked his fingers to bleeding, and worked his eyes to tears, but scrupulously ensured neither could stain his work. He even cut two perfectly shaped holes in the brim, one for each of the hare’s silken ears.

Not even a hare, he believes, should be without a hat.

• • • •

You may think that it’s fair to conclude that since the hatter loves his hare, it’s clear that the hare loves his hatter.

You are mistaken. It’s not the same thing a bit!

You might as well say that dressing a wound is the same as wounding a dress.

You might as well say that to like whom you tup is the same as to tup whom you like.

You might as well say that the heart knows what it wants so therefore it wants what it knows.

• • • •

In the garden at the outskirts of the tea party, floral prudes gaze with dismay at the sight forced upon them by their regrettably placed beds.

The Daisy blushes red. The Rose curls her lower leaves to block her view. With a gasp, the Tiger Lily wilts into a faint.

When the hatter and hare are done with this round, all exhausted, the hare curls beside his beloved. The hatter sits with a cup of Assam. Light slants between branches, the lazy golden of a summer that can’t decide whether six o’clock is afternoon or evening.

The hare stares restlessly up at the leaves. He has not been biding well; boredom has begun to rumple his fur.

Oh, he fears the return of Time as much as the hatter does; he has much to lose. However, he also feels a longing for what it was like to leap and hide, to smell fresh soil, to discover lettuces in unexpected places. He recalls the terror of a predator’s chase, the thrill of elusion, the joy of new moments unfolding like the scandalized flowers.

“Old Time,” mutters the hare, “his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.”

The hatter sits straight in apprehension. His hand withdraws from his partner’s plug tail.

He recognizes this quotation as an expression of dissatisfaction, a rebellion against their idyll. He demands his lover’s meaning. “Speech is the mirror of the soul,” he says. “As a man speaks, so is he.”

The hare recognizes an edge of bitterness in the hatter’s voice. He does not want to argue. He knows the hatter will never admit that while there are benefits to timelessness, there are detriments, too. He holds his tongue and savors the tumbling light.

Acidly, the hatter says, “Silence is the wit of fools.”

The hare ripostes. “Wit without discrimination is a sword in the hand of a fool.”

“Wit is cultured insolence.”

“Don’t put too fine a point on your wit or it may be blunted.”

“A paltry humbug! Those who have the least wit make them best.”

“Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning.”

“Bah!”

The hatter’s hands are quivering now as much from rage as from mercury. The conversation has slipped its rails; it has become something else entirely. And still the hare will not reveal his meaning.

In anger, the hatter discards their prohibition against original speech. “Our wits,” he sneers, “are worn too thin for witty exchanges.”

Lulled by their return to familiar assay and counter, the hare has failed to notice that the hatter is blisteringly mad, and in more than his usual sense. Lazily, he replies, “Many that are wits in jest are fools in earnest.”

The hatter whips to his feet. “Can’t you hear?” he demands. “Is there a whit of use in those enormous ears? No more wit! Not a witty whit more! Our witless twittering is done!”

• • • •

The hatter parted with his heart

When tea time made him gay:

The hare (that tart!), he stole that heart,

And took it quite away!

Oh, hare, my dear, though you appear

Contented with our tryst:

Boredom, I fear, has made you queer,

And you’ve begun to list.

• • • •

You might as well say that to lose what you love is the same as to love what you lose.

You might as well say that we meet then we part is the same as we part then we meet.

You might as well say that I’m undone by love is the same as my love is undone.

• • • •

The tea has gone cold. Crumpets ossify on the platter. The pastries are more stone than scone.

The hatter has gone off to sulk at the far end of the tea table. He’s pulled the tablecloth over his head. He makes a strange lump; the cloth, over his hat, looks as though it’s covering some bizarre mushroom. The tea set is all askew, scattered by the yanking of the tablecloth. The teapot slumps on its side, spout jutting obscenely upward.

The hare lopes over to the flower bed. He nibbles restlessly on the violets until he becomes bored with their tiny screams.

He’s almost drowsing when suddenly his prey senses twitch. He springs to his feet.

Whoosh! Thump. Sharpness. The hare’s heart pounds as teeth close on his nape. He paws the ground, scrambling to get away, but it’s got him fast.

“Murr hurr, ii aa oo?” comes a full-mouthed inquiry.

The hare sprawls on the ground, spat free.

Above him, the queen’s pet cheshire stares down. “Sorry, March,” he says casually, licking a paw. “Didn’t recognize you.”

The hare’s heart beats the rapid tattoo of near escape. He stutters. “Wo—would you like some tea?”

“Kind of you to offer, but no,” Cheshire says. “No time for tea.” His grin beams. “Get it? No Time?”

The hare thinks it best to ignore Cheshire’s attempt at humor; after all, the animal’s teeth remain on gleaming display.

“What would you like then?” asks the hare.

“Diversion,” says Cheshire. “A chat. A nibble.”

Fangs glisten. The hare trembles.

Cheshire curls his tail around his paws. “Have I ever told you what it’s like to walk away from here?” Without waiting for a reply, he continues, “To leave here and go back into Time is like watching the sun rise and sink a thousand times in the blink of an eye.”

Diffidently, Cheshire turns toward the tea table, surveying the scene with the aura of ownership that cats can cultivate when they wish. His ear twitches back toward the hare, signaling that he is still ready to leap.

“Except nothing like that, of course. The sun wouldn’t stir herself on account of what beasties are up to. But inside. It’s like that inside.”

The cat turns back. He licks his chops.

“Not a bad arrangement. Staying here. Drinking tea. Never getting older. Some might envy you.” The feline leers. “But then, some envy the dead.”

The hare shrinks. “The dead?” he asks, wondering if it’s a threat.

But Cheshire does not advance, all claws and teeth. Instead he fades away, leaving his grin behind.

• • • •

A raven is like a writing desk because the notes for which they are noted are not musical notes.

A raven is like a writing desk because Poe wrote on both.

A raven is like a writing desk because they both slope with a flap.

A raven is like a writing desk because there is a “B” in both and an “N” in neither.

• • • •

It is strange to make a decision outside Time.

There is, first of all, the difficulty that it is impossible. A decision must have a cause; in turn, it must spur effects.

How is it possible for Time to die and yet for events to continue occurring in sequence? How may girls in blue dresses come and go? Tea be drunk and yet never run out? Love affairs ripen and spoil? Curiouser still, how can Time be dead in one locale, and yet continue to rule the affairs of those who are not stuck at interminable tea?

If you want rules, look elsewhere. This is Wonderland; we are all mad here.

The hare has made a decision. He stands at the table, beside a cup of tepid oolong, pocket watch in paw. Musingly, he looks between the tea and the watch, the tea and the watch.

The hatter perceives something has changed. It is a sense hatters have.

He pulls the tablecloth off of his head. Porcelain clatters about. The teapot falls and cracks.

The hare glances up at him. The hatter’s face is drawn. The brim of his hat casts a long shadow across his features.

“The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place,” the hatter says.

The hare replies, “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy.” His tone is layered with both grief and expectation. “But growth is the only evidence of life.”

The hatter’s hands quake upon the table. He cannot control them.

“Friendship often ends in love,” the hatter says, “but love in friendship—never.”

The hare looks back down at the watch. Butter shines on motionless gears. “Love can do much,” he murmurs, “but duty more.”

The hatter gives a sigh like the wind that blows through a vanished cheshire. He stands, his hands still trembling at his sides. “Wait here,” he says.

“Strings of tension—” the hare begins, but the hatter isn’t listening.

He’s walking toward the garden of talkative flowers, beyond which lies the small house he calls his own. The hatter has not entered there since tea began, but now he opens the door and disappears inside.

When he returns, he is all hunched and sad, his jacket pinched around his shoulders. His bowtie droops. He can’t quite look at the hare; he looks away, mouth twitching with unsaid words.

In his hands, he holds a top hat that’s a motley of the Queens’ red and black, according to what he could scrounge. Each piece flawlessly felted, smooth and almost shining. Immaculate stitches circle the bicolored brocade band. Two round holes sit on either side of the brim, cut perfectly for long silken ears.

The hatter offers the hat, but the hare is afraid to take it. It is too beautiful, too clearly an artifact of affection. Besides, the hare’s paws are full, the buttered pocket watch open in his palm.

With another sigh, the hatter sets the hat down carefully on the hare’s head, mindful of his ears. The hat gives a formal, finished flair to the hare’s gentlemanly attire. One could almost imagine him at a garden party, offering his arm to a lady before they go to play croquet. Even a hare should not be without a hat.

The hare’s nose twitches. He can hardly think what to say. He stumbles a thank-you. “Gratitude is the memory of the heart—”

The hatter interrupts. “Look to your conscience then,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. He gives the pocket watch a dubious look. “Do it if you must.”

• • • •

What is Time anyway?

Time is a question. Time is the fire in which we burn. Time is local. Time is limited. Time will not take a beating. Time is lending, borrowing, crashing—and recovering. Time is petty jealousies and perverse grudges. Time is neither here nor there. Time is an unfair dilemma.

Time is a dream . . . a destroying dream. It covers the face of beauty and tumbles walls.

Time is but a phantom dagger that motion lifts to slay itself.

Time is a handful of sand.

• • • •

The hare picks up his cup. His paw trembles as he tips the brim. Dark, sweet liquid rushes into the gears. A swish, a rinse, a tilt. Tea flows out again. Diluted butter runs onto the grass.

• • • •

Time stirs.

You might as well say that timing a run is the same as to run out of time.

A hatter should never be forced to construct hats at the behest of a deck of cards.

Have I ever told you what it’s like to walk away from here?

A raven is like a writing desk because love is like loneliness.

It is never polite to go out of doors without a hat.

The time has come, the tea set said, to talk of many brews.

You might as well say that falling silent is the same as silently falling.

To tell the truth, a raven is not much like a writing desk at all.

What is Time anyway?

• • • •

Twinkle, twinkle. One, two, three:

Swallow then set down your tea.

Wipe your mouth. Return my heart.

Time has come to make us part.

• • • •

Time regains his unrelenting feet.

• • • •

The girl in the blue dress, walking to the queen’s croquet grounds, spending her time in conversation with men and women who fancy themselves cards (in more than the literal sense). Going to meet the griffin and the mock turtle and to sing the lobster quadrille (no, she will not, won’t not, will not, won’t not, will not join the dance). Becoming a towering presence at court. Waking beside her sister who is still reading from a book without pictures. Living her life in a land full of only ordinary wonders.

The hatter, returning to his felts and pelts, slipping, sliding, sluicing into mercurial madness.

The hare, off in the forest, risking the mutability of April.

• • • •

Go on until you reach the end: then stop.

©2015 by Rachel Swirsky.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Swirsky holds a masters degree in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published over 50 short stories in venues including the New Haven Review, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award, and in 2010, her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window won the Nebula. If it were an option, she might choose to replace her hair with feathers, preferably bright macaw feathers.

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

Portfolio

Mark Rigney | 6900 words

This is the incomplete story of Paints, grandson of Paints No More. It begins in shadow. Like this:

As far as reincarnation goes, I became a believer on the day that I found a dead mole in my Gran’s stuffy one-car garage. The old Volvo had obviously run the mole over, or at least its back half; the head and forearms still looked ready to rise and crawl away.

I resolved to pitch the carcass into the garden where it could do some good. Even at the age of eight, I knew not to handle dead things with my bare hands, so I strapped on a pair of Grandpa’s over-large gardening gloves—stiff with years of dirt and flowerbed filth—and I reached out to grasp the mole’s tail. It took a few tries, my fingers newly clumsy and gigantic in the gloves, but at last I got a decent grip.

I lifted, and the mole disintegrated in a shower of bunchy, crawling maggots.

I raced out of the garage as fast as my legs would carry me. Twenty yards down the driveway, I realized I still had what was left of the mole in my left hand, and I flung it into the daylilies, spikes of green topped with flaming bursts of peach-yellow, and then, after a lengthy, panting minute, I settled myself, forced down my gag reflex, and ventured back up the drive to the garage.

Where the mole had been was a damp, colorless stain. It looked like a two-dimensional bomb blast, a flat crater, and all the victims were crawling pell-mell away in an ever-spreading ring, blindly seeking for shelter and a fresh supply of food.

That was it: Proof positive of reincarnation, demonstrated by a common mole turned suddenly to an army of larvae. I was appalled—and fascinated. I stared despite myself and then, suddenly skittish, I ran inside to find Gran and beg her to read me a story, the longest, most involving sort, the kind that would transport me so utterly that I wouldn’t have to cope with the image of those hurrying maggots—their voracious, hungry circle—and how the largest had been crawling, as if they could scent my warmth from afar, directly toward me.

• • • •

“Must have been the rat poison,” said Grandpa, over dinner that night. “I hate to put the stuff out, but if I have to kill a mole or two to keep the rats out of the basement, then that’s their tough luck. You know Boston’s crawling with rats.”

Gran allowed her fork to clink hard against her chinaware plate. “Can we find a topic more suitable to the table?”

She painted, my Gran. She painted well and often, concentrating on flowers and birch trees, with occasional forays into brick-walled alleys, mud-red and choked with vines. Other departures included a series of looming stone portals that led only into darkness, and she’d won an award for a flight of freed balloons racing past a skyscraper. She won another for a great blue heron winging its way home across a lake lit only by a wash of green-hued Northern Lights.

Her busy, cramped studio could hold me transfixed for hours at a time. I would simply stand there, gazing at image after image, half of them painted only on cheap cardboard or featherweight construction paper. These preliminary pieces sat in piles on the floor, they hung from string on tiny rusting clips, they huddled together in heaps and clumps. The most recent scratch-work and sketches always rested on two black metal music stands, awaiting judgment.

“Studies,” she called them. “Beginnings.”

To me, they were masterpieces one and all, but the obvious quality of her work was almost beside the point. For me, each of her paintings was like a window, more inferred than seen, a glimpse or an echo of the mysterious and independent adult lurking inside my cheerful, worldly-wise grandmother.

Gran’s studio was an afterthought, an addition built directly behind Grandpa’s study. From the outside, the studio looked as it had been tacked to the house like a secondary appendage, cheap and boxy. From the inside, it always felt like a comfortable part of the whole, perhaps because it boasted windows on three sides that afforded easy views of the shady, fenced back yard. Gardens bloomed in front of the fences, uncomplicated affairs that relied heavily on hosta, daffodils, and innumerable impatiens: purple, red, white, and the occasional white and red mix.

Gran had Grandpa plant impatiens because she adored painting them. No subject held her more rapt, and when housework or church business or visiting friends didn’t demand otherwise, warm weather usually found her perched on a stool with a sketchbook on her knee, selecting yet another perfect grouping of the tiny upturned flowers. Painted and framed, her myriad impatiens had migrated to every relative and neighbor; they were given—and received—as cherished Christmas gifts. To unwrap one of Gran’s impatiens was to be accepted, blessed and acknowledged. To have one hanging from your wall connoted status, and arrival.

I was too young that summer to have been given a proper painting of my own—despite my presence in the house, I had not yet arrived—but Gran had kindly worked up a rough version of several blotchy purple impatiens on a strip of cardboard.

“A bookmark,” she said. “For a grandson gifted with a keen imagination.”

I kept that bookmark jammed in the pages of my Illustrated Knights of the Round Table, a measure of the value I attached to both. My father had given me that amazing book as a gift for my recent birthday, and I hardly ever closed its cover, leaving it always open to one page or another, each more full than the last of steely blades and unfurled standards, mighty jousts and grim-walled castles. With both of my parents looking for work in far-away Bangor (where distant relatives had promised lucrative seasonal highway jobs), I dreamed my way daily through that book, not just because of its own implicit wonder, but also to keep better track of my family, and myself. The stories inside told me more than mere tales of Arthur’s long-dead retainers, they sang to me that my parents would one day return, like knights from a quest, for me. We’d settle in one place and there’d be good and steady work, and all would again be right with the world.

Not that I objected to spending a Belmont summer with Grandpa and Gran. They were wonderful people, by a child’s or any other standard, and they made it easy to slip into their routines while still allowing me the freedom to strike out on my blue banana-seat Huffy and pedal my way to new, mettle-testing friendships with all the neighborhood children. Pirates, bombardment, sandlot baseball: It was summer, and we played them all. It should have been as idyllic a summer as any I ever experienced.

“We have,” Grandpa told me, on the day I arrived for my extended stay, “only one house rule.”

My parents sat across from him at the enormous oval dinner table in the slightly grimy kitchen. The tablecloth was corn-yellow, the walls pistachio green; I never understood, until owning a time-consuming home of my own, how anyone as artistic as Gran could put up with such a horrid-looking room. Not that the color scheme was on my mind at that moment. I stood at Grandpa’s elbow, nervous as all get out, waiting for the axe to fall. A rule, one rule! It would surely be a terror.

Grandpa grinned and showed his gums. “My one rule is: Listen to your Gran.”

Gran confided her single rule after my parents had driven away, a departure that had taken an hour or more thanks to the endless admonitions they’d only at the last minute remembered. Wear clean socks, use soap in the bath, listen to your grandparents, help out around the house, don’t track mud all over the place, leave insects and snakes and toads outside . . .

. . . and above all, listen to your grandparents. We know you’ll be a good boy.

Gran’s one rule wasn’t a rule. It was an injunction.

“Nathan,” she said, “you will ignore the portfolio behind the piano. Do not pick it up, do not take it out, do not venture any little peeks. Do you understand me?”

I did, of course, but I already knew perfectly well that if I was told not to investigate something, then it stood to reason that I would have to do so, and that at the earliest opportunity.

To my surprise, I tried to explain this, and Gran’s response I remember still, as clearly as any statement she ever made.

“You are not the first child to enter this house, and you are not the first to take a liking to my work. But you are the first that I have warned away. Of course I know that you will eventually break this rule, and I look forward to the day that you do. I only ask that you put it off as long as possible. Some paths cannot be retraced.”

What that meant, I had no idea, so I got on with the business of being eight, eight in the summer. Eight: The age when time ran fast enough that I could look to my future with a certain expectation, and yet it still crawled with sufficient slowness that I could pause and look behind with a feverish, leaden accuracy.

That combination made for a summer of powerful, indelible memories. I remember a mosquito bite behind my left ear that itched for a week. I remember devouring a coconut cake at a neighbor’s house. I cannot recall the neighbor’s name or the names of her children, my playmates, but I remember the cake, not only its flavor but its texture, the roughness of the coconut shavings blended with the sumptuous plaster-white icing. I remember bicycling all the way to Beaver Brook, shooting straight through the lethal five-way intersection at Belmont Square with hardly a glance for crossing traffic, and I vividly remember somehow making it home both alive and in time for supper. I remember slipping one day when I stepped out of the tub and catapulting head-first into the bathroom wall’s indigo tile. Grandpa had to drive me to a wizened, lisping doctor who gave me nine stitches, black and thick, on my forehead. I was the hit of the neighborhood for a month, and all the kids called me Frankenstein.

Grandpa had been a jeweler, and while he had retired from his shop, he had never stepped back from his craft. He spent long hours at it still, a green-tinted visor over his eyes to block any glare as he poked and prodded tiny strands of metal into clasping shards of brilliant jewels. He made metal and stone meet and match, he bent them to his bidding. He did private work, for friends of the family, long-time customers, relatives. Had his projects been on a larger scale, I’m sure his rings and bracelets and pendants would have fascinated me just as much as Gran’s canvases, but there were times when the work he held was all but obscured by his heavily knuckled hands or the fingers of his vise, and it was all I could do to see. For the most part, I left him alone.

And, on a day when he and Gran left me alone while they ventured out to the supermarket, I decided to do as Gran had said I must, and break her single law.

The forbidden portfolio wasn’t hidden or even locked up. Just as she’d said, she kept it tucked along the side of the old upright piano, black and mostly in key, an instrument that Grandpa still played daily in a mournful, offhand way as he waited for his morning coffee to percolate. As if the piano itself were a sentinel and I a thief, I avoided looking at it as I hauled the portfolio, stuffed and heavy, to the living room. I spread the canvases and boards across the furniture until they ringed and surrounded me. Only then did I allow myself to fully survey what I had exhumed.

Impatiens, one after another. All colors and stripes. More and more impatiens, on every single panel.

Was this a trick? Gran’s way of setting me up? No, it couldn’t be. I narrowed my gaze, I stared harder. And I saw beneath those cheerful blooms.

They were impatiens, yes, but this time rendered with a sickening attention to what lay below the gaps in the dark, orderly tangle of leaves. These were not mere flowers, a homey portraiture of petals and sepals. No, in these paintings, Gran had used the blossoms to guard and highlight what crawled and twisted beneath, host after host of hideous, snaking worms, many of them deformed into multi-tentacled, many-headed monstrosities that nature surely never meant to allow.

I peered closer. I reached out a finger to touch the surface of the nearest painting, and there is a part of me that will swear to this day that those writhing worms turned toward me and reached, up and out, to meet my offered finger.

I jerked my hand away and backed up until I stood in the very center of the artwork circle. Perky impatiens blossomed on every sofa, chair and ottoman; they leaned against the bookshelves, they stood beneath the tarnished brass lamps, they sidled up to the cobwebbed legs of the stereo cabinet. From a distance of even a couple of feet, it was impossible to see the wormlike things beneath the leaves—but I knew, without even checking, that they infected every canvas, the perfect marriage of macabre and mundane.

So there I stood, encircled by that hellish floral gallery, spinning awkwardly this way and that, and wondering if I even dared ask my fingers and hands to make contact, to do the simple but suddenly dangerous work of replacing them back in the portfolio.

I might well have remained stranded there all afternoon, transfixed by those grisly flowerbeds, but then, their approach entirely unheard, Grandpa and Gran walked in, laden with grocery bags. Time did what it so often is accused of doing, and stopped.

Grandpa spoke first. “Nathan,” he said. “Why don’t you help me unload the rest of the car?”

I don’t believe I said a word, but I followed him outside and allowed Grandpa to fill my arms with the stiff paper grocery sacks. I trudged them into the house and avoided looking into the living room as I passed it, kitchen-bound. Grandpa brought in the remainder of the food and joined Gran in the living room. I put away what I could, leaving only the items that lived on upper shelves beyond my reach. And then I stood by the sink, still mute, awaiting what I assumed would be a whipping or worse. One never knew with grandparents, no matter how kindly; they were of a different generation, and my imagination insisted that their punishments would tend toward the corporal.

Not long after, they called me in. The paintings were gone, back in their portfolio.

“Sit down,” Grandpa said. “I want to play you something.”

I sat on the sofa, maroon to match my mood, and I hugged my knees to my chin. Grandpa bent to the turntable atop the stereo cabinet and set the stylus on the edge of one of his faceless vinyl albums. I heard the faintest popping and hissing from the walnut speakers, and then a spray of sparkling piano. A violin joined in, and something deeper—a cello, perhaps. Grandpa closed the turntable’s lid and stood up straight, head listing sideways. An admiring smile played across his face.

“Schubert,” he announced, very softly. “I think of it as sun chasing shadow, one after the other in endless succession, sweeps of light and dark playing across green and distant hills. Listen. Picture that, and let those other pictures fall away.”

I listened. I imagined soft pastures, scattered flocks of sheep roaming verdant emerald moors. The music drifted from light to dark, just as Grandpa had said it would; it fled over my imagined landscape as if the notes themselves were scudding clouds and bolts of brilliant, rain-swept sun.

All of that was surprising enough, for like most eight-year-olds, I had no particular patience for classical music, much less Romantic chamber music, but then, as the shifting light continued, I felt a shift within myself, a visual transference, and as I watched, the hillsides ceased to rely on photographic verisimilitude and became instead a wash of subtle paints, an impressionistic sweep of gorgeous, blended oils. Most astonishing of all, I could see—no, I could feel—precisely which strokes were required to make each vision form. It was as if each image were already finished and drying on some unrealized easel deep inside my person.

The music ended. The stylus lifted. The record ceased to spin. I realized that I had closed my eyes only by opening them.

Gran and Grandpa stood together, studying me. Grandpa held one arm lightly around Gran’s shoulders. The gesture surprised me, for while I understood perfectly well that Gran and Grandpa were married, I had never considered that romance was in the least involved. They rarely touched, they could go for hours without speaking to one another, and they slept in separate beds. At that age, had anyone asked, I would have said that they were married simply because they were my grandparents.

“Tomorrow,” said Gran, in the sort of voice that, for all its serenity, brooked no argument, “I will give you your first lesson. After breakfast. We will work until lunch. We will continue the pattern every day of the week, breaking only for church on Sunday. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” I whispered.

Grandpa burst out laughing. “So serious, the two of you,” he said, shaking his head. “If you think painting’s hard work, just wait until you try full-time gardening. Because that’s what you’ll be doing all afternoon. Digging and weeding and mulching and endless watering and snipping. Your Gran likes her gardens just so.”

He paused and sucked on his lower lip. “You’re not afraid of a little hard work, are you? Of roots and soil and dirt?”

• • • •

That night, after I’d brushed my teeth and spat twice into the rust-stained sink and kissed both Grandpa and Gran good night, I found a sheaf of papers lying next to King Arthur on my pillow. It was a sort of story, typed on crinkled, smelly carbon paper, and laced with dabs of Wite-Out and penned-in corrections. I recognized the author’s name as my Great-Aunt Gertrude, long dead. She was Gran’s older sister, and a prolific diarist. This, however, was another beast entirely.

• • • •

Outside the Sun Room
by Gertrude J. Molland

The story of Joy ought to be a simple one. Once she was an artist, a painter, and of course it is tempting to speculate about why she stopped. For now, suffice it to say that one morning, after breakfast, with the children bundled off to school, Joy did not shut herself away in her studio as she had for so many, many years. Instead, she reached inside just enough to grasp the small round door handles, and then she pulled the doors closed.

She spent a full hour carefully covering over the doors’ French windows with wood-grained contact paper. That evening, she asked her husband to install a lock and hide the key. Lonnie consented to her request, but only after subjecting her to a barrage of numbing questions. Like you, he could not accept that the why did not matter. Only the stopping. Only that.

To the general public, the world at large, she knows she will always be Joy, but in her private life, she now thinks of herself as Paints No More. She enjoys this self-conscious appellation, full of movie-Indian directness, and she wonders why more people do not rename themselves. Partly to make up for this, she has taken pains to rename all of her neighbors, each as correctly as possible. Across the street lives Banker With Paunch, also his wife, Limps With Groceries, and their single, pale child, Eats Nothing. Next door, by the row of white roses—called Peace, a fitting name, except for the thorns—live Mr. and Mrs. Weed-Be-Gone. They spend all of their free time manicuring the lawn, often sitting down and trimming one errant blade at a time, as if Japanese blood ran thick in their veins.

Yells At Baby lives on the opposite side, to the east. Yells At Baby stays at home and lives up to her name three times a day, often more; her sometime boyfriend, Up Early Drinks Much, does his share of the yelling whenever he makes an appearance.

Joy tunes them out by wearing headphones around the house; the headphones connect to a Discman clipped to her belt. She listens primarily to chamber music, the more meandering the better, one instrument intertwined with the next like vines. She believes that classical music shrugs off easy identifications, that it resists being named, and so she does not care about which piece she chooses. She knows she ought to abandon composers as well—just another naming—but Lonnie has a fondness for Schubert, and so, of course, does she.

Even so, what matters most is the fog of silence that the music provides. Silence helps her lose herself in time. Certain markers, such as Lonnie’s comings and goings—departing for work at eight, returning by six—they upset her sense of stasis, although not, to be sure, as much as they once did. The diurnal cycles of the world fall away from her a little more each day, and she thinks she would forget them entirely were it not for her two remaining devotions: her children, whom she deals with almost as an afterthought, and gardening.

Paints No More gardens so dutifully and for such long hours—she has not worked at a paying job in years—that sometimes she wonders if it is she and not her neighbors who should bear the name Weed-Be-Gone. The yard is big, a quarter-acre, and she has six separate plots, all of which she knows by name: The Big One, Under the Rose of Sharon, Birdbath Circle, the Briar Patch, Tomato Road, Sunset Point.

Innumerable other plantings surround the bases of the trees, edge the sidewalks, and hang in baskets from the hooks on the porch. Gardening feeds her as once the painting did, by reminding her of process, of change, and her own place within a larger frame. Tending a plant, starting a seed, watching the seasons. These are the only activities that keep her sufficiently grounded to know time at all. Without them, she would atrophy completely, just as her husband already thinks she has.

The years pass. Her children have grown and flown, and with them, her remaining sense of schedule.

Joy is a large woman, not fat, but big-boned, strong. Once she was forty, but lately, birthdays have been hard to pin down. Her eyes can be piercing, or so others have told her. They are certainly almond, very light, and match the freckles on her skin. Her fingernails are perpetually chipped and dirty from the endless days spent in the soil, and she forgets to wash her hair until Lonnie demands that she remember. Chores of any kind, even basic hygiene, depress her; they smack of repetition, a tacit acknowledgment of the future. So great is her disdain for time that she no longer gets her period. Mind over matter, she used to tell herself. She could stop if she wanted to. And she did.

Lonnie—whom she now calls Man of Great Patience or, sometimes, Annoying Old Goat—has stood by her from the beginning. He is sympathetic and performs little niceties that he hopes will reconnect her, like a plug, to life. When work allows, he makes tea and bakes bread. He joins her in the garden. He claims that he especially likes raking, and his efforts always bring a smile to her face. She takes pleasure in the fact that he has learned to cope, to continue his own life despite the implosion of hers. He continues to design and build the jewelry that keeps the both of them clothed and housed. He goes out, he sees friends. He never invites them over.

Sometimes Joy sketches in the dirt with her finger, making crude little tracings of Art with a capital A, copies of the Great Masters and, sometimes, originals of her own. Then she smoothes them over or digs them up and goes back to picking aphids off the peaches. When the mailman—Afraid of Dogs—delivers the mail, she waves happily and throws the entire pile away, knowing that Lonnie will rescue the bills and maybe a letter or two. If there’s something of interest, he’ll read it out loud once they’re in bed. She will pretend to listen, but she will really be mulling over pigments and hues, the perfection of tone she could never quite achieve.

She knows that the studio pines for her. It’s hiding just downstairs. Lonnie says that when the previous owners had it built, they always called it their sunroom. In the winter, when the house contracts and the air grows chill and there’s almost nothing to do in the garden, she can hear the sunroom call for her, sighing through the heating vents, moaning for her hand.

And that is the incomplete story of Joy, a woman lost in the outskirts of life, marooned by a tangle of stubborn old weeds. Her painting awaits her. So does her family. Paints No More wishes that she could explain—she wishes this with all her heart—but she has yet to trap her problem with the arrow of a name.

(endit—G.J.M.)

• • • •

After finishing the story, I waited until I was certain that both of my grandparents were asleep, and then I stole downstairs and approached the studio doorway, ajar as usual. I did not know then what French windows were, but I did know contact paper, and it took only seconds of inspection under the light of Grandpa’s swiveling desk lamp to detect what I was certain would be there: a sticky, stubborn fringe of wood-grained contact paper still clinging to the inside rim of virtually every glass pane the old door had to offer.

Upstairs, Paints No More shifted in her sleep, as if searching out the proper path to go back to being Gran.

• • • •

My morning lesson was, as promised, daily. She was traditional, my Gran, and she forced me first to sketch out objects, to rough in the shape and textures of an apple, a green wine-bottle, a lady’s hat hung from a hook. We moved on to copying, mostly horses.

“The form of the horse contains everything that is human,” she stated. “If you doubt me, you will find your proof in the centaur.”

I asked her why she never painted people herself, and she smiled, thin-lipped.

“I’m no good with centaurs,” she said. “To paint the human form is to indulge in a particular kind of fantasy. A kind I don’t appreciate. But that is no reason,” she went on, “that you should not out-do me. Stretch the limitations of your teacher. Challenge yourself.”

We moved on, first to single plants and trees, and then to landscapes, still working only with pencils or charcoal. And then, one morning some five weeks into my punishment, we shifted into paint: oils, right out of the gate.

“What will you do?” Gran asked. “What story will you tell?”

Were paintings stories? I didn’t need to ask to know what Gran’s answer would be. She talked almost constantly while she painted, narrating the legend of whatever it was she was working on, giving it both background and foreground, a verbal and sometimes dramatic history. All art, she claimed, was the art of story. The history of story was the history of art itself.

“Gran,” I said, “why did you stop painting?”

Gran set down her brush—she’d been working on a red-walled barn and a set of sunny haystacks—and she peered at me over her shoulder. She said, “I stopped because I was afraid of what I was starting to see.”

“What did you see?”

“What do you think I saw?”

I shrugged. “But those things aren’t real.”

I knew I was right. No matter how many afternoon weeds I ripped from the garden, I had never seen anything more shocking than a slug.

“Ah,” said Gran, and she peered at her haystacks. “The important thing is, I started again. I picked up right where I left off. Now. Let’s return to you, and your blank canvas. What will you paint?”

“A cabin,” I said. “In the snow.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. A cabin, a safe one, lost in the snow.”

Gran thought for a moment, then stood up and pulled a jacketed book from a small case wedged into the corner of the room.

“Snow,” she said, “requires careful handling. What color is it?”

“White.”

“In shadow, it is blue. Or cerulean or chimney black. In low light, it can turn yellow. Does that mean that snow is really yellow, or cerulean? Be careful how you answer.”

She opened the book she’d chosen and showed me snowscape after snowscape, in all styles and periods. Delicate brushwork seemed to make certain sunlit snow banks almost shimmer, while the blunt approach of the twentieth century turned the snow to chunks, like soot-laced ice blocks. I knew I didn’t have the skill yet for the former, but the choppy swatches of snow in the book’s last few pages—those I decided I could manage.

I chose a page for inspiration and placed the open book on a music stand off to my left. I reached for a brush.

It took days, of course. Many days. But, with the deliberate slowness of a spreading, seeping stain, my painting shaped itself and grew from a paltry child’s-hand sketch into something considered and designed, more statement than picture. I practiced the art of mixing pigments and oil; I learned to keep my brushes slick and wet. I memorized the different tips and widths, and I came to know firsthand the gentle ache that comes from holding your arm bent at the elbow, adding stroke after not-so-delicate stroke. The drifts billowed and grew, and the skies drew together with threats of more snowfall to come. I was in Heaven.

Of course, by any objective standard, the results were far from good. And, because I was just old enough to see my work’s deficiencies, I was violently dissatisfied. Still, I refused to put aside this first attempt and start fresh. The paints and I were in a battle to the finish, and I was determined to end with something better than outright retreat.

Gran clearly approved of my stubbornness, and when I began to rough in the cabin, relying on umber and a half-dozen rotten-looking brownish blends, she paid ever closer attention.

“I know you, Nathan,” she said, on a morning when an early thunderhead had left the studio so dark that we had the overhead lamps switched on a half-hour before noon. “I know you better than you know yourself. There is something about this cabin that frightens you.”

“Maybe,” I said, needlessly churlish, “but you’re afraid of the garden.”

“I was once, yes.” Perhaps in tacit sympathy for my own poor technique, she was doing knife-work, a rarity for her, and she’d been making disgruntled noises for an hour. “The fact is, I am old, Nathan, an old woman. The garden tells me what’s coming next.”

I thought about the mole, the desperate circle of maggots, and the way the daylight faded a little sooner each day as August headed toward September.

My parents called the next afternoon and said they’d be coming on Saturday. They’d stay for a few days, if that was all right, and then it would be time for all of us to go. What, they asked Grandpa, had I been up to lately?

“He’s been a great help in the garden,” Grandpa chuckled. “Aren’t many boys his age who can spell ‘variegated hosta’ in English and in Latin.”

A great help I may have been, but that was the last day I worked in the garden. Gran had a whispered conversation with Grandpa while I was washing up the lunch dishes, and just as I was heading for the garage to strap on my work gloves, she caught me by the shoulders and faced me toward the front door instead.

“Enough,” she said. “Go find your friends. Have some fun. Be eight again.”

I bicycled away, too thrilled to even look back. I found my half-forgotten gang and off we went, in and out of their homes, up and down the hills, into low-limbed maple trees and tunneled-out forsythia. Pirates, bombardment, sandlot baseball: We played them all. We must have, because it was summer.

Gran and Grandpa tended to eat late, so it didn’t matter much that I only got home at dusk. I could see a light on in the kitchen and I heard water running in the sink. The smell of curried something-or-other wafted out of the house, probably lamb. I skidded to a stop and hopped off my bike and almost jammed my foot through the top of my second dead mole of the season.

Grandpa had put out more rat poison two days before, so the mole’s presence shouldn’t have been any sort of surprise. Even so, I wondered how long it had lain there unnoticed at the edge of the drive, tucked under an invading arch of crab grass. Gran had not ventured out in about two days, of that I was almost sure, and Grandpa had probably confined himself to perfecting the back yard. The intervening days had been hot and muggy, and the mole was likely just a shell, as the first had been. Under the skin, it would be literally seething.

In the moment, I’m sure I didn’t come up with such precise vocabulary, but I did realize that I had a choice. I could either deal with the mole, or at least tell Grandpa about it, or I could pretend I hadn’t noticed it at all. In another day or two, it would surely be cooked to leather by the sun, and the surviving maggots would have winged away as flies.

As I hesitated, debating, the mole’s carcass shifted ever so slightly, and out from underneath crawled the single largest maggot that I have ever to this day beheld or heard of. It wrenched itself free from the mole’s underbelly, it raised its faceless face, it got its bearings—and then, with an awful clarity of purpose, it sped directly toward my foot.

It didn’t matter that I was several thousand times bigger than that sightless, pallid grub. I panicked. I jumped backward, knocked the Huffy sideways—the bike toppled over with a clatter of spokes and pedals—and I sprinted for the open garage. I grabbed the first shovel I found—a flat-backed spade, almost my height—and I ran to the mole and I slammed the flat of the blade down on that maggot as if my life depended on it.

Crazed and frenzied, I moved on, raining blows on that poor husk of a mole. I hammered and whacked at it until every last maggot was crushed to an unholy jelly. Then I staggered backward to the lawn and collapsed in a heap, bawling to wake the dead.

Neighbors came out of their houses, curious about the fuss. Gran followed Grandpa as they hurried down the steps to the walk, probably thinking I’d wrecked my bike. Six feet away from me, across an ocean of crumbling tarmac, a splatter of flesh and ooze judged in silence, as the guiltless always do.

• • • •

The next morning, more or less recovered, I was back with Gran in the confines of the studio, mixing white and yellow and sepia into a warm but waning light, the sort of light I wanted to have glowing from my cabin’s single window. I did my best work on that glass, there and on the snow beneath, where I allowed the light from the cabin to spill out onto a midwinter drift, a cruel echo of the cozy air inside.

“Does anyone visit this cabin?” Gran asked.

“Not really.”

“Who lives there?” Gran asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You know.”

“Well.” I squirmed. “Maybe me, sometimes.”

“Maybe you. Sometimes.”

She paused long enough to inspect my brushes, still damp with thinner and laid across a paper towel like bodies, victims of some nameless disaster. An earthquake, perhaps. A devastation of plague.

When next she spoke, it was in a different voice, the kind that required that she clear her throat. Whether it was lecture or sermon, I’m still not sure. Perhaps she was speaking to herself.

“Unless you’re a hack, Nathan—and I trust that you are not—then painting is a trade that leaves scars. Wounds, even. Some stay open, they bleed. They bleed over into real life, into friendships and family. May God forgive me for both.”

Had the room grown darker, or was that my imagination? I suspect a trick of memory, the danger of looking back from where I stand today, forty-three and growing older by the second. My mind’s eye has that painterly impulse to shift and smudge, so while I know it may not be a literal truth, I emboss her words with an image equally dark and unruly.

Regardless, I am sure of what she said next, and of how she said it. She patted my head, she ran her dry-skinned fingers through my hair. She laughed!

“Oh, my poor sweet Nathan. The paint is in your blood, like it or not. Now I will always know what to send you for your birthdays.”

• • • •

But Gran died in November, and I have spent the last thirty-five years procuring everything I need—paints, brushes, frames, and an endless supply of time—for myself.

My first painting doesn’t hang from a prominent spot on my wall. Its place of honor is a box in the attic. I have told myself for years now that the only reason it isn’t up where family and friends can see it is because it simply isn’t very good. The fact is, I keep it hidden because the honesty of that first image frightens me. A simple cabin, lit from within, engulfed by lonely winter twilight. I included a copse of trees on the crest of a low hill, but other than that, the landscape shows nothing but storm-gray clouds and snow.

And on the cabin, not even a door.

It took me years to notice that, but apparently it never occurred to my eight-year-old sense of design to add a means of exit or entrance. I don’t count the window. It’s the old fashioned kind, primitive and sealed. And so I am tormented by a question: Were I to transform into Alice Liddell and enter a looking-glass world, would I discover a door on one of those two unseen walls? Or did I paint myself a prison?

• • • •

There we have it, the incomplete story of Paints, grandson of Paints No More. It began in shadow. It ends, for now, like this:

Grandpa died a year after Gran, and the house was sold. In general, the estate was left in equal portions to the three children, for them to divvy up among themselves and the nine grandchildren as best they could. I, however, thanks to a special codicil, received the entire contents of one particular portfolio. I have it still, of course. I keep it locked in a steamer trunk bought especially to house those lost, dangerous paintings.

Not so dangerous, perhaps. I dig them out now and again and show them to my wife, to my children. I want to share with them my version of life’s myriad possibilities. I want my cabin to have a door.

And so we put on Schubert for safety, and we spread Gran’s images across the floor, and we try to tear our eyes from the strange clumps of flowers. We hardly know what to make of what we see, but we are born again in the viewing, reincarnated a thousand times over. To exorcise the demons of sight and premonition, we tell fresh stories to explain each canvas, and I, like Arthur’s Taliesin, relate the life-threads that Gran herself attached so many years ago. We peer through the greenery toward what huddles and clusters beneath, and then we shiver, we cling together, and we swear the damned things aren’t moving.

©2007 by Mark Rigney. Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #22. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Rigney has had plays produced in twenty-two U.S. states, including off Broadway, together with Canada and Australia. His full-lengths are published by Playscripts, Inc. and Indie Theater Now, with ten-minute work appearing in multiple editions of The Best Ten-Minute Plays (Smith & Kraus). His supernatural quartet of novellas and novels, The Skates, Sleeping Bear, Check-Out Time, and Bonesy, are published by Samhain, while his short stories appear in Unlikely Story, Betwixt, Witness, Ascent, The Best Of the Bellevue Literary Review, and The Beloit Fiction Journal, among over fifty other venues. In non-fiction, Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet) remains happily in print, and he is a regular contributor to Black Gate. His website, which includes links to many of his (free!) online stories, is markrigney.net.

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

Ex Libris Noctis

Jay Lake | 5900 words

Beatrice’s heart skipped and skipped again, the tiny pistons clattering in their brassbound prison. Her ribs ached, and there were narrow darts of pain throughout her chest.

She was dying.

Opening her mouth to protest, to call for help, to cry out in the rank darkness that was her small room, Beatrice could not speak. Only a squeak of steam emerged. Then nothing but the bellows of her lungs in time to the errant brasswork of her heart.

Her leering jailor appeared at her door. The guttering flames of his eyes danced in their slits. The gleaming needles of his mouth parted, flexing open like morning’s first flower, as the dark words flowed like wine long gone bitter in winter’s rotted barrel.

“Regret nothing,” the jailor said.

Nox Solis: Out of heaven’s benediction

Traffic was against her at every step. Sidewalks tilted crazily, the concrete decks of the city’s ship tossed on a slow storm of crabgrass and frost heaves. The sun shone bright as the pennies on a dead man’s eyes, cold as his breath.

Beatrice stood at an intersection, waiting to cross against the running tide of steel and chrome and shrieking rubber, the gritty sulphuric belches of a passing bus crowding the air from her lungs. She was late, late, late.

The light changed, the green that was with her stuttering like an automotive disco even as the pedestrian signal faded to black. Two cars crowded close, but the light changed back too quickly, the cross-traffic erupting once more into motion.

“He’s dead,” she shouted at the uncaring streets. Her voice echoed off the rushing tinted safety glass of a limo larger than her apartment. “Let me through!”

Traffic surged in further waves. She would have to make her own crossing. Beatrice hitched up the skirt of her wool suit—her best and only funeral clothing—and charged into the street muttering, “Damn, damn, damn, damn!”

A classic VW Beetle, bright green with one of those Rolls Royce hoods, tried to slide around her in the angry blare of its tinny horn. The engine clattered like a tray of hammers stepping through the gears as it hopped the curb, flattened a newspaper box, and slammed into the light pole.

Beatrice forced herself to look away, racing past the next obstacle—a postal truck. It swerved the other way, knocking down a motorcyclist and setting off a screaming chorus of tires and horns. Running, she took a flying leap over the downed biker.

She did not return promptly to the earth.

Her black pumps—scarred and repolished a dozen times in the years since she had quit college—folded under Beatrice like the feet of a Canada goose. Arms flailing, she crossed over a rusted Pontiac with a homemade sunroof, evidence of patient hours with a Sawzall and way too much beer. A lank-haired man with a sunburnt face and a welder’s cap stared up at her, joint dangling from one slack lip.

After that she was over a TriMet bus, seeing the huge black numbers on the roof. Beatrice nearly caught her skirt on the popped-up air vent.

“Papa, I’m coming,” she shouted, though the dead have ears of stone.

The sidewalk passed beneath her. A skate punk stared up, paperclip earrings dangling down in a chain to meet his nipples at the edge of his leather vest. She waved at him as her smile stretched at the corners of her mouth. He waved back, shouting and pointing at something.

Beatrice flew on, the verdant green around her father’s open grave already glowing in her mind until she crashed headfirst into the limestone facing of the Aladdin Theater. Red fire bloomed in her skull as her teeth cracked together, the blessing of flight become a curse until she tumbled from God’s hard, brassy sky to the unforgiving Earth.

Nox Lunae: Dried butterflies and tomes of casuistry

The largest moth was more than a yard wide from tip to dust-feathered tip. Great steel pins held it directly to the wall. Beatrice had no idea what color the moth had been in life. In eternal, slightly moldering repose, it was a mouse-gray with brown spots on the wings like the lambent eyes of the angel of cockroaches. The antennae curled tightly inward, spiraling in some mournful imitation of the moth’s last flight. The palps and feelers of its face were mirrors of everyday horror.

Brother and sister moths lined the hallway in both directions, some pinned straight on like the enormous specimen before her, others in hand-lacquered frames with deep-cased velvet mountings. Still more were stuck to old shirt cardboard with mucilage, their provenance and Latin binomials recorded in shaky, careless blue biro.

Air moved slow and heavy, stirring the dust at her feet. Beatrice was afraid to turn, afraid to see what waited behind her. She was more afraid not to.

The thought of turning made her think of feet, of wings and flight. She looked down. One scuffed shoe was gone, the left. The right seemed to have broken a heel.

Had she flown? Had she really taken wing and soared over Portland’s summer streets?

“I am a creature of air and light,” Beatrice told the moths, then turned to face whatever had approached her from behind.

Nothing was there. Rather, a wall of books rose before her, towering to a vast height which even a stretch of her neck and squint of her eye could not fully discern. They were for the most part leather-bound, in various colors and textures of cordovan and calfskin. Some were marked with gold-stamped lettering, others with numbers or arcane symbols of perhaps alchemic or astrological provenance. The shelving was occasionally interrupted by mirrors mostly covered with dusty black cloth.

From where had the stirring of the air come?

She reached out, trailed her fingers across the spines of the books. Sparks crackled where the leather met her skin, each tiny jolt carrying with it a fragment of sound.

“De gustibus . . .”

“. . . xiao ren . . .”

“. . . elven hall . . .”

“. . . torn from his . . .”

“. . . omnia . . . ”

“. . . never!”

Beatrice pulled her hand away to examine the tips of her fingers. They were smeared with dust and few flecks of leather. There were red marks—evidence of the sparks?

She reached out again, pulled down a tall, narrow book with a blue spine marked only with numbers. It fell open as if the binding were worn with use, bringing her to a page which seemed almost to glow as if the sun were on the other side of paper.

Gasping out his life, the old man waved the nurse over. Words had long failed him, though the light of sweet reason still gleamed in his filmy eyes. He gripped her sleeve, hands scaly and rough like old claws. There was some wisdom he needed to impart. Some final clarity of perception had been granted him by God in the same blow that had taken his speech. Surely this was proof of the cruel jest that compromised all human

Beatrice slammed the book shut. Her father had died in a hospital, struggling for breath. Her father even now lay in a narrow pinewood box, surrounded by ice blue velvet he would have hated, watched over by some bored attendant to whom he would have had nothing to say, waiting for her, who was . . .

Where?

Here?

Once again, the dust at her feet swirled, the air moved slow and heavy. The moths behind her were readying to take flight, their brown-eyed wings glaring hatred for bell jars and chloroform.

She spun again. The stocking of her shoeless foot snagged on the floorboards.

The moths were silent and dead as ever. Uncaring as stones, just like her father had become.

Beatrice looked up.

There was no ceiling, only a towering cliff of moths facing a towering cliff of books, words and wings in eternal opposition, some wide-gapped Casimir effect siphoning energy from her. She stared into the vanishing point where wall met wall in a profusion of leather and wings.

“Papa?” His hair had been gray and dusty, like a moth’s wing.

The air stirred once more at her feet, bearing with it the scent of harsh chemicals and long-vanished summer days.

“I’m late, Papa.” His skin had been papery and thin.

This time the wing beats were clear, loud as waves. Or was it the riffling of pages?

She ran, her bare foot dragging, splinters tugging at her steps. She was late for the funeral, late for her life.

“Papa!” His eyes had been brown and penny-bright, now and forever unseeing spots encased in velvet darkness.

This hallway might run past the horizon of memory. Beatrice knew that she would never move fast enough to reach the end.

Nox Martis: Smythes or workers of yron . . . lyers, grete swerers

The first candle was almost as tall as Beatrice herself, thin as her index finger. One lacy arch of wax dripped down it. It was zebra striped, divided into light and dark bands. She had once read of keeping time with candles. This must be such a candle, though the bands seemed sufficient to track an infinitude of hours.

Perhaps the hours of a person’s life, numbered and finite though they were.

She turned, then, at the sound of a throat being cleared. Finally, Beatrice thought, an answer, only to face a huge black bird with little jet-beaded eyes.

“Memory,” said the bird.

Hammers fell, a clanging chorus of iron men with iron muscles driving their tools through sweat, gravity, and sheer old-fashioned force. Where there had been one candle there were hundreds now, from tiny votive lights flickering their dim prayers toward Heaven all the way to massive mountains of wax, as filled with wicks as a hive is with bees, glittering constellations along their slumped shoulders. Every smith worked within an enclosure of the candles, a pale, soft prison aglow around each bright forge fire and each carbon-reeking anvil.

Soaring pillars of iron stabbed upward, wrought and ornamented like those old Boston subway stations from a time when even the simplest objects were made with pride and all the world deserved decoration. She looked up, expecting to follow the rose-trimmed iron line to the end of her vision, but the ceiling was there. A clerestory glowed with the light of the unseen moon, silver-edged clouds skating past the narrow line of windows.

“Memory,” said the raven again. A second, twin to it, fluttered out of the darkness. The newcomer’s feathers smoldered, as if it were freshly wrought from one of the forges. Or perhaps had flown through a shower of sparks.

“Thought,” the other raven remarked.

“I will think no more on memories,” Beatrice told the birds. Papa’s eyes had been copper, and gleamed like stars, not iron-dark with a spark of fire. That was someone else’s memory, someone else’s life.

She looked down at herself. Both shoes were gone now, her stockings torn. Sparks from the forges had made little gray holes in her suit and the sheer silk blouse she wore beneath. Or perhaps the pursuing moths had done so.

That she could not remember was a subtle terror Beatrice held at bay by deliberate ignorance.

“Remember.”

“Think.”

Candles. Metal. Fire. Memory came hurtling at her without regard to her ignorance, shattering bliss with the power of the smallest things. An acorn could push through pavement with the patience of evolutionary time and a little water. A memory could do no less.

He was a moral man, her father, never swearing nor bearing false witness. “I have a deal with God,” Papa used to say, sometimes over a glass of whiskey—his one self-proclaimed vice—“I don’t believe in Him and He doesn’t believe in me.” Papa believed that people should do good for their own sakes. Not because somebody wrote it down and pretended God had told them to.

One summer when Beatrice was twelve, she and Papa had gone to visit Uncle Axel on his apple farm somewhere in eastern Washington State. Older than Papa by a span of years Beatrice could not then imagine, Axel was a man of the old country. His voice was thick with a thousand years of European ghetto and half a decade of imprisonment in their shared youth, and he had a beard that struck her as both glorious and frightening. Axel smelled of tobacco and some strong fishy odor that Papa had told her to ignore. Food from the old country that they did not eat in their family.

Axel and Papa got on well, except in the evenings when talk strayed to shul and kaddish and other words Beatrice did not know in a half-familiar language. Then Axel would raise his voice, and he and Papa would argue in that comfortingly strange language, throwing her name around like a curse or a prayer.

The fourth or fifth night of this, Beatrice slipped out to the barn to hide among the feral cats and the patient, whuffling old mule that Axel kept out of pity. The barn smelled comfortable, a stink of animals and hay and mouse pellets so much easier on her nose than the fish-and-paper scents of Axel’s little house. She could lean on the mule and listen to the gurgling of the animal’s gut, like the great affair of pipes and drains that never quite worked in their apartment building back in Portland.

After a while Axel stormed into the barn, muttering still in the private language he and Papa shared. She could not see him, but she heard him rattle tools a while, then light a clicking fire—the paper chatter of the flames was familiar, once they caught—and after a while, begin a metallic ticking and clicking.

Axel was working a mule shoe on his little forge, she realized.

Beatrice awoke much later that night curled next to the old mule and a dozen squirming cats. She found a piece of iron Uncle Axel had left in front of her, still warm to the touch, wrought in a many-legged shape that she knew had to be a word in that language.

It had the power of a prayer, and the pity of a forgotten name.

“Think.” “Remember.”

Amid the smiths and candles, Beatrice remembered one more thing—the brush of a hand, a gentle kiss, her name whispered as the iron clinked on the barn floor.

Papa had kissed her, his lips clean-shaven. Uncle Axel kissed like a holly bush, his beard pushing her face and cutting her chin.

Papa, who held no truck with God, had wrought her the prayer.

The candles dissolved in a blurring mist as the pounding smiths sent forth a maelstrom of sparks that plucked at Beatrice’s arms, her hair, her clothes, setting a new round of tiny fires to smoldering. Though she tried to beat them out, the whir of raven’s wings only fanned the flames until she had to scream.

The fire ran even into her lungs.

Nox Mercuriae: Philosophers, arithmeticians, and divers busie fellowes

Numbers chased Beatrice, shrieking decimals pointing their accusations as zeroes spun on their axes and devilish sixes howled and capered, pretending to be nines. She ran across a pale green expanse, tripping over dark ridges on the ground. Her feet hurt terribly, as if there were razor blades beneath them. No matter how hard she tried, Beatrice could not get her breath.

“Late,” she tried to say, though she only squeaked. Papa waited, late now and forever, bound to rest silently in his box of God-ignorance up on the forested hill among the stone-carved names of the indifferent dead. She was late, too, late for his funeral, late for his memorial, late for sending Papa on his final voyage to nowhere.

And now there was a new army of numbers, red to the black that already pursued her, closing in like a column of ants marching to war.

Beatrice found a double line, tall as a fence, and ducked behind it. For a moment she was out of the way of the towering ones and stabbing fours.

There were half a dozen men sitting back there, most on stools, one on the ground, smoking pipes and cigars and chattering away. As she tumbled into their midst, they all stopped talking.

“If it isn’t Meyer Frank’s little girl Beatrice,” one of them said finally.

Beatrice recognized him, Jacob Whelan, a one-time business partner of Papa’s. Dressed in slacks and Oxford shirt and a bright print tie of questionable taste, he was thin to the point of sparse, eyes sunk deep within the pallid banks of his cheeks. Much as Whelan had looked when dying, still surprised at the news, of colon cancer.

“I went to your funeral in 1994,” she said. Her breath had finally returned, though her throat ached awfully.

Whelan laughed and waved his pipe around. “Would I be here if I were still alive?”

On the other side of the line, the numbers battled with a terrible, riffling growl and the noises of ripped paper.

Beatrice looked around at Whelan’s companions. “You I recognize,” she said to a young black man who resembled that movie star named after some Caribbean island. “And you,” pointing at an older white man who was as fat as Whelan was thin. “Are you all friends of Papa’s?”

Whelan laughed again, joined by the others. “You could say that.”

A jagged section of black flew over the wall, some staff or serif torn off an unlucky five perhaps. Beatrice flinched as it bounced into the paper plain to her left, but Whelan and his group did not even seem to notice.

“Are you all dead?”

They laughed again. “Where do you think you are, Hell?” asked the black man.

“I’m stuck,” Beatrice admitted. “I’m late for Papa’s funeral, and everything I do makes me later.”

“So the old boy finally kicked it, huh?” It was one of the men she didn’t know, small with twisted shoulders and a face locked forever in a grimace by stroke or disease.

“Meyer, Meyer, pants on fire,” said the fat man, still grinning. “He’s gonna burn now.”

“No,” said Beatrice. “Papa made a deal with God.”

“We’re accountants,” hissed the black man. “God isn’t in it for us, any more than He was for your daddy.”

“How do I get out of here?” Beatrice asked.

The black man just looked sad at that. “We don’t know where you’re going. We only know where you’ve been.”

Where had she been? Flying, in dusty halls, standing among sparks and fire. “This does not add up,” Beatrice said.

The accountants all stared at her. The fat man finally spoke. “Tell me you didn’t say that.”

“This is your memory of Papa, not mine. I don’t belong here.”

A spray of mixed black and red shot over the wall, splattering them all. The accountants put away their pipes and cigars, each drawing an old fashioned fountain pen from some pocket or another.

Beatrice backed away, but they stepped forward to follow her. “Meyer cheated me of four hundred dollars in 1973,” said the little man with the twisted shoulder.

“He turned me in to the IRS for a reward in 1984,” said the fat man.

The black man spoke. “He called me a dirty schwarzer and filed grievances with the state until my license was revoked.”

Then they were all talking. “I was robbed by him.” “Deceived.” “Betrayed.” “Crooked.” “Criminal.” “Old Jew bastard, we should all have killed him.”

Beatrice wanted to stand there, wanted to fight for Papa’s honor. He was a good man, a proud man who always did right. He wouldn’t have cheated a one of them, she wanted to scream, but the gleaming nibs of their fountain pens pushed her back.

Finally, she turned and ran, abandoning Papa’s memories in the face of their threats. Beatrice found herself among the battling numbers, dodging lances thrown by mercenary sevens, trying to avoid being crushed by rolling zeroes.

She needed to be out of the battle, away from the numbers that lied about Papa and his life. Beatrice ran again, scrambling on her aching feet, her jacket torn away by the ragged tip of a three, her blouse scarred by a close brush with a battalion of commas and negative signs. Finally a rampaging two stabbed her in her chest, just above the line of her bra, the red tip sinking into her skin like love’s utmost kiss.

Nox Iovis: Lord of Heaven and bringer of light

The boy sat on a wooden throne. There had been gold leaf once, chasing itself across a delirium of carvings, but it was long worn by time and careless fingers to shy gleams among the crevices.

He was beautiful, prettier even than Tommy Masters that she’d had a crush on for three years running until Tommy had come out gay only to be beaten to death by four guys from the varsity football squad. The boy’s legs were long and pale, almost girlish, as were his arms, but his face had a narrow-nosed classical look that would someday grow into the sort of red-tinged crags one saw on the faces of senators and CEOs.

Beatrice tried to look around. Her neck barely moved, the bones popping and grating. She was in a hall, with carved roof beams and pillars along the side, darker alcoves in the low-roofed spaces beyond. There was no one but her and the boy.

“You’re in a great deal of trouble,” he said.

“I know.” Beatrice was surprised at the croak in her voice. She sounded old, almost rusted.

“Your heart is broken, and far from mending.”

She looked down, touched her chest. Her blouse was gone, along with her jacket and skirt, though Beatrice still had her bra and slip. The little burns she had seen on her clothes peppered her skin like buboes heralding the plague. There was a hole in her left breast, just above the edge of her bra, that she could have slid her finger into.

“My Papa is dead,” she said, “and I cannot reach his funeral.”

“My Papa ate most of my brothers and sisters. I danced at his funeral.”

Beatrice felt a welling of sorrow for the boy on the throne. He was beautiful and haughty and no one she would want to know in life, but dancing on your father’s grave spoke of a childhood she could only imagine with horror.

“Your funeral will be soon,” the boy continued. “Unless you fix that.” He nodded vaguely at her.

Beatrice covered the hole with her hand. “Can you help me?”

The boy snapped his fingers and a flame danced between them. “I have some of my Papa’s powers.”

Did she have any of her Papa’s powers? Had she ever tried to understand them?

“You must finish college,” he’d said. There was a look of strain in his eyes that Beatrice tried to put down to Mama’s death that past autumn.

They sat at the kitchen table in the little apartment in northwest Portland. The neighborhood had changed over the years, from a collection of indifferent hourly workers and students living on the cheap to BMWs and Range Rovers and markets selling vegetables she’d never heard the names of before. Rich people ate strangely.

Somehow, their little building had resisted the ravages of gentrification and the lures of selling out. The same indifferent ownership that tolerated bad drains ignored redevelopment grants. Everything in life was a blessing, if you know how to look at it.

Except Mama’s death. Even the refrigerator whined more loudly after her passing, showing the same strains as their pretenses of normalcy.

“I don’t want to, Papa,” Beatrice said, staring at her hands. All ten nails were gnawed ragged, the skin pink and puffy at each tip.

“I had hoped that you might come work with me when you had your education.” His voice was soft, cracking slightly, reinforced by all the sights and smells of her childhood in this kitchen. When he sat in the old chrome-legged dinette chair, Papa spoke ex cathedra as far as her childhood soul was concerned.

“I don’t know anything about imports, Papa.” Her nails were fascinating, Beatrice realized. Their complex patterns of tooth marks and little wounds were much safer than his soft brown eyes. “You buy engines and gears and—”

“Motors, my sweet. Stepper motors. Industrial equipment from Taiwan and Singapore.”

“Motors.” Tears stung her eyes. “What do I know about motors? There’s nothing interesting about motors!”

“Motors paid your rent and sent you to school and buried your Mama,” Papa said. His voice had gone even softer, like a fog wrapped around her.

“No!” She stood so quickly her chair toppled to the floor. “I don’t want—”

“What do you want, Beatrice?”

She’d fled crying, running out into the street to wander the city until hunger drove her home.

“Papa tried to show me his power,” she told the boy. “He wanted me to go into the family business.”

“I know that story.” The boy smiled, closed his fist on the flame, and stood up in front of his throne. Beatrice realized that he truly was a boy, no taller than she, not done growing. That made her self-conscious of her lack of clothes, and she folded her arms over her chest.

The boy smiled, took her hands, and pulled her arms open again. He reached out with a fingertip, brushing the textured cup of her bra as if by accident, to touch the wound in her chest. “I may be able to help. It would send you on your way.”

“I must meet Papa at the cemetery,” she said.

“Will you dance?”

Beatrice had no answer for that, so she shook her head and fought the sting that peppered her eyes.

The boy snapped his fingers again, then opened his palm to reveal a little brass machine. Or perhaps a sculpture. It was an odd shape, sort of a kidney with a dent, studded with tiny rivets, little bumps and divots, pinheads where perhaps internal axles or gears found their center. Various valves and openings emerged from the thing.

“I am not in my full power yet,” the boy said, “but this will work, at least as long as you need it to.” He pushed it into her chest, the hole there widening around the brass heart then swallowing it as a snake might swallow a rat.

Beatrice watched her chest clench shut, a red puckered seam where the wound had been, then felt the clattering as the heart commenced its work.

“Thank you,” she said, but the boy touched her lips.

“Never thank a stranger until you know whether he has granted you a blessing or a curse.”

She smiled, kissed his finger, and turned to walk out of the hall. There was a brass door, a figure beaten into it in low relief, not far ahead. The pain in Beatrice’s feet tore at her, step by bloody step.

Nox Veneris: Ryot and dispense

They had gone to the movies—what all kids do. Some film she could never remember afterward, men with guns and cars doing loud things. Beatrice had discovered kissing that year, and was practicing assiduously in the back row. The warm and salty taste of Frankie Salazar’s mouth was like nothing she’d ever found.

He was cute, too, a dreamboat with angry eyes and the lips of an angel. Plus he was a senior, three years older than her. Frankie was so cool, Sally and Marian and Jeni were jealous.

Three movies, six hours of kissing. She was in heaven. His hands liked to wander, but that was what boys did. The kissing was so good, she didn’t really mind.

Something exploded on the screen, and Frankie’s fingers found the line of her bra beneath the open buttons of her blue and white striped Oxford shirt. Beatrice’s heart raced. She wasn’t supposed to do this. Her mother had always been very clear about boys.

“They are little animals,” Mama would say, then try to hide a smile. “Men are just bigger animals. You can handle them when you’re older, but right now, don’t let the animal out.”

Mama had never explained exactly what letting the animal out entailed, but Beatrice thought she knew.

Frankie’s animal was wandering on fingered feet into the soft valley between her breasts.

Why had she worn a front clasp bra tonight?

Tongue driving hard, he found the clasp and slipped it before she had time to do anything. The faint pressure of the bra straps on her shoulders relaxed and his hand darted in to brush her nipple, cup her left breast.

“No,” she muttered, but Frankie kept the pressure of the kiss on, and he was bigger than her. Beatrice got her hands between them, trying to push him away, but Frankie would not move.

He massaged her breast now, the center of his palm brushing against her nipple, which was stiff as it ever was when she traced lazy circles around it in the bath.

“No,” she said again, still pushing him away. But not too hard.

Then the flashlight glared and the manager’s voice was raised and Beatrice shrieked and tried to close her shirt but somehow it tore on the class ring Frankie already wore even though he hadn’t graduated yet. She wound up out in the lobby, holding her shirt closed, crying, while Papa and the manager talked in low tones.

Somehow Frankie was gone.

Somehow Frankie wasn’t in trouble.

Somehow it was all her fault.

She had to wear Papa’s coat on the bus home, reversed to cover her pale chest and bright white bra. She looked like an umpire, or a mental patient.

“Beatrice,” he said as the bus roared through the metallic growl of its gears. “I am not ashamed of you.”

Which meant he was. She burst into tears. When Papa touched her, tried to hug her, Beatrice pushed him away.

Over time, the push replaced the rest of her love.

Nox Saturnae: Devourer of children

Somewhere in the darkness nearby, a bus rumbled. Beatrice stood on a stone floor, below a high ceiling hung in tattered banners and cobwebs large enough to trap a bird. There were no walls, only floor and ceiling.

A pool of light lay stark before her, the old flowered couch from Papa’s apartment in the center of it, a lamp and end table on one side, his stack of TV Guide magazines on the other.

There was even a circle of the faded blue carpet beneath it, just the size of the light, as if the surrounding darkness were an anti-laser cutting away everything else in their lives. Her heart ticked loud in her chest, the brass-bound pistons extending her life another second with each reciprocation.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said out loud. “I want to go to the funeral, bury my father, and go home.”

She was actually quite well off now. Beatrice had no brothers or sisters, and Papa’s will was clear-cut. A hundred thousand dollars to a charity of his choice, the rest to her. Enough to live, as earlier generations said, off the income.

Money she did not want.

“I’m ready to leave now,” Beatrice said, more loudly this time. Perhaps the ravens were listening, or the boy on his throne. If she could fly now, she would.

Her feet had melded with the stone floor. Beatrice was a chimera of stone and flesh, facing what lay before her.

Papa shuffled into the light. He wore a threadbare terrycloth robe, which dangled open. Beneath, striped boxer shorts and one of those old man undershirts with the ribbed fabric and the narrow shoulder straps. His feet were wrapped in fuzzy slippers off of which Papa had carefully cut the bunny heads long ago.

He sprawled on the couch, something Papa never did. Papa always sat straight, talked straight, looked everyone in the eye. This Papa was a cartoon image of despair, face covered with his hands opened like a prayer book, tears leaking past in a vain appeal to the God of Papa’s lifelong disregard.

Uncle Axel was there, Beatrice knew, but he’d found a temple in which to pray after Papa had forbidden the prayers inside the apartment. Axel would see Mama’s soul laid in restful memory despite his brother’s lapsarian intransigence.

Beatrice saw herself walk to the couch, sit down on the other end. A younger self, soft and round in the face, shoulders hunched a little too far since that night with Frankie. She was a door always on the verge of closing.

That day, Papa was a door cut loose from its wall.

Beatrice watched herself touch Papa’s knee. He reached one hand for her. She took it. No words were needed, no words were said. After a while, she lay across his chest and hugged him for the first time in years.

She could not watch, but had no choice, as her younger self lay curled in her Papa’s arms, his hand stroking farther and farther down her back as his other hand played with her hair and he whispered Mama’s name in her ear.

“No!” Beatrice shouted as her father unbuttoned her blouse. “It never was! It never should have been! It never will be!”

Nox Irae: The end of all things

“Regret nothing,” said the jailor. The needles of his mouth were a terminal fascination of their own. Beatrice focused on them, on the points, each one echoing some dot on the map of her own pain.

“Please,” Beatrice said. “I just want to go to his funeral. You can take me back after that.”

The jailor stared a while, his eerie face as incomprehensible as the leer of some bright-skinned demon god of the farthest east. “I do not hold your keys,” he finally said, his words slow and measured as fat dripping into a cook fire.

“Who does?”

Another silence, the flames of his eyes growing dimmer as they stared across the gulf of comprehension that stretched between them. “You.”

Love, thought Beatrice, was more than cards and flowers. Love was iron, and fire, and dusty memory and arrogant pride and a thousand other things piled like wrack on the seashore. Anger and betrayal were just treasures in the chest. Mistakes and triumphs looked the same from atop a storm-worried cliff.

Love was . . .

. . . what?

“I can be angry,” she told the jailor, her brass heart clattering fit to explode. “I can be angry and still love.”

She stood, intending to head for the door, the stone floor slippery and cold beneath her feet, only to find herself barefoot and silent in the damp grass of a Portland hillside looking down into an open grave. Her black pumps dangled from her left hand, her purse was clutched in her right.

The pinewood coffin lay below, yellow straps still linking it to the pulleyed frame that bordered the grave like some prosthesis for the dead. Dirt was scattered on the coffin, and a torn black ribbon.

“Papa,” Beatrice said, “I still love you.”

The taste of brass lingering in her mouth, Beatrice stepped into the rest of her life.

©2015 by Jay Lake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay Lake was a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. He lived in Portland, Oregon and lost a six year battle with colon cancer on June 1, 2014. Jay was a prolific writer and editor and blogged regularly about his cancer at his website jlake.com. He was well known for his novels featuring the character Green )Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura, published by Tor Books) as well as several other novels and collections. His final collection The Last Plane to Heaven was released by Tor Books in 2014. His work has been translated into several languages including Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

The Surfer

Kelly Link | 22004 words

In the dream I was being kidnapped by aliens. I was dreaming, and then I woke up.

Where was I? Someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, so I decided to stand up and take a look around, but there was no room and I couldn’t stand up after all. My legs. And I was strapped in. I was holding on to something. A soccer ball. It slid out of my hands and into the narrow space in front of me, and it took two tries to hook it up again with my feet. The floor kept moving up and down, and my hands were floppy.

“One more pill, Dorn. Oops. Here. Have another one. Want some water?”

I had a sip of water. Swallowed. I was in a little seat. A plane? I was on a plane. And we were way up. The clouds were down. There was a woman who looked like my mother, except she wasn’t. “Let me take that,” she said. “I’ll put it up above for you.”

I didn’t want to give it to her. Even if she did look like my mother.

“Come on, Dorn.” My father again. Wasn’t he supposed to be at the hospital today? I’d been at soccer practice. I was in my soccer clothes. Cleats and everything. “Dorn?” I ignored him. He said to the woman, “Sorry. He took some medication earlier. He’s a bad flier.”

“I’m not,” I said. “A bad flier.” I was having a hard time with my mouth. I tried to remember some things. My father had come by in his car. And I’d gone to see what he wanted. He was going to drive me home even though practice wasn’t. Wasn’t over. I drank something he gave me. Gatorade. That had been a mistake.

I said, “I’m not on a plane. This isn’t a plane and you’re not my mother.” I didn’t sound like me.

“Poor kid,” the woman said. The floor bounced. If this was a plane, then she was a something. A flight attendant. “Wouldn’t he be more comfortable if I stowed that up above for him?”

“I think he’ll be fine.” My father again. I kept my arms around my. My soccer ball. Keeping my shoulders forward. Hunched so nobody could take it. From me. Nobody ever got a soccer ball away from me.

“You gave me Gatorade,” I said. The Gatorade had had something. In it. Everything I ought to know was broken up. Fast and liquid and too close up and then slow like an instant. Replay. My lips felt mushy and warm, and the flight attendant just looked at me like I was drooling. I think I was.

“Dorn,” my father said. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Saturday,” I said. Our first big match and I was missing practice. My head went forward and hit the soccer ball. I felt the flight attendant’s fingers on my forehead.

“Poor kid,” she said.

I lifted up my head. Tried as hard as I could. To make her understand me. “Where. This flight. Is it going.”

“Costa Rica,” the flight attendant said.

“You,” I said to my father. “I. Will never. Forgive. You.” The floor tilted and I went down.

When I woke up we were in Costa Rica, and I remembered exactly what my father had done to me. But it was too late to do anything about it. By then everything had changed because of a new flu scare. Costa Rica could have turned the plane around, but I guess by that point we couldn’t have gotten back into the States. They’d shut down all the airports, everywhere. We went straight into quarantine. Me, my father, the flight attendant who didn’t look anything like my mother, after all, and all the other people on the plane.

There were guards wearing N95 masks and carrying machine guns to make sure we all got on a bus. Once we were seated, a man who really needed a shave boarded and stood at the front. He wore an N95 mask with a shiny, tiny mike-pen clipped to it. He held up his gloved hands for silence. Sunlight melted his rubbery fingers into lozenges of pink taffy.

People put down their cells and their googlies. I’d checked my cell and discovered three missed calls, all from my coach, Sorken. I didn’t check the messages. I didn’t even want to know.

In the silence you could hear birds and not a lot else. No planes taking off. No planes landing. You could smell panic and antibacterial potions. Some people had been traveling with disposable masks, and they were wearing them now. My father always said those didn’t really do much.

The official waited a few more seconds. The skin under his eyes was grayish and pouched. He said, “It’s too bad, these precautions that we must take, but it can’t be helped. You will be our guests for a short period of observation. Without this precaution, there will be unnecessary sickness. Deaths that could be prevented. You will be given care if you become ill. Food and drink and beds. And in a few days, when all have been given a clean bill of health, we will let you continue with your business, your homecoming, your further travel arrangements. You have questions, but I have no time for them. Excuse me. Please do not attempt to leave this bus or to go away. The guards will shoot you if you cannot be sensible.”

Then he said the whole speech all over again in Spanish. It was a longer speech this time. Nobody protested when he disembarked and our bus started off to wherever they were taking us.

“Did you understand any of that? The Spanish?” my father asked. And that was the first thing he said to me, except for what he’d said on the plane, when it landed. He’d said, “Dorn, wake up. Dorn, we’re here.” He’d been so excited that his voice broke when he said here.

“If I did,” I said. “Why would I tell you?” But I hadn’t. I was taking Japanese as my second language.

“Well,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. And don’t worry too much about the machine guns. They have the safeties on.”

“What do you know about machine guns?” I said. “Never mind. You got us into this situation. You kidnapped me.”

“What was I supposed to do, Dorn,” he said, “leave you behind?”

“I have a very important match tomorrow,” I said. “Today. In Glenside.” I had my soccer ball wedged between my knees and the back of the seat in front of me. I was wearing my cleats and soccer clothes from the day before. For some reason that made me even more furious.

“Don’t worry about the match,” my father said. “Nobody is going to be playing soccer today. Or anytime soon.”

“You knew about this, didn’t you?” I said. I knew that doctors talked to each other.

“Keep your voice down,” my father said. “Of course I didn’t.”

There was a girl across the aisle from us. She kept looking over, probably wondering if I had this new flu. She was about my height and at least twice my weight. A few years older. Bleached white hair and a round face. Cat’s-eye glasses. Her skin was very tan, and she wasn’t wearing a disposable mask. Her lips were pursed up and her eyebrows slanted down. I looked away from her and out the window.

Everything outside the bus was saturated with color. The asphalt deep purplish brown. The sky such a thick, wet blue you expected it to come off on the bus and the buildings. A lizard the size of my forearm, posed like a hood ornament on the top of a Dumpster, shining in the sun like it had been wrought of beaten silver, and its scales emeralds and topazes, gemstone parings. Off in the distance were bright feathery trees, some fancy skyscrapers, the kind you see on souvenir postcards, mountains on either side of us, cloud-colored, looking like special effects.

I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs my father had given me, or if this was just what Costa Rica looked like. I looked around the bus at the other passengers in their livid tropical prints and their blank, white, disposable masks, at the red filaments of stubble on my father’s face, pushing out of his skin like pinprick worms. So okay. It was the drugs. I felt like someone in one of my father’s Philip K. Dick paperback science fiction novels. Kidnapped? Check. In a strange environment and unable to trust the people that you ought to be able to rely on, say, your own father? Check. On some kind of hallucinogenic medication? Check. Any minute now I would realize that I was really a robot. Or God.

Our bus stopped and the driver got out to have a conversation with two woman soldiers holding machine guns. There was a series of hangar buildings a few hundred yards in front of us. One of the soldiers got onto the bus and looked us over. She lifted up her N95 mask and said, “Patience, patience.” She smiled and shrugged. Then she sat down on the rail at the front of the bus with her mask on again. Everyone on the bus clicked on their cell phones again. It didn’t seem as if we were going anywhere soon.

There was a clammy breeze, and it smelled like some place I’d never been to before, and where I didn’t want to be. I wanted to lie down. I wanted a bathroom and a sink and a toothbrush. And I was hungry. I wanted a bowl of cereal. And a peanut butter sandwich.

That girl was still looking at me.

I leaned across and said, “I’m not sick or anything, okay? My father gave me a roofie. I was at soccer practice, and he kidnapped me. I’m a goalie. I don’t even speak Spanish.” Even as I said it, I knew I wasn’t making much sense.

The girl looked at my father. He said, “True, more or less. But, as usual, Adorno is oversimplifying things.”

The girl said, “You’re here for the aliens.”

My father’s eyebrows shot up.

The fat girl said, “Well, you don’t look like UCR students. You don’t look wealthy enough to be tourists. Besides, tourist visas are hard to come by unless you’ve got a lot of money, and no offense, but I don’t think so. So either you’re here because you work in the software industry or because of the aliens. And no offense, but you look more like the latter than the former.”

I said, “So which are you? Aliens or software?”

“Software,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “Second year, full scholarship to UCR.”

About three decades ago, a software zillionaire in Taiwan had died and left all his money to the University of Costa Rica to fund a progressive institute of technology. He left them his patents, his stocks, and controlling shares in the dozen or so companies that he’d owned. Why? They’d given him an honorary degree or something. All the techie kids at my school dreamed about getting into one of the UCR programs, or else just getting lucky in the visa lottery and coming out to Costa Rica after college to work for one of the new start-ups.

“I’m Dr. Yoder,” my father said. “General practice. We’re on our way out to join Hans Bliss’s Star Friend community, as it happens. Their last doctor packed up and left two weeks ago. I’ve been in contact with Hans for a few years. We’re here at his invitation.”

Which was what he’d told me in the car when he picked me up at practice. After I drank the Gatorade he’d brought me.

“Amazing how easy it is for some rich lunatic like Bliss to get visas. I bet there are twenty people on this bus who are headed out to join Bliss’s group,” the girl said. “What I’ve never figured out is why everybody is so convinced that if the aliens come back, they’re going to show up to see Bliss. No offense, but I’ve seen him online. I watched the movie. He’s an idiot.”

My father opened his mouth and shut it again. A woman in the seat behind us leaned forward and said, “Hans Bliss is a great man. We heard him speak in Atlanta and we just knew we had to come out here. The aliens came to him because he’s a great man. A good man.”

I had gone with my father to see Hans Bliss talk at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia last year. I had my own opinions.

The girl didn’t even turn around. She said, “Hans Bliss is just some surfer who happened to be one of a dozen people stupid enough to be out on an isolated beach during a Category 3 hurricane. It was just dumb luck that he was the one the aliens scooped up. If he’s so great, then why did they put him back down on the beach again and just take off? Why didn’t they take him along if he’s so amazing? In my opinion, you don’t get points just for being the first human ever to talk with aliens. Especially if the conversation only lasts about seven minutes by everyone else’s count. I don’t care how long he says he was out there. Furthermore, you lose points if the aliens go away after talking to you and don’t ever come back again. How long has it been? Six years? Seven?”

Now the whole bus was listening, even the bus driver and the soldier with the gun. The woman behind us was probably twenty years older than my father; she had frizzy gray hair and impressive biceps. She said to the girl, “Can’t you see that people like you are the reason that the aliens haven’t come back yet? They told Bliss that they would return in the fullness of time.”

“Sure,” the girl said. You could tell she was enjoying herself. “Right after we make Bliss president of the whole wide world and learn to love each other and not feel ashamed of our bodies. When Bliss achieves world peace and we’re all comfortable walking around in the nude, even the people who are fat, like me, the aliens will come back. And they’ll squash us like bugs, or harvest us to make delicious people-burgers, or cure cancer, or bring us cool new toys. Or whatever Hans Bliss says that they’re going to do. I love Hans Bliss, okay? I love the fact that he fell in love with some aliens who swooped down one stormy afternoon and scooped him up into the sky and less than an hour later dropped him off, naked, in front of about eighteen news crews, disaster-bloggers, and gawkers, and now he’s going to wait for the rest of his life for them to come back, when clearly it was just some weird kind of one-night stand for them. It’s just so sweet.”

The woman said, “You ignorant little—”

People at the front of the bus were getting up. A man said something in Spanish, and the girl who didn’t like Bliss said, “Time to go.” She stood up.

My father said, “What’s your name?”

The soldier with the machine gun was out on the asphalt, waving us off the bus. People around us grabbed carry-on bags. The angry woman’s mouth was still working. A guy put his hand on her arm. “It’s not worth it, Paula,” he said. Neither of them were wearing face masks. He had the same frizzy hair, and a big nose, and those were his good features. You could see why he was hoping the aliens might come back. Nobody on Earth was ever going to fall in love with him.

“My name’s Naomi,” the girl said.

“Nice to meet you, Naomi,” my father said. “You’re clearly very smart and very opinionated. Maybe we can talk about this some more.”

“Whatever,” Naomi said. Then she seemed to decide that she had been rude enough. “Sure. I mean, we’re going to be stuck with each other for a while, right?”

My father motioned for her to step out in front of us. He said, “Okay, Naomi, so once I tell the people in charge here that I’m a doctor, I’m going to be busy. I’d appreciate it if you and Adorno kept an eye on each other. Okay? Okay.”

I didn’t have the energy to protest that I didn’t need a babysitter. I could hardly stand up. Those drugs were still doing things to my balance. My eyes were raw, and my mouth was dry. I smelled bad, too. I stopped when we got out of the bus, just to look around, and there was the hangar in front of us and my father pushed me forward and we funneled into the hangar where there were more soldiers with guns, standing back as if they weren’t really making us do anything. Go anywhere. As if the hangar was our decision. Sun came down through oily windows high above us, and somehow it was exactly the sort of sunlight that ought to fall on you on a movie set or in a commercial while you pretend to sit on a white, sandy beach. But the hangar was vast and empty. Someone had forgotten to truck in that white sand and the palm trees and the beautiful painted background. Nobody was saying much. We just came into the hangar and stood there, looking around. The walls were cinderblock, and a warm wind came in under the corrugated roof, rattling and popping it like a steel drum. The floor was whispery with grit.

There were stacks of lightweight cots folded up with plastic mattresses inside the frames. Foil blankets in tiny packets. So the next thing involved a lot of rushing around and grabbing, until it became clear that there were more than enough cots and blankets, and plenty of space to spread out in. My father and I carried two cots over toward the wall farthest away from the soldiers. Naomi stuck near us. She seemed suddenly shy. She set up her cot and then flopped down on her stomach and rolled over, turned away.

“Stay here,” my father said. I watched him make his way over to a heap of old tires where people stood talking. An Asian woman with long twists of blue and blond hair took two tires, rolling them all the way back to her cot. She stacked them, and then she had a chair. She sat down in it, pulled out a tiny palmtop computer, and began to type, just like she was in an office somewhere. Other people started grabbing tires. There was some screaming and jumping around when some of the tires turned out to contain wildlife. Spiders and lizards. Kids started chasing lizards, stomping spiders.

My father came back with two tires. Then he went and got another two tires. I thought they were for me but instead he rolled them over to Naomi. He tapped her on the shoulder and she turned over, saw the tires, and made a funny little face, almost as if she were irritated with my father for trying to be nice. I knew how she felt. “Thanks,” she said.

“I’m going to go find out where the bathroom is.” I put the soccer ball down on my bed, thought about it, and picked it up again. Put it down.

“I’ll come,” my father said.

“Me, too.” Naomi. She bounced a little, like she really needed the toilet.

I put my soccer ball down on the gritty concrete. Began to guide it across the hangar with my feet and my knees. My balance wasn’t great, but I still looked pretty good. Soccer is what I was made to do. Passengers in white masks, soldiers with guns turned their heads to watch me go by.

• • • •

The October after I turned fourteen I became first goalie for not one but two soccer teams: the club team that I’d belonged to for four years, and the state soccer team, which I had tried out for three days after my birthday. Only a few months later, and during state matches I was on the field more than I sat out. I had my own coach, Eduardo Sorken, a sour, bad-tempered man who was displeased when I played poorly and offered only grudging acknowledgment when I played well. Sorken had played in the World Cup for Bolivia, and when he was hard on me, I paid attention, telling myself that one day I would not only play in the World Cup but play for a winning team, which Sorken had not.

There was a smudgy black figure on the outside wall of the ranch house back in Philadelphia where I lived with my father. I’d stood up against the house and traced around my own outline with a piece of charcoal brick. I’d painted the outline in. When my father noticed, he wasn’t angry. He never got angry. He just nodded and said, “When they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, you could see the shapes of people who’d died against the buildings.” Like that’s what I’d been thinking about when I’d stood there and blackened my shape in. What I was thinking about was soccer.

When I kicked the ball, I aimed for that black silhouette of me as hard as I could. I liked the sound that the ball made against the house. If I’d knocked the house down, that would have been okay, too.

I had two expectations regarding my future, both reasonable. The first, that I would one day be taller. The other, that I would be recruited by one of the top international professional leagues. I favored Italy or Japan. Which was why I was studying Japanese. Nothing made me happier than the idea of a future in which, like the present, I spent as much time as possible on a soccer field in front of a goal, doing my best to stop everything that came at me.

• • • •

A pretty girl in a mask sat cross-legged on the floor of the hangar, tapping at her googly, earplugs plugged in. She stopped typing and watched me go by. I popped the ball up, let it ride up one shoulder, around my neck, and down the other arm. During flu season, up in the bleachers, during matches, everyone wore masks like hers, bumping them up to yell or knock back a drink. But our fans painted their masks with our team colors or wrote slogans on them. There were always girls who wrote dorn on the mask, and so I’d look up and see my name right there, over their mouths. It was kind of a turn-on.

Sometimes there was a scout up in the bleachers. I figured another year or two, another inch or two, and I’d slip right into that bright, deserved future. I was the future. You can’t stop the future, right? Not unless you’re a better goalie than me.

• • • •

I went in a circle, came back around, making the ball spin in place. “Hey,” I said.

She gave me a little wave. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was smiling, because of the mask. But I bet you she was.

• • • •

I was magic out on a field. In front of a goal. I stopped everything. I was always exactly where I needed to be. When I came forward, nobody ever got around me. I put out my hands and the ball came to me like I was yanking it through the air. I could jump straight up, so high it didn’t matter how short I was. I had a certain arrangement with gravity. I didn’t get in its way, and it didn’t get in mine. When I was asleep I dreamed about the field, the goal, the ball sailing toward me. I didn’t dream about anything else. This year, on the weekends, I’d been wearing that black silhouette away.

• • • •

I stood a few feet away from the girl, letting her see how I could keep the ball up in the air, adjusting its position first with one knee, then the other, then my left foot, then my right foot, then catching it between my knees. Maybe she was a soccer fan, maybe not. But I knew I looked pretty good.

• • • •

I was already a bit taller than that silhouette I’d painted. If you measure yourself in the morning, you’re always a few centimeters taller. I’m named after my mother’s father. (Italian American, but you probably guessed that. Her mother was Japanese American. My father, if you’re curious, is African American.) I never met my grandfather, although one time I’d asked my mother how tall he was. He wasn’t. I wish they’d named me after someone taller. My father is six foot three.

• • • •

I circled back one more time, went wide around my father and Naomi. The little lizard-chasing, spider-stomping kids were still running around in the hangar. Some of them were now wearing the foil blankets like capes. I kicked the ball to a little girl and she sent it right back. Not too bad. I was feeling much better. Also angrier.

• • • •

You could have gotten half a dozen soccer matches going all at once in the hangar. According to my watch it was less than two hours until the start of the match back in Glenside. Sorken, my coach, would be wondering what had happened to me. Or he would have been, except for the flu. Matches were always being canceled because of flu or civil unrest or terror alerts. Maybe I’d be home before anyone even realized what had happened to me.

Or maybe I’d get the flu and die like my mother and brother had. That would show my father.

Along the wall closest to the hangar doors where we’d come in were the soldiers who were still guarding us. Whenever people tried to approach them, the guards waved them back again with their machine guns. The N95 masks gave them a sinister look, but they didn’t seem particularly annoyed. It was more like, Yeah, yeah, leave us alone. Scram.

The makeshift latrines were just outside the hangar. People went in and out of the hangar, got in line, or squatted on the tarmac to read their googlies.

“So you’re pretty good with that thing,” Naomi said. She got in line behind me.

“Want my autograph?” I said. “It will be worth something someday.”

There was a half-wall of corrugated tin divided up with more tin sheets into four stalls. Black plastic hung up for doors. Holes in the ground, and you could tell that they had been dug recently. There was a line. There were covered plastic barrels of water and dippers and more black plastic curtains so that you could take a sponge bath in private.

I tucked my soccer ball under my arm, took a piss, then dunked my hands into a bucket of antiseptic wash.

Back inside the hangar, airline passengers sorted through cardboard boxes full of tissue packs, packets of surgical masks, bottled water, hotel soaps and shampoos, toothbrushes. A man with an enormous mustache came up to my father with a group of people and said, “Miike says you’re a doctor?”

“Yes,” my father said. “Carl Yoder. This is my son, Dorn. I’m a G.P., but I have some experience with flu. I’ll need a translator, though. I’ve started learning Spanish recently, but I’m still not proficient.”

“We can find a translator,” the man said. “I’m Rafe Zuleta-Arango. Hotel management. You’ve already met Anya Miike”—the woman who’d made the chair out of old tires. “Tom Laudermilk. Works for a law firm in New New York. Simon Purdy, the pilot on the flight down.” My father nodded at the others. “We’ve been talking about how we ought to handle this. Almost everyone has been able to make contact with their families, to let them know the situation.”

My father said, “How bad is it? A real pandemic or just another political scare? Any reports of flu here? I couldn’t get through to my hospital. Just got a pretty vague official statement on voice mail.”

Zuleta-Arango shrugged. Miike said, “Rumors. Who knows? There are riots ongoing in the States. Calexico has shut down its borders. Potlatch Territories, too. Lots of religious nuts making the usual statements online about the will of God. According to some of the other passengers, there’s already a rumor about a new vaccine, and not enough to go around. People have started laying siege to hospitals.”

“Just like last time,” my father said. Last time had been three years ago. “Has anybody talked to the guys with the guns? I thought Costa Rica didn’t have an army. Who are these guys?”

“Volunteers,” Zuleta-Arango said. “Mostly teachers, believe it or not. There was a quarantine situation here four months ago. Small outbreak of blue plague. Lasted about a week, and it didn’t turn into anything serious. But they know the drill. Simon and I went over and asked them a few questions. They don’t anticipate keeping us here longer than a week. As soon as someone at the terminal has sorted through the luggage, they’ll get it out here. They just need to check first for guns and contraband.”

“My kit’s in my luggage,” my father said. “I’ll set up a clinic when it shows. What about food?”

“We’ll be getting breakfast soon,” Purdy, the pilot, said. “I’ve gotten the flight crew together to set up a mess table over by the far wall. Looks like we’ve got two kerosene grills and basic staples. Hope you like beans. We’ll make an announcement about the clinic when everyone sits down to eat.”

I’d been caught in a quarantine once before, during a trip to the mall. Hadn’t turned out to be anything serious, just a college student with a rash. During the really bad flu, three years ago, I’d stayed home and played video games. My father had been stuck over at the hospital, but our refrigerator is pretty well stocked with frozen pizzas. My father stays over at the hospital all the time. I can take care of myself. When I got the email about my mother and my brother, I didn’t even page him. It’s not like he could have done anything anyway. I just waited until he got home and told him then.

Lots of people died from that flu. Famous actors and former presidents and seven teachers at my school. Two kids on my soccer team. A girl named Corinne with white-blond hair who used to say, “Hey, Dorn” to me whenever I saw her in the hall at school. She came to all my games.

• • • •

Our first meal in the hangar, served from a series of the largest pots I’d ever seen: reconstituted eggs and fried potatoes and lots and lots of beans. That was our second meal, too, and every meal after that, as long as we were in the hangar. Be glad that you’ve never had to live in a hangar with eighty-four people eating beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For variety, there were little fat yellow-green bananas and industrial-size jars of these rubbery, slippery cylinders that Naomi said were hearts of palm.

My father said a couple of things to me. I ignored him. So he started talking to Naomi instead, about aliens and Costa Rica.

After breakfast I went back and lay down on my cot and thought about how I was going to get home. I had made it as far as some weird place where everyone was running around, setting fires to these inflatable germ-proof houses, when I woke up, face and arms and legs stuck to the plastic mattress with sweat, confused and overheated and pissed off. I didn’t know where I was or why and then, when I did, it didn’t make me any happier. The girl Naomi was sitting on the floor beside her cot. She was reading a beat-up old paperback. I figured I knew who she’d borrowed it from.

“You missed the excitement,” she said. “Some executive type got all worked up and tried to pick a fight with the guards. He said something about how they couldn’t do this to him because he’s a U.S. citizen and he has rights. I thought we gave up those years ago. Zuleta-Arango and some of the others held him down while your father stuck him with a muscle relaxant.

“Have you read this?” she said. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Me, reading a book. I feel so very historical. We got our luggage back, so that’s one good thing, although they’ve taken our passports away. I’ve never even heard of Olaf Stapleton. He’s pretty good. Your dad doesn’t exactly travel light. He’s got like a hundred more actual books in his luggage. And you snore.”

“I do not. Where is he?”

“Over there. In the office he set up. Taking temperatures and talking to hypochondriacs.”

“Look,” I said. “Before he comes back, we need to get something straight. You’re not my babysitter, okay?”

“Of course I’m not,” she said. “Aren’t you a little old for a babysitter? How old are you? Sixteen?”

“Fourteen,” I said. “Okay, good. That’s settled. The other thing we need to straighten out is Hans Bliss. I’m with you. He’s a loser, and I don’t want to be here. As soon as they lift quarantine, I’m calling my soccer coach back in Philadelphia so he can buy me a ticket and get me out of here.”

“Sure,” she said. “Good luck with that. It would be terrible if a global flu epidemic meant the end of your soccer career.”

“Pandemic,” I said. “If it’s global, it’s a pandemic. And they’re working on a vaccine right now. Couple of days and a couple of jabs and things will go back to normal, more or less, and I’ll go home.”

“This is home,” Naomi said. “For me.”

While she read Stapleton, I went through the luggage to see what my father had packed. The things he hadn’t: my trophies, my soccer magazines, the knitted wool hat that a girl named Tanya gave me last year, when we were sort of going out. I liked that hat.

What he had packed bothered me even more than what he hadn’t, because you could tell how much time he’d spent planning this. He’d brought maybe a third of his collection of paperback SF. And in my duffel bag were my World Cup T-shirts, my palmtop, my sleeping bag, my toothbrush, two more soccer balls. An envelope of photos of my mother and of my brother, Stephen. The little glass bottle with nothing inside it that my mother gave me the last time I saw her. I wonder what my father thought when he found that glass bottle in my dresser drawer. It was the first thing he ever gave my mother. She liked to tell me that story. It didn’t work out between them, but they didn’t hate each other after the divorce, the way some parents do. Whenever they talked on the phone they laughed and gossiped about people as if they were still friends. And she never threw away that bottle of nothing. So I couldn’t, either.

• • • •

My father collects books, mostly sci-fi, mostly paperbacks. Most people keep their books on a googly or a flex, but my father likes paper. I read one of his books every once in a while when I got bored. Sometimes my father had written in the margins and on the blank pages, making notes about whether these were hopeful portraits of the future, or realistic, or about other stories he was reminded of. Sometimes he doodled pictures of blobby or feathery aliens or spaceships or women whose faces looked kind of like my mother’s face, except with tentacles coming out of their heads or with insect eyes, standing on pointy rocks with their arms akimbo, or sitting and holding hands with men in space suits. My father read his paperbacks over and over again, and so sometimes I left my own comments for him to find. He’d packed two suitcases for himself, and one was mostly books. I pulled out Ray Bradbury’s R Is for Rocket and wrote on the first page of the first story, down in the bottom margin, “i hate you.” Then I dated it and put it back in the suitcase.

• • • •

One of the two small offices in the hangar became my father’s clinic. He spent most of the day there—among the passengers on our flight there were seven diabetics, one weak heart, two pregnancies (eight months, and five months), a dozen asthmatics, a migraine sufferer, three methadone users, one prostate cancer, one guy on anti-psychotic medication, and two children with dry coughs. My father set up cots in the second office for the children and their parents, reassuring them that this was only a precaution. In fact, they ought to think of it as a privilege. Everyone else was going to be camping out in the hangar.

He came back smelling of hand sanitizer and B.O. “Feeling better?” he said to me.

I’d changed T-shirts and put on some jeans, but I probably smelled just as bad. I said, “Better than what, exactly?”

“Dinner’s at seven,” Naomi said. “They divided us into meal groups while you were asleep, Dorn. Meal groups with cute names. The Two-toed Sloths—Perezosos de dos Dedos—and the Mono Congos, howler monkeys to you, and the Tucancillos. That’s us. Us Tucancillos get dinner first tonight. We’re rotating dinner slots and chores. We do the dishes tonight, too. The Mono Congos are on latrine duty. I am really not looking forward to that.”

It was beans and rice and eggs again, along with some kind of pungent, fibrous sausage. Chorizo. I loaded so much food on my plate that Naomi called me a pig. But there was plenty of food for everybody. After dinner, Naomi and I went out to wash dishes in the area that had been rigged for bathing. After I’d rinsed several stacks of smeary plates and sprayed them with disinfectant, I poured a dipper of water over my own head.

I was washing dishes at a barrel next to the girl that I’d showed off for earlier. Not an accident, of course. Even with her mask on, she was better than pretty this close up. “American?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “From Philadelphia. Liberty Bell, Declaration of Independence, AOL Cable Access Riots of 2012. Are you Costa Rican?”

“Tica,” she said. “I’m a Tica. That’s what you say here.” She had long, shiny hair and these enormous baby-animal eyes, like a heroine in an anime. She was taller than me, but I was used to girls who were taller than me. I liked her accent, too. “Me llamo Lara.”

“I’m Dorn,” I told her. “This is Naomi. We met on the bus.”

“Hola,” Naomi said. “I’m at UCR. Dorn is here with his father because of Hans Bliss and the aliens. Because, you know, Hans Bliss said that the aliens are going to show up again real soon and this time he knows what he’s talking about. Not like all those other times when he said the aliens were coming back.”

Several Tucancillos stopped washing dishes.

“Hans Bliss is a big deal here,” Lara said.

I glared at Naomi. “I’m not really interested in this guy Bliss. I’m here because my father kidnapped me.”

My father had got out of dish duty when Zuleta-Arango announced some kind of committee meeting. Figures. First he kidnapped me, and now I was stuck doing his dishes.

“Hans Bliss can kiss my fat ass,” Naomi said. Now some of our fellow Tucancillos were beginning to seem really irritated. I recognized the woman from the bus, Paula, the one that Naomi had already gotten riled up. The younger guy who had grabbed Paula’s arm, back on the bus, was—I saw now—wearing a share the bliss, hans bliss for world president T-shirt. He gave Naomi a meaningful look, the kind of look that said he felt sorry for her.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Cool,” Naomi said. “Porta a mi. Wait a minute, look over there. Is that an alien? Does it want to say something to us?”

Everyone looked, of course, but it was just a huge, disgusting bug. “Whoops,” Naomi said. “Just a roach. But I hear our friends the roaches love Hans Bliss, too. Just like everyone else.”

The woman Paula said, “I’m going to punch her right in that smug little mouth! If she says one more word!”

“Paula,” the big-nosed guy said. “She isn’t worth it. Okay?”

Naomi turned around and said, loudly, “I am too worth it. You have no idea how worth it I am.”

The guy just smiled. Naomi gave him the finger. Then we were out of there.

While we were walking back, Lara said, “Tengala adentro. Naomi, I am not saying that I am a big fan of Bliss, but do you think that he was lying about his encounter with these aliens? Because I have seen the footage and read the eyewitness accounts, and my mother knows a man who was there. I don’t believe it can all be a hoax.”

Naomi shrugged. Back in the hangar, people were sorting through their suitcases, talking on cell phones, tapping away furiously at their peeties and googlies. We ended up back at the wall where our cots were, and Lara and I sat on the floor. Naomi hunkered down on her tires.

“I believe there were aliens,” she said. “I just resent the fact that the first credible recorded contact with an extraterrestrial species was made by an idiot like Bliss. People who decide to go surfing in a Category 3 hurricane ought to be up for the Darwin Award, not considered representative of the human race. Well, not considered representative of the best the human race has to offer. And we only have Bliss’s story about what the aliens said to him. I just don’t buy that an intelligent race, the first we’ve ever come into contact with, would casually drop by to tell us to be happy and naked and polyamorous and vegetarian and oh yeah, destroy all nuclear stockpiles. All of those are good things, don’t get me wrong. But they’re exactly the kind of things you expect a retro-hippie surfer like Bliss to say. And the result? What’s left of the United States, not to mention Greater Korea, Indonesia, and most of the Stans, are all stockpiling weapons faster than ever, because they’ve decided it’s suspicious that aliens apparently want us to destroy all nuclear weapons. Which kind of puts this whole flu thing into perspective, you know? If Bliss’s aliens come back, there are going to be a lot of missiles pointed right at them, a lot of fingers hovering on those special fingerprint-sensitive keypads.”

“And a lot of naked people lined up on beaches everywhere, singing ‘Kumbaya’ and throwing flowers,” I said.

“Including you?” Naomi asked. Lara giggled.

“No way,” I said. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“Like what?” Lara said. I started to think she was flirting with me. “What kind of things are you into, Dorn?”

“I’m a soccer player,” I said. “A pretty good one. I’m not bragging or anything. I really am good. You saw me, right? I’m a goalie. And I’m kind of feeling like an idiot right now. I mean, if I’d known my father was planning to kidnap me and bring me down here, I would have at least learned to say some stuff in Spanish. Like, This man is kidnapping me. How do you say that? I don’t know anything about Costa Rica except the usual stuff. Like there are a lot of beaches down here, right? And software. And iguana farms? I know a kid down the street whose father lost his job, and his father keeps saying he’s going to raise iguanas in the basement under special lights and sell the meat online. Or else raise llamas in his backyard. He hasn’t made up his mind. His kid said iguana tastes like chicken. More or less.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Lara said. “It’s okay that you don’t know Spanish. You’ll learn.”

“I hope we’re out of here soon,” Naomi said, “because I have exams coming up. Is your phone working, Lara? My googlie keeps crashing when I try to get on. I just want to know if they’ve shut the university down.”

Lara thumbed her phone. “My battery is almost dead,” she said at last. “But I know the situation of the schools. They’re closed for the indefinite future. My mother spoke to her cousin a few hours ago. Still no outbreak of this flu in San José or any other place in Costa Rica, but the government is asking people to stay at home except in situations of emergency. Just for a few days. All of the cruise ships are anchored offshore. My cousin runs a cruise-supply company, which is how she knows. The army is dropping food and supplies onto the decks of the boats. I’ve never been on a cruise. I wish I were on a boat instead of in here. On the talk shows, they are talking about the flu. How perhaps it was manufactured and then released accidentally or even on purpose.”

“They say that every time,” I said. “My father says sure, it’s possible, but you’d have to be really stupid to do something like that. And anyway, all we have to do is sit here and wait. Wait and see if anyone here is sick. Wait and see if anyone out there comes up with a vaccine. Once they get a vaccine cultured, they get it distributed pretty quickly. The question is, what do we do for fun in the meantime?”

“No point in studying if we’re doomed,” Naomi said, sounding nonchalant. “Maybe I should wait and see how bad this flu really is.”

“We’re safer in here than almost anywhere else,” I said. At dinner, my father had made some announcements. He’d said clinic hours would run every day from eight a.m. until four p.m., and that if anyone began to feel achy or as if they had an elevated temperature, they should come talk to him at once. He said the odds that someone in the hangar would have the flu were minimal. He’d already talked with everyone who’d been on the flight and there was no one coming from Calexico or from anywhere farther west than Cincinnati. Our plane had started out the previous morning in Costa Rica and there hadn’t been any changes of crew, except a flight attendant who got on in Miami after spending her day off at home, with her daughter. He explained that if we got sick at all, it would probably be some kind of stomach bug or mild cold, the kind of stuff you usually got when you traveled. Anya Miike had stood next to him, translating everything he said into Spanish and then into Japanese for these two guys from Osaka.

People had set up card games in the hangar. They’d brought out duty-free gins or tequilas or marijuana or those little bottles of Bailey’s. Kids were drawing with smart crayons right on the concrete floor of the hangar, or watching the anime Brave Hortense, which someone had loaded onto a googly with a fancy bubble screen. Big, fat tears were plopping out of Brave Hortense’s eyes, faster and faster, and the evil kitten who had made her cry began to build a raft, looking worried. A few feet away from us, a man was streaming a Spanish-language news program. The newsfeed became a Spanish-language song set to a languid beat. Elsewhere you could still hear news coming from tinny or expensive little speakers. There was good news and there was bad news. Mostly flu news. Flu in North America, and also in London and Rome. None in Costa Rica. The music made a nice change.

“I love this song,” Naomi said. “It’s on all the time, but I don’t care. I could listen to it all day long.”

“Lola Rollercoaster,” Lara said. “She always sings about love.”

“¡Qué tuanis! What else is there to sing about?” Naomi said.

I rolled my eyes.

People sprawled on their tires and talked in Spanish and English and Japanese and German and watched the guards who were watching them. A man and woman began dancing to the Lola Rollercoaster song; others joined them. Mostly older people. They danced close to each other without quite touching. I didn’t see the point in that. If someone in here came down with the flu, dancing two inches apart wasn’t going to be much of a prophylactic. Lara looked like she wanted to say something, and I wondered if she’d ask me to dance. But it turned out that her mother, a not-bad-looking woman in a pair of expensive cornsilk jeans, was waving her back over to where they’d set up cots.

“I’ll see you later,” Lara said. “Buenas noches, Naomi, Dorn.”

“Buenas noches.” And then, “I think she likes me,” I said, when she got out of earshot. “Girls usually like me. I’m not bragging or anything. It’s just a fact.”

“Yeah, well, that’s probably why her mother’s calling her back over,” Naomi said. “An American boy like you is no catch, even if you do have a wicked nice smile and nice green eyes.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Everybody knows that American boyfriends and girlfriends only want one thing. Costa Rican citizenship. Look over there. See that macha, that blond girl? The one flirting with the cute Tico?”

I looked where Naomi was pointing. “Yeah,” I said.

“She probably came down here on a tourist visa, hoping to meet guys just like him,” Naomi said. “This is a real stroke of luck for her. We’re going to be in here for at least five or six days. Lots of time for flirting. If I looked like her, I’d be trying to pull off the same thing while I’m at UCR. I’d rather cut off my legs than have to go back and live in the States. At least here they can grow you a new pair.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“Really?” Naomi said. “If girls seem to like you, Dorn, realize that it’s probably not for your brains or your keen grasp of socio-political-economic issues. Tell me what you like best about our country. Is it the blatantly rigged elections, the lack of access to abortion, the shitty educational system? Is it the fact that most of the states where anyone would ever actually want to live would secede like Calexico and Potlatch, if they had someone like Canada or Mexico to back them up? Is it the health care, the most expensive and least effective health-care system in the world, the national debt so impressive it takes almost two whole pages of little tiny zeros to write it out? Tell me about your job prospects, Dorn. Who would you just kill to work for? Walmart, McDisneyUniverse, or some prison franchise? Or were you going to join the army and go off to one of the Stans or Bads because you’ve always wanted to get gassed or shot at or dissolved into goo when your experimental weapon malfunctions?”

“Professional soccer,” I said. “Preferably in Japan or Italy. Whoever offers the best money.”

Naomi blinked, opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She pulled out a bar of chocolate and broke off a piece still in the wrapper and gave it to me. We pushed our masks up and chewed. “This is good,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Even the chocolate is, like, ten times better down here. Oh boy. Look over there.”

I turned around. It was that woman again. Paula. She was standing in a row of about two dozen other women and men and she was taking off all her clothes. Then she was standing there naked. They were all taking off their clothes. The homely guy who’d been wearing the hans bliss for president T-shirt turned out to have a full-color portrait of Hans Bliss—on his surfboard, on a towering wave, about to be lifted up by the aliens—tattooed across his chest. It was pretty well done. Lots of detail. But I didn’t spend too much time looking at him. There were more interesting things to look at.

“These are the people that my dad wants to go hang out with?” I said. I thought about getting out my camera. There were other people with the same idea, holding out their cells, clicking pics.

“Look, a priest,” Naomi said. “Of course there would be a priest. A Church-of-the-Second-Reformation priest, too, by the look of him. And Dorn? Try not to drool. Surely you’ve seen naked women before.”

“Only on the Internet,” I said. “This is better.”

A guy in a black suit and a priest’s collar was striding over toward the protestors, yelling some things in Spanish. A naked man, so hairy that he was hardly naked at all, really, stepped out of the line with his arms out wide. Hans Bliss’s Star Friends believed in embracing all of mankind. Preferably in the nude. (Or as nude as you can get when you’re still wearing your stupid little face mask.)

The priest had apparently had run-ins with Star Friends before. He picked up a tennis racket beside someone’s suitcase and commenced swinging it ferociously.

“What’s he saying?” I asked Naomi.

“Lots of stuff. Put on your clothes. Have you no shame. There are decent people here. Do you call that nothing a penis. I’ve seen bigger equipment on a housecat.”

“Did he really say that?”

“No,” Naomi said. “Just the stuff about decency. Et cetera. Now he’s saying that he’s going to beat the shit out of this guy if he doesn’t put his clothes back on. We’ll see who’s tougher. God or the aliens. My money’s on God. Does your father really buy into all this? The nudity? The peace, love, and Bliss über alles?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He just really wants to get a chance to see aliens. Up close.”

“Not me,” Naomi said. “Maybe I’ve just seen too many animes where the aliens turn out to be, you know, alien. Not like us. I am really, really tired of these Bliss people. Can I borrow another sci-fi book? Do women ever write this stuff? A story with some romance in it would be nice. Something with fewer annotations.”

“Connie Willis is fun,” I said. “Or there’s this book Snow Crash. Or you could read some Tiptree or Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler. Something nice and grim.”

The priest continued to shout at the naked Star Friends and make menacing, swatting motions with the tennis racket. Other passengers got involved, like this was a spectator sport, yelling things, or whistling, or shouting. My father and Zuleta-Arango and the rest of the committee were walking over. The guards watched from their station by the hangar entrance. Clearly they had no plans to get involved.

It was twilight. The sky through the high windows was lilac and gold, like a special effect. There were strings of lights looped along the walls, and a few worklights that people had found in one of the offices and set up strategically around the hangar, which made it look even more like a movie set. You could see the blue-white glow of googly screens everywhere. And then there were the bats. I don’t know who noticed the bats first, but they were hard to miss, once the yelling started.

The bats seemed almost as surprised as we were. They poured into the hangar, looking like blackish, dried-up, flappy leaves, making long, erratic passes back and forth, skimming low and then winking up and away. People ducked down, covered their heads with their hands. The Hans Bliss people put their clothes back on—score one for the bats—and yet the priest was swinging his tennis racket at the bats now, just as viciously as he had the nudists. A bat dipped down and I ducked. “Go away!”

It went.

“They have vampire bats down here,” Naomi said. She didn’t seem bothered at all. “In case you’re wondering. They come into people’s houses and make little incisions in the legs or toes and then drink your blood. Hence the name. But I don’t think these are vampire bats. These look more like fruit bats. They probably live up in the roof where those folds in the steel are. Relax, Dorn. Bats are a good thing. They eat mosquitoes. They’ve never been a vector for flu. Rabies, maybe, but not flu. We love bats.”

“Except for the ones who drink blood,” I said. “Those are big bats. They look thirsty to me.”

“Calm down,” Naomi said. “They’re fruit bats. Or something.”

I don’t know how many bats there were. It’s hard to count bats when they’re agitated. At least two hundred, probably a lot more than that. But as the people in the hangar got more and more upset, the bats seemed to get calmer. They really weren’t that interested in us. One or two still went scissoring through the air every now and then, but the others were somewhere up in the roof now, hanging down above us, glaring down at us with their malevolent, fiery little eyes. I imagined them licking their pointy little fangs. The man with the music turned it off. No more sad love songs. No more dancing. The card parties and conversations broke up.

My father and Zuleta-Arango walked up and down the makeshift aisles of the hangar, talking to the other passengers. Probably explaining about bats. People turned off the worklights, lay down on their cots, pulling silver foil emergency blankets and makeshift covers over themselves: jackets, dresses, beach towels. Some began to make up beds under the cots, where they would be safe from bats if not the spiders, lizards, and cockroaches that were, of course, also sharing our temporary quarters.

Half a soccer field away, Lara sat on a cot leaning back against her mother as her mother brushed her hair. She’d taken off her mask. She was even better looking than I’d thought she’d be. Possibly even out of my league.

Naomi was looking, too. She said, “Your parents are divorced, right? That’s why your father kidnapped you? Have you called your mom? Does she know where you are now?”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She and my brother lived out on a dude ranch in Colorado. They caught that flu three years ago when it jumped from horses.”

“Oh,” Naomi said. “Sorry.”

“Why be sorry? You didn’t know,” I said. “I’m fine now.” My father was headed our way. I took off my mask and lay down on my cot and pulled the foil blanket over my head. I didn’t take off my clothes, not even my shoes. Just in case the bats turned out not to be fruit bats.

• • • •

All night long, people talked, listened to newsfeeds, got up to go to the bathroom, dreamed the kind of dreams that woke them up and other people, too. Children woke up crying. Naomi snored. I don’t think that my father ever went to sleep at all. Whenever I looked over, he was lying on his cot, thumbing through a paperback. An Alfred Bester collection, I think.

• • • •

We settled into certain routines quickly. Zuleta-Arango’s committee set up a schedule for recharging googlies and palmtops and cell phones from the limited number of outlets in the hangar. After some discussion, the Hans Bliss people rigged up a kind of symbolic wall out of foil blankets and extra cot frames. That was the area where you went if you wanted to hang out in the nude and talk about aliens. Of course you could just wander by and get an eyeful and an earful, but after a while nude people just don’t seem that interesting. Really.

My dad spent some of the day in the clinic and some of his time with Zuleta-Arango. He hung out with the Hans Bliss people, and he and Naomi sat around and argued about Hans Bliss and aliens. Somebody started an English/Spanish-language discussion group, and he got involved in that. He set up a lending library, passing out his sci-fi books, taking down the names of people who’d borrowed them. There were plenty of movies and digests that people were swapping around on their googlies, but the paperbacks had novelty appeal. Science fiction is always good for taking your mind off how bad things are.

I still wasn’t speaking to my father, of course, unless it was absolutely necessary. He didn’t really notice. He was too excited about having made it this far, impatient to get on with the next stage of his journey. He was afraid that while we were quarantined, the thing he’d been waiting for would arrive, and he’d be stuck in a hangar less than a hundred miles away. So close, and yet he couldn’t get any closer until the quarantine period was over.

I figured it served him right.

Most of the passengers in quarantine were returning to Costa Rica. The foreign passengers were almost all in Costa Rica because of tech industry stuff or the aliens. Mostly aliens. Because of Hans Bliss. Some of them had waited years to get a visa. There were close to a thousand Star Friends in Costa Rica, citizens of almost every nation, true believers, currently living down along the Pacific coastline, right next to Manuel Antonio National Park; Lara had been to Manuel Antonio a few times on camping trips with friends. She said it was a lot nicer than camping in a hangar.

The first day, the Star Friends quarantined in the hangar got through, on their cells and on email, to friends already out with Hans Bliss. My father even managed to speak to Hans Bliss himself for a few minutes, to explain that he had made it as far as San José. The Star Friends community was under quarantine as well, of course, and Hans Bliss was somewhat put out that his doctor was stuck at the airport. Preparations for the imminent return of the aliens were being hampered by the quarantine.

Like I said, I saw Hans Bliss speak in Philadelphia once. He was this tall, good-looking blond guy with a German accent. He was painfully sincere. So sincere he hardly ever blinked, which was kind of hypnotic. When he stood on the stage and described the feeling of understanding and joy and compassion that had descended upon him and lifted him up as he stood out on that beach, in the middle of that ferocious storm, I sat there gripping the sides of my chair, because I was afraid that otherwise I might get up and run toward the stage, toward the thing that he was promising. Other people in the audience did exactly that. When he talked about finding himself back on that beach again, abandoned and forsaken and confused and utterly alone, the man sitting next to me started to cry. Everyone was crying. I couldn’t stand it. I looked up at my father and he was looking down at me, like what I thought mattered to him.

“What are we doing here?” I whispered. “Why are we here?”

He said, “I don’t like this any better than you do, Dorn. But I have to believe. I have to believe at least some of what he’s saying. I have to believe that they’ll come back.”

Then he stood up and asked the crying man to excuse us. “What were they like?” someone yelled at Bliss. “What did the aliens look like?”

Everybody knew what the aliens looked like. We’d all seen the footage hundreds of times. We’d heard Bliss describe the aliens on news shows and in documentaries and on online interviews and casts. But my father stopped in the aisle and turned back to the stage and so did I. You would have, too.

Hans Bliss held out his arms as if he were going to embrace the audience, all of us, all at once. As if he were going to heal us of a sickness we didn’t even know that we had, as if rays of energy and light and power and love were suddenly going to shoot out of his chest. The usual agents and government types and media who followed Hans Bliss everywhere he went looked bored. They’d seen this show a hundred times before. “They were beautiful,” Hans Bliss said. People said it along with him. It was the punch line to one of the most famous stories ever. There had even been a movie in which Hans Bliss played himself.

Beautiful.

My father started up the aisle again. We walked out and I thought that was that. He never said anything else about Hans Bliss or Costa Rica or the aliens until he picked me up at soccer practice.

• • • •

I put on my running shoes. I stretched out on the concrete floor and ran laps around and around the hangar. There were other people doing the same thing. After breakfast, I went over to an area where no one had set up a bed and started messing around, kicking the ball and catching it on the rebound. Nice and high. Some people came over and we played keep-away. When there were enough players, we took two cots and made them goals. We picked teams. Little kids came and sat and watched and chased down the ball when it went out-of-bounds. Even Naomi came to watch. When I asked her if she was going to play, she just looked at me like I was an idiot. “I’m not into being athletic,” she said. “I’m too competitive. The last time I played organized sports, I broke someone’s nose. It was only kind of an accident.”

Lara came up behind me and tapped me on the back of the head. “¿Cómo está ci arroz? What’s up?”

“You ever play soccer?” I said.

She ended up on my team. I was pretty excited about that, even before I saw her play. She was super fast. She put up her hair in a ponytail, took off her mask, and zipped up and down the floor. Our team won the first match, 3–0. We swapped some players around, and my team won again, 7–0, this time.

At lunch, people came by the table where I was sitting and nodded to me. They said things in Spanish, gave me the thumbs-up. Lara translated. Apparently they could tell how good I was, even though I was being careful on the concrete. I didn’t want to strain or smash anything. This was just for fun.

After dinner there was some excitement when the bats woke up. Apparently nobody had really been paying attention that first night, but this time we saw them go. They bled out into the twilight in a thin, black slick, off to do bat things. Eat bugs. Sharpen their fangs. Nobody was happy to see them come back, either, except some of the little kids, and Naomi, of course. This whole one corner of the hangar floor was totally covered in bat guano. My dad said it wasn’t a health risk, but as a matter of fact, one of the joggers slipped on it the next day and sprained an ankle.

The next day: more of the same. Wake up, run, play soccer. Listen to Naomi rant about stuff. Listen to people talk about the flu. Flirt with Lara. Ignore my father. I still wasn’t ready to check in with Sorken, or to check email. I didn’t want to know.

That afternoon we had our second invasion. Land crabs, this time, the size of silver-dollar pancakes, the color of old scabs, and they smelled like rotting garbage. There were hundreds of them, thousands of hairy, armored legs, all dragging and scratching and clicking. They went sideways, their pincers held up and forward. Everybody stood on their cots or tires and took pictures. When the crabs got to the far wall, they spread out until they found the little cracks and gaps where they could squeeze through. A boy used his shirt to catch three or four crabs; some of the kids had started a petting zoo.

“What was that about?” I said to Naomi.

“Land migration,” she said. “They do that when they’re mating. Or is it molting? That’s why they’re so stinky right now.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” I said. “Bats and crabs and stuff?”

“I don’t date much,” she said. “I stay home and watch the nature feeds online.”

• • • •

By lunch that second day we knew about outbreaks of flu in New New York, Copenhagen, Houston, Berlin, plenty of other places. The World Health Organization had issued the report my father had been predicting, saying that was a full-on pandemic, killing the young and the healthy, not just the very young and the very elderly. We knew there were hopeful indications in India and in Taiwan with a couple of modified vaccines. The mood in the hangar was pretty unhappy. People were getting calls and emails about family members or friends back in the States. Not good news. On the other hand, we appeared to be in good shape here. My father said that in another two or three days, Costa Rican health officials would probably send a doctor out to sign off that we were officially flu-free. The two children with the dry coughs turned out just to have allergies. Besides that, the most pressing health issues in the hangar were some cases of cabin fever, diarrhea, and the fact that we were going through our supply of toilet paper too fast.

On the third day in the hangar we built better goals. Not quite regulation, but you’d be surprised what you can do with some expensive fishing gear and the frames from a couple of cots. Then practice drills. I sat out the first quarter of the first game, and a Tico with muscle-y legs took the goal. We still won.

The hangar guards changed over every twelve hours or so. After a while they were kind of like the bats. You didn’t even notice them most of the time. But I liked watching them watch us when we played soccer. They were into soccer. They took turns coming over to watch, and whistled through their teeth whenever I blocked a goal. They placed bets. On the third day a guard came over to me during a time-out, and pushed up his N95 mask. “¡Que cache!” He made enthusiastic hand gestures. “¡Pura vida!” I understood that. He was a young guy, athletic. He was talking fast, and Naomi and Lara weren’t around to translate, but I thought I had a pretty good idea what he was saying. He was trying to give me some advice about keeping goal. I just nodded, like I understood what he was saying and appreciated it. Finally he clapped me on the shoulders and went back over to his wall like he’d finally remembered that he was a guard.

• • • •

Naomi was working her way through Roger Zelazny and Kage Baker. She was a pretty fast reader. First a Baker novel, then Zelazny. Then Baker again. I kept catching her reading the endings first. “What’s the point of doing that?” I said. “If you cheat and read the end of the book first, why even bother reading the rest?”

“I’m antsy,” she said. “I need to know how certain things turn out.” She turned over so she was facing the wall, and said something else in Spanish.

“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t really all that invested. I was rereading some Fritz Leiber.

About fifteen minutes later, Lara came over and sat down on the cot next to Naomi. She picked up the stack of books that Naomi had already read, commenting in Spanish on the covers. Naomi laughed every time she said something. It was annoying, but I smiled like I understood. Finally Lara said, in English, “All of these girls have the large breasts. I did not know science fiction was about the breasts. I like the real stories. Stories about real astronauts, or scientific books.”

“My father doesn’t really go in for nonfiction,” I said. I didn’t see what was so bad about breasts, really.

“It makes for depressing reading,” Naomi said. “Look at the space program in the old disunited States. Millionaires signing up for outer space field trips. The occasional unmanned flight that conks out somewhere just past Venus. SETI enthusiasts running analysis programs on their personal computers, because some guys blew up the Very Large Array, and guess what, when the real aliens show up, some guy named Hans Bliss says something and they go away again. Poof.”

“Our space program is state of the art,” Lara said. “Not to brag, like Dorn is always saying. But we will be sending a manned flight to Mars in the next five years. Ten years tops. If I keep my grades up and if I am chosen, I will be on that flight. That is my personal goal. My dream.”

“You want to go to Mars?” I said. I’m sure I looked surprised.

“Mars, to begin with,” Lara said. “Then who knows? I’m in an accelerated science and physical education course at my school. Many of the graduates go into the program for astronauts.”

“There are advanced classes at UCR doing some work with your space program,” Naomi said. “I don’t know much about it, except that it all sounds pretty cool.”

“We sent a manned flight to the moon last year,” Lara said. “I met one of the astronauts. She came and spoke at my school.”

“Yeah, I remember that flight,” I said. “We did that, like, last century.” I was just joking, but Lara didn’t get that.

“And what have you done since?” she asked me.

I shrugged. It wasn’t really anything I was interested in. “What’s the point,” I said. “I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they’ll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a space program, is, I don’t know, it’s like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bliss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don’t see the point.”

“The point is to go to space,” Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. “To go to space. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back.”

“Okay,” I said. “But not everybody gets a chance to go to Mars on a spaceship, either. Maybe not even you.”

I was just being reasonable, but Lara didn’t see it that way. She made this noise of exasperation, then said, emphatically, like she was making a point except that she was saying it in Spanish and really fast, so it didn’t really tell me anything: “¡Turista estúpido! ¡Usted no es hermoso como usted piensa usted es!”

“Sorry?” I said.

But she just got up and left.

“What? What did she say?” I asked Naomi.

Naomi put down her paperback, The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth. She said, “You can be kind of a jerk, Dorn. Some advice? Hazme caso—pay attention. I’ve seen you play soccer and you’re pretty good. Maybe you’ll get back to the States and get discovered and maybe one day you’ll save some goal for some team and it will turn out to be the block that wins the World Cup. I’ll go out to a bar and get drunk to celebrate when that happens. But my money’s on Lara. I bet you anything Lara gets her chance and goes to Mars. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when she isn’t playing soccer or hanging out with us, she’s studying for her classes or talking with the pilots about what it’s like to fly commercial jets. And she also knows how to get along with people, Dorn. Maybe you don’t have to be a nice guy to do well in team sports, but does it hurt?”

“I am a nice guy,” I said.

“Stupid me,” Naomi said. “Here I was thinking that you were arrogant, and, um, stupid, and what was the other thing? Oh yeah, short.” And then she picked up the Zelazny again and ignored me.

• • • •

Lara didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. She didn’t come back when we played soccer in the afternoon, and even though it was the Tucancillos’ turn to do the dishes, she didn’t turn up.

• • • •

We still had plenty of surgical masks, but by the fourth day hardly anybody was wearing them. Just the sticklers and the guards in their N95s. I think everybody else was using the remaining supply for toilet paper. I wore one like a headband during soccer. I kind of needed a haircut. I couldn’t do anything about that, but I did have a bath on the fourth night, after dinner, in one of the makeshift bathing stalls. Some of the people on the flight didn’t have a lot of clothes in their suitcases, and so some borrowing had been going on, and there were clothes and various species of underwear draped over tires. I leaned against the outside wall of the hangar, away from the latrines, and admired the sunset for a bit. Not that I was a huge fan of sunsets, but the ones here were bigger, or something. And it smelled better out here. Not that you noticed how bad it smelled in the hangar most of the time, but once you came outside you realized you didn’t want to go back in, not immediately, at least.

And the guards didn’t seem to mind. There wasn’t really anywhere for us to go. Just asphalt and runways. Still no planes coming in. Nobody to watch the sunset with me, which was an odd thing to think, since I’m usually pretty comfortable being alone. Even out on the field, during the game, the goalie is alone more often than not. Lara wasn’t talking to me. I wasn’t talking to my dad. Naomi and I weren’t talking to each other. The sun went down fast, regardless of how I felt about the whole thing, and yeah, I know that’s a melodramatic way to think about a sunset, but so what? Universe 1, Dorn 0.

• • • •

When I came back into the hangar, Lara was over in the petting zoo, just sitting there. A dog was curled up on her legs and she was thumping its belly, softly, like a drum.

The petting zoo was an ongoing project. There were the three smelly crabs and a skinny brownish snake in a plastic makeup case that the kids fed beetles to. Some girl had caught it when she went out to use the bathroom. There were lizards in recycled food containers and a smallish iguana one of the guards had donated. There were even two dogs who got spoiled rotten.

I wandered over, trying to come up with something interesting to say. “What’s up?” was all I came up with.

She looked up at me, then down again. Petted the dog.

“Watching the iguana,” she said.

“What’s it doing?” I said.

“Not much.”

I sat down next to her. We didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally I said, “Naomi says I shouldn’t be such a jerk. And also that I’m short.”

“I like Naomi,” Lara said. “She’s pretty.”

Really? I thought. (But I knew better than to say that out loud.)

“What about me?”

Lara said, “I like watching you play soccer. It’s like watching the soccer on television.”

“Naomi’s pretty brutal, but she’s honest,” I said. “I may never get tall enough to be a world-class goalie.”

“You’ll be taller. Your father is tall. Sometimes I have a temper,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

“What did you say exactly?” I asked.

“Learn Spanish,” she said. “Then when I say the awful things to you, you’ll understand.” Then she said, “And I am going to go up one day.”

“Up?” I said.

“To Mars.”

She wasn’t wearing her mask. She was smiling. I don’t know if she was smiling at me or at the idea of Mars, but I didn’t care all that much. Mars was far away. I was a lot closer.

• • • •

My father was on his cell phone. “Yes,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to him.” He hung up. He said, “Dorn, come sit down for a minute.”

I didn’t say anything to him. I just sat down on my cot.

I realized that I was looking around, as if something had happened. Naomi was over against the wall, talking to the hans bliss for world president guy, the one with the big nose. He was a lot taller than Naomi. Did Naomi mind being short?

My father said, “Your coach. He wanted to talk to you.”

“Sorken called?” I said. I felt kind of sick to my stomach already, even though I wasn’t sure why. I should have listened to those messages.

“No,” my father said. “I’m sorry, Dorn. It was Coach Turner. He was calling about Sorken.”

And I understood the difference immediately. “Sorken’s dead.”

My father nodded.

“Is everybody else okay? On the team?”

“I really don’t know,” my father said. “Mr. Turner hasn’t been able to reach everyone. A lot of people around Philadelphia came down with flu, just like everywhere else. If I’d had more time to plan, I don’t think I would have booked that flight. You were right, you know. I got an email from a colleague out in Potlatch who thought something was coming, and meanwhile I’d been in touch with Hans Bliss off and on, and the visas had just come, and it seemed like a minor risk, getting us onto the flight, getting us through the airport. I thought if we didn’t leave right then, who knew when we’d get here?”

I didn’t say anything. I was remembering how Sorken used to come down on me when I was being a showoff or not paying enough attention to what was happening, on the field, during practice. Sorken wasn’t like my dad. If you weren’t paying attention to him or you were sulking, he’d throw a soccer ball at your head. Or one of his shoes. But I’d just left those messages from him on the phone. I didn’t even know where my phone was right now.

I’d never really thought about Sorken getting the flu and dying, but it had always seemed like there was a good chance that my father would catch something. A lot of hospital workers died during the last pandemic.

My father said, “Dorn? Are you okay?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry about Sorken,” he said. “I never really sat down and talked to him.”

“He didn’t have much time for people who didn’t play soccer,” I said.

“It always looked like he was riding you pretty hard.”

“I don’t think he liked me,” I said. “I didn’t like him most of the time. But he was a good coach. He wasn’t ever harder on me than he should have been.”

“I told Coach Turner that you wouldn’t be back for a while,” my father said. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what we’ll do. If we’ll be allowed to stay. There’s been some talk in the hangar. Rumors that our government is responsible. That we were targeting Calexico. It doesn’t seem likely to me, but we weren’t going to be very popular down here, Dorn, even before people starting making up stories like that. And I’m not going to be much more popular back in Philadelphia. I checked in with my team. Dr. Willis yelled for about five minutes and then she just hung up. I skipped out even though I knew they were going to need me.”

“Maybe you would have gotten sick if we’d stayed,” I said. “Or maybe I would have gotten sick.”

My father studied his hands. “Who knows? I was planning to tell you about the visas. Give you a choice. But then I just couldn’t leave you. You know, in case.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was talking to Paula and some of the other Hans Bliss people. As of this morning they haven’t been able to get hold of anyone out that way. At the colony. They’ve been under quarantine, too, remember? And no doctor. Just two OB-GYNs and a chiropractor.”

“Everything will be fine,” I said. I was a regular cheerleader. But I couldn’t help looking around again, and this time I could see all the things that I’d been trying not to see. All around us, other people were having, had been having, conversations just like this one. About people who had died. About what had been going on while we were trapped in here.

I said, “The aliens are coming back to see Hans Bliss, remember? So there’s no way that Hans Bliss can just keel over dead from something like flu. Those aliens probably vaccinated him or something. Remember how he said he didn’t ever get sick anymore?”

“Good point,” my father said. “If you’re gullible enough to buy all the things that Hans Bliss says.”

“Hey, you two,” Naomi said. She looked flushed and happy, as if she’d gotten the last word again with the Hans Bliss guy. She didn’t seem to be annoyed with me. And I couldn’t really be annoyed with her, either. Everything she’d said was true, more or less. I hadn’t known her very long, but I already knew that that was the terrible thing about Naomi.

My father took the soccer ball out of my hands. I don’t even know when I’d picked it up, but it felt right to let go of it. He put it down on the floor, sat down beside me on the cot, and patted my leg. “It will all be fine,” he said, and I nodded.

• • • •

My brother Stephen was older than me by four years. He didn’t like me. According to my father, when I was a baby Stephen used to unfasten my seatbelt and also the strap that held my baby seat in. When I was five, he pushed me down a flight of stairs. I broke my wrist. My mother saw him do it, and so once a week for the next two years Stephen went to see a counselor named Ms. Blair in downtown Philadelphia; I remember I was jealous.

When our parents got divorced, Stephen was ten and I was six, and they decided they would each take custody of one child. Stephen thought that this was a great idea. His goal had always been to become an only child.

My mother went back home to Dalton, Colorado, where she took over the bookkeeping at her family’s fancy dude ranch and spa. Whenever I flew out to visit, Stephen made sure I understood that it was all his. His house, his horses—all of them—his mom, his grandparents, his uncles, aunts, cousins. He came back east to stay with us once, and then he developed an inner-ear condition that made it impossible for him to fly. So he didn’t ever have to come visit again. He didn’t like my father much either.

The last time I saw my mom and Stephen, Stephen was applying to colleges. He didn’t seem to loathe me as much as usual. He was practically an adult. I was just a kid. I was athletic, which he wasn’t, but my grades were pitiful. I was small for my age. He could tell how annoyed I was that he was tall and I wasn’t, and somehow it made things better. He had a girlfriend, a massage therapist at the spa, and he didn’t even care that she made a point of being nice to me. I had a pretty good time on that trip. My mother and I rode out and went camping down in the canyons. Stephen’s girlfriend cooked dinner for us when we got home. It was almost like we were a family. Stephen showed us a movie he’d made to send along with his college applications. When I said I liked it, he was pleased. We got into arguments the way we always did, but this time I realized something, that Stephen liked a good fight. Maybe he always had, or maybe he’d just grown up. If you stood up to him, it made him happy. I had never tried standing up to him before. He was applying for a visa so he could go study at a big-deal film school in Calexico.

A few months later, the horses at the dude ranch started dying. My mother emailed and said my uncle had brought the local vet in. They were putting the sick horses down. When we talked on the phone, she sounded terrible. My mother loved horses. Then people on the ranch started dying, too. Sometimes a flu will jump from one species to another. That’s why a lot of people don’t keep cats or birds as pets anymore.

I talked to my mother two more times the next day. Then things got worse, real fast. My father was staying over at the hospital, and lots of people were dying. My mother got the flu. She died. Stephen died. The girlfriend got sick, and then she got better again. She sent one email before she got sick and one after she got better, which is how I found out what had happened. Her first email said that Stephen had wanted her to tell us how much he loved us. But he probably died in quarantine. He probably felt like he was getting a cold, and then I bet his temperature shot up until he was delirious or completely unconscious and couldn’t say anything to anyone. My dad said that their kind of flu was fast. So you didn’t suffer or anything. I think the girlfriend was just making all that up, about Stephen and what he supposedly said. She was a nice person. I don’t think he’d ever said anything to her about how much he disliked me. About how he used to try to kill me. You want the people you like to think that you get along with your family.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, telling my father when he finally came home. And we haven’t talked about it much since then. I don’t know why it’s easier for some people to talk about aliens than to talk about death. Aliens only happen to some people. Death happens to everyone.

• • • •

That night in the hangar, I dreamed about Sorken. He was standing in front of the goal, instead of me, and he was talking at me in Spanish, like the Costa Rican guard. I knew that if I could only understand what he was saying, he’d be satisfied, and then I could take the goal again. I wanted to say I was sorry that he was dead, and that I was sorry that I was in Costa Rica, and that I was sorry I hadn’t ever called him back when he left all those messages, but he couldn’t understand what I was saying because I couldn’t speak Spanish. I kept hoping that Lara would show up.

Instead the aliens came. They came down just like Hans Bliss had said, in this wave of feeling: joy and love and perfect acceptance and knowingness, so that it didn’t matter anymore that Sorken didn’t remember how to speak English and I didn’t know Spanish. For the first time we just understood each other. Then the aliens scooped up Sorken and took him away.

I grabbed onto the frame of the soccer goal and held on as hard as I could, because I was sure they were going to come back for me. I didn’t want to go wherever it was, even though it was beautiful, so beautiful; they were even more beautiful than Hans Bliss had said. A wave of warm, alien ecstasy poured over me, and then I woke up because Naomi was hitting me on the shoulder. She had a plate of food with her. Breakfast.

“Stop moaning about how beautiful it is,” she said. “Please? Whatever it is, it’s really, really beautiful. I get that, totally. Oh shit, Dorn, were you having a wet dream? I am so very embarrassed. Oh yuck. Let me go somewhere far away now and not eat my breakfast.”

I wanted to die. But instead I got changed under the foil blanket and then went and got my own breakfast and came back. Naomi had her nose in a book. I said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just something that happens to guys, okay?”

“It happens to girls, too,” Naomi said. “Not that I want to be having some sex-education discussion with you. Although you probably need it, from what I hear about American schools nowadays.”

“Like you had it so much better,” I said. “And my dad’s a doctor, remember? I know everything I need to know and lots of other stuff, too. And what were you doing last night? You woke me up when you came to bed. I don’t even know when it was. It was late.”

“My parents homeschooled me,” Naomi said. “They wanted me to have every advantage.” Her eyes were all red.

“What?” I said. “Are you sick? Is everything okay?”

“I think so,” Naomi said. She scraped her nose with a sterile wipe. “I talked to my mom last night. She says that Vermont is still under martial law, so she can’t get out to see my grandmother. She can’t get her on the phone either. That’s probably bad, right?”

“It might not be,” I said.

Naomi didn’t say anything.

“At least your mom and dad are all right,” I said.

She nodded.

“Here,” I said. “Let’s get a book for you. Something cheerful. How about Naomi Novik?”

We sat and she read and I thought about stuff. Sorken. My father. My mother. My brother Stephen. I thought about how the kind of thing that Stephen thought was funny when he was alive wasn’t really anything that I thought was funny. For example, when he pushed me down the stairs. I remember he was giggling. The last time I was out visiting my mother, it was different. He laughed at some of the things that I said, and not like it was because he thought I was an idiot. We got into one of those arguments about something really stupid, and then I said something and he just started laughing. I wish I could remember what I said, what we were arguing about.

Naomi looked up and saw me looking at her. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hey,” she said. “Do you surf?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“Not much to do out there on the beach with Hans Bliss,” she said. “Not a lot of soccer players. Everybody goes surfing. You know that Hans Bliss guy? Philip? The one with the tattoo and the mother. Paula.” The one with the big nose. “He was telling me this story about a guy he knew, a surfer. One day this surfer guy was out in the water and he got knocked under by this really big wave. He went down and his board shot out from under him, really sliced him. But he didn’t realize what had happened until he got out of the water, because the water was really cold, but when he got out of the water and pulled his suit down, it turned out that the fin on his board had cut his ball sac right open, and he hadn’t felt it because the water was so cold. When he pulled his suit down, his testicle fell out and was just hanging there, way down on his leg on, like, this string. Like a yo-yo.”

“So?” I said. “Are you trying to gross me out or something? My dad’s a doctor, remember? I hear stories like this all the time.”

Naomi looked nonplussed. “Just be careful,” she said. “What’s up? Bad news?”

I’d found my cell phone, and I was trying to decide whether or not to listen to Sorken’s messages. But in the end I just deleted them. Then I went and got some people together to play soccer.

It was the fifth day, if you’re counting, and nobody in the hangar had the flu, which was good news, but my father still had his hands full. There was the pregnant woman from Switzerland who had come over to join Hans Bliss. A couple of days in quarantine, and she decided that she’d had enough. She threw this major tantrum, said she was going into labor. The best part: She took off all her clothes before she threw the tantrum. So you had this angry, naked, pregnant woman yelling stuff in German and French and English and stomping her foot like Gojiro. It totally broke up the soccer game. We all stopped to watch.

My father went and sat on the floor next to her. I went and stood nearby, just in case she got dangerous. Someone needed to look out for my father. He said that he’d be happy to examine her, if she liked, but she probably wouldn’t go into labor for another month, at least, and we weren’t going to be stuck in here that long. And anyway, he’d delivered babies before. All you really needed was boiling water and lots of towels. I think he was kidding about that.

Just a few hours later, a Tico doctor showed up with a full mobile clinic. By that point we were just kind of kicking the ball around. I was showing off some for Lara. The doctor’s name was Meñoz, and it was all pretty much like my father had said it was going to be. My father and Dr. Meñoz talked first, and then they looked at the clinic records my father had been keeping. I hung around for a bit, hoping that Dr. Meñoz would just go ahead and tell us that we were free to go, but it seemed like it was going to take a while. So Lara and I went around and got one last soccer match together. A lot of people came and watched.

That guard who’d talked to me a few times was, like, my biggest fan now. Whenever we were playing he yelled and clapped his hands, and he’d dance around when I stopped a goal. All the guards came over to watch this time, not just him, as if they knew that the rules didn’t really matter now. So much for quarantine.

Before we started for real, something strange happened. My guard put down his gun. He talked to his friends, and they gave him a high five. Then he came out onto the field. He even took off his N95 mask. He smiled at me. “I play, too,” he said. He seemed proud of having this much English. Well, it was more English than I had Spanish.

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. I waved at the other team, the one Lara was on. “Play for those guys. They need all the help they can get.”

It was around three in the afternoon, and it was warm, but there was a breeze coming in through the vents up in the tin roof and through the big metal doors. Like always, there was music playing on someone’s googly, and the little kids were having a conference over in the petting zoo, probably figuring out what to do with all of the freaky little animals they’d collected. I was almost enjoying being here. I was almost feeling nostalgic. It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends in the hangar, but most people knew me well enough to say hi. When I wanted to get a match going, there were always enough people to play, and nobody got all that upset about the fact that my team won most of the time. Whatever happened next, I didn’t think I’d be spending a lot of time playing soccer. Wherever we ended up, nobody was going to know much about me, about what I could do in a soccer game. I’d just be some American kid whose dad was a doctor who had wanted to see aliens.

Naomi, who had decided she enjoyed refereeing a match every once in a while, threw the ball in, and that hangar guard was on it immediately, before anyone else even thought about moving. He was amazing. He was better than amazing. He went up and down the concrete as if no one else was on the floor. And he put the ball past me every single time, no matter what I did. And every time, when I failed to stop him, he just grinned and said, “Good try. Good try.”

The worst part is that he did it without even taking advantage of my height. He didn’t go over me. He just went around. The way he did it was so good it was like a bad dream. Like science fiction. Like I was Superman and he was Kryptonite. He seemed to know what I was going to do before I did. He knew all about me, like he’d been taking notes during all those other games.

After a while both teams stopped playing and they just watched while he did all sorts of interesting stuff. If I came forward, he skimmed around and behind me. Score. If I hung back in front of the goal, it didn’t matter. He put the ball where I wasn’t. I didn’t give up, though. I finally stopped a goal. I felt good about that, until I realized that he’d let me have the save. I hadn’t really stopped anything.

And that was the last straw. There he was, grinning at me, like this had just been for fun. He wasn’t even breathing hard. I made myself grin back. He didn’t realize I knew he’d let me save that last goal. He didn’t even think I was that smart. He clapped for me. I clapped for him. Everyone who had been watching was clapping and yelling. Even Lara. So I just walked away.

I didn’t feel angry or upset or anything. I just felt as if I’d found out something important. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. I’d thought I was amazing, but I wasn’t. Some guy who’d spent five days standing against a wall holding a gun could walk in and prove in about ten minutes that I wasn’t anything special. So that was that. I know you’ll think that I was being melodramatic, but I wasn’t. I was being realistic. I gave up on soccer right then.

For some reason, I was thinking about the little empty glass bottle that my father gave my mother, that my mother gave me. I wondered what Sorken would think when I told him I was quitting soccer, and then I remembered Sorken was dead. So I didn’t have to worry what he thought.

Something was going on with the Hans Bliss group. They’d disassembled their modesty wall. Actually, they’d just kicked it over. They were huddled together, looking really bad. Utterly hopeless. I could sympathize. My father and Zuleta-Arango and Dr. Meñoz were there too, so I went over. My father said, “Dr. Meñoz had some news about the Star Friends community.”

“Not good news,” I said.

“No,” my father said. He didn’t sound particularly upset, but that’s my father. He doesn’t ever seem particularly anything. “One of the last arrivals came in from Calexico, and he had the flu. They weren’t being very careful in the community. Hans Bliss didn’t believe they were in any real danger. Lots of physical contact. Communal eating. They didn’t have good protocols in place. No doctor. They had no doctor.”

“It might not have made any difference,” Zuleta-Arango said. “There were deaths on one of the cruise ships, too. And in a few neighborhoods of San José, a few cities, they have set up additional quarantine zones. There are deaths. But the mobile units are being supplied with vaccines, which Dr. Meñoz says will do the trick. It isn’t as bad as it’s been in the States. We have been lucky here.”

“Not all of us,” my father said. “Hans Bliss is dead.”

The pregnant woman began to wail. Lots of other people were crying. “The remaining community is in bad shape. As soon as quarantine is lifted here, I’ll go out to see how I can help, if they’ll let me.”

Dr. Meñoz popped his cell phone closed and struck up a conversation in rapid Spanish with Zuleta-Arango, Miike, and Purdy. The Hans Bliss people were still standing there. They looked like they’d been pithed. That guy Philip, the one with the surfer friend, the one that Naomi seemed to like, blew his nose hard. He said to my father, “We’ll all go out. There will be things that they’ll need us to do.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father said. “What about you? I can’t send you home.”

Dr. Meñoz said, “As of right now, I’m authorized to lift quarantine here. This news is good, at least? There will be a bus outside the hangar within the hour. It will transport all of you into San José, to a center for displaced travelers. They are arranging for the necessary series of vaccinations there. Shall I make the announcement or would you prefer to do it?”

Zuleta-Arango made the announcement. There was something anticlimactic about it. Everyone already knew what he was about to say. And what he said wasn’t really the thing that we needed to know. What we didn’t know was what was going to happen next. Where we would be sent. What would happen in the next few weeks. When the flight ban would be lifted. Where the flu had come from. Whether or not the people that we loved would be okay. What we would find when we got home.

• • • •

Naomi had already packed up her duffel bag. She said, “Lots of people have been coming by, bringing back your father’s books. I finished the last Kim Stanley Robinson. I guess there are still a couple of short-story collections. I heard about Bliss. That really sucks. Now I feel bad about calling him an idiot.”

“He was an idiot,” I said. “That’s why he’s dead.”

“I guess,” Naomi said. “What’s in that bottle?”

• • • •

Like I said, the glass bottle with nothing inside it was the first present that my father ever gave my mother. He told her that there was a genie in the bottle. That he’d bought it at a magic shop. A real magic shop. He said that he’d already made two wishes. The first wish had been to meet a beautiful girl. That was my mother. The second wish was that she would fall in love with him, but not just because of the wish. That she would really fall in love with him. So already you can see the problem, right? You wouldn’t fall for some guy who was telling you this. Because if you fall in love with someone because of a wish, how can it not be the wish that makes you fall in love? I said that to my mother one time and she said that I was being too literal minded. I said that actually, no, I was just saying that my father’s made-up story was kind of stupid.

My mother always said that she’d never used that last wish. And I didn’t understand that either. Why didn’t she use it when they were getting divorced? Why didn’t she use it to make Stephen like having a little brother better? I used to think that if I had the bottle I’d wish for Stephen not to hate me so much. For him to like me. Just a little. The way that older brothers are supposed to like younger brothers. There were other wishes. I mean, I’ve made lists and lists of all the wishes I could make, like being the best goalie there has ever been. Like getting taller by a few inches. Other stuff that’s too embarrassing to talk about. I could come up with wishes all day long. That it wouldn’t rain. That I’d suddenly be a genius at math. That my parents would get back together.

I hadn’t ever made any of those wishes, not even the soccer wish, because I don’t believe in wishes. Also because it would be like cheating, because when I was a famous goalie I’d always wonder if I were really the best soccer player in the world, or whether I’d just wished it true. I could wish that I were taller, but maybe one day I will be. Everyone says that I will be. I guess if I were Paula or one of the Star Friends, I’d wish that Hans Bliss had been smarter. That he hadn’t died. Or I’d wish that the aliens would come back. I don’t know which of those I’d wish for.

I gave the bottle to Lara when she came over to say good-bye. I didn’t really mean anything by it.

She said, “Dorn, what is this?”

“It’s a genie in a bottle,” Naomi said. “Like a fairy tale. Dorn says that there’s one wish left in there. I said that if he gave it to me, I’d wish for world peace, but he’s giving it to you instead. Can you believe it?”

Lara shook the glass bottle.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “How would you like to be shaken if you were an invisible genie who’s been trapped in a bottle for hundreds of years?”

“I don’t believe in wishes,” Lara said. “But it is very sweet of you, Dorn, to give it to me.”

“It belonged to my mother,” I said.

“His dead mother,” Naomi said. “It’s a precious family heirloom.”

“Then I can’t keep it,” Lara said. She tried to give it back.

I put my hands behind me.

“Never mind then,” Lara said. She looked a little annoyed, actually. As if I were being silly. I realized something: Lara wasn’t particularly romantic. And maybe I am. She said, “I’ll keep it safe for you, Dorn. But I have something important to tell you.”

“I know,” I said. “You were watching the guard walk all over me. During that last game. You want to tell me to pick a new career.”

“No, Dorn,” Lara said. Even more annoyed now. “Stop talking, okay? That guard isn’t just a guard, you know? He was on the team for Costa Rica. The team that was supposed to go to the World Cup three years ago, before the last influenza.”

“What?” I said.

“His name is Olivas,” Lara said. “He got into a fight this summer and they kicked him off the team for a while. He sounds like you, Dorn, don’t you think? Not very bright. But never mind. He says you are good. Talented.”

“If I were any good, he wouldn’t have been able to walk past me like that, over and over again,” I said. But I started to feel a little better. He wasn’t just a guard with a gun. He was a professional soccer player.

“No, Dorn,” Lara said again. “You are good, but he is very good. There is a difference, you know?”

“Apparently,” I said, “there is a difference. I just hadn’t realized how big. I didn’t know he was, like, a soccer superstar. I thought that maybe he was just average for Costa Rica. I was thinking that I ought to quit soccer and take up scuba diving or something.”

“I hadn’t realized that you were a quitter,” Lara said. She still sounded very disapproving. Her eyebrows were knit together, and her lower lip stuck out. She looked even prettier, and it was because she was disappointed in me. Interesting.

“Maybe you ought to get to know him better,” Naomi said, looking at me looking at Lara like she knew what I was thinking. “Dorn needs to pack. You two will have plenty of time to talk on the bus. It’s not like you’re never going to see each other again. At least, not yet. Lara, pele el ojo. Your mother is coming this way.”

“Es un chingue,” Lara said. “¡Que tigra!” She sighed and kissed me right on the mouth. She had to dip her head down. Then she dashed off. Zip. When I thought about it, I wasn’t looking forward to getting to know her mother, and her mother sure wasn’t looking forward to getting to know me.

“So,” Naomi said. She was grinning. “You know what Lara told me a few days ago? That she wasn’t ever planning on having boyfriends. You can’t get serious about boys if you want to go to Mars. So much for that. Not that you’ll care, but you aren’t the only one who got lucky.”

“What,” I said. “Did that blond girl come over to show you her engagement ring or something?”

“No,” Naomi said. She waggled her eyebrows like crazy. “I got lucky. Me. That cute guy, Philip? Remember him?”

“We’re not thinking about the same guy,” I said. “He’s not cute. I know cute. I am cute.”

“He’s nice,” Naomi said. “And he’s funny. And smart.”

I didn’t know so much about nice. Or smart. I finished packing my suitcase, and started in on my father’s. I wished I hadn’t given away that little glass bottle. I could have given Lara a paperback instead. “You must have a lot to talk about.”

“I suppose,” Naomi said. “You know the best part?”

“What?” I said. I looked around for my father and finally spotted him. He was sitting on a cot beside the pregnant woman, who probably had a name but I’d never bothered to find out. She was sobbing against his shoulder, her mouth still open in that wail. Her face was all shiny with snot. I was betting that if her baby was a boy, she’d name him Hans. Maybe Bliss if it was a girl.

A girl walked by, dragging an iguana behind her on a homemade leash. Were they going to let her bring the iguana on the bus?

Naomi said, “The best part is he has dual citizenship. His father’s from Costa Rica. And he likes smart, fat, big-mouthed chicks.”

“Who doesn’t,” I said.

“Don’t be so sarcastic,” Naomi said. “It’s an unattractive quality in someone your size. Want a hand with the suitcases?”

“You take the one with all the books in it,” I said.

People were still packing up their stuff. Some people were talking on their cell phones, transmitting good news, getting good news and bad news in return. Over by the big doors to the hangar, I ran into the guard. Olivas. I was beginning to think I recognized his name. He nodded and smiled and handed me a piece of paper with a number on it. He said something in Spanish.

Naomi said, “He says you ought to come see him practice next month, when he’s back on his team again.”

“Okay,” I said. “Gracias. Thank you. Bueno. Bueno.” I smiled at Olivas and tucked his phone number into my shirt pocket. I was thinking, One day, I’ll be better than you are. You won’t get a thing past me. I’ll know Spanish, too. So I’ll know exactly what you’re saying, and not just stand here looking like an idiot. I’ll be six inches taller. And when I get scouted, let’s say I’m still living down here, and let’s say I end up on the same team as you, I won’t get kicked off, not for fighting. Fighting is for idiots.

• • • •

Naomi and I went out onto the cracked tarmac and sat on our luggage. Costa Rican sunlight felt even more luxurious when you were out of quarantine, I decided. I could get used to this kind of sunlight. Lara was over with her mother and some other women, all of them speaking a mile a minute. Lara looked over at me and then looked away again. Her eyebrows were doing that thing. I was pretty sure we weren’t going to end up sitting next to each other on the bus. Off in the distance, you could see somewhere that might have been San José, where we were going. The sky was blue, and there were still no planes in it. They were all lined up along the runways. Our transportation wasn’t in sight yet, so I went to use the latrines one last time. That’s where I was when the aliens came. I was pissing into a hole in the ground. And my father was still sitting inside the hangar, his arm around an inconsolable, enormously pregnant, somewhat gullible Swiss woman, hoping that she would eventually stop crying on his T-shirt.

• • • •

It was kind of like the bats. They were there, and after a while you noticed them. Only it wasn’t like the bats at all and I don’t really mean to say that it was. The aliens’ ships were lustrous and dark and flexible; something like sharks, if sharks were a hundred feet long and hung in the air, moving just a little, as if breathing. There were three of the ships, about 150 feet up. They were so very close. I yanked up my pants and pushed the latrine curtain aside, stumbled out. Naomi and that guy Philip were standing there on the tarmac, looking up, holding hands. The priest crossing himself. The kid with her iguana. Lara and her mother and the other passengers all looking up, silently. Nobody saying anything yet. When I turned toward San José, I could see more spacecraft, lots more. Of course, you already know all this. Everyone saw them. You saw them. You saw the aliens hovering over the melting ice floes of Antarctica, too, and over New New York and Paris and Mexico City, and Angkor Wat and all those other places. Unless you were blind or dead or the kind of person who always manages to miss seeing what everybody else sees. Like aliens showing up. What I want to know is did they come back because they knew that Hans Bliss was dead? People still argue about that, too. Poor Hans Bliss. That’s what I was thinking: Poor, stupid, lucky, unlucky Hans Bliss.

I ran inside the hangar, past Olivas and the other guards and Dr. Meñoz and Zuleta-Arango, and two kids spinning around in circles, making themselves dizzy on purpose.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad! Everyone! The aliens! They’re here. They’re just outside! Lots of them!”

My father got up. The pregnant woman stopped crying. She stood up, too. They were walking toward me and then they were running right past me.

Me, I couldn’t make up my mind. It seemed as if I had a choice to make, which was stupid, I know. What choice? I wasn’t sure. Outside the hangar were the aliens and the future. Inside the hangar it was just me, a couple hundred horrible bats sleeping up in the roof, the remains of a petting zoo, and all of the rest of the mess we were leaving behind. The cots. Our trash. All the squashed water bottles and crumpled foil blankets and the used surgical masks and no-longer-sterile wipes. The makeshift soccer field. I had this strange urge, like I ought to go over to the field and tidy it up. Stand in front of one of the cobbled-together goals. Guard it. Easier to guard it, of course, now that Olivas wasn’t around. I know it sounds stupid, I know that you’re wondering why aliens show up and I’m still in here, in the empty hangar, doing nothing. I can’t explain it to you. Maybe you can explain it to me. But I stood there feeling empty and lost and ashamed and alone until I heard my father’s voice. He was saying, “Dorn! Adorno, where are you? Adorno, get out here! They’re beautiful, they’re even more beautiful than that idiot said. Come on out, come and see!”

So I went to see.

© 2008 by Kelly Link. Previously published in The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and in the collection Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters, as well as the founder, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. Her latest collection of stories, Get in Trouble, is out from Random House.

NOVEL EXCERPT: A Daughter of No Nation (Tor Books)

A.M. Dellamonica | 3320 words

1

The blond woman had chapped fingertips with ragged, oft-gnawed nails, and she was half her attacker’s size. His hand around her throat obscured it entirely. The padded glove bulged like a crash collar, wedged between her chin and shoulders.

He was making to drag her away when she let out a half-strangled shriek and stomped his left foot. It wasn’t much of a blow, but he staggered . . . and, better, hesitated. She jabbed an elbow into his rib cage, then wriggled free of his grip, mostly by virtue of falling at his feet.

She scrambled away at a run, screaming at the top of her lungs, “No, no, no!”

Once she reached the far end of the dojo, she spun, improvising a victory dance.

The rest of the self-defense class bellowed approval from the sidelines.

The foam-swaddled attacker, whose name was Marc, put up a hand, acknowledging defeat.

“Sophie, you’re next.”

Sophie Hansa stretched, exchanged high fives with the blonde, and took her place on the mat.

The class was meant to help women who might otherwise freeze in a fight, to get them past any retrograde ladylike sense of hesitation over hitting someone. The idea was to make wrestling and punch-throwing more familiar and comfortable, to simulate the mock—and not so mock—fighting that little boys allegedly got into throughout childhood.

“Okay,” their instructor, Diane, said. “You’re not expecting trouble. Where are you?”

Sophie fought an interior sigh as a handful of improbable answers occurred: on a climb in Nepal or in a yellow submarine. Aboard the great Verdanii sailing ship Breadbasket, in a world these earnest women would never hear of. But six sessions in this fluorescent-lit room, with its smell of feet and tension, had given her plenty of time to come to grips with the group’s expectations.

“Coming out of a bar.”

“Drunk?”

“Just tipsy.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Parked in a well-lit—”

Diane’s role was to ask questions until Sophie at least half-forgot Marc was back there, but this time he went for surprise by jumping in right away.

The flat of his hand struck the small of her back. Sophie all but face-planted into the mat.

“Roll!” someone shouted.

It was too late to somersault back to her feet like some kind of cartoon warrior. She flung herself sideways instead, wheezing. He’d winded her.

Marc was already pouncing, dragging her by her shoulder and a handful of her hair.

Sophie turned her head sharply. It was enough to pull her curls out of the glove as she grabbed for his eyes with her free hand. She got a grip on the mesh mask, remembered she was supposed to be screaming, let out one breathless “No!” and went for the knee to the groin . . .

. . . and, briefly, remembered trying a similar move on a bona-fide monster, its hot, rotten breath and the slick of blood on the floor . . .

Then she flashed on the sound of her aunt’s neck, snapping.

Her knee came up, right on target, and it was a good hit, hard contact.

Mark let her go but didn’t pretend to collapse.

“We’re over the line,” he said gently.

It was true. He’d yanked her over the white chalk smear, the imaginary boundary between life and death.

“Nice try, Sophie, but he got you,” Diane affirmed as Sophie sucked air past the shards of glass in her lungs. “Elke, you’re up.”

Sophie thought, I’m quite the action hero.

After everyone had had a turn, they practiced clobbering inanimate foam targets as hard as they could, yelling “Commit, commit, commit!” with every blow. Then they stretched and debriefed on everyone’s success in fighting off—or, in her case, not fighting off—Marc.

“Go home and be safe,” Diane said finally, a benediction and a dismissal all in one.

The class was held in a San Francisco community center, a low-slung brick building painted with kids’ murals.

“No ride today?” a classmate asked as they stepped out into the parking lot. Sophie suspected she had a bit of a crush. She’d told the woman Bram was gay, but her enthusiasm for him hadn’t dimmed.

Scanning the lot for her brother’s car, Sophie shook her head. “It’s cool. I’ll catch BART as far as—”

A honk interrupted her.

Her heart sank as she recognized her mother.

Ambushed! She checked her phone, but there was no text from Bram.

Regina Hansa was already cracking the passenger door.

“How did it go?” she asked, as though they did this every week. Her mother had always favored car rides for parent-child heart-to-hearts. No escape that way.

Sophie pressed herself inside, through the thick air. “I got a few good shots in.”

They sat for a minute in silence, her mom not going anywhere, not saying anything. It was a good tactic—Sophie never could let a silence stretch.

“How’d you find me?”

“Bram’s got that creepy stalker app installed on his phone. It shows your GPS location.”

“You stole Bram’s phone?”

“Borrowed.” Her mother held it up.

Sophie managed to retrieve the phone without snatching it. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but—”

“I’m thinking that when your father and I came home from Sicily you were limping and mopey.”

“I don’t mope!”

“You finally defended your thesis, and then you turned down the job interview at the Scripps Institute. Then there’s all the training. I’d just about convinced myself you wanted to apply to the space program. Instead I find you taking”—her mother’s voice rose.—“self-defense classes.”

“Mom! Nobody’s attacked me.”

Her mother unknotted slightly.

She decided I’d been raped just as soon as she realized what I was doing here, Sophie thought.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t meant to worry.”

“I wasn’t meant to know about this at all, was I?” Regina started the car and pulled out into the light fog.

Where to begin? “I’m taking the class because . . . I’m filling time. I already told you, I’m waiting to hear about a sailing gig.”

“The one you can’t tell us about.”

“It’s not the space program. I thought the self-defense class would be—”

“Fun?”

This was the point where she should say yes, but Sophie was a rotten liar. Instead, she let out her breath in a whuff.

“Useful? Like the extra math drills and the knot-tying and the triathlon training and all the time you spend just looking at pictures of, I don’t know, sea snails and apparently trying to memorize every single species in the ocean?”

“A little training can never hurt, can it?”

“Training for what? If it’s not NASA, and you haven’t been attacked . . . are you expecting to be?”

That was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. “Mom, watch the road.”

“I found the pepper spray on your key ring.”

“It’s not like that.” Or it was, but hopefully that was a onetime outlier of a horrible experience.

“It’s not enough that you jump out of airplanes and risk the bends and shark bites every time you go off to pursue your so-called videography career. . . .”

“Mom, please. More people are killed by cows every year than sharks.”

“So you keep saying, but you’re not a farmer, are you? If it’s just a diving job, why the secrecy?”

“Talking about the secrecy is still talking about it.”

“If you’d joined the DEA or some other government agency, you wouldn’t be taking community center anti-rape classes. You’d be at Quantico, learning to defend yourself properly. With an enormous gun.”

“Federal Agent Sophie, that’s me.” It wasn’t a bad idea. Didn’t Quantico have programs for civilians?

“It’s not funny.”

Her mother was trying to wind her up. Get her babbling—play Twenty Questions. Then she could start mining out the truth as Sophie slipped and dropped clues. It was a good strategy. They both knew she was some-thing of a motormouth.

But Sophie had promised, under threat of having her memory wiped, no less.

And the truth might hurt more than her silence. She could imagine her mother’s face if she broke: I went looking for my birth parents.

Can of worms, or what?

The temptation to spill it all rose, as it always did. “It’s an incredibly cool gig, Mom. And important, okay? But I can’t talk about it.”

“Says who?”

“That would be talking about it, Mom.”

“You used to tell us everything.”

Her patience snapped. “Unlike you. What was it you’d say when I asked about the adoption? ‘Confidentiality, in this case, is nonnegotiable.’ ”

Regina stamped the brakes, too hard, at a red light. A driver behind them honked as they both snapped up against their seat belts.

“I would hate to think you’ve been waiting your entire life to say that.”

“What if I was? Twenty-five years ago you do a closed adoption, and what ever I might want to know about it, it’s just too bad. Isn’t that right?”

Regina’s voice was thready. “We made a promise.”

“Yeah,” Sophie said. “Gave your word, and too bad for me. Shoe’s on the other foot now, Mom.”

Her mother rocked in her seat, clutching the wheel. Sophie fought an urge to open the door while the car was stopped, to just run for it.

She’d never been at odds with her parents before. Her passion for climbing and diving made them anxious, but they’d worried quietly . . .

well, except for Dad hectoring her to finish her degree and do something worthwhile.

Worthwhile. Intellectual. Safe.

She stared at the dashboard, digging for something she could say that would help. But it wasn’t just that she’d promised—hell, she’d signed non-disclosure agreements and gotten multiple, tiresome, finger-wagging lectures on the subject. There’d been threats of jail, of magically wiping her memories, even, if she blabbed.

Secrecy, secrecy, secrecy.

In a way, the promises were beside the point, because telling the truth would land her in a facility for the profoundly delusional. She’d found her parents, all right, and they weren’t even from Earth.

“Now there’s a supermodel on my damned porch.”

The change of subject was so jarring that it took Sophie a second to make sense of her mother’s words. “What?”

Captain Garland Parrish, of the private sailing vessel Nightjar, was sitting on their stoop.

This was going to make things with her parents even worse. All the same, Sophie found herself smiling.

If he was here, odds were good she was going back to Stormwrack.

2

Parrish was dressed in normal American clothes: pressed tan slacks, a mustard T-shirt that hung very nicely indeed on his well-constructed frame, and a Mackenzie Sam jacket that had never quite fit right on Bram.

His hair was in serious need of a cut: black, lamb’s-wool curls hung every which way.

It was a relief. Sophie wouldn’t have put it past him to turn up in full captain’s uniform: breeches, long coat, and a bicorne hat straight out of a Napoleonic-era biopic. Stormwrackers rarely gave strangers a second glance, no matter how they dressed, but Parrish had obviously let Bram convince him that things weren’t the same here.

He had her mother’s polydactyl cat in his lap and was examining the extra toes on its front paws with an expression of delighted absorption.

Sophie hit the ground running, jumping out, doshing to the porch, and throwing herself into a hug. “Try not to talk too much,” she murmured in Fleet. He smelled, ever so faintly, of cedar and cloves. “And no bowing.”

“Understood,” he replied, sounding flustered.

“Mom, this is my friend Gar . . . Gary Parrish. Gary, my mother, Regina Hansa.”

“A pleasure, Mrs. Hansa.” He didn’t put a hand out. His accent was thicker than Sophie might have guessed.

“Doctor Hansa,” Mom said, tone frosty.

“Gary’s . . . uh, Gary’s a friend.”

“You said that.”

“I knocked, but . . .” He indicated the house. Her father had probably been out back, contemplating his roses or listening to Chopin.

Crap, crap. Now what?

“What do you do, Mr. Parrish?”

“Oh,” he said. “I came to get Sophie. I—”

Mom’s eyes narrowed. “You’re part of this sailing job she won’t tell me about.”

“I’m . . .” He frowned, processing, then seemed to realize it was true.

“Yes, that’s right.”

Oh, no. Time to go. “Yes. Mom, Gary’s here because—”

“So you’re a biologist? Or another crazed thrill seeker?”

“You can’t quiz him,” Sophie interrupted, before he could tell her he was a ship’s captain or, worse, mention Nightjar. Mom would do a Web search for the ship’s registration, fail, and get even more upset. And everything he said was coming out in that accent that wasn’t South Asian, which would have matched his looks, or German, which was what it sounded closest to. “He can’t talk about it either.”

Mom simmered for a second and went into the house. “Cornell,” she called. “Cornell!”

They wouldn’t have long. Sophie whispered in Fleet, “What are you doing here?”

“Bram tried to contact you, but his telephone is missing.”

“Mom snagged it,” she said.

“He was afraid that if Verena came, your parents might see she resembled you and realize you’d found your . . . your other family.”

“Verena’s at Bram’s?”

He nodded, keeping one eye on the house.

“She’s going to take us back to Stormwrack?”

“As soon as possible. We have . . .” He glanced at the sky, a habit-driven attempt to tell the time from the stars, but between the fog and the light pollution, there wasn’t much to see. “Perhaps an hour.”

“Has something happened?” She dialed a cab. She’d had her bags packed and ready to go at Bram’s for two months. She hadn’t dared leave them in her room.

Parrish opened his mouth to answer and that was when both parents came back out onto the porch.

United front, Sophie thought.

Her father taught Romantic poetry and the birth of the novel at Stanford, where he was one of the world’s authorities on Shelley. He was as acerbic as any British-born academic, and in the last few years he’d been making a name for himself by writing newspaper columns that railed against what he’d always called sloppy thinking.

“Your mother says you’ve been taking rape classes,” he said.

Sophie stifled an inward groan.

Just get through the next five minutes with a bit of grace. “Gary and I are going sailing. This is the trip I’ve been planning, the one I’ve told you about—”

“The one you’ve not told us about, to be precise. The one you’ve turned down the Scripps Institute for—”

“I could be gone awhile,” she interrupted.

“You’ll certainly be gone awhile.” Her father’s acidic repetition was a criticism of the vagueness. “The question is, how long?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I’ll e-mail when I can. I’ve told you I’m going to be hard to reach.”

“And in danger,” Mom put in.

This was the point where a sensible person would say, No, no, it’s just a sail, it’s a sensitive research project. Blahdeeblah confidentiality, don’t worry, it’ll all be fine. Sophie could never pull that off. She could barely lie to strangers. Trying to deceive her parents would be hopeless. “I have to do this. I have to. I’d tell you more if I could, I swear.”

“You’re not federal.” Dad was looking Garland up and down. “International Space Agency?”

“It’s not space,” Sophie said. “And he can’t talk about it either.”

“Let him speak for himself.”

Parrish pulled himself up as if he were a soldier at attention. “If it is within my power to keep your daughter safe, I will. You have my word.”

Dottar. Her father’s lips moved, committing the sound of it to memory. Mai verd.

She was saved by the taxicab, which pulled up behind Mom’s car.

“We gotta go,” Sophie said, tone bright despite the crushing guilt. She gave her father a hug, which he barely returned, and tried not to register how pale his face had gone. “I’m sorry, Dad, I am. I’d tell you if I could.”

Her mom clung. “I just want to understand.” She was tearing up. “Sophie, please. Tell us something.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she whispered, disentangling herself as gently as possible. “I’ll be in touch soon. Come on, Par—Gary.”

She could still feel her mother’s grip on her arm as she piled into the cab and pulled Parrish in after her. Regina tried to muster a wave.

I don’t deserve them. She was gut-achingly achurn with guilt. What to say? Could she have done that better? Looking back, she saw their faces through the cab’s back window, taut with two completely different expressions of devastation.

“Rape classes?” Parrish inquired, as she settled against the backseat, trying to banish the memory.

“Don’t, okay?” With that, she burst into tears.

© 2015 by A.M. Dellamonica. Excerpted from A Daughter of No Nation by A.M. Dellamonica. Published by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.M. Dellamonica is the author of Indigo Springs, winner of the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and its concluding sequel, Blue Magic. Her short stories have appeared in a number of fantasy and science fiction magazines and anthologies, and on Tor.com.

Artist Showcase: James Ng

Henry Lien | 2536 words

James Ng (pronounced “Ing”) was born in Hong Kong in 1985. After high school, he received a scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, majoring in illustration. He works as a freelance concept artist and illustrator for games, books and comics. He lives in Hong Kong but travels often to the United States for work and exhibitions. His website is jamesngart.com.

You are probably best known for your Chinese steampunk series of works entitled Imperial Steam and Light. The series explores the idea of the Industrial Revolution arriving in the world through China rather than the West. I am most interested in the aesthetic ramifications of this. Because the English Industrial Revolution happened during the Victorian era, the utilitarian items it produced were socially required to be ornately decorated. Even things like elevators and bridge supports were expected to be beautifully adorned, no matter how unnecessary the adornments. The idea that form should follow function had yet to exist. Your Imperial Steam and Light work seems to make corollary assumptions about the aesthetic effects of the Industrial Revolution first arising in China. Can you talk to us a bit more about this idea?

“Form follows function” is an idea I stick by for all my work. When I designed the concepts in Imperial Steam and Light, I visualized them from the perspective of someone who is in that world. Ornamentation actually serves a function to distinguish class in the Qing Dynasty, which the series is inspired by. If I am an engineer living in this world designing an airship, the ornamentation is functional in that it indicates that the ship belongs to the Imperial family. It is not purely decorative.

Beyond aesthetic considerations, the series explores the idea of how technology and modernization in general would be different if scientific development had been led by China rather than the West. For example, modern science developed in the West and as a consequence, Western medicine is extremely advanced and effective today. However, if China had led scientific development, would Chinese medicine have developed to a whole new level? I explore this idea in Crystal Herbalist.

Does the fact that China, rather than the West, birthed the Industrial Revolution in your series necessarily mean that the history of colonialism is reversed in this world? Does China colonize Europe like in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt? If so, what is it that is drawing China to Europe? The history of European colonization of China is centered on envy of resources like silk, tea, spices, gunpowder, etc. Is the Chinese colonization of Europe driven by resource envy? Or cultural envy? Even if Europe misses out on the Industrial Revolution, it still has the Renaissance and the cultural treasures and intellectual property produced by that period. Is that what would drive China’s reverse colonization? They want to loot all the tchotchkes out of the Louvre? They want to kidnap Beethoven and make him into the Emperor’s court composer?

This reminds me of a question that stumped me for a second during a convention panel. I was asked if I created this series as a fantasy “rematch” for the Chinese to take revenge. The Imperial Steam and Light world assumes that Western colonization never took place. Thus, my birthplace of Hong Kong would never have had British influence. Whether that is a good or bad thing, it is hard to dispute that Hong Kong became one of the wealthiest cities in the world because of British influence.

I didn’t create the series out of bitterness about the past, but as a way to envision the future. When I visit China, I often see historical Chinese buildings being torn down to make way for modern skyscrapers that lack any elements of my culture. If my series has a message, it would be that it is possible to modernize without losing historical cultural identity.

In the Imperial Steam and Light world, the reason that China does not invade the West is because it is itself under invasion by Manchurians. Manchurians are people from the North who invaded China to create the Qing Dynasty. The majority of the Chinese population are “Han” people who see Manchurians as outsiders. In this world, China is already ruled by foreign invaders who are too occupied with maintaining their minority rule to worry about invading additional countries, which has correlations to real Chinese history in our world. The Qing Dynasty was constantly occupied with quashing rebellions against Manchurian rule, which made the idea of expanding overseas to Europe impossible. My upcoming comic book will focus on this conflict.

In my series, I have written in the West as a third party that is interested in the riches of China. Some Westerners have allied themselves with the Empire, while some have allied themselves with the rebels. It is also interesting that you mentioned the Renaissance. One of the Westerner characters in the story is a descendant of Leonardo DaVinci. She is of course allied with the good guys in the story. Perhaps DaVinci’s flying machine will come into play in this world as well.

Finally, in the series, China does not colonize the West but it does become a bully to its neighbors. There is a female pirate character from India who fights against unfair trade treaties imposed by the Imperial Chinese.

I notice that despite the use of Western representational painting techniques, your work also embraces elements of Chinese painting such as the uniform isometric viewpoint. What are some of the other technical or philosophical elements in your work that derive from Chinese tradition?

My signature stamp would be the most obvious element that is derived from Chinese paintings. I also enjoy the use of negative space and calligraphy. I should add that the calligraphy was done by my father. I can read and write Chinese, but I have no calligraphy ability, which is of course a distinct art form in Chinese culture. I had him write the calligraphy, and then I painted what he wrote. I think he enjoys being part of my work.

Have you read Ken Liu’s outstanding novel The Grace of Kings? Liu calls his book a “silkpunk” novel. He does an interesting thing with technology by having a fanciful culture inspired by Chinese civilization achieving many of the same military and engineering accomplishments of the Industrial Revolution. However, they are achieved with fanciful, but logical and plausible, technological inventions that use materials such as bamboo and silk that have long traditions in Chinese civilization, rather than using technologies that first developed in the West (in our world). His technologies are thus harmonious with the culture that produced them. Your Chinese steampunk pieces, on the other hand, seem to embrace an uncomfortable clash between natural materials and fine Chinese ornamentation on the one hand and heavy, noisy, belching mechanical elements on the other hand. Was this tension intentional?

I am aware of Ken’s work. I actually did a small ink piece for his short story, “Good Hunting,” which I really enjoyed. The clash of natural materials with rustic and heavy machinery in my work is absolutely intentional. As I talked about earlier, I wanted to show that modernization is possible while keeping our traditions. To show that, merging the two clashing visuals into something that is pleasing is a goal I set out to accomplish. I should also note that to help visualize these concepts, research is very important. I read up on how a steam engine functions, its history and limitations. I embellished the visuals with fantastical elements, but I always kept in mind that, in order to convince the viewer to believe in the unbelievable, I have to base it on real function and real history.

In the science fiction/fantasy community in the West, there is a lot of discussion about the issues of diversity, cultural appropriation, and the colonial gaze. Is this an issue that you feel as an artist living in Hong Kong? How do you feel when non-Chinese artists take on Chinese material? Are there examples where you feel that the artist “got it right”? Honest answer.

Oh, for sure there are examples where non-Chinese create visuals that reduce Chinese culture to a joke. Characters whose only personality is “being Chinese” as if that’s a real person. It’s hard to find an Asian character who is not a hot chick, nerd, chef, or Kung Fu guy. I tried to stay away from these types of themes in my work. Instead, I tried to explore things such wedding traditions in Bridal Carriage, and Chinese superstition in Exorcist.

To be honest, it’s hard to find examples where I feel they “got it right” completely. One exception might be the Kung Fu Panda series. It is ironic because Kung Fu and pandas are probably some of the most stereotypical things about Chinese culture. However, they got a lot of the details correct: the pronunciation, the small visuals, the colors and themes. I think it is okay to use some generic visuals or characteristics, as long as that is not the only thing there, and the culture isn’t reduced to serve as a joke or plot point.

What are some of the common mistakes or clichés that non-Chinese artists should avoid when representing Chinese material? Honest answer.

The font! The red calligraphy delivery menu font that looks like slices of oranges is non-existent in Hong Kong or anywhere in Asia. At least I have never seen it. Nonetheless, it is always there when a non-Chinese tries to create a Chinese visual. A lot of Chinese-owned businesses in the West use that font, but I think that they are simply relying on that as an easy way to identify themselves to non-Chinese because the association is already ingrained in the West. I don’t think it’s offensive or anything dramatic, I just think it’s not needed and overused.

Is there currently an identifiable aesthetic to science fiction/fantasy illustration, manga, or anime coming out of Hong Kong that is distinct from what other Asian cultures are producing? If so, how would you articulate the differences? And where do you feel you fit, in relation to that aesthetic?

Yes, Hong Kong comics have a distinct style that looks like ink and watercolor. The drawing and proportions are similar to American comics but the coloring looks much more traditional. Themes usually revolve around fantasy in ancient China with magical weapons and secret martial art techniques. Hong Kong comic legend Ma Wing Shing’s Stormrider series is unforgettable. The art is amazing and I feel it is criminally underrated by comic fans. I myself have not thought about producing a Hong Kong-style comic book. Even the book I’m working on now is more Western in art style mainly because I’m better at Western painting. However, I have made it a point not to use too much hard-edge ink like in the Marvel and DC books. I want to try to maintain a softer feel to the work so it resembles traditional Chinese artwork more.

What are some things that influenced your work?

This list can go on forever. One that comes to mind is William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake explored the idea of growing up as an adult with experience while maintaining a child’s curiosity and innocence. An example would be riding a bicycle. If you ask an adult who does not know how to ride a bike to hop on and try it, most of them would decline because they fear falling or looking foolish. However, a child would probably hop on and hurt himself a few times but learn to ride the bike in the end. The adult’s decision is rooted in experience, knowing that falling hurts, and looking foolish sucks. The child’s decision is rooted in innocence and curiosity. To mature as a person, it’s best to have the heart of a child but the experience of an adult. Try and experiment with new things and learn from everything, but have the knowledge to prepare yourself for the endeavor. Every single new piece of art I do, I try something I have never done before to make myself uncomfortable so I can learn. I do a ton of research first so I’m not just blindly hopping on a bike and falling all over the place. I don’t think my clients would like that.

Another thing that has helped me as a freelancer is martial arts. It really taught me self-discipline. As I am my own boss in my work, I have to schedule everything myself to make sure I’m on task.

Recently I’ve been a big fan of the phrase “progress over perfection.” To me, the finished artwork is just the by-product. It is the development of skills and understanding during the production that is the art. If I strive for perfection in the product, I will never be happy with my work. However, if I strive for progress within my production, I will always improve. If I were to determine that I’ve reached “perfection,” I would cease to be an artist because I’m “done.” However, striving for progress is never-ending. I would prefer never to reach perfection and instead keep progressing forever.

Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you wished I had?

My Imperial Steam and Light project is now heading to the next step as a comic book. I’ve written a story and 250 years of alternate history and designed the main characters. You can check out some drafts at bit.ly/imperial_steam. It’s a large page with lots of images so please let it load for a few seconds.

Also very important, my favorite food is meatball sub.

What project would you most like to work in the future?

I’m working on my dream project now: my own story, my own characters and robots, my own world. I would love to find publishers willing to be part of it. I currently have twelve chapters planned. I’m thinking of funding the first three chapters via Kickstarter. You can support me for now by giving me some feedback via social media!

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Henry Lien is an art dealer and proprietor of The Glass Garage Gallery in Los Angeles. He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. 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. 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, has sold his work to Asimov’s, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Interfictions, and has been nominated for a Nebula. He is originally from Taiwan. Visit his author website at henrylien.com.

Book Reviews: December 2015

Amal El-Mohtar | 1846 words

Fairy Tale Feasts

In this month’s column, we review Radiance, by Catherynne M. Valente, The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Bone Swans, by C. S. E. Cooney.

• • • •

As the year winds into winter, that season of feasts and firesides, I’m drawn to writers who take fairy tales between their teeth and gnaw them to the marrow. Engaging gorgeously with both the content and concept of fairy tales are the following books, each grinding favourite stories into flour and baking them into wildly different delicious shapes.

A moment’s dwelling on full disclosure: Catherynne Valente and C.S.E. Cooney are both dear friends of mine. In both cases I fell in love with their words first.

Radiance
Catherynne M. Valente
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0765335296
Tor Books
October 2015
432 pages

Radiance is the sort of novel about which you have to speak for hours or hardly speak at all: either stop at “it’s magnificent” or roll on to talk about form, voice, ambition, originality, innovation for more thousands of words than are available to me here before even touching on the plot.

Assembled from film footage, personal diaries, ad copy, gossip rags and grudging testimony, Radiance is the search for Severin Unck, a documentary film maker who vanished while shooting her most ambitious project: an investigation into the destruction of Adonis, a small fishing village on Venus. But this is a thoroughly different Venus in a thoroughly different solar system, where humans left Earth for the aether-ridden stars in the 1870s and populated its planets with their imperial powers, supported in their reach by a protein-dense substance called callowmilk, harvested from callowhales, enormous creatures so little understood that it’s uncertain whether they’re animal or vegetable.

Most of the action—if it can be called action when it’s an assemblage of documents—takes place between the 1920s and 1960s, alternating glimpses of Severin’s childhood (through the eye of her father’s constantly shooting camera) with segments of the work of her adulthood and the aftermath of her disappearance. Mysteries unspool into mysteries: the secret of Severin’s birth mother, depositing her on Percival Unck’s doorstep and stepping out of her story; the secret of what happened on Adonis; the question of who murdered Thaddeus Irigaray and why. But these questions are grace notes in the orchestral swell of this book, a book with a protean spine self-consciously shifting from Noir to Gothic to Fairy Tale as Percival Unck and Vincenza Mako argue over what kind of story they will make of Severin’s life and perhaps-death.

In its execution—juxtaposing fragments of varied voices that tell a story between them as much as to you—it reminded me of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, but turned outwards instead of in: there are no footnotes here to bend the eye down and deep, but constant calls to look out, look at each other, look at the solar system, look through this camera. There are musings—wonderful, heart-breaking musings—on what stories are, on what they do to people. There are repeated invitations to question your narrators even as they give you systems with which to understand what they offer.

It’s magnificent. It’s Valente’s best novel yet, by a very wide margin, and one of the best I’ve read this year.

The Buried Giant
Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0307271037
Knopf
March 2015
317 pages

In The Buried Giant, history, character and fable slip and hook into each other like links in chain mail until you can step back to see what sort of whole it makes. It’s a mist-smudged homage to Arthurian myth, silvered into a kind of story-telling smoke.

In an England after Arthur, after the Romans, a strange memory-thieving fog covers the land, plagued also with ogres, pixies, and dragons: Christian Britons and pagan Saxons communicate haphazardly, trading, living, intermarrying, mostly unaware of the world outside their day-to-day transactions. Beatrice and Axl, an elderly couple tired of the casual mistreatment they receive in their village, decide to set out to visit their estranged son in his village some distance away. On their journey they meet a strange boatman and an old woman who plagues him by slaughtering rabbits in the ruins of a Roman villa; a Saxon warrior, Wistan, and a monster-bitten orphan boy, Edwin; and Gawain, one of the last of Arthur’s knights, tasked with slaying the great she-dragon Querig, whose breath may be the source of the mist.

This book provoked a lot of controversy when it appeared: Ishiguro made a comment (bit.ly/NYT_Ishiguro) saying he hoped readers wouldn’t dismiss the book because of the fantasy elements, Ursula Le Guin responded (bit.ly/leguin_ishiguro) pointing out that “Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality,” to which Ishiguro responded (bit.ly/guardian_snobbery) saying he’s “on the side of ogres and pixies.” I don’t want to argue with Le Guin’s reading of the book—the reading of which she found “painful”—but I do disagree with it completely.

The Buried Giant is quiet, which is an odd thing to say about a book chiefly made up of circling conversations: but it is quiet, and it is devastating, and it is beautiful. It’s a fable that doesn’t draw and quarter itself into allegory, but asks painful questions about collective and individual memory, the grace and agony of growing old together, and the nature of love. Beatrice asks, early on in the book:

“I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”

These questions shift their shape throughout the book the way light shifts through swirling fog, as conversations are revisited, layers of forgetfulness fall away, and terrible truths surface like bones from a shallow grave.

I was powerfully moved by this book and thoroughly absorbed in its reading. It’s steeped in Arthuriana and lovingly contributes to it; I saw nothing in this book that smacked of genre snobbery, nothing that seemed to me an awkward appropriation of fantasy tropes. Its fantasy lineage is more Gawain and the Green Knight than The Fionavar Tapestry, but that’s hardly a criticism.

Bone Swans
C.S.E. Cooney
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN 978-0988912441
Mythic Delirium Books
July 2015
224 pages

Collecting five novellas, one of which is original to it, Bone Swans is a vivacious, eminently devourable debut thick with the language and experience of folk and fairy stories. Absolutely no one inhabits fairy tale the way Cooney does. Other writers might retell fairy tales, muse on fairy tales, be inspired by fairy tales, but she synthesizes them with a fierce tenderness utterly her own: Cooney’s mode of composition is to bury fairy tale bones beneath a juniper tree and coax them up out of the earth to sing of how much they loved their murder.

Of the five stories in this collection—featuring desert cities, drowned cities, ruined cities, perfectly urbane mayoral cities, and cities hollowed out by apocalyptic plague—I’ll single out two particular favourites: “The Bone Swans of Amandale” (the original piece from which the collection is titled) and “How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One,” which first appeared in GiaNotoSaurus and may still be read there (bit.ly/giga_milkmaid).

An ancient juniper tree grows in Amandale, and beneath it Ulia Gol, the ogress Mayor, buries the slaughtered bodies of Swan Folk, forcing children to sing their bones out of the earth and into the shape of musical instruments. She’s assembling a whole orchestra out of swan bones, instruments who’ll play themselves and spare her the cost of shelling out for musicians. Of the bevy Ulia Gol has killed only one swan-lady remains: Dora Rose, beloved of our narrator, Maurice, one of the Rat Folk. Together with the Pied Piper and three children Ulia Gol mangled for disobedience, they set about foiling the Ogress’ plans.

Cooney constitutes whole worlds and landscapes out of fairy tale: “The Juniper Tree” is the background magic that fuels Ulia Gol’s work, which is the substance of a ballad, which is thwarted with reference to “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” who in turn has his powers from a dreaded Fairy Queen. But these aren’t played for laughs, and the world isn’t a Tenth Kingdom style romp through a stylised symbology of popular stories: Maurice is an amoral, unreliable narrator, and no happiness is wholly without pain.

In “How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One,” Gordenne Faircloth, the titular Milkmaid, is accused of being Gentry-born (which is to say, of Faerie) because her father has claimed she can spin straw into gold. What follows is a “Rumplestiltskin” retold by way of “East o’the Sun, West o’the Moon” and the Mabinogion, with all characters granted the depth and richness one would expect from a novel-length work.

There’s a splendid theatricality to Cooney’s dialogue, an energy that itches through every line: each piece, regardless of narration, has a voice in it that is explicitly telling stories with appetite and relish. Her characters command, demand attention, and reward that attention with troublesome enchantment that resolves, as in all good fairy stories, into satisfaction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Interview: Andy Weir

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 6163 words

Andy Weir is the author of the best-selling science fiction novel The Martian, about an astronaut stranded on Mars who must use his knowledge of science to survive long enough to be rescued. The story began as a free serial on Andy’s website, and when he uploaded the book to Amazon.com, The Martian quickly shot up the charts, where it attracted the interest of an editor from Crown. The Martian is now available in bookstores everywhere, and a big budget movie adaptation came out in theaters October 2.

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.

Let’s start by having you tell us about how you got interested in reading science fiction.

I think I was doomed to be a nerd, because my father is a particle physicist and my mother was an electrical engineer. My dad had an infinite supply of 1950s and ’60s science fiction novels. It’s interesting, in that the SF that I read when I was growing up was one generation off of what you’d expect for my age. I grew up reading baby-boomer SF. My holy trinity of authors is Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Speaking of Heinlein, I was wondering if you had ever read his Tunnel in the Sky.

That’s one of my favorite Heinlein novels. I love a good man-versus-nature story.

It seems like it would be your sort of thing.

It’s a fantastic novel. I don’t know when it was written—in the early 1950s, maybe—and the main character of that story is black. In that era, if he’d overtly stated it, then the book would’ve been classified . . . “Oh, we’ll just sell it to black people.” And he didn’t want that, so he was just really subtle, but he dropped three or four clues in the book that you could back-calculate. He was pretty forward-thinking for his time, and managed to outmaneuver the publishers and marketers.

For people who haven’t read it, the premise is that there are these kids sent to survive for a week on an alien planet, and then there’s a disaster and they end up getting stranded there. How did you start writing your own fiction?

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing silly fiction. I wrote short stories when I was twelve. I can’t think of a specific time when I “got my start” on that.

In college you wrote your first novel, right?

If you can call it that. It was pretty bad, but I think everyone’s first novel is pretty bad. It was a dystopian future thing and . . . it’s embarrassing. The good news is I wrote it before the days of the internet, so I never had the opportunity to post it online. Which means it’s not out there for anyone to find.

Talk about what happened to you after college, and what happened with your writing.

I went to college to be a software engineer, and I’ve spent twenty-five years as a computer programmer. I just quite my day job about a year and a half ago to go full time on the writing, once it was clear that The Martian could financially support me. I wasn’t willing to take that kind of financial risk of being a full time writer. It’s a pretty risky proposition. I was working at AOL around 1999 and they laid me off, along with 800 other people, when they merged with Netscape. I had a really good severance package, plus I had a lot of stock options. When you’re laid off, you have sixty days to sell your stock options or they just disappear. So I was forced to sell them at what turned out to be AOL’s all-time peak.

So I ended up with a bunch of money—I assure you I would not have made such a wise financial decision left to my own devices—and I could go two years without having to work, so I took my shot at being a full time writer. I wrote another book, my second book, called Theft of Pride, and it was a space opera kind of book: Awesome alien races that all, for some reason, are comfortable in each other’s atmospheres, and the Star Trek, Star Wars kind of feel. It was about a thief trying to steal a national treasure of this planet. I thought the story was fairly solid, but the wordsmithing, the prose, the skill of writing—or lack thereof—was the problem. It was certainly a lot better than my first effort. I tried to get it published, and I have the standard sob story that every struggling author has: I just couldn’t get any traction; no one was interested. The nice agents were the ones who sent me rejection letters. After three years I gave up, and I went back to computer programming, which wasn’t a huge defeat for me, because I like programming. It wasn’t like I was some poor cubicle dweller. It’s a challenging career, it keeps me mentally active. I get along great with my co-workers anywhere I’ve ever worked.

I know that you worked at Blizzard; was that at that time?

I worked at Blizzard before AOL, in 1995. I was one of the programmers on Warcraft 2.

I was curious, because I played a lot of Warcraft 2 back in the day.

I’m glad I could help burn thousands of hours of your life that otherwise might have been productive.

When I was in college, my roommate got addicted to playing on my computer, and one night he was supposed to go out on a date and I went out and came back, and I could hear “We move! We move! Yes sir! We move!” And I was like, “He’s back early; I guess the date didn’t last very long.” But he had actually brought the girl back to our room to watch him play Warcraft 2.

So that can go one of two ways: If she’s into Warcraft, too, that can go really well. If not, that’s the worst date in history.

I think it was more of the latter.

That’s unfortunate.

I was just curious if you had any stories from your time at Blizzard, or any memories that stand out.

Blizzard was one of the most unpleasant jobs I ever had. Most of the people were cool; it’s just the workload was so intense. The software industry has really calmed down, but back in the early to mid-’90s, software engineers were mistreated. At Blizzard, if you were awake, you were at work. I remember working sixteen hours a day, every day, and on weekends and holidays. I remember I had this reunion planned with my friends, we were all going to get together and meet up in San Diego. Blizzard’s office was in Irvine, so it’s a decent distance away. It was just a Saturday and Sunday; I told the people at Blizzard a month in advance and I got a lot of shit; people were angry at me. And while I was there, they called me many times with questions. The product we made was really good, and I’m proud to have been a part of it, but working at Blizzard was miserable. Working at any game company or start-up—Blizzard was a start-up at that time—was miserable, so it’s not Blizzard, that’s just how the industry was at the time.

Had you gotten into that because you were passionate about games? Did that affect how you felt about games?

I wasn’t like your former roommate, but the idea of being a game programmer was exciting, being fresh out of college and in my twenties. I burnt out at Blizzard. Nowadays I’m not much of a gamer. I guess I never really was.

So you were talking about how you worked for many years as a software programmer, and then you got into self-publishing. Tell us about how that started.

After three years of not being able to get my book published, I went back into the industry and started working as a software engineer. Around this time is when the internet started to become a thing; it had been around, but now it was fairly easy to make your own website. So I made a webpage; I made web comics, short stories, and serials—just posted a chapter here and there of a continuing storyline. The Martian was just one of those serials.

Now there’s a huge community of self-publishing people, but back then were you doing it on your own? Were you networking with other people?

I was on my own. I wouldn’t call myself a self-publisher at that point. I was really more of a blogger. I didn’t have any intention of making money; it was a hobby. Everything I posted was for free, there wasn’t even a registration on my site. It’s still there. You can go and read most of my stuff. There were no advertisements, no donation button—nothing. What I really wanted to get out of it was an audience, and I think that’s pretty common among writers. Our main motivation is to know that people are reading your stuff. I’m sure that’s one of your motivations with your podcast, right?

Absolutely. But as I understand it, one of the things that first took off for you was this short story you wrote called “The Egg.” Tell us how that came about.

That was my first success in narrative fiction; my web comic, called Casey and Andy, got fairly popular. But “The Egg” was just a story that I banged out in forty minutes and posted to my site, just like many other short stories I do, and I didn’t think much of it. But it got really popular, and I think the reason is that it’s got a cool plot twist at the end. Second off, the whole thing is a thousand words long—about a page and a half—and that’s a good digestible size for the modern internet audience; about as much attention span as people are willing to put into a link their friends randomly send them. It’s also small enough that people could copy and paste the entire content into their blog. It helped a lot because I have a mailing list, so people can sign up and I would send updates whenever I posted new content to my site, and over ten years I slowly accumulated readers. Then some of them became permanent, regular readers.

This is interesting, because my girlfriend is writing what they call flash fiction, these really short, thousand-word stories, and she’s always agonizing over where to send them or what to do with them. I’ve been telling her, “Don’t worry about it; nobody gets famous writing thousand-word stories.” But then I read your story. Is that something you’d recommend writers do? Or is that so much of a fluke it’s not a really good way of directing your energy?

I think it was a fluke, although what I would recommend to any writer is to write whatever you’re willing to write. The hardest thing for a writer is buckling down and doing the work, so whatever it is that you are passionate about and inspires enough to do the work on, that’s what you should write about, because it will probably be good. When you’re talking about a really short style, like a thousand words, I don’t know that many people who have gotten popular off of it. And neither did I, by the way. It’s really The Martian that put me into the publishing world, not “The Egg.” “The Egg” became like a meme for a while, and got me a lot of regular readers and it was great, but it wasn’t the launching-off point for me.

I should point out that self-published novellas are increasingly becoming a good way of breaking in, because self-pubbing now is digital, so you don’t need a 250-page book, you can say, “Here’s a fifty-page novella, and I don’t charge very much for it.” A good example of that is Hugh Howey; the book that we call Wool is actually five different novellas that he released at different times.

It seems like the audience you built up from writing “The Egg” played an integral role in the composition of The Martian.

It did and it didn’t. I had a lot of those regular readers already, but I did build up more readers from “The Egg,” and that core group of readers is what started the word of mouth on The Martian. I’m sure it mattered; I honestly don’t know what would’ve happened in a parallel universe where I wrote The Martian but never wrote “The Egg.”

You had this idea that I think went back to 2002 about a guy stranded on Mars, and so you start serializing it on your website, and then you start getting all this feedback from chemists and physicists. I think that’s interesting.

That’s true, and getting that feedback was great because they would tell me places where I was wrong and I would go correct it. For the record, I first got the idea around 2005 and I posted the first chapter in 2009. The scientists that I had as regular readers . . . I didn’t pick them up from “The Egg.” I actually picked them up mostly from a web comic I had written starting around 2000 called Casey and Andy. I made two or three scripts a week, every week, for years; the last one was number 666. And it was a science dork-based comic. The plots all revolved around these two mad scientists.

That’s interesting, because another thing that really strikes me about The Martian is that you expected this to only appeal to a niche audience of hardcore science geeks.

Yes.

I think you can really see that in the book; it’s just so heavy on the science. But it turns out it has this mass appeal. Has that renewed your faith in humanity, that so many people are interested?

I don’t define humanity’s value by their interest in science, but it did baffle me that so many people took an interest. I made the main character, Mark Watney, a smart-ass and flippant. He cracks a lot of jokes. I knew he was going to be explaining a lot of science to the readers, and if I didn’t want it to read like a Wikipedia article, I needed to present it in a funny way. And people really liked the humor in the book. For the folks who aren’t that interested in science, I’ve learned since then that when they’re reading a book they skim over the parts where it’s describing the science in detail. Which is actually pretty cool, because it means that some point earlier in the book I must have established a level of trust with the reader; the reader just assumes the stuff I’m telling them is accurate and factual. That’s a big deal for a writer, to get the readers’ trust to that level. I accidentally bungled into mass appeal by making a smart-ass character that’s an everyman.

This book does have a tremendous amount of authority to it, even to someone like me. It feels very real. But I’ve heard that even people like Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station, says this feels right to him—the science and the way the astronauts and NASA administrators act. You somehow depicted it all accurately.

Thanks. I put a huge amount of work into the science and I enjoy research and I’m a space nerd, so that stuff’s really easy for me. When it comes to personalities, I didn’t know anyone in aerospace at the time I wrote it, so I was just guessing. For astronauts, I based it off of the personalities of astronauts that I’d seen in documentaries and interviews. As for NASA’s administration and how people at NASA interact . . . Earlier in life, I had worked for Sandia National Labs, in Livermore. I started when I was fifteen, basically lab assistant stuff, and it is a large, federally funded research facility, so I projected that onto NASA. And it turns out that was right; when I went to Johnson Space Center, they gave me a bunch of tours—and it was awesome, one of the best weeks of my life. The director, Dr. Ellen Ochoa, a four-time astronaut, said, “For every NASA character that you have in the book, I could point to someone in the real organization and say ‘that guy has that exact personality.’”

What other feedback are you getting? Do you get letters from kids saying they want to be astronauts now? Or are there fan letters that really strike you?

Lots of fan mail from kids, teens, and adults alike; the ones I really like start with, “I don’t usually read/like science fiction, but . . .” That makes me feel good, because that means I’m snagging people who generally aren’t interested in science at all. And one thing I thought was super sweet: A woman sent me a picture of her daughter dressed up in astronaut clothes and said that she’s going to be Commander Lewis for Halloween. This was before the movie, like last year. I wasn’t making any sort of femininist statement; I arbitrarily decided that the commander of the mission would be a woman, but if it inspires little girls, then that’s pretty cool.

There was a video I saw online of Elon Musk critiquing The Martian and then it was intercut with you responding to it. Could you tell us about that?

His original comments were not directed at me, he was just answering questions to an interviewer. They just had me respond to his comments.

One of his comments was that he thought it might make people scared to go to Mars; he thought maybe you should’ve written a book where they have a nice vacation on Mars.

I don’t think that would be quite as popular. I don’t think anybody’s under the illusion that going to Mars would be safe. People understand that space travel, and especially something like an interplanetary mission in the early days, is going to be inherently dangerous.

And there are a lot of dangers to Mars that you had trouble dealing with in the book, right? Like the radiation. Do you want to talk about some of the criticisms of the book? What do you think have been some of the more valid criticisms?

The biggest deviance from reality in the book is the force of the sandstorm. At the beginning of the novel, our protagonist is stranded as a result of a sandstorm on Mars that damaged their equipment and forced them to abort. In reality, Mars’ atmosphere is so thin that, while it does get 150 kilometer an hour winds, the inertia of that wind is too little to do anything. It would feel like a gentle breeze on Earth. I knew that at the time I wrote the story, and I did have an alternate beginning in mind where they do a MAV engine test and it causes a problem: They start to leak fuel and they have to launch before their fuel leaks out. It would be completely accurate to physics, but it wasn’t nearly as exciting. And this is a man-versus-nature story, so I wanted nature to get the first punch. Long after the book came out and the movie was in post-production, I talked to a guy at NASA and he said, “Most people don’t know this, but Mars has lightning.” And I was like, “Ah, a lightning strike! That could’ve been pretty cool.”

The other thing I did was with radiation; I hand-waved around it. A lot of people critique the story by saying, “He didn’t account for radiation.” I disagree. I accounted for it by inventing a bullshit technology. So within the context of the book, at some point between now and the twenty years from now when that Mars mission takes place, they have invented a material that’s thin, flexible, and has a dramatic radiation reduction. Nothing remotely like it exists, unlike the other technologies shown in the book, which are either real-world tech or reasonable and expected improvements. Like the ion engine Hermes has are more powerful than have ever been made, but we know how to do it: just make them bigger.

Now maybe some kid will invent it because he read about it in The Martian.

Good. I’m sure there’s a lot more than some kid working on it; radiation is one of the biggest problems for interplanetary travel. The only solution they have requires a whole lot of mass; water is actually pretty good at blocking radiation, so if you have ten centimeters of water between you and the outside, that’s pretty good. So you say, “Store the crew’s water supply in the hull.” The problem is that’s way more water than the crew needs, so it just ends up being dead weight, and it’s an enormous amount of mass. You’d have more mass dedicated to radiation shielding than you have dedicated to the rest of the ship.

Fortunately, it’s come out that there’s lots of water on Mars, so . . .

There is. The biggest problem is while you’re on your way to Mars and back. Most of the problems come from GCRs, which stands for Galactic Cosmic Rays, which is a really bad name because they’re not cosmic rays; they’re these relativistic moving particles that are generated by the galaxy and they’re passing through our solar system. The sun is easy to block—you can just put something between you and the sun—but the GCRs come from all directions uniformly. When you’re on Mars, Mars itself is blocking half of the GCRs; the second huge advantage is you set up your base and just cover it with a meter of Martian soil. It protects you from radiation just fine. In space, they’re spending months in a spacecraft and it’s being bombarded with these high-energy particles, and the crew’s cancer risk would just go up and up.

What do you think about the way previous science fiction novels have dealt with Mars? Are there any you’re particularly fond of?

Ben Bova’s Mars. I liked it because it had a lot of accurate science in it; it had some hand-wavy stuff, too, but—and I won’t give away the twist—all the astronauts start to get sick and all the people on the surface are just getting sicker and they’re wondering if they caught some pathogen native to Mars. I thought the resolution to that plot was very clever.

That’s a terrific book. I was going to recommend it if you hadn’t read it. It has the most science of any science fiction novel about Mars that I’ve read. How about movies about Mars? I thought it was interesting: For the The Martian movie, they filmed it at a particular location, and the Wikipedia article mentioned that three previous Mars movies had been filmed in the same location. And I don’t think any of them broke twenty-five percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The location is Wadi Rum, a desert in Jordan. I know that they filmed Lawrence of Arabia there. What were the other Mars movies?

Red Planet, Mission to Mars, and Journey to Mars.

It really looks like Mars, so it’s a great location. When you talk about Mars movies, there’s what they call “The Mars Curse” in the movie industry; that was actually something that was going to, potentially, be a problem in getting The Martian greenlighted. The last significant commercial success that took place on Mars was Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I might be wrong; there may be something in the middle there. And it’s also that some things people don’t like were also commercial successes. I actually liked Mission to Mars, with Gary Sinise. Didn’t like the one with Val Kilmer as much. I think Mars is a big topic. The Martian, John Carter, Mars Needs Moms, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians all took place on Mars, but those movies are not, in any way, similar. I think comparing movies that take place on Mars is not that productive. It’s like saying Cloverfield took place in New York City and so does the TV show Friends; let’s compare them.

My issue with Red Planet and Mission to Mars is that the astronauts don’t seem to act like astronauts; they seem to act like high school students, who are very angry and not in control of their emotions.

Yeah, that’s one of the most unrealistic things in my opinion, when astronauts are incapable of working together as a team or respecting their commander’s decisions, because in real life that does not happen. Sometimes the astronauts will get a little testy with each other on long-duration ISS stays, a little bit of cabin fever, but nothing like the complete acrimonious stuff you see in movies. They’re psychologically vetted for these missions before they get sent on them. They want to make sure that exact thing doesn’t happen.

I’ve heard you make the point that, when you have a million candidates and you’re picking the top six, you’re selecting people who have good interpersonal skills.

For the most part, you can expect people who are on a manned Mars mission where, in the context of The Martian, it requires them to be together for over a year, and there’s six of them in fairly confined quarters . . . it’s not a space shuttle, and they still have more space than ISS astronauts, but those six better get along. And in the story I think I show that. The crew gets along all the time.

You definitely portray the bond between them really well, and that makes it effective as a story. I got choked up a lot reading this book because you have this sense of people caring about each other and trying their damnedest to save each other.

It’s not a new concept, that relationship among crewmates. If you just imagine a squad at war—soldiers, and the sort of camaraderie and loyalty they have to each other—that same psychological effect happens to astronauts. They’re like a family.

Speaking of the crew, this movie has an unbelievable cast; there’re ten people, any one of which could headline a movie on their own. Talk about how you ended up with so many big-name stars.

It kind of snowballed. Matt Damon said he was up for playing the lead and then Ridley Scott said he wanted to direct, and those two things is what caused everything else to happen, It made the studio say, “Okay, now we’re taking this project seriously,” which made them much more likely to greenlight it, and Ridley Scott is such a god in the field, everybody wants to work with him. They knew it was going to be heavily budgeted, and also I like to think that the performers really liked the story. It’s funny, they had all these agents for these big-name performers contacting them and saying they were interested in The Martian and the studio said, “This is great, but we cannot possibly afford all of you.” And a lot of them just worked for less than what they would usually get.

Another thing that helped, in no small part, is scheduling. One of the biggest challenges to getting a cast together for a film is scheduling, because they’re busy. The Martian works out well because there are three extremely separated settings: Mars, the crew on the Hermes, and the people at NASA. They filmed all the NASA scenes first, then Matt Damon’s scenes, and then towards the end of the time Matt Damon had on the production, they started filming the Hermes scenes with the crew together. Then they wrapped Matt Damon and filmed the rest of the Hermes scenes.

To what degree was it that people working on the movie were space nuts and wanted to promote the space program and humanity’s future in space? Was there any of that, in terms of getting people involved?

I don’t think so. It was just pure entertainment. Certainly that was my goal in writing the book, to entertain, not to press any agenda. And it’s Hollywood. They make movies because they want to make money. And that’s okay.

I’m sure you saw this recent Washington Post story: “Andy Weir and his book The Martian may have saved NASA and the entire space program.”

I think that’s a tad overstated. It’s very generous, but I think actually people might be getting cause and effect mixed up. We might be in a virtuous cycle. Space-mission based science fiction is becoming more popular, like The Martian, and before that Interstellar, and before that Gravity. The public is getting more engaged in space travel, therefore these movies become commercial successes. I don’t think these movies are driving the public interest in space travel as much as public interest in space travel is driving these movies. Either way, it’s good, because the public is increasing in their interest in space travel, and so more entertainment will come out that revolves around it, so they’ll feed off of each other.

You say that you didn’t have any particular agenda with The Martian, but you also said, “twenty-five years as a software engineer has taught me the importance of backing things up. We need to have a human population somewhere other than Earth.”

That is my opinion on why we should be doing space travel, but there’s a difference between the opinions I hold and the things I write. I’m not preaching my opinions in my writing. I think we should have a long-term goal of having another human population somewhere other than Earth, but I also think the best way to accomplish that is through basic economic activity. Make it so that there’s a profit incentive for being somewhere other than Earth. The only reason we have not already colonized the moon and Mars is because it’s so expensive to get into space. As the price of putting things in low Earth orbit gets pushed down by companies like SpaceX, eventually it will reach a point where a common guy like you or me can afford to go into space. Once that happens, then the space travel industry will mirror the commercial air travel industry, and there will be a supply and demand cycle that sends people further and further out. And you’ll wonder, “Why did they go at all?” Why did people go to the middle of Alaska? It’s what humans do.

I was curious, given your video game background, if there’s any talk about a The Martian videogame. It seems like it could be a really good way to teach science.

There may be talk about that, but at the moment there’s nothing that I’ve been told about. And I do not own the rights. The videogame rights were part of the movie deal, so FOX owns them.

I’ll have to go ask FOX, I guess.

You go ask them.

We have a comment on iTunes from Australia from Wannabebling, who gave us a three-star review. He said, “Haven’t actually listened yet; I subscribed expecting to get an Andy Weir/The Martian episode; was disappointed as there was no such. Three stars.” I just want to point out to Wannabebling that we have an Andy Weir/The Martian episode, so I hope we’ve redeemed ourselves.

Hopefully you will convert him. Maybe he’ll come back and readjust his review to five stars.

I hope so. If anyone out there knows Wannabebling in Australia, let him know that we have Andy Weir stuff. Andy, you want to tell us what other projects you got going on?

I’m working on my next book now. It’s a more traditional science fiction story. It’s got aliens and faster-than-light travel, though done my own way. I’ve got my little curl of bullshit physics that I invented, and I put a lot of work into it to ensure that it doesn’t come into conflict with real-world physics. I really need FTL for the story, but everything else is strictly accurate and science-based. It’s tentatively titled Zhek, and it should be out late 2016.

You say it’s bullshit physics, but it sounds like it sounds like this is really first-rate bullshit physics.

It is the shiniest well-sculpted bullshit that I can do. But it’s still bullshit. I don’t want to ruin it for anybody here, but you can’t actually travel faster than light, although I’m sure this will get me a bunch of e-mails from quantum physicists who say, “Well, that might not be true.”

It’s tentatively called Zhek? What are the chances it will be called Zhek when it is published?

High? Titling is a tricky thing. It may turn out that when I’m three-quarters of the way through I’ll have a much better title.

Unfortunately, we’re out of time. Everyone go check out The Martian; the movie hit theaters October 2. And keep an eye out for this book that will probably be called Zhek. Andy, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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.

Author Spotlight: A. Merc Rustad

Lee Hallison | 859 words

Tell us a little about why you are so fascinated with robots and monsters.

For the robots, it’s Star Trek and Beast Wars: Transformers. I watched re-runs of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was a very Tiny!Merc and I loved Data and the Enterprise and any time there were robots on the screen. I wanted to watch everything that had robots in it after that. I got to see Beast Wars pretty much as it aired, and it was like the show was made for me—dinosaurs and robots and DINOSAUR ROBOTS. (I do remember some of the Transformers: G1 episodes from even earlier in my childhood, and that likely imprinted on me too!)

I’m not sure when I consciously realized the theme that seemed to run through shows or movies about destroying the robots/androids, or how they were an antagonistic force that had to be defeated. It always made me sad or frustrated. The way robots and androids and cyborgs can appear so very human, yet be different, or at least seen as different by the human characters, well . . . that clicked for me on a fundamental level. I’ve always struggled with social interaction and figuring out my own brain and wanting to understand/be understood by other people. (“How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” [scigentasy.com/how-to-become-a-robot] is very autobiographical.) So I latched on to the AIs and machines emotionally when understanding humans was so hard.

And the monsters? That definitely started when I first read Frankenstein, when I was like ten, after having seen the iconic 1931 film several years earlier and being very freaked out by the scene where the Creature is by the lake with the little girl. I adore Shelley’s novel and this power dynamic that evolves between the various characters. The Creature’s story resonated with me on such a gut-level that I couldn’t see any of the classic monster movies (Wolf Man, King Kong, Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, Dracula, etc.) without feeling—sometimes almost unbearable—empathy for the monsters.

If all I ever continue to write is about robots and monsters, well, I’m totally okay with that. There’s a lot of room to explore.

What was the initial spark for this particular cyborg story?

It was one of Mere’s descriptions, actually. Several years ago, I had this distinct image of a cyborg cradling someone’s head in a pool, and the tone of that image was so strange to me—intimate, yet sad and chilling. I didn’t know what it belonged to for some time, though. Then at end of 2014 (when this was written), I got these snippets of description and the line “tomorrow when we see the sun” and everything in my storybrain just clicked. I knew where the image of the cyborg belonged, and as I teased out the different threads in the story, it all gelled together. (And then, of course, I had to write a whole bunch of other stories in this universe, because I love shiny things!)

Mere’s emotional development is cleverly crafted and believable. It has human-like feelings but clearly is still an outsider. Yet its morals are recognizable, as is its ultimate sacrifice. Do you believe it is inevitable that a bio-machine consciousness such as Mere’s would have human morals?

I don’t necessarily know if they would correlate with human morals as we see them—I suspect it would depend somewhat on the basis of the programming that bio-machine consciousnesses evolved from. But I do think that with emotional intelligence would come a way to categorize things and likely develop an equivalent to morals or a moral/honor code as a way to decide how to handle life. (I’m not a scientist, though, so the nitty-gritty technical side of the question is rather beyond me.)

Why does Century hide her Sun Lord status until the end?

Sibling rivalry, probably. She’s been the god of death for so long, and at this point in time, all the Sun Lords are starting to decay in different ways—she’s not quite the power she once was, but she doesn’t want the other Suns to know that.

You have created such a rich, complex world in the Principality: Seven Sun Lords, the peace treaty, the creation of cyborgs, eel-ships . . . any plans to revisit this world?

Yes! I have several short stories in various stages of completion, a novelette in revision, and I am working on a novel in this world. I’m very excited with the possibilities and room to explore more—past, present, future—that’s unfolded in the Principality Suns universe.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

Author Spotlight: Richard Parks

Laurel Amberdine | 581 words

I like how you twisted expectations in this original fairy tale, even subtly giving away the end in the title. Did you envision the whole story at first or did it come together more slowly?

I’ve had a few stories that appeared fully formed and needed only to be written down, but “The Queen’s Reason” wasn’t one of them. I had the opening lines and had to work out everything else from the implications in those lines.

What was your biggest challenge while writing this?

I started to say “balancing the humor with the serious elements,” but that would be nonsense. They’re part of the same thing, and in this story especially. The humor serves to both obscure and reveal the true point of the story, so the hardest part was keeping the humor focused, and not putting in a funny line just because I thought it clever but otherwise served no purpose.

Everything seems lovely and nice in the kingdom, now that the Queen has her Reason back, but she still hasn’t found someone to marry. Do you have any ideas about that, or what else might happen next?

We talk about happy endings and tragic endings and such, but the fact is that stories don’t really end, short of the heat death of the universe. There’s always something that comes next, if there’s anyone left standing. I’ll write more about those characters or that world if the stories show themselves, but as often as not it’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

What is your usual process for writing a story, as far as planning, drafting, and revisions go?

Whatever planning I do is usually internal and obscure even to me. For anything short of a novel, usually I begin with an image, a character, or in this case just an opening. The trick for me is recognizing that a story is there, regardless of how it begins. At that point I have no more idea than the reader would of what the story is about, so I write the story because I want to know, too. It’s a little different for a novel, in that I usually know who’s involved and what the ending feels like before I start. After that, of course, it’s all open.

My first drafts are pretty clean and when I’ve written something that really works I’ve found that it normally doesn’t need a lot of revision beyond a good continuity/copyedit and minor tweaking, but there are always exceptions. One of my favorite stories needed a complete rewrite, start to finish, because I’d failed to understand what the story was really about. Fortunately that doesn’t happen often. If a story just doesn’t come together, however, usually no amount of revision will save it.

What are you working on now?

The fourth book in the Yamada Monogatari series. The working title is The Emperor in Shadow, and if everything goes right it’ll be out late in 2016. I’m also in the middle of pulling up stakes and moving from Mississippi to upstate New York. As you might guess, things are a little crazy right now.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey

Sandra Odell | 1111 words

In the first three paragraphs of “Beacon 23,” you establish the voice, setting, and tenor of the story with exquisite detail. Where did you find inspiration for this tale?

This year has been a tough one for me. I lost the love of my life, my partner for the last thirteen years, after screwing up our relationship. Since then, I’ve lived on the road, alone, mostly despondent, in a constant state of shell shock. “Beacon 23” became a source of catharsis for me. The story gets darker as it goes on, and even the levity has a sinister cast. It felt great to write the work, and very easy to find the voice of someone who feels rattled and unstable. This was one of those works that seemed to write itself.

The use of sensory input throughout the story is stunning, becoming a character unto itself: “a nightmarish clatter of nerve-jangling assholes”; a steel marble dropped from a height of two inches onto concrete; whirrings, hissings, pingings, skitterings; darkness you can chew. They serve to heighten the tension in the story and provide insight into the possible question of narrative reliability of the main character. When you set out to write “Beacon 23,” did you intend for the sensory impressions to have such weight and engagement for the reader, or did that come later as the character developed?

Absolutely. This is a story about desolation. About emptiness. And the way to highlight that is to make every little sound and every nagging thought as loud as thunder. Absolute silence isn’t that interesting; anyone can plug their ears. What’s interesting is a world where your full senses are alert, but there is very little there to tickle them. It’s also the challenge as a writer to make a very constrained set come alive. You don’t have weather and traffic and wildlife to paint your world with. This means highlighting what little you do have.

This story deals with the personal horrors of war, and the twin hells of loneliness and the need to be alone. What sort of research did you do to help you prepare for the narrative?

I drew on my new singledom, my PTSD from being at ground zero on 9/11 and what I saw that day, and also my time at sea on my small sailboat nearly twenty years ago. There was a week in the Bahamas where I didn’t see another living soul. I was down in the Exumas, well into hurricane season, and most cruisers had gone home. For a week, I snorkeled and tinkered on the boat and went about my daily routine without seeing anyone. The only voice was the vocals from some CDs I had. After a few days, I realized I hadn’t talked except to sing some lyrics, so I stopped doing even that, just to see what it would feel like. After a few days of not talking, I got weirded out by the whole thing. The first time you talk after that long without talking is strange. It takes a force of will. Like the air has blocked up in your lungs. Or maybe it was because I’d resisted so long that it was hard to convince myself to break the streak. It’s not something I ever want to try again. It’s also something I’ll never forget.

This story made me twitch in some of the best ways possible, stirring both physical and emotional reactions in sympathy to the character’s plight. As a writer, what is it about the challenge of reaching out to readers on a visceral level that appeals to you?

I can’t write unless I’m writing about something that has deep meaning to me. That’s what motivates me to write every day. I want to express something, not just tell a story. Describing a series of events, just a plot, would bore me and make it difficult to sit down and write the next scene. So I need to be saying something, the bigger or deeper or more controversial the better. By the fifth part of “Beacon 23,” I’m writing about a decision that makes me cringe right now, even to think about it. I can’t believe I had a character I love make such a decision. I didn’t want to even write it. And that’s the kind of place I want to go with my writing. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to feel something I haven’t felt before. I want to be left thinking about the plot weeks, months, years later. Maybe I can’t pull that off, but it’s what I’m after.

Do you feel that a writer has as much an obligation to educate readers as he does to entertain them?

I think a writer has an obligation to educate themselves with their writing. They should learn something new, push through the folds of their brains and stumble upon a new thought, an original thought. Original to them, at least. We shouldn’t just dispense what we know; we should discover, and share that discovery. If we do, there’s a chance we’ll touch a reader or two in some significant way.

On your website (hughhowey.com) you talk about your childhood dreams of writing a novel and sailing around the world. With seven novels under your belt, you’re now hard at work on fulfilling your second dream. Tell us about the Wayfinder and your hopes of the high seas.

I’m sitting in a marina with the boat right now, using WiFi from a friend’s restaurant. Wayfinder is a fifty-foot catamaran I had built here in South Africa. In a few weeks, I’ll be sailing it back to the Caribbean. She’s my only home. I no longer have a house or a car or many possessions. Just what fits on the boat. I’ve lived like this for most of my life. The domestic thing and the writing came much later. It feels good to get back to this. Right. My goal now is to go see the world, meet lots of interesting people, read and learn as much as I can, write as often as possible, and challenge myself to live off the grid once again, in direct communion with nature and with those around me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky

Liz Argall | 1369 words

The language in this is gorgeous! How many unusual words came straight from your rapacious mind and how much did you hunt down for this story? Do you have a list of fantastic words you want to use in a story someday?

It’s hard to say what came from my mind per se, but a lot of the Victorian slang—especially the sexual slang—came from Internet sources. I did, indeed, make a list of the words I really liked, but I couldn’t fit them all in. Some just didn’t fit the sections I was writing, and others weren’t really appropriate to the story at all, especially the ones about women. So I ended up copying the words I couldn’t use and putting them in another story, which was published a few years ago in PANK Magazine.

To begin at the beginning is my favorite opening to any story, ever since I heard it in Under Milk Wood. How has Dylan Thomas influenced you? When did you discover his work?

Actually, it’s in Alice in Wonderland! Well, actually in Through the Looking Glass. The White Knight tells Alice to begin at the beginning.

What draws you to Alice in Wonderland?

It’s one of my father’s favorite books (along with The Wizard of Oz), so it was always present for me growing up. There’s even a huge print showing some of the original illustrations in my parents’ dining room. When I started working on the story, he gave me his worn, annotated copy that’s about as old as he is.

As a kid, I always loved collecting different versions of the same stories. Considering all the retellings I write, I guess I never got over it. We had VHS copies of various productions of Alice in Wonderland, which I’d watch over and over. There was a Masterpiece Theater recording of a Broadway production which had Nathan Lane in it, and a couple of children’s productions which I called Alice Blue Dress and Alice Orange Dress. One of them had Carol Channing in it. I had the Disney version, too, but I wasn’t as attached to it, except for the sequence where she finds weird Wonderland animals.

I like the total, delusional sense of Alice in Wonderland. I know that some of it reads differently if you look at it as political satire, but if you take it out of that context and just look at the odd images, it’s a very disconcerting experience in the best possible way. I also love that the writing is so witty. I went back to read The Wizard of Oz a couple of years ago, and while it’s still got a lot going for it, there’s also a lot of cute or sentimental moments where Dorothy seems to basically be a cipher for Girl. Alice in Wonderland’s not like that; the cleverness of the prose keeps it reading as sharp and savvy.

What is it about hats? What is your favorite hat?

The first thing this question makes me think of is Elaine Stritch growling her line in “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Does anybody still wear a hat?”

I like old, grand hats, with sweeping brims and sort of asymmetrical, elegantly composed accessories. Like, Ascot hats. Give me my pick of every hat from every Ascot scene of every production of My Fair Lady ever made and I would be quite happy.

My current favorite hat in our house is a bigger, red version of this terrifying Angler Fish: bit.ly/sm_angler_fish.

The number of authors you’ve quoted and referenced is so impressive. What was it like searching for all those quotes and what was the most interesting person you discovered while looking for quotes?

It’s been a few years since I did this, but if I remember correctly—I searched for the quotes by key words. For the Hatter and Hare’s conversations, I picked interesting quotes from the right time frame and put them in a document and then sort of poked them to see how they might go together, and in what orders, and what kinds of meanings they might create. When there were holes (there were often holes), I’d go back and find more quotes by key word, often a different key word.

Some of the passages about time, for instance, I did by dipping into Google searches and picking up common mentions. From that, you get a sense of what images people associate with time, how they think about it, what they most often say. You can build from that, curating which ones you include, placing them together to create certain kinds of tension, and stuff like that.

These are both poetry-writing techniques which I’ve found useful for prose. They’re interesting exercises; for me, at least, they stimulate a part of my brain that composing fiction from a raw page doesn’t. There’s an intellectual puzzle-piece part of it, and this stimulating artistic sense of discovering and unearthing and clarifying. It can be a little like making a mosaic.

This story feels so layered and employs a range of interesting devices. What was your process writing it?

I often start stories with an idea in mind, but this time I didn’t really. My friend Erin Cashier told me that she was planning to write a story to submit to an anthology of erotic Alice in Wonderland stories, and I was in a weird mood, so I tapped out some prose. My freewriting only got me a scenelet or two, and it wasn’t really appropriate for an erotica anthology, but I liked the way the prose sounded, so I tucked it away.

Over several years, I built on that, piece by piece. The story didn’t develop in a very linear way at all. It felt like a very different headspace than my normal writing one—a lot of playing, of shuffling, of not knowing what would happen next. I spent a lot of time chasing things, tidbits of humor, which made the process of writing pleasant, though not predictable.

A surprising amount of the text was shaped by almost coincidental factors. For instance, I’d sit down and write a parody of one of the poems from the original, and however it turned out, I’d steer the conversation there. When I was looking for quotes, what I found often shaped the turns of the conversation—this quote could stack with this one and that one—and it steered the motion of the narrative. (Of course, I went back to revise everything, so what were initially almost arbitrary things became inherent to the story.)

I don’t know if I could set out to write another story like this one, because the process was so idiosyncratic. But I really loved the way it turned out, and hopefully some of your readers will, too.

Do you have any projects you’d like to tell us about? What next?

At the moment, I’m working on a retelling of Galatea called “Love Is Never Still” which should be out in 2016.

Once that’s finished, I’m planning to create a novel composed of thematically linked stories (a bit like China Mountain Zhang) which are—you’ll never guess—retellings! In this case, retellings of fairy tales through the lens of American Civil Rights history. It’s an ambitious project. It works in my head; I hope I can get it to work on the page.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Liz Argall’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not–for–profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Aidan Doyle

Sandra Odell | 832 words

Conflict can be found at the heart of every great story, and “Beneath the Silent Stars” has many of them: facing Mariposa X; Jean-Paul’s internal doubts and conflicting emotions; Parveen’s role in the mission; the truth behind Unattributed Source’s loyalties; the nature of the mission itself. As a writer, what does it take to make a really good conflict, something that lingers in memory instead of dying on the page?

The process that works best for me is to think of an interesting character and start the story when they are in trouble. Then give them a difficult decision to make. Readers have such different reactions, but for most people, characters are the key to a story. If the reader doesn’t care about the characters, it’s that much harder to interest them in the conflict. It helps to make the story more memorable if a reader can identify with the choices the character faces. This is a large part of the appeal of zombie apocalypses (how would I survive?). I don’t remember the characters that well from some of my favorite stories—for example Greg Egan’s “Reasons to be Cheerful” and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”—but I do remember the choices they had to make.

Spider Robinson says “Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.” Here you have the Bibliotheque Galactique, an organization that began as a library and became so much more. What inspired you to tell this particular story?

I had been thinking about the idea that there’s now so much information available that value is moving away from producing information towards being able to search, verify and summarize. People like curated lists. If I give you a list of the eighty-six best books I’ve ever read, the information content is higher than a list of the ten best books, but most people are going to be more interested in the second list. Google and Wikipedia serve as the most important library for many people and I read Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which looks at how Google in particular filters and constructs personalized search results. What happens when we incorporate more technology into our bodies and our physical experiences start getting filtered? I do a lot of traveling, and one of my personal bugbears is when people talk about wanting to see the “real” destination. I overheard a tourist saying she took a photo of a beggar in front of the Taj Mahal and to her that was the real India. As though the rest of India was fake. Even Disneyland is part of the real United States.

The story itself came from liking the idea of a summarizer and verifier working together. I wanted to write a spaceship story, so I gave them a spaceship to investigate.

The story explores the nature of contrasts: the need for connection and the fear of exposure; the nature of trust and the hurtful truth; a child’s needs and a parent’s desires. What is it about the nature of speculative fiction that allows readers to explore such concepts that we may well encounter every day?

There’s a passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed which I think sums it up best. “If you can see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” Speculative fiction gives us a vantage point to look at reality.

Who does Aidan Doyle turn to when he wants to get his science fiction on?

Iain M. Banks is one of my favorite writers and Unattributed Source is an echo of the naming style of spaceships in his Culture novels. I also love the spaceships in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and the complexity of the aliens in Vernor Vinge’s novels. One of my favorite recent SF reads was Andy Weir’s The Martian. In terms of short stories, I am in awe of the genius of Greg Egan and Ted Chiang.

Are there any upcoming projects or stories eager readers can look forward to in the coming months?

I’ve finished a middle grade novel set in a world built on the ruins of a giant book and am in the process of looking for a publisher.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Mark Rigney

Lee Hallison | 1107 words

Your work ranges widely—from playwriting to poetry to nonfiction and fiction. Do you also work in non-word-related mediums like painting, or do you know someone like Paints-No-More?

I don’t paint, but I’ve dabbled enough to have some concept of what painting entails. (My mother’s cousin is an art restorer, and I am endlessly fascinated by her work.) I will admit to drawing, but ninety-eight percent of the time, this takes the form of detailed contour maps, invented landscapes meant to either mimic or outdo existing physiography. I recycle most of these, but once in a while, I come up with a piece that sucks me in, demands my attention, and somehow renders in two dimensions what really ought to exist in three.

As for Paints-No-More, the studio space and the environs of the house and neighborhood are that of my actual grandmother, who really did paint beds of impatiens. Neither her personality nor my grandfather’s is specifically conjured for this story. The mole, however, the first one, that was as real as the day is long. My first exposure to maggots.

Some people say the key to horror fiction is hope. Would you agree? At the end of “Portfolio,” the narrator tries to conquer the horror in his grandmother’s paintings and to exorcise the demons that live under the surface of life—did you deliberately weave hope into this story?

I’m not a nihilist, never have been, and don’t intend to become so. In a good many of my stories and plays, I aim for a benedictory close, something on the order of, “The mass is ended, go in peace.” (Not being either a lapsed or practicing Catholic, I learned those lines through Leonard Bernstein.) The fact is, I was sleep deprived when I first drafted “Portfolio.” (My youngest son would have been about three at the time.) Whatever fever-dream the story evokes was probably fueled by that. As for the underlying tropes of horror fiction, hope is certainly one engine that keeps the genre going. That said, I’ve always been wary of analyzing the workings of “scary” stories, perhaps because, all evidence to the contrary, I don’t consider myself to be a horror writer.

For more on the subject of hope, it might be best to consult James Thurber.

The cabin-without-a-door leaves the reader wondering if the narrator, as a child, painted his feelings of despair or if it was simply a childish mistake—it becomes a symbol of the narrator’s growth. As you were writing, did you first think of how doors represent possibilities or did you start with the doorless image and the idea grew from there?

Oddly, I still remember how this came about. In the writing, I kept picturing the cabin in the snow with two walls visible, since you can’t see more in a “realistic” painting. One contained a window, while the other was just planks. After a while, I realized that this arrangement only implied a door—that any normal cabin would of course have a door, but that this cabin, being two-dimensional (and, perhaps, a symbol) could survive without. So I let my narrator make the same discovery. Presto, change-o. Emotional resonance. As to which of us is sublimating some deeper trauma, well. That’s for you to decide.

Samhain Publishing recently released another Renner & Quist novel, Bonesy. Can we expect more in this dark fiction series or are you working on something different?

I adore Renner & Quist. Renner’s the effete, mousy Unitarian Universalist minister. Quist is the ex-linebacker and retired private eye who partners with prissy Renner to “solve” the occult disturbances that for unknown reasons keep landing on their doorstep. Renner & Quist are like The Odd Couple, but surrounded by things that go bump in the night. Given that no writing is ever easy, the Renner & Quist titles have been very enjoyable to craft, the writerly equivalent of smooth sailing; I especially enjoy the opportunity to slip in bits of social commentary via their often opposed perspectives. The bottom line: I feel that with Renner & Quist (and this is a very rare sensation indeed), I know what I’m doing.

That said, none of the existing quartet seem to be selling, and novels take time to create. Part of the problem is the plethora of small presses: Not even the most avid reader can possibly keep up, or sort wheat from chaff. Another issue is how books get reviewed. I love working with Samhain, but they’re a mid-scale operation, and organizations like Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, not to mention major periodical reviewers like The New York Times or The Washington Post’s Book World, pay no attention whatsoever to houses of Samhain’s type. Finally, it’s been my experience that genre fiction has been Balkanized to the point where “horrific” supernatural fictions tend not to get reviewed by the usual speculative suspects—sites like SFRevu, Locus, or Tangent. The result: Large chunks of the ideal Renner & Quist readership don’t even know the books exist.

Now some have opined that I should spend my time getting really adept at manipulating social media. That this would solve my “platform” problems. Perhaps, but then I wouldn’t be writing . . .

Please understand, I’m not interested in doling out blame or whining. It is, however, my job as a writer to survey the lay of the land, to weigh mercenary vs. artistic decisions. So, while the seeds of a fifth and culminating Renner & Quist are very much on my mind, I have precious little incentive to spin the tale to completion. That’s okay, I suppose. I wouldn’t be the first author to have to set beloved characters aside, but Renner & Quist, as living, breathing figments of my imagination, surely deserve some closure. So who knows? Perhaps if you, gentle reader, were to purchase a copy or two? No pressure! And if you’d like to (safely) dip your toes into the Renner & Quist universe, their very first adventure, originally published in Not One Of Us #48, is posted on my website (bit.ly/perfect_wedded). Free fiction, yours for the plucking!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

Author Spotlight: Charlie Jane Anders

Robyn Lupo | 671 words

Group therapy and time travel was such a refreshing and compelling combination; so fun to read. How did this story come together for you? Were there any surprises in the process?

This was an unusual story for me because it began with physics, and then I had to go back and add characters and stuff to that. I had the idea for a story in which time travel also involved spatial displacement, and that was the original engine for the story. And I had a lot of fun imagining how that would work out—but that wasn’t a story, in itself. I needed characters and an emotional hook and something to carry the story forward. I went through a few radically different versions of the story, with completely different characters and setups. One version was called “Radical Feminists With a Time Machine—What Could Go Wrong?” I spent a few weeks writing that version before I decided it just didn’t work. And then I hit on the idea of a group of people who have a “support group” where they get together to pretend they’re time travelers. Only to be offered an actual time machine.

How much did the research shape the narrative in the Time Travel Club?

For this story, getting the physics right was insanely important. I stayed up late several nights doing trigonometry, to figure out the exact displacement. Dr. Dave Goldberg, who used to write the “Ask a Physicist” column for io9, was an invaluable resource for figuring out exactly how the different variables of Earth’s movement through space would play out. Although he took years off my life, because after I had already completed several drafts, he came back to me and said that I’d actually massively underestimated the distances involved, because the calculation was based on the square of time, not simply time itself. So the further you travel in time, the more vast the distances become. Looking back at our email exchanges, there were a lot of equations and diagrams, and I had to do more math than I had done in years to make this work.

Relationships and communities getting people through rough times seem to be at the heart of this work. I was really struck by the anxieties the characters voiced at their changing community, and how the community did change, and yet endured. What did you draw on to give us such a rich picture?

A lot of my work deals with people who are outsiders in one way or another, trying to find a place where they fit in. And with this story, in particular, once I had that concept of the people who get together and pretend to be time travelers, the story became very clearly about alienation and not feeling like you belong in this time and place. This allowed me to have lots of weird humor, but also a real emotional engine for the story—and combining humor and honest, non-manipulative emotion is one of those things that looks easy but is often fiendishly hard.

How challenging was it to address alcoholism here?

Incredibly hard. I asked a lot of friends for help with this one. Also, I had written a novel right before that in which the main character was a recovering alcoholic, so I had done a lot of research for that, including talking to people but also sitting in on one meeting. But I still worried a ton about getting this right.

What’s next for you, Charlie Jane?

My novel, All the Birds in the Sky, comes out in late January. It’s about a mad scientist and a witch, and has some of the same themes of trying to find your place in the world and the people you belong with as this story.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Kelly Link

Moshe Siegel | 661 words

Your novella “The Surfer” features aliens, an associated cult of nudists, and a deadly global flu. Yet—as with all the best fiction—what resonates most are the characters, specifically, Adorno’s relatable struggle to maintain his sane-world soccer dreams and to come to terms with his paternal relationship. In writing this story, did you start with fantastical ideas of aliens and cults and pandemics, or did you set out, from the first, to write Dorn’s story?

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. I think the starting place was the quarantine. Everything else came after that, organized around Adorno and his relationship with his father.

In this novella, Costa Rica has emerged as the standard for human civilization: Residents of a fractured USA vie for citizenship and all its benefits, intellectuals flock to its booming tech industry, and Hans Bliss’s Star Friends set up their HQ on the beach. Do you have a real-world connection with Costa Rica, or is its depiction researched? (I have a suspicion that Dorn’s descriptions of its beauty are not merely roofie-induced impressions.)

I’ve been to Costa Rica once. I’d love to go back.

As a former fourteen-year-old boy, I found Dorn’s narrative cadence totally spot-on, up to and including his teen self-involvement and annoying/charming arrogance. Did his voice come naturally, or was there a process to your capturing his POV with such accuracy?

Thank you! I don’t know why it feels so comfortable to inhabit the POV of adolescent characters, when it was in fact not at all comfortable to be an adolescent character oneself.

Disaster stories often illustrate the ways in which people from disparate cultures and classes can form connections. This was evidenced in “The Surfer,” as the people housed in the hangar formed their own micro-community, to such a point that Dorn felt a sting of nostalgia when it was time to depart (I did, too; they had a petting zoo!). What do you think it says about human nature, that even individuals with severely contrasting outlooks (Naomi and her Star Friend beau, for example) can bond in the face of an outside threat?

One of my favorite novels is Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, in which a group of hostage takers and their hostages share living space in an embassy. It becomes a weirdly pleasurable kind of house party, the kind that no one wants to see come to an end, especially because one knows that the ending is probably going to be a tragic one.

In a similar fish-out-of-water scenario, we see civilian volunteers functioning as armed guards (it’s mentioned that Costa Rica has no army). What do you make of the average person’s ability to take on the arguably cold perspective of “protecting the greater good” by corralling quarantined strangers with the threat of an armed response? Why do you think teachers, specifically, volunteered for this duty in “The Surfer”?

Great question! It doesn’t speak well of me to say that, as the person who made up this situation and these characters, I have no idea why teachers specifically volunteered. I wrote it such a long time ago! Maybe teachers are used to being in positions of authority? Doing difficult things for free? I don’t think anyone in this story, though, is trying to do anything other than for what they believe are good reasons. They may not be right about that, but no one has any sinister intentions here.

Do you have any upcoming stories or projects that you would like to share with us?

Probably worth mentioning that I have a new story, “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” up at Strange Horizons.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 174 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by J.Y. Yang (“Secondhand Bodies”) and the collaborative team of Keith Brooke and Eric Brown (“Beyond the Heliopause”), along with SF reprints by Jason Gurley (“The Dark Age”) and Kate Bachus (“Pinono Deep”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Will McIntosh (“The Savannah Liars Tour”) and Kat Howard (“Maiden, Hunter, Beast”), and fantasy reprints by Peter S. Beagle (“La Lune T’Attend”) and Leena Krohn (“The Gorgonoids”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with a feature interview, the latest installment of our book review column, and the debut of a new movie review column by bestselling author Carrie Vaughn.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint of “Griffin’s Egg,” by Michael Swanwick, and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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The Editors

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

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

Henry Lien

Assistant Editor

Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Andrew Liptak

Sunil Patel

Amal El-Mohtar

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Kevin McNeil

Illustrators

Galen Dara

Elizabeth Leggett

Reiko Murakami

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 [forthcoming Oct. 2016]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Aug. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.