TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 71, April 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, April 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

Cause For A Haunting
Patricia Strand

Origin Story
Carrie Vaughn

Collateral
Peter Watts

The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel
Matthew Bailey

FANTASY

Dragon Brides
Nghi Vo

Lily, with Clouds
Theodora Goss

The Knobby Giraffe
Rudy Rucker

Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise
Ken Scholes

NOVELLA

Incident on a Small Colony
Kristine Smith

NOVEL EXCERPTS

HEX
Thomas Olde Heuvelt

NONFICTION

Television Review: The Man in the High Castle (Season 1) and Occupied
Christopher East

Book Reviews: April 2016
Andrew Liptak

Interview: Bill McGoldrick
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Patricia Strand

Nghi Vo

Carrie Vaughn

Theodora Goss

Peter Watts

Rudy Rucker

Matthew Bailey

Ken Scholes

Kristine Smith

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Sam Schechter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, April 2016

John Joseph Adams | 1150 words

Welcome to issue seventy-one of Lightspeed!

This month, we have original science fiction by Carrie Vaughn (“Origin Story”) and Matthew Bailey (“The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel”), along with SF reprints by Patricia Strand (“Cause for a Haunting”) and Peter Watts (“Collateral”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Nghi Vo (“Dragon Brides”) and Rudy Rucker (“The Knobby Giraffe”), and fantasy reprints by Theodora Goss (“Lily, With Clouds”) and Ken Scholes (“Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “Incident on a Small Colony,” by Kristine Smith, and an excerpt from Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s new novel, HEX.

Nebula Award Nominations

ICYMI last month, awards season is officially upon us, and it looks like 2015 was a terrific year for our publications. The first of the major awards have announced their lists of finalists for last year’s work, and we’re pleased to announce that “Madeleine” by Amal El-Mohtar (Lightspeed, June 2015) and “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb. 2015) are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Plus, from our sister-magazine, Nightmare, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (Nightmare, Oct. 2015) is also a nominee! Congrats to Amal and Brooke and Alyssa and to all of the other Nebula nominees! That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to fourteen since we launched in June 2010 (and Nightmare’s total to one!). We’ve currently lost twelve in a row, so here’s hoping Brooke or Amal breaks the streak! You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org. The Nebulas will be presented at the 2016 Nebula Awards Conference, held this year in Chicago, Illinois, May 12–15.

Stoker Award Nominations

In other awards news, Nightmare had two stories—the aforementioned “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong and “Snow” by Dale Bailey—on the preliminary Stoker Awards ballot for best Short Fiction (plus Seanan McGuire’s story, “Resistance,” from my anthology The End Has Come, made it in the Long Fiction category), and we’re pleased to report that Alyssa Wong’s story made the final ballot! That marks Nightmare’s (and Alyssa’s) first Stoker Award nomination. So big congrats to Alyssa, and also to Dale and Seanan for nearly making it. You can find the full slate of what made the final ballot at horror.org. The Stokers will be presented at StokerCon 2016, which is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 12–15.

Locus Award Voting

And last but not least, the Locus Awards are still open for voting [bit.ly/locus2016]. Several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and my anthologies made the recommended reading list, though the Locus Award has a write-in ballot, so you can also disregard the recommendations and vote for whatever you like instead. Voting closes April 15, 2016.

Best-of-the-Year Selections

As previously noted, several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, the Destroy special issues, and my anthologies have also been selected for reprint in several best-of-the-year volumes. However, we initially somehow managed to leave a couple stories off our big list, so here is the list again, now with everything included:

“Time Bomb Time” by C.C. Finlay (Lightspeed | Horton)

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed | Horton)

“Ghosts of Home” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed | Strahan)

“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” by Nike Sulway (Lightspeed | Horton, Strahan)

“The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan (Lightspeed | Clarke)

“Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Jim Hubbert (Lightspeed | Clarke)

“The Astrakhan, the Homberg, and the Red Red Coal” by Chaz Brenchley (Lightspeed | Dozois, Horton)

“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed | Clarke)

“Snow” by Dale Bailey (Nightmare | Datlow, Guran)

“Descent” by Carmen Maria Machado (Nightmare | Datlow)

“Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (Nightmare | Strahan)

“The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente (Fantasy | Guran, Strahan)

“Kaiju maximus®: ‘So Various, So Beautiful, So New’” by Kai Ashante Wilson (Fantasy | Guran, Strahan)

“Bannerless” by Carrie Vaughn (The End Has Come | Clarke, Dozois)

“The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” by Ken Liu (The End Has Come | Clarke)

“Blood, Ash, Braids” by Genevieve Valentine (Operation Arcana | Strahan)

“The Graphology of Hemmorhage” by Yoon Ha Lee (Operation Arcana | Horton)

“1Up” by Holly Black (Press Start to Play | Guran)

John Joseph Adams Books: New Releases + Acquisitions

And finally, one last bit of news: John Joseph Adams Books’ first three releases are now available in bookstores. Our first release, Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey, came out in February, and the final two titles of our “pre-launch” season come out in March: Hugh Howey’s Shift and Dust, were released on March 22. They’re volumes 2 and 3 of Hugh’s bestselling Silo series (which began with the blockbuster Wool). You can read an excerpt of Shift in our March issue.

In a related development, I also acquired my first original title for the line: Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn. It takes place in the same world as her Hugo-nominated story “Amaryllis,” which appeared in the very first issue of Lightspeed. Also more directly-related is her 2015 story “Bannerless” from my anthology The End Has Come (which you can also read online at bit.ly/bannerless). In the official release, we described it as: “a novel in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse.” It’s a two-book deal, with publication of the first slated for Spring 2017.

• • • •

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.

Cause For A Haunting

Patricia Strand | 4,050 words

Kate took the hatbox to the dining room table, lifted the top, and removed the items: a glass brooch, a wood carving of a beaver, an empty perfume bottle, a blue silk scarf. It was the photograph she picked up: four by six, black and white, but well preserved beneath glossy finish.

A man and woman stood in front of a small, red-bricked house—this house, but minus the coniferous shrubs and mature trees, it appeared different. Bleak almost, the coziness that had lured Kate and Shawn absent. A middle-aged couple dressed as if for church. The woman with dark hair rolled back from a high, pale forehead, a pretty face starting to thicken, looked unsmiling into the camera, arms folded awkwardly across her waist, eyes sad crescent glitters. The man was much taller, broad and slim in a dark suit. He leaned close, eyes focused darkly on the woman.

Worry and fear, Kate thought, staring at the face of the man. Love and despair.

She flipped the photograph and read the square printing in black ink on the back: Jake and Sarah Anderson, 1949.

• • • •

The previous owner, Richard Kerns, had presented the hatbox with an air of ceremony. “Passed onto you, Kate, along with the house and its ghosts.”

Shortly after moving in, Kerns had decided the house was haunted, and from his position in administration at the public library, had delved into its history.

The house had been built in 1930 by Jake Anderson himself, a civil engineer destined to work until retirement as a nine-to-five city building inspector. In 1931, he married Sarah Hamilton, and they lived together in the house for the next fifty years. At the age of seventy-six, Sarah died of a brain aneurysm in the acute care wing of the local hospital. Jake followed six months later, lying down after dinner at his sister’s house across town and quietly expiring of a coronary. They had no children.

Since no one had ever died in the house, or been a victim of violence within its walls as far as was known, Kerns remained perplexed over the haunting. He was nevertheless pleased to be in possession of a home frequented by the dead. He stayed for the next seventeen years, renovating every inch of the small, 1,300-square-foot interior, building the landscape to lavish proportions with his green thumb. Now he was retiring to Costa Rica.

• • • •

Kate heard the back door open, grocery bags clanked down on the counter.

“Shawn,” she called. “Come here.”

He came immediately, eyes going to her stomach, followed by his hands. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Look at this.”

She sensed irritation, dutifully stifled. He took the photograph. Looked for all of three seconds. “Original owners? Tense looking couple.” He dropped it on the table and surveyed the rest, lifting the beaver, touching the smooth length of its back before setting it down, peering again at her stomach. “I got you some vitamins. The pharmacist said these shouldn’t cause nausea as long as you take them after a meal.”

She groaned. “It’s getting enough nutrients. I’m eating like a horse.”

“Just try them, okay?” He lifted her chin, turned on the full power of his green eyes. “We want this baby to have the best start possible, don’t we?”

“Yes. Okay.” She puckered so he had to kiss her, kissed until he pulled away first. She looked at him and pouted. “I’m sorry for being difficult, but I feel like a whale, and I’m bored. I shouldn’t have left work early. Most women wait until the last possible minute so they aren’t sitting around like this.”

“You were on your feet all day at the store. It wasn’t good for the baby. Can’t you knit something?”

“I don’t knit, Shawn.”

The summer had left him tanned, hair streaked blonde. He looked like a California surfer, but it was a disguise, she knew, for the sensitive English teacher he really was, upset when kids didn’t like him, someone writing on the board: GRANT US MERCY FROM MERCER. Some mean boy, she was sure, not one of the girls who hung around after class wanting to discuss symbolism in Wuthering Heights.

“I was thinking,” she said. “I could write an article about the house. About it being haunted by Jake and Sarah Anderson. The local papers might be interested.”

She watched his face skip down a trail of thought she had little trouble following: Skepticism that Kate, who had done nothing more ambitious since high school than work at a downtown import shop, could write anything coherent. The suspicion that Richard Kerns was not merely eccentric, but mentally unbalanced (they’d seen no proof the house was haunted) and he didn’t want people thinking his new wife was similarly flaky. But the points in favor—it was a diversion, and she’d never get it published anyway—won out, and Shawn smiled.

“That’s an idea.”

“Richard mentioned the woman across the road has been here since the forties. Neighbors were closer in the old days. I bet she knows something.”

“Just don’t get overtired. You can write on the sofa with your feet up, okay?”

“Okay.” She kissed him. “I love you.”

“Love you too—both of you.”

He went back to the kitchen. Kate had the infantile urge to stamp her foot. How can you love her? You don’t even know her. Maybe she’s an evil little demon. Maybe she’s a two-headed monster.

She picked up the picture again. The yearning on the man’s face filled her with kindred feeling. A sharp kick at her navel made her gasp. She barely resisted the urge to take her thumb and give it a poke right back.

• • • •

She lay awake, lower spine aching dully, thinking about waking Shawn. He would have rubbed her back until sunrise, anything to keep the incubator running happily. But he had work in the morning.

A warm night, the window was open. There were two bedrooms on this small, upper half-story, separated by a short hallway and a bathroom. Shawn had already painted the other room pink and white, purchased a good crib, and hung a musical mobile of geometric shapes in bold primary colors, recommended to penetrate the blur of infant eyesight and stimulate the wee brain.

Due in three weeks, Kate despised the mountainous rise of her stomach and longed for the end. At the same time, she feared the event like an impending plague. Where were the expected maternal emotions? She couldn’t dredge up a modicum of love for this creature that kicked at her insides like a demented little goat.

“Bronwin,” she whispered, trying it out. “Bronwin Mercer.”

When they’d been told it was a girl at the ultrasound, Kate had suggested Lily. Shawn wanted Bronwin. She hadn’t argued. It was only fair. He was the one jumping for joy, like he’d been waiting for fatherhood since ninth grade.

Before this abrupt trip into marriage and imminent parenthood, they had been involved for fourteen months. Kate madly in love, ready to have his name tattooed across her chest; Shawn congenial but remote, unwilling to talk about commitment.

She turned her head and gazed at him. Shadows streamed around the perfect planes of his face. The pregnancy had been an accident—who could have predicted he’d react like this? She had almost taken care of it without telling him. Sometimes she still wished she had. A chill slipped over her. What would it do to her to see him release the full throttle of his love on a gurgling mound of fat?

She heard something, tilted her head and listened. A woman crying. She gripped Shawn’s shoulder and he sat up like a surprised vampire. “It’s time?”

“No—listen! It’s Sarah Anderson!”

“Jesus, Kate.” But he held himself still. He heard it all right. His chin jutted and he crawled out of bed.

They crept through the upstairs, Shawn in the lead, scanning the area ahead as if searching out some prankster. Kate trailed, expecting around every corner to see the luminous specter of a woman bent over weeping.

Downstairs, they flicked on lights as they went. No effect on the ghost; it just kept on crying. The sound had a hollow, otherworldly echoing. Eternal grief, Kate thought.

Shawn headed down the basement. At the drainpipe by the laundry tub the grim set of his face dissolved. “It’s coming from the pipes, just like I thought.”

She squatted and bent as much as possible over her girth to listen. “I don’t think so. It was stronger upstairs.”

“It’s the pipes. That explains the echoing effect.”

Kate stood up. “Sarah!” She called out on impulse. “Sarah Anderson! Is that you?”

Shawn frowned. “Okay, that’s enough. I’m going back to bed, and so are you.”

• • • •

Richard Kerns had talked about the crying. No pattern. Nothing for months, and then he’d hear it every night for a week. Once he had come home in the afternoon to a weeping that was nothing short of hysterical.

Then there were the cooking smells, quite pleasant, Kerns reported, filling the house when he wasn’t cooking a thing. On numerous occasions he had found things moved, but just slightly out of place, as if someone had been looking around curiously but considerately.

But in all his time in residence, there had only been one actual appearance. Kerns had been in bed—here he coughed and smiled tightly—with a friend. It was early evening and though the room was dim, there was enough light to see. They heard a gasp, and Kerns looked up to see a man he recognized as Jake Anderson hovering at the foot of the bed. On the face of the ghost, Kerns said, was a mixture of horror and disgust. The apparition had backed away, as if shocked and frightened to have come across the living, and vanished into the shadows of the hallway.

“A homophobic ghost,” Kerns declared. “I guess we gave him quite a scare.”

Kate had laughed while Shawn rippled his forehead for the counterpoint.

“More likely a browsing burglar who was surprised to find two adult males at home, and made a light-footed getaway.”

• • • •

The crying stopped abruptly when they were halfway up the basement stairs.

Back in bed, Kate spoke wistfully. “Behind every haunting, there’s a story and a reason. Do you think Sarah cries because she wanted a baby?”

“Kate, it’s the pipes. Anderson built the house himself, and he screwed things up, connected where he shouldn’t have. There’s no way of knowing exactly what he did without ripping up the ground, but the noise is coming from another house. When the pipes are full, of water or sewage or whatever, the sound is blocked. Tonight, they happened to be clear at the same time as some woman in the vicinity was having a crying fit. No doubt the same poor, depressed individual Kerns had been hearing for years.”

Kate considered Jake Anderson’s narrow, intelligent face. “He was a civil engineer. This is a good, well-built house. Everybody says so.”

“Sure, it’s a solid little house, but engineer doesn’t mean plumber. Anybody can build a house. The guy was no genius. He worked for the city all his life.”

Richard Kerns had not considered the inability to have a child sufficient cause for return from the other side. She didn’t kill herself or anything, he’d said, when Kate had suggested it. She lived a fairly long time. She must have gotten over it.

“Didn’t everybody want children back then?” Kate said now. “Why didn’t they adopt?”

Shawn sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Didn’t you grill the woman across the street?”

“She wasn’t very open. I got the feeling they were friends. I should never have told her I was writing something.”

Alma Cleary, out pruning rose bushes in a big straw hat, had been guarded about the Andersons, but eager to talk about her own dead husband, five children, and dozen grandchildren scattered across the country. She had looked Kate’s stomach over with a practiced eye and announced it was a girl. Isn’t that uncanny! Kate had said, and listened to a slew of boring advice about diapering and feeding, but about the Andersons, she could not extract a useful thing.

“It’s not like her husband would have been against adoption. He loved her so much, he would have agreed to anything.”

“How you get this big story from one old picture is beyond me.” He set one hand on her stomach. “I want you to calm down about this ghost business. Nothing’s happened that doesn’t have an explanation. Now, do you think I could get a wink or two before the alarm goes off?”

She listened to the rhythm of his breathing drift into sleep. Beneath the pale sheet, the hump rose up before her. She stared at it with guilt. Poor Sarah had wanted a child with such fever that twenty years after death she was still crying. And here was Kate, all of twenty-four, with a full womb and a closed heart.

• • • •

Nothing could have prepared her for labor, for the pain that broke right through a mere epidural, for the sensation of being ripped in half for twenty hours straight. They finally performed an emergency C-section, Kate at that point not entirely conscious.

She surfaced to Shawn standing over her. “She’s beautiful! Eight pounds three ounces. Perfect! It was tense for awhile there, but everything turned out fine.”

“I’m not fine. I’m hurt bad. I need something strong.”

“I’ll find a nurse.”

She strained to reach the cup on the bedside table. Her tongue felt swollen, lips coated with slime. Pain hung over her lower half like a throbbing thunderhead. Just as she had managed to grab the cup, bring the bent straw to her lips, and suck down a few inches of warm water, a nurse came in like a gust of wind.

“How are you doing, love?”

“I need a shot.”

The nurse smiled and cranked up the bed, bending Kate at the waist, making her moan. “There, there. You’re fine. All ready now? Here we are! Here’s Jeanette with your new girl!”

Another nurse pushed in a domed contraption on wheels.

“No! I need a shot. I’m not ready. Where’s my husband?”

“Just remember what you learned in class.” The gown was whipped down. A pink bundle came at her like a torpedo.

“Wait! No, please!”

“Isn’t she a beauty? Now hold onto her. You’ve got to use both hands. A little nervous, are we? One arm supports the head. The other across like this. I suppose that’ll do. Try to relax. Now move her mouth across like this. What a nervous new mom we’ve got here! We’ll do it this time. There, she’s taking it. Oh, look at that, Jeanette, an easy one.”

“Oh, god,” Kate whispered.

“No need to hold your breath. Breathe.” She moved her hands like a conductor. Kate rounded her lips and drew in air.

Arms like wood, she peered down, took in the purple-pink profile, the fat cheek pumping, a tiny, dimpled fist pressed into the pale curve of her breast. She stared at this creature working to drain her. A strange, demanding sensation, not exactly pleasant. Yet there was something, some nebulous promise on the horizon.

She adjusted her arms and tilted her head to get a better look. So here she was, the little drop-kicker. Well, she wasn’t half bad. Cute, actually.

By the time Shawn returned the nurses had left. “Isn’t she something?”

“Yes.”

“Our little Bronwin.”

She cleared her throat. “Lily.”

Shawn winced. “Calling girls after flowers is so common. I thought we agreed—”

“She’s got your last name. I get to pick her first. I want Lily.”

***

Eleven days later, while Kate napped, and Shawn trimmed the hedges at the back of the yard, Lily was taken from her crib in the pink and white room.

The police believed the intruder had entered through the back door, unlocked with Shawn out in the yard. Aided by the racket of the electric hedge-trimmers, the kidnapper had simply gone upstairs, picked up the baby, and left by the same route. It had happened very quickly, while Kate slept in the next room. But the police believed the perpetrator had known there was a baby in the house, and had gone in prepared to take it.

Prints were lifted from the railing of the crib, the staircase, and several other areas in the house. No matches turned up. All reports of people and vehicles in the area that day had been investigated, and though nothing had come of it yet, the police were confident new leads would emerge.

As time went on, they were less confident. In every part of the world, children go missing. But of course they don’t just vanish—someone takes them. In the majority of cases, a parent or relative, but in a very small percentage, including the disappearance of Lily Bronwin Mercer, a stranger.

After a while, Kate stopped calling the detective in charge of the case everyday, and Shawn went back to work, the kids abnormally quiet and cooperative, tears from some at the mere sight of his haggard face. At home, he was clingy and guilt-stricken.

“It’s not your fault,” Kate said, again and again.

But she was tired of comforting Shawn, weary with the effort of working not to hate him. Absurd to cast blame, she might as well blame herself, asleep in the next room while her angel was stolen. The only one at fault was the one who had taken her. But she was relieved when Shawn returned to work, and she was left alone with her grief.

Though the days stretched out torturously. She ate too little and slept too much. She got up late and wandered around listlessly, turned on the TV, flicked it off again. So many babies on TV.

One afternoon she came out of a doze and smelt meat sizzling, garlic, oregano. No one in the kitchen. In the basement she knelt at the drain, recalling Shawn’s theory of accidental connections. But it wasn’t coming from there.

Grateful for the distraction, she ferreted around. She hadn’t thought about the ghosts since Lily’s birth. The smell was stronger on the main floor. Onions and green peppers added in, her nose said.

Then the crying started. Kate stilled and listened. But it wasn’t a woman crying this time. It was a baby. It was Lily.

She stumbled around, bumping into furniture and corners. She climbed the stairs, the sound intensifying. She rushed into the pink room, bent over the empty crib, and found the sound weaker.

“Lily!” She started to scream. “Lily! Where are you?”

On the staircase where it was strongest, she pressed against the wall, could hear her baby crying, not as if trapped on the other side, but at the other end of a long tunnel.

Then it stopped. The house went silent. Kate collapsed on the stairs, panting. Lily’s cry cut off as if a door had been shut. The smell of the food was fading.

It should be seen as hopeful, the police had pointed out, that the perpetrator had no criminal record. More probable that it had been someone desperate for a baby; usually, in such cases, a woman. But the prints, the experts agreed, were more likely those of a big man. A man who loved a woman, Kate thought, and gasped.

She ran outside, darted across the road, pounded until the door opened and Alma Cleary stared back.

“Why didn’t the Andersons adopt? Please, tell me, Alma. I’m not writing anything anymore. I swear I’m not.”

The bony shoulders shifted. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. But it was never fair. The trouble started when Sarah kept miscarrying. After she’d been in the asylum, well, they never used to consider a person reliable after that.” Her brows lifted and she smiled. “But then they were blessed. Ah yes, better late than never. I’ll never forget the morning she came over to show me. Oh, the face of joy!”

“What?” Kate swallowed. “But Sarah never had a baby. They never had any children.”

Alma looked at her strangely. “Why, yes they did. A girl.” She frowned. “Died in a car accident when she was in college. Didn’t seem fair after all they’d been through. But life isn’t always fair, is it? I don’t have to tell you that. Come in for a while, Kate. I’ll make some tea. You’ve never left my prayers. Any word about Lily?”

Kate lurched off the porch, left Alma staring after her. Back home, she called the school, and told the secretary it was an emergency.

“Listen, you were right. It’s never been ghosts in this house. There is a connection between two houses. Only it’s the same house, this one, in the past and the present. A shunt, or a tunnel, or something. Jake Anderson knows how to come through. He came through and took Lily. They’ve got Lily, Shawn.”

A moment of stricken silence, then he spoke slowly. “Kate, honey, I’m going to come home. First I’ll call Doctor Finch, and see if he can get you in—”

“It’s already happened! The past has been changed. Alma said the Andersons couldn’t adopt because Sarah had been in a mental institution. Then she said that later they did have a baby, a girl! Our daughter! Jake took Lily and they pretended she was theirs!”

“But they did have a daughter. Come on, honey, you knew that. Kerns told us. He thought the girl’s death in the car accident was the reason for the haunting.”

She doubled over as her memory forked, and she saw it too, Kerns telling them about the daughter dying.

“You’ve got another memory, Shawn. Try to get to it. One that starts with Kerns telling us they didn’t have any children.”

“Listen to yourself. We’ve got to get out of that house. You know I love you, going through this nightmare has bonded us. But we have got to get on with our—”

She hung up. Upstairs she dumped the hatbox on the bed and snatched up the picture.

Sarah Anderson was no longer looking into the camera. Her cheeks curved into a smile, eyes cast down, directed at the bundle in her arms, white blanket trailing. Jake Anderson, in the same dark suit, now stared straight into the camera, face set and defiant. Kate read this expression the way she had the one before. You’re young and healthy. Have another one. We needed this one more.

Her hand trembled. Anderson’s face flickered like a dying bulb. In her head the pieces fell into place along with a strange calm.

No genius, Shawn had speculated, and he was probably right. It couldn’t have been deliberate. Kate thought it must have been an accident in two parts. First the building, then the first time he’d stumbled upon it, and went through. She imagined his terror and confusion, his massive relief when he found his way back to his own time.

On the staircase Kate knelt, running hands over the plaster. It would not be as simple as a panel, or a trap door, or a tunnel on the other side of a wall. It might be more like a fold in the atmosphere, a curve in space, or some construction she could not yet envision. But it didn’t matter—eventually she would find it.

When Shawn came home, she would explain that a spell had come over her, but had passed. She was fine now. No more craziness, and certainly no need to talk about moving. In fact, suddenly she was feeling much better.

Kate considered the gun she would buy, and learn how to use. Something from the 1940s. When she was done there would be a third and final fork in the road coming in from the past, where the only Andersons with access to this house and time would indeed be ghosts, with good cause for a haunting.

©2003 by Patricia Strand. Originally published in On Spec. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patricia Strand is a Canadian writer living in Kitchener, Ontario. Her work has been published in On Spec, Tales of the Unanticipated, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Storyteller, as well as in Best of the Rest 3, and Exact Fare 2 anthologies.

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

Origin Story

Carrie Vaughn | 3,700 words

Living in Commerce City, odds are you’re going to get caught up in something someday—pinned down in the crossfire of some epic battle between heroes who can fly and villains with ray guns, held captive in a hostage crisis involving an entire football stadium, or even trapped by a simple jewelry heist or bus hijacking.

When my turn came, I got stuck in a bank robbery.

I was waiting in line to make a deposit when a hole opened up in the ceiling. A glowing green laser light traced a perfect circle, and that section of ceiling dropped to the floor, scattering the line of people underneath in a cloud of dust and noise. I was too far back to really see what was happening, just that there was debris and screaming, some of which might have been mine. Then Techhunter rappelled through the hole, wielding a laser pistol and shouting at everyone to get down and lie still. We did.

He was just one guy. No henchmen, no partners. That was Techhunter’s M.O. in the news stories I’d read. He worked alone, with only his machines as backup. This time, he had a swarm of hovering metallic balls zooming down the hole in the ceiling with him. They fanned out around the room and trained tiny cannons on everyone. They probably shot lasers or tranquilizer darts. Surely in a place like Commerce City, with so many vigilantes and criminal gangs battling each other, bank tellers would be trained how to handle situations like this, but the ones here all stepped back from their counters, arms in the air, staring at Techhunter with trembling gazes. As if they didn’t live in Commerce City, where this kind of thing happened on a monthly basis at least.

Techhunter didn’t ask for the manager to open any safes; he just drilled through the locks with his laser pistol, collected cash and emptied a pair of safety deposit boxes into a hard-sided case. He wore wide goggles that hid most of his face, and a headset with all kinds of wires and antennae sticking from it, probably what he used to control all his devices. His suit was made of some slick material, supple as leather but appearing to be much stronger, probably armored. Pants, tall boots, padded shirt, and a fitted trench coat, all in a midnight blue so dark it looked black, except when the light caught it right.

Everyone cowered. Except me. I couldn’t help it, because by that time I’d had a chance to really look at him. The superhero stalker website Rooftop Watch had posted a half dozen or so pictures of Techhunter over the last couple of years, blurry action shots in semi-darkness, and I hadn’t paid much attention because he was just another guy in a mask. Now, seeing him in person, the way he moved, smoothly and urgently; the way he studied the room and pursed his thin, slightly chapped lips—it was all familiar. I should have thought it was just a coincidence, but I was sure. Even under those face-obscuring goggles, I knew him.

Then he looked across the room at the one person not cowering in his presence. Through the goggles, he caught my gaze. His lips parted and he froze, just for a second. He knew me.

Before I could call his name—or think that maybe I shouldn’t call his name, or find any way at all to ask what the hell he was doing here, a masked villain with a super-high-tech armory—the guy next to me reached out. While I’d been staring at Techhunter, this unassuming young businessman with a goatee and a red tie had very slowly and carefully drawn a gun out from inside his jacket. Was he an undercover cop or just paranoid? Didn’t know, didn’t care, because he proceeded to take aim at my old boyfriend.

I grabbed the gun out of his hand and threw it across the room. He wasn’t expecting that, and he stared at me in consternation, stammering out, “What—”

And I was kneeling there, shocked at what I had done, wondering if this made me a bad guy now. Again, Techhunter and I looked at each other, and I started to call out, “Jas—”

But he shouted me down. “You—get up!”

I knew that voice. It was definitely Jason. I stood, and then it all happened very fast. Police sirens blared—the whole incident had only started a couple of minutes ago—and some guy on a megaphone shouted at him to stand down and lower his weapons, and someone else yelled that Techhunter had a hostage. Remote gun spheres altered course to zoom toward the front of the bank and aim their weapons outward.

Techhunter—Jason?—went into action, hauling the case’s strap over his shoulder as he wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close. He clipped himself to the rope, then clipped me, and at some command the thing wound up on a winch and carried us to the roof of the bank and then into his stealth hovercraft. The floating gun spheres swarmed back up with him. A dozen police cars surrounded the bank now, and cops poured out of them with weapons drawn, ready to fire until they saw me, the hostage. The hatch at the bottom of the ship closed, Jason went to the cockpit, pulled back on a control stick, and I fell over as the thing tipped back and zoomed away.

Techhunter was not known for kidnapping, but I must have been special.

I wasn’t hurt, wasn’t even scared. I was just waiting for him to stop being busy so I could ask what the hell was going on. The ship was small. The cargo area, which held the rope winch and a few equipment cases, wasn’t any bigger than the back of an SUV. The cockpit was one bucket seat surrounded by control panels, looking out through panels of a wraparound windshield.

We flew for what felt like a long time.

• • • •

The last time I saw Jason Trumble was the week before high school graduation, right after he found out he wouldn’t be allowed to graduate because he had too many unexcused absences from gym class. He punched his hand through the window between the principal’s office and reception, shattering the glass with the sound of ringing bells, and marched out, right past where I was waiting for him, dripping blood along the way and not caring. I called after him, and he turned around to look at me. My heart fluttered a bit, thinking, he really does care, he really does like me. But then he scowled and kept going out the front doors, never to return. I got a birthday card from him a few months later. He said he was joining the army, which sounded like a bad idea to me, but he didn’t give me a return address, and he hadn’t answered his email since he left, so I had no way to tell him that.

I decided maybe he didn’t care after all, and I moved on.

• • • •

That was eight years ago. Sometime between then and now, he’d become a supervillain. On reflection, I wasn’t surprised, not exactly.

I waited for Jason to say something.

The ship finally came to rest on something solid, street or helipad or garage or something. I was able to sit up and arrange myself more comfortably. The engine whined to silence, the hum of electricity ceased, and in the cockpit Jason flipped a last few switches before turning around. He seemed to take a deep breath, as if steeling himself, before crouching to enter the cargo hold.

He took off the goggles and headset, and it really was him, his sharp nose and thin eyebrows, spiky brown hair and scowling expression.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “You okay?”

“Jason, I—” For just a second, I teared up, but the moment passed. “I thought you died or something. What happened to you?”

He looked at me for a long time, his expression distant, thoughtful, before saying, “It’s good to see you, Mary.”

And just like that we fell against each other, hugging, like none of the time since high school had passed. After that long, impossible hug, we sat side by side, knees pulled up, and he explained.

“I tried to join the army. Washed out of basic. I guess I should have known that wasn’t going to work out. I . . . kicked around for a while. Here and there, this and that. Picked up some things.” He glanced around the ship, regarding his gear with a pleased, proud smile.

“Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you tell me what happened to you?”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” he said, deadpan.

“Jason.”

“Do you . . . um . . . want a drink or something? I only have water and coffee and a couple of energy drinks. Can’t really drink drink while I’m out in the ship. You know.”

“Coffee, I guess.”

We drank coffee he poured from a thermos into Styrofoam cups. I had another flashback of us in high school, at the diner after an all-ages show or late movie, sucking on coffee and planning to take over the world.

It had been a joke, I thought.

“Um. I never expected to run into you like that,” he said. “I thought I was seeing things, but you just kept staring at me.”

“I’d recognize you anywhere.”

“Yeah, but what were you doing there?”

“Making a deposit. Going to the bank, like a normal person.”

A bit of the light went out of his eyes. “So that’s what you are, now? Normal?”

He said it like I was the one who’d been committing crimes.

I’d been doing really well with my own tailoring and dressmaking business. I was designing, making custom evening gowns and wedding dresses. A couple more high-end gigs like that, and I’d be on my way. I was proud of myself, but I couldn’t read Jason’s expression, which seemed blank, uncomprehending. Old high-school Jason would have accused me of selling out, making cocktail dresses for society bitches, hustling for their dime like some peasant. But old high-school Jason had left me behind. I spent a lot of months—years, maybe even—missing him and wondering where he’d gone. Then I just couldn’t, anymore. Would new Jason, with his unreal gear and flashy persona, understand that?

“Well,” I said. “And look at you. You’re famous. Techhunter, one of the archvillains of Commerce City.”

“Yeah. Who’d have thought?”

I always figured he’d either take over the world or die in a gutter, and since I never heard what happened, I figured it was the latter. I should know better than to make assumptions.

For the next minute or so, we drank coffee in silence. We never had a problem coming up with things to say in the old days. The old days—as if we were really that old, as if it really had been so long. It hadn’t, on the scale of things, but it sure felt like it.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally, abruptly. I stared at him, not sure what to say. “For not letting you know what happened to me. For not telling you where I was. I figured . . . I just figured you were better off without me. That it’d be better if I left you alone.”

I wanted to punch him. I had to think about it, but then I did it, slamming my fist into his shoulder. My knuckles banged against the armor plate protecting his bicep.

“Ow,” he muttered, rubbing his arm, just as I hissed and studied my skinned knuckles.

“Jerk,” I said. I looked around his ship, gray and sleek, like something from outer space, with levers and monitors, winches and crates holding who knew what, hatch covers and control panels. The hovering gun spheres nested in a rack on one wall, lurking ominously. Had he built all this? Found it and co-opted it for himself? And why did he rob banks, when he could use all this to be a hero?

“I didn’t do it for the money,” he said, when he caught me staring at the case of loot he’d taken from the bank. “I don’t need money, it’s just to confuse them. But the safety deposit boxes—”

“I don’t think you should tell me,” I said, gesturing for him to stop, closing my eyes, as if I could unsee it. I should have waited until tomorrow to drop off that deposit. But no. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.

“Right. You’re right.”

More silence. Too much to say, rather than too little, maybe.

“And I’m not really trying to take over the world,” he said, as if he had to explain himself. “I’m not that ambitious. Not yet, anyway.” He showed that sly grin again.

A beeping alarm drew him back to the cockpit, where he checked a monitor. “Police band,” he explained. “They’ll sweep the area soon. I have to get moving.” He swallowed, licked his lips. Just like he had when he asked me to prom. “Would you—do you want to come with me?”

He’d said later that asking me to prom was the most difficult, bravest thing he’d ever done, not because he was afraid I’d say no, but because he was afraid to go to prom at all. He was sure he wouldn’t be welcome. He didn’t think it would even be fun. No matter what he did, he’d be made fun of, pushed to the fringes, like he always was. But he wanted to show that they couldn’t keep him out, either. So just for once, he did the normal thing and asked a girl to prom, and of course I said yes because I’d been waiting for him to ask, and we hatched a plan together. I made our outfits, his tuxedo and my knee-length cocktail dress, out of leather scavenged from thrift store handbags and biker jackets. We looked wicked, in patched-together leather in a dozen different shades of brown and black. He found a black lily for my corsage, and I made a boutonniere from old resistors and wires. God, did people stare at us, but once we got to the hotel ballroom we behaved ourselves so no one could kick us out. We even had a good time.

I thought—I’d thought back then that things could only get better, but then came that meeting in the principal’s office, and that was the last straw for Jason, who must have decided that not only were the rules not fair, they weren’t worth dealing with at all.

I wished I’d known what to say to him, then. Or that he might have thought then of asking me to run away with him. I’d said yes to prom, hadn’t I?

Shaking my head was hard. My neck felt stiff, and I wondered if I pulled a muscle when he winched me up on the rope. Or if this was just hard.

“I can’t,” I said. “My business is taking off. I’ve worked too hard. I can’t leave all that. Even if it is normal.”

He nodded as if he really did understand, as if he hadn’t really expected me to say yes. “Yeah, okay. So . . . you must have a boyfriend.”

That was his problem. He made too many assumptions.

That anxious-sounding beeping from the police monitor sounded again. All serious, he went to check, flipped a couple of switches and held a hand to his ear—listening to a signal coming in through an earbud.

“They’re getting close. I’ll let you out, but I should probably tie you up. They’ll treat you like a victim then, and not an accomplice—”

“No,” I said, the word just bursting out of me like a gunshot.

He stopped, his expression neutral. “No, what?”

“No, I don’t have a boyfriend.” I had never really wanted one, after he left.

He had this look in his eyes, hungry and angry, and I didn’t know if I’d given him the right answer, or the wrong one. He moved back to the cargo compartment, was just a few inches away from me, a length of rope in hand. He smiled apologetically. “Then can I maybe see you again?”

I nodded, and by some mutual signal that I didn’t recognize, we came together. His hand pressed around my waist, the length of our torsos fit together, my hands on his shoulders, our lips, kissing. A slow, careful, melting kiss. Both his arms wrapped around my back, me clinging to the slippery fabric of his trenchcoat. Then we came up for air.

Just like the old days, except so much sadder, because we knew now what we’d lost.

We had to let go when we heard the police sirens through the hull of his hovercraft.

In addition to tying nylon cord around my wrists and ankles, he blindfolded me, explaining carefully what he was doing as he did it, tying the cloth over my eyes, securing me to the rope and winch, gently setting me on what felt like a concrete sidewalk. Giving my hand a squeeze as he released me.

The hatch hissed as it slid shut, the engine whined as the ship climbed away, and I listened until I couldn’t.

The police arrived just a minute later.

• • • •

They were very nice to me, because I was the victim. Jason had been right about that. I sat in an empty conference room at the police station, a blanket over my shoulders and a paper cup of bitter coffee in my hands, waiting for someone to arrive to take a statement. I was assured it wouldn’t take long, that it wouldn’t be difficult. They asked if I wanted a social worker or victim rights advocate with me. I said no.

A pair of detectives arrived, a man and a woman, both in their thirties and looking haggard, like they’d been working for a long time without sleep. They sat across from me, and the woman set down a manila folder stuffed to bursting with records.

They asked the standard questions. My name, why I was at the bank, what happened there, why Techhunter had picked me, and what had happened after. Did I know where he’d taken me? Did he say anything about where he was going? About what he stole from the bank and why? And so on, and I didn’t know anything, and I said so. The detectives nodded, resigned.

“Did he tell you his name? Who he really is under the costume?” the man asked, and I knew I was in trouble. I could feel my face blush and my stomach turn over. They must have heard my stomach turn over.

“No,” I answered truthfully, because Jason hadn’t told me. I’d just known.

“Can you tell us anything about him? Anything that might lead to identifying him?” he asked, and again I didn’t really feel like I was lying when I said no.

Then the woman pulled a photo from the file folder and slid it across the table to me. “Do you remember this, Mary?”

It was our formal picture from prom, the two of us side by side in the patchwork leather outfits I’d made, only Jason was snarling and flipping off the camera with both hands, and I was hanging on his arm and laughing. The photographer didn’t bother trying to get us to stand still and be nice, just snapped the picture and took our ten bucks for copies. Mine was in my scrapbook back home, which meant this was Jason’s copy, and I wondered how they got it. Or maybe the photographer had saved an extra proof or something. I wasn’t going to ask.

We looked so young. So bony and new, and I wouldn’t say we looked particularly happy, but we were something, and it was good.

“Yes, I remember that,” I answered, and the catch in my voice made me sound vulnerable and worthy of sympathy, I hoped.

The woman spoke kindly. “Mary, what would you say if I told you that we suspect that Techhunter may be Jason Trumble? That he may have taken you hostage because he knew you?”

“I would say that makes a lot of sense.” I hoped my watering eyes made my story sound more true.

“Did he reveal himself to you? Give you any sign that he was Jason and that he knew you? Did he say anything that made you suspect?”

Everything, I didn’t say. I shook my head and touched the edge of the picture, like I was mourning him. I could have told them anything, that he didn’t look anything like that skinny kid in the picture anymore, that he used a machine to disguise his voice, that I couldn’t recognize anything under his goggles. But they assumed all that, so I didn’t have to say anything. And that’s how I became a bad guy. Henchwoman to a supervillain, and weirdly that was okay.

“If Techhunter contacts you again, you’ll let us know?” the woman said, and I nodded. The man handed over a tissue, and I scrubbed my eyes.

• • • •

They let me go. But I assume they’re watching me, and that my phones are tapped and my computer hacked and all that. I’m not really even angry about it, because of course, and if it were any other former girlfriend of any other supervillain I’d think it was the right thing to do. But I also can’t stand the idea that they’ll use me to catch Jason. So I mostly don’t talk about him at all, and I hope he doesn’t contact me. At the same time, I hope he does. I constantly watch for little flying drones, buzzing as they follow me, and wait for him to make his move.

But he’s too smart for that, so he hasn’t.

Yet.

©2016 by Carrie Vaughn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, the most recent of which is the fourteenth installment, Kitty Saves the World. Her superhero novel Dreams of the Golden Age was released in January 2014.  She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

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

Collateral

Peter Watts | 9,280 words

They got Becker out in eight minutes flat, left the bodies on the sand for whatever scavengers the Sixth Extinction hadn’t yet managed to kill off. Munsin hauled her into the Sikorsky and tried to yank the augments manually, right on the spot; Wingman swung and locked and went hot in the pants-pissing half-second before its threat-recognition macros, booted late to the party, calmed it down. Someone jammed the plug-in home between Becker’s shoulders; wireless gates unlocked in her head and Blanch, way up in the cockpit, put her prosthetics to sleep from a safe distance. The miniguns sagged on her shoulders like anesthetized limbs, threads of smoke still wafting from the barrels.

“Corporal.” Fingers snapped in her face. “Corporal, you with me?”

Becker blinked. “They—they were human . . .” She thought they were, anyway. All she’d been able to see were the heat signatures: bright primary colors against the darkness. They’d started out with arms and legs but then they’d spread like dimming rainbows, like iridescent oil slicks.

Munson said nothing.

Abemama receded to stern, a strip of baked coral suffused in a glow of infrared: yesterday’s blackbodied sunshine bleeding back into the sky. Blanch hit a control and the halo vanished: night-eyes blinded, ears deafened to any wavelength past the range of human hearing, all senses crippled back down to flesh and blood.

The bearing, though. Before the darkness had closed in. It had seemed wrong.

“We’re not going to Bonriki?”

“We are,” the Sergeant said. “You’re going home. Rendezvous off Aranuka. We’re getting you out before this thing explodes.”

She could feel Blanch playing around in the back of her brain, draining the op logs from her head. She tried to access the stream but he’d locked her out. No telling what those machines were sucking out of her brain. No telling if any of it would still be there when he let her back in.

Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to scrub those images from her memory if she tried.

“They had to be hostiles,” she muttered. “How could they have just been there, I mean—what else could they be?” And then, a moment later: “Did any of them . . .?”

“You wouldn’t be much of a superhuman killing machine if they had,” Okoro said from across the cabin. “They weren’t even armed.”

“Private Okoro,” the Sergeant said mildly. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

They were all sitting across the cabin from her, in defiance of optimal in-flight weight distribution: Okoro, Perry, Flannery, Cole. None of them augged yet. There weren’t enough Beckers to go around, one every three or four companies if the budget was up for it and the politics were hot enough. Becker was used to the bitching whenever the subject came up, everyone playing the hard-ass, rolling their eyes at the cosmic injustice that out of all of them it was the farmer’s daughter from fucking Red Deer who’d won the lottery. It had never really bothered her. For all their trash-talking bullshit, she’d never seen anything but good-natured envy in their eyes.

She wasn’t sure what she saw there now.

• • • •

Eight thousand kilometers to Canadian airspace. Another four to Trenton. Fourteen hours total on the KC-500 the brass had managed to scrounge from the UN on short notice. It seemed like forty: every moment relentlessly awake, every moment its own tortured post-mortem. Becker would have given anything to be able to shut down for just a little while—to sleep through the dull endless roar of the turbofans, the infinitesimal brightening of the sky from black to grey to cheerful, mocking blue—but she didn’t have that kind of augmentation.

Blanch, an appendage of a different sort, kept her company on the way home. Usually he couldn’t go five minutes without poking around inside her, tweaking this inhibitor or that BCI, always trying to shave latency down by another millisecond or two. This time he just sat and stared at the deck, or out the window, or over at some buckled cargo strap clanking against the fuselage. The tacpad that pulled Becker’s strings sat dormant on his lap. Maybe he’d been told to keep his hands off, leave the crime scene in pristine condition for Forensic IT.

Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.

“Shit happens, you know?”

Becker looked at him. “What?”

“We’re lucky something like this didn’t happen months ago. Half those fucking islands underwater, the rest tearing each other’s throats out for a couple dry hectares and a few transgenics. Not to mention the fucking Chinese just waiting for an excuse to help out.” Blanch snorted. “Guess you could call it peacekeeping. If you’ve got a really warped sense of humor.”

“I guess.”

“Shame we’re not Americans. They don’t even sign on to those treaties, do anything they damn well please.” Blanch snorted. “It may be a fascist shithole down there but at least they don’t knuckle under every time someone starts talking about war crimes.”

He was just trying to make her feel better, she knew.

“Fucking rules of engagement,” he grumbled.

• • • •

Eight hours in IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the meat attached to it sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said: other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.

They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.

Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.

Now here she was: soul half a world away, body stuck in a windowless room paneled in oak on three sides, the fourth crawling with luminous maps and tacticals. Learning just what the enemy had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.

“They were fishing,” the PAO told her.

“No,” Becker said; some subconscious subroutine added an automatic “sir.”

The JAG lawyer—Eisbach, that was it—shook her head. “They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.”

The general in the background—from NDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction—studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.

She shook her head. “There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s been acidified for twenty years.”

“It’s definitely a point we’ll be making,” Eisbach said. “You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone.”

“But how could they be—”

“Tradition, maybe.” The PAO shrugged. “Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs, but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it.”

“They didn’t show on approach,” Becker remembered. “No visual, no sound—I mean, how could a couple of boats just sneak up like that? It had to be some kind of stealth tech, that must be what Wingman keyed—I mean, they were just there.” Why was this so hard? The augs were supposed keep her balanced, mix up just the right cocktail to keep her cool and crisp under the most lethal conditions.

Of course, the augs were also supposed to know unarmed civilians when they saw them . . .

The JAG was nodding. “Your mechanic. Specialist, uh . . .”

“Blanch.” From the room’s only civilian, standing unobtrusively with the potted plants. Becker glanced over; he flashed her a brief and practiced smile.

“Specialist Blanch, yes. He suspects there was a systems failure of some kind.”

“I would never have fired if—” Meaning, of course, I would never have fired.

Don’t be such a pussy, Becker. Last month you took on a Kuan-Zhan with zero cover and zero backup, never even broke a sweat. Least you can do now is stand next to a fucking philodendron without going to pieces.

“Accidents happen in—these kind of situations,” the PAO admitted sadly. “Drones misidentify targets. Pillbox mistakes a civilian for an enemy combatant. No technology’s perfect. Sometimes it fails. It’s that simple.”

“Yes sir.” Dimming rainbows, bleeding into the night.

“So far the logs support Blanch’s interpretation. Might be a few days before we know for certain.”

“A few days we don’t have. Unfortunately.”

The general swept a finger across his tacpad. A muted newsfeed bloomed on the war wall behind him: House of Commons, live. Opposition members standing, declaiming, sitting. Administration MPs across the aisle, rising and falling in turn. A two-tiered array of lethargic whackamoles.

The general’s eyes stayed fixed on his pad. “Do you know what they’re talking about, Corporal?”

“No, sir.”

“They’re talking about you. Barely a day and a half since the incident and already they’re debating it in Question Period.”

“Did we—”

“We did not. There was a breach.”

He fell silent. Behind him, shell-shocked pols stammered silent and shifty-eyed against the onslaught of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Minister of Defence’s seat, Becker noted, was empty.

“Do we know who, sir?”

The general shook his head. “Any number of people could have intercepted one or more of our communications. The number who’d be able to decrypt them is a lot smaller. I’d hate to think it was one of ours, but it’s not something we can rule out. Either way—” He took a breath. “—so much for our hopes of dealing with this internally.”

“Yes sir.”

Finally he raised his eyes to meet hers. “I want to assure you, Corporal, that nobody here has passed any judgment with regard to potential—culpability. We’ve reviewed the telemetry, the transcripts, the interviews; FIT’s still going over the results, but so far there’s no evidence of any conscious wrong-doing on your part.”

Conscious, Becker noted dully. Not deliberate. Conscious. There’d been a time when the distinction would never have occurred to her.

“Be that as it may, we find ourselves forced to change strategy. In the wake of this leak it’s been decided we have to engage the public. Doubling down and invoking national security would only increase the appearance of guilt, and after that mess in the Philippines, we can’t afford even a whiff of cover-up.” The general sighed. “This, at least, is the view of the Minister.”

“Yes sir.”

“It has therefore been decided—and I’m sorry to do this to you, I know it’s not what you signed up for—it’s been decided to get out in front of this thing, as they say. Control the narrative. Make you available for interviews, prove we have nothing to hide.”

“Interviews, sir?”

“You’ll be liaising with Mr. Monahan here.” On cue, the civilian stepped out of the background. “His firm’s proven useful in matters of—public outreach.”

“Ben. Just Ben.” Monahan reached out to shake with his right hand, offered his card with the left: Optic Nerve, twinkling above a stock-ticker crawl of client endorsements. “I know how much this sucks, Corporal. I’m guessing the last thing you want to hear right now is what some high-priced image consultant has to say about covering your ass. Is that about right?”

Becker swallowed, and nodded, and retrieved her hand. Phantom wings beat on her shoulders.

“The good news is: no ass-covering required. I’m not here to polish a turd—which is actually a nice change—I’m here to make sure the truth gets out. As you know, there’s no shortage of parties who are a lot less interested in what really happened than in pushing their own agendas.”

“I can understand that,” Becker said softly.

“This person, for example.” Just Ben tapped his watch and wiped Parliament from the wall; the woman revealed in its place stood maybe one-seventy, black, hair cropped almost army short. She seemed a little off-balance in the picture; doubtless the helmeted RCMP officer grabbing her left bicep had something to do with that. The two of them danced against a chorus line of protestors and pacification drones.

“Amal Sabrie,” Monahan was saying. “Free-lance journalist, well-regarded by the left for her human rights work. Somali by birth but immigrated to Canada as a child. Her hometown was Beledweyne. Does that ring any bells, Corporal?”

Becker shook her head.

“Airborne Regiment? 1992?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Okay. Let’s just say she’s got more reason than most to mistrust the Canadian military.”

“The last person we’d expect to be on our side,” Eisbach remarked.

“Exactly.” Monahan nodded. “Which is why I’ve granted her an exclusive.”

• • • •

They engaged on neutral territory, proposed by Sabrie, reluctantly approved by the chain of command: a café patio halfway up Toronto’s Layton Tower, overlooking Lakeshore. It jutted from the side of the building like a bracket fungus, well above most of the drone traffic.

An almost pathological empathy for victimhood. Monahan had inventoried Sabrie’s weak spots as if he’d been pulling the legs off a spider. Heart melts for stray cats, squirrels with cancer; blood boils for battered women and oppressed minorities and anyone who ever ended up on the wrong end of a shockprod. Not into performance rage, doesn’t waste any capital getting bent out of shape over random acts of microaggression. Smart enough to save herself for the big stuff. Which is why she still gets to soapbox on the prime feeds while the rest of the rabies brigade fights for space on the public microblogs.

Twenty floors below, pedestrians moved like ants. They’d never be life-sized to Becker; she’d arrived by the roof and she’d leave the same way, a concession to those who’d much rather have conducted this interview under more controlled conditions. Who’d much rather have avoided this interview entirely, for that matter. That they’d ceded so much control spoke volumes about Optic Nerve’s rep for damage control.

If we can just get her to see you as a victim—which is exactly what you are—we can turn her from agitator to cheerleader. Start off your appies as a tool of the patriarchy, you’ll be her soulmate by dessert.

Or maybe it spoke volumes about a situation so desperate that the optimum strategy consisted of gambling everything on a Hail Mary.

There she is, Monahan murmured now, just inside her right temple, but Becker had already locked on: The target was dug in at a table next to the railing. This side, flower boxes and hors-d’oeuvres; that side, an eighty-meter plunge to certain death. Wingman, defanged but still untrusting, sent wary standbys to the stumps of amputated weaponry.

Amal Sabrie stood at her approach. “You look—” she began.

—like shit. Becker hadn’t slept in three days. It shouldn’t have shown; cyborgs don’t get tired.

“I mean,” Sabrie continued smoothly, “I thought the augments would be more conspicuous.”

Great wings, spreading from her shoulders and laying down the wrath of God. Corporal Nandita Becker, Angel of Death.

“They usually are. They come off.”

Neither extended a hand. They sat.

“I guess they’d have to. Unless you sleep standing up.” A thought seemed to occur to her. “You sleep, right?”

“I’m a cyborg, Ms. Sabrie. Not a vacuum cleaner.” An unexpected flicker of irritation, there; a bright spark on a vast dark plain. After all these flat waking hours Becker almost welcomed it.

Monahan didn’t. Too hostile. Dial it down.

Sabrie didn’t miss a beat. “A cyborg who can flip cars one-handed. If the promos are to be believed.”

Be friendly. Give a little. Don’t make her pull teeth.

Okay.

Becker turned in her seat, bent her neck so the journalist could glimpse the tip of the black enameled centipede bolted along her backbone. “Spinal and long-bone reinforcement to handle the extra weight. Wire-muscle overlays, store almost twenty Joules per cc.” There was almost a kind of comfort in rattling off the mindless specs. “Couples at over seventy percent under most—”

A little, Corporal.

“Anyway.” Becker shrugged, straightened. “Most of the stuff’s inside. The rest’s plug and play.” She took a breath, got down to it. “I should tell you up front I’m not authorized to talk about mission specifics.”

Sabrie shrugged. “I’m not here to ask about them. I want to talk about you.” She tapped her menu, entered an order for kruggets and a Rising Tide. “What’re you having?”

“Thanks. I’m not hungry.”

“Of course.” The reporter glanced up. “You do eat, though, right? You still have a digestive system?”

“Nah. They just plug me into the wall.” A smile to show she was kidding.

Now you’re getting it.

“Glad you can still make jokes,” Sabrie said from a face turned suddenly to stone.

Shit. Walked right into that one.

Down in the left hand, a tremor. Becker pulled her hands from the table, rested them on her lap.

“Okay,” Sabrie said at last. “Let’s get started. I have to say I’m surprised Special Forces even let me talk to you. The normal response in cases like this is to refuse comment, double down, wait for a celebrity overdose to move the spotlight.”

“I’m just following orders, ma’am.” The tic in Becker’s hand wouldn’t go away. She clasped her hands together, squeezed.

“So let’s talk about something you can speak to,” Sabrie said. “How do you feel?”

Becker blinked. “Excuse me?”

“About what happened. Your role in it. How do you feel?”

Be honest.

“I feel fucking awful,” she said, and barely kept her voice from cracking. “How am I supposed to feel?”

“Awful,” Sabrie admitted. She held silence for a respectable interval before pressing on. “The official story’s systems malfunction.”

“The investigation is ongoing,” Becker said softly.

“Still. That’s the word from sources. Your augments fired, you didn’t. No mens rea.”

Blobs of false color, spreading out against the sand.

“Do you feel like you killed them?”

Tell her the truth, Monahan whispered.

“I—part of me did. Maybe.”

“They say the augments don’t do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. They just do it faster.”

Six people on a fishing trip in an empty ocean. It didn’t make any fucking sense.

“Is that the way you understand it?” Sabrie pressed. “The brain decides what it’s going to do before it knows it’s decided?”

Becker forced herself to focus, managed a nod. Even that felt a bit shaky, although the journalist didn’t seem to notice. “Like a, a bubble rising from the bottom of a lake. We don’t see it until it breaks the surface. The augs see it—before.”

“How does that feel?”

“It feels like—” Becker hesitated.

Honesty, Corporal. You’re doing great.

“It’s like having a really good wingman sitting on your shoulder, watching your back. Taking out threats before you even see them. Except it’s using your own body to do that. Does that make sense?”

“As much as it can, maybe. To someone who isn’t augged themselves.” Sabrie essayed a little frown. “Is that how it felt with Tionee?”

“Who?”

“Tionee Anoka. Reesi Eterika. Io—” She stopped at something she saw in Becker’s face.

“I never knew,” Becker said after a moment.

“Their names?”

Becker nodded.

“I can send you the list.”

A waiter appeared, deposited a tumbler and a steaming platter of fluorescent red euphausiids in front of Sabrie; assessed the ambiance and retreated without a word.

“I didn’t—” Becker closed her eyes. “I mean yes, it felt the same. At first. There had to be a threat, right? Because the augs—because I fired. And I’d be dead at least four times over by now if I always waited until I knew what I was firing at.” She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Only this time things started to—sink in afterward. Why didn’t I see them coming? Why weren’t the—”

Careful, Corporal. No tac.

“Some of them were still—moving. One of them was talking. Trying to.”

“To you?”

Up in ultraviolet, the textured glass of the table fractured the incident sunlight into tiny rainbows. “No idea.”

“What did they say?” Sabrie poked at her kruggets but didn’t eat.

Becker shook her head. “I don’t speak Kiribati.”

“All those augments and you don’t have realtime translation?”

“I—I never thought of that.”

“Maybe those smart machines saw the bubbles rising. Knew you wouldn’t want to know.”

She hadn’t thought of that either.

“So you feel awful,” Sabrie said. “What else?”

“What else am I feeling?” The tremor had spread to both hands.

“If it’s not too difficult.”

What the fuck is this he said I’d be steady he said the drugs—

“They gave me propranolol.” It was almost a whisper, and Becker wondered immediately if she’d crossed the line. But the voice in her head stayed silent.

Sabrie nodded. “For the PTSD.”

“I know how that sounds. It’s not like I was a victim or anything.” Becker stared at the table. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“It’s a common complaint, out there on the cutting edge. All those neurotransmitters, synthetic hormones. Too many interactions. Things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

Monahan, you asshole. You’re the goddamn PR expert, you should’ve known I wasn’t up for this . . .

“I feel worse than awful.” Becker could barely hear her own voice. “I feel sick . . .”

Sabrie appraised her with black unblinking eyes.

“This may be bigger than an interview,” she said at last. “Do you think we could arrange a couple of follow-ups, maybe turn this into an in-depth profile piece?”

“I—I’d have to clear it with my superiors.”

Sabrie nodded. “Of course.”

Or maybe, Becker thought, you knew all along. As, two hundred fifty kilometers away, a tiny voice whooped in triumph.

• • • •

They plugged her into an alternate universe where death came with an undo option. They ran her through scenarios and simulations, made her kill a hundred civilians a hundred different ways. They made her relive Kiribati again and again through her augments, for all the world as if she wasn’t already reliving it every time she closed her goddamn eyes.

It was all in her head, of course, even if it wasn’t all in her mind; a high-speed dialog between synapse and simulator, a multichannel exchange through a pipe as fat as any corpus callosum. A Monte Carlo exercise in tactical brutality.

After the fourth session she opened her eyes and Blanch had disappeared; some neon redhead had replaced him while Becker had been racking up the kills. Tauchi, according to his nametag. She couldn’t see any augments, but he glowed with smartwear in the Megahertz range.

“Jord’s on temporary reassignment,” he told her when she asked. “Tracking down the glitch.”

“But—but I thought this—”

“This is something else. Close your eyes.”

Sometimes she had to let innocent civilians die in order to save others. Sometimes she had to murder people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: blocking a clean shot on a battlebot that was drawing down on a medical team, or innocently reaching for some control that had been hacked to ignite a tank of H₂S half a city away. Sometimes Becker hesitated on those shots, held back in some forlorn hope that the target might move or change its mind. Sometimes, even lacking any alternative, she could barely bring herself to pull the trigger.

She wondered if maybe they were trying to toughen her up. Get her back in the saddle, desensitized through repetition, before her own remorse made her useless on the battlefield.

Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a right answer, no clear way to determine whose life should take priority; mixed groups of children and adults, victims in various states of injury and amputation. The choice between a brain-damaged child and its mother. Sometimes Becker was expected to kill with no hope of saving anyone; she took strange comfort in the stark simplicity of those old classics. Fuck this handwringing over the relative weights of human souls. Just point and shoot.

I am a camera, she thought.

“Who the hell makes up these scenarios?”

“Don’t like judgment calls, Corporal?”

“Not those ones.”

“Not much initiative.” Tauchi nodded approvingly. “Great on the follow-through, though.” He eyed his pad. “Hmmm. That might be why. Your cortisol’s fucked.”

“Can you fix that? I don’t think my augs have been working since I got back.”

“Flashbacks? Sweats? Vigilant immobility?”

Becker nodded. “I mean, aren’t the augs supposed to take care of all that?”

“Sure,” Tauchi told her. “You start to freak, they squirt you a nice hit of dopamine or leumorphin or whatever to level you out. Problem is, do that often enough and it stops working. Your brain grows more receptors to handle the extra medicine, so now you need more medicine to feed the extra receptors. Classic habituation response.”

“Oh.”

“If you’ve been feeling wobbly lately, that’s probably why. Killing those kids only pushed you over the threshold.”

God, she missed Blanch.

“Chemistry sets are just a band-aid anyway,” the tech rattled on. “I can tweak your settings to keep you out of the deep end for now, but longer-term we’ve got something better in mind.”

“A drug? They’ve already got me on—”

He shook his head. “Permanent fix. There’s surgery involved, but it’s no big deal. Not even any cutting.”

“When?” She could feel her insides crumbling. She imagined Wingman looking away, too good a soldier to be distracted by its own contempt. “When?”

Tauchi grinned. “Whaddya think we’re doing now?”

• • • •

She felt stronger by the next encounter.

This time it went down at street level; different patio, different ambiance, same combatants. Collapsed parasols hung from pikes rising through the center of each table, ready to spread protective shade should the afternoon sun ever make it past the skyscrapers. Sabrie set down a smooth rounded disk—a half-scale chrome hockey puck—next to the shaft. She gave it a tap.

Becker’s BUD fuzzed around the edges with brief static; Wingman jumped to alert, hungry and limbless.

“For privacy,” Sabrie said. “You okay with that?”

White noise on the radio. Broad-spectrum visual still working, though. The EM halo radiating from Sabrie’s device was bright as a solar corona; her retinue of personal electronics glowed with dimmer light. Her watch. Her smartspecs, already recording; the faint nimbus of some medallion packed with circuitry, nestled out of sight between her breasts.

“Why now?” Becker asked. “Why not before?”

“First round’s on the house. I was amazed enough that they even cleared the interview. Didn’t want to push my luck.”

Wingman flashed an icon; a little judicious frequency hopping would get around the jam. If they’d been in an actual combat situation, it wouldn’t even be asking permission.

“You realize there are other ways to listen in,” Becker said.

(FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n])

Sabrie shrugged. “Parabolic ear on a rooftop. Bounce a laser off the table and read the vibrations.” Her eyes flickered overhead. “Any one of those drones could be a lip-reader, for all I know, and you know what? If all those eyes and ears can see the next Michael Harris before he draws down, I’m actually okay with that.”

“Michael who?”

“Guy in Orlando? Shot up a daycare a few years back?”

“I must have been—” (FHop?[y/n])

(n)

“—wait, he shot up a daycare?”

“Whole new level of fucked-up, I know. Killed forty people across three generations before they took him out.”

“Why’d he do it?”

Sabrie fixed her with a look. “Why did you?”

Becker didn’t flinch. It took some effort.

“Malfunction.” She kept her voice carefully colorless. “As far as anyone can tell.”

“Same with Harris, probably.”

“He had augments?”

Sabrie shook her head. “Wiring can go just as bad when it’s made out of meat. Turns out he lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. They say it tipped him over the edge.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That shit never does. It’s what people say, though. They have to say something.” Something eased in her posture then, a subtle relaxation in the wake of some critical moment passed. “Anyway. I’m not one of those kneejerk privacy types, is what I’m saying. Sometimes the panopticon saves lives.”

“And yet.” Becker nodded at the device on the table.

“There are limits. The cameras are up there. Your bosses are literally inside your head.” She dipped her chin at the jammer. “Do you think they’ll object to you providing a few unprompted answers? Given this new apparent policy of transparency and accountability?”

“I don’t know,” Becker said.

“You know what would make them even more transparent and accountable? If they released the video for the night of the twenth-fifth. I keep asking, and they keep telling me there isn’t any.”

Becker shook her head. “There isn’t.”

“Come on.”

“Really. Too memory-intensive. “

“Corporal, I’m recording this,” Sabrie pointed out. “16K, Slooped sound, no compression even.” She glanced into the street. “Half those people are life-logging every second of their lives for the sheer narcissistic thrill of it.”

“And they’re streaming it. Or caching and dumping every couple of hours. I don’t get the luxury of tossing my cookies into some cloud whenever my cache fills up. I have to be able to operate in the dark for weeks at a time: You stream any kind of data in the field, it points back at you like a big neon arrow.

“Besides, budget time rolls around, how much of your limited R&D funding are you going to take away from tactical computing so you can make longer nature documentaries?” Becker raised her espresso in a small mock toast. “You think the People’s Republic is losing any sleep over that one?”

Which is awfully convenient, remarked a small voice, when you’ve just—

She shut it off.

Sabrie gave her a sidelong look. “You can’t record video.”

“Sure I can. But it’s discretionary. You document anything you think needs documenting, but the default realtime stream is just numbers. Pure black-box stuff.”

“You didn’t think you needed to document—”

“I didn’t know. It wasn’t conscious. Why the fuck can’t you people—”

Sabrie watched her without a word.

“Sorry,” Becker said at last.

“It’s okay,” Sabrie said softly. “Rising bubbles. I get it.”

Overhead, the sun peeked around an office tower. A lozenge of brightness crept onto the table.

“You know what they were doing out there?” Sabrie asked. “Tionee and his friends?”

Becker closed her eyes for a moment. “Some kind of fishing trip.”

“And you never wondered why anyone would go fishing in a place where there wasn’t anything to catch but slugs and slime?”

I never stopped wondering. “I heard it was a—cultural thing. Keep the traditions alive, in case someone ever builds a tuna that eats limestone.”

“It was an art project.”

Becker squinted as the hockey puck bounced sunlight into her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Let me get that for you.” Sabrie half-rose and reached for the center of the table. The parasol bloomed with a snap. The table dropped back into eclipse.

“That’s better.” Sabrie reseated herself.

“An art project?” Becker repeated.

“They were college students. Cultural anthropology and art history majors, wired in from Evergreen State. Re-enact the daily lives of your forebears, play them back along wavelengths outside the human sensory range. They were calling it Through Alien Eyes. Some kind of commentary on outsider perspectives.”

“What wavelengths?”

“Reesi was glassing everything from radio to gamma.”

“There’s a third-party recording?”

“Nothing especially hi-def. They were on a student budget, after all. But it was good enough to pick out a signal around 400 megahertz. Nobody can quite figure out what it is. Not civilian, anyway.”

“That whole area’s contested. Military traffic all over the place.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is, it was a just a couple of really short bursts. Half a second, maybe. Around eleven-forty-five.”

Wingman froze. Gooseflesh rippled up Becker’s spine.

Sabrie leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

“You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“Mmmm.” Sabrie watched and waited.

“I take it you have this recording,” Becker said at last.

The journalist smiled faintly. “You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“I’m not asking you to compromise your sources. It just seems—odd.”

“Because your guys would have been all over the bodies before they were even cool. So if anyone had that kind of evidence, it would be them.”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have a mole. Or at least if you do, they don’t report to me. You want to blame anyone, blame your wing man.”

“What?”

“Your preconscious triggers tie into some pretty high-caliber weaponry. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what kind of games physics plays when multiple slugs hit a body at twelve hundred meters a second.”

Momentum. Inertia. Force vectors transferred from small masses to larger ones—and maybe back to smaller ones again. A pair of smartspecs could have flown twenty meters or more, landed way up in the weeds or splashed down in the lagoon.

“We wouldn’t have even known to look,” Becker murmured.

“We did.” Sabrie sipped her drink. “Want to hear it?”

Becker sat absolutely still.

“I know the rules, Nandita. I’m not asking you to ID it, or even comment. I just thought you might like . . .”

Becker glanced down at the jammer.

“I think we should leave that on.” Sabrie reached into her blouse, fingered the luminous medallion hanging from her neck. “You have sockets, though, right? Hard interfaces?”

“I don’t spread my legs in public.”

Sabrie’s eyes flickered to the far side of the street, where a small unmarked quadrocopter had just dipped into sight below the rim of the parasol. “Let’s talk about your family,” she said.

• • • •

Monahan didn’t seem put out.

“We thought she might try something like that. Sabrie’s hardly in the tank. But you did great, Corporal.”

“You were monitoring?”

“Like we’d let some gizmo from the Sony store cut us out of the loop? I could’ve even whispered sweet nothings in your ear if I’d had to—acoustic tightbeam, she’d never have had a clue unless she leaned over and nibbled your earlobe—but like I say, you were just fine.” Some small afterthought made him frown. “Would’ve been easier if you’d just authorized frequency hopping, of course . . .”

“She had a lot of gizmos on her,” Becker said. “If one of them had been able to pick up the signal . . .”

“Right. Good plan. Let her think it worked.”

“Yes sir.”

“Just Ben. Oh, one other thing . . .”

Becker waited.

“We lost contact for just a few moments there. When the umbrella went up.”

“You didn’t miss much. Apparently the collateral was doing a school project of some kind. Art history. They weren’t actually fishing, it was more of a—a re-enactment, I guess.”

“Huh. Pretty much what we heard.” Monahan nodded. “Next time, might help if you went to active logging. You know, when we’re out of contact.”

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t think.”

“Don’t apologize. After what you’ve been through, I’d be amazed if you didn’t make the occasional slip.”

He patted her on the back. Wingman bristled.

“I gotta prep for a thing. Keep up the great work.”

• • • •

All those devil’s bargains and no-win scenarios. All those exercises that tore her up inside. Turned out they were part of the fix. They had to parameterize Becker’s remorse before they could burn it out of her.

It was a simple procedure, they assured her, a small part of the scheduled block upgrade. Seven deep-focus microwave bursts targeting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten minutes, tops. Not so much as a scar to show for it afterward. She didn’t even need to sign anything.

They didn’t put her under. They turned her off.

Coming back online, she didn’t feel much different. The usual faint hum at the back of her skull as Wingman lit up and looked around; the usual tremors in fingers and toes, halfway between a reboot sequence and a voltage spike. The memory of her distant malfunction seemed a bit less intense, but then again things often seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep. Maybe she was just finally seeing things in perspective.

They plugged her into the simulator and worked her out.

Fifty-plus male, thirtysomething female, and a baby alone in a nursery: all spread out, all in mortal and immediate danger as the house they were trapped in burned down around them. She started with the female, went back to extract the male, was heading back in for the baby when the building collapsed. Two out of three, she thought. Not bad.

Sniper duty on some post-apocalyptic overpass, providing cover for an airbus parked a hundred meters down the road below, for the refugees running and hobbling and dragging themselves towards salvation. A Tumbleweed passing beneath: a self-propelled razorwire tangle of ONC and magnesium and white phosphorus, immune to bullets, hungry for body heat, rolling eagerly toward the unsuspecting evacuees. The engineer at Becker’s side—his face an obvious template, although the sim tagged him as her brother for some reason—labored to patch the damage to their vehicle, oblivious to the refugees and their imminent immolation.

Oblivious until Becker pitched him off the overpass and brought the Tumbleweed to rapture.

The next one was a golden oldie: the old man in the war zone, calling for some lost pet or child, blocking Becker’s shot as a battlefield robot halfway to the horizon took aim at a team of medics. She took out the old man with one bullet and no second thought; took out the bot with three more.

“Why’d you leave the baby for last?” Tauchi asked afterward, unhooking her. The light in his eyes was pure backwash from the retinal display, but he looked eager as a puppy just the same.

“Less of a loss,” Becker said.

“In terms of military potential?” They’d all been civilians; tactically, all last among equals.

Becker shook her head, tried to put instinct into words. “The adults would—suffer more.”

“Babies can’t suffer?”

“They can hurt. Physically. But no hopes or dreams, no memories even. They’re just—potential. No added value.”

Tauchi looked at her.

“What’s the big deal?” Becker asked. “It was an exercise.”

“You killed your brother,” he remarked.

“In a simulation. To save fifty civilians. I don’t even have a brother.”

“Would it surprise you to know that you took out the old man and the battlebot a full six hundred milliseconds faster than you did before the upgrade?”

She shrugged. “It was a repeat scenario. It’s not like I even got it wrong the first time.”

Tauchi glanced at his tacpad. “It didn’t bother you the second time.”

“So what are you saying? I’m some kind of sociopath now?”

“Exactly the opposite. You’ve been immunized against trolley paradoxes.”

“What?”

“Everybody talks about morality like it’s another word for right and wrong, when it’s really just a load of static on the same channel.” Tauchi’s head bobbed like a woodpecker. “We just cleaned up the signal. As of now, you’re probably the most ethical person on the planet.”

“Really.”

He walked it back, but not very far. “Well. You’re in the top thirty at least.”

• • • •

Buried high above the streets of Toronto, cocooned in a windowless apartment retained as a home base for transient soldiers on missions of damage control: Nandita Becker, staring at the wall and watching the Web.

The wall was blank. The Web was in her head, invited through a back door in her temporal lobe. She and Wingman had spent altogether too much time alone in there, she’d decided. Time to have some company over.

The guest heads from Global’s Front View Mirror, for example: a JAG lawyer, a retired professor of military law from Dalhousie, a token lefty from Veterans for Accountable Government. Some specialist in cyborg tech she’d never met, on loan from the Ministry of Defense and obviously chosen as much for disarming good looks as for technical expertise. (Becker imagined Ben Monahan just out of camera range, pulling strings.) A generic moderator whose affect alternated between earnest sincerity and failed attempts at cuteness.

They were all talking about Becker. At least, she assumed they still were. She’d muted the audio five minutes in.

The medallion in her hand glowed like dim cobalt through the flesh of her fingers, a faint nimbus up at 3MHz. She contemplated the feel of the metal, the decorative filigree (a glyph from some Amazonian culture that hadn’t survived first contact, according to Sabrie), the hairline fracture of the interface port. The recessed Transmit button in its center: tap it once and it would squawk once, Sabrie had told her. Hold it down and it would broadcast on continuous loop.

She pressed it. Nothing happened.

Of course not. There’d be crypto. You didn’t broadcast anything in the field without at least feeding it through a pseudorandom timeseries synched to the mothership—you never knew when some friend of Amal Sabrie might be lurking in the weeds, waiting to snatch it from the air and take it home for leisurely dissection. The signal made sense only at the instant of its creation. If you missed it the first time, wanted to repeat it for the sake of clarity, you’d need a time machine.

Becker had built her own personal time machine that very afternoon, stuck it at #1 on speed-dial: a three-line macro to reset her system clock to a dark moment weeks in the past, just before her world had turned to shit.

She unmuted audio on the web feed. One of Global’s talking heads was opining that Becker was as much a victim as those poor envirogees her hijacked body had gunned down. Another spoke learnedly of the intimate connection between culpability and intent, of how blame—if that loaded term could even be applied in this case—must lie with the technology and not with those noble souls who daily put their lives on the line in the dangerous pestholes of a changing world.

“And yet this technology doesn’t decide anything on its own,” the moderator said. “It just does what the soldier’s already decided sub—er, preconsciously.”

“That’s a bit simplistic,” the specialist replied. “The system has access to a huge range of data that no unaugged soldier would ever be able to process in realtime—radio chatter, satellite telemetry, wide-spectrum visuals—so it’s actually taking that preconscious intent and modifying it based on what the soldier would do if she had access to all those facts.”

“So it guesses,” said the Man from VAG.

“It predicts.”

“And that doesn’t open the door to error?”

“It reduces error. It optimizes human wisdom based on the maximum available information.”

“And yet in this case—”

Becker held down transmit and sacc’d speed-dial.

“—don’t want to go down that road,” the lawyer said. “No matter what the neurology says.”

Thirty-five seconds. Gone in an instant.

“Our whole legal system is predicated on the concept of free will. It’s the moral center of human existence.”

That was so much bullshit, Becker knew. She knew exactly where humanity’s moral center was. She’d looked it up not six hours ago: the place where the brain kept its empathy and compassion, its guilt and shame and remorse.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

“Suppose—” The moderator raised a finger. “—I get into a car with a disabled breathalyzer. I put it into manual and hit someone. Surely I bear some responsibility for the fact that I chose to drink and drive, even if I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”

“That depends on whether you’d received a lawful command from a superior officer to get behind the wheel,” Ms. JAG countered.

“You’re saying a soldier can be ordered to become a cyborg?”

“How is that different from ordering a sniper to carry a rifle? How is it different from ordering soldiers to take antimalarial drugs—which have also, by the way, been associated with violent behavioral side effects in the past—when we deploy them to the Amazon? A soldier is sworn to protect their country; they take that oath knowing the normal tools of their trade, knowing that technology advances. You don’t win a war by bringing knives to a gunfight—”

Speed-dial.

“—may not like cyborgs—and I’m the first to agree there are legitimate grounds for concern—but until you can talk the Chinese into turning back the clock on their technology, they’re by far the lesser evil.”

Twenty-eight seconds, that time.

“It’s not as though we ever lived in a world without collateral damage. You don’t shut down such a vital program over a tragic accident.”

A tragic accident. Even Becker had believed that. Right up until Sabrie had slipped her a medallion with a burst of radio static in its heart, a cryptic signal snatched from the warm Pacific night by a pair of smart-specs on a dead kid walking. A signal that was somehow able to offline her for intervals ranging from twenty to sixty-three seconds.

She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.

“Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”

Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a peeping Tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.

Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?

And yet—

Transmit. Speed-dial.

“—are only a few on active duty—they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”

Forty seconds. On the nose.

“Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the Cold War, especially with the collapse of the US eco—”

Speed-dial.

“—and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”

Thirty-two.

“You’re saying this Becker deliberately—”

“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star? It was almost a love letter.”

A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.

“Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker—”

Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that. She kept coming up with the same answer.

“Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”

Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.

“Chief of Defense couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned—”

Dial.

“—should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”

Forty-two seconds.

She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.

“Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”

The other stuff, though. The compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.

“The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”

She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.

Brain must keep that somewhere else.

• • • •

“I thought they’d shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked.

“This weekend.”

The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.

“I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”

Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”

“Ohhhkay.”

“Bring your jammer?”

“Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.

“So why are we in a lekking lounge at two a.m.?”

“No drones,” Becker said.

“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”

“Yeah. I just—I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”

“At two in the morning.”

“People have other things on their mind on the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a trio stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”

“Okay.”

“People don’t—congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so—thin, these days.”

Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”

“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”

“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”

“You got me thinking.”

“About?”

“The price of safety. The next Michael Harris. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t. I just don’t—”

“Twenty thousand gun-related deaths a year, Amal. Down there. Up here.”

“Mainly down there, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”

“And you got me thinking about how Harris had to be crazy to shoot up a daycare, for chrissakes, how everyone said the death of his sister must have tipped him over the edge. Only . . .”

“Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.

“What if he wasn’t crazy?” Becker finished.

“How could he not be?”

“He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA has everyone by the balls and anyone so much as whispers about gun control gets shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words haven’t worked. Advocacy hasn’t worked. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to—countermeasures.”

“Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control—someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence—would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”

Becker spread her hands.

“You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed forty people. For what, a piece of legislation?”

“Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent, you’d make back your investment in a week or two.”

“Your investment?”

“Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.

“Do you know how insane that sounds?”

“How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”

“Because nothing changed! No new laws got passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”

“He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”

“I can’t believe that you, of all people, would—after what happened, after what you did—”

“Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.

“But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault, it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and—”

“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two strangers’ kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”

Sabrie had gone very quiet.

“Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”

Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing—”

. . . couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned it . . .

“—it ends here.”

Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone . . .

“I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.

Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.

“I can’t have people in my head right now.”

“Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”

“I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re—smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward . . .”

Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.

“You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for—” Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how—”

“That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was a least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”

Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.

It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.

It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.

She was the most ethical person on the planet.

©2014 by Peter Watts. Originally published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is a reformed marine biologist/convicted felon who feels better about his career since winning the Hugo for his novelette “The Island” in 2010. (His previous novel, Blindsight, was nominated for a shitload of major awards but only won the overseas ones, suggesting that he’s most popular with people who don’t actually know him.) Watts’ work is available in twenty languages, and his technique of backloading novels with technical bibliographies— originally intended as a defense against nitpickers—has fooled academics into using his work as textbooks not only in science fiction courses, but in those on Philosophy and Neuroscience as well. He has also been cited as an inspiration for video games such as Bioshock 2 and SOMA, although he cannot afford to purchase either game to confirm this. Both he and his cat have appeared multiple times in the prestigious journal Nature.

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

The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel

Matthew Bailey | 5,360 words

When they inform you the birth will take place on a mutually acceptable research vessel, you nod and smile as if it was your choice all along. Because smiling and nodding is what you’ve been doing since the beginning. Because this is bigger than you. Because at least this way it feels like you’re being honored and feted instead of herded and controlled.

Mr. Kagawa, courteous and diplomatic by profession, does his best to make it all seem like a request. His patronizing voice makes your feet itch. You remind yourself that he is under a lot of pressure, and that the eyes of two very different governments are constantly fixed on the space between his shoulder blades . . . until a savage kick to your bladder drives every ounce of understanding right out of your head. Your belly is swollen and stretched beyond what has hitherto been considered an acceptable tolerance level. Your appetite comes and goes with maddening inconsistency. Your back hurts, your hips hurt, your lungs don’t work properly, and despite the best efforts of the vessel’s crew, you are hellishly uncomfortable. Worst of all is the heat. No amount of refrigerated air, pumped into your room both day and night, can compensate.

Kagawa’s alien counterpart, Mr. H, is direct and unsympathetic, like most of his species. He explains that delivering on Earth is unacceptable and irresponsible. This is a scientific first. Scientific firsts result in breakthroughs, and breakthroughs are for the benefit of the Whole, not just for the Individual who achieved them. In other words, you realize, maybe your baby will be human and maybe it won’t be, but you are damn sure going to have to share it.

H, of course, is not his real name, but the name he has chosen to use when in liaison with humans. His real name is not pronounceable, and anyway, Tharkans can choose as many names as they want once they have achieved Individual status. He chose “H,” he once explained, because of its admirable symmetry, and because he prefers the simplicity of a single character to the needless verbosity of a more traditional human name, like “Frank.”

Your mate assures you Mr. H does not know that Frank was your father’s name.

Your mate—not your spouse, because neither planet has any legal precedent for intra-species marriage—is clearly uncomfortable in H’s presence. This is because H is an Individual, a status your mate has not yet achieved. The problem is that your mate is being given a level of attention and importance not usually accorded to non-Individuals. Despite being of the same species, H would obviously prefer to ignore your mate entirely, except you have insisted that, as the father, your mate be involved in any and all decisions. Of course, no decisions are truly yours to make, which means Mr. Kagawa has to pretend deference, while Mr. H has to pretend tolerance, while you and your mate have to pretend as if you don’t notice that it is all a farce. It’s all so terribly awkward and unpleasant, and that’s without getting into the fact that both parties are frustrated with you for putting them in this predicament, and that you did so without authorization (reproduction is a right, you reminded your boss angrily) and that both planets contain their share of xenophobes, fundamentalists, and scandalmongers who aren’t afraid to venture their opinions. Loudly.

And of course, your mother . . .

• • • •

The birth will be Cesarean, you are told. Goddammit! Your outburst prompts shocked expressions from the medical staff, but what the hell? You always planned on giving birth naturally, always dreamed of it. You want to have the experience, and anyway, it’s the only thing that will make all those years of blood and cramping worth it. The doctors—both human and otherwise—are unimpressed. You are giving birth to an entirely new form of life, they explain. We don’t know how your body or the child’s body will respond. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. With a C-section, we can at least exert some control over the proceedings.

“At least someone will be able to,” you reply sarcastically. The human doctors roll their eyes. Typical pregnant woman, you know they’re thinking. Everything’s a battle.

The alien doctors make no response. Their sarcasm glands must be vestigial.

• • • •

The next several months are spent in misery. Tests, tests, and more tests. There’s never a moment when some lead isn’t attached to your body. I am not an experiment, you think. But you are.

Forms, forms, and more forms. Everyone is anxious to avoid liability. Both governments have to hammer out the legal implications. War was only narrowly averted after first contact several years ago, and no one wants blood spilled now over a technicality.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. You speak with lawyers and diplomats, pontiffs and politicians, both human and Tharkan. Each with a say regarding the child inside you.

Questions, questions, and more questions. Reporters are not allowed onboard, but they circle the research vessel in tiny ships like gnats in space. Besides, you’ve heard the speculation. What will the creature look like? Will it be human or Tharkan? Will it have the ability to vocalize sounds, or will it rely on Tharkan image-projection to communicate? Can it reproduce, or will it be sterile? Soon you begin to feel less like an incubator for life and more like the carrier of a disgusting disease. Patient Zero. A terrible thing for a mother to feel about her baby, and suddenly you hate yourself more than any fundamentalist xenophobe ever could. I’m not meant to be a mother, I don’t know anything about being a mother, I’m going to be a horrible mother, oh God, what if they take the baby away from me and won’t let me be a mother at all?

Your mate projects a soothing image of pink walls and a cradle into your mind—neither of which are aspects of his culture. The gesture means a lot, but it doesn’t make you feel better. What if the baby communicates the same way he does? It’s hard enough to communicate with an adult. Some Tharkans, like Mr. H, have learned how to use their mouths to shape words, how to speak using sound like humans, but it’s uncommon. And no human has ever learned how to project mental images, not that you’re aware of. That’s why the early days of human-Thark interaction consisted of a lot of arm waving.

It took forever for the relationship you share with your mate to reach the level it has. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, you were part of the first wave of envoys sent to live and work with your Tharkan counterparts. For months, you worked side by side with your future mate. You didn’t realize you had developed an attachment to him until the day he announced he was being sent home a month early. You didn’t know he was in love with you until the day he projected the image of the two of you growing old together.

“I don’t know anything about being a mother,” you say to him.

Your mate points to your belly and shakes his head. After a few mental images, you think you know what he’s trying to say. The fetus doesn’t know anything about being a baby, either.

• • • •

There will be no baby shower. Friends and relatives are not allowed onboard (they represent an unacceptable vector for infection) and besides, what gifts could they even bring? Onesies? Little woolen animal slippers? None of it would fit. A high chair? The average Tharkan’s digestive process lasts almost four weeks, and it would outgrow any high chair in a few months anyway due to the rapid growth hormones that have Earth’s scientists so astonished and its military so uneasy. A vintage copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting? Maybe as a gag.

The pressure is finally getting to your handlers. Mr. Kagawa and Mr. H erupt into a fight over taxation right in front of you, clearly a spillover from some previously unfinished debate. Kagawa slips into his native tongue, while Mr. H starts projecting imagery all across the room involving human contortions of a slightly pornographic nature.

Kagawa storms out. After a few deep breaths, Mr. H turns and attempts to explain that the infant must not be named. Names are earned, not given. You have been expecting this. On Thark, everything a young Tharkan is or does must be for the overall population’s benefit. At first, human researchers thought this to be indicative of some quasi-socialist form of government. Tharkan authorities, on the other hand, claim it as being closer in spirit to the human concept of meritocracy . . . if the traditional notion of meritocracy were taken to the extreme. There are no class distinctions on Thark, no castes, no specific restrictions or laws based on gender or race. Anything can be earned on Thark, so by extension, everything must be. Infants that sleep soundest are fed first. Toddlers who follow instructions soonest are given the best toys. Those who listen are allowed to speak. Those who speak well may speak more. Only when a Tharkan has demonstrated great value to the Whole may he or she earn the status of Individual. Only Individuals may breed; only Individuals who show outstanding care for their child may breed again.

Only an Individual can choose a name.

“My baby has a right to a name,” you say fiercely.

“Rights, as you call them, are an arbitrary justification for allowing some actions over others,” Mr. H replies. “You may as well say that your offspring is owed a name. On Thark, we do not speak of what is owed. Only of what is earned.”

“We are not on Thark,” you say.

“Nor are we on Earth.”

This is the crux of the matter. You are of one species, your mate of another. What your offspring will be is undetermined. You reside neither on Earth nor on Thark, but amidst the trackless nether between the stars where laws end and philosophy dies. This, you realize, is why two separate worlds are so obsessed with your baby. Not out of scientific curiosity. Not for taxation purposes. Those are but skirmishes within the wider war. A new form of life is about to be born inside disputed country. Whom will that life make alliance with? Earth, or Thark? The winner gets a leg up on the other.

To them, your baby is not a person. It is territory, newly discovered. Each world in a race to plant their flag.

• • • •

The doctors show you a few images of your baby. There appear to be ten fingers and ten toes, which is encouraging. There is also the unmistakable shape of a pronounced sagittal crest. Doctor Pelzer, one of the few who still practice the ancient art of bedside manner, assures you that most hominids had sagittal crests at some point, on Earth as well as on Thark. Australopithecus, for example, and some of the great apes today. Tharkan and human morphology simply evolved along slightly different lines. Grateful for his attempt at conversation, you do not tell him that you’ve known this since you were an undergraduate.

Suddenly, the image of a finger running along the top of a young Tharkan head fills your mind. At first, you think the image is of your baby, until you realize that it is your mate when he was young, and that the finger belonged to his father. You look over and see your mate smiling at the memory. His eyes are turned inward. Lately, it seems as if you can sometimes “see” what he is thinking even when he doesn’t intend you to.

The image makes you remember your own father and how he used to tweak the tip of your nose when you were being silly. Even once, before prom, he—

Hey! You blink, look around, and rub the end of your nose. Your mate retracts his finger and smiles.

“Could you see what I was thinking?” you ask, startled.

“Yes,” he answers. It is another first in human/Tharkan interaction. You decide not to tell Mr. H.

Only later do you realize that your mate answered out loud.

• • • •

There is little to do now. You have exhausted all possible diversions and distractions. Most of your time is spent practicing communication with your mate. You show him how to use his lips and tongue to shape different sounds. He teaches you how to project your thoughts, how to sharpen the images you send, how to ensure they only go to the intended receiver.

Then, at night, when both of you are too exhausted to continue any longer, you stroke your belly and talk to the little person inside it. He’s a wonderful listener. You send him loving images and sensations. Bright sunlight. Wind in your hair. Warm sand between your toes. And out loud, you whisper, “I love you.”

• • • •

More tests, more scans. The date is set and fast approaching. Your human doctors want to pour something called erythromycin into the infant’s eyes to protect against bacterial infection. Their Tharkan equivalents object. Tharkan infants do not typically open their eyes for several days, and anyway, antibiotics in general are not appreciated in Tharkan culture. Either the immune system will fight off the infection, or it will not. Relying on medicine instead of one’s own body creates a culture of dependency and places stress on the Whole.

A Tharkan infant has never endured the ordeal of emerging from a human female’s womb, the human doctors argue.

A human female’s womb has never had the honor of bearing a Tharkan infant, is the reply.

You have your own feelings on the matter. It’s all down in your birth plan, which you sketched out in a notebook over a month ago. You gave a copy to doctors from both species, but no one has mentioned it since.

Prisoners don’t make plans, you realize, unless they involve digging a tunnel behind the latrine. Alas, even your trips to the lavatory are supervised.

Your spouse tries to apologize for his species’ dismissiveness. “Most of them haven’t worked side by side with humans for very long,” he explains. “You are simply not recognized as an Individual yet. You haven’t yet proven yourself of value—”

“Stop. Who is carrying this child?”

Your mate projects an image of you into your mind.

“Who is the one that’s given her entire body over to keeping this space-grubbing, energy-sucking parasite alive for the past six months?”

Same image.

“Who is the one who can’t breathe, can’t eat, is always in pain, always has to pee, and who has seen her entire shape—pleasantly symmetrical, Mr. H would have said, and I worked damn hard to keep it that way—morph into a very unpleasing ovoid?”

Your mate has been among humans long enough to take the hint.

“The next Tharkan to suggest I don’t have value will get smacked in the face,” you declare. And just to make it official, you put it in your birth plan.

• • • •

D-Day—the “D” stands for “Delivery,” and never was the term more appropriate—is tomorrow. The ship is full to bursting with envoys, lawyers, dignitaries, scientists, and a select number of correspondents. You are introduced to every single one. (For some reason, this is the part people thought you should be involved in.) A few are even famous. A new wave of nausea hits, one that has nothing to do with the creature inside you.

They move you to another room on the ship, bigger and with more forbidding equipment. High above is a massive glass window, with an observation lounge just behind. Tomorrow it will be full of worthies and their spouses, sipping drinks and sampling delicacies both human and Tharkan. Each side will endeavor not to make faces at the other’s cuisine. You, on the other hand, will be on a repulsor table, screaming. True, the doctors will numb your entire lower half, but maybe you plan on screaming anyway, just to make it as unpleasant for them as this whole ordeal has been for you.

Last night. You beg to be alone with your mate. No doctors, no nurses, no functionaries. No one but you and daddy-to-be. They grant you an hour.

You have been covertly practicing mental projection with your mate. You send him images of baby books, flowers, and your parents. In your dreams, you knitted a blanket for the baby the old-fashioned way. There was a midwife and a doula and a cradle nearby. The whole ordeal was messy, painful, and ultimately magical.

Your mate looks nervous. He projects an image of you in a wedding dress. Question marks patterned onto the sleeves. You tell him it doesn’t matter, and mean it. Your parents never married and they were together for twenty-four years. There is only one thing that can bind two people together, and it has nothing to do with words on paper.

Your mate projects another image. You, old and frail. Him, older and frailer. It is the same image you saw on the day you learned that a Tharkan could love a human. The day you learned a human could love a Tharkan back.

• • • •

So. Many. People!

They transfer you to a repulsor table that can move to different stations around the room as needed. The room itself is so full you doubt you’ll be floating anywhere. Tharkans and humans not just rubbing elbows, but practically linking them. Everyone talking at once, above you, around you, anywhere but to you. And the various machines are beeping at cross-purposes like some avant-garde music ensemble. But worst of all is when you catch sight of Mr. Kagawa, whispering in the ear of someone who looks suspiciously like a military officer. Your breath catches in your throat. If something goes wrong, will this lead to war? Don’t you have enough to worry about? You’re going to be a mother in a few minutes, and—my God, it’s just hitting you now, how is it just hitting you now?

Oh, something is definitely happening.

You feel your lower half going numb, and then suddenly you don’t have a lower half at all.

I’m not ready; it wasn’t even nine months . . .

Get this thing out of me!

For about thirty seconds, there is silence. Wonderful, blissful silence. The first you’ve enjoyed in months. Even the machinery seems to have gone quiet, as if listening. History is about to be made. You lift your head up, trying to see what’s going on, but they’ve put up a shield and it’s impossible to tell.

Suddenly, a human nurse makes a move to your left. Someone hands someone else a new instrument. A Tharkan doctor steps forward; a human doctor squeezes in front of him. Someone asks a question, and then two, three, four, five people are talking at once. The machinery is beeping again. You hear the word complications, and realize dimly that it is in response to a question posed over the intercom from the observation lounge above. More movement, more scuffling, and now Tharkans and humans are arguing with each other, and the beeping is louder than ever. The shield over your abdomen is still blocking your sight, and no matter how you try to sit up, you can’t see what’s going on. Your mate beside you is squeezing your hand so tight it makes you cry out in pain, and now the doctors are paying attention to you, calling for the anesthesiologist, why are the drugs not working? Another voice comes over the loud speaker, someone starts swearing, and you wonder for a brief moment if an international incident is about to start.

Now the beeping blurs into a single, continuous noise; a ringing in your ears. A cold, clammy sensation creeps up around you. Suddenly, it’s hard to lift your head up; your neck protests as if you are asking it to lift the weight of a small boulder. At the same time, your head itself feels light—so light that maybe it’s not attached to your body at all, but is in fact floating through an airlock and out into space.

“—too much blood,” you hear a doctor say. “—into shock.”

And when you hear that, you’ve simply had enough.

They took away your freedom; they took away your right to choose what was best for you and your baby. They took away your plans, your dreams. They took away everything that makes bringing another life into the universe personal, memorable, magical. True, they had reasons, but so did you. And now, at the end, at the finish line, your own body wants to turn against you?

I will not faint, you say to yourself. I will not go into shock. I won’t!

Then don’t, your Self says back.

Focus on something. Focus on your mate. No, focus on the baby. But how can you focus on the baby when you can’t see anything, when you don’t know anything? Oh, how you wish people would actually speak to you, include you, instead of treating you like a problem to solve, a diplomatic crisis to avert.

So include yourself, says your Self.

And you think, yes.

“Doctors!” you say out loud, and at the very same time—

Doctors! you say in your head, and project the image of every Tharkan present turning to you, the Queen, attending on your every word. Just like you’ve been practicing with your mate . . . well, not the Queen part.

The humans shut up. The Tharkans turn toward you, and you can see the shock on their faces, that a human has learned in a few months what took thousands of years of evolution back home.

Very slowly, very clearly, for the benefit of the entire room, you ask what is happening with your baby.

The lead doctors from both species try to answer at once. You hold up a hand. One at a time, please. And because Dr. Pelzer actually tried to talk to you once or twice, you motion him to go first.

He takes a deep breath through his mask, his shoulders rising and falling dramatically. “The baby . . . your baby . . . it’s not what any of us are used to. When the embryo implanted, it must have . . .” Another deep breath. “There’s a lot of bleeding. We can’t get it to stop. In fact, the more we try to remove the baby, the more bleeding occurs. It’s too . . . attached. It’s not just the umbilical cord. There is a kind of tissue connecting the baby to your uterine wall, and it’s proving very resilient.” He wipes his brow in the crook of his arm. “If resilient is the word.”

You feel a surge of fear, then suppress it. “What do we do?”

Dr. Pelzer looks at his colleagues, looks back at you. “Frankly, none of us here have ever seen this before. Our Tharkan friends assure me that it is usually harder to keep the fetus within the mother than it is to deliver it. And of course, this doesn’t occur in humans. It’s . . . new.”

New, you think, just like my baby. Neither Tharkan nor human, but something else entirely.

“We’ll keep trying,” Dr. Pelzer says, and bends over again.

All you can do is wait, blind behind the shield, paralyzed from the chest down. All you can do is wait, which is all you ever do, while the experts, the learned, and the powerful make decisions and have their say. Controlling everything down to the last detail. Leaving nothing to chance. Preparing for a new arrival into the universe after an eon of reruns.

But is that truly all you can do? you hear your Self ask. Is it truly all you have done?

All I’ve been doing, and all I can do, you tell yourself, is lie here.

That is not true, your Self responds. You may have spent most of the past few months in bed, but you did far more than just lay there.

Right, you think wryly. I created a birth plan. For all the good it did.

What else?

You close your eyes and remember. Tests, forms, one-sided conversations with doctors and officials. Blitzing through your collection of immersivision streams. Reading old books, scanning news reports regarding yourself and your baby. Teaching your mate how to speak vocally. Learning how to communicate using mental projection.

Yes! your Self exclaims. Pretty damned busy, I would say.

But what good does all that do?

A mental shrug fills your mind. If you did more than just wait before, your Self says, perhaps you can do more now.

You cycle through and dismiss your various options. Option 1: Lie there and faint. Not acceptable. Option 2: Try to get up. Not possible. Option 3: Try and help in some way. All right, but how? Your legs are useless. Your arms not much better. And because of the shield, you can’t even see. In fact, the only two things that seem to be functioning are your ears and your mouth. But the former is filled with the babble of doctors, and the latter, well . . . when has anyone listened to what you have to say?

When people don’t listen, says your Self, sometimes the only recourse is to find new people.

But who else is there? Your doctors don’t listen, the officials are even worse, your mate can do nothing, and the only other person in the world you’ve spoken with this whole time is the baby inside of you.

Your baby.

The words are already on your lips. You’ve been saying them for months. I love you. I love you. In spite of everything that’s happened, or maybe because of it. I can’t wait to see you. I’m your momma, do you know that? I love you.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see one of the doctors wipe his sleeve across his brow. Two nurses shoot each other meaningful looks.

There’s too much noise in the room, you realize, and your voice will never carry. And besides, what if the child is more Tharkan than human?

Your mate has been teaching you how to project images to specific people. How to reach out with your mind and feel for the recipient. Like recognizing someone by the sound of their footsteps or the smell of their hair. So you close your eyes and reach out, seeking your baby, invisible fingers creeping through the darkness, searching for something to grasp onto.

Then you find him—and he is most assuredly a him. You feel a rush of psychic feedback: pain, hunger . . . terror. All being projected along a very specific path, a path that leads directly to you. With a shock, you realize you never found him at all—he has been crying out for you. There is only one thing he wants, one thing he needs, one thing he cares about. He is unwitting and indifferent to everyone else in the room. All these Very Important Persons, all their opinions, plans, and machinations mean nothing to him. Birth plans and procedures, taxation disputes and ethical dilemmas . . . these philosophical sideshows are of little account. In a room full of egos, the child has his own Will, and it centers around one thing and one thing only: his mother.

In all this vast universe, you are his world entire.

Just like that, your doubts and frustrations vanish. Feelings of helplessness, unimportance, disenfranchisement . . . all of them cease to exist. Suddenly, you are the most powerful person here. No one in the room wields more influence than you.

Well have you earned it, your Self says.

You start projecting a stream of images and sensations. The feel of your bare skin against his. The pleasure of a full belly. The warmth of a swaddling blanket.

“Something is happening,” Dr. Pelzer announces.

“I’m here, my love,” you say aloud. Your favorite song, murmured into his ear. “I love you.” A cool finger on his cheek. “I can’t wait to see you.” The gentle movement of a rocking chair. “It’s time to come out now.” Nuzzling, nose to nose.

“My God,” says Dr. Pelzer. “It’s you. Keep talking. The tissue . . . it’s relaxing.”

You can feel him listening, feel him seeing, neither Tharkan nor human but a bit of both, something new, needing and wanting what both provide. “Let go, my love,” you say.

Momma is here.

A shrill cry pierces the air. The unmistakable sensation of want fills your mind.

“We have him!” says Dr. Pelzer. “By God, by God, we have him. Here, Dad, do you want to cut the cord?”

And your mate comes forward, finally with a name of his own.

• • • •

They take him and wash him before handing him to Dad, who in turn gives him to you. The others in the room all cluster around, staring down at your Son. An unspoken question hangs in the air: Human, or Tharkan?

You look at him, and Dad looks, too. Hid body is big and heavy. Ten fingers and ten toes. A pronounced sagittal crest. Two deep brown eyes ringed with bright green irises. Lots and lots of teeth, incisors particularly. Breastfeeding is going to be a bitch, but you look forward to it all the same.

“He looks like you,” you both say at once.

• • • •

Now the doctors are shaking hands, and even Mr. Kagawa and Mr. H have seemed to make peace. Up in the observation room, the VIPs are talking and pointing or placing calls. You stare up at them with dwindling interest. Their time has passed. The weight of your Son nestling against your breasts draws your attention back downward.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” you ask him.

You inform the room that it is your intention to feed your Son now, and that they are welcome to come and visit later at a mutually acceptable time that will be entirely of your own choosing. You do your very best to make it at least seem like a request.

A few gapes, a half-mumbled protest that there are tests to be done, experiments to be tried, measurements to be taken. This is a Scientific First, after all, and—

“No,” a voice says. You look over, eyes widening. It is Mr. H. “This is not a ‘First.’ This is her Son.”

• • • •

Slowly, the room clears. The observation lounge stands empty. One of the nurses presses a few buttons and the repulsor-table begins to move.

An admirable symmetry, says your Self. And then you realize that Mr. H is still there, has been there the whole time, standing as close as the doctors would allow throughout the entire procedure.

“Did you . . . was it . . .” The words won’t come. “Why?”

Mr. H emanates a mental shrug. It feels oddly familiar. “A mother has the right to raise her baby.”

“But I thought you didn’t believe in rights,” you say. “They’re just arbitrary justifications, isn’t that what you said?”

He closes his eyes and projects a band of golden light connecting you and your Son.

“There is nothing,” he says, “arbitrary about that.”

With a nod to your mate, he leaves the room. And at last there is only you, your mate, and your Son, floating down the hall, heading towards home. It’s as if the ship is devoid of other life. As if all those diplomats and dignitaries, lawyers and legislators never existed. As if none of that drang and dross ever mattered.

Maybe, you think, it never did.

©2016 by Matthew Bailey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Bailey hails from Salt Lake City, Utah, having also spent time in California and Alaska. An aspiring fiction writer by spiritual calling and a professional ghostwriter by trade, Matt devotes his free time to huffing and puffing on several different instruments, the saxophone first and foremost. He is currently working on adding a fifth instrument, the tin whistle, to his repertoire. When not battling a severe case of B.A.D. (Book Acquisition Disorder), Matt also loves romping in the Wasatch Mountains with his wife and three sons. Jazz music, history, and sports are his other obsessions. He writes about Brazilian soccer at www.brazilworldcupblog.net.

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

Dragon Brides

Nghi Vo | 3,620 words

Dragon brides are notoriously difficult women. We have lived with dragons, after all, those strange and terrible animals with their curiously human eyes, and some of us come back down from the broken mountains with their hisses still in our ears.

I was taken by the green dragon of Mahr when I was fifteen, and it was a full year before my lord brought me back down. Forty years would pass before I would come to those steep paths again. The first time I was flown, clutched in horny talons with my silk dress fluttering like a banner, and the second time I was carried down half-unconscious, slung like a dead woman over the back of a bay stallion.

This time, I wore the clean white robe of the penitent, and I was on foot. I stared up at the mountains, where men never went save to rescue princesses, and where it was said that women never went at all unless it was on the coppery wings of a dragon.

It was dawn when I started my climb up the mountain, and by midday I was sweaty and hot. I had memories of being only a young girl, and scaling steeper paths and byways to find the tender plants that grew in the crevasses and ridges of the mountain.

I found one of those plants almost as soon as I had the thought, and for a moment I stared at it. It was a shrubby thing, barely a handspan high, but there were a dozen plump little leaves tinged with ruby. I knelt to twist the leaves away, leaving the plant still growing from a crack in the stone.

The leaf flooded my mouth with an astringent green liquid, and I thought about how the spring melt washed grains of dirt down the mountain, and how after decades, the dirt filled the crack until a passing bird dropped a seed into it. I remembered the hiss in my ear telling me that this plant, which humans called hand-in-hand, was safe to eat so long as the leaves were not all gone red.

Of course, the dragon’s voice continued, it’s unlikely you’ll see such a thing in these cold climes. By all rights, it is a plant of warmer lands.

I had never asked the dragon where hand-in-hand came from, I realized, whether it came from the murky feverish lowlands to the west or some place even more distant. It was not the only thing I regretted not asking the dragon, and after a few moments’ rest, I continued on my way.

• • • •

By dawn of the second day, I reached the cave, and I had to haul myself up the last few miles. I lay at the cave opening, breathing hard, and slowly I became aware of the hot, faintly sulfurous smell that touched everything around it. For a moment, I wondered if another dragon had taken up residence, and if I would be met with fire and fang, but then I realize that it was the last of my dragon’s scent.

When I came down from the mountain, of course they had burned my rags, but my hair and my skin had had a tang of brimstone for weeks afterward. I am flesh, and the cave was stone, and stone remembers better than flesh.

After a moment, I walked into the cave, and two turns past the opening, I was as blind as a cave bat in the sun. Foolish woman, I had thought that my feet would remember the dark places as well as they would when I was fifteen, but a barked shin and a stone pillar where I had not remembered one told me that I was wrong.

Grimly, I made myself walk back and forth, and within an hour, I remembered to listen for the shuffling echoes of my feet, and an hour after that, I could walk from one end of the enormously hollow place to the other. The floor was relatively flat, and after a few timorous rounds, I took off my shoes and instantly remembered more than I had a moment ago. Flesh is not stone, but it still remembers some things.

During the course of my rounds, my toes found small bits of gold. There was a square coin with hole in it, of the kind that they make in Kyhm, and half a golden beetle. There was what I suspected was a gold-capped tooth and a tiny golden hand. Even if they had not been the remnants of a dragon’s horde, I knew them for gold from their weight, and their cool smoothness. That, at least, I knew from before, as the daughter of a king.

I gathered the pieces of gold, weighing them critically in my hand before placing them squarely in the center of the room. They were a small enough horde, I thought, but it was a beginning anyway.

I took off my gold wedding ring, twisted about with ivy vines and set with a single winking ruby. It should have been harder to drop it into the pile, but instead, I dropped it as easily as I would a stone, and when it fell down next to the coin and the spoon, it became one more piece of gold on a cold stone floor.

• • • •

My decision to leave the palace was one that I described as a calling, and I allowed my husband to believe that that calling was one for the nunnery on the other side of the kingdom. The Sweet Laurens were a contemplative order known for their silence and their weaving, and though I’ve had little enough interest in either, he allowed me to go.

When I told him of my desire, I saw the gears of the old war machine turning in his head. I knew he wondered if it would be better to forbid me, or even to kill me as I went on the high road to the nunnery’s whitewashed walls. I know this, because it is what I would have thought as well, and I forgave it, because long ago, he had also looked a dragon in the eye.

“Go then, and walk in grace,” he rumbled, rubbing his hands by the fire. These days, he looks like a stick man held together with loose leather straps, a far cry from the cavalier who came up the mountain, and I turned to go. There was nothing more to be said between us, and those were the last words he spoke to me.

• • • •

It took me the better part of two weeks before I really knew my way around the mountain again. Legs are more sore at fifty-five than they were at fifteen, and often, as I panted up the slope, seeking ahead of me with a stick for treacherous loose scree, I marveled that once I had danced up the slope.

Sometimes it was my own shadow that I chased up the mountain, that of a girl who could not imagine growing old, and sometimes it was the shadow of a great beast with leathery wings that could span the broad castle gate.

At night I slept on the cold floor of the cave, curling tightly around the small pile of gold there. Silver tarnishes and copper goes to verdigris, but gold stays golden. The coin was as bright as the day that it was minted, and the golden spoon could belong with any gentleman’s snuff kit. They were artifacts, and in the night, I touched them, finding their curves and learning their weight.

One night, as I rolled the tooth between my fingers, I fell into a reverie, half dream and half the spirit walk that the mystics speak of.

I was on a plain, and it burned. The sun stared down with a merciless glare, and the only movement was the flutter of white banners held up to a sky that looked worn of all color.

The animals only move because we tell them to do so, and our commanders are vicious because they are worried. Thirst will kill an army better than any armored host, and it has been too long.

A cry goes up, there is water sighted, and the whole train moves forward, jerking like an inchworm.

The company tops the rise, and suddenly, with a chill of premonition, I know what I shall see next.

What was supposed to be an oasis, a patch of green in the parched field, instead spreads wide wings and throws a jade-block head back to hiss steam. With a single flap of its leathery wings it is aloft, and even as the men scatter and the animals stampede, I know that none will escape.

I awaken from my reverie and look at the tooth more carefully. Now I know it was once worn by a man named Haseem, and that his tooth pained him until he went to a black-eyed girl in Al-Aresh who leafed it with gold.

I set the tooth down carefully, and I think I understand a little more about dragons and hordes.

• • • •

It was as though I had returned from the dead.

My parents embraced me stiffly, but cautiously, as though afraid that I was no longer quite safe, and my younger sister stared at me from around corners, her eyes wide. There was something they no longer trusted about me, and they were relieved to have my wedding before us. It was a safe place for them to put me.

They had stuffed the dragon’s head, and at my wedding feast, my lord and I ate under the dragon’s very mouth.

“It is a travesty,” my husband whispered. His eyes kept straying to the dragon’s head, and he was right. A dragon is a thing of fire and fury. This was only a dead animal’s head stuffed with sawdust and mounted to a wall.

I shrugged. The dragon was dead, and I could not see it caring what we did with the thing that had once housed its memories.

• • • •

Now that I knew the trick of it, I sat with the coin in my hand. It warmed but was unresponsive, even when I held it so tight it left dents in my palm. When I brushed it over my lower lip however, a cool shiver ran up my spine. It took a full day, a day where I sat in the unflinching sun and held the coin in my mouth, but I fell into the memory that coin held.

Khym is a cold land, and the men and women alike wear fur coats that turn them into round bears. The only place where this is not so is in Keph-Valee, where the furnaces are kept roaring all year round so that the beautiful girls and boys may dance in sheer silks and gemstones. The coin rolls in the fingers of a woman dressed as a man, and she sweats from the unaccustomed heat. She is a thief and a murderer, but she is in love, and she watches the tallest girl dancing in green silk on the stage and hands her the square coin. I sat up suddenly, choking and spitting the coin out into my hand. It is covered in my spit and I wipe it clean before returning to the cave.

The girl in green silk had carried the coin in a leather pouch for years until it became clear that her thief was not going to return, and she ventured into the wilderness, looking for a dragon.

I was getting closer to the secret, I thought.

• • • •

My husband took the throne when my father died, and so I became queen. We did no worse than others, and better than many, and when I proved barren, we adopted my sister’s son. He was a smart boy, with no brothers, which is best for young princes, and between my husband and I, we taught him what we could of statecraft and gave him enough freedom to learn the rest on his own. He’s grown now, and fighting our wars for us in the west. Sometime in the next few years, my husband’s health will falter and he will call my nephew back, to be king in his place.

My husband was a hunter, and when there were no wars to distract him, his treks into the wilderness with his man, his hound, and his horn could take him away for weeks at a time. A rumor came back to me of the night he chased a solid white stag, only to have the stag turn into a young man who took him to live a hundred years in a night beneath the cold earth. I never asked him about that boy, or of the kiss shaped like a scar behind his right ear. He let me keep my secrets, after all.

I intrigued, I schemed, I gardened. I wrote a little, I commissioned the construction of a university, which I suspect will be my great life’s work to the people who never knew me.

It wasn’t a bad life.

Some part of me never left the mountain, and some part of me never stopped watching the sky for the glint of sunlight on jade scales.

• • • •

Half a gold scarab fell from a jeweler’s hand, striking the stone track. He wished, before the dragon stove his head in, that he had had time to finish it.

• • • •

I remember very little before the dragon, and what I do remember seems muted and worn. I woke in the morning and bathed my face, I spun with the other women, and when my father returned from battle, I helped my mother bathe his scars.

I no longer remember why we were on the northern downs. I wasn’t alone. No young girl of noble birth ever was. No, the downs bloomed with the red, yellow, orange, and blue dresses of my mother and her ladies. Perhaps they were playing at shepherdesses; once in a great while, I remembered that my mother would engage in such foolishness.

I don’t remember being unhappy. I don’t remember being happy. There was an envoy come to ask for my hand that day, but that had been happening since I was a child in swaddling clothes.

I do remember the grass that was mostly still dead that early in the spring, how at first glance it looked gray, but upon closer examination instead turned out to be lilac. I took off my shoes and carried them in my hand, venturing farther away than I should. Perhaps that was what caught the dragon’s eye, a patch of red silk moving away from the others, vivid like a pool of fresh blood.

I wasn’t wearing any gold. That was for married women.

I walked farther away than I should have, and when I felt the chill of the dragon’s shadow over my head, blocking out the light and filling my gaze, it was far too late.

• • • •

The gold hand was stubborn. I held it in my mouth, I slept with it underneath my cheek, and when all else failed, I simply sewed it snugly to the collar of my shirt and let it stay while I wandered over the mountain. It was still high summer, but there was a chill to the air that did not roll down to the dales. I did not think about what would happen if I was still there when the winter came.

The dragon fed me as it fed itself, on red raw meat that I would inexpertly singe at a small cook fire. Most of the time, it was one of the great horned deer that haunted the slopes, solitary and lonely on the peaks. Sometimes it was cattle, taken from the valleys below, and once, it was a warhorse, decked out in jingling tack. That one I refused to eat, and though the dragon did, it never brought another.

One gray day, when it seemed that the sun would never break from behind the clouds, I climbed as high as I could on the mountain. I could see clouds above me, and then I sat cross-legged on the bare stone, looking up and looking down.

I stroked the little hand with my thumb, and the memory crept in, like a thief into a room where people are sleeping.

The old woman is angry because they have taken her son away from her. He marches in a war that no one really understands, for a queen that they only know through her face, poorly stamped on the coin. They made her son kiss the coin and throw down a mugful of coarse ale before they dragged him away, him and all of the other likely-looking boys in the village.

The gold hand was a thing she bought from a witch. If she took it to the swamp, and offered it to the first thing that asked for it in the name of Lunai, the Goddess of Flies and Carrion, then she could ask for her son to be saved.

She wrapped her cloak around her thin, thin shoulders and stumped towards the swamp, determined and grim. She met a tinker, who asked for the gold hand in the name of Father Rot and a willow-wisp girl who asked for it in the name of the Queen Mother of the West.

The dragon never asked her anything, and the gold hand fell with a sharp metallic clink onto the horde.

• • • •

“Why gold?” I asked the dragon one day. It was cold, and I stuck my hands tight under my arms.

The dragon made a thrumming sound deep in its body before answering. It might have been thinking, or it might have been the beast’s strange way of laughing.

“Because gold never tarnishes like silver,” the dragon said finally. “Because the gold you see now holds a perfect memory of the goldsmith’s hand and the goldsmith’s hammer.”

“Unless it’s struck by a hammer or chewed by a dog,” I objected.

The dragon thrummed again, tilting its head so that I could see into its broad gold eye, slit down the middle with black, like a cat’s or a demon’s.

“See how well you remember if you have been struck by a hammer or chewed by a dog,” the dragon replied.

• • • •

I gathered the small pieces of gold together and placed them in the center of the cavern, and when I curled around them, I could feel the memories crushing close. There was the frustrated goldsmith, the lovelorn dancing girl, the thirsty soldier, and the bitter old woman. Beneath all of those were my own memories as well, good and bad.

There was the first time I was whipped for failing at my lessons, and the first time I realized my own strength and agility by climbing higher in the old linden tree than anyone else could. I remembered the hiss of the dragon in my ear, but also my father’s absent-minded affection, and my mother’s sharply whispered instructions, which, I realize now, twenty years after her death, were as much love as they were spite. I remembered my sister’s red baby face, and the look of mingled fear and boldness when her son arrived at the palace for the first time, knowing he was to one day rule over it. I remembered my wedding night, and the nights that came after, and the mornings, too, when we would speak with our heads on the same pillow.

I dreamed of the dragon, of a beast that spoke with the tongue of a man, but which had once told me that it was no lesser thing to be a beast. In my dreams, the dragon’s body unrolled like a length of satin ribbon, catching glints of sunset light on its green hide, and it leaped into the air with a pouncing motion, like a cat or fox kit. I remembered its death, which was a fast thing, and the parts of its life that I knew, which were not.

I dreamed out a generation. I could have slept while towers rose and fell, wars were fought and won. I slept, and I dreamed, and I remembered, and I realized why dragons love gold, because it remembers, in a way that flesh does not.

• • • •

I woke up, and I stretched long limbs that were lithe with muscle. My heart was flesh and fire, and I knew that it would keep me warm even when the sun could not. I ducked my head to leave the cave, and in the bright new light of winter morning, I stretched my wings underneath the sky for the first time.

I could tell they were good wings. They would grab the air and throw me high, taking me anywhere I wanted to go, whether it was south to the lush forests where dragons came from first, or north to the dry cold deserts.

Behind me, the gold was gathered in a small heap. I had disturbed it not at all when I rose up on four legs instead of two. It waited there to remind me of all those people, of who I was when I met them, and everything I had been and done.

I spread my broad wings and leaped into the sky, climbing higher and higher with an ease akin to breathing. I didn’t need the gold to remember, not yet. Perhaps someday I would, but now, my memories were as bright as fireworks, as bold as the glint of jade scales in the sun.

©2016 by Nghi Vo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nghi Vo lives on the shores of Lake Michigan, and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Expanded Horizons, Crossed Genres, and Icarus Magazine. She likes stories about things that fall through the cracks and live on the edges, and she has a deep love for tales of revolution (personal and political), transfiguration and transmutation. She’s a writer by trade, a storyteller by nature, a volunteer by inclination, and a dreamer by design.

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

Lily, with Clouds

Theodora Goss | 2,770 words

Eleanor Tolliver’s heels clicked on the sidewalk—click click, click click, like a cantering horse, if a horse could canter in size seven and a half shoes. It was odd, this lopsided step, in a woman whose lavender suit had been bought last week at Lord & Taylor. Really, she admitted to herself as she clicked down Elm Street, she should not have bought the narrows. The left shoe, in particular, pressed against her corn and produced the cantering gait we have noticed. And this was fitting because Eleanor, in spite of her lavender suit and matching handbag, looked like nothing so much as a horse.

The Eliots had always been horsy. The men had ridden hard, shot straight, and drunk whiskey. Their women had ruled the social world of Ashton, North Carolina. Any of them could show you the foundations of a house destroyed in what they still privately referred to as The War. If you looked carefully, you could see the stump of a column among the lilac bushes. When a daughter of the house, in the irresponsible twenties, had run off with a black chauffeur, her name in the family Bible had been scratched over with ink. The Eliots were rich and respectable. On Sundays, they took up the first two pews of the Methodist church.

Eleanor had been a quintessential Eliot. Although her face had the approximate dimensions of a shoebox, its length fitted her particular type of beauty, which was angular and expensive. Charles Tolliver had felt himself lucky to catch the oldest Eliot girl, when he was only a junior partner at her father’s law office. The youngest, now, he wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole, in spite of her father’s money.

Poor Lily, thought Eleanor, clicking past the hardware store that was going out of business now a Walmart had opened fifteen miles down the interstate. She had been an inadequate Eliot, an unsatisfying sister. Instead of being angular, she had been round, with startled brown eyes and a figure that Eleanor in her less generous moments described as chubby. Instead of Sweet Briar, which had matriculated three generations of Eliot women, she had gone to an art school in New York. There, she had met and presumably married an artist. Presumably was the word Eleanor used to her friends. After all, no one had been invited to her wedding with András Horvath, and although Lily wrote a letter about it afterward, since when was Lily to be trusted? Look at how she had burned Eleanor’s school uniform by leaving a hot iron on it, in ninth grade. The artist had died in an airplane crash. He had been flying alone and probably, Eleanor told her friends, drunk. Afterward, Eleanor had assumed Lily would move back to Ashton. But she had stayed in New York.

This thought brought Eleanor to a gate that was half off its hinges, which anyway were attached to a fence that was half fallen over from the masses of honeysuckle climbing over it. Just like Lily, to come back not to Eleanor’s house, where she and Charles had lived since her father’s death, but to this shack with its peeling paint and its gutters hanging down from the roof. Everyone would think Eleanor had refused to take her sister in. How perfectly unfair. She would have put Lily in the guest bedroom, which had lavender-scented liners in all of the drawers. Lily could have shared a bathroom with Jane.

Eleanor smiled at this reminder of her evolutionary success. Jane had the sandy Eliot hair, the angular Eliot features. Everyone said she would grow up to be as attractive as her mother. On her last report card from Saint Catherine’s, Sister Michael had written, “Jane is a bright girl, who could accomplish a great deal if she would only apply herself.” Catholics were so good at educating girls.

As if she had unconsciously internalized her clicking, Eleanor repeated its pattern on the door: knock knock, knock knock. After an impatient moment, which she spent inspecting her fingernails, manicured a week ago and painted in Chanel Pink Fantasy, someone opened the door.

Someone might have been a housekeeper or a hospital nurse, but she held out her hand and, in a voice Eleanor would later describe to everyone as “New York, you know, though I’m sure she’s a very nice woman,” invited Eleanor into the house. “I’m Sarah Goldstein. Lily probably wrote about me.”

Eleanor refrained from mentioning that Lily had rarely written, and that even her last postcard, with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it, has said only, “Dying of cancer. Coming home June 7, 2:30 p.m. Charlotte. Could you send Charles to pick me up? Lots of baggage. Love, Lil.” Charles had talked about her baggage all through dinner. “You know what she had?” He spooned more mashed potatoes onto his plate. In the last two years, his waist had expanded. If he didn’t stop eating so much, he would have hips like a woman. But he refused to exercise, except for golf. “Cardboard boxes. Hell of a lot of cardboard boxes. I think I sprained my back carrying them to the car.” Eleanor had said “Charles,” because you didn’t say “Hell” at the dinner table. Jane had looked superior, because everyone nowadays said “Hell.” Even Sister Michael had said it once, when her chalk broke on the blackboard.

“Let me make sure she’s awake,” said Sarah. She stepped around the cardboard boxes on the living room floor and opened a door on the far wall. She said something Eleanor couldn’t hear, then closed the door again. “She needs a minute to get herself together. She’s still tired from traveling.” She gestured around at the boxes. “We had some time getting these through airport security. You’d think we were carrying automatic weapons. Would you like some tea?” Eleanor said that would be fine. Charles hadn’t mentioned that Lily was traveling with someone. But Charles never noticed unattractive women, she thought, looking at Sarah’s bottom, retreating through what was presumably the kitchen door. Why did anyone wear puce?

Eleanor walked around the living room, her shoes sounding hollow on the wooden floor. No furniture, just boxes. Lily would have to come live with her. Jane could probably lend Lily her television, at least while she was in school. Eleanor looked out the window, at the overgrown honeysuckle. Charles kept the grass in their yard trimmed short enough that he could practice golf swings. On Jane’s seventh birthday, they had installed a pool so she could have friends over for swimming parties. In summer, there were always young people in swimsuits lying on the deck chairs, smelling like coconuts. Jane was one of the most popular girls in school.

Eleanor looked at the boxes again. The tape on one had been torn off and balled into a sticky brown tangle on the floor. She reached down to open it, more out of boredom than curiosity, when Sarah walked back into the room. “I’ve put the water on. It took me a while, figuring out the stove. Lily hated leaving that apartment. She said she had spent the happiest years of her life there. I don’t mind that, but I do miss the dishwasher. We had everything there—and a toaster just for bagels. But don’t mind me, I’m a little homesick for New York. I think she’s ready to see you now. Go on in. I’ll bring the tea when it’s ready.”

Lily had changed. She was lying in a double bed, the only piece of furniture Eleanor had seen so far in the house, with a blanket pulled over her breasts. Her cheeks, which had always been round and slightly red from rosacea, were yellow and sagged toward the pillow. She seemed to have melted, all but her small, sharp nose. Even her hands, lying on the blanket, looked like puddles of flesh. And she was bald.

“Ellie,” she said. Her voice sounded like an echo, as though she were speaking from the bottom of a well. “Do you have a cigarette? Sarah won’t let me have one.” From the living room, Eleanor could hear the sound of ripping tape. “She thinks they make my throat worse, but they help me, Ellie. I can’t think without them.” On Lily’s bedside table were orange plastic bottles, with varying levels of pills. Eleanor counted them twice, and got two different numbers.

So this was Lily. The same old Lily, who couldn’t take care of herself, who made wrong decisions. The same old Lily, but wrinkled and unattractive—and dying.

There was no chair. Eleanor sat down on the side of the bed, which sagged under her. “I think Sarah’s quite right. Look where smoking has gotten you.”

“Sarah’s always right.” Lily shook her head from side to side, fretfully. “I was so mad when I found out András had been sleeping with her, almost from the day we got married. But he said she was the best manager he ever had. She found him galleries, you know. Really good galleries. And when she moved in, she managed the apartment for us. She’s a wonderful manager.” Lily’s voice faded. She lay with one cheek on the pillow, her eyes closed, like a piece of parchment that had been folded many times, then smoothed out again.

Eleanor sat up straighter and put her handbag on her lap. So this was her sister’s marriage to the great artist. Poor, stupid Lily. “I don’t understand why you’re staying here with that woman, instead of coming home to your family.” Eleanor spoke calmly, as though to a horse that wouldn’t jump over a hedge. One always had to be calm around Lily when she was unreasonable. Like when she had refused to come downstairs at Eleanor’s debutante ball. “A woman your husband—well. If this were my house, I’d turn her out at once.”

Lily opened her eyes and put one hand on Eleanor’s knee. “Ellie, it wasn’t like that. I was mad at first, but then I realized it didn’t matter. I invited her to move in with us. She had such a small apartment in Brooklyn, and we had that huge loft. She cleaned and paid the bills. She would have cooked, but I wanted to do it. They liked my cooking, you know. They never minded when I burned anything.”

Ellie put her manicured hand on Lily’s. It felt cold and flabby. “Did he continue sleeping with her, after she moved in?” It was best to know these things, distasteful as they were.

Lily pulled her hand out from under her sister’s, as though it had grown too hot. “But he painted me. He slept with her, but he painted me. He never painted her, not once. Such wonderful paintings. Oh Ellie, you have to see the paintings.”

“Chamomile tea,” said Sarah, opening the door. “Am I interrupting?”

“Sarah, you have to show Ellie the paintings.” Lily tossed her head again, from side to side.

“Calm down, you,” said Sarah, “or you’ll lose the benefits of your beauty sleep. I put a little honey in it,” she said to Eleanor, handing her a pottery mug decorated with yellow bees.

“See, isn’t she a good manager?” said Lily. “I don’t know what I would have done without her after András died. I had run out of money, you know. She sold his paintings to all the right galleries, and paid for my treatments.” She raised her hand, then dropped it again over the edge of the bed. Sarah took it, put it back on the blanket, and stroked it for a moment. Lily closed her eyes. Without those spots of brown, she looked curiously colorless, as though already a corpse.

“I think we’d better leave her,” Sarah said in a low voice. “She’s worn out. Maybe she’ll have more energy tomorrow.”

Eleanor followed her out of the room, wondering what András Horvath had seen in this woman, with her puce bottom and her gray hair, which looked like it had been cropped by a barber. Artists, she thought, had peculiar tastes in women.

In the living room, Sarah said, “I’m glad you came to see Lily today. I don’t think she’ll hold on much longer. You’ll want to bring your husband, and Lily said you had a daughter?”

Ellie nodded and tapped her fingernails on the mug. What did you say to your sister’s husband’s mistress? “Maybe I’ll bring Jane. My daughter, Jane.” Of course she wouldn’t bring Jane. And Charles never liked being around sick people. He hadn’t visited his own mother in the nursing home before she died.

Sarah looked at her for a moment, then looked toward the window, where the honeysuckle was growing over the fence. “Lily wanted you to see the paintings.” She leaned down and opened one of the cardboard boxes. Many more of them were untaped, now. Out of it, she pulled an unframed canvas.

It was a painting of Lily. But Lily as she had never appeared in real life. Lily elongated and white as a sheet of paper. Lily with forget-me-nots for eyes. In the painting behind it, Lily had horns: short, curving spirals like seashells. Behind that, Lily held a pomegranate in her left hand. Lily, her head covered with butterflies. A lily that was also, improbably, Lily. Lily blue like the sky, with clouds moving over her breasts. Endless Lilies, all different, all—Eleanor caught herself before she said the word—beautiful.

Sarah pointed to the painting with the clouds. “He painted all sorts of things, of course, but before his death he only painted Lily. He did a larger one of those, with the sun as her left eye. I gave it to the Guggenheim.”

“Gave it? You gave it?” Lily had said something about spending all her money. What, Eleanor suddenly wondered, were András Horvath’s paintings worth?

Sarah looked at her, and continued to look at her until Eleanor shuffled her feet. “András left his paintings to me. Just like he left Lily to me. He knew I would manage everything.” She put down the paintings she had been holding. “András could see things. He once told me his great-grandfather had married a witch or a woman who lived in a tree or something like that. Back in his own country.” She smiled, and shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. But you can see it in the paintings. If he painted a rock, it looked like a snake, and every time you looked at that rock afterward, it would look like a snake to you, because he was right. It was a snake, even though it was also a rock. Then maybe every rock would start looking like a snake, or a flower, or a piece of bread. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how he died. There he was, flying a plane. What if he saw something—really saw it? He wouldn’t have cared that he was about to crash. It’s frightening, if you think about it too hard. Maybe art always is.” Sarah turned to the window again. “He saw people, too. He saw me so well. One day he said, ‘I’ll never paint you, Sarah. I don’t need to paint you, because you’re exactly yourself.’ But he saw Lily better than he saw anyone else in the world.”

Click click, went the heels of Eleanor’s shoes on the sidewalk. She clicked homeward because Charles would need his dinner. She would make mashed potatoes. What did she care about his weight? Men always looked more dignified with a little extra padding. She would make mashed potatoes and peas, and she would ask Jane about school, and Jane would look superior, and maybe afterward they would all play monopoly.

Was it already five-thirty? Eleanor looked up at the sky, and there was Lily, with clouds moving over her breasts. Her left eye was the sun. She tried to imagine Lily with her yellow skin sagging, her bald head sinking into the pillow. But Lily’s head was covered with butterflies, and she was holding a pomegranate in her left hand.

Click click went her heels, faster and faster, and finally, in spite of her corn, Ellie began to canter in earnest through a world that was Lily, endlessly Lily, her handbag swinging like an irregular pendulum and her hair, which had been permed only last week, shedding hairpins behind her.

©2003 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in Alchemy #1, Winter 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014).  Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

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

The Knobby Giraffe

Rudy Rucker | 3,450 words

My name’s Irit Ziv. I have a low-rent apartment in the East Village that I used to share with my girlfriend, Shirley Chen. It’s April now, and Shirley died four months ago. Ever since then, I’ve been visiting visit Ma and Pa’s flat in Brooklyn Heights a lot. An awesome spot, with a full view of lower Manhattan. The trees by the river are turning green.

I’m a grad student at NYU, trying to finish a PhD thesis in the physics department. Physics was probably a bad choice for me, but it’s too late to change. My thesis is about consciousness. I’m riffing on the quantum physics idea that you alter things by observing them. I dream of basing a technology on that.

My research? Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time meditating in an MRI machine in the university labs. I’m lucky to have access to that thing. At first, I was really happy about the numbers and graphs that the MRI prints out. But then, the last time I saw Shirley alive, she said my graphs were worthless.

“Logged my hundredth hour on the MRI today,” I was telling her that night in December. It was snowing, with all Manhattan clean and still. “I feel like I’m approaching a state where I can tweak the cosmos,” I said. “Doing it with my head.”

“You’re beating a dead Schrödinger’s cat,” said Shirley. “Or is it alive?” Being a hard-core physics prof, she wasn’t taking my ideas very seriously.

“Listen, Shirley, after my session today, I did a bunch of coin flips and I scored nine heads in a row.”

“The odds against that are over five hundred to one!” exclaimed Shirley, mocking me with fake enthusiasm. “Final proof that Irit Ziv’s mind has attained direct matter control! Quantum telekinesis!”

“Why do you always tease me?” I asked. “Can’t anyone around here be smart except you?”

“You’re smart, Irit, but you’re up a blind alley. Listen to me. The physics department is not going to approve a pile of self-aggrandizing crap. You’re like a little girl making up stories about herself. I can fly! Watch me jump off the couch!”

“You’re supposed to be my thesis advisor,” I said, suddenly close to tears. Shirley had never spoken quite so harshly to me before. “I’ve been counting on you to win over the committee.”

“I adore you, Irit, but there’s only so far I can go. Everyone knows we’re lovers. If your thesis is crap and I push it—then I look crooked. Or like a fool. You have to give your ideas an academic slant, babe. Make them look respectable.”

“In my introduction, I have a whole history-of-science thing about Leibniz’s Monadology,” I said. “Which for some reason you refuse to read. Everything’s a monad, right? Particles are monads, but so are bricks, dogs, and cities. There’s no preferred level of scale.”

“What would a monad look like if it was actually real?” asked Shirley.

“They’re like, uh, little balls or blobs. They’re shiny and they reflect each other. Like ornaments on a Christmas tree. And thanks to the reflections, the monads are in eternal harmony. They’re computing the world in parallel.”

“The committee’s going to ask what’s inside one of those mirror balls,” said Shirley.

“A parameter,” I said. “The secret code for the world.” I smiled, happy with this idea. “It’s the same parameter inside every monad. The monads are like a zillion parallel computers crunching away on the same program.”

“Not bad,” said Shirley. “Be sure to say it’s a quantum computation. And say it’s all happening in Hilbert space. That’s what quantum physicists like to hear about.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “And instead of saying the monads reflect each other, I can say they’re quantum entangled. So if you change one monad, you change ’em all. But don’t forget I want to work my way around to direct matter control. If you can connect with the secret code inside even one monad, you’re like a god.”

Shirley paused for a minute, then sighed and shook her head. “That kind of talk is not going to fly, Irit. We’re the physics department, okay? No superpowers. You’ve got to produce a formula. A formula that specifies how your monads behave. Call it Monadrule.” Shirley was writing on a piece of paper while she talked. Something she liked to do. “You’ll say that our universe is being computed as Monadrule[secretcode]. The secretcode is an arbitrary initial input. Like a number, or a specific point in Hilbert space. Maybe you can suggest some possible toy-universe-type values for secretcode. But mainly you need a precise symbolic description of Monadrule. Otherwise you’re coming into your thesis defense like a crazy mumbling acidhead. And I’d have to vote thumbs down.”

“What about my graphs of me meditating inside the MRI?” I said. “Aren’t they enough?”

“They’re worthless crap,” said Shirley. “Nobody cares about them. Stop stalling, Irit. Do some actual frikkin’ work.”

And at this point I lost it. “Snobby goody-goody,” I yelled. “I wish you were dead.” And then I stormed into the soft snowy night and hooked up with a cute woman from the Physics 101 lab section I was in charge of. Spent the night at her place.

The next morning I hear that Shirley is dead. Run over by a cab. And I felt like it was my fault. So I started compulsively feeling around for the Monadrule formula that Shirley had been asking for, brooding over it night and day, stuffing myself with technical physics papers, continually fiddling with patterns of symbols in my head.

And then things came to a head on this April morning I’m telling you about.

I’m in my parents’ apartment and Pa is sitting on a high stool at the counter beside our kitchen sink, staring at the water dribbling from the sink’s faucet. He’s painstakingly adjusting the flow to the point where the stream stutters into broken drops. Our little mutt dog Ralphie is sitting attentively at Pa’s feet, wondering if food might drop off the counter.

I need to get to my Physics 101 lab, so I push past Pa and turn the faucet on high so I can brush my teeth. I can’t use the bathroom, because Ma’s in there singing—she likes the echoes. Right now she’s ramping up to perform as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Meanwhile I have my unfinished formula rotating in my brain, surrounded by a cloud of jiggling mirror-monads. It’s an obsession—stronger today than ever before. Maybe I’m almost there, like a critical mass about to go thermonuclear. My teeth are symbols. Two to the tooth power.

“Thanks for ruining my faucet setting,” says Pa. “I was just about to video the drip for data extraction.”

I should mention that Pa trades derivatives on the commodities exchange. His clients imagine he uses insider tips and computer algorithms. But in point of fact Pa bases his predictions on natural chaos. This is a trick I taught him. It’s lame to use a cheesy random number generator on a computer. It’s better to use Mother Nature. Find something wobbly and chaotic. With this in mind, Pa has fixated on our kitchen sink. Which can be a little inconvenient.

“The other traders don’t make it so hard on their families,” I tell him. “When I said to use natural chaos, I meant you could, like, monitor the hiss on the radio. But no, you’ve got to take over our sink. And last night I even saw you filming Ralphie scratching his ear.”

Hearing his name, the dog thumps his tail on the floor.

“One thump means sell,” says Pa, smiling at me. “Two thumps is buy. The world brims with secret wisdom. That’s what my daughter the physicist taught me.”

“Your daughter who can’t finish her thesis,” I say. “Meanwhile I better get to the lab.”

“Wait,” says Pa. “Scatter this box of toothpicks onto the floor. I’ll video that, too. The dripping water will stand for oats, and the toothpicks can be palladium. I’ll make a killing. And finally I’ll pay off your student loans, speaking of your never-ending thesis. Which you mainly started as a way to impress Shirley Chen.”

“If you had something against Shirley, why didn’t you say so while she was alive,” I snap at Pa. “Before she got mowed down by a moron in a cab. You’re so—”

“Irit,” interrupts Pa. “We loved Shirley. You’re driving yourself crazy over I don’t even know what.”

I press my hands against my eyes. The phosphenes look like symbols. “Shirley said I needed to find a special formula, and I yelled at her, and then she was dead. If I can find the formula it might bring her—”

“Don’t go down that road,” says Pa. He pats my shoulder. “Throw those toothpicks, okay? Scatter them real good. And be thinking about palladium.”

“What does palladium even look like?” I ask.

“Ingots,” says Pa with a shrug. “I’m trading palladium ingots against credit swaps on USDA Number 2 oats.”

“Sow the oats!” I cry, flinging the toothpicks onto our kitchen floor. A welcome distraction, really. It’s jazzing me up. I visualize the toothpicks as being the size of pencils—and then I see them as femtometer gluons connecting quarks. The half-finished Monadrule in my head jiggles and glows, reflected a zillion times within the mirrors of my mind.

In the bathroom. Ma’s voice hits a peak—the F above high C.

“Perfect,” says Pa, busy with his camera. “The voice can be—a correction term.”

“Yes,” say I.

My formula is a stack of dishes balanced atop my head. They rattle and shift. I’m in the eye of a hurricane. In the funnel of a tornado.

“Behold!” sings Ma. She strides into the kitchen, making an expressive solo of that one word. Her voice rises to a peak on the second syllable. She fixes her pale gray eyes on me, knowing and sympathetic. She always knows where I’m at. Even when I don’t.

In that moment, my symbols finally click into place. The Monadrule—a formula that generates our world from a parameter named secretcode. I can see it in action, a writhing pattern in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, a dancer that sculpts the shapes of me, my parents, and the whole seething Earth. Monadrule is the dappled sea wherein I swim. Can I touch this ocean’s floor?

Knowledge is power. I order the sea to roll away—and it obeys. The homey real world shivers and dwindles; it rushes away from me on every side. I’m renormalizing the axes of my observational Hilbert space. The scene around me assumes a new look. Like an oddly encoded video whose chunky pixels smooth into hi-res.

I’m alone. A kid on a beach. Dressed in my favorite outfit from when I was eleven years old—pale jeans and a striped cotton sweater. I’m standing upon an undulating dune of shiny monads. They’re like pebbles and grains of sand.

The ocean has ebbed way far out, yes. Tame old consensus reality is taking a break. I’m free to roam. I trot down the dune, feeling peace and joy like I’ve never felt before.

The exposed ocean floor is a gravel of monads, some of them as big as eggs or fists. It’s like I’m walking on the scree you might find on a mountain slope. A chaotic clutter of variegated stones. The monads aren’t being heavy-handed about reflecting each other—they merely sketch each other’s images, using flecks and nicks.

Heading further from the dune, I encounter some—talismans. Like I’m in a medieval painting, with physical graffiti and heavy metaphors. Parables of unknown meaning.

I see a meter-long section of a soda fountain counter, with a milkshake in a steel mixing container. Part of the shake’s been poured into a tall glass. A mound of whipped cream tops the glass, plus a sprinkle of nuts and a monadic slice of banana. Blood on the side of the steel container. I steer clear.

I see a blackboard hanging in midair, with Schrödinger’s famous wave equation chalked onto it. A fundamental axiom of quantum mechanics. Part of the equation has been erased, or no, the chalk has crawled down the board. It’s not chalk, actually. It’s a swarm of pale ants.

Further on, I find a seaman’s logbook on the pebbles underfoot. The book has a tooled leather cover—embossed with Shirley’s initials. Leery of opening the book, I fling it into the air. It spins and flutters. It flaps like a butterfly, rustling its pages, thumping its covers. A single, gossamer-thin sheet drifts my way, swooping right and left.

My new formula is written on the page. My world-generating Monadrule, refined down to ten symbols, including a pair of brackets around the spot where the secretcode parameter is supposed to go. Feeling a fierce rush of joy, I press the sheet against my face. It melts into my skin like lotion.

Right after the book, I find a classic pirate-style treasure chest. It’s half open, with a plump, warty sea cucumber resting upon the colored, gem-like monads within. The echinoderm sets smoky sparks to sputtering from its forked feelers. The sparks sketch my formula in mid-air, and I feel another spasm of exultation. I’m the queen of this hidden world.

I find a chair beside a table laden with a roast turkey, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine. I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been. I plump myself down and devour every scrap of the repast—including the glass bottle and the turkey bones. And then I eat the table and the chair.

My stomach bulges. I overate. I’m feeling weird cramps. I totter onward, and here’s the final talisman. Shirley Chen’s corpse. Awkward on the ground in a splatter of blood. Her skull is deformed from the taxi’s impact. One of her dead eyes has popped from its socket.

I look away. A distant roar. A crenellated shape on the horizon. A giant wave. The ocean of daily drone is on its way back. I barely have time to resurrect Shirley, if that’s what I’m going to do. But how?

A band of pain clamps my abdomen. Somehow I’m controlling this. I’m giving myself—labor pains? I collapse upon the gravel. I convulse and strain. I tear off my jeans and open my legs. My crotch splits up to my navel—and a shining egg squeezes out, bigger than a baby.

I press my hands to my belly and my torn flesh closes up. The surcease of pain is delicious. I sit up and check on the monster wave. It’s still a few kilometers away, but it’s closer than before. Hurry, Irit.

I focus on dead Shirley Chen. I’m running on automatic, with a chain of syllogisms pouring forth from the monad that is me. That shiny egg I birthed—obviously I should open it. With a single motion of my will, I form a hatchet in my hand. My cosmic, ten-symbol Monadrule is engraved on one side of the blade.

I slam the hatchet into the egg. It splits open; and, yes, something’s inside. The parameter known as secretcode. It doesn’t look like a number, or like a point in Hilbert space. It—no, she—looks like a foot-high, cream-colored giraffe with rust-colored spots. Her spots bulge out like knobs. Her head is—odd. A blank, eyeless bulb with a hole in one side.

I try to catch the knobby giraffe, but she dodges me and takes off, skipping along atop the larger monads, nimble as a goat on stepping stones. Monads crack open beneath her hooves, hatching out smaller knobby giraffes, and the smaller knobby giraffes stampede off, and their smaller hooves are cracking open smaller monads, releasing yet smaller giraffes. Each of them bears the same pattern of spots. I’m in the midst of a tippity-tapping herd, me still standing by Shirley’s corpse.

I manage to catch one of the littler giraffes, and I cup her between my two hands like a trapped mouse. I can feel the flutter of her legs. I coo to her, I form petitioning thoughts, I project empathy, I imagine I’m capable of love. And now this particular giraffe and I are quantum entangled. A monadic dyad. She can’t run away from me until I say so.

She stands on my right palm—poised, tense, alert. With a blank lump at the end of her neck instead of a head. Perhaps she sees via the bulging, velvety spots on her body. Or via a complex process of deduction. She is, after all, the secret seed that generates the world.

I bend the knee of giraffe’s right front leg and the scene around me shifts—as if she were a game controller. The ocean floor tilts. Hummocks segue into vales. The milling herd of her sisters drifts to one side. Each of them is holding their right front knee at the same angle. The light seems yellower than before.

But Shirley stays dead. Even though my one desire is to raise her. My knobby giraffe knows what I want. I manipulate her legs some more—with all the other giraffes in synch. To no avail.

By now the reality-tsunami is less than a kilometer away. A flowing wall that reaches into the sky. Airborne droplets of spray dampen my face. I’m pleading to my giraffe, yelling at her—and then, finally, I think to take hold of her unfinished-looking head.

A tingle travels up my arm and down my spine. A jolt. I scream Shirley’s name. The knobby giraffe’s voice echoes me—hoarse, eldritch, shrill. The other giraffes are screaming too. The sound goes on and on.

I kneel beside Shirley and kiss her lifeless lips. She twitches, blinks, warms to my touch. Stands and smiles. We hug.

The great wave’s subsonic vibrations are beating in my chest. Shirley and I run for higher ground. As we reach the summit of our dune, the wave breaks. Foamy currents surge around our legs. We leap upwards—and emerge into my parents’ apartment.

Shirley and I are alive, looking normal, and, yes, I’m still holding that one knobby giraffe. But nothing in the family’s apartment looks right. My parents aren’t here. Three hipsters loll on what was once my father’s favorite couch. The buildings outside are covered with neon signs.

I nudge the knobby giraffe. The walls of the apartment flow, and Pa is back. He looks sad. Without him even saying anything, I know that Ma is dead. I bend the giraffe’s leg and press one of her knobs. Across the river, Manhattan is a flat mound of rubble. I wiggle the giraffe’s long neck. Brooklyn is a grassy field with cows and UFOs.

“Maybe we stay here?” says Shirley, still at my side. She understands what’s going on. “Hilbert space is big. So many possible values for secretcode. If you keep this up, things might get worse.”

“One more try,” I say. “My giraffe can do it.” I focus on my happy times with Shirley. Like it was before. I don’t physically prod the knobby giraffe. But mentally I’m begging her.

And then—behold!

I’m in my parents’ apartment with Ma and Pa. It’s that same New York morning in April, and I’m supposed to monitor that lab after I stop by my apartment. And those toothpicks are on the floor. Shirley’s not here with my parents, but I feel sure that she’s in our apartment, lying in our bed reading a research paper, and—

“Yes, yes, I’ve made things the way you want,” says the knobby giraffe. Her voice is a thin, raspy whisper from the hole in her head. “And now you’ll set me free.”

“Okay,” I say. “And thanks.” I feel a tingle in my palm, and the secretcode creature is gone. I’m slyly thinking that I haven’t really given up anything. The Monadrule formula is safe in my head.

“What was that?” Pa is asking me. “Did something just happen?”

“I really do have to go.”

“Good luck,” says Ma, watching me. The Queen of the Night.

On the street outside my parents’ apartment building, I look into my mind to check that, yes, I still have ten symbols lined up. But—wait. That’s a frikkin’ Manhattan phone number? Oh my god, that’s Shirley’s mobile number!

I take out my phone and dial.

“Hi, Irit,” says Shirley. “Where have you been? I’m waiting.”

©2016 by Rudy Rucker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist.  He received Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, and an Emperor Norton award for his autobiography Nested Scrolls.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and he paints in his spare time. His recent titles include The Big Aha, Transreal Trilogy,  and Journals: 1990-2014. His next book is Transreal Cyberpunk, a collection of  nine stories written with Bruce Sterling. And he’s currently writing a novel called Million Mile Road Trip.

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

Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise

Ken Scholes | 5,890 words

Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts found the metal man sobbing in an impact crater deep in the roiling smoke and glowing ruins of Windwir. He crouched over a pile of blackened bones, his shoulders chugging and his bellows wheezing, his helmet-like head shaking in his large metal hands. They approached him silently, ghosts in a city of ghosts, but the metal man still heard and looked up.

Gouts of steam shot from his exhaust grate. Boiling water leaked from his glassy jeweled eyes. Nearby lay a mangled metal leg.

“Lla meht dellik ev’I,” the metal man said.

The Gypsies dragged him to Rudolfo because he could not stand on his own and refused to be supported. Rudolfo, from his tents outside the ruins, watched them return just like the message bird had promised.

They dragged the metal man into the clearing and released him, dropping the leg as well. Their bright colored tunics, cloaks, and breeches were gray with ash and black from charcoal. The metal man gleamed in the afternoon sun.

They bowed and waited for Rudolfo to speak. “So this is all that’s left of the Great City of Windwir?”

To a man, they nodded. Slow, deliberate nods.

“And the Androfrancine Library?”

One of the Gypsy Scouts stepped forward. “It burned first and fastest, Lord.” The scout stepped back quickly, head bowed.

Rudolfo turned to the metal man. “And what do we have here?” He’d seen mechanicals before. Small ones, though, nothing quite so elaborate as a man. “Can you speak?”

“Llew etiuq kaeps nac I,” the metal man said.

Rudolfo looked again to his Gypsy Scouts. The same scout who’d spoken earlier looked up. “He’s been talking since we found him, Lord. It’s no language we’ve ever heard.”

Rudolfo smiled. “Actually, it is.” He turned back to the metal man. “Sdrawkcab kaeps,” he told him.

A pop, a clunk, a gout of steam. The metal man looked up at Rudolfo, at the smoke-filled sky and the blackened horizon that was once the world’s largest city. He shook and shuddered. When he spoke, his voice carried a depth of lament that Rudolfo had only heard twice before. “What have I done?” the metal man asked, his breast ringing as he beat it with his metal fist. “Oh, what have I done?”

• • • •

Rudolfo reclined on silk cushions and drank sweet pear wine, watching the sunset wash the metal man red. His own personal armorer bent over the mechanical in the fading light, wiping sweat from his brow while working to re-attach the mangled leg.

“It’s no use, lord,” the metal man said.

The armorer grunted. “It’s nowhere close to good but it will serve.” He pushed himself back, glancing up at Rudolfo.

Rudolfo nodded. “Stand on it, metal man.”

The metal man used his hands to push himself up. The mangled leg would not bend. It sparked and popped, but held as he stood.

Rudolfo waved. “Walk about.”

The metal man did, jerking and twitching, using the leg more as a prop.

Rudolfo sipped his wine and waved the armorer away. “I suppose now I should worry about escape?”

The metal man kept walking, each step becoming more steady. “You wish to escape, lord? You have aided me. Perhaps I may aid you?”

Rudolfo chuckled. “I meant you, metal man.”

“I will not escape.” The metal man hung his head. “I intend to pay fully for my crimes.”

Rudolfo raised his eyebrows. “What crimes are those exactly?” Then, remembering his manners but not sure if they extended to mechanicals, he pointed to a nearby stool. “Sit down. Please.”

The metal man sat. “I am responsible for the razing of Windwir and the genocide of the Androfrancines, lord. I do not expect a trial. I do not expect mercy. I expect justice.”

“What is your name?”

The metal man’s golden lids flickered over his jeweled eyes in surprise. “Lord?”

“Your name. What is your name?”

“I am Mechoservitor Number Three, catalog and translations section.”

“That’s no name. I am Rudolfo. Lord Rudolfo of the Ninefold Forest Houses to some. General Rudolfo of the Wandering Army to others. That Damned Rudolfo to those I’ve bested in battle or in bed.”

The metal man stared at him. His mouth-shutters clicked open and closed.

“Very well,” Rudolfo finally said. “I will call you Isaak.” He thought about it for a moment, nodded, sipped more wine. “Isaak. Tell me how exactly you managed to raze the Knowledgable City of Windwir and single-handedly wipe out the Androfrancine Order?”

“By careless words, lord, I committed these crimes.”

Rudolfo refilled his glass. “Go on.”

“Are you familiar, lord, with the Wizard Xhum Y’zir?”

Rudolfo was. He nodded.

“The Androfrancines found a cache of parchments in the Eastern Rises. They bore a striking resemblance to Y’zir’s later work, including his particular blend of Middle Landlish and Upper V’Ral. Even the handwriting matched.”

Rudolfo leaned forward, one hand stroking his long mustache. “These weren’t copies?”

The metal man shook his head. “Originals, lord. Naturally, they were brought back to the library. They assigned the translation and cataloging to me.”

Rudolfo picked a honeyed date out of a silver bowl and popped it into his mouth. He chewed around the pit, spitting it into a silk napkin. “You worked in the library.”

“Yes, lord.”

“Continue.”

“One of the parchments contained the missing text for Xhum Y’zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths—”

Here Rudolfo’s breath rushed out. He felt the blood flee so quickly from his face that he tingled. He raised his hand and fell back into the cushions. “Gods, a moment.”

The metal man, Isaak, waited.

Rudolfo sat back up, drained off the last of his wine in one swallow and refilled the glass. “The Seven Cacophonic Deaths? You’re sure?”

The metal man shook in one great sob. “I am now, lord.”

A hundred questions flooded Rudolfo. Each shouted to be asked. He opened his mouth to ask the first but closed it when Gregoric, the First Captain of his Gypsy Scouts, slipped into the tent with a worried expression on his face.

“Yes?” he asked.

“General Rudolfo, we’ve just received word that Overseer Sethbert of the Entrolusian City States approaches.”

Rudolfo felt anger rise. “Just?”

Gregoric paled. “Their scouts are magicked, Lord.”

Rudolfo leaped to his feet, reaching for his thin, long sword. “Bring the camp to Third Alarm,” he shouted. He turned on the metal man. “Isaak, you will wait here.”

Isaak nodded.

Then General Rudolfo of the Wandering Army, Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses, raced from the tent bellowing for his armor and horse.

• • • •

Battlefields, Rudolfo thought, should not require etiquette nor be considered affairs of state.

He remained mounted at the head of his army while his captains parleyed with the Overseer’s captains in a moonlit field between the two camps. On the horizon, Windwir smoldered and stank. At last, they broke from parley and his captains returned.

“Well?” he asked.

“They also received the birds and came to offer assistance.”

He sneered. “Came to peck the corpses clean more likely.” Rudolfo had no love for the City States, hunkered like obese carrion birds at the delta of the Three Rivers, imposing their tariffs and taxes as if they owned those broad, flat waters and the sea they spilled into. He looked at Gregoric. “And did they share with you why they broke treaty and magicked their scouts at time of peace?”

Gregoric cleared his throat. “They thought that perhaps we had ridden against Windwir and were honoring their kin-clave. I took the liberty of reminding them of our own kin-clave with the Androfrancines.”

Rudolfo nodded. “So when do I meet with the tremendous sack of moist runt droppings?”

His other captains laughed quietly behind their hands. Gregoric scowled at them. “They will send a bird requesting that you dine with the Overseer and his Lady.”

Rudolfo’s eyebrows rose. “His Lady?”

Perhaps, he thought, it would not be so ponderous after all.

• • • •

He dressed in rainbow colors, each hue declaring one of his houses. He did it himself, waving away assistance but motioning for wine. Isaak sat, unspeaking and unmoving, while Rudolfo wrapped himself in silk robes and scarves and sashes and turban.

“I have a few moments,” he told the metal man. “Tell more of your story.”

Light deep in those jeweled eyes sparked and caught. “Very well, lord.” A click, a clack, a whir. “The parchment containing the missing text of Xhum Y’zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths came to me for cataloging and translation, naturally.”

“Naturally,” Rudolfo said.

“I worked under the most careful of circumstances. We kept the new text isolated in a secure location with no danger of the missing words being added to complete the incantation. I was the only mechoservitor to work with the parchment and all knowledge of my previous work with prior fragments was carefully removed.”

Rudolfo nodded. “Removed how?”

The metal man tapped his head. “It’s . . . complex. I do not fully understand it myself. But the Androfrancines write metal scrolls and those metal scrolls determine our capacity, our actions, our inactions, our memories.” Isaak shrugged.

Rudolfo studied three different pairs of soft slipper. “Go on.”

The metal man sighed. “There is not much more to tell. I catalogued, translated, and copied the missing text. I spent three days and three nights with it, calculating and re-calculating my work. In the end, I returned to Brother Charles to have the memory of my work expunged.”

A sudden thought struck him and Rudolfo raised a hand, unsure why he was so polite with the mechanical. “Is memory of your work always removed?”

“Seldom, actually. Only when the work is of a sensitive or dangerous nature.”

“Remind me to come back to this question later,” Rudolfo said. “Meanwhile, continue. I must leave soon.”

“I put the parchment in its safe, left the catalog room and watched the Androfrancine Gray Guard lock it behind me. I returned to Brother Charles but his study was locked. I waited.” The metal man whirred and clicked.

Rudolfo selected a sword in an intricate scabbard, thrusting it through his sash. “And?”

The metal man began to shake. Steam poured out of his exhaust grate. His eyes rolled and a high-pitched whine emanated from somewhere deep inside.

“And?” Rudolfo said, sharpness creeping into his voice.

“And all went blank for a moment. My next memory was standing in the city square, shouting the words of the Seven Cacophonic Deaths—all of the words—into the morning sky. I tried to stop the utterance.” He sobbed again, his metal body shuddering and groaning. “I could not stop. I tried but could not stop.”

Rudolfo felt the mechanical’s grief, sharp and twisting, in his stomach. He stood at the flap of his tent, needing to leave and not knowing what to say.

The metal man continued. “Finally, I reversed my language scroll. But it was too late. The Death Golems came. The Plague Spiders scuttled. Fire fell from sulfur clouds. All seven deaths.” He sobbed again.

Rudolfo stroked his beard. “And why do you think this happened?”

The metal man looked up, shaking his head. “I don’t know, lord. Malfunction, perhaps.”

“Or malfeasance,” Rudolfo said. He clapped and Gregoric appeared, slipping out of the night to stand by his side. “I want Isaak here under guard at all times. No one talks to him but me. Do you understand?”

Gregoric nodded. “I understand, General.”

Rudolfo turned to the metal man. “Do you understand as well?”

“Yes, lord.”

Rudolfo leaned over the metal man to speak quietly in his ear. “Take courage,” he said. “It is possible that you were but the tool of someone else’s ill-will.”

Isaak’s words, quoted from the Whymer Bible, surprised him. “Even the plow holds love for splitting the ground; and the sword grief for spilling the blood.”

Rudolfo’s fingers lightly brushed a polished shoulder. “We’ll talk more when I return.”

Outside, the sky grayed in readiness for morning. Rudolfo felt weariness creeping behind his eyes and in the tips of his fingers. He had stolen naps here and there but hadn’t slept a full night since the message bird’s arrival five days before, calling him and his Wandering Army south and west. After the meal, he told himself. He would sleep then.

His eyes lingered on the ruined city painted purple in the pre-dawn light.

“Gods,” he whispered. “What an unexpected weapon.”

• • • •

Sethbert did not meet him at the edge of his army; instead, Rudolfo rode in escort to the massive round tent. He snapped and waved and flashed hand-signs to his Gypsy Scouts, who slipped off to take up positions around the tent.

Sethbert rose when he entered, a tired smile pulling at his long mustache and pock-marked jowls. His Lady rose, too, tall and slim, draped in green riding silks. Her red hair shone like the sunrise. Her blue eyes flashed an amused challenge and she smiled.

“Lord Rudolfo of the Ninefold Forest Houses,” the squire at the door announced. “General of the Wandering Army.”

He entered, handing his long sword to the squire. “I come in peace to break bread,” he said.

“We receive you in peace and offer the wine of gladness to be so well met,” Sethbert replied.

Rudolfo nodded and approached the table.

Sethbert clapped him on the back. “Rudolfo, it is good to see you. How long has it been?”

Not long enough, he thought. “Too long,” he said. “How are the cities?”

Sethbert shrugged. “The same. We’ve had a bit of trouble with smugglers but it seems to have sorted itself out.”

Rudolfo turned to the lady. She stood a few inches taller than him.

“Yes. My consort, the Lady Jin Li Tam of House Li Tam.” Sethbert stressed the word consort and Rudolfo watched her eyes narrow slightly when he said it.

“Lady Tam,” Rudolfo said. He took her offered hand and kissed it, his eyes never leaving hers.

She smiled. “Lord Rudolfo.”

They all sat and Sethbert clapped three times. Rudolfo heard a clunk and a whir from behind a hanging tapestry. A metal man walked out, carrying a tray with glasses and a carafe of wine. This one was older than Isaak, his edges more box-like and his coloring more copper.

“Fascinating, isn’t he?” Sethbert said while the metal man poured wine. He clapped again. “Servitor, I wish the chilled peach wine tonight.”

The machine gave a high-pitched whistle. “Deepest apologies, Lord Sethbert, but we have no chilled peach wine.”

Sethbert grinned, then raised his voice in false anger. “What! No peach wine? That is inexcusable, servitor.”

More whistling and a series of clicks. A gout of steam shot out of the exhaust grate. “Deepest apologies, Lord Sethbert—“

Sethbert clapped again. “Your answer is unacceptable. You will find me chilled peach wine even if you must walk all the way to Sadryl and back with it. Do you understand?”

Rudolfo watched. The Lady Jin Li Tam did not. She fidgeted and worked hard to hide the embarrassment in the redness of her cheeks, the spark of anger in her eyes.

The servitor set down the tray and carafe. “Yes, Lord Sethbert.” It moved towards the tent flap.

Sethbert chuckled and nudged the lady with his elbow. “You could take lessons there,” he said. She offered a weak smile as false as his earlier anger.

Then Sethbert clapped and whistled. “Servitor, I’ve changed my mind. The cherry wine will suffice.”

The metal man poured the wine and left for the kitchen tent to check on the first course.

“What a fabulous device,” Rudolfo said.

Sethbert beamed. “Splendid, isn’t it?”

“However did you come by it?”

“It was . . . a gift,” Sethbert said. “From the Androfrancines.”

The look on Jin Li Tam’s face said otherwise.

“I thought they were highly guarded regarding their magicks and machines?” Rudolfo said, raising his glass.

Sethbert raised his own. “Perhaps they are,” he said, “with some.”

Rudolfo ignored the subtle insult. The metal man returned with a tray of soup bowls full of steaming crab stew. He positioned the bowls in front of each of them. Rudolfo watched the careful precision. “Truly fabulous,” he said.

“And you can get them to do most anything . . . if you know how,” Sethbert said.

“Really?”

The Overseer clapped. “Servitor, run scroll seven three five.”

Something clicked and clanked. Suddenly, the metal man spread his arms and broke into song, his feet moving lightly in a bawdy dance step while he sang “My father and my mother were both Androfrancine brothers or so my Aunty Abbot likes to say . . .” The song went from raunchy to worse. When it finished, the metal man bowed deeply.

The Lady Jin Li Tam blushed. “Given the circumstances of our meeting,” she said, “I think that was in poor taste.”

Sethbert shot her a withering glare, then smiled at Rudolfo. “Forgive my consort. She lacks any appreciation for humor.”

Rudolfo watched her hands white-knuckling a napkin, his brain suddenly playing out potentials that were coming together. “It does seem odd that the Androfrancines would teach their servitors a song of such . . . color.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes held a plea for rescue. Her mouth drew tight.

“Oh, they didn’t teach it that song. I did. Well, my man did.”

“Your man can create scripts for this magnificent metal man?”

Sethbert spooned stew into his mouth, spilling it onto his shirt. He spoke with his mouth full. “Certainly. We’ve torn this toy of mine apart a dozen times over. We know it inside and out.”

Rudolfo took a bite of his own stew, nearly gagging on the strong sea flavor that flooded his mouth, and pushed the bowl aside. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’ll loan your man to me for a bit.”

Sethbert’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever for, Rudolfo?”

Rudolfo drained his wine glass, trying to rid his mouth of the briny taste. “Well, I seem to have inherited a metal man of my own. I should like to teach him new tricks.”

Sethbert’s face paled slightly, then went red. “Really? A metal man of your own?”

“Absolutely. The sole survivor of Windwir, I’m told.” Rudolfo clapped his hands and leaped to his feet. “But enough talk of toys. There is a beautiful woman here in need of a dance. And Rudolfo shall offer her such if you’ll be so kind as to have your metal man sing something more apropos.”

She stood despite Sethbert’s glare. “In the interest of state relations,” she said, “I would be honored.”

They swirled and leaped around the tent as the metal man sang an upbeat number, banging on his metal chest like a drum. Rudolfo’s eyes carefully traveled his partner, stealing glances where he could. She had a slim neck and slim ankles. Her breasts sloped up rather than down, pushing against her silk robe, jiggling just ever so slightly as she moved with practiced grace and utter confidence. She was living art and he knew he must have her.

As the song drew to a close, Rudolfo seized her wrist and tapped a quick message into it. A sunrise such as you belongs in the East with me; and I would never call you consort.

She blushed, cast down her eyes, and tapped back a response that did not surprise him at all. Sethbert destroyed the Androfrancines; he means you harm as well.

He nodded, smiled a tight smile, and released her. “Thank you, Lady.”

Sethbert looked at Rudolfo differently but Rudolfo made a point from that moment forward of looking at the Overseer’s Lady. Dinner passed with excruciating slowness while banter fell like a city-dweller’s footfall on the hunt. Rudolfo noticed that at no point did Sethbert bring up the destruction of Windwir or the metal man his Gypsy Scouts had found.

Sethbert’s lack of words spoke loudest of all.

Rudolfo wondered if his own did the same.

• • • •

Rudolfo slept for two hours in the back of a supply wagon, dreaming of the redheaded Lady, before Third Alarm woke him. He leaped from the pile of empty sacks, drawing his sword and dropping lightly to the ground.

He raced past mustering soldiers and stopped at his own tent. He’d long ago learned the value of not using his own bed or tent in the field. Gregoric stood waiting.

“Well?” Rudolfo asked.

Gregoric grinned. “You were correct, Lord. Entrolusian scouts. Magicked.”

“Did they see what they came to see?”

Gregoric nodded. “And left quickly when I called the alarm.”

“Very good. That will give them cause to scamper quickly home. And our own scouts?”

“Also magicked and right behind them.”

Magicked scouts were nearly impossible to spot when you did not expect them. But Rudolfo had expected them. They had come. They had seen Isaak. They had left. And five of his best and bravest Gypsy Scouts had followed after.

“Very well. I will want to hear their report personally.”

“Yes, Lord.”

Rudolfo turned and entered the tent. The metal man’s eyes glowed softly in the dark. “Isaak, are you well?”

The metal man whirred to life. The eyes blinked rapidly. “Yes, Lord.”

Rudolfo walked over to him and squatted down. “I do not believe you are responsible for the devastation of Windwir.”

“You indicated that may be the case. I only know what I remember.”

Rudolfo thought about this for a moment. “What you don’t remember is possibly more relevant. The missing time between seeking Brother Charles and finding yourself in the streets uttering Xhum Y’zir’s spell.” He looked at his sword, watched the light from Isaak’s eyes play out on its burnished surface. “I do not think it was a malfunction. Sethbert—the Overseer of the Entrolusian City States—has a man who knows how to write those metal scrolls. He even has a metal man of his own.”

“I do not understand. The Androfrancines and their Gray Guard are so careful—”

“Guards can be purchased. Gates can be slipped. Keys can be stolen.” Rudolfo patted the metal man’s knee. “You are quite a wondrous spectacle, my friend, but I suspect you understand little the capacity we humans have for good or ill.”

“I’ve read about it,” the metal man said with a sigh. “But you’re right; I do not understand it.”

“I hope you never do,” Rudolfo said. “But on to other things. I have questions for you.”

“I will answer truthfully, Lord.”

Rudolfo nodded. “Good. How were you damaged?”

Isaak’s metal eyelids flashed surprise. “Why, your men attacked me, Lord. I thought you knew this.”

“My men found you in a crater and brought you to me straightaway.”

“No, the first ones.”

Rudolfo stroked his beard. “Tell me more.”

“The fire had fallen, the lightning had blasted, and I returned to the library seeking Brother Charles or someone who could terminate me for my crimes. Nothing remained but ash and charred stone. I began calling for help and your men came for me with nets and chains. I sought to evade and they attacked me. I fell into the crater. Then the other men came and brought me to you.”

Rudolfo offered a grim smile. “I wondered. Now I know more. By morning, I will know all.”

Isaak looked up. “Lord, you bid me remind you to return to your question about the removal of my work-related memories.”

“Ah, that.” Rudolfo stood. “Perhaps it will come to nothing. Perhaps tomorrow, we will go down an altogether different path.” He extended his hand to the metal man, who took it. The metal fingers were cool to his touch. “But if the winds of fate allow it, I would have work for you in my forest manor, Isaak.”

“Work, Lord?”

Rudolfo smiled. “Yes. The greatest treasure in the world lies between your metal ears. I would have you write it all down for me.”

Isaak released his hand. His eyes went hot and steam shot out from him. “I will not, Lord. I will not be anyone’s weapon again.”

For a brief moment, Rudolfo tasted fear in his mouth. A metallic taste. “No, no, no.” He reached out, took up the hand again. “Never that, Isaak. But the other bits. The poetry, the plays, the histories, the philosophies, the mythologies, the maps. Everything the Androfrancine library protected and preserved . . . at least what bits you know. I would not have these pass from our world because of a buffoon’s ambition.”

“That is a monumental task, Lord, for a single servitor.”

“I believe,” Rudolfo said, “that you may have some help.”

• • • •

The magicked Gypsy Scouts returned from the Entrolusian camp before dawn. They carried a bound, gagged, hooded man between them, deposited him in a chair and removed his hood. Another scout put a large leather pouch on the table.

Servers laid breakfast to the table—oranges, pomegranates, cakes made with nuts and honey, berries with liquored syrup—while Rudolfo studied their guest. He was a smallish man with delicate fingers and a broad face. His eyes bulged and veins stood out on his neck and forehead.

Isaak stared. Rudolfo patted his arm. “He looks familiar to you?”

The metal man clicked. “He does, lord. He was Brother Charles’ apprentice.”

Rudolfo nodded. He sat at the head of the table and nibbled at a cake, washing it down with chilled peach wine.

The Gypsy Scouts gave their report; it was brief.

“So how many do they have?”

“Thirteen in total, lord,” the chief scout answered. “They are in a tent near the center of his camp. We found him sleeping among them.”

“Thirteen,” Rudolfo said, stroking his beard. “How many mechoservitors did the Androfrancines have, Isaak?”

“That is all of them, lord.”

Rudolfo pondered for a moment why they’d been spared in Y’zir’s spell but the realization struck him quickly. The ancient desert mage would have known nothing of such scientific wonders. If they’d stayed out of the way, huddled in their stalls beneath the library . . .

He waved to the nearest Scout. “Remove his gag.”

The man blustered and flushed, his eyes wild and his mouth working like a landed trout. He started to speak, but Rudolfo shushed him.

Rudolfo stabbed a slice of orange with a small silver fork. “I will ask you questions; you will answer them. Otherwise you will not speak.”

The man nodded.

Rudolfo pointed at Isaak with his fork. “Do you recognize this metal man?”

The man nodded again, his face now pale.

“Did you change this mechoservitor’s script on the orders of Overseer Sethbert of the Entrolusian City States?”

“I . . . I did. Overseer Sethbert—”

Rudolfo snapped his fingers. A scout drew a slim dagger, placing its tip at the man’s throat. “Just yes or no for now.”

The man swallowed. “Yes.”

The knife eased up.

Rudolfo selected another slice of orange and popped it into his mouth. “Did you do this terrible thing for money?”

The man’s eyes filled with tears. His jaw tensed. Slowly, he nodded again.

Rudolfo leaned forward. “And do you understand exactly what you did?”

The Androfrancine apprentice sobbed. When he didn’t nod right away, the scout refocused him on Rudolfo’s question with a point of the blade. “Y-yes, Lord.”

Rudolfo chewed a bit of pomegranate. He kept his voice level and low. “Do you wish mercy for this terrible crime?”

The sobbing escalated. A low whine rose to a howl so full of misery, so full of despair that it lay heavy on the air.

“Do you,” Rudolfo said again, his voice even quieter, “want mercy for your terrible crime?”

“I didn’t know it would work, lord. I swear to you. And none of us thought that if it did work it be so . . . so utterly, so . . .”

Rudolfo raised his hand and his eyebrows. The man stopped. “How could you know? How could anyone know? Xhum Y’zir has been dead five thousand years. And his so-called Age of Laughing Madness has long passed.” Rudolfo carefully selected another honeyed cake, nibbling at its corners. “So my question remains: Do you wish mercy?”

The man nodded.

“Very well. You have one opportunity and only one. I can not say the same for your liege.” Rudolfo looked over at the metal man. His eyes flashed and a slight trail of steam leaked from the corners of his mouth. “In a few moments, I am going to leave you here with my best Gypsy Scouts and my metallic friend, Isaak. I want you to very slowly, very clearly, and in great detail, explain everything you know about scripting, maintaining, and repairing Androfrancine mechoservitors.” Rudolfo stood. “You only have one chance and you only have a few hours. If you do not satisfy me, you will spend the rest of your natural days in chains, on Tormentors Row for all the known world to see, while my Physicians of Penitent Torture peel away your skin with salted knives and wait for it to grow back.” He tossed back the rest of his wine. “You will spend the rest of your days in urine and feces and blood, with the screams of young children in your ears and the genocide of a city on your soul.”

The man vomited now, choking foul-smelling bile onto his tunic.

Rudolfo smiled. “I’m so glad you understand me.” He paused at the tent flap. “Isaak, pay careful attention to the man.”

Outside, he waved for Gregoric. “Bring me a bird.”

He wrote the message himself. It was a simple, one-word question. After he wrote it, he tied it to the bird’s foot with the green thread of peace, but it felt like a lie. He whispered a destination to the bird and pressed his lips briefly to its small, soft head. Then he threw it at the sky and the sky caught it, sent it flapping south to the Entrolusian camp.

He whispered the question he had written. It sounded empty but he whispered it again. “Why?”

• • • •

It took less than two hours. When Rudolfo returned to his tent, the metal man sat at the table, sifting through the pouch of tools and scrolls, and the man was gone.

“Do you know enough?” Rudolfo asked.

Isaak looked up. “Yes, lord.”

“Do you want to kill him yourself?”

Isaak’s eyelids fluttered, his metal ears tilted and bent. He shook his head. “No, lord.”

Rudolfo nodded and shot Gregoric a look. Gregoric returned the nod grimly and left in silence.

The bird had returned in less than an hour. His question had gone unanswered. Sethbert’s reply had been terse: Return to me the man you took. Surrender the servitor that destroyed Windwir.

He’d had an hour to ponder the why. Ambition? Greed? Fear? The Androfrancines could have ruled the world with their magicks and mechanicals and yet they hid in their city, sent out their archeologists and scholars to dig and to learn, to understand the present through the past . . . and to protect that past for the future. In the end, he found it didn’t matter so much why the City States and their mad Overseer had ended that work. What mattered was that it never happen again.

“Are you okay, Isaak?”

“I grieve, lord. And I rage.”

“Aye. Me, too.”

A Scout cleared his voice outside. “Lord Rudolfo? We’ve taken a prisoner at the edge of camp.”

He looked up. “Yes?”

“A woman, lord. She came magicked and asking for your protection under the Providence of Kin-Clave.”

He smiled but there was no satisfaction in it. Maybe later, when all of this unpleasantness had passed. “Very well. Prepare her for travel.”

“Lord?”

“She is to be escorted to the seventh manor. You leave within the hour. The metal man goes with her. Select and magick a half-squad to assist you.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And fetch me my raven.” Rudolfo fell back into the cushions, exhaustion washing over him.

“Lord Rudolfo?” The metal man struggled to his feet, his damaged leg sparking. “Am I leaving you?”

“Yes, Isaak, for bit.” He rubbed his eyes. “I wish for you to start that work we spoke of. When I am finished here, I will bring you help.”

“Is there anything I can do here?”

The realization fell on him. I could ask him, Rudolfo thought. I could ask him and maybe he would go for me now. I could send him south and west, following the Three Rivers until he reached the walled cities at their deltas, speaking his words and bringing down death. But the thought fled as quickly as it arrived. “I’d be no better than Sethbert.”

“Lord?”

He rubbed his eyes again and yawned. “Pack your tools, Isaak. You’re leaving soon.”

The metal man packed, then swung the heavy pouch over his shoulder. Rudolfo climbed to his feet.

“The woman you will be traveling with is Jin Li Tam of House Li Tam. I would have you bear a message to her.”

Isaak said nothing, waiting.

“Tell her she chose well and that I will come to her when I am finished here.”

“Yes, lord.”

Rudolfo followed Isaak out of the tent. His raven awaited, its feathers glossy and dark as a wooded midnight. He took it from the scout’s steady hands.

“When you reach the seventh manor,” he told his scout, “tell my steward there that Isaak—the metal man—bears my grace.”

The scout nodded once and left. Isaak looked at Rudolfo. His mouth opened and closed; no words came out.

Rudolfo held the raven close, stroking its back with his finger. “I will see you soon, Isaak. Start your work. I’ll send the others when I’ve freed them. You’ve a library to rebuild.”

“Thank you,” the metal man finally said.

Rudolfo nodded. The scout and the metal man left. Gregoric returned, wiping the apprentice’s blood from his hands.

“Sethbert wants his man back,” Rudolfo said.

“I’ve already seen to it, lord.”

Somewhere on the edge of camp, Rudolfo thought, a stolen pony ambled its way home bearing a cloth-wrapped burden. “Very well. Magick the rest of your Gypsy Scouts.”

“I’ve seen to that as well, lord.”

He looked at Gregoric and felt a pride that burned brighter than his grief or his rage. “You’re a good man.”

Rudolfo pulled a thread from the sleeve of his rainbow robe. This time, no other message. This time, no question. He tied the scarlet thread of war to the foot of his darkest angel. When he finished, he whispered no words and he did not fling his messenger at the sky. It leaped from his hands on its own and sped away like a black arrow. He watched it fly until he realized Gregoric had spoken.

“Gregoric?” he asked.

“You should rest, lord,” the chief of his Gypsy Scouts said again. “We can handle this first battle without you.”

“Yes, I should,” Rudolfo said. But he knew there would be time enough for rest—perhaps even a lifetime of rest—after he won the war.

©2006 by Ken Scholes. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Scholes is the critically acclaimed author of four novels and over forty short stories.  His series, The Psalms of Isaak, is being published both at home and abroad to award nominations and rave reviews. Publishers Weekly hails the series as a “towering storytelling tour de force.” Ken’s eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive, a musician and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in History from Western Washington University and is a winner of the ALA’s RUSA Reading List award for best fantasy novel, France’s Prix Imaginales for best foreign novel and the Writers of the Future contest. Ken is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon. You can learn more about Ken by visiting kenscholes.com.

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

Incident on a Small Colony

Kristine Smith | 27,930 words

The receiving dock stank of berries.

Raspberries, I think. Jani Kilian stared at the bright pink mess that spilled across the floor in front of her. With a hint of . . . what? Battery hyperacid, judging from the bitter tang. Add to that the melted plastic odor of evaporating sealant, backed by the ever-present undercurrent of stale station air.

Dammit. Above her, the dock alarms whirled like dervishes, sending wave after wave of red light breaking across the walls and ceiling.

Red.

Jani struggled to concentrate as, around her, the very air seemed to throb with color. Six hours for the paperwork. Another day and a half to get it all signed off. All that work for one shattered fifty-kilo drum of flavor concentrate. But it’s Family-licensed, and all the containers are tagged. Once you acquired a reputation for losing Family shipments, you could pretty much kiss your business good-bye.

“As if this place had any business to kiss.” Pearl Way Lading of Victoria Colony—We Cover the Commonwealth. A bit of an overstatement. Judging from their records, they covered only the six worlds that made up the Pearl Way, and thanks to competition from other companies, both human and Haárin, along with general incompetence, their share of that market had been dropping steadily for years.

It’s going to drop even more after word of this gets out. Trashing Family shipments—not the way to build business— Jani paused to wipe away tears with her coverall sleeve, then switched to breathing through her mouth. The muddled stench had made her eyes water, seared the inside of her nose.

“Timas?”

Red. Everywhere she looked, all red—

“Timas?”

Jani bent at the waist and stared at her black boots, their surfaces too scuffed and worn to reflect the pulsing color.

“Timas! You deaf or what!”

Shit—! The shout slammed Jani like a blow—she straightened as though someone had jammed a knee in her back. Timas was a new name—she hadn’t gotten used to it yet. Andree Timas. Documents technician. She pushed a hand through her cropped hair, felt the slick sweat that coated her scalp. Sing yourself to sleep with it, moron. “Just trying to figure out the best way to clean this up.”

The stevedore stepped in front of her. Royson, his name was, a baby-faced redhead of the sort who turned up at other people’s accidents. “Va-cu-um. In-cin-er-ate.” He waved a hand in front of her face and enunciated in a slow singsong as though speaking to a child, the cadence accentuated by his New Indies lilt. “Even a paper-pusher should be able to figure that out.”

Jani ignored the insult. It was standard dock abuse, and Royson had been lobbing it at her since her arrival three days before. Given some of the things she’d heard on other docks over the past five years, it almost qualified as a compliment. “The stuff’s already stained the topcoat.” She pushed at the edge of the gelatinous muck with the toe of her boot, revealing the telltale darkening of the floor beneath. “And the crate was a controlled shipment, which means triple the paperwork.” She pressed a hand to the back of her neck as the alarm continued to flash, felt the muscles knot. She couldn’t turn off the beacon—she hadn’t been coded into all of the company systems yet, so she didn’t have clearance. And I can’t ask Royson to do it. He’d just insult her again, and given her ramping anger, she might not be able to hold back. I hit him, I’m gone. And she’d only just settled in. I can’t screw up this job. She needed the money. A place to hide.

A little peace.

“Boy, Maintenance is going to love you.” Royson maneuvered between her and the spill, veering in close enough to force her to step back. “The bosses got to get informed and you get to walk upstairs and collect their signatures.” He clapped his hands. “Well, better go get those fancy forms out of the drawer and start filling them out.” He grinned, his teeth colored pink by the alarm light. “Most action you’ll see for the whole week. You might even break a sweat ridin’ up and down the lift.”

Jani sighed. Three days—guess the honeymoon’s over. Time to challenge the new tech, get in her face. See if and when she flinched, how much she could be pushed around. And Royson’s the chosen attack dog. She wondered if he’d lost a bet or won it, glanced over her shoulder toward the office compartment in time to see three heads vanish around the corner. We even have an audience. The dispatcher and Royson’s two partners on the firstshift floor team.

Turn me loose. A little voice in the back of Jani’s head, sensed rather than heard. No one will ever bother you again. The berry stench seemed almost pleasant now. Softer. Less pungent.

“Let’s go! Come on!” Royson clapped again, right under her nose, the sound sharp as a shooter crack. Then came the echoes, as though they stood in a cave.

Hit him. The voice whispered, softly as a lover. Make him bleed.

Jani looked into her designated tormentor’s eyes. She didn’t have to look up to do it—she and Royson appeared matched at about one-eight. As happened with some men, Royson’s lack of height advantage seemed to bother him. She watched as he tilted up his chin, furrowed his brow. That first murmur of doubt, rearing its ugly little head. Time to push back.

“Why bother?” Jani shrugged. “I’ll let it slide. What’s one less accident report? One less ride up and down the lift? Maintenance will ask for their copy when they come to recoat the floor, but hey, I’ll lie. Tell ’em it’s stuck in sign-off.” She took a step forward, then another, forcing Royson back until a wet smack announced the fact that he had stepped into the spill.

“Fuck.” Royson edged sideways, dragging the edge of his boot along the floor in an effort to scrape off the pungent mess.

“That’s what Maintenance will say when they realize that I lied to them about the report.” Jani kept moving forward, jostling against Royson with a knee or a shoulder when he tried to hold his ground or veer to one side or the other. “After a few comport calls, which I’ll ignore, and a few visits, which I’ll dodge, they’ll say ‘hell with it’ and bump it upstairs to the Transportation annex, which will send an investigator to check and see what happened. That’s when they’ll discover that not only didn’t we file—it becomes the company’s fault by that time, not just mine—not only didn’t we file the accident report, but we didn’t investigate the spilled drum.”

“You have to investigate cargo damage.” Royson spouted automatically, a point from his training module disgorged on command. “It’s the law.”

“Screw it.” Jani moved to one side, blocking Royson as he again tried to dodge around her. “Failure to investigate is just a Class 4 violation. So what if they send out an auditor from the ministry annex on Padishah? That makes it party time—it’ll take a whole station-week for them to get here.”

“Wait a minute.” Royson stopped in his tracks. A flush as pink as the flavor concentrate crept up his neck. “If we’re under investigation—”

“—you don’t get paid. Because as a documented employee of Pearl Way Lading, whose reputation would have to rebound into the stratosphere to qualify as crappy, you’re part of the ‘we,’ and we would be under a ministry-ordered shutdown until the auditor completed their investigation.” Jani glanced past Royson’s shoulder, caught sight of the dock wall a bare stride away, and took one last step forward. “Hope you have another job lined up.”

Royson’s head jerked as he hit the wall. The flush had claimed his face now, making his cheeks as shiny and pink as candy. “Just because it needs to be done doesn’t mean it isn’t bullshit.” He pressed against the coated concrete as though he wanted to push through the slab to the other side.

Must be my charm. Jani backed off half a step, just enough to give the man a little room to breathe. “Bullshit it may be. But it’s bullshit that guarantees you a paychit, so why don’t you just keep your opinion of my job to yourself and leave me to get on with it?” She turned and started to walk across the dock toward the office, then stopped as the red walls continued to spin. “And while you’re at it, make yourself useful and kill that goddamned alarm.”

“All you paper-pushers think you’re so hot.” Royson slipped past her to the control panel, palmed it open, and smacked one of the pads with his fist. “Two-bit tech, never gets her hands dirty, acts like she’s a friggin’ examiner.” The alarm light stopped.

The red . . . ceased.

“Bitch and moan, bitch and moan.” Jani resumed walking, eyes fixed on the floor at her feet. The light might have stopped, but her head—Why is everything still moving so slowly? “Is someone going to own up to this spill, or do I blame it on the redhead?” Her voice reverberated inside her skull. She glanced over at Royson, who glared back at her, his fist still pressed to the alarm pad. “I’ll be going to my cube in case anyone wants to talk. Confession time starts in”—she checked her timepiece—“fifteen minutes.” She veered away from the office, heading instead for the dock exit that led to the station innards. “I’ll be there with my beads and my holy water and whatever else you think might help you to unburden yourself.” She needed a few minutes alone in the dark. Just had to find someplace empty. Quiet.

“Timas?”

Jani spun toward the voice. “What?” She closed her eyes when she saw who had spoken. No, you don’t want to give him a reason to wonder about you. “I’ll write up the incident report as soon as I get back.”

“No rush.” Delmen, the dock lead, started to back away from her, then stopped. “You okay?” He cocked his head, voice soft with concern.

Jani hesitated, then nodded. “Just working out some ground rules with the gang.” She forced a smile, her facial muscles fighting every twitch.

Delmen grinned. He was young for a lead, no more than thirty, his face unlined, brown skin ashy from the months spent working at the station, four hundred kilometers above the Victorian surface. “Yeah, I heard.” His voice was gravelly, but quiet. How he got the stevedores to listen to him was anyone’s guess. “So.” He looked around Jani toward the spill. “Insurance?”

Jani tried to nod, stopping when the walls started to pulse. “Filed the updated applications yesterday.”

“Then we’re covered?”

“Maybe.” Just breathe. Jani focused on the skin on the backs of her hands. Dark brown, darker than Delmen’s, the darkest thing on the dock. Except for Delmen’s eyes. They were brown unto black, his pupils almost invisible. But I can’t stare at him. He’d think she was after him, and Royson would sniff that out like the dog he was. He’d spread the word that I was after my lead. That always did wonders for one’s reputation. “You were two quarters behind with your premiums. I let the company know that it was a case of simple oversight—your last tech had ignored the cancellation notices. You’ve had no incidents up to this point. The company should accept my explanation, but I have the appeal forms lined up in case they don’t. I just need to run up to Transportation and grab some supplemental—” She glanced up to find Delmen staring at her, his hand pressed to his forehead as though his head ached. “What?”

“How do you know all this stuff?” The man let his hand drop and shook his head. “Just wrangle it any way you have to—I’ll sign off.” He started to walk toward the office compartment, then stopped and turned back to her. “You’ve been here three station-days. I can see the tops of the desks again. The stacks of paper are disappearing. The comports aren’t bleating every ten minutes with an angry somebody or other on the other end.” He smiled. “I don’t know how we managed without you.”

“I don’t—” Jani swallowed, felt the blush creep up her neck despite her disorientation. Thank Lord Ganesh for dark skin and bad lighting. “It’s my job.”

“Maybe.” Delmen shrugged, then turned and resumed walking toward the office. “Thanks for doing your job.”

Jani watched him walk. Trim build, almost wiry. Nice shoulders. He’s shorter than I am. By half a head, at least. He likes my work—I can’t mess that up. She felt attracted to him—she could admit that as long as it stopped there. As long as it went no further. Dark hair. She could imagine lacing her fingers through it while Delmen worked that gentle voice, telling her whatever he thought she needed to hear.

She shook herself aware. Delmen had joined Royson by the control box—he did all the talking while Royson stared past him in her direction. Their eyes met. His brow furrowed.

Dammit. Jani strode across the dock, smacked the exit doorpad with the flat of her hand, then shouldered the panel aside when it failed to open quickly enough. The door array bleated in protest. Heads emerged from doorways up and down the corridor. A voice blared from an office at the far end. “What the hell’s going on!”

Jani pushed the door closed, then hurried down the hall, past the general mail drop into the women’s locker room. That door opened quickly, closed quietly.

Thanks for doing your job. Jani leaned against the wall just inside the door and pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. Anyone seeing her would think she fought a headache, which was as good an excuse as any.

Get a grip. Her eyes stung. How many things had she heard over the years that should have grabbed her heart and twisted, yet hadn’t?

I love you.

We’re going to die here, Captain.

You’re alive, Jani.

This won’t hurt for long.

“Thanks.” Jani opened her eyes slowly, then blinked. Despite the welling tears, they felt dry, as they often did. Gritty, as though someone had blown dust into them. I should check them, just in case. She walked to the bathroom entry and scanned the room, then checked the stalls. Empty. Not unusual. Few women worked at dock level.

Jani walked to the nearest sink and activated the tap. Savored the spill of warm water over her hands. Activated the soap, lathered, and rinsed. Counted to three, then looked in the mirror.

Her eyes stared back. Green nearly as dark as Delmen’s brown, green unto black, the color of the bottom of a well.

She bent closer and examined the shiny white sclera. Still white. No gaps. No splits. Not much of anything, really. No blood vessels. No shadows. Fake white, to match the fake green. Eyes from a bottle. She reached into her pocket, held her breath as she felt for the vial of filmformer, exhaled slowly as her hand closed over it. Her shield. Her security. The one thing that allowed her to maintain a pretense of humanity.

“Hello.”

Jani flinched. Straightened slowly, then turned.

The girl stood in the entry. Ten years old. Maybe twelve. Short and delicate, pale blond hair and blue eyes heightening the impression of extreme youth, as did her baggy black trousers and blue pullover.

Like she just emerged from her mother’s closet. But something wasn’t right. Eyes. There’s something wrong with her eyes. A little too bright and opened a little too wide.

Jani could see that the girl watched her. But what does she see? Nothing in this world, if previous experience held. “Are you looking for someone?” A parent, she hoped. A guardian. Somebody responsible. “Are you lost?” She pitched her voice low, and spoke slowly.

“What’s your name?” The girl cocked her head as through distracted by a distant sound. “Everyone has one.”

“Ja—” Jani stopped the sound just before it emerged. “Andree Timas.” She edged away from the sink, taking care to keep both hands open and visible. “I work here.”

“Andy.” The girl bounded forward and grabbed Jani’s left hand. “Andy, are you handy?”

Jani fought the urge to pull back, and managed to remain still as the girl squeezed her hand, then shook it, two hard pumps that rattled up her arm. Is she trying to hurt me? Jani couldn’t tell. She could detect pressure with her left arm and hand, but not pain. Same with her left leg. My old war wounds. They complicated her life at the damnedest times.

“I’m Annalise Couvier.” The girl smiled, teeth dead white in the harsh lighting. Then she dropped Jani’s hand as though it burned, wheeled, and darted out of the bathroom, through the locker area and out the door.

“Shit.” Jani bolted after her, pushing through the gaps in sliding panels and triggering safety alarms. More bleating, cut off in midyap as she freed herself and broke through into the hallway.

The empty hallway.

“Where the hell—?” Jani stilled. Listened for the pound of shoes against hard flooring, a cry or a shout.

“If you don’t stop playing around, I’m going to report you.”

Jani spun toward the voice. It belonged to an older woman, a clerk for one of the other shippers. Sour face and a tatty coverall in clashing shades of brown. “Did you see a girl run out of the locker room a few seconds before I came out?”

“All I’ve seen is you making an ass of yourself.” The woman looked Jani up and down and sniffed. “It’s all I’ve heard, too.” She pulled herself up straight, the top of her clipped hairdo barely reaching Jani’s shoulder. “Some of us have work to do.” With that, she brushed past Jani and keyed into the locker room.

Jani waited a few moments more, until a door at the far end of the corridor opened. and a pair of men emerged. She turned her back so they wouldn’t see her face, walked to the dock entry, then stopped. She couldn’t handle Royson yet. Her heart still beat slow and steady. Sounds still seemed to echo inside her head. And now . . .

Augmentation has its benefits, Lieutenant Kilian. You’ll find that under conditions of panic, you will remain calm. Any wounds you suffer will heal more quickly. You will be able, under certain conditions, to exhibit controlled bursts of greater than average strength.

That had been the good news.

However, augments exhibiting your particular brain chemistry might hallucinate under certain conditions.

The Service doctor had made it sound so innocuous.

—extended episodes of extreme stress, for example—

What would he have considered extreme? The near occasion of death? Years spent hiding, lying, stealing?

—sensitivity to the color red—

Less said about that, the better.

—at those times, the implanted gland itself may require resetting in order to maintain proper function. I’m sure you’ve heard the word “takedown” around the place. These need to be performed periodically, otherwise—

Otherwise . . .

Bless me, Doctor, for I have sinned. It’s been—Jani counted on her fingers—five years since my last takedown. She walked back down the hall and reentered the locker room. Into the bathroom, and the stall two doors removed from the one currently occupied by the scolding clerk. Assuming she’s in there. Assuming she wasn’t another artifact of a neurochemical cascade gone haywire.

—augmentation psychosis—

Jani dragged the cubicle door closed, then slumped against the cold metal wall. Did I just hallucinate? The girl, the woman, the men at the end of the corridor? Fellow augments had always told her that if you thought you were hallucinating, you weren’t hallucinating, but she had always chalked that up to wishful thinking. If you think you might be crazy, you’re not crazy. No. If you thought you might be crazy, you needed to see a medico. Except that I can’t. Because if she ever walked into a hospital, they’d never let her out. Except to transfer me to the nearest Service brig. Because the Service had been looking for her for a long time.

Five years. That long since she’d worn a uniform. Snapped a salute. Five years since she’d answered to the name she’d been born with. Jani Moragh Kilian. Born in the city of Ville Acadie, Acadia Colony, twenty-nine Common years before she had taken to seeing girls who weren’t there and hiding in station bathrooms to assess her sanity.

From two stalls down, the stopped drain sounds of a flushing toilet. Coughing, followed by muttering about the workload.

Would I hallucinate the sound without any visuals? Jani knew augments who had, but they were rarities according to the Service doctors. Of course, it had occurred to her more than once since that time that the Service doctors had lied through their collective teeth.

The sounds of the stall door opening. The workings of the sink. Footsteps, followed by the opening and closing of the bathroom door.

Jani counted to ten, then pushed open the door to her stall. Walked to the sink, washed and dried her hands. Ignored the mirror, catching only the barest flashes of her short, black hair, her brown skin. Then one more time, out of the bathroom to the locker room, the locker room to the corridor. Sounds seemed duller now, colors less sharp. Her heart tripped, then sped into its more usual rhythm. She’d feel tired as hell in an hour or so. As soon as she got to the office, she’d make coffee strong enough to etch metal, then wait for someone to confess to the spill. After that, she’d file, clean, run errands. Anything to keep moving, keep from falling asleep. The last thing she needed was for Royson to catch her snoring at her desk. Royson, her new best friend. There always seemed to be one at every dock, an inevitability she could have happily done without.

She checked the company’s slot in the mail drop, collected the thin bundle of paper missives resting within. Palmed through the dock entry, and walked out onto the floor to find Delmen supervising the spill cleanup. He’d commandeered Salay and Boudamire, the Rodent Twins, Royson’s partners in crime. Royson himself was nowhere to be seen, which meant only one thing.

“Oh, hell.” Jani drew alongside Delmen and watched the two stevedores shovel berry muck into a rolling trash bin. “He’s in my cube, isn’t he?”

Delmen grinned. “He confessed right after you left.” He edged closer and lowered his voice. “I don’t know if he really did it or if he drew the short straw, him being the new guy and all. I don’t really care, either.” He looked at her, the grin wavering. “You feeling okay?”

Jani shrugged, tried not to look him in the eye. “I just needed to get away from the stink.”

Delmen sniffed. “I think my nose has gone numb.” He pointed to the shoveling stevedores. “I’ll take care of this. Go take confession.”

“Yeah.” Jani started toward the office compartment, a prefab rectangle that ran along the dock’s far wall. A coffin with windows, Delmen had called it during her interview, which had proved the most perfunctory she had ever experienced. Take a good, hard look around. If you can control your laughter, your cube’s in the back.

Jani walked past the leaky watercooler and pushed through the old hinged door, which had put up a valiant fight against the olfactory onslaught from without but came up short. Even so, I’ve worked in worse places. She walked past the shelves crammed with smashed cartons, rolled-up clothing, cups, and baseball caps.

That yellow pullover’s still here. The broken receiver. The hand ratchet with the faulty stop. Lost lambs all, liberated from lockers with expired leases, breakrooms, and broken packing cases. Given that all but the most beat-up items found takers before they even made it to the shelves, the pickings were slim unto skeletal.

The yawning jag hit just as Jani passed the coffee table. She laid claim to the cold dregs from the brewer, adding a scoop of sugar to counter the bitterness. Walked to her cube, and entered just in time to see Royson close her desk drawer and start riffling through a stack of manifests. “Looking for something in particular?”

Royson barely glanced at her. “A stylus. Del gave me this form to fill out.” He held up a form inscribed on old version Transportation Ministry parchment, tan with a dark green border.

“You can fill it out directly in Systems.” The urge to yawn struck again, and Jani covered it by taking a swig of coffee. “It means you have to deal with questions from upstairs that much sooner, but it’s what they prefer. Especially when the paper form you have is out-of-date.” She swallowed more sugar-saturated swill. Her brain felt wrapped in fog, her eyelids, heavy.

Shovels.

The word dropped into Jani’s head as she edged past Royson to her desk and sat down. Once there, it rattled around. Stamped its feet. Shovels—they’re shoveling the muck into a bin. She tried to recall if she’d heard the low hum of the vacuum when she stopped to talk to Delmen. No, I didn’t hear a damned thing. She glanced at the penitent to find him slumped in the visitor’s chair, arms folded, sullen glare fixed on an image of a vase of flowers that had been clipped from a magazine and tacked to the partition by some previous occupant. “Low man acts as lookout.”

Royson blinked lizard-slow. His brow creased. “What?”

“They’re not vacuuming the spill, they’re scooping the stuff into a bin. When they’re finished, they’ll hand off the bin to someone who’ll portion it out and sell it downstairs.” Jani pointed to the floor, which at that time of the station-day faced Victoria. “I guess the only question is, was the accident really an accident, or did a fence place an order that needed filling right away?”

If Royson felt any discomfort at having been sussed out, he buried it beneath a fair imitation of boredom. “The lift stalled just as I began to hoist the drum. When I started it up again, the whole thing went nuts—” He held up his hands, curved toward one another as though ready to close around the nearest neck, and shook them hard. “—and the drum slipped out of the brace. Hit the floor. Splat.” He tucked in his arms again and remained slumped. He had yet to look her in the eye.

Jani nodded. “How high was the drop?”

“Two, three meters.”

“Those drums are rated at ten.”

“Well, this one flunked, didn’t it?” Royson brushed at dirt that smudged the knee of his coverall, then tucked in again, the very image of the sulky scapegoat.

Jani powered up her workstation and accessed the incident report template. “Tell Delmen that someone needs to fill out the vacuum log to account for the time it would have taken to suck up the junk. Incinerator time needs to be logged as well.” She started inputting, at the same time watching Royson out of the corner of her eye. “It would be better if they sacrificed part of the spill. Verifiers have been known to check vac function and incinerator scans to see whether something was actually sucked up and burned during the time in question.”

Royson turned slowly toward her, like a tortoise roused from slumber. “Is that what you used to do?”

Jani shook her head. “I was never a verifier.” Not officially, anyway.

“Boudy thinks you are. He says you watch too much.”

“Like Boudy does anything worth watching.” Jani transferred data from Royson’s personnel file to the incident report form. First name’s James. Middle name’s . . . Newark? Just the sort of tidbit one could file away for use at a later date. “You could tell him and Sal to be more careful when they sneak their girlfriends into the storage room during breaks.” She tapped on the wall beside her. “Stuff’s not as soundproof as they might wish.” She added Royson’s description of the spill, affixed her systems signature, then pushed back her chair. “It’s better if I know what’s going on so that I can cover with the right paper. Otherwise, loose ends start to fray during routine audits. Next thing you know, you’re up to your ass in auditors general.”

Royson took his cue, stretching across Jani’s desk and keying in his own sig. When he sat back, he put his hands in his pockets, his shoulders sagging as the tension seeped away. “I don’t know how you do that stuff all day.” He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Where are you from? You sound Felician sometimes, but it comes and goes.”

“That because I’ve been gone a long time.” Jani inserted a sheet of current Transportation parchment into her imprinter and transcribed the report, then tapped her touchboard and sent off the Systems copy to its new home in the gaping ministry maw. “Accent starts to fall by the wayside after a while.” She spoke enough Felician Spanish to get by, and made the effort now to trill her r’s and lisp just a little to reinforce Royson’s guess.

“I passed through Felix Station once, on my way to somewhere else.” Royson cocked his head. “Nice shops along the concourse.”

Jani concentrated on labeling a documents slipcase with Royson’s name and the incident number. He’s trying to trap me. Fortunately, she’d once passed through the station on the way to somewhere else, too. “They’re like anything else, nice if you can afford them.” She pushed the transcribed document across her desk. “Initial this, and I’ll file it.” She bit out the words, a busy woman with too much to do to spend time talking about another colony’s station.

Royson leaned over and scrawled his initials on the bottom of the document. Then he braced his elbows on the edge of the desk and watched Jani tuck it into its slipcase. “Guy I used to work with told me it was the idomeni’s revenge. We went to their home world, got stuck in the middle of one of their stupid wars, and that’s how those marble eyes paid us back. Showed us how to bury ourselves in paper.” He clucked his tongue. “I’d go nuts if all I did all day was shove that stuff around.”

“Then you’re lucky you don’t have to.” Jani twisted her chair so that she faced her workstation, leaving Royson with a view of her back.

“Just tryin’ to make conversation.” Chair ergoworks squeaked as Royson pushed to his feet. “Bitch.”

Jani waited until she heard the office door open and close. Then she eased back, cold coffee in hand, and pondered the day so far.

Pearl Way Shipping sells off damaged shipments. And if nothing turned up damaged over the course of the station-day, they did the deed themselves. Oh well. The only ones inconvenienced were whichever Family members owned the shipment. Nothing wrong with that. Every one of the eight Families could be inconvenienced as much as possible, as far as she was concerned.

And I caught Royson searching my desk. Could’ve just been meanness on his part. She’d embarrassed him in front of his teammates. As junior member, he’d be a long time shaking that off. Maybe stealing was his flavor of retaliation.

But he gave me a geography quiz, too. Because he and the others thought she was a verifier, a Commonwealth spy. Here we go again. One of these days, she’d have to stop giving a damn about her job and give incompetence a try. In the meantime, I better watch where I walk. Accidents happened all the time on the docks.

• • • •

“Del wants to see you.”

Jani looked up from her report to find Royson standing in her cube entry. “Something happen?”

“He just sent me to get you. I don’t ask questions.” Royson started back down the narrow corridor. “Not like some people.”

Jani walked out on the dock floor to find Delmen waiting.

“I can give you a cashcard at the end of the week.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the warehouse. “Or you can pick out something you like.” A bare hint of a smile. “Within reason. Don’t go trying to walk out with a sports skimmer or anything.”

Which degree felony do I have to cover up to get one of those? Jani bit back the question. She would have meant it as a joke, but certain brands of funny didn’t play well at times like this. I’m being gauged. Watched for any slipup, any hint that she wasn’t what she claimed to be. “Thanks.”

Delmen started toward the warehouse entry, then beckoned for Jani to follow. “Thanks for the tip about the incinerator.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Not that it mattered much—we had to burn almost three-quarters of the spill. It had already skinned over and started powdering around the edges. You can’t use it once it dries out.”

“If it happens again, throw a tarp over it. It’ll keep the moisture from evaporating, and help contain the smell.” Jani stifled a cough and wondered how long it would take the ancient ventilation system to clear the air. “You could spray a little clear oil on the contact side of the tarp, too. That’ll keep any skin from forming.”

Delmen wrinkled his nose. “Clear oil’s a machine lubricant.”

“It’s no worse than the stuff they used to make that flavoring. “ Jani gauged the warehouse, as she did every time she entered the place. It was smaller than most. A soccer field in size, maybe, and only two floors high. No vast depths that one could be led into, never to return. Only wide rows of half-filled shelves, with plenty of gaps to allow for good visibility and clear lines of sight.

And, built against the far wall, a cage.

Jani’s heart tripped, as it did every time she caught sight of the metal-link walls. She breathed deeply, concentrated on relaxing her tightened throat, on sounding interested, but not too eager. “Anything good in the cage today?”

Delmen grinned. “So, she’s human after all.” He cast a skeptical look at Jani’s coverall. “Sure you wouldn’t want some clothes?”

“I’d rather have a receiver.” Jani stepped aside just in time to avoid a collision courtesy of a dour warehouseman with a hand truck. “The com system in my flat isn’t very good, and the owner won’t upgrade unless I kick in half the cost.”

“A receiver?” Delmen shrugged. “That’s easy.” He led her to the cage door, pressed his palm to the pad, then stilled so the lock mech could scan his eyes and ears.

As that went on, Jani looked through the links to the cage shelves. She could see a variety of receivers, as well as a Transportation Ministry imprinter, seals still intact. Oh, the fun Pearl Way Lading could have with one of those. A few busy weeks, and they’d all have enough money to retire before the ministry realized what was happening. But then the price on our heads would prove damned attractive to somebody, and we’d be rolled up within a week. Which was as good a reason as any to stay small-time. Never steal enough to be interesting. Words to avoid getting shot by.

“We have all the latest models.” Delmen dragged open the door while Dour and another warehouseman watched. “Some come with subscriptions to PearlNet special programs . . .”

While Delmen continued his spiel, Jani checked out the cluttered shelves that stretched from the floor to a gridwork ceiling an arm’s length above her head. She wondered how many of the cage security systems had fallen into disrepair, if they had even been installed at all. Shelf sensors that sounded when someone removed an item from its niche. Continuous inventory. Imaging monitors. I’m sure. The last thing anyone in this place wanted was a functioning security system. She wondered what the repair logs stated, if they were kept at all.

“This might be what you’re looking for.” Delmen patted a palm-sized receiver that was barely visible amid the junk. “It even comes with its own stand—”

As he rattled on, Jani checked out the contents of the closest shelf, ever mindful of the warehousemen who still watched them. The box of foil packets didn’t attract her at first. The box bore no markings of any kind, and the packets’ labeling had been stripped. But then the format of the engraved coding along the top seam of the foil gained her attention.

She edged closer. Let her gaze flick over the packets, like a poker player gauging her cards under her opponents’ eyes.

Her heart skipped.

Update 7.5.3. Not the latest scanpack update, but newer than what she had. A complete kit, with tools and everything. She saw the warehousemen turn their attention to the workings of the hand truck. Delmen began a description of another receiver.

Jani leaned on the shelf, eyes fixed on Delmen’s back. Don’t look at the box—don’t look—Working by feel, she reached into the box, grabbed a packet, and with a light push of her fingers, tucked it up inside her sleeve. Then she bent over and tugged at her pant leg, making as though the cuff had caught on her boot. As she did, she let the packet slide into a pocket she’d long ago sewn into the seam. Brushed her hand over the opening, sealing it closed. Stood up just as Delmen turned back to her. Four seconds, tops. Possibly even three. She’d had a lot of practice.

Delmen held out his hands toward the shelf of receivers, Father Beneficent at the end of his pitch. “Well, which do you want?”

“I’ll take that one.” Jani pointed to the small receiver she’d seen first. “I don’t have room in my flat for anything bigger.”

Delmen frowned. “It doesn’t come with any subscriptions,” he said as he plucked it from its niche and handed it to Jani.

“Can’t afford those anyway.” Jani made a show of hunting down an empty carton and placing the receiver into it. Nothing in my pockets. Nothing up my sleeves. “Thanks.” She walked across the warehouse to the dock to the office, sensing stares all along the way. Only after she sat down at her desk did she breathe normally. Her hands shook. A thin line of sweat trickled down her back. Her augmentation, so lately expended, had abandoned her utterly.

Coffee. She stood, braced against her desk until her legs steadied, then trudged to the coffee table. As she passed the lost lambs’ shelves, she checked them for anything new. The yellow pullover had finally vanished, probably into the trash. She had tried it on herself her first day on the job—the sleeves had hit her midforearm, while the hem barely reached her waist. No go, not even for someone who didn’t care about clothes.

As usual, no one had seen to the brewer since the morning, so Jani rolled up her sleeves and commenced cleaning up. She was halfway through the first purge cycle when she heard the door open and sensed someone move in behind her—she turned to find Delmen perched on the edge of a nearby desk, empty coffee cup in hand.

“Don’t mind me.” He smiled more brightly than usual, a flash of teeth and glint of eye that shaved years. “You know, I can’t recall that last time that thing was purged.”

“A fact reflected in the quality of the coffee.” Jani concentrated on buttons and switches and the fine art of backflushing an ancient brewer, mindful all the while that Delmen watched her every move. Maybe he likes me. She barely caught her smile in time. Maybe he’s the one who told Royson to search my desk.

“You ever have real coffee?” Delmen switched his gaze to the empty recesses of his cup, a bright blue thing adorned with a Victoria & United football sticker.

“A few times.” Jani unwrapped a fresh brick of coffee infusion, broke off a larger than usual wedge, and tossed it into the basket. “You?”

Delmen sighed as softly as he spoke. “Right after I graduated prep, I worked for a landscaping company on Padishah. We spent weeks on this Family estate—one of the al-Muhammed daughters—planting a forest’s worth of trees and shrubs and putting down lawn by the square kilometer.” His shoulders sagged as though the mere memory of the labor drained him. “On the last day of the job, she threw us a luncheon. Little sandwiches and pastel cakes and coffee in those miniature cups.” He rested his head against the wall and stared at nothing. “It was the real thing, all bitter and foamy. You could’ve shoveled sugar into it until you wore out your arm, and you’d still know you were drinking the real thing.” His gaze slowly sharpened as he eased back to the present. “When did you have it?”

Jani dawdled over the brewer, repositioning the chunk of infusion in the basket, then tweaking the water flow and temperature. “Someone I . . . worked with once used to make it.” She glanced at Delmen to find him eyeing her expectantly. He’d opened up a little. Now it’s my turn. She activated the brewer and the contraption gurgled to life, expelling the first whiffs of synthetic coffee to do battle with the stubborn remains of synthetic berries. “He used to make a ceremony out of it. He had a special pot with gold-coated fittings. A special grinder. First he’d grind the beans to a particular particle size, spread them out just so. Then he’d heat the water to just the right temperature and pour it over the grounds at a carefully calculated rate.” Jani mimed a careful decantation. “Cream, he’d allow grudgingly, but if you tried to add sugar, you’d get an earful.” She closed her eyes for a moment as sense memories surfaced. A deep voice murmuring in her ear. Long-fingered hands moving over every part of her. “He was a scientist. Very precise. Everything had to be just so.”

“You liked him. I can tell.” Delmen patted his cheek. “Your face is all mushy, all . . .” He feigned examination of the ceiling, shit-eating grin firmly in place. “Never mind.”

Jani flexed her left hand, watched the fake joints work beneath the fake skin. “He meant well.”

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

“He was a strange man.” Jani let her hand fall. “But he knew how to brew coffee.” She grabbed a cup from the shaky pyramid someone had constructed to pass a few dull minutes and filled it to the brim. “So how did the cleanup shake out?”

“Nice way to change the subject.” Delmen pushed off the desk and stepped up to the brewer. “It wasn’t a bad haul. Payroll’s covered for the next two weeks.” He plucked a couple of sugar packets from a bowl and waved them in front of Jani’s nose before decapitating them and dumping the contents into his cup. “Would’ve been nice if we could’ve sold the whole spill, though. That would’ve carried us for three, maybe four months.” He sloshed a few fingers of coffee atop the sugar, swirled his cup, sniffed the steam, and frowned. “Oh well. Better than nothing.”

“Thanks a lot.” Jani took a sip and reached for the sugar as well. “Have you talked to the owner about working it so this shipping company could meet the payroll by actually, you know, shipping cargo?”

“Our dutiful owner?” Delmen laughed, a harsh, low bark that didn’t match his voice. “Some woman on Padishah. Met her once. I stopped bugging her about finances long ago. I think she’s letting the place go to hell so she can write off the loss.”

Or she’s using it as a means to ship personal properties as commercial goods and avoid higher cartage taxes. Jani swallowed that item along with her coffee. No sense letting anyone in on the fact she knew her Commonwealth tax laws as well as she knew insurance forms.

“Not sure if this place is worth the fight anymore, to tell you the truth.” Delmen dug through the community cooler and liberated a couple of mummified doughnuts. “Rumor has it that Haárin are expanding their presence in Padishah Station. Instead of two docks, they’re going to ten. Marble-eyed bastards are taking over. They’ll be here before you know it.” He tore a chunk off a glazed ring and dunked it into his coffee.

Jani blinked. Her films felt tight, as usual. Grainy. She’d freshen them in the evening, just to make sure. “I’m surprised Shèrá is letting them work outside the worldskein.”

“Worldskeins. Idomeni. Born-sects. Haárin. Who can keep all that shit straight? I thought the reason Haárin were Haárin was because they didn’t listen to their born-sects? Outcasts, aren’t they? Criminals and apostates? The bad seeds?” Delmen walked to the door and stared out the window toward the dock, where Royson and his buddies raced forklifts across the length of the floor. “Yeah, they’ll be building a whole separate wing with shiny new docks and altar rooms and special kitchens and all that other crap they need. And Chicago will stand aside and let ’em do it because they can’t be bothered to give a damn about their own colonists. Well, let ’em have the last dregs of the business around here. See how far it takes them.” He dunked, bit, chewed. “Don’t mind me. Bad day.” He jerked his chin in the direction of his three stevedores. “Slow afternoon.”

Jani looped her finger through the other doughnut, biting back a comment about clear oil and the composition of cheap sugar glaze. “It’ll give me a chance to work on the backlog.”

“Better make it last. May be all you see for a while.” Delmen set down his cup with a bang. Stuffed the last piece of pastry into his mouth, then keyed open the door and headed toward his gang of forklift racers, clapping his hands along the way. “Knock it off—unless you want to pay the goddamned charge station rental—!”

Jani topped off her coffee, then walked back to her cube. Set her coffee on the desk, set the doughnut atop the cup to soften in the steam, then headed to the locker room to divest herself of her new hardware.

The women’s locker area proved empty. No angry clerks. No hallucinated blondes. Jani maneuvered around trash receptacles, uniform hampers, and benches to her locker, a corner unit chosen because it allowed her a clear view of the door. She opened the finger lock and removed the sole contents, a small, battered duffel that contained all she owned. She tried to keep it close as possible at all times, either on her person or in the locker. If spooked, she could bolt and not worry whether she had left anything important behind.

She set the bag atop the bench in front of the locker, popped the fasteners, then removed just enough clothing to expose the semirigid bottom panel. Working one finger between the edge of the panel and the side of the bag, she pushed down, then pulled upward. The false bottom, scanproof and damage-resistant, gave way with a soft ripping sound, revealing an array of objects wrapped in a thinner, more flexible version of the shielding material. Her old Service shooter, its case the dull blue of an uncut gem. Her scanpack. Finger-sized scanners and sniffers.

Jani hitched the bag over her shoulder. Adjourned to the bathroom, and closed herself into a stall.

Always look a gift horse in the mouth. She dug into her bag and pulled out one of the sniffers. Ran the device over the receiver in a sweeping motion. Front first, then back, then sides, top, and bottom, in search of tracer elements. Then she checked the accessory carton. Pulled the update packet from her hidden pocket and scanned that. Finally, she checked her hair, the soles of her boots. Satisfied that Delmen hadn’t stuck her with anything intrusive, she tucked everything back into their appropriate compartments.

I don’t think these guys are hard-core. Suspicious as hell, maybe, but not organized professionals. Professionals would have known how to handle spilled flavor concentrate. They’d have had someone in place in Utilities to jazz the vacuum and incinerator settings and readouts. Hell, they wouldn’t have even bothered staging a spill. They’d have simply diverted the sealed drum as soon as they unloaded it. Only problem at that level was that they’d need a crooked document examiner in place to alter the bill of lading and other documents.

I haven’t had to stoop to that yet. Her hands were still clean with regard to her former profession, however grimy they’d become in every other. She still had some standards left.

Jani shouldered her bag and slipped out of the stall. Washed her hands, then turned to leave—

—and collided with an hallucination.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Annalise backpedaled until she struck the wall. She clutched a candy wrapper in one hand.

“It’s okay.” Jani massaged her right shin, which had suffered a head-on assault by an adolescent kneecap. So I wasn’t seeing things after all. Which the nasty bruise she could feel developing would no doubt confirm within a minute or two.

“Wasn’t watching where I was going.” Annalise edged away from the wall. “I need to stop that.” She straightened out the wrapper as she sidled up to the trash receptacle, giving the inside a quick lick before tossing it. “I’m Annalise.”

“I know.” Jani gave her shin one last rub. “We met here a few hours ago.”

“No, we didn’t, did—?” Annalise’s eyes widened. Then came a smile, forced and fleeting. “So many people around here. I can’t remember them all.”

Jani watched her walk along the wall, one hand pressed to the tile as though she feared losing contact. “What are you doing here?”

“My mom works here. A company down that way.” Annalise waved in the direction of the hallway. “I come in with her sometimes and help her out.” She reversed direction, backing along the wall until she came to the opening to the locker room. “I have to go.” She wheeled, then slipped through the door. “I think she’s looking for me.”

“Wait a minute—” Jani passed through to the locker room in time to see the door to the hallway close. She stared at the door for a time, then stashed her duffel back in her locker, all the while fighting a growing disquiet. She didn’t remember me. Did that matter? I’m on the run, right? Not being remembered is a good thing.

Jani reentered the dock office to find it still empty, her coworkers nowhere to be seen. She sat at her desk, activated her workstation, and reached for her cof—

“What the hell?” She stared at the place where her cup had rested. Pressed her hand to the polywood surface, and felt the residual warmth. “Some son of a—” She stood and held her breath, listening for muffled laughter. “Is anyone in here?”

The office door swung open, and Royson walked in, his face reddened and slick with sweat. “Who you talkin’ to?”

“Did you see anyone come in here in the last few minutes?”

“Yeah, the Transportation Minister. She resigned and asked you to take over.”

“Go to hell.” Jani edged up the walkway, checked the interior of each cube. Then she stood in front of the lost lambs’ shelf, and studied the spot where the yellow pullover had lain. Too small for me. It would fit a young girl just fine, though. As long as they weren’t too fussy.

My mom . . . a company down that way . . .

Or if they were in trouble, and didn’t have a choice.

Andy, are you handy?

Yes, I am. Jani touched the place where the sweater had rested. And I’m apparently not the only one here who can make that claim.

• • • •

Jani expected to be followed home that evening, and she wasn’t disappointed.

The tail proved to be the dour warehouseman, whom she’d christened Mopey. He didn’t bother to hide. Jani saw his reflection in every shop window as he tracked her along the pedestrian walkway, never straying more than ten or fifteen meters behind. When she boarded the tram, he did as well, standing in the rear of the car and watching her with the sullen dullness of a beaten animal. By the time she reached her flat block, she still hadn’t decided whether he had revealed himself on purpose in order to intimidate her, or if he really was that inept.

Probably a little of both. Jani keyed into her flat just as he appeared at the end of the hallway. She could sense his dead eyes on her as she closed the door.

“So now they know where I live.” Which meant that she would need to move after payday, even if it meant forfeiting half a week’s rent.

“Do they welcome all newcomers like this, or am I special?” Jani set her new receiver atop the wall-mounted polywood board that served as both desk and dining room table in the one-room flat. Next to it sat the unit that came with the room, a battered cube from which a Mozart sonata emerged in a weedy stream of sound that reminded Jani of chattering rats.

Yes, it still doesn’t work. And yes, the building owner had told her that she’d have to pay half the cost of an upgrade or repair. I bet that Mopey is in the building office now, following up on just that issue. On Delmen’s orders, of course. Jani doubted that he had the smarts to think of doing so himself. “I don’t lie if I don’t have to.” She spoke aloud, as she sometimes did, a ploy to fill the solitary silence. “Especially about anything that can be checked. Makes it easier to keep my story straight.” One of life’s lessons, learned the hard way, as most of her lessons had been.

Jani activated the new receiver. Within moments a high, thin trumpet filled the room. She fiddled with the volume until she felt sure the strains of the Vivaldi concerto wouldn’t disturb her neighbors and lead to any visits by the manager. She had work to do. She needed to avoid the near occasion of interruption.

First, she lowered the room lighting. Then she flipped up the climate control panel next to the table and reset the temperature to the lowest setting. Ten degrees—not great, but the best she could manage. She jacked up the circulator to move the air more quickly, then dragged her duffel over to the table and sat down. Once again dug through clothes and other gear and cracked the scanproof barrier, this time removing a rolled length of antistatic fabric, the stolen update packet, and, finally, her scanpack.

She unrolled the antistat first, revealing an array of instruments nestled in separate slots. Her initials, JMK, had once been etched in metallic scrollwork in the lower right corner of the cloth, but she had burned them away years before, a faint crosshatch of scorch marks the only reminder of their existence.

Your toolkit, their first idomeni instructor had told them, her attempts at English garbled by her Laumrau accent and her agitation at having to address humanish in one of their own languages. It is your connection to your reader and should be treated as such. Reader. The idomeni term for scanpack. As was usual, the idomeni called the device what it was. Humans, again as usual, dressed up the name and snuck in the manufacturer’s appellation to boot. SCAN, the acronym for four of the Commonwealth’s eight ruling Families, which combined with NUVA to make the complete set. Neumann, Ulanova, Van Reuter, Abascal, Scriabin, Cao, al-Muhammed, Nawar. Every citizen knew those names as they knew their own. But unlike other citizens, the Families know my name as well. Which was why she currently lived in a weekly rental under an assumed name.

Jani plucked an antiseptic pen from its slot and activated it. The beam shone purple in the dim light, reflected strange pale blue off the surfaces of dust motes. Someday I’ll do surgery in a clean room again, and my ’pack will go into shock. She stuck the other end of the pen in her mouth to free her hands, then removed a small bottle of nerve solder from its slot, opened it, and poured a few drops into a heat cup she’d freed from another recess. The solder looked like molasses and smelled like nothing until it hit the surface of the cup. It thinned immediately, its characteristic meaty aroma tickling her nose and making her mouth water. I should’ve eaten something first. Unfortunately, nothing she had in her cooler smelled as good as the solder.

Heart thumping, Jani removed her timepiece and set it down on the table so that she could see the face. As the nerve solder warmed, Jani cracked the fasteners of the scuffed black case and removed her scanpack. The surface of the oval document-reading device had once shone like a black mirror, but hard use and age had rendered it as tired-looking as its owner.

Jani set the scanpack on the table in front of the timepiece and pressed her hands against the sides. The cover ID’d her prints and sprang open to reveal a fist-sized mass, its gray color discernible beneath the pink membrane that sheathed it. The brain of her scanpack, grown from her own farmed brain tissue, wrapped in a protective layer of fibrous dura mater.

Jani shone the antiseptic light on the brain as soon as she removed the cover. The tissue shuddered as the room air brushed over it, a gelatin ripple that slowed as she reached beneath the device for the master touchswitch and set it to “chill.” With that, the battery that pumped nutrient through the brain shut down. The pink color of the dura mater remained, but the brain’s trembling slowed, almost stopped.

Jani tore open the update packet and shook out the contents onto a corner of the antistat. One . . . two . . . three . . . four chips in all, standard updates for your average documents examiner with midlevel security clearances, each encased in a stiff poly envelope on which its insertion instructions had been printed. She sorted through the envelopes, lining them up according to placement and difficulty of insertion. In a real clean room, she could have taken her time and installed them individually, but here, with the antiseptic pen the only defense against the unseen impurities and infective agents that filled the air, speed was her only recourse. Hack, slash, and sew. Battlefield surgery on the microlevel.

In a saner world, Jani would have clamped only the oxy feed line to whichever octant region of the brain she chose to work on first. Now, however, she shut down the feed system at the source, cutting off oxygenated infusion to the entire brain. She then disabled the nutrient web and watched as the brain’s movement slowed to irregular spasming, then ceased completely.

Four minutes. Like a human brain, that of the scanpack could survive without oxygen for four minutes. After that time, the cell death began. Within eight minutes, the device would be damaged beyond hope of salvage.

Jani took a scalpel and set of microforceps from the toolkit. Heart still tripping, she slit the dura mater from top to bottom. Peeled back one side, then the other, and anchored them to the sides of the scanpack with butterfly clamps.

She glanced at her timepiece. Seven seconds. A new Jani Kilian pack-hacking record. Three minutes fifty-three to go.

Before her, the surface of the scanpack brain glistened pearl gray, eight raised frecklings of nerve bundles and old chips marking the octant sites.

Two-eighths, seven to two—three-eighths, six to three—six-eighths, five to one, and six-eighths, two to four. One chip to insert in the second and third octants respectively, and two in the sixth, each linked up to a series of nerves that would provide power to the chips and relay the information contained to the brain for processing.

Three minutes forty seconds.

Jani pulled the laser knife from the toolkit and activated it. With a series of wrist flicks, she excised the four old chips, then plucked them out with the tweezers.

Three minutes twenty seconds.

She drew nerve solder into a syringelike threader, then focused on the second octant region. Working the threader like a fine paintbrush, she ejected a filament of solder, attached the end to the seventh nerve bundle, then drew up to the second nerve bundle and closed the circuit that would power the chip. Using the knife, she etched a square pattern of microholes in the tissue near the second nerve bundle, sending minuscule streams of smoke emanating from each new hole. She held her breath to avoid inhaling the grilled-meat smell of the solder as she picked up the chip and tweezered it into place, slipping the hair-thin anchors that radiated from the underside into the etched holes. She then drew another solder line, melding one end to the line that connected the nerves and the other to the chip, baking them into place with touches of the knife.

Two minutes thirty seconds.

She then moved on to the second chip. Thread. Loop. Etch. Drop and connect.

One minute forty-five seconds.

The third chip.

One minute five seconds.

The fourth.

Thirty-seven seconds.

Jani reactivated the nutrient lines. The gray color of the tissue took on a faint pinkish cast as life-giving carrier spread through the circulatory system. She then touched the laser knife to each chip in turn, breaking their seals—they flashed green as they activated, then faded into the tissue surrounding them.

Twenty-five seconds.

Jani removed the clamps and sealed the incision in the dura mater with a thin line of solder. Eased open the oxy lines, then reached beneath the scanpack and reset the touchswitch to “normal.”

Ten seconds.

Jani held her breath until a shiver rippled through the brain. In her mind’s ear, she heard her old surgical dominant screaming mixed English and Laumrau at her as she worked. Too fast—damned humanish—too fast—the solder has not set!

So many memories.

Fastest hands in the Academy, Jan. The Laumrau don’t like it that you’re showing up the home team.

Where’s the fire, Lieutenant?

How long will you be, Captain? The Consul General needs you in there now.

Jani reseated the cover and snapped it into place. Took the antiseptic pen from her mouth and clicked it off. Pressed a hand to the back of her neck and dug in with her fingertips, working away the knots that always formed whenever she performed surgery.

After allowing a few minutes for her scanpack to stabilize, she once more reached beneath it and activated it. The indicator light shimmered green, then flickered as the unit ran through its self-check sequence.

As the scanpack ran through its paces, Jani stashed her tools. Dumped the leftover solder down the sink, then ran lots of cold water to prevent the stuff from coagulating in the drains. Grabbed a juice dispo from the cooler and savored the cold sweetness.

A Tilani piece played now. A newer composer, his music too jangly and atonal. Jani switched to a news program, then sat down on the daybed, the only other piece of furniture in the room. Listened for any noise in the hallway outside her door, and pondered whether Delmen distrusted her enough to kill her. Wondered which out-of-the-way hole her young doughnut-swiping scavenger had found to hunker down. Drank juice and wished for bourbon, and waited for post-augie fatigue to lull her into some semblance of sleep.

• • • •

The next afternoon, Jani ran into Annalise again.

Jani was just entering the locker room when she saw the small figure dart out of one of the offices and across the hall into the vend alcove. She crept along the wall and peeked around the alcove entry to find the girl crouched in front of the sandwich machine. She wore the yellow pullover. The same black trousers, rolled up at the ankles.

Jani watched her insert a vend token into the machine’s reader slot. The token must have been empty or corrupted—the girl ran it through the slot over and over, slapped at all the buttons in turn, then checked the delivery chute. Her strikes grew more agitated with each failed attempt until finally she kicked the machine, which squealed in protest.

“Your token’s empty,” Jani said.

Annalise wheeled. “I found it on the floor.” Yesterday’s calm had shattered, leaving narrow-eyed edge and the stench of desperation. “Out there, on the floor.” She pointed toward the corridor. “It was just lying there.”

You stole it from the office you just ran out of, but ask me if I care. Jani took a step closer, hands raised and open so Annalise could see them. “May I try?” She remained still, letting the girl make the decision to walk over and hand her the plastic card, which she eventually did.

“See?” Jani pointed to the grooved region along one edge. “It’s so scratched up that the reader can’t scan it.” She slipped it through the slot quickly, slowly, backward and forward. “It’s shot.”

Annalise crossed her arms over her stomach. “I’m really hungry.”

Jani took in the girl’s dull skin, the dark circles under her eyes, then reached into her duffel and dug around before she remembered that she was just as broke. “Don’t go anywhere. Stay right here.” She walked out into the corridor just in time to spot Royson emerge from the men’s locker room. Oh well. Beggars and choosers. “Mister Royson? Do you have a spare token?”

Royson stopped, mouthed “Mister,” then rolled his eyes. “Yeah.” He made no move toward his pockets. “Why?”

Jani held out her hand. “You’ll get it back on payday.”

“Like I can say no.” Royson glared at her as she drew close. “Like you wouldn’t accidentally erase my file from the system or redirect my pay to the Outer Circle or something.” He pulled a token from his pocket with the grudging slowness that inspired nicknames like “Fishhooks.” “Payday—that’s the day after tomorrow.”

“You are kindness itself.” Jani plucked the token from his fingers and headed back to the alcove.

“Day after tomorrow.” Royson fell in behind her. “Maybe you should fill out a form or something. Add a note about how eager I am to help my wonderful doc tech.”

Oh, spare me. “I won’t forget.” Jani tossed over her shoulder. “Newark.”

Royson slid to a stop, the flush moving up his neck like the tide. “You stink, you know that?” He shot her one last look of disgust, then turned with a grumble and trudged back to the dock.

Jani watched him, waiting until he palmed through the dock entry and the door closed after him before reentering the alcove. “Here.” She handed Annalise the token. “There’s enough left on it for a decent lunch.”

“Thanks.” The girl squeezed the plastic card as though she feared she might drop it. “Be nice when payday finally gets here, won’t it?”

“Always is.” Jani followed Annalise to the sandwich machine, then watched over her shoulder to make sure she bought something decent. Fake tuna fish. At least it was better than the fake chicken salad. “Where does your mom work?”

“Across the hall.”

“Doing what?”

“You want her name? Don’t you trust me?” Annalise stiffened. “I said I’ll pay you back.”

“With what?” Jani leaned against a nearby table, setting herself so that she could block Annalise if she tried to bolt.

The girl’s small hand hovered above the drink selector. “I told you. My mom—” She flexed her fingers, then slapped the selector pad.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

Annalise shivered. “I hope not.”

• • • •

The utilities chase that ran between the commercial and passenger concourses had the same pieced-together look as the rest of Victoria Station. Conduits in mismatched colors snaked along both sides of the narrow corridor like patchwork veins. Storage cages cropped up every ten meters or so, some empty and gaping, others filled and alarmed. The ceiling was low, the lighting emergency-level, thin and purplish and as cheering as a funeral.

Jani closed the gate to an empty cage. The lock snapped into place with a sound like a blade being pulled from a sheath. “How long have you been here?”

“I’ve lost track.” Annalise sat on the floor between the cage and a utilities-switching terminal. The place was her base camp, such as it was. A rumpled blanket, with yesterday’s pullover folded into pillow. A plastic sack that contained whatever else she owned. “A few weeks Common. A month.” Her voice emerged soft, lost amid the darkness and the metal. “Ricky got money out of one of their desks, and we split it up.”

Okay. Like most stories, this one would emerge piecemeal and scattered. My job is to fit it all together. Jani let her duffel slide to the floor, then lowered next to it. Sniffed the air, and winced. All chases seemed to stink of poor ventilation and slowly aging junk. “Who’s Ricky?”

“He was my foster . . .” Annalise leaned to the side and rested her head against the terminal. “My foster fellow. Fellow foster. Refugee from hell house.” The cave light grayed her skin, added a strange, dark gleam to her eyes. “My best friend.” She sat up and set out the sandwich packet, a juice dispo, a packet of chocolate crackers. Took a bite of the sandwich, and stopped in midchew. “This is really bad.”

“That’s the best thing they sell, too.” Jani’s mouth watered. Even crappy food would have tasted good just then. “Eat it. At least it’s calories.” She waited until Annalise finished most of the sandwich and started on the juice. “So why were you in foster?”

Thin shoulders jerked. “My mom disappeared again. Usually she’d come back after a few days, but not this time. The flat manager figured something happened when the rent fell behind. I’m eleven, so he called Colonial Services, and they picked me up. Tried to contact relatives, but I guess I don’t have any.”

Jani watched as Annalise examined the juice dispo, pulled out the straw, and reinserted it over and over. Complete focus on the task at hand because it gave the brain something else to do. Because it kept you from thinking too much. “I’m sorry about your mom.” She waited for a response, even though she knew she wouldn’t get one. “So. They made you a Ward of the Colony and fostered you to hell house?”

“They said we were expensive and had to start paying back.” Annalise flinched as her voice echoed down the corridor. “Ricky yelled at them one day,” she continued, more quietly. “He said that he had read the law, and Padishah paid them to provide us room and board and the money we earned was ours and we were supposed to go to school.” Another shrug. “Two days later, they took us to the place. They said it was a hospital, but it was too small. Like a clinic, but it wasn’t busy.” She tore open the cracker packet and removed one, but instead of eating it she broke it into pieces. “Medical checkups, they said.” Another cracker. More breaking. “I never saw them again.”

“How long were you at the clinic?”

Annalise shook her head. “He told me we’d be happier. The doctor. He said that we’d never want to argue, and we wouldn’t worry so much. Ricky told him that we weren’t worried, we just wanted to keep the money we earned and go back to school.” She brushed crumbs from her fingers, then picked up one of the cracker pieces, dunked it into the juice, and ate it. “They separated us after that.” She looked across the narrow space at Jani. “We weren’t there as long as I’ve been here. Two weeks Common, maybe.” She pressed a hand to the back of her neck. “They did something to my head. They locked it in a cage.”

“It’s called a stereotaxic restraint.” The hissing click of the cage mech sounded in Jani’s memory, and she balled her hand into a fist. “You have to remain immobile during the injection process, or there’s a risk of brain injury.”

“My head hurt.”

“Yeah.” Jani worked a finger through her hair at the base of her skull. Felt her own tiny scar, the place where the cannula had penetrated into her ventricular system and pumped in the components that migrated to the area near her amygdala, took root, and grew. They told me later that I shouldn’t have been augmented. A borderline case at best, who would require frequent monitoring.

“I knew something had gone wrong. A couple of days after, I knew.” Annalise shook her head. The juice had been set aside, the crackers forgotten. “I’d be in my room, in bed. Then I’d wake up, and I’d be someplace else—the bathroom, an examining room, wandering the hallway. Once—” She looked down at her hands. “One time, I didn’t have any clothes on.” She remained still for a time, then wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “A week or so after that, I snuck out of my room and down a hallway they told me to stay away from. Found Ricky in one of the rooms.” Her voice flattened. “They’d tied him down. He didn’t know who I was. He’d done things. To his face.”

Jani leaned her head against the wall and banged it lightly. Oh, you bastards—you never learn, do you? “He didn’t recognize himself in the mirror?”

“He said that it wasn’t his face, and he didn’t know why it should be stuck to his skull. So, he’d tried to cut it—” Annalise sniffed, wiped her nose. “I went back to my room and pretended to be a good girl for a few days so they wouldn’t watch me as close. When I went back to Ricky’s room, he was better. He knew who I was. He said we had to get out of there. I untied him because even though he stopped trying to hurt himself, they still had him tied. He said he knew where there was money, and he told me to stay put while he went to get it.” She pushed up her sleeves, then fussed with the rolled pant cuffs. “He came back with the money. Said he got it out of a desk, like I told you before.” Her head came up, and she glared at Jani, as though daring her to question, to disapprove. “And we left.”

Jani met her eyes. “They just let you walk out?”

“We didn’t see anybody. Usually there was someone at the nurses’ station, and a guard at the entry, but we didn’t see anybody.” Annalise stopped worrying her clothing and hugged her knees up to her chin. “We still ran—as soon as we were out the door, we ran all the way to the tram stop.”

“No one noticed Ricky’s face?”

“It was all scabby by then.” Annalise mimed picking at her cheek. “We told people he fell off a skimcycle.” A shadowed smile, that faded quickly. “We took the tram to the shuttleport. Ricky said we should split up, so at least one of us would get away. I bought a billet for the farthest place I could afford.” She looked around. “I should have studied the schedule a little harder.”

“No one’s tracked you here. You did all right.” Jani laid her head back and studied the ceiling, unpainted concrete the color of dirty ice. “Now we need to find you—”

“Andy! Hi!”

Jani’s heart skipped. She slowly raised her head, tried to keep her expression calm.

“Andy, are you handy?” The brittle brightness had returned to Annalise’s face, her eyes glistening as though from fever. “Hello. We met . . . somewhere.” She pushed to her feet and walked to Jani. “I remember you. I scared you at the mirror.”

Jani held out her right hand, and this time felt the squeeze, the light grind of bone. “Yes, you did.” Looked at the fingers, and saw the bitten nails, cuticles reddened from picking.

Annalise’s smile ebbed. “Where am I now?” She dropped Jani’s hand as though it burned. “I was in a hallway with lots of lights, and now I’m here. The mirror’s gone. It’s gone. The mirror’s gone. It’s—” She let loose the scream with her next breath, a high-pitched shriek that seemed to ramp in intensity as it ricocheted off every hard surface.

Shit. Jani scrambled to her feet, dodged around the panicked girl, and grabbed the blanket from the floor. Shaking it open, she cast it like a net so that it enveloped Annalise. Then she closed in from behind, securing the blanket around the girl’s shoulders and pulling her close, talking gently all the while even as the screams continued and she wondered how long it would be before station security found them. “Paix. Paix.” Hush. Hush. Acadian French unspoken for so long emerged as she worked her way atop the switching box and pulled Annalise onto her lap. Brought her legs up and crossed them over the girl’s so that she kept her still. “Paix. Paix. Paix.” She rocked back and forth, keeping her voice low and soft as the screaming lowered, then stopped, and the small body sagged against her and shook with something that might have been crying but could just have been fear.

Jani waited. The rough blanket made the exposed skin of her right arm itch, but she didn’t dare release Annalise so she could scratch. Instead, she continued to sit, and rock, and listen for the echoing of footsteps that would signal the approach of trouble.

After a few quiet minutes, Annalise stirred.

“My mom used to sing me songs.” She sighed. “She said they were Hortensian songs. German. I didn’t understand any of the words.”

Jani shook her head. “You don’t want to hear me sing.”

Annalise sat still for a time, then started to squirm. “I feel like an idiot sitting in your lap like this.” Her voice lowered. “Did something happen?”

“Yes.”

A pause. “What?”

Jani hesitated. So many tiny changes, each one nothing in and of itself. Put them all together, and you have a different person. “Your eyes brighten. Your voice pitches higher, and you act twitchy. You call me Andy, and you shake my hand.”

“That’s all?” Hesitation. “I didn’t try to take my clothes off?”

“You didn’t touch your clothes.” Jani listened for any remnant of the manic edge in Annalise’s voice. When she didn’t hear it, she loosened her grip and let her slide off her lap. “They come and go that quickly? The episodes?”

“Yeah.” Annalise slipped off the blanket and started to fold it. “The doctor told me they’d ease up after a few days. He lied.”

Jani counted to three, to four, to ten, then asked the question she didn’t want to ask. “The doctor. What was his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he wear a medcoat with a name tag?”

“No.”

Are you sure he was a doctor? Oh, that it were as simple as fraud. “Did he have white hair?”

Annalise rolled the folded blanket against the wall and sat on it. “He wasn’t old.”

Jani held up her hands side by side and spread her fingers. They looked identical in the dim light. Length of fingers. Color of skin. “He would have been younger. My age. Late twenties.”

“His hair was dark.” Annalise dragged her bag onto her lap and started picking through it.

“Did you hear anyone say the name ‘John Shroud’?” Jani paused. It had been years since she’d said that name aloud. “Did you read it anywhere?”

Annalise nodded. “I heard it.” She looked up from her explorations of the bag. “I heard my doctor talking to one of the nurses, and he said that if Shroud found out what they were doing, he’d kill them.”

Jani managed a smile. Well, well, John. She flexed her hands one last time, then let them fall. Maybe I taught you something after all.

“So.” Annalise tied the top of the bag into a knot but kept it on her lap. “Now what?”

Jani stood and paced the corridor. I knew the other shoe would drop. Only this time, it turned out to be a hip boot. “The implant you have. It needs to be removed.”

“Can you do it?”

Jani shook her head. “No. You need to go to a certain type of doctor.”

“No.I’m not going back—”

“Not to Padishah. You don’t have to go back there.” Jani waited, watching Annalise until she felt sure the bright eyes wouldn’t return. “You need to see someone who knows what they’re doing.” Unfortunately, I know just who that someone is.

“I don’t see why I just can’t stay here.” Annalise tossed her sack aside and boosted to her feet. “You can bring me food, or”—she stared down at her shoes—“or I could stay with you.”

Oh shit. “No, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t.” Jani checked her timepiece. Had Delmen noticed her absence yet? Or, God forbid, Royson? “I need to get back to work.” She held up her hand as the girl started after her. “Don’t try to follow me, because—” Because someone’s already doing that. “—because I don’t work in a very safe area.” She tried not to look around the chase, which offered all the coziness of a tomb. “I’ll bring you some food later.”

“Why can’t I go with you?” Annalise’s voice was sharp with panic. Only the lower pitch indicated that her other self hadn’t emerged again. “I can work—”

“Right now, you need to stay put. Get some sleep—you probably could use some.” Jani looked at her boots, the walls, anything but the girl’s face. “Stay away from the offices. Someone could see you.”

“No one has yet.”

“It’s called pushing your luck.” Jani picked up her duffel and shouldered it. “Look, I’m sorry, but you can’t stay with me.” She started up the corridor toward the entry, walking softly to dampen the sound of her boots.

“Andy?”

Jani slid to a stop and turned. “What?”

Annalise held up her hands. “It’s still me. I think.” She just stood, silent and small, and watched her.

Even she realizes that she’s getting worse—what if she goes wandering while I’m gone? Jani scrubbed a hand through her hair. Damn and damn and damn again. “Look, you can’t stay with me for too—” Before she could finish the sentence, Annalise snatched up her belongings and ran up to her.

“I don’t need much room.” She bounded sideways, like a two-legged crab. “And I don’t eat much, and I’m real quiet.”

Except when you scream. Jani followed after her and tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong.

• • • •

Jani kept an eye on faces as she and Annalise rode the tram to the residential sector. I don’t see Mopey. The few faces she did recognize, she had seen since her first day at the station. She knew where they lived and worked, which passengers they flirted with and which they avoided. If any of them had been trailing her, they’d have closed the net by now. In her experience, Service Intelligence didn’t waste time.

She glanced at her new roommate to find her fixed on the shop storefronts, tiny parks, and other scenery, clutching her makeshift luggage to her chest like a stuffed toy. Crap. Station medical services couldn’t help Annalise worth a damn now—they’d prove less than worthless as she continued to worsen, as the man-made gland in her brain misfired with greater and greater frequency, carved new connections and obliterated the old. At some point, the damage will be irreparable. Her personality would be altered beyond recovery.

“There’s a carnival!” Annalise grabbed Jani’s sleeve as they passed a crew assembling a merry-go-round. “We can go, can’t we?” She didn’t wait for an answer before turning back to the window and pressing her nose to the glass. “They’ve got bands on the weekends. The sign says so.”

Jani turned away just as her eyes started to sting. Don’t blink. Don’t tear a film. Breathe. “Maybe.” She scanned the faces of the other passengers once more. “We’ll see how things go.”

There were still a few hours to go before official end of shift, which meant that the tram station was emptier than usual. Easier to spot the too-curious watcher, but also easier to be watched. Jani herded Annalise into her flat block as casually as she could and wondered if anyone had yet noticed her absence from the dock and sent out the first panicked feelers. I’m going to have some explaining to do when I get back. As for whether anyone would believe her . . .

Annalise looked around the excuse for a lobby, eyes goggling as she took in the sitting area complete with semifunctional holoVee and the communications bank outfitted with actual working comports. She had calmed since she’d left the chase, so much so that Jani wondered whether the dim, purple lighting had aggravated whatever condition her augmentation had brought about. By the time they reached Jani’s flat, she even yawned.

“I can sleep here.” Annalise pushed through the door as soon as Jani keyed it open, beelined for the far corner of the room, and shook out her blanket. “And I can clean while you’re gone, and cook dinner.”

“There’s not that much to clean.” Jani opened the cooler and eyed the half-empty shelves. “And not much to cook until I get paid.” She shut the cooler and leaned against the sink-counter arrangement that comprised her kitchen. “Okay. Ground rules—”

The door buzzer sounded. Before Jani could tell her to hide, Annalise grabbed her blanket and bag and scooted beneath the daybed.

“Stay there until I call you out.” Jani lowered her duffel to the counter, opened it, extracted her shooter. Activated the weapon and felt the warming hum. Walked to the monitor inset by the doorpad, checked the face of her visitor, and swore.

The buzzer blatted once more.

“Open the damned door.” The door mike transmitted Royson’s sullen growl as though he spoke in her ear. “I know you’re in there.”

Jani’s hand stalled above the doorpad. I’ll have to drop him as soon as he comes in. And Annalise would get to watch him fall. And I’d have to explain why I hit him.

“Timas?” The buzzer again. “If you don’t open in five seconds, I get the manager to let me in. I’ll tell him you stole my receiver.” The buzzer again. “Five—”

The shooter grew warm in Jani’s hand, like a living thing. Use me. I’m ready—

“—four—”

—and your young friend can watch you kill—

“—three—”

—the thing you do best—

“—two—”

“No, it’s not.” Jani pressed flat against the wall and punched the doorpad.

“—whu—” Royson fell silent as the panel swept open. “Okay.” He stepped through the door, hands raised, silhouetted against the far wall. A perfect target. He glanced sideways, eyes widening when he spotted Jani, widening even more when he saw the shooter. “You can put that away. Please.” He lowered his voice. “I just want to talk.”

“Go to he—” Jani stopped. Somewhere between “I” and “talk,” Royson’s New Indiesian singsong had vanished. His English emerged flat now, marking him as Earthbound, or a colonial too well schooled to let his origins show.

“It’s about the girl. The one from the vend alcove.” Royson turned to Jani, making sure she could see that his hands were empty. “Yeah, I spied on you. Please—it’s important.” His stare moved from her face to her weapon. “Dammit.”

Jani struggled to gauge him, comparing the dense, cocky pain in the ass she’d dealt with over the past week with the wary, determined man who stood before her now. “You’re quite the actor.” She held up the shooter so that he could see her set it on standby.

“Yeah, everyone tells me I missed my calling.” Royson walked to the middle of the room, hands still raised where she could see them. “I’d feel better if you set that shooter down where I could see it.”

“I’m not concerned about your feelings.” Jani waited until the door closed completely, then secured the lock. “And everyone thinks that I’m the verifier.”

Royson shook his head. “I’m not—” He looked overhead, as though he expected something to drop on him. “Del doesn’t trust you—he wants to know where you are at all times. When you slipped off the dock, everyone went a little nuts. I volunteered to look for you.” He blew out a long breath. “Better me than any of those other guys. They’re all crazy.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Jani boosted atop her desk. She set her shooter beside her but still within easy reach, making a point of turning the barrel away from Royson. “Start talking.”

Royson eyed the shooter. “The girl. Her name is Annalise.” He walked over to the daybed and sat. “I’ve been looking for her.”

Jani watched as the heel of Royson’s boot grazed the corner of a blanket, then exhaled as Annalise tugged the cover farther under the bed. “Are you family?”

“No.” Royson tugged at his ear. “How do I put this?”

“You work for the bastards who augmented her.”

“No.” Royson held out one hand in a “wait a minute” gesture while reaching into his pocket with the other. “I work for these folks.” He reached out and handed Jani a small plastic rectangle.

Jani slid off the desk just far enough to grip the edge of the business card and pluck it from his grasp. Studied the engraving of a caduceus entwined with a double helix, the printing along the top. “Who’s Neoclona?”

“It’s not a who, it’s a what.” Royson sat back in a sprawl. “It’s a small start-up. Medical R&D. Run by some guys who are smarter than any three people I’ve ever known.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the whole story about the girl. All I know is that Neoclona had been working with this other lab. At some point, they found out this lab performed illegal experiments, trying to alter brain chemistry. Behavior. Like Service augmentation, but more complex. They tried to work a deal to take charge of the subjects, to try to treat them, but in the meantime a couple of them escaped. We recovered a boy on Padishah. We had Annalise spotted for a time, but lost her. She didn’t have any family along the Pearl Way, not much money, so we figured she couldn’t get far. We planted people at every station, and waited.” He shot an irritated look at Jani. “But you found her first.” He sat up slowly. “I need to get to her. Her condition’s—”

“—deteriorating.” Jani watched the edge of a shadow under the daybed advance, then retreat, as Annalise moved around. I hope she’s not claustrophobic. Or that the darkness under the bed wouldn’t trigger an attack.

“You know something about what was done to her?” Royson hesitated. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” He wiped his hands along his thighs. All of a sudden, he seemed unable to look Jani in the face. “I don’t care about you, all right?”

Jani shrugged, even as her heart stuttered. “I’m devastated.”

“You know what I’m talking about.” Royson seemed fascinated by the chipped rock pattern of the lyno flooring. “You’re a deserter. I don’t care. Help me corral the girl, and I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

Jani braced her hand on the desktop. Felt the heat from her shooter, mere centimeters from her grasp. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s a Service-issue shooter. And don’t try to tell me that you bought it in a pawnshop.” Royson watched the weapon like a snake he feared might strike. “You’ve got a Service augment. I figured that out yesterday, after the spill. The alarm set you off. The red color. I thought you were going to explode.”

“And yet you kept pushing.”

“You were new. I had to feel you out. Make sure you weren’t a verifier, someone who’d make my job harder.” He tilted his head to one side, his voice softening. He did earnest well. “Will you help me? You know what’s going to happen to her if she doesn’t get treatment—you saw it with Spacers who were augmented when they shouldn’t have been. That thing in her head is going to fry her brain—”

Jani watched as the underbed shadows stilled. “Be quiet.”

“I’m trying to tell you—”

“Shut up.”

Royson stared at her, brow furrowed, mouth agape. Then his eyes widened. “She—?” His gaze flicked around the room. “She’s here. She—” He slid off the daybed onto his knees, then sprawled flat and looked underneath. “I’ll be damned.” He reached into the dark recess. “Could you come out here—come out here, please? Miss? My name is—you can call me James Royson, and I’m trying to help—come on—don’t—ow—flying—!” He jerked out his arm and tumbled over onto his back, his hand a blur as he shook it like a match he sought to extinguish. “She bit me!”

“What the hell did you expect, trapping her like that?” Jani slid off the desk, shooter in hand. “You may as well come out.” She walked to the daybed, giving Royson a wide berth in case he should attempt to go after the shooter, injury or no.

A bag and blanket emerged. “I should’ve hid in the bathroom,” Annalise muttered as she slid out after them.

“I’m here to help you.” Royson worked into a sitting position and cradled his hand. “Dammit—she broke the skin.”

Jani caught a glimpse of the beading gash in the meaty part of Royson’s hand, between the thumb and index finger. “You drew blood.” She nodded at Annalise, who beamed. “Good job.”

“Thanks. A lot.” Royson flexed his damaged hand, wincing with every twitch. “Look, Shroud told me what might happen to her. He gave me some meds. They’ll keep her stable until he can treat her.”

Jani flinched at the sound of John’s name, then prayed Royson didn’t see. “Shroud?”

“John Shroud. One of the chiefs at Neoclona.” Royson shook his head, face alight with wonder despite the pain. “That is one weird bucky boy, but if my life was on the line, I’d want him as my medico.”

That’s what you think. Jani held out her hand. “Do you have the meds with you?”

“I’ll give them to her myself.”

“Not until I see them.” When Royson scowled, Jani smiled. “Newark. I do more than bite.”

“That’s not my real name, fer chrissake.” Royson twisted so that he could reach into his right side trouser pocket with his uninjured left hand. “Think I’d be stupid enough to use—” He swore under his breath as he contorted and probed before finally freeing a small vial. “There’s only a few pills in here. Enough to see her through a day or two.” He held out the container. “I need to contact Shroud and let him know I have her.”

Jani took the vial. Shook it, and heard the pills clatter. “Where is he waiting for you?”

Royson pointed toward the floor. “Downstairs. On Victoria.”

Crap. “What’s he doing there?” Jani blurted the question, then gave herself a mental kick when she saw Royson’s brow arch. Waited for him to ask her why she cared about the good doctor’s whereabouts, and waited some more. Maybe he’ll forget I asked. He had enough on his mind, after all. If I had John holding my leash, I’d be edgy, too. She imagined a white-haired figure seated by a comport, long fingers drumming atop the table, waiting for his agent’s call. You’ve been so close, John. All this time. No wonder she felt so jumpy.

She looked down at the vial. It bore a handmade label cut from scrap parchment, the edges straight and even. Two lines of spindly handwriting, like antique script, as distinctive as the man who inscribed them. For Annalise—one tablet every six hours.

Jani beckoned to the girl. “You need to take one of these now.” She twisted off the cap and shook out a tablet, a small white oval devoid of markings.

Annalise took it from Jani’s hand and examined it skeptically. “Will it work?”

“Probably.” Jani looked over at Royson, who had discovered the tiny kitchen sink and now occupied himself by rinsing his injured hand under the tap. “Should they be taken with food, or not?”

“Shroud didn’t say anything about food.” Royson adjusted the water until it flowed so cold that the faucet frosted over.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Royson leaned against the counter and glared at them. “You know, you two are looking at me with the exact same go-to-hell expression.” He closed the tap, slamming it hard enough to rattle the plumbing. “I’m here to help, dammit.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” Annalise tossed the tablet into her mouth and bit down. “Tastes like chocolate.”

“The man knows his patient.” Royson grabbed a dispo towel from the sink-side dispenser and dabbed at the wound. “Give him a few years and some money, he’ll work it so we all live forever. If you have any spare cash lying about, throw it his way. In five years, you’ll be able to buy your own planet.”

That sounds depressingly familiar. Jani looked down at the floor so that Royson couldn’t see her face. “Did Shroud tell you how he was going to work that out?”

“He interned at the Consulate hospital on Shèrá back when we were still getting along with the idomeni, before their last civil war.” Royson’s voice lightened as he waxed expressive. He was a John Shroud fan and didn’t care who knew it. “He and a couple of other doctors, Val Parini and Eamon DeVries, figured out how to tweak human genes using idomeni genetic material.”

Make that almost figured out. And oh, the gulf between the two was as wide as wide could be. Jani put a hand in her pocket and fingered her bottle of filmformer. “Wasn’t that illegal?”

Royson laughed. “Who the hell cares? How many laws would you break for a chance to live forever?” He crumpled his damp and bloody dispo and tossed it into the trash. “Shroud’s been perfecting his techniques for the past five years. Still a few problems, but he should have those worked out anytime now.”

You have yourself a True Believer, John.Must be a relief to impart to someone who doesn’t argue with you. Jani hid a grim smile. “What kind of problems?”

“You’ve seen idomeni, right? You know the way they look, yellowy skin and eyes like marbles? He hasn’t been able to figure out a way to keep that from happening. Whichever systems model he uses, those characteristics always seem to carry over.”

“Systems modeling? He’s not experimenting on people?”

“What are you, crazy? He can’t do that until he has the science nailed down.” Royson grabbed a clean dispo from the stack and wrapped it around his hand. “He’d be shooting in the dark, working on live bodies now. Who knows what he’d wind up with?”

“Yeah.” Jani caught a glimpse of her reflection in the polished surface of the receiver. “Who knows?” She squared her shoulders and looked Royson in the eye, hoping her face appeared the mask she needed it to be. “When do we move?”

“Tonight, after shift ends.” Royson nodded toward Annalise, who had curled up on the daybed and watched them with half-closed eyes. “Shuttles for Wodonga leave on the hour. By the time we get billets and some chow and such, we should be able to make the one at eighteen-up. I have a skimmer waiting in the garage, charged and ready to go. I’m taking her to a place Shroud owns, about a half hour or so away—”

“Why?” Jani glanced at Annalise, and lowered her voice. “Hand her over up here—it’s cleaner. From here, they can take her anywhere. They can get lost in the crowd, and no one will be able to follow. It’s one less ball that can be dropped.”

“We’re covered, all right?” Royson pulled a small documents folio from his pocket and held it up for Jani to see. “She’s a Family runaway. Her folks sent me to find her and escort her home. Dad’s in the diplomatic.” He pointed to the Commonwealth seal affixed to the front of the folio. “No questions.” He studied Jani for a moment, and his eyes softened. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate you finding her, but she’s not your problem anymore.” He hesitated, then edged closer. “Mind if I ask you something? When was the last time you had a takedown?”

Jani shook her head. “I’m fine.”

“You’re in worse shape than Little Miss Bitemark.” Royson tucked the folio back in his trouser pocket. “Look—you’re a deserter, fine, but you tried to help her, and I think you’re all right. I could add you to the paperwork, no problem. Just say the word.” He glanced at his timepiece, and exhaled with a whoosh. “We need to get going.” He walked to the daybed, wrapped a sleeping Annalise in her blanket, and carried her into the hall while Jani collected her things.

As Jani shut the door and activated the lock, she sensed what little connection she felt with the flat crumble. She would have to leave as soon as Royson and Annalise departed. Delmen’s distrust, and the questions that would follow Royson’s disappearance, would dog her otherwise, and she had no desire to find out just how crazy her soon-to-be-former coworkers really were.

She followed Royson and his limp passenger down the hall toward the lift. One of her neighbors opened his door just as they walked past, and smiled.

He thinks we’re a family. Jani smiled back. Families always made people feel comfortable. Best cover of all.

• • • •

The return trip to the docks proved uneventful. Jani and Royson both watched fellow tram passengers while Annalise slept between them, using first Jani’s shoulder as a pillow, then Royson’s.

“She can stay here until we move.” Royson keyed into an empty office two hallways removed from the docks. “I scouted it for a week. No one entered or left during that time.” He laid Annalise on the floor and tucked the blanket around her, then slowly straightened. “You better get back.” He took a handcom from his pocket. “I need to call Shroud.”

“I’m going to stay. Someone should be here when she wakes up.” Jani lowered to the floor beside Annalise’s huddled form. “I don’t want her to panic, or go wandering.”

“I’ll lock her in.”

“She shouldn’t be left alone.”

“Del is going to ask questions.”

“Does he know about this place?” Jani waited for Royson’s slow headshake. “Then he won’t know where to look for me, will he?”

“No. That’s not the way I plan—”

“I’m staying. Is that clear?”

Royson threw Jani a half-assed salute. “Yes, ma’am.” He glared at his handcom. “I’m going to have to go over to the passenger concourse. Too much interference on this side.” He started for the door, then stopped. “So what’s the story? How do we explain your disappearance?”

Jani bumped the back of her head against the wall, as if that could knock loose some imagination. “Oh hell.” She looked down at her clothes, battered boots and yesterday’s coverall. “Somehow, I don’t think they’ll believe that I did a bunk to go shopping.” She blinked, then pressed her fingertips lightly against her eyelids—her films felt grainier than usual, which meant they were starting to break down and needed to be replaced. Dammit—not now. “Tell them that I went upstairs to talk to the suits. They think I’m a suck-up anyway, so that should work.”

“Nope. That was the first place Del checked.” Royson frowned. “Then there’s the fact that I went to look for you and didn’t come back right away.” He drew up straight and looked everywhere but at her. “I think we both know what the best excuse is for our extended absence.”

Jani scanned his face for some sign that he joked. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any. “You’re kidding?”

“Trust me, that’s one thing this crowd will accept without question.” Royson nodded. “I’ll tell them that I left you to sleep it off. It’ll give me a chance to describe the event in question to the assembled.” He finally looked at her, his gaze steady, his expression as grave as a judgment. “I found you in the corridor. Our eyes met, and we realized that our mutual dislike had given way to a deeper feeling.”

“Yeah, complete disgust.” Jani started laughing, then found she couldn’t stop. “You’re sick!” She dabbed away tears and prayed her eyefilms remained intact.

Royson smiled sheepishly. “Well, we’ve found out you can smile, at least.” The grin wavered. “Although I confess that I don’t quite see the humor.” He looked down at his handcom and headed for the door. “Sit tight. I’ll be back in about two hours.”

Jani tracked the sound of Royson’s receding footsteps, grappling with vague uneasiness as they faded to silence. Now we wait. Always the worst part of any job. Too much time for one’s imagination to run rampant. Too much time for things to go wrong.

“I’m scared.”

Jani looked over at Annalise to find her peering out through a gap in the blanket. “I wondered if you were really asleep, or just faking.”

“The pill made me tired. I did sleep a little.” Annalise disentangled from Royson’s careful wrapping. “Is John Shroud going to fix me so I live forever?”

Jani shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“But you know who he is, don’t you?” Annalise worked into a sitting position, the blanket still tight around her shoulders. “You asked if he was the one who worked on me, and I saw the way you acted when Royson talked about him. I’m not stupid.”

“I never said you were.” Jani felt the words bubble to the base of her throat, like acid. That was the worst part of the life she led now, more weighing than the loneliness, the hardship. The need to talk, a desire that at times overwhelmed her like physical pain. She won’t tell. And if she did, would anyone believe a child? John would. He’d believe anything where I was concerned. But hours would pass between the time Royson left the station with Annalise and they hooked up with John on the Victorian surface. With a little luck and some fast footwork, the Created would be long gone before the Creator learned of her existence.

“I just don’t like doctors.” Jani paused to clear her throat. Talking to someone else was always harder than talking to herself. The filters kicked in whether she wanted them to or not. “I was in an accident a few years ago. Technically, I died, but a doctor brought me back.” She looked down at her right hand and shivered, recalling the shiny redness of tank-grown skin that pulled and itched each time she moved. John Shroud saved my life. She inhaled through a regrown nose, shaped so differently than the one she’d been born with, felt her resurfaced lungs fill. But I’m not like everybody else anymore.

Annalise yawned. She still looked tired, but the tension had left her, driven away by the drug and the fatigue it induced. “What kind of accident was it?”

Jani hesitated. Well, this was the tricky part, wasn’t it? A transport crash. All aboard killed, except that one came back from the dead. “Skimmer crash. Stabilizers failed, and I went into a wall.”

“Were you by yourself?”

No. My troops were with me. The fourteen remaining members of the Twelfth Rover Corps. And the pilot. And the officers sent to arrest me. All gone to ashes in the hot desert wind, near an ancient idomeni shrine called Knevçet Shèràa. “Yes.” Jani nodded. “I was alone.”

“My mom got into an accident once, on the way home from a party. She broke her arm.” Annalise’s head bobbed to one side. “I don’t like doctors, either. They try to make you into what they want you to be instead of letting you be what you are. Why do they do that?”

Because sometimes they fall in love with you, and they want you to live forever. “I don’t know.” Jani pushed to her feet and paced. “Are you hungry? Do you want some food, or something to drink?”

“No, thanks.” Annalise sat up straight. “Should I have another pill?”

Jani checked her timepiece. One and a half hours to go. “Not yet.”

“You’re coming with us, aren’t you?” Annalise picked at a corner of the blanket, then pulled off a length of weave and began to braid it. “Royson said that you needed to see Shroud.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

Because I fell in love with him, too. And because people in love sometimes did things that they didn’t normally do. Even when, technically speaking, they weren’t really people anymore. “Because I’m fine.”

• • • •

Forty-five minutes later, Jani heard a soft footfall outside the door. The patpat of fingers on the touch pad, entering code. She pulled out her shooter and activated it. Glanced at Annalise. “Stay down.”

Annalise nodded. Stretched out flat on the floor and watched, wide-eyed.

Jani lowered the roomlights, then pressed against the wall next to the door, shooter raised and ready.

The door slid open. No sound at first. Then a familiar grumble. “Flying fuck—”

“Get in here.” Jani guarded the entrance until Royson had stepped inside. Then she closed the door, brought up the lights. Lowered her shooter last of all. “You could have been a little louder. People don’t hear loud, but their ears perk up when they hear quiet and careful.”

“I’m home, dear.” Royson rolled his eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you?” He held out a candy bar to Annalise, tossing it to her when she nodded eagerly. “No one knows about her, all right. No one cares.”

“It’s nice to be loved,” Annalise said as she bit into a mess of nut-studded chocolate.

Royson shook his head. “I can’t win for losing with you two.” He dug into his pocket, extracting another candy bar. “You’re covered where Del’s concerned,” he said as he handed it to Jani. “I kept him well entertained throughout the afternoon with descriptions of our exploits.” He turned his back as soon as he passed off the snack. “You’re perfectly safe, Captain Kilian. No one knows you’re here, either.”

Jani stilled. The chill started in her gut and worked outward, freezing her limbs, setting off a roaring in her ears.

“Jani Kilian.” Royson turned back to face her, his eyes alight. “Wow.” He dragged a third bar out of his pocket and tore off the wrapping. “A few months ago, I was on a job on Hortensia when an alert went out through station security that you’d triggered some system or other.” He tore a chunk out of the candy and popped it in his mouth. “Was that you? Were you there?”

Jani almost nodded, caught herself in time. The memory started her heart galloping. An old comport code from her Service days, used to send free messages. She should have known better than to try to use it, but she’d been broke, as usual, and had needed to make a call. I almost didn’t get offworld in time . . .

“Wow and wow and wow.” Royson broke off another chunk of candy, caramel stringing after it like a tether. “But the ID kit contained your old biometrics. Your old face. Shroud said you’re completely different now, right down to retinal scans. He made sure.” He talked as he chewed, one cheek bulged with chocolate. “Five years ago, I was fresh out of Boot. Just arrived on Phillipa when the story broke. Twenty-six Laumrau killed at Knevçet Shèràa. A documents examiner, they said. Did it single-handed. Picked ’em off one by one as they took a sacramental meal in their tents.” He boosted atop a desk, heels knocking against the drawers like a little boy. “They hushed it up quick, of course. You uncovered too much, made too many people look real, real bad.”

Jani heard her voice like an echo in her skull. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jani lowered into a chair. Set her shooter on standby and tucked it back in her duffel. Her right arm tingled. Her left, as usual, felt like deadweight. “You have me confused with someone else.”

“Nope—John described you like you were standing in front of him. I couldn’t have shut him up if I wanted to.” Royson grinned. He could have been running down the plot of the latest action holoVee. “Family bastards and Service bad hats promised to support the Laumrau in their war against the Vynshà. In exchange, they arranged for the Laumrau to perform mind control research on human subjects, at a Laumrau hospital shrine called Knevçet Shèràa.” The heel banging slowed, then stopped. The grin faded. “But they needed a documents examiner with experience with both idomeni and human paper to cook the books. Transfer records, data. Patients, too, if necessary. Who better to do that than someone who had trained at the Rauta Shèràa Academy, left even the Laumrau examiners in the dust?” He set the candy aside. His speech came hushed, rapid. “But you figured out what was going on. How did Shroud put it? ‘Jani possesses a keenly honed sense of right and wrong, and the will to act on it.’” He looked at Annalise, and the glint in his eyes softened. “Now I think I know why you’re taking this so personally.”

Jani looked at Annalise, who watched her in turn, jaw stalled in midchew.

“Jani?” The girl’s lips barely moved. “It’s a pretty name.”

Jani looked into scared blue eyes, and felt something deep inside break. There were times when the lies came hard. Then there were times when they wouldn’t come at all. “Thank you.” Annalise smiled, and she smiled back, eventually. “John seems to have learned judgment over the years. He can bring her back.”

“He can bring you back, too,” Royson said, his voice almost a whisper.

“He’s done enough where I’m concerned.” Jani felt something move in her hand. She had squeezed the candy bar so hard that it cracked in its wrapping, the pieces moving under her grip like broken bone beneath skin. She loosed her hold, let it fall to the floor. “Did he tell you what came after?”

Royson nodded. “They arrested you. Piled you and your people aboard a transport to cart them back to Rauta Shèràa Base.” He set aside the remains of his chocolate, wiped his fingers on his pant leg. “Then the transport—”

“You can stop now.”

“—crashed.” Royson hung his head. “Everyone aboard killed.”

“Except that three young doctors from the Rauta Shèràa consulate clinic found one charred husk that wasn’t quite killed enough.” Jani held out her fake left hand, and flexed it. And one of those doctors went a little overboard. In every way, professional and personal.

“The work they did on you was amazing. What they learned saved I don’t know how many of my buddies later on.” Royson sat forward, eyes brightening anew. “They’re great men.”

“But men just the same.” Jani fingered one eyelid. Both eyes felt as though sand had blown in them. She needed to change her films soon. To get out of the room and off Victoria Station as soon as she possibly could. “Please.” She looked across the room at Royson, saw the pity in his eyes, mixed with just enough admiration. The open, honest look of someone who just wanted to help. God help us both. “We leave in a few minutes. I’ll go with you as far as the shuttle concourse. After that, please let me go my own way.”

“Why?” Royson pushed to his feet and walked across the room to her. “They’re waiting for you down there. Shroud’s worried about your condition. I told him about the spill episode, and he said you need a takedown as soon as possible.” He crouched at her feet, then moved to one knee like a lover proposing marriage. “He can provide you all the help you need, all the protection. Why are you running in the other direction?”

Jani struggled for just the right words. When it came to John, they always proved hard to find. “John Shroud and I have a history.”

Royson blushed. “I know.”

“He’ll say whatever he has to in order to get hold of me. Then he’ll lock me down, and only tell me what he thinks I need to know, and only let me do what he thinks I should do. Because he wants me to be happy. And he doesn’t want me to worry.” Jani glanced at Annalise. The girl had pulled her knees up to her chest and buried her face. “And part of me would let him, because sometimes I just get tired. Sometimes, more than anything, I just want a little peace.” Her throat tightened. “But it’s not right. Living like a caged exhibit, like a collector’s item—it isn’t living. It’s not even existing.”

“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven?” Royson rocked back on his heels and maneuvered into a sitting position. “A sergeant I knew used to rattle off that lit shit all the time. I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. Hell is overrated, Captain.”

Jani shook her head. “I’m not a captain anymore.”

“Yeah, you are.” Royson studied her for a time. Then he picked up the broken candy bar and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “You’re coming with.” He boosted to his feet with the smooth motion of someone with two fully functional legs. “And you’ll come quietly.” He jerked a thumb at Annalise. “Because you don’t want to do anything that might attract attention and mess things up for her.” He glanced at his timepiece. “All I have to do is pick up the new travel docs at the mail drop, and we’ll be ready to go.”

“New docs?” Jani hefted her duffel. “Why can’t I just amend the old ones?”

Royson shrugged. “Why take the time to forge when Shroud can send us clean paper written to cover three people?” He strode to the door, head high, the man in command. “Not that you couldn’t make the changes—I know better than that. But you know better than anyone that scanpacks leave marks in whatever paper they touch, special encodes that identify the examiner who made the amendment.” He stood at the doorpad, hand hovering. “I think Jani Kilian’s encodes would set off alarms, don’t you?” He looked back at her, eyes narrowing as irritation warred with the pity and admiration and this time came out on top. “Do we want a repeat of Hortensia?”

“I know how to erase encodes,” Jani said through clenched teeth.

Royson tapped his hand against his thigh. A slow, even beat, as though he counted to ten. “I’m going to go to the mail drop now and pick up the clean paper. I’ll be back here in ten minutes, then we can leave.”

Jani stood. “You’ll have to pass by the dock to get there—”

“Goddammit.” Royson stepped back from the door. “How many times do I have to tell you—we’re fine. Nobody’s interested in a little girl.”

Annalise’s head came up. “I’m almost twelve.”

“Thank you for that—I’m leaving now.” Royson struck the doorpad with his fist. “It will be all right.” He stepped out into the corridor, then paused to look back, his hand braced on the door track to keep the panel from sliding closed. “Just think, in a couple of months, we’ll reminisce about this over dinner and laugh.”

Jani stared at him, the racing tumble in her head stopped cold. “What—?” She caught sight of a new light in his eye, something that gave even his irritation a savor all its own. He’s just trying to distract me. And at that particular moment, he was doing a hell of a job. “John would have something to say about that.”

“Maybe.” Royson winked at her. “Unless he can do more than talk, he’s in trouble.” With that, he pulled his hand away from the track, letting the panel slide closed. “Ten minutes.” Then came his receding footfall, followed by silence.

“I think he likes you.”

“Then he’s the one who’s in trouble.” Jani glared at Annalise, who had clamped a hand over her mouth to hide her grin. Then she pushed a hand through her hair and stood. “You should stretch your legs. Once you get to the passenger concourse, you’ll be doing a lot of sitting.” She shouldered her duffel and paced, dredging her memory for the layout of the passenger concourse and the locations of the emergency and employee exits. I have an employee code. It should work. All she had to do was find an excuse to go somewhere by herself, or with Annalise. The restroom. That would work. Even a riled-up Royson would be reluctant to force his way into the women’s bathroom without sufficient provocation. I’ll pick one with two doors. She’d be out and away before he realized she’d left—

Footsteps outside the door, louder this time. An impatient hand punching in numbers. The panel sliding open—

—to reveal a harried Delmen, who stepped inside, then let the door close behind him.

“Okay, Timas, we need to talk—” His gaze fixed on Annalise, and his jaw dropped. “What the hell?” He stared at Jani and winced. “Look, I don’t want to know what you and that clown have been up to, I really don’t.” He pressed a hand to his forehead. “I’m already going to need psychotherapeutics to erase some of the shit he described.” He sighed, let his hand fall. “Something came up that I need you to look at. Could you please come back to the office with me?”

Jani watched his hands, his face. Listened to that soft voice, that never sounded too angry no matter what happened. “How did you know to look for me here?”

“One thing you learn fast when you’re a dock lead is where all the hiding places are. Vacant offices are a big favorite.” Delmen eyed the ceiling, rocked his head back and forth. “To answer your next question, all the supervisors get all the room codes for the entire wing. If it’s got a coded panel, I can get inside.”

Jani nodded. “What’s the problem back at the office?”

“Screwed-up invoice on a new shipment. Declared values don’t square. Customs has questions, and I don’t have answers.”

“And you want me to come with you now?”

“Yeees.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s your job?” Delmen massaged his temple. “If it’s overtime you’re angling for, you can deduct the time that you two”—he waved toward Annalise—“—you three spent in here doing—God, I don’t want to know.”

Jani remained in place. “Royson said that you ordered him to follow me.” She shifted her weight so that it balanced evenly on both feet, gauging her numb left leg as best she could. “Who did you order to follow him?”

“What?” Delmen remained in place as well. Since he’d entered, he’d kept his back to the wall and hadn’t done much more than turn his head. “Look, I—” He reached behind him, then brought his hand back around. “I should’ve known you’d ask too many questions.” The shooter shone jewel green in the chemical light. “Come with me to the office. Now.”

Jani motioned to Annalise. “Get your stuff.”

“No. She stays here.” Delmen edged away from the door so that he could reach the pad with his free hand. “I just need you.”

“What did you do to Royson?” Jani pointed to Annalise, who stood pressed against the wall clutching her bag. “What are you going to do to her?”

Delmen glanced at Annalise, gaze flicking up and down before settling back on Jani. After a few seconds, he arched an eyebrow. “You oughta know.”

“Damaged goods. Salvage and sell.” Jani waited for some response. The twitch of an eyelid. Anything. You’ve done this before, haven’t you, you bastard? “Someone’s looking for her.”

“Nope.” Delmen shook his head. “I spotted her in the corridor a few days ago and ran a runaway check. No one matching her description has been reported missing through proper channels.” The boyish grin shone for an instant. “Improper channels don’t count.”

“Does the taste of real coffee mean that much to you?” Jani saw the flicker in his eyes then, and gave herself a mental kick. The object wasn’t to rile him, but to talk him into letting them go. “I have a friend downstairs who’s interested in her. He’ll sweeten whatever price you were offered.”

Delmen frowned. “The deal’s set. I don’t like to renege. Complicates future dealings.” He paused, but he didn’t hesitate. Not one bit. “Now I will do it in here, in front of her. Or we can go out in the hall.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

Jani could feel her heartbeat slow, sense the roomlight brighten, colors sharpen. It’s all slow motion but me. All the old rules bubbled up from her memory. That shooters were lousy in close quarters. Middle distance, fine. Clear shot to the head or center of mass, fine. But close in, they stank worse than spilled flavoring. Close in, there was always a chance—

—especially when part of you just wanted a little peace.

Jani shrugged her duffel off her shoulder, caught it by the handle, and flung it at Delmen. He ducked to the side, shooter still raised and ready.

Jani pressed forward. Raised her left arm to shield her head. The arm that couldn’t feel. The one with no blood in it. The one that could take the hit.

Delmen sighted down.

Grinned.

Fired.

The pulse packet whip-cracked, struck Jani’s arm, knocked her back. Her head snapped ’round, right arm twitching and heart skipping as the energy that crossed the biobarrier between her fake limb and the rest of her filtered through. She staggered. Almost fell to one knee, but recovered in time.

Felt the wet warmth splash her coverall. Carrier, pink as the flavoring, the stuff of animandroid limbs. The stuff of nightmare, and bad action holoVees.

Her left hand twitched. Her heart steadied.

“What”—Delmen stared at the dripping carrier— “the fuck?” Then he raised his gaze, looked her in the face.

In the eye.

“Ohmygod—” Delmen’s shooter hand wavered. The barrel drooped. “What are you?” Then his mouth twisted as the rage took hold. “You’re one of them? You’re one of—son of a bitch!” He brought up his weapon again—

—just as Jani drove forward. Hit him square in the chest. Rammed him into the wall. Heard the gasp as the impact forced the air from his lungs. Sensed the shock as he struck at a woman and met a man’s strength. Grabbed his shooter hand at the wrist and squeezed. Felt the bones crack beneath the skin like candy in a wrapper. Heard the shooter strike the floor.

Heard Delmen scream.

Jani grasped his arm and spun him around. Vised her left arm around his neck so that her forearm pressed against his trachea, stopping his voice in midyell. Gripped her left wrist with her right hand and levered in hard and fast. Felt the crunch, his body sag as he slumped against her. Heard the gurgle and rasp of a dying breath.

Loosened her grip, and stepped back, and let him fall. Monitored the twitching, then the final stillness.

Turned to Annalise to find her backed into the corner, eyes wide and skin so pale.

“What—?” Annalise stared at Delmen’s body for long, slow seconds, then raised her eyes to meet Jani’s. “There’s something—” She swallowed hard. “There’s something wrong with your—eye.”

Jani blinked, felt the cool, comfortable nothing of an eye without a film. Pressed a finger to her cheek and came away with a soft sliver of white. “Do you have a mirror?”

Annalise stared down at her bag as though she’d never seen it before. Then she crouched and scrabbled, and came up with a tarnished oval. Straightened slowly, balanced on the balls of her feet, poised to bolt.

Jani broke eye contact and switched her gaze to the floor. Felt the heat rise up her neck. “I’m not a monster. I won’t hurt you.” Her chin burned—she touched it, fingered the sticky smear of drying carrier.

Felt a hand on her arm and looked down to find Annalise standing beside her, mirror in hand.

“Thanks.” Jani took it from her. Breathed deep. Looked at herself.

“Are you human?” Annalise’s voice shook.

“I’m not sure anymore.” Jani studied her eyes. The right, film still intact, the dead dark green of a bad holograph. The left—

“It’s all green.” Annalise tilted her head to stare up at her. “Even the white is green. Lighter green, but still.”

Jani focused on the cracked marble thing John had made. Jade set in old glass, dark and light, the iris half again as large as a human eye’s, the sclera clear and real and oh so alien.

“Idomeni eyes are darker. The ones I’ve seen.” Annalise edged closer, her earlier panic a memory. She seemed enthralled now, probably because she had something to fix on besides the dead body on the other side of the room. “I haven’t seen many idomeni, but—”

Jani pulled the bottle of filmformer from her pocket, shook it, then tilted back her head. “My eyes were destroyed in the crash.” So John grew new ones. He didn’t realize until it was too late that the starter tissue had been contaminated. Three drops. One one thousand . . . two one thousand . . . All the way to ten. Blink. She lowered her head, then turned to Annalise. “So?”

“I like the real one better.” Annalise’s voice emerged hushed. “But I can see where it would cause a problem.”

“Yeah.” Jani blinked again and felt the right film shift. “Excuse me.” She pulled down her lower eyelid with the knuckle of her right thumb, worked her thumbnail beneath the edge of the film, and flicked out. The film peeled away with a pop, and dropped whole into her waiting hand.

“Eww.” Annalise gripped the stark green-and-white thing by the edge and examined it. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” Jani tilted back her head. Applied the drops. Counted and blinked. “We need to move.” She checked her timepiece. “I think we just missed the shuttle we were supposed to be on.” She glanced at Delmen’s body, then at the door.

“It’s okay, right?” Annalise hugged herself. “Because he’s dead. No one else is after us?”

Jani shook her head. “I doubt he was working alone up here. And whoever he sold you to must be waiting somewhere. In the station. Downstairs.” She tossed the mirror back to Annalise. Then she walked over to Delmen’s body, crouched beside it, and started searching. Pockets. Shirtsleeves. Inner pant legs. Ignored the feel of dead flesh, the reflection of the light off dark hair. Sensed Annalise move in beside her. “You can wait by the door.”

“I saw you and him talking in the hall the other day.” Annalise stood over her, bag gripped in one small fist. “You both laughed. You liked him.”

“He would have killed me and sold you off like a chocolate bar.” Jani examined her takings—vend tokens, a code card. Nothing with writing. No notes or business cards. Kept it all in his head, damn him. Maybe he’d been more of a pro than she gave him credit for. “He made the decision, and crossed the line.” And I was there waiting. Because she had crossed that line long ago.

Jani stood. Drummed the fingers of her left hand against her thigh, and realized as she tried to stop that her fingers didn’t want to.

“It’s all weird.” Annalise poked the hand with her finger, then jerked back as it twitched.

“I lost too much carrier. The fibers are misfiring.” Jani shook out the hand, and felt the jittering ease. For the moment. “We have a lot to do, and no time.” She recovered her duffel and opened it, dug out her shooter, and activated it, whispered a prayer to Ganesh that nothing important had been broken. “Stay behind me.” She shouldered her bag, then picked up Delmen’s shooter, set it on standby, and pocketed it.

“Are we going to look for Royson?” Annalise walked to Jani’s side, making a wide circle around Delmen’s body along the way. “He’s got all the papers.”

“I know.” Jani lowered the roomlights, then opened the door. Paused just inside the entry, and strained for any sound. Stepped out and looked down one end of the hall, then the other, shooter raised and ready. “Let’s go.”

“You need to clean your face.” Annalise broke into a trot to match her pace. “You need to change your clothes.”

Jani glanced down at the dried splash of carrier that coated the front of her coverall. “I know.”

“You need to find Royson.”

“I know.”

Up and down hallways, the between-shift conduits in a dying station, empty and silent. Past the locker room to the dock entry.

Jani pressed the doorpad, then stood aside as the panel trundled open. Listened, and heard only the echoing quiet. Smelled the undercurrent of berries in the cool, filtered air.

Strode onto the floor, shooter raised, circling as she walked. Watching. Watching. Seeing nothing.

Stopped in front of the office, palmed open the door, and—

—gagged as an all-too-familiar stench hit her, and her stomach flipped.

Annalise pulled the neck of her pullover up over her nose. “What is that?” Her voice emerged muffled, thinned with panic.

“Wait here.” Jani edged inside, shutting down the room lighting before the motion sensor detected her. The dock illumination through the windows shaded everything in gray, cast shadows where none should have been. She wished she had two more people with her, one to guard the door, the other, her back. She started with the cubes, checking each in turn. Moved back up the narrow corridor to the lost lambs’ shelves, the coffee table. Smelled the stench grow stronger, burnt hair combined with singed cloth and cooked flesh, and knew what she’d find before she found it.

Royson lay on his stomach, one arm twisted beneath him, the other outstretched above his head, his legs a tangle.

“Maybe he’s still alive?”

Jani looked behind her. Annalise stood just inside the entry, stare fixed on Jani’s face.

Not with that smell. Jani kept that comment to herself as she knelt beside Royson’s body. She fingered the charred cloth in the center of his back, avoided the circle of blistered skin beneath. The entry wound. He’d been standing beside the coffee table when he’d been shot in the back. She hoped Delmen, or whoever had shot him, had surprised him, that he never knew what hit him.

Again, the search through sleeves and pockets, the struggle to ignore the dead flesh beneath. Jani liberated the documents folio, the bottle containing Annalise’s tablets, John’s business card—

—and in the very depths of a pant pocket, all by themselves, a blue poker chip and a few centimeters of pink ribbon.

Don’t think. Don’t imagine what the things might have meant, because it was the imagining that killed you bit by bit. The what had been, stopped in its tracks, never to be followed by the what will be.

. . . in a couple of months, we’ll reminisce about this over dinner . . .

Jani stuffed the chip and ribbon back in Royson’s pocket. Gathered up the other things, and carried them back to her old cube.

“What are you doing?” Annalise dogged her heels. “We have to go.”

“We can’t go until we know what we have and where we’re going.” Jani sat at her desk and cracked the fasteners on her duffel, then rummaged through the layers until she struck scanpack. “Shooter fire—is like a bolt of lightning.” She freed the device from its case and activated it, watched the start-up sequence scroll across the display. “It tends to fry everything in its path.” While her ’pack finished initiating, she opened the folio and removed the first set of documents. They proved to be the fresh transmittals from John, designed to cover three people, the time stamp showing they’d been received by the station mail service only thirty minutes before.

Jani unfolded the station letter, the diplomatic-level clearance that would guarantee them unimpeded passage from the station to Victoria’s main shuttleport at Wodonga. Crisp parchment the color of sunflowers, the text etched with multicolored inks and the edges trimmed with enough foil to draw a lightning strike on a sunny day.

“Exterior really went overboard with the foil this edition.” Jani picked up her scanpack, muttered a prayer to Ganesh to remove this particular obstacle quickly, thanks, then passed the device across the top of the document. Then passed it again. And again. “Shit.”

“What?” Annalise wedged in beside her chair. “Nothing happened. That’s good, right?”

“It means the paper’s dead.” Jani spoke as she would have to another examiner, wished she could have bitten back the word right after she said it. But Annalise didn’t seem to notice, so intent was she on the document itself.

“What’s it supposed to do?” She poked it, then drew back her finger as though it stung.

“I should get a whole string of numbers and letters across the display.” Jani pointed to her scanpack, which sat atop the paper, dark and silent as a scuffed black brick. “All paper contains chips, insets, and weave coding that tells people like me which mint it came from, and when it was made, and who coded it originally. Where it’s been, and whose hands it’s passed through. Every change that’s made to it is recorded and stored within.” She pressed a hand to her stomach, which had started to rumble as her augmentation backed off, and the jitters reasserted themselves. “Then the paper gets hit by shooter fire, at which point it gets wiped as clean as the day it emerged from the kettle.”

“Can’t you fix it?”

“If I had about a week and a real documents center at hand where I could get hold of new chips and insets and the latest updates for my ’pack.” Jani checked the clock on the wall, and swore. Forty minutes for the next shuttle.

She reached into the folio and removed the original documents, the set designed for two. Unfolded the station letter, a more sedate issue in lilac and cream, courtesy of the Commerce Ministry. Ran her ’pack over it, expecting the same nothing she’d seen before—

—and saw instead broken strings of code. Locations. Colony markers. Identifications. Names.

“Your name is Gita Birkin.” Jani nudged Annalise with her elbow to keep her from crowding so closely. “I’ve heard of Birkins—they’re affiliated with the Ulanovs.” John’s circle of acquaintances must have expanded over the years.

“Gita?” Annalise grimaced. “Why couldn’t they use my real name?”

“Because they couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t contained in some system somewhere, and that someone wasn’t already looking for you. A relative you don’t know about. Your former foster parents.”

“They don’t care about me.” Annalise tapped the letter with her finger. “What else does it say?”

“I’m reading it.” More strings scrolled past, and Jani’s heart stuttered. “Damn.”

“What?” Annalise pressed closer than ever. “I hate it when you just swear, then don’t say anything else.”

“Royson had his ID coded in here, too.” Jani pointed to the broken chains of numbers and letters. “The name, N. Royce, I can work with. But his gender and description are coded in here as well. So are a lot of Service designators.” She rubbed her eyes, taking care not to apply too much pressure to her new films. “The best way for me to recode this is to leave as much alone as possible, which would mean that I would be N. Royce, Captain, discharged with honor, working in security services for an affiliate of the Ulanovs.” She unhooked her touchboard from her workstation and inserted the connector into a jack located on the side of the scanpack.

Annalise boosted up on the desk, allowing her to loom and press too close at the same time. “Can you do it?”

“Yeah.” Jani picked through the strings of code, filling in gaps and altering designations. “The problem is that once you add in the Families, you add in a whole new layer of complication that I would rather do without.”

“Don’t forget your encodes.”

Jani’s hands stilled above the touchboard. “Thank you.” Her fingers started to move again, this time more slowly. “I know how to cover my tracks.”

Annalise rested her elbows on the desk and cupped her chin in one hand. “This isn’t legal?”

Jani laughed, a little. “No, this isn’t legal. If the people who make the rules for documents examiners saw me doing this, they’d take my ’pack away.” So much for clean hands. And that last little step. “You and I need to find new clothes,” she said, not so much changing the subject as kicking it to the curb. “Because there’s no way in hell that a Family git and her paid security escort would walk around dressed as we are at the moment.”

Annalise straightened. “Where are we going to find clothes?”

“The warehouse.” Jani entered the last edit to the documents coding, said another prayer that she had caught all she needed to catch, then unhooked the touchboard from her scanpack and reattached it to the workstation. “Women’s clothing.” She entered in the warehouse codes, and waited. “Aisle four. Stack two.” She looked up at Annalise. “What size do you wear?”

The hunt for clothes went quickly. Jani worked as lookout while Annalise climbed over crates with a knife and code wand, popping locks and dragging out the chosen items.

“This is real leather.” She had pulled on the tunic before they left the warehouse, a simple style in creamy tan that lit her skin and brought her hair to life. New pants followed, dark brown and fitted. Soft boots, and a large shoulder bag.

“Hang on to your old clothes.” Jani adjusted her own weighty bundle of new tunic, trousers, and boots. “You never know.” She checked the slip of paper that she had inserted between the office door and the jamb, saw that it was still in place, and coded in. Waited for Annalise to enter ahead of her, and waited some more.

“Can I stay out here?” Annalise stood back from the door. “I can’t—” Her eyes glittered. “I can’t—” Her voice pitched higher.

Jani dropped her clothes and scrabbled in her pocket for the tablet bottle. “You don’t have to go in.” She shook out one tablet, all the while watching the girl for any sign of a personality shift. Don’t scream—just don’t scream—

“I’m okay, it’s just—” Okay or not, Annalise took the tablet, chewed and swallowed. “It’s the smell. I think I’m going to smell it for the rest of my life.”

“I know.” Jani shoved the bottle back in her pocket and picked up her clothes. “Stay by the door. I’ll be right out,” she said as she slipped inside the office.

The burnt flesh smell had lessened, but was still strong enough to make Jani’s stomach clench. She dragged off her stained coverall and stuffed it into her duffel, then pulled on the outfit deemed more fitting for a Family retainer. Trousers and tunic in darkest blue-black. Black boots, and a matching slingbag large enough to swallow her duffel. And finally, because she was now officially a security operative, a black belt complete with holster, into which she tucked her old Service shooter.

All dressed up with someplace to go. “But where, James? You never got the chance to tell me.” Jani sat down at her workstation and brought up a Wodonga directory, display after display of names and business advertisements. Entered John’s name, then Neoclona’s, and came up empty both times.

“Half an hour outside Wodonga.” She brought up a map of the city, guessed the distance, inscribed a circle and checked to see what fell on it. Smiled. Memorized the names. Shut down the workstation. Shouldered her new bag, then walked down the aisle to Royson’s body. “What was Delmen’s plan? Murder-suicide? Make it look as though I killed you, then turned the shooter on myself?” She crouched down and touched one red, springy curl. Cleared her tightening throat. “I’ll get her out. I promise.” Then she whispered a prayer for the dead that she had learned from her mother, a prayer she had said too many times before.

Annalise met her at the door, hands filled with dripping dispo napkins, courtesy of the watercooler. “Your face.” She handed Jani a napkin, then watched as she scrubbed. “How’s your arm?”

Jani flexed her left arm. The muscles trembled but obeyed, moving as she wanted them to move. “Better, I think.” She checked her timepiece. “Ten minutes to the next shuttle. Let’s go.”

• • • •

Compared to the commercial wing, the passenger concourse of Victoria Station hummed like a hive. Business travelers from Padishah. Service recruits from across the Pearl Way. Families and station workers and students. They filled the food kiosks and streamed in and out of the shops that lined the concourse, their voices a multilingual rise and fall.

Jani scanned faces as she waited in the billet line. Security operatives were a common enough sight—no one offered her more than a cursory glance in return. More importantly, no one seemed interested in Annalise, who stood next to her and nudged against her every so often as though confirming her presence.

“Everybody always wants to go to Chicago.” The billet agent addressed the crowd in general as she took the documents folio Jani handed her, spread out the station letter, and inserted it into the slot of her reader. “I been to Chicago. It’s expensive.” She shivered theatrically, which set her dangling earrings swinging like pendulums. “And it’s cold.” She pulled the letter from the exit slot with enough force to make the device whine, refolded it, and tucked it back into the folio along with two boarding passes and a flyer for a new shop. “There you go.”

Jani took the folio with a nod, then maneuvered Annalise to a couple of chairs in the waiting area.

“Why didn’t she check the letter?” Annalise sat primly, shooting the cuffs of her tunic and plucking nonexistent lint from her trousers. “You did all that work.”

“She spot-checked it with the reader. If anything hadn’t matched up, she’d have called down an examiner from the Transportation Ministry, and they would have questioned us about who we were and where we were headed and why.” Jani watched a pair of shabbily dressed women enter the waiting area and poke into one of the trash receptacles until one of the clerks chased them off. “Maybe the letter would have worked as is. Maybe. But if you do the work up front, it’s one less thing you need to worry about down the line.” Not that she didn’t still worry. Her real limbs, in recovery from yet another augmentation burst, ached. Her bones felt lead-filled. And my damned arm— She flexed her left arm over and over, and felt the animandroid muscles quiver and cramp in response. I should have done something to fix them. But it would have taken time they didn’t have. I’ll take care of it after. After she had delivered Annalise to John. After she could breathe again.

Their call sounded. They headed down the gangway as though it was something they did every day. Handed off their passes to a disinterested attendant. Boarded the shuttle.

Annalise stuffed her bag into a floor-level grapple rack, then nestled into her seat, a business-class lounger upholstered in leather just a little darker than her tunic. “We’re really getting out.”

“Yeah.” Jani stowed her bag and strapped in.

“You know where we’re supposed to go?”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“They’re waiting for us there already.”

No, they’re waiting for you. “They’re probably wondering where the hell we are as we speak.” Jani felt the engines rumble, the sweat bead. Over the years she had ridden more shuttles and transports than she could count, yet every time she felt the start-up vibrations, the old memories returned. The shouts. The takeoff shudder and roll. The . . . nothing. The gods get one chance, she’d once heard someone say. If you survive one crash, you’ll never need worry about another because they’ve shot their bolt. “Your mouth to the gods’ ears.”

“Are you praying?” Annalise exhaled with a shudder. “This has been too easy, hasn’t it?”

Jani studied the side of the girl’s face, looking for some sign she joked and not finding it. She’s spent weeks in hiding, and half a day on the run. Witnessed one killing and the results of another. All that, and she asks if it’s been too easy.

“Yes, it has.” Jani gripped the arms of her seat and waited for the breakaway.

• • • •

Arrival at the shuttleport outside Wodonga, Victoria’s largest city. A bumpy landing and hurried traverse through the concourse to the garage and the skimmer Royson had leased.

“Bay four nineteen—it’s right down here.” Annalise bounded ahead of Jani and down the narrow aisle.

“Stay with me.” Jani drew her shooter and activated it. She hated garages. Too many shadowed corners. Too many cramped charge bays to crouch in, vehicles to hide behind. I wish John had met us here. She would have risked a face-to-face encounter if it had meant avoiding this damned rats’ nest of a place. I need someone out front. Someone at my back. Maybe two someones at her back, and even then she’d feel exposed. Vulnerable.

Annalise lagged beside Jani until they reached their bay. Then she quickened her step, almost skipping to the battered brown sedan. “Let’s go—hurry up.” She yanked at the passenger-side door mech.

“Dammit.” Jani reached out to grab her, bending at the waist and bringing her right arm up—

The blow came from behind, like a board across the back of Jani’s shoulders. She dropped to her knees, her shooter skittering across the smooth concrete floor like a skipped stone. Tried to break her fall, but her damaged left arm buckled under the weight. Struck her chin on the concrete. Rolled onto her back, and caught sight of Mopey dragging Annalise back down the aisle. The girl fought his grip like a fish on a line, twisting and kicking.

Jani reached into her pocket, the roar in her ears overwhelming all other sound. Pulled out Delmen’s shooter and activated it. Sighted down.

Fired.

The shooter crack echoed through the garage, silencing the roar. Mopey dropped to the floor, the back of his shirt smoking, while Annalise pulled away from him, slapping at her clothes as the shooter aura flashed ’round her, sparking and hissing.

Jani struggled to her feet, the pounding in her head easing as augie once more took hold. She’d pay for it later, with nausea, aching, and the cramp of exhausted muscle. But now she walked down the aisle to where Mopey lay, still and scorched. Took Annalise’s hand, felt the tingle of shooter static, and led her back to their skimmer. Opened the passenger-side door and bundled her into the cabin, followed by their bags. Recovered her shooter from the place it had fallen. Eased into the skimmer, closed herself in, then leaned against the steer mech until her hands steadied and the worst of the shakes had passed.

“Are you all right?” Jani waited for Annalise to answer, heard only a sniffle in reply, followed by quiet weeping. She rested her hand on the girl’s shoulder, as much to reassure herself as to assure. “If they’d wanted to do it right, there needed to be two—one to kill me and one to take care of you. But there was only one of them. That means they’re shorthanded. He may have been the only one we have to worry about.”

“But you don’t know for sure?” Annalise stared down at her hands, clenched in her lap. “You never know for sure?”

“No. You never know for sure. You just keep guessing, and hope you guess right.” Jani let go Annalise’s shoulder and activated the skimmer dashboard. Keyed the names from the map into the autonav. Pressed the charge-through, and maneuvered the vehicle out of the garage.

• • • •

The sunset scenery around Wodonga, Victoria, gifted the eye with the best that the colony had to offer. The mountains. The cool, clean air. If you didn’t ponder what else went on out there besides the growing of the coffee trees, and if you blocked your ears to the distant rumbles of convoys in areas where no guidance tracks had been installed, ignored the occasional blast of long-range shooter fire, if you kept your eyes and your vehicle on the road, you could enjoy the verdant views and count yourself lucky to have seen them.

Problem with that was, if you stayed on the road, everyone could see you coming.

Jani skimmed alongside the two-lane, just outside a line of trees, staying as close to the guidance track as she could. Sometimes she’d lose contact, and the skimmer would shudder and whine. Then she’d reconnect and the directionals would reset, the vehicle surging beneath her like a horse gearing up to bolt.

“I don’t want to die before I get there, you know.” Annalise gripped the dashboard, eyes squinched tight.

“You won’t die.” Jani dimmed the headlamps and thanked Ganesh for clear skies and the reflective whiteness of the regional stone. “I won’t die.” She pressed the accelerator and flared the lift mech, taking the skimmer over a tumble that had once been a wall. “Nobody else is going to die.”

“Why can’t you stay on the road?”

“I don’t know who’s out there.”

“Would it matter?” Annalise squeaked as a branch struck the windscreen. “Just run past them.”

Jani edged the skimmer away from the trees. “They could shoot us. There could be more than one of them, and they’d run us off the road. They could hit us with a pulse that stops the motor cold. The possibilities are endless.”

“Mom used to say that when in doubt, you blinded them with footwork.”

Which might explain why she isn’t around anymore. Jani glanced at the girl, a sliver of light in the darkening cabin. “What did your mom do?”

“I don’t know.” Annalise shrugged. “Some of the guys that used to visit . . .” She turned and looked out her window. “They looked like the guy at the garage.”

Jani worked her bruised shoulder. If I hadn’t leaned forward to grab Annalise, he’d have caught me across the back of the head. And the evening would have ended much differently. “There will be no more garage guys in your life.” She let the skimmer decelerate as the trees grew thicker and the scattered stone gave way to well-joined wall.

“Melbourne Hill Farm.” Annalise squinted at the autonav display. “Are you sure they’re going to be there?”

“It’s the closest of the three coffee farms that are within a half hour of Wodonga.” Jani slowed the skimmer even more as shrubbery scraped the bottom and closed in on all sides. “If we don’t find them at this one, we’ll try the next one, and if we don’t find them there—”

“What if we don’t find them at all?”

“If we don’t find them at all,”—Jani tapped a beat on the steer mech—“I will call the code on the Neoclona business card and arrange to meet John.”

“I don’t know why you didn’t do that in the first place.” Annalise grew more and more fidgety, anticipation nerves swamping out the sedative effects of her medication. “Royson said that John just wanted to help you.”

“They just wanted to help you at the hospital on Padi, didn’t they?” Jani couldn’t quite control the sharpness in her voice. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“They wanted to change me into something that was easier for them to deal with.” Annalise glared at her. “I don’t think it’s the same—” She fell silent, then boosted up in her seat. “I see some lights. Off the to right.”

“I see them, too.” Jani slowed the skimmer to a shuddery halt. Drew her shooter and activated it before popping her gullwing door and easing to the ground. “Stay behind until I give the okay.” She slammed shut her door, then trotted through the knee-high grass to the stone wall and poked her head just above the top. Searched for one thing and one thing only, because if she saw it, she’d know she was in the right place, and if she didn’t, nothing else would matter.

Fifty meters or so distant, just off to the side of the road. Amid the small group gathered in the light of skimmer headlamps, a tall, slim form dressed in gray. A cap of white hair.

“Hello, John,” Jani whispered. “It’s been a while.” She watched him pace, a walk as distinctive as his appearance. Weighty fluidity. A wraith framed by the gathering dark.

“Is that him?”

Jani’s heart skipped. “I thought I told you to stay put.”

“You weren’t moving. I figured it was okay.” Annalise had scrambled atop a rock and now peered over the top of the wall. “Why’s his hair so white?”

“He’s an albino.” Jani watched John slow, then stop, and peer in their direction. “His tissues lack melanin, so his hair and skin are white, and his eyes are pink.” She fielded Annalise’s alarmed look. “He films them, though. Different colors to match his clothing.”

“Yuck.” Annalise wrinkled her nose. “Why didn’t he just get his melanin fixed?”

Because when he was a boy, his parents wouldn’t allow it. Jani watched John walk over to one of the skimmers. And as he grew older, he learned that being different had its advantages. “I don’t know—maybe you should ask him.” As John fell into conversation with the man perched on the skimmer’s hood, she beckoned to Annalise. “See the man he’s talking to? His name’s Val Parini. He’s easier to talk to than John sometimes. If something comes up, or you’re worried about something, you can talk to him.” She stepped back from the wall and listened, heard only insects and the odd nightbird. No rustling in the trees. No signs of circling subordinates sent to trap her. He trusted Royson to bring me to him.

“They—” Annalise stood on her toes, then gasped and would have scrambled over the wall if Jani hadn’t grabbed the back of her tunic. “They brought Ricky.” She pointed to a slight figure standing near Val, so still he seemed as one with the stone. Dark, bowed head. A bouquet of flowers in one hand.

“You shouldn’t keep him waiting. You should go.” Jani kept her eyes fixed on Ricky until she felt Annalise’s stare drilling the side of her face. “Don’t argue with me.”

Annalise’s voice emerged tight. “You should go to them, too. Royson said you were sick.”

“I can’t.” Jani stepped back from the wall. “Now, please.”

Annalise didn’t meet her eye as she stepped down from the rock, shouldered her bag, and made a few tentative steps toward the waiting group.

Then she stopped and looked back at Jani.

“Go on.” Jani nodded to her. “You’ll be fine.”

“Will you?” Annalise stilled, then let her bag slip to the ground and ran back to her.

Jani braced herself as Annalise barreled into her and hugged her tightly. Touched the pale head, then unwrapped her arms and eased her away. “Go.” She watched the girl walk away, pause to hoist her bag, then continue without a backward glance. Waited until she was out of sight, then ran back to the skimmer. Imagined the reunion that took place a short distance away as she reversed the vehicle and sped out of clearing. The tears. The hugs. The news of Royson’s death, and all that came after.

John’s questions when he realized that she wasn’t there, and what he’d do when he realized she’d slipped his grasp.

He’ll go to the shuttleport. He’d expect her to try to escape immediately, which meant he’d check the passenger concourse, the departure lounges. Which meant, of course, that she needed to go to the one place he would never expect her to go.

• • • •

“Welcome to the Veterans Club, Captain.” The attendant spun the register around, and handed Jani a stylus. “Please sign in here.”

“Thank you.” Jani filled in the blanks according to the information encoded in the station letter. Name, rank, and C-number. N. Royce, Captain, and the alphanumeric string she memorized after seeing it only once. When she came to the space marked “Last station,” she hesitated, then entered “Fort du Lac, Phillipa” because she knew enough about the place to fake it in case any of the dozen or so retirees scattered about the club room engaged her in conversation.

The attendant glanced at her entries, then handed her back the station letter. “Specials today are chicken pot pie and steak and pommes frites, ma’am.” He glanced at her. “Both are kettle crap, but rumor has it that the kettle the steak was cooked up in once came within a hundred meters of an actual cow.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Jani hefted her bag and wandered into the clubroom, a surprisingly pleasant arrangement of tiled floor, potted trees, and woven wood furniture complete with mountain views.

She chose a table nearest the open window, and enjoyed the scent of fresh evening air. Ordered a bourbon and soda. Adjusted to being called “ma’am” for the first time in years. Opted for the steak, with crème brûlée for dessert. Checked her timepiece every so often and wondered when John would abandon his search of the shuttleport. A few hours, probably. After two or three shuttles had departed Victoria for the station and his crew had searched every bathroom and closet, and the realization dawned that his creation had slipped his net once again.

She savored the quiet, even as she sat facing the entry and checked every new face. Even as she wondered where she would go next, and what she would do when she got there.

Hell is overrated, Captain.

Maybe, Mr. Royson. Jani sat back, drink in hand, and remembered the expression on Annalise’s face when she saw Ricky. But sometimes it has its moments. Even if they only served to remind you of the things you’d lost. The things you could never have.

She finished her meal, then adjourned with her coffee to the sitting room to bide her time. Given the proximity of the coffee farms, the club served the real stuff, black as space and deep as a cave. She drank it sans cream. John would have approved.

After a pleasant time spent perusing newssheets and discussing with a retired major the stylistic flaws of the latest Service uniforms, Jani visited the club bathroom. Added packets of sugar and salt that she had swiped from her table to a dispo of warm water, and mixed up her own version of animandroid carrier replacement. Using a filter syringe she kept for such occasions, she injected tiny aliquots of the solution into the lab-grown muscles of her left arm. After a few minutes passed and the constant quivering eased to an occasional twitch, she cleaned up her gear and departed the club.

Over the next hour, she made several circuits of the Service wing of the concourse. She disposed of the station letter and everything else she had taken from Royson and Delmen in various trash bins. She also disposed of Delmen’s jewel-green shooter, knowing as she did that she would see his grin in her nightmares for years to come. The one he’d tossed at her when he’d teased her earlier that day. The same one he’d flashed when he’d aimed the shooter at her and sighted down.

Her load thus lightened, Jani sold the leather bag and the holster belt at an exchange shop.

Lastly, she visited a shrine. Sat in the quiet dark for a time, then lit candles for absent friends. Some five years gone. One, more recently lost.

Then she walked out of the shuttleport and dropped off the edge of the world.

© 2006 by Kristine Smith. Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristine Smith is the author of the Jani Kilian series and other science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Her fiction has been nominated for the Locus Award for First Novel, Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, and she was the 2001 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, she spent 26 years working in pharmaceutical product R&D. She was born in the Northeast, grew up in the South, and currently lives in the Midwest.

She has also written the supernatural thrillers Gideon and Jericho under the name Alex Gordon.

NOVEL EXCERPT: HEX (Tor Books)

Thomas Olde Heuvelt | 4685 words

4

The entry posted the next morning on the website Open Your Eyes: Preachings from the Witch’s Nest read as follows:

tonight we’re gonna do it!! #awesome #mainstream #omfg #lampposttest
Posted 10:23 a.m. by: Tyler Grant

Obviously, no one in Black Spring read the entry that day. The five people who were aware of the website’s existence and who knew the password were all between sixteen and nineteen years of age, and would not in a million years think of visiting the OYE website via the town providers.

The website’s welcome pop-up read as follows:

OK, here’s a warning that you’re totally thinking you won’t read, just like the I-am-18-or-older bs you click away when you jack off. But this is different: this is a disclaimer you have to memorize word for word, better than the O’Neill Raiders fight song (for the heroes among us) or the Gettysburg Address (for the neonihilists). This warning is COMPLETE SECRECY and NEVER FUCKING EVER LOG IN IN BLACK SPRING, not even on your iPhone or tablet. Big-time 404 message if you do it anyway, but they can still trace the URL with their keylogger. Only discuss content IRL, not via Skype, not even if there’s a cow standing on the cable somewhere between you and HEX. To be clear: we have an Emergency Decree here in BS in which 1) keeping or distributing illegal images of Gramma K. will result in a one-way ticket to Doodletown and 2) leaks are regarded as “a serious threat to municipal public order” and have been dealt with since, like, the Middle Ages with total corporal punishment (“we-have-not-administered-such-punishment-since-1932,” LIC GAS*). Take the hint: WHAT WE’RE DOING IS DANGEROUS. The only good thing about a town that gets off on indoctrinating the young is that you all know how to keep a secret. I’m trusting you guys. I don’t wanna bitch about it, but I check the statcounter every other day so I can see exactly who’s logging in and from where. Anyone who breaks the rules will get a lifetime ban from OYE without prior warning. And that’s before Colton & Co. start their freak show. STICK TO THE RULES. That’s our ultimate fuck-you to the system!

* like I could give a shit

They stuck to the rules, all right. OYE was probably the one online guerrilla movement that only operated in the full light of day: All its users lived in Black Spring and slept in their own beds at night.

But not that night. That night they sneaked out of their rooms, climbing down drainpipes and gutters like warriors in occupied territory, and set off with shovels, rope, a black cloth, and a pair of wire cutters. They weren’t what you’d call close friends, not all of them. Of the five who went out that night, Tyler considered only Lawrence VanderMeer from next door and Burak Şayer his real friends—not just the kind you held textathons with until silly o’clock in the morning, but the kind you told stuff to, private stuff. Yet that wasn’t the whole story, not if you had no one else to depend on. Born in Black Spring, you knew each other from early on and feared the adults, not your allies.

It was the first night that fall that it rained. Not a summer shower, but a real autumn rain, the kind that seems drowsy and endless. By the time they had completed their mission forty minutes later, they were soaked to the skin. They took each other’s hands and Tyler solemnly said, “For science, guys.”

“For science,” Lawrence echoed.

“For science,” Justin Walker and Burak said in chorus.

Jaydon Holst shot them a glance dipped in liquid acid and said, “Up yours, faggots.”

The next morning, with bags under their eyes that hung to their feet, they gathered on the patio of Sue’s Highland Diner on the town square—although “square” was probably giving it too much credit. It was more like a gathering of shops and restaurants on Lower Reservoir and Deep Hollow Road surrounding the Little Methodist Church—which they all called Crystal Meth Church on account of the shape of its windows—and the old, sloping Temple Hill Cemetery. There were even those who found “gathering” too strong a word for the feeble excuse for eateries and retail establishments there at the intersection. Among those skeptics were the five boys on the patio at Sue’s, lethargically sipping their cappuccinos and lattes, too worn out to get overly excited about what was coming.

“Don’t you kids have to be at school?” Sue asked when she brought them their order. It had stopped raining, but it was chilly, and Sue had had to remove pools of water from the plastic tables and chairs.

“No, the first two periods were cancelled, so they let us out,” said Burak. The others nodded in agreement or squeezed their eyes shut in the pallid sunlight. Burak held a job as a dishwasher at Sue’s, which earned them a free first round. After that they usually moved on to Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies on the other side of the square (Griselda was Jaydon’s mom), which meant another free first round.

Burak wasn’t lying, not entirely. The first two periods really had been cancelled—but no one had let them out.

“We’ve had an alert, boys,” Sue said.

“I know, ma’am,” Jaydon said amiably, a sure sign for everyone who knew Jaydon Holst to start seeing the word BEWARE in huge blinking neon letters. In fact, as Tyler had once remarked to Lawrence, Jaydon was the reason why the word “beware” existed at all, as well as the words “involuntary commitment” and “disaster waiting to happen.” But they all knew his background, so they tried to be sympathetic. “We figured we’d just sit here, so we can help out in case something happens.”

“You’re an angel, Jaydon. I’ll tell your mom that when I go pick up the bacon this afternoon.” Burak tried his best not to laugh as Sue put an ashtray down in front of him. “Can I get you boys anything else?”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Jaydon said with a smile that rose up like a cloud of carbon monoxide.

She was about to take the open menu away from the table when Tyler quickly put his hand on it, more forcefully than he had intended. “Can I hold on to this? I might want to order something else later on.”

“Sure, Tyler,” Sue said. “You just holler, all right? And I’ll let you know if I get any messages. It probably won’t be necessary, though. They have the choir ready and waiting.” She carried the tray back inside.

All was silent for a moment, a silence in which the awkwardness of the situation seemed to thicken the air. Then, with a dim smile, Jaydon said, “Fucking hell.”

“Dude, really . . . d’you want to go to Doodletown or something?” Despite Tyler’s relief, his heart was pounding in his throat. If Sue had discovered the GoPro under the menu they would have been in deep shit. The rec light was on and the sports cam was aimed at Deep Hollow Road to the south, where at that very moment two men were placing a red-and-white barrier across the road near St. Mary’s Church. The same thing was happening to the north, past the place where Old Miners Road, coming in from The Point, opened out onto the main thoroughfare. The GoPro couldn’t see it, but Tyler, Justin, and Lawrence could. And there was something else: Out of the Roseburgh Nursing Home next to Sue’s came eight or nine warmly wrapped elderly women, fiercely scanning the road. They talked among themselves and then, with their arms linked, strolled past the patio and out toward the intersection.

“Showtime,” Justin remarked. “The crowds are going wild.”

“What time is it?” Tyler asked.

Lawrence peeked at his iPhone. “Nine-thirteen. One more minute. Turn your cam, dude.”

With great care, Tyler slid the GoPro, covered by the menu, to the other side of the small table and aimed the lens at Old Miners Road, which ran up the hill in a sharp S curve past the closed Popolopen Visitor Center. A couple of the old ladies sat down on the bench near the fountain and the bronze washerwoman. Others had ambled into the cemetery—to check out the accommodations, Tyler guessed.

“Omigod,” Justin said softly, and nodded. “There she is.”

“Right on time,” Tyler reported, too excited to be cool, calm, and collected. He licked his lips and pushed Lawrence’s iPhone under the menu and held it in front of the lens. “Wednesday morning, nine-fourteen a.m. As usual, at exactly the right spot.”

From behind Old Miners Road a woman came walking out of the woods.

Why she follows EXACTLY the same pattern at the square and past the graveyard EVERY Wednesday morning is beyond me, but the Black Rock Witch is like Ms. Autism, unchallenged titleholder for three hundred fifty years running. Which is not, like, at all what witches are famous for. Makes you wonder if she ever gets dehydrated. Well, no. She’s like a Microsoft operating system: designed to sow death and destruction, and every time showing the same error message.

So this behavioral pattern is mega interesting, of course, because: what’s she doing there, and why is she coming back every week? Behold! I have two theories:

The first theory is that she’s stuck in some kind of time warp and keeps repeating her past to the point of obsessive-compulsive neurosis (a.k.a. the Windows XP theory). Grim says that, long ago, they had this open market on the square in front of the church (I asked if it was right in front of the cemetery and he said they’re not sure there even was a cemetery back then) and that she may have gone there to get bread and fish (which, like, totally makes no sense, because if the town had cast her off they wouldn’t have been thrilled to let her shop there. Conclusion: Grim is cool, but he’s just guessing). Anyway, it’s not like she was going to church or anything, because heretics don’t go to church (except the kind where they dance around the cross naked and smear themselves with the blood of Christ and chant psalms and stuff), otherwise we wouldn’t be stuck with her now, right?

And then there’s this: if you’re dead (or should have been), what’s the point of walking the same circuit week in and week out? Didn’t they teach, like, variety in witch school? Makes as little sense as that old-fashioned, lights-on, lights-off poltergeist cliché (I mean, just speak up if you wanna say something, and don’t do it in fucking Latin).

The second and more likely theory is THAT SHE GOT THIS WAY BECAUSE HER EYES ARE SEWN SHUT. What if we have a witch in Black Spring who JUST COMPLETELY FROZE UP (a.k.a. the Windows Vista theory)?

(Source: Open Your Eyes website, September 2012)

They watched as the woman with the sewn-shut eyes crossed Old Miners Road, passed behind the bus shelter and came closer and closer. Her bare feet made circles in the puddles forming in the gutter. Perhaps it was instinct that propelled her, or perhaps something older and more primitive than instinct, but in any case Tyler knew it was deliberate, something that had no need of her blind eyes. He heard the dull clank of the chains that bound her arms and dress to her body. They made her look like one of these supermarket enchiladas rolled up in cellophane you’d rather not eat, wrapped and helpless. Tyler always found her less spooky when she walked, because then you didn’t have to wonder what she was plotting behind those stitched-up eyes of hers. She was just like a rare insect, the kind you could study, but that wouldn’t sting.

But when she stopped . . . she got a little freaky.

“You know what’s funny about her?” Justin mused. “For a fairy-tale character she’s, like, chronically ugly.”

“She isn’t a friggin’ fairy-tale character,” Burak said. “She’s a supernatural phenomenon.”

“Hell yeah she is. Witches only appear in fairy tales. So she’s a fairy-tale character.”

“Dafuq? What stone did your mother get knocked up under? That still doesn’t make her a fairy-tale character. They’re not real, anyway.”

“So what if Little Red Riding Hood appeared in front of you,” Justin said with a gravity that couldn’t be denied, let alone ridiculed. “Would she suddenly be a supernatural phenomenon? Or a fairy-tale character?”

“No, just a chick with a sick Kotex fetish,” Jaydon said.

Burak snorted his cappuccino all over his shirt and Lawrence almost laughed himself into a coma. A tad too much credit, Tyler thought. “Aw, fuck!” Burak dabbed the stain with a stack of napkins. “Dude, you’re sick.”

“By the way,” Lawrence said after he got himself back under control, “the Blair Witch wasn’t a fairy-tale character, either.”

That was an argument Justin couldn’t refute, and it more or less ended the debate.

A car approached St. Mary’s Church. The elderly volunteers at the fountain stuck their necks out and looked at it, but the car stopped at the roadblock and turned left. The ladies relaxed. Probably someone from town. If any Outsiders had been spotted, the old ladies would already have gathered around Gramma to walk with her, busily chattering among themselves. And if she stopped, Tyler knew (and this, more than anything else, was what truly made him ashamed of being a Black Spring boy), they’d huddle around her and start practicing church hymns like a kind of Glee for the near-dead. The deeper meaning behind this was beyond him, but it was a brilliant example of reverse psychology: No one would ever notice the gaunt women with the chains standing in their midst if they didn’t know she was there already. And no one could stomach an old folks’ choir long enough to find out.

The woman with the sewn-shut eyes went past the patio right in front of them and advanced to the square, watched closely by the ladies at the fountain. Tyler turned the GoPro. It was essential for the success of their experiment that no Outsiders be there. Just as he was about to bask in the luck of their good fortune, Sue came out and stood in the doorway as if suddenly struck by this public-spirited and hitherto unseen sense of responsibility for her underage guests.

“Got any pesticide?” Jaydon asked.

Sue laughed and said, “If that worked, we would have tried it long ago, Jaydon,” not realizing that it was her they needed it for, not the other witch. But Burak got the hint; he walked up to her with some lame excuse about planning his work schedule, and they both went inside together.

Justin grinned. “That woman would let you screw her even sideways, Jaydon.”

“Fuck off.”

“Guys, shut up,” Tyler said. “It’s gonna happen.” He took the GoPro out from under the menu and shielded it with his body from the security cam that was mounted on The Point to Point Inn’s façade across the intersection. To their hilarity, the camera was still hanging at a low, crooked angle, just as Jaydon had left it last night after hitting it with a long stick. Jaydon was like a living ordnance map when it came to the square and its surroundings, since he and his mom lived behind the butcher shop on the other side. He had said there were two other cameras that had a view of the lamppost on the eastern side of the cemetery. One was located in the bushes at the highest corner of Temple Hill, which they had neutralized by hanging a pine branch in front of it. The second camera was inaccessible. It was hidden in a window casing of Crystal Meth Church, but they had decided there were too many trees in front of it to cause real problems at night.

It was 2:57 a.m. when they hung Burak’s long black cloth like a curtain from the branches of the oak tree that forked over the cemetery hedge. It was 3:36 when they wrung out the soaked curtain and rolled it up. And in all that time only one car had come down Deep Hollow Road, and it had passed without slowing down.

The only visible evidence of their operation was that the streetlight behind the curtain had gone out at 3:17, just when Jaydon cut through the exposed electrical cable that ran to the underground power box. Fortunately the lamppost itself was not too tall, and its classical-looking fitting was aluminum, not cast iron. Easy-peasy. By the time they had cleaned everything up and had raised their toast to science, the lamppost was no longer standing against the cemetery hedge, but was neatly planted in the middle of the sidewalk, a foot and a half to the left.

Ground Zero.

So. As you can see in the clips below, she comes straight out of the woods and walks west down Deep Hollow Road. She arrives at the square, walks along the creek, up over the sidewalk, turns a kind of three-quarter pirouette at the cemetery hedge as if she’s the Ballet Princess or something, and stands facing the street, as if someone had pulled her plug. I mean, we’re talking serious runtime error here. A wisp of smoke rising from her hair would add to the dramatic effect. Exactly eight minutes and thirty-six seconds later, it’s as if someone had pushed Ctrl+Alt+Del, because she starts walking again and disappears behind the houses on Hilltop Drive. And she does this every week, in exactly the same way (except the stupid thing is that no one knows exactly where and how she disappears—ideas, guys?).

It all happened in a flash.

When the woman with the sewn-shut eyes walked up along the creek and passed the slow—children sign, the boys on the patio forgot their boredom and became so excited that they left their seats and rocked from one leg to another. They couldn’t help it. It felt as if they were witnessing one of those rare significant moments in human history that would outlive even Wikipedia, like the invention of penicillin or the first explosion of the silicone breast implant. Tyler forgot his fear of Doodletown and no longer bothered to keep his GoPro out of sight of the surveillance cam. This had to be captured.

“O-M-F-G,” Justin said, without taking a breath.

“She’s gonna see it . . . she’s gonna see it . . . she’s gonna see it . . .”

She didn’t see it. With an audible thud, the Black Rock Witch walked straight into the lamppost and fell backward on her butt.

The ladies at the fountain jumped up, all shrieks and hands covering mouths. Tyler and his friends looked at one another in silent, speechless amazement, their jaws down on the sidewalk. Burak had appeared in the restaurant doorway. It was as if the impact had sucked all the oxygen out of the air. It exceeded their wildest dreams. They had just floored a three-hundred-year-old supernatural phenomenon, and they had it on fucking video.

Gramma was squirming on the drying sidewalk at the foot of the lamppost, as you might imagine an enchilada squirming in cellophane. All the creepiness her mutilated face and reputation had bestowed on her had been knocked for a loop. Now she just looked helpless, like a baby bird fallen from its nest. There was no way she’d be able to stand up on her own. One of the elderly women approached her, hand on cheek, and for a moment Tyler was afraid the woman had made the suicidal decision to help her up when something totally freaky happened. In a flash, the witch was back on her feet. The elderly woman recoiled with a scream. One moment Gramma had been lying there, helpless and twitching on the sidewalk; the next moment, like in a stop-motion video, she was up and chafing against the lamppost with her chains, as if she were trying to walk straight through it.

“Jesus fuck . . .” was all Jaydon could manage.

“Did you get that?” Lawrence asked. Tyler looked down and discovered that he had just made the most dire mistake of his budding career as a reporter: In his consternation, he had let his camera dangle and shoot some super-interesting footage of the sidewalk, and had missed the witch’s stop-motion trick. He felt his cheeks turn purple and cursed himself, but the others were much too engrossed in what she was doing to pay any attention to him.

“What’s going on?” Sue asked as she struggled to see something from the doorway behind Burak. No one took the trouble to inform her.

“Look at that,” Justin said. “She’s trying to push right through it.”

It was true. For three hundred years the witch had been passing through that very spot, and today was no exception, lamppost or no lamppost.

“She’s, like, preprogrammed,” Lawrence said.

“She’s, like, fucking the lamppost,” Jaydon said.

After half a minute of metal grating against metal, she suddenly slipped past it, did her three-quarter pirouette, and disconnected.

Justin was the first to laugh.

Burak was the second.

Then they all laughed, wild, uncontrollable laughter, and they slapped each other on the shoulders and punched each other on the arms. The humorless crones at the fountain turned around and fixed their eyes on the group of boys. They saw the GoPro and one of them shouted, “Hey, what have you got there? What are you doing with that camera, young man?”

“Busted!” Jaydon roared. “Which one of you pushed her over?”

This caused general confusion among the women, as if they were seriously considering the possibility that one of them had pushed her (that, or people over seventy lost all their talent for clever comebacks), and that made the boys laugh even harder. They were still laughing when they slid past the roadblock a minute later and ran down Deep Hollow Road, and they were laughing even harder when, two hundred yards farther on, they could no longer suppress their curiosity and stopped on the shoulder to watch the footage on the GoPro’s LCD screen.

• • • •

The images should hold no surprises; you know what’s there. These are the first pictures in journalistic history to feature a supernatural phenomenon going for a nosedive. They’re so unique that they go viral on YouTube in a matter of minutes and are celebrated and debunked on hundreds of blogs, not to mention being endlessly repeated on Jimmy Fallon. But of course that doesn’t happen; of course the images are kept secret. Still, that same evening they do achieve a certain cult status.

The boys weren’t born yesterday and they know they’re in for it. They figure there’s only one way to escape Doodletown: to step forward on their own and play the holy innocent.

“We were just fooling around,” Tyler says when they show Robert Grim a director’s cut of the clip. In this version, you only see the witch walk up along the creek, bump into the lamppost, and topple over. Grim plays the images directly from the memory card. They’re the only recordings from that morning still in the camera—Tyler fixed it that way. The rest is safely tucked away on his MacBook, password protected. Tyler tries to add a contrite quality to his voice by imagining a halo hanging over his head, but at a certain point he can’t hold back his laughter.

Robert Grim is laughing, too. In fact, tears stream down his cheeks when he sees what a trick the kids have pulled. He laughs for the same reason the boys laugh, and for the same reason the regulars at the Quiet Man Tavern laugh when they crowd around Grim’s laptop that night. None of them realizes that this is more than a bit of amusement over the witch’s vaudevillian pratfall: It’s a triumph, small and inconsequential though it may seem, over the very thing that has cast a shadow over their lives for as long as they can remember. Within the laughter lies a collective relief so deep-seated that it becomes a little uncanny. And later on, when Tyler realizes why, it scares him to the marrow.

“Officially, I can’t approve of this, of course,” Robert Grim says, after pulling himself together and wiping the tears from his eyes. But then he just starts roaring again. Without a murmur the boys agree to his proposal: In order to steer clear of the Council, they must put everything back as it had been, pay for the severed cable out of their own pockets, and spend the rest of the week picking up trash in Ladycliff Park.

While he’s in bed that night, Tyler gets a PM from Jaydon:

@QT Man. Falling #ag mks evrybdy crack up. FCKD UP!

At that point, Tyler is still dazed by the success of the lamppost test (although he gets seriously stymied while writing his report for OYE when Lawrence asks him, “Okay, but what does this all prove?”), so he doesn’t yet understand what Jaydon means.

But the next day, as he’s doing his cleanup work in the park and sees the faces of the people in the rain, it begins to dawn on him. Everybody seems to know what he has done, and from one day to the next he has become a cult hero. No one says a thing, but they all smile at him and silently express their support. It’s those smiling faces that get to him. They should seem pleasant, but they’re not. They’re perverse, like they always have been. Because when these faces smile, he no longer recognizes them. They’re faces that have forgotten how to smile. They’re faces with too much skin on them, too many wrinkles for their years. They’re faces that are leading lives of their own, and every day they sag a little further. They’re flattened faces, grim faces, faces under insurmountable stress. They’re the faces of Black Spring. And when they try to smile, it looks like they’re screaming.

That evening Tyler lies in bed with a terrible premonition of darkness and horror, and there are two images that keep him awake until the crack of dawn: screaming faces in the rain and the falling witch. Then they fade to black.

Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. Excerpted from HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. Published by permission of the author and 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

Dutch novelist Thomas Olde Heuvelt (1983) is the author of five novels and many short stories of the fantastic. His short fiction has appeared in English, Dutch, Polish and Chinese and has been awarded the Paul Harland Prize (for best Dutch fantasy) on three occasions, received an honorable mention in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 for The Boy Who Cast No Shadow. In English, his short fiction has appeared from Tor.com, Oxygen Books, and PS Publishing. Recently, Jonathan Strahan selected his story “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Olde Heuvelt’s novel HEX, which became a bestseller in The Netherlands, will be out in the US and Canada with Macmillan/Tor in 2015, while Hodder & Stoughton will publish in the UK and Australia. Read more at en.oldeheuvelt.com.

Television Review: The Man in the High Castle (Season 1) and Occupied

Christopher East | 1434 words

People today are afraid of losing control: of their freedoms, their health, their privilege, their wealth, their sense of value, and their sense of identity. All of our political bickering seems to revolve around this fear, and it’s a fear that the writers of science fiction TV have tapped into recently to powerful effect. In the brilliant Mr. Robot, it’s realized in the paranoid narration of subversive hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), whose lonely Robin Hood resistance to a worldwide corporate conspiracy embroils him in dangerous, politically charged intrigue. The vastly underrated The 100, meanwhile, layers a thought-provoking extended metaphor over its gritty, post-collapse future, examining the unfortunate, tragic repercussions of the human need for control: over turf and resources, over the world’s prevailing conditions, and over each other. Black Mirror, an ingenious cyberpunk nightmare of an anthology series, grapples with another intense human fear of lost control: in this case, to inexorable, transformative technologies. And at its best, Orphan Black plays in this arena as well, as Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) and her fellow clones struggle to retain their autonomy and freedom right down to the biological level.

This takes us to the first seasons of two shows—Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle and Yellow Bird’s Occupied—which present variations on this theme. Both literalize our fear of lost control at the most basic, geopolitical level: the fear of losing national autonomy to foreign invasion.

First up: The Man in the High Castle (2015, streaming on Amazon), a lavish but rather loose adaptation of the classic Philip K. Dick novel. Set in the late 1950s, it depicts a timeline in which the Axis wins World War II, and its two dominant powers, Germany and Japan, have divided and occupied the United States. In San Francisco, Juliana Crane (Alexa Davalos) comes into possession of a mysterious newsreel film depicting a reality different than her own: namely, our reality, in which the Allies have won. She undertakes a mission to deliver this film to the resistance, a journey which takes her into the neutral zone between the Japanese Pacific States and the Greater Nazi Reich. There her path crosses with a shifty Nazi agent, Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), whose attraction to her confuses his contrary mission: to uncover American resistance agents. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the complex new geopolitics of North America pit powerful Nazi officers and Japanese officials against each other in a high-stakes chess match for world dominance.

The Man in the High Castle is a triumph of production design, realizing its gritty, dystopian vision with terrific retrofuture visuals and rich period detail. It also has an effectively paranoid atmosphere: from the breathy, lifeless rendition of “Edelweiss” that opens the show to its closing moments, it is positively immersive in its bleak and chilling tone. Davalos makes for a convincing and charismatic protagonist, and the rest of the cast is solid in support. By and large this is sure-handed and thoroughly professional television.

That said, I wanted to enjoy it more than I actually did. Structurally, it’s not terribly satisfying, and the pace ranges from slow to glacial; I frequently grew impatient with its steady, somber rhythms. That powerful tone is also relentlessly cheerless, making it a tough watch. The adaptation also lacks the quirky, unique humor I associate with Dick’s writing. Alas, I can’t speak with authority to its faithfulness to the novel, which I read too long ago to render a cogent comparison. But my impression is that, like most of Dick’s Hollywood-adapted fare, the high-concept premise has trumped the many other Dickian nuances that make his work so interesting. The writers have seized on the world-building more than the thematic elements, and the result is visually arresting, but ultimately a fairly simplistic vision of heroes and villains, authority and resistance.

At least, that’s my impression so far; the grim intrigue is tinged with occasional moments of thought-provoking commentary. One of the more interesting narrative threads involves Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell), the perfect American Nazi in charge of running Blake’s spy mission. At first Smith’s villainy is quite obvious and stereotypical, but there’s a disturbing subtext to his ideal home life: his Hitler Youth son, his perfect Aryan wife, all sitting around the dining room table like a model American 1950s Leave It to Beaver family. In a similar vein, the show—possibly by accident—renders the devious Joe Blake more sympathetic than the earnest good guy Frank Frink (Rupert Evans). A barbed, subliminal comment on the American political zeitgeist? When The Man in the High Castle draws these uncomfortable parallels, it gets considerably more interesting, and from the excellent sixth episode (“Three Monkeys”) on, this happens more frequently.

Even so, The Man in the High Castle is cemented firmly in the American historical mindset, which draws the line between good and evil pretty clearly. By contrast, the Norwegian near-future political drama Occupied presents a more European view that is just as ominous, but more immediate, and painted in more shades of gray.

Occupied (2015, now streaming on Netflix) posits a future in which Norway, led by a highly progressive, environmentalist prime minister named Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad), shuts down its petroleum production in favor of a newly perfected thorium energy technology. Unfortunately, Norway’s forward-thinking policy exacerbates a broader European energy crisis, leading Russia to not only demand Norway resume its oil production, but that Russia be allowed to insert its own people to supervise that production. In the face of American indifference and callous European Union complicity, Norway capitulates rather than face catastrophic Russian military action. But the result isn’t much better: a nightmarish occupation scenario in which the Russians take over, and a violent Norwegian resistance develops.

There’s a striking general similarity between High Castle and Occupied. The former depicts a World War II-like occupation using the familiar, dark symbols of history; the latter updates this scenario to a chilling contemporary context. Norway’s fate in Occupied parallels that of Czechoslovakia in the early stages of World War II: a country bullied against its will into becoming a satellite state. It’s a tragic violation of national sovereignty, internationally tolerated in the name of appeasement.

But Occupied’s moral questions are somewhat more slippery than High Castle’s, in that they take place outside the familiar hero-villain dynamics of known history. The protagonists—Berg, police officer Hans Martin Djupvik (Eldar Skar), firebrand journalist Thomas Eriksen (Vegar Hoel), restaurateur Bente Norum (Ane Dahl Torp), and Norway intelligence chief Wenche Arnesen (Ragnhild Gudbrandsen)—are confronted with impossible questions. Should they resist the Russian occupation and stay true to their ideals, even if it means an escalation into violence? Or should they cooperate, in the name of mitigating the bloodshed and maintaining a greater peace? Without the weight of history behind it, Occupied’s dilemmas are trickier than High Castle’s, and much more likely to land the viewer in uncomfortable “what would I do?” spaces. This quality is improved further by the shrewd inclusion of occupiers that are less black-and-white in their villainy, such as the charming Orlov (Lenn Kudrjawizki), a Russian who patronizes Bente’s restaurant, or the gracious Russian ambassador Irina Sidirova (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), with whom Djupvik maintains a careful detente. It’s difficult to choose sides, because all the perspectives make sense; whether they’re collaborating or resisting, the people of Occupied have justifiable points of view and sound reasoning behind their decisions. This kind of ambiguity is rare, and something that I believe only one other current show—The 100—has executed more effectively.

Neither The Man in the High Castle nor Occupied is perfect: Both take their sweet time advancing the plot, and neither ever quite launches a truly compelling energy. It wouldn’t surprise me to see viewers grow impatient with either of them. Nonetheless, they’re both worth watching: The Man in the High Castle for its look and its irresistible what-if scenario, and Occupied for its day-after-tomorrow, speculative relevance. On points I think Occupied is a better show, but they’re both thought-provoking narratives that speak, both directly and perhaps subliminally, to the troubled political times we live in, and to society’s deeper fears.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Book Reviews: April 2016

Andrew Liptak | 1436 words

I’ve been on a bit of a space kick recently, so for this month’s book review column, I wanted to take a look at several midlist space operas. These are the books that haven’t attracted the critical acclaim that books like Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy or Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels have garnered in recent years, but which are enjoyable, entertaining ones nonetheless.

In their 2006 anthology Space Opera Renaissance, editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer look at the broad appeal of space opera and trace its origins back to the early twentieth century. The genre name traces its origins back to a derogatory term for terrible pulp stories, though it, and the genre itself, has evolved over time into something quite a bit more positive.

Each novel reviewed is the start of a new trilogy or series, each taking place in a massive universe that recalls some of the greats: fans of C.J. Cherryh or Lois McMaster Bujold will probably find quite a bit to like here, and if you’re a reader who really likes spaceships, rogues in space, and plenty of action, you’ll find a lot to like here.

Shadow of Empire
Jay Allan
Ebook/Paperback/Audio
ISBN: 978-0062388902
Harper Voyager, November 2015
384 pages

Shadow of Empire follows Arkarin Blackhawk and the crew of his ship, The Wolf’s Claw. When we first meet him, he’s been arrested and sentenced to death in a gladiator pit: Only the daring actions of his crew save the day, escaping deep into space before hyperdrive problems force them to land on a planet consumed in war, and he is soon tasked with helping save the daughter of a friend.

Overall, Shadow of Empire is a quick, entertaining read: Allan writes with an engaging style from the get-go, and jumps right into action from the start. The first couple of chapters are an excellent case study in structure for this sort of book: Details come rapid-fire, and in no time at all, we’re introduced to Blackhawk’s situation, his crew, the ship he’s on, and before you know it, they’ve completed a daring rescue and are on to their next adventure. This book reminded me quite a bit of older pulp stories, where masculine heroes go out into the universe and go on adventures: It’s not pushing boundaries by any stretch of the imagination, but it will provide your dose of nostalgia.

The Empress Game
Rhonda Mason
Ebook/Paperback
ISBN: 978-1783295241
Titan Books, July 2015
352 pages

The next adventure, The Empress Game, is the first of a trilogy, and was probably my favorite book of these four, evoking pulp authors such as C.L. Moore or Leigh Brackett. In this adventure, Kayla Reinumon is approached and recruited by a member of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps, Malkor Rua, to take part in the Empress Game, a trial by combat to fill a seat on the Sakien Empire’s Council of Seven. The Empire is strained, and Kayla discovers how treacherous the imperial court can be as she works to fight her way to the top.

Of all the books here, I had the most fun reading Kayla’s. She’s an impressive character, with a conflicted history and responsibilities to tend to as she’s drawn into an intergalactic conflict. Mason has injected this book with a nice level of complexity in the universe, and there’s an exciting mix that elevates this book above a one-note series of adventures.

The Dangerous Type
Loren Rhodes
Ebook/Paperback/Audio
ISBN: 978-1597808149
Nightshade Books, July 2015
296 pages

Like Shadow of Empire, Loren Rhodes’ novel The Dangerous Type drops you right into the middle of a much larger story. A quarter-century after a galaxy-wide war, an assassin, Raena, has been freed from a catacomb, putting her on the trail of the man who had enslaved her and turned her into a killer in the first place.

While Rhodes drops the reader right into the action, this story doesn’t work as well as Allan’s. From the beginning, I felt like I was asking far too many questions—like about some of the scenarios, such as how Raena not only survived for two decades locked away in a catacomb, but apparently suffered no ill effects from her imprisonment. While questions are answered throughout the book, this and the pacing of the book was enough to jar me out of the story on more than one occasion.

The Last Exodus
Paul Tassi
Ebook/Paperback/Audio
ISBN 978-1940456379
Talos, September 2015
348 pages

Finally, Paul Tassi’s The Last Exodus is really the only book that deals with planet Earth in any capacity. Attacked by an invading alien armada, Earth has been ruined: stripped of natural resources, with survivors struggling to survive on dwindling supplies. One survivor, Lucas, comes across an alien ship, where he discovers a traitorous member of the invading alien race, along with Asha, a woman whom Lucas had crossed paths with in an earlier encounter. This unlikely group of characters has to figure out how to escape from the dying planet.

Of the four books here, I felt like Tassi’s was the most enjoyable overall: His prose is clean, visual, and straightforward, and it’s a novel that’ll certainly appeal to fans of shows such as AMC’s Falling Skies or SyFy’s Defiance. It’s an interesting mash-up of science fiction tropes, both post-apocalyptic and first encounter, and Tassi walks the reader along with a trio of characters who are interesting throughout. Furthermore, like Allan’s book, it’s well structured from the start: Tassi has a good idea for hooking his reader, and it’s very effective.

• • • •

What do these books tell us in aggregate? They’re well designed, despite the individual flaws. Tassi, Rhodes, Mason, and Allan are working with big worlds: galaxy-spanning civilizations that defy the conventional physics. The characters are all active: They’re mercenaries, assassins, aspiring politicians, and survivors in hard worlds that test each of them.

Furthermore, I read these books with an eye towards how the authors opened their books and carried them through. When you talk to anyone about seeing Star Wars for the first time, the answers inevitably begin with the description of that incredible Imperial Star Destroyer flying overhead. It feels like there’s an unwritten rule for space opera stories: You don’t need to start at the beginning; the story is just a small part of a much larger universe.

If there’s any takeaway from these four books, it’s that they’re just a small sliver of these larger worlds, leaving plenty of space not only for the remaining books in their respective series (remember, these are all the first installment of a trilogy each), but also for more stories set far in the galaxy.

I don’t think that these books will carry the critical weight of something like the Ancillary series, and I’m not sure that I had as much fun reading them as Becky Chambers’ Long Way To A Small, Silent Planet (well, The Empress Game, maybe!), but there is real value in settling for a fun, engaging, and familiar story. With these four books, you’ll get that and more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is a 2014 graduate of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. He can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter. His first book, War Stories: New Military Science Fiction is now out from Apex Publications, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London in 2015.

Interview: Bill McGoldrick

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 9904 words

Bill McGoldrick is the head of original programming at Syfy. He was brought in two years ago to oversee a major overhaul in the network’s lineup, which is designed to lure hardcore science fiction fans back to the channel with smart, ambitious shows. The new lineup includes adaptations of many classic fantasy and science fiction novels, including works by Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley, and Frederick Pohl, as well as books by newer writers such as Dan Simmons, John Scalzi, James S. A. Corey, and Lev Grossman.

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.

First of all, tell us a bit about how you first got interested in science fiction.

Well, I was the kid that liked to read a lot of everything, but then, you know, in those teenage years, probably like most of your listeners, I was very attracted to science fiction because I found it more interesting and more challenging than the books that were being jammed down your throat in school. It was probably through books, probably through comic books, probably through TV shows and things like that where I just developed the appetite for it.

What were some of those books that you were reading that you thought were challenging and interesting?

The great part about my job is some of them are airing very soon. Childhood’s End and Arthur C. Clarke were an early influence on me. Asimov, like everybody else. I was looking for short stories back then. I was a big DC Comics guy. A big Batman fan. So anything that was either the original or derivatives of Batman, I was very into when I was really young. The gamut, you know? As I got a little bit older, I would watch The Twilight Zone with my dad. We would watch it in repeats and stuff like that. I would get interested in those kinds of stories too. There was no kind of one moment where the bell rang, or one book where I said, “Okay, now I’m an SF fan.” But, I’m in my early forties, so I was just as influenced by Star Wars as everybody else. As you’d read the background about movies like that, I’d want to read more about the sources that Lucas was influenced by and stuff like that.

You told me that you were an aspiring writer at one point.

Yeah, when I came to USC I wanted to try writing, and I learned early on that I’d be much better off reading scripts rather than writing them. That was early in my college career. I took all of those courses in college where you write little short films, and then you have the class read it back to you, and I remember those days kind of in horror right now. But it did help me develop an empathy for writers and a real respect for anyone who tries that and anyone who really makes a career of it

You studied film or TV or something like that?

I actually minored in film. I could never get in the USC film school. No matter how many times I tried. So, I ended up minoring in film and majoring in business when I was at USC.

Then what did you do after graduation? How did you become a TV executive?

I was kind of bartending all through college, and kicking around, and trying to break into the industry and passing out my resume wherever I could, and it found its way to a guy named Stephen Chao, who was at that time a producer. He had made his career as a reality executive. He was the guy that greenlit Cops and America’s Most Wanted and kind of rose through the ranks through Fox. Then sort of through a lucky break, he was named USA and the Sci Fi Channel president, and then I came to this company in the late ’90s, and that’s where I met Bonnie Hammer, who was just shortly thereafter named general manager and then president of the Sci Fi Channel. At that time we were small enough that we were doing development for both USA Network and Sci Fi, and I was kind of the guy that would crossover from both channels, and everybody knew I had an interest in science fiction, so they would throw me all the SF projects.

One of my very first shows that I worked on was called The Invisible Man, and then there was a show on USA at the time called G vs. E that had some SF, and we did some things like 4400 and Dead Zone and those shows. That’s kind of where I cut my teeth on science fiction shows. It kind of ran the gamut. I worked on shows like Monk, and Psych, and the gamut of the USA shows, but always had a very special interest and ambition for SF programming.

I didn’t realize that your history with Syfy* went back that far. That’s really interesting.

Yeah, it went back to the very, very early days. It’s been a long road. I know a lot of people. I’ve kind of grown up with a lot of people. It’s very much home here.

How was science fiction seen in the TV industry? Did you encounter resistance to doing science fiction shows that you wanted to do?

It’s so funny how it’s evolved. Every time you brought in an SF pitch in the late ’90s, or heard one and kind of got excited about it, the resistance you would face is people would say, “It’s too SF. It’s not relatable.” I think that’s why you would see in those days so much watered down science fiction. It was too SF for an audience that was maybe not into science fiction but not SF enough for the people that are probably listening to this broadcast right now. But, that’s changed dramatically over the last few years. I think shows like Battlestar Galactica, I think was a bit ahead of its time in changing that perception, and now when you think of Game of Thrones, and you think of Walking Dead, and you think of the shows we have on our network, 12 Monkeys and hopefully The Expanse and Childhood’s End, which are going to be on next week, that you do not have to apologize anymore for being SF. And I do not at all, not here, not from Bonnie Hammer or Dave Howe or anybody here, feel a pressure here to water it down in any way, which is nice.

Do you think that if Game of Thrones or Walking Dead had come out five or ten years before they actually did that the audience just wasn’t ready for it?

I think the audience was probably ready for it. I don’t know that the industry was ready to execute it the way those shows have executed it.

Tell us about how you ended up back at the Syfy channel.

Well, it was one of those things where we had a change of ownership. Comcast owns the corporation, and they recognized very early on, probably behind the scenes Bonnie Hammer and Dave Howe were really persuading them to recognize this, that there’s a lot of opportunity in this channel if we just had the investment. So, it was clear to probably Bonnie and Dave that there was going to be a big investment in the channel, and they were looking to really sort of beef it up, and they approached me about coming over kind of right before that investment started. So, I had a great job before, but again, I knew that I liked this stuff, and I saw the opportunity just as they did and was very excited to join a couple of years ago.

Right. Your job title is “Executive Vice President, Original Content”; what exactly does that involve?

I oversee all of the original content that’s generated out here in Los Angeles. That’s all of the scripted shows you see and all of the reality shows that come out of this coast. We do have a very active group that does acquired originals, which are acquisitions that we sort of guide. There’s lots of programming, but I oversee the bulk of the original programming. It also includes alternative reality type shows too. The Face Offs, the 12 Monkeys, the shows that you know that are on our air, I have oversight over and oversight over the executives who work day to day on those shows.

You mentioned that Comcast is making a much bigger investment in the channel now, so what are you planning to do with that bigger investment?

I think you’re going to see the results . . . by the time this podcast airs, you will have seen the results of two big things we’ve done with that investment: The Expanse and Childhood’s End. It was a priority to get back in the event mini-series space. This network has had a long history of event mini-series around the Christmas season, around the fourth quarter. Now that we have the investment, we feel like we can really take on some big titles, like Childhood’s End. So that’s one thing we’ve done with it. The Expanse is another. Past that, you’re going to see The Magicians early next year, so we’ve invested very much in that. We’ve invested kind of all across the network when you look at the amount of original programming we’ve had. We’ve just tried to beef up the amount, but also be in a position where we could take strategic big bets on properties or shows that we’re passionate about.

Right, so you mentioned that Childhood’s End was one of your favorite books growing up. Was it your idea to bring that to Syfy?

No, I was very lucky in that it was in development here when I arrived. It did not have a script. It had producers Mike De Luca, Akiva Goldsman, as well as a really smart writer named Matthew Graham. But, very early stages of development, so one of the first things I did was re-read the book. I re-read a few books in that first month, and I’m not going to mention the other ones because some of them, you remember from your childhood in a certain way, and then they don’t hold up when you get to be an adult, but what’s so impressive about Childhood’s End is it not only held up, I think I like it more and understand it more at this stage than I did when I was a teenager. That was very exciting for me. With these big event mini-series, you really have to be a year and a half to two years ahead from when you greenlight, because the effects get so complicated, and the time to build effects properly is so long that you have to go quickly in order to make your date. In short order, we got that one going, and like I said, now you’re going to see the result of it.

How involved are you on a creative level with something like Childhood’s End? Are you giving suggestions and things like that?

Yeah, it took a village on that one because it was such a big undertaking. So, the studio, UCP Studio, Jeff Wachtel, Dawn Olmstead and her team, Bryan Crow in particular over there, and then my team, which was Paul Shapiro and Eli Kirschner. We were all in on that one. There were lots of conversations about how to adapt it. There was lots of back and forth between us and the producers. It was very collaborative. We all just wanted to honor the book and honor the book in a way that we feel like will give [Clarke] the recognition for being ahead of his time and really being the novelist who started it all. That’s what I’m most proud about. I think that people are going to really like it, and I think it’ll sort of later cause them to be interested in him and what he did and really give him the recognition that he was prescient because all of the themes and all of the things he was writing about are so valid today.

It does seem like a challenging book to adapt because there are a lot of characters, and it takes place over a long span of time—it was set originally in 1953—so the world has changed a lot. Could you talk about what some of the big challenges were with bringing it to television?

The book is written sort of in episodes, in a way. So, there’s main characters . . . Maybe not in episodes, in portions, so there’s main characters in the book that die of natural causes which don’t really lead you to the most dramatic mini-series or movie telling of the book. Probably the biggest change we did is sort of thread characters throughout the entire six-hours, where they weren’t threaded throughout the entire book, because the span of the book was a bit longer. We condensed time, and in condensing time, you had to make other changes, too. That was probably the most difficult one, trying to figure out how to make that narrative work in a way that the Arthur C. Clarke book didn’t really have to. There’s also the challenge of, and this isn’t a spoiler, but there’s a significant portion of the book that deals with utopia, and the whole point of utopia is that there’s not a lot of drama and not a lot of conflict, so we had to find ways during that section to bring some of the conflict from the end of the book up and do some inventing, but I just think Matthew and Akiva and Mike and that whole team did a great job of making sure the invention didn’t cut against the spirit of what the book wanted to accomplish.

One thing that’s really striking about Childhood’s End, even though it was written in 1953, is that it still is provocative today. Was there any nervousness about presenting this story today?

No, I think you hit the nail on the head. We’re sitting there looking at the book, and we’re like, well, there was a cold war brewing between Russia and the United States. There were lots of fears about where the world would go, and would this nuclear race lead to our own extinction? If you’re going down a checklist, it was like, “Still relevant today. Still very relevant today. Still on the front page of all the newspapers today.” So, I don’t think we had to change as many of those themes as we anticipated going in. And that made me happy, I think that made all of us happy, because that’s overall what we’re trying to do with the science fiction we’re putting on our air, not just to do big adventure action shows and things like that, but we really want people to walk away thinking about the episode, or the mini-series, or the pilot, or whatever you watch on our channel in a way that makes you a little more informed about your world or reflect on where we are. I know those are lofty goals, but that’s what great science fiction does, so that’s our goal in our programming.

Without going into any spoilers, one of the most striking things about this story is the appearance of the aliens. Nobody was leery about that at all?

Oh, we were very leery about that. I mean, there was probably eighteen months from pressing go to the shot mini-series, and I want to say we probably spent a whole month just on that. On how to do it, whether we do CG or prosthetics or some combination of both, can we cast a person who can pull that off? It’s a very important part of the book, and it’s a very important part of our show. We did not take that lightly. So, leery, fearful, paranoid, all of those adjectives apply to our state of mind over that one issue.

I think it’s just so exciting that you guys are doing book adaptations like this, and it seems like you have a really heavy slate of book adaptations coming up. Could you talk about why you decided to move so heavily into adaptations of existing novels?

Well, there’s sort of the pragmatic TV executive reason, which is it always helps to have a piece of intellectual property that’s got a following, that people are passionate about. It helps that you’re not starting from zero. People know what you’ve got. You’ve got your core fan base that’s anxious to see the adaptation. So there’s that, but there’s also the other reason, that these novels do give you a good indication of the world you’re creating, and creating a world is so important in SF programming, it’s nice to have, essentially, a bible, which are either one novel like for Childhood’s End or a series of novels like for The Expanse or The Magicians, because you know where you’re going and you can get ahead of it and plan for it in a way that you can’t always do when a script that’s not based on anything comes in. But, that’s not to say we’re going to be exclusively based on novels, because I wouldn’t ever close myself out, or the network out, to that great script that sneaks its way through.

I did want to talk about what some of these books were, though, because some of my favorite novels are on this list. The ones I wanted to mention in particular: You have another Arthur C. Clarke book, 3001: The Final Odyssey. You mentioned The Expanse and The Magicians. And then also coming up, I wanted to mention Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, Frederick Pohl’s Gateway, John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades, Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, and Daniel Gregory’s We are All Completely Fine. That’s just really exciting.

That’s a big slate when I hear you rattle them off like that. I’m like, yeah, we actually have a big slate of books coming as well, and you’ve keyed on the ones we’re most passionate about.

How did those particular books come to your attention in the first place?

Well, you know, all of them are probably represented by someone in the organization who was a fan of it. Brave New World, and I hope I’m not outing her on this one, but Bonnie Hammer, our chairman, is a big fan of and always has been. 3001, an executive named Eli Kirschner was pushing that one really hard, and I think we all got more interested in 3001 as we dove into Childhood’s End and kind of fell back in love with Arthur C. Clarke. Hyperion, it feels like the entire city of Hollywood and Los Angeles comes up to me and tells me about that book everywhere I go, so I credit the entire industry. I could go on and on. Every one of the books . . . you know, there’s an executive named Bryan Crow who talked a lot about some of these. Everybody is pushing on a certain level inside the company.

Childhood’s End,The Expanse, and The Magicians are either out now or will be out within a month or so. Which of those is coming up soonest?

The order is Childhood’s End and The Expanse at the same time and then Magicians will follow those two early next year. There is also a show called Hunters, which Gale Anne Hurd of The Walking Dead is executive producing, along with a real superstar named Natalie Chaidez, which we went straight to series on; that will be in that same section. We have 12 Monkeys season two as well. We’re figuring out kind of the rest of the year right now as we speak.

One thing we were talking about in our last episode is that we think that Game of Thrones and The Expanse turned out so well because the authors were involved with the TV shows. Do you have plans to involve authors with some of these other TV shows?

Yeah, we’ve done it on every show. The authors who are alive are very involved in the show. Lev Grossman has been all over The Magicians, the show runners John McNamara and Sera Gamble are talking to him all the time. The Expanse guys are on the show as writers. They’ve written scripts even in the first season. That’s how I would very much prefer to do it, always. When we can, that’s how we’re going to do it here, because we want to honor that core fan base that is passionate about the material; otherwise, why are you doing it? If you haven’t gotten it already by our conversations and the stuff we’ve greenlit, we are really trying to focus on that core audience, and I think the way to do that is to respect the stuff they really liked in the first place.

If Hyperion is so admired in LA, how come it’s taken so long for it to come to television?

Well, any of your fans who have read the book know that it’s not the most obvious adaptation. There’s different points of view, there’s different stories, and it needs development, and you need to make a lot of choices in terms of the narrative, and where you’re going to start the story, and who you’re going to focus on. There’s just so many different great avenues you can pursue in that book. Those are always the most challenging. It’s kind of for the reasons I just talked about, because you do want to honor that fan base, but at a certain point you have to have a TV show that’s intelligible, that people are going to understand. It’s taken us a while on that one, but for all of the right reasons.

I guess if people don’t know, Hyperion is structured like The Canterbury Tales, where there are seven or so characters who tell their stories. Can you say anything about how you’ve decided to adapt it?

No, because we haven’t made those decisions yet. We’ve heard takes, we’ve looked at some storylines, all of that stuff, but we haven’t hit on the one we like. So, I would love to tell you that we’re very close, and we’ve got it nailed, but we just haven’t done it yet. But it is a priority, and it is something we want to figure out sooner rather than later.

Then another thing I really wanted to ask you about is—Syfy has something of a mixed reputation among hardcore science fiction fans. I’m sure you’re aware of this. Do you want to give your take on that?

Hardcore science fiction fans are a very discerning, very passionate group. I was at Comic-Con one time, and I got into a long discussion slash argument, before I was with the channel, and there was a group of guys there that felt that science fiction only takes place in space. It was kind of a fascinating argument. So, anything Earth-based, they didn’t think was science fiction. So, some of it is just what we love about our audience, their passion and their opinions—I think to a certain level you’re never really going to be able to satisfy everybody, right? I think another part of it might have been before we were properly funded thanks to the work Bonnie Hammer and Dave Howe have done with the channel and with our new owners, you weren’t able to do hardcore science fiction like the stuff we have coming, particularly The Expanse, because you just simply didn’t have the budget. And if you don’t have the budget to go up into space, and to try to make that feel authentic, you might have to do some things that don’t play to the core as much as SF fans would like. We are sensitive to that, and we’re trying to appeal to that audience. That’s why I’m so excited to be on your podcast today, because I think you speak to the audience that is going to be excited about this stuff, and we’re trying to bring them back to our channel on a more consistent basis. But I’m happy that I can talk directly to that audience on podcasts like this and tell them sincerely that we get it, and that’s what’s motivating all of these greenlights, and all of these books that you mentioned, and a lot of our development.

It was kind of striking to me that just in preparation for this interview, I went back and looked through all of our old episodes, and I don’t think we have ever really talked about Syfy channel shows on this podcast since we launched it in 2010, and it’s not because we’re like boycotting the channel or something, it’s just the shows have not been what my friends and I were talking about, and certainly the things that you have coming up are things that we’re going to be talking about, so I definitely see a change in our posture toward the Syfy channel going forward.

Yeah, I get it. You might not have been watching us, but we’re all watching you, and our press people are fans of this show, and fans of all of the outlets where we can reach that, and we’re trying to be sensitive to that. I’m really happy to hear you say that.

I had a couple of questions from listeners I wanted to ask you. Megan Smith asks, “Are any female SF writers going to be having their works adapted by Syfy?”

Yes, we are actively pursuing one book in particular that I’m not going to mention because when I do, the option price will go up. But that is a priority of ours. And, there are so many great female authors out there today who don’t get the credit they deserve really, and I think if we can just get one of those shows on the air, or even in development, that people will really take note.

On our Facebook page in this discussion, Carrie Vaughn posted that she’d like to see adaptations of Nancy Kress, Zenna Henderson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Robin McKinley, Anne McCaffrey, and Lois McMaster Bujold. And then Megan says she’d like to see Sheri S. Tepper. And I’ll just throw in myself Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. Those were both guests on our show in the past year or two, and I really thought those books were terrific.

That’s great. Well, I can tell you that within that list you just rattled off is the book I’m chasing right now. That we’re chasing. That we’re trying to get. So, is it Megan who asked that question?

Yeah, Megan Smith.

Megan is going to be very happy if we figure this out. And here’s the thing, even if we don’t get it, it’s a competitive situation. It will end up on another network. I hope it will end up on ours, but she’ll see . . . I think within the next three or four months there will be an announcement about the network that gets this particular novel. And the author is included in that list.

Okay, excellent. Then Anthony James says, “I’ve heard that you were ‘derebranding’; can you clarify what this means and whether you will be discarding the Syfy s-y-f-y name.”

Derebranding. You know, I’m the programming guy, so I’m not the brand guy, and my general take on that sort of stuff, when you look at other channels around the dial, whether they be FX or AMC or something like that, I’m a believer in, and probably any programming guy will say this, that the programming dictates the brand. I mean, who knew what AMC even stood for or what they were about until those shows came. So, I don’t really get into the branding, marketing part of the gig. There are other people here who do that. I’m just trying to make the shows speak loudly for who we are and what we want to be.

Right, yeah, because I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes, but certainly among my friends, there was the perception that the channel was attempting to distance themselves from science fiction fans, and I don’t know how big a deal the name change is, but there were things that would happen, like on Battlestar Galactica, different actors would say, “Oh no, this show isn’t science fiction because it’s good.” That kind of thing like really rubs fans the wrong way. What I would love to see, for once in my life, is an actor on a show like Battlestar Galactica who would say, “No, this show is science fiction, and it’s one of the best shows you’ve ever seen, and this is an example of how good science fiction can be when it’s done right. Watch it and see for yourself.”

Yeah, all of that stuff has been said by other people, and all I can really speak to is the last two years since I’ve been here. In the last two years, it’s certainly has not been that. I’ve never been told to apologize for being SF, or say this isn’t really SF, or any of that stuff. In fact, I’ve been told just the opposite. Again, I think the programs we put on the air will reflect that, and hopefully convert all of those people.

All right, cool. So, John Joseph Adams asks, and you probably can’t answer this, “I’d like to know how much those Childhood’s End and Magicians promo packages cost. The Childhood’s End one has a freaking videoscreen in it that autoplays a full-length trailer when you open it up. And the Magicians one was full of Brakebills swag: scarf, notebook, hat, etc.” I know you can’t say how much they cost, but do you want to just talk about . . .

You know, the truth is, I don’t even know how much they cost, but I like them just as much as he does. We do like to do that stuff. This network has had a long history of that, but it’s really, again, in the last couple of years . . . really in even the last few months, those kits have astounded me. We have a new press team. We have some people who have ascended up the marketing ranks who have just taken it to a level . . . I almost want to sell them to people because they’re so spectacular. But, no, I can’t really speak to the cost.

I just got on this list for these things, so I just started getting them, so I don’t know what kind of things the channel has been sending out in prior years, but this stuff is really impressive. Actually, the scarf I got, it’s a Brakebills scarf, which is the Hogwarts-like school in The Magicians. I was like, “This is a pretty nice scarf.” I’ve actually been wearing it around. My girlfriend says, “I think you’re the only person who would actually wear the stuff they sent you.”

You know what, keep wearing it. Keep wearing it until that show premieres. One of the fun [experiences] I had is I happened to be in New York when we showed that to Lev Grossman, and he flipped out for it. He just completely flipped out for it, because he is a flag-waving fantasy fan, and he just felt that that captured exactly what he tried to do with the show, and it was a really nice moment to see an author get to experience what you did.

Then Rory Carol says, “Are TV shows like theirs still working on the ‘appointment to view’ model, or are modern shows gearing more toward the binge watching trend we’ve seen with box sets and video-on-demand?”

Well, look, the answer is both. We’re all big TV fans here. I am. I have an almost three-year-old son. A lot of the viewing I do at home, because of that little three-year-old, can’t be live, so we’re aware of that. There’s a big percentage of our audience that still watches these things live, but we know, it’s not just live or DVR. It’s VOD, it’s pre-linear, it’s online in various sources. We’ve loosened the rules in terms of how we get these shows out there, because we want to get them out across every digital platform we can. Anywhere you would consume television or entertainment, we want to put it there, and ultimately, of course, we would love people to be watching them live, and stuff like that, but it’s a changing marketplace, and we’re just trying to be ahead of those changes. So, we recognize that. I mean, a gigantic portion of the 12 Monkeys audience came to the show after it’s live airing on all of these various platforms, so the measurement is getting better. It’s not where it needs to be, the way to monetize that is not where it needs to be yet, but we certainly recognize that.

Right, for example, you put out the pilot for The Expanse just as a downloadable file, and I think you’re doing the same thing with The Magicians?

Yeah, and we know what’s so great about the SF audience is through these message boards, through the io9’s of the world, AV Clubs, your show, we know where a lot of these people live. We know where they are. We know what’s important to them. And this is the first time in my career, with The Expanse, that I’ve ever been a part of one of these pre-linear releases, where we release it online before its airdate. So I’ve been trolling these message boards in a way that I never have before because I find it so fascinating. You get kind of a direct feedback, and I’m very happy with what people are saying, because I’ve been on those message boards for shows before that they’re not into, and that’s not fun. It’s really fascinating to see it, to have kind of that direct relationship with the viewers in that way.

I would really recommend people check out these pilots, because I think a lot of people have the idea of the production values of a Syfy channel show, and these new shows completely blow that out of the water. I mean, Childhood’s End, The Expanse in particular, they look as good as anything on television.

Or at the movie theater, honestly. There’s certain sequences in The Expanse, and I will tell your viewers throughout the duration of The Expanse and Childhood’s End, I very much agree with you. I think the effects are great. But, there’s one episode in particular, episode four of The Expanse, that we did some real heavy-duty effects. And it was one of those episodes that I read, and I loved, and I was just sort of looking at, and I’m like, “Are we really going to be able to pull this off?” And I was very happy with it. I’m glad you feel that way, because that’s the goal. That’s the goal with this investment is to really show people that we’re serious. Obviously you can’t do that every time, you can’t spend that kind of money on every show, but when we feel appropriate, we can go there in our company, and I have to keep saying it, because I think if they hear it they’ll keep investing, but Comcast, Bonnie Hammer, Dave Howe, are all very . . . the wallet will open for the right show, and that’s what makes it so exciting to have this job right now.

In all this time that you’ve spent kind of trolling through message boards, do any interactions that you’ve had stick out in your mind?

I did get into a sort of conversation with like eight people, obviously they had no idea who I was, and it was sort of around space operas. It was very informative for me because they were very specific on what they wanted, and what shows they loved, and it was a lot about Battlestar Galactica, and it was just a great forum for me to ask questions without them knowing who I was that we could then take back to our development.

What were some of the kind of things that they wanted to see in a space opera show?

There was one woman in particular, and it was really interesting because the conversation was about the amount of combat and the amount of war you’d want in a space opera. Does that come with the expectation as your exploring, as you’re out there in space? Is part of the quid pro quo of a space opera, “Okay, I want to see some heavy-duty battle.” And this one woman in particular didn’t like that piece of it. She was much more into the anthropology of exploration and learning about new places and new cultures and culture clashes and stuff like that, whereas three other people vehemently disagreed. So, it was an interesting point of view on it, and that’s what’s so great about these message boards and what’s so great about this job, is you can get really granular, and you can really geek out. But still, it informs how you approach something like The Expanse or some of our other shows.

There’s a thing that sticks in my mind toward the end of The Next Generation feature films. Jonathan Frakes was quoted as saying, “I think that Star Trek fans really want these to be action movies.” And I saw a video online totally disagreeing with that, and I think that expresses the views of myself and a lot of fans. That we don’t particularly want Star Trek or shows like it to be action movies. We want them to be smart. Basically, the smarter the better.

Yeah, I 1000% agree with you. When you’re doing action, I think you want to do it right, and I think you want to be inventive. And there’s certainly a lot of action in The Expanse and there’s some action sequences in Childhood’s End, but Childhood’s End in particular and the Arthur C. Clarke novel in particular didn’t go for the easy sort of set piece action sequence. I hate to say this, but some of Childhood’s End, some of the movies and things like that that ripped it off, went that route, in a way that I thought made those things less interesting than they could have been.

Absolutely. One thing I wanted to ask you about is, from your perspective as a TV executive, these shows that get cancelled, Farscape and Firefly in particular, that everybody I know loves, and I recognize that my friends are not representative of the general public—

Sure they are.

—I just have trouble understanding how shows that so many people that I know love so much end up getting cancelled. Can you explain that to me?

Just in a general sense?

Yeah, just in a general sense. But for space opera shows in particular.

We get a lot of grief for this that I think is kind of undeserved because we do more original programming than I think people realize. So, when you’re doing more original programming, the odds are you’re not going to be able to continue to renew all of them.

I will tell you that the worst day you can have in this job is the day you do that. Not just when you have to deliver the awful news to the producers and writers that you’ve spent years with and really feel a very personal connection with, but then the aftermath of the fan base who inevitably finds your email or something, or lights up those message boards. It’s a real horrible thing, and it’s something we try to avoid as much as we can, but just the practical parts of the job and the shows that kind of run their course and things like that take over, and you just have to do it.

I think the SF fans, because they’re probably more passionate than the average fan, take it a little harder, so I get it. And I’m one of those people. I’m certainly one of those people. There’s nothing I hate more than when a show I’ve invested this time into leaves after a year or two, and particularly when they leave me with some unanswered questions, because it’s just like, “Well, that’s terrible.” Because I wanted to find that out, or I wanted to live with these people longer.

With every cancellation, I think that people feel like we’re in here just sort of knee jerking, “Let’s cancel this. Let’s pick up that.” A lot of behind-the-scenes thought, a lot of ideas go into it, a lot of ways to honor the audience that has been there. I know it doesn’t feel like that all the time, but that is the truth.

I can definitely understand if a show is not getting great ratings that you cancel it. That this is a business, but it seems like, because the science fiction fans are so passionate, it seems like they have a potential more so than what the numbers by themselves would suggest. I mean, if you look at Star Trek: The Original Series, there were probably tons and tons of shows at that time that had much better ratings than that that are completely forgotten today, whereas Star Trek has grown into this multi-billion-dollar franchise.

Yeah, and look, that’s part of the gig. That’s part of my job and our job as a network. I am proud to say that 12 Monkeys, just to use that as an example, did well for us; the ratings didn’t make it such an obvious no-brainer to go into a second season of that show, but by the time we saw three or four episodes, we recognized the quality, and we said, “You know what? That’s not how we’re going to make this decision.” We just think it’s a good show that’s getting better and better every week, and season two, I’ve seen most of, and it’s better than season one, even. When we can, we do that. I don’t think people notice it until they cancel it sometimes, but we have. And why I like working here, why I like working for this corporation and this channel in particular, is we are willing to make those bets on quality.

It would seem like kind of a no-brainer to me to bring back shows like Farscape and Firefly that have such passionate fan bases, but maybe I don’t know all the factors. Why do networks take risks on completely new shows that no one has ever heard of when there are these really popular shows that have been cancelled sitting around that could be brought back?

You know, look, some of it could just be sort of the ego of these jobs, maybe like, “That was their show, I want to do something that’s wholly my own,” and if it lives somewhere else it really is not . . . There is a “sitting with a writer from the very beginning” kind of connection that you have working on a pilot, working through a show, that’s hard to get when you take a show that lives for three seasons or two seasons on another network. I mean, I think you’re seeing it happening. I think some cable channels have done it. I think some of the Netflixes and Amazons of the world have picked up shows that lived somewhere else, so I do think the world is changing that way, and I think it may continue to, because, you know, in a show like 12 Monkeys, just to use an example, while it didn’t get the linear rating out of the gate that we wanted, had we cancelled it, we’d be kicking ourselves right now because the VOD numbers were so spectacular. So, we saw a big audience come to it that way. I think you’re probably going to see more and more of that, and you may see a show cancelled prematurely and then a network reconsider because of the viewers finding it on another platform.

Okay, so you mentioned that growing up you would watch The Twilight Zone with your dad, and I really love those sorts of anthology shows. I don’t know if you’ve seen Black Mirror, but that was one of the things we loved the most on this show.

I not only saw Black Mirror, but we chased that show about as hard as you possibly could. I thought it was phenomenal. I got to know the creators really well. I adore that show. It’s the closest thing that I’ve seen to The Twilight Zone, so that was one of those things . . . kind of the one that got away, but I very much agree with you. I think that’s an amazing show.

You’ll definitely try to grab an anthology show like that if another one comes along?

Well, I think the bar is so high in anthology that you’ve got to be choosy now. There’s a show called Channel Zero: Candle Cove that we have greenlit that’s going to be anthology by installments, so six-episode installments each year, which is sort of like an anthology, but extended. It’s not going to be a weekly anthology like a Twilight Zone or a Black Mirror or something like that, but I love that. The Twilight Zone is my favorite science fiction show of all time. I’ve gotten into deep, intense arguments with Star Trek fans over this, but for me, it’s Twilight Zone, for better or for worse, that’s my thing. I would love that, but I think you also have to acknowledge if you’re going to do that, you really need the Rod Serling. You really need the person behind the camera who can create those kinds of stories each week, because a bad anthology is really bad.

Yeah, but I think one of the reasons The Twilight Zone and Star Trek were so good is because they brought in science fiction authors. I mean, you’re doing this now, but they brought in science fiction novelists to write for them. And it just seems natural to me because John and I, who started this show, are so involved with short stories, it just seems natural to me to just take all the best short stories of the past ten years and turn it into an anthology show.

Yeah, there are practical reasons why it’s hard to. Sometimes those short stories have different owners, so there’s ownership complications there. Then it’s sometimes they’re so diverse that it becomes impractical to be able to produce them on anything that resembles a timely television schedule, but those walls are starting to break down, and I think that’s an interesting idea. It’s also kind of about finding the stories that thread together thematically, and that’s what’s so brilliant about The Twilight Zone. Even though they were very diverse kinds of stories, they all felt that they were of the same mind, certainly because of Rod Serling, but also the same sort of themes, the same sort of ideas, because you do need to have some sort of thread. You mentioned Black Mirror, and that’s sort of the perils of technology and that’s the title: Black Mirror. They’ve done a brilliant job at that. Until you find that, I think it’s a tough thing to just jump into.

When the Sci Fi Channel first launched when I was in middle school, sort of what I imagined in my head, what I dreamed it would be, is they would have talk shows where they would interview my favorite authors. And part of the reason I do this podcast, obviously, is because I’m interested in that sort of thing, but there’s never really been stuff like that. I mean, there’s Prisoners of Gravity in Canada, that went for a while, and Sword and Laser was on YouTube for a while. Could you talk about what factors are involved in launching a science fiction talk show like that on a TV network?

I think a show like that would be challenging today because I can cobble together a lot of the interviews with my favorite film directors, or whatever, just online, and I think it’s just so much easier online to do stuff like that for the geeks like you and I who can’t get enough of that than to really, in my opinion, launch a television show that’s going to generate enough interest, week to week, among enough of an audience to keep it going. Some of these things . . . magazine shows are hard for the same reason. When you can just click your way out to your favorite author and find Arthur C. Clarke essays or old Arthur C. Clarke interviews or whatever and just do that online, it’s hard for me to imagine a show that would feel urgent enough or relevant enough to get an audience there on enough of a week-to-week basis to do it. But I could be wrong. Somebody may prove me wrong. I mean, I watch Charlie Rose every night. My wife is like, “What are you, an 80-year-old man?” So I am very into that, and I have a lot of patience for that, and if I don’t watch it that night, I’ll watch it the next morning. So I hear what you’re saying, I just don’t know if, given the choices you have with original programming, you’d want to spend it there.

That makes sense. We’re almost out of time, so I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you is, it’s so frustrating for science fiction fans to love these shows so much and just have them go off the air, and what I’ve heard is that by the time you hear that the show is going off the air, it’s really too late for you as a fan to do anything. That decision has already been made. So, obviously with all of these shows based on some of my favorite books coming out, I just want to know: What can I and what can our listeners do now, or in the days to come, to make sure that these shows don’t disappear on us?

Watch them. Tell their friends to watch them. Tweet about them. Facebook post about them. Fill up the comment boards about stuff you like. Because, like I said, we’re watching that stuff. All of it. Buzz in the day and age of this many great programs becomes a reason to pick up a show in a way, this year in particular, in a way that it’s never been before in this business. So don’t underestimate your ability as a viewer and as a passionate fan to really get out there. You have the forums now. There’s Syfy.com, there’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there’s all that stuff. You can simply tell all of your friends to watch it, and somehow, some way, you’ll probably end up getting to Nielsen box owners. But, I really do mean, I think the power is in the hand of the consumer in a way it hasn’t been, but the earlier the better. Really, the earlier the better. I think there is some truth to, “Man, if those fans would have come out and mobilized after a cancellation during a run, in some form, it would have been a lot easier.” And a guy like me, who has bosses, and my bosses have bosses, we need to build a case about why to pick up a show. If we have these things we can point to, it makes our job a lot easier.

Right. Do you want to remind people, what are the things again that they should watch now or in the next month or so?

The first three biggies are the Childhood’s End mini-series, The Expanse series, followed by The Magicians. Then there is going to be a couple of things. Hunters will come after that; 12 Monkeys season two shortly after that. I mean, I could go on and on. I could name our whole schedule, but that feels sort of rude. I will say, because I haven’t talked about it, and I’ve got a whole crew of people who work hard on these things, that we have an alternative show that I kind of think your audience is going to dig called The Internet Ruined My Life.

Oh yeah, I looked at that.

It’s really fun and provocative and deals with this digital world and how one wrong tweet, one wrong Facebook post, can really impact your life. I just think it’s great. That one is also going to be coming. That one, along with these big, scripted shows, are the ones I’d love your viewers to prioritize.

I interviewed Jon Ronson earlier this year, and he had a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and that show was kind of looking like the TV version of that book.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a really fun show, and oddly I think it fits our network because of all of the stuff we do around technology and how tech savvy we know our audience base is. I think they’re going to dig it, and I think your podcast fans should dig it. But, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Great! We’ve been speaking with Bill McGoldrick. Thank you so much for joining us.

You got it.

* Syfy’s network name was previously “Sci Fi Channel,” but changed to “Syfy” in 2009. Since Bill McGoldrick’s time at the network began before the name change, we’ve attempted to use the proper network designation in each instance it appears in the interview, thus our usage of both “Syfy” and “Sci Fi.” -eds.

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: Patricia Strand

Jason Ridler | 529 words

I enjoyed the structure of the opening, the layers of stories. How did that manifest itself? Was that a conscious decision to do with format or something you explored while writing it?

The formatting of the opening was a decision. I wanted to launch the story with a scene from the present, and at the same time introduce the two characters from the past who are essential to the story. Tracing Kate’s thoughts as she looks at the old photograph developed as a way to do this that I hoped would catch the interest of the reader.

Kate and Shawn’s dialog seemed real, in that their needs and meanings were buried under pleasantries and what appeared to be affection. What are your thoughts on the feelings in stories that are left unsaid?

When characters leave things unsaid, and the reader is able to sense the inner conflicts, it creates tension that can add to the story. In couple relationships, the intensity of feelings can often be unbalanced, with one more devoted than the other. This balance is often in flux, shifting over time or in response to life events. It is something I like to explore in my fiction.

Kate is an engaging but incredibly normal protagonist. She didn’t have grand dreams, and has chosen stability to fill in a lack rather than add to her joy. What about her did you find interesting?

Kate is young and her dreams could still be developing. But at the time of the story, she is occupied with fears of motherhood and the perception that her love for her new husband is not fully returned. I found her interesting because she does not automatically embrace the popular culture ideas of pregnancy and motherhood as both exalted and natural. She resists becoming a mother until the moment she cannot resist falling in love with her own child.

Kate’s lack of maternal feelings reminded me of fears many women have of motherhood, of being transformed into something they don’t want to be. Why that choice for your protagonist?

I have always been fascinated by the way parenthood can transform people. I considered presenting Kate as a happy and excited expectant mother, as is more commonly the case, but I decided it would be more interesting to explore the opposite mindset, a struggle I once observed in a close friend.

Ghosts in fiction are often symbolic of memories or trauma of an individual or the writer. Here they are used as a means of time travel. How did the use of this idea come to fruition?

I enjoy real life stories of hauntings, and I happen to believe in ghosts, but I would agree that in many cases there is another explanation. The idea for this story developed after I had read about a real-life incident of infant abduction that had left the police baffled by the lack of clues, as if the child had vanished into thin air. I started to speculate on the idea of a time-traveling kidnapper.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published more than sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Richmond, CA.

Author Spotlight: Nghi Vo

Christie Yant | 729 words

What’s your earliest memory of encountering a dragon in literature or media, and what kind of impression did it leave on you?

My memories of dragons go all the way back to seeing them on things like lucky money envelopes at New Year’s and other decorations, but the first time I really ran into a dragon in literature was with Lawrence Yep’s phenomenal YA book, Dragon of the Lost Sea. I loved the novel, and what I remember most strongly is the place the dragons in the book had in the world, how they were one more strange and wonderful part of it.

Dragons are found in mythology from all over the world, in many different guises. Was yours inspired by any particular tradition?

This dragon is very firmly based on my impression of European dragons, especially with the idea of the hoard. Now that I think about it (and I can’t believe I never realized this before), this story owes a lot to C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Eustace also sleeps on a dragon’s hoard. I really wanted to figure out why a dragon might be drawn to gold, and where human ideas and the ideas of an enormous, fire-breathing, six-limbed, nearly immortal reptile might diverge.

There seems to be an entire mythology of your own in the shadows of your story—why the dragons take their brides, and whether or not they are truly “brides” in the common sense. Was the jade dragon truly your protagonist’s captor, or did it think of itself as her mentor?

None of this makes it into the story, but I have always had the idea that the dragon was looking for a successor. This is not something that the dragon ever mentioned to the main character, and it is likely nothing that the main character will ever figure out until her joints ache and more of her memory lies in gold than it does in her mind or her heart. The dragon changed her, but it had very little control over what that change did. She could have become a lot of things after she returned, and she spends decades exploring her options. It means something that she decides, after all this time, that she wants to understand the dragon better.

There are themes of memory and living many lives in your story, represented by the dragon’s hoard, which bookends the adult life of your protagonist. Is there a parallel between our own hoards of memories from our own lives and the others that have been related to us, and your protagonist’s transformation?

At the very base of it, memories are stories that we tell ourselves, and it is stories that shape who we are, who we want to be, and how we truly see ourselves. They nourish us, and they explain us. The protagonist tells us who she was, and in doing so, she gives herself a little bit of immortality as long as we remember her. The dragon put itself into its hoard, and now she remembers it. Our memories are a flimsy insurance against a rush of time that we can never, ever stop, or indeed see to the end.

Can we hope to read more about your dragons in the future? What’s next for you?

I’m sure I’ll return to dragons some time in the future. When I search for the word in my embarrassingly enormous snippets folders, I get no less than twelve separate instances of it. I know that there’s at least one story waiting for me featuring Vietnamese dragons and rivers, but that one needs a lot of unearthing yet.

As to the future, there’s always more writing to be done! There’s a lot on the burner right now, including another story about memory that takes place in a steampunk Vietnam, a story about necromancy in a place that seems to be not-really-seventeenth-century-Poland, and something that’s been knocking around my head for years about hungry ghosts.

Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about a story that I like very much! I’ve really enjoyed it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton),  Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn

Jude Griffin | 774 words

What was the spark for “Origin Story”?

This one started pretty much with the opening scene: What if you got caught up in a bank heist, and the masked supervillain behind it turned out to be an ex-boyfriend, whom you recognize despite the mask? As with most good superhero stories, the situation—running into an old ex—is emotionally familiar, but amplified. I find this kind of story intriguing and a lot of fun.

How does this story relate to the world of After The Golden Age?

“Origin Story” is definitely set in the same world as After the Golden Age. It’s the same Commerce City. I’m working on a third novel in that series, Rise of the Golden Age, and Techhunter is one of the main villains in it. I can’t remember now which came first, the Techhunter in the short story or the one in the novel, but I definitely wanted a chance to learn more about the character, hence the little bit of backstory in the short.

Which are your favorite superhero/ines/stories?

I kind of love them all. I grew up watching Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Super Friends, all those shows from the late seventies and early eighties on TV. I didn’t get into comics until much later, and even now I prefer the movie and TV versions, where the stories are more compact. Right now, I’m really loving The Flash and Agent Carter. Agent Carter is right up my alley—she doesn’t have powers herself, but she moves easily through this four-color superhero world, with all the gadgets and weird science and over-the-top tropes. I’m drawn to more positive, idealistic superhero stories. Watchmen was amazing in the way it deconstructed the tropes, but it spawned a generation of just dire, cynical, morbid superhero stories. That gets old quick.

I also have to put in a plug here for Wild Cards, the shared-world series edited by George R.R. Martin, which I contribute to. It’s a very different superhero world—more alternate history, even. But it’s just as much fun to play in. Commerce City is a more classic, four-color superhero world.

What do you wish someone, possibly you, would do for the superhero/ine narrative?

I’ve kind of already gotten my wish—superhero stories are so ubiquitous right now that the possibilities in what one can actually do have really opened up. That the ultra-sunny and goofy Supergirl can exist at the same time as the ultra-grim Jessica Jones tells me that the genre (at least in film and TV) has matured to the point where many different kinds of stories are possible, and people are ready to start experimenting. In fact, we need experimentation if superhero film and TV are going to remain popular. I’m looking forward to Deadpool, to see how much satire it can bring to the genre, because I’m definitely ready for it. I’d love to see more like Birdman, which technically isn’t a superhero movie, but rather a meditation on pop culture and superhero entertainment—but I’d argue that Birdman couldn’t exist without the current saturation of superhero everything.

We’re still waiting for the great prose fiction superhero classic. Something like The Martian for superheroes, if you will. We’ve gotten close a couple of times, but the genre still hasn’t found much of a foothold in fiction for some reason. I think because it’s hard to capture such a visual genre in prose, and because there really are so many ways of telling these kinds of stories—cynical, idealistic, serious, satirical—and not every way appeals to all audiences.

Any news or projects you’d like to share?

This summer, I have a short story collection coming out from Fairwood Press: Amaryllis and Other Stories will be out in August. My next novel is a solar system space opera called Study Abroad, and it’ll be out in January 2017. And as John mentions in his editorial, my post-apocalyptic novel Bannerless will be out in 2017 from John Joseph Adams Books. It’s set in the same world as my short stories “Amaryllis” and “Bannerless,” which John also edited. As always, visit carrievaughn.com for more info.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Theodora Goss

Jude Griffin | 962 words

How did this story come about?

I’m not entirely sure. I think it started with an image of the paintings: fantastical paintings of a woman. And then I thought about the woman, and the artist who would see her differently from how other people saw her, and finally came the setting, a Southern setting because that was at least partly where I grew up. And that was where I could imagine another sort of very rigid woman, one who insisted on her own perception of the world, and would have that perception brought into question by the end. So it sort of evolved, but it started with the image of Lily, and the paintings of Lily.

Lily seems to have few redeeming characteristics: even her cooking is prone to burning. Why does Andras see such magic in her?

I think she does actually have some very important redeeming characteristics. She’s honest—she’s not pretending to be anyone else. She’s tolerant and accepting. She’s romantic, in the larger sense—she sees the world in a romantic way. In this story, you’re only seeing her from Eleanor’s point of view, but the whole issue is that Eleanor’s point of view is very limited. There’s an entire world inside her sister that she’s never seen. And in the end that realization is overwhelming for her. I think most of us fail to see the worlds inside other people, even when we know them very well.

“Lily, With Clouds” is one of the stories in your collection, The Forest of Forgetting. There is an Emily Gray strand that weaves through some of the stories in the book: will she appear in your work in the future?

Yes, she’s in a story of mine coming out in The Starlit Wood, a fairy tale anthology from Saga Press. The story is called “The Other Thea,” and in it you find out a little more about who Emily Gray really is. Not that much more, I’m afraid. But she’ll be back . . .

In the last lines of the story, Eleanor is referred to as “Ellie.” Can you talk about that subtle change and how it relates to how her view of the world has changed?

To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t realized I’d done that. I suppose I was doing what writer do, which is writing out of instinct, out of what feels right at any particular moment. Perhaps she’s no longer her own idea of who she is, I don’t know. Robert Louis Stevenson said that he had a Brownie (the small Scottish sprite, not the pastry) in his head, writing the stories for him. Perhaps my own personal story-writing Brownie put that in, for reasons of its own . . .

What do you think of the multiple comparisons of your work to Angela Carter?

Are there multiple comparison of my work to hers? I had no idea. I think my work is very different. She’s a supreme stylist: she creates a gorgeously textured surface, and underneath the structure of her stories is primarily thematic. They are held together by thematic elements, by repetition of images and ideas, by their relationship to other stories . . . I think my writing is much simpler. What I’m trying for is a kind of clarity and directness. And the underlying structure is usually a plot of some sort. I don’t think I could write a story like Carter’s “The Erl-King,” which is really a gorgeous prose poem. That said, I love Carter, particularly her short stories. If I’m like her in any way, it’s in rewriting fairy tales, trying to reclaim and recast that literary heritage . . . and in writing about women.

I studied and worked in Hungary—a country of much magic itself. In what ways does its literary tradition influence your writing?

The first books I read were fairy tales in Hungarian, which were always the darker versions. I think those have definitely influenced my writing. But the larger influence is European literature in general: I grew up reading Kafka and Kundera, Sartre and Nabokov, Dinesen and Colette. Part of it was being a pretentious teenager, as I think most writers probably were. But part of it was missing something, and reading anything that contained what seemed to be missing, a certain approach to the world. A sense of old beauty, a sense of age, I don’t know. But I do find it again whenever I go back to Budapest. The down side is that I still haven’t read some American classics, although I read an awful lot of Willa Cather as a teenager. But then, she wrote a lot about European immigrants in a new world, so perhaps that’s the connection. And come to think of it, my favorite American writers, like Hawthorne, Poe, and James, all write quite a bit about the connection between America and Europe.

Any news or projects you’d like to share?

I have two books coming out from Saga Press in 2017 and 2018. They are both about a group of rather unusual women: Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein. The first book is about how they find one another in late nineteenth century London, and the adventures they have together. I’m still working on the second book, but their adventures will take them to Vienna and Budapest. The books have been a lot of fun to write! I’m looking forward to seeing what readers think of them . . .

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Peter Watts

Sandra Odell | 1569 words

Many of your stories make no bones about addressing difficult social and/or political issues. With “Collateral,” you shine the light on combat, veteran’s services, PTSD, politics, information technology, the media, and social awareness. Do you have any military or veteran’s services experience?

I do not. I do know a couple of generous vets—Steve Perry, Jordon Blanch by name—who beta-read the manuscript, to make sure I didn’t get the military details egregiously wrong. Steve’s Canadian, so I got all the appropriate Canadian military ranks, acronyms, and power structures from him.

As for the more personal elements of the story, though, I was just posing all the way.

The story starts with punch to the gut, a storm of confusion and sensory impressions that immediately hooks the reader. What inspired you to explore a story of combat, the aftermath, and a soul struggling to survive?

Mundanely enough, it started when Neil Clarke approached me to contribute to his cyborg anthology. So obviously cyborgs had to figure in there somewhere. And a few years earlier I’d written a story called “Malak,” told entirely from the POV of an autonomous drone that’s been outfitted with an algorithm that factors civilian casualties into its targeting choices. “Malak” follows the evolution of that drone from reflexive calculation to a sort of moral agency. It never “rebels” per se—I really wanted to avoid the hoary old cliché of the AI-that-transcends-its-program—but it does figure out how to accomplish ethical goals within those mathematical constraints.

I like “Malak,” but the issues it explores—free will, quantification of moral imperatives, the ethics of war crimes—you don’t exhaust those with one lousy short story. So I crafted “Collateral” as a kind of thematic and narrative mirror image, a left brain to “Malak”’s right. Where “Malak” tells the story of coldly logical hardware developing a concept of (for want of a better word) mercy—in a sense, becoming more human—“Collateral” tells the story of a fallible, flesh-and-blood human becoming more of a machine. Each protagonist sheds something essential to what they started out as, each follows a trajectory opposite to the other—yet ultimately, they both end up in the same place. They both become precisely, deterministically ethical. And as fate would have it, in both cases the most ethical course just happens to be the one that racks up a big honking death toll.

Neither soul “survives,” to bring it back to your original question. At least, not the way we like to think of souls. But the thing that replaces it is a lot purer.

You don’t cut corners. Each character is fully realized and complex, whether it’s Becker’s anxieties and rage, Sabrie’s perception and diligence, or the many politicians and their varied stances on the events of the war. When writing, how conscious are you of how the characters shape and influence the narrative?

Well, first off, thanks for describing my characters as “fully realized and complex”; I can think of a lot of people who’d disagree with you on that score. I might even be one of them. I think character development is probably the weakest implement in my personal toolbox, because I tend to come at writing from the direction of the idea to be explored: I think I’ll write a story about the neuroengineering properties of yoghurt—now, what kind of protagonist can best illustrate my theme? And I try to layer complex personalities onto those templates, really I do, but the very process always runs the risk of reducing your characters to mere mouthpieces for a particular point of view. In contrast, consider a show such as Breaking Bad; you rarely encounter a plot twist where you think “huh, the character had to act that way to serve the plot.” Rather, the plot always seems to emerge organically from the characters. I would like to write more like that.

This is one of the reasons I married my wife, incidentally. She’s way better at character-informed storytelling than I am. I am hoping that some day, some of that might rub off on me.

Conflict comes in many forms. One thing that struck me about “Collateral” was Becker’s objectification by the military and the media, stripping away her identity as surely as they burnt out her feelings of remorse. In the end, Becker’s final act reads as much as a means of reclaiming her own identity as building a foundation for the future. As a writer, how would you define a successful narrative conflict in a story?

I don’t think Becker has much of a future to build a foundation for. She’s not getting out of there alive any more than the people she kills, and she knows it—but if she can set the cyborgization of the military back by even a few years, put off that day when nobody is ever held culpable for any atrocity anywhere because it was all just a tragic software glitch—she considers it a price worth paying. Her own algos tell her that far more lives will ultimately be saved than those she’s ended.

And maybe that’s the essence of what I consider a successful narrative conflict in a story: It’s a conflict that extends beyond what the characters are feeling and jumps into the head of a discomfited reader. Because let’s face it, the end of “Collateral” is pretty much the platonic ideal of Spock’s famous platitude, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Everybody loves that line. It’s warm and soft and fuzzy, and redolent of noble self-sacrifice—but there’s nothing in that sentiment that says it is the self that has to be sacrificed. If the needs of the many do in fact outweigh the needs of the few, then how “the few” feels about that doesn’t really enter into the equation. It’s the difference between ethics and morality. Morality agrees with Spock’s platitude, but only until it thinks about the implications; then it gets squicked out and recoils because you can’t just kill innocent people like that, it ain’t right. Ethics is more algorithmic: Here is the plan that results in the greatest net number of lives saved. Implement it.

So I guess I’d define a successful narrative conflict as one in which the reader, finishing the tale, says No, that can’t be. It’s just wrong—but cannot tell you why it’s wrong, cannot argue the gut feeling. A successful narrative conflict makes you squirm at a dissonant bottom line you can’t disprove, even though you desperately want to. Something that forces you to question your own dearly held preconceptions.

That’s not the only successful narrative conflict, of course. There are plenty of others that work just fine. But that’s the kind that I feel most proud of, on those occasions when I can pull it off.

What writers get your heart racing when you want to get your fiction on?

If you’re asking whose style I wanted to emulate back when I was growing up, that’s easy: John Brunner. Samuel Delany. Robert Silverberg. William Gibson. (Note I’m talking style here, not substance. I loved Niven for his aliens and PKD for his hallucinogenic ideas and Margaret Atwood for her prose and insights into character—and I don’t think even Gibson managed to jam as many cool ideas-per-page into a book as Alfred Bester did in The Stars My Destination—but while I admire a whole bunch of writers, I’ve never especially wanted to write like most of them.)

If you’re asking who I’d read for pleasure today, if I ever had time to read for pleasure anymore: China Miéville. David Nickle. Richard Morgan, when I’m in angry mode. I’m really getting into this latest one from Charlie Stross. I’ve just discovered Lavie Tidhar; I’m definitely keeping an eye on him.

And nobody’s going to believe I’m sincere when I say this because she’s my wife, but have I mentioned how much I admire Caitlin Sweet’s ability to wed cool characters to beautiful prose while actually telling a decent story?

What future projects wait on the horizon for Peter Watts?

Intelligent Design, a near-future technothriller featuring sapient stock markets and genetically-engineered giant squid. (Actually giant genetically-engineered Humboldt Squid, although I seem to be the only one who actually cares about that distinction. Kids these days.) I’ve been wanting to write it for the past five years and have finally got started. After that, Omniscience, the concluding volume of the Blindsight / Echopraxia sequence. However, thanks to the spectacular implosion of a recent writing project, I have more free time in the immediate future than I was expecting.

So I think I might write a few short stories to get me back in the mood.

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: Rudy Rucker

Liz Argall | 1714 words

You have been referred to as one of the parental units of cyberpunk. What do you think of your kids? Do you have any particular dreams for the grandkids?

I’m not as up-to-date on younger SF writers as I should be, so I can’t answer this really well. Charles Stross is young enough to be second generation cyberpunk, and he’s great. Cory Doctorow, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Hannu Rajaniemi, too. Widening the focus, it feels like cyberpunk and what I call transreal SF are becoming modes used by mainstream high-lit writers. Some of them don’t actually understand SF well enough to make it work—like maybe they’ve read 1984 or something—and the results are pathetic. But David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and George Saunders are mainstream writers who can hit the SF mark really well.

I’m generally disappointed by today’s SF movies. They often have kind of a cyberpunk feel, what with the neon light reflecting on rain wet streets. But, at the movies, the future drugs are dull. The hackers are autistic. The heroes are in league with the cops. The robots are evil or childlike. Nobody ever laughs, nothing interesting happens, and, may god help us, the big AI is a face on the wall with a stewardess voice. I was encouraged, a couple of years ago, by the movie District Nine, but cyberpunk isn’t a mode that comes easily to giant corporations. I wish they’d break down and base some movies on my Ware Tetralogy. It’s under option once again, so I have a spark of hope.

You wrote a pretty passionate manifesto for transrealism in the early ’80s—see bit.ly/transrealist. How has your relationship to transrealism evolved over time?

In short, transrealism means writing fantasy or SF that is in some way based on your actual life. You’re steering clear of received media ideas and trying to write about your daily reality in a warped way. SF tropes become objective correlatives for your psychic drives. At times, I’ve based transreal novels on specific swatches of my personal history—such as college, say, or my experiences working at a software company. But these days I’m more likely to write what I call cubist transrealism. That is, I don’t go for a full reality-encrypted roman à clef. Instead I shatter my daily experiences into surreal frags and tessellate them into a tale. The juxtapositions generate the story and plot.

In your transrealist manifesto you cited the importance of organically finding a story, what might be described as sketching rather than plotting. I’m intrigued to see how many of your paintings are part of your novel writing process. Could you tell us a bit more about how your visual arts practice and writing practice interweave and feed into each other?

It’s the left-brain/right-brain thing. Part of my mind fabulates tales and thinks in words. Another part of my mind sees images and dreams up flash. It’s useful to do a drawing or even an oil painting that relates to whatever might be in one of of my upcoming chapters or stories. The paints and canvas do a lot of the work. I shove the colors around and see what I get. (By the way, you can see my paintings at rudyrucker.com/paintings.)

Of course, if I can get loose, my writing can be that way too. Sometimes I’ll be tempted to go with a completely crazy and out-there scene, even though, in the current terms of my story, it doesn’t make sense. Turns out it’s almost always better to go with that impulse and to do the gnarly scene. You and the readers want to have fun and to see wild things. And you can patch in an explanation later.

Another lesson from painting is that revisions are easy. You can always paint over a fence or daub in a tentacle. It’s just paint, it’s just words.

A couple of questions about your story “The Knobby Giraffe.” Why a giraffe? And why the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s cryptic essay, The Monadology?

For many years, I kept journals, where I’d write about my thoughts and moods, and about things I’d read or see. Last year I published my Journals: 1990-2014. While editing the journals, I made notes of entries that suggested story ideas. One particular entry, from 2004, was about me being alone in a motel in the North Beach area of San Francisco, and how I’d woken up early, and I’d read the whole of Leibniz’s short book, The Monadology, while lying in bed. The Monadology is pretty close to being incomprehensible. It’s way out there. Leibniz seems to say that our universe is an assemblage of “monads” which reflect each other, and each monad has the whole world inside it. And, naturally, it struck me that an idea this crazy ought to be used in an SF story. And—here’s the pro surrealist-in-action part—as soon as I thought of that, I immediately thought that each monad should resemble a knobby giraffe. With brindle patches on it. A zap from the muse. Those little black antlers on a giraffe, they’re like joysticks, see, and you could wiggle them to control the appearance of the world. The knobby giraffe! Very clear in my mind.

So, okay, I’d written this journal entry in 2004, and I came across it again in 2014, and a year later I found a way to put that image and the Monadology rap into the heart of an SF story. I often start with a cool image or situation, and I grow a story outwards from there, filling in the gaps with transreal story cubes.

I was so surprised by this story’s happy ending! Messing with reality in this way never works out well, we’ve been taught that in stories time and time again! Were you surprised by the ending when you got there? Was breaking the standard expectations part of your plan all along?

I think it might be easier to write a sad ending than a happy one. Sad or meh endings are a cultural default. People think a downer ending is tough, and hard, and realistic, and it’s bravely facing facts. So when you write a happy ending, you have to do it with the right touch, or people might think you’re corny or weak. But if you nail a happy ending, people like it. I almost always give my novels happy endings. People already know that life’s a bummer. So why rub that in their faces? We’re talking about escape literature, friends. Fairy tales. Entertainments.

How has working with other writers affected you? You edited thirteen issues of the webzine Flurb, you’ve taught a few writing classes, and you’ve collaborated on about twenty-five stories with other authors.

It was fun editing Flurb and being able to help other writers get into print. And interesting to be on the other side of the table—looking dispassionately at stories and making suggestions about how they could work better. But when you teach a workshop instead of editing a magazine, the students tend not to take your advice. It’s not like you’re going to pay them or get them into print. Why should they listen to you? They might feel like they wrote the story once, and that’s enough. Even so, it helps me to try and tell them how a story could work.

The most writing feedback I get is when I collaborate on a story with someone. There’s different ways of doing this. The easiest is if you just take turns, adding a thousand or a couple of thousand words at a time, and then you’re done. I learn from closely observing how the other writer bends the story and develops the characters.

Sometimes collaborating is harder—like with Bruce Sterling. Over the years, I wrote nine stories with him. Rather than just adding new stuff when it’s his turn, Bruce tends to go back and revise what I’ve already written. And then I have to think about his changes, and possibly even be angry about them. But in the end the stories always work out, and I learn a certain amount from the ordeals, like about tightening and cutting. We recently published the Bruce and Rudy stories as a collection called Transreal Cyberpunk. The transreal aspect of the book is that each of the stories has two characters, and the characters are always based on Bruce and me, although in different ways from story to story.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been writing on a novel for a little over a year. Million Mile Road Trip. It’s about three high-school kids driving their car really far on a giant flat world. I like road trips, and I have some cool aliens, and we’ve got a war against the flying saucers. Lots of wonder, it’s funny in spots. I’m slanting the book so it could be viewed as a YA novel, but it could work equally well as adult SF.

I’m not sure if I can sell a novel to a big commercial publisher anymore. Over the years I sold twenty novels to the big houses, but somehow I’ve been edged out of that scene. And I tend not to want to bother with the small indie houses. So these days my default option is to run a Kickstarter to get the equivalent of a decent book advance, and then I self-publish in ebook, paperback and hardback via my Transreal Books. I’ve learned how to make it work. I’m still not ready to quit. Writing makes me happy.

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: Matthew Bailey

Laurel Amberdine | 763 words

What was the first thing you knew about “The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel,” before you began drafting it?

There’s a line in the story that mentions having a birth plan. When my wife was pregnant with our third child, she did a ton of research and created a birth plan of her own, which her doctor promptly ignored. I was annoyed at how dismissive certain medical professionals were about her questions and concerns, and that emotion helped prompt the story. So I suppose the first thing I knew was that the main character, the mother-to-be of an entirely new form of life, wasn’t just going to have to deal with the physical and emotional implications of being pregnant. She would also have to deal with being marginalized and dismissed by the powers that be.

I love it when characters empower themselves, so that was always the ultimate destination for this story’s protagonist, even before I started writing about her.

Using second person is a bit risky, because the reader might not be able to immerse themselves in a character dissimilar to them, but you made it work with a pregnant woman giving birth to a hybrid/alien baby! Can you talk about what influenced that decision?

You’re right—it is a bit risky! But in this case, two things influenced my decision. First, the story was inspired by my wife, after I witnessed the incredible ordeal that she went through during pregnancy. So in a sense, the story is sort of a love letter to her. It’s also an ode to my mother, who endured similar trials. The protagonist is sort of a composite of them both, so in my mind, I was almost addressing them directly.

The second reason is because I wanted the story to have a sense of immediacy, as if both the reader and the main character are experiencing all this right now. I imagine pregnancy feels incredibly arduous, but in a strange way, frighteningly brief compared to what comes afterward. I wanted to capture that feeling, and I felt the second person POV helped create the effect I was going for.

What was the biggest challenge in writing this story?

I think the most difficult thing was creating a believable universe in a few thousand words, in a story that took place in—but was emphatically not about—that universe. In other words, while the story technically takes place in our own universe, it’s a universe very different than the one we know today, because making first contact with intelligent life would likely change a lot of things. Politics, religion, culture, technology, all of it would be affected. So in this story, the biggest challenge was alluding to all those changes in a way that enriched but didn’t obstruct the central plot.

What is your process for writing a short story? Do you plan first, get critiques, revise afterwards?

A lot of writers seem to be either outliners or “free-writers,” but like the protagonist’s baby, I’m a hybrid. I usually start with a basic plot, character, and/or idea in mind and just start writing. After a little bit, I can usually tell that a lot of new avenues for development have opened up. But which ones are worth exploring, and which are dead ends? That’s when I stop free-writing and start outlining, so I can proceed in a more controlled, organized manner. If I get stuck, I’ll start free-writing again to get the creative juices flowing, then outline again if necessary. Rinse and repeat.

Once I have a complete draft done, I’ll send it to some people for critiquing and either make revisions or throw the whole thing into the fire out of despair. (After saving a copy to my hard drive, of course. You never know when you can raise a story from the dead.)

What are you working on lately?

I’ve really fallen in love with short fiction over the past couple years. I recently sold a piece called “Survival of the Fittest” to Daily Science Fiction, and I have several other stories that I’m trying to find a home for. I’ve also written a science fiction novel called A Call for All Demons. I’ve just started querying agents, so wish me luck!

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: Ken Scholes

Sandra Odell | 3116 words

“Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise” opens with a riot of color and activity that immediately hooks the reader, promising beauty and mystery in the story to come. Some writers are often afraid to open a story with vibrant images and settings. In your opinion, what makes a great opening scene?

Thank you! I wrote this one back in 2005 when I was starting to turn some significant corners in my craft and it showed with “Of Metal Men . . .” It was my first professional sale after Writers of the Future, and most of the other stories I wrote at that time landed in good markets. I had about a dozen small press sales under my belt with stories that were carefully written with clever opening lines that worked well enough. But once my storytelling muscles had some practice, I started trying out different kinds of stories and different kinds of openings. I was tackling alternate history, literary fantasy, and magic realism pieces that opened with “historical” quotes or bits of lovely language or just matter-of-fact narrative introducing a character and their problem.

But this story was a bizarre blend of magic and science that didn’t apologize for itself and assumed everyone was on board with the imposed world. And it opened with an image, though it took seeing Allen Douglas’ painting of Isaak for me to truly feel the power of it: A metal man found weeping in a crater by Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts and a story about an unlikely ally in a king who want to replace some of what that act of terror had taken from the world. When I saw the painting, the 9/11 influence of it all struck me and that experience ultimately led to the birth of The Psalms of Isaak, which fully incorporates this story in the early chapters of the first volume, Lamentation.

I think there are a lot of great ways to open a story. Danger, mystery, and wonder seem to be the three big hooks that work for me as a consumer of story. And I count literary prowess under wonder—sometimes, the beauty of the lines is able to pull me in by creating a sense of wonder all its own. Show me a character in trouble, or set up a scene full of questions that get me immediately engaged, or show me something magnificently evoked with words, and I’ll stay the course. I think the key words here are engage and evoke. Often, we’d rather explain. But good storytelling, for me, is like crowding a bunch of people onto a rusty tour bus and driving them through Imagination Forest. Rather than explain what they’re seeing, hit the potholes, drive under the waterfalls, get stuck in the mud and invite them to hop out and help push. Not just at the front, but all the way through. If they have the vicarious experience we’re hoping they’ll have, they’ll get back on the next bus for another ride to Storyland.

Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind the story?

Absolutely! The first snippet of this showed up in a bit of a writing experiment I was doing. I had just written “The Santaman Cycle”—a 900-word story that Jay Lake said was one of the shortest epics he’d read—and was playing with more language. I had a line in my head that wouldn’t go away and I wrote it down: “Rudolfo rode to Glimmerglam in the Age of Laughing Madness.” There was more—I have it somewhere—but this was the only bit that stuck.

A few months later, I saw that there was a market with a call out for stories featuring a mechanical oddity, and that name, Rudolfo, was still in mind. And I had that opening image—a mechanical man weeping in a crater in the smoldering ruins of the world’s most important city. The story unfolded for me as I wrote it, doing most of my words in a Big Time Hero sandwich shop in downtown Portland on lunch breaks from my day job at the time. I had no idea why I was writing it beyond the market I was leaning toward, but Leroy, my inner redneck muse, knew I was processing some big things. Not just the events around 9/11 four years earlier and its impact upon the world, but also the loss of my stepfather and my Mom’s failing health. My subconscious was already weaving together a tale of loss from the raw materials of life mixed up with some of my favorite trappings of genre.

I’ve always been a sucker for a good mechanical man story going back to The Wizard of Oz. And one of my first and favorite SF books—The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey—carried that forward. Followed soon after by C3P0 and R2D2 when Star Wars showed up. And there was Twiki in Buck Rogers. Later on, I was wowed by “The Bicentennial Man,” Bladerunner (and the novel it was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and AI. Isaak is certainly a hat-tip to the metal men before him, and it’s been suggested that maybe I subconsciously named him for Asimov, though I was actually aiming for the Old Testament character—a name that means laughter for a robot found weeping. Of course, if you go on to read Lamentation, you’ll learn why the name was important to Rudolfo.

Jin Li Tam was a tip of the hat to my wife, Jen, who is just a few inches over five feet tall. I’m about a foot taller. For the purposes of this story, I reversed our heights and made Jin Li Tam taller and Rudolfo shorter. And of course, when I wrote the story, I had no idea that I would later turn her into one of the main characters in a series that will land at five books and 750,000 words over a decade of my life. The character here—like Sethbert, Gregoric, and the others—is just backdrop and set-dressing for Rudolfo and Isaak’s story to take place around. But of course, Jin came to life for me once I started writing in her POV, and she’s taken me on quite a journey. You really have no idea from her single scene in this story that she is far more than Sethbert’s consort—she is actually part of a powerful banking and intelligence gathering family, House Li Tam, and is doing her House’s work in the Named Lands much like Bond serves Her Majesty.

I think it took me a few weeks to finish this story, and while I did, the market I was writing for closed to submissions a little ahead of schedule. So I was left with this unusual story to find a home for. And funny thing, despite this story growing up to change my life in pretty big ways, I never imagined that it would be as popular as it was or take me into such vast project. I think it bounced from one or two of the other markets before Doug Cohen pulled it from the Realms of Fantasy slush pile and sent it up to Shawna McCarthy. They ran it in 2006 with amazing art from Allen Douglas.

Imagine my delight to see the story coming out now in Lightspeed one long and very interesting decade later! And just as I’m wrapping up the series that Rudolfo and Isaak inspired.

Rudolfo is a pure delight. A dash of high fantasy, a smidge of faerie tale, a pinch of dashing rogue, he wears the story like a fine cloak made just for him. He fills every scene, yet for all his skill and flair, he never loses that spark of humanity. Relatable characters, even those larger than life, are vital to a story. Were there particular characters that captured your imagination as a boy? Anyone who fired your sense of wonder?

I’m so glad all of that carried over into him. In my mind, I saw this king full of ruthlessness, charm, and compassion combined with a zest for life faced with the mystery of a desolated city and a weeping robot. He just kind of showed up and announced that he was Rudolfo, Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses and General of the Wandering Army, and he’s now been hanging around in my brain for eleven years.

Just like Isaak comes together from a lifetime of metal men that had goshwowed me, Rudolfo was frankensteined out of lots of characters that have influenced me and my hungry muse over the years, both with and without my conscious awareness. The truth is, it can sometimes be years before I see the various influences that show up in a project. But they are always there.

First and foremost, we may not see the caped crusader on the surface of Rudolfo, but certainly Bruce Wayne—orphan boy shaped by tragedy into a great detective and crime fighter—was an influence as one of my earliest heroes. Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Gray Mouser, Elric, and any Errol Flynn role were also characters that grabbed me all the way back into childhood and added their own influence to Rudolfo. The line “that damned Rudolfo to those I’ve bested in battle or in bed” was a nod to “that damned infernal pimpernel.” I wasn’t nearly as aware of it when I was writing the short story. My relationship with Rudolfo is now ten years older and five novels deeper so it’s harder to just see him here at the beginning of his journey without seeing the rest of it. But the story started with him, and I knew, once I realized it was a much bigger story, that it would also end with him.

And of course, there were so many other types of characters that wowed me—still wow me. The orphan of prophecy. Dreaming kings or queens. Displaced characters facing new worlds. Anyone living in Apocalypse. The homages and amalgamations of those types of characters don’t seem to leak into my short fiction very often in such a clear way as Rudolfo did. But they have certainly shown up all over the series with the hidden pope, the dreaming queen, the courtesan spy, the waste guide. And at the end of the day, I write the kind of stories I like to read . . . about people who are larger than my life and facing far scarier problems than mine.

From Fred Saberhagen to Larry Niven to Terry Brooks, the conceit of the powers of the past, whether technology or magic, evolving to become the magic of the current day is familiar to many readers. Here, the ancient works of Xhum Y’zir have leveled a city, and the Androfrancine Order write programs to run their mechoservitors. What other wonders of the past do you see having influenced the world you created?

This is a fantastic question. Saberhagen, Niven, Brooks, and Andre Norton, Clark Ashton Smith, and Sterling Lanier. All of these writers and more fed my muse, and when I wrote “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise,” I had no idea that’s what I was doing. I was hinting at something—and suggesting a blend of fantasy and science fiction—but because it was a “one-off” short story, I had no notion what it really was and didn’t need to know. I try to write strictly from the POV of my characters and Rudolfo doesn’t sit around and wonder about how his world came to be. He has a mythology, a history, a tradition that tells him and he accepts it. We don’t see much of it in this story, but Rudolfo’s is a world of moon wizards living in towers and ghosts in the sea and magicks that will heal you or hide you or make you strong, all taken from the ground. And darker magicks taken from blood that will do even more. And metal sparrows from the moon that can bear messages further, farther, and faster than Rudolfo’s raven. And steam-powered mechoservitors.

I wasn’t thinking about it when I wrote the short story, but by the time I was working on Lamentation in 2006, I realized I was dealing with Clarke’s Third Law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Of course, this was all evolving for me, too. And each new volume has surprised me with more as Leroy unpacks parts of this story that I just never saw coming when I started it all eleven years ago.

Of course, there’s so much more, but I’d hate to spoil it if folks decide they want to explore Isaak and Rudolfo’s world further in the series.

You have been very open about your struggles with PTSD and how it affects your life and ability to write. How do you feel your experiences have affected your writing itself?

Yes, Jay (Lake) taught me that openness in how many lives he touched by sharing his cancer experiences. So I try to be transparent in the hopes that it will take away some of the stigma and get people the help they need. The PTSD has definitely not only affected me, but has in many ways shaped me—I had it fully in place while my personality was developing as a small child. And I’ve discovered, as I’ve spent time with it and learned from it, that there are gifts PTSD brought to me. One of them is the ability to solve complex problems—which really serves storytelling well, since stories are really just characters solving problems. So that’s one aspect of how it’s affected my writing. There is a level of hypervigilance and perfectionism, too, that can come with PTSD that I’m experiencing less now, but as I was developing my craft, those areas of intense focus served me well.

Another area it’s impacted my writing is that it’s given me a rich well of experience to draw from. It’s a bit uncanny that I tackled a series about how trauma and loss shapes us and our world . . . only to then experience more concentrated loss than I’d ever seen in such close proximity. And if I can understand something, I can write it effectively. If I can feel it, I can express it in my words. Writing characters who have been scarred and changed by trauma comes easily to me.

And the sword goes both ways. PTSD has impacted my writing, but my writing has also impacted my PTSD. It gives me a coping and processing tool like no other, with deep lines into my subconscious mind where the stuff of dreams bubbles up. Scooping out stories from that well helps me understand myself and process the soup of who I am. Bradbury said it best: “[You must] stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” It’s been hard learning the patience to wait until my brain is ready to use that tool but once it is, I discover a lot about what is going on beneath the hood . . . all while telling stories.

I try to say this anytime it comes up: If you’re reading this and you or someone you love is struggling with PTSD, reach out to someone for help and keep reaching until the help arrives. And drop me a note through my website if any of my experience with it can help.

Tell us a little about your writing process. How do you get started? Are you a pantser or a planner? Do you have a particular location where you prefer to write?

Usually, I try to get my words first thing in the day so that they’re done. Otherwise, resistance builds and other things start looking more exciting—like dishes and organizing my paperclip collection and weighing the cat. Back when I had a day job, “first thing” was around three a.m. These days, with me working from home and Daddying, I don’t sit down until closer to eight a.m. after the kids have gone to school. And now, exercise has trumped writing as my “first thing.” I used to use a stationary bike, but I’ve shifted to walking. That external stimuli helps get my brain going and it’s easier on my knees.

I can write anywhere as long as I am not around people I would rather spend time with (as opposed to the ones in my head). And I especially don’t tend to write well around other writers. If I’m with writers, I will want to talk about writing rather than write. So if I really want to find words, I don’t do writing dates or retreats, typically. If I have my backpack and my headphones and my laptop, I can find my words. I enjoy writing in diners and bars to mix things up or if I’m on the road. But when I’m at home, I write in the Den of Ken, a room full of books and treasures I’ve picked up along the way. The one thing I need is music. And if I’m stuck, then I need Simon and Garfunkel. Or some protein.

I try to be heuristic in my process, letting it evolve and adapt as I go. And I’m a hybrid—I do a little planning and a little pantsing, using three-act structure and some other tricks to shape the story’s bones before laying on meat and muscle. I tend to write . . . then sit and think between the acts . . . then write some more. And I tend to plan my short stories out more than my novels, but I think that’s because I have more experience with short stories and the moving parts come together faster for me. I’m hoping that as I become more aware of exactly how I write novels, I will develop more planning skills for them. And of course, now that I’m learning to write without the PTSD monkeys screaming in my ear, there’s no telling what new tricks I might pick up as I get back to work.

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: Kristine Smith

Moshe Siegel | 1269 words

Can you brief us on the genesis of the Jani Kilian novels?

Mining memory here, given that I started writing the book that became Code of Conduct in the early ’90s.

I always begin with a character. Years before I started writing with the intent to publish, I noodled off and on with the idea of a female revolutionary fighting on the anti-government side of a civil war. She was younger, twenty-ish, a flashpoint—the government wanted to capture her because they knew it would demoralize the rebels. Details changed as the story developed. I aged her up, gave her a dicey background. Instead of an insurgent, I made her a military officer, but one who had trouble fitting in a military system. But I also made her a trailblazer with respect to her education and the fact that she was a working class woman who made good in a class conscious society. Then she lost it all, and in such a way that she could never get it back.

I felt that because of the changes she was undergoing, personally and physically, she could never remain in the background to function as a spy or a mercenary. There would be issues of trust, concerns about her loyalties. Curiosity about her. Hers would be a very public arc. She would be looked to as a leader, whether she wanted to be or not.

As for Jani Kilian’s world, I built it so that it challenged her at every turn, with an alien race whose various cultures smashed against ours like storm seas against a rocky shore.

How does your novella, “Incident on a Small Colony,” fit into the series chronology? How did a novella set in the novel series’ universe come to be?

“Incident” takes place about five years after Jani Kilian fled the idomeni homeworld of Shèrá, which makes it about thirteen years prior to the start of Code of Conduct, the first book in the series. It’s her “lost years” in microcosm.

The work came about in 2005, when Eric Flint asked me to contribute a story to Baen’s Universe. I had always wanted to write a Jani story that was more of a straightforward adventure, with less emphasis on espionage, politics, and the sociological skirmishes between human beings and the alien idomeni. The Jani in “Incident” is solely focused on the day-to-day challenges of surviving and avoiding capture by the Commonwealth Service. A little downtime is all she’s looking for, a chance to earn a few badly-needed dollars, and catch her breath. Yet even though she fears discovery and is reluctant to get involved in a troubling situation, she’s unable to ignore a cry for help.

The technology in this novella is described with convincing detail, especially when Jani works on her own bio-mechanical accouterments and also when she describes the nature of document tracking (yes, you even made paperwork exciting). Is any of this speculative science based on not-so-speculative, real-world research?

Really combing through the memory banks here, but I do recall reading about information storage and the superiority of the brain compared to man-made systems. I decided that bio-based and cellular systems would predominate, whether for use in spaceship instrumentation, artificial limbs, or technology like documents readers.

As for paper, I wondered about the possibility that electronic data transfer and storage could become so readily hackable or otherwise degradable that some sort of solid, static mode of information transfer like paper could make a comeback. This paper would be made from controlled materials—parchment, chips, inks and foils, with various permutations assigned to specific tasks and document classifications—leases, deeds, bills of lading.

Some of the documents procedures were based on those I encountered during my time in the pharmaceutical industry. How to deal with entry errors. How to explain and support test results. No such thing as an erasure, and all corrections have to be explained.

The concepts of perspective and perception arise again and again in this story—reality vs. hallucination; what it means to be “human;” a friendly face hiding malice; a bully covering sympathy; etc.—were these themes that you set out to explore, or did they naturally arise in the writing?

This is a great example of a reader seeing something that the writer didn’t realize was there, because I didn’t set out to explore that at all. I’m glad to learn that you found that, though, because it fits in a story that deals with impersonation, subterfuge, and identity.

I have to credit my backbrain for so much of what winds up on the page. I worry so about resolving plot points, tying up loose ends, the main structure of the story. When I do realize that themes have developed, it’s always a surprise.

And I take it back in part. What it means to be human is one thing that I did consciously set out to explore. It’s one of the main threads in every book in the series.

Jani is caught between the lure of complacent safety and the dangers of living a free, fugitive life. Ultimately, she chooses the latter, but how close do you think she came to resigning herself to the (technically much-needed) ministrations of her “creator”? How do you think she will fare on her own, so many years out from her last augmentation maintenance “takedown”?

Jani’s relationship with her “creator,” John Shroud, is complicated and not particularly healthy. She longs for respite at times, but knows that if she succumbs to his offer of sanctuary, she’ll have a hell of a difficult time breaking out. This realization doesn’t mean that she avoids the situation—it arises several times over the course of the five-book arc, and she occasionally gives in. The problem eventually resolves, as most relationships do.

As for how Jani fares on her own over time . . . she avoids certain situations and surroundings. She skirts the edges of debilitation. At the start of Code of Conduct, she is on pretty shaky ground. Not only is her health deteriorating, but it’s doing so in ways that even the doctors who rebuilt her aren’t sure how to fix. She is the incredible ongoing experiment.

Do you have any current or upcoming work you’d like to share with us?

I’m in the process of re-releasing the first four Jani Kilian books in ebook and trade POD formats through BookView Café. Code of Conduct and Rules of Conflict are currently available through all the usual outlets; Law of Survival should be available by the time this spotlight goes live. Contact Imminent will be released in May. The last book in the series, Endgame, is available from Harper Voyager.

I also write supernatural thrillers under the name Alex Gordon. Her first release, Gideon, came out last January from Harper Voyager. The follow-up, Jericho, comes out in April.

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 | 157 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“Three Points Masculine”) and Mari Ness (“Deathlight”), along with SF reprints by Tora Greve (“The Philosopher’s Stone”) and Haris A. Durrani (“Tethered”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Seanan McGuire (“The Jaws that Bite, the Claws that Catch”) and Wole Talabi (“Wednesday’s Story”), and fantasy reprints by Elizabeth Hand (“Hungerford Bridge”) and Tim Pratt (“North Over Empty Space”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “The Plagiarist” by Hugh Howey and a novel excerpt.

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

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

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The Editors

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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

Devin Marcus

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Galen Dara

Elizabeth Leggett

Reiko Murakami

Sam Schechter

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.