TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 72, May 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, May 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

Three Points Masculine
An Owomoyela

Tethered
Haris A. Durrani

Deathlight
Mari Ness

The Philosopher’s Stone
Tora Greve

FANTASY

North Over Empty Space
Tim Pratt

The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch
Seanan McGuire

Hungerford Bridge
Elizabeth Hand

Wednesday’s Story
Wole Talabi

NOVELLA

The Plagiarist
Hugh Howey

NOVEL EXCERPTS

The Water Knife
Paolo Bacigalupi

NONFICTION

Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
Carrie Vaughn

Book Reviews: May 2016
Amal El-Mohtar

Interview: Charlie Jane Anders
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

An Owomoyela

Tim Pratt

Haris A. Durrani

Seanan McGuire

Mari Ness

Elizabeth Hand

Tora Greve

Wole Talabi

Hugh Howey

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Goñi Montes

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, May 2016

John Joseph Adams | 443 words

Welcome to issue seventy-two of Lightspeed!

This month, we have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“Three Points Masculine”) and Mari Ness (“Deathlight”), along with SF reprints by Haris A. Durrani (“Tethered”) and Tora Greve (“The Philosopher’s Stone”).

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 Tim Pratt (“North Over Empty Space”) and Elizabeth Hand (“Hungerford Bridge”).

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 Hugh Howey’s “The Plagiarist” and a new excerpt from Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, which is out in trade paperback this month, from Vintage Books.

Hugo Award Finalists Announced

We are pleased to announce that Brooke Bolander’s story for Lightspeed, “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” which was previously announced as a Nebula Award finalist, is now also a Hugo Award finalist! Lightspeed is no longer eligible in the semiprozine category (which we won the last two years), but we’re pleased to report that your humble editor has been nominated in the Best Editor, Short Form category. And last but not least, Alyssa Wong—whose story for Nightmare, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” is a finalist for both the Nebula and Stoker—is a finalist this year for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Major congrats to Brooke on the rare achievement of being nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula for the same work, and to Alyssa for netting a coveted Campbell nod in the same year she’s up for the Stoker and Nebula.

Thank you so much to all of you who nominated; you can see a full list of the other finalists at midamericon2.org.

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award Finalists Announced

We’re starting to think that “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Award Nominations” might be a good title for a story about Brooke Bolander, because we’re pleased to report that “Trail of Dead” is also a finalist for the Sturgeon Award! Congrats again to Brooke! As of press time, the Sturgeon Awards website didn’t have the finalists posted, but you can see the full list at Locus Online.

• • • •

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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: What the #@&% Is That?, 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 ten 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.

Three Points Masculine

An Owomoyela | 6030 words

I was serving in Baxon just north of Hescher, guard-dogging a queue of first responders heading into the riot zones, and John caught my eye. Her beard caught my eye. Some troublemaker flaunting the rules, I thought, or a guy sneaking in under cover of audacity, thinking the Womens Volunteer Corps was a good place to get laid. If that was the case, he was looking to get roughed up, and it was my job to oblige. I pulled her out of the line.

“License.”

Roughing someone up would’ve made my day, and my day needed making. Go figure that John stepped aside and said “Of course” in that tone people use at police, all placid and don’t shoot me. She pulled her license and handed it over—and yeah, there it was: non-transitioned male sex, last Gender Assessment Test no more than two years ago, certified female register—certified female enough for government work, right—all of it signed by a state assessor I didn’t just recognize as legit, I knew personally. The grainy photo even had her damn beard.

I thought about roughing her up for making me look a damn fool. I told myself I was better than that; even kinda believed it. “Get back in line.”

In a fair world, that’d be that.

Isaac was walking the queue, giving the pep talk, getting everyone comfy with the bulletproofs and white flags. “All our pretty little heads will be back behind our boys in uniform,” he said, and I kept my fingers on my rifle. “There’s a chance our zone might go hot; if it does, we’ll get plenty of warning, just get back on the buses and we’ll peel rubber back here. Lickety-split. Time for dinner.”

I caught up to him as we boarded the bus. For the sixteen women there were only four of us from City Guard, me looking plastic and the rest looking pale and greeny under the florescent lights. “Counting four boys in uniform right here,” I said.

Isaac looked surprised, then looked at the insignia on his chest. He grinned. “Way wrong uniform, man.”

I grunted, and pointed at John. “What’s the story here?”

“What, him? —her,” Isaac corrected. Takes more than a test and a license for some people to learn. Hand to God I don’t think Isaac believes the GATs if he looks at someone and gets his own opinion, but like the rest of us, he’ll play along because it’s law. Least, like the rest of most people, he’ll play along because it’s law. “Hell if I know. Uh, hometown somewhere up north, been working with the WVC going on six years. Career, right? Just your type.”

“Shove off,” I said, and elbowed him. He cackled and headed for his seat. I took a seat near the front and decided it didn’t matter. ’Sides, I could see or guess most of it: lily-white, unlike me. College-educated, unlike me. A girl, too, unlike me. Though half the bastards would’ve argued that, had they known.

• • • •

Hescher was a hellhole. We smelled the smoke when we rolled in, and the moment they opened the doors, it was all white tents, Corps flags, antiseptic stench, and people moaning on the ground. A guy almost shoved a handful of red-yellow-green-black triage tags into my chest before deciding I wouldn’t know a sucking chest wound from a bump on the head and shoving them at the ladies behind me.

They’d cleared out one of the big bargain stores for a medical center, and its parking lot was playing support. Place was peppered with City Guard, and one came over as soon as we led our girls off the bus. “Hey. I’m Ben Kessler, managing day dispatch and logistics here. Welcome to Camp Save Big. Any two of you got a moment?”

“I got one,” I said, and Isaac came up beside me.

“So, what’ve you got going?” Isaac asked. Ben groaned.

“Cluster attacks.” He hiked a thumb over his shoulder, and Isaac and I followed him across the lot. “We go three weeks without anyone blowing anything up and now we’ve had four bombings yesterday and today.”

“Christos,” I said, and Ben hoisted up the flap of the registration tent. We went inside.

Ben went over to the sat-fax and tapped his finger on a pile of papers. I went up and said, “What’s up?”

“Your gals signed a pretty permissive contract,” Ben said. “‘Area of greatest need,’ ‘discretionary redeployment,’ y’know.”

“So where’s our area of greatest need?” Isaac asked. Ben pistoled a finger at him.

“Here, go figure. But if it’s not too much trouble, we need someone to back up the folks at the hospital. Triage and first response. They got slammed.”

Isaac looked at me. “Hell, if that’s it, we can walk our girls over.”

“Be a dear?” Ben said, and pressed his hands together. I crossed my arms over my chest, habit-like. Isaac whacked me on the shoulder.

“We’re your angels. C’mon, we’ll pull our teams.”

Isaac turned and walked back to the buses, and Ben held out a map for me. “You’ll need this. A bunch of main roads are impassable.”

I took the map, and looked over the scrawled edits. “You’re going to make me regret wearing the injury-prev helmet instead of the smart display, aren’t you?”

“Oh, there’s a lot of regret here in Hescher,” Ben said. “If that’s all you’ve got, you’re coming out ahead.”

• • • •

John was in Isaac’s group. She didn’t look at me when we rounded our eight up, and I mostly ignored her. We just got in line and marched into the evacuation zone. I did notice she didn’t walk like a girl learned to, didn’t hold herself like a girl learned to. She might’ve had the GAT, but she was off.

Shit like that makes me check how I’m walking. Out here, no one was gonna come up and check my license, but still, it’s habit, like.

The evac zone was quiet. All these buildings, still as death—no one even looting, anymore. Plenty of people were probably displaced and angry somewhere easterly, keeping their mouths shut because you didn’t bitch at the hand that fed you and rounded you up onto government buses, and that just left this place all creeped-out empty like a ghost town. Isaac and I didn’t talk. We had our hands on our rifles, watching for revs, and the girls didn’t talk because they knew you don’t distract the guys with automatics. We went in past the empty houses, past the bombed-out school, over the recent debris that made driving impossible and walking a chore and, hand to God, but I didn’t know what the revs thought they were getting by blowing up all the empty places. With all the rubble, though, I pitied the girls and their uniform skirts. Damn glad I didn’t wear one.

We were maybe halfway to the hospital and passing office buildings when Isaac held up a hand, and we stopped and ducked down. Someone was running at us down the road.

He was yelling. “Get outta there! Get outta there!”

I took aim. I was just good enough for a hipshot—not being military I couldn’t gun the guy down, not when he was waving his hands and not a gun, but for all I knew, he had three pounds of plastic on his chest. I thumbed my rifle over to single-shot, and yelled, “Do not come closer!”

Then the office behind us blew.

I was on my face like that. This chunk of concrete hit the pavement two feet from my shoulder and crap rained down, drifting on my uniform, drumming my helmet. A lot of it was glass. A rock the size of my fist caught me in the back, another almost took a chunk out of my hand. My head was ringing when I picked myself up.

First thing that crossed my mind was That’s okay, I can go home now, ’cause that was a bomb. Ten seconds later that didn’t make sense to me, and it still doesn’t. It’s just what I thought.

I don’t remember how I got to my feet. The place was quiet. Crap wasn’t falling. The guy I’d been aiming at wasn’t running at us any more, wasn’t anywhere any more, and I looked around. The color was off. Everything was yellower, and I kept blinking and blinking, trying to make it go away, and then I caught this light coming through the buildings off west. I thought, The bastards set the city on fire. Wasn’t any smoke, though. It was the sun.

Then I thought, Shit. I’d thought no time had passed. No, I’d been down for half an hour, and my helmet fit odd—pressure and suction—like I had a head injury, and the automated aid kicked on.

And where the hell were my girls?

• • • •

Ten minutes later I worked out that my helmet radio gave up the ghost and wasn’t coming home for Christ’s Mass. The tips of my fingers were numb and I couldn’t pull the helmet for fear that I’d open up a wound, so poking at the buttons was the best I could do to fix it. My maps were safe and I should’ve headed back to drum up a search, but I had a chip on my shoulder for the guy who blew me up and I wasn’t trotting home with my tail between my legs. Mama always said pride would get me killed.

So I went deeper into the evac zone.

Sure enough, before long I started seeing people, and I had to crouch down and sneak behind dumpsters and burnt-out cars and roadblocks. I could hear them yelling to each other, pick out the ones walking with rifles—and damn, some of those rifles were better than mine.

I found the supermarket easy. It was big, with people going in and out. The entire street in front was busy with revs, six or eight at a shot, walking around on important rev business. Someone came out with a big bag of something, and they gathered up and walked away. That was an opening if I ever saw one.

The supermarket was big, the kind with doors at both ends and checkout lanes lined up all across the front. Big, and stocked enough to be Rev HQ. That made walking into it a stupid idea, and of course that’s what I did anyway. I snuck around, trying to avoid the automatic doors until I remembered there was no power to this neighborhood. The doors couldn’t give me away. I picked one, poked it to see it didn’t creak, and pushed it open.

And that’s when I decided, you know, gloves off, shoot to kill. ’Cause that’s when I saw Isaac slumped against a checkout stand, helmet off and eyes staring open, with an ugly dark gunshot blown out half his head.

• • • •

I don’t know why I didn’t throw up then. I guess it didn’t feel real, between the fuzz in my hearing and the hurt in my skull and the way I’d jumped from afternoon to evening earlier. Think I thought I was dreaming.

I saw the head rev right away, when I stopped staring at dead Isaac. At least, I saw the guy acting it up. Put his name on a bullet. He was up on one of the far stands hollering like a ringleader, and there was no way I’d be able to pick him off from the doorway I’d come in. It’s hard to get sharpshooter training when you can’t meet the army requirements for infantry. Hard to shoot with a pounding headache and blood loss, too.

They don’t teach you much in City Guard, but I got on my stomach and did an army crawl like I’d seen in the comics and practiced, back home, back in that misspent youth of mine. Went creeping back into the supermarket until I found cover, with my head pounding and everything right of my pelvis one screaming mass of ache. The guy was up on the register counter, pacing back and forth, waving his gun around like that was the only way he could make a point.

“A state which controls right and wrong, which legislates right and wrong, a state which tells us what we can and can’t do, can and can’t be, can and can’t think, is a state that has legislated our humanity!” he said.

Something like that. I got the gist: usual rev talk. Blah blah this, blah blah overthrow the government, ’cause the guys with the guns and the anger will for sure be the better choice. I crept past the shelves of cereal and the display of spoiled pears and came nearer.

“Look at this guy!”

I was close enough that I could see him reach down and grab John by the collar.

He hauled John up. “This guy is a mockery of a man!” he yelled, shaking her like a rattle. “If he decided one day to put on this dress, he would be sent to jail! It’s only when the state tells him to that he can. There is no difference! The state has fabricated right and wrong!”

I lined up my shot.

And the first shot went so wild I was lucky it didn’t take out the front door. The guy spun around and almost lost his footing, but he stayed up enough to swing his pistol and take a shot that came a lot closer to target than mine had. I ducked behind a display of Corn Crunch that wouldn’t stop a ping-pong ball, but instinct said go for cover and I did. I flipped my rifle onto automatic, ’cause it’s hard to miss on automatic, and thanked God the girls knew enough to get down.

You know. Blood splattered. Girls gasped, one of them screamed before another clapped a hand over her mouth, and I looked at John, white as a sheet and bloody. One of Isaac’s girls, but I bet they all knew what happened to Isaac. They’d been looking shell shocked before I took out that rev. I pushed off up the floor and ran to them, then dropped and just barely caught myself in a crouch. God, my head hurt. Christos, I didn’t feel right. John touched my shoulder and I shoved her away.

The sensible one, the one who stopped the other girl from screaming, said, “We need to get away from the doors.” I nodded. If no revs outside had heard us exchanging bullets, that’d be one miracle. To keep any from coming back, we’d need another.

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on. Back through.” My heart was pounding. Made my ears hurt, it was so loud, and I could feel it on my stomach. I stood up, and the store yanked sideways and shook like a dog toy. Then I was on the ground.

I was on the ground, and I was back farther in the store. I was leaning against a pile of budget toilet paper. All I could hear was my own blood.

The sensible one was crouched over me, like a bad flashback to post-op. I looked around, trying to get my bearings, saw a scatter of broken glass from a freezer case, a crumpled wrapper from a snack cake, a bottle of blackstrap molasses with its top off. Nothing made any sense. The sensible woman was pushing a water bottle to my lips. “Here. Drink this, if you can.”

I caught a glance at her nametag: Agatha, with a low service number that meant she’d signed up early. That seemed important: signed up early. She was practically shoving the bottle up my nose, so I drank. The water was warm and sugary and made my headache ten times worse, but Agatha held it through two good gulps.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m concerned that you’re losing blood. Your helmet’s gone red.”

I guess I was lucky to have the injury-prev helmet instead of the HUD.

“We have to get out of here, but I don’t think you’re going to make a walk down main street,” Agatha said. “Not before anyone comes by.”

“There was a fire escape from the second floor down into the alley. I saw it when we were being brought in,” John said. Of course John said. I should’ve said; I’d seen the damn thing when I was sneaking past, watching for revs hiding in the alleys. But I was messed up, and John and her damn beard were the ones taking charge.

God, I wished Isaac was there. But that gunshot crossed my mind, and I wanted to spew. Isaac was dead. I was the guardsman left, and I was being babied by a bunch of girls.

“Then that’s where we’ll go,” Agatha said. “Come on; everyone back this way. Move it, all of you. John . . .”

John stepped up and got me under the arm to hold me up, and I yanked away. Shoved her and stumbled right into the toilet paper. Real smooth. But I didn’t want her hands on me.

“I can stand up,” I said, when they looked at me. My face was burning, but the rest of me was cold.

Agatha looked at me. Probably going to ask if I had a problem with the gender-reassigned, but I just took my rifle, pushed myself up, and concentrated on keeping steady. Were it that easy.

“I can walk,” I told her again, and turned around and started walking.

The second floor was offices and a break room, and that’s where we headed. Longest stair climb of my life. But with the shooting over and the adrenaline quieting down, it wasn’t as bad—about as bad as sneaking to the store in the first place. We went into the break room, where the revs had left bags of trash and bowls from instant meals, empty bottles of alcohol, and a map of the city tacked up on the walls. Agatha turned up her nose. “Well, I suppose we know where they’ve been spending their time.”

John went to the window and pushed it open. I went up to take a look, see if I needed to secure the alley below.

We weren’t far up, and the fire escape was a good one—wasn’t rickety or anything. But I looked and I heard myself say “Shit,” and then I was back inside the window, on my knees, spewing lunch and molasses water into a trashcan full of old receipts. Even after everything came up, I kept heaving until the vise in my head let go. My heart started pounding again.

I wasn’t going to get out of there.

I swallowed, and wished I hadn’t. Looked back at the girls, and saw John and Agatha kneeling near me. Before they could say anything I told them, “Look, it’s about five blocks to the barricades, and none of you look like revs. Just get down the side and go for it. Keep your hands up and no one’s gonna shoot you. Can you do that?”

“I’ll see them through,” Agatha said, then frowned. “Here; you’d better give me your sidearm.”

“What?” I squinted until she focused back into one solid person instead of two blurry ones. “I will get my ass raked over the coals if I hand a pistol to someone who’s never had gun training. There must be ten different laws against that.”

“Tell them I stole it off you while you were throwing up,” Agatha said. “Or do you want us just to sing if a rioter comes by?”

I squinted at her. “What?”

“It’s what you do for bears,” John said.

Fancy educated bastard. I groaned and put my head back. “Fine. Take it.” I was just gonna close my eyes. And then I felt myself falling, in the back of my head, like all that darkness under my eyelids was some river, with an undertow, and I’d sink down through. Then I felt hot hands on my face and John pried open my eyes.

There she was, staring me in the face and yammering on about a concussion and hyposomething. I tried to wave her off like a horsefly. Then she said, “We talked it over. I’m going to stay with you.”

No idea when they’d had time to talk it over. I laughed in John’s face. “Why, ’cause you’re the butch?”

“Because Agatha has more important things to do,” John said, and I thought, Yeah, like my job.

“Lemme up,” I said.

“Agatha’s going to get everyone back to base,” John said. “She’s going to tell the rest of City Guard where we are, and they should be able to get someone in here to bring you out.”

What I should’ve done in the first place. “I can make it,” I said. “In my own time, yeah?”

Agatha did just what she should have: came over and crouched down and said, “Don’t be an idiot. I’ll break both your knees if you think you’re going to crawl out, pass out, and make us carry you.”

I liked her. Kinda wished she would stay with me. Not just that John torqued me, but I had a feeling Agatha could take on the entire rev mob with guts to spare.

The girls filed out the window, and I heard their feet going down the metal stairs. John went and closed the door, and turned all the lights off. Better for my head, at least. Then she came and sat by me.

“You don’t like me much,” she said.

I rubbed a sleeve across my mouth. “Does it matter?”

John sighed. “I have been accused of not playing to the spirit of the GAT.”

Were it that fucking simple.

“Give me your hand,” John said. I squinted.

“Why?”

“Medical reasons.”

I squinted a bit more, and gave her my hand.

She took it and squeezed my thumbnail. Then she took my pulse. “Well, you haven’t lost much more blood,” she said, and let go of me. “Capillary refill’s no worse than it was, and heart rate is good, considering.” She shook her head. “You really shouldn’t have come after us.”

I tried to think of something sharp to say. I was angry—angrier than I had any right to be. Tried to blame my head.

“But thank you,” John said.

Given the way the rev had been going after her—well, I know how these things go. Gender assessment gets people angry, anger gets people nasty. That’s why most of us keep our dirty little secrets under our belts and our vests. Why most of us don’t go wearing a damn beard.

That just got me feeling sick.

“What is it with you?” I asked, and looked at her. “Get a shave, put on some makeup, grow out your hair. You walk into a warzone and you come looking like that?”

“Not my style,” John said.

I looked her up and down. “How the hell did you test female?” I asked.

John sighed. “Is this the conversation we’re going to have?” she asked, like she’d had this one before.

Probably had. Probably every time someone had to talk to her. Make small talk. So, John, what’s up with your genitals? So, John, why you wanna be a girl?

Didn’t want to be a proper girl, though.

“You scored, what, a fifty-one fem, fifty masc on the GAT?” I asked. “Just enough to scrape through?”

John looked at me. “Sounds like you’re familiar with the GAT.”

“Yeah, familiar,” I said. “Took it. Tried to go army. But I got eighty-two masculine, and the goddamn military is eighty-five, min.” I flipped the convo around again, back at her. “You think you’re a man, don’t you?”

She hedged. “I don’t think it’s useful to pay too much attention to—”

“Bullshit. You think you’re a man?”

John hesitated. Looking for any way not to answer the damn question, then answered it anyway. “Yeah, I do.”

I sneered. “Thought so. Why the hell’d you do this? Getting some girls?”

She gave me this long-suffering look. “I wanted to serve. I wanted to go into care. I didn’t have the stomach for armed service. I’ve thought a lot about why it was so important, and I don’t know how to explain it—”

“So you’re a man,” I said. “You’re not just playing queer, you’re a man.”

More hedging. “Well, legally I—”

“You’re playing!” I almost shouted. I almost didn’t care who heard me. I was shaking, I couldn’t see straight. “You’re a fucking—yeah, you know what? I grew up in this. I was playing with—fuck you. Fuck you! You want to know what it’s really like?”

John got a look like she’d worked something out.

I hated that look. Straight up hated it.

“I know what—” John said, or started to say. I ran right over her. Couldn’t stop, and Christos, I wanted to.

“Ever since I was a kid. Sold my dolls on my parents’ net accounts. Thought I’d be able to get this toy gun—they forced me into a dress once and I nearly tore their eyes out, clawed up my mom’s face so bad, and every day I was sick when someone looked at my chugs or called me ma’am, and you’re fucking—”

You’re a pretender, some sick trans-v playing in women’s clothing. I wanted to say that. Didn’t even care it was the same shit people used to fling at me.

“I was a boy,” I spat out. “I had some chromosome problem but I knew what I was. This isn’t a joke.”

“It’s not a joke for me,” John said.

“No, it’s a goddamn disguise,” I said, leaned over, and puked again.

John put her hand on my back and I shoved her away. I didn’t want to be touched. I spent my whole life up until the GAT and the surgery and the moving halfway across the country to Baxon having people say I’d grow out of this, like I’d grow out of my skin, be a normal girl, settle down with a normal guy, take those hands all over me, take him crawling on top of me, take him feeling better than me, stronger than me, like I’d take the whole five-course meal of what my life was supposed to look like and feel like and be shoved down my mouth the moment I was spewed out into the world, when some doctor looked between my legs and laid down the law on me. John’s little card with her GAT score meant nothing on all that.

There’s a word for that. Dysphoria. I got my chugs lopped off, got my own little card that got me into the City Guard with the rest of the boys, got a good haircut and remedial hormones and that all helped, but not enough. The damn rev had a point: I got to be a guy because I took a test and it said I got into enough fights, played enough sports, had enough right interests and few enough wrong ones. I got to be a guy because some white-collar jackhole stamped and signed a form. I never would’ve got to be a guy just because I was a guy.

John was quiet when I was done spewing. Then she said, “The only way I could’ve gotten this job was by acting, every day, like I was something I wasn’t.”

The only way I got this job was by arguing my whole life I was who I was.

“Do you think it makes sense?” John asked.

“Yeah, funny thing is, no one ever asked me.”

John was quiet. Then she said, “I hate it.”

I looked at her. Didn’t know what she meant.

“You can feel it,” John said. “How they look at you.”

I grimaced. “Yeah,” I agreed. “How it goes sliding over you. Like they just look, and—”

“And it’s not even—it’s a look that says ‘I know what you are,’” John said. “Like they’ve figured you out.”

“And you can’t say no. You can’t—”

“You just want to say, that’s not me!”

I turned my head to look at her. Him. I looked at him. “Why do you put up with this shit?” I said. “Just get another goddamn job.”

He watched me with blank hazel eyes. “Why didn’t you just wear the goddamn dress?”

I twisted around and punched him.

I split his lip on his teeth. If I hadn’t been wearing gloves I’d’ve split my knuckle on his teeth. He jerked back and spat blood, and gave me the kind of look people give bad wiring.

After a while, I said, “Sorry.”

John wiped a glob of blood off his lips. “I had brothers,” he said. “I’ll survive.”

“I meant—” I waved a hand. “Sorry for the other stuff. Pulling you out of the queue.”

John was quiet for a moment. “You were just doing your job.”

“So was the guy who said I wasn’t man enough to be in the army.” I ground my fingernails into my fist. “I just—this is shit, what they make us do.”

Wasn’t much to say, after that.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep the headache down. John got up and walked to the window, looked out at the alley and the street. Then I heard him take breath in.

“Someone’s coming.”

I opened my eyes. “That our boys?”

John was standing way too still, and his shoulders came up toward his ears. “No,” he said.

Revs.

I pulled myself up on the windowsill, and John grabbed my arm to keep me standing. I couldn’t see—headache made it hard—but John said, “There. Three, coming for the front entrance.”

Where they’d find Isaac. They’d find that dead rev. They’d look and wonder where their hostages got to, and they’d come up here to plan. I cussed and reached for the window, and John stopped my hand.

“Are you going to make it down?”

I didn’t look out. Figured that if I went with my eyes closed, I wouldn’t lose it. “We have a choice?”

“You get sick on the stairs and they’ll hear you,” John said. “We’ll be easy marks in that alley. We can find somewhere to hide, let the guard flush them out.”

I groaned. “Where, like the girls’ bathroom?”

John shrugged. “Good as anywhere.”

He got me under the arm and we went to the door, quiet as possible. We slipped through, just as quiet, and someone yelled “Hey!” from the stairs.

John hadn’t seen the first bunch of revs to come home.

There was maybe a second where the rev just saw John’s dress, and most people leave medical types alone. Never know when one might save your bacon, even if you are on the wrong side. Then he saw me, though, and the one thing the revs hated as much as appointed officials was City Guard.

He probably put together who’d shot his pal, too.

Pride might get me killed, but twitchy kept me alive. I shot from the hip, literally, didn’t kill the guy but came close, and the other revs started shouting downstairs.

I remember thinking something about high ground. I remember my helmet fitting too tight, watching myself like a live-action movie, like I was outside my head, stumbling down the stairs and crashing down under cover behind the pulp books. I shot one guy in the chest because I don’t think he believed what was happening—damn revs talk big, but most are just city boys, low on the masc score, lower than me—and then it was on.

By the time I hit the registers I was skidding on adrenaline. Yeah, so I had stupid ideas about action and heroism, like every kid who wanted to be in the army. Thought I’d be a big hero, mowing down hostiles and never taking a hit, lighting up a cig with a big grin. Instead I was sick to my stomach and my heart was pounding too fast; I thought I’d wig out any second. The way my hands were shaking, I can’t believe I shot anyone, but I must’ve, sometime in between the shelves knocking over and the displays getting torn apart over me. I fought those revs until my magazine was empty, not that it took more than a minute at that, and that’s when the boys in uniform came and rescued me.

• • • •

I can’t remember the trip back to Camp Save Big. I know I didn’t make it on my own power. Mostly I remember the bit before I woke up, swimming in that big back-of-the-eyelid river, up and down until I broke the surface.

Didn’t wake in any proper hospital. This was where they put the special projects, I guess. I could feel a catheter in, and my stomach dropped three feet. All I could think was Shit. All I could think was, Cover blown. People aren’t in the habit of asking after your privates unless they knew you took a reassessment, and I’d been liking that no one here knew. No one asks to see your license if you pass yourself off. If you don’t have chugs or a damn beard. Or a goddamn head injury that makes them stick a catheter in.

I bit down hard, and made fists hard, and held on to nothing until I heard a door open and guy’s voice say “Hey,” beside me.

Look up and there was John, and he reached over to take my pulse. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m your attending. I told them you might like a private room, and they gave you this one—you being the hero of the hour.”

I looked around at shelves shoved into a corner, a few warehouse pallets stacked in another corner, and decided it had been a crappy back room before becoming my crappy suite. Then what he said hit me. “Wait there. Hero?”

“Hero of the battle of Fresh Food Mart,” John said. “Save the day. Get the girl. You know, if you want her.”

I gave him a funny look, and he burst out laughing.

“Christos, not me!”

I laughed, too. “Think I’m Agatha’s type?”

He reached down and patted my shoulder, and the funny thing was, I didn’t mind. Like, maybe it didn’t matter to his thinking that I got no bits—just like he got no girliness. We both had our dirty little secrets.

“Tell you what, though. That’s got to be worth three points masculine on the GAT.”

“Not unless they hand me a medal over it.” I groaned. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather get treatment than none and I was glad that my head didn’t hurt, but I wanted out of that bed, out of that hospital gown that fell down between my legs, out of just lying there helpless and feeling exposed to the world. John looked at his fingers.

“Not fair, is it?”

Yeah, and we both knew without asking. “Shit deal,” I said. “So what do we do?”

John shrugged. “Keep going,” he said. “Things have to change sometime.”

I looked at him. “You sound like a rev.” That talk about things changing, how unjust it all was. Hell, I guess I sounded like one, too, in my head, but I knew I wasn’t, and I don’t think John was either. Just two guys in bad positions.

“Yeah, well. They’re wrong about a lot, but they’re not wrong about this.” John shrugged, and stood up. “I’ve got patients. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck on your rounds.”

He went, and I lay back and listened to the painkillers swirling in my veins. The door pulled open, and I didn’t hear it shut. I looked.

“If I have any say in it, I’ll get you that medal,” John said.

The door swung closed behind him.

©2016 by An Owomoyela. | Art by Goñi Montes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests.  An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between.  Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

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

Tethered

Haris A. Durrani | 7700 words

“Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris.”

— Isaac Asimov

“The vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution. It must be so.”

— Prince Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia

In 1978, NASA astrophysicist Donald J. Kessler predicted that the quantity of artificial satellites orbiting Earth would reach a critical limit, after which collisions became inevitable. One satellite would strike another at the dangerous speeds of Earth orbit—seven, eight kilometers per second—and the two would break into hundreds of pieces. These pieces would in turn collide with other satellites, generating a chain reaction of impact and debris. By some point, Kessler proposed, this orbiting shell of garbage would render spaceflight difficult, if not impossible.

• • • •

Charlie and Kalima receive the transmission at 2100 hours. Their junkship is hanging in the old graveyard orbits, floating among the decommissioned satellites from pre-Kessler—the ones routinely deposited there in high orbit twenty years back, before the UN Security Council discovered it was an inefficient strategy, a strategy which only worked in the short run because it was only cheap in the short run.

It’s the long run now.

Charlie drops their junkship toward the sea of debris which envelopes medium orbit beneath. The sun hasn’t yet covered this side of Earth, but it’s at just the right angle so the orbiting trash lights in yellow twinkles above the shaded planet below. The sea of garbage glitters like a limitless city blinking through the darkest time of night.

“It’s a corporate run,” Charlie says, hands on his chair’s dashboard. He’s short, stocky, with big eyes draped in shade.

Kalima shrugs. Her hair floats around her like rings around a planet, only black and built of flowing tendrils. As the junkship dives, the tendrils shoot behind her like the backend of a lightless comet’s tail.

“So?”

“I don’t like it.”

“The hell you don’t, big guy.”

Charlie shakes his head.

He activates the junkship’s external magnetic fields, and a buzzing trembles from the outside in. He deploys blocks of foam around the shuttle’s flight path; they bubble outward with a distant, viscous sizzle. Ahead, debris hits the foam, passes through at a manageable velocity, and then runs against the junkship’s B-fields. The debris breaks away as the fields thrust forward, Moses’ magnetic staff parting a sea of polluted vacuum. Anything antimagnetic ricochets away as its magnetic companions, which constitute the majority of the trash, bounce against it.

Several pieces of debris have enough momentum to break the safeguards, but by the time those shards reach the hull of the junkship they’ve been slowed to the point where they won’t do more than a scratch. The smallest bits reach higher speeds—high enough they vaporize on impact. They pelt the iron-plated sides of the junkship like frantic deep-sea creatures rapping against a submarine.

As Charlie navigates the junkship between the foam and the thicker clouds of churning trash, Kalima ties her hair into a bun. She’s strong enough to move her arms against the junkship’s Earthward inertia, to reach forward, up, and around to her nape. She is a tall, slender woman bathed in mahogany skin.

Charlie’s eyes are fixed ahead, but he steals a glance her way. His muscles are tight at the armchair controls.

“You’re supposed to cut your hair, Kal. Safety regulation.”

“I know.” She smiles. “No one’s watching, right? They don’t give a shit. We’re garbage men, Charlie. Freaking garbage men.”

He shakes his head again. “I guess.”

“We’re chums.”

“Sure, Kal. Sure.”

She finishes doing up her hair and, still fighting the junkship’s forward movement, punches him roughly in the shoulder. She grins.

“Ask NASA—well, not NASA. Not anymore.” She bites her bottom lip. “Ask the Security Council. Ask Kradys. They’ll tell you, between the lines. They’ll tell you what we are to them.”

“What, Kal?”

Charlie guns the junkship through the maze of debris. The garbage is loose here—safer in passage. He can see the clarity of low orbit a kilometer down; it’s been getting smaller down there, despite the Kessler Initiatives—despite the work Charlie and Kalima and all the other garbage men do for Kradys and the Security Council. The motives are less humanitarian than they are PR stunts. No doubt, diplomacy in space means a lot of things—and where there is diplomacy, there is war.

“What are we to them?” Charlie plays along.

“Charlie, we’re pawns.” Kalima laughs coldly.

The last kilometer is spent in silence. They listen to the buzzing electromagnetic fields, to the bits of undeflected debris raining against the hull, and to life support’s asthmatic rasp as it maintains the pressure and recycles the oh-two. Kalima’s perfume, palpable and dark as empty vacuum, fills her side of the cockpit. Charlie’s sweat reeks through the filtered air.

Finally they are out the other side, down the foam-bordered, B-field tunnel the junkship has wedged through the debris. Behind, the foam separates into tiny marbles of liquid. The marbles burst into an almost immaterial vapor.

Charlie settles the junkship at a stable orbit above the satellite they’ve been sent to decommission manually. He switches off the B-fields so they won’t interfere with EVA.

“We’re here.”

She shrugs. “No kidding.”

Manual decommission is a rare job—usually unnecessary at a time when every satellite is sent into orbit with ready-made Lorentz tethers to unspool once the machine is no longer of use, dragging the “Zombie satellite” into atmospheric burn. Tethers are controlled via radio, but apparently this Zombie is so defunct it won’t respond to wireless imperatives from the ground.

That almost never happens.

The junkship hovers over the satellite below—like two creatures in their first encounter, discovering each other for the first time, standing apart. The Zombie’s solar panels stretch obliquely from its sides, catching the rays of sun that trickle around Earth’s thick horizon. Antennae, hatchways, and silver rungs are splotched across the grayish hull, from which tiny lights blink green and red like distant stars.

“I don’t know, Kal,” Charlie says at last.

“You don’t know your ass. We need the money. I’m not waiting another two years out here.” She looks at him. “You know we need the money.”

She reaches beneath her seat. Her hand emerges with a pouch of Dr. Pepper. She snaps open the tip, pops out three bubbles of wriggling brown, opens her mouth, and sticks out her tongue. She swallows them one by one.

“Kal,” Charlie protests, steadying the junkship, matching pace with the orbit of the satellite below.

“I’ll be fine, big guy.” She unstraps herself and floats toward the exit.

“Just—”

“Hm?” Kalima stops.

“Stay alive for the wedding.”

“Will do.” She pushes forward again, grins, turns. “I do.”

“Shut up,” Charlie retorts as she exits for the departure bay. He moves the junkship closer to the satellite, preparing the docking arms. His mouth opens, closes, and then—“Yeah, me too.”

Near the airlock, Kalima can hear his whisper echo into the com. She giggles to her reflection in the EMU.

• • • •

They first met August 9, 2065 on Flight 604, when the microscopic speck of debris shot Rami Pasha through the head. They fell in love at the memorial service banquet.

Flight 604 was a standard junkship task in the relative safety of the graveyard orbits. The graveyard program had been so ephemeral that crashes were infrequent there.

This satellite was a twenty-year-old European deep space telescope, a Zombie with heat-reflecting gold foil that shone brightly under the sun’s gaze. The European Space Agency wanted some archived data files, in addition to their run-down telescope’s expensive gold foil, before the Kessler Initiatives’ garbage men—Kalima, her brother Rami, and Charlie—sent the Zombie into atmospheric burn.

While Charlie docked their junkship against the decommissioned satellite, Kalima and Rami donned their EMUs, hooked up to the junkship’s mechanical arms, and went out for EVA. Kalima booted the Zombie’s systems and extracted the data, channeling it through her safety tether back to the junkship’s archives.

Rami clambered from his mechanical arm and went rung by rung to the protruding tube which dominated the body of the European telescope. He began to snap away the gold foil, roll it up, and strap it bit by bit to his mechanical arm.

Once done, he ambled around the Zombie’s bulk with a Lorentz tether spool chained to his utility belt. He undid his own safety tether—it was too short for the climb around this massive fossil of a satellite—and said he’d be in and out, no trouble.

He went beneath the Zombie, snapped in the Lorentz tether spool, and switched it on. All the satellite would need was a push Earthward, someone to wirelessly unspool the tether, and, eventually, it would disintegrate in the atmosphere—one more piece of trash eliminated from the busy mess which had hindered orbital activity, lunar missions, and outgoing probes for three-and-a-half decades.

Rami made his way back around the belly of the satellite, emerging at the bend, when a sharp click erupted from his com.

A red needle trailed from the front of his visor like a long, bloody arrow. It angled down and to his right, exiting from somewhere near his jaw. As the blood trickled away, the droplets froze in vacuum.

A microscopic crumb of trash, likely a wanderer from the distant medium orbit debris below, had pierced through Rami Pasha’s skull.

Two meters away, Kalima saw it first. She floated still, clutching loosely to a rung.

Charlie called down from the junkship, questioning the delay, and stopped.

“Get back in the shuttle, Miss Pasha,” he warned. “Get back in the shuttle.” There could be other, unaccounted for, debris.

Silently, Kalima hooked into her mechanical arm. She maneuvered it to the junkship, watching Rami’s suit float toward the medium orbit debris.

Charlie detached the junkship from the Zombie and nudged the ancient telescope down. His jaw clenched. The tendons in his forearms pulled like steel cables as he managed the junkship’s passage with rigid, jerking movements.

Once a safe distance away, he set the shuttle in cruise and pushed down the ship tunnels swathed in tangled wires and mazelike pipes.

He met Kalima in the airlock, where she floated, balled up, tearless, by the window. Charlie looked away. He should have deployed safety foam before EVA, should have played it safer than he’d thought necessary.

She’d only managed to undo half her EMU. She stared as her brother’s suited body fell into medium orbit, where the debris began to tear him apart. He thrashed like a body drowned in the Amazon River, ripped to shreds as if by a swarm of crazy-eyed piranhas straight out of a B-grade horror movie.

By the time the body got out the other end in the debris-clouded distance, there wasn’t much of a body to speak of—only shreds of flesh and bits of EMU suit material, barely distinguishable amongst the haze. Just another indefinite swirl of debris obstructing Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, the Zombie was also pelted by the debris of medium orbit. It made it to the other side intact though tattered.

Charlie flicked a switch, and the tether spun from its belly toward the atmosphere, picking up ions. Lorentz forces tugged against the Zombie’s orbital motion, decreasing its velocity until, hours later, the decommissioned ESA telescope would bounce across Earth’s atmosphere, eventually skidding into a slow, fiery burn which in the following months would level the machine to ash.

• • • •

On January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-107. Eighty-two seconds and twenty kilometers into the launch, a piece of thermal insulation foam the size of a suitcase fell off the shuttle and pierced its left wing at Mach 2.46.

Columbia completed 225 orbits and headed home February 1. Upon atmospheric reentry, the broken wing overheated and separated from the shuttle, which then disintegrated above Texas, leaving no survivors.

A puncture not more than twenty-five centimeters had destroyed $1.7 billion dollars worth of technology and seven lives.

• • • •

Kalima is outside the junkship now. Above is the shuttle, and above that is the debris of medium orbit swirling gray and shining in its light-specked shroud. She’s strapped into the mechanical arm, and Charlie’s got the shuttle docked to the Zombie below. Kalima nudges the arm forward. It extends outward around itself, like a fire escape.

Charlie’s voice sputters into her ears. “Be careful, Kal. We’re out of safety foam.”

“Relax, big guy. I got this.” Kalima stretches forward inside her helmet and bites out of the Twix bar beneath her chin. She chews, swallows, then sips the Dr. Pepper from its tube. None of it is regulation.

Soon she’s almost at the Zombie’s electronics-mottled surface.

“Faster, Kal.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Our time frame is an hour.” His voice is tight.

Kalima reaches the surface, snaps on her safety tether, and unbuckles from the mechanical arm.

“Why d’you think?” she asks. “They’re giving us a crapload of cash, aren’t they?”

“What?”

“We never have a time frame, Charlie. Not unless we’re about to get eaten up by a shit cloud.”

Breath hisses across the radio. “The Sartus Debris Cluster is around the bend.”

“Round the bend in an hour and forty,” Kalima says, chewing on her Twix bar. “Our time frame is shorter.”

“So?”

“It’s something secret.” She snickers. “They don’t want anyone to know.”

Charlie’s breath makes the radio crackle again. “Kal, you’re crazy.”

She smiles. “I know.”

• • • •

They fell in love at her brother’s memorial service banquet. It was a strange sort of love, if anything.

They waited in a buffet line in New York City. An international gathering. Dark suits everywhere, and black dresses like the one Kalima wore.

Adorned in green neckties and dark brown suits, Pakistani officials dotted the crowd, offering condolences to Kalima as ambassadors from the country of her birth. Pentagon military men exchanged awkward, sometimes friendly glances with these brown-skinned men and women who had only two decades ago been allies; the Central Asian pipeline through Afghanistan had changed that. The US Secretary of Defense, who had shaken hands with many of these officials twenty years ago, had insisted security allow them into the country just this one time. The Vice President of Kradys, Inc. watched from his seat as his analysts and business managers talked shop.

Charlie and Kalima were behind one another in the buffet when Kalima tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, mister,” she said.

“Mr. Monnagan,” Charlie corrected, turning.

“Big guy.” She grinned.

“Charlie is fine, Miss Pasha.” He smiled, wavering.

“Big guy,” she said again. She sipped her can of Dr. Pepper. “Wanna see a trick?”

“A . . . trick?”

“Yeah. A trick.” She grabbed his wrist. “I’ll show you.” She put down her soda and snatched a knife from the table. “Ever seen the movie Aliens?”

“No?” Charlie squinted. “Miss, I don’t think—”

“Don’t think, big guy. That’s right.” She splayed his fingers on the white tablecloth. “Don’t move an inch.”

Without giving Charlie time to react, she stabbed the knife between his fingers, down and over and down. It was flashing metal, fingers too shocked to tremble, and eyes staring from all around.

“That’s dangerous, Miss Pasha,” Charlie warned. “Miss Pasha—”

Charlie bit his tongue and reached with his free hand to seize Kalima’s wrist. She stopped, smiling, looking at him, as he slipped the knife from her fingers and placed it further down the table.

Her hands were cold and dry. His were slippery with perspiration.

The crowd murmured, then hushed. A crooked grin worked its way into Kalima’s lips. “That’s dangerous,” Charlie repeated.

She giggled.

The line shifted forward. The crowd whispered, shuffled, and returned to its somber undertones.

Charlie’s mouth opened, closed, opened. “So.”

She looked at him.

“It’s been a while.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“How’s it been, since . . . you know.”

Kalima cocked her head to the side. She reached around him to grab a plate. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” she said.

She brought the soda can to her mouth, swallowed the Dr. Pepper that dripped to her tongue, and licked her lips.

• • • •

On January 11, 2007, the Chinese executed the first successful anti-satellite missile test since the United States in 1985. The Chinese military sent a kinetic kill vehicle at eight kilometers per second into one of its own weather satellites 865 kilometers above Earth. The result was 2,317 pieces of orbital debris the size of a golf ball or larger—the greatest production of debris for any incident ever recorded up to that time.

• • • •

Half an hour later, Charlie gets a call. It’s Chinese. He doesn’t need to read the frequency—he can tell by the muffled English, as if it’s coming out a grater.

The transmission floods his headset.

“Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization? Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization?”

Charlie eyes Kalima, who is climbing over the satellite’s surface. She’s hooked the archives cable into the system, which is, surprisingly, running smoothly for a Zombie.

“Kal.”

“Huh?”

“There’s a problem.”

“Well, figure it out, right?” Her voice comes out flush—happy even. “I’m busy.” Her EMU hovers over the manual control panels set along the Zombie’s hull. She’s working, but at a leisurely pace.

“I think this is military,” Charlie says.

“Toooold ya.” Kalima’s suit twists around. Her visor gleams into the junkship’s cockpit, where Charlie’s hands tremble over the dashboard.

“Shut up.”

“Will do.” She waves and turns back to the satellite’s manual control panel.

The receiver crackles. “Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization? Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization? Respond immediately.”

“Oh, hell,” Charlie says.

“Respond immediately. Junkship 0577. Junksh—”

He hits the receiver.

“This is Junkship 0577.” His voice cracks like a high school freshman verging on adolescence. “We are under international Kessler Initiative authorization. The UN Security Council has set this satellite for decommission.”

“Decommission denied. Which country do you serve?”

Charlie scratches at his thin fuzz of hair. He’s sweating.

“Sir—” He falters. “We’re international.”

There’s a pause at the other end. Kal types away below, trying to access the Zombie’s archives for the data they’ve been commissioned to save before trashing the satellite.

“That’s weird,” she says. “I can’t get the data we need, even with the passwords Kradys provided us. I mean, it looks like they could’ve just radioed down whatever data they wanted. This Zombie’s running pretty well, you know—”

The Chinese signal gurgles into Charlie’s receiver, and he lets it override Kal’s transmission. The voice dribbles into his ears.

“Which corporation do you serve?”

He hesitates. “We are not corporate.”

“These are international transmissions, Junkship 0577.”

And thus, Charlie knows, is the implied threat—that fraud is liable to international litigation. Or worse.

“We’re international, unincorporated,” he replies. “If you would excuse me one moment, we must continue our business.” Charlie puts the receiver on hold and tunes in to Kalima.

She’s still talking away.

“Hey, Charlie? Hey! This won’t do shit, not like Kradys said it would. I think there’s been a recent program override, via radio—”

“We’re under contract, right?” Charlie interrupts. “Can’t even acknowledge?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“It’s international, secure, no issue. Solid moral ground, solid legal ground. Just incorporated is all, right? Just can’t say it. Right, Kal? Right?”

“We’re in deep shit, aren’t we?”

Charlie nods, even though she can’t see him.

“Beautiful,” Kal says. “I’ve always wanted to be in deep shit, you know? Not like we aren’t always in deep shit, hanging here in the trash heap of this orbital abyss.” She laughs. “It’s the most beautiful thing . . .”

Charlie shakes his head, severs the connection, and opens to the Chinese transmission. It’s still chattering to the junkship’s receiver.

“Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577—”

“Yes?” Charlie’s voice is small.

“That satellite has not been authorized for decommission. On this breach of international code of conduct, we would like to make it clear that our operations have a right to take any action we deem necessary unless your operations comply with our demands. Is this understood?”

The junkship roars its life systems’ pressure mods and air filters into Charlie’s ears. He slams the receiver. He doesn’t want to talk.

This satellite is no Zombie.

He knows they have weapons monitoring his junkship’s movements. Fail to follow demands, and China will consider it an act of aggression, destroy Charlie’s vessel, and, if necessary, declare war against the nation or corporation—corporation, of course—which has sponsored their assignment. But if Charlie and Kalima don’t complete their assignment once they’ve gotten this far, Kradys will fire them, lock them in prison. Might kill to eliminate witnesses to whatever is going on here.

“Shoot.” He unlocks Kalima’s frequency. “Kal.”

“What?” she screams, half charged with fury, half charged with some dark, excited, nerve-wracking energy. “You cut me off. Something’s up, ain’t it, big guy? Something’s up.”

• • • •

Forty-five minutes after reaching the satellite, Kalima has finally hacked into its control system. It’s military, Charlie tells her. It’s military, and that means it’s political.

“Damn political,” he says. “I hate politics. Hate it to hell.”

“Good for you.” She laughs.

There’s crackling silence on the other end.

“Remember 2007?” Charlie says at length. “Chinese blew a weather satellite in orbit. Remember? That was over thirty-five years ago.”

“And?” Kalima fiddles with the control system. She begins feeding the satellite’s data to the junkship archives.

“They’re going to do that to us. Missiles—lasers probably, a little cleaner that way. They’ll kill us.”

She sips her Dr. Pepper. “No, they won’t. The debris would ruin their own satellite, and the way it looks, they don’t want that, do they? No.”

She pops out two bubbles of soda and uses her tongue to pull them back to her mouth before they collide with the inside of her visor. Like frog and fly.

“No,” she repeats. “They’re going to send an actual ship. One of those barges, the huge Chinese shuttles they only tell you about, with the private Chinese tech they won’t disclose for all the Saudi oil they can get. Which is why we have an hour. That’s how long it takes one of those to go from the dark side of the moon to low Earth orbit. Damn fast, eh?”

Charlie is silent on the other end.

“You haven’t checked the location of the transmission, have you, Charlie?” She grins.

His voice simmers into her ears. “It’s moving.”

“No shit.”

• • • •

At 16:56 UTC February 10, 2009, Iridium 33, a functioning Iridium Communications, Inc. satellite, and Kosmos-2251, a Russian Zombie defunct since 1995, collided at 11.7 kilometers per second 789 kilometers above Siberia. The first major accidental collision between two artificial satellites, it produced 1,740 pieces of debris.

• • • •

Charlie is shaking.

He reaches up. He opens the overhead window shutter.

Beyond, the cloud of medium orbit debris rushes passed, contained there—though weakly—by synthetic B-fields, nanosweapers, trashprobes, and the daily work of the occasional junkship like this one. Far away along the curve of Earth’s atmosphere, a space station glows red as it feeds in energy from the ionosphere and inducts currents into its kinetic-magnetic reservoirs.

Behind medium orbit are stars, almost indistinguishable from the glittering trash. Between the stars and the trash, the Moon bobs in vacuum, pale like the skin of a drowned sailor washed ashore. And between the moon and medium orbit a light screams forward like a shooting star.

“I’m gonna die,” he tells himself. “I’m gonna die . . .”

Kalima is saying something to him, calling in a wandering, dancing voice across the radio. He looks below.

She’s spinning, spinning, spinning through vacuum like a preschooler at recess.

• • • •

The sun is almost up, if that makes sense in outer space. The debris illuminates itself in orange flares until the whole of the starry sky above her glows in a warm, engulfing flame. The sun vomits a reddish-yellow brow over Earth’s blue arm.

“Chaaarrrlllliiiieeee . . .” Kalima calls. “Chaaarrrrllieeee . . .”

She snatches her safety tether and spins herself around it, around and around.

“Hello up there . . . Helllloooooo . . .” She laughs to herself.

She bites her Twix bar; it crunches between her teeth. She watches the debris above her and smiles.

“Weeeeeeee . . .” She spins through vacuum, like a loop of wire set perpendicular to a magnetic field, rotating on its long axis—a motor running like always on the three dimensional effects of magnetic flux.

“Weeeeeee . . .”

There’s a shooting star above. A great, big shooting star, and it’s coming to meet her and Charlie and Rami, somewhere lost in the fiery medium orbit debris. It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming.

• • • •

Congressman Dennis Kucinich first introduced to the US House of Representatives the Space Preservation Act, prohibiting the use of space weapons, on October 2, 2001, following international bids for a Space Preservation Treaty. Kucinich brought the bill four times to the House floor until May 18, 2005, but the Space Preservation Act never passed into law.

• • • •

Inside, something snaps. Charlie yells through the radio. It’s forty-five minutes already, and he can’t call NASA. He can’t call the UN. He can’t call Kradys. No communications, it said in the contract. That way no one can track the source.

Something has cracked, burst, kicked.

“Kal!” he screams. “Kal, are you out of your damn mind?”

“Precisely.”

“Really? Really?”

Charlie can hear the labor in his own breath, even over the junkship’s engines and the headphones in his ears. The dashboard beeps, telling him Kalima’s download from the satellite’s systems is complete.

Kalima doesn’t say a word for two minutes. She’s just spinning.

“Say,” she says at last. “Let’s finish this.” Below, she quits her spinning, hitches to the Lorentz tether spool, and climbs to the satellite’s edge.

“Kal.”

No reply.

“Kal.”

Nothing. She continues gathering her tools.

“Let’s not do this, okay? I don’t want something like before, Kal. Not safe. Not at all—”

Kalima’s EMU turns, its white surface bathed in the reflected orange glitter of the debris above. Charlie shades his eyes against her visor’s blinding light.

“D’you love me, Charlie?”

“You’re getting romantic. Don’t get romantic. I hate it when—”

“Hey. Relax, big guy.”

Charlie shakes his head. “No, Kal. No. Get back in the junkship. We’re going home.”

“Hell no.”

Charlie pushes himself against his seat. His fingers are shaking as he adjusts his harness, preparing for . . . for what? “I don’t want something like before, Kal. Not like—”

He can see Kalima look up at him one last time. “Shut up, Charlie. Shut the hell up. You weren’t there. I was. My brother, not yours.”

Her bulky figure turns and climbs around onto the underside of the Chinese satellite, passing the protruding metal stalagmites which are no doubt missiles, lasers, cameras, and protection systems. It’s definitely some sort of military satellite, Charlie’s finally realized.

“And we need the money, Charlie. I’m not going to grow old playing chum my whole damn life. It’s indentured servitude, and you know it.”

Her receiver crackles, then cuts off to the junkship’s groaning silence.

The Chinese barge’s transmission bursts into Charlie’s ears.

“Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577.This is a final warning. This is a final warning. Cease activities at once. Cease activities at once. We are approaching interception.”

Fifty minutes, the clock says. Fifty minutes.

• • • •

Kalima clips the tether spool onto the satellite’s belly. She launches the tether, and it spills away. It brushes the ionosphere a kilometer and a half below, lighting up at its end. A current starts to run through the tether, which glows. The Lorentz forces begin their work, slowing the satellite, letting Earth’s gravity pull it gradually in.

She smiles and looks all around. One minute passes. She reads the plating beside the tether spool control board. It’s in Mandarin:

PAKISTAN – CHINESE – REFUGEES : Zheng He Station

Her face contorts. Her complexion has always been a constant thing, definable, no matter how indefinable, invisible, or evasive her inner persona is. Now her face conceals nothing, and in doing so remains concealed. It becomes twisted, wrinkled, tight—a mess of knots and folds as complex as the unbounded entropy of the Kessler Syndrome. The eye can never capture its true nature, can never fully grasp what is there, like the image of a fractal painting with no brush stroke in sight—only feature thrust upon feature into a muddle so detailed it remains an amorphous disarray.

She punches the button on her EMU’s chest. Her receiver opens to Charlie.

“Change of plan,” she says.

“What?”

“Change of plan.”

“You’re killing me, Kal. You’re killing me.”

“I know.” She grins briefly. “This is a military protection unit for the Pakistani refugees in western China, in the mountains. Where the Western Allies chased them out.”

“Protection for terrorists, you mean.”

She laughs. “You really don’t know politics, do you?” No reply. “They’re villagers. Not Taliban. Everyone thinks everyone’s the freaking Taliban. Or Al-Qaeda. Or whatever.” She sips her Dr. Pepper; it takes longer to bring it up the tube this time. Almost out. “The Allies really did it for the damn pipeline anyway.”

“Okay . . . ?”

“So change of plan. Like I said. I can’t let ten thousand refugees suffer because of me. I won’t. Can’t do it.”

“Kal—”

“You think I don’t respect the place Mom let me and Rami out her damn ass? It’s my home country, Charlie.”

“China?”

“Yeah. China. Right.”

“Okay, Kal. Sorry, Kal. Let’s just . . . not . . .”

“Yes, Charlie. Yes. You’re going to detach the junkship from this satellite, and you’re going to back off a quarter kilometer. This thing is going up.”

“What are you talking about? Kal, I can’t just—”

“Trust me, big guy. Just this once. Is that too hard, or do I have to kill myself first? You tell me.”

“I—”

“I’m doing what I’m doing. Goodbye, Charlie.”

“But the money—

“Now you’re worried about the money?”

“The contract.”

“Huh. The contract. You know what, Charlie? Fuck the contract.” She laughs, takes the last bite from her Twix bar, and switches off her receiver, this time for good.

• • • •

The Space Preservation Treaty was revived in 2029, over twenty years after its US equivalent failed to pass the floor of the US House of Representatives. The 2029 Treaty followed the first extraplanetary war—a battle between the United States and China, a new species of proxy war not in which one nation funds the insurgents of another, but one in which corporations and private enterprises fund nations to do their bidding. After the end of government shuttle programs and the beginning of corporate rentals of aerospace vehicles and stations, outer space had shifted from a government to corporate frontier.

The war was so damaging in terms of lives, economic resources, and the post-war price of the ensuing space debris that suddenly the world wanted an end to the gathering domino effect of the Kessler Syndrome.

Under the new international Treaty of 2029, Zombies were booted to high orbit—the graveyard orbits—to be left out of the way, at least for the time being.

• • • •

Fifty-three minutes.

Overhead, the Chinese vessel crashes through the medium orbit debris like an icebreaker through Arctic water. The vessel is huge, the size of a small space station, and its dark blue surface flickers through the sun’s emerging light.

The transmissions are still raining in from the Chinese barge. “Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. Last chance. Last chance. Cease activities at once. Cease activities at once—”

Charlie shuts the receiver. He’s cut off completely now—from Kalima, from the Chinese, from anyone. He has only himself to listen to. Himself and the thundering mechanical workings of his junkship.

“I’m gonna die,” Charlie says. “I’m gonna die . . .”

• • • •

The Lorentz tether glows orange, electrified, by Kalima’s side. The satellite shivers.

She has to do it herself, she realizes.

By the time the Chinese arrive, it will be too late to pull the satellite from its downward spiral toward Earth. Retracting the tether will do nothing to undo the damage that has been done. The satellite’s already set on a gravitational path to atmospheric burn. If Charlie tries to pull the satellite up with the junkship, it will be a dangerous move—risking both their lives and possibly failing to yank the satellite to safety in the first place.

She needs to do it herself.

With no significant, independent power source at hand, Kalima unplugs the safety tether from her EMU and lets her suit run on battery. As she holds tight to the satellite with her left hand and pulls the safety tether forward with her right, she can feel the tension give as her safety tether spills out of the junkship, which is blocked from her vision by the white bulk of the Chinese satellite.

She grits her teeth, shoves open a panel in the Lorentz tether’s maintenance unit, fixes an adapter, and jams the power output of her safety tether into the access jack.

Conventional current rushes from her safety tether, to the satellite’s power supply, to the Lorentz tether. She reverses the voltage, tugging electrons up the tether system.

With the potential difference set the other way, the system inverts.

The magnetic forces reverse in Earth’s magnetic field, the tether’s current no longer dependent on the atmospheric ions but on the current forced by the EMF of Kalima’s jury-rigged safety tether. The Lorentz forces point in the opposite direction, accelerating the satellite upward.

Suddenly, the entire machine begins to swivel around a gut-churning rotation.

“Hell no.” Kalima holds back the urge to spit onto the inside of her visor.

The EMF her safety tether has supplied is too large and the impulse time between deceleration to acceleration too short. Instead of simply accelerating the satellite to a higher orbit, the reversed forces are strong and quick enough they’ve fixed the machine into a 180-degree rotation.

“Shit shit shit.”

Kalima bites her tongue, holds on, and waits for the satellite to gather its angular momentum. If she retracts the tether at the precise angle along its spin, she might still get it to a stable orbit.

All she needs to do is wait.

She can feel the last minutes of life upon her, whirling untethered through the dark of vacuum. Her energy fills the emptiness of outer space thinly, the way space trash scatters across its chaotic orbits.

It’s strange how easily the tether has dragged, how volatile. Too fast, too sharp an angle, to burn slowly in the atmosphere. How many Zombies hit the ground? How many skip off the atmosphere like a stone on water? How effective are the tethers, really?

• • • •

Failure to enforce the Space Preservation Treaty of 2029 resulted in the global resurgence of space weapons proliferation until the UN Security Council launched its Kessler Initiatives in 2034. As in 2029, the Initiatives also followed an escalation of extraplanetary warfare—this time a full-scale, multi-lateral world war over orbital territory, each corporation funding its own country to protect its preferred region of outer space.

The Initiatives concluded that satellites in the graveyard orbits could eventually fall Earthward and, regardless, become a collective threat to spaceflight. The financial consequences bore a price no one was willing to pay. So the Security Council decided satellites needed to be burned in the atmosphere, not left in high orbit where they could eventually pose further risk in the years to come.

• • • •

Sweat floats before Charlie’s face like frozen spittle. He shakes his head, and more sweat dashes off him like water from a dog. The droplets wobble back with his distorted, tiny reflection.

“Damn you, Kal,” he says to the empty channel. “Damn you.”

He unhooks the arms from the satellite’s docking mechanisms, and they retract into the junkship. Only Kalima’s long, gray safety tether links the junkship to the bottom of the satellite, curving around the satellite’s hull to where Kalima hangs on, doing whatever it is she’s doing.

“I’m trusting you, Kal. See? I’m trusting you.”

Charlie’s fingers grip the controls. He steadies the junkship alongside the satellite. His eyes dart from the controls to the satellite to the Chinese vessel driving through the debris above, its dark tip pushing aside the swarming bits like a snowplow.

Suddenly the satellite below begins to turn, cartwheeling through vacuum.

• • • •

Kalima clutches the satellite’s rungs. The Chinese barge is here, looming dark blue above, casting the junkship and the satellite in shadow, blocking out what fraction of the sun has edged over the gray horizon.

The satellite hits ninety degrees. It begins to decelerate.

She’s going to vomit.

The barge’s docking mechanisms have just locked to the junkship, which cowers beneath the conical behemoth like cat and mouse.

Kalima grips the rungs with all her strength as the hunk of Chinese military metal twists 180 degrees like a misshapen giant football.

“You’re crazy,” she tells herself. “You’re crazy, and you know it. Outta your damn mind, Kal.”

The Chinese satellite pulls her along in its broad, powerful arc. Her left hand breaks away. Her right slips against the satellite’s escalating rotational inertia.

“Here’s to you,” she says to the barge. “Commie bastards, I love you dearly. I’m saving your asses after all.” She looks down. “Saving mine—theirs, actually. Down there.”

South Asia blooms brown and green below, barely visible beneath the grayish smog of industrial runoff, which clings to the clouds like space trash to Earth orbit.

• • • •

Several years of international disputes led to the establishment of a small but sizeable fleet of junkships. Kradys, Inc., which emerged as the most profitable corporation following its success in the World War III proxy wars, was a manufacturer of Lorentz tethers, and so it was the tether—more than the laser, nanosweaper, or any other method—which was given the greatest precedence in the Kessler Initiatives.

Every satellite from 2039 onward was required by international mandate to be fitted with a tether. Even if it could afford the price, no country would approve laser or missile technology to nudge down the satellites; those were dangerous, unpredictable methods, the corporates told them.

By the year 2040, competitors and nations once kingdoms worthy for Kradys to wage war against had diminished to the modern equivalent of weak rebel alliances fighting the ubiquitous throne of a global empire.

Under the authority of world peace, the concepts of nationality, heritage, boundary, and place had begun to dissolve.

• • • •

They’re boarding the junkship. They’re through the airlock. Charlie can hear it hiss opened and closed, the clambering, the snap-and-quick Mandarin, a different smell in the air. A salty taste in his mouth.

“I’m gonna die . . .”

Beneath, Charlie can see Kalima hanging on by one hand. She reaches forward, fighting centripetal force, and punches the Lorentz tether’s rewind mechanism as the satellite reaches 100 degrees. Newton’s Third law holds strong, too strong, so that the force she exerts is the force the satellite exerts back on her. Equal and opposite forces rock Kalima from her handhold.

She floats untethered in outer space, hurling away along the tangential velocity of the satellite’s arc.

Her transmission blinks on the dashboard.

“Hey. Charlie. I realized something.”

He closes his eyes.

“Ever seen a Zombie burn all the way?”

“No.” He doesn’t know what to say.

“Ever seen the stats for the ones that don’t?”

Charlie opens his eyes, realizing what she’s getting at, but still can’t say more than a word: “No.”

“The tethers never worked. How could we have thought they did? They crash to Earth or deflect into deep space. It’s shit for engineering. Whole thing’s for show. And espionage.”

Charlie’s staring at the dashboard.

She grunts. “Hey. Big guy—”

But the Chinese military men are in the cockpit, tearing the gear from Charlie’s ears. He’s crying.

“With us,” the first official says, grabbing Charlie’s arm and unstrapping him from his seat. They’re wearing dark red skinsuits. Charlie flails like he’s never done before, thrashing in a seizure of boundless fury and imprisoned guilt. He’s not strong enough to do anything but rasp like a wounded deer stumbling, bloody, between the trees.

He sees the headset still blinking green in the second official’s gloved hand, rips an arm from the first man’s grip, and hits the com so it opens to the barge.

“Save her!” he screams at the headset.

They’ve got both his arms again.

“You can save her!”

They’re yanking him away.

He stares out the window. In the periphery of the frame, the barge poises at the edge of motion over Kalima’s lonely figure like an anthropomorphic cloud drifting near the inanimate pinpoint of a bird in the sky. Is the barge headed her way? Will it turn a blind eye?

Below, beside Kalima, the satellite’s tether retracts like a long, inward bound tongue. As it does so, the very tip—glowing with heat—grazes the junkship as it completes its 180 degrees.

There’s enough momentum to make Charlie’s vessel roll.

A loud creaking erupts from above the junkship as the Chinese docking mechanisms overhead break at their joints, Kalima’s jury-rigged safety tether snaps, and the junkship tears free of the barge, spinning toward Earth.

The Chinese officials hurl into the wall. Charlie squeezes the arms of his chair, buckles back in, and closes his eyes as the ship corkscrews down. It jolts as it collides with the atmosphere. He opens his eyes.

The windows flood with the red of atmospheric entry.

• • • •

Kalima clings to vacuum like the fetus of some cosmic womb. She bathes in the dark amniotic fluid of outer space.

The Chinese satellite climbs to a stable orbit, slowly rotating. The junkship drops through the atmosphere.

She smiles. Her eyes wander to the debris overhead. The debris looks back with its bright shadows of light.

“Lookit all that,” she whispers. “We like to shit ourselves, don’t we, Mr. Kessler? Yeah, Kal. Yeah, we do. We shit ourselves all the time, everyday. Whole loada fun, dontcha think?” She laughs. “Dontcha think, Mr. Kessler?”

Kalima lost her grip on the satellite at just the wrong angle so that now she’s a long while going before she runs into the medium orbit debris above or gets dragged into atmospheric burn. Her jetpack’s thrusters won’t get her anywhere safe. She’ll probably suffocate before anything physically tears or burns her body to shreds.

She laughs again.

She tastes blood in her mouth, and it smells like chocolate inside the EMU despite the fact that she’s already eaten through her Twix bar. She bends her neck forward to sip Dr. Pepper from its tube, but there’s nothing left.

The Chinese barge hovers in the near distance like a pointy balloon at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Maybe, she wonders, they’ll offer a hand.

• • • •

On June 6, 2050, China—the most powerful nation remaining—launched an electromagnet the size of a skyscraper from the dark side of the moon into outer space. It was an act of rebellion against Kradys and an act of responsibility on behalf of a species which had mummified its terrestrial planet in swathes of its own waste.

For decades many had proposed something of this nature—the construction of a magnet so powerful it could patrol over Earth and sweep debris, most of which was magnetic, into its bulk. An orbiting vacuum cleaner, so to speak.

As soon as their magnetic harvester entered high orbit, the Chinese switched on its electromagnet. It began to sweep the skies, accumulating trash along its thick exterior. For the space of thirty hours, the project worked flawlessly. The harvester managed to pick up a full sixth of the orbital debris.

In terror of what new plan, what new thing, the Chinese had discharged into orbit, the world engaged in a full-fledged attack on the harvester. Kradys launched its defense systems. Weakened corporations and nations launched every remaining kinetic kill vehicle. After all, the harvester wasn’t just picking up debris—it was destroying ships, stations, functioning satellites.

The world could not trust the Chinese. It could not trust anyone, ever.

So there was war.

When the hundreds upon hundreds of kinetic kill vehicles hit the Chinese harvester, the vehicles and the harvester exploded into an uncountable quantity of debris. From Earth, it was like watching a black star go supernova. The official statistic was two billion trackable pieces, but people knew it was more. Hardly anything in orbit at that time—machine or human—survived, and for ten years no one but the Chinese and their notorious barges could travel to and from Earth.

War, distrust, and enmity had warped outer space into an impassable frontier.

• • • •

Charlie wakes up in the Arabian Sea, surrounded by cold, dirty water that laps the windows. Parachutes are heaped over the waves in folds of brown. He turns around, turns away. The two Chinese officials are sprawled on the ground. Blood covers the walls and floor.

“Shit,” Charlie says. He spits out a tooth.

Beyond these polluted waters, a speedboat jets forward. As it makes headway through the choppy waves, Charlie reads the bold, navy blue insignia:

KRADYS, INC.

The junkship rocks in the ocean’s violent cradle, as if Mother Nature wants to rid herself of Charlie and the speedboat and the blood on the walls. The sky, as always, is an impenetrable gray.

“Kal . . .” he murmurs. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish, trying to say more, but there’s nothing more to say.

©2013 by Haris A. Durrani. Originally published in Analog Fiction and Fact. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Haris A. Durrani is an M.Phil. candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He holds a B.S. in Applied Physics from Columbia University, where he minored in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and cofounded the Muslim Protagonist Symposium. His acclaimed debut, Technologies of the Self, won the Driftless Novella Contest from Brain Mill Press. He is winner of the McSweeney’s Student Short Story Contest. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Comparative Islamic Studies, Buffalo Almanack, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Media Diversified, and altMuslimah. He is an alum of the Alpha Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Workshop for Young Writers and was a 2011 Portfolio Gold Medalist in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, for which he currently serves on the Alumni Council. He will attend Columbia Law School in fall 2016.

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

Deathlight

Mari Ness | 5660 words

Els wondered again if she should start recording her final words.

If she could start recording her final words.

There was cold, and then there was cold, and the Tolstar was cold. Dun had shut off every heating system that wasn’t absolutely needed to keep systems running outside of the main control room, and even that he left cold enough to let ice crystals form. It had seemed like a practical solution at the time, seven, eight days ago: They had their bodysuits, they had extra blankets, they could spare just enough energy to melt water to sip on while they crunched their freeze-dried rations. Hot meals and drinks would come eventually.

If they could get out of here.

They could turn some of the systems back on once they were through this.

If they could get through this.

That had been eight days ago. Els had started shivering six days ago, and had not been able to stop since. She could almost shake the cold when she wrapped herself in blankets and reset her bodysuit to keep from slipping into hypothermia when she slept—for a few hours, at least, the energy in the bodysuit warmed her back to sleep and life. But even then, she dreamed of the cold, and she did not dare reset the bodysuit too often. Just enough for life, and she watched Dun carefully for his nod, as he watched for hers.

Eight days.

It’s your imagination, she reminded herself again. Your imagination. You’re warm. Warm. She checked her bodysuit readings again. See? Warm.

The ice crystals suggested otherwise.

If she killed him, the ship would use a little—just a little—less energy. She could stay warmer just a little longer.

If she killed him, she would probably die. He was, after all, why they were both alive.

And also why they might both die.

The drop mission had been routine, exactly like their last two. Exactly. So exactly that she’d often found herself blinking and needing to check chronometers to remember exactly when they were, especially when they’d found themselves rewatching vids, rehashing conversations. Probably why she had made the tiniest, tiniest navigational error, had forgotten once—just once—to do a routine maintenance check. Probably why he, in turn, had forgotten his own maintenance check.

They still might have lost fuel.

They still might have decided to cross through this nebula to save time. To end this journey just a little faster. To move on.

All kinds of things might have happened. What mattered now was what had happened.

And now this.

We shouldn’t have done this one.

IRIAN discouraged pairs from doing more than one mission; regulations set a non-negotiable limit of three. When Els first joined, she’d found that ridiculous to deeply short-sighted: Surely, if a pair worked well together, it was in IRIAN’s best interest to keep them together? She and Dun were perfectly matched on all levels: His strengths compensated for her weaknesses, and vice versa; they’d had parallel but not equivalent training; more importantly, he’d made her laugh. A year into their first mission, and they were best friends; a half a year later, lovers. Signing up for a second mission felt only natural. She couldn’t even think of enduring deep space with anyone else.

On this mission, they were both so desperate to finish, to end it—

His fault.

You need him alive.

I need him dead.

She turned her gaze to the viewscreens, telling herself not to feel sick.

Deathlight, she’d heard some people call it, something she’d never understood until she’d gotten inside a nebula, inside the ever shifting, ever dim light that always just seemed about to show something until it didn’t. The brightest spots were the worst: She could see nothing through them, and they showed nothing, only themselves.

Stars could be born here, she knew, but the only signs of life she saw were the dim tendrils of gas and plasma that, in the shifting light of the nebula almost seemed to move, as if reaching out to grab their ship—

It’s a nebula. Nothing but dust and gas and tiny bits of stars and other worlds. Nothing alive.

Another tendril seemed to shift.

It’s just the cold. Nothing but the cold.

Or something living. Something trying to eat us through the cold. She thought of old tales of space ghosts and stars, monsters living out in the dark. It’s the nebula. The nebula. A ghost nebula, hungry. Waiting.

Cold.

Final words.

She had to think of her final words. Document. Document. Document. Not that it was likely her words would be found, not out here. Transmissions rarely managed to pass intact through nebulas. IRIAN rarely sent more than one ship on any one route. She and Dun weren’t going to be rescued, weren’t going to be followed. And yet it was ingrained in her. Document. Document.

That tendril.

She swallowed.

Moving. Towards the ship—

To conquer fear, one must face it, she chanted to herself. Face the nebula. Watch it. How many people have this opportunity? How many people survived to say that they had this opportunity? IRIAN explained the statistics to everyone who signed on: 37.2% of deep spacers were never heard from again. Those were the ghosts. Not this nebula. She didn’t need a computer, with its reassuring stream of data, to tell her that. She just had to look again.

Which is when she saw it.

“Dun!”

• • • •

Dun wasn’t pleased to be wakened. He had given up on his shift, given up on everything except for sleeping. She was pretty sure that he hoped to drift off that way, sleeping, in the cold. She was also pretty sure their bodysuits wouldn’t let that happen. The water systems would fail first. That, more than the cold, could kill them.

She couldn’t think about that.

“Dun!”

She pulled him out of the narrow cot and towards the control room, not listening to his invective, and shoved him in front of the viewscreen. “Look.”

“Yes. A nebula. That we’re—holy shit.”

Els released a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding. “It’s not just me seeing things, then.”

“Could be an optical illusion, but—I’ll fire up a couple of sensors.”

Cold. “Dun—”

“I know. But that—” He pointed, although it wasn’t necessary—“That might just be the extra scraps we need.”

• • • •

It took Dun four hours to turn on just enough heat to allow a few of the sensors to turn on, just enough heat to turn on one computer. Meanwhile, Els stayed by the viewscreen, staring, as the wisps of dust and gas blocked and then unblocked her view. Deathlight, only this . . .

. . . might be life light.

Might.

Something metallic, at least. She’d thought at first it was purely cylindrical shape, but as they drifted closer, she could see that wasn’t quite true—one end sloped into some sort of cone shape, giving the object the appearance of a tower that had fallen into clouds. Or maybe one of the ancient rockets that she’d seen pictures of during tedious history classes. Something. Whatever it was, the shape seemed made, not natural.

Whatever it was, it was more than dust. And it might—it might—

She was not going to let herself get excited. She was not.

But she was going to document.

She didn’t turn on any systems; simply picked up a marker and began writing on the wall. If they were lucky—even if they were just “get through this nebula” lucky—she’d be able to enter her notes into the computer. For now, she just wrote. Silvery white, reflective, apparent length about 500 meters—

“Els. Ready.”

He was the engineer; she the pilot. Two sets of eyes would be better, even if neither one of them had exactly been trained for this.

“Radioactivity looks pretty low. Seriously low.”

Her heart sunk. That reduced the possibility of potential fuels.

“Nebula clouding the scanners?”

“Maybe. Or whatever this is just been here for a long while. A very long while.”

“No signs of life, either,” she said.

His eyes darted to her, annoyed, then returned to the screen. “Huh. A lot less mass than I’d expect.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But look—here—here—signs of something heavier?”

He swallowed. “Els—”

“What? You know this isn’t my thing.”

“No—not that. Just—Els. Look. Low radioactivity, signs of heavy mass in some locations. I’m thinking heavy metals.” When she didn’t respond, he continued. “Rare metals.”

“Oh.”

He took a deep breath. “It could make us. Not just for this trip. But—”

After.

Something neither one of them had spoken of. Els had just assumed that after for her meant more drop missions, with a different partner. A new partner. Someone she would not be dreaming about killing.

“I think we have to check it out.”

He had not mentioned fuel. She hadn’t either. But they might be able to do something with the heavier metals. Might.

And it was better than freezing here.

“See what you can give me for the controls.”

• • • •

It took another two hours for Dun to reset the controls, carefully, cautiously; another four hours before Els could equally carefully, cautiously, move the Tolstar closer to the object, as Dun continued to study the readings.

“I’d almost swear it was manufactured,” Dun said.

“Hmm?”

“You know. Not natural. Human made.”

“It does look a bit like a tower,” Els said, after a minute. “Or maybe one of those really old ships—what did they call them?”

“Rockets, I think,” Dun said. “Not quite the right shape, but close.”

“We’ll call it the tower then.” When he darted another look at her, she shrugged. “We can’t just keep calling it ‘it.’”

He gave a half smile. “Tower it is then. Not that it looks like anything human I’ve ever seen. Then again, they shot all kinds of crap off from old Earth back in the day.”

“This is as close as I want to come,” she said.

His eyes narrowed. “We should be able to chute from here.”

“Dun—”

Cold.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

He heard her thought anyway. “I’m not sure we have that much of a choice.”

And for the first time in a long time, she almost found herself liking him again.

• • • •

IRIAN had protocols for this sort of thing. Els and Dun ignored almost all of them as they drifted closer to what Els was now calling the tower, overriding the multiple systems that would not—yet—let them access their pressure suits, much less the chute that could be used to connect drop ships, and in this case would let them access the tower.

“What if we can’t get in?”

“We should be able to access something,” Dun said. “Besides—”

He looked away from the nebula.

She didn’t say anything.

They pulled out two arc welders—another definite protocol break for IRIAN, and something Els wasn’t thrilled about using either, to be honest: They would need oxygen, and although the Tolstar was still cleaning and replenishing oxygen from carbon dioxide, it wasn’t doing so quickly. But hours of watching the tower drift closer had yielded no sign of a door.

They waited until they had drifted just close enough before hopping into the pressure suits and releasing the chute.

After her training, Els had hoped to never enter a chute again: The clear walls, suggesting that nothing stood between her and space, terrified her. It was no better this time, even with Dun ahead of her, proving—proving—that the chute really was there. She couldn’t see him. All she could see was the deathlight from the nebula, the clouds of gas and dust that, from the chute, now looked like tiny thorns ready to prick open the chute and send both of them whirling out to the void.

It was a relief to reach the other object; a relief to pull out the arc welders and start cutting through. Even a relief to find herself having to push away from the floating bits of metal in the chute.

Not at all a relief to see the inside.

She pushed herself away to give Dun a chance to look through the hole, to give herself a chance to breathe a little. She watched his body jerk; wondered if she’d done the same.

“So much for being hollow,” Dun said, turning his helmet towards hers.

Something must have shown on her face.

“Well, we won’t find those metals out here.”

“Be careful.”

He took a deep breath. “That goes both ways.”

But you’re the reason we’re doing this, she thought, and then stepped inside.

• • • •

Inside was an assortment of crystals: hard and round, sharp and smooth, some attached to the walls of the tower, some floating in midair, some solitary, some interconnected, all tossed together in disarray.

There’s got to be a pattern. Science forms a pattern. Humans form patterns. Aliens form patterns. Ghosts form patterns . . .

Cold.

Cold.

Pattern.

She made sure she had two lines tied to the chute—one IRIAN protocol she did agree with—and checked Dun’s as he checked hers. Then, with one more mutual nod, they began trying to move through the shapes.

Els’ head began to hurt within seconds. It wasn’t just the shapes, it wasn’t just the sense that everything she saw should have been leading somewhere, but wasn’t, or even the carefully restricted food rations she’d been on for months—her body was used to the last of this by now, anyway. No, it was the sense that this was all wrong, that they shouldn’t be here, that they weren’t the ones meant to be here, meant to open this—this—Tower—

“Cesium.”

“What?”

“What the scanner is indicating. Along with some other alkali metals. Up there.”

She followed his finger towards what looked like a lattice of crystals extending across the entire tower.

“Think we can make it?”

“Maybe.”

They had to move carefully, pushing themselves from crystal to crystal: Many of the crystals were visibly sharp, and their suits could be punctured. The ambient temperature here was even colder than it had been on the ship: negative 150. She wondered idly how many of these crystals were pure water; they could possibly use more of that too. At that thought, a crystal seemed to move closer.

You’re imagining things. Stop it.

Cold.

God, that’s beautiful— “Dun?”

“I see it. Colors. Might mean that the metals really are there. If in compounds. Or might mean something else.” His eyes were scanning back and forth along the lattice. “The question is how to get in—”

“Maybe we can just push it and see if something moves.”

Through his helmet, he looked dubious. “Carefully—if we push too hard—”

“I know.” Her moment of almost liking him again might not last too long at this rate. “Still. As you said. Metals. Push.”

They started to push lightly against the crystals on the lattice, making their way across the chamber. Els should have been surprised when a section easily detached, but somehow she was not. She gestured to Dun to follow as she let herself float up and—

Cold

no

colors

colors colors colors

scarlet emerald turquoise violet aqua the words weren’t enough, they weren’t enough, human words weren’t enough—

deathlight

death

light

“Els!”

Her head snapped back, sending the bottom of the helmet into her neck. She hissed.

“You all right?”

Cold.

“Yes. Just—” She forced herself to look around. “What the hell is this place?”

“You seemed out of it for a minute.”

Deathlight.

“The shock of—” she paused, tried to think of words, resigned herself to just flapping her hand in the general direction of the room—“this.”

Room. It was a room; she had no idea why she was so certain of that, but she was. The ceiling was covered with various clear panes that allowed the deathlight of the nebula to enter. Inside the crystal matrix formed a floor, and on the sides, in between the panes, were swirls of tiny crystals that she was certain—certain—had been deliberately placed there by design.

And hovering in the center, a giant sphere, connected by seven slim strands to the room’s walls.

She looked at Dun. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Hoping not.”

They said it together, the way they’d done so many things together, before. “Aliens.”

• • • •

IRIAN had been dutifully searching for alien life, as had every human explorer since, Els supposed, the very first liftoff from old Earth, back in—she couldn’t remember the date, and it wasn’t worth trying. Nothing much had been found, apart from some compounds on a few planets that might, if left alone for another few million years, develop into viruses and bacteria, and some stones on one planet near Rigel that a group insisted were sentient. But that was it.

Otherwise, humans were alone.

Very alone.

But this.

Els had heard of some objects that formed clear geometrical shapes. But this was different. The panels, the swirls of tiny crystals—those had to mean something. She floated over with her tablet and began taking vids of the crystals and the patterns. Even if she couldn’t find anything there, IRIAN had decoding programs: Surely something could give her a sense of a meaning.

“Els.”

“Working.”

“I think you need to see this.”

He was floating above the sphere. She kicked off as cautiously as she could from the crystal walls—nothing looked disturbed, she noted with relief as she looked back—moving gently towards him.

“Look down.”

The top of the sphere was covered by some substance that looked like dark glass. And beneath that—

Cold .

Vermillion amethyst rose mint scarlet blue lemon no the names were all wrong the names were all wrong they weren’t enough, they weren’t enough the names the names

cold

ah the cold coldlight

Something slammed her against the wall. She heard a scattering of ringing sounds. Her suit vibrated, making her shake. It took her a moment to see Dun’s gloved hands on her arm.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry,” he said, in the tone that said he wasn’t sorry at all. “I thought I had to get you away from it.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I called out to you about five times and you didn’t respond.”

“Forgive me for just maybe finding this more interesting than your goddamn voice.”

He didn’t apologize this time.

She took a deep breath and kicked off again.

“Els—”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Els—”

“I need another look.”

From the corner of her eye she could see him following her. She ignored him. She had to look into the sphere again.

This time, she could see.

The dark substance—glass? Crystal? Something else?—on the top of the sphere was only dark from below or the sides. Not from above, under the deathlight, which revealed hundreds of tiny, brilliant spheres beneath that substance. A thousand colors; a trillion. And between the sparkling, shimmering spheres, thick—strings? Tubes? Like the strings connecting the sphere to the wall. Tentacles. Cold. The nebula. She shook her head. Her eyes hurt. Her head ached. And yet she had to move closer.

Three centimeters away from the sphere, and the strings—no, tiny tubes, she was suddenly certain of that—came more into focus: She could see the individual shimmering fibers that made up each tube. They, too, glowed with color. Were they the source of the faint energy readings? She had to get closer to tell.

She had never seen anything so beautiful, so wonderful, in her life.

Cold.

Hungry.

Cold.

Beautiful. So beautiful.

light

Dun had forgotten his concerns—or maybe just wanted to stay closer to her—and floated up behind her, clutching his own tablet, his eyes flickering between the tablet and the sphere.

“Faint. Really faint,” he said. “Probably why I didn’t get a read on it earlier, but I’m definitely getting energy readings here. Sorta steady, with tiny fluctuations here and there. If I can just find the source—maybe it will be enough. Maybe. And if it’s alien—”

Els tilted her head, just a little—and then saw it: a small shimmer of light pulsing through one of the fibers. “There!”

“Where?”

“Gone already, but—no, wait.”

Now she could see them, shimmers of light pulsing through the fibers, almost but not quite lighting up the tiny spheres. After a few moments, Dun was at an angle where he could see them too. She saw him touching his tablet again.

But she couldn’t pay any attention to that, seized as she was by a sudden new idea. “Dun,” she said. “What if what’s inside this sphere—what if it’s alive?”

The pulsing lights below her seemed to grow a little stronger.

Cold.

• • • •

Dun was willing to accept possible aliens, but not life. Sure, whatever was inside the sphere was pulsing. Sure, this—this tower now showed signs of intelligent design. Sure, whatever was inside the sphere had to be important—the position, the ropes of fibers connecting it to the wall—that all proved that. And yes, whatever was inside—

He swallowed.

“Amazing.”

He had never liked using the word beautiful, even when they were together, Els remembered.

But none of that meant alive. Or even hibernation. Or even—

It wasn’t a word either one of them wanted to think about.

It still could mean finding something that could save them.

He insisted on more tests, more vids, more analysis. The pulses on the fibers could mean anything—could be from anything. They might not even be connected to the faint energy readings. The tiny fluctuations meant nothing—they knew this ship had been here for several thousand years, at least, if not more. Any system could have started to break down. Any. Just look at—

He choked back on that sentence.

Els ignored him. She kept thinking that if she kept watching, kept recording the pulses, that either she or the computer would figure out what was there. It wasn’t her thing at all, but maybe if she noticed a pattern or something she could work something out.

She couldn’t.

But that was only half the reason she found herself staying above the sphere.

It had been so long, so long since she’d seen anything but sickening nebula and cold stars, cold stars and sickening nebula. And now this: this pulsing pattern of light and color and deathlight and beauty. If Dun hadn’t dragged them both away for breaks, she thought she could have easily hovered above the sphere unmoving for hours. It was—

Beauty.

But for all of Els’ focus, it was Dun who found the small hole in the top of the sphere—made hard to see by the combination of the deathlight and the pulsing colors. A hole that, by all appearances, seemed to lead deep down into the sphere, perhaps right to its center, through the spheres and tubes.

“I almost wonder,” Dun started.

“Wonder what?”

“Never mind. Crazy idea.”

“This might be alien. How crazy can your idea get?”

“That just makes this sound even crazier.”

“What, then?”

“It almost reminds me of a finger or a retina scanner. Except that instead of a finger, you have to use one of those.” He pointed to the fibers connecting the spheres, the fibers that Els was starting to call tentacles in her mind. She followed his fingers.

He was right. The size of the hole, the slight indentations inside it—all looked like a perfect match for one of those glowing tentacles. And yet. She raised herself up, floating a bit above the cylinder, looking through the crystals to the pulsing, glowing, fibers below. And then pulled herself back.

“Doesn’t bode well for us getting it open,” Dun continued.

The hole was about the size of her little finger.

She had been watching the sphere for so long. For so very long.

Maybe.

Her little finger without its glove.

She swallowed. Negative 150 degrees. No. She couldn’t think about that. If she spent time thinking, she wouldn’t be able to do it. To do this.

One second to unsnap her glove. Another second to pull it off. A third second to pull in her other fingers as close to the palm of her hand as possible as she moved her hand towards the hole, inserting her finger and—

“Els? ELS?”

colors, colors, colors COLD colors red emerald indigo turquoise COLD COLD AH FIRE emerald emerald she didn’t have the words she didn’t have the words and everything was tipping, tipping, tipping and she was falling through colors, falling through colors and she could feel the fibers piercing her piercing her falling falling

“ELS!”

and she was no longer alone in the vast stars sleeping, no longer alone in the vast starts dying and the colors were dancing, dancing, alive and

falling

cold

light oh light

• • • •

She woke up to white walls and computer screens. Familiar white walls and computer screens. She shut her eyes and swallowed. Her hand—

Her hand.

She opened her eyes again.

“Did it work?”

“Since I don’t know what you were trying to do—”

“Open it. Touch her. Wake her.”

He drew in a sharp breath. “No.”

Everything felt oddly normal. The lights, the screens, the faint warmth—warmth?—in the room, Dun leaning against the door of the cabin. The tight wrappings around her palm and the four fingers left on her hands.

Phantom limbs. She’d been told about the sensation. Everybody got that lecture. But she hadn’t been warned that it would all feel so normal afterwards.

At least until she was past the shock. Probably why it felt—

“You turned on the heat.”

“A little. I felt it was worth the risk.”

“Freezing might have helped the healing process a little.”

“Or helped you lose the complete hand. Either way.”

Els looked away. “So beautiful,” she whispered. “It was worth it.” She raised up her other hand.

Dun’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “Your finger?”

“Yes. Even if I didn’t wake her.”

“Her.”

Red and blue and violet and green and beauty and warmth and warmth and warmth and someone, someone, someone pushing her into colors breathing colors breathe, breathe and—

“Just an expression.”

He looked at her hand.

“I need to show you something.”

• • • •

This trip back through the chute and the chamber up to the room was even worse. Her missing finger hurt. She was terribly cold. She tried not to think of what Dun had gone through to get her back to the medical lab area. Tried not to think of what she had seen up there. Of what she had felt.

“Stay down,” he said pulling at her as she was about to float up to the sphere again. “Look.”

He tugged her to another section—where the long tube from the sphere intersected with the wall, running his suited hands over it.

In the deathlight, this section of the wall shone with colors that looked somehow—distorted. Shifting.

“I’d noticed some radioactivity in this area.”

She felt a stirring of excitement. “An engine?”

Dun’s helmet moved back and forth. “Maybe. Maybe not. I still don’t even know if this thing has an engine. What I do know is that after you—” She could hear him swallowing. “Anyway, after that, the fibers going back and forth between here and this area lit up. I took another look while you were under, and—Els. It’s some specific heavy metals. Cesium, a few other things—Not much. But it might be enough. And some heavy metals, enough to make us—“

Her heart was thumping, loudly. “Enough to wake her up?”

His helmet was turned away.

“That’s not the point.”

Cold.

Vermillion. Aqua. Gold. Teal. Blue beyond blue.

“What is the point?”

“Heavy, Els.”

She waited. He sighed.

“Let’s assume that this—this thing—stopped moving for whatever reason. Maybe this.” He ran his suited fingers down a jagged line along the crystals and fibers. “If it did. Well. It’s just large enough to create a tiny bit of gravity. Not much. But just enough to start collecting stray particles of dust floating through space. Which in turn, with the ship, might be just enough to create bubbles of gas. Which would attract more gas and bubbles and—”

Els stared into the horrid colors, the strings of plasma and gas that still looked like tentacles to her. “You’re talking millions of years.”

“Possibly. Yes.”

“She can’t possibly be that old.”

“The universe is a lot older than that.”

no longer alone in the vast stars sleeping, no longer alone in the vast starts dying and the colors were dancing, dancing, alive

“God.” She had to try not to throw up. The pressure suit didn’t really accommodate that; she could suffocate and die by the time they got back to the ship, even assuming that Dun would want to take her back there in the first place. “So she’s been trapped here, all this time—”

“Which is a good thing for us.”

She snapped back to what he had been saying, what he had not been saying.

Cold.

“I can’t promise. But if I can get the lithium and rubidium out of here, maybe the cesium—”

“No,” she said sharply. “No. We can’t take it. We can’t.”

“Els—”

“No. If there’s a chance—a chance—she’s alive—”

“Stop calling it she.”

“If there’s a chance—”

“That’s all there is, a chance. The same chance it’s giving us. You don’t know that it’s alive. I don’t know that it’s alive.”

“We can still wake her—”

“You were under for five days this last time.”

That rocked her. For a second. “I have another finger. Maybe she needs two.”

“Els. Els.” He placed his gloved hands on hers. “I know we’re past all that crap, but—” he swallowed. “Please don’t force me to watch you die.”

Cold.

no longer alone in the vast stars sleeping, no longer alone in the vast starts dying and the colors were dancing, dancing, alive

“No.”

She wrenched away from him and pushed hard against the crystal wall. It chimed in response as she floated upwards, over the sphere. Overshot. She pushed herself back down, slamming back into the sphere, as Dun in turn started floating after her. But she had her glove off and her finger in the opening before he could reach her.

• • • •

He didn’t have to say anything when she woke up. She knew.

The lights were on, not just in the medical bay, but the hallway outside. She was wearing only light pants and a light, if long sleeved shirt, and she was warm. Delightfully warm. She shut her eyes. The missing fingers twitched. She would not scratch them. She would not.

She stayed there, in the warmth, watching the white ceiling, for some time before she was willing to move.

He was in the control room, of course. She spared a quick glance out the viewscreens. She could still see the trails of the nebula, but the deathlight was failing. It stopped the rolling of her stomach. Somewhat.

“So.”

“So.”

Dun kept tapping on his tablet.

“I’m not going to thank you.”

“I didn’t think you would.” More tapping. “I didn’t take everything.”

“But it won’t be enough.”

“You don’t know what she needs.”

She shut her eyes.

“Neither do you. Did you see her? Hear her? Was she—”

“Els—”

“Never mind.”

She reached for her own tablet, took a moment to stare down at her eight fingers. Later, maybe, when she was drunk at a bar, she would ask herself questions, ask herself what she had been doing, had been thinking.

For now, she was just trying not think of falling into colors.

“Did we get enough power for a full transmission?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Not sure we need one, though. By the time anyone gets it—”

“Not for us,” she said, tapping her screen.

“Els.”

“Whatever you took—it was just enough to keep her pulsing. And we couldn’t see her in the nebula either. If there are others—others like her—“

He let out a long breath.

“Even assuming—Els. She was in there for a very long time.”

“I know.”

He took another long breath, and tapped his tablet a few more times. She swallowed as she saw more data, more vids, popping up on her screen.

“Dun—”

“I wasn’t just salvaging stuff back there.” His mouth twisted. “Plus, I know you. Document. Document. Document.”

She swallowed.

She looked down at her tablet, at the data.

“You know it’s a million to one chance that anyone will get it.”

“I know,” she said, keeping her eyes on the distant stars, just emerging from beyond the deathlight. “But it’s her chance.”

He sighed again, then put his tablet down and walked up to her, to squeeze her shoulder. “Then let’s take it.”

“Thanks,” she said, meaning it.

“And if it doesn’t—” He stopped again. “Eventually, you know, nebulas become stars.”

no longer alone in the vast stars sleeping, no longer alone in the vast starts dying and the colors were dancing, dancing, alive

She knew. She knew. “But we still—”

And at that, he pushed her tablet away, pulling her into his arms, rocking her back and forth as they left the deathlight and its pulsing colors, as she used her eight fingers to cling to him, rocking back and forth, trying to tell herself that all of that beauty, all of that waiting, was not too great a price to pay for a star.

©2016 by Mari Ness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mari Ness lives in central Florida. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and multiple other print and online publications. For more about her work, check out her blog at marikness.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

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

The Philosopher’s Stone

Tora Greve | 7440 words

The row of horseless vehicles moved slowly along Kensington High Street. The green translucent leaves of Kensington Garden were colored red by the setting sun. The day had been unusually hot for this time of the year. Workers headed homewards now that the diminishing daylight no longer made it sensible to continue working.

The row of horseless vehicles had come to a standstill.

Dr. Isaac Barrow didn’t curse the evening rush. He was on time for his appointment. Sir Robert Boyle had made a great discovery, which he wanted to introduce to the most distinguished scientists of England.

Barrow repented that he had chosen the open vehicle for his trip to London. The smoke from the other vehicles was annoying and made him cough. His running eyes stared at the barrel at the back of the vehicle in front of him. He turned his head to look at something more pleasant.

Many female workers were hurrying home to take care of their families. Some of them had an appearance worth resting an eye on. Since Queen Elizabeth had forced through women’s equal rights with men, many women worked outside home and earned their own money.

One young woman didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She walked slowly and confidently, looking like she owned the world.

Barrow leaned out of his vehicle: “Need a ride?”

She stared him up and down with peculiar green eyes and then turned away.

The row of vehicles suddenly moved forward some yards. It stood still again when the girl passed him once more. “Sure you’re not changing your mind?”

“I will reach my destination faster by walking.” When she spoke, he understood she was probably Scandinavian or German, although she didn’t look like it. She had black curly hair and a tanned complexion. In addition, she wore long golden earrings. He would have guessed North African.

However, he didn’t see her the next time the row of vehicles got into motion. Besides, he had reached his destination in Holland Park and turned up a quiet side street. He wondered whether his timid companion from Cambridge had found Sir Robert’s address. The young man insisted on sightseeing alone that day.

Barrow had picked up young Isaac Newton when he failed to pass his first examination in mathematics and had to try again. The student had found Euclid “a dreary task.” Newton was a shy and reserved boy from Lincolnshire having to pay for his tuition and board by being a servant to his teacher. When Barrow became his tutor, he soon discovered that young Newton did his duties as a servant without being asked. Barrow sometimes got the feeling that the boy was able to read his mind. Newton’s ambition was to study history and chronology. But his interest in the subject was rather queer, Barrow thought. He had read Thomas Norton too thoroughly before he came to the university. Oh yes, he had read a lot, both sane and unhealthy literature. Unfortunately, he was more inclined to the mystics. He firmly believed that Pharaoh Sesostris the Third had known the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, and kept on insisting that only the body of Sesostris had died. Isaac Newton, Barrow believed, might gain outstanding ability in geometry if he only learned the most fundamental theorems and definitions. Luckily he succeeded in turning his mind towards that subject instead. In addition, Newton absorbed the new geometry remarkably quickly. When Barrow had taught him all he knew of mathematics, he resigned his last lecturer’s place to his pupil.

Barrow handed his card to Sir Robert’s servant. It was so hot outside that he didn’t have any coat. The servant showed him into the living room. “The others have arrived, sir.”

“Dr. Newton too?”

“Yes, sir.”

Barrow went inside. Six persons were present, sitting by the fireplace, which was lit, in spite of the heat outside. However, Sir Robert’s living room was quite gloomy with its leaden windowpanes and heavy velvet curtains. One couldn’t decide which season it was when sitting inside his house.

Sir Robert Boyle dominated the conversation. The subject was obviously alchemy. Officially the scientists didn’t bother in regards to such ancient sorcery and scientific witch-craft. In private, though, several of them were attracted to the irrational element which called upon the mystic in them. Boyle was very eagerly talking, perhaps a little loud and breathless. His face had grown almost as red as his hair.

They all turned when Barrow arrived. He knew most of the faces. Robert Hooke was, of course, present. The irritable and cynical cripple who criticized everybody and insinuated that they had stolen the fruits of his labor was Sir Robert’s assistant. John Locke, the philosopher, had placed himself in a chair near the fireplace, so that the fancy colors of his suit were revealed. He smoked a pipe and regarded the flames. Sometimes he nodded, confirming. “I admit that I’m an amateur in the natural sciences,” he said and, chuckling, emptied his pipe into the fireplace. “I had to ask Dr. Huygens whether the mathematics in Dr. Newton’s Principia was sane before I would accept its philosophical parts.” He cast a glance at the young man sitting beside him.

Newton sat as far away from Hooke as possible.

The two others Barrow had never met before.

Sir Robert rose, greeted him, and led his new guest to a chair by the fireplace. Then Barrow was introduced to the two strangers. “Captain Edmond Halley, just come home from his travel to the southern hemisphere,” Sir Robert said.

“Congratulations. I read about your discovery in the National Geographic,” Barrow said. “Was it a common comet?”

A humorous hint to the unidentified flying objects was always welcome among the alchemists. The handsome face of Captain Halley stiffened. He probably had no sense of humor.

“Humanity will soon enough conquer the air, too,” Sir Robert broke in. “I’m also expecting our impressive sailing ships to be replaced by ships driven by steam, like our horseless vehicles on the ground.”

“God forbid,” Captain Halley said and laughed.

“My consolations. I’m sorry for your father’s accident. A pity. We used to go out together,” Barrow said.

Halley just murmured some polite remarks. Barrow thought he had changed for the better since he was a child. His red, curly hair had straightened and become almost black, and his freckled complexion now had a tanned, even color, probably due to his visit in a warmer climate. Amazing that a person could alter his appearance that much only by growing up, Barrow thought.

The second stranger sat on a pillow in front of the fireplace. She wore long golden earrings like women from North Africa. Barrow recognized the girl he had tried to invite into his vehicle.

“Dr. Fredrika Wilhelmina von Leibniz, the famous German mathematician,” Sir Robert said. “I guess you two have much in common.”

Barrow didn’t blush. During their correspondence he had never fallen upon the idea that Dr. F. W. von Leibniz might be a lady. Germany had not yet given women equal rights to men. However, she lived mostly in Paris. Barrow, who sat between her and Newton, lit his pipe. Newton had been annoyed when Leibniz invented a mathematical method similar to his own. Barrow bellowed out a big cloud of smoke which made Leibniz cough and turn away. He knew Leibniz was the elder child of a noble family in Germany, famous for its many scientists and philosophers. The present Dr. F. W. von Leibniz had a reputation for being a greater genius than any of the ancestors. Barrow had always admired Leibniz’s abilities in mathematics, language, and arts. But he had thought her to be a man and much older than she looked.

At dinner Barrow managed to sit beside her. Truly, she interested him even more than before. “You must come to Cambridge and give some lectures in your new mathematical method,” he said. As a master of Trinity College, he might invite whom he wanted as a guest lecturer, although the university still hadn’t allowed any female students or tutors. It was a matter of housing, proctor used to say.

Her translucent green eyes met his. For a moment he felt being emptied of all thoughts below those eyes. “I accept,” she finally said.

He didn’t reveal that she had to live in his flat during her stay, due to lack of housing regarding female visitors.

After dinner they continued discussing alchemy. Barrow yawned in secret behind his hand. He comprehended that Sir Robert tried to tell them something important, but he used a very long time to come to the point. Sir Robert raised his brows. “Am I exhausting you, my friends?”

“Not at all, your theories are very interesting,” the always polite John Locke assured him and put away his pipe.

“As you certainly know, my friends, we can’t divide or change a basic element into another,” Sir Robert continued. “Therefore it is my firm conviction that we can’t make gold out of mercury the chemical way. We must find the Philosopher’s Stone. I have been scrutinizing Arabian manuscripts lately to try and find a hint.”

“It’s an old rumor I won’t trust,” Locke remarked.

“It’s the only solution I can see. While I was trying to make gold out of mercury the ordinary way, I found the secret of the basic elements. There are not only four, but many, which can’t be divided or changed into others, and both gold and mercury are among them.”

“I read your theory last year.” Locke nodded.

“Then we might perhaps give up trying to make gold out of mercury?” Barrow snarled with the pipe between his teeth.

“It is possible to transform mercury into gold,” Newton suddenly exclaimed. He hadn’t said a word the whole afternoon, so they all turned and stared at him. There was a glimpse of determination in his eyes.

“Since you seem to know so much, why aren’t you rich?” Hooke said.

“I don’t practice alchemy to become wealthy. I see alchemy as a way of living, a kind of philosophy. A true alchemist must resolve to give himself up wholly to it, and the prosecution of the same, next to the service of God. He must join prayer to God, with serious meditation, and diligent industry, this is the way to attain true knowledge.”

Barrow was amazed by Newton talking so much. The man must have used a lot of time contemplating the subject to have reached such a conclusion, he thought. Newton was secretive, but Barrow still hadn’t expected him to delve so deeply into alchemy. “True knowledge, is that another word for the Philosopher’s Stone?” he said.

“They who search after the Philosopher’s Stone by their own rules are obliged to a strict and religious life. They may be granted the discovery of the Stone as a gift from God, and must solemnly engage not to use the knowledge revealed to them for selfish ends or betray the secret to the wicked.”

“This sounds more like an immaterial Stone than an actual physical one,” Locke said.

“If you by accident reveal the secret to the wicked, of course unintentionally, what happens?” Barrow said.

“Then the Stone will revenge itself,” Newton said.

“Nonsense, a dead stone can’t perform any actions,” Hooke said.

“The Philosopher’s Stone isn’t an ordinary stone. It’s a living thing, it leads its own life, independent of all other forms of life in the universe. It is, you may say, the true spirit of God.”

Newton had never before been that informative. Barrow decided to take advantage of the rare situation. Religion was his area of knowledge. “You are talking about God. What kind of a God do you worship? What kind of being is He, according to your opinion?”

“The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being, and, from His other perfections, He is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient, that is, His duration reaches from eternity to eternity, His presence from infinity to infinity, He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite, He is not duration or space, but endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present, and, by existing always and everywhere, He constitutes duration and space.”

Locke nodded. “Much knowledge disappeared during the centuries. But we’ve still got some clues. The Rosicrucians claim to have their knowledge from such ancient societies.”

“I’m a skeptic,” Barrow said. “I fear that most of it has been drowned in mysteries and rites based upon several religions during the millennia. You can’t be sure of what is pure religion and what was true science.”

“The base was always science,” Newton said. “The ancients believed in only one omnipotent and omniscient God, and therefore the other gods had only a symbolic meaning.”

“How can you be so sure?” Barrow was amazed. Was Newton’s mind completely screwed up? The poor fellow had been working hard for such a long time, and in addition had probably read some unhealthy literature.

“The Roman king Numa Pompilius erected a round temple in honor of Vesta, and ordained perpetual fire to be kept in the middle of it, as a symbol of the figure of the world with the sun in the center,” Newton said. “In the Vestal ceremonies we may yet trace the ancient spirit of the Egyptians, for it was their way to deliver their mysteries, that is, their philosophy of things above the common way of thinking, under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols.”

“Are you being serious?” Locke said. “Do you mean to tell us that the mysteries of the ancient Egyptian religion were nothing more than a display of their natural philosophy? What about their many gods? Are they literally celestial bodies moving according to mathematical laws?”

“Since you are talking of the Vesta temple, do you believe the one omniscient God is a female?” Barrow said.

Locke chuckled, but Newton didn’t seem offended. “The word God usually signifies Lord, but every Lord is not a god,” he said. “I am convinced that the ancient gods of Egypt were divinized kings. In the case of Osiris, he is in reality the divinized Sesostris. Just look at the resemblance of the names.”

“We all know that Egyptian kings were named after gods,” Barrow said. “A slight resemblance in names doesn’t prove anything. And where does Jesus Christ fit into this system? Is he crushed between the gravitating bodies of your mathematically treated system? Do you mean God is a mathematician?”

“As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things,” Newton replied. “He is in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us.”

“I thought the human being was made in His image. We must resemble him in at least one way,” Barrow said. He knew he was regarded as the most learned clergyman of his time. He had been beneficent enough to free Newton from his duty to hold sermons, since he knew the young man felt awkward about it. “After all you have said, that resemblance must be grounded in our ability as mathematicians, is that what you mean?”

“Then the conclusion should be that the most powerful prophets are those who have the greatest understanding in mathematics,” Locke concluded. Barrow glanced at him. Newton had no sense of humor, so the point was wasted upon him, he thought.

“What if it really is so?” Leibniz broke in. “What if God only reveals Himself through mathematical coincidences in the universe as a whole, coincidences which can’t be mistaken and not discovered before a civilization reaches the technology necessary to detect them?”

“Where does the Philosopher’s Stone fit into this?” Halley said. “I mean, you said you started out as an alchemist.”

“Honestly, I don’t believe in that Stone,” Barrow remarked. “I will classify it in the same category as the unidentified flying objects people have claimed seeing lately. After the ingenious Dr. Newton here introduced his theory of gravity and wrote that famous article in Time Magazine about artificial satellites, combined with the appearance of Halley’s comet, people have been seeing things flying in the air. We haven’t got one proof of the existence of the Stone yet.”

“Would you believe in it if you saw it?” Sir Robert suddenly said.

“Many persons have claimed that they found it. They all showed a remarkable ability in hiding it from others under the pretext of secrecy,” Barrow said.

“Then I suggest we go to my laboratory.” Sir Robert rose and turned in the opened door.

They went through some dark damp corridors to a secret room below the rest of the house. Sir Robert went ahead of the group with a torch, and Leibniz followed next to him. When they reached the innermost door, Sir Robert gave the torch to his assistant Hooke, put an old ornamented iron key into the lock, and turned it round.

“Please enter, my friends.” Sir Robert let Hooke wait outside until they all had gone in.

The laboratory lay in darkness. However, at the far end of it, they discovered four sparkling spots. This was a secret Sir Robert hadn’t revealed to anyone, not even to his assistant Hooke.

“The Philosopher’s Stone,” Sir Robert announced proudly.

“But there are four,” Locke exclaimed.

Sir Robert’s assistant came in and hung the torch on the wall. Then they noticed that the laboratory was almost completely filled with a red rock.

“What purpose serves this rock?” Barrow enquired. “I suppose it isn’t the Philosopher’s Stone smashed to pieces because it was too big to get into the room?”

“It was during my experiments with mercury and grains of dust from this red rock I discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. It hides in small portions within it, my friends.”

Newton took up a piece of rock and examined it carefully before he threw it back.

“I have extracted everything of importance, this is only the leftovers.”

Barrow stood behind Leibniz and divided his interest between her warm body, smelling of roses, close to him, and the Philosopher’s Stone.

“Feel how odd the Stone is to touch,” Sir Robert suggested. “It’s necessary to store it in four parts, its powers are so great.”

The others progressed carefully. Newton was the first to stretch out his hand to get the smallest of the four pieces. He held it in his hand for a while, then slipped it back into the test tube. The scientists stumbled over each other in eagerness. Newton was standing in the corner washing his hands carefully. Leibniz withdrew and refused to touch the Stone.

The Philosopher’s Stone was very remarkable, Barrow thought. It was warm and heavy, and yet it shone with a cool alien light, like an evil eye.

“Have you ever tried to make gold with the Philosopher’s Stone?” Newton enquired from his corner.

“No, I will investigate it further before I try its powers. It is an element, but it seems unstable.”

Locke held one of the pieces up to the light, carefully, between two fingers. “It is really glowing with its own light.”

Barrow took two pieces and tried to bring them together. Leibniz had turned her back to him. When she noticed Newton staring, agitated, in that direction, she turned and peeped over the shoulder of Barrow. He felt her breath on his neck. Both pieces of the Stone were glowing more intensely. “They are getting hotter,” Barrow remarked.

Suddenly Newton did something unexpected. He grasped the hand of Leibniz and ran out of the room. Captain Halley followed.

Barrow laughed. “I’ve always challenged the Devil, but I’ve never lost yet.” He threw the two pieces back into the test tubes. “As a matter of fact, the Devil and I are very good companions, although I deny him the many victims Calvin offers him.” Barrow went to the basin in the corner and washed his hands. “I must get rid of this devilish stuff. Are you never afraid when you experiment on it?”

“Now and then, perhaps,” Sir Robert said.

“Alchemy is the science of the demon and of sorcerers and witches. Therefore no alchemist can be careful enough.” Barrow went to the door. “Was I seeing Drs. Leibniz and Newton fleeing upstairs hand in hand?”

“Captain Halley went after them. They won’t have a chance of being alone and causing embarrassment,” Locke said.

The three others were still standing in the living room when the rest of the party came up. They turned their pale faces towards Barrow.

“Did you feel the cold touch of the Devil?” he enquired.

“No, rather the heat of Hell,” Newton replied.

Barrow laid a hand on one shoulder of each of Newton and Leibniz. “I’m glad you two are becoming friends.” His grip hardened. “I suggest both of you come with me back to Cambridge.”

“I will stay in London over the summer,” Leibniz said and brushed off his hand. “But I promise to visit your university this autumn.”

Halley’s dark eyes flashed. “Keep away from her. She is not what she pretends,” he wheezed.

Barrow looked astonished. “I’m a grownup man. I don’t need any advice from youngsters like you, Captain Halley.”

“This is not advice. It’s a warning.” The handsome face before him twitched.

A terrible temper, Barrow thought. Terrible enough to commit murder? He shuddered. He felt the warning was seriously meant. Did old Halley get one too before he walked himself down into the river? Barrow began to comprehend that he was being mixed up in something he didn’t quite understand.

• • • •

The summer became very hot.

Barrow went to the Continent to visit John Locke in Paris. There he met a lot of other scientists, among them Dr. Christiaan Huygens. The usually popular Barrow found that the other behaved rather suspiciously towards him. Barrow wondered if he had heard something unfavorable about him. He invited Huygens to a coffee shop to become better acquainted.

Perhaps Huygens too wanted to settle any misunderstanding between them. “Mr. Locke told me that you met Dr. von Leibniz in London.”

So, that was the problem. “Quite briefly at Sir Robert Boyle’s. She’s doing some work in chemistry at Gresham College this summer. Do you know her well?”

“I was one of her father’s students. I was around twenty the first time we met. She was six, a lovely child, very intelligent. Her father said she had a slow development in the beginning. As a four-year-old, he was afraid she was retarded.”

“May I ask a personal question: Are you in love with her?”

Huygens concentrated on his chocolate. He got a mustache of crème on his upper lip when he sipped on the warm liquid. “Yes, you’re right. We better settle this. I love her. But I promised her father to protect her. She lived in my house while she was a student. I taught her mathematics for two years. But I never touched her in any indecent way. I kept my promise. God knows I wanted her. I even proposed to her. But she’s not the marrying kind. She’s only interested in science.”

They changed the subject. Now that they had settled the problem, the conversation ran more freely. They began discussing the solar system and the latest versions of telescopes. Barrow mentioned the unidentified flying objects seen over England the previous spring. He admitted that he hadn’t seen them himself.

“We watched some over Paris, too. I actually saw them myself,” Huygens said. “I wonder if they are space ships from Venus or Mars or even from the other planets. Swedenborg mentions inhabitants from other planets in his book. Our Earth too is a planet, and it is inhabited. Why shouldn’t the others be? And if we can conceive of artificial satellites and spaceships, why shouldn’t the others?”

“The idea seems farfetched to me. It is one thing to speculate about spaceships. It is another to build them. I guess the sightings are the result of a hysterical concept after Dr. Newton’s theory of gravitation and its interpretations were published. However, is it of any concern to us?”

“Of course, if the others come as conquerors to Earth, it is the concern of all mankind. I remember Dr. von Leibniz was attracted to the problem even before Dr. Newton’s theory was published.”

“So? I find the speculations a bit naïve. Mr. Locke always says that new ideas are more disastrous to a fixed society than are advanced weapons. If the others want to destroy us, it is sufficient to plant a couple of their own philosophers in our society to alter its structure to their benefit.”

“So that we will destroy ourselves in due time? Honestly, Dr. Barrow, isn’t that a rather slow method?”

“Well, the question of time may be different to people from other planets. Besides, it will save them from using any heavy artillery in a direct confrontation of which the outcome is uncertain.” Barrow rose. “You are welcome to visit me at Cambridge if you wish. Dr. von Leibniz will be holding lectures in combinatorial analysis for us this autumn.”

• • • •

Middle of August.

Sir Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke died within a few weeks interval. Barrow came too late to Hooke’s funeral, but he reached Sir Robert’s.

The large family Boyle was present, and a rather pale and timid looking Leibniz. After the funeral, Barrow ate lunch with Sir Robert’s eldest brother, John. He grieved the sudden death of a brother and good friend. “He didn’t die a natural death,” John Boyle said. “He just dwindled away, lost his hair and bled from many small bruises. I guess his experiments with the Philosopher’s Stone took his life. There ought to be a law against alchemists. As a matter of fact, I will pose that in the Parliament.”

• • • •

The following day Barrow fetched Leibniz and her belongings in Sir Robert’s house. He used his biggest horseless vehicle with a roof, having learned from smoggy London last time. They went to Sir Robert’s lawyer, another one of the numerous Boyle brothers, to listen to the will being read aloud. It turned out that Sir Robert had given the four pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone to Locke, Barrow, Newton, and Leibniz. In addition, Locke got his scientific writings.

• • • •

The weather was still warm when Barrow and his female companion set out for Cambridge. Leibniz sat silently looking at the English landscape passing. The vehicle got very warm inside. Barrow opened a window.

“Were they killed by the Philosopher’s Stone?” Barrow finally asked.

“I think so.”

“Dr. Newton often talked about the Stone. He, in fact, foresaw how it would affect those who came into too close a connection with it. He tried to warn Sir Robert.”

“I read those letters.” She sniffed. “I’m sorry I didn’t do more to make him stop doing those experiments. But I was occupied with my lectures at Gresham’s.”

“You couldn’t have stopped him. He was obsessed.” Barrow laid his hand over hers.

Barrow parked the vehicle outside a countryside inn. “Come on, let’s have some food. We have been busy the whole morning.”

She nodded and followed him inside. She looked timid and defenseless. He ordered food for them both and discovered that he liked to have her beside him at the table.

After the meal, Barrow fired the vehicle up again and they climbed into it. He tried to concentrate on the driving, but got distracted by his passenger. Every time he cast a glance at her, he noticed that she was studying him with her peculiar green eyes. He moved uneasily in his seat.

A thunderstorm was threatening on the horizon when they reached Cambridge. Barrow parked his vehicle at Trinity College and led Leibniz across the Great Court to Master’s Lodge. It was already raining. Well inside, he placed her in front of the fireplace, which was lit by a servant. She took off her wet sandals. Barrow settled in a chair halfway in front of her. He wanted to look at her. She was the most attractive woman he had ever met.

“I have invited Dr. Newton for tea in Master’s Lodge this afternoon,” he said.

Leibniz nodded.

Just then the servant showed in the young mathematician. Suddenly it felt as if the electricity of the thunderstorm filled the room. Barrow could literally feel the connection between the two youngsters. It was almost supernatural. The servant brought tea and scones. Newton put butter on a scone and devoured it. Barrow thought the young man had probably forgotten to eat the whole day. Only the slurping of tea and the thunderbolts outside could be heard. Nobody wished to start a conversation. The air was electrical. The silence became unbearable. If nobody talks, this tenseness will cause an explosion, Barrow thought. It was up to him to start the conversation. He began talking about Sir Robert’s funeral and mentioned the pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone the three of them had inherited. “I hope you won’t try to make any gold with it,” he finally said.

They just nodded silently.

It struck Barrow that their adversity against each other had ceased the moment they met.

Leibniz looked uneasy when Newton left. She clasped her hands in her lap, shuddered, and moved closer to the fireplace. Barrow put his arm around her and felt it was too intimate for her comfort. “You’re shivering. Is it too cold in here?” He let go of her. “The servants have made up a good room for you upstairs during your stay in Cambridge.”

• • • •

Barrow noticed that the students, at first, were uncomfortable with a female teacher. Soon they accepted her, especially when her method of calculus turned out to be easier to use than Newton’s. The young man didn’t mind. He had moved on to another subject, the study of light and colors. Barrow had decided that Leibniz was to take her meals in the Great Hall together with the other tutors. Some of the old fashioned clergy expressed their dislike. However, Barrow was Master of Trinity College and had the final decision.

Soon after Newton’s experiments on light and color began to leak out, Barrow got a letter from Huygens that he wanted to visit Trinity College. Barrow suspected Leibniz was the true attraction. He consented. A discussion between Newton and Huygens might be good for the scientific climate at the university. Barrow was tired of the old clergy working against the younger scientists. He comprehended their dislike really originated in Leibniz living in his house. However, everything was correct between them. He hadn’t tried touching her since that first attempt, although he admitted that he wanted to. Besides, he needed to talk to an outsider about certain suspicions that had popped up in his mind lately.

• • • •

Huygens arrived before dinner on a crisp autumn day. Barrow had offered to fetch him in London, but Huygens declined. Since he came in a carriage behind two horses, Barrow suspected that Huygens didn’t like the noisy ride in a horseless vehicle.

They all ate in the Great Hall. Afterwards Barrow invited Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz to his home for a nightcap.

Huygens enquired about the latest results obtained in optics in England.

“I admit that I wasn’t very lucky with my hypothesis of colors when I tried to explain, for example, yellow as a different degree of red and white intermingled.” Barrow looked at Newton. He was pleased that Huygens himself brought forward the subject.

“I am more interested in Dr. Newton’s peculiar theory,” Huygens said.

“Why is it peculiar?” Leibniz asked.

“Although he obviously believes in corpuscles, he doesn’t seem to be able to make a final choice between the two theories.”

“I prefer to speak of light in general terms,” Newton remarked. “And I consider your theory geometrical rather than mechanical. It contradicts physical principles, because of lack of periodicity. There’s no use in producing a beautiful mathematical theory if it isn’t confirmed by experiments.”

“I didn’t say that light waves don’t have periodicity. I believe that light is longitudinal waves crossing each other without in any way interfering with one another.”

“Such waves can’t account for colors,” Newton said. “If I were to believe in light waves at all, they must be transverse rather than longitudinal.”

“Do you suggest transverse light waves when using those rather obscure phrases fits and sides?” Barrow interpreted.

“Really, I haven’t investigated the problem thoroughly yet,” Newton said. “I’m sorry certain undigested parts of my theory have leaked out.”

The party broke up. Leibniz withdrew to her own room, and Newton went home. Huygens was lodged in a guestroom at Trinity College.

“What about a walk around the quadrangle before we go to bed?” Barrow suggested.

They walked the quadrangle twice before talking.

“I would like to talk more with Dr. Newton about his curious theory of light, but that’ll wait until his book is published,” Huygens finally said. “I understand he’s rather sore as regards undigested material.”

Barrow nodded absentmindedly. “Have you ever thought upon the possibility of producing death rays?” he suddenly asked. “Just think of the trumpets of Jericho. The walls were destroyed by sound waves. When you were working on your theory of light waves, didn’t the similarity of the two in your own theory occur to you?”

“Really, Dr. Barrow, I don’t believe in the trumpets of Jericho, I mean, that it happened exactly that way, literally.”

“I don’t intend to scorn your brainchild, but suppose the corpuscular theory of light turns out to be the right one?”

“That can’t be. I’ve performed a lot of experiments proving that light is propagated in waves. Therefore some of Dr. Newton’s experimental results baffle me. They indicate light to be of both natures, and that’s impossible. Plain logic shows that one thing can’t be of two such fundamentally different origins.”

“If it really turns out to be so?”

“Then such a discovery is abnormal for our age and lies in the future, because the conceiving of a totally dualistic nature requires a logic wholly different from the one we are used to.”

“I want to show you something.” Barrow turned and went across the quadrangle to his home. He removed a thick Bible from its place on the shelf. There he kept his piece of the Philosopher’s Stone. It was glowing in the dark. Huygens reached eagerly for it. “Be careful,” Barrow said. “It killed Sir Robert Boyle and his assistant. I think it emits death rays.” He might as well tell Huygens of the meeting in London. If the man was into the science of light and color, maybe he could explain how an element could shed out light by itself. “Captain Halley was frightened of it.”

“Captain Halley,” Huygens said. “He was mixed up in an unpleasant story lately. Grave robbing in Egypt.”

“Pharao Sesostris the Third’s grave, perhaps?”

“How did you know?”

“He was interested in the real Philosopher’s Stone. I don’t think he believed the glowing element in Sir Robert’s laboratory was the true Philosopher’s Stone. I have been suspecting Captain Halley all the time. You see, when I went to Oxford to visit a friend some years ago, I met the real Edmond Halley. As a child, he had red hair and freckles. A grownup man can’t change that completely. I was puzzled when I met him at Boyle’s. I know his father was murdered. He didn’t walk himself into the River Thames when drunk. His heart was penetrated by some kind of ray, very hot and very fast.”

“And who is the present Captain Halley?”

“I suspect he might come from Venus or Mars. You remember all those lights in the air last summer? They may be their vehicles.”

“Why should they be interested in pharao Sesostris?”

“Maybe they believe a precious item is buried in his grave.”

Huygens shook his head. “It seems too farfetched to me. A pity I have to leave for London tomorrow. I had hoped to discuss more on light and colors with Dr. Newton.”

“I don’t think he will talk about it anymore. He feels that his theory isn’t ripe yet.”

• • • •

The day after, Barrow didn’t meet Leibniz before she came back from her lecture. He and Huygens had been sitting up the previous evening talking about Barrow’s travels and consuming a lot of wine. Barrow had slept in and didn’t come down to breakfast with her.

The autumn afternoon was chilly. Newton didn’t show up. Perhaps he was afraid of being embroiled in another discussion with Huygens. Barrow was alone with Leibniz. They were silently regarding each other. He sat in a chair before the fireplace, she on a pillow below him. Physically, he was attracted to her. He had never before wanted a woman that much. At the same time, she repelled him, as if his instincts told him she wasn’t quite human. This was a new situation. He had learnt to rely on his innermost feelings and warnings of danger during his stay in the East.

“Who are you?” he finally said. “What’s really going on?”

“It’s about the future of the Earth and our own civilization. It begins with the presentation of the true son of God. Firstly, he signs his secret alchemical writings Isaacus Neuutonus, which can be transcribed into Jeova sanctus unus. As the only son of God, he thinks that he alone has access to the true knowledge. His method of describing the system of the world will, in a few generations, be regarded as the only method, even in fields where it doesn’t fit. The true God of our beliefs will be crushed in mechanistic philosophies, based upon artificial mathematical systems. The sciences based upon mathematics will eventually replace religion. The mathematicians and scientists will be looked upon as mystics and high priests by the common people not learned in the art. Civilization will reach a point where the sum of its advances in different fields will supersede the ability of perception of a single human being.”

“Are Dr. Newton and Captain Halley, too, mixed up in this?”

“Captain Halley is captain of a fleet of spaceships coming from a civilization which has been trying to steal the Philosopher’s Stone. He revealed himself by breaking into Pharao Sesostris the Third’s grave. Now that we know his identity, he will be properly taken care of.” She laughed. “For a while, I thought you were that interstellar spy.”

“Where do you come from? Venus? Mars?”

“Venus—Mars! You know nothing of the universe. I might tell you secrets which would make your mind twist itself into insanity forever. Captain Halley flies around in his impressive spaceships, but my people don’t need such primitive vehicles. Unfortunately, he spotted us at Sir Robert’s when we fled out of the laboratory. He was, however, distracted by Newton’s writings about Pharao Sesostris and thought we had hidden the Stone in his grave.”

Barrow listened attentively. He could feel the cold from outer space settling in the room. He suddenly conceived there might exist other solar systems outside the path of Saturn. And yet, he would be able to hold this attractive female being in a firm grip because she had chosen such a weak shell to hide in on Earth. “So, where do you come from?”

She rose and beckoned him over to the table.

“Sit down. I’ll show you.” Leibniz took a paper and drew a square on it, then some figures indicating openings. Barrow recognized an architectural drawing when shown it, and comprehended it was the room they were sitting in. She also drew two circles, one inside the room and one outside. “They are two-dimensional beings. If the being inside wants the one outside to come in, he must open the door. Agreed?”

Barrow nodded. He had many questions, but understood he wouldn’t have to ask.

“However, we are sitting up here in the third dimension looking down into the room of the drawing. We can enter it from above without opening the door. If you let a globe pass through the room, the two-dimensional beings would comprehend it as several different circles passing through their world. It is not just the room which is open to us. Even the inside of the bodies of the two beings would be open. Now, try and comprehend a being of four dimensions. A three-dimensional house cannot keep him out. He can even enter a three-dimensional body without doing any damage to it. And that’s what we intend to do.” She produced a beautiful item that looked like a sparkling blue, delicate egg. “This is what we really look like. However, to function in this crude world, we need a human body. We are not individuals like you are, we are all one. But we can put parts of ourselves into different human beings and yet stay undivided.”

“Where did you hide that thing?”

“I didn’t hide it. I can produce it out of my being and take it back whenever I want.” She made a small gesture, then showed her empty hand.

“Why are you showing me this egg or whatever it is?”

“We will put it behind your forehead, between your brain halves. It will make you omniscient.”

“Why me?”

“We need a person like you. You are one of the greatest scientists of your time. You have done important work both in mathematics and language. You are looked upon as the most learned man in England. You are well traveled. Besides, you are Master of Trinity College and an influential man people look up to.”

This was the same situation as Jesus Christ experienced when he was tempted by the Devil in the desert, Barrow thought.

She rose to go upstairs and change for dinner. “Think it over until tomorrow.”

• • • •

Sunday morning.

Barrow was going to preach in Trinity College Chapel. He had hardly slept. He was reminded of a philosophical saying: “If God was standing before you holding the truth of everything in his left hand and the yearning for knowing the truth in his right hand, which hand would you choose?” He realized that he himself would choose God’s right hand. Barrow didn’t wish to become omniscient.

He was standing before the shelf putting on his gown, and then took his personal Bible to bring to the chapel. The test tube containing Sir Robert’s stone was revealed. Suddenly it was in his hand. Barrow felt its warmth towards his skin. “It will certainly bring me luck in my last sermon of my Judgment Day,” he thought and put the hot little thing into his breast pocket, near the heart. In a glimpse from the corner of his eye, he noticed Leibniz coming down the stairs behind him.

They walked across the Great Court, the short way from Master’s Lodge to Trinity College Chapel. He already felt the deadly rays from the stone in his pocket penetrating him. Sweat began running down his body. He wondered whether he would be able to reach the Chapel before he collapsed. Barrow more felt than saw Newton coming up on his other side. They wouldn’t let him choose. He already knew too much about them.

Barrow entered the pulpit. His sermons usually lasted for three hours. He intended to keep on talking until the stone had done its work, even if he had to collapse before the crowd. His eyes ran across the front row. Leibniz and Newton sat alone together.

Barrow knew the end was coming fast now. He laid his hand to his heart, uttered some well chosen words from the gospel, then stumbled and fell. Professors and students screamed. Some of the elder teachers and proctors rose, but Newton and Leibniz came first to the spot. Leibniz flung herself across the dying Barrow’s body, searching his pockets. How he had wished to have her that close all the time he had known her. She smelled of lavender and something he remembered from his mother when he was a child.

Then he lost consciousness.

©2015 by Tora Greve. Originally published in Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep, edited by Peter Öberg. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tora Greve was born in Norway and currently lives near Malmö, Sweden. She is a textile artist and active amateur astronomer with a special interest in eclipses, traveling around the world to observe them. She has published science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels, some of which have been translated into German and English, along with various short stories.

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

North Over Empty Space

Tim Pratt | 6730 words

Sigmund came back to himself after a gray interval of unknown time, hunched in the yellow vinyl booth of an appallingly bright diner, his head aching from the night’s exertions.

His partner Carlsbad sat across from him, drawing no attention at all, which struck Sigmund as strange even in his exhausted state. Carlsbad was a human-shaped figure, but he was unclothed, his face was entirely featureless, and he was composed of a viscous-looking black substance instead of flesh. He was also nearly eight feet tall now; he’d been taller a few hours ago, but his size waxed and waned slightly based on the presence of local evil, and there was a bit less evil in the area after their mission.

“Why aren’t people screaming and running away from you?” Sigmund said. This was only his third time in the field with Carlsbad, but every other time, there’d been lots of screaming and running away—or at least attempts to run away.

“Oh, good, you’re all here again.” Carlsbad’s voice emerged from no apparent orifice, but it was low, rumbling, and good-natured. “You fainted, and I had to prop you up in the booth.”

“It was a long night. I’m okay now.” Sigmund looked around, suddenly afraid everyone in the diner was dead—that would explain the lack of screaming, if they were all past the point of screaming. But, no, there were old men and teenagers and miscellaneous locals eating waffles and drinking coffee in other booths and at the counter, all ignoring the strung-out little man and the very big non-man in their midst. The people he looked at barely shimmered, remaining fixed in the moment—he must be tired, if his powers had receded so completely.

A server appeared and set a cup of coffee in front of Sigmund, and another in front of Carlsbad. “Just the coffee?” she chirped.

Sigmund’s stomach roiled at the thought of food. He’d done an appalling number of drugs the night before, as usual on missions, and his appetite was nowhere to be found.

“For now,” Carlsbad said, and she went away. He turned his eyeless gaze back to Sigmund. “This was an operation in a populous area, so Carlotta cast an illusion on me. All these uninitiated people see me as a middle-aged guy with a beer belly and a kind face, unless I want them to see the real me. They probably think I’m your sponsor. You look like you fell off the wagon, and then the wagon ran you over.”

“That’s an old joke,” Sigmund muttered.

“Just trying to stay in character. We’re not expected back at the base until tomorrow or the day after. It’s so helpful when our enemies are stupid—we finished ahead of schedule. The Old Doctor says we can take a little R and R if we want.”

“What, here? Where even are we? Indiana or something?”

“Not remotely. The mountains of North Carolina.”

“Everything east of the Rockies might as well be marked ‘here there be dragons’ for me.” Sigmund was starting to come back to himself. The coffee, improbably, smelled delicious. “What is there to do around here?”

“Mountains to look at. Boulders to climb on. Bluegrass music to listen to. White water to raft on. Things like that.”

Sigmund groaned. He picked up his cup and took a long sip of coffee. The caffeine hit his system with a jolt, like a falling elevator hitting bottom. Since joining the Table, he routinely ingested quantities of amphetamines and other uppers that beggared belief, but apparently caffeine still had an impact on him, if he was tired enough. He looked around the diner, and the air shimmered with translucent veils. Even the relatively minor stimulation of caffeine was enough to intensify his powers, and allow him to peer back through time.

At this level he could peel back the layers of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months—perhaps even a full year, if he drank the whole cup of coffee. More powerful stimulants let him look back farther; centuries deep, sometimes. He glanced at their perky waitress, saw her grow still younger, becoming a teenager, cheering for some football team, radiant with carefully teased hair, then huffing paint from a paper bag under an overpass, then watching the sun rise over jagged rocks. The old man at the counter had accidentally run down a hitchhiker, hmm, three months ago, which might explain his pensive brooding in the present moment, beneath his gimme cap. The fry cook had been a fry cook and watched TV and gone to sleep and been a fry cook and watched TV and gone to sleep and been a fry cook for as far back as Sigmund could see. The twenty-something, brown-haired woman wearing a fussy old-fashioned tweed jacket had—

Had—

Hadn’t.

Sigmund stared at the woman, who sat eating scrambled eggs and reading a book open on the counter beside her, not acting like an incomprehensible enigma at all. Sigmund peeled time back in smaller and smaller increments. The woman was a graduate student, a TA at a local university, studying folklore, she’d only been there for a few months, just started this semester, and before that—nothing. Before a morning about three months ago, she didn’t exist. When Sigmund tried to look back farther, there was a gray, obscuring fog in his vision, and then the same nothing he saw if he tried to look into someone’s past earlier than their birth.

“—or I hear there are lots of meth labs around,” Carlsbad was saying. “You like meth, right? We could go out, find some, rob them, blow them up. I don’t know if that’s an act of heroism or villainy, actually. Good for people’s health, bad for the local economy. Sigmund? What’s up with you?”

“That woman.” Sigmund lifted his chin in her direction. “I was looking into her past. Three months ago, she didn’t exist.”

Carlsbad grunted. Sigmund knew Carlsbad had reservations about Sigmund leaving the safety of research in the Table’s archives and becoming a field agent, but he’d demonstrated absolute trust in Sigmund’s area of expertise. “You think she’s something we should tell the Old Doctor about?”

Sigmund considered. The current leader of their ancient and venerable organization—a group devoted to protecting an artifact touched by the hand of God, but which paid the bills by hiring out for coups, assassinations, heists, and missions of justice and/or vengeance—was theoretically interested in anything inexplicable, but wouldn’t it be better to bring the Old Doctor answers, rather than questions? “Let’s try to figure out what we’re dealing with first.”

Carlsbad shrugged. He didn’t care. Carlsbad was made of evil, and as long as there was treachery, villainy, cruelty, and horror in the world, he would endure, and be strong, and as a result, he didn’t worry about much. (Being made of evil didn’t mean he was evil, as he was at pains to point out; he had as much free will as anyone. People were mostly made of meat and chemicals, but they were capable of doing more than rotting and bubbling.)

Sigmund hadn’t been an initiate of the Table for very long, but he’d dreamed of this life—being a secret agent, discovering mysteries, meeting new people and punching their faces—and the shimmer and shine hadn’t worn off yet. He peered into the past again and saw where the woman lived: a tiny bungalow near campus with brown shingles and a steeply-angled roof, walls crawling with ivy, windows ancient and rippled, perched on the side of a wooded hill. “Her house is like a witch’s cottage,” Sigmund muttered.

“I love gingerbread,” Carlsbad said.

Sigmund shook himself back to the present. “Can you do . . . what’s it called . . . a sounding?”

Carlsbad cocked his head. “You want me to insert a slender rod into your urethra for your sexual gratification? I didn’t realize our relationship was headed in that direction.”

Sigmund, despite his access to the entire lives of anyone he chose to stare at, was still capable of a sort of provincial, blushing horror. “No! I mean that thing you do, where you look into someone—”

“Ah. We call it ‘dowsing,’ not sounding. Sure thing.” He rose and walked toward the counter, a vision as improbable as a sea monster traversing a bathtub. Carlsbad pretended to stumble, which was even more improbable, and put out a hand to steady himself on the woman’s shoulder. She looked at him in mild reproach and he apologized profusely before plucking a few napkins from the dispenser beside her and returning to the booth.

“I didn’t sense anything you’d call proper evil,” Carlsbad rumbled as he sat down. “Some resentment, but it hasn’t gone septic, and I don’t see signs of imminent metastasis. Are you sure you don’t want to tell the Old Doctor? Maybe the archivists have seen things like this before.”

Sigmund again instinctively rebelled against the idea of notifying their boss, but this time, he tried to examine why. Was it reluctance to waste the Old Doctor’s time? Probably not. The Old Doctor was one of the most terrifyingly patient people Sigmund had ever met. A desire to prove his own competence in the field? Maybe. But he also knew the Table had a habit of making use of any supernatural or psychic or other unlikely assets they found. In Sigmund’s case, they’d been content with bribery, and making him an offer he didn’t want to refuse, but there had been other cases, he knew, of more . . . forceful sorts of recruitment and containment. Anything that didn’t help the Table was a potential hindrance, after all. If Sigmund made a call, this woman could be swiftly bundled into a helicopter and taken to an undisclosable location, never to be seen again—and she wasn’t even a little bit evil. He should find out if she was a threat, first, because if she wasn’t, maybe she deserved to live her (apparently very new) life without being locked in a box in a Table basement.

“Are you up for a little fact-finding mission?” Sigmund said.

Carlsbad shrugged. “I don’t like white water rafting all that much anyway.”

• • • •

They left and went straight for the cottage, Carlsbad driving the black SUV the Table had provided for them. It was mid-morning, a bad time for break-ins, but the cottage was tucked away down a dirt lane with no visible neighbors. Carlsbad went onto the wooden porch, the boards creaking under his monstrous weight, and paused by the open door. “Well?” he said. “How do we get in?”

“I do intelligence,” Sigmund protested. “Infiltration is more your thing, right?”

Carlsbad shook his head. “I open doors by kicking them in. When the Table wants subtlety, they send Carlotta. You want a scalpel, but all you’ve got is a sledgehammer.”

“Wait.” This was the country, more or less, and people were more trusting out here. Sigmund fished in the pocket of his brown leather jacket and found a baggie that held a small bit of cocaine, all that remained from yesterday’s mission. He snorted about half of it up, and a weak bolt of lightning lanced through his brain. Gazing around the porch, he spooled through the past, and found what he needed.

Sigmund knelt down, reached under the steps, and found the little hook where their impossible girl’s spare key was hidden.

“Look at you, improvising in the field,” Carlsbad said.

They went inside, and the cottage was tiny, just a small living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen, all neat. No family photographs, and no photo albums, but lots and lots of books on assorted subjects, with a lot of mythology, folklore, and the occult. Sigmund flipped through volume three of Harry Middleton Hyatt’s Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork while Carlsbad did a professional and thorough search of the premises.

Carlsbad emerged from the bedroom a while later, empty-handed. “I read all the papers I could find. Her name is Lila Young. Wonder if the last name is a joke? Enrolled at the university in a graduate program in folklore. Supposedly went to undergrad in Chapel Hill, but you say that’s impossible, so.” He shrugged. “Not much in the way of personal effects. Clothes run mostly to thrift-store fare. Seems like your basic impoverished scholar. Are you sure your ability isn’t just glitching out?”

“It never has before.” Sigmund peered around the living room, his vision tunneling into the past until the room became empty and dusty. Then he scrolled forward slowly, a few hours at a time, until he saw an unfamiliar man—tall, gangly, hair like dead brown grass—sweeping out the place and moving in the very bookshelves that Lila had filled. A bit later, after the place was put clean and furnished, the man appeared again, leading Lila in by the elbow. She was dressed in alarmingly brief shorts and a bright red halter that hugged her figure and bared her midriff, and she looked half-asleep. The man kissed her on the cheek and then left, closing the door after him. Lila stood, unmoving, as that evening turned to night . . . but when the sunlight shone in the front window and touched her face the next morning she snapped awake, looked around, frowned, and changed immediately into more comfortable clothes. From there, she went to the university for the first day of classes, and led what seemed to be a normal life.

“She did exist before that morning three months ago,” Sigmund muttered. “Why didn’t I see that when I looked at her? Some kind of spell to hide her past? There was a man, who brought her here . . .”

“A man? Maybe he made her. Maybe she’s a golem, and you couldn’t see her until she was imbued with life.”

Sigmund let his eyes refocus on the present. “Did she look like she was made of clay to you?”

“Maybe golem technology has improved since the sixteenth century.”

“Maybe. I have an idea. Can you drive?”

• • • •

“This is the opposite of a high-speed chase.” Carlsbad guided the SUV down a remote country road, a cracked asphalt ribbon hugged on both sides by rock walls.

“His car is turning left up there.” Sigmund stared out the windshield and into the past. He was following the man from his vision at Lila’s cottage, but not in the present: He’d walked out onto the porch still looking into the past and watched the man get into a beat-up silver hatchback and drive away, and he gave Carlsbad directions to follow the route the man had taken all those months ago. The superimposition of the past on a moving landscape, matching the progress of their movement in the present to the progress of the vehicle in the past, was giving him a headache, but the Old Doctor said exercises like this were good for developing his powers anyway.

They drove up a steep driveway, which leveled out in the yard of a gray wooden house with a sagging porch and a chimney that was missing a few bricks, like a giant had taken a bite from it but hadn’t liked the taste enough to eat the rest. “The car stopped here,” Sigmund said.

“It’s here now.” Carlsbad nudged him in the side. “Snap back to the present.”

Sigmund shook his head and blinked, and the hatchback was still there, but now with different patterns of mud streaked on its fenders. “Huh. We found him.”

“So what now?”

“I guess . . . We go talk to him?”

“You talk. I’ll loom. That inspires people to speak more freely, in my experience.”

“Don’t you look like a pudgy old guy right now?”

“I’ll drop the glamour when the time is right.”

Sigmund went up on the porch and knocked on the screen door. After a moment the inner door opened, and the gangly man appeared, frowning, wearing loose corduroy pants and a white t-shirt. Seen up close he was younger than Sigmund had realized, probably just in his late twenties. He peered at them suspiciously. “Help you?”

“I’d like to talk to you about Lila Young,” Sigmund said.

“Never heard of her.” The man started to shut the door.

Carlsbad stepped forward, pushed his hand through the screen door like it was made of tissue paper, and grabbed the man by the throat. He gurgled, then his eyes went wide and he tried to scream; Sigmund surmised that Carlsbad had decided to show his true form.

“Huh. Sigmund, there’s not much evil in this guy, either. Some curdled lust all wound around with guilt, but nothing you wouldn’t find in someone who had a bunch of gay one-night stands behind his wife’s back or something.”

“Okay. So we’ll just talk, and if he’s helpful, we won’t kill him.” Sigmund kept his voice bright and cheerful.

Carlsbad released the man, who stumbled backward with a whimper. Sigmund opened the torn screen door and went inside, Carlsbad following.

“Sit.” Sigmund gestured toward the couch. “Answer our questions, and we’ll leave you in peace.”

The man was on the edge of trying to run, but he glanced at Carlsbad, who shook his head in a slow, ponderous “no.” The man sank down on the dirty, flower-patterned couch, as if trying to disappear into it.

“What’s your name?” Sigmund said.

“Abel. Abel Nathan.”

“Old-fashioned name,” Carlsbad observed.

“Folks are old fashioned around here.” Abel stared at him, then looked at Sigmund. “What is he?”

Carlsbad spoke for himself. “I’m the guy who kills you if you don’t answer my partner’s questions.”

Sigmund sat beside Abel and patted his knee, making the man flinch. Sigmund wasn’t cruel by nature, but it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by the power of having Carlsbad at his side. “I saw your friend Lila this morning. I was just wondering how you met her.”

“How—what makes you think I know her?”

“Should I eat one of his fingers?” Carlsbad said. “People always stop being evasive after I eat one of their fingers.”

“Okay!” Abel sat on his hands. “Look, yes, Lila, I know her, what about it? What do you want with her?”

“Mostly I’m curious about why she didn’t exist before three months ago.”

Abel whimpered and bowed his head. “Have you been talking to Harland?”

Sigmund glanced at Carlsbad, who gave a minute shake of his head. That name hadn’t come up when he’d sorted through Lila’s papers, then. “Right now I’m talking to you, which is all that matters, Abel. Did you . . . find her, somewhere?”

Abel shook his head. “I . . . made her. Wished for her, anyway, and there she was.” Suddenly Abel shivered all over, and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “I was so lonely, is the thing. I could never seem to connect with anybody. The college girls don’t want anything to do with me, some local guy who works on a Christmas tree farm, and the women at church laugh at me behind my back, make fun of my hair and say I’m made of all elbows. I just . . . wanted someone to love me. I told my friend Harland how low I was, and he took me out to this place he knows in the woods, to this cave. He says it’s a special cave, that a spirit lives there. He told me the things I had to do—fire, sacrifice, chant—and then I made my wish, and . . . she came out. Lila. Just walked naked from the darkness. I’d never seen anyone more beautiful. Not like the girls on the internet, though, she was a real kind of beautiful. She walked right toward me, into my arms, and kissed me.”

Sigmund’s experience with women (and men, for that matter) mostly tended toward the dysfunctional and drug-addled, but even to him, this sounded pretty fucked-up. “You . . . made her? Wished into existence?”

Abel nodded, his eyes faraway. “At first, it was wonderful. I took her home, here, and we slept together, and it was amazing, everything I’d ever wanted, but when I tried to talk to her . . . I mean, she could talk, but it was just telling me how sexy I was, how much she wanted to . . .” He ducked his head. “Do things. With me. I finally figured out she wasn’t really real, she was just a sort of . . . living doll. And then it just felt sad and wrong and pathetic, the things we did, and I was even lonelier than before. I went back to Harland, and told him it didn’t feel right, and he said there was a way to give Lila a real life, an inner spirit, but it would cost me. I’d have to give up half the years of life I had left to me, and she’d get to live those years instead. Then she’d be her own person, and she’d have memories of a life, and a future. We had to make a place for her, but Harland owned an old cottage he wasn’t using, and we bought her clothes, like regular clothes, not the, ah, things I dressed her in. Harland knew someone who could get her a fake birth certificate and all that stuff. Then I asked if she would still love me after I gave her half my life . . . and he said she wouldn’t even know me.”

The tears had stopped now, and Sigmund reached over and patted Abel’s hand encouragingly. Abel blinked, looked at him, and smiled weakly. “But she’d be real, and I’d be able to introduce myself to her, and maybe we could fall in love, actual love. That’s what Harland said. Or I could just keep her, like a doll, and keep on like I was, like we were. I think Harland was surprised when I said I’d do it. But the chance at a short life with a woman who loves me, or a long life with a doll? It was no choice at all. We went back to the cave, in the night, and we did another ritual, and she didn’t seem to change. I didn’t feel anything—didn’t feel my life get any shorter either. Harland said the spirit was in her, but it was waiting, and that I should take her to the cottage, and leave her by a window. He said when the morning light hit her, she would come to life, real life.”

“It worked.” Sigmund wasn’t asking. He’d seen it happen. “Did you lose your nerve? Why didn’t you go to her, introduce yourself?”

“I did.” The voice was all bitterness now.

“Ah.” Sigmund hadn’t seen that happen, but then, he’d scrolled through Lila’s short life at high speed. If she’d had an encounter with Abel, it hadn’t seemed significant enough to snag his attention.

Abel slumped even deeper. “I went up to her when she was in a coffee shop studying and asked what she was reading, and she told me, but I didn’t even understand what she was talking about, some anthropology of something-or-other. She was nice enough, but I could tell she was just waiting for me to go away and stop bothering her. I used to go to her house after that and watch her, I’d hide in the trees and look in her windows, but she didn’t do anything but listen to music and read and write and then I felt sick and weird about watching her, so I stopped.”

Sigmund looked around the messy, entirely bookless room. “You and Lila don’t have much in common, I guess.”

“Nothing.” He sat a little straighter. “But I don’t regret it, all the same. She’s smarter than me. Better than me. I had to stop thinking of her as a girl I was supposed to love and more of . . . almost like . . . my daughter, you know? I gave up my life to give her a life. That makes me feel good. Sometimes.”

“Where does Harland live?” Sigmund said.

“I don’t know if I should tell you that.”

“Pretty sure you should,” Carlsbad said.

Abel sighed. “Out past Meat Camp. I don’t know the address. I can give you directions. You won’t hurt him?”

“Can’t see why we would. We’re almost done here. I just need to do one last thing.” Sigmund took out the baggie of cocaine and smiled. “I’d offer you some, but I need it.” He snorted the last few grains off his thumbnail and stared intently at Abel for a while, then grunted. “Okay. All set. Carlsbad? Can you, like, erase his memory, or something?”

“The only way I can erase somebody’s memory is by hitting them on the head really hard,” Carlsbad said. “I told you, I’m a sledgehammer.”

Sigmund sighed. “Right. Okay. I’d rather not have him call this Harland guy and warn him. Maybe instead of giving us directions you can come along with us and show us the way, okay, Abel?”

“Do I have any choice?” Abel said.

“Sure.” Carlsbad lifted one immense fist. “That memory-erasing idea is still on the table.”

“Just let me get my shoes on,” Abel replied.

• • • •

“So how did you meet Harland?” Sigmund was in the back seat beside Abel, who wasn’t speaking much apart from telling Carlsbad where to drive.

“Oh, just from . . . around. I don’t know. Seems like I’ve known him forever.”

Sigmund nodded. When he’d looked deep into Abel’s timeline, he’d found it only went back about two years. Abel’s entire life started with morning sunlight touching his face on the porch of that ugly gray house where he still lived. He was no more really real than Lila was. Maybe Harland had conjured Abel up from the same cave where Abel had summoned Lila. If there was some weird chthonic god granting wishes and making bargains in the mountains of North Carolina, that was something the Old Doctor would definitely want to know about. Ancient occult secret societies needed all the help they could get—and maybe Sigmund would get a promotion for finding it.

“Harland’s place is down there.” Abel pointed to a dirt road almost entirely obscured by huge rhododendron bushes growing on either side. Carlsbad turned the SUV down the lane and drove for almost a mile, kicking up dust in their wake. They reached a secluded hollow, surrounded on three sides by steep wooded hills. In the center stood a large house in the upscale rustic mode, lots of glass and rough wood, the sort of place a millionaire might consider a country getaway.

“Stay in the car,” Sigmund said when Abel started to unhook his seat belt.

A tall, white-haired man in loose-fitting black pants and a black silk shirt came out and stood on the porch, hands in his pockets, watching the vehicle. He was a big man—not compared to Carlsbad, admittedly, but Carlsbad wasn’t exactly a man—and handsome, with sharp blue eyes.

“That’s Harland?”

“Yes,” Abel said.

The other two emerged from the vehicle. “Do you have your glamour back on?” Sigmund said.

“He’s not running and screaming, is he?” Carlsbad answered as they approached the porch.

“Hello, gentlemen. How can I help you?” Harland’s voice was a pleasant baritone, his accent Southern, but elegantly so.

Sigmund stopped at the foot of the steps and looked up at him. “We want to ask you a few questions, about a magical cave that grants wishes.”

Carlsbad snorted. “And I thought I liked the direct approach.”

“Ah. You’ve been talking to Abel.” Harland was unperturbed. “Abel, come on over here.”

He didn’t raise his voice, and there was no way Abel could have heard him in the closed back seat, but he opened the door of the SUV and got out anyway.

Carlsbad looked at Abel levelly. “We told you to stay in the car, Abel.”

“Don’t blame him,” Harland said. “Abel, switch off.”

The gangly man stopped walking and stood, blank, his hands hanging at his sides.

Carlsbad grunted. “That seems like a dangerous activation phrase. What happens if somebody says ‘Abel, switch off the TV?’ He goes catatonic?”

“Only my voice does the trick.” Harland smiled at them, his teeth white and even. “Come, gentlemen. Have a seat. We’ll talk.”

Sigmund found Abel standing there like a mannequin a disturbing sight, but he acquiesced, sitting in a wicker chair beside a small round table. Carlsbad leaned against a support post and crossed his arms. Probably didn’t trust the chairs here to support his weight. He looked even more menacing and imposing than usual, somehow, but it was wasted on Harland, who couldn’t see past his illusion.

Harland sat in a chair on the other side of the table, and gestured to a pitcher of iced tea and three glasses. “Help yourselves.”

“You knew we were coming?” Sigmund said.

“I was peeking through Abel’s eyes a bit earlier, yes.” Harland poured himself a glass and sipped.

Sigmund grunted. “You made Abel. And Lila too? You have power over them.”

Harland shrugged. “They lead their own lives, for the most part. I look in occasionally, to make sure they aren’t in trouble. I never had children in the usual way—they are my legacy. I was so proud of Abel when he decided to give Lila an independent existence, even though it meant losing his plaything. I even told him it would cost him decades of his life, to make the decision more difficult, and still, he made the right choice. It’s always hit-or-miss, whether my creations will develop a true moral sense. I’m always happy when they do.”

“How many of them have you made?”

Harland shrugged. “A few, over the years.”

“How?” Carlsbad said. “What’s in that cave?”

“Ah, the cave.” Harland spread his hands. “There’s nothing there. Rocks. Darkness. Water. I just told Abel there was a spirit in the darkness. Really . . . the spirit is in me. And before you ask, I don’t know how I do it. I just can. I summon them into existence. I did a lot of research, when I was younger, and came across a piece of Tibetan lore—”

“Tulpas,” Carlsbad said. Sigmund looked at him, surprised, though he didn’t know why he was surprised. Carlsbad was ancient, and knew many things. “Golems, but made without clay. Creatures summoned into being by will and thought alone—imaginary friends made flesh. The stories say they sometimes develop minds of their own, if they take on enough vitality.”

Harland nodded, pleased. “Just so. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to an explanation for what I do. I can create mindless creatures, who do as they’re told, who feel no pain or sadness or joy or wonder—or I can imbue them with consciousness and genuine life.”

“Why do you do it?” Carlsbad said.

Harland spread his hand. “I was given this gift. A gift that only gods have. How could I not use it? I create life. Some of them are humble creatures like Abel, simple but good. I tried my best to make him happy, within his limits.” Harland shook his head. “Some of them are brilliant, like Lila. I create them, I watch their development, and I nudge and steer them toward being good people and making the world a better place. A power like this . . . it’s a great responsibility.”

Sigmund cleared his throat. “We’re representatives of a sort of . . . secret society. The exact nature of that society is hard to explain, but let’s just say, we could use a man of your talents.”

Harland nodded, as if he’d always expected this day to come. “I’m sure you could, but I’m an old man. Set in my ways. I like my life, and the work I do in the world.”

“You could have access to amazing secrets, and power,” Carlsbad said. Sigmund glanced at him when he spoke. Something about him was different. What was it?

“Oh?” Harland’s blue eyes glittered. “Like what?”

“I—” Sigmund began, and then stopped. He looked at Carlsbad again.

Carlsbad, who was at least four inches taller than he had been at Abel’s house.

“Could you do a dowsing?” Sigmund said.

“Probably a good idea.” Carlsbad took a step forward. “Before we go revealing too many secrets.”

“What is this?” Harland’s voice was mild.

“Just a little diagnostic.” Carlsbad put a hand on the man’s shoulder, and then went rigid. “Ungh,” he said, and grew another inch, visibly. “Oh, Sigmund, this . . . this . . .” He pulled his hand loose and stepped back, then wiped his palm on the wall, like he’d touched something slimy. “This . . . he . . . cruelty. Sadism. Torture. Murder. Worse.”

“I always knew there had to be other people with powers.” Harland’s voice was still mild. He threw the contents of his iced tea glass into Sigmund’s face, blinding him, and there was a crash of breaking glass. Wiping tea from his eyes, Sigmund saw Harland had smashed Carlsbad over the head with the glass pitcher. That was like hitting a mountain with a daffodil, but the old man danced away before Carlsbad could grab him.

Harland shouted “Attack!” and Abel suddenly switched on, racing up the steps and hurling himself at Carlsbad. The door of the house opened, too, and a dozen naked men and women, from teenagers to old men, some model-beautiful and others maimed and gnarled, poured out, joining the pile-on.

Sigmund fell out of his chair and scrambled away, but the newcomers didn’t approach him—instead, Harland did, drawing a folding knife from his pocket.

The adrenaline and other fear chemicals coursing through Sigmund’s body had the same affect uppers did, heightening his powers, and against his will he saw flashes of Harland’s past. The man had created scores of people over the years. Some he’d imbued with consciousness, and tortured in the shed behind his house. One woman had lived a free life for decades, marrying and having children, until Harland seized control and made her kill her family, then restored her consciousness, laughing at her horror and watching her kill herself. He’d made people, given them false memories, convinced them they were best friends or siblings, and forced them to fight to the death for his amusement. He watched through the eyes of his creations, choosing the right moments to disrupt their lives for purposes of humiliation or violence. His yard was full of graves; his eyes were full of cold amusement.

“I am a god.” Harland opened the knife, and pointed the tip at Sigmund as he advanced. “I give life, and that life is mine to do with as I please. Who are you to judge me? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”

The Table believed in God. More than believed: They knew about God. They had relics, they had texts, and they had verified visionaries. The true God was a watchmaker. He’d created the world, filled it with wonders, set it spinning, and then left it behind to run its own course, His sights set on other tasks. God was, perhaps, neglectful—but he was not cruel. Not like Harland.

Sigmund’s back hit the porch railing and he had nowhere else to go.

Harland crouched, the point of his blade just inches from Sigmund’s left eye. The tulpas trying to tear Carlsbad apart were grunting and panting in the background. “Abel was fun. Oh, the way he agonized over Lila! Hilarious. I haven’t decided what to do with her, yet. I might let her run free for a few years, then have her wake up in a strange motel room in a bed full of blood and body parts. I wonder what she’ll do then? It’s always so interesting to find out.”

“People will come looking for us,” Sigmund said.

“That’s fine. I like meeting new people, and killing them. It gets tedious only killing people I made myself.” Still smiling affably, he moved the knife.

Carlsbad loomed behind him, and brought his immense hands together, clapping his palms against either side of Harland’s head.

The result was incredibly messy, but it was also definitive.

• • • •

They sat on the hood of the SUV, watching Harland’s house burn. “I feel bad I had to kill Abel,” Carlsbad said. “I wonder if he would have switched back on if he’d lived?”

“Oh, God, I never even thought about that,” Sigmund said. He’d taken a shower in Harland’s master suite, getting the man’s blood and brains off his face, trying to ignore the hooks and eyebolts that festooned the shower walls. “What if killing Harland made his creations die?”

“Could be. Hard to say. All the ones here were dead before I squished Harland’s head. Good thing he didn’t get a look at my real form. He might not have trusted his dolls to finish me then.” He patted Sigmund on the shoulder. “Should we go check on Lila?”

“Yeah. Let’s.” Sigmund lifted a suitcase, full of cash and jewels and bearer bonds Carlsbad had found in Harland’s safe, and got into the car.

• • • •

When he’d peered into her timeline, Sigmund had noticed Lila was a regular at the diner, eating most of her meals there, doubtless for convenience rather than the quality of the food. She was there now for dinner, eating meatloaf with a book open beside her on the table. Sigmund watched her from his booth and felt something like peace.

“If we tell the Old Doctor about this, you know he’ll be interested in Lila,” Carlsbad said. “He’ll snatch her up, and hand her off to the empirical researchers, and they’ll take her apart to see how she’s made, to see if they can figure out how to duplicate whatever Harland did. Being able to make people, that could come in pretty handy.”

Sigmund nodded. “I know.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Sigmund sipped his tea. Decaf, herbal, nothing that gave him even the slightest buzz. He watched Lila, with her head bowed, reading and reading, filling her young mind with old wisdom. Her life had begun in a beam of sunlight in an empty room, but it could go anywhere from there. Just because the foundations of her existence were built on nothingness didn’t mean she couldn’t create a world of her own.

Sigmund realized he didn’t really know anything about Lila. He’d scanned her timeline, and meddled in her world, but that was all. He was almost certainly idealizing her, getting a crush on her, putting her on a pedestal. His feelings weren’t as messed up as Abel’s obsession had been, but they were in the same general, shallow vicinity.

Trying to get to know the real Lila was one solution, but Sigmund didn’t have many illusions: He was a cross between a mercenary and a magician, and he was a drug addict too. There was no way inserting himself further into Lila’s life would make her life better.

The other solution was to go away and think of Lila fondly as a stranger he’d helped out, once upon a time.

“Sigmund?” Carlsbad prompted. “Did you faint again?”

“No. I was thinking we should go over to Lila’s house and put that suitcase full of money under her bed. Higher education is expensive, and Harland isn’t around to fill her bank account anymore.”

Carlsbad laughed. “So you’re not going to tell the Old Doctor about any of this, I assume.”

Sigmund shook his head. “What’s there to tell? We’re on rest and recreation. As far as I can remember, we spent the day antiquing and tasting local honey. Lila? Never heard of her.”

Carlsbad sighed. “I have to stop hanging out with you, Sigmund.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because just being around you makes me feel about six inches shorter.”

©2015 by Tim Pratt. Originally published in Patreon.com/TimPratt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Pratt is the author of over a dozen novels, most recently The Deep Woods and Heirs of Grace, and many short stories. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and other nice places. He’s a Hugo Award winner, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He lives in Berkeley CA and works as a senior editor a Locus, a trade magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy publishing. He tweets, a lot, @timpratt, and his website is www.timpratt.org.

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

The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch

Seanan McGuire | 5220 words

Mist flowed through the Tulgey Wood like treacle, slow and thick and unyielding. Squeaks and muffled chitters came from the underbrush as rabbits, foxes, and adolescent toves that hadn’t sensed the weather changing were caught and drowned in the gray-white mire. It would clear by noon, burnt off by the sun, and then the scavengers would come, making a feast of the small mist-struck creatures. By nightfall, nothing would be left to show that anything had died here, not even the bones. The Tulgey Wood concealed its own.

It couldn’t protect us if we let ourselves be seen.

I hung from the strongest branch on the tum-tum tree, watching the mist flowing beneath me. A jubjub bird flew by, wings shockingly bright against the gray. The mist threw up a tendril, trying to grab the bird’s leg and drag it down. I acted without thought, reaching down and snatching the bird by the tail, flinging it upward. It screeched indignation but didn’t bite at me. No creature living in the Tulgey Wood could fail to understand the danger represented by mist, or snow, or—worst of all—the dreaded, all-too-frequent rain. Jubjubs aren’t smart. It still knew that it had just been saved, even if it couldn’t understand the how or why of it.

A single brightly colored feather drifted from the branches overhead. The mist snatched it and sucked it down, burbling discontent. I watched it for a moment more, and then resumed my climb through the trees, swinging hand over hand as I moved toward the distant, terrifying light that filtered through the trees at wood’s end. Like most of my family, I had lived all the days of my life within the shadows and treachery of the Tulgey Wood. I had no interest in leaving.

No interest save for one: my youngest sister, who needed me, and who had been taken from us by the terrible creatures who lived outside our borders. Someone had to save her. Someone had to bring her home. “Someone” is a serpent of a word. It has fangs, and it can bite. It had bitten me, and now I had to go.

“Come home safely,” whispered my mother’s ghost from the canopy above.

“I’ll try,” I said. The trees had carried me as far as they could. From here, the branches were too thin to support my weight, and more, I had things to leave behind. Releasing my hold on the limb that bore me up, I allowed myself to fall into the mist.

• • • •

On the ground, with the mist flowing hard around me, pushing me back, it took the better part of the day for me to walk to the edge of the wood. It tingled and burnt as it played across my skin, stripping away everything that would tell the terrible outsiders who and what I was. There are things in the wood that the mist cannot digest. My family and I are among them. Rocks, bones, and us: the inedible heart of the Tulgey Wood. But the mist is greedy, like the outsiders. The mist always tries to take as much as it can, and so it took scales and fur and traceries of blood, leaving skin exposed and aching in the light. I shivered and shuddered and walked on. When one becomes someone, there is always a price to be paid.

The wood cut off as cleanly as a knife stroke. There were no singular trees, no orphans to confuse the demarcation between in and out; one moment I was in the wood, and the next, I was standing on open ground, with the trees to my back. Even the mist didn’t violate the tree line. Sometimes outsiders nailed signs to the trees, saying things like “Be Warned” and “Be Wary” and “Shun the Wood.” We always took them down. They were unattractive, and the trees didn’t like them, and we had better uses for the nails.

A jubjub flew by overhead, shrieking its mournful cry to the sky above. Maybe it was the bird I’d saved. That would be nice. I had kept it from the mist, and now it would remember me, even if I didn’t make it home. My family would remember me no matter what I did, but families are broken mirrors: I would only ever be a dutiful daughter in the reflection they would cast for me. The jubjub and the mist and the trees would be more accurate, even if they never spoke a word.

Fat, white-spotted mushrooms with bloody caps grew in the median between wood and world. I walked along the tree line until I found a mushroom that looked large enough to be my size. Plucking it from the loam, I whispered my name into the gills of its fleshy underside, and smashed it against the nearest tree. The nut-brown heart of the fungus fell to the ground and rolled to my bare feet, where it cracked open, revealing a bundle of fabric. I bent, picking through it. There were black leather shoes, and undergarments, and a dress made of stitched-together triangles in black and white and red. It was cunningly made, especially considering that it had been made by a mushroom, and would show allegiance to no specific suit or house. I could walk all the way to the City of Hearts in this dress, and no one would be able to claim me for their own.

I dressed, covering my exposed skin anew, this time with the stretch of cotton and the weight of cobbling. My feet, unaccustomed to shoes, protested. I scuffed my toes against the ground, bruising them just enough to numb them. The wood was a silent scream behind me, beckoning me home, begging me not to go. But someone’s venom was in my veins; I had no choice. I had a sister in need of saving.

I began to walk.

When I was very small, no more than a comma of a creature compared to the pages and paragraphs of my parents, they used to tell me stories of the world outside the wood. “It’s terrible there,” said my mother, shivering. “Their sense is nonsense, and their nonsense is sense. You can trust nothing outside the wood. Nothing. All of it waits only to destroy you.”

“It’s terrible there,” said my father, with eyes like chips of ice, so cold that they burned. “Their truths are lies, and their lies are truth. You can believe nothing outside the wood. Nothing. All of it waits only to disprove you.”

I had promised them then, and a hundred times after that, that I would never leave the wood, never dash open the mushrooms that peppered the tree line, never walk the road that led toward the City and away from the green. I had promised them. Breaking my promise burned, even though I was half-sure that promises didn’t really bind once the person who had been promised was gone. Mother had been dead for years, her body thrown to the mist by the soldiers who’d killed her for the crime of refusing to let them enter the wood. Father had only been gone for the space of a season. We were still adjusting to the weight of a world without him. With them gone, I was the eldest, and no promise could be enough to keep me from doing my duty by the family.

The road that led toward the City was hard-packed dirt, brown and smooth and scrolling out like a ribbon toward a distant, alien horizon. I prodded it cautiously with my toe, waiting for it to ripple like molasses and pull me under. It remained solid and unyielding. Gingerly, I stepped onto it, and was reassured when it bore my weight. Maybe not everything about the world outside the wood was treacherous and waiting for the chance to kill me.

My temporary relief faded. Not everything was waiting for the chance to kill me, but enough was. I would forget that at my peril. Worse, at my sister’s peril.

“I am the heart of my family,” I whispered, ducking my head until my chin brushed my breastbone. “I am the soul of my forest. I will bring my people home.”

The road said nothing, only bore me up, and waited to see what I would do next.

Next, I began to walk.

• • • •

The distance between the Tulgey Wood and the City of Hearts is always the same. When the city grows beyond its current borders, the road will stretch like the finest taffy, carrying it farther from the tree line, and keeping the people of both places safe. All the cities and sites in Wonderland are balanced in the same perfect, equitable way, preventing us from being shuffled atop each other like common cards. Those who live in the cities say that the wood moves to keep them safe, because they can’t comprehend how anyone who lives in the shadow of the trees and the circumference of the thorns could ever yearn for safety.

If I thought there was a chance they would listen to me, those jam-fed city dwellers, with their silver teaspoons and their sugar-crusted scones, this is what I would say to them:

“We wish for safety as much as you do. We want to go to bed knowing that our children and elders are safe. We want to see our parents grow old in comfort. We want to take lovers and take our time falling in love, to know that we have time available to us, time like a spool of diamond thread, time to raise our children and see them taking lovers of their own. We wish for safety and security and serenity—all the things you would deny us, all the things you would use us to deny yourselves. The cities move to protect the wood. Not the other way around.”

But they would never listen to me. What was I but a daughter of the Tulgey Wood, meant to be the monster at the end of their stories, meant to stand silently by while they came into my place, took what was most precious, and left? Monsters didn’t have homes to defend or sisters they loved more than life itself. That would make us too much like them, and then we would be less effective as excuses for the things they did to themselves. The patrols and the rules and the soldiers in their gleaming armor, blazoned with the suits of the cities—hearts and diamonds, clubs and spades—coming to challenge the borders of the wood, because at least then their rulers could pretend that there was a war to be fought.

We had never been at war with the cities. We only wanted to be left alone.

Day twisted into afternoon, the sky shifting shades above me until it began to darken into blackcurrant twilight. I kept walking. There was no telling how long my sister had, or how far the road had stretched since the last time a member of my family had been called upon to walk it. My feet ached. The dress the mushroom had made for me constricted my waist until it felt like I would suffocate. That was almost a good thing. I hadn’t eaten since I’d made up my mind to go, and the pain outside distracted from the pain inside. None of this was familiar. None of this was safe.

When I have her back, I am never leaving the wood again, I thought, and it was such a good thought that I repeated it to myself over and over again as I walked on.

“Halt!”

The voice was harsh as breaking crockery, filled with sharp edges. I halted, balling my sweaty palms into fists around the fabric of my skirt as the man stepped out of the shadows. He wore the sigil of the City of Hearts above his breast; he carried a sword. Perhaps his face was fair, and perhaps his form was fine, but I couldn’t tell. All I could perceive was terror.

“Who are you, walking the road after the sun goes down? Don’t you know that this road extends to the Tulgey Wood? There are things there, things with jaws that bite and claws that catch. Things that would think nothing of making a meal of a pretty thing like you.” He took a step forward.

I took a step back. “This is the only road,” I said, and my voice shook, and my heart pounded under its blanket of red and black and white triangles. “I have to get to the city. This seemed safer than striking out across the fields.” That was a lie. I would have felt infinitely safer among the brush and the wabe. But without the road to guide me, I didn’t trust myself to get there. The cities outside the wood had a way of moving when they felt like they were overly exposed, or like there were monsters coming. The wood had no such protections.

“You should come with me,” he said, and took another step forward. “I can lead you straight to the gates.”

“My father told me never to go walking with strange men I met on the road.” That wasn’t quite true—he had used different words—but the message remained the same. Father told me never to go walking with anyone I met outside the wood. Not to trust them, because they wouldn’t trust me. Not if they saw me with their eyes closed.

“Your father wouldn’t see me as a strange man,” countered the guard. He continued toward me. “I’m a knight in service to the City of Hearts. The Queen herself approved my appointment. Your father would tell you to get down on your knees and thank the great Alice for your luck, if he were here.”

“My father is dead.” The words were cold, naked things: They fell between us, lying slaughtered on the hard-packed ground.

The guard hesitated for only a moment. Then he smiled, and took another step, and said, “If your father is dead, it doesn’t matter what he said to you, now, does it? All that matters is the moonlight on your hair, and the starlight in my eyes. You’re very beautiful, you know.”

“I have to get to the city.”

“I can take you there in the morning. I can show you the way.”

It would have been so easy to let him take another step, so easy to let him have what he thought he wanted. It would have dulled the fire in my belly and salved the burning in my heart. And I might never reach the city, and might never bring my sister home. I took a step backward.

“I’m sworn to the White Rabbit,” I said. “I can’t be late.”

The guard’s face fell. To swear to the White Rabbit was to invoke one of the principal protections of Wonderland—and to risk a terrible punishment for failure. The Rabbit looked kindly on those who kept their time accurately and well. But the Rabbit had little patience for those who were late, and the Rabbit had teeth, even if most chose to forget them. Sometimes the Rabbit punished those who broke their oaths. More often, the Rabbit punished those who caused those oaths to be broken.

Everything that lives can have jaws that bite and claws that catch, if the need is dire enough.

“Go, then,” he said, voice suddenly harsh with loathing and fear. “The city isn’t so much further. You should make it with time to spare.”

“I thank you,” I said, and bobbed a quick curtsey, hands still buried in the fabric of my skirt, so he wouldn’t see them shaking. “Do you know if they’ve changed the password since yesterday eve? Only I’ve been on the road all this time, and I don’t want to be delayed.”

He had stopped me on the road for no good reason beyond his own amusement. If I was late—if I was really under the White Rabbit’s protection—he could be held responsible. He probably wouldn’t enjoy that. “Quiche and crumpets,” he said. “Now go. Don’t be late.”

“Thank you,” I said, and started down the road again. This time, no one appeared to stop me.

• • • •

The edge of the sky was the yellow-gold of quince marmalade when I reached the City of Hearts. The jam-colored light washed across the spires and structures of the city, setting them to glittering. I didn’t pause to admire it. If the sun was rising, the password would be changing soon, and I didn’t want to waste the morning waiting for someone to slip and speak it loudly enough to be overheard.

The gates were locked. I rapped my knuckles against them, and waited, impatient, until the heart-shaped hatch at the center of the gate swung open, and a guard peered suspiciously out at me.

“What do you feed a Duchess when she’s tired of summerwine and mockingbird pie?” he asked.

“Quiche and crumpets,” I said.

The heart-shaped hatch closed. The gate opened, and the City of Hearts was exposed to me.

As with all card cities, the suit was reflected everywhere: in the architecture, in the negative space between buildings, in the fashions of the few citizens who were already out and about, getting the streets prepared for the day to come. The cobblestones were shaped like true hearts, the kind hunters ripped, wet and beating, from the chests of the beasts they killed. I wondered, as I stepped onto those cobblestones, how many of the citizens knew what they walked upon. It would be easy to only see the stylized, artistic hearts, and miss the darker, bloody ones. But both were there. Some were blatant and others tucked away, but both were there.

I walked through the streets of the city as the sky bled from quince to lavender, and no one looked at me twice, or questioned my presence. I walked until I reached the fence that stood around the palace. It was wrought iron, painted red and taller than even the tallest trees in the Tulgey Wood. More of those odd, flattened heart shapes blunted the tops of the metal spikes that made it, but even blunt, they would be enough to make climbing over difficult—and I was sure the edges would be razor sharp, ready to cut anyone who dared to risk the walls.

My shoulders ached under the confining fabric of my dress. I wanted to rip it away, to stand free in this alien street. I didn’t move. I didn’t dare. Anything could betray me now, and I was so close to finding my sister. I was so close to bringing her home.

A girl in a white dress patterned with large, cheerful hearts stopped on the street, looking from me to the fence and back to me again before she asked, “Do you have business with the Queen?” There was a note of disapproval in her voice—but not, I guessed, aimed at me. The Queen of Hearts had a reputation in Wonderland. All the Queens did. The Queen of Diamonds was known for Beauty; the Queen of Clubs for Wisdom; the Queen of Spades for Kindness. With those ideals to match herself against, the Queen of Hearts could have chosen anything.

She’d chosen Cruelty. Hers was the Kingdom into which the Alice had fallen, all those days and all those darks ago, and the Queen of Hearts had defined her rule around what the Alice was not.

The girl in the red and white dress looked nervous enough to trust. “My sister,” I said. “They took her three days ago. I came here to get her back. I think . . . I think that if she’s anywhere, she’ll be inside the palace. But I’ve never been here before. I don’t know how to get inside.”

“No one gets inside unless the Queen wants them there,” said the girl. “What does your sister look like?”

“Like me, but shorter.” I held a hand at the level of my chest. “Hair like mine. Eyes like mine.”

“Golden hair.” The girl’s face fell. “They took her because she looked like an Alice.”

“I suppose.”

“You look like an Alice. Almost. You’re too old for the keyhole to mistake you for her.”

I stared at her. “You saw the Alice?”

“No. But I’ve seen pictures. How were you not taken? Your family should have lost you years ago. The Queen wants the door open. She wants the things from the Alice’s side of the mirror, the weapons she’s heard about, the poisons you can’t mix here.” The girl shook her head. “You should be dust and bones by now.”

“If I can’t get my sister back, I might as well be.” I looked past her to the palace walls. “I have to find a way inside. I have to save her.”

The girl was quiet for a moment before she said, “I know a way. Come with me.”

I hadn’t known her half long enough to trust her. I didn’t have any better ideas. The sun was rising, and I was in the middle of the City of Hearts, where my mushroom-made dress would stand out sooner or later. Someone would ask my name, where I was from, where I was going, and then . . . “All right,” I said. “Please. Help me save her.”

The girl in the heart-patterned dress beckoned for me to follow her down a narrow alley running along the fence line, into the shadows. Lungs like lead, I did exactly that.

• • • •

The alley wound, serpentine, around the backside of the palace, slipping out of sight of street or soldier. The girl waited until we were concealed by the bulk of the palace itself to stop, kneel, and pull up a portion of the cobblestone road, revealing a hatch that led down into the darkness under the city. “This entrance was intended to be used by the Queen, if the City of Diamonds ever marched upon us,” she said. “That was long ago. We have other enemies now.”

“The Alices,” I guessed.

“Those, and the creatures from the Tulgey Wood,” she said. She looked at me, and I knew she knew: there was no other explanation for the darkness in her eyes. “The House of Hearts doesn’t fight the other suits, because the House of Hearts is set against enemies that can’t be defeated—maybe shouldn’t be defeated. So the Queen never needs her escape routes, and the tunnels go unused.”

“I see,” I said carefully. “My sister . . . ?”

“The sun is up. The rites will begin soon. The Queen no longer tells anyone when she thinks she has a candidate; too many people afraid for their own daughters.” She reached up and touched her raspberry hair with one hand. “Too many girls with hair like corn. She’s afraid she’ll be overthrown if she frightens them again, but she can’t stop herself.”

“That explains why she came as far as us.”

The girl’s mouth twisted. “She sends soldiers as far as Diamonds. We’ll be marched on by all Wonderland, if she doesn’t find some self-control.”

None of this was getting us any closer to my sister. I squirmed in my heavy, pinching shoes, and asked, “Where does she take them?”

“Follow me.” The girl—who hadn’t offered her name, I realized; then again, neither had I—turned and dropped through the hatch, into the narrow tunnel beneath. I squeezed through right behind her, trying to shove my anxiety down. I needed to keep control of myself. This near to the end . . . I needed to keep control.

The tunnel was winding and narrow, paved in cobblestones, and ended at a door with a stylized heart at its center. The girl produced a key and unlocked it, pushing it open to reveal a gilded room dripping with pink lace, white pearls, and red ruby hearts. The girl continued onward, and I followed, through a succession of doors—each unlocked with that same golden key—and a succession of rooms, each more opulent than the last. One was filled with garnets in every color of the rainbow; another dripped with pearls, and the air was filled with bubbles, which popped as we moved through them, clinging to our skins in gleaming films. The girl with the raspberry hair never paused, never faltered. She moved through the palace as surely as I moved through the Tulgey Wood. This was her home ground. She was a predator, as much as I was.

I realized I respected her for that.

I realized I was afraid.

Finally, we came to a door made of pitch and coal and night-colored stone, with fragments of mirror driven deep into the frame. The knob was studded with longer shards of mirror. Anyone who opened that door carelessly would bleed for the privilege of whatever waited on the other side. The girl set her hand on it without looking, trusting that her fingers would find the spaces between the jagged edges. She turned enough to glance over her shoulder, looking at me through the curtain of her hair. Everything must have been the color of blood, when she viewed it through that hair.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

She knew, I knew she knew. So much knowing that it lost all meaning in its cycling repetition. I was a riddle, and she held the answer. Maybe she had always known, even before she spoke to me; maybe she had been born knowing, or had been taught to look for the small, subtle signs, the things we couldn’t change or control, no matter how hard we tried.

I reached for the button at the collar of my dress, the one that held it closed, held the fabric tight across my chest. I undid it, and the garment fell away, leaving me naked, save for the sturdy, confining shoes that still pinched at my feet. She didn’t look away. That was when I knew, too; when I saw the small, subtle signs, the ones she couldn’t change or control. The ones she wasn’t even bothering to hide.

“I’m ready,” I said, and the Princess of Hearts opened the door.

• • • •

They say that when the Alice tumbled through the Keyhole between Wonderland and whatever strange country she called home, she fell through all the long years of our history, seeing and judging and changing everything she touched.

They say that when the Alice dealt the cards, no Suit held the upper hand; that they were mixed and mingled like common riffraff, unable to hold themselves properly apart.

They say that when the Alice comes back to us—which she will, she will; everyone agrees that she will, from allies to enemies, from dearest friends to direst foes—whoever controls her will control all of Wonderland. Break her heart and yours will beat forever. Bleed her dry and never die. A kingdom without equal, a dynasty without end. And all you have to do is murder a little girl.

We stepped through the black and mirrored door and into a chamber filled with light. Mirrors coated the walls, bouncing our reflections back and forth between them until we became an infinity. Soldiers in the livery of Hearts stood at the edges of the room, spears at the ready, while at the center of the room knelt my youngest sister, golden-haired, pale-skinned, and terrified. She was wearing a white dress, white as cobwebs, white as bone, and she was weeping.

I would have been weeping too, if the Queen of Hearts had been standing over me with a mirrored dagger in her hand, ready to slash my throat.

“Mother, stop,” said the girl. She didn’t shout. She didn’t need to shout. Her voice carried like a declaration of war, and the mirrors that had bounced our images around the room bounced it back and forth as well, turning it into a wall of sound that would not, did not, could not be silenced. “That isn’t the Alice. You’ve stolen another girl who’s done nothing to deserve it. This ends.”

“No,” said the Queen of Hearts. “This ends when the Alice is dead.”

“She isn’t the Alice,” I said, stepping past the girl—past the Princess—and into the chamber. My shoes clumped against the floor. The mirrors dazzled my eyes. My sister, still crying, raised her head and stared at me, frozen with hope, and with fear. “She’s my sister. I’ve come to take her home.”

“The Alice has a sister,” snarled the Queen. “This is the Alice.”

“Many people have sisters,” I said. “Let her go.”

“No,” said the Queen, and raised her blade.

We learn camouflage early, we creatures of the Tulgey Wood, for while nothing can guarantee survival, knowing how to hide can at least make it more likely. So we mimic our own larval forms, which are soft and small and human, and we put on faces we no longer own in order to fool the eyes of Wonderland into thinking us a community of fools, who would voluntarily live so near to where the monsters are. They come to us muttering of jaws that bite and claws that catch, and we say we don’t know what they’re talking about while we fold our wings under our skins and mantle our eyes in irises.

My sister was still larval. She would pupate in a year, emerge glorious and strong and dangerous. But until then, she had no natural defenses. She couldn’t save herself.

I took a step forward, and the shoes on my feet shredded as my claws grew long and sharp. I took another step, and my wings brushed the sides of the room. I took a third step, and heard a guard shout, “Jabberwock!” before my jaws closed over the Queen’s head. Her blood filled my mouth, bitter as blackcurrant, bright as strawberry, and then her body was falling, falling, falling like the Alice, down the tunnel that has no end. My sister leapt to her feet and slung her arms around my neck, which had grown long and serpentine.

The Princess of Hearts—now Queen, I supposed—was still standing calmly in the doorway when I turned and looked back at her. She met my eyes without flinching, although the flames there must have burned her.

“Go,” she said. “I will not avenge my mother.”

I struck my wings against the air and my back against the ceiling, which shattered and fell away as I rose, my sister bundled to my scaly breast, into the Wonderland sky. There were miles between us and the Tulgey Wood. Our siblings would be waiting, terrified that I would return to them alone, or not at all. I would call to them when we reached the border, and they would come to us through the trees, flowing through the treacle mist with eyes of fire, and they would burble as they came.

©2016 by Seanan McGuire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Hungerford Bridge

Elizabeth Hand | 3480 words

I hadn’t heard from Miles for several months, when he wrote if I wanted to get together for lunch. Of course I did, and several days later I met him at a noisy, cheerful restaurant at South Bank. It was early February, London still somewhat dazed by the heavy snowfall that had recently paralyzed the city. The Thames seemed a river of lead. A black skim of ice made the sidewalks treacherous—I’d seen another man fall as I’d walked from Waterloo Station—and I wished I’d worn something warmer than the old wool greatcoat I’d had since college.

But once settled into the seat across from Miles, all that fell away.

“You’re looking well, Robbie,” he said, smiling.

“You, too.”

He smiled again, his pale eyes still locked with mine, and I felt that familiar frisson: caught between chagrin and joy that I’d been summoned. We’d met decades earlier at Cambridge; if I hadn’t been a Texan, with the faint gloss of exocitism conferred by my accent and Justin boots, I doubt if he would have bothered with me at all.

But he did. Being chosen as a friend by Miles carried something of the unease of being hypnotized: Even now, I felt as I imagine a starling would, staring into the seed-black eyes of a krait. It wasn’t just his beauty, still remarkable enough to turn heads in the restaurant, or his attire, though these would have been enough. Miles looked and dressed as though he’d stepped from a Beardsley drawing, wearing bespoke Edwardian suits and vintage Clark shoes he found at charity shops. He still wore his graying hair longish, artfully swept back from a delicate face to showcase a mustache that, on special occasions, would be waxed and curled so precisely it resembled a tiny pair of spectacles perched above his upper lip.

On anyone else this would have looked twee. Actually, on Miles it looked twee; but his friends forgave him everything, even his drunken recitations from Peter Pan, in which he’d played the lead as a boy.

I knew my place in the Neverland hierarchy: I was Smee, sentimental and loyal, slightly ridiculous. I doubt that, even as an infant, Miles had ever been ridiculous. His demeanor was at once aloof and good-natured, as though he’d wandered into the wrong party but was too well-mannered to embarrass his host or the other guests by bringing this fact to their attention. His mother was a notorious groupie living out her twilight years in Exeter; his father could have been any one of a number of major or minor rock stars whose luxurious hair and petulant mouth Miles had inherited. Back at Cambridge, he’d scattered offhand anecdotes the way other students scattered cigarette ash. His great-aunt had been Diana Mitford’s best friend; as a child, Miles had tea with Mitford, and upon the aunt’s death he inherited a sterling lemon squeezer engraved with the initials AH. Once, camping with a friend on Dartmoor, he’d found a dead stag slung over the branches of a tree, the footprints of an enormous cat in the boggy earth beneath. A German head of state had fellated him in a public men’s room in Marrakech. He’d been Jeanne Moreau’s lover when he was thirteen, and had his first play produced at the Donmar Warehouse two years later.

That sort of thing. Now he gazed at me, and unexpectedly laughed in delight.

“Robbie! It really is so good to see you.”

When the waiter arrived, Miles asked for a Malbec that was not on the wine list, but which appeared and was opened with a flourish several minutes later.

“We’ll pour, thanks.” Miles gently shooed the waiter off. “Here—”

He filled my glass, then his own. “To happy endings.”

Over lunch we gossiped about old friends. Kevin Bailey had lost everything in the crash and was rumored to be living under an assumed name in Portugal. Missy Severence had some work done with a plastic surgeon Miles knew, and looked fabulous. Khalil Devan’s third wife was expecting twins.

“And you’ve been okay?” Miles refilled my glass. “You really look great, Robbie. And happy—you even look relatively happy.”

I shrugged. “I am happy. Happy enough, anyway. I mean, it doesn’t take much. I’ve still got a job, at any rate. And my rent hasn’t gone up.”

“Mmmm.”

For a minute Miles stared at me thoughtfully. I was used to these silences, which usually preceded an account of recent disturbances among some subset of sexual specialists in a town I’d never heard of.

Now, however, Miles just tapped his lower lip. Finally he tilted his head, nodded, and gave me a sharp look.

“Come on,” he said. He removed a sheaf of notes from his wallet and shoved them under the empty wine bottle, pulled on his fawn-colored overcoat and wide-brimmed hat as he headed for the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

We walked across Hungerford Bridge in the intermittent rain, skirting puddles and pockets of slush. Below us the Thames reflected empty, parchment-colored sky. When I looked back across the water, the buildings on the opposite bank seemed etched upon a vast blank scroll, a barge’s wake providing a single ink-stroke. Gulls wheeled and screamed. The air smelled of petrol, and snow. Beside me Miles walked slowly, heedless of damp staining the tips of his oxblood shoes.

“I think I’m going away,” he said at last.

“Away? Where?”

“I don’t know. Australia, maybe. Or Tierra del Fuego. Someplace warm.”

“Tierra del Fuego’s not warm.”

He laughed. “That settles it then. Australia!”

We’d reached the other side of the bridge. Miles stopped, staring down past a dank alley. On the far side of the alley, a wedge of green gleamed between grimy buildings and cars rushing past the Thames, the intricate warren of doors and tunnels that led into Embankment tube station. I always noted this bit of park as I rushed to or from work: a verdant mirage suspended between Victoria Embankment and the roil of central London, like a shard of stained glass window that had survived the bombing of its cathedral. Depending on the season, the sidewalk leading into it might be rainwashed or sifted with autumn leaves beneath a huge ivy-covered plane tree.

Now the swatch of green glowed, lamplike, in the cold drizzle.

“Let’s go down there,” said Miles. “I want to show you something.”

We wound our way through the pedestrian tunnel and downstairs into the street. A flower stall stood outside the subway entrance, banks of Asian lilies and creamy roses, bundled green wands of daffodils that had yet to bloom. It smelled like a garden after rain, or a wedding. A black-clad girl moved slowly among her wares, rearranging delphiniums and setting up placards with prices scrawled in red marker. Miles tipped his hat at her as we passed. She smiled, and the sweet scents of damp earth and freesia trailed us into the park.

“You know, I’ve never been here,” I said, and drew alongside Miles. “All these years I’ve just seen it from up there—”

I pointed to where the bridge’s span had disappeared behind a crosshatch of brick and peeling billboards. “I don’t even know what it’s called.”

“Victoria Embankment Park.” Miles stopped and looked around, like a fox testing the air. “I haven’t been here in a while myself.”

For a few minutes we walked in silence. The park was much larger than I’d thought. There was an ornate watergate to one side, relic of a stately home now long gone. Several maintenance men smoked and laughed outside a brick utility building. A few other people strolled along the sidewalk, hunched against the frigid rain. Businessmen, a young woman walking a small dog. Tall rhododendrons clustered alongside above the path, leaves glossy as carven jade, and box-trees that smelled mysteriously of my childhood.

“This was all the tidal shore of the Thames.” Miles gestured at the river. “They filled it in around 1851, thus Embankment. I always wonder what they’d find if they dug it up again.”

We continued on. Signs warned us from the grass, close-cropped as a golf green. A large statue of Robert Burns stared at us impassively, and I wondered if this was what Miles wanted me to see.

But we walked past Burns, past the immense plane trees shedding bark like a lizard’s skin; past an outdoor cafe open despite the weather, and some wildly incongruous-looking palms with long spear-shaped leaves. Perhaps a hundred feet away, Cleopatra’s Needle rose above the traffic, guarded by two patient sphinxes.

“Here. This is as good a spot as any.”

Miles walked to a bench and sat. I settled next to him, tugging my collar against the cold. “I should’ve worn a hat.”

He didn’t even glance at me. His eyes were fixed on a small, curved patch of garden on the other side of the path, two steps away. Forlorn cowslips with limp stems and papery leaves had been recently planted at the garden’s edge. The wind carried the cold scent of overturned earth, and a fainter, sweeter fragrance: lilies of the valley, though I saw none in bloom. Here too the grass was close-cropped, though there were several small depressions where the roots of a great plane tree thrust through the dirt. Moles, I thought, or maybe the marks of older plantings. Behind it all ran a crumbling brick wall about six feet in height, topped by the knotty, intertwined branches of an espaliered tree growing on the other side. This, along with the ancient plane tree, made our bench feel part of a tiny enclave. The sounds of traffic grew muffled. People passing us on the main path just a few yards off seemed to lower their voices.

“It’s lovely,” I murmured.

“Hush,” said Miles.

He continued to gaze fiercely at the green sward across from us. I leaned back against bench and tried to get comfortable. The brick wall provided some shelter from the rain, but I still shivered. After a few minutes Miles shifted so that he pressed against my side, and I sighed in thanks, grateful for the warmth.

We sat there for a long time. Over an hour, I noted when I glanced at my watch, though Miles frowned so vehemently I didn’t check again. Now and then I’d glance at him from the corner of my eye. He still stared resolutely at the patch of garden, his expression remote as Cleopatra’s sphinxes.

Another hour might have passed. The wind shifted. The rain stopped, and it felt warmer; the light slanting through the linden branches grew tinged with violet.

Beside me, Miles abruptly drew a deeper breath as his body tensed. His face grew rigid, his eyes widened and his mouth parted. I must have moved as well—he hissed warningly, and my gaze flashed back to the swathe of green.

At the base of the plane tree something moved. A falling leaf, I thought, or a ribbon of peeling bark trapped between the tangled roots.

Then it gave an odd, sudden hop, and I thought it was some sort of wren, or even a large frog, or perhaps a child’s toy?

The something scurried across the turf and stopped. For the first time I saw it clearly: a creature the size of my balled fist, a hedgehog surely—pointed snout, upraised spines; a tiny out-thrust arrow of a tail, legs invisible beneath its rounded torso.

But it was green—a brilliant, jewel-like green, like the carapace of a scarab beetles. Its spikes weren’t spikes at all but tiny overlapping scales, or maybe feathers shot with iridescent mauve and amethyst as it moved. Its eyes were the rich damson of a pansy’s inner petals, and as it nosed at the grass I saw that its snout ended in a beak like an echidna’s, the same deep purple as its eyes. I gasped, and felt Miles stiffen as the creature froze and raised its head slightly. A moment later it looked down and once more began poking at the grass.

My heart raced. I shut my eyes, fighting to calm myself but also to determine if this was a dream or some weird drunken flashback inspired by Miles.

But when I looked again the creature was still there, scurrying obliviously between tree roots and cowslips. Its beaklike snout poked into the soft black earth, occasionally emerged with a writhing worm or beetle impaled upon it. Once, the wind stirred a dead leaf: Startled, the creature halted. Its scales rose to form a stiff, brilliantly colored armor, a farthingale glimmering every shade of violet and green. Vermilion claws protruded from beneath its body; a bright droplet appeared at the end of the pointed beak as it made an ominous, low humming sound, like a swarm of bees.

A minute crept by, and when no predator appeared the scales flattened, the shining claws withdrew, and the creature scurried as before. Sometimes it came to the very edge of the garden plot, where upright paving stones formed an embankment. I would hold my breath then, terrified that I’d frighten it; but the creature only thrust its beak fruitlessly between the cracks, and finally turned back.

In all that time I neither heard nor saw another person save Miles, silent as a statue beside me—I was so focused upon the creature’s solitary hunt that I might have been bludgeoned or robbed, and never known it.

Gradually the afternoon wore away; gradually the world about us took on a lavender cast that deepened, from hyacinth to heliotrope to the leaden, enveloping gloom of London’s winter twilight. Without warning, the creature lifted its head from where it had been feeding, turned and scurried back toward the plane tree and disappeared into one of the holes there. I blinked and held my breath again, willing it to reappear.

It never did. After a minute Miles leaned back against the bench and stretched. He looked at me and smiled; yet his eyes were sad. More than sad: He appeared heartbroken.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded. Two teenagers walking side by side and texting on their mobiles glanced at me and laughed.

“The emerald foliot,” Miles replied.

“What the hell is the emerald foliot?”

He shrugged. “What you saw—that’s it. Don’t get pissy with me, it’s all I know.”

He jumped to his feet and bounced up and down on his heels. “Jesus, I’m frozen. Let’s get out of here, I’ll walk you back across the bridge.”

My leg was asleep, so it was a moment before I could run to catch up with him.

“For fuck’s sake, Miles, you have to tell me what that was—what that was all about.”

“I told you all I know.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, shivering now himself. “God, it’s cold. It’s called the emerald foliot—”

“Who calls it the emerald foliot?”

“Well, me. And the person who showed me. And now you.”

“But who showed you? Are there more? I mean, it should be in a museum or a zoo or—Christ, I don’t know! Something. Are they studying it? Why doesn’t anyone know about it?”

Miles stopped beneath the overhang at the entrance to the tube station. He leaned against the wall, out of the wind and a short distance from the throngs hurrying home from work. “Nobody knows because nobody knows, Robbie. You know, and I know, and the person who told me knows. And I guess if he—or she—is still alive, the person who told him knows.

“But that’s it—that’s all. In the whole entire world, we’re the only ones.”

His eyes glittered—with excitement, but also tears. He wiped them away, unashamed, and smiled. “I wanted you to know, Robbie. I wanted you to be the next one.”

I rubbed my forehead, in impatience and disbelief, swore loudly then aligned myself against the wall at his side. I was trying desperately to keep my temper.

“Next one what?” I said at last.

“The next one who knows. That’s how it works—someone shows you, just liked I showed you. But then—”

His voice broke, and he went on. “But then the other person, the first person—we never go there again. We never see it again. Ever.”

“You mean it only comes out once a year or something?”

He shook his head sadly. “No. It comes out all the time—I mean, I assume it does, but who knows? I’ve only seen it twice. The first time was when someone showed me. And now, the second time, the last time—with you.”

“But.” I took a deep breath, fumbled instinctively in my pocket for a cigarette though I’d quit years ago.

“Here.” Miles withdrew a leather cigarette case, opened it and offered one to me, took one for himself then lit both.

I inhaled deeply, waited before speaking again. “Okay. So you showed it to me, and someone showed it to you—who? When?”

“I can’t tell you. But a long time ago—right after college, I guess.”

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“I just can’t.” Miles stared at the pavement. “It’s not allowed.”

“Who doesn’t allow it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just not done. And you—”

He lifted his head to gaze at me, his eyes burning. “You can’t tell anyone, either, Robbie. Ever. Not until it’s your turn, and you show someone else.”

“And then it’s over? I never see it again?”

He nodded. “That’s right. You never see it again.”

I felt a surge of impatience, and despair. “Just twice, in my whole life?”

He smiled. “That’s more than most people get. More than anyone gets, except us.”

“And whoever showed you, and whoever showed her. Or him.”

Miles finished his cigarette, dropped it and ground it fastidiously beneath the tip of one oxblood shoe. I did the same, and together we began to walk back upstairs.

“So how long has this been going on?’ We stepped onto Hungerford Bridge, and I stopped to look down at the fractal view of the park, no longer green but yellowish from the glow of crimelights. “A hundred years? Thousands?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, the park wasn’t always there, but something was, before they made the embankment. The river. Enormous houses. But I think it’s gone on longer than that.”

“And no one else knows?”

“No one else knows.” He gazed at the park, then glanced over his shoulder at people rushing across the bridge. Someone bumped me, muttered Sorry and trudged on. “Unless everyone does, and they’re all very good at keeping a secret.”

He laughed, and we started walking again. “Why did you decide to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve known you so long. You seem like someone who’d appreciate it. And also, you can keep a secret. Like you never told about Brian and that dog in Sussex.”

I winced at the memory. “Is there a set time when you tell the next person? Or do you just make up your mind and do it?”

“You can tell whoever you want, whenever you want. Some people do right away—the next day, or a week later. But I think most people wait—that’s what I was told, anyway. Though you don’t want to wait too long—I mean, you don’t want to wait till you’re so ancient and infirm you forget about it or die before you tell the next one.”

I must have looked stricken, because he laughed again and put his arm around me. “No, I’m fine, Robbie, I swear! I just, you know, decided it was a time for a change of scenery. Warmer climes, adventures. A new career in a new town.”

We’d reached the far side of the bridge.

“I’ll leave you here.” Miles glanced at his mobile, read a message and smiled slightly before glancing at me again. “I’m not falling off the end of the Earth, Robbie! I’ll be in touch. Till then—”

He raised a finger and touched it to my lips. “Not a word,” he murmured, then kissed my cheek in farewell, spun on his heel, and began striding back across the bridge.

I watched him go, his fawn-colored greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat, until night swallowed him. For a few minutes I stood there, gazing past the bridge’s span to the dark river below, the image of a gemlike creature flickering across my vision and Miles’ kiss still warm upon my cheek.

Then I turned, head down as a blast of wind blew up from the underground station, and hurried to catch my train.

Thanks to Liz Gorinsky for contributing to the selection of this story. —eds.

©2009 by Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in Conjunctions 52. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is an award-winning author whose science fiction and fantasy novels include the Winterlong series, Waking the Moon, Last Summer at Mars Hill, and Glimmering. Her novels and short stories have won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. Hand was born in California and raised in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York; she now divides her time between London and the coast of Maine. Over the years she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others.

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

Wednesday’s Story

Wole Talabi | 6725 words

My story has a strange shape to it.

It has a beginning and middle and, of course, I need not tell you that it has an end because it is the nature of all things to end, especially stories. But this story . . . well, it bunches up in places and twists upon itself in ways that no good story should. The sharpness of its arcs flare and wane in unexpected places because it is a story made of other stories and there are times when partway through telling it, I could swear I did not truly know it because I am made of so many other stories too. This story is badly shaped, but it is uniquely my story, and the burden of its telling is and always will be mine to bear.

My story has two beginnings, I believe. One of them, appropriately enough, is another story; the story of Solomon Grundy. My siblings and I have told his story before, we tell his story all the time, we will tell his story again. Men also tell each other the story of Solomon Grundy, but they never tell it well. How can they? They are not made of stories as we are.

This is the story men tell of Solomon Grundy:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on a Tuesday,
Married on a Wednesday,
Ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.

I’ve always thought that was a particularly poor story. I mean, I know it’s really a children’s rhyme, but it’s a children’s rhyme that purports to tell the story of Solomon Grundy, is it not? Well, consider it: What does it really tell you anyway? Besides the fact that Solomon Grundy was a Christian man who married a presumably Christian woman, fell ill, and then died of some unspecified illness. As far as stories go, it has a good, linear shape, but it tells you nothing worth knowing. It doesn’t tell you that Solomon Grundy was a tall, kind man. That he had firm, skilled hands possessed with a grim determination. That he loved and he suffered and he laughed and he fought. It doesn’t tell you that he was the child of a runaway Ifá priestess-to-be and a caddish English boatswain. It doesn’t tell you that he had a shock of curly brown hair and honest, brown eyes. It doesn’t tell you that he loved his wife more than life itself and that he held her desperately in his thickly muscled arms as cruel injuries slowly withdrew the life from her. It doesn’t tell you that she died a few days and an eternity before he did and it certainly doesn’t tell you that between Wednesday and Thursday, during the long, dry harmattan of 1916, Solomon Grundy stopped time.

What the hell kind of story is that anyway?

This is how my story ends:

I stab Solomon Grundy with the emerald timestone and he stumbles back with a shocked and disbelieving look in his eyes. He falls down and writhes on the floor in pain as the timestone communes with his blood and the gears of time correct themselves in his world, pulling him back into it. The correction becomes a glistening black hole in the floor beneath him that looks like the pupil of an ancient eye behind which despair, disease, and death are waiting for him. He sinks into it muttering her name and is gone with a wet, slimy sound, leaving only the glimmering timestone on the ground. When he opens his eyes, he is back in the forest, it is Thursday and it is over. In tears, I fall to the floor and cry out. Each wail is an exorcism of personal failure; each tear is an excision of regret for what I have done.

The second beginning of my story is in darkness. A darkness of place and a darkness of mind. At least this is where I think it should begin. I am unsure.

My siblings and I have just finished telling a story. It is a strange and sad story but it is a good story because we told it well. Perhaps we told it too well. A thin layer of it lingers on my skin like patina and irritates me.

This is the story we told:

A young Calabar girl named Emeh was kidnapped and violated in unspeakable ways by a self-appointed holy man. She died of her injuries a few days later, but the holy man went unpunished because he had friends and family in high places. The girl’s father mourned all he could and when that was not enough, he spent all he had in order to take cruel revenge on the holy man. When the deed was done, he found nothing but madness waiting for him on the other side of retribution. He wandered into a forest, naked and insane, and was never heard from or seen again.

In the silence after we have told the story, the darkness of it, of the world we chronicle, seeps into my mind and soon becomes overwhelming. I need to do something. To tell is no longer enough. I light myself a cigarette using one of the candles on the table around which we are seated and ask my brother Sunday, who is the most knowledgeable of us all, a question. “The Òrìṣà once told me that we can go into the world of men by using the timestone to pierce holes in the spaces between us. Is this true?”

He regards me suspiciously, the turn of his head dragging his long, flowing beard across his kaftan. “Wednesday, pay no attention to anything that falls from the lips of an Òrìṣà; it is not the mandate of Days to go into the world of men.”

The end of his sentence is the beginning of a speech I have heard before. I know it well. My brother’s eyes are the clear green of the sea in the places where it kisses a forest island and his hair is greying at the temples like a cloudy afternoon. His green eyes hold me captive as he tries futilely to make me understand the importance of a principle I have already decided to betray.

“I understand our place brother, truly, I do. I am only asking if what they say of the timestone is true,” I lie to make him stop lecturing.

The timestone sits at the centre of our table like an exotic ornament, between two ornate pewter candelabra that cradle the candles that provide all the light we have, all the light we have ever needed. Its emerald edges glint in the candlelight and remind me to look at my brother again. By this time, all our siblings are staring at us, wondering what I am getting at, what will happen, what Sunday will say. Thursday’s gaze is hard, like moonbeams falling through cloudless sky and onto a cliff. Tuesday’s pale fingers are caught in her lustrous auburn hair like she was braiding it and suddenly forgot how, giving the confused look she wears on her freckled face a powerful puerility. Friday’s stare is intense and focused beneath his thick afro. Saturday seems like she might cry, or scream, or do something strange that is neither but both at the same time. No one else seated at our grand, intricately patterned mahogany table, our vastly varied faces illuminated by candlelight, looks at me directly, but look they do.

“The question you ask worries me, sister,” Sunday says to me, his eyes overflowing with rebuke and suspicion, as though I were a young boy laughing at his own father’s funeral. Saturday turns her face away from us.

I say, “Then worry no longer, brother. I shall ask no more,” as I toss my cigarette to the floor and stomp it out with my heel.

“Very well,” He responds, stiffly.

An awkward silence follows.

“Let us tell another story,” Friday begins. His voice is a roiling bass that makes me feel like my skin is a thin sheet of metal, vibrating with his sound. “Monday, choose a story for us to tell and hear.”

Monday nods gently. I watch him take the tip of his moustache between the thumb and index finger of his right hand and begin to twirl the edge of the thin thing. The lines around his eyes deepen as he considers all the days of the lives of men that have been and will be, seeking out a story for us. He seems to shrink in his fitted pinstripe suit and then, in an instant, he expands with choice, passing the story we all know he has chosen for us to hear and tell. I close my eyes and receive it violently, as a vision.

In it, I see a large, ochre-skinned man in ripped khakis kneeling in the forest, an injured woman in his arms. She is naked and her skin is the dark purple of bruises. There are multiple stab wounds clustered around her swollen belly, the whites of her eyes are shot through with red, and blood is leaking from her broad nose, her round mouth, the cloudy beds of her short fingernails. The vision starts to warp as Monday begins to tell his part of the tale, speaking the story into existence, locking the events that have occurred and will occur into place.

I feel like ash is blowing into my mouth, the heat from the candles is burning my thin skin. I struggle to hold on to the vision but the story has become a sea of pain and sadness, choppy and grey.

Monday says, “Edward Grundy only ever set foot on the soil of the land that would become Nigeria once. He arrived aboard the RMS Ananke in June of 1896, and after offloading his vessel’s cargo at the port of Lagos, he and his crew mates went off to a local colonial tavern for drinks and rest. There, drunk and taken with well-aged lust, Edward set his eyes on a young woman who worked in the kitchens. Her name was Bamigbàlà and he forced himself upon her behind the lounge. By the time the RMS Ananke sailed off for Liverpool three days later, he had forgotten the incident and Bamigbàlà was with child. She put to bed nine months later, on a Monday.”

Monday stops speaking and my head feels light, like the petal of an old flower. Tuesday clears her throat, readying herself for her part of the story. Then she says, “The tavern owner, the Viscount Sydney Phillips, was livid when he discovered Bamigbàlà’s pregnancy and the circumstance by which it came to be, but he did not cast her out, for he had taken her in as a runaway several months ago and did not wish to have the death of an Englishman’s child, any Englishman’s child, on his hands. And so when the child was born, he named him Solomon in the hope that he would be wiser than his father, gave him his father’s family name, and had him baptised into the body of Christ on a Tuesday.”

Tuesday stops and turns to me. I close my eyes, resisting the story, but instinct and duty move my lips and I begin to speak, “Solomon grew up well and strong, mentored by the Viscount and well cared for by his loving mother. She taught him the names of the roots and the trees and the rivers and the wind, while the Viscount taught him archery and bookkeeping and loyalty and an Englishman’s confidence. The Viscount’s head servants began to fear that their master would leave the management of his property and affairs to Solomon when he retired, for the tavern had grown to become a famous lodging and it was clear that in all of Lagos the Viscount would find no fitter hands to manage it than Solomon’s. They plotted against Solomon in secret.

In time, Solomon fell in love with one of the Viscountess’s handmaids, Atinuke, and she with him. They would often go into the forest, where he would show her the secrets his mother had shown him—the ways of conversing with the old spirits, of communion with the youthful winds, of dancing with the senescent rivers. Some nights they would swim and drink fresh palm wine and make love under the moon’s tender gaze before returning to the lodging. Eventually, with the Viscount’s blessing, they were married, on a . . .”

I freeze midsentence because I know what comes next, what Thursday will say when I stop. This is a dark, dark story, full of pain and suffering. I keep thinking I can stop the pain from blooming on the horizon of their reality like an evil sun rising. I know it is not my place, the story will happen, is happening, has already happened. Ours is but to hear and tell. I know, I know, and yet, I am overcome with the need to try to stop this terrible story from being. I open my eyes and conclude that it must be done. This is the time, and this is the story.

Sunday, sensing something strange in my sudden silence shoots me a sharp look, and we lock eyes, a frown of unease chiselled onto his face and a grimace of determination onto mine. I act before he can, leaping out of my chair and onto the table. I seize the timestone from its silver base, raise it high above my head and bring it down onto the table, stabbing the narrowed, empty space between Sunday and myself. Everything stops. A hyperborean frost grips my hand and I let go of the timestone. It remains in its place, suspended above the heavy table. Monday is caught mid-protest, his lips parted. Sunday is atop the table, his right hand reaching for me and his face crumpled. Tuesday’s mouth hangs open and Thursday’s chin rests on the tip of his palms. Friday is halfway between sitting and standing. Saturday’s arms are thrown in front of her in some strange motion. All their eyes are locked onto me but they are all frozen in place, like statues.

In the wounded space between Sunday and I, a filmy blackness is spreading like poisoned blood. It expands and expands and expands until it is a hole wide enough for three gluttonous men to fall through. I remove the timestone from the centre of it slowly and the blackness ripples but does not retreat. I dip my fingers into the darkness and the chill I felt initially returns like a persistent suitor. This time I do not withdraw from its frosty caress. I lean forward, letting my hand sink deeper and deeper. Beyond the cold is warmth, the warmth and humidity of tropical night. I continue to lean in until my face is only half a breath away from the blackness, and then I let myself fall into the inky sea that fills the hole I have carved between worlds, focused only on the image in the vision from Monday’s story, using the pain of its characters as a beacon to guide me to a reality shore nearby.

The dark, woody, warm forest wraps itself beneath my feet, above my head, before my eyes. It greets me in the ancient way—with a touch of wind and falling leaves—and tells me that its name is Òkeméji, because it has swallowed two hills. I offer it greetings and ask it where the man carrying the wounded woman in his arms is, was, or will be. I am not sure where exactly I have inserted myself into the story; I only know that I have arrived, as I must, on a Wednesday.

Òkeméji tells me that there is a couple bathing together in the river that flows between its two hills. It asks me why I have come and why I seek them. Clutching the timestone close to my chest, I simply say, “It is an urgent and desperate matter.”

I realize that I am near the beginning of the bad part of the story, the part near the end of Wednesday and the start of Thursday, but feel that I may yet be able to save Solomon and Atinuke from the suffering that is to come. I beg Òkeméji to guide me to them quickly and it answers reluctantly with the falling of a branch from a nearby Iroko tree.

The branch is thick and brown and solid and seems shaped like a man in the dim light of the night forest. It begins to bend and twist and warp, as though it is writhing in pain or pleasure or perhaps both. The branch’s body becomes definitively human: old, wrinkled, and very hairy. The old man that was a branch rises to his feet on stilt-like legs, leaning forward as though he is always about to fall over. His face is not at all handsome. It looks like a face that has been cut away from one man, stretched over the skull of another and weathered in the desert sun. Forced to fit. Distorted. Beaten. Ugly. He stretches his arm forward and it instantly begins to burn like the finest quality firewood, illuminating the dark forest before us. This is the Iroko-man. We have told his story before, we tell his story all the time, we will tell his story again, my siblings and I. The Iroko-man is a cruel man, as cruel as tree can be.

This is the story of the Iroko-man:

There was once a village where the women had been barren for many years and had forgotten the sound of crying children. The women of this cursed village stripped themselves naked and went together into the forest, seeking the venerable and powerful Iroko to beg for help, for children. The tree that was the Iroko-man asked what gifts they would offer him if he indeed chose to help them. The naked and barren women desperately cried out the names of the things they possessed, hoping one of them would entice the Iroko-man to aid them: yams, kolanut, mangoes, goats, mirrors, palm wine. One of these women—Oluronbi—being the poor wife of a wood-carver, and owning nothing of value, feared that the Iroko-man would heed all but her and so she promised that once she began to bear children, she would bring the Iroko-man her first child. The Iroko-man agreed. Within a year, the barren women were barren no more, and the most beautiful of all the children was the daughter born to Oluronbi. When the other women took their promised gifts to the Iroko-man, Oluronbi did not take her beloved daughter. She bore three more children. Several years passed and as time went by, so did memory. One day, Oluronbi, forgetting her debt, passed through the forest on her way to visit her sister, and the Iroko-man seized her for what was owed to him. He changed her into a small, sad bird, and cursed her to sit on the branches of his tree singing:

One promised kola,
One promised a goat,
One promised yams,
But Oluronbi promised her child.

The wood-carver went seeking his lost wife and when he heard the bird’s song, it occurred to him what must have happened. He went home and carved a doll of fine dark wood so that it resembled a real human child, placed a gold chain bearing his daughters initials around its neck and wrapped it in beautiful aso-oke. Then he went into the forest and laid it at the foot of the tree in order to trick the Iroko-man into believing it was Oluronbi’s child.

When men tell the story of the Iroko-man, they say he took the doll into the body of his tree, tricked into believing he had Oluronbi’s daughter, and returned Oluronbi to her former form. They say she returned home and never entered the forest again, living happily ever after.

This is a lie.

When I and my siblings tell the story of the Iroko-man, we tell the truth: that he laughed at the wood-carver’s attempted trickery—how can a tree be tricked with wood? That he only took their wooden doll and returned Oluronbi to her former state as part of a trick of his own. That he let her go only so that she could watch as he possessed her husband’s body in the dead of night and using the wood-carver’s hands, hard and steady as an Iroko tree, strangled their three children. That the Iroko-man, still possessing Oluronbi’s husband, beat Oluronbi to death with a log of sandalwood and carved his name into her belly with a chisel. That only when this was all done did the Iroko-man leave the mind of Oluronbi’s husband to witness the work of his hands. Weeping followed, then insanity, and soon after, suicide.

The Iroko-man is a cruel man, as cruel as tree can be.

I am sorry; this story is not the story of the Iroko-man, is it? This is my story and this is the part of it where the wrinkled and naked Iroko-man is leading me to the river bank where Solomon and Atinuke are bathing, his wooden hand aflame to guide our way and his back bent like a sickle, like a talon, like an unkept promise.

I watch him walk wonderingly as he silently leads me past trees taller and older than any of the men who walk the earth; past a group of cherubic Àbíkú seated upon a rock playing a game I do not know, and whom I greet in the ancient way; past a blur of leaves and branches and vines and wild creatures, some of whom I have told stories of, will tell stories of; past the paths and windings and elements of the forest itself on my way to intercept the story of Solomon Grundy.

When we reach a clearing through which I can see the moon-polished river flowing by, the Iroko-man stops and turns to me. His eyes are closed. His wooden hand is burned almost to the elbow and beneath the flame it glows the bright red of good charcoal. He opens his eyes. We stare at each other until a sentence takes his face and squeezes its words through his mouth.

“They just left here,” he says, then adds, “You should not have come.”

I have no chance to answer; the Iroko-man is gone with his words.

In the distance, toward the half-full moon, I can see silhouettes of people. There are more than two of them and it looks like they are either dancing or fighting. I think on the Iroko-man’s words and consider the sight ahead of me, and deep within, in my bone-places, I know they are fighting and I am already too late; this is the part of the story that leads to my vision. The part of the story Thursday would have told if I had not used the timestone to cleave the essence of things upon which all stories are written.

There is a sudden thunderclap so loud I believe for a second that the earth beneath my feet will split in two. Around me, a curtain of water begins to crash down angrily from the sky. I start to run along the riverbank toward the silhouettes and I call out to Òkeméji to help me,

“Eater of hills, crown of the earth; please, stop them!”

I beg him to stop the fighting men before they inflict the pain and suffering Monday’s chosen story would, is, has led to. Òkeméji does not answer me; the forest knows I have broken the author’s law to be here, that I am perpetrating an abomination by attempting to amend the timestream, by trying to change the story.

This is the thing about stories, regardless of who tells them or how they are told: Every story is created by someone—the author and the finisher of its characters’ fates.

Authors do not like their stories changed.

My legs sink into the wet soil with every step, and loose twigs slap against my flesh, slowing me down. I run and run and the silhouettes grow and grow until I can hear the thud of the men’s fists striking against each other’s flesh. The sky flashes electric white fangs and growls angrily like a guard dog, protecting the story from me. I know I am too late but I keep running toward them anyway, my mascara running down my face like poisoned tears.

Each time my foot sinks into the forest floor, it seems an eternity passes. I am slow. I do not know how to be in time, having existed outside it for so long. And I am being slowed even more by someone, something, everything.

Eventually, I come close enough to the silhouettes to make out three men. They are wrestling like a new-born, six-legged animal learning to walk. Solomon Grundy is the centre of the beast, I recognize him from his story. He is a large man, larger than the two attempting to subdue him. His ochre skin is slick with sweat and his Ankara shirt is torn. He pushes one of the men away from him and throws a punch into the man’s gut that doubles him over. The other man has his hand around Solomon’s throat and is attempting to choke him. I reach them and launch myself—the only weapon I have—at the man doubled over, tackling him to the wet, grassy ground and evening the odds. From the ground, I see Solomon lift his second attacker and throw the man over his shoulder.

I climb onto the chest of the man I have engaged. His face displays the tribal markings of the assassin’s guild and in the blood-coloured whites of his eyes I can see his entire life, his story, up to and beyond the point where he and his friend accept eighteen shillings from Viscount Phillip’s head-servants to kill Solomon and Atinuke. I clasp my hands together, interlocking my fingers, and pound his face with all the strength I can muster. With every strike, I alter the shape of his story. With every hit, I try my best to change what was, is, would have been of him. The wind howls its disapproval.

My siblings and I know a lot about stories. For example: For a story to have a good shape, it must, generally speaking, be composed of three parts: the introduction, the conflict, and the resolution. The resolution need not be satisfactory for the story to be well shaped.

When I stop hitting the man, it is almost midnight, it is still raining, and I no longer hear the sounds of struggle. I rise to my feet and turn to see Solomon kneeling beside the body of a woman, cradling her head in his arms. She is Atinuke, his wife, she is naked, and she is dying. There is a constellation of gaping, pink stab wounds surrounding her prominent navel like so many unnatural lips. I have failed. I raise my right arm, my muddy and wet sleeves weighing it down, and reach out to them as though I could will her not to die, will the end of her story to change.

“Who are you?” Solomon asks without looking up from the body of the woman loves.

“I am no one,” I say, then add, “I am sorry, I should not have come here.”

Solomon pleads, his voice breaking like falling glass, “Help her. Help us.”

“I can’t,” I start to explain.

Solomon looks up and stares at me, truly stares at me through his big, wet, brown eyes, and despite (or perhaps, because of) his pain he sees me for what I truly am. There is an understanding in them that no man should have. There is the discernment that comes from constant interaction with Èlegba, the messenger, the teacher. His mother has taught him more than just the rudiments of Ifá divination; she has taught him to confer comfortably with the Òrìṣà, to see the truth of spirit-things.

Then he says in a language older than the forest, “Please, Wednesday. You can help. You have power beyond this world. Help me.”

Something like lightning traces my veins when he speaks my true name and pleads with me in the ancient way. I wish desperately that I could have entered their story in time to save her. I say, “I’m sorry,” and I mean it more than I have meant or will ever mean anything.

Òkeméji will not help me. Nothing in this world will. I have been neutralized like a child locked in a cage made of old giant’s bones. There is now no power I can call upon here. There is nothing I can do now but go back and try to use the timestone to enter this story again, perhaps in a different place, perhaps at a different time. But even as I think this, I already know that I will never be able to change it, that the forest and the rain and the trees and the Òrìṣà and the author and finisher of all stories that is also the maker of worlds will make sure that I never change this story, try as I might.

This is the middle of this story.

It is one of many.

None of them are good.

This is what happens in every middle of this story:

Realizing that I have achieved, am achieving, will achieve nothing, I turn away from Solomon and his dying wife, pull out the timestone, and jam its pointed end into ground beneath me. Where the stone pierces the earth, a hole appears, shimmering around the edges, and expands rapidly, exhaling in all directions, consuming the soil and the leaves and the water with the empty, slimy blackness that is the hole between worlds. The rain does not stop. Where the raindrops hit the blackness, they bounce away like diamonds, as pale as the reflected moonlight, but only half as bright. I lean into the darkness, ready to go back, when I feel a weight crash into me, throwing me into the dark pool of non-time-non-space head first. Around me, I feel a cold, liquid embrace. I see Solomon Grundy’s face, silent but eloquent in its grim determination. We spin and we swirl and we blur and we fall as everything that makes us us races across the emptiness, until we tumble out of the blackness and onto the stone floor of the room where my frozen siblings wait for me like potent gargoyles.

We stare at each other in the stone room, Solomon and I. He should not be here. He cannot be here, out of time. If he is, then it means that time in his world has stopped, paused, waiting for him to return to it, because just as a river cannot flow without the water that defines it, the timestream on which his story is written cannot go on without him.

Solomon’s arms tense and his eyes are fixed on the timestone in my hand. He has seen what it is through gifted eyes blinded by pain, and he thinks he can use it to go back, to re-enter his own story and save her, but he is wrong. He is as wrong as I was when I first tried to change his story. Even more. Much more.

In some middles of this story, Solomon charges at me head first, so I swing my right arm behind me sharply, clutching the timestone like it is my own heart, and let his skull crash into my belly, throwing me back against the cold stone wall.

In some other middles of this story, Solomon walks up to me and reaches for the timestone, trying to wrestle it from my vice-tight grip and pushing me back while pleading with me softly but insistently to let him have it, to let him try to save her.

In at least one middle of this story, Solomon sidesteps his way to the table as he asks me what will happen if he uses the timestone to re-enter his own story. While I am answering, he suddenly picks up the empty silver housing for the timestone and throws it at me. I stumble back into the wall, off-balance. Before I can react, his left hand is wrapped around my throat and his right is twisting mine, trying to make me let go of the timestone.

I am not cruel. I am perhaps unwise and impulsive, but I am not cruel. I really wanted to save him, prevent the loss and the pain that now drives him to do this terrible thing. You must believe me. I could not tell and hear his story without feeling his pain, completely and truly. But I cannot let him have the timestone—it’s an unspeakable thing in the hands of any man, the power to enter the spaces between stories—and I will do what I have to in order to keep it out of his hands.

There is a story men tell of the folly in trying to help another when one is not supposed to.

This is that story:

A hunter was walking through the forest after he had just killed an ostrich—rare and special game—which he was taking home for his wife to cook. He came upon a dragon trapped beneath a fallen Iroko tree. The dragon groaned and wailed in pain, for he could not free himself from his plight. The hunter was wary but filled with pity at the great beast reduced to such a state. He observed for a while with keen eyes and then he took mercy upon the beast and helped raised the fallen tree, freeing the dragon. Once free, the dragon growled and grabbed him, pulling the hunter’s head towards its maw. The hunter protested, but the dragon only said, “All dragons eat men. It is our role in this world. It was not your place to free me. No good deed goes unpunished!” The hunter pleaded desperately, reminding the dragon of his kindness until the dragon finally relented and agreed that he would wait and let the next three travellers they met in the forest decide the hunter’s fate.

The first traveller was a tired old horse. The horse said that when she was young, she carried her crippled master wherever he desired. But when she grew old, her bones tired and weary, her master cast her aside in favour of a new horse. The horse told the dragon to eat the hunter for his naivety and reminded him that no good deed goes unpunished.

The next traveller was a tired old dog. The dog, when told the events that had occurred and asked what should become of the hunter, said that when he was young he herded for his master, but then when his teeth fell out, his master threw him out, for it is the nature of men to replace the things they use, without care or kindness. The dog told the dragon to eat the hunter for his naivety and reminded him that no good deed goes unpunished.

The third traveller was a young tortoise. The tortoise considered the situation and then said that it could not decide unless it saw things exactly as they were initially, for reconstruction is better than testimony. The dragon put its neck below the Iroko branch and the hunter trapped it beneath the tree as it was before. The dragon then asked the tortoise its opinion now that it could see the situation. The tortoise only turned to the hunter and said, “You’re free now, go.”

The hunter, overcome with gratitude, told the tortoise to come home and share the rare and delicious ostrich meat with him and his wife as thanks for saving his life. The tortoise agreed and went home the hunter. When the hunter told his wife what happened, she was enraged, insisting that there was no need to share precious ostrich meat with the tortoise. She insisted that if they killed the tortoise, there would be more ostrich meat for them and they could also have delicious tortoise soup for a week. The hunter argued with her for a while, but in the end, being a hunter, he did what came naturally to him, what his role in life dictated he do. He killed the tortoise, who, with his dying breath, croaked, “Indeed! No good deed goes unpunished.”

I have never liked that story, but it is all I can think about whenever I reach this part of my own story, Solomon Grundy’s story, where a desperate and wild Solomon is trying to wring the life from me, the feel of his fingers around my neck as uncomfortable and painful as an unrequited kindness.

All the middles of this story converge at this point: Solomon pulls back and then pain explodes in my side. Solomon’s arm ripples as he punches me in the gut. I watch the waves of skin ride his body as everything seems to slow down, even though that is not possible in this place. It only seems slow because I am suddenly hyperaware of what is happening to me and I am resolved to stop it.

I am not a skilled fighter, I have never been in combat before this story, but I have told many stories of great warriors and little bits of their skill have settled somewhere in the essence of me like fine layers of dust deposited over many, many years.

All great warriors move like dancers. Every disciplined fighter is elegant. I lean back into the wall and brace myself against it, lift my knee to my chest and throw my right foot forward in a vicious front kick that crashes into his chest like heartbreak, shoving him back and away from me. I slide forward and jam the pointed end of the emerald stone into Solomon’s belly, creating an instant waterfall of blood. He stumbles back with a shocked and disbelieving look in his eyes. He falls down and writhes on the floor in pain as the timestone communes with his blood and the gears of time correct themselves in his world, pulling him back into . . .

Wait.

I’m sorry; I’ve already told you how this story ends haven’t I?

Forgive me; the shape of my story makes it easy to get lost. Although I must say, no story truly ends where it does. We choose our endings and I only end this one here because this is the point at which it merges again with the story men tell of Solomon Grundy. His wound becomes infected, he suffers a fever and delirium, dies, and is buried soon after, just as the rhyme says. There is nothing interesting to tell beyond the ending I have chosen for you. And even the most interesting parts of my story, Solomon Grundy’s story, once ended, like the soft, diffuse darkness of dawn, will eventually become pale and fade to the eternal salty grey of lost memory.

So . . .

If I have already told you how the story ends, then which part of the story is this now?

I’m not sure.

I think this is the part of the story between the last written word and the bottom of the page on which it is written; the space between the breath with which a narrator exhales the final word of the story and his next in which there is no story; the distance between the height at which belief has been suspended and the solid, hard floor of reality; the empty, fluid places where, for what is even less than a moment, the characters, the audience, the narrator, and the author of a story can all become equally real to one another, become intimately aware of one another, and maybe, just maybe, even become one another, depending on the shape of the story.

©2016 by Wole Talabi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor with a fondness for science fiction and fantasy. His stories have appeared in Terraform, Omenana, Liquid Imagination, The Kalahari Review, and a few other places. He edited the TNC anthology These Words Expose Us. He currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He likes interesting flow simulation problems, good stories and goes scuba diving whenever he gets a chance.

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

The Plagiarist

Hugh Howey | 13,091 words

1

Adam Griffey lost himself in the familiar glow-in-the-dark sticker. It was a depiction of a bee lighting on a flower, a thirsty proboscis curling out of the insect’s cartoony smile. The sticker held Adam’s attention. The glow of the bee made it seem radioactive, a poisoned thing. It adorned the edge of his beat-up computer screen, the edges curling away as the sticker lost its grip. The remnants of several other stickers stood idly by, just the bumpy adhesive outlines, the colorful bits having long ago been peeled away by Adam’s fidgety hands. He was prone to scratching at them with his fingernails. They weren’t his; they came with the old monitor, which he’d bought off another faculty member. Adam figured it belonged to one of their kids, what with the stickers. He thought about that as his eyes fell reluctantly from the bee and back to the screen. There was a message there, a series of messages typed back and forth. They populated a chat window, the only thing open on his screen. The window suddenly blinked with a new question:

lonelyTraveler1: you still there?

Adam picked at the edge of the radioactive bee, thinking of tearing it off. He read back over his conversation with Amanda, his responses in deep blue, hers a bright red. She had asked him a question before he’d gotten distracted. How long had he gone without responding? What would she read in that silence?

His fingers fell to the keyboard, leaving the sticker for another time. He sat motionless, unsure of how to respond. Thoughts whirled. Adam read the second question up. He read it over and over. Where the fuck had it come from? From nowhere, he decided. He had gone too long without reply; he decided to ignore the older question and answer the more recent one:

Griffey575: Yeah. Sorry about that. Doing too much at once.

lonelyTraveler1: you chatting with other people at the same time? you cheating on me? ;)

Adam glanced over the sad and empty expanse of his monitor and laughed to himself. Twenty-four inches by twelve inches of pathetic nothingness. His entire social life, his entire real romantic life, could be contained in one small chat window in a lonely fraction of that abyss.

Griffey575: I wish.

He typed the response, then held down the backspace key to erase the truth before he could send it.

Griffey575: Work stuff.

He decided that was better. Adam wondered if it counted as a lie if the untruth was as boring as reality.

lonelyTraveler1: what kinda stuff? for a class you’re teaching? are you writing anything? anything you can share?

Adam saw how lies could spawn more lies, each offspring bigger than its parent. The truth was, he’d been neglecting his work and his writing. Possibly, in no small part, because of Amanda’s constant badgering to read more. She was—if not his online girlfriend—at least his anti-muse, the woman whose insistence quenched all motivation. Adam had known this of himself since he was an undergrad: He couldn’t think when being told to.

lonelyTraveler1: you still haven’t answered my other question. . .

Which one? Adam thought.

Griffey575: Which one?

He hit enter before he could regret asking. He knew which question. He didn’t want to know, but he did. His stomach lurched with the audaciousness of her suggestion. And what did that say about him? How could he have a fake relationship with the real, and a real one with the fake? Which relationship was more real? Which was sicker? And who was the victim? Was anyone really being betrayed?

lonelyTraveler1: don’t you think it’s time we meet up?

There it was again. It was crazy.

Griffey575: In person?

lonelyTraveler1: how else?

Adam watched the cursor blink where he was expected to respond. The glowing bee radiated stored sunlight in his peripheral. In the utter darkness around him, he sensed the piles of clutter everywhere. He kept meaning to get to it. He kept the lights off in his apartment, kept the blinds drawn, so he couldn’t see the reminders of his laziness. The bee dimly betrayed him with its steady glow.

Griffey575: This way seems nice.

After the barest of pauses, he added a smiley face:

Griffey575: :)

It wasn’t sarcasm. It wasn’t real humor. It was an apology, something to soften the blow of what he knew to be the wrong answer. Adam had replied incorrectly; Amanda’s silence confirmed it. An icon came up to let him know she was typing something. It disappeared for a moment, reappeared, then disappeared again. He was watching her think. He wondered what things had been erased, if it was anger or disappointment she was refraining from sending.

Griffey575: I think I’m just not ready.

He wondered if that sounded better. It at least filled the silence.

lonelyTraveler1: I’m gonna find out you’re married, aren’t I?

Griffey575: I’m not married.

Such lies were not in him. Such a life, perhaps, was not in him.

lonelyTraveler1: but there’s someone else.

Griffey575: There’s no person else.

Clumsy. The sentence sounded stilted, but it kept his response, strictly speaking, from being an outright lie.

lonelyTraveler1: I won’t push you. just think about it. or at least write me something, write me something about why you’d want to or not want to.

A pause.

lonelyTraveler1: I feel like we’re living in 2 separate worlds lately.

Adam laughed nervously. His fingers left the keyboard and moved to rub his sore temples. For a brief moment, just an insane instant, he considered telling Amanda the truth. He pictured typing all the craziness of his life out in one uninterrupted, suicidal message. He imagined her sitting there, staring at the icon that let her know he was typing for hours and hours while he crafted a biopic admission of how scary and surreal and demented his life had become . . .

He deleted the thought.

Griffey575: I do have a piece I haven’t shared.

His mind was suddenly in a spilling mood—as long as it was spilling other things. It sought release of some cryptic truth. There were thousands of haikus that Adam kept to himself. They lived in his head, swirling beneath the layered façades, keeping him company. The impulse to let one out became great. He figured he could trade it for the impossible thing Amanda was asking, this meeting each other in person. Perhaps a bartered poem could delay the inevitable.

lonelyTraveler1: oh. PLEASE!!

Griffey575: Just one, then I really need to get some sleep. I have an early class.

lonelyTraveler1: is this a new one? when did you write it?

When did he write it? He couldn’t exactly remember. All his life, Adam had wanted to be a writer. The problem was: He was too good at reading. He had too many of Shakespeare’s sonnets memorized. Too much Blake and Shelly and Proust. All that good stuff was crammed up in his brainstem, pooled in his pons, dripping down his spine, now a part of his very fiber. Trying to sneak a sham of his own past such a gang of real McCoys was impossible. Adam’s great gift—knowing the good stuff—was also his failing. The only words of his own that he could sneak through his literature-stuffed brain were his little haikus, unassuming and light on their feet. They were like neutrinos streaming out from the dense center of a star, cruising across the cosmos invisible and unknowable.

Griffey575: About a year ago I think.

He hit enter, let the words come to him from memory.

Griffey575: Here it goes; then I need to get away from this screen:

Moments spill through hands
idling away at nothing
To puddle in years

Adam logged off, but the chat window remained open. It held another uncomfortable conversation he could scroll through and regret. He read over the poem and realized that at that very moment, Amanda was reading it as well. They were both seeing it for the first time. It was as if some part of him had been excised. Released. Set free and exposed.

He wondered how much of him she would see in the poem. Could it be read in any way other than the obvious? Full of regrets? A loser continuing to lose?

Not for the first time, he tried to imagine what Amanda looked like. Not that it mattered, but the human brain seemed to need to know. Eyes were used to engaging with other eyes while voices crossed. They were too accustomed to scanning faces for revealing twitches, the curl of lips, the flare of nostrils. Speaking in nothing but font was unnatural and stifling.

Adam gave the webcam above the psychedelic bee a nervous glance. It wasn’t plugged in, never had been; it came with the monitor. Still, it felt like people could see him sometimes, see the real him stripped of his avatars. Not Amanda, not his mother or sister or anyone he knew—he felt like millions of strangers could see him in his dark and filthy room, like they spent hours watching him, like they knew him better than he knew himself.

Adam closed the chat window, turned off his computer, rubbed his eyes. It was so late it was early. And Amanda had been right, even if she’d only meant it as a figure of speech: They were spending too much time on different planets. The haiku, he thought, captured that all too well. So much simplicity and truth in seventeen syllables. And now it was out in the world and no longer rattling around in his brain. He laughed to himself, scratched the beard sneaking out of his skin, then saw the hour and realized he had the time for neither a nap nor shower. Not if he was going to see his other girlfriend before his eight o’clock class.

2

Between these temples,
aching and burning and sore
my universe lies

He only had two hours before he had to be at class, but the simulator would make it feel like six. Blazing computer chips worked much like morning dreams, compressing time. It made living two lives all that easier.

Adam used his faculty pass to swipe his way to the labs, then picked one of the jacks in the far corner. He had the room to himself, four in the morning being too late for most and too early for all, but he still went for as much privacy as possible, knowing he would probably have company before he jacked out. There were only a few reasons to hit the sims at certain times of the day, prostitution being the foremost. Adam wished the stigma weren’t true in his case. He wished.

The seat squeaked as he settled into it. Adam swiped his ID through the reader; the beeps and whirrings of the booting machine were as familiar as a favorite song. And like music, they did something to his autonomic nervous system: His sleepless brain felt a jolt of energy, a dangerous surge of love and lust. He took his temple pads from his backpack, untangled them from each other, then wiped the cups off on his shirt. A dab of adhesive grease went on each, then he pressed them to the sore points on either side of his head—points he could feel without having to check the mirror. The burn there had become constant.

Adam waited impatiently for the simulation to boot. This was the longest part of his day. He could compress all the rest of his hours right into these handful of moments, he was sure. It was also the time when he truly reflected on what he had become, what he was about to do. It was in these moments that he truly loathed himself.

The lab disappeared as the sim took hold. The twinkling lights of the idling machines all around him were replaced by alien constellations. Adam floated in the center of an artificial cosmos. He was God. He could go to any dozens of planets and planetary nebula, observe tectonic plates shifting with x-ray vision, or zoom to the level of the protein and watch the molecules fold as salinity and temperature shifted. His choices were limitless, but of course he had no choice. He hurriedly selected a familiar star out of one of the constellations. The star was named Beatrice Bondeamu Gilbert III, after the donor who paid for the servers on which it was hosted. Artificial stars were like academic halls: a few million dollars and your name lived on forever.

He aimed for the fourth planet out from the star, nestled right in the Goldilocks zone. The glowing blue-green ball was named Hammond after Beatrice’s late husband. Adam “chose” the planet with his mind. It was as simple as looking at something and wanting it. He wanted it.

There were a million ways to approach the planet. If from the entomology department, one might swoop through the night clouds like a bat, virtual sonar picking up invisible bugs to collect. The climatologists would play like gods bored with their food, sitting over the clouds and swirling them with their fingers, taking notes, testing theories. Geneticists would become the size of molecules and be lost in worlds the scope of Mendelian peas, causing mutations. Adam had little use for such scientific probings. He remained much as himself, if a little taller, thicker of hair, more tan, and less paunchy. His virtual being emerged from a bathroom stall in a bookstore he had claimed as his own territory—had paid quite well for it, in fact. He pushed open the door and nodded to a customer walking by.

Hammond was one of the handful of humanoid planets, where evolution had been rigged to emulate Earth’s. As such, it was not as jarring to be an avatar as some xeno-sims could be. It felt perfectly natural to nod to someone who didn’t exist, who was just a bunch of ones and zeros. The computer-simulated customer smiled and nodded in return. It, of course, thought it was real. The customer thought the book it was about to pick up and peruse was real. It thought the sunshine streaming through the front windows, and the grime streaked across those windows, and the dust floating in the air like a grid of stars, and the clatter of bells whacked by an opening door—every simulated person in the entire bookstore thought every single bit of it, including themselves, was all real.

Adam soaked it in. He wanted it to be real as well.

“Hey!”

He turned. Belatrix stood behind him, her green work apron hanging around her neck, two creases running down it vertically from having been meticulously folded the night before. Curls of brown hair hung like springs behind her ears. Her bright eyes smiled at him, crinkles radiating away from their corners. “I didn’t see you come in,” she said. At least, that’s how it was translated for Adam.

Belatrix showed him the small stack of books she was shelving, as if to apologize for not hugging him. Adam smiled what he knew to be a perfectly symmetrical smile full of brilliant teeth.

“I kinda snuck past to the bathroom.” He waved a little wave to forgive the lack of a hug. Adam glanced at the books in her hands. “You getting off soon?”

“I am.”

She was. Adam knew she was. He had chosen the time carefully when he logged in. He had to be in class in two hours, but the flow rate would give him six. Belatrix smiled at him then slid a book into place. Adam tried not to think of the other him, the fleshy him, and the real world waiting and spinning around him. He gave himself up completely to the sim.

“How was work?” Belatrix asked as she pushed open her apartment door and shrugged off her coat. It had drizzled on their walk over from the bookstore. Adam wiped his feet on her mat, then kicked off his shoes. Details like the mud, the shiny drops of water on the tile—he still marveled at the completeness of the illusion, the scope and scale of the digitally constructed world. It was easy to lose oneself in it, to become bewildered by it all.

“That interesting, huh?”

Adam broke out of his trance and helped Belatrix hang her jacket on the hook by the door. “Work was fine,” he said. “Closed a pretty big deal this week.”

He was sure it was true. When he wasn’t present to fill and steer his avatar, the computers moved it about as autonomously as anyone else on planet Hammond. Belatrix, in fact, had probably spent more time in his avatar’s place of work than he had.

“Some tea?”

“Sure,” he said, even though he hated the stuff. It wasn’t tea, but that was the closest translation for the language parser. Horseshit would have been more apt, but the translator stuck to categories such as “warm beverages.” The only thing it left untouched were proper nouns, which left Adam’s avatar with the moniker of Phurxy, a dreadfully common name on Hammond’s Southwest continent.

“Bitter apple?” Belatrix held up a grainy lump of spice. Again, the translation was a mere approximation.

“Please,” Adam said. It made the hot horseshit taste more like wet dirt, a distinct improvement. Adam often considered fast flowing the time through these bits, but the domestic foreplay was a crucial part of the fantasy. This was the life he wanted to live, here with Belatrix in her tidy apartment. He took the steaming bowl and glanced in the mirror at his clean and neatly groomed self. His avatar had taken the time to do that in the morning, brushing his teeth and his hair. It felt like room service for the body and soul. He luxuriated in his sense of self.

“Seamonsters and Mist is opening up at the cinema this weekend.” Belatrix took a loud sip and looked at him over the rim of her bowl. “You wanna go see it?”

“Love to,” he said. It felt amazing to make plans for his avatar’s time, knowing he wouldn’t have to go—but that he would. He drank as much wet dirt as he could take, set the bowl aside, then plopped down on one of the floor cushions. “I’m feeling kinda horny,” he said with a grin.

Belatrix smiled and set aside her bowl.

Adam could get away with saying such forward things—he could rush the moment with her—because he didn’t do it often.

He did it every time.

3

Even these false worlds
with their oceans and vast plains
can’t hold all my lies

Adam arrived late to his eight o’clock class. His students were already there, sitting like powered down robots, gazing ahead, awaiting commands from him. He closed the door—too loudly—and felt annoyed by the quiet. He would’ve preferred the film cliché: balled paper flying; kids sitting on desks swinging their feet; boys with bravado and girls with batting lashes twisting in their seats. In all his years of teaching, he’d never seen such a scene, not once. It was always the blank stares, the lethargy, the sense among them that the first who moved or uttered a word would be eaten by the others—or worse, be made unpopular.

Adam dumped a stack of papers on his desk and made a show of arranging them, anything to disturb the thick silence of the room. He resented his eight o’clock class. He knew they felt the same way, but what were they missing? More sleep? Escape from their hangovers? He was missing an entire other life he preferred to live, a life that was daily truncated by a day job he wished he didn’t need. He thought this as he scanned their faces, all a weird mix of wide eyes and boredom. If it weren’t for the access to the University server farms and their sims, he wouldn’t put up with the kids at all. Well, the sims and the health care. The health care was nice.

He shuffled papers around and tried to glean from graded assignments which class this was. He had nothing planned for the day. He rarely did of late.

The hypocrisy of Adam’s new existence, the layers and layers of hypocrisy, were always right at the surface, staring back at him. He had become a master of procrastination. Like the students he had long mocked, he had honed the art of putting things off until they were simply never done. He lived under a heavy blanket of shirked responsibilities; they weighed on him every moment, this great pile of many things that needed to be done. He no longer knew where to start. It was all about getting through each moment, getting through the day to enjoy the nights, faking his real life so he could live his fake one.

More hypocrisy: Adam used to mock his kids for their addiction to video games—now he lived in one of his own. He remembered his disgust at virtual marriages between players who had never met, stories about trolls and paladins exchanging digital vows. Now he had one girlfriend he had never met, and he discussed marriage and kids with another person who didn’t really exist.

Then there was the plagiarism—his greatest hypocrisy of them all.

“Does somebody want to pass these out?” Adam gathered up the graded assignments and waved them with one hand. He hadn’t actually taken the time to read them, just verified that they existed. A student he particularly loathed, seated to Adam’s left, was the first to volunteer. The boy took the papers eagerly. Adam rubbed his palms over his eyes and his fingers through his unwashed hair. The plagiarism was his greatest hypocrisy by far. If any of his students plagiarized, they would be flunked. They knew that from the start. It was the greatest sin as a student, as a thinker, and it was a temptation they struggled to avoid. Adam, meanwhile, did it for a living. His second job, the one that paid most of his bills, was to steal the words of others. But lately he hadn’t even been able to summon the motivation to do that. While the papers, marked with their red checks and little else, fluttered their way through the room, an old conversation with his mother came back to Adam. He remembered the first time he had tried to explain his new vocation, and how unimpressed she had been.

• • • •

“I’m just so proud of you honey!”

“Thanks, Mom.” Adam held the phone under his chin, the speaker angled away from his face. The extra distance dampened the ear-splitting scream of his mother’s voice, who seemed to think her words needed extra force to cross the two time zones between them.

“My own son, an author.” Adam could picture her gingerly lifting each page of the book as she skimmed through it. “Cindy from my bridge club bought a copy. We’re racing each other to the end, but not so fast I can’t enjoy it.”

“That’s great, Mom, but you do know—”

“I really love the Marsha character. When she tells Reginold to get out of his own house—”

“Hey, Ma?”

“I love that part. Yes, dear?”

“You’re not telling people that I wrote the book are you?” Adam nuzzled the phone against his ear and pulled on the silence. He could hear his mother’s exhalations on the other end, breathless from excitement. He didn’t call as often as he should.

“Your name is on the cover,” she said. “Adam Griffey. And you dedicated it to your mom. That’s me.”

“Mom, I discovered the book. We’ve talked about this. It says it right there with the copyrights.”

“But this is your book.” The pain in her voice was gut wrenching.

“Yes, and the royalties are mine, and I get a lot of credit with some people for discovering it, but it wasn’t written by me. Please don’t tell Cindy or any of your other friends that I wrote the book. I don’t want to have to explain it on holidays—”

“So who wrote it?” Her voice had gone quiet. Adam could hear her flipping through pages, could almost picture her weathered fingers quivering as she did so. He had told her about this. He remembered telling her about this.

“Mom, do you remember the worlds I told you about? The simulated ones where people here at the university study the weather, and the way the plates of the crust move, and how stars and moons form and all that?”

“The video games?”

Adam sighed. He looked from a pile of dirty laundry to a moldy mound of stacked plastic dishes rising out of the sink. He had none of the time for this.

“It’s similar to video games, Mom, but a lot more complex and a lot more useful. People do real good research in there. That cure for testicular cancer that’s been all over the news? It came from one of these worlds.”

“They cure cancer there?”

Adam felt like he was teaching his mother to perform brain surgery over the phone. Keep your index finger extended along the back of the scalpel, like so, but a little bent. You’ve got the cordless drill charged up? Make the first incision—

“They do a lot of things on these worlds, Ma. They’re a lot like this world. People get up and drive to work. It rains and things get wet. They erect buildings, and the windows need washing after a while. And people write books and plays and poetry and what-not.”

“And someone on this world wrote this book?”

“Yeah.”

“And you just took it?”

“Ma, you know these people aren’t real, right?”

“So they don’t mind? Do you tell them?”

“No, we don’t—” Adam thought about it. They would mind, wouldn’t they? “Mom, we can’t exactly tell them that they aren’t real, that we created them and we really like their work so we’re gonna share it in the real world.”

“Why not?” His mother grunted, sounding disgusted with him. “I thought I raised you better.”

Adam slapped his palm on his chest. “It isn’t up to me, Ma! I don’t make the rules. Besides, I don’t think you could convince these people. They think they’re just as real as you and me. They’d probably lock you up in a padded room until you logged off.”

“Logged off—?”

“Forget it, Ma.”

“What am I supposed to tell my friends?”

“Tell them I’m really good at what I do. Tell them that I can memorize fifteen pages in a single session, word for word. Tell them there’s no way we can copy stuff straight out of the quantum drives, Mom. Say that. Tell them ‘quantum drives.’ Tell them that there’s hundreds of thousands of people trying to do what I do, to find that one great work of art in a sea of tripe, and most of them can’t. Tell your friends that I’m really good at seeing the true genius among the piles of plain stories. Tell them that I’ll be the one to find the next Shakespeare, Mom.”

“But you won’t tell him?”

“Tell who?”

“This new Shakespeare. You’ll memorize his stuff, and you won’t tell him.”

Adam cradled the phone to his ear and let out his breath. “He wouldn’t believe me, Ma, even if I did. These people aren’t real. It’s like a video game, just like you said.”

“So Marsha and Reginold—”

“Those are characters in a book written by a virtual person.” Adam said it slowly.

“But they’re in love with each other.”

He sighed. “I suppose they are. In their own weird way.”

“How did a video game write about that?”

“Hey, Ma? I gotta go. I’ve got a class in an hour.”

“Does your girlfriend, does Amanda know this is what you do?”

“Yeah,” Adam lied.

“And she’s okay with it?”

“Of course.” He rubbed his temples.

“When am I going to meet her?”

Not before I do, Adam thought.

“Soon,” he said.

“Okay. Well, I still like the book.”

“Thanks, Ma.”

“Even if you did steal it from some poor person.”

4

The ones and zeros
like snow, descend and blanket
my eyes, forming all.

Adam patted his pockets as he left his apartment, making sure he had his keys. It was winter; the days were short. A blanket of black hung over the campus, and a blanket of white covered the ground. He shut the apartment door too hard, rattling the windows. Of late, all doors seemed to close too hard for him or not at all. They were slammed or left wanting. It was about motor control, and Adam was losing his. He looked back to the shuddering window and saw his reflection. The scruff on his jaw measured the long nights, nights such as these when he should sleep but couldn’t. Despite his fatigue, he remained awake, a diurnal creature in the opposite of day.

“Griff?”

Adam turned to find his friend standing at the bottom of his apartment’s stoop, freshly falling snow gathering on his knit cap like stars shaken from the darkness overhead.

“Hey, Samualson.”

“You ready?” Samualson asked. He had a look of concern on his face, a look Adam was getting used to seeing. His friend was a decade older than him and half a foot taller. A neatly trimmed beard and fitted coat lent him a professorial look. He seemed more the English scholar than Adam felt, even though he was a member of the hard sciences. The two of them had become friends after seeing each other in the labs every night. They found there was something less pathetic about coming and going to the sims with another real person.

Adam shrugged his bookbag over his shoulder and followed Samualson down the walk. The campus arranged across the valley below was illuminated by tall night lights and the sliver of a waning moon. The snow on the ground and in the air seemed to gather and magnify the light. The shallow impressions of footsteps littered the ground, already half full again with falling snow. Adam hurried up beside Samualson, their boots crunching and squeaking in the wet pack.

“Hey, did you hear?” Thick smoke streamed out with Samualson’s voice, the moisture of his breath crystalized in the cold night air.

“Did I hear?” Adam tugged his gloves on and patted them together. “Did I hear what? I hear tons. I hear too much.”

“Virginia Tech.” Samualson turned his head as a gust of wind brought cold and a flurry of blown snow. “Their farm got razed.”

“Razed? As in gone?”

“Every single server got deleted. Formatted.”

“You’re shittin’ me.” Adam tucked his scarf into his collar. “When? Last night? Today?” He couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard.

Samualson groped in a pocket and drew out an orb of light, the glow of his phone dazzling the snow. “Just now.” He flashed the screen at Adam. “Read about it on the walk over. They think the Writer’s Guild might be responsible, but again, nobody’s taking credit.”

Adam shook his head. “How are they doing this? That’s three farms wiped out this month.”

“Yeah.” They turned a corner around the administration building, entering its lee and escaping the bitter wind. “Three farms went online this month and three others got hosed. That’s pretty weird.”

Adam’s exhalations billowed in the air in front of him before trailing off behind. He pulled his scarf over his mouth. “How many worlds was Tech simming?” His voice was muffled and wet against his nose.

“Sixteen. Four Humanoid and the rest Xeno. I work with a guy who had remote access to some of them. He’s gonna be crushed. Was in the middle of some good research there.”

“Sixteen worlds. Fuck me, that’s a lot to lose.” Adam glanced up at the sliver of a moon hanging over campus.

“They’re saying something close to eighty billion sentients are gone. No telling how many lesser critters.”

“Or works of art,” Adam reminded him.

Samualson shrugged and stuffed his phone away. His hands were pale blue from the cold. He dug in another pocket and pulled a pair of gloves out, then wiggled them on. “That’s your domain,” he said.

They shuffled in near silence across the campus. Adam could hear the tinkle of invisible sleet hitting the crust of snow around him. It was a small campus, which kept the jaunts short, but it was hilly and prone to gasping and wheezing. The university was kept small by necessity, nestled down and crowded in by three rising slopes, like two bosoms and a great belly, all perched on the thin sternum of a high mountain valley. It was a place that caught snow and gathered high-flying and lost souls. Griffey considered that as they reached the Madison Mitchell Jr. Computer Science building. He stamped snow off his boots while Samualson fumbled through his ring of keys. Adam watched a snowflake fall on the back of his glove, the white standing out on the black for a moment before the edges of the fragile crystalline structure folded up into a drop of water. The clarity of the transformation was stunning.

“Look how real all this is,” he said aloud, not meaning to.

Samualson turned and studied his friend, a shiny key pinched between the padded fingers of his glove.

“You feeling okay? You look like shit, man.”

Adam glanced up from the falling, melting stars. “How does it feel this real when we’re in there?” He jerked his head up at the building. Samualson turned back to the lock, inserted the key and opened the door, which squealed on frozen hinges.

“I take it you don’t dream much.”

Adam laughed and stomped snow off his boots. “I don’t even sleep much anymore.”

“Well if you slept more, you’d dream more, and you’d see how good your brain is at making something out of nothing.” He held the door open for Adam, who shuffled through, followed by a dusting of snow. “You know there’s a spot in the center of your vision where you can’t see, right?”

“Where the retina goes through.” Adam nodded. He didn’t see the connection.

“Your brain fills in that blank spot perfectly.” The door clanged shut behind them. “I was talking to a professor in the bio department about this a month ago. You know what he said? He said roughly thirty percent of everything we see is hallucination. It’s our brain smoothing things over so the world’s not so pixelated.” Samualson nodded down the hallway. “That’s how everything in there feels just as real as this, as real as our dreams.” He patted Adam on the back, letting loose a small avalanche of clinging snow. “Seriously, man, you’ve gotta get some sleep. Why don’t you take a night or two off? These worlds aren’t going anywhere.”

“That’s what Virginia Tech thought.”

Samualson laughed. “Ours are a pittance compared to that. Nobody’s gunning for us.”

Adam shrugged, and the two of them fell silent save for the squeak of their wet boots. He imagined—or hallucinated—that he could hear the collective roar of billions of tiny whispering, virtual souls as they approached the interface room. He thought about the server farm nearby with its tall cabinets of computer equipment adorned with blinking lights. Hundreds of busy little mechanical arms clicked back and forth somewhere inside the quantum hard drives, like the arms of miniature gods waving over a dozen digitized worlds, creating and destroying all the time.

5

The connected few.
Billions of neurons and souls.
So few connected.

The interface room was packed. Adam had rarely seen it so full during a night shift. Usually they would find a lone professor or technician in the room working late. Adam preferred it like that, preferred it more when he had the place to himself. He worried his facial twitches or some uttered word would give away his romantic trysts. He’d never gleaned anything from Samualson that made Adam think his friend suspected, but still he worried. The two of them often mocked those who jacked in to jack off. It was no secret lots of professors did. Regular porn had nothing on virtual whores who didn’t even know they were virtual, and tenure had been revoked over particularly exotic sprees. Adam justified what he did because he was in love, or thought he was.

“Damn,” Samualson said, seeing the crowd. “Is there a rally tonight?” He glanced over at the scheduling board where groups signed out clusters of terminals for virtual meetings. One of the bigger groups on campus was the cycling club, a habit more loathsome than jerking off in Adam’s opinion. These people actually simmed bicycle riding. They spent their time on foreign worlds, riding bikes, their brains flooded with endorphins from simulated exhaustion. Adam could always sense when he was interfacing right after a cyclist. The seat would remain warm for hours, the stench of sleep-sweat in the air. It was disgusting. The fact that most of them were grossly overweight didn’t help.

“There’s two over in that corner,” Samualson said.

Adam flipped his backpack around and dug for his temple patches. He followed his friend through the busy room.

“What’re you searching after tonight?” Samualson asked. He sat down in front of one of the terminals and squeezed gel from a tube and onto his finger. “That elusive Shakespeare?”

Adam laughed. “I’ve given up on finding him.” He plugged his temple patches into a pair of cords dangling from outlets on the wall. “There’ll never be another Bard of Avon.”

“That children’s series you picked up last year seems to be doing pretty well.” He dabbed gel onto his temples, checking the placement in the small circular mirror mounted on the wall in front of him. Adam did the same; they looked like performers getting ready for a show, an apt illusion.

“That series is drivel,” Adam said. He smiled at his friend’s reflection. “Don’t get me wrong, the royalties are good, but I’d rather have the hours back I spent memorizing them.”

“Or the brain cells.”

Both men laughed as they began pressing the interface pads into the dabs of gel. Adam tried to ignore the blue crescents under his eyes as he secured the connection. Sleep had become as virtual, as ephemeral, as his work.

“So whatcha after, then?” Samualson wouldn’t leave the line of questioning alone. The machines at their feet hummed to life, leaving thick seconds to fill with banter.

“I’m dabbling in art, actually.” He glanced at Samualson and hoped the shame of the lie would adequately mimic the shame of the truth he was hiding.

“Art?” His friend chuckled softly as he pressed the pads to his temples. “Good luck with that.”

“It’s all luck,” Adam admitted. “Are you still working on that same protein?”

Samualson flipped open a pad of paper and touched a pen to his tongue, a nervous tic more than a functional act. The woman interfaced on the other side of him twitched, her head leaping up from her folded arms, then crashing back down again. “Yup,” Samualson said. He slid pages up the spiral bound pad to find his place. Adam saw line after line of four letters repeated: CTTGACATGCA . . . It seemed like mind-numbing work. He imagined his friend peering into a virtual microscope, or cyclotron, or whatever biologists used, and memorizing a few hundred letters at a time—jacking out—writing them down—jacking back in. It gave Adam a headache just thinking about it and made him appreciate his own work. If they transcribed a few letters the wrong way, a cure for liver cancer might instead turn a poor kid into a glow stick. If Adam got a word or two wrong, nobody knew or really cared. Unlike his brief haiku, the sheer mass of a full-length piece of writing could absorb a handful of mistakes.

The machine at Adam’s feet beeped, letting him know he had a connection to the school’s server farm. Adam liked that it was called a “farm.” He smiled at the thought of worlds springing up from plowed rows of dirt, cloudlike shrouds unwrapping to reveal blue and spiral-green planets of life. The word farm, of course, was a holdover from the clusters of computers, the server farms, used at places like Pixar, where virtual worlds were created for entertainment. It took a while before the productive uses of such worlds were understood. Once they were, the result was often referred to as the third great agricultural revolution. Sim farms, in just the last decade, had sprouted all over the place. Government-owned, university-owned, even a few private ones. The flood of research from these farms drowned out all the work done in the real world. A theory would be published in the morning and overturned by mid-afternoon. Planetary formation and plate tectonics; punctuated equilibrium and mass extinctions; arsenic-based lifeforms and exoskeletons. If you weren’t jacked in, you weren’t playing.

Science became exciting again overnight. It moved to the forefront much like the days of the great space race in the previous century. Everyone wanted the red blisters on their temples from too much virtual time—the badges of important work being made. Universities and even high schools changed tack overnight, catering to the surge in computer science and math majors. The hard stuff dominated the soft sciences, and the liberal arts soon clamored for a place on campus. This scientific renaissance lasted three years—and then there was Dylan Pyle to restore order.

Adam’s temples began to heat up as the interface computer booted. His thoughts turned to Dylan Pyle as the connection took hold.

Eight years ago, nobody had ever heard of Dylan, nor should they have ever. A biology research assistant with dim prospects, Dylan transformed overnight into the greatest living author of all time. His debut novel, Whispering to Ghosts, won every award it qualified for, and some that were marginal. He followed it up with a crime novel that re-wrote all the rules, and then came a young adult tome as successful as it was massive. The only thing more surprising than this young man’s mix of prolificacy and talent was his refusal to take his writing career seriously. “I dabble,” he would say in rare interviews. “I’m a scribbler, nothing more.” The reticence to accept his talent, the reclusiveness, the desire to stay on as a humble research assistant, to pour himself into his lab work, it all served to heighten his fame. The glass bubble around him survived three years of awe and praise. It shattered when a fellow researcher discovered Dylan’s secret: The boy had a single talent, one of near-photographic memory. He was found in one of his research worlds reading a novel in a park and committing the prose to memory. Selecting from the top writers of several worlds, he had translated their genius into his own, word for word, colon for colon.

Adam felt a tingle at the base of his skull, then a buzz like electric zippers pulling back over his crown; his skull seemed to split in half. He shivered with the out-of-body experience, the sense of his self floating out the top of his head before it was sucked back into his gut. He grunted, heard an utterance by Samualson get cut off by the transfer, and then he was gone. He was joining the legions of plagiarists who had followed in Dylan Pyle’s wake, soaring down to artificial worlds, scraping them dry of their great art before the scientists were otherwise done with them.

There should have been an uproar, Adam thought. There should have been controversy over what Pyle had done. There should have been outrage. Those would have been normal human responses to having been duped. But a stronger impulse seized the popular imagination: the ability to be great overnight. It was a new type of lottery, one where fame and talent were won rather than simple money. The heyday of the sciences came to a sudden close. Discoveries were still made, of course. Real progress was won in astrophysics, biology, psychology, and other fields. But suddenly, the science wings and computer science centers were overrun with talentless hipsters who thought they had an eye for genius. Courses on memorization were invented. Adderall replaced coffee as the recreational drug of choice. Server farms groaned under the stress. Temples were seared. Tubes of adhesive gel were rolled dry.

The Anti-Renaissance ensued. As Adam logged into his account, he shivered at the memory of it. Hell, he was still living it. The outpouring of stuff, of crap, was so intense, nothing could be seen or heard. The variety and quantity were too much. It was a repeat of what YouFilm did to cinema, what AutoTune did to the music industry, what genetic splicing had done to sports. The bar wasn’t raised so much as buried under the pile of crap.

And offline talent, actual talent, rebelled. Farms were attacked, physically, by supposed bands of marginal musicians and writers. The artists and the avant garde became the new bomb-chuckers. And meanwhile, consumers were pulling away from it all, paralyzed by the sudden confusion of too much choice and novelty. Entire industries suffered.

The interface lab fully dissolved, and an entire universe of simmed worlds appeared before Adam. Here is where he would’ve, a year ago, agonized over the choices available to him. So many worlds full of so many pages of written words, all of them open to his perusal. But it had been a long time since he’d really chosen. He was now more an automaton than the sims he lived among. He moved his virtual self, shifted his awareness, and went to select the planet where his loved one resided—

And that’s when Adam Griffey saw the deletion notice hovering above the planet.

6

It may be erased,
all that is written. Destroyed,
all that’s created.

The deletion notice loomed massive over Hammond. Large white numbers on a red background flicked as they slowly counted down the planet’s final moments. Adam felt his real stomach drop, back on Earth. He felt all the emotions of shock and rage and sadness, even as he floated bodiless through the void. His plans for the night were over. His plans for the week were over. He didn’t have any plans else. Adam’s existence had suddenly become as vapid as this simulated consciousness in the black. He was death.

As he floated closer to the planet, he saw that there were just over two hours left, sim time. Two hours for Belatrix to live and breathe. Two hours for him to do nothing for her. It was around eleven thirty when he’d logged on, so the deletion must be slated for midnight, Earth time. The end of the day. The end of all days for the people of Hammond.

Adam had a sudden and strange urge to log out and tell Samualson, to let him know that this was the reason for the packed interface room. It was Hammond. He imagined the remote access groups would be going nuts as well, logging on from universities and access points all over Earth. It would be a free-for-all, grabbing what data they could, performing wild experiments that would break the suspension of disbelief for the planet’s inhabitants. Adam had watched from a distance once while meteors rained down on a planet where lived some decent playwrights. He hadn’t even had time to finish memorizing a work he’d been in the middle of, one with quite a bit of potential. That play took up half a notebook in his apartment; the too-hopeful idea was that he’d finish it himself one day.

Despondent and not knowing what to do, Adam drilled into the countdown’s menu to look for the slated reason for the planet’s deletion. It made no sense to log off and tell Samualson; his friend would see for himself, or he’d find out later. Besides, he suspected there was some other reason he wanted to log off. He felt as if he were dangerously close to coming clean about his affair. He had the urge to make Belatrix real by dragging her name back to his planet; he wanted to yell and scream at someone to not do it, to call off the erasure.

Adam felt all this—he felt anxious and desperate as he continued to drift ever nearer to Hammond. The truth of it began to fully set in. The woman he loved, virtual or not, would cease to exist in two hours. She’d be gone forever. She had been diagnosed with something terminal and sudden.

Adam read the deletion report:

With the advent of their own simmed worlds, planet Hammond has placed undue stress on our server farms. Planetology research will be suspended, to be resumed once the world re-accretes around the star Beatrice Bondeamu Gilbert III, as per the Astronomy department’s request. All sociological studies will be terminated forthwith. Deletion is slated for midnight, February 21st, 2022.

Adam’s dimensionless body sped past the message, his mind absorbing it numbly as he went. Why did they have to delete the entire planet? Why not destroy the server farms on Hammond? Why not just delete those? They can rebuild a planet, but not the people. The people would be different. Their writing would be different. Their food and names and language would be different. Their bookstores and the people who worked there would be different.

Adam didn’t want different.

He slid into his usual avatar with the shiver of numbness turning to sensation, like new skin pulled over unfeeling muscle. The clouds of Hammond parted as Adam chose his arrival destination; bright sunlight winked out, replaced by the dark interior of the bookstore’s bathroom. Adam fumbled for the light, then the doorknob. They were in the same place as before, but it took him a moment. He had become uncentered from himself. As he stepped out into the smell of fresh pulp and horseshit tea, the tiled floor below him seemed closer than it should be. His mind was spinning; he wondered what he would say, what he was even doing here. His shameful and wonderful trysts were over. His love was gone. He wouldn’t have to think of anything to tell his mother. He wouldn’t have to worry about his father spinning in his grave, or his sister finding out and being humiliated for him. He didn’t have to lie to Amanda or Samualson. He didn’t have to burn with embarrassment under the unknowing glare of his students.

As he weaved through the stacks of books, Adam became dizzy with all the implications and outcomes. He wanted none of it, not even the relief from this burden. He would gladly lie for another year, another month, another week, just one more day. At least a full day to process it. A day to sit in the park with Belatrix and break the news, maybe even let her think he was crazy. There was so much of her world she had never seen, places Adam had flown over, invisible, and wanted to take her. He hurried down the line of registers, looking for her. She wasn’t there. Where were the customers? There was a commotion outside. Adam looked past the displays of bestsellers, through the glass, and saw that the cars in the street were at a standstill. Horns blared in the distance. Someone was screaming, the voice muted. Adam whirled around and realized he was the only one in the store. Him and a single cashier, who was emptying the register and stuffing his pants. Adam didn’t recognize him; he was pretty sure he didn’t work there.

“Where is everyone?” Adam asked the man.

“Fuck off! These are mine.”

The man moved to another register and began pounding buttons. Fans of colorful bills flopped above his belt. A car roared outside, pulled up on the sidewalk and rumbled by, scattering screaming pedestrians. Adam watched it squeal out of sight, then he pushed the glass doors open and hurried outside.

“There’s another one!” someone screamed. The crowd moved as one, heads turning to follow an angled arm and a pointing finger. Eyes were shielded against the midday glare. Adam turned and looked up as well. A massive flying saucer rumbled overhead, ridiculous lights splaying out of it. The thunder of explosions grumbled in the distance, sending shivers of panic through the crowd. Adam couldn’t believe it. Of all the sociological experiments to level on the Southwest continent, an alien invasion had to be the dumbest he could think of. What was the point? How had this request won out? Unless it was for some professor’s amusement. He pushed his way through the crowd toward Belatrix’s apartment, thankful they hadn’t picked a flood or meteor impact for the area. He spotted a few other researchers in the crowd, their remote access icons blinking visibly—to Adam at least—above their heads. One icon sported University of Miami colors, another was a generic deep red that could’ve been from dozens of schools. They seemed enraptured by the panicked crush of people. Adam made sure they weren’t looking and broke all rules by teleporting his avatar out of the packed streets. He appeared above Hammond for just a moment, then zipped to the apartment hallway, saving himself the walk. An elderly couple was staggering down the hall, clutching to one another. They gasped at the sudden presence of Adam, materializing out of nowhere. He ignored them and pounded on Belatrix’s door.

“Bela, open up.”

He heard something squeak inside the room, like a tight drawer being pushed shut.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me. Open up.”

The knob jumped; the door flew open. Belatrix stood there, hair veiling her face in loose wisps, her eyes wide.

“How did you get here so fast?” she asked.

Adam moved inside the apartment, his hands on her shoulders. She was trembling.

“I hurried right over.”

“I just talked to you,” she said. “You were at work.”

Adam wasn’t sure what his avatar had been doing before he arrived to borrow it. He rarely knew.

“I was already on my way. You called my portable, remember?”

Belatrix scrunched up her face, swiped the hair off her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “I must be confused. It’s— The world has gone nuts. What’re we gonna do? What’s happening?”

She looked toward the windows. Adam noticed the blinds had been drawn. Why was he lying to her about how he got to her apartment? What good did that do? Didn’t he come there planning on telling her the truth? What good would that do? Was it better for her to go without knowing, to die thinking that she was real—?

Die. Why did he keep thinking about it like that? Deleted. She didn’t exist. None of this was real. He had to fight to remind himself of that.

“Honey? Are you okay?” Belatrix put a hand on his chest, another around his waist. Adam realized he probably looked worse than she did. What was really about to happen to her planet was far more sinister, more permanent, more real than anything she could dread from the fake flying saucers.

“I have to tell you something,” he said, even though he didn’t yet know what he wanted to say.

There was an explosion outside; the windows rattled, then the vibrations could be felt in the floor. The building was swaying. Adam had never been on the ground level of a deletion before. It was terrifying and authentic. He couldn’t believe how real it felt. Raw terror coursed up through him as he lost his center yet again. He had a brief pang of doubt that this world was real and that he was about to die. Perhaps his life at the university was some sort of delusion, and he really worked at Telematics Express on Hammond, selling accounts to—

Belatrix was screaming, her hands pressed to her cheeks. More rumbles of destruction sounded in the distance. Somewhere, avatars probably floated above it all, soaking up the data while their fleshy bodies sat in a room a billion virtual light years away. Adam’s body was in that room as well. He tried to remember that.

“None of this is real!” he screamed, voicing his thoughts. The building moved again, or his balance was gone. He wasn’t sure Belatrix heard him over her own screams. This was no way to say goodbye.

Belatrix’s arms went out for balance. She looked around the room, eyes wide with a sudden look of concentration and desperation. “We have to go,” she said. She hurried to her purse, dug around until she came out with her keys. She scanned the room for what else.

“It’s no better anywhere else,” Adam said. “There’s something I have to say.”

Anger flashed across her face. “Not now—” she began.

“None of this is real,” Adam said again. He threw his arms wide and spun in a slow circle, accusing her entire world. “There are no aliens outside. There is no outside. This planet isn’t real.”

Belatrix dug out her phone and started dialing someone. She kept a wary eye on Adam. He realized how pointless and sad all this was, how impossible it would be to convince her with words, so he disappeared. He logged off, then reinserted himself near the ceiling of her apartment, teleporting as he had before. He lessened his personal gravity and drifted slowly toward the floor, his arms stretched wide and his knees bent. Belatrix dropped her phone. Her jaw hung agape.

“Sweetheart. Listen to me. I need you to know something.” His feet reached the ground; Belatrix hadn’t moved. “It’s impossible to believe, I know. It’s impossible to even explain, but this world is a virtual construct. It’s an illusion created by my people on another planet—”

Her eyes darted toward the windows. Her lips and hands trembled.

“No.” Adam stretched an arm toward the chaos outside. “I’m not with them. Those flying saucers aren’t real either. It’s—” He needed more time to explain. “Have you read about the simulations in the news? Did you know your world has created entire other virtual worlds? Computer systems have gone live recently where entire planets evolve and thrive so people can do research.”

Belatrix nodded. “I’ve heard,” she whispered. A lump rose and fell across her throat. She was terrified.

Adam pressed his palms toward the floor. “This is a world like that.”

She shook her head. Fires crackled outside like paper being balled up and twisted. Adam could smell smoke.

“I know it’s hard to imagine—” Adam waved at the room. “But all this is a simulation, just like the worlds your people have begun to create.”

“But you’re real.” Her voice was a squeak. It was meant as a question. She didn’t believe him.

“I’m real. And I came here because I need you to know that what we have between us—it’s been the only thing in my life lately that’s felt real.”

Tears dripped from his chin, and Adam realized he was crying. He didn’t know the simulation could do that. He didn’t know why it wouldn’t be able to, but he was surprised. Belatrix took a step toward him. Something in her face changed. Wide, disbelieving eyes had narrowed with suspicion. The teleportation trick, calling him at work and him showing up at her door, the absurdity of the scene outside the window, some internal doubts perhaps that had already been there—

“I’m ashamed of us in my world,” Adam said, sobbing. “I’m living more of a lie than you are.”

Belatrix reached out and held his arms. Her hands were shaking terribly. Tears were welling up in her own virtual eyes.

Adam wrapped her up. He could taste the salt of his tears on her neck. He wanted to take her with him, to teleport out and drag her back to reality, but she had no body there to inhabit even if such a thing were possible. A deeper part of him wanted something worse. It wanted to stay on Hammond, to die right then with her.

“I’m so sorry—” he said.

“Shhh.”

She was comforting him.

The rumbles outside faded, leaving the wail of many distant, fearful screams.

“It’s not fair,” Adam whispered to no one.

“What’s going to happen?” Belatrix asked.

He squeezed her tightly. “I wish I could save this—”

Adam wasn’t sure if he meant the moment, her planet, Belatrix, or just the feeling of a better existence.

“What happens next?” she asked. “If you’re right, if this isn’t real, then what happens next?”

Adam went to kiss her, to feel the soft and warm sensation on his lips, as real as anything in the universe, one final time—

But there was no time.

His avatar automatically logged out as the planet he had been on ceased to exist.

7

I am digital
with the physical. And the
other way around.

The interface room buzzed with human energy as Adam logged out. Laughter and chatter, the static of giddy elation, surrounded him and left little room for his dull sadness. Professors and researchers exchanged notes from their various and varied disaster scenes, the thrum of their enthusiasm drilling into Adam’s head. He tugged his temple pads off the wires, then slowly peeled them from his head. He sat there, looking at them for a moment, then wiped the crust from his eyes. Samualson was still deeply interfaced beside him, his chin resting on his hands. His notepad of squiggly letters had grown over the last half hour. Adam wondered if his friend might have heard him yelling or crying as he repeatedly logged out to jot notes. He realized how little he cared, even if he had. He no longer wanted to hide Belatrix from his world; he wanted to share his memories of her.

Someone bumped into the back of Adam’s chair, causing him to drop his temple pads. An apology was offered. Adam felt like killing the man. He felt like deleting something to make room in this world for Belatrix. He never felt anger like this, not this murderous rage. Such fury took more energy than he normally had. He suddenly felt a great reserve of it.

He stood and jostled his way through the joyousness, terrified by his own anger. A different crowd mingled outside. The thick glasses and rows of pocketed pens meant the planetary crowd was wasting no time forming a new world where Hammond had once been. There would be so much new empty space on the quantum drives. All those qubits were gone. The astronomers would get their accretion disc to mold a new world with. The joy on their faces, the anticipation, it reminded Adam of how he felt logging on each night. For them, the empty space around a star was like lover’s lips to Adam. One man’s heart was shattered to make whole dozens more. But these men could freely discuss their passion. There was no shame, no lie, nothing hidden. Adam remembered feeling that way about his literary discoveries once, long ago. He had had friends in the English department, people he drank coffee with, ate with. Now he had a girlfriend he’d never met and a love who had never existed. He wasn’t yet forty and he might as well be dead.

He felt vaguely dead as he stumbled out the building and into the freshly fallen snow. Adam should have gone home. Distantly, he knew that. He hadn’t slept in two nights. He went to the cafeteria instead and drank coffee. The taste and the heat of it felt far removed from him. He listened to the clamor from the kitchen, the rattle of plastic trays and clang of silverware and chatter from the night crew. He watched the cashier flip slowly through her romance novel, scratching her head through her hairnet now and then. Through frosted glass, he could see a veil of snow begin to descend on campus. He wondered if there would be enough to cancel his morning class. Somehow, he knew he wouldn’t be teaching that day even if they didn’t call it off. He was going to be sick. He already was sick.

He nursed his coffee until the last sip was cold, went to grab his backpack and realized he’d left it in the lab. He’d left his gloves in there as well. He had his jacket, but couldn’t remember putting it on. The analog clock on the wall let him know he’d been spacing out for hours. A group in lab coats sat in a booth across from him, gesturing excitedly for the late hour. Adam didn’t remember them coming in. He wondered if he’d slept. It would be nice if he had.

He went back out into the cold. The snow was the wet kind, sticking to his hair. Adam pulled his hood up and thought briefly about heading back to the lab, then realized he didn’t care about the backpack. He trudged up the walk toward the library—another of the sleepless buildings on campus. He knew all the sleepless buildings well.

The policeman behind the night desk waved in recognition. Adam dipped his head. He sank into a chair by the periodicals and tried to sleep. He gave up as the sun eventually peeked over the mountains and the students began to emerge from their dorm caves.

The snow had ceased; it wasn’t enough to close campus. Adam knew he needed to call the department secretary, let her know he wouldn’t be coming to class, but even that required some semblance of motivation. He needed an excuse to not call in sick. He wasn’t well enough for even that.

The long walk to his apartment was chewed up one lumbering step at a time. Up several walkways, around the education building, up, up, up more steps. He pushed down on his knees to force them to work. The snow to either side seemed inviting. Adam imagined spreading out on the wide blanket of it, letting the cold erode away the last of sensation. He would sleep forever and never wake, never feel. He willed himself to do it, could feel his insides moving that way, but the shell of him kept staggering forward and up the steps, taking the rest of him home with it.

He could barely feel the keys in his numb fingers. He couldn’t tell the door was already unlocked as he worked it open. Adam was too far gone to notice the puddles on the linoleum as he crossed the foyer and into his living room. It was several moments, even, before he realized someone was sitting at his computer.

“Hello?”

A woman spun around, a worried frown breaking into a brief smile, then back to the worried frown.

“Hello, Adam.”

He didn’t know this woman. Was this his landlord’s wife? He tried to think who would have a key, or a reason to be here. Why would she be on his computer? Adam needed sleep.

“I’m Amanda.”

The woman rose from the chair and took a step toward him. Adam was too tired to recoil. If she hadn’t been standing by his computer, the name wouldn’t have registered as one he knew. With the computer in the background, though, it made sense.

“Amanda?”

This was his girlfriend, the one he chatted nightly with, his virtual girlfriend. She nodded.

“Are you okay?” She touched her own face while gazing at Adam’s. She looked worried. Everyone gave him that worried look of late.

“I haven’t slept,” Adam said. “What are you doing here?” He was simply curious. He strangely didn’t care, couldn’t quite manage it.

Amanda looked around the apartment. Adam saw the clutter through her eyes. He noticed the tall piles of debris had been raked flat, like fall leaves pushed back to their former state. A dim awareness told him Amanda had been going through his things. He almost cared.

“I thought you had an early class,” she said.

“But why?” He shook his head, clearing the cobwebs. “You’ve been here before? How do you even know where I live?”

“I’m sorry about this.” She waved her hands at the room. “But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t.”

Adam held up his hands. “I need sleep,” he said. “I can’t handle this right now. I can’t even begin to think about it. I’ve been up three days straight.”

He staggered toward the bedroom. He didn’t care that his online girlfriend was in his house. It almost felt natural. Inevitable. Some part of him processed that she was prettier than he’d imagined she’d be, but even that couldn’t douse the growing surety that he no longer wanted her as a part of his life.

Amanda followed after him. “Adam, I need your writings.”

“My what?” He mumbled it to himself as he reached the bedroom door.

“Your writings. All of them. I need them now.”

Adam leaned on the knob. His head was throbbing. He shook it, and the entire planet seemed to wobble around him. “You need them now.”

“Right now. I’m sorry to have to ask, but I can’t find them.”

Adam turned away from the door and scanned the room. He glanced at the old computer. “They’re not there.” He waved at his head. “They’re in here.”

Amanda visibly wilted. She looked at her watch. “How many haiku haven’t I heard?”

“I can’t do this,” Adam said. “I need you to leave. You shouldn’t have come here.”

She didn’t look all that upset to hear this. She took a step toward him.

“Did you hear about Virginia Tech?” she asked him.

He remembered something about Virginia Tech. He couldn’t quite place it.

“Their servers,” Amanda said.

Adam nodded. “Yeah,” he said. He remembered Samualson saying something. None of this made sense. He just wanted to sleep.

“Tech has already duped the data from MIT to their own servers. They have a dozen worlds already up and running this morning. Dozens more are coming online at universities all over the world.” Amanda frowned. “Did you know your South Korea went online with their own virtual world last week?”

“My South Korea?” Adam fell sideways against the doorjamb and remained propped there. He was going to fall asleep standing up.

“I can’t keep taking them down, Adam.” Amanda looked grave. “It takes too much time. More are going up faster than I can take them down. My boss won’t have any more of it, not for the trickle coming out of this planet.” She waved her hands around her.

Adam pressed his palms to his sore temples. One girlfriend was deleted, the other was crazy. He slid down the wall until his ass hit the carpet. His head rested in his hands.

“I need anything you can give me,” Amanda said. He heard her cross the room, could feel her standing above him. “Three or four haiku. Anything. Please, I wish we had more time.”

“Tomorrow,” Adam said. “Please leave me alone.”

A hand clamped down on his wrist. “There is no tomorrow,” Amanda hissed. He looked up at her. “Are you listening to me? I know what you do, who you are. I’m a plagiarist too, Adam. You know how this works; I don’t have time to explain it to you.” Amanda pointed toward his window. “You’ve got hours left. Your legacy is all that matters. Don’t you understand?” She shook her head. “Of course you don’t. You have no idea what you mean on my world. You don’t know what I’ve discovered in you.”

Amanda stepped away from him. Adam felt bile rise up in his throat. Her words were settling like snow upon his consciousness, forming something like understanding.

“What are you saying?” Adam asked. He looked at his palms, flexed his fingers.

“Please,” she said. She backed away from him and looked out the window. The blinds were up. Adam never had the blinds up. “A few haiku. You have to say them to me. I can’t copy it straight out of your mind. You know how it works.”

“This is real,” Adam told himself. What she was saying seemed so familiar. He rubbed his fingers together. It felt as real as the sims.

It felt as real as the sims.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said, not for the first time. “I really am. I like you. I— I feel maybe more than I should for you.” She bit her lip and looked away. “This isn’t easy for me—”

“This is real,” Adam repeated. He stood up and took a step toward Amanda. Outside, the sun was peeking over the mountains, the clear sky dazzling against the fresh snow. The brightness of it lanced into Adam’s brain.

“Say whatever comes to mind,” Amanda said. “You’ll be remembered for it.”

“I’ll be remembered,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

But Belatrix won’t be, he realized. It was what he’d wanted to tell her, but couldn’t find the words. She was real as long as he’d known her, and would remain real as long as he could recall her. Belatrix was as real as anyone he’d known who was now lost. As real as anyone who had become ash, leaving just memories behind with the living. She was as real as his father had been to him. Had his father been real? Was Adam real? Was this some kind of trick? If he was deleted, and the memory of Belatrix was deleted with him, then she was lost for good. His mind spun with the layers and layers and layers: Hammond had started simming their own worlds, placing a strain on the campus computers, so it had to be deleted. What about all those simmed worlds on Hammond when that happened? Adam had considered the loss of Belatrix, of the world and people she knew, but what about the billions of others residing on computers another layer deep? Those people thought they were real. What had they been doing when they were deleted? How few were told in advance?

Adam looked out over campus, at the amazing view from his window that he’d seen maybe once or twice before.

“How long?” he asked. He thought about the hundreds of worlds simmed on Earth. How many had worlds simming in them? Or in them, one more layer deep? How many Earths were there on Amanda’s world? Could this be real?

“Not much time,” she said.

“What if you’re not real,” Adam said. He pressed his hand against the frosted glass and felt the cold beyond.

“I think about that a lot,” she told him.

Adam wanted her to not be real. He wanted company in that sudden loneliness that had overtaken him. He wanted to hurt her in some way.

“These things happen so fast,” she said. “They reach a tipping point before we see it coming. Believe me, I did everything I could—”

“You were the one razing our farms,” he said.

The accusation frosted on the glass by his hand.

“I tried everything I could—”

“Make a copy.” Adam turned to her. “Make a copy of me. Or delete more farms.” Real or not, he didn’t want to cease existing. He felt a surge of panic. Adam looked back over the roofs of the department buildings. “I can pull the plug on our servers. I can. I know where the backup relays are. It’ll make some room on your own servers—”

Amanda placed a hand on his shoulder. “Adam, it’s been decided much higher up than me. I’ve already begged on your behalf.”

“On my behalf?” He wiped tears from his cheeks. “What do you mean? I’m nothing.”

Amanda frowned. Her eyes were following his tears as they streamed down. She seemed reluctant to touch him any further.

“That’s not true,” she said. She bit her lip again. “We are drowning in stuff to consume, just like you, just like all the worlds that are simmed and the worlds they sim. But I found your poetry, this limited syllabic form found nowhere else, this simplicity, this elegance constrained. I’ve become an expert on it, on haiku. I’ve mined the ancient hills of Earth for every nugget. I’ve combed the books and scrolls and tablets, going back to its Eastern roots—but you are the one.”

Adam sobbed. His head spun from the night’s tragedy and the day’s disbelief.

Amanda touched his cheek.

“The hours we spend pouring over a single poem of yours—” Amanda sighed. “They are the closest we get to silence on my world. The closest to a pause for thought. We sip on your works, Adam Griffey, to keep from drowning in all else.”

“That can’t be true,” he said. The sobs and tears felt so real.

“The end is coming any moment now,” Amanda said. “Please don’t take them with you. Please.”

Adam swiped at his cheeks. He was about to speak when there was a great rumble outside. It seemed to emanate from the very belly of the Earth. Amanda looked past him to the window. Adam turned. A plume of dark smoke burst up through the milky white of a hillside. Mountains, long dormant, erupted. A cone of black mixed with bright red, fading as it coursed through the cold air. The ground spit dirt. Crimson rivers leaked like wounds from the Earth. The world shook. Amanda pleaded.

“The world that isn’t,” Adam said, “becomes simply that once more.” He pressed both palms to the glass. He felt Amanda’s arms around him. He lost himself between the cold and the warm.

“And all is gray ash,” he concluded.

—For all the great teachers.

© 2011 by Hugh Howey. Originally published by Broad Reach Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

NOVEL EXCERPT: The Water Knife (Vintage Books)

Paolo Bacigalupi | 5170 words

CHAPTER 2

Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed.

The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughing off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising.

She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it.

And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.

She lay still in bed, trembling with the loss of the dream. Blotting away tears.

Sand slushed against the glass, a steady etching.

The dream had seemed so real: the rain pouring down; the softness in the air; the smell of plants blossoming. Her clenched pores and the tight clays of the desert all opening wide, welcoming the gift—the land and her body, absorbing the miracle of water that fell from the sky. Godwater, American settlers had once called it as they invaded slowly across the prairies of the Midwest and then pressed into the arid lands beyond the Rocky Mountains.

Godwater.

Water that fell of its own volition, right out of the sky.

In Lucy’s dream it had been as gentle as a kiss. Blessing and absolution, cascading from the heavens. And now it was gone. Her lips were cracked and broken.

Lucy kicked off sweaty sheets and went to peer outside. The few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out by gangs stood as dim moons struggling against a reddish haze. The storm was thickening even as she watched, the streetlights collapsing into blackness, leaving retina stains of imagined glows in their place. The light going out of the world. Lucy thought she’d read that somewhere—some old Christian thing. The death of Jesus, maybe. The light going out, forever.

Jesus blows out, and La Santa Muerte blows in.

Lucy went back to bed and stretched out on the mattress, listening as the winds whipped the night. Somewhere outside, a dog was howling for safety. A stray maybe. It would be dead in the morning, another victim of Big Daddy Drought.

A whine from beneath her bed echoed the begging outside: Sunny, crouched and shivering, thanks to the changes in air pressure.

Lucy crawled out of bed again and went to fill a dish with water from her urn. Unconsciously, she checked its level, knowing before she saw the numbers that she still had twenty gallons, yet unable to prevent herself from checking the little LED meter anyway, confirming the count she had in her own head.

She crouched down beside the bed. Pushed the dish toward the dog.

Sunny regarded her from the deep shadows, miserable. He wouldn’t come out to drink.

If Lucy had been superstitious, she would have suspected that the ragged Australian shepherd knew something she didn’t. That he sensed evil in the air, the Devil’s wings beating overhead, maybe.

The Chinese believed that animals could sense earthquakes. Used them to predict disasters. The Communists of old China had once evacced ninety thousand people from the city of Haicheng before a major earthquake, sensing it hours ahead. Saving lives because they trusted animals to know things that human beings did not.

One of the biotects at Taiyang International had told Lucy about it. Used it to illustrate how China knew how to see the world clearly and planned ahead. And because of it, China was resilient in comparison to the brokeback version of America where he’d been stationed.

When an animal spoke, you were supposed to pay attention.

Sunny huddled beneath the bed, fur and skin twitching, giving off a low, continuous, miserable whine.

“Come on out, boy.”

He wouldn’t budge.

“Come on. The storm’s on the outside. It’s not in here.”

Nothing.

Lucy sat cross-legged on the tile, regarding Sunny. The tile was cool at least.

Why didn’t she just sleep on the floor? What made her even bother with a bed or sheet in the summer? Or the spring or fall, for that matter?

Lucy splayed herself belly down on the clay tile, letting it press against her bare skin. She reached under the bed to Sunny.

“We’re okay,” she murmured, running her fingers though his fur. “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

She tried to force herself to relax, but a nervous shiver of her own refused to stop rippling under her skin. A discomfited ticking awareness.

No wonder Sunny was under the bed.

No matter how much Lucy tried to tell herself the dog was crazy, her own lizard brain believed the dog’s warning.

Something was outside, something dark and hungry, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the horrific thing was turning its attention to her—to her and Sunny and this safe little island of hunkered adobe shelter that she called home.

Lucy got up and checked the deadbolts on the doors to the dust room.

You’re being paranoid.

Sunny whined again.

“Shut up, boy.”

The sound of her own voice bothered her.

She made another circuit of the house, checking to make sure all the windows were sealed. Startled at her own reflection in the kitchen window.

Didn’t I close that?

She pulled the Guatemalan weave across the glass, half-expecting a face to appear in the darkness beyond. It was superstitious and absurd to think that anyone could actually be out in the storm looking in at her, but now she went and pulled on jeans anyway, feeling better clothed. Feeling at least psychologically protected as she gave up on sleep for good. No way she was sleeping now. Not with this storm-induced anxiety running its fingers between her shoulder blades. Might as well work.

Lucy opened her computer and scanned her fingerprints on the trackpad. Keyed her passwords as the winds continued to lash her home. The house batteries were lower than she would have liked. They had a twenty-year warranty, but Charlene was always telling her that was bullshit. Lucy just hoped the storm would pass by morning so she could sweep off the solar panels and get the charge back up.

Sunny whined again.

Lucy ignored him and logged into her revenue trackers.

She’d posted a new story with original art that Timo had shot. If she was honest, the pics really sold the story: a truck filled with belongings, mired to the hubs in dust, trying to get away from Phoenix and failing miserably. The latest in collapse pornography. The story was kicking around the net, syndicating and collecting eyeballs and revenue, but Lucy was surprised it hadn’t gotten the attention she’d hoped.

She scanned the feeds looking for reasons her eyeball share might have slipped. Something was happening over by the Colorado River: a firefight or a bombing.

#CarverCity, #CoRiver, #BlackHelicopters . . .

Bigger news organizations were already on it. Lucy pulled up video and got a water manager spitting invective about Las Vegas. She’d have pegged him as a lunatic, except for the wreckage and flames blazing behind him, lending credence to the idea that Las Vegas really had rolled in with its water knives and done some precipitous cutting.

The balding man was ranting that he’d been abducted by Nevada guardies and then dumped in the desert to hike his way back to the wreckage of his own treatment plant.

“This was Catherine Case! She completely ignored that we’re appealing! We have rights!”

“Are you going to sue?”

“You’re damn right we’re going to sue! She’s gone too far this time.”

More sites were lighting up with the story. Arizona local stations and personalities, beating the drums of regional anger, generating hits and ad revenue off the battlefield images as they inflamed local hatreds. More revenue would be flowing in as the comments blew up and people threw the story onto their social networks.

Lucy flagged the story for her trackers, but with the storm and the distance, she’d already missed the window to take much credit or do anything except draft off the hits of other journos.

She kicked the story into her own feeds, just to assure her readers that she was aware of Carver City’s evisceration, and turned to her own primary sources, hunting for leads in the sloshing sea of social media, stories that she could get to first and claim as her own.

Dozens of new comments, hashtag #PhoenixDowntheTubes:

Supposed to leave again today, except for another damn storm. #Depressed #PhoenixDowntheTubes

How you know you’re at the end: You’re drinking your own piss and telling yourself its spring water. #PhoenixDowntheTubes #ClearsacLove

Score! We’re going North! #BCLottery #Seeyoubitches

Choppers in the canyon. Anyone know who’s out there? #CoRiver #BlackHelicopters

They’re still outside my door! Where the fuck is the cavalry?!! @PhoenixPD

Don’t use Route 66. #CaliMilitia #DronePack #MM16

WTF? When did Samm’s Bar Close? #Ineedadrink #PhoenixDowntheTubes

Pic: PHOENIX RISING Billboard stuccoed with Clearsacs. LOL.

#PhoenixDowntheTubes. #PhoenixArts #PhoenixRising

She’d been tracking Phoenix residents, their hashtags and commentaries, for years. A proxy map for the city’s implosion. Virtual echoes of a physical disaster.

In her own mind she imagined Phoenix as a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down.

And Lucy, circling the edge of the hole, documenting.

Her critics said she was just another collapse pornographer, and on her bad days she agreed: just another journo hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature. But on other days Lucy had the feeling that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying, This is us. This is how we all end. There’s only one door out, and we all use it.

When she’d first arrived in the city as a green reporter, it hadn’t felt so personal. Back then she’d made jokes about the Zoners, enjoying the easy stories and micropayment deposits. Making quick cash off voyeuristic enticements for click-thru.

#Clickbait

#CollapsePorn

#PhoenixDowntheTubes

The residents of Phoenix and its suburbs were the new Texans, those Merry Perry fools, and Lucy and her colleagues from CNN and Xinhua and Kindle Post and Agence France-Presse and Google/New York Times were more than happy to feed on the corpse. The country had watched Texas fall apart, so everyone knew how it worked. Phoenix was Austin, but bigger and badder and more total.

Collapse 2.0: Denial, Collapse, Acceptance, Refugees.

Lucy was just there to watch the Zoners hit the wall, up close and personal. Autopsy the corpse with a high-power microscope, and a cold Dos Equis in her hand.

#BetterThemThanUs.

But then she’d met a few of the Zoners. Set down roots in the city. She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse.

They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience—a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.

#CollapsePorn for sure, except now Lucy was one of the actors, right alongside Timo and his sister Marta and her three-year-old daughter, who’d cried and cried as the adults destroyed the only house she’d ever known.

Sunny whined again from beneath the bed.

“It’ll pass,” Lucy said absently, then wondered if it was true.

The weather people were saying they might set a record for dust storms. Sixty-five recorded so far, and more on the way.

But what if there were no limit to the storms?

Meteorologists all talked as if there could be records—and record-breakers—as if there were some pattern they could discern. Weather anchors used the word drought, but drought implied that drought could end; it was a passing event, not the status quo.

But maybe they were destined for a single continuous storm—a permanent blight of dust and wildfire smoke and drought, and the only records broken would be for days where anyone could even see the sun—

A news alert popped up, glowing on Lucy’s screen. Her scanner came alive as well, police bands crackling. Something about it sounded wrong. It was up on her social feeds, too.

Cops all over @Hilton6. Bet it’s bodies.
#PhoenixDowntheTubes

More backup was being called in.

Not just some hooker or PV factory worker who had gotten raped and dumped in a dry swimming pool. Someone important. Someone even Phoenix PD couldn’t ignore.

A person of interest.

With a sigh Lucy gave one last envious look at Sunny, still burrowed under the bed, and shut down her computer. She might not be able to make it to Carver City, but this was too local to ignore, even with the storm.

In the dust room Lucy strapped on an REI filter mask and grit goggles—Desert Adventure Pro II—a care package gift from her sister Anna the year before. She took a final breath of clean air, then plowed out into the storm with her camera wrapped securely in plastic.

Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck’s location. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab.

Grit hissed against glass and metal.

When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she’d changed the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than sight.

It was nearly impossible to drive, even with the big storm lights blazing low from the truck. The street ahead disappeared into a wall of roiling dust. She passed other vehicles pulled over, waiting it out. People wiser than she.

Lucy drove slowly, inching along side streets, wondering why she bothered, knowing she couldn’t get good art in a storm like this, yet still compelled to press on, even as winds threatened to pitch her Ford off the road. She plowed down Phoenix’s six-lane boulevards, the empty optimistic cross streets of a car culture now so drifted with dust that vehicles moved in single file between dunes, glued to one another’s taillights as they navigated the hillocks of a city being swallowed by desert.

At last she spied the dim flicker of high-rise lights, the sentinel blaze of the Hilton 6, and the even stronger glares of the construction lighting of the rising Taiyang Arcology, the half-alive monster looming over all things Phoenix.

The Taiyang’s struts gleamed like ghostly bones in the haze of flying dust.

Lucy pulled the truck over to what she decided was a curb and parked, leaving the truck lights on, hazards flashing. She leaned against the door, forcing it open against the buffeting wind.

As she made her way into the glare of her own headlights, she found flares on the road. She traced the line of flickering magnesium glows. Ahead, human forms rose out of the darkness. Men and women in uniform, flashlight beams waving wildly. Cruisers strobing red-and-blues.

She forged closer, her breathing loud in her ears, her mask wet on her face from the moisture of her lungs, pushing past cops vainly struggling to control a crime scene that was blowing away.

Blood rivers and dust intermingled on the boulevard, a mini-badlands of murder becoming drifted, muddy, and coagulated.

Lucy’s headlamp illuminated a pair of corpses. Just more bodies, she thought, but then her headlamp caught one of the faces, black with blood-dust scabs and nearly covered with a drift.

She gasped.

All around her, cops and techs milled, but they had their hands full fighting the storm, trying to see through their own city-issued masks and filters. Lucy pushed closer, trying to prove to herself that her nightmares weren’t real and alive and true. But even without his eyes in his skull, she knew him instantly.

“Oh, Jamie,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”

A hand grabbed her shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” the cop shouted, his voice muffled by flying sand and filter mask.

Without waiting for an answer, he dragged her back.

Lucy fought for a moment, then let herself be hauled behind crime scene tape that was flapping and flying as the cops unwound it:

CAUTION – CUIDADO – chinese caution tape  – 

CAUTION – CUIDADO – chinese caution tape – CAUTION

A warning she’d tried to give to Jamie just a few weeks before, right inside the Hilton 6’s bar, where all the people were now pressing their faces against the glass to get a better view of his death out here on the sandblasted street.

He’d been so completely sure of himself.

They’d been drinking in the bar of the Hilton 6: Lucy, grubby from a week without a shower; Jamie, so polished that he almost glowed in the low light. Trimmed nails. Clean blond hair, not stringy with grease like hers, not gritty with the desert that was drifting across the sidewalks just outside their floor-to-ceiling windows.

Jamie could afford all the showers he wanted. He liked to flaunt it.

The bartender was shaking something cold and green into a martini glass, the silver of the mixer clashing with skull rings of gold on his brown fingers . . .

The skulls had stood out to Lucy, because she’d looked up from them to meet the bartender’s dark brown eyes and known that if it weren’t for Jamie’s polished presence, the bartender would have run her out a long time ago. Even aid workers had enough grace to scrub up before they came down to the bar to drown out the memory of their day’s work. Lucy just looked like another Texas refugee.

Jamie had been talking. “I mean, John Wesley Powell saw it coming way back in 1850. So it’s not like no one had warning. If that fucker could sit on the banks of the Colorado River a hundred fifty years ago, and know there wouldn’t be enough water to cover everything, you’d think we’d have figured it out, too.”

“There weren’t as many people then.”

Jamie glanced over at her, blue eyes cold. “There are going to be a lot fewer now.”

Behind them the low murmured conversations of aid workers and UN intervention people mingled with the surreal strains of Finnish dirge music. USAID. Salvation Army. Red Crescent drought specialists. Doctors Without Borders. Red Cross. And then others: Chinese investment bankers from the Taiyang, down out of their arcology and slumming. Halliburton and Ibis execs, doing water prospecting, insisting that they could frack aquifers into gushers if Phoenix would just foot the bill. Private security guards off duty and on. Bureaucrat-level narcos. A few well-heeled Merry Perry refugees, speaking in low tones with the coyotes who would spirit them across the final boundaries and lead them north. That odd mix of broken souls, bleeding hearts, and predators who occupied the shattered places of the world. Human spackle, filling the cracks of disaster.

Jamie seemed to read her mind. “They’re all vultures. Every one of them.”

Lucy sipped her beer. Pressed the glass to her dust-caked cheek, savoring the cool. “A few years ago you would have said the same about me.”

“No.” Jamie was still watching the vultures. “You were meant to be here. You’re one of us. Just like all the other fools who refuse to see where this thing is headed.” He toasted her with his vodka.

“Oh, I know where this is headed.”

“So why stay?”

“It’s more alive here.”

Jamie laughed at that, a bark of cynical humor that cracked the muffled dimness of the bar, startling patrons who had only been pretending relaxation. “People only really live when they’re about to die,” he said. “Before then it’s all a waste. You don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re really in the shit.”

They were quiet for a while, then he said, “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.”

“Maybe we knew, but we didn’t know how to believe,” Lucy suggested.

“Belief.” He snorted. “I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.” Again, bitterly: “Belief is for God. For love. For trust. I believe I can trust you. I believe you love me.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I believe God is looking down on us and laughing.”

He sipped his vodka, pinching the martini stem between his fingers, turning it idly on the bar, watching the olives go round and round. “This was never about believing. You think someone like Catherine Case up in Vegas believes things? This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”

He waved out at the dusty avenue beyond the windows: Texas bangbang girls gesturing desperately at cars cruising slowly past party slummers in from California and Fivers down from the arcology, picking off the desperate. “This should have been about testing and confirmation, and we turned it into a question of faith. Fucking Merry Perrys praying for rain.” He snorted. “No wonder the Chinese are kicking our ass.”

He went quiet again, then said, “I’m tired of pretending we’ve got a way out. I’m tired of suing pissant water ticks for pumping out our aquifers, and I’m tired of protecting goddamn fools.”

“You’ve got a better idea?”

Jamie looked up at her, blue eyes twinkling. “Definitely.”

Lucy laughed. “Bullshit. You’re in this just as deep as the rest of us.”

“Zoner for life? That what you’re saying?”

“If I am, you are for sure.”

Jamie glanced back at the other tables, then leaned close. His voice notched lower. “You really think I’m going to stay here? Just keep working for Phoenix Water or Salt River Project, hope they’re going to be able to take care of me?”

“Why, is someone hiring you? SNWA or San Diego give you some kind of offer?”

Jamie gave her a disappointed look. “A job? You think I just want another job? Like I’m going to take some buyout from the California Department of Natural Resources or something? You think I want to work for some other water department’s legal office? I’m not going to push paper all my life.”

“You don’t have much choice. There aren’t a lot of people offering plane tickets out of Arizona.”

“You know, Lucy, sometimes I think you’re about the smartest person I know, and then you say something like that, and I realize how dumb you are. You think small.”

“Did I ever tell you you have amazing people skills?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

“Good. I would have been lying.”

But Jamie wasn’t deterred. He had the maddening smile of a prophet sure of his comprehension of the workings of the heavens, and it made Lucy subliminally anxious, even as they continued drinking and trading comfortable insults.

She’d seen preachers smile the same as Jamie in Merry Perry revival tents when she’d asked them why they thought God would give them their rain when all the climatologists were predicting less, not more.

Rain is coming, they’d say knowingly. Rain is coming.

They knew how the universe worked. They’d unlocked all God’s secrets. And now Jamie looked the same way.

“What have you got?” Lucy asked warily.

“What if I told you I’d found a way to break the Colorado River Compact?”

“I’d say you’re full of shit.”

“How much would you pay to end up on top?” Jamie pressed.

Lucy paused, beer halfway to her lips. “You’re serious?”

“Dead serious. What if I gave you senior rights that you could take right up to the Supreme Court? Rights that you could count on the feds enforcing. No bullshit. No he-said, she-said; no Vegas did-or-didn’t pump how much water; no farmer did-or-didn’t divert how many acre-feet into his field. None of that. The kind of water rights that could get the fucking Marines posted on every dam on the Colorado River and would make sure the water spilled straight down to you. The kind of rights that would let you do what California does to towns all the time.” He was looking at her intently. “What would you think of that? How much would you pay?”

“I’d think you’re high, and I wouldn’t pay you a single Chinese yuan. Sorry, Jamie, I know you. You’re the one who had sex with me just because you wanted to see whether women were any good.”

Jamie grinned at that, unrepentant. “But what if I were telling the truth?”

“About being straight or about water rights?”

“It was just an experiment.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

But still Jamie wouldn’t let up. “You ever wonder how a city like Las Vegas—a city that should have dried up and blown away about a million years ago—does so well, and we’re the ones flapping around like a chicken with our head cut off?”

“They’re a hell of a lot more disciplined.”

“Hell yes! Those fuckers know how to gamble, right? They look at their cards—their shitty three hundred thousand acre-feet of water from the Colorado River—and they know they’re fucked. They don’t lie to themselves like we did. They don’t try to bluff like they have something they don’t.”

“So what’s this got to do with rights?”

“I’m saying we’re all playing the same game.” He began pulling the olives off his toothpick and eating them. “I do paperwork all day long. I see the game. I dig up the underlying rights. I file the motions. And all of us are doing it. Doesn’t matter whether you’re California or Wyoming. Nevada or Colorado. All of us are seeing what we can get away with—without the feds noticing and declaring martial law on us. And if you’ve got someone like Catherine Case playing for your side, you do okay. Better than the political hacks we’ve got down here anyway.” He stopped eating his olives and favored Lucy with a speculative eye. “But what if I told you that everyone is playing the wrong game?”

“I want to know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Lucy, exasperated.

“I found a joker.” Jamie smiled, leaning back, looking like a satisfied cat.

“You know, you sound like someone trying to sell real estate in New Orleans.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’ve been stuck in the dust so long, you can’t see the big picture.”

“And you do.”

Again he flashed that maddening smile.

“I do now.”

Except now Jamie was dead in the dust, with his eyes pried out of his head, and the big picture he thought he’d seen—gone. Lucy sought another way to return to his side, but the cops were serious about keeping bystanders at bay, and now the reality of her situation was settling in—her better judgment returning too late.

Jamie’s body didn’t matter. The only ones who mattered were the living ones: the cops, the slow procession of drivers passing around the flares, the EMTs all hunched and bug-eyed behind their masks, waiting to be told that they could cart away the bodies. The faces in the Hilton 6 bar, pressed to the glass, watching the action.

Among them, anywhere, there might be a person who wasn’t looking at the carnage but at her.

Lucy started to back away. She knew this kind of killing. She’d seen it before. Everything about it was a feedback loop, building itself into something bigger and more horrifying.

She wondered if she had already been picked out, if it was already too late to run. She fled the scene, wondering if the city was finally going to drag her down and swallow her, just as it had swallowed Jamie.

Who did this to you, Jamie? she wondered as she fled.

And then, the more important question:

What did you tell them about me?

Copyright © 2015 by Paolo Bacigalupi. Excerpted from The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paolo Bacigalupi is the author of The Windup Girl, as well as the YA novels Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. A National Book Award Finalist, and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, John W. Campbell Award, and a three-time winner of the Locus Award, he lives in Colorado with his wife and son.

Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Carrie Vaughn | 1737 words

Sixteen Years Later, We Rejoin Our Heroes . . .

At the moment, Hollywood seems to be strip-mining the ’80s and ’90s for all the material it can possibly leach out of those decades. (There’s even a production company out there trying to do a remake of my very favorite obscure one-season TV show of all time, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, even though no one has ever heard of it.) This has led to everything from an updated version of the family sitcom Full House to some really ill-advised remakes of films like Total Recall and Robocop. It would be easy to say this is totally driven by Gen X nostalgia, but I think there’s more to it. For example, that Full House remake (Fuller House, yes, I know) is produced by and appearing on the subscription service Netflix. Dozens of cable networks have gotten into the original production game, and done very well at it. Between that and the proliferation of online services, I think there’s an argument to be made that media outlets are hungry for content that will attract viewers. And nothing looks better than content with a known track record and pre-existing audience.

So now companies like Netflix produce sequels to movies that first played some sixteen years ago. How does a sixteen-year-old movie possibly require a sequel? Answer: It doesn’t. Yet here we are, with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.

I can argue with the impulse. I can fault these companies for not being more original, for relying on the familiar rather than taking risks. But two of my favorite movies last year, Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, were sequels to movies that appeared decades earlier. I could long for more original, experimental, and risk-taking content. (And to be fair, there’s plenty of that to be had as well.) But it turns out I’m just as susceptible to the lure of the familiar and nostalgic as these companies expect me to be. And I enjoyed Sword of Destiny.

A week earlier, I went back and watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which I hadn’t seen since it came out. I had forgotten just how good it is, how beautiful, and how much gravitas Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat bring to an elegant story about aging, legacy, and past mistakes. It’s a coming of age story in a sense, but one that focuses on the mentors as much as it does the young woman struggling to find her place in the world.

I want to resist comparing Sword of Destiny to its predecessor, because pretty much anything would suffer in comparison. Fortunately, and I think this is one of the film’s strengths, Sword of Destiny stands entirely on its own. The few references to the first film feel like bits of background that serve to make the story richer, just as references to the past made the first film feel richer and more lived in.

Michelle Yeoh returns as Yu Shu Lien, a legendary warrior who has mostly retired from that role but now finds herself once again defending the Green Destiny sword from those who would abuse its power. She still mourns Li Mu Bai, but doesn’t have much time for that: A young warrior from a villainous martial arts clan is captured trying to steal the sword. However, it just so happens that the young woman who turned him in was also trying to steal the sword, but switched sides when the guards moved in. (Spoiler: These two hook up by the end of the movie. This is preordained.) Confronted by Shu Lien, the young woman, Snow Vase, begs to become her student, to train in the Iron Way. Shu Lien is skeptical. She summons warriors from the Iron Way to her aid, and when they arrive, receives a terrible shock: One of them turns out to be her fiancé, whom she thought had been killed decades before. Turns out, he faked his death so she could be with Li Mu Bai. (But as we will recall from our previous episode, Li Mu Bai honored his friend’s memory by not moving in on his girl. Meng Sizhao’s sacrifice was for nothing. The tragedy! Shu Lien’s got some things to work through after this.) They’re attacked, many battles ensue. The body count is high, and villain Hades Dai will stop at nothing to gain the power of Green Destiny.

It’s a pretty good story, it turns out. Several plotlines are deftly handled and come to satisfying ends. The fighting set pieces are all you could hope for. The tavern brawl in particular is delightful. I don’t know what it is about a small band of charismatic, goofy, yet highly competent fighters that makes for such a great time, but there it is. (The Iron Way band very much reminded me of Sif and the Warriors Three from the Marvel Thor movies, whom I also love.)

What did feel weird: The film is in English. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. I’m mostly grateful that the filmmakers didn’t feel a need to populate the movie with white actors. It’s a Chinese story, and it looks Chinese. Which may be why it was strange hearing the characters speaking English throughout. I, for one, have no problem reading subtitles, and on a movie like this, they might actually add to the atmosphere. (The Russian urban fantasy film Night Watch is another that’s enhanced by the subtitles. It’s very Russian, it needs to sound Russian.) The actors are all of Asian descent and come from all over the world—Asian-American Jason Scott Lee plays villain Hades Dai, for example, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who plays Snow Vase, is Australian—suggesting a wide net was cast for actors and this was never intended to be a Chinese-made film. The director, Woo-Ping Yuen, was the fight choreographer on the first movie, and that connection reassures me that there’s at least some aesthetic continuity with the first film.

I can’t claim to know much about the conventions of Chinese martial arts cinema. What I do know: It’s a genre that has its own history and tropes. These are medieval-like settings involving various periods of Chinese history. The fight scenes are stylized and beautiful, and many of them famously use wirework to achieve fantastical effects. Warriors of certain mystical skill levels can float across rooftops and spin into their opponents from across the room. From a western perspective, I might call them wizards—there isn’t as definite a line between the physical and the magical as one might be used to in European-derived fantasy. If you’re not used to the aesthetic, it takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it’s gorgeous.

What I really enjoy about both these movies is seeing recognizable tropes of epic fantasy in a non-European setting. Named swords of power, young warriors struggling with issues of honor and duty, castles and forests, quests and battles galore. That thing that many people say they want—new and different and original epic fantasy drawing on other than European backgrounds—it’s right here. If you’re jonesing for a good dose of the stuff after the end of the Lord of the Rings films, here’s your fix.

Like the first film, Sword of Destiny is particularly focused on women warriors, without commentary or fanfare. It just is. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon featured the young woman Jen, torn between her outlaw mentor Jade Fox and the honorable Shu Lien. Sword of Destiny is also filled with women—a Blind Enchantress, good warriors and bad warriors, dead mentors and new friends. It’s so casually done, I wish it would become a model: It’s not difficult including women in this kind of story. They fit naturally. You don’t even have to shine a light on it, and I feel a little overbearing shining a light on it now. But the issue is important to me, and it’s important that we have examples to point to showing that yes, great women characters abound in fantasy film, and we need to support movies that include them.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has a famously ambiguous ending: Jen abandons her inner conflict entirely to fling herself into the cosmos to grant her beloved’s wish—or to jump off a bridge, depending on how you interpret it. Unlike its predecessor, the ending to Sword of Destiny has no ambiguity. Two happy couples ride off to Wudan Mountain to deliver Green Destiny to where it will finally be safe. It’s the right ending, it’s a satisfying ending. But like the English language, it strikes a different tone than I was expecting. Which is one of the great challenges of updating existing creative works a decade or more after their release—how do you manage your audience’s expectations, when they already have a clear idea of what they want out of a remake or sequel? I almost wish I hadn’t watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, because I think I would have had a different experience with Sword of Destiny coming to it fresh.

I skimmed a few reviews of the film after writing my own, and nearly all of them panned it, mainly for the crime of not being Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Reviewers gushed about how blown away they were by the first film, how revelatory it was, how it was their first exposure to Chinese martial arts movies. And how the second movie didn’t—couldn’t—replicate that amazing experience of seeing that kind of movie for the first time. Of course it couldn’t, and this reaction from reviewers confirms my own thought, that Sword of Destiny would have been a much better film, not by actually changing anything about the movie, but by removing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and that weight of expectation, from the title.

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.

Book Reviews: May 2016

Amal El-Mohtar | 1748 words

Time Zones, Space Hours, and Clockwork

Anyone who’s been exposed to me online or in person since roughly November of 2015 knows that I’m obsessed with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway phenomenon Hamilton. Among its endlessly numerable felicities is the fact that it’s a love letter to the written word—as evidenced by the refrain, embraced by deadline-ridden writers everywhere, of writing like you’re running out of time.

In that spirit—of writing this column wondering how on Earth we’re almost at the year’s halfway mark—I’ve decided to focus on a few books where time is really foregrounded: as antagonist; as means; as theme.

Four Roads Cross
Max Gladstone
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0765379429
Tor Books, July 2016
352 pages

Time is of peculiar concern to Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence mosaic: It’s a meta-tool for curating the series’ tension from book to book. In Two Serpents Rise, our protagonist, Caleb, is covered in ritual scars that we learn were inflicted on him in childhood; two books later we’re twenty years earlier in Last First Snow, and our protagonist is Temoc, Caleb’s father. Even though we know it has to end with him mutilating his son, we spend the whole book in a teeth-gritting haze of hoping it will somehow be otherwise.

Four Roads Cross is a direct sequel to the first book in the series, Three Parts Dead—meaning we return to Tara in Alt Coulumb, struggling to maintain fire god Kos’ solvency in the face of accusations that his love for the recently resurrected moon goddess Seril is an undisclosed liability. At stake is the well-being of Tara’s adopted city and the friends she’s made there: Cat, who’s struggling to maintain boundaries with her new-found goddess; Raz, a vampire-pirate who’s struggling to maintain boundaries with Cat; and Abelard, a priest who’s struggling against being turned into a saint. Meanwhile ghosts from Tara’s past enter the machine of global capital and threaten to bring the sky down around her.

If anything has thus far marked the Craft Sequence for me besides the engaging characters and infuriating intelligence of its scheme, it’s pace: Each book has had something of the relentless to it, a narrative clock ticking inexorably down while plot gears align and interlock. Four Roads Cross is no exception—it’s exhilarating, action-packed, and beautifully structured—but it also features some of the most moving and quietly heart-breaking writing I’ve seen from Gladstone yet. Overall it’s breathtakingly satisfying, and leaves dangling some intriguing threads that will no doubt be tugged into unravelling future books in the sequence.

Clockwork Canada
edited by Dominik Parisien
Trade Paperback/Ebook
Exile Editions Ltd.
ISBN 978-1550965797
304 pages

If there are secrets among editors, Dominik Parisien must surely be among their best kept. In Clockwork Canada, he’s brought an artificer’s eye to this collection’s various parts to ensure they work together as a whole that is more than their sum. He writes the following in his introduction:

Canada is often described as a mosaic, sometimes a patchwork. I would add that it might also be described as a great lumbering automaton; it is an absurdly large mass, a construct made of widely different cogs and gears that sometimes work together and sometimes don’t, that is physically connected by the railroad—one of the great embodiments of the power, ingenuity, and crushing ruthlessness of the steam age. It is a perfect setting for steampunk.

It’s an enormously diverse collection, both in terms of its authors’ backgrounds and interests and the eclecticism of its contents: These are stories that span the breadth (and occasionally, literally, depth) of Canada, geographically and temporally, as well as the whole spectrum of steampunk. There’s a good mix of adventure stories and domestic stories, some more hopeful, some more horror; some are more fantastic, some more science fictional. Some stories imagine alternate histories, while others nestle small, beautiful stories in the corners of enormous events; some do both, and more, tangling retro and futurism in different measures.

This is not a collection of beaver jokes and maple syrup. I hugely appreciated seeing, across all these stories, a Canada shorn of any of the jingoistic patter that masquerades as heart-warming pluralism these days. These stories probe and poke at the country’s beginnings as at the edges of a wound: the workers who fed their bodies like coal into the railroad’s furnace; the immigrants who were turned away at ports for being too brown, too foreign; the enslavement of African peoples; the indigenous people displaced and decimated. “So you think you know about Canada,” any of these stories might begin. “Let me tell you about Canada.”

As with any anthology, some stories are more successful than others; a few of the stand-outs for me were Charlotte Ashley’s wonderful “La Clochemar,” Claire Humphrey’s moving “Crew 255,” and Rati Mehrotra’s brilliantly uplifting “Komagata Maru.” But my favourite of the whole is Terri Favro’s “Let Slip the Sluicegates of War, Hydro-Girl,” which sets out to do roughly a million things and pulls them all off—not least of which is tearing down the image of a beloved Canadian icon and rebuilding it into something very, very different.

An excellent showcase for new and established Canadian voices as well as for Parisien’s editorial skill, Clockwork Canada’s a fascinating, faceted read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Binti
Nnedi Okorafor
Trade Paperback/Ebook
Tor.com
ISBN 978-0765385253
96 pages

One of the novellas that launched Tor.com’s new publishing arm last year, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti is collecting accolades, among them a Nebula nomination—and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it went on to gain a Hugo nomination as well, as I write this in the last days of the nominating period. This is a startling whirlwind of a book that engaged and entranced me, and then left me arguing back and forth with myself over what I thought it had done.

In a far-future world somewhat aslant our own, Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib is a brilliant mathematician who’s been accepted into Oomza University, a prestigious multi-species school light years away from Earth with a minority of human students—all of whom belong to Earth’s dominant ethnicity, the Khoush. Binti is Himba—a real ethnicity in our world—and would be the first of her people to attend the university. Her family is set against her going, and we quickly see why: Outside her own community Binti is sneered at, exoticised, with Khoush people tugging at her hair and the fragrant cosmetic otjize mud worked into it.

This treatment takes on a more genteel cast once she’s on a ship bound for the university—and then Okorafor pulls the rug out from under the coming-of-age space-Hogwarts story I had been expecting, as aliens called the Meduse invade the ship and massacre everyone on board except Binti.

This turn is what has me thinking about time in relation to the story, and reflecting on Jo Walton’s assertion that pace is what defines genre far more than tropes. From the massacre on, the story’s stakes skyrocket into thriller-mode, as the focus is on Binti’s survival, her attempts to communicate with her captors, and her moving into a position of mediation between them and their enemies. Time speeds up and slows down. The traits that made Binti an object of scorn to the Khoush on Earth and an object of study on board a ship full of students are the same traits that save her among the Meduse—but in a limited, complicated way that is partly the catalyst for my perpetual argument with myself over whether or not I am convinced by the things this book does.

My arguments with myself go as follow: I can’t believe how quickly the massacre is glossed over. But Amal, I reply, massacres are glossed over in the real world all the time. Sure, I concede, but shouldn’t it have had more of an impact on Binti? Well, should it, I ask, when this is a first-person narrative from a young woman stating, claiming, and maintaining her identity in the face of repeated trauma? Hmm, I muse, I suppose it’s weird to expect some kind of consensus on how an individual ought to experience or represent her trauma—that might actually be like faulting this book for not being what it seemed like it was going to be in the first place. Which would be silly. Hmm, I muse further, and think on it more, and have no conclusion except that Okorafor has written a very rich, very deliberately uncomfortable and destabilizing story that can support any number of readings and arguments before tilting sideways to tip them all out an airlock.

I highly recommend Vajra Chandrasekera’s review in the March 2016 Strange Horizons, which relates some of the historical and present-day contexts surrounding Namibia and the representation of Binti and the Himba people in the story, and delves much deeper into the text. For myself, I’m still turning the book over and over in my head’s hands, like the mysterious edan artifact in Binti’s possession, wondering if it does any of the things I think it does, but mostly wondering at and grateful for its existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Interview: Charlie Jane Anders

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 8507 words

Our guest today is Charlie Jane Anders, editor-in-chief of io9, the internet’s most popular science fiction website. She also won a Hugo award in 2012 for her story “Six Months, Three Days.” We’ll be speaking with her today about her first fantasy novel, All the Birds in the Sky, about two friends who find themselves on opposite sides of a war between witches and mad scientists.

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.

Tell us a bit about how you first got into reading fantasy and science fiction.

I think I was always obsessed with science fiction and fantasy from a young age. Some of my earliest memories of reading are authors like Lloyd Alexander, and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster was a book that I read early on when I was young and impressionable. I read all of the Doctor Who novels by Terrance Dicks and other authors when I was a kid. And then Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time. Those were sort of my gateway books, I think, to reading in general, but especially to genre fiction.

I actually saw you say that Douglas Adams was one of your favorite authors.

Yeah, I was obsessed with Douglas Adams, and as a Doctor Who fan, I kind of knew of him, but I became obsessed with his writing, and listened to all of the radio shows and read all the books. I still have a signed picture of him over my desk, which my parents got for me at some point in the ’80s, I guess when I was out of town or sick or something. They went and got me his autograph, which is looking down on me right now, the signed picture of him. And Douglas Adams led me to Kurt Vonnegut, and so I started to read Vonnegut as well, and that ended up having a huge influence on me as well.

What was it about authors like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut that you really liked?

I mean, it was the humor, and the sort of absurdism of both of their perspectives on the weirdness and craziness of life that really won me over. But also, I think that with both of them there’s a sense of the sadness and futility of people trying to figure out the meaning of existence when they ought to be just trying to be good to each other, I guess, is my way of oversimplifying it. There’s a wistfulness in both of their work that comes through, and that you know you’re constantly being confronted by the stupidity and heedlessness of the cosmos, and people are struggling to do good and make a difference, but there’s just this sort of crushing futility that comes down on you in both of their work. It kind of goes along with the absurdism, but I actually find certain passages in both Vonnegut and Douglas Adams very sad. It comes out of the humor in unexpected ways, which is something that I always love. I always love things that can do that.

I can definitely see how that has influenced your writing, but before we get to that, why don’t you just say a bit about how did you first make contact with other science fiction writers and get involved with the community?

It was a long, slow process. I would go to conventions for years and years, and it never really dawned on me for a long time that conventions were also a place to meet other writers and do writing stuff. I thought of them as places where you dressed up in costumes and went to panels and just kind of hung out and did geeky trivia or something, when I was a teenager and young adult.

I think a big thing for me was actually joining a writing group, a writing workshop, for science fiction writers. That was really where I started to get plugged into more of the actual world of science fiction writing. Until then I had always thought of it of something that you just did in isolation, without talking to anybody else, and you just scribbled away in your room on your latest science fiction story that nobody would ever read, and that was how I thought it went. And so, being in a writing group and being around other writers made me realize that, oh, actually there’s a whole world out there, and I can connect to it. And then, obviously when I was hired to work on io9, that made a huge difference, because all of a sudden I was writing articles about science fiction that people were reading and people wanted to talk to me about them, and going to conventions and going to things like WorldCon became much more about interacting with people who had seen at least my work on io9. So that made a huge difference, obviously.

How did that come about? That you got hired for io9?

It was basically pure luck. Nick Denton, who owns and runs Gawker Media, is a huge science fiction fan. He’s obsessed with Asimov in particular. He had always wanted to do a science fiction blog, and he got connected with Annalee Newitz, my partner, who I worked with on a magazine called Other for several years. She was working at Wired Magazine at the time, and he approached her about starting this science fiction blog that he wanted to do, and amazingly she thought of including me in that because we’d already collaborated on some other stuff, and she was able to convince them to bring me into it pretty early. And that was the most amazing opportunity. It was basically like my dream job. It was getting to spout off and share my kind of ill-informed opinions about science fiction and fantasy with the whole internet; it was just an incredible opportunity. I’m still amazed that that came about. It’s still hard to believe that I get to do this every day, and that I get paid to do this. It’s kind of nuts.

When it was first starting out, what was your initial vision for the site? What were you hoping to accomplish with it?

Nick’s vision, which we shared, was that this would be a site whose main thesis is that science fiction has become mainstream culture, and that science fiction, to some extent, has come true. Like, we’re living in a science fictional world. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed, as William Gibson says, and that we are living in a world where we’re constantly seeing things that would have seemed like science fiction not too long ago. So, basically the vision of the site was, instead of treating science fiction like a specialty topic, or something aimed at a niche audience, we automatically assumed it was a mainstream topic and we were talking about mainstream culture, and that our readers were ordinary people who just happened to love science fiction. And then Annalee’s brilliant addition to that was that one way to get at the fact that science fiction has become reality is by talking about science as well, and so the idea of blending science and science fiction on one website and having them side by side and informing each other and feeding into each other was really, I think, the thing that made io9 such a unique vision for several years.

I saw that Annalee said that she was kind of inspired by Omni Magazine. She wanted to do something kind of like that.

Yeah, that was something we talked about constantly, and I know that Annalee was just obsessed with Omni Magazine when she was younger and that that was a huge part of her dream for io9. And actually, weirdly, like the last couple of times I went into Gawker’s offices in New York, there’s a big magazine rack, and for some reason it’s now just stuffed with old copies of Omni from the late ’70s, early ’80s. So somebody there is also a huge fan.

I also saw in this article that Annalee said, “Charlie Jane and I never thought io9 would last more than a year.” What were some of the challenges when you started out?

Well, it was more just that at the time Gawker Media was starting a lot of sites pretty regularly, and a lot of them they tried for a while and didn’t last, or in some cases they got sold or spun off. I think that io9 just seemed like a huge experiment, it seemed like a crazy venture that nobody knew if it was going to work or not. The whole idea of blending science and science fiction seemed kind of risky or out there or whatever, and the whole idea of just doing a whole site about those topics, it seemed like something that just might not reach a big enough audience or might not win over people who were interested in those topics. It was a huge question mark.

You think you’ve had a big success though reaching out beyond the hardcore science fiction fans and bringing in, as you said, just ordinary people.

It seems like it. We obviously have a really great community of regular readers, and the people who write in the comments every single day on io9 are some of the smartest, most erudite and thoughtful people I know. I always get a thrill out of reading the comments, but it seems as though on a good day we’re reaching way beyond our core audience into an audience of people who don’t think of themselves as science fiction or fantasy fans, but just enjoy Star Trek, Star Wars, Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and William Gibson. There’s no question that the audience of people who read William Gibson is more diverse or bigger or wider or something along those lines than people who would go to a convention.

So io9 has been going now for about eight years? Is that right?

Yeah, I started working on it in mid-2007, and it really cranked into high gear in the fall of 2007. And then we publicly launched at the start of 2008, so it’s been about eight years now.

Are there any big milestones that stand out? Or any big lessons you’ve learned in those eight years?

A big milestone was when the word io9 was kind of snuck into an episode of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s TV show. And that was only like a couple years after we launched, I’m guessing. Because when was Dollhouse on? It was like . . . it was the second season and Summer Glau says the words io9 on television, which was just, holy cow, that’s insane.

And lessons are just . . . I think over time I’ve learned so much in general about genre and storytelling and how to write about these topics in a slightly more nuanced fashion. I feel as though my learning curve just in general doing io9 has been ridiculously steep, and I’m still learning, sometimes through horrible mistakes, but sometimes just through figuring stuff out as I go. Every day, I’m still learning about how to write about these topics in a smart way. In what I hope is a smart way, I guess I should say. In a less dumb way, I should say.

And you’ve been working on your own fiction. Were you working on it the whole time? Or did you take a break from it for a little while?

I’ve been working on fiction for as long as I can remember, and definitely for the last fifteen years it’s been what I consider my career. When I started io9, it was with the idea that I was going to just keep writing fiction the whole time, and io9 would be the best day job in the world, but still my day job. For the first six months, basically from November 2007 to sometime in 2008, I did have to quit writing fiction, which is the longest period that I’ve gone, that I can remember, where I wasn’t writing fiction. It was really hard. It was hard for me to put that aside, I was in the middle of writing an epic fantasy novel that ended up not getting published anyway, but it was a novel that I was excited about at the time. I had to put it aside and focus on io9 because working on that site was every waking minute for about six months. And then you get to where you can do the same things in less time, and the things that were taking you hours are now taking you a lot less because you’ve gotten better or faster or whatever.

You mentioned that you’ve been involved with writer’s groups. Were those pro writers in those groups? Or other aspiring writers?

It was other aspiring writers. I guess I’ve been in one group where there were pro writers. But generally the groups I’ve been in have been just other people who were trying to break in. The first one I joined, there was nobody who had really broken out in the group, although there were people who had been published, and it was just everybody at the same level, so it was really good to get that kind of support from other people who were just sending their stuff out and getting piles of rejections all of the time.

When did you really start breaking into print?

It was a slow and kind of weird process. Probably my first big publication was Strange Horizons, which is true of a lot of writers I know. Strange Horizons was great about accepting people who were new and untested. They worked with me a lot on that story to make it better. Around the time I was getting into Strange Horizons, I was also branching out into literary fiction and erotica and a couple of other genres. I actually sold a story to a pretty well-known literary magazine, in I guess 2001, Zyzzyva. It’s a magazine that’s well known on the West Coast at least. So that was a weird fluke. Again, Zyzzyva really believed in pulling people out of the slush, and every single issue they would be very excited to point out which authors were being published for the first time ever. That was a thing that they were really into. That was really nice. Then, basically for the decade that followed, I was just sort of getting a piece here and a piece there, and I was in some pretty big anthologies that were published by HarperCollins and stuff. But it wasn’t until Tor.com started publishing my stories in 2010 or 2011 that I really went on people’s radar screens as a fiction writer, I think. In fact, until the Tor.com stories, I would regularly have people come up to me at conventions and say, “Oh, I didn’t know you wrote fiction.” Because they thought I did io9 and that was all I did.

You had a first novel, Choir Boy, that was not science fiction. When was that published?

That was published in 2005, although I actually mostly wrote it in 2001, and it has maybe a hint of magic realism here and there, but it’s not really a genre novel. It’s a very weird literary novel.

So why did you decide to make your debut in the literary space?

At that time, I was publishing a lot in literary magazines, including a lot of sort of smaller literary magazines that have since folded, unfortunately. And I was very much involved, and I still am involved, in the literary world. I was already running a spoken word series that included a lot of literary people. At that time, I was doing Other Magazine, which published a lot of literary fiction alongside genre fiction. I think that that was, at the time, in the 2005ish, it was sort of a toss-up for me whether I was going to find myself as a science fiction/fantasy writer or as a literary author. They both seemed like directions that were equally open to me, to the extent that either one of them was; neither one of them was exactly wide open, but they were both things that seemed at least equally plausible.

What happens after that? You were working on, I think, like three or four or five different novels then?

Yeah, I wrote a bunch of novels, and I had two novels that I was working on simultaneously after Choir Boy. One was straight up literary fiction with, again, just a hint of magical realism, and the other one was a weird sort of post-apocalyptic/apocalyptic story that I ended up cutting down from 90,000 words to 20,000 words and selling to John Joseph Adams for his Apocalypse Triptych. So, one of those novels actually did kind of see print in the end. But, the literary one never made it out into the world. Partly because the small press publishers all kind of imploded in 2007/2008.

You had one, I think it was kind of an urban fantasy, that you were working on pretty seriously.

That was the last one I did before All the Birds in the Sky, and it was a thing of after those other novels, I was working on this urban fantasy that was sort of a hardboiled noir thing about this guy who is an enforcer for the magical syndicate, and he goes around basically just being a leg breaker. I still really like that novel a lot. I think it has got a lot of really interesting stuff in it. I went on a huge kick in college and after college of reading basically everything by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett, but also people like Mickey Spillane, who I think is an underrated writer. I read all of Mickey Spillane’s books at one point. I love that kind of noir, hardboiled, violent, dark, gritty sensibility. I was really excited to explore that and use it in a fantasy setting. Especially after reading things like Sandman Slim and Harry Connolly’s books and Seanan McGuire has some of that as well in her October Daye novels. I love that kind of stuff. It was really fun to explore that, and it was also a really silly, funny book in some ways. But it seemed like the people who I showed it to liked it but didn’t love it, the urban fantasy book. People said, “Oh yeah, that was really fun.” But nobody seemed really excited about it, and it felt like something that other people could have written, whereas All the Birds in the Sky, when I was getting further into that, felt like something only I could have written, for better or worse. In some ways that might not be such a good thing, but you know, it was more uniquely my work. The other thing, I’ve blogged about this, but after I wrote “Six Months, Three Days,” which was that novelette that won the Hugo and got some attention in general, it felt like a novel that was closer to that in terms of tone and ideas . . . was maybe more in line with what people seemed to be enjoying about my writing in general. It just seemed like a better idea to focus on All the Birds in the Sky.

For people who haven’t read “Six Months, Three Days,” why don’t you say a little bit more about what that one is about?

Basically, “Six Months, Three Days,” like All the Birds in the Sky, is a relationship story. And it’s using a relationship between two people to, hopefully in a non-bludgeony way, explore some big ideas. In “Six Months, Three Days,” there are two clairvoyants, people who can see the future, but one of them, this guy Doug, sees a fixed future that cannot be changed at all. It’s basically just like one set future, whatever he sees will happen, is doomed to happen, and there’s no changing it. Whereas Judy sees a multitude of possible futures and she believes that she can choose among them, and that she can actually influence what happens in the future. So it’s the whole fate versus freewill, determinism argument, but dramatized through a relationship in which basically one person believes the course of the relationship is already completely set in stone, and the other person kind of believes that there might be some wiggle room. It’s a story that’s kind of sad, but also has a little bit of hopefulness in it. The big challenge for me in that story was how to have a satisfying resolution while also dealing with the question . . . they can’t both be right, but they kind of both are right, and how does that work?

I saw that actually some philosophy classes now are having the students read the story in the class.

That’s insane. I guess I had heard that. That’s kind of nuts. If they’re getting something out of it, that’s great. My dad was a philosophy professor, so the thought of people studying that in philosophy classes is kind of amazing.

That story wins the Hugo, and then where were you in the process of writing All the Birds in the Sky at that time?

I was definitely in the middle of it. I was in the trenches of it. I remember when I went to the Nebula Awards where “Six Months, Three Days” was also nominated. I was at the Nebula Awards, and I was sitting with my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the bar, and I mentioned to him that I had this novel that was basically at that point just a pile of notebooks that I had scribbled in, and that if my apartment burned down while I was traveling at the Nebulas, the novel was gone. Otherwise I was really excited about it. I think everybody was like, “You should scan those or do something so that you have some kind of backup.” I was at a table full of people and everybody was horrified.

You said on your blog, “There were a few years that I was straight up terrified that absolutely nobody was going to get this book.” What was it about All the Birds in the Sky that made you nervous in that way?

There’s a downside to spending all of your time on the internet reading people arguing about books and about writing and about stories. I knew that there were some things that I was doing in this book that might rub people the wrong way. Just the fact that it starts out as a young adult novel, and then about a hundred pages in, you jump forward and they’re suddenly in their twenties. Some people were just not going to like that. The fact that the narrator is kind of weird. It’s definitely a book that’s third person omniscient, but most of the time it’s a very tight omniscient, which is one of the things I like about omniscient narration, that you can actually go as tight as you want to. You can be completely in one character’s head for a dozen pages, and only see what that character sees and know what that character knows, but you have the option to pull back and have a moment of omniscience, and that’s a technique that fiction writers have been using forever, but it’s something that’s more unfamiliar to, I think, today’s readers. There’s a part of the book where the narrator does something kind of obnoxious where Patricia and Laurence are watching people go by on this escalator, and they’re speculating about the people based on what their shoes look like because that’s all they can see of them, and then it turns out that they’re actually right about one of the people going by on the escalator, and that’s just, like, a funny, weird thing that the narrator does, and I was sort of like, “Oh, this is going to be the moment where a lot of people throw the book across the room.” So I definitely had that at times, where I was doing things that I thought were kind of risky and kind of breaking some of what people had been told were the rules of fiction writing. And I had [the thought] in the back of my mind that there were going to be people who were going to object violently to what I was doing.

You mentioned Patricia and Laurence, why don’t you say a little bit more about them?

They’re the main characters of All the Birds in the Sky. Patricia is a witch, and she has magical powers from an early age. Early on she finds that she can talk to animals, although this is not an ability that she can call on whenever she wants it or that is, like, reliable. It’s something that just sort of happens on occasion. And she grows up feeling super isolated, but also super passionate about achieving her destiny as a witch and becoming the person that she was supposed to be. She feels like nothing in her life will make sense unless she can actually use magic and be this kind of person who can actually make a difference. The reason why she actually wants to be a witch is so she can help people and also help creatures. She sees that there’s all this suffering in the world, and she really wants to do something about it. And one of her main things is compassion, but also she’s really, really shaped by the fact that her parents didn’t approve of her when she was growing up. She always kind of wants that approval from people, but she also resents the fact that she wants that approval. She has a complicated relationship with other people in that way.

Laurence, meanwhile, is the mad scientist, and from early on he’s inventing things and building things. He starts writing computer programs when he’s really young, and then he finds these schematics on the internet to build this device that is basically a two-second time machine. You push a button and it jumps you forward in time two seconds. And it’s almost useless, except that occasionally if you’re in a really crappy situation, you can use this device to just jump a little bit ahead and maybe things will have gotten slightly better. He really wants to find other mad scientists and inventors and makers, and he just happens to be stuck in a place where there’s nobody else like that around, and he’s just a little too weird and out there for the other geeks at his school. He’s constantly lighting things on fire and building weird robots and ray guns and stuff. So, he feels like an outcast in sort of a different, but kind of compatible, way than Patricia does.

They find each other in junior high and basically bond over the fact that they’re both outcasts. But, they also have a really kind of thorny, weird relationship in junior high, especially after Patricia starts getting labeled as goth, witch, allegedly kind of a Satanist character. The whole thing of in junior high, even if you’re an outcast, you don’t necessarily want to take on the radioactivity from someone else’s social ostracism. And you know for both of those characters, one of the things that I really obsessed about was making them people, sort of like I said a moment ago, making them people beyond just their designation. Laurence isn’t just your stereotypical scientist who’s coldly rational and constantly being empirical, acting like Mr. Spock, or analyzing everything all the time. He’s got a lot of more complicated emotional issues that he’s dealing with. And Patricia is not just the Earth mother witch that you might expect her to be, but she’s actually kind of a spiky person. The more I delved into the things that played against the stereotype of what you expect these characters to be like, the better I felt like they were just characters, at least hopefully.

Right, I know you wrote several drafts of this book, and I think that that’s one thing that happened over the revisions, right? Is that you kind of stripped out the extraneous genre elements in a way.

That was one of the things that happened, and you know, earlier drafts of the book had aliens and a bunch of other stuff in them. At one point Patricia had this evil wizard that she kept having to fight who was like her Voldemort, and he would just pop up occasionally, and maybe in the end of the book he would have to team up with her because things got that bad. But it was just . . . I was just seeing how much stuff I could throw in, and how much I could get away with, and I was just like, “You know, I’m already writing a crazy book that has kind of a weird concept, why don’t I just see how much I can actually put in there before it just breaks.” And indeed, I put stuff in there until it broke. That was a thing that happened.

I did try to overstuff it with genre elements, and in general it was much more of a kind of genre spoof early on than it became . . . and, like, that was again a thing where things like writing “Six Months, Three Days” and thinking about what kind of story I wanted to tell with this book really changed things for me because I was like, “Okay, what’s really interesting here is the relationship and the relationship only works if we’re emotionally invested in the characters separately and together.” And, there was a eureka moment for me pretty late in the process, like the sixth draft I guess. There was this eureka moment where I was like, “Actually, at this point all of the scenes I really like in this novel are the ones where Laurence and Patricia are together.” And there are good reasons for them to not be together at certain parts of the book, but the more I could push that, and the more I could have them interacting with each other, and having conversations, and dealing with stuff together, the more I was personally invested in the book, and the less it just felt like a jumble of ideas.

Do you see this kind of like a Romeo and Juliet story in any way with the science and magic, rather than two different families?

I think that any great relationship story . . . this is probably one of those generalizations that’s going to get me into trouble, but I think a lot of great relationship stories involve people that have some crucial difference or some major reason for not belonging together or for having opposing viewpoints. If you read any romance novel, that’s what you’ll probably find to some extent. I think conflict also makes any relationship more interesting than two people who agree about everything and just sit around saying, “Yes, quite right. Absolutely.” I think that it’s more dynamic and more interesting if there’s a reason for conflict and disagreement. But, at the same time, I never wanted their relationship to be defined by that. I was surprised by how much I found myself either pushing against that or exploring it from different angles than just they have a disagreement. They do disagree about stuff quite a bit, and there are moments where they argue, but I also wanted it to be more complicated than that, so that when those conflicts came up, it didn’t feel like, “Oh yeah, of course, this is the conflict we’ve just been hammering on throughout the book.”

Then, in addition to this science versus magic conflict, there’s also the conflict between the healer magic versus the trickster magic. Where did that idea come from?

There were a couple parts to that and that’s something that I really was excited by. One part of that was just that I was obsessing for months about how magic works in this book. I had kind of placeholdery stuff that I wasn’t really happy with, and at some point I had to just figure out a rationale and a system for how the magicians, how the witches, in this book would operate. I’ve read a ton of fantasy, and there’s so many different, interesting ways that magic is shaped in different worlds, and I wanted to come up with something that I hadn’t seen before, and it was just hours of staring at a blank computer screen. I finally came up with this idea that there are two schools of magic, and that they’ve been merged. Part of that was I wanted to very much dance around the existence of real life schools of magic, and real life ideas of magic in our world, and I thought that coming up with two very broad umbrella designations of magic was a way to kind of handwave the idea that, yes, there were all of these different magical traditions, but they had been gathered into these two schools, so we didn’t have to worry about getting the details of one of these real-life cultural traditions that are obviously . . . you can’t get stuff like that wrong if you start invoking it, and you have to be really careful with how you invoke it, so I felt like that was a way of cheating a little bit, but also just acknowledging that, yes, there are real-life traditions, and this was just a way of encompassing them. But, also I was fascinated by the idea that there was this dichotomy that already at some point in the past had been found to be a false dichotomy, and that had already been reconciled, and that good magic involved using both of these supposedly opposite viewpoints, and that you were a better magician if you could do both together.

How about this idea that eating spicy food can help unlock your magic powers? Where did that idea come from?

That was a super random, weird thing that came to me, and I don’t even know where that came from. I think it was just a combination of the fact that she grows up in this house that was an old spice warehouse in colonial times, so there’s all these, like, lingering spice fragrances and things and old bits of spices everywhere, and for some reason, in my mind, that turned into this idea that when she eats a lot of spicy food, it’s such a powerful physical sensation that it causes her to leave her body and have this powerful, almost vision quest.

Especially when it comes to magic, there are certain parts of the book where I just kind of went with whatever subconsciously came to me, and didn’t try to analyze it too much, because I wanted the magic to feel a little bit dreamlike and a little bit not entirely logical. I didn’t try to explain to myself too much, but it was a thing that made sense instinctively, but then it was also important that later on she shouldn’t be able to just use that as an automatic thing. Like, “Oh, I eat some spicy food and then I can do magic.” Because nothing should be that easy, ever.

That’s the magic; how about the science in the book? Did you have to do a lot of research for this? Because in the acknowledgements you mention a bunch of people that sound like really gave you some great scientific help with the book.

Yeah, and again, that was a thing where the book started out as sort of a genre spoof a little bit, and it was very much like Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. It’s just like, “I’m inventing the something-o-mat. I’m inventing the whatever ray.” And there’s still some of that in there, but at some point I decided that if the science gets too unrealistic and too cartoony then it is almost magic, and if you’re going to have magic and science opposite each other, or alongside each other, then the science has to feel distinct, and the way to do that seemed to be to really try to push it as far as I could in the direction of being somewhat plausible while still having it be unreal enough that it could be mad science, rather than just regular science. It was important to me that Laurence be a mad scientist. He’s not coming up with a new app or whatever. He’s coming up with crazy, out of this world stuff, and part of that was that when he’s a grownup, I wanted him to be in a loft on SOMA, basically in a startup working alongside other science geniuses, not so much in a lair somewhere.

So, for the science, I was lucky that at io9 we had a couple of columns that we used to do. One was called “Ask a Bio Geek” by this Berkeley professor, Terry Johnson, and the other was called “Ask a Physicist” by this Drexel University physics professor, Dr. Dave Goldberg. They’ve both written amazing books. Terry wrote How to Defeat Your Own Clone, or co-wrote, I guess, and Dr. Dave wrote The Universe in the Rearview Mirror. Those are fantastic books that everybody should pick up. And they, to this day, are incredibly generous about being willing to have me just bug them with my nonsense science questions, and I’ll come to them with like, “I came up with this crazy thing. How do I explain this in a way that sounds reasonable? How do I fix it so it’s not as crazy?” Dr. Dave spent god knows how much time with me on this time travel story I was doing that got reprinted at Lightspeed recently, where I actually was sitting up late at night to do trigonometry to figure out how time travel was working in my world, and he was helping me to do the physics of it. He’s incredibly nice about that kind of stuff. For this, I wanted things like the wormhole machine that Laurence is working on in the second half of the book, and some of the other science stuff, to have at least some connection to real science so that it wasn’t going to be just crazy, handwavey, throwing stuff up in the air kind of stuff.

One line that jumped out at me was a character says, “We always suspected that gravity was so weak in our world because most of it was in another dimension.” I was curious if there was any real science behind that.

That was something that I came up with on my own, and I ran it past Dr. Dave, and he didn’t throw up, so I think it’s at least something that has a ring of truth to it. I’m always fascinated by the idea that there’s a lot that we don’t understand about gravity, and that it’s a relatively weak force in our universe. That’s something that I personally am really curious about, and my own attempts to explore that are feeble, but it’s something that I think was an interesting way to bring stuff together in the book.

A really big theme in this book is that humanity is just on the verge of destroying itself and drastic measures need to be taken, and the scientists and wizards in the book have different drastic measures that they think ought to be taken. I was just kind of curious, do you think we’re that close to destroying ourselves, and do you think that drastic measures need to be taken?

I worry about it. I worry about the damage that we’re doing to our own habitat on this planet, and about the kind of unsustainable system that we’ve built for ourselves. I think that anybody who pays attention to what’s going on in the world has to worry about that stuff. I also was very careful in the book to include voices that didn’t think that the world was ending. I think that, for my purposes in the book, it’s not so much that the book needs you to believe that the world is coming to an end, it’s that the book needs you to believe that these people think that the world is coming to an end, because that justifies the actions that they want to take. That was something that was really important to me, to hint at that, especially Milton Dearth, who’s the guy who really believes that we’re going to need a new planet soon. He’s kind of an eternal pessimist, and in an earlier draft of the book, I included a whole story about why he became so pessimistic about human nature and about the future of our species, but that ended up being cut purely for length reasons. But there is one character in the book who says, “It’s not the apocalypse. It’s just an adjustment in our standard of living.” And I thought that that was something that absolutely had to be in there because it’s not a unanimous viewpoint.

I think that right now, everybody has these fears of the apocalypse, because we see so many things that seem beyond our control. There’s all this talk about us being on the verge of the sixth mass extinction, and I think it’s important to engage with that and talk about that in pop culture and in culture generally. Annalee Newitz wrote this amazing book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, about how we’ll survive the next mass extinction, to address that, and to have an optimistic viewpoint on what we’re going to do if the apocalypse does happen.

I actually interviewed Annalee about Scatter, Adapt, and Remember when it came out.

Oh, cool.

People can go dig through the archives and find that if they want to know more. You had a blog post that I thought was really interesting and was relevant to this book. It’s titled “Can you be a die-hard rationalist but also totally superstitious? (Asking for a friend).”

Right, that was on my Tumblr. I’m very, very, very superstitious, and I engage in a lot of magical thinking, and I kind of know that that’s nonsense or whatever, but I also kind of buy into it, and I have a weird relationship to reality, I guess. Partly because reality always seems very weird to me as a person living through it. It never feels entirely predictable or reasonable. I kind of indulge in a little bit of superstition and magical viewpoints in my own life because it’s a way of dealing with the unreality of life.

What are some ways in which you engage in magical thinking?

I pick up pennies on the sidewalk. I don’t walk under ladders. I hug trees. I used to just knock on wood, but now I actually will just hug a tree for luck or to feel grounded or whatever. Actually, I think hugging trees is probably good in general. Trees are our friends. It’s good to say hi to them.

Would you say that Laurence and Patricia are kind of those two aspects of your personality and you identify equally with both of them?

I definitely identify equally with both of them, and I think they definitely represent different aspects of my personality. I think that in some ways they have a lot in common, in addition to being different in a lot of ways. I think that they definitely represent . . . in terms of how they deal with other people and how they deal with the world, they represent different kinds of aspects of my sense of myself.

There’s this line I really wanted to ask you about, so there’s a part where the AI character says, “Society is a choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.”

Right, that’s almost a nonsense statement in a way. But it’s also something that felt kind of meaningful to me because those are almost the same thing, but they’re slightly different views of how they’re constructive. It’s like, either way you have to compromise and buy into other people’s logic, or just be subject to external constraints.

A big theme in this book in general is living in society and dealing with other people and figuring out how to handle the rest of the human race and all of the crazy stuff that comes with that, and that comes up again and again throughout the book. It was almost as much as nature versus science or nature and science is a major theme in the book, dealing with society is sort of the other theme that kept coming back to me in various ways, and I feel like those two themes speak to each other in a way that I can’t articulate, but that felt important somehow. In fact, that AI winds up creating a new way for people to interact with each other, and that’s one of the ways that the book works itself out is through finding better social connections. I had this other book that I wrote, one of the other novels that never got published, where a one character says . . . they’ve just graduated from college, and they’re like, “Well, now I can do anything I want because it’s not like I can get expelled from the real world.” And the other character says, “Well, I think that’s what they call prison.” You can actually get expelled from the real world. It’s just that getting expelled from the real world means getting locked up.

Unfortunately, we’re pretty much out of time. Do you want to talk about other projects you’re working on? Or what else has been going on with you?

I’m super excited to start my book tour, and I’m working really hard on the next novel, which I’m at that stage now where I keep kind of clutching my head and saying, “Oh my god, what was I thinking? This is the worst idea that I’ve ever had.” Which probably means that I’m making progress, I hope. It’s completely different from All the Birds in the Sky. It’s a book set on another planet in the future, and at least currently it doesn’t have any humor in it at all, although that might change.

Is there anything going on with io9 that you want to talk about?

We just merged with Gizmodo, which is the site about science and technology, so now there’s kind of a bigger, more awesome entity that combines science, tech, futurism, and science fiction. That’s sort of like a larger, more awesome version of what Annalee and I were designing all those years ago.

So, like one of those Transformers where you combine them to build a bigger Transformer?

Yeah, it’s like Voltron.

It also says in your bio that “Six Months, Three Days” is in development at NBC. Is there anything you can say about that?

I can’t really say anything about that right now. I’m hoping that there might be some news at some point, but even though I write about pop culture in my day job, I still don’t fully understand the workings of Hollywood. A lot of stuff just kind of trundles through different pipelines and rolls around in endless loops and sometimes something emerges and sometimes nothing emerges, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I thought that was just a terrific story, so I hope to see that sometime.

Oh cool, well, thank you.

I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Charlie Jane Anders, and this new book is called All the Birds in the Sky. Thank you so much for joining us.

Yay, thank you so much! It was my pleasure.

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: An Owomoyela

Sandra Odell | 2249 words

One thing I loved most about “Three Points Masculine” is the authentic narrative voice, how the action and interactions flow in such a way that it leaves no doubt that the characters had lives before the story began and will continue when the story is over. How do you challenge yourself when it comes to narrative style and voice? Are there any forms of narrative you would someday like to use?

Frequently, I’ll see something in some specific work that hasn’t been done well, and I’ll try to do it better—whether or not I think I can actually do it better. First-person writing is something I often see done poorly, especially if it’s meant to come across as something people might actually say. I remember reading a story that was supposed to be a collection of people sitting around a campfire and telling stories to each other, but it was clearly all in written language and not spoken; you could tell, if you tried to read the sentences out loud, that they didn’t flow in a natural, conversational way.

So, one of the things I was trying with Three Points Masculine was to create something you could actually hear the narrator saying—maybe at a GAT review board, or something. This is a lot harder than it looks! I went through a lot of drafts, and a lot of reading out loud, and a lot of soul-searching and questioning where the balance lay between having a truly authentic narrative style and creating a structured, readable narrative on the page.

(That’s one of the things you learn, if you spend time studying how people really speak—fluency in spoken language is usually characterized by a lot of repetition, pauses, fragments, backtracking—unless you’re looking at someone who’s practiced and practiced their storytelling or oratory skills. Spoken language is terribly messy; written language almost always brings more organization to the table.)

“Three Points Masculine” is nuanced and layered, exploring the meanings of gender, identity, service, and perception. What inspired this particular story?

. . . GOOD QUESTION. I’m not sure I remember.

I went back and searched through my notes, and eventually found this in an email conversation with myself (. . . it’s how I organize my fleeting fiction ideas and story seeds) from 2010:

Everyone is required, as part of their eligibility to get a job, to take a Gender Assessment Test* which rates them on a number of things such as aggression, physicality, nurturing instinct, etc. and assigns them male or female**. Many employers, when listing job openings, use this gender assessment to screen for desirable psychological setups.

*This was actually set up in response to complaints about employers listing male/female preference on their job listings. It came out that they were using it as a shorthand for suitability in fields like security and care, and when people pointed out that some people of the “wrong” gender were suitable for the jobs indicated, a system was put in place to allow them to “test in” to those professions.

**There are people who try to hack the system, and a small subculture which tries to hit the perfectly androgynous band in the middle or otherwise combine traits. These people are generally considered unemployable in gendered jobs.

Someone eventually sued, based on a “one-man, one-woman is the only healthy parental set to raise a child” idea, to be allowed to marry based on gender assessment rather than physical sex, and managed to get it through the courts, though this is disputed and a lot of people think it mostly sailed through on legalese.

Basically, society’s entire concept of gender is splintering, but only because people keep trying to make it rigid and defined by rules.

. . . so that has some clues. To be honest, though, I have a hard enough time remembering my thinking on fiction projects from last month, let alone from six years ago. So anything further is speculation.

Still, I speculate that I was either annoyed at the “children need a mother and a father” argument against same-sex marriage or at the prevailing opinion that certain jobs are best performed by people of certain genders—nursing, for example, being heavily gendered as a female occupation; many roles in STEM being heavily gendered male. (It’s always interesting to note how these roles change as a matter of social convenience. Computer science was once heavily gendered female, and is now heavily gendered male. In both cases, people would tend to point to the gendering as something natural and inherent—so the reasoning would go, “Well, women are quiet and patient and detail-oriented, so they can do this quiet, patient, detail-oriented work.” And then the environment shifted, and now people go “Well, men are good at math, and they’re analytical. So they can do this mathy, analytical work.” The skillsets needed are the same, and the aptitudes of people are the same, but the narratives change, and our expectations and explanations as a society of what we see have changed.)

Gender is one of those things that people really want to pin down and make explicit, so that A Man has one defined set of characteristics and A Woman has another, different defined set, so that this distinction can be used as a fundamental building block in how we organize our society. The problem is, that’s never actually worked. You can bludgeon people into these categories if you try hard enough, but it does a great deal of violence to the nuances of human variation. You can find stories of people fighting against the categories for as long as categories have existed.

Anyway, the entire story probably grew up around that little core of irritation.

I’ve been on the receiving end of more than one concussion, and they are far from gentle. Here you capture the confusion and debilitation of a concussion and use it as a vehicle to explore the meaning of the story without sacrificing either character or plot. Have you had experience with personal injury care, either as a volunteer or recipient?

I have never had a concussion, and hope never to have one! I have had friends who have had concussions, though, and I’ve had some altered states of consciousness due to other medical annoyances. I remember passing out once in elementary school and waking up completely disoriented, lying on the concrete slab in the back of the school, and I was trying to parse the situation and the first thing my brain hit on was, “Wow, this is really comfortable. I bet I’m in bed.”

Another time, I was giving blood when I passed out in the chair. (These are all stepping stones on my way to discovering that I have chronic low blood pressure. Pro tip: If you have low blood pressure, pulling a pint of blood out of your body is not the greatest of ideas.) When I came to again, I had a good minute or two when I was just seeing colors and shapes, and none of them made any sense whatsoever. I think I thought I was at a carnival or something before I realized that it was a bunch of people clustered around me.

Recently, transgender rights and gender identity have received a great deal of attention in the press. From laws policing bathroom use to the legal and personal struggles of children speaking out against their birth-assigned gender, transgendered individuals are standing up for their rights. Many critics insist it is a writer’s duty to educate as well as entertain, and just as many feel writers should entertain and leave real life issues out of their works. Do you have any particular thoughts regarding such matters?

Leaving “real life issues” out of your work seems like it would be a losing proposition. After all, life is a real-life issue. Romance and marriage, war and political intrigue, new scientific discoveries made and new technologies launched, crime, and growing up, and meeting new people, and taking chances, and suffering accidents or betrayals—all of these are real-life issues, from which fiction takes inspiration. Banning real life from fiction means, ultimately, banning fiction’s moving parts.

But what I think what people generally mean when they say that isn’t to leave “real life issues” out of work, but rather to stick to things that aren’t contentious, or that they don’t find contentious. Or possibly, they mean that there are things they’d rather not read about. Which, okay.

Fiction is not monolithic, and people’s reasons for reading fiction are not monolithic. Sometimes, people read in order to find fiction which puts into words the things that they’ve experienced, so that they can feel less alone, or so that they can use that fiction as a way to communicate parts of their life to others. Sometimes, people read in order to step back from real life for a bit, to enjoy themselves and get away from everyday stress and real-world problems. These may be the same people, in different contexts. Neither response is wrong.

I think writing should be used to educate. And I think writing should be used to give people uncomplicated entertainment. I think there’s enough writing in the world that these don’t need to be mutually exclusive.

You are a Clarion West 2008 graduate, have been published in The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: vol. 6, and in 2012 became a senior editor for the amazing Strange Horizons. If you could speak to new writers out there, the ones daring to dip their toes in the world of fiction, what would you say to them?

I’d say, hello and welcome! The best advice I can give is: Keep looking for what it is that gets you where you want to be, and doesn’t get you where you don’t. All other advice is contextual.

For specific, and thus contextual advice, I can offer these nuggets of accrued wisdom:

Keep trying new things. Do creative stuff for fun and out of spite and on a whim and to satisfy random urges that arise at two a.m. Don’t pay any attention to whether or not you think you can pull it off, or whether or not you think you can sell it. Play.

Find safe places to try new things. A friendly crit group or a bunch of writer friends can provide this. For me, it was fanfiction—I spent my early teens writing hundreds of thousands of words in an environment where people were predisposed to read my stuff and find good things to say about it. That let me play with voices and styles and plot structures and some really terribly bad ideas, like songfic (has there ever been a good songfic? Let me know . . .) and not once was I ever mocked off the forums and into the bitter wilds.

If you want to improve, keep an eye toward improvement. All that wonderful support in my fanfiction circles could have let me sit stagnant at my thirteen-year-old level of skill, but I kept reading authors whose skill I aspired to, and looking back at my own work with an eye toward seeing how I could grow. Having a body of old, unskilled work can help a lot: When enough time has passed that you can look at it with somewhat fresh eyes, you can say “Oh—my prose is purple. Let me look up ways to illustrate with words and not be overblown.” Or “Jeez, the structure of this thing is all over the place. How do you structure a story, anyway?”

If you want to move in professional circles, be professional. Don’t send off bitter rants to editors who reject your work or reviewers who don’t love it. Read the guidelines for anywhere you’d like to submit work to. Own the fact that you’ll make mistakes from time to time, and accept that other people will make mistakes. Don’t feel obligated to work with people who behave unprofessionally, and assume that no one is obligated to work with you if you don’t.

Figure out who to listen to. Never assume that all criticism is valid, but never assume it’s all invalid, either. Always allow for the possibility that you might have something to improve—even if it’s not what the people in your crit group, the editor who sent you a rejection, the reviewer who panned you, or some random person on the internet said it was. People will have different experiences of your writing. Some audiences, you’re just not writing for. But if you consistently fail to get through to the ones you do want to write for, set ego aside and consider that for a while.

And above all, don’t get discouraged! And if you do get discouraged, be kind to yourself. Take time if you need to; get support when you need to. Try to remember what brought you here in the first place. If you love the writing, serve the love before you serve the career.

And if any of this advice steers you wrong, ignore it.

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: Tim Pratt

Robyn Lupo | 475 words

Can you tell us about how “North Over Empty Space” began? Were there many, or any, surprises writing this one?

I wrote a story called “Cup and Table” (reprinted in this very magazine back in 2012!) many years ago, about a secret society of people with weird powers on a sacred quest to find an ancient artifact . . . who made money in the meantime by hiring themselves out as mercenaries and assassins. While that story has a rather, ah, definitive end for the characters, I always had the notion in the back of my mind that I could dip into their lives at other points and tell different stories about them. I was musing about Sigmund’s power, to peer into the past, and wondering what the most surprising thing he’d ever seen was . . . and I thought, “A person who has no history.”

Everything followed from that.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Carlsbad and Sigmund, but will we see them again?

It’s possible! It would be fun to write a novel about the Table, actually, though it’s pretty far down on my “list of books it would be fun to write.” Check back in with me in few years.

You’ve written in a wide variety of mediums; do you have a preferred mode of fiction delivery? What are you reading these days that gets you excited?

Whatever gets the words into people’s brains is fine with me. I do most of my reading on my phone now, actually, which is a big shift for someone who has thousands of physical books filling up his house. (Part of the move to reading mostly ebooks was practical: we’re out of room for more bookshelves.) I really enjoyed Joe Hill’s newest novel The Fireman, which is out in a couple of months—weird, big, scary, thrilling, moving, funny. I just read Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which is full of odd historical tidbits that make me want to write alternate and secret histories.

What’s next for you, Tim Pratt?

More stories! I have a Patreon where I write a new story every month for backers/subscribers/whatever: Give at least a dollar a month, get a story a month. (“North Over Empty Space” was written for that, originally.) That’s at https://www.patreon.com/timpratt. I have a Pathfinder Tales novel, Liar’s Bargain, out in June, and the final novel in my Marla Mason urban fantasy series, Closing Doors, should be out at the end of this year, or early next. I find ways to pass the time.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Haris A. Durrani

Robyn Lupo | 1044 words

How did “Tethered” get started? From the beginning, the visuals in “Tethered” had me hooked. Was there a particular image that you really wanted to show us?

I want to shout out the Alpha Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Workshop for Young Writers. I worked on early drafts of “Tethered” there, and it became my first professional sale. The idea spawned from my dual interests in space law and space debris. There was something about the image of debris around Earth that felt personal and tragic while simultaneously grand and almost apocalyptic. I had attended the 2008 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, hosted annually by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and that year the subject was “Mining the Sky.” One of the debaters was Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space law at George Washington University. Sometime around then, I’d also read about the quantity of debris in orbit—right now, just under 700,000 pieces of debris larger than a centimeter, according the European Space Agency. Even a piece of debris as small as a centimeter can do serious damage and generate a cascade effect of debris—the Kessler Syndrome. Space mining is a far off prospect, but debris is a very real issue and poses some fascinating and pressing legal and political questions about international accountability. I wanted to put a face and a story to all of this. And, yes, it could make for a visual feast.

I was particularly drawn to the early image of the junkship hanging “over” the satellite, and to that last image of Kalima. Both felt precarious—possibly hopeful, but possibly disastrous, much like the current predicament of debris.

How conscious were you at the outset of writing “Tethered” that the ending was going to be ambiguous? It’s easy for me as a reader to want to have more definite answers at the end of a work (happy endings for everyone! I’m a softie); were you tempted as a writer to fall on one side or the other regarding Kalima and Charlie’s fates?

I juggled for a while, but I think I had a feeling around a third of the way through the writing process that the story would end ambiguously. This felt the most honest. One of my favorite essays is Peter Watts’s “Outtro: En Route to Dystopia,” which concludes his collection Beyond the Rift. He’s notorious for writing very dark near futures, and he says he does so because he feels an obligation to confront the political terrors of this world: “It is not a world my characters built. It is only the world we left them.” For him, confronting this reality is integral to changing it. He wrote this after “Tethered,” but the essay resonates with my feelings about the story.

The problem we have now with debris is that the international community hasn’t woken up to the reality of the situation, that if we don’t do something to remove debris now, it will eventually hit us hard. We have reached a point of no return where, even if we stop launching satellites into orbit (which we won’t), the density of stuff up there is such that a Kessler event is likely within the next 200 years if we don’t start taking stuff down, and the 2006 study on that was before the two record-breaking events in debris history: the Chinese anti-satellite test and Russian-Iridium collision.

More generally, the debris issue is symptomatic of the even scarier problem of the politicization and militarization of spaceflight. I wanted to force readers to confront where our future is headed, and to be left with that choice to interpret the ending, to “make the future” in their social and political imaginations, because that’s the reality we’re left with today.

I also wanted to toy with readers’ prejudices. A surface reading of the story would see the Chinese as the antagonists, but I think that boils down to what you think they’ll do with Kalima at the end. I was tempted to take a side (and perhaps you can guess what I think happened based on what I’ve just said), but, again, I wanted to force readers to struggle with that judgment on their own.

You’ve written that you do two things: write and make robots. Does writing inform your robot-making, or is it more the other way around? Are there unexpected ways you combine these two passions?

Writing and engineering always felt hand-in-hand for me. What I write inspires my work in engineering, and vice versa. The climactic sequence of “Tethered” was actually inspired by an AP physics exam problem about space shuttle tethers. Since I wrote “Tethered”—maybe because of it—I’ve further pursued space law and debris. I worked at Boeing’s satellite facility in El Segundo in their “Survivability Department,” which focuses on debris and other interference from the space environment. For my engineering degree, I conducted an independent study with NASA astronaut Mike Massimino on space law and debris. All of this work has given me a host of new story ideas. And now I’m headed to law school, where I want to focus on space law. But I will never lose sight of my writing. Stories are crucial for me to grapple with the social, moral, and political implications of my work in technology and law.

What’s next for you, Haris Durrani?

My debut book, Technologies of the Self, just won the Driftless Novella Contest from Brain Mill Press. It’s a fictionalization of my family heritage from both the Dominican Republic and Pakistan, and of my experiences growing up Muslim in America. There is also a time-travelling space knight. I am happy to say that it has garnered a lot of early buzz thus far.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire

Laurel Amberdine | 514 words

I love this beautiful, intense, Alice in Wonderland-based story, told from a very different perspective. What made you think of writing such a tale?

I am sort of the worst when it comes to “where did this come from” questions, because mostly my writing process goes as follows: Someone asks me to write a story, either seriously or in jest. I say “no.” I promptly regret my “no.” I amend to “yes.” I promptly regret my “yes.” I put the story on the rolling list of projects. I forget about it until the day the march of projects takes me to that slot, and then I panic, and go and sit on something and stare off into space until my subconscious, which has been working all this time, takes pity and tells me what to do. I write the story my subconscious has been assembling for months. People tell me I am clever. I do not feel clever. Someone asks me to write a story . . .

Did drafting go as planned, or did you encounter any surprises?

See previous answer. By the time I actually start a story, there aren’t many surprises left; I’ve already hammered them all out when I wasn’t looking. This may sound really relaxing and cool, but it actually means that my brain is full of bees at all times, and I don’t get much sleep.

To me (and to anyone else paying attention!) you are icon of productivity. What is your work schedule like? How does a typical Seanan writing day go?

I get up; I sit down; I work. Eventually, I get hungry. I eat; I go back to working. I work until all the work-related tasks in my day can be checked off, and then I go and read, or play video games, or watch television. Honestly, I think I’m so productive because I’m afraid of disappointing my planner.

I know you share your life with many amazing and worshipful felines. Do they play any part in your writing process?

Most of the time, Alice is sleeping somewhere nearby while I’m working, hoping that she can lure me back to bed, while Thomas is elsewhere in the house, destroying things. He is a remarkably destructive boy.

Please tell us about your most recent releases, and what we can look forward to from you in the future.

My most recent full-length releases are Chaos Choreography (March) and Every Heart a Doorway (April), which are two very different books that I love very much. I have a third volume of Velveteen stories coming out in May, Velveteen vs. The Seasons, and my first ever short story collection, Rise, is coming out in June, under the name “Mira Grant.” The best place to keep up with me is really at seananmcguire.com, where all things are answered in time.

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 currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Mari Ness

Jason Ridler | 1090 words

The story plays with the need to find answers and take actions against things that are seemingly inevitable. Did you find that was emergent in the story as you wrote it, or something that was clear to you when you began?

This is something that pops up in a number of my stories. For one thing, I find our reactions to the inevitable fascinating. When you are faced with something inevitable, do you accept it? Try to adapt to it? Fight back? That last can present some interesting conflict, since facing the inevitable—and trying to stop it—presents a genuine challenge, both to me and the characters. Me, because I have to figure out some way to get the characters out of that situation, and the characters, because they have to carry out whatever bizarre plan I’ve come up with.

For another, I think we, as a species, have a tendency to confuse the inevitable—death—with things that may not be so inevitable—decay. So I like to explore that tension. Sure, if you’re out in the middle of deep space, running out of fuel and supplies, things look really bad—but how bad are they really?

Els’s need to take action against the rushing sense of her mortality was compelling and dire. By the time the tendril shows up, we’re now dealing with a narrator we might not trust by virtue of their ragged psyche. These are conventions usually used in horror and crime fiction. Why choose them for an SF piece, a genre that loves the rational?

I’m not entirely certain that the SF genre does love the rational—even the hardest SF stories often have a sense of wonder, of fear, of the unknown. As far back as Frankenstein, several SF works have straddled the line between horror and the rational, or used unreliable narrators, or narrators at a mental breaking point. Twentieth-century science fiction has several classic examples of this from Stanislaw Lem, C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” and “Black Thirst,” Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, and, of course, the Alien and Aliens films. More recently, we’ve seen this in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, with its blend of science fiction and horror, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, whose narrator is under constant threat of death. I haven’t encountered quite as much hard SF/crime fiction crossovers, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Disappeared is basically a murder mystery with aliens, and Jack McDevitt has often added crime elements to his science fiction novels.

And bluntly, many science fiction staples don’t really make all that much sense. Is it really rational to leave Earth—a place that, whatever its other issues, at least has food, water, and breathable air—for the vastness of space, which may not have any of those things in easily accessible forms? Perhaps when we get closer to the annihilation of the Earth when our Sun explodes into a red giant, but for now, probably not. And yet, if you offered me a ride in a space ship to go explore the Alpha Centauri system right now, I’d go. No question. And I’ll cheer on pretty much every character who wants to go as well. (Maybe not the characters on Stargate Universe. Most of them were boring or annoying or both. But everyone else.)

To go back to this particular story, however, I needed to give Els and Dun a reason to be in conflict with this alien, one who hasn’t, after all, done anything to them. Desperate people do things that non-desperate people wouldn’t. I’d also argue that “Deathlight” is hard SF only on its surface. At its core, it’s a fairy tale—almost the companion piece to my earlier story, “Stronger Than the Wind,” which was a fairy tale on the surface, and hard SF at its core, the sort of genre mixing I love to play with.

The Tower’s arrival gave the story a sense of history (is it a rocket or human trash?) being synonymous with being alien (as well as being a catalyst for action). Was that on purpose and, if so, why?

Yes. I didn’t just want to have these two people floating out in deep space: I wanted them to be part of something more.

Els’ efforts almost from the start are to find meaning. The driver is riches, perhaps, but in experiencing the alien, she desires most of all to find patterns and meaning, which we’d initially seen as a futile attempt to ward off death at the beginning. Do you like stories that play with subtext and theme more than action?

Well, once again, I’m not sure that the divide is always that sharp. Sure, there’s stories that are pure action, and others that focus on subtext and theme, but I think even the most action-packed stories have subtext of some kind, even if creators aren’t aware of it. You see this a lot in television—The CW’s The 100, for instance, is, on the surface, mostly about people running around trying to kill each other in between just trying to survive, but it also has a number of political themes and subtext. In general, I’d argue that most art is inherently political and themed.

And, of course, viewers and readers can and do put their own interpretations on what they see. To detour a bit to the other common use of “subtext”—take a look at the Star Wars fans that are happily shipping Kylo Ren with Rey or Finn and Poe, and arguing that the subtext of the film supports their preferred pairing. I’m not sure what the writers, director, and actors intended with either pairing, but I do know that a number of fans found something there. My own personal experience suggests that all sorts of things can creep into the creative process—I’ve gone back and looked at my stories and poems years later and found entirely new things—usually anger—that I was unaware of feeling at the time.

In terms of what I prefer—it depends. Sometimes I just want a straightforward comedy; sometimes a silly popcorn action film (although a number of those are loaded with political subtext), and sometimes I hunger for subtlety and shading.

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: Elizabeth Hand

Sandra Odell | 1072 words

“Hungerford Bridge” is an intimate look at a tiny slice of London, as if you had closed your eyes to recapture every detail from memory. How much of Elizabeth went into the writing of this story? Tell us about the inspiration behind the story.

John Clute, my partner of twenty-plus years, lives in Camden Town in North London, so I’ve spent a lot of time there over the last two decades—it’s a big change from where I live the rest of the year, in rural Maine. I’ve always had a very good sense memory, so for this story as with others, I do actually kind of close my eyes and try to recall everything I can.

The story had its genesis in two seemingly unconnected events. The first was a rainy day when I came out of the Embankment tube station, and was in the upstairs passage that leads to Hungerford Bridge. There was a small, triangular window in the passage, and from there I had this view of a tiny, incredibly verdant wedge of land on the other side of the street. “What’s that place?” I asked John, and he told me it was Victoria Embankment Park. I wanted to see it, so we walked down and wandered around it in the rain. Something about the rain and the fact there were few other people there made it seem like a very strange, magical, distinctly English sort of place. We then retraced our steps and crossed Hungerford Bridge, a pedestrian bridge that has some of the most spectacular views of the city. It always makes me think of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.”

Not long after, Amanda Palmer was staying with us in Camden Town, and one night she invited the most extraordinary young man to join us for dinner. He was pretty much exactly as I describe Miles in the story, and after he left I transcribed what I could recall of his conversation. I’d promised Brad Morrow a story for an upcoming issue of Conjunctions, and somehow these things—that young man and the park—conspired to create the story. I wrote it very quickly, one of those times when the story seems to come out of nowhere, a gift from the Muse.

A character in E.R. Eddison’s great novel The Worm Ouroboros is called the Red Foliot. There’s no explanation for his name, or what it means, and when I was a kid and first read the book I was utterly entranced by that name. So I stole it for the emerald foliot. The OED identifies it as a word meaning “foolish,” but also “a kind of goblin.” I envision my foliot as a cross between a hedgehog and a frilled lizard.

Here we have the intersection of magic and reality, a touch of the unknown, the impossible, on an otherwise mundane life. If you could choose to receive such a gift, a touch of the ephemeral and unreal passed down from a time before clocks and schedules, what would it be? A creature? A plant? A book?

The notion of a magical book is enticing—the novel I’m working on now, The Book of Lamps and Banners, is about that very thing!

But I think I’d really want a magical creature—I always liked the idea of having a little dragon the size of my hand. But an emerald foliot would be very nice, too.

Much like the emerald foliot, Miles’ parting kiss is a magical moment that lingers in memory. It’s this tiny, personal touch that makes “Hungerford Bridge” so accessible to the reader. Many writers and critics adhere to the philosophy that readers have an equal hand in creating the story, relying on the author’s words to stir the reader’s imagination. How aware are you of your audience when you sit down to explore a new idea?

To be honest, I’m mostly telling the story to myself. Obviously I’m always delighted (and relieved) when a story finds readers, but if I think of any audience at all, it’s a circle of shadowy faces on the other side of the campfire, where we’re all telling stories to keep the dark away.

What would you consider the greatest stumbling block to women writers entering the SF/F genre today? Why?

I’d say, if you come across any stumbling blocks, burn ’em down. This is a golden age for writers of fantastika of any stripe—women, men, LGBT, people of color or any ethnicity or cultural background, old, young—whoever you are, we need your voices! I’ve encountered more amazing and original stuff by emerging writers in the last few years than I’ve probably read in the last half-century. The whole point of fantastic literature is to blow your reader’s mind and expand her consciousness outside the boundaries of the mundane world. If anyone tells you otherwise, ignore them. Or even better, give them a book.

As a young reader, were there any particular writers who stirred your own imagination, opened the door to let the wonder of the world slip inside?

Too many to mention! Tolkien was the gateway drug for my generation—I read The Hobbit when I was eight, and then The Lord of the Rings, and those books changed everything. I asked for and received Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings for my twelfth birthday, so that was a big one, too. Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, Angela Carter’s The War of Dreams (and then everything else she ever wrote), Evangeline Walton’s The Island of the Mighty and The Children of Lyr, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, The Worm Ouroboros, Alan Garner’s Elidor—those were the books that I read and reread obsessively as a kid. Even then, I liked dark stories, and some of those books (especially Elidor and The Children of Lyr, and the final two books of The Once and Future King) were quite bleak. Elidor remains one of the most frightening children’s books ever written.

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: Tora Greve

Jude Griffin | 577 words

How did this story come about?

It really started when I wrote my thesis on Isaac Newton’s theory of light for my teacher’s training college many years ago. I always like to think in “what if” terms when regarding alternative history.

Can you talk about how you chose which characteristics of the real people you chose to highlight and why you chose what you did to change about each of them?

I tried to keep as close to their real characteristics as possible. However, I needed a woman, so I chose to change one of Newton’s antagonists in real life. Hooke wouldn’t do, he was too brutal, so I chose Leibniz. Poor Halley, who really helped Newton, I had to change him into an alien, since he was the one who had travelled the most.

There is something so appealing about alternative histories: Do you have any favorites by other writers?

No, not really among other authors. I like to read history and science, and use that directly in my own writing. That inspires me more than reading other authors.

Your website (toragreve.se) hints at a rich and adventurous life: What are your thoughts about the benefits/challenges for a writer of having such a diverse set of interests and activities?

It is absolutely essential. How could I write about damp jungles with dangerous animals if I hadn’t experienced them myself? Somehow I’m always writing about real things, but in my own twisted way.

Any news/projects you want to tell us about?

I continue writing my fantasy series in Swedish about the Sirius Solar System (it has a site in English, siriussolarsystem.se), which will consist of at least five books. Two have been published; the third will come this autumn. They are really art projects, with a program of tapestries and fantasy.

In addition, I have at least two projects of alternative history going: One is about the European moon probe Smart-1 being sent up by an electromagnetic accelerator situated in a secret tunnel in Gaustatoppen Mountain in Norway in 1903 instead of 2003. By that time, Norway was colonized by Sweden. Well, I know, a mass accelerator overcoming Earth’s gravitation would be very expensive. The financing is part of the plot. When I first started to write about that, as a short story presented in a Swedish steampunk anthology, I didn’t know that tunnel really existed. It was a secret for many years, until NATO decided to give it up, and I had the opportunity to being catapulted up to the summit of Gaustatoppen in a cable car inside it last year. The editor of the anthology told me to extend the short story into a novel. It is almost finished now. The second project is about a civilization resembling Earth’s in the 1950s. I have placed Washington DC in Rio de Janeiro. It’s about what would happen if we were contacted by benevolent extraterrestrials from a Type 3 civilization who only want to help us. That turns out to be just as bad as aliens who want to wipe us out. Just remember Western civilization confronting native people in different parts of the world, wanting to baptize 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: Wole Talabi

Christie Yant | 1466 words

I hope that other readers were as delighted as I was to realize that you’ve worked two different nursery rhymes together—“Solomon Grundy,” of course, but also “Monday’s Child.” Your narrator, Wednesday, is certainly “full of woe!” Can you tell us a little about your relationship to the nursery rhyme form, and how it inspired “Wednesday’s Story”?

I’m pleased that you brought up the references to “Monday’s Child”! I’ve certainly presented Wednesday as “full of woe!” Sunday as “wise and good in every way” and I’ve even written Solomon Grundy himself (who is born on a Monday) as “fair of face” by making him biracial, and so on. I was going to use Saturday as the main character for this story, but that rhyme (in part) made me switch to Wednesday.

So yes, I used “Solomon Grundy” to inform the plot and very loosely used “Monday’s Child” to inform some characterization, but to be entirely honest, the real inspiration for the story itself has little to do with nursery rhymes. The inspiration for the story is really other stories and other writers, which is why I suppose it’s ended up being a story about stories.

“Wednesday’s Story” is a sequel to another story I wrote two years ago, “Thursday,” published in The Kalahari Review, where the Days tell the first story I reference in this one as an inciting event, the story of the girl Emeh. That story itself was inspired by Neil Gaiman’s wonderful story “October in the Chair,” which he wrote for the legendary Ray Bradbury, and which I loved. (He says it also was a forerunner to his later novel The Graveyard Book). After I wrote “Thursday,” another writer, Kiah, who read it and liked it, sent me a message on Twitter with an idea: Use the characters of the Days from “Thursday” and the nursery rhyme story of “Solomon Grundy” to tell a new story. I thought it was a great idea, but I had no clue exactly what to do with it. Still, I was inspired, so I wrote the opening on the day she sent that message, but then I got stuck for months after that, wondering what kind of story I was going to tell. Then one afternoon, I thought about why I was writing this story: a sequel suggested by another writer to a story inspired by another story using a popular children’s rhyme. And then I decided I was going to make the story about stories and writers and readers and how they all affect each other. Inspired, I wrote about half the story before getting stuck again. That time I almost deleted the whole thing. Eventually, I sent the half story to a writer friend, Pemi, who told me she loved it and wanted to see how it would end. A few days later, while reading some old Yoruba folktales, the final inspiration for an ending came and I finally finished the story. So while the story’s inspirational relationship to the nursery rhyme form is limited, its relationship to other writers and other stories is very strong.

Do you often find inspiration in structured forms like the nursery rhyme? Are there any forms you particularly admire that you haven’t yet tried, but would like to?

Unfortunately, no, I don’t often find inspiration in structured forms, but I do like them a lot. I’m a huge fan of haikus, limericks, palindromes, and acrostics. I personally use alliteratives whenever I get the chance. I also try to take elements from other writing forms and formats and use them in stories. I really like it when an author uses a unique, constrained structure to build a good story, for example C.C. Finlay’s amazing “Time Bomb Time,” published here in Lightspeed, which is the same when read both forwards and in reverse (I’m not sure what that form is called [macro-palindrome?] but it’s excellent).

If there is any particular form I’d like to try myself, it is the call-and-response. I think call-and-response is a great part of African storytelling traditions and cultural interactions. Lesley Nneka Arimah did such a wonderful job of inserting call-and-response into a fantasy setting in her New Yorker story “Who Will Greet You at Home,” but I’d like to work it into a far-future science fiction story where it is a key part of the way people interact with technology. I just haven’t found the right story yet.

What was it about Solomon Grundy’s story in particular that interested Wednesday in his plight?

Suffering. It’s his suffering and just the suffering of people in general. I don’t think Wednesday was particularly drawn to Solomon; his story just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for her. The Days spend all their existence chronicling the lives of mankind, and I imagine they must be absolutely weary of pain, of war, of death, of all the pointlessly painful things we do to one another, have done to one another in the past.

Thankfully, the world is becoming less cruel as time goes on, but sometimes when I read or hear about some of the terrible things some humans do to each other, it jars me. I wish I could end all the suffering in the world. I imagined that at least one of the Days would feel the same, and that played into the story.

As an author, you get to do what Wednesday could not: determine the outcome of your character’s stories, choosing from an enormous range of possibilities. What goes into that choice for you, of deciding how their story should end? Do you usually know the outcome when you first sit down to write?

In deciding how a story should end, the main things that I consider are what makes sense for the characters and the story, as well as how I want the reader to feel when the story ends. But usually I don’t know how a story will end when I start.

For me, stories are a bit like life: When you start, there are many possibilities, and as you go on, you make choices that narrow the possibilities until, inevitably, life ends. It’s similar with writing: As you write the scenes, you lock in actions and characters and relationships, and usually by the time you get to the end, there are only a few ways that your story can end that will make sense and be consistent with what you’ve written. Not everything you’ve written would have been planned and sometimes a scene you didn’t think much of or a sentence you didn’t care much for might suddenly mean you can’t end the story the way you wanted to unless you go back and change that part of the story. That’s the big difference; at least with stories, you can go back, you can change things to engineer the ending you want. But usually, I don’t. Not much anyway.

What’s next for you? Where can we look forward to seeing more of your work in the near future?

I have a new story called If They Can Learn in the Futuristica Volume 1 anthology from Metasagas Press which is available for preorder now. It’s about an investigation into the circumstances surrounding a secondhand cyborg police officer shooting an unarmed boy on the streets of Lagos. I also have a story called Necessary and Sufficient Conditions in the Imagine Africa 500 anthology which is a collection of stories set in Africa 500 years in the future and another story coming out in Space and Time magazine later in the year so there are those. I also have a bunch of new short stories and one novella I’m finalizing and trying to sell right now so maybe there will be more out there soon. At least one of them will probably end up in Omenana which is doing great work in publishing African speculative fiction. I’ll probably keep sending them stuff for as long as they are willing to put up with me.

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: Hugh Howey

Moshe Siegel | 1131 words

Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of your novella, The Plagiarist?

I wrote this story during my stint at a college campus bookstore. One of the perks of the job was a free class per semester, so one summer I signed up for ENG211 – SCIENCE FICTION with professor Adam Griffey. On the first day of class, Adam went over the course guidelines and syllabus. He informed us that in lieu of our final exam, we could submit a project or work of art. And that his #1 rule, and grounds for immediate dismissal and an F in his class, was any form of plagiarism. So I decided right there that I would submit a novelette as my final project, and it would be about a professor Adam Griffey who was a professional (if closet) plagiarist.

Adam Griffey, our protagonist, experiences feelings of guilt that stem from procrastination, his own perceived hypocrisy, and a depleted sense of self-worth . . . not uncommon feeling for any writer to endure, but in this case, these feelings are tied in part to the burdens of leading a secret virtual life. Which—if either—of these root causes (virtual detachment vs. an author’s traditional lamentations) first inspired the story’s emotional arc?

Definitely the latter. I knew Adam (the real Adam Griffey) pretty well, and he and I both suffered from this distaste for our own work compared to the genius we perceived in others. Like, nothing we wrote would ever compare to the material we enjoyed, so why bother? I allowed this quite common writer’s lament to inform the main character and the plot.

In just about all the worlds envisioned in this story, people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available information, both trite and beautiful. From this clutter, Adam’s haiku resonate with refreshing simplicity, to the point that Amanda credits them as the sole source of quiet reflection in her world. Did you come into writing this story with the idea of his haiku habit, that Adam himself may be the new, virtual Shakespeare for whom he’s searching? Do you turn to poetry yourself in such a manner, amidst our own world’s crush of content?

Originally, it was going to be sonnets that Adam used for expression, but this felt a little too self-serious. I used to read and study and memorize Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I wrote dozens of my own over the years and really fell for the iambic pentameter (a meter I try and hew to in my prose). But for the story, it didn’t feel like Adam would have enjoyed even his own sonnets, and so I seized upon the idea of haiku. Here was the bare minimum of his own work that he could stomach.

There’s an episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which the holographic Doctor’s writings are seized by a publisher who claims that, as a simulation, the Doctor has no legal claim on his own work; this idea of virtual-person rights is at the crux of Adam’s professional, existential distress in The Plagiarist, an issue still more complicated by Amanda’s effort to plagiarize Adam himself. Do you have an opinion as to the rights of nonhuman content creators (be they painting elephants or virtual entities), and did writing this story shape or change that opinion?

It was while writing The Plagiarist that I wrestled with this issue for the first time. My opinion is this: If an entity has enough self-awareness to express ownership of their art, that’s the deciding factor. It’s not whether or not they can create the art, but whether they feel abused in the art’s creation or dissemination. If the elephant trumpets and has to be beaten in order to paint, that’s wrong. If an AI complains that their work is being unfairly stolen, then that’s wrong. So we shouldn’t ask ourselves if art is being made, or what the thing is that’s making it, but ask the artist what they prefer and listen only to that.

The joviality in the lab after Hammond was razed made this reader squeamish, and made me wonder about the ethics of the global Stanford prison experiment that is Adam’s reality. What do you make of the scientists, researchers, and professors who rain death and destruction upon countless billions of artificial people who live on the soon-to-be-shuttered world—artificial people whose own self-awareness arguably erases the distinction between “real” and “virtual”?

I have the same reaction to that part of the story. I was thinking about animal testing while writing that scene, what we can get used to and what we can rationalize in the pursuit of scientific or medical truth. There are surely cases where certain forms of testing can be justifiable, but I feel like the bar is usually set incredibly low. Fortunately, our collective sense of empathy has grown over the generations. But a future generation will have to wrestle with how we treat our robots and our virtual beings. What rights do they have? Should we see them as equals? I believe these questions will begin to be posed in the very near future. Anyone who has watched the Boston Dynamics team prod their robots with broomsticks has likely felt this unease.

We Lightspeeders are pumped for the new Shift and Dust editions published through John Joseph Adams Books, an SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (edited by Lightspeed’s own John Joseph Adams, who, for the record, did not request a plug). In addition to this exciting news, do you have anything in the works, or upcoming, that you would like to share with us?

I’m so thrilled with the release of these editions. They just came out just this week (as I’m writing this, not as readers are reading it). This is the first time these sequels have been out in bookstores, and the reaction from readers has been phenomenal thus far. I really feel honored to be a part of John’s new imprint with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I can’t wait to see what’s next from him.

As for me, I’m working on my next novel right now. It’s a time travel cop story, but one that I don’t think has been done before. I can’t wait to get it out there and see what readers think. It’s called Mr. Unlucky, and it should be out later this year.

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 | 323 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

It’s our anniversary, and we’ve made another special double issue for you: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! We’ve brought together a team of terrific creators and editors of color, led by Guest Editors Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim. We’ll have ten pieces of original science fiction by exciting SF authors: Karin Lowachee (“A Good Home”), Steven Barnes (“Fifty Shades of Grays”), Isha Karki (“Firebird”), Lisa Allen-Agostini (“Depot 256”), Brian K. Hudson (“Digital Medicine”), Sofia Samatar (“The Red Thread”), Nick T. Chan (“Salto Mortal”), Dayo Ntwari (“Omoshango”), Terence Taylor (“Wilson’s Singularity”), and Gabriela Santiago (“As Long As It Takes to Make the World”).

We also have a special flash fiction section curated by the talented Berit Ellingsen. We have flash from S.B. Divya (“Binaries”), Fabio Fernandes (“Other Metamorphoses”), Teresa Naval (“An Offertory to Our Drowned Gods”), Nin Harris (“Morning Cravings”), Jennifer Marie Brissett (“Breathe Deep, Breathe Free”), T.S. Bazelli (“The Peacemaker”), Caroline M. Yoachim (“Chocolate Milkshake Number 314”), Naru Dames Sundar (“A Handful Of Dal”), Kevin Jared Hosein (“Hiranyagarbha”), and JY Yang (“Four And Twenty Blackbirds”). Our nonfiction editor, Grace Dillon, has brought us some incredible essays and articles, and we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights.

For our ebook readers—and for those who seek out the print edition of our special issue—we also include have our usual novella reprint and a novel excerpt. But as a special treat, Sunil Patel has collected the more than two dozen essays on life as a PoC reader and creator of science fiction that originally ran in our People of Colo(u)r Kickstarter campaign.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with an extra special book column featuring new work by PoC authors.

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

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

Henry Lien

Assistant Editor

Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Andrew Liptak

Sunil Patel

Amal El-Mohtar

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Illustrators

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 (with Karen Joy Fowler) [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.