TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 79, December 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, December 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death
Rich Larson

The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross
Margo Lanagan

The Venus Effect
Joseph Allen Hill

This Is as I Wish to Be Restored
Christie Yant

FANTASY

The War Between the Water and the Road
William Alexander

Every Day Is the Full Moon
Carlie St. George

Daya and Dharma
Shweta Narayan

The Death of Paul Bunyan
Charles Payseur

NOVELLA

Twenty Lights to "The Land of Snow": Excerpts from The Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama
Michael Bishop

EXCERPTS

The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Seth Dickinson

NONFICTION

Review: Arrival
Carrie Vaughn

Book Reviews, December 2016
Amal El-Mohtar

Interview: Nancy Kress
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Rich Larson

William Alexander

Margo Lanagan

Carlie St. George

Joseph Allen Hill

Shweta Narayan

Christie Yant

Charles Payseur

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Lovely Creatures Studio

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, December 2016

John Joseph Adams | 942 words

Welcome to issue seventy-nine of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Rich Larson (“The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death”) and Joseph Allen Hill (“The Venus Effect”), along with SF reprints by Margo Lanagan (“The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross”) and Christie Yant (“This Is As I Wish To Be Restored”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Carlie St. George (“Every Day Is the Full Moon”) and Charles Payseur (“The Death of Paul Bunyan”), and fantasy reprints by William Alexander (“The War Between the Water and the Road”) and Shweta Narayan (“Daya and Dharma”).

As usual, we’ve put together some terrific nonfiction, including an interview with award-winning author Nancy Kress, plus our usual author spotlight mini-interviews. Of course, our media and book review team has put together some sensational insights about what to read and watch, as well.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint from Michael Bishop (“Twenty Lights to ‘The Land of Snow’”) and a book excerpt.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

As you may recall, in addition to editing Lightspeed and Nightmare, I am also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which launched last year. The first volume was guest edited by Joe Hill, and the 2016 volume (which came out October 4) is guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The table of contents for the 2016 volume includes two stories from Lightspeed (“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman and “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky), as well as Salman Rushdie, Adam Johnson, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Kij Johnson, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sofia Samatar, Sam J. Miller, Charlie Jane Anders, Catherynne M. Valente, Liz Ziemska, S.L. Huang, Vandana Singh, Dale Bailey, Dexter Palmer, Julian Mortimer Smith, Nick Wolven, and Seth Dickinson.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/basff to learn more and/or to order!

New Anthology Release: What the #@&% is That? (Saga Press, Nov. 1, 2016)

My latest anthology—co-edited with Douglas Cohen—published last month. Here’s the cover copy:

Fear of the unknown—it is the essence of the best horror stories, the need to know what monstrous vision you’re beholding and the underlying terror that you just might find out. In this anthology, twenty authors have gathered to ask—and maybe answer—a question worthy of almost any horror tale: “What the #@&% is that?” Join these masters of suspense as they take you to where the shadows grow long, and that which lurks at the corner of your vision is all too real, with stories by Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Maria Dahvana Headley, Christopher Golden, Alan Dean Foster, Rachel Swirsky & An Owomoyela, and others.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/wtf to learn more or buy the book.

New Editions of Old Favorites

Lightspeed readers are probably already familiar with most of my anthologies, but in case you missed one here or there, I thought it was worth pointing out that I recently released new editions of my anthologies Federations and The Way of the Wizard. The new covers are both by the wonderful and talented Matt Bright at Inkspiral Design.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/federations and johnjosephadams.com/way-of-the-wizard to check out the new covers or buy the books.

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror and Fantasy!

In October, our “Destroy” series continued over at our sister magazine, Nightmare, where Silvia Moreno-Garcia served as the guest editor of People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! She collected original fiction from Nadia Bulkin, Gabriela Santiago, Valerie Valdes, and Russell Nichols to help celebrate the work of creators of color in the horror field. Reprint editor Tananarive Due brought us four horror classics, including one from Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz, and nonfiction editor Maurice Broaddus presented a stellar line-up of essays and interviews.

This month, the final volume in the POC Destroy series publishes as a special issue of Fantasy Magazine (which was merged into Lightspeed back in 2012). Guest editor Daniel José Older presents original fiction from N.K. Jemisin, Thoraiya Dyer, P. Djeli Clark, and Darcie Little Badger. Reprint editor Amal El-Mohtar selected four fantasy classics, from Sofia Samatar, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, and Leanne Simpson. And last but not least, nonfiction editor Tobias S. Buckell will be bringing us an assortment of insightful essays and interviews.

Learn more about both of these special issues—and the rest of the Destroy projects—at DestroySF.com.

John Joseph Adams Books News

In my role as editor of John Joseph Adams Books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I recently acquired a novel by debut author Bryan Camp: The City of Lost Fortunes, a novel about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city.

Publication date is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2018. Meanwhile, I also bought a story by Bryan for Lightspeed, so you’ll be seeing his short story debut sometime in the near future as well!

• • • •

That’s all we have to report this month. I hope you enjoy the issue, and 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: Cosmic Powers, 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.

The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death

Rich Larson | 4260 words

Sarge knew before I did, of course, but I still had to take him the transfer orders. I didn’t know how to feel on my way to the officers’ mess. I would miss my unit and I would miss my Sarge, but it was an honor, everyone said, to get shifted up to Incisive Maneuvers.

To work with the Cyborg.

The Tinman.

The Merchant of Death.

There’s all kinds of names get floated around for him. Sarge calls him by his rank.

“So you’re with Petty Officer Cox,” he said, taking my half-rolled screen and pushing his thumb against it without hardly reading. He didn’t give it back right away. “That’s an honor,” he said. “Everyone been telling you that, I imagine.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Sarge stared off into space. “High fatality rate in Maneuvers,” he said. “Everyone been telling you that?”

“Some,” I said, because my boy Hans told me I was good as dead going in with the Tinman, said his cousin’s cousin only lasted a couple months in IM. His breath was all commissary rum when he told me that and he cried a little.

“My advice is to stick close to him,” Sarge said, no need to explain who “him” was. “But not too close. He’s not like you and me. He doesn’t think like you and me. All right?”

“He’s a hero, isn’t he?” I asked. “I mean, decorated and all. Eight hundred kills or so.” I’d looked them up: 839 confirmed ghosts and maybe double that never got tagged. The Merchant of Death’s not human, like Sarge said.

“He’s a hero,” Sarge said. “He’s damn near a god. I seen him, once, in action on Pentecost. Took out an artillery nest single-handed. Must have capped a dozen soldiers and did the operators, too. Just slaughtered them.” He paused again. “When you’re a god, you don’t think of people the same way. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, not sure what I was agreeing to. The Petty Officer was a legend, and the more enemy dead, the better.

“Good luck, Private.” Sarge threw a loose salute. “Dismissed.”

• • • •

Two days after that, the handler took me down to the shooting range to meet the Cyborg for myself. I’d seen the spliced-up combat footage from propaganda holos, and I’d seen him a few times from a good ways off, back when we first launched.

But seeing him up close was different. He was big as a freighter, a tower of armor that shifted and whispered against itself, all the little smart plates moving and interlocking. His face was armored, too, with a single convex sensor suite glowing like a sun. I still sometimes wonder what he looks like underneath, but I know the armor’s not meant to come off. Not ever.

He was shooting a submachine gun one-handed, knees locked, arm straight and drifting target to target, burst after burst, each one dead fucking center. Not human, I reminded myself.

“This is Mendoza’s replacement,” the handler said, meaning me. “Private Berenson. Top of his class. Top third of his class. He’ll be dropping with you when we hit Caldron.” The handler had a way of not quite looking at the Tinman—the Petty Officer, I should say—when he spoke. “I trust you’ll get him up to speed.”

The Petty Officer turned his blank face at me. “Give me your weapon,” he said, with a voice that was feathered with speech synthesizer and higher than I expected.

I didn’t have my rifle, of course, only my sidearm, a little snub-nosed pistol. “Sir,” I said, and I clicked off its mag and handed it over, since he was my direct superior and all, and direct superiors sometimes want to see you maintain your kit well.

The Petty Officer took the pistol and fired it straight up at the ceiling without bothering to advise us. The swellies in my eardrums kicked in fast enough to damp the noise, but I still flinched. He fired again, and again, not bothering to aim, until it clacked empty. I looked up to see the slugs hovering in a little circle up there, caught by the grav field, and wondered dimly if I’d get them back.

He handed me my pistol, his gauntleted hand dwarfing mine, and said nothing.

I was pissed that he’d gone done me like that, wasting a clip for no reason, but I felt stupid, too, like I should have realized it was some kind of test. I threw a stiff salute and then the handler hurried me away so the Petty Officer could get back to his shooting.

“It’s a lesson, see,” the handler said eagerly. “Everything he does, there’s a reason. If you look. There has to be.” But he had an almost manic look in his eye when he said it. “That was a lesson about the importance of valuing your sidearm. And about trust. Trust can get you killed, see.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I was thinking I should at least be able to trust my superior fucking officer. “I see. It’s a lesson.”

The handler nodded, almost relieved-looking. “I’ll introduce you to the rest of the squad now.”

• • • •

I’d been hoping for some vets, the tired grim kind who can tell you how things work, tell you how to survive, most of all tell me about the Petty Officer. But the rest of the squad was near fresh as I was. They’d only been called up to Incisive Maneuvers a few weeks ago. The last squad had taken full casualties, apart from the Petty Officer, of course. Some kind of weapons malfunction. An overcooked grenade, I think, with the warning circuitry fried.

The whole squad gone, just like that.

“We’re just along to soak up a few bullets,” Derozan, one of the Privates, said in the mess. All of us on the new IM squad—the suicide squad, some people were calling it—had gravitated together. “If the Tinman tries to put me on point, I’m telling him to stick it up his metal ass.”

That didn’t sit right with me. “He knows what he’s doing,” I said. “Look at his completion rate.”

“Look at the casualties,” Derozan argued, dishing the last of his protein slop onto someone else’s tray. “You think it’s just coincidence he’s the only one left from the first IM squad?”

“You can’t blame him for surviving shit that would kill a human,” I said. “He isn’t. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Derozan said. “That’s why I don’t trust him.”

And I remember I thought back to the pistol, the never-relinquish-your-weapon thing, and wondered if he’d done it to Derozan, too.

• • • •

We made planetfall a few weeks later. I knew the squad well enough by then, and we’d done plenty of sim time together, getting coordinated, getting in combat synch. Sometimes the Petty Officer ran the sims with us, more often he didn’t. Even with all the drills and sims, I still didn’t feel ready for combat. Not even close. I had to take a big old nervous shit before we loaded up into the dropship.

The Petty Officer climbed in last, not bothering to get strapped, just reaching up and bracing himself with a handhold. He stared around at each of us in turn, but I thought he stared longer at me than anyone else.

“Finally,” he said. “No more dialogue. Just action.”

We got his gist, and by that point our intravenous feeds were kicking in, pumping us up with combat chemicals. We all gave him an ooh-rah, even Derozan. Then the dropship was undocking and we were heading down to Caldron’s smaller continent, where the Coalition were dug in deepest. They had shields up to prevent orbital bombardment, but not for long. Not with the Petty Officer leading us right to the main generator.

Entering the atmosphere shook us like pennies in a jar, but then we smoothed out, swooped in low over terraformed forest valley. The chemicals were doing their thing, making me less scared, more angry, but in a cold, clear, ready-for-action way.

The dropship dumped us close as it could get to the edge of the Coalition forces and detached a little six-man hover to take us the rest of the way. I debarked, checking my gear, holding my chest-plate in place for the jump so it wouldn’t slam my chin. Just how I’d drilled it a thousand times. Then my boots were on the dirt and the dropship was thundering away.

Private Neumann, who was specced for driving, had the top scores and all, slid into the driver seat of the hover while the rest of us climbed aboard.

Except the Petty Officer didn’t. He walked to the driver side and stared at Neumann. “I want to drive,” he said.

In the back of the hover, we swapped looks. The Petty Officer had wired up reflexes and all, but he looked like he would barely fit behind the steering column, and Neumann had been assigned driver before we dropped.

“I want to drive,” the Petty Officer repeated, his voice cool, almost melodic.

“Sir,” Neumann said, with his face going red under his helmet, and he clambered into the back with the rest of us. The Petty Officer jammed into the driver’s seat and opened the throttle. We shot away like a rocket, and I ended up slamming my chin on my chest-plate anyways.

• • • •

I can’t say I remember much of that first mission, of the actual combat, the tensed-up waits behind cover and dashes in between, the aim and fire. There’s been too many missions since.

I do remember seeing the Petty Officer in action for the first time was like seeing God. His personal shields swallowed up bullets and bolts and spat them back out; his rifle cracked over and over and every single shot seemed to hit skull. He saw things before they happened, saw things happening behind us. Saw everything. The first patrol we ran up on, he deaded them both before the rest of us could even rise and aim.

The path to the generator, the last-minute swap when our primary detonator bugged out, the cover fire and the retreat and the big, beautiful explosion—I remember it in little pieces.

What happened after the mission, when we were getting back into the camouflaged hover, I remember clear as day. We were all riding the adrenaline high, all jazzed up that we’d taken the generator. Close enough to extraction to start feeling good.

“Those Coalie fuckers are waking up to hellfire,” Derozan said, hellfire being what we call an orbital bombardment. He settled back in the hover and grinned. “Wipe them right off the map.”

The rest of us Privates whooped, cheered a little. The Petty Officer didn’t.

“There’s going to be another generator,” he said. “There’s always another generator. Another checkpoint. Another op. It’s all a game. We’re just playing a game.” I’d been about to climb into the hover, but he reached out an arm and stopped me. I saw something glinting in his big metal hand. “Here’s another game,” the Petty Officer said. “Catch.”

He lobbed the cooked grenade right underneath the hover’s engine block. It was the closest I’d ever been to a ’nade going off, and the swellies in my ears didn’t do shit. The hover erupted in a fireball, spitting big shards of metal off in every direction, and nobody inside had time to dive out. I would’ve been dead too, if it weren’t for the Petty Officer’s personal shield enveloping me. Even so I felt the shockwave deep in my bones.

My ears were still ringing as he looked through the wreckage, the charred bodies. I could feel piss trickling down my leg.

“What will you tell them in the field report?” the Petty Officer asked. I looked at the mangled meat that had been my squad, our squad, only moments ago. I realized the Petty Officer had swiped my sidearm away from me, was holding it up to my temple. Maybe I should have made him kill me then.

“I’ll tell them there was a weapons malfunction,” I said quietly.

“A big one,” the Petty Officer agreed.

• • • •

The squad were scraped up by a medroid, to be bagged and identified and maybe sent back to their families in pieces. I got a commendation for bravery. The Petty Officer got another completed mission under his belt.

The squad was full again the very next week. Young and eager and yanked up hard from the low ranks, just how I had been. There were more missions to complete. I went to Sarge, to beg for a transfer, to tell him what had happened, but he cut me off before I could confess. His eyes had never looked so old as they did then. I knew I wouldn’t get a transfer. I knew now there was only one way out of IM, and I figured the next mission would be my last.

But it wasn’t. Not the next one either. Eventually they all started to blur together. Raids, counterstrikes, infiltration, sabotage. Everything always ended in gunfire, in shredded bodies, in unexpected casualties. Other squad members fell and were replaced and I stopped learning their names. I survived.

I survived because the Petty Officer protected me. Dozens of times. He blew out the skull of a cloaked enemy soldier who had a combat knife nearly to my neck. He pinned me to the ground to shield me from a fire grenade. He carried me when shrapnel splintered through both my shins.

I thought he was doing it to torture me. Making me watch my new squad mates die over and over from his recklessness. His uncalled grenades, his unpredictable suppressing fire.

Sometimes other things, too. I saw him break Grigor’s neck with the butt of his rifle, walking up so casually behind him and then driving it down so hard and so precise. I remember the sound of the bone crunching. He told me later that Grigor had been too far gone for medical attention, even though Grigor had only stopped to wrap a muzzle burn on his arm.

But we always completed the mission, even if the Petty Officer and me were the only ones alive at the end of it. He always killed more of the enemy, a hundred times more, and that was enough for Command.

And me, I was losing my mind. Nightmares I couldn’t drug away. Sweats. I was almost as legendary as the Petty Officer himself, now. The one who always lived. But in most ways, I was a ghost. People never spoke to me anymore; people avoided my eyes. I told myself there had to be a reason for what the Petty Officer did. A lesson. But what kind of lesson was worth killing our own men? It took me a long time to figure it out:

The Petty Officer didn’t believe in the war. He wasn’t trying to beat the Coalition. He was trying to beat Command. He was trying to prove a point the only way he knew how. It didn’t matter if the Petty Officer killed theirs or ours. Everyone had been dead since the moment they were drafted. All of us, dead walking.

But the Petty Officer didn’t want me dead. I tried to figure that out, too. I thought of all the times he’d saved me, and the other things. How he sometimes stood too close to me, hulking over my shoulder, sighting around like he was hiding behind me—I thought it was only a joke, his cruel kind of joke, but maybe it was something else.

And sometimes he stared. He would stand in front of me and stare. I had learned to keep my face blank, to wait, to not fidget too much, and eventually he always turned away and the mission went on. He didn’t think how we did, Sarge had said.

Maybe he loved me. The thought made me sick in my stomach, but at the same time my joints went all loose and watery. Maybe I loved him, too. I had dreamt about him, about his huge dark presence, always nearby, always watching.

I had dreamt seeing his body once, all scarred and pale and naked, the way people said he would look underneath the armor. Maybe that meant I loved him. I had never been one for buggering around, except one time on a really lonely long haul, but with the Petty Officer it would be different.

He wasn’t a man, not really. He wasn’t even a human anymore. Maybe he was trying to make me the same way.

• • • •

Another world, another mission. The Petty Officer was squatting in a stream, anchored to the slippery rock by the weight of his armor. He’d been peering down into the sparkling clear water for the past five, six minutes.

The rest of the squad was jumpy, lighting up smokes, scuffing circles in the dirt, checking and rechecking their weapons. The fresh ones stared at the Petty Officer, wondering what the fuck he was doing when we had a dropzone blinking urgent red in our headgear.

I wasn’t jumpy. I was sitting back against a nice moss-slick boulder, perfectly calm, because everything he did had a reason.

“Private. To me.”

The command crackled in my helmet. I got up off the rock and waded into the stream, feeling the collective gaze of the squad on my back. Some of them jealous, sure. Most of them confused.

“Yes, sir?” I said, once I was close, but not too close, more than an arm’s length away.

“You understand, don’t you, Private.” The Petty Officer turned his head towards me. “If we don’t stop and look at the river, if we don’t enjoy the little touches, the artistry, it’s disrespectful. Disrespectful to whoever made the river.”

“I’m very respectful, sir,” I said, and I squatted down, too, even though the cold water snuck up to my crotch and clung there.

“I know you are, Private,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I picked you.”

He stared down into the stream again, and I looked, too. Saw how the sun dappled the surface, how sediment shifted in the flowing current.

For at least a moment, I understood.

• • • •

The last body went down and my motion tracker jittered clear, but I stayed low a second longer to be sure, to let the smoky room settle and my adrenaline ebb away. The Petty Officer racked his rifle and strode right out of cover. He never waited.

I’d asked him, once, if he had any fear of dying left.

“I’ve died a hundred times,” he’d said back. “You just never remember.”

Sometimes the things he said were so beautiful, so strange, that they made my lungs catch.

There was a big fucker laid out by the control panel, gargling blood. His burnished red armor was riddled all over with bullet holes—we must have emptied a dozen clips into him before he went down. He’d fought hard. I get the Coalition insignias mixed up, but I think the gold swatch meant a Lieutenant.

The Petty Officer stopped over him. I thought he was going to pick up the dropped burner rifle and have a look at it. He does that. Picks them up, turns them over, scorches a few marks in the wall and then discards them.

But he didn’t. He started adjusting his armor, switching off the magnetic seal on his abdomen plate, then the cod-piece, setting them both down beside the Lieutenant’s twitching body with two loud thunks.

“Something slip through, sir?” I asked.

The Petty Officer ignored me, reaching a gloved hand down to his crotch to peel back the black skinsuit. His cock flopped out like a thick bruise-colored worm. Nothing like in my dream.

“Watch this,” the Petty Officer said.

I knew I should be confirming kills, securing the doors, sending Command the all-clear. But I was stuck rooted to the floor. The rest of the squad was, too, all of us watching, none of us speaking.

The Petty Officer crouched down and guided his cock onto the Lieutenant’s sweaty forehead. The man’s face twisted. Confusion and shock, then rage and horror. Blood burbled out of his lips and he made a desperate swing with his one arm that was still intact, but the Petty Officer knocked it away like a fly. He squatted and straightened, slapping his cock and balls against the dying man’s face. My stomach heaved.

“Sir, fucking stop, please fucking stop,” someone babbled. One of the fresh ones.

The Lieutenant gave a low animal moan. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. The Petty Officer squatted down again and again. I realized I could end it. All of it. His abdomen was gloved in nothing but soft black skinsuit. One frag, cooked and lobbed gently underneath him, just how he’d done to the hover all those eons ago. The shrapnel would shred his cock and his stomach both to pieces. He was still human enough to die.

But there had to be a reason. He was showing me this for a reason.

A single gunshot cracked the air. I whirled and saw Hernandez, a two-weeker who never spoke, cupping his pistol in both hands.

The Lieutenant finally slumped, strings cut by the precise bullet in his brain. The Petty Officer wordlessly wiped the spatter of gore off his cock and tucked himself away. He didn’t so much as look at Hernandez, but I knew Hernandez had signed his own death warrant.

• • • •

It happened in the corridor. The Petty Officer spun on his heel and ripped his pistol off his hip in one motion, capping Hernandez with a single bullet. The two fresh recruits rounded on him without a second’s hesitation and I realized they must have back-chattered, must have discussed it with Hernandez on a channel they’d hidden from the Petty Officer and from me, too. Even so, they were both dead before they could get more than a couple shots off.

I stared down at the bodies, at the three bullets in three shattered craniums, while the Petty Officer’s shielding recharged with an electric hum. I could have ended it all back in the control room. Now there were three more dead squad mates. And there would be three more dead after them, and after them, and forever.

“This will be hard to explain,” I said, feeling hollowed out.

“We won’t explain it,” the Petty Officer said. “We’re not going to the pick-up zone. We’re going our own way. You’re coming with me.”

There was a reason for everything. The Petty Officer had had to kill them so he could go AWOL. So the both of us could. He hadn’t been desecrating a dying soldier. He’d been desecrating the rank, desecrating authority, defying the men upstairs who sent us to our deaths.

And now we were escaping together.

“I love you,” I said, to test out the words in my mouth. They didn’t feel true, not yet, but maybe they would eventually.

The Petty Officer looked at me for a long moment. “Gay,” he said, but he motioned for me to follow him out into the starry night.

• • • •

We cut through the wilderness, away from enemy lines, away from ours, too. I had never seen the Petty Officer like this before. He was giddy, like a little kid almost, sprinting ahead through the forest and then sprinting back to dance circles around me. He would fire his rifle off into the bush at random. Once he tried to spray letters into the trunk of a massive tree. One night he showed me his dog tags, the old world vestige stamped with his name and number: Harrison Cox 969. But to me he was still the Petty Officer. Always would be, I figured.

By the time we made it to the coast, I was sick and exhausted. The Petty Officer had no need for sleep and hated waiting for me to wake up. And even heavier than the physical wear and tear was the realization: We’d gone AWOL, and Command was going to come after us. The Petty Officer’s armor alone was worth more than a dropship, and with him inside, more valuable than any weapon ever created.

The only thing I could do was follow the Petty Officer. And trust him.

“Why do you do that?” I asked. “It’s not any faster than jogging.”

He was leaping again, bounding along the surf in big two-footed jumps, sending up clods of sand and water. It was beautiful, in a way. Sometimes it seemed like he could float there in the air forever.

He looked back at me. “It feels faster,” he said.

I finally let my rifle fall into the sand. I unstrapped my chest-plate and dropped that, too. I didn’t need them anymore. I was following the Petty Officer. With my weary legs screaming, I ran, gathered, jumped. Not nearly as high as him, but high enough. High enough to feel almost light, with the wind whipping at my face, with the smell of the sea in my nose. The sand was soft underneath my boots.

The Petty Officer leapt along the beach, and I leapt after him, through the foamy surf, laughing and laughing with tears pouring down my dirty face.

©2016 by Rich Larson. | Art © 2016 by Lovely Creatures Studio.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and at 23 he now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex. Find him at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

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

The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross

Margo Lanagan | 4600 words

I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know? They pay attention. It almost doesn’t matter about their skin, the feel of it a bit dry and crinkly, and the colour. They have the Coolights on all the time to cut that colour back, just like butchers put those purply lights over the meat in their shop, to bring up the red.

Anyway, I would say we were about two-thirds the way there—I was starting to let go of everything and be the me I was meant to be. I knew stuff; I meant something; I didn’t givva what anyone thought of me.

But then she says, “Stop, Mister Cleeyom. Stop a minute.”

“What?” I thought for a second she had got too caught up in it, was having too good a time, needed to slow things down a bit. I suppose that shows how far along I was.

“Something is coming,” she said.

I tensed up, listening for sounds in the hall.

“Coming down.”

Which was when I felt it, pushing against the end of me.

I pulled out. I made a face. “What is it? Have I got you up the wrong hole?”

“No, Mister Cl’om. Just a minute. Will not take long.”

Too late—I was already withering.

She got up into a squat with one leg out wide. The Coolight at the bedhead showed everything from behind: a glop of something, and then strings of drool. Just right out onto the bedclothes she did it; she didn’t scrabble for a towel or a tissue or anything. She wasn’t embarrassed. A little noise came up her throat from some clench in her chest, and that clench pushed the thing out below, the main business.

“It’s a puppy?” I said, but I thought, It’s a turd? But the smell wasn’t turd; it was live insides, insides that weren’t to do with digestion. And turds don’t turn over and split their skin, and try to work it off themselves.

“It’s just a baby,” Malka apologised, with that smile she has, that makes you feel sorry for her, she’s trying so hard, and angry at her at the same time. She scooped it up, with its glop. She stepped off the bed and laid it on top of some crumpled crush-velour under the lamp. A white-ish tail dangled between her legs; she turned away from me and gathered that up, and whatever wet thing fell out attached to it.

This was not what I’d had in mind. This was not the treat I’d promised myself as I tweezered HotChips into artificial tulip stalks out at Parramatta Mannafactory all week.

The “baby” lay there working its shoulders in horrible shruggings, almost as if it knew what it was doing. They’re not really babies, of course, just as Polar “girls” aren’t really girls, although that’s something you pay to be made to forget.

Malka laughed at how my faced looked. “You ha’n’t seen this before, Mister Sir?”

“Never,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s a regular,” she said. “How you ever going to get yourself new girls for putcha-putcha, if you don’t have baby?”

“We shouldn’t have to see that, to get them.”

“You ask special for Malka. You sign the—the thing, say you don’t mind to see. I can show you.” She waved at the billing unit by the door.

“Well, I didn’t know what that meant. Someone should have explained it to me exactly, all the details.” But I remembered signing. I remembered the hurry I’d been in at the time. It takes you over, you know, a bone. It feels so good just by itself, so warm, silky somehow and shifting, making you shift to give it room, but at the very same time and this is the crazy-making thing, it nags at you, Get rid of me! Gawd, do something! And I wouldn’t be satisfied with one of those others: Korra is Polar, too, but she has been here longer and she acts just like an Earth girl, like you’re rubbish. And that other one, the yellow-haired one—well, I have had her a couple of times thinking she might come good, but seriously, she is on something. A man might as well do it with a Vibro-Missy, or use his own hand. It’s not worth the money if she’s not going to be real.

The thing on the velour turned over again in an irritated way, or uncomfortable. It spread one of its hands and the Coolight shone among the wrong-shaped fingers, going from little to big, five of them and no thumb. A shiver ran up my neck like a breeze lifting up a dog’s fur.

Malka chuckled and touched my chin. “I will make you a drink and then we will get sexy again, hey?”

I tucked myself in and zipped up my pants. “Can’t you put it away somewhere? Like, does it have to be there right under the light?”

She put her face between me and it and kissed me. They don’t kiss well, any of these Offs. It’s not something that comes natural to them. They don’t take the time; they don’t soften their lips properly. It’s like a moth banging into your mouth. “Haff to keep it in sight. It is regulation. For its well-being.” Her teeth gleamed in another attempt at smiling. “I turn you on a movie. Something to look away at.”

“Can’t you give the thing to someone else to take care of?” But she was doing the walk; I was meant to be all sucked in again by the sight of that swinging bottom. They do have pretty good bottoms, Polars, pretty convincing.

“I paid for the full half-hour,” I said. “Am I gunna get back that time you spent . . . Do I get extra time at the end?”

But I didn’t want extra time. I wanted my money back, and to start again some other time, when I’d forgotten this. But there was no way I was going to get that. The wall bloomed out into palm-trees and floaty music and some rock-hard muscle star and his girlfriend arguing on the beach.

“Turn the sound off!”

Malka did, like a shot, and checked me over her shoulder. I read it in her face clear as anything: Am I going to get trouble from this one? Not fear, not a drop of it, just, Should I call in the big boys? The workaday look on her face, her eyes smart, her lips a little bit open, underneath the sunlit giant faces mouthing on the wall—there was nothing designed to give Mister Client a bigger downer.

• • • •

Darlinghurst Road was the same old wreck and I was one loser among many walking along it. It used to be Sexy Town here, all nightclubs, back in history, but now it’s full of refugees. Down the hill and along the point is where all the fudgepackers had their apartments, before the anti-gay riots. We learned ’em; we told ’em where to stick their bloody feathers and froo-froos. That’s all gone now, every pillow burned and every pot of Vaseline smashed—you can’t even buy it to grease up handyman tools any more, not around here. Those were good times when I was a bit younger, straightening out the world.

It didn’t look pretty when we’d finished, but at least there were no ’packers. Now people like me live here, who’d rather hide in this mess than jump through the hoops you need for a ’factory condominium. And odd Owsians, offshoots of the ones that are eating up the States from the inside, there are so many there. And a lot of Earth-garbage: Indians and Englanders and Central Europeans. And the odd glamorous Abbo, all gold knuckles and tailoring. It’s colourful, they tell us; it’s got a polyglot identity that’s all its own and very special. Tourists come here—well, they walk along Darlo Road; they don’t explore much either side, where it gets real polyglot.

I zigzagged through the lanes towards my place. I was still steaming about my lost money and my wasted bone, steaming at myself for having signed that screen and done myself out of what I’d promised myself. There was nothing I could do except go home and take care of myself so I could get some sleep. Then wake up and catch the bike-bus out to Parramatta, pedalling the sun up out of the drowned suburbs behind me.

That EurOwsian beggar-girl was on my step again, a bundle like someone’s dumped house-rubbish. She crinkled and rustled as I came up. When she saw my face she’d know not to bother me, I hoped.

But it wasn’t her voice at all that said, “Jonah? Yes, it is you!”

I backed up against the opposite wall of the entry, my insides gone all slithery. Only bosses called me Jonah, and way back people who were dead now, of my family from the days when people had families. Grandparent-type people.

Out of what I had thought was the beggar girl stood this other one that I didn’t know at all, shaven-headed and scabby-lipped. “Fen,” those lips said. “Fenella. Last year at the Holidaze.”

“Oh!” I almost shouted with the relief of making the connection, although she still didn’t click to look at. She put her face more clearly in the way of the gaslight so that I could examine her. “Fen. Oh, yeah.” I still couldn’t see it, but I knew who she was talking about. “What are you doing in here? I thought you lived up the mountains.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But, really, I’ve got to tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

She looked around at the empty entry-way, the empty lane. “It’s kind of private.”

“Oh. You better come up, then.” I hoped she wasn’t thinking to get in my bed or anything; I could never put myself close to a mouth in that condition.

She followed me up. She wasn’t healthy; two flights and she was breathing hard. All the time I’m also, Fen? But Fen had hair. She was very nearly good-looking. I remember thinking as we snuck off from the party, Oh, my ship’s really come in this time—a normal girl and no payment necessary.

She didn’t go mad and attack me for drug money when I lit the lamp and stood back to hold the door for her. She stepped in and took in the sight of my crap out of some kind of habit. She was a girl with background; she would probably normally say something nice to the host. But she was too distracted, here, by the stuff in her own head. I couldn’t even begin to dread what that might be.

“Sit?” In front of the black window, my only chair looked like, if you sat there, someone would tie you to it, and scald you with Ersatz, or burn you with beedy-ends.

She shook her head. “It’s not as if there’s much we can do,” she said, “but you had to know, I told myself. I thought, maybe he can get himself tested and they’ll give him some involvement, you never know. Or at least send you the bulletins too.”

I tipped my head at her like, You hear what’s coming out your mouth, don’t you? I’d just about had it with women for the night, this one on top of Malka and of Malka’s boss with the cream-painted face and the curly smile, all soothing, all understanding, all not-giving-a-centimetre, not giving a cent.

Fen was walking around checking my place out. No, there was nowhere good for us to settle; when I was here on my own, I sat in my chair or I lay on my bed, and no one ever visited me. She came and stood facing across me and brought out an envelope that looked just about worn out from her clutching it. She opened it and fingered through the pages folded in there, one behind the other. “Here, this one.” She took it out and unfolded it, but not so I could see. She looked it up and down, up and down. “Yes. I guess. May as well start at the beginning.” She handed it to me. “It’s not very clear,” she apologised. “I wouldn’t keep still for them. They’d arrested me and I was pissed off.” She laughed nervously.

It was a bad copy of a bad printout of a bad colour scan, but even so, even I could work it out. Two arms. Two legs. A full, round head. For a second there I felt as if my own brain had come unstuck and slopped into the bottom of my skull.

“It’s. . . It’s just like the one on the sign,” I said, with hardly a voice. I meant the billboard up on Taylor Square—well, they were everywhere, really, but I only biked past the others. People picnicked under the Taylor Square one; people held markets and organised other kinds of deals; I sometimes just went up and sat under it and watched them, for something to do. Protect Our Future, it said; it was a government sign, Department of Genetic Protection, I think: a pink-orange baby floating there in its bag like some sleeping water creature, or some being that people might worship—which people kind of did, I guess, with all the fuss about the babies. This was what we were all supposed to be working towards, eh—four proper limbs and a proper-shaped head like every baby’s used to be.

Fen looked gleeful as a drugger finding an Ambrosie stash. One of her scabs had split and a bead of blood sat on her lip there.

I went to the chair; it exclaimed in pain and surprise under me. “What else?” I looked at the envelope in her skeleton hands.

She crossed the room and crouched beside me. She showed me three bulletins, because it was two months old. Each had two images, a face and a full-body. The first one gave me another brain-spasm; it was a girl-baby. The hope of the line, said the suits in their speeches on the news screen down the Quay; their faces were always working to stop themselves crying by then; they were going for the full drama. Man’s hope is Woman, they would blubber. We have done them so wrong, for so long.

In every picture, the baby girl was perfect—no webbing, no cavities, no frills or stumps, and nothing outside that ought to be in. Fen showed me the part where the name was Joannah. She read me the stats and explained them to me. These things, you could tell from the way she said them, they’d been swimming round and around in her head a long time. They came out in a relief, all rushed and robotic like the datadump you get when you ring up about your Billpay account.

When she finished she checked my reaction. My face felt stiff and cold—I had no blood to spare to work it, it was all busy boiling through my brain. “It’s something, isn’t it?” she said.

“You and me under the cup-maker. It only took a few minutes.”

“I know.” She beamed and licked away another drop of blood. “Who would’ve thought?”

I was certainly thinking now. I sat heavily back and tried to see my thoughts against the wall, which was a mass of tags from before they’d secured this building. I needed Fen to go away now—I couldn’t make sense of this while she was here watching me, trying to work out what I thought, what I felt. But I couldn’t send her away, either; this sort of thing takes a certain amount of time and no less, and there was no point being rude. It takes two to tango, no one knew that better than me.

After a while I said, “I used to walk home behind that Full-Term place.”

“Argh,” she said, and swayed back into a crouch. “You’ve got one of those skip stories!”

I nodded. “Mostly it was closed, and I never lifted the lid myself.”

“But.” She glowered at me.

“If someone had propped it open, with a brick or, once, there was a chair holding it quite wide? Well, then I would go and have a look in. Never to touch anything or anything.”

“Errr-her-her-herrr.” She sat on my scungey carpet square and rocked her face in her hands, and laughed into them.

“One time—”

“No, no, no!” She was still laughing, but with pain in it.

“One time someone had opened it right the way up—”

“No!” she squeaked, and put her hands over her ears and laughed up at me, then took them off again and waited wide-eyed.

“And taken a whole bunch out—it must’ve been Ukrainians. They will eat anything,” I added, just to make her curl up. “And they’d chucked them all over the place.”

“No-no!” She hugged her shins and laughed into her knees. This woman had done it, this scrawny body that I couldn’t imagine having ever wanted or wanting again, had brought a perfect baby to nine months. In the old days she would have been the woman who bore my child, or even bore me a child, bore me a daughter, and while I had to be glad she wasn’t, I. . .

Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to think about her, or about myself, or about those loose sheets of paper around her feet, and the face that was Fen’s, that was mine, two in the one. Joannah’s—my name cobbled together with a girl’s. I didn’t have a clue.

“It’s true,” I said. “All these—” I waved at the memory of their disgustingness against the cobbles and the concrete, across the stormwater grille.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “It’s mostly the heads, isn’t it?”

“It was mostly the heads.” I nodded. “Like people had hit them, you know, with baseball bats, big . . . hollows out of them, every which side, sometimes the face, sometimes the back. But it was . . . I don’t know, it was every kind of . . . Sometimes no legs, sometimes too many. It was, what do you call those meals, like at the Holidaze, where it’s all spread out and you get to put whatever you want of it on your plate?”

“A smorgasbord?”

“That’s it.”

“A smorgasbord of deformities, you reckon?”

“Yeah.” Deformities, of course—that was what nice people called them. Not piggies or wingies or bowlheads. Not blobs for the ones with no heads at all.

“And don’t tell me,” said Fen, “some of them were still alive.”

“Nah, they were dead, all right.”

“Some people say, you know? They see them moving?”

I shook my head. My story was over, and hadn’t been as interesting as some people’s, clearly.

“Well,” she said, and bent to the papers again, and put them in a pile in order.

“Let me see again.” She gave them to me and I looked through them. It was no more believable the second time. “Can I have these?”

“Oh no,” she said. “You’ll have to go and get tested and take the strips to the Department. Then they’ll set you up in the system to get your own copies of everything sent out.”

“That’ll cost,” I said glumly. “The test, and then getting there—that’s way up, like, Armidale or somewhere, isn’t it? I’d have to get leave.”

“Yes, but you’ll get it all back, jizzing into their beakers. Get it all back and more, I’d say. It’s good for blokes; you have your little factory that only your own body can run. They have to keep paying you. Us girls they can just chop it all out and ripen the eggs in solution. We only get money the once.”

“They have to plant it back in you, don’t they?”

“They have to plant it back in someone, but they’ve got their own childbearers, that passed all the screenings. I don’t look so good beside those; where I come from used to be all dioxins. My sister births nothing but duds, and she’s got some . . . mental health issues they don’t like the sound of.”

“But you brought this one out okay, didn’t you, this . . . Joannah?”

“Yeah, but who knows that wasn’t a fluke? Besides, I don’t want that, for a life. They offered me a trial place there, but I told them they could stick it. I met some of those incubator girls. The bitchery that went on at that place, you wouldn’t believe. Good thing they don’t do the actual mothering.”

She took the papers from me and we both looked at the top one with its stamp and crest and the baby looking out. Poor little bugger. What did it have to look forward to? Nothing, just growing up to be a girl, and then a woman. Mostly I think that women were put here to make our lives miserable, to tease us and lure us and then not choose us. Or to choose us and then go cold, or toss us aside for the fun of watching us suffer. But you can’t think that way about a daughter, can you? How are you supposed to think about a daughter?

“Well, good on you, I say.” I tried to sound okay with it, but a fair bit of sourness came through. “Good on both of us, eh,” I added to cover that up. “It makes us both look good, eh.”

She folded the papers. “I guess.” She put them away in the envelope. She gave a little laugh. “I hardly know you, you know? There was just that one time, and, you know, it wasn’t like we had any kind of relationship. I didn’t know how you were going to take this. But anyway.” She got up, so I did too. She was no taller than me—that was one of the reasons I’d had a chance with her. “Now you know everything, and . . . I don’t know what I thought was going to happen after that! But it’s done.” She spread her hands and turned towards the door.

I believe it used not to be like this, people being parents. Olden days, there would have been that whole business of living together and lies and pressures, the relationship, which from what I’ve heard the women always wanted and the men kind of gave them for the sake of regular sex. Not now, though; it was all genes and printouts now. Everyone was on their own.

I closed the door after Fen, and went and sat with my new knowledge, with my new status. It was some kind of compensation for the rest of my evening, for not getting Malka properly to myself. What’s more, I might end up quite tidily-off from this, be able to drop assembly work completely, just sell body fluids. I should feel good; I should feel excited, free and stuff. I should be able to shake off being so annoyed from my poor old withered bone. Some people had simple feelings like that, that could cancel each other out neatly like that.

What I hadn’t told Fen, what I wouldn’t—her of all people, but I wouldn’t tell anyone—was that I used to go home behind the Full Term place because there was always a chance there’d be someone in labour down the back wards there. And the noises they made, for a bloke who didn’t have money then, who was saving up his pennies for a Polar girl, the noises were exactly what I wanted to hear out of a woman. No matter I couldn’t see or touch them; it was dark, and I could imagine. I could hang onto the bar fence like the rungs of some big brass bedhead and she would be groaning and gasping, panting her little lump of monster out, or—even better—yowling or bellowing with pain; they all did it different. And some nurse or someone, some nun or whatever they had in there, would be telling her what to do. Oh, what a racket! she’d say. You’d think you were birthing an elephant! Now push with this one, Laurie. And I’d be outside thinking, Yeah, push, push!, and somewhere in the next yowl or roar I would spoof off through the fence and be done. There was nothing like the night air on your man-parts and the darkness hiding you, and a woman’s voice urging you on.

There’s always the buttoning, though, isn’t there? There’s always rearranging your clothes around your damp self and shaky knees, zipping, buttoning, belting. There’s always turning from the bed and the girl, or the fence and the yowling and the skip there, and being only you in the lane or hallway, with no one missing you or needing you, having paid your fee. You’re tingling all around your edges, and the tingle’s fading fast, and that old pretend-you floats back out of wherever it went, like sheets of newspaper, blows and sticks to you, so that then it’s always there, scraping and dirty and uncomfortable.

I turned out the lamp and crawled into bed. Now stars filled the window. In the old days of full power and streetlights, Sydneysiders saw bugger-all of those, just the moon and a few of the bigger stars. They say you couldn’t see the fifth star of the Cross, even. Now the whole damn constellation throbs there in its blanket of galaxy-swirl. People were lucky, then, not knowing what was out there, worse than a few gays poncing about the place, worse than power cuts and restrictions and all these “dire warnings” and “desperate pleas,” worse than the Environment sitting over us like some giant troll or something, whingeing about how we’ve treated her. Earth must have been cosy then. Who was it, I wonder, decided we wanted to go emitting all over the frickin’ universe, saying, Over here, over here! Nice clean planet! Come here and help us fuck her right up. That was the bloke we should have smashed the place of. The gays, they weren’t harming anyone but themselves.

I jerked awake a couple of times on the way down to sleep. My life is changed! I am a new man! They’ll show me proper respect now, when they see that DNA readout. To get to sleep, I tried to fool myself I’d dreamed Fen visiting. Passing those billboards every day, and Malka’s baby this evening—everything had mishmashed together in my unconscious. I would wake up normal tomorrow, with everything the same as usual. Fen’s scabby lips, the proper kisses, full and soft, we’d had behind the cupmaker—thinking about those wouldn’t do any good. Push them into some squishy, dark corner of forgetting, and let sleep take me.

© 2008 by Margo Lanagan. Originally published in Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney, Australia. She is a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award—in the short story, collection, novel and novella categories—and her short stories and novels have won and been shortlisted for many other awards. Her latest collections are Cracklescape, part of the Twelve Planets series from Twelfth Planet Press, stories from which are nominated in the Ditmar and Aurealis Awards, and Yellowcake, a collection of mostly previously published stories. Her latest novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in the UK, and shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize and the Norma K Hemming Award in Australia.

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

The Venus Effect

Joseph Allen Hill | 9340 words

Apollo Allen and The Girl from Venus

This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside. It is a good party, and the surrounding night is beautiful, warm and soft and speckled with stars. A phone is hooked up to a portable sound system, and the speakers are kicking out rapture. It is 2009 again, the last year that music was any good, preserved in digital amber and reanimated via computer magic.

Apollo boogies on the margins, between the edge of the party and the edge of the roof, surrounded by revelers but basically alone. Naomi is on the other side of the crowd, grinding against her new boyfriend, Marcus, a musclebound meat-man stuffed into a spectacularly tacky t-shirt. Apollo finds this an entirely unappealing sight. That she and Apollo once shared an intimate relationship has nothing to do with this judgment. Not at all.

Speaking merely as an observer, a man with a love of Beauty and Dance in his heart, Apollo judges their performance unconvincing. It is the worst sort of kitsch. The meat-man against whom Naomi vibrates has no rhythm, no soul; he is as unfunky as the bad guys on Parliament-Funkadelic albums. He stutters from side to side with little regard for the twos and fours, and the occasional thrusts of his crotch are little more than burlesque, without the slightest suggestion of genuine eroticicsm. He is doing it just to do it. Pure kitsch. Appalling. Naomi is doing a better job, undulating her buttocks with a certain aplomb, a captivating bootlyiciousness that might stir jiggly bedroom memories in the heart of the lay observer. But still. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

Apollo cannot bear to watch this any longer. He desperately wants to point the terribleness of this scene out to someone, to say, “Hey, look at them. They look like dumbs. Are they not dumbs?” But Naomi was always the person to whom he pointed these sorts of things out. That’s why they got along, at least in the beginning, a shared appreciation for the twin pleasures of pointing at a fool and laughing at a fool. Without her, he is vestigial, useless, alone.

He turns away from the ghastly scene, just in time to notice a young woman dancing nearby. She is alone, like him, and she is, unlike him, utterly, utterly turnt. Look at her, spinning like a politician, bouncing like a bad check, bopping to the beat like the beat is all there is. She is not a talented dancer by any stretch of the imagination, and her gracelessness is unable to keep up with her abandon. She is embraced of the moment, full with the spirit, completely ungenerous with fucks and possibly bordering on the near side of alcohol poisoning. Just look at her. Apollo, in a state of terrible cliché, is unable to take his eyes off her.

There is a problem, however.

Her heels, while fabulous, were not made for rocking so hard. They are beautiful shoes, certainly, vibrant and sleek, canary yellow, bold as love. Perhaps they are a bit too matchy-matchy with regard to the rest of her outfit, the canary-yellow dress and the canary-yellow necklace and the canary-yellow bow atop her head, but the matchy-matchy look is good for people who are forces of nature, invoking four-color heroism and supernatural panache. Yet however lovely and amazing and charming and expensive these shoes might be, they cannot be everything.

The center cannot hold; things fall apart.

Her left heel snaps. Her balance is lost. Her momentum and her tipsiness send her stumbling, and no one is paying enough attention to catch her. The building is not so high up that a fall would definitely kill her, but death could be very easily found on the sidewalk below. Apollo rushes forward, reaches out to grab her, but he is too late. She goes over the edge. Apollo cannot look away. She falls for what feels like forever.

And then, she stops. She doesn’t hit the ground. She just stops and hangs in the air. Apollo stares frozen, on the one hand relieved not to witness a death, on the other hand filled with ontological dread as his understanding of the laws of gravitation unravel before his eyes, on a third hypothetical hand filled with wonder and awe at this flagrant violation of consensus reality. The young woman looks up at Apollo with her face stuck in a frightened grimace as she slowly, slowly descends, like a feather in the breeze. She takes off as soon as she hits the ground, stumble-running as fast as one can on non-functional shoes.

Apollo does not know what has just happened, but he knows that he wants to know. He does not say goodbye to the hostess or his friends or Naomi. He just ghosts, flying down the ladder and down the hall and down the stairs and out the door. He can just make out a blur in the direction she ran off, and he chases after it.

There is a man in a police uniform standing at the corner. Apollo does not see him in the darkness, does not know that he is running toward him. The man in the police uniform draws his weapon and yells for Apollo to stop. Inertia and confusion do not allow Apollo to stop quickly enough. Fearing for his life, the man in the police uniform pulls the trigger of his weapon several times, and the bullets strike Apollo in his chest, doing critical damage to his heart and lungs. He flops to the ground. He is dead now.

• • • •

Uh, what? That was not supposed to happen. Apollo was supposed to chase the girl alien, then have some romantically-charged adventures fighting evil aliens, then at the end she was going to go back to her home planet and it was going to be sad. Who was that guy? That’s weird, right? That’s not supposed to happen, right? Dudes aren’t supposed to just pop off and end stories out of nowhere.

I guess to be fair, brother was running around in the middle of the night, acting a fool. That’s just asking for trouble. He was a pretty unlikeable protagonist, anyway, a petty, horny, pretentious idiot with an almost palpable stink of author surrogacy on him. I think there was a Kipling quote in there. Who’s that for? You don’t want to read some lame indie romance bullshit, right? Sadboy meets manic pixie dream alien? I’m already bored. Let’s start over. This time, we’ll go classic. We’ll have a real hero you can look up to, and cool action-adventure shit will go down. You ready? Here we go.

Apollo Rocket vs. The Space Barons from Beyond Pluto

There are fifteen seconds left on the clock, and the green jerseys have possession. The score is 99-98, green jerseys. The red jerseys have been plagued by injuries, infighting, and unfortunate calls on the part of the ref, who, despite his profession’s reputed impartiality, is clearly a supporter of the green jerseys. The green jerseys themselves are playing as though this is the very last time they will ever play a basketball game. They are tall and white and aggressively Midwestern, and this gives them something to prove. Sketch in your mind the Boston Celtics of another time. Picture the Washington Generals on one of the rare, rumored nights when they were actually able to defeat their perennial adversaries, mortal men who somehow found themselves snatching victory from the god-clowns of Harlem.

Fourteen.

One of the green jerseys is preparing to throw the ball toward the hoop. If the ball were to go into the hoop, the green jerseys would have two points added to their score, and it would become impossible for the red jerseys to throw enough balls into the other hoop before time runs out. The green jerseys are already preparing for their win, running over in their minds talking points for their post-game interviews, making sure the sports drink dispenser is full and ready to be poured upon the coach, and wondering how the word “champions” might feel on their lips.

Eleven.

But this will not happen. Apollo is in position. He reaches out with his mighty arm and strips the ball from the green jersey before he can throw it.

Ten.

Apollo runs as fast as he can with the ball, so fast that every atom of his body feels as if it is igniting. He looks for an open teammate, for he is no ball hog, our Apollo, but there are no teammates to be found between himself and the hoop. So he runs alone. He is lightning. There are green jersey players in his way, but he spins and jukes around them before they can react, as if they are sloths suspended in aspic. Do his feet even touch the floor? Is it the shoes?

He’s on fire.

Three.

He leaps high into the air and dunks the ball so hard that the backboard shatters into a thousand glittering shards of victory. The buzzer goes off just as he hits the ground. The final score is 100-99, red jerseys. Apollo Triumphant is leapt upon by his teammates. Hugs and pats on the back are distributed freely and with great relish. The crowd erupts into wild celebration. Apollo, Apollo, they chant.

Patrick, the captain of the opposing team, approaches Apollo as confetti falls from above. There is a sour look on the man’s face, an expression of constipated rage at its most pure. He balls his fingers into a fist and raises it level with Apollo’s midsection. It rears back and trembles as an arrow notched in a bow, ready to be fired.

“Good job, bro,” he says.

“You too,” says Apollo.

They bump fists. It is so dope.

A small child limps onto the basketball court. He smiles so hard that it must be painful for his face. Apollo kneels and gives him a high-five, then a low-five, then a deep hug.

“You did it, Apollo,” says the child.

“No. We did it,” says Apollo. “They’ll never be able to demolish the youth center now.”

“My new mommy and daddy said they could never have adopted me without your help.”

Apollo puts a finger to his own lips. “Shhhhh.”

“I love you, Apollo,” says the child, its face wet with tears. “You’re the best man alive.”

Apollo drives home with his trophy and game ball in the back seat of his sports car, a candy apple convertible that gleams like justice. He blasts Rick Ross a positive, socially conscious rap song about working hard and pulling up one’s pants on his stereo. The road is his tonight. There are no other cars to be seen, no other people for miles. For all his successes as balla par excellence, Apollo still appreciates the beauty and quiet of the country.

Suddenly, a sonorous roar pours out from the edge of the sky, so powerful that it shakes the car. Before Apollo can react, a yellow-silver-blue ball of fire shoots across the sky and explodes on the horizon, for a moment blotting out the darkness with pure white light before retreating into smoke and darkness. Apollo jams his foot on the pedal proceeds in the direction of the mysterious explosion while obeying all traffic laws and keeping his vehicle within the legal speed limits.

“Holy shit Golly,” he says.

Apollo finds a field strewn with flaming debris, shattered crystals, and shards of brightly colored metals. He hops out of his car to take a closer look. Based on his astro-engineering courses, which he gets top marks in, he surmises that these materials could have only come from some kind of spaceship. He is fascinated, to say the least.

He hears movement from under a sheet of opaque glass. He pushes it away and sees that there is a woman lying prone underneath. At least, Apollo thinks she is a woman. She is shaped like a woman, but her skin is blue, and she has gills, and she has a second mouth on her forehead. Woman or not, she is beautiful, with delicate, alien features and C-cup breasts.

“Oh my God,” says Apollo. He kneels down next to the alien woman and cradles her in his arms. “Are you okay?”

She sputters. “. . . Listen . . . ship . . . crashed . . . There isn’t much . . . time . . . You must stop . . . Lord Tklox . . . He is coming to . . . answer the . . . Omega Question . . . He will stop at nothing . . . please . . . stop him . . . Save . . . civilization . . . Leave me . . .”

Apollo notices a growing purple stain on the woman’s diaphanous yellow robes. Based on his Theoretical Xenobiology class, he hypothesizes that this is blood. He shakes his head at her, unwilling to accept the false choice she has presented him with. “I’ll do whatever I can to stop him, but first I have to help you.”

She reaches up to gently stroke his hand with her three-fingered hand. “. . . So kind . . . I . . . chose well . . .”

With his incredible basketballer’s strength, it is nothing for Apollo to lift the woman. He may as well be carrying a large sack of feathers. He places her in the passenger seat of his car and gets back on the road lickety split.

“You’ll be okay. I just need some supplies.”

He stops at the nearest gas station. He races around inside to get what he needs: bandages, ice, sports drink, needle, thread, protein bar. With these items in hand, he rushes towards the register, which is next to the exit. He is stopped by a man in a police uniform. The man in the police uniform asks him about his car.

“It’s mine,” Apollo says.

The man in the police uniform does not believe Apollo.

“You have to come help me! There’s a woman in trouble!”

The man in the police uniform does not believe Apollo and is concerned that he is shouting.

“This is ridiculous! Sorry sir. I am sure you are just doing your job. Let me show you my ID and insurance information so we can clear all of this up,” says Apollo.

Apollo goes to fish his wallet from his pocket. His naked hostility, volatile tone, and the act of reaching for what very well could be a weapon are clear signs of aggressive intent, and the man in the police uniform has no choice but to withdraw his own weapon and fire several shots. Apollo is struck first in the stomach, then the shoulder. He does not immediately die. Instead, he spends several moments on the floor of the convenience store, struggling to breathe as his consciousness fades into nothing. Then, he dies.

• • • •

What the fuck is happening? Seriously. Where is this dude coming from? I haven’t written that many stories, but I really don’t think that’s how these things are supposed to go. The way I was taught, you establish character and setting, introduce conflict, develop themes, then end on an emotional climax. That’s it. Nobody said anything about killers popping up out of nowhere. Not in this genre, anyway.

So hear me out. I think we may be dealing some kind of metafictional entity, a living concept, an ideo-linguistic infection. I don’t know how he got in here, but he should be easy enough to deal with. I think we just need to reason with him. He’s probably a nice guy. Just doing his job, trying to keep the story safe. He was probably genuinely afraid that Apollo was reaching for a gun. You never know with people these days. Life is scary.

Besides, that story wasn’t working either. That Apollo was a big phony, totally unbelievable. Guys like that went out of style with Flash Gordon and bell-bottoms. It’s not just about liking the protagonist. You have to be able to relate to them, right? I think that’s how it works. That’s what everybody says, anyway. To be honest, I don’t really get the whole “relatability” thing. Isn’t the point of reading to subsume one’s own experience for the experience of another, to crawl out of one’s body and into a stranger’s thoughts? Why would you want to read about someone just like you? Stories are windows, not mirrors. Everybody’s human. Shouldn’t that make them relatable enough? I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing. I thought smoking was a weird thing to do, too, but then I tried smoking and was addicted forever. Maybe I’ve just never come across a good mirror.

So let’s do a child. Everybody loves children, and everybody was one. Plus, it’s really easy to make them super-relatable. Just throw some social anxiety disorder and a pair of glasses on some little fucking weirdo and boom: You got a movie deal. It’ll be a coming-of-age hero’s journey sort of thing, adolescence viewed through a gossamer haze of nostalgia.

Bully Brawl: An Apollo Kidd Adventure

This is 1995. A group of young people sit on the stoop of a decaying brownstone just off the L. The topic is television. Some show or another. Who can remember? Broadcast television in the year 1995 is terrible all around, hugs and catchphrases and phantasmal laughter suspended in analog fuzz. Is Full House on in 1995? Is Urkel? They don’t know how bad they have it. Naomi leads the conversation. A skinny, toothy girl with a voice like a preacher. You can almost hear the organ chords rumbling in your chest whenever she opens her mouth. She jokes about what she would do if her own hypothetical future husband were to comically declare himself the man of the house, with the punchlines mainly revolving around the speed and vigor with which she would slap the black off him. She is sort of funny, but only because the television shows she is describing are not.

Apollo does not make any jokes. He is sort of funny himself (people laugh at him, at least), but he does not know how to make funny words happen. He is mostly quiet, only chiming in with the factual, offering airtimes and channels and dropping the names of actors when they get stuck on the tips of tongues. Six or seven of them are gathered, and Apollo believes himself to definitely be the or-seventh. He is wearing a t-shirt with a superhero on it. Not Superman. Superman gear can be forgiven as a harmless eccentricity if you’re otherwise down. But Apollo’s rocking some kind of deep-cut clown in a neon gimp suit on his chest. Remember, this is 1995, and this man is thirteen years old. Unforgivable. He’s not just the or-seventh, he is the physical manifestation of all the or-seventhness that has ever existed in the world.

The new girl is sitting next to him. She might have been the or-seventh were she not new. Check that sweater. Yellow? Polyester? Sequin pineapples? In this heat? Worse than unforgivable. But who knows what lies under it? A butterfly? A swan? Any and all manner of transformative symbology could be hiding, waiting, growing. There’s still hope for her. She may be four-eyed and flat-butted and double-handed and generally Oreoish, but there is hope. She can at least drop into the conversation sometimes, in the empty spaces after the punchlines. She has that power. For instance, after Naomi does a long routine on what she would do if she ever found a wallet lying on the sidewalk like on TV (in brief: cop that shit), the new girl says something about losing her own money and getting punished harshly by her mother. It is not a funny thing to say, but memories of belts and switches and tears are still fresh in their adolescent minds, and it is comforting to laugh it out. Apollo laughs the hardest, and he does not know why.

The sun is gone. Just a little light left. The new girl can’t go home alone. Not in the almost-dark. This is 1995, not 1948. Apollo volunteers to walk with her.

“He like you,” says Marcus, Naomi’s not-quite-but-basically-boyfriend, by way of explaining why Apollo is the best one for the job.

Apollo denies this so fervently that he has to go through with it, lest she think he truly hates her. The walk is quiet for the first few blocks. Apollo is not a big talker, and the new girl has been here for two weeks, and no one, except maybe the ultragregarious Naomi, has had a real conversation with her. Still, Apollo finds himself feeling strangely comfortable. Maybe it is the sweater. Perhaps the fact that it should be embarrassing her is preventing him from being embarrassed himself. Perhaps it is the sartorial equivalent of imagining one’s audience naked. Perhaps she’s just sort of great.

Apollo stops short just before they reach the corner. He holds out his arm so that the girl will stop, too. There’s danger up ahead. A gang of street toughs. Six of them. One of those multicultural, gender-integrated ’90s gangs, a Benetton ad with knives. Red jackets, gold sneakers. One of them has a boombox. KRS-ONE maybe? Early KRS-ONE. Stuff about listening to people’s guns as they shoot you with them. Their victim is an old, grey-haired man. His hands are up. There is a briefcase at his feet. The gangsters taunt him stereotypically.

“Give us ya money, pops!”

“Don’t make me cut you!”

“Nice and easy!”

“Don’t be a hero!”

“I need to regulate!”

Apollo takes a slow step back. He means for Shayla to step with him, but she does not. He pulls on her arm, but she is still. She has a look on her face like she wants to fight motherfuckers. This is the most frightening expression that can appear on a human face.

“We have to go,” he says.

“No,” she says. “We have to help him.”

“C’mon.”

He pulls on her arm again, hard this time, but she slips his grasp. She runs at the gang, leaps into the air, and tackles the nearest one. The gangsters are surprised at first, to see this little girl brazenly attacking one of their own, but they quickly pull her off him and throw her to the ground.

“What’s your malfunction?!” one of them screeches.

The girl stands and pulls out, seemingly from nowhere, a fantastic-looking gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon. “Stand down, jerks.”

“Oh dag! She got a gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon! Kick rocks, guys!”

The gangsters run off into the night. Apollo runs over to the girl.

“What’s going on? What’s that thing?”

“Don’t worry about it. Forget you saw anything,” says the girl.

“Exactly,” says the old man. He begins to laugh, first a low, soft chuckle, then an increasingly maniacal cackle that echos in the night. “You have fallen for my trap, Princess Amarillia! I knew you could not resist helping a stranger in need.”

The girl gasps. “Lord Tklox!”

“What?” says Apollo.

Smiling, the old man reaches up and grabs his face, pulling it off to reveal pale skin, elegant features, and hair the color of starlight. His body begins to bulge and swell as he grows larger, eventually doubling in height. He laughs as a shining sword appears in his hands.

“Run!” shouts the girl.

“What is happening?!”

“No time to explain. Take this.” She hands him her fantastic-looking gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon. “I’ll hold him off with my Venusian jiu-jitsu. Just go! Don’t stop. Please. Don’t stop. Just run. Don’t let him get you like he got the others.”

The girl takes a martial arts stance and nods. Apollo does not need further explanations. He runs in the opposite direction. He runs as fast as he can, until his lungs burn and he cannot feel his legs. Stopping to catch his breath, he holds the gun object that in no way resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon up to the light. He does not even know how to use it, how it could possibly help him in this strange battle.

So wrapped up in thought, Apollo does not even see the man in the police uniform. He does not hear him telling him to drop his weapon. He only hears the gun go bang. Later, his body is found by his mother, who cries and cries and cries.

• • • •

Did you ever read “Lost in the Funhouse”? I just re-read it as research on solving metafictional problems. Not super helpful. We get it; fiction is made up. Cool story, bro. But you know the flashback to the kids playing Niggers and Masters? Is that a real thing? Or is it just a sadomasochistic parody of Cowboys and Indians? I can’t find any information on it online, but I’m sure somebody somewhere has played it. If something as cruel as Cowboys and Indians exists, why not Niggers and Masters? There is no way a game like that is only theoretical. It’s too rich, too delicious. The role of Master is an obvious power fantasy, presenting one with the authority to command and punish as an adult might, without any of the responsibility. The role of Nigger is just a different kind of power fantasy, power expressed as counterfactual. In playing the Nigger, one can experience subjugation on one’s own terms. There is no real danger, no real pain. You can leave at any time, go home and watch cartoons and forget about it. Or you can indulge fully, giving oneself up to the game, allowing oneself to experience a beautiful simulacrum of suffering. It is perfect pretend. There are probably worse ways of spending a suburban afternoon, and there is something slightly sublime about it, baby’s first ego death. Sure, it’s profoundly offensive, but who’s going to stop you? But whatever. I’m probably reading too much into it. It’s probably a made-up, postmodern joke. When I was a kid, we just played Cops and Robbers, and it was fine.

Anyway, that was a digression. I admit that it’s difficult to defend the actions of certain uniformed narrative devices, but I’m sure there were good reasons for them. After all, there were gangsters with actual knives in that one, and Apollo was holding something that maybe sort of looked like a weapon in the dark. How are we supposed to tell the good ones from the bad ones? Can you tell the difference? I don’t think so. Besides, this was to be expected. Children’s literature is sad as fuck. It’s all about dead moms and dead dogs and cancer and loneliness. You can’t expect everyone to come out alive from that. But you know what isn’t sad? Fucking superheroes.

Go Go Justice Gang! ft. Apollo Young

Oh no.

Downtown Clash City has been beset by a hypnagogic Leviathan, a terrifying kludge of symbology and violence, an impossible horror from beyond the ontological wasteland. Citizens flee, police stand by impotently, soldiers fire from tanks and helicopters without success, their bullets finding no purchase, their fear finding no relief.

It is a bubblegum machine gone horribly, horribly awry, a clear plastic sphere with a red body and a bellhopian cap, except there is a tree growing inside it, and also it is a several hundred feet tall. The tree is maybe a willow or a dying spruce or something like that. It is definitely a sad tree, the kind of tree that grows on the edges of graveyards in children’s books or in the tattoos of young people with too many feelings, when not growing on the inside of giant animated bubblegum machines.

It trudges along Washington Avenue on its root system, which emerges from the slot where the bubblegum ought to come out, and inflicts hazardous onomatopoesis upon people and property alike with its terrible branches.

Bang. Crack. Boom. Splat. Crunch.

Splat is the worst of them, if you think about the implications.

Various material reminders of American imperialist power under late capitalism, the bank and the television station and the army surplus store, are made naught but memory and masonry in its wake. The ground shakes like butts in music videos, and buildings fall like teenagers in love. Destruction. Carnage. Rage. Can nothing be done to stop this creature? Can the city be saved from certain destruction?

Yes!

Already, Apollo Young, a.k.a. Black Justice, is on his way to the Justice Gang Headquarters. Even as his fellow citizens panic, he keeps a cool head as he drives his Justice Vehicle headlong into danger. When his wrist communicator begins to buzz and play the Justice Gang theme song, he pulls over to the curb, in full accordance with the law.

“Black Justice! Come in! This is Red Justice!” says the wrist communicator.

“I read you, Patrick! What’s the haps?!”

“The city is in danger! We need your help! To defeat this evil, We, the Justice Gang, need to combine our powers to form White Justice!”

“Yes. Only White Justice can save the city this time!”

“Also, can you please pick up Pink Justice? She is grounded from driving because she went to the mall instead of babysitting her little brother.”

“What an airhead!”

“I know. But she is also a valuable member of the Justice Gang. Only when Pink Justice, Blue Justice, Black Justice, and Mauve Justice combine with me, the leader, Red Justice, can our ultimate power, White Justice be formed!”

“As I know.”

“Yes. All thanks to Princess Amarillia, who gave us our prismatic justice powers in order to prevent the evil Lord Tklox from answering the Omega Question and destroying civilization!”

“Righteous!”

“Just as white light is composed of all colors of light, so White Justice will be formed from our multicultural, gender-inclusive commitment to Good and Right.”

“Okay! Bye.”

Apollo hangs up and gets back on the road. He picks up Pink Justice on the way. She is a stereotypical valley girl, but that is okay, since the Justice Gang accepts all types of people, as long as they love justice, are between fifteen and seventeen, and present as heterosexual. They ride together in silence, as they are the two members of the Justice Gang least likely to be paired up for storylines, owing to the potentially provocative implications of a black man and a white woman interacting together, even platonically.

“Do you ever think that we’re just going in circles?” asks Pink Justice, staring idly out the window.

“What do you mean?” asks Apollo.

“A monster appears, we kill it, another monster appears, we kill it again. We feel good about getting the bad guy in the moment, but it just keeps happening. Week after week, it’s the same thing. Another monster. More dead people. We never actually fight evil. We just kill monsters. Evil is always still there.”

“But what about justice?”

“What is justice? People are dying. I just don’t know what we’re fighting for sometimes, why we keep fighting. It’s the same every time. It’s just tiring, I guess.”

“I think we have to fight. Even if nobody gets saved, we are better for having done it. Maybe the world isn’t better, but it’s different, and I think that difference is beautiful.”

“Like, for sure!” says Pink Justice.

A police car flashes its lights at Apollo. He pulls over. The man in the police uniform walks to the passenger side and asks Pink Justice if she is okay.

“I’m fine. There’s no problem,” she says.

The man in the police uniform tells Pink Justice that he can help her if something is wrong.

“Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong.”

The man in the police uniform tells Apollo to get out of the car.

“What is this about? What’s your probable cause? Yes sir, officer,” says Apollo, getting out of the car.

The man in the police uniform slams Apollo into the side of the car and pats him down. Pink Justice gets out and begins to yell that they have done nothing wrong, that he has to let them go. This obviously agitates the man in the police uniform.

Apollo’s wrist communicator goes off, and without thinking, he moves to answer it. The man in the police uniform tackles him to the ground, sits on his chest, and begins to hit him with a flashlight. Apollo’s windpipe is blocked. It continues to be blocked for a long time. He dies.

• • • •

Come on. Really? That one was really good. The white guy was in charge and everything! This sucks. I’m trying to do something here. The point of adventure fiction is to connect moral idealism with the human experience. The good guys fight the bad guys, just as we struggle against the infelicities of the material world. That’s the point of heroes. They journey into the wilderness, struggle against the unknown, and make liminal spaces safe for the people. That’s how it works, from Hercules to Captain Kirk. It’s really hard to create ontological safety when people keep dying all the time. Barth was right; literature is exhausting.

So I guess Apollo shouldn’t have been in a car with a white lady? That’s scary, I guess. He didn’t do anything, but he was probably no angel. He was a teen. Teens get into all kinds of shit. When I was in school, I knew so, so many kids who shoplifted and smoked drugs. They were mostly white, but still. Teens are shitty. The man in the police uniform probably had good intentions. Like, he wanted to make sure the girl wasn’t being kidnapped or anything. Why else would they be together? I still think he only wants to keep people safe, especially potentially vulnerable people.

I’ve fucking got it. This is 2016, right? Sisters are doing it for themselves. Why not a lady-protagonist? Women are empathetic and non-threatening and totally cool. Everyone is chill with ladies. That’s why phone robots all have feminine voices. True story. Why would you just kill a woman for no reason? She’s not going to hurt you. This time, no one is going to hurt anybody.

Apollonia Williams-Carter and the Venus Sanction

Naomi walks into Apollonia’s private office just before 5:00. It is a cramped and dingy room, lit by a single fluorescent bulb and smelling strongly of mildew. Without greeting or warning, she drops a thick, yellow binder down on Apollonia’s desk.

“Read this,” she says.

The binder is marked A.M.A.R.I.L.L.I.A. Project. It is filled with photographs, exotic diagrams, and pages and pages of exhaustively researched reports. Apollonia proceeds slowly, taking in each and every fact printed on the pages, running them over in her mind and allowing them settle. She feels a sinking sensation in her stomach as she journeys deeper and deeper into the text.

“Dear God,” she whispers. “Can this be true?”

“Yes,” says Naomi.

“This is absolutely disgusting. How could they do something like this? How could they sell us out to aliens?”

“They don’t care about our world. Not anymore.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I brought this to you.”

Apollonia opens one of her drawers, retrieving two shot glasses and a bottle of whiskey. She pours a double and pushes it toward Naomi.

“Have some. It will calm your nerves.”

Naomi throws the glass to the ground, shattering it.

“This is no time to drink! We’ve got to do something!”

Apollonia takes her shot. “We can’t do anything if we can’t keep our cool.”

“You want me to be cool? The department will have my head if they even knew I am talking to you.”

“My head’s on the line, too. I might be a vice-president here, but they’d kill me as quickly as a break-room cockroach.”

“So what do we do? I came to you because I have the utmost respect for your work with the company.”

“We go to the press. It might cost us our lives, but at least the truth will be out there.”

“Should we try to rescue the girl?”

“No. First, we get the truth out. I’ll handle this. Delete any digital copies of these files and meet me tonight at the Port Royale.”

“Fine.”

“Remember. Anyone you know could be one of them. Use caution.”

Naomi nods and exits.

Apollonia takes another double shot of whiskey as she continues to read the binder. How could this happen? She had never trusted the powers that be, but how could they be doing this? How could they be killing people with impunity? The notes on the files indicate that it is in the name of safety and the greater good, but whose safety are they really talking about? Man or monster?

Apollonia leaves at 7:00, as she does every evening. She hides the pages of the binder in her purse. She puts on a cheerful face, smiling at coworkers and greeting the support staff as she passes. She takes the elevator down from her floor to the lobby, then the stairs to the parking garage. She makes sure no one is following her as she walks down the corridors of the unlit parking garage, turning her head every few moments to get a full view of her surroundings. She sees her car and breathes a sigh of relief. She is almost out.

“Hey there.”

She turns to see a young man in a suit. He is at least six feet tall and aggressively muscled. He smiles brightly and broadly at Apollonia, as if trying to hide something.

“Hello Patrick,” she says.

“Where ya headed in such a hurry?”

“Just going home.”

“Home, huh? I remember home.”

He laughs. She joins him.

“Long hours, huh? I feel for you.”

He sticks out his finger at her purse. She clutches it closer.

“Hey. Is that new? I think my girlfriend pointed that purse out at the store. I’m sure it was that one.”

“I’ve had this thing forever.”

“Do you mind if I see it? I just want to know if it’s well made.”

Apollonia swallows. “I’d really prefer it if you didn’t.”

The smile leaves his face, and his eyes begin to narrow. Apollonia takes a step back. She has been trained in self-defense, but this man has at least one hundred pounds on her and also might be an alien. She begins to slowly, subtly shift into a combat stance. If she times it right, she might be able to stun him long enough for her to escape. She just has to find the right moment. She waits. And waits. And waits.

Finally, he chuckles. “You’re right. That was a weird question. I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately. Sorry. I’ll see you later.”

Apollonia gets into her car. On the way to the Port Royale, she is pulled over by the man in the police uniform. While patting her down for drugs, he slips his fingers into her underwear. She tries to pull his hands away, prompting him to use force to stop her from resisting arrest. Her head is slammed many times against the sidewalk. She dies.

• • • •

She. Didn’t. Do. Anything. And even if she did do something, killing is not the answer. That’s it. I’m not playing anymore. I can quit at any time. No one can stop me. Look, I’ll do it now. Boom. I just quit for two days. Boom. That was two weeks. Boom. Now I have to change all the dates to 2016. What’s the point of writing this thing? What’s the point of writing anything? I just wanted to tell a cool story. That’s it. No murders. No deaths. Remember? It was just a love story.

I once read that people get more into love stories and poems in times of political strife and violence. What better way to assert meaning in the face of meaninglessness than by celebrating the connection between human beings? Our relationship with the state, the culture, the world, these are just petals in the winds compared to the love that flows between us. Fuck politics. I set out to do a love story, so I’m doing a love story. Plus, I’ve got a plan. So far, the Apollos have all died while messing around outside. The solution isn’t relatability at all. It’s so much simpler than that: transit. It doesn’t matter if the guy can’t sympathize with Apollo if he can’t find him. There are tons of great stories set in one place. I’ll just do one of those.

Apollo Right and the Architectural-Organic Wormhole

Apollo and Naomi sit alone on the couch by the window, the dusty brown one held together with tape and band-aids, quiet, listening to the rain and the night, watching the play of wind and glow on the raindrops outside, refracted lamplight and neon diffusing into glitter in the dark. His head rests on her lap, which is soft and warm and comfortingly “lap-like,” which is to say that it possesses the qualities of the Platonic lap in quantities nearing excess, qualities which are difficult to articulate, neotenous comforts and chthonic ecstasies of a sublime/cliché nature, intimacy rendered in thigh meat and belly warmth. Her left hand is on his shoulder, just so, and her right is on his chest, and he takes note of the sensation of her fingers as his chest expands and contracts, and it is pleasant. He takes a breath, sweet and slow. There is a little sadness, because this moment will wilt and wither like all moments, and he does not want it to, more than anything.

“Remember this,” he says.

“What?”

“I would like it if you would remember this. Tonight. Or at least this part.”

“Why wouldn’t I remember tonight?

“You never remember any of the good parts.”

“You say that.”

“It’s true. You only remember the bad parts. The before and after. Anxiety and regret. Never the moment.”

“Who says this is a good part?”

“That’s a cutting remark.”

“I just think we have different definitions of the good and bad when it comes to certain things.”

“So this is a bad part?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Which is it, then?”

“It’s good to see you.”

“You know what my favorite memory of us is?”

“Leon.”

“I’m sure you don’t remember it.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s not weird or anything. One time I came over to your place, and you smiled that smile you have—not the usual one, the good one—and you gave me a hug. Just a long, deep hug, like you were just really happy to see me. Genuinely happy. Not angry or annoyed at all. Just cruisin’, y’know. Just cruisin’. We made out afterwards, and maybe had sex? I don’t remember that super great.”

“The fact that you don’t see anything weird about that is why we had to break up.”

“Whatever, lady.”

The door flies open. The man in the police uniform shouts for everyone to get down. A flashbang grenade is thrown inside. Apollo pushes Naomi away but is unable to get away. He suffers critical burns to his head and chest. After being denied medical treatment on the scene, he dies weeks later in the hospital from opportunistic infections. Ironically, the man in the police uniform was actually meant to go to the next apartment over, where a minor marijuana dealer lives.

• • • •

They didn’t even get to the cool part. There was going to be a living wormhole in the closet, and all kinds of space shit was going to come out, and in the process of dealing with it they were going to rekindle their love. It was going to be awesome. We can’t even have love stories anymore? What do we have if we can’t have love stories?

Okay. Now I’m thinking that the issue is with the milieu. 2015 is a weird time. Shit is going down. It’s politicizing this story. I’m not into it. What we need is a rip-roaring space adventure in the far future. That’ll be cool. All this shit will be sorted out by then, and we can all focus on what really matters: space shit.

Apollo _____ vs. the Vita-Ray Miracle

The crystal spires of New Virtua throw tangles of intersecting rainbows onto the silver-lined streets below, such that a Citizen going about his daily duties cannot help but be enmeshed in a transpicuous net of light and color. A Good Citizen knows that this is Good, that beauty is a gift of Science, and he wears his smile the way men of lesser worlds might wear a coat and hat to ward off the cold damp of an unregulated atmosphere.

Lord Tklox is not a Good Citizen, and he rarely smiles at all. On those occasions when he does experience something akin to happiness (when his plans are coming to fruition, when he imagines the bloody corpses of his enemies, when he thinks of new ways to crush the Good Citizens of New Virtua under his foot), his smile is not so much worn as wielded, as one might wield the glowing spiral of a raymatic cannon.

“Soon, my vita-ray projector will be complete, and all New Virtua will tremble as I unleash the Omega Question!” he exclaims to no one, alone in his subterranean laboratory two thousand miles below the surface.

Cackling to himself, Lord Tklox waits in his lair for those who would challenge his incredible genius.

He waits.

He keeps waiting.

Lord Tklox coughs, perhaps getting the attention of any heroes listening on nearby crime-detecting audioscopes. “First New Virtua, then the universe! All will be destroyed by the radical subjectivity of the Omega Question!”

Waiting continues to happen.

More waiting.

Still more.

Uh, I guess nobody comes. Everybody dies, I guess.

• • • •

So I checked, and it turns out there are no black people in the far future. That’s my bad. I really didn’t do my research on that one. I don’t know where we end up going. Maybe we all just cram into the Parliament-Funkadelic discography at some point between Star Trek and Foundation? Whatever. That’s an issue for tomorrow. Today, we’ve got bigger problems.

It’s time we faced this head on. Borges teaches us that every story is a labyrinth, and within every labyrinth is a minotaur. I’ve been trying to avoid the minotaur, but instead I need to slay it. I have my sword, and I know where the monster lurks. It is time to blaxploit this problem.

Apollo Jones In: The Final Showdown

Who’s the plainclothes police detective who leaves all the criminals dejected?
[Apollo!]
Who stops crime in the nick of time and dazzles the ladies with feminine rhymes?
[Apollo!]
Can you dig it?

Apollo’s cruiser screeches to a halt at the entrance to the abandoned warehouse. He leaps out the door and pulls his gun, a custom gold Beretta with his name engraved on the handle.

“Hot gazpacho!” he says. “This is it.”

Patrick pops out of the passenger seat. “We’ve got him now.”

They have been chasing their suspect for weeks now, some sicko responsible for a string of murders. In a surprising third act twist, they discovered that the one responsible is one of their own, a bad apple who gets his kicks from harming the innocent.

“We’ve got him pinned down inside,” says Apollo.

“He won’t escape this time.”

“Let’s do this, brother.”

They skip the middle part of the story, since that has been where we’ve been getting into trouble. They rush right to the end, where the man in the police uniform is waiting for them.

“Congratulations on solving my riddles, gentlemen. I’m impressed.”

“You’re going down, punk,” says Apollo.

“Yeah!” says Patrick.

“I doubt that very much.”

The man in the police uniform pulls his weapon and fires three shots, all hitting Apollo in the torso. He crumples to the ground. Patrick aims his own weapon, but the man in the police uniform is able to quickly shoot him in the shoulder, sending Patrick’s pistol to the ground.

“You thought you could defeat me so easily? How foolish. We’re not so different, you and I. You wanted a story about good aliens and bad aliens? Well, so did I.”

“How’s this for foolish?” says Apollo, pulling up his shirt to reveal he was wearing a bulletproof vest all along. Then, he unloads a clip from his legendary golden Beretta at him. The man in the police uniform falls to the ground, bleeding.

Patrick clutches his shoulder. “We got him.”

“We’re not quite done yet,” says Apollo.

He walks over to the body of the man in the police uniform. He tugs on the man’s face, pulling it off completely. It is the face of Lord Tklox.

“This was his plan all along,” says Apollo. “By murdering all those innocent people, he was turning us against each other, thereby making it easier for his invasion plans to succeed. All he had left to do was answer the Omega Question and boom, no more civilization. Good thing we stopped him in time.”

“I knew it,” says Patrick. “He was never one of us. He was just a bad guy the whole time. It is in no way necessary for me to consider the ideological mechanisms by which my community and society determine who benefits from and participates in civil society, thus freeing me from cognitive dissonance stemming from the ethical compromises that maintain my lifestyle.”

“Hot gazpacho!” says Apollo.

They share a manly handshake like Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in Predator. It is so dope.

“I’ll go call dispatch,” says Patrick. “Tell them that we won’t be needing backup. Or that we will be needing backup to get the body and investigate the scene? I don’t really know how this works. The movie usually ends at this point.”

Patrick leaves, and Apollo guards the body. Suddenly, the warehouse door bursts open. Seeing him standing over the dead body, a man in a police uniform yells for Apollo to drop his weapon. Apollo shouts that he is a cop and moves to gingerly put his golden gun on the ground, but he is too slow. Bulletproof vests do not cover the head. He is very, very dead.

• • • •

I wasn’t trying to do apologetics for him. Before, I mean. I wasn’t saying it’s okay to kill people because they aren’t perfect or do things that are vaguely threatening. I was just trying to find some meaning, the moral of the story. All I ever wanted to do was write a good story. But murder is inherently meaningless. The experience of living is a creative act, the personal construction of meaning for the individual, and death is the final return to meaninglessness. Thus, the act of killing is the ultimate abnegation of the human experience, a submission to the chaos and violence of the natural world. To kill, we must either admit the futility of our own life or deny the significance of the victim’s.

This isn’t right.

It’s not supposed to happen like this.

Why does this keep happening?

It’s the same story every time. Again and again and again.

I can’t fight the man in the police uniform. He’s real, and I’m an authorial construct, just words on a page, pure pretend. But you know who isn’t pretend? You. We have to save Apollo. We’re both responsible for him. We created him together. Death of the Author, you know? It’s just you and me now. I’ve got one last trick. I didn’t mention this in the interest of pace and narrative cohesion, but I lifted the Omega Question off Lord Tklox before he died. I don’t have the answer, but I know the question. You’ve got to go in. I can keep the man in the police uniform at bay as long as I can, but you have to save Apollo. We’re going full Morrison.

Engage second-person present.

God forgive us.

• • • •

You wake up. It is still dark out. You reach out to take hold of your spouse. Your fingers intertwine, and it is difficult to tell where you stop and they begin. You love them so much. After a kiss and a cuddle, you get out of bed. You go to the bathroom and perform your morning toilette. When you are finished, you go to kitchen and help your spouse with breakfast for the kids.

They give you a hug when they see you. You hug back, and you never want to let go. They are getting so big now, and you do everything you can to be a good parent to them. You know they love you, but you also want to make sure they have the best life possible.

You work hard every single day to make that happen. Your boss is hard on you, but he’s a good guy, and you know you can rely on him when it counts. You trust all your coworkers with your life. You have to. There’s no other option in your line of work.

After some paperwork, you and your partner go out on patrol. You’ve lived in this neighborhood your entire life. Everything about it is great, the food, the sights, the people. There are a few bad elements, but it’s your job to stop them and keep everybody safe.

It’s mostly nickel and dime stuff today, citations and warnings. The grocery store reports a shoplifter. An older woman reports some kids loitering near her house. Your partner notices a man urinating on street while you’re driving past. That kind of thing.

As you are on your way back to the station, you notice a man walking alone on the sidewalk. It’s late, and it doesn’t look like this is his part of town. His head is held down, like he’s trying to hide his face from you. This is suspicious. Your partner says he recognizes him, that he fits the description of a mugger who has been plaguing the area for weeks. You pull up to him. Ask him what he is doing. He doesn’t give you a straight answer. You ask him for some identification. He refuses to give it to you. You don’t want to arrest this guy for nothing, but he’s not giving you much choice.

Suddenly, his hand moves towards a bulge in his pocket. It’s a gun. You know it’s a gun. You draw your weapon. You just want to scare him, show him that you’re serious, stop him from drawing on you. But is he even scared? Is that fear on his face or rage? How can you even tell? He’s bigger than you, and he is angry, and he probably has a gun. You do not know this person. You cannot imagine what is going through his mind. You have seen this scenario a million times before in movies and TV shows.

You might die.

You might die.

You might die.

The Omega Question is activated:

Who matters?

©2016 by Joseph Allen Hill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Allen Hill is a Chicago-based writer and bon vivant. He has also spent time in Georgia and New Jersey. He has a marginally useful degree in Classics and enjoys making music in his spare time. He can be reached on Twitter @joehillofearth2.

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

This Is as I Wish to Be Restored

Christie Yant | 2210 words

Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love—I think it’s love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won’t sleep at all. I drink until there’s no life left in me, until I’m able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what’s at stake. Sometimes I hope that I’ll dream of her. Sometimes I’m afraid that I will.

I have two things that belonged to her. The first is a photograph, taken at a party in what looks like a hotel. Her hair is dyed red—it doesn’t quite suit her, so you know it isn’t hers, like an unexpected note in a melody where you thought you knew where it was going and then it went sharp. She’s holding a glass of something pink and bubbly. Maybe it’s her birthday. If so, it’s probably her twenty-eighth. She’s laughing.

She was really young to be a client. Especially back then, most of the people who thought about life extension were retirees. Mortality was very much on their minds, and they’d had a lifetime to accumulate their savings—suspension was expensive. I wonder where she got the money. Her file doesn’t say.

So in this picture she’s laughing. She’s seated, supporting herself with one hand braced against the carpeted floor. Her head is thrown back and her back is arched, and she’s just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. There are other people around her, behind her, just smiling blurs holding drinks, but you get the feeling that she’s the reason they’re smiling. She’s the star they’re all in orbit around. Like me. I fell into her orbit years ago and can’t break free.

The picture moves with me through my bleak basement apartment, from room to room—sometimes it turns up on top of the half-size refrigerator, sometimes absent-mindedly left on a shelf in the medicine cabinet where I discover it again later and take it with me to the bedroom. I’ve found it between the sofa cushions at least half a dozen times. She follows me, or I follow her—it’s been a lifetime since she smiled that smile, and I’m still completely, utterly taken.

The one place it never goes is on the dewar in the corner. That would just be too macabre, considering.

This is the only photograph she left. I often wonder what it was about this moment, this time in her life, that she could have looked ahead and known that this was as good as it gets. In this picture the cancer’s already killing her, she just doesn’t know it.

She died less than a year later. Pancreatic cancer. It’s in her file.

• • • •

I was given her file four years after I started with the company, in a crumbling box of data that needed to be digitized.

Those poor bastards, they had no idea what would happen to them fifty or a hundred years on. I wondered at the time whether they might have changed their minds about being cryopreserved at all. Probably not—they were in the immortality business, like we are. They would have paid any price.

“All early conversion cases,” my boss said. “We don’t know what’s really there anymore. The risk of fracturing was high in those days.”

I’ve seen the results of fracturing. It’s not pretty. The early full-body cases were bad, which was one of the reasons they went to neuro in the first place. The splits in the elbows, the back of the knees, the buttocks, the groin—anywhere there’s a fatty fold, the frozen flesh split wide open. When they realized it was happening, and that there was almost no chance of a full-body patient getting out of it without severe damage, they were all converted to neuros. The procedure is executed with a power saw.

I flipped through the files, brittle and yellowed with age. The metal prongs that held the files together had rusted, and some of them snapped off when I tried to free the pages for scanning.

Her file was near the end. I scanned it and put it back in the box with the others to be destroyed. I didn’t even really think about why I went back for it. I just wanted to see her smile again.

• • • •

The other thing I have of hers is a note—hand-written, on a 3×3-inch faded yellow square. The writing runs across it at a diagonal. She wrote it with a fountain pen; I can tell by the way the width varies in the strokes. They are bold strokes, no-nonsense strokes. The ink is a whimsical green. Was that important to her? This was her last message to anyone who mattered.

There is a small stain at the bottom of the paper now, a droplet of liquid that the ink bled into and spread like lichen. Brandy, if it was from five years ago; whiskey, if it was more recent. I’ve had this file for a long time. I can’t read it now, not really, not in the state I’m in. It swims in front of me through a bourbon haze. But I know what it says.

This is as I wish to be restored.

Her wishes were clear, written there in green ink, spattered and smeared from my ministrations, and that’s what keeps me up at night, keeps me drinking. What would she want me to do? The note is all I have of her, aside from the picture, and the file, and the file says nothing.

That’s not strictly true. It’s just all I know of her. I have all of her. All that’s left, anyway.

• • • •

From what I’ve read, her actual last words were nothing to write home about. She wanted her cat looked after. She wanted water, and was cold. That’s pretty normal. “Cover my feet,” she said to the nurse. “I’d like a drink of water,” she said. “My mouth is so dry.” Usually there is no wisdom imparted, no grand finale—we’re cold, and we want to sleep. It was no different for her.

Her final moments were uneventful, if you discount the cadre of specialists outside her door. It was after she died that things got serious.

That was all a very long time ago.

When the money ran out and it became clear that we couldn’t sustain them all, we had to decide which patients we couldn’t save. I’d been with the company for the better part of a decade by then. I remember Melanie breaking down in tears during the board meeting, and Bill having to excuse himself to be sick in the restroom. This was a failure that we took personally, so personally that for a while I was spending nights taking calls from colleagues and talking them out of suicide. You can see why they would consider it—it would have been a poetic kind of atonement. Generations of patients had placed their lives in our hands, and we’d failed them.

The earliest patients had the lowest probability of success, due to the imperfect vitrification processes they used in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Eighty-three early patients were selected, their polished chrome dewars stacked against a cinder block wall and their data files updated. Distant descendants were tracked down and contacted, most of whom neither knew nor cared that they had an ancestor in suspension and weren’t much interested in the disposition of their remains.

She never had children, never got married. There was no one to call, and no one to care that the count had changed by one when I turned them over for disposal.

• • • •

The unit is fairly easy to maintain. The temperature isn’t as well regulated as I’d like, and I can’t get it as cold as we had at the facility, but I do what I can.

Three years ago last August, I nearly lost her to a storm that kept me away from home longer than expected. In my mind I could see the sweating canister as the temperature climbed, I could see that crimson hair hanging in lank wet strands, while decomposition set in—autolysis, cell rupture, her skin blistering, slippage, irreversible damage—everything we as mortal beings fear and everything that we had protected her from for the better part of a century.

And her face, while achingly beautiful, was not the worst of it. If her brain began to thaw, what part of her would be lost first? Language skills? Motor function? Impulse control? Memory? I could imagine her life as a map, traced in sepia on immaculate folds of gray matter: the roads, waterways, borders, and landmarks of her heart erased one ruptured cell at a time. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I had to get to her and stop it.

I nearly knocked the basement door off its hinges, my heart pounding like a hammer, but there she was—enclosed, sealed, regulated, cold. Liquid nitrogen levels low but not dry. Cold enough. If I had been another six hours it might have been too late.

That was the moment, knowing that I’d almost lost her. I could no longer pretend that I could store her here forever. I had to start planning for her revival.

The next morning I came to on the floor, empty bottle just out of reach, my head pounding and my gut in revolt. When I opened my eyes in the half-light, there was a face in front of me, like I’d woken in a bed beside someone meant to be there, and in my half-conscious state I thought it was her. I reached out to touch her, and my fingers struck the hard, cold steel of the dewar.

I haven’t traveled since.

• • • •

I bought a green pen. I wrote the words over and over again in a notebook that I used for nothing else, and I carried the picture of the laughing girl from room to room as I thought about what it meant to revive her.

I practiced until I couldn’t tell the difference between her handwriting and my own. I try to put myself in her place—young, unafraid, confident that the future will be better, brighter, and that she will be welcomed there. I write the words, and for the six seconds that it takes, I think I can feel what she felt in those moments. The stroke across the T is emphatic, the flourish on the d is full of anticipation of a day when all of her dreams will come true.

They’ve been working backward, last-in-first-out. The synthetics are good, I’ve seen them. Like Lassiter. He was a neuro suspended not too long after her—thirty years, maybe—and he’s taken to it fine. Everything about her that matters is still there. The memory of her first kiss, her last goodbye, all of the events that made her or broke her. All of the things that made her smile. What she really wanted, I tell myself, was to come back.

I’ll probably be fired. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely be fired. But once they know I have her, they’ll have to do it, won’t they? We don’t talk much about what happened all those years ago. When we do, we refer to it as the Crisis, and we don’t look each other in the eye. If they know that she’s still here, and that they can bring her back, they won’t have a choice. And they can’t have me arrested, not when they would have destroyed her. If we believe our own marketing material, I stopped them from committing murder.

I comfort myself with this thought and the last of the bourbon. I’ve laid in a bottle of something pink and bubbly. It seemed like the right kind of welcome. Whether or not she’ll be able to taste it is another matter.

Tomorrow. Tonight I’ll pass out like I have every night, with her picture nearby and her words echoing in my head.

It made about as much sense as wishing on a star. It could never be done. People who had never even heard of a stem cell thought we’d grow them brand new bodies just like their old one. We’re not going to grow anencephalic clones in tanks and age them to their twenties. That’s not how revival works. It’s not how it’s ever going to work.

Her future was a place, and I am a native of it. I know the terrain; I know the weather. And I know that this isn’t the future she wanted. This isn’t what she meant.

This is as I wish to be restored.

It was a naïve hope on her part. I have a lot of hopes of my own, equally naïve. But the main one, the one that I cling to as consciousness fades away with her picture pressed against my heart, is this:

I hope that she forgives me.

©2014 by Christie Yant. Originally published in Analog. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

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

The War Between the Water and the Road

William Alexander | 5340 words

Oliver’s father told him that the park across the street used to be a lake. The entire park, including the baseball field, the sledding hills, and the playgrounds, used to be underwater—everything except for the two sets of swings at the top of the hill. He said that highway construction had cut into secret, underground places and wounded the lake. It drained down to a small pond with hills on all sides.

“Why did they do that?” Oliver asked his father, who was cooking.

“Why did who do what?” his father asked, because he had already forgotten the topic of the conversation. He got very focused on his cooking. He kept the TV on in the kitchen, but he never watched, never really listened to what it said. He also never worked in a restaurant, at least not for very long. He didn’t like to be rushed.

Oliver tried again. “Why did they drain the lake?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Oliver’s father said. He closed the oven door and stood up. “I don’t think they meant to. But people who make highways don’t care very much about lakes.”

“They should,” Oliver said.

The park across the street was one of Oliver’s favorite places. He thought about what it must have looked like, all filled up with lake. He thought about the fish that must have died surprised when it drained away. Oliver liked fish. He had goldfish named Donkey and Hodey. They were serial goldfish. The fish changed, but the names remained. Right now Donkey was silver and Hodey was orange.

Oliver decided to find those responsible for draining the lake and visit justice upon them.

He tried to think of suitably watery punishments. His cousins were known for filling pillowcases with ice cubes, or putting the hands of their enemies in small buckets of warm water while they slept, which would make them wet the bed. Their enemies were mostly younger cousins, all of them except for Oliver. Nobody played pranks on Oliver.

“Who built the highway?” he asked his father. He tried to ask it like it didn’t really matter, but at that moment it was the only thing that did.

“Don’t know,” his father said. “It was something like eighty years ago. More, maybe. Anyone who worked on that thing would be a hundred by now.”

Oliver only knew one person who looked like they might be a hundred. Old Louisa spent most of her time sitting on a bench in the park, right next to the pond. Maybe she remembered the days of highway construction.

He got down from his kitchen chair and went to his room. He took a pirate coloring book from inside his pillowcase. The pillowcase had fish on it. So did the sheets. He flipped to the very back of the book, which was an old birthday present. None of the pirate pictures were colored in. None of the pages were marked at all, except for the last. He kept his list on the last page.

Oliver wrote “the lake” at the bottom of the list with a crayon. Then he returned the book to his pillowcase and went to find his coat and boots.

“Going to the park!” he shouted from the front door.

“Don’t harass the ghost,” his father called from the kitchen, like he always did.

The afternoon was cold and clear. There wasn’t any snow. Halloween had only just happened, and already it felt too cold for snow. Most kids in Oliver’s neighborhood had dressed up as pirates for Halloween. Oliver had worn a miniature navy uniform. He didn’t like pirates. They were thieves and oathbreakers.

The park had two swing sets at street level, before the slope plummeted down to the pond. One was smaller and set up for younger kids. The younger swings looked like armored underwear, impossible to fall out of. A more advanced swing set jutted up against the smaller one like a pirate ship bearing down on a weaker vessel. Three older girls were on the swings. Two older boys boarded the younger playground. They loomed over its only occupant, who held on to a ball as big as he was. The older boys looked like pirates. Oliver didn’t know their names, but he recognized them. They had not dressed up for Halloween, but they had still gone door-to-door expecting candy.

One of the pirates kicked the kid’s ball, hard. It sailed over the edge of the slope and hung there for a moment, held up by the wind—it was a windy day—or else by the air remembering where the surface of the lake used to be. Then the ball dropped down and out of sight.

“Stop it,” Oliver said.

The pirates looked at him. Either one was twice Oliver’s height, so the two of them together had the collective mass of four Olivers. They might have even been teenagers, technically. But he had said stop it in a way that wasn’t a threat, a whine, or any other kind of complaint. He said it with the conviction that they actually would stop, and Oliver’s was a contagious belief. The older boys caught it. They glared down at the intense eight-year-old who had given them the order, and then they moved aside.

“Come on,” Oliver said to the smaller kid, taking his mittened hand. The two of them walked to the hill and down the switchbacking trail. This was Oliver’s favorite sledding hill, whenever it actually snowed. The retreating lake had created excellent sledding hills on all sides. But Oliver refused to let accidentally positive consequences influence his conviction that the wounded lake required justice.

The ball had rolled out over the surface of the pond. The little boy started crying when he saw how far out of reach it was, but he cried quietly. Oliver approved.

Thin ice covered the pond. Ducks swam in one unfrozen corner. Crows stepped lightly on the ice and looked around. One walked up to the ball, pecked at it, and walked away.

Oliver couldn’t find a stick long enough to reach the ball, so the two of them went around to the other side and threw rocks to knock it back onto shore. The rocks made holes in the ice. The little boy got tired of missing all the time, so he started to throw rocks at the ghost instead.

The ghost stood where it always stood, knee-deep in pond water. Its overcoat moved around it, even when there wasn’t any wind. One thrown pebble passed through the ghost’s head and scattered the shape of it like candle smoke. The ghost’s head came back together, sputtering and confused.

“I’ve seen it cold!” the ghost shouted, but not loudly. Even its shouts were quiet. “So cold that fires went walking to find some place warm!”

“Don’t harass the ghost,” Oliver said, and the little boy stopped.

Oliver picked up a stone that felt good in his hand. He took aim and threw. The stone knocked the ball across the ice. It rolled within reach of the far shore.

“There,” Oliver said. “Go get your ball.”

The little boy ran around the pond for the ball, and then took the long, switchbacked sidewalk to street level. Oliver lost interest in the kid as soon as he had his ball back. A wrong had been redressed. Oliver’s work was done.

He looked around. He had been to the park hundreds and hundreds of times, but without knowing that it had been underwater once. He looked up and pictured leaves floating high above him, where the surface used to be. He looked at the ghost and realized why its overcoat moved.

“That’s where he sank down to,” said old Louisa. She sat behind Oliver on her usual park bench. She looked like a permanent part of the bench. “He drowned when the lake was large. When this was the bottom of it. He sank this far. Once the water drained down to small we could finally come and visit him.”

“Did you help build the highway?” Oliver asked. This was what he’d come here to know.

“Women didn’t work road crews in my day,” Louisa said. “But I knew some of the boys who built things, back then. One of them might have been a highway.”

“You don’t remember?” said Oliver.

“Not especially,” said Louisa, but she said it with a smile.

“How can you not remember?” Oliver asked, not smiling. He had a very good memory, and he took things seriously.

“I remember more than he does.” Louisa nodded at the ghost. “And maybe I remember the highway. The boys always shouted, ‘Hurry up! It’s going to explode!’ when they put down concrete. It wouldn’t really, but they all rushed around and smoothed it out like it might, because if it wasn’t ready by the time it all set then the concrete might as well have just blown up. All of it went on right outside my door.”

“Didn’t they know what it’d do to the lake, when they built it?”

“Do to the lake?” Louisa leaned forward. She poured a little more of her voice into the words do and lake. “Do to the lake? More like what the lake did to them, boy. They cut into some kind of river, down underground. I saw it happen. I was tending to things outside when the water lashed out at them, down in that trench, and it carried some of them away.”

The ghost spoke up. “I’ve seen it so cold the sun came out at night, just to keep the moon warm.” The ghost faced away from them, toward the middle of the pond. It always did. Oliver had never seen its face. “Moon couldn’t make it across the sky otherwise. It was that cold. That cold.”

Most people in the neighborhood said the ghost had fallen in by drunken accident, so Oliver had not written “the ghost” in the back of his coloring book. He didn’t write down accidents.

“Do you know what his name was?” Oliver asked.

“Of course I do,” Louisa said, “but he doesn’t remember it, and if he can’t remember then I won’t say. But he was one of those who worked on the highway crew, before this happened to him. I’ll tell you that much. Now get going.”

Oliver frowned. He had justice on his mind, but he didn’t know where it should fall. The highway hurt the lake, and the lake hurt the highway. He wasn’t sure whose fault this was.

He would have to investigate further.

“Bye,” he said. Louisa waved goodbye. The ghost went on saying the sorts of things it usually said.

Oliver walked home. He walked steady and slow, pushing the air in front of him like it was lake water.

• • • •

Dinner wasn’t ready yet. Oliver’s father kept tasting and adding things. “Just a pinch,” he said to himself. He didn’t notice that Oliver was back. “Just a simmer. Almost there.”

The news was on, but both Oliver and his father continued to ignore it. Oliver went over to the kitchen table and boxed with Bats the cat. He tried to touch the cat’s torso without getting swatted. It took a lot of duck-and-weave to accomplish this. Bats seemed to like the game, and she never drew blood when she parried, but that wasn’t self-control on her part; she had no claws.

Oliver’s father said that a declawed cat was like a human with no fingers, or at least someone who went through life without ever taking their mittens off. Oliver had worn his own mittens for three days after his father said that, to express solidarity. Then he wrote “Bats” in the back of his coloring book and set out to find those who had declawed her so that he might visit justice upon them.

He hung flyers with pictures of Bats all over the neighborhood. Was this your cat? She had walked into Oliver’s apartment one day, already a well-fed adult, and never left. Someone must have fed her before. Someone must have taken her claws.

Oliver found the former owner eventually. He was white, and tall, and he looked a little sleepy when he opened the door on a Saturday afternoon.

“Hello?” the man said.

“This used to be your cat,” said Oliver, and held up a picture.

“Yeah,” said the man. “Looks like.”

“Did you declaw her?” Oliver asked.

“Had to,” said the man. “She ruined the couch.”

Oliver fixed the man with a look, one that could take an apple off someone’s head from a hundred paces. “You have to wear these for the rest of your life,” he said. Then he handed over a pair of mittens and walked away. It didn’t even occur to him that the man would question the rightness of this order and refuse to obey.

Bats wasn’t allowed on the table, but this rule was never actually enforced. Oliver tried to touch the orange spot on her side. She swatted him away on the first two jabs, but then he faked left and tapped her with his right.

“Perfect!” Oliver’s father announced, loud enough to scare the cat down off the table. Oliver and his father finally sat down to eat. The food was good.

“Dad,” he said, “tell me more about the lake.”

“Okay,” his father said. “The water in your fishbowl overlaps with the water in the lake. It’s all the same. It’s how your goldfish swim away when it’s time to change color.”

“You’re making that up,” Oliver said.

“I am not.”

“How can Donkey and Hodey swim out of a fishbowl? It’s a bowl. It’s glass all around, and air all around the glass. It doesn’t connect to anything.”

“It does,” his father said. “It’s just that some of the water in the bowl is the same water as some of the stuff in the pond. And the ocean. And everywhere else.”

“Is that why one corner of the pond takes so much longer to freeze over? Because it’s really part of a lake that’s also somewhere else, somewhere warmer than here?”

“That’s right.”

“What about fresh water and salt water?” Oliver asked. “Some fish live in salt water. Wouldn’t it mix if it’s all the same water?”

“Hydrodynamics are tricky, I know.”

Oliver did not want to talk about hydrodynamics. He wanted to talk about the lake that was not a lake anymore. He wanted to be sure which side to blame. “Tell me about—”

Oliver stopped, because his father had stopped paying attention. He heard the news over the sound of his own chewing. He looked at the TV on the kitchen counter. He watched a news clip of a highway bridge collapsing. It happened very fast, so they kept showing the same clip.

Oliver hated that bridge, so he wasn’t actually sad to see it go.

He did not write accidents in the back of his coloring book. He did not write down the names of those who were simply unlucky, only those deliberately wronged. He had “Toyota” written down because somebody broke the windows of his aunt Bess’s car in the middle of the night, and that was the name of the car. He had “Bats” in his book, because of her claws. He had “the lake,” even though he was no longer sure that the lake was the wronged party. But he had not written his cousin Marcus in the back of his coloring book, because a patch of ice on a very tall bridge was an accident. It was just unlucky. Everybody said so. But everyone in Oliver’s whole wide family still avoided crossing that bridge, so Oliver wasn’t sorry to see it collapse.

People on the TV talked about ice getting into seams and cracks, expanding. “Ice,” Oliver said. “Again.” He watched the bridge hit the river below in the same repeated clip.

Maybe the river took down the bridge as vengeance for what the highway did to the lake.

“Is all water really the same? On the same side?”

His father looked at him sideways. “Why talk about sides?” he asked, suspicious.

“Because the water hates the road,” Oliver said. “And the road hates the water.”

His father got up and stacked dishes. “If there’s an old feud going between them, it’s no business of ours.”

“What’s a feud?” Oliver asked.

“A feud is a war on a slow simmer. It’s two sides looking for the wrong kind of justice.” His father’s tone meant that he did not want to discuss this topic any further, not at all. That tone never actually worked, not with Oliver. He saw the bridge hit the river, again, right before his father turned the TV off.

“That’s not a slow simmer,” Oliver said. “It took down the whole bridge. And it is our business because Marcus slipped off that bridge. Was it the road’s fault, or the water’s fault? We have to know.”

Oliver’s father turned away from the sink and gave him a long look. Oliver expected him to say some infuriating, dismissive thing, like he always did whenever Oliver took his leg-pulling too seriously—which was often.

“There is no right or wrong in a feud,” he said instead. “That’s why we’re not in it. That’s why we don’t choose sides. Don’t you go choosing sides.”

This was intolerable. Oliver needed to know who to blame. He said so, several times, but his father washed dishes and refused to answer.

Oliver stormed into his room, took his coloring book out from inside his pillowcase, and stood poised with a crayon hovering over the back page.

He didn’t know what to do. It didn’t feel right to put the highway or the bridge on the same page as the lake. It didn’t feel right to cross out the lake. He wasn’t sure whether or not to add Marcus, whether or not he could blame that death on water itself.

He put the book away without writing anything.

Oliver did not sleep well that night. He could feel the edges of his coloring book through the pillowcase.

• • • •

The next day Oliver still had justice on his mind. He went down to the park, down the switchbacking sidewalk path, which was made out of concrete and was therefore a kind of road. He circled the pond at the bottom and stared at it. Was it wronged, or had it done wrong?

He picked up trash as he went by. Littering was wrong, but he could fix it by gathering it up and throwing it away. He could almost fix it. Picking up trash helped keep the park clean, but it did not bring justice to litterers, so it wasn’t satisfying.

“I’ve seen the wind blow so hard it blew a cookpot inside out,” the ghost said when Oliver came near. Louisa waved hello from her favorite bench.

Oliver marched up and demanded to know about the war between the water and the road. She gave him a long look. One did not demand anything of old Louisa.

“Did your father tell you this?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Oliver. “Sort of.”

“Your father is a legendary bullshitter. Pay him no attention.”

The ghost spoke up. “Seen the wind blow so hard it blew a crooked road straight and a straight road crooked.”

Oliver would not be deterred, but Louisa would not speak of it further. A clash of wills built up between them—and then rain broke it apart.

Louisa turned her glare on the sky. “It wasn’t supposed to rain today,” she complained, “and here I am without my hat. This breaks the rules. They’re breaking all the rules.”

“Cold!” said the ghost in a muted shout. “Cold as witch tits! Cold as iron!” The ghost railed against the sky. Rain scattered the substance of its limbs as it waved both arms around.

A mist came down with the rain, and froze on impact wherever it touched. Louisa tried to stand up, slipped on the newly icy sidewalk, and landed back on her bench.

“No good,” she said. “Not hardly any good. I’ll break both my hips again, trying to get home.”

“I’ll help,” Oliver told her, his ire forgotten. Something needed doing, and he was there to see it done.

“Might work,” said Louisa. “Come here, let me lean on you. We’ll keep to the grass, away from the sidewalk. Away from the road. That’s where they’ll fight hardest.”

She leaned on him as they trudged up the steep, grassy slope. Frozen grass blades crackled underfoot. Oliver stuffed a handful of gathered trash in his coat pocket—a pink plastic lighter, a candy wrapper, and a greasy napkin that smelled like French fries.

“Supposed to be a truce,” Louisa muttered. “Supposed to be a cease-fire these days, but first the bridge goes down and now we get bombarded. This will put potholes in the road like impact craters. This is full-on ugly. There was supposed to be a truce.”

“Who called the truce?” Oliver asked. A truce wasn’t justice. It was not satisfying. But if it ended a feud then maybe it was something close.

Louisa didn’t answer for a good long while. Oliver was about to ask again, and again, however many times it took, when she finally spoke.

“Your father,” she said, “after that sad business with your cousin. Handsome boy, that one. Your father stepped out, straight from the funeral, and he brokered a truce. A bullshitter can be a decent diplomat. He’d be furious at me if he ever found out I told you, so hush just as best as you know how.”

Her apartment building stood on the opposite side of the park from Oliver’s home. They made it to the top of the hill, where they stood and looked across a long stretch of street. Cars parked by the side of the road were already frosted over, every inch of them encased.

Old Louisa looked down at the slick road surface. She ran one hand through her hair, breaking up a layer of accumulated ice. “Nothing for it but to try,” she said.

Oliver remembered some of the rules of war. He had a very good memory for rules. A medic could walk through battlefields unscathed. A medic could tend to the wounded. Both sides were supposed to honor that.

“Medic!” he yelled at the road.

Louisa jumped, startled. “Don’t you have a pair of lungs,” she said.

They inched across the road while ice fell from the sky and built up in layers underfoot. Oliver escorted Louisa onto the sidewalk, up to her steps, and safely underneath the awning at her own front door.

“Thank you,” she said. “Very much. You’d best come in and drink something warm before you try to brave it back home.” Oliver shook his head and gave her a crisp salute. He had practiced his salute for Halloween. Then he turned and made his way back across the road.

“You come back here!” Louisa called after him. “It isn’t safe!” But he didn’t come back, and she went muttering inside. He should have gone in with her. He should have circled around the park rather than cutting straight through. But he didn’t. The ice stood thick on every surface. The hillside all around the park made excellent sledding hills. Oliver slipped, and slid all the way down.

Oliver moved in a world without friction. The pond moved toward him like someone had thrown it. Then he caught hold of Louisa’s favorite bench before his momentum threw him out over the paper-thin ice. He got to his feet. He fell again, a hard fall, a hammer blow against the ground. His ankle twisted.

He lay there awhile with his eyes closed. He heard blood going about its own business inside him. He also heard the strain, the struggle, and the screaming as crystalline water pried bits of gravel apart. He had his ear to the ground over ice-covered sidewalk, where the fighting was thick. He lay there and listened to the war. It surrounded him. The cold violence of it would claim his fingers, his ears, and the tip of his nose if he stayed there—whether or not he chose sides.

• • • •

He had once watched his father break up a hallway fight between Bats and another apartment cat.

“Who started it?” Oliver had asked at the time.

“Doesn’t matter,” his father had said. He held spitting Bats over his head and kept the other cat back with one foot. He wasn’t wearing shoes. The other cat wrestled with the foot and stuck claws through the sock. Oliver’s father winced, but he kept at it.

“Who started it?” Oliver asked again. It mattered. It was the only thing that mattered.

“They’re both in it,” his father said. “They’re both in, and we want them both out of it. First thing to do is separate them, give them a chance to catch their breath.” He sucked in his own breath when teeth found his toe. “This was a stupid way to do it, though,” he admitted. “Run fetch me a blanket.”

Oliver ran for a blanket. His father dropped Bats. The two cats lunged for each other. Then Oliver’s dad tossed the blanket over both. They yowled, surprised, and fought with the blanket rather than each other. The two cats fought their way out. The blanket lay still, defeated. Bats smacked the inert fabric once more, for good measure, and then both cats marched off to their respective apartment doors.

Oliver glared at the neighboring cat, certain that it had started the uneven fight—it had claws, and Bats didn’t. He wanted to prove it. He wanted to punish it. He wanted to bring justice down upon it.

His father saw and recognized the look on his face. “Doesn’t matter. Let it go. They were in it. Now they’re out.”

But it still mattered. Oliver didn’t know how to let it go. But he also had no evidence, no real knowledge of which cat started the fight, so he was forced to leave the incident out of his coloring book.

• • • •

Oliver wondered about the ghost. He should have been able to hear it shouting from where he lay on the ground, on the ice, at the bottom of a lake that wasn’t there anymore. He felt the heaviness of the water that used to be there pressing down on him. He wondered what would happen if it suddenly came back, all of it pouring down over the sides of the park in a surrounding waterfall. He wondered if he could swim to the top in time, or if he’d be stuck right where he was, looking up at the sky through four fathoms of lake water and trying to remember how fish are supposed to breathe.

He tried to open his eyes, but the eyelashes had frozen together. He pinched his lashes between fingertips to melt the ice, and then looked for the ghost. It stood frozen, the smoke of it roiling and agitated under a vaguely person-shaped coating of ice.

“You worked on the road and drowned in the water,” Oliver said to the ghost. “Tell me which one is wrong. Tell me which one is wronged.”

The ghost remained stuck in the cold that was all it ever talked about. So cold. Oliver wanted to do something for it, something warm, something hot and blazing. He wanted to set fire to the pond, to burn away the ice around the ghost, to make it stop wailing about the cold. In that moment, he didn’t care who had hurt the ghost, or why it died, or whether or not it was an accident. In that moment it no longer mattered. The ghost was cold. It needed to get warm.

Oliver found a rock, got to his knees, and tried to get to his feet before stumbling back to his knees. Then he threw it, hard. The ice broke around the ghost. The smoke of it rolled, sputtered, and raged.

“Cold!” it yelled out once it could yell, but the yelling still sounded like a whisper.

Oliver found a stick. He dug the trash out of his pocket and wrapped the greasy napkin around the end of the stick. Then he used the pink plastic lighter to light up the napkin. It took awhile. There wasn’t much fluid left, but there was a bit. The little torch blazed. It smelled like French fries.

He threw the little torch at the ghost. The ghost caught fire. The smoke of it burned blue like a gas stove. It soaked up the warmth and burned itself out. The ashes of it swirled through the air as though the air were water, way down at the bottom of a lake. Then the ghost-ashes seemed to notice that the air was air and no longer water. They drifted down, settling on the pond ice, melting the ice where they fell.

The rain stopped, just as surprised as Oliver to learn that ghost smoke was flammable.

Oliver took advantage of the pause in hostilities and put his hand to the sidewalk pavement. “Everybody just take a step back,” he said. “I call a truce.” He said it like he meant it, like he knew the water and the road would listen and do as he said.

He got up and stumbled across the crunching, frozen grass. He made it around the pond, across the park, and as far as the foot of the opposite slope. He sat back and stared at the hill, his favorite sledding hill. In his calm estimation, he knew it would be impossible to climb, so he started screaming. “Medic!”

He kept shouting. His father finally came.

“Your dinner’s getting cold,” Oliver’s dad called down from the top of the hill.

Oliver laughed. He rarely laughed, but now he couldn’t stop laughing. “Cold as iron!” he tried to say, since the ghost wasn’t there to say it.

“Just hold on,” his father told him. He went away, and came back with a sled tied to a length of clothesline. Oliver’s father believed in clothesline, and not the clothes dryer, even in weather like this when he had to string wet wash across the hallway and the living room. The dryer agreed with this belief, because it was broken. They never got rid of it, though. Bats loved to sleep inside the broken dryer.

Oliver climbed aboard and went sledding, slow and in reverse. His father hauled him up, picked him up, and carried him home. Oliver held the line, and the empty sled followed behind them. Ice shattered under his father’s feet where Oliver would only slide over the surface. The ice respected his father, or else it was afraid of him, or else it respected his office as a medic and a diplomat.

“They agreed to another truce,” Oliver said.

“Good,” his father said. “Just make sure you don’t choose sides. Can’t stand back and call a truce once you’re in it.”

Once home he put Oliver in the bath, and then in bed. He tied a towel filled with ice cubes around Oliver’s swollen ankle. Oliver kept his leg fully extended, kept his eye on the towel, and reminded the ice cubes about the truce.

On the last page of his pirate coloring book he wrote “road” beside “lake” and drew a square around both, cutting them off from the rest of the list and each other. It wasn’t justice. It was something else, but it would have to do for now.

He still felt the edges of the coloring book through his pillowcase, but this time it helped him sleep to feel it there.

©2014 by William Alexander. Originally published in Unstuck #3. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Alexander won the National Book Award in 2012 for his first novel, Goblin Secrets, and the Earphones Award for his narration of the audiobook. His second novel, Ghoulish Song, was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. He recently published Ambassador, his third novel and first work of science fiction.

Will studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at Clarion. He currently teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

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

Every Day Is the Full Moon

Carlie St. George | 5470 words

There are things you know and things you don’t know. You find it helpful to make lists. For example:

THINGS YOU KNOW:

A Wrinkle in Time is bullshit. You don’t care if it’s Riley Chu’s favorite childhood book, because she also identifies with Holden Caulfield, and thinks spiders are adorable. Riley’s opinions are not to be trusted.

Cafeteria food is the worst. The hamburgers taste like dog meat. You’re better off bringing food from home, or developing anorexia.

You tried becoming anorexic once because you wanted more visibly unhealthy coping mechanisms. It didn’t take.

Your father is a werewolf, but mostly he’s just an asshole.

• • • •

“It’s the night before the full moon,” your mother says. “You know how he gets.”

Your mother is a Valkyrie. Her wings are glorious, golden and impossibly large. She flies into battle, wars all over the world, and carries the valorous dead to their own particular Valhallas, bringing the same passion to the battlefield that she brings to everything in her life: teaching you to cook, watching UFC, vanquishing garden gnomes.

You want to be just like your mother when you grow up. And you don’t want to be anything like her at all.

“Just a few more days,” she says, as your father, howling, throws an entire bookcase across the room. “Just try not to upset him, okay? It’ll all be over soon.”

THINGS YOU KNOW:

It will not all be over soon.

• • • •

School, the next day. Riley has bravely sought out lunch in the cafeteria; you and Lea, less foolish, are hanging out in the quad. Lea is short and black and gay and pretty, basically the polar opposite of you, and sometimes, when you’re feeling petty, you tell yourself that at least you have bigger boobs and a better vocabulary. Unfortunately, she’s winning in math, science, PE, dating, functional family dynamics, and general popularity, not that it’s a competition or anything. Also, she’s a faerie, which you both figured out last summer when you woke up with her newly grown green wings digging into your back.

You hate that you’re jealous of your best friend, that you’ve always been jealous, even before she became something. Sometimes, it seems like you’re the only senior left who hasn’t become anything, and maybe aren’t going to.

“Come over after school?” Lea asks, stealing a handful of your chocolate muffin. “You can explain that sonnet to me, and we can all get ready for the dance.”

“Yeah. About that—”

“Nope,” Lea says. “You’re not doing this to me again, B. We bought dresses. We bought tickets. We’re going to the dance.”

“I’m just not—”

“You’ll feel it,” Lea says, a little grimly. “When you’re at the dance.”

Apparently, you’re going to the dance.

At least Lea doesn’t ask to get ready at your house. She knows you, why you never want to invite anyone home.

THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW:

Why Lea wants you at the dance at all, since she’ll probably just make out with Riley the whole time.

How to walk in high heels without falling on your face.

What you want to become, when you finally, hopefully, become something. Not a werewolf, obviously, and not a faerie, either—you’d only be the mammoth faerie standing by Lea’s side. You’ve always wanted to travel, though, or at least, you wanted to leave. Maybe you could become something with wings to carry you far from home, although Mom’s wings always carry her back there, in the end. You do love to walk. Sometimes you daydream about walking out for good, taking to the open road and following it until it ends in ocean . . . and then, maybe, just walking a little further.

If having suicide fantasies means you ought to talk to someone, or just that you’re a teenager and you’ve probably watched Point Break too many times.

• • • •

Despite yourself, you’re having fun at the dance, especially since you tossed your size twelves into the community shoe pile. It’s comforting that even girls with tinkling laughs and delicate bone structures can’t dance in those things forever.

Riley has a delicate bone structure but doesn’t exactly tinkle. She’s wearing combat boots with a black tulle dress and eyeliner as thick as your wrist, and she’s not exactly gentle when she forcibly pulls you away from your very comfortable, very non-judgmental wall. “I had a vision of you dancing with me,” Riley says matter-of-factly, like that isn’t the biggest line of bullshit you’ve ever heard, like oracles can just go around predicting their own future. “Can’t fight fate, right?”

“Guess not,” you say dryly, although secretly you wonder. You find fate a depressing concept, the very opposite of freedom. What if it leads you nowhere at all? What if there really is no escape?

Your maudlin must be showing, because Riley’s expression softens, her default “fight me” eyebrow slowly sinking away. “Come on, bitch,” she says gently. “Dance with me, okay?”

You do. It’s silly and a little awkward—you both keep trying to lead—but it also makes you laugh, especially when she tries to dip you and you both end up nearly falling to the floor. “We are not the most graceful people,” you say, giggling, as you eventually right yourself.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Riley says. “I’m graceful like a motherfucker.”

“Are motherfuckers especially graceful?”

“Yes,” Riley says, just to be contrary.

Lea comes back from the bathroom just as Riley goes to grab a soda, threatening a three-way slow dance upon her return that will clearly only end in disaster. Only she doesn’t return, so Lea goes after her while you head back to your wall. When Lea doesn’t come back either, you’re pretty sure they ended up in the backseat of her car. You never got the appeal of car sex. Maybe if you were a short shit like Lea, but you tower over the boys in your class, and not in a gorgeous model way, but like an extra in a Thor movie. It’s one of the reasons you hate dances: It’s impossible to find anything in your size. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” a perky store clerk once asked. “Schools are much more progressive these days. Everyone likes Modern Family, right?”

You never know what to say, when people assume you’re a lesbian or trans. Riley always knows; she just can’t turn her mouth off, which means she ends up threatening to cut a bitch, a habit that’s gotten her into plenty of trouble. Lea, less aggressive, usually just buys ice cream.

They’re good friends, even if they occasionally abandon you for gushy romantic talk and girl sex. You tell yourself that as you stand against your wall, trying to resist indulging in stupid daydreams, like looking up and meeting eyes with some kind, mysterious new student across the room.

Hating yourself, you look across the room anyway, and you do meet someone’s eyes: Lea.

Something’s wrong.

Lea, like most faeries, loves glamour, is always trying to master her control of it. She has the minor changes down, but the more she tries to hide, the more the air around her shimmers, like a mirage. The air around her now is gold, and rippling like pond water. Her brown eyes are wide and panicked.

You’re crossing the room before you realize you left your shoes and purse behind. “What—”

“Not here,” Lea says, and drags you away, out of the gym. Her hand is cold and wet.

She pulls you to the baseball field, far away from anyone. There’s no light out here save the moon, and your bare feet are freezing. “Seriously,” you say, walking by third base. “Lea, you’re kind of freaking me—”

You stop. She lets go of your hand.

The dugout is encircled in salt. Riley paces back and forth inside, hissing words you can’t understand. There’s a smear of red across her mouth. Her eyes are red, too.

Riley is an oracle. This isn’t Riley. This is something wearing Riley, something hiding between her skin and bones.

You look at Lea, and she’s no longer shimmering. Her fluffy, white ballerina dress is torn and covered in too much blood. It’s on her shoes and knees and hands.

There’s blood on your hand too.

THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW:

Whose blood is on your hand?

How the hell did Riley get possessed buying a soda?

What the fuck does Lea think you can do about it?

• • • •

“Jesus, Lea, are you okay? We need to get you—you need a hospital, you—“

“I’m okay,” Lea says, and she doesn’t sound hurt, despite all evidence to the contrary. “It’s not me, not mine.”

“But who—” You jump when Riley slams her hands into the metal fence. “We have to call the cops,” you say. “We have—”

“We can’t.”

“They’ve got people for this,” you insist, because they must. Mrs. MacReady who ran the deli got possessed, what, four years ago? She killed her baby, and her husband called 911, and somehow they were able to pull the demon out. Your second grade teacher got possessed, too, but better not bring that up. He didn’t survive the exorcism.

Riley will, though. Riley’s strong: she takes kickboxing classes, and can actually do a pull-up, and was the only one on the aquarium field trip who ate at Teddy’s Tex-Mex and didn’t suffer brutal food poisoning. Once you go to the cops—

“We can’t,” Lea says again, and drags you to the bleachers. There’s a body underneath, although it doesn’t really look like a person anymore. It looks like . . . laundry, a big pile of it, red and shapeless and soaking wet. Your brain doesn’t want to see it, keeps trying to puzzle it out: Who would leave all these rags here? Why do they smell so bad?

You blink, and the rags give way to flesh, piles and piles of discarded meat. There’s no frame, no bones. Where—where are the bones?

“It’s Carter,” Lea says, and you stare at her.

“How can you—”

“The necklace.”

You turn back and spot the dark cross in the middle of human goop. There’s only one person in the whole school who wears such a large and laughably inaccurate statement of abstinence: Carter Laughton. You’ve never liked Carter; he’s rich and wears endless sweater vests and actually thinks student council is important, but. Jesus. Nobody deserves this.

Carter and Riley used to date, way back in freshman year, some kind of weird, opposites attract thing. It ended when Riley caught Carter making out with some cheerleader and promptly set his backpack on fire. But that was ages ago, and anyway, it’s obvious that Riley’s possessed. The cops can’t arrest her, not when she wasn’t in control—

“Don’t you remember Mrs. MacReady?” Lea asks.

“Yeah. And they exorcised her—”

“No, after.”

After. Yes, you remember after. But that’s not—

“Lea!” a voice singsongs. Riley, obviously, but her voice is wrong, uncharacteristically high-pitched. “I’m waaaiting!”

Lea inhales and brushes past you, and you really don’t want to follow. You just want to go home, and when have you ever wanted that before? But you don’t have a choice. You’ve been friends with Riley for three years, ever since she let you cheat on a math test you forgot to study for. And Lea, Lea’s been your best friend since you were six and playing monsters at recess. She’d wanted to become a centaur then, and you did, too, because you wanted whatever Lea wanted.

There’s no choice but to follow.

THINGS YOU KNOW:

Nobody pressed charges against Mrs. MacReady, but the whole town turned against her. “Not my child,” people said, refusing to sell her food, stamps, gasoline. “I’d have fought harder, if it’d been my child.” Even your asshole werewolf father said this, and the thing is, he meant it.

Mrs. MacReady drowned in her bathtub after swallowing an entire bottle of expired Vicodin. No note. None needed.

You don’t want Riley to die.

You don’t want Lea to die.

You don’t want to die.

This isn’t going to end well for anybody.

• • • •

Riley’s eyes are still red, but you wouldn’t be fooled even if they were brown; nothing sane, nothing human, smiles like that. Her blood-spattered skin seems pale in the moonlight, and there’s some kind of white dust on her mouth and fingers. “B, you made it!”

“Riley,” you say, which is a mistake. This isn’t Riley. “What do you want?”

“Oh,” Riley says. “Destruction, dismemberment.” She grins wider, and you see some of her teeth are cracked. “Bones.”

You think about the pile of red laundry that used to be Carter, the white dust around Riley’s mouth, and suppose you can add one more bullet point to the Things You Know.

Riley laughs, like she knows what you’re thinking. Probably does. Lea teases you about your lists, but Riley never has, and you figure it’s not a coincidence that you guys never hang out at her house, either. “Oh, B. Always trying to classify things, keep them in order. Make sense of this senseless world.” She shakes her head. “Tonight must suck for you.”

“Riley,” Lea says, stepping closer. “I know you’re in there somewhere—”

“Oh, are we at this part already?” Riley claps her hands and leans forward, eyes trailing up and down Lea’s thin arms, her slim shoulders. Her prominent, exposed collarbone.

“Riley, it doesn’t matter what you did,” Lea says. Her voice is unsteady, her green wings fluttering uselessly behind her. “I know you didn’t mean to. I know, and I love you. You can defeat this, Riley. You—”

“Wow,” Riley says. “That was terrible. You’ll have to try harder than that, if you wanna save Riley through the Power of Love.” She turns to you, now eyeing your limbs, your big Norse bones. “B, I know you didn’t sign off on this plan. A Wrinkle in Time is bullshit, remember?”

You’re shaking, and it’s not just the cold autumn night or your bare feet in the damp grass. “Stop it.”

“Why? I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Love can’t save anyone in real life, remember? Love is the thing that keeps you prisoner. Love is the thing that breaks your bones. Love, and the light of the moon.” Riley looks up at the sky. “How long has she been trying to save him with love, B? Only thing she needs is a silver bullet. You must have imagined it, shooting him. You’d be free. Don’t you want to be free?”

You have, and you do. But he’s still your father, even if he’s an asshole, even if he’s why your amazing, battle maiden mother is always apologizing or why you had to find a dress with long sleeves. He’s your father, and your mother isn’t the only one who loves him, because sometimes he loves you, too, because not every day is the full moon.

Freedom isn’t a silver bullet. Freedom isn’t even wings. Freedom is your feet, and the welcoming blue of the cold, patient sea.

But you don’t want to die right now, not at the hands of your friend and in a stupid dress that makes you look like a giant blueberry.

“We have to call 911. We can’t fix this, Lea.”

Lea shakes her head. “They’ll—she’ll—”

“Die,” Riley says happily. “You know how many hosts die during exorcisms? It’s pretty ugly, B. You should look at the statistics. Even if Riley did survive, let’s face it: She’s not exactly a good girl. All this black, all these piercings. The fights, the mouthing off, the backpack incident. Be honest: Didn’t she all but invite me in?”

“Riley didn’t—”

“Are you sure? She gets so mad sometimes, doesn’t she? It’s delicious, her fury. She wanted to become something powerful, some kind of avenger, and instead she can only wait for what’s to come. Funny she didn’t predict this. Funny she didn’t do anything to stop it.”

“That’s not how being an oracle works,” you say, angry at yourself for arguing, and arguing anyway.

“Convenient,” Riley says, grinning. “You think anyone will buy that? People only know what they want to know, and it’ll comfort them, believing that this only happens to other people, weak people, people who ask for it—”

“Riley didn’t ask for it,” Lea says. Her voice is steadier now. “Riley isn’t weak. You’re not, Riley. You’ve never been. You fight everything: jocks, internet trolls, sanctimonious calorie counters and gluten haters. You can fight this, too; I know you can. You can knock this asshole demon into next week.”

“Now, Lea. Haven’t we already—”

But Lea doesn’t stop. “Fight your way free,” she says, “and come back to me, cause we’re gonna have the most awesome life. We’re going to graduate and go to college and skinny dip our way through the Great Lakes. You’ll major in depressing poetry and write creepy kids books, and I’ll dance for Beyoncé; I’ll dance on Broadway. You’ll wear black at the wedding, just to piss off your mom, and we’ll get married under the stars. And someday, when we’re ready, we’ll adopt cute Blasian babies: three of them, and we’ll name them after your grandmother and my grandmother and Hermione Granger.”

Riley’s face twists, her fingers tightening on the chain link fence. Her eyes melt from red to dark brown to red again. “I don’t, I can’t—”

“You can,” Lea says. She’s crying, and Riley’s crying, and you’re crying, too, uselessly in the background. “You can.”

“Lea, I—”

“See that future, Riley, and cut a bitch to make it happen, because I love you. I love you.”

The red bleeds out of Riley’s eyes. “I love you, too,” she says, and then her whole body is thrown across the dugout, back and forth, slamming into the fence. She screams, or roars; it’s wordless defiance, hanging in the air, before she collapses on the ground.

For a long moment, no one moves.

Then Lea reaches forward, and her knee breaks the line of salt. You open your mouth, but Riley’s already lifting her head, and you freeze. Hold your breath.

Her eyes are brown.

“Riley?”

Riley shudders. “You bet your sweet, fairy ass.” Her voice is thick with tears, robbed of her usual sass, but Lea laughs anyway, hugging Riley for all her worth.

You release your breath and walk forward, trying to stop shaking, trying to think. It’s over. It’s over.

In the distance, somebody screams. Who—

“You know,” Riley says, suddenly clear. “I’ve never had fairy bones before. What do you taste like, I wonder?”

She lifts her head, and her eyes are still brown, but she’s smiling, and Oh Christ—

Lea tries to scramble back, but Riley has too good a grip on her wing, twisting it backward until there’s a sharp, cracking sound. Lea screams, and you’re there, pulling her away. “Run!“ you yell, and then you’re punched so hard you feel like there’s a hole in your chest.

You look down. Lea gasps. Riley withdraws her hand.

“Oh,” you try to say, but can’t, because there’s an actual hole in your chest.

THINGS YOU KNOW:

You’re lying flat on your back, staring up at the sky. You don’t remember falling, but there you are, listening to sirens, facing the moon. The sirens are strange because you never called 911, but the moon, the moon you understand. You always figured you’d die on the full moon.

No. You never really thought you’d die at all.

People shouldn’t die on baseball fields. They shouldn’t die in bare feet, or before they finish their homework, or graduate, or see France, or live.

There’s too much blood outside you. Was it really all inside you once? You don’t know how. You don’t know. That belongs on another list, but everything’s muddling together now, blending, blurring. Maybe your lists are bleeding, too.

You’re cold. You’re cold. You’re

• • • •

There’s no moon, when you wake up. There’s no light at all, actually, but you’re still on your back; you don’t know where. You can’t see a thing.

You feel around, try not to panic. There are walls at both sides, enclosing you. You can’t even sit up because you hit your head on something. A ceiling. A very low ceiling. A lid.

The last thing you remember, you were dying.

Shit.

THINGS YOU KNOW:

You’re in a coffin.

Either you were prematurely buried (unlikely), or you finally became something after all.

• • • •

Turns out, you’re a revenant. Exactly what kind, you’re not sure. No craving for brains, so not a zombie. No craving for blood, so not a vampire. It turns out you don’t need to eat at all, actually, although you still do because old habits die hard. Probably why you make yourself breathe, too, anytime you catch your body forgetting to bother.

You died last week. Three days ago, you rose from your grave, breaking through your coffin and climbing through six feet of wet earth. Your parents took the news pretty well, all things considered. Your father even wept, squeezing you tight and crying into your muddy, blonde hair. This morning he made your favorite: chocolate chip pancakes. You keep catching yourself thinking, Maybe it’ll be better, now that he’s buried a child. Maybe he’ll raise his fist and remember.

Hope is the worst. It’s what’s been breaking your mother’s heart for years, but a week ago you were dead. How can you turn your back on miracles now?

Turns out, you’re the only one who feels this way.

THINGS YOU KNOW:

Kat Lopez is the Sheriff’s daughter, and also a banshee. On their way to the dance, her girlfriend rear-ended another car because Kat freaked her out by suddenly screaming. She called the Sheriff, who put his deputies on alert, and ended up giving the couple a ride. Kat had barely gotten out of the car when she screamed again, this time for you.

The Sheriff is the one who managed to stop the demon from eating your bones. He also saved Lea, and captured Riley alive. You should probably get him a card or something.

There aren’t nearly enough state sanctioned exorcists for how many demonic possessions occur per state. Riley could be waiting weeks for her exorcism, if it works at all. The demon was telling the truth: The stats are ugly.

It was also telling the truth about people: They only know what they want to know.

• • • •

Your mom eventually lets you leave the house, although she insists you take one of her swords. You end up wearing a trench coat to hide it. You’re not sure if it’s illegal for underage revenants to carry swords around town, but it sounds illegal.

You walk to Lea’s and endure hugs from her parents, grandparents, and brothers before finally escaping. Lea’s on her bed, staring blankly at photo albums, wearing the Tinkerbell pajamas you bought for her becoming gift. The air around her shimmers gold. You don’t call her on it.

“I got you something,” Lea says. She can’t meet your eyes, and that scares you for some reason. “I didn’t think you’d have a becoming party, but. Call it a Happy Resurrection gift. A Sorry My Girlfriend Killed You gift. A Sorry I Was Stupid And Got You Killed gift.”

You don’t know what to say to that, so you just open the bag. It’s Night of the Living Dead pajamas.

“Inaccurate,” you tell her, “but totally awesome.”

You end up staying the night. Eventually, Lea lets the glamour fade, and you see the heavy bags under her eyes, the black bruises on her brown skin and her broken left wing, healing in a cast. You sign your full name in tiny, red letters.

“Are they letting you see her?” you ask, stealing a spoonful of Ben & Jerry’s. Lea doesn’t look up, and it takes you a minute to realize why. “But . . . after the exorcism, you’ll see her then, right?”

“She killed you.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“She killed you. You were dead, B. You came back, but—”

“The demon killed me,” you say. “That wasn’t Riley. You know that.”

Lea stabs her ice cream, eyes distant. “I know Riley didn’t invite it in, not on purpose. But . . . people can fight them off. I read some survivors’ accounts, and you just have to want it enough. You just have to fight hard, and . . . she didn’t love me enough, B. She didn’t love us enough to save us.”

Lea finally looks up, eyes dark and jaw set, and you want to say something; you want so hard to say something because you know, you know she’s wrong, but all the words are jumbled up inside you. Your body feels heavy under their weight.

“Riley killed my best friend,” Lea says, “and I can’t forgive her for that. Not ever.”

In the end, you don’t say anything; you just lie by her side, silently watching Disney movies until she falls asleep, because that’s what she needs from you. You never fall asleep, though. You haven’t slept since you died. In the morning, you go home, and make breakfast for yourself. You accidentally leave a syrup smear on the counter, and your father, already stewing for one reason or another, brushes up against it. He howls, rips off the stained shirt, and backhands you across the face.

It doesn’t hurt, not really. Not your face, anyway.

THINGS YOU KNOW:

What your mother will say later: “It was my fault, arguing last night.” Or: “He’s just been so stressed, with everything that’s happened.” Or: “It’s the werewolf in him, honey. Don’t ever forget he loves you.” Or: “You deserve so much more than me. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

The full moon is still weeks away.

Your father is a werewolf, but mostly he’s just an asshole because the Sheriff is also a werewolf, and Kat Lopez never comes to school in long sleeves.

Every day is the full moon, or has the potential to be.

THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW:

If you can’t sleep, or just don’t need to, if the dead can walk and talk but never dream.

How to convince Lea that she’s wrong, that everyone’s wrong about Riley.

How to save Riley if love isn’t enough.

THINGS YOU HOPE:

Maybe, just maybe, it is.

• • • •

Sheriff Lopez isn’t happy to see you or your trench coat, though he does say thank you for the card. He makes you repeat the visitation rules at least twenty times. “I know you want to save your friend,” he says, “but that may not be possible.”

You know that. You also know there’s more than one way to save somebody.

The demon wearing Riley is sitting cross-legged on the floor. It claps her hands while you sit down across from them, salt and iron between you. “They told me you came back,” the demon says, “but brava, B. Look at you, all grown up. A monster, just like the rest of us.”

“Hey, Riley.”

“Still have that little love tap we gave you?”

You do. The hole is just above your boobs, stuffed with cotton and taped shut, effectively making you an undead teddy bear. Riley would think that was hilarious. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

The demon raises Riley’s eyebrow. “I kill you, and you apologize for it? Apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

That stings, but you ignore it. “That night on the field, I was talking to the demon instead of you. I shouldn’t have done that, Riley, should never have called it your name. I’m only going to talk to you now, okay?”

“Sounds like a pretty one-sided conversation.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I know you probably won’t be able to talk back, and that’s okay. You can still hear me, and I need to say some things, things that other people should be saying, that Lea doesn’t know and maybe you don’t know, but that I know.”

The demon snorts. “You’re going to read me your list?”

“Yeah,” you say. “This is my list, Ri.”

THINGS I KNOW:

You can’t make a person do whatever you want just because you love them. And a person can’t do whatever you want just because they love you. Love isn’t magic, and it isn’t big speeches or swelling music or miracles, either. Love is constancy, dependability. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

Love isn’t always healthy. Sometimes, love is broken bones. Sometimes, it’s not worth fighting for. But you can’t decide that for other people. You can only be ready when they decide it for themselves.

You didn’t ask for this, Riley. You don’t deserve what’s happened to you. It doesn’t matter how many fights you’ve been in or how you dress. That’s a lie they tell, that they have a type, that the people imprisoned are responsible for their imprisonment. Monsters can happen to anyone. You have nothing to apologize for.

You’re scared, you’re hurt, and you’re lonely. Maybe you’re still fighting, and just can’t get free, or maybe you think the best thing you can do is appease it, try not to make it angrier. I wish I had the answers for you, but I don’t. I can’t exorcise you, Ri.

This is what I can do: I can sit here and remind you that you’re not the monster, you’re not the demon, you’re not the asshole, or the creature of the moon. I’m just going to sit here and keep reminding you until you’re ready to hear it, until you can come out and tell me you understand. ’Cause I’m scared, Riley. I think Mrs. MacReady must have forgotten who the real monster was, and my teacher, I don’t know if he knew; I think maybe he just didn’t want to survive the exorcism. Sometimes my mom says I’d be better off without her, and it scares me so much, I think . . . I just don’t want to lose you. I refuse to lose you.

You’re my friend, Riley. I love you, and you sure as hell are worth fighting for.

• • • •

You talk to Riley for about an hour before going home to pack. The demon taunts you, of course, laughs at you for thinking you can help at all, and maybe you can’t, but love is about the trying, not the results. You’ll go back tomorrow.

Your mom looks at the red mark on your cheek and hugs you. “This is my fault,” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Gently, you pull away.

“I talked to Lea’s parents. They said I could stay there. I’ve always said no before, but . . . I’m going, and. You could come with me, if you want?”

Your mother buries her face in her hands and cries.

You swallow, because you knew that would be her answer, even if you hoped otherwise. It’s okay. It hurts, but it’s okay.

Try again tomorrow.

“We’ll figure it out together,” you say, kissing your mother on the forehead. “When you’re finally ready, we’ll make it work without him.”

You don’t say goodbye to your father. Some things aren’t worth fighting for, even if you love them, even if they love you. You won’t turn your back on miracles, but sometimes enough is fucking enough.

THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW:

Will your mom ever leave your father? Will Riley survive the exorcism? Will she and Lea fix what’s broken between them?

Are you a draugr, maybe, or a different, less Nordic species of undead? You’ve been doing research on Wikipedia, since sleeping isn’t your thing anymore. You think of your grave sometimes, and shudder, overcome with dread. Is this a clue to who you are, or just a sign of PTSD?

Were you always meant to be undead, or were you supposed to become something else? Did another destiny once await you?

Would you just sink, if you walked into the ocean now? Would you sit there forever, alone at the bottom of the cold, patient sea?

THINGS YOU KNOW:

Dying sucks. It’s not freedom at all. Fuck that sea.

©2016 by Carlie St. George.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carlie St. George is a Clarion West graduate whose work has been published in Strange Horizons, The Book Smugglers, Shimmer, and other magazines. She overanalyzes pop culture tropes in her column Trope Anatomy 101, and otherwise spends her time writing snarky movie and TV reviews at her blog My Geek Blasphemy. She has not yet decided what she hopes to become.

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

Daya and Dharma

Shweta Narayan | 5400 words

Daya opens her eyes to the colors of dusk, though she smells and hears midday. Soft light picks out yellow and turquoise stones and the bright fire of Gul-Mohar flowers; but the heat is Surya at his fiercest, making all else pale before his glory.

She turns over, dazed and sluggish, listening to the distant clash of copper pots, breathing in spices cooked in coconut oil—then jerks upright. Why is she lazing in daylight hours? The Rajkumari, the princess, will be angry.

Why does her head hurt so? She puts a hand to it, feels something sticky. She brings her fingers to her face. Red. But only the Rajkumari and her fine ladies wear henna.

A sparrow hops into a patch of turquoise. His feathers turn as blue as the stones. Daya stares at him, then looks up into strips and swirls and diamonds of glowing color. Surya is almost overhead, a bright, veiled circle. The stones are not blue. The light is blue. And yellow, and red.

The sparrow hops up to Daya. Sparrows have never feared her. Perhaps they sense a kinship; she too is small and brown and plain. She wipes her fingers absently on her ghagra, looks at the stain they leave on the skirt. Blood. She must have fallen.

The sky is made of silk. Surya’s rays soften as they fall through it, taking on its brilliant colors; he holds back his fierceness in respect for the kingly cloth. Daya can imagine him running his fingers through it, as she used to when dressing the princess.

The walls of this new world are also silk, more silk than she ever thought to see. She is caged in a fortune and painted in colored light.

Her head is throbbing. She picks up a flower and twirls it. Four petals are pure red; the fifth is streaked with saffron lines, twisting like tiny rivers. Gul-Mohar. When the trees come into bloom, they seem ablaze. Like the red bird.

Daya once put a Gul-Mohar flower in her hair. The Rajkumari thought it was funny. “Look,” she told her other attendants. “A sparrow wearing peacock feathers to be beautiful!” Daya had worn the flower for its beauty, not her own, but she did not care that the other girls laughed, because she knew the princess loved her.

Daya stops twirling the flower, and looks up to keep the tears inside. There are crows squabbling in the tree above her. They do not seem to care how they look, though they were people in their last lives. She takes a breath, lets it out in a sigh, and shifts her gaze over to the peacock, who clearly does care. Her lips twitch. He is a little ridiculous, strutting around to outdo the other birds.

The peacock was presented to the Rajkumari by one of the first princes to court her, and his dance outdid that of any other bird in the palace. When he first spread out his tail feathers and swayed to music Daya could not hear, her breath caught. But the Rajkumari was not impressed, by either the gift or the prince.

She did not care for the singing fountain, either, or the ghagra woven from gold thread and embroidered with thousands of tiny pearls, or the magical flute whose music brought happiness, or the white mare with the silver mane and tail, or even the circlet carved from a single emerald. Nor did she care for the men they came with.

Every prince and king in the known lands had tried to court her, but she would have none of them. And Daya agreed, for who could be worthy of her princess?

• • • •

Then one day, the red bird came.

He flew into the women’s quarters, the size of a sparrow and the color of a Gul-Mohar bloom, bearing on his head a crest of feathers like small red leaves. At first he went unnoticed among the other wonders of the palace, but then he fluttered down in front of the Rana himself and started to sing, the song so sweet that a circle of silence grew around him.

Daya glanced up from her place at the Rajkumari’s feet. Her mistress had a little smile on her face. Priya, who was fanning her, was smiling, too. Daya sighed a little as she looked back to the bird; all was well.

The Rana himself had closed his eyes to listen; Daya did the same.

“Hear me, O great king,” she heard.

She looked around. Nothing but birdsong. She closed her eyes again, and heard, as if the bird were singing a tune to which she knew the words, “I come from the court of the Rainbow Prince, for the Rainbow Prince seeks a bride.”

Daya’s eyes came open, and she looked around. People looked bewildered, but for the Rana, whose eyes were closed, and the princess, who was glaring at the Rana. “What is it?” She snapped. He did not respond.

Daya whispered, “Close your eyes, my mistress, I think it is magic.” The Rajkumari’s hand came down on her shoulder, and Daya was pulled around. “How is it you know?”

Daya shook her head. “Accident, my mistress, nothing more. I closed my eyes simply for the pleasure, and I heard speech . . .”

The Rajkumari let go. Clumsy as always, Daya almost fell, missing several lines of the bird’s song. She closed her eyes to hear, “But this I must tell you. The Rainbow Prince will wed only a true beauty.”

The Rana replied, “He will surely find here what he seeks, for any man may see that none surpass the beauty of my only child.” He looked over at the Rajkumari, then back at the bird with a smile. “In the brightness of her eyes, in the whiteness of her face, in the poetry of her form, in the music of her movement, she is the loveliest girl ever to have graced a court.”

The Rajkumari smiled at this and asked sweetly, “But what is it my honored father in his wisdom has learned from this bird’s song?”

The Rana’s smile grew fond. “Dearest of all possible children,” he said, “I have heard of a great land, overflowing with riches, bursting with color and laughter and riches and music and joy and, and riches; ruled by one known as the Rainbow Prince. It is said—or sung, rather, by this most wondrous of messengers—that the Rainbow Prince is brave and generous, strong and noble, wise and fair—” he paused for a breath “—to look upon. He has also a court full of wonders—of which this bird is but the smallest example—and is therefore more than a mere mortal man; he seeks a bride, a beauty, and it is understandable that, that such a man would not settle for any maiden less lovely than yourself—” The Rana paused again “—and it may be perhaps that he is to your taste?”

Daya wondered how the bird had managed to say so much in so little a time. Truly his song must have been magical.

“If he is all the bird claims, O most beloved of fathers,” replied the Rajkumari, “then he is well to my taste. The bird is a fitting gift, and I shall keep it to sing to me in my chambers.”

The bird ruffled up his feathers, and the Rana looked dismayed. “Jewel of my land,” he cried, “treasure of our line, the bird is a messenger. It is known by all that messengers are inviolate.”

The Rajkumari smiled and tossed her head. “I shall have it as a treasured gift. It was surely meant as such, for it will tell me tales of my own dearest love, and how could I be other than miserable without some token of his esteem?”

At this the bird rose into the air, his tiny wings beating desperately, but a maid swung a peacock feather fan at him. It knocked him out of the air. Priya pulled her dupatta off her head and flung it over him: a shameful, immodest act before the Rana, but forgivable, in the Rajkumari’s service. Daya closed her eyes against the pitiful fluttering of the trapped bird’s wings.

The bird shrilled his words into the air. “O free me, free me, Rajkumari, someone! Have you no honor? This is unjust!”

Yet they caged him and took him away. The princess must not have heard his words.

In the evening, when Surya steered his chariot down behind the mountains, the Rajkumari retired to her chambers. Away from the men, she removed her dupatta and seated herself in front of a window. Daya unwound her glorious long hair from its braids and started to comb it. Her other attendants sat at her feet, and they had for a little while a comfortable silence. Then Priya asked the Rajkumari, “Will you take us with you, mistress, when you go to the Rainbow Prince’s court?”

The Rajkumari smiled. “I may, if you are good. I will certainly take Daya with me, for in such a court of wonders, I will need her to remind me that ordinary things exist!”

The other girls laughed.

Priya left the chamber and returned with the bird in a delicate golden cage. “Your gift, o light of my world,” she announced, and laid the cage on a table.

The Rajkumari clapped her hands together. “And is it not a handsome present? You shall also come with me, Priya. Come, bird, tell me of the Prince!”

The bird piped a brief, weak little tune. Daya leaned around the princess to see what was wrong.

He lay on the bottom of the cage, a little huddle of dull red feathers, wings bent forward, face hidden. Her breath drew sharply in. “Oh, my mistress, he is unwell,” she whispered.

The Rajkumari laughed. “Nonsense. The creature is pretending.”

Daya replied, “It does not seem so to me, Rajkumari,”

Priya cried angrily, “And who are you, who thinks herself wiser than the Rajkumari?”

The princess tossed her head. “Her name means mercy,” she said, “but it should mean stupidity. She knows nothing of subterfuge, so she believes this animal’s lie. And she has stopped combing my hair, and for that perhaps I shall leave her here when I depart for my new home.”

Ashamed, Daya drew back and continued with her task.

But later, after the Rajkumari and the other girls were asleep, she returned to the cage and watched the little red bird. He looked back with one dull black eye, not moving. His beak opened, but the sound coming out of it was little more than a wheeze. The cage was lined with feathers.

It was a fragile thing, that cage; strong enough to hold a bird, but no barrier to even a small girl. Daya grasped two bars and pulled them apart, then reached in and picked the bird up. His heart trembled against her hands. She took him out to the courtyard and set him down, aware that it was probably too late.

As the night air brushed his feathers, the bird’s head came up and he cocked it at Daya. His eyes were bright again, and he stood, then took to the air. Thrilled, Daya watched until he was lost in the branches of a flowerng tree.

His voice came to her in song more lovely than ever, and she hurriedly closed her eyes. “You are gentle, little sparrow, and kind. You will do nicely.”

Daya said, “My Rajkumari did not know how ill you were. I am sure she meant you no harm.”

The bird trilled a laugh. “Ah, did she not?”

Daya shook her head, turned, pushed aside the beaded curtain and returned indoors—

and came face to face with the Rajkumari. The birdsong had woken her.

And so it was that Daya found herself caged.

The princess was angrier than Daya had ever seen. She woke the whole palace, even the men, to give her orders.

It was done while she slept. Her people worked through the night, and they did not wake her until it was done. Those who were not sewing silk were felling trees to drive into the ground as pillars. Their work was lit by candles and lanterns. They all had bloodied hands before the night was out.

When the Rajkumari rose, she inspected the cage. Then she had Daya thrown in to be its first prisoner. Graceless as ever, Daya hit her head.

• • • •

A flap of the cage opens, a bright wedge of outside world appearing for a moment, then narrowing again to nothing.

It leaves a net inside, full of birds struggling to get free. Daya hurries over to help them before any lose tail feathers or eyes. She is slow and clumsy, her bloody fingers fumbling with the knots, and the birds scratch her as she releases them. The first few scratches are painful, but she realizes that she has earned this pain. After all, it is her fault they are trapped.

She frees them all with quickening breath, fearing the flash of red that will tell her that her little friend has been caught. Even now she hopes he will go free, though she hates the part of herself that could choose to defy the Rajkumari.

But the red bird showed her that the world could be wondrous, and she does not want to see that die. It does not occur to her, just then, to wonder how a cage would kill someone.

She releases seven crows, a bulbul, and four sparrows into captivity, then retreats to the cover of a Gul-Mohar tree and stares up into the flowers. At first, the red flowers and green leaves are yellowed by the silk above, but soon they begin to look normal. When she glances around again, everything seems too blue. She goes back to the warmth of the flowers. Their beauty is not tainted by captivity. They do not suffer.

A speck of red falls away from its branch far above. She watches as it comes closer, her eyes held by the color and movement. Then, with growing dread, she realizes that it is bigger than it should be. She tells herself it is merely a large flower. It has to be.

Just a flower.

But he unfurls wings to break his fall, flaps once, and lands in her lap, and all hope fails. She has betrayed her Rajkumari; she has given up her future; she has brought innocents into captivity with her; and all of it was futile. The red bird is caught, and now he will die.

A drop of water falls on the red bird’s head. A tear. “Oh, little friend.” She scrubs at her face. “I am sorry.”

He cocks his head at her, his eyes still bright. He could not have been here long. Then he tilts his head back, and she hurriedly closes her eyes to listen.

“Stop crying, child,” the song tells her, “I will free you.”

“Free me? It is not for myself that I fear, but for you!”

There is a pause. “But why?”

“It is you who cannot live in a cage!”

“Ah. —So it is.” His tone is embarrassed. “Though it comes to my notice that they have neglected to feed you. You cannot live in this cage either, Daya, not for long.”

She cannot deny it. But . . . “I am nobody. If you die, then with you dies your music, your magic.”

She can feel his wings flutter against her lap, an irritated movement. “Nobody? Perhaps. But I shall I make you somebody, child.”

She can feel tears leaking from her eyes again. “Even your magic cannot make me somebody.”

“You underestimate my magic.”

She shakes her head, eyes still closed. “I am not beautiful, nor graceful, nor even loyal. While I served the Rajkumari, I had a place in the world, but I lost that place along with her trust. I deserve this death. I am a traitor, and doubly a traitor in wishing, even now, that you had never been caught.”

“I let them catch me.”

“But why?” She stares at the bird for a moment before closing her eyes again. He looks no worse than he did a few minutes before. She wonders if the size of the cage helps him. “Why would you risk such a thing?”

“Did you really think those incompetents could catch me against my will? I did it for you.”

“But—why?”

“I want you to come with me. Forget your Rajkumari; I can take you away to the land of the Rainbow Prince.”

She shakes her head. “I cannot fly away, little bird. Can your magic take me away from all this? You could not even free yourself!”

“I did not choose to free myself.”

“You . . . but then I did not need to free you, to betray . . .?” She opens her eyes, and the music fades into notes. The little bird stops singing and glares up at her with one bright black eye. She closes her eyes again.

“The Rainbow Prince does not wish the powers of his realm to be generally known.”

“Then why tell me?”

“Because you’ll be coming with me.”

Daya catches her breath in fear. “And what will the Rajkumari do with me there?”

The bird laughs again. “What makes you think your petty mistress will ever hold power there?”

“Will not the bride of the Rainbow Prince hold power?”

“Certainly, but she will not be your Rajkumari. The Rainbow Prince has no use for such a girl so vain; it is mercy that his land stands in need of.”

Daya almost opens her eyes, then, in protest. “My princess is not vain!” she cries. “She is so very lovely, how could she not know her own beauty?”

“Her beauty is a shallow and fleeting thing. In five years, she will have it no longer, and her selfishness will be merely ridiculous.”

“Three times you have insulted her now. It is not so!”

“No? For her pleasure alone she has caged a messenger, her own maidservant, and hundreds of helpless birds. She has no honor.”

Daya shakes her head. His words turn everything upside down. “I don’t believe you,” she shouts. “You are wrong!”

And then she hears a familiar voice. “Who is wrong, Daya? Tell me, to whom do you speak?”

She starts, and her eyes fly open. The Rajkumari stands almost above her, just beyond the reach of overhanging branches. Branches might catch at the embroidery on her choli. She is flanked by guards, not courtly ladies at all but strangers, muscular women in warriors’ saris. Daya freezes.

The Rajkumari’s voice cuts into her fear. “Come here, Daya. I asked you a question.” Daya can feel the little bird crouching down into her lap, his heart beating faster against her leg.

Daya has none of the Rajkumari’s grace. She is a disheveled, dirty, plain girl, and she knows it, and at that moment it is her strength. She rises, catches her foot in her ghagra, and stumbles, kicking up dust and setting the skirt to wild flapping. She staggers forward, trips, falls heavily to the ground. She has a vague impression of fluttering wings.

The Rajkumari laughs, harshly. Daya scrambles to her feet, sinks to her knees. “My princess, I was arguing with myself. Part of me believed you would simply leave me to die here, and I was telling that part she was wrong. And she was; you are here.”

There is a small silence, and Daya hopes, wildly, that her words are true, that the Rajkumari is still somehow the friend she had as a child.

But the Rajkumari looks down with disdain. “Why would I be here for you?” she says. “No more lies, girl. The red bird. I heard its song. You know where it is. Return it to me, and you shall go free.”

“Rajkumari, I do not know.” It is the truth. Daya realizes it is not the only truth that has been spoken this day.

“You must!”

“I do not.” Daya stands, holding her arms out, and comes slowly forward, showing that the red bird is nowhere on her person, hoping that he will take the time to flee.

The princess grasps her shoulders and shakes her. “Tell me where it is.”

Daya looks at her feet.

“Look for it,” the Rajkumari tells her women. “A red bird should be easy to find.”

They search, and Daya’s heart fails. One goes behind her to search the tree. Her eyes follow the other, who strides into a patch of blue, straight through a flock of sparrows. They rise in a cheeping, fluttering cloud before her. Two crows hop cawing out of her path. There are no other birds nearby; all the wild ones are on the far side of the cage. Daya sees no red bird, only brown and black, and she fears he is hiding in the Gul-Mohar tree.

One brave sparrow returns to the ground, and, slowly, the others join him. She watches them despairingly. But one bears a crest on his head, a line of feathers no sparrow could own. She looks away, at the pond, wondering how he could have made himself brown. More magic?

Losing patience, the Rajkumari pushes her away. She falls again. The princess calls the nearest guard from the tree, and orders her to catch a bird. Any bird.

The guard walks into the sparrows and they rise again, scolding. She waits for them to come down, but they fly a little distance from her before settling. They are not that tame. But crows are. After all, who would hurt a sacred bird? She catches one as he hops lazily to one side, and brings him cawing to the princess.

The Rajkumari glares at Daya. “Your stubbornness drives me to this,” she hisses. Then, to the woman: “Wring its neck.”

The guards’s eyes widen in horror. Daya cries out, scrambles to her feet. “You cannot kill a crow!”

“Then show me where the red bird is.”

Daya is caught. Crows are people, and she cannot let this one die. But the red bird is also a person. How can she choose between their lives?

The Rajkumari snaps, “Do it!” The guard looks frightened, but takes the crow in a firmer grip. Daya stares. She cannot speak, nor hold her silence.

A blur of red feathers swoops down and the guard cries out. The crow flaps away, cawing; the guard does not even try to catch it. She is looking at her hand, at the blood running red between his thumb and fingers.

As the bird flies from yellow light into blue, his feathers turn brown. He lands among the sparrows, almost another sparrow; when he takes off again, the whole flock rises with him and he is lost to sight. The Rajkumari looks from the flock to Daya, her face more terrible than beautiful.

And in that moment Daya knows who to stand with; and she knows what to do.

She steps forward. “My princess,” she says softly. “I beg you, do not harm them. I will bring you the red bird; only leave the cage so he will come to me, and I will capture him for you.”

The Rajkumari’s eyes narrow. “And what do you expect in return?” she asks.

Daya keeps her eyes humbly lowered. “For myself, nothing,” she replies. “I know I have offended you; I cannot expect forgiveness. Only release the birds.”

“Except for the red bird, which is mine.”

“Rajkumari.”

The princess is silent, but Daya feels the weight of her eyes. She continues to look at her feet.

“Very well.” The Rajkumari turns to leave. The guard follows her, holding one hand close to her chest. The other guard, noticing from across the cage, returns to her position. And Daya is alone again.

Not entirely alone. Soon the flock of sparrows settles near her. She walks up to them. A few birds take flight, but they settle again. Daya is no threat. Daya has never been a threat.

The red bird flutters to her shoulder. She closes her eyes and hears him ask, “And what is it you plan? What I see in you is not defeat.”

She replies firmly, “You must trust me.”

“I must, must I? Tell me your plan.”

“Trust me. When you can leave, do.”

She cups her hands out in front of her, and he flutters down into them. She closes them over him. His heart hammers against her hands. He is small, and helpless, and trapped. Daya knows what that is like.

She opens her eyes to find the door flap of the cage. He asks, “And what of you?”

She blinks, surprised that she can still understand him, then shakes her head. “There is nothing you can do. Tell your Prince, if you will; perhaps he will extend mercy to me.”

His song pauses for a moment before it returns. “The Rainbow Prince is known for justice, not mercy. No, the power to break your bonds is in you; no other can do that. But if you truly want to leave this life, I will help.”

She realizes that she does want to leave. For all the years and all the love she gave her Rajkumari, it was the bird who judged truly. She has nothing left here. And since the bird spoke true about the princess, Daya trusts him.

He sings again to her as she approaches the door to the cage, and the music is sweet, coaxing. “Daya. I came seeking true beauty. I found it. Come with me.” Her eyes widen at this, and she almost drops him. But she is near the edge of the prison, now, and the Rajkumari has seen her.

Two guards pull back the silk and pin it back. Daya squints against the sudden afternoon brightness, and approaches.

The Rajkumari steps into the gap. Daya draws close and murmurs, “My princess.” The Rajkumari smiles, triumphant.

Daya does not smile. “My name means mercy, and so I must be kind—” She extends cupped hands “—to all living beings.” She opens her hands, raising them to the sky. The bird flutters out and up beyond her reach.

The Rajkumari’s eyes follow it, widening. Then they come down to glare at Daya.

That look would have made her cringe, once. Now she meets it coldly. “You see,” she says, “I have learned something today: Compassion is not a weakness.” She can feel, behind her, building inside the cage, the power of a thousand birds who have just seen one of their own fly free.

Daya drops to the ground just as wings beat over her, through the space she had been in. It is an age before the sound fades and she dares stand again.

The Rajkumari has mud in her hair and angry tears in her eyes. Blood runs down her face and wells from a rip in her choli, and her ghagra is muddy and torn. It tangles her feet as she tries to rise. And Daya did not warn her.

The sight gives Daya little joy. She offers a hand.

The Rajkumari stares up at it with real hatred. She chokes, “You—” and she starts to cry.

Daya lets her hand fall. She is dry-eyed. “I know you now,” she whispers. “You are just a girl, just another girl.”

“You!” The Rajkumari stumbles to her feet, spits blood. “What gives you the right—” Then she whirls, to glare at the guards. “The cliff. Throw her off the cliff! If her precious birds can save her then, she may have her life.”

The Rajkumari is just another girl, but her word is law.

But Daya does not believe she will do it. Until she finds herself in the air, falling, she does not believe it will be real.

The cliff is high. She has time to wonder if the birds will help her, and time to know that they will not even try. They have flown to their lives, and care nothing for Daya.

But then she hears the mad flutter of tiny wings, and the song of the red bird. The Rainbow Prince. And she knows he is come to save her.

“Now you must trust me.” The notes are blown away by the wind, but still she can hear the words. “I promised I would take you to my land.”

He thinks she has true beauty. She does not know what magic he will do, but she knows he will do something.

“And in my land you shall be queen, for my land has need of mercy.”

The ground rushes closer, closer, jagged black, and she is scared; but she trusts him. With all her heart she trusts him.

Then she hits the rocks. The world spins, sun-bright, though thunder crashes distant in her ears. She tastes blood.

He flutters close, a red smear across white pain. “Remember,” he sings cheerfully, “that you shall be queen.”

How—? The world whirls. The red bird—he opened her eyes. He spoke of honor.

But he also pretended to be dying in the golden cage. He let her free him, not caring what it would do to her. And he came back to talk her into blaming the Rajkumari.

She screams; her body makes only a broken gurgle.

“Pain is temporary,” he tells her.

Pain is everything. Pain laces in lightning streaks through her head, her heart, her shattered hands. She cannot feel her legs. He is wrong. She must tell him so. She tries to take a breath, but there is no air.

“My realm is free of sensation, and you will be there always.” He says this as though it is a promise, his voice bright in the fading world.

She falls into the realm between lives, cringing with the last of her death, and sees the red bird shift. There before her is a man wearing red. He is the only color in a world of shifting greys, and he stands out like blood on the rocks. He grasps her arm. Smiles.

Her arm is as grey as his realm.

“Did I not tell you that I would bring you into my land?” he asks. “Never say I lied to you; I never would.”

• • • •

He does not love me, of course. He does not know love. Only Dharma; only justice. I am his wife because his land needs mercy to balance his harsh rule, no more, and since I brought myself here there is no injustice in keeping me trapped.

Do you understand yet?

He is kind to me, as you were not, though he has no warmth or care. He needs my power. He cannot force me to serve. But you were right about him, as he was about you; and I, I was betrayed in you both.

My power here is simple: I may send you on to another life, or leave you to misery unending. That is my choice. It is mine because you sent me here, and because the Rainbow Prince binds me here, away from the sun and the sky. Away from the colors and sounds and smells, the sensations that made life bearable.

I am not so innocent as I was. I finally learned the lesson that you had guessed and the Rainbow Prince knew: Dharma is empty, and Daya is a game. Power too often used is weakened. I have had years to understand this, and years, princess, to think about what to do with you.

I know it is unjust. That you were only the spoiled child we let you become. The one I should hate is my lord and husband—and I do, though he merely acted in his nature. But justice is not my domain, and you shall have no mercy here.

For I have power over you, as I do not over him. What else do I have, after all?

©2009 by Shweta Narayan. Originally published in GUD. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shweta Narayan was born in India, has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California, and feels kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Tor.com, the 2012 Nebula Showcase anthology, and We See A Different Frontier.

They’ve been mostly dead since 2010, but have a few stories and poems in the works again. Seven years is a traditional length for otherworldly imprisonment, so they’re hopeful.

Shweta received an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, co-edits the speculative poetry zine Stone Telling, and feels old on tumblr at shwetanarayan.tumblr.com.

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

The Death of Paul Bunyan

Charles Payseur | 2850 words

Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains.

“We were the fire in the night,” Johnny remembers Paul saying one night, so long ago. “We were the hope when the savages and the elements and the Earth itself seemed against us. We drove it all out, made way for progress. For civilization.”

Johnny remembers nodding and running his hand through Paul’s beard. He’s never been into beards, before or after, but there was just something about Paul that made it work, jaw as sharp as an axe and not a single hair out of place, like the first thing he had done after springing from his mother was to grow a beard and then tame it.

He takes a bus north from Chicago, where he had been living, working. Green spaces. Planned communities. Beautification projects. As American as apple pie. They offered to send a car, a limo even, when they called to inform him Paul was dead and ask if Johnny could clear something up for them. He refused. Public transportation was more eco-friendly anyway. The bus coughs smoke into the air and ambles its way north, west, then north again. Johnny remembers.

“I can’t find Babe,” Paul had said the last time they talked, probably five years ago. Paul was working for an oil company. Fracking. He had always needed to be big, and what was bigger than Big Oil? What was more Paul than swinging an axe at the Earth and sucking liquid gold out of the wound?

Johnny hadn’t spoken at first. It wasn’t like they were close, not then, not for a long time. Occasionally they found themselves in the same place, the same town, and they’d meet, and they’d remember. Remember that what they shared was pain, was rough sex and the same old silences that had driven them apart.

“I went out to the farm and she was just . . .” His voice hitched and Johnny swallowed.

Gone. And whose fault was it, Johnny wanted to ask. Who had stuck her on a farm and expected her to play the dumb beast? All the old anger came welling up in him and he wanted, more than anything, to finally tell Paul what a bastard he was. How he was glad that she was gone, that she was free.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” he said instead, quietly, aware that he wasn’t alone in bed, that he hadn’t been alone for six months and yet still picked up for Paul on the second ring.

“No,” Paul said. “No.” His voice trembled and Johnny looked at the clock. Two in the morning.

“Paul, get some sleep. Like as not she’ll be there in the morning.” Beside him Derrick stirred and Johnny lowered his voice even further. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

Five years, even for an immortal, can be a lifetime. Johnny stares out the window of the bus as the fields of corn and soy give way to forest. It’s not a slow transition, just a wall of trees that lets you know you’ve arrived in the North Woods.

Paul was based out of Wausau at the end, though his prospecting took him far and wide. So it’s into Wausau that Johnny arrives to speak to Paul’s employers, which is how he learned that Paul is dead. There is a car to pick him up from the bus station, and he is driven to what must have been a strip mall at one point before it was converted into offices. He’s whisked inside where a group of suits sits around a table, matching grave expressions complementing their corporate gray.

“Mr. Appleseed?” the suit at their center asks, and Johnny nods. Been a while since someone used his real name, and it sounds almost ridiculous—an artifact from another age. He goes by other names now, aliases and identities that he plants and leaves behind when he’s used them up, a trail of old selves sprouting in his wake. But why else is he here, if not to revisit his roots, his origin?

“We’re sorry for your loss.”

Johnny nods again, annoyed now because he’s sure they don’t know or care about Paul and him. The history. The way they seemed to revolve each other like celestial bodies, passing close enough to touch only briefly, with a power that threatened them both, before drifting apart again.

“I doubt you called me here just to pass along your condolences,” Johnny says. They did enough of that on the phone, along with their not-so-subtle insistence that he come north with all possible speed. No, there’s something else, and he’s tired of waiting.

The suits pass a glance amongst themselves like it’s weed at a folk rock concert and Johnny wishes he had brought something to take the edge off. He remembers smoking with Paul and Babe, during a summer they spent in the northwest once. Bigfoot hunting, they said, though in the summer of 1944 draft dodging was probably more accurate.

“We should enlist,” Paul said for probably the fifth time in as many minutes. He blew out a lungful of smoke into the air and it was like he was creating overcast right then, like before that moment there had only ever been sunny days and in one errant action Paul had just doomed the world to gloomy weather. He was like that, always forgetting his size and his strength and his power. Or maybe Johnny was just high, letting his mind rise like that smoke and dissipate into nothing.

“And what, I’d plant some trees and you’d chop them down and they’d all just surrender?” Johnny asked.

“An axe can cut a man as easily as a tree,” Paul said, and the end of the joint was like a burning world as he took a long pull, blew it out into Babe’s face. The ox’s head was starting to loll a bit to side, a goofy look on her face, and Paul chuckled at her. Johnny took a drag, held it, the smoke in him like the truth fermenting. He released it.

“An axe won’t do much to a tank or a bomber,” he said. “And besides, we have no business fighting men.”

“I seem to remember fighting a few in my time.” Paul’s laugh was thunder and smoke.

“They were never the enemy,” Johnny said. “It was the land . . .” Images flashed in his mind, a bag of seeds and an axe, a dark forest that stretched on and on without end, filled with monsters, with disasters, with fires and a loneliness that seemed to pierce the soul. He remembered the dream of America, of man battling against the elements, the land itself. No, it was never the men they were really fighting. It was the Earth. And they had won, beaten it down until the forests were faint shadows. There were no more dark places in the world, no places man could not swing his axe, plant his seed.

Paul’s hands grabbed at Johnny’s hips, lifted him easily and deposited him on Paul’s lap. Paul’s cock was obvious through his jeans, hard and hot. Johnny was going to be sore come morning.

“There’s a problem that we were hoping you could help us wrap up,” the head suit says, dragging Johnny back to the present.

“This has to do with Paul’s death?” he asks. They’ve been damned vague about the whole thing since they called, but he knows they want something, that there was some reason for pulling him back to the North Woods.

“Mr. Bunyan was our top prospector,” the suit says like Paul could have ever been anything other than the top anything. “He found a massive shale gas deposit that stretches under most of Vilas County and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.”

“And?”

There’s a collective pause around the table as the suits confer in silence while looking different shades of uncomfortable. Something is wrong and wrong in a way that means they’ve called on an outsider to tell their secrets to because it’s too weird or dangerous or fucked to take care of on their own.

“You have to understand,” the suit says, “that we followed all state and federal guidelines concerning the use of fracking to test the viability of getting the gas out.”

Johnny doesn’t laugh, though he wants to. He just waits.

The suits start speaking, all at once.

“Mr. Bunyan used our latest equipment—”

“Which has passed all inspections by government agencies and is our sole intellectual property—”

“Unfortunately, government geological surveying failed to adequately predict seismic conditions—”

“The machinery worked beautifully. Paul was a true artist with the pump—”

“There was a collapse, an accident, and the equipment was lost, and Mr. Bunyan—”

“Our investigators suspect that gas fumes ignited due to contact with the combustion engine of the pumps—”

“There was a fireball that reached five hundred feet which we’ve manage to mostly keep out of the news cycles—”

“But—”

“And here’s the thing—”

“It won’t stop burning.”

They stop as one, just as they started, leaving Johnny standing there, dazed. Slowly the information fits into place.

“And you want me to do . . .?” he asks. He imagines the look on Paul’s face when it happened, his triumph at piercing the Earth, digging for its last secrets and treasures, replaced by the quick terror of collapse, of fire. It’s a story fit for Paul Bunyan, for the death of legend.

“Traditional attempts to put out the resulting fire have proved . . . unsuccessful,” the head suit says. “We thought, given the . . . nature of Mr. Bunyan, that you might have some alternate means of resolving the situation.”

“I’m no firefighter,” Johnny says. “Unless you want me to plant a tree to honor his memory, I’m afraid you might be out of luck.”

“If you could just . . . look?” the head suit asks. A briefcase is produced and opened. Johnny wonders if he can be bought and sold, if it matters anyway. It’s a story, and it needs a proper ending. Not because Johnny still loves Paul. Not that. But because the story pulls at him. They’re all made of stories, people like Johnny, people like Paul. They’re drawn to them, can no more say no than can step on a flower without crushing it to oblivion.

They drive him to the site, just west of Rhinelander, and he remembers.

“They say Pecos Bill died,” Paul said. They were in a hotel in Plymouth, Minnesota. Johnny was sore. They watched the sun rise over the parking lot.

Johnny laughed. “What, flew off on a tornado straight into the afterlife?”

Paul snorted, shook his head. For a long time he didn’t speak, and when he did his voice was just a whisper.

“He hooked a lasso around the moon and hanged himself.” The remains of a case of beer littered the room and Johnny went to each empty can and shook it, hoping for just one more drop.

“He shot Widow Maker through the head first,” Paul added, just the ghost of a sound.

Johnny dressed in silence, grabbed his keys from the nightstand.

“Damned horse would have been miserable without him,” Johnny said as he left. It was the last time he had seen Paul in person.

Whatever the fucking suits called it, it’s a damned lake of fire. Maybe a mile in diameter and slowly growing, the crumbling edges cutting farther and farther into the forest that surrounds it. There’s a small army there, too, all wearing corporate colors and just standing around watching. It’s burning. Not really on fire, except where trees and dirt and rocks spill in around the edges, but it’s burning all the same, red with heat.

Johnny walks right to edge. It’s hot but not unbearable, the air like a sauna. Good thing there’s been a lot of rain or else the forest would go up. As it is, there’s enough to worry about. It’s deep, a pit pitched down to a point in the center where Johnny sees the remains of a corporate rig dwarfed by the remains of a man.

He’s just bones now, just the memory of the force he was. Even so, he seems to be growing at the same rate as the pit, his bones stretching larger and larger like death wants to make true all the stories of him. Johnny remembers.

“They say you made the Grand Canyon when you dragged your axe behind you,” Johnny said, taking a step back, trying to keep his distance from the man advancing on him. He’d heard of Paul Bunyan, of course. Who hadn’t? But the man himself was different than he expected. Tall, certainly, but no giant. Burly and wide with a neat beard on his chin and blue eyes that twinkled like stars.

“They say a lot about me,” Paul said. He followed Johnny’s every move, gaze hungry. There was no doubt what he wanted.

“They say when you piss, you fill rivers, and when you eat, you beggar entire camps of their flapjacks.” Johnny bumped his back against a tree, his retreat thwarted. Paul didn’t miss his opportunity, stepped in smoothly, face just inches away from Johnny’s.

“You should see what happens when I get off,” Paul said.

The bones aren’t the only things in the pit. Shapes are moving, lumbering, the size of oxen. The bodies are scaled, though, with long, reptilian tails and heads like frogs, with claws as long as sabers. Hodags. And there, some are more like moose with batwings for ears and long, drooping mouths lined with razor-like teeth. Hugags. There are more, rock-slide bolters and splinter cats and a dozen other creatures just as deadly. Johnny swallows.

“Get your people back,” Johnny tells the foreman standing next to him.

“We’ve been told to keep the area secure,” she says, though in her eyes Johnny can see that she knows how impossible that task is. He understands why the suits called him in. Not because of Paul and not because of the fire. He’s a sacrifice. An offering. Not an apology. No, they would never even think of that, and it wouldn’t mean a thing anyway. He is a sacrifice, a hope and a prayer that feeding him to the pit will somehow appease what’s growing there.

“There’s no securing this,” Johnny says. He remembers.

Paul laughed as he cleaved the hodag in half. He laughed as, with another stroke of his axe, he took off its head. Johnny watched on, body rigid, repulsed and excited. He hated hurting animals, but this was a monster, something that had been stalking a nearby logging camp. It couldn’t really be wrong, could it? It’s what Paul did, really, just as Johnny planted trees. Neither of them were native, neither welcomed. It was all violence, of a sort, but still Johnny felt strange, seeing the blood.

Babe came tearing through the trees, a hugag gored on her horns. She, too, was laughing.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of this,” Paul said, giving Babe a pat on the flank.

“It’ll end someday,” Johnny said. “You can’t clear an entire territory of trees and expect there to be forests forever. Just like you can’t keep killing hodags and expect them to always be around. That’s the way of the dodo, after all.”

Paul paused, smile slipping on his face, but for a moment only before the laugh was back.

“There’ll always be something to clear,” he said. “Always something . . .”

Somewhere behind him Johnny can hear a truck pulling up. Maybe a van. He doesn’t turn to check. He knows that they’ll be here to make sure he goes in. His eyes are glued on the bones. Paul’s bones. Beneath them he thinks he can see movement. Something in the embers. Just the subtle poke of a horn, the hint of blue hide.

It’s all apocrypha. There is no story of the death of Paul Bunyan. In the stories, he’s still out there, sleeping, maybe, or gone to a world beneath the world. Pecos Bill is still lassoing tornadoes and Johnny Appleseed is still planting trees. But the meanings change. Cracks show through. What seemed so simple becomes anything but.

Johnny stands and watches the pit draw closer. The hodags are waiting, watching, and under them something is starting to take shape, and it looks like an ending—of what, Johnny can’t be certain. Of heroes, maybe. Or the need for them. Or maybe it’s not a death at all. Maybe it’s the birth of something new. The ground around him is beginning to crumble.

©2016 by Charles Payseur.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared at Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, The Book Smugglers, and many more. He runs Quick Sip Reviews, contributes as short fiction specialist at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, and can be found drunkenly reviewing Goosebumps on his Patreon. You can find him gushing about short fiction (and occasionally his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo

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

Twenty Lights to "The Land of Snow": Excerpts from The Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama

Michael Bishop | 21940 words

Years in Transit: 82 out of 106?
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 7

Aboard Kalachakra, I open my eyes in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat trying to well itself. I look sidelong out my foggy eggshell. Many ghosts crowd near to see me leave the bear sleep that everyone in a strut-ship sometimes dreams in. Why have all these somnacicles up-phased to become ship-haunters? Why do so many crowd the grave-cave of my Greta-snooze?

“Greta Bryn”—that’s my mama’s voice—“can you hear me, kiddo?”

Yes, I can. I have no deafness after I up-phase. Asleep even, I hear Mama talk in her dreams and cosmic rays crackle off Kalachakra’s plasma shield out in front (to keep us all from going dead), and the crackle from Earth across the rolling ocean of all-around-us space.

“Greta Bryn?”

She sounds like Atlanta, Daddy says. To me she sounds like Mama, which I want her to play-act now. She keeps bunnies, minks, guineas, and many other tiny crits down along our sci-tech cylinder in Kham Bay. But hearing her doesn’t pulley me into sit-up pose. To get there, I stretch my soft parts and my bones.

“Easy, baby,” Mama says.

A man in white unhooks me. A woman pinches me at the wrist so I won’t twist the fuel tube or pulse counter. They have already shot me in the heart, to rev its beating. Now I do sit up and look around, clearer. Daddy stands nearby, showing me his crumply face.

“Hey, Gee Bee,” he says, but doesn’t grab my hand.

His coverall tag is my roll-call name: Brasswell. A clunky name for a girl and not too fine for Daddy, who looks thirty-seven or maybe fifty-fifteen, a number Mama says he uses to joke his fitness. He does whore-to-culture—another puzzle-funny of his—so that later we can turn Guge green, and maybe survive.

I feel sick, like juice gone sour in my tummy has gushed into my mouth. I start to elbow out. My eyes grow pop-out big, my fists shake like rattles. Now Daddy grabs me, mouth by my ear: “Shhhh shhh shh.” Mama touches my other cheek. Everybody else falls back to watch. That’s scary too.

After a seem-like century I ask, “Are we there yet?”

Everybody yuks at my funniness. I drop my legs through the eggshell door. My hotness has colded off, a lot.

A bald brown man in orangey-yellow robes comes up so Mama and Daddy must stand off aside. I remember, sort of. This person has a really hard Tibetan name: Nyendak Trungpa. My last up-phase he made me say it a billion times so I would not forget. I was already four, but I almost forgetted anyway.

“What’s your name?” Minister Trungpa asks me.

He already knows, but I blink and say, “Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

“And where are you?”

“Kalachakra,” I say. “Our strut-ship.”

“Point to your parents, please.”

I do, it’s simple. They’re wide-awake ship-haunters now, real-live ghosts.

He asks, “Where are we going?”

“Guge,” I say, another simple ask.

“What exactly is Guge, Greta Bryn?”

But I don’t want to think—only to drink, my tongue’s so thick with sourness. “A planet,” I at last get out.

“Miss Brasswell,”—now Minister T’s being a smart-aleck—“tell me two things you know about Guge.”

I sort of ask, “It’s ‘The Land of Snow,’ this dead king’s place off to the west in olden Tibet?”

“Excellent!” Minister T says. “And its second meaning for us Kalachakrans?”

I think again, harder: “A faraway world to live on?”

“Where, intelligent miss?”

Another easy ask: “In the Goldilocks Zone,” a funny name for it.

“But where, Greta Bryn, is this so-called Goldilocks Zone?”

“Around a star called Gluh—” I almost get stuck. “Around a star called Gliese 581.” GLEE-zha is how I say it.

Bald Minister Trungpa grins. His face looks like a brown China plate with an up-curving crack. “She’s fine,” he tells the ghosts in the grave-cave. “And I believe she’s the ‘One.’”

• • • •

Sometimes we must come up. We must wake and eat and drink, and move about so we can heal from ursidormizine sleep and not die before we reach Guge. When I come up this time, I get my own nook that snugs in the habitat drum called Amdo Bay. It has a vidped booth for learning from, with lock belts for when the AG goes out. It belongs to only me, it’s not just one in a common space like most ghosts use.

Finally I ask, “What did that Minister T mean?”

“About what?” Mama doesn’t eye me when she speaks.

“That I’m the ‘One.’ Which ‘One’? Why’d he say that?”

“He’s upset and everybody aboard has gone a little loco.”

“Why?” But maybe I know. We ride so long that anyone riding with us sooner or later crazies up: inboard fever. Captain Xao once warned of this.

Mama says, “His Holiness, Sakya Gyatso, has died, so we’re stupid with grief and thinking hard about how to replace him. Minister T, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn, his heaven-sent successor.”

I don’t get this. “He thinks I’m not I?”

“I guess not. Grief has fuddled his reason, but maybe just temporarily.”

“I am I,” I say to Mama awful hot, and she agrees.

But I remember the Dalai Lama. When I was four, he played Go Fish with me in Amdo Bay during my second up-phase. Daddy sneak-named him “Yoda,” like from Star Wars, but he looked more like skinny Mr. Peanut on the peanut tins. He wore a one-lens thing and a funny soft yellow hat, and he taught me a song, “Loving the Ant, Loving the Elephant.” After that, I had to take my ursidormizine and hibernize. Now Minister T says the DL is I, or I am he, but surely Mama hates as much as I do how such stupidity could maybe steal me off from her.

“I don’t look like Sakya Gyatso. I’m a girl, and I’m not an Asian person.” Then I yell at Mama, “I am I!”

“Actually,” she says, “things have changed, and what you speak as truth may have also changed, kiddo.”

• • • •

Everybody who gets a say in Amdo Bay now thinks that Minister Nyendak Trungpa calls me correctly. I am not I: I am the next Dalai Lama.

The Twenty-First, Sakya Gyatso, has died, and I must put on his sandals, which will not fit. Mama says he died of natural causes, but too young for it to look natural. He hit fifty-four, but he won’t hit Guge. If I am he, I must take his place in “The Land of Snow” as colony dukpa, Tibetan for shepherd. That job scares me.

A good thing has come from this scary thing: I don’t have to go back up into my egg pod and then down again. I stay up-phase. I must. I have too much to learn to drowse forever, even if I can sleep-learn by hypnoloading. Now I have a vidped booth that I sit in to learn and a tutor-guy, Lawrence (“Larry”) Rinpoche, who loads on me a lot.

How old has all my earlier sleep-loading made me? Hibernizing, I hit seven and learnt while dreaming.

People should not call me Her Holiness. I am a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry these things the first time he comes to my room in Amdo. I’ve seen him in spectals about samurai and spacers, where he looks dark-haired and chest-strong. Now, anymore, he isn’t. He has silver hair and hips like Mama’s. His eyes do a flash thing, though, even when he’s not angry, and it throws him back into the spectals he once star-played in as cool guy Lawrence Lake.

“Do I look Chinese, or Tibetan, or even Indian?” Larry asks.

“No, you don’t. But you don’t look like no girl either.”

“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me. Mama says he will teach me logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, Buddhist philosophy; and medicine (space and otherwise). And also poetry, music and drama, astronomy, astrophysics, synonyms, and Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Plus cinema, radio/TV history; politics and pragmatism in deep-space colony planting, and lots of other stuff.

“No girl ever got to be Dalai Lama,” I tell Larry.

“Yes, but our Fourteenth predicted his successor would hail from a place outside Tibet; and that he might re-ensoul not as a boy but as a girl.”

“But Sakya Gyatso, our last, can’t stick his soul in this girl.” I cross my arms and turn in a klutz-o turn.

“O Little Ocean of Wisdom, tell me why not.”

Stupid tutor-guy. “He died after I got borned. How can a soul jump in the skin of somebody already borned?”

“Born, Your Holiness. But it’s easy. It just jumps. The samvattanika viññana, the evolving consciousness of a Bodhisattva, jumps where it likes.”

“Then what about me, Greta Bryn?” I tap-tap my chest.

Larry tilts his ginormous head. “What do you think?”

Oh, that old trick. “Did it kick me out? If it kicked me out, where did I go?”

“Do you feel it kicked you out, Your Holiness?”

“I feel it never got in. Inside, I feel that I . . . own myself.”

“Maybe you do, but maybe his punarbhava—his ‘re-becoming’—is in there mixing with your own personality.”

“But that’s so scary.”

“What did you think of Sakya Gyatso, the last Dalai Lama? Did he scare you?”

“No, I liked him.”

“You like everybody, Your Holiness.”

“Not anymore.”

Larry laughs. He sounds like he sounded in The Return of the Earl of Epsilon Eridani. “Even if the process has something unorthodox about it, child, why avoid mixing your soul with that of a distinguished man you liked?”

I don’t answer this windy ask. Instead, I say, “Why did he have to die, Mister Larry?”

“Greta, he didn’t have much choice. Somebody killed him.”

• • • •

Every “day” I stay up-phase. Every day I study and I try to understand what’s happening on Kalachakra, and how the last Dalai Lama, at swim in my soul, has slipped his bhava, “becoming again,” into my bhava, or “becoming now,” and so has become a thing old and new all at once.

Larry tells me just to imagine one candle lighting off another (even though you’d be crazy to light anything inside a starship), but my candle was already lit before the last Lama’s got snuffed, and I never even smelt it go out. Larry laughs and says His Dead Holiness’s flame “never quenched, but did go dim during its forty-nine-day voyage to bardo.” Bardo, I think, must look like a fish tank that the soul tries to swim in even with nothing in it.

Up-phase, I learn more about Kalachakra. I don’t need my tutor-guy. I wander all about, between studying and tutoring times. When the artificial-gravity cuts off, as it does a lot, I swim my ghost self into nooks and bays almost anywhere.

Our ship has a loco largeness, like a tunnel turning through star-smeared space, like a line of railroad tank cars humming through the Empty Vast without any hum. I saw such trains in my hypnoloading sleeps. Now I peep them as spectals and mini-holos and even palm pix.

Larry likes for me to do that too. He says anything “fusty and fun” is okay by him, if it tutors me well. And I don’t need him to help me twig when I snoop Kalachakra. I learn by drifting, floating, swimming, counting, and just by asking ghosts what I want to know.

• • • •

Here’s what I’ve learnt by reading and vidped-tasking, snooping and asking:

UNS Kalachakra hauls 990 human asses (“and also the rest of each bloke aboard”—Dad’s dumb joke) to a world in the Goldilocks Zone of the Gliese 581 solar system, 20.3 lights from Sol, the assumed-to-be-live-on-able planet Gliese 581 g.

Captain Xao says that most of us on Kalachakra spend our journey in ursidormizine slumber to dream about our colonizing work on Guge. The greatest number of somnacicles—sleepers—have their egg pods in Amdo Bay toward the nose of our ship. (These hibernizing lazybones look like frozen cocoons in their see-through eggs.) Those of us more often up-phase slumber at “night” in Kham Bay, where tech folk and crew do their work. At the rear of our habitat drum lies U-Tsang Bay, which I haven’t visited, but where, Mama says, our Bodhisattvas—monks, nuns, lamas, and such—reside, up-phase or down-.

All must wriggle up-phase once each year or so. You cannot hibernize longer than two at a snooze because we human somnacicles go dodgy quite soon during our third year drowse, so Captain Xao tells us, “We’ll need every hand on the ground once we’re all down on Guge.” (“Every foot on the ground,” I would say.)

Red dwarf star Gliese 581, also known as Zarmina, spectral class M3V, awaits us in constellation Libra. Captain Xao calls it the eighty-seventh closest known solar system to our sun. It has seven planets and spurts out X-rays. It will flame away much sooner than Sol, but so far in the future that no one on Kalachakra will care a toot.

Gliese 581 g, aka Guge, goes around its dwarf in a circle, nearly. It has one face stuck toward its sun, but enough gravity to hold its gasses to it; enough—more than Earth’s—so you can walk on it without drifting away. But it will really hot you on the sun-stuck side and chill you nasty on its drear dark rear. It’s got rocks topside and magma in its zonal mountains. We must live in the in-between stripes of the terminator, not some old spectal but safe spots for bipeds with blood to boil or kidneys to broil. Or maybe we’ll freeze, if we land in the black. So two hurrahs for Guge, and three for “The Land of Snow” in the belts where we hope to plug in.

We know Guge has mass. It isn’t, says Captain Xao, a “pipedream or a mirage.” Our onboard telescope found it twelve Earth years ago, seventy out from Moon-orbit kickoff, with maybe twenty or so to go before we really get there. Hey, I’m more than a smidgen scared to arrive, hey, maybe a million smidgens.

I’m also scared to stay an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. Like a snow leopard or a yeti, my life is in deep-doo-doo danger. I don’t want to step up to Dalai Lamahood. It’s got its perks, but until Captain Xao, Minister Trungpa, Lawrence Rinpoche, Mama, Daddy, and our security folk find out WHO kilt the twenty-first DL, Greta Bryn Brasswell, a maybe DL, thinks her young life worth one dried pea in a vacu-meal pack. Maybe.

In the tunnels running between Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang Bays, the ghost of a snow leopard drifts. It has cindery spots swirled into the frosting of its fur. Its eyes leap yellow-green in the dimness when it gazes back at two-leggers like me. It jets from a holo-beam, but I don’t know how or where from. In my dreams, I turn when I see it. My heart flutter-pounds towards a shutdown . . . which I fear it will, truly.

Sakya Gyatso spent many years as an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. He never did the bear sleep more than three months at once, but tried to blaze at top alertness like a Bodhisattva. He hibernized (when he did) only because on Guge he must lead the 990 shipboard faithfuls and millions of Tibetan Buddhists, native and not, in their unjust exiles. Can an up-phase ghost, once it really dies, survive on a strut-ship as a ghost for real? Truly, I do not know.

Once I didn’t know Mama’s or Daddy’s first names. Tech is a title not a name, and Tech Brasswell married my mama, Tech Bonfils, aboard Kalachakra (Captain Xao prompting the vows), in the seventy-fourth year of our voyage. Tech Bonfils birthed me the following fall, one of only forty-seven children born on our trip to Guge. Luckily, Larry Rinpoche told me my folks’ names: Simon and Karen Bryn. Now I don’t even know if they like each other. I do know, from lots of reading, that S. Hawking—a now-dead astrophysicist—once said, “People are not quantifiable.” He was sure right about that.

I know lots more, of course, but not who kilt the Twenty-first DL, if anybody did, and so I pick at that worry a lot.

Years in Transit: 83
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 8

In old spectals and palm pix, starship captains sit at helms where they can see the Empty Vast through windows or screens. Captain Xao, First Officer Nima Photrang, and their helpers keep us all going toward Gliese 581 in a closed cockpit in the upper central third of the big tin can strut-shipping us to Guge.

This section we call Kham Bay. Cut flowers in slender vials prettify the room where Xao and Photrang and crew do their jobs. This pit also has a woven wall hanging of the Kalachakra Mandala and a big painted figure of the Buddha wearing a body, both a man’s and a woman’s, with many faces and arms. Larry calls this window-free place a control room and a shrine.

I guess he knows.

I visit the cockpit. Nobody stops me. I visit because Simon and Karen Bryn have gone back to their Siestaville to pod-lodge for many months on Amdo Bay’s bottom level. Me, I stay my ghostly self. I owe it to everyone aboard—or so I often get told—to grow into my full Lamahood.

“Ah,” says Captain Xao, “you wish to fly the Kalachakra. Great, Your Holiness.”

But he passes me on to First Officer Photrang, a Tibetan who looks manlike in her jumpsuit but womanlike at her wrists and hands . . . so gentle about the eyes that, floating near because our AG’s down, she seems to have just pulled off a hard black mask.

“What may I do for you, Greta Bryn?”

My lips won’t move, so grateful am I she didn’t say, “Your Holiness.”

She shows me the console where she watches the fuel level in a drop tank behind our tin cylinder as this tank feeds the antimatter engine pushing us outward. Everything, she tells me, depends on electronic systems that run “virtually automatically,” but she and Captain Xao’s other crew must check closely, though the systems have fail-safes that can signal them from afar even if they leave the control shrine.

“How long,” I ask, “before we get to Guge?”

“In nineteen years we’ll start braking,” Nima Photrang says. “In another four, if all goes as planned, we will enter the Gliese 581 system and soon take a stationary orbital position about the terminator. From there we’ll go down to the adjacent habitable zones that we intend to settle in and develop.”

“Four years to brake!” No one’s ever said such a thing to me before. Four years are half the number I’ve lived, and no adult, I think, feels older at their old ages than I do at eight.

“Greta Bryn, to slow us faster than that would put terrible stress on our strut-ship. Its builders assembled it with optimal lightness, to save on fuel, but also with sufficient mass to withstand a twentieth of a g during its initial four years of thrusting and its final four years of deceleration. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Listen: It took the Kalachakra four years to reach a fifth of the speed of light. During that time, we traveled less than half a light year and burned a lot of the fuel in our drop tanks. Jettisoning the used-up tanks lightened us. For seventy-nine years since then, we’ve coasted, cruising over sixteen light-years toward our target sun using our fuel primarily for trajectory correction maneuvers. That’s a highly economical expenditure of the antimatter ice with which we began our flight.”

“Good,” I say—because Officer Photrang looks at me as if I should clap for such an “economical expenditure.”

“Anyway, we scheduled four years of braking at one twentieth of a g to conserve our final fuel resources and to keep this spidery vessel from ripping apart at higher rates of deceleration.”

“But it’s still going to take so long!”

The officer takes me to a ginormous sketch of our strut-ship. “If anyone aboard has time for a stress-reducing deceleration, Greta Bryn, you do.”

“Twenty-three years!” I say. “I’ll turn thirty-one!”

“Yes, you’ll wither into a pitiable crone.” Before I can protest more, she shows me other stuff: a map of the inside of our passenger can, a hologram of the Gliese 581 system, and a d-cube of her living mama and daddy in the village Drak—which means Boulder—fifty-some rocky miles southeast of Lhasa. But—I’m such a doofus!—maybe they no longer live at all.

“My daddy’s from Boulder!” I say to cover this thought.

Nima Photrang peers at me with small bright eyes.

“Boulder, Colorado,” I tell her.

“Is that so?” After a nod from Captain Xao, she guides me into a tunnel lit by tiny glowing pins.

“What did you really come up here to learn, child? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“Who killed Sakya Gyatso?” I hurry to add, “I don’t want to be him.”

“Who told you somebody killed His Holiness?”

“Larry.” I grab a guide rail. “My tutor, Larry Rinpoche.”

Officer Photrang snorts. “Larry has a bad humor sense. And he may be wrong.”

I float up. “But what if he’s right?”

“Is the truth that important to you?” She pulls me down.

A question for a question, like a dry seed poked under my gum. “Larry says that a lama in training must seek truth in everything, and I must do so always and everyone else by doing likewise will empty the universe of lies.”

“‘Do as I say and not as I do.’”

“What?”

Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, Nima pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

“Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

“‘Possible’?”

“That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya’d gone missing.”

I think hard. “But the unofficial version is . . . somebody killed him?”

“It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth arise than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

I shake my head. “Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

Nima gives a small smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’”

“What do you think happened?”

“I probably shouldn’t say.”

“Maybe you need some oxygen.”

This time her smile grows bigger. “Yes, maybe I do.”

“I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

After squinting at me hard, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

“The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: Her notion slanders the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

“Why not the Dalai Lama?”

“A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

“He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the anti-aging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”

“Then the official version has taken seed in you,” Nima says.

“Okay then. I like to think someone killed Sakya Gyatso, not that tiredness or sadness made him do it.”

Gently: “Child, where’s your compassion?”

I float away. “Where’s yours?” At the door of the first officer’s quarters, I try to bump out. I can’t.

Nima must drift over, knuckle-bump the door plate, and help me with my angry going.

• • • •

The artificial-gravity generators run again. I feel them humming through the floor of my room in Amdo, and in Z Quarters where our somnacicles nap. Larry says that except for them, AG aboard Kalachakra works little better than did electricity in war-wasted nations on Earth. Anyway, I don’t need the lock belt in my vidped unit; and such junk as pocket pens, toothbrushes, and d-cubes don’t go slow-spinning off like fuzzy dreams.

Somebody knocks.

Who is it?

Not Larry, who’s already taught me today, or Mama, who sleeps in her pod, or Daddy, who’s gone up-phase to U-Tsang to help the monks lay out rock gardens around their gompas. He gets to visit U-Tsang, but I—the only nearly anointed DL on this ship—must mostly hang with non-monks.

The knock knocks again.

Xao Songda enters. He unhooks a folding stool from the wall and sits atop it next to my vidped booth: Captain Xao, the pilot of our generation ship. Even with the hotshot job he has to work, he roams around almost as much as I do.

“Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts.”

I have doubts like a strut-ship has fuel tanks, and I wish I could drop them half as fast as Kalachakra, “The Wheel of Time,” dropped its anti-hydrogen-ice-filled drums in the first four years of its run toward our coasting speed.

“Well?” Captain Xao’s eyebrow goes up.

“Sir?”

“Does my first officer lie, or do you indeed have doubts?”

“I have doubts about everything.”

Captain Xao cocks his head. “Like what, child?” He seems nice but clueless.

“Doubts about who made me, why I was born in a big bean can, why I like the AG on rather than off. Doubts about the shipshapeness of our ship, the soundness of Larry Lake’s mind, the realness of the rock we’re going to. Doubts about—”

“Greta,” Captain Xao tries to interrupt.

“—the pains in my legs and the mixing of my soul with Sakya’s because of how our lifelines overlapped. Doubts—”

“Whoa.” Xao Songda says. “Officer Photrang says you have doubts about the official version of the Twenty-first’s death.”

“Yes.”

“I too, but, as your captain, I must tell you that this vessel cruises in shipshape shape . . . with an artist in charge.”

I gape at the man, then say: “Is the official story true? Did Sakya Gyatso really die of Cadillac infraction?”

“Cardiac infarction,” the captain says, not getting that I just joked him. “Yes, he did. Regrettably.”

“Or do you say that because Minister T told everyone that and he outranks you?”

Xao Songda looks confused. “Why do you think Minister Trungpa would lie?”

“Inferior motives.”

“Ulterior motives,” the stupid captain again corrects me.

“Okay: ulterior motives. Did he have something to do with Sakya’s death . . . for mean reasons locked in his heart, just as damned souls are locked in hell?”

The captain draws a noisy breath. “Goodness, child.”

“Larry says that somebody killed Sakya.” I climb out of my vidped booth and go to the captain. “Maybe it was you.”

Captain Xao laughs. “Do you know how many hoops I had to leap through to become captain of this ship? Ethnically, Gee Bee, I am Han Chinese. Hardly anybody in the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers wished me to strut our strut-ship. But I was wholeheartedly Yellow Hat and the best pilot-engineer not already en route to a habitable planet. And so I’m here. I’d no more assassinate the Dalai Lama than desecrate a chörten, or harm his likely successor.”

I believe him, even if an anxious soul could hear the last few words of his speech unkindly. I ask him if he likes Nima’s theory—that Sakya Gyatso killed himself—better than Minister T’s Cadillac-infraction hypothesis. When he starts to answer, I say, “Flee falsehood again and speak the True Word.”

After a blink, he says, “If you insist.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then I declare myself, on that question, an agnostic. Neither theory strikes me as outlandish. But neither seems likely, either: Minister T’s because His Holiness had good physical health and Nima’s because the stresses of this voyage were but tickling feathers to the Dalai Lama.”

To my surprise, I begin to cry.

Captain Xao grips my shoulder balls so softly that his fingers feel like owl’s down, as I dream such stuff on an Earth I’ve never seen, and never will. He whispers to me: “Shhh-shhh.”

“Why do you shush me?”

Captain Xao removes his hands. “I no longer shush you. Feel free to cry.”

I do. So does Captain Xao. We are wed in knowing that Larry my tutor was right all along, and that our late Dalai Lama fell at the hands of a really mean someone with an inferior motive.

Years in transit: 87
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 12

A week before my twelfth birthday, a Buddhist nun named Dolma Langdun, who works in the Amdo Bay nursery, hails me through the Kalachakra intranet. She wants to know if, on my birthday, I will let one of her helpers accompany me to the nursery to meet the children and accept gifts from them.

She signs off, —Mama Dolma.

I think, Why does this person do this? Who’s told her I have a birthday coming?

Not my folks, who sleep in their somnacicle eggs, nor Larry, who does the same because I’ve “exhausted” him. And so I resolve to put these questions to Mama Dolma over my intranet connection.

—How many children? I ask her, meanwhile listing to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs through my ear-bud.

—Five, she replied. —Very sweet children, the youngest ten months, the oldest almost six years. It would be a great privilege to attend you on your natal anniversary, Your Holiness.

Before I can scold her for using this too-soon form of address, she adds, —As a toddler, you spent time here in Momo House, but in those bygone days I was assigned to the nunnery in U-Tsang with Abbess Yeshe Yargag.

—Momo House! I key her. —Oh, I remember!

Momo means “dumpling,” and this memory of my caregivers and my little friends back then dampens my eyelashes. Clearly, during the Z-pod rests of my parents and tutor, Minister Trungpa has acted as a most thoughtful guardian.

The following week goes by even faster than a fifth of light-speed.

On my birthday morning, a skinny young monk in a maroon jumpsuit comes for me and takes me down to Momo House.

There I meet Mama Dolma. There, I also meet the children: the baby Alicia, the toddlers Pema and Lahmu, and the oldest two, Rinzen and Mickey. Except for the baby, they tap-dance about me like silly dwarves.

The nursery features big furry balls that also serve as hassocks, blow-uppable yaks, monkeys, and pterodactyls, and cribs and learning booths, with lock belts for AG failures. A system made just for the Dumpling Gang always warns us of an outage at least fifteen minutes before it occurs.

The nearly-six kid, Mickey, grabs my hand and shows me around. He introduces me to everybody, working down from the five-year-old to ten-month-old Alicia. All of them but Alicia give me drawings. These drawings show a monkey named Chenrezig (of course), a nun named Dolma (ditto), a yak named Yackety (double ditto), and a python with no name at all. I ooh and ah over these masterpizzas, as I call them, and then help them assemble soft-form puzzles, feed one another snacks, go to the toilet, and scan a big voyage chart that ends (of course) at Gliese 581g.

But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped booth, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and I nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck.

Alicia tugs at my lips and pinches my mouth flat, so set on reshaping my face that she seems a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate irises, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with cross-eyed puppy love. I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of that day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me goodbye.

Alicia wails.

It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of my outstanding birthday begins, that very night, to sing in me like the lovely last notes of Górecki’s Third.

I have never had a better birthday.

• • • •

Months later, Daddy Simon and Mama Karen Bryn have come up-phase at the same time. Together, they fetch me from my nook in Amdo and walk with me on a good AG day to the cafeteria above the grave-caves of our strut-ship’s central drum, Kham. I ease along the serving line between them, taking tsampa, mushroom cuts, tofu slices, and the sauces to make them palatable. The three of us end up at a table in a nook far from the serving line. Music by J. S. Bach spills from speakers in the movable walls, with often a sitar and bells to call up for some voyagers a Himalayan nostalgia to which my folks are immune. We eat fast and talk small.

Then Mama says, “Gee Bee, your father has something to tell you.”

O God. O Buddha. O Larry. O Curly. O Moe.

“Tell her,” Mama orders.

Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him. But at last he says to me that before I stood up-phase, almost three years ago, as the DL’s disputed Soul Child, he and Mama signed apartness documents that have now concluded in an agreement of full marital severance. They continue my folks, but not as the couple that conceived, bore, and raised me. They remain friends, but will no longer wish to cohabit because of incompatibilities that have arisen over their up-phase years. It really shouldn’t matter to me, they say, because I’ve become Larry Lake’s protégée with a grand destiny that I will no doubt fulfill as a youth and an adult. Besides, they will continue to parent me as much as my odd unconfirmed status as DL-in-training allows.

I do not cry, as I did upon learning that Captain Xao believes that somebody slew my only-maybe predecessor. I don’t cry because their news feels truly distant, like word of a planet somewhere whose people have brains in their chest. However, it does hurt to think about why I absolutely must cry later.

Daddy gets up, kisses my forehead, and leaves with his tray.

Mama studies me for a long moment. “I’ll always love you. You’ve made me very proud.”

“You’ve made me very proud,” I echo her.

“What?”

We push our plastic fork tines around in our leftovers, which I imagine rising in damp squadrons from our plates and floating up to the air-filtration fans. I wish that I, too, could either rise or sink.

“When will they confirm you?” Mama asks.

“Everything on this ship takes forever: getting from here to there, finding a killer, confirming the new DL.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I don’t. The monks don’t want me. I can’t even visit their make-believe gompas over in U-Tsang.”

“Well, those are sacred places. Not many of us get invitations.”

“But Minister T has declared me the ‘One,’ and Larry has tutored me in thousands of subjects, holy and not so holy. Even so, the under-lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain.”

“Don’t call their monasteries ‘make-believe,’ Gee Bee. Don’t call these other holy people and their followers ‘silly.’”

“Oh, rot!” I actually say. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid Milky Way.”

“Don’t, Greta Bryn. You’ve got a champion in Minister Trungpa.”

“Who just wants to bask in the reflected glory of his next supposed Bodhisattva—which, I swear, I am not.”

Mama lifts her tray and slams it down.

Nobody else seems to notice, but I jump.

“You have no idea,” she says, “who you are or what a champion can do for you, and you’re much too young to dismiss yourself or your powerful advocate.”

One of the Brandenburg Concertos swells, its sitars and yak bells flourishing. Far across the mess hall, Larry Lake shuffles toward us with a tray. Mama sees him, and, just as Daddy did, she kisses my forehead and abruptly leaves. My angry stare tells Larry not to mess with me (no, I won’t apologize for the accidental pun), and Larry veers off to sit with some bio-techs at a faraway table.

Years in transit: 88
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 13

Today marks another anniversary of the Kalachakra’s departure from Moon orbit on its crossing to Guge in the Gliese 581 system.

Soon I will turn thirteen. Much has happened in the six years since I woke to find that Sakya Gyatso had died and I had become Greta Gyatso, his tardy reincarnation.

What has not happened haunts me as much as, if not more than, what has. I have a disturbing sense that the “investigation” into Sakya’s murder resides in a secretly agreed-upon limbo. Also, that my confirmation rests in this same misty territory, with Minister T as my “regent.” Recently, though, at First Officer Nima’s urging, Minister T assigned me a bodyguard from among the monks of U-Tsang Bay, a guy called Ian Kilkhor.

Once surnamed Davis, Kilkhor was born sixteen years into our flight of Canadian parents, techs who’d converted to the Yellow Hat order of Tibetan Buddhists in Calgary, Alberta, a decade before the construction of our interstellar vessel. Although nearing the chronological age of sixty, Kilkhor—as he asks me to call him—looks less than half that and has many admirers among the female ghosts in Kham.

Officer Nima fancies him. (Hey, even I fancy him.)

But she is celibacy-committed unless a need for childbearing arises on Guge. And assuming her reproductive apparatus still works. Under such circumstances, I suspect that Kilkhor would lie with her.

Here I confess my ignorance. Despite lessons from Larry in the Tibetan language, I didn’t realize, until Kilkhor told me, that his new surname means “Mandala.” I excuse myself on the grounds that “Kilkhor” more narrowly means “center of the circle,” and that Larry often skimps on offering connections. (To improve the health of his “mortal coil,” Larry has spent nearly four of my last six years in an ursidormizine doze. I go to visit him once every two weeks in the pod-lodges of Amdo Bay, but these well-intended homages sometimes feel less like cheerful visits than dutiful viewings.) Also, “Kilkhor” sounds to me more like an incitement to violence than it does a statement of physical and spiritual harmony.

Even so, I benefit in many ways from Kilkhor’s presence as bodyguard and stand-in tutor. Like Larry, Mama and Daddy spend long periods in their pods; and Kilkhor, a monk who knows tai chi chuan, has kept the killer, or killers, of Sakya from slaying me, if such villains exist aboard our ship. (I have begun to doubt they do.) He has also taught me much of history, culture, religion, politics, computing, astrophysics, and astronomy that Larry, owing to long bouts of hibernizing, has neglected. Also, he weighs in for me with the monks, nuns, and yogis of U-Tsang, who feel disenfranchised in the process of confirming me as Sakya’s successor.

Indeed, because the Panchen Lama now in charge in U-Tsang will not let me set foot there, Kilkhor intercedes to get high monks to visit me in Kham. The Panchen Lama, to avoid seeming either bigot or autocrat, permits these visits. Sadly (or not), my sex, my ethnicity, and (most important) the fact that my birth antedates the Twenty-first’s by five years all conspire to taint my candidacy. I doubt it too, and fear that fanatics among the “religious” will try to veto me by subtraction, not by argument, and that I will die at the hands of friends rather than enemies of the Dalai Lamahood.

Such fears alone throw real doubt on Minister T’s choice of me as Sakya’s only indisputable Soul Child.

Years in transit: 89
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 14

“The Tibetan belief in monkey ancestors puts them in a unique category as the only people I know of who acknowledged this connection before Darwin.” —Karen Swenson, twentieth-century traveler, poet, and worker at Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission

Last week, a party of monks and one nun met me in the hangar of Kham Bay. From their gompas (monasteries) in U-Tsang Bay, they brought a woolen cloak, a woolen bag, three spruce walking sticks, three pairs of sandals, and a white-faced monkey that one monk, as the group entered, fed from a baby bottle full of ashen-gray slurry.

An AG-generator never runs in the hangar because people don’t often visit it, and the lander nests in a vast hammock of polyester cables. So we levitated in a cordoned space near the nose of the lander, which the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers has named Chenrezig, after that Buddhist disciple who, in monkey form, sired the first human Tibetans. (Each new DL instantly qualifies as the latest incarnation of Chenrezig.) Our lander’s nose is painted with bright geometries and the cartoon head of a wise-looking monkey wearing glasses and a beaked yellow hat. Despite this simian iconography, however, everyone on our strut-ship calls the lander the Yak Butter Express.

After stiff greetings, these high monks—including the venerable Panchen Lama, Lhundrub Gelek, and Yeshe Yargag, the abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery!—tied the items that they’d brought to a utility toadstool in the center of our circle (“kilkhor”). Then we floated in lotus positions, hands palms-upward, and I stared at these items, but not at the pale monkey now clutching the PL and wearing a look of alert concern. From molecular vibrations and subtle somatic clues—twitches, blinks, sniffles—I tried to determine which of the items they wished me to select . . . or not to select, as their biases dictated.

“Some of these things were Sakya Gyatso’s,” the Panchen Lama said. “Choose only those that he viewed as truly his. Of course, he saw little in this life as a ‘belonging.’ You may examine any or all, Miss Brasswell.”

I liked how my birth name (even preceded by the stodgy honorific Miss) sounded in our hangar, even if it did seem to label me an imposter, if not an outright foe of Tibetan Buddhism. To my right, Kilkhor lowered his eyelids, advising me to make a choice. Okay, then: I had no need to breast-stroke my way over to the pile.

“The cloak,” I said.

Its stench of musty wool and ancient vegetable dyes told me all I needed to know. I recalled those smells and the cloak’s vivid colors from an encounter with the DL during his visit to the nursery in Amdo when I was four. It had seemed the visit of a seraph or an extraterrestrial—as, by virtue of our status as star travelers, he had qualified. Apparently, none of these faithful had accompanied him then, for, obviously, none recalled his having cinched on this cloak to meet a tot of common blood.

The monkey—a large Japanese macaque (Mucaca fuscata)—swam to the center of our circle, undid the folded cloak, and kicked back to the Lama, who belted it around his lap. Still fretful, the macaque levitated in its breechclout—a kind of diaper—beside the PL. It wrinkled its brow at me in approval or accusation.

“Go on,” Lhundrub Gelek said. “Choose another item.”

I glanced at Kilkhor, who dropped his eyelids.

“May I see what’s in the bag?” I asked.

The PL spoke to the macaque: a critter I imagined Tech Bonfils taking a liking to at our trip’s outset. It then paddled over to the bag tied to the utility toadstool, seized the bag by its neck, and dragged it over to me.

After foraging a little, I extracted five slender books, of a kind now rarely made, and studied each: one in English, one in Tibetan, one in French, one in Hindi, and one (I’m guessing now) in Esperanto. In each case, I recognized their alphabets and point of origin, if not their subject matter. A bootlace linked the books. When they started to float away, I caught its nearer end and yanked them all back.

“Did His Holiness write these?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Panchen Lama said, making me think that I’d passed another test. He added, “Which of the five did Sakya most esteem?” Ah, a dirty trick. Did they want me to read not only several difficult scripts but also Sakya’s departed mind?

“Do you mean as artifacts, for the loveliness of their craft, or as documents, for the spiritual meat in their contents?”

“Which of those options do you suppose most like him?” Abbess Yeshe Yargag asked sympathetically.

“Both. But if I must make a choice, the latter. When he wrote, he distilled clear elixirs from turbid mud.”

Our visitors beheld me as if I had neutralized the stench of sulfur with sprinkles of rose water. Again, I felt shameless.

With an unreadable frown, the PL said, “You’ve chosen correctly. We now wish you to choose the book that Sakya most esteemed for its message.”

I reexamined each title. The one in French featured the words wisdom and child. When I touched it, Chenrezig responded with a nearly human intake of breath. Empty of thought, I lifted that book.

“Here: The Wisdom of a Child, the Childishness of Wisdom.”

As earlier, our five visitors kept their own counsel, and Chenrezig returned the books to their bag and the bag to the monk who had set it out.

Next, I chose among the walking sticks and the pairs of sandals, taking my cues from the monkey and so choosing better than I had any right to expect. In fact, I chose just those items identifying me as the Dalai Lama’s Soul Child, girl or no girl.

After Kilkhor praised my accuracy, the PL said, “Very true, but—”

“But what?” Kilkhor said. “Must you settle on a Tibetan male only?”

The Lama replied, “No, Ian. But what about this child makes her miraculous?”

Ah, yes. One criterion for confirming a DL candidate is that those giving the tests identify “something miraculous” about him . . . or her.

“What about her startling performance so far?” Kilkhor asked.

“We don’t see her performance as a miracle, Ian.”

“But you haven’t conferred about the matter.” He gestured at the other holies floating in the fluorescent lee of the Yak Butter Express.

“My friends,” the Panchen Lama asked, “what say you all in reply?”

“We find no miracle,” a spindly, middle-aged monk said, “in this child’s choosing correctly. Her brief life overlapped His Holiness’s.”

“My-me,” Abbess Yargag said. “I find her a wholly supportable candidate.”

The three leftover holies held their tongues, and I had to admit—to myself, if not aloud to this confirmation panel—that they had a hard-to-refute point, for I had pegged my answers to the tics of a monastery macaque with an instinctual sense of its keepers’ moody fretfulness.

Fortunately, the monkey liked me. I had no idea why.

O to be unmasked! I needed no title or any additional powers to lend savor to my life. I wanted to sleep in my pod and to awaken later as an animal husbandry specialist, with Tech Karen Bryn Bonfils-Brasswell as my mentor and a few near age-mates as my fellow apprentices.

The PL unfolded from his lotus pose and floated before me with his feet hanging. “Thank you, Miss Brasswell, for this audience. We regret we can’t—” Here he halted, for Chenrezig swam across our meeting space, pushed into my arms, and clasped me about the neck. Then the astonished monks and the shaken PL rubbed shoulders as if to ignite their bodies in glee or consternation.

Abbess Yargag said, “There’s your miracle.”

“Nando,” the lama said, shaking his head: No, he meant.

“On the contrary,” Abbess Yargag replied. “Chenrezig belonged to Sakya Gyatso, and never in Chenrezig’s sleep-lengthened life has he embraced a child, a non-Asian, or a female—not even me.”

“Nando,” the PL, visibly angry, said again.

“Rha (Yes),” another monk put in. “Om mani padme hum (Hail the jewel in the lotus). Ki ki so so lha lha gyalo (Praise to the gods).”

I kissed Chenrezig’s white-flecked facial mane as he whimpered like an infant in my already weary arms.

Years in transit: 93
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 18

—A Catechism: Why do we voyage?

At age seven, I learned this catechism from Larry. Kilkhor often has me say it, to ensure that I don’t turn apostate to either our legend or my long-term charge. Sometimes Captain Xao Songda, a Han who converted and fled to Vashon Island, Washington—via northern India, Cape Town, South Africa; Buenos Aires; and Hawaii—sits in to temper Larry’s flamboyance and Kilkhor’s lethargic matter-of-factness.

—Why do we voyage? one of them will ask.

—To fulfill, I say, the self-determination tenets of the Free Federation of Tibet and to usher every soul pent in hell up through the eight lower realms to Buddhahood.

From the bottom up, these realms include 1) hell-pent mortals, 2) hungry ghosts, 3) benighted beasts, 4) fighting spirits, 5) human beings, 6) seraphs and such, 7) disciples of the Buddha, 8) Buddhas for themselves only, and 9) Bodhisattvas who live and labor for every soul in each lower realm.

—Which realm did you begin in, Your Probationary Holiness?

—That of the bewildered, but not benighted, human mortal.

—As our Dalai Lama in Training, to which realm have you arisen?

—That of the disciples of Chenrezig: Om mani padme hum! I am the funky simian saint of the Buddha.

—From what besieged and bludgeoned homeland do you pledge to free us?

—The terrestrial “Land of Snow”: Tibet beset; Tibet ensnared, ensorcelled, and enslaved.

—As a surrogate for that land gone cruelly forfeit, to which new country do you pledge to lead us?

—“The Land of Snow,” on Guge the Unknowable, where we all must strive to free ourselves again.

The foregoing part of the catechism embodies a pledge and a charge. Other parts synopsize the history of our oppression: the ruin of our economy; the destruction of our monasteries; the subjugation of our nation to the will of foreign predators; the co-opting of our spiritual formulae for greedy and warlike purposes; the submergence of our culture to the maws of jackals; and the quarantining of our state to anyone not of our oppressors’ liking. Finally, against the severing of sinews human and animal, the pulling asunder of ties interdependent and relational, only the tallest mountains could stand. And those who undertook the khora, the sacred pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, often did so with little or no grasp of the spiritual roots of their journeys. Even then, that mountain, the land all about it, and the scant air overarching them, stole the breath and spilled into the pilgrims’ lungs the bracing elixir of awe.

At length, the Tibetans and their sympathizers realized that their overlords would never withdraw. Their invasion, theft, and reconfiguration of the state had left its peoples few options but death or exile.

—So what did the Free Federation of Tibet do? Larry, Kilkhor, or Xao will ask.

—Sought a United Nations charter for the building of a starship, an initiative that we all feared China would preempt with its veto in the Security Council.

—What happened instead?

—The Chinese supported the measure.

—How so?

—They contributed to the general levy for funds to build and crew with colonists a second-generation antimatter ship capable of attaining speeds up to one-fifth the velocity of light.

—Why did China surrender to an enterprise implying severe criticism of a policy that it saw as an internal matter? That initiative surely stood as a rebuke to its efforts to overwhelm Tibet with its own crypto-capitalistic materialism.

Here I may snigger or roll my eyeballs, and Lawrence, Kilkhor, or Xao will repeat the question.

—Three reasons suffice to explain China’s acquiescence, I at length reply.

—State them.

—First, China understood that launching this ship would remove the Twenty-first Dalai Lama, who had agreed not only to support this disarming plan but also to go with the Yellow Hat colonists to Gliese 581g.

—Ki ki so so lha lha gyalo (Praise to the gods), my catechist says in Tibetan.

—Indeed, backing this plan would oust from a long debate the very man whom the Chinese reviled as a poser and a bar to the incorporation of Tibet into their program of post-post-Mao modernization.

Here, another snigger from a bigger poser than Sakya, namely, me.

—And the second reason, Your Holiness?

—Backing this strut-ship strategy surprised the players arrayed against China in both the General Assembly and the Security Council.

—To what end?

—All these players could do was brand China’s support a type of cynicism warped into a low-yield variety of “ethnic cleansing,” for now Tibet and its partisans would have one fewer grievance to lay at China’s feet.

With difficulty, I refrain from sniggering again.

—And the third reason, Miss Greta Bryn, our delightfully responsive Ocean of Wisdom?

—Supporting the antimatter ship initiative allowed China to put its design and manufacturing enterprises to work drawing up blueprints and machining parts for the provocatively named UNS Kalachakra.

—And so we won our victory?

—Om mani padme hum (Hail the jewel in the lotus), I reply.

—And what do we Kalachakrans hope to accomplish on the sun-locked world we now call Guge?

—Establish a colony unsullied by colonialism; summon other emigrants to “The Land of Snow”; and lead to enlightenment all who bore that dream, and who will bear it into cycles yet to unfold.

—And after that?

—The cessation of everything samsaric, the opening of ourselves to nirvana.

—Hallelujah, Ian Kilkhor always concludes: Hallelujah.

Years in transit: 94
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 19

For nearly four Earth months, I’ve added not one word to my Computer Log. But shortly after my last recitation of the foregoing catechism, Kilkhor pulled me aside and told me that I had a rival for the position of Dalai Lama.

This news astounded me. “Who?”

“A male Soul Child born of true Tibetan parents in Amdo Bay less than fifty days after Sakya Gyatso’s death,” Kilkhor said. “A search team found him almost a decade ago, but has only now disclosed him to us.” Kilkhor made this disclosure of bad news—it is bad, isn’t it?—sound very ordinary.

“What’s his name?” I had no idea of what else to say.

“Jetsun Trimon,” Kilkhor said. “Old Gelek seems to think him a more promising candidate than he does Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

“Jetsun! You’re joking, right?” My heart did a series of arrhythmic lhundrubs in protest.

Kilkhor regarded me then with either real, or expertly feigned, confusion. “You know him?”

“Of course not! But the name—” I stuck, at once amused and appalled.

“The name, Your Holiness?”

“It’s a ridiculous, a totally ludicrous name.”

“Not really. In Tibetan it means—”

“—‘venerable’ and ‘highly esteemed,’” I put in. “But it’s still ridiculous.” And I noted that as a child, between bouts of study, I had often watched, well, “cartoons” in my vidped booth. Those responsible for this lowbrow programming had purposely stocked it with a selection of episodes called The Jetsons, all about a space-going Western family in a gimmick-ridden future. I had loved it.

“I’ve heard of it,” Kilkhor said. “The program, I mean.” But he didn’t twig the irony of my five-year-younger rival’s name, or pretended not to. To him, the similarity of these two monikers embodied a pointless coincidence.

“I can’t do this anymore without a time-out,” I said. “I’m going down-phase for a year—at least a quarter of a year!”

Kilkhor said nothing. His expression said everything.

Still, he arranged for my down-phase respite, and I repaired to Amdo Bay and my eggshell to enjoy this pod-lodging self-indulgence, which, except for rare cartoon-tinged nightmares, I almost did.

• • • •

Now, owing to somatic suspension, I return at almost the same nineteen at which I went under.

When I awake this time amid a catacomb vista of eggshell pods—like racks in a troopship or a concentration-camp barracks—my mother, Minister T, the Panchen Lama, Ian Kilkhor, and Jetsun Trimon attend my awakening.

Grateful for functioning AG (as, down here, it always functions), I swing my legs out of the pod, stagger a step or two, and retch from a stomach knotted with a fresh anti-insomniac heat. The Tibetan boy, my rival, comes to me unbidden, slides an arm around me from behind, and eases me back toward his own thin body so that I don’t topple into the vomit-vase Mama has given me. With his free hand, he strokes my brow and tucks stray strands of hair behind my ear, a familiarity that I hugely resent.

Although I usually sleep little, I do take occasional naps, for I deserve a respite.

I pull free of the presumptuous young imposter.

He looks about fifteen, and if I’ve hit nineteen, his age squares better than does mine with the passing of the last DL and the transfer of Sakya’s bhava into the material form of Jetsun Trimon.

Beholding him, I find his given name less of a joke than I did before my nap and more of a spell for the inspiriting that the PL alleges has occurred in him. Jetsun and I study each other with mutual curiosity. Our elders look on with darker curiosities. How must Jetsun and I regard this arranged marriage, they no doubt wonder, and what does it presage for everyone aboard the Kalachakra?

During my year-plus sleep, maybe I’ve matured some. Although I want to cry out against the outrage—no, the unkindness—of my guardians’ conspiracy to bring this fey usurper to my podside, I don’t berate them. They warrant such a scolding, but I refrain. How do they wish me to view their collusion, and how can I see it as anything other than their sending a prince to the bier of a spell-afflicted maiden? Except for the acne scarring his forehead and chin, Jetsun is, well, cute, but I don’t want his help. I loathe his intrusion into my pod-lodge and almost regret my return.

Kilkhor notes that the lamas of U-Tsang, including the Panchen Lama and Abbess Yargag, have finally decided to summon Jetsun Trimon and me to our onboard stand-in for the Jokhang Temple. There, they will conduct a gold-urn lottery to learn which of us will follow Sakya Gyatso as the Twenty-second Dalai Lama.

Jetsun bows. He says his tutor has given him the honor of inviting me, my family, and my guardians to this “shindig.” It will occur belatedly, he admits, after he and I have already learned many sutras and secrets reserved in Tibet—holy be its saints, its people, and its memory—for a Soul Child validated by lottery.

But circumstances have changed since our Earth-bound days: The ecology of the Kalachakra, the great epic of our voyage, and our need on Guge for a leader of heart and vision require fine tunings beyond our forebears’ imaginations.

Wiser than I was last year, I swallow a cynical yawn.

“And so,” Jetsun ends, “I wish you joy in the lottery’s Buddha-directed outcome, whichever name appears on the slip selected.”

He bows and takes three steps back.

Lhundrub Gelek beams at Jetsun, and I know in my gut that the PL has become my competitor’s regent, his champion. Mama Karen Bryn holds her face expressionless until fret lines drop from her lip corners like weighted ebony threads.

I thank Jetsun, for his courtesy and his well-rehearsed speech. He seems to want something more—an invitation of my own, a touch—but I have nothing to offer but the stifling of my envy, which I fight to convert to positive energies boding a happy karmic impact on the name slips in the urn.

“You must come early to our Temple,” the PL says. “Doing so will give you time to pay your respects at Sakya Gyatso’s bier.”

This codicil to our invitation heartens me. Lacking any earlier approval to visit U-Tsang, I have seen the body of the DL on display there.

Do I really wish to see it, to see him?

Yes, of course I do.

We’ve lost many Kalachakrans in transit to Guge, but none of the others have our morticians bled with trochars, painted with creams and rouges, or treated with latter-day preservatives. Those others we ejected via tubes into the airless cold of interstellar space, mere human scraps for the ever-hungry night.

In Tibet, the bereaved once spread their dead loved ones out on rocks in “celestial burial grounds.” This they did as an act of charity, for the vultures. On our ship, though, we have no vultures, or none with feathers, and perhaps by firing our dead into unending quasi-vacuum, we will offer to the void a sacrifice of once-living flesh generous enough to upgrade our karma.

But Sakya Gyatso we have enshrined; and soon, as one of only two applicants for his sacred post, I will gaze upon the remains of one whose enlightenment and mercy have plunged me into painful egocentric anguish.

• • • •

At the appointed time (six months from Jetsun’s invitation), we journey from Amdo and across Kham by way of tunnels designed for either gravity-assisted marches or weightless swims. Our style of travel depends on AG generators and on the rationing of gravity by formulae meant to benefit our long-term approach to Guge. However, odd outages often overcome these formulae. Blessedly, Kalachakrans now adjust so well to gravity loss that we no longer find it alarming or inconvenient.

Journeying, we discover that U-Tsang’s residents—all Bodhisattvas, allegedly—have forsworn all use of generators during the seventy-two-hour Festival of the Golden Urn, with that ceremony occurring at noon of the middle day. This renunciation they regard as a gift to everybody aboard our vessel—somnacicles and ghosts—and no hardship at all. Any stress we spare the generators, our karmic economies tell us, will redound to everybody’s benefit in our voyage’s later stages.

My entourage consists of my divorced parents, Simon Brasswell and Karen Bryn Bonfils; Minister T, my self-proclaimed regent; Lawrence Lake Rinpoche, my tutor and confidant, now up-phase for the first time in two years; and Ian Kilkhor, security agent, standby tutor, and friend. We walk single-file through a part of Kham wide enough for the next Dalai Lama’s subjects to line the walls and perform respectful namaste as he (or she) passes. Minister T tells us that Jetsun Trimon and his people made this same journey eighteen hours ago and that their well-wishers in this trunk tunnel were fewer than those attending our passage. A Bodhisattva would take no pleasure from such a petty statistical triumph. Tellingly, I do. So what does my competition-bred joy say about my odds in the coming gold-urn lottery? Nothing auspicious, I fear.

Eventually, our crowds dwindle, and we enter a deck area featuring a checkpoint and a sector gate. A monk clad in maroon passes us through. Another dials open the gate admitting us, at last, to U-Tsang.

I smell roast barley, barley beer (chang), and an acrid tang of incense that makes my stomach seize. Beyond the gate, which shuts behind us like a stone wheel slotting into a tomb groove, we drift through a hall with thin metal rails and bracket-like handholds. The luminary pins here gleam a watery purple.

Our feet slide out from under us, not like those of a fawn sliding on ice, but like those of an astronaut trainee rising from the floor of an aircraft plunging to create a few seconds of pedagogical zero-g.

The AG generators here shut down a while ago, so we dog-paddle in waterwheel slow-motion, unsure which tunnel to enter.

Actually, I’m the only uncertain trekker, but because neither Minister T nor Larry nor Kilkhor wants to help me, I stay mute, from perplexity and pride: another black mark, no doubt, against my lottery chances.

Ahead of us, fifteen yards or so, a snow leopard manifests: a four-legged specter with yellow eyes and frost-etched silver fur. Despite the lack of gravity, it faces us as if standing on a rock ledge and licks its coal-colored beard as if savoring again the last guinea-pig-like chiphi that it crushed into bone bits. Stymied, I startle and sway. The leopard switches its tail, turns, and leaps into a tunnel that I would not have chosen.

Kilkhor laughs and urges us upward into this same purplish chute. “It’s all right,” he says. “Follow it. Or do you suspect a subterfuge from our spiritually elevated hosts?” He laughs again . . . this time, maybe, at his inadvertent nod to the Christian sacrament of communion.

Larry and I twig his mistake, but does anybody else?

“Come on,” Kilkhor insists. “They’ve sent us this cool cat as a guide.”

And so we follow. We swim rather than walk, levitating through a Buddhist rabbit hole in the wake of an illusory leopard . . . until, by a sudden shift in perspective, we feel ourselves to be “walking” again.

This ascent, or fall, takes just over an hour, and we emerge in the courtyard of Jokhang Temple, or its diminished Kalachakra facsimile. Here, the Panchen Lama, the Abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery, and a colorful contingent of Yellow Hats and other monks greet us joyfully. They regale us with khata (gift scarves inscribed with good-luck symbols) and with processional music played by flutes, drums, and bells. Their welcome feels at once high-spirited and heartfelt.

The snow leopard has vanished. When we broke into the courtyard swimming like ravenous carp, somebody, somewhere, ceased projecting it.

So let the gold-urn ceremony begin. Put me out of, and into, my misery.

• • • •

But before the lottery, we visit the shrine where the duded-up remains of Sakya Gyatso lie in state, like those of Lenin in the Kremlin or of Mao in the Forbidden City. Although Sakya should not suffer mention in the same breath as mass murderers, nobody can deny that we have preserved him as an icon, just as the devotees of Lenin and Mao mummified them. And I must trust that a single Figure of Peace weighs more in the karmic justice scales than does a shipload of bloody despots.

Daddy begs off. He has seen the dead Sakya Gyatso before, and traveling with his ex-wife, the mother of his Soul Child daughter, has depressed him beyond easy repair. So he retreats to a nearby guesthouse and locks himself inside for a nap. Ian Kilkhor leaves to visit several friends in the Yellow Hat gompa with whom he once studied; Minister T, who has often paid homage at the Twenty-first’s bier, has business with Lhundrub Gelek and others of the confirmation troupe who met with me in Kham in the shadow of the Yak Butter Express.

So, only Mama, Larry, and I go to see the Lama whom, according to many, I will succeed as the spiritual and temporal head of the 990 Tibetan colonizers aboard this ship. The shrine we approach does not resemble a mausoleum. It sits on the courtyard’s edge, like an exhibit of amateur art in a construction trailer.

Two maroon-clad guards await us beside its doors, one at each end of the trailer, now graffitified with mantras, prayers, and many mysterious symbols—but no one else in U-Tsang Bay has come out to view its principal attraction. The blousy monk at the nearer door examines our implanted, upper-arm IDs with click-scans, smiles beatifically, and nods us in. Larry jokes in Tibetan with the guy before joining us at the DL’s windowed bier, where we three float: ghosts beside a pod-lodger who will not again arise, unless he has already done so in yet another borrowed body.

“He is not here,” I say. “He has arisen.”

Larry, who looks much older than at his last brief up-phase, laughs in appreciation or embarrassment: the latter, probably.

Mama gives me a blistering “cool-it” glare.

And then I gaze upon the body of Sakya Gyatso. Even in death, even through the clear but faintly dusty cover of his display pod, he sustains about his face and hands a soft amber aura of serene lifelikeness that startles, and discomfits. I see him smiling sweetly upon me when I was four. I imagine him displeasing his religious brethren and sisters by going more often into Amdo and Kham Bays to interact with his secular subjects than our under-lamas thought needful or wise, as if such visits distracted him from his obligations and sabotaged his authority in both realms, profane and holy. And it’s definitely true that his longest uninterrupted sojourn in U-Tsang coincides with his years lying in state in this shabby trailer.

Commoners aboard ship loved him, but maybe—I reflect, studying his corpse with both fascination and regard—he angered those practitioners of Tantra who viewed him as their highest representative and model. Certainly, during his life, he moved from external Kalachakra Tantra—a concern with the lost procession of solar and lunar days—to the internal Tantra, with its focus on the energy systems of the body, to the higher alternative Tantra leading to the sublime state of bodhichitta, perfect enlightenment for the sake of others.

Thus reflecting, I cannot conceive of anyone aboard ever wishing him harm or of myself climbing out of the pit of my ego to attain the state of material renunciation and accepting comprehension of emptiness that Sakya Gyatso reached and embodied through so many years of our journey.

That I stand today as one of two Soul Children in line to follow him defies logic; it offends reason and also the 722 deities resident in the Kalachakra Mandala as emblems of reality and consciousness. I lack even the worth of a dog licking barley-cake crumbs from the floor. I put my palm on the Twenty-first’s pod cover and erupt in sobs. These underscore my unsuitability to succeed him.

Mama’s glare gives way to a look of fretful amazement. She lays an arm over my shoulder, an intimacy that keeps me from drifting blindly away from either her or Larry.

“Kiddo,” she murmurs, “don’t cry for this lucky man. We’ll never cease to honor him, but the time for mourning has passed.”

I can’t stop: All sleep has fled and the future holds only a scalding wakefulness. Larry lays his arm over my other shoulder, caging me between them.

“Baby,” Mama says. “Baby, what’s going on?”

She hasn’t called me “baby” or “kiddo” since, over seven years ago, I had my first period. I twist my neck just enough to tell her to glance at the late DL, that she must look. Reluctantly, it seems, she does, and then looks back at me with no apparent hesitancy or aversion. Her gaze then switches between him and me until she realizes that I won’t—I simply can’t—succeed this saint as our leader. Moreover, I intend to withdraw from the gold-urn lottery and to throw my support to my rival. Mama remains silent, but her arm deserts me and she turns from the DL’s bier as if my declaration has acted as a vernier jet to change her position. In any case, she drifts away.

“Do you understand me, Mama?”

Mama’s eyes jiggle and close. Her chin drops. Her jumpsuit-clad body floats like that of a string-free marionette, all raw angles and dreamily rafting hands.

Larry released me and swims to her. “Something’s wrong, Greta Bryn.” I already suspect this, but these words penetrate with a laser’s precision. I fumble blurry-eyed after Larry, clueless about what to do to help.

Larry swallows her with his arms, like the male hero in an anachronistic spectal, and then pushes her away to study her more objectively. Immediately, he pulls her back in to him again, checks her pulse at wrist and throat, and pivots her toward me with odd contrasting expressions washing over his face.

“She’s fainted, I think.”

“Fainted?” My mother, so far as I know, never faints.

“It’s all the travel . . . and her anxiety about the gold-urn lottery.”

“Not to mention her disappointment in me.”

Larry regards me with such deliberate blankness that I almost fail to recognize the man, whom I have known seemingly forever.

“Talk to her when she comes ’round,” he stays. “Talk to her.”

The blousy monk who ran click-scans on us enters the makeshift mausoleum and helps Larry tow my rag-doll mama outside, across the road, and into the battened-down Temple courtyard. The two accompany her to a basket-like bower chair that suppresses her driftability. They attend her with colorful fake Chinese fans.

I go with them, looking on like a gawker at a mess-hall accident.

• • • •

Our post-swoon interview takes place in the nearly empty courtyard. Mama clutches two of the bower-chair spokes like a child in a gravity swing, and I maintain my place before her with the mindless agility of a pond carp.

“Never say you’re forsaking the gold-urn lottery,” she says. “You bear on your shoulders the hopes of a majority, my hopes highest of all.”

“Did my decision to withdraw cause you to faint?”

“Of course!” she cries. “You can’t withdraw! You don’t think I faked my swoon, do you?”

I have no doubt that Mama didn’t fake it. Her sclera clocked into view before her eyelids fell. But, before that, her gaze cut to and rested on Sakya’s face just prior to her realizing my intent. Feelings of betrayal, loss, and outrage triggered her swoon. Now she says I have no choice but take part in the gold-urn drawing, and I regard her with such a blend of gratitude, for believing in me, and loathing, for her rigidity, that I can’t speak. Do Westerners carry both me-first genes and self-doubt genes that, in combination, overcome the teachings of the Tantra?

“Answer me, Greta Bryn: Do you think I faked that faint?”

Mama knows already that I don’t. She just wants me to assume the hair shirt of guilt for her indisposition and to pull it over my head with the bristly side inward. I have just enough Easterner in my being to deny her that boon and the pinched ecstasy implicit in it.

I hold her gaze, and hold it, until she begins to waver in her implacability.

“I didn’t swoon solely because you tried to renounce your rebirth right, but also because you tried to humiliate me in front of Larry.” Mama stands so far from the truth on this issue that she doesn’t even qualify as wrong.

And so I laugh, like an evil-wisher rather than a daughter. “Not so,” I say. “Why would I want to humiliate you before Larry?”

“Because I’ve always refused to coddle your self-doubts.”

I recall Mama beholding Sakya’s death mask and memorizing his every aura-lit feature. “What else caused you to ‘fall out’?”

Her voice drops a register. “The Dalai Lama. His face. His hands. His body. His inhering and sustaining holiness.”

“How his ‘sustaining holiness’ knock you into a swoon, Mama?”

She peers across the courtyard road at the van where the DL lies in state. Then she pulls herself upright in the bower chair and tells this story:

“While married to your father, I began an affair with Minister Trungpa. He lived wherever Sakya lived, and Sakya chose to live among the secular citizens of Amdo and Kham rather than in the ridiculously scaled-down model of the Potala Place in U-Tsang. As one result, Minister T and I easily met each other; and Nyendak—Neddy, I call him—courted me under the unsuspecting noses of both Sakya and Simon.”

“You cuckolded my daddy with Minister T?” I need her to say it again.

“Oh, that’s such an ugly word to label what Neddy and I still regard as a sacred union.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but it’s the prettiest word I know to call it.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Gee Bee.”

“I won’t. I can’t. But I do have to ask: Who fathered me, the man I call Daddy or Sakya’s old-fart chief minister?”

“Your father fathered you,” Mama says. “Look at yourself in a mirror. Simon’s face underlies your own. His blood runs through you, almost as if he gave his vitality to you and thus lost it himself.”

“Maybe because you cuckolded him.”

“That’s crap. If anything, Simon’s growing apathy and addiction to pod-lodging shoved me toward Neddy. Who, by the way, has the eggs, even at his age, to stay on the upright outside of a Z-pod.”

“Mama, please.”

“Moreover, Neddy loves you. He cherishes you because he cherishes me. He sees you as just as much his own as Simon does. In fact, Neddy was the first to—”

“I’ll stop saying ‘cuckold’ if you’ll stop calling your boyfriend ‘Neddy.’ It sounds like filthy baby talk.”

Mama closes her eyes, counts to herself, and opens them again to explain that when Sakya Gyatso at last figured out what was going on between Mama and Minister Trungpa, he called them to him and urged them to break off the affair in the interest of a higher spirituality and the preservation of shipboard harmony.

Minister T, ever the tutor, argued that although traditional Buddhism stems from a slavish obeisance to the demands of morality, wisdom cultivation, and ego abasement, the Tibetan Tantric path channels sexual attraction and its drives into the creation of life-force energies that purify these urges and tie them to transcendent spiritual purposes. My mother’s marriage had unraveled; and Minister T’s courtship of her, which culminated in consensual carnality and a principled friendship, now demonstrated their mutual growth toward that higher spirituality.

I laugh out loud. “And did His Holiness give your boyfriend a pass on this self-serving distortion of the Tantric way?”

“Believe as you will, but Neddy—Minister Trungpa’s—take on the matter, and the thoroughness with which he laid out everything, had a great effect on the DL. After all, Minister T had served as his regent-in-exile in Dharmasala, as his chief minister in India, and finally as his minister and friend here on the Kalachakra. Why would he all at once suppose this fount of integrity and wise counsel a scoundrel?”

“Maybe because he was sleeping with another man’s wife and justifying it with a lot of mystical malarkey.”

Mama squints with thread-thin patience and resumes her story. Because of what Minister T and Mama had done, and still do, and what Minister T told His Holiness to justify their behavior, the Dalai Lama fell into a brown study that finally edged over into an ashen funk. To combat it, the DL hibernated for three months, but emerged as low in spirits as he’d gone into his egg. All his energies had diminished, and he told Minister T of his fears of dying before we reached Guge. Such talk profoundly effected Mama’s lover, who insisted that Sakya Gyatso tour the nursery in Amdo Bay. There he met me, Greta Bryn Brasswell, and fell in love, often returning over the next few weeks and always singling me out for attention. He told Mama that my eyes reminded him of those of his baby sister, who had died very young of rheumatic fever.

“I remember meeting His Holiness,” I tell Mama, “but not his coming to see us so often in the nursery.”

“You were four,” Mama says. “How could you?”

She recounts how Minister T later took her to Sakya’s upper-deck office in Amdo to talk about his long depression. With the AG generators running, they shared green tea and barley breads.

The DL again voiced his fear that even if he slept the rest of our journey, at some point in transit he would surrender his ghost in his eggshell pod and we his people would arrive at Guge with no agreed-upon leader. Minister T rebuked him for this worry, which he identified as egocentric, even though the DL took pains to articulate it as a concern for our common welfare.

Mama had carried me to this meeting. I lay sleeping—not like a pod-lodger but as a tired child—across her lap on a folded poncho liner that Simon had brought aboard as a going-away gift from a former roommate at Georgia Tech. As the adults talked, I turned and stretched, but never awakened.

“I don’t recall that either,” I say.

“Again, you were sleeping. Don’t you listen to anything I tell you?”

“Everything. It’s just that—” I stop myself. “Go on.”

Mama does. She says that the DL walked over, leaned down, and placed his lips on my forehead, as if decaling it with a wet rose petal. Then he mused aloud about how fine it would be if, as an adult, I assumed his mantle and oversaw not only our voyagers’ spiritual education but also our colonization of “The Land of Snow.” He did not think he had the strength to undertake those tasks, but I would never exhaust my energy reserves. This fanciful scenario, Mama admits, rang in her like a crystal bell, a chime that echoed through her recurrently, as clear as unfiltered starlight.

Later, Mama and Minister T talked about their meeting with His Holiness and the tender wish-fulfillment musing with which he’d concluded it: my ascension to the Dalai Lamahood and eventual leadership on Guge. Mama asked if such a scenario could work itself out in reality, for if His Holiness died and Minister T championed me as he’d once stood behind Songsten Chodrak (later Sakya Gyatso), lifting him to his present eminence, then surely I, too, could rise to that height.

“‘I’m too old for such fatiguing machinations again,’ he told me,” Mama says, remembering, “but I told him, ‘Not by what I know of you, Neddy,’ and just that simple expression of admiration and faith turned him.”

I find Mama’s account of this episode and her conspicuous pleasure in relating it hard to credit. But she has actually begun to glow, with a coppery aura akin to that of the DL in his display casket.

“At that point,” she adds, “I grew ambitious for you in a way that once never would have crossed my mind, your ascension was just so far-fetched and prideful a thing for me to contemplate.” She smiles adoringly, and my stomach shrinks upon itself like new linen applied wet to a metal frame.

“I’ve heard enough.”

“Oh, no,” Mama chides. “I’ve more, much more.”

In blessed summary, she narrates a later conversation with Minister T, in which she urged him to carry to Sakya—now more a moody Byronic hero than a Bodhisattva in spiritual balance—this news: that she had no objection, if any accident or fatal illness befell him, to his sending his migrating bhava into the vessel of her daughter. Thus, he could mix our subjective selves in ways that would propagate us both into the future and so assist in our all arriving safely at Gliese 581g.

Bristling, I try to parse this convolute message. In fact, I ask Mama to repeat it. She does, and my deduction that she’s memorized this nutty formulae—if you like, call it a “spell”—sickens me.

Still, I ask, as I must, “Did Minister T carry this news to His Holiness?”

“He did.”

“And what happened?”

“Sakya listened. He meditated for two days on the metaphysics and the practical ramifications of what I’d told him through his minister.”

“Finish,” I say. “Please just finish.”

“On the following day, Sakya died.”

“Cadillac infraction,” I murmur. Mama’s eyes grow wide. “Forgive me,” I say. “What killed him? You used to tell me ‘natural causes, but at too young an age for them to seem natural.’”

“That wasn’t entirely a lie. Sakya did what came natural to him. He acted on the impulse of his growing despair and his burgeoning sense that if he waited much longer to influence his rebirth, you’d outgrow your primacy as a receptacle for the transfer of his mind-state sequences and he’d lose you as a crucible for compounding the two. So he called upon his mastery of many Tantric practices to drop his body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. And when he irreversibly stilled his heart, he passed from our illusory reality into bardo . . . until he awoke again wed to the samvattanika viññana, or evolving consciousness, animating you.”

Here I float away from Mama’s bower chair and drift a dozen meters across the courtyard to a lovely, low cedar hedge. (In a way that she’s never fully understood, Nima Photrang was right about the cause of Sakya Gyatso’s death.) I want to pour my guts into this hedge, to heave the burdensome reincarnated essence of the late DL into its feathery silver-green leaves.

Nothing comes up. Nothing comes out. My stomach feels smaller than a piñon nut. My ego, on the other hand, fills the entire tripartite passenger drum of our starship, The Wheel of Time.

• • • •

Later, I meet Simon Brasswell—Daddy—in a back-tunnel lounge near Jokhang Temple for chang and sandwiches. To make this date, of course, I must visit his guesthouse and ping him at the registry screen, but he agrees to meet me at the Bhurel—or The Blue Sheep, as the place is called—with real alacrity. In fact, as soon as we lock-belt into our booth, with squeeze bottles for our drinks and mini-spikes in our sandwiches to hold them to the small cork table, Daddy key-taps payment before I can object. He looks better since his nap, but the violet circles under his eyes lend him a sad fragility.

“I never knew—” I begin.

“That Karen and I divorced because she fell in love with Nyendak Trungpa? Or, I suppose, with his self-vaunted virility and political clout?” Speechless, I gape at my dad. “Forgive me. Ordinarily, I try not to go the spurned-spouse route.”

I still can’t speak.

He squeezes his bottle and swigs some barley beer. Then he says, “Do you want what your mama and Minister T want for you—I mean, really?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known. But this afternoon Mama told me why I ought to want it. And because I ought to, I do. I think.”

Daddy studies me with an unsettling mixture of exasperation and tenderness. “Let me ask you something straight up: Do you think the bhava of Sakya Gyatso, the direct reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the ancestor of the Tibetan people, dwells in you as it supposedly dwelt in his twenty predecessors?”

“Daddy, I’m not Tibetan.”

“I didn’t ask you that.” He unspikes and chomps into his Cordyceps, or synthetic caterpillar-fungus, sandwich. Chewing, he manages a quasi-intelligible, “Well?”

“Tomorrow’s gold-urn lottery will reveal the truth, one way or the other.”

“Yak shit, Greta. And I didn’t ask you that, either.”

I feel both my tears and my gorge rising, but the latter prevails. “I thought we’d share some time, eat together—not get into a spat.”

Daddy chews more sedately, swallows, and re-spikes his “caterpillar” to the cork. “And what else, sweetheart? Avoid saying anything true or substantive?” I show him my profile. “Greta, forgive me, but I didn’t sign on to this mission to sire a demigod. I didn’t even sign on to it to colonize another world for the sake of oppressed Tibetan Buddhists and their rabid hangers-on.”

“I thought you were a Tibetan Buddhist.”

“Oh, yeah, born and raised . . . in Boulder, Colorado. Unfortunately, it never quite took. I signed on because I loved your mother and the idea of spaceflight at least as much as I did passing for a Buddhist. And that’s how I got out here about seventeen light-years from home. Do you see?”

I eat nothing. I drink nothing. I say nothing.

“At least I’ve told you a truth,” Daddy says. “More than one, in fact. Can’t you do the same for me? Or does the mere self-aggrandizing idea of Dalai Lamahood clamp your windpipe shut on the truth?”

I have expected neither these revelations nor their vehemence, but together they work to unclamp something inside me. I owe my father my life, at least in part, and the dawning awareness that he has never stopped caring for me suggests—in fact, requires—that I repay him truth for truth.

“Yes. I can do the same for you.”

Daddy’s eyes, above their bruised half-circles, never leave mine.

“I didn’t choose this life at all,” I say. “It was thrust upon me. I want to be a good person, a Bodhisattva possibly, maybe even the Dalai Lama. But—”

He lifts his eyebrows and goes on waiting. A tender twinge of a smile plays about his mouth.

“But,” I finish, “I’m not happy that maybe I want these things.”

“Buddhists don’t aspire to happiness, Greta, but to an oceanic detachment.”

I give him my fiercest Peeved Daughter look, but do refrain from eye-rolling. “I just need an attitude adjustment, that’s all.”

“The most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe won’t turn a carp into a cougar, pumpkin.” His pet name for me.

“I don’t need the most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe. I need a self-willed tweaking.”

“Ah.” Daddy takes a squeeze-swig of his beer and nods that I should eat.

My gorge has fallen, my hunger reappeared. I eat and drink and, as I do, become unsettlingly aware that other patrons in the Bhurel—visitors, monks—have detected my presence. Blessedly, though, they respect our space.

“Suppose the lottery goes young Trimon’s way,” Daddy says. “What would make you happy in your resulting alternate life?”

I consider this as a peasant woman of an earlier era might have done if a friend, just as a game, had asked, “What would you do if the King chose you to marry his son?” But I play the game in reverse, sort of, and can only shake my head.

Daddy waits. He doesn’t stop waiting, or searching my eyes, or studying me with his irksome unwavering paternal regard. He won’t speak, maybe because everything else about him—his gaze, his patience, his presence—speaks strongly of what for years went unspoken between us.

Full of an inarticulate wistfulness, I lean back. “I’ve told you a truth already,” I tell my father. “Isn’t that enough for tonight?”

A teenage girl and her mother, oaring subtly with their hands to maintain their places beside us, hover at our table. Even though I haven’t seen the girl for several years (while, of course, she hibernized), I recognize her because distinctive agate eyes in an elfin face identify her at once.

Daddy and I lever ourselves up from our booth, and I swim out to embrace the girl. “Alicia!” Over her shoulder, I say to her mama in all earnestness, “Mrs. Paljor, how good to see you here!”

“Forgive the interruption,” Mrs. Paljor says, ducking her head.

“Certainly, certainly,” I say.

“We’ve come to U-Tsang for the Gold Urn Festival, and we just had to wish you well tomorrow. Alicia wouldn’t rest until Kanjur found a way for us to attend.”

Kanjur Paljor, Alicia’s father, had served since the beginning of our voyage as our foremost antimatter-ice specialist. If anyone could get his secular wife and daughter to U-Tsang for the Gold Urn lottery, Kanjur Paljor could. He enjoys the authority of universal respect. As for Alicia, she scrunches her face in embarrassment, as well as unconditional affection. She recalls the many times that I came to Momo House to hold her, and later to her family’s Kham Bay rooms to take her on walks or on outings to our art, mathematics, and science centers.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”

I hug the girl. I hug her mother.

My father nods and smiles, albeit bemusedly. I suspect that Daddy has never met Alicia or Mrs. Paljor before. Kanjur, the father and husband, he undoubtedly knows. Who doesn’t know that man?

The Paljor women depart almost as quickly as they came. Daddy watches them go, with a deep exhalation of relief that makes me hurt for them both.

“I was almost a second mother to that girl,” I tell him.

Daddy oars himself downward, back into his seat. “Surely, you exaggerate. Mrs. Paljor looks more than sufficient to the task.”

• • • •

Long before noon of the next day, the courtyard of the Jokhang Temple swarms with levitating lamas, monks, nuns, yogis, and some authorized visitors from our other two passenger bays.

I cannot explain how I feel. If Mama’s story of Sakya Gyatso’s heart attack is true, then I cannot opt out of the gold-urn lottery. To do so would constitute an insult—the supreme insult—to his punarbhava, or karmic change from one life vessel to the next, or from his body to mine. Mine, as everyone knows, established its bona fides as a living entity years before the DL died. Also, opting out would constitute a heartless affront to all believers, of all who support my candidacy. Still . . .

Does Sakya have the right to self-direct his rebecoming or I the right to thwart his will . . . or only the obligation to accede to it? So much self will and worry taints today’s ceremony that Larry and Kilkhor, if not Minister T, can hardly conceive of it as deriving from Buddhist tenets at all.

Or can they? Perhaps a society rushing at twenty percent of light-speed toward some barely imaginable karmic epiphany has slipped the surly bonds not only of Earth but also of the harnessing principles of Buddhist Tantra. I don’t know. I know only that I can’t opt out of this lottery without betraying a good man who loved me in the noblest and the most innocent of senses.

And so, in our filigreed vestments, Jetsun Trimon and I swim up to the circular dais to which the attendants of the Panchen Lama have already fastened the gold urn for our name slips.

In staggered vertical ranks, choruses of floating monks and nuns chant as we await the drawing. Our separate retinues hold or adjust their altitudes behind us, both to hearten us and to keep their sight lanes clear. Small flying cameras, costumed as birds, televise the event to community members in all three bays.

Jetsun’s boyish face looks at once exalted and terrified.

Lhundrub Gelek, the Panchen Lama, lifts his arms and announces that the lottery has begun. Today he blazes with the fierce bearing of a Hebrew seraph. Tug-monks keep him from rising in gravid slow motion to the ceiling. Abbess Yeshe Yargag floats about a meter to his right, with tug-nuns to prevent her from wandering up, down, or sideways. Gelek reports that name slips for Jetsun Trimon and Greta Bryn Brasswell already drift about in the oversized urn affixed to the dais. Neither of us, he proclaims, needs to swim forward to reach into the urn and pull out a name-slip envelope. Nor do we need stand-ins to do so. We will simply wait.

We will simply wait . . . until an envelope rises on its own out of the urn. Then Gelek will seize it, open the envelope, and read it aloud for all those watching in the Temple hall or via telelinks. Never mind that our wait could take hours, and that, if it does, viewers in every bay will volunteer to rejoin the vast majority of our population in ursidormizine slumber.

And so we wait.

And so we wait . . . and finally a small blue envelope rises through the mouth of the crosshatched gold urn. A tug-monk snatches it from the air, before it can descend out of view again, and hands it to the PL.

Startled, because he’s nodded off several times over the past fifty-some minutes, Gelek opens the envelope, pulls out the name slip, reads it to himself, and passes it on to Abbess Yargag, whose excited tug-nuns steady her so that she may announce the name of the true Soul Child.

Of course, that the Abbess has copped this honor tells everybody all that we need to know. She can’t even speak the name on the slip before many in attendance begin to clap their palms against their shoulders. The upshot of this applause, beyond opening my tear ducts, is a sudden propulsion of persons at many different altitudes about the lottery hall: a wheeling zero-g dance of approbation.

Years in transit: 95
Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 20

The Panchen Lama, his peers and subordinates in U-Tsang, and secular hierarchs from Amdo and Kham have made my parents starship nobles.

They have bestowed similar, if slightly lesser honors, on Jetsun Trimon’s parents and on Jetsun himself, who wishes to serve us colonizers as Bodhisattva, meteorologist, and lander pilot. In any event, his religious and scientific educations proceed in parallel, and he spends as much time in tech training in Kham Bay as he does in the monasteries in U-Tsang.

As for me, I alternate months among our three drums, on a rotation that pleases more of our up-phase ghosts than it annoys. I ask no credit for the wisdom of my scheme, though; I simply wish to rule (although I prefer the verb “preside”) in a way promoting shipboard harmony and reducing our inevitable conflicts.

Years in transit: 99
Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 24

I’ve now spent nearly five years in this allegedly holy office. Earlier today, thinking hard about our arrival at Guge, in only a little over seven Earth years, I summoned Minister Trungpa to my quarters.

“Yes, Your Holiness, what do you wish?” he asked.

“To invite everyone aboard the Kalachakra to submit designs for a special sand mandala. This mandala will commemorate our voyage’s inevitable end and honor it as a fruit of the Hope and Community”—I capitalized the words as I spoke them—“that drove us, or our elders, to undertake this journey.”

Minister T frowns. “Submit designs?”

“Your new auditory aid works quite well.”

“For a competition?”

“Any voyager, any Kalachakran at all, may submit a design.”

“But—”

“The artist monks in U-Tsang, who will create the mandala, will judge the entries blindly to determine our finalists. I’ll decide the winner.”

Minister T does not make eye contact. “The idea of a contest undercuts one of the themes that you wish your mandala to embody, that of Community.”

“You hate the whole idea?”

He hedges: “Appoint a respected Yellow Hat artist to design the mandala. In that way, you’ll avoid a bureaucratic judging process and lessen popular discontent.”

“Look, Neddy, a competition will amuse everyone, and after a century aboard this vacuum-vaulting bean can, we could all use some amusement.”

Neddy would like to dispute the point, but I am the Dalai Lama, and what can he say that will not seem a coddling or a defiant promotion of his ego? Nothing. (Chenrezig forgive me, but I relish his discomfiture.) Clearly, the West animates parts of my ego that I should better disguise from those of my subjects—a term I loathe—immersed in Eastern doctrines that guarantee their fatalism and docility. Of course, how many men of Minister Trungpa’s station and age enjoy carrying out the bidding of a woman a mere twenty-four-years old?

At length he softly says, “I’ll see to it, Your Holiness.”

“I can see to it myself, but I wanted your opinion.”

He nods, his look implying that his opinion doesn’t count for much, and takes a deferential step back.

“Don’t leave. I need your advice.”

“As much as you needed my opinion?”

I take his arm and lead him to a nook where we can sit and talk as intimates. Fortunately, the AG has worked much more reliably all over the ship than it did before my investiture. Neddy looks grizzled, fatigued, and wary, and although he doesn’t yet understand why, he has cause for this wariness.

“I want to have a baby,” I tell him.

He responds instantly. “I advise you not to, Your Holiness.”

“I don’t solicit your advice in that area. I’d like you to help me settle on a father for the child.”

Neddy reddens.

I’ve stolen his breath. He’d like to make a devastatingly incisive remark, but can’t even manage a feeble Ugh. “In case it’s crossed your mind, I haven’t short-listed you . . . although Mama once gave you a terrific, unasked for, recommendation.”

Minister T pulls himself together, but he’s squeezing his hands in his lap as if to express oil from between them.

“I’ve narrowed the candidates down to two, Jetsun Trimon and Ian Kilkhor, but lately I’m tilting toward Jetsun.”

“Then tilt toward Ian.”

“Why?”

And Mama’s lover provides me with good, dispassionate reasons for selecting the older man: physical fitness, martial arts ability, maturity, intelligence, learning (secular, religious, and technical), administrative/organizational skills, and long-standing affection for me. Jetsun, not yet twenty, has two or three separate callings that he has not yet had time to explore as fully as he ought, and the differences in our ages will lead many in our community to suppose that I have exercised my power in an unseemly way to bring him to my bed. I should give the kid his space.

I know from private conversations, though, that when Jetsun was ten, an unnamed senior monk in Amdo often employed him as a drombo, or passive sex partner, and that the experience nags at him now in ways that Jetsun cannot easily articulate. Apparently, the community didn’t see fit, back then, to exercise its outrage on behalf of a boy not yet officially identified as a Soul Child. Of course, the community didn’t know, or chose not to know, and uproars rarely result from awareness of such liaisons, anyway. Isn’t a monk a man? I say none of this to Neddy.

“Choose Ian,” he says, “if you must choose one or the other.”

• • • •

Yesterday, in Kham Bay, after I extended an intranet invitation to him to come see me about his father, who lies ill in his eggshell pod, Jetsun Trimon called upon me in the upper-level stateroom that I inherited, so to speak, from my predecessor. He fell on his knees before me, seized my wrist, and put his lips to the beads, bracelet, and watch that I wear about it. He wanted prayers for his father’s recovery, and I acceded to this request with all my heart.

Then something occurred that I set down here with joy rather than guilt. I wanted more from Jetsun than gratitude for my prayers, and he wanted more than my prayers for his worry about his father or for his struggles to master all his many studies. Like me, he wished the solace of the flesh, and as one devoted to forgiveness, contentment, and the alleviation of pain, I took him to my bed and divested him of his garments and let him divest me of mine. Then we embraced, neither of us trembling, or sweating, or flinching in discomfort or distress, for my quarters hummed at a subsonic frequency with enough warmth and gravity to offset any potential malaise or annoyance. Altogether sweetly, his tenderness matched mine. However—

Like most healthy young men, Jetsun quickly reached a coiled-spring readiness. He quivered on Go.

I rolled over and bestrode him above the waist, holding his arms to the side and speaking with as much integrity as my gnosis of bliss and emptiness could generate. He calmed and listened. I said that I begrudged neither of us this tension-easing union, but that if we proceeded, then he must know that I wanted his seed to enter me, to take root, to turn embryo, and to attain fruition as our child.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

“Do you further consent to acknowledge this child and to assist in its rearing on the planet Guge as well as on this ship?”

He considered these queries. And, smiling, he agreed.

“Then we may advance to the third exalted initiation,” I said, “that of the mutual experience of connate joy.”

I slid backward over the pliable warmth of his standing phallus and kissed him in the middle of his chest. He reached for me, tenderly, and the AG generators abruptly cut off—suspiciously, it seemed to me. I floated toward the ceiling like a buoyant nixie, too startled to yelp or laugh. Jetsun shoved off in pursuit, but hit a bulkhead and glanced off it horizontally.

It took us a while to reunite, to find enough purchase to consummate our resolve, and to do so honoring the fact that a resurgence of gravity could injure, even kill, both of us. Nonetheless, we managed, and managed passionately.

The “night” has now passed. Jetsun sleeps, mind eased and body sated.

I sit at this console, lock-belted in, recording the most stirring encounter of my life. Every nerve and synapse of my body, and every scrap of assurance in my soul, tell me that I have conceived: Alleluia.

Years in transit: 100
Computer Logs of our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 25

Some history: Early in our voyage, when our AG generators worked reliably, our monks created one sand mandala a year. They did so then, as they do now, in a special studio in the Yellow Hat gompa in U-Tsang. They kept materials for these productions—colored grains of sand, bits of stone or bone, dyed rice grains, sequins—in hard plastic cylinders and worked on their designs over several days. Upon finishing the mandalas, our monks chanted to consecrate them and then, as a dramatic enactment of the impermanent nature of existence, destroyed them by sweeping a brush over and swirling their deity-inhabited geometries into inchoate slurries.

These methods of creating and destroying the mandalas ended four decades into our flight when a gravity outage led to the premature disintegration of a design. A slow-motion sandstorm filled the studio. Grains of maroon, citron, turquoise, emerald, indigo, and blood-red drifted all about, and recovering these for fresh projects required the use of hand-vacs and lots of fussy hand-sorting. Nobody wished to endure such a disaster again. And so, soon thereafter, the monks implemented two new procedures for laying out and completing the mandalas.

One involved gluing down the grains, but this method made the graceful ruination of a finished mandala dicey. A second method involved inserting and arranging the grains into pie-shaped plastic shields using magnets and tech-manipulated “delivery straws,” but these tedious procedures, while heightening the praise due the artists, so lengthened the process and stressed the monks that Sakya Gyatso ceased asking for annual mandalas and mandated their fashioning only once every five years.

In any case, today marks our one-hundredth year in flight, and I am fat with a female child who bumps around inside me like those daredevils in old vidped clips who whooshed up and down the sloped walls of special competition arenas on rollers called skateboards.

I think the kid wants out already, but Karma Hahn, my baby doc, tells me she’s still much too small to exit, even if the kid does carry on like “a squirrel on an exercise wheel.” That metaphor endears both the kid and Karma to me. Because the kid moves, I move. I stroll about my private audience chamber, aka “The Sunshine Hall,” in the Potala Palace in U-Tsang. I’ve voluntarily removed here to show my fellow Buddhists that I am not ashamed of my fecund condition.

Ian announces a visitor, and in walks First Officer Nima Photrang, whom I’ve not seen for weeks. She has come, it happens, not solely to visit me, but also to look in on an uncle who resides in the nearby Yellow Hat gompa. She has brought a khata, a white silk greeting scarf, even though I already have enough of those damned rags to stitch together a ship cover for the Kalachakra. She drapes it around my neck. Laughing, I pull it off and drape it around hers.

“Your design contest spurs on every amateur-artist ghost in Amdo and Kham,” Nima says. “If you wish your mandala to further community enlightenment by projecting an image of our future Palace of Hope on Guge, well, you’ve got a lot of folks worrying away at it—mission fully goosed, if not yet fully cooked.”

I realize that Sakya Gyatso, my predecessor, his eye on Tibetan history, called the world toward which we relentlessly cruise Guge partly for the g in Gliese 581g. What an observant and subtle man.

“Nima,” I ask, “have you submitted a design?”

“No, but you’ll probably never guess who intends to.”

No, I never will. I gape cluelessly at Nima.

“Captain Xao Songda, our helmsman. He spends enormous chunks of time with a drafting compass and a pen, or at his console refining design programs that a monk in U-Tsang uploaded a while back to Pemako.”

Pemako is the latest version of our intranet. I like to use it. Virtually nightly (stet the pun), it shows me deep-sea sonograms of my jetting squid-kid.

“I hope Captain Xao doesn’t expect his status as our shipboard Buzz Lightyear to score him any brownies with the judges.”

Nima chortles. “Hardly. He drew as a boy and as a teenager. Later, he designed maglev stations and epic mountain tunnels. He figures he has as good a chance as anyone in a blind judging, and if he wins, what a personal coup.”

“Mmm,” I say.

“No, really, you’ve created a monster, Your Holiness—but, as one of the oldest persons aboard, he deserves his fun, I guess.”

We chat some more. Nima asks if she may lay her palm on the curve of my belly, and I say yes. When the brat-to-be surfs my insides like a berserk skateboarder, Nima and I laugh like schoolgirls. By some criteria, I still qualify.

Years in transit: 101
Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 25-26

I return to Amdo to deliver my child. Early in the hundred and first year of our journey, my water breaks. Karma Hahn, my mother, and Alicia and Emily Paljor attend my lying-in, while my father, Ian Kilkhor, Minister Trungpa, and Jetsun perform a nervous do-si-do in an antechamber. I give the guys hardly a thought. Delivering a kid requires stamina, a lot of Tantric focus, and a cooperative fetus, but I’ve got ’em all and the kid slams out in less than four hours.

I lie in a freshly made bed with my squiddle dozing in a warming blanket against my left shoulder. Well-wishers and family surround us like sentries, although I have no idea what they’ve got to shield us from: I’ve never felt safer.

Mama says, “When will you tell us the ruddy shrimp’s name? You’ve kept it a secret eight months past forever.”

“Ask Jetsun. He chose it.”

Everyone turns to Jetsun, who at twenty-one looks like a fable Kham warrior, lean and smooth-faced, a flawless bronze sculpture of himself. How can I not love him? Jetsun looks to me. I nod.

“It’s . . . it’s Kyipa.” Like the sweetheart he is, he blushes.

“Ah,” Nyendak Trungpa sighs. “Happiness.”

“If we all didn’t strive so damned hard for happiness,” Daddy says, “we’d almost always have a pretty good time.”

“You stole that,” Mama rebukes him. “And your timing sucks.”

From behind those crowded about my babe-cave, a short, sturdy, gray-haired man edges in. I know him as Alicia Paljor’s father, Emily Paljor’s husband—but Daddy, Ian, and Neddy know him as the chief fuel specialist on our strut-ship and thus a personage of renowned ability. So I assume he’s come—like a wise man—to kneel beside and to adore our newborn squiddle. Or has he come just to meet his wife and daughter and fetch them back to their stateroom?

In his ministerial capacity, Neddy says, “Welcome, Specialist Paljor.”

“I need to talk to Her Holiness.” Kanjur Paljor bows and approaches my bed. “If I may, Your Holiness.”

“Of course.”

The area clears of everyone except Paljor, Ian Kilkhor, Kyipa, and me. A weight descends—a weight comprising everything that’s ever floated free of it moorings during every AG quittage that our strut-ship has ever suffered—and that weight, condensed into one tiny spherical mass, lowers itself onto my baby’s back and so onto me, crushing this blissful moment into dust and slivered glass. Ian edges to the top of my bed, but I already know that his strength and his heavy glare with prove impotent against whatever message Kanjur Paljor has brought.

Paljor says, “Your Holiness, I beg your infinite pardon.”

“Tell me.”

He looks at Ian and then, in petition, at me again. “I’d prefer to deliver this news to you alone, Your Holiness.”

“Regard my agent’s simultaneous presence and absence as an enacted mystery or koan,” I tell Paljor. “He speaks a helpful truth.”

Paljor nods and seized my free hand. “About fifteen hours ago, I found a serious navigational anomaly while running a fuel-tank check. Before bringing the problem to you, I ran some figures to make sure that I hadn’t made a calculation error; that I wasn’t just overreacting to a situation of no real consequence.”

He pauses to touch my Kyipa’s blanket. “How much technical detail do you want, Your Holiness?”

“Right now, none. Give me the gist.”

“For a little over one hundred and twenty hours, the Kalachakra traveled at its top speed at a small angle off our requisite heading.”

“How? Why?”

“Before I answer, let me assure you that we have since corrected for this deviation and that we’ll soon run true again.”

“What do you mean, ‘soon’? Why don’t we ‘run true’ now?”

“We do, Your Holiness, in the sense that First Officer Photrang has set us on an efficient angle to intercept our former heading to Guge. But we don’t, in the sense that we still must compensate for the unintended divergence.”

Ian Kilkhor says, “Tell Her Holiness why this ‘unintended divergence’ constitutes one huge fucking threat.”

Totally appalled, I look back at my bodyguard and friend. “I thought you weren’t here! Or did you leave behind just that part of you that views me as an unteachable idiot? Go away, Mr. Kilkhor. Get out.”

Kilkhor has the decency and good sense to do as I command. Kyipa, unsettled by my outburst, squirms fretfully on my shoulder.

“The danger,” I tell Kanjur Paljor, “centers on fuel expenditure. If we’ve gone too far off course, we won’t have enough antimatter ice left to reach Guge. Have I admissibly described our peril?”

“Yes, Your Holiness.” He doesn’t fall to one knee, like a magus beside the infant deity Christ, but crouches so that our faces are nearly at a level. “I believe—I think—we have just enough fuel to complete our journey, but at this late stage it could prove a close thing. If there’s another emergency requiring an additional course correction—”

“We might not arrive at all.”

Paljor nods, and consolingly pats Kyipa’s playing-card-sized back.

“How did this happen?”

“Human error, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me what sort.”

“Lack of attention to the telltales that should have prevented this divergence from our heading.”

“Whose error? Captain Xao’s?”

“Yes, Your Holiness. Nima says his mental state has deteriorated badly over these past few weeks. What she first thought eccentricities, she now views as evidence of age-related mental debilities. He stays awake so long and endures so much stress. And he puts too much faith in the alleged reliability of our electronic systems.”

Also, he came to feel that creating a design for my Palace of Hope mandala took precedence over his every other duty on a strut-ship programmed to fly to its destination, with the result that he put himself on auto-pilot too.

“Where is he now?” I ask Paljor.

“Sleeping, under medical supervision—not ursidormizine slumber but bed rest, Your Holiness.”

I thank Paljor and dismiss him.

Clutching Kyipa to me, I nuzzle her sweet-smelling face.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell Nima to advise her flight crew that they must remain up-phase ghosts until we know for sure the outcomes of Xao’s inattention and our efforts to correct for its potential consequences: a headlong rush to nowhere.

• • • •

Without benefit of lock belts, my daughter, Kyipa, kicks in her bassinet. I seldom worry about her floating off during AG outages because she loves such spells of weightlessness. She uses them to exercise her limbs—admittedly, with no strengthening resistance—and to explore our stateroom, which boasts Buddha figurines, wall hangings, filigreed star charts, miniature starship models, and other interesting items. At five months, she thinks herself a big finch or a pygmy porpoise. She undulates about, giggling at the currents she creates, or, the AG restored, inches along with her pink tongue tip between her lips and her bum rising and falling like a migrating molehill.

As Dalai Lama (many argue), I should never have borne this squiddle, but Karen, Simon, Jetsun, and Jetsun’s mama might disagree, and all contribute to her care. Even Minister T acknowledges that conceiving and bearing her has confirmed my sense of the karmic correctness of my Dalai Lamahood more powerfully than any other event to date. Because of this happy squiddle girl, I do stronger, better, holier work.

To those who tsk-tsk when they see Kyipa squirming in my arms, I say:

“This child is my Wheel of Time, my mandala, who has as one purpose to further my evolving enlightenment. Her other purposes she will learn and fulfill in time. So set aside your resentments so that you may more easily fulfill yours.”

But although I don’t fret about Kyipa during gravity outages, I do worry about her future . . . and ours.

Will we safely arrive at the Gliese 581 system? Of the fifty antimatter-ice tanks with which (long before my birth) we started our journey, we’ve used up and discarded thirty-eight, and Paljor says that we have exhausted nearly half of the thirty-ninth tank, with over five and a half years remaining until our ETA in orbit around Guge. From the outside, our ship begins to resemble a skeleton of its outbound self, the bones of a picked-clean fish. And if the Kalachakra makes it all, as Paljor has speculated, it will slice the issue scarily close.

I stupidly assumed that our eventual shift into deceleration mode would work in our favor, but Paljor cautioned that slowing our strut-ship—so that we do not overshoot Guge, like a golf putt running up to but not beyond its cup—will require more fuel than I thought. Later he showed me math proving that reaching Guge will require “an incident-free approach”—because our antimatter reserves, the fail-safe reserves with which we began our flight, have already dissolved into the ether slipstreaming by the magnetic field coils generating our plasma shield out front.

Still, I don’t believe in shielding our human freight from issues bearing on our survival. Therefore, I’ve had Minister T announce the fact of this crisis to everyone up-phase and working. Thankfully, general panic has not ensued. Instead, crew members brainstorm stopgap strategies for conserving fuel, and the monks and nuns in U-Tsang pray and chant. Soon enough, when we begin to brake, everyone will arise again, shake off the fog of hibernizing, and learn the truth about our final approach. Then every deck will team with ghosts preparing to orbit Guge; to assay the habitable wedges between its sun-stuck face and its bleaker sides; and to decide which of the two wedges is better suited to settlement.

Years in transit: 102
Computer Logs of Our Relucant Dalai Lama, age 27

Xao Songda, our deposed captain, died just twelve hours ago. Although Kyipa celebrated her first birthday last week, the man never laid eyes on her.

Xao’s “bed rest” turned into pathological pacing and harangues unintelligible to anyone ignorant of Mandarin Chinese. These behaviors—symptomatic of an aggressive type of senility unknown to us—our medicos treated with tranqs, placebos (foolishly, I guess), experimental diets, and long walks through the commons of Kham Bay. Nothing calmed him or eased the intensity of his gibbering tirades. I had so wanted Kyipa to meet our captain (or the avatar of the self preceding this sorry incarnation), but I could not risk exposing her to one of his abusive rants.

It bears stating, though, that everyone aboard Kalachakra, knowing the sacrifices that the captain made for us, forgives him his navigation error. All showed him the honor, courtesy, and patience that he deserved for these sacrifices. Nima Photrang, who assumed his captaincy, believes he and Satya Gyatso suffered similar personality disintegrations, albeit in different ways. Sakya used Tantric practices to end his life and Xao Songda fell to an Alzheimer’s-like scourge, but the effects of sleep deprival, suppressed anxiety, and overwork ultimately caused their deaths.

Xao created designs for my mandala competition, I think, as a way to decompress from these burdens. During the last hours of his illness, Ian Kilkhor searched his quarters for anything that could help us fathom his disease and preserve our memory of him as the intrepid Tibetan Buddhist who carried us within three lights of our destination. However, Ian returned to me with two hundred hand-drawn sketches and computer-assisted designs for my Palace of Hope mandala.

These “designs” appalled and saddened us. The ones Xao hand-drew resemble big multicolored Rorschach blots, and those stemming from his cyber-design programs look like geometrically askew fever dreams. All are pervaded with interlocking claws, jagged teeth, vermiform bodies, and occluded reptilian eyes. None could serve as a model for the mandala of my envisioning.

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “The old guy seems to have swallowed the pituitary gland of a Komodo dragon.”

So, given our fuel situation and Captain Xao’s death, I’ve declared a moratorium on mandala-design creation.

Now there is a strong movement afoot—a respectful one—to eject Captain Xao Songda’s corpse into the void, one more human collop for the highballing dark. As I’ve already noted here, we’ve used this procedure many times before, as a practice coincident with Buddha Dharma and, in this case, as one befitting a helmsman of Xao’s stature. But I resist this seeming consensus in favor of a better option: taking the captain to Guge and setting his sinewy body out on an escarpment there, to blacken in its gales and scale in its thaws, our first sacrificial alms to the planet.

• • • •

One work cycle past, Captain Photrang began to brake the Kalachakra. We are four years out from Gliese 581g, and Kanjur Paljor tells me that unless a meteorite penetrates our plasma shield or some other anomalous disaster befalls us, we will reach our destination. Ian notes that we will coast into planetary orbit like a vehicle with an internal combustion engine chugging into its pit on fumes. I don’t altogether twig the analogy, but I do get its gist. Alleluia! If only time passed more quickly.

Meanwhile, I keep Kyipa awake and ignore those misguided ghosts advising me to ease her into grave-cave sleep so that time will pass more quickly for her. Jetsun and I enjoy her far too much to see her down. More important, if she stays up-phase most of the rest of our journey, she will learn and grow; and when we descend to the surface of Guge with her, she will have a sharper mind and better motor skills at five or six than any long-term sleeper of roughly similar age.

Every day, every hour, my excitement intensifies. And our ship plows on.

Years in transit: 106
Computer Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama, age 31

Maintenance preoccupies nearly everyone aboard. In less than a week, our strut-ship will rendezvous with Guge and orbit its oblate, sun-locked mass. Then we will make several sequential descents to and returns from “The Land of Snow” aboard our lander, the Yak Butter Express.

Jetsun will serve as shuttle pilot for one of these first excursions and as backup on another. He and others perform daily checks on the vehicle in its hangar harnesses, just as other techs strive to ensure the reliability of every mechanical and human component. Our hopes and our anxieties contend. At my urging, the Bodhisattva of U-Tsang go from deck to deck assisting in our labors and transmitting positive energies to every bay and to all those at work in them.

• • • •

Twelve hours after Captain Photrang eased Kalachakra into orbit around Guge, Minister T comes to me to report that the Yellow Hat artists in U-Tsang have finished a mandala based on a design that they, not I, chose as our most esteemed entry. Eagerly, I ask whom these Bodhisattva selected.

Lucinda Gomez, a teenager from Amdo Bay, has taken the laurel.

Neddy asks the monks to transport the mandala in its pie-shaped shield to Bhava Park, a commons here in Kham Bay, and they do. A bird camera in the park transmits the mandala’s image to public screens and to vidped units everywhere. Intricate and colorful, it sits on an easel amid a host of tables and many happily milling Kalachakrans. Because we’re celebrating our arrival, I don’t watch on a screen but stand in Bhava Park before the thing itself. Banners and prayer flags abound. I hail the excited Lucinda Gomez and all the artist monks, congratulate them, and also speak to many onlookers, who heed my words smilingly.

The Yellow Hats chant verses of consecration that affirm their fulfillment of my charge and then extend to everyone the blessings of Hope and Community implicit in the mandala’s labyrinthine central Palace. Kyipa, almost six, reaches out to touch the bottom of the encased mandala.

“This is the prettiest,” she says.

She has never before seen a finished mandala in its full artifactual glory.

Then the artist monks start to carry the shield from its easel to a tabletop, there to insert narrow tubes into it and send the mandala’s fixed grains flying with focused blasts of air—to symbolize, as tradition dictates, the primacy of impermanence in our lives. But before they reach the table, I lift my hand.

“We won’t destroy this sand mandala,” I announce, “until we’ve planted a viable settlement on Guge.”

And everyone around us in Bhava Park cheers. The monks restore the mandala to its easel, a ton of colored confetti drops from suspended bins above us, music plays, and people sing, dance, eat, laugh, and mingle.

Kyipa, holding her hands up to the drifting paper and plastic flakes, beams at me ecstatically.

• • • •

In our shuttle-cum-lander, we glide from the belly of Kham Bay toward Gliese 581g, better known to all aboard the Kalachakra as Guge, “The Land of Snow.”

From here, the amiable dwarf star about which Guge swings resembles the yolk of a colossal fried egg, more reddish than yellow-orange, with a misty orange corona about it like the egg’s congealed albumin. I’ve made it sound ugly, but Gliese 581 looks edible to me and quickly trips my hunger to reach the planet below.

As for Guge, it gleams beneath us like an old coin.

In our first week on its surface, we have already built a tent camp in one of the stabilized climate zones of the nearside terminator. Across the tall visible arc of that terminator, the planet shows itself marbled by a bluish and slate-gray crust marked by fingerlike snowfields and glacier sheets.

On the ground, our people call their base camp Lhasa and their rugged territory all about it New Tibet. In response to this naming and to the alacrity with which our fellow Kalachakrans adopted it, Minister T wept openly.

I find I like the man. Indeed, I go down for my first visit to the surface with his blessing. (Simon, my father, already bivouacs there, to investigate ways to grow barley, winter wheat, and other grains in the thin air and cold temperatures.) Kyipa, of course, remains for now on our orbiting strut-ship—in Neddy’s stateroom, which he now shares openly with the child’s grandmother, Karen Bryn Bonfils. Neddy and Karen Bryn dote on my daughter shamefully.

Our descent to Lhasa won’t take long, but, along with many others in this second wave of pioneers, I drop into a meditative trance and focus on a photograph that Neddy gave me after the mandala ceremony at the arrival celebration. Indeed, I recall his words as he presented it:

“Soon after you became a teenager, Greta, I started to doubt your commitment to the Dharma and your ability to stick.”

“How tactful of you to wait till now to tell me,” I said, smiling.

“But I never lost a deeper layer of faith. Today I can say that all my unspoken doubt has burned off like a summer meadow mist.” He gave me the worn photo (not a hardened d-cube) that now engages my attention.

In it, a Tibetan boy of eight or nine faces the viewer with a broad smile. He holds before him, also facing the viewer, a baby girl with rosy cheeks and eyes so familiar that I tear up in consternation and joy. The eyes belong to my predecessor’s infant sister, who didn’t live long after the capture of this image.

The eyes also belong to Kyipa.

I meditate on this conundrum, richly. Soon, after all, the Yak Butter Express will set down in New Tibet.

© 2012 by Michael Bishop. Originally published in Going Interstellar, edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning Unicorn Mountain, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning story, “The Pile,” and many other novels and collections, including The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy, edited by Michael Hutchins. Bishop writes poetry and criticism and has edited the acclaimed anthology Light Years and Dark, three numbers of the Nebula Award volumes, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ, and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human. His novel for young persons, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls appeared in late June 2016 from Kudzu Planet Productions, his imprint at Patrick Swenson’s Fairwood Press. Revised editions of his novels Brittle Innings, Ancient of Days, and four others are also available from Fairwood Press. Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife Jeri and far too many books.

EXCERPT: The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Tor Books)

Seth Dickinson | 4875 words

Chapter 1

Trade season came around again. Baru was still too young to smell the empire wind.

The Masquerade sent its favorite soldiers to conquer Taranoke: sailcloth, dyes, glazed ceramic, sealskin and oils, paper currency printed in their Falcrest tongue. Little Baru, playing castles in the hot black sand, liked to watch their traders come in to harbor. She learned to count by tallying the ships and the seabirds that circled them.

Nearly two decades later, watching firebearer frigates heel in the aurora light, she would remember those sails on the horizon. But at age seven the girl Baru Cormorant gave them no weight. She cared mostly for arithmetic and birds and her parents, who could show her the stars.

But it was her parents who taught her to be afraid.

In the red autumn evening before the stars rose her fathers took Baru down to the beach to gather kelp for ash, the ash meant for glass, the glass for telescope lenses ground flat by volcanic stone, the lenses meant for the new trade. When they came to the beach Baru saw Masquerade merchant ships on the horizon, making a wary circuit around Halae’s Reef.

“Look, das,” Baru said. “They’re coming in for the Iriad market.”

“I see them.” Father Salm shaded his eyes and watched the ships, peeling lips pressed thin. He had the shoulders of a mountain and they corded as he moved. “Go fill your bucket.”

“Watch.” Father Solit, keen-eyed, took his husband’s hand and pointed. “There’s a third ship. They’re sailing in convoys now.”

Baru pretended to dig for kelp and listened.

“Pirates make a good excuse for convoy,” Salm said. “And the convoy makes a good excuse for escort.” He spat into the surf. “Pinion was right. Poison in that treaty.”

Watching their reflections, Baru saw Solit take Salm’s shoulder, callused hand pressed against his husband’s bare strength. Each man wore his hair braided, Solit’s burnt short for the smithy, Salm’s an elaborate waist-length fall—for glory in the killing circle, against the plainsmen.

“Can you see it, then?” Solit asked.

“No. It’s out there, though. Over the horizon.”

“What’s out there, Da?” Baru asked.

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Salm rumbled.

Baru loved her mother and her fathers dearly, but she loved to know things just a small measure more, and she had recently discovered cunning. “Da,” she said, speaking to Solit, who was more often agreeable. “Will we go to Iriad market and see the ships tomorrow?”

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Solit said, and because he echoed Salm instead of indulging her, Baru knew he was worried. But after a moment he added: “Grind your glass tonight, and we’ll have enough to sell. You can come along to Iriad, and see the ships.”

She opened her mother’s hand-copied dictionary that night, squinting at the narrow script in the candlelight, and counted through the letters of the Urunoki alphabet until she came to convoy—a caravan, or a group of ships, gathered for mutual protection, especially under the escort of a warship.

A warship. Hm.

It’s out there, father Salm had said.

From the courtyard of their ash-concrete home came the shriek of stone on glass and the low worried voices of her mother and fathers, a huntress and a blacksmith and a shield-bearer. Worrying about the treaty again.

She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things. But she did not see how a treaty could be poison. Perhaps she would learn at the Iriad market.

Baru put her mother’s dictionary back and then hesitated, fingers still on the chained stitches of the binding. Mother had a new book in her collection, bound in foreign leather. From the first page—printed in strange regular blocks, impersonal and crisp—she sounded out the title: A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Taranoke For Their Ease.

There was a copy number in the bottom corner, almost higher than she could count.

• • • •

Where the sea curled up in the basalt arms of the Iriad cove, beneath the fields of sugarcane and macadamia and coffee that grew from the volcanic loam, the market preened like a golden youth.

Since a time before Baru could remember how to remember the market had filled the Iriad docks, the most noisy and joyous thing in the world. There were more ships in harbor this year—not just Taranoki fishers and felucca, not just familiar Oriati traders from the south, but tall white-sailed Masquerade merchant ships. With their coming the market had outgrown the boardwalks and drifted out onto bobbing floats of koa and walnut where drummers sounded in the warmth and the light.

Today Baru went to market with a new joy: the joy of plots. She would learn what troubled her parents, this knot of warships and treaties. She would repair it.

Her family went by canoe. Baru rode in the prow while mother Pinion and father Salm rowed and father Solit kept nervous watch over the telescopes. The wind off the sea lifted flocks of scaups and merganser ducks, gangs of bristle-throated alawa giving two-toned calls, egrets and petrels and frigatebirds, and high above great black jaegers like wedges of night. She tried determinedly to count them and keep all the varieties straight.

“Baru Cormorant,” mother Pinion said, smiling. In Baru’s eyes she was a coil of storm surf, a thunderbolt, as slow and powerful as sunlight. Her dark eyes and the teeth in her smile were the shapes that Baru imagined when she read about panthers. She worked her oar in strokes as smooth and certain as the waves. “It was a good name.”

Baru, warm and loved and hungry to impress with accurate bird-count, hugged her mother’s thigh.

They found a quay to unload the telescopes and the market swept up around them. Baru navigated the crowd of knees and ankles, trailing behind her parents because the commerce distracted her. Taranoke had always been a trading port, a safe island stop for Oriati dromons and islander canoes, so Baru grew up knowing a little of the structure of trade: arbitrage, currency exchange, import and export. We sell sugarcane and honey and coffee and citrus fruits, Mother Pinion said, and buy textiles, sailcloth, kinds of money that other traders want—Baru, pay attention!

Lately she always paid attention. Something fragile had come into the air, a storm smell, and not understanding made her afraid.

The market smelled of cooked pineapple and fresh ginger, red iron salt and anise. Through the drums and the calls of the dancers and the shouts of the audience in Urunoki and Oriati and the new trade tongue Aphalone came the ring of hard coin and reef pearl changing hands.

“Soliiiiit,” Baru called. “I want to see—!”

“I know.” Solit spared a smile from his work. He had been a smith, and he was generous to everything he made, including Baru. “Go wander.”

Excellent. Now she would pursue the true meaning of treaty.

She found a foreign trader’s stall painted in Masquerade white. The man who watched over the piled broadcloth—woven from sheep, which she understood were large dull beasts made entirely of hair—could have passed for Taranoki from a distance, though up close the different fold of his eyelids and flat of his nose gave him away. This was the first impression Baru had of the Falcrest people: stubborn jaws, flat noses, deep folded eyes, their skin a paler shade of brown or copper or oat. At the time they hardly seemed so different.

The man looked bored, so Baru felt no qualms about climbing up onto his stall. He had guards, two women with shaved heads and sailors’ breeches, but they were busy trying to bridge the language barrier with a young Taranoki fisherman.

“Hello, dear,” the man in the stall said. He moved a stack of samples and made a space for her. Baru made curious note of his excellent Urunoki. He must be a very dedicated trader, or very good with tongues—and cultures too, because traders did not often understand how to be friendly on Taranoke. “Do your parents need cold-weather cloth?”

“Why are they bald?” Baru asked, pointing to the guards. By gesture or prodigious linguistic skill, they had made their fisherman friend blush.

“There are lice on ships,” the merchant said, looking wearily out into the market. He had heavy brows, like fortresses to guard his eyes. “They live in hair. And I don’t suppose your parents need cloth, given the climate here. What was I thinking, trying to sell broadcloth here? I’ll go home a pauper.”

“Oh, no,” Baru assured him. “We make things from your cloth, I’m sure, and besides, we can sell it to traders headed north, and make a profit. Do you use the paper money?”

“I prefer coin and gem, though when I buy, I’ll pay in paper notes.”

He had to his left a stack of sheepskin palimpsest—ink-scratched records that could be scraped clean and used again. “Are those your figures?”

“They are, and they are certainly too important to show to you.” The broadcloth merchant blew irritably at a buzzing fly. “Do your parents use paper money, then?”

Baru caught the fly and crushed it. “No one used it at first. But now that your ships come in so often, everyone must have some, because it can buy so many things.” Then she asked about something she already knew, because it was useful to hide her wit: “Are you from the Masquerade?”

“The Empire of Masks, dear, or the Imperial Republic, it’s rude to abbreviate.” The man watched his guards with a paternal frown, as if afraid they might need supervision. “Yes, that’s my home. Though I haven’t seen Falcrest in some years.”

“Are you going to conquer us?”

He looked at her slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. “We never conquer anyone. Conquest is a bloody business, and causes plagues besides. We’re here as friends.”

“It’s curious, then, that you’d sell goods for coins and gems, but only buy with paper,” said Baru. The shape of her words changed here, not entirely by her will: for a few moments she spoke like her mother. “Because if I understand my figures, that means you are taking all the things we use to trade with others, and giving us paper that is only good with you.”

The broadcloth merchant watched her with sudden sharpness.

“My parents are scared,” Baru added, embarrassed by his regard.

He leaned forward and abruptly she recognized his expression, from markets and traders past. It was avarice. “Are your parents here?”

“I’m fine alone,” she said. “Everyone here knows everyone else. I can’t get lost. But if you want to buy a telescope—“

“I crave telescopes,” he said, perhaps thinking she had never heard of sarcasm. “Where are they?”

“Up there,” she said, pointing. “My mother is the huntress Pinion, and my fathers are Solit the blacksmith and Salm the shield-bearer.”

At that his mouth pursed, as if the idea of fathers troubled him. Perhaps they had no fathers in Falcrest. “And you?”

“My name’s Baru,” she said, as names were gladly given on Taranoke. “Baru Cormorant, because a cormorant was the only thing that made me stop crying.”

“You’re a very clever girl, Baru,” the merchant said. “You’re going to have a brilliant future. Come see me again. Ask for Cairdine Farrier.”

When he came to speak to her parents later, he could not seem to stop looking at her fathers, and then her mother, and pursing his lips as if he had swallowed his own snot. But he bought two telescopes and a set of mirrors, and even wary Salm was happy.

• • • •

The last Masquerade convoy of the trade season circled Halae’s Reef and anchored off Iriad harbor in the company of a sleek red-sailed frigate—the warship that father Salm had expected. Barking sailors swarmed her deck, and a child with a spyglass might, if she were too curious for her own good and too poor a daughter to attend to her work, climb the volcano and watch their proceedings all day long. Baru had such a spyglass, and she was just that kind of daughter.

“They have soldiers on board,” Baru told her parents, excited to discover such a portentous thing herself. Now she could be included in the courtyard councils and whisper of poison treaties. “With armor and spears!”

But father Salm did not buckle on his shield to fight them. Mother Pinion did not take Baru aside and explain the taxonomy of sergeants and officers and the nature and variety of Masquerade weapons. Father Solit fed her no pineapple and asked for no details. They worked in the courtyard, murmuring about treaties and embassies. “Once they have built it,” Salm would say, “they will never leave.” And Solit would answer in flat fighting-without-fighting words: “They will build it whether we sign or not. We must make terms.”

Feeling neglected and therefore unwilling to attend to her chores and figures, Baru nagged them. “Solit,” she said, as he bagged their kelp harvest to carry to the burners, “when can you start smithing again?”

When Baru was young he had made beautiful and dangerous things out of ores that came from the earth and the hot springs. “Once the trading season’s over, Baru,” he said.

“And will mother go across the mountain, into the plains, and use the boar-killing spear you made for her?”

“I’m sure she will.”

Baru looked happily to her mother, whose long strides and broad shoulders were better suited to the hunt than to telescope-making, and then to her other father, who could drum as fiercely as he could fight. “And when the soldiers come, will father Salm use the man-killing spear you made for him?”

“You’re covered in filth, child,” Solit said. “Go to Lea Pearldiver’s home and get some pumice. Take some paper money and buy their olive oil, too.”

• • • •

Baru read at great length about treaties and currency and arbitrage, and when she could read or understand no more, she bothered mother Pinion, or sat in thought. Clearly there had been some mistake: her parents had been happier last year than this.

The trend would have to be reversed. But how?

At Iriad market the merchant Cairdine Farrier sat in his stall with his two guards, who had the satisfied look of gulls. That market fell on a stormy end-of-season day, gray and forbidding, close to the time when the Ashen Sea’s circular trade winds would collapse into winter storm. But the Iriad cove sheltered the market from the worst of the chop and the drummers still drummed. Baru made straight for the wool-merchant’s stall.

Farrier was speaking to a Taranoki plainsman who had clearly come all the way across the mountain, and Baru had always been taught not to speak to plainsmen, so she went to Farrier’s guards instead. The bald women looked down at her, first with perfunctory regard, then irritation, and then, when she stayed, a little smile—from one of them, at least. The other woman looked to her companion for guidance, and thus told Baru that they were probably soldiers, and also which one was in charge.

Her reading and her thought had not been idly spent.

“Hello, little one,” the woman in charge said. She had skin the color of good earth, wide lips, and brilliant blue eyes like a jungle crow. She wore a stained white tunic with her breeches. Her Urunoki was as superb as Cairdine Farrier’s.

“You’ve been here all season,” Baru said. “You never leave with the trading ships.”

“We’ll go home with the last convoy.”

“I don’t think you will,” Baru said. The other woman straightened a little. “I don’t think you’re Cairdine Farrier’s personal guards, or even merchants at all, because if you were you would have learned by now that you don’t need guards at Iriad market, and he would have sent you to find more business.”

The stiff woman said something in Aphalone, the Falcresti language, and from reading the dictionary Baru caught the words native and steal. But the woman with the blue eyes only knelt. “He said you were a very clever girl.”

“You’re soldiers, aren’t you,” Baru said. “From that ship. The war-ship that stayed here all season, anchored out of sight while the other traders came and went, sending back your reports. That’s obvious too. A trader wouldn’t learn a little island’s language as well as you have, which makes you spies. And now that the trade winds are dying, your ship’s come in to harbor to stay.”

The blue-eyed woman took her by the shoulders. “Little lark, I know what it means to see strange sails in the harbor. My name’s Shir and I’m from Aurdwynn. When I was a child, the Masquerade harbored in Treatymont, our great city. They fought with the Duke Lachta, and I was scared too. But it all ended well, and my aunt even got to kill the awful Duke. Here—take a coin. Go buy a mango and bring it back to me, and I’ll cut you a piece.”

Baru kept the coin.

At the end of the day the red-sailed frigate in the harbor put down boats. The soldiers began to come ashore, led by officers in salt-stained leather and steel masks. Through her spyglass Baru watched Iriad’s elders escort the Masquerade soldiers into their new building: a white embassy made of ash concrete.

Later Baru decided this must have been when the treaty was signed, An Act of Federation, For the Mutual Benefit of the People of Taranoke and the Imperial Republic of Falcrest.

At sunset they raised their banner: two open eyes in a mask, circled in clasped hands. And the next morning they began to cut tufa to build the school.

• • • •

Storm season blew down on Taranoke and everything began to fall.

Baru relied on her mother’s love of knowing and telling to understand. But Pinion grew distant and temperamental, her loves overshadowed by a terrible brooding anger, and so left Baru to piece together the clues herself.

This was how she explained it to some of the other children, the Pearldivers and the Tidebreakers, her second cousin Lao oldest among them and already growing into a long-limbed stork of a person who had to fold herself up between the salty rocks of their secret seaside bolthole to listen to Baru’s stories—

“The plainsmen are angry with us,” Baru would say, “because of the treaty. They say it’s because Taranoke stands alone, and we’ve betrayed that by letting the Masquerade build an embassy. But we know better.” (At this everyone would murmur in agreement, having been raised to know the jealous ways of the soggy people from Taranoke’s eastern plains.) “They think we’ve bought a foreign ally to hold over them. They think we want a monopoly on the new trade.”

And events proved her right. Early in the rainy season the Pearldivers and the Tidebreakers and a few Spearcasters packed themselves into their briny seaside fortress so Baru could explain the fires. “The plainsmen sent a war party,” she told them, relishing the power to make them gasp and lean in, and especially the power to make Lao hug her knees and stare at Baru in terror and admiration. “They came over the mountain and burned some of our sugarcane and coffee. It was a message, you see? So the harborside families took council at Iriad, and sent out a war party of our own. Champions to bear their shields east and answer the challenge.”

“What will they do?” Lao asked, to Baru’s immense satisfaction.

“Talk if they can,” Baru said, playing at nonchalance by tossing a stone to herself. “Fight if they can’t.”

“How do they fight?”

How extraordinarily satisfying to be the daughter of Salm the shield-bearer and Pinion the huntress, foremost among the harborside champions. “Wars are fought between champions in a circle of drums. The drums beat and the champions trade spear-cast and shield-push until the loser yields or dies.” Baru cracked her throwing stone against the stone beneath her, to make them leap. “And then the plainsmen go home to sulk, and we sell them textiles at outrageous prices.”

But it didn’t happen this way. When the war party set out to cross the mountain and challenge the plainsmen, the Masquerade garrison marched with them. The treaty spoke of mutual defense.

This was where Baru lost track of events, because mother Pinion and father Salm marched with them too—the war party with their shields and man-spears and obsidian knives climbing the flank of the mountain in a motley peacock throng, Salm’s braids a mark of glory among them, Pinion’s spear strapped across her brown back. And the Masquerade garrison masked and columned behind them, banners flying, churning the road to mud.

It had been a long time since war between harborside and plainsmen. Around Iriad there were old vendettas, wives who would not take plainside husbands, men who would not add their seed to a plainside woman’s child. But it had been easy to forget that hate as long as times were fat.

Baru and father Solit stayed at home. The glassmakers had stopped burning kelp and so there were no mirrors to grind. Without Masquerade traders in harbor the paper money was worthless, except it wasn’t, because everyone wanted to have it when the trade winds picked up again, and bartered outrageously for even a few slips.

The wool-merchant Cairdine Farrier came in person to invite Baru to attend the new school, a great tufa-walled compound above the cove. “Oh,” father Solit said, his voice hard. “I don’t know. What could you teach her that she couldn’t learn from us?”

“Lands around the Ashen Sea,” Farrier said, smiling conspiratorially at Baru. “New sorts of arithmetic and algebra. Astronomy—we have an excellent telescope, built by the Stakhieczi in the distant north. Science and the disciplines within it. Various catalogues—” his smile held “—of sin and social failure. The Imperial Republic is determined to help those we meet.”

“No,” father Solit said, taking her shoulder. “Your help is a fishhook.”

“You know best, of course,” Farrier said, though the avarice had not gone from his eyes.

But without Salm and Pinion, father Solit was lonely and disconsolate, and Baru insisted that she be allowed to attend this wonderful school, which might be full of answers to questions she had barely begun to form—what is the world and who runs it and more. Whether because she made Solit furious, or sad, or led him to realize he no longer had any control, her pleas struck home. (She wondered about this often, later, and decided it was none of that. He had seen the fire on the horizon, and wanted his daughter safe.)

She went into the school, with her own uniform and her own bed in the crowded dormitory, and there in her first class on Scientific Society and Incrasticism she learned the words sodomite and tribadist and social crime and sanitary inheritance, and even the mantra of rule: order is preferable to disorder. There were rhymes and syllogisms to learn, the Qualms of revolutionary philosophy, readings from a child’s version of the Falcresti Handbook of Manumission.

They know so much, Baru thought. I must learn it all. I must name every star and sin, find the secrets of treaty-writing and world-changing. Then I can go home and I will know how to make Solit happy again.

She learned a great many other things as well, astronomy and social heredity and geography. She made a map of the Ashen Sea and its seasonal trade winds, which carried ships in a great easy circle that ran clockwise (another new word) around the ocean, starting at Falcrest in the east and running south near Taranoke and Oriati Mbo, onwards past lands with many names, all the way north to Aurdwynn and then back to Falcrest again.

So many lands. Oriati Mbo below, learned and fractious, a quilt of federations. Cold Aurdwynn above, where instead of a storm season they had winter, and no decent fruit, and wolves.

And Falcrest. It must be full of secrets to learn.

“You could go to Falcrest, Baru Cormorant!” The social hygienist Diline, a gentle man the color of whitefish, aimed his stylus at her. “At the end of your schooling, every child of promise will sit the civil service exam, the Empire’s great leveler. Through the methods of Incrastic thought, we will determine your social function. You may become a translator, a scholar, even a technocrat in a distant land.”

“Does the Emperor live in Falcrest?” second cousin Lao asked. At night they whispered rumors of the silent Emperor and the Faceless Throne on which he sat.

Diline smiled blandly. “He does. Who can recite the Hierarchic Qualm?”

The civil service exam became Baru’s guide-star. It would ask her to recite the secrets of power, she imagined. It would require her to make father Solit smile again.

But that very same day Diline taught them the proof of strict limited inheritance. “One male father,” he said, watching the class carefully, as if waiting for a boar to burst out from among them. “One female mother. No less. No more.”

The class did not believe him. Cousin Lao began to cry. Baru tried to disprove this idiot proof, and had her first shouting match. She had been the daughter of a huntress and a blacksmith and a shield-bearer, and now they would tell her she was not?

She had to ask mother Pinion.

But Pinion came home alone.

Came home from the war, the blood-soaked catastrophe at Jupora, where Masquerade marines shot dead the plainsmen champions and slaughtered their war party. Cradling father Solit’s trembling face in her hands, she husked her own catastrophe—“Salm vanished on the march home. There were men among the foreign soldiers who hated him. I think they took him.”

“For what?” Solit’s voice, sealed, frozen, desperate to keep things within or without. “What could they find to hate?”

“You. None of these men have husbands. They hate husbands.” She lowered her forehead to his. “He’s gone, Solit. I looked—I looked so long—”

When this happened, it was because of the class on Scientific Society and Incrasticism that Baru could only think to ask: “Was Salm my real father? Or was he only a sodomite?”

It was because of this that father Solit cried out, and told mother Pinion about the school. It was because of this that mother Pinion struck her in rage, and cast Baru out of the courtyard to run sobbing back to the white walls and the masked banner.

Her mother came to apologize, of course, and they cried and were reunited as a family, or at least a grieving part of one. But the hurt was dealt, and the school seemed to know more than even mother Pinion, who taught no more—only whispered with Solit about fire and spear and resistance.

“Stay at school,” Solit said. “You’ll be safest there. The Farrier man—” His nostrils flared in disgust. “—will not let you be harmed.”

I must learn why this happened to Salm, Baru thought. I must understand it, so I can stop it from ever happening again. I will not cry. I will understand.

This was Baru Cormorant’s first lesson in causality. But it was not quite the most important thing she ever learned from her mother.

That came earlier, long before the school or the disappearance of brave father Salm. Watching the red-sailed warship in Iriad harbor, Baru asked: “Mother, why do they come here and make treaties? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?”

“I don’t know, child,” mother Pinion said.

It was the first time Baru could ever remember hearing those words from her.

Copyright © 2015 by Seth Dickinson. Excerpted from The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Dickinson is a graduate of the University of Chicago, a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU (where he studied racial bias in police shoot/don’t shoot decisions), and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. He worked with Bungie Studios, creators of Marathon and Halo, to write item descriptions and much of the Grimoire fiction companion for Destiny. In his dwindling spare time he’s a designer and writer on the Blue Planet project for FreeSpace Open. Learn more at sethdickinson.com and @sethjdickinson.

Review: Arrival

Carrie Vaughn | 1317 words

The Inevitable Broken Heart

If you’ve read the story Arrival is based on, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, you already know the alien language and you will understand everything about the movie from the first frame, you will know exactly how it’s going to unfold, and you will watch it all anyway, enthralled. And it will break your heart, as you always knew any adaptation of this story must in order to be successful.

If you have not read the story, the movie will strangely and wondrously unfold in much the same way reading the story does. You’ll be confused but intrigued, then you will suspect, then you will understand, and then your heart will break.

The breaking heart is mandatory in any case.

This may be what struck me most about this film, is how brilliantly it captures not just the theme and heart of the story—that communication with aliens will be alien, it will be difficult, and it will fundamentally change us. It also manages to capture the experience of reading the story, which is nonlinear, written in second person point of view, and which ought to have been unfilmable. The film is, appropriately, the story translated. You might, as I did, cry not just at the heart of the story but at the miracle of its impossible adaptation.

The story: A talented linguist, Louise Banks is called on to help initiate communication with the aliens on board a mysterious craft that has stationed itself in Montana—one of twelve that have landed all over the world. Partnered with a wry astrophysicist and overseen by an increasingly paranoid military, Louise must find a way to communicate with the Heptapods, a species so fundamentally different from us that at first there seems no real basis of engagement. Until she begins writing, and they write back.

Soon after, Louise starts having visions. Or are they memories? Or maybe even prophecy? In fact, the film opens with the history of Louis and her daughter Hannah, who dies tragically young. Only as the story progresses do we realize that history hasn’t happened yet. As Louise’s understanding of Heptapod writing increases, her perception of time and space changes. It’s not so much that she sees the future. Rather, she begins to experience her entire life simultaneously. Thus begins a race to see if Louise can convey and use what she has learned before human governments and military forces engage in typically stupid bouts of violence in the name of defense and safety.

“Story of Your Life,” first published in 1998 and winner of the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, is one of the most talked about short stories of the last twenty years. The film is a worthy adaption, and joins a small but significant list of peaceful first-contact movies—The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact, all of which are some of my very favorite science fiction movies of all time. The primary cast—Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker—are understated and solid.

Louise reminded me of two other woman scientists in cerebral science fiction films: Ryan Stone in Gravity, and Ellie Arroway in Contact. All driven, passionate, intelligent, career-focused women, enough alike that it seems like a trope, one I could probably delve more into across both written and film science fiction. I’ll just focus on these three movies.

Gravity drove me a little bananas because despite its riveting focus on the difficulties of surviving in space, carried by an engaging woman character, by the end of the story it was abundantly clear that the grand adventure was primarily a metaphor for surviving grief, particularly the poignant grief of a mother for the death of her child. I wanted space adventure, and the grief seemed cliché. It wasn’t the story I wanted.

I brought friends to Arrival who had not read “Story of Your Life.” So, unfamiliar with the source material and what they were getting into, they assumed the scenes of Louise and Hannah were flashbacks. They were fully immersed in the trope and trained to read Louise as a mother who has drowned her grief in her work. Only as the film progressed did they realize: these aren’t flashbacks. The child hasn’t been born yet. I was delighted to see that along with everything else it does, Arrival neatly overturns audience expectations of a trope that was played with such melodrama in Gravity. Arrival can be viewed as a metaphor for grief, for grief as inescapable, but rather than subsuming the science fictional conceit, the metaphor here is absolutely dependent on it. They’re intertwined, not interchangeable.

Arrival is a rather obvious successor to Contact, and Ellie Arroway a conceptual ancestor for Louise Banks. But rather than seeking out alien contact as Arroway has, Banks is thrown into it. And while Contact offers a benevolent, literally patriarchal (the alien Ellie makes contact with takes the form of her father) imagining of advanced alien races who understand us, are looking for us, and will shepherd us into greater understanding of the universe, Arrival presents a much less comforting scenario: the Heptapods are so alien as to almost be outside our comprehension. I want to mention here that the Heptapods are beautiful. Their movements are believable, built out of whatever serves them as bone and muscle and sinew, with visible joints and sensible mechanics. Most importantly, they aren’t typical Hollywood CG phantasms. They aren’t designed to elicit a specific reaction from the audience, whether fear or revulsion or attraction. They simply are.

This is the first first-contact movie I’ve seen that demonstrates just how amazingly difficult communicating with aliens is likely to be. Most films present aliens as invaders, conquerors, or would-be benevolent overlords—scenarios we understand because humanity has done those things itself. But to communicate with beings who have an entirely different outlook of time and space? Beings who present the concept of “gift”—but the linguists interpret it as “weapon” because that’s what humanity is looking for and fears? And yet, the film, like the best peaceful first-contact movies, unabashedly declares that attempting such communication is worthwhile and necessary and must be done with peace as the desired outcome.

I imagine some fans of the short story will be annoyed at the intrusion of the larger world, politics, and paranoia into Louise’s personal story. The addition of a plot about the Chinese government steering violent confrontation and the explosive sabotage planted by a disaffected soldier—recalling the act of sabotage at about the same point in the plot in Contact: This was the Hollywoodization we were worried about. But the addition of the wider world was necessary to expand such an intimate short story to the size and scope of an A-list Hollywood movie. It doesn’t betray the story’s core. The exploration of time and emotion remain. The bulk of the film focuses on Louise, on her hands as she squeezes a tremor out of them, on her eyes as she encounters the Heptapods, and as her gaze turns inward on some tangled thought. The film is more intimate than not, beginning and ending with her voice.

Arrival gives us what we desperately need now, a mainstream movie featuring scientist characters in a story that celebrates problem solving in the name of peace and exploration, part of a trend that continues what we saw in Interstellar and The Martian. I hope Arrival is wildly successful and this trend of intellectual, accessible, problem-solving science fiction in mainstream movies continues.

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, December 2016

Amal El-Mohtar | 1040 words

Bones, Marrow, Flight

I want to do something a little different with this column and review a single book with the depth and breadth I feel it deserves at this particular moment. There will be spoilers for Fran Wilde’s Updraft, but I’ll try to discuss Cloudbound without getting into any. If you’d prefer to avoid the possibility of any spoilers at all, know that I absolutely unambiguously recommend both these books, and you should go read them immediately: they’re beautifully written love letters to engineering, and full of some of the most wildly imaginative world-building I’ve read in years.

Cloudbound
Fran Wilde
Hardcover
Tor Books
ISBN 978-0765377852
September 2016
400 pages

Updraft introduced us to a city far above the clouds, made up of living bone towers between which people travel—at great personal risk—on mechanical wings. These towers surround a central Spire, where the ruling elite, called Singers, jealously guard the city’s history and specialised knowledge of flying: how to fly at night, how to echolocate, how to shout down the monsters invisible until they open their mouths to consume you. By the end of Updraft, Kirit Densira has led a revolt against the Singers from within the Spire and upended her city’s generations-old order, with the nagging question of what are the bones growing from forming a potent undercurrent to the book’s concerns about population control and futurity.

Cloudbound begins a few months later, picking up the city’s pieces: what’s to be done with the Singers who fought against oligarchy from within, but were often complicit in the Spire’s horrors? What’s to be done with the children (called “fledges”) being raised in the Spire, innocent of its crimes? What’s to be done to stitch the city’s fabric back together before it succumbs to gravity? Who will fill the vacuum of authority in a city that has only remained aloft through the most intricate and precise checks and balances of social and physical engineering?

Narrated by Kirit’s friend Nat, sibling-close and of very different temperament, the answers to these questions aren’t obvious. Where Kirit is fierce and impassioned, Nat is cautious and quiet; where Kirit leads, Nat is led; where Kirit forges forward alone for the good of the city, Nat is constrained by the bounds of his family and devotion to the letter of Laws over their spirit. It’s a choice I’ve seen held against the book by other reviews, but that I’d argue is not only appropriate, but necessary to the book and series’ central concerns.

In Cloudbound the villain is no longer secrecy, but disinformation; no longer oligarchy, but demagoguery. In a world where new laws and information are written on bone chips and disseminated by birds, it is the strength and viciousness of the birds in question that win out, not the validity of the information being spread. The helplessness in the face of being unable to communicate with one’s fellow citizens is palpable and painfully familiar; the desperate need to be heard and understood is sharpened by the impossibility of reaching through the layers of anger and fear separating the towers from each other. In Updraft, Kirit’s voice could stop monsters; in Cloudbound, monsters strangle Nat’s voice, and the only hope of rescue is buried deep in half-remembered songs that must be rebuilt between family and friends. Cloudbound is, in many ways, a book about how difficult and crucial it is to organize and communicate in the face of those who’d twist laws and language to their own ends.

The timeliness of this book staggers me. It was written and published before media narratives around false news had really solidified, before “post-fact society” became as common a phrase as it presently is. I finished reading it before November 8th; after November 8th I felt I’d read a different book. At a time when every few hours I see people questioning what good is art in the face of fascism, asking how they can promote their work in the face of proposed Muslim registries and citing of Japanese internment camps as precedent, Cloudbound’s wedding of law, memory, and history to song is overwhelmingly relevant.

I have a bone—as it were—to pick with this review of the book, which suggested that “Updraft . . . soars in a way Cloudbound doesn’t . . . partly because revolutions are glamorous, and rebuilding is not.” This is a false binary. Revolutions are only glamorous in retrospect, once the difficult work of rebuilding has been accomplished. To separate revolution from rebuilding, and to fault the latter for lacking the energy and fierceness of the former, is a dangerous category error—and given the world in which we find ourselves this winter, I am deeply grateful for books that don’t shy from depicting the visceral complexity of building something up in the wake of one’s world being torn down.

Where Updraft moved horizontally through its society to get to the Spire’s marrow, Cloudbound moves vertically through space and time to get at cultural memory and the city’s origins, excavating history out of damp, cloudy air. I see in it our own concerns about climate change, the skeletal outlines of narratives around saving our planet or abandoning it, the agonizing work of making bridges between people, whether of sinew, silk, or—more challenging than either of these—words.

A middle book is a kind of bridge, too. Between the unburied certainties of Updraft and the undiscovered country of next year’s Horizon are Cloudbound’s hard and necessary questions—and the suggestion that asking them together, of each other, is fully as important as the prospect of finding answers.

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: Nancy Kress

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 9677 words

Nancy Kress is the author of more than twenty novels, including the Probability series and the Green Tree series. She’s best known for her novella “Beggars in Spain,” which she later expanded into a novel of the same name about children who are genetically engineered to never have to sleep. That story, along with twenty others, are included in her recent short story collection The Best of Nancy Kress.

This interview first appeared in July 2016 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 about how your recent short story collection The Best of Nancy Kress came about.

I had been wanting to do a retrospective for a while, and I was delighted when Subterranean contacted me and said, “I think it is time to do a Best of Nancy Kress.” They do “the best of” for a number of authors, as you probably know, and they do an absolutely gorgeous job, so I was really, really pleased. I had a long talk with my editor, Yanni, and she said, “You can have 200,000 words.” So, I had to choose the stories that would go in there. The problem is, I tend to write novellas, which come very close to 40,000 words. Nearly all of my awards have been for novellas. But, if you put in five novellas, then there goes the whole book, so I had to leave some things out that I otherwise would have included. But the process of selection, although agonizing, was also a lot of fun.

What was it like going through all those old stories and trying to pick out the best ones?

It was strange. I don’t usually reread my stuff. Once I’m done with it, I’m moving on to the next project, and that absorbs all of my interest. When the copy-edited manuscripts show up, I actually resent it and think, “Oh lord, I’ve got to do this now.” But it feels like I’m pulling my attention away from whatever I’m writing. I don’t understand writers who can work on four or five or even six different projects at a time. To me, that would feel like adultery. I’m really committed to whatever I’m working on at a time.

Anyway, when I went through the stories, I wrote all of the names and word counts on little bits of yellow paper for all of the stories that I was interested in. And then I put them in piles. These are definites, these are maybes, these are nos. I was fooling around with the maybes when a huge gust of wind blew in the door and all of the little pieces of yellow paper end up on the floor. I thought, “This is possibly a sign on what I should include, but probably not.” So, I had to start all over again.

When you go back and look at these older stories, are they pretty much the way that you remember them or did you have a completely different perspective on any of them now?

My style has changed a lot. When I first started to write, I was not doing hard science fiction. I was doing a lot more contemporary fantasy, and a lot more very soft science fiction, and some outright fantasy, and my style was a lot more lyrical. I tended to use more figurative language. I tended to end things on a more ambiguous note. That doesn’t work really well with hard SF.

As I progressed through my career, my style got harder and more spare. I was surprised reading some of those early stories that I had been that lyrical once, so yes, that was a surprise, since I haven’t looked at them in decades. But there were many of them I still like. Many of them I don’t like at all. And many that I wish I could go back and rewrite and edit because I might do it a little differently now.

You mention that you got more into hard science fiction as you wrote, and in the note for your story “Trinity” you say that when you wrote that story you hadn’t yet discovered how much fun it is to build on actual science to create fiction. I was wondering, was there a particular moment where you discovered how much fun it is?

I don’t think so. I only know that it was after Beggars in Spain. Although, I did research sleep a little bit in order to write that, because it’s about people who are genetically engineered to never need sleep. I didn’t research it way down to the molecular level—I was content with a couple of broad generalities and a few theories. So, it was post-that.

I think it was somewhere in the late ’90s or early 2000s that science began to genuinely catch my imagination. Maybe it was the human genome project. That was gearing up at that time. Since then I’ve tried to educate myself as much as I can. I’m not scientifically trained, and that has been a drawback. I have to read, I have to research, I have to pester experts to help me. I have to do all of those things in order to make my stories as believable as I can.

Right, so if there are other writers listening to this who aren’t scientifically trained, do you have any advice for them for how to go about doing that sort of scientific research?

I subscribe to Science News and to MIT Tech Journal and a couple of others that have science in a popular form for the laymen. When something catches my imagination, then I go online, and I research in areas that I trust. For instance, the CDC site. Places that are not strange. Because as you probably now, the Internet has a lot of strange stuff on it.

I will research and research and make notes, copious notes, until I have the idea of how the science is going to fit with the plot, and then I can proceed from there. If there are things that I can’t find, and that I need to have, there are some microbiologists that I can email and they will help me. For instance, I needed to know for one story how a virus can become airborne. I emailed one of the microbiologists, and she very, very helpfully sent me a long email and the kinds of changes that have to happen in the envelope protein of a virus in order for it to go transmissible by contact to transmissible by air. That kind of thing. So, if you don’t have a bunch of microbiologists already—I collect them like butterflies—you need to research even more carefully on acceptable sites. Also, books, but the problem with books is that by the time they’re in print they tend to be outdated. Science is moving so fast.

That was your story “Evolution,” right?

Yes.

Do you want to talk about that story?

That story was written in 1994, and I could see it coming, well, so could the whole scientific world, that we were running out of antibiotics that would work against microbes, pathogens that were mutating so fast. Bacteria can, under ideal circumstances, produce a new generation every twenty minutes. Obviously, we cannot do that, and right now it is getting to the point where it is becoming really scary, because there are not that very many new antibiotics in the research pipeline. The reason is that they are not profitable. They are not as profitable as other kinds of drugs like, for instance, Viagra and all of its spinoffs. So, pharmaceuticals are not invested as much in antibiotic research.

Most cases of infection from drug resistant staphylococcus aureus are contracted in hospitals. And we are getting to a point where many people don’t want to go to the hospital, especially for something that isn’t major, because the chances of picking up a pathogen there, a hospital-born pathogen, can sometimes be greater than the chances of actually getting help if it’s not for anything major. So, that’s what my story “Evolution” is centered on. That was 1994 and twenty years ago, and it is, alas, starting to become more and more true.

You mentioned that you got interested really in the hard science stuff from the human genome project, and this book has a double-helix on the cover. Biology is really a focus of your writing. What interests you so much about biology, and particularly the genetic engineering of humans, as a theme that shows up again and again?

Well, somebody said, and I can’t remember who, that there are three very small things that are shaping science and have been shaping science for the last hundred years. In physics it’s the atom and its subdivisions. In information technology, it’s the byte, and all of what that has led to in terms of computers and eventually AI. In biology, it is the gene.

Of those three, the gene is the one that really interests me. Physics seems very esoteric, which of course it is. I just read the very popular book Spooky Action at a Distance about quantum entanglement, and I have to say that if I understood a quarter of it, that was a lot. Also, computers completely baffle me, as you saw the trouble we had just getting Skype to work. I’m not good at that. But, biology is something that not only I can follow, but that really, really interests me because this is a chance for us to actually direct our own evolution and the evolution of other things on the planet, and I really don’t understand why anybody isn’t interested in this.

When I talk to young people, to colleges, and even occasionally high schools, I say, “Your generation is the one that is going to have to make these decisions about genetic engineering. What are we going to engineer? How much are we going to engineer? Who is going to control it if it can be controlled, which I’m not sure is true. With what consequences?” These are going to be political issues. They already are, but they’re going to be really major issues, and it’s important that the right information get out there, which alas, does not always happen.

Speaking of that, you mentioned your novel Beggars in Spain, which is one of your best known works. Do you want to say more about that story?

Beggars in Spain came about partly out of sheer jealousy. I need eight hours of sleep. Preferably eight and a half every night, or I get very cranky, and my mind doesn’t work right. I know people who manage to get by with four or five hours of sleep every night and function just fine, and I am enormously jealous. They get more life than I do. Jealousy was one of the things that fed into writing that story.

The other thing was a workshop I had attended for professionals. We were all critiquing each other’s manuscripts, and Bruce Sterling made a comment about one of mine, which was exactly true. He said, “I don’t believe your future society. I don’t believe it takes place on an alien planet. I don’t know who controls the resources. I don’t know who controls the power. I don’t know who is behind all of this. You haven’t shown me the underpinnings of the money and the power. You haven’t followed the money.” So, I went home from this workshop, and I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks, and then I thought, “Damn it. He’s right.” And I started to think about money and power.

The two things on money and power that shaped Beggars in Spain are Ursula le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, in which power is shared. It’s an anarchist society. Money does not exist because private property does not exist. That’s at one end. The other end is Ayn Rand, whom I think was a dreadful writer, and whose ideas I don’t share, but her basic philosophy was that power and money belong to whoever, basically, can get them. Power should accrue to money and money should accrue to hard work and inventiveness, which is not always the case. And in her world, it does. Her world is everybody out for themselves. Ursula le Guin’s world is a total sharing, and that will eliminate violence. I didn’t believe either one of them.

So, the other thing that fed into Beggars in Spain was the question, what do I believe about money and power? What would an ideal society look like that is trying to deal with those issues along with genetic engineering? This seemed to be a large enough subject that it ended up a trilogy.

In the story you have this character, Kenzo Yagai, who has this influential philosophy. Could you talk a little bit about that philosophy?

That’s pure objectivism. Kenzo Yagai’s philosophy is pretty much pure Ayn Rand. I wanted to show that that doesn’t always work. It leaves too many people out. Ayn Rand was fine with that. Leave out everybody who doesn’t meet her criteria. I’m not fine with that. So, I wanted to talk about the people who are not naturally gifted. Who are not naturally in a position where they can create and become important titans of business. I wanted to talk about those people who are at the lower end of the franchise scale, which is Alice in Beggars in Spain. And the relationship between the two sisters, Leisha and Alice, is what drives the novella and part of what drives the novel.

Right, so you have these two sisters, one of whom, Alice, is not enhanced in any way, and the other sister, Leisha, who is genetically engineered to not need to sleep and so can accomplish a lot more than Alice can.

She’s also favored by her very wealthy father, which has a lot to do with it, as poor Alice is not.

You mentioned earlier that you thought the science in this was not as researched as you would do later, but I thought the science seemed pretty in-depth. I was just wondering how much artistic license you had taken with this idea that sleep is not really biologically necessary?

At the time I wrote it in 1994, there were theories that said that—although there were other theories, of course, that said the opposite. And I picked the theories I liked. In the twenty years since then, we have come to show that a lot more goes on during sleep than we thought. I don’t think you really could eliminate it. For one thing, we have found out that during sleep, certain toxins are flushed out of the brain, and they go down the Vagus nerve, all the way down, which connects to the gut, and eventually get flushed out of the body. We didn’t know that was going on in 1994. We did know that if you’re deprived of REM sleep, psychosis can set in. I sort of covered that in the book, but not at a molecular level. If I were writing that novel now, I think it would be a much different book. Although it would have the same plot spine, the details would be much different. But I’m not writing it now. I wrote it in 1992.

You mentioned that this conversation with Bruce Sterling kind of kicked off an important epiphany for you with this story, but at that point I think you’d been working on it for thirteen years or so, right?

I had not worked on the central economic question of Beggars in Spain, which is “what do the haves owe the have-nots?” That’s the question that Tony asks Leisha over and over, and that she’s trying to grapple with and come up with a philosophy of why the haves owe the have-nots things.

But the question of genetic engineering to not need to sleep, yes I had been working on that for thirteen years. The first story I wrote was completely dreadful, and it was rejected by everybody. Robert Silverberg rejected it twice because I hadn’t realized that he had changed editorial positions, and I sent him the manuscript at his new position, and he wrote back, “I didn’t like this the first time, and I still don’t like it.” Then I put that away, and I tried again several years later, and that story was so bad that I never even sent it out because even I could see it wasn’t working. But the idea was still there. It had been born of my jealousy of long sleepers, so that was still in there. I was still mulling it over, and eventually, thanks to Bruce’s comment, the right format to present it came to me. I wrote the novella in three weeks.

Wow, it’s just so striking to me that it’s such a successful story but it took so long to take its final form and to find success and that you stuck with it over all those years.

I don’t know if stuck with it is the right term because that implies that I was working on it continuously, which I certainly was not. I was kind of thinking about it way in the back of my mind, but writing many other books and many other stories that while I was writing them had my full commitment.

I just think for writers it’s encouraging to hear that just because a story is not working now doesn’t mean that  you can’t come back to it in ten years and figure out what’s wrong with it.

Oh, that’s completely true. Yes.

One story I wanted to ask you about dealing with science fiction writers very directly is the story “Casey’s Empire.” Could you say a little bit about that?

“Casey’s Empire” was one of my early stories, and it too was written out of frustration. Now that I think about it, frustration is driving an awful lot of my stories. The frustration here was that I had begun to sell stories, but not all of them. I could not figure out why some of them were going and some of them were not. So “Casey’s Empire” is about a would-be science fiction writer who is trying very hard to figure out what makes stories work and what doesn’t make stories work while also trying to eke out a living and get a graduate degree in English. All of which I was trying to do at the same time. In some ways, it’s a personal story, although the things that happen to Casey never happened to me.

The other impetus for writing that was the game that Casey played as a child was one I actually used to play with friends: If a spaceship suddenly landed right in the back pasture, would you get on it and take a chance that it would never come back, or kill you, or would you just run away shrieking and go find the police? Some of us said we’d get on, and some of us said we wouldn’t. That game had stayed with me all of my life.

I think that writers use everything. They don’t always use it in as direct a form as I just described, but they use it. It drops into that deep well of unconscious, and it sort of crossbreeds with everything else that’s down there, and what is down there is everything you’ve ever experienced, everything you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever seen on TV, everything you’ve ever talked to other people about, and it all ferments down there and comes out as something different.

I think that’s so interesting that you played that same game as a child, because the Casey character is somebody who is obsessed with science fiction from their earliest childhood and pursues it non-stop throughout his whole life. Is that what your trajectory was, or did you ever go away from that, or come back to it?

No, my trajectory was much different. To begin with, I didn’t even discover science fiction until I was fourteen. I grew up in the 1950s, so the reason for this could not exist today: The library was divided into a boys’ section and a girls’ section, and all of the science fiction was shelved in the boys’ section. All of the fantasy shelved in the girls’ section. And being very much a goody-goody who obeyed all of the rules, I never went over to the boys’ section. So I read a lot of fantasy. I read Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book and green book and blue book and plaid book of fairy tales. All of them. But I never saw any science fiction.

When I was fourteen, I had my first boyfriend, and I would go to his house after school. He was studying to be a concert pianist. He would practice on the piano, and I would hang adoringly over the piano. Well, I’m tone deaf. I can hang adoringly for maybe ten minutes. Then I would edge away to the bookshelves that were in the room, and I’d pull his father’s books off them, and among them was Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I started reading it. I’d never seen any science fiction before, and I was hooked. I was in love. And not with the pianist.

Did you know then that you wanted to be a writer, or did that come later?

No, I became a fourth-grade teacher, and that’s what I was. I didn’t start writing until I was nearly thirty. I was pregnant with my second child, at home, way out in the country. No car. Very few neighbors. I was going nuts. I started writing while the baby was napping to have something to do that didn’t involve Sesame Street. I didn’t take it seriously for a very long time.

But after a year, a story sold. After another year, another story sold. After a third year, another story sold. And then it began to pick up pace, and I got genuinely involved with it because by this time I was reading a lot of science fiction. But, you have to understand, I grew up in a very conservative, Italian-American family in the ’50s. Nobody ever thought a girl should be a writer or anything else. In fact, I thought all writers were dead when I was a kid. The writers who I was reading like Louisa May Alcott and Zane Grey, they were all dead. I honestly, as a little girl, did not realize that more writing was being produced. I thought it was sort of like oil: a finite commodity.

In one of the collection’s notes, you say that when you were first nominated for the Nebula Award you went to the convention, and it was like being in Heaven. That you just couldn’t believe how exciting that was.

It was! I had sold three stories before I realized that SFWA existed, that conventions existed, that fandom existed, that there was an entire universe out there that had to do with science fiction. I had just been reading it from the library and buying the magazines from the news stand and writing it in complete isolation. I had no idea. And then somebody gave me a copy of Locus, which used to do convention listings, but they don’t anymore, alas. And I went to one, and I was completely and totally hooked.

When in there did you do the master’s degree in English?

In my late twenties. I went back to school after I had my two small children, and I got a master’s degree in English and began teaching at the college level. Not tenure track, but as an adjunct, and then filling in for people who were going on sabbatical for six months or a year.

In the story “Casey’s Empire,” he’s kind of trying to pursue this career in academia, and all the academics that he encounters are so unsympathetic to science fiction that they can’t even bring themselves to say the words “science fiction.” It’s kind of funny.

That was much more the case then than it is now. I remember going to an academic conference at the college, and I was seated next to an eminent scholar, and I asked how literature courses were structured at his university, and he was very enthusiastic. He said, “We’re trying to repackage courses so that instead of being historical overviews, they are instead organized around a theme.” He said he was teaching a very successful course on the city in fiction, and he was looking at Dickens and a couple of other books that are centered in major cities, and how those affected the fiction, which was apparently a great success with the students. I said, “Oh, that’s really an interesting idea. Do you use any science fiction about future cities?” He said to me, “Oh, no, no, we try to use real books.” But I think that has changed a lot.

You say in your note that you think it’s kind of trendy now to be into science fiction in academia.

Yes, and there are a lot of PhDs who are tired of writing about Keats and looking for new figures to be able to write about that isn’t much, much, much worn territory.

Getting back to the science, one of the stories in the new collection is called “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and it has this very, very highly-developed science fictional world-building setting. Could you talk a little bit about that?

I don’t really know where that came from. The people—the aliens—who live on that planet have a shared reality, a consensus reality that depends a little bit on telepathy and a little bit on interpreting pheromones and body language. It’s a shared, consensual reality. We all have a shared, consensual reality, but theirs is very highly developed—to the point where it’s painful for them to not share the same point of view as everybody else, and this makes crime very rare. If you share what the person you’re about to thump on the head is feeling, you’re less likely to thump them on the head. That’s the plan anyway. I wanted to explore that concept.

That story was one of the “gift” stories. There are stories that come very easily, and I call those “gift” stories. There are other stories that involve a certain amount of research and plotting. Those are the vast majority of stories, and there’s also stories I call “shitting rocks” stories where you have to push and push and push to get the damn thing out.

“The Flowers of Aulit Prison” was kind of a gift story, and again the science there is not that well-developed. It was a story from mid-career. It does talk about schizophrenia, and it does talk a little bit about how the brain functions, but nothing like I would do later on. Nothing like I would go down to the molecular level and deal with as I do in “Yesterday’s Kin” or a book like Stinger, which was actually a thriller based on biotechnology. For those books, I really, really wanted to get it right. For “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” I was more interested in simply using science as a framework to say what I wanted to say about the perception of reality.

I seem to remember that John W. Campbell had this challenge for writers where he would say, “Give me an alien that thinks as well as a human being but not like a human being.” It seems like that’s what you were really accomplishing in this story.

That’s what I was trying for, yes.

Then in your note for “The Kindness of Strangers,” you say that one of the functions of science fiction is to examine ideas that the mind recoils from.

Yes, there are two ideas in there that the mind recoils from. In that story, aliens, very advanced from us, make a brief trip to earth, and then annihilate ninety percent of the population. They take out the largest cities, starting with the largest city on Earth, Karachi, and move down in population. From their point of view it’s a benevolent action. There are too many of us. We are going to ruin the planet in another couple of generations, and the whole race will not survive, and in their very pragmatic view, it’s better to eliminate most of us than to let all of us go down the tubes.

Obviously, this is not a point of view humans share. It’s a distasteful idea. The aliens consider it equivalent to culling deer herds through hunting so that all of them don’t starve over winter, which is also an idea that a lot of humans recoil from. I wanted to put that out there, not because I approve of that, but just because it’s an idea to contemplate.

The other distasteful idea has to do with my character, Jenny, who discovers that she has been completely mistaken in some important actions she’s taken, and the only thing that can cut through her resulting despair is the incredible heartening power of anger and hatred. Again, that’s a distasteful idea, but it’s a true one. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself trembling on the verge of depression, and then gotten angry, and that has reenergized you. Anger has that ability. That’s one reason we get some of the demagogues in the world that we get. Anger can be preferable to despair on an individual level. It is not, however, very good on a societal level.

I totally agree with you that it’s important science fiction deals with ideas that the mind recoils from. I’ve certainly noticed this among people who I’ve met who don’t read any science fiction, that there’s kind of this very constrained box that they can consider possibilities within, and if you bring up anything really outside what they are familiar with, they just can’t even logically process it, they just reject it out of hand. I think it’s much better to be able to evaluate ideas based on their merits rather than based on their level of comfort and familiarity.

I’m sorry to say that I think the box is constraining science fiction more than it used to. There are attacks from the right on anything that seems to threaten what we think of as individual freedom, and there are attacks from the left on anything that threatens identity politics. I don’t want to go into this too much, but I think a lot of science fiction writers are feeling much more constrained than they used to about what they can write.

I think that’s certainly true. People have become more afraid to offend other people, and that has its upsides and its downsides, but one of the downsides is there’s a certain amount of self-censoring and just playing it safe going on.

I said on a panel that as an artist—if I can use that title—I reserve the right to try to represent reality as I see it. That means that any particular group, all groups of people have good apples and bad apples. I do not feel, as an artist, that I only have to represent disenfranchised groups in positive lights. Every individual is not a hero. You would not believe how crucified I got online for that statement. Actually, maybe you would believe it.

It’s very difficult. I’ve seen that you write about families a lot, and often portray them in very strained and difficult ways. You have to get into the messiness of human relationships if you’re writing fiction because otherwise, what’s the point?

Yes, I believe that’s true. I write about families a lot because so often they are missing from science fiction. There are entire universes where you can’t imagine children existing, and you have no idea how they’re reproducing. You look at something like William Gibson’s brilliant novel Neuromancer, and it’s impossible to imagine in his world that anybody is trying to get the kids off to school in the morning, or squeeze the orange juice, or get the rent paid, or mow the lawn. It’s just not a universe that lends itself to that kind of normalcy. I think it’s important because all people come from some sort of a family, and most of them will eventually end up forming some sort of a family, but to read a lot of science fiction, you would have no idea of that.

The reason I write about strained family relationships is not because that’s been my experience. My family is actually very close. More because fiction depends on conflict. I teach writing a lot. I just finished teaching Taos Toolbox, which is a two-week intensive that Walter Jon Williams and I teach in Taos, New Mexico every year for aspiring science fiction writers. When I teach, I tell my students fiction is about stuff that gets screwed up. Nobody wants to read a 400-page novel where everything goes well. You want your life to be like that, but you don’t want to read about it. Fiction is about stuff that gets screwed up, and that includes relationships, so yes, I write about the strains in family relationships because that’s where the story is.

I also wanted to ask you about the way that you portray religion in your stories because there are about five stories in this book that deal very explicitly with religious themes. I can name them, but do you want to just say generally what you think about that?

I’m surprised there were five. I know “Trinity” does.

I’ll list the ones that I have here. I have: “Unto the Daughters”—the Adam and Eve story. “Grant Us this Day” where there’s god as a struggling artist. “My Mother Dancing” where the humans have this religion that they’re the only life in the universe. And “By Fools Like Me” where it’s set in the post-apocalyptic future where reading a book is against their religion.

Oh, you’re right. None of those are religions in a traditional sense. In other words, I’m not writing about Catholicism, or Hinduism, or Mormonism, or anything like that. They’re invented religions that grow out of existing religions, either for fantasy purposes or because in the future I think that’s where it might go. “By Fools like Me,” for instance, grows out of Christianity, sort of.

I really believe the religious impulse is under-explored in science fiction. People have always, always, in every society, wanted there to be more than what we can see and experience. Some of the formulations of more have been bizarre, to say the least, and none of them, of course, are proven because by its very nature, religion does not lend itself to the replicable and verifiable results that science does. But I think that the impulse is very much a part of the human make-up, and if you’re going to explore what it means to be human, that’s part of what needs to be explored. A lot of space opera just kind of leaves this out, and that always surprises me because even if you’re a stone-cold atheist, you have a religious impulse that you are railing against. There’s a certain underlying of minor key despair in all atheisms, and I have met a lot of atheists who have said, “I wish I could believe, but I can’t.” They’re going with a more rational point of view, but the longing is still there. I put religion in my stories because I think that longing is universal, even if you can’t manage to fulfill it.

You mentioned the story “Trinity” which is very much about what if you could design some sort of scientific experiment that would confirm the existence of some sort of invisible entity or power?

If you could design such an experiment, all the people who belong to religions that the experiment did not turn up an exact copy of would disown it. All of the atheists would disown it because they would say, “It’s not replicable.” Even if it were, there’s some kind of trick involved, or there’s some kind of hallucination going on in the mind that has nothing to do with actual reality. You would have a very small percentage of people who would actually embrace it, which again is what is going on in that story.

The main character is a scientifically-minded person who has a very strong emotional opposition to believing the results of this experiment if they disagree with what she already believes.

Right. She also has, of course, a personal stake in disbelieving it. In “My Mother Dancing,” also, the humans who come back to the planet have a very strong stake in disbelieving what they have found, or in at least in denying it, which they do.

Right, so those stories are interesting mirrors of each other because it’s the same phenomenon of not wanting to change your mind from two different angles.

Right, which is a great human failing. Once you’ve invested in something, in anything, any idea, it can be traumatic to change your mind, and it can be unsettling to other ideas that you have in your head because they’re all linked together. I think that’s why a major conversion, whether it’s religious, political, social, always shakes a person all the way down to their foundation.

I’m definitely a stone-cold atheist, but I feel like I’m in the small number of people you mentioned who would be open-minded if there was some sort of scientific experiment that said I could go to Heaven by doing X, Y, or Z. I would be very happy to find that out, and I think I would make a good monk. I just honestly don’t think there’s any good reason to believe any of that stuff.

The problem with religion is I believe the impulse means something, but the human mind immediately tries to codify everything, and so the religious impulse has been codified into a myriad of organized religions, most of which have ridiculous beliefs. So, when one rejects organized religion, one is rejecting the completely irrational, but one is also throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m wondering if we have not got the impulse there for some reason that we have not yet discovered. I don’t know. I’m a leave-the-door-open agnostic, but not for an organized religion because, again, I think we’ve codified it to the point where it becomes insanely complicated and has very little to do with what actually might be out there. Physics uncovers more and more strangenesses in the universe. As J.S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.” I don’t know what is out there. I don’t know substrates lie beneath what we think we’ve discovered. But I’m leaving the door open that there’s something that would account for this universal religious impulse in us. I’m just leaving the door open. I’m not believing, but I’m leaving the door open.

Talk about your story “Unto the Daughters” because science fiction is classically thought of as being fairly atheistic in its approach, but then you have this phenomenon of the Adam and Eve story being a sort of cliché that pops up over and over again in science fiction.

“Unto the Daughters” is a deliberately feminist retelling of the Adam and Eve myth. I wanted to write that from an entirely different perspective, and there are so many Adam and Eve stories out there that it’s almost impossible to do. But I wanted to do it from the viewpoint of the snake, and I wanted to do it in a feminist way, and that’s how that story came about. It’s obviously not intended to be taken seriously. It’s an alternate mythology.

It’s very interesting alternate mythology because it presupposes that the snake is female and that the snake has a very long view of history in mind.

Yes, and I wrote it partly because I loved the snake’s voice once I started it. That’s important to me. When I start a story, I usually plunge right into the first couple of paragraphs, as soon as the idea and character come to me together. That gives me the voice. That’s what helps, for me, to shape the rest of the story. As soon as I had the first couple paragraphs of that snake’s voice, I wanted to write that story.

Speaking of female characters, you mentioned that you write about families a lot, but most of the stories in this book, I think, are written from a female point of view and involve mother-daughter relationships. Sister relationships are very important. What kind of reactions do you get from readers to the fact that you write all these great women’s relationships?

Not much. Because my stories, except for “Unto the Daughters” are seldom overtly feminist. They don’t deal with patriarchy. They don’t deal with lack of power because of being a woman. Sally Gourley in “Out of All Them Bright Stars” is powerless because of her class, not her gender. I tend to deal more with that, so feminists who award for the Tiptree and those kinds of things tend pretty much to ignore me. I put females in central roles, but they are often conflicted females. They are often struggling with interpersonal relationships, or with the world around them. They are not kickass heroines. In fact, I don’t have kickass heroes either. But because of that, because I neither write overtly, as Alice Sheldon, for instance, did so brilliantly, about issues with the patriarchy, and because my characters are not, again, kickass heroines, I tend to be pretty much ignored. Also, I think I have about one-third male protagonists, especially in some of the earlier fiction. So, I would not classify myself as a hard feminist writer even though I do have a lot of women in my stories. I know women better than I know men, obviously.

Does it ever cross your mind to write a hard feminist story or a kickass heroine, or is that just not something that appeals to you?

No, it doesn’t. I am a feminist, very much, but not a radical feminist. I have a father, two brothers, two sons, and a husband, and a lot of male friends, all of whom I love. I cannot see the patriarchy as having every single member of it an oppressor. That just hasn’t been my experience.

You mentioned that because you write the kind of fiction that you do that you don’t get the focus from the Tiptree awards and that kind of thing. In your note for your story “People Like Us” you say that science fiction too has its social classes. I was wondering if you could expand what you meant by that.

I think class is a far more interesting subject for me to write about than gender. I don’t mean it’s inherently more interesting, I just mean it’s more interesting to me. I think we do have social classes within science fiction, but I think they’re very subtle. Many of the usual ones are erased. People who don’t have a lot of money, who don’t come from what we would call in this country a distinguished birth or whatever, none of that matters in fandom, or among writers. Among writers, what matter is talent and sales. They’re not always the same thing, but both matter. I think what matters among fans is their love of science fiction, that’s what ties them together. Or science fiction offshoots like cosplay and media and those kinds of things. I used to write for Xerox Corporation, and all of the classes that prevail in the corporate world don’t necessarily prevail in the science fiction world. Different ones do. We have stars. We have people who are aspiring to be up there with stars. Critics may favor different writers than publishers do because sometimes very good writers don’t make a lot of money. Sometimes they do. I think it’s a subtle and constantly shifting class system.

When you’re talking about science fiction having social classes, the first thing that popped into my head was hard science fiction being elevated over soft science fiction.

I’m not sure that’s true. I think the audience for hard science fiction is not that large. The audience for fantasy is obviously enormous, and the audience for accessible, if not hard science fiction, say “high viscosity” science fiction, is also large. Then the audience for space opera is large because it’s adventure. But for hard SF, the kind that actually carefully extrapolates from science, and includes a lot of science: It’s a rare book that really, really breaks through and does that. One example that did is The Martian, but I’m not sure it would have achieved quite so much attention if it hadn’t been for the movie. Incidentally, I liked both the book and the movie very much, but for different reasons. I wish the movie had more science, but I guess it’s hard to put equations in there as the book had. In the book, there is more relentless perkiness from the hero, and because Matt Damon is a good actor, he was able to give more emotional shading to it in the movie, so I liked both of them, but for different reasons.

You said in your note to “Trinity” that you mentioned that you really were so excited to go to the Nebula Awards banquet the first time, and then you say that since then your view of SF has gotten a little battered. I was curious about what you meant?

I think maybe it’s me that’s gotten a little battered. When you’re young, everything is new and tremendously exciting. I had been reading science fiction for sixteen years before I went to my first convention, and I had ideas in my head of how these writers were going to look and sound and be. It was a shock to me, as I went to panels, and as I met people at parties, to discover that the person often bears very little resemblance to the work. There were writers whose work I really loved who turned out to be sort of disagreeable in person. I’m not naming names. There were other writers whose work I thought was okay whom I thought were absolutely wonderful as people: interesting, exciting, and kind. It was kind of a shock to my naiveté to discover that.

Also, of course, as the years go on, and the decades go on, anything becomes less novel and less new. Ellen Datlow—who was my guide for a lot of this because she was publishing me regularly in Omni, and I was clearly so wet behind the ears—we’d walk into a bar, we’d sit down, and within minutes Gardner Dozois, Roger Zelazny, and everybody else would have gravitated to Ellen, and she would introduce me. I mean, to say that I was star-struck is to put it mildly. Of course, star-struckness wears off because you discover that the stars are just people. Some of them are wonderful people, but they’re just people. I guess I was a little old at thirty to be discovering this, but I had led a very sheltered life.

No, I had exactly the same experience. I just loved science fiction so much that I assumed I would love anyone who also loved science fiction. I love a lot of them, but I have discovered that I don’t love all of them.

Yes, that’s what happens. Also, of course, when you’ve been to four million panels, and you’ve discovered that most of them end up saying the same thing. Picking up a topic, carrying it in circles for an hour, and setting it down again, including the panels I’m on, that begins to pall a little bit too.

I still enjoy conventions. I enjoy seeing people, I enjoy the parties, I enjoy the signings, I enjoy meeting fans, and I even like doing panels, but it doesn’t have the same shiny, newness that it did once. That’s all I meant by that note.

I heard you talking one time about how when you first started going to conventions that Bruce Sterling was on top of tables rousing people to write cyberpunk and stuff like that, and you weren’t sure that same sort of urgency was present at conventions.

You know, it might be present among the younger generation. I don’t know. I would like to get more acquainted with some of the writers that are coming up right now, and I’ve met some of them. Ken Liu, I think is extremely good. Sarah Pinsker. Rachel Swirsky. But I don’t know them well in the way that I know the cohorts who entered science fiction at the same time I did. And because those people are all old friends, I want to see them at conventions. I only get to see Connie Willis a couple of times a year. So that’s where I want to spend my time, and I don’t get to meet a lot of the younger ones as much. Maybe they are having the same kind of urgent discussions about what science fiction should be and where it should go. I’m just not quite as much a part of it as I once was.

In the note for your story “Endgame,” you say that too much of any good thing can be bad, maybe even writing. I was wondering how do you know you’ve gotten to the point where the writing has gotten to be too much?

“Endgame” is about artificially, through drugs, concentrating the powers of concentration. It’s about what the mind is capable of in a given subject, and in the story it’s chess. I’m a chess player. I’m a bad chess player. I play a lot, and I play badly. If I concentrated more, I could probably improve, if I paid attention to it. I don’t. That’s where that story originated.

Any one power of the mind can take over and wreck the balance from the others. We talked earlier about, for instance, the religious impulse: it can take over the mind where you see everything through only the religious impulse, and that skewers your view of reality because there are lots of other things going on in the world. It can be true in a political lens. It can be true of xenophobia. It can be true, as in my story, of the powers of concentration. It can be true of the powers of anger, which might be heartening, but if that takes over your mind completely, you’re really in trouble.

When writing takes over completely, you lost touch with the world outside of writing, and that’s the raw material for it. When you devote your time to writing, and writing, and writing, and doing nothing else, I think you do lose touch with what is going on in the human and non-human world out there—and that has to be your raw material.

You can also labor over a story past the point where you can no longer improve it, and you have got to send it out already. I occasionally get students like that. They don’t want to send something out. I don’t understand why, since to me, this seems to be the whole point, which is sharing what you’ve written with other people. But, they say, “What if it’s rejected?” Well, what if it is? That’s part of the game.

A writer has to have certain qualities. They have to be able to spend a lot of time alone; in fact, they have to prefer it. They have to have an imagination, obviously. They have to be open to improving their craft and not be close-minded saying, “Well, this is perfect, and I’m not doing anything about it. I’m not changing it in any way.” They also have to be resilient. This is not a career for the faint-hearted. There will be rejections. There will be misunderstood stories. There will be bad reviews. There will be, at times, slumping sales. There will be financial insecurity because nobody provides writers with pensions, and unless you really scramble, not with health insurance either. And nobody provides a steady income until you become reasonably successful. You have to be able to be a resilient person. And I do see students who simply cannot do that.

I’m actually teaching right now at a science fiction writing workshop for young writers, and you’ll have students say, “Oh, but what if I send in my story and I get a mean rejection?” And the analogy I always use is wanting to be a writer and not wanting to get rejected is like wanting to be a boxer and not wanting to get punched.

I’m going to borrow that when I teach. That’s perfect. Thank you.

It’s like, no matter how good of a boxer you are, you’re going to get punched a lot every day.

That’s right. We’re literary boxers. We’re out there punching away at the universe, and we’re also doing the Muhammad Ali thing, “Look at me. I’m the greatest.”

Unfortunately, Nancy, we’re all out of time. What are you punching away at now? Do you have any projects you want to tell people about?

Yes, The Economist, the magazine, published a volume last year called “MegaChange” of essays on what the world might look like in the future, and it was successful, so they’re following it up with another volume called “MegaTech.” This time, instead of essays by experts, they decided they wanted to include some science fiction stories that might graphically illustrate changes in science in the year 2050. I’m working on a story for that project, which I’m very excited about and pleased to have been included.

Everyone definitely check that out when it comes out.

Thank you, David. I have to say I enjoyed this. Sometimes I do podcasts with people who haven’t actually read my work, and you obviously have, so that was a lovely thing.

I think it’s really important, if you’re going to interview an author, to actually read the book you’re talking about. Again, it’s called The Best of Nancy Kress, from Subterranean Press. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, David.

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: Rich Larson

Sandra Odell | 581 words

“The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death” where war is real, and a machine of war is perhaps the greatest soldier, or threat, of all. What inspired this story of the challenges of service?

I played a lot of Halo as a kid. This story is straight FPS parody, showing the player character’s bizarre actions from the perspective of an AI grunt trying to justify them.

From the opening paragraphs, you establish varying levels of tension in the story: a new command unit; questions about serving under the Tinman; the death of the previous squad; the chemical readiness for battle (and I loved “a big old nervous shit” as a descriptor); a deadly game; the final reality. You carry the tensions through the rest of the story, leaving the reader on the edge of their seats until the end. As a writer, how do you approach establishing the mood for a story?

Mood is not usually something I think about. I guess it just happens, bleeding over from the events of the story and the language that feels right to describe them.

Another aspect of the story that sat very well with me was the precise nature of the sensory detail you used to carry the action and plot forward: swellies damping sound; splintered shin bones; the snap of vertebrae under a rifle; the heat of a fire grenade; “a thick, bruise-colored worm.” In your opinion, what is it about these little sensory details that drives a story home?

Small, specific details anchor a reader in a story. I try to avoid clichés or dead metaphors in my description, because people slide right over them without feeling anything.

Often your work is touched by darkness, stirring the shadows of our imaginations even as it shines a light on certain facets of what it means to be human. What is it about darker fiction that appeals to you as a writer and reader?

My mom always asks me why I don’t write more nice stories. I don’t think of what I write as particularly dark, but I have always been drawn to black humor, bleak settings, flawed characters, and violent climaxes. Those elements often appear in my work. They keep things entertaining.

The story also focuses on the downward spiral of a complex Stockholm Syndrome relationship between the main character and the Tinman. What sort of research, if any, did you do to support such development?

I write speculative fiction so I don’t have to research anything. Nah, kidding. But in this specific case, I just imagined what kind of weird codependency the protagonist might develop to cope with his situation.

What’s next for Rich Larson? What can eager readers look forward to in the coming year?

Tons! I have a literary SF story forthcoming in Asimov’s, a cyberpunk con caper in Interzone, a horror novelette at Tor.com, and an adventure fantasy in Gardner Dozois’s Book of Swords anthology. Then more stories in the pipeline at F&SF, Apex, and Asimov’s again.

On the book front, I’m working with my agent on revising a YA alien invasion novel. It’s like Animorphs but darker, and it’s going to kick ass.

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: William Alexander

Christian A. Coleman | 713 words

You treat the water and the road of the title as characters in their own right. They have as much at stake as Oliver does. Tells us about the inspiration for this idea.

I was living in Minneapolis when I wrote this story, and I learned that the lake in Powderhorn really did shrink down to a puddle of its former size during highway construction. The highway in question was a deliberately aggressive act of urban planning; it veered out of its way to bulldoze particular neighborhoods, and ultimately enclosed the wealthy downtown area like a protective moat. This local history was simmering in the back of my brain when the 35W bridge came down. It just suddenly collapsed into the Mississippi. Those two random events felt like linked acts of war.

I love how Oliver’s pursuit of justice, as he understands it, evolves as the gray areas of reality become more apparent to him over the course of the story. I found his journey very relatable as an older reader. What sort of techniques and approaches do you use when coming up with a character like Oliver for older readers?

Maurice Sendak famously said that you can’t write for children. They’re too complicated. “You can only write things that are of interest to them.” Most of my protagonists are very young, but Oliver’s story strayed into territory that interested me as an adult. Eleven-year-old me would have found the conflict between water and road incredibly frustrating. What can a childhood sense of absolute right and wrong do in the face of an ancient, intractable grudge?

The technique involved is just “pay attention to what interests you.” It’s impossible to generalize what children are like, as though they were all the same and uncomplicated. It’s equally impossible to arrive at any fixed idea of what we were like as individual kids. But we can remember what interested us, what captured our attention at the time.

You write for and about children, and your work has won awards including the CBC Best Children’s Book of the Year Award. What do you enjoy about writing about children over, say, writing about older characters? Did you always know you wanted to write for children?

China Miéville said this about Joan Aiken in a Locus interview: “If that kind of writing hits you at the right time when you’re a child, the impact is like nothing else ever.” I love the impossible, absurd, hubristic ambition required to strive for that level of impact. I also love how those ambitions are tempered by goofy, playful irreverence. Writing for children is very serious work, but it only works if we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

SFF is my home. I always intended to write in genre. It wasn’t always the plan to write for kids, but it probably should have been. I never needed books more than I did when I was eleven.

In a previous interview, you listed Ursula K. Le Guin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Susan Cooper as influences. What aspects of their work have made an impact on your current writing style? Did you have one or more of these authors in mind while writing this story?

Tricky as it is to sequence my own literary DNA and sort through its influences, I suppose this story takes the mystery-solving ethic of clear, clean justice and smacks it up against the sort of moral complexity we find in Le Guin and Cooper’s work. Sherlock Holmes was probably somewhere in the back of my brain when I wrote Oliver, though I think the kid has even more Batman in him. There’s something wonderfully, frighteningly childish about Bruce Wayne’s quest to personally confront injustice. That sensibility makes more sense when it comes from a kid.

Do you have any publications coming up that you can tell us about?

A Properly Unhaunted Place comes out next summer. It’s about ghost appeasement specialist librarians at a haunted Renaissance Festival. Kelly Murphy is creating the illustrations, and that makes me very happy.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Margo Lanagan

Setsu Uzume | 970 words

I found the character of Jonah to be absolutely repellent at the outset, but no more or less than the receptacle at the Full-Term place—and Fen’s giggling at his horror story. It all seemed eerily plausible. What inspired this world and this story?

I’ve only limited notes on how this story came about, but it looks as if I was taking as my keynote the paintings of Australian painter Albert Tucker in Melbourne during the Second World War. Some things people have said about Tucker’s art of that period seem to chime with this story:

“In [the exhibition] Images of Modern Evil, Tucker eviscerates the human body for moral meaning. The results are tortured and tormented figures, their warped forms transformed into creatures part human, part monster.” —Janine Burke.

“Tucker’s shock at the disintegration of the world, symbolised by the blacked-out wartime city of Melbourne, led him to imagine a city of darkness inhabited not only by humans but a horde of biomorphic forms.” —Andrew Sayers.

There’s a kind of reverse biomorphism in ”Fifth Star,” with things that ought to be defined living organisms—e.g. human babies—degrading towards the abstract or freeform, and unable to sustain their own life. You can perhaps regard Jonah as one of those things.

The matter-of-factness with which we now regard IVF technology (those of us with the money to access it) is probably another major touchstone. And concern about environmental degradation casts a pretty thick pall over the story, too.

It was fascinating the way you flipped the trope of reproductive value on its head—sperm means multiple payouts but eggs mean only one. What was the thought process behind separating out those values—sperm, separate from eggs, further separated from incubation and mothering?

That came only from the facts of human biology—human women only do have a set number of eggs to donate, whereas men continue to manufacture sperm throughout their lives. So in a society where viable eggs and sperm are rare (and egg-harvesting technology has moved on somewhat from what we have now), women are only going to get the benefit of (i.e. paid for) donating their eggs once, whereas a man can reasonably expect to get some kind of regular income out of donation.

The separation of incubation and mothering from egg and sperm donation was (probably) meant to indicate something of the class system of this future Australia. Having viable eggs and sperm is a chance thing, but if a working-class person happens to get lucky and conceive healthy offspring, we’re not leaving that child’s upbringing to chance. New, well-formed life is such a rarity that it is immediately taken over by higher powers and given every advantage—much as budding athletes these days are transplanted to the Australian Institute of Sport and plied with money and privilege, to give our nation the best chance at the Olympics.

I re-read the line, “I went to the chair; it exclaimed in pain and surprise under me,” several times. It drew a fascinating parallel with Jonah’s response to Malka under him, and the shouting of women giving birth. How do these moments speak to Jonah’s humanity, or lack therof?

I suppose the whole story is about Jonah’s ongoing pain and surprise, which he exteriorises to things like the chair so that he can affect to be cool and unperturbed by everything the world throws at him. He hasn’t got much of a life—very little money, a drudgerous job, no family, not much of a community around him—and in his victimhood, he bears a grudge against pretty much every person or institution he encounters. He’s emotionally and intellectually stunted; he has a sense of the man he ought to be, the family he might have created around him in a different time, the society that might have supported that man and that family, but he’s got no idea, stuck as he is in his own moment, how he might make any move towards that ideal.

Jonah’s like any person who’s been well kicked around and humiliated by life; he’s so busy attending to his own day-to-day needs (and what he sees as his own basic rights) that there’s no room in his life to care for anyone else. He registers all other distresses, but only as far as they help him reassure himself that he’s still staying afloat.

This story dives face-first into taboo material and attitudes without telling us to feel one way or another about them. What is the primary message you’d like to convey?

I don’t generally think of my stories as carrying a message, but hindsight often makes them seem to be clearer statements than they were at the time. I think in this case I’m trying to make the point that environmental degradation ultimately degrades us. If we stop caring, not just about the wholesomeness of our physical environment and the preservation of the natural world, but about the education and quality of life of all levels of our citizens, as a civilization we haven’t a lot to look forward to. How preachy that sounds, said baldly outright instead of in a story!

What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

I’m finishing off the third volume of the Zeroes trilogy, which is an action-packed teens-with-superpowers trilogy I’m writing with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti. I’m also writing some new short stories to add to a mostly-reprints collection coming out from Allen & Unwin in Australia next year, called Singing My Sister Down and Other Stories.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Carlie St. George

Sandra Odell | 974 words

“Every Day Is The Full Moon” begins as a typical list of teen angst and frustration, and leaps straight into perhaps the best line for a speculative fiction introduction I’ve ever read. Tell us a little about what inspired the story.

Wow, thank you! This one started life as two different stories with similar themes that weren’t quite working individually: One was basically just that introduction with a lot of family dynamics but no plot, and the other was about a woman who had to ritually exorcise her friend’s abusive husband after a Power of Love exorcism had failed. Generally, the Power of Love is not my favorite trope, not just because I think it’s a touch lazy, but because I dislike the idea that love—especially, but not limited to, romantic love—is only this beneficial, miraculous Force for Good. I think love is much more nuanced than that, and I wanted to play with that idea, to discuss when love is healthy, when it’s not, and what the Power of Love could and could not realistically accomplish.

Once I thought to put the two stories together, things finally fell into place for me, and “Every Day is the Full Moon” emerged.

You capture the not-so-nuanced panic of pubescence and school drama, and add to that a healthy dose of urban magic. Everyone is changing around the main character, in more ways than one, leaving her to find her own way and still help her friends. What was your own high school experience like? How much of Carlie St. George made it to the page?

Oh, a fair amount. High school wasn’t entirely torturous for me (it was certainly better than middle school, anyway) but saying it was some high point in my life or something I miss would also be a considerable stretch. There are differences between B and Teenage Me, of course, and not just the obvious ones like (spoilers!) I never came back from the dead. But there are similarities, too: body insecurity, fear of being left behind, fear of never becoming anything special, a sort of wanderlust inspired by the need to escape, etc. Actually, B’s probably more together than I ever was: I pretty much thought I was going to spontaneously combust all the time.

One of the things I appreciate most about this story is how you ground the characters’ actions and reactions in a solid, visceral reality. As a writer, how aware are you of the emotional weight and presence of your characters? Do you consciously choose to delve deep into their personalities, or do you let the words come and figure things out as you go?

As both a writer and a reader, I’m pretty character-oriented. If I don’t care about the characters, or if they haven’t emotionally and/or physically changed or developed in some interesting way by the end of the story, I often don’t see the point. How much I consciously choose their personalities, though, is a bit tougher for me. My instinct is to say that, with this story, I let the words initially guide me into a rough sketch of who the characters were, and then went back and consciously delved deeper in later drafts. But I tend to flip-flop a lot on writing mechanics questions. My process remains hideously inconsistent.

In your writing, you don’t shy away from what some would consider difficult or contentious subjects: suicide; self harm; weight; sexual assault; gender preference and identity. Whether in fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, you often face such subjects head on. Are there any subjects you would still like to tackle? A particular interest you have yet to set down in words?

Hm. I worry that this question, while complimentary and lovely, makes me sound quite a bit braver than I actually am. I’m not sure that I can think of any particular subjects I want to tackle at present (although I imagine I’ll come up with a much more poignant and clever answer for this tomorrow); I do, however, want to write more stories with the kind of heroines I often struggle to find in speculative fiction: overweight heroines, asexual and/or aromantic heroines, heroines over the age of fifty, etc. I want to be able to find myself represented in awesome stories, and I want to be able to find the people I care about, too.

Who do you turn to when you want to get your speculative fiction on? What authors delight you between the covers?

There are way too many answers to that question.

In order to not be here until the end of time, let me focus on some YA authors who I’ve discovered in the last year or two and who I’m eager to read more from. I thought Frances Hardinge’s Cuckoo Song was creepy and perfect, and I’m now more excited than ever to check out The Lie Tree. I liked Rin Chupeco’s The Girl From the Well and loved its follow-up The Suffering even more. Her upcoming project, The Bone Witch, sounds totally fantastic. The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness might as well have been written for me, and A Monster Calls and The Knife of Never Letting Go are definitely on my To-Do List. And finally, I fell crazy in love with Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, and I’ve been making serious grabby hands for the sequel, Crooked Kingdom, which—as of this writing—just came out. Off to the bookstore!

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: Joseph Allen Hill

Arley Sorg | 1796 words

Just . . . wow. How did you even do that? What just happened?

I typed a number of letters in sequence, thus creating meaning.

That was an incredible reading experience for so many reasons. Please don’t tell me you just banged that out. Tell me what an arduous process it was, how it took so long to write, how you burned through so many drafts and almost quit? Tell me about how you had been aching to write this for months and finally built up the courage to do so? Where did it come from? And is this deeply personal for you, or more of an argument that was kicking to be set free?

The actual writing process was pretty quick. I used a lot of little bits and pieces from various unfinished projects, a paragraph here, a turn of phrase there, so that made it easier. I think it took maybe a day or two to hammer it out, and then another day of editing after I got some notes from a friend. I’d been thinking about the conceit of the story, the metanarrative of character archetypes and plot devices moving through different genres, since I was sixteen. I think it was the first idea I ever had for a novel that wasn’t just a rip-off of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And I think I first got the idea of connecting the conceit to the political themes two or three years ago. So I spent years writing it, but only a couple days typing it.

Emotionally, the story came from a place of fear and powerlessness, fear that something like this might happen to me or a loved one and powerlessness in the face of this huge problem. Aesthetically, I was driven by an interest in using metafiction to explore how we conceptualize race. I’ve always loved metafiction and postmodernism, particularly stuff from the ’70s. A lot of it’s just sort of fun, but I think that good metafiction is a way of examining the ways that stories influence our lives. For instance, the Apollo Kidd section is in part a riff on this Gilbert Sorrentino story, “The Moon In Its Flight,” which is about love stories, but also about how mid-century America defined itself and thus the lives of Americans, this subtle dehumanization as people are forced to be characters in a romantic but ultimately destructive national narrative. So the thing about police shootings of black people is that it’s always the same story, over and over again. Similar details, similar outcomes, just again and again. And it struck me that these people were living their lives before they got defined by this story, the police shooting story, and these lives were all unique and different stories, but this one story was always the same, a singular story that invaded other stories like an infection. And then I got kind of weird and comic booky with it, ’cause that’s like my jam.

While this piece, at face value, tackles some serious issues, in one of its many layers, there’s also the author’s “inner dialogue” (or perhaps more properly, the author’s dialogue with the reader), where the author says, “I just wanted to tell a cool story.” In that thread, the author struggles with taking on the issues at hand. Do you believe that writers have a responsibility to deal with relevant issues; do you feel that taking a position of some kind is inevitable? Or do you think that sometimes a story is just “a cool story”—nothing more, and that there’s nothing wrong with writing something that is “just a cool story”?

 I think all fiction is political, in that all fiction argues for a vision of what the world is and how it works and what is good and what is bad. I think that’s basically the essence of politics, competing definitions of the Good and the nature of the human experience. You can write a story with the aim of creating only sensation and aesthetic pleasure in the reader, but even doing that, you must make implicit statements about the world, even if only through omission and counterfactual. I think some writers and readers appreciate fiction largely for its escapist qualities, so they prefer fiction that is essentially frictionless, that doesn’t make them think about real world issues, but it’s not that this kind of fiction doesn’t have politics, it’s just that the politics are not different from the intended audience’s. Like, a lot of the SF fiction that has gotten a rep for being “political” in the last few years isn’t exactly searing excoriations of heteropatriarchal capitalism and neoliberal hegemony, right? A lot of them are just “cool stories,” but for an intended audience that is not exclusively cishet white dudes.

At the same time, I generally avoid overt political arguments in my work. I don’t like didacticism, and “issue” stories often feel like they’re preaching to the converted. I don’t find it very interesting to write about things are not uncomfortable or difficult in some way. Plus, there’s a pointlessness to it. It’s the easiest thing in the world to reject the politics of a piece of fiction. It’s made up, pretend, pointless. Why bother trying to convince people of the truth with something you are explicitly admitting is a lie? Then again, I’m a fairly political person, and in the face of this huge injustice, I felt like I should do or say something, and fiction is the thing I am good at. So part of what the story is about for me is struggling with the uselessness of fiction in the face of reality. I doubt anyone is going to read this story and actually change their opinion very much on police shootings. But there is something beautiful in the struggle, even if it is doomed to fail. I think I stole that from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In putting a piece like this out there, you run risks: of people not getting it; of people getting upset. Does this make it harder to write?

I did have some worries, to be honest. I was less concerned about people getting mad at the actual message and more concerned that people might be offended that I’m taking some very serious subjects too lightly. Jokes are a big part of how I deal with the world, but I know other people have different sensitivities. There are certainly days where I’ve been too raw for ironic, meta jokey-jokes about people getting shot. I guess I just try to be sensitive and press on, listen to people if they express concerns, and do better next time. Cowardice is the absolute worst trait an artist can have.

What were the most challenging things about writing this piece from a technical standpoint, and how did you deal with them?

 Probably getting all the voices in each section. I wanted them to evoke different styles without being pastiche. I think voice has always been my greatest strength as a writer, but doing ten different voices in one story is a little much. A lot of the distinctions are pretty fine and probably not significant to people who are not me. Like, the Apollo Allen section is kind of me making fun of how I wrote right after college, florid and kind of sloppy, while the Apollo Right section is very close to my natural style now, but I feel like they probably sound about the same to other people. The Apollonia section was the most difficult to write because it’s supposed to be a sort of Dan Brown-esque thriller and I don’t read thrillers, whereas the others were easy since I love superheroes and toku and junk like that.

It was also kind of hard figuring out how long the sections should be. I could imagine a version of this story that was half as long or even shorter. The story is basically structured as a repetition of the same gag eight times. It could’ve been done much more as setup, punchline, setup, punchline. But I liked it being the sort of grind of these long, detailed sections. You know what’s gonna happen, but the stories keep going. They set up characters and situations and plots, and then the same thing happens. I wanted it to really feel like these stories existed in their own context, like they were really being interrupted, especially in the first few.

As I mentioned, I think there are a lot of layers and facets here. What are the subtler bits that you want to make sure readers don’t miss? And what do you hope readers take away from this piece overall?

From a political point of view, I hope people get that this story isn’t just saying that cops are bad or whatever, but is arguing for a more comprehensive indictment of how our society functions and how it defines black people as citizens and as human beings. To put it real simple, the bad guy is not the cop, the bad guy is racism, racism that goes far beyond the actions of individuals or particular institutions.

There’s also some stuff about constructions of masculinity in there, as viewed through the lens of boy’s adventure fiction versus men’s adventure fiction, but it’s kind of whatever.

The most important intertext is Flash Gordon (1980).

Lastly, I hope people get all my funny, funny jokes and references. Here’s one for you. The Morrison referenced in the last interlude is first a reference to comics writer Grant Morrison, specifically to his concept of the fiction suit, which allows you to enter fictional universes. It’s also a reference to something in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but I’m not going to explain that. Hilarious, right? (I am a nerd.)

What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

I’m submitting stories to places. I should probably write a novel soon. Maybe something about robots? I’m pretty into robots right now, specifically robots that can cry or are future space gods. That sounds like a joke, but it is not a joke.

Thank you so much for “The Venus Effect.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s a true work of art.

Thank you very much. Art is my favorite thing.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: Shweta Narayan

Setsu Uzume | 1027 words

Every image in this tale seems to shimmer with the loveliness it describes, and yet it’s a scathing commentary on how we commodify—use—beauty. What inspired this story?

Thank you! It’s a retelling of a story I read as a child*—though I changed rather a lot, including the ending. It’s one of the few I’d seen where beauty wasn’t the most important characteristic a female character could have; so as an awkward unbeautiful child, I latched onto it.

In my early twenties, I was hugely influenced by the Windling/Datlow fairy tale anthologies. They’re what got me to try writing short fiction, so it was natural to try a fairy tale retelling of my own. And it had to be this one. But I realized while writing that this story I’d loved so much actually emphasizes (girls) being sweet and gentle and kind no matter what—and in the situation the protagonist is in, that’s romanticizing the idea that girls should accept abuse.

My version of the story came together once I realized how the original story’s bird character related to that narrative.

To answer the first part of the question, commodify is the perfect word, thank you. I’d moved from a childhood where I was mocked for everything Indian to college life where it seemed like everyone wanted me to provide lovely-exotic-India on demand. So I juxtaposed that content with questions about whose unseen labor went into making beauty and who got to consume it.

* The version I read was called “The Rainbow Prince,” and I’m pretty sure it was in an Amar Chitra Katha comic book.

The use of the dupatta to hide, to unveil, and to capture the bird was an interesting choice. Both Daya and the Rajkumani wear them. Is there a relationship between agency and the dupatta? What is the symbolism of this garment in the story?

The dupatta is a piece of often-translucent fabric that’s worn in ways that signal your cultural/religious group. It doesn’t necessarily serve a practical function for high-caste Hindu women; rather, it’s primarily seen as a marker of modesty / chastity / decency / respectability. (I can’t speak to how it’s used by other groups.)

I only mentioned it where relevant to the story, but all female characters not in saris would be wearing one (the trailing edge of a sari serves the same function). They’d be seen as half-dressed otherwise—and it’s not like a bonnet, which a Regency heroine might need but isn’t really used now. We still wear them. When I was a kid/teen, ditching your dupatta sent a social message analogous to bra-burning in the West, and while it may not cause quite that level of moral panic these days, it’s still not neutral.

So my uses of the dupatta are pretty standard storytelling for my culture. If there isn’t a thesis somewhere about how the dupatta is used to mediate wearer and viewer gaze and levels of intimacy in the subcontinent’s media, I think there should be!

The story turned on the interpretation of the word fair as beauty, rather than fair as justice. Daya constantly describes herself as plain, and refuses to speak ill of others. Can mercy be unlovely? Why is it important to show it as such?

This usage of “fair,” which means both beautiful and light-skinned, exists at the intersection of colorism and misogyny. (If you don’t know about Fair & Lovely skin-lightening cream, well, prepare to be horrified. The awesome Unfair & Lovely campaign didn’t exist when I was writing this story. I’m so glad it does now.)

Daya has completely internalized that colorism and misogyny, and I hope that’s clear to readers! She’s not light-skinned, so from her point of view she must be plain. How she actually looks is beside the point. Similarly, the mercy she represents is coerced—if you don’t question the underlying assumptions, Feminine Virtue (TM) is a girl’s only acceptable alternative to being light-skinned, and virtue is defined by the people with social capital.

The concept of mercy does also imply a power imbalance, and I think it’s quite different from compassion grounded in self-love. Not a good combination with internalized oppression.

Daya’s journey is as rugged as she is kind. What did you most want to convey to the reader through this story?

I’m talking about it academically now, but I was so, so angry when I wrote this story. I thought I was a failure of an Indian woman instead of a pretty okay mostly-agender person, and Daya is the person I was told I ought to be. Was failing to be. This story was my middle finger raised in response.

I wanted readers to feel and understand that anger.

But more importantly, I wanted to validate the anger and sense of injustice that young darker-skinned girls and women were (and are) still living with. I didn’t have those words as a child, or the sense that anyone understood. I had to write them myself as an adult. I was, and am, hoping that they’re helpful to any readers dealing with similar pain.

What are you working on next?

A story with zero talking birds! Don’t trust talking birds, they’re trouble.

I have a talking mechanical wildcat instead. And a young disabled biracial man who’s finding his feet within the Mughal court, while being annoyed by a talking wildcat.

He won’t be annoyed for much longer, though. If he’s not hitting red fury soon I’m doing it wrong.

The new story’s in the same universe as several others of mine, including the ones reprinted in Queers Destroy Fantasy! and POC Destroy Fantasy!. Those two do contain a talking bird, though. You have been warned.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Christie Yant

Sandra Odell | 988 words

“This Is as I Wish to Be Restored” opens with a gut punch from a shattered glass glove, vivid and unforgiving. What inspired you to tell this tale?

Wow, thank you! I’ve been fascinated by cryonics since I was a kid, when I first learned of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Ring of Endless Light. That fascination was rekindled by an episode of This American Life several years ago, called “Mistakes Were Made,” which covered the story of a California cryonics pioneer who found himself stuck maintaining several “patients” on his own when the early foundation failed. (Spoiler alert: It did not go well for him.) I listened to that episode over and over. One image really stuck with me and led directly to writing this story: Marie Phelps-Sweet, one of the first women to be cryonically preserved, had optimistically left a photograph of herself as a young woman, along with a note: “This is as I wish to be restored.” Hence the title, and the premise.

This is a love story, a horror story, a science fiction thriller story. You managed to blend a number of elements into a vivid look at a possible near future. When writing, do you concern yourself with genre labels or perceptions or do you allow the story to take on a life of its own?

I write the story as it seems to want to be written, and worry about where to send it later. Generally there’s a mood, an atmosphere, and an image in my head before there’s a story, and they do tend to be pretty dark. I had started out in my twenties expecting that I would be a horror writer, because I loved horror so much when I was growing up. I took a turn into SFF instead, but a few of my stories do still seem to lean toward dark fantasy and horror.

A great deal has been said about writing “the other,” presenting a character that is not yourself in a respectful and understanding manner. In this story, I love that you offer no identifying features for the main character. The readers are free to identify, or not identify, with the main character in any way they choose. Did you intend the character to present itself in such a fashion? How aware are you of a character’s voice when you set a story to paper?

I definitely did that on purpose. With first-person narrators I want the reader to be able to put themselves in the story. I’ve done that a few times. It’s always interesting to me to see how the reader fills in the blank—this story was produced as an audio version at Escape Pod some years ago, and the narrator was male. When I was writing the story, the narrator in my mind was female. But ultimately that doesn’t matter—once I’m done with it, the story belongs to the reader.

As for voice—voice is everything. I’m an incredibly slow writer for that reason. I can’t finish a thing until I’ve found its voice, and sometimes that takes years. This story was an exception—that first line is exactly as I wrote it in the first draft. The whole thing was done in maybe three days, and a couple of revision passes later it was out the door. I wish they were all like that!

One of your not-so-secret obsessions is your love of fountain pens (even adding references to a pen in this story). How did you begin your love affair with fountain pens and fine inks?

That is one hundred percent the fault of author Kat Howard. She drafts longhand, and she was about to start a new story and said something about needing to choose the story’s color, which intrigued me. She pointed me to the amazing Goulet Pens website, whereupon I fell down the fountain pen rabbit hole and haven’t emerged since. It turns out that they’re not reserved for the wealthy! Decent fountain pens can be had for as little as three dollars (visit JetPens.com for that price point). My current favorite is a Jinhao 321, which cost less than five dollars. Right now I’m working on a historical fantasy set in my home town, and the ink I chose (Noodler’s “Golden Brown”) is the color of the hills in the summer. It makes the process of drafting so much more pleasant. I’m a writer who loves revising but hates drafting, so anything I can do to get through that first draft is welcome!

What’s next for Christie Yant? What projects do you have in the works for 2017?

I’m delighted to say that I have a story coming out next summer in the anthology The Sum of Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas Law, and another in Strange California, edited by Jaym Gates and J. Daniel Batt.

2017 will also see the publication of the first comic books I’ve written: Pet Noir #3, which I co-wrote with Pati Nagel, should be out in early 2017 from Kymera Press. Pet Noir is an all-ages comic starring Leon, a genetically engineered cat who is an undercover cop on a space station. I took over as writer on the title starting with Pet Noir #4, which I just turned in to the editor. I never thought I’d work on something like this—it’s about as far from my prose work as you can get—but it has been an absolute blast so far, and I look forward to writing Leon and his feline friends for a long time to come.

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: Charles Payseur

Arley Sorg | 1563 words

What an incredible, delightfully dark, and multi-faceted story. Among other things, I feel like there is a discussion of the rampant destruction of both nature and native cultures through colonialism happening in the narrative, and a certain self-awareness on Johnny’s part that it’s messed up, yet the sense of resignation, perhaps. Are these important topics for you? Or am I completely reading into this?

They are definitely topics I was hoping to explore with the story, and especially with Johnny, who has such a different feel from Paul. Johnny Appleseed is a character that (historically) most people think of as a naturalist, as someone in touch with nature, and yet his story is one of invasion, of taking these plants that settlers wanted and spreading them, so in that, he’s very much a tool of colonization, of Manifest Destiny. Which I feel like he knows in some way that Paul wouldn’t, because Paul was always larger than life, too big to see the implications of his actions. Johnny’s story has always been smaller, more nurturing, and in that, there’s this contradiction, this seed of corruption—I wanted to look at that. That Johnny in some ways feels guilty, but also doesn’t want to act. That he knows there’s no way to solve this by planting trees, and so he doesn’t want to face it. And I think I grew up around this a lot, in the suburbs of Chicago, which is where I had Johnny retreat to, this white liberalism that embraces “green” spaces and worries about restoring trees and flowers more than it cares about the people and cultures that were destroyed or erased, more than it cares about the damage continuing to be done.

So yes, Johnny’s resignation is very much something that interests me, that I find myself coming back to with my writing. He knows the harm that even his own narrative can create, because he is queer (in this story) and because that aspect of his story has been erased. And instead of fighting, instead of being active and seeking to change the narrative, to subvert it, he remains reluctant and lets himself be led by the same forces that erased his queerness, that destroyed so much, that made him and Paul into the myths used to justify both human and ecological tragedies—industry and money. Not because he trusts them, but because he feels too invested in them. Which obviously doesn’t work out too well for him.

I love (and relate too well to) the relationship between Paul and Johnny. I get this sense of being almost overwhelmed by Paul, of being pulled in his wake, of knowing, hey, this guy is “wrong” in some important ways, but he’s the guy I’m with. It rings true without being overstated. What are the tools you use to write relationships that feel real?

Why thank you! I’m a bit of a sappy romantic, myself, and so I perhaps have read a few too many trashy romances than are strictly good for me. I actually write a bit of speculative romance and erotica short fiction, too, which I think really has forced me as a writer to pay close attention to the motivations people have going into relationships, and the baggage they bring. What I like about Paul and Johnny is that they’re kind of messed up and not incredibly great for one another. That they reinforce in each other the things that perpetuate the harm they do. And I think it makes them hate each other just a little while also being drawn to each other, unable to shake that comfort that they feel when they’re together, which almost washes away everything else.

I’ve also read and written my share of fanfiction, which this story could be considered, and love taking existing characters and imagining how they would fit together, how they would play off each other. I think not having examples of queer relationships in much of popular culture prompts those hungry for those stories to find ways to create their own. At least, that seems to have been the case for me, and it’s certainly a skill that I’ve developed in response to the difficulty of finding the stories I most wanted to read.

This piece evokes early American legends, only to destroy them, drawing a parallel between ruthless modernism (represented not only in the clearing of the woodlands, but also in the presence, power, and actions of corporate industry) and the end of these sorts of iconographic figures. Do you believe that the role and use of legends has changed, or perhaps been extinguished? Or do we create new cultural legends, such as Superman or Luke Skywalker, and use them in the ways that we always have?

I do think that the role and use of legends has changed. For those of this story, the tall tales of early European colonization and expansion into the Americas, I think the story ended. They came into being to stand against the “danger” that unexploited land represented. That unconquered, uncolonized land and people represented. They were there to clear away the old, the pre-European, for the benefit of the fledgling nation and its industries. It’s something that dominated American politics for a long time, the push west, the Manifest Destiny. But . . . we reached the coast, and even further. We took the forests and planted trees of our own. We banished our neighbors and made the land safe for the white settlers. And so those legends found themselves without a purpose any more, except maybe as nostalgia, which is how they survive today. I tried in the story to show where they might have gone, Paul into more extreme exploitations and Johnny into some attempt at empty “conservation” and “green spaces.”

It’s interesting that you mention Superman, because that was part of the inspiration behind the title of the piece, and part of why I think, by and large, even more modern “legends” like Superman are also pretty much obsolete. Again, Superman popped up to fight for American values against outside threats (like Captain America and other early superheroes). He survived World War II and the Cold War, but. . .but then his story basically ended, too. America won. Since the end of the Cold War, the place of superheroes has been in a sort of limbo. What happened? Well, Superman died. Canonically, he was killed in “The Death of Superman.” It’s a moment that stands out to me. Superman died. It’s something that Johnny has to face at the end of the story, when he thinks about apocrypha. Paul Bunyan died. Not because his stripped bones are burning in this hole, but because his story is over, has been over for some time. And while there is a sense that Superman can’t die, that Paul Bunyan can’t die, they have in pretty much any meaningful way perished. Lost their relevance.

And I think that legends mean something different now, at least in America, where this story is set. I think that we’re in a sort of crisis when it comes to our legends and our heroes. Not in a bad way, either. I am not mourning the death of Paul Bunyan or the death of Superman. I’m saying that we’re trying to complicate the narrative. Access to information has transformed us. Technology has transformed us. We want stories that do more than just comfort the dominant. We want stories that do more than just erase the complexity of the past or present. At least, I think a lot of people do. There is obviously a pushback, a call to “make stories simple again.” But it’s a false simplicity that allows so much harm to be done that I think, I hope, that we will resist the call to revive old heroes. That we will continue to push for narratives that do more, that strive to do more.

I really enjoyed this piece, and I’m sure a lot of other people will as well. What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

Well, speaking of superheroes, I have a novelette out this month from Dreamspinner Press titled “How the Supervillain Stole Christmas,” which is a much lighter story that features a supervillain who decides it would be easier to destroy Christmas entirely than have to pick out a gift for his new boyfriend.

As far as works in progress go, I’ve got a novella I’m hoping to sell that’s a sort-of-retelling of the Arthurian myth but with mech suits, an evil Merlin, and basically everyone is queer. It’s my first novella and the first of many stories I have planned in the setting, so I’m rather nervous about it, but hopefully I’ll have more news on that soon.

For anyone who wants to keep up with my work and opinions, I’m active on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo and also run Quick Sip Reviews, where I review SFF short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as post about my various projects.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 205 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Whole Crew Hates Me”) and Molly Tanzer (“Nine Tenths of the Law”), along with SF reprints by James S.A. Corey (“Rates of Change”) and Mary Rosenblum (“Tracker”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“Seven Salt Tears”) and Jeremiah Tolbert (“The West Topeka Triangle”), and fantasy reprints by Jeffrey Ford (“Daddy Longlegs of the Evening”) and Kima Jones (“Nine”).

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

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “Awakening,” by Judith Berman, and a book excerpt.

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

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming, with work from exciting authors like Kelly Barnhill, A. Merc Rustad, Ashok Banker, Indrapramit Das, and many more. So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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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.

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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).

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

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Wendy N. Wagner

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Christie Yant

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Robert Barton Bland

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Rich Horton

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Stefan Rudnicki

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John Joseph Adams

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Robyn Lupo

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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)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers [forthcoming April 2017]

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)

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.