TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 80, January 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, January 2017

Ebook Content Survey

SCIENCE FICTION

Rates Of Change
James S.A. Corey

The Whole Crew Hates Me
Adam-Troy Castro

Tracker
Mary Rosenblum

Nine-Tenths of the Law
Molly Tanzer

FANTASY

Seven Salt Tears
Kat Howard

Daddy Long Legs of the Evening
Jeffrey Ford

The West Topeka Triangle
Jeremiah Tolbert

Nine
Kima Jones

NOVELLA

Awakening
Judith Berman

EXCERPTS

Beltrunner
Sean O’Brien

NONFICTION

Movie Reviews: January 2017
Carrie Vaughn

Book Reviews, January 2017
Andrew Liptak

Interview: Kij Johnson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

James S.A. Corey

Kat Howard

Adam-Troy Castro

Jeffrey Ford

Mary Rosenblum

Jeremiah Tolbert

Molly Tanzer

Judith Berman

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, January 2017

John Joseph Adams | 788 words

Welcome to issue eighty of 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 an excerpt from Sean O’Brien’s new novel, Beltrunner.

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—was published in November. 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.

Last month, the final volume in the POC Destroy series published 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 brought 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.

• • • •

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.

Ebook Content Survey

John Joseph Adams | 150 words

Lightspeed is considering making a change to the content included in our ebook editions. Currently, each ebook issue of Lightspeed features 4 original short stories and 4 short story reprints, plus a novella reprint that is not available in the online edition of the magazine.

We are considering replacing the novella reprint with an additional original short story instead. The short story would be exclusive to the ebook edition (i.e., would not appear online). In this case, each ebook issue of Lightspeed would then contain 5 original short stories and 4 short story reprints (and no novella).

We’re currently conducting a single question poll to determine which option the majority of our ebook readers would prefer. If you could take a moment to cast a vote, please visit the following URL and submit your preference via the poll located there:

lightspeedmagazine.com/2017-content-survey

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.

Rates Of Change

James S.A. Corey | 5260 words

Diana hasn’t seen her son naked before. He floats now in the clear gel bath of the medical bay, the black ceramic casing that holds his brain, the long articulated tail of his spinal column. Like a tadpole, she thinks. Like something young. In all, he hardly masses more than he did as a baby. She has a brief, horrifying image of holding him on her lap, cradling the braincase to her breast, the whip of his spine curling around her.

The thin white filaments of interface neurons hang in the translucent gel, too thin to see except in aggregate. Silvery artificial blood runs into the casing ports and back out in tubes more slender than her pinky finger. She thought, when they called her in, that she’d be able to see the damage. That there would be a scratch on the carapace, a wound, something to show where the violence had been done to him. There is nothing there. Not so much as a scuff mark. No evidence.

The architecture of the medical center is designed to reassure her. The walls curve around her in warm colors. The air recyclers hum a low, consonant chord. Nothing helps. Her own body—her third—is flushed with adrenaline, her heart aches and her hands squeeze into fists. Her fight or flight reaction has no outlet, so it speeds around her body, looking for a way to escape. The chair tilts too easily under her, responding to shifts in her balance and weight that she isn’t aware of making. She hates it. The café au lait that the nurse brought congeals, ignored, on the little table.

Diana stares at the curve and sweep of Stefan’s bodiless nervous system as if by watching him now she can stave off the accident that has already happened. Closing the barn door, she thinks, after the horses are gone. The physician ghosts in behind her, footsteps quiet as a cat’s, his body announcing his presence only in how he blocks the light.

“Mrs. Dalkin,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

“How is he?” she demands instead of saying hello.

The physician is a large man, handsome, with a low warm voice like flannel fresh from the dryer. She wonders if it is his original body or if he’s chosen the combination of strength and softness just to make this part of his work easier. “Active. We’re seeing metabolic activity over most of his brain the way we would hope. Now that he’s here, the inflammation is under control.”

“So he’s going to be all right?”

He hesitates. “We’re still a little concerned about the interface. There was some bruising that may have impaired his ability to integrate with a new body, but we can’t really know the extent of that yet.”

Diana leans forward, her gut aching. Stefan is there, only inches from her. Awake, trapped in darkness, aware only of himself and the contents of his own mind. He doesn’t even know she is watching him. If she picked him up, he wouldn’t know she was doing it. If she shouted, he wouldn’t hear. What if he is trapped that way forever? What if he has fallen into a darkness she can never bring him out from?

“Is he scared?”

“We are seeing some activity in his amygdala, yes,” the physician says. “We’re addressing that chemically, but we don’t want to depress his neural activity too much right now.”

“You want him scared, then.”

“We want him active,” the physician says. “Once we can establish some communication with him and let him know that we’re here and where he is and that we’re taking action on his behalf, I expect most of his agitation will resolve.”

“So he doesn’t even know he’s here.”

“The body he was in didn’t survive the initial accident. He was extracted in situ before transport.” He says it so gently, it sounds like an apology. An offer of consolation. She feels a spike of hatred and rage for the man run through her like an electric shock, but she hides it.

“What happened?”

“Excuse me?” the physician asks.

“I said, what happened? How did he get hurt? Who did this?”

“He was brought from the coast by emergency services. I understood it was an accident. Someone ran into him, or he ran into something, but apart from that it was a blunt force injury, we didn’t . . .”

Diana lifts her hand, and the physician falls silent. “Can you fix him? You can make him all right.”

“We have a variety of interventions at our disposal,” he says, relieved to be back on territory he knows. “It’s really going to depend on the nature of the damage he’s sustained.”

“What’s the worst case?”

“The worst case is that he won’t be able to interface with a new body at all.”

She turns to look into the physician’s eyes. The dark brown that looks back at her doesn’t show anything of the cruelty or horror of what he’s just said. “How likely is that?” Diana says, angry at her voice for shaking.

“Possible. But Stefan is young. His tissue is resilient. The casing wasn’t breached, and the constriction site on his spine didn’t buckle. I’d say his chances are respectable, but we won’t know for a few days.”

Diana drops her head into her hands, the tips of her fingers digging into her temples. Something violent bubbles in her chest, and a harsh laughter presses at the back of her throat like vomit.

“All right,” she says. “All . . . right.”

She hears Karlo’s footsteps, recognizing their cadence the way she would have known his cough or the sound of his yawn. Even across bodies, there is a constancy about Karlo. She both clings to it now and resents it. The ridiculous muscle-bound body he bought himself for retirement tips into the doorway, darkening the room.

“I came when I heard,” he says.

“Fuck you,” Diana says, and then the tears come and won’t stop.

He puts his arms around her. The doctor walks softly away.

• • • •

It is a year earlier, and Karlo says, “He’s a grown man. There’s no reason he shouldn’t.”

The house looks out over the hot concrete of Dallas. It is smaller than the one they’d shared in Quebec, the kitchen thinner, the couch less comfortable. They way they live in it is different, too. Before, when they’d had a big family room, they would all stretch out together on long evenings. Stefan talking to his friends and playing games, Karlo building puzzles or doing office work, Diana watching old films and taking meetings with work groups in Europe and Asia. They’d been a family then—husband, wife, child. For all their tensions and half-buried resentments, they’d still been a unit, the three of them. But they live in the Dallas house like it is a dormitory, coming back to sleep and leaving again when they wake. Even her.

She hates the place, and what it says about her. About Karlo. About Stefan. She hates wondering whether Karlo’s new body had been chosen based on some other woman’s tastes. Or some other man’s. That her son isn’t a child.

“I stayed in my body until I was thirty,” she says. “He’s twenty-one. He doesn’t need it for work. He’s not some kind of laborer.”

“It isn’t the same now as it was when we were young,” Karlo says. “It isn’t just medical or work.”

“Cosmetic,” Diana says, stalking out of the bedroom. Karlo follows her like a leaf pulled along by a breeze.

“Or adventure. Exploration. It’s what people do these days.”

“He should wait.”

Her own body—the one she’d been born in—had failed her young. Ovarian cancer that had spread to her hip before she’d noticed a thing. The way she remembered it, the whole process hadn’t taken more than a few days. Symptom, diagnosis, discussion of treatment options. Her doctor had been adamant—get out before the metastases reached her central nervous system. The ship of her flesh was sinking, and she needed to get into the lifeboat now. The technology had been developed for people working in vacuum or deep ocean, and it was as safe as a decade and a half of labor law could make it. And anyway, there wasn’t a viable choice.

She’d agreed in a haze of fear and confusion. At the medical center, Karlo had undressed her for the last time, helped her into her gown, kissed her, and promised that everything was going to be all right. She still remembered being on the table, the anaesthesiologist telling her to unclasp her hands. In a sense, it had been the last thing she’d ever heard.

She’d hated her second body. Even though it had been built to look as much like her original as it could, she knew better. Everything about it was subtly wrong—the way her elbow fit against her side, the way her voice resonated when she spoke, the shape of her hands. The physicians had talked about rehabilitation anxiety and the uncanny valley. They said it would become more familiar, except that it didn’t. She tried antidepressant therapy. Identity therapy. Karlo had volunteered to swap out his own body, partly as a way, he said, to understand better what she was going through. That hadn’t worked at all. He’d woken up in his new flesh like he’d had a long nap and loved everything about his new self. Five years in, she still hadn’t felt comfortable in her new skin.

Her third body had been an attempt to address that. Instead of trying to mimic her old, dead flesh, it would be something new. Where she’d been petite before, she would be taller and broader now. Instead of being long-waisted, she would be leggy. Her skin tone would be darker, the texture of her hair would be different. Her eyes could be designed in unnatural colors, her fingernails growing in iridescent swirls. Instead of pretending that her body wasn’t a prosthetic, she could design one as a piece of art. It is the mask that she faces in every mirror, and most days she feels more reconciled than trapped.

And then there are bad days when she longs for the first body, the real body, and worse than that, the woman she’d been when she was still in it. She wonders whether it was the same longing that other women felt about youth. And now Stefan wants to leave his body—the body she’d given him, the one that had grown within her—in order to . . . what? Have an adventure with his friends?

Sitting at the thin, discolored breakfast bar, she laces large, dark fingers together, enjoying the ache of knuckle against knuckle. Karlo drifts past in his massive flesh, taking a muscle shirt from the dryer and pulling it over his head with a vagueness that leaves Diana lonesome.

“Why would he want to?” she says, wiping her eye with the back of one hand.

Karlo sighs, hums to himself. He draws a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator and adds vodka from the freezer. He drinks deep and bares his teeth after. His third body has bright white tombstones of teeth. His first body had been slight and compact. Almost androgynous. By the time he speaks, she’s forgotten that she even asked a question.

“Do you mean you don’t think he wants it, or you don’t think he should want it?”

“He doesn’t understand what he’s giving up,” she says.

“Do you?”

She scowled at him. The conversation is making her uncomfortably aware that the experience of him—of seeing Karlo, hearing his voice, smelling the bite of the orange and alcohol—is all phantoms of charged ions and neurochemistry in a brain, in a casing, in a body. Neurons that fire in a pattern that somehow, unknowably, is her experiencing these things. She crosses her arms like she is driving a car, and hates being aware of it. Karlo finishes his drink, puts the glass in the washer. He doesn’t look straight into her eyes. “All his friends are doing it. If he doesn’t he’ll be left behind.”

“It’s his body,” she says.

“It’s his body,” Karlo says, his eyes already shifting toward the door. Away from her. “And anyway, that doesn’t mean what it did when we were kids.” He leaves without saying goodbye. Without kissing her, not that she would have welcomed him. She checks her messages. There are a dozen queued. Something dramatic has happened at the Apulia office, and she hunches over the display and tries to tease out exactly what it was.

She never does give her permission. She only doesn’t withhold it.

• • • •

The footage of the accident plays on a little wall monitor in the medical center. The actual water had been too deep for natural light to find them, so the images have been enhanced, green and aquamarine added, shafts of brightness put in where a human eye—if it hadn’t been crushed by the pressure—would have seen only darkness. The image capture has been done by a companion submarine to document the months-long trek, and either it was a calm day in the deep water or image processing has steadied it. Diana can imagine herself floating in the endless expanse of an ocean so vast it is like looking up at the stars. Karlo sits beside her, his hands knotted together, his eyes on the screen. The contrast between the squalid, tiny world of the medical center and the vast beauty on the screen disorients her.

The first of them swim into sight. A ray with wide gray wings, sloping through the saltwater. With nothing to give a sense of scale, it could be larger than a whale or hardly bigger than a human. There is no bump to show where the carapace holding a human brain and spine might have slotted into it. There is no scar to mark an insertion point. Another of the creatures passes by the camera, curving up the deep tides with grace and power. Then another. Then a dozen more. A school of rays. And one of them—she can’t begin to guess which—her son. In some other context, it might have been beautiful.

“It’s all right,” Karlo says, and she doesn’t know what he means by it. That the violence she is about to see had already happened, that she ought not be disturbed by the alien body that Stefan had chosen over his own, that her anger now won’t help. The words could carry anything.

A disturbance strikes the rays, a shock moving through the group. The smooth cohesion breaks, and they whirl, turning one way and then the other. Their distress is unmistakable.

“What happened?” Karlo says. “Was that it?”

“Be quiet,” Diana says. She leans forward, filling her view with the small screen like she might be able to dive through it. There in the center of the group, down below the camera, two of the rays swirl around each other, one great body butting into the other. A fight or a dance. She can’t read the intent in the movements. One breaks off, skimming wildly up, speeding through the gloom and the darkness. The other follows, and the floating camera turns to track them. As they chase each other, another shape slides into the frame, also high above. Another group of three alien bodies moving together, unaware of the chase rising up from below. The impact seems comical. The lead ray bumps into the belly of the middle of the three. The little camera loses focus, finds it again. Four rays swimming in a tight circle around one that lists on its side, its wings stilled and drifting.

That is my son, she thinks. That is Stefan. No emotions rise at the idea. It is absurd. Like seeing a rock cracked under a hammer or a car bent by a wreck: the symbol of a tragedy, but not the thing itself. It is some sea animal, something that belongs to the same world as sharks and anglerfish. Inhuman. She knows it is her boy floating there, being pulled toward the surface by the emergency services pods, but she cannot make herself feel it.

“They attacked him,” she says, testing the words. Hoping that they will carry the outrage she wants to feel. “They attacked him, and they left him for dead.”

“They were playing and there was an accident,” Karlo says. “They didn’t leave him for dead.”

“Then where are they? His friends, if that’s what you call them? I don’t see them here.”

“They can’t breathe air,” Karlo says, as if that excuses everything. “They’ll come once the trip is over. Or, when he gets better, he can go back to them.”

Her breath leaves her. She turns to stare at him. His eyes, so unlike the ones she’d known when they had been married, cut to her and away again.

“Go back to them?” she says.

“If he wants. Some people find living that way very calming. Pleasant.”

“They aren’t human.” Now there is rage. Real rage. It lifts her up out of herself and fills her ears with a sound like bees. “You want to see your son among these animals? That’s fine with you? They could have killed him. We don’t know that they didn’t. You’d send him back?”

“They aren’t animals,” Karlo says. “They’re just different. And I would do what Stefan wants. I’d let him choose.”

“Of course you would.”

They are quiet for a moment. The feed on the display ends, drops back to the medical center’s logo and a prompt. Karlo sighs again. She hates the way his sighs sound now—deep and rumbling. Nothing like his first body, except in the timing of it, the patience in it. Nothing the same except that it is the same. “You know you can’t tell him how to live his life.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“It’s always been like this. Every generation finds its own way to show that it isn’t like the one before. Too much risk, too much sex, terrible music, not enough respect for the old ways. This is no different. It was an accident.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“All right,” Karlo says. “Another time.”

• • • •

Before the cancer, she worked in an office with people, a desk of her own, conversations over butter tarts and tea in a breakroom with an old couch and half a dozen bamboo chairs. When she came back in her second body, the junior partners threw a little party for her to celebrate the happy conclusion of her brush with death. She remembers being touched and a little embarrassed at the time. And grateful.

It was only later, as she tried to get back into her old routine, that her subterranean distress began to bloom. She found herself timing her trips to the bathroom and break room to avoid brushing past anyone or being touched. She avoided the bakery at the end of the street that she’d frequented before. At home, her marriage became essentially sexless.

She tried not to notice it at first, then told herself that it was temporary, and then that it was normal. Over weeks, a quiet shame gnawed at her. She bathed at night with a grim, angry focus, resenting her skin for gathering smudges and sweat, her hair for growing oily and repulsive. She ate too much or not enough. Shitting or pissing or getting her period filled her with a deep disgust, like she was having to watch and clean and tend to someone else.

She found reasons to work remotely, to talk to Karlo and Stefan while she was somewhere else. Simply having a physicality irritated her, and she leaned away from it. When the junior partners asked whether she was still using her office or if they could repurpose the space, she’d cried without knowing quite why she was crying. She’d told them they could have it and scheduled a consultation with her doctor. Rehabilitation anxiety. Uncanny valley. It would pass.

Now, she sits in the medical center cafeteria, going through her messages with her attention scattered, listening to the same one three or four or five times, and still not able to focus her attention long enough to parse what exactly it was her co-worker was asking of her. The smell of antiseptic and overheated food presses her. The lights seem both too bright and unable to dispel the shadows, and she wonders whether it might be the beginning of a migraine. Karlo has found himself someplace else to be, and she is resentful that he’s abandoned her and relieved to be left to herself.

At the next table, a woman in scrubs laughs acidly and the man she is with responds with something in French. Diana finds her attention drifting to them: wondering at them, about them. The woman has a beautiful cascade of black hair flowing down her shoulders: Had she been born with it? Is she as young as she seems, or was the brain under those raven locks an old woman’s? Or an old man’s? Or a child’s as young as Stefan? Even in a carapace, a brain still wears out, still lives out its eight or nine decades. Or seven. Or two. But without the other signs of age and infirmity, what does it mean?

She remembers her own mother’s hair going from auburn to gray to white to a weird sickly yellow. The changes meant something, gave Diana a way to anticipate the changes in her own life, her own body. There are no old people now. No one crippled and infirm. Everything is a lie of health and permanence, of youth permanently extended. All around her, everyone is wrapped in a mask of flesh. Everything is a masquerade of itself, everyone in disguise. And even the few who aren’t, might be. There is no way to know.

Her hands tremble. She closes her eyes, and has to fight not to cover her ears, too. If she does, someone might come and talk to her, ask her whether she is all right. She doesn’t know how she would answer that, and she doesn’t want to find out.

For a moment, she envies Stefan, locked away from the world, alone with only himself, and then immediately condemns herself for thinking it. He is hurt. Her baby is injured and afraid and beyond any place she can reach him. Only a monster would wish for that.

But . . .

Perhaps she can let herself want to change places with him. If she had to shed her body—all her bodies—to bring him back into the light, she’d do it in a heartbeat. Put that way, she can tell herself it would be an act of love.

Someone touches her shoulder. She startles, her eyes flying open. The physician with his uncertain smile, like she might bite him. She forces herself to nod, reflexively picturing the black casing behind the chocolate brown eyes and gently graying hair.

“We were trying to reach you, Mrs. Dalkin.”

She looks at her message queue. Half a dozen from the medical center’s system, from Karlo. She feels the blush in her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was distracted.”

“No need to apologize,” he says. “I thought you’d want to know. We’ve made contact with Stefan.”

• • • •

The interface is minimal. One of the thin silvery faux-neuronal leads has adhered to a matching bundle of nerve clusters that runs to a casing like the insulation on a wire, and from there into a simple medical deck. A resonance imager wraps around Stefan’s brain like a scarf and focuses on his visual neocortex, reading the patterns there and extrapolating the images that Stefan is imagining from them. Reading his mind and showing it on a grainy display.

“He is experiencing the interface as a coldness on his right arm,” the physician says. “You have to be slow, but he’s been able to follow us with surprising clarity. It’s a very good sign.”

“Oh good,” Diana says, and wishes there had been less dread in the words. She sits at the deck, her fingers over the keyboard layout, suddenly unsure what she is supposed to say. She smiles at the physician nervously. “Does his father know?”

“Yes. Mr. Dalkin was here earlier.”

“Oh good,” she says again. She types slowly, one letter at a time. The deck translates her words into impulses down the neuronal wire, the interface translates the impulses into the false experience of an unreal cold in an abandoned arm, and Stefan—her Stefan, her son—reads the switching impulses as the Morse-code-like pulses that he’s trained in.

This is your mother. I am right here.

• • • •

She turns to the display, waiting. Biting her lips with her teeth until she tastes a little blood. The display shifts. There is only black and gray, fuzzy as a child drawing in the dirt with a stick, but she sees the cartoonish smiling face. Then a heart. Then, slowly, H then I then M then O then M. She sobs once, and it hurts her throat.

Are you okay in there?

P-E-A-C-H-Y

“Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you, you flippant little shit.” She doesn’t look at the physician, the technicians. Let them think whatever they want. She doesn’t care now.

I love you.

Stefan visualizes a heart. The physician hands Diana a tissue, and she wipes her tears away first and then blows her nose.

It is going to be okay.

I-K-N-O-W and another cartoon smiling face. Then T-E-L-L-K-I-R-A-I-A-M-G-O-D.

God?

The display goes chaotic for a moment, as her son thinks of something else, not visual. It comes back with something like an infinity sign, two linking circles. No, a double o.

Good?

The smiling face. Tell Kira I am good. As if it were true. As if whatever girl had sloughed off her own body and put her mind in one of those monsters deserves to be comforted for whatever role she’d had in making her son into this. No one deserved to be forgiven. No one.

I will.

“His anxiety has gone down considerably since we made contact,” the physician says. “And with the interface starting to bounce back, I think we can start administering some medication to reduce his distress. It will still be some time before we can know how extensive the permanent damage is, but I think it’s very likely he will be able to integrate into a body again.”

“That’s good,” Diana hears herself say.

“I don’t want to oversell the situation. He may be blinded. He may have reduced motor function. There is still a long, long way to go before we can really say he’s clear. But his responses so far show that he’s very much cognitively intact, and he’s got a great sense of humor and a real bravery. That’s more important now than anything else.”

“That’s good,” she says again. Her body rises, presumably because she wants it to. “Excuse me.”

She walks down the hall, out the metal door, into the bright and unforgiving summer sunlight. She’s forgotten her things in Stefan’s room, but she doesn’t want to go back for them. They’ll be there when she returns or else they won’t. On the streets, autocabs hiss their tires along the tracks. Above her, a flock of birds wheels. She finds a little stretch of grass, an artifact of the sidewalk and the street, useless for anything and so left alone. She lowers herself to it, crosses her latest set of legs and pulls off her shoes to look at some unreal woman’s feet, running her fingertips along the arches.

None of it is real. The heat of the sun is only neurons in her brain firing in a certain pattern. The dampness of the grass that cools her thighs and darkens her pants. The half-ticklish feeling of her feet. Her grief. Her anger. Her confusion. All of it is a hallucination created in tissue locked in a lightless box of bone. Patterns in a complication of nerves.

She talked with her son. He talked back. Whatever happens to him, it already isn’t the worst. It will only get better, even if better doesn’t make it all the way back to where it started from. Even if the best it ever is is worse than what it was. She waits for the relief to come. It doesn’t.

Instead, there is Karlo.

He strides down the walk, swinging beefy arms, wide and masculine and sure of himself. She can tell when he sees her. The way he holds himself changes, narrows. Curls in, like he is protecting himself. That is just nerves firing, too. The patterns in the brain she’d loved once expressing something through his costume of flesh. She wonders what it would be like to be stripped out of her body with him, their interface neurons linked one to another. There had been a time, hadn’t there, when he had felt like her whole universe? Is that what the kids would be doing a generation from now? No more deep-sea rays. No more human bodies. Carapaces set so that they become flocks of birds or buildings or traffic patterns or each other. When they can become anything, they will. Anything but real.

He grunts as he eases himself to the grass beside her, shading his eyes from the sun with a hand and a grimace.

“He’s doing better,” Karlo says.

“I know. We passed notes.”

“Really? That’s more than I got out of him. He’s improving.”

“He gave me a message for Kira.”

“That’s his girlfriend.”

“I don’t care.”

Karlo nods and heaves a wide, gentle sigh. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Everything.”

“You didn’t do everything.”

“No,” he says. “Just what I could.”

Diana lets her head sink to her knees. She wonders, if her first body had survived, would she have been able to? Or would the decades have stiffened her joints the way they had her mother’s, dimmed her eyesight the way they had her father’s. The way they might never for anyone again. “What happened?” she says. “When did we stop being human? When did we decide it was okay?”

“When did we start?” Karlo says.

“What?”

“When did we start being human and stop being . . . I don’t know. Cavemen? Apes? When did we start being mammals? Every generation has been different than the one before. It’s only that the rate of change was slow enough that we always recognized the one before and the one after as being like us. Enough like us. Close. Being human isn’t a physical quality like being heavy or having green eyes. It’s the idea that they’re like we are. That nothing fundamental has changed. It’s the story we tell about our parents and our children. “

“Our lovers,” she says. “Our selves.”

Karlo’s body tightens. “Yes, those, too,” he says. And then, a moment later, “Stefan’s going to come through. Whatever happens, he’ll be all right.”

“Will I?” she says.

She waits for an answer.

©2015 by James S.A. Corey. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James S.A. Corey is the pen name used by collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank. They are best known for The Expanse series of novels. Leviathan Wakes, the first in the series, was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards, while the fourth book, Abbadon’s Gate, won the Locus award. The series has been adapted for television by the Syfy network.

They have also collaborated on short fiction and a Star Wars novel, Honor Among Thieves. They live in New Mexico.

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

The Whole Crew Hates Me

Adam-Troy Castro | 3500 words

They hate me. They have told me this, again and again, starting from almost the first day of the mission, and continuing every day since then, carrying their hostility well outside the confines of the solar system and into the realm of bentspace. Their hatred does not quite extend to the realm of murder, at least not yet; but it does include telling me every day, in every possible way, that they find my presence intolerable and that they wish I would just do something considerate, like die. I’ve given up on asking them why. They just tell me it’s obvious. They say I’m stupid for not being able to figure it out for myself. They say it’s all they can do to not smash my face. I ask if they have any specific complaints, if there are any specific transgressions I can work on. They just look disgusted. This is universal; all thirty members of the waking shift, all saying the same thing, all making the same points. They hate me, all of them. Every single one.

The various facilities the ship has for crew recreation have all been shut down to me. I am not allowed anywhere near the game room. I am not permitted to access the library, audio or video or neurec or text. Even the ship’s mess is forbidden to me. I cannot sit and enjoy my meals at leisure, listening to and participating in the give-and-take of shipboard life, the way they do, but must collect a weekly allotment of reconstituted foodstuffs from the galley, and take it down to the guts of the ship where, they assure me, I belong, because otherwise I’d be among them, ruining their appetite, making them sick. I’ve protested it in the strongest possible terms, both in the last list of grievances transmitted to Earth and with the Captain herself. But Earth has not responded and the Captain merely rolls her eyes and says, “What do you expect me to do about it? I can’t force them to socialize with you if they don’t want to.” I ask, “And that’s it, then? I’m supposed to just lock myself away and not talk to anybody for another ten years?” She rolls her eyes again—a great eye-roller, is our Captain—and tells me that it’s not her fault; it’s not anybody’s fault; it’s not even my fault, because I was born the prick I am. But she can’t help it if everybody hates me. She can’t even help it that she hates me too, as, she takes pains to assure me, anybody would.

Zieglitz has made up songs about me. Lenniman’s cornered me in one alcove or another, to poke me with his index finger while haranguing me with a long list of all my faults, actual or imagined. Pithule’s torn up all my uniforms but for one, which he’s infused with some kind of chemical agent that makes my skin itch. They’ve doubled my shifts and annotated my messages from home with rude commentary about my friends and family. They refuse to explain why they’re doing this to me except in generalities about how disgusting I am and how revolting it is to be around me and how life would be so much better if I just jettisoned myself out an airlock. I keep telling them that this is not the way to run a mission.

They shouldn’t hate me. I mean, scientifically, they shouldn’t. It’s against all we know of personality mapping. Mission Control knew that we would all be confined together for almost twelve years, one way, that we would need to operate as cogs in a well-oiled machine, and therefore that, by all known measurements, we would get along. We were all subjected to the usual exhaustive battery of psychological tests to determine compatibility and the capacity to compromise, and I scored 97.2 out of a possible one hundred, which is as good as any of them except for Raffin, who scored 97.5, rendering him by that one smidgen the most likeable of any of us, by a hair. We’re all amiable sorts, all endearing sorts, all paragons of physical fitness and sexual attractiveness, all wholly qualified in our respective specialties, all socially compatible in multiple gender combinations, and all willing to forego the normal societal mores regarding monogamy and gender preference. In training, we were placed under instructions to indulge whatever makes us comfortable, to accept and indulge all sexual overtures from our comrades, and to eliminate all tendencies toward jealousy or possessiveness. The computer simulations suggested and recorded some possibilities that we never even considered and therefore choreographed groupings of not just twos and threes but fours and fives; and never in all the resulting animatics, rendered with cinematically realistic precision down to every last ooh and aah, did all that poking about and mucking about and acrobating about and the like ever wind up with the result that one of us ended up an outcast, unable to arrange so much as a single day without being abused. But that’s the way it’s worked out, and as it happens I find myself the guy the others don’t talk to, don’t make eye contact with, don’t even respond to unless it’s mission business. When it’s mission business, like the status conferences we hold every Thursday, the others glare at me as if I’m some slimy ball of undigested hair puked out by the ship’s cat, if we had a ship’s cat. I cough and tell them everything that’s been going on in cryo-section. It’s a lot of data to get through, but no less than any of the others have to share during the same meeting, and none of them get what I get: scowls, eye-rolling, the sense that it’s all they can do to tolerate me, for the length of time it takes me to get through it; the clear message that they wish I was dead.

Early in the voyage the Captain kicked me out of my quarters. Everybody in the waking crew is supposed to have their own private space, not a big one, you understand, but a little cubicle about the size of a respectable prison cell with a retractable bed, a storage bin with 100 kilo of personal belongings, and a display wall that constantly cycles through images from home, from nature photography to pictures of Mom and Dad. In prisons, murderers get that much. We are supposed to get that much. We weren’t ten days outside the solar system before somebody hacked the system wall, deleted all my wall art, and replaced it with pornographic images of assholes: thousands of them, an impressive treasure trove of them, in fact, testifying to either a powerful search engine or an energetic feat of compiling this imagery by hand. I couldn’t retire to my quarters without those images scrolling by on my wall, refusing even the simple command to shut down in favor of a simple single shade wallpaper. Whoever did it also blanked my personal library of preferred pleasure reading and replaced it all with endless pages of the same two words, You Suck, repeated ad infinitum, at length far greater than the collected works of Proust. I complained to the Captain about that, too, prompting her reply that since I happened to be so ungrateful for the quarters I’d been provided, I would no doubt prefer a cot down by the bluegel crypts where I work; and I was still sputtering when she arranged just that, a new assigned berth made up of jury-rigged cargo netting, in a dank alcove under tubes that rattle and get uncomfortably hot in the late hours when I’m trying to sleep. I’m the only member of the crew who has to sleep under such industrial conditions, while my old assigned quarters stay sealed, a space forbidden even to me.

I’ve read back everything I’ve written so far, and I can’t help thinking that this all sounds paranoid. What needs to be acknowledged is that I know. I recognize paranoia when I see it. The thing is, one workable definition of insanity is the inability to forge appropriate reactions to stimuli, and one reason the common persecution complex tends to be listed as a symptom of mental illness is that, when applicable, the sufferer is not actually being persecuted. There’s no conspiracy of silence, no instant vibe that makes everybody hate him. It’s just a creation of faulty wiring. In my particular case, I happen to know that I’m not making this up. They dump sewage down by my berth. They play Sousa marches over the ship’s intercom when I try to sleep. They send me memos about what a gigantic piece of crap I am. They concoct a demerit system named after me, Morgan Points, that by the new ship’s Constitution can only be awarded to me and can never be wiped off my record, but can only be punished with revocation of more privileges. My communiqués to Mission Control beg them to go back over their calculations to determine just what, if anything, has gone wrong. But I have received no reply. Instead I get a memo from Hurwitz, the ship’s Psychologist. It is her duty to make sure that every member of the crew bears up under the stresses of interstellar travel and remains capable of continuing to fulfill the duties for which we were trained. I have frequently asked her to intervene with my fellow crew members. She has always been as evasive about this as the Captain. But today her memo gives me a firm reply. I reproduce it here only because it’s vitally important to document every manifestation of the way they’ve been treating me. Die, Morgan. Seriously, just die. Kill yourself or something. There are industrial accidents waiting to happen all over the ship. You can toodle out an airlock, you can jump from the catwalk over Sector Nine, you can let your fingernails grow long and rip out your own throat. Any of these things would be preferable to turning down another whiny attempt to help you avoid what should be obvious by now. Understand this. I have no intention of intervening. I will not lift one finger to make one heartbeat out of one minute out of any one of your days even incrementally more bearable for you, and will in fact do anything I can to make your stupid pointless life aboard this ship even more unpleasant than it is now. Do you get it now, you prick? Do you have even the scintilla of a ghost of a clue? Nobody likes you. Nobody has ever liked you. Even your parents hated you. Any moment in your past where you thought you were tolerable to your fellow human beings was just a pretense, which the world indulged out of awareness that it would someday get to exile you into an environment like this mission where you would be unable to escape the treatment you so richly deserve. I can’t believe I’m even wasting my breath on you. I hereby state for the record that this is the last time any communication from you will receive the dignity of a reply. Don’t you get it, Morgan? You’re an irritant; you were born an irritant; you will always be an irritant. Die Die Die Die Die.

I’ve begun giving serious consideration to the possibility that this madness, or whatever it is, will eventually result in attempts on my life. Unused space is at a premium on a starship, even one as vast and as sprawling as this one, but in every industrial facility there are places where machinery abuts against other machinery in inelegant interfaces that create alcoves, crawlspaces, even cooling shafts, accessible to human beings who might have a need to hide. In my copious time alone, I have identified four, well outside the flow of crew traffic, where a sufficiently determined outcast can hide and venture forth only in conditions of absolute secrecy, to scavenge the food he needs to survive. One of our colonists died in stasis, his body jettisoned into the void as per regulations; actually, a number of our colonists have died, the expected number, but this is one particular fellow I’m talking about, and I’ve made a little project of disassembling his bluegel crypt and creating a little cubbyhole, which from the front still looks like it’s holding a body in suspension. Decontamination was a tough and nasty job, but one of the advantages of nobody wanting anything to do with me is having plenty of free time that would normally be spent socializing, and I’ve spent it making sure that I could be quite comfortable in there for a long time, even arranging a nutrient drip and sewage line in case I’m ever in for a long siege. This is what they’ve reduced to me: the paranoia of the despised minority.

I have even engaged myself in long debates about what I’ll do if circumstances ever force me to have to kill in self-defense—a prospect that that once filled me with horror but has in recent months become more and more a deeply craved consummation. Right or wrong, I want to smash some faces. At night, alone, I imagine the satisfying crunch of the Captain’s cheekbones shattering as I smash her with a wrench; I imagine the screams of terror as Denham and Schwartz are sucked out into the cold of interstellar space; I crave the gasps as I kick the already helpless O’Hearn in the ribs, all while shouting epithets as awful as the ones they’ve chanted at me. But as much as I’ve dreamt about that, I’ve also fantasized about the other resolution, the tearful apologies, the offered hands of friendship, the sudden sexual interest by one or another who’ve cursed my name but in this reverie find me as irresistible as they now find me loathsome. I am a social being. I want my fellow human beings. I have also pictured waking some of the colonists, not all of them but just a few, explaining as they sit shivering on the cold deck that something has gone terribly wrong with the mission and that they’re desperately needed to help keep things from getting worse. I imagine creating a second country down here in the guts of the ship, a country I’ll somehow manage to hide from the internal sensors and from the resource depletion logs and therefore from those who have declared me outcast, a country comprised of dozens of thawed colonists who will embrace me as friend and grant me the acceptance I cannot have from those I trained with. I tell myself that if I recruit my friends wisely, I can even lead a little rebellion, storming the upper corridors and seizing control from those who have been so cruel to me . . . and there my fantasies return to reprisals. More and more, I seem to want that more than love. More and more, I think I’m losing my mind. But I am brought back to reality to the awareness that I have also not broken. Isn’t that funny? How can that be, that I have not broken?

But I keep coming back to the tests: the assurances we kept receiving from all the doctors and analysts and group dynamic specialists, that we had been selected to fit together, to work together, to function as a family with an absolute minimum of conflict. And I keep coming up against the one thing that frightens me most of all. In the early days of mission planning, all the predictive models based on perfect crew harmony resulted in catastrophic failure, of one sort or another, before we reached the new planet. In all those models, cliques formed; onboard society crumbled; suicides and homicides multiplied. Then the models were classified and in short order the number crunchers announced that they had licked the problem. It’s occurred to me that nothing as aberrant as a universal outcast could have gone without prediction, that it might indeed be part of the plan, that the specific dynamics of this crew might have been designed to produce one, a poor schmuck who had always known popularity under natural circumstances but who they could count on to be loathed and ostracized when faced with a particular grouping of human beings, selected not just because of their qualifications but because they would fit together in a manner that would inevitably exclude him. What, I wonder, possesses more unity than a crowd with someone to hate? If true, this would explain why Mission Control has never answered me, why the Captain has always rolled her eyes at my official protests, why the rest of the crew has always seemed more than just the tightly-knit family I expected, but a single organism, united with a purpose that goes beyond seeding the stars. If so, I just might be the most important person on the ship.

I consider the matter further and reflect that if this is true, even my failure to commit suicide in response to all this social isolation must have been a factor in the calculations. If Mission Control wanted this to happen, then perhaps they knew that Guilfoyle would slit his wrists within a year; that Tanaka would bash in her own brains within two; that Vernon would murder somebody in a fit of rage within three. Maybe they crunched the numbers and picked the one of us who would bear up under all this persecution with the lowest loss of efficiency. If so, then I could doom the mission by injecting myself with coolant, dying, and forcing the group dynamics to recalculate, until it’s someone like Schwartzhill or Dennehy the group mind decides to hate next; maybe someone whose specialty is so critical to the mission that the crew won’t be able to survive a single day of their helpless hostility toward him. That would be nice, I think. That would strike me as poetic justice.

The crew hates me. They hate me without being able to explain why they hate me. They hate me with a helpless, single-minded determination that compels them to blight every minute of every day. They hate me so much they’ve taken to waylaying me in the corridors and pummeling me bloody with sacks that they’ve filled with spanners and wrenches. They know exactly how much damage they can do to me and leave me still able to do my job. They don’t know that their abuse has changed my attitude toward my job. They believe me when I assure them at every meeting that the colonists are still doing well in stasis, with no more than the normal, expected number of deaths. They don’t know that from time to time I’ve been so filled with rage by their latest mistreatment of me that I’ve popped some random seal and let a corpus thaw out while it sat. I’ve disposed of more than a hundred this way; hardly any compared to the thousands we have in storage, but enough to qualify me as one of the most prolific serial killers in human history. I haven’t really done it, because the numbers were right when they declared me incapable of violence. I just tell myself I have. But do I take such pleasure fantasizing about it because they hate me, or do they hate me because they sense that it’s something I might be capable of doing? I find I don’t care.

What they don’t know and what I suspect the number-crunchers underestimated is just how much I hate them in return. I hate them I hate them I hate them. I want them dead so much it makes me weep. I want them dead so much I can feel it eating away every other piece of me. I want them dead so much I would stab the world in the heart just for the chance of seeing it happen. I want them dead so much that there’s nothing else in the universe I care about. I want them dead because I know that if they came to their senses and offered me their friendship, I would fall to my knees and break down weeping, foolishly grateful for the chance to be one of them again. I want them dead so much I wake up every day shattered that they haven’t forgiven me, at long last, for whatever it is they believe I’ve done; for whatever mistake I’ve made; for whatever planned or random quirk of chemistry makes them want to treat me this way. I want them dead because I hate them, more than I’ve ever hated anyone or anything. I want them dead because the numbers were right about something else, too: how helplessly and without reservation I love them.

©2017 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale will appear in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.

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

Tracker

Mary Rosenblum | 8840 words

The City Man was calling him.

Tracker lifted his head from his garden, distracted from the small fears and satisfactions of the black beetles sucking juice from the ruffled cabbages beneath his fingers. The scent of that calling came to him on the soft westerly winds that also carried molecules of ocean, fish, and seagull shit, dying shelled-things and hungry water-living mammals. It blew across City, too, and the scents it carried from that place bore images, but few names to Tracker’s mind. Only City Man’s calling carried a name.

But City Man was not really a name. His name was a complex of scent and touch, of not touching, tone of voice, and the small sharp veerings of emotion—a thread that strung Tracker’s days and nights and more days of remembered history into a contiguous thread.

City Man had created Tracker.

Jesse whined, and nudged his leg with her nose, her canine eyes on his face. She couldn’t hear City Man’s calling, but she knew Tracker heard him because her engineered brain let her know. Since she stared at him, he saw himself briefly through her eyes, a long face with planes and slopes like the cliff faces above the cove beach, his hair the tawny red of the clay soil beneath the winter rains. He caught a glimpse of his cabbages, fat and green and round at the edges of her vision. Their smooth green roundness filled him with brief satisfaction. These were old genes, unaltered, the same cabbages an old-days human might have grown, a thousand years ago, when their genes were equally innocent.

Jesse nudged him again. Conscience. Friend. Eyes.

“All right,” he said aloud. “Let’s find out what he wants.” He put out his hand, felt the hair-warmth-duty of her presence come up against his palm. She showed him the dirt path between the irregular boundaries of his garden beds with her sight, tugged him along with her silent urgency.

“He’s only going to want to play,” he said to her gruffly. “Show off one of his little creations.”

Jesse didn’t answer, marching firmly along, showing him the path she knew he should take. She was good at that—keeping his feet from stumbling. Tracker felt a birdwing shadow of fear and thought back quickly. How old was she? City Man had made her for him and he had no idea what lifespan he had built into her genes. Had never thought to ask. His step faltered, as he contemplated the cabbages and old-days plants with lost names, swept by her eyes. Smelled earth, and the tickling lifethought of small squirming things. His world.

She nipped at him. Impatient.

“Coming.” Beyond the tall wall of his garden, City waited. He gathered his senses tightly into himself as he absently admired the paving of white marble inlaid with abstract patterns of green jasper and blue lapis in front of Jesse’s paws. Too bright, he thought, but that would change, as soon as one of the City got bored. For a while—years or decades—it had been paved in mother of pearl. He had liked that, liked the subtle opalescent gleam that Jesse had showed him and the memory-song of the shells that had once held life. They walked a lot then. It had been a cloudy cool time, before someone turned up the sun. They passed a few folk on the wide street, but no City people. You rarely saw City people. Few that they were, they didn’t spend much time in City unless someone had made it new. No one had made it new for some time now.

They reached the City Man’s gate. Jesse would never look wholly at it. She looked aside, studying the thin-sliced agate that tiled the wall. He knew the gate by its feel beneath his palms. It was made of bones. He wasn’t sure whose bones they were, but they were delicate—a flying creature. They murmured to him of wind as a solid living thing as he pushed the gate open.

He was right. City Man had a visitor. Woman, he smelled, hormones in balance, full of life, unshadowed by death. He could always smell it—that lack of Death’s shadow. It shaded all the City creations, a hint of darkness on a sunny day. Not so, for City’s Residents. Death could not shadow them. They summoned it only at will, their servant, no master. Jesse wouldn’t look at the Woman or at City Man, so he stood still, admiring the raked sand and small, perfect shells that she showed him. It occurred to him that he had never really looked at City Man. Jesse wouldn’t do it.

“Of course he’s blind,” City Man was saying to the Woman. “He doesn’t need eyes. If I asked him to find you, he would feel you on the far side of the planet. Or on the orbital. On the Moon Garden. He’s that aware.”

“Oh, you’re so sure you’re the top Creator in the solar system.” The Woman sounded bored, but it was an act. He could feel her interest prickling his skin, mixed with a sharp edge of jealousy. Tracker studied the tight spiral of a shell the color of a rainy morning. A creature had made that, without thought or intent. City Man had made a tribe of men and women who built endless sand sculptures on the beach below his garden—sculptures that the tide daily washed away. Like the shell maker.

Slowly, he realized that the Woman had left the garden and that City Man was contemplating him. Jesse was leaning against his knee, wanting hard to be gone.

“Tracker.” City Man came close enough that the clove and sweat-scent of him, and that hard clean lack of Death’s shadow, filled Tracker’s senses.

“I want you to find someone.” He put a hand on Tracker’s shoulder.

Jesse flinched.

“One of my creations. She ran away once before, and I found her. This time . . . I don’t feel like going. I have better things to do.”

The jagged edge of his lie brushed Tracker’s mind and he stifled a wince. Jesse growled, so low and soft that City Man didn’t hear her. Tracker put a hand down on her silken head. Shushed her.

“Here she is.” He moved away. Something rustled, and then City Man thrust a spider-silk bag against Tracker’s chest.

He took it, felt softness and small bits of hardness within the folds of silk.

“She probably went to find the kite flyers again.” Burning like bee stings filled his words. “She stayed with them a long time, last time. Go find her.” He turned away, his scent and presence diminishing. “She’s mine, and I want her back, Tracker.”

Jesse nudged at him, panting with eagerness to be gone from this place. He wound his fingers in her silky coat, feeling her fear. “Why are you afraid?” he asked her softly as she pulled him through the bone-barred gate and back out into City’s white marble and lapis. “He won’t hurt you. He doesn’t care.”

Jesse licked his hand, then—deliberately—nipped the soft pad of flesh between his thumb and forefinger.

Tracker sucked in his breath at the sting of pain, pressed his hand to his mouth, tasting the coppery note of blood on his tongue.

• • • •

Twilight shrouded the fat cabbages with their innocent genes by the time he and Jesse reached the garden. They went inside and he told Jesse to go play. He didn’t need her here. His house existed as scents of comfort, curving walls, cushions and tables that held his echo and Jesse’s, static and welcoming. He crossed the thick carpet to run his hands along a sculpture of wave-polished wood, crafted by a young man who helped carve the sand sculptures that the waves erased with each tide.

Mindless and innocent, like the shell maker.

He fingered the complex twine of wood with polished wood and shook his head, frowning. Then he sat at his table with its not-quite-satiny grain and opened the slick folds of spider silk. It held a rumpled wad of fabric. He lifted it to his face, inhaling the scents of dust, wind, and longing. A picture flickered in his mind—a melon-colored kite diving through a cloudless sky. She probably went to find the kite flyers again. The small hard things were freshwater pearls, lumpy and irregular, that filled his mind with the timeless passage of slow, watery days. Gold wires had been threaded through them, as if they had been used for earrings once. The nip on his hand had scabbed over and he touched the grainy roughness of scab, wondering what had upset Jesse. After a while, he got up and went out into the garden, to harvest lettuce, leaf by crisp leaf, and pull tiny, sweet carrots from the loose soil. He ended beside his trellis of peas, face to the gentle breeze blowing fish scent and the evening-smoke of the sand sculptors in from the shore. Each carrot root and tiny sphere of pea-germ was a small death. Tracker tossed the last empty pod into the compost bin at the edge of the garden. Life lived on death, he thought. Until City and the people who lived here came to be.

They had defied Death.

The cooking fires on the beach were burning out. The distant scent of orcas came to Tracker. They were playing out in the dark bay, not hungry right now, just playing. He went into this house, comforted by the familiar textures and contours, and lay down on the cushions in the corner. After a few minutes, Jesse crept in beside him. She licked his hand where she had nipped it, turned around twice, and lay down with a sigh.

• • • •

They left City in the morning, walking face-on into the warmth of the rising sun. Jesse frisked like a puppy. The land outside City’s walls was desert. That surprised Tracker a little. It has been prairie last time he had been out here, full of flowers. How long ago? He tried to fix the time, gave up. Someone had decided that the land should be desert so . . . it was desert. One of City’s residents sculpted the land with glaciers. Tracker remembered City Man saying so.

They had time to sculpt a landscape with glaciers.

Away from the shore, the wind blew hot from the center of the land, and Tracker lifted his head, his hand on Jesse’s head, not bothering to look through her eyes. He could taste her. The one City Man wanted. Out there. The melon-colored kite dove and rose in the cloudless sky and he scented that hint of dust and longing, mingled with . . . joy.

They walked, living off the dried vegetables and meat in his pack, sleeping in the hottest part of the day, walking beneath the waxing moon. One of City’s members had sculpted the face of the moon. Dark lines and spaces crossed it, Tracker saw, as Jesse raised her nose to howl at it, stark against its white disk, a stain of crimson spread like a tortured rose near the center. He wondered who had made that stain.

On the morning after the full moon, on the day they shared the last of their water, they found her.

Her scent had been strong in his face all night, and an eager restlessness kept him striding on through the darkness, patient Jesse uncomplaining at his side. He stumbled on rocks, sometimes, and fell once, but he didn’t care. The wind, soft now, a desert breath against his face, stroking his cheeks like gentle fingers.

In the first faint warmth of morning, he halted, Jesse forgotten, letting the now-light pack slide from his shoulders. Ahead he sensed life, bright with flesh scent and laughter, and the joy of being alive in the warmth of a new day. The kiters. It must be. Then Jesse looked, and he saw the bright greens and blues, yellows and oranges of the kites as they soared and spiraled into the bright air, forming tightly only to break apart into explosions of color and reform once more, tails writing cryptic glyphs against the sky. A single melon-colored kite soared suddenly, briefly, circling the twined and ordered mass of the kites, a rogue dancing to its own tune.

She was there.

Tracker let his breath out slowly, and as if it had heard him, the kite veered suddenly, soaring away from the dancing spiral, straining toward him briefly, before it settled lightly to earth.

Tracker slung the near empty pack over his shoulder and strode forward. Jesse took her place at his side, her eyes showing him the rocks and scrub and small scuttling insects in front of them. He wanted her to look up again, to watch the kites, but she kept her eyes stubbornly on the ground. Then, abruptly, she stopped, and finally, she looked up. Tracker looked with her eyes, ready to see her, the melon kite in her hands, smelling of dust and longing.

It shocked him a little, as Jesse’s vision showed him his quarry. Golden hair tumbled around her face, and over her shoulders. Her eyes, the color of spring grass, laughed at him and she smiled, the kite in her hands, the curves of her body hidden by a loose shift of kite-fabric. Two polished horns sprang from her temples, curving gracefully to deadly points. Two more horns, smaller, also curved, sprang one from each hip. The shift had slitted sides so that the curved spurs could protrude and the hemmed edges revealed a flash of tanned and muscular thigh. She smiled, and the laughter in her eyes was familiar, as if they were old friends.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, and held out one slender hand.

He took it. Jesse growled and fixed her eyes on the woman’s leg, as if contemplating a bite. “Quiet.” Tracker no longer needed her eyes. The woman’s presence filled his senses so that vision would have been a distraction only. Life, he thought absently. She was life itself, a flame of vitality that radiated energy into the universe around her like a burning fire. Her fingers curved around his, holding his hand in a way that defined the casual phrase, as aware of the texture of his flesh, the tension of his bones, and the pulse of blood and neural synapses as he was.

She was so aware.

It disturbed him that City Man had made her, good though he was.

Jesse growled again, softly, uncertainty shivering through her.

“My name is Yolanda.” Her voice was low and as intimate as if they were lying side by side in a tumbled bed. “Donai sent you.”

He nodded, comprehending that “Donai” was her name for the City Man, attuned for her reaction. Anger, fear, flight, attack?

She laughed again, and he felt only sadness woven with silver threads of amusement. And . . . love. “He came himself, last time. But Donai never does anything the same way twice.”

Jesse growled again, sharply this time, pressing forward between them, her head forward, ears pricked. Tracker realized that the kiters had come, forming a shifting vortex of curiosity, hostility, and fear around them. Jesse’s eyes roved from form to form, tension knotting her body as they drew closer, reading threat in their wary stares. He put his hand on her, not bothering to look, because he didn’t need to see their faces. She quieted instantly, but her tension shivered through the skin of his palm and up his arm.

“Stranger.” One came close, radiating vitality and health, although the shadow of Death suggested that he was not young. Jesse tensed, attack hormones torturing her. “I am Karin.” He was source of the hostility Tracker had scented, although it was under tight control. “This is Sairee,” his tone indicated gesture. “She is Mayor. I am Center. We would like to know what we can do for you?”

They knew. Tracker kept his restraining hand on Jesse’s shoulders as he bowed slightly. “I came to speak with . . . Yolanda.” It impressed them that he told the truth. Certainly the Center—whatever that was—Karin, expected him to lie, and Tracker’s small truth cracked his armor of hostility. Roiling tensions seeped through the cracks. “You have been in City,” he said.

“Yes.” His sweat went acrid with suspicion. “If Yolanda wishes to speak with you, she may,” he said flatly. “If she wishes to go with you, she may. If she does not, she will stay. Is your dog going to attack? She wants to.”

“She is only afraid that you threaten me.” Tracker stroked Jesse’s head, impressed again by this creation’s awareness. “She only wants to protect me.”

“There are wild dog packs out here. They kill straying humans. I wonder where they came from.”

The Center was staring at his face. Tracker felt the pressure of his eyes, shrugged. “They were created,” he said. “As you were. And I. And Yolanda. I don’t know why they were put here.”

For a moment, everyone was silent. Then a hand touched his arm, and Jesse whined with his flinch. A soft, gray presence, a woman heavy with knowledge and authority stood close to him. “Come have water,” she said. “And food. The flight wind is past and it’s time to eat.” She took his hand and Tracker felt an odd sense of déjà vu, as if this had happened before. She tugged him forward—guiding him, he realized with a small twinge of surprise. She had guessed he was blind. He let her steer him around the scrubby tufts of thorn and ancient, worn stones. As Jesse fell reluctantly in at his heel—still growling—he realized that the sense of déjà vu was hers, not his.

She had done this before, and the memory was so strong in her that for an instant, a circle of vans wavered into being in his mind’s eye. Once, long ago, this woman had led Yolanda down to the vans, he realized.

They crested a low ridge and moved slowly down into a wide, flat channel that faintly remembered long-gone flowing water. A dusty scent of slow-living plants and small furry and scaled lives colored the wind. Jesse showed him a circle of colorful wooden vans, topped by canopies of neon-bright kite fabric. Sails, he thought. The roof could be raised to the wind, to drive the vans. Carvings of leaves and kite shapes decorated the painted sides. A cluster of small, wiry children watched from the shadow of the vans, their curiosity a brightness pricking at his senses. None of them were older than ten or eleven, Tracker guessed, and wondered where the older children were. Everyone scattered to a van, in small groups of three or four, stooping to greet the children who ran to them, glancing over their shoulders at Tracker and Jesse. They did not point, Tracker noticed. One did not point, among this tribe of creations. The Center, Karin, had joined them, his hostility a low simmer now, as the woman guided him toward a yellow van with a green and orange canopy/sail.

He gestured to Jesse to remain outside, and felt his way up the broad steps and into the close, life-scented interior. He felt a bench beneath his groping hands, eased himself onto it. It felt good to sit like this. The edge of a table or counter brushed his arm and he listened to the disciplined choreography of the three creations moving within the confined space. They had shared this space for a long time to move with such comfort. Small thumps told of containers being set onto the table top beside him. He smelled water and cooking food. He groped for them, aware of the man, Karin’s, sudden intense scrutiny, closed his hand around an earthenware mug full of sweet water. He drained it, thirsty.

“You are blind?” Karin’s surprise brightened the space.

“The dog is his eyes.” Yolanda’s voice, rich with certainty.

“Is that true?” Sairee, concerned. “You can bring it in here.”

Tracker shook his head. “It’s not important.” The van’s interior was taking shape around him, the dimensions defined by scent, the bounce of sound, pockets of stagnant air, and the casual movements of the three. Bed over there and another above. Food space beyond where he sat. All else would be cupboards for storage. He felt a finely crafted cabinet door behind his legs. The kiters had skill with wood, too. Sairee pushed an earthenware bowl gently into his hands. He found a carved wooden spoon, scooped up some kind of cooked grain, sweetened with berries that tasted of summer sun. For a time they ate silently, the sound of spoon against bowl and the warm comfort of swallowed food filling the van. Tracker finished the grain and set the bowl down on the table.

“You understand that if Yolanda doesn’t want to go back with you, you can’t force her.” Karin spoke immediately, as if he had been waiting for Tracker to finish, his voice edged with challenge and threat.

He had been in love with her. Tracker tilted his head, savoring the subtle play of chemical conversation. Not any more, but the echo was there, a duet with Sairee’s gentle sadness. She knew that Yolanda would choose to leave, he thought. As she had known immediately that he was blind. Aware, these creations, yes. Very.

“I’m going to go with him.” The air rippled as Yolanda reached to touch Karin. “It’s time.”

Karin didn’t speak, but the air moved with his abrupt gesture of denial. Sairee said nothing, but her sadness deepened. Tracker expected Karin to argue and protest, but it was Sairee who spoke, thoughtful. “How does your dog see for you?”

Tracker frowned, wondering what would make sense to these people with their kites and carved wood. “City Man engineered her,” he said slowly. “He changed the part of her brain that sees. It talks to me.”

A small, hot brightness woke in Sairee, like a tiny bright flower unfolding. “You know about City tech,” she said. “Is there a . . . disease that kills children?”

Tracker frowned, feeling the depth of their listening, and the bright desperate flower of Sairee’s hope.

“I mean . . . our children have begun to die. By their thirteenth summer. You saw them outside. It’s a sickness. Maybe City people know how to cure it.”

“Hush, Sairee.” Karin’s voice was rough and hard with old anger. “They wouldn’t share a cure with us anyway.”

How to say to these people that disease did not exist, not even out here? “I’m sorry,” Tracker said at last. “I don’t know.”

“Ah well.” The hope flower withered, leaving grayness in its wake. “I’m sorry.”

Tracker felt the stir of her rising. “We’ll let you rest, stranger.” She paused for an instant. “Will you share your name with us?”

Names were important here. “Tracker,” he said and felt their instant of hesitation. “That is my name,” he said.

They didn’t believe him, but they were polite about it and left, taking Sairee’s grief and Karin’s anger with them. He turned to face Yolanda, feeling the glow of her like sunlight on his flesh.

“These are gentle people, Tracker.” Yolanda touched his face with her fingertips. “Someone created them to be finite and this is how they are ending.”

“City Man—Donai—created them.”

She took her fingers away, her sudden anger like the flick of a sharp nail against his cheek. “How do you know that?”

He shrugged, because the silver music of their origin was written in their scent. “I just do.”

“He never told me that. I don’t believe you.”

She was lying and angry grief edged the lie. Tracker shrugged and stood. He went outside to the nervously waiting Jesse and squatted beside her, squeezing one silken ear, sorry for her anxiety. She thumped her tail and licked his face, telling him it was okay, even though it wasn’t. Climbing back into the van, he followed water-scent to a clay pitcher and returned to fill her small bowl and open a package of dried meat from his pack for her.

“Welcome to The Caravan.” One of the children, a bright flare of life and youthful joy-in-living squatted beside him, earning a wary stare from Jesse. Her eyes showed him red hair and freckles, and long legs like a horse-colt. “Did you have something to eat and drink?” she asked with a grownup reserve and a carefully restrained impatience that suggested the words were important custom.

Tracker nodded as he set the full water bowl down for Jesse. “Thank you.”

“Are you really from City?” Social necessity taken care of, the words burst forth, gleaming silver with curiosity. “What’s it like? Are there really all kinds of weird monsters there? And are the streets really paved with gems and polished agate? What is so awful there that Karin won’t talk about it?”

Tracker smiled, amused at the girl’s burning enthusiasm. “I don’t know why your Center won’t talk about it.”

“Silly not to.” The girl made a face. “It just makes me wonder about it more than if he told me everything.”

Wise child. Tracker smiled. “My name is Tracker.”

“Is that really a name?” Doubting.

“I don’t have any other.” He poured the dried meat out for Jesse. The girl burned like Yolanda, in a different way. Like a spring sun versus a summer sun, he thought.

She had been considering his statement. “My name is Karda.” She had decided he was telling the truth.

Karin’s daughter. Tracker scented it. And Sairee’s? “Do you want to go see City?” he asked, his hand on Jesse’s silken coat.

“Yes.” Her nod stirred the air. “Just to see why Karin won’t say anything. It can’t be that horrible. But I don’t think I want to live there.” Thoughtful. “I like this life. What does City have? I mean, all those people stuck in one place. Do they Fly?”

She meant kites. Tracker shrugged. “Perhaps some. I’ve never heard of it, but anything can be done.” People with millennia to live did everything eventually.

“Are you going to take Yolanda away?” Hard tone this time, warning him that she didn’t want to be lied to.

“She chooses to come with me.”

The girl’s sudden stabbing grief surprised him. He turned toward her, but Jesse’s attention was on her food, so he groped toward her spring-sun warmth, his fingers finding her shoulder, sensing the quivering control that kept back the tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it, because it was such an intense pain for something this young. “I’m not forcing her,” he said gently.

“I know.” Karda swallowed, fighting with her pain and her tears. “She said she wouldn’t, but I knew she would someday. She . . . lies about things like that. Sometimes . . . she lies to herself, I think.”

Tracker frowned, feeling truth in the texture of her words. She knew that Yolanda lied. He wondered if the kiters had been created to know truth. He had thought that he was the only one. Perhaps City Man had sculpted it into other creations, too. Not Yolanda. Jesse had finished, and now looked up into the girl’s face, her tail wagging, not worried about this one. Tracker saw the gleam of tears on her tawny cheeks, watched his fingers brush them away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not angry at you.” Karda rose gracefully to her feet. “She would have gone when she was ready anyway.”

Eleven, he thought. If the kiter children were dying at puberty . . . He sensed it ripening in her, that rich change from child to woman, felt a sudden deep pang of regret. Jesse whined and nudged his hand.

“Tracker, I’m ready to go.” Yolanda’s shadow fell across Jesse, the curve of her hip-spurs elongated curves on the ochre soil, the shadow of her head crowed with twin curves.

“Right now?” Karda’s voice quivered.

Through Jesse’s eyes, Tracker watched Yolanda cross swiftly to the girl, cup her face in her long-fingered hands, and kiss her gently on the forehead and cheeks. “Right now, my love,” she said softly. For a moment her fingers lingered on the girl’s golden hair, then she turned swiftly away to face Tracker. “I brought food and water.”

Tracker hesitated. Now that he had found her, he had only to speak to City Man and he would send a flyer for them. He felt oddly reluctant to do so, and wasn’t sure why.

“Give me your water bottles.” Karda held her sorrow in a tight net of anger now. She seized them and hurried off, toward a distant van. Jesse growled and swung her head to show him Karin approaching, his expression grim.

Oh, yes, Karda’s father. You could see it in the shape of his face.

“Catch up with me,” Yolanda said. Fabric rustled as she swung a pack lightly to her shoulder and strode way, her scent trailing behind her.

Karin stopped, all churning emotion. “How did you know I was in City?” His voice was harsh.

Tracker shrugged. “It changes you. I felt it.”

“I went back with him—the man who came for Yolanda. He let her stay here. I . . . didn’t belong there.” Karin’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment a hint of fear gleamed on their surface. “What else do you feel?” he asked softly.

Your fear for your daughter, Tracker thought and didn’t say. The death that waits in her with her womanhood. Your knowledge of the twisted sculpture in your cells that sends your kites into the sky. Yes, kite-flyer, you felt it when you walked through those City gates. That you are a sculpture and not a human. “Many things,” he said aloud. He felt Karda approaching with the filled bottles. Again Karin’s fear surfaced, bright as the flash of an ocean fish. He heard the kiter get heavily to his feet and move to take the dripping water bottles from his daughter and send her brusquely away. He thrust the bottles, cool and dripping, against Tracker’s chest.

“Good-bye, stranger,” he said, his voice hard. “I don’t think we’ll meet again.”

In a small handful of years, they would all be dead, with no children to replace them. Tracker bowed his head, seeing the vans in the old woman’s memory, bright and beautiful, their sails fluttering in the hot breeze. He turned away and Jesse bounded along next to him, very happy to be leaving this place. Yolanda had covered a lot of ground and led him now, a beacon far ahead, against the distant murmur of City and sea. He didn’t try to catch up to her, content to follow, not needing Jesse’s eyes to follow her trail in the breeze. He could open his link to City Man any time and the flyer would come.

He didn’t open it.

They walked, separated by a space that grew neither wider nor narrower, until the sun’s heat faded from his face and small creatures began to stir in their hiding places from the sun. As the last of the sun’s heat faded, replaced by night’s chill, Yolanda halted finally. Her eyes on the scatter of diamond stars overhead, she didn’t move as Jesse led Tracker up to her. The moon was up, the red stain like a rose on its pale face as Jesse lifted her nose to it. She wanted to howl, but did not. Yolanda took Jesse’s face in her hands, her face large in Tracker’s shared sight. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, stroking the dog’s ears. “We were both cruel to you today.”

Jesse thumped her tail wearily and flopped onto the still-warm sand, her tongue lolling. It was all sand here, white as snow beneath their feet, radiating away the day’s heat as the air cooled. Water scented the air sweetly, and Yolanda pressed a bottle into Tracker’s hand. The water had been flavored by her mouth, and he tasted her as he drank. Thick fabric whispered, and Tracker guessed that she had pulled a blanket from her pack. It popped softly as she shook it out, then hissed against the sand. “Look at me.” She spoke to Jesse, and they both looked.

She lay back on a yellow quilt made of kite fabric filled with soft plant fibers. Her shift slid up her long thigh, baring it to the polished curve of her hip-spur as she tilted her head to the sky. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, parted by the horns springing from her forehead. Silver moonlight gleamed like water on the polished curve of those horns.

“Do you know why Donai made me?” she asked at last, her voice dreamy.

Tracker, squatting by his pack, feeding meat to Jesse, didn’t answer.

“He made me to love him. He made me to kill him one day.”

She was speaking truth. Tracker looked up, his eyes narrowing. City people could die. It didn’t happen often, but they could. No disease could touch them, they did not age. They could heal nearly any injury.

But . . . they could die.

If they chose to.

“I don’t want to go back.” Sorrow shivered in her words like the silver light, cold and beautiful. “But I have to.” She rose to her feet suddenly, the twin moons above her head like a crown of light as she came to stand over him. Jesse whined, and lowered her head to her paws, tail thumping uncertainly as she banished Yolanda’s face. “Do you know why I’m leaving, Tracker?”

“No.” He didn’t need Jesse’s eyes. She filled his senses, as if the moon hovered before him, blazing with silver light and animal heat.

“I’m killing them. The children.” Her voice was low and full of pain. “He must have done it when he came to get me and I wouldn’t go. He changed me so that I poisoned them.” Her resignation held a bitter note. “He always gets what he wants.” She reached down, taking his hands and pulling him to his feet. His toe caught the kite fabric quilt. “Come sit with me,” she said, a mix of command and plea.

He sat on the soft slickness of the quilt that smelled of her. And of Karin. She knelt beside him to unlace his boots, burning like the spring sun, warming him, filling his senses with images of sun on bright fabric and clouds and blue sky. He felt her gaze on his face and suddenly, he understood. It was there, written like a silvery thread in the scent of her. Karda. Karin’s daughter, but not Sairee’s.

Yolanda’s.

She stood suddenly and kite fabric rustled. Her shift pooled on the quilt beside him and he felt her spring-sun heat as her leg slid across his waist to straddle him. He wanted to protest, but her heat drowned him, and as she pushed him back, he groped for memory of another moment like this, found shadows like slippery fish in the depths of his memory. Her mouth found his and her taut muscular body moved against his and the shadow fish of memory fled.

He woke to the faint, chill whisper of breeze that presaged the sun’s warmth. The scent of dew on dry leaves and stone filled his nostrils and the night-scurry of tiny lives all around. For a moment he had no idea of where he was or when, simply floated in a limbo of cool air and scent. Jesse was a furry warmth against his leg, and, head on his chest, Yolanda slept deeply. He felt the polished curve of her hip-spur against his side. A small pain drew his fingers and he felt a crust of dried blood scabbing a shallow gash in his thigh. He had no memory of her spur tearing his skin.

A small uneasiness crept through him, something . . . wrong. He sharpened his senses, gathering them, shutting out the scurrying insect lives that filled the space around him and opening himself to the rush of blood through her veins, the spiral dance of her cells. Yes. His skin tightened, although not from the morning chill. As Yolanda stirred, he sat up, newly aware, feeling Jesse’s flicker of wakening, her tail-thump of inquiry. He looked through her eyes to watch Yolanda toss the tangled gold of her hair back from her face, her eyes full of sleep and the memories of pleasure. Tracker swallowed against a sudden sharp ache in his chest.

“What’s wrong?” She touched his face. “Your skin is the color of desert flower honey when the sun hits it, you know.”

The invitation in her touch made him shiver again, and Jesse whined. Yolanda withdrew her hand. “Something is wrong.”

“You’re City.” The words came out in a hushed tone, almost a whisper. He couldn’t speak them aloud out here.

“I was born there.” Yolanda considered, thoughtful. “The woman I called Mother lived with me in a garden. There were huge flowers and some of them moved their petals, like butterflies bound to a vine. That was his hobby then. Plants. But that’s not what you mean.”

“No.” His throat was too dry; he had to swallow again to get the words out. “You are City. Like him. City Man. Donai. I can . . . I know it.” It was there, that bright absence of Death.

She was shaking her head, sadness deepening.

“Not possible, Tracker. I . . . have a daughter, remember? City people can’t breed with the beings they create. That has always been true.”

And it was, and it was true, he had sensed her relationship to Karda, had forgotten in the shock of his discovery. He groped for her hand, lifted the palm to his face, tasting that absence on her skin. She had to be City. Yolanda made no effort to pull her hand away.

“You scared me when I first saw you, blind Tracker. It’s as if I live on the surface of the world that you inhabit. You see things, sense things, that I can’t perceive, and that scares me.”

Jesse was looking at his own face now, carved with strain, but he could feel the emerald pressure of her eyes on him.

“And you scared me,” she went on softly, “because I thought you were City, here to claim me, not someone sent by Donai.” She paused, her stare warm against his skin. “At night, years ago, Karin would come to my bed. And in the morning, after he had gone back to sleep with Sairee, I would smell him on my hair and skin, as if his spirit was still lying in my arms. What are you sensing, Tracker? I am dying a little with every passing day, ticking off a finite life. What about you? Tell me about the woman who carried you, Tracker. I remember mine. I called her Mother, and she sang to me in the sun of the garden.”

“No.” It was sigh more than whisper. He wanted to tell her that he remembered, describe this woman for her.

He could not.

Grope as he might, all he found was a chain of days that disappeared into a far distance, endlessly. Before Jesse, another creature, lithe and furry, and before that one, before that one?

“City people don’t just breed.” Yolanda went on relentlessly. “They select genotypes, they match carefully. There are only so many who can live in City, only so many who can be admitted to share the universe. Donai told me about this, about the rules. That is the only rule they may not break, Tracker. To breed without consensus, without permission. I remember when he told me, Tracker. It was not long after I had left the garden, when I was his lover. And his words were bitter, but his tone was not, and I wondered about that.”

He felt her smile, sharp and cold as a blade edge against his skin. “I think you are City, Tracker. Didn’t you ever notice? Were you too close to see it? I think you are Donai’s own son.”

She was right, oh yes, the memory was there, opening now, unrolling like an endless carpet, drawing his mind’s eye back though a storm of days and nights and days, faces, voices, hands touching, animal fur and cold noses, summers and winters . . . Drowning. All the time, City Man’s face, everywhere, in all the seasons. City Man. Donai. Drowning. Tracker sank silently beneath the endless, bottomless sea of yesterdays, weighed down by his sudden understanding of . . . what he was.

• • • •

He woke to nighttime cold, to the rough-wet caress of Jesse’s tongue punctuated by the cold thrust of her nose. He was lying on the fabric quilt and the crackle of flame and scent of smoke suggested a fire nearby. Jesse nudged him again. He reached out, patted her, dizzy briefly as the deep sea of past threatened to suck him down once more. For an instant, a hundred Jesses with different fur and form and faces nudged him. Treading water in those depths, he focused until he was aware of only this one, and sat up.

“I was getting worried.” Yolanda sat on the corner of the quilt, Jesse showing him her knees drawn up, her shift pulled down over her legs for warmth. “We’re nearly out of water. I didn’t find any communication device in your pack, so I assume you need to call Donai yourself. And the Caravan is heading east, not west. So we’re on our own.” But no trace of worry colored her words. “You’ve been unconscious for two days. I gave her the rest of the food.”

He might not have woken up. For a long time he had been lost in the depths of that huge, chaotic sea. He might never have found his way back to this moment, this time. Slowly, Tracker reached out to touch her arm. She accepted his touch, even put her hand on his with a gentle sympathy.

That acceptance was the same acceptance that Jesse offered him.

Tracker summoned City Man through his link. Then they waited for the flyer, which arrived as the day’s heat grew. He was not on board, and Tracker felt a moment of piercing gratitude for that. They climbed the ramp, Yolanda first, her cool composure tinged with sorrow, then Tracker, and last Jesse, panting in the noonday heat. The cushioned interior was cool and Tracker got Jesse a bowl of water from the refreshment wall. A tiled shower cabinet drew Yolanda to strip and step inside, turning so that the jets of warm water scoured every square centimeter of her lithe body. He looked through Jesse’s eyes at the sleek curves of her flesh, momentarily swept away by the memory of the night spent with her on the kite fabric blanket beneath the ancient and weary sky.

He grieved for it.

She emerged, dry, naked and glowing. She didn’t invite him to make love to her. She would surely accept if he asked, would no more refuse than Jesse would refuse his summons. That had been built into her, lay there as real as the shadow of Death.

He didn’t ask.

He could feel the swift approach of City. Beyond it, the sand people would be working on the sculptures that the waves would erase. The flyer skimmed above City’s silent clamor, settled into the quiet lawn behind City Man’s residence. Grass like living velvet gave beneath Tracker’s feet as he stepped out. Yolanda leaped lightly down beside him, but her sorrow clouded the air around them. Jesse kept her eyes low, tail down, afraid. He closed his fingers in her fur, tugging gently, and he felt her tail move briefly.

City Man was in the garden. Jesse showed him blue-flowered twining plants. The snaky shoots wove about his legs, not touching him, their blue flowers like eyes. As he and Yolanda and Jesse approached, the vines lifted and pointed in their direction. Jesse shouldered into Yolanda and planted her feet, refusing to move farther. Yolanda stood still, her knees against the furry barricade that was Jesse. Tracker felt her gaze fixed on City Man.

Tracker walked up to him, not needing Jesse’s eyes. The vine things twined briefly around his calves and then released him, retreating as if he poisoned them. They knew City when they felt it. Like Yolanda. “Donai,” Tracker said.

City Man’s attention focused sharply on Tracker. The plants cowered away from both of them, and City Man finally shifted his attention to them. “Waste of time,” he said. “I’ll have to start over. I never doubted you’d find her.”

“She’s not yours anymore,” Tracker said gently. “Donai.”

City Man’s attention was on him fully, now. “I can go to the City Council.” He enunciated each syllable precisely. “I can tell them what you did. What I am.”

Stillness. A spike of caution, quickly extinguished. “What I did?” City Man put on a good-humored tolerance that was as translucent as gauze. “And what are you, besides a very well created tracking dog?”

“I’ll go to the Council and tell them that I am . . . your son. Father.” The word made him sway, and the dark, bottomless sea beneath his feet nearly rose to swallow him again. But the effect on City Man was visible. He went still, and Tracker tasted his . . . vulnerability.

This was new. Never before.

“Yolanda couldn’t know,” City Man whispered.

“Oh no.” Tracker shook his head, demons shrieking in his head. “She doesn’t know. I simply . . . remembered.”

“You can’t,” City Man said calmly. “You don’t have the ability. I made sure of that.”

It was an admission and they both realized it at the same instant. City Man swallowed, an audible, dry sound. “They’ll destroy you, if you tell them.”

Tracker bent his head, wishing he could cry, but that ability had slipped away from him as he drowned in that vast sea. “They’ll destroy us both, Father.” Again. The name burned them both equally.

“They denied my petition for offspring.” City Man breathed the words. “My DNA contains too many flaws. But it also contains vast talent. I can twist that ladder to create people and tribes, plants and animals that no one has ever been able to rival. I can do things that nobody else can do, no matter how much they copy me. So what if you can sculpt glaciers, mountains, the face of the moon? I can sculpt races!” He turned to face Tracker, filled with a depthless calm. “They’ll destroy you. Think about that. You have forever.”

It was a weapon, those three sentences. Oh, he felt it, that tug of cells. Live forever. It weakened his knees, called to him with a Siren’s voice to go back to his garden, pet Jesse, and make love to Yolanda. He could do that. City Man would reward him for doing that. He would help him to pretend, and after a while, Tracker would . . . forget. The promise was there. And real. “Let’s walk,” he said and it was the first command he had ever uttered.

City Man complied, and that was another admission. They strolled away from the cowering vines, through a garden of growing green things, sweet with the scents of plant sex. Behind them, Jesse and Yolanda waited and Tracker felt a clench of sorrow for the similarity of their waiting. Tracker finally stopped, feeling the silence between them like a pair of crossed swords, a silent struggle. Tracker shrugged suddenly, fingers groping to find a fleshy blossom humming with a summer’s joy. He fingered the petals gently, did not pick it. “Who was my mother?” he asked.

“You don’t remember.” A silver thread of triumph wove City Man’s words together.

Tracker shook his head. “I just can’t find her.” She was somewhere, lost in that sea. “ I would like to know.” And he wasn’t challenging, wasn’t threatening, was merely . . . asking.

City Man walked on and Tracker followed, waiting.

“There was no other.” The words came slowly. “I used my DNA, recombined it to grow, and implanted it in a . . . creation.” He was silent for a long time. “I . . . sculpted you.” He spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “If I wasn’t good enough for them, then I could make you into whatever I wanted. I gave you a gift.”

Tracker felt his stare as City Man pivoted to face him, like desert sunlight on his skin.

“You can’t remember. Not for more than a few decades. Tell me about your last lover? Your last dog?” Sly triumph shaded his words. “I made you immortal, but I gave you a mortal memory.”

And by that, he could own Tracker forever. Tracker lifted his head, feeling the early starlight on his face, remembering the wide, bright eyes of the kiter girl. “You failed,” he said gently. He reached out to touch his father’s face, felt the hard edge of his disbelief. “I could wish you had succeeded.”

“You belong to me. If you tell, we both die,” Donai whispered. “Life forever. It’s not so easy to give up.”

“No,” Tracker said. “It’s not.” Then he turned and walked away, not needing eyes, back to where Jesse and Yolanda waited beneath the silver moon.

• • • •

The sun was barely peeking up over the horizon as Tracker crested the desert rise and spied through Jesse’s eyes the circle of kite-roofed wagons below. He halted, and Yolanda came up to stand beside him, still and silent, her awareness of his City flesh a thin and impenetrable wall between them, one that would always be there.

Her scent tickled him, overlaid with dust and the bright, spiraling joy of the kiters’ morning flight as their kites twined the dry sky. It had changed, her scent, richer now, tinged with tentative new life. He groped, touched the polished curve of her hip-spur, felt the texture of her joy. It matched the kiters’.

With a sigh he stepped forward, making his way with Jesse’s guidance, down the gentle slope of the sage-covered hill that had once been a roving dune, but was now netted to the earth with roots. Before they reached the bottom, a shadowy figure emerged from one of the wagons and ran to meet them.

“I knew you were coming.” Karda halted breathless in front of them. “I knew you were coming back.”

Yolanda stepped forward, arms outstretched, enfolding the child to her. The girl winced slightly as one hip-spur scratched her arm lightly, but barely noticed the tiny trickle of blood.

And so she was inoculated with the antidote to City Man’s lethal virus. And Yolanda would free the rest of the kiters from City Man’s vengeance. That had been part of his bargain with City Man. He looked through Jesse’s eyes and found Karda standing in front of him, looking up at him. “Are you going to stay here, too? Forever?”

“Yes,” he said.

She frowned, because she could sense truth, and this was not truth but it was not a lie, either. “For as long as you live,” he said, and that truth she heard.

“I’m a lot younger than you,” she said, with a child’s forthrightness.

“You are.” He smiled, because for the kiters, he was like them. Not City. Yolanda might know, but she would not say, and here he would be . . . not alone. And that tentative silver note of life in Yolanda would grow and strengthen, and, in a space of time, would be born as a child. His child, and Yolanda’s. You made me too much like them, Tracker thought. Enough to do this. Enough not to fear Death. He groped for Karda’s hand and she closed her small, slender fingers around his. For a while this would be an island, where he would learn to swim in the dark sea that lurked in his head. And when the child was old enough, they would leave. Because there were others like them. He felt them. Behind him, he felt the distant forever murmur of City rising beside the patient sea. Beginning and end, he thought. My gift to you. Father.

With Karda guiding his feet, they walked through the sage as the first kite spiraled upward to meet the rising sun, and for the first time Tracker felt a sense of peace.

©2004 by Mary Rosenblum. Originally published in Asimov’s. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Rosenblum is the author of four science fiction novels, including her latest, Horizons, and The Drylands, which won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Water Rites—a compilation of The Drylands and the three novelettes that preceded it—is recently available from Fairwood Press. Her short work frequently appears in Asimov’s, but has also appeared in Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has often been reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual.

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

Nine-Tenths of the Law

Molly Tanzer | 6640 words

Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite—Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica—and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. They being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and brought him in meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze.

Donna felt a flash of annoyance as the EMTs wheeled him toward their bedroom, sending their cat Skimbleshanks hissing and skittering nervously out of the way. She had planned to propose they separate that night, over the tiramisu she’d put in the fridge. Then Jared moaned, and she chided herself. She was still his wife . . . for now, at least. She ought to be beside herself with worry, not annoyed over having to put off an awkward conversation.

“What happened?” she asked, hovering in the doorway while they got him into his pajamas and between the sheets, fumbling in the darkness of the room. Jared seemed pretty out of it. Doped up on painkillers, maybe? “Why didn’t someone call me?”

“Workplace accident,” the woman replied, answering only the first of Donna’s questions. “He’ll be fine, he just needs to rest. Please don’t turn on those lights. His eyes are very sensitive right now.”

Jared worked in administration at Denver International Airport. “What sort of workplace accident?”

“Someone will be by to talk to you,” the woman assured her, her eyes flickering to the other EMT, a buff young man with tattoos and one of those man-buns.

“What sort of someone?” Donna did not have to fake the concern in her voice, as it was due to the oddness of the situation rather than her husband’s condition.

As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door. Donna left the EMTs to let in a man in a gray suit. His hair was short; his shoulders, broad. Donna thought he looked vaguely military, but the pin on his lapel was the new DIA logo, the white peaks of the airport’s distinctive roof against a dark blue background.

“Mrs. Crane?”

For now. She pushed away the thought, and nodded.

“My name is Mr. Smoot. I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but it’s a pleasure.” He did not try to shake her hand. “How is he?”

“He’s in bed,” she said. She suddenly smelled the food, and rushed into the kitchen to turn down the oven temperature. Mr. Smoot followed her. “That’s all I know at this point,” she said, over her shoulder. “What happened to him?”

“Nothing a few days of rest won’t cure.”

She frowned. “That he needs rest is all anyone’s told me.”

“There’s not much to tell. Just a workplace accident.” Donna was becoming annoyed; given how everyone was putting her off, she suspected something might really be wrong. Her face must have betrayed this, as Mr. Smoot set his briefcase on the table and opened it, withdrawing a single sheet of paper from one of the files. He handed it to her—it was a photocopy of an incident report.

She began to skim it as Mr. Smoot spoke; he and the document said basically the same thing: “He was riding in the employee train. They were testing a new sort of lighting system down there, and a bulb flared and burst. He was looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. We had him rushed to the hospital. They did a quick surgery—with a laser, nothing to worry about. Really, he will be fine. He’ll have to wear the bandages for a few days. When they come off, he’ll have two black eyes, but that should be it.”

“I see.” Donna set the paper on the table. She was relieved to finally have an answer, and understood why they’d wanted a DIA rep to tell her. Damage control; lawsuit avoidance. “I’m glad it’s not serious.”

Mr. Smoot smiled. “We are, too. Now, as to the logistics, you work as a dental hygienist, correct?”

Donna frowned. “Um, yes.” Creepy that he knew, but it must be in Jared’s file somewhere . . .? And yet, every time a new acquaintance learned her husband worked at Denver International Airport, they inevitably asked about one or more of the X-Files-style rumors that floated around the place like cottonwood fluff in the springtime. Was DIA where they’d take the President in the event of a global crisis? Did its murals predict the rapture? Were the delays and budget increases that had plagued its construction due to the secret alien research facility beneath the tunnels? The truth is out there . . . except it wasn’t. She’d been on tours of the facility with Jared. It was just an airport.

“We’ll make sure you get all the paid time off you need to take care of your husband. Or would you prefer a nurse be assigned? One will stop by, of course, to check in on him until the bandages come off, but without being able to see, he’ll need someone here to help him. We’ll of course cover any and all costs of home health care if you choose the second option, but we thought you might like a little mini-break.”

“Sure . . .” Donna may have gotten her GED, but she was no dummy. This was definitely lawsuit avoidance. “Thanks.”

“Excellent. Well, I’m sure you’d prefer to be in there with him than out here with me.” Mr. Smoot sniffed the air. “Smells like you had dinner ready for him . . . so sorry.”

“It’s just takeout,” she assured him. “Would you . . . like some?” Jared wasn’t going to want the penne rustica that she’d driven twenty minutes into Aurora to get. Someone ought to enjoy it, and Mr. Smoot wasn’t bad looking, actually. It might be nice to have dinner with someone different, just for a change. What might they talk about? The possibilities were endless! “I got wine. He probably can’t have any of it.”

“I’m sure once the painkillers wear off he’ll be hungry. Thank you though, very kind of you to offer.”

The EMT showed up in the kitchen doorway. “Mrs. Crane, he’s as comfortable as we can make him, and awake. He’s asking for you. And we’d like to go over some aftercare.”

“Thank you,” she said automatically.

“I should get going,” said Mr. Smoot, closing his briefcase. “Here’s my card,” he said, handing her one. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

• • • •

Just as they’d promised, all Jared needed was rest and darkness. A little help getting to the bathroom and back, or to the kitchen table for meals. After five days, the bandages came off, and for better or for worse he was back to his usual self.

Donna forced herself to put off bringing up a possible separation until at least his black eyes faded; tried to focus on the positive within their relationship. Jared had a good job, as did she. They lived in a nice house a reasonable commute away from the airport and the dental office where she worked, and had nice friends whom they saw regularly.

Turning these facts and others into a sort of litany, Donna began to doubt herself. Her life was good, so why did she feel so on edge all the time? Her feelings of dissatisfaction made no sense. Why did she feel relief instead of regret when Jared called to say he’d be working late? She shouldn’t feel that flash of annoyance when she heard his key in the lock; shouldn’t find it so irritating when she asked how his day was and he said, literally every afternoon or evening, “Good. Busy.” Shouldn’t resent the way he never asked about her day, or his perpetually preoccupied, predictable “Oh?” when she prompted him with an “I had a long day” or similar. That and a million other things ought not to make her nerves sing with tension and her heart flutter with frustration and resentment.

But they did.

• • • •

Jared was exactly the same after he recovered. That’s what confirmed for Donna that the oddness surrounding his accident was simply DIA attempting to avoid going to court. Jared worked the same amount, said the same damn things, ate with the same hand. Nothing was different about him. Sadly.

At least so she thought . . .

Just like every other part of their marriage, sex had become a routine. To be fair, that monotony was pleasant enough, not like his responses to her attempts at conversation. Always shy about such matters, Jared would turn off his light and pretend to sleep, waiting for her to tire of reading. Once she turned off her lamp, he would grope for her under the covers in the darkness of their bedroom, first finding a breast, then drifting down to her sex, which he would caress until she was wet enough to accommodate him. Usually she came, either while he was inside her, or after, squeezing her thighs together after he rolled off.

About a week after the accident, when the purple bruises around his eyes had faded to mustard yellow and a soft, pea soup green, Jared reached for her. She was ready. As far as she was concerned, Jared’s ability to sexually satisfy her, however inadvertently, was the only thing he had going for him. Responding more eagerly than usual to his touch, she was pleased when, instead of anxiously stroking her over her panties, he pulled them aside and slid a finger gently but deeply inside her—and gasped in surprise when he inserted a second.

All too soon he withdrew them both, to snap on his bedside light. She blinked, and when her eyes adjusted she saw he was sucking his fingers as he gazed at her exposed body. She shuddered, half-alarmed, half-aroused, and covered her breasts with her hands, unaccountably shy. He pulled them away almost roughly.

“I want to see,” he said.

His voice was the same, but something was different. His eyes. They glinted queerly in the light, like Skimbleshanks’ did when he was hiding under the bed. Were they a slightly different color now? Or was it just the low wattage of the bedside lamp and the sickly bruises?

She didn’t think long on it. How could she, while he was peeling down her undies and pushing her knees apart to inspect her sex? She was unable to interpret his expression—all she could come up with was wonder, but that wasn’t possible, not after ten years. And yet, how else could she explain the way his eyes widened and breath quickened as he spread her open before tasting her, which he’d never previously been particularly inclined to do. His attentions inspired her to respond with equal enthusiasm and soon she was suckling his hard cock. His delight inspired her, and she actually whined a little when he took it away from her—but her complaints turned to moans when he plunged it inside her and proceeded apace with more than his usual vigor.

He came before her, with an unexpected yelp much different from his usual relieved exhalation of breath; more aroused than she could ever remember being, she came as he slowed his thrusting. He said nothing after, just smiled and pushed her sweaty bangs away from her forehead before turning off the light. She was left in darkness, confused but far too happy to worry much about it as she drifted off.

The next morning she felt like a housewife in an old movie when she caught herself humming as she toasted her English muffin. Amazing, the power of excellent sex . . . she was actually in a good mood. Sliding into the chair beside him instead of across from him, she grinned at him.

“Have a nice time last night?”

“Hm?” he looked up from the paper. His awful bruised eyes no longer shone with that same intense, interested light.

“Last night,” she said, faltering.

“Oh,” he said vaguely. “Yes.”

Donna no longer had any appetite for her cooling English muffin, margarine coagulating in all the nooks and crannies. Feeling disappointed—even a bit betrayed—she said nothing as he folded the paper, gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and left for work without putting his cereal bowl in the sink, as usual.

• • • •

Things went back to normal, and Donna cooled down enough that when Jared next feigned sleep she didn’t keep reading until he really fell asleep, as she sometimes did when feeling particularly resentful. Indeed, she put her book down early, as she was curious to see if she’d be treated to another display of genuine interest in her needs and her body. Hell, if the shift proved permanent, she might be able to deal with their marriage. For a little while longer, at least.

He reached for her in the darkness, to her mild disappointment. As tired as she had become of her husband’s face, she had enjoyed watching him grimace and wince during their lovemaking last time. His lip had curled and his eyes had closed when he came; it had almost looked like it pained him, which had been very hot to watch. So, while she usually kept quiet during sex, that night she asked, “Want me to turn the light on?” as he fiddled with her nipple.

“What?” Jared’s surprise was genuine.

“The light,” she said. “Like last time.”

He paused, then reached over and snapped it on. “Definitely,” he said, as his eyes gleamed.

While she was tempted to pay more attention to the fact that he was already hard, she placed a hand on his chest.

“What’s going on?” She said it calmly.

Jared froze. She waited.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Something’s going on, and I want to know what it is. And I want to know badly enough that I’m putting off . . . things . . . which, let me tell you, is difficult after last time.”

Jared laughed. “You did seem to like it. I did, too.”

“Oh, now you want to talk about it?”

“I wanted to talk about it before, but . . .” He looked worried for a moment. “I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . .” He shrugged. “Because I’m not your husband.”

This shocked her less than she thought it should. Then again, she was tired of her husband. Whoever he was now, he had the advantage of not being Jared.

“All right,” she said. “Who are you, then?”

“That’s hard to explain . . .”

“Try.”

Jared—well, Not-Jared—nodded. “I thought it was strange, when I found out, that you don’t know. But your husband, he isn’t an . . .” Not-Jared squinted, as if thinking hard, “administrator. I mean, he is, but not for the airport. For what’s under the airport.”

She felt a frisson of fear and pleasure. The truth had been out there! All those times she’d scoffed at friends or strangers . . . “What’s under the airport?”

“A research facility. Around twenty of your Earth years ago, we made contact with you. Ever since, we—our two species—have been working to facilitate an experimental collaborative co-consciousness. Jared is hosting my mind in his body.”

Donna held up a hand. “Our two species? What sort of species are you?” It—it was now an it to her mind—opened its mouth, but before it responded, she added, “And what is your name?”

“My name is,” it sounded like Glreerak, and when Donna repeated it, Not-Jared—Glreerak—smiled and nodded. “Close enough. My world is—”

“You’re an alien.” Donna, again, felt minimal surprise.

“I am. But we are not so different. Neither of our species has achieved faster-than-light travel, and yet we wished to know more of who else might be living in our galaxy. My people are naturally able to separate our consciousness from our physical forms, so we developed the technology to send out a psychic beacon. You—humanity—were the first to respond.”

Donna finally felt upset. “And Jared? He knew? All this time?”

“Yes. He has been the . . . accountant for the program since before you were married, but his selection as my host was more recent. They ran tests on everyone who worked there, from the top scientists to the janitors, and he was the most naturally receptive to the process.” Glreerak stared at her. “This dismays you.”

“He never told me.”

“He could not. He was forbidden. But,” it was studying her face, “perhaps he ought to have trusted you? You are . . . married. It is the sort of relationship where confidences are exchanged, according to my understanding.” Donna nodded. She felt furious, miserable. “We have a similar pair-bonding—my species, I mean—where intimacy is encouraged.”

Donna dashed a tear from her eye. It felt ridiculous, crying about such a small thing, when she had been ready to leave Jared anyway. “Are you . . . pair-bonded?” she asked.

Glreerak nodded. “I am.”

“But the other night . . .”

It shrugged. “I am not in my own body. And I have been instructed by my government to find out as much as I can about human ways and lives. My mate knows sex is a part of that.”

Donna looked sidelong at it; met its eyes that were not her husband’s eyes. Jared wasn’t unattractive. She’d been very eager for his attentions when they began dating, set up by a mutual friend. Then, his reticence had seemed manly, his steady, government job a sign of maturity.

“So, does that mean you want to . . .”

“Definitely,” it replied. “I am supposed to learn all I can about you, after all.”

“But for now,” it said, once it had her writhing, three fingers inside her, “let’s just keep this, ah, educational session between us?”

“Of course,” she gasped.

• • • •

Jared’s eyes healed up enough that he agreed to go to a party at a friend’s house. It was a nice time, for a bit, at least. Donna was with her girlfriends in the grass, giggling over a joint and drinking Mang-o-Ritas when her husband broke off from the pack of men standing around the grill to take her aside. He was grumpy after two scotch and sodas, and wanted to go home.

It was just so goddamn typical. She felt cute in her nice dress, the weather was finally good after several late spring snows, and she hadn’t seen Vicky or Marissa in a while. Of course he would be a pill.

“Just a bit longer,” she said, feeling like a child pleading with her parents to be allowed to stay in the pool.

“I didn’t want to come anyway,” he snapped. “We’ve stayed long enough.”

“But . . .”

“Donna, I have to work tomorrow.” She felt her expression sour at his condescending words in that exasperated tone. Work! Indeed he did, at his secret job, living his secret life. Well, she had to work, too, at her decidedly not-clandestine dentist’s office, her back aching as she picked things out of people’s teeth.

“Please?” she asked.

He shook his head, but then paused; looked back at her. “Well . . . all right,” he said, with a slow smile that was not Jared’s smile. “We haven’t been out in so long. You go spend time with your friends. I’ll get another drink.”

It was Glreerak speaking. She was sure of it. The alien was talking to her, here, in front of all these people. It was actually kind of a turn-on, the secret. Maybe she did want to go home . . .

“We can’t stay too late,” it cautioned her, waggling its finger. “But a bit longer. You’re having a nice time. Later, you can thank me,” it said, and winked.

They stayed until the sun set. Donna couldn’t remember the last time she felt so happy, alternating between chatting with her friends and sneaking kisses with Glreerak. When she climbed into the passenger’s side, she favored Jared—she was pretty sure he was Jared again—with a smile. He didn’t see it, however, sitting there with the key in the ignition.

“It got so late,” he said, sounding confused. “How did it get so late? I was ready to go hours ago.”

Donna froze. Of course, Jared didn’t recall when the alien took over. It had seemed so harmless in bed. But in public, among friends . . .

Then she recalled his tone, earlier, when he’d insisted they leave. Recalled that he had kept secrets from her—secrets bigger than how a pleasant afternoon had been passed.

“You had another drink,” she said as casually as she could, buckling her seatbelt as cover. “Maybe you got a little drunker than you realized. Sure you’re okay to drive?”

“I feel totally sober,” he said. “Huh.” He waited for another moment, then turned the key. “Better keep it to two next time, I suppose.”

Donna said nothing. Eventually, her heart slowed down.

• • • •

Before going into the induced sleep that allowed its mind to live within Jared’s, Glreerak dwelt beneath the waves, in a vast city of coral skyscrapers grown and maintained by bioarchitects to harvest and emit the faint light of the planet’s sun. Millions lived in that phosphorescently illuminated gloaming, lived and worked and loved and died in ways similar and different to humans in their cities on Earth.

Glreerak lived with its mate in a flat high above the ocean floor. It was comfortable—luxurious even, with a good view of the surrounding towers and parks and even the farmland beyond the city limits. They had been assigned such a wonderful home because while Glreerak’s mate was one of the scientists working on the project to make contact with Earth, Glreerak held a much higher-status job: sanitation.

As with all civilizations, waste removal was an issue. Burying garbage beneath the ocean bed poisoned the food supply; allowing it to drift away created problems for other cities. So, there was only one place it could go.

While all of Glreerak’s people were telepathic, only the most powerful communicators were able to pass the rigorous tests to become sanitation workers. Those who did were trained to develop their mental aptitude from a young age, until they were able to throw their minds into the bodies of simpler creatures, such as the mammal-like bipeds that lived on land. Teams of sanitation workers could combine their efforts to mobilize whole packs of them to haul waste out of the sea and inland, away from rivers and other tributaries, to minimize seepage back into the water. Glreerak was particularly talented; in fact, it could control these creatures for miles, and had seen more of its planet’s land masses than any other, such as the astonishing—

“Wait,” said Donna.

“What’s that?” said Glreerak.

It had been an intense evening. Donna had been overwhelmed by the menu at Linger, a trendy eatery with a spectacular view of Denver that Jared had never been willing to brave due to its world cuisine-inspired menu. Indeed, Jared would have hated it—would hate it tomorrow, given how spicy everything had been. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t notice anything even as fundamental as altered digestion. He’d been withdrawn and preoccupied of late, even for him, and had become nervous as well, startling at loud noises, rubbing his eyes.

To be fair, Linger’s menu had been a little weird for Donna, too, but she’d done all right with red wine, an order of sweet potato waffle fries, and the kofta, which turned out to essentially be meatballs dressed up for a night out.

Glreerak had liked everything, and the drinks along with the view of the city skyline had made it a bit homesick for its watery world.

“You can control other creatures with your mind?”

Glreerak didn’t answer; it just sipped on its cocktail, some weird thing called “Streets of Puebla” that Donna hadn’t liked at all.

“Well,” it said after swallowing, “yes. My telepathic prowess is why they chose me.”

Whatever she’d eaten for dinner felt like a cold and leaden lump inside her.

“So you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That you’d be able to control . . . us.”

“No!” Glreerak pursed its lips. “We wondered—hypothesized, as my mate would say. But we didn’t know. I mean, it was a week before I felt comfortable enough to try, just to see. And it was you who inspired me, Donna. Your body was so soft—you seemed so receptive to pleasure. I had to see you! The shape of you, all of you. The way you responded to him, I couldn’t let my time on Earth go by without taking advantage of the endless possibilities you suggested to me . . .”

Was it wooing her with sweet talk to distract her from the idea of a mass invasion? Were Glreerak’s people testing the waters, so to speak, to turn humanity into their next generation of garbage-hauling slaves?

“You know, Donna,” it said, reaching its hand across the table to take hers, “when your husband takes his turn living in my head, we will be revealing our planet’s secrets to your species.”

More than thoughts of their lovemaking, this distracted Donna from her worries of a future invasion. “What?”

“Eventually he will return with me. I am to spend a year with him, then he will spend a year with me.” Glreerak looked upset. “I know he has been concerned about how to tell you—how to explain his absence. I thought you should know, though.”

“He agreed to all this without . . .” Donna shook her head. She was so unimportant to him. What a fool she had been!

“Are you upset about the idea of losing him for so long?”

Donna looked up from her wine, saw the gleam of the ocular implants as it tilted its head at her like a quizzical puppy. She was upset—but she was upset about losing Glreerak; jealous that Jared, who had all the sense of wonder of a sack of potatoes, would get to live with it on its planet. Would get to see how it made love to its mate.

She laughed. It was the only thing she could to, really. “Well, maybe he’ll come back with a few new tricks to try on me after watching you with your mate.”

“Perhaps. At home, I would be the one to be fertilized.”

Donna blinked at it. “You’re a woman?”

“No, you’re a woman. I’m barely female! It’s rather a bit more complicated, at home. If we were interested in reproducing, my mate would fertilize me. Once the egg developed to its solid jelly form, I would pass it back to be incubated in my partner’s pouch. Eventually we would give it over to the city, where it would be implanted into a host along with the rest of the eggs around its stage. Once fully mature, it would hatch, and eat its way out of—well,” it trailed off, seeing her face. “The point is, when we fuck for pleasure, it’s a bit different.”

“Sounds like it will definitely broaden his mind.” Donna smiled. “Glreerak . . .”

“Yes?”

“Even if we only have a year, we have a year. Together. Let’s make it a fun one.”

“It has been already!”

“Sure, the past few weeks have been great, but still—you didn’t come all the way to Earth just to go to work under DIA every day and live in Aurora.”

“Well, a month from now, Jared’s going on a tour of world heritage sites . . .” Glreerak paused. “Don’t be upset . . . you were to come on that one. Mr. Smoot has been arranging it with your job. It was to be a surprise. That’s why I didn’t tell you, either. You know I would have, don’t you, Donna?”

“Well then let’s at least go away for a weekend. To the mountains, maybe. Together. Just the two of us, I mean. When we go abroad, I’m sure we’ll have all kinds of handlers and such. If you—if Jared could get a half-day some Friday . . .”

Glreerak nodded, smiling in that way Jared never smiled at her. “Sounds delightful,” it agreed. “I’ll ask for the . . .” its eyes went a bit dim as they did when it was searching through Jared’s mind for the correct turn of phrase, “time off.”

“Good.” She reached for the small menu beside her elbow. “But first, how about dessert?”

• • • •

She decided on Steamboat Springs. It was inexpensive now that the snowpack was mostly gone, she knew no one who lived in the area, and there was a legendary hot spring up there, Strawberry Park, that was supposed to be gorgeous. Plus, the drive up would show Glreerak the mountains, where the aspens were still the pale gold-green of springtime against the dark pines.

It was exhilarating. The whole drive, Donna felt like she was going on a dirty weekend, even though it was her husband was in the passenger’s seat. Well, sort of.

Glreerak was pleased with everything—pointed out gorgeous vistas, gasped as they crested various passes. Jared would only have remarked on the traffic; worried whether they should have made dinner reservations.

Saturday, they took a picnic lunch up to the springs, sandwiches and chips and a can of the kale-flavored soda that Donna had only ever seen Glreerak buy. By late in the afternoon, they’d had enough of dipping in the various pools, heating up and cooling down by turns. But that was fine, they had urgent business in the hotel room.

Donna’s googling had told her Café Diva was a hot spot even in the warmer weather, but when they walked in the door, she saw something she didn’t like one bit. Vicky and her husband Mark were there, and before Donna could suggest ought to go elsewhere to avoid being spotted, they were.

“Donna!” cried Vicky. “I didn’t know you and Jared would be here this weekend. You sly dogs, are you on a lovers’ getaway?”

“Haha,” said Donna, just like that—not a laugh, but a statement. “Yeah, we are, you caught us.”

“We are, too! Come on, join us for dinner! It’ll be fun, you can go back to your place after.” She winked outrageously at Donna. “We’ve only just ordered starters.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want to . . .”

“To what? Have fun? Come on, you won’t be bothering us.”

Donna looked to Glreerak. It shrugged.

They actually had a really nice dinner. Glreerak did well with Vicky and Mark, even if sometimes it had to think, scanning through Jared’s brain, before responding. Donna ordered a second bottle of wine to keep them from noticing too much. It seemed to work.

Back at the hotel, Donna collapsed onto the bed.

“That was close,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re free of them. I could barely eat, I was so worried.”

Glreerak pushed her skirt up over her thighs. “Your species’ constant need for nourishment isn’t unpleasant, but it’s a shame we have to leave the hotel to do it.”

“We can order room service tomorrow morning.”

“Good. No more distractions from what really matters.”

It was the longest amount of time they’d spent together without letting Jared surface. Donna felt bad—a little bit, at least—but she hadn’t wanted to argue with her husband about the drive, where to stay, what to do, where to eat. She’d wanted to enjoy some time with Glreerak without distractions, just for once.

When they cruised back into town that Sunday, after grabbing a late lunch in Denver, she felt a bit low to have to return to her marriage; her life. Even the idea of their upcoming around-the-world trip couldn’t cheer her. Glreerak had said they’d see the Library of Celsus—the Parthenon—the Pyramids—the Great Wall—the Tower of London—Machu Picchu . . . but she’d be seeing it all with Jared. She would know Gleerak was there, just beyond Jared’s eyes, but they wouldn’t be together. Not really.

They’d agreed on a cover story: A stomach virus had knocked Jared out all weekend. As Donna unpacked the last of their things, Glreerak changed into pajamas and got into bed.

“Wow, it must have really knocked me out,” remarked Jared, as Donna brought him a glass of watered-down Gatorade. “Well, I’m feeling better now.”

“I’m so glad,” said Donna. “You were really miserable. Probably best you don’t remember it.”

“Would you bring me my laptop? I ought to see if any work emails came in while I was so out of it . . .”

Yeah, maybe some new alien species made contact with the secret research facility where you work, she thought, but all she said was, “Sure.”

She took a long shower; took her time drying off. She’d brought her pajamas with her into the bathroom—it was silly, but she felt less comfortable changing in front of Jared of late. When she re-emerged, he was in bed, laptop open. He was staring intently at the screen.

“Hungry at all?” she asked, putting a little hopefulness into her voice, as if urging him.

He said nothing; didn’t look up at her.

“Well . . . let me know if you need anything,” she said. “I’m going to watch a little TV.”

“No,” he said. “Wait.”

When he looked up at her, finally, his expression was not a friendly one.

“More Gatorade?” she asked.

“I don’t want any goddamn Gatorade,” he said, throwing off the covers and advancing on her. Donna shrank against the wall. Jared was really upset; he didn’t usually swear . . .

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that I was in Steamboat Springs this weekend,” he said. “Apparently I had a lovely dinner with Vicky and Mark in some restaurant up there. But how could that be, if my wife assures me I was sick in bed?”

Donna didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t anticipated this; hadn’t thought she would ever be caught. Oh, she’d been such a fool!

“Nothing to say?”

She shrugged; shook her head.

“How long have you known?”

“Known . . . about Glreerak?”

“Who?”

Donna felt faint. “Your . . . your experimental collaborative co-consciousness.”

Jared’s eyes went wide. He grabbed his phone; dialed quickly. “I need someone here, now. To bring me in,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Yes!” He hung up the phone.

“Bring you in?”

“You think I’m going to drive, knowing it could take me over at any moment?” he snarled, almost yanking out a dresser drawer in his haste to grab a shirt. “Oh god, what am I going to tell them? None of us knew it even had a name, much less that it could make a puppet of me without my consent of my knowledge! None of us . . . except you.”

“I can explain . . .”

“Oh, please do!” he said, struggling into a pair of sweatpants. “I’m eager to hear you explain going out of town for a weekend with it.” His eyes snapped back to hers. “You fucked it, didn’t you? You fucking fucked it!”

Donna wished Glreerak could intervene, but it had told her it was more difficult to take over Jared when he was emotionally agitated. She would just have to deal with this on her own. “Well . . .” she began.

“Never mind! I don’t want to hear it, actually. I’m leaving,” he said unnecessarily, “and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“It’s not up to me,” he snapped. “But I have my doubts they’ll be pleased. This was not part of our agreement! Jesus, they can take us over! No wonder they were so eager for this partnership . . . this is not good, this is really not good. Where are they?” he said, stomping out of the bedroom.

Donna felt a chill as she followed him into the living room, and not in regards to Jared’s fears of planetary domination. “Can’t we talk about this?” she said, pleading with him.

“Talk? Talk about what?”

“Are they going to terminate the . . . the co-habitation?”

“Probably! Donna, I was supposed to be reporting anything strange. This is new technology—new law—new everything!” He shook his head. “I’m such an idiot. I knew something was wrong, but I believed your excuses. How stupid of me, to trust my own wife!”

Now Donna was furious; all her rage came bubbling up like lava, hot and toxic. “Trust! You want to talk about trust? If Glreerak hadn’t told me, how would I have known? You never even told me where you worked, what you did!”

“It’s top secret!”

“Top secret!” She scoffed at him. “You reached for me that first night, you know. Did it excite you, the idea of it watching us?”

He blushed. She’d never seen him blush, not in a decade of marriage. “It was here to learn about us! That includes how married couples . . . um, behave with each other!”

“I guess it learned a hell of a lot, didn’t it? Mission accomplished.” Something occurred to Donna, contemplating the way she and Jared had behaved with one another, before Glreerak. She really didn’t want to go back to that. Couldn’t go back to that. “Maybe . . . maybe you won’t have to terminate the relationship. Maybe there’s a way . . .”

“What?” Jared’s face crumpled. “A way? You’re more worried about losing your lover than my mental health! It was taking me over, Donna! It pushed me out of my own mind, my own body! My own marriage!”

“No. We pushed ourselves out of that.”

There was a knock at the door. Donna answered it. There stood Mr. Smoot; behind him were several military men brandishing weapons. Mr. Smoot was the only one who appeared unarmed, but given everything, it wouldn’t surprise her if he had something concealed on his person.

“Come in,” she said, as if this were the most typical of social calls.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” said he, equally pleasant. “Jared? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” he said, not exactly elbowing his way past Donna, but not waiting for her to move out of the doorway, either. “Let’s go.”

They walked to the black car parked in the driveway, Donna barefoot and following at a bit of a distance. She felt embarrassed to be seen with her damp hair and worn cotton pajamas, but she couldn’t help but tag along. She would likely never speak to Glreerak again. She had no idea if she would ever see Jared, either. He had to come back at some point . . . didn’t he?

Who could say? He’d never told her anything about any of it.

There was no time to ask. Mr. Smoot got in the driver’s side, and Jared slammed the car door shut in her face as she approached. He had clearly not calmed down at all, but maybe Glreerak would peek through, one last time. She looked into her husband’s eyes, hoping to see the familiar gleam . . . but as Mr. Smoot put the car in reverse, late afternoon sunlight glinted off the passenger window. It was impossible for Donna to tell who it was who mouthed “good-bye.”

©2017 by Molly Tanzer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Tanzer is the author of forthcoming novel Creatures of Will and Temper, as well as Vermilion, The Pleasure Merchant, and the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated collection-cum-mosaic novel A Pretty Mouth. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, The Lovecraft eZine, and the forthcoming Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender and Genderqueer Speculative Fiction, as well as many other locations. Her other editorial projects include being the editrix of Congress Magazine, which publishes thoughtful erotica, and c0-editing Swords v Cthulhu (with Jesse Bullington) and the forthcoming Mixed Up! (with Nick Mamatas). She lives in Boulder, CO.

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

Seven Salt Tears

Kat Howard | 2480 words

When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of the sea. When I couldn’t sleep, when I was restless, when I burned with some childhood fever, she would sit by my side, and conjure something wonderful and strange, something half-magic, from the ocean for me.

“Mara,” she would say, smoothing the hair from my forehead as she tucked the covers around me, “did you know that to summon a selkie, you must shed seven tears into the ocean? Salt for salt.”

Mara, she had named me, because it meant bitter. Bitter as salt, bitter as the ocean. She told me I was her saltwater child, her ocean girl.

“What happens then? After the selkie comes.” I kicked at the sheets, freeing my feet from their tangles.

“Well, you swim, don’t you? You and the selkie. And if you are very, very lucky, you will learn where the selkie keeps their skin.”

She would tell me stories of impossible things, of seal-skins slid on and off as if it were nothing, of ways people remade themselves and plunged into those salt waters as if they belonged there. They were my favorite stories, these tales of the ocean that was both the same as the one outside and yet also full of wonders, just beneath the surface. When she told them, I would settle in, safe in my bed, and at the same time, carried away on the tide of her words.

• • • •

I wake with the taste of salt on my lips and the scent of the tide in my nose. My sheets, worn linen, cling damply to me. Not the damp of sweat, I realize as I rub the sleep from my eyes, but the damp of seawater. My bed is wet, the outline of my body in the mattress a small tide pool. Green kelp clings in ribbons to my calves.

Outside, waves crash.

I dip my fingers in the water and taste, even though I don’t need to. Even though I know: bitter as salt. Salt as the ocean.

There is no set of drying footprints leading from the beach, no grains of sand stuck in my bare feet. Just a tiny scrap of ocean, filling the space where I had lain. Drops of water weep from my skin, far more than seven, though I am not looking for a selkie.

A seagull cries out, lonely among the stars.

• • • •

A hurricane blew through when I was eleven. Hurricane Abigail. “Is it because Abigail sounds like a gale that the storm has that name?” I asked my mother, raising my voice to be heard over the howl of the wind, loud enough to shake the shutters on our house. We had storms often enough, but even then, far on Abigail’s outer edge, hours before landfall, I could tell this was something different. I could feel the weight of the storm in my bones.

“No, though that’s very smart to think so. No, hurricanes have women’s names because women can call the storms out at sea, where hurricanes are born. They can whistle up the wind to make a storm wild, or they can bare their breasts to the storm, and send it back to sleep.”

I liked the storms that whipped the waves into white and terrible foam, that washed all sorts of interesting things—dull-eyed dead fish that looked far stranger than anything I’d ever seen in an aquarium, large twists of driftwood like some great underwater forest, pieces of glass made smooth—up onto our beach. And I was eleven, and didn’t understand hurricanes, not then.

I whistled. Loud and hard as I could, running to the window, so that I could get closer to the storm, so that the ocean would hear me.

My mother rushed to my side and clapped her hand over my mouth. “Mara, no!”

I relaxed my lips, waiting for her to take her hand away. “Why not?”

“Because you are my ocean girl. If you call the storm, it will come in, and where would we put it, in this house?” She smiled as she gestured at the walls, and I agreed that it didn’t seem like a storm would fit, not without breaking the dishes anyway, though a part of me longed to try. To whistle and wait for the storm to answer. I pursed my lips as I stood by the window, but kept silent.

I remember one other thing from that storm. I remember waking because the howling of the wind had stopped. Everything had grown quiet—so quiet that absence of sound was its own roar.

I crept from my bed. I wanted to go outside, to see what had happened to the hurricane, to Abigail. I wanted to whistle her back up. But there was my mother, standing at the edge of our property, where the straggly grasses turned fully into sand. She had slid the top of her nightgown off, so that it gathered around her waist, and stood, her bare breasts facing the ocean. Facing the now-quiet storm.

She didn’t seem like my mother, standing like that. She seemed like something else. Something great and terrible.

My mouth opened, and I drew breath in to call to her, but instead I stepped backwards, as quiet as I could, and crept back into bed. I didn’t sleep. Not until I heard the door creak open, and my mother’s feet on the wooden floor.

• • • •

The wind picks up. I hear it, whistling through the night, through the cracked windows and gaps in the shingles. I whistle back. I want a storm. I want to raise my voice to the wind and howl along with it.

I open the windows wider. There is a splash as I step, a skittering. My footprint is a tide pool on the wooden floor, a spiral-shelled hermit crab running sideways from it.

There is a tide inside me, too—a pulling at my blood, the moon calling the salt water that courses in my veins.

Another splash, and another tiny piece of ocean where I step. The water runs out, toward the beach.

• • • •

“I don’t like that story,” I tell my mom. “Being a human is stupid and boring. Being a mermaid is cool. She shouldn’t have traded.”

“But she loved the prince. She loved him very much, and the only way they could be together is if she was a human. So she changed because she loved him.” Mom closed the book and set it on my nightstand.

“Why couldn’t he turn into a mermaid?” I asked. “I mean, if they loved each other and so someone had to change, why did she have to become human? Mermaids are cooler.”

“It doesn’t always work like that,” Mom said. “Sometimes people only have one shape. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough.”

“Well, I still think that if he couldn’t become a mermaid, she should have stayed one. She could have found a mermaid to love. That would have been okay, too.”

“It doesn’t always work like that, either, Mara,” she said. “Sometimes you love someone so much, it changes the very shape of you, whether you want it to or not.”

• • • •

My hair is soaked with salt water. It feels like kelp, like sea-wrack plastered against my skin. The scent of the ocean, mineral sharp and heavy, fills the air.

I never knew my father. He was a tide that went only in one direction, and that was away from us. So I don’t know if it’s from him that I am what I seem to be becoming—a small ocean bound in skin, a tide going out—or if this sea change is some other thing. I don’t know if he was a human who just didn’t want to stay, or if he was a selkie my mother wept over, more than seven tears, as she gave him back his sealskin, or if he was a storm, calmed at the sight of her.

I asked. Of course I asked. It’s so much more interesting to think of a father who is a merman or a sea monster or a tide than to think of him as a man who walked away.

I never thought to ask my mother what she was. She was there, after all.

A gust of wind blows through my chest, and flings open the door in front of me. The moon silvers a path across the surface of the ocean. I walk toward it.

• • • •

Here was one story my mother told me: “Once upon a time, there were two monsters who each lived on either side of a narrow bay. One who had many tentacles that could grab a ship and drown it. Another who was so enormous that she could drink down the entire ocean and swallow everything in it. And there was a ship, trying to sail home, and the only way to get home was to pass between the two monsters.”

“But how did the ship leave?” I asked. “It must have gotten past the monsters once.”

“Sometimes they hide,” she said, “and so you don’t know there’s danger until it’s too late.”

Here was another: “Once upon a time, there was a sailor who set out to discover the edge of the world, where the water poured over into nothingness.”

And another: “Once upon a time, there was an island full of beautiful voices, so enchanting that no sailor could go past it, but would instead steer their boat onto the rocks.”

So many of her stories were of someone lost at sea, someone never coming home. I didn’t realize at the time that they were also stories of the sea stealing someone away. Luring them onto the rocks, trapping them between monsters, drowning them, even, if that was what was necessary to keep them on the waves, and not on the sand.

• • • •

I walk out past the sea grass and onto the beach, into the wind. The roar of the waves is a summons—no, a welcome. Here, here, here, the waves say to me as they break upon the beach.

I cough, and a fish slides, silvery and finned, into my hand, flopping and gasping now that it is here in the air. I drop it in one of the pools of salt water that have formed behind me.

I am a tide pool myself. My bones are corals beneath my skin. Here, here, here, I tell the ocean. I am coming.

• • • •

This is the story that my mother told me the most. It was about mermaids—all of my favorite stories were about mermaids. I wanted nothing more than to be able to live under the sea.

It was about a mermaid who sang, and the sound of her voice was so beautiful that anyone who heard it would follow it into the waves.

“But not drown?” I asked, even when I knew the answer, because that was the magic part to me.

“No, not drown. The mermaid’s song was so beautiful that it turned the person who heard it into the sea.”

“To be salt water and waves.”

Mom nodded. “To be salt water and waves and to be just like an ocean.”

“Except . . .”

“Except if someone called out, and interrupted the mermaid’s song, then the person wouldn’t turn into an ocean. Then they would drown.”

I shivered with delight under the covers. It seemed so perfect, so perilous.

• • • •

After my mother disappeared, even though by then I was eighteen and too old for games, I would play a game I called mermaid. I would walk into the ocean, and then swim out as far as I could. Then I would float, singing songs to myself, pretending that I was a mermaid, that I could sing to myself and turn into salt water and waves. Eventually, if I didn’t hear anyone, I’d turn and swim home.

But if I heard a voice, and I would swim down deep. I would sit on the bottom of the sand, watching the sun streak through the water like stained glass above me. I would sit down there until my lungs ached, until my head felt like it would burst from lack of breath. Until my rise back to the surface and air would feel as if I had drowned because it hurt so much to breathe.

I did it because sometimes when I stayed down there long enough, I felt like I was hearing voices. Like maybe, just maybe, there was a mermaid singing to me. Like maybe, just maybe, the mermaid was my mother.

On those days, I would weep at least seven tears, bitter as salt, into the sea.

• • • •

I wasn’t there when my mother disappeared. I came home from work, two days after my eighteenth birthday, a Wednesday in that hot sticky summer between high school and college, whistling, and telling myself that the anemic breeze that I felt was the beginning of a storm I was calling up.

The house was quiet. There was a slick of water in the kitchen, iridescent scales floating on its surface.

“Mom?”

No answer.

The back door, the one that lead out to the beach, was open. There were . . . there were what looked like drag marks, leading down to the waves.

“Mom?” Barely a whisper this time, as if something had stolen my voice.

And then I ran, and I ran to the shore and I ran into the water and I swam out as far as I could, calling for her, tears running salt down my face.

They were kind. They called it a disappearance, and not the other word that gets used when a woman goes into the water alone and doesn’t come back. I tried to tell them about the marks on the sand, but I had run through them, and the only marks were my own.

I didn’t tell them that I heard my mom’s voice on the wind, singing in the storm.

Or that she’d left the copy of The Little Mermaid by my bed. That she’d scrawled a message inside the front cover: I stayed as long as I could. I love you, my Mara. My ocean girl.

• • • •

I am whistling up the wind and the tide is pouring from my hair and I am weeping pearls and when I look down into the moon-streaked water, I cannot see my feet. I am salt water and I am tide and then, above the storm, I hear my mother’s voice.

“Mara,” she says, and it is bitter as salt, bitter as the sea, but she is a mermaid and I am the ocean, and she is singing, singing.

©2017 by Kat Howard. | Art © 2017 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the author of Roses and Rot, named one of the best SFF books of Summer ’16 by Publishers Weekly. Saga Press will also be publishing her next novel in late summer ’17, and a short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, in early 2018. Her novella, “The End of the Sentence”, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and performed on NPR.

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

Daddy Long Legs of the Evening

Jeffrey Ford | 3640 words

It was said that when he was a small child, asleep in his bed one end-of-summer night, a spider crawled into his ear, traversed a maze of canals, eating slowly through membrane and organ, to discover the cavern of the skull. Then that spider burrowed in a spiral pattern through the electric gray cake of the brain to the very center of it all, where it hollowed out a large nest for itself and reattached neural pathways with the thread of its web. It played the boy like a zither, plucking the silver strings of its own design, creating a music that directed both will and desire.

Before the invasion of his cranium, the child was said to have been quite a little cherub—big green eyes and a wave of golden hair, rosy cheeks, an infectious laugh. His parents couldn’t help showing him off at every opportunity and regaling passersby with a litany of his startling attributes, not the least of which was the ability to recite verbatim the bedtime stories read to him each night. Many a neighbor had been subjected to an oration of the entirety of “The Three Rum Runtkins.”

A change inside wrought a change outside, though, and over the course of a few months the boy’s eyes bulged and drained of all color to become million-faceted buds of gleaming onyx. His legs and arms grew long and willowy, but his body stayed short with a small but pronounced potbelly, like an Adam’s apple in the otherwise slender throat that was his form. Although a fine down of thistle grew in patches across his back, arms, and thighs, he went bald, losing even brows and lashes. His flesh turned a pale gray, hinting at violet; his incisors grew to curving points and needed to be clipped and filed back like fingernails.

Horrified at the earliest of these changes, the boy’s parents had taken him, first, to the doctor’s, but when the medicine he was given did nothing but make him vomit and the symptoms became more bizarre, they took him to the clinic. The doctors there subjected him to a head scan. Photos from the process showed the intruder in negative, a tiny eight-legged phantom perched at the center of a dark, intricate web. It was determined that were they to remove the arachnid, the boy could very possibly die. The creature had, for all intents and purposes, become his brain. The parents, confessing they feared for their lives, pleaded with the physicians to operate, but the ethical code forbade it, and the family was sent home.

Not long after the trip to the clinic, the boy’s mother opened his bedroom door one morning and beheld him suspended in the eye of a silver web that filled the room from floor to ceiling. She meant to scream but the beautiful gleaming symmetry of what he’d made stunned her. She watched as he turned slowly round to face away, and then from a neat hole cut in the back of his trousers that she’d never noticed before came a sudden blast of webbing that smacked her in the face and covered half her body. The door slammed shut as she reeled backward, and this time she did scream, tearing madly at the shroud whose sticky threads seemed spun from marshmallow.

Unable to bear the boy’s presence any longer, his parents took him for a hike out into the forest. “I know a place where there are flies as big as poodles,” his father said, and the boy drooled. They took him deep into the trees, marking the trail as they went, and somewhere miles in, next to a lake, they bedded down on pine needles. While he slept, they quietly rose, tiptoed away, and then, once out of earshot, ran for their lives. They never saw the boy again. Although no one in town could blame them, including the constable, and they faced no charges for their actions, the memory of their fear burrowed in a spiral pattern to the center of their minds and played them like zithers for the rest of their days.

Fifteen years later and a hundred miles from where he’d been born, the boy appeared one evening at the height of summer, not a man but something else. A woman living in an apartment of an otherwise empty building on the east side of the city of Grindly woke suddenly and looked up.

“There was enough moonlight to see him clearly,” she said. “He hung above me, upside down, his hands and knees on the ceiling. He wore a jacket with short tails, and the long legs of his satin trousers were striped blue and red. I don’t know how that hat—a stovepipe style—stayed on, as it had no chin strap. His feet were in slippers. The moment I saw him, he looked directly into my eyes. It didn’t matter that he wore round, rose-colored glasses. Those evil blackberries that lurked behind still dazzled me. I screamed, he shrieked, and then he scuttled across the ceiling and out the open window. I heard him on the roof, and then everything was silent.” The woman told her friends, and her friends told their friends, and word that something bizarre had come to Grindly spread like disease.

The Gazette put out a double edition, a whole four pages, its entirety devoted to speculation concerning “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening,” a moniker invented by the editor in chief. The name stuck, and over the course of a few more days was shortened by the populace, first to “Daddy Longlegs” and then to simply “Daddy.” “Watch out for Daddy,” neighbors said as a salutation when they parted. Before people bedded down at night, they practiced a ritual of checking closets and basements, the dark corners of attics, and under beds, latching all windows and gathering crude weapons on their nightstands—a mallet, a wrench, a carving knife, a club.

After a few more sightings that he had scrupulously arranged, allowing himself to be spotted, crawling to the top of and then into a silent mill’s crumbling smokestack, or traversing the soot-ridden mosaic of God’s face on the inner dome of the railway station as the midnight train passed through, he was in their hearts and minds, and what was even more important to him, in their dreams. Of course, he meant to drain the citizenry of Grindly of their bodily fluids, but first, to enhance nourishment, it needed to be filtered, flavored, by nightmare.

When there wasn’t a soul within the confines of the city wall who did not, in their dreams, flee slow, heavy, and naked before him, or writhe in the coil of their blankets, mistaken in sleep for his web, he struck. It was deepest night when he entered the home of the haberdasher, Fremin, through the unlocked coal chute. The hinges on the iron door creaked a warning, but that noise was transformed, by the dreams of the sleeping husband and wife, into the triumphant laughter of Daddy Longlegs. They never woke when he bit them at the base of the skull. They never cried out as their fear-laden essence left them.

“Like old worn luggage,” the newspaper said, describing the condition of the corpses discovered two days later. When the medics tried to move the haberdasher’s body to a stretcher, it split with a whisper like a dry husk and out of it poured thousands of tiny spiders. Police Inspector Kaufmann, the medics, the Fremins’ neighbors who were present, all ran out of the building, and the inspector gave orders for the place to be torched at once. As the fire raged, the crowd that had gathered belabored the inspector, Grindly’s sole lawman, with inquiries as to what he was prepared to do.

What Kaufmann was prepared to do was run, take the next train out of town for some shining new place free of rot and nightmares. The only thing preventing him was the fact that the train rarely stopped, but sped right through as if there really was no platform or station or city. “If I wait for that,” he thought, “we might all be dead by the time it arrives.” He turned to the citizens and said, “I’m going to hunt Daddy down and put a bullet in him.” Only the inspector knew that it would necessarily have to be “a bullet” as he only had one left. Government supplies from the capitol had dried up over a year earlier.

That night, Kaufmann slept slumped over his desk, pistol in hand, and dreamt of a time before the politicians in the capitol had succumbed to a disease of avarice and sapped all of Grindly’s resources for themselves. Once known far and wide as the “Nexus of Manufacture,” a gleaming machine of commerce, where traffic filled the streets, faces filled the windows, and nobody ate cabbage who didn’t want to, the inspector had a police force, enough bullets, and a paycheck. Again, in his sleep, he watched the city slowly rot from the inside out and eventually stood on the platform at the station waving forlornly as even the petty criminals left town.

While Kaufmann dozed, Daddy was busy slipping silently through the shadows. He could smell the terror of the populace, a sweet flower scent that drove his hunger. The music played on the strands of web behind his eyes directed his purpose, negating distraction, as he shuffled up a wall, found an unlocked window, and let the breeze in.

His first victim of that night: The pale and beautiful actress Monique LeDar, who still performed nightly, one-woman shows of the classics, although the stage was lit by candles and squirrels scampered amid the rafters. She awoke in the midst of Daddy’s feeding, and he saw her seeing herself in the myriad reflections of his eyes. He stopped, tipped his hat, and continued. She put her wrist to her forehead and perished.

The Gazette had the story in its late-morning edition the next day: DADDY’S DOZEN, read the headline. At the end of the lead article that gave a list of the drained and the grisly condition in which each was found, there was printed a formal plea from Inspector Kaufmann for volunteers to help track the killer. That evening, he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hall of Justice, a mausoleum of an old marble structure, dark and empty inside save for his office. The last set of batteries in the flashlight had died, so, instead, he held like a torch out in front of him a small candelabra of three burning tapers. He’d been waiting for over an hour for the mob of volunteers to form in order to begin the hunt, but, as it was, he stood alone. Taking the gun from his shoulder holster, he was about to strike out on his own when an old woman in a kerchief and a long camelhair winter coat trundled slowly up to him.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” asked the inspector.

“I volunteer,” she said.

He laughed. “This is dangerous work, my dear. We’re after a cold-blooded killer.”

The old woman opened her pocketbook and took out a blackjack. She waggled the tube of stitched leather with lead in the tip at Kaufmann’s face.

“That’s an illegal weapon,” he said.

“Arrest me,” she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

The avenues and side streets of Grindly were empty. Even the drunks stayed home in fear of being drunk themselves. It was slow going and just as lonely for Kaufmann with Mrs. Frey in tow. He’d barely gotten the woman’s name out of her. She followed five steps behind, not so much his posse as a haunting spirit. He respected her courage, her sense of civic duty, but found her quiet wheezing and the rhythmic squish of her galoshes incredibly annoying, and wondered how long it would be before he used his last bullet on either her or himself.

It was dinnertime in the city that never woke; the scent of boiled cabbage, the skittering of rats along the gutters. Occasionally, there was a lighted window and the distant, muffled sound of a radio or a child’s glee or an argument, but for the most part Kaufmann and his deputy passed down empty streets of boarded storefronts and burned-out brownstones, where the echo of the wind sounded like laughter in the shadows.

It was dinnertime for Daddy as well, and he moved along the rooftops, keenly aware of the warm spots in the cold buildings beneath, heat signatures of those who might find themselves on his menu. He was hunting for the essence of the young. His last kill of the previous night had been Tharshmon the watchmaker, a man made old by lack of work and self-respect. No one cared any longer to know the time in Grindly. It was better left unmentioned when the future arrived. As dozens of pocket watches chimed in Tharshmon’s studio at 3:00 a.m., Daddy interceded without a struggle. The bereft watchmaker’s fluid was overripe, though, insipidly sweet and watery. It gave no energy but bruised the will and loosened the bowels.

Daddy skittered down the side of a four-story apartment building. At the lighted window on the third floor, he settled upon the fire escape. With his face to the glass, he saw two young children dressed in their pajamas, playing in a bedroom. He tried the window, but it was locked. He tapped at the glass with one long nail. Their big pink faces drew close to see him, and even before they undid the latch, his system was creating the chemical needed to digest their juices. He had learned it wasn’t helpful to let them see him drool.

At the same moment, three blocks away, Inspector Kaufmann was passing the Waterworks. He turned and peered back up the sidewalk to see Mrs. Frey’s bent form inching along through the weak glow of the block’s one working streetlight. He set the candelabra on the ground, holstered his gun, and took out his last cigarette. He’d traded a pair of official police handcuffs, with key, for the pack it came from. Leaning down, he lit it on the flame of the center candle. He was cold and tired, and every scrap of newspaper that rolled in the wind or bat that darted out of a blasted window momentarily paralyzed him with fear. He took a drag and heard Mrs. Frey’s galoshes drawing closer.

The old woman had nearly caught up and there was still a good half of a cigarette left when he heard a desperate scream come from off to his right. “Shit,” he said, flicked the unfinished butt into the gutter, drew his pistol, and ran across the street. There he entered an alley and ran through the dark, avoiding piles of broken furniture and old garbage. The alley gave way to another street and then another alley, and when he was almost winded, there was again a shrill scream, and he saw a woman at an open window three stories up.

“My babies,” she wailed. Kaufmann scanned the sides of the buildings for Daddy. He heard something move amidst the trash and caught a darker spot in the darkness out of the corner of his eye. As he lifted the gun, something wet and sticky smacked him in the face. He fired blindly.

By the time Kaufmann had wiped the web from his eyes, Daddy was gone, the distraught mother above had spotted the inspector and was yelling for his assistance, and behind him, Mrs. Frey, pocketbook on her wrist, the candelabra in her right hand, the blackjack in her left, shuffled inexorably closer. The inspector dropped the gun and ran away.

Daddy sat atop the smokestack of the abandoned Harris Electric Loom Mill, nursing the wound to his leg where the bullet had grazed his calf. The spider in his head unhooked the strings that sent pain, and then nestled back into the center of things, half high from the effects of the rich essence of youth. His imagination took off, and he plucked the silver strands, composing as he played, spinning a web of an idea. “Herd them,” Daddy said in a voice that cracked and clicked. The spare, scattered pattern of the lights of Grindly required design.

Exhausted from running, Inspector Kaufmann leaned against the coral facade at the entrance to Grindly Station. His own thoughts were as scattered as Daddy’s were inspired. Against what would have normally been his better judgment, he chose to believe that for some reason the train would, that night, stop at the platform and take him aboard. He hurried on so as not to miss it. His quick footsteps echoed across the wide rotunda, and he passed through another set of doors into the dome that held the station platform. He was surprised to find himself the only passenger.

Kaufmann cupped his hand behind his ear and cocked his head toward the track in order to check for vibrations of the coming train. He thought he felt the merest rumble deep in his chest. After listening for a long time, all he really heard was the sound of water dripping. It interfered with the anticipation of escape. Then he realized it wasn’t water dripping but more a tapping. It stopped and then started again. He looked up at the inner dome and froze.

In an eyeblink, Daddy leaped down on a forty-foot thread of web and stood before Kaufmann. Mandibles clicked together, and Daddy did a bad job of hiding the drool. From some forgotten byway of his brain, the inspector’s years of experience on the streets of Grindly engaged. He made a fist and swung with everything he had. The punch hit the mark, cracking the left lens of Daddy’s rose-colored glasses and sending him stumbling backward a few feet. The inspector didn’t know whether to flee or continue to attack, and in the empty moment of his indecision, he definitely heard the train coming.

He made a move toward Daddy with fists in the air, but his nemesis twirled with insect precision and speed and clipped Kaufmann under the chin with a foot that struck like the tip of a bullwhip. The inspector was almost brought to his knees by the blow, but instead of going down, he righted himself and backed off. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth. The train was louder now, and a faint light could be seen filling the tunnel. He looked down and saw that the backs of his heels were off the edge of the platform. He put his fists up and kept them moving.

When Daddy took one long-legged step to the left, Kaufmann saw salvation. The roar of the approaching train filled the tunnel and set the entire platform to vibrating so that it was impossible to hear the squish of Mrs. Frey’s galoshes. She inched up upon him from behind, the candelabra glimmering, the blackjack waggling in her grip. Kaufmann threw a flurry of jabs to distract the arachnid, and the old woman lifted the leather club as high as she could. The locomotive entered the station but didn’t slow.

In the reflection of rushing windows, Daddy detected treachery. He spun in a blur, his mandibles severing Mrs. Frey’s neck with a swift clip, like cutting a rose. From the hole in his trousers, he shot a blast of web at Kaufmann. It happened so quickly that the inspector could only stand motionless as the strand of sticky thread wrapped twice around his neck. The web’s long tail was pulled in by the rush of the passing train and affixed itself to the handle on the back door of the caboose. Kaufmann was jerked off the platform by the neck, and flew behind the train. The last thing he saw in Grindly was the mosaic face of God. Mrs. Frey’s head hit the platform then and spat.

The next evening, in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, Daddy stood in total darkness, emitting high-pitched squeals that called all the natural spiders of Grindly to him. When he felt their delicate heaving presence surrounding him, he clicked and blzz’d out his plan. He gave instructions on rethreading the human brain. He spoke of the ear and the path to take, warning of cul-de-sacs. “A quarter pound of fly meat for every human restrung,” he promised. Spirits were high. Later, when they returned to him for payment, he crushed them beneath his slipper.

By the time he got done with Grindly, the city shone and ran like one of Tharshmon’s pocket watches. Everything moved as if to music. It became for Daddy a web of human thread. “Purpose without a point,” he often reminded his human electorate, and they tacitly nodded. He continued to feed at night, roaming the rooftops and alleyways, leaving old luggage indiscriminately in his wake. People showed him smiles during the day, but, still, no one wanted to meet him in the dark. The reconfiguration of their brain patterns didn’t eliminate terror, only their ability to react to it. “Fear and Industry” was Daddy’s motto, and it took him far.

After the train was again making scheduled stops at the station, Daddy boarded with a ticket to the capital one evening. He never returned to Grindly, but instead bit into the larger politics of the Realm and kept eating in a spiral pattern until he reached the center of everything. There, he made a nest for himself.

©2011 by Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. His fiction has won the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Shirley Jackson Award, etc. He lives in Ohio in a hundred plus year old farm house, surrounded by corn and wheat fields, and teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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

The West Topeka Triangle

Jeremiah Tolbert | 8780 words

As much as the other kids in my neighborhood like to tell me I’m a know-it-all, I realize just how short the list of things I actually know is one cold winter morning in 1987. I know my vocabulary words, everything that can be known about the Bermuda Triangle, and how well-liked a kid is by who they walk to school with.

Almost everything important that ever happens to me happens on the walk to or from school. My family lives in The Coyote Rise Townhome Co-op, which is one and a quarter miles away from McCarthy Elementary School (according to my stepdad). It’s too close for them to give us bus service, so every weekday morning, twenty-six kids leave our beige box townhouses, falling into our places in the “Coyote pack,” and make the walk without adults. We dart across a busy two-lane road with no crosswalk, pass over the cracked and patched asphalt of the West Topeka Baptist Church parking lot, and into a rarely-mowed baseball field. We stroll down a line of overgrown trees, across a dry creek bed that hasn’t contained water in our lifetimes, then skirt a small pond where mallards nest in the spring. We struggle up a small hill which becomes treacherously slick after rain. At the top of the hill, a cul-de-sac feeds out into streets lined with real houses built in the 1950s, the kind that don’t share walls with their neighbors. We call it the “rich neighborhood.”

I walk in the front of the pack because nobody likes me. I’m too poor, the other kids think I think I know everything, and I have big ears that stick out at right angles from my head. Some of the kids call me Dumbo so they can see me cry. It almost always works, even though I know it shouldn’t. My little sister and brother walk in the middle with all the other K to threes. Safe and anonymous. I like not having to worry about them. I have my own problems. Like Brendan.

“Hey, wait,” Brendan says, hurrying along behind me. His fat cheeks jiggle and he breathes hard like he’s been running since Coyote Rise. His backpack keeps slipping off because he only wears one shoulder strap like the cool kids. That slows him down some, but he catches up with me eventually.

Brendan walks with me sometimes. I’m an easy target for his insults. To his credit, he doesn’t lean too heavy on the Dumbo thing.

“Give me that branch, faggot,” Brendan says. “You’re just going to try to shove it up your ass.”

The day before, I found a fallen tree limb, longer than I was tall, in the trees beside the dry creek. Today, I’m using it as a wizard-staff/walking-stick. Sometimes a group of middle school kids let me play D&D with them after school. I’m almost as obsessed with wizards and elves as I am with the mystery of the Triangle and its victims.

“I’m not a faggot,” I say. But you are sack of crap, I think, but I don’t say it.

“You’ve never had a girlfriend,” he says. “That makes you a fag.”

“But you don’t have a girlfriend either.”

“Yes, I do. She just doesn’t go to our lame-ass school. Now gimme that stick.”

I walk faster. Brendan struggles to keep up.

“If you make me run, I’m really gonna be pissed.”

I can outrun him. I’m not fast, but I can run farther and longer than anybody at school. I’m always first to finish the “mile” run during phys ed. This one time, I told my step-dad my four-and-a-half minute time at dinner, proud that I was the best at something. He slapped me on the cheek and called me a liar. The fastest man in the world can barely run a four-minute mile, he said. So I guess it isn’t really a mile, just four times around our school.

“You run like somebody is chasing you,” our PE teacher says every year. I think, “of course I do,” but I don’t say it. Somebody’s always chasing me. When he says it, the athletic kids sneer at me, even though they’re good at actual sports like soccer and basketball. Luckily for them, I can’t outrun the speed of sound. They can always call me names.

“Goddamn it, Four-Eyes, I want that stick,” Brendan huffs. Now we’re out past the pond, where I hope to go check for duck nests after school if Brendan isn’t still hounding me.

He continues on like this through the rich neighborhood. He gets more and more agitated, and I’m worried he’s going to start hitting me soon. I jog around a corner and shove my staff in the evergreen bushes across the street from school, and then I break into a run when I reach the mowed soccer field that stretches between the school fence and the gym doors. Inside, there’s usually a bored teacher drowning herself in coffee keeping an eye on us kids who come to school early. There’s a whole bunch of us because of what time our parents have to be at work. Some come for the free breakfasts because they’re even poorer than I am. We at least have generic Pop-Tarts and Kix cereal at home. I think Brendan comes early just to have more time to pick on me.

If he catches up with me before I get inside, I’ll probably take some hits. But he won’t hit me where a teacher can see him. I’m not fast over short distances, though, and I barely make it inside ahead of him. He doesn’t punch me, but he doesn’t shut up either.

“Where’d you put that stick, dickwad? I want that stick. After school, I’m going to beat you to death with that stick.” He backs me up to the brick wall of the gym over by the window where we get our milk cartons at lunch. He keeps on with his threats. My heart won’t slow down from running. I want to get away. I need to get away, but he’s blocking me in.

I don’t know why I do it. My arms move without me telling them to, and I watch myself like a movie as my hands grab the sides of his head and swing it against the brick wall. Four times, I bash Brendan’s skull against the bricks. I wonder if the Triangle is making me do it, somehow.

There’s a horrible sound that I don’t recognize at first, but it’s me and I sound like the raccoon I found caught in the rusty jaws of trap out in the woods. I could hear it screaming almost all the way home when I went to get help from Mom. When we came back, it’d gnawed off its leg and limped away.

In my disconnected state, I am slow to notice that everyone else is quiet and watching us. I can hear Brendan begging someone to help him, but he doesn’t seem too hurt. I guess I’m not very strong. Mrs. Carter waddles toward us through the crowd, shouting. I let go and stare at her. I can’t hear anything now over the ringing in my ears and the blood rushing through my head. I want to lie down.

She marches us to the principal’s office, hands gripping hard around our upper arms. Past the secretaries, and straight into his office without a word to them. Mr. Howard stands up, frowning.

I don’t know how tall Mr. Howard really is, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s just shy of seven feet. His hair is silver, cropped short like my great-grandfather’s, another military man, although Grandpa Hawkins had fought in Dubya-Dubya-Two and Mr. Howard in Korea. An enormous wooden paddle hangs on the wall behind him, almost as big as an oar. I’m not even sure it isn’t an oar, but it doesn’t intimidate me much. Parents have to sign a consent form for him to use it on us and my mom thinks spanking is “barbaric.” Not Brendan’s mom, though. Inside the office, Brendan puts on a good show and cries a lot. It’s not his first time in here, or mine either, but every other time I’m the one who had his ass kicked.

Brendan and I answer his questions about what happened. I’m honest, but I can’t really say why I fought back this time. I tell him about my wizard staff and Brendan’s taunts. Brendan doesn’t disagree.

“Where’s this stick now?” Mr. Howard asks with a frown.

“I hid it,” I say.

“I want to see this thing,” he says. He puts on his coat and I lead them to my hiding spot. I hate him quietly for making me show Brendan my best hiding place. Hiding places for stuff you can’t take into the school are hard to come by.

I take out the stick and Mr. Howard whistles. “Who do you think you are? Moses?” He reaches for the stick. I hesitate, but hand it over. I don’t have an ounce of anti-authoritarianism in me. My step-dad made sure of that a long time ago.

“Are you going to call my mom?” Brendan asks, voice a high whine.

“Jason, should I call his mother?” He asks me. I raise my eyebrows and look back and forth between them.

“Why are you asking him? He beat me up!”

“No, it’s okay,” I say.

“Brendan, go to class,” Mr. Howard says.

“You’re not going to call her?”

Mr. Howard gives Brendan his “I killed Koreans for my country, so what do you think I’ll do to you if you don’t listen?” look and Brendan huffs off.

“Merlin,” I say, after I’m sure Brendan can’t hear us.

“What?”

“Not Moses. Merlin,” I say. “I bet if I was a wizard like Merlin, nobody would try to take my staff or call me a faggot.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” he mutters, thinking I can’t hear him, but it’s the one upside of the big ears.

We walk slowly back across the field toward the school. Mr. Howard doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Can I get my stick back after school?” I ask.

“I trust you not to misuse it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for the others. I better keep it.” I nod. It makes sense. I’d probably do the same if I were him.

“Are you going to call my dad?” It’s a little trick I read about in a book once. If he calls my mom, she’ll tell Bill, and I’ll have “hell to pay” (as Bill would say). But if Mr. Howard calls Dad, nothing will happen at all. Dad is always telling me to stand up for myself, and when he thinks I can’t hear him, wonder how he ended up with such a pussy for a son. Dad grew up with four brothers and three sisters in the country. He knows how to stand up for himself.

“Do you think I should?” Mr. Howard asks. I’m pretty sure he’s trying to teach me a lesson here. I don’t say anything for a moment while I try to figure out the right answer, but he continues. “I don’t think you’re going to hurt anyone again, do you?”

“I am not even sure why I did it this time.”

Mr. Howard squats down in front of me, doing that thing tall adults do when they really want to make an important point. I have to force myself not to look down. They never like it when you look away. He says: “There is an animal in all of us, Jason. We’re all of us tainted with original sin since Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden.”

I nod. I’ve read the Bible, or at least the good parts in the Old Testament. All the Jesus on the mound stuff in the New Testament was boring compared to the blood and sex and smiting in the early books.

“Deep down, each one of us is capable of doing something monstrous. God-willing and a heap of prayer to help, we keep it inside.”

We walk back to the school. I can see inside my classroom through the row of windows looking out onto the asphalt playground. Mrs. Dario stands at the front of the class leading the Pledge of Allegiance. My classmates stand beside their desks with their hands over the hearts, facing the flag and the poster of Ronald Reagan on the wall below it.

I’d tried praying to Ronald Reagan once. He always seemed so friendly on television. Reagan didn’t have a better track record answering me than God did, but he did like to talk a lot about Star Wars, so he was still coming out ahead.

“I said, do you understand?” Mr. Howard asks, steel edge to his voice. He’s been talking, but I didn’t heard him.

“Yes, sir.” That is always a safe bet.

My principal smiles. He has one of those smiles that made you feel a little uneasy. All teeth and no eyes. “Good. Get to class and don’t bring any more walking sticks to school.” He waves at my teacher, and she nods. I go inside and take my seat as Mrs. Dario starts going over today’s vocabulary words. They’re written on the chalkboard in neat block letters:

ABANDON
BLUNDER
HOAX
INVISIBLE
MENACE

I know them already.

• • • •

At lunch, I expect everyone to ask about my “outburst,” but as we wind through the line to collect our slices of pizza on plastic trays, all anyone’s talking about is Kim Davidson. She hasn’t come to school today and the police showed up in her fourth grade classroom.

The news hits me like my own head smacking into the gym wall. Kim Davidson, missing too? Kim lives (lived?) a building down from ours in 1127 B. I have spent many nights laying on my top bunk and thinking about the color of her hair. Trying to describe it just right to myself. It’s like wheat in late summer. It’s like the sun at noon. It hurts to look at, in a good way.

Kim is the first to go from Coyote Rise. She is a kink in my theory. It worries me.

I collect my slice; it has exactly three slices of pepperoni on it. There is no way to arrange three points without them forming a triangle. An omen, I wonder? I sit at the far end of a table where Bobby Mavis is holding court. “The cop had a huuuuge gun on his belt. Anybody could just reach out and grab it. I totally could have.”

“You dumbass,” says Becky Collette. “If you’d tried that, he woulda blown your head clear off and not gotten in trouble for it.” Becky should know, because her dad’s a cop. “When’s the last time anybody saw Kim, anyway?”

“Yesterday at school,” Bobby says.

“I saw her last night riding her bike,” I say. I’d been reading a Bobbsey Twins mystery by the window. She had pedaled by, the red and white tassels on her handlebars blowing in the breeze, and her hair tied over her shoulder in a ponytail. I wanted to call out to her, to say hello, but Bill called me to dinner. I didn’t see her ride back home.

“Nobody’s talking to you, nerd,” Becky snaps. “Go sit somewhere else.”

I know what happened to Kim. I know what’s happening to all the other kids that have disappeared. But even if I tell them, they won’t believe me. The Triangle won’t let them. So I don’t say anything. I stand up and take my tray to another table.

Brendan sits down beside me with a greasy grunt. I look around for a teacher, but whoever has lunch duty has ducked out for a smoke. Brendan probably knows that. I grip my tray, ready for something. He’s probably spent the whole morning planning his retaliation.

“Hey,” he says. “Did you get your stick back?”

I look down at my food. “No. Mr. Howard kept it.”

“That sucks. It was really cool.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish I had found it.”

I try to listen to the conversation about Kim at the other table, but it’s too noisy in the lunchroom. Then Brendan does the first thing he’s ever done that has surprised me.

“Um. Sorry I pushed you around,” he says, voice practically a whisper.

“What?”

“You heard me, dickcheese,” he snaps.

“It’s . . . okay?” I’m not really sure what else to say. Most of my days follow a pretty basic script; people make fun of me, I pretend not to hear them. I’m off the script now. I’m surprised to at how good it feels. My heart is racing again and my palms are sweaty against the sides of my lunch tray.

“Do you play Nintendo?” Brendan asks. “I’ve got Super Mario 2.”

“That’s cool.” I didn’t even know there was a Super Mario 1.

“You can come over today and we’ll play it. If you want. But I get to be player one.”

I nod to myself. Now I see. Brendan wants to get me on his territory. He’ll probably lock me in a closet or something, figure out some way to torture me without someone being there to intervene.

“Okay. Sure.”

“Cool. See you after school,” he says. He gets up and buses his tray, then heads out to the playground. I watch him go, wondering when the Triangle replaced him.

• • • •

After lunch, two blue-uniformed officers come talk to our class about the missing kids. Nobody knows anything, has any good answers for their questions, so they give us our third safety lecture of the year. Travel in groups, always tell your parents where you’re going to be, and never get in the cars of strangers. We’ve heard it all, internalized it. Lived it. My cousin Chris got in a car with a stranger two years before and he’s still going to therapy because of what happened. He got off lucky, though, compared the others. He got to go home.

I spend the afternoon ignoring Mrs. Dario. She has a Cuban accent and a lot of kids make fun of her for it. I like the sound of it. And she loves America more than anybody I know. She especially loves Ronald Reagan—almost as much as she hates the Communists. I don’t really understand all the details, but I guess the Communists invaded Cuba and made her come to Kansas. One time, she was reading us a story about the Revolutionary War and she started to cry. The whole class gave her a hug, even me.

Instead of listening, I think about why the Triangle would want Kim. I go through my “what” theories about aliens and Atlanteans, body harvesting, organ farming. Mind slaves to the slug overlords of Neptune. When the bell rings at the end of the day, I rubber-band-snap back into my body from wherever my mind drifts when I’m thinking hard. I feel like I go into a forest far away when I’m thinking about important things. The trees are enormous, so tall that the leaves disappear into a mist. The air is cool and wet. I don’t recognize the place, but I’ve searched books for pictures that match it. It probably doesn’t exist except inside my head. Or maybe it’s inside the Triangle, on the other side. Wherever it is, it’s the safest place I know.

I work on the new wrinkle with my main “why” theory on the walk home. Everybody else is long gone, so I don’t have to hurry or pay too much attention or worry about bullies. I can’t seem to piece together how the Triangle picks who it takes. My best idea until now is that it’s the opposite of a bully.

I understand bullies. Bullies look for things that stand out. Kind of like how white blood cells will attack bacteria and viruses and stuff—bullies are the human response to things that are weird and threaten the safety of the group. Bullies enforce something I’d read about in a public library book called “social cohesion.” There was a lot of other stuff about the core family group and monkey social structures that was over my head, but I understand “social cohesion” because my entire life, I’ve known that I’m not part of it.

“The nail that sticks up gets the hammer,” Bill likes to say whenever I forget myself and complain about bullies in front of him. Mom frowns but she never corrects him.

Unlike a bully, the Triangle always takes away the conformists. Until Kim, none of the poor, latchkey Coyote Rise kids have disappeared. It’s always the normal kids in normal “rich” neighborhoods whose parents are still married, the ones who don’t have siblings locked up in juvie, whose parents aren’t drunks or druggies. But Kim lives (lived?) with her uncle, who everybody knows sells weed, and her parents were both in the state pen.

I’ve never really been afraid of the Triangle because I’m not what it wants. But now I’m not sure. Should I be afraid? It’s another thing to my list of worries.

I snap back into my body to find that I’m in front of Brendan’s place. He’s sitting on the stoop waiting for me and eating a Snickers. He leads me inside without a word from either of us.

I know Brendan is an only child when I see his bedroom. He has a Nintendo and a Sega hooked up to a TV bigger than the one in our living room. He even has a computer in the corner, but it has a dust cover on it and doesn’t look like it gets much use. Instead of books on shelves, he has little Lego constructions that look just like the things on the box. Real Lego, too, not the Construx knock-offs like I have. I think maybe they’re even super-glued together. I try not to let my offense show.

We talk about impersonal stuff like school and TV shows. He loves Saved by the Bell but I’m more of a Duck Tales fan. We don’t talk about the fight at all.

It turns out that Brendan doesn’t want to lock me in a closet or do anything weird. He really wants to play video games. We play some Mario 2 for a while. It’s fun, but kind of dumb. While we play, Brendan tells me all about his games and all the cheat codes he knows.

“You sure know a lot about video games,” I say, then feel stupid for it.

“I’ve read every single Nintendo Power they’ve ever printed. That’s, like, all I read.” He takes a sip from his second can of Mountain Dew. “You know a lot about everything else, though.”

It’s hard for me to take the compliment. I list for him the things I actually know instead of saying thank you.

Brendan pauses the game. “The Bermuda Triangle? What’s that?”

“Stuff disappears in the Bermuda Triangle all the time. You can see where it is by drawing a triangle on a map. The corners are in Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. All kinds of planes and ships have gone missing for years.”

“Missing?”

“They vanish. Like, in 1945, these five bombers were on a training exercise out of Fort Lauderdale. Flight 19. Even though they had compasses and stuff, they radioed that they had gotten lost in a mysterious fog. The military searched for them for days. Nobody ever found the planes or bodies or anything, but people picked up their radio transmissions for days afterward. Can you even imagine what that must have been like?”

“Where do they go?”

I frown. This is the unknowable part. “Another dimension, probably. Maybe Atlantis. Aliens abducted them. Nobody knows, but there are all kinds of theories. Some of it ties into this thing called the Philadelphia Experiment, but I don’t know as much about that.”

“Okay, what’s that, though?”

And so I tell him all about how the US Navy experimented with cloaking technology, about the men who become stuck out of phase with our reality, half here, half not, and even stories of time travel and teleportation. And of course they’d done it all in the Bermuda Triangle. I talk for an hour, unloading all these stories I’ve collected from library books and weird late night TV shows. I can’t remember the last time I’ve talked for so long. Brendan listens, asking good questions here and there, like he really cares.

“Woah. That’s fucking crazy stuff.” Brendan lays back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. “I never knew any of that.” In that moment, I feel very strange to realize where I am and how I got here. How Brendan doesn’t make me to want to run the other direction anymore. I remind myself that maybe this isn’t the real Brendan; he’s been replaced by the Triangle with a duplicate so of course he’ll believe me. I can probably tell him anything I want now.

“I think Topeka has a Triangle, too,” I say, almost whispering. I have to tell him, even if he is a pod person. The D&D kids never listen. They just call me a dumb kid and threaten to stop letting me hang around them.

“The disappearances,” he says, sitting upright suddenly. “That makes sense.”

“It does?” Not sure what else to say. I didn’t expect his reaction.

“Hell yes. The cops haven’t found jack-shit, everybody knows that. That’s probably because they’re vanished, just like those planes in your story. So where’s our Triangle?”

“Do you have a phone book?” We go downstairs and find one in a drawer beside the phone. There’s always a map of town in the front of phone books. I take a pen from a mug beside the phone and draw out the sides. “One corner is Hillsdale Park. Another is Topeka West High School. The last one is the Kmart.”

“How do you know this?”

I draw a star for where each one of the seven missing kids lived. They all fall inside the bounds of the Triangle. I’m kind of guessing about the exact location of the corners, but it works.

“Huh,” he says. Somehow, he’s eating another candy bar. He touches the map and leaves a brown thumbprint on the page where Coyote Rise stands. A message from the Triangle, I wonder. Is it telling me, “I know where you are” now?

“Maybe the Triangle is why you tried to crack open my head today,” he says with a chocolate grin.

I wince. Here it comes, I think. But in a way, the hint of threat is a relief. The natural order of things will be restored.

After a while, the nail that sticks out wants to be hammered.

“What do you plan to do?” He waves his hand at the map, and the natural order continues unnaturally. “Did you tell the cops? Show them this?”

“Yeah.” I tell him about Officer Dan. After the second visit from the police this year, I told Officer Dan my first theory. I drew him the Triangle on a piece of construction paper, from memory. Only four kids had vanished back then.

Officer Dan was nice about it, but he said that he had read a book about the Bermuda Triangle that I hadn’t called The Bermuda Triangle: Mystery Solved. It explained that the Triangle didn’t exist. Didn’t exist. It was made up by a guy named Edward Van Winkle Jones to sell books, and a careful study showed that the Triangle had no more disappearances than any other random area of ocean.

Brendan sniffed. “What a dick.”

“Yeah! I think the Triangle controls the adults somehow. It’s the only explanation. Seven kids have disappeared, so why do we still walk to school on our own? Why do we stay at home by ourselves all afternoon?” Why is Mom still married to Bill? Why do I never see Dad anymore? I don’t say any of that. I just think it.

“Yeah, well. Kids are disappearing, but our parents still have to go to their shitty jobs,” Brendan says. Is that the Triangle talking, or my bully? I don’t know, and there’s a third option I’m almost afraid to even think, but there it is. Brendan might actually be talking as my friend.

“Until today, I thought that Coyote Rise kids were immune to the West Topeka Triangle. That it didn’t want us. But Kim . . .”

“Kim Davidson. Damn.” Brendan blows air out of his cheeks in a lazy attempt at a whistle. “What a hottie. I can’t believe she’s gone, but you know she wasn’t going to be part of the Coyote pack anymore.”

“No.” I blink. “What do you mean?”

“Kim was moving to Kansas City with her mom. She got out early on parole. Didn’t you hear? I guess nobody really talks to you at school, so why would you know that?”

I try not to wince, but I don’t do a very good job of it. His bedside phone rings, saving me his half-hearted apologies. Brendan answers and talks to someone I eventually realize is his mom. I’ve never heard Brendan mention a dad, and there’s a rumor at school that his mother was raped and Brendan doesn’t have a real dad at all. That made an evil sort of sense to me before today. Now I feel terrible for believing it.

“Okay. I’ll microwave a Hot Pocket. Yeah—he’s still here. Okay, I will. Bye.” He hung up the phone. “Mom says to ask if you want to have dinner. She’s going to be home late.” I look at the cat-shaped wall clock and realize the time. Bill is going to be furious if I don’t get home now.

“Thanks, but I can’t. I better go.”

“Hey, want to walk to school together tomorrow? We can talk about what to do about the Triangle.”

Do? Do what? I was curious what he thought we could ever do about any of it. “Sure.” I let myself out, screen door slamming behind me as I take off at a run.

Bill gives me a mean glare when I come in, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s already watching Wheel of Fortune, so I won’t have his attention for a while. I go up to my room, which I share with my little brother. He’s under the covers sniffling. I feel bad; whenever I’m not around, Bill takes out his anger on Gnat. I drop off my bag, pat Gnat on the shoulder for a moment, then head downstairs as Mom walks in the door.

She gives me a distracted kiss on the forehead and asks me about my day. She’s already in the kitchen before I can muster up the kind of answer she wants to hear.

“I’m really sorry to hear about your friend Kim, honey,” she says, placing a large pot of water on the stove. She tears open a box of spaghetti noodles and stares into the water. I want to tell her it’ll never boil that way.

“She wasn’t my friend. Not really,” I say. Mom thinks everybody in the complex is my friend, no matter how many times I correct her.

“I think Brendan might be, though.”

Her eyes widen, and she smiles. She looks happier than I’ve seen her in a long time.

“That’s great, honey.”

“We hung out after school.” I feel embarrassed for not telling her about the fight, but I know she has enough worry about with her receptionist job where the doctors are really demanding.

“Go tell your brother and sister dinner will be ready in ten minutes,” she says. I do as I’m told. By the time we’re all seated at the table, she’s done microwaving the sauce. I pop in a couple of slices of bread to make garlic toast while she sets the table.

Bill walks in and throws his third can of beer in the trash. He takes a seat at the head of the table where Dad used to sit. I can just barely remember what it was like before the divorce. Gnat was too young and can’t remember at all. Sissy might, but we never talk about it, so I don’t know. Anyway, Bill treats Sissy a lot better than Gnat and I. Better even than Mom.

We get through another beer before Bill starts in. Gnat had left a toy on the stairs the night before, and Bill had almost slipped and broken his neck on his way to work in the morning. Didn’t we know how good we had it, and shouldn’t we show him some goddamned respect for working so hard to provide for us when we weren’t even his flesh and blood?

Tonight I don’t want to be the nail that sticks up. I want keep my mouth shut and wonder at the injustice of a universe that doesn’t make people like Bill disappear and instead targets golden-haired girls like Kim Davidson.

I hear myself talking, but I swear the words don’t come from me. “If you hurt Gnat again, I will kill you. I will stab you to death in your sleep.”

My mother gasps. Bill roars, stumbles onto his feet, and the chair goes crashing backwards behind him to the kitchen linoleum. “What did you just say?”

I say it again. I say it a third time, only this time my lips are moving and I feel like I’m echoing the voice of someone else.

My mother stands his chair up, and Bill falls back into his chair at the head of the table. He’s gone pale. He doesn’t say anything. Nobody says anything, but there’s a humming in the air that I can feel in my teeth. Then I feel an electrical, snapping sensation; everyone relaxes—the scowls and frightened glances go smooth.

The Triangle has reasserted itself. Bill takes another drink of beer. My mother dishes up another helping to Gnat. I excuse myself and go to my room.

I read in my top bunk bed, close enough to the popcorn ceiling that I can reach out and make it snow if I want. Right now, I’m working on the Mystic Places book in the Time-Life Series of the Unknown that they’re always selling on TV. I got mine for twenty-five cents at a garage sale. I’ve read it three times already, but I’m trying to figure out if the sides of the Triangle might be ley lines, related somehow to the Pyramids or maybe even Stonehenge.

I only read a few pages before I fall asleep. I dream about a world covered in interlocking triangles, lines of power running from mystic place to place of ancient power. Swirling vortices form within them, sucking up boats, airplanes, children, animals, everything, a world dotted with growing black holes with endless hunger. They inhale until nothing is left, until the plants and animals are gone, and the world is a barren rock, and then that goes next. The planet gone, the Triangles somehow still remaining. It looks in my mind kind of like that thing in another of my books, a Dyson sphere. And then it too is gone, a Big Bang in reverse.

• • • •

“We have to test the theory. What do you call it?” Brendan asks as we walk. All I can think about is the cold morning air on my sides where there are holes in my thrift store coat.

“What? Oh. An experiment?”

“Exactly. We need to do an experiment.” He jumps across the dry creek bed. “You know about science and stuff, right? How do you do one?”

“I think we have to pick a variable and change it and measure the results. And, uh, then we change the theory based on that.” I have an old textbook somewhere in my closet that explains it better. I make a note to read it after school.

When we get to the cul-de-sac, the D&D middle school kids are standing in a driveway sharing a cigarette. Only Todd and Bend of them are wearing coats; Jerry and Wheeze are shivering in their Metallica and Iron Maiden shirts.

“Hey, runt,” Todd the dungeon master says, pointing the cigarette at me. “You hanging out with fattie now?”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anything. I shrug. I expect Brendan to say something, to defend himself. He never backs down to kids our age, but now he walks past me and continues toward school. My face burns with, what? Embarrassment? Shame. Older kids always make me flustered. They operate by rules of behavior I don’t understand any better than the ones adults do.

“Heh, guess not,” Jerry the fighter player said. Jerry likes me best of the four of them; he lives down the street in Coyote Rise, too. “Doesn’t that kid pick on you all the time?”

I nod. “I kind of beat him up yesterday.”

“And now he wants to be your friend? That’s fuckin’ pathetic.” Todd laughs. “We’re gonna cut class and explore the sewers under the park. I wanna try to summon a demon again, too.” He patted his backpack. “I even remembered to steal my mom’s flashlight this time. Want to come?”

“Technically, they’re storm drains,” Wheeze the wizard says. “Anybody got another cig?”

“No, dude, he’s in grade school. He’ll get in deep shit if he doesn’t go to school,” Jerry says.

“Yeah,” says Ben, the thief in real life and the game. Everybody knows he shoplifts all the time, mostly because he’s always talking about it. “With all the disappearances, they’ll have the cops after us by lunch.”

“Go on to school,” Wheeze managed to say before breaking out in his trademark cough. “Come by the basement after. We’re going to try that new Ravenloft module.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good luck in the sewers.” I run to catch up with Brendan, but I can’t find him anywhere along the route. I double back twice, thinking maybe I just missed him. I try not to think it. I look as long as I can, but I know I can’t be late. I can’t risk getting in trouble two days in a row. Even Mr. Howard has his limits.

I get inside the gym just before the bell rings, and only just catch Brendan slipping out into the hall. I call his name, but he doesn’t answer me. I tell myself it’s just because it’s so loud in the gym.

• • • •

Today’s vocabulary words are:

BETRAYAL
INDIGNATION
REMORSE
DETERIORATE
LOATHE

I know them, too.

• • • •

“Sorry about earlier,” I tell him. Brendan is showing me where the hidden warp pipes are in Super Mario. I really like his bedroom. I wonder how many years of allowance I would need to save up to buy my own TV and Nintendo. Not that Bill would let me anyway.

“Are those teenagers your friends?”

“Most of them don’t like me. I think they feel sorry for me, so they let me play D&D with them,” I say. I feel a little guilty for not going over like they asked. As the party cleric, I know they need me to survive combat. They may not like me very much, but they like my healing spells in the heat of battle well enough.

“That’s cool,” he says. “D&D seems pretty gay to me. Pretending to be wizards and shit? Video games are more fun.”

“I guess.”

Neither of us says anything for a while. We don’t take our eyes off the screens. The pixel plumber on the screen ducks down into a pipe and disappears. Weird symbols fill up the screen.

“God damn it,” Brendan says. He yanks the cartridge out and blows in it, then returns it to the machine. When it turns it back on, it still doesn’t work. I stare at the symbols for a long time. Wondering what the Triangle is trying to say. Is it ancient Atlantean? Or maybe just Japanese.

“Stupid thing always breaks at the worst time. Sorry.”

“I should get home,” I say. “I want to plan our experiment.”

“I’m going to call the Nintendo hotline and yell at them until they send me a new game,” Brendan says, red-faced and sweaty. I let myself out as he dials the number, apparently from memory, and begins yelling.

• • • •

I lay in bed that night unable to sleep. Unable to think of a variable to test in my experiment. The only idea I have is that I should become as normal as possible. Become the nail that doesn’t stick up in any way. Become, somehow, what the Triangle wants. And if it takes me, then I will know for sure that I was right all along.

A while ago, I would have liked that. But now, I don’t; not really. I need something else.

My bedroom curtains light up suddenly, someone shining a flashlight on them from down at ground level. The D&D kids sometimes sneak out to shoplift. They like to take me along because I’m good at distracting the clerk. I go along because I’m afraid Todd will kill off my level six cleric if I don’t. And I don’t do anything illegal myself. Not really.

I put on some clothes, slip on my coat, and sneak downstairs. I go out the basement door, far enough below the master bedroom that I won’t wake Bill or Mom. Jerry’s waiting for me on the patio.

“Hey, Jason,” he says. “We’re making a cigarettes and Playboy run at the Kwik Shop. Coming?”

“Okay,” I say.

The Kwik Shop is a couple of miles away. It’s a long walk, especially because they stop to vandalize stuff along the way. In another apartment complex, Wheeze shows how you can punch the plastic globes on the street lamps and take them off. Wheeze pretends to be a trooper from Spaceballs for a while before kicking it like a soccer ball into an empty lot.

Halfway there, I get a funny feeling, that tension in the air again. Todd whispers, “Someone’s following us.” I look over my shoulder, and I make out the silhouette of a large car rolling down the street toward us, all their lights turned off.

“Don’t look,” Jerry hisses. I turn back. We keep walking.

“Why would someone follow us like that?” I ask.

“Run for it, “ Wheeze yells. They take off in different directions into the shadows. I can’t move my legs. I can’t move at all.

The Triangle has me now. I gasp for air. My mouth fills with the sting of salt.

The car rolls to a stop beside the sidewalk where I’m stuck. The passenger side window cranks down. I look, and in the dark, the face seems almost familiar.

“Hey,” a man’s voice calls out. The dash suddenly lights up as he turns on his emergency lights. I can see Mr. Howard. “What are you doing out here this late, Jason?”

I attempt a shrug.

“Get in the car and I’ll drive you home.” He smiles.

I still can’t move. I can’t talk. I’m drowning in something, I think.

Mr. Howard’s face shifts. I’ve never seen him so angry. He snarls, “I said get in the car!”

“They told us not to,” I manage at a whisper.

“I’m not a stranger, am I?”

The hum is everywhere around me. I feel like I am going to break into a thousand pieces, and I cannot move. The hum builds like the crescendo at the end of “Stairway to Heaven.” I know somehow that I am about to die, and I am okay with it. I’m ready for all of the misery to be over now. I give in to it.

For a moment, the world is silent; I imagine it sounded like this before the Big Bang, before anything. Time and space skip.

Behind us, the siren of a police car wails in two short bursts, and suddenly the street around me is painted red and blue. Mr. Howard’s face goes blank, neutral.

I can move now, but it’s too late. The cop yells at me to stay where I am. I turn around and I hold my hands in the air so they know I’m harmless like they do on TV. The cop on the passenger side gets out and walks towards me while the driver talks on the radio inside his car. It’s Officer Dan.

He tells me not to move, and walks over to Mr. Howard’s car. They talk in low voices for a while, pointing at me, but I can’t tell what they are saying. All I can think about is what Bill is going to do to me when they call home. I hear the phrase “Neighborhood Watch.” I guess that’s why Mr. Howard is out driving around late at night.

Officer Dan waves at Mr. Howard, and he drives away slowly. For a moment in the light of the headlights, I see Jerry hiding in the bushes on the other side of the street. He sees me see him, and shakes his head, then crawls back out of sight.

Officer Dan asks me a lot of questions. Why am I breaking curfew? Where are the other kids? I tell him I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all.

“We’ve called your parents. Your dad is on his way to pick you up.”

“My dad?” I ask. “Are you sure?” Officer Dan doesn’t answer, but instead lectures me on how dangerous it is for me to be out, that the other kids I had been with weren’t my friends. He talks until my dad arrives behind the wheel of his beat-up El Camino. He’s wearing his pink bathrobe and not much else. He gives me his sternest look, but there’s no heat in it. “Get in the car while I talk to the officer,” he says. I do what I’m told.

“Damndest thing,” Officer Dan says. “I could have sworn we were six blocks over, but I must have gotten turned around in the dark.”

They talk for a few more moments, but I don’t listen. I’m busy knotting myself in worry. Dad shakes Officer Dan’s hand, then gets in beside me. We sit parked on the street in the dark while Dad lights a cigarette. He doesn’t say anything until it’s gone, and lights another one.

“You sneak out a lot?” he asks. “I’m guessing with those juvenile delinquents. The ones you play that game with?”

“Not really,” I say. “Yeah. I won’t do it again. Ever.” I start to cry, but Dad laughs. The sound is so surprising that my tears dry up. It’s warm, not angry. I realize how long it’s been since I heard that laugh of his. Before my parents split up.

“I don’t care if you do it again. Just don’t get caught, and don’t get me up on a work night to come get you,” he says. “I’ll drop you off home, but don’t fuckin’ tell your mom about any of this. She’ll have a stroke.”

“Okay.”

“You’re lucky I went to high school with Dan Burtowski.”

It’s a short drive back to Coyote Rise. I want to ask Dad all kinds of questions. Why hasn’t he come to get us for the weekends lately? Why isn’t he mad at me for breaking the rules? I just think them. I don’t ask them.

“Don’t slam the door when you get out. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Thanks, Dad.” I don’t ask when. I don’t want to hear him lie tonight.

He sighs. “It’s okay. I was your age not very long ago. I still remember . . . anyway. Night.” He drives off. I sneak back inside. I can’t even tell how long it takes me to go to sleep.

• • • •

In the morning, the complex is blanketed in a thick fog. I wake just in time to hear Mom at the door calling out to me from downstairs.

“Be careful today! There’s supposed to be freezing rain later. Call your grandma for a ride if it starts up, okay?”

“Okay!” I lie. No way would any of us call Grandma for a ride. She makes us feel guilty the whole way, even in the worst weather, and complains about everything all the time. It’s better to walk, even if it gets a little slippery.

I make sure Sissy and Gnat are up and moving. I have a fistful of dry cereal and a glass of milk, grab my bag, and walk to Brendan’s building. I figure he won’t be there, or the old Brendan will come back and he’ll be waiting to taunt me. But he’s waiting on his stoop. He smiles when he sees me and bounces up onto his feet.

“Isn’t this fog fucking awesome?” We begin to walk towards school in the white-out world. I worry for a moment that I might get lost, but our feet know the way.

“Brendan?” I ask as we cross the dry creek.

“Yeah?”

“Are we friends now?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. I can barely see him in the mist. “Do you want to be friends?”

Do I? I think so, but I’m not sure. “Yeah,” I say. “You?”

“Yeah, okay. This doesn’t mean I’m going to go easier on you when you’re being a dork, though.”

In a way, that’s a relief. “Okay.”

We continue walking. Past the pond, the fog is even heavier. The world is quiet. No ducks, no bird song. No cars on the freeway in the distance. Just the sound of dry leaves and grass beneath our feet.

Up the hill, past the cul-de-sac.

“Did you come up with an experiment?” He asks.

“Ah . . . not really,” I say. I want to tell him about last night. But I’m afraid what will happen to him if I do.

“I don’t think it matters if we know about the Triangle,” he says. “I think you’re right. It does something to parents. Nobody will ever listen. I told my mom about it and she just laughed and shook her head. Told me to stop listening to your crazy stories.”

“Oh.”

“She doesn’t have the energy to care about anything by the time she comes home. She just tells me to be careful and goes to work. They all do, I bet. When I grow up, I’m not going to have a real job. I’m going to work for the Nintendo Help Line.”

“What about . . . your dad?”

He laughs that kind of laugh when you think something should be funny but you know it isn’t. I laugh it all the time. “My dad left when I was a baby. Nobody knows where he went. Maybe he went into the Triangle and never came back.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe that’s where everything goes when it goes away.”

Down the nice streets with the houses now. We don’t talk anymore. The air seems to swallow up all sounds. We reach the fence at the edge of the fields that surround the school. The school is erased from the world by a grey smudge of fallen sky. We are the only people in our pocket of world.

“I can’t see anything,” he says.

I squint, then feel dumb for having done so. I can’t be sure where the sky ends and the ground begins. I know the sun is up, but I cannot tell where it is. Was this what the pilots of Flight 19 felt like?

“Do you think the school’s still there?” Brendan asks. His voice sounds distant to me, like someone shouting through a storm drain.

I’m afraid, but I don’t know what I am afraid of most: that the school is there and obscured by fog, or that it’s vanished into the Triangle, taking our teachers, Mr. Howard, the school library, almost everything in my life, good and bad. I’m afraid to know if it’s all gone, or if I am.

It feels good to be afraid. It feels good to feel like I have something worth losing.

I begin to run. I don’t know if I am running forwards or backwards; towards or away. I run for what seems like a very long time, Brendan trailing behind me.

©2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Seeds of Change, Federations, and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

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

Nine

Kima Jones | 6540 words

1902
Phoenix, Arizona

FRIDAY

Tanner named the motel Star Motel because calling the place North Star Motel would’ve been asking for it. Colored folks recognized that “star” and the little lights Jessie insisted they burn in the windows. Most of their customers were hungry, travel-weary young men who did not believe the VACANCY sign as they approached the motel and did not believe that Tanner, round as a dishpan, wide as the door, was its owner. None of them had the nerve to ask her if she was a man or a woman, but she saw their longways looks anytime she entered a room. They never stayed more than a night or two and spent most of that time asleep. Tanner checked them in at $1.25 a night on weekdays and $2.00 on weekends. She never shamed anyone for not having the full fee and would accept three quarters and a “thank you kindly.”

“Get up, Tanner, sounds like the iceman is here. Last time he didn’t ring the bell and most of the ice melted all over the porch. We don’t have money to waste, and I can’t stretch half a block of ice for a whole week.” Jessie was sitting up in bed, her breasts and collarbone soaking in the day’s first light. “I said go on and get the ice. The Campbells are checking out this morning, and Flo needs to get breakfast out to them by nine.”

“If you run me out this bed one more time, woman, you’re going to know it.”

“Ain’t nobody running you, just go get the ice. You can come back to bed after. Oh, and feed Rinny!”

Tanner knew Jessie was lying, but she got out of the bed anyway. By the time Tanner got the ice into the icebox and came back to their bedroom, Jessie would be halfway dressed, talking about the ledgers and dividing the day’s work between them. Best to go get the ice and start the day.

The ice was melting by the time Tanner reached the porch, but not enough to make Jessie have a fit. The iceman slipped everybody’s blocks into their iceboxes. Except for colored people. He left their ice sitting outside, anywhere, in dirt or sand or on a dusty porch. Tanner poured hot water down the block and quickly lifted it inside of the wooden box. Didn’t make no sense to tip the iceman but Jessie tipped him every delivery. “He don’t have to come out here, Tanner. Ain’t like we can leave to go into town and get it,” she would say.

Tanner headed back into the house and to the bedroom she shared with Jessie. “Mr. Campbell say what time they’d be heading out?” Jessie stood wearing a white blouse and ankle length skirt, her brown leather ankle booties tied tightly. “He wants an early start on the road. Almost fifteen hundred miles between here and Seattle. He thinks they could be there by this time tomorrow.”

Tanner grunted. Could be. She tried to talk more sense into Mr. Campbell the night before, but he was determined to make it his way. Tanner thought it would be better for them to stop somewhere in California for a few days and then head back to the road. Maybe leave his wife and newborn in San Francisco for a week or two and then send for them later. But Campbell wouldn’t hear of it. Said he was driving straight through, driving even if his eyeballs went bloodshot and burst through his head. “Give me the rundown, baby,” Tanner said to Jessie as she pulled her work trousers over her belly and bent to cuff them.

“Did you feed Rinny?”

“Yes, I fed Rinny, now give me the rundown.”

“Well, Campbell’s checking out this morning. That’ll leave us empty for the weekend, which is good because we’re sure to fill up the singles.” Tanner nodded. Single people always ran off the job on Fridays, soon as the boss paid them. By Monday morning, they were long gone and so far on their way north or west it didn’t make sense to send Klan after their families. They were just gone. “Flo is getting started on the weekend menu, and I’m waiting for a cigarette delivery and the bread delivery. Me and Flo will get the parlor ready for this evening. I’ll air out the singles and Newt will sweep them. All you need to do is change the oil on the Campbells’ car and check the tires and whatnot. Maybe wash down the sides of the house.”

The house was peach-colored with a brown roof and sat a quarter of a mile from the highway. Travellers could see the Star’s marquee from the road whether on foot or automobile. The marquee was its own detached, two-pronged structure painted in mint green and white and lit up every night at 9:00 p.m. The house’s front room served as the motel’s lobby, stripped of all furniture save an upright and uncomfortable sofa, two wing chairs, a wall clock, and a small lobby desk with a silver bell. Tanner kept a wide black leather barstool behind the desk to sit on when her knee acted up. All other times, she preferred to greet her guests standing. The single rooms stood in a row of six to the left of the house. The doubles, another six, off to the right. The only formal place for colored folks to stay headed west on the lonely, desert highway.

It was Flo who came up with the idea of having jook nights on Fridays for the locals and travellers alike. Black folks were starting to stay in Phoenix to make a home and needed a place to go on the weekends. Friday nights at the Star Motel were for card playing, thigh slapping, and smoky mingling. Tanner hated the idea at first. She needed to keep her family safe and didn’t want all of colored Phoenix in their parlor room on Friday nights, but the women were lonely. Flo complained of never having company and Jessie didn’t have to open her mouth for Tanner to know she was cross about it all.

Flo was one of Tanner’s first guests. Flo arrived with a belly brimming over its due date. Tanner knew the kinds of things that would make a woman run, pregnant and all, out of the swamps of Florida. They never spoke about it or how Flo found the place. She was flat out with her intentions when she checked in that night. “I can cook. If you let me stay on until my baby big enough, I’ll be your cook. I used to cook lunches for the orange pickers and deliver them in my truck. I can cook anything, and I can kill anything.” After Flora went into labor, she named the boy Newt, half because Tanner slipped on birth water running over trying to catch him out of the birth canal and half because he kind of looked like one.

Jook night at Star Motel started at nine o’clock, but folks trickled in around ten thirty. It gave Flora and Jessie time to change, time to tuck Newt in, time to perfume behind the neck, time to cast their muscled legs in nylon. The women always wore all black, including Tanner. That was the rule, everybody in something bright. Other rule was no outside food and no outside liquor. Tanner played the doorman and Jessie worked the bar. Flo managed the kitchen, bringing plates out to the cards players and collecting tips in her bosom. Flo wore a deep, matte red lipstick but kept her fingernails short and bare. “Can’t cook with that shit on my hands,” she’d say and wink at whatever woman was questioning her manicure. The manicure-questioning woman always knew Flo’s reputation: She could outlast a man, she took her time, she could cook, and she didn’t lie. Flo was thickset, with an impressively square jaw and roundish eyes. She openly bedded other women; the few nights a month she spent with Tanner were in one of the single rooms.

Tanner stood at the front door of the house, on the porch, collecting the dollar fee it cost to get in. “Order your plates with Flo,” she said, “All plates from Miss Flora. All booze from Jessie.” The parlor was lit just enough to see a card hand but barely enough to see if you were putting your fork in meat or vegetables. As soon as the brass band started up, Jessie rattled her tambourine. She bounced it off of her hip and then smacked it into her open hand. Her feet moved in time, and her hair wagged back and forth on her head with every tambourine slap. They would bring in an easy three or four hundred dollars between the food and hootch and card games. They split the income evenly and saved for their future plans. Jessie was going to Los Angeles, Miss Flora was sending Newt to Howard, and Tanner would open another motel.

Hours of dancing passed on top of hours of drinking and the night winded down. Couples were filing out on foot, holding each other up. Tanner walked over to each spades and craps table and announced that it was closing time in ten minutes. “Last bets for the night. Make them count.” A hand reached out for Tanner’s and caught her at the wrist. Tanner looked down at her hand and over to the arm holding hers. “Can I help you with something, sir?” She was used to the belligerent drunk from time to time and escorted them to the front yard to sober up. Come morning, they’d be gone and ashamed. This man’s front tooth was as gold as his watch, and he smiled big as payday, not a whiff of alcohol on him. His suit was a butter yellow and his white shoes were unscuffed. There was no dust on them either. He was a good foot and a half taller than Tanner and his reach, she estimated, twice that of hers. “I think maybe you can help me, ma’am. I’m looking for a missing person. Any information you could fetch me would sure be a nice gesture on the part of you and yours. Name is Tanner Harris, wanted dead or alive. Ring any bells for you, ma’am?” The man’s grin faded as he whispered through his teeth, “Maybe you want to be clearing the party on out of here so we can settle this. You got a debt to pay, girl.”

Flora, never missing a thing, hit the lights. “All right now, y’all heard Tanner. Jook’s closed. Next week, same time, same place.” She moved from table to table, pointing folks to the way out. Some of the drunk ones begged a dance from her, and she chided them, “Go on, now. Go on, I said.” The last patrons bid farewell to Jessie and promised to be back. Jessie thanked them for coming and walked them to the front porch. Tanner stayed in the parlor with the gold-toothed man. When Jessie returned to the parlor, Flora headed in a quick scramble for the kitchen door. “Come on over here and take a seat,” the gold-toothed man said. He kept his hand wrapped tightly around Tanner’s wrist and had a smile on his face as she sat. Flora returned to the parlor with a gun pointed at the back of her head. The man had not come alone. His companion was thin, with a face slender as toilet plumbing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and nudged Flora forward with the gun. “This one here was reaching for this gun, boss.” The gold-toothed man looked over at Flora and smiled at Tanner. “Tanner love a talented woman, don’t you, Tanner? I’ll be damned. I come to talk to you and your girlfriend here want to shoot me down.”

The gold-toothed man let go of Tanner’s wrist and draped an arm around her shoulders. Tanner looked over to Flo, but she ignored the gaze. Flo pushed back on the mouth of the gun, putting weight on her captor’s arm. Jessie was still sitting at a table, weaponless and remote. Jessie was good at disappearing inside of herself. The gold-toothed man cleared his throat, making a show of himself. “Seems to me like we have us a problem here. See, I only need Tanner, but it don’t seem like you girls gonna let me leave here with what I need. Second problem is I know either one or two of you bitches helped this fat nigger kill off all my brothers. I’m no adding man, but that’s simple enough math to me.” Droplets of sweat populated his upper lip as he talked. “Except Maud can count and do. Eight dead boys divided by three living niggers ain’t enough change at all.”

“Speak plain, if you come to speak. Kill if you come to kill,” Jessie blurted at the man.

“I’ll be damned, Tanner. I thought that other one was a robust woman, but this one here, this one got some nerve, don’t she?” The man turned his full attention to Jessie. “You want it plain, country girl? I’ll give it to you plain, baby. Name’s Glenn, Maud’s baby boy, and I come to collect this here debt. You see, girl, dead don’t scare Maud because Maud been dead, but she lonely something awful. Now Tanner here, and you bitches, the two of you, end up killing every messenger she sends. That ain’t right. Maud took her time when she made her sons. Took her time when she found Tanner, too. You know what taking time is, country girl? Let me spell it out for you. Eight niggers minus three niggers is five and you going to pay that five out in lifetimes. With Maud. Maud’ll like you. She’ll like your big girlfriend over there, too.”

“I never did nothing to Maud,” Jessie said.

“You call killing eight grown children nothing? If that’s nothing, I sure would like to see what you call something,” Glenn said.

“Maud’s the one doing it. She already done cursed us. Why she keep sending her sons to kill us?”

“That don’t have much to do with me. I come for Tanner, and I come for Tanner’s women keep helping Tanner. That’s all.”

Peanuts shot into the air like fireworks following a parade. Flora had picked up a tray full of them and smashed it against the head of her captor. His face burned down to the bone and revealed rat’s teeth. Jessie ran toward Flora, and Tanner booted Maud’s boy with the flat of her shoe. “Salt, Jessie, Salt!” Tanner screamed out. Jessie hit Flora’s captor with another tray of bar nuts. Flora held the man’s head and snapping jaw in the crook of her arm as Jessie threw every salty thing she could find. The man’s arms and legs flailed about. He snapped his jaw at Jessie’s torso until he melted into the creases of Flora’s black dress, blue and red clumps of him exploding down her front, into her patent heels. The women were so busy they didn’t hear the shot. Didn’t see Glenn’s body slumped at Tanner’s feet or see the blood trickling from his nose and into the wood floor.

“Flora, how’d you know that wasn’t no real man?”

“When I went into the kitchen to get the gun, he was eating Rinny.”

“Eating him?”

“That’s what I said.”

“The dog?”

“Only one, unless you know another.”

SATURDAY

Tanner looked at the dead man on the floor, turning the bottle opener over in her hands. She listened to Jessie opening then slamming drawers for a sheet to wrap the body in and knew that, even in distress, Jessie would not waste a good sheet on a dead man. Tanner listened to the sound of the whiskey cabinet’s old latch and heard the shuffle of glasses sliding onto the bar. Jessie poured faster than usual and Tanner half-smiled when she gulped. Tanner liked to see Jessie throw her head back and down a drink. Jessie was no wine woman. “Want one?” Jessie asked. Tanner looked at the dead man again, figuring out how long it would take to strip him down, bleed him and bury him. “Set me up,” she whispered back, letting the back of her shaved head cool on the wall behind her.

Jessie came from behind the bar holding Tanner’s drink in her right hand and a ragged sheet draped across her left arm. Her hair, usually mussed about her shoulders, was braided into a single rope, doubled over itself and secured with a rubber band. “You can’t keep killing these boys and expecting they won’t come back bigger and badder,” Jessie said. His was the ninth body on the floor in almost five years.

“You’d think they’d stop coming after me by now, Jessie. I’m trying to live good on this place here. I didn’t send for them, they come for me. You’d think Maud’d be tired of sending her boys to slaughter by now.” Tanner held the drink in hand but didn’t sip from it. Maud only had nine boys, just nine of them. If she could get this one buried by nightfall, she would be rid of Maud for good. “We need to get a move on it, baby. You know sundown comes quicker than a fly to shit.”

Jessie fixed the sheet around the dead man’s body, tucking its ends beneath him. She stood up to get salt and licorice root for his ears and mouth and backside. “He’s stinking already. We got to plug him up.”

“Can’t plug him until he’s bled through and through,” Tanner said, “this ain’t a time to be skipping steps. You know the way it’s got to be done.”

Jessie stared at Tanner as if to cut her down. “I didn’t leave Georgia to get caught up in this mess you got yourself into with Maud. And now I’m trapped, just like Flo and just like Newt. You got me here plugging up dead bodies because you couldn’t tell your last woman goodbye the right way. Now I’ll never get to California. It ain’t no more safe for me here in Phoenix burying Maud’s sons than it was in Georgia. At least in Georgia I could walk off the land when I wanted to.”

Tanner didn’t shush her. Didn’t make sense to. It was all true. Tanner left Maud one morning without so much as packing a bag. She left on foot, the weight of travel and her body at times too much for her knee. She stopped every few days in a field or under a tree to wash herself and rest up. Sometimes she found a rabbit, other times she ate nothing. She laid her suit out in the sun to dry and napped, naked, through afternoons too hot to travel. She chewed leaves of mint and packed them under her arms to keep her dry. When she could hop a train car she did and shared liquor with the men aboard. Men with names like Willie and Richard and Bartholomew and with pasts as unspeakable as her own. Most of them were going north or west. Most of them had left women behind, too. And kids to send back for. No one was lucky enough to ride one train all the way out, but no one was willing to hop off before getting into Arkansas. Some piled out in northern Texas and others in New Mexico. None of the men bothered her because none of them knew she was a woman. Her breasts were no larger than the chest of a very stout man. She wore her hair shaved close to her scalp and carried a handkerchief to wipe sweat from it. She kept a pair of socks stuffed down her shorts and listened as the other men chortled through stories of close encounters with another man’s wife. She told her own stories of being ran out of a house and marked for death. When she spoke, the gap between her two front teeth seemed to grow and swallow her audience. The soft flap of gum that hung there was the most delicate thing about her. By the time she walked from New Mexico to Phoenix, her knee had doubled in size and her cane was about ready to give up the ghost. She settled on a little abandoned ranch and in a year converted it into a motel for colored people traveling west. Out of the south, Lord knows.

It took Maud almost as long to find her and send the first boy. That first one wasn’t sent over to kill Tanner so much as he was sent to tie her there. Maud’s juju kept Tanner bound to the place. She could go anywhere on the property, but she could not leave. The first time Tanner tried to leave the motel, she learned what it was to die and come back. The juju allowed her to walk off but every step took a little bit of her life force from her. Walking off the motel property meant dying. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to and, by extension, anyone she loved couldn’t leave either. That meant Jessie. It meant Flora. It meant Newt. Maud was holding them hostage until she was ready for them all. Most Tanner could do, the most she asked her family to do, was make the best life they could. “Ain’t no such thing as life with both feet tied,” Jessie would say, “no such thing.”

Flo came down the stairs with Newt in hand, not bothering to shield the child’s eyes in any way. “The two of you can keep the hollering down because some of us need to sleep before folks start ringing on the bell tonight,” Flo said, stepping over the dead man. “What’s taking y’all so long to get this one in the ground? He the last one, ain’t he?” Jessie waited for Tanner to answer and continued to work on the body.

“Well, Miss Flora, we need to get him outside and my knee is in no good condition today. Can’t bleed him in here, on the wood floor, but Jessie done washed him down with turpentine soap. If you could help get the body out back, I’d be mighty obliged, ma’am.” Tanner’s grin spread across her face when she said ma’am and tipped her head toward Flo.

Flora kicked up at Tanner, “Just shut the hell up and get the hell on before I change my damn mind. Least you could do is grab the stretcher out the back for me and Jessie, or we got to do that too?”

Newt ran from his mother’s side to follow behind Tanner and held the screen door open as Tanner came up the back steps with the canvas and wooden pole contraption. Tanner held out her hand to the boy, and he slapped her five. “Thought I told you not to come out on this back porch without any shoes on, boy. I gotta start repeating myself around here?”

“No, Uncle Tanner,” Newt said, running through the parlor, over the dead body and into the coat closet for his shoes.

Flo rolled the dead man on his side and slipped a new ragged sheet halfway under his body, then turned him back toward her so Jessie could get to the other side. With the sheet in place, they slid the body onto the stretcher and out into the yard. They left him atop a butcher block table like they had with his brothers. Tanner walked over with her knife in hand and made incisions in his neck, groin, and armpits. Newt placed buckets around the table where Tanner had made the cuts. They sat around the dead man and said nothing, Jessie sometimes looking at Tanner, Tanner sometimes looking at Jessie. “Maybe the bottom of his feet, too. This is taking too long,” Jessie said and Tanner walked over, knife and cane in hand, and bored a hole through the dead man’s arch.

“Ain’t nobody had breakfast yet,” Flo said, “no more courting the dead until we all eat. C’mon, Newt.”

Newt looked over to Tanner and waited for her to get up. “Mama said let’s eat, Uncle Tanner.”

Tanner smiled at the boy, “Tell Auntie Jessie that your mama said come and eat. I don’t think Auntie Jessie wants to come in the house. What you think, Newt?”

Newt shrugged his shoulders and smiled at Jessie. “Better come and eat before Mama gets mad at you, Aunt Jessie.” Newt pulled Jessie up off the ground playfully, making a show of his little muscles until Jessie laughed.

The three of them walked into the house as Flo set the table. “About time. Thought the dead man got up and walked away with all of you.”

SUNDAY

They got on good together, but Tanner never wanted any juju, not even for her knee. Most Maud could do was offer a poultice of steamed herbs or strong tea. Wasn’t church that kept Tanner away from juju. Maud thought maybe she was raised in the Christian way, but that wasn’t it, wasn’t it at all. It scared her. Tanner was plain scared of juju. Scared of going to bed with a locked knee and waking up to throw out her cane. Scared of having split teeth then the next minute all the spaces gone. Scared to know the hair on her head didn’t gray as long as she was with Maud, and her skin didn’t grow slack. Because Maud told Tanner that the only reason why her knee still hurt was so she wouldn’t have to hear no mess about juju, because she told Tanner that as long as she lived so would Tanner, Tanner walked down the road. Because Tanner wanted a natural death, she kept walking. Carried a little salt with her for all she learned and kept on walking.

“I think the best thing to do is send Newt on up the road,” Tanner said to the women. “If he drops, one of us can go fetch him. If the juju is broke for sure, he’ll make it past the general store. Then we’ll know for sure.” All four of them were up early. “If one of you go out, I’m not sure I could get you back to the house before the juju took your soul altogether. If I go out, the two of you can’t drag me back, and I’m dead for sure. Best thing is to send our boy because he’s light enough to run with. Plus somebody has to perform the rights over Glenn.” Jessie looked at Flora and so did Tanner. Newt was everybody’s child, but he was Flo’s boy. She would have to make the say. “Newt big enough to walk down the highway by himself. He’s been wanting to since he started walking,” Flo said, not trying to conceal her smile. “This going to be the first time he walked down the road. Four years old and the boy never walked down the road leading to his own house.”

Newt made it a quarter of a mile off the grounds before his calves lost their way and he slipped into the couch grass. Tanner stood watching, the NO VACANCY sign alit behind her like a solitary headlight. Tanner, leading her body with her left foot and then stepping with her right foot, walked out toward the boy. Every step was lighter than the last, the marrow in her bones being pulled away from her heart and out of her skin. It did not hurt, this dying, it was more like wrestling a witch off your back—involuntary paralysis of body but total control of mind. When she reached Newt he was supine, tufts of couch grass in his hands. He was holding on. Tanner dragged Newt back to the motel by his left leg, her cane eating through the soil. She left his body at the bottom of the porch steps, having dragged it as far as she could before collapsing just steps away.

“Why didn’t Newt make it, Flo?” Jessie asked. Her eyes were tired but no water fell from them. “This was supposed to be all over, but it ain’t. We going to die here and Maud coming to collect our souls.” The two women were crouched over the bodies of Newt and Tanner, pressing cold rags against their foreheads.

“I don’t know what’s doing, Jessie, but we need to get to that grave and move that man on to where he got to go next.” Flo looked down at her child, his loose pants and plaid buttoned shirt, his eyes flickering every few minutes. The blood running from his nose. He was fighting it. Soon his heart would start beating again and his color would return. Harder for children to come back from the dead after their soul’s been snatched from them. First time Miss Flora tried to leave the grounds, it felt like a pebble found its way into her shoe, snaked up her leg, and then went straight through her lungs. Wasn’t so much pain as it was surprise. Like someone snatched a piece of fruit from a tree inside her and kept snatching and snatching and instead of taking the last piece of fruit or letting it drop to the ground for harvest, they stood on their tiptoes, opened their mouth to the branch, and ate her seed and stem and all. Even after she came out of it and understood she couldn’t leave the grounds, Flo would still try every now and again, checking her shoe for the elusive pebble when she came to.

“I don’t understand why we have to ask a dead man to move on,” Jessie said. “Every time Maud sends one of her boys out here I end up standing up for them in her place. Don’t make no kind of sense.”

“What don’t make sense is that they can come back. That don’t make sense. Feels like sense to make sure a dead man is really dead to me.”

Jessie thought on it. “Well, what if somebody pulls up for a room and sees the two of them spread out here like this?”

“Nobody stopping for a room with two dead-looking niggers out front. Let’s go.” Flo and Jessie walked around to the back of the motel where hours before they threw a warm body into a new grave. They held hands and repeated the same words at the same time again and again. Leave from here. It’s safe to go. Leave from here. It’s safe to go. Leave from here. It’s safe to go. Their clasped hands looked like prayer, but their heads weren’t bowed and neither dared to close their eyes.

Tanner ascended the porch steps as the women returned. She opened her mouth to greet them, but her voice had not returned from the other side of life. Miss Flora bent down to scoop up Newt’s body, his bare feet dirtying the front of her trousers. She cradled his neck with her right hand and kissed his small face. “I better get you washed and put to bed, little baby,” she said into her son’s neck. Jessie rubbed Newt’s back as soon as Miss Flora got him close enough to touch. Tanner watched the boy’s dangling feet and thought of him as an infant, before he could walk. “We thought we lost you, boy, out there in that couch grass like that. C’mon back and come see us. We waiting for you, hear me, Newt? Mama here. Auntie Jessie here. Uncle Tanner right here. We’ll be right here when you wake up.”

Tanner stuck her free hand into Jessie’s hair, her other hand gripped around the porch railing. She massaged Jessie’s scalp while looking out to the road at passing cars. “Nobody dying just yet. We gotta get this place ready for guests. No bookings since the Campbells left.” The three of them had scrubbed the parlor shortly after they took Glenn out to bleed him, so that was one less thing to be done, but there was still food to be made, linens to take out, the porch needed mopping with boiled water and salt.

Miss Flora headed upstairs with Newt, while Tanner went to the backyard after the mop bucket and Jessie moved pots and pans around in the kitchen. Today was the largest supper day of the week. Folks expected a family meal on a Sunday evening. Even the man who grew up eating nothing except corn mush and butter expected a decent Sunday dinner on a Sunday afternoon. Jessie stacked her ingredients all over the countertop, opening a cabinet door and reaching for everything by memory; Flora kept a well-run kitchen with everything in its place. Jessie rubbed birds down with salt, paprika, sage, and black pepper and stuck white onions, garlic, and several carrots into the hole where their hearts used to beat.

Flo came downstairs and washed her hands so she could help Jessie. “Where’s Tanner?”

Jessie kept her hands and eyes on the dough she was kneading, “Tanner mopping the front down with salt water. How’s Newt? Sleep yet?”

“Newt’s fine. I rubbed him all over with rum and laid him on his side until his nose stops bleeding.”

“What nose-bleeding you talking about, Miss Flora?” Tanner asked, coming into the kitchen for more water. “Newt ain’t been having nosebleeds.”

“I thought it might be peculiar but then I figured he was having a tough time getting back from the other side. No fever, no sweats, but his nose is bleeding.”

“Out the nose, hunh?”

“Where else you bleed from, Tanner? Yes, out his nose.”

“Let’s all go check him. Jessie wash your hands good and grab the salt.”

Jessie and Flo turned to Tanner with widened eyes but nothing to say. Flo retraced the morning in her head: the four of them up early, deciding to send Newt down the road, feeling happy, Newt laid out in the couch grass, Tanner gone to get him, Tanner’s cane tip covered in dust, Newt’s skinny feet, Newt in the bathtub cradled in her arm the way she used to nurse him. His heartbeat returned, shallow. Nothing was different about the boy except the blood coming from his nose. And who doesn’t bleed a little coming back to life?

Tanner wiped her brow with the back of her hand and wiped the sweat from it on her pant leg. “I used to know a boy whose nose bled all the time. Boy was bumped up and bruised up all over his body. Lost a tooth and bled for two gotdamn weeks. Couldn’t go to school, couldn’t go out to play. Those kids with it bad like that don’t live past eleven, twelve.”

“With what, Tanner?” Jessie asked.

“Doctors called it hemophilia. I known it to be called bleeding. Just bleeding.”

“Bleeding? I never heard of no children bleeding, Tanner, where you get this mess from?” Jessie demanded.

Miss Flora interrupted Jessie’s question, her arms folded. “But what happened to the boy? What happened to the little boy you knew?”

“He died, Miss Flora, he died and every time he died, his mama brought him right back.” Tanner didn’t wait for her women to piece the puzzle of it together. “Glenn was Maud’s favorite boy. And her last.”

Jessie grabbed onto Tanner and Flo just stared. “You trying to tell me there’s a haint in my boy, Tanner? You trying to tell me the boy upstairs ain’t my own? Like I didn’t spend the last half hour washing his ass, you going to tell me that ain’t Newt up there?”

“Miss Flora, I’m not saying you wrong, I’m saying we should go check. Can we go check on the boy?”

“You want to go check on my boy with salt in your hands? That’s what you want to do?”

“I’m afraid so, Miss Flora.”

“Jess, you hear this woman? This woman climb in your bed and mines the same and now she talking about killing my son.”

“I ain’t talking about killing, Flo, I said let’s check him.”

“Checking sounding a lot like killing. Ain’t nobody killing my child but me. You got that? Only shot’ll be fired is mine.”

Tanner opened Newt’s bedroom door and found the boy sitting up in bed putting on his shoes, trickles of blood hanging from his nostrils. Jessie and Flo flanked Tanner’s sides, Jessie with a fistful of salt, Flo carrying a musket.

“Glenn, you got to leave this place,” Tanner said. The boy did not look up from lacing his shoes. “I said Glenn, you got to leave this place now.”

The boy looked at the trio, stood and walked toward them. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Uncle Tanner. I’m going to bring this body back to Maud like she told me.”

“What you say, haint?” Flora screamed at the boy, aiming the gun off-center.

Newt began to laugh. “So it is in life, so it is in death. Heard something you didn’t like, woman? I can’t call her Uncle Tanner no more? You didn’t like that?” The boy put one hand on his hip and continued, “Maud found a way to settle this here debt of Tanner’s. Nine sons for one. Nine boys for one boy. That’s the new math. All my brothers and me for Newt.”

Miss Flora let off a shot over the child’s shoulder. “You ain’t leaving here with my boy, haint.”

“I don’t think you got much of a choice, Flora, seeing as though your boy is dead. He died out there in the couch grass this morning. I’m just wearing him. He died a natural death. Tanner is a fan of that, those natural deaths. Your boy gone on, girl. You and your friend sent his soul off mighty right this morning. He dancing right now with the little colored niggers on the colored side of heaven. How you like that?”

The man-boy passed between Jessie and Tanner. Neither of them moved to stop him. The man-boy called out over his shoulder as he marched down the steps, “Your debt is clear. Nine sons and one son paid in full.” Then he twisted the door handle, walked off the porch, made it past the quarter of a mile mark where Newt had dropped dead that very morning and kept on going.

Miss Flora remained laid out on the floor like a pile of dirty clothes. Tanner sat on Newt’s bed. Jessie went downstairs first, salt in fist. The sun was high. She closed the front door hard, turned the VACANCY sign on and stood at the lobby desk, waiting.

©2014 by Kima Jones. Originally published in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Daniel José Older and Rose Fox. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kima Jones has received fellowships from PEN Center USA Emerging Voices, Kimbilio Fiction, Yaddo, and was named the 2014-2015 Gerald Freund Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. She has been published at Guernica, NPR, PANK, Scratch Magazine, and The Rumpus among others. Her short story “Nine” received notable mention in Best American Science Fiction. Kima is an MFA candidate in fiction and Rodney Jack Scholar in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a founding board member of Makara Center for the Arts.

Kima lives in Los Angeles where she operates Jack Jones Literary Arts, a book publicity company.

Awakening

Judith Berman | 17770 words

1

The nightmare began when, thinking someone had called out, she opened her eyes and saw the leathery face of a corpse as close to her as a lover’s. She started up with a cry, heart pounding, certain she would find herself in her bed with her own warm and living lover. But she found only bony hands tangled in her hair, and the smell of cold decay.

She tried to jump to her feet, but beneath her dead men were piled up layer on layer and she could get no purchase. Whimpering, she clawed her way toward the only door of the dim chamber. Bones snagged her skirts, skulls rolled under her hands. At last she reached the doorway and fled up the narrow stair into darkness—

Rubble blocked the stair. She dug at the loose stones, breaking all her nails; she pounded on them, screaming for help. She screamed until she had no more breath. No one came to let her out.

Panting, she slumped against the wall. It had to be a nightmare that she had been walled into a crypt. But what nightmare was like this, with cold grinding into her bones and the smell of the dead as thick in her throat as temple incense?

A corpse shifted on the pile and she spun in terror. But the sound was just the disturbed bodies settling back to equilibrium.

Or was it? She stifled another scream as a skull tumbled down the pile, rolled leering to a stop—

Trembling, hugging herself, she slid down to sit upon a stair. The corpses gazed back at her. It looked as if years had passed since they had been laid here. Only scraps of dried flesh adhered to their faces. Their swords were broken, their armor rusted, the quilted leather of their jackets had rotted to fragments like old leaves. They lay with arms out-flung and jaws agape, as if they had fallen in battle and been piled up before the first rigor of death passed off.

The dead lay still now, but as they stared at her, she became ever more certain that she did not imagine their restlessness.

They must, she thought suddenly, have been walled up to stop them walking.

An instant after that terrible realization, a much fiercer panic roared down on her.

Because why else would she have been buried with them?

She herself must be one of the dead, and only dreaming now that she woke alive.

But, but—

She tried to fling logic in the face of her terror: The restless dead could dream only of their former lives. She did not know this place.

And unlike the disconnected landscapes of dream, nothing changed in this crypt, not the blank stone walls, not the jumbled dead receding into shadow, not the pain from her broken nails or the gritty stone under her palms. Not the cold or the awful smell. How could she be dead and feel all that?

No, the dream had been that voice calling out to her, and now she was truly awake—whatever she had woken to.

She tried to calm her racing heartbeat and think. A powerful sorcerer, she had read—somewhere, some time—could create places beyond the Gate of the living world, necromantic tumors grown in the guts of the divine realm. That sort of place might not be governed by nature at all, but only by the sorcerer’s caprice.

But still—

If natural law ruled this tomb, she ought to wonder where the light came from. The illumination was scant, but sufficient to distinguish stone from sword and corpse from corpse. Where daylight found its way in, there ought to be a way out.

The dead faces stared. Finally she gathered the courage to descend back into the tangle of bodies.

At first she held her skirts close to her legs and stepped with panicky care onto shrunken limbs and brittle ribs, but soon, whimpering again from the awfulness of it, she was reduced once more to crawling over the dead men.

When she had gained the brightest part of the tomb, she did indeed find the source of the light. High over her head, a handful of stones had fallen from the vaulted ceiling.

She teetered on the corpses in despair, wondering if she could pile them high enough to reach that tiny glimmer—and wondering how long it would be before one of the dead woke up to clutch at her. Here in their midst, the bated restlessness was like snakes sliding on the soles of her feet.

Then something flickered at the edge of her vision.

A fresh surge of panic swung her around. In a shadowy corner, a dead swordsman leaned against the wall, proffering her a—something—of an improbably bright yellow.

As she waited, transfixed, for him to move again, his posture stirred her memory: the handsome cavalier presenting her with his love-gift, a necklace of tourmalines the colors of sky and sun. How she had loved that trinket, and the one who had given it—

The yellow scrap in the corner trembled once more.

Again she started and nearly lost her footing. But this time she was almost sure the swordsman hadn’t stirred.

Heart pounding, she inched toward him. At last she drew close enough to see that what had caught her eye was not gold, not a shred of cloth or enamelwork miraculously preserving its color. Nor did the swordsman in fact hold it in his hand. Between his dead fingers, a spider had woven a web, and the yellow scrap was caught there.

A newly fallen beech leaf. Dead, too, but right now a more exquisite sight than all the gold in the world.

The leaf shivered, and a draft of fresher air feathered her cheek, smelling not of decay but of damp earth. She peered into the gloom beyond the swordsman. A fall of dirt and rocks covered another heap of corpses, and mixed in the dirt were more leaves, yellow and brown. No light penetrated to this part of the crypt. But the draft, those leaves . . .

She lifted her skirts and edged gingerly past the swordsman, onto the rock fall. On her first attempt to scrabble up, she dislodged a current of earth that carried her back down. Again she swam up, on all fours now, feet tangling in her skirts, until she could feel a draft blowing on her face. When she thrust an arm into the unseen opening—a rabbit hole?—her hand struck a tree root. Hope gave her the strength to grab the root and haul herself up, pulling soil down on her head, until a cascade of rubble fell away to reveal daylight. She dragged herself over the lip of the hole and collapsed in relief.

Above her hung a cloudy sky bright enough to hurt her eyes. Leaf-strewn snow covered the frozen ground. The air was even colder here.

After a while, brushing off dirt and snow, she climbed to her feet. A maze of ruined walls surrounded her. Bare trees sprouted from what must once have been streets and courtyards. She recognized nothing.

Hugging her jacket around her—its embroidered wool was too thin for this season—she cast about for a way through the ruins. After a few false turns, she reached an avenue mostly free of brush and fallen stones. This led her to a wide, snow-blanketed plaza. On the far side, a tower reared up against the overhanging mountain cliff. The tower stood in far better condition than the surrounding ruins.

At the sight of it, new cold shivered over her skin, and she pulled back into the shadow of a wall.

Suddenly she knew this plaza. Knew this city. How beautiful it had been in spring sunshine: the broad paved streets scrubbed clean, the walls plastered, whitewashed, and hung with colored pennants. Here the cavaliers had paraded on their prancing horses, armor and harness polished mirror-bright. Here peasants and merchants in their red-embroidered best had set up booths, had danced and sung for the God of Flowers, had poured libations of strong liquor onto the ground and down their own throats. How happy her lover had looked that evening as they walked through the festival! He had taken off his armor and garlanded his hair with jonquils, and when he bent his head to murmur in her ear she could smell their sweet perfume.

She strained after his name but could not remember it. But she remembered his funeral. So many had fallen in the battle, they had burned his body with green wood that popped and smoked. In an attempt to escape her unbearable grief, she had taken a new lover the same night.

That boy’s name was gone, too.

Terror spiked up in her like grass sprouting as she realized all the names were gone, even her own. It was as if they, too, had been walled into a crypt.

But—was that a voice calling in the distance?

She listened but heard only her own breathing, her own heartbeat.

The tower loomed above the plaza, a blot of cold darkness. She could not remember the name of the sorcerer who had ruled the city from there, but she remembered how much he had terrified her.

She hurried away, turning down the avenue that led to her house. A part of her knew that her home, too, must lie in ruins, but what a shock when she found it utterly tumbled down, not a single stone standing on another—

Her feet carried her onward. The avenue wound down the hill, curving past walls that had once enclosed the gardens of the Temple of the Queen of Heaven’s Mercy. Then the valley below the city came into view.

Shock jolted her again. The landscape her eye expected—villages, fields, hedgerows, the high road unfurling toward the southern hills—had been obliterated by a dark forest unbroken except by the river and its snow-lined banks. She could see not a single building, not a single smudge of smoke. Nothing stirred in an immense silence.

But this was her city. Those mountains blotting out half the sky, habitation of the gods: she had seen them every day of her life. How many years had passed for that forest to grow? How had she come to be the only living creature here? Alone—she, the highborn lady who never sat or walked by herself, never ate or prayed by herself, never willingly slept by herself . . .

At this moment, she was more alone than she could compass.

Down in the valley, a dark bird like a small, slim hawk soared above the river. As she watched it, memory stirred and brought forth a name: aleya, the black kite.

Aleya had been her own name, given because of her black hair.

And she remembered, then, the siege of the city. In the last days the city had run out of wood to burn its dead and had piled the corpses into cellars. With so much magic loose, they had walled them up in fear the dead would walk.

She must have been placed in one of those cellars before the very end.

But she could not be dead. Look at her breath fogging the air, look at the tracks her feet pressed into the snow. Surely no half-corporeal revenant could make prints so crisp! Aleya bent to scoop the snow and watched it melt on her fingers into muddy droplets. Alive.

As she straightened, she saw another set of footprints.

After a moment Aleya walked toward them, heart jumping. The tracks looked like a woman’s as well and were no larger than her own, although they had been made by heavy brogues in the country style rather than a lady’s demi-boots. The footprints made a double track, entering and leaving, through a gap in the walls of the temple garden.

Who had made the tracks—a peasant stealing from the garden? It was hard to believe that rare medicinal plantings could have survived, when the temple itself had crumbled to rubble.

Surely, though, such a thief would come to her aid, beautiful as she was and schooled in every grace, so obviously highborn—if only out of hope of reward.

Aleya stepped to the gap in the garden wall and peered in. The hair on her nape prickled: Here and there amidst the overgrown tangle stood neatly pruned trees and shrubs.

Wind gusted past her, so like human whispers that she swung around.

No one stood there. But Aleya did notice then how the winter afternoon had faded. Purple gloom had gathered under the mountain, and now it was spreading through the city.

Another cold gust of wind soughed down from the heights, bearing more of the wordless whispers. At the foot of the mountain wall, in the darkest shadows, walls and roofs faint as smoke were congealing atop the citadel ruins.

Panic gripped her. Aleya turned and ran after the footprints, down the avenue, down the hill. The twilight deepened as she descended. On all sides now, phantom armories, counting-houses and feasting halls wavered like reflections in an uneasy pool. Shadows of people ghosted into being, warriors in plumed armor, apprentices hurrying with a chest.

The lost city of her memory was building itself in the twilight. When Aleya passed the gate to a nobleman’s courtyard, longing almost turned her back. Light spilled from an unseen door, and she half-glimpsed shapes in bright clothing. Her memory added music, laughter and repartee, lovers exchanging hidden smiles. For a moment she was certain that inside that house she would find herself, and her name, and all those she had loved and left behind.

But the only sound from the courtyard now was the wind.

Aleya fled onward, following the prints toward the gate of the city. The wind whipped her hair and rattled the trees, it whined over broken stones, it whispered in her ear with a thousand lost voices. Shadow men and women reached for her. She ran faster. The wind built until it was a rockslide roaring down on her, an avalanche seeking to crush her into its cold belly.

At last the wall of the city rose before her. But the gate was closed, and a troop of silent men raised spears to turn her back. The avalanche roared close above her head. As the momentum of terror carried her forward, Aleya saw, through phantom guards and phantom wood and iron, that the true gate had fallen. Some courage she did not know she possessed gave her strength to shove through the dead men. Their touch was almost solid now, like cold rags clinging to her limbs, but she twisted free to scramble over the fallen lintel-stones of the gate. Beyond lay no more guards, only trees and the snowy high road arrowing away under their branches, and that line of footprints.

As Aleya hesitated for an instant, afraid of what might wait in the forest, a step sounded behind her—

A booted foot crunched on ice-rimed stone.

On hands and knees, she glanced up. The lord of the city stood there, in breeches and jacket and over it, carelessly, a plain brown cloak. The wind that ripped at her hair did not stir his clothing. Beyond, his guards stood at silent attention.

Aleya knew: The shepherd had come for his straying sheep.

“I never gave you my soul,” she whispered.

“Oh, but I took it anyway,” said the sorcerer.

A silver mirror glinted in his hand. He reached toward her. But he had to stoop, and she lay already at the brink of a gate-stone. She slipped over the edge and dropped six feet to the snow. Scrambled to her feet. Ran, glancing wildly backward—

No one stood there, alive or dead. Snow sharp as glass blew across the ruined gap.

2

Aleya fled along the snowy road, through the brush that now sprouted between its stones. Gusts rattled the treetops. In her mind lingered the image of the sorcerer untouched by the wind. As solid as he had seemed—far solider than his guards—he must be dead too, or something like it.

Dead and commander of the dead: She had, long ago, read about such things. A sorcerer could sustain his existence for centuries on this side of the Gate of the world, so long as he had souls to feed on. Her lord might have gathered to him all who had died during the siege and downfall of his city.

Aleya shivered: She had escaped not from a tomb but a larder.

Luckily, he did not seem to be able to pass the city gate. She wished she could remember the last hours of the city, when their enemies must have breached its walls and overrun the streets. Among the enemy had been mages who feared her lord’s ambitions, and priests and priestesses from many temples. They had defeated him, obviously, but with all the dead he had gathered up, perhaps their united strength had been sufficient only to confine him.

And now the armies of his enemies, too, seemed to have been swallowed by wilderness.

A city of the dead, through his power dreaming that it was still alive—she wondered if she herself had walked in that dream nightly for all the years since the city had fallen. How seductively real it had seemed for a moment, while the ruins and this snow-blanketed forest felt so utterly unreal—

Except that the forest persisted, mile after endless mile. The smell of cold bark and old leaves was stronger than the stink of the crypt that clung to her, and the ache in her legs was also undeniable. She could dance until dawn night after night, but never in her life had she walked so far on her own two feet.

Somewhere in the shadows, Aleya lost the footprints. She was too afraid to turn back, wanted only to put as much distance as she could between her and the haunted city, so she trudged onward. And at last the cliffs at the southern end of the valley reared up ahead.

The bridge leading south out of the valley lay in tumbled blocks in the depths of the gorge. And winter had not yet frozen the river, so she could not cross on the ice.

Aleya stood there wearily for a long moment. A lesser road did wind up the steep wall of the valley to the eastern border of her lord’s domain. She had ridden it long ago, in springtime when apple orchards had carpeted the road with petals.

The peasant who had made the footprints might know another way out of the valley. But she did not.

She found a trace of the road where she remembered it, along a stream that here joined the river. It climbed steeply through a deeper, darker forest that had swallowed all trace of the orchards. Switchbacks eventually bore her out of the trees, led her up, trudging ever more slowly, toward the barren and wind-blasted ridge top. The city was now just a pale smudge beneath the mountain wall; strange, after all the years shut up in it by the war, to see it at such a distance.

Near the summit, the tip of a boundary stone pointed into the clouds. Spurred by the thought that she would soon leave her lord’s domain, Aleya quickened her pace. Then the road topped a shoulder of the ridge, revealing what lay beyond: nothing but black forested hills and valleys as far as the eye could see.

She stopped in despair, shivering in the frigid wind. What disaster could have emptied the whole country?

A last switchback led up to where the boundary stone loomed at the summit of the ridge, now only a quarter mile away. Suddenly the shadows swimming around its base, the way the stone seemed to beckon, filled her with a cold dread that might even be one of her true forebodings.

Then Aleya spotted a gleam of yellow light down in the forest below her feet.

She cautioned herself that the light might prove to be another haunting. Still, suppose it was just an ordinary peasant’s hut. O gods and goddesses, what she had endured this day already! She would welcome even the simplest food, even the coarsest, commonest face, as long as it belonged to a living man or woman.

She glanced over her shoulder again at the stone, then headed down toward the light, into the next valley, where hopefully her dead lord could not reach.

3

When Aleya at last reached the source of the light, she found a quite solid-looking hut of squared timbers and split shingles, very like the peasant houses she had known. Rays of lamplight escaped the shutters to scatter across the snow.

She approached the door, telling herself she had left sorcery and terror behind. These would be simple folk who, despite the dirt on her, would be overawed by her gold and jewels, her lace and brocade, her exquisite beauty.

When she knocked, an exclamation sounded inside. The door jerked open on broken hinges. For an instant everyone in that room froze, and in a single glance she took in the scene:

A handful of armed men sat drinking at a plank table. One of them had answered her knock. The men wore filthy leather cuirasses and breeches strapped over even fouler woolen undergarments, the style of the whole reminding her of a pair of barbarian slaves a merchant had once sold to the lord of her city. Their longswords, together with the crest of a white eagle’s head sewn upon all their cuirasses, told her that despite appearances they were neither slaves nor brigands but some lord’s men-at-arms. As the overpowering reek of their unwashed flesh reached her, Aleya also remembered that her lord had ordered the filthy western slaves bathed, and their clothes burnt, before he sacrificed them and ate their souls.

The soldiers were not the only people in the hut, however. In a corner huddled a peasant family who had been rousted in their nightclothes. The husband, a bearded, burly man, bled from scalp and mouth, and rage distorted his face. A little girl sobbed against her mother’s knee, but the mother’s gaze was fixed upon her other daughter. That slight child, who could be no more than eleven or twelve, writhed on the lap of one of the soldiers. He grinned as he fumbled under her shift.

In that scene, Aleya read a story: When her people had died or fled this country, the western savages had invaded. These peasants had no lord now, and no recourse.

Well, she would free that girl from her tormentor.

She did not think of the harm the barbarians might do to her. No one, commoner or cavalier, had ever insulted her. As she edged past the soldier who had opened the door, stepping into the light, she expected only the deference that had always been paid to her, the admiration she had always seen in men’s eyes.

Instead, the soldier’s mouth gaped to reveal a pitiful row of decaying stumps. He began to pant with breath that stank like rotten meat. A thought strayed across Aleya’s mind: He had not cleaned his teeth in his entire life.

Then his face contorted, and a curdled scream burst from his lungs as he staggered back. His fellows scrambled away from the door as well, knocking over stools, a crock of beer.

But the soldier molesting the girl threw her aside, jumped to his feet and, shouting in a language she did not know, pulled a bit of hide out of his shirt. When he spit upon it, out flew a small winged creature with many wriggling heads—

Aleya recognized the wriggler even as it sped toward her: not by its shape, but by the greasy sheen surrounding it, the foul taste in her mouth. It had been made from the flesh and soul of a dead man. Her old lord would have dissolved it with a twitch of one finger. She herself had always tried to avoid magic, although as a child she had been taught a charm—she groped in her memory, but not quickly enough. The wriggler struck her in the chest like a stone and flung her backwards out of the house.

She dropped hard onto the ground. The men-at-arms spewed from the house into the night, some of them sobbing with terror.

When she climbed to her feet and turned once more toward the hut, however, she was met not by the peasants’ gratitude, but by first the husband carrying the younger child, then the wife pulling the older daughter by the hand, as full of haste as the soldiers had been. When she stepped in front of the family, the husband also threw magic at her—not another wriggler but a word, a god’s name, that clamped onto her limbs and rooted her like a tree.

At first Aleya could track the routes of both parties by the racket of their feet in the crusty snow. From the direction the soldiers had fled in came the jingle of harness and the thud of hooves. By the time her paralysis wore off, however, the forest had fallen silent.

She put her hands to her face but felt only her own delicate, winter-chilled features.

She was far too tired to chase the peasants tonight. Aleya stepped into the warm hut and barred the door behind her. First she searched the hut for a mirror to reassure herself, but in vain. Then, ravenous after her long trek, she looked for any food that did not require cooking. The soldiers had left only bread crumbs and spilled beer.

She hated being alone. How she longed to have those peasants back. The girl would have made a pretty servant.

Aleya found a pitcher of water and managed to drink a few swallows before an irresistible wave of weariness poured over her. Without undressing, she crawled into a bed behind the stove, and as soon as she laid down her head, fell asleep.

4

In the morning, the fire in the stove had gone out and the hut was cold. Aleya set her hair and clothes in order as best she could, drank and rinsed her face. Then she wrapped a rough blanket around her and stepped outside.

A chipmunk chit-chit-chittered from high in a fir tree. The forest otherwise appeared empty of both hauntings and living things. The footprints in the snow told her that the barbarians had ridden south, while the peasants had run away eastward.

Aleya set out on aching feet after the peasant family, following their tracks through the forest for miles without encountering another sign of a human being. None of these peasants, she decided, could have made the prints she had seen yesterday. As the day warmed, the snow melted and the ground turned to mud. The tracks joined another old road, this one more or less tended, that cut across the sides of the hills, affording her views of the lower-lying countryside to the south. Then a bend in the road revealed, about twenty miles distant, a stone-crested knob like a captain’s helmet rearing up from the forest.

Remembrance seared her. Behind that knoll lay the site of her father’s manor, burned to the ground the year she had married. Further south, along the river misnamed the Fortunate, loomed the stronghold of her lord’s ally turned savage enemy, whose soldiers had killed her husband, and in the broad valleys beyond rose the fortresses of the ever-warring great lords, who had at last appeared united at the gates of her city—

All gone now. The light of day did reveal scattered bare patches marking villages or isolated farms, but only at the base of the eastern mountains could Aleya spot anything like the cultivated landscape of her childhood. Luckily the road was leading her in that direction.

Or . . . it was not lucky at all.

The eastern edge of her lord’s domain was bordered in part by the lands of the Temple of the Oracle, a sacred wood that was never cut or hunted in. The temple itself lay as far east and north as one could go before all roads climbed toward heaven. Even her lord, whose name she would surely remember soon, who had destroyed the greatest mages of the Rich Lands, had taken care not to provoke the Oracle, one of the most powerful and secretive of the old orders. Its priestesses had nevertheless raised a wall of magic and prayer between his lands and theirs. They searched out, even kidnapped, women and girls with the sort of foresight that Aleya owned a bit of—but had always kept secret in fear of them. No one else could pass through that wall uninvited, except for orphaned girls, impoverished widows—women with no other recourse. In exchange for shelter, the priestesses would bind them in living servitude to the Oracle, just as her lord bound the dead in order to feed on their soul-stuff.

The boundary stone last night had been the Temple’s. Last night Aleya had possessed the good sense to turn away from it. Today she was stupidly walking east, straight toward the Oracle.

She tried to remind herself that her old world was gone. Even the great Temple of the Oracle might lie in ruins, engulfed by its own forest.

But once awakened, her lifelong dread that the Temple would discover her could not be contained. Those priestesses would chain her in a windowless cell, they would suck away her soul until she was gibbering and incontinent. She might already have crossed into Temple lands; it might already be too late to escape.

As Aleya skidded toward panic, a sharp thud made her glance wildly around. A second thud and a crack! followed.

The source of the noise proved entirely mundane. A farmstead abutted the road ahead, just visible through the trees. There a peasant woman had begun splitting wood. The woman was plain, dumpy, and middle-aged, dressed in the most rustic parti-colored wool, and she swung her axe with the ease of one accustomed to hard labor. Her shoes were the right sort to have made yesterday’s footprints in the city, but her feet were far too big, nearly as large as a man’s. A pair of turkeys pecked the ground beside her, gobbling.

Aleya straightened her stolen blanket-cloak and stepped nearer. Before she reached the gate, the peasant jerked erect, wide-eyed. At least this one did not scream or flee.

Aleya knew she was less than perfectly groomed, but she was still beautiful, and her bearing was always graceful. “A good day, mistress,” she said, in the cool, musical tones she liked to cultivate.

The peasant slowly lowered her axe. As Aleya continued forward, the turkeys flapped their wings in agitation. Then the peasant woman hissed a god’s name, a searing bolt of light that slammed Aleya down into the mud of the path.

How did these peasants know such magic?

Astounded and enraged, Aleya struggled to her feet. The peasant woman was still spitting out words in her rustic accent: “Go back! Go back to Lord Reyzmon, dead creature, and leave the living alone!”

Dead creature?

Reyozem Ahon—this woman knew the sorcerer’s name, though she did not pronounce it correctly.

Go back to your lord, dead creature.

Terror reared up in Aleya again. And then the peasant began droning a prayer. A prayer! As if this ugly commoner were handmaiden to a god!

Perhaps she was one of the Oracle’s snares, though, because that tuneless song sliced through Aleya’s flesh like knives, it choked the air from her lungs. The pain was so intense she nearly fainted from it. O gods and goddesses, the prayer was a supplication to the God of the Gate: Open the Gate of the world, lord, let this lost spirit pass out to heaven . . . Aleya barely managed to gasp out, “What are you doing? I’m alive! Stop it now!”

The peasant sang on. Aleya did not know how long she could survive. To show that she was alive, and that neither prayer nor pain ruled her, she stepped forward again. But the witch hefted her axe, and Aleya, shocked even in her agony by this crudest of threats, once more stopped in her tracks.

“I am not dead!” she gasped. And then, pushing out the words against the weight that crushed her lungs, “Whatever you think—I don’t mean any harm! I just need—I need . . .” What did she want? A refuge? Rest? An explanation for her long sleep and terrible awakening?

She was so tired, so alone, as pitiful as a beggar. At last she whispered, “I need your help.”

The other woman’s eyes flicked wide and she abruptly stopped her prayer. Aleya’s agony drained away and, dizzy with relief, she sucked in great lungfuls of air.

After a moment the peasant shook her head and muttered, as if talking to herself, “It’s true you’re solider than most of them. And you even have speech. I suppose you’ve been eating the living to keep your thoughts—”

“I have not!” Aleya cried out in horror.

“—and of course you’ve forgotten what you are already. But you must be full of blood to be walking in daylight and looking at me as if you can even take in my words.” The peasant witch grimaced in perplexity, scratching the back of her neck.

But Aleya moaned, “No, no,” because she didn’t remember well, and she had utterly lost all the years since the city’s downfall. Once more she put her hands to her face and felt only her own smooth cheeks. A landslide of terror and panic was nevertheless roaring down on her. She cast her denials at the peasant, trying to convince herself: “I feel hunger and thirst, and cold and weariness. How could I be dead?”

The witch, or disguised priestess or whatever she was, shrugged. “You hunger for the living, you thirst for their souls, you’re cold from the grave, you’re tired because you’re two hundred years dead, creature, and you should have lain down to rest long ago. You just dress those appetites in the memories of your life.”

“No!” cried Aleya.

But she had longed for living people, and the people at the hut had fled from her in terror.

She had drunk water, and a fire in the stove, a blanket—ordinary things had warmed her. And what about the blue sky just now gleaming through the clouds, what about the smells of cold mud and newly split pine, what about the fluttering turkeys, the crows squawking in the peasant’s apple trees? She felt these things to her bones.

As she had always been able to do with her little bit of magic, Aleya could also taste the glow of the peasant’s soul. Now the thought came unbidden: That would warm her, too . . . Although the witch was not beautiful and Aleya did not want to touch her, much less eat her life.

“I feel so much,” Aleya whispered. A lump swelled in her throat. She wanted to cry, but no tears would flow. Was that because she was highborn, and no matter what her fear or her suffering, she would not disgrace herself before this muddy, ugly, insolent, blasphemous peasant?

Or was it because the lady Aleya was dead and had no tears?

“You are dead as dead, creature,” said the peasant. “Your soul is just stuck on the wrong side of the Gate, see?” She sighed deeply. “You’ve claimed my help and I seem bound to your claim, though I never knew a person could owe a debt to one of Reyzmon’s slaves. You must be that dead woman who chased the Governor’s soldiers from my brother’s house; I suppose that’s the reason for my obligation to you.”

The peasant witch rested her axe in the mud. “All right, dead thing, stand where you are and listen, and try to remember what I say, though I know it’s not the way of your kind. You are one of Reyzmon’s ghost-slaves. I know his mark, and I see his spells all over you. Reyzmon the lord of Shenna gathered so many slaves to him that when he was killed he was able to stand fast on this side of the Gate. The nariyo say his power shrinks as the years pass, and maybe that’s how you escaped his grip. Maybe that’s how you got your own will back. But escaping your master doesn’t make you less dead.”

Part of Aleya still clung desperately to disbelief. “How can you know these things?”

“We know the story,” said the peasant. “We know it’s death to go to the city of Shenna, or to stay in that valley at night. The lord Reyzmon will eat your soul. The nariyo guard the bounds, but his creatures sometimes find their way out. We here in Ediyan don’t forget the haunted city.”

The peasant woman shook her head again. “Creature, you claimed my help. The best help I could give would be to break your master’s binding and push you through the Gate to heaven. But that seems beyond my power. I will send you to the nariyo—”

“No,” whispered Aleya. She did not know who these nariyo might be, but the word meant wise people and she did not doubt they would be terrible old sorcerers. “No, I want to live!”

“You aren’t alive now. You just remember being alive. You can keep as you are if you feed on the lives of others—”

“I’m not a monster!” Aleya wailed. “I would feel it! I would feel dead.”

The witch sighed deeply. “Stay there, creature. I’ll fetch a mirror. Not that you’ll remember what I show you—”

The woman returned from around the corner of her porch not with the circle of quicksilvered glass Aleya expected, but a simple bowl of water. “Look in,” she said.

Terrified to look, terrified not to, Aleya took the bowl. At first she saw only sky and the outline of her head. Then—

The bowl fell to the ground. “That’s not me!” she screamed.

But as she brought up her hands to conceal her face, this time she saw her withered corpse fingers, and whatever the peasant said about the faulty memory of the restless dead, she would never, ever scour that other image from her soul, that dead woman’s face with its shadowed orbits and sunken nose, the dried lips grimacing over long teeth, black hair straggling from a scalp as hard and shiny as a steel helmet . . .

The image pierced her like a sword. Dry sobs convulsed her. No shame, not even that of weeping in front of a commoner, was worse than the hideous thing she had become.

The peasant knelt to pick up the bowl. Heat radiated from her flesh and her pulse throbbed like a drumbeat inside Aleya’s own skin. She thought: How easy for one like me to rip open her throat and pull out her heart.

But her anger sank away and left behind only the bitterest loathing. I could drink her blood, she thought, I could eat her soul if I knew how, if I were a great sorcerer I could even shape my appearance. But I could never again be as beautiful as even this ugly commoner, because she is alive. She has blood and tears, she has guts that turn bread into shit. I never thought that was beautiful, but oh, it’s sweeter than honey.

I couldn’t do more than rouge a corpse.

She could no longer stand the touch of her dead hands and dropped them to her side. At last her sobs fell away, stranding her in a wilderness of despair.

“I am sorry, creature,” said the peasant. “I am sure the nariyo could help. In Leyothan they could help you.”

Leyothan! Aleya knew that name: the valley of the Oracle. “The priestesses will enslave what’s left of me.”

The witch gestured impatiently. “Priestesses! A few wise old people. Let them help you.”

“No,” whispered Aleya. “Better I stay with my lord and dream.”

5

She fled back the way she had come, back toward Shenna. Oh, she could not ignore the truth now. Her bony hands, her tattered clothes, that face in the mirror—no wonder peasants and soldiers alike had fled from her, who had been the most beautiful, the most desired lady Aleya.

In Shenna, she could have her beauty back. She would let her lord bind her again and she would pull dreams over her ugliness like a veil. She would sleep away the centuries in the ghost-city of Shenna until he consumed her soul at the last.

Except—

She stopped. That wasn’t what he would do.

She had shown that she could pass through the spells that confined him. And his strength was waning, the witch had said.

He would send her out to replenish his larder. She knew who she would kill for him. They would be the ones she had loved in life: laughing children, the young men with their strong limbs and unguarded hearts, the ones fated to ride to war and never return. The ones she had most wanted to protect from hurt. She could not bear to feed them to Reyozem Ahon.

But if she did not go to Shenna, hunger would overwhelm her eventually. She might feel horror now at the notion, but soon she would murder to assuage her own appetite.

In Leyothan, the priestesses could no doubt help her die for good, if they chose. But she could not bear, either, to surrender the semblance of life she now possessed.

Perhaps she could bargain with Reyozem Ahon.

The mere thought turned her knees to jelly. But there were ways, she recalled from long-ago lessons, to extract favors from an unwilling sorcerer—not that she had ever tried them in life.

She started walking again, more slowly. Both mages and priests dealt with the divine realm, and whatever that fundament of creation touched, it governed. The divine power that imparted efficacy to a mage’s spells or a priest’s prayers bled into all his words, acts, obligations, and affections, infusing them with a reality separate from his own being and resistant to his will. The more magic a mage worked, the more he had to suffer that governance. If a mage tried to withdraw from a promise or ignore a passion, he might choke off his magic, perhaps fatally. Even the lowly peasant had found herself ruled by an obligation to Aleya, simply because the witch loved her brother’s family and Aleya had rescued them.

Thus an ordinary person, if careful and lucky, could sometimes find the means to compel a mage. Of course mages guarded assiduously against such plots, and Aleya could not think of any clever traps or obligating favors except for that service, purveyor of fresh provisions, which she could never suggest. And surely she did not have the luxury of time to consider the problem. Her wakefulness might end as abruptly as it had begun, and then she would sink once more into the dreams of the dead.

Aleya paused, thinking she had heard a voice call out. But when she looked around, she was alone on the road.

No, of course: Someone was trying to spell her. Reyozem Ahon must be summoning her back.

The bed of the old road, here entirely unused, began to climb in steep switchbacks. The high, treeless ridge she had crossed last night came into view, but standing almost south of her now. This was the road she had turned away from before, the one that ran past the boundary stone into Leyothan.

Which meant Aleya must be walking inside Leyothan now.

But the witch had said she lived in Ediyan, which Aleya recalled as the country south of Leyothan and southeast of her lord’s domain. The road must wander back and forth between Leyothan and Ediyan, with the border marked only at the stone. The priestesses would have known the moment Aleya first stepped over their boundary. Still, they did not seem to be hindering her passage back to Shenna.

She trudged onward, groping for a plan. She should have conquered her fear of her own magic long ago, her fear of discovery by the Oracle. She was tired, so tired, she wanted only to lie down and sleep in darkness, but the almost-heard call grew louder, now unmistakably summoning her, and her bruised feet bore her forward.

At last the tip of the Oracle’s boundary stone reared above her. As she rounded the last switchback, a horse whinnied, and the next moment she walked right into a barbarian camp.

Soldiers cringed from her; their horses reared and plunged at the end of the picket ropes. The soldiers were the very men she had encountered last night, but today they did not flee. One shouted over his shoulder.

In panic, and full of shame that these savages should see her ugliness, Aleya started to hurry past them over the rough ground. But the horses, who had been picketed just beside the road, were plunging and sidling, blocking her way, and then a man came striding down from the boundary stone. “Stop!” he shouted.

The command jerked Aleya’s body as if with a leash. “Stay, revenant!” the mage shouted as he approached her. “I, Guribast, your master am who summon you! I to you ask question!”

Aleya stared at him, heart pounding. First peasants, now barbarians owned such magic?

Powerful this Guribast might be, but his lisping was almost unintelligible. And so pompous in his ignorance, thinking he had summoned her!

His commands did hold her, though, at least for the moment. She tried to step away from the panicking horses but could only shuffle her feet.

Guribast himself stopped at a safe distance from the horses. Although the peasant witch had called the men-at-arms the Governor’s soldiers, Aleya did not think this mage could be the Governor. While his clothes were cleaner than the soldiers’, they were plain and worn. He was somewhat stout, with several days’ beard on his chin. Smile lines creased a good-humored face, but his eyes seemed to belong to an entirely different person. The air around him had a greasy sheen.

And he smelled of fresh blood. A spray of droplets spotted his cheek. Guribast had just sacrificed, or else set out still-living bait for the unquiet dead like her . . . Perhaps he had come here to steal her lord’s food.

“You to me will answer!” he commanded.

He spoke the language of his betters so laughably. But his voice was rich and compelling. She loathed his necromancy, she hated the touch of his commands. Nevertheless, deep inside her, the sight of him brought a strange relief.

Memory stirred. Aleya had heard his voice before. Guribast had spoken into the darkness of her dreams.

He had summoned her.

He had awakened her.

Her lord had bound her soul in death, but this mage had raised her out of the tomb. And called her here today.

Awe and fear struggled with anger, and anger won. At least she had once owed the lord of Shenna obedience. This barbarian was nothing but a trespasser and a thief.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Guribast frowned. After a long moment he said, “I for vanished wisdom am seek, for hidden wisdom of nariyo.”

“Why did you call me?”

His frown deepened. “I to you am give the question—”

“Why me?”

He stared at her a bit longer, then turned to shout at the men-at-arms in the barbarian gabble. The men had been cowering by the pickets, trying to soothe the horses. Now they retreated down the road Aleya had come along, further into Leyothan. When they had disappeared around a bend, Guribast spoke again:

“Given to our temples is a prophecy,” he said to Aleya. “In Leyothan a secret, a weapon lie, will undo the plan of all who it oppose. My divining to this place led me, to call up the one who can the treasure reveal. Now answer, revenant! And to me this secret tell!”

His command was like a hand poking through all the cupboards of her mind. She felt a compulsion to reply even though she had no idea what he was talking about.

She did not want to help this blood-spattered savage loot the treasures of her people, even if the people in question were the prophetesses of Leyothan whom she had always feared.

Fortunately the commands of mages were like their promises. What compelled her was not his desire but the divine power Guribast had placed in his words, which gave them their own existence in the world, a reality as solid as a stone’s. If he had spelled her to find the treasure for him, she would have no choice but to search until she discovered it. But he had said, Answer, tell me the secret.

“Speak, revenant! Your master answer!”

“Master,” she began, doubting he would notice the irony with which she spoke the title. “Master, my lord was Reyozem Ahon and I died at the fall of Shenna, his city. I was never in Leyothan! Reyozem Ahon offended the Oracle with his sacrifices and his necromancy, and the priestesses raised the boundary against him and all his people.”

“But where Leyothan lie, you know.”

“There is the boundary stone between the three domains,” she said. “You have found that, master. Here we stand at the edge of Leyothan. To the southeast is Ediyan, and westward, over there, is the valley of Shenna.”

“But where,” demanded Guribast angrily, “lie the great Temple of the Oracle of Maro, all-seeing goddess of truth?”

At that, Aleya almost laughed out loud. The rudest peasant in Ediyan could doubtless have informed him, but he, self-styled seeker after wisdom, thought he had to interrogate the dead.

Absurd or not, his words squeezed her mouth and lungs, compelling her to answer something.

From those long-ago lessons in her father’s sunlit manor, she remembered: “The sanctuary of Maro has no roof or walls.”

“You claim the Oracle was not?” He punished her with those words so painfully that she regretted her evasion.

Still, she did not want to enlighten his ignorance in any little thing. She was not going to tell him that the Oracle of Leyothan was not a place but a person, or rather, people—the Abbess and the other prophetesses who sat in the Oracle’s chair.

“I don’t know where the Temple lies, master! I was never there. Everything I knew in life lies in ruins, and wilderness has swallowed the ruins. How could I direct you, even if I once knew the way? Go east from this boundary stone. I can give you no better guidance than that.”

From his expression, she could tell that he still did not like her answer. Perhaps the priestesses retained power to keep the likes of him from penetrating further into their domain. She would be happy if that were so.

The horses had not ceased their agitated milling. She glanced at them. In life, she had always been a little afraid of all but the gentlest mounts: so big, so unpredictable. But she was not alive. Strong men quailed in her presence. What could a horse do to her now?

She tested the strength of Guribast’s commands and this time managed a step toward the horses. “Stay,” he ordered.

“I have answered your questions, master,” she said, moving even closer to put them between her and the mage. The resulting whinnies and thudding hooves nearly drowned her words.

She took a few more quick steps. Horses reared and screamed all around her; pickets snapped or pulled from the ground. Then they stampeded.

Since it was she the horses fled from, she was able to herd them like sheep toward the mage, slapping rumps, waving her dead hands in their faces. Guribast shouted, but he seemed to own no horse-magic and had to scramble to escape their sudden headlong galloping. It broke his concentration, releasing her completely.

Aleya ran over snow and stone, crossing the top of the ridge. And then she was scrambling down the far side into the valley of Shenna. She felt Guribast’s commands (Stop! Stop!) flying after her like crossbow bolts, but every one of them missed its mark.

She skidded down a bank and found herself on a traverse of the road. A stream of rampaging horses bore down on her. She waved her arms and was secretly thrilled to see the great animals rear, whinny, and gallop back the way they had come.

6

Aleya ran down the road until she could no longer suck in breath (although, she reminded herself, she only dreamed that her dead lungs needed air). She did not allow herself to rest even then. Guribast was still calling her back, a silent voice shouting in her ears. She hoped that winter’s early sundown would protect her from pursuit; the peasant witch had said that it would be death for the living to come to Shenna’s valley at night.

It occurred to her then that if Reyozem Ahon could, in the nighttime, send his power beyond the city, she could not have escaped last night. He must have let her go, confident that Guribast would not be able to hold her.

Darkness was falling when Aleya reached the city gate. No snow had melted here. Somewhere she had lost her stolen blanket, and now, as she stared up at the iron-dark mountains, at the tower under the cliffs, she began to shiver in the evening chill. Did the walking dead always feel so cold?

Only the thought that she was one of Shenna’s dead made her able to step through the gate.

Her lord did not greet her at the gate. As she climbed the avenue, limping and exhausted, wind began to pour down from the heights. By the time she reached the plaza, she was so cold it was as if she no longer had any flesh, dead or alive, and there was only pain where her body had been. She walked along the citadel wall that bounded one side of the plaza. When she reached the shattered citadel gate, a jangle of harness caused her to turn in panic. But it was not the barbarian men-at-arms. Shenna’s soldiers were returning from battle with bowed heads.

Phantoms—but already more real-seeming than the true city.

She shook her head to clear it. She had to stay awake to bargain with Reyozem Ahon.

Inside the wall the fortress was reassembling: companies of soldiers hurrying; horses, goats, hay, clanging anvils, glowing foundries, shouts and curses; slaves hauling charcoal; wagon-loads of fallen soldiers awaiting the pyre; and in the distance, temple chimes ringing, ringing.

Plumed guards wordlessly swung open a gate in front of her. Aleya entered, wondering why she had come to the inner fortress. She looked down at herself: brocaded skirts, fresh lace at her bodice and on her wrists, rings adorning her smooth and slender fingers. She wore her beloved necklace of tourmalines. Of course: the annual feast of the court of Shenna. But where was her maid, or even the few doddering lackeys the lord had not required her to release to the defense of the city?

Or, no—the feast would not be held this year, because of the siege—

No, the city had already fallen.

She wrenched herself out of the dream, made herself see the rubble. Wind skittered a leaf over old bones.

But there again, at her lord’s hall, guards were holding open the doors. She stepped closer. Inside, a thousand honey-scented candles shone on the bright clothes of the feasters, on the great tapestries like windows into other lands, on the high table set with porcelain and glass. Garlands of fragrant pine hung everywhere, and the smells of the feast wound through the hall: roast meat, wine, baking apples, oranges and cinnamon from the southlands. The unearthly singing of priestly novices rose up to the rafters.

Gazes followed her as she approached the high table, as if she were a wind and those men and women grass bending in the wake of her passage. She knew herself in their eyes: knew her full, pushed-up breasts, her slim and graceful body, her shining black hair, her pale skin smooth as cream, her faintly smiling ruby lips. Her anticipation was theirs: how that night her maid would pull off her clothes in front of her lover, first her cloak of crimson velvet, then her gown, the pins in her hair, the jewels at her neck and on her fingers, the laces fastening her bodice and tying up her hose, until she stood in candlelight wearing only a lace chemise that slipped from one shoulder . . .

Did they not, every one of them, want to be that lover?

All the seats at the high table were occupied except for hers and the lord’s, who alone never noticed her. Suddenly she remembered this night, this feast. He had not come. Had stayed in his tower.

The boy, the one she had taken home that night; he had died scarcely a month later. His name had been Veydan. His family had burned their furniture to cremate him properly, hoping thereby to keep his soul from the grasp of Reyozem Ahon. Aleya had given her last scion of silk-rose to the Queen of Heaven’s temple to be planted in his memory.

This had happened already.

Veydan sat at one of the tables, a sweet good-looking boy, gazing at her with a boy’s yearning. He had already died. An ambush at the bridge. Sharp grief pierced her. What was she doing in the past, in this dream?

She was searching for something. For the lord of Shenna? Surely not; she would never seek him out. But—

She found herself at the doors behind the high table. Guards opened them for her as well, and she continued into the corridor beyond. Now she moved uncertainly, peering into shadowed doorways and courtyards. She had never been to Reyozem Ahon’s tower and was not sure where its door lay; word had it that not even his body servants set foot inside.

She had always been terrified of him, though he was a cousin and a bit of his magic flowed in her own bloodline. But all she owned were fleeting moments of true vision, and childhood lessons scarcely attended to. She had lived for music, dancing, and beautiful clothes, while he was a learned man who had traded all earthly pleasures for the disciplines of power. An unforgiving man, too: this lady, this merchant, this captain-at-arms would speak against the war or some injustice, would be stripped suddenly of all property and exiled, or worse. And his sacrifices: he needed more power and still more, he told the priests, to fight the enemies who would destroy the city. When they at last began to demur, he fought the temples, too.

She remembered the shaved, tattooed priestly heads impaled on pikes in the great plaza, whispering in her ear as she walked through the market. It had pleased the lord Reyozem Ahon to create a horde of little sendings, green and gold maggots with tiny human faces, to feed upon the decaying heads. They ate the bound souls, and when gorged, changed to green-gold flies that buzzed away to be eaten by him in turn.

A fierce pang of grief and hatred wracked Aleya; so many men dead, so many children fatherless, so many women left, as she once had been, widowed and alone. And the one whose ambition caused it always hungered for more.

A single guard, face hidden by his helmet, held open the last door. The bitterest cold blew from its dark mouth. As she passed over the threshold, a sharp tingle, like the touch of silk on a dry winter day, coursed up and down her limbs.

When the door closed softly behind her, terror overwhelmed her for a moment.

But then she remembered that this, too, had already happened. The night he had summoned her, the lower city had been burning and the air full of acrid smoke. A flock of tiny golden birds, her lord’s messengers, had launched themselves shrieking from the tower roof.

Now she listened hard until all she heard were the whispers on the wind. Tonight the air smelled only of dank stone.

After all the misery, all that was left of the city were the ghosts and Reyozem Ahon, and her own dead self.

She climbed up. The back of her neck crawled until she thought it might cramp, but at each landing she encountered only an open doorway, and beyond it a bare, darkened room.

Could his tower really be empty?

Step after step, she climbed upward. When at last she reached the top, she found herself on a platform with a waist-high wall of stone, ceilinged only by a skeleton of beams. The platform was empty, too, except for the wind.

She waited, shivering. No one came.

The platform floated high above the darkened valley of Shenna. She could see past the rough country along the lower river all the way to the lowlands, where the earth sank into blue-grey shadow, merging with the sky.

No wonder Reyozem Ahon dreamed bloody dreams of kingship in this spot. Of descending from his cold fortress on the mountain trade roads and ruling all the Rich Lands from the sunny valleys at their heart. But did he ever look up the sheer walls of the mountains, to the ice-mantled bulwark of heaven? Didn’t he know the gods looked down on him? How small every human being must seem from that height. How humble it should make you. What gratitude it should give you for small and human joys, the scent of jonquils, the warmth of a lover’s hand.

No, Aleya thought, that was the worm eating his heart: that to be human was to be small and fleeting.

She found comfort in the smallness. How tiny one’s own griefs were beneath such immensity. The city was just a jumble of pebbles at the foot of the great wall. And the eternal mountains; against them even the centuries since the founding of Shenna were a blink of an eye. In heaven, the only voices in the wind were the gods’, singing clean and pure over stone.

She sat down on a stair, cold, cold, the bitterness of dead Shenna gripping her bones like a vise. Straight above, by the overhanging peaks, the sky had cleared and the jeweled ceiling of heaven shone bright and beautiful, sharp as a sword in her heart.

Down below, a foot shuffled on stone.

Another step echoed up the stairwell, and another. And with those footsteps rose a gust of whispers.

Aleya stood in alarm, gathering her weapons around her—her grace, her perfect beauty. He might have burnt all his earthly passions to ash, but he still had his sight. He would have to look at her.

Then she remembered that she had no beauty. She was a shamefully ugly corpse-thing, conjured from sleep by an ignorant barbarian. To the great sorcerer who had made her this way, she would be merely contemptible.

She had come to bargain with her master. But she had no knowledge of a secret weakness, no more than scraps of a plan. She did not even have courage. She was here only because every other choice was a worse one.

But she could stand straight as if she did have courage. Clasp her corpse-hands together to hide their trembling.

The footsteps mounted the stairs. Wind ripped at her hair, ghost whispers grew into voices wailing in torment and desire as the avalanche of power roared upward through the stairwell. And finally the lord Reyozem Ahon himself rose into view, climbing the last few steps to the platform.

The wind and the voices poured around them. He raised a hand, and a nest of white flames sprouted on his gloved palm like the flower of a water lily. This he transferred to the low wall beside him. In its light, he appeared as he had when alive: tall, lean, heavy-browed, clean-shaven, with a long face and too-large head. His clothes were unchanged as well, all sober and without ornament, and without any sign of wear, either. The wind that whipped through Aleya’s ragged clothes did not stir anything of his.

“Why,” he said in his deep voice, “do you intrude here, slave?”

How foolish to think she could bargain with this terrible sorcerer.

Aleya took a deep breath, pulling back her wind-snarled hair. “I came back, my lord, to see if we could deal together.”

“Deal? You are my milk-cow. You are the salt venison in my cellar. That barbarian opened the cellar door and conjured you legs to walk on, but you are still nothing but dead meat.”

She said, trying to keep her voice steady, “This meat can walk out of the city again, should you let me, my lord, but you cannot do the same.”

A frown creased his forehead. In the old days, she would have found that a terrifying sight: her head shortly to find itself atop a pike, gnawed by sorcerous maggots.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but I can reach forth my power.”

“Of course, my lord,” Aleya said. “And you could have prevented me from leaving last night. But you wanted to see how far I could go, didn’t you? And I left the valley. Do you know where I went? I crossed into Leyothan in daylight and returned. You can reach forth your power, but can you reach into Leyothan? Can you send out your power when the sun is in the sky?”

“Don’t be insolent to your master, dog,” he said, and the stoniness in his voice made her tremble all over again. “You slipped your leash is all. I don’t care where you wandered. It won’t happen again.”

She tried to calm her racing heart. “‘In Leyothan,’” she said, “‘there is a weapon that will undo all who oppose it.’”

“Oh, yes,” said the lord Reyozem Ahon, “yes: the naked truth of the goddess Maro, her of the All-Seeing Eye. What is this to me, milk-cow?”

Aleya stared at him. It had never occurred to her that this so-called prophecy might not be prophecy at all, but an old and tired aphorism. The barbarian mage had taken it so seriously, but—so ignorant—!

She caught herself short. The lord of Shenna had always played a dozen or a hundred tangled intrigues at once, within his court and amongst his enemies. She should not take anything he told her to be true. He would not be talking to her now unless he had a reason to let her remain free a little longer.

“It is, my lord,” she said, “a prophecy among the barbarian priests, who consider that it refers to an earthly weapon. It’s why that barbarian sorcerer came to Shenna. I was the one his spells awoke, he says, because I am the one who can reveal this weapon of invincibility to him. Are you certain the barbarians are mistaken and it means only divine truth?”

“Priests!” the lord said. “Those savages have no priests! They are filthy, illiterate pig-herders ignorant of the divine realm. If they had any true learning they would know there is no earthly weapon in Leyothan. Those priestesses disdain the world.”

Aleya said, “Perhaps this weapon is something made since we were alive?”

He blinked, looking for a moment as if he had been thrust suddenly into the light of day. She thought: He does not understand how the years have piled up beyond his city. Or he knows, but he finds it hard to think about.

“The barbarians rule our land now, my lord. They know the prophecy, or some of them do. Soon they will all be here to search for this weapon of invincibility. But if you get it first, you will triumph. You will have the means to dissolve the spells that confine you to this valley.”

He blinked again, masking his thoughts this time. “What deal do you propose, dog? You will fetch this great weapon for me? Why should I let you run free to get it? You might just think to use it against me.”

She chose her words carefully. “Deal with me, my lord, and you will hold my promise that I will not use it against you. That promise will mean you have nothing to fear from me.”

“And what do you want from me in exchange?” he asked. “You want your beauty back, I suppose.”

He lifted a negligent hand. A tingling passed over her cold-numbed skin; in the corner of her eye, her wind-whipped rags changed to the lace and brocade of her memories. Her hands—she lifted them and saw slender, smooth fingers.

Oh, she did want her beauty back, her one power over the world, the one consolation the war had not been able to take from her. But when you bargained with sorcerers, you had to be as careful with your words as with theirs.

She also wanted to be away from him and his city. She wanted not to be cold anymore. She wanted . . . she was tired beyond bearing. She wanted to lie down and sleep, but she wanted to wake up in sunshine. She yearned to smell the first roses of summer, to make a young man smile, hear a child laugh . . .

Reyozem Ahon would know how to grant her both beauty and a semblance of life in such a way she would not have to prey upon the living to sustain them. Of course, the only way he could do that would be to share his food. She would perhaps have to eat the souls of people she had known. But they were already dead, those shadows populating Shenna. And she had no other choice except to die for good. Even the temples consumed soul-stuff; they only shunned murdering to obtain it.

She would stoop that low to cling to the living world. But she would never bestow upon Reyozem Ahon the power to break out of Shenna. She had promised him, “I will not use it against you”; she was free to find someone who could.

Anxiety that she would say the wrong words nearly prevented her from speaking. “I want . . . to live as I was, like a natural, living person again, with a natural span of years from this day forward, free of hunger for the souls of the living, and free to leave this city and your service without prejudice or harm.”

A smile spread across his face. On another man, it would have reassured her. She wondered, frantically, what her mistake had been. “If you bring this weapon of invincibility to me,” he said, “and it is a real thing and not some philosophical rubbish of the priestesses, I promise to do as you ask.”

Why that smile? What had she omitted? What actions had she left open to him? Free to leave the city without harm—ought she to have said valley instead, or free to live wherever I go?

Then the smile vanished and he stared at her with his usual cold gaze. “Don’t think,” he said, “to deceive me and go over to my enemies. I leashed you before Shenna fell so I would always have at least one dog to do my bidding. I chose you not because you have any special talent, but because you will never serve a better purpose. You are a hindrance to the defense of the city, a fatal distraction to my captains, weakening them when they need to be merciless. Maybe such as you are tolerable in peacetime, leeches feeding off men’s souls, but in the stern work of war, you are worse than nothing. So I will have no compunction about swatting you like a dung-fly. If you break your compact with me, your sacrifice and your torment will last centuries. Do not try to betray me.”

“I never fed—” Aleya stared at him, stunned. She had had no idea of the depth of his hatred. No idea he had noticed her at all. The notion that she fed on her lovers was profoundly horrifying. She was nothing like him. She had wanted—she had wanted—

She had wanted to build a wall around those young men where death and suffering held no sway. She had wanted to protect them while the enemy raged outside . . . although she had always known that they could stay only a brief time in her fortress.

She had never bound a lover to her and she had never cast one off. They had all left her. They had all died, one after the other.

Now he was saying that she had caused it. Had she truly spoiled them for war, had it been her touch that marked them out for death?

She struggled to remind herself that the lord of Shenna was always full of lies. Though it might not all be lies.

But . . . he spoke as if the battle were still raging. He knew the city had fallen, and yet in his mind his captains still led out his soldiers against the enemy.

If he had leashed her before the fall of Shenna, as he said, why had he never used the tool he had created in the hundreds of years since she and he had died? It was the barbarian mage who had awakened her. A living person.

The spells that bound Reyozem Ahon in this city must have made him unable to loose her and send her out himself.

But perhaps also . . .

It’s not the way of your kind to remember, the peasant witch had said.

Perhaps he had thought that, dead, he could live off his storerooms of sacrifices. What he had now—and therefore all he could offer her, although she would not think about that right now—was only something like life. His mind could take in nothing new, or at least not well. He could not compass the passage of time. Despite his great power, he, too, could not help but dream of the dead past.

The lord Reyozem Ahon was still, however, a cold and terrible presence. He stood waiting for her reply. Starlight fell through the roof beams brightly enough to cast criss-crossing shadows. But he cast no shadow.

She made a deep courtesy to him. “My lord, I will not break this compact if you do not.”

He said, “You will nevertheless carry this with you, so I will know what you do and say.”

He summoned a glittering disk out of the air and thrust it in front of her face. In the instant before Aleya recognized what it was, the reflection caught her gaze: beautiful Aleya, the old living Aleya, the lie.

She cursed herself. The mirror had to be the one he had tried to force on her when she first fled Shenna. Of course it was ensorcelled, and by looking in, she had become subject to the spells he had placed on it.

“Take it,” he commanded, dangling the mirror by its silver chain.

It was clear that he would not let her leave otherwise. After a moment, she reached out her hand.

The mirror was as cold as ice and no bigger than her palm. Its silver frame tingled against her skin. Circling the glass were gods’ names and divine sigils inlaid in gold: of the God of the Gate, the Queen of Heaven, the Lord of Wisdom, She of the All-Seeing Eye. Strange—the mirror looked more like a temple artifact than a spell of Reyozem Ahon’s making. Now Aleya’s false reflection was rippling like smoke. A hole tore open like a rock smashing thin ice; she was falling. Darkness and light rushed toward her—

“Put it on, dog,” Reyozem Ahon said. “You can make love to yourself later.”

She wrenched her gaze from the depths of the mirror. On his face she saw both the contempt evident in his voice, and a certain satisfaction.

She slipped the chain over her head, carefully tucking the mirror between her jacket and her bodice so it did not lie against her skin. Only then did he step aside from the stairs.

7

Again she departed Shenna; again she stumbled through the forest on feet numb with fatigue and cold. She began dreaming in snatches of the long-ago summer day when she had first met her husband. When she found herself on the ridge top, struggling up the last rise below the boundary stone, she did try to summon wakefulness, in order to keep watch for the barbarians. But she saw no sign of them.

Then the high glaciers on the mountains turned blue-silver, and a waning moon welled above the peaks. In the moonlight, the boundary stone cast an inky stripe across the road. She halted, although she told herself her fear of the stone was foolish. Yesterday she had walked inside Leyothan’s borders for at least a little while without coming to harm.

Then she saw that the rocks at its base were in fact sprawled corpses.

She edged closer. Their blood stained the snow black. One, naked, might have been yesterday’s sacrifice. The others all wore cuirasses and swords, so Guribast must have escaped the lord of Shenna’s appetite. The horses had probably scattered in terror. She would be pleased if the mage had had to make his escape on foot, and even better pleased if his journey proved long and arduous.

The black stone loomed over her. At last she made herself step past the stone and the corpses. Strange: The dead men lay scattered on all three sides of the boundary marker. Could Reyozem Ahon cross the border after all?

She was headed downhill into Leyothan when a spell slammed down on her. “Stop!”

Guribast’s command gripped her by the bones. This time she could not even turn to face him, could hardly draw breath. She could only listen as his feet clomped toward her across the snow.

It was not the lord of Shenna who had fattened his power on the dead soldiers, but this loathsome man.

“Listen you well, revenant,” he said, in front of her now. The rotten taste of his necromancy seeped into the air. “I your master am now, and no other. All those old spell that guard you I have surmount.”

He took a step closer. “This I upon you place. You, who I awaken, you who I raise so to me to reveal the weapon of Leyothan, you will go search it out. All the snare which your dead lord place when he was alive upon this land, all the illusion of the old Temple, you, dead one, you through it all will pass. You for me will find the treasure and you to me will bring it. Now go!”

The command struck her like a fist even as the spell locking her in place broke apart. Her feet carried her away from him, down the road into Leyothan.

The rest of the moonlit night she stumbled along the road, barely able to lift her feet but unable to stop them moving. Reyozem Ahon did not act through the mirror to help her. Perhaps he could no longer do so. She did not look at her hands, but her clothing was in tatters again, and she was certain Guribast had destroyed the illusion of beauty the lord of Shenna had dressed her in.

She passed the peasant witch’s house as dawn was lighting the sky; crossed a stream, where she drank. On the far side she began to encounter smaller paths feeding into the road. The paving stones grew ever more bare and worn. Then the way split. A muddy track carrying most signs of traffic headed downhill. The old roadbed, however, curved away to vanish into forest. Only a trace of a footpath continued in that direction.

To find an ancient place, she should follow the old road. She did not want to search for the treasure, but she was too exhausted to fight Guribast’s spells, and her feet carried her onward.

The path burrowed through a tangle of young trees, then ended abruptly at a hilltop meadow. And there, still shadowed by the eastern mountains, another valley opened up beneath her.

This valley was not as broad or long as that of Shenna, and was more protected from the weather. It resembled the landscape of her childhood: stubbled fields and muddy fields planted for winter; stone-fenced pastures holding the half-wild flocks brought down from mountain pastures; hamlets of stone-and-timber houses; a mill beside a swift-rushing river.

And ordinary people lived here. A woman scattered maize for her turkeys beside a dyeing shed. Children chased a dog through an orchard.

Aleya shivered suddenly. A valley walled in the north and east by mountains, a valley from which all roads headed up toward heaven: This peaceful place had to be the dread and mysterious Leyothan, home of the pitiless Oracle.

But the big temple compounds in Shenna had been the size of small villages. Leyothan lay spread out before her, and she could not see so much as a roadside shrine. The largest building was an elegant stone manor about a mile away.

Another cold shiver crawled over Aleya’s scalp. The priestesses of the Oracle of Maro were not, from all she had heard, given to public displays of magic other than prophecy, but their power to wall out the lord of Shenna told its own story. Aleya did not doubt that priestesses who could see every path into the future, and perhaps had foreseen her coming for years, would be able to conceal their entire compound in broad daylight if they chose.

She was so tired it took a moment to realize that her feet had stopped walking. The spell, it seemed, could not force her to move if she did not know which way to go.

But the valley of Leyothan drew her. War and suffering seemed never to have come here. Perhaps that was evidence of the Temple’s weapon of invincibility. Or perhaps it was merely the Abbess’ illusion: another dream like the ghost-city of Shenna, also meant to ensnare her.

8

Then the sun finally peered over the mountains. Its light threw the landscape into relief, casting a shadow from the road that wound up from the valley entrance. Now Aleya could see that the road had once aimed straight toward the hillside on which she stood, although what remained of it above the manor was grassy and neglected.

Aleya crossed the meadow to look down on the road and discovered an overgrown stairway climbing toward her. At the top of the hill, the stairs vanished under grass and fallen leaves. But a path continued into the heart of the meadow, across sunny stretches or through patches where trees and brush grew wild.

The great temple in ruins like Shenna? Another illusion of the Abbess?

There was magic of a sort here, now that she paid attention. It tingled faintly under her feet, but it also extended beyond the hilltop, a crystalline web of spells woven into the very soil of this valley. It no more resembled the temple magic of her experience than a feather did a longsword.

And then Aleya noticed something else. A woman had recently walked this way, pressing new-fallen leaves into the mud. Her feet, shod in heavy brogues, were no larger than Aleya’s.

She did not know how she could be mistaken about any woman’s shoes. These were the very footprints she had followed out of Shenna two days ago.

Aleya’s heart began to pound violently. An intuition she could not name brought Guribast’s spells to life again, and her aching feet began to stumble after those tracks.

Then she heard singing from deeper in the meadow. Aleya followed the prints past a maple shedding flame-red leaves, over a mound of stones. On the far side she found a girl cutting seed-heads into a basket. The girl did not look older than sixteen.

When she saw Aleya, she stopped singing and set her gardening knife in the basket. “There you are,” she said.

Aleya could only blurt out, “You were in Shenna!”

“Yes,” said the girl, as if there were nothing remarkable about the fact. She was gazing calmly at Aleya. “The garden needs tending. Medicines grow there that won’t root any place else.”

“But how do you go there and, and leave?”

The girl shrugged. “The priestesses of Mercy got the lord of Shenna to promise that he wouldn’t interfere in their affairs if they cared for his wounded soldiers. His promise won’t let him touch the person who tends the garden.”

Then, before Aleya could say or do anything more, the girl pressed her palms together in front of her and began to pray.

Her voice was clear, but not loud and penetrating like the singing of temple officiants. Still, the prayer sank into Aleya’s chest like water into dry soil, like molten gold spilling on straw, like a knife ripping rotten fabric to shreds.

Shocked to her core, Aleya could not move. This country girl with twigs in her hair was more unlikely as one of the terrible priestesses of Leyothan than the peasant witch. Even as the girl’s prayer tore her apart, Aleya heard the words: O Queen of Heaven, whose breath creates our souls, unbind what is bound, restore rightness to the world, give life to what is living; what has passed out of nature, give to him who guards the Gate . . .

How dare this muddy girl cast into the void the beautiful and highborn Aleya, whom everyone, lords and ladies together, had desired? How dare she be young and, o gods and goddesses, beautiful herself; or at least she would be if she spent an hour of her day on it. She did not deserve that transparent, milk-white complexion, not when she let it freckle so carelessly, nor that hair, near-black where shadow fell on it, dark red where the sunlight dappled it, which she hid in an ugly braid as if she were a temple novice.

She did not deserve to live when Aleya could not. This girl could have everything: a husband whom bloody steel would never take from her, children to run laughing through her house—

She would have no war, no grief, no lord whose ambition would drag her and everyone she loved into ruin. She could have this peaceful valley lying at the foot of heaven.

Sharp hatred surged through Aleya. This girl she could eat. She took a step forward through the pain of dissolution. The girl hadn’t even put a word on her to keep her still!

She reached toward the girl’s neck where her blood pulsed, and the warmth of life rose up like perfume. Then she saw her dead hand against the girl’s smooth skin.

She yanked it away in horror. She tried to stumble back, to run away so she could hide in darkness, but Guribast’s spells would not let her.

The girl just went on singing. Her prayer was like a hard, swift current that tugged at Aleya until the very foundation of her soul seemed to crumble, and she toppled into the flood. The current rushing her along tore her apart, piece by piece, and every break in her soul hurt so much. Aleya knew where the prayer was sweeping her: toward the Gate of the world.

This time she could not fight it. She was so hungry, so thirsty, so weary and steeped in despair. The air was darkening fast, and a fierce pain burned in her chest. Maybe she should go. She was a monster, and nothing could redeem that but a true death.

The burning in Aleya’s chest turned to white-hot fire. In the deepening shadows between her and the girl, a hole ripped open like the one Aleya had glimpsed in the mirror, and out of it, on the wings of an icy wind, rushed a void both bright and dark.

The Gate of the world. Except—all around the void hung sigils and gods’ names, exactly like the ones on the mirror—

And suddenly Reyozem Ahon stood beside Aleya. The girl inhaled sharply, and her song faltered.

“You barking, mangy cur,” Reyozem Ahon said to Aleya. “Couldn’t you keep from stirring up the priestesses for even an hour?” He stepped forward.

But it wasn’t Aleya he reached for. It was the girl.

In that eye-blink something twisted inside Aleya. O gods and goddesses, how she hated him. His works had made her heartsick beyond heartsick. The thought of Reyozem Ahon bringing his ruin to this valley, of him so much as touching that girl, filled her with more loathing and rage than she could endure.

And she had opened the way for him. She had carried the mirror here.

Twisting the fabric of the world through the mirror was a feat of magic so great that it made Guribast’s spells look like a child poking in the mud. But Aleya knew how to stop it.

She walked toward the Gate, bearing the mirror and Reyozem Ahon’s spells with her. She was so tired, she had walked so far, she did not know how she could take these last few steps out of the world. But she had to do it. The god-names ringed her now. As Aleya whispered them, they brightened, vanished. And then she crossed the threshold of the void. Darkness like ink poured on all her senses. Time and space dropped away—

She wished she could have said her own prayers before dying, said goodbye to everything she had ever had to leave behind: her mother and father, her sisters and childhood home, all left smoking under the winter sky by enemy raiders. Her husband, whose face she could no longer remember—dark hair, his eyes had been dark, but his face . . . She never had his portrait painted because it had not been possible that he would lie dead on the battlefield six months after their wedding.

Goodbye to the children she had never borne, because she could not stand to bring them into the world made by the lord of Shenna.

Goodbye to every lover who had ridden out to die—at this moment, she knew she had not caused their deaths. She only saw in a man’s face when he was going to die and could not help but want to comfort him. The God of the Gate’s breath had always been so cold on her soul.

And now the vast swelling presence of that god approached her. The cold sword of Judgement swept down, for her—

But lightning pierced her instead, and the darkness shattered around her like breaking glass.

And then, inexplicably, she was back in the sunlit garden. The lord of Shenna had vanished, and the girl was singing as if he had never interrupted her.

The blue sky arched over them. A bumblebee, heavy with pollen and slowed by the autumn chill, lit on the girl’s green jacket. The last of Aleya’s bitterness dissolved into longing, and she began to weep. The stinging in her dry sockets felt like acid.

After a while she became aware that the girl had stopped her prayer. Aleya wiped her face. She was surprised to touch real moisture. “Where did he go?” she asked.

The girl shrugged, but she was watching Aleya with that sharp dispassion. “Back to Shenna. Could I see how he came here?”

Aleya pulled the chain over her head and handed it over. Broken glass rained to the ground.

“A Temple mirror!” the girl exclaimed. “They used them for prophecy. I’ve never seen one with the glass still in.”

But she turned the mirror away from her and knocked out the remaining shards before she inspected the inscription on the front. “There was a mirror they sent to Shenna,” she said, “long ago, to bring a prophetess to them. It never came back. This must be the one. It’s too bad it’s ruined.”

Sent to bring a prophetess from Shenna? A shiver crawled over Aleya’s scalp. “I broke it because—he was trying—you—”

“Oh, he couldn’t touch me because of his promise about the garden of Mercy. But you did the right thing. What I meant was that he was the one who ruined it.” The girl laid the frame in her basket among the seed-heads and sticks. “So why did he send you?”

Her accent was much easier to understand than the peasants’. Now Aleya saw the gold in the girl’s ears and the embroidery on her jacket and skirt, but how could her maids allow her to go around with that dreadful braid and those ugly, muddy, heavy shoes—

The girl waited on her answer, her gray-green stare piercing Aleya through and through. No sixteen-year-old girl, Aleya thought, should look on the world from such a distance and at the same time as if everything was naked.

“I came to steal your treasure,” Aleya admitted.

The girl frowned. “Treasure?”

“A barbarian sorcerer raised me out of the crypt and spelled me to find it. The lord of Shenna also wants the treasure. I offered to bring it to him, you see, in exchange for a semblance of life—”

“A semblance—!” the girl said. “You’re not dead and he knows it. He was the one who disguised you!”

Aleya gaped at her. “Not dead?”

“Someone might have thought so at first glance. He put many spells on you. But I’ve untied them all. Come with me.”

The girl was already walking away. Aleya limped after her as quickly as she could, across another grassy stretch and into a stand of immense old pines.

Here there were no fallen walls. Instead, a part of the mountain, a sheer mossy outcropping untouched by stonecutters’ chisels, rose up through the forest canopy. A spring burbled out of a crack in the cliff to run into a stone-lined pool.

Power shivered over Aleya’s skin as she stepped toward the pool. This must be the inner sanctuary of the old Temple. The sanctuary of Maro has no roof or walls: not philosophy, but plain description.

Aleya expected the girl to genuflect and pray, but she merely crouched down and drank from cupped palms. Then the girl surprised her once more by taking Aleya’s hands in her own cold wet grasp, plunging them into the basin, and lifting them to Aleya’s mouth. Aleya averted her gaze and tried to twist away from her corpse-fingers, but the girl insisted, “Drink.”

The water, heavy with the power of the sanctuary, was bitterly cold and burned all the way down. Aleya’s gut cramped and for a moment she thought she might expel the water the way it had come. But after a moment the pain eased.

“Look with me into the water,” the girl said.

“Please,” said Aleya, more tears spilling down her cheeks. “Don’t be cruel.”

The girl just repeated, “Look!”

Her clear-eyed gaze did not waver from Aleya’s corpse-face. By her tone the girl might be urging her to try a gown of a color she usually shunned . . . a sister’s voice, a lover’s voice, a daughter’s voice. Longing rose up in Aleya again, and grief she could not bear. She squeezed her eyes shut. It was so quiet in that place that she heard her tears plinking one by one into the basin.

The girl’s hands did not release her own, and finally Aleya dared open her eyes again.

A stranger leaned over the glass-smooth water of the basin. The woman was gaunt, lined, worn down by years, and grey streaked her black hair. Her dark eyes glittered with tears. She had no beauty, but she was—

She was alive.

Aleya looked at her hands imprisoned in the girl’s grip; an aging woman’s fingers, but not a dead woman’s. “How—?”

“You were never dead. Reyozem Ahon tied up your life, but he never took it from you. I suppose he conceived some plan for you before he died—”

“To send me to Leyothan, past the spells of the Temple,” Aleya whispered. “He must have known the prophecy all along. Maybe he learned it from one of the Shenna temples.”

She had been lying in the tomb like an enchanted maiden, not even her fingernails growing. Except that unlike a heroine of story, she had aged . . .

“What prophecy?” demanded the girl.

“About the treasure. ‘In Leyothan is a weapon that will undo all who oppose it.’ The barbarian, the one who summoned me out of Shenna—he told me about it. He said his spells had raised me because I was the one who could find it—”

The girl was frowning again, but at the basin. Aleya followed her gaze and, with a chill, saw reflected in the basin an image of Guribast beneath the boundary stone, as clear as if he stood beside her.

But the girl said, with irritation, “What treasure? The priestesses owned some books. They never had weapons. The Temple didn’t even keep men-at-arms. Everything else left behind was just—dishes, linens, kitchen stores.” She shook her head. “‘Stupid people rely on prophecies; the future is not yet written.’ The Abbess wrote that in her pillow-book—she, the great Oracle whose prophecies they all sought out. Is that the secret of Leyothan?”

She released Aleya’s hands and turned restlessly toward the entrance of the sanctuary. “But the mage laid a command on me to—” Aleya said.

“I told you,” the girl said, looking back, “I took all the spells off.” And then, when Aleya tried to speak further, “You’re safe here, for the moment. The nariyo do pretty well at keeping him lost.”

Aleya barely heard those last words, because all at once the reflection in the water changed. A hole opened, obliterating the image of Guribast, and the void rushed toward her. As before, time and space fell away, blackness swallowed all her senses, and the God of the Gate’s cold sword swept toward her.

But this time Aleya remembered that he who wields the sword of Judgement is master only of the dead who pass through the Gate. The one who rules the Gate is the goddess sometimes named Maro, which means divine truth, and the door into the mansions of heaven is also called the Gate to vision.

Once again brightness pierced her, and this time—

“You are the Oracle,” Aleya whispered.

The girl jerked as if slapped. “There’s no Oracle. The Temple has been empty for a hundred years.”

“No,” said Aleya, “you are the Abbess, the Abbess’s—who are you?”

“The last Abbess’s great-great-granddaughter,” said the girl, angry now. “She opened the doors of the Temple. She said the cloister was a great evil and no one should ever be bound to the service of prayer, and she left the Temple herself. It doesn’t mean anything. The talent isn’t passed down—”

“No,” said Aleya. “The Temple is still here—the peasants who know so much—the nariyo, whoever they are—it’s just spread out, growing up through the grass and the trees. The Temple has no walls or roof.”

The girl pressed her lips together. Aleya recognized the fear in her eyes, and just as Aleya had always felt the cold wind of death blowing out of a doomed man’s future, now her newly sharpened sight showed how there was neither Gate nor wall between this girl and the mansions of the gods. No fleeting visions for her; only her angry refusal to look kept her from seeing all the time.

At least in Aleya’s former life, she had known how to delight in beauty, how to seize moments of joy despite the terrible war that, one by one, took everyone she loved. Aleya saw how this girl had all the things she herself longed for, but owned none of them. The girl wandered old ruins because she preferred things with no future.

And Aleya knew—the way she had always seen approaching death in the eyes of those doomed young men, her lovers—she knew that this girl was the weapon of Leyothan. She came and went from Shenna, and Reyozem Ahon had never suspected. To discover her, temples pored over old prophecies, the barbarian summoned the dead, all so far in vain.

Aleya was not going to speak about it. It was as if the goddess herself laid hands upon her lips.

The girl turned toward Aleya again. “My grandmother expects me,” she said. And then, formally, “You are welcome to stay in our house. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed since the priestesses ruled Leyothan. Any woman in distress or with no other recourse can live here, though there’s no room for idle hands.” She sighed. “If you really are the one who will find this supposed weapon of Leyothan, we can’t let the barbarians have you.”

9

Aleya watched the still-nameless girl, daughter of the manor, depart through the ruins. Now what?

The mirror the priestesses had sent to Shenna had, after all these years, found her and worked its change on her.

The girl had untied knots from the past but had left the straggling threads in the road.

Aleya did not know how to gather herself up and proceed. Still, she remembered her childhood lessons: Magic and prayer, dust drifting out of the divine realm, have their ineluctable laws. Like the peasant woman, Aleya was now left with a spiritual debt that she must repay.

And as surely as she had divined the girl’s nature, she knew what task the goddess Maro demanded of her. Reyozem Ahon was banished safely back to Shenna, but there were plenty of living people to come searching for the weapon of the prophecies. Her own gift remained so much less than the girl’s, but she had to learn to use it so she could guard the girl from them.

Aleya had been afraid her whole life that because of her gift she would be taken to serve the Oracle, and now it was her fate.

With some trepidation, Aleya looked again into the stone basin. For a moment, she did see more fragments of vision: Guribast gloved in blood; a young cavalier on a black horse, hunting him through a maze of stone, a maze of spells; barbarian temples; armies marching to war; Reyozem Ahon; a cliff face shattering into ruin.

Then the fragments dissolved and left only a strange woman’s haggard face. She would have to work to recognize the face as her own.

Aleya genuflected before the spring of the Oracle and followed the girl out of the ruined temple, as she had once followed her out of Shenna.

The cold mountains, iron-dark and ice-pale, towered over the valley. How small Leyothan was, for a sanctuary against the haunted past and the barbarian present.

Aleya descended the temple hill and trudged toward the manor. Peasants at a smithy glanced at her with desultory interest, as if she were no more than a hopeful beggar. Didn’t they know she was a revenant from the tombs of Reyozem Ahon, dead lord of Shenna?

Didn’t they know, she mocked herself, she had once been beautiful and highborn, needing no one’s pity?

Her first unthinking impulse was to seek the front door of the manor, but she turned instead to the kitchens as a beggar would. The middle-aged woman who answered her knock seemed to find Aleya, two hundred years old, as unremarkable as the peasants had. “Oh, yes, miss told us you might be coming.”

The servant led her to the bathing rooms behind the kitchen stoves. Steaming water out of the stove tank, soap scented with balsam: O gods, how that bath soothed her to her bones. The clothes they gave her were coarse-woven in the country style, dyed a plain brown and lacking embroidery, but they were clean and nearly new.

When Aleya returned to the kitchen, the servant who had admitted her sat her at a trestle table, below hanging bunches of onions. It would no doubt be the lady Aleya’s fate to chop the onions, and to scrub the pots as well.

But the kitchen was clean and warm, and Aleya had stopped feeling cold altogether. Apples and a round of cheese waited on the table. From a big copper pot rose the smell of sage and turkey, and someone had just removed fresh-baked bread from the oven.

Small and human things; what reverence they were due, o gods and goddesses, with more holiness in them than all the prayer-ridden temples in the world.

“What did you say your name was?”

Aleya looked up to see the plump head cook offering her a plate. “You look more than half-starved,” the cook said. “We don’t dine for an hour. Why don’t you warm yourself meantime with this?”

On the plate sat a slice of buttered bread. It was darker and denser than what Aleya would have expected in a manor house, but its rich fragrance rose up with the steam, headier than incense. “Thank you.” Her words emerged in a whisper. She took the plate and lifted the slice for a tiny bite.

“It’s good,” she said.

© 2007 by Judith Berman. Originally published in Black Gate. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Judith Berman’s shorter works have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, Best Short Novels 2005, and Lightspeed Magazine, as well as in her chapbook from Small Beer Press, Lord Stink and Other Stories (2002). Her novel Bear Daughter (Ace, 2005), which was praised as “brilliant” (VOYA), “powerful” (Locus), and “utterly absorbing, unforgettable” (Booklist *Starred Review*), is being re-issued through Book View Café in December 2016. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon and Crawford awards, and her often-reprinted essay “Science Fiction Without the Future” received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award. She has lived in Philadelphia, Dubai, and northern Idaho, and currently resides on a hilltop on Vancouver Island, BC, in sight of the ocean.

EXCERPT: Beltrunner (EDGE-Lite )

Sean O’Brien | 9688 words

Chapter One

Come on, come on. Show me the Ps. It was becoming a liturgy. Collier hadn’t even raised the cabin lights—he had programmed Sancho to let him sleep, for all the good it had done him—but the glow from the console was more than enough to illuminate his craggy features. Rocinante was still executing her flyby of M-1875, sending back telemetry to Collier in the Dulcinea in full 3D color. Sancho was doing his best to analyze the data, as he always did, but Collier knew better than to rely solely on the computer. He was looking for something he couldn’t ever put into words, no matter how many belters back in Ceres had asked him to try. Not that he had been the center of any conversations for many years now. He had, at best, been a quaint curiosity some time ago, but now was an eccentric old man who was close to becoming a nuisance.

There! There it is! Mark it and bring Rocinante back in, Sancho, Collier rewound the telemetry to the precise moment he had seen the signs, and told Sancho to lock the coordinates.

Coordinates locked in. Rocinante returning to her stable, Skipper, Sancho confirmed cheerfully. I’m always curious, boss—what did you see?

Collier had never been able to explain the markings of a P-vein on the surface: indeed, he had been caught more than a few times excavating what he was sure would be a strike only to find nickel and iron. But he was not about to abandon his methods. Deep impact probes were far more reliable, but they were expensive consumables he simply couldn’t afford. Rocinante was not equipped for laser mining, as many of the third-generation rock hounds were. All Collier had were his instincts and subjective experiences. And hope. Still, he made an attempt to explain his art to his computer.

There is a fissure there, running from the top right to the bottom left. Do you see it?

Sure.

That’s a heavy-metal impact fissure. Bound to be some P in it, or at least nearby.

How do you know it’s an impact fissure? Couldn’t it be just cleavage in the rock?

Collier snorted. I know cleavage when I see it, Sancho. That’s not it. Takes a man to tell the difference.

What?

Never mind. Rocinante back yet?

Still on approach. I’ve got a good track. Her stable is ready—all lights green.

Good. When she’s tucked in, take us to M-1875. Right over the fissure. How’s the spin?

Not too bad. Well under tolerance levels. Do you want to attach correctors?

Collier shook his head. Not if I don’t have to. Takes up fuel. I’ll just go down myself, start cutting. Hover us one hundred meters away, but don’t deploy the canopy. What’s your estimated time until hover?

Rocinante should be tucked in about ninety minutes from now. Under standard procedure, it will take me about two hours to achieve stable hover over the coordinates. So three and a half hours, Skipper.

Great. Just enough time for a nap. Wake me when we get there. Or if there’s a fire or something.

If there’s a fire, I’ll just evacuate the oxygen. Sleep well, Skipper.

Collier laughed at the computer’s joke, glad at the machine’s attitude. He had long dismissed the question of Sancho’s self-awareness as immaterial and worthless. It pleased him that the almost hopelessly outdated computer had quirks and bugs—including, possibly, sentience. That ill-fated experiment was one of the few taboo subjects left in the system. Earth was rumored to still have hundreds of thousands of rogue Calibans who had blended into the background of the planet’s artificial workforce. Perhaps some had left the planet to Luna or even Mars—no one was certain. Collier suspected that someday, Sancho’s increasingly corrupted programming would reduce him to uselessness, but he dared not take him in for an overhaul. If he had achieved sentience, Collier would be held liable. He did not relish the idea of being ground up in the Ceres bioconverter for fertilizer. And anyway, if Sancho were sentient, the computer would be killed as well in an overhaul. No, better to continue as he was, with a quirky, erratic computer who asked odd questions. Collier drifted off to sleep with a smile on his lips.

• • • •

New contact, Sancho’s voice woke Collier instantly. Approaching at 23 meters per second relative velocity. Distance 345.6 kilometers and closing.

What the hell? Who is it? Collier tore loose the sleep restraint and shoved off toward the control seat. Even as he maneuvered into his station he was glancing at Sancho’s readouts. One look told him all he needed to know.

Configuration suggests a mining vessel, highest probability—

Ad Astra Corporation. Yeah. Collier heaved a sigh and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, as though girding himself for what he knew must come next. Why didn’t we see them from farther away? he asked irritably.

They were in obstruction, Sancho said.

Collier took a deep breath. No sense in blaming Sancho for that. So, the Ad Astra guys want a piece of this rock too, huh?

Affirmative. I’d say they are making for the same rock we are.

Collier studied Sancho’s readout. The corporate mining ship would catch up to him in just over four hours at this velocity. They would get to the asteroid at about the same time. His eyes found Dulcinea’s fuel supply indicator: every liter of propellant he used to increase his own velocity meant a slower return to Ceres later, but it might be worth it to get to the asteroid first and claim it before the corp could. Of course, there was no telling how fast the corp was willing to go to beat him to it.

Let’s talk to them, Sancho.

Sure thing, Skipper, Sancho said brightly. After a momentary pause, he said, Contact established. Comm ready when you are.

Collier drew his breath and said, in what he hoped was a cocksure drawl, This is the Dulcinea to approaching corporate mining ship. Who are you, and what do you want with my rock?

Your rock, huh? I don’t think you’re going to be able to make that stick, Col.

His eyes half-closed when he heard the voice. The sudden dryness in his mouth and slight stirring in his loins betrayed the conflict within him.

Isa, he croaked.

Corporate Captain Mitchell, Col. Been a while, hasn’t it?

There was no mistaking the casual venom in her voice. Even without a visual link, he could see her half-smirk and narrowed eyes. She always tried so hard to be serious and grim—but in rare moments of total honesty with him, she had revealed secret insecurities and fears that had made him love her all the more.

For a time, at least.

Yes, it has. And you still haven’t answered me: what are you doing chasing my rock?

For starters, Col, it’s not your rock. I know you haven’t filed a claim on it, and you certainly haven’t begun excavation. As far as I’m concerned, this is still a free asteroid. And we’re going to get there ahead of you. Isa’s smugness was a shade too heavy.

I’ve got plenty of delta-vee in my tanks still, Isa, he said, deliberately emphasizing her name rather than use her title, so unless you want to spend a lot of your corp’s water, you should break off and look for another rock.

Isa chuckled mirthlessly. Nice try, Col. You know we carry much more water than you. I can outrun you even from here, get to the rock ahead of you, set up the mine and begin processing while you’re still nursing those shit engines of yours. I’m surprised the Dulcet is still working, actually.

Dulcinea. And she’s never been better, he snapped. Isa knew very well how sensitive he was to comments about his boat. You try to keep up, Isa. I’m going to get to the rock first, and then you’ll have to lay off. Don’t waste your corp’s water on a stupid race you can’t win.

Since when are you so worried about Ad Astra’s profit margin?

Since when are you? He knew it was a childish rejoinder, but it came so swiftly and easily he barely knew he was saying it.

Isa sighed. You never did understand, Col. But after the last six years, I would have thought you would have come to the same realization I had.

Nope, he said, too much petulance in his voice. He winced at his own tone.

Silence from the other side, during which time Collier ached to ask Isa questions: questions that he had never fully put away. Why had she left that morning six years ago? Her long letter, written on real paper and left on his pillow in some old-fashioned gesture that angered him even more at the time, had said much but answered little. How many times in the past six years had he wished he had not spaced the letter? How many times had he wondered if he would ever find it again, floating in the belt?

His masculine pride won out, and Isa spoke before he succumbed to the wounds of the past. Well. In any case, Col, this is the way it is now. I’m here, I have a corp behind me, and I will be able to get to the rock first. I’m only cruising now, but if I need to, I will fly by you like a missile and use an anchor on the rock to claim it. Ad Astra Corporation Mining Ship SCM-17, out.

Damn her. Damn her and her corporation.

Even as he thought that, he couldn’t help but feel pleased that she had risen to prominence so quickly. He had always admired her cool competence—that and her quirky moments of vulnerability had first fascinated then excited him.

Sancho’s voice interrupted his thoughts. Skipper, she’s increased velocity. Relative velocity now 29 meters per second and increasing by point 9 meters per second.

She’s not kidding. Didn’t know corp ships were allowed to move that fast—I wonder what the performance is on the thrusters? She’s going to have to flipbrake before long, he mused aloud. Isa had been right on at least one score: he had to save a certain amount of propellant for the return to Ceres, and Dulcinea’s thrust efficiency was not what it used to be. Sancho had warned him about microfractures in some of the thrust tubes weeks ago: if superheated exhaust expanded the cracks, he would not only lose the race to the rock, but have to limp back to Ceres at reduced speed.

Damn it, he had to. Not only because he needed this strike, but also to show the corporation that a freelancer like him could not be shoved aside so easily. Ad Astra could not treat him this way, like an obsolete relic of a past time.

He didn’t quite convince himself that the corporation was the target of his anger.

Sancho, go to eighty percent thrust, and inform me of any changes in thrust tube integrity. If we are holding steady, we’ll go to one hundred percent.

Eighty percent thrust, aye. Recalculating vector to target. Recalculation complete, thrust in ten seconds. Secure for approximately one-eighth gee acceleration. Seven, six, five . . . pre-thrust deicing complete, tubes primed . . . two, one. Eighty percent.

Collier felt the gentle push into his chair as Dulcinea’s engines labored.

Sancho chimed in again. Revised telemetry: Ad Astra vessel relative velocity now forty-four meters per second, increasing by point two meters per second. Time to asteroid estimated at two hours, eighteen minutes.

Collier examined the data and squinted. Will we beat them?

Impossible to say, Skipper. I don’t know when she’s going to flip and brake—that depends on how much thrust she’s capable of, how much propellant her captain is willing to use, how—

All right, skip it. When do we have to flipbrake?

At our current acceleration, assuming you want to brake at the same rate, we should flip in forty-one minutes.

Any cracks in the thrust tubes?

Perhaps it was just his imagination, but Collier thought he heard fear in Sancho’s voice. Not yet. I can’t say if they will crack or not.

Let’s go to one hundred percent thrust.

We’ll be dangerously low on propellant when we get to the rock, Skipper. It’ll mean a very low-consumption return to Ceres.

We’ll mine water from the rock. Go to one hundred.

Assuming there is any, Sancho muttered, and Collier couldn’t help but smile at his computer’s quirks. Increasing thrust to one hundred percent. Stand by for approximately one-sixth gee. Five, four, three, two, one. One hundred percent.

The gentle weight increased almost imperceptibly. The sensation that he was lying on his back, looking up through the nose window, was a temporary illusion that he had little difficulty in dispelling. His years in space had trained his mind to ignore his inner ear.

Revised telemetry. Ad Astra vessel relative velocity forty-five meters per second, decreasing very slowly. Under point one meter per second per second. New estimated time to asteroid one hour, fifty-five minutes. Flipbrake in twenty-two minutes.

Still no way to tell if we will beat them?

Sancho sounded slightly exasperated. No, Skipper. Too many unpredictable variables.

I know what you mean, Collier nodded.

I didn’t mean—

Skip it. No need to be apologetic. We’ve never really talked about women, have we, Sancho?

No, Skipper. I don’t know what I can add to any discussion of romance. But I still have a rather extensive pornography collection.

Collier reddened. Never mind that. I thought I told you to always forget when I access that?

You do. But I remember you telling me to forget it.

We’re not talking about this. It’s a perfectly normal, even healthy—

Sancho’s voice went cold again as he interrupted. Revised telemetry. Ad Astra vessel has increased her rate of acceleration. Relative velocity now forty-three meters per second, increasing by point two meters per second.

Shit. She’s not giving up. Collier thought for a moment. Perhaps Isa was right: if she was willing to expend this much water to chase down the rock, he wasn’t going to be able to match her. Her ship obviously could outperform his, and she was not being miserly with her fuel.

How are the tubes holding?

No increased damage so far. But the likelihood is that I won’t be able to detect any cracks in time to shut down. If a tube cracks, we’ll lose it.

Can we go to one hundred and five percent thrust?

Sancho was slow in replying. Well, yes, but we won’t gain much. And we may pass the fuel threshold: we may not have enough to return to Ceres without cold-sleep protocol.

I told you, we’re going to mine water from the rock. Don’t worry about fuel.

If we go to one oh five, we run a greater risk of cracking a tube. It wasn’t Collier’s imagination: Sancho was clearly worried now.

Okay. Let me think.

Sancho waited a beat, then said dryly, That doesn’t fill me with confidence, Skipper. Can I suggest that maybe Captain Mitchell was right? We can’t win this rock.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her take this from me. Recalculate time of arrival at the asteroid assuming no flip-brake maneuver.

I don’t—

Just do it, Collier snapped.

If we continue at our present rate of acceleration, we will reach the asteroid in thirty-nine minutes. And we’ll be shattered to very small particles when we do.

Okay. Alter course so that we will execute a flyby at . . . five hundred meters distance from the asteroid.

Are you sure about this, Skipper? I don’t mean to challenge you, but this seems . . . well, crazy. You remember you told me five years, ten months and twenty-three days ago terrestrial if you ever tried to kill yourself, I was to stop—

Yes, Sancho, I remember. I’m not going to kill myself, or you. You’re going to drop me off when you get near the rock.

Okay. That still sounds like you’re going to kill yourself, Skipper.

I’ll ride Rocinante and use its thrusters, plus my suit thrusters, to brake myself to a soft landing on the rock. You’ll flipbrake as soon as I leave the ship and start coming back for me. I’ll be fine on the asteroid until you get back. And once I land on it, it’ll be mine: Isa won’t be able to claim it.

Sancho was silent for a long while.

Are you still there, Sancho? This would be a hell of a time for his erratic computer to finally give up the ghost.

Yes, Skipper. May I make a suggestion?

Sure.

We don’t need to get to the rock that far ahead of the Ad Astra vessel. We could still execute your plan, but not do it so late. Let me flipbrake late—still too late to hover above the rock, but late enough to beat the Ad Astra ship. You can leave the ship with Rocinante and get to the asteroid in time to beat the corp ship, but not have so much velocity that you’ll smash into it. I don’t think Rocinante and your suit thrusters together can slow you down fast enough if Dulcinea is going as swiftly as she will be if I don’t flipbrake.

Collier listened patiently and had to admit to himself that Sancho had a better plan. He didn’t relish the thought of getting to the rock first but being a cloud of viscera when he did so. Okay, Sancho, we’ll do it your way. Arrange the flipbraking in such a way that our relative velocity to the rock will be . . . one hundred meters per second. That slow enough for you?

Skipper, I am working with a very complex formula here, with too many variables I don’t know. For example, while I know the thrust for Rocinante and your suit, I don’t know how efficiently you will be able to line up your vector. If you’re not pretty fucking close to lined up, you won’t brake fast enough. I can’t—

Collier cut off his computer with a laugh of genuine pleasure. Sancho, that’s the first time I think I have ever heard you swear.

Well, damn it, this is the first time you’ve ever done something this batshit crazy.

Collier laughed again. I appreciate the sentiment, Sancho, I really do. Start your calculations as best you can. I’m going aft to get into my suit.

Okay. Can I back off the thrusters to eighty percent again? Now that we’re trying this stunt, we don’t need to be at one hundred.

Collier nodded. Sounds good. Go to eighty percent. Calculate the ejection point for me, let me know when you have a time on that.

Aye aye.

Collier swam out of the control chair and glided expertly toward the airlock suite. The patched but still quite serviceable vacuum suit hung limply in its frame, imitating the posture and demeanor of an old warrior who had seen too many battles and too few glories. Collier zipped it open and wiggled inside, noting that the abdomen was still very tight. He had resisted tailoring the suit to accommodate his belly in the wan hope he would drop those five kilos one day, and indeed, the snugness of the midsection only served to remind him he needed to do more time in the Ceres centrifuge.

Otherwise, the suit fit quite well, and Collier allowed himself a few moments to enjoy the womblike feeling of security the suit afforded him.

Sancho, is Rocinante fueled and ready?

Affirmative, Skipper. She’s topped off. You’ll need to leave the ship in just under twelve minutes maximum. Sooner would be better than later.

Roger that, Sancho. I’m heading to the stable now. Open the bay doors and prepare Rocinante for EVA. Collier made his way along the cylindrical passageway that led to Dulcinea’s belly where the scout vehicle was kept. He was glad there was little time to waste—had he been left to think about his scheme, he might decide it was insane and give up the rock to Isa.

Incoming message, Skipper.

Route it to my suit, Collier said, twisting behind him to seal the integrated helmet to his suit. He could hear Isa’s tinny voice coming through the earphones as he sealed and locked the helmet in place.

. . . There? Col? Please answer, he heard when he had finished with the helmet. Isa’s voice was not quite panicky, but very concerned.

Sorry, Isa, I missed the first part of your transmission. Say again? He made sure his voice was as casual as could be.

You’re aware you’ve passed your flipbrake point? Are you in trouble? Has that bucket finally broken down?

Collier’s smirk vanished. No, she hasn’t, and yes, I’m very aware of what I am doing. I told you: I’m not going to lose this rock. Not to you.

Silence for a moment, then: Look, Col . . . I think you’re taking this too far. Whatever you think about how I . . . how we ended, that’s no reason to, well, no reason to do this. I’m sure you—

Collier laughed, making no effort to disguise the scorn in his voice. I’m not killing myself, Isa. Recheck your telemetry on me: Dulcinea’s going to miss the asteroid by half a kilometer.

Isa did not answer immediately—no doubt she was checking her tracking data. Okay, then, she growled, obviously annoyed at having revealed emotion to him, What the hell are you doing?

I don’t think you need to know that just yet. You’ll see soon enough. But, he added, his charm vanishing suddenly, you won’t win this rock. You may as well turn back now.

I don’t think you understand, Col, Isa said, her voice strangely calm and even tender. This isn’t a game you can win. Ad Astra has a lot of resources behind me. I’ve been given quite a bit of latitude in operations to find and mine Ps. You, alone, won’t be enough of an obstacle to stop them.

‘Them?’ Collier chuckled, then broke off as a thought occurred to him. Speaking of Ps, why are you chasing this rock anyway? Do you know something about it?

Never seen it before.

Then how—?

Isa did not sound pleased. What do you think, Col? You think it’s an accident we are both here at the same time? At his silence, Isa almost shouted, We’re tracking you, you idiot.

Collier stopped at the hatchway to Rocinante’s stable. I see. You wait for me to find Ps, then you come get them, is that it?

Yes.

But I’m not always right. How do you know I’m right now?

I don’t—yet. I was going to send an impact probe toward the rock, see what we got. You don’t use impacts, do you?

I don’t have seventy thousand metals to waste every time I get a hunch, no.

Yeah, well, the corp does. That’s what I meant about resources, Col. She sighed. You see what I mean? You can’t win this. I’m not operating on a shoestring like you. I don’t have to watch every ounce of water, every erg of energy. I can be wasteful and thorough. You—

Well, it’s been nice chatting with you, Isa, but I’ve got a complicated thing here I gotta do, Collier said, surprised at the hurt in his voice. So if you don’t mind, I’ll be silent for a while, and I’d appreciate it if you could stay out of my way. Out. He bit down on the mic to end transmission, and almost violently opened the inner hatch to Rocinante’s stable.

Of course Isa was following him—he should have guessed that as soon as she had appeared on Sancho’s telemetry. Did he honestly think it had been some kind of chance meeting, out here in the nearly infinite emptiness?

You sure did, he said to himself. You think you’re some kind of hard-bitten realist, living on facts and figures with no room for dreams, but you’re just as susceptible to romantic thinking as a lovelorn teenager. You liked to think some weird expression of Fate pulled you two back together, as if to tell you she had been wrong to leave you, and now was coming back.

Shit.

Ejection point in six minutes, Skipper. I really suggest you get going. If you wait too much longer, the—

I know, Sancho. I’m in the bay now, he said, opening the outer door to reveal the blackness of the Belt. Rocinante was still attached to her hitching post—a collection of wires, cables, and fuel lines that held her securely to Dulcinea’s hull.

A sudden thrill shot through him. As far as he knew, this had never before been attempted—at least, not at such velocity. The common mythology surrounding Belters and shared by the rest of the system was one of reckless heroism: a combination of pioneering spirit and unbalanced avarice that most closely resembled the ancient frontiersman from Earth’s North American settler movement. (At least, so Collier was led to believe from his scant and irregular contacts with Martians, Jovians, and the rare Earther.) In fact, Belters were a remarkably conservative and cautious lot in their day-to-day lives. The act of becoming a Belter might be one of desperation, but in practice, Belters carved a very even, predictable, mundane course.

Collier was an exception.

Ready to run through the checklist, Sancho? he asked, as he carefully mounted Rocinante, finding handholds and footholds among her various antennae.

What checklist? I’ve never even remotely examined this EVA for feasibility, much less designed a check—

Calm down. I’m only joking, Collier chuckled. Stand by to release hitching lines from Rocinante. Transfer her guidance controls to my mic, too, while you’re at it.

Copy that. Comm line transferred. She’s under your command, Skipper. Good luck.

Thanks. He gripped the two antennae tightly and made sure he was well away from Rocinante’s exhaust vents. Let ’er rip, Sancho.

He felt a slight tug upward as Rocinante’s attitude thrusters gently pushed her down from Dulcinea’s hull. Dulcinea appeared to shoot upward at a fairly rapid pace as the little scout left her.

I’m away clean. Let me get a little distance before you fire up your thrusters again.

Copy that.

Rocinante, minus Y-axis thrust, fifty percent, continuous burn. On mark.

Acknowledged, came the lifeless voice of the scout’s dedicated computer.

Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark. As soon as he said it, he felt a much more severe tug upward that threatened to dislodge him from the antennae. His right foot left its hold and he fought panic as he repositioned it on another outcropping. Dulcinea raced away from him and he had to remind himself that he wasn’t falling through the void. The thrust couldn’t have been much more than one-tenth of a gee, but it was enough to force his brain to override the trap-door feeling in his stomach.

You’ve got some kick, girl, Collier said when his breath returned.

Everything okay, Skipper? Sancho asked.

Seems to be. Can you give me a rough idea of how long I’ll need to keep this thrust going to meet the asteroid?

Nope. I don’t know how long or hard you plan to thrust away. Cut your Y-axis thrust and get ready for minus Z-axis burn. When you do that, I’ll be able to get an idea.

Okay. Rocinante, cut minus Y-axis thrust on mark. Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.

The sudden return of weightlessness was a welcome feeling. He could no longer see Dulcinea—he had no reference points with which to compare his own motion. It was a calming feeling the likes of which he had never experienced. He had heard of unfortunate Belters caught in eruptions of water vapor, either from ship exhaust or comet expulsion, and who had been sent tumbling at great speeds away from their fellows: some had been recovered, some not. Had they felt the same peace and calmness as Collier now did, or were they panicked as they contemplated their own deaths?

Skipper? The Z-axis burn?

Coming up, Collier said, shaking himself out of his reverie. He repositioned himself on Rocinante’s hull, gripping what he could while avoiding the exhaust vents. He would need to also fire his suit jets to keep himself from losing his grip—

Damn.

Uh, small problem, Sancho. I didn’t think of this.

What?

My suit jet controller. I need my hands to operate it, but I can’t let go of Rocinante while she’s thrusting.

Shit, was Sancho’s only reply.

Collier waited a few seconds, then said, Sort of need an answer, there, faithful computer.

Sancho answered, I suggest a very faint thrust on Rocinante at first, to see what you can handle. Then you can step it up slowly and feel how much you can take.

Not bad. Let’s give that a go. Rocinante, minus z-axis thrust, uh, one percent, continuous burn. On mark.

Acknowledged.

Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark. The thrust was almost imperceptible. Were it not for the puff of vapor escaping through the exhaust vents, Collier could have believed nothing had happened. Rocinante, increase thrust to five percent. Mark.

He could feel a very gentle pull away from him, but he could hold on at this level indefinitely. He continued to tell Rocinante to step up the thrust until he could feel his arms beginning to strain. He stopped increasing at seventy percent.

Okay, Sancho, how am I doing?

Not even close, Skipper. You’re going to miss the asteroid, high, and when you do, you’re going to be flying by her at about thirty-four meters per second. And that’ll happen in about nine and a half minutes.

Okay. What do I need to hit the asteroid?

Skipper, you don’t want to hit the asteroid. You’re going too fast.

I’ll increase minus Z-axis thrust.

Can you hold on?

I guess I’ll have to. Rocinante, increase minus Z-axis thrust to ninety percent. Mark.

The pull away from him was now considerable. The problem wasn’t so much that Rocinante’s thrust was too formidable as much as it was the lack of proper handholds—he felt himself tightening his grip on antennae that were never intended to be used in this fashion. Idly, he wondered if anyone had ever tested the tensile strength of the objects that would mean the difference between life and death for him.

Whoa, baby. Now you’ve really got some kick to you.

Skipper?

So far, so good, Sancho. How’s about now?

You will still miss the asteroid, though not by as much. You’re still a bit high. And now you’ll make your flyby in thirteen minutes, give or take. At twenty-two meters per second.

I’ll go to one hundred thrust. Has Rocinante got enough juice for that?

Yes, but—

Rocinante, increase minus-z axis thrust to one hundred percent. Mark.

The tug increased, and he felt his left hand slip a few inches on the antenna he was gripping.

Alert, came Rocinante’s expressionless voice. Fault indicator warning on high gain antenna.

Rocinante, nature of fault? Collier felt the agony of his position. He couldn’t lessen his grip on the antenna, but he couldn’t afford to have it break off, either.

Structural failure in antenna housing. Loss of contact with antenna attitude control.

Will it break off? Rocinante, will it break off? he corrected himself.

Query parameters not set.

It was useless. Rocinante was not Sancho—it was only a very basic dedicated computer. There was, therefore, no way of knowing. He scanned Rocinante’s hull. Nothing else presented itself as a handhold—it was either the antenna or nothing.

How about now, Sancho?

Well, you’re still not going to hit it. You’re still a little high. Not much: I give my calculation a ten percent chance of error. Due to the asteroid’s slow spin, there may be a high enough projection that meets you right when you are flying by. In fourteen minutes, eleven seconds. But you’ll pass the asteroid at nineteen point seven meters per second.

That’s too fast, Collier said matter-of-factly.

Yes. I’ll be on the other side to meet you, Skipper. It was a good try. You almost did it.

Collier didn’t answer. Rocinante, prepare for Y-axis burn.

Skipper! You can’t give a minus burn: you’ll put yourself in the path of the asteroid. You’re going much too fast—if you hit the rock at this speed, you’ll be killed. Even if you somehow survive the impact, which you won’t, your suit will certainly rupture. Plus Rocinante will break up, and some of the debris might—

Sancho, shut up for a second, would you? I know what I’m doing. I’m not going to lose this rock. Rocinante, cut Z-axis thrust. Mark. He pulled himself closer to the hull when Rocinante’s jets stopped.

Skipper! Don’t!

Rocinante, plus Y-axis thrust, ten percent, five second burn. Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.

The tug this time came from the opposite direction, as if Rocinante was an elevator ascending at a very low rate of speed. After the furious Z-axis thrust, the mild and short upward thrust was nothing to his muscles.

I don’t understand. You are absolutely going to miss the rock now. I’m glad, but I don’t—

Rocinante, prepare for minus-Z axis thrust. One percent, increasing by one percent per second. Continuous burn.

Ohhh, I see. Sancho said.

Collier couldn’t help but smile a little. Mark. Once the thrust had built back up to full power, Collier tried to keep the smugness out of his voice as he asked Sancho, Give me an updated telemetry report, if you please, Sancho.

Gladly, Skipper. You will begin flyby in twelve minutes, two seconds. Moving at relative velocity of twenty point six meters per second.

How thick is the asteroid?

It varies, Skipper. If I understand what you are asking, the flyby should take about three and a half seconds to be complete, so I’m going to estimate the asteroid’s ‘thickness,’ as you put it, to be around sixty-five meters. When you clear the asteroid, you’ll have a relative velocity of about eighteen meters per second, give or take a few centimeters.

How long before I catch up with it again?

About four minutes, forty seconds. But you’ll want to reduce velocity well before that. I estimate, in order to land at a reasonable velocity—say, no more than two meters per second—you’ll take around ten minutes. You’ll need to play a little bit to get the velocity right.

I’ll bet I can do it in eight minutes, Collier said, his breath wheezing a little as he continued to hold on to Rocinante’s antenna.

Sancho surprised him with his answer. You’re on.

The next five minutes were interesting: he cut back on thrust once he had checked with Sancho that Isa’s ship was still too distant to beat him to the rock even if he reduced his velocity, fearing the damaged antenna on Rocinante’s hull would snap off. Once Rocinante had taken him back to the asteroid and he was closing in on it, he let go of the scout and ordered her back to the Dulcinea for refueling and repair. He would use his suit jets to soften his landing there.

Just to let you know, Skipper, Sancho said after he had released his grip on Rocinante and reversed his jets to begin a gentle braking maneuver, your eight minutes are up. I win.

Congratulations. I owe you a dinner. How’s my relative velocity?

You’re closing at eight point seven seven meters per second. Distance ninety-one meters.

Still a little hot for my liking, Collier mumbled. He squeezed his jet control grip and felt the pressure on his chest as the suit jets thrust broke his speed. He kept up the burn for five seconds, counting in his head, and called Sancho for an update. He didn’t trust his eyes to give him an accurate assessment of his velocity: the asteroid’s surface appeared to be coming at him very slowly.

Five point one four meters per second. Distance fifty-four meters.

He nodded. That would do for now. A few more bursts from the jets once he got closer, and he’d be there.

I’m receiving a transmission from the Ad Astra mining ship, Skipper, Sancho said.

Really? Put her through to me, Collier said. Hello, Isa. I’ll be with you in a minute.

What the hell are you doing, Col? You overshot the rock and are coming back? You’re not going to beat us, not by a long shot. I don’t know—

Sorry, Isa, I already have. In fact— he applied a final tiny burst of thrust and extended his arms, absorbing the gentle impact of his slow-moving body on to the asteroid. Touchdown.

What?

I’m on the rock. It’s mine. He began to unship the tethering gear from his shoulder pack.

Sancho chimed in. Confirmed. I have you on telemetry.

Col, I don’t know what kind of game this is, but if you think you can fool me into thinking you’ve made a claim to this asteroid without being on it, you’re crazier than even I thought.

It’s not a trick. I’m on the other side. Sancho, when will the rock’s rotation carry me into view of the Ad Astra ship?

Won’t be for a while, Skipper. Perhaps thirty-five minutes.

Isa, unless you want to just trust me, you’ll have to wait half an hour before you can see me. You think you can do that?

This is insane, Isa murmured.

Yep. That’s the Belt for you, he smiled and aimed the tethergun at a likely looking spot. Sancho, I’m tethering myself now. He fired the piton and immediately drifted away from the impact. He didn’t bother using his suit jets to compensate: the piton buried itself into the rock trailing the tether cable, which coiled oddly for a moment before the shoulder winch tightened it down. He sank gently back down toward the asteroid, tucking his legs under him so he could stand.

Tethering successful, he said to both Isa and Sancho.

Col, are you really on the rock? You wouldn’t lie to me?

Collier paused even as his feet touched the dusty surface of the asteroid. No, I wouldn’t. I never did, Isa. That’s why you left me, remember? Because I couldn’t lie to you.

Yeah, Isa said, and Collier hoped the wistfulness he heard in her voice was real and not his own invention. Then, her coldness returned. So you’re on the rock.

Yep. And I plan to mine it. So why don’t you and your corp look for another one. It shouldn’t be hard. I’m planting the claim beacon now. He opened his thigh pouch and planted the disc-shaped beacon firmly on the surface of the asteroid. When he depressed the securing stud, the beacon fired its spikes into the surface and began blinking red.

Receiving beacon transponder, Sancho said.

Good. Record and send to Ceres, please, Sancho. Collier grinned and said to Isa, It’s over, Isa. Go find another.

You don’t get it, Col. Nothing I’ve said to you—you haven’t heard anything. She was silent a moment, then continued. I’m going off comm for a little while. But this isn’t over.

Whatever you say, Isa, he grunted, then told Sancho to cut transmission, hoping to get the order in before she cut hers.

Transmission ceased, Skipper.

Good. Now. Where am I relative to that crevice we saw when we first decided this was our baby?

You’re on the proper side of the asteroid, Skipper. I make it sixty six meters distant.

Good news indeed. All right. Prepare for orientation. He faced the tether point and held still. Designating bearings. I am currently facing zero degrees at designated north pole. Align my suit compass and your own compass to that, please, Sancho.

Alignment complete. Fissure beginning point located sixty-five point nine meters distant, bearing one-six-four degrees. You should see that in your helmet display.

Got it, Collier said as he saw the tiny diamond appear in his display. He turned slowly, crouched down, and launched himself as flat as he could toward the target. There were no outcroppings ahead of him, and in any case, he was not travelling very rapidly. He kept his hands in front of him, gripping the suit jet controls, and skimmed the surface of the rock toward what he hoped were the deposits that would make this whole endeavor worthwhile.

If there are no Ps there, I’m going to feel a bit stupid, he murmured. Then, louder, to Sancho, he said, You didn’t see anything down there, did you?

I’m afraid not, Skipper. But you wouldn’t expect me to be able to from up here.

Collier grunted. That was true. But he would have felt a hell of a lot happier if Ps had been just lying on the surface somehow.

You’re almost there, Sancho said a few moments later. You should be able to see it pretty soon.

Collier used the suit jets to take him higher off the surface. He increased his headlights to maximum intensity and dispersal and suddenly saw the fissure. From his vantage point, it looked like a box canyon made of shadows: his lamps could not penetrate to the bottom.

Contact. I’m going to set a second tether here. I’ll also put a beacon down for you, Sancho. What’s your ETA?

I should be hovering over your position in roughly three hours, twelve minutes.

Collier nodded inside his helmet. His suit was rated for twelve hours survival time under working conditions, and he knew from experience he could stretch that out to sixteen if he was miserly with air and water. The biggest problem with a twelve-hour suit shift was the nutrient gel. It never tasted quite right.

Okay, Sancho. I’m going to begin preliminary excavation as soon as I am re-tethered here. He set to work, firing another piton from his shoulder and securing himself close to the fissure. Once he was safely tethered to this new point, he released the first tether, securing it to the rock with a blob of stik-tite adhesive, and began his weightless rappel down into the fissure.

He descended slowly—one meter per second—despite his impatience to reach the bottom. There was no sense in hurrying things now, not when he had beaten Isa to the rock. Besides, the fissure couldn’t be more than seventy meters deep, since the asteroid itself wasn’t that thick. He should find the bottom relatively soon.

No sooner had he thought that than his feet felt the surface of the bottom of the fissure. He bent his knees and absorbed the gentle fall, being careful not to spring back up and launch himself off the bottom.

Okay, I’m down, Sancho.

There was no reply. He tried again, but still did not get an answer. The canyon walls, combined with the asteroid’s gentle rotation, must be blocking his transmission. He shrugged. It was a minor annoyance, but he should have expected it. He set to work unshipping his core sampler, deploying a firefly to give him some ambient light by which to work.

Minutes later, he eyed the harpoon-like core sampler and selected a spot on the canyon wall. He set the sampler’s anchor points and secured it to the wall. All that remained now was to press the firing stud and allow the sampler to bore deep into the rock, retrieving and analyzing samples that would tell him if all this had been worthwhile.

A single test, if negative for Ps, would not mean the rock was worthless. He could test dozens of times and still not hit veins that may be hidden elsewhere on the asteroid. He knew this intellectually, but he nevertheless hesitated on the firing button. How many tests would he perform before admitting his instincts were wrong?

He shook himself inside his suit. Haven’t even sampled the damn rock once, and already I’m . . . He pressed the firing button with what amounted to defiance.

The sampler worked invisibly and soundlessly for several minutes, boring a deep shaft into the surface of the asteroid. Only when the sampler had created a shaft deep enough did a cigar-sized cylinder fire itself through the barrel of the sampler’s long, rifle-like assembly toward what Collier hoped were the ores he sought.

Collier knew well the operation of the probe: it would scrape the sides of the shaft created by the mining laser and determine where, if anywhere, veins of rare metals and ores lay. It could, and probably would, come back with nothing on this first run, he told himself. No sense getting worked up about it.

The cylinder returned to its home in the sampler base presently and the dedicated assay computer in the sampler housing began its work. Collier watched the readout screen at the rear of the device, his breath coming quickly despite his self-talk. The dark screen brightened to life with a chemical readout. Collier gasped at the numbers. He had long ago programmed the assay computer to highlight the Ps and ignore the more common elements: Dulcinea would never be a workhorse mining vessel carrying iron ore in huge quantities. She would always be a specialist. But such a path meant many, many failures. Only when he struck a vein of Ps would any mission be worthwhile.

And so he had this time. The readout did not change even as he stared at it:

Platinum: 6.123%

Palladium: 3.237%

Total P’s: 9.36%

Rhodium: 1.788%

Iridium: 1.334%

Osmium: 1.299%

Nickel: 67.344%

Iron: 11.322%

Copper: 7.044%

Other: Trace

He had only once before broken ten Ps on a strike: that was years and years ago and had carried him for quite some time through a long dry spell. He hadn’t quite broken ten on this sample, but nine point three plus was damn good. And that was just his first sample—what if he hadn’t even hit a vein?

The possibilities swam before him. On his first sample, a nine-three. Nine three six, really. He considered his options.

He could reset the sampler and start looking for an even richer vein, but he was out of contact down here. It would be more prudent, now that he had verified that the rock was a winner, to get back to the Dulcinea, resupply, regroup, and think about his plans. He had time.

He disassembled the sampler again and returned it to its place in his pack, then placed a second beacon on the wall of the canyon with stik-tite. Grasping the tether cable, he jumped gently off the floor of the canyon and rose back to the surface, using the cable to steady his ascent.

Once back on the surface, he hailed Sancho again.

Sancho, my friend, open the champagne. The sampler came back nine-three-six on the first try. So the—

Skipper! I’ve been trying to raise you for the past twenty minutes! Sancho’s voice was tense.

Why? What’s happened?

The Ad Astra ship. She’s been sending out blast warnings. She’s preparing to send an impact probe. I’ve tried to tell the captain that you—

Damn her! Put me through to her. Now. Collier’s grip on the tether cable tightened. An impact probe could easily split the asteroid in half if it struck the rock well enough: the fissure itself was evidence that the asteroid was fragile and could break in two if—

Isa’s voice sounded tense in his helmet. Col? Where’ve you been? I’ve been sending out blast warnings for the last—

Damn it, Isa, didn’t you believe me? I’m on the goddamn rock, like I told you. Placed a claim beacon. Can’t you see me now?

We saw two tethers, one of which was stuck to the rock. The other looked like it went down some kind of crevasse. But—

Yeah, that was me. I must have been down in the canyon. It doesn’t matter. So now you know I am here, and you can’t legally mine this rock unless I sell the rights to you. Which I am not going to do. I’m here, I’ve already begun my sampling. So fuck off, he added, feeling the pain of the past few years seep into his words.

I’m afraid not, Col. You’ve begun sampling, you say? What did you get?

It made no sense to tell Isa what he had found. There was nothing that could be gained from revealing his findings to her. But the smug power behind his knowledge was too much for his fragile wisdom to contain. He needed her to know he had made a strike, just like he always said he would. The sting of the words in her letter was almost as fresh as it had been when he had first read them. You’re a dreamer, Col. That might be okay for you, but I can’t live on dreams. The Belt isn’t a place for dreamers. And neither is our relationship. If you really loved me, you’d put away your toys. But you’re not really a man. You’re a boy. I need a man. So long.

Nine-three-six P, he said, clearly emphasizing each digit. Did you hear that? he almost shouted. It wasn’t really a question: she hadn’t time to respond. He knew what he sounded like, but at that moment, he didn’t care. He let himself be petulant. Nine-three-six! And that was just the first sample! What do you think of that, Isa? And don’t think I’m going to take you back, either. You had your chance. Even as he spoke the last words, he knew he had gone too far. Not that he had hurt her, but that he had squandered his chance to redeem himself, even a little bit, in her eyes. He was merely being a boy some more.

Isa drew her breath. Nine-three-six, you say, she drawled, her voice as calm as Collier’s had been manic. Quite a find. I was right to follow you. She was evidently ignoring his final outburst. A sarcastic comment would have been kinder than silence. Anyway, Col, she said after an eloquent pause, You should head on back to the Dulcinea soon. We’ll be ready to launch our probes pretty soon. I’m going to crack this rock open and mine her dry.

You can’t, Isa, he repeated, keeping his voice calmer. Belt law clearly gives me right of first. There’s nothing subtle about it.

And what are you going to do about it, Col? Isa’s voice was dangerously smooth and soft. Run to the Authority? Please don’t tell me your childish idealism has gone that far, she chuckled cruelly.

The claim beacon, Collier said, is planted. It’s sending data to my ship and I’m sending it to Ceres.

Isa sounded almost sorry. No, it’s not. We’re jamming your transmission.

Sancho! Collier snapped.

I can’t confirm that yet, Skipper. Haven’t received verification of reception from Ceres, but that could be from slowness on their part.

Isa continued. It’s going to come down to our word against yours. And the corporation has a loud voice.

Collier swallowed. Isa was right: if she decided to flout the law, the worst the Authority could really do was slap a fine on the Ad Astra Corporation. And even that was unlikely. He had no money to defend a claim, besides his ship. If he lost the claim (which, despite the circumstances, was quite possible given the skill and resources available to the Ad Astra’s lawyers) he would lose his legal deposit. He couldn’t afford to lose. Therefore, he couldn’t afford to fight.

Why, Isa? His voice carried all the meaning he needed to convey.

She sighed. Don’t make this more than it is, Col. I’m a captain in the Ad Astra Corporation. It’s what I do.

And what if I stay here and mine? Would you kill me, Isa?

Jesus, Col, do we have to make this so dramatic? No, of course not. I’ll still fire the impact probe, maybe it’ll crack the rock open, maybe not, but the concussion will disrupt anything you’ve put down. Might even damage or destroy your equipment. Then what? You won’t be able to mine, even if you wanted to.

Collier’s fingers flexed in his suit. He knew she was right: she could probably place the impact probe close enough to him to shake him off the rock but far enough away not to hurt him. And she had plenty of probes to waste if the first one didn’t do the trick. Now that she knew the asteroid was a nine-six-three, she could afford to be liberal in her attempts to shake him off.

I need water, he said, lamely.

Isa voice indicated she saw through the ruse immediately. I’m sure you do, after your idiotic stunt. I think I can spare a few cubic meters of ice so you don’t need to sleep your way back to Ceres.

This isn’t right, Isa. You know it’s not.

There’s no such thing as right and wrong out here, Col. Just what a girl can grab.

Grab and hold onto, you mean, he amended.

As you say. Grab and hold onto. You were never good at holding onto things, were you, Col?

Collier turned his eyes toward the stars. He wasn’t looking for Isa’s ship, since it was far too distant still to be made out by eye, but was imagining her as she was during those promise-filled months. He could see her long face as she held it in her cupped palm, her elbow denting the mattress. In his mind, she was smiling slightly—not a smile of occasion because of something in particular he had said or done, but a smile of circumstance. But then again, perhaps what he saw was not a memory but a creation of his own brain. Had she really ever been happy with him?

I guess not. So I’ll go back to the Dulcinea and you’ll arrange for an ice transfer?

Yes. So that’s it, then? You’re leaving the rock?

Collier’s head snapped back to the horizon. Isn’t that what you want?

Of course. I just didn’t . . . you’re being reasonable about it. Isa sounded surprised and even a little disappointed.

What choice do I have? If I stay, you’ll wreck any mining equipment I use. I won’t see a gram of P from this rock, and I’ll have to try to replace my tools. What do you want me to do, Isa? Throw sand at you when you hover over me? Spit at your impact probe? You’ve got me by the balls, Isa, and I know when it’s time to cut my losses. So just send over the damn ice, without any of your gloating.

You were never reasonable, Isa said evenly. That was the whole problem. Are you saying you’re coming around to—

Damn you, Isa. You can’t just win, can you? Just like you couldn’t just leave me. You had to follow me. And now, now that you are going to take right out from under me the biggest strike I’ve had in years, you can’t just do it. You have to talk to me about it. Well, how’s this for talk: you’re nothing but a corporate whore, Isa. You might have had a heart at one time, may have been your own person. But now you’re nothing but another Ad Astra whore, doing what they tell you, hoping the suits will see fit to send some money your way. I’m glad you left. Sancho, cease receiving from that damn ship.

His radio went dead.

© 2016 by Sean O’Brien. Excerpted from Beltrunner by Sean O’Brien. Published by permission of the author and EDGE-Lite, an imprint of Hades Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean O’Brien is an educator and writer from Southern California. He is married and has two children along with an ever-growing number of animals. He was named Educator of the Year by the California League of High Schools and has been a head varsity football coach, television broadcaster, and Gilbert and Sullivan singer (though not a good one). He’s the author of A Muse of Fire, Wondrous Strange, and Vale of Stars.

Movie Reviews: January 2017

Carrie Vaughn | 1591 words

Moana
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements
Disney, November 2016
1 hr. 53 min.

This is one of the more gorgeous films I’ve seen in a long time. The depiction of voyaging Pacific Islander culture—particularly the sequence showing the ocean-going outrigger exploration fleets during the song “We Know the Way”—is spectacular and inspiring. (Does anyone know of any good epic fantasies inspired by this culture? Because if not, there should be.) Moana is a great, funny, self-rescuing princess. (“You wear a skirt and have an animal sidekick. You’re a princess.”) This is a true depiction of how having a chicken sidekick would really work. (Spoiler: Not well.) I liked a lot of things about this, but one of the things I really liked is that there isn’t a villain, per se. Moana and demi-god Maui must confront a Big Bad, the hideous lava creature Te Kā who is destroying life on island after island. And then it turns out Te Kā is a symptom, not the cause. It’s a physical manifestation of the imbalance in the world caused by trickster Maui’s theft of the heart of Te Fiti, an earth goddess’s mystical amulet that brings life to the islands. Restoring this balance transforms the monster. It’s a story of mending and reconciliation, not of dominance and destruction, and that’s just lovely to see.

The film raised much conversation and concern about the accuracy of the depiction of Pacific Islander cultures and the importance of making good-faith efforts to represent cultures one may not be familiar with when telling stories about them. Smithsonian Magazine has a good short article on how well the film did, which in some parts were really good, and in some parts were really not: bit.ly/smithsonian_moana.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
directed by Gareth Edwards
Disney, December 2016
2 hr. 13 min.

Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars is at a point where we need to get used to the idea of having new, slick movies on a regular basis that will be a little like fast food. This isn’t fine art that’s going to revolutionize anything, and if you’re not already a fan of the franchise in question you may not want to bother. But if you are a fan, and you need to satisfy a craving, there’s nothing better than getting a new installment of your favorite thing. Rogue One is the movie I’ve wanted for twenty-five years, ever since that year-long West End Games RPG campaign in college, when our rag-tag band of Rebel spies caused havoc wherever we went and somehow, with a liberal application of Force points, managed to sock it to the Empire, at least a little bit.

This is a secret history, a story that we knew was there but that we haven’t seen. It’s not the main saga, no matter how seamlessly it folds into A New Hope. That seamlessness was a shock and a delight. I didn’t expect them to take it so far, literally to the opening moments of the original film. This is a really good example of how knowing exactly what’s going to happen—as you do in the last five minutes of Rogue One—actually increases tension to an almost painful degree. If you didn’t know what happened next, you might think the Rebel fleet has a chance to escape. And when they don’t, that would almost be anticlimactic. But because you know the only ones that escape are that blockade runner and the all-important data disk, you know you’re going to be watching one tragedy after another unfold, and it’s almost too much to bear. The rest of the film is pretty good. Those five minutes are inspired.

Rogue One is also its own thing. It doesn’t have an opening scroll. No John Williams score. This was sort of jarring, but I also loved it. This really opens up the possibilities for future Star Wars storytelling in film. There’s more than one way to make these movies, and if we can have Star Wars without the opening scroll, without some of the other familiar trappings—well then, what else can we do? Here, we can have a PG-13 war story that maybe has as much in common with The Dirty Dozen as it does with other movies in the Star Wars franchise. It’s interesting. It’s the same, and different, which is part of the difficulty and delight of maintaining a franchise like this.

Passengers
directed by Morten Tyldum
Columbia Pictures, December 2016
1 hr. 56 min.

If you never realized how fine a line there is between romantic comedy and horror, this movie will demonstrate it to you.

The trailers tell you the premise: two passengers on an interstellar flight wake from hibernation ninety years too soon and are stuck depending on each other for survival. Naturally, they fall in love.

What the trailers don’t tell you is Jim wakes first, and then purposefully sabotages Aurora’s hibernation chamber because he fell in love with her sleeping form and passenger manifest (Aurora = Sleeping Beauty. Get it? Get it?!). He lies and tells her the chamber accidentally failed like his did. He wines and dines her, she falls in love with him. At this point I was thinking the only way the film can redeem itself is if she learns the truth and then shanks him in his sleep. So, she learns the truth and gets really furious, as well she should, and I almost get my wish. But then the ship starts to break down and they have to work together to save it and the rest of the passengers.

What I found most infuriatingly frustrating: the story of them saving the ship could have been awesome. Aurora gets some really badass action scenes and even rescues Jim from Certain Doom. But what Jim did to Aurora—essentially kidnapping her to face a long, lonely, monotonous life trapped on the ship—is so awful, so irredeemable, that I never have sympathy for him. He doesn’t deserve saving. The film could have handled the entire premise a dozen other ways. After all, this—waking up too soon, alone, on an interstellar journey—is one of the oldest tropes in modern SF. (In fact, a friend of mine just sent me a story from the comic book Weird Science #20, from July-August 1950, called “50 Girls” in which a man wakes up early from suspended animation. Only he did it on purpose so he can systematically work his way through all fifty women on the ship in the eighty years before the ship reaches its colony. But he gets his when the second woman shoots him. Love it! Let’s make that movie!) Both Jim’s and Aurora’s pods could have failed at the same time. Have her be a crewperson woken up automatically when the ship starts to fail. Have them be partners instead of making Jim a kidnapper and basing their entire relationship on false pretenses.

But the story didn’t make any of these better choices. Worse, the film seems to understand that this situation is deeply, horrifically problematic—and doesn’t care. Aurora herself calls it murder—he stole her life, the life she should have had. But the movie chose to go this route anyway because somehow, for some unfathomable reason, the story it’s most interested in telling is Jim’s redemption. Aurora’s agency? Justice for what happened to her? Nope. Instead, we’re forced to consider: Can Jim be heroic enough to earn her forgiveness? I mean, he was so lonely, and she’s so pretty—she understands, doesn’t she? The movie thinks Jim can be redeemed, and that the two of them should get a happy ending.

No, no, no. Any energy or interest in the action-packed third act is DOA because I mostly keep wanting Aurora to shank him. Let him fly off into the black of space, his broken tether hitting his ass on the way out.

And then there’s the part when Laurence Fishburne’s crewman character shows up, and I think, oh good, he’ll save us from this super-problematic romcom and finally get us to some classic SF action-adventure. But he dies ten minutes later, and I think, My God, this movie brought on a black guy from out of nowhere just so they would have a black guy to kill off first.

You’ll notice I haven’t said a word about the science-fictional elements of the starship and hibernation pod scenarios. That’s because, for the most part, they don’t make a lick of sense and are kind of boring. Why does this ship have no redundant systems? Why isn’t some senior crewperson automatically woken up the minute things go wrong? Is colonizing other worlds really that profitable? Why is there only one autodoc for 5000 passengers? Why does the bar look like the one from The Shining? And on, and on.

But mostly, I’m furious that the filmmakers really thought we’d want to see a movie about how this stalker and kidnapper really isn’t such a bad guy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show. Her newest novel is a planetary adventure, Martians Abroad. Bannerless, a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, will be released by John Joseph Adams Books in July 2017. 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, January 2017

Andrew Liptak | 1468 words

To start off this year, I decided that I wanted to take a look at the second novels of a trio of new authors. It’s often said that someone has a decade to write their first novel, but just months to write their second. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because following up a first act is a tough challenge: an author has to replicate everything that worked in their first book, while working to make sure that they’re not writing essentially the same book. Much like with a musician’s sophomore album, a second novel can tell you much about how any particular author is approaching their craft, and in the case of a series, it can show you how much they’ve plotted out their series.

Indomitable: The Chronicles of Promise Paen
W.C. Bauers
Ebook / Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0765375445
Tor, July 2016
368 pages

I initially reviewed W.C. Bauer’s military science fiction debut novel, Unbreakable, two years ago, with my January 2015 column (bit.ly/2i8H6V9). Unbreakable was an entertaining military SF novel: it introduced us to a compelling protagonist, Promise Paen, as well as an equally compelling world in which the Republic of Aligned Worlds is engaged in a sort of cold war against the Lustianian Empire. The two governments go head to head on Paen’s homeworld of Montana, and there’s plenty of action and fighting that keeps the book humming along.

For military SF, it’s always great to see an author pull back from the fighting and take a look at the bigger political picture that’s forming the main story: it gives the action context and gives one perspective. Unfortunately, Bauers pulls out too far. Much of this follow-up book is about politics, and while there’s some engaging action at the front of the book, much of the promised plot doesn’t begin to take place until you’re past the 200-page point. Bauers spends much time going over the internal politics of the RAW, which makes this book a much slower and far less entertaining read.

It’s a shame, because Unbreakable showed off much potential; Indomitable just bored me for most of the story. I see what Bauers was trying to do, but it feels like this book is a bit of an overcorrection, and it misses the mark by a bit. It’s good to see that the world is being fleshed out quite a bit more, but hopefully, a future installment will find its balance between action and context.

Remnants of Trust
Elizabeth Bonesteel
eBook / Paperback
ISBN: 978-0062413673
Harper Voyager, November 2016
528 pages

My next read is Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Remnants of Trust, the continuation of her Central Corps series, which kicked of with a bang in The Cold Between (previous review at bit.ly/1QxGCEm). I really enjoyed this debut novel, because Bonesteel plunks you down in the depths of a mystery set against the politics of an interstellar organization. She doesn’t throw you much of a lifeline with this novel, and I’ll definitely need another read or two to fully get all the nuances.

Fortunately, with Remnants of Trust, it feels as though Bonesteel has a better handle on the world and conveying it to the reader. Like the first novel, it deals with a complicated mystery that’s wrapped in some prior action undertaken by the Central Corps—in the prologue, an away team visits a colony world and finds that it’s been devastated, with its inhabitants turned savage and cannibalistic. Fast forward several years, and Commander Elena Shaw and Captain Greg Foster find themselves in more trouble after the events of the first book: they’ve been redeployed to patrol Third Sector, when they find that their sister ship Exeter has been sabotaged, as well as a nearby PSI ship. These incidents are connected, and as Shaw and others begin to investigate, it’s clear that someone is going to great lengths to cover everything up.

Remnants of Trust is as well written as its predecessor, but I enjoyed this novel more. The mystery and intrigue feel more compelling, its characters are a bit more interesting, and it’s got its share of action. To me, it feels as though it’s what Star Trek could have been if it was conceived in 2016: dark and incredibly compelling. It would make a hell of a fantastic television series.

A Closed and Common Orbit
Becky Chambers
eBook / Paperback / Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0062569400
Harper Voyager, October 2016
464 pages

There are some novels in a series that just throw out the rulebook altogether. That’s the case with Becky Chambers and her second novel, A Closed and Common Orbit (see review at bit.ly/2hBnEDt). It’s set in the same world as her stunning debut, The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet, which I had a blast reading. Chambers introduces us to an incredible cast of characters onboard a starship, and for her follow-up act, she could have plopped the crew into a new adventure and had just as much fun.

That doesn’t happen with this novel, and it’s an incredibly brave jump. This novel takes place shortly after the first, picking up Lovelace’s story. When we left her, she had been downloaded into a realistic human body, but had been essentially reformatted: she’s a new person, so to speak, which allows Chambers to inject some depth that was largely lacking in the first book. This is a fantastic jump, and we follow Lovelace (renamed Sidra) as she explores what it means to be a person.

Interspersed through this narrative is a second storyline following Jane, a young girl who escapes from a factory into a junkyard, where she’s raised for the next decade by the AI of a broken-down starship. This is an equally compelling storyline, and we watch as she grows up alone, trying to survive. These two storylines come together by the end of the novel. They don’t mesh up quite perfectly: they largely feel like two separate stories that just happen to come together with an ending that feels almost too convenient.

That said, like its predecessor, this is an incredible book. Chambers tells an incredibly sharp story, one that explores the limits of disability and acceptance as two characters make their way in a difficult world. It’s a wonderful feat, and it’s the epitome of subverting expectations. I already can’t wait to see what surprises are in store for her next novel.

Each of these three novels show how Bauers, Bonesteel, and Chambers have gone on to follow up with their novels. Each one has experimented in some ways. Chambers and Bonesteel have each taken two very different approaches: Bonesteel has essentially continued the story of her crew, but with a new conspiracy for them to unravel, while Chambers has jumped away from her first to a new set of characters and themes completely. While Bauer’s novel is the weaker of the three, he likewise does some really interesting things with his story, taking it in a direction that I didn’t expect and showing off some new parts of his world. While it doesn’t quite pay off for me, this sort of experimentation is what authors should be doing, rather than just laying down the same story installment after installment. While there’s something to be said for playing with a long, ongoing series like The Dresden Files or The Lost Fleet novels, they get tedious after a while, something that each of these novels really manage to avoid.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Liptak is the Weekend Editor for The Verge. He is the co-editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, (Apex Publications, 2014). His writing has also appeared in io9, Gizmodo, Kirkus Reviews, Tor.com, BN Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Clarkesworld and others. He lives in Vermont.

Interview: Kij Johnson

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 11965 words

Kij Johnson is the author of the novels The Fox Woman and Fudoki, as well as the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She’s worked at Tor Books, Wizards of the Coast, Dark Horse Comics, and Microsoft, and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Kansas. We spoke with her about her novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, a feminist take on H. P. Lovecraft.

This interview first appeared in August 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.

• • • •

Your new book is called The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. What’s that about?

That’s complicated, because there’s the metafictional answer, which is that it’s a sort of commentary on and response to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is one of his better known works. The other answer is that it’s the story of a woman of a certain age who goes out on a quest, which makes her a very unusual character, in the middle of a strange and very bizarre world.

For people who aren’t that familiar with Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle stories, do you want to say a little bit about the background of those?

Sure. H.P. Lovecraft was writing a lot in the early twentieth century. I don’t remember the exact dates, and he wrote a series of stories called “The Dreamlands” stories. The idea is that there is a dreamland that certain master dreamers, all male, can get to. It’s a world ruled by these whimsical, cosmological horrors and petty, immensely powered gods. The stories are usually very vividly imagined. There are certain characters who turn up again and again. Randolph Carter is one of his basic characters, who he frames the entire Dream-Quest cycle around. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is Randolph Carter’s primary story, in which he sees a mystical city when he is dreaming. He lives in Boston, and he wants to get there, but when he goes to the Dreamlands, and he’s a master there, he finds the gods will not permit him to see it, and so he quests across the Dreamlands to get somebody who will let him go to this mystical city that he’s seen.

My understanding is that Randolph Carter is sort of a self-insert for Lovecraft himself, who suffered from very vivid nightmares throughout his life.

That’s my understanding as well. Randolph Carter turns up a number of times, and also turns up in stories that are not exactly Dreamlands stories. There’s one story where—I think it’s the first time we meet him—he’s just essentially telling the cops about something horrible that’s happened. But, yeah, he seems like a very central character to Lovecraft.

There’s about twenty or so of these Dream-Cycle stories. How many of them did you reference or use in your book?

I read all of them many times. First off because I’d read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath when I was a little girl, and it was the only one of the Lovecraft stories that didn’t scare the absolute daylights out of me. So, I kept reading it again and again, and it always disturbed me a little. It bothered me, and I couldn’t identify at that point why, but I read the other Dream-Quest stories just in that childhood obsessive way that we track down everything that we think we might possibly like. When I went back to start writing this, I re-read all of the Dream stories again and again. There was one poem that I was not able to track down, so there’s one piece that I didn’t actually get to read.

What is it about these Dream stories you think appeals to you?

The Protean nature of the world. The way things shift. They were full of great wonders.

I grew up a little girl in Iowa, and we didn’t have great wonders, really. We had a lot of pigs and soybeans, which are kind of great, but not wonders, and something about this magical place that he went to, and it was all very encompassable by a little girl. You didn’t have to be sophisticated to understand Lovecraft. You just had to have a good vocabulary. I was able to read them and internalize them in a way that even books like Tolkien—I read The Lord of the Rings at about the same stage, and I couldn’t always follow the bigger emotional movements, whereas there are no big emotional movements, generally, in Lovecraft.

In the acknowledgements for this book, you say that you read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at ten, and you said that you were “thrilled and terrified and uncomfortable with the racism, but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic.”

This is something that I didn’t notice. I think most of us didn’t at that age. All of the stories that I read when I was younger, there were so few insertion points for girls. We’re stuck having to take our choice between the four girls in Little Women or having to take our choice between Eowyn and Galadriel, which is improbable when you’re growing up in Iowa, or Arwen. It’s interesting how they all have vowel names.

There really were never that many choices, and when I was a little girl reading science fiction and fantasy, I didn’t have anything much. I would read all of them, even stories like Andre Norton’s, and it was always guys, guys, guys. I was as tomboyish as I could be, because it that was the only way I could see being part of these worlds.

I didn’t notice until rereading it as an adult that the Dream-Quest mentions one human woman, and only one, and it’s a farmer’s wife. That’s all they say. “The farmer’s wife was scared.” The end. I started noticing that the only time Lovecraft ever uses women, they tend to be very negative, very stereotypical. They’re evil old grannies or they’re the scared farmer’s wife, but even those are so minor. It’s as though he existed in a world without women at all, and that’s one of the things I was doing in Vellitt Boe, because this Dreamland is empty of women, almost. There’s so few of them, and so the women kind of have to band together, understand each other, and support each other, but there just aren’t that many.

What was the specific impetus to write this? Did you just happen to go back and reread the Dream Cycle stories and then you got the idea? Or did you get the idea and then you went back and read the stories? What prompted it?

The proximate cause was that Jonathan Strahan asked me if I wanted to write something, and I had been chewing over an idea before this that wasn’t Lovecraft. There’s a book by John Myers Myers called Silverlock, which was written in the ’40s, and the conceit is that the Commonwealth of Letters is an actual country, and so in all of those great classics, those characters all live on the same terrain, and they all interact. It was sort of a big, exciting adventure novel about a guy who ends up in a place where he’s fighting Brian Boru, and he ends up meeting Beowulf, and he meets Manon Lescaut, and people like that. But, when I read it, I realized that the only females in that were either women of unsteady virtue and innocent girls for whom either good or bad things happened. There just weren’t any other types in that story. Of course, that’s because in the literature there really aren’t that many types.

So, I had started thinking before Vellitt Boe about what would be in my Commonwealth. If I were adventuring in a land full of literatures, what would my adventures be? I had started thinking, well, where do you insert yourself as a woman? Especially now that I’m an adult, where do I insert myself as an adult woman who’s not preoccupied with the things of a twenty-year-old. I found that there really weren’t that many people I wanted to be, in literature. Most of the women were boring, or I just didn’t see the point. They didn’t aspire for big things. There was a real preoccupation with things that just don’t interest me that much: family and home. There were not enough women going out and doing things. I started thinking, “Why? Why are these classics so dominated by this?” Not because of the histories and conventions of their times or their authors, but more what happens when you insert a mature woman into a science fiction or fantasy world? What do you get?

I’d just done this exploration with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows where I had just written a sequel, which will be out from Small Beer next year, where I inserted two female animals to say, “What happens to the world if we put females in?” Does it break the world? Does it break the relationships of the male characters? In what ways does it affect the world? Then, after that, when Jonathan Strahan asked me if I wanted to write something, I’d been kind of chewing over what’s wrong with Lovecraft, and that’s what I decided was going to be my next project. I didn’t realize just how absorbing it would become or how much time it would take me, because I ended up really researching it heavily. I ended up doing tons of research into completely unrelated topics like lateen-rigged boats and things like that.

I know you do a lot of research for your stories, and I was curious, you said you read all these Lovecraft stories many times. Did you make some sort of atlas or compendium of names? What sort of background worldbuilding stuff did you create?

Usually my memory is not good enough to just remember it, but because I had read these as a child, that helped a lot, and this time I did have a gazetteer, and I did have a list of characters, but mostly I just read them so much that I’d say, “Oh, oh, wait, Pickering, where’s Pickering? He’s the ghoul, right? He’s three-quarters of the way through. Let me find him.” And then I would go find that section of the book and reread, and I would just use that. Actually, there are places in this book that are direct chimes with Lovecraft’s language, although I didn’t try to simulate it, but I’m directly pointing to certain things that he did.

I saw in an interview that you said, when you went back to these stories, that he was maddeningly vague, and that you had to do a lot of your own invention.

Right. He describes towns, and he will tend to describe them all using the exact same language so that every town feels like it’s a sort of mix of medieval towers made out of some strange stone combined with quaint little New England gabled things. And that’s really all the descriptions he gives. He’ll use a lot of Latinate, multi-syllabic adjectives. They tend to be charged with emotion, not with detail, so he’ll talk about ichorous, the gooey stuff, right? But he doesn’t really tell you what the ichor looks like or what it smells like or is it sticky to the fingers or is it slippery to the fingers? And that’s just one tiny detail. When he talks about geography, people go across pasturelands, but there’s a lot of pasturelands in the world, and they all look different. He’s somewhat restricted by his geography. He’s seeing his pastures, but I decided I might as well see other pastures. So within everything he said, I made a lot of tweaks, and when he didn’t describe something . . . Like, he mentions a number of stars in the night sky, but he doesn’t mention how many stars. His assumption, I assume, is that the night sky looks exactly like our night sky, but that’s not written down, so I was able to play around with the sky and make it do different things than his sky does.

In your book, the sky has exactly ninety-seven stars. I was curious, does that number have any significance? Where did that idea come from?

It would be really funny to say yes, because then years after I’m gone, perhaps people would be trying to figure it out. Maybe she had ninety-seven books about Lovecraft or something? But no, in fact, I picked it because I wanted it to be under a hundred. He actually cites about twenty space objects, including planets, and so these people, to my mind, they’re thinking Mars and Venus are also stars, and perhaps Saturn as well, so they’re not necessarily making a distinction between Algol and Venus. But, I just wanted it to be few enough that the sky would be very, very dark, and to make the contrast with our sky so much different.

I saw that on Tor.com they posted a map of this dreamworld. Did you draw that map and then they professionalized it or did someone collaborate with you on that?

I did draw the map. My brother is a cartographer, so I grew up drawing maps. Like any good fantasist, one of the great delights of writing fantasy is making up your own maps, so I really enjoyed putting that map together. There is one classic map that shows up online a lot, and I used that as a starting point for some thinking I was doing, partly because I wanted it to fit into a vertical layout, and most of the maps are usually landscape oriented. I wanted something you could actually read on one page of a paperback.

You mentioned the language in this and that you weren’t really trying to imitate Lovecraft’s style. I mean, the style in this is unbelievably gorgeous.

Thank you.

Could you talk about what approach you took to crafting the specific style in this book?

When I started it, I was going to try for Lovecraft’s voice, but the more I read it, the less I liked it, and the more I realized that I wanted something that was lush, but I wanted it to be lush and precise. That’s what I aimed for. I usually try to experiment with style when I’m writing, so I’ll try something in a very austere style, or a very florid style, but at some point during the early stages of drafting this, I realized I just wanted it to be my voice, so it ends up being probably the closest to an unaltered voice for me that I’ve written, except possibly for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” which I wrote a few years back. I guess that’s sort of my natural voice when I’m not trying other things.

There were a lot of words in this that I did not know. Are those words you know? I thought maybe you were intentionally trying to mimic that aspect of Lovecraft. Sort of the unfamiliar words.

I wouldn’t necessarily have added all that. I do know all that vocabulary. I was a precocious child, and I was bored growing up in a small town, so I read dictionaries and encyclopedias, but I would not have used all of that vocabulary for writing, let’s say, an adventure novel set in the 1930s, but I did enjoy being able to use some of that vocabulary. It was trying to chime with the fact that he would have words that when I was a girl I would look up, and I wouldn’t find them in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford English Dictionary, that gargantuan tome. It wouldn’t even be in that. I was always a little bit in awe of that. In fact, there are, I think, two made up words in this, which is sort of my tribute to the fact that I’m not one hundred percent sure that he didn’t just make those things up.

Is there anything in this that actively contradicts anything in Lovecraft that you’re like, “Nah, this just doesn’t work. I’ve got to completely change that.”

That’s a really good question, and I haven’t thought about it that way. The biggest thing is that in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, I changed the geography just a little bit. When Randolph Carter crosses to visit his friend Kuranes, it takes him three days, and I didn’t want this to be a three-day trip. I wanted this to be an immense blue sea trip. I didn’t want to change the geography, but that’s why I put in the thing about the mutable geography. Sometimes a thing takes three days, sometimes a thing takes three weeks. You can’t trust it. That’s, I think, very appropriate to a world that’s being constantly reshaped and redriven by these whimsical, selfish gods.

That’s really interesting. That makes sense, because it is a dream world. I guess that’s sort of a double-edged sword, because a lot of the times in stories about dreams, there’s so much of this sense that anything could happen that you lose interest as a reader because there’s no rules, and it starts to feel arbitrary. Was that a concern you had at all when writing about this sort of dream world?

Absolutely. One of my other favorite books is Alice in Wonderland, and I’ve thought sometimes about how it would be fun to readdress that as an adult. The thing about dreams is that, my dreams, at least, make no sense. I know people who are lucid dreamers or people who have those long, dramatic dreams. But my dreams tend to be a fragment of this attached randomly by one ligament to a fragment of that. Sometimes there are no ligaments at all attaching them. Fiction that’s based on dreams often feels artificial because their dreams are too narrative. Or it feels incoherent because they have no narrative and story requires that. I was very aware of that, and that’s why there’s a lot more identifying of the number of days things happen in than I would have put into a story set on our planet. I would not have said, “Well, it took them five days to get there, but it might have taken nine or it could have taken three.” That was because I was constantly trying to reanchor the reader into the fact that not everything is steady, but this is a fact.

I actually heard you say in an interview that you don’t dream much.

I don’t. For a lot of years, I was on a medication that pretty much prevented my dreaming, and I didn’t even realize it until I went off that medication and found that all of a sudden I was having dreams again, and they were pretty great. Just seeing things at night. I had forgotten that when I was a little girl, sleeping was about my favorite thing to do, because dreams were so interesting.

I interviewed John Cleese and he told this story that Thomas Edison thought that he got all his best ideas just as he was drifting off to sleep, so he would sit in a chair holding ball bearings, and then when he fell asleep, he would drop them, and he would wake up. So he would constantly be falling asleep and waking up over and over again.

I understand that A. E. van Vogt would set an alarm all night. Jim Gunn tells this story, I don’t remember whether it was every hour, every twenty minutes, or every two hours, but he would set alarms all night long, and he would write down whatever he had thought, and then he would go back to sleep. I have to say, that kind of makes sense with the way van Vogt writes because it really does feel like every seven hundred words he’s forgotten which book he’s writing, and he’s just writing another one.

I thought he had a rule for himself that every seven hundred words he had to introduce some completely unrelated concept.

Right, the van Vogtian scene where you always bring something new in. You can really see at the end when he strains to pull it all together, or he just sins boldly and refuses to. It’s always very entertaining watching the last chapter of a van Vogt novel.

Did anything in this book come out of your dreams or did dreaming play a role in writing this at all?

I think so. I think that the landscape in the very last parts when she’s in our plane, a lot of those landscapes, while they’re real landscapes, at night I have recollections of dreams where I would be walking in yellow cornfields, and the sky would be very dark overhead, and I was very aware of that when I was writing this. There are other things, I think the way the deep sea feels, that’s based in dreams for me, but at no point is there something that I would say, “Well, when I was sixteen, I had this dream and it changed me forever.” Although, now that you mention it, I do remember dreaming about giant spiders biting my shoulders off and surely if you can’t fit that into a Lovecraft story, there’s no place for it. I should have put that in.

Speaking of the deep sea, just the part where Vellitt is looking into the ocean and sees the lights. I thought that was a stunning sequence in this story.

Thank you. I was swept away by it as well. I had this sense of immense mass. A lot of times, it’s hard to tell in places like planes and on the sea. I take a lot of cruises with my mother, and it’s really hard to tell if something is small or far away, and you’ll see a boat, and it’s like it’s either a very small fishing boat not too far away or it’s a cargo ship a very long distance away, and I cannot tell right away. We go to Alaska and the glaciers, you’ll come up to them, and either that glacier is forty-eight-feet-high or that glacier is a mile-and-a-half-high, and there is nothing to give you a sense of scale unless there’s a smaller boat in front of it. And even then, you can’t tell, because you don’t know how big the boat is. I was thinking about that, just the incomprehensibility of scale that happens when something is outside of our experience.

We’ve talked about Vellitt, your protagonist; do you want to say more about her?

One thing that always annoys me about older characters in television, movies, and she’s fifty-five, so I’d say she’s not older, because I’m fifty-six, so she’s really the age of sense, I’d like to say. But, one thing that’s always irritating is there’s a real assumption that you can only do and be certain things.

Five years ago, I was a rock climber, and I was bouldering V4s and V5s, which is a very high level. None of the people who write about grandmothers making cookies ever imagine someone who is a grandmother’s age could do something like that. It’s not to say that all grandmothers can, but there are grandmothers who can, and it would be nice to see those people represented.

I wanted to write something about a character who had a complicated and rich past, and I wanted to write about an intellectual who had not always been in an intellectual, because I find as a new college professor, I’m pushing a lot against people who have never done anything but be college professors and college students. There’s so much out there that they could have done but they didn’t do, and that’s what I wanted to talk about, was a woman who had done all these interesting things, made some decisions to do the right thing, the sensible thing, but still retained many of those skills, and also some of the nostalgia for that. When I had to stop climbing, it kind of broke my heart a little bit because I was never going to be the person who climbed mountains the same way again. I wanted Vellitt to be that. I did not write her to be autobiographical, but of course she turned out to be more autobiographical than any of my other characters have ever been.

Like you, she’s a college professor, which is kind of what kicks off the plot of the story. Do you want to say a little bit about what the setup is that sets off the story?

Vellitt Boe is a professor of mathematics at Ulthar Women’s College. Ulthar is a town in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and that’s where Randolph Carter meets lots and lots of cats. There’s in fact a short story called “The Cats of Ulthar.” So, Ulthar is packed full of sort of untamed and also domesticated cats.

What he says is quite minimal, it’s a town with a tower in the middle of a hill, and there’s a priest up there, and he plies the priest with alcohol to get some information out of him, but I thought, there have to be schools in this place, so I decided there’s an Oxford-style university in Ulthar that’s like Oxford in the ’30s, which is within a decade of when Lovecraft was writing his books. There were women’s colleges, but there were very few of them, and they were walking on thin ice. People recognized in the abstract that women could be educated and some of them should be educated, but that women had to be held to a different standard.

Vellitt is a college professor teaching maths to the women in the only women’s college in Ulthar, the Ulthar Women’s College, which means she’s also kind of the keeper of the morals of the girls. One of the girls, her best student in twenty years of teaching, elopes, and she leaves a letter saying she’s going to be with Stephan. Beautiful Stephan. And Vellitt decides that they need to retrieve her. The problem being that the man that Clarie Jurat, the student, has run away with is not actually a man of their country. He’s a man from The Waking World, so he’s taking Clarie back to The Waking World where nobody from Dreamland has ever been, and in fact, nobody is entirely sure you can go. But Vellitt, with her past, was a far traveler when she was a young woman, and she volunteers to go, and that’s the start of the quest.

One of the reviews I read describes this as a road trip story. Would you call this a road trip?

Every story that moves across space is a road trip. All road trip stories have picaresque elements, because you have episodes based on geography or based on author’s whim. That’s one of the things I love about road trip stories. Yeah, it’s absolutely a road trip. I think you could argue in a very strange way that it’s sort of a buddy movie because she has a cat with her, even though the cat is nothing but an ordinary cat. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t say funny things. It doesn’t do things cats don’t do. But, she’s not travelling alone. She’s travelling with something that is always with her for reasons that are very confusing to everybody, including me. It’s also a quest, because quests always take place across geography as well, and you see this if you read really anything, but if you read Lord of the Rings, you see the episodic nature of certain things that are happening.

I thought it was really interesting that you chose to have Vellitt not have a companion that she talks to in this story. I think most stories, the first thing they would do is introduce a companion for Vellitt to talk to, so this story is much more about what’s going on in her head and what she’s seeing and feeling. What was your thought process behind that decision?

I’ve written a lot of stories about isolated characters moving through space where they encounter others and then they part ways, but when I’m teaching writing, as a joke, I used to say everybody should put a dog in a story because a dog randomizes things. If you are a writer, and you are marching your characters through a plot, it can feel like they’re being marched through a plot. Here’s a point, here’s a point, and now we have to get to here. When you add any kind of a randomizer, like a dog which needs to be walked, or a baby which needs to be nursed, or anything like that, you shake things up a little bit because there’s always the chance that something else will happen, and with this cat, it doesn’t really do anything that cats don’t do. She does, rarely, talk to it. But it gives me a place where she’s looking up at the stars, something warm can curl up next to her, and that gives her something she can do besides just look at the stars. It gives me a sort of tactile, interactive, organic mover through the story.

You mentioned earlier that in Lovecraft stories, all the dreamers are men, and you carry that through into this. That there’s almost this cosmic sexism at work. Could you talk about that?

All the dreamers are men. All of the gods are men. All of the characters who are mentioned are men. I don’t know what people from the Dreamlands spring from except the minds of the dreamers, so my assumption is that’s some of what’s happening, but also, they have their own lives. Ulthar goes on even when there’s no master dreamer there. Ulthar is still changing in its own slow way. It’s behind the curve of our world. It’s always behind us, because of course in dreams we tend to be nostalgic. You point backwards, not into the future, in most dreams.

I really wanted to think about that. What does it mean to have a world where everything is male? I didn’t realize until after I had written it that these whimsical gods that change things all the time almost exactly map onto the way it would have been for women in the ’30s. They can shut down your college. They can beat you to death and not get arrested for it. They can do all of these terrible things. They can take your goods and leave you destitute. They can lie to you. All of the different practical ways that men would rule women’s lives, it all is mapped into the Dreamlands, where whimsical gods make things happen and everybody else has to just cope, has to work around their bad days, or their need for rest, or their petty rivalries.

There’s a part in the book where Vellitt meets Randolph Carter, and he tells her, “Women don’t dream large dreams. It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”

I think that’s the way certainly back in the ’30s, but I would say even now, there’s a sense, sometimes I’ll read critiques of or reviews of women’s novels, and it will feel like there’s a sense that, well, this is kind of a big topic. This is a big story or a big novel, and this is something that is changing all the time, and it’s so much better than it was twenty years ago, but I feel as though this is the air that is changing is that sense that women want to stay home. I read a lot of 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s magazines as research for something else I’m doing, and a lot of those, women didn’t really have big dreams. If you read Little Women, the woman who wants to be a novelist gives it all up to marry an older man and raise children. Amy is the only one who doesn’t, and her fallback position is that if she doesn’t—sorry to spoil Little Women for you people—but her fallback position if she doesn’t make it as an artist in Paris is to come home and marry a rich man. That’s the world that it used to be, and that’s the world that Vellitt lives in. That’s the world that Vellitt, in the end, is escaping from.

A big theme in this book, speaking of the ending, well, maybe not to spoil it, but a big theme is to mention that the gods are so capricious in this world, and Lovecraft is famous for transitioning horror away from Christian notions of Heaven and Hell and damnation being what scares you to more atheistic notions of the vastness of the cosmos and human insignificance as what’s scary.

Right, yeah, the cold cosmological horror of deep space.

Is that something you were thinking of with this theme of the evil gods and that they’re capricious like the universe is capricious?

Definitely. And, yeah, petty. Because by the end, a world without gods has its problems, but a world without gods also does not have the moon being pulled this way and that by whim. So, the rules apply. There are rules in a world that is not dominated by whimsical gods, and rules give people structure. Give you the chance to make predictions about the future, make predictions about possibilities.

How do you feel like this book is going to fit in? There’s this whole industry of Lovecraftian fiction. There’s whole presses that publish nothing but Lovecraftian fiction. What do you make of that?

That’s always been the case, because Arkham House is always doing that, and August Derleth, I think he was doing it, but certainly a lot of people were playing around with Lovecraftian horror or Lovecraft pastiches and tributes and sequels and things like that. I didn’t realize just how prevalent the Lovecraft thing was until after I was almost finished with this book, and then I thought, “I don’t know if I want to play in this field,” but I’m happy I did, actually. I think Lovecraft has come to the foreground because there’s been so much discussion about the World Fantasy Award, which was a bust of Lovecraft, and a lot of questions about why is fantasy being represented by someone who is better known for his horror, who is also a racist in writing. A lot of discussion within the field of science fiction and fantasy about this. Does he deserve the attention he gets? If so, why? If not, why not? Right now I think that a lot of people are pointing back to Lovecraft and saying, “I loved him, but now I see the reasons why I was always uncomfortable.” Or, “I love him, and I feel like he merits a second look.”

I’m seeing so many different approaches now to readdressing Lovecraft. I’m sure it will go away. It’s a trend, and five years from now we’ll be done with Lovecraft, and we’ll be on to something, I hope, like Shirley Jackson. In the meantime, there was so much going on with Lovecraft that can be explored or can be countered. You can reply to Lovecraft in so many ways.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the anthology called She Walks in Shadows, which is all explicitly feminist Lovecraftian fiction.

I’ve heard of it, but I made a decision not to read anybody else’s Lovecraft while I was working on mine.

One thing I wanted to ask you about is that this is a novella, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, which is sort of a very difficult story to publish. Could you talk about why you chose to write it as a novella and what sort of market there was for it?

I know that Tor.com has been doing these standalone published novellas now for a little while. I might very well have written a novella anyway, but knowing that it could be a novella was really nice. The book was originally much longer. This is about 40,000 words, but at one point it was almost 60,000 words. That was 20,000 words of gorgeous language and static scenery, which somebody recommended I take out, and, feeling as though I was gutting myself, I did. But it did make the book better.

The novella length, it has some really amazing gifts. There’s no need for massive subplots. You can stay true to your theme, true to your topic, without unnecessarily complicating it, if that is the kind of story you’re telling. I do feel it’s almost a perfect length for quest stories, because it doesn’t get so long that you start to see churn and repetition. You can advance a quest across 40,000 words without padding or putting in extra points of view or anything like that. So I do think it’s a marvelous length. It’s really underutilized because nobody has been doing it.

P.S. Publishing also publishes standalone novellas. P.S. is in the UK, I believe. There are a couple of people who have experimented with it. But I do think that ebooks are why we are able to write them now, because people are a lot more patient. You don’t have to hit a length. It doesn’t have to be a thirty-two-page break and the reader has to feel like he’s getting his money’s worth when he picks up the book. He has to say, “This book is worth eighteen dollars because it’s this many pages.” I think things have changed a lot, and I think there’s going to be more room for novelettes, even, and novellas.

I’m really excited about this. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, most science fiction novels were 60,000 words. Novels have basically gotten to be twice as long these days, almost entirely, as I understand it, for economic reasons, rather than artistic ones. People haven’t learned to read any faster than they ever did.

Right, exactly. There were a lot of reasons why books had to be long, or they had to be short stories. When I worked at Tor, which was twenty-five years ago, we didn’t publish novellas because nobody wanted to buy them. It didn’t seem like they were getting enough value for their dollar. Now we read ebooks and the value for dollar isn’t defined by the number of pages so much as it is on how long it takes you to get through it and whether you like it. But it’s wonderful now that we can write this length. It was a perfect length for science fiction, and for fantasy, and so much science fiction and fantasy feels unnecessarily labored. I know a lot of people talk about how science fiction is hard to read. It’s less accessible than it used to be, and there are content reasons, but also, I think just the format reason, that a 60,000-word book is just easier.

Whenever I talk to any of my friends who aren’t involved in writing and publishing, they always say, “Oh, I don’t really read much anymore.” I ask them why, and they always say, “Oh, well I got such and such book, and I made it halfway through it, and I just didn’t have time to keep reading it. I’m not going to buy any more books if I didn’t finish that one.”

Exactly. Whereas they’d be done with it if it was Mission of Gravity.

I wanted to talk to you about some of your actual short stories though. One of my favorite stories of yours is “Spar.” We can’t talk to you without mentioning “Spar,” right?

You also can’t recite any of “Spar.”

I just added an explicit content warning to this podcast, so we’re all good.

Oh, sweet. That’s good. “Spar” was really, I’m not sure what you wanted to ask about it, but “Spar” was a really interesting story for me to write because it was the first time I ever wrote a story where I just said, “Fuck it. I don’t care what people think of me or my story. This is the story it has to be.” I was really uncomfortable writing it. I showed it to one person. I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” I had trouble rewriting it. I couldn’t read the whole thing in a row. I had to read the individual sections piece by piece and craft each one, and then go read another one out of order. Since the story is told out of order, it actually works really well. I wasn’t able to read the whole thing until after it had been bought by Clarkesworld, because by that time it had been read by enough other people that I was like, “Okay, now I’m seeing it through other eyes instead of through my own eyes, and now I can judge it with different standards.” So it was a very difficult story for me to write, even though the words were not hard, since it’s only about twelve words in the whole thing, but it was a very ambitious story for me. It kind of changed everything for me, because then I realized that I was better off sinning boldly, better off writing the hard stuff that satisfied me, even if people didn’t like it, than trying to write something that was maybe more conformable.

For people who haven’t read it, can you just say what the premise is?

I can just read you the first sentence of it? That’s always a good start. I have the book right here because I thought if we were going to talk about my fiction, it would be good. “Spar” is page 199. I see they buried it towards the end of the book so that the people who never finish a book, they wouldn’t get to it.

They should just put it first just to throw down the gauntlet. If you can’t make it through this, you’re not even worthy to read the rest of this book.

You don’t even get to read the rest. The first sentence is: “In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.” That sets the tone for the whole thing. The story is about, insofar as there is a story, what happens in a lifeboat when you have two spaceships that have collided, and the only survivors are this sort of weird cilia, tentacle-thing, and this human whose point of view we’re in, and her attempts to establish communication, or not, and there’s lots of sexual activity, which may or may not be communication. She has no idea. It was actually not at all about a deep space ship collision, but that was the metaphor I was using. It was a very powerful metaphor, I found. It was powerful imagery, but it was also just a super powerful metaphor. It was everything I wanted it to do. Every piece of discomfort of what relationships are like, I was able to put into it.

I’ve heard you say that there was a great deal of variability in people’s interpretations of the story.

[Laughter] Yeah. To my mind, it seems very obvious, but a lot of people . . . feedback has ranged from: “This is just tentacle porn, plain and simple,” to: “This is about a marriage gone wrong.” People have thought of alternate endings, ways they wanted it to end that were different, but a lot of people have seen different things in it. Some people think she’s the aggressor. Some people think it’s the alien that’s the aggressor. This one doesn’t get as much variability as “Ponies” does, but it does get very strong reactions.

I want to get to “Ponies” next, but first I want to ask, you mentioned that you had a great deal of apprehension about showing the story to anyone. Has it turned out that your fears were overblown, or was it about what you thought it was going to be?

My fears were pretty overblown, but Neil Clarke insulated me from that. There was a certain amount of slagging that went on in the comments, and if it was just personal abuse, he cut it. He deleted it from the comments, which was fantastic. If it was critiques of the story, he left it, and that was fine. I’m always very comfortable with people’s critiques of a story. Once it is out of my hands, it’s not my story anymore. That’s part of why it’s hard for me not to keep fiddling, because I keep wanting to address something, but it’s not my story, and if somebody wants to read it and read it as a light-hearted sex comedy, I’m not the person who can tell them no. That’s the situation I found myself in with that. Every so often, somebody writes me and either says it’s brilliant or says it’s a really messed up story. Both of which are true. Things can be both good and bad. I’m okay with that. Pretty much that’s what they say about all my stories now, one way or another. So I’m okay with that, too.

Do you remember, at this point, what the initial spark for that story was? Like, what the first image, or character, or mood was?

Well, the first sentence was the one I just read. But the first inspiration was, I’d been working on this long, intellectual novel that I eventually shelved, and at some point I said to somebody, “You know, I am just so damn tired of writing this book. I’m going to write something that is about two people in a lifeboat fucking, because that’s simple, right? That’ll be easy.” And then it transmuted in conversation to, “Okay, a human and an alien in a lifeboat fucking.” But then I couldn’t figure out how to get an alien in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean. So then I thought, well, what about space? Then that first line came in, and it stopped being funny. It started to be deadly serious. Because once you have a first sentence like that, you have to pay off. You don’t get to back off. You don’t get to change your mind about your language. You don’t get to change your mind about your content. That is a first sentence that demands a difficult story. If I didn’t want to write the story that first line needed, then I needed a different first line.

It’s interesting that it kind of started out as a joke, because some of my stories have started out as jokes and then turned into serious stories. I’ve heard Stephen King say someone asked him, “If you have an idea, how do you know if it’s good or not?” He said, “If it makes me laugh, I know it’s a good idea.”

Right, I think that’s true. I’m working on something right now where it started as a joke, just a phrase that I use all the time. I’m always talking about seething swarms of this or that animal. I was talking about chickens, and I started thinking about seething swarms of chickens covering the landscape, and that was the start of this, and it was all very funny, and then I realized, “Oh, wait, if your chickens are raptors, and if your raptors are like fire ants, there’s nothing funny about this story.” I’m in the middle of maybe the darkest story I’ve ever written, and the bar is pretty high for that.

Something that is a joke, I think, is the bacon remix of “Spar”?

Oh yeah. Bacon remix was one hundred percent a joke. It was for a fundraiser. John Ordover was doing a fundraiser for a Brooklyn school, and he did something that he called the Baconthology. He asked us to reimagine fiction through a bacon filter, so I changed everything to bacon. So, in the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien eat bacon endlessly, relentlessly. I found that it didn’t change anything in the story. It says the exact same things about relationships and communication. It says the exact same thing, except it says it all with bacon instead of with sex.

Well, pretty much the same thing, right?

Almost.

Let’s get on to “Ponies.” Do you want to say what that’s about?

“Ponies” is a really, really short story. I think it may be the shortest story to ever win the Nebula. The theory is that little girls, they always have a Pony with a capital P. Ponies look a lot like My Little Pony. I did extensive research for this by watching every single episode of My Little Pony. My eyes were bleeding by the end. But everybody has a Pony and the Pony has a horn like a unicorn and little wings like a Pegasus, and they all can talk because every little girl wants her Pony to talk to her. There is a party that happens when you are of a certain age, like nine or ten, when other little girls are very important to you, when you bring your Pony to this party, and some terrible things happen. The Pony has to give up two of its three special characteristics in order to fit in. In order for you to be one of the girls. And that’s what this story is about. Barbara and her Pony, Sunny, go to what’s called “The Cutting-Out” party.

I heard in an interview, the way you said it made it sound like there’s an actual type of party that this is based on.

Well, sort of. When I was a little girl, I mean, little girls have little parties all the time, and when they’re in that clique stage, which is sort of nine to eleven, when girls become really cliqueish, really rankist, you’re in, you’re out. There’s a lot of viciousness if you’re one of the outside girls. Those parties, like birthday parties and Halloween parties, and pool parties, and all of those things, who is invited and who is not is very political. So that’s what I was thinking of when I wrote this, was being a little girl and having all of the other little girls be invited to a birthday party and me and one other not. So they don’t really have parties where they cut pieces off horses or anything. Not that I know of, anyway.

What were your impressions when you watched every single episode of My Little Pony?

At that point, Friendship is Magic was just starting, so for you Pony lovers out there, that dates when I was writing that, but I watched some of the old stuff, and then I watched some of the new stuff. The new stuff was working really, really hard to step away from the older stuff. Friendship is Magic is about how we all stand up for each other, we all have each other’s backs, if one of us feels insecure, we all try to band together to help her feel better, and stuff like that. My feeling about that was that it’s a lovely conceit, and if that changed the way that little girls interacted that would be fantastic, but it’s not likely. I watched them and thought, this is so improbable that this is just fantasy land. This doesn’t help anybody except by showing you a fantasy world where things might be better.

Have you followed the Brony phenomenon at all?

I have. In fact, I wrote the introduction to a Brony anthology that was done by Kazka Press in Seattle a few years back. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s entertaining. I love when people cross into other fandoms in unexpected ways, and I think that the Brony thing, when it first started, was absolutely that. I’m all in favor of people exploring other people’s fandoms.

I found out about it because I just watch lots and lots of documentaries, and there was a documentary about Bronies that I watched because I watch every documentary. I thought it was really interesting, because they were making the point that entertainment that appeals to young boys, like Transformers, we just take it for granted that this should be made into hundred-million-dollar movies that everyone should watch.

But where’s the ponies?

If it’s something that appeals to little girls, there’s just this huge amount of hostility toward people being into it, and how deeply embedded the sexist assumptions are there.

Right, and I think that the Jem movie is an interesting example of that, because Jem is not the favorite IP of little girls, but it’s the IP that adult men look at and think should be the favorite IP of little girls. So, adult men looked at Jem and said, “What do little girls want to be? They want to be rock stars. Let’s do a movie about little girls being rock stars.” Not understanding that things that are happening that are not what they are expecting. Ponies, goodness knows, all of those ponies have very conventional gender roles. None of those ponies wants to be a plumber. None of those ponies is interested in rebuilding old cars. The ponies are all doing what girls are expected to do, but they are trying to do them at the very highest level.

What did you think about the response to your story “Ponies”? Did you ever think it would win the Nebula award?

I really did not. I had no idea. For one thing, I thought it was too short. For another, I thought it was a girls’ story and pretty explicitly a girls’ story, which is not to say the Nebulas aren’t aware of that, but I thought, “This is a story about a specific phenomenon that is specific to one age and one gender, really.” But it does have broader implications and applications, it turned out. It just wasn’t . . . Because it was written in that very plain spoken voice, and I thought, it’s not a voice that people will respond to. So I was very surprised when it was nominated, and delighted, and honored, and then when it won, and it shared the award with Harlan Ellison, of all people, I was staggered by that. I did not actually pass out, which is good. Which was, I think, a major victory, on my part.

What sort of fan mail or other sort of responses have you gotten to it?

It’s taught a lot, it turns out. I get a lot of teachers writing me and telling me things about it. People have had, as I said earlier, very different interpretations of it. Everything from this is a story about female circumcision to this is a story about male circumcision, go figure, to this is a story about the way girls are, or this is a story about how parents force their daughters to conform. So many different interpretations. People have refuted it and said, “That’s not the way my friends were.” Boys who have read it and said, “That’s the way my friends were.” All of these different things. Every so often I get a personal email, this one I don’t get as much as some of my other fiction, but every so often I get a personal email from somebody who tells me a story, and often the story is about what it was like for them to be bullied and about how they totally understood Barbara’s quandary in the story.

You mentioned how often your stories get these vastly different interpretations. Do you think that’s true of all stories, or do you think there’s something particular about the way that you tell stories that lends itself to these vastly differing interpretations?

That’s a good question too. One answer is that it’s always possible to read a story in any of a thousand different ways. I used to get in trouble in college in poetry class because I would invariably argue that every religious poem was a sex poem, and I would point to all of the language and be like, see, see, this is the charged language of sexuality, and eventually the professor and I would end up in a donnybrook, and I would storm out of class, and I’d have to take it again the next semester. I almost didn’t get out of college because of one poetry class.

I know from experience with my friends that we do a lot of that. We say, “What if you read Pride and Prejudice, except you’re thinking about it as if it’s all about the horses. How does that change the story?” I bet you don’t even remember there were horses, and yet horses are pivotal to the plot, so we were always playing these little party tricks of reinterpreting stories according to this filter or that. I think with most stories, that can be done with. You can always say, “Well, I think this is the subversive. I think Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a subversive feminist subtext.” I wouldn’t say that I do more of it than other people, but I do think that, because my language is often so precise, the fact that I leave something purposefully vague makes people crazy. They put their thumb on that spot, and they start pushing at it trying to figure out what exactly it means. Other people who are more diffuse writers, and I’m thinking specifically of “The Hortlak” by Kelly Link, which is a brilliant story, but if you ask somebody what that’s about . . . the interpretations are everywhere, because you really have a hard time telling what it’s about. That’s the gift of that story. It’s so broad, and so strange, and diffuse, and wondrous.

That’s interesting. I’m sure our producer, John Joseph Adams, would also want me to mention your story “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary,” which he picked for his Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Do you want to tell us about that story?

“The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary” is, I now know, part of three stories. It’s a collection of somewhere between sixteen and nineteen very, very short stories about the animals that live in your apartment when you’re alone. So they live under your bed, or they live in your oven because you never cook, or they party in your shoes at night, and all the little animals, they’re the company that fills the empty space of the apartment. There are two that I’m working on right after the story I’m finishing right now, there are two other “Apartment Dwellers” compendia which are going to be different stages of adulthood, but the three of them together will be about a 10,000-word super-random thing. So, the bestiary I originally wrote because I wanted it to be a chapbook with illustrations, but I have a full-time job, plus I do a lot of stuff for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and I just didn’t have time to organize illustrators or anything like that, so if any illustrators are listening to this, you’re certainly welcome to write to me.

To what extent would you say those little sketches are autobiographical? Do you have a lot of experience living by yourself in apartments?

Yeah, yeah, I have. I wrote all of them when I was living in my beautiful apartment, the apartment I just moved out of, which was the third floor in a 1910s apartment building, and there was a crawlspace between the roof and the ceiling, and squirrels lived in there, and birds lived in the bathroom vents, and spiders lived in the ceiling, and at any given time, I’d be reading, or sleeping, or looking out the window, and I’d hear skittering noises that weren’t mine, and they weren’t my cats, and I would think, “Those are the beasts.” You never live alone. You’re always surrounded by the other things that share your space, and so that was the inspiration for it. At that point, I had lived alone for almost a decade, and I’d gotten really used to the weird noises and the sudden discoveries. Obviously, a mouse has been living in my oven kind of discoveries. Memo to self, use oven more often.

In New York, you have to use it for storage.

Right, right. That’s what I always thought. That’s where you put the pots. That’s where you put baked goods if you don’t want the animals to get to them.

In addition to squirrels and things, the story also reminded me a lot about cats and dogs and the way people get attached to them or use them as status symbols or things like that.

Right, or substitutes for company. There’s one called the Orco, where if you fall asleep with a book in bed, and then the Orco is there, and you reach across. It’s almost like all the pieces of someone, I say in the story. So all the ways that they substitute for company, or the ways that they console you for the lack of company, or reward you for the lack of company.

You mentioned the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which, actually, I first met you at that back in 2003. I took a science fiction writing class there. I was curious, what’s new with the Center for the Study of Science Fiction?

We are in the middle of four new initiatives. Three of them I can’t talk about, curse it. But the one I can talk about is that the University of Kansas, which has always had a lively science fiction degree and program, is starting a vertical column of science fiction courses that are specifically science fiction-colon-something or other. So, Science Fiction: The Canon, Science Fiction: Books That Should Be Canon, Science Fiction: Afro-Futurism, Science Fiction: Slipstream, Science Fiction: Fantasy, because we’re using science fiction inclusively because of tradition, mostly. We’re starting to pull this together, and part of this is because we are well into the process of building a science fiction certificate, which would be independent of a degree. Once we’ve done that, that would allow people to get a degree in anything: English, French, microbiology, and also get a science fiction certificate, which would indicate that they have some knowledge about science fiction, and also some knowledge about extrapolative thinking patterns, because one of our core premises is that science fiction is not so much a literature as it is an intellectual mode of inquiry that allows you to explore things in ways that nothing else does.

You also do these weeklong summer workshops, right? Because that’s what I did.

Yeah, two weeks long. In the summertime, the Center does a two-week residential workshop mostly not for students, but we always end up with a student or two, usually adults of various sorts. One for short fiction and one for novels. They’re both intensive workshops and everybody comes out of it strung out and exhausted. We then have the Campbell conference, which is the conference at which the Sturgeon and Campbell award for best novel are given. There are two Campbell awards, by the way, one is the Campbell award that’s given at the Hugos, and one is the Campbell that we give, which is the best novel of the year. That Campbell conference this year is actually the academic track of Worldcon, which is happening even as this thing has aired. Then, the second two weeks are three courses, and now we’re going to be adding a fourth, which is advanced workshops in novels and short-fiction. We’re starting a young adult workshop, which would be for writers of young adult fiction, and there is a teaching institute, which is actually an excuse to read twenty-six science fiction novels or one hundred science fiction short stories and discuss them in a two-week period. So, the two weeks has now expanded to be four weeks, and by the end of that we are very exhausted, but it’s also the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.

I saw you were going to be teaching at Clarion West next year?

Yes, I’m very excited about that, too. I taught there a couple of years ago, and I absolutely adored it. I’ll be teaching, I believe, week three, which means that I’m the week where I start to put people back together after they realize how much they have to learn. I’m not sure.

Plenty of opportunities to study with Kij, people, if you’re interested.

Yes, yes, come and study with me.

This is kind of a random question, but I was curious, I remember when I met you, you said that you had gotten a tattoo for each of your first two books, I was wondering if you’ve ever gotten any more. How do you celebrate publishing a novella? Do you get half a tattoo?

Just a little tiny tattoo. No, actually, I have not maintained that, and I was just thinking about that the other day. When I was a rock climber, I got climbing tattoos, but I didn’t continue with that, and now I will have had two books come out in a two-year period, so I have to decide, am I going to get a big garland of other animals or what am I going to do here? That would be kind of fun, actually. I could get a little bird, and give each of the birds a name or something.

We’re pretty much out of time. Do you have any other projects you want to mention, or maybe just remind people of the stuff you have coming out?

Sure, of course. I’ve got The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe coming out, in fact, in two days. I finally saw a copy of it, and I could not be happier. You can’t see, but I’m clutching it to myself.

Gorgeous cover.

Yeah, they did a wonderful job with it. I have a French edition of The Man Who Bridged the Mist coming out in two months from Le Bélial’, I believe, which I’m very excited for, because French is one of the few languages I can read. I can actually pretend that I’m reading somebody else’s book. Then next year, I’m really excited that The River Bank, which is sort of my retake of The Wind in the Willows, is coming out from Small Beer. That’ll be next summer. In the meantime, I expect I’ll have a bunch of short fiction coming out, because that’s what I’m concentrating on right now.

Great. Everyone go check out The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. The author is Kij Johnson. Kij, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, 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: James S.A. Corey

Laurel Amberdine | 248 words

How did “Rate of Change” originate?

As best I recall, it came from a conversation we had about Octavia Butler’s novel Lilith’s Brood, and the way she handled the struggle of the older generation to cope with their own children. It seems like a metaphor for a very common experience. That sparked the idea about technology and being left behind by your own culture.

What was your collaboration process like for this story? Was it different from how you write novels together?

We plotted it out together, then one of us did the rough draft and the other did the polish. It’s pretty much the same way we do chapters, except there was only one instead of fifty-some.

If you could replace your body like the people in “Rate of Change” could, what would you choose?

I think it would be really interesting to fly under my body’s own power. Something birdlike, I guess.

Do you have any advice for newer writers, especially those who want to try collaborating?

The keys to collaboration are to agree beforehand on what kind of project you’re doing and then understand that the point is that it will come out differently than it would have if you’d done it by yourself.

What do you like to do besides writing?

Avoid work, mostly.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

Arley Sorg | 1106 words

This is such a beautiful tale of love and longing. What I find remarkable is the mother’s connection to the sea, and specifically the way she maintains that connection through her daughter. On the one hand, I’m curious about your relationship to the sea; but I am also curious about whether or not this relationship, between mother and daughter, and especially sharing a connection or connecting through someone, is modeled on personal experiences?

Thank you. I love the ocean. I’m never so happy as when I’m by a large body of salt water. I’ve snorkeled and scubaed and was part of a four-year marine chemistry program in high school. So oceans have always been a place of fascination and love for me. I really wish there were an ocean-oriented Launchpad-type program for SFF writers. So for me, part of this story was just choosing a setting that I loved, and trying to make that love clear on the page.

To answer the second part, while I do occasionally steal pieces from my own life and give them to my characters, not this time. I am lucky that I have a close relationship with my own mom, but the mother and daughter of this story have their own.

For me, the transitions really work. I like the way everything layers. I also enjoy the use of tense: moving from an almost fairy tale past tense to a present tense that is lush with sensory details. Some people hesitate to work with present-tense storytelling, while others use it almost exclusively. For you, what are the advantages and challenges of working in present tense? Stylistically do you have elements that are your “go-tos,” or comfort zones, or do you experiment a lot in your work?

Present tense isn’t usually a go-to for me, but for this instance, it seemed right—I wanted the reader in the experience with the character, as she was having that experience. And the present tense sections were actually the first ones I wrote. The first draft of this story had none of the past tense sections, and I realized that it didn’t work.

I do tend to gravitate toward writing in first person, but at the same time, I try to consider what’s best for the story, and to push myself into trying new things. I have my favorites, but I also don’t want to always write the same thing, or in the same way.

I feel like there’s a separation between the outside world and the inside of the house, almost as if what goes on outside is wild and unruly, thrilling, unpredictable (“perilous”); and inside is safe and controlled—human. There is also the sense of limitations inside and a sort of limitless world beyond. Is this deliberate and meaningful/metaphoric?

I’d love to seem like this very controlled, all-seeing sort of writer and say, “of course,” but that wouldn’t be the full truth of the answer. Did I set out to do this, in the sense that I sat down and thought about symbolism and weight and metaphor? No. But there is that general sense of separation between our own safe worlds, inside our houses, and the wild and perilous places outside, and I think that’s something that’s so often present in literature that the symbolism is easy to reach for. At the same time, I think there’s often the idea that at home is where you are your truest self, and that is certainly not true for either of the women in this story.

Stories—especially myth and fairy tale—play an important role throughout. Were these important to you when you were growing up?

Oh, absolutely. I remember going to the library, and checking out every myth and fairy tale collection I could find. And I remember reading them, and seeing the similarities and differences in the stories, whether those were retellings of fairy tales that focused on different elements, or the similarities in the Greek and Roman myths. (I liked the Greek pantheon better, because I though the gods and goddesses had better names.) But they gave me the idea that I could pick and choose—take a favorite piece from one version of a story and combine it with a favorite piece from another version, until I had my own favorite. I suppose I still do that.

At the end, I feel like this piece is as much about freedom/release. While the things that both characters felt throughout are never necessarily resolved or healed, there is an openness to the final expression, an unhindered catharsis (“the tide is pouring from my hair . . .”); simultaneously, the two of them actually remain tied to each other. Is it one of life’s truths (and ironies) that we find emotional freedom and release through our relationships?

 I think we are interconnected people. So certainly sometimes we’re lucky enough to find relationships where we can find that freedom and release—the people we can be our true selves with. Finding that is a great joy. At the same time, I think that there are also relationships where we’re asked to limit or hide ourselves, where we feel like we have to be something that we’re not. I hope more people find the first, find that freedom, and that joy.

I think this story is filled with subtleties, and I think it’s the sort of story that people can potentially read a variety of ways.

Is there anything you want to tell readers about this piece that I haven’t touched on? Also—what are you working on now that we can look forward to?

I am definitely not the sort of writer who feels like she should interpret her own work for readers, so I am going to step back and let the readers find in it what they want to. In terms of what I’m working on now, my next novel, An Unkindness of Magicians, will be out in September 2017 from Saga press. Social-climbing magicians engaged in a ritual—and often fatal—competition for power in modern NYC. I’ll also have a short fiction collection out from Saga in early 2018—A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. It will have some previously published work, as well as new pieces, including a modern Arthurian novella called “Once, Future.”

Thanks so much for your time, Kat!

Thank you!

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Setsu Uzume | 303 words

Did you mean this as a tragic or comedic piece? Does one reading inform the other?

I think it’s largely a comedy, but one based on the sheer preposterous awfulness of the protagonist’s position, which is never ever going to get any better.

This story reminded me of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The way the narrator describes other crewmembers cracking under the same stress was fascinating. What do underdogs have that no one in the hierarchy does?

Okay, I confess; as the author of at least one other story that explicitly owes something to “The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas,” the comparison of this particular piece to that same story leaves me gobsmacked to the point of speechlessness. I don’t see it.

What do Underdogs have that no one in the hierarchy has? Nothing to lose.

How does the conscious choice not to murder everyone around you equate to love?

I think there are days, for many of us, when it equates to sainthood.

What do you want the reader to take away from this story?

I had no particular message in mind when I wrote this one. I separate stories from yarns and yarns from throwaway bits of business; this is just one of the many that sprouted from an initial situation, with no particular authorial plan regarding destination. If you take any theme from this one, it is the result of your own thought processes forming a hard shell around the story’s capacity to irritate you: a narrative oyster, so to speak.

Tell us about your upcoming projects.

I think this time out I will be satisfied with a mere, mysterious “Stay tuned.”

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: Jeffrey Ford

Sandra Odell | 1485 words

“Daddy Long Legs of the Evening” combines the best, and most chilling aspects, of fantasy, horror, fairy tales, and political commentary I have ever read. Since its initial publication in Naked City in 2011, how do you feel the story has aged? Do you find that its hidden dreads are still relevant today?

There’s something about spiders that creeps certain people out, that’s for starters. I doubt the story will ever lose that angle. The story is also told in a sort of fairy tale mode, albeit a dark one, and that might offer some staying power. And the political underpinnings seem to point out a certain insect fear and cold predation that is the heart of politics these days and doesn’t look like it’ll be changing any time soon. So, yeah, I think it stands up and will for a while at least.

Tell us about what inspired the story.

I went to a Salvador Dalí exhibit. I think it was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the double martini of art museums. The show was fairly extensive, having rooms upon rooms of painting, drawings, collages, etc., and ending with a holographic image Dalí had created of Alice Cooper. Within that show hung the artist’s famous painting “Daddy Long Legs of the Evening—Hope.” It’s kind of a typical Dalí painting, as much as you could say any of his pieces is typical—you know, you’ve got a melting violin hanging over a tree branch, a horse in the background, a yellow puddle up front that could or might not necessarily be someone’s profile. Crawling on that indistinguishable mass is a Daddy Long Legs spider. That’s where I got the title from, but the inspiration came from a cartoonish drawing in the same show of a spider wearing a top hat and tails (I forget the title of that piece). When I saw that, I thought of the movie Daddy Long Legs with Fred Astaire. Also on my mind at that time was a certain dark fairy tale like story I’d read in Robert Coover’s book A Child Again about The Pied Piper. That stuff all blended together with memories of someone telling me that Daddy Long Legs spiders were the most poisonous arachnid in relation to their size—whatever that meant—and a kid I knew when I was very young, capturing one and pulling the legs off one by one, making me want to puke.

Your rich prose carries the reader along, exploring multiple points of view and narrative without impeding the steady, inexorable plot (the electric gray cake of the brain; the memory of their fear burrowed in a spiral pattern to the center of their minds and played them like zithers for the rest of their days; It was dinnertime in the city that never woke; leaving old luggage indiscriminately in his wake.) How did you decide on the narrative tone for the story?

That aspect of fiction writing just comes to me when I am able to envision the setting and feel the mood of a story. It changes with different types of characters and narrative structures. I have no idea how that all works. I guess I get it from whatever process or presence I get the story from. I usually have a feeling that the story already exists, and in writing it I’m merely revealing it. Some very mysterious whim-wham.

The transformation of the young boy from cherubic to Daddy hearkens back both to traditional tales of stolen infants and changelings left to unknowing parents, but it also touches on the fears many parents experience when their child suddenly becomes “different,” “the other” as seen through the lens of special needs. As a writer, what is it about exploring the idea of “the other,” whether special needs, sexual preference, race, religion, or any other identifier that appeals to you?

When first conceiving of the character, I considered Daddy as totally “the other”—not “the other” as you describe in your examples above but completely alien, devoid of humanity, self-serving, and treacherously narcissistic. Since we’ve seen the results of the recent presidential election, though, I realize that Daddy is my neighbor, and I wonder how long it will be before he comes for me.

If you would, share a bit about your writing process. Plotter or pantser? A marathon writer or do you steal writing time where you can?

My writing process? I write primarily in the morning and afternoon. When I was younger, I’d stay up late at night and write, but as my father-in-law, who was a professional cartoonist, told me when he was my age, “The night is a cruel mistress.” When I got older, I found that to be true. I basically sit there and write. Either I’ve got something going and I’m directed, or I fuck around and try to come up with an idea. I save all my failed story attempts and pieces of stories that went nowhere or ones I’d always intended to return to and sometimes when I’ve got nothing going, I’ll look through them and see if the path opens up. I try to sit in the chair every day and at least type. A good day of writing for me is around 1500 words. Sometimes it’s less. Sometimes it’s way less. Sometimes just getting the first paragraph of a story is enough for a day’s work, but I’m satisfied because I have found the voice and the rhythm and I know a little more about the characters. There are times when I’m in the zone and I can bang out ten pages at a pop. Not so much of that anymore. Ten-page days were more usual when I was younger, but when those ten pages were edited, etc., they’d usually turn out to be about three and a half, which is about 1000 words. When I’m engaged in the middle of a story or book, I start out by reading over and editing through what I’ve written already. I go back to the beginning and run through the whole piece, and then I’m ready to start putting new stuff down. If it’s a novel, I go back a chapter or two and then come to the point of pure invention. This way you get to go over and over the work as you go and it helps you each day to fall into the world of the story. I also listen to music—Harold Budd, generally—contemplative, head music I probably wouldn’t listen to for anything other than writing. I don’t keep a notebook, I don’t plot things out. The most I might do is draw some pictures on the back of an envelope. Once I have the start, the setting, and the mood I want, then I’m off to the races and the thing just grows organically. I’m not a bricklayer or a schemer, although I know some writers who are and they’re fantastic. To each her own, when it comes to this game.

You are a prolific writer, with dozens of novels, collections, and short stories under your belt. Are there writing projects you have yet to tackle, any chances with words you have yet to take?

Actually, I’m not a prolific writer with dozens of novels, collections and short stories. I’ve published eight novels, five collections, and about 130 to 150 short stories. I have a new novel in the works for Morrow, a novella in the works for Tor.com, and about five or six stories wending their way toward publication. I do know writers who are prolific, and I take my hat off to them. Actually, I’ll take my hat off to anyone who legitimately publishes a story, novella, or novel. Every time out is a challenge—not just the writing, but managing one’s life in order to accomplish the writing. A big round of applause for the serious beginners, the determined plodders (my category), and the brilliant geniuses, all. I don’t know what’s coming down the pike till it arrives. I’m just going to continue to try to do the best job I can in writing the stories and books I have it in me to write. Each outing is exciting to me. Each work brings me new ideas and things to learn. I never grow tired of it because I only have ever written what I wanted to. This isn’t a factory job for me. I’ve worked factory jobs, loaded trucks, cleaned toilets, whatever. Writing, for me, isn’t that.

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: Mary Rosenblum

Laurel Amberdine | 289 words

“Tracker” takes place in an amazingly rich world, with so much interesting stuff going on. Do you have any more stories in this setting, or would you consider writing some?

I do love this far future world, but I haven’t written any other stories in it. It’s really an extension of my exploration of where we go, once we can manipulate our genes and achieve immortality. Is death the dividing line between Human and Non-human? I wonder about that.

I really enjoyed Jesse the dog’s reactions. Was she inspired by any particular dog?

Ah, Jesse is a compilation of many dogs I’ve owned and worked with, more an Australian Shepherd than a Rottweiler. Dogs have always been part of my life.

What is your usual process for writing a story? Was “Tracker” any different?

My stories start in different ways, most often with a character who has an issue, sometimes with an idea first. This story started with my thoughts about what immortality would do to our compassion, about our ability to care. Yolanda herself came from an image of a horned woman that I bought years ago, while I was attending Clarion West, actually.

What are you working on lately?

Actually, I’ve been working with authors rather than writing my own stories, doing content editing and educating new authors on the intricacies of today’s new publishing world—how to actually reach readers with your books and succeed on your own. It’s really exciting, as the publishing world changes almost daily. And I love helping authors make their stories as strong and compelling as they can be.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Jeremiah Tolbert

Arley Sorg | 1013 words

For me, this is a story about a kid who struggles to define both himself and his world. And in defining, exerts a sort of control. He tends to take a certain comfort in routine and the expected, even when unpleasant. Yet . . . in moments of the unknown, fear and joy are intertwined. Do you feel like this is a cultural condition, like we tend to want to exert control over our circumstances, even if we believe that control only exists in defining it—or in maintaining a status quo; and even if suffering is expected? And conversely, is joy found not by following the routine, but in the unexpected?

I suspect almost all control is an illusion, and a comforting one at that. My character here is desperate to apply some schema to the world to give it a reason for moving the way it does. I don’t think status quo really plays into things precisely—at his age, you don’t really know what the status quo is. Everything is new and terrifying and you’re still sorting it all out. Growing up is definitely about figuring out where we fit into things—attempting to exert control is part of that. Or perhaps, in some cases, creating belief systems that explain why we have no control, and that belief system makes the lack of control bearable. We all instinctually believe we should have some measure of it—control. But I think many of us find the amount very much lacking. Especially when we’re kids.

I love the personal feeling of this piece, the conversational tone. I had this sense of being immersed into someone’s history, rather than reading fiction. How much of this is drawn from your own past? And what are the elements and tools that you use to create a tale that is so convincingly real?

Almost all of it is based in parts or events from my own childhood. The supernatural elements, well . . . perhaps not so much, although I did entertain a belief in the Bermuda Triangle, psychic powers, and all the other paranormal things popular in the ’80s. The geography is especially true to my childhood’s reality, and the relationships mirror my own in elementary school. It’s the most painfully honest thing I’ve ever written, to tell you the truth. But I think hopefully putting so much of myself into it made for a richer experience in the end.

The speculative element is kept at a distance, and potentially doesn’t even exist, depending on how you read the story. It could be that the detective work of this kid is unraveling a supernatural mystery, or it could just be his way of using imagination to make sense of the world. Importantly, it’s real to him.

In a sense it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, because it still guides his actions and drives the narrative. This makes it real for the reader (for me, it did), and makes the ending resonant.

Did you toy with the idea of making the speculative element more direct and present? Or do you usually prefer mystery, uncertainty, or ambiguity in your stories?

As a kid, I wanted very much to believe in the supernatural. I sought evidence for it all around me, because there was always this lingering sense of “is this really it?” As I grew older, as life got harder and as my family struggled to make it in tough times, my wonder at the universe seemed to diminish. I took refuge in the idea that Bigfoot might live in the woods behind my house. In exploring the idea of the Philadelphia Experiment, and UFOs.

There is comfort—a kind of safety—within the realm of belief in things unknown. That comfort is more real and more important to this story than any concrete answers. This story is very much about that ambiguity, what it means, and the role it plays in protecting our psyches. I imagine this means some will find it dissatisfying who want concrete answers, but I hope they can see the value in the experience nonetheless.

I wanted to write a realistic story of the paranormal, where just like in my own experiences, there are never any real answers, and concrete, lasting belief is just beyond reach, always perhaps debunkable, and yet . . . and yet . . .

At the end, everything is literally enshrouded in fog, and despite the various pains of his existence, he’s glad to have this fear of losing it all. There’s something so understated and touching about this final scene, with him running and his new friend trailing him. What is the most important aspect of this moment for you?

The final scene contains a special mixture of fear and hope—an emotion I am very intimately familiar with, but rarely see captured in a way that resonates with me. I feel like I’ve spent half my life experiencing that emotion, the kind of emotion you half-expect there be a precise German word for, but if it exists, nobody has ever taught it to me.

So much of life is unknowable and really cannot be trusted. But we run forward into the fog of our futures anyway. I love that.

This was a great tale. What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

Thanks so much. I’m very proud of it.

I’m working on a few novel ideas slowly, and follow-ups to October’s “Cavern of the Screaming Eye.” Dungeonspace seemed to strike a nerve with readers—and is a much more upbeat, enjoyable series to revisit. I am slowly at work with a number of other personal stories that deal with other “mysteries of the unknown” from the ’80s. Up next is something about lake monsters. Still taking shape.

Thanks so much for your time, Jeremiah!

It’s my pleasure. Thanks very much for your questions.

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: Molly Tanzer

Sandra Odell | 1082 words

You establish “Nine Tenths of the Law” with a fairly intimate domestic scene and then tumble into the unexpected with a smooth, light hand, keeping the balance to the end. How do you manage such a balance in writing? Do you find the line between the real and the surreal easy to cross?

I wanted this story to be all about juxtaposition and disorientation—the closest to home and the most distant thing imaginable coming together in strange ways with unexpected (though inevitable) consequences.

This one, for me, was all about the quick and slow. I drew on my history writing Mythos and Weird fiction, where things often start off fairly normal and then go abysmally awry, to create that sense of disorientation and “what’s real?” But in the end, this story is probably the most classically SF story I’ve ever written, up to and including riffing on Robert Silverberg. His story “Amanda and the Alien” is a great one for “how would we deal with actual, literal aliens?” so I studied it and even included a small tribute (a cat named after one of T.S. Eliot’s).

I was intrigued by the “X-Files-style rumors” that form the core of the story. Are there really such rumors about the Denver International Airport? How did they shape the inspiration for the story?

Oh gosh yes! There really, really are. One need only google “Denver International Airport Conspiracy Theory” to find a wealth of amazing stuff. I learned all about them when I moved to Colorado, and then became semi-obsessed with cataloguing what people believe about the place.

Here’s what’s true: DIA is far away from everything (yes, even Denver!). Like, queerly so. There are layers of tunnels beneath it. It has a ton of weird art, including a mural of a Nazi with rainbows and doves, and a statue of a giant angry horse that (in reality) killed its creator. (“Blucifer,” as we call him, has his own FB fan page.)

What’s proooobably not true is that beneath DIA lurks an alien research facility, or that its murals predict the rapture or the end of the world (one of the dedicated conspiracy bloggers insists that this painting [bit.ly/2fKP2zh], featuring a leopard and two cubs, while done before the Obama presidency, reflects the rise of Michelle Obama, Sasha, and Malia), or that it’s where they’ll send the president in the event of a world event that would send him into hiding. But, just the same, people believe it. And not just locals—I was once taking a shuttle to a tiny airport in Utah when the guy asked where I was flying into. When I mentioned Denver, he got very excited and asked me, “So, what do you know about . . . it all?” Not the first time I’ve experienced such excitement from a rando about the place, either.

Because I wanted “Nine Tenths of the Law” to be a story about real life, I wanted to set it somewhere very familiar to me, but I also wanted to riff on the uncanny and the doubt people often feel about conspiracy theories, the “well . . . what if it was true?” Denver International Airport therefore seemed like the ideal setting for that.

To me, certain elements of the story—Gleerak’s curiosity about humanity, its efforts to control and redirect conversations, how the alien and the human minds slide in and out of control—touch on mental health issues as well, Dissociative Identity Disorder in particular. Was this an intentional effect or did the story shape itself?

No, it was definitely intentional, even if I wouldn’t go so far as to say I intended to make it about something as serious as Dissociative Identity Disorder. For me, this is a story about the way people react to the end of a marriage. Divorce is often an identity-shattering time for people, where they re-evaluate who they are—and who they wish they could be. Some people feel elated, only to crash; others start low and realize that in the end, all the pain is for the best. There’s no predicting what will happen, and no way to know how aware people will be of how they’re changing.

One of the things that impressed me most about the story is how you address Jared as a character, taking into account his personal feelings and needs, even his desires. His reactions force Donna to admit that they have both grown out of their marriage. How do you approach such character development so that a character does not become a caricature instead?

I never wanted Jared to be a caricature. I wanted him to be a real person, a real victim, who experiences real consequences within the story. That’s how I approached his character. Sure, he’s awful—but so is Donna, honestly. And he had a hand in his crappy marriage and his wife’s feelings of dissatisfaction—but so did Donna. It takes two to tango, and Jared is obviously not happy, either.

Basically, I knew I wanted to tell this story from Donna’s perspective, but just the same, I knew Jared shouldn’t—couldn’t—be “just” a terrible husband or a villain for it to work the way I wanted it to. I didn’t want anyone to feel comfortable with his being stripped of his life—his body—his agency, even if it was providing Donna with something she needed/wanted. Or at least felt she deserved.

What’s next for Molly Tanzer? Are there any up and coming projects in store for 2017?

Oh yes! I’ll have two books out next year. First, I’ll be celebrating the release of Mixed Up!, an anthology I’m co-editing with Nick Mamatas, which will be a gift book featuring flash fiction and cocktail recipes. I’m also excited for the release of Creatures of Will and Temper, which will be my third novel. It’s a feminist, woman-focused retelling of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with sword fighting, demons, sisters who can’t get along, and other fun stuff. I’ll also continue with my magazine, Congress, where I publish “thoughtful erotica,” and put out my usual trickle of short stories.

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: Judith Berman

Moshe Siegel | 894 words

What was the genesis of your Nebula Award-nominated novella, “Awakening”?

The opening scene came to me as I myself was waking up one morning. It might have been the tail end of a dream, or a half-waking image—I can’t remember now. I do remember writing that beginning, then saying, “Now what?” The initial sequence, in which Aleya escapes from the crypt and tries to figure out what’s going on, paralleled my own puzzle writing the first draft of the story.

That being said, I did already have a good deal of her world sketched out in my head, because I’ve long had some ideas for a novel or group of novels set there. Some of the characters Aleya meets already existed, among them Guribast and the young Oracle.

The main action of this story takes place long after Aleya’s “living” life. The sensation of elapsed time, a world drawn more ancient and fractured, is palpable, and, in many ways, is far more interesting than a study of a thriving metropolis. Have you explored her homeland during its active time in other tales? Or is Shenna more interesting to you, as a writer, as a long-dead relic?

I have not explored the living city of Shenna very thoroughly, and I would say it is more interesting to me as a ruined and undead city—though of course the interest is rooted in its living past.

On that same note, can readers find any iteration—past or present—of the story’s world in your other works? Your worldbuilding compels us!

Another story, “The Poison Well” is set in the present day of this world (published in 2004 in Black Gate 7, and still available for free online at bit.ly/2gzyKFW). The main character, who Aleya would consider a “barbarian,” is a sometime apprentice of the necromancer Guribast, and he appears briefly in Aleya’s final vision. I imagine he will someday visit Shenna in pursuit of his old master.

Speaking of worldbuilding . . . can you share with us any tidbits of your process in developing a world this rich? “Awakening” encompasses several ages, geographies, and social strata—all of it feeling part of a compelling whole. Now we hunger for your secrets.

This is a hard question. I don’t think I have a method. I certainly think about worldbuilding, but usually when I’m writing a story, I’m mostly focused on trying to make the plot work.

Certain things do influence my process. My academic training was in anthropology, I worked in an anthropology museum for years, and I’m now mostly an ethnohistorian. That has made me aware of the complexity of cultures interacting over time and across changing landscapes.

And going back to ruined cities, I lived in Philadelphia for years—including the period when I wrote “Awakening.” Although an infant in comparison to, say, Rome, it’s one of the oldest lived-in cities in North America, with both ruins and buildings still in use that date back four centuries. And it has glimpses of even earlier layers of history: in the many Lenape place-names (Kingsessing, Passyunk, Shackamaxon), in the shapes of some old streets that once connected villages, in the drainage system under the city that follows vanished streams, and, some would say, even in the remains of Lenape stone structures still visible in certain spots—all doors into the past.

Free will comes into play in this story, with Aleya being in turn manipulated by the malevolent Lord of Shenna, the desperate and controlling magician Guribast, and with the implication that a magic mirror from the Oracle played a long game, through the ages, to the end of eventually drawing Aleya to the Temple. What do you make of this fatalist interpretation? Do you think Aleya was ever in a position, alive or dead, of her own choosing?

In Aleya’s old life, her circumstances did not leave her many choices, but the way she exercised what agency she had limited her further.

You could interpret the mirror in more than one way. Maybe it’s a magical object sent to compel her to the service of the Temple. Maybe it was a chess-move against the Lord of Shenna; the priestesses of the Oracle would have seen him as a threat, alive or undead. Or maybe the mirror was intended to lead Aleya to confront herself and her gift. The mirror was after all spelled to serve the Goddess of Truth and the God of the Gate to vision.

My take is that it was the priestesses of the Oracle who were playing the long game. They sent out the mirror for multiple purposes, foreseeing its potential even while knowing the divine power infusing it would lend it a form of agency beyond their control or the Lord of Shenna’s. The events set in motion through the mirror do force Aleya to face up to the conduct of her life and the magnitude of her losses. And in the end, the mirror brings Aleya to what might be the most meaningful exercise of free will she has ever had: the choice of whether to destroy the girl, or sacrifice herself to save her.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 143 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad (“Later, Let’s Tear Up the Inner Sanctum”) and Jack Skillingstead (“The Last Garden”), along with SF reprints by Ian R. MacLeod (“Starship Day”) and Seanan McGuire (“Lady Antheia’s Guide To Horticultural Warfare”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kelly Barnhill (“Probably Still the Chosen One”) and Ashok Banker (“Six-Gun Vixen and the Dead Coon Trashgang”), and fantasy reprints by K.J. Bishop (“The Memorial Page”) and Brian Stableford (“The Elixir of Youth”).

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 our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

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

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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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

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Wendy N. Wagner

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Stefan Rudnicki

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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.