TABLE OF CONTENTS

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, February 2017

Ebook Content Survey

SCIENCE FICTION

Starship Day
Ian R. MacLeod

Later, Let’s Tear Up The Inner Sanctum
A. Merc Rustad

Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare
Seanan McGuire

The Last Garden
Jack Skillingstead

FANTASY

Probably Still the Chosen One
Kelly Barnhill

The Memorial Page
K.J. Bishop

Six-Gun Vixen and the Dead Coon Trashgang
Ashok Banker

The Elixir of Youth
Brian Stableford

NOVELLA

Taklamakan
Bruce Sterling

EXCERPTS

Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment
Fran Wilde and Luke Peterson

NONFICTION

Media Review: February 2017
Christopher East

Book Reviews: February 2017
LaShawn Wanak

Interview: Connie Willis
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Ian MacLeod

Kelly Barnhill

A. Merc Rustad

KJ Bishop

Seanan McGuire

Ashok Banker

Jack Skillingstead

Brian Stableford

Bruce Sterling

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Alan Bao

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, February 2017

John Joseph Adams | 933 words

Welcome to issue eighty-one of 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 a reprint of the novella “Taklamakan,” by Bruce Sterling.

Awards News

In the first awards news of the year, my horror anthology co-edited with Douglas Cohen, What the #@&% is That?, had two stories—”Only Unclench Your Hand” by Isabel Yap and “The Bad Hour” by Christopher Golden—on the Preliminary Stoker Awards ballot for best Short Fiction. So big congrats to them for the honor. You can find the full slate of what made the preliminary ballot at horror.org. The final ballot will be announced February 23, and the the Stoker Awards themselves will be presented at StokerCon 2017, which is being held in Long Beach, CA, April 27-30.

In other news, the nomination period for this year’s Hugo Awards is now open. Nominations close March 17. Anyone who is or was a voting member of the 2016, 2017, or 2018 Worldcons by January 31, 2017 is eligible to nominate. If you need some help remembering which stories from Lightspeed or Nightmare (or were otherwise edited by/associated with me) fit into which categories, I put together a list of all of the material I worked on that is eligible for this year’s award, which you can find at bit.ly/hugos2017.

Best-of-the-Year Reprints

Several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and the Destroy special issues have also been selected for reprint in several best-of-the-year volumes. They’re listed below, with the original venue and then the best-of-the-year editor(s)’s name following in parenthesis:

Redking by Craig DeLancey (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois)

I’ve Come to Marry the Princess by Helena Bell (Lightspeed | Horton)

A Good Home by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed | Clarke)

Those Brighter Stars by Mercurio R. Rivera (Lightspeed | Dozois)

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed | Clarke)

The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch by Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed | Guran)

Fifty Shades Of Grays by Steven Barnes (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois)

Red Dirt Witch by N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy | Strahan, Guran)

Whose Drowned Face Sleeps by An Owomoyela & Rachael Swirsky (Nightmare | Guran)

Wish You Were Here by Nadia Bulkin (Nightmare | Guran)

The Finest, Fullest Flowering by Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare | Guran)

We’ll update this list if we uncover any additional such honors!

John Joseph Adams Books News

We pre-launched John Joseph Adams Books in early 2016 with the release of three previously indie-published novels by Hugh Howey: Shift, Dust, and Beacon 23. I’m pleased to announce we’re adding more Howey to our schedule, with the acquisition of Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time, for publication in October 2017. We also acquired print rights to another of Hugh’s indie-published novels, Sand, for publication in July 2017.

Looking ahead, also publishing in July is Carrie Vaughn’s novel, Bannerless—a post-apocalyptic mystery in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse.

Then, in November, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an epee-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

A bit farther out, in Spring 2018, we’ll have City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city.

In addition to all that, there’s a couple of other titles I’ve acquired, but can’t talk about yet (including one that will also be added to the 2017 schedule); hopefully I can spill the beans about those soon. As I’m writing this, I’ve also got a couple of different prospects on my plate, so hopefully I’ll have even more news to report next month or sometime soon!

• • • •

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.

Starship Day

Ian R. MacLeod | 7720 words

The news was everywhere. It was in our dreams, it was on TV. Tonight, the travelers on the first starship from Earth would awaken.

That morning, Danous yawned with the expectant creak of shutters, the first stretch of shadow across narrow streets. The air shimmered with the scent of warming pine, it brushed through the shutters and touched our thoughts even as our dreams had faded. For this was Starship Day, and, from tonight, nothing would ever be the same. Of course, there were parties organized. Yacht races across the bay. Holidays for the kids. The prospect of the starship’s first transmission, an instantaneous tachyon burst across the light years, had sent the wine sellers and the bakers scurrying toward their stocks and chasing their suppliers. And the suppliers had chased their suppliers. And the bread, the fruit, the hats, the dresses, the meat, the marquees, the music had never been in such demand. Not even when . . . Not even when . . . Not even when. But there were no comparisons. There had never been a day such as this.

As if I needed reminding, the morning paper on the mat was full of it. I’d left my wife Hannah still asleep, weary from the celebrations that had already begun the night before, and there were wine glasses scattered in the parlor, the smell of booze and stale conversation. After starting with early drinks and chatter at the Point Hotel, Hannah’s sister Bernice and her husband Rajii had stayed around with us until late. At least, they’d stayed beyond the time I finally left the three of them and went to bed, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. But some of us still had work to do on this starship morning. I opened the curtains and the shutters and let in the sound and the smell of the sea. I stacked a tray with the butts and bottles and glasses. I squeezed out an orange, filled a bowl with oats and yoghurt and honey. I sat down outside with the lizards in the growing warmth of the patio.

Weighted with a stone, my newspaper fluttered in the soft breeze off the sea. Page after page of gleeful speculation. Discovery. Life. Starship. Hope. Message. Already, I’d had enough. Why couldn’t people just wait? All it took was for the tide to go in and out, for the sun to rise and fall, for stars and darkness to come, and we’d all know the truth anyway. So easy—but after all this time, humanity is still a hurrying race. And I knew that my patients would be full of it at the surgery, exchanging their usual demons for the brief hope that something from outside might change their lives. And I’d have to sit and listen, I’d have to put on my usual caring-Owen act. The stars might be whispering from out of the black far beyond this blue morning, but some of us had to get on with the process of living.

• • • •

Hannah was still half-asleep when I went in to say goodbye.

“Sorry about last night,” she said.

“Why sorry?”

“You were obviously tired. Rajii does go on.”

“What time did they leave?”

“I don’t know.” She yawned. “What time did you go to bed?”

I smiled as I watched her lying there still tangled in sleep. Now that I had to go, I wanted to climb back in.

“Will you be in for lunch?”

“I’m—meeting someone.”

Bad, that. The wrong kind of pause. But Hannah just closed her eyes, rolling back into the sheets and her own starship dreams. I left the room, pulled my cream jacket on over my shirt and shorts, and closed the front door.

• • • •

I wheeled my bicycle from the lean-to beside the lavender patch and took the rough road down into town. For some reason, part of me was thinking maybe we should get another dog; maybe that would be a change, a distraction.

Another perfect morning. Fishing boats in the harbor. Nets drying along the quay. Already the sun was high enough to set a deep sparkle on the water and lift the dew off the bougainvillea draped over the seafront houses. I propped my bike in the shadowed street outside the surgery and climbed the wooden steps to the door. I fed the goldfish tank in reception. I dumped the mail in the tray in my office. I opened a window, sat down at my desk, and turned on the PC, hitting the keys to call up my morning’s appointments. Mrs. Edwards scrolled up, 9:00. Sal Mohammed, 10:00. Then John for lunch. Mrs. Sweetney in the afternoon. On a whim, I typed in

About the starship.

PLEASE WAIT

What do you think will happen?

Again, PLEASE WAIT.

The computer was right of course. Wait. Just wait. Please wait. A seagull mewed. The PC’s fan clicked faintly, ticking away the minutes as they piled into drifts of hours and days. Eventually, I heard the thump of shoes on the steps, and I called, “Come right in,” before Mrs. Edwards had time to settle with the old magazines in reception.

“Are you sure, Owen? I mean, if you’re busy . . .”

“The door’s open.”

Ah, Mrs. Edwards. Red-faced, the smell of eau de cologne already fading into nervous sweat. One of my regulars, one of the ones who keep coming long after they’d forgotten why, and who spend their days agonizing new angles around some old neurosis so that they can lay it in front of me like a cat dropping a dead bird.

As always, she looked longingly at the soft chair, then sat down on the hard one.

“Big day,” she said.

“It certainly is.”

“I’m terribly worried,” she said.

“About the starship?”

“Of course. I mean, what are they going to think of us?”

I gazed at her, my face a friendly mask. Did she mean whatever star-creatures might be out there? Did she mean the travelers in the starship, waking from stasis after so many years? Now there was a thought. The travelers, awakening. I suppose they’ll wonder about their descendants here on Earth, perhaps even expect those silver-spired cities we all sometimes still dream about, or maybe corpses under a ruined sky, dead rivers running into poisoned seas.

“Mrs. Edwards, there probably won’t be any aliens. Anyway, they might be benign.”

“Benign?” She leaned forward over her handbag and gave me one of her looks. “But even if they are, how can we be sure?”

• • • •

After Mrs. Edwards, Sal Mohammed. Sal was an old friend, and thus broke one of the usual rules of my practice. But I’d noticed he was drinking too heavily, and when I’d heard that he’d been seen walking the town at night in his pajamas—not that either of these things was usual per se—I’d rung him and suggested a visit.

He sat down heavily in the comfortable chair and shook his head when I offered coffee. There were thickening grey bags under his eyes.

He asked, “You’ll be going to Jay Dax’s party tonight?”

“Probably. You?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, tired and sad and eager. “I mean, this is the big day, isn’t it? And Jay’s parties . . .” He shook his head.

“And how do you really feel?”

“Me? I’m fine. Managing, anyway.”

“How are you getting on with those tension exercises?”

His eyes flicked over toward the cork notice board where a solitary child’s painting, once so bright, had curled and faded. “I’m finding them hard.”

I nodded, wondering for the millionth time what exactly it was that stopped people from helping themselves. Sal still wasn’t able to even sit down in a chair for five minutes each day and do a few simple thought exercises. Most annoying of all was the way he still lumbered up to me at dos, his body stuffed into a too-small suit and his face shining with sweat, all thin and affable bonhomie, although I knew that he only managed to get out now by tanking up with downers.

“But today’s like New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?” he said. “Starship Day.”

I nodded. “That’s a way of seeing it.”

“Everything could change—but even if it doesn’t, knowing it won’t change will be something in itself, too, won’t it? It’s a time to make new resolutions . . .”

But Sal got vague again when I asked him about his own resolutions, and by the end of our session we were grinding through the usual justifications for the gloom that filled his life.

“I feel as though I’m traveling down these grey and empty corridors,” he said. “Even when things happen, nothing ever changes . . .”

He’d gone on for so long by then—and was looking at me with such sincerity—that I snapped softly back, “Then why don’t you give up, Sal? If it’s really that bad—what is it that keeps you going?”

He looked shocked. Of course, shocking them can sometimes work, but part of me was wondering if I didn’t simply want to get rid of Sal. And as he rambled on about the pointlessness of it all, I kept thinking of tonight, and all the other nights. The parties and the dances and the evenings in with Hannah and the quietly introspective walks along the cliffs and the picnics in the cool blue hills. I just kept thinking.

• • • •

The lunches with John that I marked down on my PC were flexible. In fact, they’d got so flexible recently that one or the other of us often didn’t turn up. This particular John was called Erica, and we’d been doing this kind of thing since Christmas, in firelight and the chill snowy breath from the mountains. I’ve learnt that these kind of relationships often don’t transfer easily from one season to another—there’s something about the shift in light, the change in the air—but this time it had all gone on for so long that I imagined we’d reached a kind of equilibrium. That was probably when it started to go wrong.

It was our usual place. The Arkoda Bar, up the steps beside the ruins. There was a group a few tables off that I vaguely recalled. Two couples, with a little girl. The girl was older now—before, she’d been staggering like a drunk on toddler’s splayed legs; now she was running everywhere—but that was still why I remembered them.

I almost jumped when Erica came up behind me.

“You must be early—or I must be late.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t been here long.”

She sat down and poured what was left of the retsina into the second glass. “So you’ve been here a while . . .”

“I was just watching the kid. What time is it?”

“Who cares? Don’t tell me you’ve been working this morning, Owen.”

“I can’t just cancel appointments just because there’s some message coming through from the stars.”

“Why not?”

I blinked, puzzled for a moment, my head swimming in the flat white heat of the sun. “I do it because it’s my job, Erica.”

“Sorry. Shall we start again?”

I nodded, watching the golden fall of her hair; the sweat-damp strands clinging to her neck, really and truly wishing that we could start all over again. Wishing, too, that we’d be able to talk about something other than the goddamn starship.

But no, Erica was just like everybody else—plotting the kind of day that she could witter on about in years to come. She wanted to rent a little boat so that we could go to some secret cove, swim and fish for shrimps, and bask on the rocks, and watch the night come in. She even had a little TV in her handbag all ready for the broadcast.

I said, “I’m sorry, Erica. I’ve got appointments. And I’ve got to go out this evening.”

“So have I. You’re not the only one with commitments.”

“I just can’t escape them like you can. I’m a married man.”

“Yeah.”

The people with the little girl paused in their chatter to look over at us. We smiled sweetly back.

“Let’s have another bottle of wine,” I suggested.

“I suppose,” Erica said, “you just want to go back to that room of yours above the surgery so you can screw me and then fall asleep?”

“I was hoping—”

“—isn’t that right? Owen?”

I nodded: It was, after all, a reasonably accurate picture of what I’d had in mind. I mean, all this business with the boat, the secret cove, fishing for shrimps . . .

I held out my hand to pat some friendly portion of her anatomy, but she leaned back out of my reach. The people with the kid had stopped talking and were staring deeply into their drinks.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This isn’t working, is it?”

I kept a professional silence. Whatever was going to be said now, it was better that Erica said it. I mean, I could have gone on about her selfish enthusiasm in bed, her habit (look! she’s doing it now!) of biting her nails and spitting them out like seed husks, and the puzzled expression that generally crossed her face when you used any word with more than three syllables. Erica was a sweet, pretty kid. Tanned and warm, forgiving and forgetful. At best, holding her was like holding a flame. But she was still just a rich Daddy’s girl, good at tennis and tolerably fine at sex and swimming and happy on a pair of skis. And if you didn’t say anything damaging to her kind when you split up, they might even come back to you years later. By then they’d be softer, sadder, sweeter—ultimately more compromising, but sometimes worth the risk.

So I sat there as Erica poured out her long essay on How Things Had Gone Wrong, and the sun beat down, and the air filled with the smell of hot myrtle, and the sea winked far below. And the little girl chased blue and red butterflies between the tables, and her parents sat listening to the free show in vaguely awestruck silence. It even got to me after a while. I had to squint and half-cover my face. Selfish, calculating, shallow, moody. Nothing new—Erica was hardly one for in-depth personal analysis—but she warmed to her subject, searching the sky for the next stinging adjective. Some of them were surprisingly on target—and for her, surprisingly long. I thought of that scarred and ancient starship tumbling over some strange new world, preparing to send us all a message. And I thought of me, sitting in the heat with the empty bottle of retsina, listening to this.

“You’re right,” I said eventually. “You deserve better than me. Find someone your own age, Erica. Someone with your own interests.”

Erica gazed at me. Interests. Did she have any interests?

“But—”

“—No.” I held up a hand, noticing with irritation that it was quivering like a leaf. “Everything you said is true.”

“Just as long as you don’t say we can still be friends.”

“But I think we will,” I said, pushing back the chair and standing up.

Quickly bending down to kiss her cheek before she could lean away, I felt a brief pang of loss. But I pushed it away. Onward, onward . . .

“You’ll learn,” I said, “that everything takes time. Think how long it’s taken us to get to the stars.”

I waved to her, and to the silent group with their sweet little kid. Then I jogged down the hot stone steps to my bike.

• • • •

Back at the office, there was a note stuffed through the letterbox and the phone was ringing. The phone sounded oddly sad and insistent, but by the time I’d read Odette Sweetney’s message canceling her afternoon appointment on account of what she called This Starship Thing, it had clanged back into silence.

I decided to clear the flat upstairs. The doorway led off from reception, with a heavy bolt to make it look unused—to keep up the charade with Hannah. I’d sometimes go on to her about how difficult it was to find a trusty tenant, and she’d just nod. I’d really given up worrying about whether she believed me.

The gable room was intolerably hot. I opened the windows, then set about removing the signs of Erica’s habitation. I pulled off the sheets. I shook out the pillows. I picked up the old straw sunhat that lay beneath the wicker chair. For the life of me, I couldn’t ever remember Erica ever wearing such a thing. Perhaps it had belonged to Chloe, who’d been the previous John; straw hats were more her kind of thing. But had it really sat there all these months, something for Erica to stare at as we made love? It was all so thoughtlessly uncharacteristic of me. Under the bed, I found several blonde hairs, and a few chewed-off bits of fingernail.

I re-bolted the door and went back into the surgery. I turned on the PC and re-scheduled Odette Sweetney’s appointment. Then I gazed at the phone, somehow knowing that it was going to ring again. The sound it made was grating, at odds with the dusty placidity of my surgery, the sleepy white town and the sea beyond the window. I lifted the receiver, then let it drop. Ahh, silence. Today, everything could wait. For all I knew, we’d all be better tomorrow. Miraculously happy and healed.

I locked the door and climbed onto my bicycle. I was determined to make the most of my rare free afternoon—no John, no patients—but time already stretched ahead of me like this steep white road. It’s a problem I’ve always had, what to do when I’m on my own. The one part of my work at the surgery that invariably piques my interest is when my patients talk about solitude. I’m still curious to know what other people do when they’re alone, leaning forward in my chair to ask questions like a spectator trying to fathom the rules of some puzzling new game. But for the second half of my marriage with Hannah, I’d found it much easier to keep busy. In the days, I work, or I chase Johns and screw. In the evenings, we go to dinners and parties. The prospect of solitude—of empty space with nothing to react to except your own thoughts—always leaves me feeling scared. So much better to be good old Owen in company, so much easier to walk or talk or drink or sulk or screw with some kind of audience to respond to.

I cycled on. The kids were playing, the cats were lazing on the walls. People were getting drunk in the cafés, and the yachts were gathering to race around the bay. Our house lies east of the town, nesting with the other white villas above the sea. I found Hannah sitting alone in the shadowed lounge, fresh mint and ice chattering in the glass she was holding, her cello propped unplayed beside the music stand in the far corner. When I come home unexpectedly, I like it best of all when she’s actually playing. Sometimes, I’ll just hang around quietly and unannounced in some other part of the house, or sit down under the fig tree in the garden, listening to that dark sound drifting out through the windows, knowing that she doesn’t realize she has an audience—that I’m home. She’s a fine player, is Hannah, but she plays best unaccompanied, when she doesn’t realize anyone is listening. Sometimes, on days when there’s a rare fog over the island and the hills are lost in grey, the house will start to sing, too, the wind chimes to tinkle, the floorboards to creak in rhythm, the cold radiators to hum. The whole of her heart and the whole of our marriage is in that sound. I sit listening in the damp garden or in another room, wishing I could finally reach through it to the words and the feelings that must surely lie beyond.

“You should be outside,” I said, briskly throwing off my jacket, lifting the phone off its hook. “A day like this. The yacht race is about to start.”

“Sussh . . .” She was watching TV. Two experts, I saw, were talking. Behind them was an old picture of the fabled starship.

“You haven’t been watching this crap all day?”

“It’s interesting,” she said.

The picture changed to a fuzzy video shot of old Earth. People everywhere, more cars in the streets than you’d have thought possible. Then other shots of starving people with flies crawling around their eyes. Most of them seemed to be black, young, female.

“I guess we’ve come a long way,” I said, getting a long glass from the marble-topped corner cabinet and filling it with the stuff that Hannah had made up in a jug. It tasted suspiciously non-alcoholic, but I decided to stick with it for now, and to sit down on the sofa beside her and try, as the grey-haired expert on the screen might have put it, to make contact.

Hannah looked at me briefly when I laid my hand on her thigh, but then she re-crossed her legs and turned away. No chance of getting her into bed then, either. The TV presenter was explaining that many of the people on the starship had left relatives behind. And here, he said, smiling his presenter’s smile, is one of them. The camera panned to an old lady. Her dad, it seemed, was one of the travelers up there. Now, she was ancient. She nodded and trembled like a dry leaf. Some bloody father, I thought. I wonder what excuse he’ll give tonight, leaving his daughter as a baby, then next saying hello across light years to a lisping hag.

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

“What’s the matter?” Hannah asked.

“Nothing.” I shook my head.

“Did you have an okay morning?”

“It was fine. I thought I’d come back early, today being today.”

“That’s nice. You’ve eaten?”

“I’ve had lunch.”

I stood up and wandered back over to the cabinet, topping my drink up to the rim with vodka. Outside, in the bay, the gun went off to signify the start of the yacht race. I stood on the patio and watched the white sails turn on a warm soft wind that bowed the heavy red blooms in our garden and set the swing down the steps by the empty sandpit creaking on its rusted hinges.

I went back inside.

Hannah said, “You’re not planning on getting drunk, are you?”

I shrugged and sat down again. The fact was, I’d reached a reasonable equilibrium. The clear day outside and this shadowed room felt smooth and easy on my eyes and skin. I’d managed to put that ridiculous scene with Erica behind me, and the retsina, and now the vodka, were seeing to it that nothing much else took its place. Eventually, the TV experts ran out of things to say, and the studio faded abruptly and gave way to an old film. I soon lost the plot and fell asleep. And I dreamed, thankfully and gratefully, about nothing. Of deep, endless, starless dark.

• • • •

We dressed later and drove through Danous in the open-top toward Jay Dax’s villa up in the hills. All the shops were open after the long siesta. Music and heat and light poured across the herringboned cobbles, and the trinket stalls were full of replicas of the starship. You could take your pick of earrings, key rings, lucky charms, models on marble stands with rubies for rockets, kiddie toys. I added to the general mayhem by honking the horn and revving the engine to get through the crowds. And I found myself checking the lamplit faces, wondering if Erica was here, or where else she might be. But all I could imagine were giggles and sweaty embraces. Erica was a bitch—always was, always would be. Now, some other girl, some child who, these fifteen years on, would be almost her build, her age . . .

Then, suddenly—as we finally made it out of town—we saw the stars. They’d all come out tonight, a shimmering veil over the grey-dark mountains.

“I was thinking, this afternoon,” Hannah said, so suddenly that I knew she must have been playing the words over in her head. “That we need to find time for ourselves.”

“Yes,” I said. “Trouble is, when you do what I do for a living . . .”

“You get sick of hearing about problems? You don’t want to know about your own?”

Her voice was clear and sweet over the sound of the engine and the whispering night air. I glanced across and saw from the glint of her eyes that she meant what she was saying. I accelerated over the brow of a hill into the trapped sweetness of the valley beyond, wishing that I hadn’t drunk the retsina and the vodka, wishing that I’d answered the phone in the surgery, fighting back a gathering sense of unease.

I said, “We haven’t really got much to complain about, have we? One tragedy in our whole lives, and at least that left a few happy memories. Anyone should be able to cope with that. And time—do you really think we’re short of time?”

She folded her arms. After all, she’d been the one who’d gone to pieces. I’d been the source of strength. Good old Owen, who—all things considered—took it so well. And after everything, after all the Johns, and the warm and pretty years in this warm and pretty location, and with business at the surgery still going well, how could I reasonably complain?

Soon there were other cars ahead of us, other guests heading for parties in the big villas. And there was a campfire off to the right, people dancing and flickering like ghosts through the bars of the forest. We passed through the wrought iron gates, and Jay Dax’s white villa floated into view along the pines, surrounded tonight by a lake of polished coachwork. We climbed out. All the doors were open, all the windows were bright. A waltz was playing. People were milling everywhere.

I took Hannah’s hand. We climbed the marble steps to the main doorway and wandered in beneath a cavernous pink ceiling. The Gillsons and the Albarets were there. Andre Prilui was there too, puffed up with champagne after a good showing in the Starship Day yacht race. Why, if only Spindrift hadn’t tacked across his bows on the way around the eastern buoy . . . and look, here comes Owen, Good Old Owen with his pretty cello-playing wife, Hannah.

“Hey!”

It was Rajii, husband of Hannah’s sister Bernice. He took us both by the arm, steering us along a gilded corridor.

“Come on, the garden’s where everything’s happening.”

I asked, “Have you seen Sal?”

“Sal?” Rajii said, pushing back a lock of his black hair, “Sal Mohammed?” Already vague with drink and excitement. “No, now you mention it. Not a sign . . .”

This was a big party even by Jay Dax’s standards. The lanterns strung along the huge redwoods that bordered the lawns enclosed marquees, an orchestra, swingboats, mountainous buffets. No matter what news came through on the tachyon burst from the starship, the party already had the look of a great success.

Bernice came up to us. She kissed Hannah and then me, her breath smelling of wine as she put an arm round my waist, her lips seeking mine. We were standing on the second of the big terraces leading down from the house. “Well,” Rajii said, “What’s your guess, then? About this thing from the stars.”

Ah yes, this thing from the stars. But predictions this close to the signal were dangerous; I mean, who wanted to be remembered as the clown who got it outrageously wrong?

“I think,” Hannah said, “That the planet they find will be green. I mean, the Earth’s blue, Mars is red, Venus is white. It’s about time we had a green planet.”

“What about you, Owen?”

“What’s the point in guessing?” I said.

I pushed my way off down the steps, touching shoulders at random, asking people if they’d seen Sal. At the far end of the main lawn, surrounded by scaffolding, a massive screen reached over the treetops, ready to receive the starship’s transmission. Presently, it was black; the deepest color of a night sky without stars, like the open mouth of God preparing to speak. But my face already felt numb from the drink and the smiling. I could feel a headache coming on.

I passed through an archway into a walled garden and sat down on a bench. Overhead now, fireworks were crackling and banging like some battlefield of old. I reached beside me for the drink I’d forgotten to bring, and slumped back, breathing in the vibrant night scents of the flowers. These days, people were getting used to me disappearing, Owen walking out of rooms just when everyone was laughing, Owen vanishing at dances just as the music was starting up. Owen going off in a vague huff and sitting somewhere, never quite out of earshot, never quite feeling alone. People don’t mind—oh, that’s Owen—they assume I’m playing some amusing private game. But really, I hate silence, space, solitude, any sense of waiting. Hate and fear it as other people might fear thunder or some insect. Hate it, and therefore have to keep peeking. Even in those brief years when Hannah and I weren’t alone and our lives seemed filled, I could still feel the empty dark waiting. The black beyond the blue of these warm summer skies.

Somewhere over the wall, a man and a woman were laughing. I imagined Bernice coming to find me, following when I walked off, as I was sure she was bound to do soon. The way she’d kissed me tonight had been a confirmation, and Rajii was a fool—so who could blame her? Not that Bernice would be like Erica, but right now that was an advantage. A different kind of John was just what I needed. Bernice would be old and wise and knowing, and the fact that she was Hannah’s sister—that alone would spice things up for a while.

I thought again of the day I’d been through: scenes and faces clicking by. Hannah half asleep in bed this morning; Mrs. Edwards in the surgery; hopeless Sal Mohammed; young and hopeful Erica; then Hannah again, and the dullness of the drink, and all the people here at this party, the pointless endless cascade; and the starship, the starship, the starship, and the phone ringing unanswered in the surgery and me taking it off the hook there and doing so again when I got home. And no sign of Sal this evening, although he’d told me he was going to come.

I walked back out of the rose garden just as the fog of the fireworks was fading and the big screen was coming on. I checked my watch. Not long now, but still I climbed the steps and went back through the nearly empty house and found the car. I started it up and drove off down the drive, suddenly and genuinely worried about Sal, although mostly just thinking how tedious and typical of me this was becoming, buggering off at the most crucial moment of this most crucial of nights.

But it was actually good to be out on the clean night road with the air washing by me. No other cars about now, everybody had got somewhere and was doing something. Everybody was waiting. And I could feel the stars pressing down, all those constellations with names I could never remember. Sal Mohammed’s house was on the cliffs to the west of the town, and so I didn’t have to drive through Danous to get there. I cut the engine outside and sat for a moment, listening to the beat of the sea, and faintly, off through the hedges and the gorse and the myrtle, the thump of music from some neighbor’s party. I climbed out, remembering days in the past. Sal standing in a white suit on the front porch, beckoning us all in for those amazing meals he then used to cook. Sal with that slight sense of camp that he always held in check, Sal with his marvelous, marvelous way with a story. Tonight, all the front windows were dark, and the paint, as it will in this coastal environment if you don’t have it seen to regularly, was peeling.

I tried the bell and banged the front door. I walked around the house, peering in at each of the windows. At the back, the porch doors were open, and I went inside, turning on lights, finding the usual bachelor wreckage. I could hear a low murmur, a TV, coming from Sal’s bedroom. Heavy with premonition, I pushed open the door, and saw the colored light playing merely over glasses and bottles on a rucked and empty bed. I closed the door and leaned back, breathless with relief, then half-ducked as a shadow swept over me. Sal Mohammed was hanging from the ceiling.

I dialed the police from the phone by the bed. It took several beats for them to answer and I wondered as I waited who would be doing their job tonight. But the voice that answered was smooth, mechanical, unsurprised. Yes, they’d be along. Right away. I put down the phone and gazed at Sal hanging there in the shifting TV light, wondering if I should cut the cord he’d used, or pick up the chair. Wondering whether I’d be interfering with evidence. The way he was hanging and the smell in the room told me that it didn’t matter. He’d done a good job, had Sal; it even looked, from the broken tilt of his head, that he’d made sure it ended quickly. But Sal—although he was incapable of admitting it to himself—was bright and reliable and competent in almost everything he did. I opened a window, then sat back down on the bed, drawn despite myself toward the scene that the TV in the corner was now playing.

The announcer had finally finished spinning things out, and the ancient photo of the starship in pre-launch orbit above the Moon had been pulled out to fill the screen. It fuzzed, and the screen darkened for a moment. Then there was another picture, in motion this time, and at least as clear as the last one, taken from one of the service pods that drifted like flies around the main body of the starship. In the harsh white light of a new sun, the starship looked old. Torn gantries, loose pipes, black flecks of meteorite craters. Still, the systems must be functioning, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing this at all. And of course it looked weary—what else was there to expect?

The screen flickered. Another view around the spaceship, and the white flaring of that alien sun, and then, clumsily edited, another. Then inside. Those long grey tunnels, dimly and spasmodically lit, floorless and windowless, that were filled by the long tubes of a thousand living coffins. The sleepers. Then outside again, back amid the circling drones, and those views, soon to become tedious, of the great starship drifting against a flaring sun.

As I watched, my hand rummaged amid the glasses and the bottles that Sal had left on the bed. But they were all empty. And I thought of Erica, how she was spending these moments, and of all the other people at the gatherings and parties. I, at least, would be able to give an original answer if I was asked, in all the following years—Owen, what were you doing when we first heard from the stars?

The TV was now showing a long rock, a lump of clinker really, flipping over and over, catching light, then dark. Then another rock. Then back to the first rock again. Or it could have been a different one—it was hard to tell. And this, the announcer suddenly intoned, breaking in on a silence I hadn’t been aware of, is all the material that orbits this supposedly friendly cousin of our sun. No planets, no comets even. Despite all the studies of probability and orbital perturbation, there was just dust and rubble here, and a few mile-long rocks.

There would be no point now in waking the sleepers in their tunnels and tubes. Better instead to unfurl the solar sails and use the energy from this sun to find another one. After all, the next high-probability star lay a mere three light years away, and the sleepers could dream through the time of waiting. Those, anyway, who still survived . . .

I stood up and turned off the TV. Outside, I could hear a car coming. I opened the front door and stood watching as it pulled in from the road. Hardly a car at all really, or a van. Just a grey colorless block. But the doors opened, and the police emerged. I was expecting questions—maybe even a chance to break the news about the starship—but the police were faceless, hooded, dark. They pushed by me and into the house without speaking.

Outside, it was quiet now. The noise of the neighbor’s party had ceased, and there was just the sound and the smell of the sea. People would be too surprised to be disappointed. At least, at first. Sal had obviously seen it coming—or had known that there was nothing about this Starship Day that could change things for him. Death, after all, isn’t an option that you can ever quite ignore. And it’s never as random as people imagine, not even if it happens to a kid just out playing on a swing in their own back garden. Not even then. You always have to look for some kind of purpose and meaning and reason, even inside the dark heart of what seems like nothing other than a sick and pointless accident.

The police came out again, lightly carrying something that might or might not have been Sal’s body. Before they climbed back into their grey van, one of them touched my shoulder with fingers as cool as the night air and gave me a scrap of paper. After they’d driven off, I got back into my car and took the road down into the now quiet streets of Danous, and parked by the dark harbor, and went up the steps to my surgery.

It all seemed odd and yet familiar, to be sitting at my desk late on Starship Day with the PC humming. The screen flashed PLEASE WAIT. For what? How many years? Just how much longer will the dreamers have to go on dreaming? I felt in my pocket for the piece of paper, and carefully typed in the long string of machine code. Then I hit return.

PLEASE WAIT.

I waited. The words dribbled down off the screen, then the screen itself melted, and me with it, and then the room. The lifting of veils, knowing where and what I truly was, never came as the surprise I expected. Each time it got less so. I wondered about what Sal Mohammed had said to me in the dream of this morning. All that stuff about grey endless corridors—was he seeing where he really was? But I supposed that after this number of journeys and disappointments, after so many dead and lifeless suns, and no matter how well I did my job, it was bound to happen. How many Starship Days had there been now? How many years of silence and emptiness? And just how far were we, now, from Earth? Even here, I really didn’t want to think about that.

Instead, and as always, I kept busy, moving along the cold airless tunnels on little drifts of gas, my consciousness focused inside one of the starship’s few inner drones that was still truly functioning and reliable, even if it didn’t go quite straight now and I had to keep the sensors pointing to one side. Outside, through the occasional porthole, I could see others like me who were helping to prepare the starship for another journey. A spindly thing like a spider with rivet guns on each of its legs went by, and I wondered about Erica, whether that really was her. I wondered whether it was actually possible, with your consciousness inside ancient plastic and metal, to laugh.

Details scrolled up of how many sleepers we’d lost this time. A good dozen. It mostly happened like Sal; not from soft or hard-systems failure, but simply because the dream of Danous ceased to work. That, anyway, was the only reason I could find. I paused now beside Sal’s coffin. Ice had frosted over the faceplate entirely. I reached out a claw to activate the screen beside him, and saw that he was actually an even bigger loss than I’d imagined—a specialist in solar power. Just the kind of man we’d need out there on some mythical friendly planet. Then I found my own coffin, and paused my hovering drone to look down through the faceplate at the grey and placid version of the features I saw each day in the mirror. In the coffin just above me—or below—was Hannah. Ah, Hannah, a few strands of brittle hair still nestled against her cheek, and that gold chain around her bare neck that she’d insisted on wearing back on Earth when we set out together on this great adventure. Just looking at her, part of me longed to touch, to escape these lenses and claws and get back into the dream. Next time, I promised myself, tomorrow, I’ll change, I’ll do things differently. No, I won’t screw John—Bernice. I might even admit to being unfaithful. After all, Hannah knows. She must know. It’s one of the things that’s keeping this sense of separateness between us.

I tilted the gas jets and drifted to the coffin that lay beside mine and Hannah’s. Like Sal’s, like so many others I’d passed, the faceplate was iced over, the contents desiccated by slow, cold years of interstellar space. There was really no sign, now, of the small body that had once lived and laughed and dreamed with us inside it. Our child, gone, and with every year, with every starfall, with the hard, cold rain that seeps through this starship, with every John, the chances of Hannah and I ever having another are lessened. But first, of course, we need that green or blue or red world. We need to awake and stretch our still limbs, and breathe the stale, ancient air that will flood these passages, and move, pushing and clumsy, to one of the portholes, and peer out, and see the clouds swirling and the oceans and the forests and the deserts, and believe. Until then . . .

I snapped back out from the drone, passing down the wires into the main databank, where Danous awaited. And yes, of course, the morning would be warm again, and perfect, with just a few white clouds that the sun will soon burn away. Nothing could be done, really, to make it better than it already is. There’s nothing I can change. And as I turned off my PC and left the surgery and climbed back into my car for the drive home, I could already feel the sense of expectation and disappointment fading. Tomorrow, after all, will always be tomorrow. And today is just today.

Rajii’s car was sitting in the drive, and he was inside in the lounge with Bernice and Hannah. I could hear them laughing as I banged the door, and the clink of their glasses.

“Where were you?” Rajii asked, lounging on the rug. Bernice pulled on a joint, and looked at me, and giggled. Hannah, too, seemed happy and relaxed—as she generally gets by this time in the evening, although I haven’t quite worked out what it is that she’s taking.

I shrugged and sat down on the edge of a chair. “I was just out.”

“Here . . .” Hannah got up, her voice and movements a little slurred. “Have a drink, Owen.”

I ignored the glass she offered me. “Look,” I said, “I’m tired. Some of us have to work in the morning. I really must go to bed . . .”

So I went out of the room on the wake of their smoke and their booze and their laughter, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. And I stripped and I showered and I stood in the darkness staring out of the window across our garden, where the swing still hung beside the overgrown sandpit, rusting and motionless in the light of a brilliant rising Moon. And I could still hear the sound of Hannah and Bernice and Rajii’s laughter from down the hall, and even sense, somehow, the brightness of their anticipation. I mean . . . What if . . . Who knows . . . Not even when . . . Not even when . . . Not even when . . . Not even . . .

Shaking my head, I climbed into bed and pulled over the sheets. And I lay there listening to their voices in the spinning darkness as I was slowly overtaken by sleep.

In my dreams, I found that I was smiling. For tomorrow would be Starship Day, and anything could happen.

©1995 by Ian R. MacLeod. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian R. MacLeod has been a writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction for more than two decades. He grew up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, England, wandered the streets and read far too many books his family and teachers disapproved of, then studied law whilst nurturing secret ambitions of being a writer. He spent many years writing under his desk in the civil service before his work began to sell and moved on to professional writing, teaching and semi-professional house-husbandry. He now lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley and maintains a personal website at ianrmacleod.com.

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

Later, Let’s Tear Up The Inner Sanctum

A. Merc Rustad | 8740 words

Avabug’s Netjournal—[friends-only] hospital update—5/17/29

Still in the hospital. Radiation burns suck. Mom came to see me, though, which was nice. She probably had to argue with that dick of a boss she works for to let her off early. You’d think since I nearly died because superheroes were fighting above my school that I’d get some sort of benefits or medical insurance, but noooo, it’s all on me and Mom to foot the hospital bills because fights are not a novelty anymore and we have minimal insurance that doesn’t cover superhuman engagement liability blah blah bullshit. Still, Mom refused to send me anywhere less than Guinevere Memorial and I think that’s pretty badass of her, don’t you?

(All my love to my awesome girlfriend fiddlebug, too, for sending me cookies when she couldn’t come visit.)

Oh! And check this out, I got an exclusive sneak peek of that new aerial stunt crew that tracks supers like some guys do tornados. Check out this sweet throwdown between Ice and Sin-Master over the stadium on Friday!!! I know you can get some crappy shakycam on the news, but the Excaliburs keep taking down the vids and their media dept is, like, insane. I know it’s a costume copyright thing, but jeez, lighten up. Anyway, they’ve got some marketing deal with HoverWatch so it’s all super (ha ha) HD and there’s going to be 3D conversion just before it hits on-demand next Monday. You’ve probably all seen the trailer they dropped, RIGHT? I know you’ll dig it. (No pirating or I’m never sharing again!)

[Uploaded: smackdown_ice_vs_SM.]

• • • •

Security Camera Archives – [8/26/26] – Excalibur HQ – RESTRICTED ACCESS – TIER ONE CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Observation hall, forty-fifth story, north wing.

The semi-circular room overlooks the city, one wall completely windowed with spy-proof glass. Plush chairs, a stylish bar, and a security console and monitor system mounted in the center of the room.

Tasha Ramirez, a.k.a. Ice Sickle, paces alongside the windows. Adrian Tsushami, a.k.a. Tiger Moth, stands at the bar and mixes a pair of drinks.

RAMIREZ: You’re wasting my time.

TSUSHAMI: I’d hardly call a disciplinary meeting a waste of time.

Ramirez slaps a hand against the glass. Ice forms in a palm-print where her skin touches the window.

RAMIREZ: I’m not sorry.

TSUSHAMI: You never are. But your actions were . . .

RAMIREZ: I saved everyone on that bus.

Tsushami picks up one of the drinks and drains it in a gulp. He offers the other to Ramirez. She shakes her head.

TSUSHAMI: That’s not the point. You let Venus escape.

RAMIREZ: She’s a minor league villain.

TSUSHAMI: And she’ll strike again. And next time she’ll aim for a bigger target than the metro station.

RAMIREZ: So I should let dozens of people die to prevent, what, a chance that next time—

The glass stem in Tsushami’s hand snaps, spilling the drink across the bar.

TSUSHAMI: We defeat our enemies first. No exceptions.

RAMIREZ: If you say so.

TSUSHAMI: Remember what you are.

RAMIREZ: Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever forget, Adrian.

• • • •

Virtual Entropy: BREAKING—Sin-Master Attacks Hospital!
Posted by Ulure Méndez—May 18th, 2029—1,367 comments

NEW CAMELOT—Notorious supervillain Sin-Master and his Deadly Sins have just attacked Guinevere Memorial Hospital. I’m on scene across the street in the Sir Gawain Hotel Plaza; the air is thick with smoke and sirens are blaring everywhere. My contacts inside the hospital tell me the Excaliburs responded within two minutes of the attack from their base of operations in the northeast suburbs of New Camelot. Not that any of us here at VE had any doubt they’d be on scene immediately.

The attack began when the henchman Sloth launched a ballistic missile into the cardiac ward. Sin-Master’s six other Deadly Sins infiltrated the hospital and overwhelmed the on-staff security and mechs. While the motive is unclear as of yet, we believe that Sin-Master was targeting Witchbane, a known rival who was hospitalized Sunday.

Guinevere Memorial Hospital is one of the few medical facilities in New Camelot equipped to deal with the aftermath of superpowered entity combat and civilian casualties. GMH is registered as neutral territory under the League of Unnatural Abilities and Powers Act of ’99. Until now, the hospital and surrounding care facilities have been respected by all parties as inviolate.

There he is! Sin-Master is escaping on his stealth glider—right overhead with Wrath. No one is in pursuit yet. I’ve just seen tech specialist Dragonfly zoom into the ruined hospital wing, presumably to deactivate whatever doomsday device Sin-Master planted. Impulse and Red Shift are clearing out the survivors and assisting the EMTs. Tiger Moth is routing Greed and Gluttony.

Over in the street—Tankboy and Commander Scorpio have taken down Lust! Lust’s power has always been overwhelming his victims with sexual attraction so they’re left distracted and vulnerable, but since Tankboy and Commander Scorpio are asexual partners, Lust’s aura has no effect on them. They’ve got Lust in restraint cuffs and a neural mask! This is the first time any of the Deadly Sins have been captured alive.

The spokesperson for the Excaliburs, Lillian Fey, formerly Lilith’s Wroth, is declining to comment on the attack or what the heroes intend to do with Lust.

• • • •

Avabug’s Netjournal—this is what happened at the hospital—5/20/29

I am so fucking in shock, guys, what the hell. Ice Sickle can’t be dead. Haven’t been able to update this until now, since mom took me to a relative’s after I got out of the hospital.

I saw this on buzzer_joint’s journal earlier:

Of the seventeen members of Excaliburs since the team’s foundation, five have died in combat.

Now it’s six. I heard on Virtual Entropy that there’s a memorial service on Saturday. I don’t know if I can bear watching the feed.

But I need to get this story out, so here’s what happened.

I was texting my girlfriend since I was about to be discharged, when suddenly all the alarms went off. I dropped my phone and then the whole wall of my room just EXPLODED.

It flung me off the bed. I was thinking ‘oh shit oh shit oh shit it’s happening again.’ There was dust and smoke and I couldn’t find my phone. My fingers were broken but part of my brain was all calm, like, okay, you need to get to safety.

Then fucking SIN-MASTER floated through the wall on those hoverboots. I swear to God, I don’t think any of the official merchandise posters or newsreels really capture how fucking scary he is. He had that skull mask and the spiky shoulder pieces and he’s like stick-thin but radiates this, I dunno, aura of power. He landed a foot away, towering over me, and he had his power gauntlet raised, the spike-gun leveled right at my head. I sure I was going to DIE.

He started talking at me (guys, I got monologued at by a SUPERVILLAIN): “Do you know the greatest calamity to befall the human race? Pride. Men have elucidated on this since history began. They’ve pondered it almost as much as they’ve fucked each other over. Do you know why? Because pride is devoid of empathy. It is the keystone of power, and for power to go unchecked, you must rid yourself of anything beyond the ego, the self. It is why we crush each other without feeling, without acknowledgment of sentience, or soul. Pride has been mankind’s ruin since God was too proud to let an angel share in glory.”

His gauntlet started glowing blue-green. I couldn’t make myself move.

“Sin-Master!” Ice shouted, and she came bursting through the door like a white leather-wearing Valkyrie. She wielded her dual sais and her hair was whipping about like she was in a blizzard. “Leave the girl alone.”

Sin-Master laughed. “Ice! As beautiful as you are relentless and blind to your own conscience! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Step. Away. From. The. Girl.”

(Guys, ICE TALKED ABOUT ME.)

“How many do you expect to save?” Sin-Master went on. “You can never save all of them. You couldn’t even save the one man you loved.”

Ice sent a burst of power streaking at Sin-Master, but he just absorbed it. Then he whipped his gauntlet up and fired the spikes at Ice, but she deflected them with her sais and lunged at him. Then the FLOOR fucking collapsed and they both went crashing down. I almost fell in the hole, but I grabbed the leg of the bed—you know how well those are bolted down?!—and held on for dear life and I saw Ice and Sin-Master punching the shit out of each other as they fell, then suddenly they landed way, way down in the basement and there was another gush of smoke and I couldn’t see anything. I heard this awful, wet, tearing sound and then there was a huge burst of fire and I heard Ice scream.

I heard her scream. Then Sin-Master went flying out on his hoverbike and I had this tiny glimpse of a body, all in white and bloody, lying burned and broken against the basement floor.

Suddenly Impulse was there, picking me up off the floor and handing me off to orderlies, and I must have blacked out or something, because next thing I knew I was outside.

Here’s the thing—I didn’t tell anyone what I saw. I dunno why. Shock? There I was, with almost the entire Excalibur team, and I’d just seen someone DIE, and what the fuck. I just kind of nodded and told the EMT my name when she splinted my fingers. Impulse gave me an autographed card, though. That’s pretty sweet.

But Ice. I just . . . what happens now?

• • • •

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: memorial service?

Adrian,

I just received the coroner’s report. It’s her DNA. Pretty convincing remains. Not 100% sure it’s her, but there’s no indication it’s not. I’m sorry. Do you want me to start a press release and contact José about the memorial service? And does she have any family off-record we need to brief?

—Lil

To: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

From: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

Subject: re: memorial service?

Lil,

No. If it leaks, have PR spin the usual bullshit about unconfirmed results. Ice is not officially dead yet. I don’t have time to deal with the shitstorm that will blow up if she is.

—TM

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: re: re: memorial service?

I know she was your protégé but this sounds like denial, not a PR spin.

To: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

From: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

Subject: stop

I am not discussing the matter further. If Ice is dead, then we still need to wait a year before we retire her uniform and officially mark a headstone.

—TM

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: re: stop

Adrian,

I know this is hard. And while I understand the year grace period in case she resurrects or we encounter another miracle revival like what happened with Lance, I think it’ll look better if we acknowledge what happened publically. Give the team a chance to express grief in case she really is dead. Don’t make them wait. At least put out a statement about her likely demise and the prospect of justice for her.

—Lil

To: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

From: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

Subject: stop

See subject line.

—TM

• • • •

Avabug’s Netjournal—[friends-only] draft of paper for class, comments plz?—5/15/29

Ugh. This is due in, like, four hours. Anyone have a minute to read/comment?

—

To date, the Excaliburs have been estimated to have saved over three billion lives collectively. Whether it’s from Baron Epsilon Omega, Witchbane, ShadowVeil, The Scepter of Venus, or Sin-Master—the latter being the only supervillain currently at large—the superhero team has rightly established its place in history. Held to rigorous public scrutiny and a moral code of justice and righteousness, the Excaliburs are the epitome of the term “hero” in our modern age.

Consider a little known event in 2020: A man-made island appeared in the middle of Lake Superior, displacing the lake water and flash-flooding homes and businesses along the shores. It was one of Sin-Master’s first diabolical plans—he had nuclear drones stationed to launch into Canada. Tankboy and Commander Scorpio, both new to the team themselves, discovered Sin-Master’s plan, raided the island to destroy the drones while Lilith’s Wroth and Impulse—the two fastest supers in history—worked their asses off to evacuate the people within targeted areas.

Analysts are unclear why the salvaged drone targeting systems were programmed for unpopulated areas—whether this was a fluke or meant to be a threat that would re-target major cities if demands were not met was never discovered. Sin-Master escaped and has remained at large ever since, despite near misses with justice, but the Excaliburs have kept the world safer since their arrival than any other force to date.

—

(I also have that bit about the Casanova Massacre, and how Impulse stopped Nukeyule from destroying even more cities, but I showed KiKi that in class.)

6 comments | fav! | share

Comment from sesameseedsareevil: sinmaster

do you ever wonder why the supervillains haven’t won yet? especially sin-master. he’s freaking powerful and he’s not stupid.

Comment from fiddlebug: re: sinmaster

*raises eyebrow* He does seem to be rather incompetent in carrying out his plans. Which is good, because oh my god, remember Nevada last year? If Impulse hadn’t show up in time to defuse the bombs . . .

Comment from sesameseedsareevil: re: sinmaster

that’s my point. are the excaliburs just so good, or is he letting them win?

Comment from fiddlebug: re: sinmaster

That literally makes no sense. He’s a supervillain! Why would he want to LOSE?

Comment from sesameseedsareevil: re: sinmaster

i think we’re missing something. it kind of freaks me out. what if this is a big game and he’s setting the excaliburs up to expect to win and one day they don’t?

Comment from fiddlebug: re: sinmaster

You’re just over-thinking this. Don’t you think that if Sin-Master could have killed the Excaliburs by now, he would have? We’re all safe as long as we have heroes.

• • • •

Virtual Entropy EXCLUSIVE:
New Member of the Excaliburs Is A Shocking Choice!
Posted by Ulure Méndez on July 1st, 2024—8,903 comments

Today marks the worldwide unveiling of the Excaliburs’ newest member: Ice Sickle, mundanely known as Tasha Ramirez, formerly Firesiren of the Banshee Babes, who steps into the unfillable shoes of super-retiree Lance of Truth. As noted in an earlier press conference, Lance of Truth has stepped down from the Excaliburs following his unexplained and miraculous resurrection after he was reported deceased for a year prior.

I’m here in Central Hall Park right in front of a hoverstage surrounded by security mechs and a massive crowd. There on stage are the elite of the Excaliburs: Tiger Moth, in gold and red, his cape snapping in the wind; Dragonfly, in a multifaceted helmet and a swarm of nanobots that forms like wings behind him; Impulse, in brilliant blue and gold with the iconic fist-to-jaw symbol emblazoned on his chest; and the newest hero, Ice Sickle, sheathed in skin-tight white leather with the mandatory low-cut top and bared midriff, a thin strip of a mask across her eyes.

Reporters shove microphones at Ice from a safe distance. “Is it true you’ve slept with every member of the Excaliburs?”

Ice’s face remains expressionless. “Maybe you should put that question to Red Shift. He’s better known for having a new paramour each week.”

“Rumor persists that the reason you were picked from a midlist troupe to top tier is because of your intimate relationship with Tiger Moth.”

Ice folds her arms. “He’s been a mentor to me from a distance for several years now and I look forward to working with him on a day-to-day basis. If you have questions about his personal life, he’s standing right behind me.”

The reporters do not have any personal questions for Tiger Moth.

Ice Sickle, who was recruited at an open Empowered Individual Symposium held annually by the Excaliburs, and is rated a Tier Two, has abilities that combine temperature manipulation and electricity control. We have heard rumors that she’s already in development with executives at Machiavelli Brothers Studios for a biopic about her early childhood, where she was the only survivor of the Casanova Massacre.

Reporter: “How does it feel to replace Lance of Truth?”

Ice shrugs minutely. “I’m qualified for the job.”

Reporter: “Isn’t this more like a PR stunt?”

Ice arches one eyebrow. “Why, because I’m a woman?”

Ice is only the fourth woman to make the Excaliburs and she’s currently the only active female on the team.

Reporter: “Who designs your brassiere and heels?”

“No comment.”

Reporter: “Tell us your plans for taking down Sin-Master.”

Ice’s jaw tenses and frost sketches around her high-heeled boots. “The Excaliburs are dedicated to justice, peace, and the upholding of the law. As a hero, it is my duty to prevent evil in whatever form it takes. I will uphold this oath to fight the corruption in our world and help usher in a better future for all.”

On either side of the stage, the male heroes nod with approval.

Sin-Master, a villain whose powers allow him to modify his physical makeup to make himself impervious to all know elements and forces, and as a consequence has evaded all attempts by the heroes to defeat him, has consistently been the Excaliburs’ arch-nemesis.

Reporter: “Did you pick your own costume?”

Reporter: “Why pants and not a skirt?”

• • • •

Security Camera Archives – 7/8/24 – Excalibur HQ – RESTRICTED ACCESS – TIER ONE CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Lillian Fey’s office, ground floor.

A spacious, windowless office lit with ambient gold lights, a glass desk in the center of the room and portraits of the Excaliburs hung on the walls.

Lillian Fey, a.k.a. Lilith’s Wroth, taps at a holo-keyboard on her desk. Monitors flicker with news feeds, memos, emails.

Tasha Ramirez, a.k.a. Ice Sickle, stands under the portrait of Impulse and stares at it, her arms folded behind her back.

FEY: How are you settling in?

RAMIREZ: It’s a lot fancier than the Banshee Babe flat, I’ll give you that.

Fey smiles and closes out her email.

FEY: So, what did you want to talk to me about?

Ramirez twists her fingers together, not looking at Fey.

RAMIREZ: I want a different apartment.

FEY: The one you have isn’t big enough?

RAMIREZ: Opposite. It’s too big.

FEY: [laughs] That’s a new one.

RAMIREZ: I feel . . . lost. I don’t like a lot of open space.

FEY: I want you to be comfortable, Tasha. Let me see what I can do—there are a few empty apartments.

Fey brings up a map of the Excaliburs HQ on her screen and taps a finger against her chin as she studies it.

FEY: Oh, we do have an old retrofitted studio in the basement levels—

RAMIREZ: Doesn’t Impulse live in the underground levels?

FEY: He does. Is that a problem?

RAMIREZ: Not at all. [she smiles] That sounds perfect. Thanks, Lillian.

• • • •

Virtual Entropy: Tiger Moth, Impulse, and Dragonfly Awarded Heroes of the Year (Tenth Year In A Row)!
Posted by Ulure Méndez on August 31st, 2028—30,712 comments

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Here at the Sir Galahad Memorial Hall, President Maya Patel and her wife, First Lady Georgiana, will present the Hero of the Year Awards to members of the Excaliburs.

Multiple-year winners Tiger Moth, Impulse, and Dragonfly—the three most established members of the Excaliburs now that Lilith’s Wroth has retired—are being recognized for their heroic valor and selflessness in combatting Sin-Master and the Deadly Sins over New York before the supervillain could pull an asteroid from orbit and crash it into the city.

Although not one of the heroes specifically honored in the ceremony today, Ice Sickle deserves recognition for her part in stopping Sin-Master. It was her efforts in keeping Sin-Master busy that allowed Tiger Moth and Impulse to rout the Deadly Sins while Dragonfly dismantled the super-attractor.

The Mayor of New York is also here to express her gratitude to the Excaliburs for saving the city once again.

I’ve secured an exclusive chat with Ice herself here on the red carpet (watch the full feed on VElive!).

“So, Ice, do you feel snubbed for being overlooked yet again for this award? No one would deny you do twice as much work keeping peace in the world as any of your teammates.”

Ice smiles thinly. “Ulure, I didn’t become a hero to collect trophies. All I want is to bring justice to those who can’t fight for themselves.”

“In the last few years, there have been fewer indie and low-tier hero bands. Is the powered gene fading out, or are we just not seeing the little guys due to how much of the spotlight major leaguers like the Excaliburs take up?”

Ice shrugs. “I’ve noticed that. I don’t really know the cause—maybe our time is coming to a close. A short but noticeable age.”

“Well, if that’s the case . . . Do you have a plan to bring Sin-Master to justice? He’s been the longest-free supervillain in history, and one you have a personal beef with.”

Tendrils of frost creep up Ice’s hair. “All I can tell you, Ulure, is that I will not rest until justice is served—both for me and for all the innocent dead.”

• • • •

An Interview With . . . Amanda Sorovitz: Unknown Friend to a Fallen Hero

[transcript from The Raja Mason Show, airdate 5/25/29, 6pm EST]

Raja Mason: So you knew Ice Sickle years before she came into her powers and joined the Excaliburs.

Amanda Sorovitz: Yeah. We were best friends. We were having a sleepover in her basement when the Casanova Massacre happened.

RM: I thought she was the only survivor when Nukeyule leveled half the county.

AS: No. We both made it. She manifested her powers and shielded us. But she didn’t have enough strength to cover her house or save anyone else. I told her she needed to keep her powers hidden for a few years after. The tests don’t actually register until after puberty anyway.

RM: You’ve kept your identity secret for almost fifteen years. An impressive feat.

AS: It’s not that I didn’t think she couldn’t protect me. Everyone is out about their identities and who knows who. It’s not like the old days when no one could know who you were if you were powered.

RM: Then why hide?

AS: I didn’t want the publicity. Besides, doesn’t it make for a better story if there’s just one lone survivor?

RM: You’re hiding something.

AS: You’re an empath, that’s cheating.

RM: Sorry. But seriously, Amanda, this is a candid interview. Be honest with me, with all of us—what really happened in Casanova County when Nukeyule attacked?

AS: It wasn’t Nukeyule.

• • • •

[Feed from security 56 camera_Sin-Master’s Dungeon | 5.21.29 02:45:30]

Crisp digital footage with Verified Tape along the bottom right-hand third. Corner mounted, wide-angle. Underground vault. A white-padded cell with a field barrier door and an old-fashioned barred gate. Against one wall stands a woman in skintight white leather. Short hair. Cosmetic scarring along the right jaw. Her wrists are cuffed beside her head. No weapons visible. A power restraint belt locks her waist against the wall.

Just outside the door stands a man. Tall. Skeletal. Dressed in black and red leather. No cape. A stylized skull-mask over his face.

ICE: You bastard.

SIN-MASTER: Archaically, that would be a legitimate claim, but in this day and age most people really don’t care.

ICE: You know I hate banter.

SIN-MASTER: It’s because you’re so unimaginative, Mia.

Ice stiffens in the restraints, her fists clenched tighter.

ICE: That’s not my name. Identities are public record.

SIN-MASTER: True. Except you changed your name multiple times before your powers manifested and you played vigilante.

ICE: What do you want?

SIN-MASTER: I left a life-like replica at the hospital infused with your DNA gathered from previous fights, and while it won’t have your associates fooled for long, it did buy me time to bring you here. I’d like you to do something.

ICE: I’ll never join you.

Sin-Master laughs.

SIN-MASTER: Oh God, no. I don’t want you to join me, Ice. I want you to destroy me.

• • • •

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: Lust?

Adrian,

I’m concerned about the containment reports I’m getting about Lust. His escape attempts have become less frequent, and he keeps insisting that he’s going to die if he remains imprisoned. Xavier informed me that there are odd readings in the radiation scans, but nothing he can pinpoint. Is it wise to keep him here? Also the fact that that Sin-Master hasn’t launched an effort to re-secure his henchman is inconsistent with his behavior previously.

We’ve also heard nothing from Sin-Master since Ice Sickle’s demise. He’s never been this passive before. What is he planning?

—Lil

From: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

To: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: re: Lust?

Lil,

I’ve seen Xavier’s reports. Dragonfly says it’s an effect of the new restraint cages interacting with Lust’s power.

As for Sin-Master, Ice has almost bested him in prior fights, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s cowering somewhere. I have Impulse out scouting for any signs of activity from the other Sins.

Since we have a brief reprieve from Sin-Master, even with everything that’s happened . . .

Dinner tonight?

—TM

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: re: dinner

Adrian,

I’ve not been feeling well. Must be the flu bug going around again. Sorry. Maybe next time?

—Lil

• • • •

Ice_Interview_draft_Virtual_Entropy_(Méndez).doc
[audio transcript, 8/21/28]

MÉNDEZ: Ulure Méndez here in a private interview with the Excaliburs’ most exciting player, Ice Sickle. So tell me, Ice, what—

ICE: Do we have to do this?

MÉNDEZ: Honey, we’re not on camera. I can edit out anything you don’t want published.

ICE: Considering you’re not even in your underwear any more, I should hope so.

MÉNDEZ: [laughs] You’re one to talk. Seriously, Tasha, I need a feature for the anniversary tomorrow.

ICE: Fuck.

MÉNDEZ: We already did.

ICE: I just—it’s been fourteen years. You’d think I could get over it.

MÉNDEZ: You don’t need to “get over” your PTSD about seeing everyone you knew killed.

ICE: You’re a reporter, not a psychologist. Besides, I get enough of that bullshit from Lil at work. It’s just that . . . after Casanova, I thought . . . goddammit, Ulure. I’m trying to make things right and no one knows anything but the fantasy your publication spun.

MÉNDEZ: You’ve lost me.

ICE: [crying] I’m so fucking scared he’ll find out.

MÉNDEZ: Wait, who will find out?

ICE: I’m strong, power-wise, I know that. I know. You’d think I could—you’d think that would make me feel safe. It doesn’t. I can’t forget what I saw. And it takes everything I’ve got not to want to run away when I see him at work.

MÉNDEZ: Honey, what are you talking about?

ICE: This can’t go on VE or anywhere else, do you understand? Promise me, Ulure.

MÉNDEZ: I promise. This is all off-record.

ICE: Barton Gray. Impulse, I mean. He doesn’t know I saw him at Casanova. [shaky breath] I’m trying to play the long game, like Mandy told me to. She knows what she’s doing. She’s my fucking best friend. But I don’t know how much longer I can last. There’s this—this knot in me that is devouring everything inside. I want Tiger Moth and Lillian and—I want all the Excaliburs dead. For protecting Impulse. For letting him get away. But mostly, I want to kill Impulse for what he did.

[end of transcript]

• • • •

[transcript from The Raja Mason Show, continued]

Raja Mason: What do you mean, Amanda?

Amanda Sorovitz: I mean Nukeyule was there, yes, and he did irradiate miles of land that’ll be uninhabitable for the next five hundred years. But he didn’t kill everyone.

RM: You’re saying someone else was there?

AS: I’m saying someone else was responsible for the Casanova Massacre.

RM: Who?

AS: Impulse.

RM:[laughs] But he’s the one who stopped Nukeyule before the villain found Ice Sickle hiding in the remains of her basement.

AS:[shakes her head] That’s what he told the press. And haven’t you always wondered why he didn’t rescue Ice if he knew she was there?

RM: The combat took its toll on him. He barely survived to return to base.

AS: So he says. He murdered everyone in my entire city, Raja. Nukeyule was a lucky accident; he showed up hunting Impulse and that’s when they fought and Impulse killed Nukeyule, too.

RM: That’s . . . quite the claim. Besides, Ice and Impulse have both been part of Excaliburs for years. They’ve worked on multiple missions together. They were the ones who saved the West Coast from the irradiated sharks hatched by Doctor Unstoppable.

AS: I know, and yes, Ice worked with Impulse. She has the best poker face I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t change what happened.

RM: Do you have any proof?

AS: I do. Ice and I were making a video of our volcano model for school. You know how no one likes actual experiments in the classroom science fairs anymore. We had verified tape—no edits. As soon as I heard the screaming . . . I recorded Impulse from the basement window when he ripped apart my neighbors.

RM: What happened to the tape?

AS: I gave it to Sin-Master when he found us.

• • • •

Security Camera Archives – 1/29/27 – Excalibur HQ – RESTRICTED ACCESS – TIER ONE CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Fifth-floor recreation and dining hall, hero access only.

A spacious room outfitted with tables, chairs, sparring rings, video consoles, exercise equipment, a private kitchen and bar, and holo-windows tuned to the city park.

Barton Gray, a.k.a. Impulse, flickers on the feed as he paces, moving too fast for the cameras to track. Kim Moore, a.k.a. Tankboy, and D’Ominique Barbados, a.k.a. Commander Scorpio, sit on a couch playing video games on a wall-screen TV.

Tasha Ramirez, a.k.a. Ice Sickle, jogs on an elliptical machine, wireless ear-buds in place.

Gray zips to one of the video consoles broadcasting the Chanel 9.5 NEWS.

GRAY: Goddamn upstarts. Another little “team” popping up, wanting to fight crime. Going to get their asses handed to them.

BARBADOS: Dude, chill. Not everyone starts in the majors. As long as they don’t go after the big bads, what’s the deal?

GRAY: They shouldn’t be on the fucking news. What are they here for? Saving a neighborhood grocery store?

MOORE: I did that. It’s cool. Owner always gave me free ice cream after that.

RAMIREZ: If new blood bothers you so much, Impulse, what’s your solution?

GRAY: Kill ’em off. Thin the herd, as it were.

Barbados turns his head sharply. Moore hunches his shoulders and fiddles with the controller. Ramirez never loses her stride on the elliptical.

RAMIREZ: Just imagine if Virtual Entropy got hold of that quote.

A long pause before Gray laughs.

GRAY: It’s a joke, kiddies.

Barbados tosses his controller on the couch and walks to the kitchen. He pulls two beers from the fridge.

BARBADOS: Not cool, man.

Ramirez watches Gray and smiles back.

• • • •

Avabug’s Netjournal—wow—5/21/29

Virtual Entropy picked up my story and now my followers list has just EXPLODED. 303 friends to over twenty-five thousand followers in 24 hrs?!

I thought the social media celebrity thing only happened to other people. It’s kind of like having a super power, you know?

(And to everyone who suddenly, selflessly just donated to fund my medical bills fund, oh my god, thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means to me and my mom not to be in debt right now!)

• • • •

[Feed from security 56 camera_Sin-Master’s Dungeon | 5.23.29 22:57:09]

Ice paces back and forth, shaking her hands at her sides. She spins and kicks the wall, then throws a flurry of punches at the door. Neither wall nor door is affected.

Sin-Master stands outside the door again, rocking slowly back and forth on his heels.

ICE: You goddamn motherfucking bastard!

SIN-MASTER: Your powers aren’t permanently gone. I injected you with biological nanite suppressants when you were captured. They’re tailored to your specific abilities. I’d rather you don’t escape and engage me in combat just yet.

ICE: When I get out—

SIN-MASTER: You will. Be patient. I’m working on a more universal variation that will be permanent, but I’ll spare you the details. The formula is in the lab, though, in the event you escape prematurely.

Ice pauses and puts her hands on her hips.

ICE: What is this? Did you suddenly grow a conscience? Find religion?

SIN-MASTER: Nothing so pathetic. I’ve always had a conscience.

ICE: Right.

SIN-MASTER: We’ve both lived our lives wearing masks. Hiding what we are capable of. For me, empathy. For you, destruction.

Ice stalks to the door and slams her fists against the barrier. Sparks ripple through the energy field.

ICE: If you’re so eager to die, open this goddamn cell. I don’t need powers to kill you.

SIN-MASTER: Technically, no. If I lowered my defenses, anyone with moderate skill could deal significant or fatal damage.

Sin-Master unsnaps his mask and tosses it over one shoulder. His face is lean, scarred, but unremarkable. Ice flinches and takes a step back.

SIN-MASTER: It’s been a long time, Mia.

• • •

Virtual Entropy: Death Toll Estimated at Five Hundred in Explosion
Posted by Ulure Méndez on October 7th, 2026—2,580 comments

BREAKING—The press release from Mordred’s Falls, ND, has stated that over five hundred civilians were killed this morning in the explosion in downtown during the October Heydays Festival. Over a thousand other people were injured. Sin-Master’s henchmen Greed and Sloth were seen fleeing the city limits just after the detonation.

During the press release, an information drone hijacked Police Chief Maybell Dunlope’s address and broadcast an ultimatum from Sin-Master that was picked up by all the major news outlets:

“Attention, mortals. This is but a taste of the true horror and chaos I will unleash on you across the country, across the world, if you ignore my ultimatum. The Excaliburs must be dismantled and surrender themselves to me. Continued refusal will see destruction a thousand times greater than what you have witnessed here, and duplicated in every major metropolis. If these so-called heroes will not surrender, then your world will burn. The Apocalypse may have only four horsemen, but I have seven.”

The Excaliburs issued a statement that condemned the attack and vowed to prevent any further violence.

We are confident that the Excaliburs will track down and exact justice on Sin-Master for this tragedy. We at Virtual Entropy extend our sincerest condolences to the families and friends of the victims in Mordred’s Falls, ND.

• • • •

[transcript from The Raja Mason Show, continued]

Raja Mason: I’m sorry. What did you just say?

Amanda Sorovitz: He wasn’t wholly Sin-Master yet, but he did have his powers and the mask. His name was Shane then. Only ten years older than us, and struggling to figure out what he wanted in life. I knew he, like Ice, would change the world one day.

You know I’m not lying. It’s why I accepted this invitation from you, Raja. Everyone loves your interviews because you don’t censor or spin your stories.

Sin-Master is the one who found Ice and me. I was in shock. She tried to attack him, but she’d expended her powers just protecting us from Impulse. He took us to his inner sanctum, gave us food and made sure we weren’t physically hurt, then let us go. That’s when Ice showed up on national television. You should run that historical photo of the little girl with the ragged white hair and ash-matted clothes who’s standing on the steps of the Liberty News building. I know it was viral when Karen Yen took it and the Times ran her story.

RM: But no one knew about you.

AS: No. See, one survivor is believable. Two are witnesses. I gave Sin-Master the tape and he got me embedded seamlessly in a foster home on the East Coast. I grew up under a new name, with a new family. Every day, I’d see heroes on the news, and sometimes I’d see Impulse, smiling at the camera and posing with school children for charity events. All I could do was scream.

• • • •

[Feed from security 56 camera_Sin-Master’s Dungeon | 5.24.29 00:54:17]

Ice sits in the corner of the cell, her arms wrapped around her knees. Sin-Master leans against the gate outside the barrier.

ICE: Shane—you—I thought you were dead. All this time.

SIN-MASTER: A necessary deceit.

ICE: Should’ve figured. This is classic. You pretend to be killed by the very nemesis you are.

SIN-MASTER: In a way, Shane did die a long time ago. I killed that piece of myself so Sin-Master could fully come into being. And it gave you a reason to hate me, didn’t it? To watch him die in flames, screaming, while a mech dressed as Sin-Master oversaw it? It was then you called yourself Ice instead of Firesiren, wasn’t it?

ICE: Fuck you.

SIN-MASTER: Will you listen to what I have to say now, Mia?

ICE: It’s Ice. Mia died that day Shane did.

Sin-Master nods. He snaps his fingers and his mask springs to his hand. He puts it on and then sits so he’s at eye-level with Ice across the cell.

SIN-MASTER: Do you remember the discussion we had under the oak trees the September after we first met as enemies?

ICE: You stabbed me through the lung. I don’t recall much after that.

SIN-MASTER: Touché.

Ice shakes hair from her face and leans forward.

ICE: I’ll cut you some slack. Tell me.

Sin-Master offers a slight bow.

SIN-MASTER: None of us are heroes or villains. We’re all just monsters. Ultimately, power corrupts and the only difference we make is how far we let that corruption grow. You “heroes,” the noble façade on display to the world, you can’t exist in a vacuum. That’s why there are other powers. Those of us who offer ourselves as distraction. As an enemy.

I’ve never wanted to destroy the world, or even conquer it. But I learned very early that “heroes” lauded by the media need to be kept in check. If I and my Deadly Sins and all others who’ve been cast in the roles of evil didn’t give you an outlet to vent your hate and frustration and lust on, who do you think would suffer? The people without the power. The ones who always suffer. Heroes will never be content in any other role. I could see what they would become if they had no one their equal to oppose. Tyrants, demi-gods. Villains.

So I set myself on a different pedestal. I give heroes a target. Have you noticed how I let slip details of my plans to give you time to intercept? How so often my diabolical inventions are being constructed in scarcely populated areas? Or how often I turn and run when the fight scales towards mass destruction or civilian casualties?

Ice works her jaw and remains silent.

SIN-MASTER: You understand your darker self, the corruption lurking inside. But unlike your fellow Excaliburs, you understand where it will take you if you let it. You lived through Casanova. You saw.

Ice holds up a hand. Her fingers tremble.

ICE: You gave that whole spiel to me when I was choking on blood from a collapsed lung?

SIN-MASTER: I’ve had time to refine it since then.

ICE: You said you wanted me to destroy you. Why?

SIN-MASTER: The world would never accept our partnership. It will never accept you the way you desire if I’m always here. I am your shadow, and you are mine. I know you won’t forgive me, and I can’t let you—I’m quite aware of how many bodies are in the ground because of me. But you could stop me.

ICE: You’re almost making up for stabbing me.

SIN-MASTER: It’s my silver-tongued way with words, isn’t it? You know, I wanted to be a playwright before I became a supervillain.

Ice and Sin-Master stare at each other in silence for several minutes.

SIN-MASTER: I’ll let you think about it. Would you care to spend the rest of the night somewhere more comfortable?

ICE: Let me guess, you’re not going to lower your defenses. Or restore my powers.

SIN-MASTER: Well . . . no.

Ice rakes her fingers through her hair, then stands up.

ICE: What the hell. But I have one condition.

SIN-MASTER: And that would be?

ICE: You break open that bottle of ’65 Duve chardonnay you once promised me.

SIN-MASTER: You’re lucky I keep the majority of my promises. I’ll have it chilled and ready for us.

• • • •

Security Camera Archives – 11/08/28 – Excalibur HQ – RESTRICTED ACCESS – TIER ONE CLEARANCE REQUIRED

Tasha Ramirez’s bedroom.

A small, plain room with cement walls and bare floor. A cot in one corner; a small wooden desk. No decorations, photos, personal items, or any luxuries.

She sits cross-legged in a yoga pose in one corner, dressed in a loose bathrobe. She has two candles lit in front of her, the only light in the room.

The door chimes.

RAMIREZ: It’s open.

Lillian Fey strides in. She’s dressed in a slim black evening gown.

FEY: You aren’t coming to the ceremony?

RAMIREZ: I’m not in the mood.

FEY: [sighs] It’s for the victims, Tasha. It’ll be bad for PR if you’re missing.

RAMIREZ: Bullshit. Three hundred people died last night, Lillian. But all we’re doing is giving speeches and promising that next time, next time, we’ll defeat Sin-Master.

The candle flames gutter.

RAMIREZ: This whole fucking world would be better off if there were no supers.

FEY: You can’t believe that.

RAMIREZ: Don’t you think the world was fucked up enough before we added super powers?

FEY: We help the world, Tasha. We’re a force for good.

RAMIREZ: And with heroes come the villains.

FEY: True no matter what. Blame Sin-Master for the massacre in Salt Lake City, not yourself. You did all you could. And do me a favor—get dressed and come to the memorial. The public needs to see you there.

Ramirez rubs her face.

RAMIREZ: Okay. But one day, I’m going to catch Sin-Master and I’m going do to him what he did to me.

Ramirez clenches a fist and the candles go out.

• • • •

Avabug’s Netjournal—you need to watch this—5/25/29

This morning, I got a Verified Tape recording and a message asking me to post it. Virtual Entropy has been mirroring my entries when I talk about Ice. I don’t know if I should post this. I asked Mom and fiddlebug. Mom started crying. But she said, “Do it, Ava. The world should know.” fiddlebug agrees.

Right now, Raja Mason is broadcasting his interview with Amanda Sorovitz. Yeah, I’m watching. Horrified. Can hardly breathe. It’s Raja, how couldn’t it be true? This is too.

What I’m about to show you . . . I’m numb. But I’m also angry—not at Ice. Not at Sin-Master, even. He could have killed me in the hospital. That posturing wasn’t because he could, but because he was waiting for someone to stop him. It was an act.

So I think we all need to see this. I’ve got a voice now, a platform, and I’ve survived two superhero fights in less than a month. I’ll be okay.

Watch the video. The file was labeled “feed from security 56 camera_Sin-Master’s Dungeon” and don’t turn away when Raja’s broadcast ends.

• • • •

[Feed from security camera 107_Sin-Master’s Inner Sanctum | 5.24.29 04:06:10]

A spare, elegant room with floor-length curtains lining each wall. At a table in the center of the raised dais, Sin-Master and Ice sit across from each other, each with a wine glass in hand.

ICE: I feel alive today. I think it’s the first time in years.

Sin-Master raises his glass. Ice returns the toast.

SIN-MASTER: To life.

Ice stands and steps around the table. She slowly reaches for Sin-Master’s face. He raises a hand, sets down his glass, and then unsnaps the mask.

SIN-MASTER: You know we’re no longer the same two people who fell in love.

ICE: We never can be. That’s not what I want.

Sin-Master sets the mask on the table. Ice leans closer; their eyes are inches away.

ICE: Can I touch you?

SIN-MASTER: Yes.

[CAMERA FEED 107 DISABLED]

• • • •

To: Tiger Moth [Adrian Tsushami, tmoffical@Excaliburs.com]

From: Lillian Fey [Lillian Fey, lfey@pr.Excaliburs.com]

Subject: you bastard

I’m coughing up blood. I blame Sin-Master because he planted something in Lust and we didn’t find it in time. But I’m more angry at you.

I found the files. I don’t know who sent them to me. It’s only signed AS. But it’s an audio clip from the old HQ base before we deactivated the security systems and replaced them with our own. It’s your voice, and Impulse’s voice, and it’s the two of you talking about how to cover up murder.

You lying asshole. You told me you were done. You promised me you and Impulse were through with your private little killing sprees, your “blowing off steam.” Wasn’t that why we brought Excaliburs public? So we could attract supervillains and you two wouldn’t need to take out this . . . this . . . fuck, Adrian, I can’t think straight. Everything hurts.

You told me you were done. That you’d controlled yourself and that you had Impulse tempered and held to heel like the fucking dog he is. It’s why I agreed to stay on staff after our divorce. That recording is a year after you promised me you were done.

I told you what I’d do to you if you ever lied to me again. So I’ve sent you a little present. That audio file is hitting the nets now. Along with all your personal correspondence. Good luck with what’s left of your world of lies, Adrian.

We can meet up for drinks in hell.

—Lil

• • • •

[transcript from The Raja Mason Show, continued]

Raja Mason: What became of the tape, Amanda?

Amanda Sorovitz: I believe you’re going to see in a minute, Raja. There’s one other thing I want to tell you before Impulse arrives.

RM: Excuse me?

AS: He knows I’m alive and giving this interview and he’ll be here shortly to kill us both. It’s too late, though. I’ve made a lot of contacts over the years. Some are supers. Some aren’t. Amber is invisible right now, undetectable, but she’s got camera implants and she’s been livestreaming our entire conversation to every major news network. Zen and Chloe are bypassing the security locks on broadcasts and making it jump every channel. All over the net, all over every screen—the only thing people will be seeing right now is our talk. And in a moment they will also be seeing the Verified Tape of what happened at Casanova.

RM: This is—

AS: It’s okay. You could run, but I’ve sealed the doors. I’m sorry, Raja. And I’m sorry, Amber, for making you watch this. I learned one thing about Impulse early on. He doesn’t actually watch news or broadcast programs live. He considers it too slow. So he won’t see this until it’s too late. He is going to murder us, and everyone in the world will witness it.

• • • •

[Feed from security 56 camera_Sin-Master’s Dungeon | 5.25.29 17:51:50]

Ice stands motionless before the cell door. Sin-Master waits on the other side. The barrier is deactivated.

SIN-MASTER: The door has been unlocked since last night.

ICE: I know.

They stare at each other. Ice pushes the cell gate open. Sin-Master doesn’t move.

ICE: My powers have regenerated and are at their peak. Since last night.

SIN-MASTER: I know.

Ice’s hand drifts up and slides along Sin-Master’s jaw. Sin-Master remains motionless.

ICE: In the end, it’s all a sliding scale of how far we’re willing to go to protect what we care about.

SIN-MASTER: And what is it you think I care for?

ICE: Me. You always have.

Sin-Master smiles and spreads his arms, palms up.

ICE: But it’s not because of who I am, but what I can do. It’s my power you’ve always been in love with.

SIN-MASTER: You know the company you keep. But how many other Casanova Massacres would occur before you broke free from the lies and saw what we’ve all become?

Ice’s hand closes around Sin-Master’s throat. Her other palm presses against his chest over his heart. He does not pull away.

ICE: Thank you. For the hate, for the love.

SIN-MASTER: We have become legend, you and I.

ICE: So we have.

She kisses him on the mouth, lingering, then slams her palm through his chest. Sin-Master’s body spasms. She withdraws her hand and lets his body fall, his heart between her fingers. Sin-Master continues to smile, blood pooling beneath his spine.

ICE: Deadly Sins, come to me.

Greed, Pride, Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, and Wrath emerge from the various corridors leading to the cellblock. They pause at sight of the body.

Ice drops Sin-Master’s heart and lifts her hand. Red speckles her cheek below her eye.

ICE: I am Sin-Master, and the heroes of this world will fear me.

All six Deadly Sins kneel in a semi-circle around her.

ICE: Show me the lab. I have a suppressant to finish so a new age can come.

[Feed dissolves into static. END RECORDING.]

• • • •

[transcript from The Raja Mason Show, continued]

Raja Mason: Amanda, please. We can get out of here if—

Amanda Sorovitz: There are more supers out there than just the villains and the Excaliburs. We’re all convinced heroes can do no wrong.

RM: What will this change?

AS: The other Excaliburs will have no choice but to hunt down and destroy Impulse. And that alone will weaken them, make them fear each other. Once people begin to doubt their idols, they have the potential to turn from them.

But there’s one more thing I want to tell you. I never lost touch with Ice. Or with Sin-Master. I worked hard to orchestrate their meeting, and their roles as each other’s nemeses; he knows what she’s capable of, and all she needs is an opportunity. Lust’s capture was not a fluke. His blood cells have been infused with a very specific type of radiation that breaks down his organic tissue from the inside and releases near-undetectable levels of poison as air-borne particles. By now, the Excaliburs’ base of operations should be entirely infected, giving them nowhere to turn. If the team wasn’t out searching for Sin-Master, they’d be dead now. Ice Sickle knows all the weaknesses of the Excaliburs, and how to defeat them. And she will.

RM: I feel Impulse coming.

AS:[nods] Peace is just an absence of war, and we have been in a war for so long. Ice can change that. She remembers the two girls trapped in a ruined basement, watching their universe burn. Ice is one of the most powerful supers I’ve ever seen; she’s not just a Tier Two, not even a Tier One. She’s off the charts, but she’s always been good at hiding. Now she won’t have to.

RM: Oh God.

AS: We should wrap. Thank you for having me on your show, Raja. I can guarantee your ratings tonight will be the highest in history.

RM:[shaky breath] Guess I can’t complain too much in that case. [to camera] From your host, Raja Mason, this has been An Interview With. Thanks for watching, and I wish you all a better tomorrow.

©2017 by A. Merc Rustad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Shimmer, Cicada, and other fine venues, with reprints included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, Wilde Stories 2016, and Transcendent 2016. Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com.

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

Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare

Seanan McGuire | 7156 words

1.

“I sometimes think it would have been better had my first encounter with humanity been a man, and not a woman of low station with no family to mourn her. Better for who, I cannot say.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

It is customary to begin one’s memoirs at birth. As I was not “born” in the gross mammalian sense, I shall begin instead at a more logical point in time. To wit:

I was borne to Earth on cosmic winds, falling through chance and the grace of the heavens to root in the soil of Notting Hill. There I grew rapidly to adult stature, devoured a lady’s maid who had the misfortune to come too close to my tendrils, and assumed her form. It was a discourteous way to introduce myself to the human species, but I must beg forgiveness: my kind are not precisely well-mannered when we first bud, and must be taught proper behavior before we can be trusted in polite society.

As servants are rarely found with skin the color of young watercress and hair the color of mature nettles, I presented quite a curiosity when I staggered through the doors of the house which previously employed the now-devoured lady’s maid. I was still in the process of absorbing her memories, and had discovered the directions to her place of employment without acquiring the context that would have allowed me to understand that returning there might be bad for my chances of continued survival. Indeed, I was not the only seed to fall to Earth that day. I was simply the only one fortunate enough to eat a lady’s maid whose mistress was sister to a man of science—Sir Arthur Blackwood, botanist in the service of Her Majesty, the Queen of England.

Where most men would have looked upon my vibrantly green face and seen a monster, Sir Blackwood saw a miracle in the making: something entirely new to present to Queen Alice, who was so very fond of novelty. Alice had been raised a princess, with no hope of the throne, only to find herself elevated and her engagement to the Grand Duke of Hesse cancelled after an ill-timed smallpox outbreak left her the heir to the British Empire. God save the Queen.

I was presented to Queen Alice on my third day of adult growth, after my mind had finished processing the linguistic and behavioral data harvested from the unfortunate lady’s maid. I was able to curtsey and offer a polite greeting to Her Majesty.

She was charmed, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I was a very well-mannered sapling, and have only grown into my graces as I bloomed and cultivated my better nature. Jill Lane—the lady’s maid I have spoken of—was a great help. She had in her an endless eagerness to please, and I often returned to her deep well of knowledge and propriety as I navigated the echelons of British society. But ah, I am getting ahead of myself.

How vividly I recall that first day in the Queen’s presence, me still unsteady on the bifurcated stems of my legs, Jill’s voice still reedy and uncertain in my mind. Queen Alice looked me up and down and then turned her attention to Sir Blackwood.

“Does your green girl have a name?” she asked.

“She came before us with nothing but her pretty face,” he said. “I have taken the liberty of calling her ‘Antheia,’ after the goddess of flowers and floral garlands.”

The Queen had smiled. That was all it took to seal my fate within the Empire—for you see, after that, I was a favorite of the Queen, and a novelty unlike any other. That made me the toast of every great house in Britain, opening endless doors, and the manners I borrowed from dear Jill opened still more, until some spoke, half-jesting, of my successful invasion of the nation. They called me their flowering princess, representative of some savage fairy race that dwelt beneath the hills of Ireland, and oh, how they laughed at the idea that I could represent their downfall.

How they laughed.

2.

“It is important that we record the last days of the Planet Earth in their own languages, for these languages contain the concepts with which the meat-based life forms of that world were most familiar. They could no more express the delight of fresh sun falling upon their roots than an unbonded pod could explain the intricacies of a lady’s undergarments. By preserving the manners and culture of the planet in this way, we can better understand them and, should we ever encounter another such species, we can bring about an even swifter and more efficient conquest.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

It was a Thursday afternoon when the advance scouts broke through the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, announcing their arrival with the usual chromatic displays in the thermosphere. The lights drew attention across the globe, stargazers and young romantics alike clustering in the fields as they strained to watch these strange and heretofore undocumented rainbows of the night. I was less interested in the phenomenon, naturally; I have always done better during the daylight hours, and the things I do in open fields are better not shared with those of delicate mammalian sensibilities. I was seated in the parlor at home, working on my needlepoint and snacking from a tray of cunning little sandwiches, when Sir Blackwood burst into the room, his hair mussed and his jacket askew.

“Antheia!” he cried. “Why are you here, and not out on the veranda with the guests? They’re asking about you.”

“I have no interest in watching the excited collision of atoms,” I said, tugging another loop of thread carefully through the muslin. A fine cabbage rose was taking form under my fingers—some of my best work, if I did say so myself. “The colors will be there with or without me to watch them, and besides, it was time for my tea. You do prefer that I continue to take my meals in private, do you not?”

Arthur blanched. It had taken the household some time to adjust to my predilection for eating only raw animal flesh and drinking only fresh blood. Sir Arthur’s sister, Julia, had adjusted rather faster than he had—she’d already known I was a beast, as evidenced by the fact that I had eaten her lady’s maid. Dear, sweet Arthur had devoted his life to the study of plants, and even the fact that I was not the first flesh-eater he had encountered had not prepared him for the notion that one day he might meet a flower who could smile and curtsey and request a hot bowl of pig’s blood for her supper.

“Yes, but the lights—”

“Are better left to those who can appreciate them.” I reached for a sandwich. The delightful smell of raw, fresh-sliced beef addressed my nose. “Really, I thought your sister had banned you from her stargazing party. Something about the noises coming from the basement?”

“I don’t understand why she gets so upset,” he said, dropping into the seat on the other side of my sewing table with a loud thump. He automatically reached for my plate of sandwiches, and looked offended when I smacked his hand with my needlepoint frame. Rubbing his fingers, he continued, “My steam-powered sun will make us richer than she can imagine.”

“You see, that is her trouble: She suffers from a shortage of imagination, and as such, cannot see where a loud, clanking clockwork machine could possibly improve her life.” I took a dainty nibble from my sandwich. “Remember, she forbade poor Jill to use any modern machinery in maintaining the house.”

Arthur blanched again. He enjoyed being reminded that I’d eaten Jill even less than he enjoyed being reminded of the rest of my diet. “Julia is a traditional soul, that’s all,” he mumbled.

“We live in an age of wonders,” I said. “The fact that she cannot embrace them is a shame. The fact that she can stand on her veranda marveling over a scientific curiosity while forbidding the pursuit of more concrete sciences is a sham. I will never understand how you can tolerate her willful interference with your business, Arthur.”

“She’ll wed eventually. One of her hulking suitors will make an honest woman of her, and she’ll have no more grounds to interfere.” Arthur looked wistfully at my sandwiches, but didn’t stretch out his hand again. “What do you think of these lights?”

“Natural atmospheric distortion, of no more interest than any of the other things one sees in the sky.” I nibbled my sandwich, swallowed, and added, “Excepting, of course, Her Majesty’s airship, which is a wonder and a blessing and is in no way an eyesore that blocks the sunlight from reaching my roses.”

Arthur laughed. “I swear your tongue gets sharper every year, Antheia.”

“What good is a rose that has no thorns?” I smiled, pleased when his cheeks reddened in reply. Blood-based circulatory systems are such traitorous things, betraying the emotions of their owners even as they struggle to keep them alive. “I presume you have some motive for asking these questions, apart from the pleasure of my company?”

“I was speaking with Lord Harrington of the Royal Astronomical Society about the lights,” said Arthur, carefully. “I thought he might have something interesting to offer on the topic, and in fact, he did. He said similar lights—similar in color and design, although less grandiose in scope—were seen in various locations around the world some six years ago.”

“Is that so?” I asked politely, before taking another nibble of my sandwich. The bread, made specially from bone meal and ground fish scales, was deliciously nourishing. I kept my eyes on Arthur, waiting for him to finish his explanation with the inevitable and begin the next phrase in our little dance.

I had been waiting for so long, and as ever, Arthur did not disappoint. “The lights were last seen on the night before you appeared,” he said. “Antheia, I have always assumed, in some vague way, that you were one of the fairy-folk of legend, escaped from beneath the hill and come to grace us with your presence. Fairy-folk have sometimes been said to be green of skin, you see. But now I come to wonder . . . did you come from beneath the Earth? Did you come from the Earth at all?”

I smiled dazzlingly, showing him my teeth in parody of the primate grimace that he and his sister wore so often, and to such good effect. Jill had taught me my manners properly, you see: No deportment coach could have been better than my own internal lady’s maid. “I never claimed a terrestrial origin, you know. I simply felt that such matters were better left behind us than discussed in polite company.”

“Antheia . . .” Arthur frowned, his brows furrowing together as he looked at me with such gravity as to make my breath catch in my chest. “These lights. Are they more of your people?”

“Oh, no,” I said blithely. He began to relax. “If this were merely more of my people, you would need only to lock up your lady’s maids and gentleman’s companions long enough to let them take their human forms from the less desirable levels of society—or at least from the parts of society where the people would be less dearly missed. This is the invasion.”

His mouth fell open. He stared at me, shocked into silence, as I set my sandwich aside, picked up my teacup, and took a dainty sip of its bloody contents. He continued to stare. I put the cup down, folded my hands in my lap, and offered him a tight-lipped smile.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you knew.”

3.

“As with so many worlds, Earth’s dominant life forms were mammalian: hot-blooded, quick to anger and to passion, and unwilling to pace their lives to the rhythm of the world around them. This allowed for some incredible leaps forward of technology and science, and we should work to retain these streaks of stubborn inventiveness and, dare I say, emotional engagement, within our own cultivars. They may serve useful, after all, even if they did not serve the human race with particular efficacy.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

Julia and her friends had watched disdainfully as Arthur bundled me out of the house and into the waiting steam-powered carriage below, as if the method of our conveyance somehow rendered us low-class and common. I spared a smile and a waggle of my fingers for Julia, who glared and turned her face away. Then I was in the carriage next to Arthur, and we were being carried into the night, with the rainbow blaze of ships piercing the atmosphere dancing in the sky above us.

“I have already sent a telegram to Lord Harrington, asking him to be prepared for us,” said Arthur, watching out the window as if he expected my brethren to be stalking the streets already. “He’ll want to know everything you can tell him about this ‘invasion.’ No detail is too small. We’re all going to need to do our part to beat these blighters back!”

“Well, what about the ray guns atop the palace and the Royal Observatory?” I asked. “Won’t they automatically take aim at anything larger than Her Majesty’s airship that enters England’s skies?”

“Yes, and we can take comfort in that, but—and please don’t take this as a criticism of your fair self, my dear, you have never been anything but a blessing to my house—they didn’t shoot you down, and that leads me to worry about the strength of our aerial defense net.” Arthur looked at me solemnly. “Are you positive that this is an invasion? Couldn’t it be a simple atmospheric disturbance?”

“I am not positive, as I have been on this planet and in this form for six years, and that does rather limit one’s communications with one’s fellows,” I said. “That aside, six years is roughly the time needed to travel here from the nearest habitable star, if said travel is undertaken in faster-than-light seed-ships.”

Arthur’s mouth fell open. “F-faster than light? But that’s beyond the reaches of modern science. Why, even Professor O’Malley’s moon-ship only traveled at a rate of seventeen thousand miles an hour. Light is—”

“Light is a far faster beast,” I said agreeably. “I am sorry. I thought you knew.”

It was a bald-faced lie, and not the first I had told him during our acquaintanceship. Lying is wrong, miss, said Jill’s small, stern voice.

Ah, but the lies are coming to an end, and sometimes things which are wrong are also comforting, I told her. Now hush, be still. I have a scientist to attend to.

“Faster-than-light travel would be a discovery great enough to put the British Empire ahead of the rest of the world forever,” said Arthur. “You must discuss this with Lord Harrington.”

“I will, if you bid me, but I am no engineer.” I refolded my hands in my lap. “I’ve never seen the drives, nor do I understand the physics behind them.”

Arthur frowned like he was seeing me for the first time. “So you remember yourself before you were—” He waved a hand, indicating my form in a most ungentlemanly manner. “This?”

“You mean, do I remember my existence before I consumed Julia’s lady’s maid?” I asked, baldly. If he was going to forsake manners for expediency, then I saw no reason not to do the same. “Yes, and no. My seed was coaxed from a cutting of a specific cultivated line. I have never been anything but what I am: I was a seed, and then I was a sprout, and then I was the Lady Antheia, who has very much enjoyed your hospitality over these past six years. The line from which I was grown, however, is a strain of diplomats and explorers. All the seeds that came to this world with me were of that same strain.” Had any of them managed to sprout, I would have had siblings all across the globe—but alas, more and more, I had come to believe that I alone had found welcoming soil.

“A . . . diplomat?” Arthur blinked at me as our carriage rattled to a stop, presumably in front of our destination. “But the first thing you did was eat my sister’s maid.”

“I am aware,” I said primly, gathering my skirts as I waited for the doors to slide open on their well-oiled tracks. “But I was sorry afterward, which is the very definition of diplomacy.”

Arthur didn’t have an answer to that.

4.

“Being only a cultivar of our greatest diplomat, the honorable and merciful Rooted in Many Soils, I cannot possibly know what it is to have conquered more than one world. I have offered my genetic material back to the trunk which grew me, and my experiences will be preserved for future generations, as is only right and just. Still, I know enough of what my parent and original experienced during their own explorations to know that the conquest of Earth was entirely unique, and extremely common, all at the same time. But then, this is always the way when we encounter a sapient race: They are all different, and they are all sadly, tragically the same. Meat is not capable of much variance.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

Lord Harrington was a walking mountain of a man, tall and broad-chested, with a ruddy complexion that spoke of much blood pumping very close to the surface. He always made me hungry in a faintly embarrassing way; it’s rude to stare at a man and think of how much his blood would do to nourish your vines.

“Arthur,” he greeted, in his booming voice, before turning his attention on me. “And the Lady Antheia, who appears to be the woman of the hour, if what Arthur tells me is true. Do you know what’s causing the lights in the sky?”

He knew the answer: I could hear it in his tone. I politely inclined my head, not quite looking at him, and asked, “How long ago did your telescope begin picking out the ships in the auroras?”

“Perhaps half an hour; no more,” he said. “I never trusted you.”

“I know.” I raised my head. “I did not press the issue. It seemed more sporting to allow you your little rebellion, rather than charming it out of you. Sportsmanship is not a uniquely human trait, you know. Very little is unique about any world, although they all assume themselves to be.”

Lord Harrington’s lips peeled back from his teeth as he drew the gun from his belt and pointed it at the spot where my heart would have been, had I possessed such an inconvenient thing. “Lady Antheia, by my authority as a Peer of the Crown, I place you under arrest for treason to the British Empire.”

“Oh, lovely.” I clapped my hands. “That is fantastic news, because you see, as the diplomatic ambassador of the . . . well, there isn’t a term in English that’s quite right for what we are, because we’ve never encountered English before, and thus far I’m the only one who speaks it, so let us say, the Vegetable Empire? As the diplomatic ambassador of the Vegetable Empire, I refuse to be arrested, but I’m happy to be taken before your Queen, as it seems the invasion is about to properly begin.”

As if on a timer, the guns atop the observatory fired, their steam-fueled chambers expelling rays of hot light that seared across the sky. Several seed ships would be destroyed in this barrage; it was natural. They didn’t yet know to make themselves smaller, and would learn only through those losses. Those which survived the initial wave of gunfire would split into multiple vessels, and continue their implacable descent. I couldn’t mourn for the dead of this wave. They would only be seeds, after all, and of no more consequence than a promise, always intended to be broken.

The guns fired again. And so, in the din, did Lord Harrington. His aim was true: The ray gun hit me squarely in the chest, burning a hole in both my favorite bodice and the bright green skin below, until it was possible to look through me to the room beyond. Arthur cried out. I looked down, considering the wreckage of what had been my sternum.

“Oh, I do wish you hadn’t done that,” I sighed, my voice rendered weak and reedy by the damage to my lungs.

And then I lunged.

Lord Harrington had always treated me as a strange sort of pet, a harmless trinket to be either studied or ignored, depending on his mood. To learn that he had mistrusted my intentions all that time was almost a relief, as it meant that he was not quite as stupid as I had assumed. Still, like most men of science, he believed only in the evidence of his eyes, and what his eyes saw when he looked at me was a woman. Green of skin and hair, yes, but apart from that? In every other regard? I was the very flower of English womanhood, with my curves trained to the corset’s embrace and my skirts hanging full and demure down past my ankles. Why, had it not been for my face, and for the narrow band of skin between top of glove and bottom of sleeve, he could easily have forgotten my vegetable origins, as so many others had tried to do. Poor man. What he did not consider was that skirts can conceal more than legs.

He jerked backward as my hands found his throat, my thorn-sharp nails piercing the skin beneath his jaw and finding purchase there, the tiny barbs that lined them making it nigh-impossible to pull me free without killing him in the process. Lord Harrington pressed his gun against my stomach, firing again; much of my midsection joined my chest in nonexistence before I could wrap a vine around the ray gun’s muzzle and rip it from his hands, hurling it away. As I did that, the creeper vines and long, thick roots I normally kept concealed—as a proper British woman would, had she found herself burdened with such things—emerged from beneath my skirt and wrapped tight around him, binding him in place.

Arthur was shouting behind me. I knew that civility meant responding to him, or at least begging his pardon, but my injuries were too great; Lord Harrington might not have known my anatomy, but he had done a remarkably good job of reducing my overall mass. So I committed the unforgiveable sin of ignoring my friend and patron as I drove my roots into the body of his colleague, linking them into his circulatory system.

His blood tasted of fine wine and excellent breeding. Perhaps there was something to be said for the aristocracy after all.

It only took me a few moments to drain the life and fluids from Lord Harrington’s body. I leaned back, glancing down, and was pleased to see that new growth had covered the holes in my chest and stomach, replacing the gaping holes with smooth, if somewhat indecent, green skin. It was paler than the rest of me, but the patchwork effect that it created was not unpleasant, and would be mostly covered by my clothing under normal circumstances. I pulled my roots from the husk of Lord Harrington, unwinding my creeper vines until he remained upright solely thanks to the nails which remained wedged in his throat. I yanked them free, and he fell with a hollow rattle, like a dried-out old seed pod.

“Well. That was uncivil of him,” I said, smoothing my skirt with the heels of my hands as I pulled all the pieces of me back into their proper places. “Arthur, dear, I don’t suppose I might borrow your jacket? I am quite underdressed, thanks to the holes your friend saw fit to shoot into my clothing.”

“You killed him.” Arthur’s voice was as bloodless as his colleague. “Antheia . . . how could you?”

“The mechanisms of it were easy, and do not really require explanation,” I said, turning to face him. It was no real surprise to find that he had retrieved Lord Harrington’s ray gun, and was aiming it at me. His hands were shaking. There was no way he would pull the trigger. “As to why I would do so, well. He shot me. Twice. You cannot blame me for protecting myself against a man who was so clearly determined to end my life.”

“But you . . . but you . . .”

“Did nothing you were not already aware I had the potential to do, Arthur.” I took a step toward him, chin up, eyes fixed on his. “We met shortly after I devoured dear Jill. You remember? You knew I had this in me. If I am a monster, then you are the man who nurtured me, and saw to it that I had good soil in which to grow. I am your fault as much as anyone else’s.”

He whimpered. Just once, like a child.

He’s frightened, miss, said Jill.

He has reason to be. Now hush, I replied, and reached out to take the gun, gently, from Arthur’s hands. That was the moment when everything could have gone wrong: when the human race could have started truly fighting back, instead of simply lashing out against an enemy it did not understand. I was leaving myself vulnerable to attack—a foolish thing to do, more suited to a hot-blooded meat creature than to a diplomat of the Vegetable Empire, but ah. I did harbor some affection for the man. I might even have loved him, in my way, had my purpose on his world not been so antithetical to the very notion. So I left my throat unguarded, giving him the opportunity to deliver a killing blow.

He didn’t. Then the gun was in my hand, barrel still warm from the two shots Lord Harrington had delivered to my body, and Arthur’s eyes were beginning to overflow with salty tears. I reached out, quite improperly, and brushed them away with a sweep of my thumb. My skin drank the moisture eagerly.

“Come now, stop your crying,” I said. “It’s time we went to see the Queen.”

The great guns atop the Observatory shuddered and fired again, blasting more of my people out of the sky, and Arthur wept.

5.

“It is not that the idea of invasion was incomprehensible to the humans: A simple visit to the breeding pens will expose the curious to dozens of pre-conquest humans who have no trouble accepting the reality of their situation. They were always prepared for the idea that an enemy might try their borders. No, the incomprehensibility came when they were defeated. The sun was said never to set on the British Empire. I am sure there are some who still cannot understand how they could have been so very wrong.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

London was in a panic. The streets were thronged with would-be defenders of the Crown, their ray guns and small sonic cannons clutched in sweaty hands and aimed toward the distant sky. Some of the buildings we passed were already aflame, no doubt ignited by falling debris. I schooled my expression into one of mild dismay as I gazed out the carriage windows on the spreading chaos. My people had not yet fired a single gun, nor killed a single head of state—Lord Harrington being far too close to common to count. All this was the humans’ own doing.

“You were always going to rip it all down by yourselves you know,” I said conversationally, glad that our carriage was a clever conveyance of steam and gears, and not a thing driven by a living human who might have understood the meaning of my words. “That’s what meat does, when it gets control of a world. It devours itself, and then it goes looking for something else to eat. We’re simply shortcutting the process.”

“I thought you were my friend.” Arthur’s voice was dull, lacking its usual fascination with the world. A pity. I hadn’t intended to break him. “I took you in. Supported you. Cared for you.”

“Yes, and believe me, your assistance in gaining the access I needed to higher society is appreciated.” I allowed one of my climber vines to uncurl from around my leg, extending it to brush against Arthur’s cheek. He might not recognize the affection in the gesture, but that was of no matter. My days of pretending to humanity were coming to a blessed end. “This will be much less painful, thanks to you.”

“I have betrayed my Queen and my country.”

“No, darling, no. Betrayal implies intent. You have simply allowed something dangerous to flourish in your garden. A weed among roses, although that’s a terribly common metaphor, don’t you think? More like a rose among cabbages, all things considered.” I allowed the curtain to fall back across the window. “I have grown healthy in the fertile soil you afforded me, and now it’s time for me to bloom. Me, and all my brothers and sisters.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t know. Why did your British Empire see fit to colonize so much of the planet? Superior force of arms was definitely a factor, and a misguided faith in your own sense of morality. ‘For Queen and country’ and all of that lovely jingoistic nonsense. But that’s all petals, isn’t it? Pretty blooms to hide the thorns. You did it for two reasons.” I leaned closer, smiling. He paled as he met my eyes.

Now, miss, it’s not polite to taunt a man by knowing things he doesn’t, chided Jill.

No, but it’s certainly enjoyable, I replied. Aloud, I said, “The places you took had things you wanted. Resources. Tea and cinnamon and precious metals and girls no one would ever debase themselves by marrying, but whom every British gentleman was happy to deflower. That’s the first reason you did what you did, and that’s the first reason we do what we do.”

Arthur swallowed hard before whispering, “What’s the second reason?”

I leaned closer still, watching my reflection expand to fill the reflective surfaces of his eyes. Such a wonderful biological invention, the eye. Functional and delicious. “Because we can.”

Arthur turned his face away. I sighed, leaning back into my own seat.

“Really, Arthur, I wish you wouldn’t be that way. I’m only acting according to my nature. Isn’t that what you’ve told me every time one of your countrymen leered at your sister or called me a savage jungle girl? Me, who has never even seen a jungle, who originated in a hothouse that spanned a world? ‘They are only acting according to their nature.’ Those were your words. Why is it correct when they do it, and so fearsome when I do?”

“You killed a man.”

“He shot me. Twice, might I add. I think he quite deserved what became of him.”

Arthur’s eyes snapped open. “That does not matter,” he snarled. “You are not judge, nor jury, nor executioner!”

“No, dear: I am none of those things. I am the vanguard of an invading army, and that means your laws no longer apply to me.” I shrugged. “If we fail—and we will not fail—I’ll be tried for treason and imprisoned until the Queen can find a suitably gruesome means of execution. If that happens, be sure they put me in a prison with large windows, or I won’t live long enough for you to kill me. If we succeed, your laws will be permanently suspended, and cannot be used against me. The things we do tonight are crimes of war. They are not things for which we can be punished in the court of law.”

“Britain will not lose.”

I sighed. “Oh, my sweet, foolish mammal of a man, it already has. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

The conveyance rattled to a halt behind the palace, near one of the many entrances used to bring in those who were better than servants, but less than noblemen. There was a soft sighing sound as the springs relaxed, allowing our carriage to sink lower to the ground. I stood, smoothing the wreckage of my skirts with my hands.

“We’ve arrived,” I said. “Do I look ready for an audience with the Queen?”

Arthur merely glared.

“Don’t be tedious, Arthur; it’s not polite.” I opened the carriage door, stepping into the London night.

The air, which would normally have smelled of burning gas and the wood fires used to stoke the steam engines of those too poor to afford solar paneling, smelled like sap and petrichor and electrical discharge. And blood, of course. The streets would be red come morning, painted carnival bright with the lives of those who had built this country. I hesitated a bare moment before kicking off my shoes and allowing the small root surfaces packed into my toes to taste the earth between the cobblestones. Ah, yes; the taste of home. It was falling to the planet’s surface with every barrage of laser fire and steam-powered bullets that ripped apart the sky. Our ships were designed to serve more than one purpose, after all, and with every one that fell, the Earth became a little more suited to our needs.

Footsteps behind me telegraphed Arthur’s emergence from the carriage. I turned to see him standing in front of the door, backlit by the rainbow- and ray gun-colored sky. It turned his skin a dozen shifting rainbow shades, from milky pale to carmine, and he was beautiful. I wondered if he would ever understand how beautiful he was. I wasn’t sure he’d have the time.

“Come now,” I said. “Walk with me.”

“I am not a traitor.” His voice broke on the last word.

“No. You’re not. You’re a man doing his duty to his Queen, and taking an ambassador to her, that she might properly negotiate surrender.”

Arthur looked unsure, as well he might: I had not, after all, specified who would be surrendering, and who would be the recipient of an empire. But the habit of mannerly comportment was drilled into him, and so he simply nodded, and said, “I pray we may end this peacefully,” and walked with me into the palace, while London burned behind us, and the night was radiant with alien light.

6.

“There were those who would insist that a lady’s chief graces were as follows: breeding, beauty, and a blind adherence to the manners of the society in which she takes root, no matter how senseless or silly those manners may be. It was considered better to bloom beautifully and without offending anyone than to grow wanton and in healthy abundance.

“Clearly, this was a civilization cultivating itself for conquest.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

As I had hoped, the Queen was in her chambers. Sadly, she was there along with the Prince Consort, the Ministers of War, and a dozen other powerful men. I sighed. This would have been so much simpler had she been alone. Humans were not a hive mind in any rational way. A human alone could make reasonable decisions, come to reasonable accords. Humans in a group all seemed to believe they and they alone had the authority to speak for their species, and disputes were resolved by shouting until the loudest won. Truly, this world would be more peaceful once it was ruled by cooler vegetable minds.

All those powerful men turned at our entrance, their eyes taking in my charred, disheveled state and Arthur’s pale, shocked face, and reaching the logical conclusion. “Lady Antheia, are you hurt?” asked a Minister, a round, ruddy-cheeked man whose name I had never bothered to remember.

“Not any longer, but thank you for your concern,” I said. “I do apologize for the hour. I have a matter of some importance to put before the Queen.”

Queen Alice finally turned, a frown on her pretty, pleasure-loving face. She had never been equipped to rule. I was here to do a favor, really. “Lady Antheia. This is most irregular.”

“I know, Your Majesty.” I proffered a curtsey. “I am here to thank you for your hospitality of these past few years, and request your immediate surrender to the Vegetable Empire. We have superior weaponry, and we are even now amassing the superior numbers we will need to take your world as our own. If you cede yourselves to us, we may be merciful.”

And then, exactly as I had expected, all those powerful men drew their powerful weapons and shot me dead where I stood. My consciousness winked out before my body hit the floor.

7.

“Humanity, in addition to being delicious and very well designed for its environment, was constantly coming up with excuses to make war upon its own kind. If they had survived as an independent species long enough to establish the means for long distance space travel, we might have found ourselves with unwanted rivals for this galaxy’s treasures. It is because of this yearning for conquest that runs so strong in the veins of most meat that I must recommend we speed up our efforts to become the only sapient life living free in known space. It is, sadly, the only way to be safe from the threat of empire.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

I never put my shoes back on.

That may seem like a trifling detail, but that is because few people fully understand the deeply concentrated root systems to be found on the soles of a diplomat’s feet—or whatever passes for feet in the local environment. My body was destroyed, broken beyond repair, and my poor Jill broken with it. But when the Queen’s men toted that unwanted seed pod away, they did not notice the small roots that had broken off in the carpet, already working their way down, down, deep into the foundations of the palace.

When we sprout, we sprout quickly, for surprise is our best weapon. Dawn came, and I rose, faceless, a pale green whisper of a thing dressed in a mockery of human form. All in silence, I moved through the chamber to the door beyond, which led to the private apartments of the Queen. She was sleeping, innocent of what was about to befall her, her husband and consort snug beside her in the bed. I did not see them, for I did not have eyes, but there are other ways of sensing such things. She did not know I was there; she presented no threat.

I ate her.

8.

“It was a small matter for our soldiers to subdue the populace, once they had seen their Queen unmasked as an alien, welcoming the invaders into Buckingham Palace with open arms. Perhaps if we had been a little less swift, there would have been time to mount a resistance . . . but that was not to be. As the humans once said: The Queen is dead.

“Long live the Queen.”

—from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing.

I set my quill aside, considering the words I had written. They were good words: They would do nicely, and would serve well as a guide to the next invasion of a world like Earth. The fields were rich with our seedlings, and the men of science already looked outward, considering the next path our colony ships would take.

Footsteps behind me alerted me to the approach of my husband—a human custom, yes, but one which many of us who found ourselves with human forms and vaguely human ways of thinking had chosen to observe. It was a diversion, if nothing else, and could provide a new social frame, if it proved useful.

“All done?” asked Arthur, a smile on his emerald lips.

It had been a small thing to take a seedling of an open line, with no ancestral memory, and place it next to Arthur’s bound, struggling form. He had thanked me, of course, when his memories settled properly into their new home. He had always been a botanist. Now he could study himself, for centuries if he liked. It was my wedding gift to him.

“Yes,” I said, and wrapped my creeper vines around his waist and my arms around his shoulders, and kissed him with the mouth I had stolen from a human Queen. The British Empire had claimed the sun would never set, and they had been wrong, because they had been thinking too small.

For the sun to be shining always, one needs more than a single world. It is vital to acquire a galaxy.

©2014 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs Aliens, edited by Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

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

The Last Garden

Jack Skillingstead | 4110 words

The Surrogate walked past Casey’s window. She watched its shadow slip across the shade, then she stood and zipped up her flight suit. This was the day. No matter what.

The doorbell rang.

It was polite, the Surrogate. It had manners. It rang the doorbell. It said please and thank you. It had saved Casey’s life, twice, and the first time she had been grateful.

Casey bit her lip hard enough to hurt. The pain helped her focus on her mission. Because sometimes she didn’t believe in it. Sometimes she was weak and disloyal to her own kind. That was understandable, considering her own kind, the human race, on Earth at least, was an extinct species. What was there to be loyal to?

The embryos. The cloned embryos in cryostasis.

Her mother.

Twenty-six months ago, Casey and her nine crewmates had watched helplessly from orbit while a plague wiped out humanity with the brutal efficiency of a worldwide tsunami. The final message sent from Washington to all orbiting spacecraft said simply, “Don’t come down.” But Casey and her crew had no choice. Without re-supply vehicles, they couldn’t remain in space. Meanwhile, arguments raged on the Lunar colony, which was self-sustaining. Those in favor of staying put seemed to be winning. Then all communication coming from the Moon ceased.

The polite Surrogate rang the bell again. It claimed to worry about her, like a parent. But it couldn’t really be worried about her.

The Surrogate was a machine, a top-secret military-grade AI, from when there had been both a military and anything secret.

Casey stood in the entry, arms folded, feet planted on the vinyl floor. Military housing, drab and cheap. When she was a child in Virginia, Casey had lived with her mother in a big house with white columns in front. She remembered her mother pulling her down the dappled sidewalk in a red wagon, remembered the sound of the hard rubber wheels rolling on pavement. It was funny how that memory stood out but later ones had folded away into the dark. It was like peering down a long tube to a vision drenched in sunlight.

The knob turned, encountered the lock, turned harder until the lock broke and the door splintered away from the jamb.

The Surrogate had a paint-can head, eyes that glowed blue, and a slot mouth. The sturdy torso contained the power source. A flexible spine, like a length of knuckled bike chain, attached the torso to a pair of ingeniously swiveling hips. The legs were like attenuated cages made from carbon rods.

When Casey and her crewmates descended from orbit in two vehicles, automated defenses had immediately attacked them, destroying one vehicle outright and severely damaging the other. Casey managed a hard landing in the high desert of New Mexico near Tourangeau Air Base. Only Casey survived. Pinned inside the wreckage, her leg broken, she had expected to die of plague. The microbes, however, had all perished as soon as no humans were left to host them, and Casey had returned to consciousness and a world of bright pain in time to see the robot Surrogate peel away a flange of the damaged hull and reach for her.

Now Casey had let the Surrogate break open the door of the house. She hoped the destruction would make her angry at the robot, instead of frightened by what she was planning. She needed the anger.

“You didn’t answer, Casey Stillman,” the Surrogate said. “Our agreement was that you would answer.”

“I know that.” Casey’s voice broke. She wiped her eyes roughly. It was the stupid door, wood splintered and hanging there on bent hinges, like a memory of things unbroken that were now broken forever. Instead of producing anger, it lifted the cover off a deep well of sadness. For months after the crash, she had combed the internet and the airwaves, desperate for contact. But if anyone had survived, they were unable to communicate. During those same months, the Surrogate had nursed Casey, waited on and bonded with her—as it was programmed to do.

The robot fitted the split doorjamb together. “I will repair this.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Then I will help you move to a new house.”

“I don’t want a new house.” She stood as straight as she could. “I’m flying out to the Doomsday Vault, and you can’t stop me trying. I want you to lower the shield.”

If the Surrogate could have sighed, this is when it would have done so. “As we’ve discussed,” it said, “the embryos will not have survived.”

“You can’t stop me trying.”

“I have never stopped you. You have stopped yourself. Before this, your mission was the gun.”

“Will you not talk about the gun?”

“It concerns me.”

“You can’t be concerned about anything. You’re a machine.”

“I am an empathic Surrogate.”

“If you won’t lower the force shield, I swear I’ll crash into it on purpose and die. I know you don’t want that.”

Almost a minute passed. From the robot came only a sound like a flywheel flutter, or humming bird wings. “Here is my analysis,” the Surrogate said.

“Spare me.”

“The embryo clones preserved in cryostasis once represented your desire for restoration. But now they represent your desire to stop living. They are like the gun.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“My casing is filled with many things, but excrement is not among them.”

Casey rolled her eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t try and be funny.”

“Apologies. Our relationship has caused a symbiotic evolution of my algorithms. It is by design.”

“This isn’t a relationship,” Casey said. “And the embryo clones are not like the gun.” After the Surrogate came upon Casey fooling around with a pistol and her soft pallet, the robot had gathered all the loose weapons on the base and locked them in the armory.

“They beckon, like the gun, and promise the same conclusion. Leaving the protection of this base for a hopeless goal is irrational. It is suicide.”

“It isn’t, but even if it were, it would be none of your business.”

“It’s wiser, and safer, to await the Moonites.”

Casey snorted. She had long given up on a rescue mission from the Lunar colony, though the Surrogate continued to flog the possibility, probably as a strategy to mollify her. But Casey knew they would never come. The Surrogate referred to that certainty as Casey’s “attitude.”

“I’m going to try,” Casey said, “whether you turn the shield off or not.”

“My algorithms will not allow me to restrain you. But if you are determined, then I will come with you.”

“No.”

“Otherwise I won’t disable the force shield.”

“I already told you, I’ll fly into it. I’ll gun myself.”

“If you truly want to save the embryos, you will let me accompany you. Otherwise you admit your mission is a gun and not what you claim it is.”

“I don’t have to make deals with you.” Casey pushed past the Surrogate and strode out to the street. She stopped and closed her eyes, took a deep breath.

“Well, come on,” she said.

• • • •

Shattered aircraft hangers gaped like broken shells. Black furrows crisscrossed the runways. Wreckage smeared across the tarmac in rusty debris fields. The plague came and was assumed to be an act of biological warfare. Someone in the US, or China, or India, or Iran, or Russia unleashed the first retaliatory assault. The reactive response spread like the plague had spread. The world became a gun aimed at itself, which kept on firing even after there were no humans left to pull the trigger.

Ironically, in the last days, CDC scientists determined that the plague itself had not been an act of war. Microbes had filtered into the atmosphere, where they thrived, located human hosts, and proliferated throughout the population. Where the plague failed to kill, the weapon response from every country in the world had succeeded. The shield over Tourangeau Airbase should have protected it, as should have the shields over the White House, Norad, and other critical places. All the shields had gone down under cyber attacks as vicious as the hardware ones. The Surrogate, however, had figured out the code to reactivate the one at Tourangeau, and now the AI controlled it.

Some air vehicles at Tourangeau Air Base had gone undamaged. A wasp with a long stinger was painted on the nose of the electric VTOL. Casey hauled herself up to the canopy and claimed the forward seat. The Surrogate installed itself behind her. Casey buckled up and began her pre-flight check. But when she attempted to move the control surfaces, ailerons, rudder, and elevators—her side stick and pedals resisted her. “Are you doing that?”

“I will fly us out,” the Surrogate replied.

Casey craned her head around, awkward in the snug helmet. “You just open the shield, like we agreed.”

“The moment this air vehicle passes beyond the shield it will be attacked by weapons still in terrestrial orbit as well as the automated weapons still operating on the ground. I have downloaded complete specs and will fly.”

Casey wrenched at the control stick. “Let me fly my own goddamn ship.”

The Surrogate went quiet. Hummingbird wings fluttered.

Casey closed her eyes, let her fury subside to the point where she could speak without shouting. “You think you can fly better than I can?”

“I do not doubt your skill. But I can predict the assault and react with greater efficiency.”

Casey tapped her fingers on her thighs. She knew the Surrogate was right. The Surrogate was always right. It was one of the most infuriating things about it (a trait the robot shared with Casey’s mother). Rudimentary AIs directed the orbital and ground-based automated weapons. Some of the weapons were “ours,” some “theirs,” some “who knows.” And yes, it was probably beyond Casey’s skill set to evade them all.

“You’ll give me control once we clear the attack?” Casey said.

“There will be other attacks.”

“You will give me control.” Not a question this time.

“Very well.”

“Then let’s go.”

The instrument panel and heads-up display came alive. Powerful GE engines spun up. The ship rose vertically. At two hundred feet, the nose pitched down and they powered towards the invisible shield.

Beyond the shield, buried in a Doomsday Vault under the Sangre de Cristo mountains, lay the frozen embryos cloned from some of the greatest scientists and leaders on Earth, including Casey’s mother. They were the seeds of humanity’s future.

And Casey was the last garden.

They sped toward the shield. Casey blinked sweat out of her eyes. “The shield’s off, right?”

“No need. We can pass through unaffected from this side.”

“What? You never told me you could do that! You mean I could have—No wonder you wanted to come. You tricked me.”

“There will be a bump.”

The ship accelerated to full power, crushing Casey in her seat. If there was a bump, she didn’t feel it. The airframe was already shuddering. And then they were through and pitching steeply upward while rolling left. The sky flashed white and blue with energy bursts. The ship rocked wildly.

“Shoot back!” Casey yelled.

Instead, the Surrogate throttled down and deployed speed-breaks, which threw Casey against her restraints. If the Surrogate hadn’t reacted with inhuman speed and precision, the VTOL would have been destroyed. They skated across the sky, wing tips banked steeply. Then they were clear, rolling right and gaining altitude, finally leveling out.

“Okay,” Casey said, “hand it over.”

“I am adjusting the vector,” the Surrogate said. “Destination in six minutes.”

“Give me control!”

“There will be other attacks.”

“You shouldn’t even be here. You lied to me about the shield.”

Casey seized the side stick and pressed her feet to the rudder pedals, fighting the Surrogate for control. She hadn’t realized the robot could lie. That made it almost human. A warning light flickered, and something streaked up from the desert. The Surrogate wrenched the ship over, but the projectile clipped the starboard wing, and the ship barreled out of control. Sky and Earth swapped relative positions. Casey grasped the stick in a death grip. Despite that, the Surrogate established a semblance of stable, albeit inverted flight, rolled again for straight and level, and compensated for the loss of starboard thrust.

“Casey Stillman, let go, please.”

Casey released her grip and watched the displays. Hydraulic pressure dropped steadily on the starboard wing. The strike had severed a line. Worse, battery levels had plummeted, an emergency reflected in the off-key whine of the big electric turbine on the port side.

The ship wallowed toward the ground.

“We’re going to crash!” Casey’s heart was racing.

“I am managing it.”

The remains of a town passed below them. The VTOL, rocking and swaying under depleted power, traveled another mile. A landing pad came into view. The Surrogate angled them toward it, dumping two hundred feet of altitude before rearing back and engaging sputtering vertical thrust. The ship teetered on the edge. Casey tensed her body for impact. In the next moment the undercarriage absorbed the bone-rattling jolt of touchdown. Casey looked up. They had landed fifty yards short of the pad.

The instrument panel displayed the red lines of overtaxed and underpowered systems, and then the display went dark.

Casey popped the canopy. “Don’t say it.”

“Don’t say what?”

“That if I’d kept my hands off the controls we wouldn’t have been hit.”

The Surrogate reverted to hummingbird wings.

Casey unbuckled her restraints and turned around, kneeling on her seat. The Surrogate’s blank face regarded her. “Damn it. Not saying anything is the same as saying it.”

“I could have avoided the attack, yes.”

“I knew you couldn’t resist rubbing it in.”

She climbed down to inspect the damage. Hydraulic fluid dripped on Casey’s boot. A piece of the starboard wing’s trailing edge was missing, a ragged bite taken by the projectile. If the VTOL had been running on jet fuel instead of electricity, it would have exploded. As it was, shrapnel had penetrated the fuselage and damaged the battery array. Maybe the Surrogate could repair the wing, but without power, they were stranded. “I will effect repairs,” the Surrogate said.

“What about—”

“The repair procedure will render me helpless. So you will get your opportunity to pilot us back to base. You will have to manually deactivate the barrier. I will provide instructions. Don’t do it too soon, or the weapons will gain access ahead of you. Don’t wait too long, or you may misjudge the approach and destroy us.”

“How long will repairs take?”

“Estimated three hours.”

“I’ll be back by then.”

“Don’t go, please.”

From the stowage compartment Casey retrieved a pulse rifle, a sidearm, and a flashlight.

“Without me, your survival is questionable,” the Surrogate said.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

But the robot was already dismantling the starboard aileron assembly.

• • • •

Casey hiked up the steep terrain to the blast-door. She stayed off the road, using the trees for cover. Her boots swished in the undergrowth. She held her rifle at the ready, knowing it wouldn’t do her much good if weapons attacked her. Once upon a time, her mother had given her a tour of the Doomsday Vault. Casey had only gone because it was so rare that her mother invited her anywhere. “You’re so busy with your career,” she told Casey, neatly reversing the situation. Casey hadn’t been the one “too busy” for her mother.

Standing before the cryostasis capsules, Casey’s own lifelong position as a daughter-in-stasis did not fail to ring ironic bells. As an Important Person, one of the world’s top researchers in genetic engineering, Casey’s mother had spent most of Casey’s childhood somewhere outside Casey’s childhood. Maybe that’s why the little-red-wagon memory was so important.

At first glance the blast-door appeared intact, a slab of thick steel recessed under a brow of granite. Casey studied it from the trees. Something wasn’t right. Finally, Casey bit down hard on her lip, burst out of the trees, and ran to the door. Nothing attempted to stop her. In a moment, she understood why. From the trees, she hadn’t seen that the door’s magnetic locks had failed, probably as a result of the cyber attack two years ago. A narrow gap presented itself. She hooked her fingers around the edge, and hauled on the door until the gap widened sufficiently for her to squeeze through.

Inside, daylight fell in dusty shafts from the shattered ceiling.

Daylight.

High above, where Casey had been unable to see it, an explosive discharge had ripped open the mountain. Just as the Surrogate had assured her, the weapons had long ago destroyed the Doomsday Vault. Casey’s hope vanished like the mirage it had always been, something to crawl towards in a desert of regret and loneliness. For years, Casey had imagined the cloned embryos, tiny quick-frozen shrimp sealed in cryogenic capsules, buried deep behind impenetrable walls. She had imagined her mother.

Casey unclipped the flashlight from her belt, found stairs, and descended to the cryo vault. She had to be sure. Twenty minutes later, she was.

The embryos were all dead.

Her mother was dead. Again. Of course, it wouldn’t have been her mother, just her genetic potential, her familiar features. Casey would have nurtured the potential in her own virgin womb, would have raised the child behind the force shield, and perhaps she would even have sat with her and told her a fairy tale about the Moonites coming back to Earth.

Casey sat on an iron beam that had partially melted and crashed down. Alone in the dark, she felt the weight of her life, like the weight of the mountain. What else had she expected? The Surrogate had been right, again. The cryo vault was another gun, a thin excuse for a suicide mission. Casey wiped her eyes and stood up. How could a robot know her better than she knew herself? In symbiosis, its algorithms had deciphered the mystery of Casey’s own secret intentions.

She began climbing stairs.

• • • •

The Surrogate had cannibalized itself to repair the ship. Hollow rods from its legs completed the broken linkages in the starboard aileron assembly. Unused rods and couplings lay in the wing’s shadow, like discarded turkey bones. The hydraulic line had been welded, but what good would that do without fluid in the reservoir?

Using only its arms, the Surrogate had pulled itself back to the cockpit, where it sat bolt upright in the pilot’s seat, strapped in place.

“Okay,” Casey said. “You were right about the cryo vault. Satisfied?”

The Surrogate did not reply.

Casey hauled herself up to the cockpit. The Surrogate had patched a line from its own body and drained itself of fluid, giving the wing reservoir a blood transfusion. A thin cable led from the Surrogate’s chest through a new hole in the firewall to the batteries. Casey toggled the power on. Battery levels jumped to ninety-six percent. But the surrogate was inert. Even the hummingbird was still.

A different emotion supplanted all the others roiling inside Casey, an emotion she had once felt acutely and then spent years suppressing.

Grief.

“You goddam piece of junk,” she said, not meaning it.

Without the Surrogate, there was only Casey’s voice left in the world.

A tablet device lay on the tandem seat. Words displayed on the screen, instructions on transmitting a number sequence. Casey picked up the tablet, which was the key to unlocking the shield. She climbed into her seat, buckled her restraints, and waited for anger to muscle aside the grief of loneliness; then she spun up the engines, lifted away, and swung towards home base.

The first attack came almost immediately. Projectiles streaked up from the desert. Casey rolled left, rolled right, then plunged for the desert scrub, leveling out at fifty feet. A warning light flashed. Out of the clouds, a glittering swarm came at her.

Casey punched the throttle. The electric power plants whined like things about to burst apart. A burning odor filled the cockpit. The Surrogate rattled and bounced on the cable, the ship violently sucking the last kilowatt from its chest. The base lay dead ahead. So did the shield.

Heat rays crossed her flight path. Casey banked onto her wingtip and veered between them, flying with the skill of unconscious desperation, proving she did want to live. The maneuver drew the attack swarm into the rays. Fireballs burst like red kernels all around her. Casey tapped in the key code and transmitted it to the shield. She squeezed shut her eyes as the VTOL streaked over the border, the force shield rising automatically behind her. Rays, projectiles, and swarms burst spectacularly against it.

On the ground, Casey threw open the canopy. Sweating profusely inside her flight suit, she reached over the seat to unbuckle the robot, but the straps had melted into its frame. She used her knife to cut them away. The Surrogate’s metal body remained searingly hot. Casey ran to the nearest intact hangar and returned with a chain-fall and a rolling cart. She pulled on big silver oven-mitt-looking asbestos gloves and used the chain-fall to hoist the Surrogate out of the cockpit and lower it onto the cart.

• • • •

Restoring the Surrogate’s mobility proved impossible. Casey had left the turkey bone parts behind, and she wasn’t a mechanic, anyway. Replenishing the robot’s power seemed at least worth a try. Casey rolled the Surrogate to the fusion generator building, which powered the force shield and everything else on the base. She rigged a connection between the generator and the Surrogate, and then she waited. After three days the Surrogate showed no signs of life, or whatever it was that animated the AI. After a week she stopped checking on it.

Without the Surrogate’s voice, the base became a tomb in which Casey wept and talked to herself and then stopped talking. She wandered the streets she had always wandered, while inside she unraveled in loneliness. Some nights she stood at the perimeter, almost wishing the weapons assault would resume—and this time be successful. She toyed with the idea of lowering the shield, but she was past that.

At night, stars encrusted the New Mexico sky, a bed of diamonds to hold the yellow rind of the moon. Suddenly Casey’s attention quickened. A point of light sped silently across the sky. She sat forward, making the chair creak. But it was only a weather sat, remnant of the conquered human race, not a humanitarian mission from Luna. She stood up and walked through the broken door into her house.

• • • •

After a month’s absence, she returned to the generator building. It had taken that long to believe again in the possibility of hope. She dragged her feet the whole way, indulged detours, pretended she wasn’t hoping, and finally approached the door. Something rapped against it from the other side. Casey stopped—then ran the rest of the way. When she wrenched open the door, the legless Surrogate lay on the floor, one arm raised.

“You were gone a long time, Casey Stillman,” it said. “I was worried.”

She swallowed. “I’m here now.”

• • • •

Casey took the Surrogate with her when she went to the warehouse for supplies. MREs lasted forever and there were enough of them to feed a thousand soldiers for a year. She placed the Surrogate’s torso and paint-can head on the cart and pulled it behind her, the way Casey’s mother had pulled her in the red wagon. The sound of the wheels was like a memory echoing up a long tunnel. Casey looked over her shoulder. The Surrogate’s blue eyes watched her.

“They’re really coming, aren’t they,” Casey said. “The Moonites.”

“Yes,” the head in the wagon replied.

The Surrogate was always right.

©2017 by Jack Skillingstead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack Skillingstead’s first story appeared in 2003 and was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Since then he has sold more than forty short stories which have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Clarkesworld and many other magazines, original anthologies and Year’s Best volumes. His work has been translated into multiple languages and taught in classrooms from Rutgers to San Diego State. In 2013 his novel, Life On The Preservation, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award. Jack occasionally teaches workshops. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

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

Probably Still the Chosen One

Kelly Barnhill | 7347 words

“You must wait here,” the Highest of the High Priests told her. “We will return and bring you back to the Land of Nibiru once we have found the circlet to place upon your head.” The very mention of the circlet made the High Priest tremble with joy. Though the journey through the portal had been brief, the Land of Nibiru was many universes away from where Corrina now stood—in her own small kitchen, in her own small house. The priest looked strange, she realized, with his headdress and robe and flowing beard, next to the magnet-encrusted refrigerator and grimy cabinets and microwave that always smelled of cheese. She had not noticed the priests’ strangeness back in Nibiru. Everything was strange there. “You are the Chosen One. We are certain of it. And you will sit on the High Throne and your Rule will be benevolent and long.” He bowed low, and his long beard draped across the vinyl floor. It needed to have been swept days ago. And mopped. Cheerios clung to the long, gray strands.

“Okay,” Corrina said. She was barefoot and filthy and was likely leaving foot-shaped stains on the floor from the juice of an unknown berry, oozing now off her feet. She was eleven years old. The High Priest told her this was the normal age for a Chosen One. He had read all the history books, so he knew.

Corrina knew that she didn’t feel like the Chosen One. She had spent the last year and a day in the Land of Nibiru. She had learned to wield a sword and defend herself with a shield and make camp using only pine boughs and moss and the sustenance of the forest. She learned how to read a map and form a battle plan and howl over the dead. She was also very good at math—or she was before she left. She looked around. Her parents surely must have worried while she was gone.

“I won’t be long,” the High Priest promised. “Only a week at the very most. But the Zonniers are hungry for your blood, I’m afraid, so I must seal the Portal behind me. You will not be able to follow. You must wait for us to come and get you. You must not wander away.”

Corrina looked around. She never cared much for the kitchen. “What if I go a little bit away? Like to the next room.”

“We would prefer that you remain right here.”

“What if my mother is here when you come?” Corrina asked.

“We shall slay any that stand in the way of the Chosen One.”

“I’d rather you didn’t slay my mother.”

“All right, then,” the High Priest said. “We will simply bind her hands and feet, and then we will take you with us.”

“That is probably not a good idea either,” Corrina said. “My dad is usually gone for two weeks at a time on his truck. What if no one comes for her? She’ll die.”

“Fine.” The High Priest seemed annoyed. “We will give her a quick knock to the head and she will fall unconscious.”

Corrina shrugged. She and her mother were not particularly close—her mother wished for a girl who shared her love of shoes. Instead she had Corrina, with her scabby knees and her filthy feet and her love of t-shirts with pictures of skulls on them. Still. It’s not as though she wanted anything bad to happen to her mother. She was her mother, after all.

“That’ll be okay,” she said at last. “But not too hard.”

“It is imperative, Princess, that you remain here. You mustn’t move. You mustn’t stray. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Corrina said. “But what if I have to use the restroom?”

“What’s a restroom?”

“The privy.”

He sighed. “If you must. Just don’t go far. No journeys, if you take my meaning.”

She did, and she promised. And she wasn’t interested in journeying anywhere, anyway. She had been in the Land of Nibiru for longer than she planned, ever since she discovered that strange metal door in the cupboard under the sink—the door that only she could see. And then the Resistance needed her. And it felt good to be needed. After the hardships and worry and travel she had done—usually without sleep—she felt as though she could lie in her bed for another month. How astonished her mother would be to see her!

The High Priest’s eyes swelled with tears. He fell to his knees and embraced the girl, sobbing as he did so. “May the gods protect you while I’m away. And may the days be short between now and when you return to us. My precious princess.”

And with that, he lowered himself—all creaking joints—to the floor and caterpillar-crawled into the cupboard under the sink, wriggling into the portal and out of sight. Once the metal door closed, it vanished.

For now.

It was only a matter of time.

A week, he had said.

And then she would leave her home and her family and her world forever. And be the Chosen One. Corrina had never been special before. She did well in her studies, but she had few friends and usually simply blended in with the crowd. In Nibiru, there were flags with her face on them and songs in her honor. There was something to that, she decided.

Corrina looked at the time. 11:43. Funny, she thought. That’s the same time as when I left a year ago. It’s quite the coincidence.

She went down the hall to the bathroom and took a long shower, half-expecting her mother to come bursting through the door and plucking her naked self out of the stall, hugging her tight after being gone so long. But she didn’t.

Well, Corrina thought. It’s not as though we are close.

She dried off and went to bed.

The next day, her mother ate breakfast and poured coffee.

“Do you want cereal or pancakes?” her mother said. As though it was a regular day. And it was. When Corrina looked at the newspaper, she saw that the date was not a year and a day after she was last in this kitchen, but just a day. The next day. And no time at all had passed while she was in Nibiru.

So, she thought. Time works differently there. That could be a problem.

• • • •

The High Priest had told her to stay near the kitchen, and so she stayed.

She stopped going to school. She’d make a show of walking to the bus, but would hide in the bushes until her mother went to work, and then called herself in sick once the house was empty. After punishments and phone calls and meetings that she did not always attend, Corrina and her mother decided to try homeschooling, provided that Corrina do it herself while her mother left every day to go work at the hair salon.

“I expect you to do it right,” her mother said while lighting her fourth cigarette of the day. “Don’t embarrass me when you take those state exams.”

Corrina didn’t. She got the highest score in the whole state that year. Her old school put her picture on the front page of their newspaper, calling her their star student and taking all the credit, even though she was no longer enrolled. She didn’t care. She took books out of the library on mathematics and astronomy, as well as gardening, martial arts, hunting, weapon maintenance, and survivalist memoirs.

When her dad came home from his long hauls, she taught him some basic moves so that he could spar with her in the back yard.

“Where did you learn this stuff?” her father said, red-faced and panting. He clutched at his heart, but claimed the exercise was doing him good.

Corrina shrugged. “Books,” she said.

She didn’t tell him about the ruined temple and the bearded priests, and the youngest one who handed her a staff and said, “Now. Defend yourself,” and then he attacked her. She didn’t tell him how proud the priests were when she was finally able to swipe his feet, sidekick his belly, and send him pinwheeling to the stone floor with a tremendous thud. She didn’t tell him about the thrill she felt when she first held a sword in her hand, first felt that honed edge slice the air in front of her. She didn’t tell him how good—how very, very good—it felt to be dangerous.

“Books, eh?” Her father chuckled. “Well, that’s something. I had no idea books were so dangerous.”

The word thrilled her to the core. She had half a mind to sucker punch her dad, but his breathing was ragged and raw. She helped him inside instead.

• • • •

A year passed. The High Priest didn’t come back.

• • • •

The summer before Corrina turned thirteen, her parents split up. They called her into their bedroom. They had been screaming at each other all day. Corrina had spent the day sitting on the kitchen floor right next to the cupboard under the sink, trying to will the High Priest to return. When she was called into their room, her parents sat at the edge of the bed, holding hands. Their eyes were red.

They explained what a divorce was, as though it was a brand new concept that Corrina had never heard of before.

“Which parent would you like to live with, honey?” her dad said gently, as though it was a foregone conclusion. It was no secret that she preferred her father. Her mother checked her nails.

“Which one of you is keeping the house?” Corrina asked slowly.

“Your mother is,” her dad said. “I found a nice apartment right next to the library.”

“I’ll stay with mom,” Corrina said. Corrina’s mother’s head snapped up and her father instantly began to cry.

“Are you sure?” he faltered.

How could she explain it to her dad? Though the memory of her time in the Land of Nibiru—the metal door, the near-constant rain, the Zonnier Hordes howling for her blood, the band of resisters and rebels who were bound to one another by something bigger than incidental family status or belief or anger, but by love, camaraderie, and brotherhood—was as fresh to her now as it had been the day she returned, there was a part of her that had begun to wonder if it was nothing more than a dream. They hadn’t come back. They promised to come back. They promised to return for her. They called her Princess, after all. The Chosen One. But she was no longer eleven. And she was growing by the day.

“I’m very sure,” she said. “I can’t move. I just can’t.”

And she didn’t.

• • • •

Another year passed. The High Priest still hadn’t come back.

• • • •

Corrina kept a stack of sketch notebooks filled with her memories of Nibiru. Drawings of people, ruined buildings, landscapes. Drawings of plants, flowers, animals. When she sat at the kitchen table and closed her eyes while facing the cupboard under the sink, she could see all of Nibiru in her mind’s eye as clearly as if she was there.

But she noticed something else, too.

As she aged, she began to notice things about the landscape and the Resistance that she had not noticed when she was eleven. For example, while the High Priests and the Resistance were both ostensibly fighting the same enemy, they didn’t seem to be talking to one another. Indeed, after she had warned the Resistance and helped them ready themselves for the battle, the High Priests were nowhere to be seen. She only was brought to them later, after a High Priest had found her out in the forest gathering berries, and told her that the best berries were over here, next to the old abbey.

And later, when she returned to the Resistance, there had been a party.

She had a friend in the Resistance, a boy named Cairn, who was a few years older than she was, who spat on the ground whenever the High Priests were mentioned.

“Old windbags,” he said. “They aren’t fighting with us.”

“But they want the same thing. Don’t they?” Corrina was honestly confused.

He spat again. “Nah. They just want not to be slaughtered by the Zonnier Hordes. Of course, the reason why they are here in the first place is the High Priests’ fault. They convinced the King to attack. They said the Zonnier were weak. And it was us—my parents and my whole village—who were sent into the battle with no training and poor weapons. And now the Zonnier want revenge. They razed the Noble City, and I don’t blame them. But they have no call killing us. We just want to farm in peace.”

At the kitchen table, Corrina drew a picture of Cairn—his grown-out hair, his lopsided smile, the scar cut across his cheek. She had such a crush on him then! If she was honest with herself, she had a crush on him now. Even now. She drew his pet—a smallbeast named Ricu—perched on his shoulder. It looked like a largish rat with fluffy fur and very long ears. She loved Ricu, though Ricu did not love her back.

How old was Cairn now, she wondered? Does he wonder what happened to her? If she ever made it back to the Kingdom of Nibiru, she might be old. Or maybe he would. Would he even recognize her then?

She looked at the picture. It seemed so alive to her—as though Cairn and Ricu would come leaping out and the three of them would have their own adventure. She laid her hand on the page. It was just paper.

• • • •

Another year passed. The High Priests did not come.

• • • •

When she was fifteen, her mother floated the idea of the two of them moving in with her very rich boyfriend. Corrina dug in her heels. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You can move in with him, but I am staying.”

“But I thought—” her mother said.

“I can’t move,” Corrina said. “I just can’t.”

They fought and fumed, but eventually the rich boyfriend moved to Rio with his secretary.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Corrina said as her mother slammed her bedroom door. It wasn’t true, though. Corrina hadn’t warned anyone.

(She had warned the Resistance about the coming Hordes. She had seen them approach right when she tumbled out of the Portal. It was her first action that she took in the Land of Nibiru, and it saved a thousand lives. It wasn’t really a thousand, but that was the story they told after that. It was the reason they thought she was the Chosen One. Just dumb luck.)

• • • •

Another year passed. And another. The High Priest still hadn’t come back.

• • • •

When she was seventeen, her mother and father sat her down to discuss the possibility of going to college. She had gotten her provisional diploma from the State Homeschooling Office, and had knocked her college entrance exams out of the stratosphere.

“You can go anywhere you want,” her father had said.

“I’ve gotten emails from the professors you’ve done your MOOC courses with,” her mother said. “They’ve all highly encouraged me to have you apply to their programs. Especially the man from Oxford. Wouldn’t that be fancy! We could buy you new shoes!”

“I can’t move,” Corrina said, and her parents’ faces fell. “I just can’t.”

She explained to them about online college. She told them that she had already started—and look! Straight A’s. Library science. It was a real degree, she assured them.

But there was another reason why she couldn’t leave that had nothing to do with the Land of Nibiru. She met a boy who was using the computers at the library to look for jobs. He was new in town. “Needed a fresh start,” he had said. He grew up on a farm, and didn’t want to spend another day smelling the lake of pig shit that sat across the road from his parents’ house.

He would come over to the house while Corrina’s mother was gone at work. Corrina taught him how to box and how to spar and how to flip a man onto the floor when he wasn’t looking. And then he flipped her onto her bed when she wasn’t looking, and taught her something else entirely. Within two months she was throwing up her breakfast. After four months, she was shopping online for new brassieres to accommodate her growing bustline and for pants with elastic panels at the belly.

“Grandparents?” her mother said, turning pale and beginning to fan her face.

Corrina sat quietly, looking at her hands. Frankly, she was shocked they hadn’t notice. She had been showing for well over a month. Her parents just didn’t notice much.

“Oh, hell no,” her father said, storming out of the house.

The boy moved in the following week.

A little over a year later she was pregnant again, this time with twins.

Two years after that, she was pregnant yet again. A singleton, which was a relief. Her mother had moved to Florida with a man named Arnold who lived on a boat in the Keys. Her father had died. The boy—not a boy any longer—after learning about the new pregnancy, had decided to move back to the farm. There was money in pigs, he said. And there was a girl who had broken his heart before but wanted him now. He told Corrina that the children couldn’t come with him, but he would send checks every month. Surely she understood.

Corrina did. Sometimes people just don’t come back. She knew that now. She kissed his cheek and comforted the children as he got into his truck and drove away forever.

• • • •

Another year passed. The cupboard under the sink was just a cupboard.

• • • •

Breakfast was loud. The baby yelled. The twins yelled. Her oldest yelled. Corrina never yelled. There was no point. She kept her eyes on the newspaper. There was a rattling sound. Like a cupboard door shaking back and forth. Corrina pressed her lips together and didn’t investigate. There was no door under the sink. She said this to herself over and over again. She knew now that there never had been. Or she was pretty sure.

She had managed to secure a job as an archivist for a law firm down the road. It was her first job in the real world and not a freelance gig on the internet. The pay was good and they had onsite childcare, which was better, and she was grateful to have landed it. But it meant that she would be out of the house.

Her eyes drifted to the cupboard door under the sink.

“Mama,” said Jacob, the oldest. He was four now. “What are you looking at?

He was always the most attuned to her. She had read that oldest children were like that.

“Nothing,” she said. The door appeared to rattle. Just a little. All on its own. She told herself that she was imagining it.

“Nothing,” said Alice, the girl portion of the twins. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” sang Andrew, her twin brother.

Rufus, the baby, had no words. He just pawed at Corrina’s breasts and opened his mouth wide. At only seven months old, he was already twenty-three pounds. A tank. At this rate, he’d be bigger than the twins before his first birthday.

“Mommy starts a new job tomorrow,” Corrina said.

Jacob wrinkled his brow. He looked around the kitchen. “Where?” he said, as though a job was sitting in a bag on the counter, like a new toy.

“Not far,” she said. “Down the road.”

“With Daddy?”

“Daddy isn’t coming back.”

“I know that,” Jacob said, his cheeks going quite red.

Corrina readjusted Rufus’s weight so as not to overburden her shoulders. His thick muscles kicked and rippled and squirmed. It was like trying to nurse a gorilla, she thought.

“No, we will be going together. You and your sister and your brothers and me. I will work in the basement, and you guys will go to the day care center. A school. We can walk there in the morning and walk home at suppertime. You’ll like it.”

Jacob looked skeptical. “I don’t think I’ll like it.”

“I like it,” Alice said. Alice liked everything.

“I like it, too,” Andrew said. Andrew liked anything that Alice liked. It drove Alice crazy. She whacked her brother on the head with a block. He didn’t seem to notice.

The next morning, before the kids got up, Corrina stood in the kitchen. It wasn’t as though she had never left the house. She did. She went to the store occasionally. And the library. And she went in for her interview. But she never left for very long. And never all day.

Still. It was time. How many years had it been? Too many. Eleven was a long time ago. And here she was, wasting her life. It was time to rejoin the world—she and her kids together.

Her eyes drifted back to the cupboard door. Was it her imagination, or was it rattling again? It was her imagination, clearly. She was sure of it. Still, she reached into her correspondence box and pulled out a blue note card and a black marking pen.

“BE RIGHT BACK,” she wrote in large, bold letters. She wasn’t sure if the High Priest could read, or if he could read English. He had explained to her that part of being the Chosen One meant that everyone could understand her and she could understand everyone else. She had been skeptical of that at the time.

“So,” she said, “we might be speaking the same language and not know it.”

“Well,” he allowed. “I suppose, but that wouldn’t make very much sense, now would it. How could we have the same language in different worlds?”

“What’s two plus two?” she asked.

“Four,” he said, “but what’s that got—”

“We have the same math. Maybe we speak the same language, too.”

They agreed to drop the subject, but she wondered about it now. If she wrote, “Be right back,” in English, would he be able to understand it, given that she was, after all, the Chosen One? She had no idea, but she figured she’d try anyway.

• • • •

When she got home, the card was undisturbed and the door was closed. The High Priests still hadn’t come.

• • • •

That night, after spending two hours trying to get the kids to stay in bed and then falling heavily asleep on the couch without washing her face or brushing her teeth, she dreamed of the Land of Nibiru again. It had been years since she had done so. She couldn’t remember the last time. In her dream, she was back in the Resistance camp at the banks of the Iygath River. They had suffered several losses in the battle the night before, and had used the thick forests leading toward the Iygath as cover during their retreat. The Zonnier Hordes, being as they were from the high Zoni plains, where trees were as rare as skyscrapers—which was to say, nonexistent—were afraid of the forest. They quaked in fear every time they went too close.

The forest was safe for now. It was only a matter of time, though, before the Zonnier Hordes enlarged their collective courage enough to swallow their fear, approach the forest, and light it on fire.

Nothing gave the Resistance more worry than the possibility of fire. The trees were their greatest defenders, but could be transformed into weapons easily enough. Every day they prayed for rain.

But for now, the Resistance was focused on filling hungry bellies and nursing wounds. This was one of the first battles that Corrina herself had fought in, and it was the very first time that she had held her sword in the way that she had been taught, allowing herself to hook the blade right under the chin of the Zonnier and then snap her elbows straight, whipping them in front of her body in a wide arc, neatly removing the Zonnier’s head from its shoulders. The High Priests instructed her to examine the body after she had done so, that she might be able to watch the twisted soul of the Zonnier wiggle from the open neck and extend its nine legs and three mouths to the sky before shuddering once and expiring on the ground. They had described the process in sickening detail, giving Corrina nightmares for over a week, and she had no interest in seeing it as described.

It was a mistake, as it turned out. One of the Zonnier souls was wearing the circlet that was destined to rest on the head of the Chosen One. And, according to the High Priests’ various ministrations, that soul emerged in the most recent battle. And then it was lost. Every other warrior carefully examined the souls as they emerged from the bloody neck stumps of the slain.

“Except you, Corrina,” the High Priest said. “I mean Princess,” he amended quickly, though it seemed to Corrina that he did not mean it.

“I’m sorry,” she said for the hundredth time. “I just couldn’t do it.”

“Not couldn’t,” the High Priest said. “Didn’t. There is a difference, you know.”

In her dream, she was no longer eleven. And the High Priest’s voice sounded suspiciously like her father’s.

“It’s not my fault!” She said in her grown-up voice.

“Of course it is!” the High Priest said. “But it is understandable. It was your first beheading, after all. It is unfortunate, though. Now we must find that circlet—if the Hordes haven’t found it first. And our collective task is much harder.”

Corrina stormed out.

There was a boy waiting for her outside. Cairn. He smiled broadly as he watched her approach. He didn’t seem to notice that she was older.

Corrina found this odd.

I guess this means I’m about to wake up, she thought. She resisted the idea, hoping to stay in the Land of Nibiru for as long as she could. It had been so long—so very long. And she missed it.

“Are you going somewhere?” Cairn said.

“No,” Corrina said. “Maybe. I can’t tell, actually. I’m not sure if I was here to begin with.”

“Oh, you’re here,” he assured her. “But there’s something you need to know.”

He had begun to fade at the edges. She would be awake soon.

“What?” she asked. Her throat hurt. Like she had swallowed a fishhook. Her life had not been unhappy. Far from it. It had simply been indifferent. She sometimes felt as though her life had been suspended in a jar full of formaldehyde. She was in stasis. Her year in the Land of Nibiru was the only time she was ever truly happy.

“The High Priests don’t know what they’re talking about. Remember that.”

And she woke with a start.

The door to the cupboard under the sink rattled and shook. She had a crick in her neck. Stupid couch, she thought. The door rattled again.

Her throat still hurt. She pulled her legs out from the cocoon of her cardigan and quietly placed her bare feet on the floor. She had been trained in the Noble Art of Stealth and had practiced the fundamentals of it every day since she left the Land of Nibiru. She was coiled like a spring. Very slowly, she approached the door. Very quickly, she flung it open.

No portal.

No High Priest.

Just a rat.

Or she assumed it was a rat. It squeaked and darted across the kitchen floor and launched itself down the stairs leading to the basement.

“UGH!” she said. “Nasty.” She hated rats.

There were smallbeasts in the Land of Nibiru. They looked like rats, and were smart like rats, but they were far more adorable. Or at least she remembered them as being more adorable. That was surely a rat. It wasn’t adorable at all. Wasn’t it?

Her alarm blared upstairs.

“MOMMY!” Jacob shouted from his room. He was, no doubt, sitting on his bed, wide awake, minding the time. Watching the minutes tick by on his sun and moon clock until he could be reasonably allowed to trot into her room and wake her up.

“I know, honey!” she called back.

The pink edge of dawn crept into the eastern window. The cupboard rattled again. “Stupid rats,” she muttered, and went upstairs to take a shower. During her lunch break, she’d call an exterminator. If she remembered.

By the time her first week ended, she’d had seven dreams about the Land of Nibiru. Sometimes she was eleven in these dreams. Sometimes she was her proper age. Each time, she had to arrange childcare in order to go into battle.

On her fourteenth night, she dreamed that she taught Jacob to parry and jab with a wooden sword.

On her twenty-first night, she dreamt that she went riding into the center of the Zonnier Hordes with Rufus strapped to her back. Her battle cry rang in harmony with his please-nurse-me wail.

On her twenty-eighth night, she dreamt that she confronted the High Priests in front of the whole Resistance. “Your plan is stupid,” she shouted, as her children clung to her legs. “And more people will die needlessly for a war that has waged for far too long.” Rufus sobbed. “Grow up!” she shouted, though in retrospect, she was not sure if she shouted it to the High Priests or to Rufus.

“You tell ’em!” Cairn shouted, who obviously thought it was directed at the High Priests.

“You are supposed to be eleven!” the Highest of the High Priests retorted, growing very red in the face. “And you’re not supposed to have opinions. Or . . .what are those things called? The things she had to bring when she took her own sweet time getting organized to come with us?”

“Tampons, your Excellency,” said one of the lower High Priests.

“Exactly. Or brassieres. You’re not supposed to have those either. Or opinions. Did I say that already?”

“You did, your Excellency, but it is still just as apt.”

“It is not out of the ordinary to pack a brassiere,” Corrina said. “Or tampons. I had no idea how long I’d be here. I also brought a diaper bag. Does that bother you, too?”

“You brought nothing with you when you came the first time,” the High Priest huffed.

“True. But I was eleven.”

“I liked you better when you were eleven.”

“And I liked you less,” she said with a smile. “I’m terribly fond of you now.”

And then she woke up. The cupboard rattled. Her forehead itched. She got out of bed and practiced a perfect Wolf’s Feint using her fuzzy bunny slipper instead of a sword. Her muscles knew every angle. Her bones snapped surely into place.

“Mommy?” Jacob said. “What are you doing?”

“Breakfast,” Alice said.

“Breakfast,” Andrew said, not to be outdone.

And she got them ready and took them to work. The rat watched them from the top of the basement stairs. Of course it was a rat. She could see him out the corner of her eye. He had long ears that came to two sharp points. Just like the smallbeasts from Nibiru.

That night she checked under the sink. No portal. And the note was still there. Though, strangely there was a hash mark that she could not remember putting there herself.

That night she dreamed of Nibiru. Again.

• • • •

A few days later, her boss came to visit her in the archives. He was an older gentleman, about the same age her father would have been, had he lived. He had wide, soft hands.

“Listen, Corrina,” he said. “We have an issue to discuss.”

Her heart sank. She thought of the cupboard under the sink and her husband’s truck driving away. People leave and they do not come back, she thought. “Are you going to fire me?” she said.

“What?” He was truly surprised. “No! Of course not. Everyone says that you’ve integrated yourself into our daily operations beautifully and no one can imagine what we’d ever do without you.”

She relaxed. At least that.

“Listen, did you drive today?” Her boss’s voice was deep, serious. He had a face full of concern.

“No,” she said. “My kids and I prefer to walk.”

He nodded. “Okay then. I am going to arrange an escort for you to make sure you get home safely. There is a gentleman from the police coming to chat with you in a moment. I took the liberty of requesting a watch on your house. A man came in today, asking for you. And then he wanted to see your children. And then he threatened to slay any that stand in his way.”

“Slay?” Corrina said. “He used the word slay?”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“No,” she said, her face was blank. “Not at all.”

“The thing is, he was armed.”

“A gun? My god.”

“No,” her boss said. “Even weirder. A sword. Randal and Julia from accounting jumped him when he wasn’t looking and got the sword away. He’s in police custody now. But he kept asking for you.”

“What does he look like?” Corrina asked, though she already knew.

“Old guy,” her boss said. “Weird clothes. With a long gray beard.”

• • • •

After chatting with the police and being escorted home, she checked the cupboard under the sink. There was no door. There was no portal. It was just a coincidence. She couldn’t even find any evidence of the rat.

The High Priests hadn’t come. They would never come. She wasn’t the Chosen One. There was no Nibiru.

• • • •

On the forty-ninth night she dreamed of Nibiru again. Seven times seven nights of dreams. It felt significant. In her dream her feet were bare and she was walking across a berry patch. With each step, the berries swelled and burst, inking her feet with juice. From time to time she’d reach down and slide her hands along the stalks, pulling berries into the cups of her palms, and pouring them into her mouth.

“Don’t eat all of them,” a voice said. Cairn. She’d know him anywhere.

“I’m glad to see you,” she said.

“Of course you are,” Cairn said. “I’m amazing.” She took his hand. She was eleven. She walked. She was twenty-two. She looked at him. She was eleven. She turned away. She was twenty-two.

They came to the edge of a ridge. Down below was a valley. The Resistance was there. They were tired and cold and bedraggled. Their children were hungry. Beyond, past the edge of the Forest, the Zonnier Hordes nursed their wounds. They were tired and cold and bedraggled. Their children were hungry. Corrina opened her eyes wide.

“They have nowhere to go,” she said. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t known it before.

Cairn shook his head. “The High Priests told the King to poison the land on the Zoni plains. Some kind of magic. The animals died and the water is bad and the grasses withered and the crops killed anyone who ate them. It was a total disaster. They came here looking for refuge, and their presence was mistaken for war. Unfortunately, they are very good at war.”

Corrina dug her hands into her pockets. “Assuming I am the Chosen One,” she said slowly.

“You’re probably still the Chosen One,” Cairn said.

“Well. I’m not admitting that I am.”

“Don’t you read stories?” Cairn said, exasperated. “If you doubt you’re the Chosen One, it pretty much proves that you are.”

Corrina waved him off. “If I am, it means I have the gift of languages, right? That’s like, one of the things. Which means I can talk to both sides. I could negotiate a peace.”

Cairn was silent.

“They killed my parents, you know. Slaughtered them where they stood.” He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. He was still a boy, after all. He had not grown up.

“You killed many of their parents, too,” Corrina countered. “So did I. More than I wish. Maybe it’s time to be done. Farm. Rebuild. Share with each other. It’s not new stuff—people have done this before. It can work.”

“So you’re coming back?” Cairn said hopefully.

“If I can,” she said. “I’m not eleven anymore, you know. And I need to bring my kids. What’s the childcare situation?”

Cairn frowned. “What’s childcare?”

“Never mind, we’ll figure it out.”

“In any case,” Cairn said, reaching into his satchel. “You’ll need this. I found it yesterday. I haven’t showed it to the High Priests yet. I don’t trust them to do the right thing.” He handed her a gold circlet. She felt the weight of it in her hands. It hummed with its own kind of magic.

She woke up in her bed. Her feet were stained with berry juice. She was still holding the circlet.

“Well then,” Corrina said.

• • • •

When the High Priests got the call, they were standing in the center of the Resistance Camp, going over the battle plans for the campaign that they hoped would spell the end of the Zonnier Hordes. It would be a bloodbath, on both ends, but they felt fairly certain that it would spell the end of things. The Resistance was balking, though.

“Cowards,” one priest muttered under his breath.

That was when the door appeared. Right there in the middle of everything.

And a voice.

“My name is Corrina,” the voice said. It came from the land, the sky, and the trees. It hummed in the bones. The Resistance fell to their knees. “And I am the one you call Chosen.”

“We are saved!” they shouted. They waved the flags with the image of the Chosen One emblazoned in their center. Someone began to sing.

The High Priests felt their spirits falter. They had hoped to bring the child back after the battle. They couldn’t afford her getting killed and they certainly couldn’t afford her getting battle fatigue. War is not pleasant for children. That’s why they had sent her away in the first place. Best she not see it.

“Why, Princess!” the Highest of the High Priests said. “How on Earth did you manage to open the Portal?”

The circlet, he knew. She has the circlet. But how? She had control of the Portal now. That could be a bother.

“I would like the High Priests to come through the Portal for a conference, please,” the voice said. “Just for a moment.”

“But—”

“Right now.”

The High Priests began to grumble. The Portal was tough on the knees. And one of their own had already gone through and still had not come back. What of him? These were things they wanted to say out loud, but the Resistance was watching, and they could not.

One by one, they filed into the Portal.

• • • •

The Chosen One had laid out a meal. The High Priests, though they were better fed than any in the Resistance, were still in possession of bellies that occasionally knew Want—as they did now. The table was pure white and was trimmed with a metal that shone like silver. Of course the Chosen One lived like a queen in her own country. It stood to reason.

“Sit,” the Chosen One said.

She had grown up. She explained to them that time flowed differently on different sides of the Portal. Just like a stream flowing to the ocean, there were sections when the waters of time moved slowly and methodically, and there were bits when it raced down a steep, steep slope. But since the two worlds had separate streams, they did not necessarily correlate. She had no idea when they’d return to the Land of Nibiru. She hoped that, with the Portal open, the time streams would be synched for a bit.

The High Priests didn’t listen. She had laid out cold cuts and rolls and muffins and cheese. Fruit. Her mom’s famous chili recipe. Cookies. A bowl of grapes. They ate ravenously.

“I’ve left instructions for the oven, and there are several casseroles in the freezer,” she said. She had a baby on her hip. A duffel bag in her hand. The other children had backpacks on their backs.

And she wore the circlet on her head.

“Princess—” the Highest of the High Priests said with his mouth full.

“I am going to negotiate a peace,” she said, shooing her children through the Portal.

“Mommy’s coming right behind you,” she whispered to the kids. They needed no encouragement. Tunnels behind tiny doors were the funnest thing in the world. Corrina had thought the same thing when she was eleven.

“But you can’t,” the Highest Priest said. “They’re barbarians.”

“So is everyone,” she said. She eyed the Portal. Her circlet hummed. She raised her hand, and it enlarged, opening behind the sink. With a quick leap, she landed surely on the counter, her legs coiled under her body, her muscles ready to spring. Rufus squealed with delight. She kissed him on the center of his shiny bald head.

“But, Princess,” another Priest said.

“Only a week,” she said. “Then I’ll return.”

“But—”

“May the gods protect you while I am gone,” she said with a grin. And she slid into the black, and closed the Portal behind.

• • • •

For the last thousand years, in the Land of Nibiru, they have told the story of the Mother Queen, and the Band of Saints that went into the Black to return her to her throne, so that she might bring healing to the land. And she did come back, and she did heal the land. The Zoni and the Nibu joined hands and hearts and homelands and lives, and a thousand years of peace followed her return to her people. The Saints succeeded, but did so at a terrible cost. The Portal closed and it never re-opened. Every year, both Zoni and Nibu returned to where the Portal last opened to light incense and sing songs and say prayers of thanksgiving.

And year after year, they never came back.

©2017 by Kelly Barnhill. | Art © 2017 by Alan Bao.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Barnhill writes short stories for grown-ups and novels for children. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Sun, Tor.com, Postscripts and other journals, and several anthologies. Her novels, The Mostly True Story of Jack, Iron Hearted Violet, and The Witch’s Boy, have garnered several starred reviews. She has received the Parent’s Choice Gold Award, and has been a finalist for the Andre Norton Award and the Minnesota Book Award. Recently, she received a McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship in Children’s Literature. An animated movie based on her novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon is in development. Her novella “The Unlicensed Magician” won the 2016 World Fantasy Award.

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

The Memorial Page

K.J. Bishop | 1930 words

It’s my habit, of an evening, to walk along the canal, a grey and sleepy little waterway that runs through our village in the low-lying Eastmarch. I follow the canal into the countryside for two miles, to the door of the Fighting Temeraire. This old stone inn by the water is a place where one can drink an excellent rum punch, and share the evening with country people and with those interesting travellers who, for their various reasons, prefer not to stay at the Rooster in the village centre. One Eve of St. Wallace, in the Temeraire’s ale room, fortune permitted me to clink tankards with no less a person than Captain Hector Drake, only a month before he met his appointment with the noose. I was sorry to hear of his fate; this country has lost one of its most convivial highwaymen. Let us drink to Drake. Inside the Temeraire, I have had good conversations with, at my guess, half the brigands, gypsies, vagabonds, roaming thespians, and other road-folk of the eastern lowlands. We are all served by the Temeraire’s owner, the magnificent Albina, of the monumental silhouette and jet-beaded breast, who is something of a goddess to her men. It is mostly men who come to the Fighting Temeraire, but one night in the middle of last November, I met a rare woman traveller.

The north wind was blowing sleet across the canal, the willows beside the water were bare, and like frail medusae they swayed violently in the wind. A small boat, come adrift from its moorings, knocked along by itself. Wrapped in an oilskin, clutching a lantern, I persevered through this autumn inclemency, wondering if I would meet anyone worth the journey.

I was rewarded, for that night the peregrine woman was there. Her colour was very black, a marvel to see in the Eastmarch. She was sitting alone in the ale room, eating a pie dinner. I had a rum punch by myself, so as not to seem rudely forward, then approached her. Her brow was high, her nose curved, and among her white teeth there were three gold ones. As she spoke our language well, and was pleasant, I said I would stand her a drink for a story. She replied that she did not drink alcohol, but would accept the price of her meal, to which I agreed.

Her name, she said, was Arnaude. I expected her to relate something of her homeland or the journey that had brought her here to our chilly country. However, she instead began to recite a story along the lines of a legend:

“Of all the cities that human beings have ever raised on this Earth, the one which they contrived to make closest to the perfect ideal was named Njaua. It was a place of marvels which cannot be described at all. Over many generations, its populace had learned the secrets of right conduct and good governance. They enjoyed peace, justice, liberty, and prosperity, and had abundant leisure, which they devoted to the quest for perfection. How they defined perfection is not known, but the quest itself generated numerous beneficial outcomes. It is written that Njaua possessed sublime architecture, incomparable gardens, and a street plan whose angles and proportions generated, through occult mathematics, vibrations in the ether which had tonic effects on body, mind, and soul. The scientists of Njaua created precious metals in alchemical ovens, and knew methods of fashioning automata which could perform menial labour, relieving the human citizens from all drudgery and allowing them to devote themselves to the cultivation of talent and virtue. Urbane talking beasts discoursed with the men and women in the salons and tea houses, and no hour passed unaccompanied by music.

“If you tried to reconstruct Njaua from this description, you would fail before you began. You could not really imagine how the buildings and gardens appeared, still less how the automata worked or the beasts spoke, or what the secrets of good living were. But if you could reconstruct it, you might notice the one flaw in this superb city. The flaw in Njaua was born of her own driving ideal: In concentrating on perfecting herself, she fell out of step with the far from perfect world around her. Her citizens learned memory as a skill, but they were selective in what they remembered. They forgot about cruelty and greed, and need and suffering. It did not occur to them that Njaua was an unguarded treasure, and a feast before the eyes of the hungry. Such disputes as arose among themselves they treated as opportunities to practice rhetoric and negotiation.

“A year arrived when one of the yellow khans came riding towards Njaua with an army of horsemen. Gold and blood were his muses. Word of sacked and incinerated cities preceded him, carried in broken mouths. Wisdom herself could not have negotiated with that man. The people of Njaua, who possessed courage as they possessed so many other virtues, chose to remain in their cherished city and defend it. However, they were not so foolish as to believe they would succeed. To save Njaua from dying utterly, they decided to preserve its essence. The vehicle they proposed for this task was a book, a codex, to contain a distilled record of Njaua: its history, plans of its streets and its great buildings, the essentials of its unique sciences, biographies of the most outstanding citizens, miniature copies of the greatest paintings in the galleries, sketches of sculpture and architecture, salient passages from the most important texts in the libraries, extracts from the scores of the finest music composed in the city during its long, luxurious life. It is not known how they decided what was the greatest, the most important, the most worthy of preservation. We do know that they made room in the book for the favourite proverbs of the people, their funniest jokes, and some of the things said by their children. Nor did they neglect to include a confession of their mistakes. They conceived this summary as a seed from which a new Njaua could be grown.

“The book was completed only hours before the conqueror’s trumpets were heard, and a citizen was chosen by lot to carry it away to safety. The one to whom the lot fell was a tiger from among the talking beasts. His name has not been preserved. The tiger journeyed for several years with the book strapped to his great striped back, going whichever way the khan did not, stopping in every town and village he came to. He met with varying receptions. Most of the people he encountered mistrusted him. Some tried to capture him, some marvelled and were afraid, and a few tried to worship him as a god. Others showed interest in the book, but explained that they had their own ways and were happy with them. Some wanted to buy the book as a curiosity, and they learned what a tiger’s yawn looks like. But a tiger is a patient animal. He continued to search for a people into whose keeping he could deliver the ember of his lost home.

“When the tiger was old and had walked around half the world, he arrived in a town called Vhar. The people who dwelled there, upon viewing the Book of Njaua, were filled with wonder and the desire to become great. They honoured the tiger and declared that they would henceforth be guided by the book. They taught him their language and learned his. In recognition of Njaua’s history, they resolved to make themselves enlightened, but rather than ignore the world, be a friend and an example to it, so that enlightenment should spread.

“Over the course of centuries, they achieved their desired society and built Vhar into a great-hearted and gracious city, full of marvels. These marvels were its own and different from those of Njaua, though in them were many traces of ideas from the book.

“Yet history was to repeat itself. Four centuries after the tiger’s appearance, warning of a barbarian invasion came to Vhar. The Vharese had not been as successful in spreading enlightenment as they had hoped. Truth be told, they had turned inward after too many rejections. They decided that they, too, would preserve their treasured home in a codex. However, they did one thing differently from their predecessors: They sent hundreds of citizens out, each bearing a single page of the final compilation, in the hope of spreading the influence of Vhar all over the world.”

Arnaude had been speaking without pause. Now she stopped, and laid her hands on the table. “Everything that I have just told you,” she said, “I learned from one page from the Book of Vhar. What became of the other pages, or of the Book of Njaua, I do not know. That one page I found in a tomb, buried among worthless pots. It took me two whole years to decipher the language. It was serendipitous, don’t you think, that I happened to find the page which summarises the history of both places and the construction of the books? The influence that Vhar, and through it Njaua, eventually had upon our world is unknown; but perhaps the fact that I was able to work out the language tells us something.”

I nodded and said aye. But privately I wondered whether she was telling me the truth or a tall tale. Even if she had found the page in a tomb as she said, how could she know that it was genuine? Surely it could be a forgery, someone’s joke. Or she could have honestly mistranslated it.

“Do you still have the page?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I gave it to a museum, in a country far from here. The scholars there were pleased to receive it. They have hopes of resurrecting something of Vhar, and even Njaua.”

She lifted her hands from the table and placed them in her lap. “I used to think of Time as a river,” she said. “Now I can only imagine it as a great, pitiless press. A little turn of its screw reduces an epic to a footnote of a footnote. Last year’s hero must this year curl up inside a cameo role, and be grateful for that much, no? Indeed, one must be fortunate to be chosen for imprisonment in a footnote.”

• • • •

The morning is still, the sky above the village a wash of soft grey between one shower of rain and the next. The air smells of wet grass and woodsmoke, and the canal is a calm, smooth ribbon, reflecting the graceful willows, the reeds, the houses in the village, my world; things you will never know about if I do not tell you now: the old ivy-covered mill with the round window; a draught horse ambling past, drawing a yellow cart piled with melons; the sturdy, handsome bridge of red brick, with three arches; a wedding party crossing the bridge with whistles and tambourines; a green-winged duck landing with a splash.

Why do I choose to record those details, and not others? Only my taste, I suppose. I want my world to last; but I feel it slipping, going under. I cannot guess what might, one day, shatter this peace; but surely something will.

Everything before my eyes now strikes me as melancholy, even the cheerful procession. The anticipation of loss saddens me more than I can say.

©1998 by K.J. Bishop. Originally published in That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K.J. Bishop is the award-winning author of the surreal-Western-decadent novel The Etched City, and the collection That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. She is also an artist, currently concentrating on bronze sculpture. She lives in Bangkok.

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

Six-Gun Vixen and the Dead Coon Trashgang

Ashok Banker | 8115 words

Dead Gulch lived up to its name. A two-bit hick town that was little more than a dirt track flanked by a couple dozen wood shacks. My beast growled low and mean as I started through and then reared up in yet another fool attempt to unseat me. I had to dig those rusty spurs in long and hard, twisting the boot heel like I was squishing a scorpion. My Halfie let out that familiar nerve-gnashing howl and settled down real quick.

I knew the twin wounds in his flanks must be pretty ugly by now, but felt no remorse. From time to time I had to remind him who was boss or he’d eat me alive. Still, I’d rather ride a Halfie than a regular horse any day. When the going got tough, at least you could count on the Halfie to do his own fighting, while the plain ole fillies and stallions just whinnied and neighed and flashed their big white eyes.

Speaking of which, it had been awhile since my Halfie had eaten anything, he was probably hungry enough to eat a horse by now! Probably the reason for his friskiness. I’d have to get some grub into him soon or he’d be munching on the first available animal in sight—or human.

The first couple of shacks claimed to be a store and an undertaker. A pair of old fogeys were sitting on the stoop of the store, jawing baccy. One of them spat a mouthload of blood-red juice in my direction as I rode by. It hit the dirt and rolled into a neat little spitball. I felt my Halfie clench the bit between his jaws and jerk his head briefly; he was that hungry, poor sumbitch.

The Undertaker was a short, thin type, so pale he could have passed for one of his own clients. His black suit was frayed and threadbare at the seams. Even death didn’t profit none in Dead Gulch.

The third place was a saloon and I turned in there. My throat was parched drier than an old whore’s cunny and I’d forgotten what real whiskey tasted like. I’d sipped a little snakejuice with some injuns back by the mesa but even that was a while back.

There were a bunch of horses tied up outside the saloon and a sullen-looking kid sitting by them, not caring that his left shoe was in my way and liable to be stomped on. His eyes widened at the sight of my Halfie and he stood up, swearing in Mexican.

“Watch it, Pedro,” I said, dismounting. “He’s a live ’un.”

“My name is Juan,” he said with that puffed-up pride some kids develop when they’re forced to fend for theirselves. “And I have seen many Halfbreeds before.”

I handed him the reins, making sure to keep my hands well away from the beast’s chomping jaws.

“Yeah, well, you ain’t seen this one before. He’s a cross between a Texican red wolf alpha and an Arabian mare. Ate his own afterbirth, then started on his ma. By the time they dragged him off, she was down to bones.”

Juan’s eyes goggled and he stepped back a couple of steps from my Halfie. I figured he’d treat the beast with a bit more respect now. If he didn’t, well, he’d end up as dinner and solve my feeding problem.

The saloon was a dusty smoke-filled place that was busier than I’d expected. The sleepy ghost-town feel of the main street belied the jumping-jack bustle in here. Bunch of cowpokes had a poker game going back by the bar, and a dozen or so other tables were occupied by maybe twenty or more menfolk, every last one with a shot glass or beer-mug in hand. A couple of dull-eyed floozies lounged on barstools, their waist-high slits and flabby thighs advertising vacancies. A stairway led up to areas unknown. A piano was tinkling off to one side, played by a fey fellow in a hat half as tall as himself. Right up front, before me: the bar. A long gleaming wood-and-glass showcase of liquor that made my mouth water with whiskey-need. Damn, but those bottles looked good.

The minute I walked in, conversation died. The piano tinkled on for a couple seconds before the pansy thought to turn his head and cottoned on to the new entrant. The poker gang froze, their hands held in front of their faces like ladies at church fanning themselves.

The bartender, a big-bellied fellow with an ugly lightning-shaped scar on his bald scalp, reached below the counter and brought out a double-barreled shotgun. He held it loosely, letting the barrel swing casually in my direction as I approached. The whores sidled away, their mouths scrunching up in disgust.

“We don’t let injuns in here,” said the bartender. His name was Big Jim, I figured, because that’s what the sign on the front said, Big Jim’s Saloon.

“I ain’t injun,” I said. “I’m Indian. Not the kind from around here, the other kind. From India, you know. The country that Columbus first set out to find when he accidentally tripped over this floating pile o’ crap.”

Big Jim pumped the action of the shotgun and pointed it right at my head. “We don’t allow no other kind neither. That includes Chinamen and your breed, whatever you are. We don’t take kindly to foreigners here.”

“Especially no foreigner wimmen,” hissed one of the whores, looking me up and down like she’d like to strip me and flog me right here and now.

“Unless she’s a whore,” said an old coot across the saloon. “With a hankering for white cock and no charge for it either!”

That brought a big laugh from the house.

“Red,” said a fat man with a reedy high voice near me. “You’d fuck a nun’s nose on Easter Sunday and still go to church, you would!”

“Hell,” Red replied. “I’d fuck anything that moves as long as it’s female and doesn’t have more than six limbs, though if it’s got a purty face on it, I’d make ’ception there, too!”

That brought the house down. My eyes swept the room quickly. I gauged the mood of the place and figured that about half or more didn’t really give a hoot if I drank there, and all of those were curious to see if I put out. The rest were indifferent. They didn’t give a shit whether I got fucked or killed. I was just a colored foreign cunt to them. Not human.

None of them looked like any real trouble.

Except for the man over at the poker table. And Big Jim.

“Shut up, Red,” he said now, raising his gravelly voice to be heard above the drunken ruckus. “All of you shut up.” The laughter subsided somewhat. “I ain’t allowing no coloreds in here, be they hos or any other kind of wimmen. Now, you git, you brownskin. Git out of here. And if you’ve half a coon’s brain in that there skull, you’ll git back on your mule or whatever fool critter you rode in on and keep going till you’re out of town. We don’t need your kind here in Dead Gulch, you here me?”

My hands were at my hips, where I always keep them. Ready for action. Although he was so big and slow, I could have taken him even if I had a whiskey bottle in my right hand and the other hand up my ass.

“Whatsa matter, cunt, din you hear the man? Get your brown ass out of here now, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

This came from the poker table, from the man sitting facing me directly. He had a high pile of colored chips sitting before him and a shiny five-pointed star badge pinned on his shirt.

“Is that like an official warning, sheriff,” I asked innocently. “Or are you just saying it to air your bad breath?”

This time the silence was so acute you could hear the piano player sniggering in the corner, then cutting himself off abruptly with a sibilant self-admonishment: “Wilbur, behave yourself!” That man had some strings loose in his under-damper.

The sheriff shoved back his chair and rose slowly to his feet. The four other men at the table rose, too. Two of them backed away quickly, the better dressed ones, but the other two turned to face me, and they both had deputy’s badges on.

Big Jim’s face split into a wide grin. He lowered the shotgun slightly to aim at my chest now. I think he liked the view better; I’m what they call well built in the chest department.

“Honey, you should of left while the going was good. Now we’re going to see if your insides are as brown as that leather you call skin.”

He should have been shooting instead of shooting his mouth off. I took him with my first shot off the right. With my second right hand I took a deputy. My left hands took down the sheriff and the other deputy. And my third pair of hands stayed on the rest of the patrons, but never needed to fire a shot.

It was over in about two seconds.

The only four shots fired were mine.

The silence continued so long, I could hear my hands rustling against the back of my shirt as they sidled back into their specially tailored pouches. I slid my Colts back into their holsters with a practiced swivel, followed by my Remingtons next, but left the little pair of hands, the ones perched high on my back, pointing the Deringers at the rest of the crowd. You never knew who might be inclined to imitate the folly of his fellow men.

Nobody objected when I took the bottle on the bar, caught the cork between my teeth and pulled it out with a sucking pop. The whiskey gurgled happily into my shot glass and then down my hatch. It burned real good on the way down. By the third shot, I began to feel almost human again. Figuratively speaking.

I turned and faced the rest of the room, leaning against the bar.

“Anybody else have a problem with Indians here?” I asked. “Or wimmen? Or any other kind?”

There was a loud rustling of clothes and clanking of glasses and bottles as everybody turned back to their drinking and cards without another word. The piano player was gaping at me as he scratched his high hat.

“Wilbur,” I said. “Play something.”

He saluted, almost knocking the hat off, and began to play some redneck shit. I didn’t care. All this whiteskin crap sounded the same anyway. I turned back to the bar and continued drinking. The mirror was good enough to give me fair warning if anybody tried to act funny behind my back. I guessed Big Jim had it installed for just that reason.

The whores were looking sideways at me as I drank. One of them sidled up to me real slow, acting coy-like. Same one made that bitchy comment about wimmen when Big Jim had his big shotgun pointed at me.

“Goodness me,” she said. “You’re one of those Mixed Breeds, aren’t you? Six hands! And they all move like lightning, don’t they, Mona?”

Mona didn’t reply. She was busy rifling through Big Jim’s pockets behind the bar. When she finished, she started on the cash register.

The bitchy whore reached out cautiously and touched my back, around about the place where I stored my topmost pair of hands.

“Jesus, if I hadn’t seen it with my own bare eyes, I’d never of known they was there. How do you keep them tucked away so discreet-like?”

I turned and looked at her. “I have slits in my back. They go all the way into my flesh, to my ribcage. The hands fit right into them, so I can massage my own heart if I want to when I feel like it. You want to see it for yourself?”

She blanched. Then she swore and turned away. I saw her going over to the poker table and starting on the sheriff’s pockets. Nice friendly town.

The old fogey they called Red came over to the bar. He walked with a kind of limp that I knew wasn’t a limp.

“I hope you didn’t take no offense to my comment about fucking a thing with six limbs or more,” he said. “Seeing as how you got eight of them. Or eight that I can see!”

“No offense taken,” I said. “Especially from a man with an extra foot.”

His eyes grew wide. He drew closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. Nobody else heard us; they were all too busy trying hard to look busy.

“I was born with it,” he said. “My pa always said it was because my ma lay with one of your kind before she begat me. Beat her to death over it one day. Then threw my ass out of the house.”

I nodded. I had heard a hundred stories like it. But I spoke to him kindly: “Time’s coming, old man. When our kind won’t have to hide or pretend anymore. Not just half-breeds. But all manner of folk that happen to be different. Including Indians, both the kind over here and the ones in my country, Chinamen, and every other color in this world. Finally, beneath the paraphernalia, we’re all the same, aren’t we? Flesh and blood, bone and soul.”

He looked at me intently for a long time.

“You’re different, ain’t you?” he said at last.

I offered him a drink in lieu of a response. He hesitated, then shrugged and took it.

“You shot all the law in this town,” he said. “Not that it was very lawful-like, to tell you the truth. And ain’t nobody goin’ to mourn Big Jim either, except that he knew how to mix up a great evil-smelling batch of stuff to cure hangovers on Sunday mornings.”

He paused, scratching the swelling on his right leg, which was actually his third leg tied tight to the side beneath the cuff of the trousers to look like a clubfoot.

He went on.

“But the Dead Coon Trashgang will be out in force now. Sheriff Dolan had a kind of working arrangement with them, so they sort of stayed under control. But now that he’s gone, they’ll be free to do as they please. Which is no skin off your nose, but it means the few half-decent folks in this shitty town will be hard-pressed to stay alive and in one piece.”

I thought about that for a while. For about the time it took me to finish the bottle. He waited patiently while I drank, barely finishing his first. I figured him for one of those temperate folk.

When I had enough whiskey in my belly to make me feel like life was worth living again, I said: “So you’d like me to take out these Dead Coons or whatever they call themselves? Is that what you’re saying? Rid the town of some trouble-making varmints?”

He nodded. “Seeing as how handy you are with a gun and all.” He frowned. “With six of them actually. What do you call yourself anyway?”

I opened a fresh bottle. “Six-gun Vixen.”

He smiled at that. “That’s rich, that’s mighty rich. Six-gun, hey? Well, you got six of them all right!” he guffawed, slapping his thigh with pleasure.

“And what’s in it for me if I do clear up this Trashgang for you folks?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He was still shivering with laughter over that last one. He slapped his double thigh again and launched into another series of guffaws. “Six-gun Vixen! Mighty rich! Six-gun! Haw haw haw haw!”

I drank some bourbon and waited. The saloon had gone back to normal-like, almost. A few men had dragged the dead lawmen out back, leaving large scarlet trails in the sawdust-strewn floor. Nobody seemed to miss ’em much, I noticed.

When the old fogey had finished having his funnies, he resumed.

“Well,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes and looking like he could be set off with a feather. “Seeing as how you’re so handy with a gun—with all six o’ them, matterfact!” He coughed and managed to control himself. “Mayhaps the town’s merchantfolk would be able to rustle up some kind of compensation for your cleaning up them varmints.”

“How much?” I asked, glancing around. This bunch didn’t look like they had two whole dollars between them, but then again, who was I to argue with people if they wanted to throw their money away? Besides, maybe these Dead Coons were bad enough for honest folks to want to pay to be rid of them.

He worked his jaw for a moment. “Seven silver ones. One for each o’em. Leastaways, there was seven last we heard. Could be more by now, they multiply like vermin.”

I sipped a little more bourbon. “Gold ones,” I said. “And one for each one I kill, seven or more.”

He sputtered. That wasn’t very funny, evidently.

“You’re out of your head! That’s half a year’s earnings for this town!”

“Way I see it, old-timer, is if you don’t flush out these Dead Coons or whatever, you won’t have any earnings. So you put it to your people and ask them which is better, paying up my fee or paying the piper. Either way, it’s the same to me. I ride on tomorrow, coons or no coons. And oh yeah, I’d need at least three of those gold ones up front. Way I see it, I already did you people a favor by offing those no-good lawmen. Them was free, so I’ll adjust it against any Coons I kill. But you tell those merchants that’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”

He blustered and fumed a bit. Then he went away for a spell, leaving the saloon. I watched him shuffle out on that folded leg of his and didn’t think he’d be coming back. Before I was halfway through the second bottle, there he was by my side again. He seemed sulky now.

“Awright,” he said, grumbling. “But they’re only paying two up front. Rest on delivery. And they want the job done today. Before the Coons learn about the dead lawmen and come calling. Means you got till sundown to bust the gang.”

I took the large gold sovereigns he gave me and examined them both, first with my teeth and then with my eyes. They had Lincoln on the front and good old Sam Eagle on the back, and they was both real. One thing about Dead Gulch: At least their gold was good.

“So what are these Dead Coons anyway? And where can I find them?”

“Down by the old millhouse. By the river.” After a moment he added: “They’re nightcrawlers. Better get the job done before sundown, or you won’t get out o’ there alive, six-guns or no six-guns.”

• • • •

The millhouse looked abandoned from the rise, and as I rode down toward it, not a soul moved nearby. The river was little more than a piss-trickle, and the area looked blasted and seared by more than just desert sun.

“Easy, boy,” I said, controlling my beast’s nervousness as he smelt the familiar stench of his most natural rival. He had eaten well. A calf I’d bought from one of the ’steaders Red introduced me to. I’d taken first blood, biting the neck of the calf with one quick motion and shutting my eyes in something near ecstasy as I tasted hot, living blood and quivering flesh. It had taken all my self-control to keep from finishing the whole steer myself. But I’d left more than three-fourths for Halfie and he’d gorged himself fat and sated. I could feel him grumbling as he carried my weight beneath this blazing afternoon heat. He’d hoped to rest a good two days and nights. And he would, just as soon as I finished with this little business here.

As I reached the outskirts of the property, I got off and whispered to him to be silent. I should of tied him up but he wasn’t goin’ nowhere with a bellyful of steer so I left him loose. I moved real quiet, walking so my spurs didn’t jangle none.

Boards creaked underfoot as I walked up the back stoop. I sniffed and caught the odor of a hundred different things, all mixed up together like a bag of sweaty rattlesnakes. There was wolverine in there, and dead flesh, and milk, and—

Milk?

What in Ram Hill were a bunch of vampires doing with milk?

I shrugged that one aside and stepped slowly over a warped board. The place was in pretty bad shape. If these Dead Coons or whatever they called theirselves had a human familiar who cared for them by day, he wasn’t doing his job. There was all sorts of nasty stains and spills around. I stepped carefully to avoid getting my boots all gummy: Nothing sticks like dried vampire blood, except maybe an elephant-zombie’s eye-mucus. Trust me, I know.

The door was ajar. Which was an invitation to disaster. No bunch of fangers leaves their door unlocked unless they want you to hie on in. I flicked up my hairy ears as far as they’d go, which is about four inches over the top o’ my head, and listened real carefully. My wolf-sharp hearing was good enough to pick up an iguana crunching on a sand-beetle a mile away. I heard nothing else except the dry wind blowing sandy dust against the walls of the shack, a sand snake scrabbling with a rat somewhere in the dirt behind me, my Halfie’s stomach groaning as it processed that bucketload of meat, a rusty hinge creaking in the wind. The house sounded empty, but it also sounded like it was meant to sound empty. Like it was waiting for me to step in and WHAM!

I went in anyway. I’d been WHAMMED! before. At least this time there was gold for my pains.

The first room was a kitchen, since I’d come into the place ass-backwards. It looked like a slaughterhouse. Either the gang had laid out a buffet or there had been one ugly bust-up in here. Severed limbs and other assorted organs, internal as well as ex-, lay in stinking pools of decay. This was where most of the smells I had caught were coming from. I flicked my eyes across the place, figuring that maybe a dozen or more bodies had bought their tickets to the great abattoir in the sky right here. Mostly human, but some Halfies mixed in, too.

The second room was so much worse, I had to stop and take a moment. Not to refer to my pocket Gita, but because this was a bit rich, even for my omnivorous digestion. I’ve seen some bad scenes in my time and will probably see several more before I eventually become part of one myself, but this was . . . well, it was plain ugly. This wasn’t the remains of a fight. It was the debris after a massacre. Judging by the entrails and stuff lying splattered all around, humans had mixed it in pretty good with a bunch of Halfies of different breeds, and not all on a single occasion either. This was an ongoing campaign that had taken place over several encounters in as many days.

The only thing I couldn’t tell for sure was who had massacred who. As for the why, that’s one question I never ask, for fear I might actually get an honest answer. I don’t know about humans, but we Halfies don’t gel with the concept of killing for killing’s sake, or for any other reason except feeding. Like the motto above a Halfie slaughterhouse in the Kansas outback: “We Waste No Part of the Humanimal.”

Standing there in that large empty room, I felt like I could be in that slaughterhouse again, except that these hunks of flesh and stuff were way past saleable. There were more maggots and flesh flies around than in most graveyards.

Barely a second after I’d stopped, I heard a whisper of sound from further inside the house. I moved in, my hands at the ready, two guns already out and cocked. The whisper came again, and I knew without a doubt now: There was somebody here. Somebody alive.

I came through a hallway with three doors leading off it. I went to the middle door and went through it. I was real careful and full-alert, ready for anything. I didn’t want to add to the body count in this slaughterhouse. So when I saw a figure move in the shadows by the far wall, I shot first and thought later.

The echoes died down like the wind in a gulley before a storm. My Halfie snickered outside, recognizing the sound of my Colts. A scorpion perched on the windowsill fell onto its back, dislodged by the reverberations of my double discharge.

I was across the room before the scorpion hit the floor, my Colts pointed straight ahead, the Deringers at the sides, and the Remingtons watching my back.

There was a bloody pile of bones and rags that might have once been a living thing, slumped against the wall. Two fist-sized splatters of blood low-down on the wall marked the results of my gunmanship.

I used my boot to kick the thing over onto its back, ready in case it was playin’ possum.

It was a kid. That was the first thing I saw and the thing that got me straightaway, like a horse-kick to the temple. A kid.

I holstered the Colts and scrunched down. The kid was still stirring as I pulled off the rags wrapped around its face and arms. The stench that it gave off was worse than the ones in the other rooms; dead rotten flesh is ugly, but live rotting flesh is gut-cutting.

It made a mewling sort of sound and I knew then that it was catbreed, a werecat of some sort. Too mixed to be able to tell the species, but a cat for sure. No mistaking those whiskers, furry ears and the feline eyes.

And it was female and fully grown, I realized with a shock. A mature adult, but so scrawny she looked no bigger than a kid.

By sniffing the hormonal soup of its sweat and groin secretions, I could also tell she was dying. Not just from my shots—those had been the last nails in a coffin long closed—but from hunger and thirst. She was starved.

Its eyes . . . her eyes . . . were opening and closing slowly, as if the life-light was flickering like a lantern on a windy prairie. I started to get up to go outside and get my water canteen, but then her dusty lids flickered open and I swear I was looking down into the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, ’fore or since. They were green as jade, like a carving of a little Chinese laughing Buddha I’d once seen in Hunan city, but flecked with gold speckles. Green and gold, sparkling, and if they could sparkle so bright now, I don’t know how good they’d’ve looked in the right light. Like gemstones, I guess. Flawless gemstones.

She would have been a purty thing, if she’d lived and taken some decent nourishment. But from the looks of those wounds and the way her breath was starting to wheeze, her living days were done. She looked up at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to snarl or lash out one last time ’fore dying, like catbreed mostly do. She could see I was wolfbreed and we’re natural sworn enemies, species-wise.

But she didn’t do none of that. Instead, she sort of stared at me as if memorizing my face. Somehow I could tell by the way she looked at me that she wasn’t afraid of me none. Should have been: I had just shot her guts out and a chunk of her liver and I still had six guns ready to blow more holes in her wasted carcass. But there was a sense of connection. I swear I could almost feel her thinking that she was so glad I was female. That’s what I saw in those eyes.

“Cubs,” she said. Just that single word. And rolled her eyes downwards, as if pointing. I looked, but there was nothing there except floorboards. “Cubs,” she said again, and coughed a low, feeble, cougar-like cough. And died.

Slimy brackish blood oozed out of her mouth like a large snail, spreading over her chest, which was barely covered by a holey poncho. And I saw the bumps on her chest and the tiny circles of wetness around about the place where her nipples were.

That’s when I remembered the milk-smell. The only one I couldn’t figure out in this place of death and decay. She was lactating. Which meant there were young ’uns nearby. Cubs, she had said.

I found the trapdoor right beneath my feet. Cleverly concealed beneath a layer of grime and sawdust. She had died guarding the way to her cubs. I don’t know how long she had been up here, but it was too long. She’d probably been checking on the cubs from time to time, and from their condition, I’d say she had been giving them milk until they were all but drinking her blood. Mayhap she had given them some of that, too: Catbreed were said to do it when unable to feed their cubs otherwise. But these were no vampires, Dead Coons; they were plain ordinary catbreed cubs.

There were eight in the original litter. Two were dead a long time, three more had died recently. Painfully, from the rictus of pain their little cat mouths were screwed up into. The three surviving ones were the toughest of the lot, but even they had turned to biting one another and themselves out of sheer desperation. Still, they snarled as I leaped down the trapdoor onto the dirt floor of the cellar. One of them got to his haunches and showed me his little cat fangs, protecting his little brother and sister. He was the first-born, I could tell. We first-borns tend to recognize one another.

He was a tough little tyke. It took him a while to accept the fact that his mother was dead; he kept licking at her whiskers and face as if trying to wake her up, or wash her. Catbreed are big on washing each other up. His smallest sibling, the other male, was a scrawny bunch o’ bones, and he seemed heartbroken at his mother’s stillness. He sniffed the ichor that had oozed out of her jaws and lay down, mewling. I didn’t think he’d make it. Their little sister was quiet and calm. She was weak from hunger and was conserving her strength. Her little belly, swollen with gases, heaved and fell, fighting the good fight to keep breathing and stay alive. She panted silently as I picked her up in one hand, then scratched me a deep short gash on the back of my hand.

I smiled at her. She had her mama’s eyes.

When I rode back into town, the late afternoon sun was just starting to slant across the deserted street. I had made just one stop, at the same farmer’s place where I’d bought the steer for lunch. He wasn’t around, but there was a cow on the place, and I got enough milk out of her to give the cubs the best goddamn meal they’d had for weeks. The little male puked his out after a few licks, and I could see a little blackish red in the puke: He was hurt inside and wouldn’t last the night. But the other two looked at me like I was their long-lost aunt Matty come home for Christmas with a whole wagonload of goodies.

I knew there was something odd about the fact that there was nobody in sight on the main street—hell, the only street, and that shoulda warned me—but I figured that Dead Gulch was one of those towns that are big on siestas.

I went to the saloon, thinking there had to be someone there. And I was right.

The whole town was there, waiting.

And this time they were ready for me.

They had the old man Red trussed up real good against the bar, spread-eagled with ropes going around him and around the bar. He was bloody and his extra foot had been exposed and was flailing helplessly. The ropes had bitten through his skin, and though I couldn’t see much blood or harm, his eyes were rolled up and he seemed to be in a bad way.

That was what got me. I wasn’t expecting it, and when I looked in over the swinging half-doors of the saloon and saw him trussed up that way, I walked straight on in.

Right into the ambush.

There were two of them beside the door, waiting. I don’t know what they hit me with, but it felt like a ton of iron. I staggered, my guns starting to come out, but the other one hit me on the side of the head and I just crashed out clean.

When I came to, I was the one tied up on the bar, and Red was washing off the pig’s blood with a sponge and bucket. I knew it was pig’s blood now ’cause I could smell it. If I’d just trusted my animal sense instead of my fool human instincts, I’d have known that straight off. He and the other boys looked mighty pleased about their little circus act.

“Ah,” he said, seeing I was stirring. “The boys here thought that they’d done bashed your brains to mush.” He chuckled. “I told them that Halfbreeds like you only have half a brain to start with. And since you’ve got foreign blood mixed up, too, you prolly don’t know how to use even the half-brain you got!”

There were guffaws and grins all around at that. The saloon was back to normal again. Everyone drinking and carousing as before; even the piano player was tinkling, his high hat swaying as he tapped out the beat. The whole siesta-time charade had been just for my benefit. I didn’t feel too appreciative though. My head bled like a leaking coconut, and the ropes really were cutting into my flesh real cruel-like. The pain in my head kept rhythm with “On Top of Old Smokey.”

Red got up and came over to me. Crouching, he half-squatted and leered in my face. “Took these back,” he said, showing me the gold coins he had taken from my pocket while I was out cold. “Figured you wouldn’t be needing them no more.”

He pocketed them.

I tried to ignore the throbbing in my skull. “You sent me there to flush out the rest of the catbreed. You had lost too many men already trying to get rid of them, so you figured I stood a better chance, being a Halfie myself.”

He grinned, turning to look at his back-up players.

“Hey, boys, looks like she might have a little sense in her skull after all. Maybe a little rubbed off from the humans she spread her legs for, hey?!”

They roared raucously in response.

“But you’re a Halfie, too,” I said. “Your leg—”

He struck me so hard and sudden, I didn’t have time to even clench my stomach muscles. It felt like the front of my stomach met my spine. Spread out like I was, it took me moments before I could start breathing again.

“I’m no Halfbreed,” he said, his eyes flashing with an anger and vigor that belied his age. He pointed to his leg, now strapped up and tucked out of sight inside his trousers again. “This is a birth defect, you hear? A birth defect!”

I didn’t say anything. I was too busy trying to hold in my digested lunch.

He took out a long ugly knife. A Bowie. The serrated edge gleamed like it had been polished for hours. He hadn’t been using it to carve woodchips, for sure.

“You creatures are a curse on the land,” he said. “Sent by the Lord to remind us of our sins.”

I sighed. Another Bible thumper. I should have known when I first laid eyes on him; he had that fanatic gleam in his eyes. And a love of violence. The two made a combination deadlier than a poison-filled rattle and fangs.

“But now the time of the plague is done. The day of redemption draws nigh.”

He was loud enough to be heard across the room. Everybody kept on with their business, like they’d heard him make this speech a hundred times afore; but as he went on, they chipped in with “Hear ye, hear ye,” and “Amen,” at just the right moments, never stopped their card games and whiskey swigging and whore-nuzzling. This was prolly what passed for Sunday school in Dead Gulch.

“We, the promised children, shall take the land back from the cursed ones. Death to the mutants and Halfbreeds and all other filthy verminous abominations!”

“Amen!”

“We shall cleanse the land with their blood, and feed their carcasses to the jackals and vultures and hogs, and shall wipe their damned kind off the face of the Earth.”

“Amen!”

“And then the Lord shall look down on us and say, ‘This is good,’ and he shall reward us with life eternal and paradise on Earth again. Eden shall be our land, and we the children of Adam will rise again to take our rightful place among the angels of the Lord.”

“Amen!”

I had a feeling he’d mixed up his Bible lessons somewhat, but it didn’t seem like a good time to correct him. I was busy trying to work on the ropes that bound me. His men had taken away all six of my guns, but they forgot that a she-wolf’s greatest weapons are her fangs and claws. I kept my claws retracted mostly; the guns were quicker and cleaner most of the time. But I extended them now and began to saw through my ropes discreetly. Fortunately, Red was shielding me from the eyes of the others, and he himself had his back to me as he played preacher. Some of the men were getting that glaze-eyed look I’d seen before, less from the whiskey than from the preachin’. I figured that he was riling them up to something. With me hogtied up here, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what that might be.

He droned on some more about the Apocalypse and the Day of the Slaughter and stuff like that, until I got tired of listening.

But I heard him loud and clear when he called for them to bring in the cubs.

The men were slow-witted from the religious spell he’d put them under and he had to repeat himself.

Red hit one of them upside the face. “Bring them in,” he said again.

I stopped sawing as the room grew quiet. I had left the cubs in a hay barn at the farmer’s place, a mile or so out of town, so they could digest their milk and sleep on a full stomach for a bit. But of course, the farmer was one of them. They all were taken up by Red’s madness.

My blood ran cold when one of the towheads that had ambushed me came in with the cubs in his paws.

I had a rough time as a yearling. A really rough time. Nothing I’d care to talk of under suchlike circumstances, but let’s just say that I got mad if I saw anyone mishandling young uns. Spittin’, cursin’, slicin’, bitin’, fightin’ mad. Even killin’ mad at times.

When I saw what these human bastards were going to do to the cub, I felt the anger rise up in me like bile in a pig’s gullet.

Old Red had the Bowie to the little male’s belly when I slashed through the last of my ropes and broke free. He looked up as I leaped to my feet and I saw his eyes flash that same grin he’d first greeted me with. He hadn’t just been sayin’ it; he really was the sort who would fuck anything with legs, two or more or less, except that he was also the sort that would kill it once he was done having his way with it.

He grinned widely and raised his right hand so’s I could see clearly.

And then he impaled the cub on the point of his Bowie, digging it in with a manic, religious glee.

Half a dozen men had their guns out and were on their feet. This time, it wasn’t just the sheriff and Big Jim and those slow-witted deputies: Red had been right about one thing, they had been the only things keeping the Dead Coons safe in town. Except that the real Dead Coons were right here in this saloon, walking on two legs, and the citizens Sheriff Dolan and his badge had been protecting were the catbreed clan out there in the millhouse—if you can call turning the occasional blind eye to a massacre or two protection. Ayuh, it’s a stretch, maybe, but part of being a Six-gun is having a touch of sixth sense; I just knew.

I could have taken all of them with just my fangs and claws, but I’d have a dozen bullets in me before I was halfway across the room. And though we wolfbreed do heal fast, we can be killed.

But Red had twisted that Bowie in that little half-starved tyke, and it was dying right there in the sawdust, and he had the other two lined up for slaughter as well, like some crazy sacrifices to his cause. And I would rather die than stand by and see three cubs get butchered. Bad enough I had shot their mother dead. True, it was this human bastard that had tricked me into going out there, but my bullets had orphaned them.

We stood there for a second or two in a Mexican standoff. Then Red called it. I could see from the look on his face that he wanted to put more than just his Bowie inside me, and maybe all the other men in the saloon were also hankering for a taste of the same apple pie. But I was free now and conscious, and there was only one way this standoff could end.

“Shoot her,” he said quietly. Smart enough to know they couldn’t take me alive or in one big enough piece. And turned his attention to the next cub, the female. She mewled softly as the Bowie rose above her, big as a guillotine to her scrawny little neck.

The sound of the saloon picture window exploding was deafening. You never heard glass crash that loud before. Because when my Halfie came through, he didn’t just charge in, he roared. And you have to hear a well-fed healthy wolf-horse mixbreed roar to know what it’s like. Blood curdles instantly at the sound, and then turns to cheese.

He burst through the window at my whistle, which I’d given out the moment I burst free of the ropes. Landing straight on a large card table. The table legs collapsed under his weight, and the four men sitting there were pinned like flies under a swat. The sound of their thighbones crunching was like gravel under hooves. My Halfie was in full fighting mode, his claws lashing and slashing in four directions at once, decapitating two men with a single swipe, turning the faces of another three to red mush in an instant.

Before he hit the floor, I was on my way, leaping in a series of arcs that took me from one end of the saloon to the other. As I went, lunging and leaping like an acrobat in a show—or a wolf in the middle of a horse herd—I cut open bellies and slit throats with vicious force. I had six hands to do it with, and my Halfie had four, and between the two of us, we were like fire and brimstone to that group of misguided, drunken Bible thumpers.

Reaching the far end, I rolled over, and when I came up on my feet, I had all six of my guns back in my fists. They’d slung them onto the piano, and as I took them, my claws slicked the piano player’s tall hat into shreds. He howled and fell to the floor, cowering and wetting his pants.

Then I snarled at Red, who was still holding the Bowie raised over the female cub, stunned into inaction by the suddenness of the violence we had wreaked on his world.

“You were right, Red,” I snarled. “The Day of Slaughter is at hand.”

And I filled him with bullets before he could even start to turn around. He went down in a blur of blood and gristle.

It didn’t take more than another minute or so to clean up the rest of the place.

By the time my Halfie and I were done, there were only two humans left alive in Dead Gulch: the piano player, and Juan, the little horse-minder.

He was sitting on the porch outside when I emerged with the two cubs in two of my hands. He was sitting like it was just another sunny day and he was just minding the horses as always. But I saw from the way he flicked his brown eyes up at me and then down again that the killing inside had rattled him, and he feared for his life, too. I didn’t blame him; I had just wiped out the entire population of Dead Gulch.

“Don’t fret, son,” I told him as I calmed my Halfie down. “I don’t have nothin’ to do with hurtin’ young ’uns, and I don’t parlay with those that do neither.”

I got onto my Halfie, who groaned with satisfaction, still chewing on someone’s leg. It had a double joint and two feet. I realized it was Red’s. That beast will eat anything, anytime.

I flicked the horse boy one of the gold coins from the cache I’d found on Red.

“Here you go, Pedro,” I said. “Take a horse and ride on somewhere else where the people ain’t prejudiced. World’s got enough killing and hatin’ in it without adding more.”

He pocketed the coin and spat a mouthful of baccy on the dusty street. “My name is Juan,” he called out to my back as I rode off. “I’ll be seeing you again someday, Six-gun.”

I grinned as I rode out of town, the two cubs peeking out of the pockets of my saddlebag. Juan. Sounded like a good name to give a spirited catbreed first-born. Now all I had to do was think of one for the female. Juanita maybe. Yeah, why the hell not.

Any darn handle would be better than Six-gun Vixen.

©2017 by Ashok Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok Banker is the pioneer of the speculative fiction genre in India. His ground-breaking internationally acclaimed eight-book Ramayana Series was the first trilogy and series ever published in India. It revolutionized Indian publishing, creating a genre which is now the biggest selling in the country. Ashok’s 52 books have all been bestsellers in India, as well as translated into 18 languages and sold in 58 countries. He has also been credited as the author of the first Indian science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and thriller stories and novels in English, creator and screenwriter of the first Indian TV series in English, the first Indian ebooks in English and other firsts. He is one of only a handful of living Indian authors represented in The Picador Book of New Indian Writing and the Vintage Anthology of Modern Indian Literature. He is of Irish-Portuguese-Sri Lankan-Indian parentage. Born in Mumbai where he lived for 51 years, he now lives in Los Angeles.

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

The Elixir of Youth

Brian Stableford | 12456 words

Frederic Paschel, a wine merchant who lived in the town of Sylah in the valley of the river Dordogne, was left a widower when his two sons, Gilbert and Benedict, were in their infancy. The younger son, Benedict, was as dutiful as any father could ever have desired; he was amiable and pliable, ready and willing to be molded in the image of his sire as a respectable tradesman. Gilbert, on the other hand, was surly and rebellious; he swore that he would do anything in the world to spare himself the necessity of following in his father’s footsteps.

When asked what he intended to do instead of working in the family business, Gilbert declared his intention of becoming a knight of the realm in the entourage of the Duc de Romanin, whose domain included Sylah and three other small towns as well as thirty farms, a dozen vineyards, and a forest that provided some of the best hunting in southern Aquitania. Frederic laughed when he heard this, saying that the most Gilbert could ever hope for was to be taken into the Duc’s service as a common man-at-arms—and even that privilege would be withheld at Frederic’s request, because Lord de Romanin was one of the winery’s best customers.

Gilbert flew into a temper then. He said that if his prospects of following the best traditions of chivalry were to be thwarted by his father’s petty spite, he would become an adventurer, hunting for treasure in Arabia and the dark heart of Africa. That declaration made Frederic laugh even louder—with the result that Gilbert left home on his seventeenth birthday, swearing that he would not return until he acquired such immense wealth that Frederic Paschel would seem a pauper by comparison.

Ten years passed while nothing was heard in Sylah of Gilbert Paschel. Frederic’s business flourished, but not to the extent that he grew conspicuously richer. The number of barrels that his laborers filled increased year by year, but the price he obtained for each barrel did not increase at all. His wealth grew slowly, moderated by the increased wages he had to pay the laborers, but he was able to make some economies in the latter respect as Benedict grew older and stronger.

Unfortunately, Benedict became rather resentful of the fact that he was expected to work harder and harder as each year passed in order to allow his father to spend less on hired labor. While the vintage was brought in, he had to work from dawn till dusk in the winery, and he continued to work long hours while the grapes were trodden and the wine fermented. He had to take more turns than any of the hired men in guarding the vats until the wine was ready for casking, and when the barrels had all been filled, he had to load them on the carts that carried them to Frederic’s customers in the neighboring towns. He was sometimes allowed to accompany his father on the most important deliveries, including excursions to the Chateau de Romanin, but he always had to take longer turns than his father driving the cart, and he was the one who had to carry the barrels down to the cellars while Frederic enjoyed the fruits of his customers’ hospitality.

“You work me like a donkey so that you do not have to pay wages to hirelings,” Benedict complained, when they returned from one such trip, “but I see nothing of the money you save. By rights, the greater portion of it should be mine.”

“The money I save on wages goes to buy more grapes and better equipment,” his father explained. “It is reinvested in the business so that the business will continue to expand. One day, it will all be yours, so the money you do not receive now will benefit you in the future.”

“That is all very well,” Benedict said, “but in the meantime, I am dressed as poorly as any common laborer, and I work even harder for longer hours. I would prefer to have the money now, so that I might dress in the manner appropriate to an Aquitanian gentleman, and entertain myself as a gentleman does instead of rising at dawn every day and working long into the night.”

“That would be a foolish way to conduct yourself, my son,” Frederic told him, severely. “Money invested reaps greater rewards; money spent is gone forever. You are young, and you have a long life ahead of you. Don’t be envious of the young popinjays who parade themselves about the chateau and its gardens, or the wastrels who hang about in the taverns; the former will spend their inheritances soon enough, and the latter will end up bearing spears and longbows in the Lord’s troop. You will have a comfortable home and a life of ease.”

“It is because I am young that I want to make more of myself,” Benedict countered. “How shall I enjoy a life of ease when I am old and my appetites are blunted?”

“I am growing old myself,” Frederic pointed out.

“My point exactly,” Benedict murmured—but he waited until his father was out of earshot, because he was a dutiful son, long accustomed to yielding to the pressure of Frederic’s will.

Benedict’s duties grew more varied by degrees as well as more extensive. In addition to filling and loading the barrels, he was gradually entrusted with the delicate operations required to bring the wines to perfection in their vats and prepare them for casking—with the result that the long shifts he worked standing guard over the vats became even more demanding. He often had to work around the clock, sleeping for short periods in the loft above the winery rather than returning to the house where his father was now able to spend more and more of his own time.

“I am growing old,” Frederic told him, when Benedict complained again. “I need more rest than I did when I was young. You will be able to set your own hours soon enough, and hire men to do your work for you, if that is what you wish.”

“Sometimes,” Benedict replied, “I wish that I had gone with my brother to seek my fortune in foreign lands. I am certain that he has had a much more interesting life than mine.”

“Ha!” said Frederic. “The ingrate will likely be dead by now, and if he is not dead he will certainly be utterly wretched. There are no treasures to be found in Arabia and the lands beyond the Sahara, no matter what traveler’s tales may say. All travelers are liars.”

It turned out, however, that Gilbert was not dead—although he did seem conspicuously wretched when he suddenly reappeared, at the dead of night, in the winery where Benedict was working late, patiently overseeing a vat of rich red wine that was just approaching the condition in which it would require to be casked.

“Hello, little brother,” Gilbert said, as he laid down his meager pack. He sat down on a stool and took off his worn-out sandals so that he could inspect the sores on his feet, adding: “Still the dutiful son, I see, hard at work on our father’s behalf.”

“I am delighted to see you, brother,” Benedict replied—politely enough, although a bystander might have thought it odd that he did not rush to embrace a brother he had not seen for ten years. “I presume, judging by your rags, that you have not found the treasure that you sought.”

“As a matter of fact,” Gilbert said, “I did.”

“Then it must consist of diamonds and rubies,” Benedict said, sarcastically, “for I could tell by the way you laid your pack down that it is not full of gold.”

“What I have is more precious than diamonds and rubies,” Gilbert told him.

“In that case, perhaps you should have sold a little of it to buy stout shoes and a pair of trousers that had more cloth than thread in them,” Benedict observed.

“That would have been difficult,” Gilbert told him, “for what I have is divisible only once, into two portions. No lesser dose would be fully effective.”

“Dose?” Benedict echoed. “Have you brought back nothing but medicine? After ten years of wandering in the wilderness, have you found nothing worth bringing home but some quack cure for warts or baldness?”

“It is an elixir concocted with water from the fountain of youth,” Gilbert told him. He opened his pack and produced a small stone flask, which might have held a single gulp of brandy, although it seemed to Benedict more like the kind of vessel in which poison might be kept.

“The elixir of life?” Benedict scoffed. “Are you immortal, then?”

“I have not drunk it yet,” the older brother said, patiently. “Nor will it make me immortal. But what it can and will do is to restore my health to the finest pitch of perfection, and make me feel as well as any man can feel, for as long as I may live. It cannot give me eternal life, nor can it protect me against the danger of a sudden violent death, but it can double the usual allotment of a man’s potential years, and make the century I might yet live, if I am careful and fortunate, a hundred years entirely worth the living. Once I have drunk it, I shall no longer age, I shall be full of vigor, and my spirits will be permanently uplifted. The measure I possess is said to be adequate to do the same for one other person.”

“So brotherly love has brought you here, in order that I might share in your good fortune?” Benedict was hesitant now, no longer daring to be quite as sarcastic as he had been before.

“You are absolutely right, dear brother,” Gilbert said. “But I fear that I must ask a price for what I intend to give you.”

“A price?” Benedict said. “That seems a trifle unreasonable, given that we are brothers. What price do you want for your supposedly miraculous potion?”

“I want your inheritance,” Gilbert said, frankly. “I want all this: the winery, and everything accessory to it. The carts and the horses, the barrels and the tools, the suppliers and the customers.”

“You mean that you want your half,” Benedict said. “The half that you gave up when you went a-wandering.”

“No,” Gilbert said. “I want it all. I was the one who took the risk. I was the one who traveled far, who staked his life and future on the hazard of discovery. If I drink one dose of the elixir, I shall have every advantage of indefinitely protracted youth save one: an income that would allow me to make the most of it. If I can trade my second dose for the income, I shall have the full extent of my desire. Ergo, dear brother, I offer you the choice: You may have youth without wealth for as long as you may live, or wealth without youth. It is a fair offer.”

“A fair offer!” Benedict was astounded. “It is piracy! Can you imagine that I would trade my inheritance for a sip from a flask that might contain anything or nothing at all?”

“If you refuse, brother, I shall have to make my offer to someone else.”

For a moment or two, Benedict did not see what Gilbert was getting at—but then he realized that, if he would not sell his inheritance, there was another who might be persuaded to sell it before he was able to receive it: his father. “But our father is already old!” Benedict protested.

“Exactly so,” said Gilbert. “He will understand the true value of the elixir. Having already spent his youth, he will not obtain as much advantage from it as you might, but I dare say that he will settle for the protraction of his current state of being for another sixty or seventy years, and the sense of well-being the elixir will give him in the meantime. I am, in any case, his eldest son; he might take the view, as I do, that the inheritance is rightfully mine in any case.”

“Over my dead body!” Benedict said.

“That will not be necessary, brother,” Gilbert replied, calmly. “Quite the reverse, in fact. What I am offering you is the opposite of death: youth and good health, for as long as you might live. What do you have to lose? If you will not pay the price I ask, the winery will be taken from you anyway. You know as well as I do what kind of man our father is. I shall not demand that he deliver all his possessions to me. I only want the business—he can keep his secret savings, to spend in whatever way his newly rejuvenated whims may take him. But I remember how he treated me when I was a child, so I have come to you first, in order that you can have first refusal of my offer. Am I not generous, brother?”

“Very generous, brother,” said Benedict, his voice redolent with astonishment and a keen sense of injury. Nor was his tone a liar, for he picked up a paddle that he had been using to stir the wine in the vat, and struck out at his brother so forcefully that Gilbert would certainly have been killed had he not stepped sideways to avoid the blow.

If the older brother had had a weapon in his pack, he would surely have fetched it out, or had there been something close at hand that would serve as a cudgel, he would surely have improvised—but he had no weapon of his own, and there was nothing nearby that would serve such a purpose.

What Gilbert did instead, therefore, was to remove the stopper from the flask and put it to his lips, saying: “Strike at me again, brother, and I will down the lot—both doses in one. You will lose your opportunity!”

Alas, Gilbert had misread his younger brother’s resolve. Benedict had not been fully persuaded that the flask really held the elixir of youth, but he had been persuaded that his father might be gullible enough to think that it might, and to disinherit his younger son in order to obtain it. So Benedict did, indeed, strike out again—alarming Gilbert sufficiently to make him carry out his threat.

Gilbert tipped the flask, and took its entire contents into his mouth. He held the liquid there, as if he thought that Benedict might relent when he saw the threat about to be carried out—but Benedict only took the opportunity to measure his victim for a third blow.

This time, Gilbert was not quick enough to get out of the way. The paddle descended upon the crown of Gilbert’s head, with lethal force. The only action he had time to perform before he fell dead upon the winery floor was to swallow what he had in his mouth.

• • • •

Benedict immediately regretted what he had done, and became exceedingly anxious to hide the evidence of his crime. It had been dark for some hours and Sylah was not a well-lit town, so it seemed unlikely that anyone who had seen Gilbert approach could have recognized him, even if anyone had been abroad at such a late hour.

“I must be grateful to my brother after all,” Benedict muttered, as he wondered how to do away with the body. “If he had gone to my father first, I would certainly have been disinherited.”

Benedict picked up the dead body and weighed it in his arms. Although Gilbert had by no means grown fat while he was on his travels, the corpse was no lightweight. Benedict did not want to risk anyone seeing him with a dead man slung over his shoulder—the Duc de Romanin was well known as a severe judge, very intolerant of all kinds of homicide except those ordered by himself.

The most obvious hiding place that was readily available was the barrel waiting beside the vat to receive the matured wine, and Benedict wasted no further time before lowering his brother’s body into the empty vessel. He considered the possibility of putting the lid on the barrel and moving it directly to the storeroom, but he knew that anyone who so much as tapped its wooden flank would realize that it had no wine in it. For this reason, he filled it up to the brim with wine from the vat before sealing it.

When Benedict turned the barrel on its side to roll it into the store, he was glad to discover that it was only slightly heavier than it would have been had it contained nothing but wine. He placed the barrel in a dark corner, intending to leave it there until he could find an opportunity to dispose of it permanently. He rolled out another empty barrel to set beside the vat, so that he could continue his work as if nothing had happened.

Three days later, when the contents of the vat had been casked and another consignment of grapes brought in for treading, Frederic Paschel came to the winery in the early afternoon, in company with the Duc de Romanin’s steward, Corentin.

“Good news, my son!” said the wine merchant. “Duc Meldred’s eldest son, Sir Blaise—the finest knight in the entire province—is newly betrothed to Lady Ghislaine de Thyresse, and there is to be a great feast at the Chateau in three days’ time. There will be jousting and a circus, and a great deal of merry-making. My old friend Corentin wants to buy every barrel of this year’s vintage on Duc Meldred’s behalf, as well as the best we still have in store from last year and the one before.”

Benedict was thunderstruck. “But father!” he protested. “This year’s vintage is far too young to please an educated palate. Lord de Romanin would do far better to take everything else we have in store and leave this year’s deposits to mature.”

“Don’t be silly, Benedict,” Frederic said, impatiently. “All the Lord’s vassals, of every rank, will be party to the celebration. This year’s vintage is more than good enough for the lower ranks.”

“Even so,” Benedict objected, “We shall need to hold some barrels back for future years, when they will be much improved.”

“Fool!” was Frederic’s reply to that. “Lord de Romanin is very willing to compensate us for any loss we might sustain by selling the wine before it is fully mature. This is a great opportunity, you dunderhead. Bring out a score of spigots immediately, and start setting them in the casks so that Corentin and I can test their contents and agree a fair price for each one.”

Benedict had no alternative but to do as he was told. He volunteered to help with the tasting, but Frederic told him yet again what a fool he was to think that his naive palate could possibly compare with the practiced expertise of a successful wine merchant and an experienced steward. Benedict knew only too well what a connoisseur his father was, and Corentin also had a great reputation as a wine-taster, so he had to give way on that—but he took what comfort he could from the fact that the two wise men were content to leave the business of rolling out the barrels and hammering in the spigots entirely to him.

One by one, Benedict brought out eight of the barrels laid down in previous years to give their contents every chance to mature, and tapped them all. Every cup brought forth cries of delight from his father, but the Duc’s steward professed himself disappointed with all of them, so the haggling process by which the prices were agreed to was long and arduous. Nor would the steward agree to let the current crop go untasted, so Benedict had to roll out another seven casks and tap them all. Again Frederic Paschel professed himself very satisfied with his crop, but Corentin was a hard man to convince, and they managed to quaff more than enough wine to keep thirst at bay as the long hot afternoon wore on.

When the fifteenth barrel had been tested, Benedict told the steward that there were no more to be tested, but Frederic Paschel had not done as well as he had hoped in the haggling, and protested loudly that he had seen with his own eyes that there was one more barrel of the current vintage left, even though some fool had misplaced it by shoving it into a shadowy corner.

“I believe that one is spoiled,” Benedict said.

“Nonsense!” his father said. “It has not even been tapped. Bring it out, boy, bring it out!”

Benedict had no alternative but to roll out the barrel and drive a spigot into its side. He filled the steward’s wooden cup for the sixteenth time, and passed it to him with a trembling hand.

Corentin had already begun to frown before he set the cup to his lips, in preparation for the customary battle over price, but as soon as he took a sip from the cup his expression changed. He had earlier been very scrupulous about spitting out at least half of the wine he had tasted, lest the expertise of his palate be confused by intoxication, but he swallowed this mouthful entire, and followed it with another that was considerably more generous. Then he looked down with evident disappointment into his empty cup.

“Now that,” he said, forgetting his prepared script, “is a truly excellent wine.”

“Is it?” said Frederic, thrown off his own stride by this unexpected development. The merchant handed his own cup to Benedict, who took it to the spigot—but before it could be filled the steward’s bony hand clamped down hard on Benedict’s wrist.

“No, no,” he said, regretfully. “That’s too fine a vintage to waste on the likes of us, I fear. That’s the sort of wine that must go to my master’s table, for the benefit of his most intimate guests.” And he offered a price for the barrel that was half as much again as the highest price he had ever previously offered for a barrel of Frederic Paschel’s wine.

Frederic was a trifle disappointed, obviously regretting the loss of an opportunity to taste such a wonder, but he was a man of business, and he accepted the offer gracefully.

“You can deliver the other fifteen barrels at your leisure, Master Paschel,” the steward said. “Have your boy put this one into my carriage; I shall take it to Romanin today.”

Benedict opened his mouth to protest, but realized that he had no possible grounds for so doing. Corentin’s carriage was designed to carry passengers rather than cargo, but there was certainly room in it for a single barrel, provided that the steward was prepared to sit beside his driver. Benedict had no alternative but to rope the barrel and lift it with the aid of the windlass, and it was only with the utmost difficulty—even though Gilbert’s corpse weighed only a little more than the volume of wine it had displaced—that he managed to inch the load on to the floor of the carriage. He recovered his breath while the steward drove away, having promised to settle Frederic Paschel’s account as soon as the other barrels were delivered.

“This is a great day, my son,” the wine merchant said. “Your inheritance has had a great boost—and to judge by the way you were sweating as you lifted that barrel, Lord de Romanin will have a very ample measure of wine therefrom. I do hope that you have not been making a habit of over-filling the barrels.”

“No, father,” Benedict said, sadly. “If that cask contains more than it should, you can be assured that it is one of a kind.”

• • • •

That night, Benedict went to his father and said: “I have had enough of the wine trade, father, and have decided to follow my brother’s example in going abroad to seek my fortune. I would be very grateful, though, if you would pay me the wages due to me for laboring these last ten years in the winery.”

Frederic Paschel was obviously astonished by this request, because he became quite purple as his temper rose. “You ungrateful swine!” He cried. “How dare you! Every farthing that the winery has earned these last ten years has been reinvested in the business for the benefit of your inheritance. Everything I have done in my entire life I have done for you.”

“Well,” said Benedict, “I suppose you might see things that way, but I cannot. It seems to me that everything I have done in my entire life I have done for you. While I have toiled by day, you have been idle. While I have labored by night, you have slept in your comfortable bed. And as for all your talk of reinvestment . . . well, I count every bunch of grapes that goes into the vats, and every barrel and spigot we buy, and simple arithmetic assures me that you must have considerable savings in gold and silver stored away as part of my so-called inheritance. I do not ask for all of it, but I do want my fair share.”

Had Benedict not grown so wiry while manhandling barrels, Frederic Paschel might have been tempted to turn his son over his knee and give him a good thrashing—but when his father’s furious gaze had measured him from top to toe, Benedict watched that resolution falter and shrivel.

“Don’t be stupid, my son,” the wine merchant said, in a more conciliatory manner. “You’ve invested far too much yourself to throw away your inheritance now. Yes, I could give you a little coin—but if you take it away, it’ll soon be spent, and the winery will go to wrack and ruin in the meantime, for I can’t be expected to continue running it when my heart is broken. If you will not keep it going, it will have to be sold, and what a pity that would be, when we’ve just been producing the finest wine we’ve ever made . . . did I say we? I meant you, of course. It’s obvious to me that you’ve always had the wine-maker’s gift, and only needed practice to bring it out. I’ve stood back to let you obtain that practice, my son, and my discretion has paid off. You don’t need to go away to make your fortune—you can make it right here.”

Benedict was slightly taken aback by this change of attitude, but he knew that he could not give in. He dared not wait in Sylah for one more day. Indeed, he had already waited longer than he should, for he was spared the necessity of answering his father by a loud hammering on the door. When he answered it, he found a contingent of Lord de Romanin’s spearmen outside, who had been sent to arrest them both on a charge of selling wine in short measure.

“Short measure!” Frederic Paschel reported, when he received this information. “Impossible! I saw the barrel loaded myself, and was only now admonishing my son for overfilling it. If it was short when it arrived at the castle, that rascal of a steward must have piped half of it away for his own use.”

The soldiers were, however, merely following orders; their sergeant assured the merchant that he could lay his counter-accusations before Lord de Romanin. So Benedict and his father were put in irons and taken to the Chateau.

When they arrived, the merchant and his son were immediately taken to Duc Meldred, who was in his banqueting hall with his son, Sir Blaise, and his steward Corentin. The barrel was set beside the head of the table. The prisoners were thrust down on to their knees.

“If the barrel is light, my lord . . .” Frederic Paschel began, bowing until his forehead was almost touching the floor.

“The barrel is not light, Master Paschel,” the Lord said. “Indeed, that is the mystery. When my loyal steward told me what a wonder he had found, I could not wait until the feast; I had to test it for myself. Having found it every bit as delightful as he promised, I offered a cup to my son, and then invited the Comte de Thyresse, the father of my future daughter-in-law to sample it. We had a second round, and then a third . . . and our enjoyment increased so dramatically with every draught that we were extremely disappointed when it ceased to flow from the spigot, even though the barrel still had so much weight that the level could not possibly have sunk below the tap.”

“Perhaps, my Lord,” the wine merchant said, “you might tilt the barrel . . .”

“Of course we tilted the barrel,” Lord Romanin said, “fully expecting more wine to flow—but no wine flowed. Plainly, there is something else in this barrel as well as wine: something solid, which has shifted to block the spigot. Now, what do you suppose that might be?”

Frederic Paschel looked at his son then, with accusing eyes. “Benedict?” he said, unsteadily. “You were the one who filled that barrel, were you not?”

“I fill all the barrels,” Benedict replied, bitterly. “Whatever is in this one is to my credit—that I admit, since I cannot possibly deny it. Remove the lid, by all means. Take a look for yourself, my Lord . . . then do with me what you please. At least I have filled my last barrel for this old skinflint.” He did not attempt to rise to his feet, but he held his head high as he met his liege lord’s eyes.

Lord de Romanin looked at Benedict curiously, and then instructed his steward to hand over the claw hammer he had thoughtfully brought to the meeting. Benedict shrugged his shoulders and accepted the instrument. It only took him a minute to pull out the staples securing the lid. When he thrust the lid aside, the Duc de Romanin and Sir Blaise both peered in, very curiously.

“Why,” said Sir Blaise, “it’s a dead man. It seems that we’ve been drinking blood with our wine.”

“So it is,” said Lord de Romanin, thoughtfully. “And so we have.”

Benedict had expected them to grow pale, perhaps even to vomit, but the aristocracy of Aquitania was obviously cut from finer cloth than the nation’s common men.

“But it is an extremely fine wine,” Sir Blaise added, “and it might not be a good idea to let my future father-in-law know what we have been feeding him, even if we were innocent of any knowledge of it.”

“I am proud to have such a wise son,” Lord de Romanin said. “A keen sense of the diplomatic niceties is the most valuable gift a future Lord of Aquitania can possess—and it is, as you say, an extremely fine wine. There will be a good measure still to be drunk, once we have moved the dead man’s back away from the tap. Perhaps you can explain, Master Paschel, how the vintage turned out so well, given that the pickling of a corpse would normally be expected to spoil it?”

Frederic Paschel could only look back at his lord and master in frank amazement—but Benedict was quick to take his opportunity. “My lord,” he said, “my father has not the slightest idea how the vintage turned out so well—but I know the secret.”

Lord de Romanin raised his eyebrows in a delicately aristocratic fashion. “Which is?” he said.

“Mine to keep,” Benedict said, boldly. “But I can assure you that the wine has a preservative effect as well as a wondrous taste. It will be of great benefit to you if you keep on drinking it, provided that you do not share it too generously—but only I have the secret of making it, so you will need to look after me well.”

The Duc de Romanin looked long and hard at Benedict then, but in the end he only said: “Will you need more dead men?” he asked, politely.

“No, my lord,” Benedict said. “That one was unique. But the body has virtue enough to improve several more barrelfuls of wine—perhaps many more, if it is supervised with the proper skill.” This was, of course, a guess—but Benedict had reasoned that the elixir of youth must be seeping from the body that now contained it at a relatively modest rate, and might yet add a piquant bouquet to a luxurious harvest of wine.

Lord de Romanin made no immediate reply to this, but Sir Blaise said; “If it is only a matter of pouring in more wine, we could do as much ourselves.”

“Wine-making is a skilled trade,” Benedict pointed out, “and the best wines require the most artful makers. You might try, I suppose, to stretch the crop yourself . . . but if you were to fail, there would be no further opportunity. You would do better to put your trust in me.”

Sir Blaise seemed a trifle offended by this slur against his competence, but Lord de Romanin was quick to intervene. “What about you, Master Paschel?” he said to Frederic. “Are you not a very artful wine-maker?”

“I am no murderer,” the kneeling wine merchant was quick to say, “and no sorcerer either. No dead man was ever been found inside any barrel loaded by me.”

“Your father has a point,” Lord de Romanin said to Benedict. “The presence of the dead body in the barrel does suggest foul play, of more than one kind. Justice insists that murderers are hanged, and sorcerers burned. I’d be reckoned a poor lord of the realm if I did not put the demands of justice before those of my palate, would I not? Wine is only wine, but crime demands reparation.”

“It is true, my lord,” Benedict said, calculating that he had nothing to lose by being bold, “that if wine were only wine, it would be a poor thing to weigh against righteousness in the scales of justice. But you have drunk from that barrel, have you not? Is it only wine, do you think, or the veritable elixir of youth?”

Duc Meldred de Romanin nodded his noble head thoughtfully. “You told my steward that the barrel was spoiled,” he observed. “You did not want your father to sell it—but he had no idea what it contained . . .”

He was interrupted by Frederic Paschel’s cry of anguish. While attention had been diverted from him the curious merchant had climbed discreetly to his feet and tiptoed to the barrel, then leaned over to see what was inside it for himself. “Gilbert!” he moaned. “My beloved Gilbert!”

Lord de Romanin did not spare the merchant a glance. “Who is Gilbert?” he asked of Benedict.

“My brother,” Benedict answered.

“You killed your brother?” Lord de Romanin said, raising his eyebrow again. “May I ask why, Master Alchemist?”

Benedict had been thinking furiously, and took his opportunity without delay. “Because that is what the recipe called for, my lord,” he said. “That is why no other corpse would do—and even then, it required ten years of careful preparation.”

“Sorcery, my lord!” cried the steward, who now seemed to repent having drunk from the barrel. “He must be burned!”

“Be quiet, Corentin,” said Lord de Romanin, before addressing himself to Benedict again. “Are we in danger of damnation, then, Master Paschel, for having drunk your concoction?”

“Not at all, my Lord,” Benedict said, without hesitation. “I suppose I might be in some slight danger, but you and your son—and the Comte de Thyresse, too—are knights of Aquitania, perfect models of virtue and chivalry. How could you possibly be in any danger, given that your hearts are absolutely pure? Men of your kind, I feel perfectly sure, could drink barrel after barrel of the elixir without incurring the slightest stain on your souls. But if you would rather not . . .” He left the sentence dangling provocatively.

“I have long been of the opinion that we ought to have our own winery here at the castle,” Lord de Romanin said, after a moment’s thought. “We would need a good man to run it, of course. Your father is obviously too old, but he seems to have taught you everything he knows, and you have evidently done a little studying on your own account. Would you be prepared to accept such a position, if it were offered?”

“I would be very disappointed to leave my beloved father,” Benedict said, “but if my liege lord needs me, it is my duty to respond. I will gladly take the job.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” the Duc de Romanin said. He turned to his steward. “See to it that Master Paschel and his father receive suitable accommodation.”

• • • •

Benedict was elated when he heard the Duc’s instruction, but his delight was short-lived. Instead of being taken to one of the workshops clustered in the chateau’s capacious courtyard, he was taken into the cellars beneath one of the towers, to a chilly subterranean chamber with a single barred window and a door with a heavy iron lock. It had no furniture, although it did have a hole in one corner whose connection to the chateau’s main sewer was a little more immediate than any occupant of the room could have desired.

“This is a dungeon!” he objected.

“Oh no,” said Corentin. “Our dungeons are much narrower, and have no windows at all. Your father’s new apartment is a dungeon. This is a winery. At least, it will be a winery when the Duc’s men have brought barrels and vats from your former establishment.”

The room had not seemed very large when Benedict first measured it with his eye; when his imagination imported a vat and a dozen barrels—which was less than half of the apparatus presently contained in Frederic Paschel’s winery—he realized that he would hardly have space enough to stretch himself out to sleep.

“The conditions are hardly conducive to good wine-making,” he complained. “I need light, and air, and . . .”

“Then you will have to earn them,” the steward said, “by the quality of your labor.” And with that, he went out, locking the door behind him.

Benedict’s imagination proved perfectly reliable. Even though the Duc de Romanin’s men only set up a single vat and stacked up ten barrels of wine—in addition to the one containing Gilbert’s body—there was hardly enough floor-space left in the underground room for a man of Benedict’s size to lie himself down.

It only required a few minutes to refill the barrel containing Gilbert’s corpse from one of the others, so Benedict had plenty of time thereafter to consider his situation. He had no idea how long the supply of elixir contained in his brother’s body would continue to invigorate the wine, nor how long it would take for the elixir to seep out of the dead flesh. There was no guarantee that the next cupful drawn from the spigot would be as good as the last, and no way to calculate how many more cupfuls would follow in its train if it were. He would have to rely on trial and error to discover the optimum rate of improvement, and the one thing of which he could be certain was that the effect would not last forever.

Eventually, the elixir would run out and the wine would cease to derive any further benefit from the body. By that time, Meldred de Romanin and his son might have supped enough to preserve themselves indefinitely—although the fact that Corentin and the Comte de Thyresse had each taken a little, and given that Benedict would have to taste future barrels to judge their readiness, might ensure that none of them would gain the full benefit of the elixir. Benedict was not certain what difference, if any, that would make to his own situation.

Given that Gilbert had only had the evidence of hearsay to advise him as to the properties of his treasure, Benedict could not be absolutely certain that there had been exactly enough elixir in the flask to preserve two men against the effects of aging for an indefinite period. There might have been less, or more. On the other hand, Benedict thought, given that he had not the slightest idea how the elixir had been manufactured in the first place, it was at least conceivable that he might have stumbled upon a process by which it could be indefinitely renewed. If that turned out to be the case, there had to be a possibility that he could continue in the Duc de Romanin’s service for months, or years . . . and perhaps, if he cared to sample his own wares, a century and more.

Alas, none of these prospects could be reckoned pleasant while he was lodged in his present accommodation.

Once the sun had set, Benedict discovered that his situation was even worse than he thought, because the hole that led down to the sewer was a two-way thoroughfare. It would undoubtedly be very convenient for him to be able to expel his bodily wastes from the chamber, but the cost of that convenience was that inquisitive rats were able to intrude upon his privacy. Mercifully, the few that emerged during his first night of captivity found nothing to encourage them to linger, and fled readily enough when he lashed out at them. Even so, he placed three barrels in a line so that their tops formed a platform of sorts, on which he could sleep without fear of rats running over his body or nibbling the leather soles of his shoes.

Benedict was grateful for the fact that the breakfast sent to him on the following morning was appetizing as well as plentiful, although he knew that any crumbs he spilt would encourage the rats. He was grateful, too, when the Duc de Romanin, who seemed to be in a reasonably benevolent mood, came to see him.

“When will the new wine be ready for tasting, Master Paschel?” Lord de Romanin asked.

“Ten days, perhaps,” Benedict guessed.

“Oh no,” his master replied. “That will not do. I shall come to test it the day after tomorrow, on the morning of the great feast. I must admit, though, that I have been thinking very carefully about what you told me yesterday. I take your point about your brother’s body having some particular virtue, and requiring long preparation for its current function, but I cannot help wondering whether it might be worth our while to try a experiment or two, in a spirit of open-minded enquiry.”

“What do you mean, my lord?” Benedict asked, although he knew perfectly well what the Duc must mean.

“It so happens, Master Wine-maker, that my faithful steward Corentin had an accident last night. He fell down a flight of stone stairs and broke his neck. It was most unfortunate—the poor man had been in my service for many years, and my father’s service before that. Now, I understand perfectly that you could not work your magic with any run-of-the-mill dead man, but I cannot help wondering whether the steward—who had, after all, drunk a measure of the wine while he was testing its quality—might be able, so to speak, to export its effect. What do you think?”

Benedict’s first thought was that if he did not agree to collaborate in the experiment, Lord de Romanin would certainly try it himself—and that if it happened to work, he would immediately become redundant. He therefore made haste to say: “I cannot be certain that my artistry, though considerable, will be able to accomplish much with a body so ill-prepared—but I am willing to try, my lord, if that is your wish.”

“Excellent,” said the Duc. “I shall have the body brought down to you.”

It was not until the steward’s body had been set in a barrel, and the barrel filled with wine, that Benedict began to wonder what the consequence might be if Lord de Romanin’s experiment did work. The steward had undoubtedly supped more of the wine than was strictly necessary while he had been tasting it, and might have stolen a few further sips while he as transporting it back to the chateau, but he could not have drunk very much of it. Any elixir his body contained would be very dilute indeed by the time it had dissolved in wine—but it might, even so, make the wine more palatable. Benedict had not yet sampled the wine himself, but he knew that he would have to test his vintages while he was bringing them to their optimal condition; the health and pleasure thus gained would undoubtedly make his imprisonment more bearable, but his ingestion of the elixir would, over time, increase his value to the Duc in an altogether undesirable way—thus making the problem of finding a way out of his present predicament much more difficult and considerably more urgent.

With such weighty matters on his mind, Benedict might not have found it easy to sleep even if the rats had not been so active, but the news that something new and interesting was happening in the world above had obviously spread through the underworld during the day, and he was convinced that the number of furry visitors scampering about the floor on the second night of his captivity was considerably more than on the first. On the third night, if his ears could be trusted, there were hundreds swarming below him while he stretched himself out across the flat tops of his three broad barrels.

Lord de Romanin was as good as his word, reappearing in Benedict’s gloomy chamber almost as soon as he had breakfasted.

“What a great day this is!” the Lord declared, merrily. “A marriage-contract to be signed and countersigned, a solemn mass in the chapel and a nuptial ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of Bordelais, a huge feast to be enjoyed, and a fine tournament to be watched. Who could ask for anything more? I am only sorry, my dear Master Paschel, that you will be too busy to join in the festivities—but I know that an artist like yourself cares nothing for the joys of ordinary men, and would far rather devote your time entirely to your vocation. Have you sampled the refilled barrel, or the one in which my old steward was interred?”

“Not yet, my lord,” Benedict said, truthfully. “I am sure they are not yet ready . . .”

“You are probably right,” the Duc agreed, “but I am so enthusiastic to keep track of our experiment that I cannot wait to take a sip from each of them.”

Benedict had not hammered a spigot into the barrel containing the steward’s body, but he had to do it now. First, however, Lord de Romanin took a cupful from Gilbert’s barrel.

“It is good!” he exclaimed. “Very good indeed! Perhaps it will improve even further, given time, but I think you underestimate your talents, Master Paschel. As an artist, of course, you think only of quality . . . but now that you are in my service, I must try to be the best master I can, and it is my duty to think of quantity. Let me try the other.”

Benedict let out a cupful of wine from the steward’s cask and handed it over, hoping that it would be foul—or, at the very least, unready as yet to be drunk.

“Not as good,” was Lord de Romanin’s verdict. “Not nearly as good . . . but on the other hand, not as bad as one might expect from a polluted barrel. I cannot reckon the experiment a total success, but it is not a total failure either. Would you care to give me your opinion of the two vintages, Master Wine-maker?”

Benedict recognized the polite request as a firm command, and took a sip himself. He took a sip of Gilbert’s vintage first, and immediately understood why the Duc and Sir Blaise had taken the view that there were more important issues stake in this affair than punishing murder. The taste was divine, and the exhilarating effect it had on his consciousness was nothing short of miraculous—and yet he was as certain as he could be that this solution was considerably more dilute than the one that the Duc and his son had tasted on the previous evening.

“It needs more time,” he said, trying not to let his sudden lack of sobriety show. Then he took a sip of Corentin’s vintage.

The wine in which the steward’s body had been soaked was not nearly as bad as Benedict could have hoped, but it was by no means as good as he had feared. He was glad of the opportunity to say: “This is not nearly ready, my Lord. Perhaps I was over-cautious to think that it would require ten years to mature, but it will certainly require one, or even two . . .”

“Perhaps you are right,” Lord de Romanin said, judiciously. “You are the expert, after all, and it would not do to be too hasty . . . especially as we have the other, which will be ready far more quickly, and might be eked out for months or years . . . but I must go now. I have a million things to do—but you may be certain that I shall return.”

“There is no hurry, my Lord,” Benedict assured him.

“None at all,” the Duc agreed—but he came again much sooner than Benedict had anticipated, before the sun had set.

“There has been a terrible accident, Master Paschel,” Lord de Romanin said.

“Not my father!” Benedict protested.

“Oh no,” his master said. “Your father is perfectly safe in his cozy dungeon. The accident occurred during the jousting at my son’s betrothal feast . . .”

“Not your son!” Benedict exclaimed, in frank astonishment.

“I wish you would not keep interrupting,” Lord de Romanin said. “My son is perfectly well. It is the Comte de Thyresse, the father of his contracted bride, who has suffered a terrible misfortune. His daughter begged him not to enter the lists, and I advised him myself that it was an unwise thing to do, given his age, but he said that he felt ten years younger than he had three days ago, and insisted on strapping on his armor for, as he put it, one last fling. How right he was! He toppled two of my best knights, and then insisted that I send my champion against him. Somehow, in all the confusion, the weakened lance that my champion should have been carrying was set aside, and a sound one handed up to him instead—and the blow he struck was so well-judged that it went clean through my new brother’s breastplate, and his heart, too. What a tragedy!”

“A tragedy indeed,” Benedict agreed, although his own heart was all a-flutter. “I suppose the Comte’s men will carry him home to Thyresse for burial.”

“So custom demands,” Lord de Romanin agreed. “Clad in full armor, mounted on a shield drawn by his favorite horse. But the weather has been rather hot of late, and he came from such a distance, that I have agreed with his widow and daughter that the armor should be taken back empty for ceremonial burial, while the body is discreetly disposed of here. We must, of course, be very discreet. A matter of diplomatic nicety, you see.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Benedict said. “I see exactly what you mean.” He recalled that the Duc de Romanin and his son had shared their wonderful wine, though not its secret, with their honored guest.

By the time that Benedict stretched himself out that night, precariously perched upon his three barrels, the contents of another three were slowly leaching whatever virtue they could from the corpses of men who had tasted the elixir of youth. By rights, he supposed, the most recent vintage should turn out to be the noblest of them all—but he suspected that rights had little or nothing to do with the matter, and that the elixir had not the slightest respect for the unsubtle gradations of Aquitanian society.

After that, Lord de Romanin came down to his new winery twice a week, in order to sample all three of his experimental vintages and obtain Benedict’s expert opinion as to their progress. Neither the Duc nor Benedict made any further mention of Frederic Paschel, but they did spend a certain amount of time discussing one another’s health. The Lord declared freely that he had never felt better, and was improving all the time, but he expressed some concern for his faithful servant.

“You are too pale, Master Paschel. I certainly would not want you to become addicted to your produce, but I do think you might be exercising a little too much abstinence. I was rather hoping that you and I might enjoy a very long partnership, if our experiments should happen to work out as well as I dare to hope. I have considered the matter carefully, and it seems to me that if the virtue of your brother’s corpse can only be preserved, careful husbandry might allow us to exploit it for a long time . . . and if the virtue imparted to the other bodies can increase our stock . . . well, suffice it to say that I shall value your art more highly than I can say.”

“It is not lack of wine that is paling my complexion, my Lord,” Benedict told his master, “but lack of light. I could be a far better servant to you, for far longer, if I had better quarters. These are cold, dark, and damp, and very uncomfortable.”

“Are they?” said Lord de Romanin, as if the thought had never occurred to him—and Benedict had to concede that, having never visited them by night, his master might well have no idea how bad conditions then became. The Duc’s own quarters were undoubtedly placed so high in a tower that he never saw a single rat, and had no idea how abundantly they swarmed in his cellars and his sewers.

After a few moments consideration, Duc Meldred went on: “Well, then, I suppose I must consider the possibility of moving you to more comfortable lodgings—always provided of course, that our work goes well. All three of the barrels are improving slowly, are they not? Indeed, your brother’s vintage has almost recovered the full flower of its original bouquet—do you not think so?”

“You are right, my Lord,” Benedict said, “as one would expect of a true connoisseur. I believe that particular harvest might be ready in a week or so to supply another evening’s bountiful carousal . . . although it might be wise to exercise a little more caution. I am sure that the other two barrels will produce something drinkable eventually, although I fear that they will never match the quality of the original.”

“Good enough,” said Lord de Romanin, nodding his head sagely. “One more week, then . . . and if the evening in question lives up to my expectations, you’ll have the kind of winery of which you’ve always dreamed, for as long as you can keep your elixir flowing. We shall become a legend in our own lifetime, Master Paschel—and if you are the artist I think you are, it will be a long lifetime.”

• • • •

Benedict went to his improvised bed that night thinking One more week . . . just one more week, confident that it was a thought that could sustain him at least that long. He still had no idea how long his produce might sustain him thereafter, but he had to admit that the drops of wine he had taken from the barrels containing the Duc’s steward and Sir Blaise’s father-in-law had shown a steady improvement in quality over the past few weeks. Although they were, as he had told Duc Meldred, highly unlikely ever to emulate Gilbert’s vintage for taste or quality of invigoration, they did seem to have acquired a certain modest virtue—and who could say how much more they might yet acquire?

Benedict permitted himself to wonder, again, whether he might have had the extraordinary good luck to happen upon the secret of manufacturing the elixir of youth. Perhaps, he thought, Gilbert’s return had been engineered by some higher power. It was surely conceivable that Gilbert had actually been the instrument of some generous spirit, commissioned by that spirit to bring the elixir to a place where it might not only renew itself but increase itself vastly—in which case, what had happened in the winery on that terrible night had not been his fault at all, but merely the working out of some divine plan. Rather than feeling guilty about his crime, in fact, he ought to reckon himself an instrument of destiny, chosen to bring a new fount of miracles into the land of Aquitania—a fount whose effects would surely spread beyond Romanin as the Duc became more ambitious.

Once his own supply was absolutely secure, Benedict mused, Lord de Romanin would undoubtedly begin thinking in terms of trade, but as an aristocrat he would not think of trade in the same vulgar terms as Frederic Paschel. No—the Duc de Romanin would think in terms of advancement at court, and the favor of the king . . . and when he went to the king’s court in distant Aix-la-Chapelle, the Duc would doubtless take his faithful artisan with him, and raise him up from the station of wine-maker to that of Alchemist, or Master Magician . . .

While he indulged these flights of fancy, even Benedict contrived to forget the rats that swarmed below, scavenging every last crumb that he had dropped from his plate at breakfast and supper, and lapping up the spillage from his cups and ladles.

The next morning, he received a different visitor: the scion of the de Romanin family.

“You do not seem pleased to see me, Master Paschel,” the visitor observed.

“Not at all, sire,” Benedict said. “I was taken by surprise—I was expecting the Duc.”

“Alas,” said the former Sir Blaise, “I am the Duc. There has been a terrible accident. Last evening, while my father and I were out hunting boar in the forest, his horse stumbled and he was thrown. Mercifully, he broke his neck—otherwise, he would have died a lingering death, gored by his quarry’s tusks and savaged by the beast’s teeth. He was so badly mutilated that I dared not allow my mother or my wife to see the body, but had it safely stowed away for discreet disposal. There will have to be a funeral, of course, but a suit of armor will suffice for all ceremonial purposes. It is a frightful thing to happen, of course; he had seemed so well of late, younger than ever. A good son cannot help but think of his beloved parents as if they were invulnerable, of course, but in my father’s case there really did seem to be a possibility that he might go on forever. I had not thought of coming into my inheritance for years yet—decades, even—but when fate intervenes, priorities must change . . .

“At any rate, Master Wine-maker, you have a new liege lord now. Fear not; I have every intention of looking after you just as well as my father did, if your produce is as good as he had begun to hope. My father seemed very well pleased with the results of his experiments, but I should like to try a few sips of each of the vintages myself—it would mean a great deal to me to know that he did not die without making a worthy contribution to the sum of human knowledge.”

“Yes, sire—I mean, my Lord,” was Benedict’s inevitable response. He drew a small measure from each of the three laden casks, one by one, and gave the three cups to his new master.

“Now that is excellent,” the new Duc said, of Gilbert’s vintage. “That is the vintage in which I shall toast my late father’s memory—privately, of course; it does not do for an aristocrat to exhibit his grief in public. The other two will never match it, and are clearly unready even by their own low standards, but they are not entirely without virtue, are they? Please taste them, and give me your expert opinion.”

“You are right, my Lord,” said Benedict, when he had obeyed the command. “The other two will never match the first, but they are not utterly insipid.”

“Given that the steward and my late father-in-law supped so little of the wine,” the new Duc said, thoughtfully, “we cannot expect too much from them, but my father must have quaffed a great deal more during these last few weeks. Even he might not produce a harvest to compare with your own dear brother, but I think we should make the most of him—don’t you? It’s what he would have wanted, after all.”

“I am sure that it is,” Benedict agreed. “Am I to understand that I may still move into the new quarters the old Duc was making ready for me? I am certain that I could work far more profitably there than I can here, and the necessity of tending yet another special cask will make my work even more difficult than it was before.”

“I will, of course, honor all my father’s promises,” Duc Blaise said, “but preparations for the funeral will take up a great deal of everyone’s time in the next few days. We cannot possibly hold the memorial mass until Thursday, given that we shall have to bring the Archbishop all the way back from Bordelais so that he may officiate. We shall, of course, require a suitable interval thereafter for mourning, so you must be a little more patient. Your new quarters should be ready in fifteen days—twenty at the most—and you need not fear that you will be neglected in the meantime. I shall visit you again, as often as my father did, to keep track of all our experiments. You do have an empty cask to spare, I hope, and some wine with which to fill it up.”

“My supplies have run very low,” Benedict said, hesitantly. “They would have stretched for seven more days, had I not had any extra work to do, but now that I must prepare another cask and my relocation is to be delayed . . . well, my Lord, the vat is empty, save for the lees, which need to be cleared out. I need more grapes to tread, and new supplies of all the compounds necessary to aid their fermentation. If you would allow me to take a carriage down to the old winery, and then to the vineyards which supply our grapes . . .”

“Oh no,” said Lord de Romanin. “You have more than enough to do here. Give instructions to my men, and they will fetch everything you need.”

“It is not as simple as that, my Lord,” Benedict said. “The grapes must be selected by an expert eye, and the compounds need to be assembled by someone who knows exactly what is what. I fear that I was never as careful in labeling as I ought to have been—even my former laborers would be all at sea if they tried to follow a list.”

“I understand your reservations,” said the young Duc de Romanin. “I am a great believer in having jobs done properly. Fortunately, there is a compromise available. I shall send your father to buy more grapes and gather all the necessary apparatus. That is doubtless why my father decided to keep him close at hand.”

Benedict was by no means convinced that this strategy would solve his problems, but he could not think of an adequate objection, so he nodded his head meekly.

The old Duc’s body was brought down to the cellar within the hour, by which time Benedict had figured out how to rearrange the casks in such a way as to have adequate access to the four experimental vessels. One unfortunate side-effect of the rearrangement, however, was that the row of three casks that he had been using as a bed had to be broken up, and the only way that he could contrive a similar surface was to place three empty casks on top of three full ones, lined up behind the four experimental barrels. This would force him to sleep no more than a few inches from the ceiling, but he judged that it would be far better to be too close to the ceiling than too close to the floor.

He had just enough wine to spare to cover the old Duc’s body—a necessary precaution, given the tendency of bad odors to rise even in a cool cellar.

On the next day, the young Duc came to see Benedict again, in a very bad temper. “Your father is a damnable rogue,” he said, “and he obviously has not an ounce of paternal affection in him. As an honorable man, I had naturally imagined that he would not do anything to annoy me while you were safe in my care, but I had forgotten that the high standards of duty observed by the aristocracy are not reflected in the lower orders of our society. It appears that the old man had considerable savings in silver and gold hidden in his house—enough, at any rate, to afford the extortionate bribes that he required to make his escape from my domain. He will have to run all the way to Castile or Normandy to find security, but he obviously believes that he can do that. I pity you, Master Paschel—it must be a terrible thing to have labored so long for such an ungrateful man, and to know that the fruits of your long labor have been the means of your own betrayal.”

This was probably the truest thing that the young Duc had ever said—as Benedict freely acknowledged with a long cry of anguish.

“But you need not worry about your own future,” Blaise de Romanin went on, “for I shall do everything in my power to protect you and keep you safe. I shall have every single item brought from your old storehouse to the castle, and I shall order my new steward to buy up every grape within a day’s ride, so that you may have your pick of them. Next year, we shall do the same. Worry not, my faithful servant—I shall not hold your father’s treason against you, and will look after you even more carefully because of it. Now, shall we see how my father’s vintage is coming along? I must admit that I am keen to find out how much life there is in it, even though it will not be truly mature for a very long time.”

This final judgment was, of course, correct—but Benedict only required a single sip of his new vintage to know that there was indeed life in it. The elixir of youth was obviously a very hardy liquor, which did not easily decay even if its host fell prey to dire misfortune. Even if the amount retained indefinitely within the four corpses reduced the reclaimable stock to a dose that was not quite sufficient to preserve two men indefinitely, Benedict guessed, there would be quite enough within the four casks to keep one man young for an exceedingly long time.

Well, Benedict thought, I suppose my fate is decided now, and at least I shall get my new winery, in fifteen or twenty days. It will doubtless have a stout lock on the door, but I shall be free of the rats.

Although he did not know himself whether his intention was to celebrate his own preservation or to drown his potentially-eternal sorrows, Benedict decided that he might as well console himself with a drink, and that if he were going to have a drink he might as well be drinking fine wine, and that, whether he were cursing his father or congratulating him, he ought to let his brother partake of his toast—so he took a generous cupful of wine from Gilbert’s cask, and drank it down; and then he took another, and another. He did not even bother to top up the cask before climbing up to his new bed.

At least, he thought, I shall be safe from the rats.

Alas, this judgment turned out to be a trifle optimistic. He would, indeed, have been safe from the rats had he slept as soundly as he intended and expected to, but the ceiling of his cell was infested with spiders, which scurried about by night, and it happened that one of them lost its grip and fell into his open mouth while he was snoring.

Benedict sat up abruptly, smashing his head on the stone ceiling, and as he recoiled he rolled off his improvised bed, falling several feet on to the four barrels neatly arrayed below. No harm would have come to them had they all been properly maintained and topped-up, but Benedict had been working without a full set of cooper’s tools for some time, and he had not topped up the barrel containing his brother’s body. That barrel splintered, and two of its hoops broke—with the result that its liquid contents burst out, flooding the floor.

Half a dozen of the rats that were swarming over the floor at that moment were drowned, but half a thousand more set about lapping up the spilled wine.

Rats are not renowned as connoisseurs of wine, but they would probably have enjoyed what they supped even if there had been nothing in it but the essence of the grape or mere dead flesh. As things were, they were so greatly invigorated by their consumption that it only took them a further half-hour to clean Gilbert’s bones of every last vestige of flesh.

Further invigorated, the rats set to work on the unconscious Benedict—who woke up just in time to feel the worst of the agonies thus inflicted, but not quite soon enough to be able to cry out in alarm. Connoisseurs of wine or not, the rats were certainly connoisseurs of flesh, pickled or fresh, and they held a tongue to be an even greater delicacy than a meaty heart or a juicy liver.

By the time that Benedict’s skeleton had been stripped, there were more than five thousand rats competing over the privilege. Under normal circumstances, they would have stopped at that, but many of these were rats that had now supped their fill of the elixir of youth, not to mention the essence of the grape, and they immediately set themselves to the task of gnawing through the wood of the three full casks that still remained to be emptied.

The eager rats broke their teeth and bloodied their mouths, but the stoutest heartwood of the Romanin forest could not have withstood that collective assault. Long before dawn the rats had cleaned three more corpses of every last morsel of flesh, and lapped up every drop of the wine in which the bodies had been doused.

By the time the young Duc’s servants brought Benedict’s breakfast down on the following morning, there was not a rat to be seen, although the scattered bones of the six that had drowned gave some evidence of what had happened. That day was, however, the last day on which life in the Chateau de Romanin maintained some semblance of normality. On the next night, the rats returned, and this time they were not content to stay in the cellars. They ran riot through the entire castle, consuming everything that could not move fast enough to run away—not excluding humans, dogs and horses. Lady Ghislaine and the young Duc’s mother were among those who failed to make their escape.

Duc Blaise de Romanin came back the next day with a company of men-at-arms and three full packs of hunting-dogs. They set traps everywhere, and waited in full armor for night to fall. When the rats came out again the battle was long and bloody—but it was the men who eventually retreated, and never returned.

• • • •

Within a year, the Domain of Romanin was no more. King Charles had revoked the title—necessarily, it was said, because the family was extinct, consumed by agents of the Devil. The Archbishop of Bordelais had informed the king that he had pronounced an anathema against the rats of Romanin, and had sprinkled holy water all around the desolate chateau, but to no avail—which was, of course, absolute proof that unholy forces were at work there.

The towns, farms, vineyards, and forests that had formerly belonged to the Romanins were redistributed among the neighboring domains—all except for the chateau itself, and the surrounding estate, which were put under proscription and left to return to wilderness.

No one was supposed to live in the chateau or its grounds, and it is possible that no one actually did—but long afterwards, on stormy nights, for a hundred years and more, the tale was told around the hearths of all the chateaux of the neighboring domains that the ruins of Romanin were haunted by a gaunt and wild-eyed human creature.

This madman, the storytellers said, called himself Blaise the Undying, and claimed to be a Duc—but he was evidently the lowest of the low, in the reckoning of Aquitanian society, for he dressed in rags in spite of his rude health, and never ate or drank anything but the flesh and blood of rats.

©© 2008 by Brian Stableford. Originally published in An Oasis of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Having sold his first short story to Science Fantasy in 1965, Brian Stableford has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for fifty years. His fiction includes eleven novels and seven short story collections of “tales of the biotech revolution,” exploring the possible social and personal consequences of potential innovations in biotechnology, and a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin in confrontation with various bizarre phenomena. His non-fiction includes the four-volume New Atlantis: A Narrative History of Scientific Romance (Wildside Press). He is presently researching a history of French roman scientifique from 1700-1939, translating much of the relevant material into English for the first time, for Black Coat Press.

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

Taklamakan

Bruce Sterling | 16120 words

A bone-dry frozen wind tore at the earth outside, its lethal howling cut to a muffled moan. Katrinko and Spider Pete were camped deep in a crevice in the rock, wrapped in furry darkness. Pete could hear Katrinko breathing, with a light rattle of chattering teeth. The neuter’s yeasty armpits smelled like nutmeg.

Spider Pete strapped his shaven head into his spex.

Outside their puffy nest, the sticky eyes of a dozen gelcams splayed across the rock, a sky-eating web of perception. Pete touched a stud on his spex, pulled down a glowing menu, and adjusted his visual take on the outside world.

Flying powder tumbled through the yardangs like an evil fog. The crescent moon and a billion desert stars, glowing like pixelated bruises, wheeled above the eerie wind-sculpted landscape of the Taklamakan. With the exceptions of Antarctica, or maybe the deep Sahara—locales Pete had never been paid to visit—this central Asian desert was the loneliest, most desolate place on Earth.

Pete adjusted parameters, etching the landscape with a busy array of false colors. He recorded an artful series of panorama shots, and tagged a global positioning fix onto the captured stack. Then he signed the footage with a cryptographic timestamp from a passing NAFTA spy-sat.

1/15/2052 05:24:01.

Pete saved the stack onto a gelbrain. This gelbrain was a walnut-sized lump of neural biotech, carefully grown to mimic the razor-sharp visual cortex of an American bald eagle. It was the best, most expensive piece of photographic hardware that Pete had ever owned. Pete kept the thing tucked in his crotch.

Pete took a deep and intimate pleasure in working with the latest federally subsidized spy gear. It was quite the privilege for Spider Pete, the kind of privilege that he might well die for. There was no tactical use in yet another spy-shot of the chill and empty Taklamakan. But the tagged picture would prove that Katrinko and Pete had been here at the appointed rendezvous. Right here, right now. Waiting for the man.

And the man was overdue.

During their brief professional acquaintance, Spider Pete had met the Lieutenant Colonel in a number of deeply unlikely locales. A parking garage in Pentagon City. An outdoor seafood restaurant in Cabo San Lucas. On the ferry to Staten Island. Pete had never known his patron to miss a rendezvous by so much as a microsecond.

The sky went dirty white. A sizzle, a sparkle, a zenith full of stink. A screaming-streaking-tumbling. A nasty thunderclap. The ground shook hard.

“Dang,” Pete said.

• • • •

They found the Lieutenant Colonel just before eight in the morning. Pieces of his landing pod were violently scattered across half a kilometer.

Katrinko and Pete skulked expertly through a dirty yellow jumble of wind-grooved boulders. Their camou gear switched coloration moment by moment, to match the landscape and the incidental light.

Pete pried the mask from his face, inhaled the thin, pitiless, metallic air, and spoke aloud. “That’s our boy all right. Never missed a date.”

The neuter removed her mask and fastidiously smeared her lips and gums with silicone anti-evaporant. Her voice fluted eerily over the insistent wind. “Space-defense must have tracked him on radar.”

“Nope. If they’d hit him from orbit, he’d really be spread all over . . . No, something happened to him really close to the ground.” Pete pointed at a violent scattering of cracked ochre rock. “See, check out how that stealth-pod hit and tumbled. It didn’t catch fire till after the impact.”

With the absent ease of a gecko, the neuter swarmed up a three-story-high boulder. She examined the surrounding forensic evidence at length, dabbing carefully at her spex controls. She then slithered deftly back to earth. “There was no anti-aircraft fire, right? No interceptors flyin’ round last night.”

“Nope. Heck, there’s no people around here in a space bigger than Delaware.”

The neuter looked up. “So what do you figure, Pete?”

“I figure an accident,” said Pete.

“A what?”

“An accident. A lot can go wrong with a covert HALO insertion.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Well, G-loads and stuff. System malfunctions. Maybe he just blacked out.”

“He was a federal military spook, and you’re telling me he passed out?” Katrinko daintily adjusted her goggled spex with gloved and bulbous fingertips. “Why would that matter anyway? He wouldn’t fly a spacecraft with his own hands, would he?”

Pete rubbed at the gummy line of his mask, easing the prickly indentation across one dark, tattooed cheek. “I kinda figure he would, actually. The man was a pilot. Big military prestige thing. Flyin’ in by hand, deep in Sphere territory, covert insertion, way behind enemy lines . . . That’d really be something to brag about, back on the Potomac.”

The neuter considered this sour news without apparent resentment. As one of the world’s top technical climbers, Katrinko was a great connoisseur of pointless displays of dangerous physical skill. “I can get behind that.” She paused. “Serious bad break, though.”

They resealed their masks. Water was their greatest lack, and vapor exhalation was a problem. They were recycling body-water inside their suits, topped off with a few extra cc’s they’d obtained from occasional patches of frost. They’d consumed the last of the trail-goop and candy from their glider shipment three long days ago. They hadn’t eaten since. Still, Pete and Katrinko were getting along pretty well, living off big subcutaneous lumps of injected body fat.

More through habit than apparent need, Pete and Katrinko segued into evidence-removal mode. It wasn’t hard to conceal a HALO stealth pod. The spy-craft was radar-transparent and totally biodegradable. In the bitter wind and cold of the Taklamakan, the bigger chunks of wreckage had already gone all brown and crispy, like the shed husks of locusts. They couldn’t scrape up every physical trace, but they’d surely get enough to fool aerial surveillance.

The Lieutenant Colonel was extremely dead. He’d come down from the heavens in his full NAFTA military power-armor, a leaping, brick-busting, lightning-spewing exoskeleton, all acronyms and input jacks. It was powerful, elaborate gear, of an entirely different order than the gooey and fibrous street tech of the two urban intrusion freaks.

But the high-impact crash had not been kind to the armored suit. It had been crueler still to the bone, blood, and tendon housed inside.

Pete bagged the larger pieces with a heavy heart. He knew that the Lieutenant Colonel was basically no good: deceitful, ruthlessly ambitious, probably crazy. Still, Pete sincerely regretted his employer’s demise. After all, it was precisely those qualities that had led the Lieutenant Colonel to recruit Spider Pete in the first place.

Pete also felt sincere regret for the gung-ho, clear-eyed young military widow, and the two little redheaded kids in Augusta, Georgia. He’d never actually met the widow or the little kids, but the Lieutenant Colonel was always fussing about them and showing off their photos. The Lieutenant Colonel had been a full fifteen years younger than Spider Pete, a rosy-cheeked cracker kid, really, never happier than when handing over wads of money, nutty orders, and expensive covert equipment to people whom no sane man would trust with a burnt-out match. And now here he was in the cold and empty heart of Asia, turned to jam within his shards of junk.

Katrinko did the last of the search-and-retrieval while Pete dug beneath a ledge with his diamond hand-pick, the razored edges slashing out clods of shale.

After she’d fetched the last blackened chunk of their employer, Katrinko perched birdlike on a nearby rock. She thoughtfully nibbled a piece of the pod’s navigation console. “This gelbrain is good when it dries out, man. Like trail mix, or a fortune cookie.”

Pete grunted. “You might be eating part of him, y’know.”

“Lotta good carbs and protein there, too.”

They stuffed a final shattered power-jackboot inside the Colonel’s makeshift cairn. The piled rock was there for the ages. A few jets of webbing and thumbnail dabs of epoxy made it harder than a brick wall.

It was noon now, still well below freezing, but as warm as the Taklamakan was likely to get in January. Pete sighed, dusted sand from his knees and elbows, stretched. It was hard work, cleaning up; the hardest part of intrusion work, because it was the stuff you had to do after the thrill was gone. He offered Katrinko the end of a fiber-optic cable, so that they could speak together without using radio or removing their masks.

Pete waited until she had linked in, then spoke into his mike. “So we head on back to the glider now, right?”

The neuter looked up, surprised. “How come?”

“Look, Trink, this guy that we just buried was the actual spy in this assignment. You and me, we were just his gophers and backup support. The mission’s an abort.”

“But we’re searching for a giant, secret, rocket base.”

“Yeah, sure we are.”

“We’re supposed to find this monster high-tech complex, break in, and record all kinds of crazy top secrets that nobody but the mandarins have ever seen. That’s a totally hot assignment, man.”

Pete sighed. “I admit it’s very high-concept, but I’m an old guy now, Trink. I need the kind of payoff that involves some actual money.”

Katrinko laughed. “But Pete! It’s a starship! A whole fleet of ’em, maybe! Secretly built in the desert, by Chinese spooks and Japanese engineers!”

Pete shook his head. “That was all paranoid bullshit that the flyboy made up, to get himself a grant and a field assignment. He was tired of sitting behind a desk in the basement, that’s all.”

Katrinko folded her lithe and wiry arms. “Look, Pete, you saw those briefings just like me. You saw all those satellite shots. The traffic analysis, too. The Sphere people are up to something way big out here.”

Pete gazed around him. He found it painfully surreal to endure this discussion amid a vast and threatening tableau of dust-hazed sky and sand-etched mudstone gullies. “They built something big here once, I grant you that. But I never figured the Colonel’s story for being very likely.”

“What’s so unlikely about it? The Russians had a secret rocket base in the desert a hundred years ago. American deserts are full of secret mil-spec stuff and space-launch bases. So now the Asian Sphere people are up to the same old game. It all makes sense.”

“No, it makes no sense at all. Nobody’s space-racing to build any starships. Starships aren’t a space race. It takes four hundred years to fly to the stars. Nobody’s gonna finance a major military project that’ll take four hundred years to pay off. Least of all a bunch of smart and thrifty Asian economic-warfare people.”

“Well, they’re sure building something. Look, all we have to do is find the complex, break in, and document some stuff. We can do that! People like us, we never needed any federal bossman to help us break into buildings and take photos. That’s what we always do, that’s what we live for.”

Pete was touched by the kid’s game spirit. She really had the City Spider way of mind. Nevertheless, Pete was fifty-two years old, so he found it necessary to at least try to be reasonable. “We should haul our sorry spook asses back to that glider right now. Let’s skip on back over the Himalayas. We can fly on back to Washington, tourist class out of Delhi. They’ll debrief us at the puzzle-palace. We’ll give ’em the bad news about the bossman. We got plenty of evidence to prove that, anyhow . . . The spooks will give us some walkin’ money for a busted job, and tell us to keep our noses clean. Then we can go out for some pork chops.”

Katrinko’s thin shoulders hunched mulishly within the bubblepak warts of her insulated camou. She was not taking this at all well. “Peter, I ain’t looking for pork chops. I’m looking for some professional validation, okay? I’m sick of that lowlife kid stuff, knocking around raiding network sites and mayors’ offices . . . This is my chance at the big-time!”

Pete stroked the muzzle of his mask with two gloved fingers.

“Pete, I know that you ain’t happy. I know that already, okay? But you’ve already made it in the big-time, Mr. City Spider, Mr. Legend, Mr. Champion. Now here’s my big chance come along, and you want us to hang up our cleats.”

Pete raised his other hand. “Wait a minute, I never said that.”

“Well, you’re tellin’ me you’re walking. You’re turning your back. You don’t even want to check it out first.”

“No,” Pete said weightily, “I reckon you know me too well for that, Trink. I’m still a Spider. I’m still game. I’ll always at least check it out.”

• • • •

Katrinko set their pace after that. Pete was content to let her lead. It was a very stupid idea to continue the mission without the overlordship of the Lieutenant Colonel. But it was stupid in a different and more refreshing way than the stupid idea of returning home to Chattanooga.

People in Pete’s line of work weren’t allowed to go home. He’d tried that once, really tried it, eight years ago, just after that badly busted caper in Brussels. He’d gotten a straight job at Lyle Schweik’s pedal-powered aircraft factory. The millionaire sports tycoon had owed him a favor. Schweik had been pretty good about it, considering.

But word had swiftly gotten around that Pete had once been a champion City Spider. Dumb-ass co-workers would make significant remarks. Sometimes they asked him for so-called favors, or tried to act street-wise. When you came down to it, straight people were a major pain in the ass.

Pete preferred the company of seriously twisted people. People who really cared about something, cared enough about it to really warp themselves for it. People who looked for more out of life than mommy-daddy, money, and the grave.

Below the edge of a ridgeline they paused for a recce. Pete whirled a tethered eye on the end of its reel and flung it. At the peak of its arc, six stories up, it recorded their surroundings in a panoramic view.

Pete and Katrinko studied the image together through their linked spex. Katrinko highlit an area downhill with a fingertip gesture. “Now there’s a tipoff.”

“That gully, you mean?”

“You need to get outdoors more, Pete. That’s what we rockjocks technically call a road.”

Pete and Katrinko approached the road with professional caution. It was a paved ribbon of macerated cinderblock, overrun with drifting sand. The road was made of the coked-out clinker left behind by big urban incinerators, a substance that Asians used for their road surfaces because all the value had been cooked out of it.

The cinder road had once seen a great deal of traffic. There were tire-shreds here and there, deep ruts in the shoulder, and post-holes that had once been traffic signs, or maybe surveillance boxes.

They followed the road from a respectful distance, cautious of monitors, tripwires, landmines, and many other possible unpleasantries. They stopped for a rest in a savage arroyo where a road bridge had been carefully removed, leaving only neat sockets in the roadbed and a kind of conceptual arc in midair.

“What creeps me out is how clean this all is,” Pete said over cable. “It’s a road, right? Somebody’s gotta throw out a beer can, a lost shoe, something.”

Katrinko nodded. “I figure construction robots.”

“Really.”

Katrinko spread her swollen-fingered gloves. “It’s a Sphere operation, so it’s bound to have lots of robots, right? I figure robots built this road. Robots used this road. Robots carried in tons and tons of whatever they were carrying. Then when they were done with the big project, the robots carried off everything that was worth any money. Gathered up the guideposts, bridges everything. Very neat, no loose ends, very Sphere-type way to work.” Katrinko set her masked chin on her bent knees, gone into reverie. “Some very weird and intense stuff can happen, when you got a lot of space in the desert, and robot labor that’s too cheap to meter.”

Katrinko hadn’t been wasting her time in those intelligence briefings. Pete had seen a lot of City Spider wannabes, even trained quite a few of them. But Katrinko had what it took to be a genuine Spider champion: the desire, the physical talent, the ruthless dedication, and even the smarts. It was staying out of jails and morgues that was gonna be the tough part of Katrinko. “You’re a big fan of the Sphere, aren’t you, kid? You really like the way they operate.”

“Sure, I always liked Asians. Their food’s a lot better than Europe’s.”

Pete took this in stride. NAFTA, Sphere, and Europe: the trilateral super-powers jostled about with the uneasy regularity of sunspots, periodically brewing storms in the proxy regimes of the South. During his fifty-plus years, Pete had seen the Asian Cooperation Sphere change its public image repeatedly, in a weird political rhythm. Exotic vacation spot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Baffling alien threat on Mondays and Wednesdays. Major trading partner each day and every day, including weekends and holidays.

At the current political moment, the Asian Cooperation Sphere was deep into its Inscrutable Menace mode, logging lots of grim media coverage as NAFTA’s chief economic adversary. As far as Pete could figure it, this basically meant that a big crowd of goofy North American economists were trying to act really macho. Their major complaint was that the Sphere was selling NAFTA too many neat, cheap, well-made consumer goods. That was an extremely silly thing to get killed about. But people perished horribly for much stranger reasons than that.

• • • •

At sunset, Pete and Katrinko discovered the giant warning signs. They were titanic vertical plinths, all epoxy and clinker, much harder than granite. They were four stories tall, carefully rooted in bedrock, and painstakingly chiseled with menacing horned symbols and elaborate textual warnings in at least fifty different languages. English was language number three.

“Radiation waste,” Pete concluded, deftly reading the text through his spex, from two kilometers away. “This is a radiation waste dump. Plus, a nuclear test site. Old Red Chinese hydrogen bombs, way out in the Taklamakan desert.” He paused thoughtfully. “You gotta hand it to ’em. They sure picked the right spot for the job.”

“No way!” Katrinko protested. “Giant stone warning signs, telling people not to trespass in this area? That’s got to be a con-job.”

“Well, it would sure account for them using robots, and then destroying all the roads.”

“No, man. It’s like—you wanna hide something big nowadays. You don’t put a safe inside the wall any more, because hey, everybody’s got magnetometers and sonic imaging and heat detection. So you hide your best stuff in the garbage.”

Pete scanned their surroundings on spex telephoto. They were lurking on a hillside above a playa, where the occasional gullywasher had spewed out a big alluvial fan of desert varnished grit and cobbles. Stuff was actually growing down there—squat leathery grasses with fat waxy blades like dead men’s fingers. The evil vegetation didn’t look like any kind of grass that Pete had ever seen. It struck him as the kind of grass that would blithely gobble up stray plutonium. “Trink, I like my explanations simple. I figure that so-called giant starship base for a giant radwaste dump.”

“Well, maybe,” the neuter admitted. “But even if that’s the truth, that’s still news worth paying for. We might find some busted up barrels, or some badly managed fuel rods out there. That would be a big political embarrassment, right? Proof of that would be worth something.”

“Huh,” said Pete, surprised. But it was true. Long experience had taught Pete that there were always useful secrets in other people’s trash. “Is it worth glowin’ in the dark for?”

“So what’s the problem?” Katrinko said. “I ain’t having kids. I fixed that a long time ago. And you’ve got enough kids already.”

“Maybe,” Pete grumbled. Four kids by three different women. It had taken him a long, sad time to learn that women who fell head-over-heels for footloose, sexy tough guys would fall repeatedly for pretty much any footloose, sexy tough guy.

Katrinko was warming to the task at hand. “We can do this, man. We got our suits and our breathing masks, and we’re not eating or drinking anything out here, so we’re practically radiation-tight. So we camp way outside the dump tonight. Then, before dawn, we slip in, we check it out real quick, we take our pictures, we leave. Clean, classic intrusion job. Nobody living around here to stop us, no problem there. And then we got something to show the spooks when we get home. Maybe something we can sell.”

Pete mulled this over. The prospect didn’t sound all that bad. It was dirty work, but it would complete the mission. Also—this was the part he liked best—it would keep the Lieutenant Colonel’s people from sending in some other poor guy. “Then, back to the glider?”

“Then back to the glider.”

“Okay, good deal.”

• • • •

Before dawn the next morning, they stoked themselves with athletic performance enhancers, brewed in the guts of certain gene-spliced ticks that they had kept hibernating in their armpits. Then they concealed their travel gear, and swarmed like ghosts up and over the great wall.

They pierced a tiny hole through the roof of one of the dun-colored, half-buried containment hangars, and oozed a spy-eye through.

Bombproofed ranks of barrel-shaped sarcophagi, solid glossy as polished granite. The big fused radwaste containers were each the size of a tanker truck. They sat there, neatly ranked in hermetic darkness, mute as sphinxes. They looked to be good for the next twenty thousand years.

Pete liquefied and retrieved the gelcam, then re-sealed the tiny hole with rock putty. They skipped down the slope of the dusty roof. There were lots of lizard tracks in the sand drifts, piled at the rim of the dome. These healthy traces of lizard cheered Pete up considerably.

They swarmed silently up and over the wall. Back uphill to the grotto where they’d stashed their gear. Then they removed their masks to talk again.

Pete sat behind a boulder, enjoying the intrusion afterglow. “A cakewalk,” he pronounced it. “A pleasure hike.” His pulse was already normal again, and, to his joy, there were no suspicious aches under his caraco-acromial arch.

“You gotta give them credit, those robots sure work neat.”

Pete nodded. “Killer application for robots, your basic lethal waste gig.”

“I telephoto’ed that whole cantonment,” said Katrinko, “and there’s no water there. No towers, no plumbing, no wells. People can get along without a lot of stuff in the desert, but nobody lives without water. That place is stone dead. It was always dead.” She paused. “It was all automated robot work from start to finish. You know what that means, Pete? It means no human being has ever seen that place before. Except for you and me.”

“Hey, then it’s a first! We scored a first intrusion! That’s just dandy,” said Pete, pleased at the professional coup. He gazed across the cobbled plain at the walled cantonment, and pressed a last set of spex shots into his gelbrain archive. Two dozen enormous domes, built block by block by giant robots, acting with the dumb persistence of termites. The sprawling domes looked as if they’d congealed on the spot, their rims settling like molten taffy into the desert’s little convexities and concavities. From a satellite view, the domes probably passed for natural features. “Let’s not tarry, okay? I can kinda feel those X-ray fingers kinking my DNA.”

“Aw, you’re not all worried about that, are you, Pete?”

Pete laughed and shrugged. “Who cares? Job’s over, kid. Back to the glider.”

“They do great stuff with gene damage nowadays, y’know. Kinda reweave you, down at the spook lab.”

“What, those military doctors? I don’t wanna give them the excuse.”

The wind picked up. A series of abrupt and brutal gusts. Dry, and freezing, and peppered with stinging sand.

Suddenly, a faint moan emanated from the cantonment. Distant lungs blowing the neck of a wine bottle.

“What’s that big weird noise?” demanded Katrinko, all alert interest.

“Aw no,” said Pete. “Dang.”

Steam was venting from a hole in the bottom of the thirteenth dome. They’d missed the hole earlier, because the rim of that dome was overgrown with big thriving thornbushes. The bushes would have been a tip-off in themselves, if the two of them had been feeling properly suspicious.

In the immediate area, Pete and Katrinko swiftly discovered three dead men. The three men had hacked and chiseled their way through the containment dome—from the inside. They had wriggled through the long, narrow crevice they had cut, leaving much blood and skin.

The first man had died just outside the dome, apparently from sheer exhaustion. After their Olympian effort, the two survivors had emerged to confront the sheer four-story walls.

The remaining men had tried to climb the mighty wall with their handaxes, crude woven ropes, and pig-iron pitons. It was a nothing wall for a pair of City Spiders with modern handwebs and pinpression cleats. Pete and Katrinko could have camped and eaten a watermelon on that wall. But it was a very serious wall for a pair of very weary men dressed in wool, leather, and homemade shoes.

One of them had fallen from the wall, and had broken his back and leg. The last one had decided to stay to comfort his dying comrade, and it seemed he had frozen to death.

The three men had been dead for many months, maybe over a year. Ants had been at work on them, and the fine salty dust of the Taklamakan, and the freeze-drying. Three desiccated Asian mummies, black hair and crooked teeth and wrinkled dusky skin, in their funny bloodstained clothes.

Katrinko offered the cable lead, chattering through her mask. “Man, look at these shoes! Look at this shirt this guy’s got—would you call this thing a shirt?”

“What I would call this is three very brave climbers,” Pete said. He tossed a tethered eye into the crevice that the men had cut.

The inside of the thirteenth dome was a giant forest of monitors. Microwave antennas, mostly. The top of the dome wasn’t sturdy sintered concrete like the others, it was some kind of radar-transparent plastic. Dark inside, like the other domes, and hermetically sealed—at least before the dead men had chewed and chopped their hole through the wall. No sign of any rad-waste around here.

They discovered the little camp where the men had lived. Their bivouac. Three men, patiently chipping and chopping their way to freedom. Burning their last wicks and oil lamps, eating their last rations bite by bite, emptying their leather canteens and scraping for frost to drink. Surrounded all the time by a towering jungle of satellite relays and wavepipes. Pete found that scene very ugly. That was a very bad scene. That was the worst of it yet.

• • • •

Pete and Katrinko retrieved their full set of intrusion gear. They then broke in through the top of the dome, where the cutting was easiest. Once through, they sealed the hole behind themselves, but only lightly, in case they should need a rapid retreat. They lowered their haulbags to the stone floor, then rappelled down on their smart ropes. Once on ground level, they closed the escape tunnel with web and rubble, to stop the howling wind, and to keep contaminants at bay.

With the hole sealed, it grew warmer in the dome. Warm, and moist. Dew was collecting on walls and floor. A very strange smell, too. A smell like smoke and old socks. Mice and spice. Soup and sewage. A cozy human reek from the depths of the earth.

“The Lieutenant Colonel sure woulda have loved this,” whispered Katrinko over cable, spexing out the towering machinery with her infrareds. “You put a clip of explosive ammo through here, and it sure would put a major crimp in somebody’s automated gizmos.”

Pete figured their present situation for an excellent chance to get killed. Automated alarm systems were the deadliest aspect of his professional existence, somewhat tempered by the fact that smart and aggressive alarm systems frequently killed their owners. There was a basic engineering principle involved. Fancy, paranoid alarm systems went false-positive all the time: squirrels, dogs, wind, hail, earth tremors, horny boyfriends who forgot the password . . . They were smart, and they had their own agenda, and it made them troublesome.

But if these machines were alarms, then they hadn’t noticed a rather large hole painstakingly chopped in the side of their dome. The spars and transmitters looked bad, all patchy with long-accumulated rime and ice. A junkyard look, the definite smell of dead tech. So somebody had given up on these smart, expensive, paranoid alarms. Someone had gotten sick and tired of them, and shut them off.

• • • •

At the foot of a microwave tower, they found a rat-sized manhole chipped out, covered with a laced-down lid of sheep’s hide. Pete dropped a spy-eye down, scoping out a machine-drilled shaft. The tunnel was wide enough to swallow a car, and it dropped down as straight as a plumb bob for farther than his eye’s wiring could reach.

Pete silently yanked a rusting pig-iron piton from the edge of the hole, and replaced it with a modern glue anchor. Then he whipped a smart-rope through and carefully tightened his harness.

Katrinko began shaking with eagerness. “Pete, I am way hot for this. Lemme lead point.”

Pete clipped a crab into Katrinko’s harness, and linked their spex through the fiber-optic embedded in the rope. Then he slapped the neuter’s shoulder. “Get bold, kid.”

Katrinko flared out the webbing on her gripgloves, and dropped in feet-first.

The would-be escapees had made a lot of use of cabling already present in the tunnel. There were ceramic staples embedded periodically, to hold the cabling snug against the stone. The climbers had scrabbled their way up from staple to staple, using ladder-runged bamboo poles and iron hooks.

Katrinko stopped her descent and tied off. Pete sent their haulbags down. Then he dropped and slithered after her. He stopped at the lead chock, tied off, and let Katrinko take lead again, following her progress with the spex.

An eerie glow shone at the bottom of the tunnel. Pay day. Pete felt a familiar transcendental tension overcome him. It surged through him with mad intensity. Fear, curiosity, and desire: the raw, hot, thieving thrill of a major-league intrusion. A feeling like being insane, but so much better than craziness, because now he felt so awake. Pete was awash in primal spiderness, cravings too deep and slippery to speak about.

The light grew hotter in Pete’s infrareds. Below them was a slotted expanse of metal, gleaming like a kitchen sink, louvers with hot slots of light. Katrinko planted a foamchock in the tunnel wall, tied off, leaned back, and dropped a spy eye through the slot.

Pete’s hands were too busy to reach his spex. “What do you see?” he hissed over cable.

Katrinko craned her head back, gloved palms pressing the goggles against her face. “I can see everything, man! Gardens of Eden, and cities of gold!”

• • • •

The cave had been ancient solid rock once, a continental bulk. The rock had been pierced by a Russian-made drilling rig. A dry well, in a very dry country. And then some very weary, and very sunburned, and very determined Chinese Communist weapons engineers had installed a one-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb at the bottom of their dry hole. When their beast in its nest of layered casings achieved fusion, seismographs jumped like startled fawns in distant California.

The thermonuclear explosion had left a giant gasbubble at the heart of a crazy webwork of faults and cracks. The deep and empty bubble had lurked beneath the desert in utter and terrible silence, for ninety years.

Then Asia’s new masters had sent in new and more sophisticated agencies.

Pete saw that the distant sloping walls of the cavern were daubed with starlight. White constellations, whole and entire. And amid the space—that giant and sweetly damp airspace—were three great glowing lozenges, three vertical cylinders the size of urban high rises. They seemed to be suspended in midair.

“Starships,” Pete muttered.

“Starships,” Katrinko agreed. Menus appeared in the shared visual space of their linked spex. Katrinko’s fingertip sketched out a set of tiny moving sparks against the walls. “But check that out.”

“What are those?”

“Heat signatures. Little engines.” The envisioned world wheeled silently. “And check out over here, too—and crawlin’ around deep in there, dozens of the things. And Pete, see these? Those big ones? Kinda on patrol?”

“Robots.”

“Yep.”

“What the hell are they up to, down here?”

“Well, I figure it this way, man. If you’re inside one of those fake starships, and you look out through those windows—those portholes, I guess we call ’em—you can’t see anything but shiny stars. Deep space. But with spex, we can see right through all that business. And Pete, that whole stone sky down there is crawling with machinery.”

“Man oh man.”

“And nobody inside those starships can see down, man. There is a whole lot of very major weirdness going on down at the bottom of that cave. There’s a lot of hot steamy water down there, deep in those rocks and those cracks.”

“Water, or a big smelly soup maybe,” Pete said. “A chemical soup.”

“Biochemical soup.”

“Autonomous self-assembly proteinaceous biotech. Strictly forbidden by the Nonproliferation Protocols of the Manila Accords of 2037,” said Pete. Pete rattled off this phrase with practiced ease, having rehearsed it any number of times during various background briefings.

“A whole big lake of way-hot, way-illegal, self-assembling goo down there.”

“Yep. The very stuff that our covert-tech boys have been messing with under the Rockies for the past ten years.”

“Aw, Pete, everybody cheats a little bit on the accords. The way we do it in NAFTA, it’s no worse than bathtub gin. But this is huge! And Lord only know what’s inside those starships.”

“Gotta be people, kid.”

“Yep.”

Pete drew a slow moist breath. “This is a big one, Trink. This is truly major-league. You and me, we got ourselves an intelligence coup here of historic proportions.”

“If you’re trying to say that we should go back to the glider now,” Katrinko said, “don’t even start with me.”

“We need to go back to the glider,” Pete insisted, “with the photographic proof that we got right now. That was our mission objective. It’s what they pay us for.”

“Whoop-tee-do.”

“Besides, it’s the patriotic thing. Right?”

“Maybe I’d play the patriot game, if I was in uniform,” said Katrinko. “But the Army don’t allow neuters. I’m a total freak and I’m a free agent, and I didn’t come here to see Shangri-La and then turn around first thing.”

“Yeah,” Pete admitted. “I really know that feeling.”

“I’m going down in there right now,” Katrinko said. “You belay for me?”

“No way, kid. This time, I’m leading point.”

• • • •

Pete eased himself through a crudely broken louver and out onto the vast rocky ceiling. Pete had never much liked climbing rock. Nasty stuff, rock—all natural, no guaranteed engineering specifications. Still, Pete had spent a great deal of his life on ceilings. Ceilings he understood.

He worked his way out on a series of congealed lava knobs, till he hit a nice solid crack. He did a rapid set of fist-jams, then set a pair of foam-clamps, and tied himself off on anchor.

Pete panned slowly in place, upside down on the ceiling, ruffled in his camou gear, scanning methodically for the sake of Katrinko back on the fiber-optic spex link. Large sections of the ceiling looked weirdly worm-eaten, as if drills or acids had etched the rock away. Pete could discern in the eerie glow of infrared that the three fake starships were actually supported on columns. Huge hollow tubes, lacelike and almost entirely invisible, made of something black and impossibly strong, maybe carbon fiber. There were water pipes inside the columns, and electrical power.

Those columns were the quickest and easiest ways to climb down or up to the starships. Those columns were also very exposed. They looked like excellent places to get killed.

Pete knew that he was safely invisible to any naked human eye, but there wasn’t much he could do about his heat signature. For all he knew, at this moment he was glowing like a Christmas tree on the sensors of a thousand heavily armed robots. But you couldn’t leave a thousand machines armed to a hair-trigger for years on end. And who would program them to spend their time watching ceilings?

The muscular burn had faded from his back and shoulders. Pete shook a little extra blood through his wrists, unhooked, and took off on cleats and gripwebs. He veered around one of the fake stars, a great glowing glassine bulb the size of a laundry basket. The fake star was cemented into a big rocky wart, and it radiated a cold, enchanting, and gooey firefly light. Pete was so intrigued by this bold deception that his cleat missed a smear. His left foot swung loose. His left shoulder emitted a nasty-feeling, expensive-sounding pop. Pete grunted, planted both cleats, and slapped up a glue patch, with tendons smarting and the old forearm clock ticking fast. He whipped a crab through the patchloop and sagged within his harness, breathing hard.

On the surface of his spex, Katrinko’s glowing fingertip whipped across the field of Pete’s vision, and pointed. Something moving out there. Pete had company.

Pete eased a string of flashbangs from his sleeve. Then he hunkered down in place, trusting to his camouflage, and watching.

A robot was moving toward him among the dark pits of the fake stars. Wobbling and jittering.

Pete had never seen any device remotely akin to this robot. It had a porous, foamy hide, like cork and plastic. It had a blind, compartmented knob for a head, and fourteen long, fibrous legs like a frayed mess of used rope, terminating in absurdly complicated feet, like a boxful of grip pliers. Hanging upside down from bits of rocky irregularity too small to see, it would open its big warty head and flick out a forked sensor like a snake’s tongue. Sometimes it would dip itself close to the ceiling, for a lingering chemical smooch on the surface of the rock.

Pete watched with murderous patience as the device backed away, drew nearer, spun around a bit, meandered a little closer, sucked some more ceiling rock, made up its mind about something, replanted its big grippy feet, hoofed along closer yet, lost its train of thought, retreated a bit, sniffed the air at length, sucked meditatively on the end of one of its ropy tentacles.

It finally reached him, walked deftly over his legs, and dipped up to lick enthusiastically at the chemical traces left by his gripweb. The robot seemed enchanted by the taste of the glove’s elastomer against the rock. It hung there on its fourteen plier feet, loudly licking and rasping.

Pete lashed out with his pick. The razored point slid with a sullen crunch right through the thing’s corky head.

It went limp instantly, pinned there against the ceiling. Then, with a nasty rustling, it deployed a whole unsuspected set of waxy and filmy appurtenances. Complex bug-tongue things, mandible scrapers, delicate little spatulas, all reeling and trembling out of its slotted underside.

It was not going to die. It couldn’t die, because it had never been alive. It was a piece of biotechnical machinery. Dying was simply not on its agenda anywhere. Pete photographed the device carefully as it struggled with obscene mechanical stupidity to come to workable terms with its new environmental parameters. Then Pete levered the pick loose from the ceiling, shook it loose, and dropped the pierced robot straight down to hell.

Pete climbed more quickly now, favoring the strained shoulder. He worked his way methodically out to the relative ease of the vertical wall, where he discovered a large mined-out vein in the constellation Sagittarius. The vein was a big snaky recess where some kind of ore had been nibbled and strained from the rock. By the look of it, the rock had been chewed away by a termite host of tiny robots with mouths like toenail clippers.

He signaled on the spex for Katrinko. The neuter followed along the clipped and anchored line, climbing like a fiend while lugging one of the haulbags. As Katrinko settled in to their new base camp, Pete returned to the louvers to fetch the second bag. When he’d finally heaved and grappled his way back, his shoulder was aching bitterly and his nerves were shot. They were done for the day.

Katrinko had put up the emission-free encystment web at the mouth of their crevice. With Pete returned to relative safety, she reeled in their smart-ropes and fed them a handful of sugar.

Pete cracked open two capsules of instant fluff, then sank back gratefully into the wool.

Katrinko took off her mask. She was vibrating with alert enthusiasm. Youth, thought Pete—youth, and the eight percent metabolic advantage that came from lacking sex organs. “We’re in so much trouble now,” Katrinko whispered, with a feverish grin in the faint red glow of a single indicator light. She no longer resembled a boy or a young woman. Katrinko looked completely diabolical. This was a nonsexed creature. Pete liked to think of her as a “she,” because this was somehow easier on his mind, but Katrinko was an “it.” Now it was filled with glee, because finally it had placed itself in a proper and pleasing situation. Stark and feral confrontation with its own stark and feral little being.

“Yeah, this is trouble,” Pete said. He placed a fat medicated tick onto the vein inside of his elbow. “And you’re taking first watch.”

• • • •

Pete woke four hours later, with a heart-fluttering rise from the stunned depths of chemically assisted delta-sleep. He felt numb, and lightly dusted with a brain-clouding amnesia, as if he’d slept for four straight days. He had been profoundly helpless in the grip of the drug, but the risk had been worth it, because now he was thoroughly rested. Pete sat up, and tried the left shoulder experimentally. It was much improved.

Pete rubbed feeling back into his stubbled face and scalp, then strapped his spex on. He discovered Katrinko squatting on her haunches, in the radiant glow of her own body heat, pondering over an ugly mess of spines, flakes, and goo.

Pete touched spex knobs and leaned forward. “What you got there?”

“Dead robots. They ate our foamchocks, right out of the ceiling. They eat anything. I killed the ones that tried to break into camp.” Katrinko stroked at a midair menu, then handed Pete a fiber lead for his spex. “Check this footage I took.”

Katrinko had been keeping watch with the gelcams, picking out passing robots in the glow of their engine heat. She’d documented them on infrared, saving and editing the clearest live-action footage. “These little ones with the ball-shaped feet, I call them keets,” she narrated, as the captured frames cascaded across Pete’s spex-clad gaze. “They’re small, but they’re really fast, and all over the place—I had to kill three of them. This one with the sharp spiral nose is a drillet. Those are a pair of dubits. The dubits always travel in pairs. This big thing here, that looks like a spilled dessert with big eyes and a ball on a chain, I call that one a lurchen. Because of the way it moves, see? It’s sure a lot faster than it looks.”

Katrinko stopped the spex replay, switched back to live perception, and poked carefully at the broken litter before her booted feet. The biggest device in the heap resembled a dissected cat’s head stuffed with cables and bristles. “I also killed this piteen. Piteens don’t die easy, man.”

“There’s lots of these things?”

“I figure hundreds, maybe thousands. All different kinds. And every one of ’em as stupid as dirt. Or else we’d be dead and disassembled a hundred times already.”

Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin. “Why do they look so crazy?”

“Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them.” Katrinko glanced up. “You remember those big virtual spaces for weapons design, that they run out in Alamagordo?”

“Yeah, sure, Alamagordo. Physics simulations on those super-size quantum gel-brains. Huge virtualities, with ultra-fast, ultra-fine detail. You bet I remember New Mexico! I love to raid a great computer lab. There’s something so traditional about the hack.”

“Yeah. See, for us NAFTA types, physics virtualities are a military app. We always give our tech to the military whenever it looks really dangerous. But let’s say you don’t share our NAFTA values. You don’t wanna test new weapons systems inside giant virtualities. Let’s say you want to make a can opener, instead.”

During her sleepless hours huddling on watch, Katrinko had clearly been giving this matter a lot of thought. “Well, you could study other people’s can openers and try to improve the design. Or else you could just set up a giant high-powered virtuality with a bunch of virtual cans inside it. Then you make some can opener simulations, that are basically blobs of goo. They’re simulated goo, but they’re also programs, and those programs trade data and evolve. Whenever they pierce a can, you reward them by making more copies of them. You’re running, like, a million generations of a million different possible can openers, all day every day, in a simulated space.”

The concept was not entirely alien to Spider Pete. “Yeah, I’ve heard the rumors. It was one of those stunts like Artificial Intelligence. It might look really good on paper, but you can’t ever get it to work in real life.”

“Yeah, and now it’s illegal, too. Kinda hard to police, though. But let’s imagine you’re into economic warfare and you figure out how to do this. Finally, you evolve this super weird, super can opener that no human being could ever have invented. Something that no human being could even imagine. Because it grew like a mushroom in an entire alternate physics. But you have all the specs for its shape and proportions, right there in the supercomputer. So to make one inside the real world, you just print it out like a photograph. And it works! It runs! See? Instant cheap consumer goods.”

Pete thought it over. “So you’re saying the Sphere people got that idea to work, and these robots here were built that way?”

“Pete, I just can’t figure any other way this could have happened. These machines are just too alien. They had to come from some totally nonhuman, autonomous process. Even the best Japanese engineers can’t design a jelly robot made out of fuzz and rope that can move like a caterpillar. There’s not enough money in the world to pay human brains to think that out.”

Pete prodded at the gooey ruins with his pick. “Well, you got that right.”

“Whoever built this place, they broke a lot of rules and treaties. But they did it all really cheap. They did it in a way that is so cheap that it is beyond economics.” Katrinko thought this over. “It’s way beyond economics, and that’s exactly why it’s against all those rules and the treaties in the first place.”

“Fast, cheap, and out of control.”

“Exactly, man. If this stuff ever got loose in the real world, it would mean the end of everything we know.”

Pete liked this last statement not at all. He had always disliked apocalyptic hype. He liked it even less now, because under these extreme circumstances it sounded very plausible. The Sphere had the youngest and the biggest population of the three major trading blocs, and the youngest and the biggest ideas. People in Asia knew how to get things done. “Y’know, Lyle Schweik once told me that the weirdest bicycles in the world come out of China these days.”

“Well, he’s right. They do. And what about those Chinese circuitry chips they’ve been dumping in the NAFTA markets lately? Those chips are dirt cheap and work fine, but they’re full of all this crazy leftover wiring that doubles back and gets all snarled up . . . I always thought that was just shoddy workmanship. Man, ‘workmanship’ had nothing to do with those chips.”

Pete nodded soberly. “Okay. Chips and bicycles, that much I can understand. There’s a lot of money in that. But who the heck would take the trouble to create a giant hole in the ground that’s full of robots and fake stars? I mean, why?”

Katrinko shrugged. “I guess it’s just the Sphere, man. They still do stuff just because it’s wonderful.”

• • • •

The bottom of the world was boiling over. During the passing century, the nuclear test cavity had accumulated its own little desert aquifer, a pitch-black subterranean oasis. The bottom of the bubble was an unearthly drowned maze of shattered cracks and chemical deposition, all turned to simmering tide pools of mechanical self-assemblage. Oxygen-fizzing geysers of black fungus tea.

Steam rose steadily in the darkness amid the crags, rising to condense and run in chilly rivulets down the spherical star-spangled walls. Down at the bottom, all the water was eagerly collected by aberrant devices of animated sponge and string. Katrinko instantly tagged these as “smits” and “fuzzens.”

The smits and fuzzens were nightmare dishrags and piston-powered spaghetti, leaping and slopping wetly from crag to crag. Katrinko took an unexpected ease and pleasure in naming and photographing the machines. Speculation boiled with sinister ease from the sexless youngster’s vulpine head, a swift off-the-cuff adjustment to this alien toy world. It would seem that the kid lived rather closer to the future than Pete did.

They cranked their way from boulder to boulder, crack to liquid crack. They documented fresh robot larvae, chewing their way to the freedom of darkness through plugs of goo and muslin. It was a whole miniature creation, designed in the senseless gooey cores of a Chinese supercomputing gelbrain, and transmuted into reality in a hot broth of undead mechanized protein. This was by far the most amazing phenomenon that Pete had ever witnessed. Pete was accordingly plunged into gloom. Knowledge was power in his world. He knew with leaden certainty that he was taking on far too much voltage for his own good.

Pete was a professional. He could imagine stealing classified military secrets from a superpower, and surviving that experience. It would be very risky, but in the final analysis it was just the military. A rocket base, for instance—a secret Asian rocket base might have been a lot of fun.

But this was not military. This was an entire new means of industrial production. Pete knew with instinctive street-level certainty that tech of this level of revolutionary weirdness was not a spy thing, a sports thing, or a soldier thing. This was a big, big money thing. He might survive discovering it. He’d never get away with revealing it.

The thrilling wonder of it all really bugged him. Thrilling wonder was at best a passing thing. The sober implications for the longer term weighed on Pete’s soul like a damp towel. He could imagine escaping this place in one piece, but he couldn’t imagine any plausible aftermath for handing over nifty photographs of thrilling wonder to military spooks on the Potomac. He couldn’t imagine what the powers-that-were would do with that knowledge. He rather dreaded what they would do to him for giving it to them.

Pete wiped a sauna cascade of sweat from his neck.

“So I figure it’s either geothermal power, or a fusion generator down there,” said Katrinko.

“I’d be betting thermonuclear, given the circumstances.” The rocks below their busy cleats were a-skitter with bugs: gippers and ghents and kebbits, dismantlers and glue-spreaders and brain-eating carrion disassemblers. They were profoundly dumb little devices, specialized as centipedes. They didn’t seem very aggressive, but it surely would be a lethal mistake to sit down among them.

A barnacle thing with an iris mouth and long whipping eyes took a careful taste of Katrinko’s boot. She retreated to a crag with a yelp.

“Wear your mask,” Pete chided. The damp heat was bliss after the skin-eating chill of the Taklamakan, but most of the vents and cracks were spewing thick smells of hot beef stew and burnt rubber, all varieties of eldritch mechano-metabolic byproduct. His lungs felt sore at the very thought of it.

Pete cast his foggy spex up the nearest of the carbon-fiber columns, and the golden, glowing, impossibly tempting lights of those starship portholes up above.

• • • •

Katrinko led point. She was pitilessly exposed against the lacelike girders. They didn’t want to risk exposure during two trips, so they each carried a haul bag.

The climb went well at first. Then a machine rose up from wet darkness like a six-winged dragonfly. Its stinging tail lashed through the thready column like the kick of a mule. It connected brutally. Katrinko shot backwards from the impact, tumbled ten meters, and dangled like a ragdoll from her last backup chock.

The flying creature circled in a figure eight, attempting to make up its nonexistent mind. Then a slower but much larger creature writhed and fluttered out of the starry sky, and attacked Katrinko’s dangling haulbag. The bag burst like a Christmas piñata in a churning array of taloned wings. A fabulous cascade of expensive spy gear splashed down to the hot pools below.

Katrinko twitched feebly at the end of her rope. The dragonfly, cruelly alerted, went for her movement. Pete launched a string of flashbangs.

The world erupted in flash, heat, concussion, and flying chaff. Impossibly hot and loud, a thunderstorm in a closet. The best kind of disappearance magic: total overwhelming distraction, the only real magic in the world.

Pete soared up to Katrinko like a balloon on a bungee cord. When he reached the bottom of the starship, twenty-seven heart-pounding seconds later, he had burned out both the smart-ropes.

The silvery rain of chaff was driving the bugs to mania. The bottom of the cavern was suddenly a-crawl with leaping mechanical heat-ghosts, an instant menagerie of skippers and humpers and floppers. At the rim of perception, there were new things rising from the depths of the pools, vast and scaly, like golden carp to a rain of fish chow.

Pete’s own haulbag had been abandoned at the base of the column. That bag was clearly not long for this world.

Katrinko came to with a sudden winded gasp. They began free-climbing the outside of the starship. It surface was stony, rough and uneven, something like pumice, or wasp spit.

They found the underside of a monster porthole and pressed themselves flat against the surface.

There they waited, inert and unmoving, for an hour. Katrinko caught her breath. Her ribs stopped bleeding. The two of them waited for another hour, while crawling and flying heat-ghosts nosed furiously around their little world, following the tatters of their programming. They waited a third hour.

Finally they were joined in their haven by an oblivious gang of machines with suckery skirts and wheelbarrows for heads. The robots chose a declivity and began filling it with big mandible trowels of stony mortar, slopping it on and jaw-chiseling it into place, smoothing everything over, tireless and pitiless.

Pete seized this opportunity to attempt to salvage their lost equipment. There had been such fabulous federal bounty in there: smart audio bugs, heavy-duty gelcams, sensors and detectors, pulleys, crampons and latches, priceless vials of programmed neural goo . . . Pete crept back to the bottom of the spacecraft.

Everything was long gone. Even the depleted smart-ropes had been eaten, by a long trail of foraging keets. The little machines were still squirreling about in the black lace of the column, sniffing and scraping at the last molecular traces, with every appearance of satisfaction.

Pete rejoined Katrinko, and woke her where she clung rigid and stupefied to her hiding spot. They inched their way around the curved rim of the starship hull, hunting for a possible weakness. They were in very deep trouble now, for their best equipment was gone. It didn’t matter. Their course was very obvious now, and the loss of alternatives had clarified Pete’s mind. He was consumed with a burning desire to break in.

Pete slithered into the faint shelter of a large, deeply pitted hump. There he discovered a mess of braided rope. The rope was woven of dead and mashed organic fibers, something like the hair at the bottom of a sink. The rope had gone all petrified under a stony lacquer of robot spit.

These were climber’s ropes. Someone had broken out here—smashed through the hull of the ship, from the inside. The robots had come to repair the damage, carefully resealing the exit hole, and leaving this ugly hump of stony scar tissue.

Pete pulled his gelcam drill. He had lost the sugar reserves along with the haulbags. Without sugar to metabolize, the little enzyme-driven rotor would starve and be useless soon. That fact could not be helped. Pete pressed the device against the hull, waited as it punched its way through, and squirted in a gelcam to follow.

He saw a farm. Pete could scarcely have been more astonished. It was certainly farmland, though. Cute, toy farmland, all under a stony blue ceiling, crisscrossed with hot grids of radiant light, embraced in the stony arch of the enclosing hull. There were fishponds with reeds. Ditches, and a wooden irrigation wheel. A little bridge of bamboo. There were hairy melon vines in rich black soil and neat, entirely weedless fields of dwarfed red grain. Not a soul in sight.

Katrinko crept up and linked in on cable.

“So where is everybody?” Pete said.

“They’re all at the portholes,” said Katrinko, coughing.

“What?” said Pete, surprised. “Why?”

“Because of those flashbangs,” Katrinko wheezed. Her battered ribs were still paining her. “They’re all at the portholes, looking out into the darkness. Waiting for something else to happen.”

“But we did that stuff hours ago.”

“It was very big news, man. Nothing ever happens in there.”

Pete nodded, fired with resolve. “Well then. We’re breakin’ in.”

Katrinko was way game. “Gonna use caps?”

“Too obvious.”

“Acids and fibrillators?”

“Lost ’em in the haulbags.”

“Well, that leaves cheesewires,” Katrinko concluded. “I got two.”

“I got six.”

Katrinko nodded in delight. “Six cheesewires! You’re loaded for bear, man!”

“I love cheesewires,” Pete grunted. He had helped to invent them.

Eight minutes and twelve seconds later they were inside the starship. They reset the cored-out plug behind them, delicately gluing it in place and carefully obscuring the hair-thin cuts.

Katrinko sidestepped into a grove of bamboo. Her camou bloomed in green and tan and yellow, with such instant and treacherous ease that Pete lost her entirely. Then she waved, and the spex edge-detectors kicked in on her silhouette.

Pete lifted his spex for a human naked-eye take on the situation. There was simply nothing there at all. Katrinko was gone, less than a ghost, like pitchforking mercury with your eyelashes.

So they were safe now. They could glide through this bottled farm like a pair of bad dreams.

• • • •

They scanned the spacecraft from top to bottom, looking for dangerous and interesting phenomena. Control rooms manned by Asian space technicians maybe, or big lethal robots, or video monitors—something that might cramp their style or kill them. In the thirty-seven floors of the spacecraft, they found no such thing.

The five thousand inhabitants spent their waking hours farming. The crew of the starship were preindustrial, tribal, Asian peasants. Men, women, old folks, little kids.

The local peasants rose every single morning, as their hot networks of wiring came alive in the ceiling. They would milk their goats. They would feed their sheep, and some very odd, knee-high, dwarf Bactrian camels. They cut bamboo and netted their fishponds. They cut down tamarisks and poplar trees for firewood. They tended melon vines and grew plums and hemp. They brewed alcohol, and ground grain, and boiled millet, and squeezed cooking oil out of rapeseed. They made clothes out of hemp and raw wool and leather, and baskets out of reeds and straw. They ate a lot of carp.

And they raised a whole mess of chickens. Somebody not from around here had been fooling with the chickens. Apparently these were super space-chickens of some kind, leftover lab products from some serious long-term attempt to screw around with chicken DNA. The hens produced five or six lumpy eggs every day. The roosters were enormous, and all different colors, and very smelly, and distinctly reptilian.

It was very quiet and peaceful inside the starship. The animals made their lowing and clucking noises, and the farm workers sang to themselves in the tiny round-edged fields, and the incessant foot-driven water pumps would clack rhythmically, but there were no city noises. No engines anywhere. No screens. No media.

There was no money. There were a bunch of tribal elders who sat under the blossoming plum trees outside the big stone granaries. They messed with beads on wires, and wrote notes on slips of wood. Then the soldiers, or the cops—they were a bunch of kids in crude leather armor, with spears—would tramp in groups, up and down the dozens of stairs, on the dozens of floors. Marching like crazy, and requisitioning stuff, and carrying stuff on their backs, and handing things out to people. Basically spreading the wealth around.

Most of the weird bearded old guys were palace accountants, but there were some others, too. They sat cross-legged on mats in their homemade robes, and straw sandals, and their little spangly hats, discussing important matters at slow and extreme length. Sometimes they wrote stuff down on palm-leaves.

Pete and Katrinko spent a special effort to spy on these old men in the spangled hats, because, after close study, they had concluded that this was the local government. They pretty much had to be the government. These old men with the starry hats were the only part of the population who weren’t being worked to a frazzle.

Pete and Katrinko found themselves a cozy spot on the roof of the granary, one of the few permanent structures inside the spacecraft. It never rained inside the starship, so there wasn’t much call for roofs. Nobody ever trespassed up on the roof of the granary. It was clear that the very idea of doing this was beyond local imagination. So Pete and Katrinko stole some bamboo water jugs, and some lovely handmade carpets, and a lean-to tent, and set up camp there.

Katrinko studied an especially elaborate palm-leaf book that she had filched from the local temple. There were pages and pages of dense alien script. “Man, what do you suppose these yokels have to write about?”

“The way I figure it,” said Pete, “they’re writing down everything they can remember from the world outside.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kinda building up an intelligence dossier for their little starship regime, see? Because that’s all they’ll ever know, because the people who put them inside here aren’t giving ’em any news. And they’re sure as hell never gonna let ’em out.”

Katrinko leafed carefully through the stiff and brittle pages of the handmade book. The people here spoke only one language. It was no language Pete or Katrinko could even begin to recognize. “Then this is their history. Right?”

“It’s their lives, kid. Their past lives, back when they were still real people, in the big real world outside. Transistor radios, and shoulder-launched rockets. Barbed-wire, pacification campaigns, ID cards. Camel caravans coming in over the border, with mortars and explosives. And very advanced Sphere mandarin bosses, who just don’t have the time to put up with armed, Asian, tribal fanatics.”

Katrinko looked up. “That kinda sounds like your version of the outside world, Pete.”

Pete shrugged. “Hey, it’s what happens.”

“You suppose these guys really believe they’re inside a real starship?”

“I guess that depends on how much they learned from the guys who broke out of here with the picks and the ropes.”

Katrinko thought about it. “You know what’s truly pathetic? The shabby illusion of all this. Some spook mandarin’s crazy notion that ethnic separatists could be squeezed down tight, and spat out like watermelon seeds into interstellar space . . . Man, what a come-on, what an enticement, what an empty promise!”

“I could sell that idea,” Pete said thoughtfully. “You know how far away the stars really are, kid? About four hundred years away, that’s how far. You seriously want to get human beings to travel to another star, you gotta put human beings inside of a sealed can for four hundred solid years. But what are people supposed to do in there, all that time? The only thing they can do is quietly run a farm. Because that’s what a starship is. It’s a desert oasis.”

“So you want to try a dry-run starship experiment,” said Katrinko. “And in the meantime, you happen to have some handy religious fanatics in the backwoods of Asia, who are shooting your ass off. Guys who refuse to change their age-old lives, even though you are very, very high-tech.”

“Yep. That’s about the size of it. Means, motive, and opportunity.”

“I get it. But I can’t believe that somebody went through with that scheme in real life. I mean, rounding up an ethnic minority, and sticking them down in some godforsaken hole, just so you’ll never have to think about them again. That’s just impossible!”

“Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a Seminole?” Pete said.

Katrinko shook her head. “What’s that mean?”

“They were American tribal guys who ended up stuck in a swamp. The Florida Seminoles, they called ’em. Y’know, maybe they just called my grandfather a Seminole. He dressed really funny . . . Maybe it just sounded good to call him a Seminole. Otherwise, he just would have been some strange, illiterate geezer.”

Katrinko’s brow wrinkled. “Does it matter that your grandfather was a Seminole?”

“I used to think it did. That’s where I got my skin color—as if that matters, nowadays. I reckon it mattered plenty to my grandfather, though . . . He was always stompin’ and carryin’ on about a lot of weird stuff we couldn’t understand. His English was pretty bad. He was never around much when we needed him.”

“Pete . . .” Katrinko sighed. “I think it’s time we got out of this place.”

“How come?” Pete said, surprised. “We’re safe up here. The locals are not gonna hurt us. They can’t even see us. They can’t touch us. Hell, they can’t even imagine us. With our fantastic tactical advantages, we’re just like gods to these people.”

“I know all that, man. They’re like the ultimate dumb straight people. I don’t like them very much. They’re not much of a challenge to us. In fact, they kind of creep me out.”

“No way! They’re fascinating. Those baggy clothes, the acoustic songs, all that menial labor . . . These people got something that we modern people just don’t have any more.”

“Huh?” Katrinko said. “Like what, exactly?”

“I dunno,” Pete admitted.

“Well, whatever it is, it can’t be very important.” Katrinko sighed. “We got some serious challenges on the agenda, man. We gotta sidestep our way past all those angry robots outside, then head up that shaft, then hoof it back, four days through a freezing desert, with no haulbags. All the way back to the glider.”

“But Trink, there are two other starships in here that we didn’t break into yet. Don’t you want to see those guys?”

“What I’d like to see right now is a hot bath in a four-star hotel,” said Katrinko. “And some very big international headlines, maybe. All about me. That would be lovely.” She grinned.

“But what about the people?”

“Look, I’m not ‘people,’” Katrinko said calmly. “Maybe it’s because I’m a neuter, Pete, but I can tell you’re way off the subject. These people are none of our business. Our business now is to return to our glider in an operational condition, so that we can complete our assigned mission, and return to base with our data. Okay?”

“Well, let’s break into just one more starship first.”

“We gotta move, Pete. We’ve lost our best equipment, and we’re running low on body fat. This isn’t something that we can kid about and live.”

“But we’ll never come back here again. Somebody will, but it sure as heck won’t be us. See, it’s a Spider thing.”

Katrinko was weakening. “One more starship? Not both of ’em?”

“Just one more.”

“Okay, good deal.”

• • • •

The hole they had cut through the starship’s hull had been rapidly cemented by robots. It cost them two more cheesewires to cut themselves a new exit. Then Katrinko led point, up across the stony ceiling, and down the carbon column to the second ship. To avoid annoying the lurking robot guards, they moved with hypnotic slowness and excessive stealth. This made it a grueling trip.

This second ship had seen hard use. The hull was extensively scarred with great wads of cement, entombing many lengths of dried and knotted rope. Pete and Katrinko found a weak spot and cut their way in.

This starship was crowded. It was loud inside, and it smelled. The floors were crammed with hot and sticky little bazaars, where people sold handicrafts and liquor and food. Criminals were being punished by being publicly chained to posts and pelted with offal by passers-by. Big crowds of ragged men and tattooed women gathered around brutal cockfights, featuring spurred mutant chickens half the size of dogs. All the men carried knives.

The architecture here was more elaborate, all kinds of warrens, and courtyards, and damp, sticky alleys. After exploring four floors, Katrinko suddenly declared that she recognized their surroundings. According to Katrinko, they were a physical replica of sets from a popular Japanese interactive samurai epic. Apparently the starship’s designers had needed some preindustrial Asian village settings, and they hadn’t wanted to take the expense and trouble to design them from scratch. So they had programmed their construction robots with pirated game designs.

This starship had once been lavishly equipped with at least three hundred armed video camera installations. Apparently, the mandarins had come to the stunning realization that the mere fact that they were recording crime didn’t mean that they could control it. Their spy cameras were all dead now. Most had been vandalized. Some had gone down fighting. They were all inert and abandoned.

The rebellious locals had been very busy. After defeating the spy cameras, they had created a set of giant hullbreakers. These were siege engines, big crossbow torsion machines, made of hemp and wood and bamboo. The hullbreakers were starship community efforts, elaborately painted and ribboned, and presided over by tough, aggressive gang bosses with batons and big leather belts.

Pete and Katrinko watched a labor gang, hard at work on one of the hullbreakers. Women braided rope ladders from hair and vegetable fiber, while smiths forged pitons over choking, hazy charcoal fires. It was clear from the evidence that these restive locals had broken out of their starship jail at least twenty times. Every time they had been corralled back in by the relentless efforts of mindless machines. Now they were busily preparing yet another breakout.

“These guys sure have got initiative,” said Pete admiringly. “Let’s do ’em a little favor, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“Here they are, taking all this trouble to hammer their way out. But we still have a bunch of caps. We got no more use for ’em, after we leave this place. So the way I figure it, we blow their wall out big-time, and let a whole bunch of ’em loose at once. Then you and I can escape real easy in the confusion.”

Katrinko loved this idea, but had to play devil’s advocate. “You really think we ought to interfere like that? That kind of shows our hand, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody’s watching any more,” said Pete. “Some technocrat figured this for a big lab experiment. But they wrote these people off, or maybe they lost their anthropology grant. These people are totally forgotten. Let’s give the poor bastards a show.”

Pete and Katrinko planted their explosives, took cover on the ceiling, and cheerfully watched the wall blow out.

A violent gust of air came through as pressures equalized, carrying a hemorrhage of dust and leaves into interstellar space. The locals were totally astounded by the explosion, but when the repair robots showed up, they soon recovered their morale. A terrific battle broke out, a general vengeful frenzy of crab-bashing and sponge-skewering. Women and children tussled with the keets and bibbets. Soldiers in leather cuirasses fought with the bigger machines, deploying pikes, crossbow quarrels, and big robot-mashing mauls.

The robots were profoundly stupid, but they were indifferent to their casualties, and entirely relentless.

The locals made the most of their window of opportunity. They loaded a massive harpoon into a torsion catapult, and fired it into space. Their target was the neighboring starship, the third and last of them.

The barbed spear bounded off the hull. So they reeled it back in on a monster bamboo hand-reel, cursing and shouting like maniacs.

The starship’s entire population poured into the fight. The walls and bulkheads shook with the tramp of their angry feet. The outnumbered robots fell back. Pete and Katrinko seized this golden opportunity to slip out the hole. They climbed swiftly up the hull, and out of reach of the combat.

The locals fired their big harpoon again. This time the barbed tip struck true, and it stuck there quivering.

Then a little kid was heaved into place, half-naked, with a hammer and screws, and a rope threaded through his belt. He had a crown of dripping candles set upon his head.

Katrinko glanced back, and stopped dead.

Pete urged her on, then stopped as well.

The child began reeling himself industriously along the trembling harpoon line, trailing a bigger rope. An airborne machine came to menace him. It fell back twitching, pestered by a nasty scattering of crossbow bolts.

Pete found himself mesmerized. He hadn’t felt the desperation of the circumstances, until he saw this brave little boy ready to fall to his death. Pete had seen many climbers who took risks because they were crazy. He’d seen professional climbers, such as himself, who played games with risk as masters of applied technique. He’d never witnessed climbing as an act of raw, desperate sacrifice.

The heroic child arrived on the grainy hull of the alien ship, and began banging his pitons in a hammer-swinging frenzy. His crown of candles shook and flickered with his efforts. The boy could barely see. He had slung himself out into stygian darkness to fall to his doom.

Pete climbed up to Katrinko and quickly linked in on cable. “We gotta leave now, kid. It’s now or never.”

“Not yet,” Katrinko said. “I’m taping all this.”

“It’s our big chance.”

“We’ll go later.” Katrinko watched a flying vacuum cleaner batting by, to swat cruelly at the kid’s legs. She turned her masked head to Pete and her whole body stiffened with rage. “You got a cheesewire left?”

“I got three.”

“Gimme. I gotta go help him.”

• • • •

Katrinko unplugged, slicked down the starship’s wall in a daring controlled slide, and hit the stretched rope. To Pete’s complete astonishment, Katrinko lit there in a crouch, caught herself atop the vibrating line, and simply ran for it. She ran along the humming tightrope in a thrumming blur, stunning the locals so thoroughly that they were barely able to fire their crossbows.

Flying quarrels whizzed past and around her, nearly skewering the terrified child at the far end of the rope. Then Katrinko leapt and bounded into space, her gloves and cleats outspread. She simply vanished.

It was a champion’s gambit if Pete had ever seen one. It was a legendary move.

Pete could manage well enough on a tightrope. He had experience, excellent balance, and physical acumen. He was, after all, a professional. He could walk a rope if he was put to the job.

But not in full climbing gear, with cleats. And not on a slack, handbraided, homemade rope. Not when the rope was very poorly anchored by a homemade pig-iron harpoon. Not when he outweighed Katrinko by twenty kilos. Not in the middle of a flying circus of airborne robots. And not in a cloud of arrows.

Pete was simply not that crazy any more. Instead, he would have to follow Katrinko the sensible way. He would have to climb the starship, traverse the ceiling, and climb down to the third starship onto the far side. A hard three hours’ work at the very best—four hours, with any modicum of safety.

Pete weighed the odds, made up his mind, and went after the job.

Pete turned in time to see Katrinko busily cheesewiring her way through the hull of Starship Three. A gout of white light poured out as the cored plug slid aside. For a deadly moment, Katrinko was a silhouetted goblin, her camou useless as the starship’s radiance framed her. Her clothing fluttered in a violent gust of escaping air.

Below her, the climbing child had anchored himself to the wall and tied off his second rope. He looked up at the sudden gout of light, and he screamed so loudly that the whole universe rang.

The child’s many relatives reacted by instinct, with a ragged volley of crossbow shots. The arrows veered and scattered in the gusting wind, but there were a lot of them. Katrinko ducked, and flinched, and rolled headlong into the starship. She vanished again.

Had she been hit? Pete set an anchor, tied off, and tried the radio. But without the relays in the haulbag, the weak signal could not get through.

Pete climbed on doggedly. It was the only option left.

After half an hour, Pete began coughing. The starry cosmic cavity had filled with a terrible smell. The stench was coming from the invaded starship, pouring slowly from the cored-out hole. A long-bottled, deadly stink of burning rot.

Climbing solo, Pete gave it his best. His shoulder was bad and, worse yet, his spex began to misbehave. He finally reached the cored-out entrance that Katrinko had cut. The locals were already there in force, stringing themselves a sturdy rope bridge, and attaching it to massive screws. The locals brandished torches, spears, and crossbows. They were fighting off the incessant attacks of the robots. It was clear from their wild expressions of savage glee that they had been longing for this moment for years.

Pete slipped past them unnoticed, into Starship Three. He breathed the soured air for a moment, and quickly retreated again. He inserted a new set of mask filters, and returned.

He found Katrinko’s cooling body, wedged against the ceiling. An unlucky crossbow shot had slashed through her suit and punctured Katrinko’s left arm. So, with her usual presence of mind, she had deftly leapt up a nearby wall, tied off on a chock, and hidden herself well out of harm’s way. She’d quickly stopped the bleeding. Despite its awkward location, she’d even managed to get her wound bandaged.

Then the foul air had silently and stealthily overcome her.

With her battered ribs and a major wound, Katrinko hadn’t been able to tell her dizziness from shock. Feeling sick, she had relaxed, and tried to catch her breath. A fatal gambit. She was still hanging there, unseen and invisible, dead.

Pete discovered that Katrinko was far from alone. The crew here had all died. Died months ago, maybe years ago. Some kind of huge fire inside the spacecraft. The electric lights were still on, the internal machinery worked, but there was no one left here but mummies.

These dead tribal people had the nicest clothes Pete had yet seen. Clearly they’d spent a lot of time knitting and embroidering, during the many weary years of their imprisonment. The corpses had all kinds of layered sleeves and tatted aprons, and braided belt-ties, and lacquered hairclips, and excessively nifty little sandals. They’d all smothered horribly during the sullen inferno, along with their cats and dogs and enormous chickens, in a sudden wave of smoke and combustion that had filled their spacecraft in minutes.

This was far too complicated to be anything as simple as mere genocide. Pete figured the mandarins for gentlemen technocrats, experts with the best of intentions. The likely possibility remained that it was mass suicide. But on mature consideration, Pete had to figure this for a very bad, and very embarrassing, social-engineering accident.

Though that certainly wasn’t what they would say about this mess, in Washington. There was no political mess nastier than a nasty ethnic mess. Pete couldn’t help but notice that these well-behaved locals hadn’t bothered to do any harm to their spacecraft’s lavish surveillance equipment. But their cameras were off and their starship was stone dead anyway.

The air began to clear inside the spacecraft. A pair of soldiers from Starship Number Two came stamping down the hall, industriously looting the local corpses. They couldn’t have been happier about their opportunity. They were grinning with awestruck delight.

Pete returned to his comrade’s stricken body. He stripped the camou suit—he needed the batteries. The neuter’s lean and sexless corpse was puffy with subcutaneous storage pockets, big encystments of skin where Katrinko stored her last-ditch escape tools. The battered ribs were puffy and blue. Pete could not go on.

Pete returned to the break-in hole, where he found an eager crowd. The invaders had run along the rope-bridge and gathered there in force, wrinkling their noses and cheering in wild exaltation. They had beaten the robots; there simply weren’t enough of the machines on duty to resist a whole enraged population. The robots just weren’t clever enough to out-think armed, coordinated human resistance—not without killing people wholesale, and they hadn’t been designed for that. They had suffered a flat-out defeat.

Pete frightened the cheering victors away with a string of flash-bangs.

Then he took careful aim at the lip of the drop, and hoisted Katrinko’s body, and flung her far, far, tumbling down, into the boiling pools.

• • • •

Pete retreated to the first spacecraft. It was a very dispiriting climb, and when he had completed it, his shoulder had the serious, familiar ache of chronic injury. He hid among the unknowing population while he contemplated his options.

He could hide here indefinitely. His camou suit was slowly losing its charge, but he felt confident that he could manage very well without the suit. The starship seemed to feature most any number of taboo areas. Blocked-off no-go spots, where there might have been a scandal once, or bloodshed, or a funny noise, or a strange, bad, panicky smell.

Unlike the violent, reckless crowd in Starship Two, these locals had fallen for the cover story. They truly believed that they were in the depths of space bound for some better, brighter pie in their starry stone sky. Their little stellar ghetto was full of superstitious kinks. Steeped in profound ignorance, the locals imagined that their every sin caused the universe to tremble.

Pete knew that he should try to take his data back to the glider. This was what Katrinko would have wanted. To die, but leave a legend—a very City Spider thing.

But it was hard to imagine battling his way past resurgent robots, climbing the walls with an injured shoulder, then making a four-day bitter trek through a freezing desert, all completely alone. Gliders didn’t last forever, either. Spy gliders weren’t built to last. If Pete found the glider with its batteries flat, or its cute little brain gone sour, Pete would be all over. Even if he’d enjoyed a full set of equipment, with perfect health, Pete had few illusions about a solo spring outing, alone and on foot, over the Himalayas.

Why risk all that? After all, it wasn’t like this subterranean scene was breaking news. It was already many years old. Someone had conceived, planned and executed this business a long time ago. Important people with brains and big resources had known all about this for years. Somebody knew. Maybe not the Lieutenant Colonel, on the lunatic fringe of NAFTA military intelligence. But.

When Pete really thought about the basic implications . . . This was a great deal of effort, and for not that big a payoff. Because there just weren’t that many people cooped up down here. Maybe fifteen thousand of them, tops. The Asian Sphere must have had tens of thousands of unassimilated tribal people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions. And why stop at that point? This wasn’t just an Asian problem. It was a very general problem. Ethnic, breakaway people, who just plain couldn’t, or wouldn’t, play the twenty-first century’s games.

How many Red Chinese atom-bomb tests had taken place deep in the Taklamakan? They’d never bothered to brief him on ancient history. But Pete had to wonder if, by now, maybe they hadn’t gotten this stellar concept down to a fine art. Maybe the Sphere had franchised their plan to Europe and NAFTA. How many forgotten holes were there, relic pockets punched below the hide of the twenty-first century, in the South Pacific, and Australia, and Nevada? The deadly trash of a long-derailed Armageddon. The sullen trash heaps where no one would ever want to look.

Sure, he could bend every nerve and muscle to force the world to face all this. But why? Wouldn’t it make better sense to try to think it through first?

Pete never got around to admitting to himself that he had lost the will to leave.

• • • •

As despair slowly loosened its grip on him, Pete grew genuinely interested in the locals. He was intrigued by the stark limits of their lives and their universe, and in what he could do with their narrow little heads. They’d never had a supernatural being in their midst before; they just imagined them all the time. Pete started with a few poltergeist stunts, just to amuse himself. Stealing the spangled hats of the local greybeards. Shuffling the palm leaf volumes in their sacred libraries. Hijacking an abacus or two.

But that was childish.

The locals had a little temple, their special holy of holies. Naturally Pete made it his business to invade the place.

The locals kept a girl locked up in there. She was very pretty, and slightly insane, so this made her the perfect candidate to become their Sacred Temple Girl. She was the Official Temple Priestess of Starship Number One. Apparently, their modest community could only afford one, single, awe-inspiring Virgin High Priestess. But they were practical folks, so they did the best with what they had available.

The High Priestess was a pretty young woman with a stiflingly pretty life. She had her own maidservants, a wardrobe of ritual clothing, and a very time-consuming hairdo. The High Priestess spent her entire life carrying out highly complex, totally useless, ritual actions. Incense burnings, idol dustings, washings and purifications, forehead knocking, endless chanting, daubing special marks on her hands and feet. She was sacred and clearly demented, so they watched her with enormous interest, all the time. She meant everything to them. She was doing all these crazy, painful things so the rest of them wouldn’t have to. Everything about her was completely and utterly foreclosed.

Pete quite admired the Sacred Temple Girl. She was very much his type, and he felt a genuine kinship with her. She was the only local that Pete could bear to spend any personal time with.

So after prolonged study of the girl and her actions, one day, Pete manifested himself to her. First, she panicked. Then she tried to kill him. Naturally, that effort failed. When she grasped the fact that he was hugely powerful, totally magical, and utterly beyond her ken, she slithered around the polished temple floor, rending her garments and keening aloud, clearly in the combined hope/fear of being horribly and indescribably defiled.

Pete understood the appeal of her concept. A younger Pete would have gone for the demonic subjugation option. But Pete was all grown up now. He hardly saw how that could help matters any, or, in fact, make any tangible difference in their circumstances.

They never learned each other’s languages. They never connected in any physical, mental, or emotional way. But they finally achieved a kind of status quo, where they could sit together in the same room, and quietly study one another, and fruitlessly speculate on the alien contents of one another’s heads. Sometimes, they would even get together and eat something tasty.

That was every bit as good as his connection with these impossibly distant people was ever going to get.

• • • •

It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out.

He’d cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a taboo area of the starship. Every once in a while, he would saw his way through the robots’ repair efforts and nick out for a good long look at the artificial cosmos. This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very well founded concern that the inhabitants of Starship Two might somehow forge their way over, for a violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter, and rapine.

But Starship Two had their hands full with the robots. Any defeat of the bubbling gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could only be temporary. Like an onrushing mudslide, the gizmos would route around obstructions, infiltrate every evolutionary possibility, and always, always keep the pressure on.

After the crushing defeat, the bubbling production vats went into biomechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything was possible now.

The starry walls grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model jailers. Starship Two was beaten back once again, in another bitter, uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland became a mass of grotesque cement. Even the portholes were gone now, cruelly sealed in technological spit and ooze. A living grave.

Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all, this clearly fit the parameters of the system’s original designers.

But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.

When Pete gazed through a porthole and saw that the stars were fading, he knew that all bets were off. The stars were being robbed. Something was embezzling their energy.

He left the starship. Outside, all heaven had broken loose. An unspeakable host of creatures were migrating up the rocky walls, bounding, creeping, lurching, rappelling on a web of gooey ropes. Heading for the stellar zenith.

Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape.

Pete checked his aging cleats and gloves, and joined the exodus at once.

None of the creatures bothered him. He had become one of them now. His equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of evolution. Anything that could breed a can opener could breed a rock chock and a piton, a crampon, and a pulley, and a carabiner. His haulbags, Katrinko’s bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused human genius, and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out.

• • • •

The unearthly landscape of the Taklamakan was hosting a robot war. A spreading mechanical prairie of inching, crawling, biting, wrenching, hopping mutations. And pillars of fire: Sphere satellite warfare. Beams pouring down from the authentic heavens, invisible torrents of energy that threw up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer’s final nightmare. Smart, autonomous hell. They couldn’t kill a thing this big and keep it secret. They couldn’t burn it up fast enough. No, not without breaking the containment domes, and spilling their own ancient trash across the face of the Earth.

A beam crossed the horizon like the finger of God, smiting everything in its path. The sky and earth were thick with flying creatures, buzzing, tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like a multiton maple seed. It bounded from the side of a containment dome, caromed like a dying gymnast, and landed below Spider Pete. He crouched there in his camou, recording it all.

It looked back at him. This was no mere robot. It was a mechanical civilian journalist. A brightly painted, ultramodern, European network drone, with as many cameras on board as a top-flight media mogul had martinis. The machine had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it was not dead. Death was not on its agenda. It was way game. It had spotted him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at him.

Glancing into the cold spring sky, Pete could see that the journalist had brought a lot of its friends.

The robot rallied its fried circuits, and centered him within a spiraling focus. Then it lifted a multipronged limb, and ceremonially spat out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething depths of the global web.

Pete adjusted his mask and his camou suit. He wouldn’t look right, otherwise.

“Dang,” he said.

© 1998 by Bruce Sterling. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

EXCERPT: Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment

Fran Wilde and Luke Peterson | 3182 words

Introduction

Over a dozen years ago my friend and mentor, Robert Putnam, gave an address in his capacity as then-president of the American Political Science Association. Calling us, collectively, to repentance, he reminded the field that political science is more than just publications, predictions, and elections. “Attending to the concerns of our fellow citizens,” remarked Putnam, “is not just an optional add-on for the profession of political science, but an obligation as fundamental as our pursuit of scientific truth.”

He didn’t mean this in the sense of publishing and hoping our analysis advances public dialogue in some oblique way. Instead stated most concretely: “On American empire, diversity and inequality, civic engagement, and many more issues,” Putnam concluded, “we have a professional obligation to engage in dialogue with our fellow citizens.”

Dialogue and more. This is especially true for me. I am a political scientist, but I also run a civic innovation office called the Office of New Urban Mechanics that, in partnership with the cities of Utah, the City of Boston, and the City of Philadelphia, seeks cutting-edge solutions to real world problems.

Over the last couple of years, I have been conducting interviews with authors about the role and purpose of science fiction for an academic research paper. What I heard in those interviews were deep concerns about the future of SF.

SF is fun, but it is also literature. It is a literature of the possible, and in that role, as with political science, it has deep public obligations.

Take award-winning science fiction author Allen Steel, for instance, who wrote me to say:

I strongly believe that science fiction stories about the aftermath of global nuclear war raised the public consciousness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race and forced governments to put on the brakes. SF inspired the exploration of space and the digital revolution, and it has also opened serious scientific inquiry into concepts like time travel and multiple universes.

When I read those words, it clicked. At any given moment, we, as a society, face not a single future, but several. SF has guided us in innumerable ways away from less desirable futures, and toward optimal ones.

Which is exactly what I try to do for cities everyday as a civic innovator. Between the words of Steel and Putnam, my aim changed from publication to public purpose.

The Result is Futurescapes.

Futurescapes is a multi-pronged effort (a workshop, an anthology, and a conference for mayors and other policy makers) to put the social purpose of science fiction front and center.

This past year, under the guidance of award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal, we developed our first Futurescapes anthology—Cities of Empowerment (see futurescapescontest.com for ordering details coming in February). It’s coming out in late April to coincide with our Writers’ Workshop at Sundance and our Civic Innovation Summit. Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment focuses on stories set in near-future cities where the concept of disability has been virtually erased, and civic life is seamless for all, or where the natural abilities of citizens have been augmented to create super citizens. These stories, by authors including Fran Wilde, Anjali Sachdeva, and Malka Older, are not simple utopias. They paint the challenges of solving a range of civic problems in full color and complexity without sacrificing character or story.

To offer a picture of what Futurescapes promises, the following is an excerpt from the amazing (and award-winning) author Fran Wilde’s story, “Happenstance, ” her contribution to Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment.

Luke Peterson
Director,
Office of New Urban Mechanics
newurbanmechanics.org

EXCERPT: “Happenstance ” by Fran Wilde

Sunlight hits the top floor of One Eastwaters Tower in a hard, bright wave. When the afternoon glow also strikes the lake, everything turns to dazzle.

I’ve lived high-lakeside for three years. I still startle at the ripple of water-light on the floor, dappling my skin, sparking off the bits of my exoskel that are otherwise invisible no matter what I’m wearing.

People are hardwired for pattern and expectation. Changes shock the system.

I think about this a lot. Especially when I’m working.

Shake off the dazzle, Lane. Focus on Eastwaters’ maps, the Happenstance Engineering overlay. A fingertip pinch here, a pull there, and you’re done. Got to hit quota before end of day and it’s already late afternoon.

Patterns mean safety. Known risks instead of unknown hazards. A smooth experience.

See also: Boredom and stagnation.

So the City gave a handful of Happenstance Engineers full access to the roadworks, the waterworks. With a fast city physics engine calculation and some caution signs, I start an alleyway shift near Water Street. Over a few days’ time, the quiet Eastwaters alley will begin to run east-west for a block. That moves several small shops onto the main thoroughfare, out from the shadows. And it means Sam Bergo from Two Eastwaters Tower, seventeenth floor, and Juliette Dory, Tower Seven, floor twenty, will meet by accident on the way to work the day before their CrossTowers date.

That’s a couple quota boxes checked with a single job.

I let the meter run out two minutes early on a single seat at El Fortuna’s open four-top. A Solar Toys CEO is timed up on two more seats as a remote office. Now I watch the dataflow as Zai Norcelli accidentally takes a seat. Before the new CEO of SolarToys realizes Zai isn’t the person they’re meeting for dinner, Zai’s awkwardly answered questions about his custom automatons and passed a business card.

Check two.

Earbud pings break my concentration: once, twice. An inner-circle chat. That could only mean Sirocco.

“Sorry, working.”

Siro’s probably staring at his palm in consternation at that. If he really wants me, he knows where to find me.

Ha. The thought makes me smile.

I toy with the idea of making a fountain rise from the intersection at King and Vorhees, way up on Eastwaters’ last hill within megacity limits. Settle for a less-whimsical pothole instead. Less likely to get me in trouble with the city, or the water division of Civil Engineering. Foot traffic will still have to go around the obstacle and people will still shift their day slightly. Bonus: I’m all the way at the edge of my territory. That’s three.

So much for patterns, city dwellers. The changes I’ve made to the smart streets and shops start to ripple in real time: people bump into each other to avoid the pothole, grumble a lot, and commiserate. On their new path, they discover that small, out of the way shop with that thing they didn’t know they needed. The shop will drop City Engineering a thank you cred, and some of that will slide to me. Check check check.

I can almost hear Eastwaters’ gears click into new shapes; the streets sing. But city infrastructure isn’t my watch. Gears, physics, street sounds, and lights belong to CivE and MechE. Those engineers listen for the grind and crunch, the rush of water, the sound of a tram barreling along a tunnel.

My skel—an old model, but I keep it because I’ve made my own mods—chimes quietly. New message from Siro.

“Text and scroll,” sends his words to my wraparounds – the only part of the skel I can take off because it’s just for work. ::Dinner 7pm w. VC VP Ok? @Home::

The depth of my sigh sets the suit’s monitors whirring, trying to figure out what’s the matter with Lane. Pain? Exhaustion? “Stand down.” It’s 5:15pm.

Annoyance isn’t on the suit’s checklist.

::Okay::

I wave the message away. For a moment, the sun-sparkled hypercarbon snaking from my palms, up past my elbows and on back past the edges of my tank top transfixes me. The skel looks like stars. I’m not going to soft-pedal Siro. He knows that two hours is nowhere near enough time for me to get ready and be entertaining. He can handle the party himself.

Sure enough he texts right back. ::Catering at 6:45::

The skel stops trying to assess me as soon as my blood pressure drops back into normal range. Need to jack those metrics down a bit. Siro likes to know how I’m feeling, but I don’t, not this much. This is way too sensitive.

On my wraparounds, the city maps illuminates new connections built off the Happenstances I’ve put down. My earjacks feed me snippets of laughter. That’s a day’s pay when you’re a Hap Engineer. The sound of cred micropayments from the city grant going in my account. The kick of unexpected meetings and faces lighting up.

Most cities, even a few years ago? My activities might have been called mayhem. But in a smart city where everything runs on smooth, automated rails? Happy accidents have to be engineered.

I bag my Haps quota when an a banana shortage I caused at Tower One’s grocery pays off. To celebrate, I vent the overhead water feed on Tower Seventeen Floor Two’s vertical farm. Just a little.

Points of reference light up all over the megatowers as people come out to see the rainbows below Tower Seventeen. The points grow brighter still as the fish in the atrium breeding ponds rise to nibble on the fruit dropped by the soaked plants. Beautiful. More lights intersect as neighbors reconnect beneath the rain and sunbows. That district’s social nodes go bright purple on the map.

Check.

5:50pm. I need to move the printing supplies off the dining room table and get changed. But I want to watch Davian Mirren’s payoff once it filters down the network. Mirren needed bananas for the desert she’d looked up at work that morning. Right after I’d shorted the grocery, my mark had to find a different store. She chose next tower over, used the crosswalk, grumbled at the inefficiency. On the way there, she met an old friend from college on her regular run. My cred record showed Davian applying for a new job at her friend’s company. Excellent.

My weekly Haps quota—upper left in my wraparounds and lower right on the main map projected above my loft’s coffee table—both go green. It’s only Wednesday, and though I’m still short on the month because I took sick leave last week, I’m catching up.

I stretch my hands and pull the wraparounds from my eyes. Drop them on the coffee table. Resist the urge to sink into the couch and watch the sun on the lake. My loft’s a big open square on the forty-sixth floor. When I found it, the tower hadn’t been popular, all the city’s hotspots were up the hill near all the good restaurants and clubs. TowerOne had been a loss leader for a failed developer who didn’t understand Eastwaters’ docks, so I locked in cheap rent and camped out, eating takeout on the sofa—my main furniture besides the matterprinter and a mattress—watching sunsets through the big windows, avoiding the Oldtown protests, and working.

The plexi coffee table came in a few weeks ago, along with the chrome dining set, the retro lamps, and Siro.

“You timed the market, Lane,” he’d said. “This neighborhood’s getting hot.” His sheepish grin did the asking for him and, tired of pushing myself to get across town for dates, I let him move in.

Don’t date your boss. I know, I know.

I could say he was closest to hand. We worked together for years. But truth was, I liked him. And he was never shocked by my mods. When I told him. He didn’t mind the skel, and he wasn’t creepy about it. That was important.

Plus, his codework was damn sexy. Even his comments.

Ok, I admit our code those first few years got pretty not safe for work, but it was just us, working on the Happenstance algorithm. Things just . . . happened.

And now I’m cleaning up so he can have investors over for dinner.

My skel chimes. “Stand down. Recalibrate for less input.” The skel chimes again, acknowledging.

I box the printing supplies—plastic and chrome for modding the skel, a few carbon tubes for reinforcements—and shove that under the sofa with my foot. The printer, Siro will have to move. It‘s too heavy for me, even with the exoskeleton’s help. Some skels are work-strong, but this one is mostly support, a little reinforcement to keep my limbs from popping, a little skin-level pain-soothe. The basics.

I grab a short, sheer black dress from the bedroom closet and wiggle it over my head. Leave my jeans on. Siro wants fancier? He can damn well let me know before noon. Swap my chucks for flats. Don’t bother about the hair, which drops straight down my back like a second brace, no matter what I do to it. Check.

I have a few minutes more to watch the map before I have to deal with guests. The map soothes me. I can’t always watch the ripples caused by Happenstances, but the metrics drop from the network to the Happenstance Overlay in a few hours. Even without metrics, I can see I’m having a good day, just by the light. Small pathways glow. New nodes in the network are strengthening. I know it’s good work.

The algorithms Siro and I developed over the past three years and the lines we’d patched through the city’s main utility systems—plus social, shopping, traffic, and scheduling apps—were light-fast responsive. That made the work easier. Not just for me. For the two other Happenstance Engineers we’d partnered with in Eastwaters also, and for the Haps in Seattle and Shenzhen who were pioneering the system there.

A knock on the door. I wave it open from the middle of the loft and go back to work. Siro’s caterers can set up the table however they want.

Smells like salmon. Big meeting then, if Siro’s springing for real fish.

I haven’t played big with the map shifts today—I’d burned a few of those from my quota last week. Today is smalls— the most fun, in my opinion. They cause the most direct Happenstances. I like the up close shifts, the changes in just a few lives that one pause or a new conversation create.

The Happenstance overlay on the map glows brighter in that edge district. The one with the pothole. Shit, maybe that was too much. That’s a lot more people than usual in that district.

My skel pings softly again—suit charge alert this time. I ignore it for now. Still enough power in the system to support my legs and back. The map’s got my attention.

With a double click the thick door to the loft opens, then slams closed. I barely hear it.

A few moments later, Siro’s fingers brush the bare edge of my ear. “You are an artist,” he says.

He always says that.

“I like the connections.” Leaning into the touch, I douse my maps.

Lakelight plays on Siro’s chrome gearbag, dropped on the coffee table. Dazzling. The sleeve of his grey suit’s dappled in light.

“Besides, you built the damn nodes. I just play them.” I turn to look at him. He smiles shyly. “Quit that. You know it’s elegant.”

He’s a weaver of networks. A maker of gates. All I do is help people walk through.

“You play a great tune.” He slides an arm around my waist, hard exoskeleton and all. Smells like cologne, bright wood tones, but not too much—so he’d been meeting with the city again—plus garlic and Thai basil—he’d had lunch at his favorite pho place.

My stomach growls. “A lunch meeting and a dinner?”

“Have to, Lane. Eastwaters isn’t going to run Happenstance off grants much longer. Utilities won’t let us in unless we hand over the algorithm, and then we can’t expand to more cities. I’d rather go private. Contract to the city.”

We’d talked about this before. I liked my job better than his. “Who’s in the net tonight?”

Before we’d proved the Happenstance concept in TowerSixteen, on the upper edge of the city, where Siro lived, no one would sit down with him. First sign of our success had been “Caledin” a competitive food-dance gig that had grown out of an accidental cross-scheduling of two community groups. Yeah, it was as messy as it sounds.

No one realized Caledin was going to be big until it caught on in three more towers, both players and watchers. Soon after, a support group appeared for school children who couldn’t use VR gear—something the city government hadn’t even known was a problem until two disparate parents met in a fifth floor grocery over the last bag of oranges.

It wasn’t long before metrics supported so much of a shift for the better in TowerSixteen: more students coming to classes, more residents attending events, that the tower and several more around it began to pay us. Give us access to more systems.

Sure, there were a few disasters that first outing—a flooded apartment, people who were so late to work they got docked—and we took the cred hit for that. But we learned a lot, too. Three years on, people across the towers are happier, more connected. They don’t get stuck in ruts as much. The data shows it. Hell, the maps show it.

Except for the map that was lighting up too much before I had to stow it. Shit, why now?

Siro hasn’t answered me about who’s coming to dinner either. I repeat the question.

He smiles his best please-don’t-hate-me grin. “Octavian Smith.”

“I don’t need to be here for this.”

Octavian’s the worst kind of player. He likes to fund companies with pretty owners or pretty assets. He seeded the first part of the Happenstance trial run, actually told people he’d invented it, and then ditched for a higher profile project. We’d nearly lost everything, Siro and me.

Now we were successful and Octavian was back. “How can you consider him?”

My partner’s smile falters. “He’s got the best offer, Lane.”

With the suit sensitivity turned down, I can seethe and he’ll never hear a thing. “It’s the only offer, right?”

Excerpt ©2017 by Fran Wilde, published in Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment. Published in Lightspeed by permission of the publisher.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Fran Wilde is the Andre Norton and Compton Crook Award-winning and Nebula-nominated author of Updraft and its sequel Cloudbound (September 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Shimmer, and her novella, The Jewel and Her Lapidary, was published by Tor.com in May 2016. Fran writes nonfiction and essays for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and iO9.com and interviews authors, editors, and agents about the intersection of food and fiction at the Cooking the Books podcast. You can find her online at franwilde.net & Twitter: fran_wilde.

Luke Peterson is the director of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. New Urban Mechanics is a network of civic innovation offices exploring how new technology, designs and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. New Urban Mechanics is the host of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop.

Media Review: February 2017

Christopher East | 1635 words

This month, we take a look at the original anthology series Black Mirror.

Black Mirror
created by Charlie Brooker
Zeppotron, 2011 – current
Streaming on Netflix.

The easiest way to begin a review of the brilliant British science fiction series Black Mirror (originally on Channel 4 in the UK, now streaming on Netflix) is to acknowledge its place in TV history as a descendant of other innovative genre anthology shows. After all, Black Mirror does for the Information Age what The Twilight Zone did for Cold War hysteria and nuclear paranoia, and it slots in comfortably with other creepy ancestors like The Outer Limits and Night Gallery. But a simpler, perhaps more appropriate parallel may also suffice as introduction: Each season of Black Mirror is like an issue of a great science fiction magazine, particularly one with a focus on near-future tales that examine the complex, usually dark aspects of technology.

Like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror multitasks, mixing in cultural critique with its slick SFnal concepts, jaw-dropping reveals, and intriguing story structures. But whereas The Twilight Zone had a broad genre approach, Black Mirror’s is more specifically centered on futurism and information technology. The series title alludes to the ubiquitous screens of our modern, telecommunications-dominated world, and how they reflect on us as a species. Indeed, every episode—no matter how futuristic on the surface—directly addresses the issues of today, often by extrapolating a few years down the road from developing tech trends in classic “if-this-goes-on” fashion. While the tactics of the horror genre are often deployed, it’s ultimately core science fiction that could be sub-categorized as post-cyberpunk or Mundane SF.

To say that the show’s viewpoint is pessimistic would be putting it mildly. A line of dialogue from its first audacious episode, “The National Anthem,” sets the tone. “My God, this planet!” exclaims an exasperated newsman while strategizing his channel’s coverage of a royal kidnapping—for along with the abduction of a princess comes a vulgar ransom demand made to the prime minister (Rory Kinnear) that rivets the depraved attention of the nation. While this episode will be remembered most for its ghastly plot conceit, where it truly shines is in its insightful, multifaceted look into how technology plays a role in the complex affair: from the way the ransom demand is made, to how the story is covered in the press, to how the government attempts to deceive the kidnappers and rescue the princess, and how all those different interests connect. Best, though, is the way it shows how instant communication shapes our lives, and the collective psychological effect it has on us as a society. It’s an ugly watch, but the point is unforgettably made.

That episode establishes a trademark grimness, but the follow-up, “Fifteen Million Merits,” injects the series’ earliest hopeful flourishes, which periodically lend a certain dark beauty to the chilling parade of nightmares. The scenario is dystopian, depicting an underground society where the unfortunate masses ride stationary bikes endlessly to earn credits and power a crass, heartless new form of digital capitalism. But there are tiny little rays of light in this society, as its citizens seek personal connection and something genuine in their lives. Bing (Daniel Kaluuya) is just another disaffected drone until he falls for newcomer Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay) and decides to bankroll her ascendancy to stardom on the show Hot Shots, a rare route out of obscurity to the wealthy elite. While this episode makes late missteps with on-the-nose messaging, it’s still the jewel of Black Mirror’s early seasons for its magical worldbuilding and piercing critique of Western consumerism and the systemic inequalities of capitalism.

If the remaining early episodes don’t quite match those heights, it’s not for want of trying. Black Mirror is a restless, inventive series, and even when it isn’t firing on all cylinders, it’s always going to different, interesting places, often in riveting fashion. Perhaps “The Entire History of You,” which explores the pitfalls of ubiquitous memory-recording tech, plays out in an expected fashion, but it’s compellingly executed. The same can be said for “Be Right Back,” in which a young artist (Hayley Atwell) copes with the death of her partner by compiling his online activity into a posthumous software companion. These episodes are immersive and the production quality, performances, and visual storytelling are consistently excellent. Even at its least sure-handed—season two’s erratic “The Waldo Effect,” in which a frustrated comedian reluctantly leverages an animated character against the banalities of politics—has an impressive grip on the artifice of the business and possesses an odd, sideways prescience about recent Western political chaos.

My personal favorite from season two is the brutal “White Bear,” another episode penned by series creator Charlie Brooker, which returns to one of his recurring themes: the cruel way modern communications are leveraged as a vicious court of public opinion. An amnesiac (Lenora Crichlow) awakens in a perplexing world to find herself the target of masked sociopaths, while silent spectators stand by to watch her run for her life. She finds an ally (Tuppence Middleton) who helps her survive the scenario and gradually recovers her memory—which, of course, only makes things worse. Characterized by kinetic, violent action, “White Bear” is one of the show’s darkest, most scathing commentaries about mob mentality on the internet, and in our culture. It contains some truly surprising twists, and like “Fifteen Million Merits,” displays Brooker’s strength for science fictional metaphor.

The final Channel 4 episode is “White Christmas,” a one-off holiday special. It’s a cleverly layered contraption about two men working together in a remote cabin, and after several years working together, one of them (a perfectly cast Jon Hamm) finally tries to get to know his colleague (Rafe Spall). The stories-within-stories format is deftly constructed and Hamm’s gregarious salesmanship lends an appalling kind of humor to its sick ideas. As it weaves together tales of social media abuse, artificial intelligence, and a horrifying Internet of Things, it builds a deep sense of existential dread.

Had it ended there, Black Mirror would have stood as a triumph of SF TV. But Netflix stepped in to revive it, rescuing another critical darling for a turn in the streaming spotlight. The show’s third season debuted this past October, just in time for reality to catch up with its disturbing, finger-on-the-pulse sensibility. It opens weakly, alas, with the strident “Nosedive,” which envisions a future in which social media interaction has evolved into a ruthless reputation-economy caste system. It’s attractively produced, but once the rules are set, it never manages to deviate from an unsurprising trajectory. “Playtest” steps it up a notch: Wyatt Russell delivers an energetic performance as a stranded overseas traveler who lands a gig playtesting augmented reality games. Seasoned SF fans will probably see where this one is going, too, but the journey is considerably more satisfying. Incremental improvement continues with the third episode, “Shut Up and Dance,” a nasty, kinetic adventure in which an awkward teenager (Alex Lawther) is victimized in a sinister ransomware attack. The subsequent demands placed on him by an anonymous hacker send him down a treacherous, life-shattering path. This one is a triumph of gripping execution, but unfortunately its compelling build-up doesn’t add up to a satisfying payoff.

Fortunately, season three more than makes up for its slow start in the second half of its six-episode run. The harrowing “Men Against Fire” follows a digitally augmented military unit in what appears to be a zombie apocalypse future, but there’s another, chilling layer to the scenario that speaks rather frankly to the dehumanizing nature of warfare and the twisted motives that sometimes fuel it. “Hated in the Nation,” meanwhile, is a feature-length mystery starring Kelly McDonald and Faye Marsay as a pair of London homicide cops who land a serial murder case involving hackers, hashtags, and mechanical insects. It’s a superbly crafted future procedural that I could see making the leap to a regular series, and it redeems the show’s pessimistic tendencies with a determined, hopeful denouement.

Speaking of hope, my favorite episode of the new season is “San Junipero,” which capitalizes on the series’ relentless darkness by wielding optimism like a weapon. In a California beach town in the 1980s, a nerdy young woman named Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) has a night out, and finds unexpected friendship with hip, outgoing Kelly (the luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Yes, it’s a meet-cute, but because this is Black Mirror, things aren’t quite what they seem. The usual focus on dark subject matter doesn’t exactly go away in “San Junipero,” but its upbeat style and message is still a breath of fresh air. Perhaps technology has its uses, after all?

This show won’t be for everybody, and even those who love it may find it too intense to consume all in one go. Humanity is a deeply flawed species, yes; the degree to which Black Mirror insightfully tortures its characters to remind us of this can occasionally feel excessive. That said, in a Hollywood where science fiction is often twenty years or more behind the literature, Black Mirror is way ahead of the curve. It’s doing the difficult, important work of science fiction, and no other show on TV does it with such scope and ambition. Collectively, its episodes form an impressive artistic achievement, and for me, if it never filmed another hour, it would still rank easily among the best science fiction shows of all time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Book Reviews: February 2017

LaShawn Wanak | 1617 words

It feels good to be writing for Lightspeed again! I didn’t read as many books as I wanted back in 2016, so I plan to remedy this in 2017 by writing this column and sharing all the yummy books I’ve devoured. This month, I will review Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley, and A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson.

Six Wakes
Mur Lafferty
Print/Ebook
ISBN 0316389684
Orbit, January 2017
400 pages

Six Wakes, written by Mur Lafferty, is a whodunit murder mystery aboard a starship. Maria Arena, a sixth-generation clone, awakens in a new body and is treated to the sight of her previous body floating before her, dead. As she wakes up the rest of the six-person crew, it is evident that all of their previous selves have been murdered. Furthermore, their spaceship, the Dormire, a colony ship which is to take them and their sleeping human cargo to develop a new world, is now off course, and the AI running the ship has been hacked. As Maria and the others try to piece together what happened, we go into their backstories and learn that they are connected to each other more than they realize. Suspicion and tensions rise as their pasts are exposed, entangling their present and threatening their future.

Reading this is like a mash-up of The Thing and Clue. Lafferty does a good job of creating an atmosphere of tension and paranoia as the crew tries to figure out who the murderer is. I also liked how different pieces of the crew’s past fit together, even if it did feel a little too convenient in places. The Dormire’s crew is delightfully diverse. Maria and the pilot, Hiro Sato share most of the storyline, though we also see point of views from rest of the crew: the paranoid captain, Katrina de la Cruz; the perpetually angry second-in-command, Wolfgang; the doctor, Joanna Glass; and the neurotic engineer, Paul Seurat.

As we learn their backstories, we learn that all of them, even the AI, hide secrets, which are slowly exposed over the course of the book. Indeed, all of the crew are tied together, mostly due to their criminal aspect, and as the crew delves further into own pasts, they learn things about themselves that are startling and unsavory. Everything is tied to the mysterious benefactor of their ship and its mission, Sallie Mignon, who we only see in flashbacks. Out of everyone, she was the only person I couldn’t get a handle on, mostly because we only see her from the point of view of the others. On the one hand, I liked that, but on the other, it was hard to read her motives.

Lafferty wrestled with issues related to the nature of cloning, the lives of the cloned crew, and the politics behind them. There is some infodumping, but I found it fascinating; she could easily write two or three books based on the ethics of cloning. That said, I found the ending a little too neat, and ethically troubling, in light of all the focus that is put on clones and humans being treated well. But for a quick read, this book shines best when focusing on its mystery and thriller aspect.

The Stars Are Legion
Kameron Hurley
Print/Ebook
Saga Press, February 2017
ISBN: 1481447939
400 pages

Like Six Wakes, this story also starts with a woman waking up and learning she is a clone. Zan is the only surviving member of a force sent to the Mokshi, a world-ship that has broken free of the cluster of world-ships called the Legion. Zan has entered the Mokshi before—many times, in fact. But she doesn’t know why she is continually the only survivor, nor does she have any memories of her previous lives.

I don’t know if this is the right book to start with if you have never read Hurley’s works before, but wow, this book is amazing. Hurley has created an all-woman space opera, and it’s not for the squeamish. There is blood and tissue and sweat and gore galore. Computers made of flesh. Multi-headed witches who prophesy and compute. The smell of coppery blood everywhere. The women who inhabit the world-ships eat each other to survive. They take cubes of flesh as payment. They recycle dead bodies for food. And they become pregnant and give birth to things the world-ships need: cogs, parts, even other world-ships. Giving birth to actual children is rare.

The world-ships are just as surreal: ships that are as huge as worlds, disturbingly organic, made of flesh, skin, and bone. They are also dying, riddled with cancerous tumors. The key to saving them is located on the Mokshi, which only Zan can reach, if she could only remember how.

The only person who could help recover those memories is Jayd, who claims to be Zan’s sister, but harbors a passion more characteristic of a lover. Jayd does indeed have all the answers, but she doesn’t share her plans with Zan or the reader. She keeps Zan in the dark of her own past. Out of necessity? Or is it because if Zan knows her own past, it will destroy everything? Who has it worse: Zan who is forced to rediscover how terrible she was by bits and pieces, or Jayd, who knows everything but has to bear the burden alone? And then there is Rasida, the leader of the world-ship Bhavaja, who proves that an enemy intertwined with desire makes for the worst ally. For the most part, though, Hurley’s imagery is breathtaking and ruthless as Zan fights to break free of old cycles and forge new, unseen paths. Rebirth and recycling indeed. I would not be surprised if this book wins many awards in 2017. This space opera will remain with you for a long, long time. And trust me, you will never look at pregnancy the same way again.

A Taste of Honey
Kai Ashante Wilson
Softcover/Ebook
Tor.com, October 2016
ISBN: 0765390043
159 pages

If I’m going to talk about this book, let’s start with the cover, because oh, what a gorgeous, gorgeous cover! Artist Tommy Arnold did a fantastic job in capturing Aqib bmg Sadiqi, the son of the Master of Beasts, lanky and lion-haired, looking up apprehensively at a storm-filled sky as he strolls barefoot next to his cheetah and Daluçun soldier, Lucrio. It’s not often that black male protagonists are on fantasy covers. A Taste of Honey is even more notable in that it is also a queer male protagonist, and the story is just as gorgeous as the cover.

This could have been a simple romantic tale about two men falling in love, but for such a slender book, there is so much more packed into its pages. Wilson has already touched upon the world of the Olorum in his first novella, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. In Honey, the worldbuilding of Olorum continues to come out in delightful bits: the Menagerie where Aqib works, the way mathematics and writing are considered womanly arts, how technology is mixed with magic. One of my favorite scenes is a bored goddess constantly gazing on what looks to be an oblong slate peppered with ciphers and images. Wilson handles this mixing of familiar culture into fantasy surroundings with a deftness that is sly and fun, such as Lucrio’s mix of Latin language with casual African-American colloquialism (his referral to a guy as “dude” immediately endeared him to me.)

The story is told in nonlinear fashion, bouncing between the eleven days Aqib and Lucrio have together, along with the days and years where Aqib lives with the consequences of his decision. Aqib lives in a world where an effete man such as himself is always considered a boy, never a true man. When Lucrio challenges that view, it has far-reaching consequences for Aqib. In a sense, the whole novella is about regret, choices never taken, dealing with the loss and the beauty of what should have been. This also applies to Lucretia, Aqib’s daughter, who was my favorite character of the whole book.

The ending caught me by surprise at first, but made me reflect further on the nature of happiness. Does Aqib deserve happiness with his lover, or should he live a quieter life as the father to a dynamic daughter? I don’t know if Wilson truly gives an answer to this question.

In the meantime, I’m going to read The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and hope that Wilson writes an alternate story starring Lucretia. As much as I liked Aqib, she deserves her own book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Interview: Connie Willis

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 9401 words

This interview first appeared in December 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.

Connie Willis is the author of novels such as Doomsday Book, Passage, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear, as well as dozens of short stories including “Firewatch,” “Even the Queen,” and “The Winds of Marble Arch.” She’s won more major science fiction awards than any other author, and in 2011, she was named a Science Fiction Grandmaster by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. We’ll be speaking with her today about her new novel, Crosstalk.

Your new book is called Crosstalk. Tell us a bit about how the book came about.

The way I do my books is like an oyster. You get this little piece of grit, and then you start accumulating stuff around it. One of the first pieces of grit was that I was on a panel at Worldcon with a moderator I really couldn’t stand. The panel was on telepathy, because telepathy is sort of a subgenre of science fiction. There have been lots of telepathy stories and novels through the years.

We were discussing the pros and cons of telepathy, and I said I thought it was a terrible idea, and I certainly did not want anyone to know what I was thinking at any given moment, and the moderator said, “Oh, come on, when have you ever not said exactly what you were thinking?” I thought, “Oh, right now. Right this very minute. If you knew what I was thinking, this panel would be over.” That was probably the first piece of grit.

The second, as things started to accumulate around it, was just looking at our information society, which I basically have resisted my entire life. I’m being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, and I was interested in how romantic people were about the idea of more and more communication. That this would solve all of our problems. That it would lead to understanding and world peace, and so on. I was not convinced at all. I’m still not convinced. The more I see of this endless stream of input that we get—there’s just been all this talk about fake news, for instance—is that we’re getting tons of data, but not necessarily any information, and not necessarily anything that helps us get along better or understand each other better, and, in fact, when you can date by swiping left and swiping right, I’m not convinced that really improves the depth and quality of our relationships.

So I just began thinking about all of the negative aspects of the constant bombardment, including the bombardment that hits me every time I turn on my email and see that I have 8,000 emails to answer, many of which are unnecessary, but all of which take time and have to be gone through, which cause more annoyance than they do communication, I think. Those were some of the things that made me think about it. Plus, the fact that I love romantic comedies, and I love to write romantic comedies whenever given the chance, being distinct from romance, they’re a completely different genre. I realized that nobody had ever written a telepathy romantic comedy, and thought that I might give it a try.

Right, you mention that there’s this long history in science fiction of telepathy as an idea, and you say you don’t think it would be good in real life, but in science fiction, do you enjoy it as a device?

Oh, I love reading stories about telepathy, but usually they don’t think it’s a good idea either. The telepathic characters always end up either trying to have world domination or blow up other people’s minds or something, or else they go mad from all the input and can’t deal with it. There are very few positive telepathy stories. James Smith, I think is the name, wrote a number of stories with a young female heroine who was just growing into her telepathy, and those tended to be shown in a more positive light, but most of the telepathy stories are really negative, and did not see it as a positive at all. They saw all the downsides, which I totally agree with.

I think our society is based on what we don’t say all the time, and the fact that our thoughts are private, and that we have the choice of sharing them or not sharing them when someone says, “Do I look fat in this dress?” or, “Tell me what you honestly think about me.”

One of the other things that inspired the book is that I lived through the ’70s, where they had all of these “let it all hang out” kind of philosophies, and I remember as a young teacher saying when we met for the first time, “Oh, we’re going to do some bonding exercises. We’re all going to go in a circle and tell each person one thing we don’t like about them, and this will lead to more openness and honesty and communication.” I’m like, this is a recipe for complete disaster, and of course, it was. Let’s all sit in a circle and tell what we don’t like about you is not the way to achieve communication, and so people would end up in tears, and sobbing, and running off. I got my first real taste of what saying too much and communicating too much could do.

You had this idea to write a romantic comedy with telepathy. The form that this takes initially in the book is that there’s this new technology called the EED. Tell us about that.

The EED is this latest trendy thing—think plastic surgery, Botox, that sort of thing—and all of the celebrities are having it done. What it supposedly does is it helps you empathize with your partner. It only works if both you and your partner are emotionally committed, so it sort of serves as a kind of physical prenup because it won’t work, and you won’t be connected, unless you both are emotionally committed. It’s supposed to make you, not telepathic, obviously, but just empathic, and you’re going to pick up your partner’s feelings, and you’re going to be more sensitive to what the vibes in the situation are. You’re going to know that even though he says he’s willing to go to the Chinese restaurant, he’s not willing to go the Chinese restaurant. You’re going to have a more open relationship. It’s a dumb idea, and a ridiculous idea that people would agree to brain surgery just to get closer to their partner, although people have been known to inject deadly toxins into their skin just because other celebrities are doing it. I really don’t think there’s any limit to how stupid people can be.

Your main character is Briddey Flannigan, and she’s planning to have this EED thing done with her boyfriend Trent, and it doesn’t quite go according to plan.

No, nothing in fiction ever goes according to plan. If it went according to plan, there would be no story. After she has the surgery, which is against the wishes of her very Irish, very interfering family, who are dead-set against this, and against the stern warnings of the tech genius at the company who says this is a terrible, terrible idea, they’re going to harvest your organs while you’re in the hospital and unconscious, but she goes ahead and does it anyway, and finds that she is not connected empathically to her boyfriend. In fact, she’s not connected to him at all. She is connected telepathically to the genius geek guy, and neither of them are very happy about it.

You obviously did a lot of research, or it certainly seems like you did, on telepathy to write this book, the history of telepathy.

Such as it is. It doesn’t exist, so, yes, the history of faux-telepathy. I did do research into the Rhine experiments. I had already been familiar with them, and did some more research with them, and oh my gosh, they were supposed to be scientific, but a less scientific endeavor you have never seen. They cooked the data and cherry-picked the data, and did everything else they could with the data, and still couldn’t come up with anything very convincing.

One of the things, also, that intrigued me about telepathy from the beginning, or from paranormal stuff in general, is that I’m from Colorado, and we had Bridey Murphy back in the ’50s, I think, and she supposedly, under hypnosis, remembered previous lives, most notably the life of Bridey Murphy who had lived in Dublin in the 1800s. She recounted her life in 1800s Dublin in great detail until the reporters got ahold of it and started digging and discovered that, in fact, all of her facts were cooked, and there was no such person, and the song “Danny Boy,” which she kept singing as an Irish song, was not written until well after Bridey Murphy would have been dead, so her story fell apart. I’ve never known, for sure, I don’t think anybody’s ever known, whether it was an elaborate scam or self-deluded people and the highly suggestible aspects of hypnotism, which we know a lot more about now. I did research into that, and I did research into Joan of Arc, who’s my favorite person who heard voices, because she was so clearly not crazy. She was so clearly incredibly sane and yet heard voices. I looked into all those things.

You also came up with some more obscure people, at least to me, St. Bridget and St. Bega of Turan. How do you come across those sorts of people in history?

You just look and look and look. The history of hearing voices among saints is pretty common. I was specifically looking for Irish saints, since my heroine is Irish. The whole idea of hearing voices was not thought of in the same way that it is now. Nowadays, you hear voices, people immediately assume that you’re schizophrenic, and probably rightly so. But back in the Middle Ages, that was not the case. It was considered that you had a direct line to God. The attitude was very much different, and I have my explanation for that in the book. I’m not the only person who shares that theory, but it’s just a theory. Like I say, I don’t know what was going on with Joan of Arc, but I found no evidence at all of actual telepathy. These elaborate experiments, the Rhine experiments, where at the most you could send an image on a card, like a star or a wave or something, that doesn’t count. Telepathy is useless unless you can actually talk to each other and send complicated messages, you know? I found no evidence of any of that, in spite of friends I have who are convinced that they have had telepathic connections with other people, but not me. I don’t buy it.

In the book, it references this story where a girl in Nebraska supposedly heard a drowning sailor in the North Atlantic, and they met, and there were all sorts of details that were matched up. What do you make of those sorts of accounts?

I made that specific story up, but there are lots of stories like that. Who knows? There were dozens and dozens of people who claimed they heard crying and sobbing and “help me” voices when the Titanic went down, but none of them, as it turned out, ever said anything about it until after the Titanic had hit the front pages. They’re undocumentable. People have strange experiments. The brain does very strange things. But I don’t know. I found no convincing evidence for it. And, yeah, are there unexplained instances? Yeah, maybe. Just like there are with near-death experiences, which I explored in another book, Passage, and came to pretty much the same conclusion that this is the brain doing all of this, not other influences.

You mention that the protagonist is Irish, and you sort of suggest that there’s this connection between being Irish and paranormal abilities; was that just completely whimsical?

No, there’s a long history of the Irish claiming they’re psychic and having second sight and so on. That goes all the way back. I played on that. I’m part Irish, but I don’t know. It is a part of the tradition of the Irish people. If telepathy actually had existed in the past, the Irish were a very isolated people, especially in the western counties. They were the last bastion of civilization during the Dark Ages. The monks on the Skellig Islands on the far, far west coast of Ireland were basically the people who kept civilization alive, but that meant also that their gene pool was not integrating with the gene pools of the rest of Europe. If there is a telepathic gene, and if anybody could have preserved it, it would have definitely been the Irish. At least according to my theories, but I make up theories all the time for my stories.

In the book, you actually reference a specific gene, the R1BL21 gene; is that an actual gene?

No. There are genes like that. The redheaded gene is very similar to that, and if there were a telepathic gene, it would be that sort of gene. Are you really disillusioned? Were you thinking I was on to something?

No, no, I’m a total hardcore skeptic, so I don’t accept telepathy at all, but I was just curious.

How far my research went? Well, you want to make it look as plausible as possible. I once wrote a story about my theory that Shakespeare was actually Marlowe and that the two had changed places and then Shakespeare had accidentally been killed, etc., and then Marlowe took his place in his life. I love that theory. I don’t really believe it, but I think it’s fun to make up conspiracy theories. I’m reaching the point where I’m realizing how gullible people are in buying conspiracy theories of all kinds. It gives me some pause, but I try to make it clear that these are fiction and not in my real life. I don’t spread these in my real life.

It’s funny, one of my favorite Tim Powers quotes is when he talks about how he comes up with all of these conspiracy theories for his books, and he says, “There’s always a point in the middle of research where you start to come across things that seem to confirm your theory, and you say, ‘Oh my god, maybe I’m onto something here.’”

Right, that’s true. That is true. Actually, when I was doing the Shakespeare story, I was using a whole bunch of actual lines from Shakespeare as dialogue in my story, and I thought it would be fun to use some Marlowe lines also and sprinkle those through. So I went and looked up the Marlowe commentary, and looking up key words that I had looked up before for Shakespeare quotes, and found almost identical Shakespeare quotes and went, “Oh, I’ve made a mistake. This must be a Shakespeare commentary by someone named Marlowe,” and then I double-checked, and no, it was a Marlowe commentary. There were so many lines that were exact copies or almost exact copies. At that point, I got very nervous. I was like, maybe this really did happen. Maybe Marlowe really was Shakespeare. There’s always that point, but I tried to resist that.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, because in the intro to The Best of Connie Willis, you say, “There was a conspiracy theory making the rounds on the internet a while back that there were actually two Connie Willises: one who wrote the funny stuff and one who wrote the sad stuff.”

That’s right. I don’t understand that. I’ve never understood that, because to me, well, Shakespeare wrote comedy and tragedy. I’m not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but no one had any problem believing that he could write the comedies and the tragedies. I don’t see them as very different in the way you write them. I don’t understand why people would assume when you wrote one thing that you can only write one thing.

I think part of that is in modern-day publishing so much emphasis is placed on the brand, and so if your brand is serious time travel stories then you shouldn’t be writing comedy, or if your brand is comedy, then you shouldn’t be writing something serious, but I like to write all over the place. That has never really suited me. I think that’s where that conspiracy theory came from.

There are actually two Connie Willises now. It’s very frustrating to me. There are actually three. There’s a Connie Willis who is a screenwriter, and you occasionally see her name flip by on the credits of various movies. That’s not me. But I don’t mind that, if people confuse me with her. But the other one is a co-host on the late night talk show Coast to Coast, and she’s a psychic, and she’s had past lives, and she’s maybe been abducted by aliens and all these things, and I’m like, “That’s not me.” I’ve had several people confuse us and say, “I heard you on the radio talking about how you were a psychic.” I’m like, “No, no, no.”

It’s very frustrating, because science fiction writers, people get very confused anyway. They often confuse us with the people who actually believe all of these kinds of things. We try to explain we’re fiction writers. We write science fiction. But, there is that idea out there that science fiction writers are actually like Whitley Strieber and believe all this stuff. I find that extremely frustrating. I never was bothered particularly by the conspiracy theory that there was one person writing the comedies and one person writing the tragedies, but this one bothers me. Especially because the other day, I was doing a speech over at a college and was introduced in the introduction, they put some of this stuff, and that was when I first found out about this other person and went, “No, no that’s not me.” The last thing you want is to be contradicting the person who is introducing you, you know? But, in this case . . . “And she herself is telepathic.” I had to rise up and say, “Nope, not me. Sorry.” It is a little frustrating. I’m sure you’ll keep that straight in your interview, that I do not believe in telepathy. I just write about it.

When I was researching interviews with you in preparation for this, I came across this other Connie Willis, and I was going to ask you, do you have people contacting you now to help them find Bigfoot and stuff like that?

No, I’ve never had that. But I realized, before I discovered this person, that a lot of people would say to me, “Oh, I heard you on the radio the other night,” and I never thought anything about it because I’m frequently interviewed on the radio, and I never know when those interviews are going to be on, so I assumed it was NPR or something I was on. Now, of course, I hasten to ask them where they heard me. I hasten to set the record straight.

Getting back to Crosstalk, I wanted to ask you, because the book is dedicated to Mary Stewart, I was just curious why that was.

I love Mary Stewart. First of all, Mary Stewart wrote a great novel about telepathy called Touch Not the Cat. It’s probably my favorite telepathy novel of all time. It’s just terrific. She wrote this series of . . . I don’t know what you’d call them. I guess modern gothic romance adventures, maybe? Where you have a young woman, she’s on vacation in the south of France or something, and she gets involved in a mystery and is endangered and in peril.

She started writing in the 1950s, so many of the girls are doing these things in high heels and bouffant petticoats, which makes it really difficult for modern young readers to read. They were always very plucky heroines and smart. They weren’t Nancy Drew intentionally going down creepy stairways and stuff. They didn’t get into trouble on purpose. They were dragged into mysteries not of their own accord, and once they were in them, they behaved very intelligently in trying to get out. They were just terrific.

That genre had been around, but it had been very badly written, and Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier basically raised that genre writing to a level where it could be taken very seriously. I have just always loved Mary Stewart’s books, and she has many, many fans. That’s one thing, where a lot of people have talked to me about that dedication, going, “I love Mary Stewart.” I’d never met anybody who’d read her before. She was just a terrific writer, and her writing was beautiful, and her plots were marvelously constructed, and I always really admired that. Especially plotting, because no one knows how to plot. I’m always very impressed when I see somebody whose plots just run like clockwork.

Are there other novels about telepathy you think you were drawing on? There was a little bit, to me, it seemed, of The Demolished Man in this. This idea of filling your head with nonsense to prevent people from reading your thoughts.

Right, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man is the classic in the field. That and I would say Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, which is about a man who has been telepathic his whole life, and has used the power to further his own ends, but now is aging and is losing the power, which is a great book. I’m not really sure it’s about telepathy. It’s ostensibly about telepathy, but really I think it’s about any creative power that you have that you are no longer possessing or that you’re starting to lose. Terrific book.

The Alfred Bester idea of getting too much input and getting mad from the input, that’s been around in the telepathy stories since the very beginning, and it’s always a problem, because when you fantasize about telepathy, you always assume that you would be able to listen to whoever you wanted to whenever you wanted to, but that you would somehow be in control. But the truth would be that you would be the victim. You couldn’t go to Starbucks anymore. You couldn’t go to the theater. You couldn’t go anywhere where there were large crowds of people, and even if you were safely at home, you might have to listen to your dog’s thoughts, which is not a good idea. Or we might find that they’re not nearly as devoted to us as we thought they were. Or to our cats’ thoughts, and we might find out that our cats actually slavishly adore us, but are just too reserved to say anything. I’m not sure we would ever be able to control what we had, so I think that’s an essential part of talking about telepathy.

There’s a scene in the book where a character is subjected to the horrible uncensored thoughts of the people around her, and I was wondering if reading internet message boards had helped you.

Oh, no kidding. It’s a cesspool out there. The hero says that repeatedly about people’s thoughts, and certainly if you want to think well of your fellow man, the internet message boards are not a good place to go. I’m always amazed at how quickly things deteriorate from civil conversation to, well, Hitler. And then screaming and horrible misspellings of swear words. I think the misspelling of swear words are intentional so you can get them past the censors or the algorithms, but the other misspellings and grammatical errors are enough to drive you crazy. I don’t know what it is when people are not accountable, when they think they’re anonymous, or they think they’re alone or something, it’s not pretty out there.

One other technology you proposed in the book is the sanctuary phone, which has all of these tricks to help you avoid talking to people you don’t want to talk to. Is that something that you would like to have yourself?

I would love to have that, yes. We’re at their mercy all the time. We actually want some kinds of communication. We want important messages. If someone has broken a leg, we want them to be able to get in touch with us. I’m not against the information age. When our daughter lived in England before cellphones, it was awful, because she didn’t have a phone at her apartment, and we had to call every Sunday at a certain time, and she would be standing at a payphone ready to take the call, and that was the only communication that we could have. Now, we had one other number that we could call if someone died, but basically I kept thinking, “Oh my god, some terrible thing could happen to her on a Monday, and I would not have any way to know until the following Sunday.” Obviously, the information age has been great for that. Facebook, and Skyping, and just the cellphone have been wonderful.

But at the same time, when I was on vacation at Thanksgiving, there were several business things that I was involved in that would never have come up before, because they would have said, “Oh, we can’t reach her. It’s Thanksgiving. She’s away from home, so it’ll have to wait until Monday.” All the business in the world would have shut down from Thursday to Monday. I think that was a better world.

Last year, our daughter was trying to buy a condo, and we were standing in Kinko’s in Santa Fe at six p.m. the night before Thanksgiving faxing papers to her realtor because there are no days off. There are no holidays. There is no time when you are not accessible to the rest of the world, and so those aspects, I think, are not good. I think part of our problem right now is that we’re living in a transition world. We’re not living in a society. We’re living in a transition to whatever the society is going to be. We’re dealing with these endless changes, and the minute we adapt to the cellphone, along comes that smartphone, and when the smartphone comes along, we know that something else will follow it which will be very different from that, and we’ll have to adapt to that. And the driverless car and everything else.

We can’t really formulate any new societal norms until the society stops changing so radically and so quickly, because we’re still in transition. I think that’s part of where all the frustration comes from, because I remember when the cellphone first arrived, there were all sorts of breaches of propriety. Then people kind of worked that out. They got that settled. But then, of course, the next big thing came along, and they needed to work it out again, and again, and again. I think that’s partly why we behave so badly. Eventually, we’ll work all of this out. It’s just hard living through it.

It’s funny because, speaking of your daughter, recently my mom asked if I could turn on this thing called Find my Friend on my phone so that if she was ever wondering where I was she could just look at her phone and see where I was.

Oh my gosh. Terrible idea.

The thing is, fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have thought that that was so weird, and these days I’m kind of like, eh, why not. Google knows everything I do, and the government knows everything I do, at least my mom can know everything I do, too.

Well, sure. Obviously while my daughter was in England, that was during the IRA bombings, and I would have loved to have that feature. Not so I could track her every move and demand what she was doing out so late, but just simply so I would know that she wasn’t at the site of the bombing. That would have given me tremendous relief, and I’m sure that’s what your mother is thinking. We have different ideas about privacy, and different ideas about things.

One of the reasons I have Maeve in the book is because I think parents . . . these helicopter parents, that the new information age has given them so much control over their kids, and kids need, I think, a certain amount of space, and freedom, and privacy, and respect. I see these parents, and they literally do want to track every second of their child’s life, and the kids really are fine if they just leave them alone, because I always think kids are way smarter than adults think they are. I understand that parents don’t want their kids kidnapped by some horrible stranger, but on the other hand, they’re not allowing their children to breathe either, so that’s a problem.

What I wonder is, because it seems like there is going to be telepathy in the future with technology, right, because I’ve talked to various people on this show who say that with fMRI technology, you’re basically going to be able to read people’s thoughts within a decade or two.

I totally disagree.

Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. The fMRI is nothing. So you use an fMRI, and you say, “Think about something.” I think about something, and you see a picture of a bird, okay? It’s a very blurry image of a bird. Okay, so maybe the bird will get clearer, and maybe you’ll get it highly refined, but what are you thinking? What exactly are you thinking about it? Are you thinking, “Oh, there goes a bird. I just saw a bird.” Or I’m looking at the TV, at an image of a bird. Or I’m thinking about a bird that I saw yesterday. Or I’m thinking about the Philadelphia Eagles. Or I’m thinking about a car named after a bird. Or I’m thinking, “I hate birds,” just because I’m a totally paranoid person and the birds, the birds are after me. Or I’m thinking about Hitchcock’s The Birds.

How do you translate an image into the sophistication of what we really think? We don’t think in images. We think in words, and that’s why we have language, because our thoughts need to be more complicated than just, “Ooh, bird.” We need the language so that we can say and think all these different things about birds: adjectives about birds, memories of birds, hopes for birds, wishes and dreams and paranoid fantasies about birds. I don’t see that we have any technology anywhere close that can decipher that.

I interviewed an author named Kara Platoni, who wrote a book called We Have the Technology, and she spoke to some researchers who thought that this was going to happen, that they were going to be able to read out your inner monologue using fMRIs.

Really? But there are people who think we’re going to be immortal in ten years. That the singularity is going to happen in ten years. And I never find any of those convincing. When the computer first came along, I was told, “Oh my god, the computer is going to revolutionize the novel. You’re going to have these incredible novels with amazing, interlocking plots. With clever, unimaginable techniques. It will revolutionize the novel.” It has not revolutionized the novel in any way except for the worst, because people tend to type so much more easily than they used to be able to.

The thing I’m always most skeptical about is technology. Not that the technology won’t do amazing things, but that there are always going to be side effects and unintended consequences to every single technology, and that the rosy hopes and dreams that everybody has for it are pretty much assured either not to come true or to come true with a really heavy price that nobody thought of.

Say the automobile for instance, which was a great idea, and did revolutionize the world, and certainly made tons of things possible, and the side effects did not become apparent for years, and years, and years, and now it’s killing the planet. I think futurists, for some reason, always have this very rosy view of the future, as though all the previous technologies, all of which came with huge disadvantages, and huge side effects, and huge unintended consequences, that those rules will be suspended regarding this next technology.

Years ago at a convention, I saw Joe Haldeman on a panel, and he was talking about his book Forever Peace. There was some sort of telepathy technology in his book, and he was saying that he thought if you could really get inside someone else’s head, and completely understand them and how they got to be the way they were, that you would not be willing to kill them, and that that would be the end of war.

Oh, interesting. I think you might be more apt to kill them, honestly. I think you would be . . . “Okay, that’s it. You’re out of here. I thought there might be some redeeming quality in you, but I was totally wrong.” So, yeah, I don’t know. Joe is usually as much a skeptic as I am. Certainly the more we know about other people, the harder it is. I do think, in spite of current events, that our getting to know people all over the world, our being able to Facebook, and Skype, and everything with people all over, has made a huge difference in our understanding, in our inability to view people as the other or as the enemy because you realize, “But I have a friend over there, and they’re just like me, and they love Hello Kitty just like I do.” It does make it where you realize that we’re all people and we all have feelings. It’s less easy to demonize them, or I would have said that before November, that it was less easy to demonize them and get away with it. I think generally that is true, and we’re moving in a direction where better understanding is making that true. I’m not sure telepathy is required. I think good old-fashioned talking to each other is probably sufficient.

I was thinking about, if there is going to be this telepathy technology in the future, if we’ll just stipulate that, it makes it very hard to tell stories then. I was thinking about how to tell a story, there’s The Demolished Man, but in a society where everyone knows everyone else’s thoughts, it seems to kind of obliterate everything that we think of as drama, because almost all drama depends on a character not knowing what another character is thinking.

Except, I would bet you, let’s say telepathy became the norm and we could easily know what other people were thinking, the first thing that people would begin to do would be to attempt to stop that. For themselves at least. They would try to build mental barriers or physical barriers. Tinfoil hats or something that would prevent other people from being able to read their thoughts, because it is so essential to not have people read your thoughts.

I don’t think most relationships could survive if you knew virtually everything that flitted through the head of your partner, because there are times when you’re furious and ready to kill them, and those are better left as moments that you can leave unsaid. With telepathy, you wouldn’t be able to leave them unsaid. The stock market would immediately crash because we would all be inside traders to the max. There’s just so many things that could go wrong. I think the very first thing that would happen would be that people would attempt to reverse it. At least for themselves or in certain ways so that you weren’t open to everybody.

If we think it’s bad that you can have stalkers on the internet right now, and that people can find out where you live and go stand outside your house, and it’s really, really creepy, think how creepy it would be if they could get in your head. You really don’t want Charles Manson in your head, and I think society would go to enormous lengths to prevent that from happening, or, once it happened, to stop it immediately from happening. I just don’t think we would ever be able to tolerate a society in which we all knew all the time what we were thinking.

I don’t think there’s any question that if people living today suddenly all became telepathic that civilization would collapse overnight, but I do wonder if a hundred years from now, if people for one hundred years had been telepathic and everyone had no living memory of ever living any other way, if society would find some new equilibrium. Or do you think that’s just impossible?

Maybe. But it would certainly not be a society that looked anything like ours, because our society is totally based on the fact that all kinds of things are private, and I know there have been all these articles about how the internet has destroyed privacy, and that people don’t care about privacy anymore, and there’s a totally different attitude toward privacy, but the truth is that it hasn’t extended very far, and that we have still have vast areas of our lives which are private, which people want to keep private and go to extraordinary lengths to keep private. I don’t ever guard what I’m thinking. I guard what I’m saying, but I don’t guard what I’m thinking. I would have to begin to behave in a totally different way if I also had to guard my thoughts and be careful what I thought in the presence of others at all times, and that would be a very different society from what we have now.

Anything is possible, and of course I love speculating about those ideas. But, for me, let’s say if I speculate, sure telepathy had suddenly become universal, maybe not suddenly, but over the years society has become completely telepathic, I would always be looking for what are the unintended consequences, because they’re always there, and they’re always more interesting than the actual technology itself.

The book also has little quotes before each chapter. I was just wondering if you could talk about how you picked those or why you wanted to include those.

I loved including those, because they’re, first of all, I think when people are reading the book, they just read right past them, that’s for the reader the second time through, or for the reader the many-eth time through. Mary Stewart always did that. She always had fascinating quotes, which did not seem to be related to the story at all, but which later, if you go back and read them are very much related to the story and offered clues. Dorothy Sayers did the same thing and I think it’s a lost art. I love doing it. I do it in almost all of my novels.

A couple of the quotes are from the TV shows Primeval and Syfy’s Alice.

Oh, my favorite television show ever. Everybody who knows me knows that Primeval, I adore, and proselytize all the time. It was a BBC show. Five short British seasons. It’s the dumbest premise of all time. It’s dinosaur hunters in modern-day London, basically. There are these rips in time, which at first are from the distant, distant past, and creatures are able to come through and threaten London. A team is formed. Somebody called it The A-Team with dinosaurs, which is probably fair, except that the reason I loved it is that it was so well written, and it had such great plot ideas. I could not figure out the plot, and I can always figure out the plot. I always see it coming from miles ahead because I spend so much time plotting myself and dealing with plots, so when I can read something or watch something that I cannot figure out, I am in awe. I’m so impressed. It had great acting and terrific, funny dialogue and lots of irony. They knew how to do romantic comedy plots, which nobody knows how to do. It was just a great show all around. And, it had an actual ending, so that you watch the five seasons and you got a satisfying ending for all of the characters, which I found the most impressive thing of all, because TV so frequently just dies, and then you’re left wishing you hadn’t watched it at all because there wasn’t a decent ending. Or they screw up the ending like in Lost. And so you want a good ending, and this had a good ending. I push Primeval whenever I can.

I haven’t seen that one or Syfy’s Alice. Do you recommend that one as well?

Oh yes, very much so. Nick Willing has done several literature-related things. He did one, I think it was called just Neverland, and it was about Peter Pan before he became Peter Pan and Captain Hook before he became Captain Hook. His first one, and the most famous, was called Tin Man. It’s an interesting reworking of Wizard of Oz.

Syfy’s Alice, it was a mini-series where a modern-day Alice returns to Wonderland, and it is much more dystopian, what Wonderland would have become under the reign of the Red Queen, and very much a dystopian science fiction landscape, and very clever ways of working in all of the things in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but in totally new context. I just absolutely loved it, and I hate the new Alice in Wonderland, the Johnny Depp Alice in Wonderland, which I think tried to steal from Syfy’s Alice, but Syfy’s Alice was very low-budget and had very pathetic special effects, but just really outdid it, I thought.

I didn’t like the Johnny Depp one either. Speaking of dystopianism, you mentioned that you were more sanguine about humanity prior to this most recent election.

I am never sanguine about humanity. Ever. We always stand on the edge of the abyss. Always. It’s always a miracle that we don’t pitch forward into it. Let’s say I thought we got way closer to the edge here with this last election.

You said on your blog, “America handed the One Ring to Sauron, and now all hell is about to break loose.”

Yep. And I have not changed that opinion in the three weeks since I wrote that, particularly since watching what’s going on with Taiwan, and watching the random tweets, and the fact that the other day at this rally, he said, “I had no memory at all of ever saying that I would rescue Carrier and keep them from leaving the United States,” which I found absolutely terrifying. It’s a bull in a china shop. The reason we have that metaphor is because valuable, fragile, wonderful things will get broken and cannot be put back together again. I’m very frightened. Really frightened. More frightened than I was two weeks ago. No, that’s not true, I’m just as frightened as I was two weeks ago. I thought this is what was going to happen.

You did talk on your blog about how you researched London during the Blitz a lot for various stories that you’ve written, and that you feel like you are able to draw inspiration from surviving that experience.

Right, it’s a little different because that was a threat from outside. This is a threat from inside, so that makes it different. Although London had its threats from inside. During the ’30s, there was a ton of pro-Nazi sentiment: Mosley and his gang, and the Duke of Windsor. All of those people were very pro-Hitler. The situations are a little similar. I think the main thing is that the ordinary person tends to think, “Oh, there’s nothing I can do. What can I do? The thing I was going to do, vote, that didn’t work, so what else is there?” That is simply not true.

When I wrote Blackout and All Clear, my World War II novel, it was so clear that every single person play a vital, critical role in the war, and that every single person doing their bit, the British attitude of “do your bit” was absolutely the right one, because you had no way of knowing which person, which action was going to be the important one. I think that’s always true in history. History not only is always at the edge of the abyss, but it always is balanced on a knife’s edge. There’s always one tiny little thing that can make all the difference in the world, and it almost always is just an ordinary person.

History tends to focus on the kings and armies, but the truth is that so many things are simply the result of one person’s action or inaction in a critical moment. In the French Revolution, Louis XVI was heading for the border, he and Marie Antoinette were in a coach headed toward the border, and they got lost in the woods, and they stopped to ask a peasant for the way, which way to go, and the peasant told them, and the king handed him a tip, a coin, and the peasant looked at the coin, realized that the face on the coin was the same face that he was looking at, and turned them in. They didn’t make it to the border, as you know. They ended up on the guillotine instead. This peasant changed the course of history. History is full of those examples.

I think the worst thing for people is that despair and to say, “Oh, there’s nothing I can do except hunker down and not watch the news.” Instead, I think everybody needs to do their bit. They need to fight for what they believe in. They need to feel as though they can make a difference, because they can.

Your talking about the One Ring and Sauron, that makes me think of one of the things that Tolkien said that I thought was really wise, where he said basically that you would have to be omniscient to know what’s going to happen, and since none of us are omniscient, we don’t know what’s going to happen, so despair is never rational, because no matter how hopeless things seem, you don’t know there isn’t hope.

That’s right. Tolkien speaks with great authority, because he lived through World War I. He lost all of his best friends at the Battle of the Somme, and said later that he based the Dead Marshes, that awful scene in the Dead Marshes, on the Battle of the Somme. Which, when I read that, I was like, of course, that makes perfect sense. He definitely had been in situations where despair would seem like the rational option. How many people died at the Somme? 60,000? In far more nightmarish situations than any of us alive has been in, and yet, he didn’t believe in despair. I’m totally with him. I get very upset with the people who do despair, because, no, that doesn’t accomplish anything. I had a button made, one of the “Keep Calm” buttons. It says, “Keep Calm and Fight On.” I’ve been passing them out to all my friends.

Speaking of not giving in to despair, on a slightly lighter note, I was wondering if you could tell your story about how you got eight stories rejected in one day and thought about giving up writing.

Okay, that’s not really a light story. It is in retrospect, but not at the time.

When I was first starting writing, the first eight or so years, I wrote completely in isolation. I didn’t know any writers. I didn’t know the science fiction community existed. I didn’t know anybody, and so I would write my stories, and I would send them out, and they would get rejected.

We lived in a little mountain town which didn’t have mail delivery, so you had to have a post office box, and when I would buy my stamps, and my manila envelopes and things, I would always buy well in advance, and I would buy not only the envelope and the stamp to send it out, and the self-addressed stamped envelope, but also for the next time I was going to send it out. I would usually even address it in advance. I’m sending it to Asimov’s, but I’m also addressing the envelope to Analog for when it comes back from Asimov’s. I was always fairly pessimistic about my chances, and rightly so.

I would get stories rejected, but it wasn’t too bad because I would say, “Well, this story was rejected, but in the meantime, I have this story at Omni, and it’s really good, and I know they’re going to take it.” Then by the time the one from Omni would come back, I would say, “Well, they rejected that, but I have a new story out at Asimov’s, and I have this other story out at F&SF, and they’re going to buy those.”

This one day, I walked up to the post office with my dog, and there was a pink slip in my mailbox. I assumed that it was a present that my grandmother had sent me or something, and so I went up to the desk to get it, and it wasn’t a present. It was all of the manuscripts I had out. Every single one. There was nothing that I could say, “Oh, but this is still out. They’re going to buy it.” These were all stories that had been rejected multiple times. Some of them, I had nowhere else to send them. They’d gone through the entire gamut of publication.

I picked up all of these manuscripts and started home, and thought, “You know, this would be a good day to quit. God is trying to tell me to quit here.” That’s always a danger for writers, because on the one hand, you have to have this incredible cockiness that other people actually want to hear what I have to say. They actually want to read these stories that I make up. Then on the other hand, if you’re too cocky, you never improve, because how can you improve? You’re already perfect. You’re never going to sell that way. You have to walk this balancing act.

So I walked home and seriously did think about quitting, getting my teaching certificate renewed and going back to work, and just giving up on this. But, I had all of these self-addressed stamped envelopes already ready to send out, so I thought, “Well, I’ll just send it out one more time.” And I didn’t really feel anything but despair at that point. I didn’t really honestly think any of them would sell, but I sent them all out again in their new envelopes, and one of those did sell, and then that kept me going until I was able to sell some more. I think, eventually, all of those stories did sell. I’m not sure, but I think almost all of them did, which was good.

And, the best part was, walking home from the post office with my dog was when I got my idea for “A Letter from the Clearys,” which was the story that was kind of one of my breakthrough stories, so it all worked out great, and now it makes a great anecdote to tell, but at the time, it was pretty awful. I really did almost quit. I always tell that story because I think that writers, they do reach moments of despair when they really could quit, and they should know that other people have had that same moment. That that’s not abnormal, and that it doesn’t mean that you should quit. On the other hand, some famous writer said, “All famous writers are people who were too stupid to know when they should have quit.” So I may fall into that category also. Too dumb and too unwilling to waste those stamps to know that I should have quit that day.

We’re all out of time, so finally, do you want to say what you’re working on now? Or is there anything else you want to mention?

I’m working on a new story about a mysterious bookshop. I love mysterious bookshop stories. I’m almost done with this one. I’m also working on a new novel about UFOs, and Roswell, and alien abductions. I think it will be kind of a road picture book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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: Ian R. MacLeod

Arley Sorg | 1115 words

One of the things touched upon in this story is the concept of infidelity in a virtual environment. Currently, people sometimes experience relationships in virtual landscapes, such as gaming environments, being “together” yet never meeting each other, but feeling that their relationship is no less real. In “Starship Day,” Owen and Hannah are further challenged by the tides of hope and despair experienced in their long journey. Yet throughout, there is a sense of Owen being anchored in their relationship. Does infidelity “count” when it’s a dreamscape, or a virtual reality, that might never happen in real life? Especially when you are imprisoned in that environment for countless years?

We know increasingly, both in terms of physics but also brain science (not to mention virtual worlds and the recent extraordinary events in politics) that the term “real” describes a useful illusion. We construct the world we perceive, not to mention our understanding of our existence and identities, out of something that isn’t really there in the way we think it is. Self and reality are plausible constructs—one we work with, even though we know they can be deconstructed in all sorts of ways. It’s what keeps us functioning and sane. Clearly, it wouldn’t be much of a defense for being unfaithful, or any other kind of “immoral” act, to say that everything’s an illusion anyway, and time, matter, and existence are merely holograms projected into the multi-dimensional spacetime foam, but in ways we can’t understand, that seems to be true. Then, when it comes to morality itself, we’re into an even more fluid area. Acts which we would perceive as entirely wrong would be seen as totally normal and acceptable in other times and in other societies. Moral relativism isn’t a theory, it’s a proven (inasmuch as we can prove anything) historical fact. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t know!

In a sense, this is a story about the will to live, and how fragile that will can be. People simply give up and cast themselves into non-existence, weary and losing grip on their flailing hope. I can almost guess that Owen’s time is coming soon, while the others are collectively holding onto their delusions; or, perhaps, he is stronger for his cynicism—a contrast demonstrated by Sal’s demise, a depressed man whose delusions were falling apart. Do you feel like this story represents, in some sense, how we live today: that we struggle against constant waves of disappointment, and that we can either bolster ourselves despite disappointments, or let them wear us down into giving up?

Again, and as you’re picking up, this is a story about the fragility of hope, and of existence. Although I think it’s cut, as in a lot of my fiction, with a sincere belief in the beauty of now. I’m not a religious person, but I am a spiritual one, and I guess what I (and perhaps many of my characters) cling to is that.

One of the interesting undercurrents here is the fallibility of science. The ship has held together for the most part, but is falling apart. The expedition itself has been thrown into the unknown, at this point just flying to star after star, running on hope and guesses. Do you feel like scientific exploration and experimentation, in real life, is more responsible and effective than this? Or is this perhaps representative of human nature in general, of the impulse to rush in, often not quite prepared for what awaits?

The stories that generally make it into history involve winners and successes. We don’t read, and often don’t even know, about the explorers who didn’t make it—who set out to sea and got lost and drowned. Similarly, when it comes to scientific discoveries and suchlike. But we also know that, for every Columbus and Newton, there are a lot of other equally brave and stupidly arrogant people who set out to prove something who were forgotten. Having said that, there’s a modern, or at least Romantic and post-Romantic, obsession with failure that I suppose I’m tapping into. Amelia Earhart and Captain Scott and so forth. It’s a particularly British obsession, or at least European. Since we don’t win at that much any longer, we have to celebrate failure instead of success. That and, as you say, the human impulse to push on no matter what.

Is there anything in particular you’d like readers to know about this story?

I think I was tapping into what currently feels like an over-pessimistic view of the lifelessness and emptiness of the Universe. There are so many planets out there, many of which appear to have atmospheres, that it doesn’t seem unlikely that we might be able to detect some life-bearing, or at least life-friendly, worlds within the next few decades. But these things come and go. It really wasn’t that long ago that we were expecting jungles on Venus and canals on Mars. Now, and I’ll fully accept that we’ve progressed hugely in observational terms, it’s the lakes of Titan or Europa, but it’s still all hopeful speculation and nothing more. These things come and go, and perhaps the launching of the starship on which Owen and the others find themselves was at the peak of some wave of optimism which turned out to be wrong.

What are you working on now that we can look forward to reading?

I have a new short story collection called Frost On Glass, which also includes some autobiographical writings, along with stuff about the craft of writing itself, out from PS Publishing. Then, sometime next year, you should see my ambitious new novel Red Snow, which features vampires, the Wild West, the French Revolution, the Wall Street Crash, and a fair amount of mysticism, from the same publisher. That, and I’m still writing short fiction. I’m pleased to say that my recent story, “The Visitor from Taured,” has been picked up for at least three of the year’s best collections, so look out for that. Like those stupid, arrogant explorers, I’m still setting out for new worlds in the hope that I won’t get lost and drown. But seeing as reality is an illusion anyway, maybe these are the last thoughts of a dying brain.

Thanks for the thought-provoking story and for your time!

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: Kelly Barnhill

Sandra Odell | 789 words

The prose for “Probably Still the Chosen One” is very sparse, yet embraces the character of Corrina and brings her to life. Can you tell us a little about what inspired this story?

I started writing this story after a conversation with my sixteen-year-old about the many, many, many fantasy novels she read in her early years as a voracious bookworm, in which an eleven-year-old discovers that he or she is the “chosen one” of some magical kingdom and goes off to have adventures . . . and then comes back. To do what, exactly? My daughter said, “I used to always wish that I’d find a magical portal or whatever, but then I started wondering what happened after. How do you have a normal life after you cut off a monster’s head and become Empress? It would make it very hard to do your social studies homework, I think. And also, since when is being eleven any indication of leadership qualities? That just seems like a bad policy.” Her brother is, after all, eleven. And I don’t think she has full confidence in his ability to be King. And, of course, that got me thinking. And then I started wondering why a group of cynical and perhaps power-hungry high priests would select an eleven-year-old to be their figurehead in a pointless war. And then I started wondering even further if they misjudged the time, and got not an eleven-year-old, but a single mother who did not have time for any sort of duplicity. And the thing snowballed from there.

I ached for Corrina’s confusion and dedication, her surprise at Cairn’s explanation of the High Priests’ motivation, her determination that eventually settles to resignation and then something else entirely. What would you say was the hardest part of writing this story?

I think, for me, the hardest part was thinking about the internal lives of adolescents—how the life and Self that their parents think they know is not the life or Self that they actually possess. That with each passing day, they become more separate, more away from us, and burdened with the lonely singularity of young adulthood. Corrina holds this secret from her parents, and that secret directs the trajectory of her life. That notion made me achingly sad—particularly because I have two adolescents in my home. So of course I made them cookies, showered them with kisses.

The trope of childhood as a magical time is found in many fantasy stories, yet we are only now beginning to explore the possibility of a grown woman, a mother, as a capable hero. Here both magic and reality interrupt Corrina’s childhood in ways she hadn’t expected. I really appreciated the transition of Corrina the child to Corrina the mother, the caregiver and instructor. How do you address tropes in your writing? Do you explore their depths, or do you tackle the challenge of turning a trope on its ear?

I think tropes exist to be challenged. The edges of Story are rubbery, and if we are not pushing on the edges as hard as we can, we are not doing our job as writers.

Tell us about your writing process. Do you have a set schedule or do you prefer to write in the moment, stealing away time when you can?

I am pretty ordered in my work time. I get my kids out of the house by eight, walk the dog until nine, and then write until three—taking breaks as needed to clean the house or go for a run or do a thousand and one errands. Part of being the parent who works at home is that I have to be used to interruptions—doctor visits or repair people or helping out other relatives or volunteering at the school or whatever. I try to write every day; sometimes I do.

What writers stir your imagination? Who tickles your fancy when you want to get your fantasy on?

Well, obviously Diana Wynne Jones. I think she and Ursula K. Le Guin are the fairy godmothers of most of our deepest selves. Kelly Link is one of my go-to writers for inspiration and imaginative gymnastics, and lately Sofia Samatar as well. Also, Genevieve Valentine, Laura Ruby, Nnedi Okorafor, and Helen Oyeyemi. And, of course, fairy tales. I was a fairy tale reader as a child, and a fairy tale reader as a teen, and a fairy tale reader as an adult. They are, for me, the ground of my making as a writer—as close to me as my own breath.

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: A. Merc Rustad

Robyn Lupo | 703 words

Secrets within secrets, betrayal, rise of super villains; “Later, Let’s Tear Up the Inner Sanctum” is through and through a superhero yarn. Can you tell us a little about how it came together? Were there any surprises writing this one?

The conflict between Ice and Sin-Master has wanted to be a story for ages in my head, but I kept hitting a wall when trying to write their story. “Traditional” formats and narrative style just didn’t click; I wanted them both to have a POV, but at the same time, I couldn’t make it work. I noodled around with telling the story from a secondary POV, initially Ava’s, and then it spiraled into a series of “ooh, what if I added this? Or this? I know! Let’s put in this bit . . .” and I wound up with a pile of snippets, different formats, POVs, and other material and began sorting it into a coherent story-form.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was figuring out how Amanda masterminds so much of the narrative from behind the scenes. Once I hit a spot in her interview, I was like, “Holy shit, she really did plot the downfall of the Excaliburs.” And that was pretty awesome.

The story comes at you in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, security footage, interviews, and so on. What inspired you to structure the story this way? Did you find yourself favoring one style over another? How difficult was it to go back and forth between these different ways of telling a story?

I’ve always wanted to write “found footage” (even though I am picky with the visual subgenre!). I remember reading “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer and going “wow, you can do that in written form?!” So ever since, I have wanted to try my hand at found footage, and for this story, it was the only format that worked. Was it difficult? Heh. I think it went through ten different drafts before I figured out what I was doing. It was one of the most structurally difficult stories I’ve written, since I was juggling so many pieces. I had to figure out the puzzle before I could properly put into place. I didn’t necessarily favor one “form” over another—the blog posts were the easiest to write in terms of prose!—since I enjoyed playing with formats and seeing how I could balance the different ideas of visual medium with text (while all in a textual medium such as print).

We need to know: What superhero power do you think you’d manifest, should you be so blessed or cursed?

Hmmm. I think it’d be either invulnerability or laser eyes. Maybe both!

To what degree has writing “Later, Let’s Tear Up the Inner Sanctum” changed the way you interact with superhero media?

Writing about, and thinking about, superhero media has made me very sensitive to the underlying levels of hypocrisy in a lot of the Marvel/DC runs—like, take the Daredevil series on Netflix. Daredevil is all “but I don’t kill people zomg!” while, you know, throwing enemies into walls and off stairwells and generally inflicting massive head trauma on so. many. people. Physical violence leaves damages; when I see the “heroes” reacting hyperviolently and then claiming they are doing good, it bothers me. (As may be obvious, I love Deadpool—and one reason, specifically, is that he is honest about the violence he does. It isn’t wrapped in a sense of moral superiority; it’s very, very visible and acknowledged.)

What’s next for you, Merc Rustad?

I’m super pumped for May 2017, when Lethe Press will be publishing my debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot. I’ve also sold Lightspeed two additional Principality Suns stories, set in the same ’verse as “Tomorrow When We See the Sun,” so am awesomely excited about seeing those published in the future!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: K.J. Bishop

Sandra Odell | 879 words

I was immediately drawn in by the wonderful voice of “The Memorial Page,” transported to the Fighting Temeraire to sit at the table and join in the storytelling. How much thought do you give to the voice and point-of-view when you write? Do you make a conscious decision to present a story in a certain manner, or do you play with the narrative to find which voice fits best?

So far I’ve found that if a story’s going to work, it’ll work with the voice and POV that first come to my mind. If it’s not working, I might try changing things, but I don’t think I’ve ever rescued a story that way. When I’ve done first-person stories like this one, it’s been because the voice turned up in my head. The character is just there and wants to talk.

Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind “The Memorial Page.” Why did you decide to tell this particular story?

I can’t remember exactly—it’s a while ago! There was probably some inspiration from travel, seeing ruins overseas and the eroded landscapes of central Australia. And my dad is a steam train enthusiast, so I grew up in an atmosphere of love for a bygone age and its technology. But I think mainly it was Turner’s painting of the Fighting Temeraire, the old warship from the Battle of Trafalgar being tugged off to be broken up. I was thinking about nostalgia and the pain of losing familiar things. But I was also thinking about the way the past survives in artifacts and ideas. The ship survives in the painting and in photographs of the painting. I had a job on a digital archiving project—maybe that was an inspiration, too.

The wonder of Arnaude’s tale contains elements of our own history: the Forbidden City of China’s Middle Kingdom; the later dynastic periods of Egypt; the invading horsemen of the East; the meager efforts to save the treasures of the library of Alexandria; piecing together the wonders of ages and civilizations past through the fragments of their language. What is it about the past, exploring the intricate possibilities, that appeals to you as a writer?

I’m not drawn so much towards the real past as a writer—I don’t think I’d try writing historical fiction. But I like reading about history. And my family would always yarn about the past. My grandparents were born between 1907 and 1911, so they’d seen a hell of a lot of change. It was just interesting to listen to them—and my parents, who were born just before World War II. The world they could remember from their childhoods was very different from the world I knew. Society had changed. And they felt it—a big gap between them and the baby boomers. Where all this feeds into writing I’m not sure, but I’ve no doubt it does feed in. As a writer, I’m drawn to create fantasy worlds in a kind of fake past, but not a medieval past; my romantic attachment is for the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Not only are you a writer, you are an accomplished artist and sculptor with an eye for the whimsical and fantastic. Your novel The Etched City won the Ditmar Award in 2004 (the same year you won Best New Talent), “The Heart of a Mouse” won the Ditmar Award for Best Short Story, and your sculptures have garnered you numerous awards and recognition. Do you find that your creative efforts feed off of one another, that the act of creation in either form sharpens your creative ability overall?

I see the same interests and obsessions surfacing in the writing and art. Some stuff comes out more easily in one than the other. It’s definitely good to have both, since I can focus on one if I’m stuck with the other. Sculpture is particularly helpful that way, because the work can be quite methodical and technical—at least the way I do it. With figurative art, you have references, anatomy. Nature does some of the work for you. I’m less likely to get stuck with art than writing. But hopefully I won’t jinx myself if I say the art has been good for the writing. It’s given my mind a break and given me time to rediscover the pleasure of writing.

What’s next for KJ Bishop? What can eager readers and art enthusiasts look forward to in 2017?

To readers I can say “Never say never.” I’m working on or playing with a novella. On the art front, there’s the Castlemaine State Festival next year (March 17-26, castlemainefestival.com.au). I’d love to show my work in the States. That’s an aim of mine for next year—to have some pieces in an American gallery. But for now I’ve got work on Etsy (etsy.com/shop/KJBishopArt), including a couple of limited edition bronzes.

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: Seanan McGuire

Setsu Uzume | 224 words

It was fascinating to see Antheia’s thoughts and feelings filtered through the language of the lady’s maid. Does politeness lend itself to deeper brutality?

Not necessarily, but I feel like it can lead to deeper cruelty, which is not always the same thing. An animal can be brutal; there’s no moral judgment to the concept. It takes a thinking creature to be cruel.

Is empire ever a good thing?

I am not an ethicist. I honestly do not know.

Is diplomacy in the apology, or in doing whatever you want, knowing that the apology is “what is done” after?

I . . . I don’t know what this question is supposed to mean. I like bunnies.

What did you want readers to take away from this story?

That the alien plant invasion is inevitable, and when the pods fall from the sky, they will all be consumed in blood and sap. It will be a glorious day. Sticky, but glorious.

What are you working on now?

Currently, editing a book that hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t talk about it, and writing a short story for an upcoming anthology set in an existing media universe. It’s fun!

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: Ashok Banker

Arley Sorg | 2456 words

What a fun, pulpy mash-up.

Thank you! I enjoyed writing it, too.

At the same time, it tackles serious topics, such as blatant racism. Interestingly, racism is often used to dehumanize its targets, and the story utilizes narrative to humanize partially human victims of racism. Are these the kind of topics that you often address in fiction: not only racism, but perhaps what it means to be human?

Yes. This was a deliberate choice. Not only in this story, but in everything I write. I have a pinned tweet on my Twitter page which reads: “If you can live without writing a story, don’t write it. Find one you can’t live without. Write that one.” Apart from a few exceptions, almost everything I’ve written has served to express something I felt passionately, or was passionately against. As a child of mixed race (and when I say “mixed,” hoo boy, am I mixed: Irish-Portugese-Sri Lankan-Indian, with some Dutch and Scots in there, too, married to an Indian Hindu-Jain hybrid, with two grown kids, one of whom, our son, is married to a Belgian, so imagine their kids!) raised without any compulsion to follow any religion, and with zero awareness of caste, I endured discrimination daily. People who are born into privilege like to say they don’t “see” color, or race, or religion, or whatever. That’s because they aren’t affected by it directly. People of Color, of mixed race, parentage, iconoclasts, individualists are affected by it every day in every way; our lives are suffused by bias, we’re drenched in the judgment of society, constantly measured not by our actions or words, but by the perception and bias of others who allot their meanings and interpretations to our actions and words—and always find us wanting.

Or, to put it another way: I thought it would be fun to turn the “Cowboys and Indians” racist trope on its head, and what better genre to do it in than the most racist of all, SF. I grew up reading SF (among other genres and literature in general), thousands of books, all the great and late masters. And the thing that always struck me was how narrow-minded, regressive, and unrealistic science fiction has been. Sure, it’s imaginative, fun, provocative, even mind-blowing at its best. But thousands upon thousands of SF novels, even the classics, portray entirely white-dominated worlds, mostly white male dominated at that, entire galactic empires of them. The few PoC in those worlds, or the few women, are either cast in negative roles, marginalized, roughly treated, or without any agency at all. This is absurd, given even a glance at our world. White people are and have always been in a minority in human history. All the great events of anthropological, historical, philosophical, or religious development were by Persons of Color in flourishing civilizations and cultures that predated modern White Supremacy-driven societies like America, Britain, and Northern Europe by centuries and millennia. Literally no major world religion was founded by white people. Even the word Caucasian is a misnomer. The “Aryan myth” is just that: a myth. The major “Aryan” gods of the Hindu pantheon were not just black-skinned, their names literally mean “Black-skinned”: Rama, Shiva, Vishnu, Kali . . .

To extrapolate a future society or world in which only white men dominated—where even white women had little or no agency other than serving sexual-romantic roles—is not only unrealistic, it is unscientific! Classic science fiction is the most racist, unscientific genre of all, similar to the white-washed Westerns that I also saw hundreds of while growing up. They would have you believe that were no PoC with agency, no women with agency, nobody except white men doing everything of importance.

Well, here’s the one thing white men have been great at and have done better than anyone else since the beginning of human history: Killing. White men are awesome at killing, murder, genocide, racial violence, hate crimes, the attempted extinction of entire species of animals, humans, races, nationalities, tribes. There were people on this continent before there was America. The First Nations are not just sidekicks or villains, they are the true great heroes of this land. That’s why Western movies and fiction are fantasies, white men’s fantasies of a world they wish had existed. Well, wishing won’t make it so.

My intent was to show that other writers can dream just as powerfully. We can fantasize about other worlds, other timelines, other futures, which are more likely, more science fictional than most science fiction of the past. To write a story that uses all the fun, excitement, action, and thrills of the Western story, but without the racism of white Western writers.

We need to reclaim SF from those dead or old white guys. We need to tell them, “Dude, chill, we got this.” We’ll tell it like it really is. And the best way to do it is by reclaiming the genre piece by piece, story by story, book by book.

Some might take this piece to be a biting polemic against (Christian) religion. Do you believe that religion encourages racism or other forms of prejudice and bigotry?

Religion is the porn of the twenty-first century. It’s addictive, convenient, neat, and tidy. Believe this and you don’t need the reading, learning, understanding, figuring out, analyzing all the new scientific data and information constantly being mined every day. It’s a simple nipple: Suck on this and be nourished, thou faithful. Every religion insists that you follow only that religion, forsaking all others. It’s a basic tenet.

I grew up in a Christian household. With a picture of a white Jesus ripping open his sacred heart to show us how much he cared. I went to church, I even sang in a Christian gospel choir (full bass). I grew up between an American Methodist Church and an American Baptist Church in Byculla, Bombay (as it was called then), and woke up to the sound of hymns being sung by the American congregation every matin. I lived in a neighborhood named Byculla with a population of over 300,000 Jewish people, as well as Christians and Muslims, the most cosmopolitan part of the city that ever existed. I studied in Christian schools first, then in a Jewish school. One of my best friends was the son of the rabbi of the biggest temple in the city, Magen David Synagogue. Another good friend was an Iranian dissident who had fled from his country and had radical Islamist ideas. Yet another friend was a Parsi, another a Sikh. I grew up exposed to multiple cultures, religions, belief systems. But because religion was never imposed on me, I was free to believe what I pleased.

One of my first SF stories was about a future Bombay where people could mix and match religions to follow what they wished: Muslim-Buddhist-Jews, or Jain-Sikh-Christians, or whatever you chose. It was a noir SF detective story, with a detective who had no religion at all, but was not an atheist because, like myself, he didn’t feel the need for religion or belief at all. (My attitude to God, by the way, is that it’s irrelevant, like religion itself. Never been troubled or challenged by questions of faith, never interested me. I see the whole shebang as beside the point of life itself.) The story was called “Embryoglio” and was about an abducted embryo, stolen from the parent’s womb (it was also a non-binary world), for unknown reasons. That was in 1976, when I was twelve, so as you can see, I was this way from an early age!

Anyway, my point is that belief in any religion compels you to be biased against all other people. It forces you to judge those of your own religion, and to abjure those not of your faith. Even if you are Christian, you have to ask: Are you Protestant or Catholic? If you’re Protestant, then are you Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian . . . If you’re Muslim, are you Shia or Sunni?

If you’re Hindu, are you North Indian or South Indian or East Indian? If you’re Jain, are you Digambar or Shwetambar? There are endless variations. For instance, Indian Muslims don’t eat beef out of respect for their Hindu compatriots, while Muslims everywhere else eat beef. It’s like a family tree with infinite branches and sub-branches. No matter if you’re from the same country, race, religion, ethnicity, community, etc., you will still differ in some way. If nothing else, it’ll come down to whether you interpret this verse in the Bible as being pro-life or pro-choice! For all the propaganda pushing religion onto us as a unifying force, the fact is, it’s the deadliest divider in all human history.

It’s not Islam that’s responsible for terrorism today: It’s religion. The Troubles in Ireland, the atrocities by the British in the Boer Wars, the genocide of the Armenian people by Turkey, the slaughter of countless anonymous tens of millions of low castes in India over time, the madness sweeping the world today as the white right wing minority in the global population suffers excruciating racial insecurity at being outnumbered and outmatched by those not of their race, nationality, sexual orientation, or just not wearing the same brand of jeans, it all takes it root in religion. Religion is the first place we’re taught to believe we’re different, we’re unique, we’re special—and others are not. The true believers who will be saved at the end of days that the LDS believe in. The faithful who will be taken to heaven and given virgins to enjoy. Religion feeds us this fantasy, this unscientific science fiction, and it’s at the root of it all. Why do you think almost all Classic SF is suffused with Christianity, has an almost Catholic obsession with it? Because at its heart, White SF springs from an attempt to write one’s own future religious history. It’s the white man’s fantasy of the world he feels he should have, will have, must have. At any cost.

And let’s not even get started on fantasy!

Indians (from India) rarely—if ever—appear as the hero figure in Westerns. They are usually completely invisible; that is, they are usually forgotten, if not intentionally left out. Why is it important that the hero in this piece be Indian; and does making the protagonist Indian create extra challenges?

The word Indian. It comes from the word India. Columbus, like other European travellers, set out to discover the “new world,” by which was meant India, the fabled land of milk and honey in the East. Like most white men of history, not only was he not able to find it, he went in the opposite direction! And when he found land, it didn’t even occur to him that it could be anyplace but India. So he named the people Indians. This was beyond stupidity, it was pure European fantasy again. India had a flourishing merchant trade with European and other nations since the earliest times. There are Greek amphora, coins, statuary, found in the sub-continent, with ample anecdotal and archaeological proof of European presence here, as well as vice versa. Herodotus tells us about Indian mercenaries who fought for Greeks in the Greek wars. Indians fought in every major European conflict, as did Africans and other races. Even in the World Wars, Indians fought and died by the millions. Yet the erasure has been so effective, so extensive, that you could read or watch and never know these facts.

The point I’m making is that Columbus and the Europeans came not to “discover” India, but to try to conquer, as the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese later did attempt, unsuccessfully, all of them. The genocide visited upon the First Nation indigenous people of the North and South American continents would have been the fate of the peoples of the sub-continent. Thanks to the poor navigational and even poorer cognitive abilities of the Europeans, India escaped this wonderful gift of colonial genocide! But the fact they tried and failed then, and tried and tried again later, links India forever to European imperialism. They tried over and over to invade us, conquer us, enslave us, exterminate us. The way they did in Africa, America, and elsewhere.

You don’t forget people who tried to kill, enslave, wipe out your ancestors! You don’t let them erase you from history. You write over them. Write stories that reinstate your people into those missing pages from history. You write SF stories, Western stories, that postulate a world where Indian means what it really ought to mean, a person from India, not an indigenous First Nation person who was mistakenly called Indian by a stupid, vicious European and continues to be called Indian even today by the equally uninformed descendants of that stupid European. You write a kickass cowboy story where the cowboy is an Indian, the real kind of Indian, and a woman at that, and she’s the hero of the piece. That’s how you write yourself back into the genre, into the gaps that they tried to erase.

Is there anything you would like your readers to know about this piece?

Every one of my stories is different, in style, content, and genre or sub-genre. But they all have one thing in common: Me. My attitude. My intent. I can promise you one thing when you read anything by me: It will make you expect the expected but deliver the unexpected. Because real SF is diverse, non-binary, scientifically realistic, and it’s as awesome and kickass as we are. Take note: We are here to kick white old dude ass and replace your ass. Move over.

Thanks very much for the Western, and for your time! What are you working on now that people can look forward to?

Apart from multiple series ongoing in India, all of which are available via my own website at akbebooks.com and in some cases, on Amazon, I’ve just finished City of Elephants, the first book in a seven-part epic fantasy series called The Five. And I’m working on an as-yet untitled YA fantasy series about a team of differently-abled PoC Ladybros heist gang that become the champions of a resistance movement. Happy reading!

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: Jack Skillingstead

Laurel Amberdine | 377 words

Casey might very well be the last surviving human on Earth, but the story is as much about her relationship with her mother as with her situation. Which of these elements occurred to you first? How did they come together?

I started with the idea of a woman giving birth to her own mother and imagined a situation in which this might occur. So I guess the mother-daughter relationship was first. Also, I wanted to write a straight-up science fiction story which included some of the more traditional tropes of our field.

Did the story give you any surprises as you were working on it?

Several. If a story doesn’t surprise the writer at some point, chances are the story isn’t working. At least, that’s how I view things. On a macro level, the surprise was that even though I’d set out to right kind of a gimmick story, just to see if I could do it, “The Last Garden” quickly became a much better piece of work than that modest ambition would have suggested. Another surprise was the image at the end of the story, where Casey is pulling the Surrogate around on a cart, the way her mother used to pull Casey around on the wagon. This image possessed a weird quality that really appealed to me and was totally unplanned.

What is your favorite place (or situation) to write in? Did you write this story there?

Routine favors creativity, so I like to work in my home office, which is where I wrote this story.

I know you teach writing sometimes. Do you have any advice for the aspiring authors among our Lightspeed readers?

Sure. This is what I tell every aspiring writer: It should be more important to you to be good than to be published. If you stick with it long enough and don’t grow discouraged or bitter, you will become a better writer. And a writer who is true to herself is more likely to enjoy regular publication, anyway. In other words, focus on what you’re doing on the page and find your happiness there.

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: Brian Stableford

Setsu Uzume | 318 words

The brothers begin as equals, but with different modus operandi that lead to very different lifestyles. Is there something of the political here?

Not really—stories require contrast and conflict, and two brothers provide a useful means of achieving both.

Is the idea of a “fair share” ultimately damning?

It can be difficult to determine, but I don’t think damnation is a necessary outcome; again, stories require conflict, and melodramatic inflation often tends to take matters to unfortunate extremes.

I loved the twist on the water from the fountain of youth. Is the vigor and “youth” inherently high energy, addictive, and destructive, or was there something else in the elixir that made its drinkers insane?

I imagined the elixir primarily as a kind of ultimate stimulant, with the various expectable corollary effects that you list. The plot assumes, of course, that most people are inherently vicious; whether or not that qualifies as insanity depends on your definition of sanity.

What did you want readers to take away from this story?

An aesthetic appreciation of the irony of fate—the aim of most, if not all contes cruels.

What can your readers look forward to next?

I continue to work furiously against the Grim Reaper’s ticking clock and raised scythe. The Mirror of Dionysus, the third novel in the series begun with The Wayward Muse and Eurydice’s Lament, will be out from Black Coat Press in January. I have several queued up at Wildside Press, but they’ve been delayed by forces beyond the publisher’s control; the next two will be a fantasy set in eighteenth-century Venice, The Portals of Paradise, and a contemporary metaphysical fantasy, The Tangled Web of Time, which will hopefully be out soon.

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: Bruce Sterling

Moshe Siegel | 553 words

What can you share with us about the genesis of your 1999 Hugo Award-winning story, “Taklamakan”?

“Taklamakan” was the last of a series of three stories, mostly about people and events in a twenty-first century Chattanooga, Tennessee. The other stories were “Deep Eddy” and “Bicycle Repairman.”

Do you visit the world, characters, or tech from this tale in any of your other works?

Yes, the hero of “Taklamakan,” known by his underworld handle of “Spider Pete,” is also a minor character in “Bicycle Repairman.”

How did you manage to conjure the diversity of bio-organic, self-evolving machines, whose manifestations are, by the admission of your characters, beyond the boundaries of human conception?

I got one of my kids to make up the monsters for me.

Which is to ask: Did you just make those primordial robots up as you wrote, or did you apply scientific consideration to what may have emerged from the synthsoup to steward this peculiar place?

Actually they “emerged” from a page full of young child’s scrawls and doodles, but yeah, they were pretty good sci-fi monsters, as such things go. They had a kind of conceptual freshness to them.

Karl Sims was an M.I.T. guy who was using software to evolve “monsters” back in the 1990s. The basic ideas in Taklamakan were pretty well known in generative-art and artificial-life circles.

Can you comment on any instances of convergence between speculative fiction and our reality (i.e., bio-organics/spy tech/things you once wrote as fiction to only later see in the flesh/metal)?

Yeah, that happens all the time. In my 1980s novel “Islands in the Net” a terrorist gets shot by a drone in the first chapter. Nowadays events like that are as common as dirt.

I don’t think there’s any causal relationship there; science fiction writers like tech stuff that is eye-catching. Drones are sexy. There’s been a lot of scientific improvement in fuel economy in aircraft, too, but no science fiction writer would take up that important topic because it’s not a dramatic page-turner.

“Reality as Simulation” is a hot topic these days—something brought to mind by the faux-generation ships in “Taklamakan”—what’s your weigh-in on that concept? Are we just now starting to claw at the fake starship walls?

Well, I’m quite the Augmented Reality fan. World-building and messing with “reality,” those have always been attractive concepts for me. We’re not inside a fake starship, but we do have a lot of social-media filter-bubbles around where irrational cults passionately believe all kinds of ludicrous rubbish.

Do you have anything upcoming/in the works that you would like to share with us?

Yeah, since I hang out in Europe a lot, I enjoy writing Italian “fantascienza” that’s about Italian situations with Italian characters. I’ve written about ten of those Italian stories in the past decade or so, and I think this will be the year when I write my fantascienza novel. It’ll be an adventure novel set in the era of the Three Musketeers and there will be quite a lot of science in it—Galileo’s science.

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, February 2017

The Editors | 134 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Indrapramit Das (“The Worldless”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes”), along with SF reprints by Rachel Swirsky (“The Debt of the Innocent”) and Julian Mortimer Smith (“Come-from-Aways”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Marta Randall (“The Stone Lover”) and Greg Kurzawa (“Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes”), and fantasy reprints by Eileen Gunn (“Phantom Pain”) and Caitlín R. Kiernan (“La Peau Verte”).

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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The Editors

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The Editors

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Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Andrew Liptak

Amal El-Mohtar

LaShawn Wanak

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

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.