TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 82, March 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, March 2017

Ebook Content Survey

SCIENCE FICTION

The Worldless
Indrapramit Das

The Debt of the Innocent
Rachel Swirsky

Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes
Adam-Troy Castro

Come-from-Aways
Julian Mortimer Smith

FANTASY

Phantom Pain
Eileen Gunn

The Stone Lover
Marta Randall

La Peau Verte
Caitlín R. Kiernan

Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes
Greg Kurzawa

NOVELLA

Proving the Rule
Holly Phillips

EXCERPTS

Orbital Cloud
Taiyo Fujii

NONFICTION

TV Review: March 2017
Joseph Allen Hill

Book Reviews: March 2017
Amal El-Mohtar

Interview: Nnedi Okorafor
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Indrapramit Das

Eileen Gunn

Rachel Swirsky

Marta Randall

Adam-Troy Castro

Julian Mortimer-Smith

Greg Kurzawa

Holly Phillips

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, March 2017

John Joseph Adams | 1453 words

Welcome to issue eighty-two of 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, plus a feature interview with Nnedi Okorafor.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of Holly Phillips’ novella, “Proving the Rule,” and a book excerpt. Our cover this month is by Reiko Murakami, illustrating Indrapramit Das’s story, “The Worldless.”

Awards News

Awards season is officially upon us, and it looks like 2016 was another terrific year for our publications. The first of the major awards have announced their lists of finalists for last year’s work, and we’re pleased to announce that “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker and “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Congrats to Sarah and Caroline and to everyone else on the Nebula ballot! That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eighteen since we launched in June 2010. We’ve currently lost sixteen in a row, so here’s hoping Sarah and/or Caroline breaks the streak! You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org. The Nebulas will be presented at the 2017 Nebula Awards Conference, held this year in Pittsburgh, PA, May 18-21.

We told you last month how 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. I’m now pleased to announce that “The Bad Hour” made the final ballot, so big congrats to Christopher for that honor. You can find the full slate of what made the final ballot at horror.org. The Stoker Awards will be presented at StokerCon 2017, which is being held in Long Beach, CA, April 27-30.

Additionally, the Locus Awards are now open for voting. Several stories from Lightspeed and Nightmare made the recommended reading list, but the Locus Award has a write-in ballot, so you can also disregard the recommendations and vote for whatever you like instead. Voting closes April 15, 2017. To vote, visit locusmag.com.

And, finally, just a reminder that the nomination period for this year’s Hugo Awards closes March 17. Anyone who became 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!

Locus Recommended Reading List / Locus Awards Voting

Locus Magazine released their annual recommended reading list, and we’re pleased to report Lightspeed has fifteen stories on the list, Nightmare has five stories, and my anthology What the #@&% is That? has two stories:

“I Was a Teenage Werewolf” Dale Bailey (Nightmare)

“Fifty Shades of Grays” Steven Barnes (Lightspeed)

“Salto Mortal” Nick T. Chan (Lightspeed)

“Ghost Pressure” Gemma Files (What the #@&% Is That?)

“Little Widow” Maria Dahvana Headley (Nightmare / What the #@&% Is That?)

“Red Dirt Witch” N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy)

“The One Who Isn’t” Ted Kosmatka (Lightspeed)

“The Finest, Fullest Flowering” Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare)

“Sparks Fly” Rich Larson (Lightspeed)

“A Good Home” Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed)

“Those Brighter Stars” Mercurio D. Rivera (Lightspeed)

“Angel, Monster, Man” Sam J. Miller (Nightmare)

“Unauthorized Access” An Owomoyela (Lightspeed)

“The Red Thread” Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed)

“Vulcanization” Nisi Shawl (Nightmare)

“Wednesday’s Story” Wole Talabi (Lightspeed)

“Dragon Brides” Nghi Vo (Lightspeed)

“Secondhand Bodies” JY Yang (Lightspeed)

“Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed)

Congratulations to our authors, and to everyone who made the list!

The release of the Recommended Reading List also means that voting for the Locus Awards is now open. Anyone is eligible to vote. Visit locusmag.com to cast a ballot or learn more. Voting closes April 15, 2017.

John Joseph Adams Books News

I’m pleased to announce a new novel acquisition for John Joseph Adams Books: Peter Cawdron’s Retrograde, a hard SF novel about an international colony of astronauts on Mars, who have been prepared for every eventuality of living on another planet except one: What happens when disaster strikes Earth? Retrograde is scheduled for publication in September.

In July, we’ll be publishing two books: (1) 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; and (2) Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel.

In October, we’ll be publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, 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.

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 épée-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 The 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.

That’s all the JJA Books news to report for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: 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 a finalist 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 a finalist ten times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Worldless

Indrapramit Das | 5130 words

Every day NuTay watched the starship from their shack, selling satshine and sweet chai to wayfarers on their way to the stars. NuTay and their kin Satlyt baked an endless supply of clay cups using dirt from the vast plain of the port. NuTay and Satlyt, like all the hawkers in the shanties that surrounded the dirt road, were dunyshar, worldless—cursed to a single brown horizon, if one gently undulated by time to grace their eyes with dun hills. Cursed, also, to witness that starship in the distance, vessel of the night sky, as it set sail on the rippling waves of time and existence itself—so the wayfarers told them—year after year.

The starship. The sky. The dun hills. The port plain. They knew this, and this only.

• • • •

Sometimes the starship looked like a great temple reaching to the sky. All of NuTay’s customers endless pilgrims lining up to enter its hallowed halls and carry them through the cloth that Gods made.

NuTay and Satlyt had never been inside a starship.

• • • •

If NuTay gave them free chai, the wayfarers would sometimes show viz of other worlds on their armbands, flicking them like so much dijichaff into the air, where they sprouted into glowing spheres, ghost marbles to mimic the air-rich dewdrops that clustered aeon-wise along the fiery filaments of the galaxy. The wayfarers would wave in practiced arkana, and the spheres would twirl and zoom and transform as they grew until their curvature became glimpses of those worlds and their settlements glittering under the myriad suns and moons. NuTay would watch, silent, unable to look away.

Once, Satlyt, brandishing a small metal junk shiv, had asked whether NuTay wanted them to corner a wayfarer in a lonesome corner of the port and rob them of their armband or their data coins. NuTay had slapped Satlyt then, so hard their cheek blushed pink.

NuTay knew Satlyt would never hurt anyone—that all they wanted was to give their maba a way to look at pictures of other worlds without having to barter with wayfarers.

When NuTay touched Satlyt’s cheek a moment after striking, the skin was hot with silent anger, and perhaps shame.

• • • •

Sometimes the starship looked like monolithic shards of black glass glittering in the sun, carefully stacked to look beautiful but terrifying.

Sometimes the starship would change shape, those shards moving slowly to create a different configuration of shapes upon shapes with a tremendous moaning that sounded like a gale moving across the hills and pouring out across the plain. As it folded and re-folded, the starship would no longer look like shards of black glass.

Sometimes, when it moved to reconfigure its shape, the starship would look suddenly delicate despite its size, like black paper origami of a starship dropped onto the plain by the hand of a god.

NuTay had once seen an actual paper starship, left by a wayfarer on one of NuTay’s rough-hewn benches. The wayfarer had told them the word for it: origami. The paper had been mauve, not black.

• • • •

The world that interested NuTay the most, of course, was Earth. The one all the djeens of all the peoples in the galaxy first came from, going from blood to blood to whisper the memory of the first human into all their bodies so they still looked more or less the same no matter which world they were born on.

“NuTay, Earth is so crowded you can’t imagine it,” one wayfarer had told them, spreading their hands across that brown horizon NuTay was so familiar with. “Just imagine,” the wayfarer said. “Peoples were having kin there before there were starships. Before any peoples went to any other star than Sol. This planet, your planet, is a station, nah?”

NuTay then reminded the wayfarer that this was not their planet, not really, because it was not a place of peoples but a port for peoples to rest in between their travels across the universe. Dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people.

“Ahch, you know that’s the same same,” the wayfarer said, but NuTay knew it wasn’t, and felt a slight pain in their chest, so familiar. But they knew the wayfarer wouldn’t know what this was, and they said nothing and listened as they spoke on. “If this planet is port, then Earth, that is the first city in the universe—Babal, kafeen-walla. Not so nice for you. Feels like not enough atmo for so many peoples if you go there, after this planet with all this air, so much air, so much place.”

And NuTay told that wayfarer that they’d heard that Earth had a thousand different worlds on it, because it had a tilt and atmos that painted its lands a thousand different shades of place as it spun around the first Sun.

“Less than a thousand, and not the only world with other worlds on it,” the wayfarer said, laughing behind their mask. “But look,” the wayfarer raised their arm to spring viz into the air, and there was a picture of a brown horizon, and dun hills. “See? Just like here.” NuTay looked at the dun hills, and marveled that this too could be Earth. “Kazak-istan,” said the wayfarer, and the placename was a cold drop of rain in NuTay’s mind, sending ripples across their skull. It made them feel better about their own dun hills, which caught their eye for all the long days. Just a little bit better.

So it went. Wayfarers would bring pieces of the galaxy, and NuTay would hold the ones of Earth in their memory. It had brown horizon, blue horizon, green horizon, red horizon, gray horizon.

• • • •

When the starship was about to leave, the entire port plain would come alive with warning, klaxons sounding across the miles of empty dirt and clanging across the corrugated roofs of the shop shanties and tents. NuTay and Satlyt would stop work to watch even if they had customers, because even customers would turn their heads to see.

To watch a starship leave is to witness a hole threaded through reality, and no one can tire of such a vision. Its lights glittering, it would fold and fold its parts until there was a thunderous boom that rolled across the plain, sending glowing cumulus clouds rolling out from under the vessel and across the land.

A flash of light like the clap of an invisible hand, and the clouds would be gone in less than a second to leave a perfect black sphere where the starship had been. If you looked at the sphere, which was only half visible, emerging from the ground a perfect gigantic bubble of nothingness, it would hurt your eyes, because there was nothing to see within its curvature. For an intoxicating second there would be hurtling winds ripping dust through the shop shanties, creating a vortex of silken veils over the plain and around the sphere. The shanty roofs would rattle, the horses would clomp in their stables, the wind chimes would sing a shattering song. The very air would vibrate as if it were fragile, humming to the tune of that null-dimensional half-circle embedded in the horizon, a bloated negative sunrise.

In the next moment, the sphere would vanish in a thunderclap of displaced atmos, and there would be only flat land where the starship had once stood.

A few days later, the same sequence would occur in reverse, and the starship would be back, having gone to another world and returned with a new population. When it returned, the steam from its megastructures would create wisps of clouds that hung over the plain for days until they drifted with their shadows into the hills.

• • • •

Being younger dunyshar, Satlyt worked at the stalls some days, but did harder chores around the port, like cleaning toilets and helping starship crews do basic maintenance work. Every sunrise, NuTay watched Satlyt leave the stall on their dirt bike, space-black hair free to twine across the wind. The droning dirt bike would draw a dusty line across the plain, its destination the necklace of far-off lights extending from where the squatting starship basked in sunrise—the dromes where wayfarers refueled, processed, lived in between worlds. The dirt bikes would send wild horses rumbling in herds across the port plain, a sight that calmed NuTay’s weakening bones.

NuTay had worked at the dromes, too, when they were younger and more limber. They’d liked the crowds there, the paradisiacal choirs of announcements that echoed under vaulted ceilings, the squealing of boots on floor leaving tracks to mop up, the harsh and polychrome cast of holofake neon advertising bars, clubs, eateries and shops run by robots, or upscale wayfarer staff that swapped in and out to replace each other with each starship journey, so they didn’t have to live on the planet permanently like the dunyshar. Nowadays the dromes were a distant memory. NuTay stayed at the shack, unable to do that much manual labour.

Those that spent their lives on the planet of arrivals and departures could only grow more thin and frail as time washed over the days and nights. The dunyshars’ djeens had whispered their flesh into Earth-form, but on a world with a weaker gravity than Earth.

• • • •

NuTay’s chai itself was brewed from leaf grown in a printer tent with a second-hand script for accelerated microclimate—hardware left behind from starships over centuries, nabbed from the junk shops of the port by NuTay for shine and minutes of tactile, since dunyshar were never not lonely and companionship was equal barter, usually (usually) good for friendships.

NuTay would meditate inside the chai-printing tent, which was misty and wet in growing season. Their body caressed by damp green leaves, air fragrant with alien-sweet perfume of plant life not indigenous, with closed eyes NuTay would pretend to be on Earth, the source of chai and peoples and everything. Each time a cycle ended, and the microclimate roasted the leaves to heaps of brown brew-ready shavings, the tent hissed steam like one of NuTay’s kettles, and that whistle was a quiet mourning for the death of that tent-world of green. Until next cycle.

The tent had big letters across its fiber on the outside, reading Darjeeling in Englis and Nagar script. A placename, a wayfarer had clarified.

When Satlyt was younger, they’d asked NuTay if the dunyshar could just build a giant printer tent the size of the port itself, and grow a huge forest of plants and trees here like on Earth or other worlds. NuTay knew these weren’t thoughts for a dunyshar to have, and would go nowhere. But they said they didn’t know.

The starshine was easier, brewed from indigenous fungus grown in shit.

• • • •

Sometimes, as evening fell and the second sun lashed its last threads of light across the dun hills gone blue, or when the starship secreted a mist that wreathed its alloyed spires, the starship looked like a great and distant city. Just like NuTay had seen in viz of other worlds—towers of lights flickering to give darkness a shape, the outline of lives lived.

The starship was a city, of course. To take people across the galaxy to other cities that didn’t move across time and existence.

There were no cities here, of course, on the planet of arrivals and departures. If you travelled over the horizon, as NuTay had, you would find only more port plains dotted with emptiness and lights and shop shanties and vast circular plains with other starships at their centres. Or great mountain ranges that were actually junkyards of detritus left by centuries of interstellar stops, and dismantled starships in their graveyards, all crawling with scavengers. Some dunyshar dared to live in those dead starships, but they were known to be unstable and dangerous, causing djeens to mutate so kin would be born looking different than humans. If this were true, NuTay had never seen such people, who probably kept to themselves, or died out.

NuTay had heard that if you walked far enough, you could see fields with starships so massive they reached the clouds, hulking across the sky, that these could take you to worlds at the very edge of the galaxy, where you could see the void between this galaxy and the next one—visible as a gemmed spiral instead of a sun.

• • • •

Once, the wayfarer who’d left the origami starship for NuTay had come back to the stall, months or years later. NuTay hadn’t realized until they left, because they’d been wearing goggles and an air-filter. But they left another little paper origami, this time in white paper, of a horse.

Horses were used for low-energy transport and companionship among many of the dunyshar. They had arrived centuries ago as frozen liquid djeens from a starship’s biovat, though NuTay was five when they first realized that horses, like humans, weren’t from the world they lived in. Curiously, the thought brought tears to their eyes when they first found this out.

• • • •

Sometimes the starship looked like a huge living creature, resting between its journeys, sweating and steaming and groaning through the night.

This it was, in some sense. Deep in its core was residual life left by something that had lived aeons ago on the planet of arrivals and departures: the reason for this junction in space. There was exotech here, found long before NuTay or any dunyshar were born here, ghosts of when this planet was a world, mined by the living from other worlds. Dunyshar were not allowed in these places, extraterra ruins where miners, archaeologists, and other pilgrims from across the galaxy gathered. NuTay, like most dunyshar, had little interest in these zones or the ruins of whatever civilization was buried under the dirt of this once-world. Their interest was in the living civilization garlanding the galaxy, the one that was forever just out of their reach.

On their brief travels with Satlyt strapped to their back as a tender-faced baby, NuTay had seen the perimeter of one of these excavation zones from a mile away, floodlights like a white sunrise against the night, flowing over a vast black wall lined with flashing lights. Humming in the ground, and thunder crashing over the flatlands from whatever engines were used to unearth the deep ruins and mine whatever was in them.

NuTay’s steed, a sturdy black mare the stablemaster that had bartered her had named Pacho, had been unusually restless even a mile from that zone. NuTay imagined the ghosts of a bygone world seeping from out of those black walls, and trickling into their limbs and lungs and those of their tender child gurgling content against their back.

NuTay rode away as fast as they could. Pacho died a few weeks later, perhaps older than the stablemaster had promised. But NuTay blamed the zone, and rubbed ointment on Satlyt for months after, dreading the morning they’d find their kin dead because of vengeful ghosts from the long dead world that hid beneath this planet’s time.

For Satlyt’s survival NuTay thanked the stars, especially Sol, that had no ghosts around them.

• • • •

Satlyt had asked NuTay one day where they’d come from, and whose kin NuTay themself was. NuTay had waited for that day, and had answers for their child, who was ten at the time. They sat by their shack in the evening light, NuTay waving a solar lantern until it lit.

I am a nu-jen dunyashar, Satlyt, they said to their child. This means I have no maba, no parents at all.

Satlyt asked how, eyes wide with existential horror.

Listen. Many . . . djeens were brought here frozen many years ago. I taught you; two humans’ djeens whisper together to form a new human. Some humans share their djeens with another human in tiny eggs held in their bellies, and others share it in liquid held between their legs. Two people from some world that I don’t know gave their djeens in egg and liquid, so that peoples could bring them here frozen to make new humans to work here, and help give solace to the wayfarers travelling the stars. We are these new humans—the dunyshar. There are many old-jen dunyshar here who have parents, and grandparents, and on and on—the first of their pre-kin were born to surrogates a long time ago. Understand, nah?

Satlyt nodded, perhaps bewildered.

I was nu-jen; the first person my djeens formed here on the planet of arrivals and departures. I was born right there, NuTay stopped here to point at the distant lights of the dromes. In the nursery, where wayfarer surrogates live for nine months growing us, new-jen kin, when there aren’t enough people in the ports anymore. They get good barter value for doing this, from the off-world peoples who run these ports.

Who taught you to talk? Who taught you what all you know? asked Satlyt.

The dunyshar, chota kin! They will help their own. All the people in this shanty place, they taught me. The three sibs who raised me through the youngest years and weaned me are all, bless them, dead from time, plain simple. This planet is too light for humans to live too long as Earth and other livable worlds.

Did you sleep with the three sibs so the djeens whispered me into existence?

No, no! No, they were like my parents, I couldn’t do that. I slept with another when I grew. Their name was Farweh. Farweh, I say na, your other maba. With them I had you, chota kin.

They are dead, too?

NuTay smiled then, though barely. I don’t know, Satlyt. They left, on a starship.

How? They were a wayfarer?

No, they grew up right here, new-jen, same as me. They had long black hair like you, and the red cheeks like you also, the djeens alive and biting at the skin to announce the beauty of the body they make.

Satlyt slapped NuTay’s hand and stuck out their tongue.

Oy! Why are you hitting your maba? Fine, you are ugly, the djeens hide away and are ashamed.

Satlyt giggled.

Anyway, such a distracted child. Your other maba, we grew up here together. We had you.

They were here? When I was born?

NuTay pursed their lips. They had promised that their child would have the entire truth.

For a while, hn. But they left. Don’t be angry. Farweh wanted to take you. They made a deal with a wayfarer that sold them a spacesuit. They said they could get two more, one emergency suit for babies. Very clever, very canny, Farweh was.

Why?

NuTay took a deep breath. To hold on to a starship. To see eternity beyond the Window, and come out to another world on the other side.

Other maba went away holding on to a starship on the outside?

I see I taught you some sense, chota kin. Yes, it is as dangerous as it sounds. Some people have done it—if they catch you on the other side, they take you away to jail, like in the dromes for murderers and rapists and drunkards. But bigger jail, for other worlds. That is if you survive. Theory, na? Possible. But those who do it, ride the starships on the side, see the other side of time? They never come back. So we can’t ask if it worked or no, nah? So I said no. I said I will not take my kin like a piece of luggage while hanging on to the side of a starship. I refused Farweh. I would not take you, or myself, and I demanded Farweh not go. I grabbed their arm and hurt them by mistake, just a little, chota kin, but it was enough for both of us. I let them go, forever.

Farweh . . . maba. Other maba went and never came back.

Shh, chota kin, NuTay stroked a tear away from Satlyt’s cheek. You didn’t know Farweh, though they are your other maba. I gave them all the tears you can want to honour them. No more.

But you liked Farweh, maba. You grew up with them.

NuTay smiled, almost laughing at the child’s sweetness. They held Satlyt before their little face crumpled, letting them cry just a little bit for Farweh, gone to NuTay forever, dead or alive behind the black window of existence.

• • • •

Many years later, NuTay’s kin Satlyt proved themself the kin of Farweh, too, in an echo of old time. They came droning across the plains from the dromes, headlights cutting across the dust while NuTay sipped chai with the other shanty wallahs in the middle of the hawkers’ cluster. The starship was gone, out on some other world, so business was slow that evening.

Satlyt thundered onto the dust road in the centre of the shanty town, screeching to a halt, their djeens clearly fired up and steaming from the mouth in the chilly air.

Your kin is huffing, one of the old hawkers grinned with their gums. Best go see to them.

So NuTay took Satlyt indoors to the shack, and asked what was wrong.

Listen, NuTay. Maba. I’ve seen you, year after year, looking at the wayfarers’ pictures of Earth. You pretend when I’m around, but I can see that you want to go there. Go after Farweh.

Go after Farweh? What are you on about, we don’t even know whether they went to Earth, or if they’re alive, or rotting in some jail on some remote world in the galaxy.

Not for real go after, I mean go, after. Story-type, nah?

Feri tail?

Exact. I know next time the starship comes, it will go to Earth. Know this for fact. I have good tips from the temp staff at the dromes.

What did you barter for this?

Some black market subsidiary exotech from last starship crew, changing hands down at the dromes. Bartered some that came to my hands, bartered some shine, some tactile, what’s it matter?

Tactile, keh!

Please, maba. I use protection. You think wayfarers fuck dunysha without protection? They don’t want our djeens whispering to theirs, they just want our bodies exotic.

What have you done, chota kin?

Don’t worry, maba. I wouldn’t barter tactile if I wasn’t okay with it. But listen. I did good barter, better than just info. Spacesuit, full function. High compressed oxy capacity. Full-on nine hours. Starship blinks in and out of black bubble, max twenty hours depending on size. The one in our port—medium size, probably ten hours. Plus, camo-field, to blend into the side of the ship. We’ll make it. Like Farweh did.

How do you know so much? Where do you get all this tech?

Same way you did, maba. Over years. There are people in the dromes, Satlyt said in excitement. They know things. I talk. I give tactile. I learn. I learn there are worlds, like you did. This? You know this isn’t a world. Ghost planet. Fuel station. Port. You know this, we all know this. Farweh had the right idea.

NuTay shook their head. This was it. It was happening again. From the fire of the djeens raging hot in Satlyt’s high cheekbones they knew, there was no saying no. Like they’d lost Farweh to time and existence, they would lose Satlyt too. NuTay knew there was no holding Satlyt by the arm to try and stop them, like before—they were too weak for that now.

Even if NuTay had been strong enough, they would never do that again.

It was as if Farweh had disappeared into that black bubble, and caused a ripple of time to lap across the port in a slow wave that had just arrived. An echo in time. The same request, from kin.

What do you say, maba? asked Satlyt, eyes wide like when they were little.

We might die, chota kin.

Then we do. Better than staying here to see your eyes go dead.

• • • •

Even filtered breathing, the helmet and the suit was hot, so unlike the biting cold air of the planet. NuTay felt like they might shit the suit, but what could one do. There was a diaper inside with bio-absorbent disinfectant padding, or so the wayfarer had said.

They had scaled the starship at night, using a service drone operated by the green-eyed wayfarer who had made the deal with Satlyt, though they had other allies, clearly. Looking at those green Earth-born eyes, and listening to their strange accent but even stranger affection for Satlyt, NuTay realized there might be more here than mere barter greed. This wayfarer felt bad for them, wanted to help, which made NuTay feel a bit sick as they clambered into the spacesuit. But the wayfarer also felt something else for Satlyt, who seemed unmoved by this affection, their jaw set tight and face braced to meet the future that was hurtling towards them.

• • • •

“There’ll be zero-g in the sphere once the starship phases into it. Theoretically, if the spacesuits work, you should be fine, there’s nothing but vacuum inside the membrane—the edges of the sphere. If your mag-tethers snap, you’ll float out towards those edges, which you absolutely do not want. Being inside the bubble is safe in a suit, but if you float out to the edge and touch it, there’s no telling what will happen to you. We don’t know. You might see the entirety of the universe in one go before dying, but you will die, or no longer be alive in the way we know. Understand? Do not jerk around with the tethers—hold on to each other. Hold on to each other like the kin you are. Stay calm and drift with the ship in the bubble so there’s no stress on the tethers. Keep your eyes closed, throughout. Open when you hear the ship’s noise again. Do not look at the inside of the bubble, or you might panic and break tether. That’s it. Once the ship phases out, things will get tough in a different way, if you’re alive. Earth ports are chaos, and there’s a chance no one will find you till one of my contacts comes by with a ship-surface drone to get you. There are people on Earth who sympathize with the dunyshar, who want to give them lives. Give you lives. So don’t lose hope. There are people who have survived this. I’ve ushered them to the other side. But if you survive only to have security forces capture you, ask for a refugee lawyer. Got it? Refugee. Remember the word. You have been kept here against your will, and you are escaping. Good luck. I’ll be inside.” The wayfarer paused, breathless. “I wish you could be too. But security is too tight inside. They don’t think enough people have the courage to stick to the side of the ship and see the universe naked. And most don’t. They don’t know, do they.”

With that, the wayfarer kissed Satlyt’s helmet, and then NuTay’s, and wiped each with their gloved hand, before folding themself into the drone and detaching it from the ship. Lightless and silent, they sailed away into the night. NuTay hoped they didn’t crash it.

NuTay felt sick, dangling from the ship, even though they were on an incline. Below them, the lights of the launching pad lit a slow mist rising from the bottom of the starship, about four hundred feet down. The skin of the ship was warm and rumbled in a sleeping, breathing rhythm. They switched on the camo-field, which covered them both, though they couldn’t see the effects.

Satlyt was frighteningly silent. Chota kin, NuTay whispered to test the range com. Maba, Satlyt whispered back with a sweaty smile.

• • • •

The starship awoke with the suns. Their uneasy dozing was broken by the light, and by the deeper rumble in the starship’s skin. The brown planet of arrivals and departures stretched away from them, in the distance those dun hills. The pale blue sky flecked with thin icy clouds. The port dromes, the dirt roads like pale veins, the shanties glittering under the clear day in the far distance. Their one and only place. Hom, as wayfarers said. A strange word. Those fucking dun hills, thought NuTay.

Bless us Sol and all the stars without ghosts, whispered NuTay. Close your eyes, chota kin.

Remember Farweh, maba, said Satlyt, face wet behind the curved visor. The bottom of the starship exploded into light, and NuTay thought they were doomed, the juddering sending them sliding down the incline. NuTay held Satlyt’s gloved hand tight, grip painful, flesh and bone pressed against flesh and bone through the nanoweaves.

I am old, NuTay thought. Let Satlyt live to see Earth.

• • • •

The light, the sound, was gone.

• • • •

Satlyt convulsed next to NuTay, who felt every movement of their kin through closed eyes. They embraced, NuTay holding Satlyt tight, a hollow vibration when their visors met. The ship was eerily still under them, no longer warm through the thick suit. Satlyt was making small sounds that coalesced slowly into words. We’re alive.

Their breathing harsh in the helmet, the only sound along with the hissing breath of Satlyt into their own mic.

NuTay opened their eyes to see the universe looking back.

• • • •

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

I know you opened your eyes, maba. What did you see?

I don’t. Don’t look. I saw darkness. Time like a living thing, a . . . a womb, with the light beyond its skin the light from creation, from the beginning of time and the end, so far away, shining through the dark skin. There were veins, of light, and information, pulsing around us. I saw our djeens rippling through those veins in the universe, humanity’s djeens. Time is alive, Satlyt. Don’t let it see us. Keep your eyes closed.

I will, maba. That is a good story, Satlyt gasped. Remember it, for the refuji lawyer.

• • • •

Time is alive, and eventually it births all things, just as it ends all things.

When the ship turned warm with fresh thunder, their visors were set aglow, bathing their quivering eyelids with hot red light, the light of blood and djeens. Their spacesuits thumped down on the incline, the tethers umbilical around each other, kin and kin like twins through time entwined, clinging to the skin of a ship haunted by exoghosts.

They held each other tight, and under Sol, knew the light of hom, where the first djeens came from.

©2017 by Indrapramit Das. | Art © 2017 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer from Kolkata, India. His debut novel The Devourers (Penguin Books India) was shortlisted for the 2016 Crawford Award, and was released in North America by Del Rey. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s , and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is a 2012 Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find him on Twitter: @IndrapramitDas. Website: indradas.com.

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

The Debt of the Innocent

Rachel Swirsky | 7520 words

On October 11, 2035, Jamie Wrede, R.N., was the sole employee staffing the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Temperance United in Martinsville’s Pine Ridge district. In the course of her career, she’d been asked to kill nine newborns. That morning, she planned to kill four more.

Jamie woke at 6:45 and began preparing breakfast for her eighteen-month-old daughter, Claire. At 7:34, she picked up a “crank call” and listened for three minutes until a series of clicks on the other end indicated that The Brotherhood of Man’s part in the operation was going smoothly. “I don’t have time for this,” Jamie said before hanging up, the signal that her end was proceeding likewise.

At 8:10, Jamie rode her bike to work. She carried Claire in a bike trailer attached to her rear wheel for the first quarter mile to the babysitter’s. When Jamie went to leave, Claire screamed and stretched toward her. This was a new trick, learned in the past few weeks. Jamie felt helpless before those tiny red palms, those hysterically waving fingers.

“Don’t despair, Claire bear,” she babbled. “We’re a pair whether I’m here or there. I swear.”

Sometimes the rhyme made Claire giggle long enough for Jamie to slip away. That morning, Claire kept screaming. Jamie left anyway, a pair of tears tumbling down her own cheeks. She swiped them away, leaving her face smarting. “It’s for the good of babies everywhere, and that helps Claire, too,” she muttered to herself, a variation on the refrain she’d mouthed daily since making her decision to help The Brotherhood.

When Jamie got to work, her friend Panda, an L.N. in Obstetrics, called out from the nurse’s station. “Here’s the paperwork you wanted on the Feliciano mother,” she said, handing Jamie a stuffed file folder. “I’ll be glad when the shift to nuclear’s done and we can go back to squandering electricity on all the computer hours we can stuff into a day.”

“Yeah, me too,” said Jamie. She squinted at the paperwork. The hospital couldn’t afford electric lights in the corridors. Overcast gray filtered through the skylights, casting a dim gloss on the tile. It was barely enough to read by. “Well, thanks,” she said, trying to brush past.

Panda held out a hand. “The hospital’s holding a memorial for the kids who gave up their places today,” she said. “I just got word, figured you might not know either. Damn internal mail system’s still designed like it’s on email. You had a displaced patient this month, didn’t you?”

“Two.”

“Ouch.” Panda winced. “I remember the second one. Little blonde baby with crazy parents? Looked kinda like Claire?”

Renée Mercer. Born with a premature shock of white-blonde hair. Almost never stopped crying during her short, painful life. “That’s right.”

“Do you want to take flowers? Rudolpho’s working the morning shift at Posies and Petals today, he can get lilies cheap.”

“I won’t be going.”

Panda frowned. “You never miss a memorial for one of yours. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m just busy. I have to pick up Claire.”

“You take it too personally, Jamie. That girl probably would have died anyway.”

An orderly Jamie hadn’t gotten to know yet interrupted. “Excuse me—”

“Can’t you see I’m talking to someone?” asked Panda.

Jamie escaped down the hallway.

She checked her watch. 9:17. She had thirteen minutes to get to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and prepare before The Brotherhood of Man initiated their part of the plan.

• • • •

Andrea Cabral, daughter of Meredith and Brian Cabral. Fourteen days old. Suffers from perinatal asphyxia due to drop in maternal blood pressure.

The first time Meredith realized she was pregnant—deep in her bones realized it—wasn’t when she used the swab test three days after, nor a week after that when a gynecologist confirmed implantation. Nor was it on the bus on the way home, jolting over potholes with one hand under the belt of her waif-waist jeans as she watched a blonde her age fuss over a newborn. Meredith tried to picture the newborn in her arms. What would it be like to coo at a little face that recognized you? An infant who knew you so well it forgot where your body ended and its began?

Experts declared this miracle would happen, was happening inside her. To Meredith, it felt inconceivable. When the baby was born, she (by week ten, the echo-cam told them to expect a girl) would see through Meredith, in that uncanny way of children and pets. She’d know Meredith was only pretending to be an adult, how she missed paying the credit bill last month because she lost it in a pile of fashion catalogs, how only three months ago she’d been considering quitting her job and buying a one-way ticket to the Great Barrier Reef.

By month five, Meredith worried she’d never get over the feeling she was watching the pregnancy happen to someone else. Every time the baby kicked, Meredith jumped, having forgotten there was something inside her that could kick. Sometimes she found herself heading for the bathroom, and realized she’d been subconsciously getting up to take an antacid, trying to soothe the baby away like a bad meal or a touch of stomach flu.

Meredith’s family—both father and husband—was well-off, even though these days that meant taking buses and rationing electricity like everyone else. Seeing so much poverty made Meredith grateful that she could afford the six months off work and still squander electricity on a hot shower when she really needed one, even if it meant an outrageous bill. Money made everything so easy. But it couldn’t help with this.

The moment Meredith realized she was pregnant finally came in her sixth month. Shopping at the supermarket, she found herself pulling down a box of green dye. My little girl will like this, she thought, My little girl will definitely be the kind of girl who likes green. She stopped in the middle of the aisle and thought How do I know that? In Meredith’s belly, the unborn Andrea shifted, like she was dancing or maybe shouting: Come on, Mom, of course I like green! Buy it already!

Meredith became aware of a traffic jam behind her cart. She tossed the dye into the basket.

That night, Meredith decided to lavish electricity on an extra load of laundry. She threw the baby clothes she’d been given into the machine and dyed them all the same searing wattage of four-leaf-clover green.

Brian thought his wife was going crazy when she lifted out the retro zebra print pants which had come out looking like some bizarre kind of radioactive lizard skin. Meredith collapsed laughing. “Your daughter’s one funny lady, Mr. Brian Cabral!” She kissed him on the tip of the nose, but wouldn’t let him take her to bed: “Not when our daughter’s watching, Mister. You can wait. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”

• • • •

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was one of the few hospital locations where electric lights shone day and night. Expensive air conditioning and heat maintained a balmy temperature, both for the babies in their incubators and the staff. Other nurses called the NICU cushy. Sure, Jamie thought, if watching babies die—and having to kill them yourself sometimes—was cushy.

The Cabral baby showed steady improvement: response up, skin color normalizing. The Shaw and Stepanian babies demonstrated normal progress. The Feliciano baby was worse: vitals and responsiveness remained low; risk of hydrocephaly remained high.

Jamie felt only an echo of her usual maternal tug when the Feliciano baby stirred, trying to turn its head so it could keep looking at her. It wasn’t his fault that he’d taken Renée Mercer’s incubator, any more than it was Renée Mercer’s fault her parents couldn’t afford enough insurance to make sure their baby didn’t get displaced. Four expensive, energy-draining incubators were all Temperance United could afford to run. Under ideal circumstances, newborns born into overfull hospitals would be transferred. Circumstances were not ideal.

How was Jamie supposed to accept that the Feliciano baby had more right to live than Renée Mercer? Yet she had accepted it. She’d displaced eight other babies. What did it mean that it took until Renée Mercer, a blonde baby who looked like Claire, for Jamie to shift from guilt to action?

9:26. Jamie went to the door. An orderly she was friendly with, Laird Douglas, stood chatting with a young nurse. He waved. “How’s Claire?”

Jamie pulled aside her mask. “She’s fine.”

Laird turned back to the nurse. Jamie slipped the pressure lock that The Brotherhood had given her out of her pocket, and pushed it onto the latch. It adhered with a whine. Laird looked over. Jamie tugged her sleeve over the lock and smiled. Laird half-smiled in return.

Shit, thought Jamie. Had he seen? She shut the door. A single, long beep indicated the lock’s activation.

9:29. The Brotherhood would begin storming hospital records any minute now. When the distraction started, security should be dispatched to that wing of the hospital, leaving Jamie alone to do her part. In case someone got curious, the pressure lock would keep them out, short of something that could cut through the reinforced door.

In the last days of the oil rush, the hospital had been built to survive a siege. Back then, people still believed China would try to usurp American world domination by force. Now the hospital’s solid construction would work against its defenders.

9:32. Still no alarm. The Stepanian baby whimpered, one feeble leg kicking out. Jamie didn’t go to her.

9:36. 9:38. Should she start early? But then, if someone saw her, security wouldn’t be divided. They’d get past the pressure lock sooner, maybe before she finished.

At 9:42, red bulbs in each corner of the room flared to warn the staff to stay put—standard operating procedure in case of potentially violent protest. Security didn’t want panicked hospital staff underfoot.

Time to start, then. She began the process of pulling out the Cabral baby’s nasal cannula.

• • • •

Roshaun Shaw, son of Bea and Tamarr Shaw. Eleven days old. Suffers from sepsis with organ dysfunction in the kidneys and liver.

Bea liked being pregnant. Pregnant meant nine months of not having to worry about her damn weight, and getting compliments from strangers at the same time. “You glow, honey”—hell yes she did, shouldn’t she ought to?

Bea had been pregnant six times, and she enjoyed each one more than the last. She did her first two pregnancies as a surrogate mother to pay for her master’s degree. Bea had no complaints about surrogacy, it was just that motherhood was better. Take the two couples she contracted with—friends of her mother’s from church, good people. She lived with them from months five to nine, enjoying free rent and hand-and-foot wait service. She sat with the parents-to-be through baby showers, nervous excitement, joyful outbursts, and fights about child-rearing. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to charge therapist rates along with surrogacy, but she never wanted to cancel the contracts, as would have been her right at any time.

The kids, Mary and Ruby, called her Auntie, and that’s how Bea felt about them. Their parents made up a holiday for her in July to go with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. When the first one, Mary, got drunk on her seventeenth and found herself stranded in Overton, Auntie Bea got called to haul thirty miles out of the city at two a.m. with an extra bus ticket, and to wipe vomit off the seats afterward. That even though Bea had three children of her own by then.

Tamarr hadn’t wanted another kid. It was already hard to manage the cost of raising their herd, as Tamarr called the boys, on the salaries of two high school English teachers. But Bea was decided. She hid all the contraception and said she wouldn’t have sex with Tamarr if he used protection—and hadn’t he listened to Ms. Addison’s health class in the room over? No meant no.

Tamarr held out for a Herculean six and a half weeks. “I’ll name this one,” he said when he relented. “And I declare there will be no more dead poets in the family.”

Bea had been hoping for a DuBois to go with their Neruda, Langston, and Keats. She frowned. “What name do you want?”

“Roshaun if it’s a boy,” he said, “for my grandfather.”

She shrugged and agreed. Three happy hours later, Roshaun existed as one full egg and one self-satisfied sperm.

When Roshaun was born, feeble and unable to cry, Bea wished this had happened during one of those pregnancies she did for money, when she was employee, not mother. She thought about Mary’s red, gray-eyed newborn face, and Ruby’s heart-shaped brown one; if only it were one of them who’d taken faltering breaths, who’d been hauled away by blue-gloved doctors.

“Your name is Roshaun!” she shouted after the people who took him. Weak from the birth, she forced herself to sit up, sweat dripping down her face. “Your father named you Roshaun. Do you hear me? You’re Roshaun, and you’re going to be all right!”

• • • •

The Brotherhood of Man approached Jamie the day after she killed Renée Mercer.

The woman, who called herself Slate, found Jamie on an empty stretch near Washington Street Market where Jamie biked during her breaks. She liked to sit alone there; it wasn’t too near the depressed commercial district, nor the construction site where Martinsville would eventually get one of its very own nuclear power plants so that in ten or twenty years no more Renée Mercers would have to die.

Slate sat on the curb waiting for Jamie to arrive. “I understand you’re unhappy with your job.”

Slate looked older than Jamie by fifteen or twenty years. She had a broad, stern face, and wore her hair in dozens of tiny braids pinned close to her scalp. Thin white scars snaked across her face and arms, interspersed with patches of dry, red skin. She looked as though she spent a lot of time fighting or doing arduous outdoor work. Still, she seemed trustworthy. She reminded Jamie of her mother, the way Renée Mercer reminded her of Claire.

Jamie came to a stop in the gutter. “How do you know how I feel about my job?”

“A friend of yours told us.”

“What friend?”

Slate shrugged. “A friend, that’s all. How many times have they asked you to kill now?”

“I don’t kill anyone. We disconnect them from the machines. They die a natural death.”

“How many?”

“Eight.”

“Including yesterday?”

“. . . Nine.”

“And you don’t think that’s right.”

“I don’t think babies should die because their parents don’t have enough money.”

“I’m here representing people who agree with that point of view. Actually—I think most people agree with it. Yet it isn’t public policy. People pay taxes, taxes go to the government, the government gives money to hospitals, corporations run hospitals, and corporations say poor people have the right to live as long as it doesn’t impinge on rich people. And the government lets them say that, because the people in the government either get paid by the corporations, or they own the corporations. Know how they get away with it?”

Jamie raised her eyebrows.

“They play tricks with voters using misdirection, like a magician using sleight of hand. They remind people what life was like before rationing: private cars, computers running all day with no one at the keyboards, a lightning fast world economy with us at the helm. Then they talk about how much more people would have to give up—how many buses to power another hospital, how many electric lights to run the catalog for a library.” She shook her head. The ends of her braids rattled like snake heads snapping in the sun. “It’s a coin in a voluminous sleeve. The private sector saps more energy than all the rationed households in the nation, and they do it on government subsidy.”

Slate tapped her boot against the curb, disturbing the deadfall. “Why does no one notice? Why aren’t the scoundrels voted out of office and chased through the streets like dogs? Because the government protects the fragile remnants of the middle class from experiencing the most insidious and insufferable indignities. They maintain a luckless, down-at-heel class the majority can look down on and think—at least that isn’t me. And as long as that balance remains, the deplorable policy of killing infants for watts will continue.” Slate sat up straight suddenly, slapping her hands on her knees. “We want to throw off the balance.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

“You want to hear?”

Jamie remembered lifting Renée out of the incubator, cradling the infant’s head as she turned her over to Dr. Oppenheimer so he could ease her discomfort until she died. Hard to believe the hands in those gloves were hers. Her betraying fingers. Her blood-stained palms.

Later, Jamie would learn Slate had been a history teacher and a missionary during the end of the oil rush, running a school in Burkino Faso with her husband, Titanium. Like all great pro-life movements, the Brotherhood had many Christian supporters. Slate called them God’s own radicals. Though the Brotherhood had no traditional leaders, Slate often spoke for them and wrote the essays that became their doctrine.

Jamie learned all that later. At the time, she was just impressed by Slate’s calm, easygoing tone as she spoke about politics, as if she were giving a lecture on something as unemotional as repairing a bike or pruning a bush.

“Let me give you a history lesson,” she said. “You know about Gandhi? His movement wouldn’t have worked if there hadn’t been a real threat of violence against the British colonialists. Martin Luther King’s sit-ins? Backed by Black Panther fists. Nonviolent alternatives don’t become appealing unless there’s something to be afraid of.”

“That’s you?”

“It’s our job to show teeth so the moderate voters who make up the bulk of our great land, the folk making baa noises and chewing on the grass as they let other people’s babies die, will flee to the peacemakers.”

Slate lifted the collar of her fleece and raised her chin, looking Jamie in the eye.

“We call ourselves The Brotherhood of Man.”

Jamie had heard of them.

“You’re terrorists.”

Slate shrugged one shoulder. “We’re freedom fighters.”

“You want me to do to insured babies what I did to Renée Mercer.”

Silence.

“What makes you think I’d work with you?”

“You haven’t left, have you?”

“I’ve got a baby of my own. If I do what you want me to, I’ll get caught.”

“We all have to make sacrifices. At least if you go to jail, your baby won’t be dead, just taken care of by somebody else.”

Jamie stared at Slate’s scars. They formed a pattern like a web across Slate’s shoulders, spider-like tendrils cast across her hands. Scarification. Before the rush ended, Jamie had wanted to become an anthropologist, help people in developing countries. Then the power crises started, funding for international charities dried up with no sign of refilling, there was talk of marching on China, and Jamie figured she’d better help her own people.

She leaned her bike against a tree. Two hours later, she rode away.

• • • •

Darlita Stepanian, daughter of Nadalia Stepanian. Sixteen days old. Birth defects caused by extreme prematurity (twenty-eight weeks) include dangerously low birth weight and Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

When they bought the dairy farm, Brosh Stepanian and his partner, Miguel Espinoza, were banking on a growing market for milk procured by hand. They had no idea. When the switch to nuclear started, politically conscious, well-off consumers clamored for low-energy, conscience-salving milk. Simultaneously, the competition struggled under new limits and rising costs. Life got lucrative for Brosh and Miguel. It also got busy.

They were mucking out the stables together one night when Brosh stopped shoveling shit and asked, “What do you think about becoming a father?”

“What are you talking about?” shouted Miguel from the loft.

“My sister’s pregnant. She doesn’t want an abortion. She doesn’t want the baby either.”

“Nadalia?”

“Yep.”

“But she’s sixteen!”

Brosh sat on an ergonomically designed steel-and-plastic milking stool. A cow lowed and blinked at him. “Mom thinks it would be good to keep the kid in the family. Nadalia agrees.”

Miguel climbed halfway down the ladder then jumped to the ground.

“The kid would be legally ours?”

“Signed contract. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Miguel. “Isn’t this fast?”

“Fast as any yes on a pregnancy test.”

Miguel kicked some straw. Finally he said, “Yeah. Okay. I think this could be good.”

Miguel borrowed an armload of parenting books from the library, then went back for another armload. Brosh took a less intellectual approach—he practiced by anthropomorphizing the calves. “See the little guy with the black head? He is not going to wait until he gets his driver’s permit. Little speed demon will be stealing cars and joyriding to Holstein preschool.”

Brosh steadfastly refused to read. After two weeks, Miguel got upset. “You have to take this seriously! Corporal punishment? Yes, no, or only gently? Elimination? Diapers or toilet or let it fall where it may? Nutrition? Should we hire a woman on hormones to breastfeed?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“But you need to prepare!”

“Not really,” said Brosh. “I’m just comfortable with kids.”

They bussed into Martinsville once a month to see Nadalia and Mrs. Stepanian. Nadalia spent her time off school relaxing and spending her allotment of electricity on old movies.

“She shouldn’t be gaining this much weight,” Miguel said. “And I’m not convinced she’s getting enough folic acid. I want to put her on a strict diet.”

“Nadalia won’t do that, she likes taking things as they come,” Brosh said. “Don’t worry. My family has healthy babies.”

But something did go wrong. Miguel was in the main house, cooking lunch for the crew on the gas stove, when the call came: Nadalia was delivering early.

Brosh and Miguel left their foreman in charge and paid the exorbitant fee to fly to Martinsville. They visited Nadalia, but the hospital wouldn’t let them into the NICU. “It’s too early,” they were told by a middle-aged R.N. with short, bristly blonde hair. “I’m sorry,” she added, touching Brosh’s shoulder. “I have a little one myself. Just have faith.”

They went outside and sat on the steps. Miguel held Brosh. “Nadalia’s fine. The baby will be, too. And if not—we can get a surrogate or adopt. We’ll get a baby.”

“A baby?” asked Brosh. “A baby?”

He fell silent. For the rest of their visit, he refused to speak. On the bus ride back to his mother’s, over their dinner of cold leftovers, all night as the two of them lay restless in Brosh’s childhood bed. Eventually, Miguel paid to change his ticket and flew back to the farm.

• • • •

Jamie disentangled the Cabral baby from the wires and machines—the baby’s first taste of freedom—and set her on the metal exam table. She started on the Shaw baby.

9:51. She wondered how far along Slate and Titanium had gotten in their mission to burn the paper copies of the insurance records. The plan was mostly symbolic. Slate knew they couldn’t get all the reams before security stopped them. Even what they managed to destroy wouldn’t be gone permanently. Recovering and reprinting the data from a remote site computer would be expensive, but it would get done eventually.

But burning the papers served another purpose, as well. “The Brotherhood has taken responsibility for many acts,” Slate said. “But we’ve kept ourselves faceless. Now is the time for us to come forth.”

Slate and Titanium would lead the force to destroy the papers. They’d be the ones to get arrested. Them and Jamie. Twin trials. A married couple of missionaries and a young mother.

“During the civil rights movement, many black women refused to give up their bus seats. The movement picked Rosa Parks, the best one to swing public opinion,” Slate explained. “We want to be frightening but familiar. People must understand that times have gotten so bad that ordinary, rational citizens can commit acts they once would have considered evil. Why do you think we study the Holocaust? History is rife with genocides. We are fascinated, terrified, by the idea that people just like us marched innocents into gas chambers. That’s the demon that makes the Holocaust more frightening than Armenia or Rwanda or Venezuela.”

Slate gave this speech the last time Jamie saw her alone. They sat together in a deserted park. The neighborhood’s residents had fled when maintaining detached, suburban-style homes became too expensive.

“Do you worry we shouldn’t do this to innocents?” Jamie asked. “I mean, babies . . .”

Slate tightened her hand around the arm of the bench. She could be frightening when she sat so rigid, every muscle taut. “No one is innocent,” she said. “From the moment of conception, those babies benefited from their place in the country’s hierarchy. They grew in well-fed bellies, drank water free of dangerous chemicals, reposed in the safety of a womb untaxed by the arduous physical labor of field hands or the unrelenting hours of a sweatshop. Other people made that possible. These babies are born perched atop a pinnacle of human grief. Have you any idea how many suffer to support even America’s middle class? And even here, where we bemoan our lost status as economic superpower while still enjoying our privileges as China’s second fiddle, even here we sacrifice more lives to the altar of these babies. We toss the uninsured out with the bathwater, as soon as they inconvenience us. These babies are not innocent!”

Jamie looked away. To stare into the heart of Slate’s arguments was to stare into the sun.

She lifted the Shaw baby. Jaundice from kidney problems yellowed his dark skin. His eyes slid to her face, then lost focus. She set him down and went to work on the Stepanian baby.

• • • •

Jonathon Feliciano, son of Petra Feliciano (deceased) and Leonard Feliciano. Nineteen days old. Suffers from low birth weight, prematurity, and complications arising from spina bifida.

Leo believed in Jesus. More than he did in sky. What was sky? Just blue air. Your eyes could be tricking you about sky. Jesus was in your bones. He was the startle when you woke, the moment of trust before you squeezed your brain into sleep. If Jesus wasn’t real, nothing was real.

Petra died in childbirth. She bled a lot. But there was no blood in heaven.

Leo stayed at the hospital. His mama brought him clothes. Black sweaters and black sweats with the tags still on, just bought. He forgot to take off the tags. Petra died, but Jonathon was still alive. Call him Jonathon, Leo told the doctors. Jonathon is a good name. Jesus would like the name Jonathon. Mama liked it. Petra didn’t at first, but she’d come around in heaven.

Petra always wanted to fly. She watched birds, any bird. She watched geese when they went overhead honking. If they got too loud, she put her fingers in her ears. She watched airplanes, too. She’d never been in one. By the time she got enough money, they were only for rich people and emergencies. They flew past so rarely now. If she heard an engine, she’d step into the street, look up at them like a kid looking for God, and spin and spin.

Leo’s mama tried to trick him into going home by saying she needed him to carry something heavy in her car. Leo figured it out. He didn’t go home with her. She sent his sisters to sit with him while she was gone. They came in shifts.

Petra always wanted to play music, but she couldn’t. She was tone deaf. She owned a harmonica. She asked Leo to play the harmonica. She smiled when he did. Sometimes she danced. Leo liked it when she danced.

Leo’s mama said he was going to move in with her, don’t argue. Petra could have taken care of a baby, she said, but Leo couldn’t do it alone. That’s okay, said Leo, Can I still change the diapers? Leo’s mama said he could.

Petra said that when she got to heaven she was going to read the Bible all day, and she was going to make Jesus read it with her because she always wanted to know what He really meant. Their friend Becky said she shouldn’t say that, the Bible meant exactly what it said. Petra said, Don’t fret now, Becky. I don’t think Jesus will mind a question or two.

The hospital people tried to get Leo to go home. He said okay and left, but then he just went to sit in the parking lot. People didn’t drive like they used to when Leo was a kid, so there was lots of free asphalt where he could sit and think. He fell asleep on the asphalt once and a car almost ran into him. There was only one person in it. Leo had trouble believing it at first. Someone had enough money to drive alone? The person honked and Leo went to sit on the curb. A pair of EMTs passed, pushing an empty gurney. One asked, are you okay? The other said, His baby’s sick, and the first one asked, What’s wrong with it? Leo tried to explain, but he couldn’t remember the right words. He tried to get close: Jonathon got born early and his spine fell out.

Petra and Leo went to school together. Leo wasn’t supposed to go to public school, but everyone knew his family. They did something funny with his test scores and said, Okay. You can go to school. Leo and Petra knew they’d get married by second grade. All the boys wanted to marry Petra when they got to high school, but Leo was the only one who was always nice to her, not just when he wanted something.

When Leo tried to do sports and he got clumsy, or when he was dumb in class, people made fun. Petra watched and sighed. She said, It’s okay, you’re better than them. That made Leo feel better. Petra watching and loving him made everything okay. She was going to do that now, up in heaven. And if Jonathon died, Petra would raise him in heaven, and they’d both watch Leo.

Leo’s mama found him in the parking lot. Don’t do that you’ll get dirty, she said. She brought him inside. I made this for you, she said, and gave him a pie. Leo wasn’t hungry so he gave it to one of the nurses. That was nice, said his mama, I brought you up nice. She put her hand on his knee. Things will be okay, you know, she said.

I know they will be, said Leo.

His mama looked at him sideways, eyes narrow in her big, fleshy face. You do know it, don’t you?

Leo didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question.

• • • •

As Jamie finished loosing the Feliciano baby, she heard someone pounding on the door. Jamie looked up. Loud, metallic thuds reverberated through the room. So they’d found her. Would the pressure lock hold? No time to be paranoid. The damn things had been invented in India to let wealthy women lock themselves in their bedrooms in case gangs broke into their apartments. They were meant to keep out violent criminals armed to the teeth with illegal weapons. Jamie had to have faith they’d keep out a few security guards for a little while longer.

9:55. The evacuation alarm sounded: a pulsating, screechy whine. The babies kicked and shifted.

“I know,” murmured Jamie. She set down the Feliciano baby and grabbed a sterile blanket. She placed it under the babies’ heads, fluffing it up so that it gave their tender ears some protection. “It’ll be quiet soon,” she promised.

She opened the cabinet on the back wall and sorted through the boxes she’d restocked a few days ago so that no one would have any reason to reach to the back of the cabinet. Behind the boxes, she found the hypodermic needle of morphine she’d stashed there.

“Use tools you put there yourself,” Slate had told her. “That way no one can mess with them. This may seem silly to you, but remember: Redundancy’s the name of the game. Surprise is the enemy of success.

“When you took the other babies out of their incubators, you let nature and time do the dirty work,” Slate said. “This time, you’ll have to kill them yourself. Do you think you can do it?”

9:57. The slamming subsided, replaced by the shrill of vibrating metal. They were sawing through. Jamie didn’t have much time.

• • • •

Renée Mercer. Teratogenic disorders of the heart due to maternal exposure to Pentathorinol in the ground water. Deceased, six days.

“I don’t understand,” said Shawna Mercer. “You’re going to murder my child?”

“No, Mrs. Mercer,” said the nurse. “She’s been displaced from her incubator. She’s resting now, with drugs to reduce the pain. We won’t do anything to make her condition worse.”

“She’s just been displaced?” asked Shawna’s husband, Trent. “Just like that?” He pushed past his wife, staring down at the runt chink of a nurse from almost two feet up.

Shawna glared at Trent, then moved to the side to get a clear view of the nurse, “The Doctor, what’s his name, Mr. Opera—”

“Oppenheimer.”

“Oppenheimer,” Shawna repeated. “But the doctor said she wouldn’t survive without care,” said Shawna. “He said that when he was talking to us about how we’d be going into debt.”

“We needed the incubator for another child, Mrs. Mercer.”

“Renée needed it, too!” said Trent.

“I know, Mr. Mercer. Temperence United is very sorry.”

The nurse was short and fat and had some stupid parody of an Asian name like Wei Wei or Chongella or something, but she didn’t look Asian. She had dark skin and big, squashed features, like a black. When she was a kid, before the crash, Shawna thought racism was bad. Now she didn’t care. Would Chongina’s kid get tossed out like a piece of garbage?

“Look,” said Trent, jabbing his hand into the nurse’s face. “I’m telling you, put her back in right now.”

“Mr. Mercer. Please calm down. I’m trying to work with you.”

“Well, I don’t want to work with you. You go get your boss.”

The nurse waddled off. Shawna felt so tired. There was hope, there wasn’t hope. Renée was going to be okay, Renée was being “displaced.”

“We’ll get this settled,” said Trent. “No way they’re doing this to us.”

Shawna looked up at him. Trent had been such a catch. He’d never even looked at her in high school. The day he asked her out, three years after graduation, with her still pumping gas at the station on Hyacinth Street, that was the best day of her life. She was smart. She should have been able to get office work while he did manual labor. They should have been able to get by.

The doctor arrived. Short, Jewish, glasses perched on a blunt nose, curly hair flying. Trent barreled toward him. “You tell me what’s going on,” he insisted.

Shawna ignored them, went straight for the blonde nurse trailing him.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The nurse eyed Trent, and Shawna realized she was nervous. Shawna rolled her eyes and grabbed for the nurse’s hands.

“Tell me,” she said.

Some expression Shawna couldn’t read crossed the nurse’s face. “I’m sorry. You should have known about the possibility of displacement. Didn’t you read the waiver?”

“What waiver?” asked Shawna.

“The one you signed when you came in.”

“In the load of papers? When I was pushing out the kid?”

“I’m sorry.”

“But the doctor said the Pentathorinol, it’s all over in our area. It’s illegal to dump near water. Some company must have broken the law. Shouldn’t we get paid for that?”

The nurse shook her head. “You might be able to, if you sue the corporation. But the hospital doesn’t acknowledge claims until they’re settled.”

“So that’s it? My baby’s dead?”

“Not yet.” The nurse glanced at the doctor, saw him still engaged. “But soon.” She glanced again. “She’s comfortable. I promise. She’s not fussing or crying.”

“You’ve seen her?”

That expression again. Suddenly, Shawna realized what it meant.

“You did it! You killed my baby!”

“Mrs. Mercer . . .”

“Don’t you finish that sentence! Don’t you tell me to calm down! God damn you to hell, you did it, you killed my baby!” Shawna felt the red rise into her cheeks. She knew everyone was staring. She didn’t care. “What kind of woman are you? How could you do that to a little baby?”

The nurse looked down, looked away. Good. Let her be shamed. Shawna became aware of Trent standing over her. The last thing she wanted to deal with now was his stupid hulk. What was he going to do? Hit the cunt?

Shawna collapsed into a chair. She covered her eyes, tearing at her hair. Her throat felt raw. “You fucking bitch. I hope you rot in hell.”

• • • •

After she killed the babies, Jamie would be arrested. She would be booked with Titanium, who’d tell her, in his terse fashion, that Slate had been shot. He wouldn’t know Slate’s condition, but in fact she’d die on a Temperance United operating table in seven hours. By then, Jamie and Titanium would be in separate facilities. They’d be informed separately.

Jamie would ask for her husband and Claire to be allowed to come visit her. This would be denied. She’d spend her short call on the phone with Claire instead, trying to coax a few sentences, maybe a giggle. Her call would be cut short by a tall officer with cold eyes who’d be unnecessarily brutal when escorting Jamie out of the room.

Titanium would stand trial alone, an intimidating, silent figure. Yet he’d fulfill Slate’s requirements for familiarity as well, a solid, familiar shape, with the build of a football player, the pale skin and blue eyes of a corn-fed boy. The cross around his neck would wink gold into the court TV cameras, drawing the viewer’s eye into a brief flash of realization that here was a terrorist who’d spent three years in seminary school, whose tongue and heart were reverent to the words of Jesus.

Jamie wouldn’t stand trial. She’d be beaten to death in a prison brawl. A guard would later be tried for standing by and watching her die. The charges would be dismissed.

• • • •

Afterward, Meredith Cabral developed panic attacks. They cornered her in grocery stores, on buses, at gardening meetings, at church.

When she got pregnant again, they got worse. Stress led to a premature birth, six weeks early. When the obstetrician arrived to give her a pain suppressant, she thought he was trying to inject lethal drugs into her arm. She screamed and tried to flee. Brian and two orderlies pinned her down as the physician sedated her. Afterward, the obstetrician told her that if she ever decided to have another baby, she should schedule a cesarean. Against Brian’s wishes, she opted for tubal ligation. Throughout her daughter’s childhood, she loomed as a frail but frightening figure: impossible to read, liable to break down at nothing, in and out of mental hospitals the way other girl’s mothers were in and out of salons.

• • • •

Bea Shaw screamed at the hospital staff. She screamed at the policemen. She screamed at her husband. “You didn’t try hard enough! You aren’t trying hard enough! They aren’t trying hard enough!”

But it was Tamarr who went into the garage where they stored his dad’s old car on the grounds that getting rid of it was more fuss than keeping it around, confirmed that an ancient sixteenth of a gallon lingered in the antique gas engine, got behind the wheel, and turned it on without opening the garage door. Bea found him that afternoon, crying over the kitchen table. He hadn’t had the strength to finish.

They sat together, Bea with her arms around Tamarr, until the boys came home. “Make dinner,” Bea told them, “You can take care of yourselves one night.”

Bea took Tamarr into the bedroom and lay with her arms around him. The sun sank, leaving the room grim and dark. The moon rose, casting a ghostly glow on the sheets and curtains.

Bea held Tamarr some more.

• • • •

Brosh Stepanian sold his partnership to their foreman and moved to New Zealand to raise sheep with his mother and sister. Neighbor boys flocked around Nadalia like flies to honey. She picked one before she was eighteen, and swelled to a happy, wifely pregnant on his parent’s farm.

Brosh found an Aussie partner to love in action instead of conversation. Their bond grew in the silences of sweat and straining muscles. When they decided to hire a surrogate mother to give birth to the child they wanted, they searched around and brought a traveling Japanese artist to the farm.

Brosh sent a picture of their baby girl to Miguel, along with a short letter. Miguel wrote back: Congratulations. Wasn’t it funny how things worked out? Miguel couldn’t see himself as a good father. He liked control too much. Maybe a baby would have forced them together when they should have been apart.

Brosh tucked the letter into the drawer where he kept official papers about the farm along with his one photograph of Darlita: tiny, blue-skinned, crying. He never wrote Miguel again.

• • • •

Leo went home. He moved in with his mom and helped with his sisters’ babies. Someone else was always around, just in case.

The children grew older. The sisters weren’t home much. Leo was. Weird Uncle Leo. Always smiling. Funny how he looked like a boy, when he was so old.

He prayed all the time. So deep it was like sleeping. Once, when Maria Renata was eight, he prayed so hard that he wouldn’t wake up. Grandma sent Maria Renata to get a mirror to make sure he was still breathing.

“Why does he pray like that?” Maria Renata asked grandma.

“He’s lonely.”

“Oh,” said Maria Renata. “Maybe I could fix him up with the hunchback lady. She’s always nice to him. She gives him plums from her yard.”

“Not that kind of lonely,” said grandma.

Maria Renata stuck her nose against the window. “She’s out there now. I’m going to go tell her about Uncle Leo.”

Maria Renata had her hand on the doorknob when grandma caught her by the wrist. It hurt. Grandma’s eyes were dark and flat, like mud drying in the sun.

“Don’t do it,” grandma said. “Leave the poor man to his peace.”

• • • •

Another baby was tangled up in the whole mess: Claire McFadden, née Claire Wrede. After Jamie was killed, her father changed their name and moved them to another part of the country where he thought Claire could grow up normally.

As an adult, Claire moved back to Martinsville. She found herself moving eerily in her mother’s footsteps: She too went into health care to work with infants, though as a pediatric oncologist, not an R.N. She made no special effort to keep her identity secret.

Twenty years after Jamie killed the babies, a woman putting together a documentary showed up at Claire’s door. Buzzing followcams hovered behind her in the entryway, careful not to illegally cross the threshold into private property.

“Could I ask you some questions about your mother?” the documentarian asked. Without pausing for an answer, she went on, her tone rehearsed: “In recent months, some rehistorians have been vocal in their claims that it was the Temperance Massacre that turned public opinion eighteen years ago to pave the way for the Energy Redistribution Act. As one of the key figures in the massacre, your mother could be on her way to becoming a hero in some circles. What do you think of that?”

Claire smiled. She set her knee behind the door so the documentarian couldn’t force her way in. She said one thing before closing the door.

“My mother was a monster.”

• • • •

10:04. Jamie held the babies for a moment as she slid the needle into their flesh. Each warm, fleet heart beat near hers for a few seconds before she set the infants on the cold exam table.

Andrea died. Roshaun died. Darlita died. Jonathon died.

Jamie watched the life flicker out of their bodies one after the other, and then went to turn herself in.

©2007 by Rachel Swirsky. Originally published in Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Farah Mendlesohn. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Swirsky holds a masters degree in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published over 50 short stories in venues including the New Haven Review, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award, and in 2010, her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window won the Nebula. If it were an option, she might choose to replace her hair with feathers, preferably bright macaw feathers.

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

Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes

Adam-Troy Castro | 2460 words

{Negelein is at his workstation working on the Lafferty file when the bone spear arcs over the sea of cubicles and strikes just above his right ear, penetrating his skull with a wet crunch. Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint. He is prevented from doing a face-plant on the keyboard by the spear, which, arrested in its flight, comes to rest with its ends hung up on his opposing cubicle walls, making it a clothing rod of sorts from which his corpse hangs like a tailored suit. He sighs. And dies.}

• • • •

“. . .something like every hour and ten minutes.”

“Seventy minutes, then.”

“Yes, that would follow. Christ, why was I even referred to you? Couldn’t you come up with something a little more helpful?”

“Now, now. I was briefed by your regular doctor, but it’s an unusual condition, I can be forgiven for taking a few seconds to absorb what you’re saying. This is once every seventy minutes, correct? Not just in times of stress; not just when you’re exposed to certain high-pressure environments. Every seventy minutes.”

“Yes. I—”

• • • •

{He is driving on a narrow and twisty road, high in the mountains, the jagged rock face to his right, the bottomless drop to oblivion to his left. It is raining, and the pavement is a cascade of water; there is no bloody reason for him to be driving here under these conditions, no place worth the suicidal idiocy of braving this weather, but the vision’s logic cannot be argued with, and so he maintains a steady pace, ten over the posted speed limit and twenty over what he should be maintaining, with the rain lashing so hard that he can barely make out anything beyond the hood. Then the vague silvery blur in front of him goes dark, eclipsed by an improbably spherical stone, the mass of a respectable bus, that has come loose of the dirt higher up and landed on the road just ahead; a rock that rests as if dazed for all of ten seconds before starting to roll toward him. There is no room to evade it, not unless he wants to steer his car into a drop of a thousand feet, and so he does the only inadequate thing he can and brakes, putting off the moment when he is crushed or knocked off the side of the road for the few precious heartbeats he can. He lives just long enough to hear his body go squoosh.}

• • • •

“. . . as it happens, sir, not every seventy minutes, but a little over every seventy-two. Over the course of our day of monitoring, we have logged several thousand intervals of neurological disruption, marked by these spikes here, here, and here; each time lasting for less than a tenth of a second.”

“They seem to last so much longer.”

“That’s not surprising. Your accounts reflect so much in the way of incidental detail that they’re less dreams than experiences, which your brain seems intent on generating out of whole cloth. Subjectively, as in your more elaborate deaths, they may afterward seem to have lasted more than an hour. I can assure you, however, that they’re all instantaneous, as is your transition back to the everyday world. It is why you can still function. They’re over in an eye blink. If you—”

• • • •

{It is late at night. Negelein is home in bed, watching TV. The screen is the only source of illumination in the room, and the alternating intervals of light and shadow lull him toward a sleep he doesn’t want, because this is a good show, and he wants to see the end of it. He follows the plot, all about a spy on a mission, with multiple cliffhanger set-pieces, and it’s really one of the best examples of this sort of thing that he’s ever seen. He glances at his wife, who sleeps beside him, as always able to achieve unconsciousness despite him playing the late-night show at the high volume he prefers; and it is this momentary look that prevents him from registering the striking giant python, all twenty-two feet of it, as it whips through the open doorway and wraps itself around his midsection, in merciless coils dedicated to squeezing the very life from his bones. He has no breath to scream, no strength to fight the inevitable, just a moment of sheer confusion over how the hell such a thing managed to find its way into his house, here in Scarsdale. Then he feels his bones and organs rupture, in a spasm of sheer agony, and the last thing he sees with the eyes now protruding from their sockets is the snake’s triangular head, yawning wide to admit him into darkness.}

• • • •

“. . . with your prior doctors having ruled out psychological dysfunction or neurological cause, there’s nothing further we can do for you at this clinic, but based on some of the anomalous readings, I feel justified in referring you elsewhere.”

“Where? An exorcist? That’s about the only thing I haven’t tried.”

“Actually, no. A physicist. There’s a woman I have in mind . . .”

• • • •

{It is a bright sunny day. Negelein is strolling down the street with a big dumb smile on his face, just minding his own business, when by sheer chance he passes by a shoe store, which just happens to be one of the few retail establishments in the United States that is a) still doing its business in a pedestrian neighborhood, and b) still hanging an oversized model of its primary product over the front door. In short, he passes under the giant shoe, which has been hanging in that spot for seventy years and is locally considered a charming little vestige of old-fashioned Americana. It has also been hanging for more decades than anybody can remember, without anybody checking the rigging for metal fatigue. By sheer idiot coincidence, one of the two wires holding it snaps at the precise moment that Negelein is passing through the wrong place. The heel hits the top of Negelein’s head with just enough force to pancake it, at which point the other wire snaps and the toe comes slamming down with equal and just as ridiculous force. Negelein lies flat under the cast-iron footwear. Very very flat.}

• • • •

“. . . apologize for all the time we’ve spent confirming these results, but we can now report with a fair degree of confidence that these are, as we suspected, genuine quantum events.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Skipping the math, we have detected a number of micro-alterations in your environment whenever you experience one of these anomalies. These include but are not limited to alterations in the air density, in the passage of time, in the local magnetic fields, and in the weight of objects—all small, mind you, but still measurable, reproducible results. There’s even a tiny Doppler shift, which suggests . . .”

• • • •

{It is a windy day. Negelein has stopped in an outdoor parking lot to tie his shoes. He has an important meeting in the tall glass building behind him, one that might well result in a lucrative mid-life change of careers. It’s a new building, and one that he has no way of knowing was built by a firm that made a number of small but critical errors in installing the panes of unbreakable glass that offer panoramic street views to the important people in suits sitting at their desks and conference tables. High winds coupled with the flex-capability possessed by tall buildings have, at certain values, the capacity to loosen window frames, and so it is that as Negelein bends to tie his shoe a mid-level manager on the fiftieth floor makes the mistake of resting his palm against the window he earned through years of exceptional performance.

{With a stunningly quiet pop, the glass topples free, as does the unfortunate manager, whose messy fate need not concern us past this sentence. What’s more important is that, as the glass tumbles, it is caught by the wind and that it takes on the function of a glider, riding the air currents in a manner that will prompt several horrified eyewitnesses to the illusion that it’s piloted. By the time it’s just above street level, it’s best imagined as a horizontal guillotine. Negelein, who would be fine if he remained kneeling for one second longer, instead finishes tying his shoe, thinks, “There you go,” and stands. He has just enough time to register a foreshortened reflection of his own face, looking pretty confused.}

• • • •

“. . . yes, yes, yes, but what does it mean?”

“We’re still working on the hypothesis, but it appears that these are neither hallucinations nor neurological short-circuits, but events, happening to living and breathing versions of yourself, in other universes adjacent to our own. The spontaneous combustions, the meteor strikes, the shark attacks, and so on are existing circumstances that are communicated to you at the instant they happen.”

“Every seventy-two minutes?”

“With an infinity of universes to go through, there must be uncounted more, a number best imagined as the number of stars in the heavens. There must be some cyclical event, unknown to us, that renders you sensitive to these occurrences, at this precise interval; perhaps some measurement by which these universes and our own are in the most sympathetic conjunction. There might be another quantum reason why you’re only receiving low-probability events. Honestly, there’s no telling. You’re already on the verge of revolutionizing physics. There’s much we still have to . . .”

• • • •

{Negelein is walking through the park with a young woman of his acquaintance, not the wife he remembers from some of his other manifestations but a different lady entirely, who he knows only slightly and with whom he is still in that portion of a relationship when the two participants are still making up their minds about each other. So far, he seems to like her more than she likes him, which is just making him resolve to do better when the screams begin, up ahead, in the direction where the two of them are headed. All of a sudden the crowds are fleeing, heedless, screaming their bloody heads off; and in a few of those cases they are actually bloody heads, because one or two of those running past Negelein and his lady friend appear to have great gaping wounds on their faces; one man who runs by right now has one of his ears hanging by a thread. One runner knocks Negelein to the ground. He hits hard, curling into a ball to minimize the hurt of being trampled, and somewhere in there takes distant comfort in the sight of his date running like hell. Then the crowds are past and he takes even more battered relief in still being alive, before a dozen vaguely humanoid forms with coarse black fur drop from the trees and surround him in a semi-circle. All bare their teeth in malice before they commence tearing him to pieces. He will never know just where they came from or why they’re so angry, but to those who know how dangerous they become at puberty, there is absolutely nothing about the adult male chimpanzee that qualifies as cute.}

• • • •

“. . . just for god’s sake stop telling me you need to collect more data. Every single time it happens I think it’s really me it’s happening to! It’s that real! There’s no way of telling!”

“I can’t even imagine what you’re going through, sir, but if it’s any consolation, there is one way of knowing: It always ends. You’re returned to your own everyday existence, refreshingly free of catastrophe. The only useful way of looking at it is that for every death you must endure, you also get that one moment of shining relief that comes immediately afterward, the welcome awareness that all is still well and that you still exist in a world with hope.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say? That I should just go home and pretend this doesn’t happen to me a couple of dozen times a day?”

“It’s all we can offer at the moment, sir. I’m afraid that there won’t be an instant cure. But I promise you that the team will keep looking for some way to sever the connection. In the meantime, it really will be best for you if you work on the techniques many afflicted people use to ameliorate the effects of chronic nightmares, by recognizing them as what they are while they’re in progress and in that manner softening their overall emotional impact. If you can summon the full force of your own rationality, you can retain enough perspective to make yourself the master of this phenomenon, and not just the . . .”

• • • •

{The skies are as dark as Negelein’s mood, as he drives home from the lab, the inadequate comforts of the project leader still ringing in his ears. Raindrops the size of quarters pelt his windshield, and he shudders, thinking of rockslides, and flash floods, and broken dams, and all the other disastrous ends he’s experienced but not lived, up until seventy-one minutes ago; all means of extinction he knows intimately, thanks to his unwanted connection to places that are now as real to him as this car, this front seat, this raging storm.

{In the morning, he’s supposed to return to the lab, which has arranged a grant so he can work there as full-time test subject, as the team struggles to help him. But the prospect does not cheer him. His problem has not been solved, and the wind rising all around him is a perfect metaphor for the rage he feels about the way he’s been singled out by a cruel and capricious multiverse. It’s just not fair.

{Then the din of rending metal makes thought impossible, the funnel cloud sweeps into his field of vision, he feels a nauseating sense of his stomach sinking as the view out the windshield becomes an impossible perspective of a gouge torn in an earth now a thousand feet below, and he rages, Oh, sure. Right. Fuck you. The car starts to fall, and he closes his eyes, focusing on the scant comfort the doctor tried to provide him. This won’t make a difference at all. What will is the welcome return to order, once this ridiculous scenario plays out.}

©2017 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Come-from-Aways

Julian Mortimer Smith | 2490 words

Come-from-aways think it’s the tides that brings the wreckage in, but any local child will tell you the truth of the matter. You can have fifty fine days in a row and the beaches will be clean and empty, except for the usual haul of rockweed, driftwood, and old plastic bottles. Fifty fine days, and then there’ll come a thick, foggy night of the sort we do so well around here, and the next morning there it’ll be—a rocket engine from an alien spaceship, or a cracked satellite dish as big as a bus, half-buried in the sand down on Bartlett’s Beach.

I found out that Shauna was pregnant on one of those thick, foggy nights. She told me over the phone. She said she wanted to come tell me in person, but her dad was out with the truck. She wasn’t crying or nothing. She just sounded kind of tired and sad. After she finished speaking, there was a long silence while she waited for me to say something, but I was on the old rotary phone in the kitchen, and my mom was within easy earshot, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. So we both just said goodbye and hung up.

That night I bundled myself up in coat, hat, and scarf and trudged through the half-frozen mud down to the wharf, the fog wet against my cheeks. There’s an old dory down in Peter Saulnier’s shed that he gives me the use of sometimes. Last summer, I ran a little ferry service to Gull Island. You can walk to the island at low tide, but tourists don’t always know that, and if they arrived at high tide they would pay me five dollars for the crossing. If they arrived at low tide, on the other hand, they might walk to the island and fall asleep sunbathing, and I would have to go and rescue them when they woke up and found themselves marooned. Those ones would also pay me the five dollars.

I always liked rowing that dory. I did some of my best thinking going back and forth between Gull Island and the beach. There’s something simple and clear about the effort of straining at the oars, while the waves slap wetly against the sides. There’s also something about it that makes me think of sex, and maybe that’s why I went and fetched it on the night I found out that Shauna was pregnant.

I opened the shed as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake Peter’s dogs, and dragged the dory over the dunes and onto the beach. It was so dark I couldn’t even see where the waves began, so I just dragged the boat along the sand until I felt the seawater soaking into my boots. Then I jumped in and began to row.

• • • •

The fog brings the wreckage in, and it’s the wreckage of a space-faring civilization. Those are the local facts. There are various theories to explain those facts, and they depend on who’s doing the telling.

Joey Outhouse reckons we’re an alien dumping ground.

“Just look around you,” he’ll say, if he’s pressed and has had a whiff or two of rum. “Imagine looking down on the Earth from space, and thinking to yourself, ‘Now, where am I going to throw all my old trash? The shit nobody wants any more?’ Well, I’m telling you, boy, those aliens looked down and they went all around the world and this was the place they chose. And be honest: Does that surprise you? It don’t surprise me one bit. Just look around you!”

But old Bob Piecemate, who’s been to college and fancies himself an intellectual, takes a different view on the issue.

“There’s always been something special about this area,” he says. “We’re close to a portal of some sort. Ley lines intersecting and whatnot. That’s where the fog comes from. It’s no earthly fog. Nobody who’s been out in it can claim it is. The portal opens, and the fog flows out of it. And our dimension is like a bridge. And sometimes, while a spacecraft is passing from one dimension to the other, a bit gets caught and breaks off.”

• • • •

As I rowed through the fog, I thought about the letters of acceptance on the kitchen table, and my mom so thrilled that I would be going to college. That was impossible now, of course. I thought about the sort of job I would be able to get in town, and knew there were no jobs to be had, now that the tourist ferry from Maine was no longer running and no one was buying lobster on account of the recession. I thought about leaving for the city, but I knew that Shauna would want to stay near her family and her church.

This whole town is like Gull Island, I thought. If you stay too long, it becomes impossible to leave. A piece of you catches and you have to break it off if you want to get away.

I knew after five minutes that I had overshot the island, but I kept rowing anyway, pulling blindly into the fog until even the orange smudge of the lights on Killam’s Wharf had disappeared. And then I was alone.

It was a still night, and I felt that I was rowing through a big, cold absence. I thought that this must be what it’s like to be in outer space, floating through so much nothingness that all the effort you can give won’t make a damn bit of difference, because you’ll never get where you’re going.

It occurred to me that I would be able to see stars if I were in space, but it was too foggy for that. But then, all of a sudden, I could see stars, a whole galaxy of them, spread out below me, underneath the water. And they weren’t the reflections of stars neither, I can promise you that. Above my head the fog was still as thick as stew. But below me—far, far below—the stars burned bright and clear.

Even on a still night like that one, the ocean is always moving, but those stars didn’t move. They just hung steady, as if the water were nothing but a thin film, and I was looking down through it at something beyond.

Well, I stared into that starry, submarine sky for a long while. I stared until my feet had gone numb and I could barely move my muscles, and I knew that I should start rowing for land or I would freeze to death. But I no longer knew which way land lay. There were no clues to be had out there in the fog.

I curled into a ball and shivered in the bottom of the boat, muscles tensed as if bracing for a blow, as if the cold could be taken on the chin. The fog and saltwater slosh had soaked through my jacket, and I wondered if I should take it off or keep it on. I knew that wearing wet things could do more harm than good. But wasn’t that only true for some materials and not others? What was that jacket even made of? I knew that some people get a stupid urge to strip off their clothes when they’re hypothermic, so I didn’t trust my gut. I kept the coat on.

I couldn’t help but think about Shauna being out there with me. Maybe we would both give in to that stupid urge, and strip naked together, out there in the cold. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been stupid with another person there. Maybe that would have been the perfect way to share body heat. I couldn’t decide.

I used to fantasize about stuff like that, before I had a girlfriend, back when sex was still a foggy shape on the horizon. I would create these scenarios in which me and a girl would have to get naked together. We were hostages, forced to strip at gunpoint; or we were castaways on a desert island and we had to use our clothes as bandages or rope. We would huddle together for warmth, or comfort, or simply because our shelter was too small not to huddle together, and then . . .

And then I didn’t know what. I don’t think I got beyond that until later. And later the circumstances didn’t matter.

But this would have been a good one, I thought, even as I lay there shivering and miserable. Me and a girl in a dory, lost in fog, our clothes sopping wet, hypothermia setting in. We would have no choice but to get naked and hold each other close. We would wrap around each other, flesh-to-flesh. I would feel the heat of her breath on my shoulder, the squash of her breasts against my chest.

• • • •

There’s a plastic container under the bench at the dory’s stern that contains a first aid kit and a flare gun, so I forced myself to sit up and fumble at it, with my numb fingers, until I got it open. I got out the bright orange pistol and loaded a bright orange flare and pointed the pistol skyward, but then I reconsidered. There was nothing but fog up there. It would swallow the flare whole. So I pointed the pistol down at the clear, starry sky beneath the water. I could hardly feel my finger on the trigger, and I fell on my rear end in surprise as the pistol kicked and the bright, noisy blaze splashed into the water.

The flare didn’t fizzle and drown as it should have. Instead, it ripped through the film of water and burst out the other side in a mist of saltwater droplets. And then it was burning there on the other side of the sea, a newborn star, messy and furious, falling into the galaxy.

There’s no oxygen in space, and fire needs oxygen to burn. I know that much. But that flare kept burning anyway as it fell.

And why not? The other stars burn in vacuum, somehow.

And then there was something else moving down there. I don’t know if it followed my flare or if it was coming this way anyway. It was big, and growing bigger by the second. I thought it might have been a whale—but no, its lines were too precise. It was a perfect circle, and it was glowing. It looked like metal, glinting in the starlight.

To this day, I don’t know if Joey Outhouse was right and it was a piece of space junk, or if Bob Piecemate was right and it was a spacecraft that got caught in our dimension. But it came spinning through space, up towards the surface of the sea, larger and larger, until it was right below me, just beyond that film of water.

With a great splash, it breached the surface, lifting my dory onto its fuselage. Water streamed over its sleek metal curves as it heaved up and up, finding its equilibrium on the ocean. Even in my boat I could feel its warmth rising around me, so I crawled out of the dory to press myself against its hot metal flank.

• • • •

Peter Saulnier found me the next morning on Bartlett’s Beach, lying unconscious in the sand beside the flying saucer. He brought me to the hospital and got me fixed up. I was all right, just a little dehydrated. I don’t know how to make sense of it, but that flying saucer had kept me alive with its warmth, and it carried me back to shore. Peter Saulnier never did get his dory back. I felt bad for that.

• • • •

Shauna and I built our house from the wreckage of the saucer. It’s a strange, circular house with low, curving ceilings, a huge domed skylight, and a toilet designed for an alien anatomy. We got Artie Mayfield to pull it up out of the sand with his backhoe, and drag it to the spit of land that juts from Gull Island’s western edge. We bought the land for a song. Nobody wants to live in a spot so exposed to the weather. But the saucer is sleek and vacuum-tight, so when the winter storms come, we barely notice.

We’ve started something of a fad in town. Last month a glittering geodesic dome washed up on the beach and Joan Grainger claimed it for use as a greenhouse. Shawn Nickerson is using the nosecone of a rocket as a gravel silo, and Dan Smith now powers his house with the solar panels from a wrecked satellite.

There’s talk of the ferry service to Maine starting up again, but even without it, we’re beginning to get more come-from-aways in town. They come to see the alien wreckage, and what we’ve done with it. They fall in love with the mystery of the place—that and the cheap property—and they stay. Council’s even considering a tax break for locals who build stuff with the wreckage.

The folk at Shauna’s church say we shouldn’t be living in an alien saucer—unwed and with a child at that—but the tourists love it. They come to Gull Island at low tide to look around our place, and some of them put a donation in the box for little Sarah’s college fund.

We discussed not having her. We even drove up to a bright, clean clinic in the city and the doctor described a process called vacuum aspiration. It made me think of the saucer and its alien technologies. But in the end we had her—awkward and unplanned, like so many of the kids around here. But we’re not going to let her stop us. She’s never going to be an anchor.

We’ve both enrolled in correspondence courses, Shauna and I. It’s going to be a long, slow slog, but we’re going to make it. I know this because we’ve got Sarah now. She makes everything harder, but she gives us a reason to succeed as well. She makes our effort simple and clear. She’s a beacon, wailing in the night, messy and furious, showing us the direction we should be traveling.

I don’t know if we’re an alien dumping ground, or a bridge between dimensions, or something else entirely. But when the tourists come to see the saucer, they sometimes linger too long and the tide comes in. When that happens we invite them in for a cup of tea, and Sarah gets to hear tales from all over the world. And we tell them the local stories in return.

We tell them that it’s not the tide that brings the wreckage in.

©2015 by Julian Mortimer Smith. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julian Mortimer Smith has published more than a dozen science fiction and fantasy stories in some of the top speculative fiction venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Terraform, Daily Science Fiction, and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. He has also written non-fiction articles about subjects such as the Shag Harbour UFO incident and the North American Conkers Championship.

He currently lives in a small lobstering town in southwest Nova Scotia, Canada, where he writes website copy by day and spec fic by night. He is an avid board gamer and former military clarinetist. You can find out more at julianmortimersmith.com.

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

Phantom Pain

Eileen Gunn | 5850 words

He was in the library. It was quiet. No guns. No mud. He could crawl in peace, as long as he didn’t make any noise. Mrs. Dientz, the librarian, wouldn’t allow noise.

Ed was worried that he would get dirt in his wound, and it would get infected. The library is full of fungus, like a locker room: You can get athlete’s foot in places you would never put your feet. Wet, too. It was raining, a hot tropical rain, but he was cold and it didn’t warm him. In the library, there was a bamboo umbrella stand that always had a couple of umbrellas in it, no matter what the weather, and a mahogany rack with a pair of rubbers. Maybe he could borrow them. He’d return them. He needed them right now, that was all. The jungle was always so wet. He had forgotten his rubbers, and he needed to get home.

The rain stopped, and steam rose from the dirt. He kept crawling. The mud, thick as peanut butter, smelled like chocolate and skunk cabbage. Large, leathery leaves brushed wet against his head and shoulders as he pushed through them.

His leg was broken, he knew it, and it was chewed all to hell. Bullets from their own gun, captured by the Japs, in one leg, shrapnel from somebody’s mortar—Jap? Yank? Who knew whose?—in the other. His fatigues were torn up and soaked with blood, and there were little ants crawling on them. The jungle wouldn’t even wait for him to die.

• • • •

The library was cool and quiet, and Ed was talking to Katie. He was whispering, because they were in the library, but he was all muddy because they were in the jungle. He was asking her a question. Had she ever wondered what it would be like to have all the money she could imagine? Just squander it, spend it wildly on everything she wanted? He used to wonder about money, before he joined the Marines, before he shipped out. How did you ever get enough, and what did you do when you got it? Katie was looking at him very seriously, and she nodded her head a little, not like she had ever wondered such a thing, but like she was encouraging him to keep talking. “Well, darling,” he said to her, “this leave I have is our fortune. Let’s spend it like we’ve never spent thirty days before, and just as though we’ll never have thirty days to spend again.”

Did he make that up himself, or did he hear it in a movie? It didn’t sound like a movie with a happy ending. In movies, the soldiers who said things like that always got shot. He hadn’t even said that to Katie, but he got shot anyway. If he ever got another leave, he would be spending it in Australia or New Zealand with a bunch of other leathernecks, not in the South Weymouth public library with his girl.

He sure wanted to see Katie again. He wanted to see his dad and his sister and his librarian. He wanted to tell Katie the things he had never told her except in letters from halfway around the world. He hadn’t even told her that he loved her. It’s the kind of thing you want to say in person.

• • • •

Ed wouldn’t have gotten shot, except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t his job to carry ammunition to the guns, but sometimes there’s things that have to be done, and you do them. The day before, the company had cleared an area of underbrush, leaving the tall trees as cover against air attack, and dug themselves in for their first night on the island. It was raining, of course. It rained and rained in this place. Ed dug himself a hole, shared rations with the guys in the holes on either side of him, hunched under his poncho, and managed to get some shut-eye before his watch.

The next morning, the captain and Ed and Johnny Dahn had left the camp to check the position of the left flank of the Third Battalion: The company was due to tie in with them later in the morning. They found the Third, checked their position, made arrangements for later. Then they started back, taking an inspection tour of the lines.

They were just finishing the first platoon when a volley of enemy fire broke loose. They hit the ground fast—it sounded like it was aimed right at them. Marines in the line behind them answered with M1s and machine guns.

The call and response of gunfire was like the responses at Mass: first the priest, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” then the altar boys, “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” You could count on it, and you knew all the voices: the heavy, adult voice of a water-cooled gun, then the chatter of light machine guns; quick, sharp automatic-rifle bursts, followed by flat rapid fire from the Japanese guns, all of it against a staccato drone of grenades and mortar.

When the volley was over, the jungle went as quiet as death. The rain had stopped. In front of the platoon, there was a green wall of trees and brush. Nothing moved there. In the foxholes, marines held themselves immobile, guns in hand, watching the jungle for the slightest movement. Occasionally the sound of a ricochet rang through the trees.

The three marines waited in the silence. Maybe it was five minutes, but it seemed like an hour. Then, dripping wet, like the jungle itself, they made their way back in the rain to the Command Post. They moved cautiously: They didn’t want to startle anyone.

When they got to the CP, however, all hell was breaking loose. The radio was on the fritz, and the men were quickly organizing a circular defense in case of a breakthrough in the lines. While they were busy with that, a wounded kid crawled in on his hands and knees. Ed and Johnny helped him turn over and lie down. He’d been shot three times, once in each thigh and once in the pelvis just below the beltline. No blood, just little round holes, blue at the edges. He was very pale and breathing shallowly: in shock, probably bleeding internally. None of the medical corpsmen were at the CP: The kid needed to be at the battalion aid station, four hundred yards away. Ed and Johnny laid him on a canvas stretcher, and, following the telephone wire, carried him through the heavy warm rain, struggling to keep their feet in the mud.

They’d only gone a short way when they met a party of marines bringing ammunition to the CP. “That was where we got ourselves outfoxed,” Johnny would say later, retelling the tale, “when we met those guys bringing in boxes of ammo. Quickest shuffle I’ve ever seen. All of a sudden, they were carrying the stretcher away from the lines, and we were headed back to the front, carrying the ammo.”

When they got back to the CP, the captain didn’t even say anything. He just grabbed a couple of boxes and started to the lines. “They were pretty heavy,” Johnny would say. “It seemed like the right thing to just grab a couple myself and follow him.” Ed never talked about it.

Carrying the boxes, they moved up into a haze of gunsmoke and a stench of sulfur. There was an opening in the trees, and they could see one of the guns.

• • • •

Katie was Irish, of course. Katie Kelly, what else would she be? Not Boston Irish: She was from Pennsylvania and California and New York. Katie liked the Boston Bruins, though. She liked to drive cars, and she liked to drive them fast. She was a fashion-design student, tall and glamorous, with a mass of dark brown hair. Her letters came in Kelly-green envelopes, so he always knew right at the beginning of mail call whether he had gotten anything from her. Sometimes she would send packages, brownies or chocolate chip cookies, direct to the jungle from Dorchester, Massachusetts.

His mother, rest her soul, had never met Katie, but his father liked her, his brother liked her, his little sister liked her. If he didn’t make it out of the library, maybe he would get to see his mother: He had been to Mass last Sunday, every Sunday, even in the jungle. He had to get to Mass again. Just needed to keep crawling.

• • • •

You can know only your own pain. This ought to be obvious. You know what’s hurting you, and you try to keep quiet about it—or maybe not. Maybe you wince, maybe you yell—maybe you make a big fuss about nothing. But it’s your own pain, it starts inside you, it is part of you. Only you know what it really means, what it says to you when nobody else is around. You know it like a friend, like a member of your family, like a fraternal twin.

Somebody else’s pain, you’d think you’d have enough sense to know that you don’t know it. But almost everyone has an idea of the appropriate display of someone else’s pain. You say, “You’re being very brave.” Or, “You’re making an awful fuss about nothing.” You say, “That doesn’t hurt so much, now does it? ”

• • • •

For no reason Ed could figure out, he was lying in bed, an ordinary bed in a nice house. No jungle, no rain, no library. He smelled ether. A blonde woman was rubbing ether on his left foot. It was icy cold where it hit the skin, and the heavy, sweet smell of it cut into his head. It hurt like hell, or maybe it was his leg in the jungle that hurt like hell. That’s Katie! he thought, looking at the woman. That’s Katie, but she’s blonde. A thin little boy and a round-faced girl were watching silently. He was not in his proper body: He had only one leg. Why is Katie rubbing ether on it, he wondered. What happened to the other one?

Ether is an antiseptic. Maybe Katie was cleaning some wound he didn’t have yet. Ed was pleased at the thought that there were wounds he didn’t have.

The medic was dead, killed by the same shrapnel that had shredded his leg, and Katie had taken the medic’s place. If he died here, he would just sink into the mattress and feed the trees and the bugs. Mud thou art, to bugs thou shalt return. Ed was muddy, but he would not return to bugs, at least not as long as he could crawl.

• • • •

When you’re shot, you might feel the pain or you might not. If you need to move quickly, to jump out of a burning plane, for instance, you might not even notice that you are injured until you are, fortunately, safe. Maybe you are so busy trying to survive that you are pain-free until you’re dead. Or maybe not.

If you survive, the cause of your pain will migrate as your condition changes. Before your leg is amputated, your pain is caused by trauma or disease in the part that will be cut off. Afterward, your pain, at first anyway, is caused by the new damage to your flesh and bone that is the amputation. Your body quickly gets to work to repair itself. It knows what to do: local pain first, then a widespread area of pain and tenderness, to keep you still while you heal. Barring infection or gangrene, the inflammation recedes, the wound and stitches heal, the stump forms properly, and the rest of your body gets on with its life. But the major nerves that served your leg have been cut, and they don’t heal in the same way as muscle and skin.

When you have a leg amputated, you may sometimes feel that your missing limb is still there. At first, the sensation may not be painful. It may tingle or tickle or itch. Then it may start to hurt. Your missing toes may be twisted or cramped, and you can’t uncramp them. Your brain is looking for sensation from your foot, and it turns up the volume in search of it. It picks up noise and tries to make sense out of it.

At first, this doesn’t hurt, but as time goes by, the cut nerves in your stump try to grow back down into your leg. They send out tiny fibers, and these fibers have nowhere to go. They get all tangled up. They send impulses to your brain: an itch here, a tingle there. For the rest of your life, your nerves will try to grow into your leg, and will be unable to, because it’s gone. You may interpret these commendable efforts as pain.

• • • •

The jungle ahead looked as though something heavy had been dragged through it. There was a gunner, Ed remembered. The guy had been covering Ed, running right alongside of him. He had been hit first, before Ed, and that must be him, dragging himself through the jungle, crushing leaves into the mud. Ed was following his path. Where are we headed, he wondered.

The funniest thing about the jungle was that it was made up of giant houseplants. Ed’s mom had worried over her philodendrons, pinching them, watering them, feeding them, and here they were all over the trees. The damn philodendrons had trunks, for Pete’s sake. They were holding him back as he tried to crawl forward. Houseplants holding him back. You had to laugh, really.

You also had to keep your head down. Keep moving. It had been so hard to start crawling, mustn’t stop. Get rid of anything that keeps you from crawling. Ed unhooked his cartridge belt and pushed it to one side. Pack long since gone. He had had it that morning, hadn’t he? He had dug himself a foxhole last night, and he was still covered with mud from that, and mud from crawling, and mud from mud.

He still had his canvas wallet, with his pocket sketchbook and a colored photo of Katie. Yesterday he had lost the silver Sacred Heart medal that Katie sent him. He and his buddy Dick were washing at the beach: a saltwater bath, but better than none. He noticed right away that the medal had slipped off, and he and Dick dived for it for an hour. No luck. It was just a piece of silver, it held no protection in itself. But he had felt awful about losing it, and here he was, shot. He could feel the wallet still buttoned into his pocket. He was not going to lose that picture. He was not going to lose his sketches. He was going to crawl out of there.

Ed wasn’t crawling now, though. He was sitting at a table in a big, warm kitchen, eating dinner, and his leg, the one he didn’t have, was acting up. It seemed to have a life of its own, but it wasn’t even there. When he needed the leg—to run, to jump, to dance, to play football—it wasn’t there, but when it hurt and gave him trouble, it was all there, hot as molten metal, and it wouldn’t hold still. It jumped, it ran, it danced by itself. He grabbed it and tried to hold it quiet. The table shook.

None of the other people at the table looked at him, as he shook and held onto the stump of his leg. Was he even there? Katie was sitting at the table. She was blonde: Maybe she was coloring her hair. She kept getting older. She must have been nearly forty. Still beautiful, he thought, but she looked . . . weathered. There were children, four of them now: the two older ones that he’d seen before, plus a little girl with a Dutch boy bob and a baby in a high chair. Mrs. Kelly, Katie’s mother, was there, too. They were aware of him, he knew, but they looked elsewhere—at the baby, at the dog, at their plates. One of the kids had her nose buried in a magazine. At the dinner table. Times change: His dad would never have allowed that.

Ed pulled himself through the pain on his own. On the table in front of him was a cold glass of Pepsi. Ice all the way up to the top, and then the Pepsi poured over it, that was the way to do it. Let the foam settle, and then fill the glass right to the rim, a tiny fountain of carbon dioxide bubbles dancing briefly in the center. The Pepsi was really cold, and condensation ran down the side of the glass. It sat there untouched. He couldn’t drink it now, because the pain made him nauseous. He would drink it when his leg stopped shaking. He would get an ice-cold drink, he promised himself, when he stopped crawling.

• • • •

Pain is not the same as damage to your body—just as you can be injured and feel no pain, you can also feel pain even though you have no detectable injury. Pain is just one small part of what’s happening to you. You’d be so much wiser if you could see the whole picture.

Take a look at your healed stump. Pain is useless to it. The time for action is past: It’s too late to avoid or reverse the damage. The muscles have been cut, the nerves have been severed, the bone has been sawn, above the knee in your case, and a flap of skin has been folded and stitched. When they were cut, the nerves first sent out a message of massive injury and then, after a time, they began to put out new fibers. The endings of the nerve sprouts tangle and loop, and they find themselves in a very different area, chemically, than where they used to end. The inflammation is gone. The wound has healed—indeed, it’s been healed a long time. But to the nerve endings, there is still something seriously amiss. They fire repeatedly, sometimes massively. They overreact to ordinary signals. A gentle touch to an unmarked area of skin may stab or burn or throb. Different people will respond differently, but every stump, not just yours, will have areas of exquisite sensitivity.

Look at this map of your brain. See these parts here and here that are working so hard? That one is the sensory cortex and this one is the motor cortex: Their nerve cells are especially busy when you’re feeling pain. Now look over here, and you’ll see more action going on, in other cortical areas of the frontal lobes, in the midbrain, in the anterior cingulate, in the hypothalamus, and in the cerebellum. Someone reading a map of your brain might think that you were planning to jump out of the way of something, because of all the activity here in the motor cortex, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum. But no, you’re just sitting there, suffering the usual steady throb in that damaged nerve.

Memory is not so different. Bits of your life and thought are stored all over your brain and chemically connected to one another. You experience a memory, say the thwack of a football hitting your hand as you scrimmage with your brother in the street on a fall afternoon, and suddenly you can smell the flowers at his funeral, ten years later. The funerals all are linked together—your brother, your mother, your child. Memory gives an innocent stimulus in an unmarked area a chemistry you can neither understand nor erase.

• • • •

Ed was sitting in a chair, looking at a cartoon in a little movie box that looked like an upright radio. In the cartoon, a kangaroo sat at a table with a checkered tablecloth. A waitress came up to take his order. The kangaroo said he wanted a Narragansett lager beer. This was bizarre but familiar. He’d seen kangaroos in Adelaide, at the zoo: They really looked like that. Half human, half animal, the ideal subject for a cartoon. Ed was going to be a cartoonist when he finished art school. The cartoon waitress brought the kangaroo his beer and set it down in front of him. There was more dialogue, but Ed wasn’t really listening: He was dissecting the cartoonist’s style. Great brushwork, great command of line. This was really good stuff. Then the waitress snapped her gum and said, “Say ! How do I know you’re not just a guy in a kangaroo suit? ” Ed leaned forward to catch the rest. The kangaroo looked up at the waitress, raised one eyebrow, and said, “You don’t. How do I know you’re not a kangaroo in a girl suit? ” Then the Narragansett logo appeared. It was a beer commercial.

Ed wanted a cold beer. A Narragansett would be fine.

His right leg was broken, that was for sure. It just dragged. He could use his left leg, though it was full of shrapnel, as a prod to help push himself forward. He moved like a worm in the mud, inching along in the faint path of the guy in front, the guy who had been wounded in the neck. That guy was getting way ahead of him. Must be easier to crawl if you’re wounded in the neck.

There was no shooting here now, no mortar. The fighting was somewhere else: He could hear it move off. Maybe the mortar fire that hit him had wiped out the guys that were shooting at him. Whose mortar had it been, Japanese or American? The Japanese had captured the gun and turned it on Ed and his buddies as they brought ammunition, and then the mortar started. Maybe the Japanese had been wiped out by their own mortar, mistaken for Yanks because they were shooting a Yankee gun. Or maybe they had run out of ammunition and been taken out by the Yanks, and the shrapnel in his leg was government issue. They should have waited until I delivered the ammo, he thought, before opening fire. The joke was on them.

The joke was on him, too. As he had approached the gun, he had heard it firing, and he yelled, “I’m a Marine ! Don’t shoot ! ” The Japs had turned the gun right on him. Maybe they didn’t speak English.

Ed raised his head to see where he was going. Watch your head, he thought. There was a marine nearby, prone in the grass. So still, so quiet, he hadn’t even known the guy was there. Only the guy’s eyes were moving, sweeping from left to right. His gun was pointed in front of him. Snipers? The guy tensed and fired right past him. The shooter didn’t speak or even move as Ed crawled past, following the almost-invisible trail.

He could use a beer, he thought again. Brown longneck bottle. Cold, just pulled from a tub of ice. There probably wasn’t a tub of ice for 1500 miles. There were drops of water on the outside of the bottle, and it was starting to get cloudy from the humidity. His fingers left prints on the glass. He flipped the cap with his pocketknife. The bottle was so cold. He was about to take a gulp, but he needed to crawl just a little bit forward.

Ed was leaning on wooden crutches that supported him under his armpits. He was standing in a small, bright bedroom. Twin beds, yellow walls, white trim. A girl’s room. Sunlight streamed through the windows. There was a child lying in one of the beds, covered with a cheerful yellow blanket. He’d seen her before—she was about ten or eleven now, with her straight brown hair still in a Dutch boy cut. Her face was puffy, and she was breathing in intermittent gasps. Her skin was almost transparent, and he could see the veins blue beneath it. Katie was sitting on the bed next to her, holding her hand. The child’s gasps came more slowly. Katie’s face—it was Katie, really, he knew—was desolate. There was nothing he could do. There was no way to pull himself past this, or make Katie feel any better, or help the dying child. There was no cold drink that could reward him if he made it through, and there would be no cold drink to reward the little girl.

He was so confused. How had he ended up so far away from the jungle? Could he please get back to the jungle?

• • • •

When you are injured suddenly, you may not immediately feel pain. You may have higher priorities than caring for your wound. You may need to get yourself out of the jungle, away from the people who are shooting.

This is not an unusual reaction. It is not even necessarily a human reaction. Dogs do it, horses do it, deer do it. You will have plenty of time to feel the pain later, when you’re having dinner with your family, perhaps, or working alone at the drawing board, late at night.

To feel pain, you need to pay attention to it. Pain can capture your attention, and once it’s captured, you may not be able to release it. It can hold you prisoner in this way, and force you to invent increasingly clever ways of escaping it.

You hear about people having a high threshold for pain or a low one, as if pain leaked into your body over some kind of baffle. But in fact, every healthy human being has about the same pain threshold, the point at which you notice a mildly unpleasant sensation—pressure, heat, prickling, whatever—that would be intolerable if it were stronger. What varies wildly from one person to the next is the point at which you would describe the sensation as actually painful, and the point at which the pain becomes intolerable.

Chronic pain doesn’t take you by surprise. You can plan for it, as you would a deadline, or a business trip. Will you accept the pain this time, or push it away? You can contain the pain, isolate it: This body has nothing to do with you. You can defer the pain, but it will seek you out later, and will not be denied.

What about the other pain, equally chronic? Will it keep that pain at bay if you never talk of your mother, dead of a stroke before she was forty, or your brother, shot down over the Pacific, or your daughter, stricken by a virulent infection? If you collect all their pictures and put them away, will that make the pain recede, or will pain take the place of pictures and become a way of keeping your memories alive?

• • • •

He couldn’t tell if he was going uphill or down. There had been a ridge, that’s where the machine gun was, so he must be going downhill. He blacked out, it was like falling and falling, but when he came to, he was in the same place. He had thought his leg hurt before, but he was wrong. Now it really hurt. He pushed the pain aside. It had crept up on him, but he could squeeze it down to a pellet, a seed, and store it away. He inched forward on the trail.

Ed was in the kitchen of a house he had never been in, talking to a dark-haired, middle-aged woman dressed like a G. I., in dungarees and an undershirt. She wasn’t Katie, but she looked vaguely familiar, like an aunt he had never met. He looked at his hands—they were baggy and wrinkled and freckled with age. His body was, well, it wasn’t his body. He asked the woman, maybe she knew: “How did I get so old? ”

The woman shook her head and smiled wryly. “I don’t know, Dad. I ask myself the same question.”

He didn’t really need an explanation: He was getting the hang of this. He was old, and he was getting older.

Getting old was not the real question, though. The real question was why the pain didn’t recede with time. Why didn’t it fade, just as his dexterity and strength were slowly fading? Why did a glance at Katie’s desk, at the misshapen kid-made ashtray with the naïve sketch of a horse’s head, yield a stab of pain? Why did she keep it there, when the wound reopened every time he looked at it? Why didn’t she put it away, as he had put away the photographs?

“Your mother was a beautiful young woman,” he said. “So lovely. So lovely. She let herself get old.”

Ed raised his head and peered through the leaves. There was a motionless marine lying on the ground ahead of him. The guy was wearing a combat pack, and he was soaked and dirty, and had been moving away from the front. He was facedown, his arms and legs too still. Dead, for sure. Between them ran a line of disturbed vegetation, bisected at an angle by the path that had been their goal.

Suddenly he didn’t feel as though he could go any further either. He could see the dark ahead, like a pit. It would be so easy to fall in.

• • • •

When you’re injured, your body uses pain to keep you from moving the injured part. Parts of you that aren’t actually injured may hurt. What is going on here? The chemistry of those uninjured parts changes. The pain circuits in your spinal cord readjust to produce a widespread area of pain. It makes you want to hold still, doesn’t it? It feels better if you hold still, and it’s better for you, too. Damaged tissue—muscles, joints, and ligaments—needs time to recover, even after a minor injury. If you don’t hold still and let them heal, the membranes that cover the surfaces of these tissues become chronically inflamed, and death-dealing bacteria eagerly find their way to the very marrow of your bones. Pain protects you from this. Pain keeps you still and safe. Pain works.

Lung cancer starts out small, a few cells with a reproductive imperative. At that stage, it doesn’t hurt. Your body doesn’t even recognize that it is being colonized—these are your own cells—so it doesn’t fight back, it doesn’t warn you. You have no idea that the tumor is there, but as it grows, it will block small air passages. Your body will try to remove the dysfunctional parts of your lung via inflammation. Macrophages come to your aid, the diseased tissue swells and pushes against nerve endings, and that hurts. Much of your pain, when you have cancer, comes not from the cancer itself, but from your body’s reluctance to give your cancer the room it needs to grow.

Like the pain of childbirth, the pain you feel from cancer does not function as a warning. It comes too late.

• • • •

Ed was sitting in a wheelchair, in an alien body that wouldn’t do what he wanted. It took so long to die. The doctor looked at him and said, “Goodbye, old friend. We’ve come to the end of the road.” Then the doctor looked beyond him, and continued the conversation with somebody that Ed couldn’t see. “I can prescribe some palliative measures, and I think you should make arrangements with Hospice. My nurse will give you a phone number.”

Ed understood that the doctor wasn’t an old friend, but he didn’t say anything. He was having trouble thinking. He had always been careful about taking painkillers when his leg bothered him, but now the doctors kept telling him he didn’t need to be careful. He didn’t want the drugs: He wanted his head to be clear. He wanted to be able to move, get in and out of bed, pull himself up onto the board and slide across it to the wheelchair. If the drugs were strong enough to deaden the pain, he couldn’t do that.

And if it weren’t for the pain, he wouldn’t know where the world started and the imagination left off. If he hurt, he must be alive. If the priests were right, they were all waiting for him there: his parents, his brother, his uncle, his daughter. If that was true, what was all the pain about? If he really believed in heaven, shouldn’t he just give up and die? How was pain protecting him here?

Like crawling through the jungle, or getting out of bed, dying was work. It wasn’t a matter of giving up. It was a matter of pulling himself forward, inch by inch. He wasn’t alone. He could hear familiar voices, and there was always someone sitting there next to the bed. But they couldn’t help with the actual dying part. Katie was there, but the spirit had gone out of her, and she couldn’t help either.

He heard his sister’s voice nearby, talking to somebody. “He’s still holding on. Tell him that it’s okay to let go. Let him know it’s all right.”

Someone sat down next to him and took his hand. She said quietly, “It’s okay, Dad. You can go now. It’s okay. You can go.”

Part of dying, if you had any time to think about it at all, was letting go—not an easy thing to do, after holding on for so long, after making it through all the mud. At the very center of dying was wanting to let go, and eventually the wanting comes to you, whether you invite it or not. Easy and hard are not a part of wanting.

Right now he didn’t want to let go. He heard footsteps approaching, the sound of sucking mud. Marines. He recognized the boots. They stopped in front of the other soldier.

“He’s dead.”

I could have told them that, Ed thought, if they had had the courtesy to ask. That marine was definitely dead.

Then there was someone standing over him. “This one’s dead, too.” It was Dugan from his patrol, redheaded Irish guy from Rhode Island.

That was the crowning ignominy, after all that work. He pushed himself up on his elbows and said, “The hell I’m dead.” He was sure that he was not dead. “I’m Irish,” he added, by way of explanation. It didn’t seem that he could be both.

“Hey! ” said Dugan. “That’s Eddie McMurray under all that mud.” He put a hand on Ed’s shoulder. “We’ll send a corpsman up here, Eddie.” He patted Ed on the shoulder again, and then the two marines, rifles ready, walked quickly back down the trail.

Ed twisted his head to watch them go.

Dugan was glad to see me, he thought. That’s nice.

©2014 by Eileen Gunn. Originally published in Questionable Practices. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eileen Gunn is a short-story writer and editor. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy awards and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. award. Gunn was editor/publisher of the influential Infinite Matrix webzine from 2001-2008 and was for 22 years an influential member of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has published two collections of stories, Questionable Practices (Small Beer Press: 2014) and Stable Strategies and Others (Tachyon Publications: 2004).

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

The Stone Lover

Marta Randall | 1510 words

When word came that the king had died, Kyros began packing his tools. Agathon had been a fine patron, commissioning statues and friezes for his capital’s many temples and his own palace, but his wife had no reputation for piety or art. He was surprised, then, when one of her pages delivered a scroll requesting his services. He unpacked his tools, shook stone dust from his tunic, and laid his palm on a block of marble for luck before following the boy up the hill.

Queen Phyrra had lost no time in cementing her power. Already her banner flapped above the palace gates while workers whitewashed the walls in preparation for her own murals. A statue of Agathon had adorned the courtyard but was there no longer. Kyros hadn’t sculpted it, but it was good, solid work and he was sorry it was gone, as were many of the pious friezes he had made to adorn the courtyard. He wondered which of the gods the queen meant to honor with her first commission.

As it happened, none of them, nor did she want to be immortalized in stone herself. She wanted a statue for her private chambers. Her hands molded the air as she described it: a man, not Apollo but like him in size and shape, reclining on a draped couch, one arm raised as if to cradle a lover, one knee slightly raised and canted to the side, his cock erect. Kyros had heard of such works before and was confident it would not tax his skill. Even before he backed out of her presence, he had a model in mind. A second messenger, the next day, added a detail. She wanted it as a fountain, its water heated by a fire in the base and triggered by a discrete switch in the neck. It would serve to warm the stone, too. The water would emerge, of course, from the cock. A small bit of engineering. He understood why she wanted it.

He started work at once. He chose Triphon for his model, one of the younger men from the gymnastírio who despite his youth carried the graceful bones and toned, sleek muscles of a warrior. His hair curled over his forehead and down his neck and when it came to carving the more intimate details, his cock rose from its bed and stayed hard until Kyros either dismissed him or brought him to climax with his own body. If the queen did not appreciate the statue, Kyros thought, she was insane.

In the city outside the yard, the people knew she was insane. Where Agathon had been kindness and compassion, returning in service and safety what his people gave him in work and taxes, Queen Phyrra was cold and demanding. She ignored the feast of Demeter, she closed her gates against the celebration of the bounty of the sea, she no longer sent the whitest of cattle for sacrifice at the Pantheon, and so the harvest filled only a quarter of the storerooms. She took it all. Poseidon withheld his bounty, so day after day the nets brought up weeds and little more, and sailors ventured farther and farther from the land in search of carp and dentice. Even the reliable herring were few and difficult to catch. Grapes soured on the vine and unripe olives fell in showers from the trees. The island had seen droughts and famines in Agathon’s day but the king had always used his treasure to import food and wine from neighboring lands. Phyrra too imported food and wine, but the populace saw none of it. She fed her court and clothed them and herself in fine linens and silks, clasped and bound with jewels.

Within his studio walls, Kyros knew nothing of this. She supplied him in abundance with all he needed; she and her courtiers came by on occasion to view his progress and she always approved, leaving gifts of fine cheeses, or amphorae of wine from Chios or Lemnos, or lengths of expensive silks. These piled up in the sculptor’s storeroom or were shared with young Triphon. The boy was much taken with the silks, which he draped around whatever part of himself was not of current concern.

At last the statue was finished: sanded, polished, painted. The little fountain worked to perfection. The queen expressed her delight and appreciation. Statue and base together weighed so much it took eighteen slaves to carry them up the hill and into her bedchamber. After Kyros installed it and made sure it worked to her satisfaction, she sent a feast to his studio to be shared with his model, and in the midst of the meal she had them both strangled and their bodies thrown into the sea.

The queen’s sexual appetites were well known even when Agathon was still alive. At least, her courtiers whispered, she couldn’t have her stone lover killed when she tired of him. As it happened, he pleased her so much she retired to her private rooms and had her meals delivered to the door, no farther. She barred her personal servants and slaves from her rooms, save for the one girl who kept the fire burning under the statue and made sure the pipes were clear. She filled the lamps and emptied the chamber pot, slept curled inside the statue’s base, and Phyrra soon forgot she existed.

The queen had never experienced such satisfaction. She took her stone lover traditionally, straddling his hips while spread above him within the circle of his raised arm. She took him while kneeling away from him. She took him in her mouth. She took him in her ass. Unlike living men, he did not cry out when her teeth scraped down his penis, or she scratched at his nipples. His cock never softened. He gave her pleasure beyond belief as his marble body heated, reacting to the fire burning below the base and the friction of her naked body on his. Did the skin of his shoulders soften? Did she feel a flutter in his belly? Was his raised knee canted more to the side?

She spilled red wine before him. She sacrificed small birds, burning their guts and eating their flesh with reverence. She lay spread-eagled on her belly, murmuring desperate prayers not to Aphrodite or Eros, but to her stone lover himself. She took him often, multiple times, spending hours naked and resting against him between bouts of lust. Outside, starving people crawled to the palace gates, begging for scraps, but the courtiers barred the entrances and drove them off with spears and arrows. Their own supplies were running low. When they banged at her door, she ignored them. As long as she was fed, she was content.

He was warming, wasn’t he? She touched his head and felt his carved curls depress under her fingers; she wrapped her hand around his penis and felt it twitch. She bathed his body with aromatic oils, she clipped his fingernails and toenails, she felt soft stubble on his cheeks and chin. She murmured to him, urging him to life, urging him to join her on her couch. She poured wine for him that he could not drink, so instead she dribbled a little on the floor and drank the wine herself. And drank again. And again, until she stumbled backwards and sprawled across her couch, legs asunder, begging him to approach.

He moved. It wasn’t just the flicker of candlelight. He lowered his raised arm, he swung his legs to hang over the edge of the base. The copper water pipe scraped and broke as he stood; water spilled and steamed behind him as he walked across the room. A floor tile cracked beneath his feet. Her breath caught in her throat. His cock seemed even bigger and hot desire flooded her. She lifted a little off the couch, legs already bent to offer herself to him.

When he reached her, he touched her breasts, his palms cool and smooth, and ran his hands down her body. She lifted her hips, urging him to enter her, and he knelt on the bed. Thick, gilded timbers groaned. He raised himself above her and then down, penetrating her, laying himself along her body, along the length of her, resting on her as her ribs snapped and her pelvis broke, and she gave one last scream before blood stopped her voice.

Silence filled the private rooms. After a time, the slave girl crept from the statue’s base to see the stone lover stone again, and the queen’s body crushed beneath him. The girl reached a tentative hand to touch the queen’s cooling foot before she walked to the doorway and flung it open, to let in the courtiers and, behind them, the populace. They crowded around the wrecked couch in silence, their liberation so sudden they could not raise a cheer, but at the shoreline voices rose in celebration.

“Fish,” they cried. “We are saved! Fish!”

©2017 by Marta Randall.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marta Randall’s first story was published in 1972 in Michael Moorcock’s New Wave anthology, New Worlds 5. Since that time she has gone on to write 7 novels (one a Nebula nominee), over 20 pieces of short fiction, and various pieces of non-fiction. She has also taught writing since the early 1970’s. She served one term as vice-president and two terms as president of SFWA. Because of this experience, she is known as a highly-skilled cat-herder.

Born in Mexico City, she grew up in Berkeley, California, and lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Finding life on earthquake faults tedious, she now lives on the side of an active volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i.

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

La Peau Verte

Caitlín R. Kiernan | 9820 words

1.

In a dusty, antique-littered back room of the loft on St. Mark’s Place, a room with walls the color of ripe cranberries, Hannah stands naked in front of the towering mahogany-framed mirror and stares at herself. No—not her self any longer, but the new thing that the man and woman have made of her. Three long hours busy with their airbrushes and latex prosthetics, grease paints and powders and spirit gum, their four hands moving as one, roaming excitedly and certainly across her body, hands sure of their purpose. She doesn’t remember their names, if, in fact, they ever told their names to her. Maybe they did, but the two glasses of brandy she’s had have set the names somewhere just beyond recall. Him tall and thin, her thin but not so very tall, and now they’ve both gone, leaving Hannah alone. Perhaps their part in this finished; perhaps the man and woman are being paid, and she’ll never see either of them again, and she feels a sudden, unexpected pang at the thought, never one for casual intimacies, and they have been both casual and intimate with her body.

The door opens, and the music from the party grows suddenly louder. Nothing she would ever recognize, probably nothing that has a name, even; wild impromptu of drumming hands and flutes, violins and cellos, an incongruent music that is both primitive and drawing-room practiced. The old woman with the mask of peacock feathers and gown of iridescent satin stands in the doorway, watching Hannah. After a moment, she smiles and nods her head slowly, appreciatively.

“Very pretty,” she says. “How does it feel?”

“A little strange,” Hannah replies and looks at the mirror again. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Haven’t you?” the old woman asks her, and Hannah remembers her name, then—Jackie, Jackie something that sounds like Shady or Sadie, but isn’t either. A sculptor from England, someone said. When she was very young, she knew Picasso, and someone said that, too.

“No,” Hannah replies. “I haven’t. Are they ready for me now?”

“Fifteen more minutes, give or take. I’ll be back to bring you in. Relax. Would you like another brandy?”

Would I? Hannah thinks and glances down at the crystal snifter sitting atop an old secretary next to the mirror. It’s almost empty now, maybe one last warm amber sip standing between it and empty. She wants another drink, something to burn away the last, lingering dregs of her inhibition and self-doubt, but “No,” she tells the woman. “I’m fine.”

“Then chill, and I’ll see you in fifteen,” Jackie Whomever says, smiles again, her disarming, inviting smile of perfect white teeth, and she closes the door, leaving Hannah alone with the green thing watching her from the mirror.

The old Tiffany lamps scattered around the room shed candy puddles of stained-glass light, light as warm as the brandy, warm as the dark-chocolate tones of the intricately carved frame holding the tall mirror. She takes one tentative step nearer the glass, and the green thing takes an equally tentative step nearer her. I’m in there somewhere, she thinks. Aren’t I?

Her skin painted too many competing, complementary shades of green to possibly count, one shade bleeding into the next, an infinity of greens that seem to roil and flow around her bare legs, her flat, hard stomach, her breasts. No patch of skin left uncovered, her flesh become a rain-forest canopy, autumn waves in rough, shallow coves, the shells of beetles and leaves from a thousand gardens, moss and emeralds, jade statues and the brilliant scales of poisonous tropical serpents. Her nails polished a green so deep it might almost be black, instead. The uncomfortable scleral contacts to turn her eyes into the blaze of twin chartreuse stars, and Hannah leans a little closer to the mirror, blinking at those eyes, with those eyes, the windows to a soul she doesn’t have. A soul of everything vegetable and living, everything growing or not, soul of sage and pond scum, malachite and verdigris. The fragile translucent wings sprouting from her shoulder blades—at least another thousand greens to consider in those wings alone—and all the many places where they’ve been painstakingly attached to her skin are hidden so expertly she’s no longer sure where the wings end and she begins.

The one, and the other.

“I definitely should have asked for another brandy,” Hannah says out loud, spilling the words nervously from her ocher, olive, turquoise lips.

Her hair—not her hair, but the wig hiding her hair—like something parasitic, something growing from the bark of a rotting tree, epiphyte curls across her painted shoulders, spilling down her back between and around the base of the wings. The long tips the man and woman added to her ears so dark that they almost match her nails, and her nipples airbrushed the same lightless, bottomless green, as well. She smiles, and even her teeth have been tinted a matte pea green.

There is a single teardrop of green glass glued firmly between her lichen eyebrows.

I could get lost in here, she thinks, and immediately wishes she’d thought something else instead.

Perhaps I am already.

And then Hannah forces herself to look away from the mirror, reaches for the brandy snifter and the last swallow of her drink. Too much of the night still lies ahead of her to get freaked out over a costume, too much left to do and way too much money for her to risk getting cold feet now. She finishes the brandy, and the new warmth spreading through her belly is reassuring.

Hannah sets the empty glass back down on the secretary and then looks at herself again. And this time it is her self, after all, the familiar lines of her face still visible just beneath the make-up. But it’s a damn good illusion. Whoever the hell’s paying for this is certainly getting his money’s worth, she thinks.

Beyond the back room, the music seems to be rising, swelling quickly towards crescendo, the strings racing the flutes, the drums hammering along underneath. The old woman named Jackie will be back for her soon. Hannah takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with air that smells and tastes like dust and old furniture, like the paint on her skin, more faintly of the summer rain falling on the roof of the building. She exhales slowly and stares longingly at the empty snifter.

“Better to keep a clear head,” she reminds herself.

Is that what I have here? And she laughs, but something about the room or her reflection in the tall mirror turns the sound into little more than a cheerless cough.

And then Hannah stares at the beautiful, impossible green woman staring back at her, and waits.

2.

“Anything forbidden becomes mysterious,” Peter says and picks up his remaining bishop, then sets it back down on the board without making a move. “And mysterious things always become attractive to us, sooner or later. Usually sooner.”

“What is that? Some sort of unwritten social law?” Hannah asks him, distracted by the Beethoven that he always insists on whenever they play chess. Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus at the moment, and she’s pretty sure he only does it to break her concentration.

“No, dear. Just a statement of the fucking obvious.”

Peter picks up the black bishop again, and this time he almost uses it to capture one of her rooks, then thinks better of it. More than thirty years her senior and the first friend she made after coming to Manhattan, his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache that’s mostly salt, his eyes as grey as a winter sky.

“Oh,” she says, wishing he’d just take the damn rook and be done with it. Two moves from checkmate, barring an act of divine intervention. But that’s another of his games, Delaying the Inevitable. She thinks he probably has a couple of trophies for it stashed away somewhere in his cluttered apartment, chintzy faux golden loving cups for his Skill and Excellence in Procrastination.

“Taboo breeds desire. Gluttony breeds disinterest.”

“Jesus, I ought to write these things down,” she says, and he smirks at her, dangling the bishop teasingly only an inch or so above the chessboard.

“Yes, you really should. My agent could probably sell them to someone or another. Peter Mulligan’s Big Book of Tiresome Truths. I’m sure it would be more popular than my last novel. It certainly couldn’t be less—”

“Will you stop it and move already? Take the damned rook, and get it over with.”

“But it might be a mistake,” he says and leans back in his chair, mock suspicion on his face, one eyebrow cocked, and he points towards her queen. “It could be a trap. You might be one of those predators that fakes out its quarry by playing dead.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes I do. You know what I mean. Those animals, the ones that only pretend to be dead. You might be one of those.”

“I might just get tired of this and go the hell home,” she sighs, because he knows that she won’t, so she can say whatever she wants.

“Anyway,” he says, “it’s work, if you want it. It’s just a party. Sounds like an easy gig to me.”

“I have that thing on Tuesday morning though, and I don’t want to be up all night.”

“Another shoot with Kellerman?” asks Peter and frowns at her, taking his eyes off the board, tapping at his chin with the bishop’s mitre.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“You hear things, that’s all. Well, I hear things. I don’t think you ever hear anything at all.”

“I need the work, Pete. The last time I sold a piece, I think Lincoln was still President. I’ll never make as much money painting as I do posing for other people’s art.”

“Poor Hannah,” Peter says. He sets the bishop back down beside his king and lights a cigarette. She almost asks him for one, but he thinks she quit three months ago, and it’s nice having at least that one thing to lord over him; sometimes it’s even useful. “At least you have a fallback,” he mutters and exhales; the smoke lingers above the board like fog on a battlefield.

“Do you even know who these people are?” she asks and looks impatiently at the clock above his kitchen sink.

“Not firsthand, no. But then they’re not exactly my sort. Entirely too, well . . .” and Peter pauses, searching for a word that never comes, so he continues without it. “But the Frenchman who owns the place on St. Mark’s, Mr. Ordinaire—excuse me, Monsieur Ordinaire—I heard he used to be some sort of anthropologist. I think he might have written a book once.”

“Maybe Kellerman would reschedule for the afternoon,” Hannah says, talking half to herself.

“You’ve actually never tasted it?” he asks, picking up the bishop again and waving it ominously towards her side of the board.

“No,” she replies, too busy now wondering if the photographer will rearrange his Tuesday schedule on her behalf to be annoyed at Peter’s cat and mouse with her rook.

“Dreadful stuff,” he says and makes a face like a kid tasting Brussels sprouts or Pepto-Bismol for the first time. “Might as well have a big glass of black jelly beans and cheap vodka, if you ask me. La Fée Verte my fat ass.”

“Your ass isn’t fat, you skinny old queen,” Hannah scowls playfully, reaching quickly across the table and snatching the bishop from Peter’s hand. He doesn’t resist. This isn’t the first time she’s grown too tired of waiting for him to move to wait any longer. She removes her white rook off the board and sets the black bishop in its place.

“That’s suicide, dear,” Peter says, shaking his head and frowning. “You’re aware of that, yes?”

“You know those animals that bore their prey into submission?”

“No, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of them before.”

“Then maybe you should get out more often.”

“Maybe I should,” he replies, setting the captured rook down with all the other prisoners he’s taken. “So, are you going to do the party? It’s a quick grand, you ask me.”

“That’s easy for you say. You’re not the one who’ll be getting naked for a bunch of drunken strangers.”

“A fact for which we should all be forevermore and eternally grateful.”

“You have his number?” she asks, giving in, because that’s almost a whole month’s rent in one night and, after her last gallery show, beggars can’t be choosers.

“There’s a smart girl,” Peter says and takes another drag off his cigarette. “The number’s on my desk somewhere. Remind me again before you leave. Your move.”

3.

“How old were you when that happened, when your sister died?” the psychologist asks, Dr. Edith Valloton and her smartly-cut hair so black it always makes Hannah think of fresh tar, or old tar gone deadly soft again beneath a summer sun to lay a trap for unwary, crawling things. Someone she sees when the nightmares get bad, which is whenever the painting isn’t going well or the modeling jobs aren’t coming in or both. Someone she can tell her secrets to who has to keep them secret, someone who listens as long as she pays by the hour, a place to turn when faith runs out and priests are just another bad memory to be confessed.

“Almost twelve,” Hannah tells her and watches while Edith Valloton scribbles a note on her yellow legal pad.

“Do you remember if you’d begun menstruating yet?”

“Yeah. My periods started right after my eleventh birthday.”

“And these dreams, and the stones. This is something you’ve never told anyone?”

“I tried to tell my mother once.”

“She didn’t believe you?”

Hannah coughs into her hand and tries not to smile, that bitter, wry smile to give away things she didn’t come here to show.

“She didn’t even hear me,” she says.

“Did you try more than once to tell her about the fairies?”

“I don’t think so. Mom was always pretty good at letting us know whenever she didn’t want to hear what was being said. You learned not to waste your breath.”

“Your sister’s death, you’ve said before that it’s something she was never able to come to terms with.”

“She never tried. Whenever my father tried, or I tried, she treated us like traitors. Like we were the ones who put Judith in her grave. Or like we were the ones keeping her there.”

“If she couldn’t face it, Hannah, then I’m sure it did seem that way to her.”

“So, no,” Hannah says, annoyed that she’s actually paying someone to sympathize with her mother. “No. I guess never really told anyone about it.”

“But you think you want to tell me now?” the psychologist asks and sips her bottled water, never taking her eyes off Hannah.

“You said to talk about all the nightmares, all the things I think are nightmares. It’s the only one that I’m not sure about.”

“Not sure if it’s a nightmare, or not sure if it’s even a dream?”

“Well, I always thought I was awake. For years, it never once occurred to me I might have only been dreaming.”

Edith Valloton watches her silently for a moment, her cat-calm, cat-smirk face, unreadable, too well trained to let whatever’s behind those dark eyes slip and show. Too detached to be smug, too concerned to be indifferent. Sometimes, Hannah thinks she might be a dyke, but maybe that’s only because the friend who recommended her is a lesbian.

“Do you still have the stones?” the psychologist asks, finally, and Hannah shrugs out of habit.

“Somewhere, probably. I never throw anything away. They might be up at Dad’s place, for all I know. A bunch of my shit’s still up there, stuff from when I was a kid.”

“But you haven’t tried to find them?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“When is the last time you saw them, the last time you can remember having seen them?”

And Hannah has to stop and think, chews intently at a stubby thumbnail and watches the clock on the psychologist’s desk, the second hand traveling round and round and round. Seconds gone for pennies, nickels, dimes.

Hannah, this is the sort of thing you really ought to try to get straight ahead of time, she thinks in a voice that sounds more like Dr. Valloton’s than her own thought-voice. A waste of money, a waste of time . . .

“You can’t remember?” the psychologist asks and leans a little closer to Hannah.

“I kept them all in an old cigar box. I think my grandfather gave me the box. No, wait. He didn’t. He gave it to Judith, and then I took it after the accident. I didn’t think she’d mind.”

“I’d like to see them someday, if you ever come across them again. Wouldn’t that help you to know whether it was a dream or not, if the stones are real?”

“Maybe,” Hannah mumbles around her thumb. “And maybe not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“A thing like that, words scratched onto a handful of stones, it’d be easy for a kid to fake. I might have made them all myself. Or someone else might have made them, someone playing a trick on me. Anyone could have left them there.”

“Did people do that often? Play tricks on you?”

“Not that I can recall. No more than usual.”

Edith Valloton writes something else on her yellow pad and then checks the clock.

“You said that there were always stones after the dreams. Never before?”

“No, never before. Always after. They were always there the next day, always in the same place.”

“At the old well,” the psychologist says, like Hannah might have forgotten and needs reminding.

“Yeah, at the old well. Dad was always talking about doing something about it, before the accident, you know. Something besides a couple of sheets of corrugated tin to hide the hole. Afterwards, of course, the county ordered him to have the damned thing filled in.”

“Did your mother blame him for the accident, because he never did anything about the well?”

“My mother blamed everyone. She blamed him. She blamed me. She blamed whoever had dug that hole in the first goddamn place. She blamed God for putting water underground so people would dig wells to get at it. Believe me, Mom had blame down to an art.”

And again, the long pause, the psychologist’s measured consideration, quiet moments she plants like seeds to grow ever deeper revelations.

“Hannah, I want you to try to remember the word that was on the first stone you found. Can you do that?”

“That’s easy. It was follow.”

“And do you also know what was written on the last one, the very last one that you found?”

And this time she has to think, but only for a moment.

“Fall,” she says. “The last one said fall.”

4.

Half a bottle of Mari Mayans borrowed from an unlikely friend of Peter’s, a goth chick who DJs at a club that Hannah’s never been to because Hannah doesn’t go to clubs. Doesn’t dance and has always been more or less indifferent to both music and fashion. The goth chick works days at Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s, selling Doc Martens and blue hair dye only a couple of blocks from the address on the card that Peter gave her. The place where the party is being held. La Fête de la Fée Verte, according to the small white card, the card with the phone number. She’s already made the call, has already agreed to be there, seven o’clock sharp, seven on the dot, and everything that’s expected of her has been explained in detail, twice.

Hannah’s sitting on the floor beside her bed, a couple of vanilla-scented candles burning because she feels obligated to make at least half a half-hearted effort at atmosphere. Obligatory show of respect for mystique that doesn’t interest her, but she’s gone to the trouble to borrow the bottle of liqueur; the bottle passed to her in a brown paper bag at the boutique, anything but inconspicuous, and the girl glared out at her, cautious from beneath lids so heavy with shades of black and purple that Hannah was amazed the girl could open her eyes.

“So, you’re supposed to be a friend of Peter’s?” the girl asked suspiciously.

“Yeah, supposedly,” Hannah replied, accepting the package, feeling vaguely, almost pleasurably illicit. “We’re chess buddies.”

“A painter,” the girl said.

“Most of the time.”

“Peter’s a cool old guy. He made bail for my boyfriend once, couple of years back.”

“Really? Yeah, he’s wonderful,” and Hannah glanced nervously at the customers browsing the racks of leather handbags and corsets, then at the door and the bright daylight outside.

“You don’t have to be so jumpy. It’s not illegal to have absinthe. It’s not even illegal to drink it. It’s only illegal to import it, which you didn’t do. So don’t sweat it.”

Hannah nodded, wondering if the girl was telling the truth, if she knew what she was talking about. “What do I owe you?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” the girl replied. “You’re a friend of Peter’s, and, besides, I get it cheap from someone over in Jersey. Just bring back whatever you don’t drink.”

And now Hannah twists the cap off the bottle, and the smell of odor is so strong, so immediate, she can smell it before she even raises the bottle to her nose. Black jelly beans, she thinks, just like Peter said, and that’s something else she never cared for. As a little girl, she’d set the black ones aside—and the pink ones, too—saving them for her sister. Her sister had liked the black ones.

She has a wine glass, one from an incomplete set she bought last Christmas, secondhand, and she has a box of sugar cubes, a decanter filled with filtered tap water, a spoon from her mother’s mismatched antique silverware. She pours the absinthe, letting it drip slowly from the bottle until the fluorescent yellow-green liquid has filled the bottom of the glass. Then Hannah balances the spoon over the mouth of the goblet and places one of the sugar cubes in the tarnished bowl of the spoon. She remembers watching Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder doing this in Dracula, remembers seeing the movie with a boyfriend who eventually left her for another man, and the memory and all its associations are enough to make her stop and sit staring at the glass for a moment.

“This is so fucking silly,” she says, but part of her, the part that feels guilty for taking jobs that pay the bills, but have nothing to do with painting, the part that’s always busy rationalizing and justifying the way she spends her time, assures her it’s a sort of research. A new experience, horizon-broadening something to expand her mind’s eye, and, for all she knows, it might lead her art somewhere it needs to go.

“Bullshit,” she whispers, frowning down at the entirely uninviting glass of Spanish absinthe. She’s been reading Absinthe: History in a Bottle and Artists and Absinthe, accounts of Van Gogh and Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde and Paul Marie Verlaine and their various relationships with this foul-smelling liqueur. She’s never had much respect for artists who use this or that drug as a crutch and then call it their muse; heroin, cocaine, pot, booze, what-the-hell-ever, all the same shit as far as she’s concerned. An excuse, an inability in the artist to hold himself accountable for his own art, a lazy cop-out, as useless as the idea of the muse itself. And this drug, this drug in particular, so tied up with art and inspiration there’s even a Renoir painting decorating the Mari Mayans label, or at least it’s something that’s supposed to look like a Renoir.

But you’ve gone to all this trouble. Hell, you may as well taste it, at least. Just a taste, to satisfy curiosity, to see what all the fuss is about.

Hannah sets the bottle down and picks up the decanter, pouring water over the spoon, over the sugar cube. The absinthe louches quickly to an opalescent, milky white-green. Then she puts the decanter back on the floor and stirs the half-dissolved sugar into the glass, sets the spoon aside on a china saucer.

“Enjoy the ride,” the goth girl said as Hannah walked out of the shop. “She’s a blast.”

Hannah raises the glass to her lips, sniffs at it, wrinkling her nose, and the first, hesitant sip is even sweeter and more piquant than she expected, sugar-soft fire when she swallows, a seventy-proof flower blooming hot in her belly. But the taste is not nearly as disagreeable as she’d thought it would be, the sudden licorice and alcohol sting, a faint bitterness underneath that she guesses might be the wormwood. The second sip is less of a shock, especially since her tongue seems to have gone slightly numb.

She opens Absinthe: History in a Bottle again, opening the book at random, and there’s a full-page reproduction of Albert Maignan’s The Green Muse. A blonde woman with marble skin, golden hair, wrapped in diaphanous folds of olive, her feet hovering weightless above bare floorboards, her hands caressing the forehead of an intoxicated poet. The man is gaunt and seems lost in some ecstasy or revelry or simple delirium, his right hand clawing at his face, the other hand open in what might have been meant as a feeble attempt to ward off the attentions of his unearthly companion. Or, Hannah thinks, perhaps he’s reaching for something. There’s a shattered green bottle on the floor at his feet, a full glass of absinthe on his writing desk.

Hannah takes another sip and turns the page.

A photograph, Verlaine drinking absinthe in the Café Procope.

Another, bolder swallow, and the taste is becoming familiar now, almost, almost pleasant.

Another page. Jean Béraud’s Le Boulevard, La Nuit.

When the glass is empty, and the buzz in her head, behind her eyes is so gentle, buzz like a stinging insect wrapped in spider silk and honey, Hannah takes another sugar cube from the box and pours another glass.

5.

“Fairies.

Fairy crosses.”

Harper’s Weekly, 50-715:

That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found.

A race of tiny beings.

They crucified cockroaches.

Exquisite beings—but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified.

The ‘fairy crosses,’ we are told in Harper’s Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the Scientific American, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the head of a pin.

They have been found in two other states, but all
in Virginia are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain . . .
 . . . I suppose they fell there.”

—Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919)

6.

In the dream, which is never the same thing twice, not precisely, Hannah is twelve years old and standing at her bedroom window watching the backyard. It’s almost dark, the last rays of twilight, and there are chartreuse fireflies dappling the shadows, already a few stars twinkling in the high indigo sky, the call of a whippoorwill from the woods nearby.

Another whippoorwill answers.

And the grass is moving. The grass grown so tall because her father never bothers to mow it anymore. It could be wind, only there is no wind; the leaves in the trees are all perfectly, silently still, and no limb swaying, no twig, no leaves rustling in even the stingiest breeze. Only the grass.

It’s probably just a cat, she thinks. A cat, or a skunk, or a raccoon.

The bedroom has grown very dark, and she wants to turn on a lamp, afraid of the restless grass even though she knows it’s only some small animal, awake for the night and hunting, taking a short cut across their backyard. She looks over her shoulder, meaning to ask Judith to please turn on a lamp, but there’s only the dark room, Judith’s empty bunk, and she remembers it all again. It’s always like the very first time she heard, the surprise and disbelief and pain always that fresh, the numbness that follows that absolute.

“Have you seen your sister?” her mother asks from the open bedroom door. There’s so much night pooled there that she can’t make out anything but her mother’s softly glowing eyes the soothing color of amber beads, two cat-slit pupils swollen wide against the gloom.

“No, Mom,” Hannah tells her, and there’s a smell in the room then like burning leaves.

“She shouldn’t be out so late on a school night.”

“No, Mom, she shouldn’t,” and the eleven-year-old Hannah is amazed at the thirty-five-year-old’s voice coming from her mouth. The thirty-five-year-old Hannah remembers how clear, how unburdened by time and sorrow, the eleven-year-old Hannah’s voice could be.

“You should look for her,” her mother says.

“I always do. That comes later.”

“Hannah, have you seen your sister?”

Outside, the grass has begun to swirl, rippling round and round upon itself, and there’s the faintest green glow dancing a few inches above the ground.

The fireflies, she thinks, though she knows it’s not the fireflies, the way she knows it’s not a cat, or a skunk, or a raccoon making the grass move.

“Your father should have seen to that damned well,” her mother mutters, and the burning leaves smell grows a little stronger. “He should have done something about that years ago.”

“Yes, Mom, he should have. You should have made him.”

“No,” her mother replies angrily. “This is not my fault. None of it’s my fault.”

“No, of course it’s not.”

“When we bought this place, I told him to see to that well. I told him it was dangerous.”

“You were right,” Hannah says, watching the grass, the softly pulsing cloud of green light hanging above it. The light is still only about as big as a basketball. Later, it’ll get a lot bigger. She can hear the music now, pipes and drums and fiddles, like a song from one of her father’s albums of folk music.

“Hannah, have you seen your sister?”

Hannah turns and stares defiantly back at her mother’s glowing, accusing eyes.

“That makes three, Mom. Now you have to leave. Sorry, but them’s the rules,” and her mother does leave, that obedient phantom fading slowly away with a sigh, a flicker, a half second when the darkness seems to bend back upon itself, and she takes the burning leaves smell with her.

The light floating above the backyard grows brighter, reflecting dully off the windowpane, off Hannah’s skin and the room’s white walls. The music rises to meet the light’s challenge.

Peter’s standing beside her now, and she wants to hold his hand, but doesn’t, because she’s never quite sure if he’s supposed to be in this dream.

“I am the Green Fairy,” he says, sounding tired and older than he is, sounding sad. “My robe is the color of despair.”

“No,” she says. “You’re only Peter Mulligan. You write books about places you’ve never been and people who will never be born.”

“You shouldn’t keep coming here,” he whispers, the light from the backyard shining in his grey eyes, tinting them to moss and ivy.

“Nobody else does. Nobody else ever could.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

But he stops and stares speechlessly at the backyard.

“I should try to find Judith,” Hannah says. “She shouldn’t be out so late on a school night.”

“That painting you did last winter,” Peter mumbles, mumbling like he’s drunk or only half awake. “The pigeons on your windowsill, looking in.”

“That wasn’t me. You’re thinking of someone else.”

“I hated that damned painting. I was glad when you sold it.”

“So was I,” Hannah says. “I should try to find her now, Peter. My sister. It’s almost time for dinner.”

“I am ruin and sorrow,” he whispers.

And now the green light is spinning very fast, throwing off gleaming flecks of itself to take up the dance, to swirl about their mother star, little worlds newborn, whole universes, and she could hold them all in the palm of her right hand.

“What I need,” Peter says, “is blood, red and hot, the palpitating flesh of my victims.”

“Jesus, Peter, that’s purple even for you,” and Hannah reaches out and lets her fingers brush the glass. It’s warm, like the spring evening, like her mother’s glowing eyes.

“I didn’t write it,” he says.

“And I never painted pigeons.”

She presses her fingers against the glass and isn’t surprised when it shatters, explodes, and the sparkling diamond blast is blown inward, tearing her apart, shredding the dream until it’s only unconscious, fitful sleep.

7.

“I wasn’t in the mood for this,” Hannah says and sets the paper saucer with three greasy, uneaten cubes of orange cheese and a couple of Ritz crackers down on one corner of a convenient table. The table is crowded with fliers about other shows, other openings at other galleries. She glances at Peter and then at the long white room and the canvases on the walls.

“I thought it would do you good to get out. You never go anywhere anymore.”

“I come to see you.”

“My point exactly, dear.”

Hannah sips at her plastic cup of warm merlot, wishing she had a beer instead.

“And you said that you liked Perrault’s work.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m just not sure I’m up for it tonight. I’ve been feeling pretty morbid lately, all on my own.”

“That’s generally what happens to people who swear off sex.”

“Peter, I didn’t swear off anything.”

And she follows him on their first slow circuit around the room, small talk with people that she hardly knows or doesn’t want to know at all, people who know Peter better than they know her, people whose opinions matter and people whom she wishes she’d never met. She smiles and nods her head, sips her wine, and tries not to look too long at any of the huge, dark canvases spaced out like oil and acrylic windows on a train.

“He’s trying to bring us down, down to the very core of those old stories,” a woman named Rose tells Peter. She owns a gallery somewhere uptown, the sort of place where Hannah’s paintings will never hang. “‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ all those old fairy tales,” Rose says. “It’s a very post-Freudian approach.”

“Indeed,” Peter says. As if he agrees, Hannah thinks, as if he even cares, when she knows damn well he doesn’t.

“How’s the new novel coming along?” Rose asks him.

“Like a mouthful of salted thumbtacks,” he replies, and she laughs.

Hannah turns and looks at the nearest painting, because it’s easier than listening to the woman and Peter pretend to enjoy one another’s company. A somber storm of blacks and reds and greys, dappled chaos struggling to resolve itself into images, images stalled at the very edge of perception. She thinks she remembers having seen a photo of this canvas in Artforum.

A small beige card on the wall to the right of the painting identifies it as Night in the Forest. There isn’t a price, because none of Perrault’s paintings are ever for sale. She’s heard rumors that he’s turned down millions, tens of millions, but suspects that’s all exaggeration and PR. Urban legends for modern artists, and from the other things that she’s heard he doesn’t need the money, anyway.

Rose says something about the exploration of possibility and fairy tales and children using them to avoid any real danger, something that Hannah’s pretty sure she’s lifted directly from Bruno Bettelheim.

“Me, I was always rooting for the wolf,” Peter says, “or the wicked witch or the three bears or whatever. I never much saw the point in rooting for silly girls too thick not to go wandering about alone in the woods.”

Hannah laughs softly, laughing to herself, and takes a step back from the painting, squinting at it. A moonless sky pressing cruelly down upon a tangled, writhing forest, a path and something waiting in the shadows, stooped shoulders, ribsy, a calculated smudge of scarlet that could be its eyes. There’s no one on the path, but the implication is clear—there will be, soon enough, and the thing crouched beneath the trees is patient.

“Have you seen the stones yet?” Rose asks and no, Peter replies, no we haven’t.

“They’re a new direction for him,” she says. “This is only the second time they’ve been exhibited.”

If I could paint like that, Hannah thinks, I could tell Dr. Valloton to kiss my ass. If I could paint like that, it would be an exorcism.

And then Rose leads them both to a poorly lit corner of the gallery, to a series of rusted wire cages, and inside each one is a single stone. Large pebbles or small cobbles, stream-worn slate and granite, and each stone has been crudely engraved with a single word.

The first one reads “follow.”

“Peter, I need to go now,” Hannah says, unable to look away from the yellow-brown stone, the word tattooed on it, and she doesn’t dare let her eyes wander ahead to the next one.

“Are you sick?”

“I need to go, that’s all. I need to go now.”

“If you’re not feeling well,” the woman named Rose says, trying too hard to be helpful, “there’s a restroom in the back.”

“No, I’m fine. Really. I just need some air.”

And Peter puts an arm protectively around her, reciting his hurried, polite goodbyes to Rose. But Hannah still can’t look away from the stone, sitting there behind the wire like a small and vicious animal at the zoo.

“Good luck with the book,” Rose says and smiles, and Hannah’s beginning to think she is going to be sick, that she will have to make a dash for the toilet, after all. There’s a taste like foil in her mouth, and her heart like a mallet on dead and frozen beef, adrenaline, the first eager tug of vertigo.

“It was good to meet you, Hannah,” the woman says. Hannah manages to smile, manages to nod her head.

And then Peter leads her quickly back through the crowded gallery, out onto the sidewalk and the warm night spread out along Mercer Street.

8.

“Would you like to talk about that day at the well?” Dr. Valloton asks, and Hannah bites at her chapped lower lip.

“No. Not now,” she says. “Not again.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve already told you everything I can remember.”

“If they’d found her body,” the psychologist says, “perhaps you and your mother and father would have been able to move on. There could have at least been some sort of closure. There wouldn’t have been that lingering hope that maybe someone would find her, that maybe she was alive.”

Hannah sighs loudly, looking at the clock for release, but there’s still almost half an hour to go.

“Judith fell down the well and drowned,” she says.

“But they never found the body.”

“No, but they found enough, enough to be sure. She fell down the well. She drowned. It was very deep.”

“You said you heard her calling you.”

“I’m not sure,” Hannah says, interrupting the psychologist before she can say the things she was going to say next, before she can use Hannah’s own words against her. “I’ve never been absolutely sure. I told you that.”

“I’m sorry if it seems like I’m pushing,” Dr. Valloton says.

“I just don’t see any reason to talk about it again.”

“Then let’s talk about the dreams, Hannah. Let’s talk about the day you saw the fairies.”

9.

The dreams, or the day from which the dreams would arise and, half-forgotten, seek always to return. The dreams or the day itself, the one or the other, it makes very little difference. The mind exists only in a moment, always, a single flickering moment, remembered or actual, dreaming or awake or something liminal between the two, the precious, treacherous illusion of Present floundering in the crack between Past and Future.

The dream of the day—or the day itself—and the sun is high and small and white, a dazzling July sun coming down in shafts through the tall trees in the woods behind Hannah’s house. She’s running to catch up with Judith, her sister two years older and her legs grown longer, always leaving Hannah behind. You can’t catch me, slowpoke. You can’t even keep up. Hannah almost trips in a tangle of creeper vines and has to stop long enough to free her left foot.

“Wait up!” she shouts, and Judith doesn’t answer. “I want to see. Wait for me!”

The vines try to pull one of Hannah’s tennis shoes off and leave bright beads of blood on her ankle. But she’s loose again in only a moment, running down the narrow path to catch up, running through the summer sun and the oak-leaf shadows.

“I found something,” Judith said to her that morning after breakfast. The two of them sitting on the back porch steps. “Down in the clearing by the old well,” she said.

“What? What did you find?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should tell you. No, I definitely shouldn’t tell you. You might go and tell Mom and Dad. You might spoil everything.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Yes, you would, big mouth.”

And, finally, she gave Judith half her allowance to tell, half to be shown whatever there was to see. Her sister dug deep down into the pockets of her jeans, and her hand came back up with a shiny black pebble.

“I just gave you a whole dollar to show me a rock?”

“No, stupid. Look at it,” and Judith held out her hand.

The letters scratched deep into the stone—JVDTH—five crooked letters that almost spelled her sister’s name, and Hannah didn’t have to pretend not to be impressed.

“Wait for me!” she shouts again, angry now, her voice echoing around the trunks of the old trees and dead leaves crunching beneath her shoes. Starting to guess that the whole thing is a trick after all, just one of Judith’s stunts, and her sister’s probably watching her from a hiding place right this very second, snickering quietly to herself. Hannah stops running and stands in the center of the path, listening to the murmuring forest sounds around her.

And something faint and lilting that might be music.

“That’s not all,” Judith said. “But you have to swear you won’t tell Mom and Dad.”

“I swear.”

“If you do tell, well, I promise I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”

“I won’t tell anyone anything.”

“Give it back,” Judith said, and Hannah immediately handed the black stone back to her. “If you do tell—”

“I already said I won’t. How many times do I have to say I won’t tell?”

“Well then,” Judith said and led her around to the back of the little tool shed where their father kept his hedge clippers and bags of fertilizer and the old lawnmowers he liked to take apart and try to put back together again.

“This better be worth a dollar,” Hannah said.

She stands very, very still and listens to the music, growing louder. She thinks it’s coming from the clearing up ahead.

“I’m going back home, Judith!” she shouts, not a bluff because suddenly she doesn’t care whether or not the thing in the jar was real, and the sun doesn’t seem as warm as it did only a moment ago.

And the music keeps getting louder.

And louder.

And Judith took an empty mayonnaise jar out of the empty rabbit hutch behind the tool shed. She held it up to the sun, smiling at whatever was inside.

“Let me see,” Hannah said.

“Maybe I should make you give me another dollar first,” her sister replied, smirking, not looking away from the jar.

“No way,” Hannah said indignantly. “Not a snowball’s chance in Hell,” and she grabbed for the jar, then, but Judith was faster, and her hand closed around nothing at all.

In the woods, Hannah turns and looks back towards home, then turns back towards the clearing again, waiting for her just beyond the trees.

“Judith! This isn’t funny! I’m going home right this second!”

Her heart is almost as loud as the music now. Almost. Not quite, but close enough. Pipes and fiddles, drums and a jingle like tambourines.

Hannah takes another step towards the clearing, because it’s nothing at all but her sister trying to scare her. Which is stupid, because it’s broad daylight, and Hannah knows these woods like the back of her hand.

Judith unscrewed the lid of the mayonnaise jar and held it out so Hannah could see the small, dry thing curled in a lump at the bottom. Tiny mummy husk of a thing, gray and crumbling in the morning light.

“It’s just a damn dead mouse,” Hannah said disgustedly. “I gave you a whole dollar to see a rock and a dead mouse in a jar?”

“It’s not a mouse, stupid. Look closer.”

And so she did, bending close enough that she could see the perfect dragonfly wings on its back, transparent, iridescent wings that glimmer faintly in the sun. Hannah squinted and realized that she could see its face, realized that it had a face.

“Oh,” she said, looking quickly up at her sister, who was grinning triumphantly. “Oh, Judith. Oh my god. What is it?”

“Don’t you know?” Judith asked her. “Do I have to tell you everything?”

Hannah picks her way over the deadfall just before the clearing, the place where the path through the woods disappears beneath a jumble of fallen, rotting logs. There was a house back here, her father said, a long, long time ago. Nothing left but a big pile of rocks where the chimney once stood, and also the well covered over with sheets of rusted corrugated tin. There was a fire, her father said, and everyone in the house died.

On the other side of the deadfall, Hannah takes a deep breath and steps out into the daylight, leaving the tree shadows behind, forfeiting her last chance not to see.

“Isn’t it cool,” Judith said. “Isn’t it the coolest thing you ever seen?”

Someone’s pushed aside the sheets of tin, and the well is so dark that even the sun won’t go there. And then Hannah sees the wide ring of mushrooms, the perfect circle of toadstools and red caps and spongy brown morels growing round the well. The heat shimmers off the tin, dancing mirage shimmer as though the air here is turning to water, and the music is very loud now.

“I found it,” Judith whispered, screwing the top back onto the jar as tightly as she could. “I found it, and I’m going to keep it. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about it, or I’ll never, ever show you anything else again.”

Hannah looks up from the mushrooms, from the open well, and there are a thousand eyes watching her from the edges of the clearing. Eyes like indigo berries and rubies and drops of honey, like gold and silver coins, eyes like fire and ice, eyes like seething dabs of midnight. Eyes filled with hunger beyond imagining, neither good nor evil, neither real nor impossible.

Something the size of a bear, squatting in the shade of a poplar tree, raises its shaggy charcoal head and smiles.

“That’s another pretty one,” it growls.

And Hannah turns and runs.

10.

“But you know, in your soul, what you must have really seen that day,” Dr. Valloton says and taps the eraser end of her pencil lightly against her front teeth. There’s something almost obscenely earnest in her expression, Hannah thinks, in the steady tap, tap, tap of the pencil against her perfectly spaced, perfectly white incisors. “You saw your sister fall into the well, or you realized that she just had. You may have heard her calling out for help.”

“Maybe I pushed her in,” Hannah whispers.

“Is that what you think happened?”

“No,” Hannah says and rubs at her temples, trying to massage away the first dim throb of an approaching headache. “But, most of the time, I’d rather believe that’s what happened.”

“Because you think it would be easier than what you remember.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t easier to believe she pissed me off that day, and so I shoved her in? That I made up these crazy stories so I’d never have to feel guilty for what I’d done? Maybe that’s what the nightmares are, my conscience trying to fucking force me to come clean.”

“And what are the stones, then?”

“Maybe I put them all there myself. Maybe I scratched those words on them myself and hid them there for me to find, because I knew that would make it easier for me to believe. If there was something that real, that tangible, something solid to remind me of the story, that the story is supposed to be the truth.”

A long moment that’s almost silence, just the clock on the desk ticking and the pencil tapping against the psychologist’s teeth. Hannah rubs harder at her temples, the real pain almost within sight now, waiting for her just a little ways past this moment or the next, vast and absolute, deep purple shot through with veins of red and black. Finally, Dr. Valloton lays her pencil down and takes a deep breath.

“Is this a confession, Hannah?” she asks, and the obscene earnestness is dissolving into something that may be eager anticipation, or simple clinical curiosity, or only dread. “Did you kill your sister?”

And Hannah shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight.

“Judith fell into the well,” she says calmly. “She moved the tin, and got too close to the edge. The sheriff showed my parents where a little bit of the ground had collapsed under her weight. She fell into the well, and she drowned.”

“Who are you trying so hard to convince? Me or yourself?”

“Do you really think it matters?” Hannah replies, matching a question with a question, tit for tat.

“Yes,” Dr. Valloton says. “Yes, I do. You need to know the truth.”

“Which one?” Hannah asks, smiling against the pain swelling behind her eyes, and this time the psychologist doesn’t bother answering, lets her sit silently with her eyes shut until the clock decides her hour’s up.

11.

Peter Mulligan picks up a black pawn and moves it ahead two squares; Hannah removes it from the board with a white knight. He isn’t even trying today, and that always annoys her. Peter pretends to be surprised that’s he’s lost another piece, then pretends to frown and think about his next move while he talks.

“In Russian,” he says, “chernobyl is the word for wormwood. Did Kellerman give you a hard time?”

“No,” Hannah says. “No, he didn’t. In fact, he said he’d actually rather do the shoot in the afternoon. So everything’s jake, I guess.”

“Small miracles,” Peter sighs, picking up a rook and setting it back down again. “So you’re doing the anthropologist’s party?”

“Yeah,” she replies. “I’m doing the anthropologist’s party.”

“Monsieur Ordinaire. You think he was born with that name?”

“I think I couldn’t give a damn, as long as his check doesn’t bounce. A thousand dollars to play dress-up for a few hours. I’d be a fool not to do the damned party.”

Peter picks the rook up again and dangles it in the air above the board, teasing her. “Oh, his book,” he says. “I remembered the title the other day. But then I forgot it all over again. Anyway, it was something on shamanism and shapeshifters, werewolves and masks, that sort of thing. It sold a lot of copies in ’68, then vanished from the face of the Earth. You could probably find out something about it online.” Peter sets the rook down and starts to take his hand away.

“Don’t,” she says. “That’ll be checkmate.”

“You could at least let me lose on my own, dear,” he scowls, pretending to be insulted.

“Yeah, well, I’m not ready to go home yet.” Hannah replies, and Peter Mulligan goes back to dithering over the chessboard and talking about Monsieur Ordinaire’s forgotten book. In a little while, she gets up to refill both their coffee cups, and there’s a single black and grey pigeon perched on the kitchen windowsill, staring in at her with its beady piss-yellow eyes. It almost reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of, and so she raps on the glass with her knuckles and frightens it away.

12.

The old woman named Jackie never comes for her. There’s a young boy, instead, fourteen or fifteen, sixteen at the most, his nails polished poppy red to match his rouged lips, and he’s dressed in peacock feathers and silk. He opens the door and stands there, very still, watching her, waiting wordlessly. Something like awe on his smooth face, and for the first time Hannah doesn’t just feel nude, she feels naked.

“Are they ready for me now?” she asks him, trying to sound no more than half as nervous as she is, and then turns her head to steal a last glance at the green fairy in the tall mahogany mirror. But the mirror is empty. There’s no one there at all, neither her nor the green woman, nothing but the dusty backroom full of antiques, the pretty hard-candy lamps, the peeling cranberry wallpaper.

“My Lady,” the boy says in a voice like broken crystal shards, and then he curtsies. “The Court is waiting to receive you, at your ready.” He steps to one side, to let her pass, and the music from the party grows suddenly very loud, changing tempo, the rhythm assuming a furious speed as a thousand notes and drumbeats tumble and boom and chase one another’s tails.

“The mirror,” Hannah whispers, pointing at it, at the place where her reflection should be, and when she turns back to the boy there’s a young girl standing there, instead, dressed in his feathers and make-up. She could be his twin.

“It’s a small thing, My Lady,” she says with the boy’s sparkling, shattered tongue.

“What’s happening?”

“The Court is assembled,” the girl child says. “They are all waiting. Don’t be afraid, My Lady. I will show you the way.”

The path, the path through the woods to the well. The path down to the well . . .

“Do you have a name?” Hannah asks, surprised at the calm in her voice; all the embarrassment and unease at standing naked before this child, and the one before, the boy twin, the fear at what she didn’t see gazing back at her in the looking glass, all of that gone now.

“My name? I’m not such a fool as that, My Lady.”

“No, of course not,” Hannah replies. “I’m sorry.”

“I will show you the way,” the child says again. “Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our Lady nigh.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Hannah replies. “I was beginning to think that I was lost. But I’m not lost, am I?”

“No, My Lady. You are here.”

“Yes. Yes, I am here, aren’t I?” and the child smiles for her, showing off its sharp crystal teeth. Hannah smiles back, and then she leaves the dusty backroom and the mahogany mirror, following the child down a short hallway; the music has filled in all the vacant corners of her skull, the music and the heavy living-dying smells of wildflowers and fallen leaves, rotting stumps and fresh-turned earth. A riotous hothouse cacophony of odors—spring to fall, summer to winter—and she’s never tasted air so violently sweet.

. . . the path down the well, and the still black water at the bottom.

Hannah, can you hear me? Hannah?

It’s so cold down here. I can’t see . . .

At the end of the hall, just past the stairs leading back down to St. Mark’s, there’s a green door, and the girl opens it. Green gets you out.

And all the things in the wide, wide room—the unlikely room that stretches so far away in every direction that it could never be contained in any building, not in a thousand buildings—the scampering, hopping, dancing, spinning, flying, skulking things, each and every one of them stops and stares at her. And Hannah knows that she ought to be frightened of them, that she should turn and run from this place. But it’s really nothing she hasn’t seen before, a long time ago, and she steps past the child (who is a boy again) as the wings on her back begin to thrum like the frantic, iridescent wings of bumblebees and hummingbirds, red wasps and hungry dragonflies. Her mouth tastes of anise and wormwood, sugar and hyssop and melissa. Sticky verdant light spills from her skin and pools in the grass and moss at her bare feet.

Sink or swim, and so easy to imagine the icy black well water closing thickly over her sister’s face, filling her mouth, slipping up her nostrils, flooding her belly, as clawed hands dragged her down.

And down.

And down.

And sometimes, Dr. Valloton says, sometimes we spend our entire lives just trying to answer one simple question.

The music is a hurricane, swallowing her.

My Lady. Lady of the Bottle. Artemisia absinthium, Chernobyl, apsinthion, Lady of Waking Dreaming, Green Lady of Elation and Melancholy.

I am ruin and sorrow.

My robe is the color of despair.

They bow, all of them, and Hannah finally sees the thing waiting for her on its prickling throne of woven branches and birds’ nests, the hulking antlered thing with blazing eyes, that wolf-jawed hart, the man and the stag, and she bows, in her turn.

©2005 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Originally published in To Charles Fort, With Love. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailed by the New York Times as “One of our essential writers of dark fiction,” Caitlín R. Kiernan has published twelve novels, including  The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl which are both being developed into feature films. Her short fiction has been collected into several volumes. In 2017, Subterranean Press will be releasing the latest collection, Dear Sweet Filthy World.

Caitlín studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado, and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes

Greg Kurzawa | 6790 words

Dear Sara,

The official verdict that I am no longer classified as human arrived in a windowed envelope bearing the return address of the Bureau of Lineage Affairs. There is one envelope for me and one for you, although I haven’t opened yours. Except for the return address, these envelopes look like something from the bank, or perhaps an offer for home insurance, the kind we throw away. Inside mine is a letter folded in thirds, and on it something like a death sentence, although a very formal and polite one. It’s here beside me—I’ve read it many times already. It breaks the bad news without much ado, then goes on to list the names and numbers of several organizations to which we may apply for further information and support. This is strongly encouraged. There is also a number to call if I feel a mistake has been made. This is not encouraged at all. Somewhere in there I’m given my identification number, which is 73281. This number is mine for the remainder of my life. Worse than all of this: They provide the numbers that have been assigned to our children: 73282 and 73283.

These facts and numbers, stated simply on plain white paper, fill me with dread—a human emotion. I’m tempted to write the BLA. “I’m terrified,” I could tell them. “Therefore I cannot be what you think I am.”

That would get my name on a list somewhere, and not the good kind.

The fact remains: Yesterday I was human—today I am . . . something else. Less than human? More than?

I wonder what your letter says.

• • • •

It’s very late. The kids are tucked away and you haven’t shown your face in almost five hours. Our bedroom door is closed, but there’s still a light on in there, despite the hour. I’m certain you’re not sleeping. Did you lock me out? I’m afraid to check. How degrading, to be locked out of one’s own room. All my things are in there. All my socks and underwear.

I considered throwing the letters away before you got home, mine and yours both. Not just throwing them away, but ripping them up and pushing them deep in the kitchen garbage, beneath the banana peels and crumpled napkins. Better yet, ripping them up into tiny pieces to disperse in trashcans throughout the house. But what would have been the use? On that paper is written truth, and truth can neither be destroyed, nor hidden. Not forever, at least.

I drank a beer instead . . . and another. I was on my third (fourth?) when the boys barged through the front door. They don’t know how to move quietly, those boys. They are incapable of sneaking and cannot whisper. They know only stomping and shouting. I hid my beer beside the couch and leaned forward to meet them as they pounded into the living room engaged in a screaming conversation. Ryan’s backpack, too big for such a small boy, dragged behind as he plowed toward the bedrooms.

Cole, seeing me on the couch, veered my way. “Dad!” he shouted. Throwing himself beside me, he shoved a fistful of colored pages into my hands.

You weren’t far behind. Not two seconds through the door and already busy closing, straightening, and collecting debris in their wake. You are disaster control, our own household FEMA. Halfway through the living room, you pried off your heels and dropped your laptop case on the recliner. Two steps later, you’d peeled off your stockings, hardly stopping.

“It’s hot out there,” you said in my direction, then vanished up the hall.

After straightening Cole’s stack of loose pages, I tried to focus on the vivid scrawls of color. They might have been monsters, but could just as easily have been superheroes. “You did all these?”

“In school.”

“Very nice. Very good.”

He guided me through his stack of monster-superheroes, each bearing a name of his own invention. Weapons, powers, and alliances were explained in detail. Though I listened to him closer than ever before, I couldn’t repeat a word of it now. I heard only his voice. I saw only his excitement, his vitality. His hair is the lightest blonde—like yours when you were a child, and too long. I wanted to gather him and his brother up and not let go. I want to go into their room now, while they sleep, to smell their hair and kiss their fingers.

These are our children. It will kill me to lose them.

• • • •

I didn’t open your letter. I left it on your dresser, in plain view where I knew you’d find it. Cole had rushed away with his stack of drawings by the time you returned. You dropped onto the opposite end of the couch and gestured for my beer, which I surrendered gladly. After a quick drink, you tossed your folded letter between us.

“That’s a relief,” you said. “Where’s yours?”

I produced it from the snug place between my thigh and the armrest and placed it on top of yours, then went for another beer so I wouldn’t have to watch your reaction. In the kitchen, I stared into the open refrigerator and listened to the boys arguing distantly about whose turn it was, or who had which thing first.

I still marvel at how human they seem.

“Oh my god,” I heard from the living room.

A pit opened wide in my gut. Everything I am—everything I was—emptied into it. The suddenness of it left me breathless and stunned. I tightened my grip on the refrigerator door and shut my eyes against the vertigo. Weightless, the voided husk of me stood in the cool air escaping the refrigerator. When I could breathe again, I turned to find you standing there with my letter held out in front of you as though contagious. And then, as though you had followed me into the kitchen to tell me this, as if I hadn’t heard you the first time, as if the words hadn’t already gutted me, “Oh my god.”

• • • •

Dear Joanne,

You should have called first. At least you brought pizza, which makes the silent judgment you serve with it tolerable. The pizza’s not the issue, though. The bathroom is the issue. I don’t like you cleaning it. You would have done my laundry too, if I’d let you—scowling all the while over the deplorable condition of my life. I know you believe that’s what big sisters are for, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’m not helpless.

Listen to me, griping like a codger. Forget I said anything. Who am I to deserve such a doting sister? I love you dearly, Jo. Thank you for bringing pizza and for cleaning my bathroom. Thank you for watching Cat while I’m away. I’m sorry I lost your nephews.

You might wonder why I’m addressing an entry in this journal to you. Truth be told, I’m not. You’ll never see this. It’s just that writing comes more naturally with a target in mind, and at the risk of sounding mean—you’re an easy target. You might also wonder why the earlier pages are stapled shut. It’s because I don’t need the temptation of reading those past entries, not after everything that’s happened. Nor do I have the heart to tear them out. Staples seemed a reasonable compromise.

But let’s talk about different things.

You dropped by tonight to wish me a happy trip tomorrow. After cleaning the bathroom when I wasn’t watching, then trying to do laundry, we sat in the living room with the pizza between us.

“Where’s Cat?” you asked, peeling away a slice. You twisted to look behind your chair. Finding nothing, you leaned forward to peer under the coffee table, as though any self-respecting cat would hide in a place so obvious.

You tried summoning him with that thing you do, “Ps-ps-ps-ps-ps!”

And I reminded you yet again, “That doesn’t work on him.”

“I’m starting to think there is no cat, Chris.” It felt like a subtle warning. Leaning back in your chair, you toed a Taco Bell bag with distaste. “Let me clean up in here, will you? You’ll get ants.” You overturned a paper bag onto the coffee table, yielding: napkins, crumpled wrappers, lettuce shreds. A mint? “I’ll save all the packets of stuff. Promise.” You dumped another sack to reveal a hot sauce I’d missed. “There: the sauce. Sauces?”

“They’re good on—”

“They’re not, Chris. They’re not good on anything.”

So we argued. First in a lighthearted manner about the merits of hot sauce on ice cream, then more seriously about why I can’t be bothered to clean the apartment. But then one of those current events programs came on, and a roundtable of talking heads began a heated debate over the proposed sites for the new hybrid reservations, and how we’ll be relocated again. You caught me by surprise when you said that you think we should go willingly, that it would be a good thing, then acted shocked to hear that the very idea sickens me. We enacted our own debate, in greater volume and far more colorful language than the talking heads, and by the end of it, the televised debate was over and we were both exhausted. Only then did we penetrate to the heart of the matter.

Drying an eye, you said, “I would go with you, you know. If you wanted me to.”

“I know, Jo. But I drink a lot out there.”

“I can drink a lot, too.”

“The hotel is terrible.”

“It’s one night.”

“And the ducks, they’re always so pissed.”

“Okay, Seven-three-two-eight-one.” And with that, you retreated to the freshly cleaned bathroom. It hurts you, I think, being barred from this part of my life, so you take the cheap revenge shots when you can. Returning ten minutes later, you dragged on your coat and gloves as though it was them you hated. I stood to watch, hands in pockets, feeling guilty for the bad air between us.

“There’s just nothing for you there, Jo.”

The look I earned for that line is still with me, dear sister. You were thinking, There’s nothing there for you, either. And that’s fair. Still: Thanks for having the decency to not actually say it.

Pulling on your knit hat, you checked pockets for keys, then called around me towards the bedroom, “Bye, Cat!” You held still a moment, head tilted, then perked at some imagined sound. “Was that him?”

“No.”

“I think that was him.”

Give it up, Jo. The animal just doesn’t like you.

And on that unfortunate note, it’s time to throw the old duffel in the trunk of the ugly coupe and kick off the yearly pilgrimage into the dreary suburbs of Chicago. This will be my sixth trip to see the boys since the event. They would have been ten and thirteen this year—which makes me realize that I never took them to Disneyland. Or the ocean. My boys have never seen the ocean. Does that make me a horrible parent? Maybe this year will be different. Maybe this year I’ll actually get to see them.

• • • •

Dear Joanne,

I’m writing this from a rest area on the Iowa side of the Nebraska/Iowa checkpoint. The crossing, as always, was a grave disappointment. Getting through a checkpoint is, at first, a triumphant event, quickly dampened upon realizing that over here is no better than over there—worse, in fact. Because now you’re in Iowa. But it’s not about what’s over here, or what’s back there. It’s about freedom of movement, and how that freedom is no longer ours.

But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because I want to apologize for the things I said last night. Calling you “willfully ignorant” wasn’t productive. But you called me a “societal hypochondriac” first, which doesn’t even sound like a real thing. All morning I’ve been replaying our fight, and I think that what it boils down to is that you trust, whereas I do not. You believe (and sincerely) that everything happening is for our protection and benefit. I believe we are being managed toward extinction.

I remember saying this, “It’s like you want to help them. You’re making it easy for them.”

You laughed at me. “Easy for them to do what, Chris?”

Are you really so blind? They already have us classified and symbolized. Watch the news—any channel—to witness the process of our dehumanization. To them we are a blight and a plague. Why do you refuse to see how they stack all the plights of the world on our shoulders? The chasm between them and us widens every time the militant members of the Hybrid Rights Coalition take another pure human hostage, every time another bus in the city is torched, or another hospital terrorized. It spreads when the police quell hybrid riots with tear gas and smoke grenades, with cudgels and the heels of their boots. Classification, symbolization, dehumanization. Those are steps one, two, and three, sister. Do you have the patience to hear the rest? I think no. And what would be the use? The rest is coming soon enough, whether we recognize the steps or not.

Meanwhile, you accept their ever-tightening restrictions with a thankful smile. You accept their marked license with its colorful hybrid hologram. Will you wear their armband, too? Will you sit still for the serial tattoo on your neck, so that there’s no hiding when step seven comes? To make it easy for militias sanctioned by our own government to drag you from your car by the hair, to murder you in the street in the midst of jeering crowds? I wonder if any Jew ever had an obstinate sister who admired herself in the mirror—dazzled by the pretty gold star stitched onto her lapel. The time will come, sister. To think anything else is—yes, willfully ignorant.

Now that it’s written, I realize this letter is nothing like the apology I intended. But it did remind me of a joke:

What do you call a thousand hybrids burning at the stake?

A good start.

Isn’t that funny, Jo? Aren’t you laughing?

• • • •

Dear Super 8,

Your hotel in Palatine stinks. Two checkpoints and twenty cramped hours in an ugly coupe and this is my reward? Flat pillows, unwashed sheets, and a coffee maker that can’t be bothered to make coffee. At least the heat works. The light is gray here at the desk by the window, just like everything else in these despairing suburbs. The sun’s up there somewhere, but you wouldn’t know it. It’ll be dark by 4:30, which is just as well. Who wants to see any of this? My whole day serves as one long excuse to climb between those questionable sheets and numb myself to sleep with television.

But you don’t care about what’s done in this room, or what I endured to get here, do you? So just forget I mentioned it. I’ve slept on dirtier sheets, and I know where to hunt coffee. I’ll save my complaints for someone who cares.

• • • •

Dear Joanne,

Indeed, there is nothing like bourbon to make a dismal hotel room feel a little less soulless. Bourbon demands ice, but the ice machine was broken (hardly surprising) so I fashioned my own ice-balls with snow from the parking lot. And why not? That’s called “depth of flavor.”

I deserve this bourbon. I’m exhausted. It used to be I could make this trip in twelve hours. These days it takes upwards of twenty. Six years ago, the checkpoints were nothing more than a forced rest area. Pull in, have some Funyuns and a stretch, get your passport stamped by some bored contract security officer, then move on. Things are different now, Joanne. Things are far more serious. Now the checkpoints span the interstate at every state line, windowless behemoths squatting over all those lanes of traffic like prisons of red brick and razor wire. The rented security officers have been replaced by squadrons of BLA agents. The grounds and halls are roamed by attentive soldiers in battlefield fatigues. Inside the building, you’re directed to wait in this line, then that. Take this paperwork and sit there, answer every question. This is important, because it’s not unusual for hybrids to disappear while traveling, sometimes entire families. It made the news when it first started happening. Now fewer people can be bothered to care. Elsewhere in the building, hourly employees in blue latex gloves rummage through our things. They make notes and phone calls, enter data into terminals—process us. We don’t see these things happening, but we feel them. My name is called, and I step up to a window behind which a weary teller holds her hand out for my passport. It’s the fourth time I’ve been made to produce it.

“Destination?” she asks.

“Chicago.” It’s all in the paperwork, all properly authorized and notarized months in advance. There’s never any need to ask.

She checks something in my passport against something on her screen. She initials in the margin, stamps an open space. “What’s in Chicago?”

“My kids. I’m just going to see my kids. I go every year.”

There’s more cross-checking, initialing, stamping. At last, she slides my passport back to me and actually makes eye contact. “Have a nice trip,” she says.

Wasn’t that kind of her? If this were a story, it would be called “My Nice Trip.”

I’m done writing for now, Joanne. Mainly, I just wanted to let you know that I arrived safely. One night, one day, then I’ll be on my way home. I’m going to put off that apology I owe you. Right now I just don’t have it in me to make peace with anyone over anything.

• • • •

Dear Chicago,

You might remember me. You might remember my name, and the names of my two sons, although I see no reason why you should—my tragedy is no greater than that suffered daily by many of your citizens. Still, it’s important to me that you know I’m back again. I promise not to stay long. I’m in my hotel now, the Super 8 on Dundee, my home away from home for one night every January.

It’s 10:20 a.m., and I’ve been awake almost six hours. I didn’t set the alarm—no need to be at the lake until after 11:00. It’s just that sleeping is hard for me here in Chicago, so close to the kids. It’s fair to say I’ve wasted the time. I got dressed—so easy when you sleep in your clothes. I finished off the watery dregs of last night’s bourbon, abandoned in a plastic cup near the sink, which only left me thirsty for more. No snow left in the bucket, so I took four fingers neat. For a while I stood at the window breathing my own noxious breath reflected back at me from the cold pane. I sat in front of the muted television without really watching it. I thought about brushing my teeth, but the bourbon wouldn’t allow it. In the full-length mirror by the door I saw myself: yesterday’s hair, yesterday’s clothes, yesterday’s bourbon. Everything about me is from yesterday, last year, another life.

And now here it is almost time to leave, and me wishing for more time.

What if I broke tradition? What if I did something different this year? There are movie theaters. There are restaurants and parks. How easy it would be to shed the clothes and watch television from the bed—to drink bourbon until the short day drains away to nothing and it’s no longer the anniversary of anything anymore. But I can’t do that. Because what if this is the year they come? What if they’re already waiting for me?

From the window I look down on my car in the lot. Will it even start in this cold? Part of me hopes not. It looks so barren out there. Not a day for spending outside. But there’s my bag, already packed. And here’s my coat, already on. I should go. And I will. I always do. But first, let me explain what it is I want out of all this:

I will drive myself to Palatine in the post rush-hour traffic. Within ten minutes, I’ll be navigating a warren of middle-income suburban streets. Big trees and old hedges, sun so low and bright it draws tears. I’ll park curbside a few blocks from Douglas MacArthur elementary school because that’s the best access to the lake—but also because I don’t want people thinking I’ve come to pester the real children, all of whom are inside where it’s warm, seated pleasantly at their desks. Unless it’s Saturday. Is it Saturday? I don’t know anymore. If they’re in there, I can’t help but wonder how many of those kids are human. Do they even let hybrids go to public school anymore? If they happen to glance out the windows, they’ll see me crossing the lot and skirting the playground for the path that circles the lake, which is really more of a large pond. I will walk around from the south bank—where my life included two small boys and a bag of groceries, to the north—where I have nothing.

Before I lost them, the boys were eating Doritos from bright little bags, their fingers orange with chip dust. They were smiling, I remember that. And in remembering, I am shocked again—and forever—by how frozen lakes under snow look so much like empty fields. So much alike, in fact, that unless you’re paying close attention you can’t hardly tell the one from the other. You’d think it would be simple, but it isn’t—not when you’re new to the area because you just lost your wife and your house and barely five months have passed since the BLA declared you and your children non-humans. Add to that the relentless confusion over what exactly happened and how fast, and it’s just now beginning to sink in what with the endless coverage on television and in the papers, and it’s all anyone ever talks about anymore: forced relocation to remote reservations, embedded chips and tracking devices, deportation and the disappearances and deaths and murders that some radicals are already calling “cleansing.” And maybe you had more to drink that morning than usual, even though it was only 10:00 a.m., because the news just keeps coming. News from not-so-distant places—alarmingly close places—where people just like you are being dragged from cars and shot in the streets, at their desks, in homes. You’d think it would be easy to see the difference—but it’s not. Sometimes you can’t tell the soccer field is a lake until it cracks open beneath you and swallows everything you have.

Stop stop stop. That’s not the story I’m here to tell. That story has already been told to death. If you must know the details, visit the archives of the Palatine public library. Find the newspapers from that cold January six years ago. Look for the tragic story of two young boys and their stupid, stupid father.

I was talking about hopes. Mine is to sit by the lake with my knees up and my bottle between my feet. Across the lake and the soccer fields the school bell clangs. A little while later I hear the shouts of children, but I don’t see the children themselves. I drink and I wait. A breeze comes off the lake, but it’s a mild breeze. Today would have been a good day to walk to the store for groceries.

It’s not long before I spot him a little ways down the shoreline. He looks to be about seven years old still. His hair is too long because his mother liked it that way. Even as cold as it is, he’s coatless—just a t-shirt and jeans. His feet are bare, as though it’s summer wherever he is. I don’t think he’s seen me yet, occupied as he is with skipping rocks into the lake. They skitter across the ice, spinning to join a host of others.

These encounters are fragile, so I hide the bottle beside my thigh and refrain from looking directly at him. It would do no good to frighten him now. His search for good rocks brings him closer, so I turn my head—my head only—to better watch him. This is when he notices me.

Brushing his bangs out of his eyes, he calls, “Hey.”

“Hello,” I answer.

It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been waiting for this, and how many words I’ve planned—even in this wishful version I find myself utterly lost for words, falling back to something inane, like, “Aren’t you cold?”

To which he shrugs, and says, “Not really.”

He throws his last rock. Instead of looking for another one, he closes the last steps between us and sits near me. Not next to—just near. With him comes the lingering aroma of Doritos and oranges.

“You seem happy,” I manage.

“I am happy.”

“And you’re safe?”

The question seems to amuse him. “Sure,” he nods. “Safe.”

I find I can’t look directly at him anymore. He’s shivering in my vision, so I turn to the far shore. And then I have to ask—it’s what I’ve come for, after all, “Are you still angry with me?”

He leans forward to better look into my face, and when I’m brave enough to look, I see he’s smiling for me. “We were never angry, Dad.”

I don’t know if that counts as forgiveness, but it’s all I ever wanted to hear. Something happens in my chest. The hurt that has been pinned in there for so long with a nail that runs straight through me and some nights won’t let me breathe comes loose. The dull ache bleeds fresh, and feels not like old pain, but like new. And I welcome it—I want it. But still it makes a mess of me. I cover my face with my hands, because a boy shouldn’t have to watch his father crumble. Then I remember how fleeting such encounters can be. Take your eyes off them, even for a moment, and poof—gone. And maybe you don’t see them again for ten years, or twenty. Maybe you never see them again.

I look, and he’s still there beside me. Still smiling. “Where’s Mom?” he wants to know. Because even ghosts can’t understand how a mother could abandon her children.

“Where’s your brother?” I ask him instead.

“He’s right here.”

That’s when two small, bare arms slip over my shoulders and around my neck. His skin is warm, and he laughs in my ear. His hair tickles my neck. “Carry me,” he says. And his breath smells of oranges and chocolate.

• • • •

Dear Joanne,

Things never go the way we want them to.

What really happened is this:

Untucked and unbrushed, I dragged my disheveled self downstairs to check out. The ugly car started reluctantly. On the way to the school, I stopped at the Shop & Save for a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and oranges—same as every year. Bourbon under coat, I trudged across the soggy soccer fields to the frozen lake and the place—near as I could tell—where I stepped onto the ice with two happy children. The sky was gray, the water black. The wind was eager to use its teeth today. The ducks converged almost as soon as I arrived. These are not nice ducks, Jo. They come at you in small gangs, from the sides, adamant and bold, but change course when confronted directly. They’re smart enough to keep just out of kicking range. (Oh, yes I would). Keeping to the gravel path that runs around the lake, I searched the shallows for bright coat sleeves among the cattails, for pale hands wrapped in weeds, for little drowned faces.

On the far side, where the bank slopes up toward the sleepy neighborhood and finally to the grocery store, our destination that day, I sat in the mud and opened my bottle. The bourbon brought heat: heat to my mouth, to my throat, and to my gut. My eyes leaked for a little while, so I drank more, because that’s what’s done for leaky eyes. I screwed the bottle into the mud between my feet and tore open the Kisses with my teeth. I devoured the entire bag, making little silver balls out of the foil wrappers before flicking them waterward. This is a wretched place, Joanne. There is nothing beautiful about here, nothing redeeming. It is a place of stubborn, persistent unpleasantness, a place that traps oranges, and sometimes children, under ice. My litter can make nothing worse.

I was already sick by the time I got to the oranges. I tore into one anyway—all part of the ritual. I ripped away the bumpy skin in long curls and ate them like apples, a few bites from each, then into the water. I washed it all down with as much bourbon as I could stomach, then leaned aside to vomit it all into the slush.

The little foil balls, the oranges, the bright rinds scattered all around: These are ghost-bait. The retching is just me expressing the hopelessness of it all.

To have it all out was a relief, although my throat is still raw. By that time the ducks were congregating again, drawn by all the shiny foil and colorful peels. Such bossy creatures. They came to remind me it was time to act like a man again. Go home, pathetic drunkard, your ghosts didn’t show. They forgot, couldn’t make it, or were otherwise engaged. Any of these could be true. And I’m not even angry. How could I be? I love those boys too much.

I’ve been sitting here in my ugly car for hours now, freezing. I’ve thought about turning on the heat, but I don’t feel I deserve it. I’d like to go back to the hotel for a shower and a long sleep, but I can’t do that—I’ve already checked out. The fact is: I don’t know what to do. My boys are here, Jo, and a father should be with his sons, don’t you think?

• • • •

Dear Joanne,

You’re angry with me, I know. I can see you sitting on my chair in the living room, legs crossed, fingers drumming the armrest, fuming. You’ve been staring at the door a long while, waiting for the rattle of my keys, which should have happened so many hours ago. You’ve called me a dozen times and left as many messages. You’re brimming with angry words—words like “irresponsible” and “reckless.” But I know you’re only angry because you’re worried. Please don’t worry, Jo. I’m safe. I’m happy. While you’ve been sitting in my chair, I’ve been driving my ugly car southeast, all the way to a place called Glasgow, which is in Kentucky. I can hear you protesting, “Kentucky is not on the way home, Chris. Why are you driving the wrong way? Where are you going? What happened?”

Let me tell you:

After leaving Palatine, I made it all the way to the Illinois/Iowa checkpoint, where I submitted myself once more to the long ordeal of processing with the rest of the non-humans. We were herded from one waiting room to another, all of them identical: sparsely stocked vending machines, clunking water fountains, uneven rows of crooked plastic chairs. In one room was a television bolted into a high corner. I don’t know who changed the channel, or why, but one minute we were absorbing the numbing scenarios of a laugh-tracked sitcom—the next we were facing a well-suited evangelist on a studio set. There he sat on the edge of an elegant chair, imploring his studio congregation (in which we were now forcefully included) to heed his words. So drained were we by the weight of our surroundings that our protests manifested in little more than private groans and slumpings.

“What we must remember, brethren,” the evangelist explained in earnest to his congregation, “is that the very word ‘hybrid’ is part of the deception. Despite what our governments would have us believe, there are no hybrids. There are humans, and there are non-humans. But because they look like us and sound like us, some of us are deceived into believing they are us. This is a great and terrible lie, brethren. While the idea of partial humanity is physically possible, it will forever be a spiritual impossibility. In the eyes of God, a thing is either human, or it is not. Hybrids—if we must call them that—are not. Recall that God’s laws governing offspring do not follow the simple rules of addition. In the case of a human paired with a hybrid—one soul combined with no soul—the result is not a child with half a soul.” He shook his head, scornful of the very idea of such fallacies. “You must remember that in God’s eyes it is multiplication that governs the laws of reproduction, as when God commanded Adam and Eve, ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ So you see: A human/hybrid pairing—and I refuse to call it a marriage—although capable of producing offspring, can produce no human offspring. Even children understand that the product of any number multiplied by zero—any number, brethren—will always be zero. This is truth. This is what was meant by our Savior when He told us that a little leaven leavens the whole bunch. Evil begets evil, brethren. Insert but one monstrosity into the bloodline, and the whole line is obliterated forevermore. And what then? What happens when all of humanity—all but a small remnant—has been supplanted by monstrosities? What happens to our world when all nations have become as a stench to God?”

Not far from me, one of my fellow watchers made a small sound of disgust and leaned away, but did not stop watching. “Change it,” someone else complained wearily. Some of us looked around to see who would act on this, but no one did—or could.

The evangelist was leaning forward to better hear a question coming from his studio audience, then joined his palms together and spoke quietly, but with the greatest conviction. “Everywhere we look, we see unions such as these producing children, and my heart breaks at their suffering.” He placed a hand over his heart to prove it was so. “And I say to you now—as I always have: It is tragedy of the worst sort that hybrids are capable of breeding with humans. As agonizing as it may be to do, I encourage believers to separate themselves from their non-human partnerships. As the Apostle Paul instructed the Corinthians, we ought not be unevenly yoked.”

Again he listened to a question from his audience, tilting his head. “You need have no worry for their souls,” he explained. “For they have none. As for yours,” he added with a smile, “remember that the soul comes from the Father, and to Him it returns. Ecclesiastes twelve seven. It is not ours. It is who we are, but it does not belong to us. It is a gift from God to a being conceived by a man and a woman—a human man and woman.” And here he looked through the television, sending his explanation into the audience to seek its targets. “Anything else has not been sanctioned by God. It is without soul. It is an abomination.”

There were more questions. More answers, too, I’m sure. But I heard my name called with the brisk impatience of someone who might have already called it more than once already. An agitated woman with stooped shoulders and a clipboard stared at me as I crossed the room.

“Destination?” she asked at my approach.

“I made a mistake,” I admitted to her. “I have to go back to Chicago.”

She scowled at her clipboard. “You’re coming from Chicago.”

“No, I have to go back. I left something important.”

Still frowning, she laid a possessive hand on my arm, as if she feared I would bolt, and that this would keep me in place. “Come on back,” she said.

“I don’t need to go through,” I repeated in my most reasonable voice.

But it was against the rules. I was processed despite my objections, and my agitation only peaked their suspicions and raised more questions: Where will you stay in Chicago? Who will be with you? What will you do? I endured, and was eventually released. I turned the car around at the next exit and went right back through again. Back to Chicago, and back to Palatine. Back to the lake in the dark because I couldn’t bear to leave them there another year. I promised them I wouldn’t drink anymore, and to prove it emptied the remainder of my bourbon into the mud. I told them I would take them to Disneyland. I promised them the ocean.

They didn’t answer right away. In fact, I wondered if they’d heard me at all. But when I got back to my ugly car and opened the door, I knew they’d decided to trust me. They fill the interior with such smells. Is this only my imagination? What of the orange peels on the back seat? The smudge of chocolate on the steering wheel? Are these make-believe, too? And now, as I sit here at the little table writing by the flickering light of old black-and-white television, I hear the creak of springs as they wrestle on the bed. Is their laughter not real?

And now here I am in a ratty motel in Glasgow. Same unwashed clothes, same unbrushed teeth. In all honesty, I can’t remember a time in the past six years when I’ve been happier. The first thing I did after locking the door behind me was remember the chapter and verse quoted by the television evangelist. I found a Bible (surprise!) in the bedside drawer. It says: “Then the spirit returns to God who sent it.” But that’s not what the evangelist said. He said, “The spirit returns to the father.”

I think the evangelist had it right. But he also told a terrible lie—which is how all the greatest deceptions are delivered—hand-in-hand with pleasing truths. He would have us believe that we hybrids lack souls. But we do have souls, Joanne, and in abundance. Our souls return to the father from which they came, just like humans, and I am happy to receive them if God will not.

The boys are losing interest in the television now. I’m taking too long, and they want my attention back. Please take Cat home with you (if you can find him). And take anything else you want from the apartment. Take everything. We’ve got a lot of things to do, the boys and I, and I don’t know when we’re coming back. I don’t know if.

Tomorrow I intend to fulfill my promises. If we keep off the beaten path, we can avoid the checkpoints all the way to Florida. We’ll race the clouds to places with names like Clearwater and Kissimmee. Places where maybe they haven’t started checking identification papers before seating you in their restaurants. Where I can still pretend to be human. And it won’t matter if we’re stopped before we get there. It won’t even matter if I disappear. They can’t take the boys from me now. They’re out of the water, living in my bones and in my blood. I lost them once, Jo. I’ll not lose them again.

• • • •

Dear Sara,

I forgive you, if there’s even anything to forgive. I have no right to hold grudges, not after what I’ve been forgiven.

I’m writing to ask a favor of you. Please come to Florida. Our children are asking for you, and it’s not my place to keep you from them. I told them you had to leave us, but not why. It hasn’t changed their minds. They ask for you every day, and they’re confident that if I ask, you’ll come. They miss you. If you come (and I hope you do), you can tell them your story in your own words.

We made beautiful children, Sara. And they will always be beautiful.

©2017 by Greg Kurzawa.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Kurzawa studied theology at a small university in east Texas before taking a career in information technology. He is the author of the bleak fantasy novel Gideon’s Wall, which he self-published in 2006 to learn the process. He learned it pretty well except for the marketing part, which is hard. Since then his short fiction has appeared in various print and online venues, and he has completed his second novel, The Sickness of Silas Traitor, for which he is seeking representation. Greg has two kinds of favorite stories: tragic ones, and ones that don’t give up their secrets without a fight. He currently lives in Omaha with his wife and three children.

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

Proving the Rule

Holly Phillips | 20300 words

A busy pub at noon.

He had his pocket notebook out on the table and was flipping past old stories, scratching out unconfirmed facts and unusable quotes: the merest gesture toward work. Someone jogged his table, but he saw it coming and lifted his pint out of danger. He drank, licked his lip, set the glass warily down. Should have ordered food, he thought. The crowd at the bar was two deep and if he got up now, he’d lose the table and the chair he was saving for her. If she didn’t come, he’d go hungry. But if he got up and she came? He went on leafing through the notebook, his head bent low.

She slipped inside like a draft through an open window. He would have sworn that he felt her, that he looked up an instant before she came into view. The crowd parted for her like curtains; she lit him up like a ray of light. Resenting it, he refused to stand, but bad manners failed to hide his open face, his pencil falling to the floor. She smiled, pleased to see him, and sat in the saved chair.

“What are you drinking?” she asked him.

“Bitter. You won’t like it. Try the ale.”

“All right. And food? Are you feeding me, too?”

He fed her cold game pie and apples and cheese. The apples were from somebody’s cold store and under their wrinkled skins tasted of cider and old wood. They went well with the beer.

She had the knack of elegance. She was dressed well, of course, something simple in green wool that hinted at the coming spring, but that was just money. The mystery was the rest of her. The way she could hum with greed, wrinkle her nose when she took a bite, catch a drop of mustard with her tongue, and still be elegant, dainty and refined. That wasn’t money, surely? Breeding, another woman of her class would say. But she was the daughter of a scandal and didn’t know who her father was.

“You aren’t listening,” he said.

She took her time reeling her gaze in from the depths. She had darkish hair, paleish skin, eyes somewhere between gray and blue. Yet her gaze was definite. When she looked at you, you knew you were looked at.

“I am,” she said. “Well, a little bit, I am.”

“What did I say, then?”

She offered him a smile. “I’m inventing a riddle. The answer is ‘magic,’ but I haven’t got the question right yet.”

“If it’s the one about the racehorse trainer and the greyhound, I’ve already heard it.”

She smiled again, but her mind was still somewhere else.

Piqued, he said, in accidental parody of a jealous lover, “If you don’t want the work, just say so. We both know you only do it for fun.”

“Fun? You mean, I don’t do it for money.”

“What for, then?”

“Well, it’s what I do. History. Research. All the delicious books, yum, yum, and reading dead people’s letters behind their backs. Lovely, malicious sense of power. Blackmailing ghosts. It’s where my money really comes from, of course.” She played at mischief with a straight face, her long-fingered hands fluttering in the air.

“All right,” he said heavily to drag her back down to earth. “But really. Why?”

She looked at him with those pale eyes, her pupils so black they never seemed to reflect any light. “All for love of you, my hero. Tell me again what you need?”

Another beer, he thought. He flipped back a page in his notebook so vigorously that the thin paper tore.

• • • •

For love of him? Because it’s my only talent, because it’s the only thing that marks me as something besides my mother’s daughter, because it’s the only thing that’s entirely mine. But though Graham was her friend, he wasn’t that kind of friend, so she didn’t say it. She just took a little leather-bound notebook out of her purse and made notes, to mollify him, with her little gold pencil. He was writing a series of articles on immigration. While he was talking she jotted down a few citations, reminded herself of a private memoir that she had found in the family library; thought that she probably could have written the articles herself, and knew that she would never say so. Graham needed to work for a living. They could be friends for fifty years, she thought, and he would never reconcile himself to the fact that she did not.

No, she only needed to work to live. Because, because.

Her name was Lucy Donne. Her mother was beautiful, her grandfather was rich. She had been allowed to go to university—it was one of the done things these days—but there were no advanced degrees for women. One could study, write, publish, even tutor, but one could not lecture; one could never call oneself Professor Lucy Donne. She might have done anything, really, she had her mother’s recklessness, but she had her grandfather’s self-conscious pride as well. She would not trail in her mother’s footsteps. Books would be her open doors. A drab compromise, she thought sometimes, though she tried not to think about it. She preferred the delicious books, the impossible hunt, the riddling obsession that kept her up late, night after night. Yum, yum . . . yawn.

The library was a rich man’s pride, a set-designer’s dream: a long room with a gallery and window bays, jewel-colored carpets and fat-legged tables and a globe clasped in a polished brass arm. It was real to Lucy, though, it was her province, her private realm. She knew about the mousetraps behind the bottom shelves, the silverfish like hungry beads of quicksilver, the dead moths that would fly again if you gave the curtains a good shake. She knew that in a cold winter the cavernous fireplaces could only warm the end bays, leaving an arctic space between them, and she knew that in a hot summer the very walls breathed sleep into the dusty, sun-shot air. Home.

The big clock with its gold and ivory face ticked down another hour. A brass-shaded lamp spilled its pool of light, but Lucy’s mind had wandered off into the dark, and so did her books and papers, sprawling outside the lamplight. Her chin was in her hands, her elbows on the ink-splotched blotter. An hour ago she had still been chasing her quarry. Now she dreamed, tracing the route of past hunts across the map of knowledge in her mind. Landmarks, scraps of information, raised themselves up above the horizon and fell away. Yes, she knew this. Yes, she had been there. Most recently:

. . . in the “he’s famous even if I don’t care” category, the Marshal of Kallisfane (of ancient and dull renown) returned to the capital today after a refreshing month’s holiday in the historic and terminally comfortless garrison of Denbreath. The garrison might have a greater appeal to this writer and several other ladies of her acquaintance (the Hon. Miss H. comes to mind!) if it still featured hot-and-cold running soldiers, but as the Denbreath Fortress was recently turned into a museum, one can only wish the Chief Exhibit joy of his new vacation spot . . .

Yes, and:

From our provincial correspondent: Two teachers at the Palton Grammar School were dismissed yesterday after a recent outbreak of hysteria among the students forced authorities to close the school. The school will reopen next week and school governors say they will not be bringing charges against the teachers, saying the two women demonstrated “poor judgment rather than criminal intent.”

And what has the one to do with the other? Nothing at all, except that Palton is only ten miles from Denbreath as the crow flies. What tales did the teachers tell? What tales did the children claim to encounter on their way home from school? What would the crow see as it launched itself from the highest steeple in Palton and flew over the winter-dark woods of Breadon How?

Up over the haunted trees, up over the bare brow of the hill where the Cold Hounds were once said to lair, out along the stony ridge where Denbreath Castle sits as it has for six hundred years, a fortified shell for its silent master, the Exhibit, who is older still. The breeze carries the crow to the deep sill of an archer’s window, where it folds its wings and cocks its head to stare inside. A stony room. A man, or the shape of a man, stiff as a mannequin waiting for the curators to put its armor on.

The clock clunked and whirred, preparing Lucy for the mellow gong of the hour. One, two . . . Lucy waited for the rest, but the clock had said its piece. She rubbed her face, made a token gesture towards putting her notes in order . . . impossible, it would take a week . . . she put out the lamp and went to bed.

She dreamed the dream in which her house dissolved into a muddled realm of college rooms and hospital corridors. There were a lot of doors, a lot of odd corners twisting the known world out of true. It got harder and harder to find her way, but the harder it got, the closer she was to something important, some vivid presence at the heart of the maze. This anticipation was as familiar as the dream, but as the dreamer did not know she was dreaming, she could not say, as she would when she woke, “Ah! This dream!” But she could recognize the feeling for what it was, and that recognition opened the final door. There were the heavy stones of the wall, the arch that opened out onto nothing but the air. There was the bright clear light, the taste of autumn, the memory of trees. And perhaps the dreamer woke a little in her dreaming, because when she saw the man who stood looking out on the world, she thought or said, “Maybe this time I will see his face. Maybe I will. I will.”

An obvious dream; a biographer’s dream. But there was nothing stale about the brightness of her will to turn him. Oh, she wanted to see! He knew she was there, he stirred. Her heart leapt. She would wake now, she always woke now and was now awake enough to know it. She held on to the dream with both hands.

And then it seemed that the dream turned and grabbed on to her. The brightness in the air was gone, there was only a warmth as oppressive as a stranger’s breath. He stirred, and she no longer knew why she wanted to see his face. “Don’t,” she said, and the catch of sound in her throat drew her farther out of sleep.

The dream followed her.

He turned. He saw her, and she fled, a bird dashing across the room—the window was there again, his dark figure like a door—she fled, he plucked her from the air. She was a sand-colored dove between his hands, his flesh pressing her flesh as if he grasped her bare ribs, her naked arms. She cried out and woke.

She was still held.

She tore herself free from the bedclothes, flung herself from the bed to fall on her hands and knees. Awake, yes, and dreaming, yes, and still held. Her heart beat its wings. Sweating, trembling, she launched herself from the floor and caromed into the wardrobe across the room like a bird battering itself against a windowpane. Wood bruised flesh, a banged elbow barked, and she woke, finally, truly woke, with the wardrobe door swinging open and her nightgown clinging to her skin.

With a deliberate, practical gesture, Lucy reached out and swung the door closed. The latch snicked, and held.

Her room was dark except for the pale rim around the curtain’s edge, and the house was quiet, although it seemed to Lucy that the reverberations of her thumps and cries still hung in the air. She stood and listened as if the house might mutter a response—

As if, far below, the street door might open and booted feet might begin to climb the groaning stairs.

She was found.

It was a dream, she told herself with the sweat still wet on her face. Only a nightmare version of a dream she had been dreaming since she was a little girl.

She had been hunting him since girlhood. She had finally come near enough to be noticed.

Him.

. . . the Marshal of Kallisfane (of ancient and dull renown) returned to the capital today . . .

The Marshal of Kallisfane, the Dead Lord, the Revenant, the Living Ghost, Empire’s Bane: Him.

The Marshal of Kallisfane returned to the capital today.

She was found.

Lucy pried herself away from the wardrobe and crept up to the window. One finger opened a crack between curtain and frame. A gray dawn, the garden in the square still more turned earth than green, the windows in all the houses still dark. No deathless warrior on the pavement, no Nameless Regiment pulling up in big black motorcars. No one at all, in fact, except for a few sparrows and a cat digging in a flowerbed. Logic, late in waking, said that even if he had found her by some arcane process in her dream, a dream does not shout out a name and an address. Her heart was still thumping, her skin still clammy, and Lucy was not reassured. Sick with fear, she walked with increasing haste down the hall to the lavatory and vomited out the residue of the dream.

Pipes thumped when she flushed the toilet and sang when she ran water to rinse her mouth, guaranteed to wake half the household. But the prosaic was reassuring and nausea imposed its own earthy fatalism. If the Revenant really had found her where she lived, she was already doomed, and if he had not, then . . . Then she hardly knew what. The need to do something was beginning to assert itself, but what the something was, was still obscure. Bathe, Lucy thought, smelling the fear sweat like bile on her skin.

She washed, found a skirt and jacket in sensible tweed, and put on the most sensible shoes she owned, which weren’t very. Dull, ordinary, please-don’t-notice-me clothes. She pinned up her hair, powdered her face—in the mirror her hands shook—put a few practical items in her pocket book. She paused on the landing, but there was no sound from behind the family’s doors. Her mother’s door. Would her mother still hold her after a bad dream, envelop her in warm silk and cigarette smoke and perfume?

Lucy shook herself back into motion. Down the stairs to the grand entry hall, and did she scurry across the marble floor, wrench open the bolts, flit like a sparrow out into the square? That was the motion of her heart, but she hesitated at the stained-glass window by the door, peering through a red rose into the square. A yawning domestic was airing a pair of leashed dogs. Still no living statue (ten feet tall? lichened armor? pigeon-stained helm?) and no ominous black cars. Do what, Lucy? Go where? Seized by a sudden impulse, she left the hall and struck out for the library.

No one had been in yet to open the drapes. She pulled them open as she walked down the main room, letting in daylight the same color as the dust she shook from the brocade. The farthest bay held her table like a ship in its berth, a ship still laded with the cargo of a years-long journey: books, clippings, diaries, letters; notes sorted and unsorted, re-sorted, scribbled over, lost. No one tidied Lucy’s desk, Lucy least of all. The order was all in her head, a tangled complexity that, taken all in all, built a structure as simple as a tombstone. Lucy sifted through the top layer of papers, shifted a book from one stack to another, and failed utterly to discover the source of her panic. This was scholarship. It had only been a dream.

Then the panic said: This is evidence.

At first she read her notes over with an eye to organization, but she gave that up almost immediately. The clock chimed the half hour and her whole skin shivered. She crammed papers into whatever folder would hold them, shook out the books and scrabbled to gather up the snowfall of torn envelopes and old letters and receipts from the dressmaker with her elegant scrawl on the back. She liberated a large portfolio from an ancestor’s anatomical sketches and tied her papers inside with a faded ribbon. She took up armloads of books and scattered them about the shelves, almost dancing as she moved in and out of bays, up and down the gallery stairs. It would take her days to find them all again, these books with their damning marginalia, but it would take a stranger weeks. Finally, swiftly, she disposed of the anatomical sketches behind a rank of foreign dictionaries, tore the blotter from her desk pad and tossed it burning into the fireplace, snatched up the heavy portfolio and her pocketbook and fled for the door.

Doing what, Lucy?

She seemed to be discovering that as it got done.

Going where, Lucy?

She would likely discover that as well.

But it was only a dream.

• • • •

The same pub, too early for a crowd.

Resentful at being called away from his typewriter, Graham sat at a table under the small-paned window, scribbling on a tablet of ruled paper: real work this time, distilling interviews into news. The midmorning sun fought through thin clouds and thick, old glass to raise a gleam from the polished table. He didn’t notice. He did notice the brewer’s dray that creaked to a stop outside, its high sides painted with the brewer’s slogan—Our Best Bitter is Better! Barrels rumbled off the tailgate, enormous horses stamped iron-shod feet, and he experienced one of those hiccups in time, a flash of his childhood when horses were everywhere and motorcars were rare. Change, he thought. Would we dread it so much if it didn’t sneak up on us from behind?

“What do you do,” she said, “if you have a story no one will believe?”

“Don’t write it.” He rescued his notes from the descending bulk of a leather-bound portfolio. The thump of its landing was lost in the grumble of barrel rims being rolled across the stone floor. “You could have asked me that over the telephone.”

She sat down and drank from his glass. It was an unprecedented intimacy and he watched, astonished, the tilt of the glass and the long swallow. The bitter made her grimace even as she sucked the dampness off her upper lip. Oh, Lucy, he thought. What is this, now? A barman materialized, wiping his hands on his long white apron.

“Brandy, please,” she said.

“She means the real stuff, Jock,” Graham said. “In one of those fat glasses that spill all down your chin.”

“A snifter, sir, yes, thank you, sir,” said Jock, his accent refined to the point of sarcasm. But he came back with the brandy and another pint for Graham. Graham finished off the old pint and then looked at Lucy. She was shivering from too harsh a swallow—Our Best Brandy Isn’t Better—and put the back of her hand to her mouth, a fascinating gesture, but they all were, her gestures like a private conversation between Lucy and herself, and she had such beautiful hands . . . Graham gave his second pint a wary look and pushed it away. Trouble, he thought. And then looked at her again and woke up to her pallor and bruised eyelids: trouble indeed.

“But what do you really do?” she said, and lowered her hand.

He had to retrieve her initial question. “Really don’t write it. What would be the point?”

“What if people should believe it? What if they need to know?”

Graham hooted with laughter. “There is no such story. Listen, love, you can’t tell the glorious public anything for their own good, not unless you’re in advertising. One of the great mysteries of life. Tell them snake oil cures warts and they’re happy to pay a shilling an ounce. Tell them the Country Hospital Fund requires property taxes to increase by a shilling next year and consider the outrage!” He drank from his beer, then remembered and set it aside.

“Maybe outrage cures warts,” she said with a smile that made him feel she was looking at him for the first time.

“Maybe snake oil does. What’s your story that no one will believe?”

“Maybe magic does.”

“Cut a potato with a silver knife and bury it by the light of a full moon.”

Her smile grew lighter, questioning.

“Magic,” he explained. “To cure warts.”

“Shhh.” She reached across the table and touched her fingers to his lips. “Not so loud. He might hear you.”

She wasn’t smiling now. He knew what he was supposed to ask, but it took him a moment, seduced as he was by a touch that lingered after she had taken her hand away. What is this, Lucy? What the hell?

“Who might hear?”

She didn’t answer him directly. “Do you believe in magic?”

“Do I believe in . . . are we talking philosophy? History? Curing warts?”

“Magic,” she said, as if it were a perfectly sensible thing to say in an empty pub on a day in early spring. “Here and now, curing warts, whatever you like.”

“No. Never tell me that’s your story.” His eyes wandered to the fat portfolio between them on the table. “What is that, dispatches from a thousand years ago? Or is all this just leading up to something else?”

“Magic is real. Here and now. And I can prove it.”

She had a faint smile and a tension that dared him to take her seriously, but was she serious?

“You’re dead right, chicken: Nobody will believe you.”

“But I can prove it. I can. And it’s easy, anyone can do it who’s ever read a newspaper, seen a newsreel at the moving picture show. Anyone who learned their history lessons at school.”

“What?” This whole conversation was the set-up for an insult to his intelligence. “Can you possibly be talking about who I think you’re talking about? That stuffed suit the royals haul out for parades! That dressmaker’s dummy! That moth-eaten remainder from a waxwork museum! What the hell has come over you?” His gaze was caught again by her portfolio. “Oh, Lucy. Lucy, no. This is your life’s work? This is what you’ve been chasing after all this time?”

She looked down as if she were surprised to see the battered folio case on the table. Her cheeks were flushed and her smile had fled; he felt a stab of shame, as if he’d been picking on the slow child at school; but all the same!

“Of all the dull corners of history you could have chosen,” he said before he could change tack. “Well, all right. But please don’t suggest the Marshal of Whatsisname is news. Really, old darling, believability is not the issue. Sheer, unadulterated boredom is the issue.”

“Didn’t you ever scare yourself with the stories when you were a child?” Her voice was quiet, and though there was a humorous quirk to her brows she didn’t meet his eyes. “The end of an empire, the end of an age. The end of magic. And the one who did it just goes on and on . . .”

“I know. ‘Don’t stay out after dark, he might get you!’ But that was just to make staying out after dark more fun.” Studying her face, Graham found himself increasingly sorry for his scorn. She always looked delicate; at this moment she looked frail. “I still don’t get what this is about? The story no one will believe?”

“Magic is still alive,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And I can prove it.”

“All right. What’s your proof?”

“The Marshal of Kallisfane.”

“But he ended it.” He leaned forward, as if it was important to convince her. “He brought the dread empire down and put an end to magic. Hurray for the dawn of reason and the rule of law.”

“A thousand years ago.”

“Give or take.”

“Then what’s keeping him alive?”

“What . . .” Graham scratched his chin. He was on the verge of laughter, because though it was nonsense, it was clever nonsense. “Well, he’s a remnant, isn’t he? Sort of . . . a leftover. Wasn’t it supposed to be the doing of it, whatever he did, that preserved him? Dried prunes, salt cod, the Marshal of Whatsisname?”

“Are you asking me, or telling me?”

“I am telling you,” he said pompously, “what they taught us in school.”

But the more he tried to jolly her out of it, the more solemn she became.

“That,” she said with one of those direct, heartstopping looks, “is what he told someone a long time ago.”

“There you are, then.”

“And he’s a reliable source, is he? Mister Newspaperman?”

“Oh, come on!” He was stung by her echo of his scorn. “It’s clever, I grant you, but you don’t think you’re the first person ever to think of it, do you?”

“No,” she said, her gaze falling again to her papers. “No, I don’t.”

“Even if it’s a neat bit of logic, it doesn’t go anywhere, does it? I mean, so what if he is . . .” (he felt like an ass for saying the word) “. . . magical. If he’s the only magical thing in the world, what’s it good for? He’s an anomaly, the exception that proves the rule.”

“That just means ‘tests the rule.’ The challenge to the rule. Did you know that?” This, apparently to the portfolio.

“And it’s no kind of newspaper story,” he forged on, though he was starting to hate the sound of his own voice. “You do know that, right?”

“Oh, yes. I know. Because no one will believe it, and no one will care.”

“Well, listen . . .” By this time feeling like an utter shit. “There’s nothing wrong with the idea. I mean, as an idea. Philosophy, history, all that. Very profound.”

“Rest easy, my hero. I wasn’t going to ask you to put it in your paper.”

She smiled, finally, but she didn’t quite meet his gaze. And then before he knew it, she was gathering up the weighty portfolio and bending down to kiss him, which she never did, a press of her lips to the corner of his mouth, a gesture as mysterious and expressive of any of hers, warm and sad and what? What is this, Lucy? What the hell is this?

But by the time it occurred to him simply to ask, she was gone.

• • • •

Lucy had called up Graham with the vague notion of asking for help, or perhaps for less than that, for comradeship, a shoulder braced against her own. So his contempt stung, and confused her, too, because she could have argued against it, but what if he was wrong? What if the danger was real? It was real, it was the crooked backward course she had been plotting all this time. So if she was wrong, if she had been chasing nothing more than a scholar’s delusion, then she was a fool, but she was safe. And if she wasn’t wrong, then he was safe, because she had taken her proof away unshared. And wasn’t it just a dream? She didn’t know. She could not explain the certainty of danger, even to herself. She went home.

And walking from the bus stop (the bus easier than hunting for a cab so close to noon) she turned the corner into the square and saw him.

Him.

Benbury Square was really three squares nested one inside the other: the outer square of townhouses; then the square of cobblestone pavement fronting the houses; then the square of the central garden, hemmed in by palings and punctuated by trees. There were beds of turned earth, two benches awaiting this year’s coat of paint, and a rounded patch of lawn already showing green. And on the lawn stood a man wearing a double-breasted overcoat of the sober, fashionless type favored by royalty. As Lucy had said to Graham, one saw this figure sometimes in the newsreels: herky-jerky frames of celluloid gray, at once luminous and drab, of the king opening the High Court or greeting a Special Envoy, with this stiff dark figure in the background. Stuffed suit, waxwork dummy, museum mannequin waiting for his armor. He stood so dreadfully still on the greening lawn. Watching Lucy’s house.

Lucy drifted backwards, taking a glacial age to slip back around the corner. She felt transparent as a ghost, as if her substance had been stripped by shock, leaving nothing but the damp gray chill of the day. She drifted, and even around the corner she could feel him, as if she were a compass and he, black as iron, were a magnetic pole. Still walking backwards, she was jostled by a passer-by, and suddenly the world leapt into existence: not a ghostly arena hushed with anticipation, but a living city, busy with pedestrians, motor cabs squawking their horns and delivery van horses clattering on metal-shod hooves.

She ran until she could not breathe around the stitch in her side.

She rode a bus until the conductor turned her off at the end of its route, and then she rode another one.

She did not know where to go. The very concept of hiding was equivocal, denying as it did her passage from there to here. Hadn’t her feet pressed all that ground? Didn’t the tires of the bus? Wasn’t there a trail?

Hadn’t he, even he, left her a trail?

The buses all seemed to turn her back towards the center of the city. After a bit, she realized this was no arcane conspiracy, it was simply the logic of transportation: Where else would the buses go? But getting off was hard. She looked anxiously through the dusty windows, expecting that stiff, dark, figure; or if not that, then the rumored black motorcars of the Regiment No One Ever Saw.

There were black cars, but they were only taxicabs. She hoped. She dared. She descended the high steps onto the curb and found herself in a neighborhood she knew, the politely shabby territory behind the national library, realm of scholars and writers, private libraries and obscure museums, bookstores and cafés. She was known here. She could not possibly go to ground here. But her feet were on pavement they knew, and they took her to one of the smaller train stations in the city where she bought a ticket for a slow suburban train leaving in half an hour.

Half an hour. A terrifying gulf of time.

She sat, her feet throbbing in her not very sensible shoes, and watched the suburban shoppers flock and scatter like pigeons. She eyed the crippled clock above the ticket booth that refused to move its hands any faster than a creep. She studied the Departures board, looking for the hundredth time for a train that left any sooner. Which meant that she must have look at that one word a hundred times before she saw it. Palton. A country town, one stop among many, so why did it swim slowly up into her consciousness like a fish rising to the hook? Palton, Palton . . .

Palton, where only last week two teachers had been dismissed to cover up the “hysteria” amongst the students of a country school. Palton, that lay tucked under the haunted peak of Breadon How. Palton, that was only a crow’s flight away from the castle at Denbreath.

It was like finding a path in the trackless wood. She had somewhere to go.

• • • •

The last thing Lucy expected was to fall asleep on the train, but that was what she did, all but resting her head on the shoulder of the plump girl who had entered the compartment with a bevy of aunts just as the train pulled away. While they clucked over their parcels, Lucy slipped gently into the murmur of voices, the swaying of the carriage, the rhythm of the wheels. Outside the window, the city peeled away, diminishing into low brick districts, into gray waste grounds, into greening suburbs half-veiled by the engine’s steam. The train’s whistle shrieked at crossings and hooted for stations like a huge iron owl. Lucy half-slept while the train was in motion, half-woke when it crawled into one station and the next. The ladies left in a flurry of packages and she had the compartment to herself until a young man looked shyly in.

“Do you mind, miss?”

“No,” she said. He had a plain, open face, and an old raincoat slung over an off-the-rack suit that gave an impression of untidiness despite the bright polish of his enormous black shoes. Perhaps it was just that men of a certain size shouldn’t wear suits: He wasn’t fat, but he was very large. He gave Lucy a nervous smile and tucked himself away behind a paperback book that looked small in his hands. She relaxed a little; yet as the train rolled on, she began to find the racketing rhythm of the wheels more implacable than soothing. To Palton to Palton to Palton and what was she going to do when she got there? Something, she thought with her hands clenched into sharp-knuckled fists. Something to oppose. Something to defy.

Unable to sit still, she got up and slid open the door to the corridor. The countryside spread over brown fields and grey-green trees to the dusky northern hills. The smoke of burning thatch rose to meet the end of the day, drawing down the clouds. Lucy leaned against the corridor window, feeling a hard, old-woman’s sadness that seemed like the older sister to her fear, as if part of her knew that things weren’t going to turn out well. To defy, yes, that seemed necessary. That did not mean that she, knowing what she knew, could hope to overcome. She thought of the books scattered throughout her grandfather’s library. She thought of her grandfather, and her mother, and Graham. She thought of the hasty letter she had written, and of the papers she had abandoned to the care of the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and of the claim check that had gone into the post just as the train was called.

A woman swaying down the corridor to the end of the carriage excused herself as she bumped into Lucy. Lucy pressed herself aside, and through the window of the compartment’s glass door she caught the eye of the large young man with the book, who was watching her as patiently and unfeelingly as the fox watches the brush pile, waiting for the hare.

• • • •

My hero,

Here is the story no one wants to know:

218 years ago, the Marshal of Kallisfane founded Madrigal College’s Chair of Imperial Studies, the only one in that subject in the university. Since the founding, there have been twenty-nine Fellows, as compared to an average of sixteen Fellows in the same period of time across all other subjects. Of those twenty-nine Fellows, only six in 218 years have died peacefully of old age. Three have simply disappeared—the rest have died of suicide, unexplained accident, or outright murder. Check the university records and local police blotters: This is fact. Also ask yourself: Why is there only one fellowship in Imperial History, when we are, today, living in the ruins of that empire? In the university, it is because every time another such fellowship has been proposed—even when the proposal includes generous funding—the University Council has declined. The only reason ever offered: Such a chair already exists. Never mind that six different colleges sport research chairs in Modern History. There shall only ever be one chair in Imperial History, and the scholars who hold that chair are more likely to die violently than if they joined the army or worked in a mine . . .

• • • •

They waited until she stepped off the train in Palton.

The large young man, with his book in his coat pocket, followed her onto the platform and was joined by an older man, thin enough to hide in his shadow, who materialized out of the engine’s steam.

“Please, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he took her elbow, “let’s not have a fuss.”

They didn’t have a fuss. It was exactly as though she had been met by friends. The large young man took her pocket book and rifled through it, but he did it so calmly no one seemed to notice. The ticket collector took Lucy’s ticket from his hand without a flicker and they walked out into the astonishing freshness of the spring evening. There was the cobbled street of the country town, the sketch of chimney pots against the violet sky. The air was impossibly sweet after the stuffiness of the train. Instinct made Lucy look up, but clouds hid the stars. Looking down, she saw the massive shape of the long black car pulling up to the station door. There was something inevitable about that car, about the dusk, about the country quiet pouring in around the wail of the departing train. She drew a long breath with a strange kind of eagerness. Whatever else happened, she was going to know.

“That’s right, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he opened the rear door. “Nothing to be frightened of here.”

• • • •

. . . But it isn’t only scholars he is keeping under his thumb. Seventy-two years ago, the village of Galburgh in South Pevenshire was digging up a section of the commons at the edge of the village to widen a carriage road. In the course of the work, they uncovered a stretch of old paving, which, when it was taken up, proved to cover a spring that drained into the Macklebrook via an underground channel. There was some debate, reported in the parish records, as to whether to cover the spring and carry on with the road or to leave it uncovered and put it to some use. In the meantime, however, workmen who drank from the spring complained of dreams of such terrible import that one man joined an overseas missionary society and another committed suicide. The parish priest called upon the bishop for advice, but no church action was ever taken, for the simple reason that that was the month in which the Crown passed the Commons Development Act, which allowed, and still allows, the sale of common land by parish councils for the “creation or development of such industries, enterprises, public buildings, etc., to the benefit of the township.” The commons was bought, the spring was paved over, and a new village police station built on the spot. According to the Pevenshire newspapers of the time, the Marshal of Kallisfane was on hand for the new station’s official opening.

Graham, the king overturned a common-use law of centuries’ standing so that the Revenant could pave over a spring and put it under guard. And that is one of the most harmless stories that comes to mind . . .

• • • •

The motorcar slid down narrow country roads, carrying Lucy into the night. Lucy’s companion from the train shared the back seat with her, but with the darkness to hide his watchful gaze, he was just the shy young man abashed by his own size, and then even less than that, as if he were absorbed into the car itself, just one more shade of dark. The air was chill, whistling with drafts, but it smelled warmly of tobacco and leather, leaf-mold and aging upholstery. Lucy was reminded of being chauffeured from school to her grandfather’s country house, always knowing that the man behind the wheel reckoned she was no more than an excuse to take the new car, hand-built in her grandfather’s own stable, out for a drive. She had never minded that feeling. It had been the real holiday between the heated friendships and rivalries of school and the equally perilous attentions of her mother, her cousins, her aunts. Tonight, as the wind whined in around the windows and the chill soaked through her sensible tweed, she felt as though she were wrapped in a ghost of that comfort. But while she acknowledged that ghost, she did not let it fool her. In the end, she thought, it was just the calm certainty of doom.

• • • •

. . . for he is rarely inclined to hold his hand. Consider the fishers of Belmouth, who only two years ago complained of seals with human voices wrecking their nets and stealing their fish, but paying for their plunder with prophecy and song. The Marshal of Kallisfane, according to your very own newspaper, was granted use of the royal yacht for a late-autumn cruise ending in Belmouth harbor. Captain Ellerby, master of the king’s yacht, reported cloudless skies, light breezes, and an easy sail. That same day, the entire fishing fleet of Belmouth was lost in a freak storm. We will never know if it was because those fishermen were telling stories of talking seals, or if it was because of what those seals were saying. Every man off those boats is presumed drowned. Fifty-seven men . . .

• • • •

The black motorcar of the Unnamed Regiment paused just long enough for an iron gate to swing open. They eased past a saluting sentry and onto a drive. It was late. They had traveled much further than Denbreath. Trees flickered in the edge of the headlamps’ glow, then fell away into blackness and an impression of rough ground. The car’s note deepened as it began to climb. Then even the ground fell away, and Lucy’s heart stopped for an instant of disoriented terror—but they were not flying, only following the back of a ridge, its steep slope invisible in the dark. That moment of fear lingered, a quickening in her belly and a tightening in her flesh, prelude to the shock of arrival.

• • • •

. . . And if even the list of the dead is still not enough to make anyone care—and Graham, I know hundreds of these stories—then consider our history. Consider the holy wars in which the ancient pantheon and its temples were thrown down. Thousands of priests hanged or burned, their congregations killed, persecuted, scattered, an entire faith relegated to a footnote in the history books, because we have no ancient history, no memory, and no way to know what those priests once knew about the world or the magic the Revenant claims to have killed a thousand years ago.

He isn’t a joke, Graham, he isn’t a scarecrow stuffed with straw. He isn’t even a walking corpse. He is a tombstone, and he has spent the last thousand years keeping magic in its grave.

My train is leaving, I must fly—

Lucy

• • • •

Perhaps it was the starless night they had traveled through, perhaps it was the chill and the wood-rot smell of age, but Lucy was exquisitely aware of the stony weight of the castle that swallowed her up. She felt as if she had been eaten by a mountain, as if the dark were the perfect and immutable dark of a mine. And there was the silence, too, a deep, conscious, listening silence. Even her escorts seemed reluctant to intrude; they stepped softly, spoke in undertones to the men at the door.

What must it be like to work for the Undying, to run his bloody errands, to keep his house?

They ushered her through the great hall, shadowy as a cathedral, and down a back-eddy of a corridor to a chapel. In the corridors there were electric lights strung along the plastered walls, but in the chapel there were only banks of candles burning with a honey smell. Light and warmth hovered in the narrow room, complimenting rather than banishing the cold and dark. The high white walls were decked with brass memorial plaques, mirrors for the ranks of flame burning in their corner stands, and there were more plaques set in the floor. There were no pews, only a plain altar stone and the candles, and the Sacred Flame hanging on the end wall, a tapered silver oval like the point of a spear.

The room was so quiet Lucy could hear the rustle of the many candle flames, and the footsteps coming down the hall.

He still wore his overcoat, buttoned to show only his trouser hems and the neat square knot of his tie. His head was bare, his thick dark hair neatly combed, his face expressionless, lifeless . . . dead. Lucy thought his eyes were dark, but she found it impossible to meet them. She did not want to see them or be seen by them. Her heart beat with a trapped flutter, remembering the bird in her dream.

“Miss Donne,” he said, “do you know why you are here?”

His voice shocked her: an ordinary baritone, a little rough, but without menace. No sullen echo of the grave.

“I dreamed . . .”

He waited for her to finish, as patient as the walls. The pause was so long it finally seemed that Lucy’s fear had peaked, that she had breasted some steep rise and found herself still standing. She took what felt like her first breath since he entered the room and said, laying her cards on the table or throwing them to the wind,

“I have been studying you. I have researched you, I have learned . . . I have learned some of what you are . . .” Lucy tailed off again, this time with a blush. How childish that sounded! And how intimate, with an unwarranted, uninvited intimacy.

“And you dreamed,” he said, inflectionless.

“I did not dream you outside my house,” she said. You. That was the intimacy: saying, not him, but you. You.

Lucy, is it only fear that makes your heart race?

He had stepped further into the chapel without her noticing. She drifted away from his advance.

“You looked for me. You found me.” He began to unbutton his overcoat, standing before the altar, and Lucy realized there was something lying on the stone as if for consecration. She tore her gaze away, desperate not to have seen what she saw. The Marshal of Kallisfane shrugged his coat from his shoulders and bent to lay it on the floor, and Lucy closed her eyes, trembling in every bone.

This was beyond fear. This was the end of her life.

“Me, and some of what I am,” he went on. “Tell me what you think you know.”

And there it was, still, the magic of intimacy; of talking with him, her whole treasure store of knowledge rising in her mind. Who he was, who she was.

Lucy opened her eyes and accepted what she saw: the sword on the altar, the Marshal of Kallisfane laying his suit jacket, neatly folded, next to his coat on the floor. He looked smaller in his shirtsleeves, but she could see the muscles in his arms as he began to unknot his tie.

She was very conscious of her trembling body, her stuttering heart, the dizzying lack of air.

“I know that magic did not die with the Empire.”

“True.” He slipped his tie from his collar.

“I know . . .” Breath failed her. Her chest hurt, a widening pain from her breastbone to her shoulder blade, and for the first time she began to wonder if this was only fear. It felt as though he crowded all the air out of the room, pressed the blood out of her heart. Even the candles seemed to be growing dim. “I know you have been fighting all this time to keep magic out of the world. I know you have lied to us, and killed us, and led us by the nose.”

“Go on.” The tie went into one trouser pocket, cuff links into another. He began to roll up his sleeves, revealing powerful wrists and forearms shadowed with dark hair.

Lucy leaned against the wall. The pain pried into her shoulder, her wrist. I’m going to die, she thought, before he gets a chance to kill me.

“I know the worst lie you’ve ever told,” she said.

“Tell me.” He unbuttoned his collar and tossed it onto his coat. He looked completely human now, and Lucy could hardly bear to look at him.

“That you have no magic of your own.”

He was finally still. “Why is that the worst lie?”

“Because you betray . . . you betray magic. The world, the gods, the Divine. You betray us. You lie . . .” She had no air left. The pain grew like a tree through her chest, down her arm.

“What do you imagine magic is, that you think I’ve done wrong in betraying it?”

“Life,” she whispered. “You’re the tombstone. You’re the paving over the well.”

“You know nothing of magic.”

She looked at him past the sparkling darkness in her eyes and for an instant she was entirely Lucy, as if she had regained the fear-scattered pieces of herself just in time for the end. Her hand described a fluttering moth’s circle in the air and she said faintly, lightly,

“Dying gives one a certain insight. So does living, I suppose. Perhaps I know something you don’t.”

“I have always considered the possibility,” he said. He turned to the altar and with a movement devoid of ceremony he picked up the sword. Steel rang gently off the stone; light slid like water off the steel. “Tell me, Miss Donne. What did you hope to accomplish in Palton this afternoon?”

Palton? This afternoon? A lifetime ago.

“Breadon How. The Cold Hounds. I thought . . .”

“Yes?”

“I thought I . . .”

“You thought you could oppose me. You thought you could raise up some power I have kept buried for nine hundred years.”

“No.” Lucy’s tears caught the light like the steel. “But I thought I had to try.”

“Ah.” It sounded oddly like satisfaction. He turned the blade in his hand as if he too wanted to see the candlelight run off its edge. “You aren’t the first to think that.”

“I know.”

“The others all failed.”

She knew.

He lifted the sword, a man in modern dress playing with an archaic toy—but he did not look ridiculous. He looked like himself. He looked like death.

“Does your heart pain you?”

“Yes.” The pain was her heart, condensed into a pulsing star lodged against her spine.

“You might have succeeded at Breadon How, Miss Donne, although I think you would not have found the Cold Hounds comfortable allies. But you might well have awakened them. I believed it after dreaming your dream, and I think it even more likely now. But you are wrong about one thing, and your heart, Miss Donne, is wiser than you. Your heart, so full of life, knows that I am not magic. I am the antithesis, Miss Donne. I am exactly what you called me: a tombstone. For I promise you, Miss Donne, if I had one glimmer of magic in me, I would have ended this curse of a life the instant I knew my emperor was dead.”

“But you killed him?”

“My emperor, the last emperor. Yes, I killed him, but it was treachery, Miss Donne, not magic. And it was not life that he would have summoned if I had not stopped him, very far from life, that magic he would have raised. Oh, I won’t call it death. Not life, not death: a denial of both. But you do not understand me.”

“I want to. Tell me . . .” But the pain clenched, her pulse stumbled, racing at the edge of a fall.

“Ah, but it is not your understanding that I need. Put out your hand.”

Lucy was aware of the sword he held as she was aware of her exhausted heart, her stuttering blood, but she had come too far for petty defiance. She held out her shaking hand and he pressed the sword’s hilt against her palm.

“Take it,” he said. “Hold hard.”

Her hand clenched in instinctual response as he let go, so she did not drop it, but the point chimed when it struck the floor. The blade was heavy, the leather-wrapped grip warmer than her own chilled flesh.

The Marshal of Kallisfane knelt on the floor and began to unbutton his shirt.

“No,” Lucy said.

He ignored this so completely the word might have been a burning wick, a drop of wax. He took the neck of his undershirt in both hands and tore it to bare his chest. He seemed to diminish at every stage, smaller and smaller, now showing bone as well as muscle beneath the pale skin.

“Just here,” he said, pointing, as if she might have missed it, to the thick crosshatch of scars between his nipple and his breastbone.

Lucy used the sword’s weight to drag herself away from the supporting wall, though her heart beat like a bird crushed between icy hands. Pain tasted like a new penny on her tongue.

“How many times . . .?”

“Oh, many.” He spoke as if he still stood over her, as if he were not half-naked on his knees. “Not always in search of death. Men have needed to test me, to be sure of who or what I am.”

“And you want this?” The point of the sword jittered across a memorial stone, struck a spark from a date of birth.

“Call this,” he said, “my test of you.”

She put her free hand to her own breast, as though the pain she felt there was the pain of those terrible scars.

“Here,” he said, and he lifted the sword, cutting his fingers on the edge as he aimed the point at his heart. “Lean your weight against the hilt, it needs no more than that.”

The star behind Lucy’s own heart bloomed in sympathy. She let go the hilt, and though he tried to hold the blade, it pulled itself out of his grasp, cutting his palm, ringing like a bell on the floor. Lucy fell to her knees. Her hand traveled the distance between her heart and his. She felt his scars, his warm and living skin.

“I pass your test,” she whispered on the last of her breath. “I am not you.”

Then there was no more light, no more air.

No more pain.

• • • •

The envelope containing a left-luggage claim check was collected from the mailbox in the train station not long after the Palton train pulled away from the platform. It was sorted that day and delivered to Graham’s flat the next morning at 10:12. Graham, however, was not there to receive it. He had interviews to conduct, an article to write, and an argument to have with his editor after he handed in his copy. He stopped for a drink and a bite to eat with some of his colleagues, and finally reached his flat around nine—early for him, but after the argument he was in an unsociable mood. So an early night for once, and for once, only the one drink. He unlocked the street door, fished his mail out of its box, and sorted through it as he climbed the stairs.

Lucy’s handwriting stopped him cold three stairs below the landing.

Lucy, Lucy. He hadn’t thought about her all day, and yet here she was. A drink of beer, a touch, a kiss. He could feel her mouth against the corner of his mouth, her lips warm and mobile, as if they shaped a thought even as she kissed him.

Graham shook himself, finished the climb to his flat and let himself inside. With Lucy’s letter in his hand, he saw the place as he would if she were here: dusty, not too untidy, but uncared-for, unloved. Somehow all his things acquired a sepia tone, regardless of their original colors, as if a couch or a lampshade could fade like a plant for lack of attention. He turned on the desk lamp, which at least afforded kinder shadows, leaving the letters on the desk while he shed his coat and tie, pulled on a sweater, poured himself a drink. Only two for the night, so he was still ahead. Finally he sat, his desk chair creaking as he leaned back against the spring, and picked up her letter again. Her handwriting, elegant but hard to decipher, reminded him of her gestures, her hands.

He realized he was reluctant to open the letter. Love note, brush off, the research notes he was waiting for? He turned the envelope in his hands. Cheap, mass-produced, a far cry from the heavy rag of her usual stationary. He tapped it edge-on against his desk, feeling the shift of several folded sheets inside. Research notes, he decided, and did not know if he was relieved or— Well, but he did know, didn’t he? Because he didn’t believe in the love note, kiss or no kiss. He wasn’t sure he believed in the kiss.

He took a drink, tore the envelope, shook out the letter and a claim check, a rectangle of red pasteboard that lay on his inky blotter, the only spot of color in the room. He let it lie, unfolded pages.

My hero, here is the story no one wants to know . . .

He read it once distractedly, remembering their conversation in the pub. His scorn, he remembered that, and her face, delicate and tired. He remembered that better than he remembered her words. Proof, she had said, and, I can prove it.

He threw the letter down, poured himself more whiskey, paced, muttering, around the room.

Then he read the letter again, forcing his attention onto the points that could be verified: parish records, newspapers, police reports.

He paced again, glass in hand. “I don’t believe it.” And, “Come on, Lucy! Magic isn’t news.”

An imagined Lucy said, “The systematic murder of university professors isn’t news? The manipulation of the Crown to the detriment of rural villages isn’t news?”

“I don’t believe it. Not a word, Lucy. I don’t.”

But it could be checked. Some of it could be. University records, harbormaster’s logs. He emptied his glass and started for the drinks cabinet, then changed course for the desk.

“What bloody train? Where the hell did you go?”

The claim check stared up at him. Left Luggage. Skillyham Station. Hours: 6 a.m.—Midnight.

He glanced at his watch, snatched up his coat and his keys.

• • • •

Whirr, whirr, click.

“Benbury oh-oh-nine-three.”

“Could I speak with Miss Lucy Donne?”

There was a pause, a most definite pause, and a deepening chill. “Who is calling, please?”

Something was wrong. “A colleague at the national library. We were doing some research together and she has some materials I need. If I could speak with Miss Donne . . . I know it’s early . . . you can assure her I will be brief if she is otherwise engaged . . .”

Another pause. Then, ominously, another voice. “Sir, Miss Donne is not available. If you give me your name and a telephone number and address where you can be reached, I will be sure to pass the message along.”

Graham hung the receiver gently on its hook, breaking the connection. Then he set the telephone on the floor, where it kept company with his typewriter, his dictionary, his mug full of pencils. Lucy’s papers covered his desk, sheet after sheet of foolscap, typewriter bond, notepaper and envelopes and scraps, a drifting sea of her handwriting that threatened to drown the desk. She kept meticulous record of her researches, but it was in no sort of order at all. And yet the sheer mass of it was compelling. Whatever one thought of old wives’ tales, the whispered glories of the magical past—and he had stored up a far-ranging argument on that score—it was difficult to deny that the Marshal of Kallisfane was actively at large in the world, working toward some goal.

Or did he have a goal? Could all of this be, what? The senile boredom of a very old man? The directed service of an agent of the Crown?

There were more possibilities the farther away he looked from Lucy’s obsession with magic, but he couldn’t deny the weight of her research. He wanted to argue it out with her. He wanted her to lead him through the chaos, form an argument, defend her conclusions—convince him, if that was what was in the cards—but most of all he wanted her to be here. After a night of reading about death, disappearance, suppression, manipulation, he was all too ready to read bad news into that brief conversation with whomever it was that answered the telephone at Lucy’s house. Especially that second voice asking his name, his telephone number, his address. Why his address, where there he was talking on the telephone? Was it because, with the newly automated exchanges, it was more difficult to trace a call? And do upper servants really “pass messages along”?

My train is leaving, I must fly—

Fly where, Lucy, damn you? And why?

Oh, Lucy, Lucy. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this?

What do you do if you have a story no one will believe?

The answer did not come so glibly this time. He sat with his elbows holding down a drift of paper and his hands clenched before his mouth. What do you do if you have a story you don’t dare to tell?

“Because if you’re right, Lucy . . .” If you’re right about even half of this—forgetting the magic for a minute—don’t you see what you have here? Not just the Revenant, but the police, the army, the church, the very Crown! And even if you ducked the whole boiling lot of them, who the hell else is there left to tell? The common people? The general public who go to church, who believe the police keep good citizens safe, who would be scared pissless if you told them you were bringing magic back into the world? The truth is, Lucy, you could publish a book and give it away on the street corners, and if the king said it was all for the good of the bloody realm, they’d believe him. They would say, thank you, Mister Revenant, sir, and toss the book on the fire, and you could kiss your hand to whatever it is you’re looking for, justice or the cure for moral outrage, because you know what, Lucy? They might be right.

If magic is real. And if that’s what the Marshal of Kallisfane has been doing: keeping magic out of the world all these years.

And if you’re not just being a coward, Graham Isles, Mister Newspaperman.

My hero, here is the story that will destroy your life, your career, your every cherished illusion about yourself . . .

He bundled her papers back into the portfolio. Shaved, changed his shirt. Went to work.

He was not surprised to find a message waiting for him, directing him to his editor’s office. Even if last night’s dispute had not spawned fresh points of attack, he was late. He was surprised to find one of the crime reporters lying in ambush outside the editor’s door.

“Just remember, Isles, you talk to me before you go anywhere.”

“What?” Graham’s attention was still more on Lucy than the world. “Go where?”

“Nowhere, until you talk to me.”

Graham shut the office door in the man’s anxious face.

“You took your time,” his editor said. “Drowning your sorrows?”

“Research,” Graham said shortly.

“Well, I’ve a bit more for you to do. Lucy Donne. You’ve heard, I suppose?”

Graham experienced the curious sensation of blood leaving his face as he went pale. A tightening, a cooling. “Heard what?”

“She went missing two nights ago. The family was keeping it quiet, figuring she’d turn up on her own, I suppose, but now the police have issued a bulletin. We’ve got a friend in CID who will tell us what comes of it—a dog’s breakfast of bus conductors and ticket sellers so far—but no one’s getting in to see the family. But you worked with her quite a bit, didn’t you? Something in the way of being friends?”

“Something in the way.” Graham worked his tongue in his dry mouth. “Do they think . . . What do they think?”

“Reserving their opinions for the moment, but you can suppose they lie somewhere between scandalous and dead. What do you think? You know her. Inside information will win your employer’s approval, affection, and possibly a wee bonus on the side.”

Graham saw that last scribbled line. My train is leaving, I must fly— Had she just played into the Revenant’s hands, leaving everyone a trail that went nowhere? Or had she successfully escaped his notice—and gone where?

He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t have a clue. Actually,” he added with perfect honesty, “I’m stunned.”

“No boyfriends that you know of? No fights with the family? Storming off to leave them stewing and make the papers who cried havoc look like silly chumps when she comes home in perfect health?”

“That, no. I think she has a very high regard for her family, in her way.” In her off-hand, defended, too-sensitive way.

“And no, er, lover’s quarrel?”

His editor’s feeble attempt at delicacy told Graham volumes about the rumors circulating in the newsroom this morning.

“Not a chance.”

“No coppers here, son.”

“I’ve bought her a drink or two, but that’s as far as it ever went. Look,” he said, a little desperate in the face of skepticism, “the last time I saw her she told me a story about the Marshal of Kallisfane. I mean . . .” He shrugged, put out his hands.

“A funny story?”

“Not particularly.”

His editor nodded, accepting this as proof of the absence of romance. “Well, if you think of anything. In the meantime, what about getting in to see the family? As a friend and colleague, I mean. Offer them the resources at your disposal.”

“Do you mean the paper’s resources?”

“Well, we wouldn’t mind posting notice of a reward for information received, especially if it came with an exclusive interview with the mother. That might open the door for you. Also keeping in mind that she did work for us, even if she was freelance and, well, an amateur. We owe her our support.” This was said, not with self-righteousness, but with the tone of a newsman trying a subhead out loud.

Graham felt a quickening, the conception of an idea. “If I had a note on the publisher’s letterhead?”

His editor scratched his chin and said he would see what he could do.

• • • •

“Are there any more questions, Mr. Isles?”

Sir Roger Donne picked up the paper knife on his blotter and set it a little to one side. It was the ninth time he had made that gesture in the course of the interview and it was starting to obsess Graham. He made a mark beside eight other marks in his notebook.

“Sir Roger, you have been very forthcoming.”

Though in fact, Lucy’s grandfather had not said any more than a hundred other anxious relatives Graham had interviewed over the years. She’s a good girl, really. She’d never stay away if she could come home. And sometimes they were right, and sometimes they were wrong, and the one was as likely to crush a loving family as the other. We’re just praying she’s all right, wherever she is.

“Then if that is all.” Sir Roger put his hands on the edge of his desk, preparatory to rising.

“There is one other thing.” Graham hesitated, as he had been hesitating all along. He felt a flash of empathy for Lucy, remembering again their last conversation: her tentative opening, his scorn.

Sir Roger frowned into the pause. “I hope, Mr. Isles, that you and your superiors are sincere in your offer of help. It would add enormously to the pain and distress of Lucy’s mother if old scandals are raked up out of the past, and it would do no good whatsoever. I’m sure I can rely on you in this matter.”

“No, it isn’t that. I mean, yes, sir, you can rely on us to be discreet.” Although if the old man thought the tabloids weren’t going to disinter the scandal of Lucy’s fatherless state, he was more naïve than Graham supposed.

“What, then?”

“Are you aware of the nature of Lucy—of Miss Donne’s research?”

Sir Roger’s scowl deepened. “I was under the impression, Mr. Isles, that my granddaughter was providing background material for your newspaper articles. Are you suggesting that her work for you put her in some kind of danger?”

“No! Absolutely not. I was referring to her own private research.”

“Lucy is an amateur historian. An intelligent and erudite young woman. And I can assure you, sir, that her ‘private research’ has no bearing on the case whatsoever. She reads books, sir! No young woman has ever disappeared because of reading books.”

“Even if the books she reads lead her into a pursuit of the Marshal of Kallisfane?” Graham kept his eyes on his notebook, as if was just one more question to make a note of, but eventually he had to look up into Sir Roger’s silence.

For the first time Graham saw some family resemblance between Lucy and her grandfather, a ghost of her fragility and pallor, a reflection of her steady, unreadable stare. Sir Roger lifted a hand, touched the paper knife. Pushed himself away from the desk and stood.

“Come with me.”

Sir Roger took him to the library, and it was a long walk through grand rooms, useless unless you were giving a party for three hundred friends. The library would have seemed just the same, as empty as a stage between shows, except that Graham had seen Lucy handle books, had seen how they spoke to her hands as well as her mind. Thousands of volumes, and any one of them might have come alive to her touch, her fingers slipping through their pages as if paper were fur, as if books could purr. For every window bay they passed he felt a jolt of anticipation, as if she might be standing there perusing the shelves, but she never was. Her absence persisted all the way down the room.

The table at the end bore a desk lamp, a blotter pad, a box of paper, and a neat stack of books. This tidy set-up obviously had nothing to do with the mad profusion of Lucy’s papers and Graham gave it no more than a glance. He turned to Sir Roger, waiting for him to explain, but Lucy’s grandfather gestured at the table.

“Here is my granddaughter’s research, Mr. Isles. A perfectly unexceptional genealogical study of her grandmother’s family. Please, have a look.”

Graham picked up a book from the pile. It was a ledger, a handwritten parish register, a record of births and deaths. He gave the pages a desultory ruffle with a distinct feeling of heat growing beneath his collar.

“Take your time,” Sir Roger said. “There are some notes there, too, which you are welcome to read. You see, I want you to be absolutely satisfied on this point, Mr. Isles, because when your article appears in the newspaper, I want there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that my granddaughter is a perfectly innocent young woman. Which you should already know as well as I, if your claims of friendship have not been grossly exaggerated for the sake of this intrusion into our private affairs.”

The heat rose into Graham’s face. “Are you suggesting that research into the Marshal of Kallisfane would not be innocent?”

Sir Roger rocked back on his heels. “I am telling you that this is all there is. Lucy did nothing to deserve her fate.”

“What fate?” Graham said, anger giving his reporter self full rein. “Do you know what has happened to her? Do you know where she is?”

“No! Of course—”

“So what fate do you think she would deserve if she had been studying the Marshal of Kallisfane?”

Sir Roger’s face was as red as Graham’s. “This is an outrage! I let you into my home only because your superiors assured me of their desire to help us find Lucy—”

“Do you want to find Lucy?”

“Of course!”

“Then why are you lying?”

“Get out!”

“Why are you covering up for the Revenant?”

“Get out before I throw you out!”

• • • •

The story about Lucy’s disappearance ran without any mention of the Marshal of Kallisfane. Not because of any interference from on high, but because Graham had written it that way. It had seemed the only reasonable thing to do. His editor would never have agreed to print unfounded allegations of a public figure, and to found the allegations on Lucy’s research, unconfirmed as it was, would have been at best premature. There is still time to tell that story, he said to himself. But it was harder to say it to Lucy as she stared at him from the printed page. The paper had copied a studio portrait that made her look like a woodland fawn.

Graham paid for an uneaten meal and took the paper home with him; another early night, though he made no resolutions about the whiskey waiting for him in his flat. He was turning his key in the lock of the street door when a friendly voice said, “Mr. Isles? I wonder if you could give us a moment of your time?”

He turned, his keys in his hand, just in time to see the black motorcar pulling up to the curb.

• • • •

In the Castle of Kallisfane, the silence persisted. It was impossible not to be conscious of it, of the way a footfall or a word only threw it into sharper relief. Impossible, too, not to think of museums, mausoleums, tombstones, tombs. And so Lucy did think of them, but they were not gloomy thoughts. She felt as light as a hummingbird among the mourning wreaths, a petal on the breeze. The fact that her heart skipped and bounded like a puppy tumbling down a flight of stairs, the fact that her breath came in sips and gasps, the fact that her hands were icy and her lips were halfway numb: These facts were simply irrelevant. She was alive, alive in the Marshal’s stronghold, alive and on her way to talk to him again.

She had to sit on the stairs to rest halfway down. Her guide, the thin balding man who, in her other life, had taken her arm in a train station and warned her not to make a fuss, waited patiently, cleaning under his fingernails with the thumbnail on the opposite hand.

The castle was disappointing at first, as the oldest castles tend to be, being small and cramped and dim. But age exerts a subtle fascination, most of all in the ancient place that is still inhabited. Lucy the historian thought of the famous men, the legendary men, who had trod these floors, who had passed through these doors, who had ridden out from these walls to impose a new order on their collapsing world.

The Marshal’s order, Lucy, don’t forget. The Marshal’s chaos, too.

The Marshal’s library was a pokey warren of badly lit rooms, old castle offices knocked together with shelves built to fit the awkward walls, and books and papers crammed in every which way to fill the shelves. Lucy the book hound was drawn like a nail to a magnet, but the scholar in her was shocked, even offended. Did the Marshal of Kallisfane, the embodiment of living history, have so little respect . . . ? But then she remembered the dead and vanished scholars, herself included, and felt a little pulse in her gut that had nothing to do with her damaged heart. Of course he had no respect. Respect, for history and for historians, was the very last thing he would have.

He met her in the largest room.

“Sit there,” he said, gesturing to a chair by the door. “It would be better for you if you don’t come too close.”

Lucy had to believe him, with her blood scampering through her veins, but it didn’t trouble her. He took all her attention. Was this what it would be like to be in love? The shape of him, the glance of light across his shaven cheek, the arch of his brow. The movement of his chest beneath the shirt and jacket and tie. The lightless eyes that woke a tremor in her skin. Not love—fear, in fact—and yet . . . Was there something of desire, some kind of desire, here? Or was it only that deceptive intimacy of being here with him, of knowing the scars that lay behind the armor of his suit?

“I wish I knew your name,” Lucy said, breathless and fey.

“That isn’t necessary.” He was dismissive, faintly ironic. For some reason it made her laugh.

“No, I’m just curious. But I do wonder why I’m still alive?” She had lost the rhythm of breathing and had to snatch after air when her words failed. “But maybe that doesn’t matter either. Maybe I’m only curious, a curious ghost, you must know so many.”

The Marshal of Kallisfane looked at her a moment, his eyes black in shadow, then pulled a chair away from the desk under the window and sat down facing her from across the room. (The room darkly walled in books, with a too-small rug on the stone floor, a window cut through thick walls, a paraffin heater exuding its peculiar oily smell. Lucy would only notice these things later, when their memory cast a shadow on her mind.)

“You said a thing to me last night,” the Marshal said. “You said magic was life and I was its death, keeping it out of the world. I wonder why you think you know this? I wonder how you could know.”

“Then you’re curious, too. Such curious hauntings . . .” More air, and a stab at humility: “I don’t, of course,” except she spoiled it with a shrug and a coiling gesture with her hand. “Well, maybe it came to me in a dream.”

“Magic was life and death, once. We used to say, the fires of creation, the breath of the gods. They did, the wizards and the priests. I was only a soldier, of course, I made my sacrifices and held to my oaths, no more than that. Most of us were like that. Magic was part of the mysteries, part of the world. The Cold Hounds of Breadon How were no different than the ice storms that blow out of the mountains in the north. They were the same. Their victims were the same. Living and dying was what humans did. Life and death was a matter for the gods.”

It was like love. Lucy lay back in her chair, pinning her pulse with a thumb on her wrist, watching his dry, spare mouth shape his words. Oh, to say you to this man. Oh, to hear him say we and I.

“Caedemus was insane, but only in the manner of his kind. Wizard, priest, emperor’s son: The godfire was in him—like a disease, you would say now, but then it was expected, desired even, it was the mark that made him heir. Not that he had powers,” the Marshal added distastefully. “He had nothing, none of them did. They were not gods, only men . . . and women, some of them, like you. You need to know this. You will need to understand.”

Oh, to hear this man say you. Lucy’s heart found its rhythm as it quickened.

“They had nothing—he—had nothing,” the Marshal said, speaking still of the emperor he betrayed. “He was no more than a door through which magic could sometimes step into the world. And he knew it. Being a little madder than the rest, he saw it clear. And being a little madder than the rest, he sought to change that fact, to change himself, to change the world. To become magic. To transform the human world of living and dying into the world of the gods, where life and death stand still, where life and death are one . . . The perfect world, he called it. I was a soldier. He was what he was: a wizard, an emperor, insane. I have never understood what he desired. But what he tried to bring into the world. What he tried to make of the world . . .”

Lucy was nothing but the sight of him, the sound of his voice. She hung suspended over his hesitation as if it were a chasm in the earth.

“I know what it would have made of the world, because I know what it made of me when I killed him. Death and life: death in life. Perfection. The tombstone you saw in your dreams. And that is what I have been keeping out of the world these endless years. That is what I have been keeping out of the human world. Myself, writ large.”

She thought of him as he had been without his armor. She thought of him in the chapel, on his knees, her hand on the warm scars over his heart.

She thought of her studies. She thought of her letter to Graham. She thought of herself, and dared to ask,

“The dreaming spring of Galburgh? The prophetic seals of Belmouth? Is that lifeless, deathless perfection?”

“It is magic.”

“But then—”

“Is that,” he said, “a gamble you would take if you were me?”

But Lucy’s mind was already skipping down another path of logic. She laughed, incredulous, stunned. “Why, then you are a god!”

“No,” he said, an absolute negation.

Lucy, not believing him, laid her fingers against her lips and stared.

“No.” He rose, with the first restlessness she had seen in him, and then stood, self-restrained, as if pacing were too alien a concept—too human a concept—to pursue. “Believe me. Understand me. I am a tombstone, I am a closed door, nothing more.”

“Keeping magic out of this world. Or . . . this other thing, this perfection.”

“If they are not the same thing.”

“If?” Lucy whispered, incredulous all over again. “If? Don’t you know?”

“I have wondered,” he said, and stopped. “I have wondered, from time to time.”

Lucy went cold, and then more than cold, thinking of what he implied. To take on such a mission, such a burden—not only the long years, not only the murders, the lies, the kings held under his sway, but the destruction, the erasing from history of the whole world he had been born to—and then to doubt. The chasm between them was deep, and filled with hell, and in that moment, terribly, terrifyingly real.

“When one such as you comes along,” he said to her, “an open door yourself, with a mind prying at every door I have ever closed, digging up every spring I have ever paved over, I do wonder.”

“No, I . . .” Lucy’s voice trembled with tears. “I only . . .”

“Wondered?” A perfection of irony. “You were only curious, I know. But perhaps you understand my dilemma now. To release what my emperor summoned would be to allow the end of everything, the end of life, an end without ending, an end with no hope of beginning, an end without even the hope of death. And yet. And yet.”

“And yet,” Lucy said—oh, to hear this man!—“And yet, what if what you are keeping out of the world is life? ‘The fires of creation, the breath of the gods.’”

“It is not such a terrible world, this world that I have made.”

“No. It isn’t, no. No, but . . .” Trembling on the edge of the abyss.

“But could it be better? But could it be that without magic it is as dead as that other world would be, as dead as I am, could it be?”

“But do you have the right to have made it anything at all?”

He stood with his back to the window, looking down at her with his lightless eyes, and she felt again the weight of the sword in her hand.

“No right,” he said at last. “Only the necessity to save . . . Do you understand, Miss Donne? It was the necessity of the moment, the desperate need to stop my emperor before he brought about the ruin of the world. And I have been stopping him ever since.”

“But not knowing!” she cried, and was not sure if she was crying out in empathy or argument.

“Ah, but you still do not understand me. He was an open door, once upon a time. Like any wizard. Like you, and all the other open doors I have closed. Even if it is magic that I have been keeping out of the world, to let it back in might be to let him come again, sometime, in some form, when I am not there to stop it as I stopped him before.”

“Do you mean his ghost or his idea?”

“Either!” He turned away from her, and by that she knew.

“If that sufficed to lay your doubts, I’d be dead now.”

“I am so tired!” His voice broke, he bent an arm across his chest as if to protect himself from further scars. “Gods give me aid, I am so tired.”

Lucy hung on his silence, afraid, but it was the fear of awe at what he had given over into her hands. Finally, she realized that the silence was hers. “What do you want me to do?”

• • • •

The black car conveyed him to an anonymous building that was, if one unwound the tangle of streets, not far from the royal palace. A small, un-numbered door let him into a corridor lit by bare electric bulbs, stark and dim. Graham could feel his courage fading like old wallpaper, and it didn’t help that his escort, a hulking young man with a face like a plowboy, moved him along by the simple expedient of stepping forward and assuming Graham would proceed to get out of his way. Graham proceeded, a wry internal voice telling him you’re in trouble now, mate even as the sweat came out on his palms. Anger guilt fear . . . and Lucy. Lucy very much on his mind.

“Just here, Mr. Isles,” said the oversized plowboy, rattling open an accordion-fold lift door. They went up, the lift bobbing and swaying in its shaft, and exited into a corridor where there were new runners on the floor and the light bulbs had frosted glass shades. Coming up in the world. The plowboy knocked on a door and pushed it open without waiting for an answer.

“Mr. Isles, you can’t know how glad I am—how relieved I am to make your acquaintance. Thank the Divine you’re here.” Not a tall man, but a bulky one, his body fronted by a robust belly and his face obscured by jowls. Neither handsome nor famous, but Graham knew who he was, at least, he had a vague notion that crystallized as the man drew him into the room. Barrimond, senior bureaucrat, quiet power in the Ministry of State. Releasing Graham, he smoothed his hand over the glossy hair painted over his scalp and offered Graham a drink. Nothing to be offended by there, and in fact Graham could have used one, but he didn’t like the assumption that had the plowboy already clattering amongst a tray of decanters.

“No,” Graham said with deliberate lack of courtesy. “Why am I here?”

A small pause, a look of calculation in the fat man’s eyes. “Yes. Perhaps it is a trifle late for the amenities. I should apologize for sending an invitation you could not refuse—and yet—great heavens—here I am not even offering you a chair. Please.” He gestured.

Graham sat where indicated. Barrimond sat behind his desk. The plowboy propped himself against the door. All in our stations, Graham thought.

“I’m glad to see you’re a direct kind of man, Isles,” Barrimond said, “though I should say I’m not surprised, having read so much of your work—read and admired, I should hasten to say. I also believe—indeed, I am relying on it—that you are capable of discretion, a much rarer thing in a newspaperman. I take this evening’s article about poor Lucy Donne as an example in point, because you and I both know how much more you could have written.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Graham said, more or less automatically.

Barrimond looked at him, then bent to haul open a drawer in his desk. “I suppose that if I want directness from you I should be honest myself. Always the best policy, really, though I’m afraid I owe you a kind of an apology. Or rather, since we are being driven by necessity, not so much an apology as an expression of regret. Your privacy and your person have been a little impinged upon, but I trust it will be made clear how important—and really, we could have done much worse and been justified . . .” Having been talking with his hand in the open drawer, Barrimond now dragged out a heavy object and laid it on his desk. It was Lucy’s portfolio, stolen from Graham’s flat. “For example, we could have simply turned this, and you, over to the Marshal of Kallisfane. As I think you know.”

There is something painfully ineffectual about sitting in the face of an outrage, so Graham stood, his pulse beating in his temple. But although he was angry—almost as angry as he was frightened—his thinking was clear and he knew he was only making a show. When the oversized plowboy stepped away from the door, Graham sat back down and raised his eyes from the portfolio to Barrimond’s face.

“You might as well turn me over,” he said, fairly calm. “Why not let the old man do his own dirty work? He certainly doesn’t seem to mind.”

“No, indeed,” said Barrimond, though the plowboy made a noise suggestive of irony or dissention. “But this is a rather unusual case. I take it you have in fact read . . .?” He patted the portfolio.

“Some of it,” Graham said, as if he could at this stage still hedge his bets.

“A remarkable piece of work. Truly remarkable. Miss Donne must be an interesting young woman to know.”

Graham felt his temperature rise, but he said nothing. He had no intention of discussing Lucy with this man. Barrimond, however, seemed bent on discussing Lucy with him.

“A highly interesting young woman, and in other circumstances, in another field, no doubt an asset to us all. But in this particular instance . . . No, I’m afraid our Lucy has been stirring up some murky waters. Very murky—and to be frank, extremely dangerous. I wonder if you would be glad to know she is still alive?”

Graham’s heart seemed to shrink, leaving a dizzy cavern in his core. He still said nothing, but he doubted his reaction went unseen. Barrimond went on finger-tapping Lucy’s portfolio, almost caressing it, but his eyes never left Graham’s face.

“Yes. A relief to me, too, of course, although something of a surprise. And I hope you understand me—it’s crucial that you understand me—that although the fact that Miss Lucy Donne is still alive is a great relief to all of us, the circumstances are a matter of extraordinary concern, and not only for Miss Donne’s sake—though she is not, I assure you, far from my thoughts at any time. No, the consequences for her . . . But then, you see, the consequences for us all . . .”

To Graham’s relief, Barrimond finally took his hand off Lucy’s portfolio, knotting his fingers together as if he physically captured his thoughts. “It occurs to me that I have skipped a crucial question. I asked you if you had read Miss Donne’s research. I did not ask you if you believe it. Really a crucial question, Mr. Isles. I wonder if you can answer it honestly.”

“Do I believe in Lucy’s research?” Graham said, stalling for time.

“No, Mr. Isles. Not, Do you believe in her research. Not, Do you believe in her. I want to know if you, having studied the evidence, agree with Miss Donne’s conclusions.”

“I’ve read her notes, but without having verified her facts—”

“They have been verified. You have my word on it. Factually, Miss Donne is in most respects entirely correct.”

“Why would you verify that?” Graham said on a burst of skepticism. “Why aren’t you bending over backwards to convince me the other way? Why the hell are you bothering to try and convince me of anything at all?”

“Because we need your help, Mr. Isles. We need your help very urgently—to head off unmitigated disaster—and to save Miss Lucy Donne.”

• • • •

But did Lucy want to be saved? She was aware of her perilous situation. The Marshal of Kallisfane had made it clear.

“You held your hand from me once,” he said, “and if you failed that challenge, perhaps you won another, even so. I will grant you that. But it has only won you yet another challenge, and this one you may prefer to lose. For as you held your hand from me, so I will hold mine from you, to let you live and do as you will. Would you bring magic back into the world? Would you wake the old gods, the old dreamers and the ancient dreams? I will hold my hand in the hope that you might also summon the death that has long eluded me. And if you fail to open that door, no matter. You can serve me in other ways, in my house here. I have kept other scholars so. And so you might win your own life either way.

“But do you open the door on that other world, on that dead and deathless perfection that made me what I am, it will be otherwise. I will destroy you and all of your blood unto the ninth degree, until even the name of Donne will be erased from the world.

“I tell you plainly: This challenge, you might prefer to fail.”

Yes. Indeed, yes. So a sensible woman might have hoped for rescue. An even more sensible woman might have given some thought to escape. But was Lucy a sensible woman? To live in his house, to plunder that library of stolen history, to plumb the depths of that ancient mind! The rewards of failure were rich, even if she would be a prisoner, dead to her family and her friends. Except perhaps for Graham Isles, who had inherited all the breadcrumbs that had marked her trail to this end. That was a thought to pull her up sharply. As far as Graham was concerned, she would not simply disappear.

Did that matter? By his own declaration, he would not pursue a story no one wanted to hear. He would only know.

And, a sinful inner voice added, he would never know that she had settled for failure. He would never know she had refused to try for the greater prize.

So it must have been that voice, rather than the thought of Graham’s opinion, that roused in her a hot and prickly blush of shame.

• • • •

As it happened, Graham was also none too sanguine about the thought of a rescue. Or rather, he thought rescuing Lucy from the Marshal of Kallisfane sounded like a fine idea; he just wasn’t sure what role he was expected to play. Even after it was explained to him by Barrimond and the plowboy, it wasn’t clear in his mind. “Persuade her,” they said. “Make her listen to reason.” But surely the telling point was whether or not she was in the Revenant’s clutches? It seemed to him that the sensible order of proceeding was to extract her from her prison and then make her see reason. “We need to get her out quietly,” said the plowboy, “and for that we need her cooperation. And for that, we need you. Right?”

Right, said Graham, though he said it with hidden irony, as if he could humor these men until they started to show some sense. Yet playing along had him riding in the back of the big black motorcar somewhere on the wrong side of midnight, dressed in imaginary armor and clutching a cardboard sword, on his way to rescue the princess before she could be sacrificed to the dragon. Though in fact, the idea seemed less absurd now, rushing through the cold, black night, than it had in the bureaucratic comfort of Barrimond’s office.

“Sacrifice!” he had said. “Are you insane?”

“No,” Barrimond had replied, “but the Marshal is.”

“Well,” the plowboy said, “say he has his moments. He’s an old man, you know, and old men do have their moments. Most times he runs on the rails right enough.”

“Yes,” Barrimond said, “and the point is to get him back on the rails as soon as possible, before any damage is done.”

“Remove Miss Donne,” said the plowboy, “and remove the temptation, like.”

The temptation to do what? Suddenly, there was no more time for explanations. It was down to the car and out in the night, and the sound of the engine droning back at them from the dark-windowed houses, and the quick sharp fire of the whiskey from the plowboy’s flask. And then the city fell away into the dark.

• • • •

Morning drew a mist out of the winter-wet ground. Lucy was out early enough to see the rising sun wrapped in a ball of foggy wool. She was weary, but a lifetime habit of nervous energy won out over the condition of her heart—if its jackrabbit thumping was an injury and not just a symptom of her confusion. She walked out into the valley of Kallisfane without a thought for her health; but her walk was of necessity a thoughtful invalid’s stroll.

Kallisfane Castle could be found on any map, though there were some odd discrepancies. Did the road cross the Fernsey River above Mimmenbrook or below? Was the castle on the southern spur of the Starsey Hills, or was it more southwesterly? But all the maps agreed there was no valley behind the castle, nothing but a blank space or a ripple as of hills. This morning the mist seemed to be conspiring with the mapmakers. A haze against the sky, a creeping whiteness against the ground, it erased colors, blurred edges, muted sound, as if this valley, the heart of the Marshal’s demesne, might in the next moment efface itself entirely from the world. Or perhaps it had already done so. Perhaps where Lucy walked was no-place, no-time, nothing but a memory in the Marshal’s skull. A fading memory, all that was left of the Empire-that-was.

And yet the black mud sucked at her shoes. Puddles bright as mirrors cupped in worn paving stones reflected her face, the edge of a wall. The thrushes singing in the woods that guarded the hilltops sang like the first springtime in the world.

In the valley lay a city. A city of white stone, all in ruins, though the mist filled in the gaps of fallen domes and tumbled walls, teasing the eye with long-lost grandeur. There had been a wide avenue here, palaces rising behind their colonnades, a statue, perhaps, on that great stone plinth that divided the way. Lucy sat there a moment to catch her breath and scrape the mud off her shoes. Her poor not-very-sensible shoes. They would never be the same again. Lucy sighed and pressed her hand over her heart, as if that could calm the queasy race and lag of her pulse. When she was walking, the valley seemed perfectly quiet except for her own footsteps, the ring of distant birdsong chiming with the sunlight far above the fog, but now the silence was alive with hidden drips and scrapes and soft muddy sounds, as if the mist had grown feet to follow her with. But of course she likely was being followed by one of the Marshal’s men. Walking away was not one of the options he had offered her.

Well, let them watch! she thought, a nice show of courage that did nothing to dispel the prickle creeping down her spine. She rose with a too-casual glance around and continued on. The ground mist was lifting above her head, hiding the sky and the tops of the surrounding hills, but here and there a shaft of milky sunlight broke through.

And where is she going, our Lucy, strolling on a misty dawn in early spring? At the end of this long avenue, where once the legions paraded and the wizard-philosophers strolled, lies the imperial palace. The Emperor Caedemus’ palace, where one age was killed and another was erected on its grave. But she is only going there to appease her curiosity, to think . . . perhaps to decide . . .

• • • •

The black motorcar stopped at an iron gate and the plowboy got out to talk to the guard. Graham lowered the window on his side, hoping the shock of fresh air would rouse him from the stupefaction of the drive. It was dawn, damp and cold, and Graham started to shiver without feeling any more awake. The real world was hot coffee, a razor, his own bed. He could not fathom what he was doing here.

The plowboy got back in and the motorcar pulled through the gate, wallowing in the ruts of the drive.

“Where are we?” Graham said.

“Kallisfane.” The answer was curt. The man himself was pale with sleeplessness, stubbled and grim, and Graham had to admit that he looked more soldier than plowboy.

“You’re one of the Nameless Regiment, aren’t you? One of the Marshal’s own.”

The big man grunted what was probably an affirmative.

“None too loyal, then, are you?” Graham’s mild tone took the edge off the provocation.

“We’re sworn to serve the Crown, same as any other regiment. And we serve the Marshal, too, believe me. He’s his own worst enemy, when he gets to thinking on the past.”

“How so?”

“Feels the weight of the years, like. The burden of his responsibilities. Well, you can imagine it, can’t you, after all this time? Wanting to let it all go?”

“Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with Lucy Donne.”

The plowboy-soldier kept his eyes on the road past the driver’s shoulder, but Graham had the sense of an intelligence working behind that homely face.

“We reckon he thinks he can use Miss Donne to bring us all back to the way things used to be. Bring us all back to the days when he was an ordinary man, d’you see? Return the world to the way it was, and maybe return himself to the way he was . . .”

“But how will he use her? Use her how?”

“They was grim and bloody times—” He interrupted himself to say to the driver, “Take the east fork.” The car turned. Graham caught a glimpse of the castle rearing up to their left, already falling behind. Where were they going? Graham started to ask, but the plowboy was talking again.

“People don’t know what it was like in those days. They have these romantic notions that it was all storybook adventures and poetry and folksongs—people like Miss Donne, who think the Marshal’s a hard man doing a bloody job. Well so he is, and a good thing, too. Do you have the least notion of what this world would come to if he left his post? It’d be chaos. Your worst nightmares can’t even touch what it would be to let the old gods walk again.”

Graham was not immune to direful predictions, not when they echoed the fears that Lucy’s work had raised, but still he persisted. “You haven’t said what part Lucy has to play in all this.”

“She’s the sacrifice, man! Haven’t you been listening? She’s the life that opens the door the Marshal has been keeping shut all these years. She’s the bloody key. Here,” he said to the driver in the same rough tone, “park here, we’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”

“What—” Graham began.

“Right,” the plowboy said, all soldier now. “We may just have a chance to take her away with no one the wiser until we’re gone. The aim is to get her to come quietly back to the car, and that’s your job. Say anything you need to—she’s in danger, you’re here to take her home—be a hero to her—”

“But—”

“Wake up, will you? We’re saving the girl. We’re saving the damn world!”

“But why me?”

The plowboy leaned to put his big face in Graham’s. “You know the background, you know the girl, and I don’t have time for arguments with men who don’t know where their loyalties should lie. All right? There’s men here who serve the Marshal before the Crown, and I can’t take them all on, not if we’re going to keep this quiet. You cooperate with me, you get the girl to cooperate with me, and we just drive away, no fuss, end of story. All right?”

The big man swung himself out of the car. After the briefest hesitation, Graham followed suit. But in that half-second pause, he had time to wonder what would happen to them after he had persuaded Lucy to cooperate. Were they going to be sent home and trusted to keep their mouths shut? Graham thought of Lucy’s portfolio, all the stories no one wanted to hear. He climbed from the car into the misty morning. Birds were singing somewhere in the fog.

• • • •

The palace was roofed with mist, walled with air. Grand steps of once-white marble were broken and half buried by the fallen columns of the portico, but Lucy found she could pick her way between the disarticulated pillars, up the shattered stair. For the first time, as she scuffed her muddy shoes through the mold of windblown leaves, it struck her as odd, how lifeless the ancient Fane was. No moss to blur the carvings on the broken capitals, no grass to carpet the stairs, no bird-flitting or mouse-scurrying nearer than the treed battlements of the enclosing hills. The end of everything, he had said, the end of life, an end without ending, an end with no hope of beginning, an end without even the hope of death . . . As if everything could just stop, Lucy thought. Stop, freeze into crystal, her breath and blood, the air, the mist and the birds in the trees and the trees themselves. Like a book, she thought, a story captured between the covers, beginning and end all there, simultaneous, undifferentiated, a beginning never begun, an ending that never ended, the perfect story, unread, ideal. Yes. She did not at all understand what the Marshal had said about doing magic, or being magic, or the difference between them, but this she understood, the perfect, the completed world.

But the blood moved through her limping heart, the air moved into her lungs and out again, warm enough to make steam. She breathed out again, a deliberate puff, for the pleasure of seeing it hang for an instant in the milky brightness, and then went on into the palace. Her footsteps echoed around her, hinting, with the mist, of companionable ghosts.

Did he ever come here, the self-named Marshal of this place? He would have ghosts. In these rubble-mounds he would see the shape of rooms, the fountained courts and lucent tiles and stone-filigree walls. Or would he? How long had he lived here as a mortal man, a soldier and then a captain of soldiers? Twenty years? Thirty? A scant handful of decades to set against the long centuries of ruin. Perhaps he wondered, as she did, which were the rooms of state, which the private apartments, which the emperor’s own room where he had been stopped in the very act of summoning the end of time. Where he had been betrayed, killed by a trusted hand.

Here, where a pillared arch still stood, though the room beyond was adrift with shattered roof tiles and the pale stones of the further wall?

Here, where the broken roots of columns still marked out the line of a shady cloister?

Here, where a fountain’s bowl fell into petal-shards like a teacup dropped just so in the center of the yard?

Here, where footsteps echoed, pat-patter-pattering even though Lucy was standing still.

Or maybe it was her heart, she thought, with the hum of invisible bees in her ears. She lowered herself to the flat top of a column’s tumbled capital. Its leafy carvings sloughed away a skin of rotten stone under her fingers, crumbs of past beauty sifted into the dirt beneath her feet. The walls were mostly intact here, giving a shape and a sense of enclosure to the small courtyard, but the misty ceiling was lifting away, thinning against the blue sky. Sunlight, still diffused by damp, brightened the many shades of white of all the naked stone, walls, flagstones, fallen columns, broken bowls. There was even a ghost of color on the walls, rose and blue and ocher, scabrous as lichen if lichen could have grown in this place.

This dead place . . . save for the drift of the air, the far birdsong, the dripping of condensed mist from the many lips of stone. And the footsteps. Lucy was almost sure, despite a long silence that conjured up again the humming in her ears. The blood seemed to shrink away beneath her skin, leaving it tingling and cold. But of course, she knew she was being watched.

Yes, there, the unmistakable grit of shoe leather over dirty stone.

Sunlight found its way through clouds and mist to sparkle in the rainwater cupped by the shards of the fountain. Warmth pressed through the damp tweed of Lucy’s jacket, and as though the sun confirmed something she already guessed, she was abruptly convinced that there was no magic here, neither in the place nor in her, and that all this morning held for her was an early walk and a mild sort of farce, grown men sneaking about in the wake of her curiosity. Rather like the new parlourmaid who hovers outside the drawing room door, holding her breath and fidgeting in her shoes, unsure whether she should go in to fetch the tea tray if there was still someone in the room. So Lucy thought, and she called out a cheerful, “Hullo!” which startled her in spite of herself, it had been so quiet before she spoke.

The silence itself seemed to be startled. Then an answering, “Lucy?” came cold and clear through the stony maze, and more footsteps, forthright ones, and then—she was dumbfounded, having refused to believe the familiarity of the voice—Graham Isles appeared in the archway on the sunny side of the court. He peered against the brightness, pale, stubbled, thoroughly disheveled, and said her name again, in as questioning a tone as before.

“Lucy?”

“Graham! But what— How on Earth—” But then she remembered the portfolio, left for him a thousand years ago in the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and was silenced by a rush of guilt.

Graham glanced behind him before he crossed to where she sat. “I’ve lost him, I think. Or he’s lost me. Listen—”

“Who?”

“Can you come? Right now? Right away? The driver’s still with the car at the foot of the valley, but I think, if we climbed the hills, they don’t seem very steep, we might manage to go very quietly all on our own.”

He was looking around him as if he expected policemen with whistles, huntsmen with dogs. He was out of breath, and his shoes were even muddier than hers.

“Graham.” She caught one of his hands, hot and damp with sweat. “Stop a moment. Please explain. Where have you come from, who are you talking about, where to you want me to go?”

“There’s no time,” he said, but his hand closed around hers and he hunkered down beside her where she sat on her carved and crumbling stone. “Are you all right? I didn’t expect to find you wandering about on your own. You look awfully pale.”

So did Graham, but in the sunlight his eyes were the same dark amber as his favorite beer. A lovely color, in fact, which Lucy had never noticed before. He was otherwise entirely himself, and wonderfully alive and real in this—now that he was here she could think it—dreary graveyard of a place.

“Not exactly on my own,” Lucy said, “but on a long leash, I think. Graham, I know why I’m here, but I haven’t a clue where you come into it. Did they find out about the notes I left for you? Was it the Marshal’s men who brought you here?”

“Yes, but not on his orders. Listen, they seem to think there’s something dangerous about you being here. I mean, not just dangerous for you, but for everyone. Damn!” He looked around again, his hand tightening on hers. “There’s really no time. I’m supposed to help get you away from him, but I’m not sure I like our chances much better once I have, so I thought, if we could slip away without them . . . We should just go, Lucy, and save the talk for later.”

“But I don’t—”—want to. She bit off the end, but her hand had gone limp in his grasp and the telepathy of touch must have told him. He stared up at her.

“They said he’s going to sacrifice you. To raise the old gods. To bring the world back to the way it was.”

“They’re wrong!” she said fiercely, and twisted her hand out of his. “Whoever ‘they’ are. They’re completely wrong. It’s the other way round, it’s exactly the other way . . .” She balked, catching a glimpse of something she hadn’t quite seen before.

“Which other way?” Graham said, impatient.

“He . . .” Lucy balked again.

“Listen.” Graham reclaimed her hand. “Lucy. I think we should just go. We should just get out of this, this whole thing, whatever it is, just get the hell out and—”

“And let everything go on as it has been.”

“Yes! Holy fires and all, Lucy, do you hate this world so much you want to bring it crashing down around our ears?”

“No!” Lucy was shocked.

“Do you want to die for that?”

“But I’m not the one— And it’s change, it’s not—”

“Let’s just go.” Graham stood, pulling Lucy to her feet. “Lucy. Please. Let’s just go.”

She was caught, by the desperate pleading in his voice as much as by the hard grip of his hand, and it seemed as though that instant was the deciding one, as though, if she had not hesitated, if she had just moved, or spoken—but it was only a seeming. She could have changed nothing in that moment. It was only a pause before all the rest that was going to happen, happened. She looked up at him, at Graham, who was burning with impatience and determination, and then someone stepped into the archway on the sunny side of the courtyard. They looked. One of the Marshal’s men, the big young man who had escorted Lucy off the train.

“Oh dear,” Lucy said, feeling a guilty lick of humor at being caught.

“Oh damn,” Graham said, in another tone entirely, and he pulled at Lucy’s hand, turning, trying to move her, put her behind him, she wasn’t sure. In any case, she stumbled against the fallen masonry she had been sitting on, and it broke, or something did, a crack that shook the air, and Graham was pulling her, very clumsily, so they both half-fell to the ground.

“Damn!” Graham said on a gasp. “Lucy. Go. If you can.” But his hand was still holding hard to hers, and somehow, perhaps through that same telepathy, she realized he was shot, he had been shot by the large young man who carried, not a book, but a gun.

Lucy looked up at him, but he was already dead. The Marshal of Kallisfane withdrew his sword with a meaty sound, and the large young man, looking stupid in his dead man’s surprise, fell in a heap to the ground.

“Treachery,” the Marshal said in his ordinary voice. “This is a good place for it.”

Graham was falling, too, a slow continuation of the motion that had put them on their knees. His mouth was open as he fought for air. He still held Lucy’s left hand very hard in his right. She used her free hand to grope under his jacket until she found the small hot hole in his side. His breath seemed to be stopped wetly in his throat, but still he managed to speak.

“I loved you,” he said. “I never said. I never said.”

His grasp weakened. Lucy clutched his hand hard, as hard as she could, pressing it with both her hands against her side, but still he let go, he let her go. She leaned over him to catch his gaze, but she could not, he was gone.

She was very conscious, in the silence, of the beating of her heart. If she had stopped the world, one minute ago, five minutes ago, an hour ago, he would be alive, forever and always. Graham. Who had loved her. If she had. If she had only known how.

“Perhaps now you are ready to try again,” the Marshal said. His sword was smeared with blood—not dripping, only smeared, like her hand.

Would she say no because Graham, who had died for her, would want her to? No. She would say yes, yes, because only yes would end the deadlock of a thousand years, the deadlock that had killed him and all the untold others. Yes.

She was very slow, but he was patient. It was hard to let go of Graham, but it was really time she wanted to hold, and she could not, the moment was past. She stood, and looked at the Marshal, and wondered what he had really stopped, what impulse had died in the last emperor’s brain. He tried to hand her his sword over Graham’s body and she waved him brusquely away, back toward the broken fountain. But when she had followed him there, she took the warm hilt again in her hand.

Her heart pounded out a fierce and primitive rhythm. If there had been words for it, they would have run something like, you won’t stop me, you won’t bury me, I won’t let you end me here. The great weight of the Marshal’s presence could not stifle it. She did not know what it was. Not magic. Perhaps only life in the face of death.

He knelt, as he had in the chapel, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Looking down, as she had looked down at Graham, Lucy saw his eyes were not black but brown, a dark tea-colored brown without red or gold to lighten them. He opened his shooting coat and shirt to bare his scarred breast. Lucy set the sword’s point there and stopped, seeing how her heartbeat trembled in her hands.

“Tell me your name,” she said.

He told her. She drove the sword home.

He choked once, as Graham had, and died.

The world changed.

© 2008 by Holly Phillips. Originally published in A Book of Wizards, edited by Marvin Kaye. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Holly Phillips is the author of the story collection At the Edge of Waking and the novels The Burning Girl and The Engine’s Child. Her first collection, In the Palace of Repose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and won the 2006 Sunburst Award. Holly lives in Vancouver with Steven and Savoy. You can visit her at hollyphillips.com.

EXCERPT: Orbital Cloud

Taiyo Fujii | 3348 words

Yekshambe, 23 Azar 1399, 09:05 (2020-12-13T05:35 GMT)
Tehran Institute of Technology

404 File Not Found.

Jamshed cursed. “You expect me to believe that this came from a US server?” he cried, jabbing at the cathode-ray monitor with his finger.

The error message telling him in Persian that the page could not be found was one that Jamshed was all too familiar with. He saw it every time he tried to access a site run by someone from the US or the EU. This time, he had run into it while attempting to download the original observation data linked by the intriguing Meteor News blog post entitled “Thousands of unknown objects around SAFIR 3?”

No one took the 404 message at face value. It came not from the server in question but from the firewall placed on ISPs by the government. How were they supposed to conduct research like this? It wasn’t surprising in the least that Alef should be agitating for azadi interanet, Internet freedom.

Seeing no other option, Jamshed returned to the Meteor News blog, to which access was permitted, and began to laboriously copy the data excerpted there into Windows Notepad.

“Yes, I see . . . Spherical coordinates, in radians. Time resolution, one thousandth of a second.”

Jamshed turned to the drafting table beside his desk to plot the data, then sighed. His last piece of paper was already densely covered with hastily scribbled lines and equations.

“No Internet access, no paper . . .” he muttered, retrieving a crumpled sheet of paper from the dustbin. He smoothed the sheet out and laid it on the drafting table, placing a magnet at each corner to hold it in place. Then, wondering if there might be more paper in the lab next door, he got to work. Drawing freehand, he sketched four concentric circles, then added a cross through the center to divide them into quadrants. This done, he began to plot the coordinates he had copied into Notepad on his diagram with small Xs.

After a few minutes spent struggling with the creases in the paper and marking each azimuth and elevation, Jamshed was struck with a sense of déjà vu. The next point would be . . . here. And the next . . . yes, right there. As if the two points were holding hands and whirling in a circle. Even the slight quiver in the circle was the same as the oscillation he’d observed in his experiments back then.

“This . . . this is my space tether. What’s it doing up there in orbit?!”

• • • •

“Alef!” Jamshed cried. “Are you in here?”

The students gathered in the student center turned as one to stare at him. Most of them were young, dressed in jeans and dirty jackets. Many wore scarves to conceal the lower parts of their faces, no doubt fearing identification and arrest.

Jamshed buttonholed a student carrying a yellow poster so new it still smelled of ink. “Where’s Alef?” he asked. “Alef Kadiba.”

After a brief pause, the student lowered his scarf. “Over there,” he said, turning to point at the tarp that hung from the roof in the middle of the hall, dividing the space in two.

As Jamshed craned his neck to see, the friend he was searching for lifted up the sheet and poked his head out.

“So, have you come to join us after all?” he asked.

“Alef!” Jamshed said. “My tether’s in orbit!” He thrust the student with the poster aside and started to run toward Alef, only to be intercepted and held in place by other students around him. “Let me go!” he said. “I’m not with the government.”

Hands raised, Alef walked calmly toward the mass of students, which parted as he approached. “Let him go, everyone,” he said. “He’s a friend of mine. You,” he added, turning to a nearby student. “Bring us two cups of chai.”

Ushering Jamshed into the makeshift office behind the tarp, Alef handed him a small cup of chai on a porcelain saucer. “Drink, drink,” he said. His pliant voice alone had a calming effect. “Now, what’s gotten into you? Your tether, you say? Those balloons you were launching a few years ago—you got that thing into orbit? Congratulations, my friend!”

“No, that’s not it,” Jamshed said. “Someone got my papers somehow, and they’re using them to fly it on their own!”

“Are you certain? Maybe they just had the same idea as you.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Jamshed said. He explained how closely the observation data posted on Meteor News matched his own papers. His tether propulsion theory had a few “magic numbers” in it, numbers he’d painstakingly extracted from experiments that involved dropping test units from balloons and seeing how far they could move off course. The same numbers could be found in the observation data. The chance of another experimenter coming up with them independently was practically zero.

Alef nodded receptively, long eyelashes lowered. Jamshed doubted his friend understood one tenth of what he was saying but appreciated that he was making the effort to listen. “Tether propulsion is such a fringe idea that no one else is looking into it anyway,” Jamshed said finally. “No, there’s no mistake. Those are my space tethers up there.”

“I see,” Alef said cheerfully, one hand at his chin. “And so?”

“I want to tell someone.” Jamshed pointed at the yellow case slung from Alef’s shoulder. “Will you lend me your tablet? Just for a day. If I don’t let NASA or the European Space Agency know about this, whoever stole my papers is going to get the credit for inventing the space tether.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alef, placing his hand on the tablet case. “I can’t do that. It’s true that this SIM could get through to them, but it’s being monitored. I can’t afford to attract any attention right now. Not with the demonstration next week.”

Jamshed hung his head. “I see,” he said.

A web camera came into view before his downcast eyes.

“You can still get through to Japan, can’t you?” Alef said, offering him the camera. “Why don’t you get that Meteor News site to pass on your message?” He turned over his wrist to check the time—11:12. “You’d better hurry, though. Word is that the government’s going to lock down the whole Internet at noon today. And once that happens, even Japan will be out of reach.”

• • • •

Sun, 13 Dec 2020, 16:19 +0900 (2020-12-13 T07: 19 GMT)
Fool’s Launchpad, Shibuya, Main Conference Room

The image of a white tower brightly lit against the night sky covered the conference room’s whiteboard. The tower was Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, where Ronnie Smark’s rocket Loki 9 was awaiting liftoff. The swollen, metallic gray fairing at the top of the rocket held the partly exposed spacecraft Wyvern.

Launch Complex 36 had a long and respectable history, having been used for everything from the Apollo program to the Space Shuttle. Ronnie’s company, Project Wyvern, had bought it outright and maintained it impeccably. Even the clock at the corner of the screen, counting down the minutes until launch—00:19:13, 00:19:12 . . .—was an original NASA model from the days of the Apollo program.

Kazumi was sitting on two chairs he’d lined up in the conference room, one to sit on and one for his feet. He had just finished his work on the site for the day, having posted some brief comments on Ozzy’s data on his blog followed by a teaser for the post Akari had just suggested, predicting where Loki 9 would fall back to Earth.

Watching the circles appear on the world map that showed where the hits to his site were coming from, Kazumi added some words of appreciation for his anonymous visitors who were taking the time to check his shooting star forecast even as Project Wyvern’s launch broadcast held the world’s attention. Hits were coming from all over the world, but the circles from Seattle and Seoul were largest. Perhaps a dozen or so in each city. There was even one person connecting from right in the center of the Middle East. And that circle in the Indian Ocean had to be Ozzy “X-Man” Cunningham.

Kazumi murmured a word of thanks to Akari, still fast asleep, and raised his cup of coffee, long since cold and sour, to his mouth. As he took a sip, a notification popped up on his laptop screen. A chat request.

“Who could this be?” he muttered. The account name on the pop‑up just read jj. Kazumi wondered if those were initials or a pseudonym.

With only fifteen minutes until launch, Kazumi decided to ask whoever it was to wait until afterwards. Clicking the speech bubble next to the account name to enter the chat, Kazumi found that “JJ” had already started talking.

>emergency!

>have news about safir 3

>video call pls. no time. hurry

Kazumi smiled. Whoever it was, their English wasn’t easy to understand. According to the map in the connection information, the call was coming from off the west coast of Africa. Ghana or Nigeria, maybe? Email from X-Man in Seychelles yesterday, a videoconference with someone in Africa today . . . Meteor News was becoming quite cosmopolitan.

>ok

Kazumi hit enter and clicked the camera icon. He would just tell “JJ” face-to-face to wait until the launch was over, or perhaps suggest that they watch it together. It wasn’t every day that Loki 9 took Ronnie Smark into orbit, after all. The window for the video call opened on Kazumi’s display. Heavily accented English came through his speakers before the video even came online.

“Thank you for taking my call. You are the owner of Meteor News?”

“Yes. I am Kazumi Kimura, owner of Meteor News. It’s nice to meet you.”

“I am relieved I am getting through. Please listen to me for just a few minutes. My name is Ja—. . . Jay. I am calling you in Japan because I can only—”

The end of the sentence was too garbled to catch. The audio was very choppy, and the video still hadn’t come online. A network problem?

“Jay? I can call you Jay?”

“. . . fine, fine. Jay is fine.”

Kazumi glanced at the whiteboard. The broadcast being projected there was coming over the Internet too, and it was coming through fine at thirty frames per second. If network speed was the problem, it certainly wasn’t on his end. Jay must have been having problems with uplink speed. Perhaps that was par for the course in Africa.

“Thank you. Kazumi, please . . .”

Again, his words dissolved into unintelligibility, but the video finally came on as they did. The image was noisy, but Kazumi could make out a man in a dark room with a patch of blue sky showing through a window in the upper right. The windowsill was clearly illuminated by the sunlight, but it was difficult to make out the man’s face in the gloom.

“I can’t hear you very well, Jay,” Kazumi said. “I’d like to propose that we talk again in thirty minutes. I’m waiting for the launch of Ronnie Smark’s rocket, Loki 9. Are you watching it too?”

“No! I cannot wait. Please, hear me out!” The man moved violently, setting off a swirl of pixelation that danced around him. Kazumi could just make out what looked like a beard.

“I have only until noon,” the man continued. “Just ten minutes. Will you listen?”

Kazumi cocked his head. The African countries displayed in the connection status were directly under London. It should be about six in the morning there, nine hours behind Japan.

“Jay, where are you calling—”

“Who is there?” Jay interrupted, either intentionally or because of lag in the connection. “Is that one of your staff behind you?”

Kazumi turned to see Akari standing behind him. Her display goggles were on, and a keyboard was already strapped to one of her arms.

“Sorry,” Kazumi said to her. “Did I wake you up? I borrowed your projector.”

“No problem,” Akari said. “But it doesn’t sound like we have time to discuss that right now.” She crouched down so that her face was visible in the frame alongside Kazumi’s. “Hello there. I’m Akari, engineer at Meteor News. Nice to meet you, Jay.”

So Akari could speak English too. It didn’t seem like Jay had anything too complicated to say, but it was a relief to have someone help him with the listening. Akari pulled up a chair and sat beside him.

At the other end of the call, Jay looked taken aback. “An honor to meet you,” he said finally. “Here is what I want to tell you. It is about the objects around SAFIR 3. Listen closely, yes? They are spacecraft with a tether-propulsion system of my invention, known as the ‘space tether.’”

“Space tether?” Akari whispered to Kazumi.

Kazumi shook his head. What Jay had just said was impossible. They must have misheard him. “These objects,” Kazumi said, taking care to separate his words, “are electrodynamic—space tethers—made by you?” He pronounced “space tethers” especially slowly and clearly, so that there could be no mistake.

This wasn’t the first time Kazumi had heard of this technology, referred to variously as electrodynamic tethering, inductive tethering, and tether propulsion. But it was still only supposed to be in the early experimental stage. Even Japan’s space agency JAXA, despite its reputation for eagerly exploring new propulsion systems, had only run a few trials so far. It was the latest idea for spacecraft propulsion, but at this point it was more fantasy than reality.

“Electrodynamic . . .?” Jay repeated. “Yes. Exactly.”

Kazumi stared.

“But,” Jay continued, “Also, no. I did not make them.”

“What do you mean? You are—”

“I do not know who made what is up there now,” Jay said, interrupting Kazumi for the second time. Akari reached out unobtrusively to click record on the video call. “But the system is of my design. Please, tell someone! The idea came from me!”

“Why did you contact us, Jay?” asked Kazumi. “Why not tell this to NASA or the space agency in your own country? I am sure they would listen.”

If Jay really had designed a space tether that was currently in orbit, a Japanese shooting star forecast service was hardly the first place he should contact.

“Please, Kazumi. There is no time. It is impossible. Ir—. . .—lease.” His voice began to break up. “. . . send . . . papers . . .”

“Sorry, Jay,” Kazumi said. “I could not hear you. Can you repeat—”

As if by way of reply, a file transfer request appeared in the chat window. Kazumi clicked the accept button, but the file didn’t begin downloading. Akari began to tap furiously at the keyboard on her left arm, eyes never leaving the screen.

“What is this, Jay?” asked Kazumi. The sound came back clearly for just a moment.

“Proof. My papers on the space tether, from five years ago. They are not reaching you?”

“No, they aren’t,” Kazumi said. The file transfer dialogue was open, but the download still hadn’t begun.

“Thirteen, fourteen.” Akari said. “Too slow.” She leaned in close to the camera.

“Jay, this file you are sending is being censored. Censored!”

“Mahhodotsiman!”

As Jay buried his face in his hands, the download finally began. It was a PDF, about 130 kilobytes. The progress bar moved agonizingly slowly.

“I don’t know any African languages,” Kazumi said quietly to Akari.

She shook her head. “What are you talking about? That’s Persian. Jay’s in Iran.”

No, he isn’t, Kazumi protested, pointing at the connection information showing a connection in Africa, but Akari grabbed his arm and pulled it back. Kazumi saw pages of text scrolling across her eye display.

“Later,” she said. “Move.”

“What?”

“Move, please! Now! There’s no time!”

Akari pushed Kazumi out of the way and seized the laptop.

“What are you doing?” Kazumi demanded, trying to snatch it back. Akari held up one palm to silence him, typing something into the chat window with her other hand as she shouted into the camera. “Jay, click on the URL I’m about to send you!”

“Got i—”

Jay’s image froze as the sound cut out midword. The file download stopped. The connection had been terminated.

“Now look what you’ve done!” Kazumi said.

“It wasn’t me,” Akari said, pointing at the whiteboard. “Your call with Jay was cut off by the Iranian government.”

A new window had been added on the conference room’s screen, beside the launch livecast. A woman was looking at the camera with a pained expression. At the bottom of the screen was the station’s logo: Al Jazeera.

“. . . confirm that as of noon today,” the woman on the screen said, “the Iranian government has severed the country’s Internet from the rest of the world.”

The camera panned to one side, revealing a city street. In the background, a man with a potbelly was pulling the shutters down over a window full of computers.

“Internet cafés have also been closed down,” continued the black-clad anchorwoman. The potbellied man yelled something at the camera and then pasted a green poster over his shutters.

“The government has made no public announcement about the disconnection,” said the woman. “Student groups have declared that they will stage protests to demand free access, but if the Internet remains unavailable for too long, the possibility of the demonstrations turning violent cannot be discounted.”

A caption appeared: INNER TEHRAN. The streets were full of colorful strips of paper, as if countless posters had been torn to pieces. A woman with her face covered by a scarf hurried past.

Iran, Kazumi mused. So an engineer from this Islamic nation had developed the working theory behind the space tether? While unable even to connect to the Internet? Kazumi had never even imagined such a thing.

“Al Jazeera reporting via satellite link,” the anchorwoman continued. “This is Tehran, signing off.”

“Sorry about that, Akari,” Kazumi said. He should have paid more attention to Jay. But it was too late now. Jay couldn’t get in touch with anyone outside Iran. Would that half-downloaded file they’d received from him even be readable?

“No problem,” Akari said. “But forget about that. Let’s see if we can find Jay. He hit that URL just before his connection dropped out, so he should be in the access log. I’ll reconstruct the PDF we got half of too. You want to read it, right?”

“Yes, please,” Kazumi said.

“I guess the launch is over by now.”

Akari was right. On the conference room screen, Loki 9 was soaring into the clear night sky, long white trail behind it. The Launchpad was still roiling with a mass of steam. It looked like all had gone well.

“That’s okay,” Kazumi said. “I’ll watch the recording.” He turned his thoughts back to the space tether. If Jay was right about those objects floating around SAFIR 3, they made up a cloud of miniature spacecraft, each one capable of moving freely in orbit. He had to tell someone what was up there waiting for Ronnie. With Jay’s name attached, of course.

But who?

He thought back to the hackathon where he’d developed the first prototype of Meteor News. Who was that JAXA employee he’d met there? That was it: Kurosaki. And Kazumi was pretty sure he still had his private contact details, too.

Copyright © 2017 by Taiyo Fujii. Excerpted from Orbital Cloud by Taiyo Fujii. Published by permission of the author and Haikasoru. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Taiyo Fujii was born in Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He has worked in stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development. In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design, and it became Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle bestseller of that year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and digital as Gene Mapper—full build— by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013 and was nominated for the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Award. His second novel, Orbital Cloud, won the 2014 Nihon SF Taisho Award and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2014” in SF Magazine. His recent works include Underground Market and Bigdata Connect.

TV Review: March 2017

Joseph Allen Hill | 1320 words

This month, we take a look at the series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, an adaptation of the classic series by Douglas Adams.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Created by Max Landis
Produced by IDW Entertainment, Circle of Confusion, and Ideate Media
October 2016

The role of the fictional detective is to strike at the unknown and restore order to the universe. Someone has stolen something or killed someone or otherwise gone outside the bounds of statutory, moral, or, in some cases, natural law, and it is up to the detective to resolve the tension of this trespass, either by returning things back to the status quo, stopping the bad guy from creating more chaos, or just providing an explanation of what exactly happened. The detective’s tools tend to be a combination of cleverness, grit, and insight that allows him or her to make connections between chaos, and in doing so, find meaning in a chaotic world. This is how most detective fiction operates.

BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a reversal of the usual formula. The universe of the show seems chaotic, but it follows patterns and synchronicities, strange loops and echoes of itself. “Everything is connected,” we are continually reminded by Dirk. The titular detective can’t see the big picture any better than anyone else, but he does have a knack for navigating the web of coincidences and fate. In the process, though, he does not restore order, but instead creates chaos in the lives of everyone he meets, especially in the life of his everyman sidekick, Todd.

The show shares its name, a scattering of references, and its basic conceit with Douglas Adams’ novels. The show is otherwise very different. It’s set in contemporary America rather than Britain in the ’80s and follows a very different plot. While still British himself, this Dirk Gently is ebullient and silly, drawing more from Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor than Douglas Adams’ original. This isn’t in itself a bad thing. Douglas Adams’ work is known for being difficult to adapt, and a more faithful adaptation, BBC’s Dirk Gently, was produced just a few years ago. I appreciate a bold reimagining, even if at times you might wonder if the series really needs the Dirk Gently name at all.

The series starts with a day in the life of Todd Brotzman (Elijah Wood), a put-upon sadsack who discovers a dead body in the hotel where he works as a bellhop. This discovery draws the attention of Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett), who was hired to investigate the murder by the victim before it happened. Todd is reluctantly enlisted as Dirk’s assistant/best friend as they try to unravel a complicated mystery involving psychics, time travel, bodyswapping, murderous cults, secret government experiments, assassins, energy vampires, electricity monsters, and cops on the edge.

Todd and Dirk bounce back and forth from one ridiculous situation to another at a breakneck pace, stopping only to wonder what the hell is going on. Over the course of the series, they are joined by Todd’s sister Amanda (Hannah Marks), who suffers from a surreal illness, and Farah Black (Jade Eshete), the hyper-competent and hyper-neurotic bodyguard of the dead man. Todd and Dirk’s adventures are mirrored by a woman claiming to be a holistic assassin (Fiona Dourif) and her captive (Mpho Koaho). The performances are probably the best thing about the show, and the cast manages to keep things compelling even when the script loses momentum or the jokes don’t land.

Beyond the performances, much of the charm of the show comes from the ways it subverts typical tropes of detective and adventure fiction. Dirk is neither particularly clever nor capable, and his use of intuition often plays almost like a bizarro parody of Sherlock Holmes-style deductive reasoning. The central mystery is so dense and diffuse that nobody we meet seems capable of even understanding it. Whenever we meet someone who we think will explain the plot, we only find another confused weirdo trying to figure out what is happening. There’s an endearing fragility to most of the characters, even its villains, although this fragility is hard to reconcile with the show’s use of violence, as discussed below. The SF elements only barely make sense, even within the show’s own logic, adding to the sense that the mystery is impenetrable. While I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, the unknowable, psychedelic mystery is one of my favorite subgenres (cf. Twin Peaks, The Prisoner), and it’s fun to see it presented here as a stylish action-comedy.

While entertaining throughout, the show really finds its footing in its final episodes. The ultimate explanation for the central mystery is probably the most coherent I have ever seen for a show of this kind. More importantly, the characters and their relationships really start to go to some interesting places. Dirk in particular becomes a lot more interesting as we see how floating through life as a tool of fate has affected him emotionally. Todd, too, reveals himself to be struggling with the past in a way the recasts his earlier actions. Indeed, coming to grips with the past is revealed to be the central theme of the show, a fact that I wish had been introduced earlier.

My main complaints about the show are intertwined with the things I like most about it. A lot of things that are conceptually interesting can be awfully dull in practice. As much as I love the idea of a detective who operates entirely on impulse and coincidence, Dirk is often a passive character, waiting around for something to happen while Todd complains about how nothing makes any sense. Likewise, when looking at the series as a whole, the way that seemingly random incidents come together at the end is pretty interesting, but in the early episodes the randomness makes the show feel scattered and arbitrary. The fact that a boring scene in episode two will pay off brilliantly in episode eight doesn’t make that scene any less boring when you’re initially watching it.

Additionally, the show has a tendency to rely on gratuitous violence to establish its stakes. While the violence works really well as a dark punchline for the holistic assassin character, much of the violence feels like an attempt to balance out the quirkiness of the proceedings with some menace, as if the show is embarrassed that it is about two dummies solving a silly sci-fi mystery and needs to make sure you know that it is serious and meaningful and not really as silly as you think. One particular instance of brutal violence against a woman in the middle part of the show stands out as gratuitous, gross, and out of step with the general tone of the show. It’s made worse by the fact that there’s already plenty of thematic menace built right into the story, crazy monsters and people meeting nightmarish ends due to weird science, that the gun violence and brutality seems that much more unnecessary.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency shares a lot of its creative DNA with Sherlock and Doctor Who, and fans of the latter series will likely enjoy the former. If you lay aside its themes and conceits, the show is, at its heart, about two goofs goofing around in order to solve a goofy mystery. It’s a fun ride, very bingeable, and good for some light entertainment. I am especially excited for the next season. If the final two episodes are any indication, the show may have worked out its kinks with pacing and character, and season two could elevate the show from good to great.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Book Reviews: March 2017

Amal El-Mohtar | 1446 words

In Praise of Sequels

Over the last several years it’s become a critical commonplace that SFF is glutted with trilogies, series, sequels. Where, cry critics (myself included), are the standalone novels of yester year? Have we forgotten, we lament, how to tell a story in a single book?

Reflecting on last year’s reading, though, I was blown away by how many of my favourite novels were not only sequels, but the much-maligned Middle Book of a Trilogy. According to the received wisdom I’ve absolutely been guilty of indulging in from time to time, such books tend to be slower, considered filler, at best building effective scaffolding for a finale. So in this month’s column I want to dig deeper into the strange work of sequels by looking at why and how these books dazzled and surprised me.

Phantom Pains
Mishell Baker
Hardcover
Saga Press
ISBN 978-1481480178
March 2017
416 pages

Mishell Baker’s Borderline was one of the most remarkable books I read last year (and is, as of this writing, nominated for the Nebula Award). It’s justly lauded for centering its story on Millie Roper, a disabled bisexual woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, without letting any of those elements overshadow either her character or the plot. In a world where discussions of mental illness and disability are usually the province of saccharine after-school specials (though I confess I have no idea if those are still a thing – will they go the way of televisions tuned to dead channels?), Borderline is intensely refreshing.

That said, the last thing I want is to celebrate its success at representation to the exclusion of its sharp, dextrous prose style, sly character work, and courage in plumbing the depths of people’s interactions. When I think of Borderline, I don’t immediately think of Millie’s attributes; I think of the quality of the writing, of its sensory affect. Baker’s prose is a liquid line with light in it, that you can’t tell is gasoline until she touches it with a match.

Now, Borderline is urban fantasy, of which long, multi-volume series are staples; it’s typical for a series such as, for instance, Kim Harrison’s Hallows, to begin each new book with an awkward expository section to catch you up on the state of things, like the “previously” bits on TV. But Borderline’s sequel, Phantom Pains, makes striking virtue of that necessity: the plot, in a world where fairies exist but ghosts don’t, is that people are being literally haunted by the events of the previous book. Ironically, this means that Phantom Pains is functionally a standalone novel; the flashes to Borderline are so thoroughly woven into the plot structure that they hardly seem to refer to a story outside it. Meanwhile, the fairy politics are being so up-heaved that the audience may as well be starting from scratch, while Millie’s first-person narration provides the continuity necessary to returning readers.

Having established structural room to manoeuvre between the premise of her series and the concerns of the present book, Baker does more of everything I loved about Borderline: more difficult conversations, more harrowing revelations, more moments of agonizing, vulnerable intimacy. She also smoothes out the pacing wrinkles of the debut—and is funnier. The late addition of a new character kicks the humour up several notches, and the book dances a tightrope between gutpunch and guffaw.

Phantom Pains succeeds in being both seamlessly connected to Borderline and utterly its own ambitious project. I was constantly aware of being impressed with it while being absorbed by it—and I ended up loving it more than Borderline, which is saying something.

The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin
Trade Paperback
Orbit
ISBN 978-0316229265
August 2016
448 pages

After the wreck and ruin The Fifth Season made of our feelings, it’s understandable that some readers found The Obelisk Gate a more muted experience. There isn’t a grand, reality-realigning revelation built from the book’s narration strategy, for one thing; Essun stands still instead of travelling all over the continent, for another; and it introduces a number of new characters who perhaps suffer in comparison to the sustained attention given to Essun and her fellow-travellers in the first book. Nevertheless, I’m firmly on the side of it being magnificent in its own right, and completely as engrossing—if not as striking—as its predecessor.

I love when space is an organizing principle of a trilogy: something like Edward Carey’s Heap House, Foulsham, and Lungdon, which follow two characters’ adventures in a single house, then a borough, then a city, the story expanding to fill each locale. Jemisin’s Fifth Season starts on the surface of a troubled continent, then delves below it in The Obelisk Gate—and if the title’s anything to go by, The Stone Sky will turn its gaze moon-ward.

But this is an oversimplification of what Jemisin’s doing with her series, because each volume is as uniquely pitted, jagged, and colourful as geode. Both books are textured as much as they’re structured, fleshing out Essun’s world and its history through excerpts from historical figures, legends, politicians’ reported speech. And if the series as a whole is concerned with parenthood, figuring the Moon as the Earth’s lost child, then Essun remaining stationary while her daughter travels around her has further resonance for the series—especially as the final volume looks likely to involve inviting and avoiding enormous collisions. Even when The Obelisk Gate is, in fact, standing still, it’s also lying in wait.

In spite of not having read the third book yet, I feel confident in saying that Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy should, by rights, be considered a three-volume novel of the old school. It’s epic in the classical sense: a story of how the world came to be and a story of what the world will become. “Let’s start with the end of the world,” says the sly observer narrator of The Fifth Season, moving smoothly from a woman’s heart-broken interiority to the literal breaking of the land’s heart happening around her. From the great to the small, from the inside to the outside, Jemisin’s series investigates the thermodynamics of individuals and societies as well as geology, mapping very carefully the places in which they intersect.

In Conclusion

I’ve read more stunning sequels recently than I can get into at length in this column, but let me end by saying that Fran Wilde’s Cloudbound, which I covered in my last column, managed the difficult trick of engaging me more fully instead of alienating me by writing it from a different character’s point of view, one better suited to the material of her story; Ken Liu’s Wall of Storms dazzled me by addressing all the complaints I had about women and agency in The Grace of Kings and completely changing his storytelling style; and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti 2: Home brought into focus the family life Binti left behind in the first book.

My early reading of fantasy taught me to expect disappointment from the second and third volumes of trilogies, as if the book that hooked me was just a burst of energy spent too soon in the marathon. The story felt diminished by being extended. These books, though—with their complexity, their invention, their ambition, and attention to structure—are welcome amendments to that narrative. Ultimately, if I were to name one thing these books have in common, it’s an awareness of enterprise—a desire to have the whole be more than the sum of its parts, and an appreciation for how those parts fit together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Interview: Nnedi Okorafor

Christian A. Coleman | 5525 words

Nnedi Okorafor, born to Igbo Nigerian parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, is an author of fantasy and science fiction for both adults and younger readers. Her Tor.com novella Binti won the 2015 Hugo and Nebula Awards; her children’s book Long Juju Man (Macmillan, 2009) won the 2007-08 Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa; and her adult novel Who Fears Death (DAW, 2010) was a Tiptree Honor Book. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Buffalo.

First things first: Congratulations on winning the Hugo last year for your novella Binti! Tell us what winning the award means to you.

It feels really special to me, and I can’t help thinking about it along with the Nebula because both feel connected. When I returned home to Chicago from Buffalo for the summer, a day later, Binti won a Nebula Award. Then at the end of the summer, a day before I left Chicago to head back to Buffalo, Binti won the Hugo. Both awards were a total shock to me. Why? Every award feels like a rare moment when so many factors align; expecting to win seems silly to me. Both my Nebula and Hugo will always carry that feeling of shock when I think about them.

Binti is a space opera about an African girl in the future who sneaks away from her beloved home to attend the finest university in the galaxy. For that kind of story to be the one that won me two of the most major awards in science fiction and fantasy means there’s been some sort of shift. This is especially uplifting when I consider the strong signs of other more nefarious types of shifts in this country. For me, these awards are a sort of beacon in the fog.

Your latest novella Binti: Home picks up where Binti left off. How did you decide to tell Binti’s story in a series of novellas rather than a novel?

I didn’t decide; the story did. It was August 2014 and I’d just left my family in Chicago to take a position at the University at Buffalo, NY. My family had not wanted me to take the position, and I’d done it anyway. I felt like I’d just left my home planet and I was nervous about my choice.

I started writing.

I hadn’t been asked by anyone to write a story for an anthology or publisher. No deadlines. No required length. No nothing. I just started writing this narrative about a girl named Bint, which simply means “girl” in Arabic (which became “Binti” after I sold it to Tor because of the negative stigma the word has). I knew the world of Binti was huge. I knew I loved this character. I knew she was opportunistic when she left home. I had no idea all hell would break loose on that ship until it did. I was just writing. It was liberating and it had a depressurizing effect on my own life. And I knew that when I got to a point, it was time to stop, so I did. I knew there was more, but at that point, I knew the story was done.

I edited it. Polished it. Reread and reread it and loved it. Then I looked at the length and was like, “What the hell do I call this?” It wasn’t a short story any more. I Googled the length and realized it was a novella. I told my agent and he happened to know exactly where to send it: Tor.com’s new novella line.

August 2015 came around. Exactly a year after I’d written Binti. After spending the summer in Chicago, I was back in Buffalo for the start of the semester. I started writing again. Again, I did it without anyone knowing. When I finished, Binti 2 was longer than the first, but it was still a novella. It stopped where it stopped. I knew the moment when I reached part two’s end. It completed an arc, but with this one there was very clearly more.

Come August 2016, I didn’t write part three, but the moment I arrived back at Buffalo, my brain threw the entire plot at me. From end to beginning (my stories usually come in a non-linear way). I wrote the first two pages, but wanted to let it cook for a bit before I wrote it. It wasn’t time to write it yet. That time came in mid-December 2016. I finished the first sloppy draft on January 1st, 2017, around 3 a.m., after I’d come home from celebrating New Year’s. Though at this time I was already contracted to write a part three, there was no deadline. Come sun-up on New Year’s Day, I shot a quick email to my agent and editor letting them know what I’d spit out. They were pleased and probably surprised, though they’ve seen me do this before.

I remember reading Stephen King’s Green Mile as a novella/serial series and loving that format. I didn’t consciously try to write this story in this way, but subconsciously, I’m sure that pleasure played a role in me feeling the freedom to write a story in a non-traditional format. Binti 1, 2, and 3 are all just one big story, and the spacing between them allows for a different experience of that one story. But it’s the only story that came to me in this way, and I’m really blessed to have the opportunity to tell it/have readers read it in this way.

You wrote in the acknowledgments of Binti that your daughter, Anyaugo, essentially came up with the plot of the novella. Was she also involved in plotting Binti: Home?

Anya didn’t come up with the whole plot of Binti. I was stuck on that ship with Binti and the murderous aliens; I knew the ending, but I wasn’t sure what should happen next. I told her about being stuck and she suggested something that went on to become a major part of the plot. The same happened with Binti: Home. When I write, Anya is very often around me or FaceTiming with me. So I’ll look up from writing and talk to her about what I’m writing. She always has something to say, and nine times out of ten, it’s good stuff. The same with part three. There was a major part in part three that we actually argued over because it was disturbing. I wanted one thing; she was like, “Heck no! You can’t do that.”

We live with my characters.

I love the way Binti visualizes numbers and mathematical equations. It made me think of the patients with number-space synesthesia described in neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain. Does Binti have numerical synesthesia, or is her ability to visualize numbers and equations in space based on this idea?

I’ve never heard the term “numerical synesthesia,” but now that I have, yes, this is how she often sees. This is how she is able to calm herself. This is her path to tapping into the energy of spirit. I’ve also blended it with a phenomenon that I became familiar with while playing sports. “Treeing” was when you were effortlessly performing at a level beyond yourself. It was like looking into time and space and being able to manipulate it, but if you tried to analyze it, you’d fall out of it. Hence the phrase that I started using in Binti 2: “falling out of the tree.” I’ve had this feeling when doing math as well. It’s weird, I know . . . and this is going to grow weirder and more complicated as the story progresses.

One of the most potent images and symbols of the Binti series is the edan, the mysterious device Binti finds in the desert that turns out to be an ancient piece of alien technology. At one point, it comes apart, leaving intact its golden spherical core; it seems to represent Binti’s psychological development. By the end of Binti: Home, she feels torn because she’s reconciling three identities: Himba, the tribe she was born in; the alien Meduse, because she has okuoko—the species’ blue sensory tentacles—where her hair used to be; and Enyi Zinariya, the tribe with alien technology coursing through its veins. The edan also seems to be commenting on the intersection of these identities. Would you like to say anything about that?

Having just finished writing the third installment, I’m smiling at this question. I’ll start from the beginning, because things have come a long way.

The edan is an object usually used by Yoruba sorcerers (for lack of a better word) to find their way. It’s sort of like a magical GPS. A friend of mine (who is Yoruba) told me about this, and it stayed with me.

In Binti, the edan is alien technology that only a particular extraterrestrial people know and understand. Binti finds it when she is eight years old, and as the story progresses, learns about its functions in a nonlinear, incomplete, random, often sporadic way. It becomes more the more she lives her life and studies it. As she becomes, it becomes.

The entire story, Binti herself, her edan, all comment on intersectional identities. This was not something I set out to write about. But being who I am, from the cultures that I’m from, living the way I live, especially in the last few years, this theme was bound to come forth in my works, strong and bold and conflicted.

Speaking of ancient alien technology, Binti also discovers that, as a descendent of the Enyi Zinariya, she also carries the biological nanoids from the alien civilization known as the Gold People. This part of the novella reminds me of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens program. My critique of this thesis—if you will—is that it discredits technological advances made by non-white, non-European peoples. In other words, ancient civilizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas “needed” intervention from aliens to build their pyramids, great temples, their societies, and what have you. But I was wondering if you were playing with this idea or subverting it in the world building of Binti’s story.

I believe aliens have definitely been here. I don’t think the theory that they have affected, interacted with, exchanged with the people of Earth (human and otherwise) in the past takes away from the accomplishments or innovations of anyone. I think the general belief that certain peoples are less than other peoples is what does that.

That said, I wasn’t consciously commenting on these ideas. I just believe that some things have happened on this Earth that would surprise the heck out of us if we knew. We don’t control or know everything, and that fascinates me. And not everyone is going to use amazing tech to try and rule or dominate others. Some things may just stay within a small group of people because some people really do just like to keep to themselves.

You were a keynote speaker at the 4th Annual Igbo Conference (bit.ly/2jF3Dcp). You said in your speech that science fiction is where you prefer to discuss and speculate about your cultures. How is the Binti series an example of this?

Some may get very angry with Binti’s family in part two. They may see her family as cruel, intrusive, controlling. It will probably be the same way that many saw the sorcerer Aro in Who Fears Death. These are cultural things that I am very used to and that I don’t demonize, despite disagreeing with it.

Much of Binti is about the push and pull of family and culture, and what it is and what it means to travel beyond one’s roots and grow while bringing along your roots. Too often, as an American, I see this sentiment that in order to evolve, one must leave family behind, one must leave one’s foundation behind, break bonds, forget the past. I say, “What if you bring family with? Aren’t you more that way?” Yes, it’s a harder road to walk, because you have to travel while carrying the loads of home and the past, and it requires a lot of negotiating and understanding and submitting. This is the cultural conversation in Binti. She’s constantly asking herself, “Who am I? What am I?”, but always while maintaining that she is Himba. And the Himba people are constantly grappling with this issue, too. Can one move into “modernity” with her culture? What does “modernity” mean? Most of the time it just means assimilating to Western cultures and ideals so you can enjoy technology. What is lost? Who is in control of the direction of “modernity”? Must it always be this way? If not, how? This is an issue I know Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora will have to face in the future, if not already.

The opening line of Binti, “I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer,” comes up again in Binti: Home. It captures Binti’s embrace of both technology and spiritual beliefs. Science and magic coexist without any problems or cognitive dissonance for her or her community. Where does this openness to the concrete and the mystical come from?

This comes from being an African. Being a Nigerian. Being Igbo. I was born and raised in the United States, but my upbringing was very Naijamerican (Nigerian American). My parents were connected to Home, but also very open to making the US and its culture a simultaneous Home. Duality, hybridization, gathering of more and more, is part of who I am, not leaving things behind to travel lighter.

Then there are the things I’ve observed while visiting Nigeria. Such as seeing people without running water or electricity in their homes build a computer from junk. Seeing yam farmers in the village using cell phones. Watching the way my video game-addicted cousin’s desktop computer wouldn’t miss a beat when the power went out because it was connected to a small generator. Watching my uncle say a prayer over his broken DVD player. Watching a friend of mine get out of his broken down car, speak some Yoruba words, and then say “I know who did this,” after he got back into the now running car (this actually happened in the United States, not Nigeria). I can go on and on about the ancient and the modern, technology and spirituality, living together comfortably.

In your interview on The Africa Channel’s Behind the Words (bit.ly/2jI8fPd), you spoke about your parents moving from Nigeria to the US primarily for school, but also because of the Biafran War. How much did the war inform the ongoing feud between the Meduse and the Khoush?

In this case, not much. Nigeria’s Civil War was caused mainly by colonialism time bombs going off; schisms purposely encouraged by the British to create unrest. The war between the Khoush and Meduse in Binti is more me looking at humanity as a whole and various hatreds that have been cultivated and acted upon for so long that no one even remembers the origin. We just hate and judge because that’s what’s been done before. The treatment of the Khoush by the Meduse is based on Arab racism toward Black Africans in the Middle East and parts of Africa and the simultaneous cultural blending of and relationship between the two groups.

In the same interview, you talked about being diagnosed with severe scoliosis. You underwent spinal surgery during your first year of college. How much did this experience inspire the scene in Binti where the Meduse change her hair into okuoko by injecting their DNA into her spine?

Great observation. This was purely unconscious, but definitely the origin. Of all places, I chose the spine. That surgery changed me and my destiny forever. It was involuntary. And afterwards, I could do nothing but live with the change. And I often resent it, and still the change led me to some of the greatest things in my life. Yes, having this happen to Binti may have been unconscious, but it was not a coincidence.

This scene brings up issues of consent, or a lack thereof, between Binti and the Meduse. Binti’s mother, in fact, asks her about it in Binti: Home. On one hand, the injection ensures her survival during her trip to the university and gives her the ability to speak and understand the Meduse’s language. On the other hand, she didn’t consent to being genetically altered. Her run-in with the Meduse and her friendship with Meduse ambassador Okwu have literally changed her. I thought of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and how thorny the issue of consent gets between the humans and the Oankali, her gene-trading aliens. Was her trilogy a reference point for the dynamics between Binti and the Meduse?

Again, not consciously. But Octavia’s literary DNA runs through me. Thus, it’s no coincidence.

In the introduction you wrote for the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, you mention that Wild Seed was the first novel of hers that you read. Wild Seed was my first Butler novel, too, and I’ve been a Butler fan for life since reading it. I was wondering if you could go into more detail about what drew you to Wild Seed and how it spoke to you.

When I picked up Wild Seed, I had no idea who Octavia Butler was. It was the year 2000, and I was at Michigan State for Clarion. The only reason I noticed and then bought Wild Seed was because it was the first novel with a black woman on the cover that I’d ever seen in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. I had no idea that Octavia herself was a black woman, either. I read that book not knowing for sure . . . well, upon reading the first few pages, I knew.

I was immediately blown away because within the first few pages, I found myself reading about an Igbo shape-shifter in Nigeria who was a woman, but hiding in her village as a man. Oh my goodness, that was it. I was hooked. Of all of her books, Wild Seed was the perfect one for me to start with. At the time, I was writing about an angry mean woman in pre-colonial Eastern Nigeria who could fly and was about to be lynched by her village because of it. Reading Wild Seed let me know that such stories could be published and loved. That was a big deal for me as a black writer.

You also mentioned in your introduction that you interviewed Butler about her last novel, Fledgling, and that you met her in person at Chicago State University. I’d love to hear what that was like.

I remember keeping her on the phone longer than I needed to for that interview. Once I had all my interview questions answered, I just wanted to talk to her and listen. I’d spoken to her a few years prior as well. She was just really cool, funny, and full of witty wisdom. I remember laughing a lot during all our conversations. She was cynical about the world and had strong political views. Meeting her in person was just sweet. I’m tall and she was taller. She came to CSU for the Gwendolyn Brooks Writer’s Conference, a black conference at a black university, and the place was packed with black people. I think it surprised her to see that big room full of mostly dark faces gazing at her with wide eyes of love and awe. This wasn’t long before she passed and I always hope that she understood that day how much she is loved amongst blacks in the US, that we do read science fiction, and we love her.

What has been her influence on your writing?

Epic.

You’ve mentioned that Butler and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan author of one of your favorite books, Wizard of the Crow, write in a clean prose that you admire. What is the attraction to their prose style?

When the story itself is complex, I don’t like the words to obscure or weigh it down.

You’ve tweeted that Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind has influenced much of your work (bit.ly/2kWGDdZ). How so?

My daughter and I watched it recently and I just saw so much. The giant bugs helped me imagine Binti’s world. Nausicaä was an agent of peace in a similar way that Binti is (though Nausicaä does kill a bunch of men in one memorable scene). Oh, and when I imagined the breathing room in Third Fish (the living ship that Binti leaves Earth in), I was imagining the room where Nausicaä was growing the pollution-free plants in the dungeon of her father’s palace.

In which works of yours can we see Miyazaki’s influence?

Binti,Who Fears Death,The Book of Phoenix,Lagoon,Akata Witch,The Shadow Speaker . . . yeah, um, all of them.

One recurring theme I’ve noticed in your work, such as Zahrah the Windseeker and the Binti series, is the symbiosis of the natural world and technology. In your far-future scenarios, humans have developed technology that depends on both flora and fauna. What interests you so much about bridging the natural world with technology?

It’s simple. I think we as humans can go further and become more if we work with nature. And I believe everyone (from flora to fauna to mineral to metal) will be happier if humans work with nature.

On the planet where Binti goes to university, there are these transportation shuttles made from the molted cuticles of giant creatures that live in the forests. Knowing your passion for entomology, I have to ask if these giant forest creatures are huge insects. Are they?

Oh yeah, they’re insects. Huge, blue, slow-moving beetles.

Another recurring theme—and plot point—that I’ve seen in Who Fears Death, the Binti series, and your short story “Afrofuturist 419” published in Clarkesworld in 2016, is the need to leave home. I would also include Lagoon, because the shape-shifting aliens leave their planet to make first contact with the city of Lagos. And earlier in this interview, you mentioned your recent move to New York for a teaching position at the University of Buffalo, NY. Tell us about the personal significance of this theme to you.

I’ve always followed the stories. And the stories have always pulled me further than I would ever have gone without them.

I’ll start with my paralysis. In that first year where I relearned how to walk, I avoided driving at night, because though I had regained my ability to walk, I sometimes couldn’t feel my legs or feet. I was interning at a newspaper and one day there was this story I really wanted to chase. However, it involved me interviewing a family at night. It was that day that I came up with the idea of driving with a flashlight. I’d flick the flashlight on whenever my legs and feet seemed to disappear. Seeing them let me know they were still there. I still use a flashlight to drive at night.

With my writing career, it’s been similar. I went from spending many years rarely getting into an airplane to hopping airplanes like buses. I had a fear of airplanes (mainly the idea of not being in control) and of travelling to unfamiliar places. I had to learn to face that fear in order to go to all these places I was invited to because of my works. In this way, I grew as a person and my worldview expanded.

When it came to my teaching career, it’s another similar experience. I was teaching at Chicago State University and was really miserable there. It’s not really a university for writers who are actually writing. When the opportunity to teach in New York State at the University at Buffalo (an R1 institution) arose, though I was worried about (and afraid of) leaving my home in Illinois to teach there, I had enough experience with travel and stretching my boundaries to take the leap.

The themes of change, moving beyond one’s comfort zone, stepping into the dark or the unknown and learning how to deal with whatever comes my way are dear to me and, thus, constantly appearing in my stories.

“Afrofuturist 419” incorporates multimedia storytelling with an audio file of the Nigerian astronaut abandoned in space by the private spaceflight company he works for. It also uses the epistolary format by way of the infamous Nigerian 419 scam letters we’re all familiar with on the Internet. What prompted you to tell this story with these narrative devices?

When I read about the 419 scam letter concerning a Nigerian astronaut in space, I knew I would write a story about it. How could I not? Plus, I love the film The Martian (the novel, not so much). I have a journalist background and have been a reporter before. I wanted this story to be heard, not read, and my character was male and Nigerian.

All these elements led to the multimedia telling of “The Afrofuturist.” I always let the story guide me when I write, and this one led me to come up with a creative odd format.

Structurally speaking, we’re distanced from astronaut Abacha Tunde through the epistolary format. We don’t get to his voice until the last third of the story. It highlights his displacement from the planet and also humanity. That spaceflight company just left him out there to die!

Yep. Sadly, nothing I can’t imagine, heh. It’s a commentary on who’s quite often the expendable one. Remember when we had the Ebola crisis? Why did the two white Americans get the Ebola serum when hundreds of Africans had died and were dying? Yeah. African lives have consistently been treated as less than by others.

Award-winning Nollywood (Nigerian film industry) director Tchidi Chikere does the voice of the astronaut. How did you come into contact with him to do the audio file?

Tchidi and I have been friends for nearly a decade. I merely had to ask him for the favor and after a good laugh; he was happy to do it.

You co-wrote the short story “Rusties,” also published in Clarkesworld in 2016, with Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu. How did this project come about? What was it like collaborating with her?

My daughter and I went to Kenya last summer to attend Wanuri’s traditional wedding and for a vacation. Wanuri and I talked out the plot of “Rusties” while sitting on the porch looking out at the Indian Ocean one night in Diani, Kenya. We wrote it a few weeks later. Wanuri and I have several projects we are working on together, including Camel Racer, an animated film with the South African film production company Triggerfish. When we write things together, it’s a true collaboration. By the time we finish, neither of us will even know who wrote what half the time.

“Rusties” has this intricate social dynamic in its world building where African citizens opposed to the traffic-policing robots join forces to form an anti-AI union because automation has taken away jobs. Some of them even resort to illegally stripping metals from the robots’ motherboards to make what are called “backlash bracelets,” which then get adopted into the rap music scene. It’s a take on showing the cause of a robot uprising that I haven’t seen done before. How did you and Wanuri develop this idea?

Through a lot of cynical laughter and snickering.

In your 2009 interview on Clarkesworld (bit.ly/2kWJ8gF) you said, “If it scares you to write it, then you should definitely write it.” Could you tell us what scared you to write “Afrofuturist 419” and “Rusties”?

With “Afrofuturist 419,” the idea of getting left behind in space is terrifying to me. And space itself is terrifying. It’s vast, you die out there because you’re not supposed to be out there, and there is too much we don’t know, like what’s out there and why it’s out there and what it’ll do when it gets inside.

The terror of “Rusties” lies in being self-absorbed. We all get self-absorbed. But what happens when all hell is breaking loose around you? What if it happens when you are not ready? When you’re too busy freaking out over a stupid break-up? Also, what if you cause the robo-revolution because you were projecting your issues with your stupid cheating boyfriend on a robot? What if the robo-apocalypse is all your fault?

Has your idea about what scares you changed over time as you work on new projects?

Not really. Fear is where the energy lies. Facing it is almost always a great story.

Going back to what you stated in your keynote speech at the 4th Annual Igbo Conference, how do “Afrofuturist 419” and “Rusties” discuss and speculate about your cultures in science fiction?

“Afrofuturist 419” forced me to channel a typical Nigerian man who was kind of losing his mind. That was fun. What would he miss, being stuck out there? What would he seek to do? How would he speak? How would he feel about space travel and how would his family feel?

“Rusties” was just speculating about what could happen with the robot cops currently in Kinshasa.

Science fiction is not something you add to African culture. It’s not something separate from it. Both stories look into the future, and that’s what makes them science fiction.

As we approach the end of the interview, I have to note that Binti: Home ends on a cliffhanger. When can we expect to see the next installment?

You can expect to find out what happens next, haha. That’s for me to know and interested readers to find out. But just so you know, I know exactly what happens because I just wrote it.

Do you have any other writing projects in the works you can tell us about?

I’m still polishing a novel set in a near future part of Africa called Remote Control. I’ve been working on it for six years and it’s complete now and deep into the most major edits. The sequel to Akata Witch, titled Akata Warrior, is scheduled for release in the fall. I have a comic book project that should soon be announced. I’m working on a very cool short story for a very cool anthology. And so much more, including film projects that are too new to discuss. I stay busy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Indrapramit Das

Laurel Amberdine | 842 words

NuTay believes that “dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people”—but I wonder, did you have any specific origin of the dunyshar in mind?

I didn’t have anything too specific in mind beyond what’s offered in the story (that offworld humans help sustain their population by becoming surrogates and donating babies to the Port, to get bartering power in the interstellar economy), but I see them as the casualties of progress—because humanity never moves forward in lockstep, always sacrificing the majority for the benefit of a privileged minority with the most power, privilege, and wealth (on a global scale—in this case, a galactic scale). The dunyshar are the people left behind, the people left to do the dirty jobs that others travelling through interstellar space can’t or won’t do (like people in poverty in India, who literally prop up the middle and upper classes with their labour). Since the Planet of Arrivals and Departures has alien ruins that are vital to space travel, I imagine there were (or are) wars fought on it, between different human factions, and the dunyshar might have descended from the people disenfranchised and stranded by those wars, divested of their original cultures and left by this travel hub to facilitate the movement of more privileged humans through the galaxy.

Samuel R. Delany explored some similar issues in his novella “The Star Pit,” which I heard about while reading a Jo Walton essay about his work days after writing “The Worldless.” I was stunned at the similarities (it’s about a working-class—or equivalent, in a future with FTL travel—starship mechanic working at a star port at the far edge of the galaxy, and how the grinding gears of human social machinery can trap people in certain places and contexts) between it and my story. I sought it out and read it—it’s actually quite different (despite even having a character, Ratlit, that sounds like “Satlyt,” one of my characters), but also thematically similar. It’s a fantastic novella—one of my favourite science fiction stories ever, and one of my overall favourites in Delany’s ouevre. I like to think “The Star Pit” retroactively inspired me to write “The Worldless,” reaching back through spacetime (the story was actually sparked by a dream I had).

I was intrigued by your use of pronouns in “The Worldless.” For me, this evoked the feeling of some other language, with different usage than English. Am I on the right track there, or did you have some other intention?

I like that reading—that they’re speaking a different language. I didn’t specify gender, and used gender-neutral pronouns, because I imagined that the spectrum of gender is less stifled so far in the future—so it’s fairly normal to be genderqueer/genderfluid/agender. But specifically, I also saw the dunyshar themselves as not really having a culture that specifies or sees the construction of distinct genders as important or useful.

It’s only a minor part of the story, but I was very intrigued by these spaceships that can only go to or from a single planet, that contain some living (sentient?) component from that world. Do you have any other stories set in this universe, or plans to write them?

I do have plans to try and write a novel set in this universe, and explore it more, but I have plans to do that for pretty much every universe I write. We’ll see how many of them I can open up into novel length! It’s interesting that you saw them as being able to travel only to a specific planet. Different readers see the starships differently—which is what I wanted. They’re meant to be a mystery. I didn’t want to be too specific about the mechanics involved.

When you’re not writing, what else do you like to do?

Reading, watching TV and movies, listening to music, playing video games, eating, drinking, spending time with people I like and love, going out, exploring new cities, exploring old cities, travelling (I do very little of that, because of money and time), being a twenty-first century data-cyborg by constantly saturating myself with digital stimuli and information (though I hate that, too, with a passion—like many twenty-first century cloud-cyborgs), making shit up (whether or not it ends up on a page), constantly hoping the world becomes less dystopic.

What are you working on lately? Lots of new stories, I hope!

I have a very haphazard process of writing, so I am working on lots of new stories at the same time, some of which will never become stories (or won’t be published), others that hopefully will be. But the priority is a new novel, which I hope to have a first draft of this year. You’ll forgive me not talking about it in detail—it’s not at that stage yet.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Eileen Gunn

Setsu Uzume | 802 words

I found the juxtaposition between his memories of Katie and his musing on knowing another’s pain particularly striking, especially, “what it says to you when nobody else is around.” What kind of connection is being drawn between love and pain in this story?

That’s a very interesting comment, Setsu. I wasn’t aware that I had drawn such a connection, but now that you mention it, I see that it is there. What I was aware of was drawing a connection between physical pain and emotional pain. The pain that is called “phantom limb” is caused by the loss of a major part of someone’s body; it consists of physical pain in the illusory presence of a body part that is gone. The emotional pain that my protagonist feels when he thinks of the people he loved that he’s lost—his mother, his brother, his daughter—is analogous. He’s not remembering the good times with any of those people, only the pain of the loss of what was, and his love for them is the source of that pain. They were part of him, of his life, and now they are gone. He seems to deal with their loss by suppressing happy memories of them, and focusing just on the pain. They have become phantoms.

The idea of nerves continuing to grow into a leg that isn’t there was such a vivid depiction of what loss is. At what point does the commendable effort cease to serve, or was it always a pointless endeavor? What’s the turning point?

That’s a good question. Physical pain does serve a purpose: it keeps people from putting additional stress on an injury. There are people who have a congenital insensitivity to pain. They cannot feel pain, and are much more likely to incur serious injuries and to die at a relatively young age. But pain that persists past the healing point, such as a phantom limb, serves no purpose, as far as I can determine.

People who indicate no sadness or emotional pain are usually regarded as suffering from a psychological problem, as are people who appear to be grieving too much or too long. It does seem there is a correlation to physical pain, in that there is a point after which grief is not productive and interferes needlessly with the griever’s life and well-being. And just as there are no objective measures for another person’s physical pain, there is no objective way to measure whether someone has crossed an invisible line of appropriate emotional pain. (“That doesn’t hurt so much” is, in either case, a condescending and useless assessment.) Indeed, that might be the major underlying theme of my story.

What inspired you to tell a Marine’s story?

My father was a US Marine in World War II. He lost his right leg in an action on the island of New Britain, similar to what happened to the character in my story, and suffered from extreme chronic pain the rest of his life. In the early 1990s, a few years before he died, he sent me a short story he had written about being injured, and he said he’d finished the story when he was sitting in a hospital waiting room, waiting for me to be born. It was a good Saturday Evening Post story, professional quality, though it was never published. I used some incidents from it in my story, although my story is, of course, different, and not necessarily my father’s story.

What would you like your readers to take away from this story?

Whatever they want to, really. I don’t think it’s my task as the author to tell readers what to take away from the story. That’s the wonderful thing about stories, actually. They should be concrete enough in the writing to evoke reality, but generalized enough in the meaning that the readers can take away from them whatever is meaningful to their lives. The story won’t have quite the same takeaway for each reader, and whatever the reader takes away is right.

What’s coming up next from you?

I’m looking forward to the publication in April of “Night Shift at NanoGobblers,” a short story I wrote about near-future commercial exploitation of asteroids. I expect there will shortly be an announcement about it: it’s part of a project sponsored by NASA.

I’m also at work on a metafictional novel, The Education of Samantha Clemens. It is concerned with issues of gender and race, and of history as a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Rachel Swirsky

Arley Sorg | 2043 words

My first thought when I finished this story: Rachel, you are absolutely crazy. And I mean that in a good way. Such a daring story, complex, layered, well-constructed, subtle in some ways, and disturbing. I can honestly say, I could come up with a lot of questions around this piece. But I need to narrow it to a handful. “The Debt of the Innocent” originally appeared in Farah Mendelsohn’s Glorifying Terrorism anthology, whose introduction said, “the purpose of the stories and poems in this book is to glorify terrorism,” which was meant as a statement against the Terrorism Act 2006. On the state of health care and specifically on keeping children alive, and the disparity that not everyone has access to life-saving resources, Colleen Mondor reviewed this story (in “The Right to Read Science Fiction” at bit.ly/2jF3Dcp), saying, “we are already here, living it, although many people, who have likely never been truly poor, would deny that.” If we agree with Mondor, then what this story does is nothing less than bring middle/upper class America into the experiences of those who struggle considerably more. Do you agree with this assessment, and if so, was this part of the intention?

 In a way, this spans two questions. First, there’s the urgency of responding to the kind of censorship that the U.K. was trying to impose on writers and readers in the Terrorism Act of 2006. The Act sought to bar anything that could be construed as “glorifying terrorism.” On the surface, this may seem appealing—after all, terrorism is bad. But even laying aside the free speech argument that can be made in response, a law so broad is inherently a problem. The United States was founded by traitors, and their acts could have been considered terrorism. Yet I’m proud of the founding of the United States, and would write with pride about those men and their actions. (Also, as Mondor points out, there’s the whole Star Wars franchise which would have to go.)

Then, of course, there’s the specific form this story takes. I think Mondor is right that we live in a society closer to the one that’s being depicted than a lot of people think we do, especially now that we’re seeing the rollback of the progress we’d made toward universal health care. When I wrote the story in 2006, I was writing in response to news stories about poor infants having support withdrawn because their parents couldn’t pay. After reading this story, a friend and critique partner told me that this kind of thing would never happen in the United States; we wouldn’t let babies die because their parents had no money. But it had indeed been happening at that moment.

So, yes, I suppose I was writing in Mondor’s mode. At its best, fiction can reveal things to us about ourselves or our world. Near future science fiction is poised in a particular, unusual way that can sometimes reveal things that are already happening. Paolo Bacigalupi has discussed this as an element in his books. Children are already used as labor in intensely dangerous salvage industries; children are already mutilated and traumatized as soldiers for horrifying causes that aren’t their own. Adding a science fictional element—in the case of this story, a widely adopted policy with a cause that people recognize; in Bacigalupi’s case, adding an affiliation with the United States—can give people a new angle for looking at ongoing global situations.

 The role of socio-politics in fiction is controversial. Ian McEwan, in Sweet Tooth, portrays governments actively attempting to manipulate society through fiction. Do you think it’s important to make a stand or a statement through fiction? Is fiction, by its nature, political? Or is it better, or even possible, to attempt to tell a story that doesn’t send some sort of social or political message?

 I believe that fiction is by its very nature political, and that it is impossible to write fiction that doesn’t have political implications (which is different than carrying a deliberate message). This story contains issues that many people recognize as political: health care, energy use, terrorism. The story also includes issues that some people consider political: racism, interracial adoption, gay marriage, and surrogate motherhood. But really there are plenty of background things that no one much thinks about. The story depicts a money-based economy, unrestricted travel between continents, nuclear families, and a lot of other things that are part of the background noise of our society. Hand it to an ancient Roman, and they would probably find many things I’d never notice which nevertheless have sociopolitical consequences. Even if art does nothing more than hold a mirror to reality, reality is political. (And, of course, mirrors always create a degree of change and distortion.)

Ruling classes throughout time have always regarded fiction as potentially dangerous to their power. There are poems forbidden to be written, songs forbidden to be sung, books considered to be so hazardous that they must be put to the fire. We don’t have the Hays code regulating Hollywood anymore, but we still have film ratings, and even if ratings are overall a positive (I think the issue is more complex than “all good” or “all bad,” but even if so), they’re still ways to assert political control over content.

McEwan’s government wouldn’t be the first to use fiction for propaganda, and there will be many more. You can argue the United States does it now when we pass on mythologized versions of our history like George Washington’s cherry tree. Historical narratives and fictional narratives intersect in a lot of ways. Humans think in stories, and act in societies. The two are always going to be intertwined, at least a bit.

 Obviously, there are a couple of topics on offer that some people would find shocking, or even hard to read. For many, terrorism and violence against children are triggers. Was this story difficult to write for those reasons? Not to mention, on the other hand, do you worry about the ways in which people might read it, and does that make the writing difficult?

 This was a very difficult story to write. One criticism people have made of it is that I don’t do as good a job getting into Jamie’s head as I do into the heads of the people whose children have died. That’s quite possibly true, and if it is, then I expect it’s true for obvious reasons. Thinking of killing children—of killing anyone in your care – is deeply distressing and incomprehensible to me, as it should be to anyone. Killing at all is something terrifying that I can’t comprehend, but killing someone dependent on you adds a deep, abiding horror. (This is not to say there’s something wrong with parents who have the fleeting intrusive thoughts about hurting their infants, something I understand to be common—those people tend to be deeply, appropriately distressed by the involuntary images.)

That said, one way I deal with fear is to write about it, or try to imagine it. I’m comically afraid of blood, for instance, so the idea of fetishizing it makes my stomach do a flip—that’s why I wrote a story in grad school about someone who does. Trying to write about an act like this is a way of staring directly into that fear.

I was about fifteen minutes away from the towers on September eleventh. I don’t want to co-opt anyone’s grief or terror about that. Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes is a big deal. I didn’t lose anyone. I didn’t watch the towers fall next to me. I was afraid of more terrorist attacks, but not with anywhere near the same justification as many, many others. Yet, I think I’ve spent so much of the past sixteen years emphasizing that I have less right to be upset about it than many others that I’ve also denied the fact that it did impact me greatly. I was nineteen, still adjusting to living away from home, and it was the defining moment of my young adulthood, one that severely and lastingly changed the world I’d grown up in.

Several years ago, I became obsessed with disasters where people are trapped somewhere by malevolent human agency in a way where escape is visible but unattainable—mostly fires and sinking ships. Over time, as I’ve learned the outlines of this particular obsession, I’ve come to believe it’s my way of trying to learn about and cope with the impact of 9/11. At nineteen, we made jokes about how we wouldn’t get bombed, because, what, were terrorists going to target tiny liberal arts schools? But running beneath the jokes was a very real, electric fear.

Whenever we write something and put it out into the world, we know that people will make their own way with the words we’ve put down. When John approached me about reprinting this piece, I was initially very hesitant. I don’t want people to misread the story as an endorsement of violence, whether terrorist violence or state violence, and my concerns about both types continue to mount as I read about things like the normalization of stabbings or shootings at protests.

But I also don’t trust the idea that because something is hard to discuss, we shouldn’t discuss it. Precisely because this topic is frightening, it’s something we need to confront. This takes us all the way back to the premise for the anthology where this story was initially published, I suppose. Banning anything that “glorifies terrorism” only seeks to destroy hard conversations, pushing painful concepts deeper into subterranean territory where they can fester. We learn by talking about things, not ignoring them.

This story seems to have a fresh relevance, scary as that is. Without health care, babies will die. We can and must be prepared to fight without violence.

 One of the points on discussion here is the effect of diminishing resources, specifically fossil fuels. It’s a discussion that is prominent in the SF community. Is this a topic that is personal or important for you?

 Unfortunately, I think it’s personal for all of us.

I was definitely pre-occupied with this topic when I wrote the piece in 2006. I’m not as preoccupied with it anymore because I don’t think hitting peak oil will be the first energy-related disaster we have to deal with. I think we may see catastrophic, unignorable climate change disasters before we are close to tapping out our oil reserves.

 Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story that I haven’t asked?

 I can talk a lot about this story, and my motivations in writing it, and what I hope people will glean from reading it. But at a certain point, I have to rest on what I’ve said, so I think I’m going to rest here for now.

Rachel, thanks so much for this story. I personally think it’s incredible for so many reasons. What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

I just finished moving from the place where I’ve been unhappy to a new, thriving, creative, and beautiful city! This is already making it way easier for me to work and create.

The easiest way to get a bunch of my new work is to sign up for my Patreon: patreon.com/rachelswirsky.

Every patron receives a new piece of flash fiction or poetry each month. For January, I released something light and funny: “An Open Letter to the Coffee Table Currently in Residence at Mrs. Tabitha J. Mountwhite’s Home, Family Room, By the French Doors.”

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Marta Randall

Laurel Amberdine | 337 words

What was the first thing you knew about “The Stone Lover” when you began to work on it?

I’ve been reading through Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s excellent series of modern day fairy stories, and at the same time revisiting my adolescent fascination with Greek mythology. The two combined in the storyteller blender to come up with “The Stone Lover.” In essence, it’s the Pygmalion story turned on its head (although I didn’t know that at the time).

Did the story give you any surprises as you were writing it?

Oh yes, all the way through. I knew the queen wanted a statue, but her choice was a surprise, and what she intended to do with it. I didn’t know that the island would be visited by classic catastrophes, but it was. And the ending, the rescue, came as a complete surprise, but I was delighted to see the story resolve itself so neatly.

I know you have a lot of experience teaching. Do you have any advice to share with the aspiring writers among our readers?

Just do it. Stop nattering around the edges and reading every single “advice on writing” book or essay you come across—I am convinced that this is a pernicious form of writer’s block and the only way to avoid it is to hold your nose and jump in. Remember that if your first drafts stink, that’s a good thing: It means you have something to work with in subsequent drafts, which is where the real writing happens. If you hear that malicious voice in your head that derides you and your work, tell it to go to hell. The only thing it exists for is to deceive you and slow you down. Write!

What can we look for from you next?

I wish I knew. I have a couple of things in the pipeline but nothing scheduled yet.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Sandra Odell | 1079 words

Tell us about the inspiration behind “Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes” and the repeat terrors of predictable death.

“Inspiration” is for me often a tough one to answer, but I can track at least part of this down to its source. My dreams love to kill me off. They kill me off in intensely gory ways, in highly cinematic ways, in highly mortifying ways. I am well-used to dreams where I am in a car that plunges off the edge of a mountain road into water many hundreds of feet below, and indeed have them so frequently that my dreaming self is occasionally able to say, “Oh, this. I’ve been through this already. I don’t need to worry about this.” From time to time, it has occurred to me that if I ever am in the car that goes over the edge of a cliff and experiences a plunge long enough for me to think about, I might suffer the disconnect that my protagonist does at the end of the story, thinking, “Oh. This. I’ll wake up any second now.” From there it was just a short hop to the tale under discussion.

The story starts on a high note and only gets better. The vivid sensory description draws the reader into the story, from the wet crack of bone, to the taste of peppermint, to Negelein’s sigh the moment before death. As a reader, what are some of the elements that make for a strong opening? Immediacy of plot? Sensory description? Narrative voice? Do you find your impressions as a reader differ from those as a writer?

The general rule of short fiction, one I subscribe to, is that the opening scene should take place as late in the timeline as you can possibly get away with—sometimes with the initiating circumstances relegated to backstory. You don’t have to begin every tale with a stampede of camels, but you should have, in no more than the first hundred words, some feeling, some unanswered question, some narrative hook, or even some image that gives the reader reason to continue. I’ve seen writers do it, masterfully, with as little as a stranger saying hello. You can get away with a few flat paragraphs in the middle—even entire flat chapters if we’re talking novels, as some of our most beloved masters have demonstrated—but by God, readers are always looking for an opportunity to quit at the onset, and that’s what you’re fighting, with canny use of the elements cited.

I was struck by the story’s narrative voice, slipping back and forth between Negelein’s third-person omniscient deaths to the dialogue-only passages that actually carry the story along. Did you experiment with different forms of narrative structure, or did you have a firm understanding before you set down the first word of how you wanted the story to read?

Form is dictated by function. Going in, I knew that the story would be a series of outrageous ways for the viewpoint schmuck to die, and that I was going to have genuine fun describing those in vivid detail . . . but, as you note, the dialogue is what drives the plot, and it struck me very early on that while I could have designed those sections as straight narrative, our protagonist actually going to the doctors and submitting to the tests and so on, that presenting this in any detail would dilute the impact of the whole. That stuff could be cut to the bone. We could enter and leave those sections in mid-sentence just to establish that there is more before and afterward that we don’t need to hear, that what we tune into is the important part. No real experimentation was needed to decide this. Reasoning out the way the story had to work took less time than it probably did to read this paragraph, though some tinkering would be required and the last dialogue section in particular was substantially revised not long before publication.

Your work spans genres and form: novels; short stories; film, TV, and book reviews; public commentary. You’ve written about the struggles that lead to your eventually becoming a full-time writer, and how happy you are that your wife is such a staunch supporter (and occasional accomplice) of your work. Taking a page from “Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes,” what do you think your life would be like if you had not decided to take that leap of faith into the writer’s life?

First: I write in different genres, different voices, and different styles, because I get bored, terribly bored. I don’t want any story I write, any novel I write, to ever receive a shrug and the judgment, “Oh, that’s pretty much typical from him.”

Second: If I haven’t made it a hundred percent clear by now, my wife is not only my inspiration, but my hero. I’m fortunate enough to have more than my fair share of champions, but none quite as fervent or as dedicated as her, and the most I can say is that I’m not quite sure what I’ve done to deserve it.

This is a good place to note that this year she is celebrating her first fiction publication as collaborator on the story “Undiscovered Gods,” which should be imminently seeing print in the anthology Cosmic Powers.

Third: If circumstances were different, and at times this full-time gig has been a tough row to hoe with long gaps between obvious reward, I’d likely have fewer books out and be working at something I hated, while almost certainly having a lot more money.

What’s next for Adam-Troy Castro? What projects are in the works for 2017?

I’m not, as of this writing, quite certain whether the novel just completed is safe for me to plug. (This has been going on for months; the situation is complicated.) In the meantime, I have been working on something not under contract, a mainstream thriller unlike anything I’ve ever done before. Some of you, reading these words in a time far-removed from this answer’s composition, will have far more information than I do. If you can email through time, let me know, especially if it’s good news. I can use the encouragement.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Julian Mortimer Smith

Robyn Lupo | 504 words

Regarding the subject of aliens, it does seem pretty right to have a coastal setting, and you use the Maritimes aesthetic to really root the work in real-world stuff in a satisfying way. With “Come-from-Aways,” how did the story start? Was there a particular image you began with?

The idea for “Come-from-Aways” came from an article I wrote for a local magazine about the Shag Harbour Incident, a well-documented UFO crash that took place in the sixties near my home in southwest Nova Scotia. There’s a great little museum in the town of Shag Harbour and several witnesses still living in the area who are happy to chat about the crash.

This is a fairly isolated area of the province with a declining population, and locals use the term “come-from-aways” to refer to people who have moved to the area from elsewhere. Social attitudes can be fairly insular, but we also desperately need immigration, so communities have complicated relationships with outsiders and newcomers. The story explores that relationship to some degree.

There are debates over whether the term “come-from-aways” is affectionate or a pejorative. To me, it was simply an irresistible title for a story about aliens.

You work in board games as well; how does your involvement in that area inform your fiction work? Do you tend to work on multiple projects at once, or do you focus on one task at a time, or one sort of work at a time?

When I first moved to Nova Scotia (I’m a come-from-away myself), I worked as a freelance editor for a while and I ended up doing several jobs for a major board game company. In many ways, I find writing and editing board game rules is the opposite of writing fiction. Board game rules have to be utterly precise and exhaustive. Everything must be explained in such a way that there is zero confusion about meaning or intent. But the best stories are full of ambiguities and unresolved mysteries. I think it’s up to readers to play with them however they see fit.

I tend to work on only one creative project at a time. I now have a full-time day job writing copy for a web design company, so I’m no longer freelancing (although I still love board games). With set hours, it’s a little easier to schedule regular writing time, although I have far less time to write than I’d like.

In the debate over whether it’s a ley line intersection or cosmic dumping ground, did you find yourself favouring one explanation over the other?

Are the pieces of wreckage wondrous artifacts or pure garbage? I think they’re both. I guess it depends on how you look at them and what you do with them.

What’s next for you, Julian?

I’m currently working on a young adult novel, tentatively titled The Wildlands.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Greg Kurzawa

Sandra Odell | 755 words

The opening paragraph for “Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes” contains one of the most poignant lines I have ever read in a speculative short story: “Except for the return address, these envelopes look like something from the bank, or perhaps an offer for home insurance, the kind we throw away.” This tiny, familiar detail cements the reader in the familiar, a stark contrast to the nature of the story. How conscious are you of establishing a reader’s perspective in relation to the narrative of a story?

Anchoring the reader’s perspective is something I know is important, but not something to which I give much thought. I drop myself into the story and let it flow as best I can. Even during editing (ninety percent of the process) I don’t consciously examine each detail with the thought of how the reader will react. In fact, I rarely think of the reader at all. During editing, I’m the reader, and my reasoning goes: If I can relate, so will others.

What was the inspiration behind “Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes”?

There really is a Douglas MacArthur elementary school in Chicago, Illinois. And there really are some lakes behind it that look deceptively like empty fields when snow-covered in the winter months. There was a mother once, new to the area, who didn’t know there was enough water to drown in under all that snow, and led three small children across on a walking trip to the grocery store. The ice didn’t crack that day, thank God, which is why I get to tell this story. That wintry hike, and what might have happened, was the original seed of the story. That’s not the only seed, though. I wanted to write an alien invasion story, so that’s in there too. I know it doesn’t look like an alien invasion story, but under the covers, it really is. It’s just that the aliens aren’t who the story tells you they are.

Fear of “The Other” permeates the narrative. We becomes You and I. All becomes Us and Them. Embrace becomes Divide and Conquer. Fiction has been called a respite from the harsh realities of the world. How do you think fiction’s reflection of our world allows us to process what is happening around us?

I’ve heard it said that readers of fiction have a greater capacity for empathy than non-readers. I have no idea how true that is, but it feels good to say. We can read facts all day, but we won’t necessarily understand how a situation might feel until it happens to us. Imagination helps with that, but where our own imagination fails us, fiction steps in and leads us around for that proverbial mile. In short, it exercises our empathy.

What first stirred your interest in speculative fiction? How did you come to read the stories of stars and dreams?

My older brother Michael started me reading fiction in the third grade. Dad had a deal with Mike: He’d pay for half of any book Mike wanted to read. Mike wanted to read fantasy, and a lot of it. In a short while, he had a sizeable collection, to which he never denied me access. Eventually, Dad tired of that deal and got Mike a library card instead. If Mike hadn’t been around, I probably wouldn’t have read much of anything but Sunday comics and cereal boxes. Michael was killed by a mountain in 1998, when he was twenty-six years old. He never got to read any of my stories, but I honestly believe he would have liked most of them, and certainly would have helped me make them better.

If you could speak directly to new writers trying to get their feet out from other them, what would you say to them about the joys and realities of writing?

I would say this: It sucks, you’ll love it!

What’s next for Greg Kurzawa? What projects do you have coming up in 2017?

I’ve got more short stories in the pipeline, and I don’t expect to stop writing until I’m dead. I’ve also completed my second speculative fiction novel, The Sickness of Silas Traitor, and I’m in the process of finding an agent.

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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: Holly Phillips

Robyn Lupo | 609 words

“Proves the Rule” is a story with a huge history: a world that had magic now doesn’t. The sense that many great and terrible things happened before the start of the narrative gives it a nice big grounding for me; the world of the story had a figurative heft to it. What was it like coming up with a story before the story? Would you consider revisiting the setting in another work?

The world of “Proving the Rule” is much bigger than the story, you’re right. I am fascinated by history, both the creation of the stories about our past and the forces that drive big change, and I do love the idea of such a huge skeleton hidden in a whole society’s closet. And I have to admit to some curiosity about what happens next to Lucy. Is she co-opted by the crown? Driven into flight or exile? Does she inherit the Marshal’s secret library, and if so, what does she do with it? But there are so many variations possible that it might be hard to follow just one character.

I was drawn to the apparent mismatch of feelings and points of view between Lucy and Graham. What was it like to switch between these two characters’ points of view? Did you learn anything from going back and forth?

It was in their first scene together that the two characters really came to life for me when I was writing. Lucy is so much her mother’s daughter, and Graham is so cranky and uncomfortable outside his reporter’s milieu. I had originally expected a more traditional love story between them, but it was quickly obvious that it would have taken a whole novel to bring that about. Poor Graham! He does get a rough deal in the end. But he opened the door onto all the constraints trapping the Marshal in his grim existence. He keeps the whole story grounded in the mundane.

There’s much in this story to engage the imagination, a world of magic not entirely hidden by massive conspiracies, the complicated figure of the Marshal of Kallisfane, and there’s a delightful attention to details; the visuals in this work, from Lucy’s memories of her mother to the opening pub scene. How did this story come together? How did you figure out the best way to tell this story was to kill a main character?

This story was written quite organically. I had the world and the characters, but I didn’t know how the plot was going to unfold until I wrote it. I was shocked when the Marshal offered himself up as a kind of sacrifice, but then he explained the dreadful double bind he was in, not even knowing himself if he was a force for good or evil. At that point he obviously had to die in the end, but how on earth was Lucy, a gentle and curious girl, to be brought to that point? I’m afraid the Marshal couldn’t die unless Graham went first. I still feel bad about it though. Poor Graham.

Is there any forthcoming work you’d like to tell us about? What’s next for you, Holly Phillips?

Right now I’m playing more with design than writing. I’ve got a series of chapbooks in mind, fancy art versions of some of my favorite stories, but I haven’t produced anything I’d want anyone else to see yet!

©2017 by Lightspeed Magazine.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 210 words

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Joseph Allen Hill (“Infinite Love Engine”) and Lina Rather (“Seven Permutations of My Daughter”), along with SF reprints by Paul Park (“If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien”) and Nancy Kress (“Someone to Watch Over Me”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Susan Palwick (“Remote Presence”) and Jess Barber (“Maybe Look Up”), and fantasy reprints by Genevieve Valentine (“Familiaris”) and Charles Yu (“Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger”).

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.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Adam-Troy Castro, Shweta Narayan, Susan Jane Bigelow, Matthew Kressel, Pat Murphy—and many more.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

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

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Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

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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.