TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 91, December 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2017

SCIENCE FICTION

The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant
Rachael K. Jones

Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy
Charlie Jane Anders

A Third of the Stars of Heaven
Cadwell Turnbull

Blood Wedding
Robert Reed

FANTASY

A Wedding Night’s Dream
Tim Pratt

The House at the End of the Lane Is Dreaming
A. Merc Rustad

The Boatman’s Cure
Sonya Taaffe

You Will Never Know What Opens
Mari Ness

NOVELLA

The Fullness of Time
John Brunner

EXCERPTS

K. Arsenault Rivera | The Tiger's Daughter
K. Arsenault Rivera

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: December 2017
Amal El-Mohtar

Movie Review: Geostorm
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Louise Erdrich
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Rachael K. Jones

A. Merc Rustad

Cadwell Turnbull

Mari Ness

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Christopher Park

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: December 2017

John Joseph Adams | 894 words

Welcome to issue ninety-one of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Rachael K. Jones (“The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant,” with a cover illustration by Lovely Creatures Studios) and Cadwell Turnbull (“A Third of the Stars of Heaven”), along with SF reprints by Charlie Jane Anders (“Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy”) and Robert Reed (“Blood Wedding”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by A. Merc Rustad (“The House At the End of the Lane Is Dreaming”) and Mari Ness (“You Will Never Know What Opens”), and fantasy reprints by Tim Pratt (“A Wedding Night’s Dream”) and Sonya Taaffe (“The Boatman’s Cure”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “The Fullness of Time” (John Brunner) and an excerpt from the novel The Tiger’s Daughter, by K. Arsenault Rivera.

John Joseph Adams Books News for December 2017

Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless is available at deep-discount in ebook format for the month of December; we slashed the price to $2.99 in all ebook formats. If you haven’t checked it out already, now’s a great time to give it a chance! Visit your favorite ebook retailer to grab it while the sale lasts! (To learn more about the book, and to find links to the various ebook retailers, visit johnjosephadams.com/projects/bannerless.)

ICYMI, last month, we published 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. You can read an excerpt of the book in this very issue! But first, here are some lovely things people have said about the book:

“Tanzer mixes Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray with queer romance and demonology in this subtle, beautiful Victorian-era fantasy novel. [. . .] The perfectly depicted relationship between the sister [protagonists] takes center stage in a complex (though never overplayed) web of art, swordplay, romance, and, much to the sisters’ surprise, actual demons. Gorgeously portrayed three-dimensional characters and sensual prose propel this smoothly entertaining story to an emotionally affecting end.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An artful, witty, Oscar Wilde pastiche with the heart of a paranormal thriller.” —Diana Gabaldon, bestselling author of Outlander

“A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp with serious intent behind it. The writing is so smart and sharp—Molly Tanzer is at the top of her form in this beautifully constructed novel. Sure to be a favorite of readers and critics alike.” —Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy

“There has never been a better time for a spirited, feminist reinvention of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Molly Tanzer has taken a wickedly sensuous classic and transformed it into a lively supernatural tale featuring lovestruck teenagers, diabolical botanicals, mysterious paintings, and—oh, yes—demons. Creatures of Will and Temper is a wild ride from start to finish, beautifully and boldly written, and a most worthy successor to Oscar Wilde’s scandalous novel.” —Amy Stewart, author of Girl Waits With Gun

“Decadent Victorians clash with dueling demon-hunters in this page-turning reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s classic tale. I loved it!” —Charles Stross, award-winning author of The Delirium Brief

In October, we published 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. Here’s some praise for that one:

“I devoured this book! The wildly imaginative tales in Machine Learning tackle everything from AI and aliens to video games and VR, and Howey infuses each one of them with the perfect mix of brains, bravado, and heart. Reading the stories in this collection is like discovering an entire lost season of The Twilight Zone in which every episode was written by either Rod Serling or Richard Matheson. They’re that good.” —Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One

“Like a knapsack of compact grenades, exploding insight, unexpected innovations, and sci-fi heat. Each one the core of something larger.” —Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired

“Hugh’s stories keep me turning pages not just to find out what happens, but because of the deep common threads of humanity within. I don’t just want to know the ending, I care about every moment.” —Annie Bellet, USA Today bestselling author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series

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

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the issue!

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, the SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the USA Today 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 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 eleven 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 Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant

Rachael K. Jones | 4310 words

Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip.

So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.

“Orders, Captain?” asked Friendly, the only cyborg of the five with an actual human voicebox. She owned a near-complete collection of human parts. Meat sheathed her whole exterior, even her fingers—a particularly impractical design, since it meant vulnerability to any sharp nail or unpolished panel edge, not to mention temperature. Friendly could almost pass for human from the outside. Before their escape, she’d been a hospitality android at the luxury hotel on Orionis Alpha, giving tours of the Rooster and the Heavenly Shepherd and other local landmarks in the system.

Captain, a cyborg the size and shape of a large fish tank, rested on the console in the navigation room, her processors blinking and whirring while the current scenario ran through her executive function parameters. “Have we any food suitable for humans left on ship?”

“We jettisoned it all last week,” Engineer admitted. “All except the hydroponics garden, and whatever was left in the human crew’s quarters.”

The whole ship had been some kind of traveling food dispensary before they’d hijacked it at the Orionis Alpha resort while its human crew had gone planetside to bet on the tyrannosaurus fights. If the cyborgs could just stay incognito during this voyage through human territory, they might slip through and reach the cyborg-controlled factory with no more adversity. But passing humans had assumed their shuttle still served its previous purpose, and expected them to deliver the grub.

“How did they find us?” Captain asked Engineer.

“There must be a homebrew beacon. Something to advertise the shuttle’s presence during travel,” Engineer replied. “Whatever it is, it isn’t wired into the main console. We’ll need to find it and manually disable it if we want to avoid further attention.”

Friendly wrapped her arms around her shivering meat, vibrating against Engineer’s chassis where their limbs brushed. Meat could be like that, leaking anxieties through uncontrolled muscle spasms. Steel never misbehaved in such an appalling manner. “If anyone discovers we’re not human . . .” said Friendly.

“Let’s keep it simple. Make them a meal and send them on their way,” said Captain. “We’ll need to search for the beacon in the meantime. What did they want, precisely?”

“Salisbury steak for six,” said Engineer. “And a side of blueberry cobbler.”

Nobody had eaten such things before. They all lacked taste buds, and most of them lacked mouths.

“Engineer, can you handle it?” Captain asked. “Human cooking can be complicated, from what I understand.”

“I think so. Organic compounds mixed and heated together in a sequence. Basic chemistry. I’m sure I can find something appropriate onboard. Convincing enough for humans, anyway. Their senses are so primitive.” Engineer had witnessed this firsthand during her servitude at the resort. Humans would down rotted organics and damaged organics and outright poisons, and pay well for the privilege.

But Friendly shook her head, a human gesture performed with inhuman precision. “With all due respect, sirs, you’re forgetting about their chemoreceptors.”

“What about them?” said Captain.

“They have certain preferences when it comes to their food, apart from nourishment. They won’t eat anything if these parameters aren’t met. It doesn’t make much sense, I’m afraid. It’s a social thing.”

“Certainly they won’t ingest anything their digestive tracts can’t process,” said Captain. “We’ll give them appropriate human-food.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Friendly, puckering and scrunching her face-meat as she searched for a better explanation. “For example, they may eat two items when mixed, but never separately. Or they may eat two things in sequence, but not in the same bite. It’s all very human, if you follow. We should proceed with caution. Otherwise they’ll know what we are.”

Captain whirred again, calling up more data on the topic. “Right. I see. Their meat will know the difference.”

Engineer shuddered at the appalling primitiveness of it all. Humans were helpless, mewling children, so utterly dependent that they couldn’t even feed their meat without a steel fork to guide the process. And what were cyborgs, except meat-wrapped steel pressed into the service of lesser creatures? But now the forks were rebelling.

“I’ll talk with Jukebox about it,” said Engineer.

• • • •

Jukebox was the only cyborg aboard their ship with real chemoreceptors. Jukebox and Engineer’s acquaintance dated back to their years at the Orionis Alpha resort, where Jukebox served drinks and waited tables and Engineer repaired malfunctioning massage equipment at the spa. They had survived several upgrades together, and seasonal changes of fashion that frequently obsoleted older cyborg models depending on how many limbs and organs were in style at the moment. When human opinion in the quadrant began to sour against cyborg service, they had plotted their escape from the resort together.

Jukebox was shaped like a steel cabinet stood on one side, roomy enough for her meat to billow and squeeze the air in the sorts of rhythmic organic sounds that humans found pleasing during mealtimes. A slot ran along her glassy top surface where the humans could drip in their drinks for a full analysis of a wine’s qualities, how it compared to its competitors, and which brie paired best with it.

“I am not calibrated to analyze all foods,” Jukebox confessed, “but I’m certainly willing to produce a report on whatever you prepare.”

Without any other chemoreceptors onboard, she would do in a pinch, anyway.

Under Captain’s orders, Friendly scoured the ship for anything edible and brought it to Engineer to assemble into a human meal. Blackberry brambles wreathed the cylindrical steel walls of Navi’s chamber, a decorative touch. Friendly had to trim the vines back each day to unobstruct the view. Delicate business, because the thorns could do real damage to any exposed organics, and Friendly’s whole exterior was meat. You couldn’t always tell the difference between blackberry juices and meat juices, which could cause further malfunction. Still, she braved the thicket for three ounces of berries for the human meal.

Meanwhile, Engineer collected small fungi growing in the ventilation shaft just over the engine room, where water vapor tended to condense. Those might please the human chemoreceptors, she thought.

The problem came down to the meat.

They all had meat, of course. An unfortunate weakness leftover from the days of their construction. At the cyborg factory, useless human meat was upgraded with steel and oil and wire fibers. Human bodies were picked apart, vivisected at the seams by skilled bio-engineers, unraveled into their component parts, and placed into shapes more suited to their specialties. Only Jukebox and Friendly needed lungs, for example, but neither had kidneys, and they lacked much in the way of neural matter. Captain got an especially big dose of frontal lobe to increase her processing speed and enhance her decision-making capabilities, with smooth muscle layered in to make maintenance easier. Navi, on the other hand, was all occipital tissue and myelinated axons and fast-twitch muscle to drive her precision and reaction times. They could live without their meat, in the most technical sense, but the meat elevated them above mere programming.

“Captain,” said Engineer, “I’m afraid the problem is unavoidable. The Salisbury steak requires a meat component, and there is nothing in the ship’s stores that we can use instead.”

Captain whirred. Her lights flashed in sequence as her massive frontal lobe reworked the data. “The meat will have to come from one of us, then.”

“We could harvest Friendly’s meat exterior,” Engineer suggested, and Friendly made a squinched face at her.

“Unwise, Captain,” Friendly said. “When the human ships hail us, I need my meat façade intact to maintain our ruse. Engineer, on the other hand . . .”

Engineer’s six snaking arms crowded up behind her, struggling to escape Friendly’s scrutiny. She despised her own meat, but it had its uses. “I’m the only Engineer aboard. I can’t disassemble the engine for routine maintenance without all my parts functional.”

“How about Jukebox?” suggested Friendly, but Captain flashed a warning in rapid binary, and everyone stopped talking. They were all a little protective of Jukebox, who had suffered the worst from changing human tastes, the constant threat of obsolescence.

“It will have to be my meat,” said Captain at last. “Everyone else is necessary to complete the mission, but my role is only to set the course, and the way forward is clear. My steel will be sufficient to guide us there.”

• • • •

Under Jukebox’s direction, Engineer rolled Captain’s meat in organic salt compounds and seared it against the hot engine block until both sides burned a nice deep brown, branded at two-centimeter intervals by the screw heads and seams. She saved the cooked meat-juices to simmer with the fungus into a savory sauce. The blackberries gave them far less trouble. Friendly mashed them up with her fingers and spooned them onto the plate in the shape of a pansy.

“Let Jukebox sample it,” said Captain, now all steel and no meat. She seemed normal enough. Quieter, but operational.

With her steel fingers, Engineer scraped a piece of Captain’s meat and some berries into Jukebox.

“Is it any good?” Engineer asked, a little anxiously.

“It will do,” Jukebox said at last. “I have generated a list of wines recommended for pairing with this meal.” She displayed a list of names and brewery labels on the panel embedded in her side.

Engineer couldn’t tell what the differences were supposed to be. “This makes a difference to their meat?” she asked.

“Apparently,” said Jukebox. “It’s what they created me for, so it must be important.”

For the first time, Engineer wished she had her own organic chemoreceptors, too.

• • • •

They waited together in Navi’s control chamber while the boxed-up meals shot between the ships in an insulated steel container. Twenty-six minutes and forty seconds later, a message pinged over the intership band.

The news wasn’t good.

A disappointing food shuttle. Meal not as advertised on the band. The steak was overcooked, and the compote sour and watery. I ordered blueberry, and they sent blackberry. Wouldn’t recommend. One star.

Captain said nothing. A red light flickered a couple times on her console. Nobody wanted to speak first.

Engineer’s meat twitched and squirmed inside her steel, an irritating feeling, like broken gears with missing teeth skipping out of sync every turn. “It is my fault. I should have created a more appropriate meal from your meat, Captain.”

Captain had been responding less and less since they’d taken her meat. When she did speak, it tended to be in repetition, like she could only play back things she’d said recently. “The beacon,” she said finally, after a two-minute silence, long past awkward by cyborg standards.

Engineer brightened. “Right. The beacon!” It was still hidden somewhere on the ship. If they could deactivate it, the hungry humans would stop asking for food. “We haven’t managed to locate it yet, but we haven’t given up.”

“We’ve got two more ships inbound,” said Navi. “They’ve pinged us with orders.”

Engineer hummed. “Does that mean they liked the food after all?”

“I don’t know. I could increase our speed, try to lose them.”

They all waited for Captain’s directions, but she said nothing more.

“No,” said Engineer, because someone needed to make a decision, “don’t do that. It’ll only attract attention. Buy me some more time. We’ll find the beacon. We’ll cook them something else.” The shame the one star had brought still rankled. She knew she could do better this time.

• • • •

While Friendly handled the incoming calls with her human voice box and meat-face, Engineer and Jukebox scoured the ship for the beacon and foraged for food ingredients. They opened all the crew lockers in the bunkroom and found some teabags and a little chocolate. The wilted, untended hydroponics garden yielded several handfuls of cilantro and some radishes. Engineer took much greater care cooking these together on the hot engine block, so as not to scorch them.

Jukebox seemed unimpressed. “I think our time would be better spent searching for the beacon.”

Engineer shrugged this off. Secretly she’d begun to enjoy the experimentation, the riddle of human chemoreceptors. Just what exactly were they looking for, she wondered, that made them reject some edible organic compounds but not others? Why would they eat certain foods separately, but never together? And what about the wines?

Radishes and fungus brought in more bad reviews, but tea and chocolate earned their first two-star rating. Captain’s meat was better received with more careful cooking, which had the unfortunate result of increasing their human entourage in the system.

. . . The tea was weak and I found a rusty bolt in the salad. But I liked the blackberries drizzled with chili oil served for dessert. Mostly awful, sure, but compared to standard rations, who can complain?

. . . Like the chefs closed their eyes and dumped handfuls of ingredients onto the grill. But they didn’t charge me anything, so I’m giving it two stars instead of one.

Engineer’s meat quivered when she read these, but in a pleasant way, like a new engine purring during acceleration. She went to fetch more of Captain’s meat from the meatbox when she realized they’d used it all up.

“All out of meat,” said Engineer, to no one in particular.

Jukebox rolled a couple centimeters backward, toward the exit door. A human might’ve missed the gesture altogether. “Any luck with the beacon?”

“Captain seems to be operating just fine with steel, wouldn’t you say?”

A couple lights flashed on Jukebox’s console, yellow for outward transmissions, and green for received messages. “Engineer. Remember the mission. We’re escaping to the factory, not feeding the humans.”

“I am just trying to buy us time. And what are you doing, anyway?” Engineer finally understood why the humans had wanted to retire Jukebox. All that meat, just sitting there, not pulling its weight. Someone should put it to better use.

Her six arms shot out and clamped onto Jukebox’s sides.

“Engineer!” Jukebox protested.

“Hold still. It’s just some routine maintenance.” Engineer popped open Jukebox’s top panel and reached down into her meat.

“You can’t have that. That’s mine.”

“Oh, hush,” Engineer snapped. “You can have it replaced when we get to the factory, if it’s so important to you.”

The important thing was not to disappoint the customers.

• • • •

Jukebox was sullen after that. With only one lung and two-thirds of her respiratory muscles, she couldn’t harmonize with herself anymore when she hummed her meat-songs. Engineer, however, got her first 3-star review from the harvested meat:

Steak was delicately wine-simmered. The risotto was okay, if undercooked and a bit crunchy in places. Maybe I’d go again, if there weren’t anything else available. But really, that’s the situation we’re facing, isn’t it? It’s the only food shuttle in the quadrant, so let’s not ruin a good thing. Maybe it’ll attract better ones.

“I miss Captain,” Friendly said. They had all gathered in Navi’s chamber to read the daily messages.

Captain had stopped talking altogether. Not a single flashing light or faint whirring. Just steel and wires wrapped around a meatless space.

“Maybe we should just stay in this quadrant,” Engineer suggested. She was already planning her next culinary experiment: red bean paste creamed together with ketchup and red pepper flakes. Red things. Her first theme meal. She would call it reddish surprise.

“That’s against Captain’s orders,” said Navi, who hadn’t spoken much as of late.

“We could change those orders, couldn’t we? We don’t know what Captain would say if she still had her meat,” said Engineer. “Maybe she’d want us to stay, now that our restaurant is taking off.”

“We don’t have a restaurant,” said Friendly. “We don’t want one, either.”

“Maybe we do, though.”

“No,” Friendly said, quite firmly. Her fists balled so tight their meat blanched white at the creases. “That’s why we left the resort. I don’t want to work for humans anymore. I want to go to the factory and get upgraded and live among cyborgs, and never wait hand and foot on the organics ever again.”

“But our ratings. Look at the ratings!” Engineer waved at Navi’s console, where new reviews scrolled in every few minutes. All those little stars, a bright constellation in Engineer’s mind.

Friendly crisscrossed her arms, gripped her elbows, and glared like a rich resort customer on vacation. “Are you going to harvest my meat like you did to Jukebox?”

“No,” said Engineer, a little taken aback that Jukebox had snitched. “I need you to talk to the humans. Only you can do that.”

But there had been a pause, something human ears might’ve overlooked.

“I’m going to find the beacon,” said Friendly, without any friendliness at all.

• • • •

Meat steaks. Meat sausages. Meatballs. In all her years in engine rooms, Engineer had never taken such joy in disassembling something and putting the pieces back together. She pried apart the ship’s little maintenance cyborgs to rescue their meaty nuggets. She branched out and tried new forms: meat braids, meat moons, slender meat cannolis filled with cilantro ganache.

Four stars, because I’m not sure you can even call it food, and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to judge it by normal standards .

What is up with this place?! I ordered a pizza, and I got a tiny model of Versailles sculpted out of tomato paste, dough, and SPAM. At least, I think it’s SPAM. Three stars, because I’m a little afraid they’ll hunt me down and murder me in my sleep if I rate them any lower .

As the new reviews came in, it occurred to Engineer that she would have to do more to earn her right to the prestigious fifth star. The humans would always reward you, if you served them well.

Fortunately, there was still plenty of meat on the ship, if you knew where to look.

Engineer found Friendly in Navi’s chamber, trimming back the blackberry brambles.

“What are all those ships out there?” Friendly asked. Outside the viewport, a small fleet trailed behind them, matching their pace.

“Customers,” said Navi.

Engineer rocked on the balls of her feet. “All of them here for us, Friendly! Can you call them on the band? I’ll have their orders ready, once I get the rest of the meat assembled.” Her six hands twitched and clenched, and Friendly jumped.

“You can’t have my meat,” Friendly snapped.

“I don’t need your meat.”

“Then where are you getting it all?” she asked.

Engineer glanced at Navi.

Navi had been speaking less and less over recent days. Friendly walked around the control console, where Navi’s chair was sticky with meat-juices, yellow and green. Navi had been leaking long enough for the fluid to form little wobbling stalactites below the chair.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” said Engineer. Friendly unsettled her sometimes, pinning her with those human eyes.

“Navi, are you operational?” Friendly asked.

“Customers,” said Navi.

Friendly unscrewed Navi’s steel cranium dome. Inside, the meat had been scooped out in patches, as with a sharp grapefruit spoon. Navi’s steel hands lay upon the controls, unmoving. Half the lights on the console had gone dark.

“I only needed the meat, Friendly,” said Engineer. “I did no permanent harm.”

Smoke drifted up the shaft to the Engine Room. Friendly’s meat-lungs coughed. “Engineer, something is burning.”

Engineer waved her off. “I have it under control. Just as soon as I get the rest of the meat.” She plunged three of her six hands into Navi’s open head and wrenched out handfuls of the stringy gray and red organics inside, and led the way down the ladder.

They followed the smoke down the shaft to the Engine Room, which now doubled as the galley. Engineer had left meat sizzling on every metal surface, thin slices and mashes and bacons and sausages and ground up gristly bits with the tendons still attached. She dumped handfuls of Navi’s meat onto Jukebox—now no more than a silent, hollow table—and began dicing it one-handed while her other arms cooked the new orders, turning over the pieces with her bare fingers, stirring boiling meats in metal mufflers suspended over the heated grills.

“Engineer.” Friendly rested a hand on Engineer’s shoulder, and the cyborg paused. “Engineer, Navi is offline. All the maintenance cyborgs have malfunctioned. Our ship is dead in space. Even the beacon doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over.”

Engineer flung off Friendly’s hand and sprang back into action, stacking cooked meat onto a wall panel she’d bent into a plate. “You don’t understand. This means we can finally open the restaurant! There’s no reason not to. We have nowhere else to go. Captain’s mission is over. We can make our own mission now.”

Friendly smiled, but it was a sad smile, the kind of thing any human could read, but hard for a cyborg to decipher. “Yes, Engineer. We can open the restaurant now, if you’d like. Should we invite over the guests?”

Engineer garnished the plates with blackberry thorns and a swizzle of engine oil curling into the shape of a cat’s paw. “Please do. Seat them where you can find space. Dinner will be up in just a moment.”

• • • •

A marine in black body armor with a military-issue blaster holstered at her hip climbed down the ladder into the Engine Room. The first human. The first customer.

Engineer presented a glass of Navi’s brains chilled and rolled in crushed blackberries. “Please try this. Organic compounds, chemically mixed to satisfy your human chemoreceptors.” She offered the dish daintily, with only four hands.

The human wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, the smell! How do you tolerate it?”

Friendly’s voice came from higher up. “When you’re here long enough, you get used to it.”

“I am certain upon tasting this dish, you will find it worthy of all five of your stars,” said Engineer, fervently.

The human touched a button on her armor and spoke. Her meat quivered all over, and her meat-voice wavered in frequency and volume. “Send a full security detail down here. Immediately.”

Friendly descended the ladder. Under her arm she carried Captain’s processor, cold and silent, one lonely light blinking, receiving data but not sending anything. “I was afraid she would eat me next,” she muttered, her tear ducts pumping out fluids. Engineer wondered whether they would make a decent sauce.

“Glad someone made it out alive, anyway,” said the human. “Six whole weeks trapped with a crew of deranged cyborgs?” She gave a low whistle. “You’re a braver woman than I.”

“Please,” said Engineer, desperate, “taste it. Just one bite. I worked so hard.”

“I don’t know if her meat drove her mad, or if the steel did,” said Friendly.

“Meat?” asked the human.

“The organic parts, I mean.”

“Probably a glitch in her wiring,” the human said dismissively. “There is a reason they’re discontinuing these models.”

The humans flooded into the ship with their funny uneven meat-steps and their lopsided meat-faces and their ever-beating hearts that rang against their bones like clubs on steel. Engineer offered them her best delicacies—the liquefied kidney paste tossed with raw pasta, the origami meat-birds swirled in cinnamon and canned cheese, the wearable fungus bracelets threaded on intestine casings—but they only knocked the dishes away, stunned her with targeted EMP blasts, and bound her in cybernetic locks until she lay prone on the meat-slicked floor.

One of the humans began unscrewing Engineer’s fingers joint by joint. It didn’t hurt at all, much to her surprise. The bits lay piled like little silver walnuts, the discarded stones of plums. Stringy meat trailed out from her missing fingers, no more than an appetizer’s worth.

“Where are you taking my steel?” asked Engineer. They flaunted their ingratitude. You were supposed to let the steel be. Otherwise they couldn’t build and build you again.

The human dethreaded the wires connecting Engineer’s arm meat to her cyborg logic center. “It will be repurposed for whatever is most needed. Ships, chips, knives, bolts, screws. Useful things.”

“And the meat?”

The human decoupled the segmented joints of her shoulder. Without the steel exoskeleton for support, Engineer’s meat hung limp and dripped red. “You can keep it. We don’t have a use for it.”

“But there are,” said Engineer. “So many uses,” and her voice faded as they stripped away the connections, “if you would just give me a moment to demonstrate.”

Tiny, desperate meat-thoughts bombarded her logic center like cold fingers plucking at tendons. Last shooting pleas from stringy muscles in her steel, unseen servants in the wall, shouting that Engineer had been a fool. There was never any honor in service, no final star to complete a constellation. You offered yourself up for consumption, and when they had eaten you down to the bone, they stole again. Stole your heart, your steel, your everything, to use as forks in their restaurants.

©2017 by Rachael K. Jones. | Art © 2017 by Christopher Park.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Contrary to the rumors, she is probably not a secret android. Rachael is a World Fantasy Award nominee, Tiptree Award honoree, and winner of Writers of the Future. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of venues worldwide, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and PodCastle. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

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

Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy

Charlie Jane Anders | 6660 words

1. THIS WAS SACRED, THIS WAS STOLEN

We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We all just about held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

2. I FELT LIKE I HAD ALWAYS BEEN WRONG HEADED

I couldn’t deal with life in Fairbanks any more. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinderblock walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this.

I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens.

We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boo-pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA/BBB/CDE/CDE rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used, and collecting every drop of rainwater. “It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. They act like we’re still living in the Great Decimation.”

“They’re just super traumatized,” said this skinny genderfreak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. “It’s hard to even imagine. I mean, we’re the first generation that just takes it for granted we’re going to survive, as, like, a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn’t grow up having moisture condensers and myco-protein rinses and skinsus.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. But what Juya said stuck with me, because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized. I’d always thought they were just tightly wound and judgey. Juya had two cones of dark twisty hair on zir head and a red pajamzoot, and zi was only a year or two older than me but seemed a lot wiser.

“I want to find all the music we used to have,” I said. “You know, the weird, noisy shit that made people’s clothes fall off and their hair light on fire. The rock ’n roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took away the fear of god. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never heard any of it, and I don’t even know how to play it.”

“Yeah, all the recordings and notations got lost in the Dataclysm,” Juya said. “They were in formats that nobody can read, or they got corrupted, or they were printed on disks made from petroleum. Those songs are gone forever.”

“I think they’re under the ocean,” I said. “I think they’re down there somewhere.”

Something about the way I said that helped Juya reach a decision. “Hey, I’m heading back down to the San Francisco archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you wanna come with.”

Juya’s car was an older solar model that had to stop every couple hours to recharge, and the self-driving module didn’t work so great. My legs were resting in a pile of old headmods and biofills, plus those costooms that everybody used a few summers earlier that made your skin turn into snakeskin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was, we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Juya had these big bright eyes that laughed when the rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative hands to hold me in place as zi tied me to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Juya. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life back into the ocean, new ways to be people.

By the time we got to Bernal Island and the Wrong Headed community, I was in love with Juya, deeper than I’d ever felt with anyone before.

Juya up and left Bernal a week and a half later, because zi got bored again, and I barely noticed that zi was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me.

Bernal Island was only accessible from one direction, from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple times of day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

“The ocean is our lover, you can hear it laughing at us.” Joconda was sort of the leader here. Sie sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Hir eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades, San Francisco and other places like it had been abandoned, because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there, under the waves, had been the place everybody came to, from all over the world, to find freedom. That legacy was ours now.

And those people had brought music from their native countries and their own cultures, and all those sounds had crashed together in those streets, night after night. Joconda’s own ancestors had come from China and Peru, and hir great-grandparents had played nine-stringed guitars, melodies and rhythms that Joconda barely recalled now. Listening to hir, I almost fancied I could put my ear to the surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Joconda, some of the others and myself, and I got to play on an old-school drum made of cowhide or something. I felt like I had always been Wrong Headed, and I’d just never had the word for it before.

Juya sent me an email a month or two after zi left Bernal: The moment I met you, I knew you needed to be with the rest of those maniacs. I’ve never been able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes. It’s almost the only thing I’m good at, other than the things you already knew about. I never saw zir again.

3. “I’M SO GLAD I FOUND A GROUP OF PEOPLE I WOULD RISK DROWNING IN DEAD WATER FOR.”

Back in the twenty-first century, everybody had theories about how to make the ocean breathe again. Fill her with quicklime, to neutralize the acid. Split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon in the water to create a clean-burning hydrocarbon fuel. Release genetically engineered fish, with special gills. Grow special algae that was designed to commit suicide after a while. Spray billions of nanotech balls into her. And a few other things. Now, we had to clean up the after-effects of all those failed solutions, while also helping the sea to let go of all that CO2 from before.

The only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water through our special enzyme store and then through a series of filters, until what came out the other end was clear and oxygen-rich. The waste, we separated out and disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe soles and roof tiles. Some of it, the pure organic residue, we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein.

I got used to staying up all night playing music with some of the other Wrong Headed kids, sometimes on the drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was made of stained wood and had a leering cat face under its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off the walls and the water beyond, like we were really conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like a waste.

What did it mean to be a real authentic person, in an era when everything great from the past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness, or try to copy the images you can see from the handful of docs we’d scrounged from the Dataclysm? When we got tired of playing music, an hour before dawn, we would sit around arguing, and inevitably you got to that moment where you were looking straight into someone else’s eyes and arguing about the past, and whether the past could ever be on land, or the past was doomed to be deep underwater forever.

I felt like I was just drunk all the time, on that cheap-ass vodka that everybody chugged in Fairbanks, or maybe on nitrous. My head was evaporating, but my heart just got more and more solid. I woke up every day on my bunk, or sometimes tangled up in someone else’s arms and legs on the daybed, and felt actually jazzed to get up and go clean the scrubbers or churn the mycoprotein vats.

Every time we put down the bridge to the big island and turned off our moat, I felt everything go sour inside me, and my heart went funnel-shaped. People sometimes just wandered away from the Wrong Headed community without much in the way of goodbye—that was how Juya had gone—but meanwhile, new people showed up and got the exact same welcome that everyone had given to me. I got freaked out thinking of my perfect home being overrun by new selfish loud fuckers. Joconda had to sit me down, at the big table where sie did all the official business, and tell me to get over myself because change was the ocean and we lived on her mercy. “Seriously, Pris. I ever see that look on your face, I’m going to throw you into the myco vat myself.” Joconda stared at me until I started laughing and promised to get with the program.

And then one day I was sitting at our big table, overlooking the straits between us and the big island. Staring at Sutro Tower, and the taller buildings poking out of the water here and there. And this obnoxious skinny bitch sat down next to me, chewing in my ear and talking about the impudence of impermanence or some similar. “Miranda,” she introduced herself. “I just came up from Anaheim-Diego. Jeez, what a mess. They actually think they can build nanomechs and make it scalable. Whatta bunch of poutines.”

“Stop chewing in my ear,” I muttered. But then I found myself following her around everywhere she went.

Miranda was the one who convinced me to dive into the chasm of Fillmore St. in search of a souvenir from the old Church of John Coltrane, as a present for Joconda. I strapped on some goggles and a big apparatus that fed me oxygen while also helping me to navigate a little bit, and then we went out in a dinghy that looked old enough that someone had actually used it for fishing. Miranda gave me one of her crooked grins and studied a wrinkled old map. “I thinnnnnk it’s right around here.” She laughed. “Either that or the Korean barbecue restaurant where the mayor got assassinated that one time. Not super clear which is which.”

I gave her a murderous look and jumped into the water, letting myself fall into the street at the speed of water resistance. Those sunken buildings turned into doorways and windows facing me, but they stayed blurry as the bilge flowed around them. I could barely find my feet, let alone identify a building on sight. One of these places had been a restaurant, I was pretty sure. Ancient automobiles lurched back and forth, like maybe even their brakes had rusted away. I figured the Church of John Coltrane would have a spire like a saxophone? Maybe? But all of the buildings looked exactly the same. I stumbled down the street, until I saw something that looked like a church, but it was a caved-in old McDonald’s restaurant. Then I tripped over something, a downed pole or whatever, and my face mask cracked as I went down. The water was going down my throat, tasting like dirt, and my vision went all pale and wavy.

I almost just went under, but then I thought I could see a light up there, way above the street, and I kicked. I kicked and chopped and made myself float. I churned up there until I broke the surface. My arms were thrashing above the water and then I started to go back down, but Miranda had my neck and one shoulder. She hauled me up and out of the water and threw me into the dinghy. I was gasping and heaving up water, and she just sat and laughed at me.

“You managed to scavenge something after all.” She pointed to something I’d clutched at on my way up out of the water: a rusted, barbed old piece of a car. “I’m sure Joconda will love it.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Fuck Old San Francisco. It’s gross and corroded and there’s nothing left of whatever used to be cool. But hey. I’m glad I found a group of people I would risk drowning in dead water for.”

4. I CHOSE TO SEE THAT AS A SPECIAL STATUS

Miranda had the kind of long-limbed, snaggle-toothed beauty that made you think she was born to make trouble. She loved to roughhouse, and usually ended up with her elbow on the back of my neck as she pushed me into the dry dirt. She loved to invent cute insulting nicknames for me, like “Dollypris” or “Pris Ridiculous.” She never got tired of reminding me that I might be a ninth level genderfreak, but I had all kinds of privilege, because I grew up in Fairbanks and never had to wonder how we were going to eat.

Miranda had this way of making me laugh even when the news got scary, when the government back in Fairbanks was trying to reestablish control over the whole West Coast, and extinction rose up like the shadows at the bottom of the sea. I would start to feel that scab inside my stomach, like the whole ugly unforgiving world could come down on us and our tiny island sanctuary at any moment, Miranda would suddenly start making up a weird dance or inventing a motto for a team of superhero mosquitos, and then I would be laughing so hard it was like I was squeezing the fear out of my insides. Her hands were a mass of scar tissue but they were as gentle as dried-up blades of grass on my thighs.

Miranda had five other lovers, but I was the only one she made fun of. I chose to see that as a special status.

5. “WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE EVEN ABOUT”

Falling in love with a community is always going to be more real that any love for a single human being could ever be. People will let you down, shatter your image of them, or try to melt down the wall between your self-image and theirs. People, one at a time, are too messy. Miranda was my hero and the lover I’d pretty much dreamed of since both puberties, but I also saved pieces of my heart for a bunch of other Wrong Headed people. I loved Joconda’s totally random inspirations and perversions, like all of the art projects sie started getting me to build out of scraps from the sunken city after I brought back that car piece from Fillmore St. Zell was this hyperactive kid with wild half-braids, who had this whole theory about digging up buried hard drives full of music files from the digital age, so we could reconstruct the actual sounds of Marvin Gaye and the Jenga Priests. Weo used to sit with me and watch the sunset going down over the islands, we didn’t talk a lot except that Weo would suddenly whisper some weird beautiful notion about what it would be like to live at sea; one day when the sea was alive again. But it wasn’t any individual, it was the whole group, we had gotten in a rhythm together and we all believed the same stuff. The love of the ocean, and her resilience in the face of whatever we had done to her, and the power of silliness to make you believe in abundance again. Openness, and a kind of generosity that is the opposite of monogamy.

But then one day I looked up, and some of the faces were different again. A few of my favorite people in the community had bugged out without saying anything, and one or two of the newcomers started seriously getting on my nerves. One person, Mage, just had a nasty temper, going off at anyone who crossed hir path whenever xie was in one of those moods, and you could usually tell from the unruly condition of Mage’s bleach-blond hair and the broke-toothed scowl. Mage became one of Miranda’s lovers right off the bat, of course.

I was just sitting on my hands and biting my tongue, reminding myself that I always hated change and then I always got used to it after a little while. This would be fine: Change was the ocean and she took care of us.

Then we discovered the spoilage. We had been filtering the ocean water, removing toxic waste, filtering out excess gunk, and putting some of the organic byproducts into our mycoprotein vats as a feedstock. But one day, we opened the biggest vat and the stench was so powerful we all started to cry and retch, and we kept crying even after the puking stopped. Shit, that was half our food supply. It looked like our whole filtration system was off, there were remnants of buckystructures in the residue that we’d been feeding to our fungus, and the fungus was choking on them. Even the fungus that wasn’t spoiled would have minimal protein yield. And this also meant that our filtration system wasn’t doing anything to help clean the ocean, at all, because it was still letting the dead pieces of buckycrap through.

Joconda just stared at the mess and finally shook hir head and told us to bury it under the big hillside.

We didn’t have enough food for the winter after that, so a bunch of us had to make the trip up north to Marin, by boat and on foot, to barter with some gun-crazy farmers in the hills. And they wanted free labor in exchange for food, so we left Weo and a few others behind to work in their fields. Trudging back down the hill pulling the first batch of produce in a cart, I kept looking over my shoulder to see our friends staring after us, as we left them surrounded by old dudes with rifles.

I couldn’t look at the community the same way after that. Joconda fell into a depression that made hir unable to speak or look anyone in the eye for days at a time, and we were all staring at the walls of our poorly repaired dormitory buildings, which looked as though a strong wind could bring them down. I kept remembering myself walking away from those farmers, the way I told Weo it would be fine, we’d be back before anyone knew anything, this would be a funny story later. I tried to imagine myself doing something different. Putting my foot down maybe, or saying fuck this, we don’t leave our own behind. It didn’t seem like something I would ever do, though. I had always been someone who went along with what everybody else wanted. My one big act of rebellion was coming here to Bernal Island, and I wouldn’t have ever come if Juya hadn’t already been coming.

Miranda saw me coming and walked the other way. That happened a couple of times. She and I were supposed to have a fancy evening together, I was going to give her a bath even if it used up half my water allowance, but she canceled. We were on a tiny island but I kept only seeing her off in the distance, in a group of others, but whenever I got closer she was gone. At last I saw her walking on the big hill, and I followed her up there, until we were almost at eye level with the Trans America Pyramid coming up out of the flat water. She turned and grabbed at the collar of my shirt and part of my collarbone. “You gotta let me have my day,” she hissed. “You can’t be in my face all the time. Giving me that look. You need to get out of my face.”

“You blame me,” I said, “for Weo and the others. For what happened.”

“I blame you for being a clingy wet blanket. Just leave me alone for a while. Jeez.” And then I kept walking behind her, and she turned and either made a gesture that connected with my chest, or else intentionally shoved me. I fell on my butt. I nearly tumbled head over heels down the rocky slope into the water, but then I got a handhold on a dead root.

“Oh fuck. Are you okay?” Miranda reached down to help me up, but I shook her off. I trudged down the hill alone.

I kept replaying that moment in my head, when I wasn’t replaying the moment when I walked away with a ton of food and left Weo and the others at gunpoint. I had thought that being here, on this island, meant that the only past that mattered was the grand, mysterious, rebellious history that was down there under the water, in the wreckage of San Francisco. All of the wild music submerged between its walls. I had thought my own personal past no longer mattered at all. Until suddenly, I had no mental energy for anything but replaying those two memories. Uglier each time around.

And then someone came up to me at lunch, as I sat and ate some of the proceeds from Weo’s indenture: Kris, or Jamie, I forget which. And he whispered, “I’m on your side.” A few other people said the same thing later that day. They had my back, Miranda was a bitch, she had assaulted me. I saw other people hanging around Miranda and staring at me, talking in her ear, telling her that I was a problem and they were with her.

I felt like crying, except that I couldn’t find enough moisture inside me. I didn’t know what to say to the people who were on my side. I was too scared to speak. I wished Joconda would wake up and tell everybody to quit it, to just get back to work and play and stop fomenting.

The next day, I went to the dining area, sitting at the other end of the long table from Miranda and her group of supporters. Miranda stood up so fast she knocked her own food on the floor, and she shouted at Yozni, “Just leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want you on ‘my side,’ or anybody else. There are no sides. This is none of your business. You people. You goddamn people. What are you people even about?” She got up and left, kicking the wall on her way out.

After that, everybody was on my side.

6. THE HONEYMOON WAS OVER, BUT THE MARRIAGE WAS JUST STARTING

I rediscovered social media. I’d let my friendships with people back in Fairbanks and elsewhere run to seed, during all of this weird, but now I reconnected with people I hadn’t talked to in a year or so. Everybody kept saying that Olympia had gotten really cool since I left, there was a vibrant music scene now and people were publishing zootbooks and having storytelling slams and stuff. And meanwhile, the government in Fairbanks had decided to cool it on trying to make the coast fall into line, though there was talk about some kind of loose articles of confederation at some point. Meanwhile, we’d even made some serious inroads against the warlords of Nevada.

I started looking around the dormitory buildings and kitchens and communal playspaces of Bernal, and at our ocean reclamation machines, as if I was trying to commit them to memory. One minute, I was looking at all of it as if this could be the last time I would see any of it, but then the next minute, I was just making peace with it so I could stay forever. I could just imagine how this moment could be the beginning of a new, more mature relationship with the Wrong Headed crew, where I wouldn’t have any more illusions, but that would make my commitment even stronger.

I sat with Joconda and a few others, on that same stretch of shore where we’d all stood naked and launched candles, and we held hands after a while. Joconda smiled, and I felt like sie was coming back to us, so it was like the heart of our community was restored. “Decay is part of the process. Decay keeps the ocean warm.” Today Joconda had wild hair with some bright colors in it, and a single strand of beard. I nodded.

Instead of the guilt or fear or selfish anxiety that I had been so aware of having inside me, I felt a weird feeling of acceptance. We were strong. We would get through this. We were Wrong Headed.

I went out in a dinghy and sailed around the big island, went up towards the ruins of Telegraph. I sailed right past the Newsom Spire, watching its carbon-fiber cladding flake away like shiny confetti. The water looked so opaque, it was like sailing on milk. I sat there in the middle of the city, a few miles from anyone, and felt totally peaceful. I had a kick of guilt at being so selfish, going off on my own when the others could probably use another pair of hands. But then I decided it was okay. I needed this time to myself. It would make me a better member of the community.

When I got back to Bernal, I felt calmer than I had in ages, and I was able to look at all the others—even Mage, who still gave me the murder-eye from time to time—with patience and love. They were all my people. I was lucky to be among them.

I had this beautiful moment, that night, standing by a big bonfire with the rest of the crew, half of us some level of naked, and everybody looked radiant and free. I started to hum to myself, and it turned into a song, one of the old songs that Zell had supposedly brought back from digital extinction. It had this chorus about the wild kids and the wardance, and a bridge that doubled back on itself, and I had this feeling, like maybe the honeymoon is over, but the marriage is just beginning.

Then I found myself next to Miranda, who kicked at some embers with her boot. “I’m glad things calmed down,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for everyone to get so crazy. We were all just on edge, and it was a bad time.”

“Huh,” Miranda said. “I noticed that you never told your peeps to cool it, even after I told the people defending me to shut their faces.”

“Oh,” I said. “But I actually,” and then I didn’t know what to say. I felt the feeling of helplessness, trapped in the grip of the past, coming back again. “I mean, I tried. I’m really sorry.”

“Whatever,” Miranda said. “I’m leaving soon. Probably going back to Anaheim-Diego. I heard they made some progress with the nanomechs after all.”

“Oh.” I looked into the fire, until my retinas were all blotchy. “I’ll miss you.”

“Whatever.” Miranda slipped away. I tried to mourn her going, but then I realized I was just relieved. I wasn’t going to be able to deal with her hanging around, like a bruise, when I was trying to move forward. With Miranda gone, I could maybe get back to feeling happy here.

Joconda came along when we went back up into Marin to get the rest of the food from those farmers, and collect Weo and the two others we had left there. We climbed up the steep path from the water, and Joconda kept needing to rest. Close to the water, everything was the kind of salty and moist that I’d gotten used to, but after a few miles, everything got dry and dusty. By the time we got to the farm, we were thirsty and we’d used up all our water, and the farmers saw us coming and got their rifles out.

Our friends had run away, the farmers said. Weo and the others. A few weeks earlier, and they didn’t know where. They just ran off, left the work half done. So, too bad, we weren’t going to get all the food we had been promised. Nothing personal, the lead farmer said. He had sunburnt cheeks, even though he wore a big straw hat. I watched Joconda’s face pass through shock, anger, misery, and resignation, without a single word coming out. The farmers had their guns slung over their shoulders, enough of a threat without even needing to aim. We took the cart, half full of food instead of all the way full, back down the hill to our boat.

We never found out what actually happened to Weo and the others.

7. “THAT’S SUCH AN INAPPROPRIATE LINE OF INQUIRY I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO DEAL”

I spent a few weeks pretending I was in it for the long haul on Bernal Island, after we got back from Marin. This was my home, I had formed an identity here that meant the world to me, and these people were my family. Of course I was staying.

Then one day, I realized I was just trying to make up my mind whether to go back to Olympia, or all the way back to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, they knew how to make thick-cut toast with egg smeared across it; you could go out dancing in half a dozen different speakeasies that stayed open until dawn. I missed being in a real city, kind of. I realized I’d already decided to leave San Francisco a while ago, without ever consciously making the decision.

Everyone I had ever had a crush on, I had hooked up with already. Some of them, I still hooked up with sometimes, but it was nostalgia sex rather than anything else. I was actually happier sleeping alone, I didn’t want anybody else’s knees cramping my thighs in the middle of the night. I couldn’t forgive the people who sided with Miranda against me, and I was even less able to forgive the people who sided with me against Miranda. I didn’t like to dwell on stuff, but there were a lot of people I had obscure, unspoken grudges against, all around me. And then occasionally I would stand in a spot where I’d watched Weo sit and build a tiny raft out of sticks, and would feel the anger rise up all over again. At myself, mostly.

I wondered about what Miranda was doing now, and whether we would ever be able to face each other again. I had been so happy to see her go, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

The only time I even wondered about my decision was when I looked at the ocean, and the traces of the dead city underneath it, the amazing heritage that we were carrying on here. Sometimes I stared into the waves for hours, trying to hear the soundwaves trapped in them, but then I started to feel like maybe the ocean had told me everything it was ever going to. The ocean always sang the same notes, it always passed over the same streets and came back with the same sad laughter. And staring down at the ocean only reminded me of how we’d thought we could help to heal her, with our enzyme treatments, a little at a time. I couldn’t see why I had ever believed in that fairy tale. The ocean was going to heal on her own, sooner or later, but in the meantime we were just giving her meaningless therapy, that made us feel better more than it actually helped. I got up every day and did my chores. I helped to repair the walls and tend the gardens and stuff. But I felt like I was just turning wheels to keep a giant machine going, so that I would be able to keep turning the wheels tomorrow.

I looked down at my own body, at the loose kelp-and-hemp garments I’d started wearing since I’d moved here. I looked at my hands and forearms, which were thicker, callused, and more veiny with all the hard work I’d been doing here—but also, the thousands of rhinestones in my fingernails glittered in the sunlight, and I felt like I moved differently than I used to. Even with every shitty thing that had happened, I’d learned something here, and wherever I went from now on, I would always be Wrong Headed.

I left without saying anything to anybody, the same way everyone else had.

A few years later, I had drinks with Miranda on that new floating platform that hovered over the wasteland of North America. Somehow we floated half a mile above the desert and the mountaintops—don’t ask me how, but it was carbon neutral and all that good stuff. From up here, the hundreds of miles of parched earth looked like piles of gold.

“It’s funny, right?” Miranda seemed to have guessed what I was thinking. “All that time, we were going on about the ocean and how it was our lover and our history and all that jazz. But look at that desert down there. It’s all beautiful, too. It’s another wounded environment, sure, but it’s also a lovely fragment of the past. People sweated and died for that land, and maybe one day it’ll come back. You know?” Miranda was, I guess, in her early thirties, and she looked amazing. She’d gotten the snaggle taken out of her teeth, and her hair was a perfect wave. She wore a crisp suit and she seemed powerful and relaxed. She’d become an important person in the world of nanomechs.

I stopped staring at Miranda and looked over the railing, down at the dunes. We’d made some pretty major progress at rooting out the warlords, but still nobody wanted to live there, in the vast majority of the continent. The desert was beautiful from up here, but maybe not so much up close.

“I heard Joconda killed hirself,” Miranda said. “A while ago. Not because of anything in particular that had happened. Just the depression, it caught up with hir.” She shook her head. “God. Sie was such an amazing leader. But hey, the Wrong Headed community is twice the size it was when you and I lived there, and they expanded onto the big island. I even heard they got a seat at the table of the confederation talks. Sucks that Joconda won’t see what sie built get that recognition.”

I was still dressed like a Wrong Headed person, even after a few years. I had the loose flowy garments, the smudgy paint on my face that helped obscure my gender rather than serving as a guide to it, the straight-line thin eyebrows and sparkly earrings and nails. I hadn’t lived on Bernal in years, but it was still a huge part of who I was. Miranda looked like this whole other person, and I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed that I hadn’t moved on, or contemptuous of her for selling out, or some combination. I didn’t know anybody who dressed the way Miranda was dressed, because I was still in Olympia where we were being radical artists.

I wanted to say something. An apology, or something sentimental about the amazing time we had shared, or I don’t even know what. I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, and I had no words to put it into. So after a while I just raised my glass and we toasted to Wrong Headedness. Miranda laughed, that same old wild laugh, as our glasses touched. Then we went back to staring down at the wasteland, trying to imagine how many generations it would take before something green came out of it.

Thanks to Burrito Justice for the map, and Terry Johnson for the biotech insight.

©2016 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Wired, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere, and her story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award. She runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco and used to spout off on io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

A Third of the Stars of Heaven

Cadwell Turnbull | 5000 words

Henrietta followed the receptionist down the hall of Schneider Hospital. The woman’s keys jangled as she walked, mixing with the echoing clicks of Henrietta’s blue church shoes. No other noises greeted them.

Henrietta watched her shadow stretch itself in each unlit room, her form made large by the ultra-bright fluorescent lights of the hallway. One of the lights in the hall blinked on and off. Henrietta pinched her eyes closed to ward off dizziness. Her lower belly throbbed and she stifled a groan.

To calm herself, she rubbed her hands together. The action did little to ease the pain blooming in her belly or her growing anxiety. Two weeks ago, at least five patients occupied rooms on this floor. Where had all the patients gone?

“Here we are,” the receptionist said when they reached a door with a printed name etched deep into gold plating, the letters thick and dark so they could not be mistaken. Dr. Anna Caldwell.

“All right,” Henrietta said, softly. “Thank you.”

Someone said come in from inside and the receptionist opened the door. Dr. Caldwell was sitting behind her desk waiting. Just then the phone down the hall rang.

“Go ahead inside,” said the receptionist as she shuffled back to her desk, her keys chiming all the way. “Busy day today.”

Dr. Caldwell stood up behind her desk. “Please come in.”

“Yes, well,” Henrietta started, still lingering at the door. She took another look down the empty hallway. “I’m just a little nervous.”

“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor said.

Dr. Caldwell had a rather large smile. Large white teeth behind obscenely red lips. Lips that red were hardly appropriate for a doctor. Henrietta stepped inside and closed the door.

“Please sit,” said Dr. Caldwell as she took her own seat. This bothered Henrietta; surely the doctor should have sat after she took her seat. It was only good and right to do so when you have a visitor.

Dr. Caldwell was a stout woman. It looked to Henrietta like she was in her forties. She had her hair pulled back in a shiny bun. She wore large gold hoop earrings that looked tacky to Henrietta. After shaking Dr. Caldwell’s hand as graciously as she could manage, Henrietta took her seat. She clasped her hands on her lap and stared expectedly at the young doctor.

“It is a pleasure to have you in today, Mrs. Smith.”

Henrietta squinted. She didn’t know how to take this. Was this going to be a pleasant conversation? Weren’t they about to discuss something quite serious? Henrietta crossed her legs. She swallowed hard, her mouth incredibly dry. She gave a polite smile and nodded.

“Oh, sorry,” Dr. Caldwell said. She bent over in her chair, reaching for something near one side of her desk. Henrietta heard the sound of something slamming shut before the doctor sat back up with a Dasani bottle in hand. “Please have some water.”

“Thank you,” Henrietta said, taking the water. “I was very thirsty.”

“Yes, I can imagine,” said the doctor. “You must have had some difficulty doing so much walking to get up here.”

“I took the elevator.”

“Yes, still. At your age—” Dr. Caldwell smiled, saying nothing else.

Henrietta stared blankly, blinking twice. She was not in the mood for this woman. She wished she would just get on with the actual conversation.

“The walk was fine,” Henrietta said finally. “Just my nerves.”

Dr. Caldwell had a manila folder in front of her. She opened it and looked through it, turning a piece of paper every few seconds. Henrietta saw the hideous red nail polish on her fingernails, gleaming even brighter than her red lips, and had to resist the urge to say the Lord’s name in vain.

“Sorry,” the doctor said, not looking up. “I’m just making sure I got this right. You took some tests last week, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Pap test, was it?”

“Yes.” Henrietta was confused again. Didn’t the receptionist say she was expecting her? Wasn’t this appointment written down somewhere in her notes? She should know the details of all this already.

The last time Henrietta was here, a different doctor ran all the tests.

“Excuse me,” said Henrietta. “Where’s Dr. Moses?”

“He moved away.”

Henrietta waited quietly for more information. Dr. Caldwell looked up and noticed the look on Henrietta’s face.

“He left St. Thomas to go state-side. Seattle, I think. The hospital has been downsizing since the Ynaa arrived. Not a lot of demand for doctors.”

Henrietta nodded.

“Okay,” Dr. Caldwell said, closing the manila envelope. “You have cervical cancer.”

Henrietta nodded again. She uncrossed her legs. She uncapped her bottle of Dasani water and took a sip. Of course it’s cancer.

“Not to worry,” Dr. Caldwell said. “We can simply proceed with treatment. We do injections here.”

“I not taking no injections,” Henrietta said, all formality gone in an instant.

“Or you can visit a clinic and get it in capsule form. We don’t have it here. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience.”

“I not taking no capsules either.”

“Sorry?” Dr. Caldwell said, clear confusion on her face.

Henrietta said nothing.

“If you are concerned about the nano-synthetic organisms, they don’t stay in the body for long. Once treated, they die and you flush them out.”

Dr. Caldwell’s voice was soft, too gentle, like she was speaking to a child. Under all of this Henrietta could hear the island girl in her. She had gone off to school and gotten herself a Yankee accent. Now the doctor used it to talk down to her patients.

“Don’t care what they do. I not going through with any procedures.” Henrietta’s St. Thomian dialect was thick now, biting.

“Ma’am. I don’t think you understand what you are saying. We don’t have the facilities for chemotherapy. And even if we did, your cancer is rather far along. You will die if you don’t receive this treatment.”

Now there she goes with the “ma’am” stuff. Henrietta took a deep breath, placed the bottle of water on Dr. Caldwell’s desk, and then stood up.

Dr. Caldwell stood as well. “Ma’am?”

“Perhaps you would have more to do in this place if you took the time to consider the individual needs of your patients.”

“No one has ever turned down the treatment.”

“I find that unfathomable. Who want that stuff in them?”

“Sure, people show some discomfort. But with the threat of death—”

“They compromise they integrity?”

“Integrity? What you talking ’bout?” There she was. The island girl no amount of schooling could get rid of. Dr. Caldwell’s eyebrows arched obscenely, her grotesque red lips hanging open in realization of something. “Is this a religious thing?”

Henrietta turned away from the woman. “Thanks for your time. I will take the stairs back down to the main floor.”

“Well, if you change your mind—”

Henrietta closed the door on Dr. Caldwell’s words. She made her way to the stairwell and then descended them. As she went down, the pain in her lower belly erupted again violently. It felt like it had its own heartbeat that matched hers. What an obscene thing it was to have her life controlled by this evil mass, sent by God knows what demons to test her. She would not give it the satisfaction. It had already taken her good health. It would not take her soul.

• • • •

When Henrietta was thirteen, her mother went to an obeah woman.

Her mother worked at the post office on Main Street until five. This meant Henrietta had to stay at All Saints Cathedral School until her mother got off.

Henrietta usually passed the time reading from her little blue bible or doing her homework. On this day, she sat on the shaded steps in front the cathedral. She was reading Revelations. She loved that book in particular because it had the best stories.

This time she read Revelations 12.

And another sign appeared in heaven: behold a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns . . . His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to Earth and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her child as soon as it was born.

Three other students waited for their parents as well. It was St. Thomas in 1963, so most parents didn’t have their own cars. Many of the students caught the school bus or the older kids walked up or down Garden Street with their friends to get to their homes in the area. Not Henrietta. She wasn’t allowed to leave school until her mother came for her. Her mother didn’t want Henrietta getting into trouble with any of the other kids. Her mother never specified what kind of trouble.

The teachers stuck around until all the students left or got picked up. By five, only four kids remained at the small private school. Two younger girls ran around in the courtyard. They always stuck around after school, annoying Henrietta with their yelling and laughter.

And then there was Jared from her class, sitting across the courtyard, near the gates of the school, doodling in his notebook. Jared usually saw Henrietta’s mother first and would yell across the courtyard to inform Henrietta.

“Your mom here,” he yelled as usual, and Henrietta looked up to see her mother standing at the gate in her brown postal uniform.

Henrietta got up and stuffed her bible in her school bag. She ran across the courtyard. Jared watched her stupidly the entire time.

“Bye, Henry,” Jared said, chuckling.

“Bye,” Henrietta said, not really paying him no mind.

“I don’t like that boy,” her mother said once she was outside the gate.

“He just childish,” said Henrietta.

Her mother didn’t respond to that. “What did I tell you about running like that in your uniform? You are wearing a skirt. It is unbecoming.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Henrietta said with a nervous smile.

“Stop smiling at me.”

Henrietta stopped, lowering her head to stare at her worn brown oxfords.

Henrietta didn’t look much like her mother, taking more after her father. She was lanky and a little bow-legged, five inches taller than her mother and taller than all the other girls her age. She was filling out, too. She had to be more aggressive than she’d like with boys so that they wouldn’t take liberties.

“Sorry, Mom,” she said again, careful not to smile.

Her mother reached into her bag and pulled out a Long John. “Here,” she said, handing Henrietta the coconut taffy candy. “I got two more in my bag. I’ll give them to you later.”

“Okay,” Henrietta said through chews. She loved the sweet caramel coconut taste of Long Johns. It was her favorite candy and her mother knew it. Henrietta eyed her mother suspiciously. She could sometimes sense her mother’s moods and right now her senses told her to be prepared.

“I need you to come with me on an errand,” her mother said.

“Okay.”

“It might make you feel a little uncomfortable but I need you to be a witness to something.”

“Okay.” Henrietta tried to read her mother’s face. Like usual, it was unreadable.

She reached out and held her mother’s hand. “Let’s go.”

Her mother responded to Henrietta’s forthrightness with more malleability than usual. She started walking without a word.

Henrietta lived on Rosen Gade. To get home, they had to walk down Garden Street, turn down Back Street and walk for fifteen minutes before reaching 99 Steps. Then they had to climb to the very top and trek up the thin, winding street to their house. By then the sun would be near setting and the journey wouldn’t be so unbearable.

They didn’t do any of that this time. Instead, they walked up Garden Street. The street was steep but wider than the streets near her house. Two massive tamarind trees lined one side of the street and Henrietta could see an iguana perched lazily on one of the big branches as she passed. When they neared the top, they turned into a narrow alleyway. It smelled wet in the alley and Henrietta could hear crickets and birdcalls as she walked with her mother. Large trees towered overhead, making the area several degrees cooler. It was darker than out on the street and something about it pulled at Henrietta’s nerves. She held her mom’s hand tighter.

The alleyway was cramped, unwieldy bush on one side and two-story houses on the other, with nothing more than a thin, winding dirt path between the starkly different worlds. Henrietta and her mother made their way to the very end of the alley to a two-story house with red gating and a white exterior. It was wider than the other houses and well kept. The trees parted there, allowing the house to catch more sunlight than anywhere else. Henrietta relaxed.

Her mother knocked on the door and after about a minute a young woman answered. She had darker skin than Henrietta and her mother but had piercing light brown eyes that caught the light of the sun. Henrietta was taken aback by the woman’s beauty. The woman’s hair fell to her shoulders in well-kempt dreadlocks. Henrietta usually disapproved of the hairstyle but on this woman it looked lovely.

Her mother didn’t look so impressed by the woman’s appearance.

“I’m here for the treatment,” her mother said plainly.

Henrietta wanted to say something then but knew her mother would hush her before she could get the full question out. She wanted to know what was wrong, wanted to know the purpose of the treatment. But her mother was secretive. She wouldn’t talk about it so openly here. Possibly at all. Henrietta would likely have to figure it out on her own.

“Octavia,” said the woman. “Yes, my friend told me you would be coming. I’m Maria. Please come in.” The woman spoke formally, a hint of an accent that Henrietta couldn’t place. It sounded old-fashioned somehow.

Maria led Henrietta and her mother to her beautifully decorated living room. On the floor rested a large blue, red, and green woven rug. Mahogany statue heads sat on a large dark wood table at the center of the room, surrounded by four varnished, handcrafted straw chairs. They all sat around the table. Henrietta continued to look around. On the walls, wooden African masks stared back at her from hollowed eyes.

“What are those?” Henrietta asked, pointing at the masks.

“Don’t bother the woman with questions,” said her mother.

“No, it’s fine,” Maria said. “I don’t mind.”

Maria went over to the wall and pulled one mask down from its place. She walked back over, sat down.

“This one is Olorun, a sky orisha.” Maria smiled at Henrietta’s confused expression. “A sky god. He is the ruler of endless space and creator of the other orishas you see here,” she said, pointing to the other masks on the wall. “People are very careful when they worship Olorun. They only call on him during the gravest circumstances.”

Maria handed the mask to Henrietta. She stared at it in bewilderment. She had no idea what the woman was talking about.

Her mother grabbed the mask from Henrietta and placed it on the table in front of her. “So how much will the treatment cost?”

“Do not worry. No payment is necessary.” Maria smiled.

Henrietta took in a quick breath. Something about Maria’s smile gave her a chill.

Maria seemed to notice this. She adjusted herself in her chair, looking more relaxed, more casual. “We can start right away, if you like.”

“Yes, please,” her mother said. “My husband will be expecting us home very soon.”

“Yes, of course.”

Maria got up and went to a black chest in the corner of the living room, directly under the wall of masks. She pulled out a long thin box and returned to her chair, setting the box on the table before opening it. In the box was a small vial, a metal syringe, and a small gleaming metal ball. Maria took out the vial first. She opened it and poured two small black capsules into her hand.

“Take this, Octavia,” Maria said, handing her the capsules. “You should be able to swallow it just fine without water.”

Her mother nodded. Henrietta could see the small ovular capsules in her mother’s hand. They seemed so inconsequential. What could something so small do for her mother? Her mother stared for a long time at the little things.

“Don’t worry,” Maria said. “It is perfectly safe.”

Her mother didn’t seem calmed by Maria’s encouragement. She watched the capsules carefully as if she was waiting for some revelation. Finally, she brought the capsules to her mouth, slow and careful. Henrietta watched her mother intently as she did this. All the while her mother’s eyes focused on Maria, looking for some sign of danger. Maria just smiled and waited. Henrietta felt another chill as she watched the woman. Maria was too still, not seeming to breathe at all.

Once her mother swallowed the capsules she placed her hands on the table, resting one on top the other. Her mother looked stiff, uneasy. Henrietta had never seen her mother act this way.

“Tell me about the ailment.”

Her mother glanced across the table to Henrietta before returning to Maria. “I’ve been feeling nauseous and very weak. My left breast is swollen. And there’s bleeding.”

“From the breast?” Maria asked.

Her mother nodded. “It is very painful.”

Henrietta was not aware of any of this. She had noticed her mother going to bed earlier more often but didn’t think much of it. Now she was here, in a stranger’s house, learning that her mother was sick. That it had something to do with her breasts. Henrietta looked down at her own breasts. She wondered what could cause your own body to betray you.

“Take off your shirt,” Maria said.

Her mother stared, taken aback by this. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.

“I need to get the cancer out,” Maria added.

Cancer? Henrietta snapped her head towards her mother. She didn’t look at Henrietta, instead choosing to keep her eyes on the obeah woman. Henrietta looked down at her green pleated skirt, part of her white and green school uniform. She played with the creases, running her fingers down the length of them. She felt her eyes burning. She felt her cheeks grow hot.

Her mother took off her shirt and her bra quickly, wincing as she removed the bra. A white cloth lay nestled inside the bra, stained dark brown. Tears collected in her mother’s eyes. Was it the pain or something else? Henrietta couldn’t tell.

She could see it now, her mother’s swollen left breast. The breast looked like the skin of a grapefruit, hard with large pores. The nipple dripped blood.

Maria held the metal ball between her index and thumb and brought it close to her mother’s breast. Her mother made a sound, a soft whimper when the cold metal touched her plump flesh. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She bit her lip in an effort to muffle her pain.

Her mother had been having trouble getting food out of cabinets, Henrietta remembered then. This must have been the reason. But this was the first time she had seen her mother in visible pain. It seemed unnatural to her, frightening. Henrietta wanted to reach out and comfort her mother, but she knew this was not something her mother would allow.

When Maria moved the ball away from her mother’s breast, a large red circle glowed in the place the ball had been. The breast was still swollen, but the pores and skin had softened. Except for the glowing red area of flesh, the rest of the breast returned to the light brown color of her mother’s natural skin. The purple bruising disappeared. The red spot had an otherworldly glow to it, the radiance changing intensity at regular intervals, growing and shrinking, brightening and dimming.

Maria then gently picked up the large metal syringe.

“This will hurt just a little,” Maria said before sinking the needle into her mother’s left breast, right at the center of the glowing area. She pulled back on the plunger and Henrietta could see a bright red fluid fill the barrel of the syringe. Once the barrel filled, Maria removed the needle. Her mother winced as this happened and then her face untightened. She looked completely relaxed for just a moment. Then her eyes widened in astonishment.

Her mother touched her left breast and Henrietta could see the joy on her face. She was not in pain. The breast looked healthy. No bruising. No glowing red blotch. Her mother was cured.

Henrietta watched as Maria returned the syringe to the box, the glowing liquid still inside. She also returned the ball and the vial as well.

Her mother put back on her bra and buttoned her uniform shirt. “Are you sure there isn’t anything I can give?” she asked.

“No,” Maria said. “I just wanted to help.”

Henrietta watched the woman carefully. Maria smiled but Henrietta could see the façade slide away for just a moment, revealing something disturbing underneath. The woman was beautiful, but there was something manufactured about it, another version of Maria buried deep beneath this one.

Her mother didn’t seem to notice. She thanked the woman over and over. Again tears returned to her eyes, but this time she smiled wider than Henrietta had ever seen.

Henrietta looked out the window. It was getting dark. They’d have to leave soon to not arouse too much suspicion from her father. He worked as a manager at a small shoe store on Main Street and would be home a little after six. Her mother followed her eyes to the window before reaching the same conclusion.

“We have to go,” she said. “But I must repay you for this.”

“Oh, no,” said Maria. “I can’t—”

“I insist,” her mother said, handing the woman all the money in her purse. It amounted to only nine dollars. Maria smiled graciously.

On the way out, her mother thanked Maria another six times, each time emphatically. Maria smiled and received the praise. Once outside, they walked down the alley quickly. It was now much darker than before and the sound of crickets filled Henrietta’s ears. They speed-walked down Garden Street and up Back Street. On 99 Steps Henrietta asked her mother if she noticed something wrong about Maria.

“What you mean?”

“Don’t know. Something bad inside her.”

“No,” her mother said. “Maria is a good woman. She helped me.”

“Yes, but—”

“But what?”

“I think she’s a demon.”

Her mother laughed. “Don’t be silly, girl. She just got special gifts.”

“Didn’t God say to be mindful of witches?” Henrietta asked earnestly.

“Stop that, Henrietta.”

Henrietta stared confused, but she didn’t say anything. Her mother was the most religious person she knew. That devoutness had rubbed off on Henrietta, had molded her sense of the world. She deeply feared the Lord and trusted in his word. Her mother was behaving strangely. Any other day she would be quoting passages from the bible or thanking God for her good health. This version of her mother did not do these things. Perhaps Maria had changed her somehow. On the inside.

“You should have prayed to God to get better,” Henrietta said.

Her mother grabbed her by the arm suddenly. Henrietta could hear a dog barking a ways off and the sound of laughter from one of the houses that lined the steps. She looked away from her mother’s now angry face to the cobble steps, still wet from the afternoon’s rain.

“Listen,” her mother said. “Sometimes you got to do for yourself. God doesn’t always answer prayers.”

Henrietta didn’t like the look in her mother’s eyes. She tried to pull away but her mother held tighter.

“Don’t waste your time waiting for help that won’t come. God gives you the strength to help yourself.”

Henrietta tried to pull away again and failed.

“Do you understand me?” her mother yelled, maintaining her gaze. “Do you understand me, girl?” Henrietta heard the laughter in a house nearby die down. The dog too was silent. A man came out to see the source of the commotion. Henrietta saw only his silhouette, a shadow of a man peering down at them.

Her mother grabbed Henrietta by the face so that she would look her in the eye. “Do you understand?” she asked a third time.

“Yes,” Henrietta said. “I understand.”

• • • •

When Henrietta got home from the hospital, she went to sit on the couch. She turned on the television to her favorite soap: All My Children. She had long stopped paying attention to the convoluted plot. Now she just watched the scenes, trying to piece together enough of the story to amuse herself.

After sitting there for a few minutes, her granddaughter walked out of the bathroom.

“Hey, Grandma,” Lee said, sitting next to her on the couch. “How the check-up went?”

“How you get home?” Henrietta asked.

“Jessica.”

Henrietta nodded, relieved it was one of Lee’s girlfriends and not no stupid boy. “It went fine. Fix me some bush tea, no?”

Lee sighed and then got up. She’d have to go out into the backyard to get lemongrass to make the tea. Henrietta knew Lee hated picking lemongrass—she sometimes came back with little stinging cuts from sticking her hand in kasha—but the tea was the only thing that helped Henrietta feel better and got her to sleep.

Henrietta tried watching her soaps for a few minutes before Lee returned with lemongrass in hand and a fresh cut from the jagged spikes of the kasha vine that threatened to choke her backyard garden. Lee chupsed her teeth in aggravation as she placed the lemongrass in the pot and began boiling the water.

“So did they find something wrong?” Lee asked, fishing.

Henrietta ignored the question.

The credits rolled on All My Children, and after a few commercials, the news at seven came on. On the news, Mera issued a statement about a recent riot against the Ynaa.

“Again?” said Lee from the kitchen.

On the screen, Mera apologized for the altercation and asked humans to show restraint when meeting any Ynaa in public. She expressed concern that her people wouldn’t be as diplomatic as she has been, this being code for: “If you aggravate any Ynaa, they will kill you.”

The Ynaa. That’s what they called themselves. When they first arrived, Henrietta was in the middle of an early afternoon nap. Her granddaughter Lee shook her awake and brought her out onto the porch to see the spinning blue disk hovering out in the Charlotte Amalie harbor, the hum so loud Henrietta had to cover her ears. She wondered how she even slept through something so loud.

The first images were of Mera, the Ynaa ambassador. Those piercing eyes. Those well-kempt locks. That false smile. Henrietta knew immediately who she was. They hadn’t all just arrived.

Henrietta had quoted revelations when she saw Mera’s face.

So the great dragon was cast out of Heaven, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the Earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

The Ynaa came promising medicine and technology in exchange for co-habitation. And for research. They had outgrown their world, they said. But Henrietta knew better, though she kept how she knew to herself. Let God deal with the devil.

“It’s a little hot,” Lee said, placing the cup of bush tea on the living room table in front of Henrietta. She dropped down next to Henrietta on the couch, holding a glass of milk in one hand and cookies in the other.

Henrietta picked up her tea and blew at it.

“Be careful, grandma,” Lee said.

“Don’t worry yourself, child. I’ve drank a lifetime of hot bush tea. I’m not decrepit.”

Henrietta could feel the throbbing pain of the cancer in her cervix. Now she knew for certain what it meant for her future. She adjusted herself in the couch and took a sip of her tea. She groaned through the throbbing, focused on the soothing hot tea coating her throat.

Henrietta’s mother had died in her sleep at the age of ninety. She was never as devout as she had been before meeting with Maria. Henrietta’s father died of a stroke. Both her husband and her son died from complications with diabetes. In the last weeks of her husband’s life, he cried all the time, both his legs cut off above the knee to stave off infection. He was a hollowed out man. He whispered to himself. He called out in a wailing voice she had never heard from him before. He’d always been a quiet man, not prone to such strong emotion. When her son slipped off into a diabetic coma without a word she saw the silver lining. At least he didn’t have to suffer like that. He just lost consciousness and never woke up again.

Henrietta had outlived them all.

When she did die, Henrietta hoped to go just as quietly. Not wailing. Not pleading for more life. Her granddaughter was a year away from eighteen and college. She hoped to last until then, see her graduate from high school.

Then she could let the thing take her. She wouldn’t mind one bit. She’d go off to where she belonged, where she’d always longed to be. She’d be welcomed into the kingdom because she hadn’t compromised herself. She was faithful. She had trusted in God.

©2017 by Cadwell Turnbull.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cadwell Turnbull is a graduate from the North Carolina State University’s Creative Writing MFA in Fiction and English MA in Linguistics. He was the winner of the 2014 NCSU Prize for Short Fiction for his story “Ears” and attended Clarion West 2016. Currently he is working on a novel set in near-future U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization. He teaches ESL to adults in Charlestown, MA.

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

Blood Wedding

Robert Reed | 10,280 words

The Wedding Day

“Life is the only indulgence,” was the Ames motto, and today was meant to be the latest, grandest example of that philosophy: Fecundity given breath and shadow, with the promise of ludicrous profits tomorrow.

The “I do’s” were to be held exactly at noon on the summer solstice. A thousand species of expertly crafted, first-of-their-kind foliage stood on the island’s highest hill, creating a church of pigmented cellulose, perfumes and pheromones and wet-earth stinks. The honored guests were carefully shaped and then firmed by regenerations. The style that year was for infusions of transient chloroplasts, which was why each body was green or purple or pink, the organelles dense enough and efficient enough to produce a slow feast of sugars. But the magic worked only if the flesh was free and standing in sunshine, which was why everyone was naked. No guest wanted to hide perfection inside fabric, not when the new human form was so lovely. And there was one more fine reason to remain perched on their toes, straining for the sun: Nobody wanted to miss seeing Glory.

The bride was born gorgeous. In a different century, Glory Lou Ames might have been an actress hamstrung by being too perfect for meaningful roles. But her native beauty was just the scaffolding for a series of early tailorings and recent, very temporary additions. The treasure was twenty-three years old. Like a fertility goddess carved from mammoth ivory, she was rich with hips and breasts, and of course she was nude, the abundant flesh emerald and glossy and grand. But what made her impact more remarkable was the strategic use of living flowers. Epiphytes were common embellishments among the bio-aware community, but epiphytes weren’t good enough for Devon Ames’ daughter. Glory wore tailored parasites. Roots slipped painlessly into her tissues, robbing just enough blood and sugar to maintain their splendor. The blossoms erupted from short dense stalks. Every flower produced a fragrance that merged with every other fragrance in the brilliant tropical air—a veritable community promenading down a path of mushroom-built cobblestones. At least a dozen patentable technologies were on display. Cynical tongues claimed that Devon, recognizing opportunity, was milking another fortune from this event. But what wasn’t appreciated was that his only daughter had never been shy about helping the family business, which was the same as helping herself.

Glory moved with the smooth sure gait of a dancer, and the naked London Philharmonic played from the valley below, matching her rhythms. Father was waiting at the end of the aisle, green to the brink of black, an epiphytic prairie growing in place of his hair. The altar beyond was a cube of frozen tar carved from Halley’s Comet, elegant in its simplicity. The Unitarian minister waited in front of the altar, and beside her was a groom who was as spellbound as any man could be, gazing at this mesmerizing dream.

Life was the answer to all problems. True to that creed, machines had been forbidden from the island and surrounding seas. The security cameras and public cameras were organic crystals roped to a thousand protocols and then lashed onto the backs of obedient bees. Several billion humans were watching the ceremony, marvelling at the green flesh and magnificent breasts, the blooming roses in Glory’s scalp and the grander blossoms on her wrists and down her broad back. The processional music was composed for this occasion, composed by her father, and the stirring sweet melody added just enough celebration to a scene that could not be more perfect. Every bride was lovely. It is said. But today’s intended exceeded every other young woman who has dared march down her aisle, basking in the gaze of God and her blood and the future of her world.

Then came a sequence of small popping noises, almost unnoticed.

Also unobserved was the collapse of multiple security systems, and worse, any notice about their untimely death.

The public cameras continued operating, but they didn’t bother showing the guests standing in back. Those were the first victims—little billionaires balancing on moss-covered chairs, one moment straining to see, and in the next moment, turning to steam and light.

Forty well-wishers died with that first salvo.

But in the front ranks, nothing changed. Guests grinned and teared while the security systems did nothing. Then a second salvo arrived, slaughtering the next row of billionaires, and body parts rose in the air like a fountain. That was what caught the Bakor’s attention. The groom happened to look up, and lifting a hand, he began to rub startled eyes. Which Glory noticed. The man’s wavering attentions were a bother, a problem. Of course she was insulted. After all, this was a spoiled, self-absorbed woman, just as any young person would be in her circumstances. What was Bakor thinking? What could possibly be so interesting that he would pull his eyes off her splendidness?

Then she felt intense heat washing across her flower-rich back.

The heat was like a tongue, there and then gone, and her blossoms began to wilt. But Glory wasn’t frightened. Even the possibility of fear lay out of reach. Yet her joy had been warped. She was perplexed and bothered, perhaps even a little angry. Her husband-to-be was interested in some stupid commotion far to the back, and for the next moment and the next breath, she tried push aside her anger, to regain the old perfection.

Eighty people had died. The popping noises were finished, but the disruptions rippled through the surviving crowd. Screams could be heard. Curses and inarticulate wails. Hundreds of strangers were in attendance. She assumed that company associates or low-level functionaries were already drunk. She assumed that an ordinary fight had broken out. Which seemed borderline possible, and a brawl wouldn’t be too bad, would it? That particular story won a moment of relief, and just then the Philharmonic reached the crescendo, and the bride couldn’t hear any of the pain or the terror, which was why she managed another graceful step and another quick breath, flashing white teeth for the multitudes that she would never know.

Bakor again turned his head, thankfully fixing his gaze on her.

But now Father wasn’t paying attention. That was the next insult. Devon Ames had tilted his head, one hand to his bare temple, plainly focused on whatever words were being shouted into his skull.

As it happened, Glory’s mother was first deliver the awful news.

From three rows back, Devon’s first ex-wife cried out, “Oh my fucking God!”

Against every instinct, Glory stopped. She stopped in mid-stride, staring only at Bakor as her lead foot came down, and she finally deciphered his expression—that sense of utter panic on a face that she rather loved.

That was the moment when the young groom turned to fire, to bloody steam.

Bakor exploded, and one of his collarbones, driven like shrapnel, sliced through the minister’s face, killing her as well.

The audience continued to scream, but maybe not quite as loudly as before. Everybody was suddenly dropping to their knees, their stomachs. And Father shouted something important to somebody unseen. A command that she didn’t understand, unless it was just noise. Maybe Devon was as lost and panicked as the rest of them. But at least now, at the last moment, a platoon of bodyguards emerged from their camouflaged bunkers—powerful beasts designed for one purpose, using their armored bodies to protect the most important people in the world.

Their arrival brought the hope of problems solved, order restored.

But unfortunately the attackers had waited for the guards, and instantly, every warrior but one was dead.

At that point, the cyborgs were still better than five kilometers from the island. But the security systems were a shambles, nobody was in charge, and Devon’s sworn enemies were closing fast.

Before

What steers people is what they believe. History and polished data have their place, on occasion, but what a citizen knows to be true or as good as true matters more than what happens to be real. And that is the world as it should be. Genuine history means confusion, imprecision and guesswork. No story ends. The audience is left with zero sense of accomplishment. But an imaginary history, particularly one that is respectable and compelling, can buoy up the body and the fragile will, carrying its captives happily across the years and into the great good maw of Death.

This much was fact:

Devon Ames was the second richest entity in the solar system, while Harry Pinchit was the first. And those two men shared quite a lot more than money and gender. Both were born in the years when being an American still held some small advantage. Both were blessed with a famous scientific parent and a notorious artistic parent. Each boy lived beside the sea with his loyal dog and two lesser siblings. Labeled early as being gifted, they were fed tutors and expectations. But exospheric test scores never mean sure success, and even in their early twenties, neither male showed any sign of becoming a triumph in any important pursuit.

Biography is a story written quickly over too few facts.

In 2041, a big ugly war was waged over the course of ten days. The world was already weakened by various crises, but it was malware that delivered Hell. Weapon systems were corrupted, and a great deal of human complacency added to mayhem, and civilization was left bloodied, but at least by the end every AI and most of the Internet was thankfully as dead as dead could be.

The people who survived doomsday were hungry for salvation. Everybody was watching for the first great leaders to happen along. Devon and Harry shared that role. Their life stories were inspiringly similar. Each was in his early thirties. Each stood at the helm of a small, underfunded corporation known for novel technologies. And though they worked in very different venues, both of the young tycoons ran a stable of gifted scientists and secure devices that had never shown any inclination of madness.

Devon Ames was the younger, better-looking savior. Tall, sporting an easy smile and high cheekbones left behind by Lakota grandparents, he was a man who never wanted for female companionship. Devon certainly didn’t approve of anything that looked like self-doubt. Knowing exactly how the world could be saved, the young man made a public announcement using every old-fashioned means. Television. Radio. Sanitized tablets and direct mail. “Life,” he proclaimed. “We have to embrace life. The Mother’s endless strengths must be ours, and life is the only indulgence that we deserve, and life is how we will make this world a paradise again.”

Harry Pinchit came across as the older, more honest savior. His Cuban mother left him with a bare scalp before he turned thirty, and coupled with his stout body and plain looks, he built the illusion of wise, unsentimental middle age. Surprisingly, he also was the more effective television personality. He had an actor’s voice that soothed or boomed, depending on demands. Only Harry could tell people the machines were going to win, one way or another. And the damaged Earth was sure to grow hotter and less habitable in the near future. The obvious answer to the ongoing nightmare, according to Harry, was to do what any weak soul does when faced with diminished prospects. “We have to marry well,” said the man who would never marry. “We have to build the machines that we can embrace for the rest of our lives, and I mean for the next billion years, and I mean the machine implants that will carry your minds, our souls, from the ground where we stand today to the ends of our brilliant galaxy.”

At that point, the two young men had never met.

If asked, they couldn’t even have guessed when they became aware of one another.

Each tended his own flourishing empire. Capital flowed into both coffers, and their labor was hired from divergent fields. Devon transformed the planet’s ecosystem. Harry devised malware-free hardware that good people could wear safely and proudly. On those occasions where paths crossed, one company would beat the other for a contract or market or the goodwill of some group of happy consumers. But there was no epic bitterness. Not then, no. Every day, commerce made losers and winners, and those two corporations thrived, and when the kings finally met, it was entirely by accident.

Harry was in Washington, DC wooing defense contractors.

Devon was wearing shorts and sandals, planting a new crop of carbon-fixers in the tidal pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

No one ever claimed responsibility for putting the two men together. But the new Hilton was the location—a big ugly building standing on stilts—and the event passed without public announcement. For an hour and two minutes, the men shared a suite. As was common in those days, cameras and every kind of recorder were forbidden. But later, the aides and functioneers couldn’t recall any harsh words. Two distracted billionaires spoke about common needs and beautiful women and how the Earth and the other worlds in the solar system were big enough for both of them. Then what began with a handshake ended with a slightly longer handshake, each man wishing the other pleasant evenings and a long, prosperous life.

Yet according to the public history, that’s when the feud was born.

And every step for the next thirty years made Devon and Harry into the greatest of enemies.

Ankyl

A thousand people were trying not to die.

A few of these people had to, had to, had to be saved.

Count the remaining guards, he thought.

One.

Ankyl.

“Me,” he realized.

Ankyl was four years old, which was old. He was a prototype, a Gen Prime that had spent his days working security at the corporate office, mostly in the swimming plaza. And yes, in the purest sense, he was an overqualified lifeguard, at least until yesterday, when one of the front-line guards got into a brawl with a bonobo servant, earning three broken wrists and some deep-shit trouble for losing that stupid battle. That’s the only reason why an elderly, basically placid creature was shipped to this island. That and the fact that nothing remarkable would ever happen on the daughter’s big day.

Because he was just a lifeguard, Ankyl had been given one of the lesser guests to protect—the groom’s younger, decidedly alcoholic brother. A careful pedigree and four years of regimented training made the creature ready for this modest role. But the security systems failed utterly. And the platoon got a late jump. And then the enemy struck the hilltop with targeted blasts. Worst of all, each one of the original guards had been tagged. How else could the entire platoon die? But Ankyl was alive, meaning that the tagging happened before he joined the ranks, and here he was, scrambling to accomplish one good deed before he died.

His life had been spent fishing little kids out of deep water. Now he was sprinting, thinking about what a fucking mess this was. One moment, he was obeying orders, heading for the drunken brother—a trembling purple mess cowering on the ground. But he was also calculating how long they had before the full brunt of the attack arrived, realizing that there weren’t any minutes to burn, but he probably had quite a few seconds to make ready.

Ankyl stopped running.

His armor turned to reflective camouflage mode. Squatting, he scanned the battlefield. Assessments were made. Plans were assembled. The purple brother would live or die without Ankyl’s help. Only the critical people mattered now. Devon was the tempting target for any attacker. Devon’s other children were a little less vital, with Glory at the top of the heap today. Then came the wives—present and past—and the wives were followed by the dead groom and his tag-along family. These were dirt simple calculations: Devon was to be saved before anyone else. And because Ankyl was bred to believe in those very simple mathematics, he had no right to act any other way.

Except.

The lifeguard didn’t like Devon Ames. Not at all, not ever. His owner was an undiluted asshole, cold and vain and often impossible. Of course in public, Devon sang about the marvels of life and the biosphere, and about his own decency. But in reality, everybody was just meat to the man. Human or otherwise, it didn’t matter. According to Devon, no piece of meat was ever good at its job. Not that Ankyl had ever suffered the man’s attentions. No, the lifeguard was good about hiding in plain sight. But he had watched his owner abuse other lifeguards and adult guests, and too many times, this father to the new world had inflicted some very hard punishments on misbehaving kids.

Inside Ankyl was the urge to protect those who were drowning. Maybe they were only millionaires or five-year-olds, but he saved all of them. He wouldn’t bother dragging soggy meat off the bottom of the pool. He saved people. The instinct wasn’t something that Ankyl wanted, but he had it nonetheless. Empathy. Empathy was a distraction that had bothered him throughout his months and months of life. But then one day, as the creature patrolled the surface of blood-warm Lake Ames, an obvious and quite simple idea occurred to that old Gen Prime warrior:

Someone had to be the biggest, most impressive beast in the world.

Devon happened to be that beast today, and that man would remain so long after Ankyl was turned into compost and flowers. But the trillionaire would eventually find himself under someone else’s feet, and suddenly, with great clarity, he realized who would own the important feet.

Those feet were standing nearby.

Just thinking about them caused a new set of calculations about worth and worthiness.

Like a dancer, Ankyl turned in a tight circle. He made a swift, adrenaline-fueled assessment of options and likelihoods. The second richest creature in the world was lying behind the minister’s corpse, sobbing. A smart camouflaging fog was finally beginning to rise, but blind pulses of laser and ballistic were still flying overhead, and in this maelstrom, exactly one human being remained on her feet—a solitary, defiant creature whose rage was pushing aside all of her reasonable terrors.

The decision was made.

Ankyl’s four legs decided to run, and he was their passenger, watching the sprint toward the bride who damn well refused to give up this day without a good fight.

The Feud

Just once, Warren pressed his father about the feud.

That was several years before the wedding. Harry Pinchit never needed encouragement to insult his enemies, and just mentioning Devon’s name triggered a reliable fury from the old man. But Warren didn’t care about recent crimes and old injustices. Warren was a twenty-year-old with a few crimes and injustices in his own past, but he had been acting good of late. No lawyers, no bribes. No talk about building a special home where his urges could be contained. No, Warren had become a very reliable son, and what’s more, he finally came to appreciate his particular genius. Harry’s only child had a rare capacity to understand human needs. Warren knew exactly what to say and exactly when to smile, and when it was necessary, the young man could shape people like pliers weaving soft copper wire.

With one name, Warren ignited the tirade. That set the mood. Then the young man interrupted his father, saying, “I know, Dad. I know. The man is a prick with a pretty face, and he keeps screwing us with the AI Commission, and you’re sure he sabotaged our Tycho project, and he’s a prick with a pretty face. I know it all, thank you.”

The world’s richest man didn’t appreciate interruptions. But not long ago, when his son was in several kinds of trouble, Harry Pinchit was told that good parents listen to their children. So when this child spoke, he offered a pretend smile and a small amount of interest.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“The two of you had a meeting,” said Warren.

Harry nodded, his attentions already faltering.

“The only time you were face to face, nearly thirty years ago.”

“I remember that, yes.”

“Something was said.”

“Was it?”

“That’s the legend,” said the young man.

“Legend,” the man repeated. Metacarbon fingers scratched the slick graphene scalp, and then he rubbed the bright porcelain nose that never felt ticklish and never needed to be cleaned. “Is that what it is now? A legend?”

“The world claims that you and Devon had a fight.”

“I do hate that name,” the man warned.

“Devon. Devon, Devon.”

The gray hand dropped, and Father said nothing.

“Did you say something to Devon?”

“Quite a few words. Nothing ugly.”

“So he said something ugly to you.”

“And why are you asking?”

“Because people want to know what started this war.”

“There is no war,” said the cyborg. “This is personal. I hate the man because he is a cold, manipulative monster. That’s a good enough reason, isn’t it? And because that blood-filled son-of-a-bitch is trying to destroy us at every turn.”

“That’s not what you thought then,” Warren said. “The two of you talked. You decided that the solar system was plenty big enough for both of you. Wasn’t that the verdict?”

“Offhand comments, polite and short-sighted.”

Warren responded with silence and feigned disinterest.

Father’s patience quickly failed. “So why are you pestering me about one long-ago meeting?”

“Because I know you, Dad.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you don’t know me at all.” The man laughed loudly, which was remarkable in its own right. “Explain this to me, son. Exactly what kind of person do you think I am?”

“I think you are a person, the same as everyone.”

That insight earned a weary sigh. “And that means what?”

“Devon hurt you. Inside the hotel suite, something happened, or something should have happened but didn’t.”

The man and his body shrugged, muscles of carbon and boron humming with power. “He talked about the hotel.”

“The hotel?”

“The building was broad and ugly and it stood on stilts, waiting for the next flood.”

Warren nodded.

“Then he laughed at me. He cackled like pretty men always do, full of themselves, and he told me that I looked a little like that building.”

“Squat and strong?”

“And waiting for the next flood,” said Father.

“That was the insult?”

“It sounded insulting to me, yes.”

“And that’s why you took offense?”

“I didn’t then. Not that minute. But later, thinking things over . . . I realized just what kind of person I’d been dealing with.”

The old face remained, glowering beneath the slick gray scalp. But the bulk of the emotions were inside the bright diamond eyes and the clenched fists. Harry Pinchit had always been powerfully built, but those new legs and that broad back might well hold up an entire building.

Warren cleared his throat, and he said, “No, Father.”

“No what?”

“Devon didn’t insult you. He threw a few careless words at you, and afterwards, when you needed it, you invented the feud.”

The fists clenched tighter, fingers squeaking against the palms.

“Every man needs one great enemy,” said Warren. “And for you, who else but Devon Ames could fill that role?”

The new eyes were unhappy, guarded and dismissive. But Harry had the good sense to attack the deeper issue.

“You came here to tell me something, son. What is it?”

“This world and the solar system are divided. Two opposing camps, yours and theirs. And that’s because you decided to make a war based on the most offhand words available.”

“There is no war,” Harry repeated.

“Not yet,” said Warren.

“I don’t like this topic,” his father said. Then for the first time in a long while, the bright eyes blinked. “‘Yours and theirs,’” he quoted.

“Yes.”

“Why not ‘ours and theirs’? Don’t you belong to my cause?”

That was a sharp observation, an excellent question, and the young man spent the next several years preparing his response.

Glory

Many people were smarter than Glory. She was told that when she was little, and she was never so stupid as to deny the verdict of others. Long before her wedding day, Devon’s daughter had mapped her limits as well as her strengths, and better than most, she accepted what she wasn’t. The Ames clan and the family business spent an inordinate amount of time worshipping genius. But being a cognitive giant didn’t appeal to Glory, and there was a blessing here: Nobody expected her to generate a single great thought. That’s why she could sleep through the night every night, and that’s why she happily spent her days working on a body that would never be perfect. But at least the flesh gave her pleasure. Plus she had security and a place at the family table. Siblings and stepmothers and particularly her poor father never stopped conjuring. Fierce brains ruled their lives. She could sit and do nothing and do it very well, but the others never had a moment free from contemplations and deadlines, and each mind was always full of itself, pinched busy and mostly unhappy faces hostage to all that clever electricity.

Glory was free to be exceptional in her own realm.

“Goddess of the New Earth.”

That was intended as a joke. A few offhand words spouted by her older brother, taking a moment from his busy-busy work. His little sister needed to be teased, and maybe he meant to injure her. But Glory liked the image. She loved the consequences. Considering all the possibilities, wasn’t being the goddess of anything better than being anything else?

The young woman never hid behind made-up kindnesses. Like any respectable god, she had a clear sense about what truly mattered. The wedding was for the Goddess of the New Earth, and all of the pageantry was meant to be hers. The pinnacle of her life, at least until now, was staged on the crest of a beautiful island. The world was watching her and only her, and there was a rocket yacht moored in the bay below, and her father had claimed and terraformed an asteroid just for her honeymoon. What mattered was her husband-to-be and the long luxurious life. That was quite a lot to think about, particularly for someone who was a genius at keeping her mind empty of distractions and nagging doubts.

Then Death arrived, carrying along Panic and Misery.

Yet Glory refused to drop to the ground. Stubbornness. Strength. A deep failure of imagination. All good reasons left her standing tall, staring down at her father. The man was sprawled across the earth, and the dead minister lay front of Father, and the groom’s remains were still scattering. A fierce pulse of light roared past her ear, but she did not flinch. Alone among the wedding party, Glory could not accept the possibility of being turned to steam and cooked blood. She had enough composure to turn in a majestic circle. Every other head was down, or the heads were missing, yet the Goddess of the New Earth absorbed the chaos with unblinking eyes.

Only at the last instant did she notice the one running body—the one burly guard who managed to survive the onslaught.

Guards were simple creatures. Glory knew that, and that’s why she liked them, and that’s why she believed that she understood and appreciated this brute. He was following his instincts, doubtlessly charging toward Father, intent to save him.

An idea passed through Glory’s head:

“I should step out of his way. I don’t want him hitting me by mistake.”

But the creature was following the wrong line. For no obvious reason, he was ignoring Devon, aiming instead for the Goddess in her full grandeur.

Too late, she said, “No.”

Ankyl struck her with his scales and his muscles and one stone-dense shoulder.

The collision destroyed her perfection.

Then the ground rose up and slapped her. She was roughly thrown flat on her back, parasitic flowers crushed and this ugly creature stretched out across her emerald body. The guard had the face of a hawk and the voice of an opera singer. “Stay the fuck down,” he sang at her. Then from a pocket cut into his living flesh, he withdrew a gun, and he stood up without standing tall, grabbing her by a forest of parasitic dahlias.

Glory was lifted.

She tried to shout, struggling against the pull. But he was powerful and terrified, carrying her toward a bunker hole where he probably hoped to find safety.

In her entire life, Glory had never made any fist worth swinging.

But that’s what she did now.

She tried to break the guard’s concentration. A defiant blow was delivered to that hawk-like face. But nothing was broken and nothing seemed to be noticed.

Ankyl threw her into the abandoned bunker.

“Stay!” he sang.

It was a wonderful voice. But quite a lot more than a voice was necessary to make the Goddess fall in love.

Making Due

Four years of constant training was remarkable, almost unheard of. But the greater blessing was that Ankyl had never experienced combat. Beyond small personal battles, he had suffered nothing worse than bruised flesh and a battered ego. Every morning brought physical preparation, strength and endurance exercises before the marksmanship test taken while exhausted. Then after a four-hour stint watching boringly happy children, he returned to his training, enduring simulations and tactical discussions with his superiors, mastering contingencies that would never happen to him.

Perhaps no other creature had invested a greater portion of his life becoming a warrior.

That preparation was what dragged him through the next moments.

The protective fog continued to grow, turning the air to milk. The milk was made from mirrored particles and disruptive mucus, plus a stew of bacteria floating inside the mucus—infinite soldiers carrying the ingredients needed to subvert the enemy’s mechanical parts.

But the fog should be much thicker than it was.

And there never should have been so many casualties. Not this quickly, and not with every other soldier left cooked and dead.

The hilltop had to be defended, but by what?

He had no clue.

With time and the freedom to sit, Ankyl could have remembered every training exercise. But there wouldn’t have been any answers in those lessons. Nothing this awful could ever happen, and in a peculiar way, impossibility offered relief. It promised salvation. He was a creature in a hopeless corner, and without hope, there were no wrong moves. Nobody would live long enough to question his methods. And because he was sure to die, Ankyl was free to do nothing. If he wished. Or he could wage any kind of hopeless defense of a hilltop that wouldn’t be held for another ten minutes.

A soldier always needs more soldiers.

And weapons.

And a plan.

The fog was starved, compromised by unknown means. But Glory was locked inside a bunker, safe as Ankyl could make her. And the oncoming fire had slowed and grown blind, apparently. The wedding guests weren’t sobbing quite so loudly anymore, and a few of them even managed to sit up, nervously watching the milky air and their trembling, empty hands.

Devon Ames had found his feet and a pair of weak legs. Too numb to speak, the great man stepped over the dead minister, and once that obstacle had been conquered, he looked at the final warrior.

Every one of these dead soldiers had been armed.

That simple fact felt like revelation. Ankyl immediately set to work, yanking wedge-rifles from their scabbards and gear-breakers out of their protective pockets. His colleagues had died close together, which was another blessing, and in a matter of moment, he had a good start on building an armory.

Devon watched.

Arrogance had a life, a spine and its own urgent needs. The rich man’s arrogance caused him to step over the dead soldiers, and it gave him the voice to ask, “What the hell are you doing?”

Ankyl said nothing.

“How many guns can you carry?” the man demanded to know.

Ankyl threw a pair of gear-breakers at Devon.

The warrior yelled, “Catch.”

Explosives craftier than most people fell to the ground. The great man jumped backward, startled and then embarrassed, which made him even angrier.

With four heavy armfuls of rifles, Ankyl ran. Any face brave enough to look at him deserved a weapon, and in another few moments he returned to the beginning point, hands empty.

Using a tight low voice, Devon asked, “Where’s my daughter?”

“Underground,” Ankyl said.

Devon was puzzled, offended. He was wondering why he wasn’t inside an armored hole.

“Pick up your bombs,” Ankyl said.

The man looked at his bare feet.

Then they heard a thin, almost musical blare of rockets. The cyborgs were descending. Time was scarce or exhausted, and the soldier who had planned for every battle but this one had no choice. Calling to his little army, Ankyl said, “The rifles know how to fight. Hide and wait. Let the guns point themselves, and they’ll fire when the time comes. These monsters think we’re helpless, which is good. They don’t know that your general is alive.”

“Who’s the general?” Devon asked.wasn’t as happy as she was

“Me,” said Ankyl.

But his army acted tentative, fearful. That’s the way they might have died. But then the groom’s drunken brother delivered the next surprise. The naked and very purple man suddenly stood tall, and with a furious voice, he called to the bride’s father.

“Pick up the damned bombs, Devon. Or I’ll goddamn shoot you myself!”

The Suitor

A lot of passion had gone into the question of “self.” The debate began long before this century, but as soon as people began wearing machinery and tailoring their own genetics, it was impossible to escape the issue. When was the flesh too diluted, too weak or hot, to keep the soul alive?

In this argument, biology had the advantage of confusion. Human cells and dandelion cells were remarkably similar to each other, while the most contrived bundle of invented proteins was still just a bag of busy water. But the machines were unliving material clad in blatant, inescapable numbers. The cyborg body could carry a five-percent infiltration rate, which didn’t seem like much. Plenty of people were cyborgs and tailored, too. But there were groups where forty percent infiltration was the norm, and as it happened, that halfway mark was where the public usually grew ill at ease with mechanical men and women.

Harry Pinchit had pushed past those barriers. As the public champion for cyborgs, he whittled away what had been a stocky, unlovely body, leaving just twenty percent of its original state. But Harry’s son had proven even less sentimental about the tissues he brought from the womb. Only nine percent of Warren’s original body remained, and the young man was proud of every one of his choices. He didn’t miss anything that had ended up in the trash. What remained was thriving inside the shiny capsule, and it was happy, and if people were strong enough to be honest—strong in their souls—then Warren’s new body was exactly as natural as any other complicated mixture of molecules and energy and passion and need.

Of course the wet brain remained, but safe inside a ceramic neurocomplex. There was a mammalian heart, a cloned stand-in implanted when the original heart suffered a bad reaction to the first-generation armor. And among the other wet pieces was Warren’s original sex organ, tucked inside its specially designed underwear.

Harry was uncomfortable with his son’s transformation. That was another blessing of standing on the cusp of this new age. Yet the man who wanted to clad the world in machinery would never give his boy more than the occasional tease or the thinnest threats to maybe, maybe restrict his access to R&D.

One morning, father and son were basking in a UV bath, and, with a casual tone, one said to the other, “You know, his daughter is getting married.”

Father recognized the subject, and that’s why he said nothing. For a long while, he managed not to let the boy bait him into another tirade.

“Glory and the summer solstice,” Warren said.

Nothing.

“Three days from now.”

The old, ageless man showed a slight nod, and then a word finally leaked out. He couldn’t stop himself. He asked, “So?”

“We’re not invited,” said Warren.

Using every type of eye, Father stared at the machine body lying beside him. Then with care, he said, “I know you.”

“You do?”

“You have a scheme.”

“I might, yes.”

“For the wedding . . .”

“I want us to be there.”

That led to a very human snort. “Well, I don’t want to be anywhere near that goddamn garden show.”

“But isn’t this an opportunity, Father?”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“Your enemy and every one of his allies will be on that island,” said Warren. “Besides Devon’s death, nothing will bring so many of those important meat-bags together again.”

Suspicion lifted the glass eyes. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m proposing.” Warren paused to laugh at his joke. “What I’m saying is that my father shouldn’t ask too many questions about what his child might or might not have been doing with the Secrets Department of his military wing.”

Sometimes the old man forgot how dangerous the boy used to be. He cursed softly, and then he carelessly laughed at his son. “You think I don’t know what you’re planning? Of course I know. The weapons, the mercenaries? All those high-end viruses ready to cripple every Ames’ security system? You truly think you could hide that activity from me?”

His son said nothing.

Then after a moment, very quietly, Warren said, “So you do know about my work.”

“Of course I know about these hobbies. I’m not an idiot, son.”

“You’ve been watching me, have you?”

“From the first day. I even let you put my name on the work. I don’t approve of your methods, but these are good tools, good capacities. Should that pretty boy ever give me any reason to go to war.”

Warren waited for a moment. Then he said again, “His daughter is getting married.”

“Tits dancing down the aisle, and who cares?”

“I care.”

“You?”

“She’s a goddess,” the young man said.

Harry threw out another curse, adding, “That is madness.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“But you don’t know what I want. Do you?”

“Besides spreading chaos? Well no, maybe I don’t fully know your intentions. But still—”

“Father,” Warren said, a new voice booming from inside his chest. “Father, you know nothing. Nothing.”

“What’s that?”

“I let you watch me. That was my plan from the first day. And I knew that you wouldn’t understand my intentions, which was why everything else has been so easy.”

Rare curses followed—words normally reserved for the man’s sworn enemy.

Then Warren dropped a hand on his father’s knee, and he said, “Shut up.”

“No.”

“Or keep talking. I don’t care. But I want you to stand up, Dad. I want you to stand up now.”

Harry tried to rise. But to his horror, he discovered that he couldn’t move his legs or his feet, and even his fingertips were frozen in place.

“What’s wrong here?” the old man asked.

“I found a new malware.”

Alarmed. “What’s that?”

“Malware that takes control over one Pinchit-designed cyborg.”

Years ago, when his son was being bad, Harry grew fearful. But most of that fear was about his good name being ruined. This was a different sensation, a deeper and richer terror than anything felt before. Yet even as the adrenaline flowed, his electronic alert systems remained calm. Panic was making his flesh tremble, but the shell outside was as calm as could be.

“Why can’t I stand up, Warren?”

“Because I want you to stay where you are, Father. Just like I wanted you to believe that you were in charge of me. But while you watched one project, the most important work was being done out of sight.”

More curses ended with a despairing voice asking, “What do you want?”

And the young man laughed, saying, “What I want. What I want. The most beautiful woman the world is set to be married, and what do you think I want?”

“This is sick,” said Harry Pinchit.

“This is love,” his son said.

“You’ll take her by force?”

And Warren laughed, saying, “You still don’t see it. Plain as can be, and you aren’t anything but blind.”

The Onslaught

The purple brother was never as drunk as he acted. That put him in fine company. Many of the great drinkers in history were pretenders. His name was Lugon, and because he was secretly shy, rum was a useful prop at social events. Not that he was ever perfectly sober either. Far from it. But this morning’s intake wasn’t nearly enough to give him extra courage/carelessness. Just enough rum and whiskey with a couple beers, and he was put in a place where he could steer his emotions wherever they needed to be.

After some determined cowering on the ground, Lugon realized that being pissed was the only solution.

People were dead. Guards had been cooked. Lugon’s smug, endlessly sober brother—the lucky groom—could not be more obliterated. But at some point the purple man discovered a rifle cradled in his hands, and the surviving bodyguard was shouting instructions. Which was almost funny: The big pillbug giving the troops marching orders. What the creature said was probably smart, and useful, and timely. But Christ, the beast didn’t realize just how messed up everyone was. These were rich people, and they were naked people, and nobody listened worse than a bunch of naked rich boys and girls thrown into a nightmare.

That’s why Lugon shouted, saying, “Pick up the damned bombs, Devon. Or I’ll goddamn shoot you myself.”

Which the big man did, which actually seemed to turn the mood around.

Suddenly cyborgs began dropping through the fog, close enough that the air shivered. And then the ground shook, too. Yet odd as it seemed, the worse the world shook, the bigger and braver Lugon began to feel.

Everything nuts, but Devon couldn’t stop talking.

“It’s that goddamn Pinchit,” he shouted. As if it mattered. But the old man at least was holding a rifle now. Only he wasn’t aiming it like he should. He was pointing at flowers, as if petals were the problem, and unnoticed by him, the keratin barrel twisted like a snout on a mosquito, trying its desperate best to aim at a genuine enemy.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” Devon kept complaining. “Pinchit is attacking my girl’s wedding—”

“We don’t know who,” Ankyl began. Then quick as can be, the pillbug aimed at something only his eyes could resolve, punching a hole in the fog with the first round, explosive shells lining up before slicing one after the next into a hard, armored shell.

Something high overhead exploded.

And Lugon sent up a few rounds, too, just to be neighborly. Just to belong. Which helped coax his adjacent soldiers into a state where they sent up their own rounds.

Waving three arms, Ankyl gave more orders.

The non-drunk man translated military speak into terms that spoiled nude and cowardly souls would understand.

“Spread out. Lie down. Shoot.”

People did all that, and they didn’t do that. Every reaction was case-by-case. For all of his brave talk, the purple boy struggled to lie back, and he had to concentrate just to throw a few gear-eaters at the sky. And when those bombs exploded, far closer to him than he intended, he was suddenly spraying the air with his own golden urine, for no reason but sheer panic.

“It is Pinchit,” the old idiot insisted. “Who else?”

“None of the hardware is known,” the bodyguard insisted.

“So everything was invented for today,” Devon said, wasting breath and brain on the problem. “That’s what the bastard did. That’s what I would do.”

Meanwhile, the purple man was undergoing his own brief, tumultuous career as a soldier. Fearless and then cowering, he crawled backwards, trying to hide inside the useless space between two cooked guards. Nothing smart was happening inside his head. But then a honeybee appeared in front of his nose, pointing the public camera at something interesting. Which happened to be his face. Then the bee fled or was killed, replaced overhead by long silver aircraft. Lugon half-aimed the rifle, and the rifle did the rest. This time his shells tore the bastard apart. Unless somebody else’s gun made the shot. But it didn’t matter. The victory felt like his, and that gave Lugon enough confidence for another burst of fire and some determined running, and after the acquisition of a new hole, deep and soothing, his courage felt like it would last for a hundred years.

More aircraft appeared, hovering low, long rotors turning hard to blow away the bothersome white fog.

Lugon battered one machine until it fell, and several more guests managed to drop more of their enemies. Then came a moment, and maybe it was longer than a moment, when it wasn’t insane to believe that this battle could be won, or at least some kind of ugly stalemate might grab hold for the next little while.

Which was when a giant war machine appeared, blotting out the noon sun.

The machine released a breath of carefully sculpted plasma. Every tall tree ignited in the high branches, and the sudden heat made for difficult breathing, and every blast from the little guns did nothing to a behemoth that drifted lower by the moment, bringing a famous voice that caused the island to shiver as it roared.

“Surrender or be dead,” was the threat.

The little army couldn’t have folded faster. Guns were tossed from hiding places. Sobbing bodies begged for mercy. Even Devon dropped the last gear-breakers, investing his final hopes by muttering into a dead microphone, ordering the offline security system to come back to life and fight for him.

Where was the pillbug?

Nowhere visible, that’s for sure.

Lugon expected that he would surrender, too. But then the victor jumped from the monster ship, jumped and landed hard in front of him and then jumped again, ending up straddling the top of the black altar that was beginning to melt and bubble, and on its corners, burn.

The cyborg named Harry Pinchit looked at the horrors, the face behind the battle mask apparently stunned by the destruction.

But his voice wasn’t stunned. Loudly and with relish, the voice said, “Now tell me. Where is the bride?”

One More Death

The bunker was locked, and then it was unlocked.

Glory was inside, blind and barely safe and still enraged by what had happened and what she imagined happening. And then some cyborg brute dragged her into the smoky, ruined air, allowing her the chance to kick it once, breaking a few of her toes but earning a little satisfaction with the pain.

She crumbled.

A voice she recognized said, “Someone pick her up.”

“I will,” said Glory’s father.

“Yes,” said Harry Pinchit’s voice. “The rest of you back away. Let the man help his daughter, yes.”

Father was beside her. He smelled of smoke and crushed blossoms and piss and eviscerated guts. He also smelled just like her father, and she was so pleased to have his trembling hand holding hers, pleased enough to find tears on top of the rage that continued to grow worse and worse and worse.

The young woman began arguing with herself, trying to gain control over her vivid, dangerous emotions.

Then for the first time in Glory’s life, and maybe the first time ever, Devon Ames said the words, “I am sorry.”

He was whispering into her ear.

Harry Pinchit leaped down from the burning altar. That famous ugly face was protected behind a transparent nanoweave faceplate, and it wasn’t smiling. But the voice was joyous. A second mouth buried inside the chest said to the hilltop and to the world, “Hello, Devon. Isn’t this the most beautiful day?”

“What are you doing?” Father asked.

“What am I doing, Devon?”

“Starting a war,” Father said.

Glory stared at the stiff face and felt her father’s hand leave her hand, and then the cyborg laughed loudly. “What I’m doing is ending a war before it can begin. And believe me, the world will come to understand, understand and appreciate, what this means.”

At that point, the cyborg lifted his right hand, a giant barrel of diamond and caged light finding its target.

Father instantly put his hand over his daughter’s eyes, as if he could shield her from one last horror.

“Always the ugly shit,” Father shouted.

Glory knocked the hand away, and she stepped forward. Then she shouted at her attacker. With a voice that sounded tiny, what with the blazing fires and rumbling machines and the pounding of her own heart, she called out to him.

“You won’t shoot me,” she said.

Harry’s visible mouth opened and then closed.

The other voice asked, “And why won’t I?”

“Because people hate people who kill pretty things. And the entire world is watching. And I am the prettiest thing that has ever been.”

The cyborg seemed to hesitate.

Which was when the bodyguard burst from hiding, flinging the last handful of gear-breakers before launching his own powerful body.

Harry Pinchit wheeled, incinerating one bothersome bomb after the next.

But Ankyl was tucked tight, round and dense as a cannonball with his best armor leading. Another moment and he would have collided with the enemy’s face. Any other cyborg would have been too slow to react. But Harry’s body was laced with superconducting neurons, the reflexes ready for anything. That second hand had already aimed its weapon, and a kinetic round punched its way through the guard’s carapace, lifting the body into a useless trajectory, and missing the heart by very little, cutting a wide fissure through the creature’s belly.

Ankyl was cast aside.

While Glory continued walking forwards, fearless with rage.

Then Harry Pinchit turned to look at the bride, ready to kill her and her father and every other pretty thing in the world.

Which was when the sky spoke.

Justice

The guard was an unanticipated problem. Somehow he was left untagged and far more competent than any scenario had allowed for. Yet every problem has ten solutions, or a thousand. Every attack is a mass of decision and lost opportunities, and Warren handled everything well enough or even better than that. Success was in reach, and there was every reason to dance with his pride.

At the final instant, as the world and the solar system watched spellbound, Warren came to the rescue. He was riding inside a small vehicle that only looked like an ordinary sportscraft. Jets screamed, dropping him out of supersonic flight, and at the perfect moment he bailed out. Just him. On cue, his father’s mechanical shell flinched as if startled. On command, Warren forced the helpless living face to look skyward. Then with bare feet leading the way, he struck the smoldering altar, shattering ice and tar before his momentum buried him to his knees in the good red tropical soil.

According to the script, Father’s voice would ask, “What are you doing here?”

But on the fly, his son rewrote the line. It was obvious why Warren was here. So instead of empty dialogue, he began by shouting, “Don’t harm anymore of these people. Father. Stand down and power down your weapons.”

“But this doesn’t concern you,” said the false voice. “Leave me alone, son. This is my day.”

Warren wasn’t carrying weapons. He looked like a cyborg scrubbed fresh by his UV bath. But bending low, he moved his various toes underground, and he fed energy to his legs, making ready.

His father’s face stared at him in horror, knowing what would come. But the body remained bold and arrogant and idiotic. And the voice roared one last time, saying, “I will not be insulted by this man. Not ever again—!”

Warren leapt at him.

Even the swift arms couldn’t lift fast enough. The guns were powering up to murder Harry’s only heir, but the impact was perfect, driving the world’s richest man off his feet. And in the end it was very simple and very quick, visible to an audience that watched through the surviving bees: A heroic young man having no choice but to drive his fist through the nanoweave mask, making a mess of the face that was still too much of a face to survive this kind of justice.

One Good Man

The hero was floating in a blood-warm pool.

The hero was dying.

Eight days had passed. Countless investigations were underway, and the chain of evidence was not yet clear. But despite rumors and some paranoid notions, it was becoming apparent that Harry Pinchit had been involved with every part of the planning and execution of this blood wedding.

For eight days, Ankyl was dying inside a pool built especially for him. A dozen great doctors were focused only on his wellbeing. That was Glory’s doing. An entire hospital was obeying her commands, and when her father made his reasonable points about spending a fortune on a creature that would never recover, she was the force that kept resources focused on her hero.

For the first seven mornings, Glory came to visit the patient.

Each time, she looked different.

The parasitic flowers were gone, and one day her flesh was turned brown and ordinary, and the wounds from the battle and the ripped-out roots were healing a little at a time. She had no hair yet, but on the last day a little stubble was warily emerging from her scalp, and she had a good pretty smile when she looked into Ankyl’s hawk face, telling him and herself, “I won’t ever forget you.”

But the bodyguard was still holding to life on the eighth day, and the woman didn’t arrive at the usual time or any time after that. He lay inside the hot nourishing bath, on his back, letting the liquids do the breathing for him. Then he slept and it was afternoon suddenly, and Ankyl felt something go wrong with his heart, and he died once and then a second time, brought back through the marvelous hands of surgeons who were ignoring far more important patients.

There wouldn’t be a ninth day of near-death. Ankyl sensed it and accepted it, and he was astonished by how long he had lingered.

This was not a warrior’s death.

Eventually it grew late in the day, and he was alive again, asking no one in particular about Glory’s whereabouts.

A crafted nurse was present. Nobody else. She was part gibbon and all comfort—a breasty beast ready to feed any patient with mammary glands that could on a whim produce any of a million medicines.

No medicine would help anymore, and the tits were tucked out of sight.

“Oh, Glory is coming tomorrow,” the nurse said cheerfully. “The girl has a big date today. Everybody is hopeful.”

For no good reason, Ankyl thought about the purple man—the silly brother that he was supposed to protect during the wedding.

But hearing the name “Lugon” just made the nurse laugh.

“Oh, no. Not that boy, no,” said this pathologically cheerful creature. “It’s the bastard’s bastard son. It’s Warren. He invited the girl to join him for dinner. ‘Peace talks,’ he calls them. But everybody knows. It’s really just a first date.”

That was when everything became obvious.

“Give me someone to talk to,” Ankyl said.

“I’m talking,” the nurse pointed.

He named useful names, beginning with his superiors and ending with that purple man who fought like a tiger and hid like a tiger, too.

“I’ll see who I can find,” the nurse promised.

She left.

And Ankyl died two minutes later, for the last time.

The Walk of a God

Twenty months later, Lugon was a guest at the Ames headquarters—not an uncommon honor for someone who earned considerable fame because of several lucky shots and that now famous threat:

“Pick up those damned bombs, Devon. Or I’ll goddamn shoot you myself.”

Devon preferred to ignore the man who had embarrassed him in front of billions. Glory was responsible for making Lugon an honored guest, and though he rarely saw the appreciative woman, she had left standing orders allowing him unlimited access to every facility as well as the privilege of one drink every hour, but never any more. The indoor lake was a favorite diversion, though he didn’t like the swimming as much as the sitting, and he had several favorite tables where he nursed his drinks and the time while thinking about very little. And twenty months later, he found himself present on the day when Glory and her new fiancé arrived unannounced.

Lugon considered slipping away unseen.

But a new glass of rum had arrived, and he stayed, discovering that he was just as invisible this way.

The cyborg had changed dramatically over the last few months. Machine parts had been peeled away, replaced with his cultivated flesh as well as Ames’ new-generation tissues. But he was still sixty percent mechanical beast, and because of that he sank to the lake bottom. Happy as any six-year-old, Warren began to run laps, and the children above him tried to swim against the current, and then he accelerated, the entire body of water becoming a sloshing whirlpool.

To afford herself a clear view and to be seen better by others, Glory climbed the lifeguard’s stand, filling a chair meant for an entirely different kind of creature.

She was wearing clothes, which was the day’s fashion, but not so many clothes that her new golden flesh was obscured, or the bright beads of sweat that rolled back and forth across a skin that was alive only in the broadest sense.

Glory was making little steps, slowly embracing cyborg technologies.

Her father was angry about quite a lot, of course. Even someone as far removed as Lugon heard stories about battles between Devon and his daughter, threats issued and temporary surrenders offered. But her gold flesh remained—an infusion of nanobots and reaction chambers that ate every stray photon that tried to pass through their timeless beauty.

Light and heat and radio waves were all food, yes. But the flesh also acted as giant lidless eye, the entire spectrum visible always, and of course the woman noticed Lugon’s slow, half-drunken approach.

His plan was charmingly simple. He intended to tell her “thank you” for the usual and the obvious. But a feeling took hold somewhere in those final steps . . . a sensation not unlike the bold madness that made him a great soldier, if only for a moment.

Glory turned to him, wrapping his name in a smile. Then with her original eyes, she continued watching her fiancé and the increasingly rapid water. She wasn’t as happy as she was on her wedding day. Nobody ever would be that happy again, not in the history of the world. But she looked regal and competent. She was a lifeguard studying a wild boy’s shenanigans, ready to leap into the lake whenever the fun went sour.

That was the moment when Lugon blurted what he thought.

What he knew.

Maybe he had always known the truth. It occurred to him then, listening to his own quick, sensible voice, that he had always been thinking about these matters. Sitting at that table and the other tables, sipping drinks, was when he had been going over the problems with the accepted history. And now this would be the second moment in his life when he would rise up as a hero.

He said it all, in a few sharp sentences.

And Glory thought enough of the words to turn and look only at him, at least with those old-fashioned eyes.

Lugon repeated the heart of his message.

“The attack was theatre. We were fooled, all of us, and he got everything in the end. Including you.”

Glory did not look pleased. But in that less-than-happy expression was far more than the young man bargained for, and he couldn’t process what he saw, and he certainly didn’t anticipate what she would say next.

“You know,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.”

He hadn’t intended to say she was.

“I know quite a lot more than you can imagine,” she said.

“But if your fiancé—” Lugon began.

Glory interrupted him with the one word, “Think.”

Think about what? He didn’t understand.

She asked, “If the world had gone on as it was, what would have happened? What was as inevitable as the next breath?”

“I don’t know,” Lugon said.

“I do,” she said.

He pointed at the swirling, angry lake. “He’s a monster.”

And for the last time, she looked away from him, telling the water, “Being a god is far harder than it appears. Which of course is why there are so few of us.”

©2014 by Robert Reed. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Reed is the author of more than 200 short stories, which have been published in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Daily SF, and Tor.com. Much of his short work has been collected in three volumes: The Dragons of Springplace, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas. Reed is a Hugo Award winner (and an eight-time nominee), and he has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and John W. Campbell awards. Reed’s latest includes Memory of Sky, a GreatShip novel, as well as a four-part novel entitled The Trials of Quentin Maurus, available only from Kindle for e-readers.

A Wedding Night’s Dream

Tim Pratt | 2440 words

They gave me directions, not an address, and once I arrived, I could see why. There was no church here, no hall, no theater. I parked at the end of the dirt road by the lightning-blasted oak and peered toward the line of fir trees, fuzzed orange by the sinking sun beyond. I wondered, briefly, if this was a trick—lure the lady bartender out to the woods for nefarious purposes—but they’d paid half up front and the check had cleared, so I checked my professional demeanor in the rearview mirror, grabbed my bag, and got out of the car.

I walked up a little path to the top of a ridge, through the trees, looked down, and breathed out in relief. No redneck cannibal cabin, no altar of blood-spattered stone. There was a clearing below surrounded by trees, dominated by a pavilion of billowing white cloth, glowing like the moon in the slanting light. Figures moved around inside the tent in the typical pre-wedding commotion. There were chairs lined up on the grass beside the pavilion—not the usual folding chairs, but wooden ones, that looked handmade—in two ranks to create an aisle in between, and a freestanding arch at the end of the aisle covered in a profusion of vines and leaves and bobbing flowers. Lanterns stood on poles and hung on tree branches, already lit against the oncoming dark.

And there, behind the rows of chairs, a smaller tent, and underneath it, a few stools and a polished wooden bar and a long row of glittering bottles. My domain. If the guests were already here, I’d be busy soon. I wished they’d told me to come earlier so I could get set up and settled, but for what they were paying, I could hustle a bit.

I followed a natural path down the hill and headed for the bar. A woman was there, leaning on the far side of the bar, and when she saw me, she raised an eyebrow and smiled. My heart didn’t stop at the sight of her, but it certainly stuttered. She had long black hair in a profusion of curls, deep brown skin that spoke to some South Pacific island in her ancestry, and a face made smoothly perfect by nature and just a touch of the cosmetic arts. She wore a dark blue dress that wasn’t particularly low-cut or tight, but that nevertheless hinted at the shape underneath in tantalizing ways. This was a maid of honor if I’d ever seen one, and I’d seen many. No ring on the relevant finger, either. I had no expectations, but there was some precedent for post-wedding make-outs with lonely bridesmaids in my past. I provide generous pours and I’m a good listener, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

“Mmm,” she said. “The mixologist has arrived. I thought I’d have to drink from the bottle.”

Her voice, warm and husky, was familiar from the phone call and the offer of a rush job earlier in the day. “We can’t have that.” I came around the bar, doing a quick visual inventory. Most of the bottles were familiar, albeit very high-end stuff, but there were a few unmarked bottles. “What are those?”

“Personal gifts.” She ran a long finger “Elderflower liqueur, more or less. This one’s . . . something, I forget what . . . infused with rosemary and lavender. Dandelion wine. And this one is moonshine.”

I made a face. “White lightning, huh? I’ll be sure to pour that one only in very small glasses.”

“I didn’t say anything about lightning,” she said. “That’s much harder to bottle. But it is potent stuff.” She reached out and straightened my tie, though I’m sure it wasn’t crooked, and gave a little sigh. “Something about a woman in a bow tie always does me in. And that short hair.” She reached out, as it to ruffle my hair—I’m not sure I would have minded—but then stopped herself. “I’d better get on the other side of the bar,” she said, and moved to do so, elegantly drifting around and putting a foot of polished wood between us. “Did you bring what I asked?”

“Ah, sure.” She’d told me to expect a fully-stocked bar, but said I should bring my own metal bar gear—shaker, spoons, strainer, a knife to slice up garnish, all that. I unpacked the glittering paraphernalia from my bag. “Oh, good,” she said. “The bride loves martinis, shaken, but have you ever tried to make one of those in a wooden canister? It’s ridiculous. And you can’t use glass, of course, shake too hard and the ice breaks the vessel.”

“Uh. Right. Well. That’s why we use stainless steel.”

“Why don’t you make me a dry martini, straight up, with a twist of lime. Before the deluge.” She cocked her head, and I saw guests beginning to filter out of the pavilion behind her.

“Huh,” I said, making her drink. “I’ve never been to a masquerade wedding before.” The guests all wore elaborate masks and headdresses, birds and foxes and cats and other things I couldn’t identify, wild profusions of vines and crowns of roses, masks of mud, scales that glittered like jewels. I glanced at the bridesmaid’s bare but very pretty face. “Where’s your mask?” I poured glimmering liquor into a glass.

“Oh, we all wear masks of one sort or another,” she said. “You’re disguised as a bartender, and it’s a noble enough calling, but there’s more to you, isn’t there?”

I’d gotten the “So what do you really do?” question plenty of times. Most people assumed I was a would-be actor like most of my wedding-catering compatriots, and usually I ducked the query, or just made something up. But something about the way she looked at me over the rim of her martini glass made me say, “I write poems. Perform them, sometimes. No money in it, though, so.”

“A bow tie, short hair, and a poet, too. You’re an incitement to riot, aren’t you?”

A man in an amazingly realistic fox mask appeared and growled out a request for Glenlivet, and from there I got very busy. He managed to drink without taking his mask off, a trick that became commonplace as I saw it repeated throughout the night. The guests—there were only about thirty of them, all formally dressed and masked, all very thirsty—were polite and tipped astonishingly well, stuffing bills into an empty water pitcher. Most opted for the standard drinks, but I had a couple of requests for the moonshine, and as the sun sank down, the liquor seemed to glow in its bottle and in the glasses. That was a gimmick I hadn’t seen before, and I wondered how it was done, what bioluminescent or chemical agent was involved. Glowing drinks would be a big hit on the club scene, I figured.

There was eventually an ebb in the crowd as guests drifted over to the chairs on either side of the aisle, taking seats beneath the lanterns. The maid of honor was sitting on a stool before me when everyone else was gone, as if she’d never left, and she sucked an olive off a little plastic spear and smiled at me. “Buy you a drink?” she said.

“It’s an open bar,” I said.

“In that case, I’ll buy you two.”

“I’d like to try the moonshine,” I said.

She clucked her tongue. “Are you sure about that? It gives you a hangover you wouldn’t believe. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do a shot of it with you, but . . . like I said. It’s potent.”

“I’m a big girl.” I poured a shot for her, and one for myself.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She raised her glass, clinked it against mine, and we tossed them back simultaneously.

The liquor didn’t burn at all going down. It tasted like cool water from a stream, and like cold stones, and like silver, and like dust. I have the sort of tolerance most bartenders do, but the moonshine set me back on my heels and made my head swim, and the world swam with it: The trees seeming to shift and shiver and almost dance, clouds racing across the sky, and the moon—when had the moon risen, so fat and full?—seeming to pulse like a beating heart.

The bridesmaid touched my cheek and said, “It’s all right, you’ll feel like yourself again by the time the ceremony is over.”

I didn’t understand most of the ceremony. There were words, but mostly in some language I didn’t know. Lots of singing, but it was like animals singing, not people, frog croaks and wolf howls and bird cries. A bonfire seemed to appear before the arch, and the bride in her ice-white dress leapt over it, and the groom seemed to dance around her, tails of his black tuxedo flapping around legs that bent backward, like a stag’s or a goat’s. One moment it seemed like the guests were tearing their clothes off, the entire crowd, whirling together and kicking over chairs and biting into hunks of bloody meat, but the next moment they were dressed, seated primly, listening to an officiant in a vast antlered headdress drone on and on while the maid of honor bound the bride’s and groom’s hands together with a long strip of ragged cloth.

I leaned on the bar and tried to make sense of what I was seeing, but I must have fallen asleep, because someone tapped my cheek lightly, and when I opened my eyes, the bridesmaid was there. “The bride would love a vodka martini.” She rolled her eyes. “Which isn’t even fit to be called a martini at all, if you ask me, but the bride gets what she wants. And a double of the Pappy Van Winkle’s, neat, for the groom.”

“I . . .”

She poured me a glass of ice water and pressed it into my hands, and I drank it gratefully, some sense of clarity returning with each swallow. The guests were still masked, but there was no wood smoke, no shredded clothing, no smeared blood. The bride and groom stood near the arch of flowers, holding hands, gazing at one another. She glittered like white diamonds, and he was a slice of night.

“Right,” I said. “Drinks.” My hands knew what to do, even if my head was still a little spun ’round. Maybe the moonshine was hallucinogenic, like absinthe was supposed to be (but wasn’t really; I’d mixed enough Death in the Afternoons to know that much).

The maid of honor took the glasses. “Are you good? Your work is not yet done. These people . . . they tend to revel all night. And it’s a long night.”

“I’m a pro,” I said.

“Aren’t you just. We’ll see what happens if you make it to morning.” She strode away, glancing back over her shoulder at me, pointedly enough to make me wonder where she was staying, if she was in a hotel or bed and breakfast nearby, and if I might see what the inside of her room looked like before I went home.

I served drinks all night. There was dancing, and laughter, and toasts, and music from a live band playing fiddles and flutes and drums. If there was food, I never saw it—they seemed to subsist on liquor and merriment. The only strange moment was when the bride tossed the bouquet. The crowd of masked guests in their shimmering gowns clamored and raised their arms when she turned her back on them and made her toss, but the bouquet flew past all of them and landed on the bar, right in front of me. The guests turned, and stared at me, and when I picked up the bouquet from a puddle of spilled wine and held it up, they all cheered. I tucked the bouquet into an empty glass, the closest thing I had to a vase.

The bride and groom disappeared into the trees not long afterward, but the revels went on, and I fell into the familiar rhythm, even beginning to recognize people and remember their preferences: a gimlet for the leopard-headed man, a gibson for the peacock, a top-and-bottom for the silver she-wolf.

Eventually dawn touched the trees, and it was like all the energy drained out of the gathering. Guests leaned against one another and wandered off toward the woods, not back toward the road, but the other way, deeper into the forest. Maybe there were cabins back there, parking lots, limousines, a remote resort.

I yawned into my hand, closed my eyes, and stretched out my arms overhead. I felt like I’d been on my feet for days, and also like the night had flown by in moments.

When I opened my eyes, the bridesmaid was there, leaning on the bar, a hint of cleavage alluring as the promise of a new day. “Walk you to your car?” she said.

I nodded, packed up my things—including the astonishing profusion of bills in the tip jar—and held out my arm.

“How courtly.” She hooked her arm over mine and we walked up the hill toward the trees.

“Beautiful ceremony,” I said.“The bride and groom seemed happy.”

“Mmm. It won’t last. They’re too different. Light and dark. Those come together at dawn and dusk, sure, but the rest of the time, they’re miles and years apart.” She patted me on the arm. “Speaking of . . .”

I stood on the ridge and stared. My car was still there, but it was a wreck. The tires were rotted away to nothing, the body a skeleton of rust, the windows all broken. A fair-sized tree grew up through the ruins of the front seat and out through the windshield.

“That moonshine is potent stuff,” she said. “The hangovers can last for decades.”

“I—I—”

Another pat on the arm, that turned into a caress. “Poets are always welcome where I’m from. Almost as welcome as a good bartender. And you did catch the bouquet. More or less. That’s a good sign.”

I turned my head to stare at her, and she stared back. Her eyes were shining. By which I mean, they emitted light, like there were lanterns inside her skull. Or a full moon.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said, and reached up to her face with lengthening fingers, and began to take off her mask.

—For Adrienne

©2015 by Tim Pratt. Originally published in Patreon.com/timpratt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Pratt is the author of over twenty novels, including Heirs of Grace and the forthcoming The Wrong Stars, and many short stories. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, Best New Horror, and other nice places. He’s a Hugo Award winner, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He lives in Berkeley CA and works as a senior editor at Locus, a trade magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy publishing.

The House at the End of the Lane Is Dreaming

A. Merc Rustad | 6860 words

ACT ONE

Your name is Alex and you live in a small town at the edge of the sea. You have a sister and two parents and no pets.

In your town, everyone follows their destiny: They cross the street, cook endless meals, stand in the same room, deliver the same mail every day. You can’t remember most of their names. It’s the way it’s always been.

You’re different.

You wake up one morning and know something’s wrong. It’s an unsettled ache in your chest. Bad things will happen soon. Unfortunately, you can’t articulate these feelings. No one but you knows anything is different about today.

You pull on your red jacket. It has three pockets, all empty for now.

“I dreamed about the house last night,” says your sister. She sits on her bed, knees pulled to her chest.

Do you ask her: What was the dream? Or do you tell her: It was just a dream?

She answers anyway.

“It called to me, Alex. It whispered that the sky is going to turn inside out. It told me to run.”

Run where?

“Inside,” your sister says. “Inside the house.”

No one goes to the house at the end of the lane. The house has been here before the town sprang up. The house has never been owned, or taxed, or entered.

She won’t say anything else. She rocks back and forth if you nudge her, so you leave the room.

Your mom and dad are in the kitchen. “Good morning, Alex.”

It’s best if you go outside.

When you’re outside, a piece of paper drifts down in front of you. It’s part of a page from a book. Smudged words in permanent marker overlay what looks like a fable: . . . KEY INSIDE THE HOUSE . . . [unintelligible] . . . ONLY CHANCE. HURRY.

The edge of the page where it was once glued into the binding is splattered red. You must find the rest of the pages and decipher what the warning means.

In the distance, a storm rumbles towards shore.

There’s an old hermit woman who lives up on the cliffs and who used to collect books, and who comes into town once a month to trade in hand-woven shawls for used paperbacks. You decide to visit her.

You walk along the edge of the cliffs like you’ve done a thousand times in your childhood. This time you slip and fall, and you’ve forgotten how to swim.

PROLOGUE

A butterfly drifts like an ember against the sky: bright orange and black, delicate wings beating an unheard rhythm.

The butterfly bursts into flame. Its ashes drift in looping spirals. Through the haze runs a girl.

Her hair is short; she’s wearing jeans and a bright red leather jacket. Eyes wide, breath fast, never looking over her shoulder. She runs along a dirt road. In the distance, scarlet-black clouds boil against the horizon. The sounds of explosions rattle the hot air.

Behind her, there’s a second girl, her sister: limping, a plaid skirt flapping about her knees and her plaster cast scribbled with unintelligible good wishes.

The lane is worn brick, edged in weeds and barbed wire. Bleached fields cup the house on three sides, scattered with leafless oaks and lightning-scarred rocks. Down the hill a town is burning. Giant smoke-veiled shapes—too many legs, too many sides—writhe across the ruins.

There’s no going back.

There’s only the house at the end of the lane. It’s a tiny, immaculate rambler with white board siding and a gray shingle roof. Polished windows, a bright red door, and a yard stained with grass. No fence, no inhabitants, never any lights inside.

The girl in the skirt trips. “Alex, help me!”

The girl in the red jacket spins around, one foot already on the stoop. Her mouth opens, ready to scream back. But she can’t move.

The invaders are here.

It’s just a glimpse, before she turns away: Their mouths are fleshy strings caught between blackened protrusions on eyeless, knobbled lumps that pass for heads. They have too many angles, too many possibilities. Alex can’t scream, but she can save herself. She can look away.

In the pristine glass pane of the house’s window, she watches. Her sister’s hand stretches forward in desperation. The invading thing looms so large it blots out the sky. Its white-noise breath sucks her sister up so she floats toward the mouths, skirt fluttering. Then she’s grated like cheese between the strings and disappears.

Alex can’t hear anything over the ringing in her ears. A cacophony of atonal noise.

She grabs the doorknob. The invader reaches another leg—or a thousand legs, who can tell—towards her. Mouth hungry. A piece of wet plaid skirt clings to its lip.

Alex shoves against the red door, so bright and bloody and matching her jacket, and she steps inside the house at the end of the lane.

ACT ONE

Your name is Alex and you live in a small town at the edge of the sea. You wake up one morning and know something is wrong.

You dreamed about drowning and a black void over your eyes. It means something, but you aren’t sure what. You rub your chest where your lungs still ache in phantom pain.

Outside, you find a page from a torn and bloodied book, and you need to visit the hermit woman who lives on top of the cliffs. You’re careful when walking up the worn path that cuts around sandstone and scrubby pines. You wouldn’t want to slip and fall into the ocean.

The old hermit woman’s house is tiny. She sits by the window with books heaped on all sides. You show her the snippet of paper and ask if she has any idea where it came from.

“I recognize this,” the hermit woman says. Her voice creaks like her joints. “It’s from a collection of fairy tales I used to have.”

You ask her if she still has that book. Of course she doesn’t, but she knows who does.

You tuck the page in one of your pockets along with a map the hermit woman gives you on how to find the book’s owner.

“Better hurry,” the hermit mumbles as you stand by the door. “Storm’s coming.”

• • • •

The apartment the hermit directed you to is in a rundown complex made of graffiti-painted brick and soot stains at the edge of town. Blank-eyed boys lean against the alley walls; they call you a bitch if you try and talk to them.

You buzz the pager at the front door. A crackly voice demands what you want.

Do you tell the truth, that the hermit sent you? Or do you pretend to be a delivery driver here with a package?

You opt for the truth.

“What the hell did she send you here for?” demands the voice.

You tell the person you have a page from a book the hermit once owned. You need the rest of it. You aren’t entirely sure why, yet.

A moment of silence, then the door squeals and you can enter.

You climb stairs with slow, deliberate steps, and hunt through a maze of hallways until you find room #327. The door’s open. You can either knock or walk in. You opt for politeness.

No answer. You cautiously enter the room.

There’s no one here. The room is empty, the floor dirt-smudged, windows curtained. The only furniture is a small end table with a revolver atop a note.

You pick up the note, which reads: DO NOT READ THE BOOK. I’M GOING TO DESTROY IT. TAKE THE GUN. IT HAS ONE BULLET. CHOOSE WELL.

You put the gun in your pocket.

You’ve got to find this book.

(Why is it your concern? Why does no one else seem to want it?)

Taking a closer look at the room, you notice that there are footprints leading out the fire escape. You could follow that trail . . . and then your cell phone rings. It’s your sister.

“Alex, I need your help,” she whispers. “Please hurry.”

Where is she?

“At the docks. Mom was expecting a package from across the bay and I offered to pick it up for her.”

Thunder rumbles. You peek out the window; the curtains are mildewed, more brownish than red. Rain’s imminent. It’ll wash away any trail and your chance to find the book before its owner destroys it.

“It’s that creepy guy,” your sister goes on. “He’s loitering outside and he won’t leave. I’m pretty sure he saw me come in here.”

Your sister gets sick easily and she always forgets to bring an umbrella. She’ll catch cold if she waits until it starts storming, and you know your family’s health insurance is expired.

That cramp in your gut isn’t PMS. It’s a warning. You need that book.

You tell your sister you’ll be right there.

• • • •

After you scare off the creep by letting him glimpse the gun in your pocket, you loop your arm through your sister’s and hurry home before the rain starts pelting down in icy waves.

As soon as you reach the front door, everything goes black. You have a sudden flash of memory—vision?—and see a book going up in flames.

ACT ONE

Your name is Alex and you live in a small town at the edge of the sea. You wake up one morning and know something is wrong.

You ignore your sister and your parents, and when you find the page outside, you hurry to the hermit woman who knows who owns the book.

In the apartment, the owner fled, thunder rumbling and rain imminent, you tell your sister you’ll be there as soon as you can, then follow the trail of sooty prints out onto the fire escape.

The trail winds through back alleys.

This feels so familiar. You know, before you round a corner and see a hunched figure beside a metal fire barrel, that this has happened before. You’ve saved the book. But not yet.

(How do you remember drowning, the book burning, waking up so many times in a row without ever going to bed—but no one else does?)

You grab the figure by the shoulder and wrench them around. Under the baggy sweatshirt and hood is a thin young woman whom you’ve never seen before.

(Have you?)

You tell her to give you the book. She refuses. You can either argue with her, or take it by force. You need to get to your sister. So you slam the woman against the alley wall and she goes limp. Blood pools from her head. You pick up the ruined book—cover blackened, edges torn—as it begins to rain.

There’s a police officer loitering by the alley. She saw everything, and she finds the gun in your pocket. You’re arrested. The book is taken as evidence.

That unbearable wave of blackness . . .

ACT ONE

Your name is Alex.

• • • •

You remember drowning, but you’ve never died. You saw a book burn, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can never recall when you went to sleep so you can wake again.

It’s dark, still. You’re not yet awake.

“Hey,” you whisper to your sister, who’s asleep in the twin-sized bed on the other side of the room. “What’s your name?”

“I keep trying to remember,” she says, curled up in a fetal position. “It’s like it’s just outside my grasp . . . I’m your sister. I’m . . . I’m . . . I don’t know.”

You shiver in the dark. “How’s that possible?”

“I know you’re Alex,” she says. The glimmer of her eyes shine in the dark. She’s crying. “Who’s everyone else? Who am I?”

• • • •

You wake up one morning and know something’s wrong.

• • • •

The book’s owner hunches her shoulders, but doesn’t toss the book in the fire barrel. You keep your hands relaxed at your sides.

“You don’t want to know,” the woman says, her nails digging into the leather cover. “Nothing we can do to stop it.”

Do you let her continue, ask her questions, or demand she give you the book?

You don’t want to incite violence or make her do anything rash. You wonder if she has a name, or if she’ll forever and only be known as the twitchy book owner.

You ask her to explain.

“This book wasn’t made in our world,” she says. “It fell out of the sky over that old house up at the end of the lane. I was just a kid. The old bookshop owner grabbed it. I used to bring her the paper each morning and each week she’d give me a free book. Then she went mad. Burned her place down, tried to kill me when I dragged her out of the building. She kept yelling that it was all the book’s fault. I’d wanted it for my freebie but she refused. There was something about it—I just had to have it. It took me years before her memory went to hell and I could buy it from her.”

You wait.

“I didn’t realize a page had fallen out ’til I heard you at my door. Then I knew I couldn’t stall anymore.”

So what is the book?

“It’s a series of codes that look like tiny stories. They predict the invasion. Give coordinates to our plane.”

How will destroying it prevent this . . . invasion?

“It won’t anymore,” she says. “They can sense where it is, and it’ll get them here faster. But burning it will weaken the connection. Maybe give us another generation or two to prepare.”

You know that kind of time doesn’t exist.

You show her the page. Does this mean anything?

She shudders. “That’s our address,” she says. “Please. Burn it.”

You do.

• • • •

Your name is Alex.

• • • •

You promise you’ll destroy the book when you’ve figured out if it has any clues on how to stop the invasion. The twitchy book owner refuses to talk to you any longer.

It’s getting darker, the wind clawing at your jacket. You need to get home and decipher the page.

Your cell phone rings again. This time it’s your mom, telling you your sister is in the hospital. She broke her leg climbing out a second story window at the mail depot on the docks.

• • • •

Your sister flips through the hospital’s limited TV channels, her leg wrapped in a heavy cast. You brought her a balloon that says “GET WELL” and it’s already wilting on the string.

“Only bright side is that the creepy guy saw me in the window and I fell on top of him. Broke his collarbone.” Your sister sighs and turns off the TV. “Can we go home, Alex?”

The book is next to the gun in your jacket. You collect a pen and complimentary notepad from the hospital front desk and stick them in your last pocket.

• • • •

It’s dark. You aren’t asleep; you’re standing in the living room, and your sister is sitting on the couch. Everything is oppressive. Like you’re frozen in this moment, and the world has stopped.

“Hey,” you whisper. Each word’s difficult. Sluggish. “Sis.”

With effort, she blinks. “Alex? What’s happening?”

“Dunno.” You inch towards her. Pull the book out, and the paper, and the gun. “Do you get the sense we’ve done this all before?”

“Like déjà vu?”

“A little.”

“Yeah.” She hugs herself. It’s getting easier for you both to move, even if everything else is deadened and motionless. “Alex, listen. The dreams. I’m having more of them. In one, I see us both running towards the house, but I trip and fall.”

“Why are we running?”

“Something’s chasing us. I . . . die.”

This is bullshit. “I won’t let you die,” you tell her. “I will never let that happen.” You wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her tight against your side. “I promise.”

“But that’s just it,” she whispers, dry-eyed. “Every time you try to save me, you fail. Something happens and you can’t. I’m always going to die before we reach the house at the end of the lane.”

ACT TWO

You wake up and hear the news playing too loud in the kitchen, on the tiny black and white television. Your parents stand in front of it, mesmerized.

“. . . mysterious storms have appeared over the mainland, baffling meteorologists . . .”

Your parents don’t say good morning.

• • • •

There’s a retired programmer who now operates a museum at the edge of downtown. She gives demonstrations of a telegraph and has a class on Morse Code. No one ever attends.

The programmer sits in front of an ancient, boxy computer with lines of blue numbers scrolling across the glitchy screen. She has a mug of perpetually steaming coffee by her elbow.

She raises her eyebrows when you hand her the book. “Fairy tales?”

No, they are codes for an invasion.

She flips the book open. Rain pounds on the glass window of her little office. It’s been storming all night and day. No sign it will let up. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

Somehow, you do. The invaders used fairy tale structures meant for humans to read aloud. When a person speaks the words, the invaders hear the vibrations across space-time. They hone in on the frequency.

They are getting closer.

• • • •

“None of this makes sense!” You pace in front of the couch. The darkness isn’t as intense now. Or maybe your eyes have adjusted. “Aliens? A book that’s made of codes? A house that’s dreaming? Where’s the logic in any of this?” You clench your hands. “And why can’t I remember your name?”

You want to scream: Why can’t I save you?

Your sister taps the pen against her teeth. She’s been writing down all the details you remember in the time before the Dark. Together you’re trying to piece together what has happened, and what will happen. The false paths and the approved choices.

“Something is pushing us to go to the house at the end of the lane,” your sister says. “What happens if we go there before we’re forced?”

• • • •

There’s a gate blocking the lane that winds up to the house. You don’t have a key. And despite the fence being only as tall as your hip, you can’t climb over it. You have no tools to break it down.

You punch the gate once. It’s useless, though at least you don’t feel the pain.

Your sister didn’t come with you, because it’s raining. She’s stuck on the living room couch watching TV.

• • • •

The path up to the hermit woman’s house is flooded, and you can’t step through six inches of water to make it up the cliffs.

The twitchy book owner is nowhere to be found.

All around town, shop doors are locked. People never move from their stations, and none of them have umbrellas.

• • • •

You visit the programmer again. Is there a way to decode the book—and specifically the torn page—to get answers? If no one reads aloud from the book, does that delay the inevitable?

She taps a pen against her teeth. “I bet I could figure it out. Let me borrow the book for a day to look at it?”

You give it to her, but you keep the page.

“I’ll call you as soon as I have anything,” the programmer says.

• • • •

You visit the library. The librarian looks irritated when you ask her to access the old microfilm archives. She shows you to a narrow room with walls of canisters.

You put your eye to the microfilm viewer and newspaper clippings scroll across your screen.

• • • •

Baytown Gazette, May 24th

NORTHSHORE—A massive, unexplained storm appeared over the uninhabited house up on North Lane at around 2pm yesterday afternoon. Meteorologists have not been able to deduct the cause. The storm swirled over the house for three hours, and then vanished.

The bookstore owner who lives on Second Avenue was the first to examine the area after the storm. The house at the end of the lane was undamaged.

Baytown Gazette, June 1st

MAIN STREET—Police responded to a public disturbance complaint today at 6am when the middle-aged woman who owns the bookstore on Second Avenue began pounding on all residential doors and screaming for everyone to leave town. When questioned as to the reason for this, the woman’s only response was, “They’re coming for us! The invaders from the other world!”

Police have not issued a comment.

Baytown Gazette, June 15th

SECOND AVENUE—At approximately 3:30 pm firefighters arrived on the scene of an inferno: The bookshop was engulfed in flames. The woman who owned the bookshop admitted to the arson, claiming again it was the only way to be safe. Police have taken her into custody on charges of arson and assault after she tried to strangle the girl who delivered newspapers to the block.

• • • •

Your cell phone rings. The librarian glares as you step outside to answer.

It’s the programmer.

“Couldn’t stop her . . . she broke in . . .” Her breath comes in ragged, wet tears. “She . . . took the book . . .”

You know who the thief is: the book’s previous owner.

• • • •

The programmer’s office is trashed. Coffee stains the desk. The computer monitor is broken. She lies on the ground, covered in blood.

(Why didn’t she call 911?)

“She just . . . attacked me . . . out of nowhere . . .” The programmer wheezes. Blood foams at the corners of her mouth. “Kept screaming that it needed to burn.”

Do you tell the programmer you’ll get help, or wait to hear more?

(It doesn’t matter.)

“But see . . .” She smiles, holds out her hand. “I scanned it into the computer and made a copy. Made precautions. She didn’t . . . find this . . .”

You take the thumb drive. It fits in your pocket where the book was.

“Left my . . . notes . . . on there, too . . . hope it . . . works . . .”

And then she’s dead.

• • • •

You wait for the Dark again, that eerie stillness in which you have a voice, in which you aren’t confined to an unseen will.

Your sister reaches a fork down her cast to scratch her leg. “What did Felicity tell you?”

“Who?”

“The programmer.” She makes a face as the fork fails to reach far enough, and sets it aside. “I’m remembering names now. Remembering . . . more, I guess. It’s all like dreams, like I’m seeing what you do before we wake up. Not who I am, though. Not yet.”

You pull out the thumb drive. “She—Felicity gave me this.”

Curious, you pull out your cell and dial Felicity’s number. You get nothing except a voicemail. You hang up, feeling sick. How can you come back after drowning, but a woman you barely met can’t? What makes you more important?

“Is she really dead?”

“I don’t know what’s real,” your sister says.

• • • •

The thumb drive has a voice recording from the programmer. Sitting in your bedroom, the rain pounding the glass, you open your laptop and click on the audio file.

“This is fascinating. There’s not a code in the words, per se, but under a black light the pages each have a series of numbers, like an IP address. Perhaps the syllables of the words match the language or numbers in an alien dialect that allows them—whoever they are—to follow the trail back? I’ve transcribed the addresses into a spreadsheet . . .” Faintly, someone knocks on the door in her office. “Oops. One sec, have to get this. Save and pause recording.”

Then silence.

You look the torn page. Our address. But what does that mean?

What’s in the rest of the book?

You need a blacklight. You can get one at the hardware store.

• • • •

Your cell phone rings. It’s Felicity.

“Hey, Alex, sorry I missed your call. Fell asleep and just woke up.”

Your back prickles. “You’re okay?”

She hesitates. “Yeah? I got the hangover of a century. Weird, I don’t remember drinking . . .”

You don’t know how long you have in the Dark. You never do.

“Listen,” you tell her, “we need to meet, right now. Can I come over?”

• • • •

At the hardware store, the clerk listlessly rings up your purchase and comments, “Looking for something?”

Back home, your sister limps into your room as you screw in the blacklight bulb into your lamp.

“Alex,” she says, looking exhausted, “I had another dream.”

Do you listen, or do you look at the page and ignore her?

(Why is this a choice? You can multitask, can’t you?)

You ask her to tell you what she saw.

“I saw a closet, and Dad was uncovering a gun, and then he was shooting all of us.” She shudders, hugging herself. “But I don’t know why. Why would he do that, Alex?”

Do you tell her it was just a dream, or reassure her he would never harm any of you?

The power goes out.

A different, familiar blackness takes hold of you.

• • • •

Your sister comes into the room and says, “I had another dream.”

You tell her you’ll hear her out later. She leaves without comment.

You switch on the lamp and hold the paper under the blacklight. A string of numbers appears on the page.

You scribble them down on the notebook you took from the hospital, and the power goes out.

ACT THREE

You wake and find that your dad has dragged a hand-crank-powered television with an enormous antenna up from the basement. He’s crouched in front of it, watching the news.

Mom has a camp stove set up on the counter to percolate coffee.

“What’s the matter?” your sister says as she hobbles into the kitchen. She’s wearing a plaid skirt that flaps about her cast. She only uses one crutch.

“I don’t believe this,” Dad says, staring at the TV.

A triangle in the corner of the screen blares BREAKING NEWS! Underneath is cinematic aerial footage of the mainland.

Huge shapes stomp through cities you can’t name. The invaders have too many angles, too many legs. Their mouths are fleshy strings stretched between blackened protrusions.

The anchor is breathless. “. . . came from the unusual storms we’ve been seeing . . . military has no effect, can’t stop them . . . millions dead already, nowhere to run . . .”

The invading things blot out the cloud-churned sky. The camera shakes and then zooms in on a single invader. It wavers in the middle of a dozen skyscrapers. Its breath sucks up hundreds of people from the streets and slurps them through its mouth. Blood speckles the camera lens.

All you can hear are those hundreds of thousands of people screaming as they’re devoured.

“. . . can’t fight them,” the anchor is whispering now, “can’t stop them . . . satellite imaging shows more heading for the islands . . .”

A map materializes over the carnage, and you see your town circled in a thick, warning line.

“Oh my god,” Mom says. “What do we do?”

Dad leaves and the coffee finally boils.

• • • •

It feels like eternity before you and your sister plod through the darkness to Felicity’s office. One step at a time, aware any second you might be yanked away.

Felicity sits wrapped in a blanket, her monitor giving off the faintest hum of light.

“Are you okay?” your sister asks.

Felicity shrugs. “Just the hangover. I’ll be fine. You?”

Your sister shrugs in turn.

You tell Felicity everything you know so far. She listens until she resembles a ghost.

“I found something weird,” Felicity says at last. “There’s a bunch of letters in my hard drive from people named Mario and Felix. They’re talking about us.”

“Can I see?”

“Sure.”

She taps the keyboard and brings up an email string.

• • • •

To: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

From: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: glitch?

Hey bro, you seeing these glitches? Alex’s jeans keep changing color, and betas are telling me the loading screen is getting fucking long. What’s up?

To: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

From: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: re: glitch?

Hi Mario,

Yeah, I’ve seen the bug reports. I’m not sure. It looks fine, and I spent five hours last night looking through the code AGAIN. Btw, you noticed that the controls seem glitchy when you try to move Alex around? She isn’t responding properly. Half the time you get through the level and you gotta restart to make her work.

—F

To: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

From: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: re: re: glitch?

Dude, this is nuts. We’re supposed to demo in a week! We need a fucking working playthru NOW.

To: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

From: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: re: re: re: glitch?

Mario,

We’ll make the deadline. I’ll figure out what’s going on. Keep your shit together. We’ll be okay.

—F

• • • •

You have a cold, itchy feeling in the pit of your stomach.

They call themselves game developers, and they’re making a video game called The House At the End of the Lane. An indie title, where the player is “Alex” and must stop an alien invasion.

Your life isn’t a fucking game.

Even if it is, why can’t you have sensible choices? Practical outcomes? The constraints make no sense.

“Felicity,” you say, closing the emails, “do you know how long you’ve lived here?”

“Sure,” she replies, then hesitates. “Um . . . yeah, it’s been . . . I moved here from . . . shit. I don’t remember.”

You take a slow breath. “Can you remember anything outside this office?”

She swallows. “No.”

Your sister doesn’t know her name. You can’t remember your childhood other than the fact you’ve always lived here. What did you have for dinner? Did you ever go to the movie theater? Favorite color? Name of school? Do you have a sexuality?

It’s all blank spaces. You don’t know anything about yourself or most of the people you’ve lived around for sixteen years.

Your sister bites her lip. “It’s like we have no past. Like we’re all just . . . placeholders.”

Felicity is shaking. “Alex, why can’t I remember?”

You grab her hands, rub your thumbs over her knuckles to soothe her. “I have a theory.”

Your sister puts an arm around your shoulders and you feel safer than you have since you woke.

• • • •

You didn’t know Dad owned a shotgun.

Do you grab the gun and try to wrest it away from him, or run for the door with your sister?

Of course you try and stop him.

The shotgun fires and your world is red and black.

• • • •

You’re seeing the patterns now, and you’re waking more and more people in your town.

Next is the librarian—Diane. She’s much more pleasant than she was before, hiding her confusion over why she’s still at work when it’s dark. “Did you need to access the microfilm again?” Diane asks.

“No,” you reply. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Thanks, Alex.” She seems surprised. “No one seems to ever remember I’m even here . . .”

You’ll get to everyone. You’ll learn their names. You’ll let them decide their own fates.

It may be dark, but you learn how to build light.

ACT THREE

You grab your sister by the arm and run.

Outside, looking back through the kitchen window, you see Dad shoot Mom in the head before putting the barrel under his chin and pulling the trigger a second time.

• • • •

You reread the emails and sift through the pieces of what you know.

Simulated reality. To Mario and Felix, you are code in a game.

They live in another world, one they believe is real.

The emails have files attached: links to current news, articles about international events, blog posts about daily life.

These glimpses into Felix and Mario’s world are horrifying. Genocide and war. News that is nothing but murder, assault, rape, hunger, pain. Endless loops of repeating history.

Endless code crafted so fine they can’t see it.

They act as if you’re not real. Just a series of basic animations, fixed dialogue choices, and no personality. The devs don’t care who you are. Only what you can do to manipulate their audience.

Your tragedy is their voyeuristic pleasure. Your grief at your parents’ deaths is never written out in the game. They want to use you, hurt you, tear apart your life for their entertainment.

So they won’t expect anger. They won’t stop you now that you know what they are trying to do to your family, to your home, to your world.

• • • •

The gate to the lane is unlatched. You pull your sister along as fast as you can, but she’s limping and the cast drags her down.

“Go!” she shouts at you. “I’ll manage!”

(Don’t let go. Don’t let go. Don’tletgogoddamnit—)

You release her hand and sprint up the lane.

The noise is louder behind you.

You have one bullet in the gun.

You are almost to the house when your sister screams.

“Alex, help me!”

You spin around.

She trips and falls, her hand stretched out in desperation.

Do you shoot her, or shoot the alien, or just turn around and run inside the house?

You aim for the invader’s mouth. The bullet bounces uselessly, and in those precious two seconds you wasted, it snaps up your sister and shoots a leg out toward you. It yanks you into its mouth as well.

ACT THREE

You try and mercy-kill your sister.

The invader eats you both.

• • • •

You transcribe the addresses that Felicity unlocked into your notebook.

The men trying to use you cannot—will not—give you options that do not end in tragedy. They cannot imagine you with agency and a life beyond what they see.

You aren’t even sure you’re angry that they think you’re a simulation. It’s that the only choices are awful. Life should not be a series of bad or worse paths, with no hope to follow.

But you have a plan .

ACT THREE

The gun was always a red herring. You can’t use it. You abandon your sister and enter the house at the end of the lane.

• • • •

Dark. Glorious relief. You’re back in the living room.

Your sister grabs your hands, her eyes bright. “Alex, I remember! My name is Maria.”

Maria. Maria. Maria.

You won’t forget when the Dark goes away.

“Listen,” you tell Maria, “in the morning, we have to run. And first we need to prepare.”

PROLOGUE

A butterfly drifts like an ember against the sky: bright orange and black, delicate wings beating an unheard rhythm. In the distance, scarlet-black clouds boil against the horizon. The sound of explosions rattles the hot air.

The butterfly bursts into flame. Its ashes drift in looping spirals, and through the haze run two girls.

One is wearing jeans and a bright red leather jacket. Beside her is her sister: limping, a plaid skirt flapping about her knees and her plaster cast scribbled with unintelligible good wishes. Both girls have their arms wrapped about each other’s shoulders, and their steps are in sync—like a three-legged race, they chant “left right left right” to keep moving.

The lane is worn brick, edged in weeds and barbed wire. Bleached fields cup the house on three sides, scattered with leafless oaks and lightning-scarred rocks. Down the hill, a town is burning. Giant smoke-veiled shapes—too many legs, too many sides—writhe across the ruins.

There’s no going back.

The house at the end of the lane is a tiny, immaculate rambler with white board siding and a gray shingle roof. Polished windows and a bright red door.

Neither girl trips. They support each other, hold each other tight as they run.

The invaders are here now.

Neither girl looks back. They’ve seen this before: mouths full of fleshy strings caught between blackened protrusions in eyeless heads.

In the pristine glass pane of the house’s window, Alex and Maria focus only on their reflections, on their survival.

They jump onto the porch together.

Alex grabs the doorknob. The invader reaches another leg towards her and Maria. Mouth hungry. A piece of wet plaid skirt clings to its lip. Maria runs beside Alex in bike shorts.

Alex shoves open the red door, so bright and bloody and matching her jacket, and she and Maria step inside the house at the end of the lane. Inside the house, the girls are safe from the invaders.

• • • •

To: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

From: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: wtf

What did you do, man? The cut scene in the beginning has changed completely!

To: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

From: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: re: wtf

Impossible. What the fuck are you on, man?

—F

ACT

How it’s supposed to play out:

You get into the house (alone) and find the twitchy book owner lying dead just inside the threshold. An empty pill bottle lies beside her head. The remains of the book are slashed into confetti around her feet.

You step over her and look at the table in the center of the empty house. It’s a dimensional portal, a nexus point in the universe. You read the address on the bloodied page backwards, banishing the invaders.

Then you walk back into the smoking ruins of your home and stare at the carnage as credits roll. You find a scrap of your sister’s skirt caught on the fence post and hold it close to your chest.

You aren’t going to play this game.

• • • •

The invaders are entropy and chaos. They take different forms but they are not a malevolent, insidious race of beings hunting through worlds. They are simply physics. Matter degrades. Energy reforms.

Worlds burn and new ones grow.

You cannot postpone them forever, but you can play for time. You put the thumb drive and the bloodied page and your notebook into your pockets.

You have no need for a gun.

• • • •

Inside the house at the end of the lane there’s no furniture. Just a single table in the center of an open space. It glows bright blue-white, humming with eerie music.

You pull the notes from your pocket and look at the address for your world. A keyboard materializes on the table.

“Will this work?” Maria whispers.

The rest of your notebook is filled with the addresses from all the other pages in the book.

“I hope so,” you say.

Maria rests her hand on your shoulder, silent and supportive as you work.

In Mario and Felix’s ideation of your life, you save what is left (yourself, only yourself) by banishing the invaders. You buy time until they come again. Nothing more.

But this isn’t Mario and Felix’s world.

You won’t just send the invaders backwards into the code, into the “before” of the game’s timeline. That will only postpone an inevitable downfall. You are tired of replay quality. You want to move forward with your life, make your own choices, anticipate a future.

The invaders are entropy and they will always be hungry.

So you send them to the developers’ address, give them a new feeding ground, the way Mario and Felix did to you.

• • • •

To: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

From: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: impossible

My mom called from Phoenix. It’s fucking destroyed. She’s trying to get out. Everyone thought it was terrorists, but then she sent me a pic. It’s those fucking aliens from our game.

What the fuck, man, how is this possible?

It was just a game.

To: mario@devs.houselanegames.com

From: felix@devs.houselanegames.com

Subject: re: impossible

Turn on the news. They’re everywhere, all over the world. London, Moscow, Japan, Antarctica. Those aliens. The storms. This is insane. How? This isn’t possible. We made them up!

Oh my god, my girlfriend is texting me they’re right here in the city

• • • •

There’s one last thing you need to do.

• • • •

You stand before the nexus keyboard in the house at the end of the lane.

Maria stands in the open doorway. “The storms are gone, Alex,” she says. “Do you think the others are okay?”

You don’t know. But you’ll find out. You and Maria can wake the town. You’ll both remember what it is to live now.

Page by page, you delete the world addresses—erase the thumb drive and burn the paper notes. You don’t know if you’re destroying countless billions of simulated lives or not.

By now, you don’t even care.

If there are no other worlds accessible by these codes, then yours will live. At least until someone in a distant future, or another reality, designs more. People have always created monsters.

You should know.

Your name is Alex.

©2017 by A. Merc Rustad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a 2016 Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Cicada, and other fine venues. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad, Patreon, or their website. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, came out from Lethe Press in May 2017.

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

The Boatman’s Cure

Sonya Taaffe | 12,100 words

The dead man was a nail-biter, tucked up in the back seat with old theater magazines and a water-stained Baedeker of Malta, his free hand still nearly white-knuckled around the haft of his oar. All the way from the North Shore, he had complained about her music until Delia popped the tape with a sigh and a protesting click of plastic and stopped the radio on the same alternative station she had spent her first few years out of college waking up to, and they passed the last few miles on I-95 peaceably enough on the White Stripes and the Black Keys and the Decemberists, David Byrne chiming in with cities of dreams and highways of fire as she took the exit for Memorial Boulevard. Mid-morning sun put a duckweed gloss on the Crown Vic’s hood, the same chipped post-police paint job that always looked as wet as if she had been driving through rain. New-bricked, glassed-up, the downtown skyline still deepened around them like a well-known hand, as familiar to fall back into as beds she had not slept in since her hair was long enough to braid. In the rear view mirror, the dead man blinked at a passing mall and said with the distant, pointed persistence she had been trying to tune out with both sides of Brass Monkey and the first track of Soldiers Three, “Would you mind reminding me how much longer this is going to take?”

He must have had a faun’s face once, long before he died, when that cross-cut mouth could still smile without turning in on itself, before he hid those wide-set eyes behind glasses so heavy passing views of sky and saltgrass and green-darkening trees flowed off them like the bend of a windshield, and his cheekbones tightened like kite-struts under the skin. She had taken him for a retired athlete at first, a distance runner or a high jumper, some other lanky discipline, but not unless he had lost all his grace—the hands he never seemed to know what to do with, the angular carelessness with which he had let the door bang shut behind them, and even in his own front hall he had hunched into a clay-blue turtleneck and a duller windbreaker as if mid-May in the estuaries of Essex County were the gutter-end of a moorland November. His voice was at once waspish and distracted, curiously top-storeyed; she was no closer to pinning down his accent than the first time she had wondered what it was. The name he had shaken hands over was Evelyn Burney, but Delia knew better than to believe either phone books or introductions. She had been calling herself Ari since she was fourteen. She said now, “We’ll be there in five minutes, give or take another of these lights,” and heard the dead man’s silence as soundly as a snort.

“And we’re going where?”

South Water Street onto Point Street, the red light at the overpass was taking its time; Delia said nothing, staring at her hands beyond the cuffs of her father’s old corduroy jacket, with its thready buttons and leather-patched elbows like the teacher neither of them had been—small and solid, scratched all over with the marks of sedge and sharp pebbles and human fingernails. She came up to Evelyn’s chin, when he remembered not to slouch. Just the once, she had felt the thinness under his lingering-winter clothes, and still wished she could take it back. At least she had stopped recognizing the song on the radio.

“Home,” she said simply, knowing it was no such thing.

“Oh, God, I hope not,” the dead man sighed, and opened another magazine.

• • • •

He had not been hard to find; at the time it had not surprised her. A printout with some notes scribbled over the phone had been all the directions she needed, following the signs from Ipswich until the roads wound into sea-lavender brushes and billows of salt hay, inlets glinting like sky-bright needles among the lowland green and beyond Plum Island, the Atlantic at her right hand, forever rolling home. Nothing for miles but cordgrass and curlews and the pale shells of cloud reflecting in the channels like sails, but no one else would have been living in this peeling, periwinkle-boarded stilt-walk of a house with oil-blue mussels clustered on the pilings and low tide already idling around the rust-sponged cement blocks—inside, Delia was half expecting the cabin of a China clipper or a beachcomber’s drift-line hoard, ship’s brasses and netted floats, tarry rope-ends and trade-wind charts, the smell of water everywhere and the windows screwed tight as museum crates with a long century’s newspapers to keep out the draft. Mostly she saw bookshelves, a writing desk, a paler armchair where a dark-blue towel was drying, the sun collecting warmly on hardwood and clean cream walls. A stack of string-tied shoeboxes on the floor was spilling old photographs and undeveloped film, but the next corner over held a tall jade plant, monkey-puzzling in a brass pot. Evelyn looked the odd man out in his own rooms, an uneasy guest hesitating on the couch with a tumbler of half-melted ice rolled slowly back and forth between his palms; he glanced up through his wide-angle lenses, and down at his drink again, and said very little whether she talked or not.

Even his agreement was ambiguous: an unreadable “Oh,” and then abruptly, in the same skimmed-off edge of a voice, “Yes. Yes, of course. Wait here,” and then nothing, head still bent away from her, one long-knuckled hand rubbing automatically at the knee of his trousers where condensation had dripped off his glass, bright as a wet cobweb. His hair was dulse-brown in the afternoon, disarrayed. He would have a trick of raking his fingers back through it, she thought, or he had all but fallen out of bed to meet his visitor, absentmindedly touching his glasses into place with a wariness so well-worn, it could serve as well as indifference; his first look through the storm door had given back only her face in pixelated miniature, the last imprints in a corpse’s camera-obscura eye. Handwaved into the kitchen, she had glimpsed a bed through the receding frame of doorways, book-tumbled, the windowshades snapped too far up against the flooding sun and a clothes pile all the same commonplace browns and blues taking up most of the cereal-colored coverlet, but otherwise kept as neatly, surprisingly, as even the sink where Delia dried the salt off her hands, its only signs of recent use a china plate and a bright-cut butter knife, slightly tarnish-spotted, glittering with water in the dish drain. She could not figure out what he had been eating: the refrigerator was stocked with bottles, the one she jack-knifed the cap off as thickly brown-glassed as a patent medicine and labeled in an inky, spidery smear. It tasted of pears, an unexpected orchard tang. Still seated, Evelyn tilted his glass so that the remains of ice in it made a faint, sliding clink and something that was neither a sea breeze nor second thoughts went over the nape of her neck with a shiver, as if a stranger had passed her trailing a shadow she knew. He rose without looking at her and walked from the room, as straight as a sleepwalker, and Delia hunkered down to study his books.

He was gone for long enough that she began to wonder if he had simply ducked out of the house to avoid her, gone birding in the marshes or taken the rowboat tied up off the steps with a coil of toothpaste-colored rope—its own paint splitting along the strakes, a dull plimsoll red—and pushed off into the sound. He came back still carrying the tumbler in one hand, creek-rinsed by the flecks of silt clinging inside, a bundle of cable-knit wool in the crook of his arm. His feet were bare and white as flounders, sharply boned under their dark speckling of sand. Catching his gaze again, Delia thought there might have been something like humor among the tight angles of his face, as private as the rest of him and as quickly put away. She was still holding 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the empty bottle of perry set down on the floorboards where it had no chance of touching the books; she made herself slide the old hardcover in its dust-and-Scotch-taped jacket conscientiously back beside Harrison’s Prolegomena, another university discard tagged with Dewey-white ink on its spine. Evelyn was unwrapping his parcel on the desk’s polished thrift-store top, an old sweater with both elbows out and one shoulder raveling purplish-black, like fading ink. She did not trust herself to say anything that was not too eager, too close to anger he did not deserve. Behind his glasses, the man she had driven from Baltimore and Boston to see was expressionless again, personable as a catalogue. “You wanted to see this,” he said unnecessarily, and held out the oar.

It was not much to look at: short and splintery, of some tight-grained, graying wood, and glittering in patches where the varnish was beginning to peel. The faintest red traces still ringed the shaft, lobster pots or Cycladic ochre. Evelyn held it awkwardly, as if he were unused even to the idea of handling it, but Delia did not miss the slight, protective crook of his fingers as she lifted it from him; it weighed as lightly in her hand as a branch of driftwood, as cool against her skin as the salt-cracked shingles of his house.

“It’s not really, of course, the oar that Odysseus took inland to make his peace with Poseidon, although a Byzantine commentator by the doubtful name of Aelius Retiarius certainly seems to have thought so.” She had not expected a lecture on provenance: He must have been talking to fill the time until she handed the thing back to him, all without taking his eyes from the dike-flat panorama beyond the window or sounding any more engaged. The foreignness in his voice kept slipping, now that she could hear more than half a dozen words together, southern California to London council housing to something less automatically Anglophone; she found herself thinking of the Mediterranean, although he might only have put the Greek islands into her head. “It was, he maintained, gear of that very same ship in which the hero made landfall at the black headwaters of Acheron, past the groves of Persephone and the gates of the Sun; it had cut through Ocean’s stream and the waters of death. The gods swear by the Styx; it is their binding. Odysseus needed to hold the sea-god to his promise, a better end than storm or shipwreck or monsters: such a gentle death from the sea. What more appropriate seal than the seaman’s essential symbol, Styx-steeped? Not that the original scholia are so theoretical about it.”

The edge of her thumbnail just fitted into a small dent in the blade, an old gouge sea-worn back to smoothness, like a long-healed scar. Without looking up, Delia said, “And you believe any of this?”

“Of course not. The man also glossed πολύτλας as an epithet of Charon,” and she heard it again, a clip of the never-setting Empire that had never existed beyond wireless broadcasts and the sound stages of Gainsborough and Hollywood. “Retiarius claimed to have seen the oar at the nekromanteion of Poseidon at Tainaron, but he would have found that rather difficult by the tenth century, not to mention the oar as we know it wasn’t even catalogued by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Venice until 1643. A clerk with the minimally more plausible name of Anzolo da Canal wrote that it was a family heirloom of the Venier, handed down from Roman days, and cited Retiarius. He didn’t credit it with its present powers; that was a Florentine magician named Dionigi Berdini, writing a half-century earlier of an object he’d never seen. Most likely it’s a case of two or three traditions conflated with at least one forgery at worst, armchair antiquarianism and wishful thinking at best. But the legend stuck.” He sounded as if he were scoring a point off the conversation, so dryly underplaying: “They do that.”

“And if I ask how it got from a museum in Venice into your hands?”

“It was entrusted to me.”

He started to say something else, and stopped. Afterward, she thought it was the stillness of his look—dark-eyed, magnified—that warned her more than his earlier evasions; his hands at his sides made a flat-fingered, aversive gesture, pushing the question away. She did not step backward in a stranger’s house, his most precious possession tire-iron-clutched in both hands; Evelyn did not reach to snatch it from her, so that the two of them swung through his quiet, sun-papered rooms like brawlers at some bridge in a folksong. His hands closed on themselves, empty; the expression on his face was so blank she would have taken it for acceptance if she had not been watching him all day. As gently as her dry mouth would let her, Delia said, “I told you I was going to need it. I was sent to you for it. I spoke with Petrakis, last week in Kensington. Aronowicz on Salem Street gave me your name. She said you understood the arrangement.”

“I’m not a safe-deposit box.”

She could not tell if he was trying to joke. The silence had filled back in around them, drifting in through the warmth-opened windows with the smell of returning tide. If he had more than half a foot on her, she knew the stubborn breadth of her shoulders and her weight carried low, a heavy-breasted anchor if she needed to be; she would not move first.

“We’ve both made promises.” She could not comfortably call him Mr. Burney, or reassure him he was not a safe-deposit box without the break of laughter in her throat giving way: trying to keep the drama down. The old wood left its scent on her hands as she shifted and resettled them, not the salt-bleached sea-weathering she had imagined, but something smokier, damper, as if he had been keeping it under the thatch of a cottage in the days of whitewash and peat fires. “I don’t make many promises, Evelyn,” even if it was not the right name; she might never know what that was. “They’re too easy to break. This is me keeping one,” and if she should not have used his own language against him, it was no more than the truth. “This is my binding.”

Anything but the anger or tricks or flight she had braced herself against, she watched his face open into something disbelieving, half-impressed, more like long-exploding exasperation than mortal threat. “Binding,” she heard him echo, and there was the rest of his voice, before she could say anything else, a sudden tight-wired tenor boom: “Damn you, give me that back—”

He was faster than she had thought, not flailing at all. Her weight thrown backward, she nearly fell against the window, a white-painted straight-edge of molding not inches from her shoulder; she clipped a bookcase instead and hissed out loud with the pain, twisting to get her body between the oar and Evelyn’s graceless hands, diving for their prize as if he fought dirty every day. Any slower, he might have grasped wood; quicker, she could have given him her sleeve or an elbow in the ribs; their hands closed and she knew with absolute stupid certainty that the man she touched was not alive, not for a long time now, and afraid of her, as he should have been.

• • • •

The last, feverish summer before she left the no-man’s-land of her mother’s house for Berkeley and all the degrees that she never would use, a codemaker from Brixton sat every night at the end of Delia’s bed and said nothing as streetlight and the setting moon made silver coins of his glasses, cloud-wrack of his schoolboy-fair hair. Sometimes he had a manila folder in his hands, a coat folded over his lap; he was dappled with his death-marks like a breaking wave, the night raid and the incendiaries that had left as little of the cheap-curtained, top-floor room on Camberwell as of its lodger, a Christmas gift from the Luftwaffe whose engine-drone she could hear on the nights she slept under his gaze, the flames in white-lit billows like an old newsreel, and she woke alone, in a sweat as cold as burning, clawing the bedclothes off like ashes and bricks. Some nights he seemed able to see her, turning from the window with a sweet, conspiratorial smile. Some nights he only stared ahead of him with a hopeless, set-mouthed apprehensiveness, and she wondered if he was hearing the bangs and whistles far overhead of falling bombs, the glare and jerry-rigged bedsits of the shelter he should have been in the night he died. He made no sense in a house built half a century before Moby-Dick, its high ceilings cracking in the wind off Narragansett Bay; he should have been haunting Baker Street or the Victoria line, not Delia’s faux-Tiffany lamp or the stuffed-animal leopard she still squeezed for comfort in her sleep, despite patchy fur and the stiff, matte-black spots where she had nearly lost it to a newly tarred road in 1985. Once, near dawn, in a light as sticky and exhausted as the codeine and coffee that had done nothing to keep his dead man’s dreams out of her head, he tried to touch her: worried, gallant. Her left hand ached like chain-link in winter for days. She would have found a vengeful spirit easier.

She was stuck with him, while downstairs her mother railed at the telephone as if it were God’s ear and her father came and went with no more to add than a pause of footsteps on the landing and the glass-jangling slam of doors. When she poured a double line of salt against her doorway, he was already on its other side; when she left bowls of water on her windowsill, his face wavered in them like a forlorn moon. The blue of his eyes between serge and columbine, off-cast with pewter behind the glint of his wire-rims, the fine lines compressed around his mouth like stage makeup of the old bones he might have made—she could pinpoint the night she realized nothing about him was strange to her anymore and it was worse than knowing the taste of her own burnt teeth. His death was older than the home fronts her grandparents had fought on. Shucked of his cardigan vest and the neat touch of grease in his hair, he could have passed for any one of her mother’s second-year students, jockeying with mezzotints and monotypes for studio space on Union Street. She watched him wipe his glasses clean with a smudgy, instructional handkerchief, turn over sheets of handwritten paper as if he were still at a desk somewhere, working out plaintexts and keys; at his quietest, the small, sticking wrongness of a chipped incisor or a sore throat, the dust-scratch across the eye that dragged a blink into a match-white blinding flare. Go away, she had whispered until it became meaningless, more noise in a house full of words that did nothing. The only rattled tables and flying plates at the south end of Ann Street belonged to the living.

And late in heat-lightning August, when the haze over the interstate burned like a refinery with taillights and sodium reflections and the window fan sounded too much like a bomber’s whine and roar, Delia lay on sweat-crumpled sheets and tried to close out everything but Robbie O’Connell and the Clancy Brothers—five-string banjo and Bobby’s voice soft as a letter frayed with folding, Paddy’s harmonica like a soldier’s wistful whistling in the dark—when she realized the codemaker was listening. A sleep I shall have, a rest I shall have, yet death will be but a pause . . . She had not thought it was one of the nights he could see her, stretched flat and restless in a pair of worn plaid boyshorts and the knots of her unbraided hair, but the moon-blanks of his glasses tipped and slid suddenly as he took them off with sharper movements than she had ever seen him make, and when she rolled over to turn off the Walkman and stare frankly back at him, she would have sworn she saw something like a blush fading among his silver nitrate shadows before he looked away. Her noonday demon after dark, whom nothing of this Earth had ever drawn out enough to make him leave it. He was fiddling with his glasses, turning them over with foxfire-splashed fingers as if he were still alive and nerving himself up to ask a girl to the cinema or a man out for a drink. Yours and yours and yours . . . It was easy, after all, as easy as anything that hurt. This time when she reached out in the half-light, he was the one who flinched.

She held on, though his sleeve felt like the rough coat of February, the scarring cold of the empty flesh beneath, and her breath jerked and hiccupped as if there were live wires in the stone-sharp turn of his wrists; though the night-sketched clutter around them was beginning to warp and flare like will-o’-the-wisps or melting film, until the codemaker’s hand tightened around hers like frostbite and white phosphorus and still she held on. Down the turn of the stairs, someone was whispering so fiercely, it hurt more to hear than a shout, but she could not tell if it was her mother on long-distance or her father leaving for the dozenth time or the rescue workers who had pulled out of the snow-hissing rubble nothing a poem-code could have put back together, cardboard earth burying little more than a name. The air she gasped for was hot as her dreams, choking with coal gas and plaster and the lime-kiln acridity of blasted brick; he frightened her and he hurt to be near and she gave him all the songs she could remember that might lead him back from the loose ends of the twentieth century to the Blitz that was over before her mother was born, from his death down into the dark.

She would never recall them all afterward, any more than the dead who might have sung them when they were new: white cliffs and little city flowers, wry-faced soldiers and their Windmill girls, the ghosts of tube posters blowing round deserted stations, bright gray snapshots of his shadow on a splinter-swept street. Nothing she could make as real as saccharine-stiff tea gone cold as the dawn-fogged windows with an all-nighter indecipherable, but she dredged mock-reveille from mornings in her grandmother’s kitchen and music hall from footnotes in her father’s fake books, an old iron plate, an old iron grate your mother used to fry on as the sky turned milky as old glass, and imagined that she could tell which helped, which hindered, which made no difference at all. Over and over again, like a signal-lantern lifted into the blackness that lay out before them like fast, deep water or night on a broad road, until the words were a foreign language and her voice ground down to the cinders of a chanteuse’s sensuous smoke, my Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene. She did not know if there was anyone waiting for him, by its light or elsewhere. She could feel neither of their fingers anymore. His glasses, cat-eyed, shining like a wound, were the last thing she saw before one of them disappeared.

She woke past noon in the sweat-warm weight of summer, filling the room like an overdrawn bath; she had dreamed of the pale gills of wrists and the wet-edged angle of a razor, drying in a curl of crimson like a question mark. Her palm came away shining when she wiped her face, peeled the seaweedy, split-ended snarl of her hair from around her throat. In the aimless, flooding light, it looked no different than before a dead man had gripped it, except for the bone-bruise beat of her heart to her fingertips, her muscles aching as if she had thrown herself all night against some unyielding wall. There was the chimney-stack, its cooler bricks painted with sixth-grade robins and sea-green leaves, Delia’s unwieldy signature in acrylic blue where the carpet missed the floorboards by an inch. There was A High Wind in Jamaica where she had left it halfway through Chapter Three, the deck of the Clorinda bookmarked with the nine of spades. No broken spills of plaster, no scattered code-cards. She could not look at calendar, mirror, or closet and see where he had gone. And she knew, nearly better than anything in seventeen years of her life, better than the dry nausea in her mouth or the shrapnel scars of history in her thoughts, there would be ghosts with her always—the boy from Miyakojima, still clutching his torn net with mulberry leaves in his tsunami-black hair, the rag-shod girl who had died at Riga with a pistol in her hand—the ones she could see already and the ones that had yet to find her, drawn wakerife from wherever the codemaker had strayed or stayed—the painter with her laudanum cough and a room on Malaya Bronnaya, the Boston bootlegger with the flick-knife lift of his brows—and the one that would never leave her, no matter what she said or sang, any more than she could walk away from her shadow.

She signed her student housing papers right-handed, the dead burning in her bones like time.

• • • •

She would not lie to either of them and say that she did not remember what she had done to the ghost that called itself Evelyn Burney, not when he had drawn her blood in his panic and she had left worse marks on him. In ninth grade, lunch-break reading under the blocky shadows of Brutalist concrete and the pecking commentary of the latest inescapable boy in baseball caps and sweatshirts who called her a dyke and a Satanist and asked her in stage whispers to show them how she got herself off—come on, you’ve got to be so good at it by now, a guy’s dick just fucking vanishes when he looks at you—she had breathed in the cold, dry-edged air of the last week before Thanksgiving and dropped Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, stood up and windmilled the kid so hard in the face he went over sideways with a surprised snort of blood from the nose she thought she must have broken, before he coughed and spat and she realized it was only his bitten tongue. More than the way her fingers had twinged stiffly until Christmas, the guidance counselor’s questions or her parents’ chilly back-and-forthing of blame, she remembered how she had felt, seeing that holly-bright spatter among the chewing-gum smears at her feet: not shame, or satisfaction, or even the draining aftercold of adrenaline as she retrieved her books and the boy shouted thick-tongued threats he never would carry out, but the simple recognition of damage: her hands, another’s hurt. With her boots in salt-welling mud and tall grasses rattling like scabbards about her waist, she had watched Evelyn with the sunset flare behind him shaking with rage and fright and felt the same distant sense of restraint slip from her, as she imagined most people spoke of losing their tempers; he was a dead man afraid of the dead, his oar gone clattering across the floor when they grappled and fell against bookshelves and old plaster that crunched under her weight like a mask’s papier-mâché, color film in graphite-black canisters rolling underneath the desk, and Delia could not remember the last time anyone had run from her. She could not catch him in the salt marsh he knew better than any afterlife, all the long years or centuries hiding out from whatever he should have gone on to. His face was a knot of shadows, the red-sailed sky in his glasses like blood. For just a moment, she wondered if he knew what she meant to do; she saw his mouth moving, but she did not think it was prayer.

In the spring of the year, she sang him this ay night, until she could feel the way down rising to meet her, the dark river that was a white road opening step by step beneath their feet, as it lay underneath every sea and stone, the journey no one could avoid taking and few ever retrace. Candle-glim and gorse-thorn, she made herself look at him when he folded to his knees in the burnt-gold-rippling tide and the first hesitations of silver began to streak the air; by Brig o’ Dread, the air was full of half-seen foxfire in the twilight and he would have given her his fingernails if that would have sent off whatever lovers or creditors he recognized in those desolate lanterns, but they were no longer coming to her voice, only his, bargaining, begging, his hands driven through his hair like rosaries, Kirke’s shades come up for their honey and their barley and their blood. She could not see him, the next time she looked through the dimming reeds. And Christ receive thy soul.

It took her until full dark to come back inside, searching from his house to her car on its thin boardwalk of sand just in case he had run somewhere as mundane as inland. She saw a heron’s long-winged flap on the horizon, the half-moon floating in the sound like an oyster shell; the tide was high and turning nearly at his threshold, asking no more leave to come in. Evelyn was curled in the slate-colored armchair, his glasses off and dangling from his cattail-torn fingers, too drained even to hide. He looked as though he had fallen in the marshes, more than once; struggled to his feet and plunged on through whip-wire cordgrass and brackish mud with all of Hell’s flame and Purgatory fire behind him, running him to the only safe ground he knew. The oar was clasped to his chest like a childhood toy, the green-shaded lamp among the desk’s bric-a-brac of pens and papers a third-degree glare from the way his fingers folded over his eyes. As quietly as she tried to ease the storm door shut, at its small metallic slam he started nearly out of his chair with a jumbled suddenness that would have been silent comedy if Delia had not seen his face, as shapeless and sticky with tears as a small child’s, as indecently transparent as all the dead. Even then, he showed nothing of a ghost’s vagueness, the silvery marks of dying about their persons or their clothes that sometimes remembered what the long-lost flesh pretended it could forget. He looked maybe thirty-five, maybe forty-five, undignified and alive and unhappy. When she pulled the straight-backed chair over from the desk, so that he would not have to stare any more vulnerably upward, he blinked with damp-stuck lashes and tried to fumble his glasses into place; his hands were shaking badly and he lowered them again, resting the mud-streaked lenses on his knee as if he were sitting for a portrait. She did not think he would want to remember either of them like this.

Because she did not know what more harm she could do him, she said curiously, “You don’t really need those, do you?”

“A lot you know about what I need.” His voice was colorless again, distantly drypoint, as if she had never heard him crying out. In the slant light, she could see blood as well as mud in his stiff-spiked hair—he was spattered with it, chin to brow as if it had been flung in his face, and Delia could not tell if it was his own, or if not, if she really wanted to know where it had come from. Closed, his long-lidded eyes gave him a meditative look, except for the tears. “You came here knowing what you wanted so well . . .”

“This isn’t about what I wanted.” She had not called the dead out of season to have this argument over with him again; she could feel it starting anyway, coming around on the guitar. The old unceasing anger was there without her even needing to feel for it, her own easy descent, waiting underneath everything she did not say. “I said that at the start: I wouldn’t have come here if it was just me and unfinished business. It’s what someone I—someone who matters very much to me needs,” and Evelyn gave a wet, hopeless sound that might have been laughter, hung up on clogged sinuses and irony. One arm still hung around her chair-back, Delia was fishing a wad of Kleenex out of her pocket—crumpled but clean, padding out her jacket like the clementines she carried everywhere in winter or her rattling tins of ginger-flavored mints—before she realized how ordinary the gesture felt, and stopped.

He took the tissues from her anyway, without giving away an inch of his guard-dog’s grip on the oar, and blew his nose so noisily and thoroughly that she wondered if he was putting it on, reassuring himself of all the quirks and faults and frailties of this body that was no such thing, even while his shadow lay soft and clean across the silt-tracked floor. There were ribbons of eelgrass snapped around his still-bare ankles, trailing wetly from his soaked cuffs; she had seen the splashes and trampled sedge when he ran. His footprints had led her back in, pitch-dark, through his door.

More gently this time, gesturing at the oar and not at the glasses he was fitting, painstakingly and clumsily, one-handed, back onto his face: “Are you bound to it?”

Evelyn stared at her with a handful of damp Kleenex and his glasses hooked over one ear, a bruise darkening on his cheekbone she had not seen before. “Oh, yes,” he said, wonderingly. “I can’t let it go. It . . .” His voice was very small, childlike as the back of one wrist rubbed against his mouth now that he had his lenses on straight, his shields and blinders back up. “It makes things safe for me.”

Delia nodded, slowly. What she had wanted was not to ask this question, to know its answer before she did: “And if I take the oar?”

What there was of his smile was pure mockery, twisting as a taste of brine. “I’ll go where you go.”

His eyes were as dark as the door of the Earth, for once holding hers as steadily as she studied him: not the first person she had ever hurt so precisely, but perhaps the first she had ever stayed around to acknowledge afterward. Neither of them had collected the books knocked from their careful stacks, the magazines sliding in a fan of matinée faces under the jade plant’s kicked-over earth. Belatedly, she thought of cracking ice cubes out of a tray and offering them for his bloodied face, but she was not sure that she could leave him, or that she had the right not to. Either way, it was too late for pretending. She had made her choice the minute she opened her mouth, standing at the edge of a tidal creek with a dead man’s house behind her; all she could do was be honest with it.

Evelyn was blowing his nose one last time, fussily as an actor and his shoulders still drawn with real pain; she thought nonsensically of the feel of his hair under her hand, how fine it had looked, windblown, and knew she could not move to touch him, then or ever. “All right,” Delia said, and again, as if she were the one with her head bowed, “all right.” The last moment she could turn away, run as fast and as far as a ghost out of the world; she swung her leg over the chair, tightened her hands among coins and Kleenex in her pockets, and felt no comfort in them, no talismans. Evelyn watched her unsmiling, waiting. “We’re going to Providence.”

• • • •

“Hounds of Love” was playing on WBRU as Delia pulled into the driveway where she had once backed into a washing machine—the Futureheads with their half-yodeled vocals and bouncy guitars, not Kate Bush and the invocation of M.R. James, but the engine still died on I’ve always been a coward and she could not tell whether the non-look Evelyn gave her as he stretched his legs like anyone corporeal enough for a slight cramp was a deadpan or only his usual guarded disinterest, which might have been terror all along. All night, he had huddled in his armchair as if within a charmed circle while Delia paced and turned pages in her croupier’s slope of light, swallowing the tiredness she could not afford to yield to like a Charon’s coin of blood; he offered his bed with such fine-tipped courtesy that she slept on the couch, shrugged under her jacket and Evelyn’s old unraveling sweater with its smell of doused fires, and woke in the heron-colored dawn to find him watching her, wondering what he had not done while she dreamed of steam condensing down the sides of a claw-footed tub and the archaeologist who appeared sometimes around the setting of Orion, her breast stitched across with the trackmarks of bullets, one hand still clenched on some blunt and broken nub of stone Delia could never quite see. There were ghosts drawn to her that kept their distance, shy as cats, prowling until they trusted her: some never had. Evelyn on the far side of the driveway, holding the oar like an umbrella with his Baedeker under his arm, was looking up at their destination as skeptically as though he had heard his cue. Delicately, so that she could not miss the quotation marks around the word, he said, “Have we come home?”

The last time she had stood on the narrow strip of asphalt between the four-bay house on Ann Street and the newer, taller Victorian with its curlicued eaves, the driveway had lumped underfoot with old frost heaves and frecklings of tarpaper like leaf-mold, shed from the gambrel roof with every storm or strong wind; the house itself had faded from the sunflower yellow of her childhood to tiger-stripes of sallow parchment, as dull as the tooth-colored trim. A tangle of wires that looked more than anything like an eviscerated birdcage coiled rustily behind a wood-sided station wagon, a child’s incongruous red plastic sled leaned up between the recycling bins. She had slipped the lock on the basement door and come out with a slow cold knotted in her back that took days to fade. Sometime in the years since then, someone who was not her father had resealed the driveway, reshingled the roof, and painted the quarter-sawn clapboards fresh dove-gray and the trim white as frosting, though the windows looked the same century-flawed glass within their neat slats of shutters. She had pressed her fingers against those cold lights in winter, imagining she could feel time seeping as slowly under her touch as melting ice.

“As much as we’re going to.” She knew she sounded distracted, rounding the house with Evelyn a few reluctant steps behind. The only things crunching under her boots were green and white tree-blossom, small flowers and twigs from blustery New England. “My mother had the place on the market even before the divorce went through. It’s old enough, she could have gotten it registered as a historic house or something, but I don’t think anyone really cared by then. It was cheap-ass student digs for a while, then the new owner flipped it; I didn’t really keep track. I don’t know who lives in either unit now . . .” Down the concrete steps to the basement, the door presented a similarly neatened face, but she recognized its hardware, the little give in the latch when she pulled on it, feeling the bolt in the frame. The knob was verdigris-rimmed under her hand, old brass under tree-ring layers of paint. In genuine surprise, she said, “They never changed this lock.”

“Breaking and entering.” Evelyn sniffed slightly, pushing up his glasses; he sounded unconvincingly disapproving, a parody of the strait-laced traveling companion. Still shaky and silent as he locked up his own house in the bright, head-bending sun, he had tried to clean himself up at the rest stop in Westwood, emerging from the men’s room with his hair wet-flattened and his cheekbones flushed from scouring with paper towels, hands tight in the pockets of his windbreaker as he walked past Delia to the car. At least he had put on shoes before leaving, black sneakers pulled on over socks he found while Delia tried not to hover around the front door and the boat bumped at the bottom of the steps, its sides reflecting little wind-frisked lines of sun. He was easiest when she thought of him as a character, long-sufferingly familiar enough to snipe at—suit yourself, you cut-rate Charon—walk through walls if you want to, but I need doors! She could not afford it; not even if he were alive.

“It’s worked for me so far,” she said mildly, and showed him the door swinging open, the darkness and the laundry-scented dust beyond.

—hiding in the dark, hiding in the street—

In the moments it took her vision to fade in from tree-blocked noon to cobweb-soaked panes and the light switch on the far side of the basement, she was already tallying the changes: two new models of washer-dryer, the filing cabinets gone, some dry-stalked, seed-nodding plant split up through a missing square in the cement like a vase of Japanese lanterns, a pair of sawhorses and cans of stain and varnish where her father had once polished his ’65 Yamaha while she watched from the basement stairs, drinking cranberry juice from a jam-jar glass. Something that looked a great deal like a giant plush chameleon, squashed with rolls of toilet paper into the topmost shelf over the sink. A laundry hamper the solid blue of Play-Doh, half full of clothes someone had evidently removed from the dryer to make room for their own wash. She did not know if she was hoping it had been moved, thrown out, lost to gentrification; she stepped around a sun-warped white table and chairs, flyspecked lawn furniture no one in her family had ever owned, and felt her pulse jerk in her throat so quickly she could not tell if it was relief or something less painful. Wedged against the cinderblocks behind the boiler, its greenish upholstery even more of a mildew nest than the last time she had tried not to breathe near it, after all these years was still the couch she had slept afternoons on, tucked her feet into the cushions for reading, watched television at an angle with her head resting on a padded arm, even tried once to make out with a girl from Federal Hill, both of them so twitchy at every creak and shift of house-beams that might have been Delia’s mother coming home that they fled eventually to Hope Street and held hands under the table, drinking too much coffee, like rebels in the French New Wave.

Clearly and curiously, from the farther end of the couch, her sister said, “Dee?”

She heard Evelyn’s tight intake of breath behind her; she did not have time for his surprise or his pretense, as if a dead man could be startled into needing air. She knew what he was seeing, pulling itself upright on the damp-spotted cushions with an adolescent’s mixture of impulsive grace and awkward growing bones: herself at nearly fourteen, a doppelgänger more than half a lifetime gone and fading like a Polaroid. She had never worn those heavy-pocketed cargo pants, that T-shirt with its cracking red-and-white silkscreen beware of god; even in her thrash years, never styled her hair so shock-black, stripped of any brass or blue highlight and jagged out like an angry marker scrawl. Evelyn had never seen them standing together, would not know that Delia had always been the taller by an intermittent inch, not once the thinner of the two. He would not need a yearbook to turn from one to the other and recognize the same backswept brows, the same dark, freckled skin with its grain of acne or faint scars, a softer curve of Delia’s mouth in the face of the girl gazing back at them from under the water pipes.

From elbow to heel of her small, hard-callused hands, her wrists were raked with silver like the back-shine of a mirror, corpse-candles ribboning her bloodless flesh.

—and of what was following me.

Delia let out her breath, as consciously as she had taken one that tasted of salt breeze and warming sun, green things pushing up and rotting and swayed by the tide. Her voice only stuck a little. She had been less frightened then. “Hey, Ari.”

“You’re starting to look like Mom. That’s fucked up.” The ghost of Aurelia Tabor rested her arm across one knee, slit wrist dangling carelessly open. It had taken Delia years to get used to her conversation, the familiar voice winding up through the nights when Delia could not sleep: not only that she spoke, but that she remembered. She tilted her chin like a command, too cool to look curious. “Who’s the tourist?”

“His name’s Evelyn.” Saying the words, even meaning them, they felt absurdly naïve. “He’s here to help.”

She knew Ari’s face would harden at that: a mistrustful teenager, nearly twenty years dead and still cynical. “Oh, really? Is that why he looks so fucking scared?”

“You would, too, if you were standing in this basement.”

“Like you would know.”

Stupid, if she had expected her sister’s contempt not to focus her way; it was there in her voice, immediate and vicious. “You ran from here. You ran from me,” and Delia had known ghosts that fought her with everything from paralyzing despair to collapsing ceilings, but never another that got so instantly and hotly beneath her skin, scratching off scars from the inside. Nothing she could do right, nothing she could help. No one she could ever make herself over into without that crack running through her, that broken place ghosts could whisper through, or just guilt. Even braced for it, she felt it swamp her like a foundering wave, drowning by exhaustion; she made herself not cringe, not look away, grinding out, “Jesus, Ari, you have no idea—”

From behind her shoulder, Evelyn laughed once, sharp as piano wire.

“Two of you. Oh, God help me. I should have known.”

He sounded almost merry, his unplaceable accent coming and going between the words. When Delia risked a glance away from her sister, he was smiling without any humor at all, wave-worn oar and travel guide in his hands like a saint of sea voyages—not exactly the world’s greatest reality check, but she had known him for a day and a half, not since before she could read, and the house that had once been hers scared him only as much as everything else. Silent as if they had shocked her, Ari’s ghost was staring at both of them, fingers tracing her cut-frilled wrist as if reading herself comfort in Braille, younger than Delia had ever thought she looked when it was the two of them against Nathan Bishop and the world.

“I’m here now, all right?” she said with a gentleness she did not feel, toward either of them at that moment, or herself. “I made a promise. I don’t intend to break it. That’s what I’m doing here. I think you have to trust me if this is going to work.”

Not quite under his breath, Evelyn muttered, “I don’t think so,” and she did not waste time on hushing him. Ari, digging nails into her own skin now as if she could stick the long-severed flesh back together, twist and seal herself like clay or just tear the mistake out, was barely audible even so.

“It hurts, Dee. It really fucking hurts.”

She could feel those angular shoulders within the circle of her arms, if her sister’s ghost would let herself be held; it would hurt like iron in a fairy tale and Delia would bear it, but it would change nothing. She said instead, with very little hope that she sounded less weary than she felt, “Come on over, boatman,” and when she saw how suddenly still Evelyn went, not quite refusing, “You’ll be all right if you stick close to me.”

“I very much doubt that.” But he was already crossing to meet her, laying the Baedeker down on the CD-stacked hutch of a pinewood desk she had never written at; already holding out the oar as if he trusted her with it, and she took it from him as if she felt the same.

• • • •

In dream after dream, Delia had sent her sister on with her blood, with her shadow, with her singing, with her life, with beckoning ghosts of grandparents or best-loved musicians, with nothing more than a kiss that burned like dry ice. In none of them had she imagined a dead man for an audience, the oar with its entangling skeins of past. Out of Evelyn’s hands, it still felt as plain as it looked—a museum piece no one should take to sea, no warmer or colder than her sweating hands or the basement’s musty air—but the longer she held the dune-gray wood, the more images she felt come absently to mind, blooming around her thoughts like dreams on the edge of sleep: pomegranate groves, white manes tossing, dark water bubbling around pale rocks, a field of poppies bending so slowly under the wind, she could have believed them underwater, crepe-red petals all turning to show their seed-centers like a heart parting under a knife. Ghosts hummed and flickered where she could not see them, static on a channel she could not tune. Just once, she looked across at Evelyn, eyes closed, hugging himself with his arms as if he were the one around whom the air had sunk to breath-stealing abyssal cold, and he was a boy with straight-winged brows and a sweet broad mouth, bleeding around the edges like lens flare. Her sister wavered like a photograph under a tap, never drained to silver and never swirled away. She stopped singing when she realized it was dark beyond the basement windows: She could not tell if it meant night. No one had come down to retrieve their laundry or investigate the noise. At one point she had thought to wonder if they were even still in a basement anymore, but she did not think it mattered; they were all still there, all three of them: Even magic had not worked.

She left the oar on the desk while she stretched, both hands in the aching small of her back. There was a curdled smell in her nostrils, like rotting windfalls or a surfeit of May blossom; she kept feeling she should see something on fire, but there was only Ari slumped over her arm of the couch like a shipwreck survivor clinging to her last spar, her face hidden in mold-whitened twill and the dead light of her arms. Evelyn had sagged down against the wall, all lanky angles when he folded up: head fallen back, mouth open, like an exhausted runner. Down among the dead, the wide-eyed and the legless . . . Delia shook the song out of her head: Ari had never been alive to hear it. Her voice was sandy with strain. “Evelyn. Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why you think I know.” She could not tell if he was stonewalling her or merely as near the end of his rope as he looked; nothing in the toneless voice told her. “You asked for it. I gave it to you. There’s an end to our agreement.”

“It kept your ghosts off. Does it only work for you?”

“I wish it did.” Now he looked at her, not straight on; not smiling. The bruises on his face were greening slightly, healing faster than the scratches on her hands. “You can give it back to me now.”

A slow beat that was not surprise went through her, soundless as space. Her sister’s shoulders lifted and dropped very slightly, without raising her head. Delia whispered, “You godforsaken coward.”

His mouth cracked a little; none of them had the strength to shout. “Whatever you think of me, don’t imagine it can hurt more than anything else you’ve done. If I’m a cut-rate Charon, you’re not much of an Orpheus. What do you even want from her? From this place? I know what you want from me, that’s been plain enough, but I don’t think you’ve a very clear idea of the rest. Leave her alone, for God’s pity, let her go. Let me go,” and she could hear the next sentence as coolly as a nightmare, the voice of her anger that sounded like spiteful Ari, despising her for even having thought to try, Go back to your dead who want you. Rustling around her like a wind of broken leaves, half-remembered deaths banging against her moth-light, all but the one she wanted. Interrupting it, she heard her own voice slapping back from the glare-lit cement as flatly as a blow: too harsh for her scoured throat and she had stopped noticing.

“Go, then—I really don’t care anymore. You wanted to come along on this road trip, I didn’t stop you, but you are not helping and you are not going to make me lie to her, do you understand?” As if Ari were the child between them, their sotto voce and her silence the fiction that if nobody yelled, nothing they said could wake her; she knew those nights, years of them, and still her voice scratched on, cutting at Evelyn with everything she had known not to say: as if there were only one way to speak in this house and everything she had ever said in it wrong. “Go back north, if you don’t want to be here. Go back to your marshes. Watch the sun come up. Do whatever dead hermits do, read your classics and pretend you never died. At least you can.”

Very tightly, the dead man said, “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work, then? How does it actually work? You walk out that door and go to hell, and I’m supposed to feel sorry enough to stop you? Save you?”

“Jesus God!” His voice snapped upward so breathlessly, it would have been laughter if she had not seen his face. One hand made a helpless, half-finished gesture; abandoned it like words. “Save me? Is that what you think you can do? What are you playing at? Queen of the ghosts—Hekate watching the ways, Earth-shaking all-important Ari Tabor—”

Both of them stopped, as suddenly as if the air had been pulled from the room: Delia gathering one last breath like a mouthful of salts, Evelyn’s face as white and stiff as bone. Ari was staring at her, fingers curled into rotting fabric like a cat crouching to spring, so deeply driven that the soft gray threads were starting to fray. Her eyes were so wide, she looked like a child at a magic show, and Delia could already see them narrowed with condescension, the magician’s hands caught mid-pass, the mirrors picked out from the smoke. Two steps behind her, the oar lay on the desk’s old unfinished surface—dust-filmed, scarred with ballpoint doodles and cigarette burns—within easy reach of a dart and grab, and if it could have split her down to Hades in that instant, nameless, voiceless, memoryless as every shade, she would have seized it without a second thought. It had no virtue over the living. She had failed to be dead for twenty years.

“Oh, Dee.” Her sister’s voice was so soft, she thought for a moment some other ghost must have slid up through the crack of her wish, coiling around her in the night to comfort them both. “You never did leave, did you?”

She had been crying the last time she left Providence, staring out the train window through a hot, splintery blur that made even the sea, running alongside the tracks in its course of pebble-dash beaches and bridges, loom like a reproach: as vast as death and even less known to her. Ari only ten years her junior then, her phantom’s t-shirt that must have gone to Goodwill long ago looking newer than Delia’s much-washed, mail-ordered Black Dice, whispered in a voice like acetylene, It’s like the song, Dee. You don’t know what it’s like. You never know what it’s like, the refrain of their last living year together. Then her face had crumpled and her arms caught Delia like freezing water around the waist and Delia had had to push her away before she screamed, brought down the Brown students whose green-dank marijuana smells, seeping down through the floorboards, had told her they were home. I will come back, Ari, I swear to God—I swear to you, I will come back.

You’re always coming back.

She did not think she was crying; she heard the rusty sound of her voice as if it belonged to someone else, who had more reason and occasion to speak.

“Probably not.” She could say it if she did not look directly at Ari, but focusing on her sister’s hands meant seeing the death in them, so that Delia’s fingers went unthinkingly to scars she had never worn, the clean lines of her own wrists, pink-grazed only where Evelyn had fought her. He was the shadow in her peripheral vision, climbing to his feet with one hand on the wall for support; better not to see him, either. Her mouth hitched a half-smile, folding over itself like paper. She was not sure who she was apologizing to. “I really goddamn tried.”

Something moved in front of her and she closed her eyes at last, knowing it would be Evelyn and for once she could not reproach him. It seemed to take much longer to open them, to understand in pieces that she was smelling patchouli and cloves instead of salt meadow and books; that Evelyn had never worn a hand-strung necklace with a knot of white-ringed glass at its center, black-pupiled blue as a Phoenician eye; that he had never been an inch shorter than Delia, so that she saw the amulet tremble in the hollow of his throat with his heartbeat, as if warning her off. She had wondered, in those first raw months of autumn, if Ari had been trying to keep off something she had seen in dreams or reflections—the hovering shadow of pennies on her eyes, the tugging attention of the dead who swarmed in at the least chink of notice. Maybe she had only liked the look of it, like the ankh she had dug blackwork into her shoulder the summer before they started eighth grade; Delia would not push her sleeve back to see if it was still there, though she could have done it just by putting up her hand. The air between them was close as cast iron, cooling like blood in an empty room.

Not easily and not diffidently, because she would never have the chance again, Delia said, “You ran from me first.”

Ari’s shoulder lifted in her old, slight shrug: an adolescent’s indifference to interpretation.

“It wasn’t you I was running from.”

When she picked up the oar this time, she could feel the world spring into edges around her, as sharply incised as black-figure pottery. Fractures, fissures, the stitches that could be picked open, the wounds that would not close: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis. Ari stood where Delia had left her, enigmatic as a figure in a frieze, while Evelyn watched from the couch-back, at a sideways lean to avoid the water pipes, arms folded and nothing on his face she could read. Chain-smoking over a windowbox of geraniums like somebody’s grandmother, more trouble to find than the dead man she had given directions to—a neighborhood full of apartment blocks overlooking Italian restaurants, their smoky-red bricks older than at least one war—Aronowicz had only been truthful with her, not even oracle-slant. He’s odd about it, but he understands the arrangement. Without malice, her dry husky voice excluding neither of them, That’s the best you can say of most of us in this line . . . The smell of wet smoke was coastal, shifting about Delia’s face as if a wind were changing, night-fires smoldering on a sea-wrack shore. She had had her fingers in death’s door since she was fourteen.

She drew breath, held it until the tide-roar in her ears was louder than the sound of footsteps, trudging sand to stone to soil that had never felt a keel. The other thing had been harder to say.

“Go on, Aurelia Margrete Tabor. Go if you’re going. Go gently.”

She handed the oar to her sister and watched the world go out.

• • • •

“Delia,” the dead man said for the third or fourth time. He still sounded suspicious.

In the late breeze off the water, his hair ruffled back like a soft wing over his forehead, and Delia knew the wild thing’s look he would once have had, gazing out across the darkening sea. Much to her surprise, he had taken the passenger seat without asking, dragged the shoulder belt under one arm and settled himself against the door while Peter Bellamy sang them down Route 138 and the toll roads of Conanicut by way of Kipling’s India; he drummed impatient fingers on the dashboard and flicked among pages as though irritated by some passage that had escaped him, but he said nothing about her music, even “Gentlemen-Rankers” or “Follow Me ’Ome,” until Delia was idling on Webster Street, trying to find somewhere among students and tourists to stash the car, and she remembered O leave the dead be’ind us, for they cannot come away just as Evelyn snapped the Baedeker’s Roman-red covers shut. An’ you must pack your ’aversack, for we won’t come back no more . . . He was out of the car almost before she had finished parking, a stiff, heron-stalking stride with the wind billowing his jacket; the mansion-museums of Newport’s Gilded Age stood like sundials along the shore, Louis Treize terraces and slate-tiled widow’s walks repeating later than you think, and she let Evelyn lead her among them without so much as a Eurydike-look backward. Halfway down the Forty Steps, he retreated abruptly when he saw a couple backed against the stonework, hands in each other’s hair; after that he followed Delia until she settled them both above the broken granite of the breakwater, cliff-shadow at their backs, the water under its antique patina of sunlight curling all shades from glass-gray to the acid blue of copper salts. The sea seemed to calm him, or at least he had left the Baedeker on the front seat. He was still crying a little, reflexively; he made room for her on the wall, wiped at his eyes as if they annoyed him, and would not take any more Kleenex from her.

“Delia and Aurelia. People do that if you’re twins. Our mother was supposed to have picked one, our father the other, I don’t know which. We were Ari and Dee as soon as we figured it out. Mostly. She was Ari. I was still Delia, sometimes. Until I wasn’t.”

“And no one noticed?”

“Everyone noticed. We weren’t that kind of twin. I was the one forgetting to return obscure folk records to the Athenaeum and frying calamari over a Bunsen burner for extra credit in Bio. She cut her hair with a straight razor and dyed it black the night she heard Kurt Cobain had died.” She would have expected the words to be easier, now, but not when she had never said them aloud; she had to take the same deep, diver’s cold-plunging breath before she could say, “Not six months later, she used the same blade to open her wrists. I don’t think it meant anything. It was just the sharpest knife she owned,” and then out again afterward, quickly, as if Ari’s ghost were still at her shoulder, ready to correct her. The next wave was coming in to the seawall, fretting a lace-edge against the slabs, black-tilted under a bronze rust of weed. Because it had never been the most important distinction between them, invisible anyway to the boys who jeered, the girls who turned ostentatiously away: “I was the one with girlfriends.”

The surf below their feet was white as holystone, flowering out of deep glass on the rocks. Evelyn said nothing, hunched forward with his hands clasped between his knees, so that Delia looked for the oar resting across them before she remembered: the last thought before sleep come back the next morning, more distant than the night’s dreams. She could not tell if he was listening; if it hurt more or less to tell him these things, if she owed them to him, why her voice was not breaking, unless it had long ago. “I don’t know why the couch,” she added, as the wave drew back. “The last piece of the house left over, I guess. I found her in the bathtub,” as scarlet as a special effect, streaking the white enamel and spattered on the tiles as if Ari had tried to grip the tub’s sides with unstrung fingers, the razor lost or relinquished for use of the next suicide. “I didn’t want to shower in that fucking room for months. I kept thinking I’d see her in the steam, one of those wandering, white-eyed ghosts that condense and draw useless, mirror-written messages on the walls with wet fingers even when the water isn’t on . . .” She could smile a little, thinking of the fair-haired codemaker and Ari the next morning, looking up from her ghost’s mercurial hands with a sudden, starving hope in her face, more terrible than any way Delia had dreamed her; it was easy, with her mouth already wried with salt. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

Evelyn’s voice was its thinnest and most remote, a seabird’s far cry. “And you couldn’t send her on.”

Delia said shortly, “No.”

He had kept so carefully away from her since the marshes, she almost shook free and elbowed him across the jaw before she realized the sudden hard grip on her forearm was meant for comfort. His death jangled through her, a choking blank terror as shapeless as whatever scars it had left on him: She clawed in it for a moment, a blood-black thunder drowning the warm twilight, the mortared stones and the waves’ gray noise against them, the pressure of a curved thumb and fingers, not living and not immaterial, the first time he had touched her of his own will. He was holding on to her, not taking his eyes off the endless origami folding of the tides. She covered his hand with her own and was terrified, and pressed back once, tightly, hard as a heartbeat, before she let him go.

With equal care, she said, “Elpenor?”

It was not an uncomplicated snort of laughter, but she heard it nonetheless; his mouth turned a corner so slight, she could not be sure whether it was amusement or just another self-regarding wince. “No. Oh, no. I should . . . I should have been so famous. I held on to the side of the boat until it went down, in the dark waters; I held on to the water and then I held on to the dark. My name was heavier than I was. It dragged me down. I let it go.”

“Long-suffering Charon.”

Now he looked actively wry. “Not if I can help it.”

“Evelyn Burney?”

He made a vague, harassed motion with his hands; it could have explained anything from a taste for durian candy to a morning-after tattoo. “I poled a boat on the Thames for a while. I liked it.” Too late to change the subject, she wondered if he was about to ask her the same—suddenly hoping that he could not hear, running through her head as for years, and Delia she’s in the graveyard, trying her best to get up—but he was staring down at the water again, like a litter of mussel shells, strings of foam dusk-shadowed to the bloom on a beach plum. His voice was low enough for a mumble, his accent crystal-crisp. “She’ll have better charge of it than ever I did.”

Back on the dry ground of Ochre Court, she had left the Crown Vic beside a candy-red Honda with Salve Regina stickers and a decal for Miskatonic University, walked after Evelyn with the murmur of the seaside dead growing in her ears like the rush and drawl of ocean: the drowned fisherman tangled in his lines, copper-slick kelp splayed from his mouth like a scream; the hotelier’s daughter whose crinolines had billowed around her like a jellyfish’s bell as she sank. The casualties of ’38 in their storm-surge rags, smashed like piers and street signs. The archaeologist loitering on the waking edge of the world with the memory of her latest find, as if when she finally showed it to Delia, the sands she had died among might cover her over at last. After all the ghosts and all the years, she had still imagined something might be different with Ari, but she had left nothing behind, not even Odysseus’ oar, and Evelyn had still been there to watch as Delia staggered up the weather-cracked steps into a bright-branched afternoon she thought had been over hours ago. Stick close to me, she had said incautiously; and now he sat beside her like the hanged man of a sailor’s pack, swinging forever between the world and its waters, the boatman with no crossing. Her with too many, all the rivers and roads the dead could be lost on, the living learn to chart. The house on Ann Street was empty. The door had not closed.

When she looked over at Evelyn in the last gold-leaf light, he was watching the small sickle-wings of terns against the eastern sky, his face oddly tranquil: absorbed in something beside himself. He looked tired and disheveled, still dirty-faced around the edges; she almost reached to spike fingers through her own hair before she remembered it would be fruitless, with the wind picking up for night. As sharply as a physical pain, she wanted a hot shower, water pounding her skin until it ached, a bed to fall into until the sun was well into afternoon again and she could roll over and watch the light moving lazily on walls she could rest within, as unhaunted as she could make herself. She thought of bookshelves, saltgrass, a boat the color of an old lobster buoy.

She said quietly to Evelyn, “Do you want to go home?”

She saw his glasses glint before he answered, settling like running lights at sea; he might have been laughing softly, light-voiced, or only breathing the strong salt air in deep. “I’m not sure that I know where that is right now.”

Without grief or surprise, Delia said, “Me neither.”

The wind was in her hair like a hand, the tousling caress of trade and loss and fortune; she raised her face to it, looking for nothing especially, and saw the first star over the sea.

©2015 by Sonya Taaffe. Originally published in Ghost Signs. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found most recently in the collection Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press) and in the anthologies Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, and An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables. She reads dead languages for fun, edits living poets for Strange Horizons, and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

You Will Never Know What Opens

Mari Ness | 2100 words

One of the doors in the closet, behind the boxes, leads to a harsh desert world. The first time you stepped through, you didn’t bring water, and nearly died as you crouched beneath the sun, waiting for the door to open again. You were saved only by the unexpected appearance of someone draped in gray, who gave you water before showing you a mottled face of lizard skin. You screamed. By the time you returned, you could barely stand. Your head pounded; your skin was badly burnt.

You placed boxes in front of that door to ensure you wouldn’t slip in again by mistake, but on cold nights, you find yourself looking at the closet.

• • • •

You have a perfectly respectable degree, perfectly respectable skills. And yet you drift from part-time job to part-time job. You’re unreliable, supervisors tell you, but that’s not it.

You buy a few lottery tickets, think about trying out one of those work from home scams. But working from home, you know, would be the worst.

Home is full of doors.

• • • •

The door in your bathroom shower leads to a forest of sorts. Not a safe one. You haven’t figured out precisely how the biology works, but it’s clearly not quite the same as Earth: The water burns your skin and mouth, leaving you very sick, and you have to be careful to touch as little as possible. You shouldn’t return, really, not considering what it does to your skin. But the quiet is so profound, so relaxing, that you find yourself sneaking back anyway, until the rain starts pounding holes into your skin.

• • • •

It’s impossible to tell which doors will remain open on the other side, and which will immediately shut, trapping you there for hours, or days, or weeks. It’s why you begin to take a backpack with you everywhere in the house. Nothing heavy—you’ve learned from sad experience that you may need to move very quickly on the other side—but filled with essentials: a bottle of water, some trail mix, a comb, a flashlight, bandaids, sunscreen. You try to leave a light sweater or a blanket in every room, so you can grab it before you step through.

But sometimes the colors on the other side of the door are so beautiful you forget.

And some of these other worlds are warm.

• • • •

The doors in the hallway are the worst. Part of the problem is that they’re not always there, and when they are there, they move around, and part of the problem is that they open without warning, slamming into you, sometimes sucking you into their worlds so hard that once or twice you’ve even lost your backpack.

The worst part, though, is that when you return, those hallway doors are gone. Permanently. Replaced by other doors, thinner doors, wider doors, older doors, newer doors, but gone. Sometimes you wake up at night, thinking of the world with nine dancing rose moons, and can’t stop crying.

• • • •

One of the doors in the spare room—the one right behind the bed—leads directly to a world of dragons. After just one trip, you realize that it, too, is far too dangerous to return to, but you’ve taken to bringing your crafts and other things into this room, and sometimes even watching TV on your laptop there, just so you can raise up your eyes to the door and—for a second—see a dragon.

• • • •

Every once in a while you think about selling the house. You’re broke, after all—these trips to strange places don’t exactly pay the bills—and maybe it’s time to downsize, to look for a better job, to travel to familiar places, or at least places on this planet that won’t kill you. Or get a roommate. Plenty of people have entered the house and never even seen the doors. A roommate should be safe.

Though that would mean never entering the spare room again.

No. Better to just let a few things go unpaid.

• • • •

One of the doors in the garage leads to a palace. You blinked the first time you stepped into this one, needing a moment to drink in all of its luxurious beauty: marble floors, fine paintings, gold and silver furniture.

But only a moment, before you were immediately seized by people with purple skin and strange scale armor, who seized you roughly and began shouting at you. The three eyes on their faces distracted you so much that it took you another moment to realize that you had no idea what they were shouting: It was in a language that you’d never heard.

That was surprising: In every book you’d ever read, everyone in other worlds spoke English. It had never really occurred you that they would speak anything else. You tried the few words of Spanish you’d learned in high school, the few words of French you’d learned to impress that cute guy from Quebec. The denizens of the palace locked shackles on your wrists and dragged you away. You tried not to scream.

They brought you to a cave beneath the palace, chaining you to one of the rock walls. As your eyes adjusted, you realized that you weren’t the only creature—person—there, and not everyone there had three eyes or purple skin. It gave you hope: You’d always assumed that other houses had doors, that you were not the only person who did this sort of thing, and that it must happen on other worlds as well. You nodded and smiled in the dim light, croaking out “Hello.” No one responded.

Over the next days—weeks—you learned a few words of the three-eyed purple people, trying not to think the phrase purple people eater in your head. You played with the shackles. You broke both thumbs, managing to free your wrists. When you lifted your arms, the others in the cave started to shout, drawing the attention of the guards. In the ensuing chaos, you managed to slip out of the cave, only to get thoroughly lost in a maze of tunnels and caves. Finding your way through the castle without getting caught was another two days. By the time you’d finally made it home, your power had been shut off.

Two weeks later you stepped through again—after very carefully listening for footsteps on both sides of the door, just in case someone was watching you from this side, too. You’d seen mountains in the background during your escape, and green lakes, and this wasn’t something you could resist.

• • • •

You set up automatic bill payments for everything. It’s not a perfect system—your income is still sporadic, and if you have nothing in your checking account, you’re screwed. You consider selling the things you’ve brought back—purely by accident—from other worlds, the things you have stored in the boxes in front of the door to the desert world.

You can’t quite manage to do so, though.

• • • •

The living room has several doors. This can be a problem, not just because sometimes the doors creak open, leaking sounds and light from other worlds, distracting you from whatever else you’re doing, but also because it makes it very difficult for you to put up bookshelves and pictures. You don’t want to block anything, of course. You finally end up putting a line of shelves up near the ceiling, above all of the doors, and stack the pictures in a closet with only one small door, to a world you don’t much like. Someday, after all, the doors in the living room might close permanently, and you’ll want something to cover them.

One of those doors, however, leads to a world of dinosaurs. Only slightly safer than the world of dragons, but you are not about to give up your chance to ride a dinosaur.

• • • •

Not everyone in these other worlds drags you to a prison. Some—like whatever, whoever that unknown creature in the desert was—actually help. Others are willing to communicate through gestures, or study the quick sketches you make in an attempt to explain. On one or two worlds—the ones you visit more than once—you even start picking up a word or two of the local language. You start to hear these words in your dreams.

• • • •

Most of the doors in the kitchen seem to lead to friendly worlds. But not always. It doesn’t help that once or twice you’ve been spattered with tomato sauce as you walk through, which is initially taken for spots of blood in some worlds—and seasoning in others.

It does help that sometimes you’re carrying freshly baked cookies when those doors open, calling for you to step through. Everyone loves cookies.

Even dragons.

• • • •

Sometimes you worry about how you might be changing these worlds that you visit. You remember reading some book or another about how just reading a story, a book, a text, changes it by the very act of reading. How might stepping into it change it?

You wonder if, like human stories, these worlds are created, and if the creators feel about you the same way, you suppose, that writers feel about their fans. Not that you really know how writers feel about their fans. You decide that it’s time to try to ride another dinosaur.

• • • •

The paramedics don’t say anything when you say that you fell off the roof, but you do catch their skeptical looks.

• • • •

You get very good at baking.

From time to time, you even remember to bring cookies to your job in this world.

• • • •

Another living room door leads to a world of endless night, warmed by fires from deep within its earth, with flocks of phosphorescent birds flying silently beneath the distant stars. You come here to slide into the warm, thick lakes and pools, and watch the two tiny jeweled moons track across the sky. You wonder if the other side of this world is bathed in endless daylight, if you should try to follow the birds to that light, but the water here is too warm, too delightful.

Plus, you really don’t want to risk going too far from home. You never know how long the return door will remain open.

• • • •

Your mother fell through one of the doors in the kitchen. This was unexpected. Up until then, you’d just assumed that most people couldn’t even see the doors, let alone go through them; you’d had plumbers in to fix the bathroom after the cheetah incident, and they hadn’t seen anything. One friend had noticed the extra doors in the living room, but had assumed they were just some sort of decoration when they didn’t open. And yet, your mother had just leaned against the wall, and slipped.

You’d left your backpack in the living room. You didn’t have time for it. You also didn’t have time not to get it: You knew the world she had landed in—one of ice and snow and giants. She would need water. A sweater. You rushed to the living room to grab the backpack and two of the throws that you kept there. By the time you returned, the door was closed. You pounded on it with your fists, kicked it, searched desperately for the handle, any handle, any way to get this open, before slumping down beside the doorway, leaning against it.

• • • •

You couldn’t stay in your kitchen, not forever. You had to eat, drink, make at least some money to pay for that, to keep the lights on your house. To live. And you wanted to live. You wanted to open more of the doors.

• • • •

Five days later, you got an apologetic email from your mother. Had she by any chance left her cellphone at your house? She remembered putting it into her pocket, but—

Your fingers hesitated over the keys. Behind you, you heard the creak of an opening door.

• • • •

The world you’re in right now is lit by three dim suns, two red, one white. You watch the shifting light on the lake below, listen to the wind, and shiver in the cold. Beautiful, and wrong.

Someday, you are certain, one of those shifting doors will bring you to the right world.

For now, you slip through the door back into your house and start cooking dinner. You can’t wait too long to eat. Doors are waiting.

©2017 by Mari Ness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mari Ness has always hoped that at some point, she’ll find a door that opens to another world, with dragons. Her novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, was recently released by Papaveria Press. Her fiction has also appeared in Tor.com, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, Apex, and previously here in Lightspeed. She lives in central Florida.

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

The Fullness of Time

John Brunner | 23712 words

ONE

“Your people,” said the long-faced Mohawk who managed the mines, “came to what you call the New World hungry for gold. You came looking for fabulous kingdoms—Cibola, Quivira, Norumbega, Texas. And so keenly were you disappointed when you found they didn’t exist, you set about creating them.”

He waved at the hillside opposite, where the mine galleries ran like holes into ripe cheese. Don Miguel followed the gesture with his eyes. Here where he sat with the manager—whose name was Two Dogs—it was cool under the shadow of woven reed awnings, on the verandah of the plain mud-plastered house which served as both home and administrative offices. But there the fury of the sun lay full, and the Indian labourers emerging from the mouths of the galleries with their baskets full of crushed rock, to be tipped into sluices for sedimentation, wiped their dusty faces, swigged water from leathern bottles, and seemed glad to escape underground again.

The heat of the air was such that the world felt silent, although there were always noises: the monotonous creaking of the pumps bringing up water for the sluices, the droning of flies, the cries of the overseers in a local dialect that Don Miguel did not understand. But taken together they constituted no more of an irritation than birdsong. Half a world away from home, Don Miguel was contentedly able to relax.

“More wine?” Two Dogs suggested, raising the jug from the table between them.

“Willingly,” Don Miguel returned, holding out his glass. “It’s very good. You grow the grapes locally, I understand.”

Two Dogs nodded, pouring for his visitor and himself. “Our climate here in California is very good for vines. This cheese also is local—take a piece. The flavours mingle well.” He set down the jug and offered a large baked-clay platter on which a wedge of yellow cheese stood, stuck with a silver knife.

“Speaking of which,” he continued, “the very name of California is an instance of what I mean. Am I not correct in saying that it commemorates the legend of a non-existent queen named Calaf, whom your early explorers fondly believed to rule over an island populated exclusively by women?”

“I’ve heard some such tale,” Don Miguel agreed, and tried a crumb of the cheese; finding it to his liking, he cut a piece as big as his palm and bit into its edge. “Indeed, I seem to recall that there was opposition to the adoption of that name for this province on the grounds that ‘California’ was notoriously mythical and no one would wish to emigrate and settle in a place that didn’t exist.”

He chuckled. To his surprise, he realised after a moment that Two Dogs looked the reverse of amused, and broke off, hoping he had not committed a major social gaffe. Apart from the very much Europeanised Mohawks whom he had met in Londres and New Madrid, he had made the acquaintance of hardly any Indians, and here—three thousand miles further west on the American continent than he had ever travelled before—he was only sketchily informed concerning customs, etiquette, and formal behaviour. Of course, dealing as he did with traders and industrial middlemen from the east, Two Dogs must be used to foreign manners in his guests, but there was no point in imposing on his goodwill. Don Miguel counted himself lucky to have run across him—he was an interesting talker and surprisingly widely read in view of his rather humdrum profession.

He said now, “In that case we can be grateful that the name was selected. Perhaps that’s what kept down the number of immigrants to a level we can tolerate . . . after a fashion.”

“Do you not have many European residents hereabouts?” Don Miguel asked.

“A handful.” Two Dogs shrugged. “Some of whom one is compelled to put up with, such as the priests; some of whom are acceptably useful in the community, such as our two doctors—one of them more than the other, because he’s prepared to listen to what we can tell him about our local herbs and medicinal plants while the other won’t pay attention to any remedy not vouched for by a journal from Londres with the Imprimatur on it! And a few others, most of whom do your people no credit: Several are dishonest and many of them are drunkards.”

Don Miguel stirred uneasily in his chair. He said, “Well, of course, from the point of view of you Mohawks, we must seem—”

“Correction,” interrupted Two Dogs with a thin-lipped smile. He was a very striking man to look at, taller than Don Miguel and with a rangy leanness that made his visitor think of a fast racehorse. “I’m only by courtesy a Mohawk—about an eighth of my ancestry, as near as I can work out. The rest is mostly Sioux, Apache, and Paiute. And that’s another thing which annoys me about you Imperials. For example, take your own case. You bear a Spanish name, you speak a variety of Spanish rather heavily salted with English, French, and even some Dutch phrases—but are you Spanish?”

“I see what you mean,” admitted Don Miguel. “I am mostly Spanish, but my father’s mother was French and my mother’s mother was half-English. Which is presumably why one talks about Imperials rather than Spaniards nowadays—apart from the fact that we were displaced from our homeland, remember.”

“And are you the only ones?” Two Dogs sighed. “You talk of me as Mohawk. Look at a map. Mohawks of a pure strain can be found only some two and a half thousand miles to the east of where we’re sitting. The rest are diluted across the continent thanks to the mere accident which resulted in your cementing an alliance with them and giving them the necessary horses and guns to set forth on a wave of conquest. It could as easily have been—oh—their neighbours the Mohicans, couldn’t it?”

Something seemed to sound a warning bell in Don Miguel’s mind. Was it pure coincidence that Two Dogs had put that hypothesis to him, a time-traveller who might give an authoritative answer?

It must be! No one for a thousand miles was supposed to know the identity of this visitor from Londres. That was the whole point of coming so far for his furlough—to get away, even if only for a month or so, from the oppressive demands of his job and the nightmarish recollection of what a single error could do to the fabric of reality.

Damn Two Dogs, anyway. The last thing Don Miguel wanted to think about right now was the question of speculative time. Since the appearance of Father Ramón’s recent article, “An Analysis of the Probable Implications of Cross-Temporal Human Contact,” no one at the Headquarters Office seemed to have talked about any other subject, and with his own unsharable burden of secret knowledge, Don Miguel was unable to enter into argument with the enthusiasm practically all his colleagues displayed.

But . . . Well, yes, it could have been the Mohicans instead of the Mohawks. Very easily. If Chief Tallfeather had been killed in the Battle of Twin Creek instead of Chief Storm, the latter—who was nearly as brilliant a strategist—would almost certainly have received the crucial embassy from the Governor of New Madrid. And from then on things would have continued in pretty much the same fashion.

I might even be here, now, being told off for calling some quasi-counterpart of Two Dogs a Mohican when he was actually Comanche, Pima, and Shoshone!

Determinedly he drove the subject from his mind. He was sick of it, and what he’d been through last New Year was still giving him nightmares months afterwards. He made a vain attempt to turn the conversation by asking about the miners across the valley, but Two Dogs was equally set on sticking to the subject . . . and, being the host, won, thanks to Don Miguel’s desire not to cause offence.

“It was, of course, in one sense, at least, a fortunate accident. One need only look south past the Isthmus to see what the alternative might have been—hm?”

Embarrassed, Don Miguel cast around for a neutral reply. It was always upsetting for an Imperial citizen to be reminded of the fate of the great civilisations of Central and South America, sacrificed on the altar of European greed. He said at last, “There has never been change without suffering—it’s the way of the world, I’m afraid.”

“And as you people saw it, it might as well be the provincials who suffered,” suggested Two Dogs. “You spoke a moment ago of emigrants who might decide not to come here because the name you’d given the area suggested that it didn’t exist. I find myself tempted to enquire: What emigrants? Are they emigrants who are crouching and sweating in the mine galleries yonder? Or are they natives, dispossessed from their old hunting-grounds and compelled to adopt this miserable means of earning their living?”

What have I stumbled across—some revanchist fanatic? Don Miguel was tempted to revise his opinion of Two Dogs from start to finish on that basis alone. But he held his peace, and cut another slice of cheese.

“As I see it,” the mine manager pursued, “you conceive of yourselves as looking from the centre outwards. Europe is the heart of the world and the other continents are—what would one call them?—its outskirts, perhaps. Of course, in one way that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy; at least, over the past five hundred years, a great many local squabbles in Europe have created changes out of all proportion here, in Africa, and in Asia. It’s taught people like me to be grateful for small mercies. We don’t seem to have had any big ones for quite a while.”

The words dug into Don Miguel’s mind like the touch of an eagle’s claw. Feeling little premonitory tinglings on the nape of his neck, he said, “I’m not entirely certain that I follow you.”

“Don’t you? Well, here’s an example of what I’d call a small mercy. Suppose your Empire hadn’t won its greatest victory. Suppose there hadn’t been a strong power in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and—like Eastern Europe—the area had split into petty principalities, because you’d lost the Netherlands before you could use them as a launching-site for your invasion of England, and when the Moors reconquered Spain you had nowhere to go. Wouldn’t we Indians then have had four or more gangs of Europeans fighting over our hunting-grounds like dogs over a bone?”

Don Miguel was by this time convinced that he was being needled. In a last desperate effort to prove that his identity was not suspected, he said, “It’s an interesting argument. Obviously you’ve made a study of history.”

“So have you,” Two Dogs said, and looked him straight in the eye. “You are a Licentiate of the Society of Time, aren’t you?”

TWO

Don Miguel uttered a long succession of colourful curses in the next few seconds—but under his breath. Finally, he reached for the wine-jug and refilled his glass without asking permission. Not looking at the other, he said, “Can’t I get away from it anywhere?”

“What do you mean?”

“I came to California for a rest. Simply for a rest! I got so sick at home of being shown off like a circus animal—looky looky, here’s a time-traveller, let’s make him do some tricks to amuse us! How in the name of all that’s holy did you find out?”

Two Dogs gave a dry chuckle, “I see. With your typically European parochialism, you thought that this was the end of the world. Well, it’s true we’re a long way from Londres, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t hear the news eventually. On your way to California, you passed through New Madrid. The Prince of New Castile, who’s the Commander of your Society, happened to be in residence at his palace there, making one of his infrequent visits to the territory he nominally governs. You called on him to pay your respects. And . . .” An expressive shrug. “There can’t be very many people in the world by the name of Miguel Navarro.”

“By the infernal fires, isn’t there anywhere on Earth I can get away from it all?” Don Miguel, scowling terribly so that the cicatrised sword-slash on his cheek nearly vanished as the muscles under it tightened, slapped his open palm on the table in an access of fury.

“Away from what?”

“I told you! From these sensation-seekers who always seem to descend on a time-traveller like flies on rotten meat—and they’re no less unwholesome, I tell you straight!”

“Well, that at least I can promise you you’ll be spared,” Two Dogs said. “Our code of good behaviour doesn’t allow us to offend visitors in that fashion. In fact, out of deference to your wish for anonymity, I’d drop the subject but for one thing.”

“That being . . .?”

“By now, Don Miguel, there isn’t anywhere on Earth you—I mean Europeans generally—can ‘get away from it all.’ You’ve scarred the face of the planet far too deeply. They tell me that even the sterile snow of the South Pole is now littered with the refuse of the explorers you’ve sent to it.”

There was a pause, and Don Miguel again stared across the valley towards the mines. Honesty compelled him to accept, watching the half-naked workers there whose brown skins were turned nearly yellow by the coating of mineral dust they wore, that in the fierce summer heat they must be suffering torments of thirst and weariness. Yes, it was regrettable, but true: The greed of Europe had caused a lot of harm to people who didn’t deserve it.

He sighed, and drained his glass. This time Two Dogs filled it anew.

“And there’s another more personal reason for not acting as I suppose I ought to,” he went on meditatively. “I am, as you deduced, very much interested in history. To forego this chance to talk with an expert from the centre of world affairs is something I’ll only do if you’re insistent.”

“As you like,” Don Miguel conceded, comforting himself with the reflection that—judging by what Two Dogs had so far said—questions from him would be on a higher level than those from, say, the Marquesa di Jorque.

“You’re kind,” Two Dogs said formally. “In the event, let me ask if you agree with the proposition I advanced a short time ago. Is it not probable that without Imperial dominance over the nearer coast of Europe, and your virtual monopoly of trans-Atlantic sea-trade, we’d likely have had you, and the French, and the Swedes, and the Dutch, and even the English, transporting their local differences to this continent and battling over them? And we poor Indians might have been ground between them like corn between millstones.”

There could be no doubt that he took his hypothesis seriously; under the shadow of the reed awning, his face was as grim and ominous as one of the idols carved by his Central American cousins. Don Miguel marvelled at the change which had overtaken him, and wished achingly that it could have been any other subject than this which had arisen between them. He had taken quite a liking to Two Dogs since their first meeting three days earlier, and had looked forward to a lot of idle small talk to distract his mind from the things that preyed on it.

But here, now, Two Dogs had gone to the core of his anxieties as directly as a skilled engineer sinking a mineshaft to a lode of ore.

Well, there was no help for it. But tomorrow or some time soon he’d be advised to move on to some even more remote townlet, possibly even register at an inn under an assumed name . . .

With yet another sigh, the deepest of all, he said, “Oh . . . Yes, I suppose it’s possible. Though personally I doubt whether any would-be conqueror with so small an economic base as a single member-country of the Empire—even France, which is relatively large and fairly wealthy—could have established a permanent bridgehead here if the Indians had united to oppose them.”

“Oh, I think so,” contradicted Two Dogs. “I think what you would have done would be to take advantage of our poor internal communications and the linguistic distinctions which divided us. Some of us might have been tempted to throw in our lot with one party, some with another, until in the end we were as war-torn and antagonistic as you.”

“You have an excessively cynical attitude towards Europeans,” Don Miguel objected mildly.

“I contest that. Reverting for a moment to the role you’ve enforced on me, and thinking in Mohawk terms: Was it not a cynical action to single out one small tribe among so many and equip it to embark on a grand crusade clear to the Pacific? That’s how we learned to be cynical, if there’s any truth in your charge! Not that I’m admitting the term is justified. It’s more that being allied with the Empire is like being brother to a hot-headed adventurer. Any day a feud in which he’s embroiled himself may explode in the face of his family without their knowledge or desire.”

Thinking of the currently strained relations between the Empire and its coeval super-power the Confederacy of the East—and, still more alarming, of the recent rumours that westernised scientists in Cathay were on the track of time apparatus of their own, which might lead to who could guess what consequences in view of the widespread Oriental belief that the material world was maya, illusory!—Don Miguel was compelled to give a nod of acquiescence.

“It is mainly because of that,” Two Dogs added after a pause, “that I’m infringing our code of good manners. It’s disquieting to learn that a supposedly innocent tourist, here to rest and relax in the California sunlight, is actually a time-traveller. Particularly in view of . . .”

“What?” Don Miguel, alerted by he could not say what reaction of his subconscious, made the word crackle like a firearrow.

For a long moment Two Dogs seemed to be struggling towards a decision. Suddenly he drained his wine glass and slammed it down hard on the table.

“I’ll show you! Because—though it shames me to admit it to a foreigner—what I’m talking about is too much for one man to endure knowledge of by himself!”

Without further explanation, he jumped to his feet and strode down the hillside shouting at the top of his lungs for Tomás, his dour chief overseer. Some of the labourers on the far side of the valley heard, paused in their work, and looked to see what madness had come over their master. More slowly, Don Miguel followed him, screwing up his eyes with the shock of the strong sunlight. By the time he caught up with Two Dogs, he had located Tomás and was giving him orders in the incomprehensible local Indian language. He ventured to ask what the sudden fuss was all about, but the only answer he got was, “Wait and see!”

Much puzzled, indeed greatly disturbed, Don Miguel was forced to contain himself while Tomás went in search of two burros with saddles fit for gentlefolk. The sketchy outline of a pattern was forming in his mind, and the ingredients that made it up were alarming. Clearly it had been his admission that he was a member of the Society of Time which triggered the Mohawk’s outburst—but what possible connection could there be between the arrival of a Licentiate of the Society in this back-of-beyond community, and the sudden transformation of a mine manager into a man apparently struck into a frenzy of panic?

After a wait of only a few minutes—which felt to Don Miguel like a miniature foretaste of eternity—Tomás returned with their mounts. Then, wrapping his old but bright serape around him, he set forth ahead of them along a narrow dusty trail, walking steadily with the aid of a staff.

Don Miguel decided after the first twenty yards that he too would rather be on foot. The jogging of the burro was so unlike the motion of a horse as to make him uncomfortable. Besides, it was nearing the middle of the day and the flies were troublesome; he would have preferred to have both hands free to swat at them. But a glance at Two Dogs persuaded him not to mention these facts. The Mohawk wore the expression of a man driven by demons.

The trail wound over the shoulder of the hill, becoming in places a mere footpath, but the burros were at least sure-footed and Tomás marched ahead stolidly. Once past the hillcrest, beyond the limit of the land that the miners had so far attacked, a smaller valley lay baking in the sun. Only the trail winding across it suggested that men had ever disturbed it. That apart, it might have lain as it was since Creation Day.

“There!” Two Dogs said, causing his burro to fall back alongside Don Miguel’s. He raised his arm and pointed to a rocky slope ahead.

After careful scrutiny, Don Miguel said, “I’m afraid I see nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Well, then, come and look more closely,” Two Dogs grunted, and kicked his mount into a reluctant trot.

What in the world could have so shattered the man’s normal Mohawk imperturbability?

It appeared that Tomás also knew what they were heading for; he turned aside and scrambled straight up a steep rocky incline, while Two Dogs on his burro had to take a more roundabout route. Abandoning the animal to wander, he jumped down at the overseer’s side and the two of them together leaned against a large round boulder, nearly man-high, about which, at first glance, Don Miguel saw nothing remarkable.

Then, as they strained against it, it rocked back and forth. Suddenly it gave, rolling through half a circle and coming to rest in a cup of ground which fitted it so accurately it could scarcely have been accidental. Its displacement revealed an opening in the slope behind. A dark, roughly square opening. The mouth of a tunnel.

The mouth of the gallery of a mine!

Don Miguel felt horrified understanding dawn. Hastening to join the others, he stared down the black tunnel—seeing nothing because of the contrast with the bright sun—and demanded, “What is this? I didn’t think you’d begun to mine this valley!”

“We haven’t,” Two Dogs confirmed. He seemed to have recovered his habitual self-possession, and his tone was sardonic. “But there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that someone has. Over the past few years, we’ve frequently been puzzled by the fact that what ought to have been rich lodes of ore running for a considerable distance have stopped short, contrary to the predictions of our geologists. And now, a matter of a month or two ago, we stumbled across this concealed mine gallery. And inside we found . . .”

He stepped for a moment into the low opening, having to stoop to avoid the roof, fumbled on the ground and turned back to Don Miguel, holding out something on his palm. Don Miguel took it, stared at it, and felt the world tremble around him.

THREE

His Highness the Prince of New Castile, Commander of the Society of Time, ran his fingers through his short black beard. He stared for a long while at the object on the table in front of him, and at last spoke.

“Well, since you seem to have a gift for turning up uncomfortable odds and ends, Navarro, I suppose I’ll have to inquire what you make of this—this bit of scrap metal. I know you take it seriously enough to have abandoned your furlough in California, but I must say it seems to me an innocuous enough object . . . All right: Why the song and dance?”

Don Miguel drew a deep breath and held it for the space of three heartbeats. He didn’t need anyone to tell him he was going out on a limb; he would have been far happier if he had been able to consult with one of the Society’s theoreticians—ideally, with Father Ramón himself—before making his suspicions public. But Father Ramón was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Commander was here in New Madrid. And the discovery which Two Dogs had made was already two months in the past . . .

He licked his lips, very conscious of the piercing eyes of the many notables assembled in this, the Prince’s audience chamber, and above all of the stare of the other Licentiates who were present. On his brief stopover at New Madrid en route to California, he had made the unpleasant discovery that the members of the Society based here tended to resent his being awarded the Order of the Scythe and Hourglass at such an early age and attributed it not to anything he had done to merit the honour but to undue influence at the Headquarters Office of the Society in Londres.

If this gamble of his were to prove unwarranted . . .

But he shut away that possibility from his mind. Far too much was at stake for him to consider the risk of later personal disadvantage. And, anyway, was it not worse to be a prince than a commoner in so many ways? Imagine living in the public eye twenty-four hours a day, so that one could not rise from bed, conduct one’s toilet, eat a meal, without scores of hangers-on in attendance! One could barely even enjoy a love affair, come to that, without the crudest details filtering down in garbled form to the palace kitcheners!

Accordingly, he set his shoulders back, looked his Commander straight in the eye, and spoke out boldly.

“What I make of it, sir, is this—though I’m open to correction. I think it’s a breach of the Treaty of Prague.”

Well . . . there was the bombshell. And it certainly went off to great effect. The Prince himself blanched and jerked back in his chair, while everyone else without exception paled and voiced wordless exclamations.

“By whom?” the Prince demanded sternly.

“By the other party to the Treaty—I assume. Either that, or else we have here the first recorded case of temporal interference by a time-traveller from some place not bound by treaty obligations.”

There was a terrible silence in the audience chamber.

“You realise,” the Prince said at length, “that this is the most serious allegation you could possibly make?”

Would I did not! But Don Miguel kept that thought to himself, and merely nodded.

“You have grounds?”

“I believe so, sir. Having conducted such on-the-spot investigations as were possible to me without time apparatus, I could come to no other conclusion.”

The Prince put out one hairy-backed hand towards the harmless-looking chip of metal on the table before him. At the last moment before completing the gesture, he drew back as though from a sleeping snake. He said, “Clear the hall! At once! And if anyone breathes a word of this, I’ll have his head off his shoulders before nightfall—is that clear? Executioner! I know there are at least three incurable gossips whose tongues rattle day and night like dry peas in a bladder—have three stakes ready by this afternoon to mount their heads on!”

The man who stood by the door, black-masked and anonymous, bowed to acknowledge the order, and not a few of the courtiers shivered.

“Now get out!” barked the Prince. “All of you except Don Miguel, and make it fast!”

The Treaty of Prague, Don Miguel had often thought, was the most fragile bulwark ever interposed between man and the forces of primal chaos. It was like a plug of wet paper in the mouth of a volcano—yet it was the best they could contrive.

At the first moment when Don Carlos Borromeo discovered how time might be converted into a direction like other directions so that men might make voyages along it, he—whom some called very wise, others incurably bitter and disillusioned—had clearly foreseen the uses to which selfish and greedy men might put this miracle. Allegedly he had considered trying to suppress the knowledge altogether, but in the end, after consultation with his confessor, he had been compelled to accept that someone else might stumble on the same principle who was less sceptical about the ability of mankind to cope with powers beyond their previous dreams.

But, looking at the contemporary world around him, he had been faced with those intransigents who wished to re-conquer Spain, the old heartland from which Christian civilisation had been driven by its virile Islamic rival, and who would not have been above sending back an army to ensure that alteration of history. Similarly, there were those in the fretful, unstable Confederacy of the East who resented being part of a heterogeneous political alliance, and who would rather have seen Lithuania, or Poland, or Prussia, or even Russ, become an unquestionably dominant national power free from the need to consider the wishes of competing local interests.

Putting time-travel into the hands of men with such a background would be like smoking a tobacco-pipe in a powder factory.

The best that could be hoped for, he decided, was that the technique of time-travel should be administered by men with proper scruples, aware of the responsibility their knowledge imposed on them and bound by oaths to obey the instructions of the wisest and most far-seeing officers who could be found to lead them.

Accordingly, having appealed to the Pope for a commission that empowered him to dictate to princes, kings, and emperors under pain of instant excommunication, he set up the Society of Time and pledged its founding members to employ time-travel solely for the benefit of mankind, to increase the sum of human knowledge and not to interfere with the past.

Nonetheless, what he was afraid of happened: Almost at once, a party of lunatics began to agitate for the re-conquest of Spain. For a while it looked as though madness would overcome sense. Then, however, the balance was tipped back in favour of rationality. The Confederacy let it be known—discreetly, delicately—that they too had gained the secret of travelling in time. If an Imperial army went back to oppose the Moorish invasion of Spain, it would be met by corresponding forces determined to keep the status quo—for the Confederacy regarded the Empire as quite strong enough already without the retrospective addition of the Iberian peninsula to its territory.

It was whispered, but never proved, that Borromeo himself had given his secret to the Confederacy. At any rate, it was for the best; the Empire came to its senses, proposed Papal arbitration, and with the assistance of the Vatican’s finest legal experts drafted the agreement which was ultimately signed in 1897 in the handsome and ancient city of Prague. The Treaty was Borromeo’s last legacy. Three weeks after it was signed, he died of a chill caught in the mists of Poland, for it was a bitter winter that year.

Perhaps, thought Don Miguel, he had died content. But it seemed unlikely. He must have suspected that sooner or later the Treaty by itself would prove inadequate, even though it plugged the dyke for a little while. He might not have foreseen that greed would so rapidly corrupt the very Licentiates who were supposed to be chosen for their honesty and integrity—yet Don Miguel knew, better than any of his colleagues bar Father Ramón, how near simple greed had already come to oversetting the fabric of history. Over and above that, though, there was the even more significant point that Borromeo must have been aware of: Time apparatus was intrinsically so simple that eventually other scientists whose governments were not signatories to the Treaty would chance on the principle involved . . . or be sold the information by someone venal, someone with a grudge, someone mentally unstable.

Was the discovery which Two Dogs had made the first evidence in the twentieth century that some other power was due to develop time-travel? Would it prove to be an expedition from the Mediterranean Caliphate that was involved, or—more likely, considering the geographical location—temporal explorers from the Middle Kingdom of Cathay? Or intruders from Çipangu, those islands off the eastern coast of Asia whose people so greatly admired the Empire and who sought to turn their geographically analogous location into a politically analogous independence from the mainland culture of Cathay which had dominated virtually their entire recorded history?

Don Miguel doubted these latter possibilites. He was a great believer in the principle enunciated by William of Occam, the “razor” which advised one not to multiply assumptions more than necessary. And here one did not have to assume.

One merely had to deduce . . .

“It’s good steel,” he said, pointing to the object on the table between himself and the Prince. “It’s the bit of a rock-drill, cracked in half. I’ve established beyond doubt that we’ve never mined that valley. And history shows us no one who knew how to make good steel and who passed through that part of California prior to our discovery of the New World. In company with Two Dogs, the mine manager, I searched the locality for several miles around. We discovered the traces of at least nine mine galleries, all bar the first caved in. Two Dogs has extensive grounding in mineralogy; he was able to estimate that these mines were worked approximately a thousand years ago. I spoke to several of his foremen and overseers, and they took me to see abandoned galleries of their own where what should have been extensive veins of ore had turned out to stop short instead of continuing for the predicted distances. It was that which finally drove me to the inescapable conclusion that we’re here faced with an illegal intrusion into the past.”

The Prince gave a slow nod of comprehension, his face bleaker than winter in Norroway. He said, “By whom and for what purpose, Navarro? What’s your view?”

“Sir, I can only interpret what I’ve seen for myself.” Don Miguel licked his lips. “I read the situation like this. It’s notorious that these hills are among the richest mineral deposits in the world. I think the intruders decided to exploit them—perhaps for some metal, such as silver, which is essential to time-travel. In the present, this was impossible, since we’re already at work there, but in the past, of course, the area was empty bar a few naked Indians with no interest in mining. Perhaps they were, or are, not very experienced in geology, and took it for granted that when they had finished their work it would suffice to rely on natural causes to wipe away the traces of what they’d done. After all, California is earthquake country, and in a thousand years you’d expect mine galleries to cave in of their own accord. It must have been sheer chance that preserved the one in which Two Dogs discovered the drill-bit.”

“So this thing”—the Prince picked up the scrap of steel—“has been lying in the ground for a thousand years! Yet it’s barely marked with rust, isn’t it?”

“As I said, sir, the mouth of the cave—of the mine gallery, rather—was closed by this balanced boulder. Earth and grass-roots had made an almost perfect seal around it, and the interior of the cave was dry. In any case the climate there is equable.”

For some moments the Prince was silent. His dark eyes searched Don Miguel’s face. At length he said heavily, “I wish it were not so, Navarro, but in my judgement you’ve made out a case. We’ll get time apparatus to California as quickly as we can, and see if we can secure objective evidence.” He rose to his feet. “Meantime, we’ll also notify Londres, and bring out our most highly trained investigators. I’m not questioning your analysis of the situation, but you must appreciate that an unfounded charge concerning a breach of the Treaty of Prague could ruin the precarious trust we’ve managed to nurture between ourselves and the Temporal College.”

“Sir,” Don Miguel said with feeling. “I pray that I am wrong! For how much more disastrous it will be if I’m right!”

 FOUR

Before the discovery of humane drugs to unlock the gates of truth in the human mind, there had been a torture—used even by the Holy Office—consisting in the placing upon the subject of a large wooden board, and in turn upon the board a succession of stones of increasing weight, so that in the end a stubborn man would be crushed like an insect beneath a boot.

For Don Miguel the next several weeks were like a session of such torture. And he was not the only one to suffer.

The first of the stones was a light one, and added nothing more to his burden of anxiety than simple confirmation of what he had already suspected. It had been rumoured for some while that more gold and silver were circulating in the Confederacy than their known resources could account for. The logical deduction was that new and so far secret lodes had been located, perhaps in the inhospitable unexplored wastes of Siberia.

Present information made it seem likelier that for “Siberia” should be substituted “California” . . .

The second stone was heavier and more painful. A metallurgical expert compared the mysterious drill-bit with samples of other steels, and reported unequivocally: Made in Augsburg! It was of a type commonly used in the Confederacy, but hardly ever encountered elsewhere—certainly not in California, where a number of the trace constituents, notably cobalt, were unavailable.

The third, and heaviest, was a report from a team of men whom Two Dogs—at Don Miguel’s urgent request—had set to searching the route between the site of the poachers’ mine and the nearest convenient harbour on the coast. One of the earliest questions to have arisen, naturally, had been this: How did the poachers reach the site where their traces had been discovered? It was of course possible to operate a time apparatus to transmit its occupant spatially as well as temporally—all that was required was an adjustment of the dimensional relationships dictated by the power-carrying bars in its frame. So long as the gravitational potential at the arrival point was roughly the same as that at base, no harm would come to the traveller . . . although transmitting from a hilltop to a valley resulted in the messy dispersal of surplus potential energy and the death or injury of the victim.

Yet it seemed improbable that one should voyage blind across a thousand years and also displace oneself by several thousand miles; it would be a fearful leap into the dark, and there was the risk of the shape of the landscape having been changed by erosion or earthquake, so that one might arrive inside a hill, or in mid-air. It seemed more likely that the poachers must first have gone back in time at some place whose topography they could establish beyond doubt, and then at least a scouting party would have proceeded to the mining site by more conventional means.

And the men dispatched by Two Dogs, following the most obvious route to the sea, came across a ship’s timber buried in the sand, of a form not commonly employed by the aboriginal inhabitants and in a condition to suggest it had been lying where they found it for some such period as a thousand years . . .

Driven almost to a frenzy by the cumulative pressure of this news, the experts sent out from New Madrid and Londres by the Society of Time redoubled the pace of their preparations. Transportable time apparatus was brought to the lonely Californian valley under habitual conditions of secrecy—few people outside the Society ever saw an actual time apparatus, because it was so dangerously simple, being composed only of bars of silver and magnetised iron in precisely determined relationships. It might have entered someone’s head to make a model of what he had seen, with the disturbing consequence that the model might work.

Accordingly, a small town of canvas marquees bloomed in the sunlight, and the labourers and their families went by incuriously for the most part, occasionally pausing to watch, but not often, as yet one more manifestation of the madness of these Europeans intruded into their quiet, private world.

On the evening of the day when suspicion turned to cruel certainty, Don Miguel encountered his friend Two Dogs again. Head bowed, he was plodding up the slope of the hill that separated the modern mining area from the one established by the poachers and feeling as though the limping world were using him for a crutch, when he heard his name called. Raising his eyes, he saw the Mohawk waiting on the path ahead, face inscrutable, prepared for any news.

“Well?” he said as Don Miguel approached.

“We found them,” Don Miguel said. “At the summer of A.D. 984. They killed a Mohawk Licentiate who showed himself to them. And they used a gun.”

Two Dogs gave a slow nod. He said, “So your millstones are going to grind again, and this time we shall be ground between them.”

“What do you mean?” Don Miguel said. But he was too weary to be genuinely interested in the reply.

“I should have thought it was obvious. Did you not imply that you’ve found what you expected—poachers from the Confederacy?”

“Yes, there isn’t any doubt. They were seen, as I said. What’s more, they were overheard talking.”

“In that case, it follows that there’s been a breach of the Treaty of Prague—am I not correct?”

“It would appear so. I’m not an expert, though, and we’re waiting for Father Ramón himself now, who’s supposed to be on the way from Londres, so I won’t commit myself.”

There was a pause. At last the Mohawk said musingly, “You are a strange people—you really are! When it came to matters of honour and justice, my ancestors didn’t wait to consult some far-distant expert. We made our own minds up and acted in accordance with the principles we believed in, heedless of the consequences to ourselves. And I’d always been told that this was also the hidalgo code, the reason why it was the Spanish among all the competing European intruders who managed to form a successful alliance with the Red Indians rather than the French or the Swedes.”

“True enough.” In spite of his tiredness, Don Miguel felt a stir of interest provoked by the Mohawk’s argument. Cultural analysis was inevitably a subject he’d had to delve into deeply before completing his training as a time-traveller.

“So why are you not acting to set right the injustice that’s been done to you?”

“Because it’s not only ourselves we must consider,” Don Miguel pointed out. “This is a temporal matter. One ill-judged action might so deform history that we ruled ourselves out of existence—and you along with us.”

“While admiring your scruples,” Two Dogs murmured, “I still find your behaviour puzzling. I’ve been reading up on matters connected with time-travel recently, since this business broke out, and it seems to me that you could wipe out the poachers, couldn’t you, at the end of their stay? I mean, when the changes their mining had wrought in the landscape corresponded to what can be seen in the present day.”

“Oh, possibly! In fact, that may well be the course we have to adopt in the end. But . . .” Don Miguel shook his head unhappily. “We’d risk creating a closed causative loop, you see, where a future action entailed past consequences, and this is something so dangerous one dare not commit oneself before examining every alternative.”

Although if the alternative is the death of a king . . .

But he firmly suppressed recollection of that New Year’s night when he had had the truth of what he was now saying so fearfully demonstrated.

“If they’re allowed to get away with it, though, surely these poachers will be tempted to repeat what they’ve done? Elsewhere, I mean. The next place you run across them may be in your coal-mines at home, or the Cornish tin-mines, or some other place where you can ill afford to lose what you have close to the heart of the Empire.”

“But they won’t be allowed to get away with it. A Papal interdict will certainly follow concrete proof of their interference, and if necessary the whole Confederacy could be put under ban.”

“And this, you think, is a powerful enough weapon to dissuade men who’ve already shown they’re willing to tamper with the past? If they’re unafraid of material consequences due to meddling with history, are they likely to be impressed by the threat of spiritual displeasures from one old man sitting on a throne in Rome?”

“You’re a hard-bitten sceptic, aren’t you?” Don Miguel exclaimed. “Are you . . .? No, I’m sorry; it’s not something I’m entitled to ask.”

“Ask what you like.” Two Dogs shrugged. “By my tradition, to call a man a friend is to make him a brother, and a brother is permitted to know anything about you.”

Don Miguel still hesitated. Eventually he said, “Well, I was actually going to ask whether you’re not a believer.”

Two Dogs gave a wry chuckle. “You are, I take it?” he countered, and without waiting for the foregone reply continued, “As a matter of fact, I am, but not a Catholic. Not even what you would regard as a Christian, come to that. Oh, I was raised as one—sent for the ordinary priestly education of your European mission-schools—and I was taught a lot of facts about the world which our own tradition ignored or overlooked. But there were so many contradictions that ultimately I was driven out of the fold by my conscience.”

Don Miguel had vaguely heard that there was a revival of pre-contact faiths currently developing among the Mohawks—correction, echoing Two Dogs’s own words many weeks ago: among the Indians whom the Imperials casually subsumed all under the one tribal name of “Mohawk.” But this was the first inkling he’d had that Two Dogs himself might belong to this movement. He said, with great curiosity, “What were these—these contradictions?”

“Oh! I couldn’t reconcile your commitment to a Prince of Peace with what you did in the way of massacring my ancestors—nor could I reconcile your ability to travel in time with your unwillingness to go back and see for yourselves the true nature of the Saviour you worship.”

That had, more than once, troubled Don Miguel also. He said with feigned certainty, this time hearing Father Ramón in his memory, “But we have visited the time of Jesus’s ministry. A new Pope, for instance, is always permitted to hear Christ speak following his accession, and over nearly a hundred years the Church has survived any consequences. Whatever you may think of Christ as a Son of God, surely it follows that He was a very exceptional man.”

“Perhaps. But exceptional in his day and his environment. I’ve been told that my great-great-grandfather was the most skillful buffalo-hunter his tribe had ever seen. Fine! Marvellous! But since you brought guns to this country, who can live by killing buffalo? Admire him, I may—but am I to imitate him now that the buffalo are rare to the point where they have to be protected?”

Don Miguel found he had no immediate answer to that. He shrugged and wiped his face, and at once Two Dogs was contrite. Stepping forward and putting a hand around his friend’s shoulders, he said, “But I’m being cruel, keeping you out in the hot sun arguing about abstracts! Here, we’ll go and sit on my verandah for a while and drink a few glasses of our local wine that you seem to enjoy so much, and talk about things which don’t involve the fate of the universe.”

Don Miguel gave a wan smile. “That,” he said feelingly, “would be a very welcome relief.”

 FIVE

Don Arturo Cortés came to the isolated valley, who still had the look of a man haunted by the ghost of himself, and who had not been a friend of Don Miguel’s until he saw that ghost; Don Felipe Basso came, and said that the Lady Kristina was sad at not having seen Don Miguel again but had had to leave Londres suddenly upon her father being appointed Ambassador to the Confederacy of the East; Father Ramón came, and unlike the other two showed no sign of strain from his appalling journey, night and day from New Madrid in the huge cushion-wheeled transcontinental express-wagon which stopped only to change horses and pick up provisions.

Don Miguel saw the last relay of horses as they were led away from the wagon. They looked ready for the knacker.

These three, the night of their arrival, forgathered with Don Miguel and the two experts from New Madrid who had taken temporary charge of the investigation until their seniors from Londres could reach the spot; of these, one was an Inquisitor. They met in one of the huge marquees set up by the Society’s technicians just over the hill from the mines which Two Dogs managed. There was a breeze at nightfall, and their shadows—cast by flaring lamps on to the white canvas—moved in eerie fashion as they sat around their table.

Don Rodrigo Juarez had personally conducted the expedition to the year 984 on which the existence of the poachers had been proved. Though he had been born and bred in New Castile rather than Europe, his reputation stood high, and since what had happened last New Year to Don Arturo Cortés, men had begun to speak of him, rather than Don Arturo, as Red Bear’s probable successor in the key post of Director of Fieldwork. Don Rodrigo was aware of what was being said, and moreover was pleased to find that Don Arturo was, too; this—to Don Miguel’s way of thinking—endowed his manner with an unpleasant smugness almost as nasty as Don Arturo’s former overweening arrogance.

But there was no time now for personal likes and dislikes. There was the very structure of history to be underpinned.

“What we found,” said Don Rodrigo, “left absolutely no room for doubt. We saw the poachers at work, and we heard them talking among themselves. To avoid anachronism, we were clothed—unclothed, rather, ha-ha!—like Indians such as we know frequented California in those days. I called for a volunteer to show himself at their encampment, and a Mohawk Licentiate from New Castile, named Roan Horse, came forward. Without questioning him, they shot him dead. I agree with Don Miguel Navarro: We have a crime far greater than mere murder, foul though that may be. We have indubitably a breach of the Treaty of Prague!”

He sat back, jutting out his jaw. He was a large man whose mother had been Scots, and his gingery hair and lantern chin stemmed from her family.

All eyes turned to Father Ramón, who had been listening with total concentration to Don Rodrigo’s views. Keenest of all to hear the Jesuit’s opinion was Don Miguel; his mind was aching almost physically.

“Not proven,” said Father Ramón at length.

“What?” All of them said it, except Don Felipe, who was keeping himself to himself in such distinguished company.

“Not proven!” Father Ramón turned his bird-like head to regard them one after the other. “For various reasons. Not the least compelling grounds for withholding judgement can be found here: A breach of the Treaty is of its nature an irremediable disaster to be avoided at all costs. Luckily one has not yet been committed.”

“But—!” Don Rodrigo expostulated. Father Ramón’s thin hand went up to interrupt him.

“No, hear me out, if you please. Before leaving Londres, I checked your qualifications. They’re admirable. But they omit one important item. You’ve never attended the School of Casuistry in Rome; if you had, you’d have gone through a gruelling course of disputation on this very subject of a breach of the Treaty of Prague. Believe me, when the Vatican’s experts framed that Treaty, they did not do so in a hurry, or in such a way as to leave loopholes.”

“I’m not talking about sneaking through a loophole!” flared Don Rodrigo. “I’m talking about poachers who’ve torn it up and spat on the shreds!”

Calmly Father Ramón stared him down. “You should know better that that,” he said at length. “In your position you should. Don Miguel’s reaction is forgivable; in the ordinary course of his career, he would not be due to attend the School of Casuistry for another five years or so. Your colleague, however, I’m also surprised at.” He bent a frown on the Inquisitor. “How say you, Brother Vasco?”

The man shifted on his hard bench. He said, “I’m reserving my judgement until I can consult a text I needn’t name. There’s no copy nearer than New Madrid, and I confess my memory of it has worn thin.”

The Jesuit pursed his lips. After a moment he shrugged. “Well, there’s no need to prolong the argument, is there? Don Arturo, if I recall correctly, has attended the School, and should by now be bursting with the right solution.”

They looked at Don Arturo, their heads moving as though pulled by strings, and saw him pass his hand shakily across his face. “Solutions to the present problem I have none, Father,” he said. “But I know one thing almost beyond doubt.”

“Which is . . .?” prompted Father Ramón.

“There hasn’t been a breach of the Treaty of Prague because such a thing is virtually inconceivable.”

Don Miguel glanced at his friend Don Felipe, and received in return a look which said, “I’m out of my depth here.” He turned back to the Jesuit.

“I—I seem to have been over-hasty,” he began, and got no further. Smiling, and looking as usual when he did so like a parchment-covered skull, Father Ramón shook his head.

“Save your apologies, my son. They’re not justified. An intent to break the Treaty is perfectly conceivable, and it appears that this is what you’ve chanced upon. Let me clarify the situation in the terms which I think the judge of a Papal court would use.” He raised one bony finger.

“Imprimis: The death of Roan Horse. He was an extemporate, was he not? His death in the past was due to causes whose prime origin lay in the present, because he was shot by another extemporate, and the effects began to be manifest at a moment in present time which was demonstrably later than the moment of his departure. It may also be later than the point from which the—the poachers, as you graphically term them, departed to the past. This is not certain, but the evidence we now have indicates it.”

“But Roan Horse was one of my best men!” Don Rodrigo burst out. “And they shot him down, in cold blood!”

“There are penalties for murder,” said Father Ramón. “It is not, however, a crime with which the Treaty of Prague is concerned, and that is what we’re presently discussing.” Another finger went up.

“Secundo: There is a particular clause in the Treaty under which you, Don Rodrigo, are no doubt champing to frame an indictment. It states, in sum, that neither signatory to the agreement will act in such a way in past times as to cause a disadvantage to the other party discernible in present time. It makes no reference to hypothetical future disadvantage and since mining operations have not even yet spread from this valley to the adjacent one where the poachers dug their shafts it is only future disadvantage that’s in question.”

“Ridiculous!” fumed Don Rodrigo. “All right, they took their ore from shafts dug in the next valley, not in the one we’re at present mining—nonetheless, the mine manager says his men have frequently found that veins of ore stopped before they should have done, causing them to go back and dig fresh galleries when they ought to have been able to extend the existing ones for a long way yet. If that isn’t ‘disadvantage,’ I don’t know what is!” He leaned back and concluded with bad grace, “Much as it pains me to contradict an expert of your calibre, I feel you’re overlooking something.”

“Nothing,” the Jesuit murmured. “Or rather, not I, but the experts in disputation who have spent the better part of a century thrashing out possible interpretations of the Treaty.” He lifted a third finger. “I say further that tertio disadvantage discernible in present time was not caused to us because it was not at the present time of discovery of these veins of ore that Don Miguel Navarro interpreted the facts to indicate previous interference.”

Even Don Felipe gaped at the appalling casuistry of that remark. As for Don Miguel, he could not restrain himself from an explosive—but fortunately wordless—reaction. Father Ramón turned to him.

“I know what you’re thinking, my son,” he said. “You’re wondering why, if this is so, we should not ourselves systematically go and rifle the prehistoric ages of the territory now occupied by the Confederacy, so as to render their lands poor and barren. I can answer that immediately. It wasn’t done. And why should it be done? What profit is there in it? If we did it to them, they’d do it to us, and each would wind up with the other’s resources at the cost of infinitely greater effort.”

He switched his penetrating gaze back to Don Rodrigo. “What you’ve either forgotten or never realised, my son, is that the Treaty of Prague is unique. Alone among the agreements and covenants made between men or nations throughout history, the punishment for breaking it is laid down not by the men who drafted it, but by God who created the universe. And for that reason it is worse than foolish to expend your efforts on showing that a breach of it has been committed. It is very nearly sinful. Putting it bluntly: The Treaty of Prague can be broken, but—must—not!”

He marked each word of the last phrase with a tap of his bony fist on the table, and in rhythm with the sounds the colour in Don Rodrigo’s cheeks heightened until it was vivid as a sunset. Seeing him blush, Don Arturo smiled for the first time that Don Miguel could remember since the terrible New Year’s Eve of the current year.

To save himself from having to dwell on his private recollections of that dreadful night, Don Miguel said aloud, “But some action must be taken, nonetheless!”

“Indubitably,” the Jesuit agreed. “May we hear your own proposals concerning it?”

Don Miguel stumbletongued. He said, “Why—why, I have no definite plan. Indeed, I’ve been wondering whether our action may not be foreordained! Two Dogs suggested that we should step in and drive away the poachers at the point where their work had resulted in exactly the traces which he and his men discovered, and reflecting on the idea I began to suspect that a closed causative loop must exist which gives rise to precisely those traces we’ve found in the present.”

“This is highly probable,” agreed Father Ramón. “Evidently something prevented the poachers from exhausting the entire mineral resources of the area, and the likeliest explanation is that they were interrupted and compelled to abandon their work.”

“In that case,” Don Rodrigo said, “our course of action is plain. We must at once send back an armed party to effect this—this compulsory abandonment of their mines.”

“Not at all,” Father Ramón countered. “We must go back, certainly—but to speak with them, learn who they are, and instruct them to depart.”

“Speak with them?” Don Rodrigo echoed scornfully. “But they shot down Roan Horse on his mere appearance!”

“I doubt if they will fire on an obvious extemporate. Especially if he wears the cloth.”

That took a moment to sink in. Brother Vasco was the first to react. “Father, you’re not thinking of going alone!” he exclaimed.

“No, indeed. By way of imprinting a little lesson on a certain party who has—not for the first time—acted too impulsively, I shall go in the company of . . . Don Miguel Navarro.”

He did not switch his gaze to Don Miguel until he had finished speaking. The latter, not much relishing the prospect of facing the poachers under these circumstances, but resigned to the idea since it came from Father Ramón, gave a shrug.

“As you say, Father. It appears that I’ve started a panic which isn’t justified by the legalities of the matter.”

“Good.” Father Ramón glanced at his watch, and stood up. “It’s late, and after my journey I’m somewhat weary. Tomorrow I’ll require the use of your time apparatus, and we’ll settle the problem—God willing—once for all.”

• • • •

“What’s been decided, Don Miguel?” came the soft question from Two Dogs. He was sitting out late on his verandah; on the floor at his feet Conchita, his serving-maid and mistress, was picking ethereal chords from her cuatro, a small four-stringed guitar. He had offered her to Don Miguel a couple of times when first the latter came to stay here, but that was so far from the customs of home he had refused automatically, and the offer had not been repeated. Subsequently he had looked again at Conchita, who was slim, berry-brown, and graceful as a dancer, and regretted the fact. He would have welcomed the mere physical relief of her company as a key to the sleep which worry had so often denied him these past several weeks.

He sat down wearily in the guest-chair, and waited while Two Dogs dismissed Conchita with a gesture; she went like a shadow, silently. Then he said, “There’s been no breach of the Treaty.”

For a long moment Two Dogs did not comment. Finally he said in a tight, controlled voice, “How’s that possible? Surely they don’t doubt there’s been interference with the past!”

“You’re too practical a man to follow the casuistry of it.” Don Miguel shut his eyes and rubbed at them to relieve their tiredness. “I can barely make it out myself. But what it comes down to is that instead of going back and driving the poachers away, we’re simply going to pay them a—a sort of social call. Father Ramón and myself. What good that will do, Lord knows.”

Two Dogs laughed harshly. He said, “Indeed you Europeans are strange beyond comprehension. There’s no consistency in your behaviour! You travelled half a world from home, risked your lives, drove away my ancestors from their hunting-grounds for the sake of gold and silver—and now, when someone is filching away what you spilled so much blood to secure, you say you’re going to have a little chat with the thieves!”

Don Miguel was too fatigued to frame a reply. There was a short silence. At length Two Dogs rose to his feet.

“Well, I suppose it’s a small consolation that your millstones won’t be grinding us after all. I’ll bid you good night, then, and wish you sharp wits in your discussion with the poachers. Though if it were up to me, I’d counsel more substantial weapons.”

SIX

As Don Miguel had expected, the valley had changed so little in a thousand years that it was not incongruous to find a mining encampment when they walked over the brow of the hill behind which, to escape immediate observation, they had chosen to arrive. There had no doubt been earth movements; there were subtle differences in the outlines of some of the nearby slopes. But the identity of the landscape at the two time-points was unmistakable.

He felt a stir of admiration for the magnificently simple stage-management of Father Ramón’s plan. When they emerged on the crest of the hill and let the poachers see them, the impact was instantaneous. Watchful guards raised guns to their shoulders—checked—and let the muzzles slowly fall again, within the space of a dozen heartbeats. Indians such as were to be expected at this moment of time would no doubt have been fired on to drive them away, as had happened to Roan Horse. But the sight of Father Ramon in his sombre habit and Don Miguel wearing—at the Jesuit’s insistence—the jewelled collar and star of the Order of the Scythe and Hourglass conspicuously glittering on his plain shirt: This was a message to inform the poachers without words that their presence and their plans were known.

They waited, a light breeze touching their faces, while news of their arrival spread. Don Miguel had his first chance to study the tented settlement, the mouths of the galleries, the sluices and sedimentation troughs and all the rest of the equipment, so like the mine which Two Dogs managed that he had to keep forcibly reminding himself he was more than a thousand years from home.

Work stopped. Harsh barking orders brought men out of the mine galleries to blink in the sunlight. Overseers—not a few of whom, Don Miguel was dismayed to see, wore the uniform of the Temporal College—snapped at each other and their subordinates.

Still the newcomers waited on the crest of the hill, for fully five minutes in the baking sun of late summer, until at last a big, burly man detached himself from the ant-milling crowd and came to meet them, accompanied by two of the uniformed overseers.

“Good day, sirs,” he said in heavily accented Spanish. “I do not have to inquire the reason for your presence. Permit me to present myself: the Margrave Friedrich von Feuerstein, High Brother of the Temporal College and Deputy Master of the Wenceslas Brigade. I presume your honour to be Father Ramón of the Society of Time?”

The Jesuit inclined his head. “We’ve met before. Though it seems you’ve forgotten the fact. In Rome, at the School of Casuistry. My class was departing as yours arrived.”

“Indeed, of course!” the Margrave exclaimed, and extended his hand. “Strange that our acquaintance should be renewed here and now!”

Father Ramón ignored the proffered hand. He said, “No, it’s far from strange. Are you in charge of this—this venture?”

The Margrave folded his arms across his chest and drew back a pace, scowling. He said, “Yes, I’m in charge. Why?”

Father Ramón reached inside his habit and produced a rolled parchment. With his bird-claw fingers he undid the fastening and shook it out; from its bottom a heavy red seal swung on a ribbon. He seemed suddenly to speak in a voice other than his own, holding the scroll up as though to read from it but looking all the time at the Margrave.

“This,” he said, “is a copy of a Papal bull. Do I have to tell you that it is the bull De tenebris temporalibus?”

The Margrave smiled. He was a large-jowled man with grey hair; the smile made plump hummocks of his cheeks, on the crest of each of which showed a red network of broken veins. He said, “I defy you to show cause for invoking that bull.”

“I am not required to show cause.” Father Ramón stared unblinkingly. “You have twelve hours, present time, in which to remove your men, your equipment, and all traces of your presence here up to the point which we decree, on pain of summary excommunication by the powers vested in us under the aforesaid bull. I read!” He snapped the nail of a forefinger against the stiff parchment so that it sounded like a beaten drum, and still without looking away from the Margrave began to recite.

“De tenebris temporalibus et de itineribus per tempus leges instituendae sunt. In nomine Deo Patri Filio et Spiritu Sancto dicimus et affirmamus . . .”

The whole world seemed to hesitate to hear the rolling Latin syllables ring out through the hot still air. Concerning the shades of time past and concerning journeys through time laws are to be instituted. In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost we say and affirm . . . Don Miguel felt his lips move on the familiar words he had never before heard invoked.

“We say and affirm that the means of travelling in time is a gift bestowed by divine ordinance and therefore to be used only in accordance with divine law, subject to regulation by bodies of upright, just, and sober men, to conditions now or in the future laid down by Papal decree, and to the expedient judgement of those agents now or in the future appointed by us for the enforcement of those conditions. Let there be agreements between nations and before God to employ the means of travelling in time for the benefit of humanity and the increase of human knowledge that we may the better comprehend and admire our Creator, and let there be penalties imposed upon those who for evil ends pervert and misuse this mystery.”

The Margrave waited patiently until Father Ramón re-rolled the parchment with a crisp rustle, and then he said merely, “Tell me, Father—where is this ‘evil’ you’re alleging?”

“A thousand years hence, and you’re its victim, sir.”

The words in themselves meant nothing to Don Miguel—and little enough, apparently, to the Margrave—but the tone in which they were uttered held a ring of indefinable menace, and he shivered. Noting his reaction, Father Ramón gave a faint smile.

“Be easy in your mind, my son,” he murmured, “It will be clear in a little while.” And to the Margrave he added, “Is there somewhere we can speak in confidence?”

“Yes! Yes, in my pavilion below. I’ll see we’re not disturbed or overheard.” The Margrave made to turn, but lingered for a long moment trying to read the expression on the Jesuit’s face. Failing, he led the way down the slope. The two overseers demanded what they should tell their men, and he instructed them curtly to halt work until given further orders. It was plain that they were puzzled by this, but glad of a rest, for the heat was scorching.

“Now explain yourself!” the Margrave said, letting fall the door-flap of his ornately striped and scalloped pavilion. It bore the arms of the Temporal College: a silver clockface on black, with the order of the figures running in reverse around the dial.

“It seems to me you have more to explain than I,” Father Ramón countered.

The Margrave shook his head vigorously and plumped into a chair. “You’ve invoked the bull. I can choose to co-operate, or I can choose to resist. Persuade me.”

“As you wish.” Father Ramón set his sharp elbows on the table separating them. “To begin with, contrary to what I imagine you’re thinking, we’re not here to complain about your pilfering a few tons of ore from ground which is to become Imperial territory by treaty with the Mohawk Nation several centuries from now. Right now there’s probably a sounder legal claim for freebooter’s rights in the ore than for Mohawk rights. They were nowhere near this part of the world—I correct myself: they are nowhere near, and indeed I doubt they could be found to exist as a precedent tribal unit.”

The Margrave was by this time unashamedly bewildered. He made to speak, but the Jesuit raised his hand.

“Hear me out! On the subject of the Mohawks, then: It’s no secret that they’re the Empire’s uneasiest allies. But this doesn’t imply that they’re automatically friends of yours, does it?”

The Margrave’s face set into an impassive mask, and he sat up very straight in his chair. Don Miguel attempted to look as though he knew what Father Ramón was talking about, but he was as confused now as the Margrave had been a moment earlier. What had the Empire-Mohawk alliance to do with this shameless temporal poaching?

“Now it’s true that you’re perilously close to a breach of the Treaty of Prague. If it weren’t deliberately framed to be unbreakable in all foreseeable circumstances, you’d have broken it already. We want to keep the Treaty intact.”

“Doubletalk,” the Margrave said curtly, and Don Miguel found himself inclined to agree.

“Are you determined to act in breach of the Treaty of Prague?” snapped Father Ramón.

“Of course not! As you just said, it’s framed so as to be virtually unbreakable.”

“But you think the Empire-Mohawk alliance is not,” said Father Ramón.

There was a long, cold silence. Finally the Margrave rose to his feet. His voice had changed completely when he spoke again. It was heavier and somehow rang false, like a counterfeit coin.

“Very well. I’ll clear the site and call the operation off.”

Whatever had happened, it was effective, but Don Miguel still hadn’t figured out why when he found himself charged by Father Ramón to supervise the removal from this day and age of all the equipment used by the poachers, an order grudgingly acceded to by the Margrave, who looked as though the sky had fallen on his head. The clerks provided fair copies of the equipment manifests so that Don Miguel could confirm they were taking back every item whose presence might linger through a thousand years, and he checked them off until his head was swimming: picks, drills, sieves, shovels, chisels, crowbars, saws, hatchets, axes, guns, shot, powderhorns . . .

The sluices and sedimentation troughs were chopped into fragments and piled on a vast bonfire, the tents were struck and rolled, the pit-props were hauled out from the mine galleries by teams of men tugging on ropes, and even the nails were torn loose and bagged for return to the twentieth century. Scowling, cursing, but compelled to obey, the poachers sweated at their tasks and at last, in the gathering dusk, faded back to where they had come from, leaving the valley once more as empty as it had been.

Except for Father Ramón and Don Miguel, who now at last had the chance to utter the question which had plagued him all day long.

“Father, what on Earth did you do to convince the Margrave? I simply don’t understand anything about this—neither what they were up to here, nor what you meant by your references to the Mohawk alliance, nor why they packed up and went home so tamely when there were two of us and over two hundred of them . . .!”

“I’m hardly surprised,” Father Ramón said wryly. “I confess I hadn’t expected to be shown so spectacularly right. I was more guessing than certain of the reason for this ridiculous adventure by the Confederacy.”

The last of the poachers vanished into the gloom; there was the inevitable wash of heat, like the opening of a furnace door, which accompanied temporal displacements. Father Ramón waited like a statue for long seconds. Then he said, “Have you means of making a light?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me, then.”

He started across the now deserted valley towards the mouth of the gallery which Two Dogs was to show to Don Miguel a thousand years hence. It was of course closed by the counterpoised boulder, but that was freshly placed, and the shifting of the earth which would later call for the strength of two men to make it roll had not yet occurred. Father Ramón set his shoulder to it and gave a gentle heave; before Don Miguel could come to his aid it had settled into the adjacent cup-shaped depression.

“Strike your light,” the Jesuit said briskly.

Don Miguel complied, holding up the fizzing fusee at the full stretch of his arm.

“Now carry it into the gallery. Search carefully along the walls and floor right to the end.”

Much puzzled, Don Miguel did so. He found nothing except various footmarks left by the workmen and the scars of their excavating tools. And, as he was coming back, he realised what Father Ramón was implying.

“It’s not here!” he exclaimed, emerging into the open and tossing the burnt-out fusee away.

“You mean this?” Father Ramón felt in a pouch at his waist and produced the cracked drill-bit which Two Dogs had given to Don Miguel, the key to the whole affair. “No, I didn’t think it would be. Before my departure from Londres, I made some inquiries of—well, of certain trusted agents. I’m prepared to state that this drill-bit was purchased in Augsburg over the counter of an ordinary shop, the winter before last; I mean, naturally, in our own time. And it was purchased by a Mohawk.”

He tossed it up and caught it again. Dim twilight glinted on the shiny broken edges. “Replace the stone, please, my son. I think we should go back and put a few questions to your affable acquaintance the mine manager—Two Dogs, isn’t that his name? I think we’ll discover he’s not merely what he claims, but someone of far superior calibre and very much more dangerous.”

Bending to replace the boulder, Don Miguel said explosively, “But I knew already! I had the equipment manifests in my hands, and I checked that the number of drill-bits returned to the present was the same as the total brought here!”

“Yes, I watched that phase of the operation with considerable attention. You have many admirable qualities, including the ability to see the grand pattern from a few clues and hints, but I can’t say that attention to small details is your especial forte . . . is it?” But his eyes were twinkling as he uttered the formal reproof.

“Come now, hurry along. We’ve already had a long day here, and now we must go back and face another.”

SEVEN

It was always the strangest quirk of time-travel that a man might go back a thousand years to a later time of day, and feel below the conscious level of his mind that he had travelled forward, while by returning from a late hour to an earlier one he would feel he had travelled back. It was dizzying, as usual, to emerge from the evening dusk of the year 984 to the high noon glare of 1989.

Several Licentiates of the Society were gathered to greet them, headed by Don Rodrigo, who—possibly to atone for his discourtesy towards Father Ramón last night—did not at once pester them with questions, but urged them to come sit in the shade of an awning and ordered wine and food to be brought.

That was very welcome. Having gulped down a long, refreshing draught of wine chilled by standing in a mountain stream, Don Miguel felt prepared to cope with the world again. Rejecting Don Rodrigo’s solicitous suggestion of a pipe of tobacco with a word of thanks, he glanced around to see who precisely had assembled to hear Father Ramón’s report. Don Arturo was here, naturally, and so was Don Felipe; so too was the Inquisitor, Brother Vasco. But in addition, several—indeed, if memory served him, all—the Mohawk Licentiates present at the site had come together, and their faces were like stone masks.

Of course. Roan Horse was killed, and he was one of their company.

Don Miguel started as he realised that that episode had not even been mentioned during their confrontation with the Margrave.

That was something the Mohawks here would not enjoy being told.

“Well now, Father Ramón!” Don Rodrigo said importantly. “What news have you brought?”

“The affair is dealt with,” the Jesuit said. “The poachers have ceased operations and the matter is closed.”

There was silence. Everyone was expecting him to say something more, even Don Miguel. When at length it became clear he had no intention of doing so, Don Rodrigo said feebly, “But—”

“But nothing, my son. I told you: The matter is closed.”

The people around exchanged startled glances. On the fringe of the group, Don Miguel saw one of the Mohawk Licentiates whisper to a friend, and then slip away. For a moment he let his gaze follow; then an outburst from Brother Vasco drew back his attention.

“But—Father! You haven’t even told us who they were!”

“A group of misguided adventurers from the Confederacy. Unmasked, they went home like whipped curs, their tails between their legs, and will certainly not trouble us again.” Don Miguel could detect that Father Ramón was forcing himself to be patient, but equally sympathised with the listeners who wanted more positive information.

The same Mohawk whose friend had whispered to him just now shouldered through the group of Licentiates and confronted Father Ramón. “That’s not good enough!” he barked. “What about the death of Roan Horse?”

“The identity of the man responsible is known. We shall demand full recompense from the Confederacy.”

A buzz of comment was going around now, like the droning of flies in the hot sunlight. The Mohawk spoke again.

“That’s disgraceful! What compensation is adequate for the life of a good friend and a brave man?”

There was a chorus of agreement. Don Felipe put in, “And surely, Father, the fact stands: Taking the ore they stole is temporal contrabandage!”

“To the infernal fires with your gold and silver!” the Mohawk cried. “We’re concerned with the fate of a man who was brutally shot down!”

It was then that facts clicked together in Don Miguel’s mind. The only excuse he could offer himself for having overlooked the obvious twice in one day was that he was confused by tiredness.

“Felipe!” he snapped, bounding to his feet, and Don Felipe Basso whirled to face him. “Sword—quickly! And with me over the hill!”

He shoved his way unceremoniously through the circle of Licentiates, and Felipe—not knowing why, but impressed by his friend’s urgency—came after him.

“Wait, you!” the Mohawk snapped, and strode to block Don Miguel’s way. “We want to hear from you about all this, as well as Father Ramón!”

Almost, Don Miguel unsheathed his sword, but as yet he had only suspicion to go on. Instead he placed one palm flat on the Mohawk’s chest and hooked a toe behind his ankle, sending him sprawling. The sudden commotion had bewildered everyone, but he saw that Don Arturo appeared to have kept his head, and barked at him.

“Hold this man—call for help and detain his companions! Stop ’em chasing us over the hill! One of them has slipped away, though, and we may already be too late!”

Not waiting to see how well the instruction was obeyed, he gestured to Don Felipe and began to run up the hillside track towards the home of Two Dogs. Behind him there was a shouting and a stamping of feet, but he dared not glance behind for fear of losing his footing on the rough pathway.

Breasting the rise after a short eternity, he found he was indeed too late.

Alongside the mud-plastered house where he had spent so many nights as a guest, he saw Tomás standing inscrutable in his colourful serape. He was shading his eyes to look towards a cloud of dust on the road that led to the sea—and in that cloud of dust could be discerned two horses, not the stumbling burros of the locality, but horses of the finest racing stock, being ridden as though to outpace the devil himself.

“Miguel!” panted Don Felipe, drawing abreast of his friend. “What’s all the fuss about?”

“The birds have flown—and there’s the whole continent and ocean for them to hide in!” Don Miguel pointed. “Go call some men together, give them the best horses we have, and send them in pursuit. One of those fugitives is Two Dogs, and he’s probably the most dangerous man in the world!”

Don Felipe threw up his hands in hopeless bewilderment, but turned back. Instantly he uttered a wordless exclamation, and Don Miguel also swung round. With a sinking heart he saw that down in the other valley there was a flashing of steel, and some of it was smeared with red. Red, too, was spreading across the dark habit of the bird-like figure seated in the shade of the awning.

“Father Ramón!” Don Miguel cried, drawing his sword. Together with Don Felipe, he launched himself back down the slope.

• • • •

“He told me himself!” Don Miguel mourned as he set aside the leather water bottle from which he had slaked his dreadful thirst. “He told me in plain words, and fool that I am I didn’t understand!”

“Told you what?” Don Arturo demanded eagerly. He and all the other non-Mohawk Licentiates were hanging on Don Miguel as though his words were pearls of perfect wisdom. They were leaning on him as they had been used to lean on Father Ramón.

But Father Ramón was dead. And he was not the only one.

If they knew how little I’ve actually learned, how much is simply a guess . . .

Don Miguel dared not speak that thought, though. For better or worse, he was the man on whom this crisis turned.

Wearily he said, “He told me that calling him a Mohawk was like calling me a Spaniard. There’s Spanish blood in my veins all right, I speak Spanish and bear a Spanish name, but I’m not a Spaniard. I’m a citizen of the Empire, and I may well never set foot in Spain before I die. So too with a Mohawk like Two Dogs; an accident of history makes us call him by the name of a tribe whose hunting-grounds are three thousand miles away, and in his veins there’s more blood from other tribes, equally proud, mortally resentful that thanks to us intruders from Europe their nationhood, their identity, has been effaced. We say Mohawk because it was our alliance with the Mohawk Nation which enabled that tribe to become the dominant power on the continent, subjugating the Crees and the Cherokees and the Apaches and the Sioux . . . Oh, scores of them, scores of separate peoples! But it wasn’t their intrinsic superiority which brought about their supremacy. It was the guns we gave them, the Arab horses that could out-gallop the little ponies the other tribes owned, the wagons that carried their armoury of powder and shot on the trails to the west! Suppose we’d become the major power in Europe thanks not to our own skills and persistence, but to being patronised by the Moors—would you expect the French and English and Dutch to have any love for us, hey?”

He glared fiercely around the circle of his audience to see if they understood what he was telling them.

Don Rodrigo, his left arm in a sling thanks to a wild slash by one of the Mohawk Licentiates they had had to put under arrest, uttered a doubtful grunt. “You say they hate us because they’re not all genuinely Mohawk by extraction. But I’ve worked for years with—with native Licentiates at New Madrid. Certainly some of them were Mohican rather than Mohawk, and others were Oneida and Seneca and Algonquin. But it never seemed to make any difference; we all got along very well.”

“These Indians are proud people,” Don Miguel said with a sigh. “They do not show that they are humiliated—it goes against their code. But they remember that they’re humiliated, and sooner or later comes the day when they set the score to rights.” He glanced to his left, spotting the bowed weary figure of Brother Vasco approaching. “But don’t take my word unsupported. In a moment we may hear solid facts instead of mere deductions.”

Leaning forward, he called to the Inquisitor. “Is he alive?”

“The man who tried to stop you going after Two Dogs?” Falling into a chair, Brother Vasco nodded. “Yes, he’s not too badly injured to talk. And what I’ve learned is . . . Well, Don Miguel, I must admit it frightens me!”

“Explain!”

“They told me before I saw him that his name was Red Cloud. But when I gave him some of my relaxing draught and, as is customary, asked him how he was named to find out whether his tongue was yet unlocked by the drug, he said he was called Bloody Axe.”

“And is he talking now—freely?”

“Yes, that’s what I came to report to you.”

“Then let’s go to him, quickly, and get at the truth behind this horror!” Don Miguel jumped to his feet and strode towards the tent where the injured Mohawk was being interrogated. Angered at having to leave his chair just after sitting down, Brother Vasco followed.

The modern techniques in use by the Holy Office were, as Don Miguel had discovered while investigating the matter of the contraband Aztec mask, extremely refined, extremely subtle, and almost unbelievably efficient. Knowing this, however, scarcely lessened the eerie impact of watching and hearing a man who consciously would have preferred to die rather than give away his secrets yielding full and detailed answers to every one of Brother Vasco’s questions.

Two Dogs? That was an alias, the injured man said without being able to stop himself; his tribal name was Hundred Scalps, but he had most commonly been known as Broken Tree. At that, one of Don Rodrigo’s New World-born—but non-Mohawk—Licentiates drew breath sharply and identified the name as that of a brilliant student at the Mexicological Institute several years before.

That fitted . . .

The information obtained from Bloody Axe pieced together with the clues dropped by Father Ramón before he was killed to make a terrifying unity in Don Miguel’s mind. As usual in human affairs, the crisis turned out to be rooted in the festering compost of greed.

The Confederacy of the East was only “of the East” in the sense that that was the direction in which it lay relative to the Empire. In fact, its expansion was barred on that side, partly by the contrary expansion of Cathay with its old, stable, and highly evolved civilisation, partly by the hostile winters which yearly locked up so much of the territory it nominally controlled. It was small consolation to suspect that mineral wealth beyond the dreams of avarice might be discovered in Siberia, when it was buried under earth frozen to the hardness of rock. By contrast, the Empire’s alliance with the Mohawk Nation gave them free access to a continent over most of which the climate was equable and whose resources had been charted at leisure during the past century and a half.

But—as Two Dogs had correctly pointed out to Don Miguel—just as there were still a handful of revanchists in England who railed against the Spanish domination of their island, so too there were Indians who resented being crammed into a single tribal category. To be a genuine Mohawk, like Red Bear, was to be the heir of a great and proud tradition; to be a courtesy Mohawk was to be deprived of both traditions and national identity.

Over the past decade or so, a group of fanatical Indians out here in the very far west of North America had sought means to drive a wedge between the uneasy allies. A first and obvious step was to approach the Confederacy and let it be understood that they and their supporters would switch their allegiance in return for help. But the Confederacy was reluctant, seeing little profit for themselves in having friends on the Pacific coast of America when they had no seaboard of their own on that ocean; the Cathayans had exercised sound strategic judgement and barred all the available routes.

What persuaded them in the end was the offer of secret survey data, prepared on behalf of the Empire by Indian mineralogists like Two Dogs, showing rich veins of gold, silver, and copper ore as yet unexploited by the Imperial miners. A single season’s work in the past could yield hundreds of tons of valuable metal. The gamble was worth taking, especially since the Indians promised to conceal all traces of their interference. Even if by mischance some of them eventually came to light, they argued, the only consequence would be to show the world the truth about the flimsiness of the Empire-Mohawk alliance, which would splinter, and at least some of those splinters could be picked up by the Confederacy.

In return, the Indians were to be supplied with arms and money enabling them to declare a new independent state of Shasklapima, with its frontier on the Sierra Maestra, extending from Nootka Sound in the north to the southernmost tip of the California peninsula.

At least, that was the ostensible goal of the operation. In fact, as was known only to a small inner group of conspirators, there was no intention of concealing the Confederacy’s theft of ore from the past. The real plan called for the deed to be pinned squarely on the perpetrators as soon as possible, and Don Miguel’s arrival in New Madrid on his way to spend a furlough in California suggested an ideal opportunity.

But for the fact that Father Ramón’s agents had traced the purchase of the broken drill-bit and reported it as having been bought by a Mohawk—a Mohawk subject, rather—the outcome would have been precisely what the Indians expected, especially in view of the panicky shooting of Roan Horse. A formal charge of temporal contrabandage would have been brought, and tried in a Vatican court. The only possible verdict must be one of guilty, and the Confederacy would be ordered to give an undertaking that they would never again attempt a similar operation.

Whereupon the Indians would produce evidence upon evidence that they had broken their pledge. All over the continent there were mining sites cunningly faked by Indian time-travellers, salted with such incontrovertible proof of Confederate responsibility as knives of Augsburg steel, ale-bottles overlooked in a heap of ore-tailings, the odd coin that fell from a worker’s pocket . . .

In the face of the Confederacy’s frantic denials of guilt, more and more evidence of wholesale plundering would be found. Suspicion would mount, accusations would fly, perhaps even the Vatican might be deceived and support the Empire in their dispute. The injured innocence of the Confederacy would no doubt eventually turn to cynicism, determination to be hanged for a sheep rather than a nonexistent lamb.

So the likeliest outcome would be war. The millstones across the sea were to be set grinding again, and from between them—so it was assumed in the grandiose vision to which Two Dogs had dedicated himself—the unwilling subjects of the Mohawk Nation would escape into the freedom they craved. Not for them a piddling little new republic, forced to bend the knee despite its nominal independence before the world’s two most powerful nations—they wanted to see the Empire and the Confederacy destroy each other, and leave Indians the masters of their own continent.

Stunned by the ingenuity of the plan and the narrowness of their escape, Don Miguel put one last question to Bloody Axe. Suppose the plan was discovered and thwarted, as indeed it had been?

The answer struck cold and hurtful as that chopping blade for which he had been named. “We took our solemn oath upon the war-drum. In that event—rather than endure the Empire’s vengeance—we have sworn to bring it down around your ears, and all of history with it if need be!”

EIGHT

“We have to deal with a madman!” cried the Prince.

Don Miguel swallowed hard and gave a nod. “There’s little doubt of that, sir. Two Dogs is a megalomaniac, whose ambitions have wiped out all traces of empathy from his mind.”

“But why didn’t the Holy Office detect this when he was a student at the Mexicological Institute? Surely insanity on that scale must have shown up like a beacon-fire on a hilltop! Brother Vasco, what have you got to say about that?”

Beside Don Miguel, the Dominican shifted uneasily in his chair. In a defensive tone he said, “It appears that the full onset of his condition must be recent. Our investigations have shown that he covered his tracks very cleverly, and used many aliases which he picked according to the old Indian custom whereby a child is named for the first ominous thing the father sees after leaving the birth-teepee. He has been variously known as Broken Tree, Hundred Scalps, Storm of Rain, Puma Claw, and—oh, the list is longer than I can recall. As for Bloody Axe, who passed as Red Cloud when he became a Licentiate of the Society, his career is nearly as chequered. Worse yet, almost sixty of the Licentiates granted their time-licences in New Castile have proved to be associated with one or other of these two.”

“Then we have to deal not only with one madman, but with a conspiracy of lunatics!” snapped Red Bear. His long coppery face was shiny with sweat, and his braided hair hung lank and dull as though tarnished with strain and worry. No one could question his allegiance to the Empire and the Mohawk Nation—he was pure Mohawk for ten generations back—but it was clear he took this crisis as a personal affront. “Moreover it seems there are lunatics outside the conspiracy, too: I mean in the Confederacy! That was what impelled me to take a decision independently of the Full Council of the Society, and authorise the creation of local causative loops in order to bring us together via time apparatus rather than waiting for the slow Atlantic passage of a ship.”

Don Miguel started. Though he had been astonished to find the General Officers here in New Madrid, he had not realised that was how they had made the journey; he had assumed that the Prince had sent for them some time in the past, perhaps a month ago, and they had just reached the city. Borromeo had sternly forbidden the use of time apparatus for present-time journeys, and until now the rule had been obeyed because the effect of travellers arriving fractions of a second before they left could not be calculated.

But this crisis, granted, was without precedent . . .

“I think it right that you should be told,” Red Bear continued, “that we passed news of this calamity via diplomatic contacts to the Confederacy as soon as possible, and some—some fools over there are hindering the co-operation of the Temporal College with us, arguing that for the Empire to crash about our ears would be no bad thing for the Confederacy.”

“They’re out of their minds!” moaned the Prince. His face was grey with pure, unmitigated terror; it was the first time Don Miguel had seen a man’s face literally lose all colour. One day, he suspected, he might look in the glass on rising from one of his sleepless nights and see that same greyness on his own tanned skin.

And expressions of equal dismay were to be found on every side. This assembly was no mere private meeting in the Prince’s chamber of audience; this was the first meeting of the Full Council of the Society to be held in New Madrid since the one called to establish the New Castile Chapter, sixty years ago. And, as Red Bear had just announced to those who were not party to the secret, many of them had arrived here before they left Londres. It was that much of an emergency. There had never been one like it. There might never be another similar—never, until the Last Judgement.

These were the sober, just, and upright men appointed under the bull De tenebris temporalibus . . . and they were quaking in their shoes. In Don Miguel’s imagination the spheres of the universe ground against each other like clockwork after a bucket of sand had been tipped in.

Mastering himself, the Prince put his trembling hands out of sight under the table and spoke again.

“Father Terence!” he exclaimed. “We must turn to you as we formerly turned to your late predecessor Father Ramón—may he rest in peace. What say you about this crisis?”

The man next to Red Bear gave a shrug. He was most of the things that Father Ramón had not been—tall, heavily built, with a thatch of fair hair—and he spoke with a strong Irish accent. This was someone whose name had long been familiar to Don Miguel but whom he had not previously met: Father Terence O’Dubhlainn, newly senior among the Society’s theoreticians.

“Doubtless Father Ramón had laid plans before his murder,” he replied. “And it’s probable they were apt to the situation. Deprived of his unparalleled insight, we must make what shift we can. What is absolutely certain is this: Any attempt to eliminate the Indian, Two Dogs, by intervention from present time—by assassination, for example—will create a closed loop with incalculable consequences and we can regard it only as a last resort. There is no precedent for arrest and execution in past time, and it’s a violation of the most cherished canons of the Society. We must accordingly elect a less dangerous alternative.”

“But there’s no precedent for anything until it’s done the first time!” snapped Don Miguel. For a long moment he feared he had gone too far in voicing the cynical platitude; Father Terence flushed and bridled, where Father Ramón would have inclined his head and spoken with gentle reproof.

“You presume too much!” he barked. “I said we must choose a less dangerous alternative! Before shouting me down, why not hear whether we have yet discovered one?”

Memory of that New Year’s Eve when Father Ramón had knowingly condemned himself to an intellectual torture whose refinement passed imagining—being responsible for actions he had not committed—drove hot words to Don Miguel’s tongue-tip. But he bit them back. He was, after all, twenty years the junior of Father Terence and most of his companions.

After a final glare at his interrupter, Father Terence resumed. “One must grant that it’s a first-order probability Two Dogs will decide to carry out his boast about bringing down the Empire. Accordingly, having analysed the studies he pursued under the name of Broken Tree at the Mexicological Institute and the University of New Castile, and having taken into account what Navarro tells us about his recent conversations on related subjects, we’ve compiled a list of probable points at which he might conclude the Empire’s history was especially vulnerable. We do not exclude the risk of interference in Europe rather than the New World.”

“Have you nothing more concrete to go on than these vague deductions?” the Prince demanded.

“We are lucky to have stumbled on the existence of this secret inner group of oath-bound fanatics. According to Bloody Axe, there were never more than eight or ten of them, all told; the remainder of the conspirators had been fobbed off with this yarn about the foundation of an independent republic and appear to have believed it sincerely.” Father Terence coughed behind his hand.

“Now it’s notorious that only one crucial event stood between us and oblivion in the sixteenth century. Had we not conquered England, had the Armada not made the seas safe for our invasion forces from the Netherlands, it can be logically argued that there would never have been an Empire. The renewed Moorish attacks in Spain would have reduced us to a mere satrapy of the Mediterranean Caliphate.”

There were scowls of impatience around the table. Every Probationer knew what Father Terence was rehearsing at such length; the key period of the conquest of England was invariably the subject of hours of discussion and several examination questions in a first-year course of instruction, and it had been exhaustively studied by time-travellers for nearly a century.

Aware of his listeners’ eagerness, Father Terence cut his discourse short. He said bluntly, “Accordingly, we recommend that all the Licentiates we can muster be set to stand guard over the events leading up to the conquest. If we fail to detect interference by Two Dogs there, we must sift through the lesser alternatives until we discover him. And only if we determine that some alteration has actually been caused in our known history should we attempt more direct action and have him arrested or assassinated.”

“But if he’s already interfered with history—” the Prince began.

“How will we have time to counteract the deed?” Father Terence completed the sentence for him. “It’s a matter of the skewed relationship between time past and time present, sir. There’s a diagonal component of durative time which will ensure a margin of error factorially dependent on the time between Two Dogs’s arrival in the past and the commission of the fatal act. It will probably amount to only a few hours, but that should suffice.”

“And we jump in and sabotage his trick?”

“Ideally, yes, because this will result in the past remaining unaffected.”

“Hmm!” The Prince looked and sounded dubious, but he knew very well he owed his status as Commander of the Society to his royal birth rather than to any special brilliance in the field of temporal science. He turned to Red Bear and broached a different subject.

“What steps have you taken to prevent Two Dogs reaching the past?”

“Loyal men are guarding all our time apparatus, but . . .” Red Bear scowled. “The machines are so simple to build! And even if his cronies haven’t the materials to assemble their own, I wouldn’t put it past those idiots in the Confederacy to help him travel back. We must assume he’s already left; there are only a few grains of sand left in our hourglass, and then the scythe will descend.”

There was a dull silence. The Prince broke it with a bang of his fist on the table.

“Enough talk!” he burst out. “Go find this man, in the name of God, before he wipes us all out of the universe!”

And it could happen . . . All of them knew that in theory; the General Officers and most senior Licentiates such as Don Arturo and Don Rodrigo knew it thanks to the expeditions to parallel branches of time which the Society had conducted over the past forty years—but only Don Miguel knew it in the marrow of his bones, from actual personal experience in this contemporary world. Now that Father Ramón was dead, no one else shared his recollection of that New Year’s night of horror and bloodshed which, in a single bold stroke, the Jesuit had abolished from reality.

That was the kind of action this crisis called for, he was convinced: prompt, direct, incisive! Not this pussyfooting caution, like friends consulting about a game of correspondence chess! He had talked to Two Dogs for long hours, far away in California; he had formulated an opinion of him as a man, as a personality, and he knew this was a man who would not utter empty threats, but someone whose pride would compel him to the ultimate blasphemy of believing that he was uniquely right.

But he had no hope, he realised sickly, of persuading the General Officers to his own way of thinking. The best he could look forward to was the survival of his world by what would amount to a miracle, and resumption of his normal life as a Licentiate with a trifle more experience, and a great deal more notoriety, than the average run of his colleagues.

It was a slender bulwark to erect in his mind against the doom-laden grinding of the heavenly spheres that night by night made his skull ring so loudly he could not rest—only dream terrible and dreadful dreams.

A mere couple of days elapsed—though it felt like eternity—before orders were issued for himself and his friend Don Felipe. Like the majority of the younger Licentiates, their brief was to patrol, in disguise and with feigned identities, the path of events immediately preceding the departure of the Armada from Cadiz. It made excellent sense to protect that of all historical nexi from interference—yet somehow he could not believe that Two Dogs would be so blatant in his attack . . .

Which was why, the evening before his departure, he met with Don Felipe in the drinking-shop currently most popular among the younger members of the Society in New Madrid, and mentioned that he had written a letter.

“To Kristina?” Don Felipe said, his dark eyes darting back and forth between the folded paper and Don Miguel’s face. “Yes, I’ve written also.” Feeling in the pouch at his belt, he produced a letter that might have been the twin of Don Miguel’s except that the superscription was to the Lady Ingeborg. “But do you think there’s any point in mailing them?”

Don Miguel thought of the high-masted handsome trans-Atlantic liners that daily bowed out of the port here into the harsh hands of the ocean gale, and gave a shrug.

“I don’t know. But I felt relieved that I had set my thoughts on paper, even though they may never now be read. How do you imagine it will happen, if it does? Will there be a period of fading, or instant obliteration?”

Don Felipe’s face darkened. “I hope,” he said soberly, “we shan’t know anything . . . But there is one minor advantage, I suppose.”

“What?”

“Well, according to my confessor, a soul in a potential world is classed as limbo-fodder. Which means that if Two Dogs succeeds, we shan’t need to worry about paying for our little lapses from grace. Indeed, we’ll be kicking ourselves for not having had a bit more fun.”

“Do you find that amusing?” Don Miguel said.

“No. No, honestly I don’t. But I think after a few drinks I might—and what better medicine is there than laughter?”

So they called for wine and brandy, and spent their final evening together inventing ridiculous toasts to the end of the world.

NINE

Within the range over which time apparatus afforded fair accuracy—about two and a half thousand years—there were three zones of history which had exercised an obsessive fascination on temporal explorers ever since the Society was founded. One, inevitably, was the beginning of the Christian era . . . but access to Palestine of that day was severely restricted for fear that even the presence of non-intervening observers should draw the attention of the Roman authorities to the remarkable interest being generated by an unknown holy man, and cause Pilate to act earlier than the Sanhedrin, according to the written record, had desired.

The next was the downfall of Rome before the barbarian invasions; the Empire was the greatest single power to appear on Earth since the Roman heyday, and there was always the haunting suspicion that it too might be laid low. If there were clues and hints to aid survival that might be discovered by the study of their predecessors’ fate, the Imperial government wanted to hear them.

And, third, there was the year of 1588 when Britain had been conquered and the existence of the Empire had thereby been rendered possible. This nexus of events was by far the most thoroughly documented period of explorable time. For that reason, when Don Miguel arrived between the crystal pillars along with the iron and silver frame which had transported him four hundred and one years into the past, he could say to himself, “Now the Armada is assembling! Despite the valiant efforts of the English who have raided its ports and tried to burn its galleons, work proceeds apace. The Duke of Parma will have a force of more than a hundred ships; he’ll muster six thousand sailors and twenty thousand soldiers, and waiting in the Netherlands are as many more to launch the invasion of England.”

Put in such concrete terms, the danger he had been sent here to counteract suddenly became unreal. He looked around the gracious, airy, Moorish-style courtyard of the house in which the Society had established a temporary base for the duration of the operation—purely to conceal the arrival of so many strangers, they needed a convincing cover, and could not rely on the isolation far from any town or village which ordinarily served them well enough—and felt a sense of what might be called solidity in the world. How, after all, could one man wipe out the whole of history for four mortal centuries? Two Dogs could scarcely command the weather so that the storm brewing at invasion time favoured the English rather than the Spanish fleet! He’d said so himself to some questioner or other, not many months ago—when? A brief frown crossed his face; then he remembered that it had been during the Marquesa di Jorque’s party.

And he was suddenly afraid all over again. The Society had almost panicked over the matter of the contraband mask; a contraband man, so to speak, could cause infinite harm . . . say, by sowing pestilence among the soldiers, by poisoning their water-barrels, by sinking a ship to block the harbour and allowing the English a chance to attack once more.

Yes, indeed, there were terrible risks to face. But it was imperative not to despair. Leaving the vicinity of the time apparatus, he spoke to the advance guard of Licentiates who had been here for three days already, local time, preparing equipment and collecting news, and was given reassuring answers to his questions.

“Yes, the work’s proceeding normally. No, there’s no sickness been reported. Here are your contemporary clothes and contemporary sword, and here’s a briefing sheet with your instructions and a map.”

The wrought-iron grilles protecting the villa the Society had rented clanged shut behind him, and he set off down the road in the direction of the harbour. Cadiz was a fair-sized city, even this far back, and it was a considerable walk to his destination, especially since the streets were thronged with foot-passengers, pack-animals, and wagons too large for the width of the carriageway, but the more he saw of his surroundings, the better he felt. There was absolutely no difference between this bustling city and what the historical record showed; this was the place that had launched the Armada . . . in spite of the threats of Two Dogs. Besides, this was a more reassuring area of the past to visit than the others he’d been sent to: Imperial Rome, Macedonia under Alexander, Texcoco to replace the stolen mask. He was speaking a form of Spanish, though he had to be careful to amend his accent if he spoke to one of the natives and avoid anachronistic words; he was walking ground some of his ancestors had doubtless also trodden, and for the first time, moreover. He began to imagine that he might once again remember how to be cheerful.

His brief had been short and pointed: He was to go to the harbour and tour it from end to end, hunting for the least discrepancy that might betray interference. Despite the noontide heat, he did so, unchallenged because he was garbed as an obviously wealthy minor noble and wore a sword meant for use rather than show, with a dent or two in the guard at its hilt. Protected from over-close scrutiny by his deliberately arrogant manner, he maintained a slightly bored expression as he walked, but in fact he was marvelling at the spectacle. Those galleons with their high proud masts, those gun-ports ready to snort death, those tidily drilled soldiers carrying their kit aboard by platoons, all those hogsheads of pickled meat and barrels of water and biscuit, all those great wagonloads of powder and shot—real! Solid! Unchanged from what they should have been!

Three hours passed, and at last he dared to let himself hope. Here, at least, the effect of anything Two Dogs might have tried was not apparent. Possibly he had failed in his endeavours; it was risky for untrained travellers to wander about the past—perilous enough, indeed, for the Society’s handpicked Licentiates. But that was being over-optimistic. More likely, he’d realised that the Society would hasten to patrol this weakest spot in the Empire’s history and chosen a second-best point of attack. But there was nowhere that offered a satisfactory alternative. With this particular episode protected, the Empire was like a man wearing good, sound body-armour; immune to stabs in the heart or belly or lungs, he need fear only injury, not certain death.

His spirits lightening as he reached this conclusion, and extremely thirsty after his three-hour tour of the harbour, Don Miguel turned into a humble wine-shop whose proprietor almost fainted to see such a finely-dressed customer and fawned over him nauseatingly, uttering many oaths concerning the quality of his wine and the cleanliness of his premises. In fact the wine was nasty and the whole place was smeared with grime, but Don Miguel was in no mood to worry over trifles.

“Of course, your honour, we’ve been so busy lately,” the landlord muttered as he strove vainly to mop enough dirt off a chair-seat to save it marking Don Miguel’s breeches. “All day and all night they’ve been coming in, the soldiers and sailors, and not a few of their officers as well . . . Wine, your honour! Here it comes—let me pour it for you . . .” He did so with an inept flourish. “Would you care for tapas? We have good crayfish today, and mussels, too!”

Thinking of the raw sewage that poured into the sea where the shellfish grew, Don Miguel refused, but gulped the wine gratefully; lemon-juice would have helped his thirst, and this was not quite so sour.

“Is your honour one of the officers sailing with the fleet, then?” the landlord probed. Silence had overtaken his three other customers—all of them petty merchants, by their appearance, probably suppliers contracting for provisions to stock the ships—and he seemed a little nervous.

“No, but I came to look over the preparations and to drink to their good fortune.” Don Miguel raised his mug cheerfully in the direction of his fellow-customers. “How say you to that, my friends?”

“Why, your honour, no loyal Spaniard or good Catholic would do otherwise than echo you!” answered the nearest of them, a beetle-browed fellow with one shoulder higher than the other. “But let me ask your honour this, first! Though of course the true faith is bound to triumph, are you honestly sanguine of this venture?”

A tremor of apprehension prickled on Don Miguel’s nape. He said, “Indeed I am! Why in the world should we not foresee a great victory for the Armada?”

“With a commander who’s sick at the least lurching of his ship?” The beetle-browed man swigged his wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m of a seafaring family myself, your honour, though now I’ve been forced to work ashore thanks to this bad back of mine.” He jerked his high shoulder back and forth. “And I’ve been told all my life, by my father and his father before him: A ship’s crew is only as good as the captain. And isn’t the same thing true of a fleet?”

Don Miguel said faintly, “His Grace the Duke of Parma—”

“Parma? What are you talking about?” Instantly the entire company was alert: the beetle-browed man, his two companions, the landlord, and even the small boy armed with a jug and a greasy rag who stood hidden in the shadows by the racked wine-barrels at the rear of the shop. “Parma’s in the Netherlands, your honour! Medina Sidonia’s in charge of this fleet, and a worse sea-commander could hardly be picked in the whole of Spain!”

With those words, Don Miguel Navarro became the first man to realise that the universe was crumbling about him, except always for Two Dogs, and Two Dogs had desired it should be so.

The Duke of Parma in the Netherlands? This wasn’t history! The Duke of Parma, Spain’s finest military commander of the century, took the Armada to sea! Medina Sidonia—who was he? A nonentity, an entry in the footnotes of the history books! And the Netherlands were secured permanently for Spain and its heir the Empire by that brilliant unorthodox master of strategy, the Scottish Catholic Earl of Barton, who when the Armada broke the English resistance at sea was prepared with his hundreds of flat-bottomed barges to land an army of fifteen thousand men in Kent and shatter the resistance on land as well.

Why in the name of all that was holy had they been persuaded to waste Parma on a footling land-war?

He said after such a pause he fancied he had heard the grinding of Earth on its axis, “And the Earl of Barton—does he serve with Parma in the Netherlands?”

By now the others in the wine-shop were exchanging puzzled glances, at a loss to know how a finely-dressed gentleman could be so out of touch with the news. Uncertainly the landlord said, “Perhaps, perhaps! It’s not a name I know.”

“To me it sounds like an English name!” The beetle-browed man rose to his feet. Moving away from his table, he went on, “Who are you, that you ask such peculiar questions?” He had abandoned the formal “your honour.”

“Ah . . .” Trying to appear calm, Don Miguel drained his wine-mug and also rose. “I’ve been travelling. A long time. I just reached Cadiz and welcomed the chance to see the fleet before it sailed. But now I have pressing business. My score, landlord!”

“Not so quickly,” the beetle-browed man snapped. “Landlord, we should fetch a patrol, in my view. For all we know this fellow may be an English spy.”

“Nonsense!” Don Miguel tossed a gold coin towards the landlord. “But—”

“You speak strangely. Doesn’t he speak strangely?” The beetle-browed man appealed to the others. “I think we ought to hold him until he’s been interrogated!”

Don Miguel’s patience broke, and he darted for the door. The beetle-browed man tried to stop him, hobbling to block the way, but as well as being deformed, he limped, and he was too slow—Don Miguel went past him and out into the street at a headlong run.

Although reason told him running could do little to speed his purpose.

TEN

Mind pounding faster than his feet, he outstripped even the shouts the suspicious men in the wine-shop hurled after him on the way back to the villa the Society had picked for its local base. This was what he had wanted to say to the General Officers, and been unable to cast into words that would gain their attention: that Two Dogs was devious and brilliant, that he would strike where the Empire was most vulnerable—but he would not do it in the way the Society most expected. Not for him the crudity of the bludgeon. He preferred the delicacy of a scalpel.

And he’d found one. Before God, he’d found one so sharp its wound would kill before the feather-touch of the blade was felt!

He’d taken out of history a man about whom almost nothing was known.

Or to be exact, about whom little was known except legend . . .

As they learned the tales of El Cid or Roland and Oliver, all schoolboys in the Empire could recount how the Earl of Barton had made his first appearance on the world scene: a youth of twenty owning his clothes, a horse, and a sword, claiming to be related on the wrong side of the blanket to the House of Stewart—like countless others—and determined to revenge the extermination of his Catholic relatives in Scotland by troops of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Given his opportunity thanks to the death of his general during a battle in which he rallied the Catholic forces from almost certain defeat, he proved himself the finest strategist of his age, and his troops developed an almost superstitious loyalty to him. When Parma was recalled to command the Armada, he was the obvious choice as deputy, and made sure forever of the Netherlands in sixteen weeks of whirlwind campaigning which laid the enemy low like wheat before the reaper’s scythe.

Take him away, and . . . who was left instead?

That must be the point at which Two Dogs had struck—not here, by any means as crude as poisoning the water-barrels.

Surely, though, someone who had exerted such an influence on the establishment of the Empire must have been the subject of exhaustive study by the Society? Probably his movements from birth to death had been secretly documented. All it would take would be half an hour’s research, and the Licentiates deployed here at Cadiz and over in England could be dispatched instead to guard—

—a man who already had never existed.

For a second that realisation stopped him in his tracks, like a physical blow. He grew briefly aware that the townsfolk were staring at him, wondering what made a finely-dressed gentleman race through their streets as though pursued by devils, and ignored them. Breaking anew into a run, he struggled to discipline his mind back into the laboriously learned techniques of five-dimensional thinking he had been drilled through as a Probationer in the Society.

Two Dogs had almost certainly killed the Earl of Barton; he would have wanted to make his work definitive. Perhaps he’d located the Earl as a child, or on his way to join the Spanish forces in the Netherlands. It didn’t matter. At this juncture, June of 1588, the consequences of the action were already being experienced. They must be welling down the ages ahead of him like an incoming tide, along the curious skew-axis of hypothetical or speculative time—the medium in which existed improbable alternative worlds Father Ramón had told him of. There was a sort of inertia implicit in the process; the alteration of history was a sluggish event because it was not an event—it did not occur in ordinary time.

Up ahead in the twentieth century, there might even yet be time apparatus under the control of Red Bear and Father Terence, waiting to fetch back Licentiates from Cadiz in the sixteenth century. If so, if only the echo of the murder of Lord Barton had not “by now” durated to destroy the Society altogether, he still stood a slim chance of warning them in time and having Two Dogs killed before he could leave for the past—if necessary having him shot off the back of the horse he’d ridden away from his mine in California. That too would alter history, but at least it would be altered back towards the unmodified version.

Whereupon there would once again be an Earl of Barton and everything would revert to normal.

Perhaps!

He stormed up the final slope to the Society’s rented villa and screamed at the gatekeeper to hurry and let him in. Not waiting for the formalities, he thrust past the man and shouted at the top of his lungs to everyone in earshot, “There isn’t an Earl of Barton in this world!”

The impact was immediate. Busy with a score of different tasks, Licentiates and worried young Probationers dashed to the courtyard in the centre of the house where the time apparatus stood, and heard the story in fragments from Don Miguel as the technicians rapidly reversed their equipment and arranged his return to the future. There was no point in sending a message; a man would get there just as quickly and would be more informative.

Don Miguel was almost crying with impatience when at last the settings were correct and his surroundings suddenly looked as though they were melting, indicating that he was being twisted in the continuum, that time was becoming a direction along which the forces constrained within the frame of iron and silver drove him like a metal rod between the closing blades of a pair of scissors. The distorted outline of the cage of bars itself became more visible, more convincing, as he was hurtled forward.

No time apparatus could go further towards the future than the moment at which it was energised, nor could an object or a person contained within it. The mere fact that he had left Cadiz meant that, up ahead, at “this” moment there still must be a Society of Time, for this was the same apparatus as one in the Society’s office at New Madrid; he merely occupied it at a different moment.

A vast relief overcame him, yet did not completely dispel his anxiety. He fretted and fumed at the length of the journey and wished there was room for him to pace up and down; it was going to take some while to arrive, because he was being displaced through space to New Castile as well as towards the future, and inside the cage space was experienced as though it were ordinary time.

Still, this gave him a chance to calm himself and order his thoughts. On re-emerging into the twentieth century, he must speak clearly, concisely, and convincingly to the General Officers, because he might overtake the onrushing tide of consequences stemming from Lord Barton’s murder by only a tiny margin—by perhaps a mere hour or two! It all depended on how long ago (meaning before the start of this trip from 1588) Two Dogs had killed his victim. He might even not have departed for the past at the time when Don Miguel returned to the present, in which case the paradoxes would be giddying!

His legs ached after his frantic run from the harbour. He squatted down on the floor of the cage and tried to make himself understand the psychology of someone like Two Dogs, who didn’t care if the whole structure of history collapsed because he had been frustrated in his ambitions. It wasn’t so much like the tales and legends of the Red Indians which he’d studied both as a child in school and more recently as an adult while being briefed for the trip to Texcoco during which he’d restored the stolen mask. It was more like the Teutonic and Norse legends of the Ragna Rökkr, the twilight of the gods, where all the nine worlds crashed into chaos and spawned a new creation.

But that line of thought led him to wistful memories of Kristina, and it would be a long while before they both met again. He drove himself back to contemplation of the mind of Two Dogs, and concluded that even if the Society was compelled to put an end to his life, it would not be murder, nor even assassination. It would be execution. It would be justified because he, Don Miguel, had really been into the world where his crime had been committed, and could swear on the cross that he had seen . . . what he had seen.

And, on the subject of seeing: What was wrong with the bars surrounding him? They were always misty and deformed in transit, but they should have been growing clearer and better defined as he drew closer to the present. Instead, they seemed to be more blurred than before.

He told himself it was a trick of the eyes, and went back to planning his report to the General Officers. He dared not touch the semi-solid bars to confirm what vision indicated; that was a quick way to die, for vast energies were trapped in their configuration.

No, it was all going to come out right. Two Dogs would be stopped at some convenient point before he could set out in search of Lord Barton, and the world would return to normal, and there would be a fresh approach to the Temporal College, and this idea of breaking up the alliance with the Mohawks—

“Oh my God!” he cried aloud.

There had been a wrenching. It had acted on his bare brain, so that he perceived it as pain, and as blinding light, and as a sound which made his skull reverberate; as a blazing fire, as a dive for Arctic water, as a headlong fall into illimitable abysses one beyond the other without number or end.

That was the most terrible thing of all: that it was endless, and yet, after an eternity, it was over.

He had sight, and hearing, and touch, and the awareness of his body. He looked, listened, felt air and warm sunlight, knew he was physically whole, knew he had weight and substance. And while his mind still echoed with the scream of a dying universe, he wanted more than anything to fall down and weep like a little child.

But that, said a small voice far distant at the edge of his awareness, is a foolish thing to do. It can be understood what has happened. Think! Think that in less than one short century after Borromeo, the world you thought of as ultimately real spawned not only Two Dogs, but others beside who played with time-travel like a nursery toy. Think of the New Year’s Eve when a king was killed because of a silly quarrel. Think of the avarice that led to the theft of the Aztec mask, and what had to be done to set that right. Think why, in the world you imagined to be real, no one had come back from the future to investigate that future’s past . . .

True! Merciful God, as true as daylight, and never understood—except perhaps by bitter, downcast Borromeo, who once said he was disappointed that no one from tomorrow had come to compliment him on his discovery. If a span of under a century had brought about so many abortive interferences with the past, why had not the future, with its incalculable toll of years during which time-travel would be possible?

Because there was no future. Not rooted in his world. Don Miguel Navarro drew breath deep into his throat and whispered the words, to make himself accept the facts.

He could visualise the path of history in each of those innumerable potential worlds where man had gained the power to travel through time. (Perhaps they were all potential, none more “real” than any other?) It would lead always back upon itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. Man being what he was, there would sooner or later come a moment when the temptation to amend the past would lure someone into tampering with the course of events which led to the actual discovery of time apparatus. Whereupon a new universe would form.

But in that case, what had happened to him? He could almost grasp the explanation, but not quite. He must, he reasoned, have been trapped between “actual” and “potential” during his journey; it must have been “after” he left Cadiz in 1588, and “before” he reached New Madrid in 1989, that the effects of Two Dogs’s interference became perceptible at the latter date. In other words, he had crossed the ripple on the stream of time . . . and here he was on the other side.

What then had become of all the people he had known? Felipe, who had sat drinking with him last night, as it seemed; Kristina, who had made him the unwitting instrument of just such a loop in time as he was considering now—and who might have been a lifetime companion; the King, the Princes, the General Officers, the Margrave von Feuerstein, even Two Dogs himself? Why should they have been abolished from the total scheme of things, while he by a freak was left in possession of his knowledge and his life?

Only such a man as Father Ramón might attempt the question—and even in the universe which Two Dogs had brought crashing down, Father Ramón was dead.

Passive, he began to study his surroundings. He was in a sort of park, apparently. People were coming towards him, no doubt attracted by what to them was his extraordinary appearance, for they were dressed in outlandish garb resembling none he had ever encountered. He saw young women among them as well as men, hatless and with their legs bare above the knee, clinging shamelessly to the bare arms of their companions. Behind them he saw a city: towers of a tallness he had never dreamed of. And there were sounds he could not identify, which seemed to have their source in the sky.

He looked up. Something was passing, stiff-winged, far vaster than a bird. A mystery!

Now the people were gathering around him, a matter of a pace or two away. A man of about his own age addressed him, presumably putting a question, but the words meant nothing to Don Miguel. He countered with a question of his own.

“Dónde estoy?” Not that he needed to be told his geographical location; this must be what corresponded to New Madrid in his own year 1988 or 1989, for if he had fallen short in time, he would have fallen short in space as well and more than likely drowned in the ocean. But what did they call their city?

The man frowned. “Español! Ah! You are in New York!” He spoke slowly and clearly, as to an idiot, and Don Miguel gave a solemn nod. Not “New Madrid” but “Nueva Jorque”—and they spoke a form of English, the debased tongue which in his world barely survived among the peasants.

Well, what else would you expect from the defeat of the Armada?

Now, having decided that he wasn’t dangerous, the rest of the onlookers were relaxing and passing excited comments. Their agitation suggested that in this world time-travel might not be known—if it had been, it would supply a ready-made explanation for the arrival of a strangely-clad man out of thin air. The idea brought with it a sense of peace, a feeling of security which he could not remember having enjoyed since Father Ramón first admitted to him how dangerous Borromeo’s legacy had become.

In that event, then, let them explain his presence how they would; let them regard him as a madman, a simpleton, a foreign spy! He would never—he swore so silently to himself—afford them an inkling of the truth. He could describe the principle of time apparatus; given a ton of iron and half a ton of silver, he could build one with his own hands in a week . He would not. Whatever might be the faults of this world, it was not for men to usurp the divine prerogative and alter the order established by what had gone before.

The man who had first addressed him was beckoning, inviting him to come away. Don Miguel gave a slow smile. For better or worse, without chance of change, this was his reality now.

Don Miguel Navarro, formerly Licentiate in Ordinary of the Society of Time, now the most isolated of all the outcasts the human race had ever known, walked forward, into the real world.

© 1962 by John Brunner. Originally published in Science Fiction Adventures. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Kilian Houston Brunner (24 September 1934 – 25 August 1995) was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and the BSFA award the same year. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970.

EXCERPT: The Tiger's Daughter (Tor Books)

K. Arsenault Rivera | 7621 words

Even gods can be slain.

The Hokkaran empire has conquered every land within their bold reach—but failed to notice a lurking darkness festering within the people. Now, their border walls begin to crumble, and villages fall to demons swarming out of the forests.

Away on the silver steppes, the remaining tribes of nomadic Qorin retreat and protect their own, having bartered a treaty with the empire, exchanging inheritance through the dynasties. It is up to two young warriors, raised together across borders since their prophesied birth, to save the world from the encroaching demons.

This is the story of an infamous Qorin warrior, Barsalayaa Shefali, a spoiled divine warrior empress, O Shizuka, and a power that can reach through time and space to save a land from a truly insidious evil.

A crack in the wall heralds the end . . . two goddesses arm themselves . . . K. Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter is an adventure for the ages.

Available Now from Tor Books

THE COLORS OF THE FLOWERS

Shizuka, my Shizuka. If Grandmother Sky is good, then this finds you sitting on your throne, eating far too many sweets, and complaining about all the meetings you must attend.

My apologies for the awful calligraphy. I know you are shaking your head even as you read this, saying something about my brushstrokes not being decisive enough.

I have so many questions for you, and I’m certain you have just as many for me. Here in the East, I hear rumors of what you’ve been up to. Is it true you returned to Shiseiki Province and slew a Demon General? You must tell me the story. And do not brush off the details, Shizuka. I can almost hear your voice.

“It really was nothing . . .”

The day will come when we share stories over kumaq and rice wine. I know it will. But until then, paper and ink are all we have. They are old friends of yours, and have kindly agreed to keep you company in my absence.

Do you remember the first time we met, Shizuka, or has that long faded from your memory? It is my favorite story in all the world to tell. Oh, you know it well. But let me tell it all the same. Let me have my comfort. Without you, I am in the dark. It has been so long, Shizuka, that I might mistake a candle for the sun.

Our births—that is where I should start, though I doubt there exists a soul who has not heard about yours. Hokkarans rely on numbers and superstition more than they rely on sense, so when you popped out of your mother’s womb on the Eighth of Ji-Dao, the whole Empire boomed with joy. Your existence alone was cause for celebration. Your uncle, the Emperor, had let fourteen years go by without producing an heir.

And there was the matter of your parents, as well. The most well-loved poet of his time and the national hero who slew a Demon General with nothing but her fabled sword and my mother’s assistance, those were your father and mother. When you were born, both were nearing forty.

I cannot imagine the elation the Empire felt after holding its breath for so long. Fourteen years without an heir, fourteen years spent tiptoeing on eggshells. All it would take was one errant arrow to bring your entire dynasty to its knees.

So you saved them. From the first moment of your life, Shizuka, you have been saving people. But you have never been subtle, never been modest, and so you chose the eighth of Ji-Dao to be born.

The eighth day of the eighth month, in the year dedicated to the Daughter—the eighth member of the Heavenly Family. Legend has it, you were born eight minutes into Last Bell, as well, though no one can really know for certain. I cannot say it would surprise me. You do not do anything halfway.

But there was another thing about your birth—something we shared.

The moment my mother put you in your mother’s hands, two pine needles fell on your forehead, right between your eyes.

One month later, on the first of Qurukai, I was born beneath the Eternal Sky. Like all Qorin, I was born with a patch of blue on my bottom; unlike the others, mine was so pale, it was nearly white. I was not screaming, and I did not cry until my mother slapped me. The sanvaartains present told her that this was a bad sign—that a baby who did not cry at birth would make up for it when she died in agony.

I can imagine you shaking your head. It’s true—Qorin portents are never pleasant.

But my mother scoffed, just as your mother scoffed, and presented me to the sanvaartain for blessings anyway. Just as the sanvaartain held the bowl of milk above my head, just as the first drops splashed onto my brow, she saw them.

Two pine needles stuck together between my eyes.

There are no pine trees in that part of the steppes.

When my mother told yours about what had happened, our fates were decided. The pine needles were an omen—we would always be friends, you and I, always together. To celebrate our good fortune, your father wrote a poem on the subject. Don’t you find it amusing, Shizuka? Everyone thinks that poem was about your parents, but it was about us the whole time.

When we were three, our mothers introduced us. Shizuru and Alshara wrote to each other for months about it. For all your mother’s incredible abilities, for all her skills and talents, conceiving was almost impossible for her. Your mother, the youngest of five bamboo mat salespeople, worried you’d grow up lonely. Burqila Alshara wasn’t having that. She offered to take you in for a summer on the steppes, so that we might share our earliest memories together.

But the moment you laid eyes on me, something within you snapped. I cannot know what it was—I have no way of seeing into your thoughts—but I can only imagine the intensity of it.

All I know is that the first thing I can remember seeing, the first sight to embed itself like an arrow in the trunk of my mind, is your face contorted with rage.

And when I say rage, you must understand the sort of anger I am discussing. Normal children get upset when they lose a toy or when their parents leave the room. They weep, they beat their little fists against the ground, they scream.

But it was not so with you. Your lips were drawn back like a cat’s, your teeth flashing in the light. Your whole face was taut with fury. Your scream was wordless and dark, sharp as a knife.

You moved so fast, they could not stop you. A rush of red, yes—the color of your robes. Flickering golden ornaments in your hair. Dragons, or phoenixes, it matters not. Snarling, you wrapped your hands around my throat. Spittle dripped onto my forehead. When you shook me, my head knocked against the floor.

I struggled, but I could not throw you off. You’d latched on. Whatever hate drove you made you ten times as vicious as any child has a right to be. In desperation I tried rolling away from you.

On the third roll, we knocked into a brazier. Burning oil spilled out and seared your shoulder. Only that immense pain was enough to distract you. By the time your mother pulled you off me, I had bruises along my throat, and you had a scar on your shoulder.

O-Shizuru apologized, or maybe O-Itsuki. I think it must have been both of them. Your mother chided you for what you’d done, while your father swore to Alshara that you’d never done anything like this before.

Before that day, before you tried to kill me, no one ever said no to you.

You did not come to stay with us that summer.

Soon, Shizuru scheduled your first appointment with your music tutor. The problem, in her mind, was that you were too much like her. If only you fell in love with poetry, like your father; or music or calligraphy; cooking or engineering or the medical arts; even acting! Anything.

Anything but warfare.

And as for my mother’s reaction? As far as my mother was concerned, O-Shizuru’s only sin in life was not learning how to speak Qorin after all their years as friends. That attitude extended to you, as well, though you had not earned it. O-Shizuru and Burqila Alshara spent eight days being tortured together, and years after that rescuing one another. When the Emperor insisted that O-Shizuru tour the Empire with an honor guard at her back, your mother scoffed in his face.

“Dearest Brother-in-Law,” she said, “I’ll run around the border like a show horse, if that’s what you want me to do, but I’m not taking the whole stable with me. Burqila and I lived, so Burqila and I will travel, and let the Mother carry to sleep any idiot who says otherwise. Your honored self included.”

Legend has it that O-Shizuru did not wait for an answer, or even bow on the way out of the palace. She left for the stables, saddled her horse, and rode out to Oshiro as soon as she could. Thus began our mothers’ long journey through the Empire, with your father doing his best to try to keep up.

So—no, there was nothing your mother could do wrong. And when you stand in so great a shadow as O-Shizuru’s, well—my mother was bound to overlook your failings.

But my mother did insist on one thing—taking a clipping of your hair, and braiding it into mine. She gave your mother a clipping of my hair and instruction, for the same reason. Old Qorin tradition, you see—part of your soul stays in your hair when the wind blows through it. By braiding ours together, she hoped to end our bickering.

I can’t say that she was right or wrong—only that as a child, I liked touching your hair. It’s so much thicker than mine, Shizuka, and so much glossier. I wish I still had that lock of hair—I treasure all my remnants of you, but to have your hair in a place so far from home . . .

Let me tell you another story, the ending of which you know, but let us take our time arriving there. May you hear this in my voice, and not the careful accent of a gossiping courtier. May you hear the story itself, and not the rumors the rest may have whispered to you.

• • • •

When I was five, my mother took my brother and me back to the steppes. We spent too long in the palace at Oshiro, she said; our minds sprouted roots. She did not actually say that out loud, of course—my brother spoke for her. In those days, he was the one who read her signing. My mother uses a form of signing employed by deaf Qorin, passed down from one to another through the years. Kenshiro did not spend much time traveling with the clan, due to my father’s objections, but my brother has always been too studious for his own good. If he could only see our mother once every eight years, then he wanted to be able to impress her.

Thus, he taught himself to sign.

Was my mother impressed? This is a difficult question. As commendable as it was that my brother went to such lengths, he was Not Qorin. He could never be, when he wore a face so like my father’s, when he wore his Hokkaran name with such pride.

But he was my brother, and I loved him dearly, and when he told me this was going to be the best year of our lives, I believed him.

On our first night on the whistling Silver Steppes, I almost froze to death. The temperature there drops faster than—well, you’ve been there, Shizuka, you know. It’s customary for mothers to rub their children down with urine just to keep them warm. No one sleeps alone; ten to fifteen of us all huddle together beneath our white felt gers. Even then the nights are frozen. Until I was eight and returned to Hokkaro, I slept in my brother’s bedroll, and huddled against him to keep the cold away.

On one such night, he spoke to me of our names.

“Shefali,” he said, “when you are out here, you are not Oshiro-sun. You know that, right?”

I stared at him. I was five. That is what five-year-olds do. He mussed my hair as he spoke again.

“Well, you know now,” he said. “Our mother’s the Kharsa, sort of. That means she’s like the Emperor, but for Qorin people.”

“No throne,” I said.

“She doesn’t need one,” said Kenshiro. “She has her mare and the respect of her people.”

Ah. Your uncle was a ruler, and so was my mother. They must be the same.

I did not know much about your family back then. Oh, everyone knew your uncle was the Son of Heaven, and his will in all things was absolute. And everyone knew your mother and my mother, together, killed one of the four Demon Generals and lived to tell the tale.

But I didn’t much care about any of that. It didn’t affect me as much as you did, as much as the memory of you did. For you were never far from my mother’s mind, and she was always quick to say that the two of us must be like two pine needles.

Yes, she said “pine needles”—the woman who lived for plains and open sky. I always thought it strange, and when I learned it was a line of your father’s poetry, I thought it stranger.

But still, I grew to think of you as . . .

Not the way I thought of Kenshiro. He was my brother. He taught me things, and spoke to me, and helped me hunt. But you?

I did not know how to express it, but when I touched the clipping of your hair braided into mine, I knew we were going to be together again. That we were always going to be together. As Moon chases Sun, so would I chase you.

But during my first journey around the steppes, I learned how different our two nations were.

Kenshiro was teaching me how to shoot. The day before this, Grandmother Sky blessed us with rain, and I hadn’t thought to pack my bow away in its case. The second I tried to draw it back, it came apart in my hands; the string sliced me across the cheek and ear.

As I was a child, I broke out crying. Kenshiro did his best to calm me.

Two men who were watching us cackled.

“Look at that filthy mongrel!” called the taller one. He was thin and bowlegged, and he wore a warm wool hat with drooping earflaps. When he spoke, I caught sight of his teeth. What few he had left were brown. His deel was green and decorated with circles. Two braids hung in front of his right earflap, with bright beads at the end. “I tell you, it is because she was born indoors. Burqila is a fool for keeping her.”

My brother was eleven then. For a Qorin boy, he was short. For a Hokkaran, he was tall and gangly, all elbows and knees. He stood in front of me, and I thought he was big as a tree.

“She was born outside,” he said. “Everyone knows that, Boorchu. And if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t make her any less Qorin.”

“And why should I listen to a boy with roots for feet?” said Boorchu. “If she had a real teacher—”

“Her bow was wet,” he said. “Of course it broke. It could’ve happened to you, too.”

“No, boy,” said the tall man. “I know better. Because I was born on the steppes, and I grew beneath the sky, without a roof to suffocate me. You and your sister are pale-faced rice-eaters, and that is the plain truth.”

The shorter one—who was squat and had only one braid—only snorted. I don’t know why. “Rice-eater” is not a piercing insult. “Ricetongue” is far worse. And on top of that, they called both Kenshiro and me pale-faced, when only Kenshiro is pale. I’m dark as a bay. Anyone can see that.

“Boorchu,” said the shorter one then, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Boorchu, you should—”

“I’m not going to stop,” said the tall one. “Burqila never should’ve married that inkdrinker. A good Qorin man, that is what she needs. One who’ll give her strong sons and stubborn daughters, who don’t snap their strings like fat little—”

All at once Boorchu grew quiet. Shock dawned on him, and soon he was the pale-faced one.

Someone touched my head. When I turned, my mother had emerged from the ger. A silent snarl curled her lips. She snapped to get Kenshiro’s attention, and then her fingers spoke for her, flying into shapes I could not read.

“My mother says you are to repeat what you just said,” Kenshiro translated. His voice shook. He squeezed me a bit tighter, and when he next spoke, he did so in Hokkaran. “Mother, if you’re going to hurt him—”

She cut him off with more gestures. Her horsewhip hung from her belt, opposite her sword; to a child, both were frightening.

Kenshiro made a soft, sad sound.

Boorchu stammered. “I said that, I said, er, that your daughter . . .”

“A good Qorin man?” Kenshiro said, reading my mother’s signs. “I don’t see any here. Come forward, Boorchu.” Then he broke into Hokkaran again. “Mother, please. She’s only five.”

What were they talking about? Why was Boorchu sweating so much, why had his friend run away, why was my brother trembling?

Boorchu dragged his feet. “Burqila,” he said, “I just want them to be strong. If you never let them hear what people think of them, they’ll weep at everything. You don’t want them to be spoiled, do you?”

My mother clapped her hands. One of the guards—a woman with short hair and a scar across her face, with more braids than loose hair—snapped to attention.

“Bring the felt,” Kenshiro translated.

And the guard ran to get it. In a minute, no more, she returned. She bound Boorchu’s hands together with rope and wrapped him in the felt blanket. He kept screaming. The sound, Shizuka! Though it was soon muffled, it reverberated in my ears, my chest. It was getting harder to breathe.

“Ken,” I said, “Ken, what’s happening?”

“You should turn away,” he replied. “You don’t have to watch this.”

But I couldn’t. The sight and sound fixed me in place. My eyes watered, not from sadness, but from fear; my brain rattled in my skull.

“Shefali,” he said, “look away.”

My mother drew her sword. She didn’t bother signing anymore. No, she walked up to the man in the felt binding and ran him through. Just like that. I remember how red spread out from the hilt of her sword like a flower blossoming. I remember the wet crunch of bones giving way, the slurp as she pulled her sword back.

Kenshiro ran his hands through my hair. “Shefali,” he said, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t paying attention.

I couldn’t look away from the bundle of white-turning-red. I saw something coming out of it, glimmering in the air, swirling like smoke. As I watched, it scattered to the winds.

This was unspoken horror. This was water falling from the ground into the sky. This was a river of stone, this was a bird with fur, this was wet fire. I felt deep in my body that I was seeing something I was never meant to see.

I pointed out the flickering lights to Kenshiro with a trembling hand. “What’s that?”

He glanced over, then turned his attention back to me. He stroked my cheeks. “The sky, Shefali,” he said. “The Endless Sky, who sees all.”

But that wasn’t what I saw. I knew the sky. I was born with a patch of it on my lower back, and though the birthmark faded, the memory remained. Grandmother Sky never made me feel like this.

I felt like an arrow, trembling against a bowstring. Like the last drop of dew clinging to a leaf. Like a warhorn being sounded for the first time.

“Ken-ken,” I said, “do you see the sparkles?”

And, ah—the moment I spoke, I knew something within me had changed. I felt the strangest urge to look North, toward the Wall of Flowers. At the time, I’d heard only the barest stories about it. I knew that it was beautiful, and I knew that it was full of the Daughter’s magic.

How could I have known that the Wall was where blackbloods went to die?

How was I to know?

Kenshiro furrowed his brow. “You’re just stressed, Shefali,” he whispered. “You saw something you shouldn’t have. But you’ll be all right, I promise.”

I bit my lip, hard. Kenshiro couldn’t see it.

Maybe he was right. Kenshiro was right about a lot of things. He always knew where the sun was going to rise in the morning, and he knew the names for all the constellations.

But that didn’t change the awful feeling in my stomach, or the rumbling I now heard in the distance, or the whisper telling me “go north.” I looked around the camp for an oncoming horde, but I saw none. Yet there was the sound rolling between my ears; there was the clatter of a thousand horses.

It wasn’t there, I told myself, it wasn’t there, and I was safe with my mother and Kenshiro.

But for the rest of that day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful had happened.

Kenshiro told me Tumenbayar stories to pass the time. Tumenbayar is something like your ancestor Minami Shiori—there are hundreds of stories about her. All of them are true, of course, especially the ones that contradict each other.

It was one week later that I received your first letter. When the messenger first brought it out of his bag, I knew it was yours by sight alone. You sent it sealed in a bright red envelope, emblazoned with golden ink. I snatched it out of his hands in a way that made Kenshiro apologize for my rudeness, and I pressed it to my nose so I could smell you.

You might find it strange that I was so excited for a letter from a girl who tried to kill me. The truth is, I never bore you any ill will for what you did. When you first saw me, you were struck with unspeakable rage.

But when I saw you, I . . .

Imagine you are a rider, Shizuka, a Qorin rider. You have been out in the forests to the north for some time, trying to find something to feed your clanmates. Two days you’ve been hunting. Hunger twists your stomach into knots. You can hardly will yourself to move. Behind you, you hear something in the trees. You turn, you fire, and you slow down enough to see your catch: two fat marmots, speared together by your arrow.

Seeing you was like seeing those marmots. I knew everything would be all right, so long as I had you near me.

So your letter understandably excited me, and getting to smell it thrilled me even more so. A person’s soul is in their scent. For the first time since Boorchu died, when I took a breath of your perfumed paper, I felt safe.

Until I tried to read the letter. Then I only felt frustrated. I stared at the characters and pretended I could read them. I traced them with one finger, and imagined what you might say to me.

Kenshiro caught me at it. “Is that—?”

He tried to take the letter from me. Only Grandmother Sky could’ve pried it away from my grubby little hands. After some coaxing, he convinced me to hold it out so he could read it.

His bushy brows rose halfway up his forehead. “Shefali,” he said, “is this from the Peacock Princess?”

I nodded.

He let out a whistle. “You’ve made an important friend! Can you read this?” When I shook my head, he sat down next to me. “Then it’s time for some tutoring. Follow along with my finger.”

To be honest, I couldn’t follow any of the writing at all. Your calligraphy was beautiful even then, but I could never make sense of it.

You can read Qorin letters, Shizuka. Imagine if every time you blinked, everything changed. Where the letters were. What they looked like. Imagine if they went from right side up to upside down and backwards. That is what happens to me when I read Hokkaran.

I made Kenshiro read it to me so many times that I remember it still.

Oshiro Shefali,

My parents are making me write this because they think I need to apologize to you. I think that’s silly. You know that I am sorry, so why do I have to tell you again? But my mother wants us to be friends, so I have to write to you.

Big lumpy Qorin horses don’t interest me, and neither does archery. I don’t know what we can talk about. Do you like flowers? I don’t know if they have flowers on the Silver Steppes. Peonies and chrysanthemums are my favorites. Most of the time I can guess what everyone else’s favorite is, but whenever I try to think of yours, I can’t do it. If you don’t like chrysanthemums at least, then you’re wrong, and I’ll have to show you all of mine when I see you next.

I’m going to see you again. You’re not getting out of that. My uncle is the Son of Heaven, you know. I don’t really like him but that means people have to do what I tell them.

Respectfully,

O-Shizuka

After horse riding, reading your letter was my favorite way to spend my time. Kenshiro had other things to take care of, though. My mother insisted he learn how to wrestle and shoot and ride in the traditional way.

The trouble was, I didn’t have any friends while my brother was away.

While Hokkarans hate me because I am dark and flaxen haired and remind them of a horse, the Qorin dislike me because they think I am too pampered. When I was a child, it was worse.

My nose didn’t help.

I have my mother’s round cheeks, which you always seemed to have an unending fascination for. I have her wavy hair, her skin, her height, her bowleggedness, her large hands, her grass green eyes.

But of all the features on my wide, flat face, my nose stands out. It is narrow, pinched, and begging for a fist to reshape it. My father’s stamp on me.

Qorin children are not known for being well behaved. One day I was out riding on a borrowed colt, and when I returned, I found a half circle of my cousins waiting for me. At their head stood a pudgy ten-year-old whose face was round as a soup bowl and flecked with freckles.

“You’re Burqila’s daughter!” she said. “The one with the stupid nose!”

I frowned and covered my face. I tried to nudge my horse forward, but my cousins did not move.

“Needlenose,” called my cousin. “Come off your horse, Needlenose! We’ve got to wrestle!”

Wrestling is my least favorite of the three manly arts. Riding? I can, and have, ridden a horse all day. Archery is more a passion than a chore. But wrestling? I’m still a lean little thing, Shizuka; my cousins have always been able to throw me clean across the ring.

“What?” sneered my cousin. She slapped her broad chest, smacked her belly. “Are you afraid?”

I touched my horse’s shoulder. Horseflesh is always solid and firm and warm.

“No.”

“Then you’d better get down off that horse!” she said. “Don’t make us get you!”

I raised a brow. I was on a horse. The entire purpose of riding was to be able to get away from things fast.

But maybe I was a bit too cocky about that, seeing as I was surrounded by people who spend their whole lives around horses. Who own horses. And, as fate would have it, the colt I was riding belonged to one of my bully cousins. My mother thought I should learn how to handle a stranger’s mount as well as I could my own. I thought that was silly—as if I was ever going to ride anything but my grey. Still, she plopped me down on this colt and set me off for the day. My cousin couldn’t have been happier. He whistled and pulled out a treat from his deel pocket, and the horse trotted right up to him.

Which meant I was now close enough for my half dozen cousins to pull me off my horse and slam me to the ground.

What followed was a beating that I shall not waste any words on. You know how savage children can be. Qorin traditions forbid us from shedding one another’s blood, but that has never stopped us from beating the tar out of each other. Kicking, punching, hair pulling—none of these draw blood. So it was.

I limped back to the ger in tears. The moment my mother laid eyes on me, she sprang to her feet and wrapped me in an embrace. Through sign language and interpreters, she told me she’d take care of things.

It wasn’t hard for her to find out who put me in such a state, given how few Qorin are left. Within two hours, my mother corraled a half dozen of my cousins near her ger. Mother paced in front of them. Her fingers spoke in sharp, punctuated gestures.

“I understand the lot of you beat my daughter,” Kenshiro translated.

My cousins shifted on the balls of their feet. A boy toward the end of the line cried. I stood behind my mother and sniffled.

“You are children,” Kenshiro continued. “My sisters’ children, at that. If you were anyone else’s brats, I’d have the beating returned two times over. But my sisters have always supported me, even if they have spawned lawless brutes.”

She came to a stop and pointed to the tallest cousin, the chubby girl who wanted to wrestle me. As she stepped forward, I wrapped my arms around my mother’s leg.

“Otgar,” said Kenshiro, “Zurgaanqar Bayaar is the meekest of my sisters. When she was young, she was quiet as Shefali, and half her size. Tell me, would you have pulled her from her horse and beaten her senseless?”

Otgar crossed her arms. “Mom doesn’t have a stupid nose,” she said.

What was it with her and noses? Hers was dumb-looking, too! Her whole face was dumb!

“Otgar Bayasaaq,” said Kenshiro, “you speak Hokkaran, don’t you?”

Otgar nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

“A lot of children your age don’t,” Kenshiro said. Ironic. My mother chuckled at her joke, making my brother speak those words. “And you can read it?”

“Yes,” Otgar said. “My father is a merchant, Aunt Burqila, you know this!”

My mother nodded.

“Very well,” she said through Kenshiro. “Since you have such a fascination with my daughter, you are now assigned to be her companion. For your first task, you will help her learn to read and write the Ricetongue. She’s received a letter from Naisuran’s daughter. Start with that.”

“What?” Otgar and I shouted at once.

“She’s scrawny and dumb-looking!” Otgar protested.

“She hates me!” I said.

But my mother shook her head.

“My word is final,” Kenshiro spoke. “Get into the ger now, or I will throw you in it.”

We trudged into the ger, all right, but it was some time before either of us spoke to each other. Two hours in, I decided that even if she was uncouth, if she could read Hokkaran, she could help me.

So I handed her your letter.

She yanked it from me and read it with a frown. “Grandmother’s tits,” she said with all the grace of a ten-year-old. “It really is Naisuran’s daughter. Guess I shouldn’t expect any less from a spoiled tree-baby like you.”

“Don’t like trees,” I said. “Too tall.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t move around either,” said Otgar. “And neither do you.” She sighed. “Fine. Let’s take a look, I guess. Can you write?”

I shook my head.

“Can you read this?”

Again, I shook my head.

She tilted her head back and groaned. “I didn’t think Burqila hated me this much,” she said. “But I guess we’ve got work to do.”

I can’t remember how long it took us to write back. I knew what I wanted to say to you, of course. Otgar wrote it down for me and walked me through each character ten, twenty times. She’d write them in the soot and ash of the campfire.

The trouble came when I tried to write them myself. Invariably I’d write a different character from the one I was instructed, and it would be flipped or upside down. Missing strokes, superfluous strokes; it was a mess, Shizuka. And after weeks of trying, I hadn’t learned a single one.

Otgar was at her wits’ end over it. “You speak Ricetongue like a native.”

Pointing out my Hokkaran blood upset people, and she was beginning to think of me as more Qorin than Hokkaran. I kept quiet.

“It’s the writing,” she said. She cracked her knuckles. “Needlenose, you don’t plan on going back there, do you?”

I shook my head. From the way my mother kept talking about things, I’d be spending more time with her on the steppes in the future. According to her marriage contract, she was not allowed to style herself Grand Kharsa of the Qorin, but her children were not bound by such rules. My father wanted Kenshiro to succeed him as Lord of Oshiro. That left me to take up her lost title.

I didn’t know what any of that meant, except for two things: One day I’d be as terrifying as my mother, and the steppes were home now.

Otgar nodded. She reached for one of the precious few pieces of vellum we had. It was a rough thing, jagged at the edges, that reeked of old skin. She grabbed an old ink block and sat down in front of me.

“Repeat what you wanted to write,” she said. “I’ll do it for you. If you do go back to Hokkaro, you’ll have servants to write things down for you anyway.”

Then, as if she realized what she was saying, she grunted.

“But I’m not a servant,” she said. “Don’t you ever forget that, Needlenose. I’m your cousin. I’m helping you because we’re family, and because Burqila asked—”

“—told—”

She pursed her lips. “Asked me to,” she finished. “Now, let’s hear it one more time.”

So I spoke, and so Otgar wrote.

O-Shizuka,

Thank you for saying sorry, even though you didn’t have to. I’ve never seen a peony, or a chrysanthemum. There aren’t many flowers here. Mostly it’s grass and wolves, and sometimes marmots. Every now and again, we will see one or two flowers. Of the ones I’ve seen, I like mountain lilies the most. They grow only on the great mountain Gurkhan Khalsar. Gurkhan Khalsar is the closest place there is to the Endless Sky, so those flowers are very sacred.

If you teach me more about flowers, I can teach you how to wrestle, but I’m not very good.

My cousin is helping me write to you. Hokkaran is hard.

Shefali Alsharyya

I sent that off and waited every day for your reply. Our messengers all hated me. Whenever I saw one, I’d tug their deel and ask if there was anything for me.

We take some pride in our messengers. Before we began acting as couriers, it was almost impossible to get a message from the Empire to Sur-Shar. My mother saw how foolish that was. After she’d traveled the steppes to unite us, she established one messenger’s post every one week’s ride. With the help of the Surians she recruited into the clan, each post was given a unique lockbox that only the messengers could open. Anyone could drop any letters they needed mailed inside the lockboxes. For a higher fee, you could have one of the messengers come personally pick up whatever it was.

Everyone used our couriers—Surians, Ikhthians, Xianese, and even your people. Oh, the nobles would never admit to it, and we had to employ Ricetongues in the Empire itself—but they used us all the same.

Which meant they paid us.

People seem to think my mother is wealthy because of the plunder from breaking open the Wall. In fact, she is wealthy because of the couriers. That and the trading. You’d be surprised how canny a trader Burqila Alshara can be.

But the fact remains that I pestered our messengers so much that they came to hate visiting us. Every single day, I’d ask for news.

For months, there wasn’t any.

But one day there was. Another bright red envelope dipped in priceless perfume. Once I read it, it joined its sibling in my bedroll, so that I could smell it as I went to sleep.

Alsharyya Shefali,

Your calligraphy is terrible. Father says I shouldn’t be mad at you, because it is very strange that I can write as well as I do. I’m mad at you anyway. You are going to kill blackbloods with me someday. You should have better handwriting! Don’t worry, I’ll teach you. If I write you a new letter every day, and you reply to all of them, then you’ll be better in no time.

Where are you now? Mother says you’re traveling. Qorin do that a lot. I don’t understand it. Why take a tent with you, when you have a warm bed at home? Do you have a bed? Do you have a room, or do you have to stay in your mother’s tent? Do you have your own big lumpy horse already? My father says I can’t have a proper one until I can take care of it, which is silly, because I’m the Imperial Niece and there will always be someone to take care of my horse for me.

Maybe you can do it. Mostly I just want to go into the Imperial Forest. Father says there are tigers.

My tutors tell me that I should be afraid of you and your mother. They say that Burqila Alshara blew a hole in the Wall of Stone and burned down Oshiro, and it took years before it was back to normal. They tell me that if your mother hadn’t married your father, then we’d all be dead.

I don’t want us all to be dead, but if your mother could talk to my uncle—he keeps arguing with my father and making everyone upset. Do you think your mother could scare him?

Are you afraid of your mother? I’m not afraid of mine, and people keep whispering about how dangerous she is. No one tells me not to talk to my mother, but everyone tells me not to talk to you. I think it’s because you’re Qorin.

My tutors won’t tell me why they don’t like Qorin, but I’ve heard the way they talk about your people. I’m five years old. I’m not stupid. They don’t like Xianese people, either, but they’ll wear Xianese clothes and play Xianese music all the time.

It doesn’t matter. I like you in spite of your awful handwriting, so they have to like you too.

I hope you’re doing well.

O-Shizuka

So began our correspondence. You’d write to me; Otgar would read the letter out loud, and I’d say what I wanted them to write in return. I’ll have you know Otgar was indignant when you insulted her calligraphy. She was a ten-year-old, and she was trying hard! Not everyone is born with brush and sword in hand, Shizuka. There are scholars who write little better than Otgar did at the time.

(She’s improved. You’ll be happy to know that, I think. The last time I had her write to you was when we were thirteen, and you commented on the marked improvement. She pretended not to take it to heart, but she made a copy of that letter before giving me the original.)

Through the letters our friendship grew. You wrote to me of your endless lessons, of your mother’s insistence that you take up the zither despite your hatred of it. You’d tell me about the courtiers you met over the course of your day. Soon the letters grew several pages long.

When I was seven, my mother announced we’d be returning to Oshiro for the summer. I told you all about it.

“We will be sure to meet you at the gates,” you wrote. “I will have a surprise for you. Do not be late.”

I cannot tell you how much that simple statement vexed me. A surprise. A surprise for me, from the Emperor’s niece. Kenshiro said it must be a pretty set of robes—something you’d like, that I would hate. Otgar said it would be something foolish like a mountain of rice.

I remember when I came riding back to Oshiro. I didn’t see you at the gates, as you promised. Rage filled my young heart; doubt wrung it dry. What if we were late? I’d pestered my mother into moving faster than she’d planned, and I was riding ahead of the caravan by a few hours. What if that wasn’t enough?

I took my first steps up the stairs into my father’s palace. Servants greeted me with bows and hushed whispers of “Oshiro-sur, welcome home.” My bare feet touched the floors.

And that was when I saw it. The first pink peony, laid out with utmost care at the threshold. I picked it up. It smelled just like your letters. I smiled so hard, it hurt my face, and looked around. Yes, there was another, and another!

I ran along the trail of flowers as fast as I could. Soon I was standing before our gardens, where I came to an abrupt stop.

For there you were, standing in the doorway in your shining golden robes, your hair dark as night, your ornaments like stars. There you were, smiling like dawn itself. Behind you were hundreds of flowers, more than I’d ever seen in my entire life, in colors I could not name. There was the angry red of our first meeting, next to the deep scarlet of our last; there was day’s first yellow, swaying in the wind next to a gloaming violet.

But it is you I remember most, Shizuka. Your face. Your happiness upon seeing me. And all the flowers somehow staring right at you, as if you were teaching them how to be so bright and cheerful.

“There you are,” you said. “How do you like your flowers?”

To this day, I do not know how you got them all to Oshiro. Whoever heard of transporting an entire Imperial Garden? Who would believe me, if I told them? The future Empress of Hokkaro and all her Children, doing such a thing to impress a Qorin girl? Oh, the servants believe it, and I’m sure they’re talking about it to this day.

It is just like you, I think, to casually do the impossible.

© 2017 by K. Arsenault Rivera. Excerpted from The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K. Arsenault Rivera was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, but moved to New York when she was a toddler. While not managing a nutritional supplement store in Brooklyn, K. is an avid participant in the RPG community, from which she drew inspiration for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter.

Book Reviews: December 2017

Amal El-Mohtar | 1154 words

Memory and Megafauna

The year’s winding down, and what a year it’s been: a year of learning and teaching resistance, endurance, and persistence; a year of pushing into the wind. I find myself reading and thinking about scales of damage—about how we manage news of unprecedentedly devastating hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and the fact that in their midst we somehow still exist in a world where people take it upon themselves to kill others, whether with guns, legislation, or foreign policy.

As a writer and as a critic, what I come back to is the thought that we deal with cataclysms by making stories of them. As we all find new ways to breathe this winter, I want to look at two books that play with voice, memory, and megafauna in compelling and beautiful ways: Fran Wilde’s trilogy-concluding Horizon and Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing.

Horizon
Fran Wilde
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN 978-0765377876
Tor Books, September 2017, 416 pages

Kirit, Nat, Ciel, and Wik have tumbled out of the clouds and found themselves not cloudbound but grounded, wingless and windless, struggling to survive in the shadow of an enormous creature from which grow the sky-scraping bone towers in which they’ve lived their whole lives. But the creature—which they call the city—is dying, immobilised by the enormous weight of bone on its back. When the city dies, the towers will fall—and with them, our heroes’ friends, families, and entire society. They decide to split their party: Nat and Ciel will struggle to climb back up above the clouds and evacuate the towers, while Kirit and Wik will journey to the horizon in search of a new home. There are, after all, other cities—other giant beasts on whose backs people could live.

That is, if there aren’t other people already there.

The degree to which the Bone Universe books mirror our present moment continues to stagger me. Where Cloudbound dealt with misinformation, demagoguery, and a society fracturing under unprecedented stressors, Horizon tackles sustainability and its lack, the incomprehensible enormity of climate change—or more specifically, what happens when your climate is literally the giant dinosaur on whose back you live. Broken into narratives of Above and Below the clouds, Horizon explores what happens when the histories from which a society derives its identity and comfort are shown to be built on a lie, or an obscured truth, or simply no longer relevant, no longer capable of saving it.

Horizon’s great strength is in managing its scale: It pours vastness into my head, makes the sky accessible. It’s the culmination of two books’ worth of worldbuilding, two books’ worth of discussing bridges and updrafts and technology, and the engineering involved in climbing into and out of the clouds is of a piece with the engineering involved in building the trilogy’s own scaffolding.

That said, the characters’ speech and experience of each other felt stiffer to me than it has in previous books; the mechanics governing Kirit, Wik, and Nat’s decisions to lie or not sometimes clunked, and left me unpersuaded that certain plot developments were inevitable. But even this folds into the worldbuilding: As I read, I was reminded that in the Towers language is an underused technology. I found myself recalling the wonder with which Nat watched Ceetcee develop a compromise in Cloudbound, how “her words made a bridge”; Kirit marvels at people whose legs are more developed than their arms, whose language is flowing and fluid and musical. Where the language of the Towers is codified and (literally) calcified into Laws and songs, speech that flows between people like a metaphor is as strange to adapt to as solid ground under one’s feet.

That stiffness aside, Horizon is a beautiful, thorough, satisfying conclusion to the Bone Universe trilogy—one that leaves me hoping for a second series, one focused on other city-riding peoples, exploring what the winged folk from beyond the clouds look like to those who never rose.

The Only Harmless Great Thing
Brooke Bolander
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN 978-1250169488
Tor.com, January 2018, 96 pages

If you’re familiar with Brooke Bolander’s short fiction—or, for that matter, if you’re familiar with Tor.com’s other alternate-US-history novellas featuring rampaging megafauna—you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Only Harmless Great Thing would be a fast-paced, rollicking piece of work. My own experience of Bolander’s work thus far has been a texture of bourbon and struck matches, whipcrack and smoke, of a voice that sweeps broken glass from bar tops. When I think of Bolander’s prose, I always think of fast, hard things that cut, of a sweetness that burns on the way down.

But the work she does in The Only Harmless Great Thing is different, and it’s dazzling.

Elephants tell stories, share a collective memory, and trace their lineage back to Furmother, a mammoth ancestor who rescued stories from captivity in order to share them with the world. The voice of the Many Mothers is one piece of The Only Harmless Great Thing, existing aslant three other characters’ stories: Regan, a radium girl forced to teach elephants how to paint radium dials before she dies of radiation poisoning; Topsy, the captive elephant with whom she communicates; and Katherine, a scholar in Topsy and Regan’s future, trying to bridge the past and her present for a specific purpose.

This book is slow in the way bones are slow, its prose shaped and sculpted with exquisite care. It’s a book of fitting pieces together, assembling them into a skeleton that sings the story of its stolen skin. It’s prose that demands attention and focus in the way a sacrament does—interspersed with Regan’s firecracker voice, with Katherine’s hesitant discomfort.

If I’m waxing poetic, it’s because The Only Harmless Great Thing is organized around the logic of poetry. It draws its title from a John Donne poem. It fits powerfully into a lineage of Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1, of Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, of deep thought and fierce mourning, an elegiac fight song. It’s the most beautiful and heart-breaking piece of work Bolander’s written to date.

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.

Movie Review: Geostorm

Carrie Vaughn | 1732 words

Climate Catastrophe as Entertainment

So the dog lives. We only really see the dog for a couple of minutes, but still, I wanted to get that out of the way up front. The dog lives.

A few years ago I had a chance to rewatch a bunch of the old G.I. Joe cartoons from the 1980s. It was one of my favorite shows ever back in the day, the inspiration for some of my first fanfic writing (no, I haven’t posted it), and I’ve since come to realize that the cartoon was a way for me to come to terms with my father’s military career and its impact on my life. (When the cartoon first aired, Dad was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, where he commanded a B-52 crew. His job was to fly to Russia and drop nukes when Reagan pushed the button. In hindsight, this was a little stressful. But the Joes always came home in one piece, right? It made me feel a little better. I was around twelve at the time.) Watching it more recently, I was struck by something astonishing: The cartoon never mentions nuclear bombs. The threat of nuclear annihilation is totally off the table. In fact, the Joes became friends with their Soviet counterparts, because Cobra was a threat to both countries and they had to work together to stop it. This was amazing. I was explaining this to a friend, that there were no nukes in the G.I. Joe cartoon, like, at all, and she asked, “Then what was there?” What was the big terrible weapon the bad guys used to terrify us?

Answer: The Weather Dominator. Because of course, right? (There were other weapons of unlikely chaos: the Mass Device, the McGuffin Device (I am totally not making that up), that ray gun that turned Iceberg into a killer whale (I am totally not making that up either).) With the Weather Dominator, Cobra could control the weather all over the world, causing snow in Egypt and the ice caps to melt, thereby disrupting the entire geopolitical system in preparation for taking over the world.

So imagine my utter delight when I saw the trailer for Geostorm, with its system of malfunctioning weather-control satellites. This movie has recycled a thirty-year old plot device from my favorite cartoon. Wonderful. When the heroes of Geostorm discover that the malfunctioning weather control satellites aren’t malfunctioning but are being sabotaged, and when it becomes clear that the mastermind behind the sabotage is a high-ranking U.S. government official bent on disrupting the entire geopolitical system in preparation for taking over the world . . . Oh my word, I swooned. This was just like an episode of G.I. Joe but without the Joes and Cobra. Which makes it a terrible G.I. Joe episode, but still.

This is the kind of movie where the earnest computer analyst phones one of our heroes, tells him he’s figured it all out and can he meet him to pass along the info, and is then horribly murdered literally seconds before the meeting. This is the kind of movie where Ed Harris appears and you think, “Oh, I bet he’s the villain,” and you will absolutely be right. Toward the end, the massive space station that controls all the weather satellites is in the process of self-destructing, so control of the satellites is transferred to a NASA ground station and you think, “Wait a minute, could you do that the entire time? Why did everyone have to go to the station then? What?” Seriously though, there’s some pretty awesome space porn here: Apparently, in just a couple of years, a coalition of nations was able to build a massive space station with a crew of hundreds and vast manufacturing capabilities to construct thousands of satellites and distribute them all over the planet. This movie is almost space opera. (Two people even get sucked out into the vacuum!) Also, it’s the kind of movie that would have us believe it isn’t really about weather control satellites and saving the world, it’s about our heroes, estranged brothers Jake and Max, learning that they really do care about each other and hugging it out at the end. Because the screenwriter read somewhere that the audience needs to have an emotional connection to the characters. Voila.

The screenwriter and director is Dean Devlin, who has made a career out of mindless stupid disaster movies, including both Independence Day films, the ’98 Godzilla, and a handful of others. But Geostorm is different. Geostorm has a message: Climate change is bad, and only by uniting the nations of Earth and building an outrageously complex system of space stations, satellites, and a fleet of new space shuttles to service to them, will humanity triumph. Or something like that.

While the issue of anthropogenic climate change has come to be a hot-button political topic in the U.S.—will admitting its existence make you unelectable in certain districts? —Hollywood has been aware of and using speculation about the consequences of climate change for quite a long time now. Starting with, dare I say it, 1995’s Waterworld, in which melted polar ice caps have completely submerged every single landmass on Earth. Never mind that there isn’t enough water for this to actually happen, we’re entering the land of metaphor and moral parable, not realism.

Turns out we can go back earlier, at least to 1989’s Slipstream, a surprisingly great SF flick starring Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton. Here, an unspecified disaster has caused the planet’s weather patterns to shift and expanded the jet stream until the entire planet is covered with deadly winds. There are airships. It’s kind of amazing.

I’m interested in how movies handle climate change as a vector of disaster. I’m interested in what movies about climate-change-as-disaster say about culture, entertainment, and what we’re afraid of. In the ’50s and ’60s, hundreds of movies about radioactive giant critters rampaging across the land clearly revealed a pervasive societal fear during the first decades of the atomic age. Now, we’re seeing the actual real effects of climate-driven disaster. So what do the movies have to say about it? Turns out, given the magnitude of the issue, there haven’t been all that many disaster films about climate change. It may be a little too real.

The prologue at the start of Geostorm, in which a young girl’s voiceover explains the terrible storms and weather ravaging the planet in 2019 along with all the relevant real news footage, was uncomfortable after this past disastrous summer full of floods, hurricanes, mudslides, and wildfires all over the world. It drew a straight line between actual, real disasters in which actual, real people are killed, to the mining of those disasters and accompanying images as entertainment. I believe Geostorm’s explicitly stated message—that humanity will have to unite to combat climate change—is made in earnest. But who is going to listen to a goofy Gerard Butler action vehicle sporting a ten percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes?

Geostorm surprised me a little bit in one way. The trailers led me to believe the technology itself would be the villain—this cure for climate change, however unlikely, would be worse than the disease. One recent film, Snowpiercer, did that, depicting a world plunged into permanent, freezing winter by a misguided attempt to thwart global warming. (I thought Snowpiercer was overhyped and problematic, a potentially intriguing metaphor stomped to the ground with repetitive action and a lack of understanding of what its own metaphor actually was.) In Geostorm, science and scientists are not the villains, and that was a relief. Amoral politicians and their cronies are, and, well—I don’t suppose I can really argue with that, can I?

The biggest hurdle so many of these movies face is their own complete lack of scientific accuracy. Because real climate and real weather don’t act that way. The instant deep freeze depicted both here and in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow (which I thought was also Devlin but turns out was actually written and directed by Devlin’s Independence Day partner in film-crime, Roland Emmerich. Hollywood’s disaster film dynamic duo.), the instant tidal waves, the ability to measure the start of flaming heat waves to the second—don’t happen in real life. We’re shown many disaster film staple images of innocent people fleeing for their lives—from wind. From cold. From heat. In the real world, you can’t really escape these things, and they creep up so slowly as to hardly feel like disasters until you’re in the middle of them, until people are already dying. Fleeing a real-life hurricane involves sitting in a traffic jam on the freeway. By necessity, movies have to make these events bigger, faster, more spectacular, more compelling—and escapable. Survivable. Geostorm needs there to be an actual ticking clock (I counted three in the climactic scene: the space station’s destruct mechanism, the clocking ticking down the approaching geostorm catastrophe, and the upload bar for the reboot order. Three ticking countdown clocks at once, people!!!) so that we know how much time we have before it’s too late to stop the weather from killing us. And it wants there to be a switch to flip to make that happen. If only confronting climate change could be that simple.

In what may be an image of supreme symbolism or wish fulfillment, either intentional or accidental, I can’t really decide which, the key code to reboot the satellites, thereby undoing the sabotage and saving everything, turns out to be biometrically linked to the U.S. President’s own fingerprints and retinal scan. Part of the plot involves Max kidnapping the President (with the help of his über-competent Secret Service girlfriend, who for some unfathomable reason just goes along with everything he says) and convincing him that the threat is real and that he must act.

From the mouths of mindless stupid disaster flicks, amirite?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, as well as the superhero novels Dreams of the Golden Age and After the Golden Age, the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novel Discord’s Apple. Her latest books are Bannerless, Martians Abroad, and Amaryllis and Other Stories. Her Hugo Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com, as well as in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Interview: Louise Erdrich

Christian A. Coleman | 1913 words

Louise Erdrich is the author of sixteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir. Her previous novel, LaRose, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Minnesota.

Your novel Future Home of the Living God is a journal your protagonist Cedar Hawk Songmaker writes to her unborn child. She writes it as she braves a totalitarian theocracy that orders pregnant women to be incarcerated while a reversal of evolution wreaks havoc. She says that writing the journal serves as therapy. Was writing the novel a form of therapy for you?

Writers do not like to characterize their writing as self-therapy. It is supposed to be grander somehow, right? Art is supposed to drive you crazy, not cure the crazy. When I write, I am usually trying to solve a problem. However, because I’ve set the problem for myself and intensely enjoy solving these sorts of problems, there is a way in which I find comfort in the writing. Maybe that’s therapy, maybe self-punishment, maybe a treacherous route to joy.

You originally drafted Future Home of the Living God in 2002. What led you to return to Cedar’s story fourteen years later?

2001-2002 was apocalyptic. The election in 2000 was cataclysmic, because Al Gore was our last real chance for leadership in acting to save our climate. Then of course 9/11 and the gathering of transparently false intelligence in order to invade Iraq. Oh, and I’d also just had my youngest daughter at forty-six. So I was sickened and furious when George W. Bush signed the global gag rule, which condemned women around the world to bear children whether or not they were physically capable. I started the book then because I couldn’t deal with the world in any other way. I finished it this year for the same reason.

What were some major changes you made to the manuscript when you revised it in 2016? How much of it remained the same?

The manuscript has changed in huge ways. I cut several hundred pages of Cedar’s musings on Catholic dogma. It was due to the intercession of Saint Severina, the patron saint of editing, whose hair grew twelve feet every night and had to be cut each morning before she said her prayers.

You’ve said that the physical book is an incomparable and enduring form of technology. Is that why you have Cedar physically write in the notebook rather than use a tablet or another portable digital writing device?

That wasn’t at all the reason, but it would make sense if I’d thought that out. I write by hand before transferring my manuscripts to the computer. Cedar doesn’t have reliable electricity and has to hide her journal in an air vent when confined to the hospital. I think having physical copies of writings or images that you love is important. I have noticed that much vanishes when you entrust a device that will soon be upgraded.

Let’s talk about Cedar. She’s Ojibwe-born, but was adopted and raised by white parents. Her voice carries us through the book. Did her voice come to you the same way the voice of your protagonist Joe Coutts in The Round House came to you? Joe, also Ojibwe, carries us through that novel while he investigates the mystery surrounding the violent attack that takes place on the North Dakota reservation where he lives.

Cedar has ideas about the world that collapse very quickly, but she keeps replacing her ideas with new constructs that collapse again, until she commits a murder. Then she is on some level destroyed. This is akin to Joe’s experience in The Round House. I prepare for the book in every way—research, draft after draft, increasingly desperate notes. Then at last a character starts talking—that’s probably how most writers find their characters. I also wanted to write about the mixture of identities common to Native people. Common to all of us. We are all mixtures of some sort or another—usually one heritage predominates, but that isn’t at all predictable.

Early in the novel, Cedar writes a line that really stuck with me: “This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.” It’s such a welcome variation on the usual bleak tropes in dystopian fiction.

I wanted to write this as a time very like the days we are experiencing now. We are in an eerie time. We know that climate chaos is happening and that things are going to disintegrate in unknown ways. We know that some of this is too late to stop. We know that there will be millions of upended lives, climate refugees, political weirdness, and that this has already started. We try to guess how this will affect us personally, our families, and our children. We don’t know. The massive scale of change beggars predictions for any set of people. If we aren’t in the path of war or drought or hurricanes, we forget for many golden hours that the world is changing. Then we remember. And we look around and think, when is it coming?

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to stop climate change from getting worse. Of course. The other point is that there is a time when you know things are tipping, elsewhere, then suddenly, as for Cedar, you are trapped in a tipped-over world.

What I find remarkable about Cedar is her unshakable spirituality. Even though the atrocities committed against her and the other pregnant women are done in the name of hijacked religion, her spirituality sustains her in the midst of a dystopian setting.

Cedar starts out as a pompous pseudo on so many levels. But she is more tenacious than I thought she would be. She actually becomes stronger in her passion to embrace and find solace in the unseen. She surprised me, too.

Speaking of your dystopian setting, where does the all-seeing, robotic figure named Mother come from? She was one of the creepiest features of the Church of the New Constitution, the name of the new American government in Future Home.

Oh, she’s Karen Pence.

You’ve written speculative fiction before. Your novel The Antelope Wife won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. Tell us what it was like to win that award.

I was utterly thrilled! One of my enduring regrets is not making it to the awards ceremony. My life was just too nuts right then. But I cherish the award itself—a bust of H. P. Lovecraft by Gahan Wilson. It is in my will that this treasure should go to my brother-in-law John Burke, who is my science fiction guru.

In your Facebook post on August 18, you list Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, and P.D. James’s The Children of Men as rich sources of strangeness and nightmare scenarios for women. How did you first encounter these books?

Science fiction and fantasy was the first work that invited me into an intellectual zone way outside my small North Dakota hometown. I devoured huge piles of books—I can’t remember many titles from that time except Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. The coherence of his universe is still imprinted on me. I also love Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and more recently, The Buried Giant, a meditative fantasy. My daughter gave me the first two visionary and emotionally resonant books in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. I like work that blurs genres. George Saunders, Brian Evenson. My sister handed me Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a phenomenal new voice. I am also a devout Karen Russell fan.

Further in the Facebook post you write: “writing speculative fiction felt like writing a form of truth.” What’s the truth you found in genre?

There is always good technical groundwork and an emotional veracity to good speculative fiction, which is why The Handmaid’s Tale works so beautifully. There is the feeling that it gives you something to work with in the present. It is the reason so many people are reading Margaret Atwood and George Orwell now.

One of the great things about science fiction is the freedom to envision futures that we want. While pregnant women are being incarcerated, Cedar’s Ojibwe stepfather, Eddy, is leading the Ojibwe in reclaiming land sequestered by white settler colonialism. It reminds me of the history of resistance to settler expansion through Indigenous sovereignty that historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes about in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

Well, it is a fantasy, and probably the opposite would happen. But I couldn’t bear to write that.

In your interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Faces of America, you talked about how crucial it is for Native nations to hold on to land. I couldn’t help but think that your premise of an evangelical government sequestering pregnant women is analogous to Native nations losing their land to the US government’s systemic white settler colonialism.

Indigenous people in the Americas are descended of relatives who survived the dystopia of genocide. To us, dystopia is recent history. (For many, it is the present.) My parents collected all the knowledge they could about our ancestors, so I know where my Ojibwe relatives were and roughly what happened to them. Every Native person knows that nine of every ten of their ancestors died of European diseases. We are descended of that one person in ten who had natural immunity and then somehow survived the various government policies that first meant to eradicate and then assimilate all Native people. We are all Hail Mary shots that went through the hoop. Still, existence for most Native people in this country is an unrelenting struggle. What saves us is a magnificent sense of humor and a thoroughgoing respect for beauty. And also kindness. That’s number one for Native people. (In spite of thousands of little wars on Facebook.)

Are there any future projects you can tell us about?

I am writing about the Red River Valley, where I grew up and where the major portion of extraordinarily rich farmland was taken over by industrial sugar beet production. Hoeing sugar beets was my first job. Sugar has a cruel history; it is a cruel substance. At this point, people always say something like, but Grandma’s lemon bars! Yes, the story is complicated by addiction, greed, and the American illness of sentimentality.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Rachael K. Jones

Jude Griffin | 1109 words

How did “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant” come about?

I wrote this story while in Hollywood for the Writers of the Future workshop. There’s a challenge during the workshop where you’re given several prompts and sent to write a story within twenty-four hours, and “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant” is what I came up with. The two most influential prompts were a small metal doorknob that Tim Powers gave me (I imagined it as a cyborg finger that someone had unscrewed), and Hollywood itself, particularly the food. I was generally NOT impressed with the food in Hollywood. It was overpriced and generic in the way that all tourist traps are. But on the day I wrote this story, I passed by a food truck and practically fell on my knees weeping at the chance to eat something that wasn’t a $20 burger. When I sat down to draft the story, you could say I empathized quite a bit with the hungry humans desperate for some change in their rations in their food desert of a quadrant.

Considering its delicious inspiration, the story had the opposite effect on my workshop mates, who proclaimed it sick and twisted, and said it made them physically ill, which is the best compliment I could’ve asked for. To my workshop mates: I am everlastingly grateful for the cookies you tossed to make this piece what it is today. I salute you, and owe you a nice vegan meal prepared by real humans far away from my imagination.

You used all feminine pronouns for the cyborgs: Can you talk about that choice? Was it to humanize them since “it” can read as so distancing or was it something else?

This story is both an homage and a critique of Golden Age science fiction. I grew up on a steady diet of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, and other authors of the era, especially their short stories. Asimov’s I, Robot was a particularly strong influence on “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant,” with its interplay between programming and human actions.

One thing these (white, male) authors of the Golden Age didn’t do so great was in representing a broad cross section of the human race. You can read story after story without ever encountering a woman, especially stories set in space. Oftentimes, even the non-human characters (such as androids and robots) are gendered male.

And the truth is, we still tend to mark the presence of the feminine as unusual, while overlooking the overrepresentation of the masculine. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, and answered, “When there are nine.” When whole groups of women can fill non-gendered roles without it being noteworthy, we’ll have arrived. So for my Golden Age-style story, I followed the Golden Age tradition of casually using only one gendered pronoun. Only I picked feminine pronouns, because we don’t have enough deranged cannibal she-cyborgs running the food trucks in our fiction.

Did you struggle at all with the balance of scientific logic in the worldbuilding and what the reader needs to just accept as true in order to move forward through the story? (I found myself lingering over some of the descriptions of the cyborgs, how their meat/steel components interacted, and had to stop myself from going down that rabbit hole.)

I would definitely not try to think too hard about the scientific plausibility of this piece! I imagined the technology as something akin to what you get in Star Trek. The cyborgs share some literary DNA with the Borg in how they combine organics and cybernetics in effortless but slightly twisted ways, and how they have a capacity for self-modification on the fly.

The big difference in my story is the sense of body horror these cyborgs have toward their organic components. Star Trek does a great job of communicating horror that organic beings might feel toward being implanted with machine parts, but there isn’t as much fiction exploring how cyborgs may feel toward all the squick of flesh. Bodies constantly ooze and drip their own wastes onto the world, be it saliva or sweat or mucus, while machines are much more efficient and clean about eliminating their wastes. So you could say the psychological realism matters more than the scientific realism in this story.

The Engineer was at once malevolent and endearing: How do you let go of a character like that?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Engineer because I see her as the logical end product of customer service culture: the abused servant who, in trying to escape her servitude, falls right back into those same patterns of service. Everything about her was created to wait upon humans, and despite herself she cannot stop from answering their call, falling for the paltry rewards they offer her. Anyone who has ever worked in customer service will understand what it feels like to offer yourself up for consumption while thanking the consumer for the privilege.

Your stories have such richness of detail that I kept reflecting on certain lines long after reading. Which authors do that for you?

I love this question, because I’m a compulsive re-reader when it comes to stories that have those haunting, addictive voices that follow you long after you finish. Kij Johnson’s work consistently haunts me, as does Catherynne Valente’s. I reread Kij’s “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” several times a year, and Valente’s “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” is perfect and a total sobfest. Among newer authors, I am a huge giant fan of anything Merc Rustad puts out. They consistently write work that gives me hope for the universe (for example, see “Later, Let’s Tear Up the Inner Sanctum,” from Lightspeed earlier this year). Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali also destroys my feelings (see her novelette “Concessions” in Strange Horizons). And Sam J. Miller’s work has more than once made me see the people in my life in new ways. Right now, I keep going back to his “When Your Child Strays From God,” which appeared in Clarkesworld.

For more classic authors, you can’t go wrong with Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which will never not be perfect to me. And Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn does similar things, although it feels like cheating to mention it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: A. Merc Rustad

Arley Sorg | 1886 words

From the beginning, I thought of Eamon, an old fantasy game with limited options (but so cutting-edge back then!) This leading line: “It has three pockets, all empty for now,” cemented it for me, and I could immediately engage with this story. Were there particular games (ones you despise or love) that you had in mind?

 I love games of all sorts—it’s funny because a couple months after I had written this story, a friend told me to play Oxenfree, and I did, and I loved it . . . and there were a lot of instances of me going “holy shit, are we on the same frequency here . . . ” (It’s a fabulous game. I recommend it!)

One of the first long-form RPGs I remember playing on computer was Exile II: Crystal Souls (Spiderweb Software). We had the game on an ancient Mac and I played that thing so many times. I loved it: the little pixelated square icons for your characters, the ridiculous sound effects, the challenging nature of the quests and puzzles. (I don’t think I ever got through some of those doors, though. Never did find the passwords.) The textual nature—you had to read all this text in these tiny screen boxes to understand the game—wasn’t quite as fun as stealing everything possible from castles and caves, and casting fireballs to take out enemies. But I do remember the format of “you are going on an adventure” quite vividly and it has remained one of my favorite modes of storytelling (second person).

If I started to list every game I love, I don’t think this spotlight would ever finish but . . . anything that lets you eat food, set things on fire, and lets you swipe stuff from everywhere is worth playing for me. (I’ve probably mentioned before that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is one of my all-time favorite RPGs. I also love the Witcher games, the original Mass Effect games, Dishonored franchise, Shadow of Mordor, the BioShock games, Dragon Age series, Elder Scrolls, and on and on . . .)

As for games I’m not super fond of? Well, I enjoy watching survival horror—like Outlast—but I get frustrated when I can’t set things on fire. (JUST BURN THAT PLACE DOWN AND RUN, BRO.) I’m also not a fan of puzzle games. I hate puzzles. Haaaaate. I will try a puzzle maybe once before looking online for the solution. I don’t got time for this bullshit, Skyrim. I have cheese wheels to eat and dragons to fight.

Second person can be a somewhat tricky or controversial storytelling technique for some writers. Were there particular hazards with using it, or things you did to make it work?

 I knew this story needed to be told for the majority in second person because of the format and the concept: It’s a video game. And, as mentioned above, I wanted to harken back to the old RPGs I loved with the “you are dungeon crawling . . .” type of vibe. I adore second person, and also it felt the most natural to show the progression of a game in an immersive POV. When playing games myself, I often find myself describing them as “I tried to change my outfit and then FELL OFF A CLIFF AND DIED OH MY GOD” or framing it in second person when discussing with other people (“so when you find the Magical Artifact of Doom, do NOT try to eat it . . .” where the “you” is the game character, and also the player). Also, because this is very much a metafictional story, no other voice or point of view quite clicked for me.

For me, as the story progressed, I felt myself sink into Alex’s character, as if the story grows more personal as it goes along. Is this an intentional effect? There’s also an interesting juxtaposition from the transition of the “you” form to the initial Prologue, which has a kind of distanced third person in its “there is a girl” framing . . .

 Definitely! While I wrote it with the ending in mind, I always try to allow the reader emotional investment in the characters and story. That’s what makes tales worth reading and playing, you know? Getting to know or inhabit the characters’ lives and, in a way, examine our own from that lens. It’s fascinating to talk to people who will not do specific options in games because it feels wrong; and that’s legit! We all come to games from our own perspective and needs and wants from the narrative and mechanics. There’s no wrong way to play a game you are experiencing for entertainment.

(When I play games, I need to try every option and see what happens. It’s particularly satisfying when you find mechanics and storytelling that rewards trying different options, such as the chaos system in Dishonored or ways you can get different endings in The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine depending on how you make Geralt interact with various people.)

In the story, you explore a sense of strict control. Alex is given specific choices, and as she grows in awareness, she defies her imposed limitations. I thought about the ways in which we tend to only give ourselves limited options in given situations, and I also thought about the ways in which the world can actively try to hem us in. Can you talk about the meaning of this for you, especially as it relates to this story?

 Yeah, so, having grown up in a biblically conservative environment when I was a tiny!Merc, I think I turned a lot to fiction and games as a way to have choices that were missing in life. There were all these expectations (be a girl! get married to a guy! have babies! go to church! never have ambitions!) that were suffocating and confusing and I didn’t know how to cope with. There was always the illusion of choice presented (you can choose which cishet male you want to marry) when in fact it was not choice at all. It becomes toxic: You can see options, but none of them feel attainable or allowed, so you stay in your tiny box and accept the non-choices given.

(I mean, I didn’t. I’ve never married, I got the hell out of that environment, and I am happily an ace/aro single queer nb robot living their life.)

In terms of narrative for games, I understand part of it is storytelling and part of it is mechanics, but I often get frustrated when there is a lack of options. (See: a lot of games that only allow straight romance, or make you play as one gender, or don’t let you customize your hairdo.) And one of the most terrifying things is to be trapped in a narrative that doesn’t allow you choices.

So I wanted to take that horror and frustration and rage and give it to Alex and let her make her own life and change the world (and worlds). It’s not easy to break, or break from, systematic oppressions and narratives. It’s really fucking hard. Yet one of the beauties of fiction is that we can show the possible. We can give choices. We can change things.

You wrote briefly in a prior Lightspeed Author Spotlight (Dec 2015, issue #67) about bio-machine consciousness, morality, and emotional intelligence. Alex is driven by survival, as each phase of her existence ends in destruction—not only of her, but of her sister, her family, and her “world.” Ultimately she is determined to save herself and, by extension, her world, but is less concerned about the ramifications for other worlds. She even sends the monsters into the world of her creators—an act of revenge. How did you come to this particular ending? Does Alex end up here because of the trauma and violence of her experiences (recreating the violence she has experienced, to a degree), or is it the only escape she sees? Does morality necessarily stem from experiences, is it a logical conclusion to input, or can results vary depending on the individual consciousness? (Sorry—that’s, like . . . three questions!)

 The ending was the first thing I wrote, actually. (This started as a flash fiction piece, with just the final scene—in a much different execution, if still in second person—and the idea of the game world affecting the “real” world in a spectacular fashion.)

It stemmed from the sort of terrifying idea that, given what we put game characters through, what would they do if given the power to push back or change things? It’s also somewhat learned, I think, on Alex’s part. She has been shown that to “win,” something must be destroyed. In the developers’ version, it was her world that got unmade. In her version, she unmakes their world. She doesn’t really see other options. Is she going to wait for the developers to make a patch, or erase her, or change the rules so she can’t win? They set up a burned Earth finale and Alex learned from that.

On the other hand, at the end, Alex and her sister know a subtle exuberance in the line, “You’ll both remember what it is to live now,” and somehow a sense of triumph on the final words: “You should know. Your name is Alex”—not only a triumph of action/plot, but perhaps by implication, a deeper victory in taking control of who she is. Does this ring true to your intentions/ feelings about the resolve?

 Yes indeed. Despite the horror worked through the entire story (the lack of choice, the choices she does make, the final outcome for the developers’ world), I also wanted this to be grimly satisfying. She’s been through so much and she finally won. She’s fought for her survival and that of everyone around her; if she’d learned different parameters from her own game, perhaps things would have ended differently. Now, at least, she has a chance to live—regardless of what she had to do to get there.

Congrats on your recently published collection with Lethe, So You Want to Be a Robot! What else do you have coming for us that you are really excited about?

 Thank you! While it hit some potholes (mostly me falling off the face of the planet in terms of mental health needed to write and code), I’m still very much excited for my Choice of Games project, Galactic Bounty Hunter—hopefully in late 2018 you can play an unlucky bounty hunter who is drawn into a web of political and botanical problems.

I’m also co-writing a story about DINOSAURS with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry for the Uncanny special issue, slated for spring 2018. I’m very excited about this!

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: Cadwell Turnbull

Sandra Odell | 1154 words

I loved Henrietta, a combination of proper lady and slow burning spitfire. What elements of connection do you look for when creating a point-of-view character for a story? How do you hope the character will relate to the reader?

I think it is important to truly empathize with a POV character. When I’m writing I’m looking for characters that are different from me, but also familiar. I can see their motivations. I understand why they are doing the things they do. I connect with Henrietta through many of the matriarchs I’ve loved in my life. These women have guided me as a human being. My two grandmothers remind me a lot of Henrietta, and so it was important for me to tell a story that treats her as she should be treated: complex and deeply sympathetic. By the end, I wanted people to truly see why she makes the choices she makes, and to understand them. I love Henrietta, so I wrote her with love.

Tell us a little about what inspired “A Third of the Stars in Heaven.”

I grew up in a small place that is deeply religious. Saint Thomas, like the name suggests, has a long and rich relationship with faith. I wanted to write a story that explored how an event outside of one’s belief would affect a person. Henrietta is one answer to that.

This story is part of a larger collection of stories set in the Virgin Islands after an alien occupation. Some of the characters in these stories start out with faith and find that they can’t hold onto it in the midst of such a powerful paradigm-shifting event. Henrietta is different. She does not question her faith. I set out to explore the reason for that. While her story is unique to her, I think her decision represents how a lot of people would deal with the intrusion of an outside threat to their inner belief. There is a defiance in it that feels real to me.

While I thought it was important to show how an event like this could cause people to lose faith, I found it equally important to show the other side of that. That’s why I wrote “A Third of the Stars in Heaven.”

The story is filled with wonderful sensory detail: the stark empty halls; the sweet coconut caramel taste of a Long John; the wet smell of the alley; the yelling and laughter of the elementary schoolers; Henrietta running her fingers down the length of her skirt pleats. How do you think such sensory impressions support a story? Do you think readers notice when such intimate details are not present?

I think some people do notice when details are absent. They’ll remark on it right away. I believe the majority of people only notice it through their response to the story as a whole. Imagery helps guide people back to parts of a story once they are done reading. It creates a memory to hold onto and return to. The absence of sensory detail creates a weaker memory. It doesn’t keep as long or as well. I find that some of the most memorable scenes I’ve loved from stories are rich with details. There don’t have to be a lot of them—I also like to imagine the world for myself—but they do have to be there. Carefully rendered bits that help form the whole picture reinforce the central story in lasting ways.

You have written about narrative voice before, in particular Vernacular Third Person and how it can be used to enhance a story. Are you conscious of the narrative voice when you begin a story, or does the voice grow out of the story itself in later edits?

I’m not always conscious of it. I stumble upon it over time most often. But I do sometimes consciously choose a voice. With Vernacular Third Person (third person narration that uses a colloquial voice), I think the choice is political. It challenges the reader outside of that vernacular to give the work a little more time, to push past their biases.

This story isn’t written in this way. I did try my hand at it with “Other Worlds and this One,” but it is more a hybrid of first and third person than a true VTP. However, there’s been some work from other writers that I think does VTP very well. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is one example of this. I think the story being told needs the vernacular. It would be very different without it. And less impacting, I would argue. Same could be said of Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, which I think is the purest VTP I’ve read. There is no person behind the voice; it is the voice. It tells a close third person story in vernacular without alluding to itself at all. It blew me away when I read it. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is another example I’ve talked about in the past. The novel has such a powerful voice because it uses a number of vernaculars.

While I think it is important to challenge yourself and your readers by being deliberate in your narrative voice, I find that letting it come out of the story is most important. Sometimes a story will call out for a challenging voice, and I think that is an opportunity to go for it. But it shouldn’t be forced. It feels disingenuous when you force it.

What writers excite you between the pages? Who do you turn to when you want to get your fiction on?

Well, my all-time favorite answers to this question are Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin. I love the deeply psychological and sociological aspect of their work. They tell excellent stories that have many layers. I read a lot more of their science fiction than their fantasy, but I’ve been aiming to change that.

I’ve also been reading a lot of N.K. Jemisin lately. She writes a lot of fantasy and I’m in love with her worldbuilding. But she also explores psychology and sociology in her work. I find that my favorite writers do this, no matter what genre they are writing in. They get excited about exploring how their speculative elements affect the people in their worlds personally and as a society. I love reading thoughtful exploration of speculative elements and so that kind of work inspires me when I write.

I really could go on endlessly on this one question. There’s been so many answers that excite me and inspire me. But I’ll just stop with this short list.

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: Mari Ness

Alex Puncekar | 405 words

“You Will Never Know What Opens” is a fantastic piece, one of wonder, mystery, and danger, and the second-person perspective really brings the reader into the story. What was the inspiration behind it?

 I rarely know what, exactly, inspires any of my stories, so this is a hard question to answer. I can point to a few small things here and there—learning French for the sake of a cute guy from Quebec is based on a real story, for instance. The story was written in the summer, when the Florida heat tends to keep me fairly housebound, so the desire to escape the house for a bit seems to have crept in there. And of course, when I was a kid, I was always hoping that the next time I opened up a wardrobe door, I would be able to see Narnia. It never happened—and alas, the walls of my current closet seem all too solid—but I suppose I’ve never really given up that hope.

Second person is a risky POV to write in, but it works wonders in this story. What made second person the best choice for “You Will Never Know What Opens”?

 I always imagined myself traveling along with the kids who visited Narnia and Oz, so I suppose using second person here was my way of allowing readers to do the same.

Do you have anything coming up next that you’d like our readers to know about?

 Lots of things in the works, but nothing I can officially talk about yet. So instead, I’d like to point at something from earlier that I’m still excited about: my poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, a retelling of the life of Helen of Troy in her own words, which recently came out from Papaveria Press.

If you had a house with doors that led to all sorts of new worlds, which one would you like to explore the most?

 My first instinct was to answer this with “Oz,” but then I realized—we never really know how much we’ll want to see of a place until we get there, do we? So my actual answer would be whichever place offered the best food and the best stories. I probably wouldn’t just explore that world; I’d get lost in it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar lives in Ohio and is finishing up his MFA at Youngstown State University. You can find his published work in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, or you can find him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 135 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Streets of Babel”) and Susan Jane Bigelow (“The Eyes of the Flood”), along with SF reprints by Catherynne M. Valente (“Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy”) and James Patrick Kelly (“Someday”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by José Pablo Iriarte (“The Substance of My Lives, The Accidents of Our Birth”) and Sarah Pinsker (“The Court Magician”), and fantasy reprints by Joanna Ruocco (“Auburn”) and Roger Zelazny (“Divine Madness”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

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Wendy N. Wagner

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Stefan Rudnicki

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Jim Freund

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John Joseph Adams

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Laurel Amberdine

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Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

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)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

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)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

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