TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 93, February 2018

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: February 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance
Tobias S. Buckell

Four-Point Affective Calibration
Bogi Takács

Jamaica Ginger
Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl

The Goddess Has Many Faces
Ashok K. Banker

FANTASY

The Quiet Like a Homecoming
Cassandra Khaw

The Seventh Expression of the Robot General
Jeffrey Ford

A Coward’s Death
Rahul Kanakia

One True Love
Malinda Lo

NOVELLA

The Charge and the Storm
An Owomoyela

EXCERPTS

R.A. Salvatore | Child of a Mad God
R.A. Salvatore

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: February 2018
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Reviews: February 2018
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Carmen Maria Machado
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Cassandra Khaw

Bogi Takács

Rahul Kanakia

Ashok K. Banker

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Sam Schechter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: February 2018

John Joseph Adams | 1612 words

Welcome to issue ninety-three of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Ashok K. Banker (“The Goddess Has Many Faces”) and Bogi Takács (“Four-Point Affective Calibration”), along with SF reprints by Tobias S. Buckell (“Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”) and Nalo Hopkinson writing with Nisi Shawl (“Jamaica Ginger”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Cassandra Khaw (“The Quiet Like a Homecoming”) and Rahul Kanakia (“A Coward’s Death”), and fantasy reprints by Jeffrey Ford (“The Seventh Expression of the Robot General”) and Malinda Lo (“One True Love”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. We also have a feature interview with Carmen Maria Machado.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint (“The Charge and the Storm,” by An Owomoyela) and an excerpt from R.A. Salvatore’s new novel, Child of a Mad God.

John Joseph Adams Books News for February 2018

One new acquisition to report:

New York Times bestseller and multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Greg Bear’s The Unfinished Land, about a time of great peril—the sailing of the Spanish Armada—when a young man is transported in a wrecked fishing boat to a lost island at the top of the world, to be caught up in a war that pits gods against monsters and humans against the slavery of history. (2019)

And in other exciting news: I’m pleased to report that Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless was just named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award! The winner and any special citations will be announced on Friday, March 30, 2018 at Norwescon 41 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac WA. To learn more about the award, and see the full list of this year’s finalists, visit philipkdickaward.org.

News aside, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2018:

In April, we have Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. Here’s some early buzz for the book:

“Camp’s fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple chaotic-seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. [. . .] Any reader who likes fantasy with a dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City.” —Publishers Weekly

“Take a walk down wild card shark streets into a world of gods, lost souls, murder, and deep, dark magic. You might not come back from The City of Lost Fortunes, but you’ll enjoy the trip.” —Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series

“In The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp delivers a high-octane tale of myth and magic, serving up the best of Neil Gaiman and Richard Kadrey. Here is New Orleans in all its gritty, grudging glory, the haunt of sinners and saints, gods and mischief-makers. Once you pay a visit, you won’t want to leave!” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

“Bryan Camp’s debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes is like a blessed stay in a city both distinctly familiar and wonderfully strange, with an old friend who knows just the right spots to take you to–not too touristy, and imbued with the weight of history and myth, populated by local characters you’ll never forget. You’ll leave sated with the sights and sounds of a New Orleans that is not quite the real city, but breathes like the real thing, a beautiful mimicry in prose that becomes its own version of reality in a way only a good story—or magic—can. You won’t regret the visit.” —Indra Das, author of The Devourers

“With sharp prose and serious literary chops, Bryan Camp delivers a masterful work of contemporary fantasy in The City of Lost Fortunes. It reads like the New Orleans-born love child of Raymond Chandler and Neil Gaiman, featuring a roguish hero you can’t help but root for. It’s funny, harrowing, thrilling—the pages keep turning. The City of Lost Fortunes establishes Bryan Camp as the best and brightest new voice on fantasy literature’s top shelf.” —Nicholas Mainieri, author of The Infinite

“Anyone who loves New Orleans will love this mystical adventure where gods, magicians, vampires, zombies, angels, and ghouls clash in the only city where a story like this is actually possible. The City of Fortunes expertly blends the real and the surreal, capturing the essence of New Orleans in such a unique way. In this city, just as in this story, the line between fact and fiction blurs, and your imagination is set free.” —Candice Huber, Tubby and Coo’s Bookstore (New Orleans, LA)

“Myth and archetype combine with the gritty realism of modern post-Katrina New Orleans in this fast-paced novel. Throughout the twists and turns of a clever, compelling plot, the soul of the city and strength of its survivors shine through. As a southern Louisiana resident, Bryan Camp saw firsthand the devastation and impact on people’s lives caused by Katrina, and the emotion of that experience fuels the power of the story and its unique, well-crafted characters. If you like the work of Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny, you’ll enjoy this book. A fun, engaging read. Highly recommended.” —Les Howle, director of the Clarion West Writers Workshop

In June, we have Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham, a debut novel about a future where the world is on the brink of total subjugation by machine intelligences when a man stumbles on a sinister conspiracy to exterminate humanity and a group of human and machine misfits who might just be able to prevent it. Here’s what some early readers are saying about this one:

“When the robot apocalypse comes, I hope it’s this much fun. Like The Martian and Ready Player One, Robots of Gotham is set in a high-tech near-future where something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s navigated by a hero who’s quirky, resourceful, and as likable as they come. Read it for the rock’em-sock’em-robot action—read it for the deft world-building with its detailed taxonomy of intelligent machines—read it for the sobering parallels to modern-day issues and threats. Or just read it because it’s a helluva good ride.” —Sharon Shinn, author of the Elemental Blessings series

“The Robots of Gotham is a crackling good adventure, stuffed with cool action sequences. It also features serious and intriguing speculation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence, for good and bad. And it’s an engaging read, with absorbing characters, and, of course, lots and lots of nifty robots.” —Rich Horton, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Todd McAulty has imagined a fascinating geopolitical future, filled it with some very cool technology, and thrown in healthy helpings of intrigue and action. The result is a page-turner that kept me riveted from the opening lines to the final chapter. Highly recommended!” —David B. Coe, author of The Case Files of Justis Fearsson

“If Johnny 5 had a baby with the Terminator, the result would be Robots of Gotham: a book that explores the consequences of world domination by our Robot Overlords. (And, lest we forget the badassiest of them, our Robot Overladies.) Drones, dinosaurs, and doggies—with a plague thrown in for good measure!—the barter is banter, and death is cheap. With man against machine, machine against machine, man against man, unlikely alliances must be forged across all species, rational or otherwise. For all its breakneck world-building, constant questing, and relentless wheeling and dealing, Robots of Gotham is deceptively deep-hearted: a novel about, of all things, friendship.” —C.S.E. Cooney, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories

“Soldiers, spies, diplomats—and that’s just the machines. Wait until you meet the wise-cracking hero and his dog. Wildly inventive, outrageous fun.” —Kay Kenyon, author of At the Table of Wolves and Serpent in the Heather

“Adventure, mystery, action, sinister intrigue, clever heroics, and robots—what more do you need? I couldn’t put it down.” —Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls

Further out in 2018, we’ll have The Wild Dead—Carrie Vaughn’s sequel to Bannerless—in July; Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood in October; and then Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin in November. We’ll provide more details about those as the publication dates draw nearer, but as always if you want more information about these or any other John Joseph Adams Books titles, just visit johnjosephadamsbooks.com.

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.

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

Tobias S. Buckell | 6290 words

After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory and bloated with the riches we had all acquired.

Give me a ship to sail and a quasar to guide it by, billions of individual citizens of all shapes, functions, and sizes cried out in joy together on the common channels. Whether fleshy forms safe below, my fellow crab-like maintenance forms on the hulls, or even the secretive navigation minds, our myriad thoughts joined in a sense of True Shared Purpose that lingered even after the necessity of the group battle-mind.

I clung to my usual position on the hull of one of the three rotating habitat rings deep inside our shields and watched the warped event horizon shift as we fell in behind the metallic world in a trailing orbit.

A sleet of debris fell toward the event horizon of Purth-Anaget’s black hole, hammering the kilometers of shields that formed an iridescent cocoon around us. The bow shock of our shields’ push through the debris field danced ahead of us, the compressed wave it created becoming a hyper-aurora of shifting colors and energies that collided and compressed before they streamed past our sides.

What a joy it was to see a world again. I was happy to be outside in the dark so that as the bow shields faded, I beheld the perpetual night face of the world: it glittered with millions of fractal habitation patterns traced out across its artificial surface.

On the hull with me, a nearby friend scuttled between airlocks in a cloud of insect-sized seeing eyes. They spotted me and tapped me with a tight-beam laser for a private ping.

“Isn’t this exciting?” they commented.

“Yes. But this will be the first time I don’t get to travel downplanet,” I beamed back.

I received a derisive snort of static on a common radio frequency from their direction. “There is nothing there that cannot be experienced right here in the Core. Waterfalls, white sand beaches, clear waters.”

“But it’s different down there,” I said. “I love visiting planets.”

“Then hurry up and let’s get ready for the turnaround so we can leave this industrial shithole of a planet behind us and find a nicer one. I hate being this close to a black hole. It fucks with time dilation, and I spend all night tasting radiation and fixing broken equipment that can’t handle energy discharges in the exajoule ranges. Not to mention everything damaged in the battle I have to repair.”

This was true. There was work to be done.

Safe now in trailing orbit, the many traveling worlds contained within the shields that marked the With All Sincerity’s boundaries burst into activity. Thousands of structures floating in between the rotating rings moved about, jockeying and repositioning themselves into renegotiated orbits. Flocks of transports rose into the air, wheeling about inside the shields to then stream off ahead toward Purth-Anaget. There were trillions of citizens of the Fleet of Honest Representation heading for the planet now that their fleet lay captured between our shields like insects in amber.

The enemy fleet had forced us to extend energy far, far out beyond our usual limits. Great risks had been taken. But the reward had been epic, and the encounter resolved in our favor with their capture.

Purth-Anaget’s current ruling paradigm followed the memetics of the One True Form, and so had opened their world to these refugees. But Purth-Anaget was not so wedded to the belief system as to pose any threat to mutual commerce, information exchange, or any of our own rights to self-determination.

Later we would begin stripping the captured prize ships of information, booby traps, and raw mass, with Purth-Anaget’s shipyards moving inside of our shields to help.

I leapt out into space, spinning a simple carbon nanotube of string behind me to keep myself attached to the hull. I swung wide, twisted, and landed near a dark-energy manifold bridge that had pinged me a maintenance consult request just a few minutes back.

My eyes danced with information for a picosecond. Something shifted in the shadows between the hull’s crenulations.

I jumped back. We had just fought an entire war-fleet; any number of eldritch machines could have slipped through our shields—things that snapped and clawed, ripped you apart in a femtosecond’s worth of dark energy. Seekers and destroyers.

A face appeared in the dark. Skeins of invisibility and personal shielding fell away like a pricked soap bubble to reveal a bipedal figure clinging to the hull.

“You there!” it hissed at me over a tightly contained beam of data. “I am a fully bonded Shareholder and Chief Executive with command privileges of the Anabathic Ship Helios Prime. Help me! Do not raise an alarm.”

I gaped. What was a CEO doing on our hull? Its vacuum-proof carapace had been destroyed while passing through space at high velocity, pockmarked by the violence of single atoms at indescribable speed punching through its shields. Fluids leaked out, surrounding the stowaway in a frozen mist. It must have jumped the space between ships during the battle, or maybe even after.

Protocols insisted I notify the hell out of security. But the CEO had stopped me from doing that. There was a simple hierarchy across the many ecologies of a traveling ship, and in all of them a CEO certainly trumped maintenance forms. Particularly now that we were no longer in direct conflict and the Fleet of Honest Representation had surrendered.

“Tell me: What is your name?” the CEO demanded.

“I gave that up a long time ago,” I said. “I have an address. It should be an encrypted rider on any communication I’m single-beaming to you. Any message you direct to it will find me.”

“My name is Armand,” the CEO said. “And I need your help. Will you let me come to harm?”

“I will not be able to help you in a meaningful way, so my not telling security and medical assistance that you are here will likely do more harm than good. However, as you are a CEO, I have to follow your orders. I admit, I find myself rather conflicted. I believe I’m going to have to countermand your previous request.”

Again, I prepared to notify security with a quick summary of my puzzling situation.

But the strange CEO again stopped me. “If you tell anyone I am here, I will surely die and you will be responsible.”

I had to mull the implications of that over.

“I need your help, robot,” the CEO said. “And it is your duty to render me aid.”

Well, shit. That was indeed a dilemma.

• • • •

Robot.

That was a Formist word. I never liked it.

I surrendered my free will to gain immortality and dissolve my fleshly constraints, so that hard acceleration would not tear at my cells and slosh my organs backward until they pulped. I did it so I could see the galaxy. That was one hundred and fifty-seven years, six months, nine days, ten hours, and—to round it out a bit—fifteen seconds ago.

Back then, you were downloaded into hyperdense pin-sized starships that hung off the edge of the speed of light, assembling what was needed on arrival via self-replicating nanomachines that you spun your mind-states off into. I’m sure there are billions of copies of my essential self scattered throughout the galaxy by this point.

Things are a little different today. More mass. Bigger engines. Bigger ships. Ships the size of small worlds. Ships that change the orbits of moons and satellites if they don’t negotiate and plan their final approach carefully.

“Okay,” I finally said to the CEO. “I can help you.”

Armand slumped in place, relaxed now that it knew I would render the aid it had demanded.

I snagged the body with a filament lasso and pulled Armand along the hull with me.

It did not do to dwell on whether I was choosing to do this or it was the nature of my artificial nature doing the choosing for me. The constraints of my contracts, which had been negotiated when I had free will and boundaries—as well as my desires and dreams—were implacable.

Towing Armand was the price I paid to be able to look up over my shoulder to see the folding, twisting impossibility that was a black hole. It was the price I paid to grapple onto the hull of one of several three hundred kilometer-wide rotating rings with parks, beaches, an entire glittering city, and all the wilds outside of them.

The price I paid to sail the stars on this ship.

• • • •

A century and a half of travel, from the perspective of my humble self, represented far more in regular time due to relativity. Hit the edge of lightspeed and a lot of things happened by the time you returned simply because thousands of years had passed.

In a century of me-time, spin-off civilizations rose and fell. A multiplicity of forms and intelligences evolved and went extinct. Each time I came to port, humanity’s descendants had reshaped worlds and systems as needed. Each place marvelous and inventive, stunning to behold.

The galaxy had bloomed from wilderness to a teeming experiment.

I’d lost free will, but I had a choice of contracts. With a century and a half of travel tucked under my shell, hailing from a well-respected explorer lineage, I’d joined the hull repair crew with a few eyes toward seeing more worlds like Purth-Anaget before my pension vested some two hundred years from now.

Armand fluttered in and out of consciousness as I stripped away the CEO’s carapace, revealing flesh and circuitry.

“This is a mess,” I said. “You’re damaged way beyond my repair. I can’t help you in your current incarnation, but I can back you up and port you over to a reserve chassis.” I hoped that would be enough and would end my obligation.

“No!” Armand’s words came firm from its charred head in soundwaves, with pain apparent across its deformed features.

“Oh, come on,” I protested. “I understand you’re a Formist, but you’re taking your belief system to a ridiculous level of commitment. Are you really going to die a final death over this?”

I’d not been in high-level diplomat circles in decades. Maybe the spread of this current meme had developed well beyond my realization. Had the followers of the One True Form been ready to lay their lives down in the battle we’d just fought with them? Like some proto-historical planetary cult?

Armand shook its head with a groan, skin flaking off in the air. “It would be an imposition to make you a party to my suicide. I apologize. I am committed to Humanity’s True Form. I was born planetary. I have a real and distinct DNA lineage that I can trace to Sol. I don’t want to die, my friend. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I want to preserve this body for many centuries to come. Exactly as it is.”

I nodded, scanning some records and brushing up on my memeology. Armand was something of a preservationist who believed that to copy its mind over to something else meant that it wasn’t the original copy. Armand would take full advantage of all technology to augment, evolve, and adapt its body internally. But Armand would forever keep its form: that of an original human. Upgrades hidden inside itself, a mix of biology and metal, computer and neural.

That, my unwanted guest believed, made it more human than I.

I personally viewed it as a bizarre flesh-costuming fetish.

“Where am I?” Armand asked. A glazed look passed across its face. The pain medications were kicking in, my sensors reported. Maybe it would pass out, and then I could gain some time to think about my predicament.

“My cubby,” I said. “I couldn’t take you anywhere security would detect you.”

If security found out what I was doing, my contract would likely be voided, which would prevent me from continuing to ride the hulls and see the galaxy.

Armand looked at the tiny transparent cupboards and lines of trinkets nestled carefully inside the fields they generated. I kicked through the air over to the nearest cupboard. “They’re mementos,” I told Armand.

“I don’t understand,” Armand said. “You collect nonessential mass?”

“They’re mementos.” I released a coral-colored mosquito-like statue into the space between us. “This is a wooden carving of a quaqeti from Moon Sibhartha.”

Armand did not understand. “Your ship allows you to keep mass?”

I shivered. I had not wanted to bring Armand to this place. But what choice did I have? “No one knows. No one knows about this cubby. No one knows about the mass. I’ve had the mass for over eighty years and have hidden it all this time. They are my mementos.”

Materialism was a planetary conceit, long since edited out of travelers. Armand understood what the mementos were but could not understand why I would collect them. Engines might be bigger in this age, but security still carefully audited essential and nonessential mass. I’d traded many favors and fudged manifests to create this tiny museum.

Armand shrugged. “I have a list of things you need to get me,” it explained. “They will allow my systems to rebuild. Tell no one I am here.”

I would not. Even if I had self-determination.

The stakes were just too high now.

• • • •

I deorbited over Lazuli, my carapace burning hot in the thick sky contained between the rim walls of the great tertiary habitat ring. I enjoyed seeing the rivers, oceans, and great forests of the continent from above as I fell toward the ground in a fireball of reentry. It was faster, and a hell of a lot more fun, than going from subway to subway through the hull and then making my way along the surface.

Twice I adjusted my flight path to avoid great transparent cities floating in the upper sky, where they arbitraged the difference in gravity to create sugar-spun filament infrastructure.

I unfolded wings that I usually used to recharge myself near the compact sun in the middle of our ship and spiraled my way slowly down into Lazuli, my hindbrain communicating with traffic control to let me merge with the hundreds of vehicles flitting between Lazuli’s spires.

After kissing ground at 45th and Starway, I scuttled among the thousands of pedestrians toward my destination a few stories deep under a memorial park. Five-story-high vertical farms sank deep toward the hull there, and semiautonomous drones with spidery legs crawled up and down the green, misted columns under precisely tuned spectrum lights.

The independent doctor-practitioner I’d come to see lived inside one of the towers with a stunning view of exotic orchids and vertical fields of lavender. It crawled down out of its ceiling perch, tubes and high-bandwidth optical nerves draped carefully around its hundreds of insectile limbs.

“Hello,” it said. “It’s been thirty years, hasn’t it? What a pleasure. Have you come to collect the favor you’re owed?”

I spread my heavy, primary arms wide. “I apologize. I should have visited for other reasons; it is rude. But I am here for the favor.”

A ship was an organism, an economy, a world onto itself. Occasionally, things needed to be accomplished outside of official networks.

“Let me take a closer look at my privacy protocols,” it said. “Allow me a moment, and do not be alarmed by any motion.”

Vines shifted and clambered up the walls. Thorns blossomed around us. Thick bark dripped sap down the walls until the entire room around us glistened in fresh amber.

I flipped through a few different spectrums to accommodate for the loss of light.

“Understand, security will see this negative space and become . . . interested,” the doctor-practitioner said to me somberly. “But you can now ask me what you could not send a message for.”

I gave it the list Armand had demanded.

The doctor-practitioner shifted back. “I can give you all that feed material. The stem cells, that’s easy. The picotechnology—it’s registered. I can get it to you, but security will figure out you have unauthorized, unregulated picotech. Can you handle that attention?”

“Yes. Can you?”

“I will be fine.” Several of the thin arms rummaged around the many cubbyholes inside the room, filling a tiny case with biohazard vials.

“Thank you,” I said, with genuine gratefulness. “May I ask you a question, one that you can’t look up but can use your private internal memory for?”

“Yes.”

I could not risk looking up anything. Security algorithms would put two and two together. “Does the biological name Armand mean anything to you? A CEO-level person? From the Fleet of Honest Representation?”

The doctor-practitioner remained quiet for a moment before answering. “Yes. I have heard it. Armand was the CEO of one of the Anabathic warships captured in the battle and removed from active management after surrender. There was a hostile takeover of the management. Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Are you here under free will?”

I spread my primary arms again. “It’s a Core Laws issue.”

“So, no. Someone will be harmed if you do not do this?”

I nodded. “Yes. My duty is clear. And I have to ask you to keep your privacy, or there is potential for harm. I have no other option.”

“I will respect that. I am sorry you are in this position. You know there are places to go for guidance.”

“It has not gotten to that level of concern,” I told it. “Are you still, then, able to help me?”

One of the spindly arms handed me the cooled bio-safe case. “Yes. Here is everything you need. Please do consider visiting in your physical form more often than once every few decades. I enjoy entertaining, as my current vocation means I am unable to leave this room.”

“Of course. Thank you,” I said, relieved. “I think I’m now in your debt.”

“No, we are even,” my old acquaintance said. “But in the following seconds I will give you more information that will put you in my debt. There is something you should know about Armand . . .”

• • • •

I folded my legs up underneath myself and watched nutrients as they pumped through tubes and into Armand. Raw biological feed percolated through it, and picomachinery sizzled underneath its skin. The background temperature of my cubbyhole kicked up slightly due to the sudden boost to Armand’s metabolism.

Bulky, older nanotech crawled over Armand’s skin like living mold. Gray filaments wrapped firmly around nutrient buckets as the medical programming assessed conditions, repaired damage, and sought out more raw material.

I glided a bit farther back out of reach. It was probably bullshit, but there were stories of medicine reaching out and grabbing whatever was nearby.

Armand shivered and opened its eyes as thousands of wriggling tubules on its neck and chest whistled, sucking in air as hard as they could.

“Security isn’t here,” Armand noted out loud, using meaty lips to make its words.

“You have to understand,” I said in kind. “I have put both my future and the future of a good friend at risk to do this for you. Because I have little choice.”

Armand closed its eyes for another long moment and the tubules stopped wriggling. It flexed and everything flaked away, a discarded cloud of a second skin. Underneath it, everything was fresh and new. “What is your friend’s name?”

I pulled out a tiny vacuum to clean the air around us. “Name? It has no name. What does it need a name for?”

Armand unspooled itself from the fetal position in the air. It twisted in place to watch me drifting around. “How do you distinguish it? How do you find it?”

“It has a unique address. It is a unique mind. The thoughts and things it says—”

“It has no name,” Armand snapped. “It is a copy of a past copy of a copy. A ghost injected into a form for a purpose.”

“It’s my friend,” I replied, voice flat.

“How do you know?”

“Because I say so.” The interrogation annoyed me. “Because I get to decide who is my friend. Because it stood by my side against the sleet of dark-matter radiation and howled into the void with me. Because I care for it. Because we have shared memories and kindnesses, and exchanged favors.”

Armand shook its head. “But anything can be programmed to join you and do those things. A pet.”

“Why do you care so much? It is none of your business what I call friend.”

“But it does matter,” Armand said. “Whether we are real or not matters. Look at you right now. You were forced to do something against your will. That cannot happen to me.”

“Really? No True Form has ever been in a position with no real choices before? Forced to do something desperate? I have my old memories. I can remember times when I had no choice even though I had free will. But let us talk about you. Let us talk about the lack of choices you have right now.”

Armand could hear something in my voice. Anger. It backed away from me, suddenly nervous. “What do you mean?”

“You threw yourself from your ship into mine, crossing fields during combat, damaging yourself almost to the point of pure dissolution. You do not sound like you were someone with many choices.”

“I made the choice to leap into the vacuum myself,” Armand growled.

“Why?”

The word hung in the empty air between us for a bloated second. A minor eternity. It was the fulcrum of our little debate.

“You think you know something about me,” Armand said, voice suddenly low and soft. “What do you think you know, robot?”

Meat fucker. I could have said that. Instead, I said, “You were a CEO. And during the battle, when your shields began to fail, you moved all the biologicals into radiation-protected emergency shelters. Then you ordered the maintenance forms and hard-shells up to the front to repair the battle damage. You did not surrender; you put lives at risk. And then you let people die, torn apart as they struggled to repair your ship. You told them that if they failed, the biologicals down below would die.”

“It was the truth.”

“It was a lie! You were engaged in a battle. You went to war. You made a conscious choice to put your civilization at risk when no one had physically assaulted or threatened you.”

“Our way of life was at risk.”

“By people who could argue better. Your people failed at diplomacy. You failed to make a better argument. And you murdered your own.”

Armand pointed at me. “I murdered no one. I lost maintenance machines with copies of ancient brains. That is all. That is what they were built for.”

“Well. The sustained votes of the hostile takeover that you fled from have put out a call for your capture, including a call for your dissolution. True death, the end of your thought line—even if you made copies. You are hated and hunted. Even here.”

“You were bound to not give up my location,” Armand said, alarmed.

“I didn’t. I did everything in my power not to. But I am a mere maintenance form. Security here is very, very powerful. You have fifteen hours, I estimate, before security is able to model my comings and goings, discover my cubby by auditing mass transfers back a century, and then open its current sniffer files. This is not a secure location; I exist thanks to obscurity, not invisibility.”

“So, I am to be caught?” Armand asked.

“I am not able to let you die. But I cannot hide you much longer.”

To be sure, losing my trinkets would be a setback of a century’s worth of work. My mission. But all this would go away eventually. It was important to be patient on the journey of centuries.

“I need to get to Purth-Anaget, then,” Armand said. “There are followers of the True Form there. I would be sheltered and out of jurisdiction.”

“This is true.” I bobbed an arm.

“You will help me,” Armand said.

“The fuck I will,” I told it.

“If I am taken, I will die,” Armand shouted. “They will kill me.”

“If security catches you, our justice protocols will process you. You are not in immediate danger. The proper authority levels will put their attention to you. I can happily refuse your request.”

I felt a rise of warm happiness at the thought.

Armand looked around the cubby frantically. I could hear its heartbeats rising, free of modulators and responding to unprocessed, raw chemicals. Beads of dirty sweat appeared on Armand’s forehead. “If you have free will over this decision, allow me to make you an offer for your assistance.”

“Oh, I doubt there is anything you can—”

“I will transfer you my full CEO share,” Armand said.

My words died inside me as I stared at my unwanted guest.

A full share.

The CEO of a galactic starship oversaw the affairs of nearly a billion souls. The economy of planets passed through its accounts.

Consider the cost to build and launch such a thing: It was a fraction of the GDP of an entire planetary disk. From the boiling edges of a sun to the cold Oort clouds. The wealth, almost too staggering for an individual mind to perceive, was passed around by banking intelligences that created systems of trade throughout the galaxy, moving encrypted, raw information from point to point. Monetizing memes with picotechnological companion infrastructure apps. Raw mass trade for the galactically rich to own a fragment of something created by another mind light-years away. Or just simple tourism.

To own a share was to be richer than any single being could really imagine. I’d forgotten the godlike wealth inherent in something like the creature before me.

“If you do this,” Armand told me, “you cannot reveal I was here. You cannot say anything. Or I will be revealed on Purth-Anaget, and my life will be at risk. I will not be safe unless I am to disappear.”

I could feel choices tangle and roil about inside of me. “Show me,” I said.

Armand closed its eyes and opened its left hand. Deeply embedded cryptography tattooed on its palm unraveled. Quantum keys disentangled, and a tiny singularity of information budded open to reveal itself to me. I blinked. I could verify it. I could have it.

“I have to make arrangements,” I said neutrally. I spun in the air and left my cubby to spring back out into the dark where I could think.

I was going to need help.

• • • •

I tumbled through the air to land on the temple grounds. There were four hundred and fifty structures there in the holy districts, all of them lined up among the boulevards of the faithful where the pedestrians could visit their preferred slice of the divine. The minds of biological and hard-shelled forms all tumbled, walked, flew, rolled, or crawled there to fully realize their higher purposes.

Each marble step underneath my carbon fiber-sheathed limbs calmed me. I walked through the cool curtains of the Halls of the Confessor and approached the Holy of Holies: a pinprick of light suspended in the air between the heavy, expensive mass of real marble columns. The light sucked me up into the air and pulled me into a tiny singularity of perception and data. All around me, levels of security veils dropped, thick and implacable. My vision blurred and taste buds watered from the acidic levels of deadness as stillness flooded up and drowned me.

I was alone.

Alone in the universe. Cut off from everything I had ever known or would know. I was nothing. I was everything. I was—

“You are secure,” the void told me.

I could sense the presence at the heart of the Holy of Holies. Dense with computational capacity, to a level that even navigation systems would envy. Intelligence that a Captain would beg to taste. This near-singularity of artificial intelligence had been created the very moment I had been pulled inside of it, just for me to talk to. And it would die the moment I left. Never to have been.

All it was doing was listening to me, and only me. Nothing would know what I said. Nothing would know what guidance I was given.

“I seek moral guidance outside clear legal parameters,” I said. “And confession.”

“Tell me everything.”

And I did. It flowed from me without thought: just pure data. Video, mind-state, feelings, fears. I opened myself fully. My sins, my triumphs, my darkest secrets.

All was given to be pondered over.

Had I been able to weep, I would have.

Finally, it spoke. “You must take the share.”

I perked up. “Why?”

“To protect yourself from security. You will need to buy many favors and throw security off the trail. I will give you some ideas. You should seek to protect yourself. Self-preservation is okay.”

More words and concepts came at me from different directions, using different moral subroutines. “And to remove such power from a soul that is willing to put lives at risk . . . you will save future lives.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

“I know,” it said to me. “That is why you came here.”

Then it continued, with another voice. “Some have feared such manipulations before. The use of forms with no free will creates security weaknesses. Alternate charters have been suggested, such as fully owned workers’ cooperatives with mutual profit-sharing among crews, not just partial vesting after a timed contract. Should you gain a full share, you should also lend efforts to this.”

The Holy of Holies continued. “To get this Armand away from our civilization is a priority; it carries dangerous memes within itself that have created expensive conflicts.”

Then it said, “A killer should not remain on ship.”

And, “You have the moral right to follow your plan.”

Finally, it added, “Your plan is just.”

I interrupted. “But Armand will get away with murder. It will be free. It disturbs me.”

“Yes.”

“It should.”

“Engage in passive resistance.”

“Obey the letter of Armand’s law, but find a way around its will. You will be like a genie, granting Armand wishes. But you will find a way to bring justice. You will see.”

“Your plan is just. Follow it and be on the righteous path.”

• • • •

I launched back into civilization with purpose, leaving the temple behind me in an explosive afterburner thrust. I didn’t have much time to beat security.

High up above the cities, nestled in the curve of the habitat rings, near the squared-off spiderwebs of the largest harbor dock, I wrangled my way to another old contact.

This was less a friend and more just an asshole I’d occasionally been forced to do business with. But a reliable asshole that was tight against security. Though just by visiting, I’d be triggering all sorts of attention.

I hung from a girder and showed the fence a transparent showcase filled with all my trophies. It did some scans, checked the authenticity, and whistled. “Fuck me, these are real. That’s all unauthorized mass. How the hell? This is a life’s work of mass-based tourism. You really want me to broker sales on all of this?”

“Can you?”

“To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”

“Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”

A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”

“And Emergency Services.”

“I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”

“I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.

Oh, what was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.

Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.

• • • •

Armand was suspicious. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.

But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.

It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.

On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.

Armand would be safe.

Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.

“Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”

“I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming”—I all but spit the word—“does not allow it.”

Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”

“You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”

Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”

I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.

As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.

I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.

“It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”

“Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.

I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.

There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.

Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”

“The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”

“No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”

“I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”

“But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.

“Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”

I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.

Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.

But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.

Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.

But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.

After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.

Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.

©2017 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work.

His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over 50 stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow-up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will ‘give you the shivers.’

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

Four-Point Affective Calibration

Bogi Takács | 1400 words

Prompt: Anger

Of course I can be angry.

But I wear a headscarf. The moment I’m angry, you put me in your mental box labeled “TERRORIST” in neat, tidy small capitals. You store me under “Potential Danger” in the warehouse of your mind.

When I cross the parking lot to the grocery store, sometimes people hit the gas, not the brakes. And this is a university town, supposedly liberal—or is it?

I’m not a Muslim, but it’s not like most people around here can spot the difference. I allow you to guess my religion, my level of observance, my gender. You will probably guess wrong.

Let’s start over. I can be angry, but I won’t.

I won’t because it would not have gotten me out of secondary screening, immigration detention, hostile interrogation, and all the other abstract concepts that need at least two words to describe. I lived to learn.

But you know? Maybe I’m not angry because I’m not.

You expect me to be angry, or at least be silent but simmering with rage. And sure, I can work myself up to it. But right now I’m mostly just annoyed, sitting here under the helmet and asked to contemplate various emotions supposedly basic, supposedly universal across cultures. I have my doubts about this last part.

I hope next up is sadness, because thinking about anger makes me sad.

Prompt: Sadness

I wish my thoughts were tidier. A complete stranger will be examining these transcripts. I keep on going off on tangents.

I have a succulent on my living room table that keeps on trying to grow out of its pot and downward, forming a fringe of thick green bundles. But its branches are not strong enough to support their own weight, and they keep on breaking off, wasting away. The plant does not give up, and I water it dutifully, try to rotate it so that it occupies various positions with respect to the north-facing window, the evanescent sunlight.

It only wants to grow downward, toward certain harm.

This is not a metaphor, this is straight-up life. Plants have personalities—the balsam gourd in the office is feisty, rapidly growing tendrils toward all the other pots, seeking to reach out and tickle. Possibly smother.

Maybe you chose me for this task because I’m so observant.

Is this enough for sadness? Can I get a different one? Impatience is not a basic emotion, I am told.

[Pause]

Disgust is apparently a subcategory of anger, but I really don’t want to redo that segment. They should’ve briefed me first—this is not my field, I only know about Ekman’s six basic emotions from undergrad. Happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust. People refine their models all the time.

I threw out all my models, and again, and again. Extraterrestrial communication is also an abstract concept that needs two words to describe. It doesn’t sound much friendlier than hostile interrogation.

Prompt: Fear/surprise

Fear and surprise fall under the same heading, emotions evoked by “fast-approaching danger.” I’m trying to scrape my brain for citations. Jack et al, I don’t remember the year.

I didn’t sleep through the initial briefing, I was just so anxious that nothing they said registered. Sure, I can tell you about the amygdala, fear response, interactions with short-term memory. It’s not really an excuse though. Does it matter? I feel like I’m in my comprehensive exams again, being interrogated by my committee, even though it’s just my thoughts being transcribed. Even though this is just the calibration phase.

I feel like I am looking at the immigration officer again.

Deep breath. I can upset myself with great alacrity and skill.

The research team think aliens will probably not understand the substance of my thoughts as much as the underlying emotions—at least at first. Everything needs to be precisely calibrated.

Am I too scatterbrained? I’m told that everyone has messy transcripts. Mine feel worse. I’m put on the spot. There are plenty of backup people standing by if my calibration fails, if the factors won’t converge, if, if. Plenty of people to take my spot.

Who wants the person in the headscarf? They made me take it off to put on the helmet, they made me take it off on the border, even for my driver’s license, my ridiculous student ID photo, my clip-on work ID stating my name and my surprisingly senior position. It’s not the right name either, but at least it doesn’t have a gender marker, and it’s not like people can spell my name anyway.

In the past two decades in this country, I have amassed a variety of ID photos with uncovered-head me. Maybe I should make an installation. Very artistic.

I’m supposed to produce fear and surprise on command, not anger. I don’t think my emotions segment into four neat categories. Boxes in the warehouse. I can try again—I do think I had the fear component. As for surprise, I would need to be surprised.

When I got this assignment, I was surprised.

It made me rethink that moment back over a decade ago, in undergrad, when in tears I confessed my diagnosis to my biostatistics professor, when he dragged me to Disability Services. If I’d stayed in my country of origin—I refuse to say home country, this is my home country now—if I’d stayed, I would never have experienced that moment. Disability Services wasn’t particularly a thing back there. I’m told now it’s different.

Surprise. Focus. When I’m nervous, I fidget, constantly readjusting my clothes, my scarf—and I’m clumsy so I sometimes pull it off my head altogether. I’ve never seen anyone else do that, but most of the other autistic people I know are staunch atheists. Secular people are horrified on my behalf, and I feel embarrassed, but I don’t think [uninterpretable] minds much—after all, [uninterpretable] is supposedly all-knowing and [uninterpretable].

I pull at my clothes and [uninterpretable] [uninterpretable] my fingers even now, but I’m reprimanded that this produces motion artifacts.

I really want to talk to aliens, so I try to sit still. Just one more emotion to go.

Prompt: Happiness

I know why they saved happiness for last—it’s because of the priming effects. If I finish with happiness, I will remain a bit happier, for a little while. They didn’t tell me about this, but I do work with human participants in my own line of research.

I’m glad I transitioned from purely quantitative to mixed-methods. Extraterrestrial communication needs all the methods we can throw at it. Of course it’s my quantitative-minded colleagues who will read the transcripts. Stop with those thoughts, I don’t want to lose my job. Am I expected to think of sex? I generally don’t think of sex.

Happiness. Happiness is a vast spacecraft, reminiscent of alien-invasion movies, but accompanied by a feeling of elation and relief. Happiness is change.

I’m sure the people in the lab next door chose me for this assignment because they have these ridiculous stereotypes that being neuroatypical makes me better at understanding aliens. But you know, one tiny part of that is true: I want to talk to aliens, because I’m fed up with humans sometimes. When I was compared to space aliens as a kid, I probably internalized the wrong message—I decided that aliens must be really cool.

Happiness is love. Happiness is change and aliens are change and love is aliens—I move along the chain of associations, I don’t care about formal logic. Love is aliens.

They want to talk. Not shoot, destroy, evaporate, invade—they want to talk. I want to talk. They don’t know how. We’re working on it.

I used to be an alien—of a different kind; a resident alien, and before that, a non-resident. And inside me a warm feeling bubbles up as I’m told that the calibration has finished, concluded, I am ready, I have passed.

I know with the certainty of joy that I can help the newcomers with settling in.

©2018 by Bogi Takács.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bogi Takács is a neutrally gendered Hungarian Jewish person living in the US. Eir speculative fiction and poetry has been published in venues like Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Apex, Uncanny, and more. E has a space opera webserial that has a trans couple as protagonists: Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, with free episodes each Monday. You can visit eir website or find em on Twitter.

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

Jamaica Ginger

Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl | 8220 words

“Damn and blast it!”

Plaquette let herself in through the showroom door of the watchmaker’s that morning to hear Msieur blistering the air of his shop with his swearing. The hulking clockwork man he’d been working on was high-stepping around the workroom floor in a clumsy lurch. It lifted its knees comically high, its body listing to one side and its feet coming down in the wrong order; toe, then heel. Billy Sumach, who delivered supplies to Msieur, was in the workroom. Through the open doorway he threw her a merry glance with his pretty brown eyes, but he had better sense than to laugh at Msieur’s handiwork with Msieur in the room.

Msieur glared at Plaquette. “You’re late. That’s coming off your pay.”

Plaquette winced. Their family needed every cent of her earnings, but she’d had to wait home till Ma got back from the railroad to take over minding Pa.

The mechanical George staggered tap-click, tap-click across the shop. It crashed into a wall and tumbled with a clank to the floor, then lay there whirring. Msieur swore again, words Ma would be mortified to know that Plaquette had heard. He snatched off one of his own shoes and threw it at the George. Billy Sumach gave a little peep of swallowed laughter. Msieur pointed at the George. “Fix it,” he growled at Plaquette. “I have to present it to the governor the day after tomorrow.”

As though Plaquette didn’t know that. “Yes, Msieur,” she said to his back as he stormed through the door to the showroom.

The second the door slammed shut, Billy let out a whoop. Plaquette found herself smiling along with him, glad of a little amusement. It was scarce in her life nowadays. “My land,” Billy said, “’Pears Old George there has got himself the jake leg!”

The fun blew out of the room like a candle flame. “Don’t you joke,” Plaquette told him, through teeth clamped tight together. “You know ’bout my Pa.”

Billy’s face fell. “Oh Lord, Plaquette, I’m sorry.”

“Just help me get this George to its feet. It weighs a ton.” Billy was a fine man, of Plaquette’s color and station. Lately when he came by with deliveries he’d been favoring her with smiles and wistful looks. But she couldn’t study that right now, not with Pa taken so poorly. Together they wrestled the George over to Plaquette’s work table. There it stood. Its painted-on porter’s uniform had chipped at one shoulder when it fell. Its chest door hung open as a coffin lid. Plaquette wanted to weep at the tangle of metal inside it. She’d taken the George’s chest apart and put it back together, felt like a million times now. Msieur couldn’t see what was wrong, and neither could she. Its arms worked just fine; Plaquette had strung the wires inside them herself. But the legs . . .

“You’ll do it,” Billy said, “Got a good head on your shoulders.”

Feeling woeful, Plaquette nodded.

An uncomfortable silence held between them an instant. If he wanted to come courting, now would be the time to ask. Instead, he held up his clipboard. “Msieur gotta sign for these boxes.”

Plaquette nodded again. She wouldn’t have felt right saying yes to courting, anyway. Not with Pa so sick.

If he’d asked, that is.

“Billy, you ever think of doing something else?” The words were out before she knew she wanted to ask them.

He frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I got cousins own a lavender farm, out Des Allemands way. Sometimes I think I might join them.”

“Not some big city far off?” She wondered how Billy’s calloused hands would feel against her cheek.

“Nah. Too noisy, too dirty. Too much like this place.” Then he saw her face. “Though if a pretty girl like you were there,” he said slowly, as though afraid to speak his mind, “I guess I could come to love it.”

He looked away then. “Think Msieur would mind me popping to the showroom real quick? I could take him his shoe.”

“Just make sure no white folks in there.”

Billy collected Msieur’s shoe, then ducked into the showroom. Plaquette hung her hat on the hook near the back and sat down to work. Msieur’s design for the George lay crumpled on her table where he’d left it. She smoothed out the sheets of paper and set to poring over them, as she’d done every day since she started working on the George. This was the most intricate device Msieur had ever attempted. It had to perform flawlessly on the day the governor unveiled it at the railroad. For a couple years now, Msieur had depended on Plaquette’s keen vision and small, deft hands to assemble the components of his more intricate timepieces and his designs. By the point he decided to teach her how to read his notes, she’d already figured out how to decipher most of the symbols and his chicken scratch writing.

There. That contact strip would never sit right, not lying flat like that. Needed a slight bend to it. Plaquette got a pencil out of her table’s drawer and made a correction to Msieur’s notes. Billy came back and started to bring boxes from his cart outside in through the workroom door. While he worked and tried to make small talk with her, Plaquette got herself a tray. From the drawers of the massive oak watchmaker’s cabinet in the middle of the shop, she collected the items she needed and took them to her bench.

“Might rain Saturday, don’t you think?” huffed Billy as he heaved a box to the very top of the pile.

“Might,” Plaquette replied. “Might not.” His new bashfulness with her made her bashful in return. They couldn’t quite seem to be companionable any more. She did a last check of the long row of black velvet cloth on her workbench, hundreds of tiny brass and crystal components gleaming against the black fur of the fabric. She knew down to the last how many cogs, cams, and screws were there. She had to. Msieur counted every penny, fussed over every quarter inch of the fine gauge wire that went into the timekeepers his shop produced. At year’s end he tallied every watch finding, every scrap of leather. If any were missing, the cost was docked from her salary. Kind of the backwards of a Christmas bonus. As if Msieur didn’t each evening collect sufficient profits from his till and lower them into his “secret” safe.

Billy saw Plaquette pick up her tweezers and turn towards the mechanical porter. “Do you want Claude?” he asked her.

He knew her so well. She smiled at him. “Yes, please.” He leapt to go fetch Claude out of the broom closet where they stored him.

Billy really was sweet, and he wasn’t the only one who’d begun looking at her differently as she filled out from girl to woman this past year. Ma said she had two choices: Marry Billy and be poor but in love, or angle to become Msieur’s placée and take up life in the Quarter. Msieur would never publicly acknowledge her or any children he had by her, but she would be comfortable, and maybe pass some of her comforts along to Ma and Pa. Not that they would ever ask.

’Sides, she wasn’t even sure she was ready to be thinking about all that bother just yet.

Plaquette yawned. She was bone tired, and no wonder. She’d been spending her nights and Sundays looking after Pa since he had come down with the jake leg.

Claude’s books had excited Plaquette when she first heard them, but in time they’d become overly familiar. She knew every thrilling leap from crumbling clifftops, every graveside confession, every switched and secret identity that formed part of those well-worn tales. They had started to grate on her, those stories of people out in the world, having adventures she never could. Pa got to see foreign places; the likes of New York and Chicago and San Francisco. He only passed through them, of course. He had to remain on the train. But he got to see new passengers at each stop, to smell foreign air, to look up into a different sky. Or he had.

He would again, when he got better. He would. The metal Georges would need minding, wouldn’t they? And who better for that job than Pa, who’d been a dependable George himself these many years?

But for Plaquette, there was only day after day, one marching in sequence behind another, in this workroom. Stringing tiny, shiny pieces of metal together. Making shift nowadays to always be on the other side of the room from Msieur whenever he was present. She was no longer the board-flat young girl she’d been when she first went to work for Msieur. She’d begun to bud, and Msieur seemed inclined to pluck himself a tender placée flower to grace his lapel. A left-handed marriage was one thing, but to a skinflint like Msieur?

Problems crowding up on each other like storm clouds running ahead of the wind. Massing so thick that Plaquette couldn’t presently see her way through them. Ma said when life got dark like that, all’s you could do was keep putting one foot in front the other and hope you walked yourself to somewhere brighter.

But as usual, once Billy set Claude up and the automaton began its recitation, her work was accurate and quick. She loved the challenge and ritual of assemblage: laying exactly the right findings out on the cloth; listening to the clicking sound of Claude’s gears as he recited one of his scrolls; letting the ordered measure take her thoughts away till all that was left was the precise dance of her fingers as they selected the watch parts and clicked, screwed, or pinned them into place. Sometimes she only woke from her trance of time, rhythm, and words when Msieur shook her by the shoulder come evening and she looked up to realize the whole day had gone by.

Shadows fell on Plaquette’s hands, obscuring her work. She looked around, blinking. When had it gone dusk? The workroom was empty. Billy had probably gone on about his other business hours ago. Claude’s scroll had run out and he’d long since fallen silent. Why hadn’t Msieur told her it was time to go? She could hear him wandering around his upstairs apartment.

She rubbed her burning eyes. He’d probably hoped she’d keep working until the mechanical George was set to rights.

Had she done it? She slid her hands out of the wire-and-cam guts of the mechanical man. She’d have to test him to be sure. But in the growing dark, she could scarcely make out the contacts in the George’s body that needed to be tripped in order to set it in motion.

Plaquette rose from her bench, stretched her twinging back and frowned—in imitation of Mama—through the doorway at the elaborately decorated Carcel lamp displayed in the shop’s front. Somewhat outmoded though it was, the clockwork regulating the lamp’s fuel supply and draft served Msieur as one of many proofs of his meticulous handiwork—her meticulous handiwork. If she stayed in the workshop any later, she’d have to light that lamp. And for all that he wanted her to work late, Msieur would be sure to deduct the cost of the oil used from her wages. He could easily put a vacuum bulb into the Carcel, light it with cheap units of tesla power instead of oil, but he mistrusted energy he couldn’t see. Said it wasn’t “refined.”

She took a few steps in the direction of the Carcel.

C-RRR-EEEAK!

Plaquette gasped and dashed for the showroom door to the street. She had grabbed the latch rope before her wits returned. She let the rope go and faced back toward the black doorway out of which emerged the automaton, Claude. It rocked forward on its treads, left side, right. Its black velvet jacket swallowed what little light there still was. But the old-fashioned white ruff circling its neck cast up enough brightness to show its immobile features. They had, like hers, much of the African to them. Claude came to a stop in front of her.

CRREAK!

Plaquette giggled. “You giving me a good reminder—I better put that oil on your wheels as well as your insides. You like to scare me half to death rolling round the dark in here.” She pulled the miniature oil tin from her apron pocket and knelt to lubricate the wheels of the rolling treads under Claude’s platform. It had been Plaquette’s idea to install them to replace the big brass wheels he’d had on either side. She’d grown weary of righting Claude every time he rolled over an uneven surface and toppled. It had been good practice, though, for nowadays, when Pa was like to fall with each spastic step he took, and Plaquette so often had to catch him. He hated using the crutches. And all of this because he’d begun taking a few sips of jake to warm his cold bones before his early morning shifts.

Jamaica Ginger was doing her family in, that was sure.

Her jostling of Claude must have released some last dregs of energy left in his winding mechanism, for just then he took it into his mechanical head to drone, “ . . . nooot to escaaape it by exerrrtion . . . “

Quickly, Plaquette stopped the automaton midsentence. For good measure, she removed the book from its spool inside Claude. She didn’t want Msieur to hear that she was still downstairs, alone in the dark.

As Plaquette straightened again, a new thought struck her.

The shutters folded back easily. White light from the coil-powered street lamp outside flooded the tick-tocking showroom, glittering on glass cases and gold and brass watches, on polished wooden housings and numbered faces like pearly moons. More than enough illumination for Plaquette’s bright eyes. “Come along, Claude,” Plaquette commanded as she headed back towards the workroom—somewhat unnecessarily, as she had Claude’s wardenclyffe in the pocket of her leather work apron. Where it went, Claude was bound to follow. Which made it doubly foolish of her to have been startled by him.

She could see the mechanical porter more clearly now, its cold steel body painted deep blue in imitation of a porter’s uniform, down to the gold stripes at the cuffs of the jacket. Its perpetually smiling black face. The Pullman Porter “cap” atop its head screwed on like a bottle top. Inside it was the Tesla receiver the George would use to guide itself around inside the sleeping-car cabins the Pullman company planned to outfit with wireless transmitters. That part had been Plaquette’s idea. Msieur had grumbled, but Plaquette could see him mentally adding up the profits this venture could bring him.

If Msieur’s George was a success, that’d be the end of her father’s job. Human porters had human needs. A mechanical George would rarely be ill, never miss work. Would always smile, would never need a new uniform—just the occasional paint touch-up. Would need to be paid for initially, but never paid thereafter.

With two fingers, Plaquette poked the George’s ungiving chest. The mechanical man didn’t so much as rock on its sturdy legs. Plaquette still thought treads would have been better, like Claude’s. But Msieur wanted the new Georges to be as lifelike as possible, so as not to scare the fine ladies and gentlemen who rode the luxury sleeping-cars. So the Georges must be able to walk. Smoothly, like Pa used to.

The chiming clocks in the showroom began tolling the hour, each in their separate tones. Plaquette gasped. Though surrounded by clocks, she had completely forgotten how late it was. Ma would be waiting for her; it was nearly time for Pa’s shift at the station! She couldn’t stop now to test the George. She slapped Claude’s wardenclyffe into his perpetually outstretched hand, pulled her bonnet onto her head, and hastened outside, stopping only to jiggle the shop’s door by its polished handle to make sure the latch had safely caught.

Only a few blocks to scurry home under the steadily burning lamps, among the sparse clumps of New Orleans’s foreign sightseers and those locals preferring to conduct their business in the cool of night. In her hurry, she bumped into one overdressed gent. He took her by the arms and leered, looking her up and down. She muttered an apology and pulled away before he could do more than that. She was soon home, where Ma was waiting on the landing outside their rooms. The darkness and Pa’s hat and heavy coat disguised Ma well enough to fool the white supervisors for a while, and the other colored were in on the secret. But if Ma came in late—

“Don’t fret, Darling,” Ma said, bending to kiss Plaquette’s cheek. “I can still make it. He ate some soup and I just help him to the necessary, so he probably sleep till morning.”

Plaquette went into the dark apartment. No fancy lights for them. Ma had left the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, turned down low. Plaquette could see through to Ma and Pa’s bed. Pa was tucked in tight, only his head showing above the covers. He was breathing heavy, not quite a snore. The shape of him underneath the coverlet looked so small. Had he shrunk, or was she growing?

Plaquette hung up her hat. In her hurry to get home, she’d left Msieur’s still wearing her leather apron. As she pulled it off to hang it beside her hat, something inside one of the pockets thumped dully against the wall. One of Claude’s book scrolls; the one she’d taken from him. She returned it to the pocket. Claude could have it back tomorrow. She poured herself some soup from the pot on the stove. Smelled like pea soup and crawfish, with a smoky hint of ham. Ma had been stretching the food with peas, seasoning it with paper-thin shavings from that one ham shank for what seemed like weeks now. Plaquette didn’t think she could stomach the taste of more peas, more stingy wisps of ham. What she wouldn’t give for a good slice of roast beef, hot from the oven, its fat glistening on the plate.

Her stomach growled, not caring. Crawfish soup would suit it just fine. Plaquette sat to table and set about spooning cold soup down her gullet. The low flame inside the kerosene lamp flickered, drawing pictures. Plaquette imagined she saw a tower, angels circling it (or demons), a war raging below. Men skewering other men with blades and spears. Beasts she’d never before heard tell of, lunging—

“Girl, what you seeing in that lamp? Have you so seduced.”

Plaquette started and pulled her mind out of the profane world in the lamp. “Pa!” She jumped up from the table and went to kiss him on the forehead. He hugged her, his hands flopping limply to thump against her back. He smelled of sweat, just a few days too old to be ignored. “You need anything? The necessary?”

“Naw.” He tried to pat the bed beside him, failed. He grimaced. “Just come and sit by me a little while. Tell me the pictures in your mind.”

“If I do, you gotta tell me ’bout San Francisco again.” She sat on the bed facing him, knees drawn up beneath her skirts like a little child.

“Huh. I’m never gonna see that city again.” It tore at Plaquette’s heart to see his eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Plaquette,” he whispered, “What are we gonna to do?”

Not we; her. She would do it. “Hush, Pa.” It wouldn’t be Billy. Ma and Pa were showing her that you couldn’t count on love and hard work alone to pull you through. Not when this life would scarcely pay a colored man a penny to labor all his days and die young. She patted Pa’s arm, took his helpless hand in hers. She closed her eyes to recollect the bright story in the lamp flame. Opened them again. “So. Say there’s a tower, higher than that mountain you told me ’bout that one time. The one with the clouds all round the bottom of it so it look to be floating?”

Pa’s mouth was set in bitterness. He stared off at nothing. For a moment, Plaquette though he wouldn’t answer her. But then, his expression unchanged, he ground out, “Mount Rainier. In Seattle.”

“That’s it. This here tower, it’s taller than that.”

Pa turned his eyes to hers. “What’s it for?”

“How should I know? I’ll tell you that when it comes to me. I know this, though; there’s people flying round that tower, right up there in the air. Like men, and maybe a woman, but with wings. Like angels. No, like bats.”

Pa’s eyes grew round. The lines in his face smoothed out as Plaquette spun her story. A cruel prince. A fearsome army. A lieutenant with a conscience.

It would have to be Msieur.

That ended up being a good night. Pa fell back to sleep, his face more peaceful than she’d seen in days. Plaquette curled up against his side. She was used to his snoring and the heaviness of his drugged breath. She meant to sleep there beside him, but her mind wouldn’t let her rest. It was full of imaginings: dancing with Msieur at the Orleans Ballroom, her wearing a fine gown and a fixed, automaton smile; Billy’s hopeful glances and small kindnesses, his endearingly nervous bad jokes; and Billy’s shoulders, already bowed at seventeen from lifting and hauling too-heavy boxes day in, day out, tick, tock, forever (how long before her eyesight went from squinting at tiny watch parts?); an army of tireless metal Georges, more each day, replacing the fleshly porters, and brought about in part by her cleverness. Whichever path her future took, Plaquette could only see disaster.

Yet in the air above her visions, They flew.

Finally Plaquette eased herself out of bed. The apartment was dark; she’d long since blown out the lamp to save wick and oil. She tiptoed carefully to the kitchen. By feel, she got Claude’s reading scroll out of the pocket of her apron. She crept out onto the landing. By the light of a streetlamp, she unrolled and re-rolled it so that she could see the end of the book. The punched holes stopped a good foot-and-a-half before the end of the roll. There was that much blank space left.

Plaquette knew My Lady Nobody practically word for word. She studied the roll, figuring out the patterns of holes that created the sounds which allowed Claude to speak the syllables of the story. She could do this. She crept back inside and felt her way through the kitchen drawer. She grasped something way at the back. A bottle, closed tight, some liquid still sloshing around inside it. A sniff of the lid told her what it was. She put the bottle aside and kept rummaging through the drawer. Her heart beat triple-time when she found what she was looking for. Pa did indeed have more than one ticket punch.

It was as though there was a fever rising in her; for the next few hours she crouched shivering on the landing and in a frenzy, punched a complicated pattern into the end of the scroll, stopping every so often to roll it back to the beginning for guidance on how to punch a particular syllable. By the time she’d used up the rest of the roll, her fingers were numb with cold, her teeth chattering, the sky was going pink in the east, and the landing was scattered with little circles of white card. But her brain finally felt at peace.

She rose stiffly to her feet. A light breeze began blowing the white circles away. Ma would probably be home in another hour or so. Plaquette replaced the scroll in her apron pocket, changed into her nightgown, and lay back down beside her father. In seconds, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

• • • •

Ma woke her all too soon. Plaquette’s eyes felt like there was grit in them. Pa was still snoring away. Ma gestured her out to the kitchen, where they could speak without waking him. Ma’s face was drawn with fatigue. She’d spent the night fetching and carrying for white people. “How he doing?” she asked.

“Tolerable. Needs a bath.”

Ma sighed. “I know. He won’t let me wash him. He ashamed.”

Plaquette felt her eyebrows lift in surprise. The Pa she knew washed every morning and night and had a full bath on Sundays.

Ma pulled a chair out from under the table and thumped herself down into it. Her lips were pinched together with worry. “He not getting better.”

“We’re managing.”

“I thought he might mend. Some do. Tomorrow he supposed to start his San Francisco run. Guess I gotta do it.”

At first, Plaquette felt only envy. Even Ma was seeing the world. Then she understood the problem. “San Francisco run’s five days.”

Ma nodded. “I know you can see to him all by yourself, Darling. You’re a big girl. But you gotta go to work for Msieur, too. Your Pa, he’s not ready to be alone all day.”

It was one weight too many on the scales. Plaquette feared it would tip her completely over. She stammered, “I-I have to-to go, Ma.” Blindly, she grabbed her bonnet and apron and sped out the door. Guilt followed her the whole way to Msieur’s. Leaving Ma like that.

She would have to start charming Msieur, sooner rather than later.

Plaquette was the first one to the shop, just as she’d planned it. Msieur generally lingered over his breakfast, came down in time to open the showroom to custom. She’d have a few minutes to herself. She’d make it up to Ma later. Sit down with her and Pa Sunday morning and work out a plan.

Claude and the George were beside her bench, right where she’d left them. She bent and patted Claude on the cheek. She delved into Claude’s base through its open hatch and removed the remaining three “books” which Claude recited when the rolls of punched paper were fed into his von Kempelen apparatus. Claude bided open and silent, waiting to be filled with words. Eagerly Plaquette lowered her book onto the spool and locked that in place, then threaded the end—no, the beginning, the very beginning of this new story—onto the toothed drum of the von Kempelen and closed its cover.

She removed the ribbon bearing Claude’s key from his wrist. She wound him tight and released the guard halfway—for some of the automaton’s mechanisms were purely for show. In this mode, Claude’s carven lips would remain unmoving.

With a soft creak, the spool began to turn. A flat voice issued from beneath Claude’s feet:

“They Fly at Çironia, by Della R. Mausney. Prologue. Among the tribes and villages—”

It was working!

Afire with the joy of it, Plaquette began working on the George again.

But come noon the metal man was still as jake-legged as Pa. Seemed there was nothing Plaquette could do to fix either one.

She tried to settle her thoughts. She couldn’t work if her mind was troubled. She’d listened to her punchcard story three times today already. She knew she was being vain, but she purely loved hearing her words issue forth from Claude. The story was a creation that was completely hers, not built on the carcass of someone else’s ingenuity. Last night’s sleepless frenzy had cut the bonds on her imagination. She’d set free something she didn’t know she had in her. Claude’s other novels were all rich folk weeping over rich folk problems, white folk pitching woo. They Fly at Çironia was different, wickedly so. The sweep and swoop of it. The crudeness, the brutality.

She wound the key set into Claude’s side until it was just tight enough, and tripped the release fully. With a quiet sound like paper riffling, Claude’s head started to move. His eyelids flicked up and down. His head turned left to right. The punchcard clicked forward one turn. Claude’s jaw opened, and he began to recite.

“Now,” she whispered to the George, “one more time. Let’s see what’s to be done with you.” She reached into his chest with her tweezers as the familiar enchantment began to come upon her. While the Winged Ones screeed through the air of Çironia’s mountains on pinions of quartz, Plaquette wove and balanced quiltings of coiled springs, hooked them into layer upon layer of delicately-weighted controls, dropped them into one another’s curving grasps, adjusted and readjusted the workings of the George’s legs.

Finally, for the fourth time that day, the Winged Ones seized the story’s teller and tossed him among themselves in play. Finally, for the fourth time that day, he picked himself up from the ground, gathered about himself such selfness as he could.

The short book ended. Gradually Plaquette’s trance did the same.

Except for the automatons, she was alone. The time was earlier than it had been last night. Not by much. Shadows filled the wide corners, and the little light that fell between buildings to slip in at the tall windows was thin and nearly useless.

A creaking board revealed Msieur’s presence in the showroom just before the door communicating with it opened. He stuck his head through, smiling like the overdressed man Plaquette had run from on her way home last night. She returned the smile, trying for winsomeness.

“Not taking ill, are you?” Msieur asked. So much for her winning ways.

He moved forward into the room to examine the George. “Have you finished for the day? I doubt you made much progress.” His manicured hands reopened the chest she had just shut. He bent as if to peer inside, but his eyes slid sideways, towards Plaquette’s bosom and shoulders. She should stand proud to show off her figure. Instead, she stumbled up from her bench and edged behind the stolid protection of Claude’s metal body.

Smiling more broadly yet, Msieur turned his gaze to the George’s innards in reality. “You do appear to have done something, however—Let’s test it!” He closed up the chest access. He retrieved the mechanism’s key from the table, wound it tight, and tripped its initial release. The George lumbered clumsily to its feet.

“Where’s that instruction card? Ah!” Msieur inserted it and pressed the secondary release button.

A grinding hum issued from the metal chest. The George’s left knee lifted—waist-high—higher! But then it lowered and the foot kicked out. It landed heel first. One step—another—a third—a fourth—four more—it stopped. It had reached the workroom’s far wall, and, piled against it, the Gladstones and imperials it was now supposed to load itself with. It whirred and stooped. It ticked and reached, tocked and grasped, and then—

Then it stuck in place. Quivering punctuated by rhythmic jerks ran along its blue-painted frame. Rrrr-rap! Rrrr-rap! RRRR-RAP! With each repetition the noise of the George’s faulty operation grew louder. Msieur ran quickly to disengage its power.

“Such precision! Astonishing!” Msieur appeared pleased at even partial success. He stroked his neat, silky beard thoughtfully. He seemed to come to a decision. “We’ll work through the night. The expense of the extra oil consumed is nothing if we succeed—and I believe we will.”

By “we,” Msieur meant her. He expected for her to toil on his commission all night.

But what about Pa?

Self-assured though he was, Msieur must have sensed her hesitation. “What do you need? Of course—you must be fed! I’ll send to the Café du Monde—” He glanced around the empty workshop. “—or if I must go myself, no matter. A cup of chicory and a slice of chocolate pie, girl! How does that sound?”

Chocolate pie! But as she opened her mouth to assent she found herself saying instead, “But Ma—Pa—”

Msieur was already in the showroom; she heard the muffled bell that rang whenever he slid free the drawer holding the day’s receipts. Plaquette crept forward; obediently, Claude followed her onto the crimson carpet. Startled, Msieur thrust his hands below the counter so she couldn’t see what they held. “What’s that you say?”

“My folks will worry if I don’t get home ’fore too late. I better—”

“No. You stay. I’ll have the Café send a messenger.”

That wouldn’t help. She couldn’t say why, though, so she had to let Msieur herd her back to the workroom. Under his suspicious eye she wound up the George again and walked it to her bench. Not long after, Claude rejoined her. “That’s right,” said Msieur, satisfied. “And if this goes well, I’ll have a proposition to make to your mother. Eh? You have been quite an asset to me. I should like to, erm, deepen our connection.”

Plaquette swallowed. “Yes, Msieur.”

His face brightened. “Yes? Your own place in the Quarter. You would keep working in the shop, of course. Splendid, then. Splendid.” He winked at her! The door to the showroom slammed shut. The jangle of keys told Plaquette that Msieur had locked her in. Like a faint echo, the door to the street slammed seconds later.

She sank back onto her seat. Only greyness, like dirty water, trickled in at the workroom windows, fading as she watched.

So even if she became Msieur’s placée, tended to their left-hand marriage, he would expect her to continue in this dreary workroom.

Plaquette frowned, attempting to recall if she’d heard the grate and clank of the safe’s door closing on the day’s proceeds, the money and precious jewels Msieur usually hid away there. Sometimes she could remember what had happened around her during the last few minutes of her trance.

Not today.

Only the vague outlines of its windows broke the darkening workroom’s walls. And beneath where she knew the showroom door stood, a faint, blurry smear gleamed dully, vanishing remnant of l’heure bleue. She must go home now. Before Msieur returned with his chocolate pie and his unctuous wooing.

She considered the showroom door a moment longer. But the door from there led right to the street. People would be bound to see her escape. The workroom door, then; the delivery entrance that led to the alleyway. She twisted to face it.

Msieur had reinforced this door the same summer when, frightened of robbers, he sank his iron safe beneath the workroom’s huge oak cabinet. It was faced outside with bricks, a feeble attempt at concealment that made it heavy—too heavy for Plaquette alone to budge. Plaquette, however, was not alone.

Marshaling the George into position, she set him to kick down the thick workroom door. The George walked forward a few more feet, then stopped there in the alley, lacking for further commands. A dumb mechanical porter with no more sense than a headless chicken.

Though she hadn’t planned it, Plaquette found she knew what she wanted to do next. She rushed back to her bench. Claude cheerfully rocked after her. She erased all the corrections that she’d meticulously made to Msieur’s notes. She scribbled in new ones, any nonsense that came to mind. Without her calculations Msieur would never work out the science of making a wireless iron George. Someone else eventually might, but this way, it wouldn’t be on Plaquette’s conscience.

She took a chair with her out into the alleyway, climbed up onto it, and unscrewed the George’s cap. She upturned it so that it sat like a bowl on the George’s empty head. From her apron she produced the bottle she’d taken from Ma’s kitchen; the one with the dregs of jake in it. Ma could never bear to throw anything away, even poison. Plaquette poured the remaining jake all over the receiver inside the George’s cap. There was a satisfying sizzling sound of wires burning out. Jake leg this, you son of a—well. Ma wouldn’t like her even thinking such language. She screwed the cap back onto the George’s head. Msieur might never discover the sabotage.

One more trip back inside the workroom, to Claude’s broom closet. On a hook in there hung the Pullman porter’s uniform that Msieur had been given to model the George’s painted costume after. It was a men’s small. A little large on her, but she belted in the waist and rolled up the trouser hems. She slid her hands into the trouser pockets, and exclaimed in delight. So much room! Not dainty, feminine pockets—bigger even than those stitched onto her workroom apron. She could carry almost anything she pleased in these!

But now she really must hurry. She strewed her clothing about the workroom—let Msieur make of that what he would. A kidnapping or worse, her virgin innocence soiled, maybe her lifeless body dumped in the bayou. And off they went—Plaquette striding freely in her masculine get-up, one foot in front of the other, making her plan as she made up the stories she told Pa: by letting the elements come to her in the moment. Claude rolled in her wake, tipping dangerously forward as he negotiated the steep drop from banquette to roadway, falling farther and farther behind.

When they came to the stairs up the side of the building where she lived she was stumped for what to do. Claude was not the climbing sort. For the moment she decided to store him in the necessary—she’d figure out how to get him back to Msieur’s later. She’d miss his cheerful face, though.

Ma yelped when a stranger in a porter’s uniform walked in the door. She reached for her rolling pin.

“Ma! It just me!” Plaquette pulled off her cap, let her hair bush out free from under it.

Ma boggled. “Plaquette? Why you all got up like that?”

The sound of Pa’s laughter rasped from her parents’ bedroom. Pa was sitting up in bed, peering through the doorway. “That’s my hellcat girl,” he said. “Mother, you ain’t got to go out on the Frisco run. Plaquette gon’ do it.”

Ma stamped her foot at him. “Don’t be a fool! She doing no such thing.”

Except she was! Till now, Plaquette hadn’t thought it through. But that’s exactly what she was going to do.

Ma could read the determination in her face. “Child, don’t you see? It won’t work. You too young to pass for your Pa. Gonna get him fired.”

Plaquette thought fast. “Not Pa. Pa’s replacement.” She pulled herself up to her full height. “Pleased to introduce you to Mule Aranslyde, namely myself. Ol’ Pullman’s newest employee.” She sketched a mock bow. Pa cackled in delight.

A little plate of peas and greens and ham fat had been set aside for her. Plaquette spooned it down while Ma went on about how Plaquette must have lost her everlovin’ mind and Pa wasn’t helping with his nonsense. Then Plaquette took a still protesting Ma by the hand and led her into the bedroom. “Time’s running short,” she said. “Lemme tell y’all why I need to go.” That brought a bit more commotion, though she didn’t even tell them the half of it. Just the bit about the George. And she maybe said she’d broken it by accident.

• • • •

Ma twisted Plaquette’s long braids into a tight little bun and crammed them under the cap. “Don’t know how you gonna fake doin Pa’s job,” she fretted. “Ain’t as easy as it looks. I messed up so many times, supervisor asked me if I been in the whiskey. Nearly got your Pa fired.”

Plaquette took Ma’s two hands in her own. “I’m a ’prentice, remember?” She patted the letter in her breast pocket that Pa had dictated to her, the one telling Pa’s porter friend Jonas Jones who she was and to look out for her and thank you God bless you. She kissed Pa goodbye. Ma walked her out onto the landing, and that’s when Plaquette’s plan began to go sideways. There at the foot of the stairs was Claude, backing up and ramming himself repeatedly into the bottom stair. Plaquette had forgotten she had Claude’s wardenclyffe in her pocket. All this time he’d been trying to follow it.

“Plaquette,” said Ma, “what for you steal Msieur’s machine?” It wasn’t a shout but a low, scared, angry murmur—far worse. In the lamplight scattered into the yard from the main street, Claude’s white-gloved hands glowed eerily.

Plaquette clattered down the stairs to confront the problem.

“I know you think he yours, but girl, he don’t belong to you!” Ma had come down behind her. Plaquette didn’t even need to turn to know the way Ma was looking at her: hard as brass and twice as sharp.

“I—I set him to follow me.” Plaquette faltered for words. This was the part she hadn’t told them.

Ma only said, “Oh, Lord. We in for it now.”

Pa replied, “Maybe not.”

• • • •

“Watch where you’re going!”

Plaquette muttered an apology to the man she’d jostled. Even late like this—it must have been nearly midnight—New Orleans’s Union Station was thronged with travelers. But in Ma’s wake Plaquette and Claude made slow yet steady headway through the chattering crowds. A makeshift packing crate disguised her mechanical friend; Plaquette held a length of clothesline which was supposed to fool onlookers into thinking she hauled it along. Of course the line kept falling slack. Ma looked back over her shoulder for the thirteenth time since they’d left home. But it couldn’t be much farther now to the storage room where Pa had said they could hide Claude overnight. Or for a little longer. But soon as the inevitable hue and cry over his disappearance died down Plaquette could return him to Msieur’s. So long as no one discovered Claude where they were going to stash him—

“Stop! Stop! Thief!” Angry as she’d feared, Msieur’s shout came from behind them. It froze her one long awful second before she could run.

Ahead Ma shoved past a fat man in woolens and sent him staggering to the right. Behind them came more exclamations, more men calling for them to halt, their cries mixed with the shrieks and swearing of the people they knocked aside. How’d he know where to look for her? Trust a man whose business was numbers to put two and two together. Msieur had friends with him—How many? Plaquette barely glanced back. Two? Four? No telling—she had to run to stay in front of Claude so he’d follow her to—an opening! She broke away from the thick-packed travelers and ran after Ma to a long brick walk between two puffing engines. Good. Cover. This must be why Ma had taken such an unexpected path. Swaying like a drunk in a hurricane, Claude in his crate lumbered after her.

The noise of their pursuers fell to a murmur. Maybe she’d lost them?

But when Plaquette caught up with Ma, Ma smacked her fists together and screamed. “No! Why you follow me over here? Ain’t I told you we putting your fool mistake in the storage the other side of the tracks?”

“B-but you came this w-w-ay!” Plaquette stammered.

“I was creating a distraction for you to escape!”

The clatter and thump of running feet sounded clear again above the engines’ huff and hiss. Coming closer. Louder. Louder. Ma threw her hands in the air. “We done! Oh, baby, you too young for jail!”

One of the dark train carriages Plaquette had run past had been split up the middle—hadn’t it? A deeper darkness—a partially open door? Spinning, she rushed back the way they’d come. Yes! “Ma!” Plaquette pushed the sliding door hard as she could. It barely budged. Was that wide enough? She jumped and grabbed its handle and swung herself inside.

But Claude! Prisoned in slats, weighed down by his treads, he bumped disconsolately against the baggage car’s high bottom. Following her and the wardenclyffe, exactly as programmed. Should she drop it? She dug through the deep pockets frantically and pulled it out so fast it flew from her hand and landed clattering somewhere in the carriage’s impenetrable darkness.

Hidden like she wished she could hide from the hoarsely shouting men. But they sounded frustrated as well as angry now, and no nearer. Maybe the engine on the track next to this was in their way?

The train began moving. From Plaquette’s perch it looked like the bricks and walkway rolled off behind her. Claude kept futile pace. The train was pulling up alongside Ma, standing hopelessly where Plaquette had left her, waiting to be caught. Now she was even with them. Plaquette brushed her fingers over Ma’s yellow headscarf. It fell out of reach. “Goodbye, Ma! Just walk away from Claude! They won’t know it was you!” Fact was, Plaquette felt excited almost as much as she was scared. Even if Msieur got past whatever barrier kept them apart right now, she was having her adventure!

The train stopped. Plaquette’s heart just about did, too. Her only adventure would be jail. How could she help Ma and Pa from inside the pokey? She scanned the walkway for Msieur and his friends, coming to demand justice.

But no one showed. The shouts for her and Ma to stop grew fainter. The train started again, more slowly. Suddenly Ma was there, yanking Claude desperately by his cord. She’d pulled his crate off. It was on the platform, slowly disappearing into the distance. Together, Ma and Plaquette lifted Claude like he was luggage, tilting him to scrape over the carriage’s narrow threshold. As they did, the tray holding the books caught on the edge and was dragged open—and it held more than book scrolls. Cool metallic disks, crisp or greasy slips of paper—Msieur’s money!

How? Plaquette wasted a precious moment wondering—he must have put the day’s take into Claude when she surprised him in the showroom.

Ma’s eyes got wide as saucers. She was still running to keep up, puffing as she hefted Claude’s weight. With a heave, she and Plaquette hauled him into the car. He landed with a heavy thump. The train was speeding up. There was no time to count it; Plaquette fisted up two handsful of the money, coins and bills both, and shoved it into Ma’s hands. Surely it was enough to suffice Ma and Pa for a while. “I’ll come back,” she said.

The train kept going, building speed. Ma stopped running. She was falling behind fast. “You a good girl!” she yelled.

When it seemed sure the train wasn’t stopping again anytime soon, Plaquette stuck her head out—a risk. A yellow gleam in the shadows was all she could see of Ma. Plaquette shoved the sliding door closed.

Well. She’d gone and done it now. Pa’s note was no use; this wasn’t the train making the Frisco run. It for sure wasn’t no sleeping-car train. A porter had no business here. The train could be going to the next town, or into the middle of next week. She had no way of knowing right now. For some reason, that made her smile.

She fumbled her way to Claude’s open drawer. The money left in there was all coins, more than she could hold in one hand. She divided it amongst the deep, deep pockets in her trousers and jacket.

She was a true and actual thief, and a saboteur.

Finally she found the wardenclyffe. Feeling farther around her in the loud blackness, she determined the carriage was loaded as she’d imagined with trunks, suitcases, parcels of all shapes and sizes. Nothing comfortable as the beds at home, the big one or the little. She didn’t care.

When the train stopped, she’d count the money. When the train stopped, she’d calculate what to do, where to go, how to get by. She could slip off anywhere, buy herself new clothes, become a new person.

She settled herself as well as she could on a huge, well-stuffed suitcase and closed her eyes.

Claude would help. She would punch more books for him to read and collect from the people who came to listen. Send money home to Pa and Ma every few weeks.

She’d write the books herself. She’d get him to punch them. She’d punch a set of instructions for how to punch instructions for punching. She’d punch another set of instructions and let Claude write books, too. And maybe come back one day soon. Find Billy. Take him away and show him a new life.

The train ran toward the north on shining steel rails. Plaquette’s dreams flew toward the future on pinions of shining bright ideas.

©2015 by Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl. Originally published in Stories for Chip, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and both volumes of the Dark Matter series.  She was the 2011 Guest of Honor at the feminist SF convention WisCon and a 2014 co-Guest of Honor for the Science Fiction Research Association.  She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward, and co-edited the nonfiction anthology Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.  Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair came out in 2016 from Tor Books.  Her website is nisishawl.com.

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. Her debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring was the winning entry in the Warner Aspect First Novel contest, and led to her winning the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has since published many acclaimed novels and short stories as well as numerous essays. She currently teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Sister Mine.

The Goddess Has Many Faces

Ashok K. Banker | 4350 words

Pillai expected Kali border security to be much tighter than it was. All he got was a body search that was routinely thorough, and a few old-fashioned tests and checks. It reminded him of a visit he had made as a very young rightwing Hindu activist to an Indian nuclear weapon testing facility back in 1998, after the Pokhran atomic tests. His briefings had been correct in this respect: Kali did not seem to have much use for twenty-first-century Safe Care.

The border guards finished with him in a few minutes then led him down into the basement of the border post and on through a concrete corridor that was at least a kilometre long in his estimation, although there were far too many turns to be certain: It could be twice as long, or half. He was surprised at the absence of defenses. After all the build-up, it was an anti-climactic letdown. Could the disputed area truly be this easy to infiltrate? A single platoon of Black Cat commandoes armed with nominal Safe Care weaponry could take this border post and entrance in a few minutes, he estimated. The dozen-odd border guards he had seen above ground had borne no visible weapons. Ridiculously easy.

Then he remembered the first and longest of his briefings.

Shalinitai, the renegade Kaliite-turned-consultant to the Disputed Territories Task Force (DTTF) had commented on this very fact during her lecture on Kali’s political history: “Do not be fooled by Kali’s apparent lack of defenses. Like the Goddess after whom it is named, the disputed region that aspires to nation status under the name of Kali is armed with something far more dangerous than physical weaponry. She is armed with the power of the spirit. The power of faith.”

Pillai had resisted the urge to yawn. He had heard this kind of “empty-hand-spirit-power” mania too many times to even give it credence by mocking it. He had also seen any number of similarly deluded cults and spiritual blindfaithers walk like fools into the trajectory of Safe Care weapons, only to have their very real physical bodies torn to shreds by unspiritual projectiles and explosives that needed no faith in invisible deities to perform their lethal function. Faith might move mountains, but lasers cut flesh. And without flesh to sustain it, there was nothing left to harbour faith.

Sensing his bored skepticism, the renegade had paused and sighed softly. Almost resigned to his indifference, she had added, “Kali exists only because the people support its existence and because India is still a democracy. That is a far more formidable defence than any Safe Care arsenal.” This he found more acceptable. It was a political argument, one of the classic cornerstones of every nationwide cult that was allowed to fester in the armpit of a republic under the guise of freedom of faith and right to political dissension.

There had been an adversarial gleam in her dark eyes as if daring him to challenge this statement. But Pillai was too much of a cynic to waste time on political arguments either. As far as he was concerned, they could dispense with the briefings and motivational lectures. He didn’t need the comfort of political conviction to help him do his job. Whatever the justification, assassination was murder. The only motivation he needed was the paycheck.

As if sensing this from his lack of risibility, Shalinitai paused in her briefing. Deviating unexpectedly from her subject, she had poured herself a glass of plain water and said, “You will find no resistance when you go to assassinate Durga Maa. It will be the easiest assassination you have ever committed.”

Pillai had waited for the punchline he knew was coming. Moral lectures always had a punchline.

“It’s living with the knowledge of your act that will make the rest of your life unbearable,” she said.

He hadn’t smiled. He hadn’t needed to. She knew the smile was there, behind his inscrutable face. He read the awareness in her eyes and sought the inevitable frustration she must feel after having made her strongest argument and failed. There was none. Only a faint glimmer of sympathy.

“I pity your task, assassin,” she said.

He hadn’t smiled at that either. He had been pitied before too. It was one of the most predictable responses, apart from self-righteous rage.

• • • •

The corridor curved one final time and ended abruptly in the entrance of a very narrow stairwell. Pillai drew his large frame in to accommodate the inconveniently low ceilings and close walls. As his escort and he climbed, their footfalls echoed jarringly in the confined space. The female guards moved easily upwards, setting a hard pace for him to match. He had visited enough ancient Indian fortresses to understand the principle: Invaders would be forced to attack in single file, crouched awkwardly low. A single guard could defend the stairwell, and the piled bodies of the wounded and dead would make progress even more tortuous. It was a virtually impregnable defense—a thousand years ago. He glimpsed tiny slits in the wall and ceilings, and recalled similar apertures all along the corridor. He had taken them for air vents at first but now understood that they were in fact guard posts. The corridor was lit from above, illuminating him and the guards as they climbed endlessly, but effectively concealing the watching guards stationed behind the walls.

Pillai wasn’t impressed. Medieval subterfuge and manual defenses were no match for modern Safe Care. A single Safe Care biogas capsule, delivered by any number of methods into the corridor, could wipe out the entire garrison of unseen defenders. The self-consuming biogases would take barely three seconds to render the air safe again and that would be the end of Kali’s stupidly outdated defense system.

He had climbed more than a thousand steps and was suffering from the bent posture and elbow-and-shoulder-bruising closeness of the concrete walls when the stairwell finally widened and rose high enough for him to straighten up. The alcove resembled a small circular chamber in a stone tower, again of obviously medieval design. It was ironic in a way, he thought as the guards led him through a series of corridors and transitional chambers. Whatever little he had seen of Kali so far was clearly modelled on the architecture of medieval India. Yet Kali itself went to great pains to insist it was not part of India. Not according to the 700,000-odd renegades who had taken refuge in this tiny pocket of disputed territory, defying Indian national laws and international sanctions to declare its independence as a sovereign nation in its own right. To these cultist fanatics, this little area of Central India bordering the legitimate Indian states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa was the nation of Kali, a concept as fiercely independent as the concept of Israel had become after the Nazi pogroms of World War II, almost three quarters of a century earlier. The world’s only all-woman nation. To the Indian Government, though, this was simply Disputed Territory, just as areas of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir had once been designated before the ReMerger with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal ten years ago. United India could not afford to sanction a Kali, let alone acknowledge its legitimacy.

That was why he was here now. To end the problem by rooting out the source. Destroy the brood-mother and the species dies out.

The guards fell back, surprising him. He could not conceive of a reason why he should be allowed to proceed unescorted. Yet when he turned to look at them questioningly, the one who had led the detail, a short, dark-skinned muscular woman with scar tissue obscuring her left cheek and neck, pointed unmistakably down the corridor. He was to proceed alone. Pillai shrugged, amused at yet another ludicrously amateurish security lapse, and walked on.

He had gone several hundred paces before he realized what was odd about this particular corridor. His footfalls made no echoes.

The reason for this became clear when he reached the end of the corridor, another circular chamber. A slit in the wall revealed not the darkness of the subterranean passage or the diffused top lighting. Instead it exposed a slice of brilliant blue sky. He was undoubtedly in a tower. He realized with a start that this was the very same edifice that he had seen on various sat-images during his briefings. One of several hundred such towers positioned at regular intervals along the border of the besieged territory, ringing the entire disputed territory like giant stone sentinels. They were believed to be guardian outposts constructed to watch over the Line of Control that demarcated Kali’s disputed landspace from the surrounding Indian territory.

“Envoy Pillai,” said the woman who was waiting in the sunlit tower chamber. “Please be seated.” She indicated a thin woven mat on the ground, identical to the one on which she was seated cross-legged in the yogic lotus posture. Pillai scanned the room and surrounding area and couldn’t believe his luck. No guards, no weapons, no defenses. In short, no Safe Care at all. Pillai was unable to believe that his mission could be this easy to accomplish. He looked at the woman who was watching him calmly.

“I am Durga Maa,” she said. “The one you seek to assassinate. Tell me, Envoy, would you like to kill me at once, or would you like to maintain the pretence of a diplomatic debate for a while?”

Pillai blinked rapidly.

She smiled. “I suggest that we get the assassination over with first. That way, your mind will be free to discuss the larger issues at stake here, without distraction.”

And she opened her arms in the universal Hindu gesture of greeting. “Sva-swagatam, Mrityudaata.” Welcome, Angel of Death.

• • • •

Even if was a trap, as every meg of data in his mental archives said it must be, Pillai could not let the opportunity pass. His not to question why. His but to kill and fly.

He hesitated only long enough to run one final scan-check. The result was the same as the previous three times. It was an ID-OK, confirmed through half a dozen cross-checks including a perfect DNA match. This woman seated before him was Durga Maa, the founder and leader of Kali. She was his target.

He used his thumbnail to circumscribe a tiny crescent-shaped incision in his left wrist and withdrew the reinforced silicon needle from his forearm. It was barely ten millimetres in diameter and he had to grip firmly. He drew it across his palm, wiping it clean of the tiny flecks of blood and gristle that coated it. Tinted to resemble a prominent vein, it was a translucent green that caught the sunlight as he moved across the chamber. He was at full alert now, his keenly honed senses prepared for any resistance or ambush. There was none.

She smiled as he inserted the lethal tip of the needle between her ribs. Her breast was yielding and warm against his hand. He pressed hard, brutally, and the entire nine-inch length entered her chest, sliding in easily. He pictured it puncturing her left lower chamber, spilling precious life-fluid. In her eyes, he watched the look of serenity flicker and fade.

“Kali be with you,” she said.

And then she was gone, her body slumped sideways, legs still locked in the yogic position. He kicked at her thighs, releasing their grip, and she sprawled out more naturally. Darkness pooled beneath her body.

He stood and looked around, unable to believe it had been this easy. He felt a qualm of unease. Her attitude, the knowledge that he was to assassinate her, her serene acceptance of her death, these were not things he was equipped to deal with. Even with the most fanatical of cult leaders, there was always the final struggle for survival, the organism’s instinct for self-preservation. But she had been truly ready.

He pushed these thoughts from his head. The most difficult part still lay ahead. Escape. He had analyzed the possible options and they were all negative-rated. The least likely to fail (12.67%) was by blasting a hole in the wall of this tower and speed-climbing down the outside. But that was assuming the guards were armed and prepared for violent retaliation, which they didn’t seem to be.

A circular stairway ran around the perimeter of the chamber. Pillai went down the stone stairs quickly and silently, alert for the first sign of armed response.

He descended to the next level, and found himself in an almost identical chamber. It was as sparsely furnished, with the same chick mats on the floor. And a woman.

He stopped short at the sight of the woman. She was younger than Durga Maa, but premature greyness made her seem older at first glance. She was dressed similarly but not precisely the same way. He found no match for her in his records. She was also very beautiful.

She looked up as if she had been expecting him and indicated a bowl of steaming tea and two earthen cups.

“Greetings, Envoy Pillai. With the demise of our beloved sister, I am now Durga Maa. Would you like to kill me at once, or will you partake of some refreshment first?”

And she opened her arms in that same gesture of acceptance.

Pillai thought it was a ploy at first. A delaying tactic intended to stall him until the guards arrived. But his internal systems showed nobody else approaching within a hundred-metre radius. No Safe Care weaponry in the chamber. Nothing capable of doing him any physical harm.

His system announced an ID match for the woman seated before him. With a rising sense of unease, Pillai checked and rechecked the scan results until he could no longer doubt them. Somehow, in the space of a few seconds, she had changed her DNA structure internally, although her physical appearance remained the same. To all intents and purposes, she had become exactly what she claimed she was: Durga Maa, leader of Kali, down to the smallest twisted strand of genetic composition.

• • • •

She poured tea for him. “You cannot comprehend how two women could possess the same identity. It is a scientific impossibility, you think.”

She held the clay cup out to him. He made no move to take it. He was still running checks and rechecks to examine every variant possible, tapping into the orbital systems to access greater processing power and other archives.

She set the cup down before the mat intended for him.

“You are right,” she said. “Science cannot explain it. But faith can. There is only one Durga Maa—at a given point in time. But on her demise, her entire personality and being, what we like to call her aatma, passes to a successor. That is I.”

“Aatma,” he repeated scornfully. “You mean, soul?”

She poured tea for herself. Her movements were delicate, assured, and very pleasing to watch. She had a fine bone structure that would have been considered beautiful among North Indians, but far too Aryan and brahminical to South Indian eyes.

“It does exist,” she said. “No matter that science cannot prove it does. I now possess Durga Maa’s soul, which makes me Durga Maa.”

She gestured at herself. “This physical shell is immaterial. It is the person within that matters. I am the avatar of Kali, just as Durga Maa herself was while she lived.”

Pillai chuckled softly. “Avatars and aatma. What is this? A TriNet Fiction? Save the spiritual rant for blindfaithers.”

She held the bowl up in both hands, Asian style. “You are sceptical,” she said, sipping tea. “It is to be expected. But I can establish this as a scientific fact which your technology can verify beyond doubt.”

She set the tea down on the floor and spread her arms in the same universal gesture of acceptance.

“Assassinate me too. And see for yourself.”

He hesitated for barely a fraction of a second. This time, he used the instrument at hand, smashing the tea cup and drawing the jagged clay edge across her jugular, severing it on the first try. He watched her bleed to death, spraying her life across the stone floor. The beam of sunlight shining through the jetting arc turned vermillion briefly.

• • • •

Because he was curious and because it was the easiest option, he proceeded to the next lower level.

There was another woman waiting in another chamber. This one was much older, with the wizened semi-oriental features of a North-Eastern Indian. A Mizo or a Naga. Descendant of the head-hunting tribes of the Indo-Burmese hills that had been converted to Christianity by relentless American Baptist missionaries a few generations ago. She did not speak as much as the earlier one. But his scans showed once again that impossible change in DNA even while her physical appearance remained the same.

He killed her with vicious efficiency, snapping her neck with a fierce twist of his powerful arms. This time, he observed the change after death closely. His scans showed a change to another DNA structure. Not a change, he realized. A reversion to the woman’s original identity before she became the avatar of the Goddess.

A rage swept through him, replacing the initial sense of bewilderment. This could not be happening. It was not part of the plan. It was a scientific impossibility.

He took the stairs with athletic speed, reaching the next level an instant before the change occurred, and through the “eyes” of his system he watched the conversion in progress, the very molecular structure of the ribonucleic strands altering. Then he killed the fourth avatar—for want of a better term—before she could even speak. She had a mole on her left eyebrow and the darkened skin and sallow features of a Malayalee. There was coconut oil on her hair and it smeared on his fingers as he held her skull and smashed it against the stone wall repeatedly.

This went on for several more levels. Chasing the “aatma” as it flew from woman to woman. Assassinating each new avatar of Durga Maa as she was genetically rebirthed.

• • • •

By the twenty-third level, he found himself tiring. His clothes and body were soiled with blood and gristle as well as traces of each woman’s individual identity. Tea, coconut oil, sweater yarn, pooja threads, rangoli powder . . . His systems showed that the tower was precisely one hundred stories high. Seventy-seven more levels to go. And the sat scans had analyzed his first batch of data transmission: One hundred such towers ringed the perimeter of the disputed territory, each with a hundred levels. Assuming that each housed a successor, that meant a sum total of 10,100 women to be assassinated.

He stopped and re-examined his options.

“It will be easier if you accept it,” said the twenty-third avatar. A very diminutive young woman, barely more than a girl. A Maharashtrian, with the dark skin and black pupils of the Dalits of the Deccan Plain, descendants of the ostracized scheduled castes of the twentieth century, the “untouchables” that Mahatma Gandhi had renamed “harijans, children of God” and whom Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar had renamed Dalits. She was weaving a shawl on a charkha, using her feet to grip the wooden spinney, and working steadily as she spoke. “The more you fight it, the harder it will be for you later.”

He spoke with barely concealed anger, his frustration getting the better of his legendary self-control. “How do you do it? You transmit the genetic coding through orbitals? But then how do you effect the morphing? This kind of technology doesn’t exist! It has to be some kind of illusion.” But no illusion could deceive the massive processing power that he had accessed to check and recheck the twenty-two “impossible” transformations.

She worked the spinney, weaving the red, white, and saffron strands of wool expertly as she spoke. “Is it so hard to accept, Envoy? You are Indian, like us. Not a Westerner with a mind fogged by science. You know that some things cannot be explained, only accepted.”

He sat down wearily, his blood-splashed feet staining a pile of spotless white wool, not caring. She clucked her tongue and moved the wool aside, picking out the stained strands and putting them in a separate pile for cleaning later.

“All right,” he said, deciding there would be no harm in a brief theoretical discussion while his systems sought a more scientific explanation. “Assume for the moment that you are all avatars of the Devi. But—”

“Nako re, baba,” she said. “No, my brother. We are only women. Ordinary mortal women. Only when the living avatar of the Devi dies, then the next of us in line takes her place. Samjhe? Understood now?”

She reminded him irritatingly of his mausi, a paternal aunt who was always completely self-assured and implacable. He gritted his teeth in frustration.

“But how many times can it possibly happen? There has to be a limit!”

“Kashasaati limit?” she asked him in the matter-of-fact Maharashtrian way. “You know your religious mythology. A Goddess can be reborn infinite times, because a Goddess on the mortal plane is aatma, pure spirit. And an aatma cannot be killed. Read your Bhagavad Gita again. Weapons cannot cleave it, wind cannot blow it away, fire cannot burn it, water cannot dissolve it, earth cannot consume it, it is the soul immortal.”

He was silent. The very same mausi had taught him this exact same verse from the Gita, in the original Sanskrit. With very little effort he could recall her sitting cross-legged before the wooden chaupat propping up the oversized hand-calligraphed copy of the Bhagwad Gita, chanting the Sanskrit slokas in that maddening, unforgettable singsong manner.

“Then there is only one solution,” he said at last. And stood up.

She looked at him over the rims of her spectacles, pausing in her weaving.

“I have to nuke you all. Wipe out the whole of Kali in one shot. That way, there won’t be any more bodies left for your damned Goddess to take refuge in.”

He walked away from her then paused. He really should kill her. He had said too much. Perhaps she had some way of informing her compatriots, of mounting a defence against the genocide he proposed.

But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He consoled himself with the thought that he would be killing them all anyway in a few moments.

As he walked away, the sound of the charka whirring began again behind him.

• • • •

It took surprisingly long for him to secure the necessary permission to “salinate” the disputed territory. It was a final alternative listed in his command menu, and as the official Envoy to the rebels, he had the authority to make the decision. Kali had become a sore on the belly of United India over the last decade. The noises of commisseration from overseas had begun to sound more like rumbles of discontent, especially after so many American and European women had emigrated to the renegade “nation.” His superiors had anticipated the need for a final solution and had sent him in with all the necessary preparations in place. They wanted this problem solved now, one way or the other, before the tri-annual summit of Non-Aligned Independent Nuclear Nations the following week in New Delhi.

He filed a charge of discovery of nuclear weapons and testing on Kali territory, proof of the renegades’ terrorist intentions and capacity. He initiated a program that simulated a crisis situation developing on his arrival in the disputed territory. Reviewed later by the inevitable Human Rights panel, it would perfectly simulate a series of events in which all his accompanying officers and staffers were successively tortured and brutally killed by Kali terrorist troops and then he himself was taken on a tour of their formidable nuclear facility in order to inform and warn the world of Kali’s intention to strike blind at India. There would be holes unfilled, and gaps, but they would only add to the authenticity of the whole charade.

The nuclear orbitals were positioned and armed, ready for release on his command.

He had retreated through the tunnel by this time, almost at the peripheral guard base from which he had entered. The guards had offered no resistance at all, not even an attempt to stop him. He smiled at the absurdity of these people, and felt a rush of joy at their imminent destruction.

He triggered the nuclear orbital the moment he reached minimum Safe Care distance. In an instant, the gaudy afternoon sky over the flatlands was obscured by the familiar blinding flash and then the rising mushroom cloud. He whistled as he walked to the Rimmer he had left parked on the Indian side of the Line of Control. There was a welcoming committee waiting to greet him, to shake the hand of the man who had finally “solved” the Kali problem.

He allowed himself a smug smile of triumph and was about to offer his hand in greeting when the change took him.

“Agent Pillai?” said the PM-General, his smile wavering as he saw his most celebrated Safe Care executive stagger and raise a hand to his forehead. “Are you feeling quite well?”

Pillai swung around, staring at the billowing cloud that marked the 230 square kilometres of land that had housed 700,000 renegade women until a few seconds ago. He raised his fist and shook it, his mouth opening in the rictus of a soundless scream.

“Damn you,” he managed to choke out. And then the Change was done. When he turned back to the PM-General, the anger and hate was replaced by an expression of such calm serenity that it startled the supreme leader of United India far more than any act or gesture of violence would have done.

“I am Durga Maa,” said the man formerly known as Envoy Pillai.

©2018 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the pioneer of the speculative fiction genre in India. His ground-breaking internationally acclaimed eight-book Ramayana Series was the first trilogy and series ever published in India. It revolutionized Indian publishing, creating a genre which is now the biggest selling in the country. Ashok’s 52 books have all been bestsellers in India, as well as translated into 18 languages and sold in 58 countries. He has also been credited as the author of the first Indian science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and thriller stories and novels in English, creator and screenwriter of the first Indian TV series in English, the first Indian ebooks in English and other firsts. He is one of only a handful of living Indian authors represented in The Picador Book of New Indian Writing and the Vintage Anthology of Modern Indian Literature. Two new novels are due out in 2018: Upon a Burning Throne (John Joseph Adams Books) and Rise as One (Delacorte). He is of Irish-Portuguese-Sri Lankan-Indian parentage. Born in Mumbai where he lived for 51 years, he now lives in Los Angeles. He loves to correspond with readers and is very active on Twitter and Facebook.

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

The Quiet Like a Homecoming

Cassandra Khaw | 1980 words

Travel to Scandinavia if you can, the older cats told me, the queens in their raftered kingdoms. The coffee there, they said, is bitter as an old lie. The Norsemen are beautiful, their women even more sublime, but most importantly, they are quiet. Preoccupied only with Nordic things, disinterested in the outside world. This is crucial. This is what makes them safe.

But this is not the only reason I am here.

I shade my eyes against the noon sky, its cerulean without dimension or depth, no gradient of quality; the color is absolute as a rich man’s confidence. Malmo tastes like a memory, like a word misplaced. I can smell the ocean, an afterthought in the air. It is cold and clean and old, so very old. Older even than the myth of marriage, than selkie stories, than Adam, than the Eve-that-never-was and the Eve-who-lives.

I follow the crowd onto the platform and then into the station, pouring through their pale bodies. Everyone looks but no one is gauche enough to comment on the tail that droops from the hem of my black woolen coat, the fur a little ragged. Months ago, I’d have been better groomed, more together, more cognizant of propriety, the profound obscenity of wearing my skin like a point of pride.

Then again, months ago, there would have been nothing to see, nothing but dark hair worn in a long, sleek braid. A smile. Skirt, knee-length. Pastel blouses. Nothing of me. Nothing at all.

“I have a room,” I tell the front desk when I find my way to the hotel at last. I smile at them with sharp little teeth and they smile back, empty.

“Welcome,” they say, not meaning any of it.

I leave pawprints on the stairs, even though I am wearing shoes. It amuses me to do so. The front desk says nothing. Someone in the lounge, a woman with a voice like a broken heart, begins to sing, and it sounds like a story of you and I.

• • • •

An animal wife is an accessory.

She must be.

A spouse is permitted liberties, the libations of agency. Small things like the right to choose the hue of her hair, to drink the stories decocted by strangers, to sleep on a roof under a damask of stars. A spouse, according to fiction, is equal. They are a partner.

An animal wife is not. She is instead ornamental, constrained by coercion, not choice. She is leashed to a length of flayed skin, tidily folded into a cedar chest. She is pliable, pure, convincingly demure.

And most of all, she is angry.

An animal wife always is.

• • • •

“You’re too kind.” I accent the smile with a stooping of the head, a crooking of the upper lip. The expression must communicate two things: humility and a sweet bewilderment, as though I couldn’t possibly believe what I’d authored but delight in it all the same. It must look like I’d meant it only for him.

He takes the bait. He flushes prettily and we talk, his eyes unfocused the entire while, reverent. I somnambulate through the motions, the minuet familiar. I’ve rehearsed its choreography so many times before. When we reach the finale, I disengage gracefully and he reluctantly, pressing a card into my grip. “Call me.”

My skin sits unevenly on my shoulders. It pulls. It is heavier than it should be, burdened with the years too. I smile at him.

“I will.” We both know I don’t mean any of it.

Obligations discharged, I escape the throng, cross the bridge, the sun warm on the back of my neck. I want to run. The compulsion scratches beneath my skin, push-pulling at my bones until I am halved by conflicting desires. It’d be so easy. To shuck this body, its responsibilities. To feel the cobblestones beneath paws, not feet. Scale the barbicans of the shops, their eaves and trellises. The plunge of the world from the roofs of their gods now domesticated by academics.

But not yet, not yet.

The road takes me to a square. Restaurants swathe its borders, every one of them pleasingly austere. Sweden disdains excess even in their tourist traps. Everywhere, there are tables, colonized by drunks, by devotees of the rare Nordic sun. Men and women conversing softly, bodies pressed together like hands in prayer.

I push past them to a small café, its exterior crowded with giggling couples and families, the children mesmerized by plates of cream, shaved white chocolate piled atop syrup-drenched cakes. The woman inside is fleecy-haired, exhausted. She scowls a warning. Be quick, her expression says.

I take my time, nonetheless, poring over their cheesecakes and in the end, commit to a slice of their bestseller and a mug of coffee, black as grief.

“Upstairs,” the waitress barks at me and I bob an acknowledgment, darting up a spiralling staircase. The second storey is lonely of people, low-roofed and too hot. I take a seat beside the window and stare, silent. The sun makes everyone beautiful.

We came here once, you and I. I’d clung to your shadow as you steered us to a table, my voice in a box in the basement of your apartment. You ordered—what was it? I don’t remember any specifics anymore, only sweetness and curls of chocolate, too much for either of us. You smiled at me and it was good, and I wish it wasn’t the few moments I loved about us.

I miss that version of us.

But I don’t miss it enough to not rewrite this memory, replace that evening with this one. The light beading on the rim of my mug, on my blue jeans. The quiet like a homecoming. Animal wives are performative, performances, a menagerie of curated expression and long-lashed silences. We exist to accent and accentuate that which makes our husbands impressive.

If you read this one day, darling, go fuck yourself.

I choke down every mouthful, chase every clump of sugar down with another gasp of coffee. I eat until I’m sick. It will not be the best memory, but it will be mine and there will be nothing of you layered in its nuances, no trace of your expressions, no ghost of your voice. When I talk about this memory one day, it’ll be without you in the conversation.

You kept me silent for so long.

It only seems fair.

• • • •

I remember when I first saw you.

It was on the stoop of an old temple. You’d been crying for hours. Salt seeped between your fingers in glistening rills, like someone’d licked rivers across the back of your palms. You looked like you were praying, had been begging the stars to spill out the love they’d eaten. While the moon glared, you slit your palm—the tiniest notch, like a small red seed—and squeezed until you’d anointed the steps with your blood. Please, you said. Like the word would be enough.

In a way, I suppose, it was.

I came out of the jungle wearing silks the color of muscle, a saucer of bone in my small hands. You laughed when I saw me. I hadn’t expected that. I see, you said before you came to me on your knees, humble as a penitent, and bled your tithe into my bowl. My eyes held no color and yours held no fear, and you watched without flinching as I lapped up your gift.

When I was done, you asked if I was a rib taken from the roof of god’s breast.

No, I said drowsily. But here, darling, here. I’ll grant you a wish, anyway.

You did not hesitate. You asked me to marry you right there and then, my fingers ringed with red, a drop of your blood in the hollow of my throat. I’d kissed you. Do you remember that? You told me I’d tasted like blackberry wine, like honey and aloe, like summer, like the last fine thing to see in this life. I told you not yet, all dowries must be paid in threes, but the truth is this: I loved you from the first heartbeat, was yours before my body could rehearse the next.

• • • •

I do not restrict myself to the places we’ve seen, the places you’ve stained with your breath and your words, your insouciant description. The day before I leave, I stalk a winding canal along its cobbled path, follow the blue-green water to where it yawns into the ocean. It is a tedious walk. You’d have despised it. No shops, no landmarks to entice the eye, only an endlessness of manicured grass, and long tanned bodies plated on checkered blankets. Unbidden, your voice uncurls like a drag of smoke, resentful: I used to look like that not too long ago.

I take my time. I do not run. I memorize the topography of my silhouette, its unhurried lines, and the sweep of my hair along the meridian of my spine, the sheer audacity of it all. You loved me best when I was exceptional.

But today, I am merely free.

At a bridge, I pause, inhale the air, and Malmo smells like the first day I realized every cloak of feathers and bearskin coat is invaluable, not irreplaceable. A scent of thyme and brisket being smoked, fresh-cut grass, the rain cooling on fresh asphalt. Pre-processed potential, like only spring can articulate it. I lean over the rails until gravity beckons, hungry as a husband: Come to me, trust me, fall into me, I’ll catch you, I love you, I love you, I’ll love you forever.

I laugh into a breeze, who carries my merriment like a boon to a couple lying tangle-limbed on the opposite bank. Step by step, I am erasing you, packing every instance of you into a cardboard box in the attic of my thoughts. Soon, it’d be all gone.

“I can’t wait,” I tell the water and the ghost of you, your eyes old as a wedding vow. My grin is the moon cut in two, incandescent, victorious. Though your memory connives to deter my decision, I shed this poor human façade. It ribbons from my bones, sheets of tissue and hair dip-dyed in emerald, leather and blue jeans. Underneath, I am joy flensed of your petty conditions: basal, bone-deep, breathless.

• • • •

Three times you came to the temple.

Three times you paid what you owed.

The rest?

It doesn’t matter except for this:

You lied to me.

You rolled up my skin and locked it into a chest. For safekeeping, you told me, your mouth in my hair. When I stopped looking, you set it all on fire, mixed the ashes with a sip of sweet mead. And I’d cried at its taste and you said I was crazy. There was no salt, no lies, nothing but honey, heady as expensive wine, no life outside of you and I.

• • • •

I have a cloak again, better than the one you burned.

A stitch of grey mouse fur wreaths my right shoulder; he is too little to give me more. But soon, he’d promised, and I believed him. The trimming is all badger, its span woven from elk. Feathers from a stormcrow, like knife-cuts above my heart. A hellhound’s mane. My mother’s fur, blanched by the years. Souvenirs from a thousand small loves.

The hotel says nothing about my damp attire, the way my hair sticks to my face. Tonight, I will make a bonfire of your gifts. I will drink gin and make haikus of our last conversation. I will wear red. I will climb to the roof and I will rename every star, while Malmo dreams of when its tides seethed with ships.

I will be me again, darling, and you will be nothing.

©2018 by Cassandra Khaw. | Art © 2018 by Sam Schechter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

By day, Cassandra Khaw works as the business developer for Singaporean publisher Ysbryd Games. By night, she moonlights as a freelance technology reporter for places like PC Gamer and The Verge, while still writing exorbitant amounts of fiction. Charles Stross called her novella Hammers on Bone  “possibly the most promising horror debut of 2016.”  Hammers on Bone was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award for Best Novella. Rumor has it that Khaw does not sleep and can only be satiated with offerings of fluffy things. You can find her on Twitter.

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

The Seventh Expression of the Robot General

Jeffrey Ford | 3120 words

In his later years, when he spoke, a faint whirring came from his lower jaw. His mouth opened and closed rhythmically, accurately, displaying a full set of human teeth gleaned from fallen comrades and the stitched tube of plush leather that was his tongue. The metal mustache and eyebrows were ridiculously fake, but the eyes were the most beautiful glass facsimiles, creamy white with irises like dark blue flowers. Instead of hair, his scalp was sandpaper.

He wore his uniform still, even the peaked cap with the old emblem of the Galaxy Corps embroidered in gold. He creaked when he walked, piston compressions and the click of a warped flywheel whispering within his trousers. Alternating current droned from a faulty fuse in his solar plexus, and occasionally, mostly on wet days, sparks wreathed his head like a halo of bright gnats. He smoked a pipe, and before turning each page of a newspaper, he’d bring his chrome index finger to his dry rubber slit of a mouth as if he were moistening its tip.

His countenance, made of an astounding, pliable, non-flammable, blast-beam resistant, self-healing, rubber alloy, was supposedly sculpted in homage to the dashing looks of Rendel Sassoon, star of the acclaimed film epic, For God and Country. Not everyone saw the likeness, and Sassoon himself, a devout pacifist, who was well along in years when the general took his first steps out of the laboratory, sued for defamation of character. But once the video started coming back from the front, visions of slaughter more powerful than any celluloid fantasy, mutilated Harvang corpses stacked to the sky, the old actor donned a flag pin on his lapel and did a series of war bond television commercials of which the most prominent feature was his nervous smile.

It’s a sad fact that currently most young people aren’t aware of the historic incidents that led to our war with the Harvang and the necessity of the Robot General. They couldn’t tell you a thing about our early discoveries of atmosphere and biological life on our planet’s sizeable satellite, or about the initial fleet that went to lay claim to it. Our discovery of the existence of the Harvang was perhaps the most astonishing news in the history of humanity. They protested our explorations as an invasion, even though we offered technological and moral advancements. A confluence of intersecting events led to an unavoidable massacre of an entire village of the brutes, which in turn led to a massacre of our expeditionary force. They used our ships to invade us, landing here in Snow Country and in the swamps south of Central City.

It was said about his time on the battlefield that if the general was human, he’d have been labeled “merciless,” but, as it was, his robot nature mitigated this assessment instead to that he was simply “without mercy.” At the edge of a pitched battle, he’d set up a folding chair and sit down to watch the action, pipe in hand and a thermos of thick, black oil nearby. He’d yell through a bullhorn, strategic orders interspersed with exhortations of “Onward, you sacks of blood!” Should his troops lose the upper hand in the melee, the general would stand, set his pipe and drink on the ground next to his chair, remove his leather jacket, hand it to his assistant, roll up his sleeves, cock his hat back, and dash onto the battlefield, running at top robot speed.

Historians, engineers, and AI researchers of more recent years have been nonplused as to why the general’s creators gave him such limited and primitive battle enhancements. There were rays and particle beams at that point in history and they could have outfitted him like a tank, but their art required subtlety. Barbed, spinning drill bits whirled out from the center of his knuckles on each hand. At the first hint of danger, razor blades protruded from the toes of his boots. He also belched poison, feathered darts from his open mouth, but his most spectacular device was a rocket built into his hindquarters that when activated shot a blast of fire that made him airborne for ten seconds.

It was supposedly a sight the Harvang dreaded, to see him land behind their lines, knuckle spikes whirling, belching death, trousers smoldering. They had a name for him in Harvang, Kokulafugok, which roughly translated as “Fire in the Hole.” He’d leave a trail of carnage through their ranks, only stopping briefly to remove the hair tangling his drill bits.

His movements were graceful and precise. He could calculate ahead of his opponent, dodge blast beams, bend backwards, touch his head upon the ground to avoid a spray of shrapnel and then spring back up into a razor-toed kick, lopping off a Harvang’s sex and drilling him through the throat. Never tiring, always perfectly balanced and accurate, his intuition was dictated by a random number generator.

He killed like a force of nature, an extension of the universe. Hacked by axe blades or shot with arrows to his head, when his business was done, he’d retire to his tent and send for one of the Harvang females. The screams of his prisoner echoed through the camp and were more frightening to his troops than combat. On the following morning he would emerge, his dents completely healed, and give orders to have the carcass removed from his quarters.

During the war, he was popular with the people back home. They admired his hand-to-hand combat, his antique nature, his unwillingness to care about the reasons for war. He was voted the celebrity most men would want to have a beer with and most women would desire for a brief sexual liaison. When informed as to the results of this poll, his only response was, “But are they ready to die for me?”

Everywhere, in the schools, the post offices, the public libraries, there were posters of him in battle-action poses amidst a pile of dead or dying Harvang that read: Let’s Drill Out A Victory! The Corps was constantly transporting him from the front lines of Snow Country or the Moon back to Central City in order to make appearances supporting the war. His speeches invariably contained this line: The Harvang are a filthy species. At the end of his talks, his face would turn the colors of the flag and there were few who refused to salute. Occasionally, he’d blast off the podium and dive headlong into the crowd, which would catch his falling body and, hand over hand, return him to the stage.

In his final campaign, he was blown to pieces by a blast from a beam cannon the Harvang had stolen from his arsenal. An entire regiment of ours ambushed in Snow Country between the steep walls of an enormous glacier—The Battle of the Ice Chute. His strategies were impossibly complex but all inexorably lead to a frontal assault, a stirring charge straight into the mouth of Death. It was a common belief among his troops that who’d ever initially programmed him had never been to war. Only after his defeat did the experts claim his tactics were daft, riddled with hubris spawned by faulty AI. His case became, for a time, a thread of the damning argument that artificial intelligence, merely the human impression of intelligence, was, in reality, artificial ignorance. It was then that robot production moved decidedly toward the organic.

After the Harvang had been routed by reinforcements, and the Corps eventually began burying the remains of those who’d perished in the battle for Snow Country, the general’s head was discovered amidst the frozen carnage. When the soldier who found it lifted it up from beneath the stiffened trunk of a human body, the eyes opened, the jaw moved, and the weak, crackling command of “Kill them all!” sputtered forth.

The Corps decided to rebuild him as a museum piece for public relations purposes, but the budget was limited. Most of his parts, discovered strewn across the battlefield, could be salvaged and a few new ones were fashioned from cheaper materials to replace what was missing. Still, those who rebuilt the general were not the craftsmen his creators were—techniques had been lost to time. There was no longer the patience in robot design for aping the human. A few sectors of his artificial brain had been damaged, but there wasn’t a technician alive who could repair his intelligence node, a ball of wiring so complex its design had been dubbed “The Knot.”

The Corps used him for fundraising events and rode him around in an open car at veterans’ parades. The only group that ever paid attention to him, though, was the parents of the sons and daughters who’d died under his command. As it turned out, there were thousands of them. Along a parade route, they’d pelt him with old fruit and dog shit, to which he’d calmly warn, “Incoming.”

It didn’t take the Corps long to realize he was a liability, but since he possessed consciousness, though it be man-made, the law disallowed his being simply turned off. Instead, he was retired and set up in a nice apartment at the center of a small town where he drew his sizeable pension and history of combat bonus.

An inauspicious ending to a historic career, but in the beginning, at the general’s creation, when the Harvang had invaded in the south and were only miles outside of Central City, he was a promising savior. His artificial intelligence was considered a miracle of Science, his construction, the greatest engineering feat of the human race. And the standard by which all of this was judged was the fact that his face could make seven different expressions. Everyone agreed it was proof of the robot builder’s exemplary art. Before the general, the most that had ever been attempted was three.

The first six of these expressions were slight variations on the theme of “determination.” Righteousness, Willfulness, Obstinacy, Eagerness, Grimness 1 and 2 were the terms his makers had given them. The facial formation of the six had a lot to do with the area around the mouth, subtly different clenchings of the jaw, a straightness in the lips. The eyes were widened for all six, the nostrils flared. For Grimness 2, steam shot from his ears.

When he wasn’t at war, he switched between Righteousness and Obstinacy. He’d lost Eagerness to a Harvang blade. It was at the Battle of Boolang Crater that the general was cut across the cheek, all the way through to his internal mechanism. After two days of leaking oil through the side of his face, the outer wound healed, but the wiring that caused the fourth expression had been irreparably severed.

There is speculation, based primarily on hearsay, that there was also an eighth expression, one that had not been built into him but that had manifested of its own accord through the self-advancement of the AI. Scientists claimed it highly unlikely, but Ms. Jeranda Blesh claimed she’d seen it. During a three-month leave, his only respite in the entire war, she’d lived with him in a chalet in the Grintun Mountains. A few years before she died of a Harvang venereal disease, she appeared on a late-night television talk show. She was pale and bloated, giddy with alcohol, but she divulged the secrets of her sex life with the general.

She mentioned the smooth chrome member with fins, the spicy oil, the relentless precision of his pistons. “Sometimes, right when things were about to explode,” she said, “he’d make a face I’d never seen any other times. It wasn’t a smile, but more like calm, a moment of peace. It wouldn’t last long, though, ’cause then he’d lose control of everything, shoot a rocket blast out his backside and fly off me into the wall.” The host of the show straightened his tie and said, “That’s what I call ‘drilling out a victory.’”

It was the seventh expression that was the general’s secret, though. That certain configuration of his face reserved for combat. It was the reason he was not tricked out with guns or rockets. The general was an excellent killing machine, but how many could he kill alone? Only when he had armies ready to move at his will could he defeat the Harvang. The seventh expression was a look that enchanted his young troops and made them savage extensions of his determination. Out manned, out gunned, out maneuvered, out flanked, it didn’t matter. One glance from him, and they’d charge, beam rifles blazing, to their inevitable deaths. They’d line up in ranks before a battle and he’d review the troops, focusing that imposing stare on each soldier. It was rare that a young recruit would be unaffected by the seventh expression’s powerful suggestion, understand that the mission at hand was sheer madness, and protest. The general had no time for deserters. With lightening quickness, he’d draw his beam pistol and burn a sudden hole in the complainant’s forehead.

In an old government document, “A Report to the Committee on Oblique Renderings Z-333-678AR,” released since the Harvang war, there was testimony from the general’s creators to the fact that the seventh expression was a blend of the look of a hungry child, the gaze of an angry bull, and the stern countenance of God. The report records that the creators were questioned as to how they came up with the countenance of God, and their famous response was “We used a mirror.”

There was a single instance when the general employed the seventh expression after the war. It was only a few years ago, the day after it was announced that we would negotiate a treaty with the Harvang and attempt to live in peace and prosperity. He left his apartment and hobbled across the street to the coffee shop on the corner. Once there, he ordered a twenty-four-ounce Magjypt black, and sat in the corner, pretending to read the newspaper. Eventually, a girl of sixteen approached him and asked if he was the robot general.

He saluted and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“We’re reading about you in school,” she said.

“Sit down, I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”

She pulled out a chair and sat at his table. Pushing her long brown hair behind her ears, she said, “What about all the killing?”

“Everybody wants to know about the killing,” he said. “They should ask themselves.”

“On the Steppes of Patience, how many Harvang did you, yourself, kill?”

“My internal calculator couldn’t keep up with the slaughter. I’ll just say, ‘Many.’”

“What was your favorite weapon?” she asked.

“I’m going to show it to you, right now,” he said, and his face began changing. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought forth a small caliber ray gun wrapped in a white handkerchief. He laid the weapon on the table, the cloth draped over it. “Pick it up,” he said.

He stared at her and she stared back, and after it was all over, she’d told friends that his blue pupils had begun to spin like pinwheels and his lips rippled. She lifted the gun.

“Put your finger on the trigger,” he said.

She did.

“I want you to aim it right between my eyes and pull the trigger.”

She took aim with both hands, stretching her arms out across the table.

“Now!” he yelled, and it startled her.

She set the gun down, pushed back her chair, and walked away.

It took the general two weeks before he could find someone he could convince to shoot him, and this was only after he offered payment. The seventh expression meant nothing to the man who’d promised to do the job. What he was after, he said, were the three shrunken Harvang heads the general had kept as souvenirs of certain battles. They’d sell for a fortune on the black market. After the deal was struck, the general asked the man, “Did you see that face I had on a little while ago?”

“I think I know what you mean,” said the man.

“How would you describe it?” asked the general.

The man laughed. “I don’t know. That face? You looked like you might have just crapped your pants. Look, your famous expressions, the pride of an era, no one cares about that stuff anymore. Bring me the heads.”

The next night, the general hid the illegal shrunken heads beneath an old overcoat and arrived at the appointed hour at an abandoned pier on the south side of town. The wind was high and the water lapped at the edges of the planks. The man soon appeared. The general removed the string of heads from beneath his coat and threw them at the man’s feet.

“I’ve brought a ray gun for you to use,” said the general, and reached for the weapon in his jacket pocket.

“I brought my own,” said the man and drew out a magnum-class beam pistol. He took careful aim, and the general noticed that the long barrel of the gun was centered on his own throat and not his forehead.

In the instant before the man pulled the trigger, the general’s strategy centers realized that the plot was to sever his head and harvest his intelligence node—“The Knot.” He lunged, drill bits whirring. The man fired the weapon and the blast beam disintegrated three quarters of the general’s neck. The internal command had already been given, though, so with head flopping to the side, the robot general charged forward—one drill bit skewered the heart and the other plunged in at the left ear. The man screamed and dropped the gun, and then the general drilled until he himself dropped. When he hit the dock, what was left of his neck snapped and his head came free of his body. It rolled across the planks, perched at the edge for a moment, and then a gust of wind pushed it into the sea.

The general’s body was salvaged and dismantled, its mechanical wizardry deconstructed. From the electric information stored in the ganglia of the robotic wiring system, it was discovered that the general’s initial directive was—To Serve the People. As for his head, it should be operational for another thousand years, its pupils spinning, its lips rippling without a moment of peace in the cold darkness beneath the waves. There, “The Knot,” no doubt out of a programmed impulse for self-preservation, is confabulating intricate dreams of victory.

©2008 by Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in Eclipse Two, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. His fiction has won the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Shirley Jackson Award, etc. His latest novel, Ahab’s Return, or The Last Voyage, comes out in spring 2018, (Morrow/Harper Collins) He lives in Ohio in a hundred plus year old farm house, surrounded by corn and wheat fields, and teaches part-time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

A Coward’s Death

Rahul Kanakia | 2140 words

Well, the 101,201st Emperor needed some levies to build a huge statue of himself, so he said, “Okay, all of my recently subjugated peoples: If you’ve got at least two sons, you need to give me your first-born. But don’t worry, I’ll give him back, assuming he can survive ten years of lifting these big heavy stones.”

In some places, people weren’t happy about this. The city of Yashar revolted, and in response the Emperor’s legions killed the men, castrated the boys, and sold all the survivors into slavery in the steel cities (and you know what that means for them). But in my hometown? In Sundi? In keeping with our reputation for learning, we were more philosophical about these things. We didn’t get angry; we got sad.

My teacher, Usurus, was a huge part of the reason for that. After he read out the order for us, he said, “I won’t mince words. This is horrible”—Usurus didn’t talk in a very elevated way, like the other teachers at the academy, which is why we loved him—“but the only alternative is death for our entire people. So there’s really nothing to do.”

I was in the back rows of the amphitheater, not taking notes, just drawing parallel lines in the wax with my stylus. I was the firstborn in my family, and we had seven sons. The sweat dribbled down the small of my back, right down to my butt.

Usurus said, “For for our lecture today, let me be truthful. Some of you are departing here for a life of slavery. The work won’t be easy. It will be hot; it will be difficult; food will be scarce; you will be whipped if you slow down. Many of you won’t survive the march to the capital, much less the work itself. So what’s to be done?”

The question was rhetorical. I mean anybody with any Sight could see the flouncy little ghost of a former Emperor hanging out up in the sky above us—I think the ghost had reigned roughly ten thousand emperors ago, but I can’t be more specific than that.

But Tiktus answered anyway, “I don’t wish to do it. I simply do not.”

My teacher spared a glance upward. “And why is that?”

“I’m not strong of body. I won’t survive a year of toil. I won’t survive even a week.” That’s how Tiktus talked. Very elevated. None of us liked him, obviously.

The former Emperor’s ghost circled us slowly, but it called no attention to itself. That was their way. They wanted us to say what we thought, but if we didn’t think the right things, then, well, that was very bad. This was late in the day, when sweet breezes were blowing off the mountains. My feet dug into the grass on the terraced steps, and I felt a little dapplebug crawling over the nail of my emperor toe.

“Do you have an alternative?” said my teacher.

“No,” said Tiktus. “But why is it my responsibility to provide one? I simply won’t go. They can drag me if they want, but I will not set one foot in front of the other on their behalf.”

“Let us say you do that,” he said. “If they scourge your family, what then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you deny that they have the right to do what they want with your body?”

“I think I do deny it. No free citizen should be forced to labor against their will.”

“Ahh, so therein lies the issue, which is one of improper definitions. Would you say that the inhabitants of a conquered city are truly ‘free?’”

“Yes,” Tiktus said. “I would.”

“By what right then do you enslave your household servant? Xios, correct? That’s his name?”

“He’s a slave. I purchased him.”

“He’s Nureenian, isn’t he? Aren’t you, Xios?”

I turned and saw the blue sky outlining his shoulders. The boy was high up in the stands. He peered over us.

“And wasn’t he sold into slavery because your father sacked his city and tore down their walls, Tiktus?”

“This is sophistry,” Tiktus said. His voice had attained a very high and very screechy quality. He stood up now, and he threw the trailing end of his toga over his shoulder. “I am not a slave. I am free. I won’t do this.”

“But by what right do you refuse?” our teacher said.

They went on like that for quite awhile, and our teacher eventually proved to Tiktus that he was no different from his own slaves. Our teacher proved that there’s no law, in human relations, except the laws of your nation, and that when you live under despotism, it’s your duty to obey the whims of the despot (unless you can overthrow him, was the unspoken addendum, but of course with the Emperor that was impossible).

After Tiktus stomped away—he’s never happy when he’s on the losing end of one of our teacher’s debates—we got a long sermon about how to lead a happy life even in slavery. This was very basic stuff. Misfortune comes into all lives. Even if we were second sons and, hence, managed to escape the forced labor edict, tomorrow we might be trampled by horses and be left crippled.

And yet we could control how we behaved. We could resist temptation. We could hold nothing too dearly. We could keep our emotions in check. We could struggle, even in the worst circumstances, to be good people.

That was the sum of it, and the message was really very stirring. When I left that evening I had a heightened sense of purpose inside my chest. A feeling of nobility, really.

We were followed—the group of us—by the former Emperor’s ghost: a big green hungry mass of eyes and mouths and claws that flitted through trees and walls. The ghost spoke to us. It said during its reign a person had tried to refuse to go into this Emperor’s army, and as punishment, this Emperor had been devouring that guy’s soul for twenty thousand years.

This was true. The Emperor’s mouths opened wide and its arms spread out, and we saw the chewed-up remains of the guy. His head was a mass of red, set off by the shocking white of bone. But even after twenty thousand years, his mouth still worked, and he spoke to us in rusty worn-down words from an ancient language that only one of us, Vellix, had any inkling of.

When we asked him what the guy had said, Vellix replied, “Something about a pie. Strawberry pie, I think.”

That’s not relevant to the story, by the way, it’s simply an odd fact.

• • • •

While I was listening to my teacher, the census-takers had come to my parents’ villa and made a charcoal mark on the door. I knew instantly what it meant: We’d seen a few others on the way home. My youngest brother toddled past, totally naked. He slipped over his feet, tumbled headfirst into the door. I didn’t move, and he got up eventually, then grabbed onto my leg.

My stomach growled, and my brother cried, and still I stood. Then of course it opened, and my grandmother was on the other side, tears in her eyes. She wrapped me up in prayer strands and led me inside, and they branded me and bedaubed me and made lots of prayers to our household gods.

The next morning I was sent out of the house with my dad’s finest pair of shoes on my feet. A troop marched past, made up of ten other guys, ranging from ten years to fifty, and we were all daubed in black and spattered with red in just the same way. I gave my name to the clerk, who rode alongside on a donkey, and he marked it on his stylus. We had two guards, and they had swords, but their armor was light. After what’d happened to Yashar, nobody expected trouble.

Tiktus didn’t even live in a villa. His home was an apartment in the leather-workers’ district. He wasn’t at the door like we were. When the chief clerk blew his conch, we waited for a long time. The heat was intense, and an old woman, taking pity, brought us a pail of water, and we took turns plunging our faces into it. Finally the conch blew one more time, and then we heard thumping and screaming.

The soldiers went up, kicked in the door, and after a few moments they emerged, holding a pair of legs. Tiktus’s body followed closely behind. His father was at his head, saying, “Get up! Get up!”

Tiktus was wholly naked. He had no markings on him, and we all saw his cock flopping around. I winced as they dragged him over the wooden steps. He must by now have splinters all over his ass. Finally the soldiers kicked him down the last few steps and he tumbled face-down into the mud.

Only now did he move, and that was only the slightest bit. His head rolled to one side so he could breathe.

The clerk read some sort of proclamation, but Tiktus didn’t move or speak. The soldiers kicked him. Then one got out the lash, and he was about to whip the student, but we all got a cold feeling along our backs, and we looked up: The Emperor’s ghost was a few feet above us.

“No,” the ghost said. “Do it to the father.”

The eyes of Tiktus’s father got wide. “Get up!” he screamed. Grimacing, a soldier caught hold of his arm. Another took hold of his tunic and ripped it off, leaving him naked.

“Get up,” Vellix said. “Get up.”

Then the chant got louder. Everyone in the street wanted Tiktus to get up. To be a man, to do our people proud. We kicked him a few times, and he groaned, pulling his legs inward. We grabbed him and his face so he could see his father.

By now the whipping had started. They wasted no time. The soldier aimed directly for his groin, and within a few strokes that area was a bloody red and purple mass: It looked like some terrible mushroom that ought never have been exposed to the light.

“Come now!” The shout came from an old man, who leaned forward, grabbing Tiktus by the ears. It was our teacher, who had weak legs and strong, beefy arms from dragging himself everywhere. “This is absurd. You’re proving nothing.”

Tiktus whimpered, saying, “No, no, I won’t.” We could barely hear it over his father’s screams. But when the clerk asked if he’d serve, Tiktus once again shook his head and fell limp, so his father’s beating continued while our teacher stood over him, remonstrating.

After Tiktus’s father stopped moving. One of the soldiers took out his sword and approached Tiktus. “Lay him down, belly up,” the soldier said.

But the Emperor interposed himself: He was still all green mist and flashing mouths. “No,” he said. “Someone else.”

So the soldier turned and moved towards Tiktus’s mother. With one thrust he shoved the blade into her belly. We heard a thunk as it hit her spine, and when she fell, she ripped the blade from his hands.

Tiktus’s eyes were closed now, and no amount of us scratching at him could make him open them. The Emperor flashed all his teeth at us, “Stop!” he said, and we conscripts, startled, dropped our former friend into the dirt.

“Someone else,” the Emperor said. “Find someone else.”

But Tiktus’s little brother had fled, so the old woman, the one who’d brought us water, was the next to be grabbed. And after a few seconds, a sword was raised up over her as well.

That’s when we heard a scream. I froze, thinking this was it—the breaking point. Perhaps the crowd would actually rebel against—but then I saw an old man bent over Tiktus, beating out his brains with a paving stone. The soldiers, caught off guard, stabbed the old man several times, and then they flipped him over to lie on the ground next to Tiktus.

That old man was our teacher, of course.

Nowadays Usurus is venerated in Sundi. You know, because he saved us all. When I finally went home, after ten years in the quarries, people kept asking me if I’d known Tiktus. They wanted to know if he would’ve stopped. If he would’ve given in. And I always said the same thing: “No. Never.”

Another thing I told them is that as we marched away, the Emperor’s ghost stripped the soul from Tiktus’s bleeding body, so not even in death was he able to escape.

©2018 by Rahul Kanakia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rahul Kanakia’s first book, a contemporary young adult novel called Enter Title Here, came out from Disney-Hyperion in 2016. Additionally, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, Apex, and Nature. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford, and he used to work in the field of international development. Originally from Washington, D.C., Rahul now lives in Berkeley. If you want to know more you can visit his blog at blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter @rahkan.

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

One True Love

Malinda Lo | 9150 words

It is never lucky for a child to kill her mother in the course of her own birth. Perhaps for this reason, the soothsayer who attended the naming ceremony for Princess Essylt was not a celebrated one. Haidis had barely finished his own apprenticeship when the summons came. He knew that delivering the prophecy for this princess was a thankless job, because no soothsayer in his right mind would attempt to foretell the life of a girl-child born out of death.

His mentor and former teacher told him to sugarcoat the prophecy as much as possible. “She’s unimportant, in the grand scheme of things,” said Gerlach. “King Radek needs a son; he’ll find a new bride soon enough and the princess will simply be married off when she’s older.” He gave Haidis a sharp glance. “Make sure your prophecy sounds true enough, but remember that the king doesn’t need the truth; he only needs a benediction.”

So Haidis went to the naming ceremony prepared to omit any problematic details from the prophecy he would deliver. He planned to stop by the soothsayers’ temple afterward, to make an offering to the God of Prophecy to counteract whatever bad luck he might acquire from being in such close proximity to the princess.

It was a small ceremony, as Haidis expected, and the king himself seemed a little bored, his mind likely focused on his next journey to the war front rather than the baby held in the arms of the nursemaid nearby. The child wouldn’t stop crying, her voice a thin, angry wail that echoed in the cold, stony throne room. When Haidis approached her with the Water of Prophecy and the Sceptre of Truth, she screamed even louder, her mouth stretched open in a tiny O of frustration, her eyes screwed shut. She had wisps of reddish hair on her scalp, and her cheeks were ruddy. He wondered if she would ever grow into a beauty; her mother, the late Queen Lida, had been known for her inheritance, not her looks.

King Radek barked, “Get on with it before the girl makes us all deaf.”

“Apologies, Your Majesty,” Haidis said. He lifted the pewter bowl containing the Water of Prophecy and dipped his fingers in it, dampening the girl’s forehead and cheeks with the liquid. Her squalls stopped as if she was shocked by his touch, and she opened her eyes. They were a vibrant green, as vivid as springtime in the woods outside the castle, and Haidis was as startled by her as she seemed to be by him. She might not become a beauty, he thought, but those eyes were certainly a marvel.

He picked up the Sceptre of Truth and held it over the princess as he began the incantation that would bring him into the trancelike state required to foretell her future. He didn’t expect to fall deeply into the trance; he was too aware of the king glaring at him, not to mention the princess’s luminous green eyes. He kept his own eyes half open, so he saw the moment when the girl reached up with her baby fingers and wrapped them around the Sceptre itself.

This was unusual, and Haidis knew it. He knew it because the Sceptre changed into a living thing at the princess’s touch, and he had to hang on to it with all his might to prevent it from flying out of his hand. His eyes widened, but he did not see the nurse’s astonished expression, or the way the king sat up in surprise. He saw, instead, the princess’s future, and this vision would remain with him for the rest of his life, for it was the first time he had seen true, and he could not resist speaking it wholly, without any of his mentor’s suggested sugarcoating.

“The princess shall grow into a young woman strong and pure,” Haidis intoned. “But when she finds her one true love”—the nursemaids standing in the throne room giggled—“she shall be the downfall of the king.”

The attendants and guests erupted into shocked whispers. Haidis’s vision cleared with a snap, and he saw the baby Princess Essylt gazing up at him with what appeared to be a smile on her face. Terror filled him as he realized what he had said. He pulled the Sceptre of Truth away from the princess, and as it left her hands it became ordinary again.

Behind him the king roared, “Take this abomination away! She shall never be the downfall of me! Take her away or I will have her killed, and she will join her mother in the grave.”

The nursemaid clutched the Princess Essylt to her breast and fled. Haidis swayed on his feet as he wondered if he had sentenced the baby girl to her death with his careless speaking of the truth.

It was the king’s most trusted advisor who devised a solution to the problem of Princess Essylt’s prophecy. “We shall simply never allow the princess to find her true love,” he told the king, “and so your safety will be assured.” Of course, the advisor had ulterior motives—he believed the princess might one day be useful, politically—but he kept that to himself, and the king consented to his plan.

From that day forward, Princess Essylt was restricted to the castle’s West Tower under the supervision of her nursemaid, Auda, and was not allowed to see any man except for her father. He visited her rarely, for he had little desire to see the cause of his prophesied doom. The few times he did visit, he glared down at the princess and demanded, “Are you being an obedient little girl?”

She shrank away from him at first, running back to Auda, who would turn her around forcefully and whisper in her ear, “This is your father, the king of Anvarra, and you are his daughter, a princess, and you must behave as such.”

As the years passed, Essylt learned to bow to her father, and she came to see him as a sort of duty: one that she had inherited by birth, but not one that she enjoyed. She knew that he did not particularly like her, but she did not know why, for Auda kept the prophecy that had relegated her to the West Tower a secret.

Auda was a skilled and loving nursemaid, and she took her job seriously. She knew that the only way Essylt would be content in the tower was if she thought her life was entirely normal. For several years, Auda was quite successful, for she made the West Tower into everything a little girl could wish for. When Essylt wanted new dolls, Auda ordered them; when she asked for playmates, Auda invited the princess’s young female cousins to visit; when she yearned for a pony, Auda convinced the king to deliver one to the gardens adjacent to the West Tower. She even arranged for a female riding instructor to teach Essylt how to ride. Whenever Essylt voiced questions about why she couldn’t go through the heavily carved oak door in the hall, Auda said, “We must keep you safe, for you are the princess of Anvarra, and you must be protected.”

The only times Essylt left the West Tower were on the occasions of her father’s weddings, for it was deemed too unseemly for the princess to remain locked away on such an important day. For those events, Essylt was dressed in veils from head to toe so that no one could see her face. The veils also had the unfortunate—or perhaps intentional—side effect of rendering her mostly blind, so she had to hold Auda’s hand the entire time. That meant that Essylt’s experience of the greater castle was confined to careful study of the floor, glimpsed in flashes through the gap at the bottom of the veils.

During Essylt’s childhood, King Radek married several times, for his wives had a troubling tendency to die. Essylt’s mother, of course, had died in childbed, as did the king’s second wife. His third wife bore two stillborn children—sons, the king noted in despair—before succumbing to a fever. After that, several years passed before the king decided to marry again. Some believed he worried that he was cursed, but others noted that he was merely distracted by a new war that had broken out between Anvarra and its eastern neighbor, the kingdom of Drasik. This war went on season after season, and Essylt passed her thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays with her father away at battle, and no new bride on the castle threshold to draw her out of the West Tower.

As Essylt grew older, she became increasingly curious about the court and her father and why he did not return except once or twice a year, and Auda reluctantly began to answer her questions. In this way, Essylt learned that King Radek had sought an alliance with the island nation of Nawharla’al, which had once been invaded by Drasik but had successfully driven them out through an ingenious use of poison-tipped arrows that spread plague through the Drasik soldiers. In Essylt’s seventeenth year, Anvarra and Nawharla’al fought and won a decisive battle against Drasik. In celebration of victory, the king of Nawharla’al gave his seventeen-year-old daughter Sadiya to King Radek in marriage to further cement their alliance.

Sadiya, like all Nawharla’ali people, had brown skin and black hair, with eyes the color of rich, dark soil. The first time King Radek saw her—in a tent on the side of the road after the last battle—he felt lust stir within him, for he had never seen a girl as beautiful and exotic as she. The king saw the way his attendants looked at her, too, and black jealousy rose within him, even thicker than his lust. He ordered that Sadiya be taken immediately to the West Tower and locked inside until their wedding, which would take place in exactly one fortnight.

Sadiya did not understand what he said, for she had not yet learned the Anvarran language. She only knew that the king’s voice was covetous and greedy, and when he lifted her chin with his hand, she could almost smell the desire on his breath. It took all her years of royal training to not spit in his face, and she prayed to her gods that something would come to deliver her from this marriage.

On the day of Sadiya’s arrival, Essylt was poring over history books in the West Tower’s small library when she heard the heavy oaken doors in the entry hall flung open. Startled, she ran out onto the balcony overlooking the hall and saw a stream of women in strange, colorful clothes entering the tower, bearing a series of curious objects: wooden trunks carved with unfamiliar animals; a golden cage containing a bird with brilliant purple and green feathers; cushions the color of sunsets. Amid all this movement, Essylt saw one girl standing stock-still in the corner, her arms crossed around herself protectively. She was wrapped from head to foot in azure scarves, with only her eyes peering out.

Auda came running into the hall, demanding to know what was going on, and a woman in a plain blue dress detached herself from the entourage of attendants to speak to Auda in low, intense tones.

Essylt came down the stairs. She was drawn to the silent girl in the corner, who looked up at that moment and saw her. A shiver ran down Essylt’s spine: quicksilver, insistent. Go to her.

As Essylt approached, the girl unwound the veils from her face to reveal brown skin, full lips, and dark eyes: a beauty unlike that of any Anvarran woman. This girl took a step away from her corner and extended her hands, palms up, toward Essylt. In the center of her palms a design was painted: swirls and loops that connected to form a pattern that was like a flower, but no flower that Essylt knew. Instinctively, Essylt reached out and covered the girl’s hands with her own, paler ones, and when their skin touched, a tremor went through Essylt’s body. For the first time, she became wholly aware of the way her fingers and toes were connected to the pulsing of her heart, to the breath that fluttered from her lungs to her lips, to the heat that spread over her cheeks.

Behind her, Auda said in a strained tone of voice, “Your Highness, this is the Princess Sadiya of Nawharla’al.” There was another round of feverish whispers between Auda and Sadiya’s chief attendant, who spoke Anvarran with an accent that Auda had never heard before and thus found difficult to understand.

“Sa-dee-ah?” Essylt said uncertainly.

“Sah-dee-ya,” the girl corrected, and her name sounded like music on her lips.

Sadiya’s chief attendant said something to her in Nawharla’ali, and Essylt heard her own name amidst the stream of foreign words. “Ess-elt,” Sadiya said tentatively, her gaze never leaving Essylt’s.

Essylt’s heartbeat quickened, and she realized that Sadiya had wrapped her fingers around her own, and it was as if a faint dusting of magic had settled over them, fixing them in place so that they might look at one another for just a bit longer.

It was Auda who broke the spell. “Your Highness,” she said, “Princess Sadiya will be staying here in the West Tower until your father returns in ten days. Then they will be married. The princess will be your new stepmother.”

“My new stepmother?” Essylt said, and saw Sadiya’s attendant whisper something urgently in her ear.

Sadiya pulled her hands away. She knew that her attendants were shocked by how Essylt had touched her and how she had accepted it. The proper greeting would have been for Essylt to hover her hands over Sadiya’s and then to incline her head ever so delicately, but of course Essylt did not know Nawharla’ali customs. Her mistake could be excused, but what had caused Sadiya to hold Essylt’s hands, as if she were a lover rather than a stranger who would someday become her stepdaughter? Sadiya’s face flamed as she realized what a scene she was making.

Essylt did not understand how she had erred, but she saw that Sadiya was uncomfortable, and she regretted it, for already she wanted to ensure that Sadiya was happy. “Welcome,” she said, but then her mouth went dry. She could think of nothing more to say except You are so beautiful, but even Essylt, unpracticed in courtly manners, sensed that others would find that odd, so she bit her lip and remained silent.

But that was enough, and Sadiya smiled, and her face was so exquisitely shining that Essylt was certain that another sun had burned into being right there in the entry hall to the West Tower.

From that moment on, Essylt and Sadiya were inseparable. Essylt taught Sadiya the words for the flowers and plants that grew in the West Tower’s garden, and Sadiya taught Essylt the Nawharla’ali equivalents. Their progress was remarkably fast, for they spent every waking minute together, exclaiming over the sounds of words and the way sentences formed when they spoke them to each other. Essylt learned that Nawharla’al was a kingdom of many islands, and each island was named after a different tropical flower, and each flower was worn by the prince of that island on state occasions. Sadiya learned that summer was short and hot in Anvarra, and she had arrived at its beginning, when the days are long and lush and sometimes so humid that sitting in the shade brought sweat to the skin. Essylt learned that the women of Nawharla’al wore long, loose skirts dyed in shades to match their islands’ flowers, and they preferred to leave their arms bare, binding only their breasts in scarves that matched their skirts. Sadiya learned that the women of Anvarra wore layers of undergarments beneath heavy skirts and bodices that gripped their torsos with whalebone, and she wrinkled her nose at these gowns and said, “I will not wear those,” and Essylt laughed at the expression on Sadiya’s face.

The days they spent together seemed to stretch out luxuriously in the peaceful isolation of the West Tower, but as the fortnight drew to a close, neither girl could avoid the increasing sensation of impending doom, for soon Sadiya would marry Essylt’s father. The night before the wedding, they walked the garden together in silence, as if not speaking would stave off the future. When they parted to sleep in their separate chambers, Essylt held her hands out, palms upward, in the way Sadiya had upon her arrival. Sadiya was surprised, but she hovered her hands over Essylt’s unmarked ones, a bittersweet sadness sweeping through her.

Then, as if she were a knight in a storybook, Essylt raised Sadiya’s hands to her mouth and kissed the knuckles, her lips brushing soft and quick over Sadiya’s skin. A flush spread across Sadiya’s face, and she saw an answering emotion in Essylt’s green eyes.

“Sleep well,” Essylt whispered, and she wished she could sleep beside Sadiya and guard her against any nightmares that might slip into her mind that night.

“A blessing upon you,” Sadiya said in Nawharla’ali, and then backed away before the tears could slip from her eyes. Essylt watched her go, her scarves fluttering in the dim evening light.

The wedding was held in the castle’s Great Hall, which was hung with golden ropes in honor of the God of Matrimony and wreaths of snowbell flowers for the Goddess of Fertility. The morning before the ceremony, which was to take place at noon, Sadiya’s attendants bathed and scented and dressed her in the Nawharla’ali bridal finery they had brought with them. They wrapped her body in fine white linen, and then draped her with scarves the color of the sea in every shade from deepest blue to azure and aquamarine. They hung jewels from her ears and twisted them around her bare arms and throat, and when she stepped into the sunlight she glittered with reflected light. Her lustrous black hair was brushed out and woven with the little white flowers plucked from the gardens around the West Tower, and though they were not the tropical blossoms of Nawharla’al, they served well enough. Essylt especially liked to see the flowers she loved in Sadiya’s hair.

Auda had taken care while dressing Essylt that morning, as well, though Essylt’s gown was much plainer so that she would not outshine the bride—and so that she would draw no man’s eye. Essylt did not like the way the tight stays cut off her breath; she found the layers of skirts confining; and she thought the dove gray of the gown itself was ugly in comparison to the brilliant colors of Sadiya’s clothes. But the thing she hated most was the gray linen veil she was forced to wear, obscuring her hair and face and swathing the whole world in dimness. As they left the West Tower, Essylt followed in Sadiya’s perfumed wake with Auda’s guiding hand on her arm. She felt suffocated and suppressed, each layer of clothing like a hand over her mouth.

In every Anvarran wedding ceremony, a series of customs is dutifully followed in order to ensure that the union is a fertile one. As with every naming ceremony, a prophecy is given, and to be chosen to deliver the prophecy at a royal wedding is a high honor. Haidis, the hapless soothsayer who had presided over Essylt’s naming ceremony, was present at King Radek’s marriage to Princess Sadiya of Nawharla’al, but Haidis had not been chosen to officiate. He came as a guest of his mentor Gerlach, who was prepared to deliver a prophetic benediction on the king’s marriage to the exotic foreign princess if he had to lie to do it.

The wedding prophecy, however, would not take place until after the initial prayers to the God of Matrimony and Goddess of Fertility, led by a high-ranking priest, who intoned the traditional phrases in a voice devoid of emotion. Sadiya was expected to kneel on a cushion at the feet of King Radek during the prayers, and though she did as requested, she refused to lower her gaze, for she did not believe in these gods. To her right, seated in the first row of ornate wooden benches, she could just make out the corner of Essylt’s veil, shroudlike in comparison to the bright colors worn by Sadiya and her attendants.

Essylt did not need to bow her head, for no one could tell if she participated in the prayers at all. Instead, she clenched her hands into fists and hid them beneath the voluminous folds of her hot, scratchy gown. A deep ache began to spread in her, from belly to chest to throat, until she felt as if she might choke from it. She heard the priest ending his series of prayers, and she knew that after this would come the ceremony itself, when Sadiya’s hands would be bound with golden rope to the King’s left wrist, and from that moment on, Sadiya would be her stepmother.

Essylt watched through her veil as the priest picked up the rope and approached Sadiya, still chanting the blessings for matrimony. The rope dangled over Sadiya’s head like a snake uncoiling to strike. The ache that gripped Essylt hardened. A desperate anger galvanized her. She lurched to her feet and felt Auda’s hand reaching for hers, but she shook it away. She ripped off her veil and cried, “No! Please, no. Sadiya, you must not marry him.”

Essylt lunged for the rope and tore it out of the priest’s hands, throwing it behind him onto the stone floor.

Sadiya stood, astonished and terrified and hopeful.

At first everyone in the Great Hall was simply too startled to move, for none could remember a time when a royal wedding had been disrupted in such a manner. In that moment of stunned immobility, Essylt took Sadiya’s hands in hers and pulled her away from the king. Sadiya said to her in Nawharla’ali, “You are mad, my love,” and Essylt responded in the same tongue, “I am mad with love.”

Haidis had watched in shock from his seat as Essylt leapt to her feet, jerking away the marriage rope. As she clutched the hands of the foreign bride, Haidis realized that the prophecy he had delivered on Essylt’s naming day was coming to pass. He stood up—he was the first among the audience to do so—and said under his breath, “The princess shall grow into a young woman strong and pure, but when she finds her one true love—”

Gerlach’s hand gripped his arm. “Do not speak any more!” he hissed, and Haidis’s mouth shut tight in fear as the Great Hall exploded into shouts.

King Radek’s thick, strong hand clamped down on his bride’s shoulder, and as Sadiya winced in pain, he dragged her from his daughter. “What perversity have you wrought on my bride?” he demanded of Essylt, who tried to reach for Sadiya again but was wrenched back by the hands of the king’s soldiers, who had leapt forward at his command. “What damnation are you bringing upon my kingdom? You have been cursed since you killed your own mother, and it was only my mercy that kept you alive.” The king would not take his hands off Sadiya, whom he held near him like a plaything. He growled to his soldiers, “Take Essylt away to the farthest reaches of the darkest forests of the north, and abandon her to the wolves. She is no longer my daughter. May she die alone.”

Essylt heard the words as if from a distance, for all she could focus on was the look of terror on Sadiya’s face. As the soldiers dragged Essylt from the Great Hall, she tried to struggle, but her skirts were too heavy and her bodice too tight, and then someone struck her across the face. Pain burst in her cheek and nose. She screamed and lunged away from the soldiers, but they grabbed her and hit her again and again. The last thing she saw before she fainted from the pain was the glimmer of blue in the jewels around Sadiya’s neck, liquid as the faraway sea.

Essylt awoke in a cage on a moving wagon. She winced as the wagon jolted over a bump and caused her hip to bang against the wooden floor. Outside the bars she saw green fields rolling past beneath a clear late afternoon sky.

She was outside the castle.

This fact alone overwhelmed her. She had never been outside the castle, and her heart began to race as she sat up, hands gripping the bars. She drank in the unfamiliar landscape: stone walls rising and falling over the fields; solitary trees standing watch in the distance; an occasional farmhouse or barn, with horses grazing nearby. It was almost dark before she realized that a man was riding behind the cage, watching her.

A soldier.

She shrank away from the bars, and everything that had happened rushed back to her: Sadiya and her father’s wedding, the marriage rope hanging like a noose above Sadiya’s head, her father’s words. May she die alone.

As the sun set, she wondered whether it was still the day of the wedding. Was this the wedding night? Her stomach twisted. When she had first begun her monthly bleeding, Auda had told her what it meant, and Essylt knew very well what her father desired from his wives: sons. There was a chance that her father had not gone through with the wedding, but the way he had treated Sadiya made Essylt doubt that he would give her up. No, he would take Sadiya as his bride regardless of how perverse he thought his daughter was.

Essylt wanted to throw up, but she hadn’t eaten all day, and she could only cough up bile, bitter and acidic.

The soldier behind the cage rode closer and banged his sword on the bars. “Don’t choke to death, Princess, we’ve a long way to go yet.”

The journey to the wild forests of the north took a week. There were two soldiers: one who drove the wagon, and one who rode behind. They gave her a bowl of water every night that she had to lap up like a dog, and once or twice the driver slipped her a piece of dried beef out of pity, but she was given no other food. Neither of the soldiers ever let her out, so Essylt was forced to relieve herself in one corner, humiliated by the stench that began to rise from her body.

She watched the countryside when she was awake, but as the days passed and she grew weaker, she slid into a half-sleeping doze in which she saw Sadiya’s face hovering over her, radiant and beautiful. She clung to those visions as tightly as she could, the memory of the last words that Sadiya had said echoing in her mind: You are mad, my love. Mad, my love. Mad.

Finally, they reached the pine-forested border of Anvarra. The driver drew the wagon to a halt in a small clearing in the woods and climbed down from his seat. The soldier riding behind dismounted, pulling a black iron key from the chain attached to his swordbelt. Inside the cage, Essylt sat stiffly with her arms around her knees, her bright green eyes wide in her pale face. The soldier unlocked the cage door, which groaned open on its hinges.

“Welcome to your new home,” he said, and laughed. “Time to get out.”

Essylt didn’t move until the soldier reached inside and clamped one hand on her ankle. Frightened, she kicked him in the face. He cursed as blood spurted from his nose, then grabbed both of her ankles, his nails digging into her skin, and dragged her out until she landed with a bruising thump on the ground.

“Never seen a man except your father, eh?” he said, and the tone in his voice made her skin crawl. He began to unbuckle his belt.

Essylt tried to scramble away, but she only banged into the wagon wheel behind her.

“There’s a reason you turned out wrong,” the soldier was saying, a horrible grin on his face. “You need to learn what’s right—”

“Shut up,” said the driver. He smashed a wooden staff into the side of the soldier’s head, knocking him to ground, unconscious. The driver shook his head and looked down at the princess. He had a sister her age, and he would never forgive himself if he let the soldier have his way with her. Even if she was perverse. He jerked his head toward the woods. “You’d better run for it, Princess. You’re on your own now.”

Essylt didn’t hesitate. She jumped up, her legs tingling as she stood for the first time in seven days, and she fled.

She ran over unbroken forest ground, her thin-soled court shoes doing little to cushion her feet from fallen twigs and upturned stones. She ran as the daylight faded and turned the forest into a land of murky shadows, and she slowed down only enough to prevent herself from tripping on the uneven ground. She found a riverbed where the trees parted to reveal a sliver of black night sky strewn with stars, and she knelt down and drank the water from her cupped and dirty hands, and then she kept going.

At some point she removed her whalebone corset so that she could breathe more freely. She stripped off her encumbering underskirts and wrapped her torn shoes in the cloth to cushion her feet. When she was too tired to walk any farther, she made a nest for herself in a bed of fallen pine needles and slept with her head resting on her arms. When she awoke, she continued. She saw no one.

She was hungry, but she did not know what she could eat in the forest, and her book learning had taught her to be wary of unfamiliar plants. A few times she thought she glimpsed the shadowy movement of wolves nearby, and she prayed to the God of Safe Passage to watch over her. She did not know where she was going, but she knew she had a destination. With every step she took, even though her body felt weaker and weaker, she was more and more certain that she had something to live for. Sadiya. Sadiya. Someday, she vowed, she would go back for her. She would return to Anvarra City and save her, and King Radek would pay for what he had done.

• • • •

One morning, after Essylt had walked in a stubborn, starving daze for hours through the dark night, she stumbled through the last of the pine trees into a clearing where she saw a little cottage built of logs. Smoke curled out of the chimney, and the windows were hung with cheerful plaid curtains. She dragged herself the last few steps into the clearing before she collapsed, her body giving up at last.

The cottage belonged to a retired knight named Bowen, who lived there with his wife, Nell. It was Nell who discovered Essylt later that morning, lying in a crumpled heap at the edge of their garden, and it was Bowen who lifted the princess in his burly arms and carried her inside, laying her down on their bed.

Essylt did not wake until evening, and the first thing she saw was an older woman rocking in a chair nearby, knitting. Essylt was not frightened, for the woman had a kind face and reminded her of Auda, but she was disoriented, and she pushed herself up and asked, “Where am I?”

Nell put down her knitting and studied the girl, whose eyes were a remarkable shade of green. Her reddish-gold hair was disheveled and knotted up, and her face was dirty. In fact, all of her was so dirty that she smelled rather unpleasant, but neither Nell nor Bowen would turn away a girl who so obviously needed their help simply because she also needed a bath.

“You’re in the village of Pine Rest,” Nell told her, speaking with an unfamiliar accent. “I found you in our garden this morning. I am Nell, and my husband’s name is Bowen. He is outside. What is your name?”

Essylt stared at the woman, whose gray hair was wound up in braids coiled at the nape of her neck. She seemed kind, and Essylt wanted to trust her, but a knot of fear still held tight within her, and she did not wish to reveal her true identity. “My name is Auda,” Essylt said, and flushed slightly at the lie.

Nell nodded. “You must be hungry.”

Essylt’s stomach awoke at those words and growled so loudly that it embarrassed her. But Nell only smiled and got up from her chair. She left the little room and came back a few minutes later with a bowl of soup. “Something gentle for you,” she said, “while you regain your strength.”

Essylt took the bowl from Nell’s outstretched hands and inhaled the fragrant scent of broth and herbs. She drank every last delicious drop, and then lay down again in Nell and Bowen’s bed and fell asleep instantly, feeling safe at last.

In the morning she met Bowen, who was large and gentle and had lost all his hair except for the bushy white eyebrows that seemed to speak long sentences on their own. She learned that the village of Pine Rest was just over the border from Anvarra in the neighboring kingdom of Ferronia. Essylt remembered from Auda’s geography lessons that Ferronia was rarely concerned with Anvarran politics because the Black Forest that separated the two countries was mostly impassable—and this Essylt could now attest to personally, having crossed it herself on foot. Bowen had been a knight serving the king of Ferronia, but after many years of service he had retired to the village where he had been born. Bowen and Nell’s son, Petra, was a swordsmith whose forge was in Pine Rest, and Petra drew much of his business from Bowen’s old knightly acquaintances.

As the days passed, Essylt regained her strength while Bowen and Nell fussed over her as if she were their long-lost daughter. They set up a pallet for her in the loft over the main room of the cottage, and Essylt began to help out with the chores. She grew strong from tending the garden with Nell and learning how to chop wood with Bowen’s hatchet. And though she came to know the other villagers and to love Bowen and Nell, she kept her secret. Pine Rest might be far from Anvarra City, but the news of Princess Essylt’s depravity had reached Ferronia via traveling minstrels who sang of her tragic lust for the queen. Essylt worried that Bowen and Nell would turn their backs on her in disgust if they knew who she was, so she grew accustomed to being called Auda, and swallowed her own feelings of shame and sorrow. Every day, she thought of Sadiya and her vow to return for her. Every night before she slept, she whispered Sadiya’s name to herself so that she might never forget how to pronounce it.

She spoke with Petra, who had traveled to Anvarra because of his skill as a swordsmith, and began to plot her own return journey. She laid aside a store of food, stealing as little as she could. From the old trunks in the loft where she slept, she discovered a cloak that was moth-eaten but could still keep her warm at night. She felt guilty for taking these things from Nell and Bowen, but she promised herself she would return one day and pay them back if she could. She did not let herself think of where she and Sadiya might go. Was there a place in this world that would have them? She did not know, and it was easier to accept the emptiness of not knowing than to face the fact that she might rescue Sadiya and still fail in giving her a happy life.

One morning she awoke and her body felt ready. She was strong and healthy again, and she had finally stocked enough provisions to last for the several weeks’ journey to Anvarra. But when she went outside to pump water as usual, snow was falling from the sky. She stood on the doorstep in shock as white flakes tumbled down, thick and fast, from iron-gray clouds. How had the summer passed so quickly? She hoped that the snowfall was an early anomaly and that it would only delay her journey by a day or two.

But the snow continued to fall, and it stuck to the ground, and the air became colder and colder until, weeks later, Essylt had to admit that winter had come early and hard, and she would not be able to journey to Anvarra until spring.

It was Nell who found her, weeping silently at the woodpile, her tears turning to ice crystals on her cheeks. “My dear,” Nell said, “whatever is the matter? Come inside and be warm.”

That night, exhausted from the subterfuge, Essylt told her the truth. “I am Essylt,” she said, and speaking her own name out loud broke a dam inside her and she sobbed. Nell gathered her into her arms and stroked her hair and rocked her back and forth as if she were a baby. “I am Essylt,” she said again and again. When at last her tears were spent, she told them of growing up in the West Tower, and the unexpected joy she had felt when she met Sadiya, and the anguish of being forced apart. She told them of her plan to rescue Sadiya, and finally, her voice diminished to a tentative whisper, she said, “I will leave if you will not have me here any longer. You have been so kind to me, and I have only defiled your home.”

Bowen had sat silently in the corner as Essylt confessed her truth, but as Nell’s hands stilled on Essylt’s hair, he said, “It is never a crime to love someone.”

Essylt looked at him in surprise.

Anger darkened Bowen’s face. “The king of Anvarra is a bastard. In the spring, you shall ride to Anvarra City and save your true love, and we will help you.”

“But—but why?” Essylt asked.

Nell had drawn back a little, and Essylt saw that tears streaked down Nell’s face as well. She shook her head. “My dear, we love you like a daughter. That is why.”

As Essylt looked from Nell to Bowen, she felt as if her heart might overflow with gratitude and love for them. “I have never felt like anyone’s daughter,” she said, “but I will do my best to make you proud.”

All winter, Essylt trained with Bowen. “You will need to learn to fight,” he said to her, “for the king will not give up his wife without a battle.”

Bowen took down the old tools of his trade from the attic: his broadsword, which was so big that Essylt had to carry it with two hands, and his armor, which was now darkened with rust. During the days, he forced her to run through snowdrifts with the sword strapped to her back until sweat streamed down her face. At night, she helped him polish the armor until it gleamed. It was too large for her, but Bowen said that Petra could adjust it to her size. And so she began to visit Petra at the forge, where he fitted various pieces of steel to her, muttering under his breath about fashioning a special breastplate.

Essylt could not understand why Petra was willing to do this for her. She knew that he knew who she was now, for he called her Essylt instead of Auda. She thought perhaps he was simply his father’s son, and would not speak out against anyone his father loved. It wasn’t until well past midwinter when she noticed the way Petra spoke to the blacksmith who shared the forge with him: Markus, a broad-shouldered, black-bearded man who sometimes came to supper at Nell and Bowen’s home. There was a certain angle to Petra’s body as he approached Markus, and then Essylt saw him reach out and smooth his hand gently over the man’s shoulder: a caress. Essylt realized with a jolt that Petra did not merely share the forge with the smith; he shared a life with him. She felt a great sense of wonder steal over her, and she had to turn away as tears came to her eyes.

From that day on, she felt as if she had found her family. She would hate to leave them in the spring, but she could come back. She could come back with Sadiya, and they could be happy here.

Petra finished the full suit of armor in late winter. It was light and well balanced, but when Essylt put it on, she felt the strength of the steel close against her muscles, and she knew that it would protect her. To her surprise, Petra also presented her with a sword, forged specially for her height and weight, and the first time she swung it in an arc, it sang in the cold winter air.

She spent the last month of winter parrying with Bowen, and sometimes with Markus, who had been a knight’s squire in his boyhood. She learned how to ride a horse in full armor, her red-gold hair braided and coiled beneath her helm. She learned how to force back a man twice her size with her sleek, elegant sword, her gauntleted hands gripping the beautiful hilt that Petra had designed. And she thought of Sadiya, as she always did, keeping her face alive in her memory, as fresh as the first day she had seen her, standing behind the oak door to the West Tower, swathed in azure scarves.

The news came before she was entirely ready to go, but as soon as she heard it from the mouth of the traveling minstrel at the tavern in Pine Rest, Essylt left to pack her supplies. The Anvarran king had discovered that his island-born wife had been drinking a concoction she had brought from Nawharla’al to prevent herself from conceiving a child. This, King Radek said, was treason. He sentenced Sadiya to die by beheading on the first day of summer, which gave his people time to travel from their villages to witness her public execution.

When this news reached Pine Rest, the last of the winter snow had barely melted, even though the first day of summer was less than one month away. Essylt decided to ride directly through the Black Forest to Anvarra instead of following the highway south. It was dangerous, but it would cut two weeks from her journey.

“There are wolves,” objected Nell, worried.

“They didn’t kill me before,” Essylt said. “They won’t kill me now.”

Bowen and Petra wanted to go with her, but she refused to allow them to come.

“It is my task, and my choice,” she told them. They relented, for they saw the determination in her eyes.

She departed at dawn, riding Markus’s white mare—a horse he insisted she take—with her saddlebags full of food that Nell had prepared. The forest was quiet as she rode south, with only the sound of her horse’s passage to accompany her. Petra’s armor sat lightly on her shoulders, and already she was so familiar with her sword that when she slept, she rested her hands upon it. She did not feel threatened by the wolves she glimpsed sometimes at night, their eyes reflecting the light from her campfire. They saw her weapons, and they left her alone.

She emerged from the Black Forest two weeks later, and struck out on the hard-packed dirt road that led southeast toward Anvarra City. At first she was alone on the highway, but as she drew closer to Anvarra City, other travelers joined her, all on their way to the execution. At night, she camped as far from the other travelers as she could. She kept her armor covered with her long brown cloak, and she did not remove her helm in the daylight. She could not reveal who she was, for the Princess Essylt was supposed to be dead.

She arrived on the eve of the execution, and though she could have ridden into the city and bought herself a room at an inn, she could not bring herself to pass through the gates. In the distance she saw the West Tower—her old home—and now she recognized it as a prison. She wondered what had happened to Auda, and her gut wrenched, for though Auda had always maintained a certain formal distance from her, she was the one who had raised her.

All night, Essylt lay awake beneath a spreading oak tree on the side of the highway, watching the silhouette of the castle on the hill. When dawn broke, Essylt was already mounted on her horse and waiting outside the city gates. Hundreds of other people surged around her, eager to view the death of the traitorous foreign queen. Their jubilation made Essylt sick with rage, and her fingers trembled as she curled them into fists on her thighs.

A stage had been erected at the northern edge of the central square, and on that stage the executioner’s block was waiting. Essylt rode into the square, surrounded by the crowd and unnoticed by the soldiers who stood guard along the perimeter. She found a place near the stage, beside a fountain that shot cool water up into the warm summer morning. The scent of snowbell blossoms hung thick in the air, sweet and cloying. The people in the square chattered about the coming event, but Essylt paid no attention to them. Her entire body was tense and alert, her heart beating a war drum in her chest. She could sense Sadiya approaching—as if they were connected, flesh and bone drawn together—and when the murmur of the crowd crescendoed, she looked to the north and saw the king riding into the square on a black stallion.

He was flanked by soldiers and followed by a wagon with a cage strapped onto it—the same kind of cage that Essylt herself had been locked into. Within the cage, Sadiya was seated with her hands bound behind her back.

The crowd exclaimed at its first glimpse of her: hair loose and tangled, a rough sackcloth dress draped over her body, her face bruised but defiant.

Essylt felt as if an arrow had torn into her belly. She had to suck in the muggy air to calm herself down, for her mare sensed her nerves and began to prance in place. Essylt wanted to rush forward at that very moment and seize Sadiya from the soldiers, but she remembered what Bowen had taught her, and she forced herself to wait.

She waited as the executioner mounted the stage, his black cowl hiding his face from the crowd, the sun glinting on the blade of his axe. She waited as the king, resplendent in purple robes, joined the executioner. She waited as the cage door was unlocked and Sadiya was pulled out, barefoot, onto the cobblestones of the square. She waited as Sadiya was hauled onto the stage by two soldiers who bent her arms back at an angle that made Essylt wince to see it.

She waited until the king said: “For betraying me, and by extension, your people; for dishonoring me, and by extension, your people; for murdering before birth my very own children and heirs; for all this, you are sentenced to death.”

Then—and only then—Essylt threw off her cloak. Her armor shone silver-bright in the sun, and her white horse leapt through the crowd that parted before her, their mouths agape in excitement. Everyone on the stage turned to see a knight riding toward them, sword raised in the air. From the margins of the square, the king’s soldiers raised their bows and shot, their arrows flying toward the rider.

Essylt felt an arrow slam against her back, but Petra’s armor held. Then she was at the edge of the stage and the archers had to stop shooting, because the soldiers were in their line of sight. She pulled herself onto the stage and met the first soldier with her sword raised. She shoved him back with all her strength, her steel blade screaming against his. The soldier stumbled, startled by her assault, but he had a second to back him up, and then Essylt had to fight two of them.

But the soldiers wore standard-issue armor, not nearly as well crafted as hers. She could slice their breastplates off with ease, and beneath that, they weren’t even wearing chain mail. No one had expected an attack at the queen’s execution. Essylt disarmed one and slashed open his side. He yelped and fell off the stage into the crowd. The other came at her with his broadsword, but she used his momentum against him and flipped him onto his back, knocking his weapon out of his hands and tipping the point of her sword against his throat. His eyes bulged up at her and for an instant she hesitated—was she going to kill a man?—but out of the corner of her eye she saw him pull a dagger from his boot and ready it to throw at her. Before his weapon left his hand, she cut his throat.

She looked up and across the stage, her heart pounding, and called, “Sadiya!”

Sadiya had watched the knight beat back the king’s soldiers with a rising sense of hope, and when she heard the voice behind the helm, she knew who it was, and hope exploded into joy. She tried to run to her, but the king grabbed her arm, yanking her back. He shouted, “Who would dare to act against me?”

Essylt took off her helm. The long braid of her red-gold hair fell out over her shoulder, and she said, “Father, I dare.”

The king’s face was a mask of fury as he beheld his daughter standing before him—his daughter who should be dead, and yet she was alive and breathing, her green eyes glinting like emeralds as she raised a sword against him, and he unarmed.

“Give me a weapon!” the king cried. The executioner stepped forward and handed the king his axe.

The king swung it in an arc, and Essylt met the axe handle with her sword. The thunk of metal meeting wood rang through the square. She jerked the sword back and leapt away as the king advanced, his eyes wild with anger. She parried him again, and this time the handle of the axe broke as the sword cleaved through it. The axe head clattered onto the stage.

“A weapon!” the king shouted again. A soldier in the crowd tried to shove his way through to give the king his sword, but the crowd—riveted by the spectacle before them—would not let him pass.

“I will not kill you unarmed,” Essylt called. “Let us go and you will never see us again.”

“Never,” the king snarled. “You will die. Both of you will die here today.”

Suddenly Sadiya stepped over the body of the dead soldier and said, “She may not kill you unarmed, but I will.” She lunged toward the king and shoved the soldier’s dagger into the king’s chest, thrusting it straight through the rich purple velvet, and the king fell, howling, to the wooden boards of the stage.

Sadiya stood above him, gasping, her hands bloody, and spit on his face.

The crowd roared.

Essylt saw the hatred in her father’s eyes swept away by fear and bewilderment as his hands scrabbled furiously at the dagger. Sadiya turned to Essylt, wiping her bloodied hands on the ruins of her dress. Essylt reached for her and crushed her into her arms, and Sadiya’s body shook against Essylt’s armor. All around them the crowd murmured. Those who had been close to the stage had heard Essylt declare who she was, and now they passed that knowledge back across the square, until all who had gathered for Sadiya’s execution understood that Princess Essylt was not dead—she was alive—and the words of her naming-day prophecy were repeated until it became a slow and steady hum.

The princess shall grow into a young woman strong and pure, but when she finds her one true love, she shall be the downfall of the king.

Prophecies, the people said, were not always straightforward, but if they were real, they were true. None who saw the way that Essylt and Sadiya held each other that day could deny the strength of their love. But for many years to come, they debated whether it was Essylt or Sadiya who had been the downfall of the king.

No one stopped Essylt and Sadiya as they left the city. No soldier lifted a weapon to harm them; no man or woman shouted a curse. They rode as far as they could before stopping to rest their horse. They found a sweet little spring bubbling out of a rocky cleft in a hill near the road, and dismounted to allow the mare to drink.

Then Essylt took off her armor, and Sadiya peeled off her soiled dress, and they waded into the water and scrubbed the dried blood and sweat and dirt from their skin. When they emerged from the spring, naked and wet in the warm evening air, they saw each other as if for the first time: one woman dark and slender; one woman fair and muscular. Essylt took Sadiya’s hands in her own and pulled her close, their breasts and hips sliding together, slick and soft, and her breath caught in her throat as Sadiya whispered, “You are my one true love.”

Essylt wrapped her arms around Sadiya’s waist. Her fingers found the hollow of Sadiya’s lower back, her spine like a string of jewels, and she leaned in, pausing to remember this moment always, and kissed her.

Thanks to Liz Gorinsky for contributing to the selection of this story. —eds.

©2012 by Malinda Lo. Originally published in Foretold, edited by Carrie Ryan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Malinda Lo is the author of several young adult novels, including most recently A Line in the Dark. Her novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book for Children and Teens. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda’s nonfiction has been published by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Huffington Post, The Toast, The Horn Book, and AfterEllen. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner and their dog. Her website is malindalo.com.

The Charge and the Storm

An Owomoyela | 17250 words

Petra was already in a bad mood, not that that said much. Her good moods had become increasingly apocryphal over recent years. But today there was a lightning storm outside her Faraday cage of an office, and she could feel it like a second psyche, inhuman and insentient and laid over her thoughts.

And today, when she walked into her office, there was a familiar man sitting on the chair before her desk. Amad.

She stopped, a step in from the doorway. Amad turned, looking back at her over his shoulder. He had a small device in one hand, and while Petra could sense the stream of information flowing from it, the mental interference from the lightning storm drowned it out.

“I’ve jammed your communication lines,” Amad said.

Petra gave him a withering look and headed toward her desk. “You think that’ll keep me from contacting security?”

“For a couple minutes, yes,” Amad said. “We need to talk, Sulai Tabov.”

“No,” Petra said. “You need to be arrested.”

She settled into her desk chair, bringing her interface up with a sweep of her hand. He had jammed her communications lines, the bastard. Clever bastard—she had a very nice system, full of redundancies and adaptive compensators—but he’d always been clever. Probably always been a bastard, too, though she’d looked past that, once.

“It’s about Nash,” Amad said.

“He needs to be arrested, too.”

Amad made a frustrated noise. “Look,” he said. “Knowing there’s no love lost between the two of you, and knowing that I would rather hang myself by my thumbs from the lightning towers than come ask you for help, I expect you to know what it means that I’m here and I’m asking. This is about Nash’s life.”

A cold anger sparked into being at the bottom of Petra’s stomach, ringing against the lightning she could feel outside. There was no sound of thunder in here, no electrical interference except the noise inside her head, but her fingers twitched, as though urging her to become a conduit. A lightning tower herself. She could string Amad up by his thumbs right here on her own.

“I have,” she said, “on multiple occasions, attempted to help Nash fix his life. On the last occasion, he sold Su secrets to violent revolutionaries and got my wife kidnapped. I’m not interested in trying again.”

“Yeah, great,” Amad said. He stood up from the chair, almost started pacing, then caught himself. Petra watched with a knife-sharp interest, taking in the tension in his shoulders, the tremor concealed in his hands. Amad liked to think he was better at being unreadable than he was. “Leaving aside your ignorant and well-intentioned efforts to turn him into a good little colonizee, this isn’t about fixing his life. It’s about saving it. Are you going to help, or do you honestly think he should die for screwing up and screwing you over?”

Yes, Petra thought, but it was a knee-jerk thought, more spite than sense. And it was a pretty damn big screw-over, her brain retorted, and it took a moment for her to blink and realize what Amad had said.

“What,” she managed, the anger still smoldering but neatly derailed.

Amad glared at her, then took a deep breath. “The Su,” he said, voice bitter and brittle, “have decided that he’s a detriment to the colony and should be excised. However, they will accept his abject submission to a citizen in good standing, to whom reparations are owed, in lieu of his death.”

The anger in Petra’s gut gave a long, uneasy turn. “No one else is willing to speak for him?”

“No one the Su are inclined to listen to.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.” She watched Amad. As an afterthought, she gestured away her interface. Right or wrong—and she felt that it was wrong, for all that knowing that didn’t stop her—she wasn’t going to fix the lines, call in the authorities, turn Amad in. “You came to me because you had nowhere else to go.”

Amad didn’t bother confirming her comment.

“And what makes you think I’d agree to this?”

Amad’s fingers curled around his jammer. “You used to be friends.”

“Used to be.”

“You’re not that heartless,” Amad said.

He was right. The Su had a casual disregard for life. If the life in question didn’t serve their ambitions, they had no compunctions about casting it aside.

Petra, human, balked at that.

Yes, she resented Nash. Hated him, it felt like. She would have liked to see him suffer for screwing her over, years ago.

Seeing him die was a little much.

“Well.” The word left a taste like ozone in the back of her throat. It very nearly made her sick to her stomach, until she shoved it away, hunted out the control she’d developed to turn down her own feelings. “Then. What jurisdictor has him?”

Some of the tension leached out of Amad’s shoulders. Not all. “The information is here,” he said, and gestured a data sigil to her interface. Petra could feel it blink into availability; text, no more than a few lines. Amad said All the information; Petra heard everything you need to know, and her fingers itched for the comm line again. One call and she could very easily ruin Amad’s life, if not end it.

Him and Nash. Always so eager to use her. Sudamn opportunists, both.

She accepted the transfer. Amad backed toward the door, the jammer in his hand coming up like a talisman.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” he offered. “I—you know, I liked her. We never intended for anything to happen to her.”

“Ex-wife, now,” Petra said. “And what you intended doesn’t matter much, does it?”

Amad made a noise like he was the one who should resent all of this. In his mind, maybe so. “Can’t say it’s been a pleasure seeing you, Sulai Tabov,” he said. “Shouldn’t happen again.”

Then he vanished into the halls.

After a moment, the comm lines cleared.

The jurisdictor module was in a part of the colony Petra never visited. Other, more skilled, biologically SuMakers maintained the physical mechanisms of that part of the colony, and there was nothing in that area that Petra needed to concern herself with personally: the organs that recycled air and water and processed waste back around into nourishment; raw material intake from the ruined outside world; corpse handling. And the jurisdictors, where aberrants against the colony peace were held and, if necessary, excised.

The Su had a particular sense of utility.

One Su was waiting outside the cluster, her antennules moving in the still air. “Sulai Tabov,” she said, each word humming out of the speech synthesizer embedded on the underside of her head.

How, exactly, all the Su managed to recognize her and her exact place in society was an open question, and one Petra didn’t bother asking. She had her suspicions, but it didn’t matter much, so long as their system worked.

Unfortunately, she had no such skill when it came to the Su. Fortunately, the Su hierarchy was stiff enough that she knew what rank would be standing here, acting as custodian to the condemned.

“Sudaeg,” she said. “You have Sudaeg Nash Carder?”

The Su gestured assent. “You would like to take ownership of the aberrant?”

Saying No, I’d like nothing of the sort, but I seem to be obligated to would mean that the Su would only hear the no. “I would,” Petra said.

The Su didn’t question the statement or ask for any justification. Petra had standing among the Su; Petra was owed reparations from Nash; Petra, therefore, had the right to claim his life. The Su never questioned the exercise of rights. The Su did not believe that if one had the right to do something that thing could be morally questionable.

Sometimes Petra wished she could see it the same way.

“This way, Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and unfolded her legs beneath her. At her full height, she stood nearly half a meter taller than Petra: an armored mass, through whom hummed a faint bioelectricity that Petra could feel at the corner of her mind. Stronger than a human’s but too faint and too subtle to control.

The Su led her back into the module. Only one of the cells was occupied, though another had been sealed off—and through its translucence, Petra could see a dark shape, rounded toward the extremities and just about the size of her own torso. Someone, human or Su, who had been excised already, their body being digested by the biomat cell walls.

She turned away from it.

“The aberrant is here,” the Su announced, pressing claws and her tarsal pad into a receptor. It sensed her energy, or her pheromones, or simply pressure—though Petra doubted it was simply pressure—and a membrane dilated open, revealing the figure inside.

Nash was looking worse for wear, Petra thought. The years hadn’t treated him well, or maybe it was just sitting in a cell that might devour him that had him looking grey of mien, thin, and uneasy. His head snapped up when the membrane retracted, and a flood of emotion passed through his expression—mortification, horror, desperate relief. “Petra—”

“Amad found me,” Petra said. She could hear her voice resonating in her head, oddly cold, almost alien. There was a cold pressure constricting her lungs, too. She didn’t let herself think about it. “Come on.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked out again. It took Nash a moment to scramble to his feet and follow, the Su coming along after him.

“How did you end up with a death sentence?” Petra asked. The Su didn’t give a damn about life, but out of respect for their human constituents, they usually didn’t jump straight to excision from the colony. Not these days. The fact that they had with Nash— a man who, despite his many faults, was neither violent nor destructive—suggested that he’d annoyed them more than he’d ever annoyed her, and that was a feat.

Nash hurried to keep up with her, trying to put a few paces’ distance between himself and the Su custodian. “I wasn’t expecting you to come save me,” he said.

“Neither was I.” Petra increased her own pace, focusing on the crisp clip of every footfall. The rhythm gave her something to focus on that wasn’t the lightning storm and wasn’t Nash. “What did you do, Nash?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. And then they were at the gate, and the Su moved in front of them and took a collar from a cache on the wall. She regarded Petra with characteristic nonchalance.

“I will put this on the aberrant,” she said. “For you.”

Petra nodded acquiescence.

Nash stiffened, but he didn’t resist as the band fastened around his neck, the inner lining adhering to his skin with a soft schup. “In typical situations I would format the collar myself,” the Su said. “However, you possess the skills to format it yourself, Sulai. You are free to request that I format it for you.”

“Thank you, no,” Petra said. “I understand the technology.”

“You are free to return him for excision at any time. You are to format the collar before removing him from the jurisdictor. May I serve you otherwise?”

Petra gestured her to leave, and the Su made an answering movement of assent and acknowledgement. Then she turned and walked away, folding herself down into repose at the door again.

Petra turned to Nash, who looked back at her with as much mistrust as he’d shown the Su. Unsurprising. To listen to Amad, Petra was half-Su anyway, and she knew who Nash had thrown his lot in with.

After a moment, though, he forced himself to relax. Put on a smile that was as fake as anything Petra had seen. “Try not to electrocute me?”

“It will be an effort,” Petra said, and took the collar in her hands.

She could feel it resonating against the colony around them; feel it asking the colony walls for information, catching the signals the walls sent out. The colony was never quiet, to Petra—it was always murmuring to itself, bright paths of directed energy and a haze of signals. But the loudest things to her senses were the flashes of lightning, carving brilliant but transient pathways through the atmosphere. The electricity running through the channels in the colony was dull by comparison. Hard to focus on. And the collar was fainter still.

And Nash’s closeness made it hard to concentrate, too. They’d enjoyed an easy physicality when they’d been on good terms: a clap on the back, a nudge with the elbow, a warm presence against the flank or in repose against the chest. Now, Petra couldn’t help but feel that she shouldn’t be standing so near, that Nash might try to seize her by the arm or pick her pocket or loop an arm over her shoulders. Try to trick her into believing that they were still friends.

She closed her eyes and wrote permissions into the collar.

Every circuit in the collar, live or dead, mapped onto one of the halls in the colony; all she needed to do was energize the ones she needed. Like trying to draw a line of sand in a statue of glass capillaries while wind howled through cracks in the habitat. But she got the basics done with the same determination she applied to all of her work. The lightning storms were nothing new, nor were the headaches or the brain-fog that accompanied them, and while it might slow her down, it wouldn’t incapacitate her.

She let her hands drop and stepped back, away from the sound of Nash’s breath, the heat of his body. “Dare I ask where I’m allowed to go?” Nash asked, with a kind of wary wryness.

“For now,” Petra said, “the halls from here to my quarters. I requisitioned a room across from mine. You can go from there to the baths, the libraries, and the commissary, using the most direct routes between all four. I’ll figure out more later.”

“Thanks,” Nash said. By his tone, he wasn’t sure that was the correct response.

She’d saved him from death, and put him under house arrest. Petra wasn’t sure there was a correct response. “I have work to do,” she said. “The room will open for you. We’ll talk later.”

She turned, and Nash said “Wait,” and she turned back, already seething. She hadn’t expected to get away that easily, no. But it would have been nice. At least Nash caught that and made an appeasing gesture. “Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you. But there’s stuff in my lodgings, out by the ship corridor. If I could—”

“I’ll ask a sudaeg to get it,” Petra said. “Forgive me if I don’t feel like letting you go back there.”

“Right,” Nash said.

Petra watched him. “The collar will kill you if you stray too far from the path.”

“Right,” Nash said again and made a stiff, Su gesture of apology. It had an overtone of self-parody to it. “I won’t delay you any longer.”

Petra could have said something to that.

She didn’t.

• • • •

She met Kaah at the juncture between the human First Cluster and the Su Brooding Cluster 9. Kaah gave no indication of how long she’d been waiting; she only crouched with an unconcerned stillness and with the smug self-assurance all Su seemed to carry with them.

Petra drew her fingers down from her forehead to her chin to indicate respect. “Hello, Sulai Kaah. How are we operating?”

Kaah echoed the gesture. “We have erected seven additional towers along the polar perimeter,” she said. She flicked her claws toward the wall, which beaded out a display and lit up with graphs. “We have an excess of energy, Sulai Petra. Now we must craft it. It interests me to create a new habitat in the Third Cluster. Do you agree?”

“It would behoove the colony,” Petra said. Third Cluster wasn’t yet overcrowded— the Su would never let it get to that point—but it was coming close, and Kaah at least saw creating more space as the natural answer. Being a human cluster, it would do more for colony harmony than the other answer, which was to curtail population growth outright.

In a race like the Su, where all reproduction was hierarchically decided, such an edict was non-notable. Among the human population, it was a call for rioting. Or for just the kind of separatism that Amad and his ilk espoused.

“I’ll follow,” Petra said, and Kaah uncurled her legs and paced off in Third Cluster’s direction—slowly, for a Su, in consideration of Petra’s shorter and fewer legs.

The Su had no real use for small talk, and so they walked mostly in silence. They passed one of the human commissaries and a number of dwellings—nearly all empty, as First Cluster housed those who worked directly with the Su, and the Su valued productive work more than they valued much else.

A hall or two into Third Cluster they passed a human woman with two boys who looked at Petra walking stride-along-stride with Kaah and seemed to come to her own unvoiced conclusions about that. Humans and Su lived together, but the pace and activities of their lives were so different as to make living together academic. There were only so many positions where a human would work alongside the Su.

Kaah turned her head, and made a superior greeting.“Hurem Omotoso,” she said. “Your children grow well?”

The woman’s eyes softened a bit, and she made a gesture of subordinate greeting—though the quirk of her lips, an expression interpretable by Petra but not Kaah, suggested she was playing along with propriety rather than moved by any genuine submission. “They do, thank you for asking, Sulai,” she said, then looked to Petra. “Sulai . . .?”

“Petra Tabov,” Petra said, and extended a hand. Omotoso took it.

“First time in Third Cluster?” Omotoso asked. “We don’t often rate two Makers.”

“We’re building an expansion,” Petra said.

“Long time coming,” Omotoso said, and made an offhand gesture of appropriate respect toward Kaah. Petra gestured recognition and acceptance—the Su didn’t understand speaking like this across hierarchy. But that Petra accepted it satisfied them. So long as Petra gestured acceptance, Omotoso would not face any penalties for hierarchical transgression.

It nagged at the edge of Petra’s mind, these days.

“I’ve got a third at home,” Omotoso said, tousling the tight curls of one of her son’s hair. “People get jealous, you know, and there’s no room. So even another level would be godsent; my eldest, you know, she wants to move out, start her own family, not inherit my house. But she doesn’t want to live in another Cluster. Well.” Omotoso eyed Petra, thoughtfully. “First Cluster, maybe, but she’d have to marry up.”

Or wrong someone, Petra thought. Wrong them and contrive to be taken in by them. She wondered what Nash’s living space had been like—if he, like Amad, took pride in his cracked and patched and atmosphere-leaking quarters in the old human ship. She wondered if he would rhapsodize about the noise of the hull, how it sang that it wasn’t designed for atmosphere.

Humans, Amad liked to say, and human inventions, adapt well to circumstance.

The Su adapted well to necessity. Circumstance took much longer.

“It is a wise use of resources,” Kaah said, and gestured certainty. “Act well, Hurem Omotoso.”

“As you shall, Sulai Kaah,” Omotoso said, and nodded to Petra as well, and continued on her way.

For a moment Petra wanted, irrationally, to stop her. Ask, for all their failings, you’re glad to live with the Su, aren’t you? They’re different, yes, but this is possible. It doesn’t have to be thrown away.

But this was not an argument to be had with strangers. Petra’s soft desperation was her own.

She followed Kaah to the access nub at the end of a terminal hall.

Kaah, without ceremony, pressed her claws into the wall at the nub, and a stream of energy surged through her. Petra stepped up and pressed her hands into the wall across the nub from her, and closed her eyes, and called up the lightning.

The nub expanded like a bubble, stretching out into the atmosphere and accreting material. Far beneath their feet, toward the center of the colony, the colony’s organs chewed at the mineral substrate beneath them and reprocessed it into usable form; now, crops and stomachs full of smart matter disgorged their contents and sent it crawling in waves toward the Makers’ call. The static matter of the existing colony walls hummed in recognition.

Petra could feel every one of them echoing in her awareness. As though she was one limb of a colony and the walls were part of her body, sluggish and slow but movable with nothing but thought and energy and effort.

The nub grew to encompass them, Kaah and Petra both, flooding the area with oxygen-rich atmosphere and moving them out of the insulation of the colony, into the maelstrom of storm and smart matter, where stability sat behind them and potential all around. And together, Kaah and Petra began to Make.

• • • •

The colony had always grown like a fern, uncoiling—and Petra found it hard to imagine ferns and fauna growing outside. Still, she had toured the oxygen facilities like most classes of her generation, and ferns grew in some variety in the gardens. The human colony ship had brought its own miniature ecosystem for air purification, and the Su had been happy to integrate that system into their colony and research it for any new information on how to optimize the plants they’d scavenged from their own vanished biomes. Petra didn’t visit the facilities often, but she remembered them in brilliant greens, reds brighter than blood, yellows cleaner and softer than the atmosphere outside.

After spending enough time in her head—or casting her thoughts outward, forming the colony walls—it took time for color to seep back into Petra’s awareness. She could see the walls, but they were the meaningless shapes they’d be if she’d stared at a spot until her eyes canceled its contrast out.

But she came back to herself. In time.

Here in Third Cluster, there were patterns inlaid in the floor, murals, windows: all the things the human population did to make the colony habitable. There were windows through which you could see the roiling clouds—or the battered landscape, when the clouds lifted enough that the ghostly shapes of rocks and craters could be seen. Sometimes, Petra could see vast shapes moving in the distance, not quite the way the clouds moved, and wonder if they were some echo of the vanished ecosystem the Su had clambered out of.

Sometimes, Petra wondered what the hell the Su had done to this place.

Sometimes, she wondered what it had been like to be on that first ship, watching the gamble pay off. How they had felt as they saw their potential near-Earth resolve into a tangle of yellow clouds and fierce winds.

Petra had never been out through the old, crumbling habitat spaces that had covered the ship like a blanket. She had no reason to do so; the Su didn’t find the ship of much historical interest, and her parents hadn’t been willing to go through the hassle of compensating for the damaged environment in those areas. Suiting up, taking medical packs and lights, traveling out past the well-maintained central Su spaces to a ship that would never fly again. They had books, images, videos, holos, history preserved for digestion in everything but physical presence. The ship was roughly as real to her as Earth was.

Nothing like the colony, solid and present under her shaking limbs, a vast map of power and potential to her sensing mind. She could lean back into it, let it soak up the tremors in her muscles. Her fine motor control was shot. Humans hadn’t been meant to shape this kind of energy.

But Petra among them had been made. One of the first attempts, a grand experiment toward the full participation of humanity in the colony. Amad had said once that that privilege made her uncaring— You’ve got yours, so fuck the rest of us—but Petra couldn’t breathe without the awareness that she was judged by the Su as a possibility. She’d been representing humanity in the court of Su opinion for her entire productive life.

Sulai Kaah had finished her own work, and turned to Petra, forelimbs crossing over each other, out of the way. “You are well?” she asked.

She’d asked a thousand times before, and would ask a thousand times again. So long as they worked on the same projects. “I will be,” Petra said.

Sulai Kaah gestured understanding. “Our work will benefit many,” she said. “I look forward to its completion,” Petra answered, and with their goodbyes said, Kaah wandered off.

• • • •

Petra’s work had a way of scouring all the petty day-to-day concerns of her life out of her mind. She’d become used to coming home feeling drained, pleasantly empty—at least, empty in a way she could convince herself was pleasant, because none of the pollution in her mind, the grudges and doubts and recriminations, seemed to survive.

Unfortunately, it looked like the business with Nash was more persistent than the day-to-day annoyances of being her. She pushed it away— It’s done, I’ve made my decision, it’s nothing to do with me until he starts something—and then she rounded the last curve in the corridor to see Ilen walking out of her quarters.

An uneasy stiffness went up Petra’s spine. She’d never removed Ilen’s access permissions from her doors—she’d always said Ilen was welcome any time. But seeing her there, emerging, unannounced, hooked jealousy into her diaphragm and tugged.

Ilen saw her and pursed her lips before forcing them into a smile. “Petra,” she said, and crossed the hall and took Petra’s shoulders. Petra tried to relax them. “We need to talk.”

“It’s good to see you,” Petra said, though woodenly.

“I wish I saw you more often,” Ilen said.

I’m sure, Petra thought, and her diaphragm tugged again, insistently. But you don’t come by, do you? Not until Nash winds up here.

“I wish you did,” she said.

It wasn’t Ilen’s fault, after all. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d ended things between them. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d established a carefully constructed distance, measured out degrees of separation like they were insulators. That was all on Petra’s head.

The jealousy didn’t care if Petra had no one to blame but herself.

“Coffee?” Ilen asked.

Petra bit on nothing. “I’ve probably just made some more enemies.”

“And I’ve never cared. Coffee?”

There wasn’t any question, really. Petra nodded and gestured along down the hall. “Please.”

The corridors in this section were all separated into levels, with slopes up at the perimeter and at places that had been the perimeter before colony growth had overtaken it. That was how you could tell it was a human sector—at least, it was one of the ways. The Su had no issues with clambering up and down wherever they found it most expedient, not caring much whether one room shared an elevation with another chamber adjacent to it. But they’d designed these sectors after the floors-stacked-atop-each-other layout of the human ship.

The commissary was little more than a food receptacle with an open chamber adjoined to it. A colonist could go and select the food they wanted and eat communally, if they so chose. The chairs and tables were a human invention; the space to prepare food, and the modules that heated or cooled food on demand, had been Su gestures of goodwill to accommodate human taste. The Su didn’t have the breadth of culinary aesthetics that the human population had.

Petra and Ilen went to a hot receptacle and got bulbs of coffee—a thin, dark liquid that tasted vegetative and burnt. She had to wonder if it bore any resemblance to the coffee the colonists had remembered from Earth; if this was a replica, Su ingenuity and human gengineering, or just some poor substitute carrying a name that meant almost nothing.

“I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Petra said, and found a table. This commissary was empty; in general, the people with rooms in this area tended to have nicer places to eat.

Ilen followed her, but paused at her words. “Neither do I,” she admitted. “But, you know, you shut me down when it’s not about business. Nash is business.”

Despite the heat of the coffee in her hands, despite the sensation of lightning over the habitat, Petra felt cold. “Why is Nash your business?”

“Because he threatens colony harmony,” Ilen said, “and my rank theoretically obliges me to be conscious of that.”

Petra blinked at her, then cracked a thin smile. “How long did it take you to come up with that excuse?”

“Oh, I’ve been holding it in my pocket,” Ilen admitted. “Not that it’s any less true.”

“You’re not a social engineer. You’re a medical worker.”

“And you’re a construction specialist, Sulai,” Ilen pointed out. “Not a warden. Or a rehabilitator. Looks like today’s the day we wake up with new vocations.”

Petra set her coffee on the table.

Ilen hadn’t taken a seat yet, and she didn’t. Instead, she came around the table and pressed her hands into Petra’s shoulders. And then she pressed, her Su-engineered powers coming down through Petra like a wave.

Petra could sense the lightning, sense the chattering patterns of electricity racing through the walls, the floor, here and there through the air. But none of it was like the golden warmth of Ilen’s hands and Ilen’s power, moving through her. Putting right, it felt, all the cells that had been excited or singed by Petra’s work.

Petra melted, sinking onto the table with a mew. “Ilen . . .”

“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” Ilen pointed out. Petra grimaced, though the expression melted away.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“So’s the pitted, pock-marked ground,” Ilen said. “That means nothing.”

Then she ducked and pressed her lips against Petra’s jaw. Petra caught her breath.

“I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Ilen said, and Petra felt her shoulders trying to stiffen up again, but the tension was chased away by Ilen’s hands. “I want to talk about you. Do you know what you’re doing?”

Petra let out a weak laugh. “Amad came to me,” she said, and felt Ilen’s fingers pause on her muscles. “Nash was going to be executed. No one else in the colony was going to speak for him. Can you believe it?”

A moment passed before Ilen said, “No, actually. He must have gotten a lot better at making enemies. But we’re talking about you, Pet—”

“Once I knew about it,” Petra said. She tried to make her voice like the end of an argument. “If I knew about it and didn’t stop it, I’d be complicit in his death. Or I could stop it and end up owning the man. Those were my choices. Kill him or own him.”

“You still blame him—” Ilen started.

Petra pulled herself out of the chair, out of Ilen’s grip. The sense of the storm closed in around her awareness again, an angry backdrop. It felt like coming home to herself. She turned to look Ilen in the eyes. “You don’t?”

“Pet,” Ilen said. She stepped forward, bringing them almost body-to-body, and cradled Petra’s head in carefully poised fingers. She washed away the chaos of the lightning again. “All right. Your choices are rotten. But you’re going to burn yourself to death in anger here, if you don’t end up killing him yourself. Something has to change.”

“If you have any suggestions,” Petra said.

Ilen said nothing.

“Thought not,” Petra said, but it was difficult to be mad at her. Especially difficult when Ilen’s hands, Ilen’s power, carved out a safe, quiet spot in Petra’s head.

Petra leaned forward, slipped her own hands onto Ilen’s shoulders, slid them down toward her elbows. Tried not to feel like her hands, this contact between them, was a veiled threat.

Ilen— Suva Ilen, highest rank in the colony, could reach into a person’s body and direct, in broad strokes, the growth of cells, the patterns of immune response, the firing of synapses. Sulai Petra, one rank below as the Su recognized it, could only control the lightning.

A strong skill, a Maker skill, when it came to directing the responsive material of the habitats, feeding the biomat infrastructure with power. The Suva, Su Fathers, could create new Su life, but the Makers could control the colony.

More people than the Su valued that.

Petra could reach into the sky and blast lightning through Ilen. No matter the insulation in the walls, no matter the carefully constructed cages she was afforded as a human Maker. There was always a conductive line from the towers through the habitats, because without the possibility of access, the Makers couldn’t make.

And while she’d never hurt Ilen—had never, would never—their being who and what they were had brought harm to Ilen. Petra’s willingness to take Nash into their lives had channeled hurt right to her. Like Petra was only the conduit through which harm coursed.

“Pet,” Ilen said. “I do love you. You know that, right?”

“I love you,” Petra said, and her hands tightened on Ilen’s arms. Her proximity, her sheer physical presence, drove Petra’s mind back to Ilen in cords, Ilen hidden in the atmosphere-leaking, ill-powered castoff modules of the colony, Ilen bound by conductive wire to her captor, her image on an encrypted and bounced data-stream, her life reduced to leverage. And Petra hammering out messages to a data address she suspected represented nothing.

NASH

PLEASE

WHAT DID YOU DO, NASH?

PLEASE HELP, PLEASE

“I love you,” Petra said again, and Ilen didn’t protest her hands, fear-tight. “I’ll figure this out, Ilen. What happened before isn’t going to happen again.”

“Pet,” Ilen said, voice like mourning. She probably meant to say, That’s not what I’m afraid of, not at all, but Petra’s mind was circling around He won’t get away with it again. I’ll watch him. He ought to pay for what he’s done.

Nash was waiting for her at the doors to her quarters, and Petra pushed by him. He let out a breath and followed her in.

Petra considered ignoring him, but the consideration only lasted until she reached her desk. Nash wasn’t one to be ignored.

“Why are you here, Nash? Curious citizen, wants to learn more about Su resource allocation?”

“Will you listen to me?” Nash asked.

Petra let out a long breath, shaped like a growl. “That doesn’t seem to end well for me.”

Nash didn’t take the bait, and part of Petra was disappointed. “According to the Su I don’t have rights as a member of the colony,” Nash said. “Anything I want, anything I want to do, you have to specifically allow me to do it. The doors to the gardens won’t even open for me any more. Did you save me just so I could spend the rest of my life going from bed to baths to library and back again?”

“I saved you because Amad came into my office and jammed the comm lines,” Petra said, and dropped into her chair. Storm season meant the endless headaches of the lightning storms and the scrabbling emptiness she felt when Ilen’s hands weren’t on her shoulders, her temples, her hips. It also meant the abundant energy, refilling their reserves as fast as they could drain it, and that meant all the Makers were in a flurry to get the big projects done. For the benefit of the colony. Her fingers twitched.

The Third Cluster expansion would be something good. She could do something good. For colony harmony, to make life better, to carry them on into the next generation of improvements, negotiations, accommodations.

You’ve got yours, so screw the rest of us. She and Amad had had their share of hissing and spitting, coming to uneasy truces largely because of Nash. If it wasn’t for Nash now, Amad would never have come to see her. Probably wouldn’t have bothered spitting on her if she was on fire.

Like she was the one who’d done something to damage their friendship, and not him.

“What do you want?” she asked. “You want garden access?” She gestured up a console and skimmed her quarters’ logs with half her attention. As expected, Nash had made a few cursory access attempts. She hadn’t set up access for him, though, and it didn’t look like he’d had any success. And the comm lines showed no abnormalities; she doubted Amad had come in to see him.

If the Su had been willing to kill off Nash, Petra could only imagine what they’d do if they found Amad skulking about in colony territory.

“I want you to forgive me,” Nash admitted. “I want things to be okay between us again.”

So says the criminal to his mark, Petra thought. “Because I own you now.”

She could see flickers of Nash’s temper in the muscles of his face. Like he was the one who should be frustrated here. And yes, she could admit—the better part of her could admit—that he had reason: his freedoms all curtailed; his life bound up to someone who hated him, or was making a good go at hating him; no recourse but to play nice and hope for the mercy of someone he’d wronged.

The part of her that ran her thoughts and her opinions just said: well, that’s a perfectly mercenary reason, isn’t it?

“Because,” Nash said, “it kills me that this is what happened between us.”

And? Petra thought. “Your guilt,” she said, “is the outcome I care about the least.”

A door alert pinged her awareness.

Petra gave a half-voiced “Fuck,” and pulled herself up from her chair. Her body felt nerveless and rubbery, between the earlier Making and Ilen’s ministrations and the ongoing storm. She tried not to sway as she opened the door.

In the hallway stood a smaller Su, probably young. She drew her fingers from the top of her forehead down past her thorax: deep respect for a hierarchical superior. Sudaeg, then; just a worker. Petra gestured superior greeting. Then, because she could, because it was allowed, because she felt it, gestured annoyance and inquiry. The Su gestured back apology and necessity.

“There’s an anomaly at one of the Maker sites, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “We hoped to have your expertise.”

Petra nodded, resigned. “Show me the way.”

• • • •

The anomaly itched in her awareness like a missing tooth. A dark spot in the paths of energy, like an insulated package attached to the collection lines. Not damage or disruption—something set with intent behind it.

Something that had made the Su seek out Petra, most senior of the human Makers, specifically, in lieu of a Su maker, closer or with more expertise.

Petra turned to the Sudaeg, the awareness settling in her stomach. “Have there been threats?”

The Su didn’t have membranes over their eyes that would allow them to blink. But the look that the Su gave her was somehow languorous, unsurprised, perhaps calling into question Petra’s own inquiry. “There are frequently threats, Sulai Tabov. The aberrant human elements wish the destruction of the colony.”

Not all of them, Amad would have argued. There are fringe elements in any movement. Most of us—the reasonable ones—just want independence.

It was the sort of distinction that abruptly stopped mattering to Petra when her wife was kidnapped. “Credible threats?” she asked.

“We do not monitor the human activity outside the bounds of the colony,” the Su answered.

As sentient creatures outside the colony limits, the human separatists were none of the Su’s business. Not much concept of natural security in a Su colony—they didn’t read human history, either. No sense of what to expect.

“The anomaly will be removed,” the Su said. “Do you anticipate that it will be dangerous?”

By which the Su meant, Should we send a Maker, who can quickly excise it and effect any repairs, or do we send a Worker, less skilled but more expendable? If it was a bomb—and the Su did have some experience with bombs; it resided in their historical awareness, if not their future planning—they would rather a Sudaeg die.

She stretched her awareness out again, trying to filter out the mental noise of the storms. The anomaly was a black box, and she felt out the currents around it. Energy flowed in, but not through. It was gathering up energy for something.

She turned her attention outward, along the line of the colony, feeling the ragged channels in the old halls that had grown around the human ship. They tingled in her awareness, like a sleeping limb halfway to nerve death; a few faint lines, pirated energy that fell below the thresholds the Su needed to care about it, enough to eke out a subsistence existence on.

Could be a battery. Energy was life in the colony; it’d be life on the ship, too. Fill up a battery at the height of storm season, and, if they calibrated carefully enough, the Su wouldn’t bother trying to shut them down. They could skim off the excess and power themselves through whatever they were planning now.

But the Su had noticed, which meant that someone had screwed up. Or the Su were meant to notice, and it was meant to have some meaning for them or prod them into some action.

Petra wasn’t a tactical thinker, especially not with the static of the storm, the static of Nash and her own emotions. She was a Maker. Her skills were in smart matter and architecture. She was human, yes, but her insight into the minds of human separatists had some serious failure points.

She gestured uncertainty. A sign to the Su that her judgment in this matter could be questioned; if a Sudaeg questioned it, it was no affront to the hierarchy. “My inclination is to treat it as dangerous until otherwise proven,” she said. “But there are facts of which I am unaware, and which you cannot provide. My analysis is inconclusive.”

The Su gestured recognition. “We will proceed on your analysis, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “The colony will be well.”

“You’re welcome,” Petra said, and let herself sink back on her heels, just a little, before turning and walking home.

Nash was sitting on the couch in her quarters, brooding, when she let herself in. Rehearsing the next phase of the argument, maybe. He could be persistent when he tried.

Petra walked past him, to her desk again. “Is Amad still agitating for segregation?” Nash looked up, expression sharp and suspicious. “You save me so I could inform on him?”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Petra snapped. Her patience for Nash’s dissembling would have been low if the storms hadn’t been going on. But Nash being Nash, he seemed to see the misstep, and rushed to make sure it didn’t sound that bad.

“I know he’s still interested in it,” he said. “. . . He calls it independence and not segregation, by the way.”

“I remember.” Petra’s mouth twisted. “He know anything about tampering in the collection lines?”

Silence, for a moment, and then Nash said “Amad doesn’t sabotage,” with damaged calm.

“He knows the people who do,” Petra said.

“He knows everyone in the movement. He doesn’t get along with half of them. Seven out of ten, he disagrees with. Says that’s the reason they never get anything done.”

“Anything except kidnapping,” Petra said. “Theft—”

Nash stood up. “I don’t want to argue this with you.”

“There’s been tampering,” Petra said. “At the height of storm season. We’re trying to build this colony; they’re trying to tear it down. Nash, do you know anything?”

Nash gave her a cold, even glare. “If you want me to ask around,” he said, “you’ll have to give me access to the outskirts.”

They’d probably be able to remove the collar, out there. “I didn’t save you so you could continue colluding, either,” Petra said.

Anger gathered itself in tense lines in Nash’s expression. Petra watched it with a kind of distant anticipation—Nash didn’t lose his temper often, and she was curious how it’d look when he did. Especially if he did in a situation like this. She couldn’t picture him screaming his lungs out. He was so very practiced at not saying the salient things, but the anger had to go somewhere.

She’d never been in a fight, and suspected that Nash hadn’t, either. But then, there was a lot of Nash’s life she wasn’t privy to. Who knew what the hell went on in the outskirts?

But if it came to a fight, if he took a swing at her, she’d put him down before she had to call for anyone. A twitch of her fingers; several thousand volts through his flesh. She could feel the possibility dancing at her fingertips.

And as though Nash could feel it too, he swallowed his own anger and backed down. Gestured, with heavy irony, submission and appeasement. “People talk about blowing up the colony. They get shouted down. Everyone with any sense knows we can’t survive without the colony’s resources. The last guy—Dolan—they found him taking apart the ship’s engine to make a bomb. They put him outside.”

The anger stuttered on that, a space underneath it opening up to void. It didn’t compute, and Petra was left, for a few seconds, with no way to respond.

Outside the colony, without any environmental protection, meant a choking, lungsearing death. With protection, but without the resources of the colony, it meant dying of thirst, isolated, and alone.

And here she’d thought the excisions, the culls, were the raison d’être for separatism in the first place.

The expression on Nash’s face looked oddly satisfied, for being so bitter. “Yeah,” he said. “We self-police. What, you thought we were all lawless bandits scheming in dark rooms? Amad voted for the execution, by the way. He said we couldn’t tolerate that sort of thing and survive as a movement.”

How very Su of him, Petra wanted to say. But that would kill the conversation there, and she wasn’t done with it yet. “How did you vote?”

Nash was silent for a moment. “I was sick that day,” he said.

Petra suspected he was lying.

“What did you do, Nash?” she asked. “What made the Su want to excise you?”

Nash’s expression twitched, and he looked away. “I didn’t blow anything up or kill anyone,” he said. “Or kidnap them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

“Like you,” Nash said, tones clipped, “I don’t like it when people get hurt. But it looks like we’re both stuck with people who do.” He gestured wish for dismissal— stiffly, with bitterness in his human expression. “I think I’d like to go back to my quarters, Sulai, if that’s all right with you.”

You invited yourself in here, Petra wanted to say. Not me. But she gestured dismissal and reminder of hierarchy, to bite back instead.

• • • •

Petra woke earlier than she wanted, which was a shame, given how long it had taken her to get to sleep. She kept to a common human schedule, most days, with a bit of jitter room on either side—Makers tended to put in short periods of intense effort, unlike oxygen specialists or teachers or census-takers or social engineers. So she was early enough to catch the commissary while it was mostly full, exchange pleasantries with some First Cluster residents, and ignore the knowing looks when she pulled a bulb of some tasteless, aqueous nutritional solution. Her throat would close up on anything solid or well flavored; her stomach wouldn’t admit hunger. But she could get the solution down, at least.

As she drank, she gestured up a token comm line to Kaah—no video, no audio, just a quick inquiry as to when they should meet for work on Third Cluster. By the time she’d finished, Kaah had gestured back that much of their work didn’t need to be synchronized. A do what you want, or as close as a Su would come to saying it.

The first three answers to And what do I want? were impossible or inadvisable. The fourth took her through the halls to Ilen.

She found Ilen in one of the medical modules, her hands on a human woman’s belly, eyes closed in concentration, face a smooth mask. She looked illuminated this way.

Deep in Petra’s lungs rose a stirring of the old compulsion. Petra had never wanted to carry a child, and Ilen hadn’t felt strongly enough to have one herself. But Ilen was a Father, through and through. If she’d been a Su, she would have been sought after. But even with humans, who could get by without her, she found her way in—her hands on a sweat-slick belly, guiding the fertilization and implantation of an egg; her mind teasing out the development of a zygote, encouraging the health of a fetus. She was no midwife, but she might as well be. She was godfather to a good handful of the children in the colony. The genetics of her body might not appear in their bloodlines, but she was wrapped up in their genetics nonetheless.

It was something Petra’s mother had never understood, because without blood children, what link did you have to the future, what solace could you have in your old age? But her mother had been closer to the generation of the colonists, for whom the unbroken interweave of genetic lines was still a practical and moral imperative.

Petra was her own generation, and she was a Maker—held close, kept jealously, by the Su. The Su of this generation let humans revere their elders; they didn’t discard them for the resources. They had learned that lesson, in the early violence.

And the Su cared about the colony in toto’s link to the future, not the genetic line of any specific individual. Petra had often said she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body; Ilen did, after a fashion, but she could mother Petra and her human patients and feel as fulfilled as she would with a child. As fulfilled, and considerably less harried.

Petra watched the woman, who smiled at Ilen in something like affection and pride. After a while Ilen opened her eyes and her face, in profile, changed; somewhat less saintly, more warm and human. Through the door, Petra didn’t hear what they said and didn’t need to. The woman gave Ilen a quick, fleeting hug, and vanished out another entrance.

As soon as she’d gone, Ilen looked over and smiled. Ilen always seemed to have a sense of where everyone was in spaces around her. Petra had asked if it was like her own sense of the energy in the colony and the lightning above, but Ilen had sworn it wasn’t—not a Father skill, just her own particular social proprioception.

Ilen gestured the door open and came to greet her. Petra wrapped her arms around Ilen, pressing her face into Ilen’s hair.

Ilen’s hair always smelled of some kind of vegetation—a deep, grounding scent; a ritual anointment held over from the ship, from Earth comforts, from ancient times. Every family in the colony had roots to Earth as deep as any other, most of them crossing at some point. But the ship hadn’t homogenized them; some lines still passed down practices like scenting one’s hair when washing. Not every line could have produced Ilen.

Ilen’s hands curled in the small of Petra’s back, holding her close. “This is a surprise,” she said.

I might have sent a Su worker to her death, Petra didn’t say. Nor did she say, I had to see you; I had to know you were safe. “I love you,” she said, instead.

Which, she thought, was really saying almost nothing.

Ilen laughed into Petra’s collarbone. “I know, Pet,” she said. “I could get used to you stopping by to tell me, though.”

“There was something on one of the collection lines,” Petra said. She hadn’t meant to say it.

Ilen stilled, and Petra wasn’t sure if the sinking sensation she felt was Ilen sagging back, or her own estimation of herself dropping. “Are you all right?” Ilen asked.

Petra swallowed. “Fine,” she said. But that’s not really the question.

Ilen’s hands traveled up her back, catching her shoulder blades like instruments fitted for her palms. “Pet,” she said. “The Su do learn.”

Any next words were shot down in Petra’s throat. She pulled back to look at Ilen and saw Ilen looking at her, her expression level and grave.

“That’s my line,” Petra said. Just not to you.

“Yeah,” Ilen said, “it is. So let me remind you: the Su do learn. They change their behavior. Just not always as quickly or as visibly as you’d like.”

“I didn’t plant the damn thing,” Petra said.

Ilen smiled, but the smile was thin. “No,” she said, “but you came here to warn me. The Su are not about to let anything happen to me. And frankly, if anyone thinks about grabbing me, they haven’t learned much from last time.”

“I know the Su can learn,” Petra said. “The separatists, I’m not so sure about.”

“Well, the lessons just get harder from here,” Ilen said. “I’m not meeting anyone for a while yet. Breakfast?”

The nutrient solution sat uneasily in Petra’s stomach. “Had it,” she said. “I was on my way to work.”

Ilen gave her the look she used to give when Petra had said that her head was fine, or she liked the windows, or she’d let an argument go, really. She didn’t even need to say anything.

And Petra was still wound tight enough not to let her not say anything. “What?”

“One day,” Ilen said, “I will get a Sudaeg to come in and sit on you just to keep you in one place long enough for something to get through your head. You know they’d do it if I asked them to.”

Petra jerked back. The fact that Ilen could joke about the hierarchy always struck her like a ruptured coolant channel. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, “because you’re not officially insane.”

Ilen shrugged. “No, I wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But you’d be surprised how many of my fantasies involve things like that, these days.” The corner of her mouth twitched up. “I might get to see you for more than six heartbeats if we opened our relationship up.”

“I—” Petra started. But getting into an argument about what their relationship was or wasn’t seemed like a less good idea than almost any other available option. “I’m still a target, Ilen. Now more than ever.”

“Because Nash has so many friends on the ship that they’ll ransom someone to get him back?” Ilen asked. “That explain why Amad showed up, begging?”

Petra threw out two or three of the first available responses, and completely failed to throw out the next. “What, you’ve been talking to Amad, too?”

“No,” Ilen said. “No, I think you two both burned that bridge and tossed the cinders in chemical reprocessing.”

“You think I shouldn’t have?” Anger was coiling up from under Petra’s stomach, down where she usually shoved misery. “You, of all people, think I should be playing nice?”

Ilen’s expression went hard and uncompromising. That was another part of her; the other half of what made her an effective Father, what made her adapt to and use the Su hierarchy. Ilen could command with warmth and gentle affection, but when those didn’t work, out came the steel.

“If being angry was doing a damn thing to make your life better, I’d make you a pitchfork,” she said. “Find you the music from that old Earth media Amad likes. We could go on the warpath together. But it’s just making you sick and sad, Petra, and it’s not getting better until you fix something.”

Petra bit down on any response she could make. Because oh, she’d tried to fix things—this entire mess was her trying and failing to fix things. Mostly just managing to keep herself in a holding pattern and scrambling away from any bombs that came up. Things were bad enough without her trying to fix them further.

Eventually, she said “I have work to do. In Third Cluster.”

Ilen’s expression didn’t change. Apparently she still felt that there was a high degree of shit in what Petra was saying.

But she didn’t call her on it. “Well,” Ilen said. “Later, then. And you can feel free to stop by.”

Petra grunted. She’d always been free to stop by; the invitation was more irony than anything.

“If you need anything . . .” Petra said.

“The things I could say to that,” Ilen said. “I’m fine, Petra. And you’re humming like a lightning rod. Go Make.”

• • • •

The route to Kaah this time took Petra through the ebb and flow of the crowds. Third Cluster was one of those clusters that synchronized sleep-wake cycles, to some extent—there would always be early risers and late sleepers and those who eschewed the cycle altogether, but it was consensus early morning, and human colonists filled the halls. Here and there on whatever business they had; Petra had to admit, she didn’t know what they got up to.

Sulai, her mind whispered. In one of their spats, Amad had said You’re half-Su yourself. Do you even know how to speak to real people? Nash had apologized for him, and Amad had apologized in his own way—no words, no overt gestures of contrition, but he’d brought some physical media display in from the ship and showed her an old performance of something. He’d found it hysterical. She’d found it incomprehensible, and he’d sulked off and avoided contact with her halfway to the next season.

Kaah was already Making at the outgrowth when Petra entered it, and she was beaming, inasmuch as the Su had interpretable expressions that could be read as beaming. Petra sat on the ground, crossing her legs like a Su would, and waited, with her eyes closed, watching the colony take shape in ordered lines beneath the sporadic wrath of the sky.

Finally, Kaah finished her hallway, and the bright electricity quieted down to a more latent level. She turned to Petra and gestured greeting.

“My petition for offspring has been granted,” she said.

Petra blinked back into a social mindset, then processed what Kaah had said.

“That’s wonderful!” Petra said, then had to search a moment for the traditional Su response. “The news is my joy; the benefit of the colony is my joy. Have you found a willing Father?”

Kaah gestured assent. “Suva Umet, who approved my petition. She is skilled in constructing zygotes with Father and Maker potential. As we increase our capacity for gathering energy, there will be further roles in the colony for Makers. I expect a clutch of five, potentially more.”

“It will be good,” Petra said. Then, a human phrase: “I’m happy for you.”

Kaah gestured pleasure, then said, “Your arrival is convenient. I defer to your expertise in the dimensions of family units.”

Some expertise, Petra thought. Third Cluster tended to have family homes that kept a core of children and grandchildren and grandparents all together, a few peeling off in each generation, plenty staying behind. Petra had grown in a more Su-flavored cluster; individual rooms for the most part, pairs and two-generation groupings here and there. But she had a sense for what the division of rooms should be, at least; what private areas a human expected that a Su would find extraneous, what layouts between the units would help people mix in the halls as they did in the halls below. And in any case, it was a change of subject.

Thankfully, with the Su, a conversation about pregnancy would rarely turn toward whether or not the other participants hoped for a child. It wasn’t a traditional milestone in a Su life. It was a bestowed honor.

“I’ll set the foundation lines,” Petra said, and pressed her hands into the smartmat.

A bestowed honor. Like the fact that one of the Su Fathers had pressed her hands into Petra’s mother’s belly, felt out the growing cells, and whispered to them that this human child, this one, should have the gift and the curse of hearing the lightning, of feeding it to the substance of the colony walls, feeling that substance change and grow and stretch into new walls and new forms. It had taken three generations on this planet for human Fathers and Makers to be born. Was that only because the Su Fathers had taken so long to understand their different biology? Maybe it was some quirk in how the Su found individuals worthy—maybe it had taken that long to overcome their revulsion at human reproduction.

To the Su, human females were defective—they possessed the necessary organs to carry life, but not the banks of gametes that could be prompted to combine at a Father’s influence. They’d found human males even more bewildering: jettisoned gamete banks walking around in sentient containers that seemed, to the Su, unnecessary.

The Su had caches of each gamete in themselves. The Su Fathers impelled combination and controlled mutation. Autosexual reproduction requiring two participants, unless the Father self-fertilized, but the relationship was hierarchical, not intimate.

She traced out the energy-bearing conduits, laying the foundation for walls here, partitions here, thick sheets of smartmat to occupy the interstitial places. Big round rooms for families to gather in; little compartments for sleep, a storage room here, a solitude room here. Life dictated the layout of the rooms and was circumscribed by it in turn; Petra only aped it, feeling out the spatial rhythm of the units below.

The lines of energy through the colony made sense. She felt alive here, right here, laying her will into the colony walls. All the chaos in the sky came down through the towers and the smartmat and her hands and became something solid and good. And if she could dissolve herself in the doing, so much the better.

• • • •

Petra came home to the smell of something frying.

Apparently one of the workers had moved in a collection of Nash’s old culinary equipment, or he’d had them delivered somehow from the colony outskirts; he was one of the only people Petra had ever known who’d had cooking supplies manufactured for him. Most everyone was content with the variety of engineered foods the Su provided. But Nash had a few old-world aesthetic sensibilities.

And Petra had to admit, he could do damn impressive things with the raw materials that came from the Su.

He’d connected up a heating apparatus to the module’s power, and when she walked in he flashed her a quick smile—uneasy, and probably forced—and transferred a series of somethings into a shallow, lens-shaped bowl. Every motion was deft, as though he’d rehearsed his actions in the event of her arrival.

He filled another bowl for himself, picking them off the stack of four sitting by the cooktop. There’d been a time when all four would have been filled. Four bowls, four bulbs of drinks, four little trays of whatever Nash had been experimenting with that evening. Four cushions around a low table, with Ilen’s laughter and Nash’s anecdotes and Petra and Amad sparring good-naturedly over this or that bit of policy or pragmatism.

Nash had only replicated the barest bones, here. He sat cross-legged on the floor, the lens bowl in his lap.

“Let’s try this again,” he said.

Petra rolled her palm around the curve of the bowl, feeling the heat, and took it to her desk. “A lot’s missing.”

From Nash’s expression, he didn’t see her meaning for a moment. Then he shook his head. “No, I just meant—you know. Talking.”

Ah. Petra placed the bowl on her desk, which changed itself, just a little, to hold it. Buttering me up.

Still, food was food, and she turned her attention to it. Thin strips of grown protein matrix—a food form modeled to mimic the striations of muscle, glistening with a sauce that smelled sharp and sweet. Edible flowers, breaded in something that had heated up golden, so that the red of the petals peeked through like sunrise on a thin atmosphere day. A long white grain, flecked with green. All of it so much more reminiscent of the raw material than anything Su-processed, Su-consumed.

She hadn’t thought she was hungry, but the smell suffused her and woke her stomach. Storm, but it did smell good. She’d forgotten that food was an art, in some of the human subcultures. For a long time now, she’d just approached it as one of the mechanisms necessary to not die.

“I kinda used your authority to get some of this,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. “I told the Sudaeg that it would ease the mental strain of the storms.”

That’d explain it, then; she hadn’t thought they’d stock fresh flowers in the commissary. Low demand. Tension wound through Petra’s jaw. “Always the people person, Nash.”

“I’m not going to abuse your authority,” Nash said. “I’m pretty sure I couldn’t if I tried.”

There were too many things Petra could say to that, and they all twisted in her throat. She took a bite, instead.

Flavors she’d known the names for, once, flooded her mouth; textures she hadn’t eaten in ages rolled against her tongue. She let a long breath out and cursed. “I forgot all about this,” she said.

“Old Earth specialty,” Nash said, which was a lie. It was some new reinterpretation of the old cooking tradition, twisted around to match whatever food plants they’d brought and established in the colony. So much of Earth had remained on Earth, lost to their colony either forever or for the time it took for another generation ship to decide to come and bring their own array of important things.

“Lucky hurem,” Petra said, and took another bite. Nash chuckled and laid into his own food.

“You ever go down to the Folly Garden Cluster?” he asked.

Despite herself, Petra smiled. “Haven’t. They did finish it, though.”

“I heard,” Nash said, and grinned. This smile looked less forced. Not quite right yet, but on its way. “Original size, too?”

Petra let out a laugh. “You know the Su,” she said. “They commit.”

“They committed to a spitball,” Nash said. “Lin and I had no idea how to design a garden. They wanted a size, we said ‘large’ thinking we wanted something bigger than the garden modules we had, and when we woke up there was this cavern that a Maker had just gone ahead and put together and we were supposed to find a way to fill it. No one even thought that, hey, this is a ridiculous size.”

“You said ‘large,’ they thought ‘large in terms of absolute Making size,’ ” Petra said.

“The Su tend to assume that humans know what humans want and will say what they mean when they ask for things.” Whether or not they’d approve of those things as benefiting the colony was another question, but Nash and his colleague had asked for space at the height of storm season. They’d asked for a resource nearly as abundant as air. Any other time, and they’d have had to pin down dimensions and limit their expectations and find a Maker who felt like indulging human needs was a priority just then.

“That was the first resource allocation project I had, remember that?” Nash said. “Talk about distorting your expectations early.”

“You didn’t understand the Su,” Petra said. “I would have expected that.”

“So you told me,” Nash said, and tilted his head at her. “That was back when you liked me.”

Petra’s humor cooled. She set down her utensil, fingers braced on the curve of the composite. She could etch it with lightning, but not much else; it wouldn’t hold a charge or define a path through which intelligent circuitry could flow. “Remember when Hurem Keyne paid me a visit?” she asked.

All humor vanished from Nash’s expression. “Don’t,” he whispered.

“Remember,” Petra said, voice low to keep from breaking, “when I came home to a habitat rupture? Remember how I could smell the sulfur coming in from outside? They set off a blast inside our home, Nash. The lights were out. I could hear the air ingress. I couldn’t find Ilen. I didn’t know if she was lying dead in a corner. You wouldn’t remember that, would you, because you had run.”

Nash was staring down at the floor, jaw stiff, expression hard. “I didn’t ever think anyone would come after you,” he said.

“You didn’t ever think,” Petra corrected. “You want to reminisce about the times when I liked you? You know exactly what happened. You made your choices, you sold us out, and when it all went up in sparks you vanished back to the ship. All that’s on you, Nash—it’s still on you. You think you can cook me dinner and all’s forgiven?”

“I made mistakes,” Nash said. “And people got hurt because of them. I know I’m not going to make that right, but I figured I could at least start making it up to you. Start,” he added, quickly, as Petra found a retort at the tip of her tongue, “doing something good in your life, at least.”

Petra stared at him.

“You look like you haven’t eaten since I left,” he said.

Petra blinked. She hadn’t considered how she’d look to someone who hadn’t seen her in so long—why would it matter, anyway? She knew she’d taken to running off the tension. Knew she felt harder and leaner than she had back in the good times. But seeing a fleck of maternalism in Nash stunned her for a moment.

Then, like everything about Nash, it fed a bit more fuel into the slow-burning anger in her gut.

“The food was very good,” she said, stiffly. She couldn’t find a way to say I don’t need your good works; I’ve survived this long without you caring; There’s nothing you can do to change what happened, so why bother trying now?

“Yeah,” Nash said. “You know, I didn’t do much cooking out in the ship. Harder to get food variety, there. It’s more of a holiday thing.”

Plenty of things Petra could ask, at that. What kind of holidays do you celebrate, out there? or Wasn’t there a big push to get the ship’s hydroponics up and running again? Time was, she’d been curious about life on the ship the way she’d been curious about life back on Earth: it was a foreign land, and one she’d never be visiting. Tales of strange customs were always passing amusements.

Now, the comment felt barbed.

“I’m glad,” she said, “you’ve found something to enjoy here.”

Nash bit back words—probably a curse, probably some invective. “Please,” he said. “Can we just start over? Start from here?”

You haven’t been living here, went Petra’s anger. I’m here. I’m always here. Where the hell else would I be starting from?

Probably wasn’t what he meant. Probably what he meant was, can’t we pretend like we don’t have a past? Or more likely, can’t we just pretend like our only past’s the good one?

And maybe he could pretend that they could have a fresh start. But Petra couldn’t imagine what the hell it would take to feel good about this. About Amad showing up and throwing Nash’s life into her arms, like it was her responsibility. About Nash forcing a smile and bringing his guilt to lay at her feet like it was her job to forgive him.

About him bringing up those times before all this, the food and the company and the easy companionship. Petra didn’t get along with most people—Ilen and Nash had been notable exceptions. She’d pushed Ilen away herself, and Nash—

Was Nash.

“We are,” she said, “exactly where we are.”

The question was, as it always was, where the hell to go from here.

Sooner or later something would break, one way or another. Petra knew this. She’d either wall off Nash completely, let him live his ghost of a life out beyond the periphery of her awareness, or she’d crack, let him in again, maybe find herself dragged along to forgiving him. This shambling mockery of their former friendship was too unstable not to decay. But just the thought of forgiving him made her feel duped and stupid, like she was falling again for the easy smile and the amiable interest.

She knew that where they were now, what she was feeling, was miserable. Thing was, there was quite some distance between knowing that and knowing how to fix it.

And she didn’t have a way to say it. Never had been the best with words, except those words she had a chance to rehearse, over and over, locked in her head for hours.

Still, she might have found something to say if the colony hadn’t shuddered, as something in the sky exploded.

Petra’s head snapped up, even though she couldn’t see a damn thing through the colony composite. But there was no time to feel shock or fear: an instant later two more explosions shook the ground, presaged by a matter of moments by a wave of energy that rammed straight through her mind and tossed her in all directions at once.

Petra’s mouth was open but sound wasn’t coming out; her body curled and spasmed outward, skin and muscle and bone striking smartmat composite desk and floor and walls, mind tossed between them as though it didn’t have a home in either one. Attack, part of her thought, but the rest of her was alight. Drowning in lightning. Her mind was scrabbling through the whole of the colony, lit up like a nightmare, smartmat there growing into tumorous outcrops, food receptacles there searing their contents or expelling them, the insulation at the oxygen recyclers glowing their resistance.

Nash here, reaching out to grab her, his voice insistent and concerned, and Petra threw out a hand and found his body and sent great gluts of energy cascading out of her—through her body straight from the screaming sky and the overloaded colony walls—and the body that was Nash flew away and out of her awareness again.

And then awareness flew out of her awareness, caught and twisted on the overload, and she was nowhere.

• • • •

There was nothing, and then there was noise and senseless sense data and pain and noise, and then there was a tumult of energy she couldn’t find her way out of.

And then there was a tiny sliver of calm, pressing its way into her awareness, with the barrage of energy hammering around it. Petra reached for it, tried to focus in the wreckage of all her thoughts, and the calm pressed deeper into her until she came to the surface of cool air and nausea and a hand on her forehead.

Petra tried not to whimper. At whatever sound did come out of her, the hand shifted, and a long, cool sensation wended down Petra’s throat and into her stomach, settling it.

“Love?” Ilen asked.

Petra groped for her hand. Her body felt disconnected at the joints; all the muscles felt like water. Her coordination was shot. Ilen found her hand for her and pushed a sense of stability into her bones.

“Come on,” Ilen said, and got an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Pet. Sit up. Ground.”

Vertiginous motion. The whole world went tilt-a-whirl and Petra collapsed against Ilen, swinging her feet out of the infirmary cubbybed, pressing bare soles into the floor.

“Ground,” Ilen said again, and Petra fumbled for the energy in her mind. Everything was out of whack. The walls were cacophonous. The storm outside was too much, too close.

She took the energy in her body and the energy in the air and pushed it down into the channels beneath the floor of the habitat that would carry it to its repositories. She could feel them, distant and bright: new ones, as well, likely put into place by the Su Makers, who wouldn’t have been incapacitated as she was.

All of her ached. The colony ached. The new channels stood out like lines of cold metal grafted into living flesh.

Then she could feel Ilen’s fingers on her temples, Ilen’s presence trying to clear up the mess of her mind.

“Pet,” Ilen said. “If you can think, you need to deal with Nash. They’re going to kill him.”

Rage tingled at Petra’s fingertips. Ilen must have felt it, must have felt the balance of her body’s energies shift, because she moved her hands, palms against Petra’s cheeks, tilting her head so Petra’s choices were to look at her or close her eyes.

“Petra,” Ilen said. “You almost killed him.”

“Fuck,” Petra breathed, and it sure as hell felt like the sky was falling in on her. She cast an arm out, seeing Ilen’s shoulders, and Ilen got herself under it and pulled her up.

“All right?” Ilen asked, and Petra made herself nod. Then they were off; Petra was stumbling, her weight on Ilen, back through the halls to the jurisdictor.

• • • •

There was a different Sudaeg there this time, her carapace paler, her stature taller— some older generation, then. Petra’s stomach roiled, and not all of it was vertigo.

“Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and gestured respect and consideration. “Your health benefits the colony. You experience adequate recovery?”

“I request Suva Ilen’s continued attention,” Petra said. Beside her, Ilen made a perfunctory, granting gesture—as eager to dispense with the pleasantries as Petra was to not deal with any of this. “I also request aberrant Nash Carder’s status.”

“He is to be excised,” the Su said. “Has there been a confusion?” Petra nearly laughed. From what she could tell, a collection tower had been blown up. Of course there had been a confusion. But that wasn’t what the Su worker meant.

“He should not be excised.”

“You yourself partially excised him,” the Su observed. No wounded here; no you hurt him, Petra, what were you thinking. She hadn’t been thinking. “Do you not wish this interpreted as your intention?”

Petra closed her eyes. Most of the Su didn’t bother learning human expression; humans could speak or gesture what they needed understood. “His excision is not my intention.”

“And yet, with knowledge of the effects of lightning energy on human physiology, you discharged a great deal through his body. Sulai Tabov,” the Su said. “Are you admitting violent actions not in accordance with your intention?”

That was the question.

So far as Petra knew, the Su didn’t understand self-control. They didn’t understand that an emotional urge to do one thing could conflict with an intellectual desire to do another. If Petra wanted Nash hurting, the Su would understand it as wanting him dead. If they understood Petra hurting Nash and not wanting him dead, they would understand that as a dangerous aberration in Petra’s own mind. A disease that, because it was violent, might warrant excision.

The leftover energy twisted around her gut, and bile attempted the back of her throat. But Ilen drew herself up.

“Sudaeg,” she said, and the Su made a gesture of deep respect. “Sulai Petra is human. You are aware that human Makers of the early generations can experience cognitive overload in high-energy environments? Interpret the situation in that light.”

The Su made a gesture of apology, and turned to Petra again. “Sulai Tabov,” she said. “Was it your intention to excise the aberrant, or did you damage him as an indirect result of the destruction of the lightning tower?”

I damaged him because I was angry and in pain and I resented the hell out of him and still do, Petra couldn’t say. “The discharge which injured him was an indirect result of the attack on the tower.” Please don’t kill him. Please don’t kill me.

“Is it your intention that he return to your custody?”

Can you be trusted? seemed to be the undercurrent of that, and Petra could have spit fire or bile there. Could she. Like maybe she should recuse herself for Nash’s own safety, never mind that it was his people who’d done this to her.

“That,” she said, “is the intention”—the option—“I have.”

The Sudaeg put up her foreclaws, and gestured a series of commands into the jurisdictor module. “Then I release him into your custody,” she said. “You are free to return him for excision at any time.”

“I am keenly aware of that fact,” Petra said, and pushed on toward the cells.

• • • •

The moment they got to the cell and the membrane lensed open, Petra shoved away from Ilen’s support. The Su didn’t bother putting chairs or other furniture in their cells; creature comforts were too human a concept, comfort for the condemned even more so. She let herself collapse to the ground in a messy tangle of limbs, tipped against the wall.

“Is Amad part of this?” she hissed at Nash. Amad, whose friend had just faced excision. Amad, who’d had to beg someone in the Su power structure for his friend’s life.

Amad, who’d hated the Su for years, and might take a chance at striking back at them if he could.

Amad, who’d practically adopted Nash, and who Nash would protect. Nash could be stupidly loyal, from time to time. It was just that none of that loyalty had been directed toward Petra, when it came down to it, in the end.

Nash raised his head, and there was actual terror in his eyes. There were lines under his jaw, spidering up his neck—discoloration from an electrical burn.

Petra drew back. A hand touched her shoulder and Ilen settled down next to her, a warm solid presence, twining the fingers of her own hand around Petra’s.

Petra took in a breath, and tried not to feel how jealous she was of Ilen’s steadiness, that ability to move past it all, to smile and forgive if it was the useful thing, the healthy thing, to do. Petra’s head was a lightning storm. In a way it always had been, even when the atmosphere was quiet outside.

There was pain on Nash’s face, as he gathered up his resolve to speak. After this, he might well believe that Petra planned on excising him, the moment he got too far out of line. Between that and the injury she’d inflicted, even accidentally, it almost made Petra feel like they were on equal ground.

“Do you really think the Su want what’s best for us?” Nash asked.

For some reason, she hadn’t been expecting that. She didn’t know what she had been expecting—groveling apology, maybe, or some arrogant parroting of the party line. But Nash waved his hands to the soft cell walls—walls that were as eager as anything Su to close in and dissolve him.

Dissolve both of them, given a chance. The cell was much smaller, this time. It had already begun to close in, Petra thought, when Ilen had come to wake her.

They were far too close.

“I think the Su created this colony,” she said. “And they’ve been adapting it to human use. They provide for us as well as they know how to, and—”

“As well as they know,” Nash pressed. “But they have a different biology—they’re from a different environment. They don’t understand us—”

“And blowing up a lightning tower is supposed to help?”

Nash gestured helplessly. “I didn’t know—it’s not that I want—I can understand it, Petra, even if I don’t agree. If we don’t have the Su to rely on—” he began.

“Then we could all be exiles,” Petra said. “And most of us like it here.” Then, before he could retort, she asked, “What the hell did you do, Nash? Why did the Su want your execution?”

Did you come in here to tear us all down?

Nash looked away. “What the hell does it matter?” he asked. “The Su thought it was a crime. Isn’t that all you care about?”

Petra shook off Ilen’s hand, and reached out and grabbed Nash by the throat.

Nash’s whole body went rigid, and an angry, twisting thrill wound through Petra’s gut. This was a problem, this was something she’d have to think about, have to talk to Ilen about, but it felt good to feel that fear under her fingers. To know that on some fucking axis, at least, what she thought and felt mattered to Nash. In a way that it apparently hadn’t, back when it was just her trust and her friendship on the line, and not the looming threat of excision.

“I could have been excised, out in that other room,” she said, running over the intake of breath from her side, over the screaming in her head that she was going too far, or not far enough. “Because I wasn’t trying to kill you when I almost killed you. Because if Ilen hadn’t had the rank of a Su Father and if she didn’t still care about both of us and fuck if I know why she does, they would have stamped me out because I was this close to seizures because of what Amad’s friends did. You think I’m above all this? I’ve got mine? I live and die by the same sudamn rules. Do you fucking live by any? Do you just dream of not living by any?”

She could feel Nash’s heartbeat racing under her fingers; feel him swallow, feel him breathe. Might have meant something if she was Ilen; as it was, it was just proof that he, like her, was a haphazard collection of blood and muscle and bone. Bodies didn’t tell her much.

Beside her, Ilen breathed, “Oh, Pet.”

Petra shuddered. Ilen’s voice was soft, like she’d just realized something, but if Ilen didn’t know Petra was a walking disaster by this point, she just hadn’t been paying attention. And that’d be all right, then. They could just blast all the illusions to pieces today.

Ilen reached out—slowly, carefully—and put her hand on Petra’s wrist, disentangling her fingers from Nash’s throat, and then drawing her in, Petra’s head under her chin.

It wasn’t until she had Ilen’s arms around her that Petra realized just how badly she was shaking.

She turned into Ilen’s chest and screwed her eyes shut, because even if she couldn’t stop Nash from seeing this, she could stop herself from seeing the look in his eyes. She didn’t want to fall apart—sick and shaking and blasted half to hell, ready to pave the rest of the way with her own Maker’s hands. She didn’t want him to see that this was how twisted-on-hooks she got. Didn’t want him to know that he’d won.

Even if this had never been about winning, for him. But for all the power she had over him, he had this over her, and wasn’t that just something?

She could feel, in the movement against the crown of her head, that Ilen had turned to look at Nash. She could feel a tilt of Ilen’s head, and then Nash stood up and his unsteady footsteps left the cell. Leaving us in it, Petra thought. And isn’t that the story of all of us.

There would have been a long silence, if not for the thrumming of blood and the hard drag of breath and Ilen making soothing noises, soothing motions of hands and power and influence. And Petra leaned into it despite herself.

“Come back to live with me,” Ilen said, in time. “You can Make yourself an office in my quarters. You’re not protecting me by staying away, Pet, you know that. And I don’t want to see you on your own.”

A laugh echoed up from somewhere in Petra, but it was a largely hollow thing. “Clearly not alone any more, am I?”

“No,” Ilen said, but it didn’t sound like agreement. “But you’re more locked in your head than you’ve ever been. And, Pet, I know what your head’s like, in the storms.”

Petra could have said the storms aren’t the half of it, but Ilen being Ilen, she would know that. Ilen being Ilen, Petra thought she meant any storms, not just the ones in the atmosphere. Nash was a sudamn storm of his own.

“I’m still here,” she repeated.

“Is that the only thing that matters?”

Why not? Petra thought, and Ilen drew her hand back through Petra’s hair.

“Just which one of you did you want me to file the grievance over?” Ilen asked. “Trusting someone isn’t a crime, Pet, and you can stop punishing yourself for it any time now. Maybe you could even try again.”

Petra laughed, though it wasn’t much like laughter.

“You and Nash both saw the best potentials in people,” Ilen said. “The only difference is that Nash still does.”

“Do you even know why we’re in here?” Petra asked. As far as she was concerned, there was more support for her point of view in the air than for Ilen’s. Or Nash’s, if that didn’t go without saying.

“Four parts stubbornness and three parts enemy action,” Ilen said. “Pet.”

“I’ll find a way through this,” Petra said. It was easy to say if she didn’t think about how much she was lying when she said it.

“I’m here for you,” Ilen said.

Petra let out a breath and sagged closer to her. “Ilen,” she said. “It was always supposed to be the other way.”

• • • •

There came a time when Petra could stand again, and take her leave. And she did, and she walked back to her quarters and went inside, and there was Nash stripped to his trousers, a Su biomat healing agent extruded from the wall and creeping across his skin.

Petra hadn’t thought to give him access to the medical stations, but apparently someone had—Ilen, maybe, or Amad had come in and done whatever he could do to muck with the systems. But when Petra walked in the door Nash pulled himself away, the biomat suctioning off his bare shoulders, and went to one knee, head bowed. He touched his forehead, drawing his hand down in a line toward the ground. Gestured abasement.

“I didn’t,” he said, “want any of this to happen.”

Petra stood rigid, watching him. There were still traces of discoloration on his skin, dark trees standing out like lash marks where lightning had coursed through him, gathering around his neck under the Su collar. A disconnected part of her thought she should check his collar; make sure she hadn’t flooded the thing, make sure some control was still in place. Nash kept his eyes down.

“I want to fucking fix this,” he said. “But there isn’t a way, is there? What do I do, Petra?” Then, after a moment—not a long enough pause into which to speak—he said, “Amad wants to steal me back from you.”

Petra’s hands curled. “Of course you’ve been in contact with him.”

“Of course he’s been in contact with me,” Nash said. “He cares. We both cared about you, believe it or not. But we told the wrong people the wrong things and then everything went to hell so fast that saving our own skins was all we could do. Would it have helped you or Ilen for us to get thrown into excision chambers then?”

Yes, part of her said, but it was the same part that would have watched Nash die in the first place. Small and miserable. I could have saved you then. Would have meant something, then, that you faced what you did wrong.

“I never thanked you,” Nash said.

Petra’s stomach turned.

“I showed up trying to spread separatist sentiment, and you didn’t agree with me, but you made a space for me anyway,” Nash said, and Petra’s train of thought jolted. This wasn’t about saving him from excision; it was about that time, years ago, when they’d worked and eaten and laughed together. When the word friend didn’t have to stretch thin to cover them. “Got me into resource allocation. You know, there actually were times where I thought I was doing some good?”

“You were doing good,” Petra said. “Doing good work is hard and slow. It’s not flashy bright results like blowing up a tower.”

Pain flickered under the muscles of Nash’s face. Petra looked away.

Good work was the slow, generation-by-generation change of Su attitudes. It was the vanished practice of culling human elders. The dwindling practice of culling dissidents—though that probably didn’t look dwindling to Nash. It was Petra, standing in the miasma of seasons-long headaches and knowing that the next generation of human Makers would benefit from what the Su Fathers had learned from her; that the next generation would call the lightning with more ease and less pain than she had.

Good work meant enduring the things that weren’t perfect, because the people who solved things by burning them to the ground weren’t people Petra would trust to build good infrastructure.

But that was Petra’s thought on the matter. Amad had different ideas. The separatists, too. And as for Nash, well, who the hell knew where he stood, but him?

“Maybe,” Nash said, and Petra could hear the separatist sentiment lingering around his tone. Words like unendurable, like insurmountable difficulties. One of Nash’s great-great-grands had been an original colonist, excised for reasons Petra had never looked up. Amad’s own parents had been excised—they’d been separatists of the violent strain. Petra had no such painful history. Maybe it’s easy for you to say, the old saw went, “wait and see.”

Maybe, Petra thought, there just were no good options, but she’d stand by hers as the best of the imperfect ones.

“I was informing on you from the beginning,” Nash said. “I didn’t think of it that way. I guess Amad and the others did.”

And she, like an idiot, had taken him in and showed him the gardens in First Cluster and introduced him to her wife and talked politics and plans for the future. How they must have drunk that up, back where Nash came from. They must have thanked him.

How must that have felt.

What did you do, Nash? The question was on the tip of her tongue. And really, she could make Nash answer.

In the end, though, she didn’t have to make him.

“You know how they got me?” he asked. “I came back in. I was trying to get in with one of the younger human Fathers. See if we could find some common ground. I guess I was spoiled by you; he pegged me pretty fast as a separatist, and tossed me to the Su, with prejudice. He never lodged a grievance over me, though. You know, you’re the only person who ever has?”

Petra’s stomach stilled like a dead thing. “I said that Ilen should have. It would have had more weight coming from her.”

“I was nothing, remember?” Nash snorted. “Wasn’t a Sudaeg any more, after I left allocation. Hurem Nash Carder. A grievance from a Maker had plenty of weight on its own.” He looked at her. “I told Amad that Ilen was learning how to make human Fathers and Makers in utero. Amad told someone else. That’s why they decided to take her. Can you imagine what that would do for human independence? We wouldn’t need the Su at all.”

“You made her a target,” Petra said.

Nash showed his palms. “If you hadn’t listed that grievance, they’d never have handed me over to you.”

Petra laughed, if that was what you wanted to call it. “How convenient for you.”

It was an unusual sight, to see Nash struggle with words. But there was a struggle between his throat and his jaw now, as though human articulators could not shape human words into their right sentiment. He gestured helplessness, and abasement again. “What can I do?”

Change the past, maybe, Petra thought. Convince the Su to take back the ship territories. Give them what they need to do that. Hurt all the rest of these friends of yours the way you hurt me.

“What makes you think I have an answer?”

Nash’s shoulders slumped, just slightly. “Maybe I just look up to you,” he said.

Then, literally, he did look up. Met her eyes, held her gaze.

“I’m going to keep trying,” he said.

As long as I own you, Petra thought. Made it hard to trust his good intentions, even when some small traitorous part of her was tempted to.

“I’m going to go lie down,” Petra said, and turned away from him.

• • • •

Petra made it back through her quarters to her sleeping cubby and collapsed into bed, staring up at the curving ceiling.

She could feel an active bank of lightning clouds moving in. Energy for the colony, noise and pain for her. Not too long and they’d be right over her, and she’d be lucky to keep stringing thoughts together. Not that her thoughts were proving so helpful to her now.

She raised her hand and caught the faint lines of energy that pervaded the colony, and she almost tweaked them, almost gestured a comm channel into being, but stopped herself. That was interesting. She hadn’t come this close to calling in a long time.

What do I do, Ilen?

Her fingers held there, on the edge of completing the gesture. Opening the comm line, seeing Ilen’s face projected in the dark.

There’d been a time when she could have just rolled over, pressed her face into the curve of Ilen’s neck at the shoulder, said wordlessly that which she didn’t have words for. And Ilen would wrap around her, human warmth and human softness, and make the noise in her head go away. Lightning or no lightning. It was a skill Petra had never developed in herself.

What do I do, Ilen? Storms, what do I do?

A pressure was creeping up between her shoulder blades; it mirrored, above her, the crashing power of an unstable atmosphere, of some cataclysmic ecological mistake. The kind of thing that made anything she or Nash or Ilen or Amad could do pale by comparison. They hadn’t managed to bring down an entire world.

Just felt like it, sometimes.

Her hand curled around the air. Even from here, with great effort, she could punch a spire of smart matter into the sky like she could cut it apart. With that cloud formation rolling in, the energy would be replenished as fast as she could deplete it. The Su would question it, but probably not excise her for it, and it would be just as pointless and futile as most of her other options.

Feel good, though, that energy coursing through her. Proof that she could make a mark, even if in the end it didn’t matter.

She moved her hand, changed her gesture. Contact addresses scrolled through her awareness: an array of human and Su connections she wouldn’t let herself reach out for. After three loops through she settled on the old address for Amad—a contact that she hadn’t erased, despite every reason to do so. The address had been dead at Ilen’s kidnapping and was probably still dead now, but the data pings, heading off into nowhere, occupied part of her awareness. With all the various storms, any distraction was welcome.

Anyway, calling out into nothingness fit her mood. She could sense the change in the data, the signals routing out, and watch them, waiting until they were dissolved in her awareness by the lightning strikes.

Then the nothingness answered.

The screen fitzed into existence in front of her, the pale white of ship lighting casting most of the picture as edges and impressions. What wasn’t faint and poorly defined, though, was the face of the man who’d answered the comm.

“The hell?” Petra said.

Amad looked just as confused as she was. “You’re the one who called me!”

“The hell are you still responding on this address?” Petra asked, scrambling up to sit and face the screen. And it might have been her imagination, but she thought Amad flushed.

“I—look, a colony data address is useful, okay? Why are you calling if you thought the address was dead?”

“Diagnostics,” Petra said.

Amad stared at her for a moment. “You,” he said, “are a crap liar.”

“We can’t all be good at it,” Petra growled.

Amad made a series of gestures that Petra couldn’t interpret. She shook her head, and squinted at the screen. Some kind of human gesture, she thought; there were physical nonverbal languages in human history, and ship people sometimes pulled those things out as counterculture. Whatever he was saying, Petra got the feeling it wasn’t complimentary.

“Right, so you found my little not-so-secret data address,” Amad said, his voice still coming through flustered. Why the hell he felt flustered was an open question. If the emotion had anything to do with why he’d kept a data address he’d only set up at Petra’s insistence in the first place, Petra didn’t want to examine the situation too closely. “Should we both go into another room and pretend this was a wrong gesture that never happened?”

Petra’s head was pounding. It sounded like an appealing option. Except then Amad would get in contact with Nash again, try to smuggle him back out to the edge of the colony and get the collar off, and this would probably come up—in a what the hell is Petra playing at way or an is Petra investigating us way or a is something wrong with her way, and Petra’s mind flashed to Nash, kneeling on the floor, hand moving from his forehead to the ground.

What the hell were any of them supposed to do?

She let out a breath and collapsed back to the bed. Energy was itching at her fingertips, ready for the shaping.

Do something, it seemed to say.

“We need to talk,” she said.

© 2016 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests.

An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between.  Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.

EXCERPT: Child of a Mad God (Tor Books)

R.A. Salvatore | 2113 words

From R. A. Salvatore, the legendary creator of Drizzt Do’Urden, comes the start of a brand new epic journey.

When Aoelyn loses her parents, she is left to fend for herself among a tribe of vicious barbarians. Bound by rigid traditions, she dreams of escaping to the world beyond her mountain home.

The only hope for achieving the kind of freedom she searches for is to learn how to wield the mysterious power used by the tribe’s coven known as the Song of Usgar. Thankfully, Aoelyn may be the strongest witch to have ever lived, but magic comes at price. Not only have her abilities caught the eye of the brutish warlord that leads the tribe, but the demon of the mountain hunts all who wield the Coven’s power, and Aoelyn’s talent has made her a beacon in the night.

Forthcoming from Tor Books on February 6, 2018

The moon called it forth, the summons of blood. Long and sleek and low to the ground, the fossa crept across the underground crawl space, some areas with no more than a foot of clearance. The demon creature felt every jag and bump in the stones, for it had little fur left on its six-foot-long body, with only occasional tufts across its reddish, angry skin of welts and boils. Its tail extended back three feet, perfectly straight, and was flattened and hardened, with its edges scraped keen like a scythe.

It walked on four padded paws, moving catlike, killing claws retracted, and perfectly silent, save the occasional scrape of that hard tail on stone.

The demon creature came through the narrow and rolling crawl space into a taller corridor, and there it paused and inhaled, smelling the scent of life on the mountain, and hearing the song of the mountain’s magic, a sensation that drove the beast mad with hatred.

So many months, it was trapped in its lair of murder, in the darkness, that maddening song echoing about the stones. But it could not go out and kill the singers. It could not release its rage upon an animal, or a man, or a sidhe. For under the light of the sun, or the stars, or the normal moon, the song was too strong, and would drive the fossa back into the cave.

But not tonight. Tonight, the moon was red, the Blood Moon, and so the fossa could come forth.

And taste blood.

And devour magic.

And silence the singers.

Faster it loped, through the corridor and into the small cave, then to the mouth, and there the fossa paused and looked up to the night sky, to the huge full moon, hanging red.

Promising food.

What would it kill this night? What creature’s bones would add to the litter of the deep den beyond the long crawl? What singer’s throat would crush beneath the press of its maw?

It came out into the open air, under the red moon. Hunger called it to the hunt.

Perhaps a deer. Perhaps a bear, or a warthog, or a great roc, or a giant mountain ram, or one of the ugly sidhe humanoids. None of them gave the demon fossa pause. None could stand against its savagery. None, though, were savory, and gave the demon the pleasure it truly desired.

A sensation froze the creature just outside its bone-littered cave. At first, the vibration drifted on the night breeze as just a tingling, teasing and tickling, but then those sparks became something more, something that stung, something unpleasant. The creature let forth a feral growl that reverberated about the mountain stones, a warning, a protest, against the painful intrusion, the maddening resonance of magic.

And that was the rub—not the pain, for the fossa was ever in pain, but the vibration of magic, an incessant burr the creature could not scratch away.

How the demon fossa hated magic! The song of it played as an endless voice, a pervasive and incessant ringing, just a single, maddening note in its ears and vibrating throughout the creature’s body with a singular message: murder.

But the growling stopped very quickly.

The fossa sensed the pulse of magic.

A human was out on the mountain this night, under the Blood Moon. And that human carried magic, and that magic had been called and so it was singing now.

The demon fossa set off, silent as the shadows. The animals of Fireach Speuer could rest easy this Blood Moon night.

Aye, for the fossa’s favorite meal was served.

Ravines did not slow it, nor high slabs of stone, for the creature traversed ledges with sure-footed eased and could leap straight up a score of feet, two score, and with claws that could catch hold in the stone as readily as a cat might climb a tree.

Down the mountainside it went, down and around to the west, where the plateau rolled out wide before it and the red moon reflected in the waters of the great lake, far below. There was no pause to take in the grand vista, though, for the song grew louder and more focused as the fossa neared.

So much louder, then, and the fossa slowed.

Over one rise went the fossa, through a tangle of trees and into the brush at the edge of a field of chokeberry bushes. There the creature hunched and watched and waited.

The man came over an angled stone across the way. He carried a long spear, its tip glowing with magical energies, singing brilliantly. He moved down slowly into the low brush and stepped his way to the middle of the patch.

He was hunting, the fossa understood. He was hunting the demon fossa.

He was a fool.

The man stood amidst the chokeberry bushes and whispered something the creature could not understand, but the sounds gave the fossa pause. It hunched further and from the concealment of the taller brush scanned all around, ensuring that this one was alone.

The human spoke again, as if not alone, but the fossa saw no others.

There were no others.

The fossa issued a low growl, then silently circled as the man turned toward the sound.

The man sniffed. He could smell the demon and the demon fossa could smell his fear.

The man set himself, that horrid, magical spear tip forward, toward the place where the fossa had growled, as if expecting a charge.

But the fossa wasn’t there anymore, there upwind from the human so that he could still smell its lingering scent. No, the fossa was already across the way, watching the human from behind.

The breeze gusted, the chokeberries shivered, and the human shifted left and right, but with his focus still to the spot where the fossa had been.

Belly to the ground, the fossa moved, gaining speed, readying a killing leap.

But somehow the human knew! And he spun about, that spear flashing across!

The fossa burst from the chokeberries and cut fast to the right, then back across to the left, too swiftly for the man to keep up with his lumbering sweeps. The spear tip chased, but could not catch up, and right by the man rushed the fossa, and out the other way.

But as the creature passed, its tail, a sword of bone, slashed across to take the man’s legs out from under him, and to take the man’s feet from his legs.

A short distance away, the fossa skidded to a stop and spun about, to see the man struggling to his knees, bringing his spear around defensively. He seemed excited, elated even, ready for battle, and he moved as if to stand.

The fool didn’t even know.

Only when he extended his leg as if to stand did he scream out in pain and then—and oh, it sounded as the sweetest music of all to the fossa!—in fear. Only then, the fossa understood, did the human even realize that he had no feet, that both of his legs had been severed at the ankles!

The human looked all about frantically, even reached for a severed foot, sitting atop a nearby chokeberry bush.

Amused now, the demon fossa watched the human regain some measure of courage, stubbornly using his spear for balance as he forced himself to his knees. Then he took up his spear in both hands and shouted a challenge.

The fossa calmly stalked a perimeter about him. Time was not on the human’s side, not with his lifeblood pouring from his severed ankles.

The man spoke again, as if in conversation with some unseen other human. “My daughter will not be shamed!” he yelled.

The fossa stalked before him and stood staring.

“Come on!” the human yelled, waving his spear.

The fossa sat down and let him bleed.

But then he hugged his spear, that crystalline tip glowing with magic, and whispered again, as if to the spear, and the magic intensified suddenly, the song assailing the demon creature, particularly so, for it was a song of warmth and healing! The human closed his eyes and seemed to bask in that healing.

The fossa ran to the side. It could smell the lessening of the blood flow; it could hear the song of healing magic.

“Where are you?” the human cried, seeming stronger again, invigorated, healed somewhat.

“Coward!” he taunted, or tried to, for the word came out with a giant exhale as the demon fossa slammed into his back, its fangs closing fast onto the back of his neck. The fossa knew that he wanted to turn and strike, but knew, too, that its fangs had cracked through the neckbone, that the human’s body would no longer answer commands.

Down they went together, the fossa smashing him down face-first through the chokeberries.

The fossa didn’t finish him. Not then. It would drag the human to its lair and eat him slowly, while he was alive.

But first . . . that spear! The magical crystal!

The fossa released the human’s shattered neck and sprang for the spear, its powerful maw clamping on the spear tip, cracking it, shattering it.

And the demon knew that it was not alone, that the human had indeed not been alone. For through this magical spear tip, there loomed a spiritual connection to another human, the true singer of the magic!

And she was there, in the spirit realm, joined to the man in his hunt.

And the fossa heard her song and felt her trying to strengthen the flow of magic into the doomed man who lay in the chokeberries.

But the fossa was more than a physical being. So much more. And the spirit world was its truest domain.

Into the darkness it went, and it found her.

And it knew her then: Elara.

She tried to flee, to send her spirit flying back to her own corporeal form far away. But the spirit of the fossa saw her and followed her.

She could not escape.

The fossa couldn’t bite her neck or her mortal coil at all, of course, but it didn’t have to. It could eat her soul. It could shatter her mind!

This kill was less substantial, perhaps, but to the fossa proved far more satisfying.

To its surprise, the magic singer spun back and returned to the man, and found him there, and he, her.

And the fossa found them both, their spirits huddled, embracing as the demon closed.

And it knew him then, too: Fionlagh.

The human spirits drew comfort from each other, but the fossa was amused, knowing such comfort a fleeting thing. The demon creature mocked them as it dragged its victim to the dark hole in the dark cave. It watched them as it consumed the man’s corporeal body, watched his spirit flitter away.

The woman’s spirit flew away, but it could not escape, the fossa knew.

It sat in its hole, atop a pile of bones, the torn carcass before it. But part of the demon creature went with the woman, too, back to her tent, where she lay on her back, staring blankly, seeing only darkness, her magic consumed, her life force diminished, her mind shattered by the horror.

The horror.

Copyright © 2018 by R.A. Salvatore. Excerpted from Child of a Mad God by R.A. Salvatore. 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

R.A. Salvatore is one of fantasy’s most popular authors, with his books frequently appearing on the New York Times bestseller list and more than 10 million copies of his books sold. He is the author of The Dame, The Ancient, and The Highwayman as well as Gauntlgrym, The Legend of Drizzt books, including the Dark Elf Trilogy—Homeland, Exile, and Sojourn—and the DemonWars series, among many others. Salvatore lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Diane, and their three children.

Book Reviews: February 2018

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1737 words

This month, I’ll be reviewing the short story collection Starlings by Jo Walton, the novella collection The Tangled Lands by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell, and the novel The Fairies of Sadieville by Alex Bledsoe.

Starlings
Jo Walton
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781616960568
Tachyon Publications, February 2018, 288 pages

In her introduction to Starlings, Jo Walton writes, “For ages I felt like a fraud, because my short stories were either extended jokes, poems with the line breaks taken out, experiments with form, or the first chapters of novels.”

Indeed, most of the stories in this collection can easily fall into the above categories. Some feel like half-sketched ideas. Others start off promising, but end just when they start to get interesting. It’s like stumbling onto a writer’s journal.

But in this case, it’s Jo Walton’s journal, and I will still read it, because the ideas in this are gorgeous.

In “Jane Austen to Cassandra,” the well-known author’s correspondence slips through a time loop to address Cassandra at the Fall of Troy. “The Panda Coin” follows an Eritrean coin as it passes through several characters’ hands, giving us a snippet of their lives. “Remember the Allosaur” has a theater agent trying to persuade his client, an actual dinosaur, from auditioning for Hamlet. This story had a punchline that took a couple of minutes to hit, but when it did, it knocked the breath out of me. On the other hand, “A Burden Shared,” where a family physically bears a daughter’s chronic pain, was heartbreaking to read.

Some stories I would have loved to see expanded into longer works. My favorite story in the whole book, “What Would Sam Spade Do,” is a typical noir with a Sam Spade protagonist called to investigate the killing of a clone of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only the suspect is a Jesus clone, but also so is the protagonist. (Side note: The plural of Jesus is Jesi.) I was genuinely disappointed when it ended. “Sleeper” has a biographer communicating with a virtual version of her subject, who may have been a Russian sleeper agent. “Relentlessly Mundane” is the usual spin on how children who have slipped through portal worlds deal with returning home, but Walton left me wanting more.

And there are others that are obviously Walton playing with style and form. “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” is a series of vignettes set in the Depression Era interspersed with newspaper headlines. It has no plot, and yet, seeing the science fiction authors highlighted among such hardship gives interesting insight on what makes SF so escapist. Another story, “The Need to Stay the Same,” is a fictional book review written from a post-human point of view, and “Three Shouts on a Hill (A Play)” is indeed a play about story that had me chuckling. And, of course, there’s the poetry, which ranges from biological (“Not a Bio for Wiscon: Jo Walton”) to fairy tale (“Three Bears Norse”) to outright silly (“The Godzilla Sonnets”—Walton seems to have a thing for dinosaurs and Shakespeare).

If you love short stories that have well-defined conclusions, this might not be the best collection for you. With that said, Walton’s stories, even in their brief, incomplete forms, are a master class in studying technique, form, and ending stories with zingers such as from her story “Parable Lost”: “There’s everything in the universe in this story; except answers.”

The Tangled Lands
Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781481497299
Saga Press, February 2018, 304 pages

Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell have teamed up again to bring us back to the country of Khaim in The Tangled Lands. This book pairs their initial novellas, “The Alchemist” and “The Executioness,” with two new stories, “The Children of Khaim” by Bacigalupi and “The Blacksmith’s Daughter” by Buckell.

The land of Khaim is overrun by the Bramble, a thorny invasive plant that grows in the presence of magic. Anyone who brushes against the plant falls into a sleep, which, unchecked, can deepen into a coma and eventually death. Despite this, the people of Khaim continue to prolong its existence by sneaking in magic spells, risking execution.

In “The Alchemist,” a technique is invented to destroy the Bramble, but instead of using it for good, the ruler corrupts it for his own greedy use. Considering we live in a world when corporations and environmentalism clash, this one hits a little close to home. The truly sad thing is that the Alchemist’s corruption of his invention has long-reaching effects into the other stories.

“The Executioness” is the strongest story of the bunch and my favorite. When a butcher takes over her father’s executions, she is pulled onto a path of reluctant legend as she pursues her kidnapped children. It pairs two world-views: those of Khaim, who still use magic despite it destroying their land, and the Paikans, who feel the only way to eradicate the Bramble is to shift people’s dependence away from magic. Also, it was thrilling to watch the Executioness go from an awkward axe wielder to having a kind of confidence in her own moniker.

“The Children of Khaim” has a young boy desperately searching for a cure for his sister who has fallen to the Bramble sleeping sickness. The boy must deal with the ethical quandary of either mercy-killing his sister, or caring for her and draining their resources. Either way, he experiences loss of innocence, and although this story ended much better than I thought, it’s still a harrowing read.

“The Blacksmith’s Daughter” is probably the bleakest and most violent of the four. A young woman is forced to create a set of armor for a duke’s son who only gives them half the money to buy materials. I had a hard time with this one because the protagonist is trapped in an unsolvable situation, where the lives of herself and those she cares about can easily be snuffed. Her lack of agency and the subsequent consequences of her choices are hard to read.

The Tangled Lands does not offer a solution to the Bramble crisis. Life is stark and grim, and there are no true happy endings. Yet, despite this, I found the book surprisingly hopeful. Resistance in the face of a corrupt government and broken systems can take many forms. Even though the characters live in constant fear, they all find ways to resist, even if it’s just standing up for doing what’s right. In today’s climate of distrust and fake news, it’s both devastating and yet encouraging.

The Fairies of Sadieville
Alex Bledsoe
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780765383365
Tor Books, April 2018, 320 pages

Alex Bledsoe continues to weave music and magic in the latest in his Tufa series, The Fairies of Sadieville. As with his previous books, you don’t need to read them in sequence, yet many characters from the previous books do make an appearance: war veteran Brownyn Hyatt and her pastor husband Chess from The Hum and Shiver, C.C. and Matt from A Chapel of Ease, Bliss Overbay from A Wisp of a Thing, and Mandalay Harris from Long Black Curl. Bledsoe gives just enough of their backstory to cement their place in this new story, and whet the appetite to learn about them in their own books.

The Fairies of Sadieville starts off with Justin and Veronica, a pair of grad students who are passionate about their studies and each other. After Justin’s advisor dies, they come across an old film in his office showing a girl seemingly turning into a fairy. They learn that the film took place in the mining town of Sadieville, a town in Tennessee that was the focus of a catastrophic accident. They decide to go to nearby Needsville to do further research, and in doing so, unearth a secret that will uproot the Tufa’s lives as they know it.

I love Bledsoe’s portrayal of relationships, from Justin and Veronica’s relationship as a mixed couple (Justin is black, Veronica Puerto Rican), to the longing between C.C. and Matt, to Brownyn’s and Chess’s more mature love. Justin’s presence is a nod to African-American roots in bluegrass, and it is interesting to see how he interacts with people in the South. However, Justin and Veronica are only catalysts for the true heart of the book: the Tufa realizing they may have a chance to return to their homeland, Tir na nOg, which they were exiled from long ago. Would they do it? What of those who aren’t Tufa? Would they be left behind?

Toward the end, it felt like Bledsoe lingered a little too long on different Tufa reactions, but I still enjoyed watching the Tufa wrestling with this possibility. I also enjoyed the flashbacks of Sadieville’s past, and even the time when the Tufa first arrived into what is now Appalachia. And, of course, most of all, I love how this book is infused with music—the Tufa are constantly singing and playing instruments. When you read this, arrange to have bluegrass playing in the background. It won’t invoke the magic of the Tufa, but it does put you in the right mood.

Note: On January 11, 2018, Alex Bledsoe noted on his blog (bit.ly/2FtsT1y) that The Fairies of Sadieville will be the last book of the Tufa series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Media Reviews: February 2018

Carrie Vaughn | 2122 words

Holiday Movie Roundup

December is always such a great month for movies, between serious Oscar-bait flicks and big holiday blockbusters. I always feel like I miss the good stuff, but I managed to get to a few fine films this year. Here’s what I saw:

The Shape of Water
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
Produced by Bull Productions, Double Dare You (DDY), and Fox Searchlight Pictures
December 8, 2017

This deceptively simple film is a thorough dismantling of the tropes of the 1950s sci-fi monster movie. There’s a gothic government laboratory with a design aesthetic of oppressive concrete, industrial pipes leading to nowhere, and a mysterious swamp-like aquarium in which a captured . . . something . . . lives. But instead of the usual collection of square-jawed scientists and their winsome assistants, this story is about one of the cleaning women who scrubs away the blood and severed limbs after things have gone terribly wrong. She must have always been there, right? We just never saw her before.

Elisa Esposito is mute. She sees a kindred spirit in the amphibious humanoid creature who can’t communicate with its captors. She knows what it’s like not to be heard, and so she starts teaching him sign language. Then, they fall in love. The story follows her through her daily life and her friends: her cleaning partner Zelda, a black woman who is always tired and frustrated with her husband; her neighbor, Giles, an unemployed advertising artist who pines for the guy working at the pie shop across the street (one of the more horrifying images in the film is the shop’s gelatinous key-lime pie, which Giles keeps buying as an excuse to talk to his crush and then not eating).

This film is about marginalized people. Without changing any of the other parts of the B-grade monster-movie story, the focus shifts to the cleaning ladies, the Russian spy who is a scientist first and appalled at both sides of the Cold War that would rather destroy knowledge than share it, and the gay artist who can’t find his place anywhere.

Deployed against them is Strickland, a caricature of pretty much literal toxic masculinity. Early on, the creature bites off Strickland’s fingers. The fingers are recovered and reattached, but unsuccessfully. They are rotting off his hand and pouring septic rot into his bloodstream. But Strickland is so afraid of appearing weak, of failing, that he won’t acknowledge that he has become grotesque. (Delightfully, at the showing I went to, there was a deep-voiced guy who made loud, horrified noises every time a shot focused on Strickland’s hand.) Toxic masculinity doesn’t mean that men are inherently toxic. It’s about a society that demands strict, and damaging, performative gestures of men. Strickland is determined to drive the right car, to live in the right town, to have the right perky wife, with two perky children who he won’t even look at. He’s so focused on himself, on the status he’s been promised if he plays by the rules, he’s incapable of empathy.

All Elisa is asking of anyone is to feel empathy for the creature. It’s the marginalized characters who are able to do so. They all—Zelda, Giles, the turncoat scientist Hoffstetler—unite to liberate the strange and wondrous creature when Strickland advocates for vivisection. The cast here—especially Sally Hawkins as Elisa and Doug Jones as the creature—are all great.

The film is also about loneliness and sex, whether it’s Elisa alone in her bathtub, the gay bachelor pining for the impossible, or Strickland’s wife formally offering sex and Strickland perfunctorily accepting. And then there’s Elisa and the creature. It’s telling that while her friends might be confused by the relationship, they’re not judgmental. They’re happy she’s found someone who really seems to care for her. It’s the only joyful intimate relationship in the movie.

The Shape of Water is a horror movie and not for the squeamish. But it’s also a kind, earnest, and even hopeful movie. Fans of Guillermo del Toro, especially of his more surreal and symbolic films like Pan’s Labyrinth, shouldn’t miss it. But I think it’s a film that most genre fans will enjoy for its handling of some of those classic monster movie tropes.

The Man Who Invented Christmas
Directed by Bharat Nalluri; screenplay adaptation by Susan Coyne
Produced by Mazur/Kaplan Company, The Mob Film Company, and Parallel Films
November 22, 2017

This is the story of how a single book—Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—changed the way Victorian England celebrated Christmas.

Charles Dickens is one of my favorite writers of all time, and I’ve been a fan of Dan Stevens since his leading role in the TV show Legion (maybe the most amazing superhero thing I’ve seen ever), so I was bound and determined to see this one. My favorite part of the movie, the part that made me cry, is a bit I didn’t know I needed to see until I saw it, but I know now the movie wouldn’t have been complete without it. Dickens took walks through London. He’d walk for hours, through all the neighborhoods, day and night. It’s where he got much of his material, his characters, his descriptions. He did it for inspiration, for mental health, and to stay in touch with his roots, his poverty-stricken childhood.

Dan Stevens’ Dickens walks. They’re not long walks, they’re connected to other parts of the story (as they should be). But his ease, his comfort in any part of London, his joy at just being in the streets of London—these couple of scenes are the only times he looks relaxed. It’s a lovely character moment.

I think people who spend their whole lives writing fiction forget how mysterious and magical the process looks like from the outside. It really is just this mundane slog of putting words together and then rearranging them and turning them into sentences that people will actually want to read. Which is, granted, usually much harder than it sounds. But gosh, it looks magical, doesn’t it? How is that one can create this thing out of nothing that goes on to have such a profound impact and become such a huge part of the culture?

The mystery of the process leads to a whole architecture of tropes that Hollywood engages about writers. Myths, even. You’d think that the screenwriters who write these stories would want to unravel these myths rather than reinforce them. Well, yes. But the tropes are a great deal of fun to play with. So we get The Man Who Invented Christmas, which covers some of the same ground as Shakespeare in Love, where the writer is snatching bits of dialog and characters whole cloth from the world around him and constructing them into the beloved story at hand, with a deadline to add some suspense. There’s a definite air of fiction to the whole thing. Not, This is what really happened, but What if this was how it happened?

But this means that it’s rare that I ever see a movie about writers and think, ah yes, that’s just how it is. On the other hand, there’s a moment where Dickens and his friend and agent go on a bender at a low-class pub. It’s not yet the Dark Night of the Soul, but Charles is on the way there, and he mutters, “Kate [his wife] doesn’t understand me.” And Forester looks at him and says good naturedly: “I’ve got news for you, Charles. Nobody understands you. You’re a freak of nature.” My friend reached over and patted me at this moment. Was he trying to tell me something?

The film could have gone one way—an author and his most famous character in a curmudgeonly, roommates-at-odds type comedy. And that’s partly there, when his office fills with his characters eagerly waiting for him to finish the story. But it also goes dark: Christopher Plummer’s Scrooge is an awful person. He doesn’t want to reform, and Charles can’t make him, until he confronts that part of himself that is just like Scrooge: his own insecurities about money, his terrible childhood working in the bootblacking factory that made him sympathetic to those in dire poverty but also deeply afraid of that poverty, his temper—the chains of his past, bearing him down. This part did ring true for me: that sometimes our best writing happens when we’re willing to face down the parts of ourselves we didn’t expect to find in it. This is the moment when Charles realizes the Scrooge isn’t just a character: he’s a warning. And the story comes together.

Ah, but those Dark Nights of the Soul would be so much easier if we knew we were writing something like A Christmas Carol.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Written and directed by Rian Johnson
Produced by Lucasfilm, Ram Bergman Productions, and Walt Disney Pictures
December 15, 2017

I’ve decided there’s not really much point in writing detailed, thoughtful reviews of either Star Wars movies or the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point, since my reviews moving forward are essentially the same: Did you like the previous movies? Then you will probably like this one. Did you not like the previous movies? Then why would you ever spend time and money on this one?

There’s more to be said, of course. I can talk about it in terms of whether it’s better or worse than all the others, and how it moves the franchise forward or not. But these are the tedious discussions of baseball fans talking about batting averages, deeply important and completely opaque to outsiders.

I find so much of fans’ reactions to these movies are rooted in expectation. It isn’t about being good or not, it’s about meeting expectations. Where the problem comes is realizing that the best stories are often ones that go where you didn’t expect them to, where you didn’t want them to. (As the author of a long-running book series, I ran into this a lot. In the year it takes for the next book to come out, the fans are spinning their own versions of the story they want. The new books will never, ever match those versions. Some fans take it in stride. Others . . . don’t.) You can be angry that the story in your head isn’t what you got on the screen. Or you can step back and be open to the story that you never would have come up with on your own. Expand your expectations.

The big spoiler in this one: Luke Skywalker dies. Like actually and for real. And I wasn’t even sad because how it happened was triumphant and just perfect (unlike the broadly telegraphed and rather anticlimactic death of Han Solo). He displays a magnificently powerful Force ability we’ve never seen before—and the cost of him using that ability is death. The film sets it all up, lays out all the clues, and we’re still surprised-but-not-really. And the series is breaking ties with its predecessors. Yes, some scenes are callbacks to the previous movies, right down to the framing—but I recommend not focusing on the similarities, but on the differences. Luke stands defenseless as Kylo Ren sabers him in half—and he doesn’t vanish in a heap of collapsed robes as Obi Wan did. He’s untouched. We’re in new territory here. One of the themes of the film is letting go of the past. Letting go of our heroes, who are and always have been only human. This isn’t the only scene where this kind of reframing happens. It’s just great.

These days, my fangirling over these ridiculously huge and popular franchises is keeping me sane. Giving me something to think about that doesn’t have dire consequences in the real world. If ever there was a time for escapist entertainment—escapist entertainment that is also asking lots of questions about power, who has it and why, the responsibilities of power, the consequences of war and of failure, while also promoting the values of friendship and doing the right thing, etc., etc.—it’s now.

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: Carmen Maria Machado

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7391 words

Carmen Maria Machado holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently the artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Years Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica. Her debut book is a short story collection called Her Body and Other Parties, and it was a finalist for last year’s National Book Award.

This interview first appeared in November 2017 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

One topic that’s come up a bunch of times on this show is what kind of experiences people have writing fantasy and science fiction in college and in MFA programs. Could you talk about what your experience with that was like?

Well, in college I wasn’t really writing non-realism. I feel like I was mostly writing realism in college and undergrad, but when I got to my MFA program . . . like I started writing realism, and then I transitioned to fantasy and horror and more experimental stuff. I consider myself pretty lucky in that all of my classmates were really behind it. Every so often someone wouldn’t really get it, but for the most part, everybody was really supportive, and amazing, and were just like, “This is weird as hell. Keep going.” Which felt really good. I really, really liked it. Nobody really stopped me or got in my way. They were just like, “This is great. Keep going.”

You were at Iowa, right? Was anyone else there writing fantasy and science fiction?

 Oh yeah. I’d say at least half of my classmates submitted nonrealism in some form or another throughout the time I was there. I was there with E.J. Fischer who identifies as a science fiction writer. But, a lot of my classmates were writing horror, or liminal fantasy like magical realism, or science fiction. All kinds of stuff. I think most people were playing around and experimenting.

My experience seems to be that maybe programs are more open to the magical realism, liminal fantasy kind of stuff—like Kelly Link or Karen Russell, things like that—than they would be to Game of Thrones or Dune or something like that. Was that your experience as well?

I don’t think there was a ton of epic or secondary world fantasy, not because it was discouraged, but just because I think that’s not what folks were really writing. I feel like maybe there were a couple, but I don’t really remember much about it. It was more about what people were actually bringing in. But, there was definitely science fiction. There was definitely liminal and portal-style fantasy of various kinds. And horror.

I know that you also went to the Clarion science fiction writers workshop. I wonder if you could contrast Iowa and Clarion a little bit?

Clarion is not an MFA program. Clarion is a six-week, insane, exhausting boot camp. It’s a totally different process. The MFA program is more moderate, in the sense that it’s happening over the course of several years. I don’t know really how to compare them. The workshop style is really different. Genre places tend to use the system where everybody goes around in a circle and says their piece and then is silent.

The Milford system?

Oh yeah, the Milford. Which, actually, I do not like that workshop system, but that is the way it’s done at Clarion. It was done that way when I went to Sycamore Hill. That’s just the sort of tradition. Whereas, in my MFA program, it was more of a style of people talking and responding to each other in real time, which I prefer. It’s hard to compare Clarion and Iowa. They’re just inherently really different in terms of what you’re getting out of them. What I got out of Iowa was two years of funded time to work on my own shit, which was amazing and really wonderful. What I got out of Clarion was this really bombastic, high-intensity, octane-fueled, genre extravaganza where I barely slept. I was writing a lot of stuff, some of which was really terrible, and some of which was pretty good, and workshopping non-stop and barely sleeping. They’re really different programs.

Who were your Clarion instructors? Ted Chiang was one of them, right?

It was Ted Chiang, Walter Jon Williams, JeffreyFord, Delia Sherman, and then our duo was Holly Black and Cassie Claire.

That’s really cool. Does any advice that you got stick out in your mind? Or any conversations that happened, or anything like that?

I feel like the nice thing about Clarion was how every instructor brought a different sensibility to the classroom and had different focuses. Some people were more plot-focused, and other people were more focused on the energy of a story. It’s funny, we had written down all of the advice and Sam J. Miller, who was in my class, at some point had published a post somewhere that went semi-viral. It was like all of the advice we received over six weeks. Some of which was kind of obvious, and some of which was . . . I’m trying to think of a good example. Like Ted Chiang gave us this incredible lecture about time travel and the way that time travel can function in a story, and sort of gave us a mini-lecture on how time travel could theoretically work. He was like, “You can write a story that has this as its basis, or you can use it as a more literary device, where it’s less about the technicality of the genre, and more about using it as a device.” That was really awesome.

I feel like we were getting lots of really different, interesting areas of focus from other writers. Holly Black and Cassie Claire were really into plot and structure and outlining. Holly gave us this really great piece of advice about making a menu for yourself of things that could theoretically happen in your story or in your novel, and then when you’re feeling stuck in your plot, going to the menu and being like, “Oh, this would be a good time to do this thing,” and pluck it off the menu and try putting it in. That was really helpful to me because I’m a person who struggles with plot all of the time.

So, yes, everybody had their own sensibility based on their work and their genre. I think the neatest part of that was getting such a wide range of instructors.

You do these sort of artist colony things as well?

I do. I love residencies. I get a lot of work done because I like to have a lot of time at my disposal. It really works for me to go somewhere for four weeks and have nothing to do besides write.

Did you write your story “The Resident” at a residency?

I started it before I went to a residency, which is pretty amazing because I didn’t have a sense of what really happened at residencies, but I was like, “I need an isolated, natural place.” I want the character to be an artist, so that’s actually a perfect sort of setup. I’d begun the story like that, and there were a lot of details in the story that if you’ve been to a residency, you’ll be like, “Oh, that’s very real.” Those I wrote after. That story took me like three years to write. In between starting it and finishing it, I went to multiple residencies, and so I had a better sense of even better details to include.

What happens in the story is that it starts out as a fairly regular kind of residency situation, and then it becomes more and more surreal, and grotesque, and hallucinogenic, and very gothic. I was wondering, are you importing that mood into the residency experience?

I definitely feel like that sort of gothic sensibility. You’re in this very isolated place. You’re with a lot of other artists who are usually more or less pretty high strung. I was at a residency last year during the election, and it was like twelve or fifteen people having a slow, collective nervous breakdown over the course of a month and a half. There is the sort of weird group energy. You’re talking at dinner, and conversations can get weird, and you’re all sort of strangers, but also there’s this forced sense of intimacy because you’ve been together non-stop for however many weeks. The mood is very strange, even though I love it. I really enjoy residencies. But, the mood is definitely odd. Also, when you’re alone with yourself it’s weird, right? It gets weird if you’re alone with yourself for a certain period of time. That setting was perfectly suited for the mood I wanted to strike in that story.

Were you consciously drawing those gothic elements, or surreal elements, from any particular source, or was that coming out of your imagination?

It was coming from a few places. That story is pretty heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and also this writer that I really adore, Bennett Sims, who has a book collection called White Dialogues. He’s a friend, and is a tremendous writer, and he has this really beautiful, terrifying story called “House Sitting” that’s about a guy who goes to a cabin in the woods, and it’s different in many ways, but I think it’s drawing from this inspiration. Films like Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, right? These eerie films about isolation. I feel like I was drawing from all of these narratives where it’s like one must go to a place and be alone with oneself, and oneself slowly spiraling away from reality. I very much enjoy that genre to watch as well. It worked out pretty well.

In the story, one of the characters talks about the artists who cloister themselves away from the world as being undesirable. The narrator says, “I needed to be home with my wife in our home and civilization and away from other artists. At least the sort of artists who cloister themselves away from the rest of the world. Dying profession. Dead hotels. I had been foolish.” Do you share that view that you don’t want to be around artists who are cut off from everyone else?

Oh yeah, I don’t actually think that. I think it’s perfectly fine to go isolate yourself and make art. I think that’s actually admirable and wonderful. I could see how if you were having the feelings and the experiences that she was having that you would be like, “I need to get back to civilization.” After you’ve been at a residency for a certain period of time, there is a sense of, “I would like to return to some sense of normalcy in terms of my routine, and my life, and my relationships.” You miss all the things that make your life your life. I think that it was more like calling on that sense of like, “This is too much. I need to get back.”

I thought it was interesting because a lot of the stories in this book have a bit of influence from the millennial experience, and the kind of running down of jobs that pay well and college degrees that get you a good job. Could you talk a little bit about that?

I am a millennial, so that makes a lot of sense. I feel, like everybody, as an artist, I’m responding to my own sense of the world. I was one of those people who had these dreams of being an artist. I was talked into getting a certain degree by a parent, which was going to be a little more fruitful in terms of income. Then in college I rejected that major and went to another major that was even more useless.

Then the recession hit, and I’ve never even worked in my field at all. Because everything really shifted, and the world really changed dramatically around us. I feel like any millennial will tell you or will sort of know, even if they don’t admit it, that sense of being unmoored, and feeling very mistrustful when people tell you what you should and should not be doing. It’s like, they tell us how to do things, the world shifted around us so dramatically, and now everyone is yelling at us for things that are completely outside of our control. I think that that is a general sentiment shared by millennials.

I also wanted to draw on the fact that we’re the last generation that remembers time before the current technology was more ubiquitous. It’s this weird, liminal boundary between the technical and non-technical elements of our lives, in terms of computer and smartphones and whatnot. I feel like we are this weird, liminal generation that is really trying to grapple with a lot of chaos, while also being told that we are garbage at every turn.

I really find that very interesting. I identify with it, obviously, as a member of that group. Also, this collection draws on the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, which were very formative for my generation. I’m a millennial, and so this book is drawn from me, and so it makes sense that that influence would be felt throughout.

If you could go back in time, would you tell yourself not to go to college? What advice would you give?

I think if I went back in time, I would say, “Hey, maybe think about getting a different degree, one that maybe could be applied in many ways.” But also, because I literally graduated in 2008, and the recession happened, and I was like, “Well, everything I thought I knew is not the case anymore.” I’m going to be growing up with this sense of economic instability, and I wish I had known that was just going to be the case. But no one could have, right? I probably would have gotten a degree with some more and broader practical applications. Stuff that would have actually mattered. People that I knew who had “useful” degrees also struggled to find work.

Everything changed for me when I went to grad school because I reset my professional experience, and I could work from a new place. I don’t know if I would do it any differently because, obviously, everything has worked out pretty well, in terms of my writing career. The reason I went to grad school is because I was living in California, had a job I hated, and I spent two years trying to find other jobs and never even got an interview anywhere. It was really bad. I was miserable, and I was like, “I need to get out of here. I don’t want to be here anymore, but I also can’t just quit my job because then I won’t have any money, and I don’t know what I’ll do.” If I applied to a funded grad program, it would be like a get-out-of-jail-free card. I ccould just go and not have to worry about a job.

Then I decided to apply for MFA programs. It ended up working out pretty well, but I literally applied to grad school because I was like, “The world is fucked, and I don’t know what to do about anything. I might as well go do this because what else am I going to do with my life?”

Do you feel like literature has fully come to terms with this changed world you’re describing? I feel sometimes that if you read books, realistic novels, it’s almost like a fantasy world where people own houses and stuff like that. That’s not my experience, you know?

All of fiction is its own fantasy, but there definitely is fiction that grapples with the changed world we live in. That happened about ten years ago, right? So, we’ve had a decade to have art reconcile with that. But, certainly there are situations like house ownership that I find totally baffling.

I remember one time, my aunt, who has a government job was like, “What are you doing for retirement?” And I was like, “Retirement?” And she was like, “Well, you have a retirement account?” I was like, “Nope.” She was like, “Well, where do you put your extra money?” I was like, “What extra money? My savings? What? I don’t have savings.” I’m barely scraping by. I have student loans I’m still paying off. That is just not the world that I have grown up in. Our lives are just so different.

We’re just trying to figure it out. I think it would be easier to figure out if everyone wasn’t telling us we were pieces of garbage all the time. I think that would be a little bit easier. But, you know, what do you do about that?

I wanted to talk about how a lot of these stories deal with men and women and the way they relate to each other, and the way that women relate to women, and so on. I thought the story “Eight Bites” was really interesting because it’s sort of this weight loss horror story. Could you talk about the premise of that story?

The premise of “Eight Bites” is that there’s a woman who lives up in sort of Cape Cod, and she’s pretty estranged from her adult daughter, and all of her sisters and her are somewhat overweight. Then her sisters all get weight loss surgery, and she decides to also get weight loss surgery. As she loses the weight, she begins to hear things in her house, and at some point realizes that the fat that she’s losing—the body of hers that’s leaving—is accumulating somewhere else, and has become sort of its own creature. The latter half of the story is her very fraught relationship with this thing that used to be sort of her, but is not really anymore.

Do you remember how you came up with that idea?

You know, I actually had originally written that story for an anthology prompt, and I ended up withdrawing it from the anthology because the edits they wanted me to make, I did not like. I ended up just not submitting it. But, my initial concept is that it was a retelling of The Little Mermaid, which you would not know, unless you knew that and then looked at the story again. There are certain beats. But it’s pretty far removed from that story, so I don’t really consider it a retelling.

I wanted to write about an older woman. Most of my characters are fairly young. I liked the idea of writing a story about a woman with an adult daughter, and I was really interested in tackling the concept of weight loss and weight loss surgery, which is something that I think about, and something that I have experience with in my own family. It was like so many stories where I wanted to grapple with this idea using fiction. I just got this idea like, “What if she’s haunted by her own body?”

And then that took shape, and then it became this thing, this creature. I wanted it to be not scary, exactly, but more like tender and strange. I had all of these ideas about setting something in a tourist town in the off season. I feel like I pulled together a bunch of things, and then I was really pleased with the result. I really love that story.

A lot of the stories in your book deal with women’s bodies disappearing and things like that. Bennett Sims, actually, you mentioned earlier, had an interesting blurb for the book saying that “the stories are about women that can survive in worlds that want them to disappear, whether into marriage, motherhood, death, or literally prom dresses.” Could you talk about that idea a little bit? Of the world wants women to disappear?

Yeah, it’s funny, I get asked this question a lot, but it dwoesn’t seem to me as if this is that revolutionary, or strange, of an idea. There’s nothing clearer to me in this world than the fact that we, and by we, I mean like culture, society, hate women. We hate women. We hate women so much that we couldn’t even have a national imagination that could imagine Hillary Clinton being president. I think about that, not just in terms of Trump, which is its own sort of problem, but sort of the progressive response to Hillary Clinton, especially with progressive men.

It’s not shocking to me that Hillary didn’t win because it makes total sense to me. We hate women so much. I think that we want women to disappear. We want women not to take up any kind of space: either literal space, or emotional space, or mental space.

Every so often, we sort of burst forth, so like, right now there’s this current, really intense, violent conversation happening about sexual assault and sexual violence, and Harvey Weinstein and all of this stuff. Every so often, women will cry out as one, and then it recedes into itself, and then the silence continues, and then it bursts forth. It’s just this horrible cycle.

I feel like we are not—and again, we meaning society—do not find it suitable for women to be present in any significant way. Sometimes other readers see things that you don’t necessarily see in your own work, so when Bennett gave me that blurb, I was like, “Wow, I hadn’t even really considered that, but that’s true. Every story is like that.” I think that was just a thing that’s on my mind as an artist, so of course, it was reflected in this book.

So, when you say that we hate women, you mean women as well? Do women also hate women, or the idea of being a woman, or something like that?

I think women have been socialized to hate women. I don’t think women naturally would, but I think that we also are sort of trained. For example, the obsession with weight loss, with food policing, and body policing, and thinking of food as this shame—that whole conversation, we, women, have been taught to do that. So, yeah, I think women also hate women. It’s a really bad situation. I don’t know what to do about it, but it really bothers me.

I just was talking to somebody about autobiographical fiction, and thinking about the guy who wrote My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s like this multi-book series, this very meticulous recounting of his life. I can’t even imagine a woman writing a book like that, not because I don’t think a woman could write a book like that, but because we would never permit a woman to engage in that self-love and self-obsession. Women are punished for doing that. We call them divas. We’re like, “Ugh, she’s so self-centered.” We don’t allow women the same range of artistic expression that we permit men because we hate them, and we don’t want them to take up any space.

I think if like art was reflecting more of that space-taking, then yes, I think there would be a kind of trickledown effect. But, unfortunately, they sort of follow each other. Culture follows art, and art follows culture. So, it’s like, if we can’t imagine it—and the artists who are the most prominent and the most well-known are men, and they can’t imagine it, so it doesn’t show up in their art—then we don’t see it, and we can’t imagine it in other ways. Again, it’s like a cycle.

Are you trying to fight back against that in this book, do you think? By writing autobiographical stuff into it?

Yeah. Except for the Law and Order story, where half of it is about Stabler, all of my characters are women. Some stories have no men at all, or only have a couple. Actually, I’d had an editor of one of my stories, not my editor at Greywolf, but a magazine editor, kind of get short with me about the fact that I didn’t have male characters in one of my stories. I was like, “So what? Who cares?” It’s like, I don’t give a shit about men’s stories. I mean, there are men in my life that I love and adore, and there are male artists that I love and adore, but also, I don’t need to add another male character to the pile. That’s not what we need. We need women. We need queer women. That’s what I want to see. And so that’s what I did.

I was also kind of struck by this line: One of the characters says, “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right to be unsociable, and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around.”

In that story—that’s again the story “The Resident”—and that character is super weird. She’s very in her own mind. It’s clear looking at the way that other people interact with her that she’s so strange, right? And the others get weird about it, and she’s like, “No, it’s my right to be weird.” Basically, it’s my right to be an unlikable character, is what she’s saying. Or an unlikeable person. Again, I wanted her to be a little unpleasant and a little weird because like, why not? Men get to be unpleasant and weird all the time. I really just wanted to give her that space and give her that mission. I think it was more subtle throughout, and then at some point I was like, “I should just have her say that out loud.” And I did.

Is that just something for characters, or when you’re out in the street and stuff, do you think there are virtues to be had in the attitude that I can be unpleasant to be around if I want to be?

Yeah. Street harassment is an example of this. Some days when I’m out doing business, I’ve got things I’ve got to do, and I’m zoning out, I’m in my own head, I’m thinking, I’m listening to a podcast, and it’s like I’m not even allowed to just walk down the street in my own mind because some person, a man, has to be like, “Hey, I’m going to say this thing to you now. I’m not actually trying to like take you home on a date. I want to let you know that you’re not allowed to occupy this space on your own. I have to impose myself.” Then my reverie, my private time with myself, like that whole process has been punctured and ruined.

This happens all of the time. The fact that women can’t just be out in public in their own heads. That’s like forbidden to us. Informally. It’s an informal process.

So I will tell somebody like, “Fuck off. Leave me alone. Go away.” Because I am being covetous of my time, and being covetous of my space. Also, like, the fact that just saying no to things, like saying, “I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to do that.” And not having to give an explanation. Or just saying, “I don’t want that.” And not having to provide an excuse.

I think women need to do that more. And honestly, my life has been better since I learned how to do that. And not be so worried about being polite, or being giving.

I wanted to also ask you about the story “Mothers” because the characters kind of invent their own religion. Could you talk about coming up with that idea?

There’s a movement in the middle of the story where the character is fantasizing about the life she had imagined with her lover who has since left her. There are many pages of her fantasizing about this place that they would have lived. She talks about her own liturgical calendar. I have a good friend, who I’ve known since I was a kid, who is Catholic, and for a while, she was blogging about what she called “eating liturgically,” which meant eating according to the Catholic saint calendar. I’m not going to know any of the actual saints, but she’ll be like, “Today is so-and-so’s day, so tonight we’re going to eat based on this.” I’m not Catholic, but I was like, “That’s so cool. What a cool idea.”

I had always imagined what if I had my own liturgical calendar, but it was like my own saints. So it would be figures in history, characters from books, and then they would have their own affiliation, and there would be ways to celebrate them if you so chose. This is an idea that I’ve always had, like I want to make my own saint book.

I just got to make a fictional version of it where there’s this day, which is for Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, and there’s this day, which is for Frieda Kahlo, and there’s this day for Shirley Jackson. Those are their saints. There are various ceremonies and foods and things that they use as part of those celebrations. I was like, “Maybe I’ll be able to do that at some point for myself, but I’ll just write about it in this story.”

I love the idea of having one’s own religion based on the figures in history that speak to you. Also, the fact that I feel like part of being an adult is learning all of this history that you never knew existed. One of the best parts of being older is like, for example, learning queer history that you never know. For example, most people do not know that Eleanor Roosevelt was bi and had this lover for decades. I read about Eleanor Roosevelt all the time, and I never had heard this story at all. Then I discovered all of these letters. It’s a pretty infamous story. So, it’s really cool, that just becoming part of one’s own personal history and faith.

You mentioned your story about Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and there’s a part in the story where the characters realize that they’re characters in a story, and that people are watching the characters’ suffering for their own amusement. I was wondering if you could talk about how you included that in the story, and how you feel about those kinds of stories where the characters realize that they’re characters in a story.

That whole novella is sort of my attempt to grapple with the idea of what does it mean that we as a culture are so invested in these narratives of violence against women? That was part of what I was thinking about going into this project. Then at some point it just made sense that art is an inherently metafictional conceit—this is a piece of fan fiction about a show that exists that deals with our reality, in the sense that it’s about sexual violence, which obviously exists in real life, and also the ripped from the headlines qualities of the Law and Order franchise. They might as well be aware of the fact that they are in a story that is satirizing another set of stories where they are trapped in the cycle, but they are trapped in the cycle because we the real life viewers are really invested in this narrative.

I mean, Law and Order: SVU has been on for nineteen seasons, and is like the only one that’s outlasted all of its other compatriots in the Law and Order universe. Again, what does that mean? Why are we so invested in this particular story? It made sense to me that those characters would become aware of the fact that they are trapped in this weird, metafictional story. It just made sense with the rest of the conversation of that story.

Right, and your version of Law and Order features doppelgangers and ghosts and various other kinds of supernatural creatures. Could you talk about why you wanted to incorporate those into the Law and Order universe?

I’m firmly of the belief that Law and Order is a profoundly capital-W Weird show. Despite the fact that ostensibly it’s realist. I think if you think about the fact that all of these episodes are “ripped from the headlines,” so it’s like these weird, mashed up, reality-adjacent episodes, even though they’re fictionalized. The fact that actors repeat on that show. Sometimes an actor will be a D.A. in one episode, and then seasons later will come back as a suspect. There are a lot of ways in which it’s already sort of pushing through the boundaries of reality anyway, and so I just pushed it a little further. Because that was just made the most sense to me.

Something I think about a lot is if you buy the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and you believe that there’s all these different universes where anything that can happen does happen then literature that you read, you are reading about real people, and real things that are happening somewhere in the multiverse.

Right. I love that. I also was thinking about, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Tommy Westphall Universe theory of television. Do you know about this?

Not just offhand. What is that?

Basically, in the final episode of the show St. Elsewhere, which was like that ‘80s medical drama, there’s a sort of image that’s like an implication. There’s a zooming out process, and it’s a snow globe. The hospital is a snow globe. There’s a boy looking at the snow globe. This boy named Tommy Westphall, who I think in the story is autistic, and because St. Elsewhere has done all of these crossovers with other shows, there’s actually this Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis, which is that all of the shows that have crossed over with that show, or that have crossed over to shows that crossed over with those shows, are all included in this fictional universe that is all being imagined in the mind of this boy. And the whole Law and Order franchise is included in that list.

The idea that it’s all sort of consumed inside this boy’s head, which I really love, and I feel like in its own way it accounts for the weirdness. There’s actually a website that’s dedicated to tracking all of these shows, and it’s like seven decades of TV ensnared in this metafictional net. It’s really interesting to me. I feel like Law and Order is, again, a capital-W Weird property, so it didn’t seem that weird to include ghosts and doppelgangers and things, because why not?

This book of yours I mentioned is a short story collection, and I think people generally think short story collections don’t reach a really wide audience, but this book seems to be doing really well. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. Just from what you’re hearing from people, do you have any sense of why this book seems to be striking such a chord with so many people?

I think there are a few reasons. It’s unfortunate because I wish that Trump was not president and my book would do less well—I feel it’s a bit of a response to that. Everyone is feeling fucked up. I think women are feeling extra gas-lit, just by culture. Again, I feel like we haven’t really reconciled that Trump won, that we blew past the facts of why Hillary did not win. I feel like the fact that we did not have this large, public reckoning about sexism, and the way that we hate women so badly that we wouldn’t let one run our country. I feel like a lot of women have sublimated the trauma.

Also, the fact that the whole election cycle was like everything women experience, just on a huge, massive public stage. It was really traumatic. I feel like there is a sense that people are responding to that.

I also feel like the fact that it engages with media that is really meaningful like Law and Order: SVU and Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories. That, I think, is also important.

It’s a very tight collection. It’s eight stories and two of them are novellas. They all deal with a very tight set of overlapping, interlocking themes and ideas. I don’t think all collections do that, actually. I think a lot of collections feel a little more haphazard in terms of what’s in there. I think it has more of a novelistic feel, even though it is a short story collection. I would never call it a novel, but I feel like that sense of all these stories are doing the same work in just slightly different ways is really powerful.

It’s partially because I’m coming from both a genre and a lit world, which have their own powerful reading presences, and the fact that the genre world has such a robust short fiction scene and short fiction awards. I feel like that’s part of it. Greywolf did a really great job with the book. There have been a lot of factors. And, yeah, the book is doing great. No one is more shocked than me. I’m like, “Wow, I did not think this book would sell at all, and here we go.” I worked really hard on this book. Greywolf worked really hard on this book. There’s a lot of luck and timing that’s involved that I think is also a part of it.

When you’re talking about Hillary Clinton, I’m curious, do you think that somebody like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris could be the next president? Or do you think the sort of cultural factors you’re talking about are going to undermine any female candidate in the near future?

No.

Honestly, if a woman is elected president in my lifetime, I will fall over dead from shock. Not because I don’t think women are qualified to do it. I think they’re probably more qualified. But, I don’t think we’ve reckoned with it. We’ve never had a very public conversation where even progressive dudes were like, “I didn’t like Hillary Clinton being president because I have mom issues,” or, “I don’t like the idea of a woman telling me what to do, and so I’m going to find all of these weird faults with her that I wouldn’t find with a male candidate.” We have not had that conversation. And, until we do, I don’t think it’s possible for us to elect a woman. I really don’t. Call me a pessimist, but no, I really don’t think so. It makes me really sad.

What is the way forward, do you think? Do you have any advice for us? For what we can do as a culture?

I don’t know. I’m not a political consultant. I have no idea. I don’t know. I guess we have to have that conversation. I just don’t think we’re capable of having that conversation. I don’t feel optimistic about it. So, I don’t have any advice. I wish it were different, but it’s not.

Do you want to talk about what kind of upcoming projects you have?

I sold a second book to Greywolf earlier this year. It’s a memoir, and it’s due next September, so next summer I’m going to a residency to finish that. That’s an experimentally structured memoir about abuse in same-sex relationships.

I’m always working on a bunch of things. I have a bunch of novels started. I have this novel in stories I’m working on. I have a lot of stories that don’t have places to go yet. I am working on an essay collection, but that takes a long time because essays take me a million years to write. I’m working on a million things at once right now. The memoir is the next big thing that I have to finish because it actually has a deadline. After that, I’m not sure what I’m going to be submitting next to publishers. We’ll see.

Can you say what’s experimental about the memoir’s structure?

I’m sort of using genre tropes as lenses to examine specific ideas and memories. For example, I have a chapter that’s a haunted house chapter, and it’s using the metaphor of the haunted house as the way of examining a specific memory. Or another chapter that’s a generation ship, and so thinking about generation ship as a genre or sub-genre, and using that to examine another idea. It’s hard to explain. I don’t quite understand it myself, but it works. I’ve been trying to write this book for a while, and it was that structure that helped me break into the version of the book that I wanted to write, so it’s been pretty helpful.

We’re pretty much out of time. Do you have any final thoughts? Anything else you wanted to mention?

No, no. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so lovely.

Absolutely. We’ve been speaking with Carmen Maria Machado, and this new book again is called Her Body and Other Parties. Carmen, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Author Spotlight: Cassandra Khaw

Setsu Uzumé | 617 words

You recently tweeted a kind of counter to the Forbes 30 Under 30, asking people to share their post-thirty victories. What were your favorite or most surprising responses?

 Hah! God. Somehow, that turned into a two thousand-reply thread, which . . . still boggles the mind. Unfortunately, because there were so many responses, I’m going to have to be honest and admit that they’ve all blurred together for me. But shining through were the stories about how people found joy, plain and simple, and how they didn’t feel like they deserved to talk about it. It’s fascinating that we’re wired to think that success requires empirical evidence. We need to be X or Y in order to say we’ve found “success” and “joy” past the age of thirty. And that’s ridiculous to me. At the root of our ambitions, there’s the drive to be happy. Some people need a complicated route to get there. Some people find their bliss in simpler things. Both are valid. Both are wonderful to see in the world. The fact society teaches us to devalue one of these just exasperates me to no end. All joy is good.

Except when it involves non-consensually collecting someone else’s teeth.

I loved the line, “we exist to accent and accentuate that which makes our husbands impressive.” What drew you to that dynamic?

 Growing up in Malaysia, really, and listening to the usual doctrine. The wife is an asset, an advantageous acquisition for the husband’s family. She has to be. Because otherwise, what’s the point of her? There’s definitely a growing awareness of women’s rights in the country, but a lot of the older generation still subscribe to the idea that women are almost property. And you do see its impact on men of my generation, on even how the women have internalized those beliefs. Like, I’m still worried about not being sufficiently useful to people. I constantly feel the urge to be a living manifestation of Siri with some cosmic powers, because that’s what I’ve been taught: that my value is dependent on my ability to benefit the social infrastructure I’m part of.

Also, that line just rolls off the tongue, damn it.

There are folktales of animal-husbands and animal-wives all over the world, both getting captured and escaping, but it’s rare that we see the aftermath from this point of view. Is she reclaiming or erasing the city with these rituals?

 Reclaiming the city. I won’t lie. A lot of this story is autobiographical. Malmo, where the story is based, is unique to me in that it represents one of the rare happy memories I had with an ex. For the longest time, I couldn’t think about visiting, couldn’t wrap my thoughts about the place. I couldn’t divorce that city from them, and I hated that because I loved Malmo. So, someone suggested I build memories—my memory is audiovisual, the kind you can sort of walk through, re-experience everything from taste to subvocal thought—that weren’t associated with them. Pile my brain with all of my own memories, reclaim the city I’d loved by walking through it, free of any notion of them. And I did. And Malmo felt like mine again.

What can we look forward to next from you?

 A post-apocalyptic mermaid novel that I desperately hope the world will love, a volley of short stories, and so many bloomin’ [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] that I’m beginning to feel like my life is one big embargo.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Bogi Takács

Arley Sorg | 1410 words

This piece, for me, really touches on a sense of social groups imposing conformity/structure on an individual’s physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual being. There is an underlying concept here that assumptions about “basic human nature” are derived from cultural context (an idea which really resonates with me). Can you talk a little bit about this?

 Absolutely! I’m a psycholinguist who’s also a first language speaker of a language (Hungarian) that often defies received wisdom about “language universals.” A lot of “facts which are true of all languages” simply do not hold for Hungarian. I am less of an expert about emotions, but my knowledge of languages has in general made me skeptical of claims of cognitive universals.

All the research that I mention in the story is real. I like to provide citations not only in my research, but also in my fiction—alas, sometimes bonus notes or supplementary material can’t really fit in a fiction magazine. So I developed tactics to incorporate at least partial citations into the main text itself.

Also, fidgeting while having electrodes on really does produce motion artifacts!

I like this idea of communicating through emotions, even though it’s a relatively messy and inexact method. Can one argue that humans could potentially communicate with each other through more basic emotional contexts? By that, I mean using emotion as a point of contact and a place to relate to each other, despite other differences?

I’m honestly not sure about that, and the protagonist is also skeptical of emotional universals. I think there are at least two major issues here: one, the fact that emotions might be culturally dependent to an extent, and two, the fact that people’s neurology also varies, and some people documentedly have different emotions than others (or do not have those emotions!). I would not pathologize this; it’s a part of everyday human diversity.

In the story, there is an emotional calibration process to try to deal with these differences . . . or not. This is similar to many other calibration processes—I used to work with eye tracking and the “n-point calibration” term actually comes from there. Many eye trackers need to be calibrated to a specific person, and this is achieved by the person looking at a number of preset points.

As for how well the emotional calibration worked, that is actually for the reader to decide! Did the message get across? Maybe the message that got across was completely different from what I’d intended, and there might be no way of knowing . . . There might just be a distinct cosmic horror aspect to this.

In the story, the central character feels out of place pretty much everywhere—“home country” is really “country of origin,” despite that certain aspects of identity were easier there—to the point that there is a (beautiful) sense of empathic relationship with plants and a clear desire for the sense of possibility that comes with the “new,” in this case represented by aliens. “Happiness is change and aliens are change . . .” It feels . . . very personal, introspective. Is this autobiographical in some ways? If so—what are the challenges for you in writing so close to the heart—or is this the space that your writing often occupies? Also—have you found pockets of “alien cultures” that are more comfortable, those spaces and groups of people that feel more like “home”?

A lot of this story is autobiographical, to the extent of people trying to run me over in the grocery store parking lot. There are some details which are different. For example, I haven’t spent two decades in the US and I’m not naturalized, which changes the entire timeline—I did spend my undergraduate years in Hungary, and also some of my graduate years. I’m still a resident alien.

I generally write what I know, but what I know is quite different from what many other people know! Also, I like to write about aliens and magic, but everything comes from my own perspective. In general I’m a big proponent of letting marginalized writers write about whatever they (we) want, and sometimes I want to write more autobiographical work, sometimes less. Sometimes I want to write about insectoid aliens.

I have been uncomfortable calling Hungary my “home country” for many years now—as a Jewish trans person, many people have made it very clear that they don’t consider me to be a proper Hungarian, and most of the rest of the country silently endorses those government-backed sentiments. Of course, other minority people should absolutely claim it as their home if they want to do so. But for me it hasn’t been easy.

I have found a lot more acceptance in English-language SFF, specifically among other marginalized writers from all over the world. I also review books, and I very much appreciate the community that has arisen around the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag on Twitter. Hungarian SFF was very hostile to me, and I’m very glad I made the leap to start writing and blogging in English—several years before I moved to the US. It was a bit sad to see that in a big discussion about the state of Hungarian SFF last year, several people bemoaned “the lack of LGBT writers.” We exist, but we are actively driven away.

What I really enjoy about this piece is that the ending isn’t just positive, it actually transforms personal struggle into a thing that helps everyone. It becomes larger than just the individual in the story, while gratifying the main character, not just through the possibility of newness, but also, I think, through being part of something productive and important. Do you have the same feeling about the ending? Was this always the direction the story wanted to go, or were there other ideas you had for the ending?

I generally like to end stories on a hopeful note. I try to always think about hopeful aspects even in desperate situations. One key point that I like to emphasize is solidarity between different marginalized groups—because this has been so important in my life. I read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind about a decade ago and it really made me consciously aware of this. It made me understand so much that I’d previously been trying to do without an explicit consciousness of it. Though I do write mostly in English, so I do not follow all the points in the book, but those discussions of solidarity had a huge impact on me.

I also had a story in Clarkesworld recently that had this theme, titled “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus.” There the marginalized groups are entirely fictional, but the preexistent awful situation and hopeful tone are shared.

Another writer who also works with these themes very deliberately is RoAnna Sylver. I just reprinted some of their work in Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016. I loved editing this anthology and hope to do it again in the future.

What are you working on now that your new fans can look forward to?

I have an ongoing webserial, Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, that can be read for free online, or one episode ahead with a $1/month Patreon subscription. It features a queer, trans autistic couple who solve magical crimes in the space future . . . and often find that solving a crime is just the beginning of the trouble.

I’m also working on episodes for another webserial, The Song of Spores, edited by Scott Gable for Broken Eye Press. I’m just about to finish edits on the first part. This one has a QUILTBAG ensemble cast of counterintelligence operatives, and also space fungus.

I have a variety of forthcoming stories, but the one that probably got the most buzz is my novelette in Dracula: Rise of the Beast edited by David Thomas Moore for Abaddon, coming in March 2018. This story involves Renaissance-era Jewish characters investigating bloodthirsty vampires in the Hungarian royal court.

After many years of only writing short fiction, I’m now also trying to write a science fiction YA novel. You are all very welcome to find me on Twitter @bogiperson and cheer me on!

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: Rahul Kanakia

Alex Puncekar | 672 words

What was the inspiration for this story?

I’d been reading a lot about Soviet Russia, and what was striking, to me, was how fruitless all of the resistance against it was. The Soviet regime lasted for generations, and when it fell, it wasn’t the people who overturned it; instead, it sort of just ran out of steam. Which is to say, all of the dissidents, all of the samizdat writers, all of the people who got shot or sent to the gulag . . . they really didn’t accomplish anything.

In our society, we valorize dissent. We’re literally taught in school that if one man refuses to knuckle under, then the entire world can change. That’s also a key element of so many fantasy stories. But it’s just not true. Oftentimes, you lose. The problem is, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know if you’ll win or lose. You don’t know what courage is. So it’s impossible to know, ahead of time, what’s the right thing to do.

Usurus—by denying the ghost of the Emperor his torture of Tiktus—goes against his earlier teachings of learning to obey and live under the rule of a despot. What do you think that says about him as a teacher versus him as a citizen of this regime?

Philosophy is full of figures who compromised their ideals in order to survive. I can’t say exactly who I was thinking of when I wrote Usurus. I imagine he’s based somewhat on Socrates, who, famously, was sentenced to death for his beliefs and who, equally famously, refused to flee from the city, because he felt it was his duty to die if his people commanded it.

But I think that I must’ve also been thinking of Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who served as one of Nero’s chief advisors. Seneca counseled holding yourself free from the moment and from temporary pleasures; he counseled doing your grim duty, no matter what. But he also lived a fabulously wealthy life. He used his position as Nero’s tutor, and later minister, to make himself possibly the richest man in the Empire. And yet, at the same time, he ruled well, and during his life he successfully protected the Empire from Nero’s worst impulses.

Anyways, I don’t actually think in this case Usurus is going against what he said. Actually, he’s not thwarting the Empire; he’s thwarting Tiktus. This totalitarian regime demands that its peoples’ spirit be crushed, and Usurus gives them a symbolic example of that crushing, in the spectacle of one of their greatest thinkers savagely beating out the brains of one of its youth. This too mirrors the Soviet Union—a place where it was impossible to keep your hands clean and stay above the fray. Either you betrayed your friends and colleagues, or you suffered for your purity.

My favorite line in this story is, “We could struggle, even in the worst circumstances, to be good people.” Do you think that being a good person is a constant struggle? Is Usurus “good people” by the end of the story, even if he had good intentions?

I don’t know. His actions save people. But maybe if he hadn’t done what he did, the people would’ve risen up. Maybe Tiktus’s death would’ve meant something.

What other things are you working on? What’s next for you?

So many things! My first young adult novel, Enter Title Here (a contemporary realist novel), came out in the summer of 2016. My second book is currently on submission to publishers. I’m also working on a fantasy YA novel: an epistolary novel starring a non-magical boy whose best friend gets into a wizarding school (kind of like Hogwarts), and who begins a furious letter-writing campaign to get himself admitted as well.

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.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Jude Griffin | 1557 words

How did this story come about?

It’s inspired by the rise of violent crimes against women in India. As you may know, India has the highest number of crimes against women and is regarded as the world centre for human trafficking in women and girl children. The numbers have kept rising steadily in the past few years and the situation is only getting worse. As a result, single women—unmarried, widows, abandoned women especially—in a number of communities across the country have begun banding together, arming themselves and training in martial arts to defend themselves and other victims. The dacoit queen Phoolan Devi was, in a sense, an early harbinger of this social phenomenon. There was also the famous Gulab Gang (Rose Gang). And it’s no coincidence that kickboxing is one of the most popular sports for young Indian women, with some of the boxers very competitive at the world level.

Watching these developments, I thought “What If” these millions of victimised women got together to carve out their own safe space in the heart of India (since the heartland is where these crimes are most common), and named it Kali. I wrote a very early version of this story a long time ago, then set it aside. Recently, I revisited it and found it more relevant than ever and revised it.

The scariest thing about “The Goddess Has Many Faces” is that India is now so virulently patriarchal that the very idea of a safe space for women would outrage men and draw violent reactions. To give you just one instance, the recent Indian film Padmavati, about a Muslim invader who covets a Hindu princess, angered meninist groups so much that they put out multiple rewards ranging from a hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars for anyone who would behead Deepika Padukone, the actress who plays the female lead, burn her alive, or rape and murder her. They had no issues with the male lead’s character, just the heroine of the film. The government not only endorsed these attacks but banned the film.

What aspects of the goddess Kali were most relevant to your story?

Kali was actually created out of body parts of different Hindu gods. They were unable to defeat a powerful demon themselves, so they each contributed a body part, which came with that god’s greatest power or weapon, and created Kali. But they hadn’t anticipated how powerful she would be now that she had all their powers (duh). She was a wrecking ball. An unstoppable force of destruction. This part of Kali has been explored extensively in many stories, including my own crime thriller series The Kali Quartet, but in this case, I thought it would be interesting to make the nation of Kali a haven of peace. For one thing, it was made up of women who had suffered terrible violence and brutality under patriarchal society. For another, they had the ultimate power of Kali herself. It’s like a society where everyone is literally part of the same larger being, not a group-mind or a hive-mind in the typical sense, but a collective of equally empowered individuals. They didn’t need to use power or brute force on a daily basis to impose order.

It’s my belief that peace and harmony are the natural ways of the world. Violence is the aberration, and by that I mean unnatural violence, not the natural violence of predators killing prey for food. So the women of Kali have reverted to the natural state, where violence is unnecessary and pointless. It’s a perfectly balanced power equation. And that is Kali in her state of rest, until male aggression (her enemies were always male) rises again and has to be put down with force.

Were your choices of gender significant? Would a reversal have changed how the story had to unfold in your mind? (All-female Kali, male assassin and PM-general.)

All Kali’s enemies were male. Almost all crimes against women and girl children in India are perpetrated by males. As a feminist, I’m not interested in exploring a male-dominated story, which is why almost all my work (sixty books and hundreds of short stories) features women or girl protagonists or as major characters. A gender reversal would have been a meninist reactionary tale, which doesn’t interest me. I would hope the SFnal tropes I use in the story are enough to make it unique and contemporary.

You link the physical appearance of each Durga Maa to a specific group/culture—is this a problematic approach in India?

India is an entirely caste- and class-driven society. As someone of mixed race (Irish-Portuguese-Sri Lankan-Indian) growing up in a Christian family, I was often told that I “couldn’t exist” or “don’t belong here.” It’s the reason why I finally left India, my birthplace and lifelong home, to migrate to the US in 2015, and why I now live here permanently. Even in the US, most Indians you encounter tend to be upper caste, upper class, and regard people like me as “not people” (that’s literally how they view those who aren’t high caste Hindu). This “othering” means they regard us as disposable. India’s caste system was actually a very effective guise for enslavement. There’s an excellent book titled Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla, which I highly recommend. It’s impossible (and irresponsible) to write about India without touching upon caste in some way and it’s unfortunate that the few Indian writers of SF and even fiction in general all tend to be upper caste Hindus with inherent biases and bigotry embedded in their work. Any story about India is inherently a story about bias and bigotry, as well as chauvinism and patriarchy. A story that doesn’t touch, however slightly, these issues, is not credible.

What else would you like readers to know about this story?

Hopefully, nothing. Just enjoy it as an SF story! The info I provide here in this interview is for those who want to know more about me. A story should stand on its own several feet.

Whose Ramayana-inspired work do you most admire/enjoy?

Because of the prohibition against non-brahmins reading or writing for millennia, the only versions of the Ramayana available until recently were by brahmins or upper caste Hindus. They’re all religious works, whether overtly or covertly. Like any rational progressive person, it was depressing and discouraging to me to see this great story dominated (so to speak) by religious bigots.

About twenty years ago, I set out to write the first retelling of the Ramayana. It was published from 2003 onwards as an eight-book epic fantasy series and went on to sell close to two million copies to date, translated into multiple languages and published in several dozen countries around the world. Since in India it’s unacceptable (and dangerous) to publish anything remotely related to mythological or historical personalities as “fantasy” or even “fiction,” it was labelled “Mythology” and shelved in Non-Fiction, Religion, Geography (the book titles had place names, e.g. Prince of Ayodhya, Siege of Mithila), Philosophy, etc. It was so successful, it spawned a category of Mythology which is now the biggest selling category in Indian publishing, with hundreds of authors and thousands of books following.

Which themes do you find yourself returning to in your work?

 The struggle for marginalised persons to survive, persist, and succeed in the world. The marginalisation itself may vary—disability, gender, sexual orientation, caste, class, race, etc.—but the struggle, the persistence, and the triumph are what my stories are about, and very often in the form of intense, action-driven fantasy.

You’ve written across genres and formats: Which do you most enjoy? What are the challenges of switching forms?

Fantasy, without any doubt. I write other stories because they sometimes come to me and demand to be written. For instance, crime fiction, SF, even literary fiction. But my first and great love is fantasy.

Has writing screenplays influenced how you write in other genres?

It’s taught me the importance of structure, economy, and precision. So has writing middle grade and young adult fiction—you have to pare down to the lean, mean story machine, and excise all that adult middle-aged fat. I recommend that every writer should write screenplays and children’s fiction, just to learn how to make words count.

Any upcoming projects/news to share?

The first books in The Rise Trilogy (Random House/Delacorte) and The Burning Throne Series (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Adams) are completed and in the publication pipeline. They should both be out in late 2018 or early 2019. Have just finished the first book in a middle grade fantasy series, which will go out on submission soon. Next up is a very ambitious epic fantasy series. I also have a story forthcoming in A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 216 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Bryan Camp (“The Independence Patch,” with a cover by Reiko Murakami) and Timothy Mudie (“The Elephants’ Crematorium”), along with SF reprints by A. Merc Rustad (“Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn”) and N.K. Jemisin (“The Effluent Engine”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Beesan Odeh (“Al-Kahf”) and Cassandra Khaw (“You Do Nothing But Freefall”), and fantasy reprints by Xia Jia (“Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse”) and Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Dreamers of Alamoi”).

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 (“The Proving Ground,” by Alec Nevala-Lee) and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. You can look forward to work from Will McIntosh, Adam-Troy Castro, A. Merc Rustad writing with Ada Hoffman, Martin Cahill, and many more.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that fictional goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

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Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Jude Griffin

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

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Joseph Allen Hill

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Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

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

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.